Earth is losing 39 cubic miles of ice per year

Not counting the ice in your glass, the one you grabbed after digesting that headline.

Via grist.org, there's this from Science Daily (my emphasis):

Earth's glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The research effort is the first comprehensive satellite study of the contribution of the world's melting glaciers and ice caps to global sea level rise and indicates they are adding roughly 0.4 millimeters annually, said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. The measurements are important because the melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.

And:

"This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth's glaciers and ice caps with GRACE," said Wahr. "The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet's cold regions are responding to global change."

Of course, money has the last word, even in the face of this:


Click to big. More here (h/t Daily Kos).

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Video: Sasha versus the blueberry

No good blueberry goes unpunished.  Basically, I offered my dog a blueberry this morning, she flipped out, so, recognizing she was in one of those moods, I grabbed my phone and decided to offer her a second blueberry, camera rolling. Here is what transpired. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Say something nice

This is a very cute idea.

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Santorum, who is pretty fringe himself, suggests Obama isn’t a Christian

Considering how far out of the mainstream Santorum is - the man thinks birth control is "harmful" - it's almost a joke that he'd criticism someone else's religious beliefs.  Rick Santorum doesn't fully comprehend how fringe he really is.

From Jake Tapper:

Obama campaign strategist and former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum this morning, saying he was “well over the line” for questioning President Obama’s Christian faith.

“It’s wrong, it’s destructive and it makes it virtually impossible to solve the problems we face together as Americans,” Gibbs told me in an exclusive interview Sunday on “This Week.” “It’s just time to get rid of this mindset in our politics that if we disagree we have to question character and faith.”

Gibbs was responding to comments Santorum made Saturday that Obama is pushing a “phony theology” that is not based on the Bible and “imposing his secular values on the church.”

Then again, one of Rick Santorm's top funders suggested that women who can't afford contraceptives should just use Bayer aspirin:

"This contraceptive thing, my gosh it's so inexpensive. Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put them between their knees and it wasn't that costly."

Santorum wants to talk about phony theology? Show of hands: Whose church aids and abets pedophilia and still hasn't come clean about the rape of small children as young as five years old? Lift that hand a little higher, Mr. Santorum. Read the rest of this post...

Arcade Fire: "Poupée de cire, poupée de son"

This piece of music is fun on so many levels, I can't not share it.

First, Arcade Fire is one great band. Second, "Poupée de cire" is one great song. And this performance is just wonderful.

A word about the song. It's by Serge Gainsbourg, the brilliant bad-boy of French popular songs from about 1960—1980 or so. There's so much more to say about him than I have space for.

This song was introduced in 1965 by France Gall (one of the great French pop singers) when Gall was 18 years old, on Eurovision, one of Europe's "Pop Idol" shows. It won first place and launched both Gall and the song internationally.

The song has a trick — the lyrics:

▪ A "poupée" is a child's doll. "Cire" is wax, and "son" is grain, bran, or in an American context, sawdust (inert material to stuff a doll with).

So on the surface, the title "Poupée de cire, poupée de son" could be translated roughly as "Wax doll, rag doll" or "Wax doll, sawdust doll" — with the usual association of "doll" as a girl of interest. (Sam Seder on Majority.fm, for example, regularly plays a French song about a "doll who always says No" — same idea.)

▪ Next layer down — Who is the "wax doll" of "poupée de cire"? The singer herself, who makes recordings in an age when records were called "wax discs" (as in the old DJ's comment, "these are the wax to watch, the picks to click.") France Gall is herself the "wax doll" — a "doll" who makes wax recordings.

And there's a nice pun in French on "son" — it's "bran" (grain) but also "sound". In other words, "poupée de son" is another reference to France Gall, the singing doll. The lyrics are loaded with these double meanings.

▪ Ultimately the song is about innocence, and maybe not in a good way — "Am I better or worse than a fashion model [poupée de salon]," she sings, "(because) I see the world through bright rosy (innocent) eyes?" Is the songwriter actually making fun of youthful 60s singers like France Gall?

▪ Add to that the relationship between the singer and the writer. There's no indication that the 18-year-old was in a personal relationship with Gainsbourg, but the professional relationship was turbulent. There are layered sexual meanings buried in some of Gainsbourg's songs of the period (for example, "Les Sucettes", "The Lollypops" from 1966, another France Gall hit). Gall claimed that she was unaware of this aspect of the lyrics she was singing (and making hits with), all of which colored for a while the way the French public came to receive her.

France Gall managed to right her career, especially after meeting, working with, and marrying her perfect collaborator, Michel Berger. (I may present their classic jazzy "Il jouait du piano debout" — "He played the piano standing" — at some later date.)

If you really want to dig into the lyrics, try this or this.

But if you just want to listen to a heck of a song and performance, click below and sit back. (Earworm alert; it's seriously hard to get the opening melody out of your head.)



That's a live performance from Paris, 2007. To see France Gall's 1965 Eurovision performance, go here.

Music for a Republican-dominated February; they don't own the whole world yet, and they don't want France. Good.

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