Another very interesting essay about air travel from Patrick Smith. The 747 has always seemed to be an awesome machine from the runway, although I did not expect to see such fine "airplane pornogaphy" shots celebrating its beauty. Also, I never thought I'd find a column about such a seemingly banal subject this interesting until I joined Salon and started reading Smith's essays. I'd gladly take a bunch more of his well-written insights into something ordinary over Paglia's amature musicology.

Much as I love Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's version of it, we must also admit that it can be read as an equally anxious tale about the overrun of Western whiteness by those frightening easterners and monstrous "darkies." Part of the pervading melancholy and loss of the book (and movie) stems of course from Tolkein's sadness at the loss of tradition-based communities and the enchanted natural world to modern industry, but equally so it seems to be fear about the coming impurity of the "higher man."

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow deals repeatedly with the themes of European colonialism and its fear of natives and darkness. He has more than one funny rant about the first King Kong and the way it reproduces the colonialist's fears and myths. Jackson's Screenwriting team is geeky and well-read; I wonder if they know about this angle on the film.

Whether they do or don't, it does all make you wonder about what deep and possibly unconscious motives are driving his choice of material.

I have tried all the sleeping medications; my insomnia yields to few effective treatments. My physician pulled me off of Ambien immediately after I told her I'd stayed up late talking with my boyfriend and had no memory of it the next day. No abuse, no mixing, just plain old black outs. This is not an uncommon action of taking the drug. Neither is its addictive powers, which were originally denied when it first hit the market. (The commercials on TV now stress that ALL sleeping medications can be habit forming, but originally they explicitly claimed that Ambien wasn't. My physician told me it produced some of the most immediate and severe cravings she'd seen -- she pulled ALL of her patients off of it.) It's a lovely drug, subjectively -- the sleep is terrific, it has no hangover, and it produces a sweet euphoria before dropping off. Too bad that it's really dangerous, objectively. How did it get through to the market without these effects being noticed? How is it that physicians keep pushing it? Oh wait, we know the answers to these questions, don't we?

1. Please don't talk about "red state neighbors," as if all of us living in Red States were the same. Some of us might like living in the South even as we deplore some much about its dominant politics. Isn't the goal to be able to live freely and fairly anywhere, rather than flee to our tribal (blue or red) lands? Moreover, this is divide and conquer culture politics of the worst kind. To wit:

2. This study hardly seems surprising -- why wouldn't majorities in states vote for the politicians that bring money back to their districts? Wouldn't a power base in the southern states be maintained by precisely by governmental largesse? Finally, does this money reflect funds for economic development or for poverty relief? It would help us considerably to be more fine-grained in our analysis of what this money is doing, rather than make simplistic jibes at the hypocritical "red-staters"

3. Finally, and only partly with tongue in cheek, I can't help but hate the red-blue scheme anyway -- let's reclaim red as the color of the left, as it was historically, and blue as the color of aristocratic blood. An unfortunate and ironic reversal of symbolic meanings has occured, that nobody seems to notice.

I'm not sure exactly whether this was a loving or a hateful tribute -- somehow the brief flash of Little Debbies peanut butter bars seemed knowing, but the references to the Dukes of Hazzard questionable. What continues to bother me is the Salon writing -- the introduction simply assumes that Salon has no CURRENT readers in the South; either we're blue-state liberals and want to vomit or we're lucky immigrants out of the South. Come on folks, show a little more sense.

Funny, Fox may ignore the baseline line-up, what Kaufman nicely calls the most "stately" tradition in sports, but watch NASCAR on Fox and you will see the National Anthem, the Blue Angels flyover and the "invocation" -- a specifically Christian prayer for the safety of the drivers and the enjoyment of the fans, along with "the genlemen start your engines." I guess pre-event events that stress Christianity, military might and patriotism are "must-see" TV, but traditions that don't do this, well, they just aren't traditions at all. Mind you, I am a NASCAR fan (who wishes some of that stuff would go away) my point simply concerns not only what doesn't make it onto TV, but what does.