Back into running, and eyeing these things with fascination. The latest foot fad is high-tech retro, a sort of Space Age Australopithecus thing, back to the future. Based on a highly scientific theory that we should run the way Darwin intended us to, Serengeti-style, only with faux callouses, suitable for homo sapiens’ more recently evolved urban sophistication or loping across the suburban landscape. Here’s The Australian with an extended rant on running, injuries, feet and evolution. With lots of controversy:

Humans have been endurance running for millions of years according to evolutionary biologist Dan Lieberman of Harvard University. And they didn’t need a pair of Nikes to do so. Until the mid-1970s all humans ran shoeless or in minimal footwear such as sandals, moccasins or thin running flats.Lieberman’s latest research, published in Nature in January, indicates humans are able to do so comfortably and safely by landing with a flat foot, a midfoot strike, or by landing on the ball of the foot before bringing down the heel, a forefoot strike. In contrast, those who wear modern running shoes mainly land on their heels first.

This seemingly small difference in gait, which Lieberman measured in shod and unshod runners from Kenya and the US, makes running much less jarring.

Heel striking generates a rapid high-impact force — about 1 1/2 to as much as three times the body weight — the moment the foot collides with the ground. That’s equivalent to someone hitting your heel with a hammer using 1 1/2 to three times your body weight. Scientists suspect this spike in force, or impact transient, causes repetitive stress injuries.

Conversely, with a forefoot strike, impact forces increase smoothly throughout the stride with no impact transient. Still, this doesn’t prove the running style is less injurious, and flies in the face of popular belief.

Running shoes with pronation-control features and elevated, cushioned heels (PCECH) have been the gold standard for the past 30 years, with many sports medicine professionals prescribing them to help prevent injury.

So Craig Richards, of the University of Newcastle in NSW, rocked the status quo in March last year when he reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that there were no studies that found PCECH running shoes reduced injury rates.

Podiatry New Zealand responded by stating consumers would be foolish to believe the study. The release was withdrawn but is indicative of the, well, foothold PCECH running shoes have among health professionals. And it only touches on the ferocity of a debate that has been simmering for decades.

“The sports medicine sector has been prescribing a treatment without proven benefit for close to 30 years,” says Richards, who’s critical of the integrity of the sports science literature, noting the influence of running shoe companies on sports medicine.

They’re barking right up my evolutionary tree. Neo-troglodyte is the wave of the future. Here’s a local fan. MetroWest Daily News.

I currently use these:

ASICS Men’s GT-2140 Running Shoe Cheap, comfortable, get the job done. I’ve gone through several pairs, no problems as long as I stretch, like them a lot. Here’s the same for sheilas:

ASICS Women’s GEL-Kayano 15 Running Shoe

But I am highly intrigued by these. Here several models of the Vibram Five Fingers. The coolest ones … off-road “Trek” model, natrually are the most expensive:

Vibram Five Finger KSO Trek

Vibram Five Fingers Flow – Women’s

$180 bucks to play caveman? Not likely. These ones are a little more like it, in the $80 range:

Vibram Five Fingers Sprint – Men’s

Vibram Five Finger Sprint – Women’s

They should make Five Finger loafers and Five Finger dress shoes, suitable for office, nightclubbing, primitive man-about-town, that kind of thing. Plus the Five Finger combat boot. It’s only a matter of time. Look, they’re doing it for women:

  Vibram Five Fingers Classic – Women’s

Vibram Fivefingers Shoe Boot – Women’s W125 Surge 

One question. What if you have irregular toes? A longer-toed version, maybe with some cleats, could be pretty good for climbing coconut trees.

Meanwhile, in other foot fitness fads, here’s the Shape Up. Pretty much the anti-Five Finger, but here’s a Palm Beach Post blog post summing up the basics, with reference to a lot of rave reviews.

Skechers Women’s Shape Ups-Optimize Fitness Walking Shoe

Here’s one for blokes:

Skechers Men’s Shape Ups Lace-Up

Average American, meanwhile, recommends Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

Meanwhile, Running The Sahara was kind of cool project I saw on TV. Three guys running all day through the desert for weeks, encountering camels, political problems, etc. I must have missed the part that involved Matt Damon, George Clooney and Brad Pitt shilling for water projects.

Along similar lines: The Marathon Des Sables: Seven Days in the Sahara Enduring the Toughest Footrace on Earth Mark Hines

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times’ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?”

Person 1? I think I might be offended by that terminology. Especially if my wife gets ahold of the form before I do and I get up being Person 2. Kirkorian again:

My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.

I was thinking of getting into the spirit of the thing and being more accurate. “Asian-Pacific Islander.” Because my parents and several generations before that came from a couple of big islands in the Pacific called “Australia” and “New Zealand.” Maybe “North Atlantic Islander.” Because everyone before that came from a couple of big islands in the North Atlantic. A hardy ocean-going people with a lot of quaint folkways, like sticking out their pinky fingers when sipping tea, and taking over other people’s continents.

Maybe “Northern Barbarian.” Because that’s what my people were before the Romans showed up, started organizing everything.

Then, if you want to be minimalist, there’s “human.”

Malkin’s onboard with “American,” too, and offers up some historic philosophizing re same.

Found on the bookshelves one I’d forgotten I had: England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel by James McDermott. Published at the same time as Neil Hanson’s The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True Story of the Spanish Armada, which I’ve raved about earlier, Necessary Quarrel is a very different take. 

I’m only about 70 pages in, and just getting to the start of Elizabeth’s reign. McDermott starts nearly a century prior to Spain’s ill-fated 1588 Enterprise of England, and dives even farther back than that as he lays out the history of privateering, verging heavily on piracy, its periodic ineffective and generally insincere regulation and discouragement, and quite effective encouragement. His argument is that England’s use of privateers as a tool of war, foreign policy and enrichment, and England’s failure to do more than gently guide the institution created a threat that Philip II couldn’t ignore, and essentially created the crisis. At the same time, Hapsburg Spain’s New World monopoly and growing hegemony in Europe, with not a few economic and diplomatic blunders on Spain’s part, left England with the choice of effectively being a dominated if not a vassal state, or going boldly forth. He also looks at new emerging forces that autocratic princes were discovering they were unable to control, which come into play to varying degrees: Religion, commerce and popular political expression. The rest is history …

Beautifully written, looks to be an excellent companion to Confident Hope, which zeroes in on the immediate buildup to war, with a lot of intense and probing detail on politics, diplomacy, espionage, strategy and tactics surrounding the Armada. Remains to be seen how  Quarrel will handle those, but with more than 300 pages to go, there’s plenty of room for that and more.

The always erudite Robert chimes in, “Read Mattingly first.” That would be Garrett Mattingly, The Armada. Here’s an earlier incarnation: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1962 edition, and for total Armada nerds, the 1959 import.

Related reads:

Elizabeth’s Spymaster: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War That Saved England by Rober Hutchinson

Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll.

Re the fascination with this era:  I basically stumbled into it the usual way. Picked up a book, realized I only knew the barest outlines of the Armada tale, some myth and legend, and dove in. Turns out almost everything I knew was myth and legend, except that the Spaniards got the worst end of it, the weather was really bad and a lot of them wrecked against the west coast of Ireland.* 

However, it is the era that sets the stage for England’s rise from second-rate European upstart/nuisance to world power which, when you look at some of the circumstances of the time, is an astonishing and hardly to be expected outcome. The manner in which it was accomplished, for all the noble ideals that the Anglosphere has come to embody, basically involves a lot of audaciousness, political cynicism, theft and violence. Not that, in 16th century Europe, there was anything particularly unusual about that. Plus that timeless combination of deftness and bumbling, professionalism and incompetence that makes this history readily accessible to a modern audience.

* That washed-up Armada survivor/black Irish thing? Myth. Anglo-Irish lords executed them all. Every last one, except a handful they turned over to the English, and a few who may have gone to ground. Absence of Armada “black Irish” genes confirmed by Sykes’s genetic study of the British Isles:  Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland. Another great read that will give you a quick rundown on the early history and settlement of the isles from which our current version of western civilization is largely sprung. Among other myths busted by Sykes, the notion of “Celtic” roots. Those of us of Irish and British descent share a great deal of common ancestry among the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain down both our maternal and paternal lines … including ancient Iberian and Gallic and Germanic strains … with more recent overlays of Saxon, Norman, Viking and Danish blood mainly in the male lineage. But central and eastern Europe’s Celtic genes are not in the mix. Sykes, who devotes a lot of attention to the history of British racism and what the Irish, English and Scots have perceived themselves to be in modern times, uses the word “Celt” in relation to the Isles mainly with quotation marks.

Some astute reader just picked up this ”Glorious Revolution” take via the site’s Amazon links. 1688, The First Modern Revolution, by Steve Pincus. Looks great. Summary, reviews plus gratuitous Anglophilic frog-bashing commentary:

 1688 dust jacket copy via Amazon:

For two hundred years historians have viewed England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution—bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. In this brilliant new interpretation Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view

By expanding the interpretive lens to include a broader geographical and chronological frame, Pincus demonstrates that England’s revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, not months, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich historical narrative, based on masses of new archival research, traces the transformation of English foreign policy, religious culture, and political economy that, he argues, was the intended consequence of the revolutionaries of 1688–1689

James II developed a modernization program that emphasized centralized control, repression of dissidents, and territorial empire. The revolutionaries, by contrast, took advantage of the new economic possibilities to create a bureaucratic but participatory state. The postrevolutionary English state emphasized its ideological break with the past and envisioned itself as continuing to evolve. All of this, argues Pincus, makes the Glorious Revolution—not the French Revolution—the first truly modern revolution.

You know me, always on board for another world-changing Anglophilic glance back, all the better with some gratuitous frog-bashing thrown in.

(For more on what a violent, ill-conceived, out-of-control and broadly destructive thing the French Revolution was, with horrible consequences not just for Europe and the Near East, but even for France itself for generations to come, here’s a straightforward retelling of the quarter century that begins with the runup to said bloody debacle. Robert Harvey’s The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France: 1789-1815 notes that the French Revolution was not only inspired by but kickstarted off by some former participants in that other early modern revolution, the American one. However … I don’t want to suggest the involvement of the French had anything to do with this … unlike the American one that created the first modern constitutional state, the French one spawned the first modern military dictatorship and world war, threw France decades back in economic and industrial development and left several generations’ bones out to bleach from Russia to Egypt to Flanders and points in between.)

1688 Reviews:

“A magnificent, fully documented, very well written study of how the first thorough-going modern revolution was achieved with effort and against substantial obstacles over several years. It was bloody and popular, not merely a palace coup achieved with little loss of life, as is commonly held … Pincus’’s commitment to vigorous argument (in which he overturns many received views; his definition of revolution itself is bracingly refreshing) makes this book exciting reading  … For anyone interested in modern liberal society, its origins, and why it is worth defending, this book is indispensable.”-Nigel Smith, Princeton University

“A radical interpretation of a radical revolution. Steve Pincus’’s brilliantly researched account of the extraordinary events of the 1680s and 1690s mounts an insuperable challenge to the comfortable view that the Glorious Revolution was another instance of British consensus politics, pragmatism, and common sense … ”-John Brewer, California Institute of Technology

“In this remarkable work of scholarship, vast in scope and profound in its implications, Pincus challenges Macaulay and the orthodox view that the Glorious Revolution was moderate, peaceful, and conservative, and reveals a violent transformational event that revolutionized England’’s state, church, and political economy, and introduced political modernity.”-Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University 

“Meticulously researched and deftly written” -Andrew Stuttaford, National Review

“Utterly extraordinary.”-Don Herzog, University of Michigan 

“We all know that the year 1688 is a milestone in England’’s history; now, thanks to Steve Pincus, the book 1688 will be a milestone in its historiography. Pincus transforms what once seemed a peaceful compromise among agreeable aristocrats into a fractious and all-encompassing crisis, the ‘first modern revolution.’ Provocative, erudite, and accessible, 1688 is a must read for anyone interested in seventeenth-century Europe and its possessions.”-Cynthia Herrup, University of Southern California.

Here’s Pincus at Yale, where he’s all about 17th and 18th century Britain.

I may have to raid the change jar for this 1688. As you know, I’m increasingly zeroing in on war and politics of that extraordinary era, in its various manifestations, from Mayflower and 1776, reaching back a little deeper to The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True Story of the Spanish Armada, fast-forwarding to Harvey’s The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France: 1789-1815 (speaking of whom, I still need to pick up Harvey’s A Few Bloody Noses: The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution).

Apparently I’m not the only one. Other recent reader purchases via the site:

Cromwell’s War Machine: The New Model Army 1645-1660 by Keith Roberts

God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars by M. J. Braddick

Elizabeth’s Spymaster: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War That Saved England by Robert Hutchinson

Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll

Re the Glorious Revolution, Robert in commnts below likes Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers by Michael Barone

Currently taking a break from pre-modern intrigue, splatter and head-rolling, however, with what is turning out to be great quick and dirty history of the geology, archaelogy, settlement, major political/population upheavals and not least genetics of the British Isles. Can’t recommend Bryan Sykes’ myth-busting Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland highly enough. You will want to find out which strains you’re sprung from, and conveniently, Oxford geneticist Sykes is in the business.

In other mythbusting, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann is another must-read which has been wildly popular with the site’s readers.

Still love that title. If you haven’t once confidently hoped for a miracle, you probably haven’t lived. But there are some circumstances that call for miracles, and then there are others. Here’s a review of  The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True Story of the Spanish Armada by Neil Hanson, plus a quickie on Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.

The Confident Hope of a Miracle first. In a word: Magnificent.

Two more words: Breathtaking and exhaustive. The product of extensive research, as illustrated by an incredible level of detail on all aspects of Philip II’s “Enterprise of England” and Elizabeth’s efforts to keep her throne. There are a lot of stories, history and characters packed into these 429 pages. The political rivalry of England and Spain in France, the Netherlands and the West Indies in the late 16th century is extensively explored. It is expressed in a variety of ways from sophisticated espionage and counterintelligence operations, brutal counterinsurgencies, and the intensity of religious politics and suppression as the Reformation continued to play itself out. Also explored in detail is the rapid evolution of maritime and military technology, tactics and practices … more rapidly in some places than others, as Spain led in military prowess, with a highly professional army, while England critically shot ahead in maritime design and naval tactics and gunnery, which proved to be the deciding factors.

The destruction of the Spanish fleet … accomplished by nature and ineptitude with a major assist by English naval tacticians and gunners … is a tale for the ages. The sleek “race-built” English warships were literally able to sail circles around the antiquated Spanish galleons … steering clear of them to prevent grappling and boarding that would have given the Spanish an advantage … while their improvements in naval gunnery allowed them to outshoot the Spaniards by ratios of up to 10-to -1.  Drake and Frobisher also cleverly made use of the familiar and often extreme homewater currents to aid their strategic goal of forcing the Spanish to keep along of southern coast of England, away from invasion ports, until their ungainly ships … with poor maneuverability, unable to beat close to the wind … were swept into the North Sea.

There are the spymasters, Walsingham and Mendoza. Then there are people like the monkish, manipulative and murderous Philip II of Spain, the equally manipulative and murderous Elizabeth I of England. A lot of space is devoted both to Philip’s preparations for invasion and Elizabeth’s preparations to defend against it. Both made critical errors, though Elizabeth comes in for special excoriation for her “cheese-paring” parsimoniousness in the very face of the enemy. Ships were put to sea with insufficient rations, poweder and shot despite repeated warnings, with disastrous results. Hanson notes that casualty rates in the English ships, despite little battle damage, approached those in the Spanish ships … which were heavily bombarded, short on rations themselves, full of disease, lost by the dozens to shipwreck, with survivors facing execution when they crawled ashore. Most of the English losses, Hanson posits, were entirely avoidable had Elizabeth heeded early and frequent pleas for naval provisioning that would have averted disease and malnutrition, followed on by the complete abandonment of the infirm and refusal to pay off crews when they came shore after saving her realm. It was left to commanders like Howard and Drake to look after their men, out of their own pockets. The well-documented myopia and miserliness of the queen, to the point of endangering her throne and her nation and repeatedly chastising those whose largely thankless exertions saved both, is beyond astonishing. Especially in comparison to Philip’s treatment of those who failed.

The book is not without flaws. The extensive quoting of contemporary material is often unattributed, or simply footnoted so that, unless you are willing to dive deep into the source material, you don’t know who is making key observations or statements of fact.  A lot of the chronological jumping back and forth is unavoidable in a tale of this complexity, but it could have been reduced by greater organizational discipline. Both were frequent annoyances, but in the end were unable to diminish the power of Confident Hope’s retelling of this legendary tale. 

It’s the kind of history that comes to life on the page, shatters myths, and reveals human strengths and frailities in the way the best histories do, showing that people of great ages were not so different from us at all, while still leaving you wondering how they did it. And grateful that if the passage of centuries hasn’t relieved us of religious war, political shortsightedness and large-scale death and suffering, it has at least led us away from so many of the horrors that were the commonplace result of policy, practice and human limitations then.

Now partway into Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes, which is shaping up to be equal parts scientific, political and cultural history, as well as another mythbuster, spreading well beyond the Isles. Sykes is the Oxford geneticist who will, for varying fees of several hundred dollars, tell you who you are. And where you came from. Also author of  The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, Adam’s Curse: A Future without Men and The Human Inheritance: Genes, Languages, and Evolution.

But making progress. Two steps forward, one step back. Having never had major health issues before, it’s weird to be in this predicament. A friend who had a similar issue a couple of years ago and crawled out of his own hole says, you’re in your 40s and wondering if this is it. It gets better, he assures. Sure it does. Meanwhile, mortality sucks.

Did I mention how weird it was to actually be a patient in the hospital? To be the one who is lying in the gurney in a johnny, drugged up, with an IV in my arm, being wheeled through the halls and getting glances from all the healthys. Being stuck in a room with a raver who had a “sitter” watching him at all times and the latch taped open in the bathroom because they didn’t want him locking himself in, if you know what I mean. I didn’t mind that much, thanks to the generous doses of intravenous Dilaudid, he was even a bit entertaining, though I did use a demonstration of agonized grogginess to shut down his efforts to engage me in manic conversation. The nurses later reconsidered that placement and wheeled him out shortly after.

There’s the general helplessness and pissing in a bottle, though as I explained to the nurse, that part was nothing new. It even had an odd comforting familiarity to it. That’s what we did in the tracks when we were on the move in the desert. Piss in empty water bottles and hand them up for the gunner to throw them out the turret. The nurse who kindly took my piss bottle liked that. (I didn’t tell her about the time I accidentally took a swig from one. Need-to-know basis.) Her Boston firefighter boyfriend did two combat tours as a Marine — Iraq and Afghanistan – so it was a little like old home week. People who know. We talked about how a nurse/Marine-firefighter matchup is probably a good one, just like my matchup with a woman whose dad and brothers are cops, firefighters and commercial fishermen made things easier. That and her background in politics. They already know there are no normal hours and a lot of times, the job is going to come first. When you gotta go, you gotta go, and when you have to stay there, you have to stay there. And sometimes, you might not get to come back. 

(My relatively mild brush with mortality, the normal aging wear-and-tear type, made me think more than once about some of the guys I’ve run into over the years whose lives become defined by mortality’s more extreme expressions. Marine LCpl. James Crosby, paralyzed from the waist down with his guts cut up, constant pain and continence issues on top of being an invalid, after a rocket interrupted his PX trip at Al Asad. Army Sgt. James Lathan, neck down, will never climb out of bed on his own again. Marine Cpl. Matt Boisvert, minus a leg and parts of one arm, wishing he was back with his guys in Fallujah. “We enjoyed it. We loved it,” he said about the intensity of combat. Army PFC Paul Skarinka, large parts of his calf missing and a hole in his side, going cold … and as a civilian paramedic, knowing what that meant … expecting he’d bleed out in the back of the Humvee they threw him into in Sadr City. Marine Cpl. Peter Bagarella, on his back outside Haditha, counting his fingers with his thumbs, his foot gone, temporarily blind, asking the medic who was ripping his pants open, “Is it there?” … for them and the rest, thanks for helping make this year’s IT Valour a success, BTW. Donate to Soldier’s Angels here. So what have I got to complain about? Nothing. I’ve made it to middle age on my own two feet, with a lot of years ahead. It puts things in perspective.) 

Still weird crawling back from this thing. Starting to get how people get “addicted to painkillers,” as they say in the papers, and scaling back usage. Physical activity in my case is turning out to be a great alternative, but sooner or later you have to sit down or lie down, and that’s when it kicks in.

PT is going well, and the therapist is letting me incorporate more elements of my workout … flutter kicks, pushups, some light dumbbells to stay current on the upper body … to the range of abdominal exercises and stretches he’s got me on, so I actually feel like I’m back on the “Live Forever” track of the “Live Forever Or Die Trying” program. Walking around at work with blue ice poking out of the back of my pants, and getting in a lot of one-mile walks. Moving around is when this all feels best, though, because this is very much a moving target, there are times when that isn’t possible. Also, you have to sit down or lie down sooner or later, and that’s when it moves back in, grabs the leg. 

Many thanks again to those who have patronized the Boutique Warmongery and the Amazon links. Big shout out to all who hit the Paypal button.

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Speaking of Roger Daltrey, hate to differ with the Boston Herald’s Jed Gottlieb on The Who, but it was more like The Why? 

I forced my kids to watch it for purposes of cultural instruction, at least until about the third note of “Pinball Wizard” when it became too painfully embarrassing. We clicked over to ESPN for more sports blah blah blah, checked back. The geezers were crawling through their medley … that high-tech lightshow and pyrotechnics actually were impressive, held us for a minute, but only served to make the oldsters look lamer … clicked away again, back, away again, back. It didn’t get any better. Someone please tell the NFL that geriatric hasbeen halftime shows are painful, especially when the 60-somethings insist on dressing retro and are hanging out of their mod gear. At least Paul McCartney a couple of years ago was skinny enough that if you squinted he could almost pass for the teenager he was dressed and behaving like, though with McCartney earplugs have been mandatory since he stopped being a Beatle. Gottlieb declares it a “smart branding move” but unfortunately fails to elaborate. I don’t get it. Please explain if you do. I thought the big target age range is something like 18-to-35. Please, NFL, target them. I’d rather watch rap. Some eye candy with full vocal range, please. Speaking as a near-geezer who fondly remembers these acts from when they were big and has an iPod full of them, Superbowl halftimes are like the Lenin’s Tomb of Rock’n'Roll.

Great minds think alike. Don Surber, who’s even closer to Daltrey’s g-g-g-generation than I am: “The Who Sucked.”

Surber advises lip-syncing. I advise act-sinking. Surber also hurtfully observes that Daltrey patently didn’t get his “hope I die before I get old” wish.  

In other Superbowl business, Powerline and HotAir pick a bone with AP over the Tebow ad. More on the Tebow controversy from HotAir and Gateway. Sorry to say that in my extended state of geezer-like convalescence, I’ve missed the contro and also missed the ad last night. Must have been in the kitchen popping another ice cold muscle relaxant.

It probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise that both President Obama and U.S. Sen.-elect Scott Brown can count a politician among their ancestors.

But the same one?

It’s true. Genealogists said the Democratic president and the Bay State’s Republican senator-elect are 10th cousins. They both are descendants of the same 17th century Massachusetts selectman.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society said Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown’s mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill.

“I’m glad to be in such distinguished company,” Brown said.

Singletary died in 1687 at the advanced age of 102. Good genes! Earlier, he served as a selectman in Salisbury and Haverhill.

… Obama is related to seven prior presidents, including George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. They also learned he was related to actor Brad Pitt.

Not that big a surprise. Virtually every president and presidential candidate lately has turned out to be related 10 generations back. If your relatives were here in the 18th or 17th century, hard not to be, as the population was about 100th of what it is today. A visit to the Mayflower Society on Thanksgiving underscores the point. You’ll meet people of Chinese and Japanese descent, American blacks and people whose great-grandad fled the shtetl one step ahead of the Cossacks. All Mayflower descendants. As Philbrick notes in Mayflower, something like 30 million people, about one in 10 Americans, are descended from the 104 people who got off the boat in 1620. In my own case, as my parents immigrated to this country in the 1950s, any relationship with any of the above goes back to the old country, the British Isles. Go back far enough, we’re all related, and you don’t have to go back to Africa for that. DNA studies find stodgy go-nowhere Brits loaded up with African and Roman genes, thanks to Julius Caesar etal, in with the usual Celt, Saxon, Viking mix.

In other political business, here’s a “rock star” Scott Brown doing a three-day victory lap to thank the voters. It’s a nice gesture, but he might be enjoying this a little too much. Boston Herald. Lolly-gagging attention-sopping idol worship-mongering cometh before a fall.

Meanwhile, via WSJ, Scott Brown: “People Aren’t Stupid.” Well, yes and no. Surber, riffing off same, reckons Brown could be Obama’s salvation. Maybe, if he’ll listen. I dunno, like the old man always said, you can lead a horse to water …

Meanwhile, Obama mixes it up with the GOP. via Boston Herald. As NYT has it, they “vent politely.” calls it You know, if he had tried this a year ago instead of lecturing everyone about bi-partisanship and then flipping them off. Then again, he could ease off the the bi-partisanship lectures now. You know what real hardball, pipe-swinging pols say. I’m talking about the ones who know the game, how it works in the schoolyard: What you say is what you are. I’m rubber, you’re glue …

Raging hypocrisy alert as ThinkProgress lectures the right, accuses the hated cons of raging hypocrisy for daring to complain about being lectured at by a raging hypocrite. It’s a classic Democratic tail-chase … no, not the Clinton variety.

Put another way, by HotAir: “Don’t demonize me, teabaggers!”

Gateway: He’s “not an ideologue.” He’s an ideologue in denial.

This one’s fun. Sadly No!

At they very least, he put the teleprompter joke to rest forever.

I would absolutely like to see more of this, and not in a partisan way. I’d like to see the opposition get smarter for the next one, knowing as they do now that if they aren’t, they’ll get a well-deserved ass-kicking. Thoughts?

Well, proofread, for starters, but that happens to us all. But I’ll venture that Teleprompter joke has more legs than Obama’s “ass-kicking” skills do. Sadly Doh! deems it a “good week.” Sheesh. If that was a good week I’d hate to see him have a great one. OK, maybe I wouldn’t. 

More hurtful fun from HotAir: Post-SOTU poll shows disbelief on Obama claims.

Moonbattery digs deep into the archives to the ”last time the Progressive Left had the level of political and cultural dominance it enjoys today … the early to mid-1970s.” That’s a debatable point, but the wackiness of the rebordered 38 United States isn’t.

Moonbattery’s Gregory of Yardale notes not only are C. Etzel Pearcy’s boundaries designed to emphasize the urban centers, which would have the effect of benefiting you-know-who, but “States would also be renamed to eliminate the painful memory of those dead white guys who named them the first time around.” In most cases, yes, but not entirely. Oppressive slave name “Plymouth” subs out Indian name “Massachusetts.”* “Hudson” and “Cumberland” are dead white guys. “Carolina” is a Latinate, feminized version of dead white guy Charles I’s name. “Alamo,” ”San Gabriel” and “San Luis” come from the grandaddy of hated white invader languages, Spanish, ironically now in vogue as a linguistic marker of oppressed status, while the latter two names have the added awkwardness of non-PC religious origin. “Superior” comes from a dead white language. “Bonneville” is a Pontiac, “Talladego” is adapted from a NASCAR track, and “Dearborn” is Arabic. Ha ha, just kidding about those ones. But the guy who made this map is clearly pre-warmal, as he’s honoring at least five historic vehicles: El Dorado, Biscayne, Plymouth, Hudson and Bonneville, plus the two automotive locales, Talladego and Dearborn … three seeing as “Bonneville” is really more about the place than the Pontiac, and the place is all about fast cars. Dearborn and Bonneville, in fact, look a lot like overt nods to naked automotivism by the 1970s geography students that Pearcy polled in working up his new state names. 

All that considered, I’d say renaming the United States after cars is an idea that perhaps should be revisited. They are pretty much the driving force, along with national defense, behind our most dominant geographical feature at present, the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. I wouldn’t mind living in the state of Ford Mustang, or maybe Dodge Challenger. Of course, given that this is Massachusetts, I’d probably end up living someplace lame like the “Commonwealth of Prius.” I’d settle for something historic like “Plymouth Valiant.” If they made all of New England one state they could call it “Slant Six.” Yeah, I know, enough with the hurtful jokes already, it would be a leftward slant.

But a bold vehicular theme in the renamed Unitd States of Automovia would be a strong symbolic move to signify that, given the various setbacks that manmade-warming theory, politics and economics are currently encountering, we’re done with that crap.

* For a good primer on how the history of the English settlement of North America and relations with its Indian inhabitants does not neatly fit into common misconceptions, read Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. It’s also a great counterinsurgency primer, thanks to the military innovations of Benjamin Church.

Checking in at Amazon, I noticed they are pushing Casio G-Shocks. Two thumbs up. I’ve been wearing G-Shocks for about 20 years. From the bottom of the North Atlantic, through blizzards high in the mountains of New England. (Through blizzards on the North Atlantic, now that I think of it, with mountainous 15-foot seas crashing on the bow … and scuba diving on the side of a mountain in mid-winter, for that matter.) Under fire from the terrifying cliff-hanging roads of Kashmir to burned-out Kosovar villages to the howling sands of ancient Uruq and the war-torn boulevards of Baghdad. Also, at the very Final Battleground of Good and Evil at Armageddon itself, on the eve of dread and terrible Millennium.

Perhaps more dire, at the Palestinian celebration of said Millenium in Bethlehem, where I survived being pelted by a panicked flight of symbolic peace doves, narrowly dodged a faceful of fireworks and successfully negotiated a crush of 20,000 Palos all trying to get out through the same ancient alleys at the same time.  

All true stories. Even when I thought my time was up, I always knew what time it was.

I’m on my third G-Shock, but my first one still works. It’s attached to my ScubaPro BCD by a Velcro strap, because the only thing that has broken on any of my G-Shocks is the plastic strap, usually after six to eight years. Here’s my second one. It’s in the sock drawer, having a rest.

I’m a big fan of Casio’s cheap, tough, enduring reliability. They just keep getting better. I’m wearing the Casio Men’s G-Shock Multi-Band Solar Atomic Analog Watch #AWG100-1A these days. Roughly 20 years on, I’m into Casio for about $200 bucks. That’s a lot of tough reliability for not a lot of dough.

You can get them digital, with assorted bells and whistles, pimped out with flashier colors. Whatever you like. I like this one. It has hands … I was getting a little tired of living in a totally digital world. Those hands are readjusted nightly to atomic time by radio signals from a hidden bunker deep in the Rockies. Something like that. (very Bondian. I like this.) It also has zillions of miniature solar cells, barely visible in a honeycomb pattern on the face, that keep it charged. So it never runs down, and as long as that secret bunker keeps blasting out signals, it will keep telling atomically precise time. My one complaint, it isn’t analog enough. Instead of a sweep second hand, it has a small digital second readout. Maybe a power/space/efficiency tradeoff. I can live with it. 

(In accordance with the FTC’s desire to mind my business, I’d like to disclose that I have received no remuneration from Casio for plugging their excellent products … though I’d be more than happy to. I still have the cheap Casio calculator I picked up in 1986, BTW, in my desk drawer at work. Works great. Your purchases through Amazon links help support the site through modest commissions, however.)