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As this Year of Our Common Calendar 2010 began its downhill slide, I turned 32 years old, saw bleakness on all sides of me, and read the following books:

The Rise of the Roman Empire, Polybius. This one took forever. Not because it’s long; I read the far more lengthy Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in much less time. Whereas Gibbon’s prose still seems very contemporary after a couple of centuries, however, no translation can really quite bridge the ten-times-as-long gap between us and Polybius. As I find to be the case with many classic works, it was interesting, and if you settle into its rhythms you can make good progress, but it’s still very easy to set aside.

Having finished it, I confess that I’m still not entirely sure how Rome built its empire; this book was really more like “How Rome subdued Carthage and became kingmakers among the Greeks.” I can note, however, that while “killing those who opposed them” certainly did play a role, I really don’t think it was the key. (After all, a province with a productive, taxpaying populace was of far greater value than a desolation.) In fact the Romans employed canny diplomacy as much as sharpened steel.

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First, everything not fairly closely-related to environmental issues:

• “Krugs” throws old, familiar charges of alienating his primary base of support, in a futile quest for “postpartisanship,” at President Obama. Charges still stick.
• While subjecting Facebook and its pimple-faced kid billionaire to growing scrutiny, let us not forget about that other Great Cyber-Satan.
• Optimistic (or worried?) that Americans have learned a new and lasting sense of thrift? Rejoice (or despair).
• Flipboard: I wonder if this is anything like how John Henry felt while watching technicians set up the version 1.0 steam drill.

This one is borderline: A Times op-ed calls the much-ballyhooed, and much taxpayer-subsidized, Chevy Volt an overpriced flop. (“W” encouraged talk of the “hydrogen highway,” and now electric cars are having their moment… bets on whether the next administration will raise flywheel technology to the rank of automotive savior?)

And the rest:

• The Economist arrives about a week late with coverage of the fizzling out of climate change legislation, apparently hoping to make up for the delay by publishing two largely interchangeable articles. The picture is, of course, bleak, but hey! Schadenfreude: “a patchwork of different rules in different states… may leave big energy firms regretting their opposition to cap and trade.” (Though we’ll probably just end up bailing them out, as we do with everything else that big businesses have cause to regret.)
• NPR’s science blog seems to spend a lot of time indulging in elliptical ruminations on the authors’ personal unresolved issues about science and non-secular philosophy. But this item was one of the rare breaks, and remarkably poignant; I thought about posting some sort of commentary, but there’s probably no just no real need.

No, this isn’t any kind of serious post, really. It’s actually a satirical post featuring some goofy ideas I had this morning about alternative logos for the Democrats.

This, I guess, is the party’s official logo:

I grabbed it from Wikipedia, at any rate; I dunno

Interestingly, this is rarely what media seem to use; I think the Democrats are far more often represented by some sort of donkey-shaped variant of the official GOP logo, as the BBC does here. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is with this; it may be that most Democrats aren’t either. America’s two leading political parties seem to be more like the Cleveland Browns, in terms of standardized graphic identity, than like major political parties in say, Canada, or Britain.

But in any event, the Democrats’ emblem is a donkey, in some form. I think that much, at least, is pretty well established. And admittedly, if I were setting out to indulge in a little embittered mockery of “my” party, suggesting that they be represented by a jackass would seemingly be quite sufficient, you’d think. (It continues to afford the GOP endless merriment, after all; thank you, Thomas Nast.) Sufficient, perhaps, but also boring. So in light of the Democrats’ latest in a string of craven climbdowns, I’ve decided to explore some other options just in case they might better represent the party of mush: (more…)