Shots in the Dark

As if its looks weren’t enough of a turnoff, hagfish, when agitated, vomit and secrete a protein that reacts with seawater to create a thick mucus.

A single animal can turn a five-gallon bucket of seawater into a pool of goo in a matter of moments, said Eddie Kisfaludy of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. While the slime distracts predators, it also occasionally suffocates the hagfish.

—The Associated Press, reporting on the truly bizarre hagfish, which has become a delicacy among Koreans who consider it an aphrodisiac

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That was fast: Dick Gross is out of a job.

Here’s part of a press release by FAS spokesperson Richard Mitchell:

Harvard College Dean Benedict H. Gross announced today that he will conclude his service as dean on Aug. 31, 2007. In making the announcement, Gross said that, with the conclusion of the legislative process of the curricular review, the time seems appropriate to move on to other projects.

Anyone else surprised by the speed with which Drew Faust made this move? Or did Derek Bok do it, just as he effected calendar reform on his own? Anyone think it’s a bad move? And finally…who’s the next dean of Harvard College?

“Many Iraqis, beleaguered at every turn, said they saw the bomb as an attempt to aggravate sectarian strife and as one more piece of evidence that the Americans could not protect them from extremists. Many of those who live near the site of the destruction said they had concluded that the Americans must be helping the suicide bombers.”

—Alissa Rubin in the Times, writing about yesterday’s mosque-bombing in Iraq

What does it say when citizens of the country we were supposedly/allegedly/ostensibly trying to save now believe that we are the ones trying to destroy it?

I don’t know at what point we can truly conclude that we have lost Iraq, but surely one indicator would be when ordinary Iraqis believe that Americans are helping suicide bombers blow up mosques.

The state chairman of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign, Thomas Ravenel, has been indicted on federal charges of cocaine possession.

According to the Times,

The treasurer, Thomas. Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, is accused of buying less than 500 grams of the drug to share with other people in late 2005, said United States Attorney Reggie Lloyd.

Let us hope that it is a lot less than 500 grams, because, well, let’s just say that, if it were, say, 450 grams, Mr. Ravenel would either be awfully rich, awfully generous, or have an awful lot of friends. 500 grams is a lot.

In other Giuliani news, it turns out the self-proclaimed hero of 9/11 was more interested in giving lucrative speeches than attending meetings of the Iraq Study Group—which is why they kicked him out…..

A friend of mine from college went to work for Ford Motor Company in Detroit after she attended business school, and at times the culture there drove her crazy. It wasn’t just that she was about the only female executive in the entire country. It was also that she found the top management at Ford incredibly isolated, both geographically and culturally. “You can’t believe these people,” she said. “It’s like they’re living in a different era.”

I thought of that reading today’s Times story about how American automakers are finally succumbing to political pressure to raise fuel standards. Well, kind of:

Even as recently as last weekend, a lobbying group financed by auto companies was still running radio ads in 11 states, raising the prospect that soccer moms might lose the opportunity to buy big sport utility vehicles if they did not urge Congress to reject legislation calling for higher mileage.

“Why can’t they let me make the choice?” one of the ads said. “I’m all for better fuel economy, but for me safety is my top concern.”

These people really are complete idiots, aren’t they?

(And not just because we know that SUVs are actually less safe than smaller cars.)

Why do American auto executives need political pressure to tell them that they need to make cars with better gas mileage? You’d think that the marketplace would have made this fact obvious to them by now. Ford, GM, Chrysler—whatever Chrysler is called now—they’ve all been making the same clunky, ugly gas-guzzlers for years now. No one wants ’em. And yet, they still say, Don’t make our cars get good gas mileage, it’ll kill our business.

Which would, of course, make it a race to the bottom, because Detroit seems to be pretty good at committing suicide.

Carmakers say the plan will probably cost the industry tens of billions of dollars in development costs for new vehicles and technology over the next decade.

It’s called research and development, Detroit. Perhaps you should have been investing it over, say, the past 20 years?

Imagine if the American computer industry had the same mentality as the auto industry. We’d have computers that got slower and had less memory with every passing year, and were plagued an unfortunate tendency to roll over….

In Slate, Ron Rosenbaum writes a vicious and hilarious deconstruction of Esquire magazine’s celebrity profile of Angelina Jolie.

I particularly enjoy Rosenbaum’s short essay because Esquire drives me nuts. (Deep, I know.) It’s a magazine that wants to appeal to the prurient interest that every men’s magazine tries to appeal to, and so it puts Angelina Jolie and various other gorgeous women on its cover. Nothing particularly wrong with that. But then it suggests that, well, unlike those other magazines, it’s actually very highbrow about the whole thing. This inevitably leads to pretension; Esquire’s website, for example, proffers a list of articles “for your perusal.” For your perusal. Pretty funny.

The result of Esquire’s pretensions to seriousness, Rosenbaum suggests, is the worst celebrity profile ever written…. Give Esquire some credit, though: It is a beautifully designed cover.

In a desperate attempt to be counter-intuitive, New York magazine asks, “Has Steve Jobs peaked?”

Translation: We want to do a story on the iPhone, but we are scrambling to figure out something to say other than how cool it is going to be/will businesspeople survive without a keyboard.

What if [the] consensus is wrong? What if Jobs and Apple have peaked? What if, in terms of power and influence it’s all downhill from here? These suggestions might seem incredible, but half a century of high-tech hnistory indicates otherwise…..

Zzzzzzzzzz…….

In the Globe, the M-Bomb looks at the explosive new fad among college students: the hunger strike.

In most of the protests, the hunger strikers claimed to have won concessions. But they have also alarmed university leaders and, on some campuses, triggered a backlash from fellow students.

Bombardieri points out that the technique developed at Harvard in response to crackdowns on other forms of protest…..

Cozumel toadfish by Phil Harris.

The debate about the end of The Sopranos rages on-another sign of the brilliance of David Chase’s ending-and there seems to be a growing faith that the eleven-second blackout at the end of the show does indeed represent Tony’s death.