September Already?

Hey, it's been a while. What're ya gonna do? Life gets busy sometimes. In the meantime, here are some interesting things I've been looking at today:

• Salon.com has a fascinating, three-part profile of the early radio career of Glenn Beck. It's clear that the author is no fan (whereas I generally like Beck, though I preferred the Glenn-Beck-on-the-radio version of about three years ago to the Howard-Beale-Prophet-of-Doom that I see on Fox News). About the early, pre-Mormon Beck, virtually all seem agreed: he was not a good guy. For a radio geek like me, a story like this is like catnip.

• Even the liberals over at Slate are starting to get a whiff of the unpleasant stench of nannystatism that is descending upon the land. They take a look at a draconian paper in the New England Journal of Medicine advocating taxes even on diet soda--because it may cause you more in your heart to want real sweets. After all, since we're going to put health care under state control, the state now has a direct interest in your eating habits. Slate notes:

  If you're trying to sink health care reform, this is a good way to do it: Show everyone how subsidized health insurance will entitle other people to regulate your eating habits.

• Like the previous article, TIME's Joel Stein points out that liberals have just as tenuous relationship with science as they're always claiming conservatives do. Talking about the resistance to getting vaccinated for swine flu among his circle of friends, he says:

  while the far right gets a lot of crap about not believing in science, the left isn't crazy about it either. Only instead of rejecting facts that conflict with the Bible, it ignores anything that conflicts with hippie myths about the perfection of nature. That's why my neighborhood is full of places you can go to detoxify with colonics, get healed with crystals and magnets and buy non--genetically engineered food.

  Unfortunately, however, Stein's answer to the problem leaves him in no better a spot:

  When presented with doubts, I don't search for detailed information from my side. I go with the consensus of mainstream media, academia and the government. Not because they're always right but because they're right far more often than not, and I have a TiVo to watch.

  And just when he was so close to making sense.

• On Bruce Springsteen's 60th birthday (a fact that just makes me want to crawl into a hole somewhere), here's a cool piece about the birth of Born to Run.

• And here's a note about an, ahem, awesome television program that will be making its way to the airwaves next year.

Hey, great seeing you. Have a nice autumn.