UNASKED QUESTIONS 2

posted by James Reel

    Arizona Daily Star reporters and their editors continue to parrot press releases instead of digging up facts independently. Example: Monday’s article announcing that “Animal care officials hope new rules will put an end to the breeding of wolf-dog hybrids in Pima County.”
    The proposed rules—at this writing, the Star hasn’t bothered to follow up this story with a report on the Board of Supervisors’ action—arise from ignorant hysteria about the nature of wolf hybrids. The problems with these animals have more to do with bad owners than with animal nature, but attach the word “wolf” to anything and people grab their rifles. (Note: There has never been a properly documented wolf attack on a human being in North America.) The excuse for banning wolf hybrids is that the rabies vaccine has not been proven to be effective on them. Well, actually, it has been proven effective, but the USDA has refused to approve the vaccine for political reasons. Furthermore, rabies vaccines have been used successfully in wild wolf reintroduction projects in North America and Africa, so what’s the problem with hybrids?
    You won’t learn any of this background from the Star article. Instead, reporter Erica Meltzer relies on three sources with very narrow perspective: Pima Animal “Care” Center veterinarian Bonnie Lilley, local Humane Society director of operations Pat Hubbard, and Linda Searles of the Southwest Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education Foundation. Searles deals with wild wolves, hardly any hybrids, and so isn’t really qualified to speak on this subject. Hubbard can talk about wolf hybrids being abandoned at her shelter, but her remarks have to do with owner malfeasance, not problems with the animals themselves.
    Then there’s Lilley, the primary source, who gets to state her case without the reporter providing background or finding an opposing source (which would not be difficult). Had reporter Meltzer dug into her own newspaper’s archive, she would have noticed an article from Aug. 28, 2005, reporting that “Problems at Pima Animal Care Center involving animal care and customer service have prompted officials to replace the facility's manager. Veterinarian Bonnie Lilley was hired as manager last winter, but she has been criticized by animal rescue groups that said she is thwarting adoptions and failing to properly care for animals. … Rescue-group leaders said that when they are being offered animals, they were often very sick and have languished untreated at the center for days.”
    In other words, Lilley was removed from her administrative post for incompetence and obstructionism. Presumably she is also the person who recently withheld treatment from Clay, the dog found stuck up to his neck in a muddy wash, during the pound’s standard three-day countdown to euthanasia. Perhaps Lilley was too busy masterminding her wolf-hybrid witch hunt to tend to the animals in her care.
    Oh, and here’s an interesting tidbit: “There have been at least three cases nationwide in which vaccinated wolf-dog hybrids contracted rabies, Lilley said.” Three cases over how many years? Which vaccine was used? Are there any cases during the same period in which vaccinated domestic dogs contracted rabies? Without any of that information, Lilley’s “three cases” are statistically meaningless.
    Why does Meltzer allow this source, with her unscientific agenda and questionable integrity, to go unchallenged? Because the Star lets its reporters get away with repeating, rather than reporting.

STREAMERS

posted by James Reel

    Burt Schneider, afternoon host over at KUAZ-FM, files this report:

Alan Campbell [a former KUAT-FM morning announcer] checked in the other day. He's programming five streaming stations on the internet from his hideout in Monterrey, Mexico. He says one of his stations has just passed the 10,000 listener mark. I don't remember which one, but you can check out his offerings here.

    I’d noticed that Alan had started his own streaming audio services, but I’ve never checked them out because the audio function on our studio computer has been disabled. After all, you wouldn’t want strange sounds to start emanating from the computer while we’re on the air.

REPUTATIONS

posted by James Reel

    A couple of weeks ago I tweaked Terry Teachout for letting Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s affiliation with Nazism color his opinion of her artistic work. I’m happy to report that Terry has now laid out a quite sensible guide to evaluating the sins of artists. Here’s his first point:

Be historically aware. Judging the sins of the past by the standards of the present can be a shortcut to self-righteousness. Make sure you have all the facts—and that you understand their historical context—before passing sentence. Robert Conquest, author of "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties," was reluctant to condemn the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for toadying to his Soviet masters. "We might yet accept," he explained, "that in Soviet circumstances [Yevtushenko's] record, with all its shifts and compromises, may merit, on balance, a positive assessment." As Mr. Conquest knew, Soviet artists like Yevtushenko and Dmitri Shostakovich lived in fear of being jailed—or shot—for saying the wrong thing. Are you sure you would have done differently in similar circumstances?

    Read the rest here.

HEAR HIM ROAR

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I go to the trouble of previewing a show you probably already know whether you want to see or not:

    Nathaniel Stampley is the king of the jungle, and he is a just and noble king, so he thinks you should be warned about a few things before you visit his realm.
    Stampley's domain is the theatrical version of The Lion King, a story that started out as an animated Disney movie but is now in its ninth year as a live Broadway show. It's also been showing in London for a very long time, and in Hamburg and in Tokyo, and two companies are currently touring it around the United States. One of them—Stampley's—will settle into the Tucson Convention Center Music Hall for a substantial run Aug. 17-Sept. 24.
    Stampley plays Mufasa, the story's initial lion king, who is killed and usurped by his brother, who in turn is brought to justice and replaced by Mufasa's son, the story's ultimate lion king. But right now, it's Stampley who is lounging on his jungle throne. Actually, he's sitting on a hotel bed between shows in Houston, on the phone to tell the Tucson multitudes what they should and should not expect when they come to witness the end of his reign. …
    "It is very different from the film," he says of the live musical. "From the opening number, you realize this is going to be somewhat like the film, but entirely different. We are people on a stage, so we can't exactly re-create the animated film." …
    All well and good, but there's another important point that Stampley wants you to know: He is not James Earl Jones.

    You can find the full article here.

PLUTO

posted by James Reel

    If the new definition of “planet” just devised by the International Astronomy Union (IAU) is ratified next week, Pluto will retain its status as a planet after all. A diminutive planet, though; a new category, “pluton,” is being created for Pluto and three other bodies in the solar system that are just a bit undernourished to count as full-strength planets. (“Pluton” sounds more like a particle than a planet, doesn’t it?)
    I have nothing against Pluto itself, but I was hoping that it might be downgraded simply so we could divorce British composer Colin Matthews’ “Pluto” movement from Holst’s The Planets. Around 2000, conductor Kent Nagano unwisely asked Matthews to “complete” Holst’s suite with a piece depicting the one planet that hadn’t been discovered when Holst wrote the original work. This was a very bad idea for several reasons. First, The Planets has nothing to do with astronomy; as I’ve been belaboring for years, and as Tim Mangan pointed out in a recent concert review, The Planets is about astrology. That’s why, for example, Mars is presented as “The Bringer of War”—that’s the planet’s astrological association. (If Holst had intended a tour of the physical solar system, wouldn’t he have written an “Earth” movement?)
    So not only is Pluto conceptually out of place, but tacking anything onto the end of The Planets is a horrible idea; extra music ruins that long, ethereal, death-haunted fade-out of the women’s chorus at the end of “Neptune.” Besides which, Matthews’ music sounds nothing like Holst’s. Matthews’ “Pluto” deserves to be heard, but only as an independent piece.
    If you want to learn about the solar system, turn not to music but to various reader-friendly books by my astronomer friend William K. Hartmann.

UNASKED QUESTION

posted by James Reel

    I should turn this into a recurring feature: What important question has a reporter failed to ask? Here’s the latest example.
    The story of the poor dog found stuck up to his neck in a muddy wash after the recent heavy rains has ended sadly. The dog, called Clay by his rescuers, has apparently died from tick fever. He received good care at a private facility for the last week of his life—after having been rescued from the pound, where he’d been taken after passersby pulled him out of the muck.
    According to the Arizona Daily Star, “Clay was taken to the Pima Animal Care Center but did not receive veterinary treatment for three days.” What? Here was a dog whose plight had been highly publicized, languishing with baseball-sized mats in his fur and a vicious tick infestation, vomiting mud and too weak to stand, and he did not receive medical attention? The Pima Animal “Care” Center may have reasons or at least excuses for the neglect, but they’re not detailed in the article, and there’s no sign that the reporter or her editors even thought to ask. This is going to be another public-relations disaster for the pound, and the Star should have looked into it before readers write angry letters calling for an investigation.