Charles Kent Wilson, lead singer of the Gap Band and one of the most influential vocalists of his era, turns 60 today. Here are a few of his songs. (Because it is his birthday we will not include the theme to I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, although we could because it really isn’t anything to be ashamed of.)

You’re right to be suspicious of all the buzz, but sometimes high praise turns out to be justified; Heartthrob, the new one by Tegan and Sara, is just so so good. Trust your pal Al on this one. Or, you know what? Trust, but verify.

To Prison Island, where spoilsport smartypants are trying to suck all the joy out of the only nonviolent activity to bring the natives pleasure: “A toxicologist has warned against frolicking in the smelly brown foam blanketing Sunshine Coast beaches as hidden dangers lurk within. University of Queensland Associate Professor Barry Noller said residents should steer clear of the foam whipped up by strong winds off the foreshore for fears it may be poisonous and containing pollutants, toxins and sewage.” To which Australians are all, “So?” [Via]

Rosie Schaap at Word Brooklyn or Emily Raboteau at Greenlight Books? Cat Power at Terminal Five or Peter Hook at the Strand? Only you can decide.

AARRROOOO!!! Now, right now, is Super Bowl! This week! The most American week of all! Super Bowl has more America™ in it than Fourth of July, Election Day, the Academy Awards, NASCAR, and Tet all rolled up into one, and now is the time when America has Super Bowl all up in it!

Super Bowl is here for America, the Whole America! Super Bowl is here for you! Even if you don’t want it! Especially if you don’t want it! Super Bowl will football you until you love it! Super Bowl is here for the 47%, and the 98%, and the 99%, and it is brought to you by the One Percent! All the teevee advertising-spot space is sold! For kabillions of millions of dollars!

Money! Super Bowl is that! You might be able to make some, too, if you make a bet someplace, but you don’t have to know anything about gambling! All you gotta do is pick a square on one of those office pick-a-square things, and then you will be assigned a random set of numbers that could match the score, and you can root or pray for those numbers! Math!

You don’t have to know jack-squat about football to get in on Super Bowl! All you gotta do is plotz in front of a TV someplace and it will be there, waiting for you! On TV, you cannot “counter-program” Super Bowl! Because it will be on every channel! Only disguised! It will be disguised as “The Puppy Bowl,” or it will be disguised as the “Sex & The City Bowl,” or “The Real Housewives of Orange County Bowl,” or “The Romantic B&W Movies from the ’40s Bowl!” Super Bowl will be disguised as America!

You can protest Super Bowl if you want, but what are you gonna do, “Occupy” Super Bowl? You can’t Occupy™ Super Bowl! Super Bowl Occupations itself! With Roman Numerals! XLVII! That’s how you know we have big-D Democracy! Because of the Roman Numerals! They were handed down to Super Bowl by the Roman Emperors who invented Bread & Circuses! If the Romans were around now, they who were about to die would salute with a Chicken Wing on their way into the Colosseum!

Super Bowl stuffs itself with food! Pizza! Stuffed-crust pizza! “Queso dip” made outta RO*TEL and Velveeta and microwaved until it explodes inside your microwaver and your mouth-hole in that order! Chili! Doritos! A hollowed-out bread filled with dill dip for dipping raw vegetables (ugh) into!

And: Beer! Super Bowl is Beer! So much beer! It can be snobby beer or beer-beer!

Super Bowl Entertains You with celebrities and popular recorded-music stars who may or may not be pretending to sing along to the music they may or may not have recorded! Super Bowl reminds you and the whole Wide World of Sports who is boss with the implications of the combined Military Might of the United States of America as represented by a “fly over” of powerful and frightening flying machines! Sometimes the President of the United States of America watches Super Bowl, or even calls Super Bowl on his POTUS-phone to congrats the winners! They sing The Star-Spangled National Anthem at Super Bowl, plus stuff like “America the Beautiful” and songs about having a party and getting it started in here, because Super Bowl is a Democratic and Republican Party whirled together ’til you puke!

Super Bowl is always on a Sunday, in the manner of a Day of Worship, because! Enjoy all your Gods, Super Bowl is not jealous! Pray for Super Bowl! Pray for your team, if you know one that’s playing! Pray for the Coin Toss! The Extra Point! Pray that The Enemy doesn’t take advantage of where Our Nation’s Attention is focused, seriously!

Exclamation point!

Previously: The Terrible Truth About Cats & Dogs

Joe MacLeod is busy making one of those grids with the squares where you pick a square and you don’t have to know anything about football.

★★★★ Bare hands no longer burned in the open air. Light in the treetops gleamed red off buds on the tips of the branches. Down in the garden courtyard, the toddler found one long, skinny patch of snow still on the pavement and left sneaker prints through it. In another snowy spot, finger-drawn letters had gone puffy, down to the underlying blocks: OOD ORNING. Late sun touched the tailgates and trunks of the cars on the elevated expressway, with the Hudson in shadow beyond them. A contrail slanted southwestward into choppy clouds, silver now. At dusk, they would deepen to aquamarine.

Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner died of cancer Saturday in Trotwood-Dayton, Ohio. Bonner was guitarist and lead singer of funk legends and hip-hop forefathers the Ohio Players. The synthesizer line from the Player’s 1972 hit “Funky Worm” became a bedrock foundation of gangsta rap when Dr. Dre sampled it for N.W.A’s “Dopeman” in 1988. Four years later, Dre replayed it for his own “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” and it has been used in about a million other songs since then. So much so that any high-pitched synth line used in rap production is commonly referred to as a “worm synth.” Bonner was 69.

by Awl Sponsors

Luxury vehicles make a statement — but too often, you can’t hear it over the roar of their engines. So the makers of top-line craft are dummying up the decibels, with a technological silence that’s 24-karat golden. Indeed, keeping quiet has become a science of its own. Whether at sea, in the air, or on land, merely piling on the insulation or amping the scrambler frequencies isn’t enough. The most effective solutions for shielding pampered passengers now require nothing less than restructuring the entire architecture and engines of boats, jets, and car engines.

I feel for Times op-ed contributor Ross Douthat — at times. He has to work extra-hard to communicate ideas about religion to atheists and Christians alike, and also to lock down his cases against hedonism and “pre-marital sex” and abortion, consulting as he does for a liberal paper in a liberal town. And as a religious person, he has to both obey and articulate his faith’s professed principles of empathy, even while being a polemicist. This is a sticky situation! So it’s reasonable that he sometimes succeeds at one but fails at the other.

This weekend, however, he’s gone too far. He’s mangled and misrepresented a major study to his own ends, and relied upon the work of academics that publish in far-right think tank journals, obscuring their bias along the way.

Douthat’s column is his latest effort to make the case against abortion. His brief here is at least surprising: he claims that the idea, put forward by feminists, that the anti-abortion forces are also traditionalists is wrong. “Most anti-abortion Americans today are also gender egalitarians,” he writes. This is not even conceivably true, but it’s vaguely stated, so let’s let it pass. Let’s focus on just two things.

His whole argument here is based upon the work of “Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College.” A professor at a tiny California liberal arts college? Oh then, surely this is going somewhere unusual, right?

Shields got his Ph.D. in politics in 2006 from UVA. He studies conservative movements and religion. He is the author of, among other things, What Abortionist Killers Believe. This is a fascinating and strange article: an important history of the creation of the abortion blockade movement. It’s a good read for liberals, because it feels fascinatingly alien. (Writing about abortion clinic bombings: “These early attacks, however, were successfully timed to avoid human casualties.” How thoughtful of them!)

Here is a very interesting combination of sentences:

Then in 1994, a new federal law increased the penalties for blocking access to clinics. Now isolated, the seriously violence-prone were left to their own worst impulses. Violence escalated. For the first time, abortion providers were targeted for execution.

I see. Yes, the laws that allowed women to actually enter clinics to receive a legal medical procedure: those were what directly led to religious terrorists killing doctors. A terrific — and subtle! — argument.

In the end, Shields comes out against murder, a brave stance. “Its many Catholic and Protestant participants, moreover, obviously do not understand their faith to require them to kill doctors or nurses — or mothers or fathers — involved in the great evil of abortion.”

The conclusion of the paper from which Douthat is quoting is far more interesting. The abortion conflict, Shields writes, is “perhaps the only conflict in American history in which both sides regard themselves as human rights activists who are expanding the frontiers of human freedom.” (I don’t really agree with this, but Shields is treating the war over gay marriage and anti-gay discrimination as already over — which may be true.)

Also last year, Shields published with the Witherspoon Institute, work that Douthat has clearly read. The Witherspoon’s house organ is edited by a fellow of the Heritage Foundation, a person who also wrote amicus briefs in defense of Prop 8 and in defense of DOMA. Its managing editor chaired a Right to Life conference. The Witherspoon Foundation’s president is Luis Tellez, who is on the board of the American Principles Project, who have hands everywhere. Tellez is an anti-gay marriage activist.

At the Witherspoon’s right-wing organ, Shields wrote:

Study after study finds strong emotional reactions to abortion provision even in clinics that cultivate feminist cultures and community. Studies of such clinics consistently find that those who perform second- and third trimester abortions feel powerful and unexpected feelings of sympathy for the fetuses they destroy. Some are even compelled to doubt the justice of abortion itself.

This is a known quantity. There is a reason that women and abortion professionals have feelings about abortions (or “fetuses they destroy,” to use his language). That is because they are on the front lines of hard choices. Few women find abortion a pleasant way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. Few medical professionals do not sympathize with their patients. This conservative miscasting of the empathy of abortion providers is particularly offensive.

Similarly, Douthat writes:

…public opinion on the issue doesn’t break down along the gendered lines that many liberals expect — why more women than men, for instance, told the latest Pew survey that abortion was “morally wrong” and (in smaller numbers) that Roe should be overturned.

Here is the summary of that Pew survey, by the way.

Right. Support for Roe v. Wade has strengthened since 1992. Nearly 2/3rds of people surveyed said the case should not be overturned.

And of course there is conflict about abortion among women. That stems as well from a conflict between religious teaching and actual practice: “Thirty-seven percent of women obtaining abortions identify as Protestant and 28% as Catholic.”

But as for the “morally wrong” question, divided by gender….

This falls just in the safe zone of his assertion, with a 2.9% sampling-related error range.

(And it should be noted: 28% of women also said that having an abortion was not a moral issue at all. Most fascinating, there are some outliers: 15% of all people surveyed who favor overturning Roe v. Wade say that it is not morally wrong to have an abortion.)

But most importantly. When Douthat says that more women than men say that Roe should be overturned, those numbers are: 30% for women, 29% for men.

Pew went so far as to note, contra Douthat, that: “There is no gender gap in opinions about Roe v. Wade.”

That Douthat would exploit a result well within the range of sampling error — directly contradicting Pew’s instructions about how to read the data — as a backbone of his case is malpractice.

And just for reference: “White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group in which a majority (54%) favors completely overturning the Roe v. Wade decision.” As well, a majority of respondents said that abortion was not even important to them overall. “The percentage viewing abortion as a ‘critical issue facing the country’ fell from 28% in 2006 to 15% in 2009 and now stands at 18%.”

Writing this survey backwards is one of the tactics that Douthat must use. It is all he has left: Dependent on work welcomed by a baleful conservative publication, and obviously misrepresenting a major study. A review of his work will turn up more of his dancing on the edge, and surely over it.

What has always been the worst about Douthat is that his conclusions, supported by whatever he can scrape together, have rarely been true. “The pro-life cause has proved unexpectedly resilient,” writes Douthat. That is not particularly true. At all! Plagued by the violent fringe documented by Shields, the pro-life cause alienated its potential members and allies who did not believe in bombing clinics and murdering doctors. And along the way, the anti-abortion movement alienated the middle ground of Americans who felt — or still feel! — a reasonable discomfort with abortion. This, I believe, is the story behind the Pew data. The extreme right’s tactics failed. Those who defend them and those who misrepresent them — Douthat and Shields both — surely know it. That may be why they fight fast and loose with facts.

Good news, maybe, about our challenging situation here on the only available habitable planet: Today’s climate change study (from Norway) says maybe the 1990s were worse for global warming than the 2000s, which means …. we can go back to five steaks a day, and McMansions, and Hummers?

New estimates from a Norwegian research project show meeting targets for minimizing global warming may be more achievable than previously thought. After the planet’s average surface temperature rose through the 1990s, the increase has almost leveled off at the level of 2000, while ocean water temperature has also stabilized, the Research Council of Norway said in a statement on its website.

Having not really done much about global warming since it really picked up in the second half of the 20th Century, world governments and the fossil-fuel corporations that manage those governments have bravely decided temperatures shouldn’t rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, even though 3 degrees has been predicted by scientists. According to this new Norwegian study, “the results showed temperatures may rise 1.9 degrees Celsius if Co2 levels double by 2050, below the 3 degrees predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Sadly for people and other living things in coastal regions, the rise in sea level for an additional 2 degrees Celsius is somewhere between a meter and “4–8 meters,” the latter being European for “a sea level rise of up to 26 feet,” which would mean a lot of Brooklyn and most of coastal New Jersey will be underwater, beginning in 2051.