Cracks AV Club
Magic Numbers, This American Life on Iraq & More

Despite my pneumatic/tubercular lungs, I headed out to a smoky show at the historic Crocodile (which hosted everyone from Nirvana to Pearl Jam to Mudhoney back in those Grunge days of olde), where Britain's The Magic Numbers were making their Seattle debut. Even without the suppressed lungs, it takes a lot to get me out to a show these days. I freely admit it--I'm becoming an old fuddy duddy who doesn't like to stand around for hours listening to a lame-ass opening act and breathing in a metric tonne of second hand smoke. And as one of my companions (Combie) noted last night, I even went to the extreme a few years ago of banning myself from going to shows after I grumpily stomped out of a few before they even really got started.

But The Magic Numbers are special enough to get me out, and it was well worth it. In typical Seattle fasion, the crowd started out very Scandanavianly stoic, with hands in pockets and arms crossed, waiting for the band to prove its worth. It didn't help that they started out with a fairly mellow tune (the self-pitying "The Mule," which is actually the one song on the album that causes me to fast-forward) and the band's leader, Romeo, was a tad shy and reserved. But soon, their effervescent selves and sunny pop music (melding Lovin' Spoonful early 70s guitar pop, Mamas & Papas three-part harmony, Meatloaf's uber-romanticism, and soulful/bluesy/country-esque jams that would make Willie Nelson proud) won over the crowd, which ended the night clapping and singing along with the choruses. They played just about all the tunes from the album (which I highly, highly recommend--get it via Amazon or the iTunes Music Store) and definitely hit a high note with their country-fied version of the Beyonce/Jay-Z monster hit, Crazy in Love (definitely the best cover I've heard since Travis took on Brittany Spears' "Baby (One More Time)"). If you want to catch what The Magic Numbers are all about without spending a nickel, catch their performance at KCRW (available in video as well as just audio).

A couple Fridays back when Mrs. F headed to the spa and left me at home to fend for myself, I listened to the This American Life episode, What's in a Number, which was a fascinating look at a Johns Hopkins study on the number of Iraqi civilian casualties, which was published in the British medical journal, The Lancet (which I blogged about when it was first announced late in October 2004). It came out with an extraordinary number of casualties--100,000--that many found hard to believe, and many (especially on the Right) attacked it for being too loose with its methodology and for making this announcement right at the precipice of the election. It's a fascinating listen, which includes an interview (done by This Life producer Alex Blumberg) with Les Roberts, the lead author of the Lancet study and an expert in counting war dead, who provides some fascinating background to how the numbers were derived as well as some harrowing anecdotes on culling those numbers.

Even more fascinating is the talk with Human Rights Watch advocate Mark Garlasko:

Blumberg: And there was one other thing that made it easy for the media to dismiss the report. A researcher at Human Rights Watch, who himself had done studies of civilian casualties during war time, said he didn't believe the study. The researcher's name is Mark Garlasko, and he told a reporter from the Washington Post, quote, "the number seems high to me," and quote, "it seems like a stretch."

Garlasko: I was actually on the Long Island Railroad when he called me, it was sometime in the evening and I had yet to read Les's report.

Blumberg: This is Mark Garlasko. He said he told the reporter from the Post that he hadn't read the study, but the reporter said that he really needed a quote. And could he just respond to the number. Garlasko's quote was cited elsewhere, and it appeared on CNN, although none of the study's authors were interviewed on CNN or any of the major networks. Here's what Mark Garlasko says now.

Garlasko: First of all, I'm not a statistician. I know absolutely nothing about it. And when I then went and spoke to statisticians, they said, "oh no, you know, the method he's using is a really accurate one; this is something that we use in studies all throughout the world and is a generally accepted model." And that kind of made me think about my prejudices going into reading his report, because I had been on the ground in Iraq immediately after the war. But I also had taken part in the targeting for the war.

Blumberg: OK, let's just stop here for one minute. You heard what he said; he'd taken part in the targeting for the war. Get ready, because this story is about to take a turn. Mark Garlasko isn't your typical human rights advocate.

Garlasko: Well, I worked in the Pentagon, almost seven years. And my last job there was chief of High Value Targeting on the Joint Staff. And basically that means that I was one of many people that was involved in the tracking and attempted killing of Saddam Hussein and all those people in the deck of cards.

If you've got an hour, this is great, great radio--and an important re-entry of this story into the media consciousness--and it's online at the This Life site in Real Player format (you can also order a CD or get it via a subscription to Audible.com).

A couple other media notes:

• Crooks and Liars has a video of a segment (in Windows Media and QuickTime) from MSNBC's Hardball, which reminds us of what all the players (from Big Time! to Judith Miller to Condoleeza Rice) noted in their selling of the Iraq War back in 2002. A very good reminder, indeed.
• Some very good politically themed movies are coming out this holiday season, and Apple's Movie Trailers section has 'em: Steven Speilberg's Munich (about the hunt for the plotters behind the deaths of Israeli athletes taken hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics) and Syriana (a multi-layered tale of espionage and the oil industry from the writer of Traffic and starring George Clooney and Matt Damon).
• If you haven't seen the Colbert Report (the companion-piece to Comedy Central's The Daily Show), give it a spin. Some of the bits are miss, but I find most of them quite funny. Check out this Word of the day segment on Shhhhh!... (if you can't say something nice about the horrors of war, then shhhh!...).