An extra $30 million? No thanks, pitcher says

Enough is enough, Cliff Lee has said.

The baseball pitcher known for his pinpoint control was in perfect command of the situation, as he proved by walking away from $30 million. That was an extra $30 million, actually. Lee chose to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies for $120 million rather than sign with the New York Yankees for $150 million.

Why? It wasn't the money. It was much more than that (even if it was, in the end, less).

Lee simply liked Philadelphia better. He liked the city better. He liked the team better. His wife was in agreement on both counts, which probably tells us the rest of what we need to know. Kristen Lee was appalled at Yankees fans' behavior during this year's playoffs. (She probably wasn't the only one so appalled, but that's another story entirely.)

Cliff Lee wasn't at all happy with the Phillies when they dealt him to Seattle after he helped lead them to the World Series in 2009. (He won two games in the World Series, which the Phillies lost to the Yankees in six.) Lee was back in the World Series this year, with Texas, helping lead the Rangers to their first-ever Series appearance. (He didn't have the stellar results that his fans were used to, but that could have been because he ran into the Team of Torturous Destiny that was this year's San Francisco Giants.)

At any rate, Lee has proved that it isn't all about the money — the most money, anyway. Yes, he could have earned more money playing for the Yankees, but that would have meant playing 81 games in Yankee Stadium and living somewhere near New York and all the other things that go with donning the pinstripes — not to mention that Lee and his wife liked the city of Philadelphia more for its opportunities for their two young children.

Instead, he'll be in a rotation that also features Roy Halladay, Cliff Hamels, and Roy Oswalt and he'll be backed up by one of the fiercest-hitting teams in all of baseball.

Maybe Cliff Lee did the right thing after all by making the bucks stop in Philly.

Chernobyl Tour: Not Your Average Reality TV Show

Quick, do you know how to counteract radiation poisoning? No? Well, you'd better not go on a tour of the suddenly open-to-the-public Chernobyl nuclear power plant, then, because that's what you're guaranteed to get.

OK, so guaranteed is rather a strong word. The amount of radiation seeping out of the still-contaminated plant is minimal, which is why the 2,500 employees still working there take it in shifts. Get through your tour in about half an hour and you shouldn't register more than a slightly unhealthy dose on the radiation detector in the doctor's office that's sure to have been set up a few miles away from the plant.

Seriously, why would people take a tour of this place? The 25th anniversary (if we can use such a word for such a travesty-tragedy) is in 2011, so interest in Chernobyl will be high. But do you really need to go in there and have a look round to be able to say something akin to, "Yep, it's still a place to be avoided"?

To this day, people for dozens of miles around are reporting health problems. And that's today. That's nothing compared to what happened shortly April 26, 1986, when the exclusion stretched more than 30 miles in all directions.

Oh, sure, the Emergency Situations Ministry says that plans for building an impressive new shell over the reactor are progressing along nicely. That's one big shell, as well, weighing in at 20,000 tons and measuring 345 feet tall, 853 feet wide, and 490 feet long. (In case you carry such measurements around in your head or you have a guidebook handy, that's big enough to get over the top and all the sides of Notre Dame.

Did we mention the pricetag? It's up to $1.15 billion now, up just a bit from the original estimate of $505 million. Cost overruns are surely nothing new to government and/or construction projects.

The timeline for completion of this fancy new shell, by the way, is 2015. So the budget could blow out again. (Let's hope that's the only thing that blows out.) But if the shell won't be finished until 2015, then I don't like our chances of getting a radiation-free tour before then — in which case I say, "Why bother?" Yes, we are naturally curious. No, we don't want to see Chernobyl that badly.

Tim Burton Scares Up Performance Art via Tweets

Performance art online? Why not, said famed film director Tim Burton.

The result certainly isn't the first collaborative fiction to appear anywhere, but the tools used might be the most in-the-now. Such things might become more of the norm, which would certainly be a good thing.

Burton asked for Tweets — any Tweets — from followers brave enough to submit their short-but-tweet prose to help tell the story of Stainboy. The result is Cadavre Exquis, or "Exquisite Corpse," part of an exhibit organized by the Toronto International Film Festival and New York's Museum of Modern Art. The title and subject matter are perhaps not all surprising, coming as they do from the mind behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.

The online window was open from November 22 to December 6. Users could tweet as often as they liked. One tweet was selected each day to continue the story. Some tweets were sweet; others were odd; still others were unprintable. In the end, 88 tweets made up the story.

Burton started it off thus:

"Stainboy, using his obvious expertise, was called in to investigate mysterious glowing goo on the gallery floor."

The fans took it from there, collaborating on a tale of a robot, the mysterious goo, rusty corpses, and other familiar Burtonesque elements. The fans certainly got into the spirit of things (as it were.) Each day brought a new tweet, contributed usually by a new tweeter (although some writers had more than one tweet chosen for the final story).

How did it end? Click here to find out.

Twitterati Going Strong at 8 Percent

Tweet, do you? You're among the 8% of Americans online who do, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. The center emphasizes the word online there, to differentiate from the mobile Twitter crowd. That's probably a good thing, since the number of Twitter users by mobile phone is probably much larger, although, as with yours truly, that number could include people who do both.

Seems that more women tweet than men and more people under 30 and Latino than other ages and races. The survey also found more Tweets coming from urban areas than from rural or suburban areas. (That's probably to be expected given that the survey asked online users.)

The survey sample was a respectable 2,257 Internet users, whose main vocation in the Twitterverse was posting personal updates. An overwhelming percentage (72, to be precise) of users reported using their Twitter feeds to issue updates on their personal situations. Work status updates weren't far behind. The bar graph starts to level off, however, with categories of activity like sharing links to news stories, retweeting other people's updates, and sharing photos and videos. (Presumably, Stephen Fry would have answered in the affirmative for all categories.)

Nearly a quarter of Twitter users surveyed check for other people's posts more than once a day. That's the fun of it really, isn't it, to see what other people are saying? Otherwise, it's just a dump of information into the world of digital recording.

Still, the overwhelming conclusion from this figure of 8% is that it isn't a huge number. Twitter gets a lot of publicity because a lot of quite public are tweeting quite publicly and often (such as the aforementioned Mr. Fry), but the numbers overall compared to the rest of the American online public are quite small, despite every tweet being archived in the Library of Congress. Perhaps the other 92% haven't figured out yet that they can distill the various bits of their daily lives into 140-character sound bytes.

In the meantime, you can follow this author's tweets here.

After the Flood, There's the Tourist Attraction

Some day soon, we will all be able to see the Ark of Noah on display on Kentucky.

No, this isn't some miracle that has renamed Mount Ararat (or wherever Noah's famed rescue boat ended up). It's actually a theme park, tourist attraction, boondoggle — pick your term being sponsored by none other than Governor of Kentucky. Yes, Steven L. Beshear himself has gotten onboard with this one, talking about how the construction of this whatever-it-is will create jobs and funnel tourist money into the state economy and other such funds-based initiatives. But, apparently, it really is going to happen. They're really going to build a theme park with a mockup of the famed Noah's Ark as the centerpiece. Giraffes will be kept in pens onboard, and presumably visitors can walk around on the ark and get up close and personal with the giraffes. (No word yet on whether they're going to let a dove go periodically from the bow of the boat.)

Also planned are a 100-foot-tall Tower of Babel, a recreation of a Middle Eastern village from the 1st Century CE, and a series of special programs depicting Moses, the plagues that bedeviled Egypt's pharaoh, and the parting of the Red Sea. (No word, either, on whether Yul Brynner's voice will be heard at any point.)

I can see the Tower of Babel being a hot-ticket item, actually, for people wanting to learn several foreign languages at once (although they will have to listen very closely). Then again, it might be just another day in Brussels.

The whole thing is called the Ark Encounter. The governor claims that up to 900 people will employed in the end to build the thing, which is supposed to cost in the neighborhood of $150 million. A site hasn't been picked yet, but the website says that organizers are considering somewhere in some county near Ohio. That narrows it down.

And in the first year alone, organizers say, more than one-and-one-half million visitors will cross the threshold. That's certainly enough to make back the money spent to build all of this wonderfulness.

And just to show that it's not all their-way-or-the-highway, the organizers have enlisted Amish builders to supply the wooden pegs and frames for building the showcase Ark. So that surely puts to rest any ideas of any sort of radical agenda being pushed by these folks, who have also given us the Creation Museum in Petersburg.

Last thing: Don't hold your breath waiting to see all this stuff. The park isn't due to open until 2014. Some things are worth waiting for.

New Life Found Right Here on Earth

Found: something that can absorb arsenic and survive. Where found: here on Earth.

NASA has announced the discovery of strange life right here on the homeward, in the form of a bacterium that can not only swallow one of the world's most deadly poisons — arsenic — but thrive on it to the extent that it absorbs the deadly liquid into its DNA.

The bacterium in question has been termed GFAJ-1, and it was found thriving quite well, thank you very much, in Mono Lake, in California.

Here's the significance: This bacterium has been able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its building blocks. Remember that phosphorus is one of the six major elements that scientists consider essential for life — the others being carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. But GFAJ-1 has proven the ability to jettison phosphorus for the quite-similar-in-structure arsenic and run with arsenic instead.

Not coincidentally, Mono Lake has high levels of arsenic. Scientists probably knew what they were looking for, but they still seemed surprised when they found it.

So what does all this mean? Is E.T. made of arsenic? Possibly. But that's probably not the correct question to ask.

The better question would be this one: How do we need to change the way we are looking for extraterrestrial life? Efforts in this area have long been preoccupied in finding life that closely resembles the familiar — humans or animals or microbes that we can readily identify and understand. But the more exotic lifeforms like GFAJ-1 we find, the more we will be forced to re-examine our prejudices and assumptions in determining the parameters of the search.

Will we recognize life when we bump up against it? Will it recognize us? We should be prepared for outlandish answers to these questions.

Pay Your Way into the Pages of a Book

What's in a name? Depends on who you ask and how much you're willing to pay.

A recent trend in fiction writing, apparently, is to name characters after people who have paid for the privilege. The most recent instance of this is a set of eBay auctions, the proceeds of which go to the nonprofit the First Amendment Project.

Heard of Thomas Perry? He writes the Jane Whitefield mystery novels. He'll use your name for a character in his latest book. He's just started writing, so you can have your pick of victim, villain, or anywhere in between. And, you get your name mentioned at least four times. Surely that's worth a few hundred dollars, right? Remember, the money is going to a nonprofit.

Dave Eggers, the fabulously funny author of You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is onboard as well. So is Anywhere but Here author Mona Simpson.

Fancy appearing in a graphic novel? Chris Ware's your man. The author of the award-winning Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware will happily write your name above a character in one of this future projects.

It does make me wonder, though, what's to stop authors from doing this all the time. Maybe they already do? Those character names have to come from somewhere.

Some authors spend ages agonizing over names, doing research and sounding out possibilities. (J.K. Rowling comes to mind, with all of her comparative religions and cultures knowledge (not to mention astronomy and astrology) being brought to bear in names like Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, and Sirius Black.) Rowling, like Dickens before her, seems to have the knack for choosing names that fit the characters like literary gloves (like Remus Lupin, the werewolf).

But that's not what we're talking about here, at least not according to Andrew Sean Greer. The author of The Story of a Marriage, Greer is offering to include an auction winner's name in his next book but doesn't guarantee anything else. It is, after all, a roll of the dice: You could very well win the auction, get your name in the book, and then find out that you (or at least a character named you) has died in some horrible way midway into Chapter 3.

Maybe that's OK. Maybe it's worth the money. I won't be finding out, since I won't be bidding. If I'm going to see my name in a book, it's going to have to be an autobiography.