Just So We're Clear...

Citation Needed. And maybe a new flag.

2008-08-09T18:44:00.004-04:00

I just found this on the Wikipedia article for Arcadia University. There's no source cited, so it's plausible it's not altogether true. It's pretty funny, though.

At the beginning of the school year in Fall 2006, in an effort to better portray itself as sensitive to the needs of minority students, Arcadia University created a "civility flag," which was to be flown at half staff in the event of an act of incivility. Students have established a tradition of stealing the flag, and replace it with a variety of other symbols. It was first stolen by a student in November, 2006. The student replaced the flag with a pair of boxer shorts featuring $100 bills.

Are you sure.....

2008-07-18T18:42:00.002-04:00

....that's Christian Bale starring in Terminator 4, and not Jim Caviezel?

Listerfail

2008-07-13T16:44:00.002-04:00

I've been using mouthwash much of my adult life. So I have no idea how I managed just now, while intending to gargle, rinse, and spit, to instead swallow much of the Listerine as if my plan all along was to drink the stuff. Naturally, this was so surprising to me that I immediately coughed half of it up all over the sink while the rest presumably disinfected my throat and removed any possible unpleasant odors from the inside of my stomach. Stunned and confused, I stood there hacking and spitting before rinsing with some water and trying again.

32 and still getting the basics wrong.

And in case you were wondering, yeah, this'll leave the back of your throat burning for a while afterward.

The floor and the dirt

2008-07-06T16:25:00.002-04:00

The underside of my bare feet are annoyingly dirty. The apartment I moved into about a week ago has laminate flooring. It's the first I've had in several years that hasn't been carpeted in the living room as well as the bedroom. I'd been walking around on carpet in Houston, and prior to that, Pittsburgh, Augusta, and the Air Force barracks at Ft. Gordon and DLI. Not since the place with the hardwood floors in Charleston back in 2001 have I had to consider a need for a broom as well as a vacuum cleaner. Dang it.

Netflix suggests a scary future.

2008-06-14T16:04:00.002-04:00

I've had my Netflix account on hold for a while, but once in a while I log in and look over the queue anyway. Today I found a little notice informing me that an unspecified change had occurred with the edition they offer of one movie in the queue, the Kurosawa film of a Dostoevsky novel. Toward the top of the screen above the queue, after an exclamation point graphic, was simply the sentence:

The Idiot has been replaced by a different version.

Having forgotten I had the Kurosawa film in the impractically long list, my first thought was simply, "Well, that's what one could say in November this year if John McCain manages to win."

Charlie Savage won me over quickly.

2008-05-31T02:17:00.001-04:00

I'm only a few pages into Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, and I see already why Charlie Savage won the Pulitzer Prize.

Really wonderful album names

2008-05-31T01:48:00.002-04:00

Without comment on the albums themselves:

Sleep Late For A Better Tomorrow
Everybody Makes Mistakes
We Are All Natural Disasters
Underachievers Please Try Harder
Perfect From Now On
Lonely People of the World, Unite!
Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See

(Several of the albums are pretty terrific, though. For more info, visit allmusic.com)

Less work for catalogers but less useful for readers

2007-12-30T17:23:00.001-05:00

The Library of Congress has apparently decided to start calling Scottish literature English. I'm annoyed that it took a days-old Neil Gaiman blog post for me to discover this but even more annoyed that they're adopting this policy. All of the objections raised in the BBC article seem valid to me. It's completely counterproductive to the purpose of subject headings. Further, I like Gaiman's point here:

Scotland is its own country, with its own traditions and its own literature, a literary tradition in English and Gaelic. On the other hand, it's less work for the Library of Congress. But then, they'd have even less work if they just filed them all under Books.

The trouble with your fast dictionary

2007-11-24T06:09:00.000-05:00

Reddit's been drawing some attention lately to a site called Definr, which bills itself as an "incredibly fast dictionary" and which the goofy description at Reddit calls an "amazing, secret online dictionary." Ooh. Personally, I've never found either dictionary.com or m-w.com (Merriam-Webster) to be noticeably slow, so I didn't get all that excited by Ninjawords.com ("A really fast dictionary... fast like a ninja.") But amazing and secret, though? That's intriguing. How can you not check that out?

Visiting Definr moments ago to try it out, I didn't have a word in mind I needed to look up. I immediately noticed, though, they've got a little announcement right now reading "We're currently getting hammered by Digg and Reddit! (not that it will slow us down)." Taking this as a suggestion, I entered "hammered" as my test word.

Definr returns one definition, with no links to other forms of the word. Simply, "adj : shaped or worked with a hammer and often showing hammer marks: 'a bowl of hammered brass'." That's all they give us, and it doesn't fit their own use of the word.

Meanwhile, dictionary.com offers, without much delay and from such known sources as the American Heritage and Random House dictionaries, over a dozen different definitions for various forms of the word, including the precisely relevant "To keep at something continuously."

Ninjawords, meanwhile, ("fast like an ineffectual ninja") draws from wiktionary.com and defines "hammered" with one simple word: "drunk." Right. Thanks. M-w.com offers for "hammered" as an adjective only "having surface indentations ..." and "drunk," but prominently offers on the same page five definitions for the verb "hammer,"which do a pretty good job at making things clear.

I'll stick with dictionary.com, with an occasional m-w detour. Honestly, Definr and Ninjawords have much, much cooler names. But how good is fast but useless?

Our Dangerous Shoes

2007-06-16T11:22:00.000-04:00

The folks at Boing Boing have persuaded me that Bruce Schneier is perhaps the most sensible and persuasive writer we have on matters of terrorism and security. And I agree with their view that all the restrictions against liquids on airplanes are ridiculous and limit our liberties without improving our safety or security. I want to agree likewise with them that the same is true about making us take off our shoes all the time at the airport security checkpoints. It certainly seems that way to me. But Cory Doctorow in his post yesterday linking to an excellent recent Schneier essay, "Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot," seems to misuse that reference somewhat in furthering his argument against the airport checkpoints with all the shoe-shedding and liquid-leaving.

Before the two paragraphs he excerpts from the Schneier post, Doctorow opens with a sentence briefly describing the essay and closes with one effectively summarizing its thesis as "We devote all our security energy to saving ourselves from idiots whose capacity for self-delusion is far greater than their capacity to kill us and blow up our national monuments."

In between is a paragraph that I want to agree with that begins "There's an analogy to DHS checkpoints where we take off our shoes and shed our liquids." On the matter of liquids, I've never encountered anything to dissuade me from the Boing Boing view.

On the shoe question, though, Doctorow says, "It's only because [Richard Reid's shoe bomb] plot failed miserably that we even know about it," which I pretty much agree with. However, he uses this idea to argue that therefore "Blowing up airplanes with your shoes doesn't work." It could well be true that rigging your shoes as explosive devices is hopelessly useless, but the man he's linking to as an authority on these matter actually says, "if shoe-bomber Richard Reid had been just a little less stupid and ignited his shoes in the lavatory, he might have taken out an airplane." That sounds as though it does work.

I hate taking off my shoes airport security checkpoints. I want to be on board with Boing Boing when they explain why I'm right to. But Cory Doctorow only hurts that cause when, in arguing that shoe bombs don't work, he links for support to his preferred authority suggesting that they can.

Update: Cory Doctorow points out something important via e-mail. "X-rays don't detect explosives in shoes, Steve." Which is a comment highlighting the two levels to the issue here. One: as long as I'm nitpicking, Cory's suggestion in his post that blowing up an airplane with shoe-bombs wouldn't work is still undermined by Schneier's that it would have worked had Reid the sense to get a little privacy before attempting detonation. Two: that criticism aside, he's restored my certainty of the wrongness of the airport shoe-scanning circus.

Suspension of Disbelief

2007-05-05T17:49:00.000-04:00

Cinematical's review of Spider-Man 3 has a really great paragraph about suspension of disbelief as it pertains to good stories built on ridiculous foundations:

Some would argue that any movie with "Spider," "Man" and a hyphen connecting those two words in the title doesn't need rigorous or especially well-thought-out story logic – after all, this is a universe where exposure to radiation gives you superpowers, not leukemia; where blows to the head result in amnesia, not fatal cranial bleeding. But I'd argue just the opposite – if you want me to swallow a man swinging between Manhattan's concrete canyons on webs, lifting cars and leaping yards at a bound, you have to make the rest of the film as tightly and carefully as possible. I can suspend my disbelief up to a point, but it ultimately has to have something to hang from. One of my favorite things about Spider-Man 2 was almost subliminal – but you'll notice that whenever Alfred Molina's robot-armed Doctor Octopus picks something heavy up, he's got one robot-arm on the ground for leverage, because they may be super-strong robot arms, but they obey the laws of physics. And, that simply, you knew someone cared. A rock falling from the sky into Central Park coincidentally near our hero? That simply, you know the exact opposite.

My life is full of drama...

2007-04-04T23:03:00.000-04:00

...and action, suspense, and star power. Or at least the general vicinity of my workplace is. One of my part-time jobs is in downtown Pittsburgh, and the past couple of days, I've been walking past a full-blown television production in progress. Actually, today's the first day I saw them filming, but the accouterments have been all over the place around Smithfield Street, PPG Place, and Market Square.

Turns out it's "The Kill Pit" with John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg, set to air this summer on Spike TV. I figured they were just filming around here, and I wondered why. But it turns out the story's actually set here. It's kind of an interesting story how that came to be. Take a look at this Post-Gazette article.

Not realizing the story actually takes place in Pittsburgh, I figured when I saw part of a scene being filmed today that at least some of the cops I saw around it were just there for crowd control. Obviously the guys in SWAT gear were wearing costumes. But all those actual Pittsburgh police uniforms? Figured it was the real thing. With it being a show about cops in Pittsburgh, though, that was probably all pretend, too. Now I'll have to get Spike TV in the summer to watch the show, wait for this scene and figure out what I was looking at. And they'll probably have cut the scene.

I kept scrutinizing the faces of the folks in the SWAT gear trying to spot Walhberg or Leguizamo, but if one's playing a bank robber and the other a negotiator, it's no surprise I didn't see them.

I'd plan to pull out the camera if I run across any more of this, but with the threat of snow for the next four days, they're probably done filming outdoors for a while. John Leguizamo holds fictional bank customers hostage; bizarre weather holds John Leguizamo hostage.

I thought we were done with April Fool's.

2007-04-03T17:50:00.000-04:00

It's warm, sunny, and beautiful in Pittsburgh today. According to various weather reports I've seen, it's 75 degrees right now--and beginning Thursday and lasting through the weekend, it's likely to be in the low thirties, with snow. Snow. That's ridiculous. That's completely unreasonable. Who makes these plans? I want to file a complaint.

BigHappyFunhouse

2007-04-01T13:01:00.000-04:00

For anyone who might happen to stumble upon this blog (probably searching for info about prawns or the library of Alexandria) and isn't already familiar with Bighappyfunhouse, please take a minute to direct your attention to that marvelous site.

Items from the past few days I particularly like are storytime, celebration, and prepared. Other recent highlights: Conversation. Threat. Uplifting. Wonderment.

Oh my God, no, Leonard, no!

Also enjoyable are the rollover comments on the photos. You know, when you hold the cursor over the image and wait a second, and a little box of text pops up. Humor and/or insight to be gained from that with such pieces as this and this, among others.

Really, any archived month is well worth scrolling through.

Plus, after devoting an unreasonable amount of attention during my teenage years in the early nineties to DC Comics, I was a bit startled to see this careless disclosure of secret identity.

The 61-cent paper archive

2007-04-01T12:11:00.000-04:00

There's a coffee shop on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, pretty near to where I live. It's called the 61C Cafe, probably because of the 61C bus line that runs past it. Last night while driving past it, I noticed the sign out front advertised "Sunday, April 1st: 61¢ cappuccinos (and after 10 PM on April 2-7)." I decided I'd have to get one of those on my way to work today, but then this morning it dawned on me--maybe it's an April Fool's joke. Probably not a good business move if so, but it is April 1st, and that is a notably cheap cappuccino.

It turns out that it's no joke; it's just a smaller cup. It got me wondering what other April Fool's jokes are going on today, though. Besides the weather, I mean, which got ridiculous fast. While wondering about that, I directed my browser to Gmail and saw on the login page this promotion of a new feature:

New! Introducing Gmail Paper

Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it’s here. We’re bringing it back.

A New Button Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we'll send it to you in the mail.

Simplicity Squared Google will print all messages instantly and prepare them for delivery. Allow 2-4 business days for a parcel to arrive via post.

Total Control A stack of Gmail Paper arrives in a box at your doorstep, and it’s yours to keep forever. You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash—the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged.)

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe Google takes privacy very seriously. But once your email is physically in your hands, it's as secure as you want to make it.

It's appropriate, I guess, that I rediscovered in a conversation last night with some friends and then another on IM with Jim Henley this morning that, much as I may imagine myself a wit, I'm sometimes too dense or humorless to get some jokes. I must have stared at that Gmail Paper explanation for a good two or three minutes as the thought formed in my mind, "Why...wouldn't...people...just print the stuff out on their printer?" Finally, it dawned on me, "Wait a minute....This coffe was only 61 cents, but...this is a joke!" Artfully done joke, too. Here's more.

Update (x2): Via the comments here [and, uh, now via the comments here, too], this is another, more clever Google prank.

NMPA vs XM: another tale of copyright claims vs music listening

2007-03-24T11:16:00.000-04:00

From page B3 of Friday, March 23's WSJ comes another example of copyright claims asserted in an effort to prevent consumers from listening to music and, likely, of those asserting the copyright ultimately behaving self-destructively.

The National Music Publishers Association, the article says, is suing XM Satellite Radio Holdings over XM receivers' XM+MP3 service, "which allows listeners to store songs they hear on XM and arrange them in playlists."

The NMPA suit claims that XM is thereby "unlawfully reproducing and distributing copyrighted music without paying appropriate royalties," but XM points out that it "pays royalties to writers and composers, who are also compensated by [the] device manufacturers. " The article also says

XM has contended that songs captured and stored on their receivers aren't true sales, in part because they stay on the radio only as long as the owner remains a subscriber; also they can't be moved...onto a computer or another music device. Legally, XM has said, the recordings are little different from those taped onto cassettes from the radio for personal use, which is permitted by law.

Actually, the two facts they note just before the mention of the cassette argument seems to indicate a marked difference between this and recording to cassettes--but a difference that's advantageous here to XM. Once I record a song off the radio onto a cassette tape, I have that recording indefinitely, possibly for years, without having to worry about maintaining any kind of connection to the corporate entity from which I recorded it. Moreover, I can play that tape in any cassette tape player owned by me or anyone else. There's a great deal more flexibility and less restriction to the use of the recording on a cassette tape. If that's legal, I'm not sure how NMPA can argue that XM's functionality with this has any less legality.

Apparently, the NMPA's disagreement entails "saying users get to use and store the songs recorded with the devices just as if they owned them." How? Given the restrictions XM described above, it's not clear at all how that is, and while there are two vague claims by the NMPA's president and CEO that the "devices go well beyond...radio transmission" and "replace the need to buy music," he gives no evidence at all, that the article quotes, for either those claims or the initial claim in this paragraph.

I think NMPA would probably like to see the whole situation continue but with them getting a lot of money out of it, but what if the suit were to drive XM to abandon the XM+MP3 service altogether? Not only would XM and their consumers lose, but so would the members of the NMPA--XM has pointed out that "the devices encourage its subscribers to buy songs they like, allowing them to bookmark favorites and facilitating digital sales with its partner Napster Inc.; buying the song allows users to transfer it to computers or other music players." If someone wants to play a saved song anywhere other than on the XM player itself, they have to buy it. And they will want to listen to it elsewhere, and they will therefore buy it, because they only stored it in the first place because they really like it a lot. The service is actually a terrific marketing tool to sell more songs, creating greater revenue for the NMPA members than if there were no XM+MP3.

I'm interested in arguments on behalf of the NMPA, but I'm pretty sure I really want XM to win this.

E.G. Deadworry and The Toastrack Enigma

2007-02-18T15:17:00.001-05:00

One of my part-time jobs at the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library is in a room that's considerably colder than much of the rest of the library. As I found my hands growing increasingly and unpleasantly colder, I decided the solution would be to wrap my hands around a nice, hot espresso. Conveniently, there is within the library a little coffee shop serving Starbucks products. When I ventured back to The Cup & Chaucer, though, I found there were six people in line ahead of me, so I'd need to wait a few minutes.

Waiting in line is always improved by some light reading, of course. Fortunately, the room that includes the coffee shop also houses the Alldred Collection, the library's principal selection of "contemporary fiction and popular non-fiction." Even from where I was standing in line, I could browse a decent number of titles, but most of them were thick novels of no interest to me. And then I noticed a little volume by Edward Gorey, The Haunted Tea-Cosy : A Dispirited And Distasteful Diversion For Christmas. This did the trick nicely. I noticed something that surprised me, though.

The edition I picked up showed a copyright date of 1997. "That's odd," I thought. "I had no idea Gorey was alive in 1997. From the little I've seen of his work, he's always struck me as having a perspective, however bizarre, that's stuck in about 1912. I'd imagined he lived from 1887 to 1964 or something." Naturally, when I returned to my desk, I looked on Wikipedia to see what it showed of his actual lifetime. It says he actually lived from 1925 to 2000. That's mighty interesting to me, especially considering that a guy I thought produced most of his work before the advent of television was apparently a big fan of Cheers and The X-Files.

Also of interest are some interesting points Wikipedia raises about Gorey's fondness for pseudonyms. "Gorey was very fond of word games," it says, "particularly anagrams. He wrote many of his books under pseudonyms that were usually anagrams of his own name (most famously "Ogdred Weary")." It goes on to list several of the anagrammatic pseudonyms he used, along with the works they accompanied. My favorite has to be "E. G. Deadworry," the author of The Awdrey-Gore Legacy. which is followed in the Wikipedia entry's list by "D. Awdrey-Gore" as another Gorey pseudonym, associated with the titles The Toastrack Enigma, The Blancmange Tragedy, The Postcard Mystery, The Pincushion Affair, The Toothpaste Murder, The Dustwrapper Secret. This is charmingly followed by the clarification "Note: These books, although attributed to Awdrey-Gore in Gorey's book, The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, were not really written."

That's brilliant. The Dustwrapper Secret and The Toothpaste Murder were imaginary books that Gorey pretended were written by his imaginary persona D. Awdrey-Gore in a book that he wrote under the pretend identity of the magnificently named E.G. Deadworry. I love it. This is so clever the author must have confused himself.

Further, the titles of the books he actually did write are often at least as cool as the ones he just wrote about his pretend self fictionally having written. I very much look forward to reading The Sopping Thursday, The Fatal Lozenge, The Deranged Cousins, and The Glorious Nosebleed. I am a bit concerned, though, that the actual works may be unable to quite live up to the high expectation set by such terrific titles.

One little exception perhaps?

2007-01-31T19:43:00.000-05:00

From the Post-Gazette's Super Bowl week coverage:

The Steelers shouldn't take it personally, but Bears kicker Robbie Gould hates them. Hates the Pirates, too. Again, it's nothing personal.
"My brother liked the [Miami] Dolphins growing up," Gould, a native of Lock Haven, Pa., and a Penn State graduate, told a throng of reporters yesterday. "So, I wanted to root for a team in the AFC East and I took the underdog [New England] Patriots."
Why not the Eagles?
"No, no," Gould said, "I hate every Pennsylvania team possible. Pirates, Phillies, you name it, Eagles, Steelers.
"I got tired of hearing Eagles and Steelers chants. I like to be unique. I like to be different. We started Dolphins chants and Patriots chants in Lock Haven."

He hates...every Pennsylvania team possible? College must have been a rough four years for him.

Well, that sounds appetizing.

2007-01-24T01:12:00.000-05:00

New Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin has selected former wide receivers coach Bruce Arians to be offensive coordinator.

A fan asks the Post-Gazette's Ed Bouchette whether that's a wise pick:

PhillyMarty: Ed: What gives the Steelers reason to think Arians qualifies to be OC? During his 3-yr term in Cleveland, even the year they lost the playoff game to the Steelers, their offense was ranked 21st. The other years it was bottom six. I know you were not consulted, but do you agree with this promotion?
Ed Bouchette: Yes. Arians is qualified and it gives them some continuity. He made chicken salad out of chicken droppings in Cleveland.

What?? Salad made of....droppings? Dung salad? Ugh. That sounds terrible. No one wants any of that. Is that the kind of offense Bouchette's suggesting Arians may serve up? Crap salad?
Of course, maybe he was just catering to the tastes of connoisseurs of Cleveland cuisine.

2006-12-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

Unless you count Terry Bradshaw, right?

2006-11-08T23:18:00.000-05:00

ESPN has an excerpt up on its web site tonight from a book glorifying Tom Brady, which is fine. I like Tom Brady just fine. 21st century Joe Montana and all that. But let's not let the whole Joe Montana angle, enjoyable as it is, obscure our view of history. Author Charles P. Pierce includes this sentence in the excerpted passage of the book: "He's won three Super Bowls, more than any other professional quarterback except Joe Montana." Um...what? Forgetting about someone, maybe?

Cause for celebration.

2006-11-04T17:56:00.000-05:00

From Slate magazine's recent consideration of what the new Borat movie gets right and wrong about the real Kazakhstan:

In Borat's Kazakhstan, popular sports include cow punching and "shurik, where we take dogs, shoot them in a field and then have a party." In reality, Kazakhs, like most of the world, prefer soccer. But they also like horsemanship, wrestling, and, occasionally, buzkashi (literally "grabbing the dead goat"). In this popular game (a precursor to polo), players on horseback try to control the "ball"—the headless carcass of a goat or sheep. Then they have a party.

Seriously, the web is much better with RSS.

2006-10-12T01:55:00.000-04:00

I took a long time to start using an RSS reader. I'd see bloggers making reference to RSS, figure it was some technical thing that was beyond me, and ignore it. When I eventually realized how simple and convenient Bloglines is, it became my principal way of exploring the web.

It's terrific, of course, for being alerted to new stuf from sites that update frequently. But such alerts are at least as valuable if the site doesn't update regularly and you wouldn't know to expect new content. My friend Joel has a blog that he until recently updated as infrequently as I do this one. I'm not in the habit of reading his stuff, because his not in the habit of posting it, but I have had a subscription to his site's feed, which is generated automatically by Blogger. Consequently, when he posted something this week for the first time in months, I knew right away, even though I'd have never had motive to go looking there each day or even each week. I made this point in a comment there, and he sought clarification.

I'm ashamed that it's taken a couple of days to provide that clarification when I actually had an old e-mail lying around I could have tweaked and forwarded, but I wanted to dress it up a little to put it here in the hopes of edifying at least a couple more people besides Joel. I'd almost be ashamed that it's been almost two months since I last posted here, but, unlike the first year or so of this site's life, I'm actually really busy these days.

Anyway, here's a brief explanation of RSS for those unfamiliar with it. It's a slightly edited excerpt of an earlier e-mail on the topic I've sent to a couple other people.

RSS is wonderful stuff. Using an aggregator to subscribe to syndicated feeds from the blogs and other web sites I follow regularly, I can see all their new posts and articles from one central program (in the case of a web-based aggregator such as Bloglines, it's one central web site) without having to check back to see if they've updated.

For instance, I want to read every new thing Radley Balko posts at The Agitator, but I don't want to keep going back there all the time if there's nothing new. Because I subscribe to his site's feed, Bloglines puts his site's name (and those of other updated sites) in bold with a number in parentheses after it of how many new posts there have been since I last clicked on the listing for it under "My Feeds." When I click on it, it shows me just the new items. I can read the whole entry there (for most sites, though not all) and/or choose to click through to the actual web page for that item.

This Slate article explains it better than I can. This is also a helpful article. There are a lot of different RSS-reader programs, but I find two advantages with Bloglines. First, it's free, unlike several others. Second, it's just really convenient to use. With a "Subscribe with Bloglines" toolbar button, you can very quickly and conveniently add subscriptions from any site you're viewing that has a feed. You can see my subscriptions here for an example. There are no parenthetical numbers reflecting updates that way because it only tracks what's been viewed already if you're logged in to your account, but you can, by clicking on a blog title there, see how the content appears from the feed.

It all works a whole lot better if you use Firefox and its tabbed browing, I can tell you that. If you're still using Internet Explorer, you really should get Firefox. Joel's seen me wearing the T-shirt enough times, I think, that he ought to know by now. But let me just try to make this clear for everyone. There are a lot of reasons listed on the Firefox site to start using it, but the tabbed browsing alone makes it worth it. I rarely simply left-click on links anymore, right-clicking instead and choosing "Open Link in New Tab." I can toggle back and forth then between large numbers of different web sites much more conveniently than if I had multiple browser windows open. It's easy to download and easy to install.

Afterward, it's easy to start up a Bloglines account and start subscribing to feeds from your favorite web sites. For instance, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, or this.

Oh, and anyone who's clicked onto Joel's site and is wondering why he's invented this word, "Rhetorantical," I have a couple of theories, but my favorite is that just as I learned the hard way not to blog drunk, he's learned the same about blog creation.

Quick update: In case anyone might be confused, you don't need to have your own blog to have a Bloglines account. Just so we're clear on that.

It's so obvious once it's pointed out.

2006-08-18T00:26:00.000-04:00

It's not a substantiated news item but an anecdote. Still, Eugene Volokh of the eponymous blog seems a pretty credible guy. Yesterday, I saw this from him:

An acquaintance of mine (whom I've always found quite reliable) reports that when she sought out an egg donor, one candidate donor — a woman who was past the age of majority, and in fact in graduate school — was disqualified by the agency involved because she was ... a virgin. The theory, I take it, is that somehow the lack of sexual experience made it harder to maturely make the egg donation decision, though that sounds pretty odd to me. (The acquaintance stressed that the disqualification was the agency's choice, not her own.)

Perhaps there was something lost in the translation, but, as I said, my source was quite credible. Nothing illegal here, just interesting.

In the comments on that post, many people kicked around various ideas about the reasoning behind such a decision. One person, though, made the most of the moment:

Clearly religious. They want to avoid creating a virgin mother.

Comedy gold.

Would that we all had such a gift

2006-08-16T02:46:00.000-04:00

Say what you will about Tim Cavanaugh—he does have a real knack for clever titles on his blog posts.

(See here if clarification is required.)

When to Ignore Public Support

2006-07-19T23:25:00.000-04:00

According to reports today, a federal judge has overturned the Maryland law that "required Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll in the state on medical benefits...or pay the difference in taxes."

From Dow Jones Market Watch:

In reversing the act, federal Judge J. Frederick Motz wrote that the law imposes "legally cognizable injury" upon the world's largest retailer because it would have required Wal-Mart to track and fund benefits for its Maryland employees in a different manner than its other U.S. employees, according to his opinion accompanying the ruling. Wal-Mart insures about 1 million people nationwide.

Motz also wrote that the law violated the "fundamental purpose" of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, that permits multi-state employers to keep national health and welfare plans, provide uniform nationwide benefits and permit uniform national administration.

Groups opposing Wal-Mart were critical of the decision, of course. That's to be expected. What I object to here was a view conveyed by one of the comments in their reaction. A statement from the group "WakeUpWalMart" varyingly attributed to Paul Blank, campaign director, and to Chris Kofinis, spokesman, includes the comment, "The District Court's decision, unfortunately, ignores legal and public support for requiring large, profitable corporations to pay their fair share for health care."

Now, "legal support" could mean a few different things. Do they mean legal precedent from earlier court cases? Do they mean the Maryland law itself? Do they mean their own group's lawyers' opinions of the validity of that law? It's unclear.

"Public support," though, seems pretty plain. And whatever position any of us may take on the desirability of laws requiring corporations to pay for their employees' health care, the group's contention that it's "unfortunate" that the judge's decision ignored public opinion is perverse and disturbing. It isn't the judge's role to be influenced by what the public supports or opposes. It is simply to adhere to the law, as passed by state legislatures or Congress, derived from judicial precedent, or laid out in the Constitution itself, and to reconcile these as necessary.

A judge deciding cases based on perceived public support would be usurping the role of the legislative branch. The effect of that is to devalue the importance of the legislative branch and, consequently, to diminish the democratic process and ultimately the power of the public to play an effective role in lawmaking. That WakeUpWalMart thinks it unfortunate not to see this occuring indicates, whatever their views on health care, they don't think much of democracy.

BSFUC: Back to square one?

2006-07-18T00:57:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, it looks as though I won't get to read the rest of the Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children any time soon after all. On the other hand, I wasn't expecting to at all before last spring. So perhaps I can sweep away the disappointment by simply dialing back my expectations a year or so on this.

On the bright side, I have gotten to meet the author (well, you know, over the web), which is pretty awesome.

Last year, I wrote on this blog of my excitement at the appearance of the scans of all the BSFUC issues and then my disappointment at their disappearance. This year, I wrote of my excitement at the prospect of publication of a BSFUC anthology, and now it's necessary to note my disappointment at the ~~collapse~~ postponement of that plan.

Since the delinquent beginning of my involvement last fall with Dave and Dan's message board, I've kept an eye on it pretty regularly. What I didn't watch, though, was another page on the BSFUC site called BSFUC Nation. Naturally, that's where the devious Dave dished on the deal's demise.

Unfortunately, the would-be publisher went bankrupt soon after coming into contact with us, and now the deal is off. Good to know that our reverse Midas touch is still intact!

I noticed this only after, Spring having come and gone, I e-mailed him and asked what the word was on the anthology, and he pointed out that the deal fell through a while ago and he'd already posted on it.

"Hmmmm?" I grunted, in my best confused Scooby-Doo voice, and remembered the BSFUC Nation page. The trouble is he updates that page pretty much quarterly. It's one of the same reasons people don't follow this blog. They can't have any reasonable expectation of finding new content from one day to the next. (Well, that and my navel-gazing bores them.)

The solution, of course, to keeping up to date without needing to check back to a site all the time is RSS. I didn't think BSFUC Nation had an RSS feed, though, but I can't even tell anymore, because all I know is now I'm subscribed to an update feed for it I made with RSSPECT, a service from Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics!) that can create feeds for any site. So now I should stay up to speed on that, at least. You can tell I know what the important things are in life.

So, anyway, the point is despite my earlier announcement, there was no Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children anthology this spring, nor this summer, and while Dave remains confident it will happen, we are left without anything concrete. Just so we're clear on that. Stay tuned, and give him and Dan support that they might be able to use to entice publishers.

The only spot you can park in is any of them.

2006-07-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

When's the only time this parking lot is for bank customers?

Only always. That's all.

It's good that she's wary.

2006-06-17T23:57:00.000-04:00

Peter Lynn has a section in his sidebar entitled "What People Are Saying About Peter Lynn" filled with not only the ample praise he's received in comments and on the web elsewhere from readers but also the insults and outright denunciations.

The praise outweighs the criticism, but some fun highlights of the latter are

"... you almost come across as human in that story! Well done!"
"You're hated around the office, aren't you?"
"Your misery brightens my day - thank you."
"Why do you insist on ruining everything?"
and
"... we're no longer friends, after your gross calumny and slander on manvsclown."

He's described these to me as "strangely satisfying."

I don't plan on copying the feature, but I can certainly identify with the satisfaction that comes from people recognizing and responding to what we write. Also with the element of that satisfaction that comes from the perceptiveness evident sometimes in a less enthusiastic view. Skepticism, at least.

I personally provoke little comment or opinion with my bland and infrequent remarks here. This site is such a meager little effort that most of the visitors are hapless Googlers querying on crustaceans, BSFUC, and Equifax vice-presidents. Generally they return whence they came with nary a word, and so I tend to take for granted that the only people who hold any thought of this blog as a whole are a few of my friends and some some scattered bloggers elsewhere.

Of course, there was a time when the scope of folks I presumed to intentionally read this stuff didn't inclulde those bloggers, and I was happily surprised to discover I'd made an impression. The happy novelty of that kind of surprise hasn't worn off yet.

This morning I noticed an unfamiliar site in the referral log and, checking it out, was all too flattered by the description of me therein. It's really cool to have complete strangers appear out of nowhere and announce that I'm "very witty." That really made my morning. "I'm 'very witty,'" I'd say to myself, doing stuff around the apartment.

Also, it's a compliment to my approach with some topics, I think, that she calls me "exhaustive."

"Not exhausting," she clarifies, then qualifies that: "Well, not yet."

Some people have more patience than others, but I think it's smart of her to be prepared.

Just wait. You'll get there.

More from Dave and the clowns

2006-06-17T23:31:00.000-04:00

Dave Louapre left a comment on this blog a few weeks ago announcing the introduction of a new cartoon on the BSFUC site. I'm not altogether sure how to feel about this.

On the one hand, it's sort of thrilling that a published author whose work I've admired and enjoyed since I was 15 comes to my pathetic rinky-dink little site to inform me of the appearance of his latest material. On the other hand, not only do I draw too little traffic to have much of an impact, I have less than perfect love for the CCA cartoons.

A Cotton Candy Autopsy was the first volume of the "Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children" series and featured a bunch of antisocial clowns who bust out of the circus and go wreak havoc. As I recall. It's been a while, and they've taken the scans down. The further adventures of one of those clowns and his two-headed freak show girlfriend from volume 13 stick in my head a little better at this point for some reason.

Each was a good story. But I didn't develop any special affection for those clowns as characters and enjoyed the other BSFUC stories that I read, which had nothing to do with them, at least as much.

Those books were brilliant. The animation that Dave and Dan have created focusing on Nick, Bingo, Addy, Foo Foo, and Joey Punchinello are not brilliant. They are amusing. That gap between what they achieved with the books and what the cartoons are disappoints me. Those cartoons are still worth taking a look at, though, certainly.

There are nits I could pick with the pieces, but there are many funny bits in several of the cartoons that I quite enjoy as well. For instance, the stuff with the random penguin cowboy in the second. The line from the fourth, "So....you ready to shoot some rats, baby?"

Update: Two things. First, a much stronger endorsement comes from a friend who, walking in as I was finishing this post, caught the end of one of the cartoons and roared with laughter. Roared. Which leads us to (the stupidly neglected) thing two: Here's the link. Go and check them out.

Second Update: Fixed a typo in the first full sentence of the first update. Because I hate that stuff.

I Wear My Sunglasses at Nightfly

2006-06-17T19:28:00.000-04:00

Emily points to this Nightfly post in which he entertainingly deconstructs the 1984 Corey Hart song "Sunglasses at Night" and tries to decipher the gibberish lyrics. My favorite bits were probably

Those opening bars sound like something Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox cooked up as a gag when they were hung over, then thought about for 2.3 seconds and said, “Ha ha ha, OK, seriously..."

and

You’re wearing plaid with a flying shade of gold!

Well, that would be a fashion nightmare.

At least until I considered the title more closely. I didn't know what he meant by it until I said it out loud, and then I thought it was damn clever. I think I prefer that other one, though I can't find the whole thing to listen to.

"Sunglasses at Night" is more easily available though. Which leads to trouble for me. My reaction to Nightfly's post was threefold. First, I laughed at some funny lines.

Second, all this attention on Corey Hart called to mind the blog Corey Hart Drives a Fiero, which comes from Kyle MacDonald of One Red Paperclip fame and which is a blog of satirical madness along the lines of the horse hater or Chewbacca's blog. I never meant when I got up this morning (or any day this week) to think this much about Corey Hart, but anything that leads back to Chewbacca's blog is OK with me. Chewbacca invented awesome.

Thirdly, though, I started listening closely to the words of "Sunglasses at Night" to see if I could hear the words Nightfly imagines hearing. (And thanks to Kathy K. for teaching me the word "mondegreen.") Mostly, I couldn't. It's too bad, though, that the words aren't really what he mishears them as, because the actual lyrics don't make any damn sense either. At least his don't pretend to.

Figuring that out, I left the song on repeat. And then I let it play not only while reading through his post and its comments but also while writing this, because it only seemed right. However, Emily's assessment of it as "atrocious" may be fair. It's certainly not a good song. And as long as this sort of stuff takes me, I must have listened to it thirty times straight.

I need to go wash out my ears.

Come on now.

2006-06-10T14:51:00.000-04:00

I wonder if it's a coincidence or someone's cleverness at work when I log into eMusic today and find in the section headed "Your New Arrivals" that two of the three featured albums are "Come On Pilgrim" and "No, You C'mon."

The amusement value of this is undiminished by the explanation in the album review that "No, You C'mon" was released by the band Lambchop simultaneously with its companion album "Aw C'mon." Instead it is enhanced by the discovery that this band is apparently fronted by the blue, devil-shaped teleporting mutant Kurt Wagner.

Square Miles

2006-06-10T13:48:00.000-04:00

While reading this interesting old article about Ruby Ridge by Alan W. Bock, I encountered this perplexing sentence:

It’s about 10 miles square, but because mountains rise on either side of the valley through which State Highway 95 runs, only an area about two miles by eight miles is inhabited.

Use of the word "only" implies the area inhabited here is smaller than the area covered by the zip code, but isn't "an area about two miles by eight miles" equal to about sixteen miles square and consequently larger than the 10 miles square of the Naples zip code?

If Bock's contruction actually makes sense, I wish someone would explain it to me.

Next I'll be banning myself.

2006-05-26T13:47:00.000-04:00

I've made a number of comments over at Peter Lynn's Man vs. Clown! blog, several of which were not completely lame. I think my favorite one, though, is the comment yesterday that I retracted almost immediately upon publication.

Not for the pointless remark itself or the misdirected hyperlink in it, but for the decision to scrap it altogether. In a turn of events I did not see coming, my deletion spawned a thread of meta-hilarity. I don't know if anything more will follow, but the first ~~three~~ four comments after mine are comic brilliance I'm glad to have provoked. Even if they are making fun of me.

I have to imagine Lemuel would appreciate the lesson in this. After all, imagine how much funnier the internet would become if I deleted everything I've written.

Spoiler Alert

2006-05-16T22:22:00.000-04:00

Friends of mine are big fans of the new Battlestar Galactica. It's a show with many fans. Very positive things have been written about it, for instance, here, here, here (scroll all the way down), here, here, and here. It recently won a Peabody Award.

I like science fiction. I like good stories. And I like TV shows with good production values and strong acting. So when I picked up on the hype after missing the boat when the 2003 miniseries aired and the series began, I was eager to see the miniseries and get caught up. Naturally, I was delighted when I stumbled upon a re-airing of the miniseries late one night a few weeks ago.

It was pretty enjoyable science fiction with solid production value and strong acting (plus Tricia Helfer!), so I became a little worried about the danger of becoming hooked on a weekly series after catching up with the back episodes. Then Gregg Easterbrook, on ESPN of all places, solved that problem for me by providing a sufficient excuse to disrespect and disregard the acclaimed television phenomenon.

[The] core problem with "Battlestar Galactica" is that the people of the show's imaginary space society are incredibly stupid. True, there are lots of stupid people on Earth, so presumably there would be stupid people on the opposite side of the galaxy. And folly is, inarguably, a grand theme of history. But practically everyone in "Galactica" is so astonishingly falling-down dumb, it's hard to care about their fates: And this is setting aside how, if they're so stupid, they were able to construct enormous faster-than-light starcruisers.
In the pilot for "Galactica," a society spanning 12 planets is threatened by a race of living machines called Cylons. The machines are known to sabotage computer systems. Yet all defense systems on all 12 worlds, along with all military spacecraft, have a common password. A human scientist named Baltar unwittingly gives the password to a Cylon; the Cylons transmit a computer virus containing the code; all humanity's military systems stop working; the planets are helpless against the attack that follows. Now, do you suppose there is one single password that controls every device in the American military? We'd be idiots to engineer such a code, exactly because it might fall into the wrong hands. Yet on "Galactica" not only can every defensive system built by humanity be remotely deactivated, the information necessary to do this has been placed in the hands of a mentally unstable scientist. This is one stupid society we've got here. (Two gigantic space battleships did not receive the deactivation transmission and are protecting humanity's survivors, creating the premise of the series.)
The author James Blish has said that much of sci-fi relies on Idiot Plots, defined as stories "kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot." (See the entry on Idiot Plots in the 2005 edition of the "Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy," said entry by Official Brother Neil Easterbrook of Texas Christian University.) Consider a brief rundown of "Galactica" stupidity as exemplified by the character Baltar, named after the traitor of the original 1970s series. Baltar escapes the Cylon invasion and becomes a trusted science advisor to the remaining human leadership. No one in military intelligence seems struck by the fact that all the defensive systems turned themselves off precisely at the moment of the attack, nor wonders whether this might have had something to do with Baltar, who possessed the code. Baltar rises to become vice president in the survivors' government. He obtains high position though he often speaks, aloud, to a Cylon avatar that manifests in his consciousness. That is -- the other characters hear Baltar talking to a Cylon, yet are too stupid to think anything of it.
In the final few episodes of the recently concluded season, Idiot Plots drove the action. Baltar is assigned to interrogate a Cylon spy and instead helps her escape, killing a guard in the process. No one suspects Baltar, though he and the guard were the sole people with the Cylon and though, presumably, faster-than-light starcruisers would have video monitors in their detention cells. Baltar claims he can build a Cylon detector, but needs plutonium for the device. Rather than supply Baltar with a vial of plutonium the fleet's leader, Admiral Adama, gives him a complete working nuclear warhead, which Baltar is allowed to keep in his cabin.

There are a couple more good paragraphs, in one of which, especially, Easterbrook further drives home his point. Scroll down about four fifths of the way through the article, or just do a word search in it for "stupid." (Without the quotes, of course.)

My life has got enough of an idiot plot already. I don't need to tune in every week for more. Thanks, Gregg Easterbrook!

Glissandro 70

2006-05-16T20:49:00.000-04:00

I really don't have the money to go around buying CDs, but whatever troublesome effect such deficit spending might have, this disc was worth every penny. Really amazing stuff. It just arrived in the mail today, and my first thought was, "Why did I spend the money on this thing?" Then I listened to it and thought, "Why didn't I spend the money on this thing much sooner?"

See reviews here, here, and here, as well as in the blog post that originally led me to the wonderful and haunting song, "Bolan Muppets." The mp3 of that song was again presented, along with further description and praise, here, but it has by now been taken down by each, the latter just in the last few weeks. Perfect. If I could bottle and sell my sense of timing, it would be stamped with a "Sell By" date six days in the past.

Seriously, if you like music that is every bit as creative, obscure, and interesting as "The Number 1 Listen-at-Work Radio Station!" is not, I can't recommend Glissandro 70 highly enough. You can buy it online from Amazon or its affiliated sellers or, as I did, direct from Constellation Records.

Defense of a Tautological Idiom

2006-04-07T00:02:00.000-04:00

It is surely a fool's errand for me to dispute the edicts of editors on the use of the English language. Nonetheless, I must object to this blanket condemnation of the phrase "it is what it is" by the...[sheesh]...managing editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. Next week I'll argue with Steve Jobs about how to use an Apple computer and Scott Adams about how to create and market a comic strip.

I hadn't been keeping up with the blog A Capital Ide a as I should, and when I rediscovered it recently, I found that in one of the posts, Nicole Stockdale linked, with apparent endorsement, this E&P column by Shawn Moynihan [unfortunately denied to us before my belated completion of this post; I persist undeterred], in which he called the phrase "it is what it is" "one of the most deflective, meaningless, redundant, and idiotic phrases in the English language" and "about as offensive as it gets to those of us who still care about words and their meaning." Since I am not offended by the phrase, it would seem I do not care about words or their meaning. This is a genuinely distressing discovery.

Despite that distress, I will, without defending Scott McClellan, the principal villian of Moynihan's piece, defend the phrase itself. Moynihan says the phrase is a cliche typically used to mean "I'm done talking about this. I can't or don't want to quantify my logic in this exchange; I have no defense. Just accept what I'm saying without any further argument, and let's change the subject." He says it's "useful for ending an argument without having to justify your point." I agree that in his McClellan examples, the press secretary does seem to be using it for that purpose, and this is an objectionable use of the phrase.

Moynihan also criticizes Bill Cowher and Rosanne Cash for saying it, though, and there's an important distinction between their cases and that of McClellan. Though Moynihan first called the phrase "meaningless" and was thereby able to load it afresh with a meaning unjust and unlikable, there can reasonably be found in this idiom meaning that is legitimate and inoffensive.

In reference to an undesirable circumstance the speaker himself is forced to accept, the phrase is an effective and concise way to express resignation to and reconciliation with an unsought yet unavoidable reality.

To get a sense of the difference between McClellan's use, on the one hand, and Cowher's and Cash's, on the other, consider the subject matter. McClellan is confronted with a question about a program conducted by an element of the federal government, with implications for the American people. It's the nation's business.

Cowher, meanwhile, was asked about how he deals with criticism. Moynihan doesn't cite a specific instance, but it's likely this query concerning criticism (prior to this February) that he "can't win the big one" after taking the Steelers to five AFC Championships and no further. Does it bother him? Does it gnaw at him? How does he feel about it? "It is what it is. I can't do anything about it. You can say anything you want about me and the failures I have had. That's fine. I understand it's part of this business."

Moynihan had described Cowher's comment this way:

We're barely into the pre-Super Bowl media frenzy and Pittsburgh Steelers Coach Bill Cowher already has used the phrase, "responding" to questions about how he deals with criticism.

Moynihan's quotation marks around "responding" indicate, of course, that Cowher hasn't really responded to the question, that "it is what it is" was a device to avoid actually answering. In fact, Cowher followed "it is what it is" with another four (mostly) longer sentences expanding on his point.

Not only does Cowher not use the phrase as a means of evasion, the question in the first place is about his own state of mind and his feelings. How does he cope with disrespect from various writers, commentators, and football fans? How does such disrespect affect his psyche? He perceives the reality of the situation, understands that it's beyond his control, and accepts these facts. He sees the fact for what it is, and while it may not be as he'd prefer, he's reconciled himself to it.

Similarly, Rosanne Cash is discussing her own feelings toward a film that portrays her parents' marriage in a very unpleasant light. Her mother in that movie is essentially just an obstacle keeping her father from June Carter. She calls the movie "sometimes true, sometimes just factual," but she doesn't resent the film, she says. "It is what it is." Which is to say, unpleasant to her though it may be, she recognizes the reality of the situation, harbors no delusions about the film, understands that she can't change it, and has resigned herself to it.

It would seem that either her stance toward the film is unacceptable to Moynihan or her concise way of phrasing it is. You've probably noticed how tiresome it is for me to keep rephrasing "I grasp the reality of the situation, I understand it's out of my hands, I know I can't change it, and even if it isn't pleasant to me, I have reconciled myself to it." Moynihan, though, is apparently insisting that this be spelled out in every event rather than conveying this sense of acceptance with such an "offensive" expression as "it is what it is."

The foregoing defense of the expression is no defense of McClellan's use of it, though. The above elaborate encapsulations of recognition, resignation, and acceptance essentially imply, "it's not worth worrying about," which, despite the proclamations of certain authorities, is a perfectly reasonable response if the question concerned simply the speaker's feelings, as with Cowher and Cash. On the other hand, "it's not worth worrying about" is obviously not a reasonable position for the government to take in response to questions about economic data or wiretaps.

Why bother arguing such a point? Moynihan or Stockdale could, I expect, easily demolish my puny resistance with their superior knowledge and authority were the mood to strike them, and what other normal person would care anyway? These objections I brush aside and remember instead the expressive value of an idiom that, yes, may indeed be—or at least appear—a tautology but that, along with its brethren, is of such great use in coping with a range of unsought, undesired, yet unavoidable circumstances.

For if we banish "it is what it is," what justification remains for noting that "things are what they are" and "I am what I am"? And without such succinct summations of sentiment, can I count myself still as able to acknowledge the mess I've made of my life, accept it, and set those regrets aside in order to deal with the present, disappointing reality? Or to confront and accept my own flaws and limitations, neither deluding myself with visions of greatness nor succumbing to despair?

I am not what I wish I were. I am what I am. Circumstances are in many ways not what I wish they were, but we cannot undo the past. Things are what they are. And as I finish yet another tardy post, the seclusion of Moynihan's article behind a subscriber wall (new since the time I started this post, weeks ago) is not at all what I would wish for. Instead, it is what it is.

On Not Knowing It's Normal

2006-04-04T20:30:00.000-04:00

From page 17 of Nick Webb's Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams:

Douglas was a radical atheist, and quite unequivocal about using the term....He really did mean "atheist" and not agnostic. The more he learned, the stronger his atheism became—but this was nothing as crude as replacing one paradigm with another.

One of the slanders frequently addressed to atheists is that their view of the world is mechanistic and reductive—a long, cold chain of materially determined consequences with each iron link of cause and effect stretching back to the Big Bang. Where in this account, argue the believers, is there room for spirit or free will? But Douglas thought that imputing such a position to atheists was absurd. The more you know about how the world works, the more astonishingly wonderful it becomes.

His way of looking at things is infectious.

In terms of quantum physics, you...are mostly empty space consisting of infintesimally tiny nuclei surrounded by clouds of electrons whizzing round in (relative to the nucleus) hugely distant and ultimately unknowable orbital clouds that nevertheless can only possess discrete values. The nuclei contain still smaller components, and their numbers determine what you're made of. All but the very lightest elements in your body were synthesized in the thermonuclear hearts of stars and blasted into the universe by explosion. You're at the bottom of the gravity well of a planet that is moving at nineteen miles a second around its solar central heating unit that is one star of about a hundred billion in the local system. Gravity is—by millions of orders of magnitude—the weakest of all the binding forces of the cosmos, but it weighs heavily on you because you're so tiny compared to the mass of our planet. What's more, you're living in a thin envelope of dangerously reactive gases. You don't give this a moment's thought because, of course, you know all this is normal. Douglas didn't.

I'm not the atheist Adams was (and Webb apparently is), so it's unsurprising that I don't agree that Webb's proven all of his points here. The physics discussed in the last paragraph are indeed mind-boggling. However, even if we stipulate that that these points demonstrate that the world is astonishingly wonderful, and increasingly so with increased knowledge and understanding of its workings, that still doesn't show the atheist worldview not to be "a long, cold chain of materially determined consequences." The amazing physics here may be astonishing and wonderful but still don't illustrate a role for spirit or free will.

That in itself doesn't mean that Adams was mistaken in his atheism, but it does mean that Webb presents us with a proposition he fails to prove.

Nonetheless, that quantum physics description of our situation is still pretty amazing.

Kicking the Splat Habit

2006-04-03T23:41:00.000-04:00

You know, I had thought I could balance all the Splash Back playing with some semblance of productivity in, among other things, blogging. Clearly, I was wrong. I was warned how addictive this game was, and yet I charged right in and succumbed completely. Now I may have to find a 12-step program or something. If you consistently see further blog posts in the coming days, you'll know cold turkey is working OK. I don't know, though. I'm like a chocoholic, but for Splash Back.

Further clarification on the prawn matter.

2006-02-28T03:48:00.000-05:00

One of the first things I wrote about on this site was my confusion about the difference between shrimp and prawns. As I discovered while writing that post but even more after seeing all the Google hits it drew, such confusion is not at all uncommon. Recently, though, I found that post linked from a site I hadn't heard of before called AskEarth, where someone raised the question, as I did here, "What is the difference between a prawn and a shrimp?" and added, charmingly, as I had not thought to, "I will not pay for an answer."

One of the people who responded in that thread offered a link to my post and two other sites, one of which I had linked to. The reaction to those links by VladmirW, a respondent later in the thread who's determined to dispel the crustacean confusion, was interesting to me in a number of ways.

First, I was amused to see that in his insult and dismissal of what I'd written, he appears to refer to me once as a journalist and once as a food writer "or whatever." Not quite, Vlad. Not quite. I'm just someone who knows nearly nothing, will drone on at absurd lengths about anything that crosses his mind, and is quite apt to stick his foot in his mouth and say something he'll regret. That's all. Just so we're clear.

I'm pretty sure if I were a journalist, someone would pay me somtime for something I'd written. This is certainly not the case.

On the one hand, I was a little annoyed at his implication that I'm doing a poor job as a journalist. On the other hand, I was flattered that my writing is evidently so good passersby imagine that I must be doing it professionally.

(Also, I wasn't "looking for something to yammer about." I was looking for answers. Yammering just comes naturally to me.)

"It's clear that none of those journalists owns a dictionary" chafes in another way, though. Specifically, I love the dictionary. It pains me not only to be thought ignorant of it but even more to have genuinely been neglectful of it. While I do of course own a dictionary (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate), I'll confess I did not pull it off the bookshelf in the other room when I wrote the post. Let me do that now.

(As an aside, I must mention that, in opening it up just now to a random "S" page, I came upon one headed by "soft-shell clam," from which I conclude the English language is dominated by seafood.)

Shrimp, 1: any of numerous mostly small and marine decapod crustaceans (suborder Natantia) having a slender elongated body, compressed abdomen, long legs, and a long spiny rostrum.

Prawn: any of numerous widely distributed edible decapod crustaceans (as of the genera Pandalus and Peneus) that resemble shrimps with large compressed abdomens; also : SHRIMP

OK, granted, maybe it's partly my fault for not recognizing the terms Natantia, Pandalus, or Peneus, but c'mon. My friend The Dictionary? Not helpful here. It defined a prawn as something that resembles a shrimp.

Just to get into the spirit of things, to take seriously Vlad's ownership concerns, and, well, to keep it real [I'm all about keepin' it real], I quoted above from the solid old hardback copy that my parents gave me for Christmas in 1991, but you can see the same definitions online here and here. Dictionary.com is also of little help. Its definition of prawn? "Any of various edible crustaceans similar to but larger than the shrimps."

So I think Vlad's mistaken to try to throw the dictionary in my face, but he does make a very valid point that there are actual scientific differences that I originally failed to note. Honestly, though, it's hard to make note of those differences when you watch a "Science Information Officer" respond to the direct question "What is the scientific difference(s) between shrimp and prawn?" by discussing only the scientific similarities between them.

Vlad emphasizes that prawns have two sets of pincers while shrimp have one. It's not clear what his source for that fact is. Perhaps he's an expert and doesn't need to consult one, but citing one would be helpful for us nonexperts. Mack, who earlier in the thread linked my post, also linked to this site, which speaks of not the number of pincer sets but their location on five pairs of legs versus two.

Vlad does helpfully quote this Wikipedia entry, which says prawns "are distinguished from the superficially-similar shrimp by the gill structure which is branching in prawns..., but is lamellar in shrimp." If you are unable, as I am, to visualize lamellae, this still doesn't make the distinction altogether clear. But OK, something about gill structure. That same Wikipedia paragraph says that while shrimp belong to the sub-order Pleocyemata, prawns belong to Dendrobranchiata, which, it notes, is a name that means the gill structure branches as in a tree.

So certainly there are some genuine scientific differences between the two, and I should have pinned those down and made them clear in my earlier post. To that end, I should have first checked Wikipedia ("a better source than the Googling everyone is so fond of," says Vlad). So dock a point or two from me.

However, does this render worthless my whole earlier post? It does not. While I was regrettably unclear, I wasn't trying to assert there is no scientific difference between the two but rather no culinary and commercial difference. Clues indicating that may be found in the way I opened with this sentence: "It's seemed lately that I'm seeing dishes with prawns appearing on more restaurant menus than in the past" and closed with this paragraph:

In fact, that same article observes that "essentially, there are no rules governing what your supermarket can sell as shrimp and what it can sell as prawns." It also included this sentence, my favorite on the subject: "One [seafood] industry expert we spoke to became so exasperated, he swore that no one on earth knows the difference." So I guess I was as good as an expert already.

On this count, the Wikipedia prawn article doesn't undermine but rather validates my post, asserting, "As used in commercial farming and fishery, the terms shrimp and prawns are generally used interchangeably." Googling, whatever Vlad may think, was very helpful in developing and demonstrating this point.

So what have we learned here, other than pincers and gill structure?

I should always remember to check all relevant terms in the dictionary before writing about them, although in this instance, I'd have gained nothing.
It's worthwhile checking Wikipedia when researching a topic. In this case, it shows both where I went wrong and where I went right.
I may never draw a paycheck for anything I write, but I can string together sentences well enough to fool some people.

My sincerest gratitude to the rude but helpful VladimirW for bringing these things to my attention.

It's illegal to break the law.

2006-01-31T22:37:00.000-05:00

While I'm sure this will be observed by countless others, I can't let it pass.

A high-profile arrest was made at the U.S. Capitol tonight:

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush's State of the Union address.

"She was asked to cover it up. She did not," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman, adding that Sheehan was arrested for unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor.

That's the charge? "Unlawful conduct"? Isn't that sort of implicit and therefore redundant and therefore ridiculous? When was the last time someone was arrested and charged with lawful conduct? I'd like to read the statute in question here. "It shall not be legal to do that which is illegal," perhaps.

(Do not confuse recognition of absurdity with support or approval of Cindy Sheehan. There is none of the latter here.)

If any lawyer would like to explain why this isn't ridiculous after all, I'd welcome the clarification.

IT WAS A DECOY!

2006-01-20T18:48:00.000-05:00

IT CONFUSED THE CREEPS!!

This is great news. Eggagog is back. One day after I resigned myself to his enduring absence from the blogosphere and removed him from my blogroll, he's put up his first post in almost four months. This is indeed fun to make a blog on the computer website.

Let's hope he keeps at it.

Update: False alarm. It looks as though that post was the decoy, and we were the creeps who were confused into thinking he was back at it.

Burning the Alexandria Library

2006-01-19T23:59:00.000-05:00

Tim Cavanaugh put up a post on Reason's Hit & Run blog yesterday about "an interesting brouhaha result[ing] from Pope Benedict XVI's alleged comments on Islam and the possibility of reinterpreting the Quran." The title of the post, which wasn't referenced further in the piece but shares with it an underlying principle, was "If it accords with the Quran it is unnecessary and can be burned. If it doesn't accord with the Quran it is heresy and must be burned."

That quotation, while phrased differently elsewhere, is surely a reference to the command of the Caliph 'Umar concerning the great library at Alexandria after the Muslim conquest of that city in the seventh century. Since Cavanaugh only quotes it in passing, it's difficult to know whether he means to refer to it as historical fact or as legend. It's worth noting, though, that it's the latter.

I probably wouldn't have recognized it all if I hadn't been reading earlier this week Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles. Battles relates the story of a Coptic priest, John the Grammarian, who in 641 asked the Muslim conqueror Amr what was to be done with the famous library.

The general replied, however, that he could not decide the fate of the books without consulting Caliph Omar. The caliph's answer, quoted here from Alfred J. Butler's Arab Conquest of Egypt, is infamous: "Touching the books you mention, if what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore." According to tradition, the scrolls were bundled up and delivered as fuel to the city's baths, where it is said they fueled the furnaces for six months.

Some on the web are today passing this on as historical fact, sometimes for the apparent purpose of disparaging either Islam specifically or religion generally. However, as Dex at The Straight Dope puts it, "this story is almost certainly apocryphal, invented in the 12th century." Battles again:

In fact, the story as we know it may have been invented by one Ibn al-Qifti, a twelfth-century [or thirteenth] Sunni chronicler. According to the Egyptian classicist Mostafa el-Abbadi, al-Qifti may have invented the story to justify the sale of books by the twelfth-century Sunni ruler Saladin, who sold off whole libraries to pay for his fight against the Crusaders.

While Battles does note that "despite its possible Islamic origin...the story has been handed down in the West as an Orientalist lament for the fate of Hellenic learning in the heathen East," this Wikipedia article considers no Islamic origin and instead asserts that claims of 'Umar's library destruction simply "are generally regarded as a Christian attack on Muslims."

While it's possible these claims are generally regarded that way, we can find a persuasive rebuttal for such an explanation from Princeton's Bernard Lewis. Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at the university and has been described as "one of the world's foremost authorities on the Middle East" and "a towering figure among experts on the culture and religion of the Muslim world." There was a very interesting 2003 Wall Street Journal article about him that's worth reading.

In 1990, Lewis wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books, wherein he expresses his astonishment that a reviewed book found credible the story of 'Umar's destruction order and proceeds to set the record straight. It could be Lewis's work that Battles draws on in his 2003 book; it certainly seems to provide the details behind the conclusion Battles presents succinctly.

Lewis first notes,

This story first became known to Western scholarship in 1663, when Edward Pococke, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, published an edition of the Arabic text, with Latin translation, of part of the History of the Dynasties of the Syrian-Christian author Barhebraeus, otherwise known as Ibn al-'Ibri.

He then describes a long history of Western scholarship finding the story implausible for various reasons, culminating with this:

By far the strongest argument against the story, however, is the slight and late evidence on which it rests. Barhebraeus, the principal source used by Western historians, lived from 1226 to 1289. He had only two predecessors, from one of whom he simply copied the story and both preceded him by no more than a few decades. The earliest source is a Baghdadi physician called 'Abd al-Latif, who was in Egypt in 1203, and in a brief account of his journey refers in passing to "the library which 'Amr ibn al-'As burnt with the permisison of 'Umar." An Egyptian scholar, Ibn al-Qifti, wrote a history of learned men in about 1227, and includes a biography of John the Grammarian in the course of which he tells the story on which the legend is based....Barhebraeus merely followed the text of Ibn al-Qifti....

In light of Ibn al-Qfti being the apparent originator of the tale, Lewis responds this way to the idea that it's principally "a Christian attack on Muslims":

Myths come into existence to answer a question or to serve a purpose, and one may wonder what purpose was served by this myth. An answer sometimes given, and certainly in accord with a currently popular school of epistemology, would see the story as anti-Islamic propaganda, designed by hostile elements to blacken the good name of Islam by showing the revered Caliph 'Umar as a destroyer of libraries. But this explanation is as absurd as the myth itself. The original sources of the story are Muslim, the only exception being Barhebraeus, who copied it from a Muslim author. Not the creation, but the demolition of the myth was the achievement of European scholarship, which from the 18th century to the present day has rejected the story as false and absurd, and thus exonerated the Caliph 'Umar and the early Muslims from this libel.

The last two full paragraphs of the piece explain in some detail the reasoning that the actual impetus of the myth was not to slander 'Umar but, as Battles suggests in his book, to justify Saladin for breaking up and selling off another, much later library.

None of this affects the points raised in Cavanaugh's post about Quranic interpretation and the Pope's views on it. But it's worth bearing in mind when encountering the story he alludes to in his title.

Updated to correct a bad link and a typo. Also, see Tim Cavanaugh's reply in the comments.

Another update, 11/30/06: I guess, given the mutable nature of Wikipedia, it's not surprising that the passage I quoted above from the relevant entry isn't there any longer. What is surprising is I discovered that after noticing from my referral logs that two of the footnotes there (11 & 12) point to this blog post. At least today they do. Wacky!

ESPN.com bug report

2006-01-19T19:28:00.000-05:00

What I sent them a few minutes ago:

The ESPN.com site has become worse since the recent redesign in one respect. I use for my browser Firefox 1.5, and one of the main reasons is that I enjoy being able to right-click on links and open them in a new tab. On the present incarnation of the site, I can do that with many stories, for instance, any of the headlines or the titles for four featured columnists--Wojciechowski, Forde, Jackson, or Simmons. However, several stories are in a "Spotlight" Flash player that allows, when right-clicking, only the options, "Open," "Open in New Window," and "Copy Link." This definitely makes the site redesign less user-friendly than if the full Firefox functionality were present for all stories on the page. If you wish to reply, my e-mail address is steve.ely[ at ]gmail.com.

Let's see if there's a response or a change.

Edit, August 17, 2006: I went in and broke my e-mail address in the excerpted message. Belated anti-spam measure and all that, you know.

MirrorMask DVD

2006-01-19T01:28:00.000-05:00

You may recall my earlier enthusiasm about the movie MirrorMask. If not, and you're not already enthusiastic about it yourself, click here to read about how awesome it is.

Unfortunately, it's not in theaters anymore. Fortunately, the DVD will be coming out soon. According to the Muppet Newsflash blog, it's scheduled for release on February 7, 2006. Click over and read their post for details.

Stroke Recognition: 3 Steps

2006-01-18T02:02:00.000-05:00

My grandfather had a stroke when I was a small child. Until the time he died, when I was 18, he could barely move or make himself understood. So you can understand why I found important the claims in a recent e-mail I was forwarded that doctors can often totally prevent or reverse the effects of a stroke if able to treat the patient within three hours and that, while bystanders frequently fail to recognize a stroke in time, there are three simple steps to check for stroke symptoms.

I'm generally very skeptical of unattributed claims forwarded by e-mail, but a little quick checking around supports the information here. Barbara Mikkelson on Snopes.com called this e-mail last November "much-circulated," so it's possible anyone reading this blog has already seen the information. For those who haven't, though, and those who'll find some supplementary sources useful, consider the following.

WebMD lists these as symptoms of a stroke:

Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm, or leg, especially if it occurs on one side of the body
Sudden confusion, trouble speaking, or understanding speech
Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes, or double vision
Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance, or coordination
Sudden severe headache with no known cause
Drowsiness, nausea, or vomiting

That same page, though, quotes an expert as saying, "Sometimes, the person having the stroke is the last to know what's happening." And obviously bystanders are dependent on the victim to know if there actually is headache, confusion, numbness, or nausea, for instance. A lot depends then on the perception and judgment of the bystanders. As Mikkelson notes,

Focal neurological signs such as slurred speech, unilateral facial droop, blurred vision, discoordination, and partial or total paralysis are often indicative of some sort of brain dysfunction and would be recognized as important markers by those in the medical profession. However, expecting laypeople to diagnose that something has gone terribly wrong in a loved one on the basis of that checklist would be reaching for too much; in that key moment few would be likely to remember what they were supposed to be looking for.

Therefore, these three steps can be particularly helpful:

ask the individual to smile.
ask him or her to raise both arms.
ask the person to speak a simple sentence.

Mikkelson again:

By distilling the assessment process down to three simple tests (smile, raise both arms, speak a simple sentence), anyone is likely to remember what to ask of someone they suspect has just undergone a stroke and to correctly interpret the information so gleaned.

The questions in question were apparently "drawn from a report presented in February 2003 at the American Stroke Association's (ASA) 28th International Stroke Conference." (I didn't even know there is such a thing as the American Stroke Association. I believe I might need to give them some money.) Mikkelson goes on to point out,

News of [that report] can be found on the ASA web site and the American Heart Association's (AHA) web site. However, as the ASA says in its official statement about the report, though the research was funded by a grant from the ASA, that body has not taken a position on the topic nor endorsed the test because the results, though positive, arose from a very small study.

The article about the report is definitely worth a look and very encouraging if recognition has been such a problem historically. Mikkelson's right, though, about the ASA non-endorsement. They're damn emphatic about it. Certainly, if the symptoms the ASA and WebMD list are noted, 911 should be called immediately. When uncertainty exists, however, those three questions might help to clarify the situation.

WebMD on that three-hour window:

During a stroke, experts urge people to get to the hospital as soon as possible, preferably within one hour after symptoms appear, so that they can be evaluated and perhaps receive treatments that must be given within a window of time. One drug, t-PA, can dissolve blood clots and restore blood flow during an ischemic stroke, but doctors must start delivering it intravenously within three hours after symptoms begin.

More on tPA here. And a stark reminder here that, while strokes grow more likely as we grow older, they can happen at any age. We do well to be aware.

Thank you for the math help, Washington Post!

2006-01-17T14:30:00.000-05:00

I don't at this time have anything like a solid grasp of the Jack Abramoff scandal. As I began today to take a few steps toward changing that, I came across a weirdly insulting paragraph in this Washington Post story:

Of the 18 largest recipients of tribe contributions directed by Abramoff's group, six, or one-third, were Democrats. These included Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2001 to 2002, and Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.), a leader in Indian affairs legislation.

All factual claims in and related to this paragraph aside, I find damn near unbelievable that "or one-third." Is the Post next going to clarify for us that five is "one-half" of ten? Do they actually think that people reading an article about campaign financing really are so poor at arithmetic as to need it pointed out that six out of eighteen is one third? Do Birnbaum, Willis, and Schmidt really think so little of their readers?

PacMan Puppet Show Theatre

2006-01-05T11:50:00.000-05:00

"PacMan stars in his own Mexican puppet theatre adaptation." Awesome.

via PuppetVision Blog.

Why What Now?

2006-01-04T02:42:00.000-05:00

Provoked by fresh consideration of Piranha Press while composing my latest BSFUC post, I discovered that searching on Amazon.com for Kyle Baker's most notable work by its title, "Why I Hate Saturn," will also provide you with the following book-buying options:

The Cowboy Wally Show by Kyle Baker
Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq
Why Did I Marry You Anyway?... by Barbara Bartlein
Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison... by Hampton Sides
I Hate the Man Who Runs This Bar! by Eugene Chadbourne

Plainly, fans of Why I Hate Saturn do enjoy a diverse array of reading options.

Springtime is a good season for resurrection and new life.

2006-01-03T23:15:00.000-05:00

Still in its youth, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children was killed off over 13 years ago, and though relics of its life have circulated, and it's been remembered and noted by those who knew it, we've waited until 2006 to see its triumphant return. I'd earlier here rejoiced in its author's return to us of his excellent stories, only to mourn their disappearance once again and beseech him to give them back to us in some less fleeting form. Finally, as the clock ran out on 2005, BSFUC writer Dave Louapre posted a comment on New Year's Eve that I read between dinner out and a party, when friends and I stopped back in here to pick up the champagne (OK, Gruet, whatever that is) from the fridge:

BSFUC will live in the Spring.

DL; 8:13 PM

Enticed but cautious, I replied the next day,: Details, man. I'm withholding my excitement until I hear a few details.

But evidently when Dave tried to reply here, the software wasn't cooperative. Happily, he was able to tear himself away from the college bowl games to reply to my inquiry on the BSFUC message board:: [I]t looks like Spring will finally bring a multi-book anthology in both trade paper and hardback. Can't say any more right now, but it's with a Canadien publisher. Hopefully it won't fall through.

Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children was originally published under the Piranha Press imprint by DC Comics. Here's a helpful listing of all the titles published by Piranha Press. (I think I might still have a couple of Gregory books stashed away back in Pennsylvania in my parents' attic, along with the BSFUC issue "I Am Paul's Dog" and a million old Justice Leagues. I am happily reminded of my continuing need to acquire Epicurus the Sage and Why I Hate Saturn.)

As this Wikipedia article points out, though, DC agreed to contracts giving creator ownership to writers and artists, a situation I understand to have been even more unusual then than now. This would account for Dave Louapre and artist Dan Sweetman being in a position to seek 21st century publication from another company altogether.

I imagine there are stories full of details relating to both the DC end of things back in 1989 and with the current Canadian publisher, but I'll refrain from asking Dave about it until he's able to speak more freely after business is completed.

K'vitsh, a Canadian herself, says, "With a Canadian publisher, all will be well." I think I don't share her motive, but I must share her optimism. This is bound to improve the spring. I'm going to need to start budgeting for the purchase of each volume. I encourage anyone with the good fortune of reading this to likewise to take advantage of this new life for Louapre and Sweetman's creative achievement.

Update (20 July 2006): Turns out she was wrong. The publisher went belly up, and they've got to find a new one now. See here and here.

Plastic Jesus

2006-01-03T10:46:00.000-05:00

Last month, I wrote about Paul Newman, beginning with a mention of having just watched Cool Hand Luke. Then, a few days ago, almost as if in response, Said The Gramaphone posted this. It's Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke playing the banjo and singing Plastic Jesus. (Not to be confused, of course, with Personal Jesus, by Depeche Mode.) Really cool.

Better hurry over there. It looks like a limited-time offer.

Who am I kidding?

2006-01-03T10:07:00.000-05:00

I decided back before Christmas that I wouldn't post here at all until almost mid-January because there are certain other things I really should be preoccupied with in the meantime, but it's not as if I've managed so far to really stay away from the internet anyway. So as long as I'm online anyway, I may as well link some things over the next few days that I've encountered over the last few. The real writing will be next week, though.

How It Is Different

2005-12-20T22:19:00.000-05:00

I don't know much Aimee Mann music but I liked one of her songs I heard on Pandora.com, so I went looking for it on eMusic.com to possibly download it and watched a cascade of title discrepencies occur.

Pandora says the song is called "How Am I Different."

eMusic, on the other hand, shows the title as "Now I Am Different."

OK, what about allmusic.com? "How I Am Different."

Terrific. Let's give the deciding vote to Amazon and call it "How Am I Different," as on Pandora.

You know, of all the song titles to keep turning up differently, could there be one more appropriate and self-referential? It's as if the whole web really is run by the Master Control Program that journal-seeking Texan imagines and it's amusing itself with wordplay.

"Knave!"

2005-12-20T16:56:00.000-05:00

Peter Lynn has up a post about his arch nemesis over at Man vs. Clown! [That's his exclamation point, not mine.] It's one of his funniest in a while, I think.

Man vs. Clown is probably my favorite humor blog right now. If you're not yet familiar with it, check out a few highlights here, here, here, and here. And the classic that won me over, here.

Peter Lynn is a copy editor, so he may have an opinion about whether that exclamation point from the blog's title ought to stay in the title when it's used in a sentence. I'd be interested in knowing it. For now, I suppose I'll defer to Bill Walsh on this one.

Of course, I guess I was inconsistent with that exclamation point between the first and second paragraphs. But it seemed to help at first. Damn these people putting punctuation in their blog titles! Oh. Wait. Never mind.

Things

2005-12-18T18:56:00.000-05:00

A few items from things magazine:

M.C. Escher's impossible staircase built from Legos.

To steal their description: "a great urban climbing video, apparently set in a very crumbling Russia (complete with French rap soundtrack)." Pretty impressive stunts.

And "a look at the Hyperbole Towers, a development composed of the best overstatements, redundancies, non-sequiturs, and fetishizations of obscure Mediterranean kitchen materials that today’s real estate flacks have to offer."

"It is...in the time-honored tradition of infinite grandeur, reaching uncompromising levels of luxury never realized in modern times....with the warmth of textured concrete."

Carl Denham's Giant Monster

2005-12-17T11:23:00.000-05:00

I saw Peter Jackson's King Kong Wednesday and enjoyed it. I didn't love it but did love parts of it.

The most important thing to know about it is that it's an even three hours long, so lay off the fluids for a few hours beforehand, use the restroom right before, and don't buy a soft drink.

Ann Althouse suggested it has some "especially bad CGI." Call me undiscerning, but it looked OK to me.

David Denby in this New Yorker article, meanwhile, feels that the monster fights "go on forever" as Jackson's "exuberance spills over into senselessness." One attack by a bunch of oversized critters that I found appropriately creepy, disgusting, tense, and exciting was to Denby "kiddie-show horrors" that "stop the movie cold." It all tries his—he likes to say "our"—patience. "Even children," he says, "may feel that they’ve seen it all before." Perhaps I have less discernment than a child, but those were actually my favorite parts of the movie.

I can't remember the last film that had me saying, "whoa!.........whoa!" so much. Everything between Kong and Naomi Watts is charming and poignant, and her performance throughout is a tremendous success, but the stuff with the monsters is the most fun.

Anyway, pretty good movie. I hope it's profitable. NRO's John J. Miller (of course) said, "Skip Kong. See Narnia." Well, OK. If you have to pick just one of the two, I guess I'd say go with Narnia, too. But if you're able to see two movies during the time these two are in theaters, I recommend them both.

If you do enjoy Jackson's Kong, you may find interesting a few articles about it from this past Monday and Thursday in USA Today.

As much as I liked all the little nods to the original, I was particularly intrigued by the last paragraph in this article:

An advertising sign for Universal Pictures, the studio behind this version of Kong, can be spied in Times Square. Archival photos of New York City, circa 1933, showed a promo for Columbia Pictures in that spot. "We did try to make it Columbia," Jackson says. "They wanted to be paid a huge amount of money. So we went with Universal," which let him use a sign for free.

They wanted to be paid a huge amount of money? Really? If that's true, I don't understand Columbia's reasoning at all. Don't companies usually pay the filmmakers good money to get their product or company name in a film? Or at the least, happily accept free advertising? Why would Columbia decide it would be worth more to Peter Jackson to put their company's sign into his movie than it would be worth to them?

One of the articles has a litte blurb with each of the four principal actors in the film. I was surprised to discover there that Andy Serkis—who provided the motion capture performance for Kong, as he did for Gollum in Jackson's Lord of the Rings—also appears in the flesh as Lumpy, the ship's cook.

There's more about Serkis's role as King Kong in the third article. Apparently, for all of the scenes in which Naomi Watts interacts with Kong, her green screen work included participation by Serkis so she could play off him. Then after her part was filmed, he would repeat each scene "with 132 sensors stuck to his face and 60 on his body while 72 cameras shot his every move." Wow.

If Serkis, along with the CGI team, couldn't have pulled off Gollum, Lord of the Rings would have been severely undermined. Peter Jackson was banking on him here a whole lot more. He really came through for him.

Because Bacon's Gooood...

2005-12-16T01:04:00.000-05:00

In the vein of all that talk about Bacon from a couple weeks ago, a few things come to mind.

One is a conversation my friend Laura related to me a few weeks before that. She's got a cat named Isabel, that her family calls Izzie for short. Her nine-year-old daughter, McKenzie, one day informed her that the cat's last name is Bacon.

(Personally, I think "Izzie Bacon" would make a much better name for a pet pig, but no matter.)

"Izzie Bacon?" Laura asked. "Why?"

With no further explanation, McKenzie adopted her best redneck accent and said simply, "Because bacon's gooooood."

For McKenzie, especially, then: bacon tape, bacon wrapping paper, and my favorite, bacon bandages.

Also: Push Button, Receive Bacon!

What do they think the internet is, really?

2005-12-15T22:41:00.000-05:00

I love this person for making me laugh so much. Someone found this site by searching in Yahoo for this question:

"can you find steve F. Austin's journal" [without the quotation marks.]

Apparently, I'm the number one search result on Yahoo for that, though I've never, well, I've never had any idea what that even means. How does Yahoo connect this blog to that search? Here are the excerpted lines the search page offered with matching terms bolded:

Just So We're Clear... Thursday, December 08, 2005. Is The New Yorker published by Piranha Press? ... posted by Steve Ely at 12/08 ... Street Journal. Important newspaper columns detailing the wrongness of this nomination have been written by George F ... Antone's, Austin's Home of the Blues ...

At first, it was just funny that

Yahoo works in such a way that this is the best it can do there. Compare that to Google, which copes rather better.
Someone reading the lines above, with such hints as "Steve Ely," "George F," and "Antone's, Austin's Home of the Blues" chose to click through to see what I had to offer them.

Then, though, I realized it shouldn't be too surprising they'd click through despite those giveaways. Of course a search engine might be baffling. After all, this is a person who gave Yahoo not search terms but a conversational question, implying a conception of some kind of conscious mind lurking inside The Internet that Yahoo allows us to converse with.

That perception of the web made me roar with laughter. Roar, I tell you.

Yahoo's not the Computer on board the Starship Enterprise, pal. Or the Master Control Program in the movie Tron.

Of course, it's probably some 78-year-old person who never uses the web, which makes me kind of a jerk for laughing. Except "Steve F. Austin" makes it sound as if our Texan friend conflated the names of Stephen F. Austin, who was the founder of Texas, and professional wrestler Steve Austin, who is stone cold.

And yet, my curiosity aroused, I am compelled to learn the answer: can i find steve F. Austin's journal?

(I'll just pretend it's less an overheard question from Geordi to the ship's computer than a sort of message in a cyberbottle—"Hey, benevolent stranger with a cable modem, can you find this for me?" "Sure!")

And, of course, as usual, Google makes it easy. The Prison Journal of Stephen F. Austin. Wow. I hadn't even known Stephen F. Austin had ever been imprisoned. Of course, I hadn't known much of anything about him. It's been an educational night. Thanks, Yahoo! Thanks, Geordi!

Later: Of course, now each Yahoo and Google find the text string in this post first, so you'll just have to take my word for the earlier results.

Newman's Own Blog Post

2005-12-14T08:41:00.000-05:00

Until yesterday, when I finally watched Cool Hand Luke, I had never seen a Paul Newman film made when he was younger than 68 years old, although I was a big fan of Nobody's Fool. My familiarity was actually more with his Newman's Own brand pasta sauce, and in case there's more than one person out there with the idea that products under that label are simply a case of celebrity-endorsement marketing, the story behind it is something I've been meaning to clarify since I started this blog.

There seems to be at least one person who's confused, as I discovered after I received last year a couple of notable gifts for Christmas. My parents gave me a George Foreman Grill to try to provoke me to do something that begins to approach actual cooking a little bit more. Meanwhile, a couple of friends gave me a compact volume entitled simply, The Movie Book.

The first time I used the Foreman grill, I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast the history of that celebrity-named product with the history of the sauces, salad dressing, popcorn, and other foods I had read about earlier in Newman and A.E. H otchner's book, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good. In that book, they tell how Newman was so unbelievably picky about his salad dressing that not only did he make his own for home use, but he also would require in restaurants that they bring him the necessary ingredients from the kitchen so he could make the dressing at the table. "On one occasion," the book says,

when the restaurant mistakenly served the salad with its own dressing, Paul took the salad to the men's room, washed off the dressing, dried it with paper towels, and, after returning to the table, anointed it with his own, which he concocted with ingredients brought to him from the kitchen.

Seems as if it could be obnoxious behavior, but who am I to argue with a man of such success? They go on, anyway, to explain the obsession this way:

At that time, almost all dressings, especially the mass-market ones, contained sugar, artificial coloring, chemical preservatives, gums, and God knows what. So Paul really started to make his own dressing not just as a taste preference, but also as a defense against those insufferable additives.

The book's first chapter, which includes the above passages, portrays the commercially available Newman's Own Salad Dressing as springing directly from a December 1980 effort by Newman and Hotchner in Newman's converted barn to mix up a batch of Newman's salad dressing in an old washtub, bottle it themselves in old wine bottles, and give it as a gift to neighbors when their families went around Christmas carolling. Apparently, there was some left over in the tub, giving Newman the idea of trying to bottle and sell that, until Hotchner pointed out that selling food produced in such conditions would break any number of laws. So Newman agreed to "take out insurance, create a proper label, and get a bona fide bottler and see if it would sell."

The rest of the book goes on to tell the story of how they went about taking those steps, what the marketing entailed, how Newman's taste for natural ingredients led to his creation of a variety of other products, and how the charitable projects ensued after the Newman’s Own® brand saw profits he never anticipated.

Until recently, I wasn't sure where the George Foreman Grill came from, but I was pretty sure it wasn't actually invented by the boxer. Excellent gift, though. In those same days of post-holiday indoor grilling, I also enjoyed and benefited from The Movie Book, which, though out of date (as one Amazon.com reviewer points out), did introduce me to or remind me of a number of significant persons in the film industry I knew little of, such as Ken Loach, Milos Forman, Terrence Malick, and Werner Herzog, to name a few.

However, the book's writers include at least one misleading clause in their Paul Newman entry: "he has lent his name to a flourishing salad-dressing business."

"Salad-dressing business"? This was published in 1999, and they're unaware of the sauce, the popcorn, and the rest?

But more egregiously: "lent his name"?

"Lent his name" is what Frank Sinatra evidently did with a line of spaghetti sauces, which Newman in his book recounts with pride watching go out of business. Evidently, Sinatra knew how to make sauce in a kitchen but took no interest in how it would be mass-produced or sold. Except that, apparently, while Newman says he got into selling sauce because he was dissatisfied with what was available to him in jars previously, Sinatra said the reason he went into the spaghetti sauce business was an affection for seeing his name "on all those bottles in the supermarket."

"Lent his name" is what George Foreman did with a line of indoor grills, which were invented by Michael Boehm, a salaried employee for the grill's original manufacturer who later asked the boxer to endorse the product.

Paul Newman, on the other hand, came up with the recipe and chose the ingredients for the salad dressing, the pasta sauces, and his other products, found a bottler, played a role in figuring out how to mass-produce these foods, and oversees the course of the business. As well he should. He owns it. It says right on the back of this jar of Italian Sausage and Peppers sauce, at the beginning of the sentence about donating all the post-tax profits and royalties to charity, "Paul Newman, as sole owner of Newman's Own®...." (Kind of sounds silly saying it—"Newman, sole owner of Newman's Own."

"Lent his name....."

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some leftover rotini with Tomato & Basil Bombolina to finish. And a copy of Butch Cassidy to hunt down.

Is The New Yorker published by Piranha Press?

2005-12-08T00:24:00.000-05:00

It's weird—if you Google "beautiful stories for ugly children," you don't get the site www.beautifulstoriesforuglychildren.com until the third page. You do get this blog on the first page of results, though, with or without using quotation marks around the phrase. Which means I continue to get a decent flow of people seeing my posts after Googling those words. And maybe even one or two of them has read or will read something else I've written here, too. Who knows? I can only win.

Anyway, looking at those Google results, I found that a few listings beneath my site was this New Yorker story. It's pretty funny, but in a really sick way. It's a bit of short fiction by Paul Rudnick inspired by this New York Times article, which reports on a study that asserts that "parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones."

Stuart Buck debunked the study, which failed to account for socioeconomic status, here. That was actually on the same day the New Yorker piece was posted on the web.

The premise of Rudnick's story? "I am the mother of an ugly child. She’s not deformed or handicapped or odd; she’s unattractive." The narrator goes on to elaborates on this point to absurd effect. A sample: "As she grew older, I referred to her as our new cocker spaniel, although no one really believed this, because, of course, cocker spaniels are adorable."

Paul Rudnick's treading a little close to Dave Louapre's territory with his beautiful stories about ugly children.

Of Margins and Timeliness

2005-12-07T23:05:00.000-05:00

I somehow just noticed: that is a whole lot of white space on either side of the actual content, isn't it? Do I really need that much? Do people reading this? It seems like a bit much.

Also, I wanted to make a make a little clarification up in the title box that seemed like a clever and pithy comment about how slow I am to get around to doing stuff, relevantly writing and posting here. Provoked by John's waiting for the sure-to-disappoint Paul Newman post, I put into the blog description, "Timely I'm not."

However, it too much brings to mind the corny joke I used to make when driving past this business called the Timely Finance Company—"Look, it's my cousin Tim's finance company!" I read the top of the page here a minute ago and couldn't help finishing it, "Just so we're clear...Timely I'm not; Steveely I am." Wocka Wocka! ....And here comes Kermit to introduce the next act...

Six Degrees of Laziness

2005-12-01T20:41:00.000-05:00

Often when I finish watching an old movie on VHS or DVD, I want to look on IMDB for who the actors are that I can't name and what else they've been in. Between sitting down at the computer, though, and actually looking for that info, I often spend a few minutes looking at blogs and whatnot. Stuff that doesn't require any typing.

Somehow, I often find—while leaning forward on my desk, chin on my left hand, left elbow on my desk, and the right hand occupied simply with a little mouse movement and clicking—it seems easier, and certainly more interesting, to just follow chains of collaboration to find the film in question. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

For what it's worth, Wikipedia, after attributing the name of the game to a pun drawing on the near-rhyme with Six Degrees of Separation, has this to say about use of the name when Kevin Bacon isn't actually part of the chain:

The game has expanded to become more about linking two film actors than just one actor to Kevin Bacon. The name is still retained, however, because it has been shown that Bacon is a common link member in a chain.

Meanwhile, Patrick Reynolds at the Oracle of Bacon points out that Kevin Bacon is by no means the most common link member in such chains. A Bacon Number is the number of steps it takes to link some other actor to Kevin Bacon. Bacon himself has a zero. Anyone who was in a film with him has a Bacon Number of 1. Reynolds, a computer scientist at Duke University, calculated the Bacon Number of every single damn person in the Internet Movie Database and then came up with their equivalent number (Connery Number, Turturro Number, etc.) for each other. All 800,000 of them. Sheesh. And then he used that data to determine who's the most linkable person in the IMDB. (Most linkable, not most likable. He's useless to us there.) The Center of the Hollywood Universe, as he calls it.

Turns out Kevin Bacon isn't even in the top 1000. So despite Wikipedia's claim, I'm gonna have to say there's a thousand reasons that the name's just retained because the rhyme makes it fun.

If over a thousand actors have average Themselves Numbers under 3, just think how many have average numbers within 6. In light of that, it makes the game rather more interesting to use actors from different eras.

Back in the spring, I found myself connecting Tom Green to Humphrey Bogart. And the next day Haley Joel Osment to Fatty Arbuckle.

Anyway, last night when I wanted to know who the female lead was in the old Jeff Bridges movie I watched the other night and where I saw her before, I clicked from a bookmark onto the IMDB homepage and saw it was Woody Allen's birthday. Woody Allen was in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion with Helen Hunt, who was in Twister with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, of course, was in The Big Lebowski with Jeff Bridges.

Forget just six degrees. If you include the explanation of all this, it has an absurdly high Laziness Number, compared to just typing into the search box "Tron."

The female lead, by the way, was Cindy Morgan and where I saw her before was nowhere.

Against Lewis's Oppostion and Gopnik's

2005-12-01T09:38:00.000-05:00

Brendan Loy says what I wanted to, but better.

Update: Shortly after posting the above link to Brendan Loy's comments a couple days ago, I read this post from Mister Snitch. One of the things he talks about a number of times in it is adding value by providing some unique analysis of or lens on the content linked, something I didn't do here and something I really ought to do. After all, why read this blog if I'm only linking to blogs you'd read without me here?

So in addition to echoing Loy's point about why today's technology renders Lewis's opposition obsolete, I want here to connect a related point John J. Miller makes in an NRO article and, after addressing the presentation of Aslan in a movie, consider the question of his being a lion in the first place.

First, if you haven't read the Loy piece, obviously I think you should. I'll excerpt here, though, the key parts wherein he conveys well the same reaction I had to C.S. Lewis's 1959 letter expressing absolute opposition to a live-action production of the Chronicles of Narnia when I first heard of it on Boing Boing.

"Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography," he wrote in 1959. "Cartoons...would be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan would be to me blasphemy."
...Lewis's distinction between cartoons and non-cartoons seems rather outdated in this age of CGI effects. Perhaps 10 or 20 years ago, and certainly 50 years ago, it was true that a movie Aslan would inevitably "turn into buffoonery or nightmare." But, in light of what is now possible with computer graphics, this seems an unfair statement today. Certainly, Aslan will not be "human, pantomime," nor will he be primarily an object of "photography" -- he'll basically be a very realistic-looking cartoon.

Precisely the case.

Further, Miller in his excellent NRO piece* on why it's essential to read "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" first and NOT "The Magician's Nephew" (which properly comes sixth in the series) notes "a wise expert is not the same thing as a final authority" and makes the point that, having given us the finished works, they are no longer Lewis's alone to interpret and, moreover, Lewis himself agreed with that: "An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else."

Now, there's certainly a difference between interpretation of a literary work—how we choose to read and understand it—and a creator's control over whether his book is turned into a movie. But the latter is a matter of copyright, which isn't at issue. The point is simply that if the author isn't necessarily the best judge of the meaning his own book in his own era, how much less suited is he to judge whether it ought to be made a movie more than 40 years after his death? This just underscores the points Loy makes above. Lewis was absolutely opposed to the movie that could have been made of Aslan's world in 1960. He had no way at all of expecting the kind of movie that would be made in 2005.

The movie aside, C.S. Lewis crafted a series of wonderful books, which are intelligently thought out, even if he did later wrongly prefer them read out of order. As to the content, as Miller says, "Lewis of course understood the meaning of Narnia." One person who disagrees, though, is The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik clearly thinks Lewis doesn't know what he's doing. He describes Aslan, the lion who is the manifestation of Christ in the world of Narnia, as "not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure." The article itself was linked at Tolle, Blogge, where R. Reeves summarized it as revealing "that the New Yorker knows little of the Incarnation, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, or Narnia" and which I found via Trawlerman's Song, where John notes that Gopnik gets it so wrong it's hard to believe it's in an established, well-regarded magazine.

Reeves quotes the following paragraph, in which Gopnik develops his Aslan-as-anti-Christian thesis:

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Wow, where to begin? Well, as simplistic as it may be, how about with Google searches for "Christ as lion" and "Christ as donkey"? The former gives us about 98 results. The latter gives us....zero. (Except now, it'll probably give you this post. So that's annoying.)

Let's take a look at some of the Biblical precedent for Christ as a lion in a minute, but let's first give a couple more chances to Adam Gopnik's contention that in addition to the lamb, "his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey." A phrase in quotes, as in the previous paragraph, is pretty narrow, so to be fair, after seeing a number of references to the animal in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance but none I could tell to be representative of Christ, I tried a couple more search strings in Google:

donkey+represent+Christ
donkey+symbol+Christ
donkey+symbolic+Christ

That first search only returned one result that seemed relevant; it also came up with the second and third search. The second search brings up, amusingly, someone else who's quoting Gopnik. That's pretty much it. That third search string will give you results including the following two. There's this jewelry site, which says,

The [d]onkey is an animal symbolic of humility, peace and Davidic royalty (a donkey was a princely mount before the horse came into common use - the royal mount used by King David and his sons was a mule/donkey - see II Samuel 13:29). A donkey that had never been ridden was also appropriate for sacred purposes.

Well, humility, peace, and Davidic royalty are each things that have to do with Jesus Christ, but that's not to say that the donkey is symbolic of Christ himself, certainly. A page that gets into more detail about the symoblism associated with donkeys in the Bible starts off, very promisingly for Mr. Gopnik,

The lowly donkey has been used to represent Christ who, like the symbolic donkey, was both meek and mild. The donkey carried the material burdens of the poor, while Christ humbled Himself, and took on a life of poverty, in order to carry the heavy burden of man's sins. The donkey represents many of the characteristics of the self-abasing Christ: patience, courage, gentleness, peace, and humility.

However, while the author of that page draws that parallel, she doesn't cite any Biblical verses for the donkey representing Christ himself. As the page progresses, she cites specifically many Biblical references to donkeys and offers reasonable interpretation of the symbolism for each, but none of those verses shows Christ Himself to be represented by a donkey.

Is Adam Gopnik even suggesting that this there's any Biblical basis for his donkey/Jesus symbolism or only drawing a parallel himself? It very much seems to be the former to me, but I invite him to e-mail me and clarify.

As for his assertion that a lion doesn't qualify as a symbol for Jesus Christ, there are some verses and ideas he might want to consider. The key verses are Genesis 49:9,

Judah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?

And a later passage that draws on it, Revelation 5:5-6,

And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof. And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.

I like the succinctness with which this page explains** that the point in switching metaphors for Christ in quick succession from Lion to Lamb is that the same God who, as our King, judges us is the God who sacrificed Himself to save us from that judgment:

Though these two symbols seem to be opposites, they are in fact (to mix a metaphor) two sides of the same coin. The actions of the Lamb on our behalf provide for us the only way that we can be unafraid of the actions of the Lion.

The principal authority explaining the symbolism of Jesus as a Lion, though, is no less than Jonathan Edwards, one of the most important theologians in the history of America. [See here after 12/21/05.] He lays it all out in his sermon, "The Excellency of Christ," which can be found here. Edwards calls Christ a "Lion in majesty and a Lamb in meekness." A great many parts of his sermon are relevant in establishing this, but I'll excerpt just two paragraphs here.

He is called a Lion. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah. He seems to be called the Lion of the tribe of Judah, in allusion to what Jacob said in his blessing of the tribe on his death-bed; who, when he came to bless Judah, compares him to a lion, Gen. 49:9. "Judah is a lion's whelp; from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?" And also to the standard of the camp of Judah in the wilderness on which was displayed a lion, according to the ancient tradition of the Jews. It is much on account of the valiant acts of David that the tribe of Judah, of which David was, is in Jacob's prophetical blessing compared to a lion; but more especially with an eye to Jesus Christ, who also was of that tribe, and was descended of David, and is in our text called "the Root of David"; and therefore Christ is here called "the Lion of the tribe of Judah."
The lion and the lamb, though very diverse kinds of creatures, yet have each their peculiar excellencies. The lion excels in strength, and in the majesty of his appearance and voice: the lamb excels in meekness and patience, besides the excellent nature of the creature as good for food, and yielding that which is fit for our clothing and being suitable to be offered in sacrifice to God. But we see that Christ is in the text compared to both, because the diverse excellencies of both wonderfully meet in him.

Really, if Adam Gopnik wants to argue seriously that the lion is an un-Christian symbol for Jesus, an anti-Christian figure, even, he may want to start citing some scripture and presenting a pretty startling theology, because it's, at the least, Jonathan Edwards he's contending with, and I, for one, am intrigued to know why he doesn't find himself in dispute with the Apostle John.

As Reeves says, it's not so much the ignorance that annoys, it's the arrogance in lecturing a classic author that he doesn't get the basic message of his own faith. You know, he could have just taken a glance at Wikipedia.

Aslan the lion is an entirely suitable Christ figure and there's every reason to hope that his appearance in the upcoming movie is such that it would please even C.S. Lewis himself. It opens December 9th.

* One minor error in Miller's piece is his reference to Douglas Gresham as Lewis's son-in-law, when in fact Gresham was his step-son. Gresham's still wrong about the book order, though, and Miller's right.

** Updated to add the missing link. (Heh. That'd be clever if this post were about evolution or something.)

Whoa

2005-11-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

Twenty monkeys with hats (and one squid)

Also brilliant: Becoming My Own Worst Enemy

* Updated too many times for such a short bit of simple linking.

And Two Dollars Short, Too.

2005-11-26T20:38:00.000-05:00

Today isn't Thursday, so this isn't so timely anymore, but I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm unstoppable.

We're at least still closer to Thanksgiving than to any other major holiday, so I want to take the (diminishing) opportunity to note a couple of related points.

First, a commendably inquisitive friend of mine recently demanded to know why we in the U.S. celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday, of all days of the week. Not some day during or adjacent to the actual weekend but Thursday, which, let's face it, is the only day of the week less obscure and mundane than Tuesday. She was already familiar with much of the holiday's history (recounted here) but wanted to know who picked Thursday, specifically, and why.

The best explanation I could come up with is on this page, which includes the following:

The Puritans introduced the regularity, calling for a religious-based feast of thanksgiving, using Thursday, because it coincided with a time in which worshipers would be at church {This would be similar to Wednesday night services, today in the US; moreover, in some Anglican countries, such as South Africa, Thursday is still “Church Night”}. Church in the morning and a feast in the late afternoon became a New England tradition. A National day of thanksgiving was proclaimed by General George Washington after the victory at Saratoga (NY); but, not until after the War between the States was a National Thanksgiving practice set in place.

My friend pointed out that Thursday worship didn't likely last into the days of Abraham Lincoln, who made Thanksgiving an annual national holiday. I agree and doubt that it even lasted into the nineteenth century to any significant degree. It was probably just the basis for Thursday as the day Thanksgiving was celebrated in the Puritan era, and an informal tradition of the holiday being celebrated on that day persisted after the actual church custom ended, making it the day already unofficially used when individual states started making it official in the 19th century and then likewise when Lincoln ultimately made it official nationally in 1863.

As to why my Thanksgiving post goes up on Saturday, there's a much simpler explanation: procrastination. That being acknowledged, there are a few things I'd like to give some thanks for here.

Certainly I've got a number of things to be thankful for in my personal life, but in the specific context of this blog, I do feel gratitude to a number of people for various reasons. I'm happy, of course, for the people who made Blogger and Blogspot free and easy, allowing me to publish on the web as I am. But as none of those people know who I am, it rather mutes my gratitude. Let's not dwell on them.

I'm thankful for each personal friend and to each blogger who raised questions or issues in my mind that drove me to learn something and to write something. Such people include but are by no means limited to Christian Scales, Eric Norris, Bill McCabe, John Owen, as well as the above-mentioned kindred spirit to Arthur Dent.

I'm thankful for each person who leaves a comment on any post I put up. (OK, except for La Bona, I guess.) I love getting feedback, and I love seeing that something I wrote meant enough to someone for them to add a comment. Lately, that's mostly been Laura, and I hope she'll keep it up, but she wasn't the first, and I trust that as I increase the content I provide here, she'll be outnumbered by others. To everyone who comments, thank you.

I'm thankful for everyone who's linked to me, directing others to this site. Those include, among others, Bill McCabe, Fr. Rob Johannsen, Andrea Harris, Bill Ardolino, John Owen, Lemuel Kolkava, and, recently, this woman. I'm always grateful for recognition and appreciation.

And finally, I'm thankful for anyone taking the time to read this stuff at all and especially for those who like it well enough to return and check back on what new I might have written. You few know who you are, even if I don't always.

Happy unThursday.

We Apologize for the Interruption in Service

2005-11-16T11:10:00.000-05:00

I have pieces I want to write about Che Guevara, Paul Newman, Jon Stewart and Thomas Jefferson, Campaign Finance "Reform," some of the wackier Supreme Court Justices, what seafood not to eat, the problems with the U.N., some lynchings in twentieth-century American history, a few bioethics issues, and an update to the Bill Finger post.

However, right now I need to hit the road to go see some people about some new employment and also visit my relatives for Thanksgiving, so it'll probably be the 26th or so before I get anything new up. Sorry. If you're looking for more that I've written and haven't read all the old stuff, I encourage you to scroll the archives. And if you're looking for a postcard from the trip, drop a note to the Gmail address letting me know.

Of Paper Clips and Barrels

2005-11-12T17:42:00.000-05:00

Via Samizdata, I discovered One Red Paperclip today and, from that, Message in a Barrel. Kyle MacDonald is my new hero.

A Divine Endorsement for that feature?

2005-11-12T14:28:00.000-05:00

Speaking of stumbling onto the occasional prize through that "Next Blog" feature, a few clicks after the aforementioned photoblog, I discovered a blog with a beautiful picture of and high praise for the Cathedral of......well, just go take a look. What are the odds?

Cool New Photoblog

2005-11-12T14:08:00.000-05:00

Often what you find clicking on the "Next Blog" button at the top of a blog on Blogspot tends to be of very limited appeal. Sometimes outright junk. Once in a while you find some good stuff, though. I struck gold a few minutes ago.

This is the J. Buck Photoblog, and it's loaded with good stuff. It appears to be brand new; we can only hope that the proprietor continues to pass on such terrific photos. Check out the November archives to see everything that's up there so far, or go to the main page to bookmark the site.

I think the comment moderation policy is strangely restrictive on a blog so unlikely to draw trolls (for stopping spam comments, I've found word verificatio n effective), but it's a small quibble relative to the high quality of content.

This better not last.

2005-11-11T08:35:00.000-05:00

Thursday evening: flu shot.
Friday morning: newfound muscle aches, fever, chills, and headaches.

For anyone else who shares my concern, this site offers reassurances:

The flu vaccine is very safe. The flu vaccine cannot give you the flu. The flu vaccine contains dead flu viruses that cannot cause infection.....Mild flu-like symptoms may occur in some people, especially those being vaccinated against flu for the first time. These symptoms are due to the body’s immune response that is building to protect against actual infection. These symptoms can include mild fever, headache and aching muscles starting within 6 to 12 hours but ending within 24 to 48 hours.

I sure hope they're right. I've got important stuff I need to do next week.

No on HR 4194

2005-11-10T14:02:00.000-05:00

I'll be writing more on this general topic later (hopefully), but, for now, let me just note that I agree with both Krempasky and Kos on this one. (via Instapundit)

Call your congressman.

1002 Details

2005-11-10T00:48:00.000-05:00

You may be familiar with the controversy about plans to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It was brought to mind today by this post on Boing Bong, which links to the Sierra Club's ANWR maps utilizing Google Earth.

Required reading for a useful consideration of the ANWR question is Jonah Goldberg's 2001 cover article for National Review. It includes a lot of useful perspective that especially contrasts with the message presented in the Boing Boing post, which starts with this hyperbolic—and misleading—declaration:

It's final innings for the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska as Congress gets ready to fill it with oil wells.

Fill ANWR with wells? Really? Goldberg points out that

ANWR is 19.6 million acres, about the size of South Carolina....On the very northern cusp of ANWR is what is commonly called the coastal plain, a tract of flat tundra largely indistinguishable from other spots along the coast and throughout the region. This comprises about 8 percent of the refuge-but an even smaller fraction of its pretty scenery. Some of this area is already off-limits to oil exploration, permanently. Nonetheless, the U.S. Geological Survey — seconded by industry experts-believes there could be untold billions of barrels of oil in the swath still legally available.

This 8 percent is known as the "1002 Area." Are even the 1.6 million aces of that going to be filled with oil wells? Goldberg again:

The oil industry says it would need to use only 2,000 acres-an area no bigger than Dulles Airport, outside D.C.-to get that oil. This footprint would be 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned by Ted Turner, who helps bankroll efforts to keep ANWR off-limits.

So rather than filling ANWR with oil wells, the oil-drilling activity would actually take place in one percent of it. Well, what impact would it have there? Goldberg goes on to note elsewhere that

The oil industry has made huge strides in oil exploration in the last few decades. The oil under the coastal plain could literally be extracted during the dead of winter — when it's night for 58 straight days and no caribou would be dumb enough to come within 500 miles of the Arctic Ocean — and all that would be left come spring would be a couple of Portosan-sized boxes.

[Portosan link mine. Jonah Goldberg is not, to my knowledge, endorsing the Portosan company. Nor, for that matter, am I, really. I'm just trying to clear it up for anyone who, like I, didn't recognize the word. But we're getting off-topic here.]

He also explains in those articles that drilling in the specified area won't be despoiling ANWR's natural beauty because while ANWR is replete with beauty, the coastal plain slated for drilling is really not. He went there to confirm, and he describes it in some detail. He also clarifies that while many allege the plans threaten the caribou in that area, the threat is mitigated not only by the surprisingly low-impact procedures alluded to above but also by the experience at Alaska's Prudhoe Bay,

specifically, the areas around the oil installations and pipelines, where the Central Arctic caribou herd has thrived in the shadow of extensive oil extraction. Since drilling started here, the herd has increased fivefold.

Seriously, read the whole article. And other writings of his on this topic can be found here, here, and here.

Naming Names

2005-11-09T14:31:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine is expecting her third child and so, along with her husband and older children, is working through the name selection process. While I most strongly suggest giving any son the first and middle names Vaclav Havel, I offer here for her further consideration some names recklessly drawn from The Sagas of Icelanders:

First some options for the name of a new baby girl:

Sigrid
Hrafnhild
Thordis Stick
Asgerd
Thorunn
Ingunn
Moeid
Asny
Thorlaug
Vigdis
Melkorka

Then an unfairly disproportionate slate of appellations suitable for a new son:

Thorolf
Harek
Kveldulf
Thorir Long-chin
Ketil Haeng
Olvir Hump
Onund Sjoni (Keen-sighted)
Olaf
Athelstan
Thorgils Boomer
Erik Blood-axe
Skallagrim
Hallvard
Thorgeir
Skuli
Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
Hrafn the Poet
Hoskuld
Hrolf
Hromund the Lame
Thorbjorn Hunchback
Thord Hobbler
Finn the Squinter
Eyvind the Plagarist

Any of these would be choices sure to fill the older children with enthusiasm. If anyone else reading this has any other unexpected suggestions for her—be they as straightforward as Petunia, Mortimer, or Alphonse or peculiar, meaningful, and drawn from an interesting source—I'm sure she'd appreciate the ideas, so feel free to leave them in the comments.

Patterico, Miers, and What Comes Next

2005-10-29T20:25:00.000-04:00

Patterico noted today that the Washington Post's reported list of likely nominees for the once-again-open Supreme Court seat is full of strongly qualified candidates, which stands to make the widespread opposition to the nomination of Harriet Miers all the more worthwhile. He notes also that the "current environment" described in the Post article as requiring such qualifications was created through this succesful Miers-opposition and acknowledges his own pride in contributing to said environment.

Which makes now a convenient occasion for me to acknowledge the important work he did on that front. In my one earlier post on Harriet Miers, I somehow failed to mention him, but Patterico was one of the most prolific single bloggers I read on the subject. His insights were important in general throughout the process and of benefit to me specifically. I've read his blog on occasion for a while, but it's one of priority for me by now. I look forward to what unfolds with the next SCOTUS nomination and to what he contributes to the discussion about it.

Defining and Undefining Emo

2005-10-28T11:54:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago now, when I had barely heard the term "emo" at all, I mentioned to some friends that among the CDs I had just bought were Ben Lee and Sun Kil Moon. I may have also, thinking nothing of it, mentioned having bought a Modest Mouse disc, which could possibly have contributed to the resulting confusion. For, in reference, I thought, to the Ben Lee & Sun Kil Moon purchases, my friend Justin responded, "Boy, you really do like that emo stuff, huh?"

So for the next couple of years, I thought emo was a style exemplified by such artists as Lee and Mark Kozelek, so I was somewhat confused during a discussion at work about what the term really meant. One co-worker said that he had the understanding it referred to any sort of music that's very emotive--including such things, I believe he mentioned at various points, as blues and bluegrass and even the rapper Lil Jon.* While I knew that was wrong, I didn't know what the right answer actually was. Another guy said that emo is basically just watered-down new wave, which was basically just watered-down punk (though I'm confident he used phrasing more profane than "watered-down"). The punk angle seemed odd, since I had Ben Lee and Sun Kil Moon in mind.

In an effort to clear this up, I checked both allmusic.com and my copy of The Rock Snob's Dictionary. First, allmusic.com doesn't associate Ben Lee or Sun Kil Moon with emo (nor did any useful result I could find from some Google searches). Instead, it turns out that co-worker number two is on the right track. Allmusic.com explains emo in the following ways: It says that it's "originally an outgrowth of hardcore punk" and that it's "full of complex guitar work, unorthodox song structures, arty noise, and extreme dynamic shifts." Apparently, while some emo is close to punk-pop, it's a bit more intricate.

Emo lyrics are deeply personal, usually either free-associative poetry or intimate confessionals. Though it's far less macho, emo is a direct descendant of hardcore's preoccupations with authenticity and anti-commercialism; it grew out of the conviction that commercially oriented music was too artificial and calculated to express any genuine emotion.

It seems that "emo ideal is authentic, deeply felt emotion that defies rational analysis" and at its best, it has a "a sweeping power that manages to be visceral, challenging, and intimate all at once." The term "emo" was intially used to describe "hardcore bands who favored expressive vocals over the typical barking rants" and the first true emo band was some outfit I've never heard of, followed by a bunch of others I've never heard of. The most notable bands in the emo genre seem to be Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, Jimmy Eat World, Weezer, and Modest Mouse. There's more details there, though, even after the mention that "some vocalists literally wept onstage during song climaxes, earning derision from hardcore purists" and the references to "dramatic melodies and introspective mysticism" and "wry, geeky introspection and catchy punk-pop." Go take a look if you're interested.

The Rock Snob's Dictionary defines it this way (with a conclusion I particularly like):

Controversial term for a strain of punk-steeped yet thoughtful rock popular among depressive teens and twenty-somethings. Arising out of a Washington, D.C., scene of the mid-eighties in which hardcore bands got tired of playing noise and went slightly sensitive and mid-tempo, emo matured into a codified national movement in the late nineties with such bands as Jimmy Eat World and Promise Ring, which played pained hard rock overlaid with boyish vocals characterized by odd, flatulent vowel pronunciations. By the turn of the century, emo had broadened in scope to accommodate the madlin Dashboard Confessional, the somewhat more jaundiced Cursive and Yellowcard, and the countryish Bright Eyes. Aptly, given the hypersensitivity of the genere's practitioners, most emo artists recoil at being called "emo," claim that their music is unique and uncategorizable, and insist that you don't even know what the term means anyway.

(*Update: I've been advised that the Lil Jon comment, which he made later than the others, was, in fact, a joke. I have more than my fair share of humor-impaired moments.)

Will Miers Represent?

2005-10-10T11:29:00.000-04:00

I agree with those who've made the argument that President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is outright cronyism. See, for example, this Randy Barnett piece at The Volokh Conspiracy and this one in the Wall Street Journal. Important newspaper columns detailing the wrongness of this nomination have been written by George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer. A concise summary of objection was offered by Gregory Djerejian and a call to opposition presented by David Frum and also by Stephen Bainbridge. The Corner, The Volokh Conspiracy, Bench Memos, and The Right Coast are all blogs which have also been rich in relevant arguments against the nomination. Beldar responds to many of the aforementioned and makes the best sustained argument in favor of Miers that I've seen, but I remain quite unpersuaded.

On Saturday, there was an interesting New York Times article, which includes a revealing remark with which I think the Bush administration severely undermines one of its central contentions. Dan Coats is the former Republican Senator who the Times tells us the White House has asked to help Miers get through the Senate confirmation. Orin Kerr points out this remark from Coats:

If great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole.

Kerr, like Arlen Specter, derides Coats for evoking the late GOP Senator Roman Hruska, who praised mediocrity in a nominee thusly:

Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?

The Hruska mediocrity echoes* notwithstanding, I, like an insightful and more concise anonymous commenter on Kerr's post, find very peculiar and perhaps more disturbing, the multiple references from the White House's chosen SCOTUS confirmation guide to the nominees role as a representative. It's especially jarring right after reading Krauthammer:

Moreover, the Supreme Court is an elite institution. It is not one of the "popular" branches of government.
To serve in Congress, or even as president, there is no requirement for scholarship and brilliance. For good reason. It is not needed. It can even be a hindrance, as we learned from our experience with Woodrow Wilson, the most intellectually accomplished president of the 20th century and also the worst.

But constitutional jurisprudence is different. It is, by definition, an exercise of intellect steeped in scholarship. Otherwise it is nothing but raw politics. And is it not the conservative complaint that liberals have abused the courts by having them exercise raw super-legislative power...?

Legislators ought to represent their constituents. The President ought to represent the American people. The Supreme Court is outside of that consideration. If someone is to represent me, I want the opportunity to replace him or here once it's apparent they no longer do. You don't give someone a lifetime appointment who's meant as someone else's representative. You give someone a lifetime appointment you trust to exercise wisdom and judgment irrespective of what you would want done on any given issue.

We select people to represent us in order to pass and execute legislation. Considering that, Coats' remarks Saturday totally undercut President Bush's promise Friday that Miers "will not legislate from the bench."

* I may have to use "The Hruska Mediocrity Echoes" as the name for some future post-Blogspot blog.

Your T-shirt probably isn't as clever as you think.

2005-10-10T08:18:00.000-04:00

I read the following on the back of a T-shirt a preadolescent girl was wearing at the Greek Festival on Friday night:

I survived Family Fun Day at Patriots Park.

I understand the thinking behind a souvenir T-shirt for a roller coaster, for instance, that says something like "I survived the Photon Light Speed Moebius Plowhorse Express" or whatever, but...Family Fun Day? The only sense in which that T-shirt could be clever is one far too morbid for a young girl, which is the implication that significant numbers failed to survive Family Fun Day:

I survived Family Fun Day, unlike some unfortunate people I could mention but won't...

Oh, sure, rub it in.

Is this really the message they're going for?

My frequently worn T-shirts are pretty straightforward:

Antone's, Austin's Home of the Blues (in green)

Firefox

One that simply says, in block letters on blue background, "I want the full story." (From Spamshirt.)

The only one that really tends to engender confusion, which bears a simplified picture of a camper and the name of this band.

Go See MirrorMask.

2005-10-04T00:44:00.000-04:00

MirrorMask was worth the 4-hour round-trip drive to Atlanta to see it on its opening night last Friday, and it'll be worth another 4-hour drive this Wednesday to see it again. If you haven't heard of it, that's because Sony Pictures has shamefully underpromoted and underdistributed it. Of course, they deserve great credit for initiating this in the first place.

What happened was this. They approached the Jim Henson Company and gave them a mere 4 million dollars to make a movie to follow in the tradition of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The Jim Henson Company then turned to the Everything Award-winning author Neil Gaiman and his longtime collaborator, artist Dave McKean, who jointly came up with a story for which Gaiman wrote a script that McKean then turned into a film of unique and astonishing genius.

If you've ever read anything Gaiman wrote or seen anything McKean created, you should automatically see the appeal. If you haven't yet or are somehow still unenthused anyway, click here to go to an unofficial Dave McKean site that includes a whole lot of still photos from the film and a good number of video clips, including, of course, the trailer. Actually, go there even if you don't need persuading. It's great. Probably the second-most important link in a link-heavy post.

Obviously, I loved it, but I'm honest enough to tell you that not everyone did. Roger Ebert, for example, wasn't too impressed at all. And this guy absolutely hated it. A lot of critics quite like it, though. Some choice quotes:

"Avant-garde panache...remarkable cinema fantasy...this dazzling reverie...has something to astonish everyone." --Entertainment Weekly (A-)

"A gloriously loony yarn and astounding work of art." --Übercine

A longer one:

If I offered the opinion that MirrorMask is an amalgamation of Alice in Wonderland, The NeverEnding Story, The Wizard of Oz, Labyrinth, M.C. Escher & Tim Burton, you'd probably be pretty intrigued...if not all that convinced of the film's unique vision and startling presentation. But despite clear "inspiration" from these and numerous other sources, MirrorMask still stands as a powerfully original composition. It's playful, dark and mysterious. It's got a few simple little morals, it's amazingly gorgeous to look at, and it's effortlessly enthralling for 90-some straight minutes. Much of the movie feels comfortably familiar...yet it's certainly unlike anything you've ever seen before.
.................................
Somewhat beholden to some of the finest fantasy stories ever conceived, yet still more than fresh and unique enough to stand on its own, "MirrorMask" is one of the most thrillingly addictive adventures I've had in years. Hats off to superlative artists Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean for constructing something this endearingly odd and utterly enjoyable. Movies like this give me renewed hope for movies in general, and for that I'm very appreciative indeed.

--EFilmCritic.com

And perhaps my favorite, from the very enthusiastic reveiw in the East Bay Express:

"When Tim Burton manages to see this movie, he'll realize he just got owned."

Also of interest might be this L.A. Times article and these interviews of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean in the Onion A.V. Club and this one of both on Nerve.com.

And because it's only showing in select cities, this list of theaters is the most important link here.

Find a theater in a city you can get to, plot out a course on MapQuest if necessary, check showtimes on Moviefone or Fandango, and go see this movie. You're not required to thank me afterward, but I won't be surprised if you do.

Procrastination and Adam Baldwin

2005-09-29T13:49:00.000-04:00

Don't infer from the title that Adam Baldwin procrastinates. What do I know about his behavior? What I just learned was about his lineage, and I need to make two points.

1. The main reason I haven't posted anything in several weeks is that I had resolved that the next topic I was going to address was where blame should appropriately be placed for deficiencies in the relief efforts in response to Hurricane Katrina. I know it's a topic that's been pretty well covered by many, and I don't have anything actually new to add at this late date, but I do want to clarify some points for folks like a friend of mine who seemed to be, like many others on the left, blaming only Bush, seeing Ray Nagin as a victim, and overlooking Kathleen Blanco. On the one hand, I wanted to make dealing with this question a priority before moving on to other subjects and on the other hand, it's a big enough undertaking that I've avoided it out of laziness, like I did with papers for college classes (getting extensions on due dates and then missing those extended deadlines). I still mean to do that post but am going to allow myself to post other stuff in the meantime.

2. I'm a big fan of the Joss Whedon series Firefly and am very much looking forward to seeing Serenity, the movie from it, in the theater tomorrow. Watching through the whole series on DVD, I consistently enjoyed the performance by Adam Baldwin as Jayne Cobb quite a lot. It felt wrong, though. It felt like a compromise of principle to be a fan of one of the Baldwin brothers. It seemed unfortunate. I'd watch it and think, "he's really funny and cool; it's too bad he's...." But it turns out he's not, I was delighted to discover today. No relation. See this page, including at the bottom, where it says "Other Baldwins," and this Fametracker profile. ("It's Alec, Stephen, Billy, Daniel, Tito, Donnie, Ryan, "Ace," Stretchy, and Kip. No Adam.")

Man, Firefly/Serenity gets cooler all the time--now a taint has been removed from the cast.

A little less truth in the music, please.

2005-09-02T06:20:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me that the first song I ever loved by one of my favorite bands, The Tragically Hip, off their early album Up To Here, has a title that was once starkly poetic and a little darkly whimsical but is now only creepy, sad, and depressing--"New Orleans is Sinking."

I then discovered when I searched my music library something much sadder.

Besides that song and the instrumental by R.E.M., the other song I have with the city's name in its title is one I first heard at Preservation Hall this spring and received on a CD of Bob French's Original Tuxedo Jazz Band when I visited Donna's on Rampart a few nights later: "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?" I do now. I do now.

Surreal Defamation Humor

2005-09-01T14:50:00.000-04:00

Via Radley Balko at The Agitator, it's Libelous Claims About Large Corporations. Laugh-out-loud hilarity.

Exceptions

2005-08-25T06:25:00.000-04:00

Driving back from Pennsylvania a couple weeks ago, I saw a bumper sticker (on a car bearing another sticker, which identified its owner as a "tree-hugging dirt-worshipper") that exclaimed "God bless the whole world--No exceptions."

No exceptions? That sounds awfully benevolent, and I understand not wanting to limit the God-given good fortune to just one country, as in "God bless America," but no exceptions at all? That's just senseless.

Consider the meaning of "bless" in such an expression as "God bless America." From the various definitions Merriam-Webster offers, the most literally applicable might seem to be "to invoke divine care for." But, of course, that works in an example such as they give--"Bless your heart"--but not so much if it's actually God himself who is doing the blessing. Then the better definition for this context is "to confer prosperity or happiness upon."

There are persons whose prosperity and happiness is mutually exclusive with the prosperity and happiness of many other persons, if those terms are understood to entail success in reaching existing goals.

It seems pretty much an Either/Or proposition to me in many cases. Consider just a few:

Either Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq or anyone and everyone in Iraq who's an American, Christian, Kurd, fan of democracy, Shi'ite, or even Sunni with insufficient zeal for jihad against anyone or anything Al Qaeda says threatens the purity of Islam. (Detailed explanation and extensive sourcing feasible upon request if this dichotomy seems unlikely; in the meantime consider this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.)

Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir or the people of Darfur

Howard Dean or the GOP

John Bolton or Kofi Annan

NARAL or the National Right to Life Committee

Saparmurat Niyazov or just about anyone living in Turkmenistan under his brutal and quite insane rule. (See also this Obsidian Wings post or almost any of the posts on Registan about him.)

Pirates or ninjas.

No exceptions. Right. People and their bumper stickers.

Neil Gaiman Book Signings

2005-08-25T06:23:00.000-04:00

Neil Gaiman is going to be in Charlotte, NC on September 21 to read a bit of, answer questions about, and sign copies of his new novel Anansi Boys, which will have been released for sale on the previous day.

This is terrific. Atlanta would be closer, but Charlotte is still pretty close, and I've been encouraged to see the city anyway. The 21st is a Wednesday, which, with my work schedule, is actually a pretty good day to take off work.

The tour schedule is here.

The event details are here.

And--not that I don't appreciate the trust that doesn't demand evidence; I do, even if I don't understand it--because I like sources, I like to give sources. Here's the pronunciation of his name.

Unfortunate Rhetoric

2005-08-11T23:16:00.000-04:00

I don't know where I stand on all the drug war questions, but I do agree with Bill from INDC that Jeff Harrell's handling of them does him little credit. I'm disappointed.

I just mention this because I've endorsed Jeff's work in the past, and I want to note that I do not endorse suggesting, for instance, that anyone "deserve[s]...a harsh beating at the hands of cold-blooded mob." It ought to be possible to passionately disagree with John Tierney's column without wishing violent harm to him.

I wish I had discovered this earlier.

2005-08-11T22:38:00.000-04:00

Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry

Good reading.

via Publius

You're all pretty much the same person, too.

2005-08-09T23:54:00.000-04:00

Random lame confession: I've long tended to blur W.C. Fields and H.L. Mencken together in my mind. (See here and here for quotations from each.)

Misanthropic, initial-using, and dead before my time--why shouldn't that describe just one guy as far as my memory is concerned?

Planet Deletion and Infinite Disappointment

2005-08-09T23:33:00.000-04:00

Michael Jennings at Samizdata makes a strangely persuasive case for the idea that there are no planets. I found it extremely informative about several matters astronomical.

Also from Samizdata, I discovered This Blog will be Deleted by Tomorrow, where I learned from Lemuel of the Agoraphilia economic analysis of the Islamic martyr's famous prospect of 72 virgins in the afterlife. It goes on long enough to get too specialized for me to fully grasp in detail all of the points he makes, but it starts out very entertainingly with this:

If you were a Muslim, and you died and went to the Muslim heaven, how would you space out your enjoyment of the 72 virgins? Suppose that you actually find virginity desirable, and suppose that the virgins’ maidenheads are not magically restored periodically. If the afterlife has infinite duration, then no matter how long you wait to deflower your 72nd virgin, you’ll still be looking at an infinitely long virgin-less future thereafter.

Cavalier

2005-08-09T19:23:00.000-04:00

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

Deep Thoughts
by Jack Handey
Saturday Night Live
October 12, 1991

Salt vs. Sodium

2005-08-09T17:59:00.000-04:00

Christian Scales noted to me many months back that he heard a doctor or nutritionist saying, "the problem is not salt but sodium."

"What's he talking about?" He asked me. "Isn't it the same thing?"

I have as little scientific knowledge as any ignoramus you're likely to find, so it's a difficult question to answer. I suggested that salt, being sodium chloride, isn't just sodium, so it would seem that that's somehow the point. Though why that makes a difference nutritionally I wasn't able to guess.

Some explanation comes from this 2004 MSNBC article from Phil Lempert, Today show food editor, in which he says,

The right amount of salt intake — and the correct balance between its two main ingredients, sodium and chloride — is essential to our health. According the Institutes of Medicine, healthy 19- to 50-year-old adults should consume 1,500 milligrams of sodium and 2,300 milligrams of chloride each day — or a total of 3,800 milligrams of salt — to replace the amount lost daily on average through sweat and other excretive processes.

This would seem to imply that different varieties of salt have differing proportions of sodium to chloride. Disappointingly, Lempert doesn't offer examples of such variations, nor have I so far been able to find instances searching in Google.

Lempert does helpfully explain the difference between refined and unrefined salts:

Unrefined sea salt is 98 percent sodium chloride, with the other two percent consisting of up to 80 essential and accessory minerals.

Refined salt is higher in sodium chloride (99.9%). It is also likely to contain aluminum silicate to stabilize and prevent caking. Bleaching agents may be use to both table or sea salts.

That's helpful in understanding that if most of the salt we consume is refined, we're missing out on the 80 accessory minerals that Lempert describes as essential. However, this description of different percentages of sodium chloride does nothing to clarify his earlier reference to correct or incorrect balances between sodium and chloride. I've emailed him about that reference, asking him to elaborate.

This risk assessment of sodium chloride from a British "Expert Group on Vitamins and Minerals" discusses the functions and behaviors of sodium and chloride separately but also notes, "no relevant data are available relating to the toxicity of the chloride ion, and therefore the EVM decided to consider sodium chloride as a salt, rather than the separate elements."

This suggests to me that the statement from the expert Christian heard wasn't implying that the problems of sodium aren't consequently problems of salt but probably was emphasizing that the dangers are from sodium specifically, rather than chloride or any accessory minerals: The health effects of sodium chloride are strictly the health effects of sodium.

Moreover, it may also be pointing toward what Lempert notes in his article--"Processed foods can be loaded with...other forms of sodium [besides salt] such as sodium benzoate, sodium citrate, sodium nitrite or monosodium glutamate." So the most important point here is that we need to watch out for sodium in whatever form it reaches us.

On the matter of the troublesome processed foods, Lempert cites as examples canned soups, frozen dinners, sauces and condiments, packaged convenience foods, and fast foods. That describes most of my diet. He says to "look on the label for the 'percent daily value for sodium' and try to choose foods that are under 5 percent." I just looked at the labels of what's on the shelves in my kitchen and found most of it is at least 35%. And that's per serving. A can of soup has two servings in it, they say, and I always eat the whole can's worth.

As Lempert notes, "Medical studies have linked high consumption of salt"--let's presume that implies sodium generally--"with increased blood pressure or hypertension, which can lead to heart attack or stroke." So I have that to look forward to.

Damn Scales and the newfound clarity of his expert's remark, bringing into focus my eventual doom.

Amnesia with Style!

2005-08-08T21:46:00.000-04:00

This guy has to be the coolest amnesia case this century. That sounds heartless in a way, and I guess really is kind of cold. People with amnesia are probably suffering. While I don't really know anything about it, I imagine that we should wish for the full recovery of anyone struck by it. Likewise, anyone who has been driven to abandon speaking has probably suffered some kind of awful trauma.

But still: not only does the "mysterious mute pianist," who's had officials at a Kent (UK) hospital searching fruitlessly for the past four months for any clues to his origin or identity, communicate only by masterfully playing classical piano, this 30ish blond man first showed up April 7 on a beach on the south coast of England "soaking wet but fully dressed in a black suit and tie."

Serious style points. Serious cool factor.

(via the guestblogging Ann Althouse at Instapundit)

Update: Wikipedia has a lot of details of the story so far, pulling together a variety of sources.

Windy City, Here I Come!

2005-07-26T02:02:00.000-04:00

I'm up far too late, considering I meant to leave early in the morning for parts northward. Whatever time I do manage to get on the road, though, I don't expect I'll be posting much of anything else on here for the next couple of weeks.

Be sure to check back after 10 August for further writing on a persistently unfocused and eclectic range of topics. In the meantime, if you'd like to read more I've written, consider perusing, if you haven't yet, these posts on Iceland (and Bobby Fischer), Anne Bancroft's obituary, the number of civilian deaths in Iraq, a Moebius Strip of fictional and real universes, why I gave my blog this title, sentence-ending prepostions, etymology, carelessness, and gullibility, Charles Schulz on Garry Trudeau, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, Bill Finger and Batman's beginning, the crazy dialogue in The Manchurian Candidate, the fun of Fables, Shrimp vs. Prawns, Plates vs. Scales, and my overacheiving doppelgangers. Plus, obviously, the one from an hour ago.

If it's a postcard from the trip you're looking for, you'd better drop me your postal address in a message to the Gmail address to the right.

Web Site from Another Universe

2005-07-26T01:27:00.000-04:00

It's what Cliff Pickover at Reality Carnival calls a "mysterious web site enthrall[ing] visitors from around the world."

It actually grows somewhat less mysterious as you explore it further, but it's definitely weird and cool and, frankly, enthralling. I like it.

Diane Roberts, John Ellis, and Election Night 2000

2005-07-26T01:24:00.000-04:00

I checked out of the library the book Dream State by Diane Roberts, intrigued by its colorful topic, which is described in the subtitle as "eight generations of swamp lawyers, conquistadors, Confederate daughters, Banana Republicans, and other Florida wildlife." The front inside of the dust cover description begins this way: "Part family memoir, part political commentary, part apologia, Dream State is all Floridian, telling the grand and sometimes crazy story of the twenty-seventh state through the eyes of one of its native daughters." It mentions a few of the zany and historically meaningful anecodtes involving Roberts' relatives and says "with a storyteller's talent for setting great scenes," she "lays out the sweeping history of eight generations of" her family and "Forrest Gumps them into situations with more historically familiar names."

Roberts is not just a journalist and an NPR commentator, but one whose family is tightly woven into the Democratic Party throughout Florida history and even now. She says they were "pretty much all" Democrats until 1976 when one wing of the family, noting that Jimmy Carter wasn't the racist they wanted, voted for George Wallace and "later turned to Ronald Reagan." (p.11). So it's not surprising that when, as the jacket blurb tells us, the book "start[s] in the recent past with the botched presidential election of 2000," she has an approach that's biased against the Republicans in the matter.

Her bias clouds her judgment of that episode. On pages 15 and 16, she recounts election night this way:

At 7:52 PM on November 7, John Ellis of the Fox Network Decision 2000 team called Florida for Al Gore. ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN had already projected a win for Gore. At 7:58 PM, John Ellis phoned his first cousin John Ellis Bush, better known as Jeb, to say he was awfully sorry, old man, but Junior was about to crash and burn in Florida. Shortly before 2:15 AM on November 8, John Ellis dialed the governor's mansion in Austin, Texas. Good news: Republican numbers have shot up. At 2:17 AM, John Ellis declared Florida a win for Cousin George W. The other channels followed like sheep.

George W. thinks he won. The Bush logic goes like this: 1. Jeb said he would win Florida; 2. Cousin John Ellis said he did win Florida; 3. On national TV, damn it.

This is insulting, frankly, in its unfairness to the reader. With her "storyteller's talent for setting great scenes," she deftly dismisses the possibility that George W. Bush may have thought he won for reasons more legitimate than his family connections and effectively excludes it from consideration.

Her assertion of a Bush victory claim resting prinicipally on Ellis's Fox call relies on two spurious ideas. The first is that Ellis (who, I acknowledge, shouldn't have been involved at all) himself invented the conclusion that Bush had come out ahead after all. The second is that the other channels, following like sheep, must have had no valid basis to call it for Bush themselves.

Each of those premises are flawed. I was going to draw on Dave Kope'sl Fifty-Nine Deceipts in Fahrenheit 9/11 article to discuss the role of Voter News Service (VNS) in providing data to the networks and the chronology of various networks making and rescinding calls for either candidate. But after stumbling upon this anti-Moore site that also quotes Kopel, I discovered on it an even stronger refutation of this theory by--disappointingly, to me--Ann Coulter.

Now, I pretty much never read or pay attention to Ann Coulter. Whenever I've run across articles or appearances by or quotes from her, I've found her so shrill and abrasive, so apt to pour vitriol and animosity into an argument that it makes me cringe. I think such invective tends to drive its targets to entrench themselves further into their positions. Some who disagree with her on a given issue may be reasonable people suitable for persuasion until she alienates them. Given that I've then avoided her, I may be wrong in my impression, but I mention it in case anyone shares it and so would be apt to disregard her argument on this issue.

The passage, though, from her book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right excerpted at the bowlingfortruth.com page, I actually found really rather temperate. It's full of facts (or at least plausible purported facts--I don't know who the three Democrats working in concert with Ellis were who she mentions) and cogent reasoning.

I'm not going to quote her. It's a pretty long passage, and it would be insufficiently effective for me to clip a small bit of it and silly of me to copy the whole stretch. It's worth clicking over there and reading. If you agree with Diane Roberts about the role of John Ellis and Fox News in causing the other networks to call Florida for Bush and Dubya to believe he'd won it, please read that excerpt and, if it doesn't change your mind, explain to me why Coulter doesn't refute Roberts.

(And feel free to disregard Coulter's paragraph that begins "It was a 'suggestion' made all the more insidious by virtue of being true." I happen to agree with her point in that paragraph, but it's not at all essential to the argument at hand.)

Diane Roberts is a good writer with an interesting subject in that book. I just wish I felt I could trust her a bit more.

Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel

2005-07-26T01:22:00.000-04:00

Via Andrea Harris, this is the fascinating Edward Gorey book The Unstrung Harp.

Edward Gorey art, Edward Gorey perspective, and witty insights into writing, specifically writing a novel. Excellent stuff. I've got to dig up more of his work.

Blogspot Trickery

2005-07-21T00:55:00.000-04:00

Why is it that about half the time when I change something on this blog--add a new post, add a link to the list on the right, or change the description lines under the blog title--the change doesn't immediately seem to take effect even though Blogger tells me that my blog published successfully?

That's frustrating. This is baffling: The URL http://elyclarifies.blogspot.com doesn't reflect the changes, but the URL http://www.elyclarifies.blogspot.com does. What's behind that? I obviously am no web genius or I'd have a much more sophisticated site. So there could be some relatively simple explanation that still I wouldn't get. But relatively simple or ridiculously obscure, I have no idea what the explanation is.

Now I'm gonna hit post and see how long it takes for this to show up in the first URL.

Bill Finger and Batman

2005-07-21T00:51:00.000-04:00

John at Trawlerman's Song put up this post linking to an NPR interview with the late Bob Kane, the officially credited creator of Batman and, alluding to the title of the recent Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale movie, advised listening to it to hear how Batman really began.

I'm glad he did and thank him for it. It's an interesting listen. Unfortunately for NPR listeners, though, it's not so much how Batman was really created as how Bob Kane really wanted everyone to think Batman was created.

It's a testament to Kane's ego and selfishness that he made it through that ten-minute interview without once mentioning the name of writer Bill Finger. That's only a small example, though, of Kane's lifelong pattern of behavior since the moment Batman first appeared in 1939, with a few weak exceptions briefly in the time around when he was on NPR, though he returned to form for the interview itself .

For 66 years and counting, every appearance of Batman has carried the words "Batman created by Bob Kane." It certainly should read "Batman created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger," but never will, thanks to the "iron-clad guarantee" in the contract that Wizard magazine says was produced by the lawyers employed by Kane's "well-to-do New York family with enough money...to nail down Kane's interest in the character." [For the excellent and informative Wizard article, see this page and scroll down.]

That description of Kane's family's affluence conflicts with Kane's repeated description of himself in the NPR interview as "a poor kid from the Bronx." Who to believe? Well, Kane in that interview also says at the time he submitted Batman to DC (then National) Comics, he was 18. He was born, according to some conflicting accounts, on October 24 of either 1915 or 1916. If he wasn't born until 1916 and was 18 at the time of meeting he describes with editor Vincent Sullivan, that meeting couldn't have been later than 1935. But Kane tells interviewer Terry Gross that "the period when I spoke to Vincent Sullivan was 1939. It was about a year later [than the creation of Superman]." So Kane's account is at best unreliable.

Of course, the point ultimately isn't Kane's age or economic background but how Batman was created and by whom. Numerous sources describe Bill Finger as having played a crucial role. See, for instance, the Wikipedia article (apparently drawing on the Gerard Jones book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, & the Birth of the Comic Book, which I just ordered used from Amazon for $2 plus shipping), this Philadelphia Daily News article, and the books and articles from which excerpts appear here, including the Wizard article mentioned above. Consider also these press releases announcing and awarding the Bill Finger Excellence in Writing Award.

Bob Kane's own 1989 autobiography, Batman & Me, recognized this, but that was in contrast to his usual behavior. In 1965, in response to a subsequent fanzine article resulting from Finger's participation in a panel discussion at a comics convention, Kane sent an angry letter to the fanzine Batmania, in which he insisted he was the sole creator of Batman, accused Finger of delusions of grandeur, and pretty much called Finger a glorified typist.

24 years later, and 15 after Finger's death, Kane in his book gave Finger credit for several of the key contributions in defining Batman's costume, characteristics, and identity. Without Bill Finger's contributions right from the beginning, the character of Batman would have been something entirely different, probably wouldn't have lasted a couple of years, and certainly wouldn't today be a major character, let alone anything like DC's second highest-profile character and an American icon. Yet because it was Bob Kane whom editor Vincent Sullivan commissioned and Finger who was subcontracted by Kane, Kane maintained even in the 1989 book that Finger "came into the strip after I had created Bat-Man."

Consider: in Kane's original conception, Bat-Man would wear--along with black trunks and black mask-- a union suit costume of not gray but red . He would wear no gloves. He would have no cape as such but instead big fake bat-wings attached to the back of his arms. There would be no cowl, no hood with bat-ears, but instead just a little mask like Robin ended up wearing, through which Kane's hero's eyeballs would be visible, unlike the blank slits for eyes in the Batman costume we came to know. All the changes away from Kane's original conception toward what the world came to know came from Bill Finger--those with the mask, at least, before the character was ever published.

What kind of personality or tactics this superhero might have had is unclear. Kane said, "I made Batman a superhero-vigilante....Bill turned him into a scientific detective."

Kane's dishonesty is strikingly illustrated in that NPR interview when he speaks of the origin of the name Bruce Wayne, as if he came up with it: "Well, it's an alliteration of Bob Kane. Bruce Wayne. Alliteration." Yeah, "Bob" and "Bruce" each begin with the letter B. But do you think maybe another concept he was grasping for was "rhyming"? Never mind, though. He goes on, developing the theme of his naming his hero Bruce Wayne: "I wanted it to sound...I wanted to be Bruce Wayne in my revelry and in my daydreams. Instead of a poor kid, I imagined I'd like to be a rich playboy and fight crime at night because I hate all injustices in the world." The last bit makes me a little ill, but we'll return to his hating all injustices in the world in minute.

Look, did, in fact, Bob Kane name Bruce Wayne? He did not. In Batman & Me, Kane writes, "The alliteration of the names - Bruce Wayne - Bob Kane - was probably one reason Bill came up with the name." Got that? "Bill came up with the name." [Emphasis added, obviously.] And it turns out Kane is just speculating on the alliteration (rhyming?) idea: "probably one reason." What ego!

Now that we've got the acknowledgment from Kane that Finger came up with the name for Batman's alter ego, let's look at how Finger himself described the idea's genesis, according to TheBatSquad.net's quotation from Jim Steranko's History of the Comics, vol. 1. "Bruce Wayne's first name came from Robert Bruce, the Scottish patriot. Wayne, being a playboy, was a man of gentry. I searched for a name that would suggest colonialism. I tried Adams, Hancock...then I thought of Mad Anthony Wayne." Doesn't mention Kane's name in there. So NPR's Terry Gross asks Kane about the name Bruce Wayne, and he a. neglects again to mention Bill Finger's name and b. gives her a load of BS.

(It now seems pretty much undisputed that Finger himself came up with the Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Two-Face, the Batmobile, the Batcave, the Batplane, the Batsignal, and the phrases "Dynamic Duo" and "Gotham City." Those are all in addition to his role in creating the actual Batman character.)

Perhaps the most disgustingly hypocritical comment from Bob Kane in his latter days comes from Tales of the Dark Knight by Mark Cotta Vaz. "I regret that I did not give Bill a byline, which he richly deserved, but somehow the policy in those days was to give credit only to the original creator and not to the writers who came in after the fact." Setting aside the question of what precisely Kane could be said to have created without Bill Finger, Kane had a contract guaranteeing him exclusive and perpetual credit. "Somehow the policy was..."? What chutzpah! Kane profited handsomely from Batman and died in 1998. Bill Finger struggled his whole life and died in 1974. Throughout Finger's lifetime, Bob "I-hate-all-injustices-in-the-world" Kane denied him credit, adopting his phony posture of a generous spirit only after Finger was long dead and no threat to his own role as Batman's sole creator.

How did Batman begin? Bob Kane had an opportunity and a starting point. Bill Finger had the creative wherewithal to make from that a character that captured people's imagination.

Jumping the Tracks of Reality. Lovably

2005-07-19T09:21:00.000-04:00

A few scenes of deranged, if temperate, incomprehensibility from the original 1962 John Frankenheimer film, The Manchurian Candidate.

Frank Sinatra, as Major Bennett Marco, is asked by his boss about all the bizarre books piled up in his apartment. He responds with this, as he picks them up and reads the titles:

The, uh, truth of the matter is I'm just interested, you know, in the, uh, principles of modern banking and the history of piracy...paintings of Orozco, modern French theater, the jurisprudential factors of mafia administration, diseases of horses, and novels of Joyce Cary, and ethnic choices of the Arabs...things like that.

That was a sequence of words I never could have suspected might come out of Sinatra's mouth. And he delivered it in a sort of nonchalant but confused fashion. As if he didn't really know what the deal was with these books but didn't really care. Crazy talk, though! Jurisprudential factors of mafia administration? Ethnic choices of Arabs? Man. If there are such things as these, I'm interested. And, heck, for that matter, the diseases of horses, history of piracy, and even principles of modern banking. Dammit, Major Marco, you've roused my curiosity.

There's never an explanation given for those books or his comments about them.

Roger Ebert also notes that this is a film that, in his words, "jumps the tracks of reality." I'll let Ebert set the scene for and begin the excerpt of some really insane dialogue:

Consider the peculiar first meeting between the Sinatra character and Rosie (Janet Leigh), who will become his fiancee. He's so shaky on a train that he can't light a cigarette. She follows him to the platform between cars, lights his cigarette, and then says, "Maryland's a beautiful state."

Sinatra: "This is Delaware."

Leigh: "I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter."

Sinatra: "I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town. You in the railroad business?"

Leigh: "Not anymore."

[A moment ensues of some miscellaneous lame topics I ignored and forgot. It includes the phrase "more or less."]

Sinatra: I never could figure out what that phrase meant: "more or less." [Then, a total non-sequitur:] You Arabic? [She's not even remotely.]

[They briefly discuss his name, Bennett Marco.]

Leigh: Major Marco....Are you Arabic? [Of course he's not.] Let me put it another way. Are you married?

Ebert again:

Soon she has broken off an engagement and taken up with Marco, leaving us to wonder what in the hell that dialogue was about. Was it in code? Was Marco hallucinating? It seems strange that the Chinese brainwashed the entire patrol, but needed only Raymond as an assassin. Why, then, spare the others with their nightmares and suspicions? Is Sinatra's Maj. Marco another Manchurian sleeper, and is Rosie his controller? If you look at their scenes carefully, you find that she broke off her engagement immediately after their awkward train meeting and before their first date. Reflect on the scene where she talks about Marco beating up "a very large Korean gentlemen," and ask yourself what she means when she calls this man, who she has never seen, "the general." I don't know. Maybe Rosie just talks funny. It would be a nice touch, though, for this screwball story to have another layer circling beneath.

I don't deny there might be this other layer. I suspect Ebert may be right. The thing is, though, nothing is ever made of it. There's never any explanation in the movie of her-as-contoller or any real development of it in the plot. Which at least allows us to enjoy it as pure zany madness.

This little speech by Raymond Shaw, the central character, to Marco can't be made less ridiculous by his brainwashing, though. It's a whole other deal. He's just pathetic and hilariously so.

Years later I realized, Ben, that I am not very loveable. No, no. Don't contradict me. I am not loveable. Some people are loveable, and other people are not loveable. I am not loveable. Oh, but I was very loveable with Jocie. Ben, you cannot believe how loveable I was. In a way. [He complains about his horrible mother for a minute and then gets into the Jocie anecdotes, which include the following lines.] We were together every minute after that. You just cannot believe, Ben, how loveable the whole damn thing was. All summer long we were together. I was loveable. Jocie was loveable. The senator was loveable. The days were loveable. The nights were loveable. And everybody was loveable. Except, of course, my mother.

Doing for Scientology what Radley Balko does for Morgan Spurlock

2005-07-18T18:28:00.000-04:00

Via Sheila O'Malley, here is Proud Suppressives, a new blog focused on exposing and ridiculing Scientology. A whole lot of good material so far. Their links in the place of a blogroll also conveniently collect some of the best resources on Scientology, such as Operation Clambake and Rick Ross.