There are readers who are looking for a refuge from the chaos and pain, and once they find this spot — scroll down to find it — they can soothe their weary minds.
I only clicked through to the article on Taylor Swift. Did you know Taylor Swift songs are "bombastic, unexpected, sneakily potent" and "overt... about sexual agency" and she's "barrel[ing] ahead... charting her own sui generis path"?
Language quibble: "own sui generis" is a redundancy.
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As James Taranto used to call it, "News of the Tautological".
Obama, love, barreling ahead with potent sexual agency. All over a bowl of comforting Honey Nut Cheerios the morning after.
Obama the boyfriend. And their loins ache for him.
My daughter did a Taylor Swift cover song that made a little bit of a splash in Canadian media in 2015 when it got a TS retweet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sSOoMu_MWI
""bombastic, unexpected, sneakily potent"
Sounds like one of the marijuana reviews Althouse blogged about recently.
I am Laslo.
Language quibble: "own sui generis" is a redundancy.
They really love to throw in one of the few Latin phrases they know to remind the Proles who is supposed to be doing the thinking.
Laslo Spatula said...
""bombastic, unexpected, sneakily potent"
Sounds like one of the marijuana reviews
This could be said of almost all reviews of pop culture. Journalism doesn't doesn't send its finest out to wade through the muck of pop culture.
Taylor Swift songs are "bombastic, unexpected, sneakily potent" and "overt... about sexual agency" and she's "barrel[ing] ahead... charting her own sui generis path"
No wonder she's so popular - she's just like everyone else!
Why all music sounds the same
AReasonableMan said...
Journalism doesn't doesn't send its finest out to wade through the muck of pop culture.
The ones wading through the muck of pop culture appear to be rocket surgeons compared to the ones covering politics.
The No Agenda team has a theory about Taylor Swift and the fact that she is being tarred as a white supremacist for failing to openly support a candidate in the 2016 election. It has become a sort of meme at this point and isn't bland at all.
A perfect safe space to escape cognitive dissonance stress from watching Trump Make America Great Again. Gimme shelter, Grey Lady lay .
The NY Times may have missed that famine in Russia, but they're right on top of the sugar content in Honey Cheerios.
The first tentative feelers to revise the reputation of David Dinkins upwards. Maybe it can be done. There's a major motion picture out now that shows LBJ in a favorable light. LBJ was effective in passing civil rights legislation. That should be the yardstick by which we measure him and, for that matter, all other politicians except, of course, FDR.
Funny.
I like chaos and pain.
Its odd, maybe an engineers thing.
There is nothing more interesting than failure analysis.
There is a weird joy in finding a fault, a defect, before or after it causes a problem.
There is nothing more fun either than the stress of a high-priority project in rollout, with the thrill of problems popping up, requiring resolution ASAP. I know that prep, testing and planning should minimize this, and testing is my metier, but when the unexpected comes in, the fight is on. Joy.
There is nothing more interesting than failure analysis.
Damn right! I knew there was a reason why I liked you, buwaya.
I used to love sitting in meetings where everybody was realizing that we were heading off a cliff on the project and the PM asks what we can do. And I've got an answer right off the top of my head because I've been spending my entire time as technical lead wondering how things can go wrong and what we can do about it if worst comes to catastrophic.
"Own sui generis" is like "the hoi polloi."
There is nothing more interesting than failure analysis.
Amen! I still have a book on error analysis from my engineering-school days, with a spectacular photo of a train halfway through a wall a couple of stories up on the front cover. Someone erred. :-)
When I was living in Germany leading a team of German Engineers as an American, I found I had to implement the No Naked Issues Rule.
They couldn’t dump out an issue without also dumping out the recommended solution.
Without the Rule, my desk and the conference tables would soon be piled sky-high with naked issues.
Taylor Swift isn't my kind of music. But she has a resolve stronger than Madonna.
Who quotes Latin anymore? Excepting lawyers and biologists, that is. Using Latin and French phrases seems kind of pretentious in this day and age.
I used to drive past a company called "Failure Analysis Associates" on my commute. Always kept them top of my list as a possible employer.
My first job after my degree was basically to break computer systems. This had some extras compared to the typical QA-type thing - one of our tests was the "500 pound hammer test".
There is an important use for Latin and French quotations today. And for that matter, Spanish, though in a bit of a different context.
The way to use them is as counterfactual rhetoric against would-be intellectual superiors in the media. Bubba quoting Cato. Throw them off their feed. Of course its pretentious, in a way.
But this has to be done correctly.
Btw, the fact that this is considered pretentious is a symptom of cultural decline. It used to be that a self-made, self-educated man (like my great grandpa) would do this out of pride. This was normal in a Republic of self-made men. But there no longer is such pride in education, and it is pretentious because the class that could do it is the de facto aristocracy, and from them it would sound pretentious.
Using Latin and French phrases seems kind of pretentious in this day and age.
De gustibus.
Using Latin and French phrases seems kind of pretentious in this day and age.
Chacun a son gout.
Did the taxpayers pay Pete Sousa's salary? Or did Obama?
I'm trying to figure out how Pete Sousa can sell a book using pictures he took when a US Government Employee.
A “gotcha!” moment:
"Language quibble: "own sui generis" is a redundancy”
When you use “sui generis” in a sentence, you damned well ought to get it right. It was my understanding that the only ones formally allowed to use that term were womens' studies professors. I may be wrong.
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