Althouse: At Kurt's Kaffe...

September 23, 2021

At Kurt's Kaffe...

... you can write about anything you want in the comments.

I took that photo of my favorite Indianapolis mural when I was in town last weekend.

49 comments:

Joe Smith said...: He has ET fingers...the better to phone home with I guess...; 9/23/21, 11:59 AM
Joe Smith said...: Btw, I have a theory of murals on buildings.

In almost all cases they are a terrible idea.

But if you're white and in a big city and the mural is of Caesar Chavez or MLK or (God forbid) George Floyd, then you're in the wrong neighborhood.; 9/23/21, 12:01 PM
David Begley said...: Lots of murals in Omaha. My dad’s cousin is in one of them: Dan the Mailman.; 9/23/21, 12:06 PM
Andrew said...: Weird Al?
JK; 9/23/21, 12:19 PM
RAS743 said...: And so it goes..,; 9/23/21, 12:36 PM
RAS743 said...: And so it goes…; 9/23/21, 12:37 PM
Howard said...: Unmoored; 9/23/21, 12:43 PM
Temujin said...: Happened to drive by that in July on a trip to the Indy area. I did a double-take. No one else in the car knew who it was. Once upon a time, everyone knew that face. So it goes.; 9/23/21, 12:44 PM
rhhardin said...: There's systemic sexism Linda Scott one of the top 25 global thinkers.

Calls for immediate action.; 9/23/21, 1:11 PM
Mike of Snoqualmie said...: I've been using a Ryobi brush cutter to clear the brush off of our home site. The Ryobi broke today after about 5-months of use. It has a two-piece shaft, so different tools can be used with the same engine piece. The shaft of the engine-piece broke where the shaft tightener is, metal fatigue. I'm not buying another Ryobi brush cutter, it's not durable enough. I'm getting a Honda brush cutter this afternoon.; 9/23/21, 1:11 PM
mezzrow said...: Hi ho.; 9/23/21, 1:21 PM
pacwest said...: I've got a theory. And you are an idiot.; 9/23/21, 1:38 PM
pacwest said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/23/21, 1:39 PM
Barbara said...: Around here, some high schools celebrate the week leading up to homecoming with theme dress-up days for students and teachers…like pajama day, crazy mis-match day, school color day, clown day.

This year, at least one school has added Gender Bender Day.

SoCal leads the way.; 9/23/21, 2:09 PM
Humperdink said...: Visited a customer today who happened to be a fellow Christian. He daughter went to the local Christian school (as did my 4 children). The daughter is now attending a public university where the LBTQ ... issue was brought in one of her classes. She took the laissez faire position ..... and was ripped for it by the professor. One fellow student started screaming and fled the classroom. Time to save some tuition bucks.; 9/23/21, 2:19 PM
Barbara said...: Around here, some high schools celebrate the week leading up to homecoming with theme dress-up days for students and teachers…like pajama day, crazy mis-match day, school color day, clown day.

This year, at least one school has added Gender Bender Day.

SoCal leads the way.; 9/23/21, 3:22 PM
Joe Smith said...: 'I've got a theory. And you are an idiot.'

Says the double-poster : ); 9/23/21, 3:47 PM
BG said...: @ Humperdink,
There are conservative Christian colleges out there. One of the best is in Milwaukee, believe it or not (NOT Marquette). Your customer needs to take advantage of Duck Duck Go.; 9/23/21, 3:50 PM
Maynard said...: Schools must be doing well. The San Diego AFT chapter spent their time creating a resolution that wants the UN to recognize Israeli war crimes against the mostly peaceful Palestinians. Of course, they also state that Israel is actually "historic Palestine".

If I recall correctly, it was the Roman White Supremacists who created the name Palestine not the indigenous people.; 9/23/21, 4:05 PM
tim maguire said...: Temujin said...Happened to drive by that in July on a trip to the Indy area. I did a double-take. No one else in the car knew who it was. Once upon a time, everyone knew that face. So it goes.

Gabe Kaplan?; 9/23/21, 5:28 PM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Mike of Snoqualmie... Hold on there a minute. Can you find a Red Max dealer near you? Red max is the Top Dog for the commercial guys. Second place is Stihl. Keep those blades tuned up! Ryobi lawn care is for weenies.; 9/23/21, 6:11 PM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Say, you've got a couple true democrat Afghans in custody there in Wisconsin. Child molesters and wife beaters. Better get used to that press release, gonna be frequent. All cultures are equal, right?; 9/23/21, 6:14 PM
cf said...: Mona Aamons Monzano was my natural sister totem in that era of free soles of the feet love, opened it a few years back -- 2012? -- and had to park on its disclaimer proclaiming opener page a few days before I settled in. refreshing.; 9/23/21, 6:25 PM
Mike of Snoqualmie said...: The Ryobi brush cutter was a best seller at Home Depot and the price was very attractive. It worked well until it didn't. Repeated clearing 1.5-acres of heavy brush and black berry vines was too much for it. I've had to clear the site a couple of times because that darn brush keeps growing back! One section was neck-high in brush and black berries. My excavator used a mini-skidsteer with a brush rake to clear that area.

I looked at the Red Max and Stihl. Red Max doesn't have brush cutters, only string trimmers. And Stihl doesn't list prices on their cutters. I'm going to stick with the Honda brush cutter.; 9/23/21, 6:58 PM
DanTheMan said...: >>I'm not buying another Ryobi brush cutter, it's not durable enough. I'm getting a Honda brush cutter this afternoon.

I agree with Bumble Bee, but if you don't want to mortgage the house you are maintaining, Makita 18/36V stuff is pretty good, and not as expensive.

It's what everybody uses on Tralfamadore, I promise. :); 9/23/21, 7:18 PM
Joe Bar said...: I see I am not the only one who does not like these "murals." Most of the examples I see in the nearest city (Richmond, VA) are ugly, or shocking, or designed to evoke an emotional response. I guess I must be old, if I find them off-putting.; 9/23/21, 7:25 PM
Yancey Ward said...: It will be the 100th anniversary of Vonnegut's birth next year. Hard to believe.; 9/23/21, 7:40 PM
William said...: i haven't read Vonnegut in quite a while. Has his moment passed? I liked him quite a lot. He was one of those writers who got into your synapses and became part of you. I'm afraid if I went back and re-read Cat's Cradle or Sirens of Titan, those books would not seem quite so profound......I read a lot of Shakespeare nowadays. There's a writer that's really held up. Shakespeare lived in an era where death was a lot more democratic. Ten year old boys, drunken writers, women in childbirth--everyone could croak at any moment. When you reach your late seventies, it's good to spend time with a writer whose hand stinks of mortality.....Vonnegut due to that unpleasant experience at Dresden had an elevated awareness of death, but he presented it as an abomination rather than as part of the natural order of things.; 9/23/21, 8:47 PM
Narr said...: Funny term, Palestinian. In WWII there was a Palestinian Brigade fighting on the British side. They were Jews.

I need to reread some KV. He was profoundly important to me and my friends in high school and college, but after about the mid-70s I stopped paying him much mind.

In (restored) Dresden, and in (unbombed) Prague where the movie was filmed, I thought of Updike's observation that Vonnegut had come by his wooly fulminations against the powers-that-be honestly.

Oh, that Athenaeum by KV's grandsire is a scary old mishmash IMO. Props if it's still useable.; 9/23/21, 8:59 PM
stephen cooper said...: mustaches on men with feminine passive-agressive faces are as bad as shorts on men who look bad in shorts.
That mural is not good art.; 9/23/21, 9:51 PM
PJ said...: I gather that mural is there all the time? Better if they could find some way to make it appear every 59 days.; 9/23/21, 10:38 PM
effinayright said...: Kurt gets props for having written "Harrison Bergeron" all the way back in 1961.

Here's how wikipedia describes its premise:

"In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic."

So that meant really good dancers like Bergeron had to wear weights around their ankles, lest they leap higher than anyone else, and masks for good measure, so as not to unfairly burden less attractive people.

Kurt was prophetic, but much more so than I bet he ever could have imagined. Sixty years early. I suspect he would have been horrified.

p.s. The best part of the movie "Slaughterhouse Five", based on a KV book by the same name, was Valerie Perrine appearing topless. NO mask or burkah for HER!

WOOT!; 9/23/21, 11:28 PM
Mutaman said...: So the Cyber Ninjas work is done and after spending $5.7 million of Arizona taxpayers money they found absolutely nothing wrong. Biden still wins in their counting.; 9/24/21, 1:44 AM
Mutaman said...: "But if you're white and in a big city and the mural is of Caesar Chavez or MLK or (God forbid) George Floyd, then you're in the wrong neighborhood."

Joe Smith's neighborhood-CRACKER; 9/24/21, 1:48 AM
Hugh said...: He wrote Harrison Bergeron, one of the best refutations of enforced “equity” and “equality” ever written. Surprised he hasn’t been cancelled. That was required reading when I was in middle school. Doubt it’s ever read in school anymore. He’s probably just been forgotten.; 9/24/21, 5:13 AM
Andrew said...: “There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”
— Breakfast of Champions; 9/24/21, 6:07 AM
Tom Grey said...: I knew right away it was NOT Kurt Cobain - but Harrison Bergeron author K. Vonnegut.

The first wall mural I saw was in early 80s (late 70s?) of a little Martian on the corner near a store. When done well, or even just good enough, they're OK, and far preferable to graffitti.

KV would probably be quite like Franzen, conceding that the Democrats against free speech might be a danger, but not so concerned about PC until ... it's so bad it's too late to be against it. Not sure Chait goes into it, but it seems that Dems support censorship partly because the Free Speech Trump supporters support it so often, and the Dems hate such people, as well as strongly feel superior to them: intellectually, spiritually, morally; and usually with celebrities in beauty as well. (no "...lly" for attractiveness or "good lookingly" superiority). Haters of Trump & Reps are secretly big on superiority.

Half-blind Pollitt asks a good question about what to do when so many Americans believe things that are demonstrably false, but then lists mostly anti-Rep things:
"Covid denialism, Trumpism, health nuttery, hyperlibertarianism, New Age woo-woo, fundamentalist Christianity, and an unhealthy fixation on exaggerated or imaginary dangers to children."
But Black Dems are least vaccinated, altho Dem media blames Reps the most. [prior article about Not Getting Vaccinated to Own Your Fellow Libs in The Atlantic.]
Hong Kong & Singapore seem hyper-market oriented and were successful, there are no trials of hyper-libertarianism.
Christians claim human lives start at conception - just like science; it's Dem feminists who are "conception denialists".

And no mention of Russian Collusion Hoax so beloved and believed by so many Dems for so long. Nor the "election fraud denialists" who claim, without evidence of mail-in ballot signature verification, of a "free and fair" US election, despite known and admitted unfair censorship.
"Genetic denialists" claim that group IQ differences are not genetic.
There's plenty of demonstrably false beliefs of Democrats not complained about.

The twisting woke lies of the ACLU are such that Vonnegut might well have liked Titania McGrath (as well as The Babylon Bee), even tho KV likely loved RB Ginsburg (despite her being a vile trasphobic bigot). Titania doesn't list any famous Cobain songs.

Finding the genetic mutation that allowed humans and some other primates to be without tails is something KV would likely have found amusing.

One of the last books of his I read was Galapagos, where humans and their big heads are devolving back towards sort of a fun-loving dolphin.
(end part 1); 9/24/21, 6:16 AM
Tom Grey said...: (part 2, 4096 max chars) I've recently read a few big, important books:
Humankind,
The Goodness Paradox,
Sapiens.

All concerned with how humans came to be human, with The Goodness Paradox by far the best and most insightful, tho I'm glad to have read the others. [Less reactive aggression, more proactive]
It strikes me as, wildly speculative (but possibly true!), that loss of tails requires better balance adding more impetus for better and bigger brains.

Yet another book I plan to read soon, The Cult of Smart, claims that our education & culture are pushing the "superiority" of those who are smarter. (Freddie deBoer is a Marxist who accepts genetic IQ differences; on substack). Being smarter doesn't make you "better" - which I agree with. Freddie wants more equality of human worth.

[But supporting smarter people making better tech can make our lives easier. Yet, counter-intuitively, I'm now fearing that our lives are so easy, we face so little suffering, the lack of overcoming problems results in a lack of real accomplishment, and a lack of real meaning. We need new culture for this. And spending time in games where you "level up", and your virtual game character suffers, or even dies, does not give meaning to you In Real Life. ]

Vonnegut's story of Harrison Bergeron is one of a society where smart people have devices buzzing in their ears to disrupt their thoughts, so that they are "equal" to less smart folk. It's the special Olympics version of equality in a race - everybody finishes at the same time. Together. At the speed no faster than the slowest.

That's not the equality of all humans, created in the image of God, that I envision.; 9/24/21, 6:17 AM
Tom Grey said...: (part 0)
I’ve been reading Ann Althouse for years, but usually not her many comments, nor had I been commenting much. Then she changed her policy to one of no comments, but folk could email her. And she might publish an email as a comment. Then she did this more and decided to just have folk make a comment, but require her approval. And now she’s approving most comments. I read her by Tablet, while having coffee or sitting with wife on couch – wife often on her iPhone doing work or other comm activities. But I like to comment by the computer. So I wrote one long comment, rather than many little ones, but it’s too long.
She doesn’t quite name her favorite Indianapolis wall mural.
(on my own, intermittent blog: https://tomgrey.wordpress.com/2021/09/24/ann-althouse-kurt-vonnegut/)
Ann is SO FAST on comment approval, she's already approved my above 2 parts as I make after lunch coffee (in Slovakia, with wife on phone after a pro-life talk by a pro-life German doctor who was ... not quite pro-life correct. So wife is busy on phone); 9/24/21, 6:39 AM
Tina Trent said...: Our school paid him 10K to give a speech and he was so drunk he fell off the stage. More than I made cleaning vomit and worse off motel floors in a year. Re-reading him, I was not impressed.

Ray Bradbury. There was a writer.

Maybe Vonnegut should be relegated to children’s fiction. He took the money, so he is also an completely dishonest person.; 9/24/21, 9:06 AM
Critter said...: Althouse, can you remove the comment of Mutaman? He's obviously trying to hijack the topic for his political views of the 2020 elections.; 9/24/21, 9:54 AM
Critter said...: Althouse, can you remove the comments of Mutaman? He's obviously trying to hijack the topic,; 9/24/21, 9:55 AM
Narr said...: Bradbury never grabbed my attention, though a lot of my friends loved him-- same ones who loved KV, go figure. (No 'drunken asshole writer' tale surprises me, BTW.)

For a lot of people, fiction and music preferences congeal in college or at college age.
That's probably true for me as far as fiction--the big name youngsters that get mentioned here are virtually unknown to me.

At this point I can't recall if KV was on any syllabus, and I tested out of the Norton Anth classes and took "Modern Novel"--I know Joyce was on the list but can't recall others. Camus probably. Possibly even Hesse.

The prof for that one was a brilliant young scholar with a wife and small children and a promising future. He jumped from a hotel window downtown soon after.; 9/24/21, 11:13 AM
Ann Althouse said...: “ Althouse, can you remove the comments of Mutaman? He's obviously trying to hijack the topic,”

No. It’s a cafe post, so all topics are fine.; 9/24/21, 2:55 PM
gpm said...: >>I'm afraid if I went back and re-read Cat's Cradle or Sirens of Titan, those books would not seem quite so profound

D'accord.

I read all of what Vonnegut had out at that point 45 years ago or so (and must still have all of the books around somewhere), though nothing much he did later. Harrison Bergeron is surely a story for our current time, what with all that is going on with eliminating "gifted" programs in various school systems (locally, the "exam" schools in Boston are not going to be exam schools for at least the next year or so), the high school graduation insanity in Oregon, etc.

One Vonnegut novel that resonated a lot with me was, I think, Player Piano (if I'm remembering correctly). Any way, the one where practically no one had a job. As I recall, the major character (one of the major characters?) had a job but lost it because he hadn't passed the swimming test at college (I want to say the college was Princeton). Resonated because, um, I never passed my college swimming test. The latter allegedly required because the mother of a guy (alumnus?) who went down on the Titanic imposed that requirement in funding the main college library (it's a different story, but there was allegedly another requirement). Maybe the fear that they'll come and take away my degree (as happened in the novel) will finally go away after our 50th reunion four years from now.

Anyhow, as my high school friends and I used to say to each other at the Brookfield Zoo (Lincoln Park Zoo is more fun!), "Welcome to the Monkey House!"

--gpm; 9/24/21, 5:28 PM
gpm said...: >[KV] was profoundly important to me and my friends in high school and college, but after about the mid-70s I stopped paying him much mind.

Not sure I'd say "profoundly," but otherwise d'accord again.

--gpm; 9/24/21, 5:33 PM
gpm said...: >>Bradbury never grabbed my attention

D'accord encore (feeling quite Frenchy and rhyming tonight). Fahrenheit 451 was sorta interesting and the Martian Chronicles was OK, but nothing else Bradbury much interested.

And I was a huge SF fan. My favorites were first, when I was very young, Asimov (also read tons of his nonfiction); then, mostly through high school in the late 60s/early 70s, Heinlein (still the god/gold standard); then Larry Niven. Have a couple hundred mostly paperback SF, mostly up in N.H. Harry Harrison was another favorite.

Haven't really kept up since the 70s. A friend gave my a copy of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, which I liked, though the ending was rather abrupt. It sounded interesting, but I couldn't get through the first hundred pages of Stephenson's Anathem.; 9/24/21, 6:19 PM
Narr said...: KV seemed profoundly important at the time.

The part I recall most from Player Piano were the professional athletes the universities hired to represent them on the gridiron; I almost forgot Mother Night, with the moral, be careful what you pretend to be.

Those were before he got so whimsical, IIRC.; 9/24/21, 6:55 PM
gadfly said...: Mutaman said...
So the Cyber Ninjas work is done and after spending $5.7 million of Arizona taxpayers money they found absolutely nothing wrong. Biden still wins in their counting.

Actually the $5.7 mil. came from Trumpies. Maricopa County sent a bill to the Arizona Senate to pay $2.8 million for new voting machines which means taxpayers are also on the hook.

As for the Cyber Ninja vote count, no details or work logs were provided to the AZ court, as requested, to prove that they counted anything. As a result Doug Logan has been asked to appear before the U.S House oversight committee. Logan is believed to be testing the demand document for rice content.; 9/24/21, 11:46 PM