१ जानेवारी, २०२२
"My New Year’s Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envys, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace."
"A governor, not governing during a crisis; and sunning his belly on vacation instead. @GovRonDeSantis is the Nero of Ted Cruzes."
Let this be a lesson to everyone: You don't know what other people's troubles are, and maybe some of those troubles you don't know about aren't even a secret and could have been known by you.
This gets my "empathy" tag.
ADDED: Why don't links to Fox News work? Can anyone tell me the solution? If not, I will stop linking to Fox News.
ALSO: On the anti-empathy side, we need to remember that a politician might use his wife's illness — and specifically breast cancer — as a cover for behavior that really is unseemly.
"If I ever found one of those on my car, I’d attach it to a police car ASAP. The owner would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do when a cop with an iPhone was informed he was being tracked."
"The biggest target of this campaign is 'little fresh meat,' a term of endearment for massively popular makeup-wearing male entertainers."
Writes Helen Gao in "China’s Ban on ‘Sissy Men’ Is Bound to Backfire" (NYT).
2022.
३१ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"Pointless," I said out loud...
... as I did my sunless sunrise run this morning.
I needed to remember a distinctive word in the passage I wanted to blog from the audiobook I had in my earphones.
Mittens has graciously deferred to Gary; Leo couldn’t care less about power; and the dog just finds the whole thing, and, in fact, everything in life, exciting. So what are these two creatures fighting about? I trust in the fact that animals are pure in their hearts, efficient in their emotions. I admire that they don’t seem to waste time hating each other if there isn’t a specific purpose to it. Food, shelter, dominance, and love affairs seem to be the things that matter, and once those are sorted out, what else is there to say? Could it just be a personality conflict? Does Gary find Mittens unlikable? What a disappointment that would be. It would mean that animals are just as flawed as we are, susceptible to petty grievances and pointless conflict and capable of making awful sounds at each other when we really have nothing to say.
The book is "On Animals" by Susan Orlean. The "creatures" — Mittens and Gary (and Leo) — are cats.
"We could not imagine that Trump would become President, that he would sow disinformation and denial about a deadly virus, that he would attack the legitimacy of American democracy itself..."
"Chinese social media has been engrossed in an eye-popping debate over ads depicting alleged Western beauty ideals for Asian women, including the usage of makeup to create stereotypical 'slanted eyes.'"
Mercedes-Benz has reportedly removed a recent video advertisement published on Chinese social network Weibo on Dec. 25, after the brand was criticized for doing up a model’s face to give her exaggerated sloping eyes.
“Is there any beauty in this makeup?” one critic wrote. “It is not [open for] interpretation. No Chinese will think this kind of ‘beauty’ is attractive,” another added....
This is an interesting problem of subjectivity. Should each racial group be the judge of whether its own features should be minimized or exaggerated with makeup?
Earlier this week, Gucci was similarly called out for a new handbag ad that uses “discriminatory” Chinese features.
Communication-law professor Zhu Wei, of the state’s China University of Political Science and Law, said in a statement to the Global Times regarding Gucci’s ad, “This is extremely disrespectful to our culture. The disgust and revulsion expressed by the whole society toward this kind of insult should be heard.”
Here's the photograph he's denouncing (which looks beautiful to me (ugly handbag, though)):
"The Taliban have ordered a series of mannequin beheadings, telling clothes shops to remove the heads of dummies that offend Islam...."
"Aziz Rahman, the head of the local department of the [Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in the western Afghan province of Hera], described the mannequins as 'statues' and claimed that they were being worshipped, which is prohibited under Islam. Despite shopkeepers’ pleas that they needed their dummies, Rahman said he 'ordered that they [the mannequins] should have their heads removed' and warned there would be severe punishment if they violated the ruling...."
The London Times reports.
"There’s a tremendous amount of information she has on some very important people. Now that she’s been convicted she may be more eager to discuss."
"A wind-fueled grass fire in Colorado burned hundreds of homes in a matter of hours and forced thousands to evacuate Thursday... as flames rapidly spread..."
Close up view of the Boulder County fire and reaction from inside the Chuck E. Cheese off Marshall Rd in Superior, CO with wind gusts of 110mph. pic.twitter.com/OkBUnl8E9c
— Jason Fletcher (@SoFarFletched) December 30, 2021
This is a big day for those of us who've been watching the gradual unfolding of "What a Wonderful World" — one letter at a time.
३० डिसेंबर, २०२१
"When you run out of ideas, just write down a list. Readers love lists."
At this point, the police certainly knew the thief’s name. After all, it was on the pawn voucher and in the detention records from his previous lockup with Chris Walker, and there were fingerprints on the Volvo, the viola da gamba, the pawn voucher, and probably on Coby. But the man was still at large. Before the car was towed to a wrecking yard, [the dog owner] went through it one more time to see if there were any last belongings of his or [his wife's] still inside. There was nothing of theirs, but the thief had left behind some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name.
... some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name — a list! Just write down a list. Readers love lists.
The next thing that the reader wanted to happen was the capture of the thief, but it's a true story, and that didn't happen. So how do you tie it up satisfyingly? Out of the blue, there's a list, miscellaneous items, indicative of miscellaneous things — the man had a girlfriend, he wrote poetry....
I appreciated the essayist's artistry. And oh! how pleased I am that I have a tag for this: lists.
"At least a dozen cities have set homicide records this year. The scale of the killings is recapitulating the worst moments of the United States’ 20th-century urban crisis."
"Kuachua Brillion Xiong, 25, of Merced was pulled over for driving aggressively on Interstate 80 in Cass County, Iowa, on Dec. 21. He had an AR-15-type rifle, ammunition and a grappling hook, among other items...."
From "Merced man arrested on way to White House with rifle, ‘hit list’ compiled from TikTok" (L.A. Times).
Ostracon and ostraconophobia.
Ostraconophobia is the fear of shellfish.[1]Ostracon:
NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin has this phobia. On July 16, 2017, after winning the Overton's 301 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, he was given a 44-pound lobster by crew chief Mike Wheeler (a trophy that is traditionally given to winners at the track), and Hamlin attempted to leap away. "I have a lobster phobia. I don't know why. I just don't like them," Hamlin stated. "I cannot eat dinner if someone beside me is eating lobster. I can't look at it. So as far as I'm concerned, they need to put it back in the water and let it live."[2]
An ostracon (Greek: ὄστρακον ostrakon, plural ὄστρακα ostraka) is a piece of pottery, usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel. In an archaeological or epigraphical context, ostraca refer to sherds or even small pieces of stone that have writing scratched into them. Usually these are considered to have been broken off before the writing was added; ancient people used the cheap, plentiful and durable broken pieces of pottery around them as convenient places to place writing for a wide variety of purposes, mostly very short inscriptions, but in some cases very long....
In Classical Athens, when the decision at hand was to banish or exile a certain member of society, citizen peers would cast their vote by writing the name of the person on the shard of pottery; the vote was counted and, if unfavorable, the person was exiled for a period of ten years from the city, thus giving rise to the term ostracism....
What's going on here? The etymology of "ostracon" (from the OED) explains it:
Etymology: < ancient Greek ὄστρακον earthen vessel, potsherd, hard shell < the same Indo-European base as the word for bone (see osteo- comb. form), with an -r- suffix (shown also by ancient Greek ὄστρειον oyster n.).
"[V]irtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened...."
From "The Metaverse’s Dark Side: Here Come Harassment and Assaults/As Meta and other companies bet big on an immersive digital world, questions about its harms are rising" (NYT).
"I feel like a woodland creature or like a Laura Ingalls Wilder girl.... I think the brown hair brings out my hardworking and serious side, which is good for the winter — like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper."
२९ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"Four men accused of breaking Covid-19 restrictions were marched through the streets of a Chinese city in a 'shaming parade.'"
"Ghislaine Maxwell convicted of trafficking girls for Jeffrey Epstein."
At trial, prosecutors argued that the teenagers, who were as young as 14 during their encounters with Epstein, expected Maxwell to be a buffer and chaperone between them and the much older multimillionaire. Instead, Maxwell facilitated massage appointments and gave instructions on what Epstein liked, the now-grown women said. She also sometimes arranged their flights and other travel details when they visited his homes.
"Where was men’s outrage while women were poisoning themselves with pills and scarring their reproductive organs with IUDs and abortions?"
Writes Kathleen Parker, in "Men want to have vasectomies now? What took them so long?" (WaPo). She's reacting to that article from a few days ago: "Men across America are getting vasectomies ‘as an act of love’/With the right to abortion under threat, men say they want to play a role in reproductive planning to support their partners" (WaPo). You may have noticed that, and you may even have noticed my failure to blog it. My reaction to the "act of love" framing was more cynical than I was in the mood to type out. So I was glad to see Parker do the work.
"As a little girl, I shared a bedroom with my sister. And I got to sleep on the side of the bed facing the outside wall, so there was a window, and I would look out at the stars."
"Russia’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the nation’s most prominent human rights organization must close..."
Variations on the repeating-history theme appear alongside debates about attribution. Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
AND: What are we doing now that is a repetition of the past that we don't know is a repetition because we haven't learned history?
"Lower-court rulings... disregarded the broad scientific consensus that covid-19 poses a major public health threat requiring a strong emergency response..."
From "The Supreme Court must uphold Biden’s vaccine mandates — and fast" by Lawrence O. Gostin, professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law; Jeffrey E. Harris, emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and practicing physician at Eisner Health; and Dorit Rubinstein, law professor at University of California, Hastings College of the Law. (WaPo).
"Ashley, who transitioned in 1960 aged 24, was a dancer in Paris, a top fashion model in London, a nightclub owner in Marbella and a Knightsbridge restaurant owner."
From "April Ashley, trans pioneer, dies at 86" (London Times).
"Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it 'challenged' a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug."
"He was raised in almost Dickensian circumstances in tiny Searchlight, Nev.: His home had no indoor plumbing, his father was an alcoholic miner who eventually died by suicide..."
From the NYT obituary for Harry Reid.
२८ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"Having the humility to acknowledge that there’s a lot that no one knows and is unknowable right now is going to be really important."
Sunrise — 7:29.
"Alex Jones’ wife Erika Wulff Jones allegedly struck the far-right conspiracy theorist 'over 20 times' and threatened to hit him in the head with a stone ball, causing him to 'fear for his life'..."
"do blurry edges make them soooooooo afraid?"
the people making cartoon clouds are so anti-wisp and pro-puff. they fear soft lines so they invent a border as if they were the government. do blurry edges make them soooooooo afraid? wish these narcs would give a little smudge a try. or like get gentle pic.twitter.com/ekp1IJGM67
— liva (@realchoppedliva) December 28, 2021
A question I wasn't asking, but I'd like to know.
Has anyone ever tracked down the very first use of the now-clichéd slowed-down "OOOOOH NOOOOO" in film? No guesses, please—I'm looking for an informed answer.
— Terry Teachout (@TerryTeachout1) December 27, 2021
"On any given afternoon, Bongino might read advertisements for survivalist food rations ('Act now, and your order will be shipped quickly and discreetly to your door in unmarked boxes') and shotguns and massage chairs and filet mignon and holsters..."
"Crippled by a spinal cord injury, Grandmother Bolling was confined to bed. Edith had the responsibility to wash her clothing, turn her in bed at night, and look after her 26 canaries."
From the Wikipedia article on Edith Wilson (née Bolling, formerly Edith Bolling Galt).
२७ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"But they all didn’t just quit their jobs. They also posted a video about their decision, some of the very moment they resigned, on the popular social media site TikTok.
From "#IQuitMyJob These 5 TikTokers wanted more from work. So they quit — in a very public way" (WaPo).
Here's the page at TikTok collecting all the #IQuitMyJob videos.
"During the Second World War, a pigeon was cited for bravery by the U.S. Army. During a storm, the bird, known as U.S. 1169, carried a distress message..."
"They are really looking for a unicorn... They want someone who is going to fight — but not too hard, because they don’t want it to be ugly and bickering."
At the same time, the anti-Trump conservative can’t be seen as too chummy with the other co-hosts, as the network’s market-research shows that the audience wants to see the women spar. Sources said that this has hurt the chances of ANA NAVARRO.... It doesn’t help that there’s a perception that whoever sits in the conservative host slot is on borrowed time, with prominent Republican former co-hosts like NICOLLE WALLACE, ELIZABETH HASSELBECK, ABBY HUNTSMAN and [Meghan] McCain leaving the show with claims of being bullied by their co-hosts and ABC executives on-set and off, while veterans like [Whoopi] Goldberg and [Joy] Behar have thrived. Sources said that the show was eager to recruit young libertarian KAT TIMPF, but she turned them down because of the show’s reputation for treating conservatives poorly and her contract with Fox....
How is a libertarian right for the Republican Party position? I don't watch the show, but it seems to me that the problem is they've got a panel with 3 on one side and only 1 on the other. There should be 2 to oppose the 3 — at least. Or make it 2 to 2. Have a libertarian and a conservative Republican. Why wouldn't that make a better show (unless bullying the outsider really is the narrative)?
"In Agra in Uttar Pradesh, members of right wing Hindu groups burned effigies of Santa Claus outside missionary-led schools...."
From "Jesus statue smashed in spate of attacks on India’s Christian community/Amid growing intolerance to India’s Christian minority, several Christmas events were targeted by Hindu right wing groups" (The Guardian).
Kamala, actually.
But let's not forget our individual power to actually do something about it…. And that is again, where every individual has it within their ability and- and many may argue within their responsibility to actually take on these- these- accept the tools that are available to do something about this issue…. When we talk about the economy, the average person in America is going to measure the economy based on can they actually just afford to get through the day and through the month…. And- and Goldman Sachs just today said that actually, we know that Build Back Better will strengthen the economy. And so, I think there is without any question, room for discussion about what actually will be the impact to the economy…. But it actually makes economic sense to do that and it brings down the cost of living…. we have the ability to actually alleviate the burdens that people are carrying that make it difficult for them to get through the day or in the month…. Every- I read it every day. I read it every day, and then most days the president and I actually do it together with our IC- with the intelligence community…. I think that, you know, I actually wrote a book many years ago, and I do believe that it is important for us to have a cyber doctrine…. I mean, and I actually mean that sincerely for a number of reasons…. People are- people have a right to know and believe that their government actually sees and hears them. … And it has actually been part of my lifelong career to deal with tough issues and this is no different.
It's quite obvious that the word as she's using it has the opposite effect of its literal meaning. She must want to stress the reality and practicality of what she's saying, but it undercuts her credibility. It's the equivalent of asserting "I'm telling the truth," over and over. Who does that? Someone who's insecure about her believability. A good liar would know better. A secure truth-teller wouldn't run into the problem in the first place.
"I think of Roe v Wade as a house that’s sitting on the edge of a beach, where the water is coming under it and taking the sand out. The house is still standing there, but it is more and more in danger of collapsing in the water."
"But on closer inspection, his pictures of idealized pies, spaghetti entanglements of highways and gumball machines rimmed in blue halos required unpacking."
"The way C.K.’s flirtations with the offensive and the taboo work, at least historically, is by making himself a temporary stand-in for the bad guy."
"Finally, here comes omega (ω). Everybody knows it signals the end. Although we are still near the middle of the alphabet, albeit on the downhill side, people are noticing that Greek has two 'O's."
Omega means “big O.” (Get it? O-mega?) Omicron means “little O.” O-micron. The Greek micro, or “small,” has given us “microbes,” “microscopes,” and “microminis.” Mega, Greek for “big,” has come into English in “Mega Millions,” “mega-threat,” and “megalopolis.” If the repercussions from little old omicron have been so catastrophic, what are we to expect from big bad omega?
Before panic sets in, a note on pronunciation: “small O” and “big O” refer less to the size and shape of the written letters (omega is an omicron with big feet: Ω) than to their sounds. They are vowels with short and long values. Though there is no universal agreement about it, many American classicists pronounce omicron with a short “o,” as in “om,” and omega with a long “o,” like an Irish surname: O’Mega.
Norris links to a Mother Jones article from a few weeks ago, "I Asked Seven Classics Experts How to Say 'Omicron.' Come Down the Rabbit Hole With Me." Excerpt:
My first call was to David Sider, an American scholar with a terrific Bronx accent, in whom I found an equally frustrated ally. “You’ve called the right person!” he exclaimed. “I was driving in a car the other day, listening to the radio, and hit two different people on two different episodes say ‘ah-ma-CRON. And that’s wrong.”
“Kind of like the French president?” I asked. “Ah, Macron!”
“Yes, yes, exactly,” he said. “I’ve been bothered.”
२६ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"1. No, the Taliban did not seize $85 billion of U.S. weapons.... Note: This was the most popular article in The Fact Checker’s 14-year history."
"She was the lead voice on 'Don’t Mess With Bill' and other songs written by Smokey Robinson, who said she 'had this little voice that was sexy to me.'"
Among the other Robinson songs that featured Ms. Young’s voice were “I’ll Keep Holding On,” a 1965 release that peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard chart; “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” which rose to No. 13 in 1967; and “My Baby Must Be a Magician,” which hit No. 17 in 1968.
"These were not men who would necessarily raise a Black Power fist or quote Stokely Carmichael or Angela Davis, but were activists nonetheless, who doubled down..."
"In the past decade, millions of Pakistanis have been caught up in the religious fervor of an anti-blasphemy campaign..."
From "The mob killing of a factory manager in Pakistan comes amid surge in anti-blasphemy violence/This religious crusade is rapidly gaining popular support and could threaten the country’s stability" (WaPo). The factory manager, "preparing to repaint the walls for a visiting delegation, had taken down some religious posters that praised the prophet Muhammad and tossed them in the trash," and "several hundred workers chased him onto the factory roof and then dragged him into the yard, where they beat, stoned and kicked him to death, then set his crumpled corpse on fire."