Friends of Andrew say he has been doing “a lot of thinking and work on himself”.... There is much more thinking to be done as Andrew, who once described himself as “an ideas factory”, contemplates a permanent retirement devoid of flummery. Some in royal circles believe a safe option would be for him to run one of the Queen’s estates. Others, including the royal historian Hugo Vickers, think he should devote himself to a life of charitable rehabilitation.
“Prince Andrew needs to start up an animal sanctuary and work there, Profumo-style,” Vickers said. “The British love animals.”
Retirement devoid of flummery... "Flummery" is one of those words that gets my attention. Oddly enough, I have a tag for "flummery." I'm not sure how that happened. My favorite word is "flummox," as I've mentioned a few times on this blog. And yet I don't have a tag for "flummox," only for "flummery." It makes you wonder, what is flum? Is it like phlegm?
As I've discussed before — here — the OED calls the word "flummox" colloquial or vulgar and suggests it's onomatopoeic, "expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily."
But what about "flummery"? That's not connected to "flummox." According to the OED, "flummery" originates as the name of a food — a "coagulation of wheatflour or oatmeal." From there, it got figurative: "Mere flattery or empty compliment; nonsense, humbug, empty trifling" or "Trifles, useless trappings or ornaments."
Yes, we don't need any of that from Andrew.
"Most people will never have what it takes to compete at the elite levels of high school, college or professional sports. That’s not an argument for kicking the genetically blessed out of the league so that those of us who are slower and weaker can experience the thrill of victory. One might add that it is particularly not an argument for kicking out people who face as many other disadvantages in their lives as trans athletes do. But if you like that answer, you should probably ask whether women’s sports should exist at all. After all, we didn’t create separate leagues to reinforce the special feminine identity of female athletes; if anything, women’s athletics was supposed to break down such divisions. The separation is a nod to biology: After puberty, biological women can’t compete with similarly gifted biological men.... [Do we] think it’s important for cisgender women to have a place where at least a few of us can experience the thrill of victory. Maybe that isn’t an important social goal. Or maybe it is, but just not as important a goal as trans inclusion. Either way, that question will have to be asked and answered — out loud, where everyone can hear it."
Writes Megan McArdle in "We need to be able to talk about trans athletes and women’s sports" (WaPo).
The easiest solution is not to talk about it. Not only does it seem undesirable to say anything that could feel hurtful toward transgender people, but it's also quite unpleasant to need to say anything about the physical inferiority of women. The only way even to consider excluding transwomen from women's sports is to forefront the athletic inferiority of the female body. To have this conversation is to be transformed into a bunch of Bobby Riggses. But to fail to have the conversation is to say we don't need a special category for the female body and the whole women's sports movement was about nothing.
I thought maybe it would facilitate the conversation to speak of "the female body" instead of "women" or "ciswomen" or "natural women." As McArdle points out, women's sports isn't about how much "like a woman" the athletes feel inside. Indeed, it seems probable that many of them don't identify with what the culture traditionally considers feminine. And the women's sports movement was about transforming traditional gender roles: You could feel very very boyish and you're as womanly as the girl who revels in girliness. Isn't that the ideology of the women's sports movement?
The separate category exists because of the bodily differences and not at all because of inward feelings.... or does it? Maybe sports is really only about how people feel inside. You have to do something outwardly for it to be sports, but you do it for the feelings. If the women's sports movement was about boosting the feelings of women — women, who are inherently inferior at sports! — then how can you turn around and be unkind to the transgenders?
"After decades in prison, he has failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy. Mr. Sirhan lacks the insight that would prevent him from making the same types of dangerous decisions he made in the past."
Said Gavin Newsom, quoted in "Gov. Gavin Newsom rejects parole for Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy" (L.A. Times).
"... in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels.... If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—'In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time'—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges. By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center...."
Writes Peggy Noonan, in "Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point/He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him" (Wall Street Journal).
"... if sometimes humorless. But inventing infractions merely to put people in the wrong is not."
The advice columnist "Miss Manners" answers a woman whose daughter chided her for using the automatic door button when she is not disabled.
The words "Your 7-year-old has perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the moment" feel humorous, and I hope the girl has a frivolous foible that she will outgrow. Or maybe she has a sense of humor and the mother is the humorless one who's overly afflicted by the zeitgeist. But it's terrifying to think that Generation Alpha is going to be grimly looking for meaningless micro-offenses.
I've said it before — I'm investing my hope in the babies — "those who will be born over the next 5 years, and kids up to the age of 10": "What are these people going to be like — after living through the lockdown and witnessing the heightened, hysterical, hypocritical empathy of the millennials." I said: "I was hoping they rebel against the prudery and the repression of the millennials."
But what if they lean into the worst tendencies of the millennials and Gen Z?
"The baby girl was discovered by a group of teenage boys on a remote snowy road near the village of Sosnovka in Russia’s Novosibirsk region. She was wrapped in an old rag and there was a feeding bottle next to her. 'We thought it was a doll at first.... It was a shock.'... It was initially feared that she could have suffered frostbite and would not survive, but doctors warmed her up by carefully rubbing her arms and legs... The discovery came on January 7, the date that Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas Day. Anna and Dmitry Litvinov, whose teenage son was one of the baby’s rescuers, have said they would like to adopt the child, but they will have to wait to see if any relatives can be traced first...."
ADDED: That's -4 Fahrenheit.
"'African Americans' are underrepresented, but is that true of, say, Nigerian Americans, who have among the highest incomes of all American groups? 'Asian Americans' overall do very well in educational achievement, but that's primarily because of the success of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Korean Americans. Are Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Bangladeshi, Pakistani Americans well represented in the American legal profession? I doubt it. In the white category, how many Appalachians wind up as attorneys are legal faculty? Cajuns? Yemeni, Iraqi, and Egyptian Americans (contrary to popular belief, all Arabs are counted as white)? If the ABA is truly concerned about underrepresented ethnic groups, is there a sound reason why someone of Argentine or Spanish descent should be of special interest to law schools because they (justifiably) check the Hispanic box, but not someone of Hmong or Yemini descent?"
From "The American Bar Association's Problematic Proposed 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' Rules for Law Schools" by David Bernstein (The Volokh Conspiracy).
Missing a package? Shipment delayed? Maybe your package is among the thousands we found discarded along the tracks. This is but one area thieves have targeted trains. We were told this area was just cleaned up 30 days ago so what you see is all within the last month. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/43002DPyZa
— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022
I had the pleasure of spending an evening with Terry Teachout when he came to Madison to see the play "Rembrandt's Gift" at the Madison Repertory Theater in 2005 and — simply based on knowing this blog — invited me to join him.
He was devoted to visiting theaters around America, choosing carefully, rejecting productions of "The Santaland Diaries, Tuesdays With Morrie, and anything with the word 'magnolias.'" And he was eager to see "The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Man and Superman, Rhinoceros, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, What the Butler Saw, or anything by Jean Anouilh, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, or August Wilson."
He was gentle when regional theater productions — such as "Rembrandt's Gift" — were flawed, and he gave important recognition where it was done well:
Teachout called [American Players Theater] "America's finest classical theater festival, unrivaled for the unfailing excellence of its productions." Teachout hated a 2015 Broadway production of "A View From the Bridge." He called it a "flatulent exercise in Eurotrashy gimmickry." He called this APT production "a masterpiece of sustained tension" and "of the two best Miller revivals I've ever seen."
[T]he circumstances in which she reiterated it — as Senate Democratic leaders prepared to launch a decisive floor debate and less than an hour before President Biden was scheduled to arrive on Capitol Hill to deliver a final, forceful appeal for action — put an exclamation point on her party’s long and fruitless effort to counter restrictive Republican-passed state voting laws.
We're told that she wore "purple, a symbol of Washington bipartisanship." There's always interest in what this Senator is wearing. So here — you can look at her as she stands in the breach:
Multiple polls have measured opinion post-Jan. 6, and the ratings continue to decline.
The vaccines, I recommend taking them, but I think that has to be an individual choice. I mean, it's got to be individual, but I recommend taking them. Many people recommend them. And if some people don't want, they shouldn't have to take them. They can't be mandated, as the expression goes. And I think that's very important. Personally, I feel very comfortable having taken them. I've had absolutely no reverberation....
But then it's all about the 2020 election results, with Trump sticking to his attack on the election and the interviewer, Steve Inskeep, pressuring him until Trump cuts it off. A few highlights:
Why did Republican officials in Arizona accept the results then?
Because they're RINOs, and frankly, a lot of people are questioning that....
A perfect storm in the Democratic Party is making a once-unfathomable scenario plausible: a political comeback for Hillary Clinton in 2024.
Several circumstances—President Biden’s low approval rating, doubts over his capacity to run for re-election at 82, Vice President Kamala Harris’s unpopularity, and the absence of another strong Democrat to lead the ticket in 2024—have created a leadership vacuum in the party, which Mrs. Clinton viably could fill....
So the point is, the Democrats somehow have no one. "Viable" means capable of living. The party is so bereft of life that it might dig up Hillary and run her again. That said, I remember "The New Nixon," the 1968 Nixon. She's in the same position: Lost an election, sat out the next election, and then came back and won/could win. And Nixon always seemed unappealing.
The authors of the WSJ piece never mention Nixon. Because he is so unappealing. But he's the accurate comparison if you want to argue it can be done, which they do.
In a recent MSNBC interview, Mrs. Clinton... took a veiled jab at the Biden administration and congressional Democrats in an effort to create distance: “It means nothing if we don’t have a Congress that will get things done, and we don’t have a White House that we can count on to be sane and sober and stable and productive.”
Did she mean to say that Biden is not sane, not sober, no stable, and not productive?
Hillary Clinton remains ambitious, outspoken and convinced that if not for Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s intervention and Russian interference that she would have won the 2016 election—and she may be right.
It's good to be reminded of her similarity to Trump: She never accepted the results of the election.
If Democrats want a fighting chance at winning the presidency in 2024, Mrs. Clinton is likely their best option.
"Best" = they've got nothing better.
Something life-changing happened while Jordi Casamitjana was working on his PhD on the social behaviour of wasps. He was observing a nest when one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. And it decided ‘you’re fine’ and didn’t raise the alarm [to the rest of the nest].” He vowed that day to devote his life to helping animals....
[His] devotion to his beliefs led a judge to rule... that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief and therefore a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010...
I got my wish, so I'm just going to be happy about an artist on the money, not argue about the particular artist chosen.
When I wrote in my sketchbook, I picked the name Dr. Seuss not only because he wrote accessible words and drew charming drawings, which is what St. Exupéry did. I picked it because I thought virtually all Americans could get behind the choice of Dr. Seuss. We all know him and have enjoyed his work. Who can't like him? But 18 years have passed, and... is Dr. Seuss cancelled? He's somewhere on the road to cancellation.
So I couldn't get my precise wish.
When you wish upon a Star-Bellied Sneetch/Makes no difference who you reach/Something like your heart desires/Will come to you....
So I got my wish imprecisely. I got Maya Angelou!
***
Like a songbird, her legs are invisible as she flies, arms outstretched/Darting into the slots of vending machines/Across America.
Some 2022 Democrats are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.
That's not exactly how I remember it (and I watched Trump's Covid show every day). I accept the use of "comparable" but not "hardly worse." But those who loathed Trump agonized over every comparison to the flu because it seemed he wasn't taking things seriously enough. I think he was trying to steel us for the fight and avert panic, but anti-Trump people were already in a panic over Trump and — in that election year — they wanted Trump to fail. So I see why people split politically over something that wasn't inherently political.
In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true—for most vaccinated non-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats....
And again, no photograph. It was another super-cold day here in The North.
The rare panelist inclined to regularly push back against Gutfeld is Tyrus, a 6-foot-8-inch, 365-pound Republican actor and professional wrestler, who towers over the 5-foot-4-inch host. “He’s never asked me to share his vision,” Tyrus says in an interview. Tyrus, who is African American, is a central figure in the show’s relentless lampooning of woke culture. He appears in regular skits as “The Angry Black Male” to mock activists who he and Gutfeld believe overuse and misuse assertions of racial inequities.
I'm trying to watch it, but what I've been doing is watching maybe 20 or 30 minutes and stopping, then starting again on another day. I think I've had 4 bites of it on a sequence of days, but I'm still far from the end.
I'm interested, but I get annoyed. I think it's badly written and badly directed. The timing is wrong. I don't know. I'm fascinated by the character who talks like Jordan Peterson — Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell. I think Jennifer Lawrence is good as the "We're all gonna die!" girl. Leonardo DiCaprio's character is interesting enough, and Meryl Streep is reasonably funny as the ditzy President.
Here's some of what Mark Rylance does:It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.
The government's mandates came out when the concern was Delta, not Omicron, and therefore its "findings are now obsolete."
For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager’s point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker,” gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul.
Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie’s best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps “Work!” at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment.... Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie’s affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate.
Dobie’s cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.)
They forgot to mention Chatsworth Osborne Jr., the ridiculously snobby rich kid.
And why did they call Zelda "deeply intellectual"?! Seems to me Zelda was sexually harassing Dobie, failing to accept that no means no, insisting that he'd end up with her because their names on the alphabetized class roster were right next to each other — Gillis and Gilroy. Thalia was at least as smart — and much more rational.
I really don't think anyone on that show was intellectual, and certainly not "deeply intellectual." Deeply! Where does the NYT get that? From the fact that the actress turned out to be gay? Here's the Wikipedia article on Zelda:
Zelda especially irritated Dobie by wrinkling her nose at him. He always wrinkled back; he claimed it was a reflex action (often admonishing her "Now cut that out!"), while she took it as proof that he loved her but didn't realize it yet. Zelda assured Dobie that he would eventually come to realize his love for her through the influence of "propinquity": because he was Gillis and she was Gilroy, they were always going to be seated together through high school and college and would eventually fall in love.Here's a full episode — complete with opening theme, musing by "The Thinker," and plenty of Thalia:
One more day without a sunrise picture. Once again it was bitterly cold and windy.
That’s wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor’s number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in “serious condition.”
Kessler notes the special importance of accuracy for Supreme Court Justices. This isn't a place to show special respect. And her number was "absurdly high." So, "She earns Four Pinocchios."
By the way, Kessler also absolves Justice Gorsuch off the accusation that he got a number absurdly wrong. The official court transcript has him saying: “Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year.” Kessler listened to the audio verifies that Gorsuch said, “flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” Wow. Correct the transcript, people. Or is correcting the transcript a dangerous, endless exercise?
There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."
1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."...
Oh, what's not a gaffe these days?
But back to the memorial service. Biden and Pelosi spoke too, and both of them told a joke premised on the reputation Reid had for being untalkative.
Here's Biden joke : "Harry and I both liked to talk a lot... I’m just testing whether you’re asleep yet."
Here's Pelosi's: "He was a man of few words — and he wanted everyone else to be a person of few words."
They kept it light. There was an opportunity to go much lighter on the man-of-few-words theme — man of even fewer words now, ha ha — or to go much more deeply....
It was election night 2006, when Democrat Claire McCaskill won her race in Missouri, a victory that gave control of the Senate to Democrats, and Reid rushed over and kissed McCaskill through the television screen.
“His lips remained attached to the TV screen for a full 10 seconds,” Schumer said. “I had to get up and wipe the copious spittle off the TV screen.”
Labor officials say that many of their critics are acting in bad faith, exploiting parents’ pandemic-related frustrations to advance longstanding political goals, like discrediting unions and expanding private-school vouchers....
If periods of remote learning this winter hurt the Democratic Party, “that’s a question for the consultants and the brain trusts to figure out,” said Mr. Abeigon, the Newark union president. “But that it’s the right thing to do? There’s no question in my mind.”
You can't open the schools without the teachers, and Democrats can't win without teachers.
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