२३ जुलै, २०२२
"How much political damage did Trump actually do to himself?"
"Bill Schutt, the author of 'Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,' says that fictional plots about eating human flesh are as old as literature itself."
I just found 8 TikToks for your mid-Saturday enjoyment. 2 of them made me cry. Let me know what you think.
1. Grab a banana and dance.
2. How to go downstairs in a wheelchair.
3. What exactly is your skin color?
4. The oldest car in the world.
5. Two young boys get a little puppy dog.
6. The organist at the Salisbury Cathedral hears a tourist singing and, unseen, plays in accompaniment.
7. A woman describes her own life in Victorian times — brushing mud off skirts, darning socks, and hearing the drunkards singing in the streets.
8. The uncanny power of classical music.
Weeds of July.
Solfege?
Anyone else annoyed by "solfege"? That is, apparently, "solfège." Accent grave over the "e."
In music, solfège... or solfeggio... also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a music education method used to teach aural skills, pitch and sight-reading of Western music. Solfège is a form of solmization, though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
Syllables are assigned to the notes of the scale and enable the musician to audiate, or mentally hear, the pitches of a piece of music being seen for the first time and then to sing them aloud. Through the Renaissance (and much later in some shapenote publications) various interlocking 4, 5 and 6-note systems were employed to cover the octave.
If you don't know why this is annoying me today, I have to begin with a spoiler alert:
"I feel like women have to be more careful and more selective now in who they have intercourse with."
Said Sarah Molina, 25, a "newly single" "event planner in Phoenix" who had been eager "to get back on the dating scene" until the overturning of Roe v. Wade "changed" her attitude toward sex, even though "abortion is currently legal in Arizona."
२२ जुलै, २०२२
Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.
1. Singing "Hey there, lonely girl" to a random woman in the supermarket.
4. Some nice young people harmonize singing "Landslide" quite sincerely.
2. The Drew Barrymore Effect. (If you watched #5 on the July 19th post, you'll get this.)
3. A man dresses for summer, Regency style.
(Just talk about these videos in the comments. If you want to rag on TikTok, there's a specific post about that: here. This post is purely for the enjoyment of videos, not discussion of the platform that happens to host them.)
"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."
Bannon guilty!
The jury deliberated for less than three hours. The guilty verdict came after weeks of heated speeches by Mr. Bannon outside the federal courthouse in Washington, a lengthy jury selection process and a speedy trial that a judge had vowed to keep from becoming “a political circus.”...
ADDED: Bannon spoke to the press after the verdict:Although Mr. Bannon was found guilty of what amounted to a low-level process crime, his conviction was the first of a close aide to Mr. Trump to result from one of the chief investigations into the Capitol attack....
"Can I use 'It/It’s' as gender pronouns?"
I see 2 extra problems — extra problems beyond the usual issues surrounding pronoun preferences.
First, you're requiring other people to use a word that is dehumanizing, that portrays you as a thing and not a person.
I noticed this problem in the context of attempting to answer the question, "What's with the weird, kinda ominous music on the Barron Trump video? Sounds like the music you'd hear on a true crime documentary about the hunt for the Sheep Ranch Killers or something."
I said, "I think it's trying to say: Look, there's a duplicate Trump, and it's bigger and stranger...." I used the word "it" to convey the thinking of someone who regarded Barron Trump as not human but a monstrous thing.
Second, you're going to force other people to get the punctuation wrong? It's? Not its?
"Gratefulness is where I live cuz my granny, gmama, momma, family modeled and instilled it in me. It isn’t a posture of less than or crumbs scraping..."
Said Shonka Dukureh, who played Big Mama Thornton in the Baz Luhrmann movie "Elvis," quoted, unfortunately, in a report that she has died at the age of 44 (NY Post).
"We both have the same interests, but our viewpoints are different: He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual."
[“PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story” (1991)] is divided into two parts: first a thinly veiled autobiography, then a do-it-yourself guide to making some 170 drugs, a feature that made this self-published volume an underground hit in the United States and Europe....
“Inventing new psychoactive drugs,” Ms. Shulgin told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “is like composing new music.”...
She took her first psychedelic trip in the early 1960s, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. “We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something forming in the air, slightly above the level of my head,” she recalled in “PiHKAL.”
“It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence.”
"If a tech company operates in mainland China, the Communist Party can easily gain access to its data."
In its article about Dave Chappelle, The Washington Post changes "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people" and makes no note of the correction.
... backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic jokes.
You've just accepted the criticism of Chappelle at face value, I see. Personally, if I'd been editing this, I would have changed it to "jokes perceived by some as transphobic." Or maybe even "jokes involving transsexuals."
By stating it as you have, you've sided with his critics in, not an opinion column, but what is ostensibly an objective news story. Nice job, WAPO.
I wrote, "Do I need a '[sic]' after 'transsexual'?" because I think "transgender" is the preferred term, but other than that, I think that comment said it well.
WaPo has now changed "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people."
I've added an update to my original post, and I'll repeat my criticism that this was an important, substantive change correcting a shameful journalistic mistake. It should be acknowledged forthrightly, with assurance that the paper will pay attention and make an effort to avoid repeating this mistake.
I want to see a "CORRECTION" notice on this article!
२१ जुलै, २०२२
Sunrise...
Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.
1. Barron has grown impossibly tall.
2. Kamala's reaction to Joe's getting covid.
3. All the things he had to apologize to his wife for.
4. How to drink wine in the rain.
"Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic [sic] jokes...."
"Biden tests positive for covid-19, White House says."
Biden, 79, is fully vaccinated and boosted, and as president has access to some of the best medical care in the world. But elderly people often suffer more serious symptoms than younger individuals, and Biden’s positive test is likely to send tremors through the political world and the international community until the course of his disease is clearer....
Despite covid-19 having increasingly seeped into Biden’s inner circle — infecting everyone from his family members to many of his top advisers — the president had, until Thursday, managed to avoid the illness.
Know thyself?
That's a cute little BBC animation that I found after that Bret Stephens column — blogged here — made me think about the old aphorism "Know thyself." Stephens was talking about the "self-satisfied elite" who didn't understand the point of view of the non-elite. It made me think: How dare these people regard themselves as elite if they are self-satisfied? They are not educated if they haven't looked into the functioning of their own mind, especially if they satisfy themselves with contempt for others.
Here's Wikipedia on "Know thyself":
The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, transliterated: gnōthi seauton...) is the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.... The two maxims that follow "know thyself" were "nothing to excess" and "certainty brings insanity." In Latin the phrase, "know thyself", is given as nosce te ipsum or temet nosce.
"Certainty brings insanity" is the least well-known of those aphorisms. It explains a lot!
Much more at that Wikipedia link, but — here — I'll just show you this cool painting from the 1600s, inscribed with the Latin phrase:
"Inside, the church was less than half full. There were plenty of Hermès bags but few boldfaced names from the gilt-covered slice of Manhattan society the couple had inhabited..."
"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"
Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?... What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this....
He was part of that "self-satisfied elite." Does he genuinely take responsibility for his failure to see from the viewpoint of the non-elite? Or is this a repositioning in the hope of regaining power over the deplorables?
"Doing a set at Summerfest on July 21, 1972" — 50 years ago today — "[George] Carlin went through much of the material on his latest album, 'Class Clown,' including 'Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.'"
From "George Carlin documentary shines a light on his breakthrough moments at Milwaukee's Summerfest and Lake Geneva's Playboy Club" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).
२० जुलै, २०२२
Tonight, I am serving up 9 TikTok videos. Let me know what you like.
1. Your brain would just like to go over a few things.
2. Prompting the AI image generator with nonsense words like "plism sprute."
3. Ricky Gourmet reveals where he got his VibeSmith certification.
4. A young woman finds it hard to believe the harsh reality of adult life: You have to register your car. Every year.
5. "I'm like: What has Leon the lobster got going on?"
6. She's tried to be normal, but will now be as weird as possible.
7. The TikTok algorithm — thinking this man is a woman — has revealed to him the secret knowledge of what women want.
8. How do you explain the Upper Peninsula? Did Wisconsin lose a war?
"The defendant decided he was above the law, and he didn’t have to follow the government’s orders like his fellow citizens. So this whole case is about a guy who just refused to show up? Yes, it is that simple."
Lawyers for Bannon dismissed Vaughn’s characterization, saying their client was still negotiating with the House Jan. 6 committee when he was accused of a crime. “No one ignored the subpoena,” said defense lawyer M. Evan Corcoran. “It’s called negotiation, it’s called accommodation.”...
"Mr. Brand uses no special technique to produce his images.... He doesn’t use filters, preferring his special effects to come from a reflection in water or a dramatic angle of light..."
"[Matthew] Crawford is out to defend what he calls 'homo moto,' the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it..."
Writes Ross Douthat, in "What Driving Means for America" (NYT).
"The vast majority of people here are pro-choice. And the very vast majority of people here think that these protesters have gotten out of control."
Last Wednesday, officers indicated protesters were edging closer to being arrested. Demonstrators take strong exception to the reactions, saying that to whatever extent they disrupt tranquility, it is part of a much more important message — bringing attention to how a number of justices altered the lives of millions — and a message could be even stronger with the residents’ participation. As they chanted recently: “Out of your houses and into the streets!”
"Am I the only one who liked the girl afraid to drop in?…one father-daughter dynamic 2022 in a nutshell. Plus, she can drop in."
Writes Barbara, in the comments to last night's TikTok post.
That prompted farmgirl:
Barbara- I just watched the Father/daughter.
That is what America should look like.
What a great Dad!!
I'd only written "She's scared to drop in." So I didn't let on what an immensely cool father/daughter interaction there was. It makes me want to be more obvious:
१९ जुलै, २०२२
"She was outstanding. Beautiful inside and out. We began all of it, our lives together, with such a great relationship."
Said Donald Trump, about Ivana Trump. He'd called up NY Post columnist Cindy Adams, because he was "just thinking how well you knew Ivana. You knew her very well. You knew her from the first."
Adams asked what he remembered about Ivana, and he said: "That she was different. That she never gave up. Beautiful, yes, but she was also a hard worker. No matter how rough things were or how badly they looked she never fell down. She went from communism to our lives together. She took nothing for granted.”
Never fell down.
Adams asked "if he thought we were about to also lose our country," and he said: "It’s horrible. We’ve never been at such a low point. That trip to Saudi Arabia? We have more oil than they have. This man in Washington is setting us all back. Setting everybody back."
Updates on 2 recently blogged NYC stories.
I've assembled 10 TikToks to keep you occupied for the next 10 minutes. Let me know what you like best.
1. This is your pilot speaking.
2. The puppies are not yet ready to play.
4. If you baby-talk, will your friend baby-talk back?
5. Drew Barrymore really wants you to go out in the rain.
6. Backstage with The Beach Boys.
7. When Sting had to endure the Jose Feliciano version of "I'll Be Watching You."
9. When the Wisconsin man goes to Hawaii.
10. The deadline gave us purpose.
"How to Build a Sex Room is technically a home-makeover reality show like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Flip or Flop, and Fixer Upper — complete with sledgehammering walls..."
From "So You Want to Build a Sex Room …" (Curbed).
"As Biden eyes 2024, one person weighs heavily: Trump."
That's a headline at WaPo for a piece by Matt Viser.
Subheadline: "Biden’s associates say he will feel compelled to run if Trump does. If that rematch materializes, Biden said recently, ‘I would not be disappointed.'"
That was published at 5 this morning. I read it just after seeing this new poll by the Trafalgar Group:
If the 2024 presidential election were held today and Joe Biden and Donald Trump were your choices, for whom would you vote?
- Donald Trump — 47.9%
- Joe Biden — 42.6%
- Undecided — 9.6%
"He talks a bit about famous customers he’s served, including Patti Smith, who shares his fondness for Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays."
"We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty..."
That's from "National Conservatism: A Statement Of Principles/A world of independent nations is the only alternative to universalist ideologies seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe" by The Edmund Burke Foundation (published at The American Conservative).
There’s a lot to like about the burgeoning “national conservative” movement, which stands against the increasingly stale, pre-Trump intellectual orthodoxy on the right....... but quickly switches to criticism. Trump is, of course, awful, so hooray for the alternatives that might lure conservatives away from Trumpism, but any alternative that works will swiftly become the new target.
"Since redheads are often more vulnerable than most to the sun’s rays, we’re giving them shelter from the sun inside our fully air conditioned cinema screens."
Some posts on social media noted that redheads can often be bullied at school for their rarer hair coloring — and that the offer may ostracize the community further.
"The Uvalde, Texas, gunman gave off so many warning signs... that teens who knew him began calling him 'school shooter.'"
"I feel much more seen when I’m referred to as ‘they,’ but my closest friends, they will call me ‘she,’ and I don’t mind, because I know they know me."
I usually forget to read Vogue, but I saw that this morning because Instapundit linked to "Hairy Pits Strike Blow Against The Patriarchy" at Victory Girls, a discussion of the Emma Corrin cover photo at Vogue, which followed on a Wall Street Journal piece entitled "Armpit Hair Is Back, Whether You Like It or Not."
The only hair the Vogue text refers to is head hair: "Emma Corrin’s... mop of short, insouciantly tousled blond hair." The armpit hair is just something to dare other people to talk about.
Is the body in its natural form unsettling to you? Must it be changed to suit your feelings of unease? Ironically, the people saying yes are (probably!) the same people who think those who feel unease about their natural genitalia should not undergo surgery.
Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not?
"We have definitely taken care of the researchers. Question is, have we taken care of other people? I reject vehemently this idea..."
Said Mark Sweeney, Principal Deputy Librarian of Congress, quoted in "Preservationists say Library of Congress makeover plan is ‘vandalism’/The library’s Main Reading Room, included in a $60 million renovation of the Thomas Jefferson Building, lands on the D.C. Preservation League’s list of endangered places" (WaPo).
A proposed change to the ornate Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress that critics say would remove the symbolic and functional heart of the 1897 Beaux-Arts masterpiece has landed the library on the D.C. Preservation League’s 2022 list of Most Endangered Places. The Library of Congress plans to remove the mahogany librarian’s desk that rises some 16 feet in the middle of this spectacular, first-floor room and replace it with a circular window in the floor that will offer a view of its decorative dome to visitors looking up from the floor below.
Sweeney touts the project as a "game changer." He's right about that. He's changing the "game" of research and architectural preservation to tourism. And it wouldn't even be good tourism. As one commenter over there puts it:
१८ जुलै, २०२२
"One of his most famous installations, erected in 1976 — the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence — is 'Clothespin,' a 45-foot-high, 10-ton black steel sculpture..."
"Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news."
"Among people of color, 45% now approve of Biden’s overall performance, down from 54% in the spring."
"An epidemic of Spanish-language right-wing disinformation that spiked around the 2020 election on social media platforms, and in some big-city AM radio stations, is revving up again..."
Writes Lizette Alvarez, in "Fake news speaks many languages, but it’s particularly fond of Spanish" (WaPo).
"Statues paint an idiosyncratic portrait of American history. Consider Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko."
Movies that you have to watch twice to understand.
"Mr. Biden’s face-to-face meeting with MBS — preceded by a cordial, and ill-advised, televised fist bump — conferred a much-coveted legitimacy on the crown prince."
Writes the Washington Post editorial board, in "In the Middle East, Biden’s policy bumps into U.S. principles."
"If you think about human biology, our bodies are built to reproduce.... You have to override what your body is saying..."
"Tall and bald with the build of a swimmer, Pollan is no Timothy Leary — he isn’t asking anyone to drop out..."
"More people are cancelling their video subscriptions to save money in the face of the cost of living squeeze, with under-24s most likely to walk away...."
१७ जुलै, २०२२
You know what?
- "What a relief that Janeane Garofalo never sold out, our critic writes"
- "What Will Happen if Doctors Defy the Law to Provide Abortions?"
- "What to Know About BA.5"
- "What Joe Manchin Cost Us"
- "What It Means to See America in Person"
- "What Turns a Person Into a Mass Shooter?"
- "What I Learned When My Sister Got Sick"
- "What It Would Take for Your Team to Land Juan Soto"
Just 5 TikToks made my list tonight. Let me know what you like
3. The return of the influencer.
4. Asking people to name 3 songs by the band whose name is on their shirt.
"[T]he slowdown of human activity... has become known as the 'anthropause.' Some species clearly benefited from our absence..."
"I don’t understand why the [Snopes] verdict is 'mostly false,' when most of this article is giving reasons why it would’ve made sense..."
Writes my son John, at Facebook, commenting on a Snopes post about its article "Did People Refer to Gaslighting During the Era of ‘I Love Lucy’? A stray piece of dialogue from the 2021 biopic 'Being the Ricardos' set off a fascinating online debate about a cultural anachronism."