It's not a defense of race discrimination to call it "completely natural."

Murder and rape are "completely natural." 

I'm reading "Boston City Hall roiled by email party invitation for ‘electeds of color’ sent to all" (Boston Herald).

A Wu administration official, on behalf of the mayor, mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for “electeds of color,” prompting an apology and mixed reactions....

"I am appalled that even as a healer I have to get my cup poured into in this incident, but in this incident I will continue to pour into other people's cup as a way to pour into my own cup."

Said Charles Murrell, "an artist and peace advocate in the Boston area." 

Quoted in "Community Leaders Condemn Hate After White Supremacists March Through Boston/Photos and videos on social media appeared to show throngs of protesters marching under the banner of the Patriot Front, characterized by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist group; Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and other city leaders have spoken out" (NBC Boston).

"Whose story is being told with this monument? The hierarchy is very evident. White commander out front; Black soldiers in the background. It’s the first thing you see...."

"It’s not enough to just see the piece. You have to go deeper. There’s so much not told, but the monument is so moving that it can lead you to those things, if you’re curious."

Said L’Merchie Frazier, the education director at the nearby Museum of African American History in Boston, quoted in "Black soldiers monument faces scrutiny amid racial reckoning/Amid the national reckoning on racism, an unlikely monument is facing scrutiny: a Boston memorial to a famed Civil War unit made up of Black soldiers." The monument in question is the beautiful bas relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that depicts the story that many of us know from the movie "Glory."

The work, which sits across from the Massachusetts Statehouse, has been vandalized over the years, mostly by people snapping off Shaw’s broadsword. But during the unrest that followed Floyd’s killing in May, the monument was tagged with anti-police slogans, expletives and other graffiti, along with about a dozen others in and around the Common.

Kevin Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition that’s calling on Boston to rename Faneuil Hall after Crispus Attucks, said the Shaw monument should be moved to a museum because it casts Blacks as “subservient” to whites.

Similar complaints have prompted the removal of other ostensibly well-meaning monuments in recent weeks, including a statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a statue of Abraham Lincoln depicting a freed slave kneeling at his feet in Boston.

"Boston Accent Ranked Second Sexiest in America, Survey Says."

Boston 10 reports.

Texas is #1, in case you're wondering. My favorite part of the ranking is "14. Yooper."

And I learned a new term "Hoi Toider." (At #35.) I thought it might be a joke, but:

High Tider or Hoi Toider is a dialect of American English spoken in very limited communities of the South Atlantic United States—particularly, several small island and coastal townships in the rural North Carolina "Down East" that encompasses the Outer Banks and Pamlico Sound (specifically including Atlantic, Sea Level, and Harkers Island in eastern Carteret County, the village of Wanchese and also Ocracoke) as well as in the Chesapeake Bay (such as Tangier and Smith Island). The term is also a local nickname for any native resident of these regions....

Listen:



I know what a Yooper is, but what exactly is the accent? You can learn that and more here:

"A paltry $20 fine for people who ride bicycles on the state’s high-speed expressways — as a crowd of 'kids' did Saturday night through the O’Neill Tunnel..."

"... will do nothing to deter the behavior and should be revised, officials said. The group of around 30 cyclists zipped onto Interstate 93 south at Leverett Circle and, to the astonishment of the people in cars around them, took up the two right-hand lanes as they pedaled over the Zakim Bridge and through the tunnel.... Boston City Councilor Tim McCarthy said risky behavior by people on bikes, dirt bikes and various other means of transportation creeps up this time of year — and he’s going to ask the cops to take a look at their policies and enforcement.... He said he’d been at a lacrosse game recently when a group of 10 or 15 dirt bikers screamed past, doing wheelies for the people gathered in the parking lot. 'It’s like anarchy,' McCarthy said of the dirt bikers and this week’s highway cyclists. 'The temperature hits 40 and this starts back up.'"

The Boston Herald reports.

Annotations.

Link. Click image for a clearer view.

For more discussion of that song, read my old post called "The Anxiety Clown."

Let's look at the word "patsy" — used yesterday by Donald Trump to describe the United States.

Context:

Donald Trump filled a speech Saturday with images of the United States on the world stage getting mistreated and taken advantage of — and declared that if he’s elected president in 2016, he won’t let that happen to America anymore....

“We’re tired of being, like, the patsy for everybody,” Trump told those gathered at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies in Nashville.

Is "patsy" an unusual word these days — an old-man word? I see a Tampa Tribune article from a couple weeks ago, "Reject patsy treaty with Iran." And in the NYT last April: "prosecutors were laying down a marker that Dzhokhar [Tsarnaev] was instead a willful young man who was nobody’s patsy." So I'm leaning toward seeing "patsy" as a word with present-day currency.

Perhaps you associate the word with Lee Harvey Oswald:



I associate the word with Patti Smith. Her song about Patty Hearst — a version of "Hey Joe" — ends with the lines: "I am no little pretty little rich girl/I am nobody's million dollar baby, I am nobody's patsy anymore/And I feel so free." Smith hits the word "patsy" hard, and there's no mistaking the intention to resonate with the name "Patty/Patti."

Hearing Trump use the word, I joked that he could be accused of sexism, using a woman's name to express ideas about gullibility and weakness. But from an etymological perspective, "patsy" is more likely related to the man's name Patrick. I got that from the (unlinkable OED) which adds "perhaps influenced by association with Italian pazzo crazy" and "Apparently spread in theatrical slang through the name of a character in a theatrical sketch."

1889   H. F. Reddall Fact, Fancy & Fable 404   A party of minstrels in Boston, about twenty years ago, had a performance... When the pedagogue asked in a rage, ‘Who did that?’, the boys would answer, ‘Patsy Bolivar!’... The phrase..spread beyond the limits of the minstrel performance, and when a scapegoat was alluded to, it was in the name of ‘Patsy Bolivar’..the one who is always blamed for everything.

"Lena thought NOHO was BORO. Then hypothesized that BO RO might stand for something. Boston Rosewater."

"Lena says it sounds like a sex act. Or when you use Guinness as perfume. 'Splash a little rosewater on your neck.' Me: 'Why would you put Guinness on your neck?' Brayden: 'Have you *been* to Boston?' Lena: 'Shhh. Boston can hear you?' Now she's calling John Mellencamp 'John Menstrual Cramp.'Also Lena is an ex-bartender and is distressed never to have had a Brompton cocktail, even after finding out what's in it (it's not something you'd consume for pleasure ... probably)..."

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's NYT Crossword puzzle, which he's doing in a "Madison Avenue Starbucks that [his] companion Lena called 'the saddest Starbucks ever.'" "NOHO" was the answer for "Big Apple neighborhood," and  "Ingredient in a Brompton cocktail" was the clue for "cocaine."

I was reading that on my iPad but I jumped up to write this on my iMac after I clicked on that link at "it's not something you'd consume for pleasure ... probably. " Oh, my! I did the puzzle last night before conking out and I got "cocaine," which was 2 Down, after seeing some of the Acrosses. It's only just now that I'm learning that a Brompton cocktail is not a recreational drink:

Brompton cocktail... is an elixir... [m]ade from morphine or diacetylmorphine (heroin), cocaine, highly-pure ethyl alcohol (some recipes specify gin), and sometimes with chlorpromazine (Thorazine) to counteract nausea, it was given to terminally-ill individuals (especially cancer patients) to relieve pain and promote sociability near death....

The original idea for an oral mixture of morphine and cocaine helping patients in agony with advanced disease is credited to surgeon Herbert Snow in 1896.

The Brompton cocktail is named after the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, England, where it was invented in the late 1920s for patients with tuberculosis. While its use has been rare in the 21st century, it is not entirely unheard of today.

To promote sociability near death....

Rand Paul demands that the immigration debate focus on terrorism.

"I believe that any real comprehensive immigration reform must implement strong national security protections. The facts emerging in the Boston Marathon bombing have exposed a weakness in our current system. If we don't use this debate as an opportunity to fix flaws in our current system, flaws made even more evident last week, then we will not be doing our jobs.... [N]ational security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform to make sure the federal government does everything it can to prevent immigrants with malicious intent from using our immigration system to gain entry into the United States in order to commit future acts of terror."

Creepy Boston lockdown.

The photo-op.

If you'd shown me those pictures a quarter century ago and told me that's what Boston will look like after a terrorist attack, I would have thought: Oh, my God! The neutron bomb!

After all this talk of "dark-skinned" suspects, it seems the Boston bombers were Caucasian.

Literally.

"The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings led police on a wild and deadly chase through the suburbs..."

"... here early Friday morning that ended in the death of one of the suspects as well as a campus police officer; the other suspect remained at large while hundreds of police officers conduct a manhunt through Watertown, about five miles west of downtown Boston."

The surviving suspect was identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass., a law enforcement official said. The suspect who was killed was identified as his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the law enforcement official said. Investigators believe that both of the suspects were Chechens.

ADDED: "Victim in iconic photo says he saw bomber... 'He woke up under so much drugs, asked for a paper and pen and wrote, "bag, saw the guy, looked right at me"'..."

2 explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line: "I saw people’s legs blown off. Horrific.... Runners were coming in and saw unspeakable horror."

"Eyewitnesses at the scene said there were two loud explosions about five seconds apart, and emergency vehicles crowded the scene. Up to 60 people have been reported injured, dozens of them seriously."

"It is a crime that officially does not exist, because it’s not on the books."

Said the Rev. Eugene Rivers of the Youth Violence Reduction Task Force.

"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."

Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:

I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....

And then:

We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.

A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman." 

Icepick advises:

Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).

Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."

That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing. 

ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"

"Boston’s becoming a town devoid of nightspot fun as some bars in the city eliminate board games and water pong..."

"... fearful that city regulators will come crashing in and accuse the pubs of sponsoring drinking games."

“If two friends at a bar say, ‘I’ll buy your next beer if you make this shot on the dartboard,’ the bar may have to go before a board. It’s silly how arbitrary it can be,” said Chris Mitchell, general manager of the Better Off Bowling league, who has seen the bar crackdown firsthand.

Hypnotist...

... thieves.

"They are promoting drug use... This is the wrong message for Nike to send."

The Mayor of Boston — Thomas Menino — doesn't like the T-shirts in the window at Niketown.

A Nike spokeswoman told the newspaper that the company doesn’t condone the use of banned or illegal substances.

“These T-shirts are part of an action sports campaign, featuring marquee athletes using commonly used and accepted expressions for performance at the highest level of their sport, be it surfing, skateboarding or BMX"...

The mayor is insufficiently hip, apparently. Doesn't cotton to ambiguity.

The death of the Boston Globe.

"From the moment the Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993, it has treated New England's largest newspaper like a cheap whore. It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the hard sciences."

Squid ink bubbles?

I was with you up to the squid ink bubbles. Then I was kind of grossed out. Nice to see Boston again though, via photographs. I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, eating Milk & Honey Granola. It's quite delicious. Chez Althouse, where we love Milk & Honey Granola, "It's quite delicious" is an oft-invoked allusion to a favorite movie...

Hunh. Well, uh. What is the, uh, "vromborova polevka"?

It's a potato soup. It's quite delicious.

Oh, well, that's great! I'll have that.

Vromborova polevka... that looks like something my linkee could easily translate without asking the waiter.

Anyway, as I often say, I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin. But spring break looms, and I will break out of Madison before long. Where am I going? You'll have to wait for the photographs, and I will let you guess. But it won't be Boston, and it won't be the Sahara Desert, and it won't be a forest in Poland, and it won't be India or Scotland or Montauk, Long Island. And there won't be any squid ink bubbles, I don't think.