Watching other people play video games has gotten very popular.

"For some Boomers, that may recall comedian Brian Regan’s line about televised fishing shows: 'I’m not even fishing, I’m watching fishing! I’m too lazy to fish!'"

Yet Twitch’s success demonstrates that the thrill is real. And while I tend to think media reporters overstate the importance of generations... there’s something generational going on here....

What is Twitch? Twitch is the modern, monetized version of an experience now decades-old. Twitch is watching friends play Mario Kart at a sleepover. Twitch is watching your cousin—the only familial owner of that precious N64—play Zelda. It’s losing early at Halo or Goldeneye and having to sit out; it’s watching your sister navigate the world she built in Minecraft.

"I like the guy… off in his human world, gesticulating about things un-dog."

Say I, commenting at Dogging Meade.

Elsewhere, there, I said this: "Zipper is surly. He is uncaring. Not Zipper the dog, of course. He's great. Zipper the dolphin!"

"If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?"

Wrote E.B. White, quoted in "A Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States" (PDF). The authors of that article went to a touching amount of trouble to get the correct pronunciation of the most-likely-to-be-mispronounced names of Supreme Court cases.

To be sure, this is an inexact process, not only because of the sheer passage of time, but also because some litigants may not have pronounced their own names in the way native speakers, or others, might deem correct. Where we have come across that information, we have followed the choice of the litigant. In some cases, pronunciations may even change during the course of litigation. Rumsfeld v. Padilla is an example. Two litigants with the same last name may also elect to pronounce it differently.

Here's the website collecting the pronunciations.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.

Life with dolphins.

American pop culture has its helpful friend dolphin, Flipper...



That's the delusion, built on the accidental smile.

"To be fair, they should have also had a bad dolphin: Zipper!"

But really, the dolphin is neither "ever so kind and gentle" (Flipper) or "surly" and "uncaring" (Zipper). It has its own ways.

Killer whales — like the one that killed Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld — are dolphins (the largest dolphins).

***

In starting to write this post, after that last one, my idea was to develop the theme of dolphin rape, but I got grossed out by many YouTube videos showing people at dolphin shows being set up — legs spread — to receive a dolphin, who — not understanding the lines human beings draw with respect to bodily interactions — leaps up and performs according to its own standards.

And, amongst dolphins, the standard is what we would classify as rape — gang rape:

In order to coerce the reluctant females, males form groups of two or three – often remaining together in their search for sexual gratification for well over a decade. When they find a suitable female they literally force her to mate with one or more of the group, and have even been known to herd their unwilling consorts for months at a time, basically using them as their personal sex-slaves.

Although dolphins are not alone in the animal world of gang-rapists, research suggests they’ve the perfected the art to a degree unseen in any other species, and it seems they don’t limit their advances to their female partners, either: there are several reports claiming divers and swimmers have also been accosted.

Studies would suggest the behaviour is likely to be undertaken for reasons of pleasure as much as reproduction, as dolphins are known to enjoy sexual activity in cases when reproduction would be physically impossible

In real life, the dolphin is more Zipper than Flipper. Leave him to the ocean where he can do the things he wants to do — unless you think he's so smart he can be convinced to learn principles of human morality. I would be interested in hearing the dolphin's perspective. Perhaps there is complex dolphin reasoning about the sexual slavery of the female, but I have no interest in considering adopting it for human society.

Presumably, a dolphin who managed to learn our morality would find it repugnant — and he would argue for his position with reasons that would outrage us. Maybe if that learned dolphin were confined to an aquarium — where, like a human prisoner in solitary confinement with nothing to do but read — he might take advantage of his knowledge to create some structure of asceticism around his deprivation. Then it wouldn't be so painful. I'll leave it to you to imagine how that analogy works from the perspective of a human woman who had to live in a society controlled by dolphins.

"The spelling mantra "i before e except after c" is no longer worth teaching, according to the government."

"Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren."

Okay. Responses:

1. Rules with exceptions may frustrate and annoy the young child:



2. The government doesn't want children to think about rules as things that have exceptions.

Little League.

That's the comedian Brian Regan, with some YouTubish animation by some guy.

By the way, why do adults teach children to be assholes? Is there some purpose to that? Maybe!