"Now, it’s easier to become a 'who.' Everyone has at least a thousand hard-core fans. You don’t even have to be that famous to have a dedicated audience."

Said the podcaster Lindsey Weber, quoted in "Who Even Knows What Famous Means These Days? They Do. As viral stars cross into the mainstream, the hosts of the 'Who? Weekly' podcast consider: Is Addison Rae an actual celebrity? Yes. Brittany Broski? Definitely not" (NYT).

The podcast, which started in 2016, is a roundup of developments for notable “whos” — and for teasing out who is a “who.” Recent episodes have weighed the celebrity of the actor Jason Isaacs, who entered the zeitgeist for his awkward commentary on his nudity in “The White Lotus,” and that of the former “America’s Next Top Model” contestant Yaya DaCosta, who addressed modern viewers’ criticism of that reality show. Both are interesting, but nowhere near front-page news....

Fame isn't what it used to be. Fame is a has been. Who's who? Who cares? When I think of a "who," I think of Cindy-Lou Who, and, in that light, and considering present-day fame, here's something I saw on TikTok yesterday:

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not."

Wrote Dr. Seuss, in "The Lorax," quoted by Luigi Mangione at Goodreads.

Quoted in "Man Arrested After C.E.O. Killing Showed Interest on Social Media in Self-Improvement/Figures like Andrew Huberman, Tim Urban and the Unabomber feature in posts shared by accounts that appear to belong to the man arrested on Monday" (NYT).

Mangione is the "Man Arrested."

Is she even asking for a box?

Trump has this at Truth Social:

No boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed to stand on during my upcoming debate with Comrade Kamala Harris. We had this out previously with former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he was in a debate, and he was not allowed a “lift.” It would be a form of cheating, and the Democrats cheat enough. “You are who you are,” it was determined!

Easy for him, the taller one, to say. How quickly you perceive the principle in formal equality when you are the one who comes out ahead and when you are a member of the group that, systematically, gets the real-world benefit.

But though I am ready to make arguments in favor of lining the heads up for television viewing, I'm not seeing that her people are asking for that. 

Why not try it?

Would you debate him on a box?
Would you debate with him on Fox?
Not on a box. And not on Fox.
Not in a house. Not with a mouse.
Not here or there.
Not anywhere.

And check out this art project:

The classic "Fear and" title is "Fear and Loathing," but somehow, in these days of loathing, we've got "Fear and Joy."

I'm so skeptical... as I'm reading "Fear and Joy in Chicago/The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair" by Fintan O'Toole (NYRB).

[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....

Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:

[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...

They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude." 

Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

I add my favorite blog tag, "big and small." 

"Sounds like schools assume all families have a lot of spare cash."

Says one commenter, at "Why is it always spirit week? Schools keep adding theme days, and parents can’t keep up" (WaPo).

From the article: "Some themes are simple enough (wear blue for autism awareness, wear pink to stand against bullying), but others ('Book Character Day,' 'Favorite Animal Day,' 'Adam Sandler Day') are far more likely to involve advanced crafting skills or a panicked 9 p.m. Target run. 'Some of it is just wildly specific: ‘Wear a Dr. Seuss hat.’ Who has that just lying around? "Crazy Sock Day." Socks are expensive!; says... a single mother.... 'I think I spend a good $200 on spirit days every year.'"

"[I]t’s almost awe-inspiring how little actually happens. In the first episode, Carrie learns, via YouTube, how to poach an egg."

"In the second, Miranda loses her phone on the beach. In the third, Carrie pretends she has COVID to get out of recording her own audiobook. The stories are breathtakingly small, as though the original show has been shrunk down into a vivid maquette. A substantial portion of the fifth episode is dedicated to Charlotte and Harry dressing up as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans for Halloween and getting frustrated that no one gets the reference...."

Writes Sophie Gilbert in "The Ghost of a Once Era-Defining Show/In its second season, And Just Like That seems constrained by its fear of being conventional" (The Atlantic).

Ooh... just by chance, following my usual blog practice, I seem to have stumbled into a theme day. The theme is: Nothing happens. I haven't used my "blog has a theme today" tag in a long time.

This feels propitious. Things fall in place. Anything falling in place for you? Can you poach an egg? No?! Well, then, pay attention at 0:16 to 0:24 of "Levi eats Green Eggs and Ham Benedict":

"Question: When will we put Dr. Seuss on the twenty?"

That's a question I wrote in this page of the sketchbook I drew when I was in Paris. (It was some time in the 1990s. I forget when. I blogged this page in 2004, the first year of this blog, after St. Exupéry's plane was found in the Mediterranean Sea, 60 years after he crashed and died.)

I loved that France had put an artist on its money, and I felt a little sad that we Americans don't put our artists first. So I must feel elated that we've done it at last. We've put an artist on our money:

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.

"Pepe [Le Pew] was set to appear in a black-and-white Casablanca-like Rick’s Cafe sequence. Pepe, playing a bartender, starts hitting on a woman at the bar..."

"He begins kissing her arm, which she pulls back, then slamming Pepe into the chair next to hers. She then pours her drink on Pepe, and slaps him hard, sending him spinning in a stool, which is then stopped by LeBron James’ hand. James and Bugs Bunny are looking for Lola, and Pepe knows her whereabouts. Pepe then tells the guys that Penelope cat has filed a restraining order against him. James makes a remark in the script that Pepe can’t grab other Tunes without their consent...." 

From "Pepe Le Pew Won’t Be Appearing In Warner Bros’ ‘Space Jam’ Sequel" (Deadline Hollywood). 

The actress, Greice Santo, is unhappy to have her big scene cut: "Even though Pepe is a cartoon character, if anyone was going to slap a sexual harasser like him, Greice wished it would be her. Now... she doesn’t have that power to influence the world through younger generations who’ll be watching Space Jam 2, to let younger girls and younger boys know that Pepe’s behavior is unacceptable."

If I remember the old cartoons correctly, the other cartoon characters always let Pepe know his behavior was unacceptable... though I think that was mainly because they were cats and he was a skunk.

Why isn't there a vibrant anti-pornography movement within the present-day cancel culture?

I wondered. I remember the big anti-pornography movement of the 1980s — and how it was squelched — and I thought it is due for a comeback. We're censoring Dr. Seuss books for minor racial improprieties, but the monumental misogyny problems of pornography are ignored. 

So I looked to see if there were signs of a resurgence of the anti-pornography movement, and I found this (from a few days ago, at Vox): "This week in TikTok: The problem with the 'Cancel Porn' movement/On TikTok, it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion about sex work."

Apparently, there's enough of a new movement that Vox needs to instruct us about what's wrong with it. If there's a resurgence there's also a squelching of the resurgence, off and running. 

Notice that Vox's problem with it is structured as feminism — helping sex workers? — but that's how the squelching of the 1980s movement worked too. It was packaged as feminism. What's different now: There's TikTok, and the activists are teenagers reaching teenagers.

Here's #cancelporn if you want to educate yourself about how this movement is taking off.

ADDED: Here's a Reddit discussion from January: "I'm very worried about the #cancelporn movement on TikTok." The worry expressed is that it will be used "to shame sex workers and generally safe ways of sex work."

Someone there says: "I wouldn't worry too much, the porn industry is one of the largest in the world and there's no chance in hell that a bunch of TikTok cringe artists are going to have any sort of actual impact." 

That roughly corresponds to something I was thinking. You can't pressure porn businesses if they are nothing but porn. It's not like demanding some publishing company take out a book here and there or movie company cancel some of its productions. If the questionable material is only a part of a business, there is leverage to pressure the business. 

So the "Cancel Porn" movement will need a different strategy. What I would expect to see is young people, especially women, staunchly disapproving of people who consume porn and declining to be in a relationship with a porn user. Boycott the users.

AND: From the Vox article (which is written by a woman, Rebecca Jennings):

What is FAIR?

Because I follow the Twitter feed of the erstwhile NYT columnist Bari Weiss, I noticed that there's a new group that calls itself FAIR — The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Here's their video:

 

That's on such a high level of abstraction that it hard to understand what's really going on there. The assumption is that you'll recognize at least some of the names/faces and trust their authority. They seem to be banding together as a correction to the excesses of social-justice activists. But what exactly? Are we to trust them as experts, with details to come later?

I found their website, here, and the front page has that video embedded next to the words "What is FAIR?" So I'm stuck in a loop. "What is FAIR?" is the question I had after watching the video. So I watched it again. As far as I can tell, based on the words spoken, it is a forthright demand for the old-fashioned color-blindness approach to racial justice: There is "one race, the human race."

Given the famous names who've joined together — Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Bari Weiss, etc. — I would expect news coverage of this organization, which seems to have been announced yesterday. But when I did a Google News search, only one thing came up, a NY Post item titled "Booksellers were unprepared for Dr. Seuss ban as sales skyrocket." 

That's not an article about FAIR, just a reference to it at the end of an article about the Seuss crisis:

A Web site has sprung up called BannedSeuss run by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism that says: “Erasing books is insanity. Stand up for our common humanity.”

Here's the BannedSeuss website.  Ah! It has the full text and pictures of "And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (a book, that, I think, is cancelled because of the line "A Chinese man who eats with sticks" and the picture of a man whose eyes are represented by short angled lines when everyone else in the book has eyes represented by dots). 

Back to the NY Post:

"Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down..."

"... into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure...' I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." 

That is the suicide note of Helen Palmer, the first wife of Theodore Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss. Here's her Wikipedia page. She was born in Brooklyn, he was born in Massachusetts, she went to Wellesley, he went to Dartmouth, and they both went to Oxford, where they met. 

She later stated, "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that."...

Press coverage of Dr. Seuss, worn at a slant.

I was reading this Vox piece, "Meltdown over Dr. Seuss/Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in his Read Across America Day statement. All hell broke loose from there," and of course, I could see from the title the piece was massively slanted... 

Oh! Maybe I shouldn't use the word "slant" in the vicinity of the Dr. Seuss dispute. It's the worst word he ever used. Oh, no, it's not cute:

That's from "If I Ran the Zoo," a 1950 book that Dr. Seuss enterprises has just withdrawn from publication.  

Vox writes its article at a slant on a website where everything must be a rant. I'm not staying there long. I won't and I can't. But I noticed this one thing that seemed slightly wacky — a press conference question aimed at poor Jen Psaki:

"Though I may be late, I am willing to admit that I was ignorant to the truth of Dr. Seuss’ writings until recently. I have unknowingly read many of his books to my own children."

"But now that I am better informed, I am committed to advocating for change. Because when we know better, we should do better."  

Writes Maureen Downey (in the Atlanta Journal Constitution). 

So drearily earnest...

She means well. Is she anxious about what else she may be unknowingly doing... such as depriving children of the fun of reading Dr. Seuss or generating morbid fears about strange manifestations of racism or being too subservient about taking instruction from dull people who are oversure of their puritanical notions of racial correctness?

Downey links to what she calls a "fantastic list" of other books to give to children, but it's not just a list. It's an opinionated blog post, "Dr. Seuss was racist. Why are we still reading his books?"

... I pulled out the extensive collection of Dr. Seuss books that I have in my home and re-read them with a critical lens only to find that the themes of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Orientalism are garishly prevalent. I have used Dr. Seuss books in my classroom for the last ten years. I feel disgusted knowing that I not only celebrated these texts, but the life of Theodore Geisel. Dr. Seuss books will no longer have a place in my home. The messages that children absorb through literature will impact their racial beliefs. Without proper support in navigating the harmful messages from books like Dr. Seuss’s, children are likely to transfer what they read to their play and social life....

Go to that link to see the suggestions of books to read in place of particular Dr. Seuss books. The book covers are depicted, so you can get a sense of the kind of drawing that anti-Seussers think could work as a substitute for his highly idiosyncratic work. But these substitutes just have blandly realistic, sentimental illustrations that depict people of color. If you want to replace Dr. Seuss, the first thing you'll need some exciting, inventive drawing! And you've got to have a little edge to the story. It can't be just love is important and nice people are nice.

It will be hard for the WaPo "fact checker" to give 4 Pinocchios to Joe Biden. He has to back off one Pinocchio because... well, why exactly?

Here's Biden repeatedly asserting that "he's traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jingping": 

 

Biden is making a lot of misstatements of fact. The WaPo fact checker, Glenn Kessler, writes:

During his recent town hall on CNN, President Biden made a number of mistaken claims and assertions. He suggested racehorse owners receive tax breaks worth $9 billion, almost enough to pay for free attendance at community college — a claim that left tax experts scratching their heads. He said that the $7.25 minimum wage set in 2009 would be worth $20 if indexed for inflation, a statement that only makes sense if you are measuring from 1968. He wrongly stated that “vast majority” of undocumented immigrants were not Hispanic.

No Pinocchios assigned for any of that. It's all so obviously wrong that maybe it's not worth bothering to investigate. But Kessler's approach in these columns is, I think, to isolate one thing and figure out where it stands on the continuum from utter truth to bald-faced lie. Here, he's chosen the 17,000 with Xi Jingping assertion. 

The first time Kessler heard it, he says, it "seemed like a typical Biden malaprop." See? Biden gets graded on a curve. Unlike Trump, whose misstatements were judged against a stereotype that he's a huge liar, Biden gets the benefit of a presumption that he's always getting words wrong — as though it's some sort of disability, like his stuttering, and we ought to be charitable.

But Biden has repeated the assertion, as you see in the video clip, so the standard charitable allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the Biden brain was hard to use, and the fact checker has to fact-check at least some of the new President's statements. The feast on Trump is over, and the fact-checking enterprise must go on or at least seem to go on.

Here's Kessler:

"My 12-year-old daughter had a sticker on her water bottle with a quote from Dr. Seuss: 'You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.'"

"A classmate told her the sticker was racist because many people can’t choose what they want to do because of structural racism. My daughter peeled off the sticker and threw it away. When she told me about it, I was at a loss. I believe structural racism is real and pernicious, but I also think we should teach children that they have agency. And my daughter and I like the sticker’s message. Help!"

A question asked of a NYT advice columnist. The answer isn't interesting (just something about having a nuanced conversation with the daughter).

Hey, remember when Melania Trump tried to donate some Dr. Seuss books to an elementary school and the librarian rejected them?

[W]e will not be keeping the titles for our collection.... You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature....  Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art. Grace Hwang Lynch’s School Library Journal article, “Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away from Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books,” reports on Katie Ishizuka’s work analyzing the minstrel characteristics and trope nature of Seuss’s characters. Scholar Philip Nel’s new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, further explores and shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and oppression in education and literature.

ADDED: If that Dr. Seuss quote is racist, then isn't just about every graduation speech racist? Aren't kids given racist advice all the time? You can be whatever you want. Is that a good message?

"Mayor Pete blindsides Kamala Harris in California."

Headline at Politico.

The "blindside" isn't anything he said or any startling new policy that brilliantly goes to the left (or to the right) of Kamala.

By the way — complete sidetrack — is it disrespectful to write "Kamala" (without the "Harris")? It seems we're getting awfully close to using just first names for all the candidates — Joe, Bernie, Pete. But do we hold back for the women? And if we do, is that bad for the women? I think we do hold back — though clearly we called Hillary "Hillary" — and that holding back expresses the idea that women are more sensitive and need protection. That perversely reinforces a sense that women are not tough enough to be President. Kamala Harris has the most distinctive first name of the entire group, and she has the most boring, generic last name.

I had to hit the down button 20+ times to get to the end of the Wikipedia list of famous people with the last name Harris. There are a lot of them, but it's actually hard to think of an interesting character with the surname Harris...



There's some risk going with the first name, but the men in the race are on a first-name basis, and haven't we been calling our Presidents by their first names? Oh, maybe not. Trump is Trump (and he used to be "The Donald"). Obama was Obama (and Barack is a very interesting name). I guess we called Carter "Jimmy," but that's not the example to copy.

What about Ike? That's the ultimate presidential nickname, but was that supposed to represent his first name or his last name? I realized I did not know and could not figure it out on the sounds. There's no "k" sound in Dwight or Eisenhower. I had to look it up:

Dwight David Eisenhower was born on October 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas, the third of seven sons. His mother originally named him David Dwight but reversed the two names after his birth to avoid the confusion of having two Davids in the family. All of the boys were called "Ike", such as "Big Ike" (Edgar) and "Little Ike" (Dwight); the nickname was intended as an abbreviation of their last name.

Ha. Like the old Dr. Seuss story...

Have I ever told you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?...
She often wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one fo them Bodkin Van Horn...
And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed
And one Paris Garters/And one Harris Tweed...

Harris Tweed. Harris is interesting as a first name. Can you even think of anyone famous with Harris as a first name?



I've reached a deadend to my sidetrack, so I must proceed to the "blindside" and get out of here. The "blindside" is just that Buttigieg — Pete — is getting support in Kamala's home state California:

Democratic strategist Garry South says the growing buzz about Buttigieg’s success in wedging his way into California’s lucrative fundraising base has shocked many longtime politics watchers in the state.

“I think the amazing thing is that nobody is ceding California to Kamala Harris ... no one is abandoning California to the native daughter — which tells you something,’’ he says. “Why would he come out here and spend four days if he thought she had California locked up?“

Fundraising. Rich people in California. They're just fundraising now, not — like Trump — getting out there in rallies and stirring up crowds. If I were a rich Democrat looking to fund a candidate, I'd be watching Trump — look at the Panama City rally he just blew through in his spare time — and wondering who can match that intense, exciting campaigning?

Are the Democrats even doing rallies? I can't find full-scale rally with Kamala Harris on YouTube (not since her announcement rally from back in January). I see her at a fundraising dinner with the NAACP, but only a little clip, interrupted by an announcer saying that Kamala gave a "fiery campaign speech," but nothing actually fiery. I want to see the equivalent of what Trump repeatedly does, throws himself out there before a big crowd and really inspires them. Here's 2 minutes of Harris before a crowd from a few weeks ago. Where's a full-scale and recent campaign event? Why isn't this material out there? Is it being withheld?

Back at the Political "blindside" article:

Buttigieg’s May fundraising schedule includes four events alone Thursday in the L.A. area, including at the home of Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Brad Falchuk. Co-hosts include actor Bradley Whitford and John Gile, who has been in LGBT leadership on the Democratic National Committee and served on the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns.

“[Buttigieg] does interest me, because he’s so multifaceted,’’ says Melissa Rivers — the former star of the cult favorite show “Fashion Police” and Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” with her mother, the late Joan Rivers.

A Joe Biden supporter, Rivers notes that many of her Hollywood friends who have long expected to back Harris are feeling torn these days over their growing attraction to the newcomer mayor.

“It’s going to be very hard. If you don’t like that he’s gay, you’ll like that he’s a military guy,’’ says Rivers, who says she’s been deluged with fundraising invites. “If you don’t like that he’s a military guy, you’re going to like that he’s a mayor. It backs people into a corner because there’s nothing to attack him on.’’

Well, Politico got Melissa Rivers to chatter, but she's a Joe Biden supporter. What's she up to?



ADDED: Speaking of nicknames:

Looks to me like it’s going to be SleepyCreepy Joe over Crazy Bernie. Everyone else is fading fast!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2019

The man in the middle.

"It was an aggressive display of physicality. They were rambunctious and trying to instigate a conflict. We were wondering where their chaperones were. He was really trying to defuse the situation."

Said Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project, quoted in "'It was getting ugly': Native American drummer speaks on the MAGA-hat-wearing teens who surrounded him" (WaPo).

I am touched by the charity of "They were rambunctious."

But I'm only guessing at what the video sounds like. I cannot bring myself to play it.

[A] Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity urging them to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.

Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, with one who stood about a foot from the drummer’s face also wearing a relentless smirk.

Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle....

The phrase "man in the middle" resonates with me. I will never forget the day — at the rambunctious Wisconsin protests — when Meade encountered The Man in the Middle:

[O]ne man — who did not agree with the protesters — decided he would occupy the central spot. To the consternation of the others, he invited people to come talk to him one-on-one....

I started to imagine Wisconsinites coming back to the building every day, talking about everything, on and on, indefinitely into the future. That man who decided to hold dialogues in the center of the rotunda is a courageous man. But it isn't that hard to be as courageous as he was. In the long run, it's easier to do that than to spend your life intimidated and repressed. That man was showing us how to be free. He was there today, but you — and you and you! — could be there tomorrow, standing your ground, inviting people to talk to you, listening and going back and forth, for the sheer demonstration of the power of human dialogue and the preservation of freedom.

Video at the link.

Looking for posts about that man in the middle, I see that in 2013 I wrote about the phrase "man in the middle" as it appears in "Atlas Shrugged." Ayn Rand wrote:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

I said:

Is this cranking you up? It doesn't work on me. I think moderation is a virtue, but in this imagery, virtue is blood, evil is poison, and moderation is a tube. You're supposed to feel this as a flashy display of reason, but it's full of emotional bluster and heavily reliant on metaphor. I'm being asked to regard myself as a rubber tube. No....

I'm not accepting this picture of life in terms of people with good blood and people with bad blood and everyone else as a bunch of tubes conducting a big old transfusion that's just got to stop....

I was talking about that Ayn Rand passage because Ted Cruz read it — along with "Green Eggs and Ham" — out loud while filibustering in the Senate. The phrase "the man in the middle" grabbed me, and I wrote:

"Man in the middle" is a phrase that feels like a call to action, because it's a phrase Meade and I have used when we talk about a man we saw as a hero for sitting down in the middle of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, in a crowd of sign-carrying, noisy partisan protesters, inviting them to speak, one-on-one, with someone who was not in agreement with the crowd....

Talking, indefinitely into the future... in the middle of a government building. That's what Ted Cruz is doing, but not in the moderate, surely-we-all-can-get-along mode. He's on one side, and he's reviling anyone in the middle. He's reading from Ayn Rand, saying that the moderate is evil, because the moderate is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. Oh? But would you like it it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? Would you like it in a house? Would you like it with a mouse?

UPDATE: I still haven't watched the video, but I have watched Scott Adams's strong apology for portraying the Catholic schoolboys in a negative light, and Adams describes the extended video in detail. So check out my new post, which includes quotes from Adams's description.

"Forego"/"forgo."

Oh, come on! Who doesn't know the "forego"/"forgo" distinction?!

I'm reading this humor piece in The New Yorker — "Dr. Seuss’s Freelance Rhymes and Woes" by Jeremy Nguyen — and I'm having a pretty humorless reaction to the last of 6 reinvented Dr. Seuss book covers:



The Grammarist explains:

The original definition of forego is to go before. This definition is easy to remember because both forego and before have the syllable fore, with an e. To forgo, meanwhile, is to do without (something) or to pass up voluntarily. But forgo has so completely encroached on forego's territory that the latter’s older sense is now essentially lost (outside legal contexts and the phrase foregone conclusion—see below), and forgo now bears the secondary definition to go before.

In short, the foregone conclusion is don't write "forego."

I remember when The New Yorker was punctilious about word editing.

Because now you're having nightmares?

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."

A quote from — of all people — Dr. Seuss. That's the third-most-like quote at Goodreads on the topic about which people have registered the most "likes" — love.

I got there this morning because I was having a conversation in which I needed to remember the quote, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

I was surprised to see who the quote was from because I thought it was something that Rush Limbaugh says a lot. But why was I surprised? I blogged about that quote just 4 years ago. It's a quote about remembering and forgetting, and I keep remembering the quote and forgetting who said it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill Peschel said:

Maya Angelou never said it. She didn't even improve upon an existing quote.

It was really said by a Mormon official, Carl W. Buehner, in 1971: "They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel."

There's no evidence Angelou said anything like this.

This commonly happens with quotes. There's even been cases where a phrase as simple as "Elementary, my dear Watson," the seed for which was planted in the original books, improved by William Gillette in his "Sherlock Holmes" play, but the actual direct quote came from, of all people, P.G. Wodehouse in one of his school stories.

In short, never trust quotes from Goodreads or BrainyQuotes.

Bill provides a link to Quote Investigator, which concludes:

In conclusion, based on current evidence QI suggests that Carl W. Buehner can be credited with this adage. Many people have used the saying without ascription in the years after 1971. The attribution to Maya Angelou is unsupported at this time.

GoodReads is a big website. It often comes up first or close to first when I google something (as I did before writing this post). And here's a misattributed quote that ranks #1 for quotes on the #1 topic! Mental note never to trust GoodReads.

I wonder if Dr. Seuss said "You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams," which I blogged because I thought it was so dumb (yet ranked so high).

It's dumb for at least 2 reasons, one of which is indicated by my post title: Your real life could be better than your dreams because you are having bad dreams, and it's possible that your lover is giving you nightmares that are worse than what is actually a bad relationship. The other reason is that the insomnia is a problem that diminishes the quality of your life. It's much better to get a good night's sleep and be in good condition to enjoy the next day with your loved one. It's one thing to stay up late (or even all night) because you're having a great time with someone — perhaps having sex for hours while telling each other the story of your life thus far — but that's not a sustainable love. You need your sleep. And who goes to sleep because they're just eager to dream? The motivation to sleep is that you are tired and you care about feeling good the next day!

Okay, now that I know not to trust Goodreads, I'm checking whether Dr. Seuss is responsible for the idiocy the Goodreads crowds liked so much. Ah! According to this discussion at Wikiquote, there's no evidence that this quote came from Dr. Seuss. Seuss innocent. Goodreads guilty.

Barack Obama was "the ‘good parent’ at home... The responsible parent, the one who told you to eat your carrots and go to bed on time."

"And now we have the other parent. We thought it’d feel fun — maybe it feels fun for now because we can eat candy all day and stay up late and not follow the rules."

Said Michelle Obama.

I don't really understand the idea of the "good parent"/"bad parent." In a stereotypical traditional family, you might have one parent who's softer and more empathetic and the other who's more about strict enforcement of the rules, but aren't both responsible? If not, did Michelle just unwittingly take a shot at mothers and even, obliquely, at the Democratic Party (the "mommy party")? And Michelle's idea of the rule-enforcing parent sounds more like the mother, who's generally the one concerned with getting you to eat your vegetables (and, indeed, Michelle Obama made getting kids to eat vegetables her cause). But usually it's the father who gets portrayed as the "bad cop" in a "good cop"/"bad cop" routine that might describe some families of the wait-'til-your-father gets home kind.

So I don't know what kind of family she's envisioning — or even if she's presenting her husband as the mother or the father.

What she's talking about seems more like the contrast between any parent and some weird interloper like the Cat in the Hat:



And don't get me started on Hillary Clinton and carrots....

Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself!...