"You can't beat something with nothing," the wingless plane, and the deleterious effects of athletic awards for girls.

I was researching the saying "You can't beat something with nothing" — I wanted to critique the Biden campaign strategy — and I came up with this wonderful page from the New York Times archive.

It's page 17, from November 10, 1934, just after the Democrats' massive victory in the midterm elections:

In the upper right corner, you see Will Rogers, saying that "the Republicans lost because they had nothing to offer but criticism" — "No plan, denounce, but don't suggest." But Will Rogers didn't invent "You can't beat something with nothing." Even back then, it was an "old saying."

X is bad and we're not X ≠ a winning strategy.

The amazing tombstone of Jules Verne.

CC BY-SA 2.0

I don't think I've ever seen that before. I encountered it as I was working on some photographs I took last month at Hicks Cemetery in Perrysville, Indiana. I had a question that was difficult to phrase, and I only arrived at Jules Verne's tombstone because of the awkwardness of my search terms. I still don't know the answer to my question, which is whether there is a conventional artistic idea of half carving a stone for someone who died young. That is, the stone is made to look incompletely carved as a way to express the idea of a life not fully lived. On one side it resembles rough stone. I don't have an appropriate photograph to show you of that stone, but here is one of the photographs I was working on when I thought of that question.



As for Jules Verne's grave:

Two years after his death a sculpture entitled “Vers l’Immortalité et l’Eternelle Jeunesse” (“Towards Immortality and Eternal Youth”) was erected atop his marker. Designed by sculptor Albert Roze, and using the actual death mask of the writer, the statue depicts the shrouded figure of Jules Verne breaking his own tombstone and emerging from the grave.

The grave is in the Cimetière de la Madeleine in Amiens, France. The link goes to Google Maps, where the street view will not take you onto the paths inside the cemetery. The same is true of the Hicks Cemetery. You can go right up to the gate, but you can't "walk" around inside.

Trump and Macron will dine "at Le Jules Verne, the elite, blue-lobster-serving restaurant... something of a surprise, considering Mr. Trump’s fondness for ketchup-doused steak and cheeseburgers rather than gourmet foods."

Sniffs the NYT.

Let's look into the future and read Macron's diary entry:

Recently I took a United States President to dinner. Insensitively, I led him into a gourmet restaurant. Suddenly I saw his face freeze up as he was confronted with dishes like homard bleu and ingredients like tomate and olives noires. I quickly asked him if he wanted to go somewhere else and he anxiously nodded yes and we ate at McDonald's.

Thank you NYT for setting up the opportunity to find something to say about that paragraph so many people have already made fun of — that David Brooks thing:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

As I said yesterday:

I've been meaning to write about that sandwich.

As Warren Zevon famously said: "Enjoy every sandwich."

The trick is to figure out how to enjoy it when a lot of other people have already written about it.

I need an angle.

So thanks, NYT. Thanks for the lob. Thanks for the lobster.

"Are we able to stay at home and explore the meaning of the things around us, at least until the world has gotten a little more 'normal' again? "

"Pierre Bayard, a professor and psychoanalyst in Paris... may provide us with some additional requisite know-how on how to not lose face and even be comfortable with staying at home. In How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel, he dissects the reports of the likes of Marco Polo, Jules Verne, Karl May, on minute details of geographies they had never visited, to tell the reader they were wrong. He exposes the alternative reality they unfolded, but he doesn’t blame them: 'Ill-equipped to defend itself against wild animals, inclement weather or illness, the human body is clearly not made for leaving its usual habitat and even less so for traveling to lands far removed from those where God intended us to live.' And: 'We know from Freud and the works of other psychiatrists who have studied various travelers’ syndromes that traveling a long way from home is not only liable to provoke psychiatric problems: it can also drive you mad.'"

From "Between Everywhere and Nowhere/A little review of travel literature," by Bernd Brunner, which I'm reading mostly because it has something about Paul Theroux — "one of the grand doyens of travel writing... His passion for the foreign appears to have been lost, if only partly so" — whose novel "The Mosquito Coast" I started reading after seeing it likened to a movie I loved ("Captain Fantastic").

But I got interested in Bayard, and added How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel to my Kindle. Love the title, and I'm fascinated by the critique of travel, since I love to read and feel prodded to travel, and reading is so much faster and simpler than traveling.*

I had the vague feeling that I'd blogged about that book before, but it was another book by Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, which I blogged about without reading.

______________________

* You know me, I'm not up for a challenge.

"I apologize if this seems disrespectful, but if Bush is really never rescued, I'd prefer to imagine him as the hero of a Jules Verne novel..."

"... exploring the fantastical landscapes of Hollow Earth, fighting blind cave apes, and saving Theda Bara from the assassin priests of some subterranean cult."

I'd like to see the science fiction movie called "The Karst."

Where are you on the Karst map?

"Have you ever wanted to live inside the retro-futuristic world of a Jules Verne novel?"

"Do you prefer submarine portholes to skyline views?

No. The Chelsea steam-punk loft is the young urban equivalent of some old outsider artist's sculpted grotto in rural Wisconsin. You don't want to live with all this junk. You don't want the upkeep. What would be amusing to visit would be depressing, burdensome, dusty, and creepy to live in.