The intriguing shape of the betting average graph.

Link.

IN THE COMMENTS: We all get together and recognize that the "intriguing shape" is a dinosaur. Wince digs up the precisely relevant Monty Python clip:

"I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does."

I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an
impersonation of Hitler

I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) November 10, 2021

Not much fun in Stalingrad, no...

My Twitter feed serves up a strange run of male humor.

Suddenly, I get this:

Links: 1, 2, 3. 

I know Crosby's only passing something else along, and it's from an account that presents a female identity, but I'm counting that as Crosby's humor, replete with the casualness of masturbation and second-hand jokes.

Pick your favorite male humor style:

1

2

3

 

pollcode.com free polls

2 questions of balance: 1. Does Amy Coney Barrett weigh as much as a duck, and 2. Is Facebook applying its anti-violence policy equally to conservatives and liberals?

Regular readers know I'm not a fan of the Babylon Bee website. I don't think it's original or sophisticated enough, but I very much want the big social media platforms to apply their various content-related policies with neutrality as to viewpoint. They ought to test any censorship of the right by asking whether if the equivalent material were presented by the left, they'd do the same thing. 

I'm reading a Fox News article about Facebook's decision to censor a Babylon Bee piece titled "Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch." The fictional quote from Hirono is: "Oh, she's a witch alright, just look at her! Just look at the way she's dressed and how she's so much prettier and smarter than us! She's in league with Beelzebub himself, I just know it! We must burn her!" And: "In addition to being a Senator, I am also quite wise in the ways of science. Everyone knows witches burn because they are made of wood. I think I read that somewhere. Wood floats, and so do ducks-- so logically, if Amy Coney Barrett weighs as much as this duck I found in the reflection pool outside, she is a witch and must be burned.'" 

The threat of burning and the verbal image of burning a human being — a specific, famous person — is violent. It's certainly not a true threat, because witch burning is a familiar trope in American discourse and because, if somehow we're confused about whether literal witch burning is a possibility, we can be confident that Barrett weighs significantly more than a duck.

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweets: "So after a manual review, Facebook says they stand by their decision to pull down this article and demonetize our page... They say this article 'incites violence.' It's literally a regurgitated joke from a Monty Python movie! In what universe does a fictional quote as part of an obvious joke constitute a genuine incitement to violence? How does context not come into play here? They're asking us to edit the article and not speak publicly about internal content reviews. Oops, did I just tweet this?" 

I'm not impressed by the "regurgitated Monty Python" argument. Not everyone knows the movie. I saw it long ago but didn't remember this part, which actually isn't a good reference point if the aim is to make Hirono look stupid and wrong. Watch:

There, you see that the character who proposes the duck-weight test is attempting to devise a method of convincing the mob that the woman is not a witch. So the Bee lacks originality — cutting and pasting text from a movie script — and it isn't even very good at selecting what text to use.

But Facebook doesn't have a policy against unoriginality, inapt quoting, and lame humor. Facebook teems with that stuff. The question is whether equivalent violent language — with reference to a real person — is censored the same way when it is posted by non-conservatives. I don't know the answer, but if Dillon wants to make an argument that works on me, he needs to point to similar things from the other side that Facebook has not targeted.

Womansplaining mansplaining.

In "She Explains ‘Mansplaining’ With Help From 17th-Century Art/In her new book 'Men to Avoid in Art and Life,' Nicole Tersigni harnesses her skill with a Twitter meme to illuminate the experience of women harassed by concern trolls, 'sexperts' and more" by Alisha Haridasani Gupta (NYT).

Here's Tersigni's Twitter feed, but it's not entirely examples of the meme explained and explained in the article. Here are 2 examples:

"there probably just weren't any qualified women for the job" pic.twitter.com/RwHIEDbc7u

— nicole tersigni (@nicsigni) May 7, 2019

From the article:

“The mansplainer explains things in a condescending way,” Tersigni said. “Their thoughts are always unsolicited. Nobody is asking for them. One of my favorite jokes that I used in the thread and also in the book for the mansplainer is, ‘Let me explain your lived experience.’”

It's a nice social-media phenomenon that led quickly to the sale of a book, so congratulations to Tersigni. But she started her project last May. The idea of putting comic captions on old paintings certainly isn't her invention. It's the mainstay of the subreddit r/trippinthroughtime, which has 3.5 million followers and has been around since 2013. And the repurposing of old art for modern comic purposes was the method of the animation in in Monty Python (1969 to 1974):

Fame.

Nice moment at the theatre in Innsbruck last night...

Just before I went on, I asked a stage manager " Will this audience know me better from Monty Python or Fawlty Towers ? "

He replied "I don't know. I've never heard of you "

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) September 8, 2019

Cleese doubles down.

I think it's legitimate to prefer one culture to another

For example, I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation.

Will this will be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them - on someone else's behalf, naturally https://t.co/4WbZDFjs3o

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 30, 2019

"John Cleese was hit with a deluge of criticism online after accusing London of not being an 'English city any more.'"

The Evening Standard reports.

I read that after seeing on Twitter that "John Cleese" was trending.

*See’s John Cleese trending*

Me: please don’t be dead...

*Clicks*

Bollocks, he’s said something stupid. pic.twitter.com/T4YfW8h8Q2

— 𝒮𝒾𝓂𝒾𝓃𝓉𝒽𝒶 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓉𝒾𝓅𝓅𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝑒𝓇𝓇🚫𝓇 (@evilneedscandy) May 29, 2019

"After months of trying to move the political needle in favor of Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, American far-right activists..."

"... threw their weight behind a hacking attack against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, hoping to cast doubt on an election that is pivotal to France and the wider world," according to the NYT.

Who are these weighty American righties and what are they doing with the hacking attack? The NYT says "American far-right groups" are "promoting the breach online." The NYT has articles about the hacking, but I guess these articles don't count as "promoting" it, so what are the "groups" doing other than repeating the news that Macron got hacked?

“It’s the anti-globalists trying to go global,” said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow of the digital forensics research lab at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, who has studied the far right’s recent efforts against Mr. Macron and others in France. “There’s a feeling of trying to export the revolution.”

So they got Nimmo who's at a think tank, and he reports "a feeling."

[W]ithin hours after the hacked documents were made public, the hashtag #MacronLeaks began trending worldwide, aided by online far-right activists in the United States who have been trying to sway the French vote in favor of Ms. Le Pen.

I still don't understand how this is anything more than passing on the news story that there was a hack. The NYT and all the major media are doing that too.

Jack Posobiec, a journalist with the far-right news outlet The Rebel, was the first to use the hashtag with a link to the hacked documents online, which was then shared more widely by WikiLeaks....

So one person showed where to find the documents. 

While there is no evidence that the recent hack against Mr. Macron’s campaign was organized by this loosely connected group of extremist campaigners...

What loosely connected group? Does that refer to something earlier in the article? The sentence continues

... the American activists...

Who?

... have been regularly gathering on sites like 4Chan and Discord, which was previously used to coordinate support for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

The name of websites where people communicate seems to stand in for details identifying the "activist" "groups" the article is talking about.

One popular tactic, according to experts, has been so-called Twitter raids, or efforts to hijack trending hashtag and topics on the social media site and inject far-right and anti-Macron propaganda.

That sounds nefarious — raids! inject! — but what does that say other than that social media exists and works in a certain way?

A week before the second round of the French election, for instance, online activists, many from the United States and other English-speaking countries, flooded Twitter with coordinated anti-Macron memes — online satirical photos with often-biting captions — carrying hashtags like #elysee2017 that were linked to the campaign. That included portraying him as a 21st-century equivalent of Marie Antoinette, the out-of-touch last queen of France, and other memes linked him to false allegations of an extramarital affair.

They used satire!  Wait... was it... The Piranha Brothers?!



ADDED: The "loosely connected group" just doesn't even seem to be a group at all. I can't see how it's anything more than the way social media operates to facilitate reading and writing. It's just free speech. I read this as the NYT agonizing over how MSM isn't filtering everything these days, and yet here it is, demonstrating how badly it filters. I'm giving this post my "fake news" tag. That just means the subject of "fake news" is an issue, not that I'm saying the NYT published a fake news article.

Do you think this NYT article should be called fake news?

Yes. Because it is fake news.

Yes. Because it's fake enough that the NYT deserves to be taunted with the aggravating pejorative.

No. Because it follows the norms of ethical journalism.

No. Because "fake news" is too strong a term. Criticize the article, but don't name-call.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

"As a trader in this village it's hard enough to earn a living without a prat like this sticking his fat nose where it['s] not wanted."

"You know who you are, u prat."

That made me look up "prat." It's English slang, going back to the 1500s, meaning "a buttock." Later, it came to mean both buttocks, i.e., a "bottom." (Source: OED.)

"Why, she's getting groggy on her pins, and if you don't pipe rumbo, she'll go prat over nut." That's from 1846. 

By 1955, it was slang for "An idiot, a fool; an ineffectual or contemptible person." Joe Orton used it in 1964 in "Entertaining Mr Sloane": "Go on, you superannuated old prat!"

I must say that before looking it up, I pictured it as a fish. I was thinking: sprat.

ADDED: This planted it in my head that Brits insult each other with fish:



IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula said: "I'm surprised Althouse din't also link o this Monty Python fish skit:"



The answer (to quell your surprise (I'm always alarmed at what surprises people around here)) is that — although I've had the DVD on my shelf for years — I've never gotten very far into "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life." There's only so much of this sort of foolery I can take in one sitting. A half hour is best for comedy. In the early days of movies, that was well understood. For example, this half hour of Chaplin from 1918:



That's all you need and all you want.

"BRITISH LOSE RIGHT TO CLAIM THAT AMERICANS ARE DUMBER."

Humor in The New Yorker... which also came up with this "silly walks" new cover by Barry Blitt:

Whither "the man in the street" and "John Q. Public"?

The other day, talking to Meade, I made the stray observation: "Nobody says 'the man in the street' anymore."

It was a common colloquialism in news reports years ago. It's hard to take note of when something stops getting said. Decades could pass before you notice that something has disappeared from the language. Maybe the death of "the man in the street" began in the 1970s, with the success of the women's movement, as it became less and less possible for mainstream folks to convince themselves that "man" includes woman. Perhaps there was a transitional period in which reporters — perhaps literally in the street with their microphones seeking random comments from passersby — said "the man — or woman — in the street," before that got old and sounded corny and then nobody ever said it again.

Yesterday, Meade and I were watching "Jeopardy!" It's "College Championship" time and all the players are college students. The board full of answers in need of questions is stocked with things that younger people know — pop singers, movie superheroes, school-level math, history, and science and so forth. The kids buzz in and get many questions right. But yesterday, they had an answer that drew absolutely vacant stares and even puzzlement when Alex Trebek revealed the question. The answer was: The middle initial of John Public. The question: What is Q? I laughed a lot, because I could see that from the kids' perspective, that was just some weird nonsense.

Nobody says "John Q. Public" anymore. Like "man in the street," the term embodies the general  public in a single person. This time, that person has a name, John Q. Public. I'm going to assume, it's gone away because we won't accept the idea that the public can be personified as a male, and that also means the whole idea of the general public as one person just doesn't work anymore. If there was ever a period when people adapted to changing times by saying, cutesily,  "John Q. — and Jane Q. — Public," I missed it.

Now, it just seems goofy, I suppose, to people who don't remember the common usage, to hear that John Public has a middle initial and it's Q. What's the Q for? From the OED:

1937   N. & Q. 6 Mar. 177/2   ‘John Citizen’..is not so frequent in American usage as ‘John Q. Public’... It is probably a play on the name of an early president, John Q(uincy) Adams.

I think it's more like Jesus H. Christ. An initial just seems funny. And if you want funny, there's no funnier letter than Q.

As for Jesus H. Christ, well, what's that about? Hilariously, there's a Wikipedia entry for Jesus H. Christ — which, you may realize, is "a vulgarism" that "is not used in the context of Christian worship." Mark Twain referred to it in his autobiography as typical of "the common swearers of the region," so the usage goes way back. Some people attribute it to "the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus (Ἰησοῦς)... transliterated iota-eta-sigma, which can look like IHS." There's also an idea that the H is for Harold — from mishearing "hallowed be thy name" the Lord's Prayer as Harold be thy name.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said "Monty Python had man in the street segments":

"A team of archaeologists confirmed Monday that ancient remains found under a parking lot belong to long-lost King Richard III..."

"The verification came after scientific tests were used to match DNA samples taken from Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, a direct descendent of Anne of York, Richard’s elder sister."

Richard III supporters such as Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and member of the Richard III Society, were driven to find the lost king’s remains by a desire to reopen the debate over his place in history....

“I think the discovery brought the real Richard into sharp focus,” Langley said. “People are realizing that a lot of what they thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building.”

Why does finding the body have anything to do with the historical project of finding out what really happened in the past? There's something in the human psyche that makes us care about an ancient controversy because we are confronted with the man's bones. But there is also some relevant evidence:

Trauma analysis of the skeleton found 10 battle wounds, eight on the skull and two on the body, which were inflicted around the time of death, according to Jo Appleby, project osteologist of the University of Leicester. Many of the wounds provided evidence of “post-mortem humiliation injuries,” exacted on Richard III after death by his adversaries.

It looked a little something like this:



Warning: That was propaganda. And Class A scenery chewing.

By the way: As I was setting up that clip for the embed, Meade came over and said: "From just the audio, I couldn't tell if that was Laurence Olivier or a Monty Python parody."

ADDED: There's a Richard III ward in the Hospital for Overacting:

"The tears coursed down her cheeks — not freely, however..."

"... for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."

That's the sentence from "The Great Gatsby" today, in the "Gatsby" project.

Tears coursed. The subject and the predicate are right up there at the outset. No teasing about where the foundation of this sentence is. Course is a strange verb for ran. There are reasons to choose the odder word. Course, for example, is more woody, less tinny than ran. The tears coursed, but not freely, because they got stuck on the woman's mascaraed eyelashes. It's thickly applied black mascara. We know it's thickly applied, because it's the excess blobs of mascara that give the impression of beads, and inky means black. So the tears got stuck on the blobs and became a coagulated black liquid, slowed down, but still, on each cheek, a little river, a rivulet.

"Althouse, 'embarrassed' by flashing her... 'its'?"

Observes EDH... with an apt clip.

"Palin Rejects 'Seventh Python' Claim in Court Case."

That's Michael Palin... testifying in a case about whether the producer of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" deserves a share of the profits from "Spamalot," the Broadway show based on the movie.

Of [Mark] Forstater, Palin said: "He was not the creator of the film. The film had been created by the Python team entirely. Mark was not part of our team."...

[Eric] Idle and [Terry] Jones, who sat at the back of the small, modern courtroom in central London, occasionally chuckled at what was being said, but mostly Idle had his eyes closed and Jones could not resist a yawn.

How do you know he couldn't resist?

"President Obama on Monday unveiled a $3.8 trillion spending plan that seeks to pump billions of dollars into the economy while raising taxes on the rich..."

"... to tame a soaring national debt now projected to grow significantly faster than previously forecast."

President Obama, the debt-tamer.

Deadline Hollywood summarizes the movie and TV history of men dressed as women...

On the occasion of the new TV show "Work It" (which we talked about yesterday):

While it may have deeper implications today than it did decades ago, men dressing like women is one of the oldest forms of comedy. It is at the heart of one of the best feature comedies ever made, Some Like It Hot, as well as several other classic comedy films, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Birdcage, and it has had a presence on TV, most notably with the 1980 series Bosom Buddies starring Tom Hanks, and Saturday Night Live where male cast members regularly impersonate female celebrities. And then there is the British school of comedy with Monty Python and Benny Hill. ABC’s president Paul Lee brought up his heritage when explaining his decision to pick up Work It to critics at the summer TCA press tour. “I’m a Brit, it is in my contract that I have to do one cross-dressing show a year,” he said. “I was brought up on Monty Python. What can I do?” As a fellow European who also grew up with Monty Python and Benny Hill, I can actually relate to that...."

I can see the Brit excuse, but it's really awful, if you're going to indulge in argument by listmaking like that, to leave out the most prominent — in more ways than one — cross-dresser in the history of television, the man who was called Mr. Television, Milton Berle.

Here's a great clip of Berle in drag — in a guest spot on Lucille Ball's show.  (If you've only got 2 seconds to spare, click here.)



By the way, what a concentration of comic acting in that 5-minute clip, from everybody involved, including Desi Arnaz, who, if he showed up on TV today, would probably elicit criticism from some dignity-protecting group that doesn't care whether or not comedy has room to breathe.

Stanley Fish finds "a unity" to Sarah Palin book "America by Heart," but "it is not one Palin proclaims or works out discursively."

NYT readers will have their Sarah Palin processed through the Mind of Fish:

Rather, the unity is conveyed by the quotations that carry the argument, long (sometimes two-page) quotations from an impressive variety of authors, quotations that are strong in isolation and even stronger when they are laid next to one another. The book is really an anthology. The author does not present herself as controlling or magisterial; she gives her authorities space and then she gets out of the way. Her performance mimes the book’s lesson: rather than acting as a central authority, she lets individual voices speak for themselves. Humility is not something Palin is usually credited with, but here she enacts it by yielding the stage as others proclaims the truths she wants us to carry away.

Sarah Palin is doing something that is, perhaps, pure genius, and it takes the brilliant professor to say what she is doing so that the ideas are apparent even to New York Times readers, who are well-defended against the notion that Palin is anything but stupid. Even slapped in the face by Fish...



... they resist. I'll be the professor translating the diverse items into a unity for your easy consumption: NOOOOOOOOO! Favorite way of saying "no": surely, the book was actually written by Bill Ayers some ghostwriter.

"He's clearly made a terrible mistake. It was the endorsement of Sarah Palin he was after — not that of Michael Palin."

"I'm surprised that a former U.S. Attorney isn't aware of his copyright infringement when he uses our material without permission."