"Can you do me a favor? Can you stop scattering your dearly departed’s ashes all over my favorite golf course?"

"I want to play Pebble Beach, not your grandpa. For that matter, stop dumping your meemaw’s sandy 'cremains' on Disneyland rides. Last year, somebody on Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance pulled the stunt, forcing the ride’s shutdown for cleaning. What are parents in the next car supposed to tell the kids when a cloud of human ash hits them in the face? Luke, that is not your father...."

From "Please. Stop. Spreading. Human. Ash. In. Public. With a huge rise in cremation rates, a sentimental ritual is turning into a gritty scourge" (WaPo)(free-access link, because it's full of amusing/horrible details).

Can we also stop saying "cremains"? I see the author put the term in scare quotes and the word "ash" is in the headline. I object to "cremains." The word, according to the OED, only dates back to 1950, and it seems to have been concocted like the name of a snack food. For example, Funyuns = fun + onions. Wouldn't it be more respectful to say "ashes"? Or do we think that "ashes" suggests the soft silky material left after a wood fire and thus has a whiff of false advertising?

"Under her leadership articles have included 'How Feminism can Guide Climate Change by Action,' 'Denial of Evolution is a Form of White Supremacy,' and a critique of Star Wars..."

"... titled: 'Why the term JEDI is problematic for describing programmes that promote justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.' The author of this last piece called the Jedi 'a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of "Jedi mind tricks," etc)'...."

From "How magazine went from publishing Einstein to calling Jedi racist/Scientific American has been accused of abandoning objective rigour for a ‘woke’ agenda" (London Times).

The "her" in "Under her leadership" is Laura Helmuth, who was appointed editor-in-chief of "Scientific American" in 2020. She supposedly had a "deep respect for the brand," but then "broke the magazine’s tradition of impartiality by endorsing Joe Biden for president in 2020."

But: "Helmuth was forced to resign last November after making a series of derogatory comments about supporters of Donald Trump. In since-deleted posts on Bluesky after Trump’s election, she called his voters 'fascists' and the 'meanest, dumbest, most bigoted' group."

"Wow."

Via Metafilter, where many comment "Wow"... because Owen Wilson says "Wow."

 

"It was only later in the 19th century, with the Romantic cult of the author and the rise of academic textual scholarship, that the notion of a sacrosanct authorial vision began to take hold."

"But even then, such standards tended to apply only to established authors. The most common English editions of many 19th-century French novels were still heavily bowdlerized.... In comparison with the familiar sanitized versions, Dumas’s original ['Three Musketeers'] is an obscure, slightly seedy French romance...  The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether it is ever reasonable [to make changes] but who should be able to do so — and in what spirit and with what purpose.... In the Dahl case... it was a company treating Dahl’s beloved creations as if they were merely its assets....  I, for one, do not believe that philistines should be allowed to buy up authors’ estates and convert their works into 'Star Wars'-style franchises, as Netflix now seems to be doing, having purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company...."

 
Writes Matthew Walther, the editor of a Catholic literary journal, in "The Truth About the ‘Censorship’ of Roald Dahl" (NYT).

Weeds of July.

Joe Pye weed:

Butterfly weed:

Feel free to write about anything you want in the comments. Raise your own topics. Myself, I've read a lot of news stories this morning and my rejection rate is unusually high.

Some headlines feel so stupid — "Finally, the dam is breaking against Trump" — that it puts me off all the surrounding headlines. It's like a disease.

Did you know monkeypox is an emergency? Did you know there's a movie called "Nope"? Did you know "Liz Holtzman Wants Another Crack at Congress, 50 Years Later"? Did you know "Joe Manchin Squanders an Opportunity and Ushers In Despair"? Are you interested in News of the Future: "Jan. 6 Panel After 8 Hearings: Where Will the Evidence Lead?"

"Rotting penis not pictured."

That's at Gizmodo, where I knew that wasn't a picture of a rotting penis and where they are wrong that I "might like" something about Yoda.

CORRECTION: That says I "may also like" that thing about Yoda. As if I liked the rotting penis! I am sick of these insinuations from Gizmodo. It thinks it knows me, but it does not know me.

What word is missing from this PJ Media headline?

"Parents Shocked at Drag Queen 'Pre-Show' Ahead of 'Star Wars' at Alamo Cinemas."

How good is your bullshit detector?

I went there from Instapundit. PJ Media is not a place I go on my own, and here's a great example of why I find it so off-putting.

"You have said before that you haven’t seen any of the 'Star Wars' films. Do you feel that affected your performance in any way?"

Variety asks Werner Herzog in "Werner Herzog on Why He Didn’t Need to See ‘Star Wars’ Films for ‘The Mandalorian’ Role" (The "The Mandalorian" is Disney’s live-action “Star Wars” series.)

Answer:

No, it doesn’t really matter. You see, it was a very lively exchange, man-to-man so to speak, between Jon Favreau and myself. I was not tossed into unknown territory. I was very well briefed. I knew what was expected of me — I knew the interior landscape of the character and I knew the exterior landscape. You shouldn’t feel upset that I haven’t seen the “Star Wars” films; I hardly see any films. I read. I see two, three, maybe four films per year.

Asked if he watches television, he says:

I do, I watch the news from different sources. Sometimes I see things that are completely against my cultural nature. I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity, but sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch “WrestleMania.”... You have to know what a good amount of the population is watching. Do not underestimate the Kardashians. As vulgar as they may be, it doesn’t matter that much, but you have to find some sort of orientation. As I always say, the poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them.

I like that — "The poet must not close his eyes, must not avert them." It's an idea I associate with another film director, Akira Kurosawa. Perhaps Herzog read the same obituary I read in 1998. I blogged about it in February 2004:

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes." On this topic of disgust and shock... let me share a passage from the obituary, written by Rick Lyman, for Akira Kurosawa, which is one of the most influential things I've read in my life....

"Why didn’t Chewbacca get a medal?"

On the occasion of the death of Peter Mayhew (the original actor to play Chewbacca), Kyle Swenson asks what is an old question . It's not a question I've ever considered (unless I forgot my musings about a movie I saw more than 40 years ago). But the answer has got to be speciesism (that is, metaphorically, racism) — right? Otherwise, why remember and perseverate about this plot point? It's got to interweave with our present-day obsessions or why write a WaPo column about it?

As a crowd looks on, Princess Leia bestows gold medals on both Skywalker and Solo. But Chewbacca — who displayed just as much courage as his two human cohorts — goes unrewarded. The scene has since had fans asking whether Chewbacca was unjustly cheated out of the victory spoils. Or, as the “Star Wars Explained” YouTube channel asked in 2016: “Is the Rebel Alliance just as racist as the Empire?”

Mayhew himself had 2 answers:

“One, they didn’t have enough money to buy me a medal. Or two, Carrie [Fisher] couldn’t reach my neck, and it was probably too expensive to build a little step so that I could step down or she could step up and give me the medal.”

Back in 1977, George Lucas said something that I think is a cover-your-ass, after-the-fact explanation:

“Chewbacca wasn’t given a medal because medals don’t really mean much to Wookiees. They don’t really put too much credence in them. They have different kinds of ceremonies,” Lucas said. “The Wookiee Chewbacca was in fact given a great prize and honor during a ceremony with his own people. The whole contingent from the Rebel Alliance went to Chewbacca’s people and participated in a very large celebration. It was an honor for the entire Wookiee race.”

Swenson digs up something that I actually did remember ‚ Chewbacca got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Movie Awards (in 1997):

It's not enough for women to succeed. Men must fail.

That's the message I take from this Daily Beast graphic:



The image is of a shattering of the symbol of the male. The conventional shattering we hear about when the topic is feminism is the shattering of the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling is a barrier that has kept women from rising beyond a certain point. It's glass because you don't see it. Women are told that they can rise and that there is no limit, but in reality, there is a ceiling. The glass ceiling metaphor led to the idea of breaking through the glass ceiling, and when you break glass, it shatters. But the glass shouldn't have been there in the first place. Maybe "shattering" feels like a feminist activity, but it is destructive, and it shouldn't be done to things you don't want to destroy. So I hate this image of shattering the male. Women are not trapped inside the male and needing to destroy him to achieve our full dimension. The male is not the equivalent of the glass ceiling.

The article is "Democrats Can Vote to End the Myth of the White Male Savior/As accomplished women fear that they’re imposters, men see greatness as their birthright. Will primary voters agree?" by Emma Goldberg (in The Daily Beast). I don't know how much supports the offensive message in the graphic. After the first 3 paragraph, it's blocked by a pay wall.

The 2020 Democratic primary will serve as a referendum on a whole host of political questions—chief among them the myth of the white male savior.

One of the assumptions stubbornly lodged in our cultural psyche is the belief in male genius, the notion of men destined for a hero’s journey. Women can be hardworking, motivated, enthusiastic—but not brilliant by nature. For children, this assumption forms as early as age 6; according to NYU psychologist Andrei Cimpian, girls rate their male classmates as better suited for activities that demand exceptional talent. This insecurity persists throughout women’s careers. Research in the journal American Psychologist found that women are less likely to apply for jobs when the description requires candidates with “a brilliant mind.” Another recent study, also by Cimpian, found that people associate terms like “genius” and “brilliance” more often with white men, not people of color.

It’s unsurprising that we find it so hard to undo our tightly held belief in white male saviors; it’s a story that gets perpetually reinforced. Harry Potter was anointed, from birth, to slay Lord Voldemort; Hermione Granger may be savvier and more hardworking, but without a messianic birthright, she remains just Harry’s sidekick. From Odysseus to Skywalker, we’ve been raised on tales of men who are reluctant to take on epic journeys but find that they were just born for it....

Perhaps Goldberg goes on to say that women can be brilliant and heroic too. I don't know, and I'm not going to subscribe to The Daily Beast to find out. Judging from the title, the idea is that we need to stop thinking of men as heroes. Is it that we need women to be our heroes or just that we ought to stop looking for heroes and give the job to a savvy, hardworking Hermione type? That makes sense to me, but I've never looked to politicians for salvation. The "Myth of the White Male Savior" isn't anything I've ever believed in. And I'm not interested in Harry Potter or Star Wars or all the many super-hero movies that fill the theater these days. Maybe America does have a problem of fixation on heroes, and maybe that does affect our willingness to vote for a woman for President because — on some deep level — we feel the hero is male.

If so, the "myth" might be something like a glass ceiling, and I might see the temptation to illustrate the concept with a shattering symbol of the male. But the temptation should have been resisted. It expresses a hateful intention toward a class of human beings.

"If I ever incarnate, I hate to be a human being any more.... Oh yes, I would like to be... a shellfish living on the rock-bottom of the sea."

A line that explains the movie title "I Want to Be a Shellfish." I'm reading the plot summary of this 1959 movie...

On a post-war peaceful day in Japan, Toyomatsu Shimizu, a barber as well as a good father and husband, is suddenly arrested by the Prefectural Police as a war criminal and sued for murder. According to the accusation by GHQ, Toyomatsu "attemped to kill a US prisoner," which was nothing but an order by his superior and failed after all with hurting the prisoner by weak Toyomatsu. Also, Toyomatsu was driven to corner at the trial by the fact that he fed the US prisoner some burdock roots to nourish him. Toyomatsu believes nothing but being not guilty, but he is sentenced to death by hanging. Prior to the execution, Toyomatsu writes a long farewell letter to his family, the wife and the only son: "If I ever incarnate, I hate to be a human being any more.... Oh yes, I would like to be...a shellfish living on the rock-bottom of the sea."

... because I saw the puzzling title in the NYT obituary, "Shinobu Hashimoto, Writer of Towering Kurosawa Films, Is Dead at 100." Hashimoto wrote the screenplay for the Kurosawa movies "Rashomon," "Ikiru," "Seven Samurai," "Throne of Blood," "The Hidden Fortress," and "Dodes’ka-den." I've seen all those films. Have you? "The Hidden Fortress" story was the basis for "Star Wars." "Rashomon" was the basis for a million invocations — something I wrote about at some length in 2000:

"The actor who played Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars franchise has revealed how the vicious backlash against the character left him close to suicide."

BBC reports.

At the time [Ahmed Best] was 25, and it was his first major film role.... Jar Jar Binks quickly became the most hated character in the Star Wars universe, and critics branded Best's cartoonish portrayal a dumbed-down exercise in child-pleasing - or worse, a racist stereotype with a misplaced Caribbean accent.

Best did not name the Star Wars films in his emotional post... "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It's still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know."...

Actor Frank Oz, a puppeteer who voiced the Jedi master Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), declared that he "LOVED Jar Jar Binks", adding, "I just will never understand the harshness of people's dislike of him. I do character work. He is a GREAT character!"

I stopped watching "Star Wars" movies after "The Empire Strikes Back," but it's easy enough to find clips of this character who's obviously just supposed to be very cute:



Poor Mr. Best went all out with the cuteness assignment, and then (it seems) people got squicked out by their own racial stereotypes that were stimulated. That or they just got irritated by the overuse of cuteness.

But cuteness is a big part of the "Star Wars" formula. Here, Vulture ranks all of the non-human creatures one "Star Wars" movie ("The Last Jedi") in order of cuteness. There are 10 species on this list, so the straining for cuteness is very obvious. Vulptices are ranked #1, beating out Porgs, because "the Porgs are more conventionally cute, they lack the dreamlike majesty of the Vulptices." Whatever! Don't kill yourself over it.

"‘Solo’ Sputters at Box Office, Raising Worries of ‘Star Wars’ Fatigue."

Oh, I certainly hope so! After 40 years — and it was considered ironically retro in Year 1 — we'd better be tired of it.

The headline is from the NYT, here.

“‘Star Wars’ fans have an enormous sense of ownership, which works to the benefit of the movie company and to the detriment,” said Steve Sansweet, the president of Rancho Obi-Wan, a nonprofit “Star Wars” memorabilia museum, and the former head of fan relations for Lucasfilm. “There is a growing feeling among fans that the movies are starting to come out a little too frequently.”

Oh, apparently, it's not truly cosmic fatigue, just a pacing preference. I'm bored with that. I want to see people deciding they've had enough at long last. But I'll just turn away from fandom. I have some things I've liked far too long. For example, I just quoted Bob Dylan (in the previous post).

"Saudi Arabia accidentally prints textbook showing Yoda sitting next to the king."

The Telegraph reports.

Does anyone want to see a biopic about Dick Cheney? And can you picture Christian Bale in the role?

Apparently, this is something Hollywood is attempting to do.

Mr. Bale, 43, is a three-time Oscar nominee and a one-time winner (for his crack-addled boxer in “The Fighter”), but he is best known for playing Batman in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.

And Dick Cheney has been called "The Dark Knight":

1. "Cheney is the Dark Knight." ("I loved The Dark Knight.... And Christian Bale plays an excellent Batman.... But its message was deeply statist, and the movie really reflects the sort of fear that scares Americans most, post-9/11.... This fantasy is precisely the Cheney/Bush approach to fighting the war on terror. The Bush administration couldn't find better cultural-ideological support for this approach than The Dark Knight and its chaos-driven bad guy and its omnipotent hero.")

2. "Dick Cheney is the Dark Knight." ("The Dark Knight, however, is conservative fantasy – someone who cuts through the red tape and throws bad guys off of balconies.")

3. "The Dark Knight: An Allegory of America in the Age of Bush?" ("Batman is a vigilante who works outside the law in order to combat crime; operating in the dark policy corridors to which Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded in speeches following 9/11.")

4. "Dark Knight: Former Vice President Cheney in the Global War on Terror." ("In a world of suicide bombers, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), covert financial sponsors, and enemies unconstrained by the laws of armed conflict, Cheney emerged as the man in the shadows who would do whatever he deemed necessary to address these threats. The power he acquired, however, and its implications for the future of a democratic society, caused many Americans to fear a greater potential threat from within.")

5. "The Dark Knight Turns Out to Be a Dick Cheney Fantasy." ("But as the film reached its climactic denouement, I found myself getting more and more perturbed at its underlying message, which seemed straight from the office of the Vice President.")

Quite aside from the specific connection to Batman/The Dark Knight, Cheney has been relentlessly characterized as "dark":

1. A NYRB review of 3 books about Cheney is titled "In the Darkness of Dick Cheney." ("[S]ecret power. Untrammeled power. Hard power. The power behind POTUS. The Dark Side.")

2. Just last November, Steve Bannon said: "Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they (liberals) get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

And I don't know what Dick Cheney thinks of the comparison to The Dark Knight, but "Dick Cheney embraces the Darth Vader meme":

While attending his granddaughter’s high school rodeo in Casper, Wyoming, Cheney showed reporters a trailer-hitch cover in the shape of the infamous “Star Wars” villain. “I’m rather proud of that,” he told them with a smile....

President George W. Bush also cracked a joke about it during Halloween season in 2007 while he was still in office. ”This morning I was with the vice president... I was asking him what costume he was planning. He said, ‘Well, I’m already wearing it.’ Then he mumbled something about the dark side of the force.” That same year Cheney said, “I’ve been asked if that nickname bothers me, and the answer is, no. After all, Darth Vader is one of the nicer things I’ve been called recently.”

Cass Sunstein picks "The Best Films of 2016 (for Behavioral Economists)."

Sunstein likes "The Jungle Book" because it shows the concept of fairness...

"For the strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack.")

"Weiner" because you can think about the 2 kinds of thinking which are System 1 ("automatic and impulsive") and System 2 ("deliberative and calculative")....

Behavioral economists like to distinguish between two families of cognitive operations in the human mind: System 1, which is automatic and impulsive, and System 2, which is deliberative and calculative.... Beset by a sexting scandal, former congressman Anthony Weiner resigned and then decided to run for mayor -- only to be laid low by another sexting scandal (or two). Does he even have a System 2?

Ryan Gosling because of "norm theory"...

"La La Land" is full of... counterfactual thinking: dreams abandoned, dreams deferred and connections lost....

Isabelle Huppert because of the "control premium" ("many people will pay an extra amount to retain control over a situation... others actually want to give up control")....

Isabelle Huppert [in "Elle"] understands what it means to take control and to lose it.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” because "as an empirical matter, most people display unrealistic optimism"....

Is our band of rebels unrealistically optimistic?... [W]hen all seems lost, they give themselves the greatest gift, which is the feeling of hope.

"My best guess is that the public is primed for Trump to act presidential because it fits the 'bad boy turns good' movie we all have in our heads."

"Everyone likes Han Solo, the tough talker with the heart of gold. Trump is making that movie-like transition now, but don’t expect him to go easy on Clinton. The Clinton attacks will be vicious, but Trump’s overall vibe will still trend (spottily) toward presidential.... It serves Trump well to have it both ways at the same time."

Says Scott Adams, who also says Trump opponents who are calling him “dangerous” are making a mistake because "You know who likes dangerous men? Answer: Everyone."

This reminds me of something I heard Rush Limbaugh say on yesterday's show. He was saying that the new media shape their coverage in a manner that is like movie-making. They look for a main character with a quest and antagonists:

So, going forward, which story will the media find more interesting, Trump's or Hillary's?  Does Hillary even have a story?  Does anyone even care?... [The media] know what Trump wants.  They are fascinated with the idea, "Can Trump really get this?"  Because Trump, there's nothing professional about him.  He doesn't have a speechwriter, doesn't have a teleprompter. He doesn't have a pollster, he doesn't have a consultant, he doesn't have campaign staff. He hasn't been fundraising. He hasn't done anything you're supposed to do. Look what he's doing!  They are fascinated....

That's it.  The Republicans have never had, in their story -- conservatives, either, have never had... I'm talking this in a media context, now. They've never had an agenda or a story that the media would like them to have.  The Republicans are never anything but villains.  Whatever the Democrats want, yeah, they should get it.  We're for it! (interruption)  No, no.  I'm just saying, there may be ways unlocking this deadlock here in the way the media covers people, Republicans and Democrats, and there may be a way for Republican to change it around.  Trump may be showing how it's done, but I run great risks in saying that. 

Privilege watch: Check your "tourist privilege."

I've got a long-time anti-travel theme going on this blog, so my heart leaped at the prospect of a newly hyped up political version of my critique. I mean, I deplore the overdone political correctness of the left as much as... well, as much as I do... which is only up to a point, which is the point at which it seems overdone to me, which is a complex matter, interswirled with my taste and my sense of humor.

So here's Katherine Timpf at The National Review, looking askance at the students at Clare College in Cambridge who are critiquing an "Orient Express" themed party on the ground of tourist privilege.

One student — with the delightful name Ploy Kingchatchaval — said:

"They weren't that keen to have me involved anyway, but if I get in there, I'm just going to cause trouble..."

"... because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, 'OK, I will go my way and let them go their way."

They = Disney. Me = George Lucas.

"They wanted to do a retro movie. I don't like that. Every movie, I worked very hard to make them different... I made them completely different – different planets, different spaceships to make it new."

Disney is like the government (like the left-winger's idea of the government). It's better at knowing what you want (what you should want) than you are.

Let's watch the Democratic debate!

Say what you think and I'll weigh in if I think anything.

UPDATE: I guess I had no thoughts. I almost blogged O'Malley saying "L'etat c'est moi," but decided to wait for the transcript. And Sanders asked Clinton if she'd ever heard of Bill Clinton. Then Hillary said "May the force be with you," which made everyone forget everything else anyone said.

ADDED: I found the O'Malley line in the transcript: "I was the only -- one of only seven states that had a AAA bond rating."