"The EV charging station tale marks what amounts to a 'Wizard of Oz' moment for progressives."

"They want to prevent abuse and use government to serve the greater good. But as its snail-like rollout demonstrates, government today is more like the man behind the curtain than the great and powerful Oz. Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again."

Yeah, progressives: Figure it out!

I'm reading "Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses" (WaPo)(free-access link). The article is by Marc J. Dunkelman, author of "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back."

Sometimes not understanding is the greatest understanding of all.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo discuss the viral “Holding Space” moment in recent Wicked interview. pic.twitter.com/kdbULBcwgB

— wicked news hub (@wickednewshub) December 7, 2024

"There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good..."

"... but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in 'Wicked' does these great 'yasss girl' ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being 'good' is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters."

Says Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’?" (NYT)(free-access link, because this is a long conversation with, obviously, 4 voices).

What is the word in the 1964 movie "Mary Poppins" that has caused the British Board of Film Classification to change the rating to "Parental Guidance”?

I'm reading "‘Mary Poppins’ gets higher age rating as U.K. reckons with racism in classics" (WaPo).

"Once, her daughter’s drama teacher assigned her the monkey role in a school play. 'I think it was The Wizard of Oz'...."

"'My daughter at the time was young enough not to know what the message was, but I did, so I went right down to the school and I said, "Any time you’ve got Black kids in your class none of them are going to be the monkeys."' Mendez said that she learned later that another Black parent had the same conversation with the teacher two years earlier. 'We all have those stories in Amherst,' she said. 'And so, for me, this reparations program is about changing it for the next generation, chipping away at the systemic racism we have here and creating a place where there’s affinity and facility as well as prosperity for people of color.'"

 

From "Activists split over whether reparations should go to Black immigrants" (WaPo).

Mendez = Yvonne Mendez, who, as a second-generation immigrant, would be left out if slavery reparations are limited to the descendants of American slaves.  

AI picks the stars for a present-day remake of "The Wizard of Oz"?

Click for TikTok video:

"Players accuse the parents of enlisting their kids as combatants against the sport, urging them to launch projectiles (footballs, Nerf darts, etc.) into their courts...."

"[A] petition to stop the pickleball 'takeover' has garnered nearly 3,000 signatures. Its backers – which include the influential Greenwich Village Little League, and at least four other downtown sports leagues – see the West Village as a tipping point: if the city doesn’t step in now, the insatiable pickleball players could monopolize untold open spaces across the city. Lydia Hirt, a local pickleball organizer, described the characterization as 'unfair,' noting the group has worked to share space with other park users. 'Pickleball is a super happy, fun sport, you know, it's called pickleball,' said Hirt, who also runs a pickleball lifestyle newsletter called the 'Love At First Dink.' 'We all just want to enjoy New York’s limited outdoor space.'"

From "'Utter takeover': Pickleball invasion prompts turf war in West Village" (Gothamist).

The anti-pickleballists are hardcore. They don't just get signatures for their petition. They garner them.

That phrase: "super happy, fun." What does that remind me of?

 

No, that's just happy fun ball. So far from a whiffle ball, but let's move on, because it's not super happy fun.

I google the phrase and the top hit is "Super Happy Fun America." Oh, no! It's right wing! Wikipedia says: 

"That we largely associate love scenes or depictions of the less fortunate in films — or any scene evoking tears or strong emotions — with the sound of the violin is largely due to Seidel."

Wrote Adam Baer, quoted in "A Violin From Hollywood’s Golden Age Aims at an Auction Record Played in 'The Wizard of Oz' and other classic films, Toscha Seidel’s Stradivarius could sell for almost $20 million" (NYT).

Baer dismissed the notion that the Hollywood pedigree of the “da Vinci” might curb its value at auction. While he conceded Seidel did not record the most intellectually rigorous music, he added that “the fact he was a Hollywood performer shouldn’t diminish the value at all.” 

“He was a great classical musician before he came to Hollywood,” Baer added. “And ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is a pretty big deal.”

Here's Baer's article "The Sound of Tinseltown/Toscha Seidel made a nation fall in love with the violin" (American Scholar).

I've got 10 selections for you today from TikTok. Let me know which one(s) you like best.

1. Walking like Obama/Biden/Trump/Macron/Erdogan/Putin.

2. Get creative when annoying your wife.

3. Living in a narrowboat on the British canal system without a permanent mooring.

4. Dining versus eating — in the mind of Nancy Pelosi.

5. Something white people can do that black people can't.

6. That lady from HR.

7. Jack White can guess from just 1 second what Beatles song you're playing.

8. This poor man is so uncomfortable.

9. "Daddy, where are we?" (Daddy = Steven Tyler)

10. When women get passionate talking about nothing.

"Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues..."

"... or the decades-long quandary of federal immigration reform. He has also asked her to lead the administration’s voting-rights efforts, which are in a filibuster limbo. According to The Times, he has her working on combating vaccine hesitancy and fighting for policing reform, too, among other uphill battles. It’s gotten to the point that every time I see Ms. Harris, I immediately think of 'The Wiz' and hear Michael Jackson singing: You can’t win, you can’t break even/And you can’t get out of the game/People keep sayin’ things are gonna change/But they look just like they’re stayin’ the same...."

That's a NYT column, "Dear Kamala Harris: It’s a Trap!" by a polisci professor named Christina Greer Ms. Greer is a political scientist at Fordham University.

Of course, it's a trap, a set up, and I don't know why Greer doesn't go the whole way and accuse Biden of white supremacy. But what interested me the most was the random appearance of Michael Jackson. Is he uncancelled now?

"Many schools have been held back by CDC standards saying that they only permit in-person classrooms if students sit no closer than six feet apart."

"This requirement makes full-time schooling impossible, because schools simply don’t have enough room to teach every student while spacing them so far apart. But that requirement, chosen hastily last year, turns out to be useless. The most important scientific advance is the recent conclusion that the guideline that students must maintain six feet of distance in schools has no value. David Zweig reported for New York last week that 'the CDC’s six-foot guidance and tethering school openings to community transmission does not reflect the science'.... [A] trio of doctors in the Washington Post, likewise concludes, 'Keeping students three feet apart instead of requiring them to stay six feet apart won’t make students or teachers and staff less safe.'... But that crippling and hastily erected barrier has remained in place even after it has been proven useless.... [O]pponents of reopening have managed to maintain the appearance of controversy... by emphasizing uncertainty about the precise level of danger, explicitly or implicitly setting a baseline of zero risk as the correct standard for resuming school...."

From "Just Reopen the Schools Now" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

Chait quotes a WaPo columnist, Valerie Strauss, who insists that "There is no such thing as learning loss." Strauss opines, dreamily [CORRECTION: The author of these quotes is Strauss’s guest columnist, Rachael Gabriel.]

Learning is never lost, though it may not always be “found” on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement....

We have all learned, every day, unconditionally… They learned to take gym class on YouTube, that people you have never met can be your greatest teachers, that the ability to go outside and play during the day makes every day brighter, and that their safety depends on the decisions of others.

Yeah, you are always learning something. You can learn how to play video games. You can learn how to take naps... and drugs. Oh! The places you go when you don't leave the house!

Or go play in the yard. And stop being so prejudiced against different types of learning! They're all worthy of respect in the rainbow of education.

And if you ever think you're missing out on learning, don't go looking any further than your own backyard. Because if it isn't there, you never really lost it to begin with!

A strange image, from Joe Biden: "We got to stop pouring flames on the fire."

Pouring flames? On fire?

The context is his remarks yesterday to the US Conference of Mayors (transcript):

This moment we’re facing now, isn’t a partisan moment. It’s an American moment.... It’s a chance for us to overcome anger and division that has hold [sic] us back of late for far too long. We can emerge from these crises.... If I’m elected, you will have direct access to the White House. I want to thank you all because we need you to build back better. You are the foundation stone, not a joke. You’re the ones leading away.... We got to stop the hate and the division now, we got to stop pouring flames on the fire, we got to start talking straight to the American people.... I’ve never been more optimistic... The blinders have been taken off the American people. They understand what’s going on now. They understand.... They want to get things done... and I want to make sure that your ideas are the ones that are funneled up. They don’t have to go through a state legislature, go through a governor. They can go straight to the federal government, straight to me....

Funneled up? I'm trying to picture that. Don't funnels work only downward, through gravity? Oh, I don't know!



That's a detail from the Hieronymus Bosch painting "Cutting the Stone," which appears at the Wikipedia article "Funnel." There, I learn something about the idea of a funnel working upward instead of downward:

The inverted funnel is a symbol of madness. It appears in many Medieval depictions of the mad; for example, in Hieronymus Bosch's Ship of Fools and Allegory of Gluttony and Lust....

And in "Cutting the Stone." Michel Foucault, "History of Madness," had something to say about that doctor in an inverted funnel hat: "Bosch's famous doctor is far more insane than the patient he is attempting to cure, and his false knowledge does nothing more than reveal the worst excesses of a madness immediately apparent to all but himself."

There's also inverted funnel hat worn by the Tin Woodman in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."  It's not mentioned in the text of the book. It comes from the imagination of the the first illustrator,  W. W. Denslow:

"So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter."

"What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would 'destroy suburbia,' but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955....  [T]he big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again."

Writes Paul Krugman in "Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream/Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice" (NYT).

The second-highest-rated comment is from Phyliss Dalmatian of Wichita, Kansas:

Trump has turned the usual GOP dog whistle in a Tornado Siren. Blaring, omnipresent and undeniable. The Party Of, by and for White Males, with their stepford wives and perfect blue eyed children. That’s the myth, and the aspiration. Join us !

Except Johnny starts fires, bullies younger kids and has started stealing pain pills from relatives homes. And Sally has dreams of a glamorous life as a FOX spokesmodel, the epitome of GOP womanhood, before aging out. At 30. But, she’ll find a rich Husband before that, no problem.

Professor, to the very, very large majority of the GOP, not white people are an afterthought, at best. Takers, Moochers, Lazy, irresponsible, criminal, blah, blah blah.

Dream on, GOP. Your time is nearly done. You won’t be able to WIN, irregardless of vast and inventive Cheating.

Trump is your Epitaph. You own Him.

A wild fever dream from Wichita — replete with random capitalization, "irregardless," and raging contempt for white people. What's up with Kansas? I love the inclusion of the "Tornado Siren." Makes me want to conjure up some "Wizard of Oz" jokes. Maybe something with Toto and a Dalmation....

The featured quote from Obama's graduation speech has Obama unwittingly complimenting Trump.

The NYT puts this gaffe in the headline, "Obama Says U.S. Lacks Leadership on Virus in Commencement Speeches/The virus has 'torn back the curtain on the idea that the folks in charge know what they’re doing,' the former president said...."

There's a problem with figures of speech: You might forget what they mean!

Here's Obama, looked to by the elite as a source of wisdom, and he's simply reading from a speech he had every opportunity to have edited by the most able wordsmiths, and he uses a cliché, and he doesn't notice that he's got it exactly wrong.

To tear back the curtain is to suddenly reveal what is really there! It was behind a curtain and you've torn — pulled —it back.

In Obama's botched figure of speech, the virus is tearing back the curtain — hard to picture that, but it's intended as a vivid image — and what is revealed — what had been hidden behind a curtain — is "the idea that the folks in charge know what they’re doing." So he's saying that it wasn't seen before, but now it's blatantly obvious: The folks in charge know what they’re doing!

I could say more about "folks," but I want to talk about "torn." The cliché is to pull back the curtain. Pull, not tear. But "torn back the curtain" is comprehensible, just as "ripped back the curtain" would be comprehensible. It's a more aggressive pulling. (You know how viruses are, so impetuous.)

But one reason "torn" might have suggested itself to the speechwriters is the Biblical phrase "tear the curtain." (That must be the source of the Hitchcock film title "Torn Curtain.") When I googled "tear back the curtain," I couldn't get to an answer because the page filled up with discussion of Matthew 27 — the death of Jesus:

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

I'm pretty sure Obama and his speechwriters had no intention of evoking that image. Anyway, I accept the use of the phrase "torn back the curtain." The problem is that when you pull or tear or rip back a curtain, you show what is really there. And it's just funny that he accidentally declared that we can all see clearly now that The folks in charge know what they’re doing.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ralph L finds the pop culture reference for pulling back the curtain. It's so apt for political discussions:



Do I presume to criticize the great Obama? So ungrateful! I should think myself lucky that I am permitted to hear his graduation oration!

At the Closet-Cleaning Café...

... what have you found today?

The Tuesday sunrise, photographed at 7:13.

1. The actual sunrise time was 7:12. The truth is that the best time for a photograph was about 7:00, when there were some vaguely rounded pink rectangles. If I'd delayed the start of the run, I could have captured that unusual sight, but I had it for my personal, private viewing as I ran the first half of my out-and-back. The half run took about 12 minutes, and that's where I stopped and got out my iPhone, and that's the best picture of the morning.

2. At 7:00, I didn't know it wasn't going to get better, so it was hard to decide whether to stop or or to try to get out to the best vantage point sooner. It was cold, so maybe getting out there later would have been better, because once I got out there I ended up waiting, thinking the light would become more dramatic. Post-run, Meade said: "I told you you should take picture at the beginning." I said: "Why didn't you take a picture?" He said: "That's not my thing." I said: "Who was it who was just saying 'That's not my thing'?" Meade, joking, said: "Zabriskie." Ah, yes! Zabriskie Point, site of some of my best sunrise photography (from back when I had no idea I'd be going out for all the sunrises):



3. It was Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. He said: "Look, I never talked to the president from the position of a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing." And I wondered aloud — as we drove back home — how it is that he used the colloquial expression "That's not my thing"? Meade said: "He speaks good English." Which naturally caused both of us to switch to our Bob Dylan voice: "He speaks good English as he invites you up into his room."

4. The Bob Dylan song is "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues": "Sweet Melinda/The peasants call her the goddess of gloom/She speaks good English/And she invites you up into her room/And you’re so kind/And careful not to go to her too soon/And she takes your voice/And leaves you howling at the moon." There was some confusion over the line "careful not to go to her too soon." Maybe it was "careful not to come to her too soon." There was a long involved discussion about whether the line referred to the male orgasm, which got tangled up with the subject of Trump's imitation of Peter Strzok's orgasm. Even if the word were "come," I think the idea is about accepting the invitation and coming up into the goddess of gloom's room, but you never know about poetry. A woman's room could be her womb, her womb-room. Who knows where Sweet Melinda was inviting Bob Dylan and why it was kind for him to delay? But anyway, she got whatever counts as his voice that somehow didn't render him silent. He could howl. Howl at the moon. Moon, room, gloom, soon.

5. That conversation gets us all the way home. It's only a short drive. It's not as though we dragged out those musings. I had a big handful of mittens and gloves as I walked from the car back to the house. And then I thought I'd lost one of the gloves. (I wear iPhone-sensitive liner gloves — these, at Amazon — with fleece mittens over them when the weather is as cold as today (27°)). But I looked again through the handful of handwear and found it. When you're afraid you've lost something, it's usually best to check to make sure you've lost it before you go looking for it.

6. I wanted to express that principle of lost things in the style of Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz." What is it? If you haven't something something something then you haven't really lost it at all? I try about 12 variations before I look up the text in the script:  "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." That's not really apt when it comes to losing a glove. If it's not here in the house, I never really lost it? Makes no sense. I just wanted to say, it might be right here with me, and it's most efficient to look here first, before going outside.

7. But why did Dorothy's line ever make sense? Suddenly, I see the sense of it. She's not talking about searches for all sorts of things. She's only talking about the search for her "heart's desire," and the desire is always in the heart. The desire is not the thing that is desired. The desire is the desire. If the desire is not there in your heart, then you don't have the desire in the first place. There is the desire to desire. As soon as you think you need to look for your "heart's desire," you have the desire to desire. It's there and you have not lost it.

8. "The Desire to Desire" is the title of a book I had on my office shelf for many, many years. Something feminist. What was it? Ah, here: "The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Theories of Representation and Difference)." There was a time when I had the desire to desire to read "The Desire to Desire." That book has 2 reviews — useless, spammy reviews — "I'm very happy with this book. I was glad to purchase it. There is always wonder in the pages of it. Thank you seller!" and "Thank you for the great book, it was better than I thought it would be for my very first used book order online. Thank you so much."

9. There is always wonder in the pages of it...

"As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)."

Some amazing Trump rhetoric.

He's amused by his power and thinks we can be amused too. Like it's a movie. Reminds me of the Wizard of Oz — "The Great and Powerful Oz knows why you have come."

"Thinking is the best way to travel..."

Classic hippie advice from the Moody Blues. That's from 1968, which we're reminiscing about this morning a propos of "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?/In the age of global warming, traveling — by plane, boat or car — is a fraught choice.'"

Of course, the hippie way of life is also a fraught choice.

Speaking of travel that occurs entirely within the mind... there's "The Wizard of Oz." And that Moody Blues video — if you can stick with it long enough — looks a bit like Glinda the Good Witch is about to arrive...

Impeaching Justice Kavanaugh? Senator Whitehouse says, "The hourglass is running on Brett Kavanaugh...."

I video'd this clip from "Morning Joe" just now. It's Whitehouse, prompted to talk about continuing the investigation after the confirmation and working on impeaching and removing the future Justice Kavanaugh:



He's ready to go and endeavoring to sound ominous, even as he looks weary.

We've heard a lot lately about witch hunts. Whitehouse — with his hourglass running on Brett Kavanaugh — reminded me of pop culture's most famous witch, scaring us with her hourglass:



ADDED: There's such an effort to create anxiety in the populace, but they themselves are anxious about the election. Note that Whitehouse resists saying the word "impeachment" as the scowling interviewer foists it on him. The interviewer is Susan Del Pescio, who is identified on her Wikipedia page as "a political strategist and media and Republican political analyst" (emphasis added).

What I did a year ago.

Facebook reminds me of what it calls my "memories," even though they aren't my memories, because I'd forgotten all this:

1. Wrote a lot. 2. Walked 2 miles to Hilldale and bought 2 pairs of glasses with Theo frames. 3. Met Chris and drank a pomegranate martini. 4. Walked 2 miles back home. 5. Watched the 1934 movie "Bright Eyes" on TV and Meade watched it just because it's what I was watching. That was sweet of him. And Shirley was sweet. We laughed at Jane Withers and I was delighted that the actor who played Uncle Ned was the same actor who played Mr. Muckle in "It's a Gift," one of my all time favorite movies. Also the dog that played Rags was the same dog who played Toto 5 years later in "The Wizard of Oz."

The actor is Charles Sellon: