Everyone's talking about whether Trump meets "the definition of a fascist," after John Kelly "read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online."

I saw that Kamala Harris, doing a town hall on CNN last night, "agreed" that Trump meets "the definition of a fascist," but she did not, herself, define "fascist," so I wondered what she was doing, embracing a conclusion, calling names. I live in a city where you can get called a "fascist" for venturing that Justice Scalia wrote a well-reasoned opinion. Among left-wingers, the definition of "fascist" is: right-wing. It's a shibboleth. To call someone a "fascist" is to identify yourself as on the left.

So it's a good thing to interpose the idea that a definition is needed, and it's interesting to see that Anderson Cooper did not ask Harris is Trump a fascist. But he did not task her with providing a definition. He just asked her whether Trump met the definition of a fascist. What's a home viewer to do? 

I didn't watch the town hall live. Frankly, I didn't know it was on. Which is odd considering that I read the news all day yesterday and it was a 90-minute CNN extravaganza. Hard to hide, one would think. And yet it was hidden from me.

The first headline I saw this morning was "Harris says in CNN town hall she agrees Trump is a fascist" (WaPo). Agrees? Who is she agreeing with? It was confusing, because the article only says that the moderator, Anderson Cooper, asked her if she believed Trump is a fascist. Who is she supposedly agreeing with? I don't think Cooper expressed an opinion. (That would be wrong. He was the moderator. Whatever he may think, he can't properly say it.)

I quickly figure out that this traces back to an October 22 article in the NYT, by Michael S. Schmidt: "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator/John Kelly, the Trump White House’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that he believed that Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist." Boldface added.

In response to a question about whether he thought Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Kelly first read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online.

Good for Kelly for sensing that a definition is required. Bad for Kelly for just finding something on line and reading it out loud... 

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.

... and quickly concluding that the definition is met:

Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.

“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said.

He thinks... but didn't do in 4 years in office? When did Trump ever say that the better way to run America is through "centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition [and] belief in a natural social hierarchy"? 

Are you wondering where on line Kelly found his definition? Make the most obvious guess and you will be right:

"Thirst trap."

You might have noticed the phrase "thirst trap" in the previous post. I have to start a new post because I don't want to sidetrack my own post, but there's a great and long Wikipedia article, "Thirst trap."

This is a slang term of recent origin — it's only about 10 years old — but somehow it has an entry as long as what you'd expect to find for a modestly significant historical character. I'm also recommending that you click through to see the one photograph, captioned "A woman taking a selfie." That's just perfect. 

To the text:

"Historically, Wikipedia has been written and monitored by a community of volunteers who collaborated and contested competing claims with one another."

"In the words of Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger who spoke to Freddie Sayers on LockdownTV, these volunteers would 'battle it out.' This battle of ideas on Wikipedia’s platform formed a crucial part of the encyclopaedia’s commitment to neutrality, which according to Sanger, was abandoned after 2009. In the years since, on issues ranging from Covid to Joe Biden, it has become increasingly partisan, primarily espousing an establishment viewpoint that increasingly represents 'propaganda.' This, says Sanger, is why he left the site in 2007, describing it as 'broken beyond repair'.... 'Because there is a lot of influence. Wikipedia is known now by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world. So there’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say.'"

From "Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created/Freddie Sayers spoke to Larry Sanger about why he left" (UnHerd).

"Pretzel in pocket."

A very short podcast for reasons explained in the first minute.

Topics: "Pretzels, height, crabs, white-presenting voters, roll-off voters, Wikipedia, Billie Eilish, George Harrison, David Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Emanuel Macron."

"A major influence on Jimmy Wales’s conception of [Wikipedia] was an essay by Friedrich Hayek called 'The Use of Knowledge in Society'..."

"... published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism.... Hayek’s argument about knowledge is... markets are self-optimizing mechanisms.... This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge...." 

 From "Wikipedia, 'Jeopardy!,' and the Fate of the Fact/In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge" by Louis Menard (The New Yorker).

"At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of [Kamala] Harris’s 'tough-on-crime' record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute..."

"... Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that 'it is not progressive to be soft on crime' — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public first gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning.... Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.... who goes by the username 'Bnguyen1114'...."

From "THERE’S A WAR GOING ON OVER KAMALA HARRIS’S WIKIPEDIA PAGE, WITH UNFLATTERING ELEMENTS VANISHING" (The Intercept).

IN THE COMMENTS: wild chicken says:

Too bad. It sounds like some of those "damning" items would recommend her to me!

A black law-and-order candidate would be awesome.

Wouldn't it be funny if she were rather conservative deep down but had to play that Democrat game because California.

"Cups are used for quenching thirst across a wide range of cultures and social classes, and different styles of cups may be used for different liquids or in different situations."

"Cups of different styles may be used for different types of liquids or other foodstuffs (e.g. teacups and measuring cups), in different situations (e.g. at water stations or in ceremonies and rituals), or for decoration.... Cups are an obvious improvement on using cupped hands or feet to hold liquids. They have almost certainly been used since before recorded history, and have been found at archaeological sites throughout the world. Prehistoric cups were sometimes fashioned from shells and hollowed out stones.... There is an evidence that the Roman Empire may have spread the use of cups throughout Europe, with notable examples including silver cups in Wales and a color-changing glass cup in ancient Thrace...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia entry "Cup."

I was contemplating cups as I was out running this morning, mainly because a familiar song lyric with the word "cup" came up again on my November-sunrise-running playlist, and I often get hung up on the idea in that song and in 2 other songs I've liked for a long time. Maybe it was the endorphins, but I got to imagining writing an entire book about cups and could see all the chapter headings. Back home at my desk, following my standard sitting-at-a-desk approach to exploring a sprawling concept, I looked up the word on Wikipedia.

I love the line "Cups are an obvious improvement on using cupped hands or feet to hold liquids." That slight deviation from Wikipedia flatness — "obvious" — amuses me. And then there are the 2 words that are so weird I didn't even see them on first read: "or feet."

What's the color-changing glass cup from Thrace? — you may wonder. It's the Lycurgus Cup — "a 4th-century Roman glass cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front":

 

That's King Lycurgus who tries to kill Ambrosia after Ambrosia turned into a vine that twined itself around the king. The king eventually dies (in this myth) and Dionysus laughs at him.

Yes — I am answering unheard questions — my unwritten book includes the communion cup and the  cups in tarot cards. Yes, I have thought of bra cups and the World Cup and other trophies.

The song on my playlist was "Full Measure" by the Lovin' Spoonful, which begins: "The full measure of your giving/You don't yet understand/A cupful of living/That you hold in your hand." The other 2 "cup" songs are "Across the Universe" ("Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe") and "Danny's Song" ("Love the girl who holds the world in a paper cup/Drink it up...").

If you're like me, you're wondering whether the Lovin' Spoonful cup was — like the "Across the Universe" cup and the "Danny's Song" cup — a paper cup.

Notice that all 3 songs visualize the cup as containing grand and exalted space — life, the universe, the world. Thus, this post gets my #1 all-time favorite tag, "big and small." And I'm making a new tag now — "cups" — and will add it retroactively, so wait an hour and click it, if you enjoy the random delights of the archive. While you're waiting, why not have a drink? Use a cup. It's obviously better than cupping your hands or your feet.

"Inmates [on suicide watch] are often placed naked in suicide cells, which are usually bare concrete, often without bedding (to prevent hanging by using bedsheets)..."

"... and under frequent or continuous observation by guards. Unsanitary conditions are also common since toilet paper, underwear and tampons (all potential means of choking) are restricted. Being exposed without any way of covering oneself, coupled with being under constant observation, can aggravate mental distress, particularly if the inmate has been a victim of sexual abuse. These harsh conditions came to light in 1998 when Elizabeth B., an inmate of Framingham prison in Massachusetts, USA, called a radio talk show to describe how she had been treated while on suicide watch: 'I was ... put on eyeball status, stripped of belongings, clothing, placed naked in a room with nothing but a plastic mattress on the floor. Watched 24 hours a day by a man or woman. I was on my period but because of my status not allowed to have tampons or underwear. I was very humiliated, degraded. Being on eyeball status with male officers, my depression intensified. I didn't want to be violated any more than I already was, so I put the mattress up against the window. When I did that I was in violation because they couldn't see me. The door was forced open, I was physically restrained in four-point restraints - arms, legs spreadeagled, tied to the floor, naked, helmet on head, men and women in the room.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Suicide watch," which I'm reading this morning because I saw on Twitter that some people had been aggressively editing the page inserting references to Jeffrey Epstein. If you look at the revision history for the page, you'll see that a huge number of back-and-forth edits were made yesterday until the "protection level" of the page was raised.

I copied the text you see above because it may help understand why Jeffrey Epstein was not kept on suicide watch, even though he had (apparently) attempted suicide last month. The treatment is so severe that to continue it might be cruel and unusual punishment. It could be used to deliberately torment a prisoner.

The NYT mini-crossword today is all about the similarity between "Biden" and "bidet."

Is this in bad taste?

Now, that I'm staring at it, the words — all of them, taken together — seem to suggest a dossier-worthy tale about Joe Biden.

If you're wondering whether "Julia" was clued as "Fictional character in a much-mocked Obama slide-show," it wasn't. The clue was "Louis-Dreyfus of 'Veep.'"

Extra points for commenters who compose a story gliding through all 10 of those words in a lucid, tasty combination.

ADDED: My link on "Fictional character..." doesn't go to the slide-show itself but to an Atlantic article from 2012, "Obama's 'Life of Julia' Was Made to Be Mocked/It has easy-to-manipulate Web graphics, an oversimplified narrative, and hits a political hot spot: Barack Obama's new campaign tool The Life of Julia was apparently built specifically to be co-opted by right wing meme-makers." That article links (repeatedly) to the actual slide show with the URL barackobama.com/life-of-julia. But if you click on it, you get this:



The deadness of the "Life of Julia" link is something I commented on long ago, in October 2013, with "Is the old Obama campaign slideshow 'Life of Julia' anywhere to be found on the web?"

I have something I'd like to say about it, but I can't find it anywhere on the web. It's not at the link everyone linked to when everyone was talking about it, which was at the Obama campaign website. The campaign is over, so I guess there's no obligation to continue to host it, but this was an important historical document, and it shouldn't fall down the memory hole.

"The Life of Julia" has come to be cited — somewhat humorously — for the proposition that the government has lured women away from men, into a dependent relationship with the government, and this has had various ill effects. But I want to take a new look at why the graphic used a female character. Using a female screened out the reality that males rely on government programs too.

Surely, "The Life of Julia" is important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. This is the sort of thing Wikipedia is great at. But no. In fact, there's only one page in Wikipedia with both "Life of Julia" and "Obama" and "The Life of Julia"....



Campbell Brown??! Remember her?

In May 2012, Brown published a New York Times op-ed in which she criticized President Obama for sounding “paternalistic” when he speaks of women. Noting his repeated practice of describing women as “smarter than men,” she commented: “It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress.” Brown added that the women of her acquaintance “who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, ‘The Life of Julia,’ a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.” Brown outlined the lives of relatives of hers who have rescued from business failure by “Friends and family, not government.”

Hmm. That almost makes it look as though her conspicuous disparagement of "The Life of Julia" ruined her career! She was once important enough to have been impersonated by Kristen Wiig and Tracey Ullman. Couldn't find the KW one (it's not in this otherwise fantastic collection). Bit here's the TU:



IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth links to "Life of Julia" by putting the Obama URL into the Wayback Machine. I should have thought of that.

"Beto O'Rourke was the one to come up with the name 'Cult of the Dead Cow' for the hacker group in April 1985."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Cult of the Dead Cow" because I was blogging about Beto O'Rourke this morning, and in the comments Ron Winkleheimer said, "i'm way more interested in the fact that he was in the Cult of The Dead Cow." I said out loud, "Why did they call it Cult of the Dead Cow? Was it because they were eating hamburgers?"

So I looked it up, and I see: "Beto O'Rourke was the one to come up with the name 'Cult of the Dead Cow' for the hacker group in April 1985." The footnote sent me to "cDc 079: The True Story of Cult of the Dead Cow by Psychedelic Warlord" (Psychedelic Warlord being Beto O'Rourke), and I actually took the trouble to read the whole thing, out loud, within earshot of Meade. Then I was going to blog it by starting with the most interesting quote from the piece, but looking back over it, I had to say, "That wasn't really very interesting, was it?" And Meade confirmed that it was not.

But I must say that it's ridiculous to read "The True Story of Cult of the Dead Cow" and come up with the flat Wikipediaese "Beto O'Rourke was the one to come up with the name 'Cult of the Dead Cow.'" Maybe it depends on whether you've rearranged your brain with hallucinogenic drugs, but to my mind, calling it "The True Story..." is a way to say This is a tall tale. And:

Well, it was about 11:30pm on cold night in April of '85. I had just
finished talking to Franken Gibe. I still kinda remember how it all went
about....

I still kinda remember... That means it's made up (to one degree or another)...

FG "Hey Psyche! I just had the greatest idea for a new organization!"

PW "Really? What are you planning on calling it?"...

FG "Comatose Cow Club.....

PW "Yeah... hey, why don't you call it Cult of the Dead Cow?."..

FG "Ahhhh Psyche... you are such a dreamer! And anyhow, "Cult of the Dead Cow" Ha! Who would want to join a group like that? Oh well... talk to ya later."

PW "Bye... but consider it, ok?"

You may say Psychedelic Warlord is a dreamer, but...

Let's take a closer look at Wikipedia's "threat" to delete its article on the anti-abortion film "Gosnell."

I'm seeing this Instapundit post, put up last night at 2:24 a.m, "YET MORE LIBERAL TOLERANCE: Now Wikipedia Is Threatening ‘Gosnell’ Film." Key word: "threatening." It links to a Hollywood in Toto article, "NOW WIKIPEDIA IS THREATENING ‘GOSNELL’ FILM/Kickstarter. NPR. Facebook. Movie Critics. Here's the latest group to resist the story Hollywood wouldn't touch."

You have to get halfway into that article to find anything about Wikipedia. Then you see, "Now, another Internet behemoth is threatening to kick 'Gosnell' off the web. This week site users looking for the film’s official Wikipedia page found this." Displayed is a tiny screenshot, apparently from Wikipedia and showing the top of the article "Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer" a banner that says "This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy."

One of the film's producers, Phelim McAleer, is quoted saying, "This is part of the left’s ongoing attempt to suppress and shutdown the Gosnell movie. Not only do they want stop people finding out about it they want to deny its very existence.... hey just don’t want people to know the truth about this case … they don’t want people to know the truth about abortion... They are pathetic. The mainstream media refuses to review a film that launches in 600 theaters and crashes into the top 10 of movies in the US... This is Orwellian and won’t be allowed to stand."

McAleer is very accusatory, so Hollywood in Toto ought to have a response from someone at Wikipedia. What is the "Wikipedia's deletion policy" and what does it take to raise a banner saying the article is "being considered for deletion"? That sounds very transparent and neutral. What proof does McAleer have that Wikipedia is doing something other than its normal approach to preventing its site from getting littered with efforts to promote everybody in the world's little film project, every film-length commercial for a political candidate or issue, every bit of corporate PR that comes in film form? What does it take to begin consideration for deletion, and isn't Wikipedia running the entire process openly and subject to criticism and mass participation? Not much of a way to participate in a vast left-wing conspiracy.

At the bottom of the Hollywood in Toto article, there's a nevermind:

UPDATE: A flurry of pro-free speech Wikipedia commentators rallied on the page’s behalf. It’s off the ‘deletion’ threat at the moment.

I don't know when that was published, but the Instapundit item isn't updated. Here's Wikipedia's "archived debate of the proposed deletion," so you can see the uneditable discussion of the policy, which resulted in what Wikipedia terms a "speedy keep."

I will read the debate. It begins with a proposal for deletion by XOR'easter, and you can click through to a page with an immense amount of information about this person and the deletion debates he/she has participated in. There's a long list of links, so you can see the many topics that this person works on, and it's mostly math and science.

After XOR'easter's "Delete" entry, there are about a dozen entries in the debate, and every single one of them says "Keep." The conclusion is to reject the challenge, with a link to the Wikipedia policy on "Notability (films)."

The challenge began at 18:32, 22 October 2018 and the "speedy keep" result happened 14:18, 23 October 2018. The Instapundit post happened 2:24, 25 October 2018, more than 30 hours later.

This is the one time I've stopped to take a closer look at the complaints about suppressing the "Gosnell" film, and I am unlikely to put time into this again, because this was a case of crying wolf. Fake news. Conservative bubble. Ridiculous hysteria.

"As a queer, trans, disabled person who goes by they/them, I'm this SJW snowflake. I don’t want to sit down with cops. The Christian right is making strange bedfellows right now."

Said Dakota Bracciale, the owner of Catland, quoted in "Inside the Brooklyn Witches’ Antifa Hex on Kavanaugh/Despite protests, the Brooklyn antifa witches’ hex on Brett Kavanaugh went on. Both vengeful hate and intense love filled the event" (The Daily Beast).

Bracciale — "who goes by they/them" but calls themself "I" — made "strange bedfellows" with the police to arrange for security during Catland's planned event purporting to call violence down upon Brett Kavanaugh.

Catland is a Brooklyn shop that sells "spiritual literature, healing crystals, tarot cards, burnable incense, and other occult accoutrements."

Occult — from "classical Latin occultus secret, hidden from the understanding, hidden, concealed, past participle of occulere to cover up, hide, conceal" (OED) — means "Of or relating to magic, alchemy, astrology, theosophy, or other practical arts held to involve agencies of a secret or mysterious nature; of the nature of such an art; dealing with or versed in such matters; magical." Historical example:

1711 Ld. Shaftesbury Characteristicks III. Misc. ii. i. 53 From this Parent-Country of occult Sciences..he was presum'd..to have learnt..judicial Astrology.

Judicial Astrology!

Anyway, this Catland shop has done a fine job of getting publicity. And the Christians who protested did the hard work of making this stupid story viral.

But I want to talk about Judicial Astrology. Is it anything that our cursèd Supreme Court might do? Wikipedia — I love Wikipedia!! — has an article, "Judicial Astrology"!

"List of school pranks."

A Wikipedia article I'm reading as a consequence of the discussion of the idea of banning plastic straws, here, earlier this morning. The conversation turned to the disgustingness of paper straws, old memories of chewing on paper straws welled up, and I said "And that's how spitballing was invented!" If you got the paper to chew from a straw, the means to jet-propel it is right in your hand.

But oh! All those other pranks! Did you know all these? Example:

Kancho is a prank played in Japan; it is performed by clasping the hands together so the index fingers are pointing out and attempting to insert them sharply into someone's anal region when the victim is not looking. It is similar to the wedgie or a goosing. Kancho means "enema". In South Korea it is known as "ddong-chim" This prank is also played in Scotland, in this case known as a 'fishy' or 'jobbie jab'. In Brazil is known as Pula Pirata (literally, Jump Pirate), named after the name which the game Pop-up Pirate is known there.

The article ends with a link to "List of hazing deaths in the United States." That list goes back only to the 1800s. Here's something that happened at Yale in 1892:

A pledge was led blindfolded through the street during his fraternity initiation towards Moriarty's Cafe, a popular student hang-out. He was told to run and did so at top speed. He ran into a sharp carriage pole, injuring himself. He was rendered unconscious, but the injury was not thought to be serious at the time. He suffered an intestine rupture and died five days later of peritonitis.

Here's something that happened at the Loyal Order of Moose in Birmingham, Alabama in 1913:

Kenny and Gustin... were made to look upon a red hot emblem of the Order, then blindfolded, disrobed and had a chilled rubber version of the emblem applied to their chests, while a magneto was attached to their legs and an electric current was applied to them by a wire to their shoulders. The aim was evidently to make them believe that they were being branded. Both men fainted, but, as it was thought that they were feigning, the lodge officers did not stop the initiation until it was evident that the two were dying and the lodge physician was unable to revive them.

"I come to this blog for the hodology!"

Said kwenzel, in the first post of the day, which is about the meaning of "path."

Wikipedia knows...



... what the OED does not:



"Homology" is the quality of sameness.


"Podology" is the branch of medicine that deals with the feet — a less-familiar alternative to "podiatry."

"Chorology" is the study of the geographical extent or limit of something (for example, crayfish).

"Horology" is the science of measuring time. The "hor-" attached to "-ology" just means "hour."

"Codology" is a specifically Irish sort of hoaxing. The OED quotes James Joyce — "The why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business" — and the Daily Express (1928) — "There is in Ireland a science unknown to us in England called Codology... The English is ‘leg-pulling’... When I received an invitation to breakfast at the Dublin Zoo I thought that I could detect the hand of the chief codologist."

It's the "-ology" ending stuck on "cod," which is a slang term for a hoax or joke. Here's James Joyce again:

You went there when you wanted to do something... And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:

Balbus was building a wall.

Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard.... Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod....

But back to "hodology," which Wikipedia says is "the study of pathways." I click on the Wikipedia links to "Psychology," "Philosophy," "Geology," and "Neuroscience," and the word "hodology" appears on none of the pages. Is this a cod? I don't know. But I love the drawing on the page for neuroscience...



Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum. It takes me back to one of my favorite subjects, How to Draw Like Paul Klee.

"Electric cars struggling to cross the ‘valley of death’ in Colorado."

The Denver Post reports, explaining the term "valley of death." It's not a geographical place, like Death Valley. It's the predicament where "new technologies to struggle to win public acceptance, especially if different trends need to come together at the same time."

I'd never seen that term, and for once, when I find myself in that situation,* there isn't already a page for it at Wikipedia. Wikipedia's "Valley of Death" page refers only to "any of the numerous landforms named Death Valley" (perhaps because of "the valley of the shadow of death" in Psalm 23), a Nazi mass grave in Poland, the place of the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Gettysburg Battlefield landform of Plum Run, the nickname for a very polluted city in Brazil, the title of a book about Dien Bien Phu, the title of an influential 1970 article about Vietnam, and an alternate title for a horror movie you don't need to watch.

_________________

* It isn't uncommon to hear of something for the first time and to go to Wikipedia and to see that there is already a page for it. There's even a name for it — the antechamber of enlightenment.

I used the word "nerdily" (in that last blog post) and Meade, proofreading, questioned it: "Nerdily?"

I questioned that, and he said "I question all adverbs."

Now, I want to get him a hat that says "Question Adverbs." You know, like the old slogan "Question Authority." Where did that slogan come from? Ah, Wikipedia — I love Wikipedia — has a page for "Question authority":

The slogan was popularized by controversial psychologist Timothy Leary....

It is intended to encourage people to avoid fallacious appeals to authority. The term has always symbolized the necessity of paying attention to the rules and regulations promulgated by a government unto its citizenry. However, psychologists have also criticized Leary's method of questioning authority and have argued that it resulted in widespread dysfunctionality. In their book Question Authority, Think For Yourself, psychologists Beverly Potter and Mark Estren alleged that the practice of Leary's philosophy enhances a person's self-interest and greatly weakens the ability to cooperate with others.

Since — as quoted in the previous post — "Everybody's shouting "Which side are you on?,'" I'm on Timothy Leary's side.  About questioning authority. About questioning adverbs, I'm on Meade's side. I question them, but — as with authorities — after questioning, I sometimes go along with them.

Leerily.

"Today's featured picture" (at Wikipedia): The Homemade Brownie.

"This is an image of a chocolate brownie/Ɱ - Own work." Creative Commons license.

The Wikipedia main page always has a "featured picture" of the day.

I love the stark iconic quality of that picture, which appears at the top of the article "Chocolate brownie," identified as a homemade brownie (in contrast to — ugh! — "Store-bought brownies"). From the article:

One legend about the creation of brownies is that of Bertha Palmer, a prominent Chicago socialite whose husband owned the Palmer House Hotel. In 1893 Palmer asked a pastry chef for a dessert suitable for ladies attending the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. She requested a cake-like confection smaller than a piece of cake that could be included in boxed lunches. The result was the Palmer House Brownie with walnuts and an apricot glaze...

The first-known printed use of the word "brownie" to describe a dessert appeared in the 1896 version of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer, in reference to molasses cakes baked individually in tin molds.

The Oxford English Dictionary has something earlier...

1883 J. Edge-Partington Random Rot vii. 312 Each with a huge hunch of ‘browny’ (bread sweetened with brown sugar and currants) in one hand.

... but that's a different food item, coming from Australia and New Zealand. The American "small square of rich, usually chocolate, cake containing nuts" is traced back only to 1897:

1897 Sears, Roebuck Catal. No. 104. 17/3 Fancy Crackers, Biscuits, Etc... Brownies, in 1 lb. papers.
1954 J. Steinbeck Sweet Thursday xii. 80 Do you like brownies?
1968 L. J. Braun Cat who turned on & Off (1969) x. 96 On her tray were chocolate brownies..frosted chocolate squares topped with walnut halves.

Cat who turned on & Off... is that about hash brownies? Here's the book. I don't think it is. But if you are interested in hash brownies, Wikipedia deals with that topic in the article "Cannabis edibles":

Modern interest in edible cannabis is credited to the publication of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Toklas included a recipe for "Haschich Fudge" which was contributed by artist and friend Brion Gysin when it was published in 1954. Although it was omitted from the first American editions, Toklas' name and her "brownies" became synonymous with cannabis in the growing 1960s counterculture.

Hence the movie title "I Love You Alice B. Toklas." Highly recommended. That's the second time today I wrote an unintentional marijuana pun. And I am not looking for marijuana stories.



So 1968.

"Later came grad school, Sweet ’n Low, Datsun 240Zs, Tab, thong underpants and free love — it was clear: Life had been lovingly fashioned around us."

"Us" = Baby Boomers.

The line is from "Why Are the Baby Boomers in Such a Bad Mood?" by Marilyn Suzanne Miller (in the NYT).

If you begin with delusions like thong underpants are lovingly fashioned around you, you're on the path to disappointment.

Wikipedia provides this history of the thong:

The thong, like its probable predecessor the loincloth, is believed to be one of the earliest forms of human clothing and is also thought to have been worn mostly or exclusively by men. It is thought the thong was probably originally developed to protect, support, or hide the male genitals. The loincloth is probably the earliest form of clothing used by mankind, having originated in the warmer climates of sub-Saharan Africa where clothing was first worn nearly 75,000 years ago. Many tribal peoples, such as some of the Khoisan people of southern Africa, wore thongs for many centuries. Much like the Japanese fundoshi, these early garments were made with the male genitalia in mind.

It was so not lovingly fashioned around a female Baby Boomer.

A descendant of the loincloth and thong is the jockstrap, created by Chicago sporting goods company Sharp & Smith in 1874. The first historical reference to the thong since then is in 1939 when New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia ordered nude dancers to dress more appropriately...

Prior to its entrance into mainstream fashion, g-strings were primarily worn by exotic dancers. In the modern Western world, g-strings are more commonly marketed towards females but are worn by both sexes. By the late 1980s, the style (for females) had made its way into most of the Western world; thong and g-string underwear became more and more popular through the 1990s due to shows like Baywatch, where numerous females were recorded wearing thong swimsuits.

Maybe you thought that TV show was about you.

In the 1990s, the thong began to gain wider acceptance and popularity in the United States as underwear.... In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some people wore thongs with low-cut hipsters and deliberately exposed them over the top of their trousers....

Now that the history of the thong has reached the 1990s, the name Monica Lewinsky belongs in this Wikipedia article, but it's not there (yet). Oh, wait. There's a separate Wikipedia article, "Social impact of thong underwear." Excerpt:

Monica Lewinsky gave evidence during the Lewinsky scandal that she was flirting with Bill Clinton in Leon Panetta's office, and that she lifted her jacket to show him the straps of her thong underwear above her pants. Some of the news media in America used thong underwear as a metonym for smut in the Starr Report...

Metonym? Let's switch to the "Explainer" at Slate, "The Thong Show" (1998):

There has been much discussion of Monica Lewinsky's thong underwear. Thong underwear has even been adopted as a metonymic for the smuttiness included in Starr's report. (In fact, underwear isn't the raciest bit in the report--"oral-anal contact" is more shocking by far--it's just the raciest bit TV producers will air.)...

Lewinsky's... Aug. 11 testimony says "no one else in the room could have seen [the thong]..." In other words, showing the thong isn't a prudish way of saying that Lewinsky stripped for the president. Showing the thong was a lewd trick Lewinsky knew, something just slightly more salacious than a suggestive wink.

Lewinsky — who was not a Baby Boomer — might have thought the thong was lovingly fashioned around her. And Bill Clinton — definitely a Baby Boomer — would probably agree.

It's all narcissism. We Baby Boomers have soaked in it for a long long time, and if the illusion that it's all lovingly fashioned around us is wearing thin and we have no backup resources, we deserve to be sad.

Clockwise.

Why do we prefer clockwise? Is it because we're in the northern hemisphere — that is, does it have to do with clocks, which were modeled on sundials? And was clockwise a concept (and a preferred direction) before we had the word "clock," and if so, what there a word for it?

What about the way lids and screws and things are designed to be turned clockwise to tighten? Is that related to clocks or to the fact that most of us are right-handed and right-handed people are stronger turning things clockwise and it's more important to have strength to tighten than to loosen? Ever notice that left-handed people are good at opening jars?

Or do you think the preference for clockwise is related to our left-to-right writing system, and clockwise is really a matter of going from left to right? Or does our writing system go left to right because of: 1. The direction of the sun, or 2. The fact that most of us are right-handed?

The answers to most of these questions are in the Wikipedia article "Clockwise."

Wikipedia had exactly what I needed to find, in a stunning Wikipediesque layout.

I love that the entire joke is the title of the article. I love the seriousness of the presentation, including the faux-seriousness of the explanation inherent in the 2 photographs: "An archer about to launch an arrow" and "A fruit fly on a banana peel."

I can't explain why I had to look up this joke. Let's just say it all started when Meade put the overripe bananas in the refrigerator.