How many people should be traveling to Antarctica every year? Was that "rogue wave" a wake up call?

I've already blogged about the rogue wave that killed one cruise passenger, but I want to take up the question whether Antarctica ought to be visited at all anymore — or at least not routinely by bucket-listers on cruise ships.

I'm reading "Rogue Wave Strikes Cruise Ship, Killing a Passenger and Injuring 4 Others/The passengers were hurt after a large, unpredictable wave hit the ship, which was traveling toward the Antarctic, Viking Cruises said" (NYT):

Tourism to the Antarctic has steadily increased in the last 30 years, with 74,401 people traveling there in the 2019-20 season, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Roughly 6,700 people traveled there in the 1992-93 season, according to the association....

Brain teaser about Hillary Clinton in Donna Brazile's book.

I've been reading Donna Brazile's new book "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House," and I encountered a (presumably unintended) brain teaser, which I have already figured out.

First, see if you can find the brain teaser in this passage. The context is, some weeks after the election, Donna Brazile –  the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee — is finally getting a telephone call from Hillary Clinton:

She asked me how I was doing and I said I was fine. She sounded rested and confident, as if the Hillary I knew had returned. I told her about the Future Forums and that I felt good about the people who were running to be the new leaders of the party. We were in better shape financially than we had been in months. Before leaving the White House, the president had agreed to do one more fund-raising appeal, and our online fund-raising was outpacing previous months. We had almost $11 million in the bank, which would give the new chair a head start. This was chitchat, like I was talking to someone I didn’t know. This was not I can’t wait to see you. Let’s get together. You stepped up and I really wanted to thank you for doing it. I know Hillary. I know she was being as sincere as possible, but I wanted something more from her.

So does she know Hillary or not? She says "the Hillary I knew had returned" and "I know Hillary," but also that it was "like... talking to someone I didn’t know."

My solution to the brain teaser is: The real Hillary is like a person you do not know.

"Pretty girl, not as pretty as James Bond, maybe prettier than his co-presenter (who was that?)."

Said Bad Lieutenant in the comments to "Patti Smith : Bob Dylan :: Sacheen Littlefeather : Marlon Brando?"

The "co-presenter" of the 1973 Best Actor Oscar was Liv Ullmann. Do people today really not recognize Liv Ullmann?! She was the greatest actress of that time. "Scenes from a Marriage," "Cries and Whispers," "The Emigrants," and "The New Land." Do people not know these movies?

I googled to find something to link to, and I was intrigued to see a 2014 article in The Guardian: "Liv Ullmann on Miss Julie, Donald Trump and why she hates the modern age/Ingmar Bergman’s muse talks about directing a version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, terrorism and Twitter."

That's 2014, not 2016, so what's up with Donald Trump showing up in a headline alongside Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg? 

Liv Ullmann likes watching The Apprentice. Or, rather, she likes it when Donald Trump goes in and out of rooms. “I find it tremendously interesting, his entrances and exits. I can’t believe someone is doing this and taking it so seriously! If you made a movie about such a man, you would tell them they were overacting.”

Spend some time thinking about "If you made a movie about such a man, you would tell them they were overacting." It almost a conundrum. You have a larger-than-life character, except he is in life. He's real. Then you want to make a movie about him, and the actor playing him is trying to be exactly like him, but you have to tell him, no, you've got to tone it down, because otherwise you seem like a bad actor. You're going to have to underplay him to preserve this biopic's sense of realism.

It is Trump, she thinks, who is a modern-day Miss Julie – the queen bitch in the August Strindberg play she’s just made into a movie. Both are snoots sneering down from a pedestal of their own construction. “Trump says no to refugees trying to get into US from Mexico. He says it’s all Obama’s fault and he’s given them too much freedom. And he blames him for Ebola coming in from Africa.” Ullmann smiles, gentle and appalled and vulnerable. “If you live in a tunnel, hiding, then people don’t like you and in the end they will come back and kill you. It’s not because he’s evil. It’s that it’s easier for him to be apart than to hold the hand of someone homeless and alone.”

Hey, spoiler alert on "Miss Julie"! Oh. All right. Now, I've got to read the plot summary. Don't worry. Okay, I'm satisfied. Nobody other than Miss Julie kills Miss Julie. Miss Liv is not predicting assassination. Liv is very sensitive:

“That is the sadness of being human today. We still don’t realise that there is no 'other.' We still think we are the audience to everything; we don’t understand we are not witnesses, we are participants. You cannot save the world, I cannot, even Donald Trump cannot. But if we do allow beauty, if we don’t kill movies and concerts and ballets and books we still have a chance.”

"Someone wrote 'Trump 2016' on Emory’s campus in chalk. Some students said they no longer feel safe."

Some... some...

These somes are everywhere.

Said the Emory president: "... I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity. Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own."

An old tune plays in my old head: "'Rip down all hate,' I screamed."

Doing the tags for this post, I noticed I had both conundrums and paradox. 

"Why 2014 Isn’t as Good as It Seems for the Republicans."

Amusingly lame NYT headline.

It's also kind of a conundrum. Two days before the election, the author is only in a position to tell us how good it seems. What's with the seeming and not seeming? Either he's saying: I'm right and those other people are wrong. Or maybe it's more subtle: My notion of "good" is much more nuanced than the notions of those who think the coming big blow-out victory for Republicans is actually good for them.

Here's why that headline isn't as good as it seems for the NYT: I don't really give a damn what the author (Nate Cohn) has to say in his drearily long essay. It looks like a holding pen for people with the sads.

"Who do you think the president could nominate and get through the current Senate that you would rather see on the Court than me?"

That's a question Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she "asked some people, particularly the academics who said I should have stepped down last year" and "No one has given me an answer to that question."

Ginsburg knows how to frame a question, but so do I. Here's mine: When that question falls on the ears of people close enough to Ginsburg to hear it and they make no sound, what does their silence mean?

"Hey, hey, ho, ho, fossil fuels have got to go."

Fossil fuels have got to go? I'm reading there were 3 or 4 hundred thousand people at the People’s Climate March. How did they all get there? It's a puzzle! A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

"If you choose an answer to this question at random..."

"... what is the chance you will be correct?"

Where's that pen? Meade has lost a pen that was very special to him.

It was that cheap little pen with the hotel name on it that he liked so much because he wouldn't care if he lost it.

White male says we've heard enough from white males.

Am I supposed to listen to him?