"It’s going around that they were electrocuted. The fact that they had an electrician’s truck show up shortly thereafter — I mean, it wouldn’t make sense that three people just drowned right away like that, with an adult there, too."

Said the neighbor, quoted in "NJ family found dead in backyard pool died from drowning" (NY Post).

"Still, as a readerly translation of the Bible, the King James is imperfect. Its archaisms aren’t always grand..."

"... sometimes they’re just dead weight. Its Christian bias, in theologically freighted words like 'soul,' can be a distraction. And some of its translations are simply incorrect, as we’ve learned thanks to advances in Near East philology and archaeology since the 19th century. The translators of the King James, though they were masters of English style, showed little interest or ability to represent the characteristic forms of ancient Hebrew, especially, as Alter has argued, in the poetic sections. If the King James demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible can be made an English masterpiece, it also proves that even a masterpiece of translation is never the final word."

From "After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James/The pre-eminent scholar Robert Alter has finally finished his own translation" (NYT).

On the subject of rejecting the English word "soul" (to translate the Hebrew word "nefesh"):

"Anyone who thinks that the value of 2,000 hogs transcends that of a human soul made in the image of God himself... is so obtuse that likely no argument would be effective in unscrambling the discombobulation within his skull."

The use of the plural pronoun "they" — by the non-gender-binary performance artist Emma Sulkowicz — reminds me (writing in the comments to this post of mine) of the Biblical story of the man who said "My name is Legion... for we are many." Jesus, we're told — in a passage I quote in full — speaks with demons who request and are given permission to relocate into some nearby pigs — 2,000 of them — and the pigs suddenly run into the lake where they drown.

I ask some questions, get few answers, restate questions and get accused of mockery and called stupid by one of the regular commenters. So I look for and find a serious effort at answering some of my questions, which ends with the kiss-off I've used as the post title.

I'm stunned by the horribleness of that statement. For one thing, animal cruelty does matter, and driving 2,000 hogs into a suicidal frenzy is not explained by saying that human beings are more important than animals. For another thing, if you think human beings are so precious, why do you rush to conclude that they are not worth talking to? Human beings are made in the image of God... with scrambled skull contents.

Ugh! What an image. Scrambled brains. Everyone knows you're supposed to fry brains.

Maybe you want to talk about the "drool" flowing from the corners of Joe Kennedy's mouth as he delivered the Democratic response to Trump's SOTU.

I'd like to know who thought it was a good idea to pose a Kennedy in front of a car in a place called Fall River?



I know it's a vocational high school where the students work on cars, but the hood up on a car is a roadside signal of distress, and the words "fall" and "river" had us thinking about Mary Jo Kopechne.

As for the "drool," I think it's obvious that Kennedy overlubricated his mouth, perhaps out of fear that he'd make the devastating Rubio mistake and experience an overwhelming need for water as he gave the response to the SOTU. To me the "drool" is a symbol for what's bad about partisan politics. One party has its problem — too dry!! — and then the other party comes in and instead of correcting to a moderate position goes too far the other way — too wet!!!

And speaking of too wet... if you drive your car badly in Fall River and fall in the river, you'll get too wet and you might drown. And no matter how much the Democratic Party thinks we might love another Kennedy — another Clinton not good enough for you? we got another Kennedy! — the Kennedy brand is badly tainted by Chappaquiddick. And Chappaquiddick is due for further examination in this time of #MeToo and The Reckoning. Let's go through all of the story of the Kennedy dynasty from the point of view of enlightened women today.

Democratic Party, you need to process your Kennedy material into the present day, where we do not accept the subordination of women anymore. And when you're done with all that, you can roll out your new Kennedy. The Kennedy brand, right now, is a broken down car with its hood open, signaling distress.

ADDED: The first time the NYT ever noticed this blog was on October 13, 2004, when I was liveblogging the presidential debate:

"Just after 10 p.m., the Democratic Web blogger Ann Althouse wrote . . . : 'A glob of foam forms on the right side of [George Bush's] mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote.' "

I was all:

Oh, I'm blogging as a Democrat? Well, I read it in the New York Times, so it's probably true. Did Rutenberg read enough of my blog to see that I'm voting for Bush, or is he just concluding from the fact that I don't mind saying that I observed spittle in the corner of Bush's mouth that I must be opposed to him? Maybe Rutenberg is assuming that these bloggers are all so partisan that if they say one thing against a candidate, they must say everything against that candidate.

50 years ago yesterday: "It was a quintessential Australian death. On 17 December 1967, Australia’s 17th prime minister, Harold Edward Holt..."

"... waded into the churning surf at Victoria’s Cheviot Beach, defying a swift current and a strong under-tow that left others in his party refusing to enter. Within minutes Holt was swept up and out, 'like a leaf … so quick, so final,' and never seen again.... It was an ordinary death, a shockingly banal one that still befalls dozens every summer. That it happened to a prime minister, swimming alone in dangerous conditions without bodyguards, made it extraordinary. Photos of Holt in snorkel gear, surrounded by his bikini-clad daughters-in-law, only propelled the sense of intrigue and the view of him as a carefree, careless playboy... The failure to find his body fuelled conspiracy theories for decades – his judgment was dulled by opiates he was taking for a shoulder injury; he was a Chinese spy and had been taken by a Chinese submarine; he was depressed, driven to the point of suicide by Liberal party factional battles; his personal life was in turmoil and equally driving him to insouciance and danger...."

From "Harold Holt: the legacy is evident, 50 years after his disappearance" (The Guardian).

Can you take a little time to care about Australia or are you already working on a comment speculating that others will comment about the potential for Trump to go swimming?

I used Google Street View to visit Cheviot Beach and got an aptly ghostly, disconnected picture:



Imagine being driven to insouciance.

"Prominent French academic and author, Anne Dufourmantelle, who wrote about the importance of taking risks, died Friday while trying to rescue a drowning child."

Anne Dufourmantelle, 53, suffered a heart attack trying to reach a 10-year-old boy in high waves at a beach in Saint-Tropez.

Here's something she said a couple years ago:

"The idea of absolute security — like 'zero risk' — is a fantasy. ... Being alive is a risk.... When there really is a danger that must be faced in order to survive, as for example during the Blitz in London, there is a strong incentive for action, dedication, and surpassing oneself."

"The low-quality, 2.5-minute cellphone video... shows a man flailing in the middle of a body of water as the teenagers describe his struggle and laugh at him from the shore."

The NYT reports:

One of the teenagers, using an expletive, calls Mr. Dunn a junkie. Someone tells him not to expect any assistance: “Ain’t nobody going to help you, you dumb bitch. You shouldn’t have got in there,” he says.

About a minute into the video, the man appears to let out a whimper before submerging, fully, underwater. “He just died!” a voice can be heard saying, as the others begin to laugh.

The police have identified the 5 cruel teenagers, but...

"In the state of Florida, there is no law in place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in distress..."...

Did the boys even have the ability to rescue the man? You could die trying to rescue a person. It's not surprising that the law doesn't require rescue. Such a law could cause more people to die. Imagine standing on the bank of a raging river thinking I'd better jump in there and give it a go or I'll be sent to prison.

As for the laughing and what the boys said, the law can't and shouldn't do anything. I haven't heard the recording, and I assume it's very disturbing, but I don't know that the boys are monsters. They happen to witness a person struggling and they decide that they cannot or will not help and they must deal with their predicament. They talk to the man. What they say is crude, but it communicates a truth to the man. They will not help him. And they struggle to explain why: He shouldn't have gone in there. They laugh in the end when he goes under. I haven't heard the laughing. But it could be anxiety, shock, and denial.

The boys may nevertheless be charged with a crime. The authorities are threatening to charge them under this statute, which imposes, in some circumstances, a duty to report that a death has occurred. I think they're grasping for a way to punish these boys for their speech and their laughter.

The charismatic leader of a ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect "was reportedly taking part in a purification ritual last Friday when he was swept away by an unusually strong river current."

The National Post reports in "Drowning of Lev Tahor leader raises fears over ultra-Orthodox sect's future/The strict rules [Shlomo] Helbrans imposed led Israelis to nickname the cult-like group the Jewish Taliban, because female members wear burka-like robes beginning at age three."

The group had been established on the outskirts of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, north of Montreal, for more than a decade before Quebec authorities began paying close attention. As they prepared to move in to protect children in the sect in late 2013, community members left en masse overnight for Chatham, Ont. Before the next summer, they had moved on to Guatemala....

The article quotes the University of Pennsylvania religion professor Marci Hamilton:

"To the extent that there are children who are either American or Canadian citizens, at this point the authorities could swoop in and take them. Everything they are doing to those children, at least from the reports we’ve had, violate international standards.... The concern was while (Helbrans) was in power that if the government got too close, he would turn them all against themselves and perhaps have a suicide pact or something horrendous.”

"The drowned child washed up on a Turkish beach captured in a photograph that went around the world Wednesday was three-year-old Alan Kurdi."

"He died, along with his five-year-old brother Galib and their mother Rehan, in a desperate attempt to reach Canada. The Syrian-Kurds from Kobane died along with eight other refugees early Wednesday. The father of the two boys, Abdullah, survived."

ADDED: A photo shouldn't make a difference. Should it?

"The father of a 20-year-old woman let her drown in Dubai rather than let lifeguards rescue her."

"Two rescue men were at the beach and they rushed to help the girl. However, [the father] considered that if these men touched his daughter, then this would dishonor her. It cost him the life of his daughter. The father was a strong and tall man. He started pulling and preventing the rescue men and got violent with them. He told them that he prefers his daughter being dead than being touched by a strange man."

The father was arrested.

A "a free-diving superstar" dives deep and fails to resurface.

Natalia Molchanova, presumed dead.

Oliver Sacks writes about Spalding Gray's brain injury and suicide.

Gray was in a car accident, in 2001, that drove bone fragments into his right frontal lobe and, it seems, changed him profoundly:

It was while he was in the hospital in Ireland following his hip surgery, he told me, that he finalized a deal to sell the old house. He later came to feel that he was “not himself” at the time, that “witches, ghosts, and voodoo” had “commanded” him to do it....

Three years later, he was still obsessing about selling the house. Asked if he had other recurrent thoughts:

He said yes: he often thought about his mother and the first twenty-six years of his life. It was when he was twenty-six that his mother, who had been intermittently psychotic since he was ten, fell into a self-torturing, remorseful state, focussed on the selling of her family house. Unable to endure her torment, she had committed suicide....

"The initial inspiration for the song 'London Calling' wasn't British politics."

"It was our fear of drowning."

In 1979 we saw a headline on the front of the London Evening Standard warning that the North Sea might rise and push up the Thames, flooding the city. We flipped. To us, the headline was just another example of how everything was coming undone.

The ice age is coming, the sun's of an end/Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin/Engines stop running but I have no fear/Cos London is drownin' and I live by the river.../London calling to the zombies of death/Quit holding out and draw another breath...

8-year-old boy hero.

His father was trapped in their car that had "crashed through a guardrail and landed upside down on a sandbar in the middle of a river":

But his son, 8-year-old Joshua [Garcia], wriggled out the wreckage, waded through the rushing water, scaled an embankment, then walked more than half a mile home to alert his mother, who called 911.

I find this touching and inspiring, but on reflection, since the man and the boy were not in immediate danger, I think that perhaps staying together on the sandbar and yelling and waiting for help would have been better than what the boy did.

If we truly care deeply about the death of young children...

... what are the most effective things we can do? There's so much talk about gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, but rather than fixating on the particular device that has fixated our attention, perhaps we should reflect on what actually causes the most fatality in children, particularly since we have so much power to act affirmatively to prevent these deaths.

Here is a chart (PDF) from the National Center for Health Statistics, showing the "10 Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, United States – 2010." Young children's lives are clearly most threatened by accidents.

Here's a chart (PDF) showing "10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group Highlighting Unintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2010." You can see that the greatest threat, by far, is the motor vehicle accident. Second, for 5- to 9-year-olds, is drowning. Third is fire. Homicide by firearm is fourth for this age group.

Go ahead and talk about the problem of murder, but let's remember that one thing we've learned from the Newtown massacre is how much we love and want to protect children. Children are continually dying from crashing cars, drowning, burning, suffocating, and poisoning. There are so many things we could do to be more careful and protective every day. Some of these things are fabulously banal, like keeping your eyes on the road and not walking away from the bathtub. There are no political enemies here to demonize, no legislation to stuff down your stubborn opponent's throat.

We're fixated by violence, and we love remedies for violence that have a frisson of (metaphorical) violence. But if we really care about the death of young children, we could take care.

Engaging in a trend called "Trash the Dress" — "where recent brides playfully destroy their wedding dress"...

... a beautiful woman dies:

The distraught photographer, Louis Pagakis, told CTV Montreal that he did everything he could to save [30-year-old Maria] Pantazopoulos after she got into danger.

She had her wedding dress on and she said, ‘take some pictures of me while I swim a little bit in the lake,’ she went in and her dress got heavy, I tried everything I could to save her,” he told the station, visibly emotional....

'She was doing the photo shoot in about 6 inches or 1-foot of water when part of her wedding dress got soaked and became extremely heavy,' [police spokesman Sgt. Ronald[ McInnis told MailOnline.

She was found 100 feet from the photo spot, sunk to the bottom, dragged down by the wedding dress.

Diana Nyad fails — again — to swim from Cuba to Florida.

But the photos are fabulous (if you love survival).

She was aiming to be the first person to make the 103-mile journey without a shark cage, long rest breaks, or any physical contact from another person. It was her fourth attempt.

She's 62.

Meanwhile, in other swimming news:

A married couple in their 60s drowned while apparently trying to rescue their dog from a pond in Westfield Monday evening....

State Police said preliminary reports indicate the man ­entered the water to retrieve the couple’s small dog after it jumped off the boat.

Then, State Police said, the man became distressed while trying to reach the dog, and the woman entered the water to ­assist him, before she, too, ­became distressed....

The dog survived, Manos said.

"At the end of the day, the biggest impact you can make in anything is through kids."

Said the children's surgeon, who died yesterday in Lake Michigan, saving children.

"Rodney King — the man who was at the center of the infamous Los Angeles riots — was found dead this morning"... at the bottom of a pool.

"He was 47."



"I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Um, can we stop making it, making it all before, for the older people and the, and the kids..."

"This grasping at straws was just the capstone to what even liberal observers admitted was a week of self-immolation..."

I'm annoyed that I can't get into that article — about the SG's argument in the Obamacare case — because I don't have a subscription to the Weekly Standard. Now, I'll never know whether that article contains a funnier mixed metaphor than that.

What are those images?

Self-immolation is deliberately setting oneself on fire. I picture dramatic protests from the Vietnam era, but it's been going on for centuries:

It was Western media coverage of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the South Vietnamese regime in 1963 that introduced the word "self-immolation" to a wide English-speaking audience and gave it a strong association with fire. The alternative name bonzo comes from the same era, because the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves were often referred to by the term bonze in English literature prior to the mid-20th century...

Bonzo! Most Americans think of that Ronald Reagan movie when we hear "Bonzo." Perhaps some think of Led Zeppelin. But fiery suicide, to make a political point? That's new to me.

A capstone is "a stone that caps or crowns." I'm quoting the OED, where we can see the metaphorical use of the word goes back to 1685: "Here is the fair occasion... to put the cap-stone upon his other perfections" (tr. B. Gracián y Morales Courtiers Oracle 150). By the way, the Great Pyramid is missing its capstone. Ever notice? Makes you want to put an eye there:



Okay, now what about grasping at straws? What's the image there? I realize I've always pictured ants trying to get out of water by climbing onto some bit of straw. Focusing on that for the first time, I can see that grasping at straws would probably work for an ant. You're supposed to picture a human being trying to escape drowning and desperately grasping at anything, no matter how absurdly useless it is. Wiktionary tells me that the image goes back Thomas More, "Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation" (1534). More is talking about people who will not seek the "comfort" of God. Some of them are completely lethargic — "so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness." Others are so "testy" and "fuming" that you don't even want to talk to them. Then there are people who do want to be comforted. Some of them "seek for worldly comfort":

He who in tribulation turneth himself unto worldly vanities, to get help and comfort from them, fareth like a man who in peril of drowning catcheth whatsoever cometh next to hand, and that holdeth he fast, be it never so simple a stick. But then that helpeth him not, for he draweth that stick down under the water with him, and there they lie both drowned together. So surely, if we accustom ourselves to put our trust of comfort in the delight of these childish worldly things, God shall for that foul fault suffer our tribulation to grow so great that all the pleasures of this world shall never bear us up, but all our childish pleasure shall drown with us in the depth of tribulation.

You know, that eye on the pyramid, as seen on the Great Seal of the United States dollar bill is the "Eye of Providence":

On the seal, the Eye is surrounded by the words Annuit Cœptis, meaning "He approves (or has approved) [our] undertakings", and Novus Ordo Seclorum, meaning "New Order of the Ages". The Eye is positioned above an unfinished pyramid with thirteen steps, representing the original thirteen states and the future growth of the country. The lowest level of the pyramid shows the year 1776 in Roman numerals. The combined implication is that the Eye, or God, favors the prosperity of the United States.

Have we gone so deeply into the mixed metaphor that it's all coming together somehow?