"Wow. Not a word about Dilbert. I thought I could return to Althouse for the straight skinny on the bizarre Scott Adams meltdown. Guess there’s a lid on Dilbert."

Wrote jacksonjay, in last night's Sunrise Café.

It's more work to pick up an issue that is presented in audio. Am I supposed to transcribe and explain? It's not like blogging the written word, where I can cut and paste and edit down to what's important. When people speak in podcasts, they expand and repeat themselves, so even if I were willing to transcribe, I wouldn't get the kind of text I can get from the written word. So there's a big disincentive to blog.

As for this recent thing — which I take it is Adams's assertion the day after the debate that Trump just lost his vote by not denouncing white supremacy forcibly enough — I thought it was the audio equivalent of clickbait, so I had some resistance to it. I'm supposed to explain it and have a reaction to it? Why? Wait a day and everything changed. He explained that he didn't like that jerks of the left didn't welcome him into their fold, so he was back on Trump's side, because righties, being the unpopular kids, are happy to have anybody halfway like them.

Yeah, that's not a verbatim transcription. That's just my vague memory after listening to 2 or 3 podcasts. Podcasts are evanescent. The written word, now that's something. Just the other day on one of my podcasts — I forget which one — Meade and I were talking about how Trump has built real-world things that have to work and hold up, while the editors of the NYT could not even get from the beginning to the end of a single column without it collapsing into incoherence. The column metaphor was noted at the time. You see it when a physical thing like a building lacks structural integrity, but words are so strong, they stay there on the page exactly as written, no matter how irrational.

But in blogging, you can take that text and demonstrate what's wrong with it. You attack text with text. But if you're doing text — blogging — it's hard to get at anything other than text. It's a text-on-text endeavor, mostly. You could blog podcasts... but for the most part, that's a mug's game.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ralph L questioned jacksonjay's phrase "straight skinny":

A cap is more of a hat than a cape is a hate.

Let's frontpage a debate that broke out in the comments. I had said, in the previous post:

Trump the billionaire has successfully bonded with millions of working-class Americans. He's convincingly worn a trucker hat and spoken like a tough guy. Trump's wealth is built on branding, and he made his grand political success out of branding: He's a man of the people.

jacksonjay said...

The Professor can be so dumb. The headwear is OBVIOUSLY a cap not a hat.

I responded (links added):

The standard term for that item of clothing is "trucker hat." I agree that the term for the baseball item is "baseball cap," but I believe the thing Trump wears is not a baseball cap but a trucker hat.

On the standard distinction between the words "hat" and "cap" in English, I'll start the debate with the statement: Not all hats are caps, but all caps are hats... except perhaps a skullcap.

I found a discussion of the hat/cap distinction at the blog of Mary Robinette Kowal, who, I see, is a Hugo-award winning author and professional puppeteer. Kowal writes: