"I hate the idea of the Republicans redrawing the district lines in Texas, as much as I hate what the Californians are trying to do. But I’m thinking now about California..."

"...and about the people of California. I promised them that we are going to create a commission that would be independent of the politicians, and there will be an independent citizens commission drawing the lines. So I’m not going to go back on my promise. I’m going to fight for my promise."

Said Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted in "Newsom’s Gerrymander of California Has a Formidable Foe: Schwarzenegger/The actor-turned-governor helped overhaul how California draws political maps. In an interview with The New York Times, he said he would fight to preserve that legacy" (NYT).

Now, Mr. Newsom is asking voters to set the independent commission’s work aside for the next three elections in favor of a map drawn to help elect more Democrats.... Exactly how Mr. Schwarzenegger plans to wage this battle is still taking shape. It started with him asking an aide to design the T-shirt, which he wore to the gym Friday morning and then donned as he rode his electric bike to breakfast. As Mr. Schwarzenegger sat down in a private dining room filled with potted plants, a waiter brought him a dish of walnuts and raisins, and poured him a glass of watermelon juice....

If Arnold Schwarzenegger is eating walnuts and raisins and drinking watermelon juice, that's already part of the battle. It's a referendum. The people will vote. All either man can do is to advise the people how to vote. Arnold Schwarzenegger being Arnold Schwarzenegger and eating walnuts and raisins and drinking watermelon juice... that's persuasive!

What does the NYT know about me?

I was scanning the front page of the NYT, looking for headlines to click, and I noticed that the Times had picked out a set of things recommended for me. I was pleased for an instant and genuinely ready to to share Penn Jillett's love for hot baths and cold watermelon, but...

 

... I don't like the implications of the rest of it. The kiosk and the toilet are okay — lowly and functional — but don't push Jeffrey Dahmer at me, and don't juxtapose him with a person with a mysteriously drooping face.

I go to read the Penn Jillette article and the word editing slows me way down:

"I hate elephants. Two simple reasons: They have widowed me, and they have left me without a harvest."

Said Lumba Nderiki, quoted in "I hate elephants’: Behind the backlash against Botswana’s giants" (WaPo).

Nderiki and her husband had been married 65 years before he was killed by an elephant in 2014. Like nearly everyone else in this cluster of villages, it has been years since her fields weren’t trampled and eaten up by what she calls “the giants.” She used to grow more than 100 bags of sorghum in a season. Last harvest, she salvaged three.

Did NYU serve a racist dinner to celebrate Black History Month?

The NYT describes the controversy:

On Tuesday, a dining hall at New York University advertised a special meal in honor of Black History Month. On the menu? Barbecue ribs, corn bread, collard greens, and two beverages with racist connotations: Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water.

Nia Harris, a sophomore in N.Y.U.’s College of Arts & Science, sought an explanation from Weinstein Passport Dining Hall’s head cook. The cook dismissed her objections, Ms. Harris said in an email to university officials, telling her that the Kool-Aid was actually fruit punch (it was not, she said) and that the dining hall served fruit-flavored water “all the time” (it does, she said, but not watermelon).

The head cook also told Ms. Harris that the employees who planned the menu were black.

Ms. Harris, 19, posted a screen shot of her email on Facebook, along with a post that began, “This is what it’s like to be a black student at New York University.” It spread quickly....

The university president blamed Aramark, the company that provides the university's food service. Aramark blamed 2 of its workers. Supposedly, they deviated from the company's "longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion." So those 2 guys got fired, which can't be what Nia Harris wanted, can it?

In a phone interview Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris said she chose to believe that the Aramark employees had acted out of ignorance of their menu’s implications, not out of malice. But she added that, while she was glad they had been fired, it should not have been her responsibility to point out the problem — one that she said went far beyond a single incident.

To fire the 2 low-level workers is to say this is not a systemic problem but an inconsequential deviation from the norm by 2 inconsequential people. They're out and now we can return to our proud tradition of diversity and inclusion. [AND: The article is cagy about revealing the facts, but if I'm reading this correctly, the 2 men who lost their job are black.]

ADDED: This post caused me to make a new tag, "watermelon," and to apply to posts in the archive. In this process of retroactive tagging, I found 2 fascinating things.

First, the time Dan Rather said, about our first black President, Barack Obama, "if a state trooper is flagging down the traffic on a highway, Obama couldn't sell watermelons."

Second, the story of how Sayyid Qutb — who inspired al Qaeda — grew to hate Americans. So I dug up the text of "The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values" Sayyid Qutb ash-Shaheed (1951). The relevant excerpt:

As for their food, that too is very strange. You will attract attention, and cause disbelief, if you request another cube of sugar for the cup of coffee or tea that you drink in America. Sugar is reserved for pickles and salads, while salt, my good sir, is saved for apples and watermelons.

On your plate you will find combined a piece of salted meat, some boiled corn, some boiled peas, and some sweet jam. And on top of all this is what Americans call gravy, which is composed sometimes of fat, vinegar, flour, broth, apples, salt and pepper, and sugar, and water.

We were at the table in one of the cafeterias of the University, when I saw some Americans putting salt on their watermelon. And I was prepared to see these strange fads and also to play jokes on them from time to time. And I said, faking innocence, "I see you sprinkling salt on the watermelon." One of them said," Yes! Don't you do the same in Egypt?" I said, "No! We sprinkle pepper!" A surprised and curious giri said," How would that taste?" I said, "You can try for yourself!" She tasted it and said approvingly," It's tasty!" and so did all the others.

On another day in which watermelon was served, and most of the same people were at the table, I said "Some of us in Egypt use sugar at times instead of pepper." One of them tried it and said, "How tasty!" and so did all the others.

How nice we were to him!

Does the word "Caucasity" — used in the NYT today — express the idea of whiteness as a problem?

I don't remember ever seeing this word until I read "The Unabashed Beauty of Jason Brown on Ice" by Patricia Lockwood (in the NYT today):

The elasticity of his Russian splits belongs to ballet; his flexibility is less like rubber bands than ribbons. His spins are so beautiful that they look as if they might at any moment exit his body completely and go floating off like the flowers in “Fantasia.” And running alongside the joy is something grave, which seems to me to be respect for the gift.

The audience begins to clap as well as its overwhelming Caucasity will allow. “He’s got ’em,” the longtime commentator and Olympic gold medalist Scott Hamilton exclaims as the fiddle picks up. At other points, onlookers burst into the spontaneous laughter of babies. I love that laughter....

Notice the pairing of "Caucasity" with "overwhelming," reminiscent of the phrase "overwhelmingly white," which I feel I've seen many times, such as in "In Ferguson, Black Town, White Power" (NYT, August 17, 2014): "The North County Labor Club, whose overwhelmingly white constituent unions...."

"Caucasity" has appeared in the NYT one other time, last July in a food article illustrated with a photograph of watermelon soup:

Can we acknowledge that Labrador retrievers are awesome? Also, that this dude doing recaps of the Phish shows this week at Madison Square Garden is awesome as well? (Here’s the start of the set he’s talking about, if you’d like to get a sense of what this noodly-noodly caucasity is all about.)

I see that there's a Twitter hashtag, #caucasity. That's a mixed bag. I'll let you check it out. Some of it seems powerfully aggrieved ("Spawn of the devils who did THIS to #EmittTill are now actually trying to tell you that they 'care' about BLACK PEOPLE.. They still refer to you as childlike 'slaves' on some plantation. Just wow.. file under #caucasity" (with a photograph of the dead Emmett Till)), some of it seems sort of playful ("#caucasity RT @chungswag: Honestly it STILL blows my mind that people out here have NO LIPS. like I can't even wrap my mind around it" (with a photo of what seems to be Amy Schumer's lips)).

I see that Urban Dictionary defined the word back in 2015: "Mad wack things only white people would do. The term originates from the Bodega Boys podcast starring Desus Nice and the Kid Mero which chronicles all the caucacity in modern pop culture and society/Person 1: I saw some lady attach a leash to her toddler./Person 2: Damn that's some caucacity right there."

That makes it sound like what the old blog "Stuff White People Like" was about. And, indeed, I see "caucasity" in the Washington Post in 2015: "'[T]he first graduating class of Internet books... includes Stuff White People Like (a satirical, self-loathing look at caucasity)...."

A harsher definition is coming in second in the voting at Urban Dictionary: "Something done with the audacity of white privilege. An act showing little compassion towards people of color."

So... it's an interesting word. To my ear it conveys humor, but humor can be hateful, and white people are too numerous to be laughed off as some kind of joke, but that's why there seems to be a privilege to laugh at them (us). I'd call that "white privilege," but the term is already taken.

"My dessert in the middle of the night was the idea for which I will win the Nobel Prize. I invented this."

"I took a lot of blueberries, like four big containers (this one is expensive), rinsed them off and then put way, way, way too much cayenne pepper on them. Way too much. Lots. I shook that around and then added way too much cocoa powder, no fat, no sugar. It’s like a Mexican flourless chocolate blueberry cake. It’s my favorite food. I went to bed with my mouth on fire and my belly full."

From "Penn Jillette Thinks Watermelon Is Magic."

"Hi, sir. Bye, sir. Your kind are not welcome here. Read the sign. Out!"

Says Hermie (Colin Quinn's character) on the "I Love You Baby" episode of "Girls" that aired on HBO this week. The sign — in Ray's Coffeehouse — says no "man buns." And Hermie is blatantly, vocally enforcing the shop's new "hipster hate" theme. Shoshanna (the Zosia Mamet character) has very enthusiastically devised this theme and put up the signage and gotten the NYT interested doing a style-section piece on the place: "They love the hipster-hate angle." Hermie's interpretation of the theme is overt refusal of service. Shoshanna reacts:

"Hermie, Hermie, we cannot actually turn people away. That's discrimination. We just have to, like, you know, glare at them and make them super-uncomfortable and bully them until they leave of their own volition."

Hermie reacts:

"From now on, anybody walks through that door with a bun on top of their head or tattoos that were not acquired on a naval adventure on the South Pacific, we treat 'em like a hippie at Disneyland in '68. This is a haven for normal people — working men and ladies... We're taking back the night. You're either with me or against me."

Shoshanna seems to have come up with the hipster-hate theme as a marketing gimmick to counter the competition from the extremely hip coffeeshop across the street (Helvetica). She's following the "lean in" advice Hermie found in that book by Sheryl Sandberg. Later, Hermie tells her he needs her to "lean out" a bit, because she's too intense. But he likes the money that's been coming in under the hipster-hate branding, which the NYT and some of the customers might think of as ironic, but Hermie is an older guy — the actor who plays him (who I remember from the old MTV quiz show "Remote Control") is 58. Hermie seems to be getting excited by the theme unironically.

The interplay between these 2 characters is wonderful. Is Hermie some kind of stand-in for Zosia Mamet's father David? In the final scene, closing the coffeehouse for the night, Hermie and Shoshanna dance to the evocative old voice of Frankie Valli singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." I had to puzzle over whether that counted as sexual harassment in the workplace, but I backed off — influence by retro-ishness and my idea that Hermie and Shosh were like David and Zosia — into the view that they were like a father and daughter at a wedding. Isn't "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" an iconic wedding song?

As for those hippies in Disneyland in '68... like many of the things we remember from the 60s, it happened in the early 70s:

August 06, 1970. A bizarre occurence takes place at Disneyland when 750 "Hippies" and "Radical Yippies" infiltrate the park, and take over the Wilderness Fort. They raise the Vietcong flag and pass reefers out to passersbys. Later, they march in a Main Street parade, and sing their own lyrics to "Zipadee Doo Dah" ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn is going to win..."). More conservative park guests try to drown them out by singing "America the Beautiful." Before the confrontation can heat up, a platoon of Anaheim Police officers in full riot gear pour into the park from backstage areas! A riot is adverted and Disneyland vice president of Operations Dick Nunis orders the park closed at 7:10 PM. For many years afterward Disneyland will selectively enforced a "dress code" at the park, occasionally refusing admission to "long-haired hippies."

Look at the ads in the NYT next to the story about the great hippie invasion:



What a fabulous moment in movies: You've got the iconic hippie movie, "Easy Rider," the iconic racial comedy "Watermelon Man," the iconic military movie "Patton," and — tucked in there cozily in the corner — "Rosemary's Baby" (7 years before Roman Polanski committed rape) and "Tales for Males" (2 decades before Hollywood began making its movies about gay men).

"Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence."

"Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: 'The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,' Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. 'It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.'"

From "A Lesson In Hate/How an Egyptian student came to study 1950s America and left determined to wage holy war," a 2006 article in Smithsonian, which I'm reading this morning as a result of the conversation we were having about "You Hate Leaf Blowers, Your Neighbor Uses Them: How One Town Seeks Middle Ground." I won't bother you with the logical links that connected these subjects.

"We’re interested in the color, shape and sizes of the vegetables from 400 years ago, compared to modern cultivars of the same vegetables..."

"... the deep sutures on cantaloupe in Italian art of the Renaissance or the lack of pigmentation in pictures of watermelon compared to today," says UW horticulture professor Jim Nienhuis, who teaches Hort 370, World Vegetable Crops.

"Vegetables are perishable (as opposed to grains), and were domesticated prior to photography, but Renaissance art saves the day."

Here's Giovanni Stanchi's Frutta e fiori con paesaggio marino (Italian, 15-16th century) overlaid by Nienuis with examples of modern counterparts:

"The Prize For The Most Racist Interview Of A 2016 Candidate Goes To Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin."

Writes Ian Millhiser at Think Progress (who's no fan of Ted Cruz (the caption over there says "Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, who somehow managed to act like a bigger jerk than Ted Cruz")):



"The interview sparked outrage among conservative writers over the weekend. Hot Air called it a 'train wreck.' Twitchy mocked 'Bloomberg Politics reporter-turned-ethnic policeman Mark Halperin.' PJ Media’s Rick Moran opined that '[a]sking Cruz to say something in Spanish is akin to asking a black person to eat watermelon or start dancing.'"

"My thriftiness overwhelmed my modesty, and I removed my T-shirt, stripped off my briefs and marched back to the store."

"If it was hard to buy produce without clothing and with a poor command of the language, it was more difficult to return it. Perhaps the poignant sight of a flat-chested, middle-aged American woman seeking to buy a voluptuous French melon melted the icy heart of the clerk. She found me another watermelon."

From "Vacationing in the Nude, With Mom" (in the NYT).

Personal watermelon.

"It’s hard to find pants"... size matters!

"Förstemann’s thighs, each comparable to a watermelon, measured 34 inches — wider than his waist."

Hands and heads, positioned by Drudge.

Let's analyze this. (Click to enlarge.)



In the first column, we see Barack Obama holding his head, as if he's got a headache.

The middle column shows 2 politicians, both governors, gesturing outward, not holding anything.

The third column shows a bear holding a slice of watermelon and George Bush holding a little African orphan, grasping his/her head.

That is to say, the outer columns feature hands (or paws) holding something, and in 2 of the 3 pictures, what is held is a black person's head, and in the other what is held is watermelon.

Analyze the Drudgetaposition.
	Drudge was intentionally joking about race, though of course it's deniable.
	Drudge should have noticed this accidental allusion and avoided it.
	Althouse is seeing something that isn't there and should have refrained from talking about race.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED:

.@annalthouse You forgot to mention that the governors are pointing up, which is code for "uppity." althouse.blogspot.com/2012/07/hands-…
— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) July 7, 2012

What does the crowd say? Watermelon, cantaloupe, watermelon, cantaloupe...?

Or is it walla walla walla?

I saw a movie once, probably twenty years ago, in which one character is a Hollywood old-timer who's known in the biz as the World's Greatest Extra. Another character says, awestruck, "He invented the 'Courtroom Walla'!" It's explained that in courtroom dramas, when the verdict is announced, everyone in the courtroom softly says, "walla walla walla," creating a nice, low-level hum of excitement without anything really discernible in it.

Or are they just saying murmur....



Is the word "murmur" onomonopia? OED says:

Etymology: Partly < Middle French, French murmure indistinct expression of feeling by a number of people (c1170 in Old French), subdued expression of discontent (c1200), muted noise (c1230), sound of a light breeze (1555), respiratory murmur (1819 in passage translated in quot. 1821 at sense 5) < murmurer murmur v.; and partly < its ultimate etymon classical Latin murmur a low, continuous sound, a subdued or indistinct utterance, such an utterance indicative of anger or resentment, a reduplicated imitative formation....

The answer seems to be partly.

Ben & Jerry's apologizes for its ice cream that (attempted to) honor Jeremy Lin.

The "Taste the Lin-Sanity" flavor contained lychee honey swirls and fortune-cookie pieces, which outraged some people.

Do you see why? It's stereotyping to connect someone of a particular ethnic group to the food conventionally associated with that group.

Should Ben and Jerry have apologized for "Taste the Lin-Sanity"?
	Yes. It was as bad as trying to honor a black player with watermelon ice cream.
	Yes. Someone was offended, and it's best to say sorry to anyone who was offended.
	No. It was a cute, nice, fun thing that Ben and Jerry should be proud of.
	No. Apologies suggest blame, show weakness, and erode traditional values.
pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: The original link to The Daily Mail has gone dead, so here's the HuffPo coverage of the same story.

Sometimes a watermelon is just a watermelon.

Poor Dan Rather. Don't you feel sorry for him? Look at the ridicule:

"[H]e couldn't sell watermelons to" who?  A state trooper?  He couldn't sell watermelons on a highway?  Yeah, the rest of it is "if a state trooper is flagging down the traffic on a highway, Obama couldn't sell watermelons," and Chris Matthews says, "Well, whoa! (muttering) I didn't think you meant that."  I'll tell you (laughing) from Massa describing Rahm Emanuel walking in a House shower with no curtains stark naked poking him in the chest and yelling at him about health care, to Dan Rather saying Obama "couldn't sell watermelons on a highway with a state trooper flagging down traffic," (laughing) I'm telling you, folks, they are falling apart. (interruption) No, it's no longer Black History Month.  If this had happened Black History Month, Oh.  Well, I don't know the menu was still up there or not, but this is hilarious.  Dan Rather! (laughing) "He couldn't sell watermelons..."  (laughing)...

... [Y]eah, some of you have written me notes.  "Don't you understand that Rather is saying this is what Republicans would say?" Of course he said Republicans are going to say this.  It doesn't matter.  Republicans have not said it.  Dan Rather did.

Now, you know darned well that if the racial slur conventionally perceived in "watermelons" had flashed through Dan Rather's still-flickering brain, he wouldn't have indulged in that particular Southernism. Rather has been dribbling Southernisms for decades and his enablers have petted him affectionately for being so darned sweet and cute and down-home. I'm sure this one was just a way of expressing the notion of incompetence — quite apart from race. It's meant to conjure up an image of someone unable to sell something that people really love even under really favorable selling conditions. The state troopers are there because you're supposed to picture the roadside stand, where the popular product alone is normally enough to lure drivers to stop. The troopers are providing even more help. They're flagging people down. That's all Rather meant. People are going to say Obama can't get anything done. That's it. If he'd have thought about race, he'd have censored "watermelons."

So I'll give Dan Rather a pass. But if we give Dan Rather a pass for the accidental appearance of racism, will anyone who isn't liberal be given a pass? I know they won't. That's the way it is.

For good luck.

I'm not superstitious, really. But that last post makes me think I should look into some new year's good luck traditions.

You might want to buy traditional Japanese amulets -- omamori -- pictured here.

Maybe you just need to cook the right food. Maybe some Hoppin' John: black-eyed peas, salted ham, and rice. Some folks emphasize collard greens with the black-eyed peas and some form of pork. This seems related to what my mother used to make for the new year's meal: "pork and sauerkraut." It wasn't very good!

Hmmm... this could be considered cabbage-blogging.

Let's see. Here's a list of new year's luck traditions, including this info:

Many parts of the United States celebrate the new year by eating black-eyed peas. They are usually eaten with ham or some cut of pork meat. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog and its meat is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity.

Cabbage is another "good luck" vegetable that is consumed on New Year's Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity. Cabbage is representative of paper money!

Okay, now I'm definitely cabbage-blogging!

Here's to the new new year's tradition!

For good luck: cabbage-blog!

UPDATE: And there is also watermelon-seed-blogging, which is based on a Vietnamese tradition of eating red-dyed watermelon-seeds for the new year. Checking to make sure there really is such a Vietnamese tradition, I found this nice site describing a lot of new year's traditions. (And, yes, I realize January 1st is not necessarily the new year holiday.)