At the Deaf Ear Café...

... you can talk all night.

***

It was rainy and windy today, so I did not leave the house... other than to open the door and take in a package of a few random things ordered from Amazon. So I decided to put up a photo I took on October 23rd, when we stopped for a while in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

"Cotton Mather called them 'The Hidden Ones.' They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard."

"Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all."

That's from "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735," a 1976 article by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of Early American history at Harvard. I'm reading that at Professor Buzzkill because I wanted to know the source of the line I put in boldface, which is a pretty common feminist slogan.

Some people think that quote originated with Marilyn Monroe (or one of many others), but no, it was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Anyway, the old saying popped into my head when I saw that title of a new NYT op-ed, "The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin" by Rosie Gray. Let's read:

"He writes for five hours a day and spends the evening at home listening to music. On top of this he gets up at dawn to run every morning...."

"... 'To keep writing for 30, 40 years is not easy,' he says. 'It’s very difficult to keep up your standards. I did everything to keep on writing books, so I sacrificed other things in order to do that. Other pleasures — for instance, nightlife. I didn’t make so many friends, especially in the literary world. I don’t want those relationships and connections. I don’t like dinner parties.... I try to imagine there’s another Haruki Murakami... He’s famous and popular and has many fans. But I’m a different Haruki Murakami and I live a quiet life. Most of the time I forget that I’m a famous writer. I ride the subway or take a bus and go to some used record shop or bookstore, and in those times I’m just nobody. When I write fiction I’m somebody else, but when I’m not writing I don’t feel any ego. Ego is a kind of burden to man, and I don’t like those burdens. I just want to live lightly.'"

From "Haruki Murakami: ‘Ego is a burden’ new/For decades the Norwegian Wood novelist rejected fame. In a rare interview he reveals why he has quit the quiet life and answers accusations of misogyny in his writing" (London Times).

I see there is a new Murakami book coming out in 3 days — "Novelist as a Vocation." 

We watched "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story."

Just watch the trailer and you'll easily see if this movie is for you:

We laughed a lot. I especially liked the big scene early on that had a lot of celebrities — including Andy Warhol (played by Conan O'Brien) and Salvador Dalí. Rainn Wilson plays Dr. Demento, and Jack Black plays Wolfman Jack. Madonna is an important character — played by Evan Rachel Wood. Al is played by Daniel Radcliffe, and Weird Al himself plays a stern record executive. 

We streamed it on the Roku Channel, and it was interrupted by commercials — as you might expect, a ton of political commercials. I don't know how I put up with it, because I normally watch zero commercials — other than in front of YouTube videos, like that embedded clip itself. I saw an absurd number of commercials related to Mandela Barnes... and don't remember a damned thing about them. Why would I vote based on commercials?

When AI does Thanksgiving: "It's doing it without emotion. There's no context. I don't feel anything... It feels very machine-generated. There's no backstory."

A NYT food editor, Priya Krishna, asks AI to generate Thanksgiving recipes, then follows the recipes to the letter: 

 

This was an interesting project, well presented, so just a few comments: 

According to Elon Musk, the misinformation (malinformation?) is in the mainstream press.

Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.

In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

RCP's midterm prediction for the Senate.

Final weekend. @RealClearNews Senate map. RCP average for each race on left. Then factors in polling error from last three elections. Adjusted estimate on right. Bottom line: Predicts 54-46 GOP control. Experimental; GOP would be ecstatic if correct. https://t.co/wnUsin4aKB pic.twitter.com/DFRRXtfgsZ

— Byron York (@ByronYork) November 5, 2022

 

Compare FiveThirtyEight here. And betting odds here.

"A bill to permanently 'spring forward' has been stalled in Congress for more than seven months, as lawmakers trade jabs..."

"... over whether the Senate should have passed the legislation at all. House officials say they’ve been deluged by voters with split opinions and warnings from sleep specialists who insist that adopting permanent standard time instead would be healthier, and congressional leaders admit they just don’t know what to do."

 From "Clock runs out on efforts to make daylight saving time permanent" (WaPo).

Great! I wish there'd be more of this admitting that they just don't know what to do. 

I don't want to spoil the Sunday NYT acrostic, so I'll just say was that just a coincidence...

... or did they hurry this one out?

"Devastating cuts to Twitter’s workforce on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling anxieties among political campaigns..."

"... and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help them combat violent threats and viral lies.... The layoffs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on call this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content around the election... [A] representative from one of the national party committees said they are seeing hours-long delays in responses from their contacts at Twitter, raising fears of the toll workplace chaos and sudden terminations is taking on the platform’s ability to quickly react to developments. The representative spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity...."

From "Twitter layoffs gutted election information teams days before midterms/With half of the company gone, political campaigns are gripped with anxiety over how to address election misinformation and potential threats" (WaPo).

I wonder which "national party" is expressing this anxiety to The Washington Post — which party relied on Twitter moderation to protect its interests in the run-up to the elections. 

"My mother is Circassian, her great grandmother was brought from the Caucasus to Istanbul as a concubine in Sultan Mahmud II's harem."

"The concubines were removed from the Ottoman court after Mahmud II's death in 1839 and she was married to the imam of a local mosque."

Said Dr. Oz, back in 2012, quoted in "Dr Oz, Meryl Streep related through Ottoman harem." 

He said he learned about the common ancestry after Meryl Streep said "What's up cousin?" to him and, we're told, a DNA test confirmed the story, which I originally encountered at the Wikipedia page for Oz. 

Who are the Circassians?

Sunrise — 7:33.

"If Wisconsin Democrats lose several low-budget state legislative contests here on Tuesday... it may not matter who wins the $114 million tossup contest for governor ..."

"... between Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Tim Michels, a Republican. Those northern seats would put Republicans in reach of veto-proof supermajorities that would render a Democratic governor functionally irrelevant.... The Republican leaders in the Wisconsin Legislature say they will bring back all 146 bills Mr. Evers has vetoed during his four years in office — measures on elections, school funding, pandemic mitigation efforts, policing, abortion and the state’s gun laws — if they win a supermajority or if Mr. Michels is elected."

From "Wisconsin Republicans Stand on the Verge of Total, Veto-Proof Power/In a 50-50 battleground state, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant even if he wins re-election" (NYT).

The northern seats are "three counties in Wisconsin’s far northwest corner make up one of the last patches of rural America that have remained loyal to Democrats through the Obama and Trump years... Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland Counties."

Large hail the size of small hail.

 

Just now, in Madison, Wisconsin.

"At 80, Streisand isn’t going out of her way to listen to music she’s already made. By her own admission, she’s too busy worrying about the state of the country..."

"... to fuss over her work. But what she heard surprised her. 'I didn’t realize, actually, that my vocals were that good ’til they played me the new one,' she said, before laughing. 'I thought, "Oh my God. That girl can sing."' That, of course, is the shock of 'Live at the Bon Soir.'"

From "Barbra Streisand on Her Pristine Early Recordings: ‘That Girl Can Sing’/'Live at the Bon Soir,' a restored set of songs from November 1962, allows listeners today — and Streisand, herself — to rediscover the sounds of a star being born" (NYT).

Wow! This is fantastic! And who needs Streisand fussing about the state of the country rather than "fuss[ing] over her work"? Art is not a frivolous "fuss"!

Jon Stewart treats a Democratic Congresswoman as if she's brilliant because she came up with the phrase "No shit, Sherlock."

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA): “This is the Republicans all day long: ‘Inflation’s bad!' No shit, Sherlock. Of course inflation’s bad. I too go to the grocery store. That is not a policy statement.” pic.twitter.com/L313mWZ0tf

— The Recount (@therecount) November 4, 2022