At the New Snow Café...

... stop here.

Comment about whatever you'd like. Be aware that you have to wait for your comment to get moderated through. It's the way it's got to be now. Sorry. Really sorry.

Even if you can't have everything you might want — and some of you want moderation — I hope you still consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal.

"For women the punishment was being burnt at the stake, for a bloke it was being hung, drawn and quartered.

"It would have been a lot to have been caught with": The Toenail Hoard.

500 silver clippings, shavings from metal coins dating back to 1560, found by a man with a metal detector in the Forest of Dean.

Looking for that article I'd read earlier today, my keyword "toenail" got me to "Toenails stashed in Harvard basement could hold clues about cancer":

Deep in the basement of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health sit more than a hundred vault-like freezers. Inside them... the toenail clippings from more than 100,000 people.... Because your toenails grow at different speeds, each one represents a different period in time. A clipping from your little toe captures substances that have been in your body for roughly a month. A clipping from your big toe gives a snapshot of a year’s worth of exposure.“When you take the edge of the nail of all five toes, you have a measure that stretches over the past year,” Tworoger said.....

"I think you’ll be pleased to know that it was a unanimous vote against using the Lord Jeff."

"I said to my staff, ‘We’re moving on here; the Lord Jeff is done.'"

Here's an article from the Amherst College website about Sir Jeffery Amherst, including the key sticking point:

Meanwhile, Native peoples west of the Alleghenies grew restive. Here, Amherst’s ignorance, scorn and frugality bred discontent. In particular, in an effort to cut costs, he severely reduced the distribution of presents to Native peoples, saying he would not engage in “purchasing the good behavior, either of Indians, or any others,” believing instead that “When Men of What race soever, behave ill they must be punished but not bribed.”

This attitude played a direct role in inciting a wave of attacks during the late spring of 1763 that Natives directed at British forts and colonial settlements along the colonies’ western frontiers. In a matter of weeks, British power west of the Alleghenies vanished, and Amherst found himself scrambling to find troops to stabilize the situation. In early July 1763, he advocated spreading blankets infected with smallpox among the Natives, a measure that his subordinate at Fort Pitt, Capt. Simeon Ecuyer, had already employed in late June on his own initiative. Historians debate the degree to which these actions promoted outbreaks of smallpox. The presence of a pre-existing infection at Fort Pitt strongly suggests that a smallpox epidemic had already broken out along the western frontiers of the British colonies. Still, by recommending such a course of action, Amherst and other British officers revealed their contempt for Native Americans and a willingness to promote genocide by spreading lethal diseases.

5 videos I watched, none of which seem capable of supporting a free-standing blog post.

1. On Facebook, somebody got me watching this parody video of Hillary Clinton singing "I Will Survive." Amusing enough that I looked up the YouTube page of Maximum Suffrage. Lots of stuff there, as yet unwatched by me.

2. I didn't know "Convos with my..." got a second child (like the first, amusingly played by an adult). I watched "Asking Nicely."

3. Charles Grodin, in 1995, as a talk show host, riffs for 6 minutes surrealistically introducing Jerry Lewis. (I started watching Jerry Lewis interview videos on YouTube a while back, for reasons I don't remember, and YouTube keeps suggesting more Jerry Lewis videos, and this is never going to end, because I keep watching them, and I'm not going to stop, because they are all so weird, including some where Lewis is the host, like here, interviewing Cassius Clay.)

4. The Grateful Dead in a live performance of "It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry." I got there as a result of a conversation that was mostly about "Ballad of Thin Man," prompted by reading this old 1965 interview in which Nora Ephron tried to get him to identify Mr. Jones and Dylan said: "He's actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, 'That's Mr. Jones.' Then I asked this cat, 'Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?' And he told me, 'He puts his nose on the ground.' It's all there, it's a true story." Meade seemed to believe that Mr. Jones was Leonard Bernstein, but "That Party at Lenny’s" that Tom Wolfe described in "Radical Chic" took place in 1966. The word "camel" does appear in that greatest-of-all-time article, in this sentence: "Forty years ago firms flogging things like Hardman pianos, Ponds cold cream, Simmons metal beds and Camel cigarettes found that matrons in the clans Harriman, Longworth, Belmont, Fish, Lowell, Iselin and Carnegie were only too glad to switch to their products and be photographed with them in their homes, mainly for the sheer social glory of the publicity."

5. "Yeah, I'd like to see a video of a young person singing 'Eve of Destruction,'" I said after commenting in yesterday's post about the death of P.F. Sloan, who wrote the lyrics. The hit single was by Barry McGuire, who was 30ish, and I watched the video of a TV performance I remembered from 1965. I wrote: "Watching it again, I'm struck by the inappropriateness of McGuire's age. The lyrics are ridiculous coming from an adult. They're a perfect expression of teenage confusion about the world. Coming from an adult, it's mental or stupid." I found this, by Bishop Allen. It becomes noticeably "Eve of Destruction" at 3:44, but only the chorus is used, in the changed form: "And I tell you over and over and over again, my friend/That I'm down with you, even on the eve of destruction." I'd like to see a video of a teenager singing the original lyrics earnestly and sincerely.

"That's a plant? Thought it was Meade's bed head?"

Out loud, I read a comment by BarrySanders20 on that post with a photo of a spiky plant in front of the window through which we see the first snowfall.

I say: "Yeah, Meade wears his hair like The Little Prince."

Meade says: "Meade wears his hair like Butters."

I have a realization: "Maybe Butters is The Little Prince."

[IMAGES REMOVED]
ADDED: Meade says: "Butters' hair is like one of the stars." And stars are crucially important in "The Little Prince." The Little Prince, before disappearing from Earth, says:

“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night... You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”

If I didn't kale...

... it's too late now.

Song reference:



Don't miss the high note from 3:27 to 3:33.

"For the more mortal among us, there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion."

Writes Stacy Schiff in a biography of Vladimir Nabokov's wife Véra. The quote appears in a New Yorker piece by Judith Thurman titled "Silent Partner/What do Nabokov’s letters conceal?" Nabokov and his wife had a long, extremely close relationship, and he wrote many letters to her, praising her in terms that, as Thurman puts it, are "hard to distinguish from self-infatuation ('It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts')." But he cheated on her and, at one point, "Nabokov is enjoying torrid sex with his worshipful mistress while lying to his wife about ending the affair," and:

He suffers not a little shame, yet tells Irina he can’t live without her. He even hints that he will leave Véra—given time. And, in letters that might have made a fascinating appendix, he extolls his and Irina’s uncanny compatibility in suspiciously familiar prose. “For the more mortal among us,” Schiff observes, “there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.”

"Trump doesn’t look fastidiously tailored, which is probably one of the many reasons why the average voter can listen to him pound his chest and still relate."

"Trump may have his name plastered on assorted buildings, but he looks more like an ordinary, angry middle-management guy," writes Robin Givhan, criticizing Donald Trump's looks after criticizing Donald Trump for criticizing somebody else's looks.

The somebody else is an unnamed "guy" who "went crazy" about something Trump said about food stamps. Said guy was "seriously overweight." Givhan takes Trump to task for "fat-shaming" this man:

[M]ocking someone’s weight cuts at the core of personal appearance, societal prejudices and a fraught sense of insecurity that by all rights should not exist but stubbornly does. 

By all rights? Really? Isn't there at least a smidgen of justification for observing that the federal government spends our money on a program that feeds people who are, demonstrably, eating too much? Trump used a fairly respectful expression. He said:

You know, it’s amazing. I mentioned food stamps and that guy who is seriously overweight went crazy. He went crazy. . .  That’s an amazing sight.

It's not like he said I mentioned food stamps and that fat pig — huuuge pig — went crazy....

Givhan says "It is a fashion insult — of the pettiest sort," before proceeding to criticize the fit of Trump's suits, the color and length of his tie, and the strategy of the combover. She's not taking a 2-wrongs-make-a-right/tit-for-tat position. Trump's insult of the "seriously overweight" "guy" was "a visceral, intimate insult.... So Trump’s fat-shaming of a protester begs one to consider Trump’s own appearance." He was asking for it.

But does Givhan really need justification to launch into an analysis of how some politician looks? That's her beat as a columnist and has been for years. Since when does she need to build a foundation for her fashion critiques by demonstrating that her target has done fashion insults that cut to the core?

I had to think for a few seconds about that, and what I came up with was that she wanted to criticize Trump for talking about how a guy looks, but that risked hypocrisy, since she continually writes about how people look, and she's criticized for that. How to attack Trump without exposing herself to the same attack? And I think her first reaction to Trump's pointing out that some guy is fat was probably that Trump himself is fat. But it's not her taste level to write that somebody's fat.

So Givhan processed the temptation to say that Trump is fat into the assertion Trump worries about whether he looks fat. There's this anecdote from 1999, in which Trump comically exclaimed that some photo made him look "like I weighed 500 pounds!" But I think that little story displays Trump as openly expressive, feeling free to talk about weight, and not a shame-oriented kind of person.

But Givhan places a sound bet that Washington Post readers are shame-oriented and ready to loathe Trump for prodding them where it hurts and where liberals are telling them they're entitled not to hurt. And of course they're entitled to food stamps even if they're fat. That's not even an issue to discuss. But it's what Trump was discussing.

Waking up to the first snow of the season.

Pre-dawn view.

UPDATE AT 7:09: A coyote just trotted through the backyard. Almost got a pic.

"I’ve seen my share of nasty, bizarre, and over-the-top political ads. But this may be the first that I can honestly say is just plain stupid."

Says Mediaite about this Democratic National Committee ad. I happen to think it's a great ad:



At 0:23, I was all my man.

ADDED: It's interesting to see the Democrats honoring George W. Bush, the man they impugned and reviled for so many years. Bush does deserve honor for what this ad shows, not that the Democrats honored him when it wasn't part of achieving some political goal of their own as it is now. The current GOP candidates have been pushed by the GOP base to say the word "Islamist," and that empowers their opponents to remind the more moderate among us that we should not alienate or disrespect the vast numbers of Muslims who are not violent extremists.

"Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time."

Vox explains, supporting the Princeton students who are protesting the use of Wilson's name on various programs and buildings around the university.

Easily the worst part of Wilson's record as president was his overseeing of the resegregation of multiple agencies of the federal government, which had been surprisingly integrated as a result of Reconstruction decades earlier....

Outright dismissals were also common. Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people....

In 1914, a group of black professionals led by newspaper editor and Harvard alumnus Monroe Trotter met with Wilson to protest the segregation. Wilson informed Trotter, "Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen."

Much more at the link.

"A crew member from 'The Hunting Ground,' a one-sided film about campus sexual assault..."

"... has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film."

"It’s still a capital crime, and I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted."

Said former former CIA director James Woolsey about Edward Snowden.

"I think the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his hands."

ADDED: Who appointed Woolsey? Bill Clinton. Oddly:

Never once in his two-year tenure did CIA director James Woolsey ever have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton. Even semi-private meetings were rare. They only happened twice. Woolsey told me: "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."

Woolsey once made this joke: "Remember the guy who in 1994 crashed his plane onto the White House lawn? That was me trying to get an appointment to see President Clinton."

About 2 dozen Harvard Law School students barged into Dean Martha Minow's Constitutional Law class and demanded that their issue be talked about immediately.

The NYT reports in an article about the aftermath of finding black tape on the glass of framed photographs of black law professors at the law school. It's not known who put the tape on the photographs or why, but the incident brought — as the Times puts it —"a new sense of urgency to discussions about race and racial discrimination that have spread across this campus as well as universities and graduate schools around the country."

Was it "a pretty clear act of intolerance, racism," as the student government president said, or was it an effort to create a new sense of urgency to discussions about race? Does anyone want to know the truth or is the idea to not let a sense of urgency go to waste? I suppose the student activists would say the source of the tape is a side issue, a distraction, and the general questions of racism are worthy of discussion even if the tape was some anti-racism activist's trick to ramp up the agitation.

Would a real racist just put gaffer's tape on the glass? Gaffer's tape "leaves little or no residue and will generally not damage most surfaces when it is removed." Wouldn't someone who really hated those black professors do something more destructive, like break the glass or try to get at the photographs?

Ah, but the tape has a history. The NYT reveals that black tape was used earlier by anti-racism activists a few weeks ago to cover up the Harvard Law School crest on various mats. (As blogged on November 4th, the crest was protested because of its connection to a slave-owning family.) Maybe someone who didn't like the tape on the mats felt motivated to protest the protest by moving the tape from the crest to the portraits, perhaps more of a lightweight tit for tat than deep-seated racism.

Anyway, it troubles me that students would disrupt and end a class that other students have prepared for and have put the time into attending. It troubles me that students would disrespect a professor and dean who has no connection to racism other than her position of leadership in an institution that (they think) has not done enough. Minow did respond, it seems, immediately:

Shortly after noon, hundreds of students — as well as faculty members and administrators, including Ms. Minow — gathered for what the law school called a community meeting, filling one large room and much of another. Ms. Minow acknowledged that racism was an issue at Harvard as it was around the country. “Racism exists in America and in the United States and in Harvard and in Harvard Law School,” said Ms. Minow, who has written extensively on topics like school desegregation.

But some students said the administration had not done enough to make the school fully inclusive of minority students and faculty members and voiced an array of concerns that ranged from the relatively low number of black professors — there are 12 black permanent full-time faculty members out of 125 — to the way the school taught law.

I'd like to see more detail about what the "array of concerns" was (other than the ratio of black to nonblack professors). As to the way law is taught, that's a perennial subject of complaints among law students, but the argument that it's a racial problem needs some explication. The Times quotes a student claiming that Harvard lawprofs have "just forced [students] to regurgitate" the cases, but I find that extremely hard to believe.

"A 1,111 carat gem-quality diamond, second in size only to the Cullinan diamond cut into the British Crown jewels, has been unearthed by Lucara Diamond Corp. in Botswana."

"The Type-IIa stone, just smaller than a tennis ball, is the largest diamond discovery for more than 100 years.... It was recovered by machines at the south lobe of Karowe mine in central Botswana...."

I like the "recovered by machines" part, because I don't have to picture a miner making the discovery of something he cannot keep.

At the Remontant Café...

... there's one last burst of flowering as the big storm approaches our little town.

Please consider encouraging me by shopping through my Amazon Portal. (It costs you no extra, and it contributes to the project of writing this blog.)

We've put the comments on moderation, so be a little patient waiting to see your comment published. If you've been shy about commenting, perhaps fearing weirdness or abuse, now's a good time to consider sharing your thoughts with us. I'm especially interested in providing a forum for a wider range of commenters with differing points of view, not just on this post, but on all posts. And let me send out a special invitation to liberals and lefties and anyone else who can add to the balance, including apolitical types with unusual things to say.