Up for 2 hours... still waiting for the sunrise.

I love mornings!

"It is shockingly inexpensive to travel within Turkey by plane."

"Take this segment: from Istanbul to Izmir (about an hour flying time) on Atlas Jet, it's $25 (without additional discounts). For this, we get not only the flight itself, but a warm snack (melted cheese sandwich, cake, coffee or a soft drink) and, too, upon arrival in Izmir, free transportation by bus to towns south of us. Including to Slecuk — another hour's worth of travel."

... worth of travel.

Do you understand it?

"What do a cake, a runner, a rainbow and a kalashnikov have in common."

"10 Contested African Images of 2012."

Baz Luhrmann's "Gatsby."

If you loved "Moulin Rouge," as I did, you may find the new trailer thrilling:



I was literally thrilled. And I'm very skeptical of all movies. I resist going to the movies. I see one comment over at YouTube whining about this not being in 3D. 3D is a curse. I've vowed never again to see a movie shot in 3D unless it's in a 3D theater. I saw that most recent "Planet of the Apes" movie, which was shot as a 3D movie, in a non-3D theater, and it was full of dumb shots — objects placed in the extreme foreground, actors framed in a way that you could tell was for an effect that you weren't able to see. I'd love to see "Life of Pi," but I put off going, because it's such an ordeal to engage with a 3D experience, and now it's only around here in non-3D, and I can't go, because of my vow. I'm delighted that Luhrmann didn't mess up the visuals to pander to the 3D dweebs.

Here, you can read "The Great Gatsby" on line, in a nice format. This is one of my favorite books. What I like is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration. I'll vouch for that.

ADDED: A trailer was put out last summer using many of the same visuals and a very different audio track, and I blogged at the time: "It looks awful, with horrible acting." I'd forgotten that! Here's the old trailer:



But I did say: "But then I think it's like 'Moulin Rouge,' which can seem bad if you look at it the wrong way, and this new 'Gatsby; is in fact directed by the same person, Baz Luhrmann." There's a fine line — in some quarters — between garbage and greatness. 

What's Happening to Hillary? Only a clod would say the clot is a plot!

Here are Senators Lindsey Graham and Dianne Feinstein, interviewed by Chris Wallace (yesterday, on "Fox News Sunday"):

WALLACE: Senator Graham, how important is it for Secretary of State Clinton to testify under oath before she leaves office about the Benghazi terror attack?...

GRAHAM: Absolutely essential that she'd testify....

WALLACE: Some of your Republican colleagues say they are prepared to hold off the confirmation of John Kerry as secretary of state, until Secretary Clinton testifies as secretary, before she leaves office.

GRAHAM: That's going to happen. I've been told by Senator Kerry he wants that approach also. He needs to hear what she says so he can make comments about, I agree with her/I don't agree with her. It makes sense to have her go first.

WALLACE: Do you agree with that, Senator Feinstein, that she needs to testify first, as an -- and have you been assured she will testify, though it has been 3 1/2 months since Benghazi and she still has never really answered questions, about Benghazi, her role before, during, after the attack? Do you have reason to believe she'll testify as secretary?

FEINSTEIN: She has said she will and I believe she will. You know, she's had a very real accident and she's recovering from it, and, she will be back. I gather, her first day, of work may well be next week. So, I think that's good news.

With all that assurance that Hillary Clinton would testify, later that day, we heard the news that Hillary Clinton had entered the hospital with a blood clot. We weren't told the site of said blood clot. Was it her brain (recently concussed)? Was it her leg (where she had a blood clot back in 1998)? The former is a big deal, the latter, not so much. Why not specify the site, since it make such a big difference, medically? Oh, but we're told we must not display any skepticism, any hint of suspicion that the SOS is trying to avoid having to testify about Benghazi. The woman is ill. Only a clod would say a clot was a plot.

Here's medical expert Kent Sepkowitz:

Unlike the relatively bland “concussion after fainting” pronouncement from earlier this month, this terse press release from her spokesman smells a little fishy. First it is odd that we are not told where the clot is—usually the clot, referred to as thrombophlebitis, occurs in the leg, a condition suffered by former president Richard Nixon after leaving the White House. 

Maybe you can remember — if not, guess! — how sensitive we were to Nixon's phlebitis, which conveniently flared up in the midst of Watergate. Ha! That bastard thinks he can get our sympathy. Pathetic! (That's what I said at the time.)

The clot [in the leg] can be uncomfortable but is only dangerous and even life threatening if it breaks free and travels downstream into the lung—a pulmonary embolus, in medical parlance.... Given that Clinton already has had this condition and those who have had one episode have a predilection to recurrence, the lack of a reminder of the 1998 clot from her press people seems a strange oversight.

Another problem with the “concussion then clot” story is this—the concussion, if indeed it came after a faint, should not directly predispose Clinton to a clot....

Alternatively, is it possible that the clot in question is one in the lining of the brain that can form after head trauma.... But anticoagulation is never given to persons with clots around the brain. They are either watched without intervention or surgically evacuated. So this possible explanation is out.

We are left with a story that is not easy to connect up with sparse information from the inside crowd, who could easily deflate speculation with two or three more measly facts. The National Enquirer has already declared Clinton to be suffering from a brain tumor, linking her observed weight gain, possibly from treatment for the putative cancer, and not-exactly-explained need to leave Obama’s Cabinet to the grim diagnosis. Such a story no longer seems to me as implausible as it did after the faint and concussion reports.

The suppression of information — the site of the clot — suggests 2 radically different theories: 1. fakery/exaggeration to evade testimony, or 2. something horribly serious. I read Sepkowitz to exclude the middle ground.

UPDATE: Email from CNN says: "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has a blood clot between her brain and skull behind her right ear, her doctors said." This seems to be the option that Sepkowitz excluded because "anticoagulation is never given to persons with clots around the brain." If that's correct, then something is still, to use Sepkowitz's word, fishy.

UPDATE 2: Here's the Washington Post, on January 1st, noting the site of the clot and saying "The conventional treatment is an anticoagulant drug for at least six months." So that directly contradictions Sepkowitz's statement that "anticoagulation is never given to persons with clots around the brain."

AND: I've got a bit more to say here. 

Obama seems amenable to the NRA idea of armed guards in schools.

On today's "Meet the Press": David Gregory asked him what he thought of having "armed guards at every school in the country," adding "That's what the NRA believes. They told me last week that could work." Obama said:

You know, I am not going to prejudge the recommendations that are given to me. I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools. And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem. 

Of course, we are also skeptical that gun control is going to solve our problem. My only point here is that Obama didn't denounce the idea and treat it as crazy, which seemed to be the left/liberal spin last week after NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre made the proposal. Obama is saying that the idea deserves consideration. And to say you doubt that it's the "only answer" is to imply that it may belong in a package of items that together are the answer. In fact, later, he said: "I'm going to be putting forward a package..."

At the Sunroom Café...

... we can wait out the winter.

Fiscal cliffhanging on their every word.

Are you?

On "Meet the Press" today, Obama mostly came across as the moderate, pragmatic politician I like.

Now, I'm not a sucker for mere posing, and in fact, I get suspicious when I hear what are simply assertions of pragmatism:

But generally if you look at how I've tried to govern over the last four years and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I am a pretty practical guy. And I just want to make sure that things work. And one of the nice things about never having another election again, I will never campaign again, is I think you can rest assured that all I care about is making sure that I leave behind an America that is stronger, more prosperous, more stable, more secure than it was when I came into office.

Well, no, I'm not going to rest assured. Much as I would love these statements to be true, they make me nervous. And that assurance came right after the most partisan thing he said in the whole interview. The moderator, David Gregory, had asked Obama how "frustrated" he was about the difficulty of getting things done with Congress. Gregory asserted that people were constantly coming up to him saying "Don't they realize, all of them, the president, Republicans and Democrats, how frustrated we all are?" And President Obama showed a little irritation:

Well, I think we're all frustrated. The only thing I would caution against, David, is I think this notion of, "Well, both sides are just kind of unwilling to cooperate." And that's just not true. I mean if you look at the facts, what you have is a situation here where the Democratic party, warts and all, and certainly me, warts and all, have consistently done our best to try to put country first.

Country first. Where'd he come up with that slogan?

Then Obama started inching away from this assertion that the Democrats are better. He shifts to more neutral boilerplate about trying "to work with everybody involved to make sure that we've got an economy grows" and "Make sure that it works for everybody. Make sure that we're keeping the country safe." Then he retreats again, making abstract concessions (in question form):

And does the Democratic party still have some knee jerk ideological positions and are there some folks in the Democratic party who sometimes aren't reasonable? Of course. That's true of every political party.

So are the Democrats better or not? He's melted into squishy blandness. And it's exactly here that he does the not-an-ideologue/practical-guy riff that appears at the beginning of this post.

"Shut up. Shut up. Shut up."

"Please. Shut up."

"What I learned about beauty from my 56 hours in jail."

I hope you learned not to do that duck-lips thing with your mouth that you did in the "Self-portrait from the day before the incident." But no, it's stuff like:

These women were endlessly resourceful: colored pencils for eyeliner, lip liner, and eye shadow (yeah, it fucking hurts to apply). If you bend every other prong of the standard-issue comb, it becomes a makeshift brush....

The worst thing about my short time in jail? Honestly? Besides the indignity and the shitty food and the crushing boredom and the derision from the staff and the self-loathing just being there obviously inspired? Chapped lips.

OK, maybe I’m being a little facetious, but I was parched. My lips were cracked and bleeding, spoiled with a steady diet of Fresh Sugar lip treatment. Licking my lips only made it worse, but I couldn’t help it — it was Pavlovian. It sounds stupid, but I remember that agony more clearly than anything else. When my cellmate shared her makeshift chapstick (shave gel mixed with something pink that I never actually identified) with me, I practically kissed her. 

That sets up a hilarious lampooning by a commenter. Excerpt:

We broke our inkpins and blew the black ink out into our small cups of vasaline, then took a small 2 inched toothbrush to apply... some girls lined their eyes with Sharpies, meant to label our personal property. We made lip gloss with color out of red Kool-Aid or red jello and neosporin. We had clear toothpaste gel that did everything but brush your teeth, and we used this for everything from hair gel to adhesives for our pictures and calanders... We took our Gold Bond Foot Powder and dripped coffee and red Kool-Aid in our cups to try and create eyeshadow and blush....

Another commenter offers a tip she learned in school:

This sounds gross, but my 8th grade science teacher told the class that he just used his own ear wax as lip balm...

The worst part is that he wasn't even mentioning this as like a survival technique....

I love when science teachers challenge their students.

Look, don't even get started with the chapstick. It's addictive:



You'll wake up thinking about it:

"Impractical Accessories."

There's some great stuff in this slideshow, but attention must be paid to the 10th image, shoes designed by Iris Schieferstein, with the toe portion made from real horse's hooves and the high heels little pistols.

"Treating OWS as 'potential criminal and terrorist threat' was exactly the right thing to do."

"No one knew whether these protests were going to stay peaceful or not. OWS certainly wanted it to turn into a phenomenon of national civil unrest. Why the FBI wasn't supposed to treat it as if it had the potential to go that way is beyond me."

Writes one Metafilter commenter, who gets 3 "favorite" votes from the community and — 8 minutes later — this response:

Treating OWS the Tea Party movement as "potential criminal and terrorist threat" was exactly the right thing to do. No one knew whether these protests were going to stay peaceful or not. OWS The Koch Bros. certainly wanted it to turn into a phenomenon of national civil unrest. Why the FBI wasn't supposed to treat it as if it had the potential to go that way is beyond me.

FTFY

The response now has 33 "favorite" votes.

"[I]ncredibly articulate and human... charmingly personal while at the same time substantively deep."

Who can it be?!

The notion that technology is the reason the murder rate has fallen by half.

"A deranged woman who told cops she detests Muslims broke into a maniacal fit of laughter as she was charged with a hate crime Saturday..."

"... three days after she allegedly shoved an Indian immigrant to his death in front of a Queens train."

“Tell your client this is not funny,” Queens Criminal Court Judge Gia Morris thundered, speaking to defense lawyer Dietrich Epperson. “This is not appropriate.”...

Before she was ordered held without bail, prosecutors revealed [Erika Menendez, 31] has expressed no remorse — and even bragged about smoking pot and having sex with her “man in Brooklyn” after the murderous deed.

The deranged drifter - who witnesses said was mumbling to herself but never said a word to Sen before the fatal shove - ran downstairs from the elevated tracks after the attack....

A wild-eyed Menendez seemed startled as she was led out of the stationhouse in handcuffs, en route to her arraignment, about 8:30 p.m. Saturday....

“I know her. ... You could tell that something was not right, like she needed medication or something,” said [one doorman at her mother's apartment building]. “It’s just very sad what happened.”...

“When she didn't take her medication, she got wacko,” said [another doorman].

There are no guns to propose banning, and we're not going to ban subway trains or enclose the platforms in elaborate sliding panels. Maybe something more needs to be done to institutionalize the mentally ill or to supervise the taking of anti-psychotic medication. But one must observe that this subway pushing comes less than a month after an earlier subway pushing in NYC, one that receive a great deal of publicity. There are many murders, but some get more media than others.

A subway pushing is one of those riveting events that the media fixate upon. That becomes an idea vividly imprinted on millions of brains, which intensifies as they head down into the subway, see the platform, the platform's edge, the people standing near it, and hear the sound of the train coming into the station. Emotion is stirred. Most people either ignore that idea, or it's an idea that makes them step from the platform's edge and try to get a wall behind them or keep an eye out for odd movements. But some people are mentally ill. The idea rages up into a powerful impulse, the train is pulling into the station, and they can't resist.

The media reports are — I must assume — a causal factor in the creation of a murderous impulse that some people are not going to be able to control. And yet, the media have their own irresistible impulse to publish these highly stimulating stories, an impulse which, by linking, I am stimulating.