"But working your tail off to get the job done doesn’t have the same cachet here that it has in the United States."

"The first thing an American friend warned me upon moving to London was never to brag about pulling an all-nighter. 'People will think you’re insane,' she confided."

"I’m just going to come out and say it: I love horsemeat."

"It’s lean, yet tender, it is flavorful but not gamy; it’s delicious...."

I was first introduced to it in the Uzbek restaurants of Moscow, where they serve kazy, the horse sausage eaten across Central Asia, with translucently sliced onions and warm, naan-like bread. I was skeptical at first, but eating kazy is a conversion, that first moment of doubt melting away into a long “mmmmm” as you chew. But this was no mere staple of exotic Central Asia. By the time I got to Zurich, I was totally ready for the horse steak my hosts ordered for me. For the sake of comparison, we got one steak steak and one horse steak, and both slabs of raw meat came out on hot stones that sizzled and cooked the meat to the degree you wanted. And you know what? It wasn’t even a contest. Compared to the sweet richness of the horse, the cow tasted bland and dry. If I ever come across horse a menu again, I would order it: I still crave that horse steak.

"Obama pushing to diversify federal judiciary amid GOP delays."

Headline at The Washington Post — for article that has the top placement on the front page).

In Florida, President Obama has nominated the first openly gay black man to sit on a federal district court. In New York, he has nominated the first Asian American lesbian. And his pick for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit? The first South Asian.

Reelected with strong support from women, ethnic minorities and gays, Obama is moving quickly to change the face of the federal judiciary by the end of his second term, setting the stage for another series of drawn-out confrontations with Republicans in Congress.

This is such a ridiculous Obama puff piece. Obama pushing to diversify the federal judiciary? Like it's an Obama innovation?! I can't remember when Presidents didn't go out of their way pick federal judges from various minority groups.

WaPo is obviously using this diversity hook to criticize Republican resistance to liberal nominees. Does anyone in their right mind believe the GOP objects to these nominees because of their particular diversity factors.

"The first woman to be signed exclusively as a male model, ex-Olympian Casey Legler..."

"Legler is 6ft 2in, 35 years old... muscular and cheery, with the awkward swagger of a rock star."

Her voice is soft and earnest, and when she talks, she holds unblinking eye contact. In front of the camera, edges appear. Spikes. She juts her chin; she becomes a boy....

Emily Novak at Ford Models signed her to the men's board immediately. "She has an incredible presence and personality, and, most importantly, she is confident in who she is," Novak tells me. "Being the first woman on a men's board is the least-surprising bit to me – it's me," Legler laughs. "I walked in. It seems so obvious. I have the vocabulary."...

Geoffrey Finch, the creative director of London fashion label Antipodium, says one of his proudest moments was giving Peji´c his women's catwalk debut, but believes fashion has always celebrated difference. "It's all about playing with the ideal of beauty and normality. Perfectly pretty girls are rather dull, aren't they?" he says. "It's Cara Delevingne's strong brows that make her such a babe, likewise Saskia de Brauw's boyish features and iconic crop. Sartorially, women in slouchy suiting, or men in kilts, catch the eye: the 'off' element is the turn-on."

ADDED: Some pix.

"So while expansions in the wealth gap have become sport for the partisan and economically illiterate on both sides of the political divide..."

"... the real truth is that the sentient among us should cheer every time they read of rising inequality."

The sentient should cheer because it signals enterprise being rewarded, freedom to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and then for all of us not rich it signals that our lives are getting better and better; the lifestyle disparity between us and them (the rich) shrinking precisely because economic achievement is taking place.

"A 3-year-old girl who went missing from her home in a village in western Poland on Friday evening..."

"... has been found alive after her pet dog snuggled up to her overnight to help keep her warm in sub zero temperatures."

"Woman leaves in tears after getting injured on just her second kick..."

"... during try out to become the first female in pro-football."

As more than two dozen media, including E! Entertainment network, watched her every move, the 28-year-old [Lauren] Silberman was examined off to the side of the practice field. About 30 minutes later, while 36 other kickers continued their workouts, she called the scene 'surreal' and thanked the NFL for 'this tremendous opportunity.'

"Sperling Admits Obama Misled in Debate: The President Did Propose the Sequester."

"We put forth the design of' the sequestration, Sperling finally admits after a long back-and-forth."



Here's the whole "Meet the Press" transcript. Here's the part about Bob Woodward:

"Christopher Columbus reached the island of Hispaniola on his first voyage, in December 1492."

"On Columbus second voyage in 1493 the colony and Santo Domingo became the new capital, and remains the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas."

Hundreds of thousands Tainos living on the island were enslaved to work in gold mines. As a consequence of oppression, forced labor, hunger, disease, and mass killings, by 1535, only 60,000 were still alive. In 1501, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand I and Isabella, first granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves, which began arriving to the island in 1503. These African importees have had the most dominant racial influence, and their rich and ancient culture has had an influence second only to that of Europe on the political and cultural character of the modern Dominican Republic.

The Dominican Republic is today's "History of" country. (In the "History of" project, we're going through the 206 countries of the world in alphabetical order and reading their "History of" page in Wikipedia.)

Romney: "The hardest thing about losing is watching this critical moment — this golden moment — just slip away with politics."

On "Fox News Sunday" this morning, talking about what is happening with the sequester deal:

I look at this sequester and also the expiration of the Bush tax cuts as an almost once in generational opportunity for America to solve its fiscal problems.... I mean, I see this as this huge opportunity and it's being squandered by politics... by people who are more interested in a political victory than they are in doing what's right for the country. And it's very frustrating, I have to tell you.

Romney criticizes Obama for going "out campaigning to the American people, doing rallies around the country, flying around the country and berating Republicans and blaming and pointing," which "causes the Republicans to retrench and then put up a wall and to fight back. It's a very natural human emotion." Maybe Romney would have been better at working out a deal, but Obama, being better at campaigning, won the election, and if what he is doing now is more campaigning... well, that's the downside of democracy, isn't it? We judge the campaigns. We don't know what expertise they'd bring to negotiating and reconciling differences.

One of the commentators in the second part of the show was Charles Lane of The Washington Post, who said:

Mitt Romney is a person with a lot of ability and a lot of energy — who still has got a lot to contribute, and, you know, his hometown of Detroit, right now, has just been put into state receivership or it's about to be. I wonder if there is no role for him in the restructuring of Detroit.  He'd be the perfect person to do it. He has got the expertise, he's a hometown guy, and he is a kind of a political free agent at this point. That is the kind of thing that he could, I think, contribute in the future.

That sounds like a great idea to me. Fix Detroit!

"Boehner defends Senate 'ass' jibe."

Politico front-page headline leads to: "Boehner on 'ass' comment: 'I speak English.'"

(He said the Senate needs to "get off their asses.")

ADDED: I've heard of the hand jibe.



Trying to picture the ass jibe.

AND: I do know the song is "jive," not "jibe," but I'm moved to check out the origins of the 2 words in the Oxford English Dictionary (which I can't link to).

"Jibe," originally spelled "iybe," goes back to 1573, and spelled "gibe," appears prominently in Shakespeare, in Hamlet's speech to the skull of the dead jester Yoricke: "Where be your gibes now?" It's a word "Of obscure origin: perhaps < Old French giber... as meaning to shake... ‘to handle roughly in sport’, ‘to use horseplay.’"

"Jive" is a much more recent word, going back only to 1928. It's U.S. slang, "Origin unknown." It means "Talk or conversation; spec. talk that is misleading, untrue, empty, or pretentious; hence, anything false, worthless, or unpleasant; vaguely, ‘stuff’; = jazz n. 2a."

1928   R. Fisher Walls of Jericho 301   Jive, pursuit in love or any device thereof. Usually flattery with intent to win.

It's also "Lively and uninhibited dancing to dance-music or jazz; spec. ‘jitterbugging,'" which is pretty clearly the meaning in the song.

1943   Dancing Times Dec. 117/1   The rhythm of the Jive is not an entirely new one.
1957   C. MacInnes City of Spades i. iv. 24   I'll teach you..bop steps, and jive, and all.

"Ass jive" would be a much more disparaging way to refer to Boehner's remark.

"The Harrad Experiment"/"The Herod Experiment."

That last post, about universal pre-school, led to an in-person conversation with Meade proposing such an extreme change from what we have now that, I said, it would have to be presented in the form of a novel — a utopian/dystopian scenario. People would need to ease into entertaining the idea.  It would have to be like "The Harrad Experiment," which was a novel that was based on a 1960 academic paper written by a couple of married sociologists, "outlining a program designed to achieve sexual sanity."

Essentially, our method consisted of teaching a new sexual ethic and moral code by conditioning and indoctrination throughout a four-year period to a select group of male and female college students of unusually sound character and high creative ability. The paper was the result of ten years of work in family and marriage counseling and years spent studying the sexual habits and mores of man throughout recorded history. My wife and I felt that, in order to survive, Western man must take the long step away from primitive emotions of hate and jealousy and learn the meaning of love and loving as a dynamic process. Such a program would counteract the decadence that is slowly infiltrating our society....

Obviously it would be too startling a change in sex and marriage behavior for the average person in our present culture. The point we made was that the time to begin is now. A start must be made somewhere. Too much is at stake to permit our basic social and family patterns to drift on the currents of haphazard marriage and distorted sex relations.

Our paper proposing a Premarital Living Program at the college level met with a great deal of unfavorable reaction....

So they hooked up with Robert H. Rimmer, who turned their proposal into a novel, and in novel form, people were able to engage with the professors' proposal. [UPDATE: I've now skimmed the book and  see that the sociologists are part of Rimmer's fictional story.]

Meade's idea was: Free and compulsory government schooling to begin at birth and to end at age 10. Meade jokes that his book would be "The Herod Experiment." Sounds gruesome!



The quotes above are from the introduction to the novel, which I just bought on Kindle. I had wanted to read a good summary, but Wikipedia only has a short article about the 1973 movie based on the book. I see Tippi Hedren and the young Don Johnson were in it. It looks amusingly cheesy from the trailer — watch out for the (hilarious) nudity:



Here's a more sedate trailer. No nudity, but I laughed out loud more than once (especially at the oh-so-professorial professor, played by James Whitmore, who "represents the past"):

"Do we really think it is fair to predetermine children’s chances for success in life based on what ZIP code they live in?"

"Doesn’t every child deserve as close to the same chance to develop her or his abilities as any other child?"

Universally available prekindergarten is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Raising lifetime wages (and thereby tax revenues) and reducing the likelihood that children will drop out of school, get involved in crime, and become a burden on the justice system more than make up for the costs of early childhood education."

Other countries have realized this. China reportedly has set a goal of giving 70 percent of all children three years of prekindergarten education — far ahead of the modest one year proposed by President Obama — by the year 2020.

China is so far ahead of us... in setting goals. Come on, everybody, let's gets some more aggressive and expansive goals. Surprisingly, it's absolutely free, having goals. And in these goals, children stay in school, crime plummets, and taxes soar!

Some people criticize Obama for "moving the goal posts" about this or that, but look over there. It's the Chinese. They've got amazing goals. Okay, now you can look at Obama's goals. So modest!

ADDED: The quote in the post title is the most specious rhetoric I've seen in a long time. Who is doing the "predetermining"? We're supposed to feel that doing nothing is doing something, that our inaction is deliberate and wrongful.

"I apologize if this seems disrespectful, but if Bush is really never rescued, I'd prefer to imagine him as the hero of a Jules Verne novel..."

"... exploring the fantastical landscapes of Hollow Earth, fighting blind cave apes, and saving Theda Bara from the assassin priests of some subterranean cult."

I'd like to see the science fiction movie called "The Karst."

Where are you on the Karst map?

NPR's embarrassing headline: "In Voting Rights Arguments, Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data."

The article is by Nina Totenberg, who presumably didn't write the headline, and it makes a somewhat abstruse point about the basis for a set of questions that the Chief Justice asked at oral argument.

Roberts' questions and conclusion appear to be taken from a census survey cited in a lower court dissent. 

"A lower court dissent" is a funny way to refer to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case that is under review! Roberts pulled something out of the case that the Court is working on. Under the circumstances, it would be bizarre if the Solicitor General didn't get the reference. (Check the transcript PDF at page 32.) Tapping material in the lower court's opinion is predictable and perfectly mundane. Totenberg glosses over that to stress the data underlying the Court of Appeals judge's opinion, which, she tells us, comes from Census Bureau data that have such a wide margin of error that it doesn't really mean much. Well, if that's such an important point, why didn't the Solicitor General say that in the oral argument?! Here's what we got instead:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: [D]o you know which State has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African American voter turnout? 

GENERAL VERRILLI: I do not.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Massachusetts. Do you know what has the best, where African American turnout actually exceeds white turnout? Mississippi. 

GENERAL VERRILLI: Yes, Mr. Chief Justice. But Congress recognized that expressly in the findings when it reauthorized the act in 2006. It said that the first generation problems had been largely dealt with, but there persisted significant -­ 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Which State has the greatest disparity in registration between white and African American? 

GENERAL VERRILLI: I do not know that. 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Massachusetts. Third is Mississippi, where again the African American registration rate is higher than the white registration rate. 

Maybe saying "I do not know," Verrilli secretly meant that the Census data was so rough that no one could really "know" such facts, but the transcript shows a blank statement of lack of knowledge and an effort to shift away to the subject of what findings Congress relied on. If the statement in the dissenting opinion (written by Stephen F. Williams) was so unreliable, Verrilli should have shot it down neatly and quickly. 

He didn't. Totenberg is doing cleanup work. She went out and talked to "Census officials" who told her that "these numbers are simply not reliable for state-by-state comparisons because of the high margins of error in some states." That's useful to know, as the issue in the case has to do with how closely the Voting Right Act tracks the actual problem of voting rights violations in the states.

But "Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data"?! Why doesn't NPR care about its reputation for journalism? What an embarrassing display of eagerness to discredit Roberts! Totenberg's article isn't about Roberts misconstruing anything. It's about the relatively low value of Census data that Judge Williams used in his dissenting opinion. If that material was so terrible, Verrilli fell short at oral argument.
 
ADDED: Pepperdine lawprof Derek T. Muller emails noting Totenberg's focus on 2010 census data, when the relevant data — in the Court of Appeals case and for the purposes of the 2006 reenactment — is the 2004 data:

The fiction of nonfiction and the uninterestingness of someone else's dream.

From Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murder":

Where the novelist has to start from scratch and endure the terrible labor of constructing a world, the nonfiction writer gets his world ready-made. Although it is a world by no means as coherent as the world of fiction, and is peopled by characters by no means as lifelike as the characters in fiction, the reader accepts it without complaint; he feels compensated for the inferiority of his reading experience by what he regards as the edifying character of the genre: a work about something that is true, about events that really occurred and people who actually lived or live, is valued simply for being that, and is read in a more lenient spirit than a work of imaginative literature, from which we expect a more intense experience. The reader extends a kind of credit to the writer of nonfiction which he doesn’t extend to the writer of fiction, and for this reason the writer of nonfiction has to be punctilious about delivering the goods for which the reader has prepaid with his forbearance. Of course, there is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art. As the novelist must curb his imagination in order to keep his text grounded in the common experience of man (dreams exemplify the uncurbed imagination—thus their uninterestingness to everyone but their author), so the journalist must temper his literal-mindedness with the narrative devices of imaginative literature.

1. That's one of my favorite books, which I was just rereading last night and which I just bought on Kindle instead of typing out the last sentence.

2. One copies a larger chunk when it's not a matter of typing out each word!

3. I used the phrase "someone else's dream" in the post title because there's a song I like with that title. It's not this Faith Hill song, which I'm noticing for the first time because I'm Googling looking for the one I like, which is this. You have to get to the second page of search results to find the one I was looking for, and there's even another song with that title — by Laurie Anderson — before you get to the Youth Group one. These are 3 completely different songs, and the phrase is used to mean 3 distinctly different things:

A. She was daddy's little girl/Momma's little angel/Teacher's pet, pageant queen/She said "All my life I've been pleasin' everyone but me/Waking up in someone else's dream..."

B. You know those nights/when you're sleeping, and it's totally dark/and absolutely silent, and you don't dream/and there's only blackness/and this is the reason/it's because on those nights you've gone away/On those nights you're in someone else's dream....

C. Let's all go to the holy soul/to that soulless hole where the restless people go/To shout, oh you never got out/Don't you hate it when they just say hi?/They don't see the sadness in your eyes /Oh yeah, let's dream it down/You're having someone else's dream...

4. If other people's dreams are uninteresting (because they contain too much fiction) and if it's bad to find yourself in someone else's dream, why is "dream" such a buzzword in American culture today? In the field of politics, we're played by characters who talk about dreams. The President of the United States introduced himself to us as a man composed of someone else's dreams.

5. A stock message to schoolchildren is that they must have dreams and that their dreams not only can come true but actually will come true. That seems designed to counteract what we presume they are thinking: Nothing big will ever happen to me. We seem to assume hopelessness and rush to dispel it. But why do we think that assertions about dreams would accomplish such a feat?