The Dr Franff character is depicted on the Netflix show with a high-pitched laugh and unable to speak certain words due to his plastic surgery. He is also seen drinking from a surgical bag and reinflates his own face after being punched.
April 6, 2015
Martin Short devastates a doctor.
"Cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt - who was recently rumored to be the inspiration behind a character on the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — died on Sunday, aged 65...."
"Teens who completely suppress puberty are also likely to be sterile, but Bird says it's now possible to undergo a temporary puberty."
"It can last for just long enough to harvest sperm or eggs for later use, but not so long that a teen begins to grow sexual features, like breasts or an Adam's apple."
From an NPR piece titled "Puberty Suppression Now A Choice For Teens On Medicaid In Oregon."
From an NPR piece titled "Puberty Suppression Now A Choice For Teens On Medicaid In Oregon."
"Why skeptics think a South Carolina sailor lied about being lost at sea for 66 days."
"Despite claiming to lose 50 pounds after his canned food ran out and he was reduced to raw fish, the amateur sailor appeared robust and upbeat as he exited a rescue helicopter and walked without assistance.... his skin... looked pale and unblemished...."
Jordan’s two-month ordeal was made stranger by his enthusiastic tales of getting iodine poisoning, sailing through swarms of glowing phosphorescent jellyfish at night and encountering two killer whales “with such beautiful faces, they looked so friendly.”
"Every summer, a beehive would form behind the backboard."
"Shooting the ball from close meant a close call with a swarm of bees. So naturally, I would shoot from far away, let the ball land, then sprint and go grab it and run back to my spot. Every once in a while, a bee would get me, but it never stopped me from shooting."
From Frank Kaminsky's "remarkable blog," quoted in a Washington Post article titled "Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin basketball’s Napoleon Dynamite, and the triumph of the goofy."
From Frank Kaminsky's "remarkable blog," quoted in a Washington Post article titled "Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin basketball’s Napoleon Dynamite, and the triumph of the goofy."
"Look, I love art. I work in the arts. I cherish world monuments, and have traveled to see them."
"Why are you promoting the use of force to save things, while the slaughter of innocents and the destruction and displacement of their communities have not moved you to such action?"
Comment at a NYT op-ed titled "Use Force to Stop ISIS’ Destruction of Art and History."
Comment at a NYT op-ed titled "Use Force to Stop ISIS’ Destruction of Art and History."
April 5, 2015
Just published: "Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report."
"An anatomy of a journalistic failure," by Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, Derek Kravitz.
[The Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin] Erdely believed firmly that Jackie's account was reliable. So did her editors and the story's fact-checker, who spent more than four hours on the telephone with Jackie, reviewing every detail of her experience. "She wasn't just answering, 'Yes, yes, yes,' she was correcting me," the checker said. "She was describing the scene for me in a very vivid way. … I did not have doubt." (Rolling Stone requested that the checker not be named because she did not have decision-making authority.)...
The problem of confirmation bias – the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones – is a well-established finding of social science. It seems to have been a factor here. Erdely believed the university was obstructing justice. She felt she had been blocked. Like many other universities, UVA had a flawed record of managing sexual assault cases. Jackie's experience seemed to confirm this larger pattern. Her story seemed well established on campus, repeated and accepted.
Madison Easter.
We walked downtown and sat in the Peace Park...
Some shops were open and some were closed. A store with massive quantities of Wisconsin-themed clothes had racks of "Final Four" Badgers clothes but nothing representing tomorrow's game. "Final Four" is so yesterday, but the sales guy said the more up-to-date things are not printed yet. "It's Easter!" he said. Who wants to work on Easter? The skateboard shop was closed:
We pondered whether the skateboard people were religious, since they'd taken the trouble to make a special Easter-themed "closed" sign. There's no inconsistency between skateboarding and religion, but perhaps there's a slight disjuncture between religiosity and the use of the human-adult-sized rabbit character, as President Obama is learning if he's reading his Facebook commenters.
At the square, we sat on a bench near the statue of our Civil War hero Christian Heg, the site of some of our fondest protest-era memories — recorded here and here — and we conversed and people-watched until it seemed as though we were accelerating the process of becoming oldies...
... and we got a couple B-cycles out of the nearest kiosk and biked back home along Lake Mendota, which is exactly what we'd done the day before. But yesterday the lake was still maintaining its ice, in layered shards that looked like solid whitecaps. I should have taken a photo then, because today all that water had assumed the liquid form that gets to hog the name "water."
Some shops were open and some were closed. A store with massive quantities of Wisconsin-themed clothes had racks of "Final Four" Badgers clothes but nothing representing tomorrow's game. "Final Four" is so yesterday, but the sales guy said the more up-to-date things are not printed yet. "It's Easter!" he said. Who wants to work on Easter? The skateboard shop was closed:
We pondered whether the skateboard people were religious, since they'd taken the trouble to make a special Easter-themed "closed" sign. There's no inconsistency between skateboarding and religion, but perhaps there's a slight disjuncture between religiosity and the use of the human-adult-sized rabbit character, as President Obama is learning if he's reading his Facebook commenters.
At the square, we sat on a bench near the statue of our Civil War hero Christian Heg, the site of some of our fondest protest-era memories — recorded here and here — and we conversed and people-watched until it seemed as though we were accelerating the process of becoming oldies...
... and we got a couple B-cycles out of the nearest kiosk and biked back home along Lake Mendota, which is exactly what we'd done the day before. But yesterday the lake was still maintaining its ice, in layered shards that looked like solid whitecaps. I should have taken a photo then, because today all that water had assumed the liquid form that gets to hog the name "water."
"The journal, first envisioned as an amulet against the passage of time, has grown to overwhelming proportions."
"'I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago,' [Sarah] Manguso writes. 'It’s eight hundred thousand words long.'... Of all the psychological conditions to be burdened with, graphomania is hardly the worst, and Manguso doesn’t quite succeed in dispelling the suspicion that she is a little proud of her eccentricities, perhaps even exaggerating them... In her memoir, Manguso makes the striking decision never to quote the diary itself. As she started to look through the old journals, she writes, she became convinced that it was impossible to pull the 'best bits' from their context without distorting the sense of the whole: 'I decided that the only way to represent the diary in this book would be either to include the entire thing untouched—which would have required an additional eight thousand pages—or to include none of it.' The diary, she observes, is the memoir’s 'dark matter,' everywhere but invisible, and the book revolves around a center that is absent. 'I envisioned a book without a single quote, a book about pure states of being,' she writes. 'It sounded almost religious when I put it that way.'"
From "Dear Diary, I Hate You/Reflections on journals in an age of overshare," a New Yorker review of a memoir called "Ongoingness."
The description of the connected process of obsessive journaling and carefully written memoirs reminded me of what David Sedaris has written about about carrying a notebook everywhere and continually jotting down observations, expanding it into a typed form every morning, making an index to help him find the .01% that "might possibly qualify as entertaining," and using that as material for the essays he uses in his public readings. He's kept this diary for 35 years, and: "Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud...."
From "Dear Diary, I Hate You/Reflections on journals in an age of overshare," a New Yorker review of a memoir called "Ongoingness."
The description of the connected process of obsessive journaling and carefully written memoirs reminded me of what David Sedaris has written about about carrying a notebook everywhere and continually jotting down observations, expanding it into a typed form every morning, making an index to help him find the .01% that "might possibly qualify as entertaining," and using that as material for the essays he uses in his public readings. He's kept this diary for 35 years, and: "Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud...."
"Why should a woman cook? So her husband can say, 'My wife makes a delicious cake,' to some hooker?"
From "61 Comedians Recall Their Favorite, First, and Life-Changing Jokes." That joke is from Joan Rivers, and the comedian who calls that her "favorite joke of all time" is Jen Kirkman. Most of the 61 comedians, by the way, don't identify a particular joke, so the headline is misleading. I chose Kirkman's joke for this post because it is a joke, it's funny, and it gives you something to think about.
You might think I chose it because CAKE! has been the subject of the week and the tendency of people to pay attention to CAKE!!! has been amply demonstrated. But I didn't. And I'm actually pretty sick of the cake-o-mania of the past week. I've got some really mixed feelings about this cake-focused exposure of the RFRA laws — laws I've studied and taught for many years. I feel as though I should explain things about which I have an overload of understanding, but I also feel hopeless about conveying that understanding. The political demagoguery will overwhelm the legal material. I'm absolutely convinced. I could do my professorly part, but why should I pour hopeless effort into the rehabilitation of RFRA laws, which I've never liked? When it's not hopeless, it's my practice to explain arguments for things I don't agree with. But it is hopeless here. The political noise is too loud.
Okay? Now, please acquire your cake somehow. Have cake and eat it and share it and stop being so obtuse about love.
AND: I wanted to replace that cake pic with a photograph of a cake that had "God is love" written on it. That would be a loftier ending for this post, but instead I'm going to return to the joke-y spirit I began with. Here's what Google gave me when I asked for a picture of a cake with "God is love" written on it:
What would Mitt Romney do?
You might think I chose it because CAKE! has been the subject of the week and the tendency of people to pay attention to CAKE!!! has been amply demonstrated. But I didn't. And I'm actually pretty sick of the cake-o-mania of the past week. I've got some really mixed feelings about this cake-focused exposure of the RFRA laws — laws I've studied and taught for many years. I feel as though I should explain things about which I have an overload of understanding, but I also feel hopeless about conveying that understanding. The political demagoguery will overwhelm the legal material. I'm absolutely convinced. I could do my professorly part, but why should I pour hopeless effort into the rehabilitation of RFRA laws, which I've never liked? When it's not hopeless, it's my practice to explain arguments for things I don't agree with. But it is hopeless here. The political noise is too loud.
Okay? Now, please acquire your cake somehow. Have cake and eat it and share it and stop being so obtuse about love.
AND: I wanted to replace that cake pic with a photograph of a cake that had "God is love" written on it. That would be a loftier ending for this post, but instead I'm going to return to the joke-y spirit I began with. Here's what Google gave me when I asked for a picture of a cake with "God is love" written on it:
What would Mitt Romney do?
"On day ten, I turned a corner— I felt awful, as usual, in the morning, but a completely different person in the afternoon."
"This was delightful, and wholly unexpected: there was no intimation, beforehand, that such a transformation was about to happen," writes Oliver Sacks, describing the aftermath of treatment for metastatic liver cancer.
How much of this was a reestablishment of balance in the body; how much an autonomic rebound after a profound autonomic depression; how much other physiological factors; and how much the sheer joy of writing, I do not know. But my transformed state and feeling were, I suspect, very close to what Nietzsche experienced after a period of illness and expressed so lyrically in The Gay Science:
Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened — the gratitude of a convalescent — for convalescence was unexpected…. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.
Beware, Duke.
Beware, Duke. #Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/jRfDuyPclK
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 5, 2015A 10-point list of Easter news.
1. "An Easter Bunny character first hopped up in the 8th century with the English monk Bede's The Reckoning of Time..."
3. The Archbishop of York said: "God is creator of the Cosmos and that includes the Palace of Westminster and the White House. There are followers of Jesus Christ in all the main political parties in the UK. It is not for me to tell their fellow church members how to vote next month, but I will encourage them to use their vote."
4. Police in Tahlequah City, Okahoma nabbed a stuffed rabbit carrying $30,000 of meth: "We’ve intercepted narcotics in the mail before... The Easter Bunny I thought was a strange touch."
5. "When Obama spotted 5-year-old Donovan Frazier distraught after losing his egg roll in 2013, the president gave him a hug and advised him to 'shake it off.'"
6. Pope Francis said: Easter is "so beautiful, and so ugly because of the rain."
A little girl found a bird that was close to death and prayed to Eostra [the Germanic goddess of spring and fertility] for help. Eostra appeared, crossing a rainbow bridge — the snow melting before her feet. Seeing the bird was badly wounded, she turned it into a hare, and told the little girl that from now on, the hare would come back once a year bearing rainbow colored eggs.2. In Norway, "Each year, nearly every TV and radio channel produce a crime series for Easter. The milk company prints crime stories on their cartons. In order to cash in on this national pastime, publishers churn out series of books known as 'Easter-Thrillers' or 'Påskekrim.'"
3. The Archbishop of York said: "God is creator of the Cosmos and that includes the Palace of Westminster and the White House. There are followers of Jesus Christ in all the main political parties in the UK. It is not for me to tell their fellow church members how to vote next month, but I will encourage them to use their vote."
4. Police in Tahlequah City, Okahoma nabbed a stuffed rabbit carrying $30,000 of meth: "We’ve intercepted narcotics in the mail before... The Easter Bunny I thought was a strange touch."
5. "When Obama spotted 5-year-old Donovan Frazier distraught after losing his egg roll in 2013, the president gave him a hug and advised him to 'shake it off.'"
6. Pope Francis said: Easter is "so beautiful, and so ugly because of the rain."
He had just celebrated Mass in rain-whipped St. Peter's Square for tens of thousands of people, who huddled under umbrellas or braved the downpour in thin, plastic rain-slickers.7. In 1926, Time Magazine considered the proposal to fix the date of the moveable feast that is Easter. Was Easter not more about commerce than religion?
People have stepped from decorating their altars to decking their bodies, until the Easter Sunday “parade” of fashionables and fops gets more notice in the lay press than does the sanctity of the holiday. This display of clothes and flowers and jewels and carriages, wily merchandisers have gloated over. None the less they have peered with squinted eye at the fluctuating date of the festival, even as they touted a robe as “hot from N’ York, lady,” or “new from Paris, madame.”8. "Do You Really Need Jesus for Easter?" asks Steve Neumann at The Atheist's Life at The Daily Beast.
[T]here simply is no supernatural realm for a God to occupy. Nature is all there is.9. David D. Ireland of Christ Church in northern New Jersey indulges in the kind of golf meditation that used to drive me crazy when I went to church in northern New Jersey half a century ago:
America's native philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson... wrote “Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him.” Achieving that isn’t easy—if those impressions were too feeble 175 years ago, they’re almost undetectable now that we’re surrounded by a shell of concrete and steel, covered by a blanket of wireless radio waves....
“Time and nature yield us many gifts,” continued Emerson, “but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.”
Easter is God’s mulligan to humanity. In golf, a mulligan is a stroke that is replayed from the spot of the prior stroke without any penalty. Your error has been forgiven. You may take the shot again. This Easter make a commitment to meet Jesus for the first time … again. Easter reminds you to keep trying to live the God-kind of life.10. "For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."
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