At the Prospect Hotel...

... you can shoot the moon.

A Saturday evening snack.

Meade took my picture:



... as we had an order of frites and a glass of our favorite brew...



Now, checking in on the Gmail, I see that Hazy Dave has sent me a clip of something I happened to say somewhere on an old podcast. It seems appropriate or inappropriate:



Ha ha. It's all out of context. I'm reading something — probably something written in the 18th century. But we didn't drink 6/7/8 pints — not to be weak or strong. We shared one glass and easily walked home in the pre-Spring sunset:

"The Time Has Come to Say No to Death," by Bianca Jagger.

All right then: No! 

You hear that, Death?

Finally succumbing to Blogger's "Layout" format.

I've updated the blog to "layout." If anything looks worse now, let me know. One thing that's clearly better is that if you click on a tag, you'll be able to see all the old posts with that tag. Also...

At the Sweetness Café...

... don't you love it?

Life with dolphins.

American pop culture has its helpful friend dolphin, Flipper...



That's the delusion, built on the accidental smile.

"To be fair, they should have also had a bad dolphin: Zipper!"

But really, the dolphin is neither "ever so kind and gentle" (Flipper) or "surly" and "uncaring" (Zipper). It has its own ways.

Killer whales — like the one that killed Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld — are dolphins (the largest dolphins).

***

In starting to write this post, after that last one, my idea was to develop the theme of dolphin rape, but I got grossed out by many YouTube videos showing people at dolphin shows being set up — legs spread — to receive a dolphin, who — not understanding the lines human beings draw with respect to bodily interactions — leaps up and performs according to its own standards.

And, amongst dolphins, the standard is what we would classify as rape — gang rape:

In order to coerce the reluctant females, males form groups of two or three – often remaining together in their search for sexual gratification for well over a decade. When they find a suitable female they literally force her to mate with one or more of the group, and have even been known to herd their unwilling consorts for months at a time, basically using them as their personal sex-slaves.

Although dolphins are not alone in the animal world of gang-rapists, research suggests they’ve the perfected the art to a degree unseen in any other species, and it seems they don’t limit their advances to their female partners, either: there are several reports claiming divers and swimmers have also been accosted.

Studies would suggest the behaviour is likely to be undertaken for reasons of pleasure as much as reproduction, as dolphins are known to enjoy sexual activity in cases when reproduction would be physically impossible

In real life, the dolphin is more Zipper than Flipper. Leave him to the ocean where he can do the things he wants to do — unless you think he's so smart he can be convinced to learn principles of human morality. I would be interested in hearing the dolphin's perspective. Perhaps there is complex dolphin reasoning about the sexual slavery of the female, but I have no interest in considering adopting it for human society.

Presumably, a dolphin who managed to learn our morality would find it repugnant — and he would argue for his position with reasons that would outrage us. Maybe if that learned dolphin were confined to an aquarium — where, like a human prisoner in solitary confinement with nothing to do but read — he might take advantage of his knowledge to create some structure of asceticism around his deprivation. Then it wouldn't be so painful. I'll leave it to you to imagine how that analogy works from the perspective of a human woman who had to live in a society controlled by dolphins.

When the whale killed Dawn Brancheau... was it an instance of domestic violence?

"They really develop an interesting intimate relationship with these whales!" That is said about Dawn Brancheau, in this video depicting her with a killer whale, in happier days:



"Animals are real, sensitive to the touch, and they can feel all those things," Brancheau explains as she demonstrates her practice of rubbing the whale. Brancheau was rubbing the whale's nose when he turned on her and dragged her to her death.

Here are 6 theories of why the whale may have killed Brancheau. #3 is:

He was feeling sexual

[Whale expert] Nancy Black has also said it might have been a hormonal outburst from the killer whale. The killer whale was often isolated and encouraged to breed.

"He was used a lot [by SeaWorld] for mating and could have even been enacting a mating behavior during the incident," said Black.

Now, obviously, I don't know the extent to which the woman and the whale had a sexual relationship. I don't know it either from her perspective or the whale's. But the whale is an intelligent creature with feelings and in need of relationships, and the woman — if we listen to her own words — believed that she was providing a relationship. But think of it from the whale's perspective. Imagine the whale's sexuality. Imagine the frustration, tension, and deep longings.

No, you can't get that far trying to imagine how the whale felt. Animals are real, sensitive to the touch, and they can feel all those things. What things?! We don't really know. And yet we use them, for our purposes, which they cannot possibly understand. We imagine that we provide them love and companionship and touching. But we must know that even if a human being could fully grasp what the whale felt, she could never give him what he really needs.

***

The whale's name? Tilikum: 'Til I come.

At the Sweet and Salty Snackhouse...

... you can get your fill. And you know damned well that none of this is any good for you. Yet you cannot stop!

A "balding, blunt, unprepossessing, listed-at-5-foot-7 policy wonk would be a strong contender to take on President Barack Obama....."

"[H]e’s the un-Obama. If the country has soured on a charismatic orator who brought glamour but little executive experience to the presidency, the thinking goes, then [Mitch] Daniels could provide the antidote.... He’s a Princeton-educated former Senate chief of staff-turned political operative-turned think tank chief-turned Fortune 500 executive-turned White House budget director-turned two-term governor."

The Hoosier is willing.

A sociology professor is suspended for making the wrong kind of wisecracks on her Facebook page.

Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, wrote:

"Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..."

"Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's been that kind of day."

I guess the smiley face isn't enough to calm nerves in post-Amy Bishop academia.

Is this a fair description of the way Obama looked at the summit?

I've put some effort into defending Rush Limbaugh this week, so I want to balance that with some criticism. I didn't watch the summit yesterday. I had other demands on my attention. I don't watch Daytime TV. I could have watched the rerun at night, and I can still watch some clips. I just didn't and haven't. But I did listen to the podcast of some of Rush's show yesterday. At one point, he was running the audio of the summit and commenting in real time. He had some descriptions of how Obama looked, and it had me crying out loud that it was over-the-top:

Obama was sitting there and his lips were pursed. There as tight as he could be. He had one finger over his mouth and he was shooting Boris Karloff eyes.

So, something like this?

Or this?

More Rush:

He just looked like, "How dare you do this! This is not going the way I had it planned. I'm the one being embarrassed here! They're the ones are supposed to be made to look like a bunch of mean-spirited extremists, and now they're throwing my own words and my own plan right back at me and they don't even know how to respond to this." So he had to come over some help. Some aide had to come over and give him some advice on how to respond like he was a witness in front of a congressional committee, like a mob guy and his lawyer whispering. "Psst, pss, pss, pss."

There was utter panic.

Utter panic? Really?

"Women who have multiple sex partners 'preserve humanity.'"

Seriously. It "reduces the spread of a sex-ratio distortion (SR) chromosome that would lead to all-female offspring."

The affable, stuttering skeptic and the grim, concise Jeremiah.

Will Wilkinson and Mark Kleiman are talking about anthropogenic global warming, but in this quick clip, they could almost be talking about anything. They are 2 really distinct types in the big human conversation about what is true:

"Lost Sweathog Tyler Grady had a nice look and shtick, but he sang a mediocre song boringly."

No, that's not my theory why Tyler Grady failed to garner the votes to survive for another week of the "American Idol" competition. The song — "American Woman" — is not so much "mediocre" — many songs sung on AI are mediocre. That can hardly cause sudden death. The problem is that the song insults American women, and American women are the main people who do the voting. I have hated this song since it came out in 1970. The original group that did this song was the Guess Who. They were Canadian, and they were insulting American women and insulting America:

American woman gonna mess your mind...
American woman, stay away from me...
American woman, get away from me...
Don’t wanna see your face no more...
You know I’m gonna leave
You know I’m gonna go, woman
I’m gonna leave, woman
Goodbye, American woman
Goodbye, American chick
Goodbye, American broad ...

Well, hell. He was asking to leave. Don't want to see our face? Fine! We don't want to see yours.

Now that at long last no one cares, Carly Simon reveals that the "you" who probably thought that song was about him was...

... David Geffen.

(Via Throwing Things.)

Do liberals pretend to be deaf to Rush Limbaugh's sense of humor?

I have to respond to this post over at Language Log, because they are talking about me. Mark Liberman can't understand my post — "Disingenuous or stupid, Hendrik Hertzberg calls Rush Limbaugh a disgusting race-baiter" — which is about how Hertzberg misses — or pretends to miss — the humor in something Limbaugh said. Liberman's failure to get me replicates Hertzberg's failure to get Limbaugh.