"People often say things like, 'Pointers point, retrievers retrieve, and pit bulls fight,' implying that violence is in pit-bull-type dogs’ DNA."

"How does that hold up under scientific scrutiny?"

It doesn’t. There are all these layers of nuance and complexity that people aren’t interested in. It’s a lot easier to say, “Pointers point, retrievers retrieve, and fighting dogs fight.” That’s a very soothing and simplistic way of looking at the world, but it’s not really true. Pointers who have been highly selected for pointing will perhaps have a knack for pointing based on the breeder and the processes of selection and the particular line of dog and all these other choices that are being made (how the dogs are handled, how they’re trained, etc). Breeders know how to increase that likelihood, but as one of the trainers I interviewed in the book stressed, “There’s no such thing as a litter of winners.”...

"Just How Creepy Are Uber’s Driver-Nudges?"

Asks New York Magazine's Jesse Singal, who's reading a NYT article that nudges you to think that Uber's nudges are creepy.

The company is trying to solve basic problems baked into its business model: From Uber’s point of view, it’s great to have tons of drivers on the road, because that means customers don’t have to wait as long to get picked up. But from drivers’ points of view, having fewer fellow drivers on the road is best, because it means less time idling and earning no money (since drivers get paid only per ride, not on an hourly basis).

So Uber has introduced all sorts of nudge-y tricks to try to keep drivers driving. Some involve gamification — drivers can earn certain (meaningless) badges if they meet certain performance benchmarks — while others involve subtler forms of engineering, like building menus and interfaces in a way where certain options are easier to click. Drivers, Scheiber’s reporting reveals, often feel they’re being nudged into working more than they want to for less than they feel they should be earning.

Singal wonders whether what Uber is doing is anything different from the usual maximizing of profit within the current "American framework in which workers are increasingly alone, batted around by epochal forces, simply trying to get by." So I guess the question is comparative creepiness. Or... if something is common enough, is it just not creepy anymore?

I see I have a tag for creepiness. What is creepiness and why should we care about creepiness as opposed to simply whether something is good or bad? I found 2 useful things:

1. "The Age of Creepiness" (The New Yorker, July 9, 2015):

Half a century ago, there were squares and libertines, stalwarts and histrionics, private lives and public personalities. Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time, these categories have got scrambled, and distinguishing between a charmingly revealing Instagram post and a bomb of oversharing requires daunting feats of judgment. Looming behind many missteps is the threat of creepiness: a fear that, out of all the free paths open to the modern social actor, you have picked the one that is invasive, obviously needy, and perverse.

2. "On the Science of Creepiness/A look at what’s really going on when we get the creeps" (The Smithsonian, October 29, 2015):

Being creeped out is different from fear or revulsion, [says a psychology professor]; in both of those emotional states, the person experiencing them usually feels no confusion about how to respond. But when you’re creeped out, your brain and your body are telling you that something is not quite right and you’d better pay attention because it might hurt you....

[T]here’s an evolutionary advantage to feeling creeped out, one that’s in line with the evolutionary psychology theory of “agency detection”. The idea is that humans are inclined to construe willful agency behind circumstances, seek out patterns in events and visual stimuli, a phenomenon called pareidolia. This is why we see faces in toast, hear words in static or believe that things “happen for a reason.”...

"Big Pharma's anti-marijuana stance aims to squash the competition, activists say."

"Pharmaceutical company Insys spent $500,000 to block legalization in Arizona. Five months later it won approval for a cannabis-derived medical drug."

“I really don’t have a lot of hope for the small guy in this country,” said Dr Gina Berman, medical director of the Giving Tree Wellness Center, a cannabis dispensary in Phoenix, Arizona. “Pharmaceuticals are going to run me down. We have a small business, and we can’t afford to fight Big Pharma.”...

“We’ve got these pharmaceutical companies that are using their lobbying power to bring something to market that people can grow in their home,” said JP Holyoak, a marijuana dispensary owner and cultivator in Arizona, who chaired the state’s legalization campaign last year. “They recognize that the horse has left the barn regarding marijuana. They can’t beat it, so now they’re trying to just take it over.”

"Explosions at two subway stations in St. Petersburg killed at least 10 people on Monday afternoon, as President Vladimir V. Putin was in the city..."

10 have died at "at least 50" others are wounded.

"Followers of a self-described mystic, the pilgrims were accustomed to rituals in which they received spiritual guidance and sometimes removed their clothes to be cleansed of their sins."

"Instead, the Pakistani police said on Sunday, they were given an intoxicating drink and then beaten with batons and hacked with knives, leaving 20 of them dead and four others injured...."

“The practices at shrines include money donations, jewelry and gifts in return of a pat of blessing from the custodians,” [said an aide to the aide to chief minister of Punjab Province]. “Some guardians are appointed after an inner power struggle no less than those on the lines of Cosa Nostra... There have been cases in which unknowns are granted the status of sainthood and their burial places declared shrines, merely for the purpose of donation collection... Large sums of money are then collected and used on food, clothing, processions and, when an illicit custodian is involved, on drugs, women and alcohol.”

"'Goebbels had very nice eyes but,' she added with a laugh, 'he was a devil!' She said Adolf Hitler, on the other hand..."

"... was always very pleasant to her – and [her husband] Harlan would often remark on his amazing eyes. She was not unimpressed by Hitler’s eyes herself."

She = Kristina Söderbaum, quoted in a Guardian article subtitled "She was the Nazis’ pin-up, the Aryan sex symbol whose films fired up the SS. In this previously unpublished interview, Kristina Söderbaum talks about Hitler’s charm, shooting scenes as the Allies closed in – and being nicknamed the State Water Corpse."

Here's how she looked in one of her less evil and more ridiculous movies:

Apathy in The New Yorker.

1. April 3, 2017: "In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country."

Georgi was given a diagnosis of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees. The patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live. The Swedish refer to them as de apatiska, the apathetic. “I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in,” Hultcrantz said. “They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world.”

2. March 27, 2017: "'Get Out' and the Death of White Racial Innocence."

“I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country,” [said James Baldwin in 1968]. In his mordant telling, Americans are consumer zombies struck by an “emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black-white relations. If [white] Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call the Negro Problem.”

3. March 9, 2017: "Parquet Courts and the Uncertain Future of Indie/The Brooklyn-based band on the struggle to be yourself in an age of reinvention."

When Parquet Courts toured Europe this fall, the band found itself delivering a nightly diatribe against Trump, lest anyone mistake its inward vibe for political apathy. “Being sentimental for that time when rock music was thought of as the most legitimate music, when it was at the core of the culture—it doesn’t make sense to try and go back to that. You’re never going to succeed.”

4. March 8, 2017: "The writers of a recent New Yorker article on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election respond to reader questions":

Do you think democracy will survive? I see very little keeping us from becoming like Putin’s Russia. Where should we put our energy to be most effective? How can we stop the apathy and get those in power to choose democracy over personal interest? How can I help? —Kayde Kat Martin

For the first time I can remember, daily conversation has become infused with questions about the basic strength of our democracy, a far-reaching anxiety about whether the political and digital technology of our time are strong and resilient enough to bear the pressures of the moment. It’s easy to dismiss this as little more than Democrats hyperventilating—liberal “snowflakes” who were undone by the results of the election searching for a way to challenge its legitimacy....

5. February 5, 2017: "Life Under Alternative Facts":

There was no real cognitive dissonance existing in the minds of most people in the Soviet Union of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Everyone knew that everything said on the radio or on television, everything (with the exception of weather reports or sports results) was a blatant lie...

Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds. Their worlds were small and filled with sameness. People lived their lives in a state of permanent shell shock, like dynamite-blasted fish still somehow capable of swimming.

"15 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Dentists."

"... 4. THEY’D LIKE YOU TO STOP PULLING OUT YOUR OWN TEETH.... 6. THEY GET ASKED TO MAKE FANGS.... 7. THEY HOARD EXTRACTED TEETH IN JARS...."

"One in three breast cancer patients under 45 removed the healthy breast along with the breast affected by cancer in 2012..."

"... a sharp increase from the one in 10 younger women with breast cancer who had double mastectomies eight years earlier, a new study reports."

The NYT reports in an article that attributes the decision to irrational fear.

But there's a link in the sidebar, under "related coverage," to a piece from last October, by the same reporter, Roni Carin Rabin, titled "‘Going Flat’ After Breast Cancer," about women choosing not to go through breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. This article — with many photographs — celebrates the post-mastectomy, unreconstructed look. But all of these women have had both breasts removed.

Putting the 2 articles together, I would guess that at least some of the women opting for a double mastectomy are at least partly thinking about the aesthetics of symmetry. The new article does have this:

Researchers initially thought that women would be more likely to choose a double mastectomy in regions where reconstructive surgery is more commonly done because they wanted symmetrical reconstructed breasts, but many states with high rates of double mastectomies do not have high rates of reconstructive surgery, and vice versa.

How about symmetrical unreconstructed breasts? I'm surprised Rabin doesn't consider this possibility, because the article she wrote last year shows women who are critical of the pressure to reconstruct:

For years, medical professionals have embraced the idea that breast restoration is an integral part of cancer treatment.... In promoting the surgery, doctors cite studies that suggest breast reconstruction improves a woman’s quality of life after cancer. But some women say that doctors focus too much on physical appearance, and not enough on the toll prolonged reconstructive procedures take on their bodies and their psyches. Up to one-third of women who undergo reconstruction experience complications. A systematic review of 28 studies found that women who went without reconstruction fared no worse, and sometimes did better, in terms of body image, quality of life and sexual outcomes.

"In a world where parents of children ages 8 to 14 have long been concerned about hypersexualized clothing, early puberty and overly sophisticated media messages..."

"... JoJo is part of a growing group of girls documenting routine, age-appropriate behaviors and activities such as being nice, doing their chores, divulging what’s in their backpacks, making dresses out of garbage bags and working to pay for their own clothes."

The Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy — at the University of Wisconsin — hosts Charles Murray at its "First Annual Disinvited Dinner."

Here's the announcement of the event, which is subtitled "Exercises in Applied First Amendment Theory."

The CSLD’s Disinvited Dinner is an effort to re-offer a podium to individuals whose First Amendment rights have been abridged elsewhere. In other words, this is an exercise in applied First Amendment theory. While we may disagree with the content of our speakers’ talks, that is no matter. With this dinner we celebrate and affirm First Amendment principles, the importance and meaning of academic freedom, and the search for Truth.

The keynote speaker at our first annual Disinvited Dinner will be Dr. Charles Murray, the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, whose 1994 New York Times bestseller The Bell Curve (1994) sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Dr. Murray’s other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), Human Accomplishment (2003), In Our Hands (2006), Real Education (2008), and the New York Times bestseller Coming Apart (2012).

Dr. Murray has the honor of being disinvited from Azusa University in 2014, and Virginia Tech in 2016. More recently a mob of leftist activists drove him from the stage at Middlebury College and put a political science professor in the hospital in so doing. Although our invitation to Dr. Murray long preceded this ugly event, it nevertheless underscores the principle we are pursuing. During our dinner, Dr. Murray will deliver a talk called "Coming Apart: Trump’s Transformation of the Right."

I like the idea of the University of Wisconsin distinguishing itself by showing a commitment to intellectual diversity and to the values that underlie the First Amendment. That doesn't mean students and others who don't like what Murray has to say must refrain from staging their own events, only that they shouldn't use their own speech and action to obstruct the people who do want to hear him. The "applied exercise" in First Amendment theory isn't just about Murray having a podium. (Give him a podium, and a lectern too.) It's also about the people who choose to "celebrate" by sitting politely through dinner in a somewhat posh club and the people who don't want to do that or can't attend an event that is "$50 by invitation only" (whatever that means).

For those who do attend, is it really possible to celebrate the First Amendment and not also the speaker? It seems to me that by attending an event in such an elegant setting, where only one person is speaking, you are inherently honoring the individual, unless you violate the social norms of an sedate dinner. You can find out about the person's ideas by reading his books and articles or by looking at on-line video of his speaking. We're not living in a time when we must see someone in in the flesh to know what he has to say. Of all the people you might take the trouble to go out and hear speak in person, should you prioritize those who've been hooted out of other places? I think the honest answer is: Yes, but only if I also want to give support to his ideas. And what about people who just don't get invited anywhere, like those Westboro Church folks or out-and-proud Nazis? They won't get an invitation to the Disinvited Dinner, but if they did, can you imagine sitting through a dinner where they were going to speak and thinking of yourself as merely celebrating the idea of the First Amendment?

For those who don't attend and who might want to oppose Charles Murray, I have 3 recommendations: 1. Educate yourself about what he actually has said so you don't hurt your own cause by saying and doing ignorant things or waste your time by fighting things you're not even against, 2. Don't help your opponent by committing or threatening acts of violence that make him seem like a sympathetic victim or a cool rebel, and 3. Don't lower yourself by looking like a mob. Use words. Good words. If you can't think of any, reread point #2 and consider doing nothing.

"The whole notion of 'macho' and 'manliness' has eluded me all my life."

"I have divided my working life between construction and teaching primary grade's. I'm sure at times when I was hauling 2x8s up a ladder to frame a building I gave this some thought but I honestly have found my best, most manly self when some kindy or 1st grade boy student — likely missing their divorced or otherwise absent father — snuggles against me at story time and lays their little hand on my hairy arm. Recently another kindergarten teacher came into the class I was subbing in and told me her whole class was jealous because my class had a 'boy teacher.' Boiled down, are you man enough to show a child about manhood? If so, you are doing alright."

Wrote Mark Schlemmer or Portland, Oregon in the comments section at the NYT for the Frank Bruni column — "Manhood in the Age of Trump" — that I blogged 2 posts down.

I liked this comment and hope you see what's good about it. I anticipate that some of you are about to say terribly cynical things about men who go into the profession of teaching young children, and I hope you are man enough — or woman enough — to find better things to say. 

"Dolly Dingle's Little Friend Joey."

This is an image I found while doing some research on the Campbell Soup mascots, the "Campbell Kids," which I talked about in the previous post. The creator of the Campbell Kids was Grace Drayton (1877-1936).

She is considered to be one of the first and most successful American female cartoonist.... In 1900 she created two series for The Philadelphia Press called Bobby Blake and Dolly Drake. From 1905–1909, she was a member of The Plastic Club, an arts organization in Philadelphia....

The Plastic Club! (Must go back and study more about that.)

The Campbell Soup Kids and Drayton's other children characters were drawn in a cute cherubic style often with round faces, plump bodies, and rosy cheeks.

In collaboration with her sister, Margaret G. Hays, Drayton published The Adventures of Dolly Drake, Bobby Blake in Storyland, and The Turr’ble Tales of Kaptin Kiddo. Drayton designed the popular Dolly Dingle Paper Dolls which appeared in the women's magazine Pictorial Review. She also created syndicated newspaper comic strips such as Toodles, Pussy Pumpkins, Dolly Dimples, and The Pussycat Princess....

I'm fascinated by these old cartoons and looking for images. Not all these search terms work, however. Notably "Pussy Pumpkins." ("I Put Pumpkin in my Vagina Because It’s Fall and Why Not.")

Strange to get randomly drawn into the work of Grace Drayton today after just running into Rose O'Neill (the creator of the Kewpie cartoon character). I'm reading about Drayton today because Frank Bruni was talking about Campbell's Soup ads in the NYT, and I was reading about O'Neill yesterday because "Kewpie" came up as an answer in an old acrostic puzzle I happened to do.

O'Neill (1874-1944) was Drayton's contemporary. I don't know the extent to which female cartoonists  were channeled into drawing cute children. (The great Windsor McKay was drawing Little Nemo in the same era, but Little Nemo didn't have the hyper-exaggerated cuteness of Kewpies and Campbell Kids.)

Here's Rose O'Neill:



And here's Grace Dayton:



And here's Little Nemo:

The NYT columnist Frank Bruni — in an attack on Trump — attacks manliness.

Would anyone in the NYT attack femininity — in general — the way Bruni attacks masculinity in "Manhood in the Age of Trump"? It would be outright misogyny, and Bruni deserves to be called out for the misandry here.

Much of the column is about his personal struggle as a gay man to deal with his own anxieties about whether he is masculine enough.

That's personal to him, and not about Trump at all and not about all the other men who are free to experience, express, and enjoy whatever level or version of manliness they want.

Bruni begins with a personal memory from the 1970s — the Campbell's soup commercial with the macho cowboy voice singing “How do you handle a hungry man? The Manhandlers!” (Despite straining to portray the commercial as hypermasculine, Bruni chooses the verb "croon," which denotes soft, sentimental singing.)

Bruni agonizes over the image of men that bombarded him when he was an impressionable teenager: "The message was that a man worked up a sweat and then ate up a storm.... He was a force of nature with untamable appetites."

Maybe I read the tea leaves too closely and pessimistically, but then I’m a gay man whose teen years were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when homosexuality alone was considered antithetical to true manhood and someone like me was left in a limbo, wondering what claims on masculinity he really had.

But to be a bit more objective: Campbell's was addressing women, who, you can tell, had the opinion that Campbell's soup wasn't enough of a meal to serve to an adult male. In fact, the familiar white and red cans had long been marketed as a meal for children. And by the way, the children — the "Campbell kids" — were remarkably androgynous:



Those old Manhandlers commercials were aimed at emboldening women to go ahead and open up one can, heat it up, and call it dinner. If that Frankie Laine wannabe in the commercial wasn't complaining, maybe your guy will be okay with it. Maybe he'll even laugh, sing the commercial, and add a lewd meaning to the name of the product.

Come on, Frank, we laughed at these commercials at the time, and Campbell's was in on the joke. Did you really feel these commercials were bullying you to be more manly? In the culture of the 70s, masculinity was examined, questioned, and mocked. Meathead continually critiqued Archie Bunker's blustering macho on "All in the Family" — the #1 show on TV from 1971 to 1976. Lou Reed's "Transformer" came out in 1972. David Bowie was in his prime. I know a lot of your readers were not around in the 70s, but I was, and it was no barrage of unmediated messaging that men must be sterotypically masculine.

Bruni says that as a gay teenager, he was "wondering what claims on masculinity he really had." Why did you feel you needed "claim" anything at all? It was a rich culture, and everyone made fun of commercials, especially children's soup begging to be taken seriously.

I was a competitive swimmer, and while I hated it, I didn’t dare quit, as it felt like a retort to, and inoculation against, anyone questioning my maleness. Just before college I completed an Outward Bound course in the Oregon mountains, and my outsize pride was about how classically manly the adventure had been: no showers, no toilets, harsh weather, bland food.

Bland food? "Bland" is the "crooned" of this paragraph. Since when is bland food considered "classically manly"? And also, why shouldn't young Bruni have felt proud and strong about his athletic and survivalist accomplishments? Why is that boy in the past exploited as weak and confused for the purposes of assailing a politician in the present? And why are all of the men of the present getting caught in the crossfire of an attack on the President?

Bruni proceeds to talk about how 2 of his friends say they "feel most manly" when engaging in some physical feat of strength. One remembered playing football. The other spoke of moving heavy tree limbs that had fallen on a hiking trail (which reminded me of the George W. Bush pastime, "clearing brush"). Bruni then purports to know — it's obvious — when Trump is feeling manly:

When does Trump feel the most manly? That’s pretty obvious: when he’s salivating over women and styling himself some conquistador of the flesh, as he did repeatedly with Howard Stern and on one infamous occasion with Billy Bush. When he’s belittling and emasculating rivals (“Liddle Marco,” “low-energy Jeb”), as he did throughout his campaign. When he’s vowing vengeance against the House Freedom Caucus, as he did last week. When he’s surrounding himself with generals. When he’s pledging huge increases in military spending while moving to starve wonky research and the arts.

Whatever you think about these aspects of Trump's behavior (and how Bruni puts them into words), we don't know if he really feels manly doing these things. Even Bruni seems to be implying that Trump — like Bruni's remembered version of teenage Bruni — is confused and afraid that the world might see that he is not what he thinks of a truly manly. And Bruni even takes that shot at him. Bruni bullies Trump as not masculine enough:

I think Trump protests too much, distracting us from other traits. He abhors handshakes: all those icky germs! He gilds and swirls his hair. Those white crescent moons under his eyes suggest time spent wearing goggles during artificial tanning sessions. The Marlboro Man got his sun on the range, not in the salon.

There are plenty more things about Trump that read as stereotypically feminine. Many of his hand gestures and vocal inflections and gushing descriptions of people and places feel feminine to me.

But like all of us, Trump is a mixture of traits, including traits formed within a culture that is presented and imperfectly understood in terms of masculine and feminine. What's important, I think, is for individuals to find a way to live a good and satisfying life. There are infinite possibilities, and the expression of sexuality and gender are probably going to be a part of it. I don't see how impugning masculinity is any more ethical and helpful than impugning femininity.

You may hate Trump, but don't use him as a weapon to attack masculinity. Masculinity doesn't deserve hatred. Find your own mix of masculinity and femininity and respect your own individuality and the individuality of others.

"Pop Art. I’ve never cared for the term, but after half a century of being described as a Pop artist I’m resigned to it. Still, I don’t know what Pop Art means, to tell you the truth."

Said James Rosenquist, quoted in his NYT obituary. He was 83.

It was while working in New York as a sign painter by day and an abstract painter by night that he had the idea to import the giant-scale, broadly painted representational pictures from outdoor advertising into the realm of fine art.

“Was importing the method into art a bit of a cheap trick?” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in 2003 on the occasion of a ballyhooed retrospective of Mr. Rosenquist’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “So were Warhol’s photo silk-screening and Lichtenstein’s limning of panels from comic strips.

“The goal in all cases,” Mr. Schjeldahl added, “was to fuse painting aesthetics with the semiotics of media-drenched contemporary reality. The naked efficiency of anti-personal artmaking defines classic Pop. It’s as if someone were inviting you to inspect the fist with which he simultaneously punches you.”

"You can’t tear yourself away from the results — especially from the fate of Tyler Goodson, an especially open-hearted and forthcoming subject, who you come to care about deeply..."

"'S-Town' is expertly constructed, by some of the most talented people in the podcast realm. The incidental music is an intriguing combination of strings and handclaps, urging you along, suggesting wistfulness and contemplation; episodes conclude with a lovely Zombies song, 'A Rose for Emily.' In the end, we empathize with almost every character, and find commonalities between them and ourselves. 'S-Town' helps advance the art of audio storytelling, daringly, thoughtfully, and with a journalist’s love of good details and fascinating material—but it also edges us closer to a discomfiting realm of well-intentioned voyeurism on a scale we haven’t quite experienced before. In the past four days, 'S-Town' has exceeded ten million downloads. Whether the Internet and an audience of millions will share the show’s sensitivity toward its subjects remains to be seen."

Writes Sarah Larson in The New Yorker.

You can listen to the series here. I've listened through the whole series once and am an hour away from hearing it all twice. I've thought a lot about what will happen to Tyler. It seems inevitable that less scrupulous people than the "This American Life" team will find him and want to use him for purposes that he may not competently evaluate. He's a young man and — you won't learn this listening to the podcast — unusually good looking. I can't believe there won't be offers to participate in filming a reality show. Wouldn't people love to see that house he's built out of scraps and wisteria vines and a horse trough? Wouldn't people love to hear him talk with Uncle Jimmy shouting "Goddam right!" and "Yes suh!" in the background? What is "This American Life" doing to protect him? What can they do? What should they do?

ADDED: As for the incidental music of strings and handclaps... listen closely to the difference in the music at about 36 minutes into Episode IV V, right after Cousin Rita says "Cut his nipples off — he's dead." The percussion becomes a snippy-snappy sound that — to my ear — was made with some sort of metallic clippers or loppers. [Sorry I had Episode IV, but it's Episode V. And I would begin a bit before minute 36 to hear Rita. The music I'm talking about begins around minute 37.]