"As a frequent (daily) reader of your blog, I have observed that your postings have taken a darker tone since you closed the comments section."

"As to causes and effects, I have no idea whether you closed the comments because of some other area of your life or the disappointment of closing of the comments (and the reasons therefor) caused the apparent darkness. Whatever the case may be, I hope that you are well."

Emails a reader, interestingly. I'm not seeing any life changes, aside from the anosmia for which I had an MRI of my head, which has the side effect of causing me to feel unusually assured that there's nothing wrong with my brain. I feel fine, and Meade and I are very happy as we approach our 4th anniversary on Saturday. But your question got me thinking — as I was out biking today — and I worked out a 3-part answer. Each of the 3 parts has 2 subparts. Any combination of the subparts may be causing what you see as darkness.

1. It just looks different.

a. The absence of comments has pushed me to go a little further in revealing my thoughts, since I'm not throwing it over to the commenters. When I do this, you are less able to think what you want to think about me, which might be that I'm only saying bland, nice things, but I never was.

b. The comments, especially the comments at the top, closest to my writing, were often breezy wisecracks or social byplay, and these undermined my seriousness and blunted my edge. Without that cream and sugar, the black coffee is bitter.

2. It's a shift in the news out there, and I'm blogging about different things.

a. Last month we were talking about Supreme Court cases, and this month it's been the racial and sexual matters in the Zimmerman trial and the long shadow of the World Wide Weiner.

b. Before the gay marriage case was decided, I engaged in a lot of conciliatory interplay with people who were saying some pretty harsh things, which I did not respond to in kind, but after the case was decided, we needed to move on.

3. The loss of comments really did affect my mood.

a. I saw some hurtful hostility before I gave up. You can't see all the things that Meade and I deleted, so you don't know what happened, and the moderation function was broken at the time. After I shut off the comments, I had to deal with email and writing on other sites, and I saw some people whom I had valued as guests griping about what I did to them, showing little appreciation for what I had given for 9 years.

b. I really do miss the comments — or, that is, my idea of what the comments were. 

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"On reflection, then, I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded."

"There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks. We have no reason to make this assumption...."

I don't know. It's getting late. There's an overwhelming sleepiness here. 

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In place of the old hedge...

... we now have grass, that seems to crash like surf onto the sidewalk:



Behind the grass: cleome and zinnias. The stakes are holding up sungold tomato plants. There's some other stuff in there too. Meade is hosing down the topdressing on the lawn:



ADDED: The ornamental grass is Pennisetum alopecuroides.

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"23 Libertarian Problems."

"Yes, I do sleep on a copy of Atlas Shrugged."

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At long last audiotape: Monica Lewinsky micromanages Bill Clinton's next blowjob.

National Enquire seems to have a cassette that was supposed to have been destroyed long ago. On it, we hear Monica handling the sexual logistics:

"Since I know you will be alone tomorrow evening, I have two proposals for you, neither of which is you not seeing me... Now the first thing that has to happen is that you need to pre-plan with Betty..."

Betty Currie was Bill's secretary.

"... that you will leave the office at, I don't know, at 7, 7:30 so that everyone else who hates me that causes me lots of trouble goes home... Then you quickly sneak back and then in the meantime I quickly sneak over and then we can have a nice little visit for, you know, 15 minutes or half an hour. Whatever you want."...

“Maybe we could go over and watch a movie together and just have kind of, I don't know, boxed dinners or something like that... And then that way we don’t have to deal with the problem of me… of there being a record of me going upstairs and we can spend some time together and see a good movie. So I don’t know, those are two proposals and you can’t refuse me because I’m too cute and adorable and soon I won’t be here anymore to pop over."

Ah, those were the days. When relationships had context. It was more dinner and a movie, an elegant trajectory of feeling, not merely those phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness we hear so much of these days.

"I’m hoping you will hear this and you will choose which one you want to do and go tell Betty and then she can call me and let me know so I don't have to stress out all day and I don't have to call her every two hours and bug her because, I know you will find this very hard to believe, but I can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I’m very persistent, but um… I really want to see you."

How feminism has regressed since that golden era! Back then, a girl knew how to demand what she wanted and to get it.

ADDED: How blinded by sex do you need to be not to hear your future nemesis in her words?  I have two proposals for you, neither of which is you not seeing me... I can be a pain in the ass...  I’m very persistent, but um... But um, indeed! Think about how these  personality quirks will play out when you cut off her access. If you can. I bet you can't.

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"As a feminist, I find it infinitely sad to imagine a vibrant young woman sitting alone at her computer..."

"... and turning herself into a sex object for a man... she does not know — even if she is also turning him into a sex object. Twentieth-century feminism always linked the social progress of women with an expanding sense of self-worth — in the sexual as well as intellectual and professional spheres. A willingness to engage in Internet sex with strangers, however, expresses not sexual empowerment but its opposite — a loneliness and low opinion of oneself that leads to the conclusion that any sexual contact is better than no contact at all."

So writes Susan Jacoby, in the context of the Anthony Weiner story. I suspect that Jacoby was sitting alone at her computer when she wrote that. And I'm sitting alone at my computer writing this now. Is anything infinitely sad about writing at the computer? Is it sadder when you expect someone is waiting to read what you write and you expect them to write back? These days I choose, for each post, whether I want to allow comments or not, and for this one I haven't chosen yet. Is the sadness of what I'm doing right now dependent on whether I allow comments?

Or is this infinite sadness dependent on whether you are writing about sex, which I kind of am, or writing about sex while hoping that your reader finds you sexy?

As a feminist, she finds it infinitely sad, so perhaps you have to be a feminist to feel what's so terribly sad about a woman sitting at a computer, writing sexily to someone she expects will write back sexily. And perhaps the woman at the computer needs to be vibrant and young for it to be extremely sad for her to chose bodily solitude and sex in written form. Those are the words of the self-identified feminist, feeling sad about women writing alone and sexily at computers. Jacoby is 68 years old. Is she like Paul's grandfather in "Hard Day's Night," scoffing at Ringo for reading — "tormenting your eyes with that rubbish" — instead of "gettin' out there and living... Parading the streets!"?

That's not about sexting. It's timeless advice from the old to the young. Perhaps the elders in Jane Austen's life pressured her to quit writing about love relationships and get out there and fall in love.

But Jacoby seems most concerned with context:

Sex with strangers online amounts to a diminution, close to an absolute negation, of the context that gives human interaction genuine content. Erotic play without context becomes just a form of one-on-one pornography....

Deep down, what does a man really think of himself when he must feed his ego with phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness? What does a woman think of herself in the same arid zone of sex without sensuality?

Sex without context is pornography (to Jacoby). It's arid and fake. Even the man's orgasm is fake: "phony gasps." Even the man must lack self-esteem. That's the wrong kind of equality, with the woman straying out into the "arid zone" where meager men satisfy themselves. That's "not the sort of equality envisioned by feminism," she says in the end.  Women should shun this "lowest common denominator" sexuality that "debases the passion and reason of both men and women." Jacoby claims this end for feminism, but it's the oldest task in the world for women: channeling male sexuality, taming them, civilizing them, lifting them up, pumping the phallic lever for the elevation of us all.

(I'll put the comments on to make this more sad.)

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"The fact that tall people die younger appears to be an immutable physical reality."

"A short person is like a Honda Civic: compact and efficient. Tall people are Cadillac Escalades. With all that extra weight and machinery, something’s just bound to go wrong."

Despite that, most people want to be taller.

They also want to be gas guzzlers. In the language of weigh-loss obsession, they want to have a fat-burning, boosted metabolism. Who expresses joy at their body's efficient use of calories, the way they'd brag about their car's gas mileage? But what if life span correlates with the number of calories burned? That question is beyond the scope of the linked article, which is only about the health problem of tallness.

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After growing for millions of years, why has the human brain been shrinking over the last 10,000 years?

An infographic.

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"'Coucou, tu as pris le pain?' ('Hi there, have you picked up the bread?') is the campaign’s slogan."

"Modeled on the American advertising campaign 'Got Milk?' the bread slogan was plastered on billboards and inscribed on bread bags in 130 cities around the country."

“Eating habits are changing,” said Bernard Valluis, a co-president of the lobby. “People are too busy or work too late to go to the bakery. Teenagers are skipping breakfast. Now when you see the word ‘coucou,’ we want it to be a reflex for consumers to say to themselves, ‘Ah, I have to buy bread today.' ”

Coucou for Cocoa Puffs bread.

So the French aren't eating so much bread anymore. Too bad. Anyway, I just like knowing that "coucou" means "hi there." Coucou, to American ears, seems insulting. Hi there, by contrast, seems really nice. But it's all in the context...

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You and your dog's eyebrows.

"This is good to know in case you have a sneaking suspicion that your dog might be playing you...."

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Dickmanship, Part 2: Women in politics.

This blog has been heavy on the Weiner coverage. 3 of yesterday's 14 posts had substantial Weiner content. But I passed on the Olivia Nuzzi story in yesterday's Daily News: "Anthony Weiner intern reveals why she, fellows joined New York mayoral campaign." It just looked like another woman trying to horn in on the Weiner action. Who is she? Who does she think she is? Yeah, campaigns have interns. She asserts that Weiner interns are hot to get to Huma and through Huma to Hillary, but that's not surprising or disturbing. Ambitious people seek to network and climb. Why is this even in the newspaper?

To my eye, it looked like Nuzzi's selling point was her ability to look somewhat pretty posing with tilted head; long, flowy, bleached-blonde hair; lips pursed just short of duck face; and a tight, sleeveless navy blue dress. Navy blue, for comparison purposes to a  picture of Huma looking less pretty in a more frumpy navy blue dress. Navy blue, because Monica Lewinsky, the ultimate intern, historically wore, stained, and retained a navy blue dress. In case the subliminal hint isn't enough, the article has the name "Monica" inserted in an anecdote in which Weiner attempts to demonstrate his ability to remember the names of his 20 interns and incorrectly calls one Monica, then tries Monica a second time with the author. Not told whether any of the interns were really named Monica, we are left free to imagine that the lecherous Weiner intended to convey the message that he was looking for Lewinskyesque services from his interns.

I'd kicked the sext-crazed man around enough, and Nuzzi was such an unsubtle attention whore, so the best thing to blog is nothing. But that was yesterday. Why am I writing about Nuzzi today? Because there's another woman stepping out onto the stage of The Anthony Weiner Clown Show, and her I find amusing, and she's not an attention whore. She didn't realize she was on stage. She thought/claims she was giving an off-the-record interview. It's Weiner’s communications director Barbara Morgan:

“I’m dealing with like stupid fucking interns who make it on to the cover of the Daily News even though they signed NDAs and/or they proceeded to trash me... And by the way, I tried to fire her, but she begged to come back and I gave her a second chance.... Fucking slutbag. Nice fucking glamour shot on the cover of the Daily News. Man, see if you ever get a job in this town again,” said Morgan.

“It’s all bullshit,” she said. “I mean, it’s such bullshit. She could fucking — fucking twat.”...

“She sucked. She like wasn’t good at setting up events. She was clearly there because she wanted to be seen. Like it was, like, terrible and I had to like - she would like, she would just not show up for work... And then like she had the fucking balls to like trash me in the paper. And be like, ‘His communications director was last the press secretary of the Department of Education in New Jersey.'... You know what? Fuck you, you little cunt. I’m not joking, I am going to sue her.”

Key word: balls. Paging Tina Brown, who — in "End the Damn Dickmanship!" — longed for a testosterone test to screen excessively masculine individuals out of the political arena. Brown acted like she thought her dreamed-of test would only exclude dickish men like Weiner, but I suspected — in my first Weiner post of yesterday — that Brown herself would score high on the test. And now we've got more ladies waving their hands around. Give me the test!

There have long been soppy dreams that women in politics would mean kindness and cooperation. "My idea has always been that if we could bring the mothers of the various nations together, then there would be no more war." I wish I could find video of Vanessa Redgrave delivering that line in "Howards End." Her silliness is vividly apparent, in a story set at the beginning of the 20th century. It's absurd to hear the same idea recirculated, as ambitious women tear into men — like Nuzzi into Weiner — and into other women — like Morgan into Nuzzi. To quote Morgan: It’s all bullshit. I mean, it’s such bullshit.

I guess I'm supposed to denounce Morgan for calling Nuzzi a "slutbag," a "twat," and a "cunt." Those female-specific insults. But didn't Tina Brown call Weiner a "dick"? And, if so, shouldn't we give equality to women and get our share of gender-based insults? But Tina Brown didn't call Anthony Weiner a "dick." She referred to his "dickmanship." He's not a dick but a Person of Dickmanship. The equivalent would be to refer to a woman's twattishness. But that kind of distancing in the insults is for the official print version. How does Tina Brown speak off the record? Seriously, why do you think Barbara Morgan thought she could talk like that? Such a string of epithets can't come out of nowhere. There must be a culture.

And yet, if that were the culture, wouldn't there be thousands of ambitious interns like Nuzzi, whose climbing hit a ceiling, dishing out a million "Fuck you, you little cunt" quotes?

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"When USS Indianapolis was hit by Japanese torpedoes in the final weeks of WWII, hundreds of crewmen jumped into the water..."

"... to escape the burning ship. Surrounded by sharks, they waited for a response to their SOS. But no one had been sent to look for them."

"They were continually there, mostly feeding off the dead bodies. Thank goodness, there were lots of dead people floating in the area. But soon they came for the living, too.


"We were losing three or four each night and day.... You were constantly in fear because you'd see 'em all the time. Every few minutes you'd see their fins - a dozen to two dozen fins in the water. They would come up and bump you. I was bumped a few times - you never know when they are going to attack you....

"In that clear water you could see the sharks circling. Then every now and then, like lightning, one would come straight up and take a sailor and take him straight down. One came up and took the sailor next to me...."

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"No concealed weapons allowed on this property."

Posted, at a residence in my neightborhood:



Is that helpful? Should I post a "No burglary" sign? A little farther along...



... apples.

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Records From My Father, Part 6: "$64,000 Jazz."

Here's the 6th selection in this series, and I've got to admit it was the silly TV-related cover that got my attention:



... but this was great. Every damn thing on the album, immensely enjoyable.  (You can download it for $7.) I will not attempt to describe this music, because, look, it has extremely extensive liner notes, including an elaborate description of the TV show, which offered the category jazz, an event that has something to do with the assembling of this collection.
If you're curious what, read this:



The track I'm least inclined to like was Erroll Garner cascading all over the piano with "Laura." It's the one track that seems corny, but I still like it. Garner is obviously committed to playing like that, and I see that it was recorded on January 11, 1951, the day before I was born. There's no singing on this album — except for that Sarah Vaughan track and a bit of Louis Armstrong on "Ain't Misbehavin'" — so if you're not familiar with the lyrics to "Laura," your enjoyment of the Garner instrumental might be heightened by listening to one of the beautiful versions of it. Here's Frank Sinatra, and here's Johnny Mathis.

My favorite track was Buck Clayton, "How Hi the Fi." I can't find it on YouTube, but it's only 89¢ to download. I don't remember ever hearing of Buck Clayton. Wikipedia says:

Buck Clayton (born Wilbur Dorsey Clayton; Parsons, Kansas, November 12, 1911 – New York City, December 8, 1991) was an American jazz trumpet player who was a leading member of Count Basie’s "Old Testament" orchestra and a leader of mainstream-oriented jam session recordings in the 1950s. His principal influence was Louis Armstrong....

From 1934 or 1935 (depending on the sources), he was a leader of the "Harlem Gentlemen" in Shanghai. His experience in the east was unique, since Clayton was discriminated against by fellow American marines who were stationed in Shanghai. On numerous accounts, he was attacked by soldiers, including an instance where bricks were thrown at him. On the contrary he was treated like an elite by the Chinese. Some of the bureaucratic social groups he was with included Chiang Kai-shek's wife Soong Mei-ling and her sister Ai-ling, who were regulars at the Canidrome. Clayton would play a number of songs that were composed by Li Jinhui, while adopting the Chinese music scale into the American scale. Li learned a great deal from the American jazz influence brought over by Clayton. A 1935 guidebook in Shanghai listed Clayton and Teddy Weatherford as the main jazz attraction at the Canidrome. He would eventually leave Shanghai before the 1937 Second Sino-Japanese War. Clayton is credited for helping to close the gap between traditional Chinese music and shidaiqu/mandopop. Li is mostly remembered in China as a casualty of the Cultural Revolution.

I wonder what my father would have thought of computers. He loved his HiFi, and built some components using Dynaco kits. I think he would have loved computers and he would have looked up these biographies and clicked through to learn about Li:

Li Jinhui (September 5, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was a composer and songwriter born in Xiangtan, Hunan, China. He is often dubbed as the "Father of Chinese popular music." He created a new musical form with shidaiqu after the fall of the Qing Dynasty-- moving away from established musical forms. Li was a very controversial figure in China. Although his music was extremely popular, the Chinese Nationalist Party attempted to ban his music, and Li was eventually silenced in death as a victim of political persecution in 1967 during the height of the Cultural Revolution....

Though Li’s early work is completely innocent and educational in content, it still met with disapprobation from some critics despite its immense popularity. This resistance may be due to the manner in which these songs were performed. Beginning in 1923, Li’s broke the taboo of not allowing women to perform on stage when he hired young girls to sing and dance in his school musical productions....

As radio became more widely accessible, so then did Li’s jazz, for which he received vicious criticism as “Yellow (or pornographic) Music.” One 1934 reviewer said of Li that he is “vulgar and depraved beyond the hope of redemption…[but] as popular as ever.” His greatest source of Jazz influence came from American Buck Clayton who worked with Li for two years. Clayton played a major role in shaping the musical scores written by Li. Li’s revolutionary Sinese jazz music dominated the nightlife scene, and it was performed at cabarets, cafes and nightclubs around southeast Asia....

Li continued to compose music the rest of his life, though he would eventually pay dearly for his fame. Classified as a founder of Yellow Music by the Communist Party of China, he became a victim of political persecution during the Cultural Revolution.

Exactly what happened? It's so sad to think even of the memories that have been lost. Googling, I find this interview with Andrew Jones, author of “Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age”:

Li Jinhui... had a bad reputation. He was supposed to be a bad guy who created the degenerate form of music that was called “yellow music.” “Yellow music” means, basically: pornographic, salacious, off-color music in Chinese. It was a music that had been banned by the Chinese Communist Party.  It was a kind of music that was seen as being decadent and colonial and unfit for Chinese ears after 1949, after the revolution.

But what I started to find out about Li Jinhui was actually pretty surprising. He was known as the founder of pop music but, in fact, he began his career as a nationalist and a patriot who was trying to modernize the Chinese language by instituting a new, standard Mandarin to knit together the patchwork of different dialects in China to create a stronger, more unified nation.  The way that he hit upon to do this was actually to write operas for children using Chinese folk tunes, western instruments and having scripts for the kids to sing in standard Chinese..... 

[T]he young girls that he had trained became the biggest stars in Chinese pop music and on Chinese screens. He, himself, became a very famous song writer and kind of pioneered this new style of modern jazz music, almost against his will or expectations....

In the early ’30s, the ruling Nationalist Party had a movement called the New Life Movement. It was basically a propaganda movement to instill proper virtues and morality in the people. The Nationalist Party at that time wanted to adopt or re-champion Confucian morality as a sort of ideological glue for the nation. So, they wanted to clamp down on Li Jinhui because they saw the music as being decadent. There was a lot of hypocrisy in that and, of course, once you ban something, it just means it does even better in the marketplace.

It seems like there should be a movie about Buck Clayton and Li Jinhui. Trying to remember my father, I stumble into their story, and it feels so terribly sad. And I've drifted so far from the starting point. This record has nothing to do with China. My father was always trying to engage me in conversations about anything. I'm sure China was one of his topics, maybe jazz in China, maybe black jazz men in the marines, and how the Chinese treated American black men, and how the Chinese treated their own jazz men. But all those conversations, which he sought so dearly, are eternally unspoken.

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"We’re... baffled by Huma’s choice because women no longer need to be professionally affixed to a man to make inroads in business or politics..."

"... especially when they’ve got a résumé like hers. Two decades ago, Hillary needed Bill, that much we could understand."

What bullshit! Written by Ann Friedman in New York Magazine under the heading ("Stand by Your Man? How Huma Can Do What Hillary Couldn’t"). I don't give a damn about Huma or what happens to her, but this is unmitigated trash about Hillary. Hillary did not need Bill. Not 2 decades ago, when he was running for President, and not 4 decades ago, when she graduated from Yale Law School.

In fact, there was strong pressure on women back in 1992 and 1973, even more than now, to go it alone and not stand behind some man. Hillary knew it was a career risk to go to Arkansas with Bill, and she chose it with eyes open. Friedman is purveying some made-up social history, asserting that we "understand" it, like it's in our cultural memory. But it's completely untrue.


I was around back then, and I remember the messages to women in 1973, the year Hillary graduated from Yale Law School, which was the year I graduated from college (and I read all the feminist books of that era). By 1981, the year I graduated from law school, the message that woman had independent careers and were not destined to be helpmeets to their men was itself so old-fashioned that it wasn't even said anymore. And by 1992, the year of Hillary's sit-by-your-man interview on "60 Minutes," radical feminism — with its active distancing from patriarchy — had been tearing through the culture for years.

Such pathetic nonsense about Hillary and her place in history. And as for Huma, the notion that she could now be some pathbreaker is so stupid I don't know where it came from. Some people — who are they? — got fixated on her — why? Because she's somewhat attractive? Because she's somewhat attractive and Muslim? Because she's somewhat attractive, Muslim, and close to Hillary? I'd like those people to confess what they're so enamored about. I bet they won't, because it's nothing but stupidity.

ADDED: I suspect that Hillary and Bill are responsible for screwing up the cultural memory. So many people subordinated their feminism to Democratic Party interests during the Lewinsky scandal. It erased memory of earlier feminist progress.

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The verdict in the Bradley Manning case.

From the NYT:

A military judge on Tuesday found Pfc. Bradley Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy, but convicted him of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act....

Manning pleaded guilty so some other charges, but the government went forward with the more serious charges.

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"Alarmed by Eliot Spitzer’s momentum in his unexpected bid to win citywide office, an unlikely coalition of business leaders, women’s groups and labor unions..."

"... is vowing to finance an ambitious effort to thwart the former governor’s ambition," begins this NYT article.

The interest groups, which often spar with one another over competing agendas and priorities, have found rare common cause in their antipathy toward Mr. Spitzer, who infuriated the business community with his aggressive posture toward Wall Street, who offended feminists by paying for sex with prostitutes and who alienated unions by taking on a labor-backed candidate.

Kinda makes you like him, no?

And here's how Tina Brown referred to Spitzer in that "End the Damn Dickmanship!" piece that I've already blogged this morning:

He looks demented. The scimitar mouth pulled back in a mad crow of triumph, the face sweating with guilty pleasure.

That's so mean I'm starting to root for him.

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The Most Pretentious Thing Ever Written About George Zimmerman.

This is Sasha Frere-Jones, writing about Jay Z’s new album (which is pretentiously titled "Magna Carta Holy Grail") in the (pretentious but traditionally a bit subtle in its pretentiousness) New Yorker:

But just like the politician that he occasionally texts, Jay Z is exactly who should disappoint us, unless our admiration is mute conformity and our optimism was a party smile. His friend has disappointed us by allowing a squeegee of surveillance to be dragged across America and approving the killing of foreign civilians with robots. Those civilians, in another country, see America the way Trayvon Martin saw George Zimmerman — a force they couldn’t stop physically creating a story they couldn’t fight historically. So what should Jay Z be doing instead of currying favor with critics in an art gallery? Maybe something like what his friend Kanye West thought up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when he blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Jay Z may be our most accomplished rapper but he rarely does anything to alienate anyone the way that West continually, and valuably, does. Which is probably why Carter represents athletes now, for profit and pleasure.

I think Frere-Jones fancies himself some sort of genius rapper of the print medium, cramming together disparate references and conveying a tone of outrage over... oh, who know what? What's Frere-Jones's problem here? Jay Z shouldn't work for profit? He shouldn't aspire to an art gallery audience?

Jay Z’s performance at the Pace Gallery, a transparent rewrite of Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present,” took place three days before the Zimmerman verdict, so what could he have done to leverage his influence? He could have ditched the idea of lip-synching to “Picasso Baby” (a weak retread of “99 Problems”) and recreated the Zimmerman-Martin showdown with everyone in the room, following them around the perimeter of the gallery and scaring the shit out of them, eventually pulling a gun. And though that would have been the aggressive vision of a different artist, Jay Z is exactly the kind of figure who could weather the ensuing controversy, retaining all of his homes and maybe even his Samsung deal.

Speaking of failing to scare the shit out of people, for whom is this New Yorker shit writ?

What emotions were felt by the target audience for Frere-Jones's article?
	Agitation about the latest doings in art and politics.
	Relief and assurance that one is both hip and politically correct.
	Superiority to anyone who is insufficiently race conscious, such as Jay Z.
	Sensuous luxuriating in words that presumably have deep meaning.
pollcode.com free polls

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"The perks Google lays on for its employees are the stuff of legend."

"Free gourmet food all day, the best health insurance plan anywhere, five months' paid maternity leave, kindergartens and gyms at the workplace, the freedom to work on one's own projects 20 percent of the time, even death benefits. No wonder the tech behemoth has topped Fortune Magazine's list of best companies to work for every year since 2007. Why, then, aren't Googlers more loyal to their employer?"

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The corpse flower is about to bloom.

Here at the University of Wisconsin. The horrible smell only lasts for a day or 2, so I'm watching the D.C. Smith Greenhouse Facebook page to know when to run over there.  I have very little sense of smell — anosmia bad enough to have submitted to an MRI over it — so I welcome the opportunity, like a blind person facing the sun or a deaf person at a heavy metal concert.

Back in 2005, I blogged a UW corpse flower bloom: "Visiting the corpse flower with pro-sunsetters."

How did the flower smell? I thought it had a zoo smell. Maybe I've never smelled a corpse, but it didn't smell dead to me, just funky and animal-y. It wasn't at all fishy. More mouse-y. It wasn't nauseating or even terribly strong, in my opinion. I can't really understand the distinct aversion felt by the three persons who humored me by coming along.

I wasn't aware at the time that I was losing my sense of smell. From the comments, back then, Goesh said, "Botany be damned, what we have here is a burgeoning phallic cult." And I said "The scientific name for the plant is Amorphophallus Titanium. 'Amorphophallus' means 'shapeless phallus.'"

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"TV reporter fired for ‘tell-all’ blog about going bra-less on air."

Headlines The Daily News, but I think these 2 items were the real problem:

6. I'm frightened of old people and I refuse to do stories involving them or the places they reside....

9. If you ramble and I deem you unnecessary for my story, I'll stop recording but let you think otherwise.

That and the fact that after they told her to take the post down and she did, she re-posted it, saying "No Apologies" and "momentarily misguided about who I am and what I stand for." Items #6 and #9, above, undercut her ability to do ordinary, professional reporting. The re-posting and the self-publicizing reflect a decision to leverage a different kind of writing career, and we'll see what happens with that.

She's Shea Allen, and she's too cheeky for Huntsville, Alabama.

I had to decide whether to make a tag for her name, and I decided not to, so that's my bet on what happens with this.

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10-year-old girl catches a baby dropped from a second-story window.

The mother was tossing kids out of the window during a fire. The girl caught the newborn, but there were 2 other children, aged 2 and 3, and they "hit the ground and sustained minor injuries." I'm impressed with the 10-year-old, but apparently, the baby would have been just fine uncaught.

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Anthony Weiner says, "it's very hard to have it come up again."

I'm not really indulging in cheap Weiner humor. I mean to demonstrate how cheap the humor we've been indulging in is. Here's the context:

You must remember this isn't something that happened yesterday. For us, this is an issue that's over a year old. And we'd gotten to this really great place with each other and we'd put it behind us to a place where we felt comfortable enough to move ahead to run for mayor. For us, this was a distant event. That doesn't change the fact that it's very hard to have it come up again.

No one believes he's in this really great place with Huma, if he ever was, but what is the man supposed to do? Some people are telling him to get out, but — speaking of places — where can he go? This is it for him. If he doesn't make it through these narrow straits, he's got nothing.

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Real Buffalo and Sweet Potato Dog Food.

That's one item from the things bought through my Amazon portal yesterday. (Thanks to all who show support for this blog shopping that way.) I like finding out about a category of product I would never have thought about, like super-specific dog food. The company that made the above-named product, Merrick, also makes Grammy's Pot Pie Dog Food, Real Duck and Green Pea Dog Food, Real Lamb Brown Rice and Apples Dog Food, Thanksgiving Day Dinner Dog Food (come on, aren't there always leftovers?!), Cowboy Cookout Dog Food, and Tripe & Liver Steak Patties for Dogs.



Alternatively, you can cook up your own pet food:

[Some lady's] standard recipe, which will feed Orion along with the other dog and the three cats in her house for around 10 days, calls for grinding 40 pounds of pasture-raised chicken necks with another 20 pounds of chicken giblets. To this, she adds five pounds of carrots, a whole cabbage and several other fruits, all from the organic fields of Midsummer Farm, [her] farm in Warwick, N.Y. Finally, she blends the mix with herbs and supplements.

And here's a less grandiose recipe. 

ADDED: A reader recommends the "recipes" at Raw Fed Dogs. Click links to laugh.

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Tina Brown's war on men: "End the Damn Dickmanship!"

She's not just railing against sexting, but against "testosterone," generally, as a driver of bad behavior.

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all.... Perhaps we need some kind of sexual DUI test developed to tell us what is likely to happen when middle-aged libido meets a whiff of power.

And politics is not the only arena to require this test. 

She goes on to talk about some boat and train accidents, caused by cock, in her view. By contrast, there are women:

Think about some of our prominent women in Washington right now. Can you ever even imagine—forgive me, Secretary—Katherine Sebelius uploading a crotch shot of herself on Instagram? Or Janet Yellen ordering up male hookers during downtime at the Federal Reserve? It’s preposterous.

Can we imagine females causing sexual wreckage? A year ago, we were imagining Janet Napolitano "turning the department [of Homeland Security] into a female-run ‘frat house’ where male staffers were banished to the bathrooms and routinely humiliated." I would have forgotten that had Tina Brown's screed not reminded me.

Brown's pushing the old female superiority theory, which is the sexism that was once used to keep women out of politics and business. We're too delicate and too prissy to do what needs to be done. And what if it were a substance like testosterone — a liquid squirting through ducts — that could be extracted and measured and reported to voters and employers? Tina Brown says she wants that information, so we can discriminate. Imagine the world she suggests but doesn't really want us to imagine. Everyone gets a masculinity score, and we judge his/her fitness for power accordingly.

Ironically, Tina would probably score very high. How much testosterone fueled the headline "End the Damn Dickmanship!?

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Sharp stone cuts.

A new picnic site on Picnic Point in Madison. I like the design here, preserving the roughness of the stone, but making those sharp cuts for the wood planks. It's a terse statement about the degree of civilization we want in nature.

2 other things to spot in this photo: 1. Meade, and 2. the Wisconsin Capitol building.

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"Spain's first-ever town councillor with Down Syndrome is set to start work..."

"... in the Spanish city of Valladolid on Monday, but many people with her condition in Spain... many find themselves unable to [vote] after they are declared 'incapacitated' by a judge."

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"7 Disgusting Retro Canned Foods That You Won’t Believe Existed."

Beginning with Oscar Mayer’s “Sack O’ Sauce in a Can O’ Meat."

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"It’s not that I don’t love my dog. It’s just that I don’t love my dog."

"And I am not alone. A very nonscientific survey of almost everyone I know who had a dog and then had kids now wishes they had never got the dog. This is a near universal truth, even for parents with just one child...."

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Education and teacher supplies.

A nice selection at Amazon, where you can show your support for this blog.

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"A Closer Look at ‘Nonhuman Personhood’ and Animal Welfare."

"Nonhuman Personhood." Not to be confused with human nonpersonhood.

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"Mort Sahl is the guy who inspired me to go on stage for the first time in my life, and when I saw him the other night..."

"... I had that feeling again of, 'I can do this,'" said Woody Allen, contemplating doing standup again.

“He was as great as I remembered... So I thought, ‘Gee, it would be nice to get up there and do that again.’... It’s a lot of work....You have to put together an hour of laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. You can’t dawdle. In a film script, if there’s a laugh here and there, but people interacting in a meaningful way, it’s good. But on stage, you come out and you’ve got to get a laugh, and then another and another.”

Allen is 78. Can you picture him doing standup now? Did you picture Mort Sahl? I didn't know Mort Sahl was still alive. He's 86. Here he is in 1967, opening with a shot at that actor who wants to be Governor of California and proceeding to explain, using a blackboard, the difference between left, right, and middle (which includes a left, right, and middle, to the left, right, and middle, respectively):

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"They threw this baby out the window because the girl was on fire and the fireman had to catch the baby."

From the news report of the building collapse in Philadelphia.

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"A 4-step technique is used to turn stem cells from animal flesh into a burger."

"First, the stem cells are stripped from the cow’s muscle. Next, they are incubated in a nutrient broth until they multiply many times over, creating a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg. This 'wasted muscle' is then bulked up through the laboratory equivalent of exercise - it is anchored to Velcro and stretched. Finally, 3,000 strips of the lab-grown meat are minced, and, along with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat, formed into a burger."

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"Seriously? The mere image of eight women and one man puts you in mind of '... a high-class escort service and an ad for Charlie’s Angels LLP'?"

"Then how about this caption: 'Staci Zaretsky — get a sex-change operation already. You're embarrassing the rest of us!'"

Wow! What a sexist screwup at Above the Law.

I noticed that today, as Zaretsky had to deem somebody the winner of what was an embarrassing-from-the-start caption contest. Here's the photo that was supposed to inspire hilarity:



This reminds me of the blind judging I did back in 2008, when Above the Law had a contest to determine who would replace David Lat as the chief writer at the blog. I criticized one contestant for racism, and the contestant — Elie Mystal, who won — turned out to be black. He thought I'd be embarrassed to have said that, because ha ha he's black:

I’m male. I’m liberal. I’m Catholic (of the “a la carte” variety). I believe in evolution and global warming. I’m happily married. I’m African-American (Althouse. “Racism alert.” What does that even mean? Go jump in a Great Lake)....

Note the similar defense made by Staci Zaretsky, in her apology here:

Old stereotypes persist within the legal profession, and as Above the Law’s sole female editor, even I am guilty of propagating them, for which I sincerely apologize (some of the resulting entries in our recent caption contest were despicable)....

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"Being a manic depressive is like having brown hair."

Said Delmore Schwartz, quoted by Lou Reed, reviewing Kanye West's new album "Yeezus."

[On the song "Hold My Liquor," a]t first, West says "I can hold my liquor" and then he says "I can't hold my liquor."  This is classic — classic manic-depressive, going back and forth....

"I'm great, I'm terrible, I'm great, I'm terrible."  That's all over this record....

There are more contradictions on "New Slaves," where he says "Fuck you and your Hamptons house."  But God only knows how much he's spending wherever he is.  He's trying to have it both ways — he's the upstart but he's got it all, so he frowns on it.  Some people might say that makes him complicated, but it's not really that complicated.  He kind of wants to retain his street cred even though he got so popular.  And I think he thinks people are going to think he's become one of them — so he's going to very great lengths to claim that he's not.  On "New Slaves," he's accusing everyone of being materialistic but you know, when guys do something like that, it's always like, "But we're the exception.  It's all those other people, but we know better."

By the way, does Lou Reed/Kanye West ever smile? Do Google image searches for "Kanye West smiling" and "Lou Reed smiling." I think of Kanye West as a guy who only gives "depression face" to the cameras, but compared to Lou Reed, he's a veritable Goldie Hawn.

ADDED: Sorry I had "Jeezus" instead of "Yeezus" there for a while.

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"I'm sorry, did Elbow just call the Solidarity Singers 'the gray-haired retirees and public workers that gather for the daily event.'??"

"Hahahaha! I mean, he is absolutely right but none of the SS would admit to the fact that they are just bored like-minded liberals scared to death that finances matter. One might think that Detroit would put some sense into this crew of 'gray-haired retirees' but I won't hold my breath. Carry on! Just get a freaking permit."


Comment on a Madison newspaper article by Steven Elbow titled "Singalong show-down imminent at Capitol?"

SS = Solidarity Singers, an anti-Scott Walker group that dates back to the big protests of 2011.

I've explained these people to you before, e.g., here, and there was a singalong showdown back in 2011 that I covered here. I've also been hit with a vuvuzela by a singalong participant, and I've seen these people switch from singing old union songs to paranoid chanting for a boycott against the company whose workers were installing a sprinkler system and making it harder for them to get their singing done.

Take a wild guess whether I'm in the mood to scurry down to the square right now to cover the "show-down." I am old, but I'm not that old.

UPDATE: The singalongs took place.

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How the Obama 2012 campaign — replete with hugely tusked mascot — mined and processed data.

Dan Balz writes about "How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data," quoting the campaign manager Jim Messina about the obsession with tracking and measuring data.

It took the technology team nearly a year, but it produced software that allowed all of the campaign’s lists to talk to one another. The team named it Narwhal, after a whale of amazing strength that lives in the Arctic but is rarely seen....

So, "amazing strength" and Arctic habitat are the distinguishing features of the narwal? Here's a picture to help you think about what these folks really said when choosing this name:



Back to Balz:

The next goal was to create a program that would allow everyone... to communicate simply and seamlessly... That brought about the creation of Dashboard... 

The Obama leaders not only wanted all the lists to be able to talk to one another, they also wanted people to be able to organize their friends and family members.... “... what if we could build a piece of software that tracked all this and allowed you to match your friends on Facebook with our lists"....

It took months and months to solve, but it was a huge breakthrough. If a person signed on to Dashboard through his or her Facebook account, the campaign could, with permission, gain access to that person’s Facebook friends.... The [Obama] team could supply people with information about their friends based on data it had independently gathered.... It knew who was solid for Obama and who needed more persuasion — and a gentle or not-so-gentle...

 Tusked!

... nudge to vote. Instead of asking someone to send a message to all of his or her Facebook friends, the campaign could present a handpicked list of the three or four or five people it believed would most benefit from personal encouragement....

On Obama’s target lists, the voter file contained no good contact information for half of those young voters — they didn’t have land lines, and no other information was available.

Here's an idea: Get the officials at huge universities in swing states to let you hold big rallies on campus, cancelling classes, and let the campaign require students seeking access to send the campaign their email addresses.

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"The Clintons are upset with the comparisons that the Weiners seem to be encouraging..."

"... that Huma is 'standing by her man' the way Hillary did with Bill, which is not what she in fact did," according to an unnamed "top state Democrat."

“The Clintons are pissed off that Weiner’s campaign is saying that Huma is just like Hillary,’’ said the source. “How dare they compare Huma with Hillary? Hillary was the first lady. Hillary was a senator. She was secretary of state.”

She wasn't any of those things in 1992 when she sat by her man on "60 Minutes" and claimed to be doing something more than whatever it was Tammy Wynette was singing about in "Stand By Your Man." And what Bill had done was worse than what Weiner seems to have done. Bill had sex with other women. Weiner merely sexted. And Bill was sitting there lying about it and Hillary backed him up big time, whereas in the recent Huma-and-Anthony TV stunt, the misdeeds are admitted.

If Hillary is pissed off, I would think it's because she doesn't want people reminded of her old stand-by-your-man routine:

“Hillary didn’t know Huma would do this whole stand-by-your-man routine, and that’s one of the reasons the Clintons are distancing themselves from all this nonsense,’’ the source said.

I put up the old 1992 interview in my post about Weiner yesterday, and we watched the whole 10 minutes and laughed a lot. I scoffed: "This is the first female President of the United States?!"

I encourage you to watch the whole thing. Watch Bill bullshit to avoid telling an outright lie, and watch Hillary nod as her man wriggles through — lip bite at 6:15 — and marvel at her delight in his equivocations — her smug smile at 6:38! At 7:02, Hillary does a little "zone of privacy" riff that should feel irksome to women's rights advocates, since it's the key phrase in the law relating to women's bodily autonomy and Hillary is using it to say don't look at the selfish, women-exploiting things my husband has done.

After that, Bill is very animated and smiley, waving his hands about, theorizing about privacy, and at some point we see his big hand resting on and weighing down Hillary's demurely clasped hands. When did his hand get there? I ask out loud and scroll back to see how he managed to plunk it there. It's just suddenly there at 8:01 after a cut to Steve Kroft's face. CBS made that cut! We weren't allowed to see him segue from expansive explaining gesture to holding the woman down. At 9:03, after another cut, Hillary says they will not say anything more, no matter how much they are pushed.

And Kroft pushes, suggesting that they have reached — to use the classic adultery-tolerating buzzwords — "an understanding" and "an arrangement." Bill's all "Wait a minute, wait a minute" — and his big mitt is back on top of Hillary's hands — "You're looking at 2 people who love each other. This is not 'an arrangement' or 'an understanding.'" And then, in a very sincere, whispery tone: "This is a marriage. That's a very different thing."

Here's where Hillary jumps in (9:38) — with a harsh, Southern-accented twang and waggling her head around — "You know, I'm not sittin' here like some little woman standin' by her man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sittin' here because I love him and I respect him... and if that's not enough for people then, heck, don't vote for him."

The soft gentle man, and the sharp modern-but-not-modern woman. That moment was the triumph of a lifetime for Hillary. It made everything happen. It got her man elected President. That's so much more than anything Huma accomplished in her balky wan press conference with Weiner. Hillary is rightly pissed.

ADDED: Meade — who's sittin' by me right now — reads the post out loud and says "Bring in the comments... I think it will be great." So go ahead. Do comments. I have to moderate them, so there may be a delay and comments must relate to the text of the post to be approved.

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Who is in Madison with a "Who is John Galt?" bumper sticker?

A strange sighting in the parking lot at Picnic Point, in the heart of Madison, Wisconsin:



At the same time — a good time for interesting dark green cars — there was this vintage Nova:



We didn't catch the owner of the Yukon, but I think it was a politician we've seen in that parking lot before. We did run into a group of young guys who were headed for the Nova, which one of them said he'd just bought it. The old car was new to him. I told him I loved it, that it's great to see a vintage Nova, and Meade couldn't resist alluding to the old urban legend — which I'm sure this guy has already heard a hundred times — "Does it go?"

In addition to cars, there were dogs on Picnic Point, and this is the one I caught in a photograph:

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"If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?"

Asks the Pope.

"The problem is not having this orientation," he said. "We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem."

Is that a translation? If so, how did the translator get to "lobbies"? I presume what he was saying is something very similar to what conservatives in the United States say, that we're all individuals and all human, and we shouldn't have special interest groups pushing us around making special demands, seeking special privileges. Note how his list of lobbies progressed, not from gay people to race and gender, but on to "greedy people" (economic interest groups?) and the generic "political." Then before the totally generic "so many lobbies," he inserted the Masons.

3 observations:

1. What is the depth of the Pope's conciliatory tone toward gay people? Is it more than a display of love toward the human beings who feel urges that he will still teach should be resisted?

2. Are the Masons up to anything these days that is seriously troubling the Pope? (I see that last October, when Benedict was still Pope and his former butler was on trial for stealing "highly sensitive papers the pontiff had marked 'to be destroyed,'" there were headlines like "Trial reveals papal butler's interest in Masonry, Church scandals.")

3. Did Francis say "lobbies" and is he being lobbied? The meaning of "lobby" he's using is (from the unlinkable OED): "In extended use: a sectional interest..., a business, cause, or principle supported by a group of people; the group of persons supporting such an interest." Examples of this usage, going back to 1952, are all in British writings, and I think it sounds odd to Americans, who think of "lobby" more in terms of groups organized for the purpose of affecting legislation. The term goes back to the 17th century, when there was a specific entrance-hall — literally, a lobby — in the House of Commons, where people could interact with legislators. The OED marks the word "lobbyist" as "Chiefly U.S."

The Pope referred to the "gay lobby" last month. Here's a NYT article from June 12th:

For years, perhaps even centuries, it has been an open secret in Rome: That some prelates in the Vatican hierarchy are gay. But the whispers were amplified this week when Pope Francis himself, in a private audience, appears to have acknowledged what he called a “gay lobby” operating inside the Vatican, vying for power and influence.

The remarks — which the Vatican spokesman did not deny and the participants at the private audience confirmed — appeared to be part of an effort by the pope to take on the entrenched interests in the Vatican that many believe were a factor in why the previous pope, Benedict XVI, resigned unexpectedly....

“In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true,” [Pope Francis] said in Spanish... “The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there ... We need to see what we can do,” Francis continued....

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Records From My Father, Part 5: "Remember How Great...?"

Do you remember the old Lucky cigarette ads? Remember how great cigarettes used to taste? Luckies still do. I can't find the old jingle, but I'd sing it for you if I you were here. Lucky Strike was my father's cigarette brand, back in the days when the greatest music stars recorded for Columbia, which put out a collection of greatest recordings purportedly "specially selected by Lucky Strike Cigarettes." (Here, you can download it for $7.)


Look at that yellowed Scotch tape. This record was played and played, and I remember hearing it, back in the 1960s. What a collection! Unfortunately, this record, my 5th choice for this Records From My Father series, has a chunk taken out of it, and so I can't listen to Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" or Dinah Shore singing "Buttons and Bows."



I'll have to start with "Sentimental Journey," with Doris Day and Les Brown's Band of Renown. This was the song my parents always identified as "our song," and I shrugged that off and let them pass on without ever telling me exactly why. Wikipedia says:

Les Brown and His Band of Renown, with Doris Day as vocalist, had a hit record with the song, Day's first #1 hit, in 1945. The song's release coincided with the end of WWII in Europe and became the unofficial homecoming theme for many veterans. 

My God. My father was drafted in 1945, and he met my mother in the Army — she was one of the first WACs — and they married 2 weeks later. Anyone reading that can construct a better idea of why that was their song than I had, growing up hearing that and hearing those seemingly silly old fools calling it their song.

A couple songs later is something I remember loving as a child. "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," sung by Mary Martin — whom I (and maybe you) mostly think of as Peter Pan. I didn't understand the idea of a sugar daddy. The adults understood the song on that level. To me, a girl was devoted to her father... to the point of calling him "da da da da da da da da daddy."

There's much more on this immensely pleasurable album, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellignton, and Xavier Cugat, and Cab Calloway, "that Hi-De-Ho man," as the liner notes remind us...



You can see the handwritten initials in the top left corner: RAA. My father's name was Richard Adair Althouse. "Adair" is also my middle name.

So I want to warn you laddie
Though I know that you're perfectly swell
That my heart belongs to Daddy
Cause my Daddy, he treats it so well

This is a broken record, but my heart is not broken. I only wish I'd figured out, before it was to late, that there were things I could have talked to my father about, but I am talking about these things now.

Gonna take a sentimental journey
Gonna set my heart at ease
Gonna make a sentimental journey
To renew old memories.

(Comments invited... and moderated.)

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I condemn Kedem.

"According to two people told of the decision, the campaign manager, Danny Kedem, no longer wished to oversee Mr. Weiner’s bid for New York mayor after a week of bruising revelations about the candidate’s latest online conduct...."

What kind of campaign manager bugs out on you right when you need him? He should be your trusty champion! So inappropriate. Defend your guy! What? Are you trying to save your career? Your career is in campaign managing, and you dropped your guy when he was down.

Unacceptable. I don't really care that what Weiner did is is also unacceptable. This is a campaign. Did James Carville and George Stephanopoulos abandon Bill Clinton in 1992 when the Gennifer Flowers story hit?

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A much-criticized WaPo headline: "What motivates a lawyer to defend a Tsarnaev, a Castro or a Zimmerman?"

That still runs atop an article by lawprof Abbe Smith which explains the role of the defense lawyer within the criminal justice system. The explanation is familiar to anyone who's considered the topic beyond the shallowest level, but the article appears in the Washington Post because of all the attention to the Zimmerman trial, which explains the presence of the acquitted neighborhood watchman alongside the names of the evil Castro and the accused terrorist Tsarnaev.

The headline drew fire. At Breitbart.com: "the Washington Post outlandishly sought to equate the acquitted Robert [sic] Zimmerman to accused serial rapist Ariel Castro and Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev." At Instapundit: "Which one of these things is not like the others?... 'Tsarnaez = Castro = Zimmerman? Why not just throw in a Hitler? That’s usually how the question is posed at cocktail parties.'"

So look at how this article is teased on the front page at WaPo right now:



Quick! Roll out the Kaczynski!

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"But Mr Stach’s biography also shows Kafka’s lighter side."

Topic sentence of a paragraph that continues thusly:

On holiday with a mistress, he feels almost sick with laughter. In the last years of his life he meets a crying young girl in a park who explains that she has lost her doll. He then proceeds to write her a letter a day for three weeks from the perspective of the doll, recounting its exploits. With his final mistress, Dora Diamant, Kafka has no doubt that he wants to marry her. She even inspires him to recover his interest in Judaism.

Do those 3 points really show a lighter side? 1. Sick with laughter. 2. A creative but creepy extended interaction with a child encountered in the park. 3. Interest in marrying a woman who reconnects him to his religious roots.

To be fair, there's no assertion that the side is light. Only that it's lighter than the other side. Dark gray is lighter than black.
 
(Here's the book.)

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"Barnaby Jack, a hacker and security researcher previously known for his hacks involving ATMs and insulin pumps, has died in San Francisco. He was 35."

"His death came just days before he was to give a presentation about techniques for hacking implanted heart devices, which could kill a person from 30 feet away."

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"Stand still. Stand steady. Stand clear."

"Don't let this happen to your child."



A 1970s public service announcement warning you not to do what Mayor Bloomberg is actively encouraging. What used to be following basic safety is now regarded as anti-social:

"Able-bodied people standing on the downward escalator are in effect robbing the people behind them of time," says Hamilton Nolan, who writes for Gawker and regularly uses the New York subway.

"Their presumptuous need for leisure may cause everyone behind them to miss a train they would have otherwise caught. Then those people are forced to stand and wait on a subway platform for many extra minutes. Those are precious minutes of life that none of us will get back."

People seem to have forgotten the horrors of the escalator.

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Cute dog on a cold day in July.

The cold day:



The cute dog:



That was yesterday, though today is cold too. It's 60° indoors, and we refuse to turn on the heat in July. It's nice to put on sweaters and wooly socks in the summertime. We were sweltering a week ago. It's like taking a trip north without leaving home. Automatic, in-place vacation.

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The consequences of blushing.

1. I was reading this Wall Street Journal essay — "The Appeal of Embarrassment/Blushing, fidgeting, looking down — the more contrite a wrongdoer looks, the more likable he seems" — written by Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and author of the enticingly titled "The Trouble with Testosterone" and "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."

2. I don't give a damn about zebras and their freedom from ulcers. (I'll just guess that when any given zebra slips toward ulcer-producing mental activity, some lion eats him, and that's the end of that trajectory.) But I am interested in the trouble with testosterone in connection with the subject of Sapolsky's essay, which is Anthony Weiner. Something about that ravaged face. Is he using testosterone to build up those muscles he shows off in his selfies?


3. Sapolsky's essay is not, however, about testosterone, but visible signs of embarrassment, like blushing. Is Weiner one of these people who do not blush like normal people? If so, Sapolsky suggests, we shouldn't trust him. "Numerous studies have shown that autonomic responses to strong emotions are blunted in sociopaths. Thus, in individuals there is a positive and statistically significant covariance between concern about violating social norms and concern with pro-sociality." (I'm resisting inserting an old joke here.)

4. Sapolsky's essay pulled me in enough to read it, but it didn't make the cut into bloggable. Something unsatisfying about the maundering. And it's just the same old thing about Weiner, really. Why isn't he embarrassed? The Stanford prof doesn't have anything new to say: Why doesn't Weiner blush? Maybe he did blush? Was anyone checking to see if he blushed? That's how Sapolsky ends it, saying it would be "nice" if there were some kind of blush-o-meter to check.

5. I thought I could find a way into blogging the essay I'd dumped time into reading with an almost-remembered song lyric with the word "blush." Was it Bob Dylan? I do a word search at bobdylan.com I see Bob's used the word exactly once: "Now, there’s a certain thing/That I learned from my friend, Mouse/A fella who always blushes/And that is that ev’ryone/Must always flush out his house/If he don’t expect to be/Goin’ ’round housing flushes."

6. That's not helpful. This friend Mouse always blushes. I thought the line was never blushes, which might help me with the Weiner/Sapolsky quandry, and anyway, it's a dumb Dylan verse, just some off the top of his head Basement Tapes foolery, where Bob not only wasn't above rhyming "mouse" and "house" but he also double-used "flush" in his low-effort rhyme for "blush."

7. I'm not getting any good material about blushing, and I'm completely distracted by the title of the song, "Open the Door, Homer." If you've listened to "The Basement Tapes," you know it as "Open the Door, Richard." What's with the Homer/Richard switch?

8. That turns out to be a much better question than did Anthony Weiner blush? For one thing, it's perfectly answerable, via Wikipedia. "Open the Door, Richard" was an old vaudeville routine:

Pigmeat Markham, one of several who performed the routine, attributed it to his mentor Bob Russell. The routine was made famous by Dusty Fletcher on stages like the Apollo Theater in New York and in a short film. Dressed in rags, drunk, and with a ladder as his only prop, Fletcher would repeatedly plunk the ladder down stage center, try to climb it to knock on an imaginary door, then crash sprawling on the floor after a few steps while shouting, half-singing "Open the Door, Richard." After this he would mutter a comic monologue, then try the ladder again and repeat the process, while the audience was imagining what Richard was so occupied doing.

Jack McVea was responsible for the musical riff which became associated with the words "Open the Door, Richard" that became familiar to radio listeners and as many as 14 different recordings were made....

"Open the Door, Richard" was an early R&B novelty record, a song category that became a basic genre of rock and roll in the 1950s. It started the fad of answer song records. It was also the first commercial record to use a fade out ending....

The phrase "Open the Door, Richard" passed into African American Vernacular English and became associated with the Civil Rights Movement. When college students marched in 1947 to the state capitol demanding the resignation of segregationist governor Herman Talmadge, some of their banners read "Open the Door Herman." The Los Angeles Sentinel used "Open the Door Richard" as the title of an editorial demanding black representation in city government and a Detroit minister used the title for a sermon on open housing.

"Open the Door, Richard" became a catchphrase in broader American society, as well; the line appeared in routines by Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Phil Harris. Jimmy Durante and Burl Ives each recorded versions of the song; opera star Lauritz Melchior performed it on national radio. Molly Picon recorded a Yiddish language version; it was also covered in Spanish, Swedish, French, Armenian and Hungarian. There were "Richard" hats, shirts, and jeans, and ads for products ranging from ale to perfume incorporated references to the song....

In 1967, Bob Dylan and The Band recorded an homage to the song as part of The Basement Tapes. Entitled "Open the Door, Homer," the chorus nevertheless repeated the phrase "Open the door Richard."

9. The door never opens, I think. What's that old line, when a door closes, a window opens? I immediately remember the lyric I was searching for at stage #5:

Some people, they like to go out dancing
And other peoples, they have to work...
And there's even some evil mothers
Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y'know that, women, never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo!
And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that, life is just to die!

10. Children are the only ones who blush... that's what the evil mothers tell you. The evil mothers are the sociopaths who don't blush, and they'd like you to believe that no adults blush, so you won't attribute any significance to the failure to blush when caught in a shameful act.

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"This was shot over the course of the 2012/2013 academic year, where I was lucky enough..."

"... to get the chance to study abroad at the University of Wisconsin Madison. This film is longer than most of my timelapse projects, but I hope the video is just as enjoyable to watch. It's been amazing to live in Madison for the last year and it will be sorely missed."

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The new science of poker playing.

"This growth over the past decade has been accompanied by a profound change in how the game is played. Concepts from the branch of mathematics known as game theory have inspired new ideas in poker strategy and new advice for ordinary players."

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Obama says "racial tensions won’t get better."

And "they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot. If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested."

How to understand that statement? Possible interpretations:

1. He wants all focus on the the economy, so any other topics are portrayed as subtopics to the economy: Worries about race should not distract us, because the best way to improve racial matters is to improve the economy.

2. Obama wants more economic policies that redistribute wealth: The threat of worsening "racial tensions" is meant to drive people accept those policies.

3. Obama realizes there isn't much he can do about racial problems, at least not without annoying some of his base: Stop expecting him to do something about race.

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Reel mowing a semi-circular lawn.

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Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, tries to explain.

He objected to his own "complicity... on behalf of a government that openly acknowledges that it would hate for the law of Almighty Allah to be the supreme law of the land." He apologized to "the Mujahideen, the believers, and the innocent" and "ask[s] for their forgiveness for participating in the illegal and immoral aggression against Muslims, their religion and their lands." He wanted to be able to argue "defense of others" at trial, but the judge has denied that.

At a hearing earlier this month, Hasan, who is paralyzed from the abdomen down after being shot by police the day of the Fort Hood shooting, said he wanted jurors to know that he was being forced to wear a camouflage uniform that he believes represents 'an enemy of Islam.'

Is there some crazy notion about camouflage that he objects to or is this simply the main idea that he felt like a traitor to his religion by serving in the U.S. Army? When I first read this, I thought, is there some misreading of the camouflage pattern that is troubling some people? I looked around on line but found nothing, and I'm ready to assume that I was the one doing the misreading.

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"Parkinson's itself there's nothing horrifying to me. It's not horrible."

"I don't think it's gothic nastiness. There's nothing on the surface horrible about someone with shaking hands," said Michael J. Fox, who will have a new sitcom in which he plays a dad who, of course, must have Parkinson's disease, since Fox has it. But the disease, we're told, won't be central to the plotlines.

"'The way I look at life and the reality of Parkinson's, sometimes it's frustrating and sometimes it's funny. I need to look at it that way and other people need to look at it that way."

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Travel bloggers organizing travel bloggers to leverage travel blogging for travel.

It's not just the old problem of how to monetize your blog. It's the special travel blogger's problem of needing to pay for the raw material for your writing, and these people can barely talk about the problem of writing well (or usefully) about things they've been given free in anticipation of good publicity.

You have to get deeply into this NYT article to get to the really complicated commerce that made me write the post title above:

In order to make a go of it, some [travel bloggers have] contractual partnerships with outfitters like G Adventures, which created Wanderers in Residence in 2010. The program currently includes five bloggers, who lead tours, do speaking engagements and write blog posts for the company (the bloggers are compensated monthly)...

A different sort of outlet is IAmbassador, which [a travel blogger] started in 2011. The program...  organizes bloggers and pitches campaigns to tourism boards. There are now about 40 bloggers participating in the resulting sponsored trips, Mr. Jenkins said; he has also formed partnerships with travel blogging networks in Germany and Brazil.

I'm not a travel buff and I don't care about travel blogs or other travel writing, but I understand the appeal of real life activities with other bloggers and the desire to have good travel companions, and why shouldn't some bloggers make money organizing trips? It's just another form of packaged vacation, but part of the organizer's clout is some sort of offer of good press. Once the freebie is acquired, do the bloggers feel compelled to be nice? I'd be inclined to be the blogger who calls bullshit on the other bloggers on my tour who effused too much. Maybe I'd get banned (as a troll).

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iPaw.

(From Irene.)

ADDED: I've added the "poodle" tag. Having blogged about breed-specific dog food today, I'm interested in my breed-specific tag. But only for poodles.

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"Walter Cronkite hosted a special about Sinatra in 1965..."

"... and as part of that production, a CBS film crew was there for the recording of 'It Was A Very Good Year,'" writes an emailer who read yesterday's post about the Gordon Jenkin's record "Manhattan Tower."

Here's the video, in which you see a lot of Jenkins, conducting the orchestra, which is there in real time as Sinatra does the vocal:




Here's the album, "September of My Years," with Sinatra backed up by Jenkins. I should search through the records from my father to see if I have that. I haven't chosen the record for Part 4 of the Records From My Father series, but after my ordeal with "Manhattan Tower," I was thinking of picking something by Sinatra.

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Dachshund food.

I had no idea there was breed-specific dog food. But Dachshund food was one of the items bought through the Althouse Amazon portal yesterday. Whatever you need to buy — on whatever level of specificity — you can choose to enter Amazon through that link and thereby bark, howl, and yap your appreciation for this blog, where there's always another biscuit.

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What if a black widow spider were to nest in a prisoner's dreadlocks?

That happened once. There might also be a fungus hidden in the hair-covered scalp. Weapons might be stowed in the hair, and guards searching for them by hand are afraid of getting cut by razor blades. Moreover, if a long-haired prisoner were to escape, he'd have a ready means of disguise: cut off that hair. These and other reasons were the "compelling interests" that worked for the government in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected a claim for a religious exemption to the no-long-hair policy in prison.

The suit wasn't based on the Constitution's Free Exercise Clause, which doesn't require religious exemptions as long as the government applies the same rule equally. It was based on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal statute that provides for exemptions. Here's the main U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Cutter v. Wilkinson, rejecting an Establishment Clause challenge to RLUIPA but nudging lower courts to remember "that prison security is a compelling state interest, and that deference is due to institutional officials’ expertise in this area."

The plaintiffs in the 11th Circuit case, Knight v. Thompson, were followers of a Native American religion. Back in 2009, when I used the prison haircut problem for an exam in my Religion and the Constitution course, I presented 5 prisoners, with different situations, intended to highlight the problem of giving special treatment based on religious (as opposed to secular) needs. (Hot links added.)

Prisoner #1 is a musician serving a 2-year sentence who hopes to return to work playing in bands where long hair is traditional.

Prisoner #2 is a young man who believes that his wife loves his long hair. He is hoping that when he is released from prison after serving 3 long years she’ll still want him.

Prisoner #3 was arrested at an anti-war protest called “hair peace” at which he, along with others, chanted “grow your hair for peace.” When a passerby approached him with scissors, a scuffle ensued, and he was arrested for assault. He is serving a 1-year sentence.

Prisoner #4, serving a 5-year sentence, has been a Sikh all his life. For centuries, Sikhs have believed that to cut one’s hair is to reject the love for God and respect for God’s creation that hair symbolizes.

Prisoner #5, also serving a 5-year sentence, decided on his own — before entering prison — to embark on a “spiritual journey” that would be manifested by growing his hair and never cutting it. He isn’t a member of any group, but he was inspired by learning about the Rastafarian movement, which, as he quotes from his readings, is “not a highly organized religion,” but  “a movement and an ideology.” Rastafarians wear their hair in a distinctive uncut way, showing “patience… a journey of the mind, soul and spirituality.”

I asked:

Can the new forcible haircut policy be applied across the board to all 5 prisoners (and any other prisoner that refuses to consent) or will at least one exemption be required? If any exemptions are required, explain which prisoners are entitled to an exemption. If the state wants to make an exception for one or more of the prisoners, will it have to make an exception for more than one? For all of them?

It was very interesting to me to see how students would respond to the 5 different needs for long hair. If I remember correctly, most students found the Sikh's interest so strong that they began there. But then what happens? Do you include all? Just the Rastafarian-inspired man?  None of the others? And does thinking about that make you want to exclude the Sikh too? If your answer is yes, then you may be an 11th Circuit judge.

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