$700,000 to $800,000 spent to erase a quote that was displayed out of context.

Martin Luther King said "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness," which we will remember, even through it's now off the memorial. It's off the memorial because, in the "drum major" speech, there were some other words around it — as is always the case with snappy lines in speeches — and Maya Angelou and others felt some shades of subtlety were lost, making the man sound arrogant. Deeper grooves will be carved all over the memorial to disguise the wordlessness where there were once words, words that are etched more deeply into our memory as we read this news story and see, once again, "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness."

Ironically, the news story doesn't include the context. So I'll tell you the context: The context is abysmal phony outrage, toadying obeisance to Angelou, and an atrocious waste of money.

Read More

Instapundit opens up comments in a "grand experiment."

He writes:

I’ve opened ‘em up before — and, for that matter, Ann Althouse did it once when I was away, to much excitement — but this new system should be much better. 

The system is part of "the new rollout of tech at PJ Media will allow one sign-in to work across the whole site," so you've got to join their system to be able to comment. And they will be able to manage you in ways that I was not able to manage my commenters (some of whom really were trying to destroy my blog and waste all our time).

Someone at Instapundit named Stoutcat says:

Where Althouse closes a door, Reynolds opens a window! This is an excellent idea, and I'm anticipating much enjoyment and eddification from reading your commenters, who are, no doubt, as far above Althouse's commenters, as hers were above the general horde.

Instapundit responds:

Yeah, Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free gives me pause. But there' s no connection -- this has been in the works for months as part of PJ's single sign-on thing.

As for "Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free," if that's what he's seeing, that is in fact only appearance. The loss has been very painful, because I believed the comments gave the place a lot of energy. But some unknown proportion of the commenters were people with ill will, who wanted destruction, and deleting even the ones we knew about had become literally a full-time job. But I wasn't in some big old system with lots of tech people. I've kept independent, with the simplicity of the people's platform, Blogger, which won't let me exclude people. I could only delete, which was a technique that my most aggressive antagonists used against me (and against all the other commenters who'd contributed so much over the years).

That really hurt, but I'm an optimist, and — like a blog — I live in the present and move forward, so I find the good in whatever the situation is, continually making choices about how to keep things as good as possible, and the day came when the balance of good and bad in the comments experience tipped so severely that I couldn't maintain the sunny denial needed to put up with everything. Since then, I've felt the loss, and part of the loss is seeing exiled commenters talking about me elsewhere on the web, forgetting/ignoring the problem that made me close the comments — as if I would shut off the comments because people attacked my writings! — and saying such nasty things about me that I could get depressed brooding about the real proportion of good faith to bad faith commenters.

But I've got to resist traipsing down that detour as I continue on the road of blogging, where I've found so much joy in the past and hope to find more, doing things in this newly simplified style. Meanwhile, Instapundit gets fancier, as PJ Media makes its play to become a social media enterprise. That's the road I've diverged from. I can't be your social media website.

I've redefined my task as something I can do alone, not that I'm alone. I've got Meade — the commenter I married — walking with me every step of the way. I've got all the joy I can handle, and maybe it is joy at being comment-free. I'm a less is more kind of person. My own version of that slogan is: Better than nothing is a high standard. I do notice and take joy in the negatives that I'm free of. That's called freedom, and comment-free is a kind of freedom.

ADDED: I said it back in 2004:

Why do you blog? > To live freely in writing.

Read More

William Faulkner is never dead. He just needs to get the hell out of court.

So the estate of William Faulkner sued Sony Pictures Classics over the line "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past," spoken by the Owen Wilson character in the Woody Allen movie "Midnight in Paris." The line is a paraphrase of a famous Faulkner quote "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The judge said: "The copyrighted work is a serious piece of literature lifted for use in a speaking part in a movie comedy, as opposed to a printed portion of a novel printed in a newspaper, or a song's melody sampled in another song. This transmogrification in medium tips this factor in favour of transformative, and thus, fair use."

Oh, good lord. I'm sure we're allowed to quote that quote whenever we want, in newspapers and songs, even pretending we just thought it up, without getting permission from the Faulkner people and without crediting Faulkner.
Anyone can Google who said the past is never dead it's not even past (or the Woody Allen paraphrase) will get to the details about Faulkner. And now, they'll also get to the news of the heirs' disgusting effort to cash in on a cliché that had long ago run free into the common speech.

Hey, I said that first, moaned the undead William Faulkner in his grave.

If zombie Faulkner is that petty, I don't want to read him. And if the descendants of Faulkner want us to think that he is, they should sue themselves for defaming him.

ADDED: The Woody Allen line did give Faulker credit, in the script itself (if not in the closing credits):

"The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party."

And here's (PDF) the opinion itself, which does not spell "favor" "favour," despite the way it's quoted at the first link, which goes to The Guardian.

Read More

"America needs to have a national conversation about grace."

Said Meade.

Read More

"As a dogge that turneth aȝen to his spuyng, so is an vnprudent man that rehersith his fooli."

1. So said Wycliffe's Bible, in Middle English, around 1382, translating a proverb that can be more easily understood in the King James form, from 1611: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly." No need to get more modern than that.

2. "Returneth" is nice (and helpful to those who lisp). The double "returneth" may seem more poetic than "turneth... rehersith." But you've got to love "fooli" for "folly." The older form is more accessible. And "spuyng" for "vomit"... surely, we lost something there.

3. "Dog" is a very old word of unknown etymology, according to the (unlinkable) OED, which proceeds to explain this particular unknown at great length. Do you prefer the older form "dogge"? (Which I presume was pronounced "doggie.")

4. I'm rummaging around in the OED under "dog" after writing that first post of the day, about the dog vomit fungus, which was the first post today because it's something that came up on the front lawn overnight. (Some things come up in conversation, and other things come up on the front lawn.) The OED has no entry for the fungus, but I tumbled upon the old aphorism, and thought you might find some use for it.

5. I, of course, was returning to my old fooli, having blogged about dog vomit fungus in 2006, and, in fact, I was inclined to return to another old fooli: dog's breakfast, which sounds like something you could order at The Slime Mold Café, which could have been the name of that first post (since it fits the Althouse blog model of a "café" post, having a photograph and an open-ended invitation to talk).

6. The OED says:

dog's breakfast n. slang (orig. U.S.) a confused mess; = dog's dinner n.

1915   New Castle (Pa.) News 13 Feb. 2/5   They abandoned the plan, went ahead in their own way, and have gotten their side all messed up, like a dog's breakfast.
1959   Times 29 Apr. 10/4   He can't make head or tail of it... It's a complete dog's breakfast.
2004   Classic Rock Oct. 102/3   The 1974 record..is either the furthest-reaching concept album ever made, or the biggest dog's breakfast in the entire history of the state of California.

7. What 1974 record? Can you guess without Googling? I'll give you another excerpt:

Here, no longer held back by the leashes of a mere rock band, Ray wastes no time wading right into a carnival of jazz and samba, synth and rumba, rock-opera and boogie-woogie, all the while wearing golden Tutankhamun facepaint and global new-age influences on his sleeve.

8. Ray was not returning to his old fooli, but moving on to new fooli. How about you?

Read More