Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, is alleged to have said that he spoke French to men and Italian to women; he also revealed that he conversed with God in Spanish and with his horse in German.
David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy
It's a much more interesting book, and more readable, than I anticipated. Reading about the reality of Italy and its history makes it a lot easier to understand its seemingly chaotic politics. Italians don't really identify as a single people of a single nation.
We talk of the Italian language and the Venetian dialect as if the second is a sort of deviant of the first whereas it is in fact much older, evolving from Latin centuries before the birth of Dante.
Venetian is only one example. There are dozens of dialects alive and well in Italy, where half the population speaks a dialect at home and thousands and tens of thousands still speak German, French, Slav, Arabic, Spanish and variations in different parts of the country.
They are as possessive of their dialects as any Native American tribe is of its lost language, and for much the same reason. Italy is a country of many tribes, not many of them ethnically "pure," however.
It's the geography mostly, its vulnerability to invasion and the difficulty in travel with a mountain range dividing it north to south. I've lost that romantic notion of Italy and will henceforth retain it only for Tuscany. And Venice, of course. Fuck Rome and the Nazi horse you rode in on, Benedict.
Alice Neel became a sort of feminist icon in the 1970's — and a frequent guest on the Johnny Carson show — after a lifetime of bohemian artistic obscurity, which her two children clearly still remembered with some bitterness long after her death and their long adult lives of success. Yet the two men retained her New York apartment after her death, and one of them used it to conduct business. They said they wanted to be near her.
I love her paintings and am thinking about getting a print of this.
There's no particular reason to feature Alice Neel today except I just finished watching the documentary about her done by her grandson Andrew Neel and have been thinking a lot about her, the sacrifices she made, the huge tragedies involved in her persistent pursuit of her art.
You can see a lot more of her portraits here.
I'm really glad Andrew Sullivan decided to highlight Brian Cox today because it gives me an excuse to publish my list, which I worked on all day yesterday (off and on, I also slept a lot) and seems to be all I need for now.
Remember I claimed (honestly reported) to have awakened wanting some sort of comprehensive accounting of the universe and all its things in some sort of hierarchal order so I could grasp it?
You don't remember? Well, I did and it was just a day or so earlier and remember I posted that coolest thing size scale vid?
So yesterday I just though FI!, the vid isn't really what I need, I need something all on one page, so I started with the vid and Wikipedia and made my own and here it is.
I'm going to carry it around with me to consult and write poems about it, but basically I just need it so I won't forget.
subatomic particles
chemical elements
atoms
molecules
cells
tissues
organs
organic systems
organisms
There's probably a 3rd grade science book somewhere that explained that to me, but I was repelled by science and math for reasons that have yet to be explained. Maybe because there were no people in there, all the more reason to dramatize the history, which is all very impressive. Did you know Marie Curie's daughter also won a Nobel? Did you know some didn't want to give Marie her second prize because of her scandalous affair with a married colleague? Heh.
Not really, but I guess I may try it. Actually am reading Roger Ebert's memoir, which is more leaden than his typically short pieces, underscoring the newpaper writer's lament — "I don't think I can write anything longer than 15 inches."
He's gone through all the major interview subjects with nary a usable quote, but offers a gem in a piece about his friend the sports writer Bill Nack, who used to recite favorite passages from books.
From Nabokov's Pnin, a perfect metaphor:
With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical instrument that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
There are so many perfect things about that paragraph that I despair of ever writing even that much again. Maybe I'll try for a perfect sentence. Oh, wait...
Just to deconstruct this a little. The repetition of ticonderoga is the exact sound of a pencil sharpener. You have to listen, and remember, many times to get that right. He could have said it growled, but it wouldn't have been the same.
The sweet wood. We've all smelled it. Even tasted it. I can smell it now.
Okay, I get why it's highly satisfying, but not why it's highly philosophical unless it's a reference to the ending of the thought, in which case the allusion is lost by the time you get there. So, yeah, I can even criticize Nabokov, but what other "highly" could he have used to balance out the rhythm of the whole thing?
Soundlessly spinning ethereal void. Really dangerously elevated language. It only works because of everything that's come before.
He does not much break up this somewhat long sentence (long for journalism, long for Hemingway). I would have put a period after void and made "As we all must" it's own short, tap-tap sentence. But that's my rhythm, not his.
Tune in tomorrow as Julimac deconstructs The Bible!
I put in the drawer? I think it might be worth something after all.
I never heard of Kickstarter until today, but it sounds cool.
31 films playing at this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, were funded by Kickstarter donations, over 10 percent of those playing, along with 17 films at theSundance Film Festival.
I woke up wishing I had something like this (really, I did, I was thinking particle, atom, cell, whosis, jeez I wish I had a chart) and then suddenly this appeared via something you might also like, The Browser's weekly best-of newsletter.
UPDATE: Actually, I was thinking neutrino, then particle, etc. Turns out, there's string. It figures.
When you look at the structure of the brain it's made up of neurons. Of course, everybody knows that these days. There are 100 billion of these nerve cells. Each of these cells makes about 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons. From this information people have calculated that the number of possible brain states, of permutations and combinations of brain activity, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.
Mindblowing, as they say. If you click the link, you will be at The Edge, which is a pretty cool place to be on a rainy day.
So if dismantling the facade of lies around, say, Bush's tax cut is so easy to do--and makes you the most talked-about newspaper writer in the country--why don't any other reporters or columnists do it themselves? Because doing so would violate some of the informal, but strict, rules under which Washington journalists operate. Reporters usually don't call a spade a spade, unless the lie is small or something personal. When it comes to big policy disagreements, most reporters prefer a he-said, she-said approach--and any policy with a white paper or press release behind it is presumed to be plausible and sincere, no matter how farfetched or deceptive it may be.
This is from an old profile of Krugman, whose blog posts lately hint he's feeling some stress. Buck up, Paul, we need you.
Isn't there a song by that name. Isn't it from Hair?
So, I'm reading this guy's book next, right after Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman, which I have to finish in two weeks. Guess I better think fast.
Anyhoo, the guy is Lawrence Krauss and his book is A Universe From Nothing.
Photographer Cindy Sherman has a new show coming up in New York and I am glad I bothered to read about it and I am glad they reproduced some of the images in the NYT story. Sadly, I'll probably never see the 16-foot images printed on something like contact paper. That would be cool.
The self-portrait aspects of her work are the most popular, and while I'm intrigued with what she has done, the apparent narcissism of it attracts/repels me. Is it okay, are we destined to be narcissists or are we just in a phase that will be forgotten in history as we evolve into the Borg? Um, it's late and I'm wide awake now.
I'm also wondering how we can take seriously an artist named Cindy. On the other hand, I guess we're okay with the Bobbies of the world, the Lennys. Like I said, it's late.
Has been my basic news source for four years because I'm a political junkie. Here's an hour's worth of Josh Marshall, its founder and publisher and a man I have greatly admired (and sometimes done minor battle with via email, he answers personally) for his journalism.
Unfortunately, the interview is Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, who is a good interviewer only because he injects so little of himself into the work. On the other hand, he's a snooze and seems like kind of a dolt. Does he ever smile? I wouldn't call it a smile, some descriptive phrase containing the word rictus comes to mind.
So, yeah, the car dealer shouldn't have to offer insurance that covers contraception either.
From the bishops' chief lobbyist:
That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for "good Catholic business people who can't in good conscience cooperate with this."
"If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I'd be covered by the mandate," Picarello said.
Who am I?
We don't often perceive how we've changed, or think about it much when we do. And it's hard to remember what we used to be like, how we thought, what we thought. And even what we do remember, we know from experience, is inaccurate from an objective point of view. In fact, it's inaccurate from the moment it's recorded. God! Living is chaos. Consciousness is precarious. Best forget about it.
But wait.
There is indeed a self, says Damasio, “but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious.”
Just the other day, I found someone who argued that consciousness wasn't much good for anything from an evolutionary standpoint and that there's no reason to believe that something like human intelligence is evolutionary progress rather than just a dead-end side road. (Although I must say his reasoning that dung beetles or whatever would have consciousness if it was such a good thing didn't really resonate. Maybe the dung beetle is just waiting to see how it turns out for us.)
Anyway, now this:
the reason why conscious minds prevailed in evolution was the fact that consciousness optimized life regulation.”
The California Attorney General is a beautiful black (African American, Indian/Asian American) woman. Kamala Harris. Whodda thunk I'd see all this change in my lifetime?
(Yes, I would not have noted if it was a really, really hot guy like, say Gavin Newsome, even if he had been not white. Beautiful men are allowed to be successful at something other than entertainment, beautiful women, not so much.)
I've seen a lot of seemingly heartfelt, rationally argued comments lately about the current controversy over whether Church-owned institutions should offer insurance that pays for employee contraception.
The bishops argue these people (I'm thinking about the CNAs, janitors, cafeteria workers) can just pay out of pocket (up to $50 a month) for pregnancy protection.
The commenters argue it's an offense against their faith, although it's shaky whether a Catholic car dealer would have the same challenge to his faith, and his situation is not at issue. He has to provide such insurance.
But just in case there's any doubt about what Catholic women think, this little piece of data might shed some light.
Sixty-eight percent of Catholic
women use highly effective methods: sterilization
(32%, including 24% using female sterilization,) the
pill or another hormonal method (31%) and the IUD
(5%).
Huffpo has a good story up today, pursuing while MM (mainstream media) walked away.
Sufficient evidence, rather than speculation, that the radically right-wing new VP was behind it all.
My take?
The trouble with this story is that Komen still lied, denying Handel's influence. Hell yes she should resign, and they should have asked her to and the announcement should have come with the reversal. Fall on your sword, Karen, you're the one who unsheathed it.
In my opinion, Komen doesn't come off any better in crisis management mode than it did while in baldfaced denial of fact. How many donor dollars went for the revised script, I wonder.
So the "sophisticated" Planned Parenthood just did what even old back woods I would have done, shouted it to the rooftops, sending out an action call not only to the usual suspects, but every intelligent person on the planet. Social Media 101 is like basic newspaper reporting, call everybody you can think of. If that's sophisticated, I guess I should start drinking cucumber martinis. No, maybe not. I know, balsamic donuts!
(With basil, "savory" donuts. I think I just thought of the next new thing. Move over cupcakes, your time is so-o-o 2010.)
Shit, the science always gets ya in the end, doesn't it?
I haven't read this in depth, only skimmed, but my takeaway (the U.S. isn't Australia) is look for grass fed beef.
Zeke Emanuel, Rom's bro and a big player in health care reform, says insurance companies will be extinct in eight years.
The piece sort of explains for me the puzzling spectacle of my local hospital buying up local provider practices and clinics, affiliating with a big Seattle provider for reasons — as explained in the local press — that were indeciferable. Now the same thing is going on in my old stomping grounds.
Fun fact: The third brother is Ari, the model for Ari Gold, the lovably insufferable Hollywood agent on HBO's Entourage.
those Republicans paleontologists have no shame. Okay, so not only are we part Neanderthal, but apparently somebody named Denisovia was fooling with grandma, too. In Siberia, before she moved to New York.
There's a new aggregator-with-taste out there and I thought you might want to know about it. I don't think I'll have time for much long-form reading, but who knows.
Oh, it's called The Syllabi.
Isn't that the name of a song? Why yes, yes it is.
Working on my Mood Music playlist in Spotify today and rummaging around for Chet Baker's My Funny Valentine. But I'll save that for Feb. 14.
In the meantime:
From Wiki:
In 1983, British singer Elvis Costello, a longtime fan of Baker, hired the trumpeter to play a solo on his song "Shipbuilding", from the album Punch the Clock. The song was a top 40 hit in the UK, and exposed Baker's music to a new audience. Later, Baker often featured Costello's song "Almost Blue" (inspired by Baker's version of "The Thrill Is Gone") in his live sets, and recorded the song on Let's Get Lost, a documentary film about his life.
There are hundreds of thousands of these foreigners in Israel; in 2010, the first victim of a Hamas rocket attack after the previous year’s Gaza War was a man named Manee Singueanphon, not Moshe Cohen.
Sullivan today points to an interview with Francis Fukuyama recommending The Big Short. I'm probably never going to read that book, so it's good to know it's out there and being talked about by people who are listened to.
Another book is co-authored by Kenneth Rogoff, who Krugman is always referring to as being under attack for his economic opinions. I won't read that book for sure, but am glad it isn't just a few commentators like Krugman and the dirty hippies who are pointing at the Emperor.
So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis...Lloyd Blankfein doesn’t get up in the morning and say, “OK. How are we going to defraud people today?” but I do think the relationship of these banks to social rules is fairly dodgy. Rules are viewed as potential obstacles that you try to get around if that maximises your profit. This is a deeper social issue that I think has to do with the economisation of a lot of thinking. Economists have this model of rational utility maximisation – that social benefit comes out of everybody pursuing their private rational self-interest. This has shaded over – imperceptibly over the past couple of generations – to a downplaying of social norms as constraints on behaviour. You see this in a number of places. In business schools, for example. Back in the 1960s and 70s, business schools regarded themselves as professional schools along the lines of law schools or architecture schools. They were meant to inculcate a certain sense of professional responsibility, that you have obligations to society at large. But as a result of the economisation of a lot of what was taught in these schools, individual profit maximisation began to displace this normative sense, and this spilled over into the behaviour of the people who went on from these programmes into the financial sector. In their minds, they weren’t deliberately trying to defraud people, but if they saw an opportunity to take advantage of less sophisticated buyers of subprime mortgages, they would go ahead and do it.
Or you can just watch the movie Margin Call. Chilling.
UPDATE: I posted the Fukuyama interview before I had finished reading it. Now that I have, I can't recommend it enough.
She's wearing your grandmother's leopard print housedress. And what's that ugly, tacky thing on her wrist? I didn't know they had a gift shop at the trailer court.
Oh, wait, let me pull myself together.
Yes, when your enemies are busy destroying each other, do nothing.
UPDATE: Upon further investigation, I have bookmarked something else to learn about as soon as I overcome my addiction to web surfing and politics. Not likely this year, but I like to think I will someday a) study Italian (they also offer Pirate) b) learn to code (because I think it would be good for me, a sure sign I won't do it) c) learn something about physics.
I was told there would be fireworks. Newt, you let me down.
But he wouldn't put Marco Rubio in the cabinet, he'd give him a "more central, dignified role." President, perhaps? Heh.
Oh, next question is "why would your wife make the best First Lady?" I can't believe anyone even considered that question. Oh, wait, Republicans. Not president Barbie, First Lady Barbie. Sorry, girls.
I can see why Andrew Sullivan is seduced by Ron Paul. The crazy old geezer sounds the sanest of the four. I mean, he'd talk to Raul Castro. Oh, brother.
Krugman never ceases to please me. He doesn't confuse anecdote with data, no matter how charming the story. My friends hate it when I say stuff like that. I figure I'm in the right company.
If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
Obama’s auto bailout, just by itself, saved a lot more jobs than Apple’s US employment.
which is pretty much irrelevant and unnecessary. Heh.
What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.
The philosophy of physics. I didn't even know there was such a thing. And I thought the multiple universe thing was pretty much accepted. There is just too much I don't know.
I have a Roku and I have Netflix streaming and I get to watch all the Spectacle shows whenever I want.
I don't know if they're still on (Sundance), because this one is from 2008 or something, but no matter, Elvis Costello is host, Elton John is executive producer and Diana Krall is one helluva musician.
Which brings me to Diana Krall. Why haven't I ever thought to make her an Honorary Contrarienne before?
There, fixed.
Last week, it was Andrew Sullivan writing for the cover of Newsweek. Pretty good piece, but weighted to personality, which is fine.
Ryan Lizza is not as good a writer as Sullivan is, but he's armed with recently released internal WH memos to bolster his story in the New Yorker.
It's about politics this time, a bit plodding, but then that's kind of the way governance is.
I find a good poem. And I. Fall. Apart.
That's the point, I suppose.
Sullivan had this one up today.
Fragment:
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.
I believe my dog has an imagination. And a memory. Those are the two things you need acutely to be a writer. That and, uh, hands with fingers. And language.
So instead of writing down what is in her head, she must make do with the loop of Shorty-generated stories she tells herself.
Why else would a dog settle down atop a mound of snow, surveying her surroundings with interest and alertness, when all her companions are indoors where it's warm?
She is gathering material. She has been there for more than a half hour, alone, researching.
Eighty five percent all the gravity in the universe comes from something about which we know nothing. ...
[Add that to dark energy and] it is ninety six percent of the universe. Everything we know and love--electrons, protons, neutrons, light, black holes, planets, stars, everything we know and understand--occupies four percent of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy is everything else.
Without my heart rate skyrocketing, my breathing getting shallow and goosebumps of the non-thrilling variety beginning to break out on my chest and neck. My fingers and toes get cold, my skin feels cool and damp.
So it must be fun, right?
This is not your average surfing video. This astounding footage was shot on August 27th, 2011 by cinematographer Chris Bryan at Teahupo’o, a small village off the coast of Tahiti. At the time these guys hit the water the French Navy had declared the day a double code red prohibiting and threatening to arrest anyone entering the water. Watch and you’ll see why. This is probably the most terrifying yet beautiful surfing video I’ve ever seen. (via stellar)
Weather is the safest and most common subject of human conversation. No, I can't prove that, but you know it's true.
Then why, pray tell, do we know so little about it, we being you and me, not the people who actually know something about weather. I say it's because weather is science and, frankly, most of us avoid science like it was, well, the plague. Which is also science.
So although the Northwest winter is often like this give or take a few degrees and inches of rain, the rest of the country is having really warm weather this winter. Here's why.
Not once, not once in the whole article did they say La Nina, although they had to bring up climate change, which turned the comment thread into a shitstorm as usual.
In the first place, my tongue always slips when I try to say digital, and it sounds like Chinese Portugese for watercress sandwich.
In the second place, I once asked a science-minded colleague over lunch what digital meant and he said, "I always think of it as 1s and 0s."
Stopped conversation for five minutes and then I let him talk about baseball, which I never, ever do.
So, yeah, I don't understand anything about the following New York Times article about the latest in nano research, but it sounds important and maybe you can translate.
No, never mind.
Don't write. Don't call. Thank you.
Okay, wait, they're exploring biological generation of this stuff? Am I on Mars?
UPDATE: There's a nice discussion going on over at MeFi about the Mitt video and I particuarly liked this comment: Well put together. Some touches I particularly appreciated:
- They never mention that he's a Mormon (could be controversial) but... they do a slow pan over a Timecover that mentions it. Time is so middle of the road and boring that this couldn't possibly cause trouble and they manage to sneak it in.
- Clips of him speaking French (with an atrocious accent) as part of an Olympics promotional thing for the SLC event. Perfectly lines up with the image his enemies want to project.
- This one late middle aged woman they 'cast' (and that is what they did, the aggrieved ordinary people here were meticulously curated) hits this perfect note at some point when her voice almost but not quite cracks. Fantastic! I bet they did a fist pump in the editing bay when they saw that footage.
- The rest of the casting was great too. Instead of being artistically lazy and having someone talk about their military service, they had him wear a Vietnam baseball cap, somebody was paying attention when they were taught to show rather than to tell!
I don't know what's more fun, watching Newt now promising to stick to criticizing Obama and the backer of the Newt SuperPAC, Sheldon Adelson, say he just wrote a $5 million check and had no say on that devastating Mitt hit piece (second video), ...or knowing that they are providing the Obama campaign with the greatest gift since Osama was killed.
As one TPM commenter put it, "never get in a stink contest with a skunk."
Frederica outlived 'em all. Oldest Honorary Contrarienne so far.
One of Frederica Sagor Maas' scripts launched Clara Bow. Maas eventually quit the movie business in disgust and much later wrote a scathing book about the industry.
And while we're at it, throw in Eve Arnold, too. Although she only lived to 99.
Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm... “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”
But how remarkable that the Tea Party infused GOP has picked two of the most fiscally liberal candidates as their final two. Now Newt and Santorum will savage Romney; and the press will expose Santorum. Paul will have his delegates and will have to be handled right if he is not to indirectly re-elect Obama in a landslide.
I also do not see Santorum lasting long and who knows what Newt will do, he's such a loose cannon. Sullivan also noted that Santorum didn't even file signatures in Virginia, so maybe Romney can promise to make him Secretary of State. Or maybe that's what Newt wants, I dunno.
But I'm not convinced that a third-party run for Paul wouldn't be just as bad for Obama as for Romney. I just picture all these techno geeks as his base, but maybe that's wrong. Haven't really seen any analysis of his supporters.
Contrarienne is very grateful that not everything in ones and zeroes is garbage. She spent all New Years Day culling the year past for the best links that fed this site in 2011. But by the time she hit April, she was worn out and quit. Then she remembered she had to do the new video embed and that's a pain, really. So she procrastinated.
Of course, she should have thought of all that a day or two earlier and got it up on Saturday, but her editor was busy with other things and forgot to remind her.
As an intro, let's start with a little Tennyson. He had to wait fourteen years to marry his intended, the family fortune having been lost to bad investment. Nevertheless, marry they did and produced two sons. The success of his poetry allowed him to buy a house in the country where he could have solitude to write. You don't see that kind of thing much nowadays, do you? I'm looking at you, Billy Collins. (See below.)
1. Dec. 25. Much to my surprise, the multiverses are not only much smaller and inaccessible, but also much larger. I stand corrected better informed, but no more stable.
2. Dec. 8. Best poem. No contest, note last line. Take it, Billy.
Aristotle by Billy Collins
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily.
5. Nov. 26 Paper (unlike sand, see below) is fabulous!
6. Is this what they mean by keeping it real?
7. Laugh o' teh year. "Digression, cast adrift on the buoyant Dead Sea of your own narrations, is a sign of old age, and remarked by ancient moralists and proven by modern neurology and brain science to be a symptom of natural decay of the aging brian, so let me conclude with one, which now that I consider it, is not really a digression at all, though this present clause surely is:
January 13, 2010: I am defending to a colleague the wisdom of the police rounding up the usual suspects.
Me: Claude Rains was being more than a mere cynic, which of course he was also being, when he said "round up the usual suspects" because the usual suspects were not innocent but the known criminals of whatever the city was, Tangiers, Marrakesh, I forget which.
Colleague: Casablanca
Me: I am going to shoot myself.
9. I play this all the time. All. The. Time. It's attributed to Mississippi John Hurt but is only available by Gillian Welsh on a tribute album I bought once by mistake.
10. Contrarienne predicts: 2012 is a presidential election year. What a great opportunity for Occupy Everything. Just sayin'.
11. Contrariennes o' teh year: Cassinni and Voyager planetary imaging scientist Carolyn Porco, and Helen Frankenthaler.
12. Margeret Atwood's not worried about Facebook and Twitter, so neither am I.
13. Headline o' teh year: Riots in London worsen, stock markets drop and is it all over for hitchhiking. BBC, Aug. 8.
14. Aug. 7. Definition o' teh year:
First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.Bertrand Russell
17. Lest we forget, Too Big To Fail. Top of my Save list on Netflix.
18. In Memoriam Douglas Adams. Because we all should read a little DNA each year.
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.
And the smarmy Eric Cantor cannot escape. This link is to an analysis and if you can't stand to watch him aw-shucks his way through it all, just go over to the 10:19 mark and watch and listen as Cantor does a deer-in-the headlights and his press secretary makes a major blunder. Did he really think 60 Minutes wouldn't use it? I'd love to have been listening in on the phone calls as they begged and threatened. Not ready for prime time.
It is comforting, but only a little, to know that scientists are as flummoxed as mere mortal me when it comes to certainty. I have only recently learned the term "liquid" modernity to describe the sociologists' current world view of our basically unstable and unpredictable times, which at least seems to contain a finite number of people in a measurable space, thank Dog for that.
As for the multiverses, I say, bring 'em on! (But what if they also conclude there are people in some of those, too? Oh, my.)
It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.
Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials.
...Hedy’s folly may have been in assuming men in government might overcome their prejudice that a beautiful woman could not have brains and imagination. But she lived to see similar versions of her invention be put into common practice, and in 1997, Hedy Lamarr, at the age of 82, and George Antheil (posthumously) were honored with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The house centipede has the same poison fangs that normal centipedes do, but they can move towards you at great speed thanks to its long spindly legs. They have a top speed of 40 cm per second.
Incidentally, 40 cm is the exact distance between the house centipede and your face.
I assumed I would never have to think about John Bolton again. Then Newt promised to threatened to named him Secretary of State. Here's Juan Cole, the rational blogoshere's go-to guy on such matters:
I was all set to make fun of Hillary's wardrobe, but I can't get the photos to work.
In the meantime, here's something completely different.
I'm not a big Hitchins fan, but he's so rigorously honest and truthful in this piece and I'm really grateful for it.
So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.
And then there's always this which, when I told her about it, frightened my therapist into a quick and facile rejection of the tone, that last line. She's my age, and sicker, at least judging from the last time I saw her shopping and looking like death, not even a smile of recognition, but a complaint. Maybe she was in pain.
User's Guide to Physical Debilitation
by Paul Guest
Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
or the culture of death, which really has it out
for whoever has seen better days
but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,
you, or your beleaguered caregiver
stirring dark witch's brews of resentment
inside what had been her happy life,
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.
An important first step,
with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor.
When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity;
with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;
or with someone blindly feeling their way
through an extended power outage
caused by summer storms you once thought romantic.
Page twelve instructs you how best
to be inspiring to Magnus next door
as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit
above Alberta. And to Betty
in her dark charm confiding a misery,
whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours.
I consider them right." Biologist Lynn Margulis, recently deceased and awarded an honorary contrarienne title because we hardly ever hear about them when they're alive
You may have heard this week that all the Democrats have to do is do nothing. Wasn't that Sun Tsu's line?
(Sun Ya? I get all those dead Chinese generals mixed up.)
You may not have heard that this has been the plan all along. but if I hadn't been busy elsewhere I would have told you that the Supercommittee was not a serious move.
I am happy to see that Jon Taplin's hangin' in there because I miss his blog since he went and compromised himself by getting a real job. Rope-a-dope indeed.
They go on smoking in part because of a fact that the prohibitionists are loath to recognize: Nicotine is a drug with benefits. It has been linked by researchers (and smokers) to reduced anxiety and stress, lower weight, faster reaction time and improved concentration.
Yet the New Puritanism of the anti-smoking crowd stinks strongly of a vested lobbying interest, not just some twisted moral stance.
http://ask.metafilter.com/200224/What-are-Americas-quirksMeFi has a lovely thread answering the musical question, "What do foreigners find weird about us/our country."
My favorite:Only in America would we have a Mexican Sushi place that is actually called "Casa Sushi".
It is nice to know that our service culture is actually superior to others, who apparently get away with being sullen and difficult. I think Americans expect each other to act like they like people, even though they don't. Where do we get that? And exactly what's wrong with it? Makes the day more pleasant.
