The Greenbelt

Groan

2012-02-02T15:07:00.001-05:00

A friend just sent me this....

An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a southerner, a New Englander, and a Californian), an Argentinean, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovakian, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a Spaniard, a Russian, a Guatemalan, a Colombian, a Pakistani, a Malaysian, a Croatian, a Uzbek, a Cypriot, a Pole, a Lithuanian, a Chinese, a Sri Lankan, a Lebanese, a Cayman Islander, a Ugandan, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Uruguayan, a Czech, an Icelander, a Mexican, a Finn, a Honduran, a Panamanian, an Andorran, an Israeli, a Venezuelan, a Fijian, a Peruvian, an Estonian, a Brazilian, a Portuguese, a Liechtensteiner, a Mongolian, a Hungarian, a Canadian, a Moldovan, a Haitian, a Norfolk Islander, a Macedonian, a Bolivian, a Cook Islander, a Tajikistani, a Samoan, an Armenian, an Aruban, an Albanian, a Greenlander, a Micronesian, a Virgin Islander, a Georgian, a Bahaman, a Belarusian, a Cuban, a Tongan, a Cambodian, a Qatari, an Azerbaijani, a Romanian, a Chilean, a Kyrgyzstani, a Jamaican, a Filipino, a Ukrainian, a Dutchman, a Ecuadorian, a Costa Rican, a Swede, a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Swiss, a Greek, a Belgian, a Singaporean, an Italian, a Norwegian and 47 Africans walk into a fine restaurant . . .

"I'm sorry," says the maître d', "you can't come in here without a Thai."

Happy Birthday, John

2012-02-02T09:44:00.000-05:00

If dictionaries really worked like the saying, this is the picture that would be next to crafty lefthander. John Tudor, one of my favorite pitchers of all time, was born today in 1954 in Schenectady, New York (only a month younger than me!).

In 1985 Tudor pitched 10 shutouts, two of them ten-inning games. In fact, I clearly remember the game where he went head to head with Dwight Gooden, both of them pitching shutout ball for nine innings. The Mets manager put in a relief pitcher, who gave up a home run, and Tudor came in and wrapped up the game. He pitched three times in the World Series that year, brilliantly in Game One and even better in Game Four, but then he fell apart in Game Seven, leaving in the third inning.

In 1987 Mets catcher Barry Lyons crashed into the dugout chasing a pop fly and broke Tudor's leg. The next year, despite a good ERA, he was traded to Los Angeles, where he again posted a great ERA and got a World Series ring, but he blew out his elbow doing it and retired a year later.

"Deep fences and fast outfielders," he said once when asked why he was so much better in St Louis than he had been in Boston; his style was not made for Fenway.

A poem for Groun... er, Candlemas

2012-02-02T07:46:00.001-05:00

Here's another poem by Robert Herrick about what to decorate with now that Christmas-tide is over...

CEREMONIES FOR CANDLEMAS EVE

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter's eve appear.

Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.

When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

Happy Birthday, Tom

2012-02-02T06:45:00.000-05:00

Born today in 1937 in New York, New York, Tom Smothers. I'm old enough to remember them on television (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour) - that's Tom with the guitar, and Dick with the bass... Here's a bit from a long interview with Ken Paulson on "Speaking Freely":

And Dick was doing an introduction. I came out in a bunny suit with just my face showing with these big ears and a pink bunny suit. He says, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm protesting our policies in Central America." "So, wearing a bunny suit doesn't make any sense." I said, "Neither does our policy in Central America." "Well, that looks stupid." "So does our policy!" "Well, get out of that bunny suit!" "We ought to get out of Central America!" Big laughs, very funny. And that was at dress rehearsal. The guy says, "Well, now, you've got to say at the end there, 'But it's up to our elected officials to get us out of this.'" (Laughter) So I said, "OK." Then that was even funnier, like they're gonna do that.

Thanks, Tom - for the songs, the jokes, and the passion.

Candlemas = Groundhog Day

2012-02-02T05:46:00.000-05:00

"Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall;
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see."
— Robert Herrick (1591–1674), "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve"

Today is Candlemas, the day to take down all the Christmas finery. As Pope Innocent XII (1691 to 1700) explained, it's another feast day stolen from the pagans (though since it dates to very early 4th century it predates attempts to Christianize the Celts, so it's not likely to be a cooption of Imbolc, but rather of Lupercalia):

Why do we in this feast carry candles? Because the Gentiles dedicated the month of February to the infernal gods, and as at the beginning of it Pluto stole Proserpine, and her mother Ceres sought her in the night with lighted candles, so they, at the beginning of the month, walked about the city with lighted candles. Because the holy fathers could not extirpate the custom, they ordained that Christians should carry about candles in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and thus what was done before in the honor of Ceres is now done in honor of the Blessed Virgin.

Candlemas is also a day for foretelling the end of winter:

"If Candlemas Day is clear and bright,
winter will have another bite.
If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain,
winter is gone and will not come again."

Sound familiar? In Serbia, they say that on this day the bear will awake from winter sleep, and if in this half-waking state it sees its shadow, it will flee in fear and return to sleep, thus prolonging the winter. At least we don't think Punxsutawney Phil has the power to control the winter - just predict it. (Though we really know that the predictions are right actually not quite half the time...)

4 February 1841 (from Morgantown, Berks County, Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris' diary) "Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate."

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!

2012-02-01T05:46:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of one of my best friends ever. May it be wonderful!

"took him no time at all"?

2012-01-31T19:04:00.004-05:00

In 1902 he lost his job as a tutor but family friend Marcel Grossman got him a job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office.

The guy said Einstein immediately and Alex said, sounding very surprised, "That took you no time at all! You're obviously familiar with the story."

Aren't most people - at least those who'd be on Jeopardy! ? I mean, really, aren't they?

ps - "Slavic" with the vowel of "cat"? Really, Alex? And you to speak Russian?

pps - I have to confess I did not come up with Custer.

Political Poster, Russian-Style 2

2012-01-31T12:40:00.004-05:00

This poster is hilarious on many levels, especially the "Better Red Than ..." which recalls all the "Better Dead Than Red" posters of my youth. It's the CPRF - Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the number two party in terms of votes and Duma representatives), with the slogan "Better to be Red than Blue". Across the bottom it reads "Parasitical Party 'We'll Eat Russia'", which works much better in Russian: paraziticheskaya partiya puns on politicheskaya partiya, political party, while Edim Rossiyu is similar to Edinaya Rossiya, United Russia. Also, the tiny running people... (ps, the not-funny Communist logo reads Russia · Labor · Popular Rule · Socialism)

Purposeless eye dialect

2012-01-31T10:27:00.004-05:00

Eye dialect is when you write a character's dialog as he pronounces it, in an attempt to reproduce his dialect or speech patterns. It can be done to good effect, as by Mark Twain, say. It can also be a lazy way to shorthand a judgement or a characterization - say, by writing "was" as "wuz", which is how everybody says it, or the relentless apostrophe for the 'dropped g', or "coulda, shoulda, gonna, wanna". In comics, kids' speech is often done that way, to show how cutely they're mispronouncing things.

And then there's this:

Frankly, I haven't a clue what this is meant to show us. Is there anyone out there who wouldn't say "The fuhn pahrt wuz beein reskyood"? Maybe the "beein", but how else would you pronounce "fun, part, was, rescued"?

This isn't the first time they've done this, either (see below, from Jan 21). I suppose it's meant to be cute, but all it really does is make me wonder if her father says things like "wass that foon?" and "ill joost craool likuh yo."

Happy Birthday, Jackie

2012-01-31T05:48:00.000-05:00

Today in 1919 Jackie Robinson was born.

A stunning second baseman over ten seasons, he played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Championship. He was selected for six consecutive All-Star Games from 1949 to 1954, was the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949 – the first black player so honored. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 on the first ballot. In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform number, 42, across all major league teams.

And of course, he was the first black major leaguer since 1880, breaking baseball's color barrier... and contributing massively to the advancement of civil rights.

Exemplar

2012-01-30T19:26:00.002-05:00

Scheherazade? What 1960s tv show was she in?

Seriously. That is what I think of as a quintessential Jeopardy! question. Category is a clue, and then the clue is

One of her first lines was translated as "You have the face of a wise and gentle caliph."

Now there is no way in hell I'd have known the answer to "What was Jeanie in I Dream of Jeanie's first line?" But asked like this?

And yet the champ missed it! (Didn't wager much and still won...)

Happy Birthday, Gelett

2012-01-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

Today in Boston in 1866 (Frank) Gelett Burgess was born.

He wrote more than 35 books of fiction and nonfiction, including Lady Méchante or Life As It Should Be (which is funny), as well as several plays, and he coined the word "blurb". But he is best known for this (which has a title I never knew till today):

Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least

I never Saw a Purple Cow;
I never Hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One.

This poem haunted his life , eventually causing him to write this little sequel:

Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue

Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow;
I'm sorry now I wrote it;
But I can tell you, Anyhow,
I'll Kill you if you Quote it.

(But he's dead, so I'm not afraid.)

The Week in Entertainment

2012-01-29T23:18:00.007-05:00

Film: A Separation which was quite a bit different what I expected (which was the wife's point of view, and about the divorce) but was intense, filled with escalating tension, ultimately devastating, and quite, quite beautiful. It's an emotional wallop, and the final credits roll over a scene that grips you with surprisingly visceral emotion. Highly recommended.

DVD: Murder by Decree, an ... interesting ... Sherlock Holmes with Christopher Plummer and James Mason, in which we discover that Jack the Ripper was a Masonic cabal defending Prince Eddy from the follies of his marriage to a (gasp!) French Catholic woman. Also a couple of Indian films: Bhoothnath (Lord of Ghosts), a remake of The Canterbury Ghost with Amitabh Bachchan as the titular ghost, which was a lot of fun and succeeded in making me teary at the end; and Paheli (Riddle), with Shah Rukh Khan as a ghost (theme night!) who falls in love with a human woman (played by the exquisite Rani Mukerji, so who can blame him?) and impersonates her husband when that one takes off on a five-year business trip immediately after the wedding. (Yes; this is Bollywood. Immediately after the wedding.) He confesses who he is to her and asks her to decide if he should stay. It's the first time in her life anyone has actually asked her what she wants, and she decides she wants him (it's Shah Rukh saying he loves her madly, so who can blame her?) The trouble starts when the husband comes home... Enjoyable fairy tale of a story, and simply beautiful to look at it.

TV: Once Upon A Time had a bit of intrigue developing - who's the writer? Does he have to be a fairy-tale person? Caught up on Downton Abbey's second season; they're plunged into the slaughterhouse of WWI, new characters and such. No real character development, and since it's now 1916, i.e. 2 years later than the end of season 1, that's a bit disappointing. There's just some "oh, Matthew is engaged now" stuff, but he - and everyone else - are exactly the same as they were. This, of course, is probably by design - and I'll watch the rest of the season, so I guess they're doing something right.

Read: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (after seeing the brilliant movie), and then I reread The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which I didn't really remember very well. I picked up an omnibus for Kindle of all three Karla novels; I haven't ever read the other two.

Happy Birthday, Anton Pavlovich

2012-01-29T06:49:00.000-05:00

Today in 1860 Антон Павлович Чехов (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov) was born. He was a doctor throughout his life, and probably contracted the tuberculosis that killed him while practicing medicine in the labor camps of Siberia - not as a prisoner, but as a volunteer medic, a logical conclusion to a career that began with free clinics and sliding-scale fees for Russia's working poor and included building schools and a fire station.

But if medicine was his lawful wife, literature, as he said once to Alexei Suvorin, was his mistress (Медицина — моя законная жена, а литература — любовница), and he wrote four classic plays (Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard) and many short stories - his masterpiece "The Lady with the Dog" was written in Yalta, where he'd gone to battle his tuberculosis. (The picture is Chekhov with a dog, in Yalta...) Many consider him the father of the modern short story, many of whose forms he pioneered. He also formulated what's often called "Chekhov's Law" of "economy in narrative": "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Or, in a more famous formulation, often called Chekhov's Gun: Если в первом акте на стене висит ружье, то в последнем оно обязательно выстрелит - "If there's a gun on the wall in the first act, it has to be fired by the end of the third act."

In May 1904 he became so ill that he went to a German health spa, where he died two months later.

All 201 of his stories, in the Constance Garnett translations and in chronological order, can be found here, with notes. And here they are in Russian.

«Если ты кричишь "Вперед!", ты должен принять безошибочное решение, в каком направлении нужно идти. Разве ты не понимаешь, что, не сделав этого, ты взываешь как к монаху, так и к революционеру, и они будут двигаться в противоположных направлениях?»

"If you cry 'Forward!' you must make it absolutely plain which direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?"

Regret

2012-01-28T22:27:00.001-05:00

Went to A Separation this evening, followed by dinner at Mon Ami Gabi. Both were wonderful.

But the theater was pretty full, and my friend and I moved over to open up two seats for a couple. I don't know what it is, but every time I've done that in the last four or five years I've ended up regretting it. This time, the woman had somehow, best as I can tell, managed not to realize that this was a foreign film. Or at least, that it had a Farsi soundtrack with English subtitles.

How do you manage that? And why must you read so many of the subtitles aloud to yourself?

Happy Birthday, Jose

2012-01-28T06:50:00.001-05:00

José Martí was born today in Havana, Cuba, in 1853. He was exiled to ASpain at 17, later moving to Mexico, Guatemala, and back to Cuba, from which he was again deported to Spain; he fled to France and then the US, living in New York and working for Cuban independence. He joined the war in 1895 and died shortly after the invasion.

Por Tus Ojos Encendidos... (Verso XIX)

Por tus ojos encendidos
Y lo mal puesto de un broche,
Pensé que estuviste anoche
Jugando a juegos prohibidos.

Te odié por vil y alevosa:
Te odié con odio de muerte:
Náusea me daba de verte
Tan villana y tan hermosa.

Y por la esquela que vi
Sin saber cómo ni cuándo,
Sé que estuviste llorando
Toda la noche por mí.

translation by Manuel A. Tellechea:

Because your eyes were two flames
And your brooch wasn't pinned right,
I thought you had spent the night
In playing forbidden games.

Because you were vile and devious
Such deadly hatred I bore you:
To see you was to abhor you
So lovely and yet so villainous.

Because a note came to light,
I know now where you had been,
And what you had done unseen —
Cried for me all the long night.

(More of his poems in Spanish and in English here)

Bananas!

2012-01-27T19:26:00.002-05:00

It's true: you can learn something every day. I had no idea that O. Henry coined the term "banana republic" - and possibly less that it originally referred to Honduras having only one export.

Happy Birthday, Charles

2012-01-27T06:54:00.003-05:00

Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was born today in 1832, near Daresbury, Cheshire, England.

Four years ago you got The Mad Gardener's Song; three years ago Bessie's Song to Her Doll, two years ago Tema Con Varizioni, last year A Sea Dirge, and this year A Valentine:

Sent to a friend who had complained that I was glad enough to see him when he came, but didn't seem to miss him if he stayed away.

And cannot pleasures, while they last,
Be actual unless, when past,
They leave us shuddering and aghast,
With anguish smarting?
And cannot friends be firm and fast,
And yet bear parting?

And must I then, at Friendship's call,
Calmly resign the little all
(Trifling, I grant, it is and small)
I have of gladness,
And lend my being to the thrall
Of gloom and sadness?

And think you that I should be dumb,
And full DOLORUM OMNIUM,
Excepting when YOU choose to come
And share my dinner?
At other times be sour and glum
And daily thinner?

Must he then only live to weep,
Who'd prove his friendship true and deep
By day a lonely shadow creep,
At night-time languish,
Oft raising in his broken sleep
The moan of anguish?

The lover, if for certain days
His fair one be denied his gaze,
Sinks not in grief and wild amaze,
But, wiser wooer,
He spends the time in writing lays,
And posts them to her.

And if the verse flow free and fast,
Till even the poet is aghast,
A touching Valentine at last
The post shall carry,
When thirteen days are gone and past
Of February.

Farewell, dear friend, and when we meet,
In desert waste or crowded street,
Perhaps before this week shall fleet,
Perhaps to-morrow.
I trust to find YOUR heart the seat
Of wasting sorrow.

Happy Birthday, Thomas

2012-01-27T06:10:00.000-05:00

Today in 1621 Thomas Willis was born - the father of modern neurology. He discovered much about the way the brain is put together - nerves and cranial anatomy, including the Circle of Willis, and the circulation of the blood into and through the brain.

Carl Zimmer has written a (typically) brilliant book, Soul Made Flesh, that tells his story - and others (did you know Christopher Wren was more famous in his lifetime for his anatomical drawings than his architecture?) - highly recommended. I happened to read it shortly before visiting London, and it made me hunt out Willis's tomb in St Paul's.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang

2012-01-27T05:11:00.001-05:00

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born today in 1756 in Salzburg.

Symphony No 40

"fraudsters who dubiously perpetrated fraudulent acts with first degree ulterior motives against you"

2012-01-26T09:24:00.002-05:00

OMG. I wish I'd seen this one before I posted Major Steve's effort. This one puts that one to shame. (I particularly like the signature.)

Office of the British Secret Intelligence Service Mi6 P.O Box 1300,Vauxhall - London SE1 1BD - United Kingdom.
Website: http: //www.sis.gov.uk/output/sis-home-welcome.html S.I.S
Ref: LN/mi6/SIS/XX027
Dear Beneficiary, BRITISH JURISDICTIONAL FUND LETTER: As Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) also known as Mi6, SIS provides the British Government with a global covert capability to promote and defend the national security and economic well-being of the United Kingdom. Regional instability, Financial Frauds, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and illegal narcotics are among the major challenges of the 21st century. SIS assists the government to meet these challenges. To do this effectively SIS must protect the secrets of its sources and methods.

In regards to Legislation and accountability, SIS like other British intelligence and security agencies, is subject to parliamentary, ministerial, judicial and financial oversight. Oversight is based on two pieces of UK legislation, the intelligence services Act 1994 (I.S.A) and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (R.I.P.A). With notice, SIS has litigated a group of apprehended UK-based multimillionaire financial fraudsters who dubiously perpetrated fraudulent acts with first degree ulterior motives against you through your e-mail over the internet in the United Kingdom. By court order, prior to 12 years prison sentence charged upon them by the Lord Chief Justice and President of the Courts of England and Wales (R.H, The Lord Judge: Igor Judge, Baron Judge), the culprits were placed on a bail by way of compensation to you in a sum of 2,350,000 (Two million, three hundred and fifty thousand British Pounds Sterling) in lieu of British International Fundamental Human Rights Ordinances of 1997, of which your benefited fund has been brought in cash to our Head Office by the culprits' Legal councils prior to their inception of jail term.

Click on johnsawers56@yahoo.co.uk to contact the British Secret Intelligence (MI6) Chief of Operations indicating your names, phone contact, age, current residential address & a valid identity card. Caution: Do not recopy this letter or publicize the above Britain's secret agent or the secret email identity above. For SIS diligence & effectiveness, it must protect the secrets of its sources & methods.

The Management, British Secret Intelligence Service London, United Kingdom.

He's baaaaack

2012-01-26T08:06:00.003-05:00

Amy Goodman writes:

In his State of the Union address, many heard echoes of the Barack Obama of old, the presidential aspirant of 2007 and 2008.

Indeed.

And why is this?

It's because he's now the presidential aspirant of 2012.

Look, I'm probably going to vote for him. Bad as he is, he's better than whichever Republican emerges from this dog-fight. But he's not a populist. He's not a progressive. He's not even a liberal, let alone a socialist.

I'm not falling for that again.

Happy Birthday, Jules

2012-01-26T06:15:00.000-05:00

Today in the Bronx in 1929 Jules Feiffer was born.

Here's my annual offering of a classic... still (unfortunately) relevant.

Some verbs just aren't intransitive

2012-01-25T15:11:00.007-05:00

This morning I spotted this local news item

Driver crashes, kills fleeing police

The salient bits of the article are:

Baltimore County Police say Aaron McCoy, 20, of the 4000 block of Cedardale Rd. in Baltimore, was driving a Honda Accord while he was trying to flee police.

Five minutes later, at Dulaney Valley Rd. and Ivy Church Rd., police say McCoy crashed into the two other vehicles.

He was transported to Shock Trauma, where he died.

So he didn't actually kill any police, fleeing or otherwise.

Parallelism is all well and good, but especially in headlinese you can't say "driver kills" without providing a direct object. Even moving "fleeing police" away from the DO slot (fleeing police, driver crashes, kills) doesn't work (and please note you need that comma! "Fleeing police driver crashes, kills" is all other kinds of bad.).

In fact, even if you convert "kills" into the participle, if you write this in headline syntax (as they have now changed the headline to read) you get a bad reading:

Driver crashes, killed fleeing police

The whole point is, he didn't kill any police, fleeing or otherwise; in fact, he didn't kill anyone, except himself.

Why the heck not "dies fleeing police"? Fev?

Major Steve, do you know Major Tom?

2012-01-25T13:50:00.005-05:00

I got this email today. Being "the bad type" I'm going to disregard the major's request and not just delete it, but share it with you... it's just too good not to.

Greetings,

My name is Major Steve ,, I am an British soldier in peace keeping force in Afghanistan, I am serving in the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Afghanistan,as you know insurgents everyday and car bombs are attacking us. On the other hand I want to inform you that I have in my possession the sum of US$7.3Million dollars in cash, which was recovered from one of our raids on terrorists here in Afghanistan, because they keep most of their money at home for evil activities which they normally get through illegal deals on crude oil.

Based on the suffering we undergo here some of us do meet such luck.It happened that I went for this raid with the men in my unit and I decided to take it as my share for my stress here in this evil land filled with suicide bombers.

I deposited this money with a red cross agent informing him that we are making contact for the real owner of the money.It is under my power to approve whoever comes forth for this money. I wish to use this money and invest anywhere in world because that is where i intend to move over with my family at my retirement.

i am a uniformed man and I cannot be parading such an amount so I need to present someone as the beneficiary, and i need somebody i can trust and it would be wise working with somebody like you.If you accept,I will move the money out where you will be the beneficiary

I am British soldier and an intelligence officer at that so I have 100% authentic means of transferring the money through diplomatic means. I just need your acceptance and all is done. Please if you are interested in this transaction, get back to me so that i will give to you the complete details you need for us to carry out this transaction successfully.

Where we are now we can only communicate through our military communication facilities which is secured so nobody can monitor our emails.I will only reach you through email,because our calls might be monitored.

If you are interested please send me your personal mobile number so I can call you for further inquiries when I am out of our military network.I am writing from a fresh email account so if you are not interested do not reply to this email and please delete this message. I am doing this on trust,you should understand and you should know that as a trained military expert I will always play safe in case you are the bad type,but I pray you are not.

I wait for your response so we can go on. I will give to you 30% of the sum and 70% is for me. Reply to(stevebill81 @hotmail.com) Regard s,

Major Steve,

Ah, Politifact... you used to be good

2012-01-25T13:17:00.003-05:00

Paul Krugman asks how to tell if a fact isn't a fact:

The criterion, according to Politifact, seems to be that a fact isn’t a fact if it helps a Democratic narrative.
Jared Bernstein watches the train wreck. Obama said:
In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.
which is just true. Period.
But Politifact rated it as only “half true” because he was “essentially taking credit for job growth”. He didn’t actually take credit — and even if he had, a fact is still a fact.
I do not think that word means what Politifact thinks it means.

Now, it seems they've revised this to "Mostly True". But it also seems that Politifact is so vested in balancing Right vs Left in the Truth Ratings that they're really stretching to find ways to say things aren't true when they are - as in labelling the Democrat statement that RyanCare would destroy Medicare as "Lie of the Year".

Happy Birthday, Rabbie!

2012-01-25T11:21:00.003-05:00

Robert Burns was born today in 1759, two miles (3 km) south of Ayr, in Alloway, South Ayrshire, Scotland.

The Highland Widow's Lament

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!

Sair, sair may I repine;

Sae far to set us free;

Right to wrang did yield;

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!

Right on cue

2012-01-24T18:52:00.001-05:00

At 9:30 am today, Paul Krugman wrote:

Meanwhile, the Romney campaign is signalling that it’s going to try to spin this as “he pays lots of taxes”! How stupid do they think we are? Actually, don’t answer that.

No kidding. The shuttle driver at 8 this morning was listening to some talk-show where the host told us it sounded like "a lot of taxes" to him.

Happy Birthday, Vasily

2012-01-24T05:16:00.003-05:00

Born today in 1848 in Krasnoyarsk, Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (Василий Иванович Суриков).

He is probably the foremost Russian painter of large-scale historical subjects, which often focused on events that resonated with the ordinary person, though he also painted smaller events and portraits. His major pieces are among the best-known paintings in Russia.

Four years ago I showed you his portrait of the Bronze Horseman - Peter I (the Great) in St Petersburg - and depiction of the arrest of the Boyarina Feodosia Morozova, three years ago it was a light-hearted game, Taking of the Snow Fort, and one of his more intimate works, a portrait of Menshikov and his daughters in exile; two years ago, a moody picture of Stenka Razin in his boat, and a portrait of an old man in his vegetable garden, and last year, two of his landscapes, a herd of horses on the Barabin steppe and a seasonally-apt watercolor of the Kremlin. This year, a water-color church in Dyakovo, and the Yenisey river.

You can find more of his pictures at this Russian-language site if you're interested.)

Officially an adjective? Not quite

2012-01-23T19:15:00.004-05:00

So, over on Twitter this is going around (for a limited definition of "going around", to be sure):

"Pete Caroll" is officially an adjective. As in "Chip Kelly just Pete Carroll'd his way out of town"

Errrrr - that's a verb, guys. An adjective would be

Chip Kelly is very Pete Carroll today, isn't he?

Happy Birthday, Sergei

2012-01-23T05:27:00.003-05:00

Born today in Riga, Latvia, in the then Russian Empire, Sergei Eisenstein (Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн), one of the great pioneers of film directing, often called the "Father of Montage." He directed some of the early great movies - the silent films Strike [Стачка](1924), Battleship Potemkin [Броненосец Потёмкин] (1925) and October - Ten Days That Shook the World [Октябрь «Десять дней, которые потрясли мир»](1927), and the historical epic Alexander Nevsky [Александр Невский] (1938). Potemkin has some of the most famous sequences (or montages) in film - particularly the utterly brilliant Odessa Gates steps sequence.

The Week in Entertainment

2012-01-22T23:19:00.016-05:00

Film: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - finally got around to seeing this. What a tremendously good movie this is. So well-made, and brilliantly acted. Gary Oldman, especially - so very different from the flamboyant Oldman villains.

DVD: Moneyball, very entertaining. I remember that Oakland team, when "that Bill James bullshit" suddenly became the new paradigm, and small-market teams could compete with the big dogs. Brad Pitt was very good (no surprise there), and it's very well filmed.

TV: The Mentalist - last week's was good. I love how when the bomb went off Jane ran away from it. But my god, that whole framing-the-dead-guy-for-the-murder - wow. Jane is absolutely a piece of work; it's just hard to figure out what kind of work he is, isn't it? "Hunting monsters changes you" he said, and it did. And the second episode was okay, some nice work by Jane. But while I'm glad that they're showing us that Van Pelt can't escape the consequences of killing O'Loughlin, I could have done without the hint that the ghost was real. Once Upon a Time stays intriguing, especially Gold/Rumplestiltskin who is a lot more than he seems. Grimm is still interesting, too - Monroe's killing the ogre might bring down some trouble from Hank and the captain (who's intriguing in his own right) - and, the second episode shows it's bringing some trouble from other Others.. Modern Family - OMG voters think Claire is "angry and unlikeable"! ROFL. The Middle: the Donahues are just plain weird! Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, one of those episodic 'slice of life' movies with Margaret O'Brien and Edward G Robinson.

Read: The Rope by Nevada Barr, the latest Anna Pigeon novel is chronologically the first, exploring how she came to be the person she is in Track of the Cat, the first one written and covering the themes of monster-hunting, feminine strength and survival, and wilderness compared to city living. Two sets of short trilogies, one really funny and one so-so. The funny one is DEAD(ish), by Naomi Kramer about a ghost who can't find her body and the PI she hires to do it - fair warning, lots of foul language. The other one is a crossing-into-fairy-tale-land thing called "The Clever Detective", who isn't really (she's just read the fairy tales) - they're very short, and very cheap (on Kindle), but not really worth the time. The Unholy Trinity by Paul Adam, a thriller about the Vatican and WWII and modern-day Italy.

We no longer believe in due process

2012-01-22T20:10:00.001-05:00

A rather depressing conclusion from Glen Greenwald:

The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole. Supporters of both political parties endorse, or at least tolerate, all manner of government punishment without so much as the pretense of a trial, based solely on government accusation: imprisonment for life, renditions to other countries, even assassinations of their fellow citizens. Simply uttering the word Terrorist, without proving it, is sufficient. And now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed — its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business rendered impossible — based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.
It’s true, as Sanchez observes, that “the owners of Megaupload don’t seem like particularly sympathetic characters,” but he also details that there are difficult and weighty issues that would have to be resolved to prove they engaged in criminal conduct. Megaupload obviously contains numerous infringing videos, but so does YouTube, yet both sites also entail numerous legal activities as well. As Sanchez put it: “most people, presumably, recognize that shutting down YouTube in order to disable access to those videos would not be worth the enormous cost to protected speech.” The Indictment is a classic one-side-of-the-story document; even the most mediocre lawyers can paint any picture they want when unchallenged. That’s why the government is not supposed to dole out punishments based on accusatory instruments, but only after those accusations are proved in an adversarial proceeding.
Whatever else is true, those issues should be decided upon a full trial in a court of law, not by government decree. Especially when it comes to Draconian government punishments — destroying businesses, shutting down websites, imprisoning people for life, assassinating them — what distinguishes a tyrannical society from a free one is whether the government is first required to prove guilt in a fair, adversarial proceeding. This is a precept Americans were once taught about why their country was superior, was reflexively understood, and was enshrined as the core political principle: “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It’s simply not a principle that is believed in any longer, and therefore is not remotely observed.

"this is not a miracle"

2012-01-22T15:07:00.001-05:00

I watched Our Vines Have Tender Grapes this week. Not at all a bad movie but one weird thing- I always heard that cows would leave a burning barn, though the ones in this movie just stood there and had to be shot.

So I looked it up, and by gosh, it certainly does look like cows have to be chased out. So much for that "cows-are-smarter-than-horses" factoid. (PS - this story was heart-warming: "The farmers say it's rare that livestock survive a fire like this. And to people like Pagel, this is not a miracle or a heroic thing; it is just what farmers do. It's what good neighbors do.")

Happy Birthday, George

2012-01-22T13:44:00.005-05:00

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was born today in 1788.

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

Rodents? I don't think so

2012-01-22T11:24:00.004-05:00

Note to the people on Grimm - or possibly the writers: Raccoons are not rodents. They are carnivores, caniform musteloid carnivores of the family Procyonidae. They are somewhat related to bears and weasels and to seals.

They are not rodents.

That said, no, Juliette, Nick is right. You do not want them in your garbage - or, worse, in your house.

Happy Birthday, Louis

2012-01-21T06:44:00.001-05:00

Today in 1952, Louis Menand was born in Syracuse, New York.

I confess that my favorite thing by him was his book review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which begins:

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

You can read the whole review here, and you should, and not just because his take-down of Truss is masterful and humorous. There's more, as the saying goes; the second half begins with this question:

Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?

Menand has an answer, and it's an examination of writing itself :

Though she has persuaded herself otherwise, Truss doesn’t want people to care about correctness. She wants them to care about writing and about using the full resources of the language. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is really a “decline of print culture” book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised). Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. Writing is an instrument that was invented for recording, storing, and communicating. Using the relatively small number of symbols on the keyboard, you can record, store, and communicate a virtually infinite range of information, and encode meanings with virtually any degree of complexity. The system works entirely by relationships—the relationship of one symbol to another, of one word to another, of one sentence to another. The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words.

What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. You can’t taste writing. It has no color and makes no sound. Its shape has no significance. But people say that someone’s prose is “colorful” or “pungent” or “shapeless” or “lyrical.” When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. When deli owners put up signs that read “ ‘Iced’ Tea,” the single quotation marks are intended to add extraliterary significance to the message, as if they were the grammatical equivalent of red ink. Truss is quite clear about the role played by punctuation in making words mean something. But she also—it is part of her general inconsistency—suggests that semicolons, for example, signal readers to pause. She likes to animate her punctuation marks, to talk about the apostrophe and the dash as though they were little cartoon characters livening up the page. She is anthropomorphizing a technology. It’s a natural thing to do. As she points out, in earlier times punctuation did a lot more work than it does today, and some of the work involved adjusting the timing in sentences. But this is no longer the norm, and trying to punctuate in that spirit now only makes for ambiguity and annoyance.

One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t.

He goes on, and like most of Menand, it is well worth your time.

Etta James: Gone from us

2012-01-20T21:11:00.002-05:00

Maybe you only knew her from crossword puzzles: she had that name perfect for 4x4 squares, and if you do enough puzzles you could see her name two or three times a week. But there was a reason they would use words like "legend" or "great".

Etta James died today. She was a true legend and we're lucky to live in a time when her voice could be preserved forever.

Here are five of her songs - You Tube has hundreds.

Sweet Memories:

I've Been Loving You Too Long:

Lie No Better:

Stormy Monday:

Someone to Watch Over Me:

Not quite...

2012-01-20T19:11:00.001-05:00

A truce called ... to rearm?

It would take some real nerve to ask for that!

Buy Thin Mints!

2012-01-20T16:00:00.007-05:00

Or Samoas, or whichever is your favorite.

But definitely step up and buy a couple of boxes from the Girl Scouts this year. They're getting hammered by the Christian Right for accepting transgender Scouts.

The rightwing Washington Times I get has run at least four major articles and columns demonizing them for abandoning traditional morality and values, including Jesus (yes, that's right; their 'family values' columnist would restrict Scouting to Christians if she had her way).

So make sure to pony up for a box or two, even if you don't want to eat them yourself. (Surely you know someone who will.)

Support the tolerant Scouts and show them you appreciate their values just fine.

Happy Birthday, Buzz

2012-01-20T06:25:00.000-05:00

Today in 1930 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Buzz Aldrin was born (as "Edwin", but he legally changed it to Buzz, his childhood nickname, later). One of the first men to land on the moon, he was the second to set foot on it. He made many crucial contributions to the space program, including the use of water for neutral-buoyancy training, and coordinate rendezvous.

And when moon hoaxer, conspiracy nut, and stalker Bart Sibrel ambushed him, poking him in the chest with a Bible and calling him "a coward, a liar, and a thief", Buzz Aldrin, 72 at the time, punched him in the face. Sometimes, that's what it takes.

Political Poster, Russian-Style

2012-01-19T19:41:00.002-05:00

I love this! United Russia's bear, like Pooh, dipping into the honey pot. "Party of Crooks and Thieves" indeed...

"a very brave person"

2012-01-19T11:46:00.005-05:00

In the Ask Amy in today's print WaPo (online in December, apparently) is this letter:

DEAR AMY: I was merging onto the freeway just before Christmas when I hit a patch of ice and lost control of my car. I spun across all four lanes and slid back into the middle of the highway. Finding myself face-to-face with oncoming traffic, I helplessly watched as dozens of headlights came toward me at 65 mph.
After several cars narrowly dodged mine, a very brave person came to a standstill in front of me and turned on his/her emergency blinkers. Other drivers saw the flashing lights and followed suit, creating a wall so that I could turn around.
Had a stranger not risked his/her life to save mine, I certainly would not have celebrated Christmas this year (or ever again).
Thank you to my guardian angel. -- Hannah, Denver

Amy's answer?

DEAR HANNAH: This reminds me of that tear-inducing Carrie Underwood song “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” I’m so relieved you survived this, and very happy to help you thank your fellow motorists.

WTF?

Carrie Underwood's song is about abdicating all responsibility to Jesus. This letter is about "a very brave ... stranger" who risked their life for another human being. There's no resemblance here. Unless you think only Jesus could have made someone do that - and the history of the world suggests otherwise.

Way to devalue human bravery and capacity for altruism there, Amy.

Only regular nouns need apply

2012-01-19T07:38:00.001-05:00

Funky Winkerbean's use of "girls basketball team" and "the boys team" sparked a discussion over on The Comics Curmudgeon over whether there should be apostrophe's there. A commenter dug up this:

the AP stylebook says: “Do not add an apostrophe to a word ending in s when it is used primarily in a descriptive sense: citizens band radio, … a teachers college, … a writers guide. Memory Aid: The apostrophe usually is not used if for or by rather than of would be appropriate in the longer form: a radio band for citizens, a college for teachers. An ’s is required, however, when a term involves a plural word that does not end in s: a children’s hospital, a people’s republic.”

And if that's not the perfect example of how totally illogical, inconsistent, and risible the "rules" of English can be, I don't know what is. The word's function changes depending on whether it's a regular noun or not? Because that is totally a hospital for children, right?

Happy Birthday, Edgar

2012-01-19T06:25:00.000-05:00

Today in 1809, in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe was born. Wikipedia notes

Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Oh, that Wikipedia and its wacky understatements!

He died in Baltimore, probably as a result of drug- and alcohol-poisoning due to cooping (the practice of kidnapping someone and forcing them to vote often in many precincts), though there have been many theories of his death, all records being lost. Until a couple of years ago, three roses and a bottle of cognac, half empty, were left on his grave every year for more than 60 years. Two years ago was the first time the anonymous visitor didn't come. Last year, he didn't come again, meaning it's likely that he died and left no-one to carry on the tradition.

Here's one of his shorter, less macabre works:

To Helen

Helen, thy beauty is to me
    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
    The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
    To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
    To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
    How statue-like I see thee stand,
    The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
    Are Holy Land!

More can be found here

The Party of Fools and Frauds

2012-01-19T06:21:00.000-05:00

It's not quite as catchy as "crooks and thieves", but it'll do. Krugman yesterday:

It goes as follows: to be a good Republican right now, you have to affirm your belief in things that any halfway intelligent politician can see are plainly false. This leaves room for only two kinds of candidates: those who just aren’t smart and/or rational enough to understand the problem, and those who are completely cynical, willing to say anything to get ahead.

...

So what you have are fairly dim types like Perry, on the one side, and the utterly cynical Romney, on the other. (Gingrich manages to be both a fool and a fraud). Maybe, just maybe, the GOP could have found someone able to achieve Romney-level cynicism while coming across as sincere; but political talent on that level is quite rare.

by definition

2012-01-18T23:31:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald:

That the targeted assassination plot aimed exclusively at the Saudi Ambassador was “Terrorism” was the automatic, unexamined, consensus claim from major media outlets, foreign policy experts, and the U.S. Government. Indeed, the accused defendants were formally charged with “international acts of terrorism” notwithstanding that it was to be a targeted assassination of a Saudi official. If anyone disputed this characterization, it escaped my notice, and I pay close attention to debates over the Terrorism label. Very few people, if anyone, objected at all when this allegedly Iranian plot was repeatedly denounced as Terrorism.
But now that it’s widely believed that some combination of Israel and the U.S. are behind the ongoing plot to serially extinguish Iranian scientists — see here, here and here for just some of the evidence suggesting that — it’s suddenly improper, even outrageous, to suggest that this is Terrorism. That’s because the U.S. and Israel are incapable of committing Terrorism, by definition. Terrorism is only something done to those countries and by Muslims, not the other way around (the list of examples proving this to be true is extensive indeed).
Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos (while wounding several of their wives, including, in one instance, shooting them in front of their child’s kindergarten), that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion? As always, Terrorism is the most meaningless — and thus most manipulated — term of propaganda; it’s always what They do and never what We do.

As always, the whole thing is well worth your time.

Happy Birthday, Peter Mark

2012-01-18T08:41:00.001-05:00

Peter Mark Roget was born today in 1779, in London.

His Thesaurus has been an invaluable tool for many writers - a work of genius. More people need lessons in how to use it, but that's not his fault. For one thing, he didn't intend it to be a dictionary of synonyms, but rather a classification of English's lexicon - "of the words it contains and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express."

And then there's this shirt I got for my birthday last year!

(lol image from loltheorists)

Happy Birthday, Genndy

2012-01-17T08:43:00.000-05:00

Today in Moscow, Russia (then USSR), in 1970 Genndy Tartakovsky was born.

Happy Birthday, Ben

2012-01-17T06:24:00.001-05:00

Born today 302 years ago in Boston - yes, Boston - Benjamin Franklin, "inventor of the stove" — which he never patented because he created it for the good of society. Also, inventor of the fire company, fire insurance, bifocals, a flexible urinary catheter, swim fins, the glass harmonica, the odometer, the lightning rod, and - boon to all us vertically challenged readers - the "long arm" — a long wooden pole with a grasping claw at the end — to reach the books we want to read. Also, a very quotable man, one way or another. Here's Adams on Franklin:

“Franklin did this, Franklin did that, Franklin did some other damned thing. . . . Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, full grown and on his horse. . . . Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them--Franklin, Washington, and the horse--conducted the entire Revolution by themselves.”

And here's Franklin himself:

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Happy Birthday, Robert

2012-01-16T08:01:00.003-05:00

Robert W. Service was born today in Preston, England, in 1874. At the age of 23 he moved to Canada, which become his home (though he died in France at the age of 84). And, no; I'm not going to give you a bunch of the boys whooping it up in the Malemute Saloon - you can find that anywhere. Instead, here are two things from his Ballads of a Bohemian, written in the lead-up and early days of WWI, in which Service was an ambulance driver, two prose poems interludes between the poems themselves:

Near Albert,
February 1915.

Over the spine of the ridge a horned moon of reddish hue peers through the splintered, hag-like trees. Where the trenches are, rockets are rising, green and red. I hear the coughing of the Maxims, the peevish nagging of the rifles, the boom of a "heavy" and the hollow sound of its exploding shell.

Running the car into the shadow of a ruined house, I try to sleep. But a battery starts to blaze away close by, and the flame lights up my shelter. Near me some soldiers are in deep slumber; one stirs in his sleep as a big rat runs over him, and I know by experience that when one is sleeping a rat feels as heavy as a sheep.

But how ~can~ one possibly sleep? Out there in the dark there is the wild tattoo of a thousand rifles; and hark! that dull roar is the explosion of a mine. There! the purring of the rapid firers. Desperate things are doing. There will be lots of work for me before this night is over.

In Picardy,
January 1915.

The road lies amid a malevolent heath. It seems to lead us right into the clutch of the enemy; for the star-shells, that at first were bursting overhead, gradually encircle us. The fields are strangely sinister; the splintered trees are like giant toothpicks. There is a lisping and a twanging overhead.

As we wait at the door of the dugout that serves as a first-aid dressing station, I gaze up into that mysterious dark, so alive with musical vibrations. Then a small shadow detaches itself from the greater shadow, and a gray-bearded sentry says to me: "You'd better come in out of the bullets."

So I keep under cover, and presently they bring my load. Two men drip with sweat as they carry their comrade. I can see that they all three belong to the Foreign Legion. I think for a moment of Saxon Dane. How strange if some day I should carry him! Half fearfully I look at my passenger, but he is a black man. Such things only happen in fiction.

.............

We have just had one of our men killed, a young sculptor of immense promise.

When one thinks of all the fine work he might have accomplished, it seems a shame. But, after all, to-morrow it may be the turn of any of us. If it should be mine, my chief regret will be for work undone.

Ah! I often think of how I will go back to the Quarter and take up the old life again. How sweet it will all seem. But first I must earn the right. And if ever I do go back, how I will find Bohemia changed! Missing how many a face!

Daventry, the sculptor, is buried in a little graveyard near one of our posts. Just now our section of the line is quiet, so I often go and sit there. Stretching myself on a flat stone, I dream for hours.

Silence and solitude! How good the peace of it all seems! Around me the grasses weave a pattern, and half hide the hundreds of little wooden crosses. Here is one with a single name:

AUBREY. Who was Aubrey I wonder? Then another:

~To Our Beloved Comrade.~
Then one which has attached to it, in the cheapest of little frames, the crude water-color daub of a child, three purple flowers standing in a yellow vase. Below it, painfully printed, I read:

~To My Darling Papa -- Thy Little Odette.~
And beyond the crosses many fresh graves have been dug. With hungry open mouths they wait. Even now I can hear the guns that are going to feed them. Soon there will be more crosses, and more and more. Then they will cease, and wives and mothers will come here to weep.

Ah! Peace so precious must be bought with blood and tears. Let us honor and bless the men who pay, and envy them the manner of their dying; for not all the jeweled orders on the breasts of the living can vie in glory with the little wooden cross the humblest of these has won. . . .

all his works

The Week in Entertainment

2012-01-15T23:29:00.001-05:00

Back from vacation, I mostly read this week...

TV: Leverage - all of the promos showed us Jimmy Ford, and the trailers. But even if that weren't true, there was no point at all in being so coy about who Nate was charging off to rescue, with the big "surprise" camera reveal. Tom Skerritt was in the danged credits, after all. Also, I love the way Eliot always lectures his opponents on how to be better. But I didn't expect Dubenich. I tell you: war is not nearly a strong enough word. I'm excited about the season finale, I really am. Once Upon a Time had a nice look at Mr. Gold's backstory (one wonders how powerful he could be if he remembered himself). The Middle was funny - I love Sue's cheerleaders - and Modern Family, with Luke's desperate attempt to blame it all on Manny.

Read: Two Cremona-based mysteries by Paul Adams, about a violin-maker, easy and pleasing reads (The Rainaldi Quartet and Paganini's Ghost). All five of Beverle Graves-Myers' 'Baroque' mysteries about an 18th century Venetian castrato - well-written and -plotted and very engrossing.

Happy Birthday, Noel

2012-01-15T07:51:00.000-05:00

Today in 1899 Noel Coward was born, in Teddington, Middlesex, England.

He chose his own epitaph: A Talent to Amuse.

And how perfectly fitting it is.

Happy Birthday, Martin

2012-01-15T06:49:00.000-05:00

January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

She's back

2012-01-14T12:00:00.004-05:00

I spotted her from the road, sitting in the dead tree that gives her a commanding view of the park and the water (I think this is her, but if the pair isn't there I can't be sure). She's so gorgeous, especially against that high January sky. A red-shouldered hawk, one of the pair that breeds nearby.

Happy Birthday, Berthe

2012-01-14T05:52:00.001-05:00

Berthe Morisot was born today in Bourges, Cher, France, in 1841. One of the Impressionists, she exhibited in the Salon and then, along with the other "rejected Impressionists" (Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley), in their own exhibitions.

The Dining Room

Summer Day

On the Balcony

(More here)

oh, goody

2012-01-13T18:32:00.001-05:00

It's going to a long campaign. As Paul Krugman indicates, though he's discussing Romney's stump speech:

Now, however, Mitt Romney seems determined to rehabilitate Bush’s reputation, by running a campaign so dishonest that it makes Bush look like a model of truth-telling.

I mean, is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama’s record and about his own. I can’t find a single true assertion anywhere.

And he keeps finding new frontiers of falsehood.

Happy Friday

2012-01-13T10:39:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday, Salmon

2012-01-13T06:55:00.000-05:00

Salmon P Chase was born today in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1808. He used to be best known - in fact, only known - to me as the odd man out in American currency: Hamilton and Franklin were Founding Fathers, if not presidents, but who was this Salmon P Chase and why did he rate the $10,000 dollar bill?

Well, he was Senator from Ohio and Governor of Ohio; Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln; and Chief Justice of the United States. He was an Abolitionist, and he coined the slogan of the Free Soil Party, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men." The whole of his political life was dedicated to destroying slavery and its threat to the America's republican government.

Not bad.

Chase was first a Whig, then a member of the Liberty Party, then a founding member of the Free Soil Party (ah, yes; the US's multi-party days). And he founded the modern Republican Party - oh, how things have changed! - by uniting Whigs and liberal Democrats within a party dedicated to fighting slavery. He ran for President but ended up supporting Lincoln, and while Treasury Secretary he established the modern banking system - including the first federal treasury notes, which is why he's on the money.

In 1868 he wrote in a private letter:

"Congress was right in not limiting, by its reconstruction acts, the right of suffrage to whites; but wrong in the exclusion from suffrage of certain classes of citizens and all unable to take its prescribed retrospective oath, and wrong also in the establishment of despotic military governments for the States and in authorizing military commissions for the trial of civilians in time of peace. There should have been as little military government as possible; no military commissions; no classes excluded from suffrage; and no oath except one of faithful obedience and support to the Constitution and laws, and of sincere attachment to the constitutional Government of the United States."

He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Lincoln, as Chief Justice, and one of his first acts was to appoint John Rock, the first black attorney to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Chase dearly wished to be president, but his unflinching support for equality for black Americans meant he couldn't find a party which would back him. He even founded the Liberal Republican Party to combat Grant and the Radical Republicans, and although that party didn't last much beyond the election of 1872, most of its leaders didn't return to the Republicans but instead became Democrats, beginning the swap of positions that finds the "party of Lincoln" where it is today.

Happy Birthday, Clark

2012-01-13T05:54:00.000-05:00

Clark Ashton Smith was born today in Auburn, California, in 1893. Mostly self-educated (he had only an 8th-grade formal education), he was one of the the member of the great triumvirate who wrote for Weird Tales (the other two being, of course, HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard). Although he outlived them by more than twenty years, after their deaths - in quick succession, Lovecraft from cancer in '37 and Howard by suicide in '36 - he ceased writing, ending the Golden Age of fantasy. He's certainly best known for his fantastic fiction, but his artistic career had three parts: in his later years he was a sculptor, and he had written poetry before fiction. In fact, he had been called "the Keats of the Pacific". Though most are long, here are two of those poems:

September

Slumberously burns the sun
Over slopes adust and dun,
Leaning southward through September. . . .
I forget and I remember,
Life is half oblivion. . . .
Somnolently burns the sun.

Close and dim the horizons creep,
Earthward lapse the heavens in sleep;
Woodlands faint with azure air
Seem but bourns of Otherwhere:
Swooning with ensorcelled sleep,
Close and dim the horizons creep.

Embers from a dreamland hearth,
Glow the leaves in croft and garth;
Vines within the willows drawn
Relume the gold of visions gone;
Darkly burn, in croft and garth,
Embers from a dreamland hearth.

Sleepy like an airless fire,
Smoulders my supreme desire:
Throeless, in the tranquil sun,
Hearts could melt and merge as one
In forgetful soft desire
Drowsy like an airless fire.

Snowfall on Acacia

I

Drooping low,
Acacia-branches bear their double
Burden of flowers and snow.

Humped with snow, the golden
Sprays careen, lifting free
Suddenly.

You can find his works (and more) at the Eldritch Dark.

Happy Birthday, Ira

2012-01-12T05:32:00.002-05:00

Born today in 1923, Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima - of the six, one of the three who survived the battle. After the war, almost certainly suffering from PTSD as well as survivor guilt, Hayes was unable to handle the public adulation on one hand and reservation life on the other, and he slowly drank himself to death. He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

"Let's say he had a little dream in his heart that someday the Indian would be like the white man — be able to walk all over the United States." (Rene Gagnon, fellow flag-raiser, at Hayes's funeral)

Call him 'drunken Ira Hayes',
He won't answer any more,
Not the whiskey-drinking Indian
Or the Marine who went to war.
-Peter LaFarge

More on Firing the Insurance Company

2012-01-11T15:16:00.002-05:00

Krugman quotes David Atkins at Digby:

But most of all, we don’t see the health insurance company as providing us a service. We see ourselves, rather, as indentured supplicants forced to pay exorbitant monthly rates for a basic need that responsible people with means can’t get out of paying for if we can help it. We don’t see ourselves as in control of the relationship with them. They are in control of us–and no more so than when we get sick and need the insurance most. If the company decides to restrict our coverage or tell us we have a pre-existing condition after all, we’re in the position of begging a capricious and heartless corporation to cover costs we assumed we were entitled to based on a contractual obligation. It’s precisely when we need insurance most that we’re least able to “fire” the insurance company.

The same goes for the rent/mortgage, for the utilities, for the car, for the cell phone bill, for nearly everything.
…
Romney talks about paying for health insurance as if it were the same as getting a pedicure, hiring an escort or getting the fancy wax at a car wash. It’s a luxury service being provided to him, and he doesn’t like it, he can take his business elsewhere. Romney’s is the language of a man who has never wanted for anything, never worried about where his next paycheck would come from, never worried about going bankrupt if he got sick.

It is the language of an entitled empowerment utterly alien to the experience of most Americans.

(By the way, head to Digby for a little Tennessee Ernie Ford singing "16 Tons"!)

And then Krugman gets right to the point and adds:

The point isn’t necessarily that Romney has lived in privilege all his life; so did FDR. It’s his apparent inability or unwillingness to imagine what it’s like for those less privileged, his complete failure to try, even in his imagination, walking in someone else’s shoes that stands out.

Just like he couldn't imagine what it was like for the dog he strapped to the roof of his car.

Google Doodle for Steno!

2012-01-11T08:25:00.001-05:00

"The father of geology", Nicholas Steno, was born today in 1634.

Google has a gorgeous Doodle today reflecting his work on the stratification of rocks.

Check it out.

Happy Birthday, Haruki

2012-01-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of one of our great living writers (our = humanity's), Haruki Murakami. He was born in Kyoto and grew up in Kobe, Japan, and has taught at Princeton and Tufts in the US, where he now lives. In 2006 he won the Kafka Award. His writing is humorous, nostalgic, magical, and often fierce, dealing with loss and the question of who we are, and it is sprinkled with sharp social observations. 1Q84, his latest and most ambitious - and fascinating - novel, as well as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. and Kafka on the Shore, two of his best novels, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of shorter fiction, are available in English (many others are, too, including Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a brilliant novel so confusing I'm still not entirely certain what happened). He's one of my favorite authors.

Ach?

2012-01-10T19:06:00.000-05:00

Alex just pronounced Cathy's trademark Ack! as though it were German's Ach!

That's just weird. I don't know anybody who doesn't put the "a" of cat in that exclamation.

And then he pronounce "paleo" (in reference to cavemen) as though it were Spanish - pahLAYoh - instead of PAYleeoh.

What's up with him tonight?

$999???

2012-01-10T17:23:00.005-05:00

Man. This has got to be one of those robot-algorithm-pricing things (select picture for larger version).

Nothing like

2012-01-10T14:28:00.002-05:00

Wondering why success in running a business is supposed to mean success in running a country, Paul Krugman points out a fact:

For the fact is that running a business is nothing at all like making macro policy. The key point about macroeconomics is the pervasiveness of feedback loops due to the fact that workers are also consumers. No business sells a large fraction of its output to its own workers; even very small countries sell around two-thirds of their output to themselves, because that much is non-tradable services.
This makes a huge difference. A businessman can slash his workforce in half, produce about the same as before, and be considered a big success; an economy that does the same plunges into depression, and ends up not being able to sell its goods.

And that's even if you think Romney was a success.It's sort of like Rick Perry trying to parlay his success in Texas into the presidency. Even if you think he was successful, he can't reproduce it: luring business from other states just doesn't translate to the federal level.

Firing your insurance company

2012-01-10T12:46:00.000-05:00

Does Romney like to fire people? Maybe, I don't know. It's not really what he said.

What he said was worse. (Krugman and Aaron Carroll agree with me - or I with them - but I'm not linking because I don't want to exhaust your reads, and because I thought of it before I read them, and because it's really pretty obvious if you give it a moment's thought.)

What he said was that the health care system in this country ought to work to allow you to shop around for the best insurance company, "firing" yours and "hiring" a better.Only, who can do that?

Most people don't really have the money to get just any health insurance they want. Most people's insurance depends on who their employer offers them. And even those with full, free choice don't usually know that they have a "bad employee" until they get sick. At which point it is far too late to go shopping around for another one. Pre-existing conditions and all that. In fact, the best thing about his Massachusetts plan was that it made it hard for you to get dropped by your company.

Moreover, he really seems to think (he can't really. Can he?) that insurance companies are in it to spend money on their customers, instead of to make money for their stockholders. Insurance companies love it when sick people leave.

Romney has no clue about how health insurance works for the vast majority of Americans

Happy Birthday, Robinson

2012-01-10T06:57:00.001-05:00

Today in 1887 Robinson Jeffers was born. Here are three of his works:

To the House

I am heaping the bones of the old mother
To build us a hold against the host of the air;
Granite the blood-heat of her youth
Held molten in hot darkness against the heart
Hardened to temper under the feet
Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow
And march from the remotest west.
This is the primitive rock, here in the wet
Quarry under the shadow of waves
Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone
Baptized from that abysmal font
The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you.

The Bird With the Dark Plumes

The bird with the dark plumes in my blood,
That never for one moment however I patched my truces
Consented to make peace with the people,
It is pitiful now to watch her pleasure In a breath of tempest
Breaking the sad promise of spring.
Are these that morose hawk's wings, vaulting, a mere mad swallow's,
The snow-shed peak, the violent precipice?
Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you prize their blame?
"Their liking" she said "was a long creance,
But let them be kind enough to hate me that opens the sky."
It is almost as foolish my poor falcon
To want hatred as to want love; and harder to win.

The Vulture

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing,
I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight- feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, 'My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.' But how beautiful
he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.

Happy Birthday, Marie

2012-01-09T06:03:00.000-05:00

Dorothy Parker wrote a poem called "Comment"

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

This is all I know about Marie of Romania.

But she was born today in 1875.

Hungary is ... wow

2012-01-08T21:07:00.001-05:00

Krugman shares a look at the new constitution of Hungary. Cautionary tale? You betcha.

Might could have explained that better

2012-01-08T13:51:00.000-05:00

The local "grammar guy" in my father's paper is, in my admittedly very limited exposure to him, a peever who can't explain his positions even when he's right. Today he tackles double modals, not that he calls them that. He doesn't even seem to know what the problem is with them:

Have you ever said "might could?" Many have.

This expression and a few others like it are nonstandard. They are more common in speech than in writing, and they are heard in regional American speech, especially in the South, according to Webster's Dictionary of English Usage.

And then he trots out this contradiction, without even seeming to notice:

The helping verb "might" seems to intensify the notion of possibility or speculation, Webster's says.

The problem with these expressions is that only one of the verbs is necessary.

Apparently, he thinks "might do", "could do", and "might could do" all mean the same thing. (At least that's what he's saying.) Clearly they don't.

What he needs to do is point out not that only one is necessary, but that in MSE only one is permitted. The other must be replaced with an adverb (he possibly could, maybe he could) or another, non-modal-auxiliary verb (he might be able to).

ps - my father said he thought "might" wasn't even a verb here, but an adverb. This may in fact be the same feeling that most double-modal speakers have: might = probably/perhaps.

Happy Birthday, Elvis

2012-01-08T07:12:00.000-05:00

That's the Elvis.

Happy Birthday, Alfred

2012-01-08T07:06:00.000-05:00

Today in 1823, in Usk in Wales, Alfred Russel Wallace was born. He was profoundly influenced by Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work of popular science published in 1844 that advocated an evolutionary origin for the solar system, the earth, and living things. Wallace began his work hoping to find evidence that supported the ideas found in that extremely controversial book. After field work in the Amazon basin and in Sarawak, he wrote several papers that were preludes to the one he sent to Charles Darwin: On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.

While Wallace's essay did not employ Darwin's term natural selection, it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was essentially the same as the theory that Darwin had worked on for twenty years, but had yet to publish. Darwin wrote in a letter to Charles Lyell: "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters!" Although Wallace had not requested that his essay be published, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker decided to present the essay, together with excerpts from a paper that Darwin had written in 1844, and kept confidential, to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, highlighting Darwin's priority. Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, grateful that he had been included at all. Darwin's social and scientific status was at that time far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken as seriously.

Many today regard Wallace as merely the catalyst that made Darwin publish, but he was regarded in his own time by his peers - including Darwin - as a great man in his own right. His chief contribution is perhaps biogeography, but he also contributed to the fields of animal coloration, reproductive isolation, and natural selection. True, he fell for Spiritualism, but nobody's perfect.

Much info and some sentences from Wikipedia

Happy Birthday, Stephen

2012-01-08T06:59:00.001-05:00

On January 8th, 1942, Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford, England. Black holes, A Brief History of Time, mathematics and cosmology - and all in his head.
(Yeah. Technology is dehumanizing.)

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

(ps - check out him and Captain Pike reviewing movies at The New Adventures of Queen Victoria from last year.)

Happy Birthday, Charles

2012-01-07T06:57:00.002-05:00

January 7, 1912, was the birthday of Charles Addams, master of macabre humor.

The Addams Family - 'nuff said (and check the Googel Doodle for today) ... except there's so much more. Here's his most famous, and also one of my favorites.

"Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up."

Happy Birthday, Zora

2012-01-07T06:57:00.001-05:00

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, probably 1891 and most probably in Notasulga, Alabama - though she grew up in Eatonsville, Florida, an all-black incorporated township. She attended Howard University but couldn't afford to finish her studies. Later she received a scholarship to Barnard College where she received her B.A. in anthropology in 1927. While at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic research under her advisor, the noted anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University. She also worked with Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead. Her best work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written in just seven weeks and published in 1937. A novelist and anthropologist, member of the Harlem Renaissance yet conservative libertarian in her politics, disengaged from the civil rights movement and concerned with representing blacks as they were, she wrote many excellent books yet died in penniless obscurity.

A textbook example

2012-01-06T08:53:00.002-05:00

My father's local(ish) paper - Knoxville's 19 miles away - carries Billy Grahma's "My Answer" column (on the obit page, actually). Today, the reverend gives us a textbook example of circular reasoning. Asked if the Bible is the "sole authority" or if people should "listen and try to discern if God is saying something new" he comes down hard on "the Bible is the Word of God". Why? "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness."

Yes. He's using 2 Timothy - the Bible - to prove that the Bible is the word of God.

Happy Birthday, Carl

2012-01-06T08:31:00.003-05:00

Today in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878 Carl Sandburg was born.

A couple of his shorter works:

Whitelight

YOUR whitelight flashes the frost to-night
Moon of the purple and silent west.
Remember me one of your lovers of dreams.

Hydrangeas

Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas
turn rust and go soon.
Already mid September a line of brown runs
over them.
One sunset after another tracks the faces, the
petals.
Waiting, they look over the fence for what
way they go.

Jan Kubelik

YOUR bow swept over a string, and a long low note
      quivered to the air.
(A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect
      learning to suck milk.)

Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering
      and wild.
All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon
      in the hills with their lovers.)

(Many more of Sandburg's poems here)

Happy Birthday, Earl

2012-01-06T06:37:00.000-05:00

Earl Scruggs is 86 today.

He was born and grew up near Shelby, North Carolina, in the heart of banjo country, and he is one of the two most important figures in bluegrass - the other, of course, being Bill Monroe.

It was the fiddler John Hartford who put it best: “Here’s the way I feel about it. Everybody’s all worried about who invented the style and it’s obvious that three-finger banjo pickers have been around a long time -- maybe since 1840. But my feeling about it is that if it wasn’t for Earl Scruggs, you wouldn’t be worried about who invented it.”

Happy Birthday, you ol' banjo-picker!

Watch - and listen to - Cumberland Gap with Lester Flatt:

and Foggy Mountain Breakdown with an all-star lineup (Steve Martin, Albert Lee, Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill, Marty Stuart):

Happy Birthday, Hayao-sensei

2012-01-05T06:39:00.000-05:00

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎駿, Miyazaki Hayao) was born today in 1941, in one of the special wards (municipalities) of Tokyo, Bunkyō-ku, in Akebono-cho district. He has given us some of the most beautiful and enjoyable animated films of all time: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Naushika, Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-Hime), Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Howl's Moving Castle (Hauru no Ugoku Shiro), even My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro).

Ponyo was his last, and it was a delight. The Borrower Arrietty (借りぐらしのアリエッティ, Karigurashi no Arietti) is Studio Ghibli's most recent, though I haven't seen it yet. They have two more lined up - Kokurikozaka kara (コクリコ坂から, From Kokuriko Hill) is slated for 2011. I for one can't wait, even though Miyazaki is no longer directing.

In the 'making of' feature on the DVD of Spirited Away he is shown with some junior animators, describing to them the look he wants for the dragon as it falls. Like an eel, he says, you've all seen eels. No, they confess, they haven't; they've never watched eels being killed in a restaurant. Theatrically he exclaims: "Japanese culture is doomed!"

so true

2012-01-04T23:24:00.001-05:00

ShoEboX at Partially Clips notes:

Anyway, if George Lucas wants fans to be happy, “A New Hope 3-D” will replace Greedo with Jar-Jar, and Han will shoot first and repeatedly. Just sayin’.

Oh my yes.

Ah, the comma updated

2012-01-04T09:07:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I noted about commas that sometimes when you leave one it it's no big deal ... but sometimes it is. As in this Non Sequitur from Sunday:

I pointed out that Eddie might have been, at the moment, her lone customer, and that he was hygenically challenged. But I didn't buy that he's ever her "lone hygenically challenged customer".

And look! Today's strip proves me right:

Happy Birthday, JRR

2012-01-03T20:42:00.000-05:00

107 years ago in Bloemfontein, South Africa, JRR Tolkien was born.

I like LOTR much better than The Hobbit, to be honest, and I enjoy the poetry collections and like to browse the Silmarillon... I read the novel yearly, and have it in several translations - I particularly like the Ukrainian translation I have.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

(Also, try here for more)

Ah, the comma

2012-01-03T07:37:00.004-05:00

Commas. They're a very versatile little punctuation mark. They lead a double life, sometimes imparting syntactic meaning and sometimes semantic. They can distinguish an integrated (restrictive) from a non-integrated (nonrestrictive) clause or apposition, they can separate clauses or phrases in sequences, and they can distinguish vocatives from subjects or objects. (All of this in writing, obviously.) They have a lot of optional uses, and a lot of mandatory ones, which means that sometimes when you leave one it it's no big deal ... but sometimes it is. As in this Non Sequitur from yesterday:

Now, it's true that Eddie is at the moment Flo's lone customer. And I don't at all doubt that he's hygenically challenged. But given the kind of place she runs, I sincerely doubt he's ever her "lone hygenically challenged customer".

It's gonna be a long year

2012-01-02T19:50:00.005-05:00

I fear we're in for a ton of Mayan-calendar themed comics ... mostly by people who don't get the Mayan calendar at all. Bottom line: the calendar is cyclic. When it gets to "the end", it just starts over.

A couple of years ago Brewster Rockett took a shot at it, with Pam the voice of reason. And amazingly, of all people to get it right, Jeremy of Zits did.

But we're two days into the year, and in the limited collection of strips in my father's local paper there have been two strips so far, one each day - and both are saying the world will end. First yesterday's Mother Goose and Grimm

and today's Freshly Squeezed

I fear the rest of the year...

Although there's a tiny chance that xkcd can take point... maybe?

Happy Birthday, Isaac

2012-01-02T07:30:00.001-05:00

Isaac Asimov was born today in 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia. He was one of the first science-fiction writers I ever read, and his science fact books were staples of my childhood.

The Week in Entertainment

2012-01-01T23:15:00.009-05:00

Film: The Artist - an absolutely wonderful movie! Funny, touching, sad, happy - just about perfect.

DVD: A whole lot of versions of A Christmas Carol, including one with Basil Rathbone as Marley's Ghost, and another with him as Scrooge.

TV: Doctor Who Christmas Special. Sweet. "Usually called the Doctor. Or the Caretaker. Or Get off the planet - although strictly speaking that last isn't probably a name." and "Do what I do; hold on tight and pretend it's a plan." and "Is it real? Is it... Fairyland?" "Fairyland? Oh, grow up, Lily. Fairyland looks completely different." And the very end, when he went back to Amy and Rory's house? And the happy tears? Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. And speaking of "happy tears", I watched Tenth Avenue Angel with Margaret O'Brien, quite enjoyable. Also, speaking of her, a slew of Christmaas movies including Meet Me in St Louis (which MO'B is also in), tons of Christmas Carols, Holiday Affair which is very slight but enjoyable enough, and One Magical Christmas, which is a pretty dark sort-of "Carol"ish movie with Harry Dean Stanton(!) as a Christmas angel bringing the Christmas spirit back to poor, harassed Mary Steenbergen. Two eps of Leverage: Loved Parker taking photos of the bling and the poor facial-recognition software trying to match them with 's face. And the very complicated thing that Hardison ran in the second one, and the way the others gave him such a hard time... And the way it all fell apart on him. Funny. Grimm - this was a nice episode, good Munroe bits. Evelyn Prentice, an early Myrna Loy-William Powell vehicle, not at all funny but not meant to be, and not bad, either.

Read: Actually, nothing (can't think when that was last true!)

It's been this way a while

2012-01-01T22:21:00.000-05:00

Life imitates art ... sort of.

So, you probably know this great xkcd cartoon:

Today's Classic Peanuts is from 1961 and features a panel remarkably similar.

Sure, Lucy proceeded to use the snowball to bowl all the boys over, but if Linus had made that snowball, the taunt would never have been "boys sure do some stupid things."

Happy Birthday to Many

2012-01-01T06:28:00.001-05:00

Today is the birthday of many, including

Lorenzo de' Medici, Paul Revere, Mad Anthony Wayne, Sir James George Frazer, Pierre de Coubertin, George Washington Carver, E. M. Forster, Xavier Cugat, Dana Andrews, Stepan Bandera, Hank Greenberg, Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko, J. D. Salinger, Frank Langella,

and me.

С новым годом!

2012-01-01T00:39:00.000-05:00

моим читателям - To my readers:
Всего вам самого-пресамого в 2012!!! И здоровья, и счастья, и успехов!

The best of everything to you in 2012!!! Health, and happiness, and success!

On fir branches snow is lying,
The New Year to us today is flying!
May everything in life take a turn for the best,
May your most cherished dreams come true,
May the year give you treasures above all the rest:
Warmth, health, and understanding all come to you!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

If you celebrate the turning of the year today, then Happy New Year! May it find you happy and well, make you so if you aren't now, and keep you thus until it ends.

Saale Nao Mubbarak
Gelukkig Nieuw Jaar
Antum salimoun (اجمل التهاني بمناسبة الميلا و حلول السنة الجديدة)
Shuvo Nabo Barsho
Nedeleg laouen ha bloavezh mat
Schastliva Nova Godyna! (Щастлива Нова Година)
Z novym godam i Kalyadmi! ( З Новым годам i Калядамi)
Gung hay fat choy! Sun nien fai lok!
Chu Shen Tan
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda
Scastny Novy Rok
Godt Nytår
Gelukkig Nieuwjarr!
Head uut aastat!
Aide shoma mobarak (كرسمس مبارک سال نو مبارک)
Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
Bonne Année
Bliadhna Mhath Ur don a h-uile duine
Prosit Neujahr
Kenourios Chronos
Hauoli Makahiki Hou
L'Shannah Tovah (חג מולד שמח ושנה טובה)
Krisamas aur nav varṣ saṃgalamay ho (क्रिसमस और नव वर्ष मंगलमय हो)
Selamat Tahun Baru
Sanah Jadidah
Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
Felice anno nuovo
Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu
Xin nian hao
Godt Nyttår
Manigong Bagong Taon
Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
Feliz Ano Novo
Karisama te navāṃ sāl khuśiyāṃvālā hove (ਕਰਿਸਮ ਤੇ ਨਵਾੰ ਸਾਲ ਖੁਸ਼ਿਯਾੰਵਾਲਾ ਹੋਵੇ)
An nou ferict - La Multi Ani
S Novim Godom (с новым годом)
Sretna nova godina (Сређна Нова Година)
Nayou Saal Mubbarak Hoje
Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa
Próspero año nuevo!
Gott nytt år!
Manigong bagong taon
Eniya Puthandu Nalvazhthukkal
Sawadee Pee Mai (เมอรี่คริสต์มาส และสวัสดีปีใหม่)
Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Shchastlyvoho Novoho Roku (Щастлівого Нового Року)
Naya Saal Mubbarak Ho (نايا سال مبارک هو)
Chúc Năm Mới Tốt Lành

Happy Birthday, Li

2011-12-31T08:26:00.000-05:00

Today in 1965, in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, Gong Li was born. Star of a number of films including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, Farewell My Concubine. and Curse of the Golden Flower, Gong is a stunning and brilliant actress.

Happy Birthday, Carol

2011-12-30T19:25:00.001-05:00

Born today in 1906, the great director Carol Reed, who gave us (and was knighted for doing so) such classics as The Third Man, The Stars Look Down (which I always remember from the Lord Peter Wimsey story where his mother is reading the book under the misapprehension that it's a sweet Christmas tale), Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, the very funny Our Man in Havana, and The Agony and the Ecstasy.

Happy Birthday, Bo

2011-12-30T07:23:00.001-05:00

Born today, in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi, The Originator, Bo Diddley.

He died three years ago, just shy of 80, and he is missed.

Happy Birthday, Rudyard

2011-12-30T07:10:00.002-05:00

Today, in Bombay in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was born. His parents sent him "back" to England to avoid the typhoid and cholera, and he used his school experiences in several of his works, the horrifying 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and the delightful Stalky and Co. particularly. After school he went back to India and became a reporter, writing fiction and poetry in his spare time. Celebrity came after six years, and he returned to England. But he didn't like living there, and after a few years spent traveling the world, he settled in Vermont - and it was there he wrote The Jungle Book, probably his most well-known work.

Here's another:

Eddi's Service
AD 687

Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
     In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
     For such as cared to attend.

But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
     And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
     Though Eddi rang the bell.

"'Wicked weather for walking,"
     Said Eddi of Manhood End.
"But I must go on with the service
     For such as care to attend."

The altar-lamps were lighted, --
     An old marsh-donkey came,
Bold as a guest invited,
     And stared at the guttering flame.

The storm beat on at the windows,
     The water splashed on the floor,
And a wet, yoke-weary bullock
     Pushed in through the open door.

"How do I know what is greatest,
     How do I know what is least?
That is My Father's business,"
     Said Eddi, Wilfrid's priest.

"But -- three are gathered together --
     Listen to me and attend.
I bring good news, my brethren!"
     Said Eddi of Manhood End.

And he told the Ox of a Manger
     And a Stall in Bethlehem,
And he spoke to the Ass of a Rider,
     That rode to Jerusalem.

They steamed and dripped in the chancel,
     They listened and never stirred,
While, just as though they were Bishops,
     Eddi preached them The World,

Till the gale blew off on the marshes
     And the windows showed the day,
And the Ox and the Ass together
     Wheeled and clattered away.

And when the Saxons mocked him,
     Said Eddi of Manhood End,
"I dare not shut His chapel
    On such as care to attend."

Happy Birthday, Linus

2011-12-28T08:09:00.000-05:00

Linus Torvalds, chief architect of Linux, was born today in 1969 in Helsinki, Finland.

"Basically, it is short and sweet. It won't give your life any meaning, but it tells you what's going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life - for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. And there is nothing after entertainment. So, in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And once you've reached the third stage, you're done. But you have to go through the other stages first."

Happy Birthday, Stan

2011-12-28T08:07:00.000-05:00

Born today in 1922, the one and only Stan Lee.

When I was growing up, you read either Marvel or DC comics. I read Marvel. The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Spiderman - I was there for them all. That first incarnation of X-Men was genuinely amazing. And they didn't read like kid's books, either; as Stan said once,

"If a kid has to go to a dictionary, that's not the worst thing that could happen."

I vividly remember walking over to the drugstore every Saturday to get the new issues and reading them on the way home. Those guys all seemed so real to me.

Thanks, Stan. Thanks so much.

Happy Birthday, Johannes

2011-12-27T19:48:00.000-05:00

Today in 1571 Johannes Kepler was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. Kepler was born to Lutheran parents, but never subscribed fully to the doctrine of "the real presence" and refused to sign the Formula of Concord; therefor he was excluded from the sacrament. Being unaccepted by the Lutherans and not a Catholic, either, Kepler had no refuge during the Thirty Years War and the counter-reformation, which meant he was forced to move over and over again to stay alive.

I quote from the biography of Kepler on NASA's Kepler Mission page, where you can go for more details on his work and his three laws (my emphasis):

Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He inherited Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in forward to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), a fundamental law of nature. Today we call this the scientific method.

In 1612 Lutherans were forced out of Prague, so Kepler moved on to Linz. His wife and two sons had recently died. He remarried happily, but had many personal and financial troubles. Two infant daughters died and Kepler had to return to Württemburg where he successfully defended his mother against charges of witchcraft. In 1619 he published Harmonices Mundi, in which he describes his "third law."

In spite of more forced relocations, Kepler published the seven-volume Epitome Astronomiae in 1621. This was his most influential work and discussed all of heliocentric astronomy in a systematic way. He then went on to complete the Rudolphine Tables that Tycho had started long ago. These included calculations using logarithms, which he developed, and provided perpetual tables for calculating planetary positions for any past or future date. Kepler used the tables to predict a pair of transits by Mercury and Venus of the Sun, although he did not live to witness the events.

Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg in 1630, while on a journey from his home in Sagan to collect a debt. His grave was demolished within two years because of the Thirty Years War. Frail of body, but robust in mind and spirit, Kepler was scrupulously honest to the data.

What a tremendous epitaph that is.

Happy Birthday, Louis

2011-12-27T08:18:00.000-05:00

Born today in 1822 in Dole, France - Louis Pasteur.

If you're like me, you think of pasteurized milk, and maybe beer ... but the man was a workhorse of applied science. Louis Pasteur brought about a veritable revolution in the 19th-century scientific method. By abandoning his laboratory and by tackling the agents of disease in their natural environments, he was able through his investigations to supply the complete solution to a given question, not only identifying the agent responsible for a disease but also indicating the remedy.

When in 1881 he had perfected a technique for reducing the virulence of various disease-producing microorganisms, he succeeded in vaccinating a herd of sheep against the disease known as anthrax. Likewise, he was able to protect fowl from chicken cholera, for he had observed that once animals stricken with certain diseases had recovered they were later immune to a fresh attack. Thus, by isolating the germ of the disease and by cultivating an attenuated, or weakened, form of the germ and inoculating fowl with the culture, he could immunize the animals against the malady. In this he was following the example of the English physician Edward Jenner in his method for vaccinating animals against cowpox. On April 27, 1882, Pasteur was elected a member of the Académie Française, at which point he undertook research that proved to be the most spectacular of all—the preventive treatment of rabies. Having detected the rabies virus by its effects on the nervous system and attenuated its virulence, he applied his procedure to man; on July 6, 1885, he saved the life of a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog.

Among his other discoveries - the theory of molecular asymmetry, showing that the biological properties of chemical substances depend not only on the nature of the atoms constituting their molecules but also on the manner in which these atoms are arranged in space. By means of simple and precise experiments, including the filtration of air and the exposure of unfermented liquids to the air of the high Alps, he proved that food decomposes when placed in contact with germs present in the air, which cause its putrefaction, and that it does not undergo transformation or putrefy in such a way as to spontaneously generate new organisms within itself.

He showed that milk could be soured by injecting a number of organisms from buttermilk or beer but could be kept unchanged if such organisms were excluded. After laying the theoretical groundwork, Pasteur proceeded to apply his findings to the study of vinegar and wine, two commodities of great importance in the economy of France; his pasteurization process, the destruction of harmful germs by heat, made it possible to produce, preserve, and transport these products without their undergoing deterioration. In 1870 Pasteur devoted himself to the problem of beer. Following an investigation conducted both in France and among the brewers in London, he devised, as he had done for vinegar and wine, a procedure for manufacturing beer that would prevent its deterioration with time. British exporters, whose ships had to sail entirely around the African continent, were thus able to send British beer as far as India without fear of its deteriorating.

In 1865 he undertook a government mission to investigate the diseases of the silkworm, which were about to put an end to the production of silk at a time when it comprised a major section of France's economy. To carry out the investigation, he moved to the south of France, the centre of silkworm breeding. Three years later he announced that he had isolated the bacilli of two distinct diseases and had found methods of preventing contagion and of detecting diseased stock.

In 1854 Pasteur became dean of the new science faculty at the University of Lille, where he initiated a highly modern educational concept: by instituting evening classes for the many young workmen of the industrial city, conducting his regular students around large factories in the area, and organizing supervised practical courses, he demonstrated the relationship that he believed should exist between theory and practice, between university and industry. A skillful experimenter endowed with great curiosity and a remarkable gift of observation, Pasteur devoted himself with immense enthusiasm to science and its applications to medicine, agriculture, and industry.

"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence."

info and many sentences from: "Pasteur, Louis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 27 Dec. 2006 < http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-12562 >.