The Week in Entertainment

DVD: The first three episodes of UFO, the 1970 live-action Gerry Anderson show. I'd forgotten the wacky uniforms - not just those silver dominatrix-looking things the girls on the moon wear (along with the purple wigs - when Lt Ellis goes to earth she doesn't wear it! It's part of the uniform!), but also the mesh see-throughs everyone on the sub wears. rrowr. It actually holds up pretty well, though they didn't anticipate some things - like guided missiles, or smoking bans - in one ep, Straker and Alec stand around Straker's office smoking, and then Alec goes and gets a whiskey out of the dispenser of various boozes on the desk!

TV: Psych! Yay! It's back, and with an episode chock full of character stuff. Sweet. (But Santa Barbara airport - I know it's small, I've been there, but still... do they really let you through security without a boarding pass? Or could they just not resist the iconic shot of Abby walking to the plane, instead of joining the security line? It wouldn't have the same visual impact, that's for sure. Scrubs reboot - nice, actually. I think it might be finding its feet, and while it's not nearly as funny as the early years of the original, it's becoming amusing. Better Off Ted: I will not get the image of a flying Uzi-toting fawn out of mind in a hurry. Linda: "I don't have a debilitating personality disorder that makes me unable to care about people." Veronica: "First, it's not debilitating." Numb3rs: another distractingly edited episode, but intriguing. And Larry came out of the desert at the end! Whee! Leverage: I liked it - Maggie and Nathan are interesting together. And I love it when Eliot gets to show off his brain.

Read: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, a brilliant novel narrated by an autistic kid who's investigating the death of his neighbor's dog. The Dreaming Place, a lovely old Charles de Lint YA that I managed to miss when it came out. Started Anne Tyler's latest - Noah's Compass and am enjoying it very much.

Streak Stays Alive

Angie Bjorklund, cold all game, hits a jumper in the last minute to put the Lady Vols ahead by three. And then Kamiko Williams hits her two free throws for 17 in all (her high) and UT beats South Carolina 60-55 in a nail-biter that went to less than 30 seconds before it became clear who would win. Wow.

Lady Vols on TV

Playing South Carolina. The Gamecocks had a 10-point lead early, but they played hard, both teams, and half-time it's a 1-pt lead. SC is pretty good with the lead at the half this year, but they have a 36-game losing streak against UT...

More snow

A couple from yesterday afternoon, then from last night, then this morning...

I and the Bird #117

Hmmm. Something's happening with I and the Bird entries. Either they're being rejected for being boring (I could understand that, lately, though I thought the juncos were nice), or they're not getting through.

But that should not by any means stop you from reading this edition, hosted over at the Marvelous in Nature, especially for her great drawing. Lots of good posts there - check it out!

Out my window right now

14 degrees and coming down hard. Good thing my groceries were delivered last night and I have nowhere to go until Monday morning.

Join us for dinner

Mark Trail often has word balloons coming out of random animals or plants, due to Elrod's tendency to draw at least one panel focusing on the scenery and wildlife. And the surreal element of a goose threatening people who won't stay away from the lake or talking about portaging is often very amusing. Today, though, it's perfect:

Happy Birthday, Gelett

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.)

Sky Watch: Contrasting Clouds

The sky is filled with clouds that are pale, almost white, above the ones that are showing us the sun...




more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Anton

Today in 1860 Антон Павлович Чехов (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov) was born - on what was 19 January by the calendar Russia was using at the time. 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?"

Presidential I's on Fox

At headsup, Fred takes one more look at Fox New's deceptive style, this time their "The I's have it" series:

Let's get the obvious journalistic fraud out of the way before addressing the fun stuff. No, "much attention" has not been paid to Obama's "persistent use of 'I'" (which is sort of like his persistent breathing; if you speak English, you use "I" persistently). Charles Krauthammer mentioned "I" last night, in Fox's analysis of the State of the Union address, and George Will has brought it up frequently, but two hacks isn't a measure of "much attention." And the "critics" don't call this a sign of "campaign mode"; they've persistently held it up as a measure of presidential narcissism. But our point here ought to be the numbers, which demonstrate more or less beyond the shadow of a doubt that Fox is more like an advertising agency than a news organization.

... If you want to do journalism or content analysis, on the other hand, you start with the questions Rolaids and Fox leave out: Is that a lot, and what does it mean if it is? Obama said "I" 96 times in this appearance, we're told. Judging from the transcript, that's right: I get 96 instances of "I" pronouns (including "I'll," "I'm" and "I've"; "me," "my" and "mine" apparently don't matter to Fox). In an address of 3,399 words, that comes out to about 2.8%. Which means?

Like all Fred's work on Fox, this is good stuff.

Milepebble

When it comes to reaching your big milestones - and all your little milepebbles - Ameriprise Financial can help.

This is cute, but it's kind of dumb, too. A milestone is a stone used as a mile-marker. A milepebble would be the same thing, just small. Surely "yardstone" would have made more sense.

Or so ran my first impression.

But then I started thinking that maybe the big-little contrast is more easily processed.

And now I'm not sure. But "milepebble" annoys me for no reason I can pin down.

Really? I'll be blowed

The answer in Calligraphy was "serif". The contestant said "se-REEF", and Alex said, "ser-if, right", rhyming it with "sheriff".

Really? I thought. So I looked it up - and ... yes.

Amazing. I am quite certain that I have never in my life heard that pronunciation. I say "se-reef" and so does everyone I know. I startled to see that variation isn't even listed.

You learn something new every day, I guess.

Happy Birthday, José

José Martí was born today in Havana, Cuba, in 1853. He was exiled to Spain 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.

Dos patrias

Dos patrias tengo yo: Cuba y la noche.
¿O son una las dos? No bien retira
su majestad el sol, con largos velos
y un clavel en la mano, silenciosa
Cuba cual viuda triste me aparece.
¡Yo sé cuál es ese clavel sangriento
que en la mano le tiembla! Está vacío
mi pecho, destrozado está y vacío
en donde estaba el corazón. Ya es hora
de empezar a morir. La noche es buena
para decir adiós. La luz estorba
y la palabra humana. El universo
habla mejor que el hombre.
Cual bandera
que invita a batallar, la llama roja
de la vela flamea. Las ventanas
abro, ya estrecho en mí. Muda, rompiendo
las hojas del clavel, como una nube
que enturbia el cielo, Cuba, viuda, pasa...

I have two homelands; Cuba and the night. Or are they one and the same? No sooner has the majesty of the sun retired when Cuba, with long veils and a carnation in her hand, silently appears, as if a sad widow, before me. I know what that bloody carnation is that she holds in her trembling hand! My chest is empty; destroyed and empty is the place where my heart was. Now has come the time to begin to die. The night is good for saying goodbye. The light hinders, as does the human word. The universe speaks better than man does. As a flag calling me to fight, the red light of the candle burns. The windows are opened, already intimate and dear to me. Mute, tearing apart the carnation, like a cloud which darkens the sky, Cuba, like a widow, passes.

Translation by Daniel A


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

Happy Birthday, Charles

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

Two years ago you got The Mad Gardener's Song; last year Bessie's Song to Her Doll, and this year Tema Con Varizioni:


TEMA CON VARIAZIONI

[WHY is it that Poetry has never yet been subjected to that process of Dilution which has proved so advantageous to her sister-art Music? The Diluter gives us first a few notes of some well-known Air, then a dozen bars of his own, then a few more notes of the Air, and so on alternately: thus saving the listener, if not from all risk of recognising the melody at all, at least from the too-exciting transports which it might produce in a more concentrated form. The process is termed "setting" by Composers, and any one, that has ever experienced the emotion of being unexpectedly set down in a heap of mortar, will recognise the truthfulness of this happy phrase.

For truly, just as the genuine Epicure lingers lovingly over a
morsel of supreme Venison - whose every fibre seems to murmur "Excelsior!" - yet swallows, ere returning to the toothsome dainty, great mouthfuls of oatmeal-porridge and winkles: and just as the perfect Connoisseur in Claret permits himself but one delicate sip, and then tosses off a pint or more of boarding-school beer: so also -


I NEVER loved a dear Gazelle -
Nor anything that cost me much:
High prices profit those who sell,
But why should I be fond of such?

To glad me with his soft black eye
My son comes trotting home from school;
He's had a fight but can't tell why -
He always was a little fool!

But, when he came to know me well,
He kicked me out, her testy sire:
And when I stained my hair, that Belle
Might note the change, and thus admire

And love me, it was sure to dye
A muddy green or staring blue;
Whilst one might trace, with half an eye,
The still triumphant carrot through.

Happy Birthday, Thomas

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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born today in 1756 in Salzburg.

Precisely. On both counts.

Over at Slacktivist, in the comment thread for the latest Left Behind Monday, someone asks,

As for today's Open Question for the Floor, as our host so nicely puts it, "The members of the Tribulation Force don't take decisive action, they do not sacrifice themselves for others, they are not brave, determined, loyal, honest, valiant or clever." So, you guessed it, what are your favorite book/tv/film examples of character(s) taking decisive action, sacrificing themselves for others, being brave, determined, loyal, honest, valiant or clever?

The whole thread is full of lovely examples, many of which I was not familiar with and had to go looking for. But down towards what is currently the end there's this:

Also, I can't think of any favorite examples of my own, which is odd and slightly disconcerting. Except, I've seen people mention River Tam, but where is the love for Simon? A single heroic gesture is one thing, but his heroism was planned, it wasn't a split-second passionate decision with his back against the wall.

And a few comments later comes this perfect answer:

Quoting every moment when Simon makes a grand sacrifice for love and principle would be the same as printing a full script of his dialogue. But we're afraid not to mention River, because she can kill us with her brain.

(And that's from Firefly, in case you don't recognize the names. I too have an unreasonable love for Simon.)

Deer at Dusk

Again I left work at the right time (late enough but not after dark) to see the deer coming around.

Happy Birthday, Jules

Today in the Bronx in 1929 Jules Feiffer was born.


Here's a classic... still (unfortunately) relevant.

How did they do that?

My web-based email at work had this ad (dunno what for, I didn't click through):


How did they get it wrong? "Could you see the two men?" Unless you can see them and say No, or can't and say Yes (and in either case how do they know?) you can't get the question wrong. You can not penetrate the illusion - see only the two old folks instead of the guys sitting on the floor, but how can you get the question wrong?

Looters?

At The Nation Rebecca Solnit asks why the media is so quick to label disaster survivors criminals:

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who'd survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn't arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual "objective" roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of cliches and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced.

Her article is a piercing analysis of the media's response to anything that looks like disorder - even when the situation is so awful that only taking what you can find makes sense - especially when those who come to help you are too paralyzed by the fear of disorder to actually do it.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of "stampedes." Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it "security" -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery "risks sparking chaos." The chaos already exists, and you can't blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they're unworthy and untrustworthy.

She has a nice solution for the media:

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I'd like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let's start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: "Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti's starving millions."

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? "As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti."

For the murdered policeman: "Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings."

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: "Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world."

That one might not be totally accurate, but it's likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

I urge you to read the whole article and give some serious thought to her questions - especially the next time you see a picture of "looters" in a rubble-strewn disaster area.

Happy Birthday, Rab!

Burns Night!

Yes, today is Robert Burns' birthday. He was born in Alloway, Scotland, in 1759, and started writing poetry for the oldest reason: to get girls. Now he's Scotland's national poet. Everyone sings Auld Lang Syne at New Year, and we all know at least part of To a Mouse and maybe To a Louse, too... Three years ago I gave you "Is there for honest Poverty" (also known as "A Man's a Man For A' That"), the next was , "Talk of Him That's Far Awa' ", and last year "Craigieburn Wood". This year, "To Ruin":

ALL hail! inexorable lord!
At whose destruction-breathing word,
    The mightiest empires fall!
Thy cruel, woe-delighted train,
The ministers of grief and pain,
    A sullen welcome, all!
With stern-resolv’d, despairing eye,
    I see each aimèd dart;
For one has cut my dearest tie,
    And quivers in my heart.
        Then low’ring, and pouring,
          The storm no more I dread;
       Tho’ thick’ning, and black’ning,
          Round my devoted head.

And thou grim Pow’r by life abhorr’d,
While life a pleasure can afford,
    Oh! hear a wretch’s pray’r!
Nor more I shrink appall’d, afraid;
I court, I beg thy friendly aid,
    To close this scene of care!
When shall my soul, in silent peace,
    Resign life’s joyless day—
My weary heart is throbbing cease,
    Cold mould’ring in the clay?
       No fear more, no tear more,
         To stain my lifeless face,
       Enclaspèd, and grasped,
         Within thy cold embrace!

Monday Science Links

This week's heaping helping of science:

• At Language Log Mark Liberman posts on a bit of research on who sees what: Now there's increasing experimental evidence that phone conversations are not only cognitively more troublesome than in-person conversations for outsiders, they're more difficult for participants as well. One recent study interviewed pedestrians who had just walked along a 375-foot path across an open plaza where a clown on a unicycle was riding around. Only 2 out of 24 cell phone users reported seeing the clown. In comparison, the unicycling clown was reported by 12 out of 21 people involved in real-life conversations as they walked the same path.


• Brian at Laelaps discusses how lemurs might have reached Madagascar: Who doesn't love lemurs? The strepsirrhine primates, or wet-nosed cousins of ours, are favorite documentary subjects and extremely popular zoo attractions. And, in one of those bits of zoological trivia that everyone knows, lemurs only live on the island of Madagascar off Africa's southeastern coast. The question is how they got there.


• At Starts With A Bang Ethan tells us what it's like inside a gas giant (with pictures!): Some regions of the disk are slightly more dense than other regions. Gravity is this wonderful force where, when you have more matter, it becomes more attractive. In the early stages of formation, these slightly overdense regions grow and grow, limited only by the amount of matter around them. Something like Jupiter was pretty successful, eating up about a full 50% of the matter in the Solar System that wasn't eaten by the Sun. Something like Earth was far less successful, by a factor of about 300.


• At Neurophilosophy Mo looks at time dilation: The apparent prolonged duration of a looming or deviant stimulus is referred to as the time dilation illusion, and three possible, but not mutually exclusive, explanations for why it might occur have been put forward. First, the stimulus might be perceived as lasting longer because it has unusual properties which require an increased amount of attention to be devoted to it. Alternatively, the perceived duration of the stimulus might reflect the amount of energy expended in generating its neural representation (that is, duration is a function of coding efficiency). Finally, the effect might be due to the intrinsic dynamic properties of the stimulus, such that the brain estimates time based on the number of changes in an event.
  


• And finally, Darren at Tetrapod Zoology looks at Australia's alleged bigfoot: Like many people interested in cryptozoology (the study of animals - or alleged animals - known only from anectodal evidence), I'm of the opinion that the Australian Yowie is one of the most problematic of mystery beasts. It is, in fact, so ridiculous and inconvenient that it's difficult to take seriously. As if sasquatch, yeti and orang pendek aren't difficult enough, what are we to make of antipodean reports of a hairy, bipedal, ape-like creature? Back in 2006 (oh my god, four years ago already), Tony Healy and Paul Cropper collated everything known about the Yowie for their book The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot (Strange Nation, Sydney, 2006).

Enjoy!

The Week In Entertainment

Film: The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus - Terry Gillliam's masterwork. I've since read a lot by critics who can't get over Heath Ledger (Manohla Dargis says "Mr. Ledger’s death understandably haunts the movie, shadowing its every gaudy and hyperventilated scene to alternatively distracting and depressing effect," for example. Dargis also, insanely, said that the scene of Ledger's Tony hanging from the bridge should have been edited down, if not cut completely. WTF? It was crucial to the story. If you can't forget that Ledger is dead, wait ten years to go, but I fail to see why Gilliam should have pandered to that aspect of the cult of personality, or fear of death, or whatever it is. It's not like the man hanged himself, after all.) Anyway, I don't think his ghost haunts the film at all though, obviously, ymmv on that score. I just saw a very good performance by lots of gifted actors, him one among the rest.

DVD: Книга мастеров (Kniga Masterov, the Book of the Masters) - a Disney film shot in Russia, by Russians and starring great Russian actors, an adaptation of Russian folk tales about a young man, Ivan (everyone he meets asks him if he's a fool - Ivan the Fool is the protagonist of many folk tales) and the Kamennaya Knyazhna, the Stone Princess, who needs a Master to awake a gemstone so that she can rule the world, and her daughter, who lives with Baba Yaga ... the movie is full of hilarious touches to anyone familiar with Russian folktales (an up-to-date rusalka who's married to Kaschei the Deathless, the chicken legs na remont (under repair), the talking horse, the GPS-ball-of-yarn, the 34th hero... As far as I know it's only in Russian, with Ukrainian and Kazakh subtitles. But if you can understand one of those, or find it in English, I definitely recommend it. Also 9, which is as visually intriguing as anything I've seen this year.

TV: "We have unhappy Germans. Nothing good has ever come from that." I love Veronica. "Is everything we do down here evil?" "That's ridiculous! What about ... Kills. Kills. Kills slowly. Kills quickly. Helps you lose weight ... and also kills. O, God; we're evil scientists!" I love Phil and Lem. And the whole thing with using Nixon's voice - "I'm beginning to think you really are evil scientists!" I love Ted. And Scrubs reboot is getting better, now that Dorian is gone. How ... odd; yet how nice. Leverage - a nice episode showing a bit of Nate's past and the way the team pulls together (and how Tara only does it for the money). The Mentalist - enjoyable, very. I loved the way Cho swapped his attention as soon as Jane started talking, there at the end.

Read: The Anthologist, which is a fascinating melange of literate ramblings and opinions as a self-labelled minor poet tries to overcome his writer's block and finish (honestly, start) the introduction to an anthology he hopes will revive his career. It will send you to the Internet to look up poets, I guarantee it. Also a couple of short things by Scalzi: Judge Sn Goes Golfing, a short story, very funny, made even funnier to me by my living near Dulles; and The God Engines, which definitely packs a punch.

Why are US troops in Port-au-Prince?

While we all watch Hope for Haiti Now's telethon and make donations (if not there, then somewhere), let's take a moment to think about the situation and how it's being handled. Now, let me emphasize, this is not at all meant to discourage you from giving. Give - give as much as you can, whatever that is. But don't give blindly, and don't relax afterwards...

Over in Slate Ben Ehrenreich asks a disturbing question: Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?

The U.S. military did what the U.S. military does. Like a slow-witted, fearful giant, it built a wall around itself, commandeering the Port-au-Prince airport and constructing a mini-Green Zone. As thousands of tons of desperately needed food, water, and medical supplies piled up behind the airport fences—and thousands of corpses piled up outside them—Defense Secretary Robert Gates ruled out the possibility of using American aircraft to airdrop supplies: "An airdrop is simply going to lead to riots," he said. The military's first priority was to build a "structure for distribution" and "to provide security." (Four days and many deaths later, the United States began airdropping aid.)

...

So what happened? Why the mad rush to command and control, with all its ultimately murderous consequences? Why the paranoid focus on security above saving lives? Clearly, President Obama failed to learn one of the basic lessons taught by Hurricane Katrina: You can't solve a humanitarian problem by throwing guns at it. Before the president had finished insisting that "my national security team understands that I will not put up with any excuses," Haiti's fate was sealed. National security teams prioritize national security, an amorphous and expensive notion that has little to do with keeping Haitian citizens alive.

This leaves the more disturbing question of why the Obama administration chose to respond as if they were there to confront an insurgency, rather than to clear rubble and distribute antibiotics and MREs. The beginning of an answer can be found in what Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell, calls "elite panic"—the conviction of the powerful that their own Hobbesian corporate ethic is innate in all of us, that in the absence of centralized authority, only cannibalism can reign.

But the danger of hunger-crazed mobs never came up after the 2004 Pacific tsunami, and no one mentions security when tornados and floods wipe out swaths of the American Midwest. This suggests two possibilities, neither of them flattering. The first is that the administration had strategic reasons for sending 10,000 troops that had little to do with disaster relief. This is the explanation favored by the Latin American left and, given the United States' history of invasion and occupation in Haiti (and in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and Nicaragua and Grenada and Panama), it is difficult to dismiss. Only time will tell what "reconstruction" means.

Another answer lies closer to home. New Orleans and Port-au-Prince have one obvious thing in common: The majority of both cities' residents are black and poor. White people who are not poor have been known, when confronted with black people who are, to start locking their car doors and muttering about their security. It doesn't matter what color our president is. Even when it is ostensibly doing good, the U.S. government can be racist, and, in an entirely civil and bureaucratic fashion, savagely cruel.

It's a good question. I don't like either of the answers. But I can't think of another...

Center Embedding!

Check out this beautiful example (from a comment thread at Mark Fiore's site):

The dog the rock thrown into the pack hit snarls the loudest.

Isn't that gorgeous?

It's a perfect example of what textbooks for other languages remind English speakers of: you can omit relative pronouns in English - that is, the commenter could have said "the dog that the rock which was thrown into the pack hit snarls...". (I hope you wouldn't, though; that sentence is clunky.) But it's also deeply embedded.

The dog snarls the loudest that was hit by the rock that was thrown into the pack.

The dog that was hit by the rock (that was) thrown into the pack snarls the loudest.

Both of those avoid the second level of embedding; the first one has no embedding, and thus the information structure is altered. "Snarls the loudest" is the kicker here and should be last; that's one of the things embedding lets you do.

(You can, of course, restructure this sentence lots of ways, for instance "The dog that snarls the loudest is the one that was hit by the rock that was thrown into the pack" or even something like "When you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, you will hit one and that one will snarl the loudest". )

ps - But wait! Isn't it a rule of English that

when the relative pronoun is the subject of a relative clause, it has to be included. (source BBC Learning English)

So how can we say "the rock thrown into the pack"? Isn't "the rock" the subject?

Yes, it is. But here we have a "reduced relative", which is made by omitting not only the relative but also the aux (the part of the verb phrase that carries tense and number), here the was of "was thrown". That turns the relative clause into an adjectival phrase, so it can modify the subject of the original clause and turn one entire clause into a noun phrase instead - thus densely compacting the sentence. Note, too, that if the verb doesn't have a complement, this new adjectival phrase can precede the noun (in effect, becoming an adjective):

the dog hit by the thrown rock snarls

In fact, note that in this compacted clause, "hit by the rock" is also a reduced relative; you could say "the hit dog". Other languages (Russian and Ukrainian, for example) can say "the thrown into the pack rock," or "the hit by the rock dog," or even "the hit by the thrown into the pack rock dog" - and how's that for embedding? It's helped by gender and case endings on the adjectivals, of course

Where in English we have three bare nouns

pack rock dog

in Russian we'd have

pack-accusative rock-instrumental dog-nominative

with matching endings on the participles and it would all sort out nicely

But English puts such complex (or heavy) modifiers after the noun regardless of whether a verbal form is involved:

a big house
a big enough house
a house big enough for my family

Ah, syntax. It's so much fun.

Happy Birthday, Vasily

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.

Two 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, Last year 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. This year, a moody picture of Stenka Razin in his boat, and a portrait of an old man in his vegetable garden.

The Summitt

I meant to post these earlier. I took them the evening I saw the Lady Vols play Oklahoma. They came from behind to win by 21, powered by Angie Bjorklund's 5 three pointers and Shekinna Stricklen's triple-double - 17 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists - just the second in Tennessee history.

Here's the floor at Thompson-Bolling Arena, called The Summitt.

And here are the banners at the women's end of the court. The men's end isn't quite so gaudy.

Snowbirds

Dark-eyed juncos (or slate juncos, or snowbirds) come down here from Canada every winter. They're hard to get pictures of, but two weeks ago in the dawn of a snowy day, these two sat still against a pastel sky long enough to get several shots.

Disappointed? I wish that were all I was

Okay, it's been over a year. A quarter into the presidency of Barack Obama. And I am more disappointed than I thought I'd be.

Oh, Bill Clinton made it very clear to me that I was going to be disappointed by Obama - as did the man's own style. His fairly progressive rhetoric was harnessed to the service of a centrist policy that consistently seeks "consensus" and "bipartisanship" for their own sake, not to serve any other goals. Oh, yes, he inherited a helluva mess, and oh, yes, he's handled a lot of it okay. But. His consistent refusal to push for a public option - or pretty much anything at all - in the health care debates pretty much made a mockery of his claim to want to be the last president to deal with the issue. His silence on DADT and DOMA rightly infuriates his GLBT supporters. And his escalation of the war in Afghanistan infuriates a lot of others.

But his promise to close Guantánamo within one year has not only been broken, it's been savagely shredded. As reported in the New York Times yesterday:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

Half a year ago Bob Herbert took us to task for not screaming louder about Obama's disregard for civil rights in the War On Terror. I didn't post then, because I'd made this promise to give the man a year. Well, it's been a year. And - as Herbert said - "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

To bereave a man of life... or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government. - Alexander Hamilton

This isn't just a "disappointment". This is a betrayal.

[check Glenn Greenwald's column from yesterday (Just to add some thick irony to all of this, today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama's Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year -- an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo -- indefinite detention with no charges -- will continue indefinitely.) for more on this topic.]

Awkward non-error avoidance

In his diary entry for today George Orwell preserved a newspaper clipping on making macon (mutton cured like bacon). In that clipping is this extremely awkward sentence:

One [method] is to obtain a high-sided cask out of which the top and bottom have been struck.

This is what happens when you contort your prose to avoid "errors" that aren't.

(Heck, even

...a cask with the top and bottom struck out of it

is better than this!)

Lack of Skill

I'm watching Hope for Haiti Now and they had the number on the screen: 1-877-99-HAITI

I can't call that number - at least not easily. My Blackberry doesn't have a standard phone keypad, and I never memorized it. I would have to draw a phone-keypad and stick numbers on it, and hope I remembered which ones were left out (i and o, right?) Or else find my cordless phone in the other room... at least I have one! I know people who don't. (Hmmm... maybe those who don't are so used to texting they have the keypad memorized.)

I went to the website and they had the same number. I found a contact number for questions, and was going to call it, but then I see someone else thought of it: they put the numbers up on the TV under the word (994-2484).

I had noticed before (with the Post Office) that I couldn't remember what number went with what letter. Then I was on the bus, and there was no way I could remember.

I never liked those word-numbers, but I used to be able to dial them by staring at the phone... What an odd gap in my knowledge!

The frost was white as snow

Tuesday morning we had a cold, hard frost.

Happy Birthday, George

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know... George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born today in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1788. Lame and bisexual, he had a miserable childhood, and left Britain as a young man to travel the eastern Mediterranean. He wrote a long poem about that trip, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and it made him an overnight success... success which he handled badly. Eventually his scandalous life made it dangerous for him to remain in Britain, and he fled to Italy, where he died at 36, deeply involved in the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire and still working on his final poem, Don Juan (which, in true English fashion, is pronounced Don Joo-an - as we see from the very first stanza, where it rhymes with "true one" and "new one".)


On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year

'Tis time the heart should be unmoved,
   Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
      Still let me love!

My days are in the yellow leaf;
   The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
      Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys
   Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze--
      A funeral pile.

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
   The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
      But wear the chain.

But 'tis not thus--and 'tis not here--
   Such thoughts should shake my soul nor now,
Where glory decks the hero's bier,
      Or binds his brow.

The sword, the banner, and the field,
   Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
      Was not more free.

Awake! (not Greece--she is awake!)
   Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
      And then strike home!

Tread those reviving passions down,
   Unworthy manhood!--unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
      Of beauty be.

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?
   The land of honourable death
Is here:--up to the field, and give
      Away thy breath!

Seek out--less often sought than found--
   A soldier's grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
      And take thy rest.

Cold Duck

A pair of mallards celebrate the pond's unfreezing

Sky Watch: Cold Frosty Morning

Tuesday morning, 7:20 am, a cold, frosty morning...







more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Louis

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.

The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’ ”). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.”

Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: “I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has).” Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as “Luke, xxiii, 43” and another, a page later, as “Isaiah xl, 3.” The word “abuzz” is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write “Who said ‘I cannot tell a lie?’ ”) A line from “My Fair Lady” is misquoted (“The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning”). And it is stated that The New Yorker, “that famously punctilious periodical,” renders “the nineteen-eighties” as the “1980’s,” which it does not. The New Yorker renders “the nineteen-eighties” as “the nineteen-eighties.”

...Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor.

You can read the whole review here, and you should, as his discussion of writing

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.

is well worth your time .

Worthless polls

Here's a great example, from today's Baltimore Sun:

Do you approve of Gov. Martin O'Malley's plan to balance the budget through a combination of program cuts, fund transfers and an expected infusion of federal funds?

Yes / No / Not sure

But you could be against it because you don't think Maryland can afford to cut services and should raise taxes instead, or don't expect federal funds, or don't think a balanced budget is a desirable goal, or for some less easily described reason - or just because you hate O'Malley. What's the point of a question like that? 75% of respondents say "No" won't give you any useful information.

At least it's not pretending to be scientific...

Brown wins. Can we?

If the loss of the 60th vote (assuming, of course, that it was ever really there) motivates the Senate to listen to Howard Dean and just pass the damn thing using reconciliation and 51 votes, then yes.

Yes we can.

We can pass a better bill by bypassing the likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. We can actually have health care reform, not deform.

Will we? That's a horse of an entirely different, and improbable, color. But you can ask for it by petition and by calling your representative.

Happy Birthday, Buzz

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.

Why was the Haiti earthquake so devastating?

There's one fairly unsettling reason.

At Common Dreams Ted Rall tells us why the Haitian earthquake was Made in the USA.

As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."

Gee, I wonder how that happened?

Hat tip to the Cranky Linguist, who points out a neglected (or contradicted, depending on where you get your "news") truth:

There were [before the quake] 300-400 Cuban doctors and other health workers in Haiti, doing the job the US is mostly AWOL from of providing ongoing health care to Haitian people.

Balancing Act take two

Today's paper - print and online - have a little example of real "balance".

Q: If global warming is real, why is it so cold?

Two answers, one explaining the difference between weather and climate and detailing the cause of the current cold weather (The cold winter thus far in many parts of the United States and northern Europe has been caused by another oscillation, the Arctic oscillation. A strong high pressure over Greenland deflects cold air of the jet stream farther to the south than usual. But Arctic temperatures have been quite a bit warmer than usual, as are temperatures around the Mediterranean, most of Africa, South America and south Asia.) and the other starting with a nice but irrelevant tu quoque and then falling back on saying "no proof!" (Some activists are now claiming that the cold snap is evidence that global warming increases extreme whether events, be it unusual cold or heat. In truth, the evidence of an uptick in extreme weather is thin.)

The real kicker is that response one is from Donald F. Boesch, president, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, but response two is from Ben Lieberman, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation's Roe Institute for Economic Policy.

Yeah. An economist. Or, rather, an economics policy analyst. He's qualified to talk about climate change why, exactly?

Happy Birthday, Peter Mark

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!


(lol image from loltheorists)