Black and Orange

Some near-dawn shots of a Northern (Baltimore) oriole - a bit fuzzy, but he doesn't pose often.

Happy Birthday, Ray!

Today is Ray Harryhausen's birthday.

His movies were technical marvels of storytelling wonder. It Came From Beneath the Sea, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and even The Valley of Gwangi: maybe they didn't always make sense, but they made you watch and say "oooooo". What more can we ask?

Happy Birthday, John

Today John Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, in 1685 - he wrote The Beggar's Opera. Although its sequel, Polly, was banned by then Prime Minister Walpole from being performed, sales of it made Gay rich. Unfortunately he then lost everything in the South Seas Bubble. He died in 1732 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph, written by Alexander Pope, is followed by two lines that Gay himself composed: "Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it."
LOVE in her eyes sits playing,And sheds delicious death;Love in her lips is straying,And warbling in her breath;Love on her breast sits panting,And swells with soft desire:Nor grace, nor charm, is wantingTo set the heart on fire.

One henchman, two ...?

In the commentary for "The Future Job"on Leverage season two, the production staff are trying to decide what generic term to use for the villain's assistant who is not the muscle (that one is called the "Busey", after Gary Busey's character in Lethal Weapon). One of the producers suggests "lackey" but they think the type is more powerful than a mere lackey - "He's more of a henchman than a lackey," the producer says. And one of the co-writers adds,

"Lackeys don't have lines. Henchmans do."

Wow. How's that for aggressive regularisation?

In the green

Redwinged blackbirds are black. Well, the males are. The females and juveniles are not. It's the kind of thing that can really trip up a novice birder (she said out of experience...)





Don't these juvies' faces look like, I don't know, cartoons or little hedgehogs or something?

Not mainstream?

Here's what the second-ranking Republican in the Senate had to say during Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing:

"Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy is not what I would consider to be mainstream."

And what, exactly, is it that Kyl objects to?

"In 2003, Ms. Kagan wrote a tribute to Justice Marshall in which she said that, 'in his view, it was the role of the courts in interpreting the Constitution to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government."

Also? (Yes, there's an "also".)

Kagan also emphasized Marshall's "unshakable determination to protect the underdog," Kyl said.

So protecting the unprotected isn't "mainstream". Good to know what things will be like if the GOP get a majority, isn't it?

(Source: Dana Millbanks column from today)

Origins

Robins are thrushes - well, American robins, anyway. Most thrushes have speckled breasts, and robins, of course, are "red breasts" - or rusty, anyway. But the juveniles display their family heritage for a few months, anyway.

Big Blue

Friday morning at the pond. A Great Blue Heron fished at the deeper end. Suddenly he lifted out of the water and left, flying all tucked in and being harrassed by redwings. He disappeared, and as soon as he was out of sight they forgot him. Within thirty seconds he - or another - circled back over the reeds and landed back in the water.

Happy Birthday, Krzysztof

Krzysztof Kieślowski was born today in Warsaw, in 1941. He wanted to direct in the theatre but there wasn't room at school, so he went into film as an intermidate step. Of course, he never went "further", but what an intermediate! The Decalogue and Three Colors are world-famous, and rightly so...

His grave in Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw bears the classic 'framing hands' - the view through which he showed us so much.

I and the Bird

Mike introduces this edition of I and the Bird:

The power of a group of like-minded individuals working together towards a common goal never ceases to astound me. No, I’m not talking about the blatant (and unsuccessful) efforts of FIFA referees to keep the U.S. team from advancing in the World Cup! I’m speaking instead about the greatest group nature blog on the planet, the Bird Ecology Study Group website out of Singapore.

The BESGroup blog, led by the indefatigable Y C Wee, takes the group’s commitment to know more about a bird than just its name forward by providing a platform from which each member can share field observations, photos, and research. This blog is simply amazing and successful too based on its long history! If you’re not already a fan, you’re in for a treat but make sure you start with Y C’s “many faces of birding” edition of I and the Bird #128.

I can only echo that.

Monarch

Here's a butterfly I don't need my Kaufman for! The Monarch, probably the most well-known North American butterfly of all... it's a male: see the little spot on the vein on the lower wing? Females don't have that.

Happy Birthday, Ambrose

Ambrose Bierce, born this day in 1842.

He left us

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,

The Devil's Dictionary,

an opinionated style manual called Write it Right which is more fun than Strunk's "horrid little book",

several fantastic short stories,

and the abiding legacy of a mysterious disappearance...

(Are you still out there, somewhere, Old Gringo?)

Happy Birthday, Joss!

Joss Whedon was born today in New York City in 1964.

Buffy, Angel, Firefly & Serenity the movie ... even Dollhouse. And not forgetting Dr Horrible! Wonderful, wonderful stories.

Many happy returns of the day, Joss!

Happy Birthday, Alan

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS, was born today in Maida Vale, London, in 1912. Every person reading this owes a debt to Turing. As Time put it, naming Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."

Turing was also an important figure at Bletchley Park, Britain's WWII code-breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. (If this interests you, check the National Cryptologic Museum's working Enigma the next time you're in the DC area.)

Turing was also gay, living in an era when homosexuality was still both illegal and officially considered a mental illness. After he was outed (in the course of an investigation into his house's being burgled), he was criminally prosecuted - on the same charge as Oscar Wilde had been - and this ended his career, and his life. Offered the choice between prison and probation plus chemical castration, he opted for the latter, but his clearance had been revoked. The next year he died from what was officially declared self-induced cyanide poisoning.

Here's a website maintained by his biographer, Andrew Hodges.

Happy Birthday, Anna!

Anna Akhmatova (Анна Ахматова) was born today in 1889 in Odesa, Ukraine. That was her pen name; she was born Anna Andreevna Gorenko (Russian: Анна Андреевна Горенко; Ukrainian: Ганна Андріївна Горенко). She wrote under her grandfather's Tatar surname because her father didn't wish her to embarrass him by publishing verse using the family's honorable name...

One of Russia's greatest poets. Once, long years ago (1974 in fact), one of my Russian professors (Russian by birth) was talking about gendered nouns to a first-year class. One of his examples of professions: поэт and поэтесса (poet and poetess). All women were "poetesses", not poets, he said, and something in the way he said it evoked Victorians and their "lady authoresses". So I asked him, Even Akhmatova?

And he said: Аг! Ахматова! Она настоящий поэт! (Ah, Akhmatova! She is a genuine poet!)

Да, я любила их, те сборища ночные,-
На маленьком столе стаканы ледяные,
Над черным кофеем пахучий, зимний пар,
Камина красного тяжелый, зимний жар,
Веселость едкую литературной шутки
И друга первый взгляд, беспомощный и жуткий.

5 января 1917, Слепнево

And as translated by me:

Oh, I loved them, those gatherings at night -
The little table with iced glasses
The black coffee with its fragrant, wintry steam,
The red hearth's heavy, wintry heat,
The tasty pleasure of a literary joke
And a friend's first glance, helpless and terrible.

5 January 1917, Slepnevo


Find her in Russian and English here. And her Poets.org page.
And her Requiem in Russian and English.

Scathing his insight teeth

Recently I've been getting comment spammed by "Anonymous". But this spam is intriguing - he seems to take some sentence and use some machine program to produce varying translations - essentially by replacing individual words.

Generally I just delete them, but I thought I'd offer a few here.


1

A human beings begins cutting his discernment teeth the first often he bites eccentric more than he can chew.
A humankind begins scathing his wisdom teeth the first often he bites eccentric more than he can chew.
A man begins scathing his insight teeth the earliest without surcease he bites off more than he can chew.

2

As your faith is strengthened you determination find that there is no longer the emergency to from a discrimination of repress, that things commitment flow as they will, and that you drive flow with them, to your fantabulous delight and benefit.
As your obligation is strengthened you determination find that there is no longer the need to be suffering with a intelligibility of repress, that things thinks fitting progress as they will, and that you discretion flow with them, to your great gladden and health.

3

To be a good human being is to procure a philanthropic of openness to the in the seventh heaven, an skill to guardianship aleatory things beyond your own manage, that can govern you to be shattered in very exceptionally circumstances on which you were not to blame. That says something uncommonly weighty with the prerequisite of the principled life: that it is based on a corporation in the unpredictable and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something somewhat tenuous, but whose acutely precise attraction is inseparable from that fragility.
To be a upright human being is to from a amiable of openness to the world, an gift to trust aleatory things beyond your own pilot, that can front you to be shattered in hugely extreme circumstances on which you were not to blame. That says something exceedingly important with the fettle of the ethical compulsion: that it is based on a trust in the fitful and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a sparkler, something fairly feeble, but whose acutely item attraction is inseparable from that fragility.
To be a good benign being is to have a philanthropic of openness to the far-out, an cleverness to trusteeship aleatory things beyond your own pilot, that can lead you to be shattered in very exceptional circumstances as which you were not to blame. That says something very impressive with the condition of the principled passion: that it is based on a trust in the up in the air and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a prize, something somewhat dainty, but whose very special attraction is inseparable from that fragility.


It might be amusing to try to find out the originals of these: none of them are quite English but you can readily enough tell they're meant to be the same thing.

Kingbird

Another first for me: an Eastern Kingbird!

Happy Solstice!

It's the Solstice! Summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere - nearly Midsummer Day - and winter solstice in the southern, nearly Midwinter.


Longest day or longest night: may it find - and leave - you happy.

Happy Birthday, Billy!

Billy Wilder was born today in Sucha (now Poland, then Austria) in 1906. It always - always - startles me to hear him speak. He gave us the incomparable Some Like It Hot... which alone would have been enough. But of course it isn't alone - there are also Sabrina, Stalag 17, Lost Weekend, Witness for the Prosecution, Sunset Boulevard... Thanks!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Murder Most English, a low-key, quirky English village mystery series. Some more Murdoch Mysteries (season 2), and Campion. A Russian movie called Rusalka (Mermaid), which is funny and heartwarming if in a particularly Russian way; though its blend of dreamy magical realism and the nitty-gritty of post-Soviet Moscow isn't typical of Russian film-making, it's pretty typical of Russian thought.

TV: Leverage!! Yay, it's back. I have to get up too early to watch both episodes tonight, but so far it's on its game. Doctor Who. I should have known. No sooner do I say I like having two companions than... Poor, poor Rory. As soon as the doctor said this wasn't a fixed point in time and anything could happen, I knew they were teasing us with the two of them on the hillside... This new show is harder on its companions that the earlier incarnation... Some of the US Open, and I don't think I've explicitly said, but I do watch baseball...

Read: Emyr Humphreys' brilliant character study The Shop. Began The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Ochsner, which is so far excellent, in the tradition of social satirists like Bulgakov.

Good news, everyone

By the way, in case you hadn't heard...

Futurama is back!

This Thursday at 9 - new episodes!

That might have something to do with it, yes

I'm watching the Orioles (well, somebody has to, right?). They're playing in San Diego (which is an abomination, but that's a rant for another day). They just said that Camden Yards has the fourth fewest doubles hit in it in the majors. Gary Thorne, the announcer, was flabbergasted. "I just find that astounding," he said. Jim Palmer was more clear-eyed, as usual, and pointed out, "A lot of that might be because the team that plays here doesn't hit very well."

(Let me add: it's not San Diego that's an abomination, it's the Orioles, an AL team, playing the Padres, an NL team.)

An organic strike?

From Bradshaw of the Future, a lovely example of how words change in meaning (and we usually only object to the change that happens while we're alive):

I have a friend who complains about the term organic food. Isn't all food organic, he says. My response is yes, but that's the neat thing about language - a word can have more than one meaning. Organic has been used in connection with farming without chemicals since 1861, so it's here to stay. Interestingly, the earliest use of organic in English was "designating the jugular vein", and if the meaning can change from that to "relating to organs", then to "having the characteristics of a living organism", there's no reason why it can't change further to "of, relating to, or derived from living matter" then to "of food: produced without the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial chemicals" (OED).

What makes this particularly lovely is that your rejoinder doesn't have to be "language changes, deal with it". No, you can agree heartily - with the premise, while professing shock that your friend thinks "organic" means anything other than "designating the jugular vein".

Do they despair, as does the Queen's English Society, that "“our language will become diluted by foreign (especially US) influences”… Ask why they don't say "our tongue will become weakened by outside (chiefly US) inflowings"?

Do they bemoan "between you and I"? Add your wails over the loss of "ye" - possibly of "between me and eowic"!

Ridiculous? Of course it is: just as ridiculous about complaining about a use that's been around for very nearly 150 years. Such complaints about changing meanings - usually about additional meanings - are rarely anything other than carping about change (which, believe, me I understand; little annoys me as much as change for change's sake) or the people who use the new meaning... the first is a forlorn hope, and the second usually doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

Unearthing: a bad idea regardless

There was an episode of Buffy in which Cordelia, responding to a report that archaeologists had unearthed something that was proving quite deadly, said: "Some things should remain earthed!"

I'm watching a Doctor Who Confidential, on the episode The Water of Mars; they've got water all over the set and one of the electricians is pointing out how dangerous that is for shooting. "So, everything has to be 12 volt. All the lights, all the monitors, all the buttons, etc., all have to be earthed, so that no one dies."

I guess Cordelia was right!

(for those who don't know: the American for what you do with electrical stuff is "ground")

We're all the same, unfortunately...

Just got this from a friend in Moscow...

So I'm walking to the mall today -- our car shipped on Thursday -- and I pass a news truck that says on the side, "Komsomolskaya Pravda - the most widely read paper in Russia."

Well, no surprise. I've long known that most Russians get their news from KP. But what a shame. Because it's not just the most popular news source in the country, it's also the least reliable, the one more out to inflame than inform, the one out to discredit anyone trying to improve this sad country. The one that plays to populist fears and prejudices. The one that never passes up the chance to twist and distort. The one that blames Russia's ills on the foreigners, the minorities, the intellectuals, the liberal media; anyone but the steaming clod reading the page.

Then I sensed something nagging me at the back of my head. Well, once I got rid of the old beggar woman I'd absent-mindedly picked up and thrown over my shoulder... no, that didn't happen. What I meant was, all that seemed familiar.

Then I remembered. It was the feeling I'd had when I realized that the most popular news source in Germany, at least when I lived there, was Das Bild... also the least reliable.

Then I stopped cold dead. Britain. What had I just read the other day? Most Brits get their news from... the Daily Mail.

The most unreliable source of news in the country? The one most prone to misrepresent in the name of firing up the masses?

The Daily Mail.

Suddenly I knew what to say the next time someone smugly reminds me that Fox News is the highest-rated news channel in the country.

Happy Birthday, Salman!

Today is the birthday of Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay (now Mumbai). His novel Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize. His novel The Satanic Verses won him a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini (which was revoked in 1998) - and got his Japanese translator killed, his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher wounded, and the hotel of his Turkish translator set on fire - a fire which killed forty others staying there. Then his knighting the year before last brought the crazies out again (and yes, they're crazies, those who claim killing the author is the only response to a book they don't like - you didn't see any Christians calling for the death of Robert Graves or rioting over The Last Temptation of Christ, blasphemous though those may have been. Even those protesting DaVinci Code restricted themselves to saying "Don't watch this blasphemous film!", not "Kill Tom Hanks!").

So another birthday arrives for Salman Rushdie, who still writes: recently he published The Enchantress of Florence.

May he enjoy many more.

Sky Watch: Silver Sky

A bright silver sun shines through clouds framed by trees...





more Sky Watchers here

This is why I know I'm an introvert

Carolyn Hax had a question today starting "I can't have all my eight BFFs in my wedding, and I can't choose without hurting feelings"...

How can you possibly have eight best friends?

They're coming to take you away

Ignore the man whose mustache signals that he will find himself at the business end of the Right Fist o' Justice before this story is over. Ignore the woman who might just as well be Cherry Trail, including wearing Cherry's favorite color. And don't be too distracted by Ernest Borgnine in drag there (tip of the hat to Josh at Comics Curmudgeon for noticing that first!).

Instead, focus on what "Sally" is saying to Sassy: I hope your owners find you before they take you away.

Well, duh, Sally; they'd have a hard time taking her away before they found her!

Seriously, what's happening here? Simple: Sally is using the indefinite "they" to refer to the city employees who will be taking her yardful of dogs away. Pronouns, like other deictic elements, take their meaning from the context in which they appear; they don't have any real meaning on their own. What makes this sentence potentially ambiguous is that its structure seems to posit "your owners" for the referent, as in "I hope your owners find you before they have to go back to California", but actually "they" is referring to something not specified in the sentence, but part of the larger context.

Yes, Sassy: they're coming to take you away!

What's really interesting is how easily we parse such sentences; we may note (and chuckle over) the ambiguity, but we aren't actually thrown by it at all. Instead, we are able to quickly identify the pragmatics that make "they" unlikely to refer to "your owners" and then to come up with the contextual identity that makes sense. I don't think we could do it better if we had different pronouns.

Too professorial? Not really...

Mark Liberman neatly sums up the "Obama is too professorial" meme ...

This case is no exception. Mr. Payack trots out a few nearly-meaningless numbers, and the media (including many bloggers) obliges by arguing about whether the problem is Obama's elite aloofness or the public's bad education. In fact, the problem is none of the above: it's the media's shallowness and credulity.

And, yeah: he has a lot of numbers to back it up, including that Obama's speech used shorter sentences than many of Bush's.

Two days, three herons

Monday afternoon I saw my first Yellow-crowned Night Heron. This morning the other two were back - the Great Blue, snagging a fish from the bank, and the Green, hiding in the willow and then heading for the other side of the pond from the Blue... A great week, and it's only half over! It's just too bad that it was so early and dim; the Green's shots are particularly grainy.

Zeus gets active

Over at Slacktivist, Fred writes about a clear, blindingly clear, sign of The Wrath of Zeus:

Some called it "Touchdown Jesus," or "Big Butter Jesus," or "Quicksand Jesus," but the actual name for the giant statue outside of Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, was "King of Kings."

Whatever one calls it, that glorious piece of Roadside Americana is now gone. The statue was struck by lightning Monday night and burned to the ground.

That's right, Jesus burned to the ground. Yet the Cowtown Cowboy still stands -- along with hundreds of his kin. What does it all mean?

This is being interpreted by some in the congregation as a sign from God. Perhaps it was -- perhaps Zeus was displeased that the people of Monroe, Ohio, had forsaken him. Lightning bolts, after all, are Zeus' thing, so if we're going to interpret them as signs of divine intervention, then Zeus is the divinity we should be talking about.

Check it out!

Now, that's an image...

At The Nation, Dave Zirin asks:

Is it possible that if the USA was favored to win the World Cup, Beck himself would be in the streets with his own solid gold vuvuzela? I feel that to ask the question is to answer it. In fact, this is as good a reason as any to hope for a mighty run by the US team. It would be high comedy to see Beck and Friends caught in a vice between their patriotic fervor and their nativist fear.

It would, at that.

Go Celtics!

I have a stake in this, now. If Boston wins in six, ABC will air two new episodes of Better Off Ted!! w00t!

Yes, I'll be buying the DVD and will see them then, but I don't want to have to wait! Gratification now! Go, Celtics!

Happy Birthday, Issa!

Today is the birthday of Kobayashi Issa, a master of haiku. He was born in Kashiwa- bara, Japan, in 1763.

One of his most well-known:

.かたつぶりそろそろ登れ富士の山
katatsuburi soro-soro nobore fuji no yama
little snail
inch by inch, climb
Mount Fuji!

Above is one Issa wrote and illustrated:

.庭のてふ子が這へばとびはへばとぶ
niwa no chô ko ga haeba tobi haeba tobuniwa no chō
ko ga haeba tobi
haeba tobu

garden butterfly
as the baby crawls, it flies―
crawls close, flutters on

And a few more:

.慈悲すれば糞をする也雀の子
jihi sureba hako wo suru nari suzume no ko

when you hold it kindly
it poops on you...
baby sparrow

.地蔵さへとしよるやうに木の葉哉
jizô sae toshiyoru yô ni ko[no]ha kana

even holy Jizo
is looking older...
fallen leaves

.罷出るは此薮の蟾にて候
[makari] izuru wa kono yabu no hiki nite sôrô

"Allow me to present myself--
I am the toad
of this thicket!"

(more, and image from contemporary haiga)

First time!

It was a hot, gray day today. The kind of close, sultry day that just cries out for a thunderstorm to break the heat, but cries out in vain - although it has just started raining now, three and half hours later. I was walking towards the pond when I spotted a heron beyond the small willow. I thought it was a green heron - I saw one last week, getting some not very good photos of him. (One of those is below...)

But, as you have probably guessed, it wasn't. Nor was it the great blue who hangs around the pond (a shot of him below, too). I knew that as soon as I got a good look. It wasn't anything I've seen before - not just around here, but ever, except in my sister's photos from Florida. It was a Yellow-crowned Night Heron, my first, and a bird I didn't even know we had around here (the guide says we do, though in the coastal areas, which we're just a bit inland to be, I'd have thought. But here he is!).

The Week In Entertainment

DVD: Some more of The Murdoch Mysteries, and also a couple of Campion episodes.

TV: Caught up on Doctor Who (I must say, I like it when there are two companions, and also I like it that Amy has seen past the fascination of the Doctor; one of the many things I loved about Donna Noble was that she wasn't in love with him). "The graves round here eat people" ... that's a spooky line. And not addressed yet...

Read: A brilliant thriller called Black Water Rising by Attica Locke, which uses its genre to look at two moments in the civil rights movement - the fiery 60s and the early 80s, when the results of the 60s were making themselves known in often unanticipated ways. This book is really good. Also I picked up Kindle editions of a couple of the books the Murdoch TV series is based on. They're good, too, though (of course) rather different from the show, which is lighter, more procedural, and features a strong woman as a regular, which the books (probably truer to the time) do not. They're darker explorations of the seamy side the late 1900s, not grim or explicit but darker than a show that features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Nikola Tesla ... both good stuff.

Helen

A few thoughts on Helen Thomas. or more accurately l'affaire Helen Thomas...

First, and this is really rhetorical, just when did questioning or insulting Israel become such a big deal? Why exactly are Israel's policy choices so sacred to Americans?

Second, why is it such a triumph that an old, respected reporter has been forced to resign because of something she said? Regardless of how insensitive or even genuinely prejudiced (though put it next to a lot of what, say, Rush says... ). Seems to me it's a bit of a blow to free speech and the media, not any sort of triumph.

Third, does this mean we can all agree that "why don't they go back where they come from?" can be retired from American political speech from now on? If it's wrong to ask it about the Israelis, it should be wrong to ask it about anyone, from recently arrived Hispanics to third generation blacks to those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower "never caring that someone was already here", right?

Fourth, and this is really important ... it's a truth that cannot be legitimately denied: if it was a crime when George Bush was in office then it's a crime now that Obama is. Guantanamo isn't okay now (nor will Bagram be), for instance. If you were upset about Gaza before, you should still be; the situation hasn't improved there. Just because Helen Thomas has been pushed into obscurity doesn't mean that everything else goes along with her.

Sky Watch: Clouds at Dawn

Yesterday's spectacular dawn over Maryland City....







more Sky Watchers here and you definitely want to see the Swedish sunset on the home page! It's a don't miss.

Flaunting his heterosexuality

Ben Lowson, a self-identified military commander, writes to the Washington Post:

The principle of this policy is a good one. In 12 years of service as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, I have not once found that an individual's sexual orientation had any role in military operations.

Law or no law, standards of professional conduct demand that military personnel avoid asking about, talking about or flaunting sexual orientation. Our attention belongs solely on our mission to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, not on our individual differences.

This in no way denies the fact that we are unique individuals with diverse backgrounds, interests, and, yes, sexual orientations. But it is for the greater good of our country and our world that we unite and put these differences aside. So let's keep "don't ask, don't tell" but apply it equally to all service members as a common-sense standard of conduct.

I wonder if Lowson is married. I wonder if he wears his wedding ring or mentions his wife and kids. Such flaunting of his heterosexuality!

Seriously, it's amazing to me how often it's "flaunting" when a gay person says they're gay, but just normal when a straight person makes reference to his "regular life". Try going through a whole week at work without ever once mentioning your family (no "we went to the movies", no "my wife told me about...", no "my kid wants to go to Hopkins" - none of it). That's just as much " talking about or flaunting sexual orientation" as whatever it is Lowson thinks his gay soldiers are going to talk about...

Remember the old "It's not a style, just a life"? Yeah.

Feminism Palin style

In today's Boston Globe is an op-ed piece by Cathy Young in which she argues that "feminism" should be broadened to include people like Sarah Palin because otherwise it "risks losing valuable allies for the women’s movement".

I couldn't disagree more with her stated conclusions, yet I think Palin-type "feminists" do in fact mean something important. This paragraph is the key one for me:

But is a feminist like Palin, who has pursued an ambitious career and raised a family, really a feminist? In her autobiography, “Going Rogue,’’ Palin writes, “I didn’t subscribe to all the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me.’’ She voices a sentiment most American women would embrace.

The picture used to illustrate this column has Palin doing her famous wave next to Rosie the Riveteer rolling up her sleeve. That's a perfect picture: Rosie was less a feminist than Palin is. Palin at least expects equal opportunity; she'd be incensed if her daughter was fired because some man showed up looking for a job; she'd be horrified if a boss made sleeping with him part of her job duties; and I doubt she thought Alaska should pay her less when she was governor than they're paying her successor. Rosie, on the other hand, meekly unrolled her sleeves and went back to the kitchen once her boyfriend/husband came back from the war: she wasn't a feminist, she was a patriot. She was a main-stream American who wanted to win the war.

So, too, is Palin mainstream on this topic. "I'm not a feminist, but -" is a conversational gambit you hear all the time. It annoys women old enough to remember the fights these girls, and women like Palin, take for granted as won. But perhaps they're the surest sign of those victories.

No one would actually dare to say in a political campaign that he (or she) actually believes that women's work is worth less, or that the glass ceiling is God-ordained because Paul said women shouldn't "usurp authority over" men. (Tim 2:12) Setting aside the arguments about what Paul actually said (woman? wife? man? husband?) or what "authority" or "teach" meant, we can acknowledge that there are plenty of people out there who believe that women shouldn't run for President. But none of them advanced that argument against Clinton or Palin - but it's an argument that certainly used to be made, back in the old days.

A parallel argument was once made about race. Witness the trouble Rand Paul encountered when he tried to make a core Libertarian point, one which isn't, in its pure libertarian form, about race (Libertarians don't care what race, color, creed, sex, gender, religion, or anything else you are: the government shouldn't be able to force them to serve you in their restaurant if they don't want to). Yet only a few days went by before Paul was backing away from his statement as fast as he could.

Why? It's not because no one in Kentucky - or anywhere else for that matter - isn't racist. Of course they are, some of them. It's because you simply can't say that sort of thing in so many words - or even slightly near the count - in public in any more. Nowadays you have to speak in code to signal your real meaning. Nowadays you have to at least pretend to agree with the absolute minimum of the original civil rights agenda. Nowadays, a black man can be president.

In the same way civil rights activists aren't out demanding that blacks be allowed to sit at restaurant counters, vote, or attend public schools, feminists too have moved beyond voting, education, or equal opportunity in jobs. This isn't to say, of course, that women always get paid the same as a man would, or that there isn't a glass ceiling, any more than one can say the race relations picture is all rosy. It's to say that the notions that they should be, and there shouldn't be one, are common - so common that "I'm not a feminist but -" always precedes some basic feminist notion.

Young says

Feminism, [Jessica Valenti] says, is “a structural analysis of a world that oppresses women, an ideology based on the notion that patriarchy exists and that it needs to end’’ — presumably in America and not, say, Afghanistan. But this definition dismisses out of hand the can-do feminism that celebrates female strength and achievement and appeals to vast numbers of women.

Perhaps that's because the feminists get to decide what feminism is? And perhaps that's because the Palin variety of feminism is just Americanism now, like the can-do notion that blacks are people isn't a core part of civil rights activism any more. Perhaps feminism has moved on to something besides the now ordinary, everyday idea that women, too, are people.

If so, whether Palin gets to call herself a "feminist" or gets to continue dumping on them is beside the point, surely. If we're going to call Palin a feminist, then people like Valenti will pick a new name. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not; but don't fool yourself: Valenti and Palin will never co-exist inside the same movement. They can only co-exist inside the same overarching, common ground of being Americans and humans. If Palin wants to co-opt the label, that doesn't mean she's a feminist. It means that the core feminist ideals of a generation ago have finally taken hold of even the most conservative minds.

Breaking news?

I get "breaking news" email from the Sacramento Bee. Often it is (for instance, Judge blocks strike by University of California nurses).

Sometimes it's quite marginal, like this: Seattle police unions recommend Braziel for chief, TV reports

But this morning I got this: Sacramento County median home prices highest since September 2008

Come on. That's "breaking"?

The Week In Entertainment

Grrr. Thought I'd scheduled this but only saved it...

Live: The Thirty-Nine Steps at the Hippodrome, part of Broadway Across America. This play is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and not just on a stage. It's remarkable how closely they could keep to the script while the actions rendered necessary by the cast of four (yes: Richard Hannay, one woman playing Annabella/Pamela/Margaret, and two guys playing everybody else) subverted the suspense and just made it damn funny. Plus, the scene where Hannay crosses the loch - hysterical.

DVD: Some of the Murdoch Mysteries, based on the novels by Maureen Jennings. This Canadian series is fun, so far - "cutting-edge Victorian science" as employed by the Toronto police department just before the turn of the century (19th, that is). Also a couple of the Tommy & Tuppence shows, and a Russian film called "Two Comrades Were Serving (Служили два товарища)" which is a very funny Civil War comedy.

Read: Finished The Leavenworth Mystery and also read The Woman in the Alcove. Intriguing puzzles and a time frame so long ago that it feels very alien (unlike Murdoch, which is written by a living author and set in the 1890s, these were written then).

Happy Birthday, Alexander Sergeevich!

On this day in 1799 Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin was born in Moscow. Pushkin, the father of Russian literature and literary Russian as a language, was beloved in his lifetime - when he died as the result of a duel the government feared rioting. Instead, there was national mourning... Ruslan and Lyudmila, Eugene Onegin, The Captain's Daughter, Boris Godunov, and countless poems ...

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, "Russians know the conceptions of 'homeland' and 'Pushkin' are inseparable. ... To be Russian means to love Pushkin." And 19th century poet Apollon Grigoryev wrote, simply, "Пушкин - это наше все (Pushkin is our everything)".

I've given you Winter Evening and Winter Morning before; this year, a short one, suitable for memorizing.

Птичка

В чужбине свято наблюдаю
Родной обычай старины:
На волю птичку выпускаю
При светлом празднике весны.

Я стал доступен утешенью;
За что на бога меня роптать
Когда хоть одному творенью
Я мог свободу даровать!


Little Bird

In a foreign land I follow
A custom ancient in my own:
To freedom I return a swallow
In this bright rite of spring.

So I achieve some consolation;
Why should I complain of God
If to but one of his creation
I may sweet liberty bestow!

Then again, I might not

The algorithms Amazon uses to alert customers to potentially intriguing purchases can sometimes yield bizarre results. Three years ago, my interest in Anthony Trollope netted me notification about a book on oil tankers and container ships (still baffling).

And today I got this email:

As someone who has purchased or rated Preaching to the Corpse: An Advice Column Mystery by Roberta Isleib, you might like to know that Pharmacotherapy for Psychologists: Prescribing and Collaborative Roles will be released on June 15, 2010.

Indeed, as mood-improvers, I suppose light humorous mysteries and pharmacotherapy have much in common!

Text based

This is a rant, (and why else do we have blogs, really?) posted here because I'm failing to get through to certain people with whom I work.

"Text-based grammar" is more than a buzz-word. It has meaning. If you don't think it works, fine; say so and be done with it. But...

Taking an article, removing the endings off all the nouns and adjectives in the accusative case, helpfully writing plural under those that are, and then putting at the top "Provide the accusative case ending for each blank" is not text-based grammar instruction. You could just as easily have given them a list of words with no surrounding text at all.

At the very least - the absolute very least - you could instruct them to provide the "appropriate case ending". That way they'd have to read a few sentences before figuring out that everything was accusative.

Your cloze is nothing more than a declension test. Here's a word, put it in the accusative.

This is not - I'll say it again: not - text-based grammar instruction.

What is?

Let's assume you want to focus on the accusative. Take your same text and ask them to identify all the accusative case nouns and adjectives in it. That's elementary. For a more sophisticated task, challenge them to not only identify the accusatives, but explain what's happening in the syntax of that particular clause that requires the accusative. Don't just do a rote "produce the ending" drill; get into the usage. Direct objects, accusatives of time and motion... Focus on the sentence fragments Russians are so fond of: why is this lone noun phrase, with no verb or preposition next to it, in the accusative? (a parallel English example might be asking "what is 'candy' in this: "Candy. He didn't eat it." Only by going back to a previous "I gave him books. He didn't read them" could you know.)

Later, you can take your text and isolate those words with endings that might be one thing or might be another - U, for instance, which is feminine accusative and masculine/neuter dative. Don't ask for the ending - give it to them - instead, ask which case it is. If they don't know the word, they'll have to use the syntax. Look at neuters and masculine inanimates and soft-sign feminines, where the accusative and nominative endings are the same; look at masculine animates, where the accusative and genitive endings coincide; again, don't ask "what's the accusative ending?", ask "what case is this? And why?" Participles and relative pronouns both have standard adjectival endings but take different cases (participles match the noun in case, number, and gender, but relatives take the case dictated by their own clause, that is, gazeta chitannaya Ivanom and gazeta, kotoruyu Ivan chital, though they both mean 'the newspaper Ivan read' have a nominative participle and accusative relative; moreover, if the newspaper goes into genitive, so will the participle but not the relative) - they're a fertile field for asking "what case should this be, given that it modifies/refers to this noun?"

That's text-based grammar instruction. Surrounding your list of words to be made accusative with text most of your students won't look at and none of them need to, that isn't.

Is that concept really so hard?

Sky Watch: June arrives in splendor

Check out this dawn! June first, and a more spectacular sky I'd be hard pressed to remember.










more Sky Watchers here

Quote-mining the Constitution

Over at headsup: the blog, Fred tackles another remarkable piece of quote mining, this time of the Constitution (!) by Mark Tapscott in the Washington Examiner:

... but there's a particular touch toward the end that helps put into perspective the deep, ahem, reverence that these people have for the Constitution:

Conservative journalists will do well not to roll their eyes impatiently with liberal colleagues who don't understand that government always expands its control over any activity it either funds or regulates, and therefore must be limited at every level to well-defined, narrowly circumscribed powers that only it can fulfill, as was done by the U.S. Constitution.

Better to explain yet again that the original intention of the Founders with respect to the media -- "Congress shall make no law respecting ... the freedom of the press" - is the key to saving independent journalism.

As Fred says,

We have no idea what the Founders' "original intention" was "with respect to the media," any more than we can comprehend their original intention with regard to powered flight, the internal combustion engine and the ability of those phenomena to deliver nuclear weapons around the globe. Those things were simply inconceivable when the Founders got around to the Bill of Rights. We're fairly sure of what they thought about "the press," though we really have no idea whether "the press" as operated by Ben Franklin's older brother is supposed to be the same thing as when it's operated by Gannett or McClatchy or News Corp. That's sort of the practical minefield we operate in when we genuflect toward the 18th century.

More to the point, though, that third graf is a remarkably incompetent -- or dishonest -- elision of a fairly plain bit of text. The First Amendment doesn't say anything about the making of laws "respecting" speech and the press. The "respecting" clause is about religion (as is the subsequent one, in which the verb is "prohibiting"). The clause about the press says that Congress shall make no law "abridging" freedom of the press. The federal Freedom of Information Act is self-evidently a law "respecting" the freedom of the press, but it doesn't "abridge" that freedom. You'd like to think the "buh-buh-buh ... the CONSTITUTION!!!!" crowd could figure that out -- certainly in the guise of an alleged journalist warning other journalists about the coming Kenyan Negro Muslim Socialist apocalypse.

Indeed. (And do read the whole post.)

Here's the First Amendment, with Tapscott's version highlighted. Please note he doesn't even use as many ellipses as he should:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Honestly... I'd ask, Have these people no shame, but my reading of Fred's ongoing analysis of Fox & Friends makes it unnecessary to do.

Orwell at War's Beginning

In 1940, George Orwell is no longer able to focus his diary on country things, planting and eggs and watching the seasons. War is upon him. A couple of days ago he went to search for his wife's brother amongst the Dunkirk evacuees, and painted a vivid picture of "Belgian or French refugees", most of whom "seemed only bewildered by the crowds and the general strangeness". There was a quick glimpse of a "naval officer in a uniform that had been in the water and parts of a soldier’s equipment" who "hurried towards a bus, smiling and touching his tin hat to either side as the women shouted at him and clapped him on the shoulder" and a memory of "1914, when all soldiers seemed like giants to me"...

Today's entry has this remarkably timeless observation:

From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies:

“Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining…in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”

Apparently, nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist.

The Law Makes Them Do It

There's a certain number of people who react to Rand Paul's initial trashing of the Civil Rights Act by claiming that people don't need the government to make them play fair.

So - and it's probably no coincidence that it's in Kentucky, though to be fair a few such clubs remain in other states - there are people defending segregated country clubs from the oppressive federal government.

A 2004 state Supreme Court ruling pushed Kentucky's remaining segregated clubs to stop the discrimination or risk losing tax deductions. Still, at least one club held out until late last year....

The Idle Hour Country Club in Lexington is one example. The club, founded in 1924, is known for its pristine 18-hole golf course, clay tennis courts and Southern cuisine. Until seven months ago, it had never had a black member. ...

The Louisville Country Club accepted its first black members in 2006. John McCall, the club's president and an executive at a local energy company, said he feels strongly that it and others "should have moved faster." (He declined to say how many black members are there now.) Yet he, too, resists the notion that government should have a say in how his club operates. "You will have a more successful value-based society" if you can move people to the "right conclusions about their own lives than if you force it," McCall said.

You know, it's 2010. If people were going to come to "right conclusions" on their own, they'd have done it by now. Unless, of course, you really think they have...

Mr and Mrs Chuck

I've known there must be two groundhogs (or woodchucks if you prefer) living next to the creek at work, but this is the first time I've seen them together. Kind of adorable, aren't they?

Irony?

PBS today:



It just doesn't work for me. Trembling, I turn to the dictionary to see if it should (like the time I found out how to pronounce macabre... it turns out not to be mack-a-burr). Whew! MW's Unabridged OnLine says the metal is
/aɪrn/, /aɪərn/, or (Brits, I guess) /aɪn/ or /aɪən/
and the adjective "made or consisting of iron; resembling iron in some way" is
/aɪrni/, /aɪərni/ or /aɪ(ə)ni/
while "humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm that adopts a mode of speech the intended implication of which is the opposite of the literal sense of the words" is
/aɪrʌni/ or /aɪrʌnɪ/ sometimes /aɪərni/

So this is a sight gag - at least for me. And if the goat is pronouncing "irony" as /aɪərni/, then I don't see that he has a hoof to stand on, let alone stalk away on.