There's a bit more to translation than just looking up the words.

Have you read Machine of Death yet? It's a great idea - a bunch of people, web artists among them, writing stories about people who know (sort of) how they're going to die, and most of the stories were pretty good. Anyway, the thing is not only going to have another volume, but there's an MOD store selling various products. Like this poster.

Which, especially if you're familiar with old-style Soviet posters, is pretty funny. But ... they didn't ask a Russophone to look at, I fear.

СМЕРТЬ - Death.
Она объединяет нас - It unites us
А не делит - rather than divides (lit: and not divides)

And the cards they're holding read:

ТРАКТОР - tractor
ПОЛЕВОЙ- in the field
КОНВЕЙЕР- assembly line

All that's okay. There's a little stylistic weirdness in the "it unites us"; putting the pronoun after the verb is an emphatic construction (like many other European languages, including - once upon a time - English, normal pronoun objects precede the verb). This implies "but it doesn't unite them/everyone" - it's like saying "We're the ones death unites".

But then, at the bottom of the poster (you probably can't make it out, but I don't have a bigger image of it, and mine's on the wall at work where I can't get a picture... ) it says:

Народный комиссариат по гражданин удовлетворительность

Now, this is pretty clearly meant to be "People's commissariat for citizen satisfaction", which is what each word means. But.

It's gibberish. It looks like they just picked the words from a dictionary one at a time.

You can't do noun-noun modification like that in Russian. You could say удовлетврорительность гражданина (or граждан in the plural), which would be "satisfaction of the citizen (citizens)". But "citizen" has to be in genitive; you can't just slap two nouns down side by side. Moreover, Russian would almost certainly use an adjective form of "citizen" here, not the noun. And finally, after the preposition по you need the dative case, not (as here) the nominative.

What it should say is:

Народный комиссариат по гражданской удовлетворительности

I'll be honest. It's a funny poster, but I'm not 100% sure I'd've bought it had I seen that mistake. Probably would have, but it would have been funnier had it been accurate.

Happy Birthday, Alexis

de Tocqueville, that is - born in 1805.

"He went with his best friend, Gustave de Beaumont, and after a brief stop in Newport, they arrived in Manhattan at sunrise May 11, 1831. Over the course of the next nine months, Tocqueville and his friend traveled more than 7,000 miles, using every vehicle then in existence, including steamer, stage-coach, and horse, going as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and as far south as New Orleans. He interviewed everyone he met: workmen, doctors, professors, as well as famous men, such as Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the richest man in America. At the end of nine months, Tocqueville went back to France, and in less than a year, he had finished his masterpiece, Democracy in America (1835)." [quoted from The Writer's Almanac]

America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a State. ... Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough.

It would be nice to think our passions aren't necessarily so "small", nor our intelligence just "practical" that they won't be "enough" this time around, wouldn't it?

And yet it was

Glenn Beck is almost certainly the most purely horrible and despicable person in American politics today. And yet it was still surprising that he chose to defend the Norwegian terrorist's choice of targets while still condemning him:

“As the thing started to unfold and there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. Who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing,” Beck said.

Granted he, as I said, also condemned the action and said the Norwegian was no different than bin Laden. But two things come to mind. First, the personal touch:

the Vacation Liberty School, run by a Tampa affiliate of the 9/12 Project, which Beck is aligned with [is] a Tea Party political camp for children 8 to 12 years old.

8- to 12-year-olds. At Utøya they're late teens and even in their twenties. And don't bother pointing out that he wasn't directly involved. He asked "who does a camp for kids that's all about politics?" and the answer is the Tea Party does. And does without Glenn Beck comparing them to the Hitler Youth.

Second, I thought only liberals blamed the victims. (/sarcasm)

Happy Birthday, Gerard

Born today in 1844 in Stratford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets (still today, though I don't always agree with his philosophy).

Bless you, Robert Bridges, for publishing his work after he died, in 1888, too young and no longer writing...

This one's my favorite:


The Wind-hover

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
   dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

(more Hopkins here)

Happy Birthday, Estes

Born today in 1903 in Madisonville, Tennessee, one of the great progressive populist politicians of all time, Estes Kefauver. He fought tirelessly for civil rights, civil liberties, antitrust enforcement, and consumer protection legislation. "Too liberal for Tennessee," he was nonetheless reelected twice to the Senate, where he died of a heart attack he suffered during a debate on consumer protection. He and his colleague from Tennessee, U.S. Senator Albert Gore Sr., were the only members of the Senate from the South (not counting Lyndon Johnson, who wasn't asked - but probably would have joined them) who categorically refused to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto in 1957, and Kefauver was the only man to vote against legislation to make simply being a Communist illegal. I'm adding (thanks, Bonnie) here that he wore that coonskin cap because E H Crump, a powerful Memphis politician, accused him of being a raccoon-like Communist stooge. Donning the cap during a campaign stop in Memphis, Kefauver announced: "I may be a pet coon, but I'm not Boss Crump's pet coon."

He was one of my parents' favorite politicians; I remember how sad they were when he died. He was much loved - thousands of people turned out for his funeral - and much missed. Would that we had more like him now.

Rusty will help!

There's just no way to read this panel that doesn't have Mark blatantly palming his barn-cleaning chores off on Cherry and Rusty. And after he's just spent days in the woods, too!

A feel for history

Okay, I'm not saying you should know what year Victoria was born, but you really shouldn't think she died before 1827.

Not so clearly

In a post on Language Log, Geoff Pullum looks at what he calls a misplaced adverb.

According to the BBC News for US & Canada website today, "The Pentagon is set to announce that the ban on gay people openly serving in [the] US military is to end"; and my colleague Heinz Giegerich did a double-take. He notes with puzzlement that he understood it despite the fact that the adverb is clearly in the wrong place. It's not open service that is banned by the military; it's open gayness. How can we possibly understand an adverb positioned as a premodifier of the verb serve when it ought to be positioned before the adjective gay?

He compares these sentences and says no one would think the adverb modified the adjective.

1. The ban on gay people openly serving in the military is to end.
2. The ban on unlucky people cruelly kicking their cats is to end.
3. The ban on stupid people thoroughly cleaning their homes is to end.

He then talks about hypallage, (it's your own stupid fault) while admitting that this isn't the same thing (with hypallage, there is no way to put the adjective where it "should go" - "it's stupid you's own fault"??). But he has to admit that "it isn't quite the same." And he adds "for an error it's curiously close to being able to pass as correct and be unproblematically understood."

I would argue that he's not taking the full context into account. Gay people openly serving is pragmatically the same as openly gay people serving, because the ban is not on gay people being in the military, it's on them being in the military while being open.

So yes, there's a syntactic difference - as there is for the noun-noun pairs race horse and horse race - but because of the specific words involved, that difference is quite minimal, more like slave boy and boy slave. In this particular case, openly could have gone in either place, and to say it's in the "wrong" place and yet is somehow "curiously ... unproblematically understood" is to be putting form ahead of meaning.

(I'm saying this here because the comments are closed there...)

More than ... you guess!

So, a couple of weeks ago (yes I'm late with it) the Independent had this headline:

British Muslims more tolerant of gays, says poll

More tolerant? That's not very informative.

More tolerant than what? Than they used to be? Than British something elses are? Then non-British Muslims are? Or than they are of, say, atheists?

No.

Than they're given credit for.

I don't like that headline at all.

Happy Birthday, Zelda

My father grew up in Montgomery, and once when he was ill Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald read him a story. She was beautiful and crazy, and her life is a tragic romance... Her husband loved her dearly, and she him, and he wrote once, "...For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness."

Happy Birthday, Robert

Today in Wimbledon, England, in 1895, Robert Graves was born. 18 when WWI started, he was immediately shipped off to France. He was badly wounded and reported dead; he believed his life had been spared to write poetry. He suffered from PTSD - recurring nightmares and flashbacks that paralyzed and terrified him. But after he married he began to write, prolifically. In 1929 he published a memoir called Goodbye to All That, and he was able to support himself and his family on his writing for the rest of his life. He may be best known for The White Goddess, a exploration of poetry and myth, and his novels I, Claudius and Claudius, the God, his translations from Latin, and the controversial King Jesus. But he also wrote poetry:

When I’m Killed

When I’m killed, don’t think of me
Buried there in Cambrin Wood,
Nor as in Zion think of me
With the Intolerable Good.
And there’s one thing that I know well,
I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!

So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You’ll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you’ve read.

So when I’m killed, don’t mourn for me,
Shot, poor lad, so bold and young,
Killed and gone—don’t mourn for me.
On your lips my life is hung:
O friends and lovers, you can save
Your playfellow from the grave.

A minute of silence

Sunday, noon Norwegian time - that's 6 am here.

That said, me too

I find myself (again) in agreement with Mr Krugman:

of course the big problem is the craziness of the GOP. That said, I am among those in a state of suppressed rage and panic over the president’s negotiating strategy.

I’d like to believe that it’s all 11-dimensional political chess; but at this point — after the midterm debacle, after the big concession on taxes without even getting a raise in the debt limit — what evidence do we have that Obama knows what he’s doing?

It’s very hard to avoid the impression that three things are going on:

1. Obama really just isn’t that into Democratic priorities. He really doesn’t much care about preserving Medicare for all seniors, keeping Social Security intact, and so on.

2. What he is into is his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend the partisan divide. He imagines that he can be the one who brings about a big transformation that settles disputes for decades to come — and has been unwilling to drop that vision no matter how many times the GOP shows itself utterly uninterested in anything except gaining the upper hand.

3. As a result, he can’t or won’t see what’s obvious to everyone else: that any Grand Bargain will last precisely as long as Democrats control the Senate and the White House, and will be torn up in favor of privatization and big tax cuts for the wealthy as soon as the GOP has the chance.

I hope I’m wrong about all this. But when has Obama given progressives any reason to believe they can trust him?

Happy Birthday, Steven

Vincent Benet, that is. Born in 1898. This fragment is one of my favorite bits of poetry - it's from The Army of Northern Virginia and is describing Traveller. I love it for its sentiment and its complexity.

They bred such horses in Virginia then--
Horses that were remembered after death,
And buried not so far from Christian ground
That if their sleeping riders should awake
They could not witch them from the earth again
And ride a printless course along the grass
With the old manage and light ease of hand...

They're all bad

I have a friend who won't buy gas at a BP station. I understand this, but I question whether BP is really worse than the rest of them. Have we forgotten the Exxon Valdez? How about the Atlantic Empress, carrying Mobil oil? The Amoco Cadiz? The Odyssey? Or is "forgotten" the right word for those last three? It's certainly not for the ongoing Conoco-Phillips undersea-drilling-leak currently (yes, right now) taking place in the Yellow Sea. (And that's what you're seeing in the picture, not the Gulf of Mexico.) You can't forget what you've never been told.

So I'm just not sure that selecting one company and not buying its oil is a rational response - unless you change out every time there's a disaster. If so, it's time to start shopping at BP again and boycott Conoco... After all, the Yellow Sea isn't isolated from the rest of the oceans.

Happy Birthday, Emma

Today in New York City in 1849, Emma Lazarus was born. Certainly her most famous work is The New Colossus, but she wrote others (available at Project Gutenberg). I offer you three:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


1492

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest and people, spurned with zelot hate.

Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.

Then smiling thou unveil'dst, O two-faced year
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, "Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!"


from "Epochs": IV. Storm.


Serene was morning with clear, winnowed air,
    But threatening soon the low, blue mass of cloud
Rose in the west, with mutterings faint and rare
    At first, but waxing frequent and more loud.
    Thick sultry mists the distant hill-tops shroud;
The sunshine dies; athwart black skies of lead
Flash noiselessly thin threads of lightning red.


Breathless the earth seems waiting some wild blow,
    Dreaded, but far too close to ward or shun.
Scared birds aloft fly aimless, and below
    Naught stirs in fields whence light and life are gone,
    Save floating leaves, with wisps of straw and down,
Upon the heavy air; 'neath blue-black skies,
Livid and yellow the green landscape lies.

And all the while the dreadful thunder breaks,
    Within the hollow circle of the hills,
With gathering might, that angry echoes wakes,
    And earth and heaven with unused clamor fills.
    O'erhead still flame those strange electric thrills.
A moment more,--behold! yon bolt struck home,
And over ruined fields the storm hath come!

Happy Birthday, Alex

Today in 1940, in Sudbury, Ontario, Alex Trebek was born (the son of a Franco-Ontarian mother and Ukrainian father, though it's only the French he's good at!). I pick on him, but the truth is it's only because I care. He's perfectly suited to host Jeopardy! and I really enjoy watching that show.

Many happy returns of the day, Alex, and many more seasons on the air.

It's funny because... wait

Haha It's funny because evolution is a religion not a science and atheists worship Darwin.

Happy Birthday, Gregor

Gregor Johann Mendel was born today in 1822 in Heinzendorf bei Odrau, Austrian Silesia, Austrian Empire (now Hynčice, Czech Republic). As most of us know, his experiments with peas laid the foundation of modern genetics and made possible the Modern Synthesis that makes sense of all biology.

I remember well doing the F1, F2 charts in college. A Hereford crossed with a Black Angus (red recessive to black, white face/feet dominant to self-coloring) was so much more interesting than yellow and green peas. Ditto the Shorthorn cattle (red-roan-white) and red-pink-white flowers.

Or, as my old professor once said: I told the Palomino people I could guarantee 'em 100% palomino foals, but that they wouldn't like it. And they didn't. (Palomino is the result of one incompletely dominant gene acting on red, so to get 100% palominos you don't breed from them, you breed a cream stallion to chestnut mares...) And you don't breed merle collies to each other, since their recessive is lethal...

С днем рождения, Владимир!

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Владимир Владимирович Маяковский) was born today in 1893, in Baghdati - now in Georgia (well, it was Georgia then, too, just part of Russia). Of Ukrainian descent (his father was a cossack), he was a Russophone and a great poet, who had a tremendous effect on poetry in Russian, in style and in meter. He was also a supporter of the Revolution, turning out many posters and other propaganda pieces. But, like many who began as a fervent believer in the Revolution, he became disenchanted with it in its reality; though Stalin praised him (which kept him safe), he shot himself in 1930 - thus sparing himself the grimmest days of Soviet Union's betrayal of the ideals he had once gone to prison for.

One short verse:

Вывод

Не смоют любовь
ни ссоры,
ни вёрсты.
Продумана,
выверена,
проверена.
Подъемля торжественно стих стокопёрстый,
клянусь —
люблю
неизменно и верно!

Conclusion

Love isn't washed away
by quarrels
or by miles.
It's thought through,
considered,
proven.
Solemnly raising my verse to swear by
I vow -
I will love
constant and true!

(The word стокопёрстый which modifies "verse" is throwing me. It's composed of "many + finger + adjectival ending". What he means, I think, is that instead of raising his hand to take the oath, he's raising his poem, its lines like fingers. But man that's hard to get into a single line, even if it's the longest one in the poem! I'll have to revisit this...)


(Many of his verses are translated by Andrey Kneller here.)

Happy Birthday, WG!

Today in 1848 at Downend, near Bristol, William Gilbert - WG - Grace was born. He was an English amateur cricketer who is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest players of all time. He played first-class cricket for a record-equalling 44 seasons, from 1865 to 1908, during which he captained England, Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, the Gentlemen, MCC, the United South of England Eleven and several other teams.

Oh, and he was the Face of God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Source Code. Exciting and well-done. And what a fantastic ending. Loved it. If you can find it watch it - or get it on On Demand.

TV: Leverage not one of the best, really, but it did have its interesting moments. I watched a lot of the British Open - how nice to see Lefty doing well, though I was pulling for Donald or Sergio (I always pull for Sergio). Royal St George's gave them a hard course with driving winds - links golf as it's meant to be played (unlike Castle Stewart last week). Masterpiece - The Pale Horse. I'm not crazy about this iteration of Marple - Julia McKenzie - but at least it's not the awful Geraldine McEwan ones. However, The Pale Horse is not a Marple novel, and in shoehorning her into the book they had to do some violence to the source material. Easterbrook and Ginger become bit players, and Mrs Dane Calthrop, Ariadne Oliver, and the Despards vanish. (At least some of the changes were probably because the characters of Colonel and Rhoda Despard were reprised from Cards on the Table, which was slashed up quite badly for the Masterpiece (Poirot) version of that novel, including the killing off of Rhoda.) I'm not entirely sure what's going on over at the Masterpiece studios, but the most recent Christies and Poirtos have been really altered - in some cases rendered almost unrecognizable - and often for the worse. This Pale Horse isn't awful, but I have to admit that it nearly put me to sleep...

Read: The Alchemy of Murder, the second of the Nellie Bly books. This one was much, much better than the first, which seemed interminable. Possibly it's because we weren't stuck in the sewers of Paris fighting a mad anarchist who wanted to destroy the world, accompanied by too many people we knew didn't do it - Pasteur, Verne, Wilde...; instead we were racing around the world involved in espionage. It's long, too, but doesn't ever drag or feel padded. Whatever the reason, this one's really enjoyable, without reservations.

So lame

Seriously: is there anything lamer than settling a World Cup title on penalty kicks? It's a tough game, yes, I get that. But you don't settle the World Series on a home run derby, or a basketball game on free throws, or the Super Bowl on ... what? Field goal kicks? You don't settle a tennis tournament on an ace-shooting contest, or a major in golf with a bunch of putts. You don't. You play the damned game.

Another little thing

I love Roger Ebert. But there's no denying that sometimes he misses things - sometimes little, sometimes not. He said Muntz in Up had "robotic dogs". He said Jeremie in Summer Hours was moving to Hong Kong; it was Beijing. In his review of A Life Less Ordinary he misidentified a character's father as "a friend". He really didn't grasp warp drive and the size of the universe in Star Trek, nor did he catch that when the drill was operating it meant that transporters didn't work. And in his review of Beginners he shows that once again he missed an exchange:

One of the pleasures of "Beginners" is the warmth and sincerity of the major characters. There is no villain. They begin by wanting to be happier and end by succeeding. The person left out is the dead mother, Georgia. She spent years in a pointless marriage. If Hal and Georgia were sticking it out for the sake of Oliver, that doesn't seem to have turned out well. And once he was an adult and had left home — why did they persist? Did Hal lack the moral courage to declare himself? He could have been happier years sooner, and she could have had her chance, too. Hal is not quite as nice as he seems.

Hal explicitly, in so many words, told Oliver that Georgia knew he was gay all the time and insisted on marrying him anyway, believing that she could "fix" him. Hal was perhaps nicer than he seems, and Georgia more self-deluded than anything else.

Neighbors

I received a request to post this, and I'm glad to:

America has always been a melting pot, but in the post-9/11 world the environment can be downright hostile. Recent mosque protests and congressional hearings on American Muslims are all unfortunate examples of a rising tide of fear. This climate of suspicion towards our fellow Americans compromises the great values that our country was founded upon. We've put together a 2 minute film in response that I believe you and the readers of The Greenbelt will be interested in sharing, watching, and discussing:

http://myfellowamerican.us

The site also has many other cool features including the ability to share your own stories

Juvenile Mockingbirds

After the young mockingbirds are flying (which is 8-10 days after they leave the nest) they leave the individual bushes where they'd been hiding out, fed first by their mother and then - after she puts the new nest their father built to use - by him, and gathered in the Japanese maple. They look calm here, but they squabbled a lot - jumping on each other, even. This was my last day, so I don't know how long they stayed their or if they got along any better after a while. There were three of them - I'm not sure you can see the third in the one photo. The rest of the pictures show the one youngster in his near-constant preening. Clearly, growing those grown-up feathers is itchy work.

Update Grumble

WHY does Microsoft insist on changing things when they update? For years I've been importing photos quite happily, and now - with Windows 7 - it's all changed. I don't have any control over where the photos are going even. Oh, sure, I can separate them out by the day they were taken, but I really hate Windows Live Photo Gallery.

How truthful?

I've been reading Carol McCleary's books about Nellie Bly - involving her in fictional escapades along with the likes of Jules Verne, Louis Pasteur, Sarah Bernhardt, and Frederick Selous (who? you may ask; I did). They footnoted him and showed a photo, so you couldn't suspect him, though Nellie does; he was very famous in his day and was the inspiration for Alan Quartermain... and thus a forerunner of Indiana Jones. I like them (though the second book is much better than the first).

I was charmed from the preface, though. How can you not like an author who tells you:

The reader may rest assured that they may compare our truth and veracity to that attributed to that lioness of literature, Lillian Hellman, by none other than author Mary McCarthy.

(In case you don't know the story, the latter said of the former (prompting a lawsuit): Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.)

Happy Birthday, Erle

Born today in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889, the creator of America's most famous fictional lawyer. Erle Stanley Gardner qualified as a lawyer himself without attending law school, only working in a law firm. After passing the bar, he made his living defending poor immigrants in California, and writing an enormous number of stories. He finally settled into the Perry Mason novels, and wrote more than 80.

Here I must add that as well as the tv series I remember so well, there were a lot of movies made in the 30s - with a Perry Mason Raymond Burr wouldn't have recognized (especially the boozy Nick-Charles-wannabe from The Case of the Lucky Legs)!

There were also some good movies made of the DA series (yes, the other side of the battle) one of which featured Jim Hutton in the starring role.

Happy Birthday, Hermann

Hermann Jadlowker was born today in 1877 in Riga, Latvia.

Destined by his family to be a merchant, he ran away from home at 15 - heading to Vienna, where he studied classical singing with Josef Gänsbacher. In 1899 (some sources say 1897), he made his operatic début at Cologne in Kreutzer's Nachtlager von Granada. He then secured engagements in Stettin and Karlsruhe. Kaiser Wilhelm II heard him and was so impressed that he offered him a five-year contract at the Royal Opera in Berlin. Apart from Berlin, Jadlowker sang also in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Lemberg, Prague, Budapest and Boston during the course of his career.

In 1910-12, Jadlowker appeared at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, where he proved to be one of the company's most versatile artists although his performances were overshadowed by those of Enrico Caruso. He returned to Europe prior to the outbreak of World War I and continued his operatic career in a number of German cities. During the 1920s, Jadlowker sang increasingly on the concert platform and, in 1929, he was chosen to be chief cantor at the Riga synagogue. Jadlowker subsequently became a voice teacher at the Riga Conservatory before emigrating to Palestine with his wife in 1938. He taught in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, dying in the latter city at the age of 75.

Jadlowker possessed a dark-hued, lyric-dramatic tenor voice of extraordinary flexibility. His agile vocal technique enabled him to sing runs, trills and other coloratura embellishments with ease and accuracy. He made a large number of records in Europe and America across a 20-year period, commencing in 1907. Many of these recordings, which include arias by composers as diverse as Mozart, Auber, Verdi, Rossini and Wagner, can be heard on CD reissues.

Among the very best of those is Hermann Jadlowker: Dramatic Coloratura Tenor which has everything he ever recorded, from Mozart to lieder by Strauss and Tchaikovsky, including his incomparable "Noch tönt mir ein Meer im Busen (Fuor del Mare)" (they say that when Mozart wrote Idomeneo, his tenor was a sexagenarian who thought Mozart was a brat. Be that as it may, he must have had a voice to die for: since then, not until Jadlowker, and (I think) not since, has anyone sung the "long" aka "hard" version of this aria, with trills and coloratura like you've never heard before.) and "Ecco ridente in cielo" from Rossini's "Barber of Seville". Marston 52017-2. Because of the age of the recordings, there is some noise, easily (in my opinion) overlooked.

As soon as I found this, I had to buy it. As Tom Kaufman's liner notes say, "Jadlowker's voice and skills were unique." Simply a fantastic collection, 2 discs, and I can (and have) listened to the first disc for literally hours. Here is "Fuor del Mare". Enjoy it.

Happy Birthday, Peter!

It's the birthday of Peter Schickele (1935)! A Julliard-trained musician who writes good stuff under his own name, he's probably most famous for his "discovery" of JS Bach's youngest son - the incomparable PDQ Bach, composer of such works as Oedipus Tex, Iphigenia in Brooklyn, The Abduction of Figaro, and innumerable shorter works. I saw Schickele in concert a few years back - it was amazing fun!

Ah, oligarchy

Paul Krugman is depressing today:

So, terrible growth prospects; low inflation; oh, and low interest rates, with no sign of the bond vigilantes. Ordinary macroeconomic analysis tells you very clearly what we should be doing: fiscal expansion and monetary expansion by any means we can manage; in fact, the case for a higher inflation target pops right out of just about any model capable of producing the kind of mess we’re in.

And what are we talking about in policy terms? Spending cuts and an end to monetary expansion.

I know the arguments — fear of invisible bond vigilantes, fear that 70s-style stagflation is just around the corner despite the absence of any evidence to that effect. But why do such arguments have so much traction, while everything economists have spent the last three generations learning is brushed aside?

One answer is that macroeconomics is hard; the idea that if families are tightening their belts, the government should do the same, is as deeply intuitive as it is deeply wrong.

But the susceptibility of politicians — including, alas, the president — and pundits to these wrong ideas demands a deeper explanation.

Mike Konczal ratchets up my rentier argument, arguing that what we’re seeing is

a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense.

Even the colorists can't be bothered

Reply All is a horrible comic strip carried by, among others, the Washington Post. I look at it since it's there, though often the lines are too long to make squinting at them worthwhile, since it's never funny. It's also the ugliest strip in the paper... probably the world... quite possibly the entire universe.

All this to point out that the Sunday strip this week was totally sabotaged by colorists who started (for no reason that I can see and in fact against all reason, since the characters aren't moving (they never do)) alternating pink and green for the backgrounds and couldn't be bothered to change when they got to the last panel... Even they hate this strip.

Gratulerer med fødselsdagen, Roald!

Today in 1872 Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was born. Polar explorer par excellence - first to reach the South Pole, first to reach both poles, and first to make it all the way across the Northwest Passage. He succeeded where his British rivals failed, partly because of his single-mindedness (he did no surveying and took almost no pictures) and partly because of his willingness to follow the lead of the native peoples - skin-and-fur parkas instead of heavy wool, and dogs to pull his sleds (and to serve as food). Perhaps fittingly, he died on a mission to rescue polar explorers from the Nobile expedition in 1928.

"I may say that this is the greatest factor -- the way in which the expedition is equipped -- the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order -- luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

Sky Watch: Summer Dawn

Friday dawned cool - a relief after recent heat and humidity - and beautiful.





more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt

Today in 1606, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born.

Le 14 Juillet

Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé ! (bis)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes !

Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons ! Marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

Mike??

When he's looking right at you, you don't usually have to tell your dad who you are. This is rendered even more unnecessary by the events of the least few seconds (or couple of days):



Then again, Mike has proved himself before this to be not the sharpest crook in the town...

Ummmm. And?

Ty Burr writes in the Boston Globe on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2:

There is terrific pop storytelling in this movie - not to mention some very fine filmmaking - but there are surprisingly few surprises. That hurts just a bit more than one might wish.

I'm not sure but I think had there been any "surprises" that the fans would have risen up in mass protest.

Happy Birthday, Woody

Woody Guthrie, born this day in 1912.

He wrote a lot, and he gave a voice to the unheard.




Don't Kill My Baby And My Son

As I walked down that old dark town
In the town where I was born,
I heard the saddest lonesome moan
I ever heard before.

My hair it trembled at the roots
Cold chills run down my spine,
As I drew near that jail house
I heard this deathly cry:

O, don't kill my baby and my son,
O , don't kill my baby and my son.
You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don't kill my baby and my son.

Now, I've heard the cries of a panther,
Now, I've heard the coyotes yell,
But that long, lonesome cry shook the whole wide world
And it come from the cell of the jail.

Yes, I’ve heard the screech owls screeching,
And the hoot owls that hoot in the night,
But the graveyard itself is happy compared
To the voice in that jailhouse that night.

Then I saw a picture on a postcard
It showed the Canadian River Bridge,
Three bodies hanging to swing in the wind,
A mother and two sons they'd lynched.

There's a wild wind blows down the river,
There's a wild wind blows through the trees,
There's a wild wind that blows 'round this wide wide world,
And here's what the wild winds say:

O, don't kill my baby and my son,
O, don't kill my baby and my son.
You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don't kill my baby and my son.

Woody Guthrie lyrics

Today's haiku

a nightingale wipes
his muddy feet...
plum blossoms


.鶯や泥足ぬぐふ梅の花
uguisu ya doro ashi nuguu ume no hana


more Issa poems here

Boldog szuletesnapot, Ernö!

Rubik Ernö (Hungarians do it that way, personal name last) was born today in Budapest in 1944.

Panetta the loose cannon

New Pentagon chief a loose cannon.

That's what Craig Whitlock wrote for the Hindustan Times today. It was just a short little article, beginning "Just 11 days into his tenure as defense secretary, Leon Panetta has demonstrated a flair for making blunt, unscripted comments" and ending with this observation "In contrast to his poker-faced predecessor, Robert M Gates, it turns out that Panetta happily speaks off the cuff and doesn’t seem to edit his thoughts too closely."

It's amusing. But Panetta isn't, really.

See, actually, the HT just grabbed the beginning of the full article. It contains some disturbing comments. For instance, the repeated statement that the US was going to leave 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2014 was over. A misstatement, his aides say.

And then the apparent belief that al-Qaeda was in Iraq before we were, and the strong implication that the invasion of Iraq was causally linked to 9/11 (not just temporally):

“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” he told troops at Camp Victory, the largest U.S. military outpost in Baghdad. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”

An aide explained that:

“I don’t think he’s getting into the arguments of 2002 and 2003. He’s dealing with the security situation our country faces today.”

Oh.

But the thing about that is, I think he was sort of scrambling to cover another misstatement.

He made the observation that Iraq is rich in oil. “This damn country has a hell of a lot of resources,” he noted.

Indeed it is, and indeed it does. Nothing wrong about that statement.

Except that it comes perilously close to admitting that oil is why we're there.

I don't think the White House wants that said, true or not. Maybe especially if it's true.

Sock it to me!

"Sock it ... to me?"

That doesn't really capture the utter weirdness of the way Alex just said the Laugh-In catchphrase. He did all right with the other, but I don't remember anybody saying 'sock it to me' the way he just did.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Super 8, which was far more enjoyable than Transformers 3 I must say. The kids were all well-realized characters and the effects were good, and the story was, if a tad formulaic at the end, nonetheless exciting and captivating. And definitely stay for the beginning of the credits, when they show us Charles's film!

DVD: The Bat (it was on the late night horror movie on Retro, so we put in the DVD) - I wouldn't have thought of Agnes Moorhead as a leading lady but she was perfect. Doomed to Die, not at all a bad little mystery for its time.

TV: Leverage - a nice ep. Hardison's frustration with the old tech was hilarious, and clearly he and Parker have moved to the next level. Also, well-done with the Jim-Hutton-Ellery-Queen homage. Very nice. Also watched part (had to go out about half-way through) of a 1940's propaganda film called The 49th Parallel about a handful of Nazi U-boat survivors trying to make their way across Canada- Laurence Olivier as a French-Canadian fur trapper, ma foie! I didn't get to see Raymond Massey, or Leslie Howard, so I can't judge their parts in the movie. It was pretty, but it was also pretty heavy handed.

Read: The Greatest Hits series, somewhat uneven - since each book is narrated by a different person, and not all the narrators are as interesting - comic tetralogy about assassins. Uneven, I said, but when it works perfectly it's very good, and even when it doesn't it's enjoyable, and I didn't see the end coming at all.

Happy Birthday, Alice

Today is the birthday of Alice Munro (born in Ontario in 1931). I'm almost ashamed to say it, but I read my first Munro story only a couple of years (after watching Away From Her). I've read many since then, and have the rest of her collections in my to-read pile. She's amazing. Her prose is clear, spare, beautiful, and her characters so real and vivid that even in stories where nothing much seems to happen the story draws you in and releases you only well after you've finished. I'd call her a national treasure if she were American; as it is, she's a treasure in the world of English-language writers (and readers).

Words have meanings

Also in today's Knoxville News Sentinel is a short piece called

Gov. Haslam cuts 9 of 10 officials from news report: Makes lists 'more manageable,' spokesman says.

The lede says

No news is not good news to hundreds of political figures who have quit receiving a popular daily roundup of state media reports emailed by Gov. Bill Haslam's office.

Um, no. They didn't "quit receiving". "Quit" implies they did it, with volition, and that's not what happened.

They "stopped receiving", a bit ambiguous, or "they were cut off from receiving". But the governor dropped them. They didn't quit.

Galileo was wrong...

In the print edition of my father's local newspaper is a reprint of a Chicago Tribune article called Some Catholics seek to counter Galileo: Splinter group says the Earth, not the sun, is, indeed, at the center of the universe. It begins:

Some people believe the world literally revolves around them. It's a belief born not of selfishness but faith.

A small group of conservative Roman Catholics is pointing to a dozen biblical verses and the Church's original teaching as proof that the Earth is the center of the universe, the view that prompted Galileo Galilei's clash with the Church four centuries ago. The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among a few Chicago-area Catholics who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of original Church doctrine.

"This subject is, as far as I can see, an embarrassment to the modern church because the world more or less looks upon geocentrism or someone who believes it in the same boat as the flat Earth," said James Phillips, of Cicero. Phillips attends Our Lady Immaculate Catholic Church in Oak Park, a parish run by the Society of St. Pius X, a group that rejects most of the modernizing reforms the Vatican II council made from 1962 to 1965.

This is a great bit:

Indeed, those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that the Earth revolves around the sun, is nothing more than a conspiracy theory to squelch the church's influence. "Heliocentrism becomes 'dangerous' if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system," said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. "False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today. … Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world; and governments and academia were subservient to her."

The world? The whole world? O RLY? But I digress...

Sungenis is no lone Don Quixote, as illustrated by the hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters at a conference last fall titled "Galileo Was Wrong. The Church Was Right" just off the University of Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Ind.

I love how the writer went to Ken Ham, for whom this is just too loony: "The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system." When Ken Ham finds you too wacky, you are definitely in need of help.

My favorite part of the article, however is this:

But supporters of the theory contend that there is scientific evidence to support geocentrism, just as there is evidence to support the six-day story of creation in Genesis.

There is proof in Scripture that the Earth is the center of the universe, Sungenis said. Among many verses, he cites Joshua 10:12-14 as definitive proof: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe. … The sun halted in the middle of the sky; not for a whole day did it resume its swift course."

Guys. It can't be any simpler, it really can't: "the Bible says" is not "scientific evidence".

Your faith may be strong, but you aren't scientists. And that's really all there is to that.

(Plus, of course: this is one more demonstration of why Stephen J Gould's dream of "non-overlapping magisteria" has always been a non-starter. Religion makes claims about the real world. It won't stay in the unreal. It just won't...)

Happy Birthday, Nikola

It's the birthday (1856) of the man who invented alternating current - and made the modern world possible, Nikola Tesla.

Sky Watch: Independence Sky

On Independence Day, the setting sun paints the white clouds red against the blue sky.




more Sky Watchers here

Glorious

Here are some glorious fancy lilies in my father's neighbors' yard.

Governments are instituted...

Very good piece recently by EJ Dionne on the Declaration of Independence and the federal government and what the Founders wanted... An excerpt:

I know states’ rights advocates revere the 10th Amendment. But when the word “states” appears in the Constitution, it typically is part of a compound word, “United States,” or refers to how the states and their people will be represented in the national government. We learned it in elementary school: The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation to create a stronger federal government, not a weak confederate government. [Rick] Perry’s view was rejected in 1787 and again in 1865.

Happy Birthday, Satchell

Today in 1905 (or possibly 1906) Satchel Paige, the greatest pitcher ever to play the game, was born. He dominated the Negro Leagues, and finally played Major League Baseball after the color line was broken - a fifty-year-old rookie whose record was 6–1, with a 2.48 ERA, 2 shutouts, 43 strikeouts, 22 walks and 61 base hits allowed in 72 2/3 innings.