Happy Birthday, Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born today in 1797 and married to Percy; she's best known for Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus although The Last Man (about the end of humanity due to a plague) is probably a better book.

Happy Birthday, Molly

Today, in Monterey, California, in 1944 Molly Ivins was born.

We miss her more than ever now, I think. How she'd gleefully tackle "Governor Goodhair"'s run at the presidency, accompanied by Bachman and Mitt! And what hell she'd be giving the Conciliator-in-Chief, too...

"There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity -- like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar. "

"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."

"There's never been a law yet that didn't have a ridiculous consequence in some unusual situation; there's probably never been a government program that didn't accidentally benefit someone it wasn't intended to. Most people who work in government understand that what you do about it is fix the problem -- you don't just attack the whole government. "

more of her words here

Happy Birthday, Ernest

Today in 1871 in Spring Grove, New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford - who famously said: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

His work took place in the early days of nuclear physics - he discovered the structure of the atom the cause of radioactivity (atomic decay), and alpha and beta radiation. He was the first person to transmute matter (nitrogen into oxygen) and he figured out the principle of half-lives and radioactive dating. But when he won the Nobel Prize - in 1908 - it was categorized as Chemistry - just going to show how very much a creature of its time that famous quote was...

Happy Birthday, Preston

Preston Sturges was born today in Chicago in 1898. The first man ever to write and direct a film (the same film) - and omg, what films. Classics still funny today:

The Great McGinty
Christmas in July
The Palm Beach Story
The Lady Eve
Sullivan's Travels
Hail the Conquering Hero
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

Happy Birthday, Robertson

Born today in Thamesville, Ontario, back in 1913 - a great Canadian writer, Robertson Davies. His four trilogies are enthralling, complex observations of life. And he gave me one of those little shocks that happen when your world-view is challenged: it was in one of his books that I read of Americans fleeing to Canada during the Revolution to escape political persecution. I knew, of course, that Tories (in our sense of the word) had existed, but this was the first book I'd ever read that cast one as the hero. I love his books - Fifth Business and The Lyre of Orpheus especially.

Happy Birthday, Master Kung

K'ung-fu-tzu, or Kǒng Fūzǐ - Confucius to the West (his name was Latinised by Matteo Ricci when his teachings were introduced to Europe - everybody's name was; think of Copernicus) - was born today in 551 BCE

The man who in view of gain thinks of righteousness; who in the view of danger is prepared to give up his life; and who does not forget an old agreement however far back it extends - such a man may be reckoned a complete man.

Happy Birthday, Albert

It was a hot summer afternoon. My mother took us to the schoolyard at Woodland Elementary and she stood in a long line of other mothers (there may have been fathers there, I was too young to remember that now). She stood for hours in the hot Tennessee sun, and we - my brothers and sisters and all the other mothers' kids - ran and played in the school playground. I didn't really understand why we were there; I did know that my mother, all the mothers, were in the grip of some emotion I couldn't understand. They weren't afraid, though - just the opposite: happy, keyed up, talking and laughing and not caring about the heat or the length of the line or long wait. That's really what I remember: that line of women, waiting with relief and joy.

Eventually my mother got to the head of the line, and the five of us kids each got a sugar cube. It was that simple.

I never knew anyone who caught polio. I knew a few who had caught it before I was born, but it was a word to me, not a terror.

Albert Sabin was born today, in Białystok, then in Russia but now in Poland, in 1906. Along with Jonas Salk, he changed the world.

Mike Flanagan is gone...

Mike Flanagan died last night.

Flanagan won the Cy Young Award with the Orioles in 1979 when he went 23-9 with a 3.08 ERA and five shutouts. He also played for Baltimore's 1983 world championship team, going 12-4 despite missing nearly three months with ligament damage in his left knee. Only two pitchers have thrown more innings in an O's uniform (Jim Palmer and Mike Mussina). He also ranks fifth in wins, with 141; he is fourth in strikeouts and complete games and seventh in shutouts. Though he spent parts of four seasons with the Blue Jays, he finished his career pitching two more seasons with the Orioles, re-casting himself as a successful left-handed reliever. He fulfilled a dream by recording the final two outs by an Orioles pitcher at old Memorial Stadium in 1991.

"I know everybody that played with him loved him to death. He was the backbone of that pitching staff. He never quit — this guy never quit. He was there for the duration. We had so many great games and so many great times." - Rick Dempsey, who caught many of those games

"He's one of our family. A great friend, competitor, wit, funny, hysterical, talented. He was a breath of fresh air with his humor, his insight, all those things. He was just a terrific guy." - Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, long-time teammate

"I am so sorry to hear about Mike's passing. He was a good friend and teammate... Mike was an Oriole through and through, and he will be sorely missed by family, friends and fans. This is a sad day." - Cal Ripken, teammate for every Oriole game

"He could make you laugh when you didn't want to laugh.... He just kept going out there. He never wanted to come out of a game. No matter how good or how bad the situation, Mike always tried to make the best pitch every time the ball came out of his hand." - Terry Crowley, teammate

I moved to Maryland in 1982, a die-hard NL fan. I was going to go to Orioles games because that was the team that was here, but I'd decided to pull for my mother's team (the Indians). But that was the year the Orioles won it all. And I fell hard for that team, including that marvelous pitching staff with Palmer and Scotty McGregor and Mike Flanagan. If they'd played the Braves in the Series I'd have been torn... And I loved them for years afterward - even through that almost unimaginably bad 1988 season.

If it's true he killed himself, the news is immeasurably sadder. But it's sad enough.

Bad news

This is some bad news.

Pat Summitt has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

But as you might expect,

She sounded like herself in saying: "There’s not going to be any pity party and I’ll make sure of that."

"I feel better just knowing what I’m dealing with," she said. "And as far as I’m concerned it’s not going to keep me from living my life, not going to keep me from coaching."

Hang in there, Pat. We're all behind you.

They does?

I noticed this poster when it went up last week - it's all over the Metro system. That's a grammar error, there, and not a common one, either. Leveling the -s form to the bare one (he do) is far more common. I wonder if the copy originally started as "Miss Jessie l♥ves Washington". (Cute use of the ♥ symbol, though.)

I pointed it out to a friend Saturday, and she noticed the misspelling... All in all, a poster in need of copy editing.

Happy Birthday, Robert

Robert Herrick, the great Cavalier poet, born today in 1591 in London
Some of his verse is here, and a few short ones here:


WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes!

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
—O how that glittering taketh me!

A Meditation for His Mistress

You are a Tulip seen to-day,
But, Dearest, of so short a stay,
That where you grew, scarce man can say.

You are a lovely July-flower;
Yet one rude wind, or ruffling shower,
Will force you hence, and in an hour.

You are a sparkling Rose i'th' bud,
Yet lost, ere that chaste flesh and blood
Can show where you or grew or stood.

You are a full-spread fair-set Vine,
And can with tendrils love entwine;
Yet dried, ere you distil your wine.

You are like Balm, enclosed well
In amber, or some crystal shell;
Yet lost ere you transfuse your smell.

You are a dainty Violet;
Yet wither'd, ere you can be set
Within the virgins coronet.

You are the Queen all flowers among;
But die you must, fair maid, ere long,
As he, the maker of this song.

Exciting

The 5.9 (5.8?) earthquake in Virginia definitely rattled the building up here. Nothing so much as fell over, though.

Still, we're all being sent home. Wouldn't complain except I know the roads are going to be a freaking disaster.

edit: Actually, we got out of College Park fast enough to beat the massive traffic jams. Smooth sailing once we got past the construction on Kenilworth. Home by 3!

Happy Birthday, Ray

Ray Bradbury is 91!

"I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."

"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."

"First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power."

"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."

The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and (my favorite) Something Wicked This Way Comes, and all those wonderful short stories. Thank you, Ray, and have a wonderful day!

Happy Birthday, Ogden

Born this day in 1902... Ogden Nash

Everybody knows his funny stuff, but he also wrote more poignant things. Here's one of my favorites (some of the others are very long, like Isabel and Custard the dragon) and another I like. There are a few more here (and lots more here):

Old Men

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.


Two Dogs Have I

For years we've had a little dog,
Last year we acquired a big dog;
He wasn't big when we got him,
He was littler than the dog we had.
We thought our little dog would love him,
Would help him to become a trig dog,
But the new little dog got bigger,
And the old little dog got mad.

Now the big dog loves the little dog,
But the little dog hates the big dog,
The little dog is eleven years old,
And the big dog only one;
The little dog calls him Schweinhund,
The little dog calls him Pig-dog,
She grumbles broken curses
As she dreams in the August sun.

The big dog's teeth are terrible,
But he wouldn't bite the little dog;
The little dog wants to grind his bones,
But the little dog has no teeth;
The big dog is acrobatic,
The little dog is a brittle dog;
She leaps to grip his jugular,
And passes underneath.

The big dog clings to the little dog
Like glue and cement and mortar;
The little dog is his own true love;
But the big dog is to her
Like a scarlet rag to a Longhorn,
Or a suitcase to a porter;
The day he sat on the hornet
I distinctly heard her purr.

Well, how can you blame the little dog,
Who was once the household darling?
He romps like a young Adonis,
She droops like an old mustache;
No wonder she steals his corner,
No wonder she comes out snarling,
No wonder she calls him Cochon
And even Espèce de vache.

Yet once I wanted a sandwich,
Either caviar or cucumber,
When the sun had not yet risen
And the moon had not yet sank;
As I tiptoed through the hallway
The big dog lay in slumber,
And the little dog slept by the big dog,
And her head was on his flank.

Happy Birthday, Dorothy

Today in West End, New Jersey, Dorothy Parker was born.

A Certain Lady

Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,
And drink your rushing words with eager lips,
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.

Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, --
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me -- marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go ....
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.

Comment

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

More here

The Week in Entertainment

oops - got in too late on Sunday and then fell asleep on Monday, so it's two weeks worth

Film: Another Earth, which was extremely intriguing, though the camera did tend to call attention to itself a bit more than perhaps it should have. William Mapother in particular is affecting, but Brit Marling also does a fine job indeed.

DVD: Walk, Don't Run, Cary Grant's last movie, with the always-engaging Jim Hutton. Amusing if very dated little romcom with Grant matchmaking for all he's worth. The hysterically funny Burker & Hare with Andy Serkis - quite a good actor even without cg and motion-capture - and Simon Pegg, also quite good, and a virtual who's who of British character/comic actors, including Christopher Lee as their first victim and a very funny Ronnie Corbett. This movie looks wonderful, period details very accurate, and the story (loosely accurate) is actually touching as well as laugh-out-loud funny.

TV: Leverage - three good episodes on the dvr (maybe I should have saved one?) - I liked Parker and Hardison in the one where he was in the coffin, and Eliot walking into the cop's funeral by mistake; and I really liked the whole "Big Store" one, everything about it, including Eliot eating the snake's heart. Good stuff. Intriguing teaser with the guy offering to hand them the real bad guys as long as he can profit. Futurama catchup - "I remember it like it was interesting!" Zen, all three episodes so far. I guess I lean a bit more to Beth's enthusiasm than Kathie's meh; Aurelio Zen's no Robbie Lewis, nor even "Dangerous" Davies, but he's quite watchable. It does make me wish someone would adapt the Brunetti novels. Spotted Time Bandits a while ago and DVR'd it, watched that this afternoon; a grand movie for a rainy Sunday.

Read: Red Hook Road, a very good study of grief between two ill-matched families suffering a terrible joint loss. The Shattering, a fascinating ya set in New Zealand. Brain Wave, an old Poul Anderson I had managed to miss until now. Reread John Myers Myers' masterpiece Silverlock, which is such great fun. Began How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe, which is fascinating so far.

Sky Watch: Emo sky is emo

After the thunder, slashing rain, wind, and hail, the sky seems pensive...




more Sky Watchers here

Nice conundrum

So, last night I saw a trailer for George Clooney's new movie, The Descendants. It raises an interesting question: if you were married to Clooney and cheating on him, who on earth would you cheat on him with?

With friends like us...

Another must-read from Glenn Greenwald: A couple of teasers:

An illustrative example of this process has emerged this week in Egypt, where authorities have bitterly denounced Israel for killing three of its police officers in a cross-border air attack on suspected Gaza-based militants, and to make matters worse, thereafter blaming Egypt for failing to control "terrorists" in the area. Massive, angry protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo led to Egypt's recalling of its Ambassador to Israel and the Israeli Ambassador's being forced to flee Cairo. That, in turn, led to what The New York Times called a "rare statement of regret" from Israel in order to placate growing Egyptian anger: "rare" because, under the U.S.-backed Mubarak, Egyptian public opinion was rendered inconsequential and the Egyptian regime's allegiance was to Israel, meaning Israel never had to account for such acts, let alone apologize for them. In that regard, consider this superbly (if unintentionally) revealing phrase from the NYT about this incident:

By removing Mr. Mubarak's authoritarian but dependably loyal government, the revolution has stripped away a bulwark of Israel’s position in the region, unleashing the Egyptian public's pent-up anger at Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians at a time when a transitional government is scrambling to maintain its own legitimacy in the streets.

And

This is why American media coverage of the Arab Spring produced one of the most severe cases of cognitive dissonance one can recall. The packaged morality narrative was that despots like Mubarak -- and those in Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere -- are unambiguous, cruel villains whom we're all supposed to hate, while the democracy protesters are noble and to be cheered. But whitewashed from that storyline was that it was the Freedom-loving United States that played such a vital role in empowering those despots and crushing the very democracy we are now supposed to cheer. Throughout all the media hate sessions spewed toward the former Egyptian dictator -- including as he's tried for crimes against his own people -- how often was it mentioned that Hillary Clinton, as recently as two years ago, was saying things such as: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family" (or that John McCain, around the same time, was tweeting: "Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his 'ranch' in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.")? Almost never: because the central U.S. role played in that mass oppression was simply ignored once the oppression could no longer be sustained.

And

For Americans in such consensus to celebrate the fall of evil Arab tyrants without accounting for the role the U.S. played in their decades-long rule was bizarre (though typical) indeed. That "senior intelligence officials" are regarding these fledgling, potential democracies with such suspicion and longing for the days of the "dependably loyal" dictatorial regimes tells one all there is to know about what we have actually been doing in that part of the world, and have been doing for as long as that part of the world was a concern to American officials.

No risk ... physically

The recently retired Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has an op-ed in the NY Times today in which he points out that continued use of drones in Pakistan and other countries where we aren't "at war" is not such a good idea. For one thing, as he notes

Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.

It's a very bad idea for a lot of reasons. One he doesn't mention is this: As the Libyan conflict escalates into its sixth month (yes, month - how long will the media keep talking about "weeks" (let alone the ludicrous "days" we heard about in March)?), and the White House starts haranguing Assad, our propensity for getting involved in these regional conflicts just grows. And what's much worse, so is our propensity for lying to ourselves and saying it's not really a war, because there aren't American ground troops involved.

Guess what? When our drones kill people - particularly civilians, most especially children, but any people - then we're at war. We're at Endless War, and it's draining us financially and morally more and more every day. We can't summon the will to put people back to work, but we can fly unmanned drones into sovereign nations to kill people and kid ourselves that it's okay.

There may be no risk to American soldiers in Pakistan or Yemen or Libya now. But how long can we expect that to be true? And if we start pushing too hard in Syria or (I wish there was a god so I could ask him to forbid it) Iran, we'll pretty damn well quick discover that drones alone won't cut it. Just like they don't cut it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just like, as the admiral says, they aren't really cutting it in Pakistan...

Here's Blair a couple of weeks ago:

“I just see us with that strategy walking out on a thinner and thinner ledge and if even we get to the far extent of it, we are not going to lower the fundamental threat to the U.S. any lower than we have it now.”

That's because, he elaborated today,

Qaeda officials who are killed by drones will be replaced. The group’s structure will survive and it will still be able to inspire, finance and train individuals and teams to kill Americans. Drone strikes hinder Qaeda fighters while they move and hide, but they can endure the attacks and continue to function.

So the only point of the drones is ... what? To make ourselves feel like we're doing something, while not actually doing what we can't afford to do: open a third (fourth, fifth) front with American soldiers on the ground. We can't afford it monetarily (why the heck did we have to raise the debt ceiling so much and so often in the last decade?), we can't afford it from a manpower standpoint (we barely have enough soldiers to fight the two wars we admit to fighting, and we're grinding them down doing it, and we sure as hell can't sell it to the public (hence Obama's "days not weeks" estimate on Libya and his insistence that no US ground troops are involved, though of course drones don't fly themselves, really, and air cover means all kinds of US forces somewhere in the vicinity), and we can't afford it morally, either.

For even if we manage to continue not sending ground troops in, how long can we continue to kill children and other civilians before someone else decides to bring the pain to our own ground? How long before the wars we pretend we aren't fighting become the one we can't pretend about?

And when that time comes, will we be willing to accept our share of the blame? Or will we still ask, in aggrieved tones, what did we ever do to them?

So strange

I've about gotten used to headlines like France troops sent to Ivory Coast, though they still sound awkward (and Google hates the search, assuming I meant "France's").

But this is so odd sounding:

What Happened to My Bahrain Friend

Especially since in the first sentence of the column, Kristoff writes:

I wrote recently about an old friend, Hasan al-Sahaf, a Bahraini artist who had been imprisoned –nominally for economic offenses, but in reality for standing up to the regime.

I can't imagine a headline writer changing "What happened to my German friend" to "my Germany friend," or "my French friend" to "my France friend".

The real problem with the Texas "Miracle"

Paul Krugman takes a look at another problem with the Perry's "Texas Miracle": its unreproducibility. First, he shows that it's not even true:

In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. ....

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth. ... [T]he high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

And he then asks:

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.

And points out the sober reason why (my emphasis):

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

So however enticing the picture of Governor Goodhair (as the late Molly Ivins used to call him) presiding over some sort of jobs-creating-paradise is, resist it. Partly because the jobs are, in large part, public-sector jobs to begin with, but mostly because the rest of them are stolen from the rest of the US, a trick he can't repeat on a national level.

Fashionisti!

You gotta admire the fashion senses on display here. Kelly hanging out in her pink slip, Johnny in his ethnic overalls, and especially Mark in his brown slacks, blue plaid shirt buttoned all the way up, and natty gray suit jacket complete with pocket handkerchief!

Oh boy, will they

OMG. The world may indeed be in the End Times.

A Republican presidential candidate - Jon Huntsman, to be precise - just said

"To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

And they will. Oh, will they ever.

The man behind the curtain in Texas is Uncle Sam

A post on Talking Points Memo shows us that Rick Perry's "Texas Miracle" is built on public sector jobs. Yeah, government funding and government jobs. Without them, the "Miracle" state is as bad off as the rest of us.

Despite being one of the loudest critics of President Obama's stimulus, Perry used billions of dollars of federal money to patch Texas' budget shortfalls, and was thus able to create and maintain lots and lots of public sector jobs. In fact, if you look at net job creation between 2007 and 2010, it's clear the only thing keeping Texas buoyant was government jobs.... [T]he recession cost Texas 178,000 private sector jobs -- a fairly small share for a populous state, when you consider that crisis cost the country many millions. But in the same period, it added 125,000 public sector jobs -- nearly half of all government jobs created in this period nationwide. Put together, the Texas has only lost 53,000 jobs total during the downturn.

As Bernstein notes this "shows Texas to be following a traditional Keynesian game plan: as the private sector contracts, turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference."

Additionally, Perry's papered over some looming budget gaps with fancy paperwork, and unless he or the next governor take steps (like raising taxes) to balance the books, he'll have to cut spending (read: public sector jobs) and many of his gains will have proved illusory.

So the next time someone says "Perry-jobs-miracle" to you, just respond "public-sector-big government-budget deficit". Maybe they'll even listen...

Really?

His "story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had been to him as but one night" - and the answer from the teens on Jeopardy were .... What?

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde?

What??

Tom Sawyer??????

Well, at least one of them had heard of Rip van Winkle.

(Tom Sawyer? Really?)

I hate this

Catching up on Leverage. They just did one of those things where they run a teaser with clips from the episode ... only re-edited. So, they show Eliot saying "I'm going to bring you back" and then a sniper aiming and shooting and then Eliot falling off a wall. Except, in the episode? The sniper is aiming at Nate, and Eliot is knocked off a foot-high carnival stand.

We watch the show because we love it. We don't need to be lied to.

password security

I would laugh more if we hadn't just been ordered onto on 16-character password mixing at least 3 each of caps, lower-case, numbers, and characters with no more than 3 of any in a row ...



source

Happy Birthday, Walter

Born today in College Wynd in the Old Town of Edinburgh in 1771, Walter (later Sir Walter) Scott, one of the English language's most influential novelists. Best known for Ivanhoe and the other Waverly novels, he also gave us a number of well-known pieces of poetry, including these:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!


Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!


But the lost bride of Netherby ne'er did they see.
So daring in love and so dauntless in war,
Have ye e'er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

More of Scott's poetry here

Gasp! What an idea!

Over at Language Log, Victor Mair analyzes another mistranslation on a Chinese sign, this one turning "one meter line" into (the homophonous in Modern Standard Mandarin) "rice-flour noodle" with amusing, or baffling, results.After discussing the machine translation (not Google this time, though they still produced "noodle"), but Babel Fish) that produced it, and why it happened, Prof. Mair muses on how to design the heuristics that do allow another program (Baidu Fanyi) to get this sample right, and suggests ways to enhance the lexical parameters of others to help with pragmatics...

Or, more radically, you could pay someone who knows both Chinese and English to translate your signage.

Words Well Said

The following is from a letter a friend of mine sent to Maryland State Senator Jim Rosapepe.I agree (duh), and I think he's expressed it so clearly I'm sharing it with you:

That argument that it's up to the private sector to create jobs strikes me as deeply flawed, for precisely the same reason that I find faith in upper-income tax cuts as a job creator so badly misplaced.

The private sector will not create jobs before the demand for goods and services is there. It doesn't matter how much surplus cash they have or how many tax breaks they're given. The private sector is not in the business of providing charity. They won't create jobs for workers to produce and sell what people are not buying. That's not how a free-market economy works.

When the economy has stagnated, the only entity that can and will create jobs is government.

Roads and bridges and schools and public infrastructures need to be built and repaired. Our borders and our water supplies and our food and our communities need to be safe.

What private company takes the initiative to do that? Why would they? That's what we elect governments to do. And it's the construction and inspection and repair and law enforcement and other jobs -- jobs that only government can create -- that will get people spending again. THAT's when the private sector will start to pick up and produce its own jobs. Not before.

When you're bleeding...

Krugman on the usual suspects:

For the fact is that right now the economy desperately needs a short-run fix. When you’re bleeding profusely from an open wound, you want a doctor who binds that wound up, not a doctor who lectures you on the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle as you get older. When millions of willing and able workers are unemployed, and economic potential is going to waste to the tune of almost $1 trillion a year, you want policy makers who work on a fast recovery, not people who lecture you on the need for long-run fiscal sustainability.

Unfortunately, giving lectures on long-run fiscal sustainability is a fashionable Washington pastime; it’s what people who want to sound serious do to demonstrate their seriousness. So when the crisis struck and led to big budget deficits — because that’s what happens when the economy shrinks and revenue plunges — many members of our policy elite were all too eager to seize on those deficits as an excuse to change the subject from jobs to their favorite hobbyhorse. And the economy continued to bleed.

What would a real response to our problems involve? First of all, it would involve more, not less, government spending for the time being — with mass unemployment and incredibly low borrowing costs, we should be rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.

The usual suspects will, of course, denounce such ideas as irresponsible. But you know what’s really irresponsible? Hijacking the debate over a crisis to push for the same things you were advocating before the crisis, and letting the economy continue to bleed.

O'Malley sees the light

Martin O'Malley, governor of my state of Maryland, wrote the following to an archbishop who had the gall to presume to tell O'Malley that his Catholicism had to dictate the way he runs the state for those who aren't Catholics:

“When shortcomings in our laws bring about a result that is unjust, I have a public obligation to try to change that injustice. I have concluded that discriminating against individuals based on their sexual orientation in the context of civil marital rights is unjust. I have also concluded that treating the children of families headed by same-sex couples with lesser protections under the law than the children of families headed by heterosexual parents, is also unjust.”

And here's the money quote, the one the archbishop should memorize - italics mine:

“I do not presume, nor would I ever presume as governor, to question or infringe upon your freedom to define, to preach about and to administer the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. But on the public issue of granting equal civil marital rights to same-sex couples, you and I disagree. . . . I look forward to working with you on other issues of mutual agreement. And I respect your freedom to disagree with me as a citizen and as a religious leader without questioning your motives.”

No one is requiring the Catholic Church to solemnize same-sex marriages, any more than they are forced to let divorced people, atheists, or Hindus be married by their priests. But I fear O'Malley is expecting too much if he thinks civility is going to be the order of the day.

Happy Birthday, Alfred

Today in 1899 in London Alfred Hitchcock was born.

Enough said, surely?

Awk, awk, awk!

Oh, okay: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see? You and me with long faces plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known.

Happy Birthday, William

Today in Kent, in 1422, William Caxton was born. He did not invent printing, of course, but he brought it to England and made it popular and profitable - to the point that, for a while, a printed book was called "a caxton".

He helped standardize English spelling, though he did predate the Great Vowel Shift, and so didn't standardize what we might think of as a "rational" orthography; still, considering what he had to deal with, he ruled.

In the late fifteenth century, the printer William Caxton, who greatly influenced what is now Standard Written English complained about the changes in the language since earlier times and its diverse dialects:

[I] took an old book and read therein, and certainly the English was so rude and broad that I could not well understand it. And also my lord Abbot of Westminster had shown to me recently certain evidences written in old English for to translate it into our English now used. And certainly it was written in such a manner that it was more like Dutch than English. I could not translate it nor bring it to be understood.

And certainly our language now used varies far from that which was used and spoken when I was born. For we Englishmen are born under the dominination of the Moon, which is never steadfast but ever wavering, waxing one season, and wanes and decreases another season.

And that common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another. Insomuch that in my days happened that certain merchants were in a ship in the Thames, for to have sailed over the sea into Zeeland, and for lack of wind they tarried at foreland and went to land for to refresh themselves. And one of them named Sheffelde, a mercer, came into a house and asked for food; and especially he asked for eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French.

And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but wanted to have had eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last another said that he would have "eyren." Then the good wife understood him well.

Lo, what should a man in these days now write, "eggs" or "eyren"?

[Tr. from the preface to Enydos Caxton's Eneydos, 1490. Englisht from the French Liure des Eneydes, 1483. Ed. by the late W. [read M.] T. Culley ... and F.J. Furnivall, London, a EETS, 1890 [Widener: 11473.57].

Source: The Geoffrey Chaucer Website

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/

odd error at VT

Today's Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day is collaborate, about which they say:

The pronunciation of this word and also of its cousin, elaborate, might through you off the scent of their relationship to labor -- but not if you have your eyes open!

That through is an odd error, because although it eye-rhymes with though, it doesn't rhyme at all with throw.

(not bothering with the link because they caught it on the website, and it's not free anyway.)

Sky Watch: Beyond the cloud

Here I give you the magnificent Mount Rainier. It's peeking out of the cloud it had gathered around itself for several days, only a few hours before emerging to dominate the horizon.





more Sky Watchers here

What kind of dog was it?

The Seattle Times headline:

Bear attacks man on Lewis-McChord base

and the story begins

Washington wildlife agents are trying to trap a bear that attacked a man while walking his dog on Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

What kind of dog do black bears favor, I wonder?

More seriously, "while" doesn't work like that. If you don't specify the subject of the participle (the -ing form here), it's presumed to take the same one as its matrix clause. That's the clause the while-clause is subordinate to. Compare

A man saw a bear while walking his dog.
Agents are looking for a man that saw a bear while walking his dog.

So, in the story, who's walking the dog?

A bear attacked a man while walking his dog.
Agents are looking for a bear that attacked a man while walking his dog.

Yeah. It's the bear. To make it the man, you have to repeat him (with a pronoun probably) and turn the participle into a full verb phrase by adding the auxiliary verb:

Agents are trying to trap a bear that attacked a man while he was walking his dog.

And now, of course, anybody could be walking the dog:

Agents are trying to trap a bear that attacked a man while it was walking its dog.
Agents are trying to trap a bear that attacked a man while they were walking their (or his) dog.
Agents are trying to trap a bear that attacked a man while his girlfriend was walking his (or her) dog.
Agents are trying to trap a bear that attacked a man while some random dog-owning tourist was walking his dog.

ps - The dog went into woods then came running out, chased by the bear. As the bear ran by the man, it took a swipe at him and continued chasing the dog. The dog was later found OK off the military base.

Happy Birthday, Bob

Today in 1833, in Dresden, New York, Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll was born.

Ingersoll was most noted as an orator, the most popular of his age, when oratory was public entertainment. He was stunningly popular as a speaker, given that his most popular subject was agnosticism; many attacked him as a blasphemer, but crowds paid the then-huge sum of a dollar to hear him advocate free thought and attack organized religion.

Ingersoll enjoyed a friendship with the poet Walt Whitman, who considered Ingersoll the greatest orator of his time. "It should not be surprising that I am drawn to Ingersoll, for he is Leaves of Grass... He lives, embodies, the individuality, I preach. I see in Bob the noblest specimen--American-flavored--pure out of the soil, spreading, giving, demanding light." At the poet's death, Ingersoll delivered one of the great panegyrics.

Ambrose Bierce's satiric Decalogue contained this Second Commandment: "No images nor idols make/for Robert Ingersoll to break."

His obituary said

Ingersoll was one of the most eloquent public men of the present day. He was a lawyer of pronounced supremacy and was held in the highest esteem in the courts of his country. There was no office in the gift of his people that he could not have obtained but for his pronounced antagonism to orthodox Christianity. A man of unimpeachable morality and uprightness, honest in all his dealings, overflowing with generous impulses, Ingersoll set his face against the teachings of revelation and, as his spare moments permitted, conducted an energetic warfare against the Church of Christ.

And he said, among other things:

You can't be bad enough to cause an earthquake, neither can you be good enough to stop one.

You can find more about him here.

A seething river of birds

We ate dinner at The Depot Restaurant in Long Beach (very good), and then went to the beach itself. It is long, and sandy, and we walked to the Pacific to take some pictures. And then we saw a river of birds - an endless stream of dark shapes pouring over the water going north. Along with them came string after string (skein, like geese?) of pelicans, big enough to see as individuals, twisting and diving into the water. Sooty shearwaters by the thousands - maybe the tens of thousands - and hundreds of pelicans. There were some gulls, too, larger than the shearwaters, but not so many; they were mainly on the beach, watching. The birds kept coming for at least twenty minutes - still going strong when we had to leave. It was the most astonishing thing I've seen in maybe ever.

Happy Birthday, Rocket

Today 1938, in Rockhampton, Australia, Rod Laver was born. The only man to win the Grand Slam tournaments in a single year twice, Rocket Rod was the first tennis player I ever followed. I loved to watch him play. That left-handed serve, that devastating backhand, those light dropping volleys - and those vicious smashes on the rare occasions someone made him run out of the court: Rocket indeed. Back when the Australians dominated tennis, he, Ken Rosewall (whom I also adored), and John Newcombe were such marvelous players...

Happy Birthday, Rocket; may you have many more.

Bigger, slower, easier...

Sometimes this country's lack of (for lack of a better word) institutional memory baffles me.

Afghan insurgents (back when they were the good guys) shot down freaking Hind-D gunships. Why are we surprised when they shoot down a huge, lumbering Chinook?

Happy Birthday, Sara

Today in St Louis, Missouri, in 1884 Sara Teasdale was born.

A Little While

A little while when I am gone
My life will live in music after me,
As spun foam lifted and borne on
After the wave is lost in the full sea.

A while these nights and days will burn
In song with the bright frailty of foam,
Living in light before they turn
Back to the nothingness that is their home.


In a Garden

THE world is resting without sound or motion,
Behind the apple tree the sun goes down
Painting with fire the spires and the windows
In the elm-shaded town.
Beyond the calm Connecticut the hills lie
Silvered with haze as fruits still fresh with bloom,
The swallows weave in flight across the zenith
On an aerial loom.
Into the garden peace comes back with twilight,
Peace that since noon had left the purple phlox,
The heavy-headed asters, the late roses
And swaying hollyhocks.
For at high-noon I heard from this same garden
The far-off murmur as when many come;
Up from the village surged the blind and beating
Red music of a drum;
And the hysterical sharp fife that shattered
The brittle autumn air,
While they came, the young men marching
Past the village square....
Across the calm Connecticut the hills change
To violet, the veils of dusk are deep—
Earth takes her children's many sorrows calmly
And stills herself to sleep.




(more poems here)

Dear Respectfully

Quite possibly the least convincing one of these I've gotten:

Dear Respectfully,

My name is Annabelle Webb, I know that this mail might come to you surprisingly because we neither know each other nor has ever met. I got your contact details in my search for a reliable and neutral person to partner with me.

Work with me to receive a discountable contract Bank Guarantee on a United Nation Contracted projects in Darfur, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Malaysia,India and Haiti which has been completed and commissioned and you will receive 30% of the total value of the Bank Guarantee.
Details will be furnished to you when you indicate your interest in partnering with me in this life time venture.

Please contact me urgently.

Rainier

A quick post - we went to Mt Rainier park yesterday. For much of the day the mountain was playing peek-a-boo (mostly not peeking) with the clouds - I feared all my pictures, like this first one, would have to be labeled "Mt Rainier towers majestically above the clouds; we, unfortunately, are below them" but at the end of the day it came out. Yay!





Also, it's August. Do they ever not have snow at Paradise?

The Week in Entertainment

not much this week - or next, for that matter, I predict

Read: Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler, an intriguing beginning to a series, moving between present day and WWII; Snow, a disturbingly good book by Orhan Pamuk, and I started Let Not The Waves Of The Sea by Simon Stephens, about coping with the loss of his brother in the Christmas tsunami.

Long long gone

Glenn Greenwald compares Norway's response to ours:

What's most striking, and ironic, is that the Norwegian response to the Oslo attack is so glaringly un-American even though its core premise -- a brave refusal to sacrifice liberty and transparency in the name of fear and security -- was once the political value Americans boasted of exhibiting most. What we now have instead is the instinctive exploitation by political elites of every threat -- real and imagined -- as a means of eroding liberties, privacy and openness, based in part on fear and in part on an opportunistic desire for greater power. That's why Norway's courageous, principled response seems so foreign to American eyes and ears.

I've quoted this from Sarah Vowell before, and I'm afraid I'll have to quote it often again:

Whenever I hear the president mention, oh, every 12 minutes, that his greatest responsibility is "to protect the American people," the insufferable civics robot inside my head mutters: "Actually, sir, your oath, the one with the Bible and the chief justice and the Jumbotron, is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. For the American people are not mere flesh whose greatest hope is to keep our personal greasy molecules intact; we, sir, are a body politic -- with ideals."

Happy Birthday, Alfred

Born today in 1809 in Somersby in Lincolnshire, England, Alfred Tennyson, later (at 75 and for his poetry!!!) Baron Tennyson. The most popular and best-selling poet of his day (or any, probably), he outsold even Dickens.

A Farewell

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea,
A rivulet then a river:
Nowhere by thee my steps shall be
For ever and for ever.

But here will sigh thine alder tree
And here thine aspen shiver;
And here by thee will hum the bee,
For ever and for ever.

A thousand suns will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

Bird list

Pictures will follow, once I have time to edit them properly, but here's a list of what I saw in my brief time in Seaside/Monterey:

scrub jays
cormorants (including a white one)
great blue heron
some little ducks (I'm not sure yet which)
Canada geese
big white feral geese
pelicans!
blackbirds, redwinged and Brewer's
great-tailed grackles
house finches (or maybe purple?)
house (English) sparrows
crows
buzzards (vultures)
and, of course, gulls

Not bad for not really having a chance to look.

Sky Watch: Monterey Evening

The last evening in Monterey the overcast was clear just over the peninsula, pouring golden light onto the town and the water from a dark cloud-filled sky.




more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Conrad

Today in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia, Conrad Aiken was born. His poems won a Pulitzer, but he was never wildly popular, which is a shame. Many of them are too long to post here, but this one isn't:


Music I Heard With You

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved, --
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always, --
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Happy Birthday, Helen

Today in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1920 Helen Thomas was born. An Arab-American and a woman, she's forged a path few of any ethnicity or gender have followed. The longest-serving White House reporter, she has covered every president since Kennedy, first for UP and then UPI (until 2000), and then as a columnist. For 45 years she has covered them with "respect for the office but no awe for the man" - which, as you can imagine, has earned her the dislike of more than one of them. She hadn't been afraid to call Obama out, either, on what she perceived to be his failings: secrecy and "controlling" the press, a reluctance to fight hard for things like universal healthcare ("no stomach for the political battle," she says), and turning a blind eye to Israel's conduct in Gaza.

She's now retired (as I'm sure you know), having finally said something nobody wanted to hear in terms too blunt to be forgiven... But she was never anybody's lap dog, this lady. We need more, not fewer, like her.

Happy Birthday, Percy

Percy Bysshe Shelley, born this day 1792. He drowned while sailing, in 1822, before his thirtieth birthday, but still managed to produce many poetic masterpieces. He was twice married, the second time to Mary (neè Godwin), who wrote Frankenstein.

He spent one year at Oxford University, but in 1811 he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg published their pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which resulted in their immediate expulsion from the university. Many of his poems are not only lyrical, but progressive, even revolutionary, in their politics.

But here's one that's only (or is it?) lyric:

A Poet's Dream

ON a Poet's lips I slept,
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses
Of shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
  Nor heed nor see what things they be—
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
  Nurslings of Immortality!

Happy Birthday, Louis

Louis Armstrong, great jazz trumpeter and no mean singer, either, born today in 1901. His recordings with Ella Fitzgerald are classics. His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings practically created modern jazz.

Happy Birthday, Rupert

Today, in 1887, Rupert Brooke was born in Warwickshire, England. He published his first collection of poems in 1911, and it was hugely popular (find his works here). When World War I broke out he wrote to a friend, "Well, if Armageddon's on, I suppose one should be there," and joined up. He died in 1915 of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite and is buried on Skyros, a lonely Greek island off which he died, as described by his friend, the composer Denis Browne, who himself died two months later:

he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.

He published only 87 poems, including five war sonnets, of which the most famous begins "If I should die, think only this of me; / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.") and this:

Clouds

Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.

Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.

Happy Birthday, Clifford

It was today in 1904, in Millville, Wisconsin, that Clifford Simak was born. A practicing journalist for most of his life - in Minneapolis - he also wrote brilliant and award-winning science fiction, earning three Hugos and a Nebula and being named a Grand Master (a title given to a living author for lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy). His best known novel (sort of) is probably City, which is very good, but my favorite - one of my all-time favorite novels by anyone, for that matter - is the wonderful Way Station.

The Week in Entertainment

Goodness this is late! Traveling and conference prep has thrown me off schedule ...

DVD: Rango, odd but entertaining, though I generally have a problem with films that give me animals acting like people (clothes, tools, towns, banking systems) in what's meant to be the real world. Fortunately, since they only interacted with people - and at a remove - once or twice, I could overlook that. Most of the time, you don't even think about it.

TV: Leverage, a lovely episode giving the actors a bit more to do than usual as they played second characters in the flashback bits. Caught up on the Futurama eps on the dvr - generally quite funny. Village of the Damned which remains quite creepy no matter how many times I watch.

Read: A bunch of Peter Lovesey novels - Diamond and Mallin, no Cribb - prompted by a glowing review of Stagestruck. Also (re)read The Midwich Cuckoos - prompted by seeing the movie version. I haven't read it in decades, and I'd forgotten how much they changed in the book while not altering the basic story/message at all. Sometimes weird little changes (like a character's name) and sometimes quite ruthlessly hacking people (like the narrator, Zellaby's daughter, and Zellaby's son who was not, in the book, one of the Childred) right out, not to mention that in the book the kids aren't as young as they are in the movie. Then I (re)read Chocky, because it was there on the shelf and I remembered liking it very much. Still do. The Secret Diary of Alice in Wonderland, age 42 and a half, which is ... weird. Very good, very entertaining, but also quite hard to describe.