Happy Birthday, Lucy

Today in 1874 in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born. Her most famous book, Anne of Green Gables, was written 102 years ago now. She wrote 19 others, all but one set on PEI. My favorite? Jane of Lantern Hill.

Happy Birthday, Mark

Mark Twain was born today as Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. Instead of a few shorter quotes as I usually do, today I'm offering you one of the great passages in American literature. It's from Huckleberry Finn (offensive word and all):

I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie — and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

And after you recover from the power of that "All right, then, I'll go to hell", enjoy some short Twain stories courtesy of The Atlantic

Happy Birthday to My Father

My father is 90 today. We're throwing him a big party, coming in from three states. In this picture, he's six - but he still has that smile.

Happy Birthday, Minnie

Today The Cuban Comet, Minnie Minoso (born Saturnino Orestes Armas Miñoso Arrieta in Havana, Cuba), is 87 years old.

His major-league career spanned five decades (1940s-1980s) and he made a couple of brief appearances with the independent Northern League's St. Paul Saints in 1993 and 2003, which make him the only player to have played professionally in 7 different decades. He played for the Indians, White Sox, Cardinals, and Senators, and was the first black White Sox player. "Mr White Sox", another nickname he had, didn't play regularly until he was 28, but his career numbers are impressive: a .298 batting average, with 186 home runs, 1023 RBI, 1136 runs, 1963 hits, 336 doubles, 83 triples, 205 stolen bases, 814 walks and 192 hit by pitch. His career ended with a .389 on base percentage and a .459 slugging average, combined for a solid .848 OPS. He was a 7-time All-Star. For his excellence in left field, he received the Gold Glove Award three times. He led his league in triples and stolen bases three times each.

Happy Birthday, Louisa

Louisa May Alcott was born today in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. She's best known, of course, for Little Women and similar books, but those aren't what she wanted to write. She had started out writing sensational stories about duels and suicides, opium addiction, mind control, bigamy and murder. She called it "blood and thunder" literature, and she said, "I seem to have a natural ambition for the lurid style." She published under male pseudonyms to keep from embarrassing her family. But in 1867 - four years after her first book was published - an editor suggested that she try writing what he called "a girl's book," and, needing the money, she said she'd try. The result was Little Women, and it was a huge success. Such a success that she, with her whole family to support (her father was a Transcendentalist - a well-known one, in fact - and a social reformer, an educational reformer, and an abolitionist, and there's never money in that sort of thing!), felt obligated to keep writing books like it although she hated them.

You know, I've read a couple of those "blood and thunder" books - they're not bad at all. It's a shame she didn't write more. But I do admit that when I was in junior high, I loved Eight Cousins... the sequel wasn't as good, though.

That editor was obviously the model for that horrible professor in Little Women ...

Happy Birthday, Aleksandr

Today is the birthday of Aleksandr Blok, or in Old Style 16 November.

A little poem from 1912

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века -
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

Night, the street, the lamp, the drugstore,
The senseless and dreary light.
If you live on another quarter century
All will be the same. There's no escape.

You'll die - and then begin it all again
And you'll repeat it all, as of old:
The night, the icy ripples on the canal,
The drugstore, the street, the lamp.

There's no place like ...

Birmingham! Birmingham! "The Pittsburgh of the South" and once home to many a steel mill. (I can remember seeing the red-hot glow when we drove through on the way to Mongtomery, back when I was a child.)

Plus of course a giant statue of Vulcan. With no pants.

Happy Birthday, Sprague

Today in 1907, in New York City, L. Sprague de Camp was born. Alternate histories, time travel, ethnocentrism (attacking it, I hasten to add), linguistics ... de Camp was a giant. The Incomplete Enchanter is one of the funniest fantasy novels ever written. Lest Darkness Fall, "The Wheels of If", and "A Gun for Dinosaur", among others, set rigorous standards for time travel novels and short stories to come. Land of Unreason is brilliant. And we can't forget the "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, especially Rogue Queen. He also wrote non-fiction, including history and debunking... There were giants on the earth in those days, indeed. (pictured: l-r, Heinlein, de Camp, Asimove)

It's All in Way They Ask

And I must confess: I had no idea that Frank Lloyd Wright lived in Wisconsin, or what he'd named his house, or anything that would have helped me from that angle. Any question like "Who lives in the house called Taliesin?" or "What is the name of FLW's Wisconsin home?" would have sunk me dead. But I got "This famous Wisconsin home was named for a Welsh bard associated with King Arthur" anyway - because I knew Taliesin.

Distracted by the wrong thing

Category: The Book of Numbers (all the titles had a number in them). Clue: Solzhynitsyn's book desribing an inmate's 24 hours.

"A Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovich," says the first guy. Alex starts to say no and he corrects himself to "Denisovich." But Alex still says no.

Number 2 rings in. "A Day in the Life of Denis ... Denisonovich?" she can't figure how to end it. And Aex says no.

Third one rings in. "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," he says confidentely, figuring (probably) that the first one had taken too long.

But they'd all forgotten the category. It's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Argh. That would be a killer.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD:  King Uncle, a 1993 Indian film starring Gujarati and Bollywood star Jackie Shroff in the title role of a tyrannical millionaire who drives away his brother (Shahrukh Khan) and marries his sister (Neviditra Saraf) to an abusive womanizer, and then has his empty life turned upside down by a spunky orphan (Pooja Ruparel). The film is based on Annie, but but only loosely so.

TV: A couple of episodes of Grimm - can't wait to see what they end up doing with Renard and Juliet. There's No Business Like Show Business, which once upon a time got me labelled square by giving me the wrong first-thought-of "Heat Wave", and Gypsy (which, inexplicably, I had never seen the movie of).

Read: The Lawgiver by Herman Wouk, a delightful novel. Also a charming YA called Boy Meets Boy, and a splendid, oh-my-god good one called Will Grayson, Will Grayson, that I can't praise highly enough. Margaret Maron's latest, The Buzzard Table, which again mixes Deborah Knott with Sigrid Harald, though fortunately Harald is very much a minor character, and they're in North Carolina. Looking For Yesterday by Marcia Muller, an excellent entry in the Sharon McCone series. Dogfight, a collection of Calvin Trillin's "Deadline Poet" verse about the 2012 presidential campaign.

Especially easy when it's what you want to hear

Pat Robertson on missing God's message:

Today, responding to a question from a viewer who wondered why her business is struggling since she thought God told her it would be successful, Robertson admitted that he sometimes misses God’s message. “So many of us miss God, I won’t get into great detail about elections but I sure did miss it, I thought I heard from God, I thought I had heard clearly from God, what happened?” Robertson replied, “You ask God, how did I miss it? Well, we all do and I have a lot of practice.”

One does begin to wonder why he should ever be believed...

Why does he win?

This always bugs me.

In the Errol Flynn The Adventures of Robin Hood (or any movie, for that matter), there's an archery contest, and Robin enters and wins by splitting the arrow of his last remaining competition. But why is that a win? Why isn't it a tie? He just hit the exact spot the other guy did, after all!

Translating demonstrative pronouns

Here's a paragraph translated from the Russian incorporating a phrasing used by almost all of my students:

In this context* (and one may also remember that the need for obtaining aid for modernization from developed nations was a recurrent theme in Medvedev's foreign policy statements) one can also explain Dmitry Medvedev's decision in March 2012 to abstain from voting in the UN Security Council on the question of military intervention in Libya. This contradicted the traditional position of Moscow, which had never, even in its period of maximal weakness and pro-westerness in the 1990s, so clearly supported intervention in anyone's domestic affairs. But if one considers that Russia has clearly defined goals and interests, then it is completely rational to refrain from participating in that which does not directly affect them.

* Russia as a local, rather than global, power.

The paragraph reads rather awkwardly, right? The sentences don't hang together well at all. And I cheerfully marked it wrong the first time I saw it, but the ninth? I was wondering if my interpretation was off, if I was missing a valid English ambiguity. Yes, the Russian original wasn't, but an ambiguous translation is a different kind of error than one with a referent that's simply wrong.

So I asked around among people who hadn't seen the original, and a bunch more who didn't even know Russian and were just judging the English as an original text: What does the "this" in "this contradicted the traditional position" refer back to?

There was some disagreement. A few people thought it meant the abstention and a few thought it was ambiguous between the abstention and the decision to abstain; most, however, were sure it mean the decision. And they all thought there was something wrong with the next sentence, that being so. So I was right.

Because in the Russian, it's very clearly the military intervention. (The paragraph in question is below.) I haven't discussed this in class yet, but I think I know what happened. They translated this linearly (they almost always do, they're at that level), and when they came to the Russian word это (ehto, this), they simply translated it like that, not noticing that while the Russian word goes to the nearest phrase, the English one goes to the noun in the main clause. That is, this can't be referring to something in a NP that's buried four-deep (decision to -> refrain from -> voting on -> question of -> military intervention). If this had been written in English, it would have needed a repetition of the noun ("This (or "such") intervention contradicted") for clarity.

Many times the errors my students make come from their habit of translating things a sentence at a time, and not paying attention to the cohesion between the sentences. But this one adds another dimension, I believe: they don't write much in English, so they don't realize when they've made an error like this. I'm always telling them they have to read a lot in English at ILR 3 if they want to have any hope of doing it in Russian. I think I'm going to have to start telling them they need to write, too.

Here's the original, from a review by Fyodor Luk'yanov of a foreign affairs paper written by Vladimir Putin, followed by a better translation (she said modestly):

В этом контексте (а можно вспомнить и то, что лейтмотивом внешнеполитических заявлений Медведева служила необходимость содействия модернизации со стороны развитых стран) объяснимо и решение Дмитрия Медведева в марте 2011 года воздержаться при голосовании в Совете Безопасности ООН по вопросу о военном вмешательстве в Ливию. Это противоречило традиционной позиции Москвы, которая никогда, даже в период максимальной слабости и прозападности в 1990-е годы, не поддерживала столь явно вмешательства в чьи-то внутренние дела. Но если считать, что у России есть четко ограниченные цели и интересы, то тогда вполне логично воздерживаться от участия в том, что напрямую их не касается.

This context (while remembering that the need for obtaining aid for modernization from developed nations was a recurrent theme in Medvedev's foreign policy statements) also explains Dmitry Medvedev's decision in March 2012 to abstain from voting in the UN Security Council on the question of military intervention in Libya. This intervention contradicted Moscow's traditional position, which even in the late 1990s, its period of maximal weakness and pro-western attitudes, was never so clearly supportive of intervention in anyone's domestic affairs. But if one considers that Russia has certain clearly defined goals and interests, then it is completely rational to refrain from participating in anything which does not directly affect them.

(The Russian original can be found here)

Happy Birthday, Doctor Who!

On this day 49 years ago, the Doctor first appeared on TV screens across the UK  (in "An Unearthly Child").

10 regenerations and nearly 800 episodes later and Doctor Who remains the longest running and most successful sci-fi TV show in the world!

Via the BBC: Join us as we say - Happy 49th Anniversary Doctor Who!

Happy Birthday, Hrihoriy

Григорій Савич Сковорода - Hrihoriy Savych Skovoroda - was born today in Chornukhy, near Poltava, in the Hetamanate of Ukraine which at the time (1722) belonged to Russia. He spent the last thirty years of his life wandering Ukraine with a flute, teaching and philosophizing; he wasn't published till after he died. His epitaph - which he composed - reads: Світ ловив мене, але не піймав (The world tried to catch me, but did not succeed / Svit lovyv mene, ale ne pijmav).

On a linguistic note, this epitaph is interesting as it contains an aspectual pair of verbs which come from different roots, a rare but not unheard of situation. The verbs - ловити and піймати (lovyty, pijmaty) - mean "to catch" but the imperfective means "to be trying to catch" (success not implied); "ловити рибу (lovyty rybu)" is thus "to go fishing". Hence, the compact "ловив мене" becomes "tried to catch me", and "не піймав" is "did not catch".


(Find some Skovoroda in Ukrainian here.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers, and happy end of autumn (or spring) to the rest!

Happy Birthday, Voltaire

Born today in Paris in 1694 was a man who helped spark the Enlightenment in France: Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. He spent most of his life in exile, and his writings built up support in Europe for what we now think of as basic human rights.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

Happy Birthday, Dick

Born today in 1939 in New York, New York, Dick Smothers. He was actually the younger of them, though as a kid I always thought he was the older. Mom loved him best, and so did I... I'm old enough to remember them on television (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour) - that's Tom with the guitar, and Dick with the bass... Here's a bit from a long interview with Ken Paulson on "Speaking Freely":

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

And here's another interview, with David Bianculli who wrote "Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers".

Tommy gets most of the press - and the laughs. But it wouldn't have worked with the patient straight man. So thanks, Dick - for the songs, the jokes, and the passion.

Why it matters that Rubio thinks it matters that he's not a scientist

Krugman tells us why we should care that Marco Rubio thinks it doesn't matter how old he thinks the earth is:

But here’s what you should realize: when Rubio says that the question of the Earth’s age “has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow”, he’s dead wrong. For one thing, science and technology education has a lot to do with our future productivity — and how are you going to have effective science education if schools have to give equal time to the views of fundamentalist Christians?

More broadly, the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence — and boy, do we have lots of evidence on the age of the planet! — if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy. If you’re going to ignore what geologists say if you don’t like its implications, what are the chances that you’ll take sensible advice on monetary and fiscal policy? After all, we’ve just seen how Republicans deal with research reports that undermine their faith in the magic of tax cuts: they try to suppress the reports.

What IS that word?

Over at the Moscow Times, Michelle Berdy samples some Russian kids' history papers from a linguistic point of view. One paragraph reads:

Others had some issues with word choice, something I sympathize with: В советских школах дети были как инкубаторы — у них всё было одинаковое (In Soviet schools, children were like incubators, they all had the same things). Врагов советской власти называли дивидентами. Дивидентское движение росло и ширилось (Enemies of Soviet power were called dividents. The divident movement grew and spread.) Ельцин осуществлял политику шаговой терапии (Yeltsin carried out a policy of step-by-step therapy).

Now, two of those seem obvious to me - the second should be диссидент (dissident) and the third should be шоковой (shock - shokovoj vs shagovoj). But that first sentence? Man, I don't know. Clearly "incubators" is the wrong word, but what's the right one?

One of the native speakers I work with emailed me that "We've always said 'they look like they are from one and the same incubator' which in Russian is они как инкубаторские". So the adjective instead of the noun... Not quite the same error, but okay. At least I understand it now.

Word play is so hard to translate, and that's if you even get the joke in the first place! 

Happy Birthday, William

William Russell, companion to the First Doctor, was born today in 1924, in Sunderland.

The Week in Entertainment

(Oops, let this go out uncompleted!

Live: Don Giovanni by the Peabody Opera at the Lyric. A really well-done show, clocking in at just over 3 hours, thanks in part to their minimalist, but effective, set design. Huanhuan Ma (Donna Anna) and  Halim Shon (Don Ottavio) in particular have fine careers ahead of them, but most of the cast was excellent, including Jeffrey Martin who gave us a fine comic Leporello.

DVD: Zamaana Deewana (ज़माना दीवाना "Crazy World") with Shahrukh Khan and Raveena Tandon the children of feuding crime bosses Shatrughan Sinha and Jeetendra, with character actor Anupam Kher in a great turn as a psychologist with a plan to unite the ex-friends by making their children fall in love. Also, the villain is Tinnu Anand, the same actor who was the bad guy in Chamatkar. This one was a lot of fun, though the dvd is one of those that doesn't subtitle the songs. Also, a Tamil-language adaptation of Sense and Sensibility called Kandukondain Kandukondain (கண்டுகொண்டேன் கண்டுகொண்டேன், I Have Found It) with the lovely and talented Aishwarya Rai as the younger daughter and Tabu as the older. The bones of Austen's story are there, but it's definitely of its own time and place, even opening with the war its "Colonel Brandon" - Major Bala (Mammootty) - comes from. A really beautiful film, with a similar but different visual feel to Bollywood (especially noticeable in the first musical number, "Konjum Mainakkale (Chirping Mynahs)").

TV: A combination of sports pushing things around (mostly that, I hope) and the dvr acting weird caused me to have to go online for Modern Family and The Mentalist - one ep of the latter, anyway. That mural - ack. It's worse than the one in Lily's room! The Mentalist is still too hung up on Red John. I like the shows where he doesn't get more than a passing mention... Also caught up on some Grimm.

Read: Began Hermann Wouk's new novel, The Lawgiver, which is quite engaging so far.

Turns out not to be so

I was catching up on The Mentalist, and caught the tag end of a The Good Wife episode. Some woman was telling Chris Noth's character that he should quit his campaign and be her running mate. She said she had plenty of her own money and she could afford to spend lots. "People are attracted to someone who's willing to spend their own money," she said.

Well, I have no idea how it's playing out on that show (despite liking the actors, I really disliked the first three or four episodes and haven't watched it since). But in real life we've seen just the opposite. Plenty of people ran this last time, and the time before, spending a lot of their own money (like Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Linda McMahon, for example). And they weren't attractive enough to enough people.

Happy Birthday, José

José Saramago, (that's a Portuguese name, not Spanish, so it's [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmaɣu] zho-ZEH sah-rah-MAH-goo) was born today in 1922, to family of landless peasants in the village of Anzihaga, Portugal. His books have been translated into at least 25 languages, and he's a Nobel laureate. His style is idiosyncratic, his themes humanity, individuality, commonality... I find him either brilliant or incomprehensible; some of his books I love (Death With Interruptions, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reyes, The Stone Raft) and some I can't get past the first chapters...

He spent much of his life, and died - in 2010, in June -, on Lanzarote (one of the Spanish Canary Islands), because Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to compete for the European Literary Prize, arguing that it offended the Catholic community.

Voter Fraud! in New Jersey!

Another guy (this one a self-described "independent") got so worked up over voter fraud and the need for ID that he actually voted twice to see if he'd get stopped:

A 75-year-old New Jersey man is under investigation by prosecutors in Cumberland County for casting two ballots in what he said was a test for voter fraud.

Clarence Custis called the Cumberland County Board of Elections on Nov. 7 to report that he had voted at the clerk’s office and a second time in his hometown of Fairfield, the South Jersey Times reported late Wednesday.

“I was hoping that I would get flagged when I went to vote,” Custis told the paper. “I first went to the courthouse and filled out a mail-in ballot at the County Clerk’s office. Then I went to Gouldtown to vote like I normally would. I figured I would be flagged. But I wasn’t.”

No. He wasn't. And without some kind of science-fictiony control of the post office, he couldn't have been. And I mean science-fictiony, not dystopian: How the heck did he expect anybody at Gouldtown to know he'd mailed in a ballot that same day?

What happens, guy, is that when your mail-in ballot arrives, they check the rolls and see you managed to make it in to vote in person, and then they chuck the mail-in ballot. Which is smarter all around, since who knows who was watching you fill in that mail-in one? And if they marked the wrong name and prevented you from voting, it's kind of too late.

Not to mention that, you know, New Jersey? Maybe they're running just a little slow after the devastating hurricane? Maybe you could have given then a whole freaking day, huh?

Also not to mention that he voted as himself both times, so mandatory voter ID wouldn't have helped.

... Say, you know what would help? Making voters get a stamp, like for a club, or a purple finger like in Iraq. That way you can only vote once, with or without ID. This guy would have been flagged at Gouldtown that way. But any other way? Until the mail-in ballots actually arrive, there's no way to know.

Abbreviations ... not

Not to be overly pedantic, but an abbreviation is a "a shortened form of a written word or phrase used for brevity in place of the whole made commonly by omission of letters from one or more parts of the whole", and things like DEAR, FERPA, ACT, SLP, and ESEA are acronyms or initialisms.

(But I'm more perturbed that none of them knew who William F. Buckley, Jr, was.)

Happy Birthday, Marianne

Today is the birthday of Marianne Moore. She was born near St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887, and won many awards for her writing, including a Pulitzer.


Silence

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences.

Happy Birthday, Frederick

Frederick William Herschel, born Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, was born today in 1738. Herschel is most famous for the discovery of Uranus in addition to two of its major moons, Titania and Oberon. He also discovered two moons of Saturn - Enceladus and Mimas, shown below (they're tiny! yet large enough to be rounded by self-gravity), Enceladus against the clouds and Mimas below the rings. Mimas, by the way, is the "Death Star moon", its huge Herschel crater prominent in the photo at the bottom.

A great map

Remember (if you saw it) Colbert fretting over the election map and wondering why we didn't elect the president "based on square footage?" Looking at this map, that seems a fair question.

This map shows a different take (source: http://io9.com/5960484/this-is-most-accurate-political-election-map-weve-seen-yet - there are some very high-res versions available there, too). The darker the color, the more votes were cast, meaning you can see population here. Look how empty the middle of the country is. (Alaska's county results weren't in, but it would be mostly white, too.)

What a concept!

The Chicago Manual of Style October Q&A contains this radical notion:

In many cases it will be a judgment call. The decision, like so many others in writing and editing, should not be made according to some idea of what is “correct.” Rather, it must be made according to what is logical and helpful.

The question, by the way, was whether there was a rule for citing city names: with or without the state.

When he stops being a general

Actually ran into someone at work today who thought Petraeus was still on active duty. All this "General this" and "General that" ... part of the worship of the military, I guess. At any rate, it made me think of this song from White Christmas:




Nowadays I guess the answer is "slap him into a consulting or government job, stat, and pay him lots of money..."

Happy Birthday, Claude

Today in 1840 Claude Monet was born. One of the first Impressionists, Monet painted many series of paintings - the same subject from the same place under all different light and weather, exploring the idea that you can never really see the same thing twice. Here for instance are two from the Houses of Parliament series (above) and two from the Poplars on the Epte series (below).


(Monet at WebMuseum)

Stay away from the dog!

Okay, it has been almost two actual weeks since we saw pretty widow Ava's little boy, but I think the strips are delivered for coloring in batches, aren't they? So... is Andy's saliva acidic? Or merely bleachy? Or has the widow dyed her son's hair for some plot point? 'Cause surely it's not just carelessness! (And that's without getting into that bizarrely stilted dialog: "My son is becoming attached to your dog!" "Andy is a great friend... he has saved my life many times!" "My friends like you also!")

Woodpecker

The commute to the new office has no good photo ops on it, but here's a red-bellied woodpecker from September...

Name Colon Statement

So, the headline is

Grover Norquist: Romney A ‘Poopy Head’

But the story says

“The president was elected on the basis that he was not Romney and that Romney was a poopy-head and you should vote against Romney,” Norquist said on CBS’s “This Morning.”

Sure, it got me to click through, but that's one misleading hed.

I do like the eloquence of Norquist's summary, though. giggle.

And this is where she lost me

I was trying to stay sympathetic to the woman in this WaPo story about Red America being forced to rethink its image of the country. It wasn't easy, since she had bought so deeply into the alternate reality - running a campaign office in Hendersonville (my cousins used to live there), Tenn, and being the kind of mega-church SBC Christian who "speaks about the right to life at area schools" and bans Harry Potter books from her daughters' lives. But I was trying to empathize with her fear that her way of life was becoming marginalized. I was. Until I hit this paragraph:

She could sense liberalism creeping closer, and she worried about what Red America would look like after four more years. Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch.

You know what? "Do X to do Y" is not a neutral phrase; it's a causal one. It says the point of doing X, the motive, is to be able to do Y. Y is the goal, X is the tool.

And I'm willing to be quite a lot of my own hard-earned taxpayer dollars that those 400,000 Tennesseans signed up for food stamps to feed their children. This smug, self-righteous stay-at-home mom  "who respected what she called the “natural order of the household”" is another one of those people who thinks that right to life applies to zygotes only, not kids already here, and (though to be fair, this wasn't specifically mentioned in the article, though not "relying on the government" and "drugs, dependency and indulgence" were) thinks welfare moms need the dignity of work instead of "the advantages of raising children at home" like her and her friends.

So, yeah. I lost a lot of my sympathy for her. She "will be okay" she says. Yeah, she will. "I just don't think that we will be okay," she adds, and that depends on how narrowly she defines "we". Because one of the reasons she'll be okay is that her guy lost. Tennessee may be ruby red, but she lives right next to blue Nashville.

And that's a sign of hope for us.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Chamatkar (चमत्कार, Miracle), an old (well, 1992) Hindi ghost comedy movie with Naseeruddin Shah as the ghost of the dead criminal and Shahrukh Khan as the young man, stranded in Bombay, who is the only one who can see him. It's a bit dated, but quite amusing. Also a 1993 SRK film called Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (कभी हाँ कभी ना, Sometimes yes, sometimes no) in which he plays (and very well, you're so sorry for him) the second choice and doesn't end up with the girl (at least, not with Suchitra Krishnamurthy, who plays the lead - Juhi Chawla has a tiny appearance at the end, to reassure the audience that he won't suffer too much for being willing to stand aside even after the wedding is fixed). And oh my goodness, the party his parents throw for him when they think he's passed his university exams brings tears to your eyes.

TV: The usual Wednesday comedies (The Neighbors, The Middle, Modern Family, once again funny in ascending order.

Read: What Maisie Knew, which is, oddly enough, the first Henry James I've ever actually read. It was odd, but very good. An enjoyable light-hearted romp called Harry Lipkin, Private Eye about an 87-year-old man working as in Florida; it's in first person and Harry's voice is very engaging. I started an Australian detective novel called Corparoo Blues but it wasn't enjoyable, to me anyway, so I quit about halfway through.

Veterans Day

Six years I wrote a post which began:

It's called "Veterans Day" here in the States - we renamed it, I guess, when it became clear that the War to End War hadn't and wouldn't. So it's Veterans Day, now - not Memorial Day, for the dead, that's in May... now we remember the living.

At least, we say we do. Well, I'm a veteran. I don't want just another day off work with no commitment behind it to actually give a damn about the veterans, especially those who come home from these modern wars all torn up, because medicine can save their bodies, only to find that no one in the government intends to take care of them. Veterans Day is nothing more than automobile sales, and servicemen get a 5% discount!, and wear your uniform, eat free! It's not go to a hospital and see what the price really is; it's not lobby the congress to restore the benefits cut in 1995; it's not give them their meds and counseling on time and affordably; it's not tell the VA to actively take care of vets instead of waiting for them to find out on their own what they're eligible for. And it's most certainly not the government actually giving a damn....

Since then, of course we had the stark proof of that, in the Walter Reed scandal (you do remember that?); we've had "Warriors in Transition" (the catchy new name for wounded soldiers on their way to discharge via the VA and therapy); acres of missing paperwork, "personality disorders" being diagnosed by the dozens so soldiers (and no, I won't capitalize it, we aren't Germans, we don't capitalize ordinary nouns, and this is just another ultimately empty fetishization of the military, like calling them "Wounded Warriors" in ordinary prose) can be kicked out of the army without benefits; National Guardsmen brought back from Iraq after 729 days of active duty - so they don't qualify for the educational benefits that kick in at 730... Need I go on?

We've also had some steps taken in the right direction, of course. As Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Edward Shinseki is trying hard to take care of those who need it most. He's tackling homelessness, and joblessness, among vets; the agency provides much more than medical care now. The VA has made huge strides in the past ten or so years, and is now capable of delivering world-class care, efficiently and more cheaply even than Medicare does. And just this week we, in passing for most of us I expect, rejected the policies that would have privatized the VA, leaving veterans to navigate the private sector with vouchers that would, if experience is any guide, have never paid for enough.

But those problems, and the rest of them, still exist (homeless vets still number around 60,000, their unemployment rate bounces between 6.6% and 8%). And we still tell ourselves that we're honoring veterans by what are, in the end, gestures only.

Today is Veterans Day. It's not Memorial Day. It's a day to honestly assess the price of the war - any war - to those who fight it and come home, and to promise ourselves to do the right thing by them. Because it is the right thing. Because we owe it to them. Because we sent them into harm's way, and they were harmed (one way or another, they were harmed, war harms everyone it touches). As I said before,

We don't need people paying lip service to vets while ignoring them in the VA hospitals or on the street corners. We don't need to mythologize veterans, turn them into some great symbol of our nation's righteous aggression while we forget their humanity. We don't need a holiday that glorifies war by glorifying soldiers.

Let's stop capitalizing Solider and Wounded Warrior and Troop - and stop capitalizing on them, too. Let's stop the relentless glorification of the figure of the soldier, and start actually caring about them. Let's stop Supporting the Troops with magnets and signs, and start some actual damned support - with money, first of all, money and beds and hospitals and benefits that actually are.

Let's save the worship for Memorial Day. Today's for the ones who are still alive, and most of all for the ones who still need us.

I've offered a number of poems for today: 1916 seen from 1921 by Edmund Blunden; Siegfried Sassoon's Aftermath (written a year after WWI); Li Po's Nefarious War, translated from the Chinese by Shigeyoshi Obata (with its key line: The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home. That's the kind of war we can pretend is going well, because we can't see it or its fighters.); The Next War by Robert Graves; and a pair of short poems by Carl Sandburg, written during WWI: Iron and Grass; Wilfred Owens's great Dulce et Decorum Est

This year I offer you Stephen Vincent Benét's Minor Litany:

This being a time confused and with few clear stars,

Either private ones or public,

Out of its darkness I make a litany

For the lost, for the half-lost, for the desperate,

For all of those who suffer, not in the flesh.

I will say their name, but not yet.

                                              This is for those

Who talk to the bearded man in the quiet office,

Sensibly, calmly, explaining just how it was,

And suddenly burst into noisy, quacking tears;

For those who live through the party, wishing for death;

For those who take the sensible country walks,

Wondering if people stare;

For those who try to hook rugs in the big, bright room

And do it badly and are pleased with the praise;

For the night and the fear and the demons of the night;

For the lying back on the couch and the wincing talk.

This is for those who work and those who may not,

For those who suddenly come to a locked door,

And the work falls out of their hands;

For those who step off the pavement into hell,

Having not observed the red light and the warning signals

Because they were busy or ignorant or proud.

This is for those who are bound in the paper chains

That are stronger than links of iron; this is for those

Who each day heave the papier-mache rock

Up the huge and burning hill,

And there is no rock and no hill, but they do not know it.

This is for those who wait till six for the drink,

Till eleven for the tablet;

And for those who cannot wait but go to the darkness;

And for those who long for the darkness but do not go,

Who walk to the window and see the body falling,

Hear the thud of air in the ears,

And then turn back to the room and sit down again,

None having observed the occurrence but themselves.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Freud, have mercy upon us.

Life, have mercy upon us.

This is for those

Who painfully haul the dark fish out of the dark,

The child’s old nightmare, embalmed in its own pain,

And, after that, get well or do not get well,

But do not forget the sulphur in the mouth

Or the time when the world was different, not for a while.

And for those also, the veterans

Of another kind of war,

Who say “No thanks” to the cocktails, who say “No thanks.

Well, yes, give me Coca-Cola” with the trained smile,

Those who hid the bottles so cleverly in the trunk,

Who bribed the attendant, who promised to be good,

Who woke in the dirty bed in the unknown town.

They are cured, now, very much cured.

They are tanned and fine. Their eyes are their only scars.

This is for those with the light white scars on the wrists,

Who remember the smell of gas and the vomiting,

And it meant little and it is a well-known symptom

And they were always careful to phone, before.

Nevertheless, they remember.

                                        This is for those

Who heard the music suddenly get too loud,

Who could not alter the fancy when it came.

Chloral, have mercy upon us.

Amytal, have mercy upon us.

Nembutal, have mercy upon us.

This occurs more or less than it did in the past times.

There are statistics. There are no real statistics.

There is also no heroism. There is merely

Fatigue, pain, great confusion, sometimes recovery.

The name, as you know, is Legion.

What’s your name, friend? Where are you from and how did you get here?

The name is Legion. It’s Legion in the case history.

Friends, Romans, countrymen,

Mr. and Mrs. Legion is the name.

Happy Birthday, Kurt

Kurt Vonnegut died just five years ago, but he was born, fittingly, today in 1922. Fittingly, I say, because he was a veteran, and it was his experience in WWII - specifically and famously surviving the fire-bombing of Dresden and living through the horrific aftermath - that shaped his writing.

New collections of his early and unpublished or uncollected works are now available. Get them.

Secession over greed?

Some Republicans are genuinely unable to consider things except though the lens of "memememe". Witness that guy in Texas, calling for secession. Among his comments,“many members of minority groups are simply racist against the party most white people happen to vote for.” He singled out Asian Americans, who he said should be Republican “as they earn more money and pay more in taxes than white Americans.” He's genuinely baffled that someone who makes a lot of money and pays a lot of taxes might want something from their government other than a lower tax rate, or that some people have other goals than making as much money as possible, regardless of how that affects other people.

"Vulture capitalism" (while a slur against vultures, who, after all, wait for their meal to die on its own) certainly describes a rather large and influential percentage of the modern GOP. But fortunately, not a majority of the US. After all, O'Reilly and Palin et al. to the contrary, Obama's supporters include quite a few people who earn in six figures or more.

(ps. The "Texas miracle" depended on siphoning jobs away from the rest of the country. Who knows how it would play out if they were on their own? There's no guarantee, after all, that BlueSA would want to "sign a free trade agreement" with Texas... Anyway, in case Texas didn't notice it, twenty years after they joined the Union there was a little contretemps that settled that "we have the right to secede" notion pretty firmly.)

Men basketball

I've lost track of the number of times I've told to write girls basketball instead of girls' basketball. AP Stylebook announces that girls is being used attributively, it's basketball for girls not basketball belonging to them.

Fine.

So why is this right, then?

Maryland men’s basketball edged by Kentucky in season opener at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center

Happy Birthday, Neil

Born today in 1960, in the English town of Portsmouth, Neil Gaiman.

Mirrormask, Sandman, Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys...

Thank you, Neil. Happy Birthday, many happy returns of the day, and keep writing...

Happy Birthday, Carl

Carl Sagan was born today in 1934, in Brooklyn.

I'm sure I don't have to say anything about him, but if I did, besides Cosmos and The Demon-Haunted World and The Dragons of Eden, I'd mention his insistence on putting cameras on space probes. Imagine Cassini without cameras...

He was a national treasure, no, a global - no, a specific treasure and he's missed.

Rockies???

The Azores and St Helena are actually the highest peaks in this mountain chain, said the clue in this, the second of the Teacher's Tournament.

Apparently, none of them knows where, or possibly what, the Azores are. And maybe she thought St Helena was Mt St Helen's. Because the first guy said the Atlas Range and the second one said the Rockies. And the third one just didn't know...

Even though I almost couldn't remember the name of the Mid-Atlantic Range, at least I knew it was in the Atlantic Ocean.

They found one!

In person voter fraud, that is. A guy voted twice in New Mexico, once pretending to be his son (he says he had his son's permission).

Yes: It's an actual in-person voter fraud, and it would have been caught by photo id!

Of course, the guy is a white Republican.....

ARWB, Inc?

I thought Krugman was being facetious, or sarcastic, when he asked:

Well, what if we’ve been misunderstanding Rove? We’ve been seeing him as a man dedicated to helping angry right-wing billionaires take over America. But maybe he’s best thought of instead as an entrepreneur in the business of selling his services to angry right-wing billionaires, who believe that he can help them take over America. It’s not the same thing.

But over at TPM I see this:

Thankfully for future GOP campaigns, the Romney team and Karl Rove seem to have successfully convinced the GOP’s billionaire mega-donors that it was all money well-spent and Romney was on course to a smashing victory until Chris Christie rode into final days on Unicorn Sandy.

They quote from Washington Post story:

“A lot of people feel like Christie hurt, that we definitely lost four or five points between the storm and Chris Christie giving Obama a chance to be bigger than life,” said one of Romney’s biggest fundraisers, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

So, ummmm.... maybe not?

Happy Birthday, Kazuo

Today in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, Kazuo Ishiguro was born. His family moved to Great Britain when he was six, and he has become one of the great writers in the English language, winning the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, and the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third, The Remains of the Day, and being shortlisted for the Booker for When We Were Orphans and his most recent novel Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro explores memory in his books, and the clash of memory with reality - The Unconsoled is a tour-de-force of shifting memory - and his work is fascinating. Nocturnes is his latest, five short stories about "music and memory" and easily among his better work. Not one of these guys who turns out a book every year (every five or six years, more likely), he's well worth the wait for the next one.

A good night

The president was re-elected - and it looks like he'll win every one of the critical swing states, except North Carolina but including Florida (and Pennsylvania, despite the suppress-the-vote attempts there). The policy of thuggery and blackmail, endorsed by pundits such as David Brooks, has failed. Moneyball beat the scouts - Nate Silver and others like him beat the feelings and experience of Gingrich, Rove, Will and their ilk. Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Tammy Baldwin, Angus King, Claire McCaskill, Chris Murphy, Joe Donnelly, Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Mazie Hirono, and Bob Casey, among others (including most likely Heidi Heitkamp), won hotly contested Senate seats, mostly against lots of money and/or Tea Party Republicans. Bernie Sanders, who I think of as my senator, though I don't live in Vermont, and my actual senator won reelection pretty easily. A record number of women are going to the Senate.

And there is now a sea change for gay rights: Maine and Maryland turned the tide by putting gay marriage to the voters and winning for the first time; Washington is projected to follow. In Maryland, especially, the vicious tactic of pitting black and Catholic churchgoers against their gay neighbors failed spectacularly, as our Catholic governor fought back hard, recruiting even Southern Baptist preachers to the cause of civil equality. Seven states sent their first out gay representatives to the House: Florida, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Tammy Baldwin became the nation's first out gay senator. Minnesota refused to enshrine bigotry in their constitution; Iowa voters retained Judge Wiggins (who'd upheld Varnum v Brien, which made same-sex marriage legal there). The older way of thought is passing.

It was a very good night indeed.

Voting

I voted last week. I hope you (if you're in the US) are voting today if you haven't already.

Happy Birthday, Suleiman

Suleiman the Magnificent was born today in 1494. Known also as Suleiman the Lawgiver, he ruled over the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire, doubling it during his reign.

Happy Birthday to the Big Train

Walter Johnson was born today in 1887, in Humboldt, Kansas.

Ty Cobb talked about facing Johnson the first time:

The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup. And then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him... every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park.

They called it a pneumonia ball - the wind it raised was so strong it would chill you to the bone (where most fastballs are "heat", the Big Train's were cold...)

When it comes to the perennial debate, there were no speed guns. Johnson said, "Can I throw harder than Joe Wood? Listen, Mister, no man alive can throw any harder than Smokey Joe Wood." But Wood said, "Oh, I don't think there was ever anybody faster than Walter." We'll never know. But we do know this: In an era when the strikeout was not king, Johnson racked up 3,509 of them, a record that stood for 55 years (he's now 9th on the list). Batters feared facing him, and in return he feared killing them - Cobb exploited that fear by crowding the plate; he couldn't hit Johnson but he could draw walks.

He won 417 games, second to Cy Young's impossible 511, and the two of them remain the only pitchers with 400+ wins.

The Week in Entertainment

A mixed week - slow start, crammed middle, and busy weekend!

Live: Two operas - went up to the Met for Thomas Adès' The Tempest, with Simon Keenlyside (for whom the role was written) singing an angry, vengeful Prospero and Audry Luna dazzling as an Ariel whose voice ranges well into the very top of a soprano's range, spiky and unhuman... I wasn't totally crazy about the staging - La Scala? Except that in Act II we're in a forest and on a beach? What the heck? I don't get what the point was. Also, sorry, but the first act was unattractively scored and the libretto was, well, trite throughout (They are so noble and so grand and I am loved by Ferdinand) - though possibly many Italian and French libretti are as trite, I don't know. Anyway, the cast was brilliant and the singing masterful. That said, this afternoon's  La Bohéme at the Lyric in Baltimore was much more to my taste, a really beautiful production.

DVD: Babul, in which Amitabh Bachchan decides his widowed daughter-in-law deserves a second chance at love, which sparks anger from his more traditional relatives, including his older brother - and his own beloved wife.

TV: Watched a couple of old Spencer Tracy movies (Inherit the Wind, The People Against O'Hara, Judgement at Nuremburg) and The Terminal with Tom Hanks, which was a pleasing story.

Read: Sungudogo, which was quite entertaining right up to the very end, where the big twist was - imo - unfounded and silly. Your mileage may well vary on that. The Marrying Kind, a very engaging book about a gay wedding planner who decides he can no longer support an institution he's barred from - which is fine until his sister decides to marry his partner's brother.

Happy Birthday, Will

Today in 1879, near Claremore, Oklahoma, Will Rogers was born.

An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

Happy Birthday, Walker

Let us now praise Walker Evans, portrait-maker of America, who was born today in 1903. Of his work, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art says

Evans' elegant crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications inspired artists of several generations, from Helen Levitt to William Eggleston. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular -- the indigenous expressions of people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés, advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making.

Probably his greatest work came in 1941 when he co-published, along with James Agee, the ground-breaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book chronicled the pair's journey through the rural South during the Great Depression - words by Agee, photos by Evans, presenting a stark yet deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. The pairing of the anguished dissonance of Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers makes this book a powerful, wrenching experience.

Happy Birthday, SRK

Born today in 1965 in New Delhi, one of my all time favorite actors, Shahrukh Khan.

As a friend of mine said recently, "I'm so impressed he can play such a variety of very different characters and make every one convincing."

Me, too.

Happy Birthday, Grantland

Today in 1880, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Grantland Rice was born.

He coined the term "the Four Horsemen" for Notre Dame's 1924 backfield:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

One of the great sportswriters of all times, he dabbled in verse, too. A defender of the right of athletes to earn a living, he also decried the influence of money in sports:

"Money to the left of them and money to the right
Money everywhere they turn from morning to the night
Only two things count at all from mountain to the sea
Part of it's percentage, and the rest is guarantee"

And if you think you don't know him, you almost certainly know this:

"For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks - not that you won or lost -
But how you played the Game."