Truman?!

The Final clue: He came to power 34 days before FDR and left it 19 days after him.

They guessed: Stalin. Churchill. Truman. (Truman????)

Stalin ruled until 1953, and started, depending on how exactly you reckon his "ruling" the USSR, sometime in the 1920s. Churchill was PM twice - 1940-1945, and then again 1951-1955. As for Truman (!!!), he didn't come to power until FDR died.

The correct answer? Hitler.

I'm sorry

I'm sorry, Larry Hogan's daughter. The fact that your father married a woman and has three daughters and is (let's give it to you) the greatest dad ever ... has nothing to do with the policies of the party he belongs to or what kind of governor he would be.

And that's the truth.

Things could always be worse

Haha. Last time Hannah Dingdon's ne'er-do-well daughter left her son (Hannah's grandson, that is) "for a few hours" it was an overnight stay. This time the kid looks to have been there ten years!

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Macbeth, the Verdi opera, at the Met. Netrebko absolutely blew the place away as Lady Macbeth - this is the kind of role her powerful voice was made for. Also at the Met, a brilliant recital by René Pape, with Moussorgsky and Dvořák, among others. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - definitely worth seeing, if not quite as good as the London cast. Of course, they're still shaking it down, so it can only get better. Wonderful show.

TV: The new season of The Middle and Modern Family. I have to admit Alex as joy-killer was funny. And my gosh Luke is growing like a weed.

Read:The Glass Magician, enjoyed it. A couple of old Doctor Thorndykes.

Nearly in half

When you cut something "nearly in half", how much do you have? Is it slightly more than half? That's what it is for me. I could possibly be persuaded that cutting to 47% was still "nearly in half", but really, I'm going to be thinking you meant, oh, to 55%. Maybe even 60%.

Which is why I'm still puzzled by this:

In May 2013, Uber charged customers a fare of $2.75 per mile (with an additional 60¢ per minute under eleven mph).... Uber has cut UberX fares nearly in half: to $1.10 per mile, plus 21¢ a minute.

That's a cut of 60% for the basic fare and 65% for the slow rate -  down to 40% of the fare and 35% of the slow rate. To me, that's not "cut UberX fares nearly in half". That's "cut fares by more than half."

Outrageous

So, I kind of hate to do it, but I think I must agree with Dick Cheney.

There is no moral equivalence between ISIS and Ferguson.

Sure, one is a violent, narrowly theocratic group who kills civilian hostages in a particularly provocative and cruel way. But we would be remiss in not remembering that those hostages are at least from a country who invaded the group's homeland, bombed and destroyed it, causing the death of hundreds of thousands, and then placed into power an equally narrowly theocratic bunch on the other side of the divide. This is a war.

In Ferguson, the killing was done by the local police - the ones with the mandate to protect the one who was killed.

You're right, Dick. They aren't morally equivalent at all.

(Of course, Obama didn't really say there was a moral equivalence; he merely pointed out what other nations such as Russia love to point out on their own: "at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders... yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions." "This is true," he said. And it is.)

Under

This was interesting. Watching the end of Family Feud as I wait for Jeopardy! The last round's pompt was: "Name something that people are sometimes said to be under."

The number one answer, which she gave, was "the weather."

Her family then struck out with "paid - the covers - age", so the other team got the chance to steal. And said "educated".

They should have take a hint from the only right answer. It's a thing. The others are phrases that describe people, but, for instance, "paid" is not a thing that you are under, it's a description of how you're paid. (Granted, "the covers" is a thing, it's just not something you say about people.)

Here's the ones they missed: the gun - the influence - a spell.

OMG Chai

So, the president returned a salute today with a cup of chai in his hand. (It is, of course, proof positive that Obama hates the troops.) And let's not get sucked into whether the president should even be saluting - it's a modern custom started by the theatrical Reagan, so OF COURSE HE SHOULD!!!!!!11!

Ahem.

Instead, let's dwell on the outrage provoked in Republicans and Foxicans by this:



Oh, there wasn't any? Moving on...

Why I still take cabs

I'm not crazy about the wait time for cabs, that's for sure. Fortunately, the company I use to go to the airport is bookable for that. But something's always nagged at me about things like Uber.

From the very beginning, Uber attracted drivers with a bait-and-switch. Take the company’s launch in LA: In May 2013, Uber charged customers a fare of $2.75 per mile (with an additional 60¢ per minute under eleven mph). Drivers got to keep 80 percent of the fare. Working full time, drivers could make a living wage: between 15 and $20 an hour.

Drivers rushed to sign up, and thousands leased and bought cars just to work for Uber — especially immigrants and low-income people desperate for a well-paying job in a terrible economy. But over the last year, the company has faced stiff competition from its arch-rival, Lyft. To raise demand and push Lyft out of the LA market, Uber has cut UberX fares nearly in half: to $1.10 per mile, plus 21¢ a minute. ...

Uber is part of a new wave of corporations that make up what’s called the “sharing economy.” The premise is seductive in its simplicity: people have skills, and costumers want services. Silicon Valley plays matchmaker, churning out apps that pair workers with work. Now, anyone can rent out an apartment with AirBnB, become a cabbie through Uber, or clean houses using Homejoy.

But under the guise of innovation and progress, companies are stripping away worker protections, pushing down wages, and flouting government regulations. At its core, the sharing economy is a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers, discourage labor organizing, and ensure that capitalists can reap huge profits with low fixed costs.

There’s nothing innovative or new about this business model. Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.

(source via AZspot)

The Week in Entertainment

Film:To Be Takei - very funny, and also very thought-provoking.

DVD: The second season of Murder in Suburbia. I went back and looked at what I wrote about the first one, and it holds true: they still have only two topics of conversation - their cases and their love lives. It's odd; I know they're not meant to be best friends, but surely they could talk about food or traffic or something. It's a minor thing, though; the show is entertaining and well made.

TV: Doctor Who's "Time Heist" was great. Nice callouts to all heist films - the crew striding in in slo-mo, for instance. Given that Clara is leaving at Christmas, I'm hoping the Doctor's 'call me' gesture when Cy left means he'll be back. And a lot of Leverage on Sunday. I do miss that show. (new things start soon! yay!)

Read: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. It's an excellent book, though Quanah only shows up about halfway through - it is the story of the Comanches and their wars with the Spanish and the Texans as well as the US, not just a biography. Very good, violent story, though marred just a bit by the author's unconscious failure at even-handedness. He describes the Comanche (all the Plains tribes - he's very scrupulous in distinguishing the Civilized Nations and other eastern tribes as different from the horse Indians) as "backward" and "primitive" and "Stone Age"in explaining their behavior, although what was going on in Texas and the US South during most of the book was just as barbaric (to use yet another loaded term). But he does try to place their violence in context, while avoiding the simplistic dichotomy of Noble Savage/evil barbarian or ruthless invader/innocent pioneer: that is, he looks at Manifest Destiny and its impact on the Plains peoples with a clear eye, for the most part. Worth its Pulitzer nomination.  Then I relaxed with Newt's Emerald, a Regency+magic romp.

9,000,000 still waiting

Hmmm. Christain Mingle dot Com has "over 13,000,000 members" and "4,000,000 joined this year". That means some 9,000,000 people have been there at least a year and haven't "met [their] beautiful wife" yet.

God may be saying "it's your turn" but it doesn't look like this way is any more likely to set you up than any other.

I wish...

Over on Facebook, a friend commented on a story about that young GOP candidate who withdrew from a Wisconsin state assembly race over his old racist and homophobic tweets. Two of the comments there:

I wish Mormonism didn't marginalize homosexuals giving this kid license to gay bash

I wish Homophobic people didnt use their religion to excuse the marginalization of homosexuals they cause, and instead accepted their own personal responsibility for perpetuating this so that my religion and many others didnt seem like it marginalized homosexuals

I didn't want to mix it up on someone else's (not even my friend's) FB wall, so I didn't say what I immediately thought:

Maybe if your religion/church didn't get involved in political campaigns to marginalize homosexuals, other people wouldn't get that impression.

Or ... you know ... maybe not

Hmmmm. In today's Dear Abby, the writer says

Mom ... and [husband] Evan engaged in tense conversations concerning politics and religion. I asked them to please not talk about such things with each other, but they didn't listen. ... they had a huge argument and Mom walked out. She has never returned to our home.

Since then, I have never had a holiday with my parents, although I do travel once or twice a year with the kids to see them. Mom and Evan did come to an understanding when our third child was born, but that, too, ended in separation six months later.

Abby says:

If they were more mature, they would, in the name of family harmony, agree to disagree.

I don't know. That's a very sweeping generalization. Much depends on exactly what their argument was about.It's very difficult and quite probably not a good idea to "agree to disagree" "in the name of family harmony" with someone who has said others of your friends and family should be stripped of their civil rights. Or, you know, damned them - or you - to hell. Just for instance.

This this this

This. This. This. Oh, so much this, though I wish it weren't so.

Here's what the president said:

We carry on, because, as Americans, we do not give in to fear.

That's ridiculous. What contemptible nonsense. Who the hell told him to say that? And what country does he think he's talking about?

Americans almost always give in to fear. Giving in to fear is what we do first, before we've tried anything else. Even things that might actually work.

ps: this

Fingers crossed and knocking on wood

I certainly hope we choose better this time than we have in the past, that the Syrian rebels we decide to arm against ISIL/S don't end up turning into our new enemies, requiring us to arm someone else against them,  the way the rebels we have armed in the past did.

"You inspire positive morale"

"Anything is possible it just depends on how you dream" she says. "Is morale so bad [here] that we do not assume that people are working towards greatness already?"

Someone else says "I appreciate the positive words you always have to convey - you inspire positive morale".

For some, maybe. For others - no. No she does not. She inspires seething frustration at her constant bubbly "gee whillikers, we can do anything if we just want to bad enough" brand of optimism. You know, the kind that implies that if you aren't happy and achieving all your goals, it's your fault because you're just not dreaming the right way.

Guess which camp I'm in?

Squuueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

The mustache is back!

(check it out)

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Once, which is quirkily staged but interestingly so.

DVD: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I missed in theaters. Damn good.

TV: Doctor Who - I found "Listen" to be truly affecting. Like a lot of Moffat-penned stories, it was best at its quietest, but I think it would have been better without the thing (what/who ever) under the bedspread. Also, why have we decided that Danny is the one with his foot in his mouth? Clara's the one who started the date by calling him a killer, wasn't she? Also, I know he's going for awkward, but unfortunately I'm not buying the existence of enough chemistry between the two of them to make them keep trying again. Sad but true.

Read: Dead Water, the first of the next Shetland Quartet by Ann Cleeves. I knew they'd have to have changed a lot for the TV series, since (among other things) they've completely redone Jimmy's relationship with Fran and made Cassie about ten years older, but I was startled at just how much they redid it! The Truth by Michael Palin, which I really enjoyed - much more than his first novel, The Hemingway Chair, though I did like that one, though looking back at it now (1995! I was startled at how long ago it was published) it's "laugh so you don't cry" in its attack on 'modernization' and privatization, isn't it? I decided to give The Monogram Murders a try after reading several reviews of it. A number of them mentioned the Jill Attenbury continuations of Lord Peter, but although I found the couple of them I tried well enough written, they're too ... fannish (and I say that as a fan and writer of fan fiction myself); the whole point of Lord Peter is that he's Lord Peter, not Lord St George and then the Duke of Denver, plus I'm sorry about Jerry just for himself! Anyway, Monogram is quite entertaining. And then I found Ann Hillerman's Spider Woman's Daughter, in which she continues the Leaphorn/Chee story. And in a worthy fashion.

Some inconvenient facts

There have been more incidents of police officers killing unarmed black men since July 17 of this year than there have been incidents of police officers being killed by unarmed assailants in the past three years.

...

Police homicides made up less than 1 percent of all occupational fatalities in 2012 (the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published occupational fatality data), and police homicides by personal weapons [i.e, hands and feet] made up .02 percent of all occupational fatalities. 2013 saw as many dog bite-related fatalities as police officer firearm-related fatalities. The facts remain that occupational fatalities for police officers are rare, occupational fatalities due to homicide even rarer, and occupational fatalities due to homicide via personal assault so rare that no serious argument can be made that its statistical incidence requires constant vigilance.

...

A study funded by the Center of Disease Control tracked the number of fatalities caused by cattle in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska between 2003 and 2008. There were 21 such fatalities. That means that there were two more fatalities caused by cattle in just four states over a six year period than there were law enforcement officer deaths caused by homicide using personal weapons over an 11 year period nationwide.

 [source]

The Party Label Matters

In the recent attempt by the Senate to pass an amendment that would have overturned Citzens United, every Republican voted against it. Even Susan Collins (of course).

So, as I have said before, do not "vote for the person". The "person" may have to hold their nose when voting, but they will do it. When it counts, there is no meaningful difference between someone who votes for something repellent because they like it, and someone who doesn't like it but votes for it anyway. The latter may get to pose soulfully, but - to quote from a different venue - it all looks like line drives in the box scores in the morning.

Dangerous encounters

An attorney writes (apropos "this Washington Post editorial by Sunil Dutta, 'I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me,'" to which he links, adding "I'm not sure you actually need to read Dutta's piece, for which the Post's editors deserve full credit for producing the most complete and accurate headline I've ever seen in the history of anything.") something well worth reading all of:

In any event, it's sort of unfathomable that Professor Dutta evidently wants to embrace a model of the world suggested by weary defense lawyers who think citizens' encounters with police ought to proceed in much the same way as a hiker's encounter with a mountain lion: with distance and deference due to a hostile and powerful predator. Dutta writes, "For you, this might be a 'simple' traffic stop, for me each traffic stop is a potentially dangerous encounter"; well, indeed, I view a 'simple' traffic stop as a potentially dangerous encounter, too. But the respect I show a grizzly bear--or a traffic cop--isn't the kind of respect any mentally healthy adult human being ought to be seeking. It's the respect you give to things that can kill you on a whim, and however heady an empowerment it might seem to a shallow and narcissistic personality type, it's mostly dehumanizing.

Once more...

Over at headsup, Fred looks at another anniversary and how Fox covers it. (Surprise! It's "mendaciously".)

Remembrance

I was at work that day, and spent much of it in a parking lot as they tried to evacuate our building in nothing flat. But, really, who am I, that anybody cares where I was or what I was doing?

Still, here's what I think about:

A man describing making his way down the stairs from the 67th floor of the North Tower:

"And then when we got to around the 35th floor we had to move over for the firefighters. I mean, we were all trying to get out, and here they came, up into the building."

Like wildfire ... a teeny tiny wildfire

Trail Life, the "family-friendly" no-gays-allowed "apologetically Christian" alternative to the Boy Scouts, is "growing like wildfire" according to its national director of field operations. Yep, 14,000 members! Woooooo!

Of course, the Boys Scouts still have a few more:

At the end of 2013, BSA counted 2.5 million youth members and 960,000 adult volunteers, a decrease of approximately 6 percent from the reported number in December 2012.

Last I checked, 14,000 is way less than 6% of 2.5 million. Like one-tenth of it. So that decline isn't composed of boys running off to join Trail Life.

Oh Noes!

The NRA has apparently run out of attractive young white women for their "Third Century NRA" feature in the Washington Times - they've started recycling them.

Today is even the same photograph as Mar 12 2013.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Love Is Strange, a lovely, sweet, sad, brilliant movie, quiet and understated and brilliant. Alfred Molina and John Lithgow are absolutely perfect. What a wonderful movie.

DVD: Because I found it while putting something away, the fourth (and final, waaaaaah!) season of The Sarah Jane Adventures, which had some wonderful stories in it - and the DVD has "The Pyramids of Mars" as a tie-in, so of course I watched that, too.

TV: So I remembered I have Prime, and got "Into the Dalek," which I liked. The Doctor has of course had soldiers around him before, but that was before. He doesn't like that part of himself just now, so he of course doesn't want one around. If this guy Pink is going to be involved, with his obviously complicated backstory, the Doctor's new aversion to them (which has in fact been growing for some time since Three) will complicate that, too. (I just hope we're done with old enemies (saving Missy if she's who I think she might be) - no Cybermen, no Weeping Angels.) And I really like Journey's saying "It's smaller on the outside!" On rewatching, I'm really pleased by the Doctor's facing up to what he did as the War Doctor. Nine (Ten? oh let's say Nine, everyone's used to that) was consumed with rage and grief and survivor guilt, but neither he nor Ten and Eleven understood it. Ten and Eleven, I think, fled from it by getting younger and flirtier - hell, Ten fell in love - but it's only now, after learning what the War Doctor did, that Twelve is actually facing the trauma of destroying Gallifrey (because he did, in a sense: he was willing to, and that he was spared it doesn't mean it didn't scar him) and asking the question: Am I a good man? That that rage and hatred still burn so brightly inside him that the Dalek could see nothing brighter - that "that's what you do" is true - presages a long journey. Maybe what "this face" is trying to tell him is that he can save people... And then I watched "Robot of Sherwood" which really was a throwback in many ways to the old historical episodes ("Robots! Now we're getting somewhere!") I loved it - so much fun.

Read: Finished Wildwood, which had a somewhat unexpected ending. Enjoyable. An old John Thorndyke (The Red Fingerprint) - did anybody ever actually try to frame someone by forging fingerprints, or was that just a rage-against-modernity by the old writers? Started Lincoln's Boys but was not moved to get through the first chapter; will try again later. Found too many good things at the bookstore this evening to fight my way though something.

Cool!

It's International Vulture Awareness Day!

Here are two of my shots, and there's a whole gallery of the world's vultures at the link.

Misses?

Gail Collins writes today:

Male invitees to an event for Florida Congressman Steve Southerland were told to “tell the misses not to wait up” because “the after-dinner whiskey and cigars will be smooth & the issues to discuss are many...”

Misses? Really? (And since it goes on to say "Whatever you do, don't tell her the night's menu includes ...", they don't mean "misses".)

If you're going to indulge in that faux-folksy style, you really ought to learn to spell it.

(It's very funny that Southerland's campaign's response to being called on this is to point out it was six months ago, already, geeze.)

A *very* excellent question

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf asks "Why Do Newspapers Keep Publishing Op-Eds by John McCain?", noting

But McCain is not a prescient foreign-policy analyst, and newspapers should stop giving him a platform to confidently assert what will happen next in geopolitics. He thinks he knows his stuff. But his track record shows that he's emphatic in his pronouncements even when he is utterly, catastrophically wrong.

He's talking about Peter Beinart's Atlantic column about McCain and Lindsey Graham's NYT editorial, a column called "The Unbearable Emptiness of a New York Times Op-Ed". In that column Beinart notes:

What Obama was really saying in response to the reporter was that he doesn’t want to intervene militarily in Syria—where, as opposed to Iraq, the government is hostile and our allies are weaker—without a well-thought-out plan deserving of public support. McCain and Graham endorse that caution: “The president clearly wants to move deliberately and consult with allies and Congress as he considers what to do about ISIS. No one disputes that goal.” Then, two sentences later, they dispute that goal, slamming Obama for not displaying a “far greater sense of urgency.”

It’s a wonderful illustration of the emptiness of much Beltway foreign-policy-speak. McCain and Graham want Obama to act both “deliberately” and “urgently” because they’re both happy words. (As opposed to “lethargically” and “rashly,” which are nastier synonyms for the same thing.) But when you translate these uplifting abstractions into plain English, you see how contradictory McCain and Graham’s demands actually are. You can either demand that Obama not bomb Syria until he’s ensured he has a plan likely to win international and congressional support, or you can demand that he bomb as soon as possible. You can’t demand both.

Both columns are well worth your time.

Whimsical????

From a Ken Follet interview in the Times book section:

Q: Is there a certain type of book you try to steer clear of as a reader? As a writer?

A: I just can’t read whimsical fantasy. I’ve never got through a Tolkien. If there are no rules, and anything can happen, then where’s the suspense? I hate elves.

First, whimsical? Tolkien?

Ahem.

Anyway, the point is that "no rules, and anything can happen" is bad fantasy. Fantasy is different rules, not no rules. Because yes, if "anything can happen" then there's no suspense or structure. But in good fantasy the rules are just as rigorous and the suspense can be just as great; you simply have to accept different operating principles.

I mean, nothing says he has to like fantasy. And I agree with him about "no rules." And I probably would have let it pass had he not unequivocally described Tolkien as "whimsical fantasy" that has "no rules". That's not a question of taste. That's just wrong.

We're not going anywhere

One of my regular readers sent me this email:

"Why human translators are still unlikely to be replaced anytime soon by computers," she says, providing the title of a book she's working on:

"Alice da Biblioteca das Maravilhas (Nota Bárbara de Onésimo Teotónio Almeida)":

GOOGLE: Library Alice in Wonderland (Note Onesimus Theotonius Barbara Almeida)

BING: Alice Wonderland library (Note Bárbara de Onésimo Teotónio Almeida)

MINE: Alice in Libraryland (A Barbarous Note by Onésimo Teotónio Almeida)

I particularly like the inability to deal with the adjective "barbara". And I'm not sure why Google decided to Latinify his name.

A more literal translation would be (I suppose) "in the library of wonders" or - clunkily - "wonderlibrary". Commenter's "Libraryland" works well since it plays off the original title.

September begins in two universes

Both have small, stand-alone pictures and big ones accompanying their center-page story. And may I say how piquant it is to see them worried about treaties in the Times?

Washington Times:
Second Amendment Businesses say 'bring your guns' | Second Amendment-friendly establishments on rise
Accountability Contractors fear hidden costs linked to Obama's social ideals | 'There's a target on their backs'
Accountability Illinois to go bust as its teachers get richer | Six-figure pensions outpace cash poured in
Foreign Policy U.S. inaction in Ukraine is worrisome | Sends signal arms treaties are worthless
Elections Republicans struggle to build wave of Senate votes | Races tighten in states where party needs to flip control
Affordable Care Act Obamacare troops home in on Hispanics | Enrollment of key population vital to program's success
Big Picture: a mom with a baby and "an openly displayed firearm" at a Cajun restaurant in Leesburg
Small picture "Protest in Pakistan" showing a little riot

Washington Post:
Guardsmen adjust to new role in Texas | Troops deployed by Perry add to an already beefed-up border
D.C. police could face personnel shortage | Many officers are nearing retirement, and some young ones are moving away
Pentagon expands footprint in Africa | Drone base will be second in Niger | U.S., France coordinate efforts to counter jihadists
How safe are files stashed in the cloud?
With limit on political giving lifted, wallets are open wide | Extra contributions allowed by ruling foavor GOP 2 to 1, analysis shows
Big Picture: Cool Guardsmen in Texas, with a pull quote "We want someone else to come in and handle it." attributed in smaller print to a farmer, not the Guardsmen
Small picture: President Obama giving Labor Day speech at Milwaukee's Laborfest

It's hard

Lenta.ru, an online Russian paper, had a story yesterday about the tenth anniversary of the Beslan school hostage debacle. The headline is Беслан - 10 лет, Beslan - 10 years. And the tag for Facebook is

Это тяжело, об этом хочется забыть. Но это стоит помнить, чтобы просто оставаться людьми.

As usual, Bing offers to translate it. And this is what they give us:

It's hard to forget about it. But it is worth to remember to just remain people.

And here's Google, for comparison:

It's hard, you want to forget about it. But it is worth remembering that just be human.

There are some obvious differences. But they both get it definitively wrong, in different ways.

Bing says "it's hard to forget about it." This completely ignores the хочется, which is an impersonal intransitive form of "хочеть", to want. Хочется (often with a dative "subject" (an experiencer) means "(one) wants to, (you) want to" with the implication that this desire is not volitional but imposed by circumstances or the universe (мне хочется есть means I'm hungry; я хочу есть means I want to go to lunch). And it's not an infinitive complement to тяжело - it's not "it's hard to forget about it," it's Google's "it's hard, you want to forget about it."

But Google shouldn't preen itself. It screwed up чтобы, which is a conjunction that introduces the irrealis, the counterfactual, the conditional and the subjunctive. It's not что, which is the simple subordinator "that"; it's "so that" or "in order to". Bing's "remember to just remain people" is much better (though Google's "human" is, I think, better here than the more literal "people"). And I can't tell but I think Google, like Bing, is ignoring the object of "remember" - if not, then it's ending ungrammatically (try substituting "it" for "that" to see what I mean).

Also, Google translates оставаться as"be", and that's not right; Bing's "remain" is much better.

Both of them choose the literal "worth" for the modal стоит, which does come from the verb for "cost". "Worth it" is okay, "worthwhile, worth one's while" better. But its modal meaning is closer to "really ought to".

So, anyway, my translation would be:

This is hard; you want to forget it. But we really should remember, in order to just stay human.

Pres in Boots?

We all heard about Ted Cruz calling Barack Obama a "kitty cat".

"The Russian bear is encountering the Obama kitty cat," Cruz said, according to the Washington Times, adding "The reason Putin feels no fear to march into his neighbors, the reason our allies up and down Europe are terrified of what happens next is because our president is leading from behind."

Well, that story was picked up by the popular on-line Russian paper Gazeta. There are some interesting translation errors in that story, discussed below, but I want to draw your attention to the picture Gazeta chose to run on its Facebook page linking to the article.


Yeah. That's Puss in Boots, making his famous big eyes ... the ones that come just before he whips out his sword and cuts you to ribbons. I wish I knew if the guy who picked that did it on purpose...

(At least a couple of commenters also wonder.)

There are a couple of tiny translation errors in their rendering of that quote (the "kitty cat" one was pretty straight-forward: «русский медведь столкнулся с котенком Обамой»).

«Причина, по которой Путин действует без опаски, кроется в страхе наших союзников в Европе перед тем, что может произойти дальше, так как они не видят впереди себя нашего президента», — заявил Круз на партийном мероприятии в Далласе.

"The reason Putin acts without caution is that our allies in Europe are in terror of what may happen next because they do not see our president in front of them," Cruz declared at a party event in Dallas.

Or, more literally: ... in the fear of our allies in the face of what may happen next, since they do not see...

Yeah, that's not exactly what he said.

Let's just hope that this is just as wrong:

Сенатор Круз считается наиболее вероятным претендентом в кандидаты на пост президента США на выборах, которые пройдут в 2016 году, от республиканской партии.
Senator Cruz is considered the most likely claimant for Republican nominee in the 2016 US presidential elections.

Although that would give us a pretty clear choice.

"Hidden" text

By the way, I'm aware that the "hidden" text on my Lock In post isn't hidden, though I hope it's unreadable. But I just spent 30 minutes trying to decipher the source code and get that background color, and could not. And then I went to one of those sites where you create a color and it gives you the hex code - and even though it looked like a match to me, when I plugged it into the post it was anything but.

So I gave up. Sorry. The colors defeated me.

Pendleton and Milton-Freewater

On the way to the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, which is in Oregon (Walla Walla is quite near the border), we passed through a little place called Milton-Freewater, which seems to have frogs as its symbol, and Pendleton, home of the Mills, where they have a very nice shop :-).


We kept hearing ads on the radio for this festival, but I confess we didn't go. (Muddy-Frogwater is apparently a local nickname for Milton-Freewater.)


A frog king riding on a snail. Okay...



Welcome to Pendleton


Horses graze inside the town



A nice line of goods!

Tamástslikt

Tamástslikt is the only Native American museum along the Oregon Trail. Its name means "the turning of the years" or "telling our own story". On the Umatilla Reservation, it shows the culture of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla). It was built in 1998, funded by Oregon and the tribes (the Interior Department's budget did not "include any money for Indian interpretive centers," but after protest and publicity, the BIA guaranteed a loan to help finish the construction) to "tell the story of the Oregon Trail from a Native American perspective." It's a gorgeous place, well curated and accessible (no photos inside). Don't miss the Coyote Stories in the theater!

The Casino is the first thing you see, but the cultural center is well back from it


The cafe is supposed to be good, but it was closed when we were there


My school-teacher friend's nightmare: a field trip on our vacation! (Though actually, there were no kids, and the guy seemed to be using the parking lot to learn how to drive.)


The building was the home of many barn swallows




No pictures inside, but the village outside was open for photography

Gender (and Race) in Lock In

So, I just had it pointed out to me in a discussion thread at Making Light (not to me personally, but I realized I had been doing it): the narrator of Scalzi's Lock In is not identified by gender. Since it's first-person, there's never any reference to "he said/she said", it's just "I said", and no one ever actually uses a noun that would nail it down. Chris is "a rich kid" and exercises "my rich-person privilege". When people remember Chris's childhood, it's "a child-sized threep offering an Easter Lily to the Bishop of Rome" and "a child's first steps". There's also no hint of Chris's sexuality to help (or hinder). Like the attorney Hilary Tamar in Sarah Caudwell's excellent novels, Chris could be either gender.

Wow.

I have to admit I didn't even notice. I read the book with a preconceived idea of Chris's gender, and now I'm realizing that I brought that, and others brought something else. Now I'm looking at it with the notion that one of the many fascinating things going on here was the idea that it doesn't even matter.

I'll note here that the gender of other hadens is perfectly clear. Pronouns, etc., are deployed as usual, and when we see the digital self-images of Tony and Cassandra, they're idealized versions of themselves, male and female.

Also, race wasn't hidden - but we don't find out about Chris's parents' races until 72% of the way through the book, in Chapter 19 (spoiler: highlight to read: Chris's father is black, his mother white). And again, I noticed that - when it happened.

So. Well done, John Scalzi. You've not only told me a wonderful, ingenious story, but you've shown me something about myself, and brought me questions to think about - even more questions than I actually realized the day I finished the book the first time.

Goodbye to Summer

Well, today is meteorological autumn. School starts (if it hasn't already) tomorrow. It's been an odd, cool summer - yesterday, the last day of August, we had our first 90°-day - for August! one of them! - and a tremendous thunderstorm.

Weekend brought to you by...

And this fabulous poster is by Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio

Happy Labor Day

This year we in the US celebrate Labor Day today.

By Hammer and Hand all Arts do stand.

Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts. Molly Ivins

Labor Day differs in every essential from other holidays of the year in any country. All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflict and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation. Samuel Gompers

If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. Abraham Lincoln

Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. Ronald Reagan

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men. Clarence Darrow

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership - the American worker. US Department of Labor