The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Finished the third series of Scott & Bailey, and enjoyed it very much. Series 4 has arrived, so I'll be diving into that soon.

TV: Tried out The Game, which seems horribly complicated. But it's weirdly fascinating so I'll probably keep watching for a while. Grimm - I'm glad that Nick's back (though I wasn't worried he'd stay like that for long, of course, but I did worry they'd drag it out a couple more eps); he's going to be needed what with Adelind, Renard trying to find the kid for his mother, and that FBI problem. And I caught up on The Newsroom, which is definitely amping up the tension. (I do have one thing to say to that FBI agent who kept saying no reporter had ever been charged under the Espionage Act: James Risen.)

Read: Legion and Legion: Skin Game, which are very good, an intriguing character and set-up. No Man's Nightingale, a Wexford novel. Like Lewis, he's now retired; unlike Lewis, he's not a contractor but a private citizen whose friendship with Burden gives him a look-in that he's not officially empowered to do anything about. Very interesting book. Danielle Paige's fascinating Dorothy Must Die and its prequels The Witch Must Burn and No Place Like Oz. I'm waiting impatiently for March and the conclusion.

Exactly

Noam Schieber at The New Republic writes:

Bob McCulloch had every right to pass on an indictment. But absent an indictment, he has no right to the pretense that Office Wilson’s guilt or innocence has been adequately litigated. He should have to live with whatever backlash his non-indictment provoked.

Exactly. You don't want to indict the man, that's your right as prosecutor. Obviously, though, that would have provoked a huge and justified backlash. McCullough is a coward as well as a weasel.

Mark Twain

Over at Slacktivist Fred celebrates "the Feast Day of Mark Twain" by

revisiting the greatest religious conversion narrative in American literature, a scene from Huckleberry Finn

If you don't know the scene, it's the one where Huck wrestles with turning Jim in. It's one of the greatest scenes in American - possibly English-language - literature.

Amputees

A man has new arms. Yes, he had lost both arms and both legs, but now he has new arms - and might be able to get new legs, if he wants to go through another surgery and massive rehab.

This is because of medical science. Doctors and researchers learned how to take limbs from a donor and graft them onto another person. It will take months, perhaps as much as a couple of years, for his nerves to extend all the way to his hands. But he can fully look forward to having working arms and hands again.

One thing I found extremely cool was this:

“There have been about 70 hand transplants in about 50 patients around the world,” said Dr. Simon Talbot, director of the Brigham’s upper extremity transplantation. “This is certainly becoming more common. There are aspects of it that may be a first, but for the most part, this is, for us, becoming an operation that we are comfortable with.”

The doctors find this procedure "an operation that we are comfortable with" - how cool is that? I mean it. It's soon going to be routine for people who lose a limb to be able to get a new one. That is outstanding.

I was also extremely happy to see that in none of the stories I read about this included anybody thanking God.You know what I mean. There's a disaster or a disease, and engineers or techs or doctors do something fantastic and save lives or limbs, and then God gets the credit. Like the radio preacher I heard in Georgia last summer, who spent five minutes listing people who needed prayers, one of them a woman who had suffered from severe headaches for years. "Now she has relief," he said, adding parenthetically "they did a procedure", so "let's thank God for her healing and pray for her continued relief." Or miners are buried alive and dug out after days, and we hear how "I asked God to let me live and he listened to me" or that it was "a miracle of God." No, in this story all the praise is given to the donor and the doctors.

And speaking of God and amputees... Over as Slacktivist Fred ran a three-part series looking at the "God hates shrimp" question, explaining why it's far more than a sarcastic one-liner from atheists: part one, part two, and part three. Another of those questions came to my mind when I saw this headline. You know the one: "Why doesn't God heal amputees?"

Through the centuries faith-healers and those running shrines have routinely declared that  God heals cripples, people with cancer, blind people, all sorts of things ... but not amputees. God has never managed to restore a finger. When you ask why, there are generally a few stand-by answers: (a) it would be too obvious a display of God's power and thus destroy faith and free will; (b) somehow it's really better for that amputee; or (c) mysterious ways. None of which are very persuasive to someone who doesn't already believe them.

But here is a take that genuinely baffles me:

I feel God chose me to be a very special mother to these special children, and I had no idea until seeing the topic about why doesn't God heal amputees that people used this as a reason to doubt the existence of God. As the mother of one child with no feet and the potential mother of another child that will be missing some of his lower limbs as well, I've never seen it in that light. Rather, I have seen His calling me to be a special mother as a way to teach others of the blessings of God. He is also calling me to give these children the opportunity to be added to a Christian family that will teach them to love the Lord in their special way and to understand that we can overcome all things through Christ.

Ooookay. God is creating children with no feet - children with no feet - so that this woman can be special and teach others about the blessings of God, the God who creates children with no feet. The children who are just pawns in the game of this woman's specialness and God's blessing-showing.

I do wonder if she would even consider letting her kids get feet. At what point does "learning that we can overcome all things through Christ" become refusing to overcome things otherwise?

Doesn't give a

I'm not sure how I missed this, but I didn't see this episode of John Oliver's show (Last Week Tonight). I did see a clip from it (the climate change debate) and I guess I somehow thought I'd see the whole thing. Anyway, they did a take-off on the commemorative coin Russia issued to celebrate the . Here's their version:

And the voiceover said "If you're wondering why there's no map of Crimea, that's because Vladimir Putin doesn't give a f* about Crimea, which is what it says in Russian around the edges of the coin."

But that is not what it says. What is says is Владимиру Путина крым не ебет, which is kind of ... To Vladimir of Putin crimea not give-a-f* . It's hard to replicate the grammatical wrongness here. Putin's name should be in accusative, but Vladimir is in dative instead. It's a basic grammatical mismatch. By the way, Crimea should be capitalized, too.

I don't know where they got their translation - it wasn't from Google, because they can't handle the idiom at all; their translation is painfully literal, with the verb "to give" in it. And possibly it's just a typo - Владимиру instead of Владимира. Still, it's too bad. 'Cause it's actually pretty funny.

Why is NOT so hard to get?

Seriously. Why?

В Индии фермер убил жену за, что она не родила ему сына

In India a farmer killed his wife because she bore him a son Translated by Bing

Bing. There's a не there. Because she did not bear him a son.

To be fair, Google is no better:

In India, the farmer killed his wife after she gave birth to a son

This story is horrible. But Bing and Google make it wrong. And there's no way to even guess that it's wrong.

I can't understand why both of those programs miss the negative so often.

Bing? What on earth?

On Facebook, often the foreign-language posts have an offer from Bing to translate them. If you read this blog regularly you know Bing often does a poor job. Today, though ... well, check it out:



What on earth, I wondered, does Bing think it has here? And what will it translate "Um, no" into? I clicked - and this is the result.



So I still don't know exactly what was going on in Bing's little positronic brain.

Black Friday and Thanksgiving hours

I'm in the top 15% of Americans by income. I'm not even close to rich - the top 2% have so much more money it's mindboggling - but at least 85% of the country makes less than I do. That means I really cannot comment on where other people should shop or when they should. My choices are born of privilege that others simply don't have.

I don't have to try and make $9 an hour ($18,720 a year) or even $15 ($31,200/year) feed and clothe and transport and educate and entertain my family.

I personally never shop at WalMart, but then I don't have to. And I don't have to shop on Black Friday to save some money. And that's why all these memes - gods, I must have seen 60 at least this week - about how Black Friday is evil and people who shop on it are evil or stupid and probably both just annoy the hell out of me. (And don't even get me started on the ones that say straight up you shouldn't want anything more than you already have. I mean, this is just that whole undeserving poor trope again: it's entirely possible to be sincerely thankful on Thanksgiving for what you have and still want to buy something else. Unless you don't plan to give anyone a Christmas present this year and don't want anyone to give you one, either, shut the hell up, okay?)

Ahem.

Personally, I wish everyone in the country made enough money that they didn't need to save a few hundred bucks today.

But they don't.

So if you're shopping today or tomorrow, I hope you get what you wanted and save the money you're trying to save. And come home safely.

And on the flip side ... all the above means I don't have to depend on my employer's generosity or the whims of last-minute scheduling. I don't have to hope for overtime to make that part-time or even full-time minimum wage ... see second paragraph above. And I don't have to swap working today for things that I need or even just want (see third paragraph...) Seriously. That is a problem I have never had to face.

So if you're working today or tomorrow, I hope you have a good day.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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

Broken

Normally, when you run over someone and then drive away, you are considered to have at least violated a traffic ordinance. But apparently, if you run over someone protesting the Ferguson decision and then speed away, your action is approved of by police: "Police did not take the driver into custody or ticket him, according to KSTP."

Mind, this wasn't in Ferguson. It was in Minneapolis. And the person who was run over was a white woman.

But the system of blue solidarity may be just too entrenched. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel, the saying goes, and a handful of bad cops spoil the whole force - because they are protected instead of indicted.

The point

Ezra Klein writes:

Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson's full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: "difficult or impossible to believe." But I want to be clear here. I'm not saying Wilson is lying. I'm not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

And he tells us why he thinks that.

And then he tells us this (my emphasis):

Which doesn't mean Wilson is a liar. Unbelievable things happen every day. The fact that his story raises more questions than it answers doesn't mean it isn't true.

But the point of a trial would have been to try to answer these questions. We would have either found out if everything we thought we knew about Brown was wrong, or if Wilson's story was flawed in important ways. But now we're not going to get that chance. We're just left with Wilson's unbelievable story.

And that is the point.

Things that are not alike

An indictment is not an execution. It's not incarceration. It's not even a conviction.

An indictment is an acknowledgment that something happened, something that needs to be examined in a court of law.

It is an acknowledgment. It was needful. Justice was not served.

November crescent

Chicking?

Today's Bound and Gagged is odd. I suppose they didn't want to infringe the copyright, but they did spell "more" as "mor"... and "chikin" as "chickin'". What do you suppose they think that apostrophe is for?

 

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Some of Scott & Bailey season 3. I'm not crazy about the "moment of jeopardy-cut to months earlier" frame, but the through story (I'm assuming) with the horrible family is quite engrossing.

TV: The Sky TV adaptation of The Colour of Magic (which includes The Light Fantastic), rather well cast and made - enjoyable, indeed. The Lego Movie, which I'd managed to miss before and which I found enormously entertaining. November Christmas, which I watched because Sam Eliot is in it, but was - even for Hallmark - full of glurge. Worst of all, the story was about a town coming together to make Christmas come early for a little girl with cancer but - just in case the fact that it was on Hallmark wasn't enough - they got rid of all possible tension by having the girl narrating as a grownup! Also caught up on The Middle and Modern Family, both of which were good, and Grimm, in which I'm glad to see that Nick at least realized he would have to move to a different city if he didn't get his powers back. If the spell works (and really, they're not going to give him powers back? What kind of show would they have?) it's going to be a good thing that FBI agent "knows" he's not a Grimm...

Read: The Dinosaur Feather, a very good Danish novel about murder among scientists. The last two Julian Kestrel novels. I liked them all, but the last one was a tiny bit contrived and the whole Italian setting bugged me for some reason. Still, it was an enjoyable series. 

Still not

And South Carolina joins the list.

Hmmmm

Over at Contrary Brin, David Brin looks at the election and asks:

Recall that the GOP controlled Congress for TWELVE years, from 1995 to 2007 and for the last six of those, they controlled every branch and lever of the US government, from presidency to courts to Congress and so on. What did they do with that perfect and complete lock on power? Did they take control of our borders? Solve the “entitlements crisis?” Balance budgets? Deregulate reviled agencies? Offer a plan for health care reform? Can you recall anything they actually did, during those years? Other than deregulate banks and Wall Street?

It's an interesting read, particularly when he starts trying to look for hope.

(Via AZ Spot)

Cold Gold

Jet Stream Weirdness

Chris Mooney looks at the idea that climate change - the loss of Arctic ice in particular - is driving the extremes of recent winters by affecting the jet stream.

We need another name for it, obviously

The writer asks:

It “went through the windshield”… by accident? By magic? Why this use of the passive voice?

Sigh.

"Went" is not in the passive voice. "Go" isn't transitive and can't be made passive, in the first place, and if it could it would be "was gone". (I know, but "it was gone" isn't a passive construction - try adding "by him" to see what I mean - it's a participle used as an adjective.) "The bullet went through the windshield" is an active-voice sentence.

Clearly, what the writer is complaining about is that the reporter seems to be implying that the shooter had nothing to do with the bullet's going through the windshield; it's not his fault somebody ended up dead, the bullet did it all on its own. That implication may be reprehensible; agency may be being denied; culpability may be being covered up; but the passive voice isn't to blame.

Passive != "avoiding laying blame/taking responsibility". You can do that with the passive, of course, but (a) the passive can actually stress blame ("the victim was killed by the criminally careless shooter!") and (b) you can do it with the active, as well. As here.

Perhaps, if people are going to continue using the term "using the passive voice" to mean "avoiding assigning responsibility" we should take Mark Liberman's suggestion and rename it - maybe to "thematic" or "focussing" voice - and let people use "passive" to mean whatever it is they think they're talking about.

PS: If you think this might be just a one-off, I invite you to browse the Language Log archives to see just how often "passive" is used to mean "language I just don't like".

Lake Effect

Holy cow.

Six feet of snow. I can't even imagine it. (Snow days!)

Stay safe out there!

You know...

Just sayin':

When only 37% of the electorate votes, the result, even if it were unanimous, is not a mandate.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Blithe Spirit, from the "David Lean directs Noel Coward" set. A Touch of Cloth, a very funny British takedown of cop shows - John Hannah as the weary detective with a troubled past and Suranne Jones as his new, ambitious sergeant.

TV: The Futurama/Simpsons crossover, which was funny. Things to Come, still a good movie even if severely overtaken by events. A good print (at last!) and uncut. Big Trouble in Little China - I love this movie! The Douglas Fairbanks silent version of A Thief of Baghdad.

Read: The last of the Libby Serjeants ... and on to something new! First, Undeniable by Bill Nye, engaging (perhaps a tiny bit too much so) but really aimed at people who know less than I do. Good Christmas present material, though. Then A Bicycle Built For Murder, set in a small English village in WWII. Not bad, but I am tired of women falling for men the very first time they see them and spending the whole book obsessing over them. So I won't be reading any more of this series. I did enjoy Under an English Sky, and also the first two Julian Kestrel books.

Amazing ...

It's amazing to me how differently the different brands - or even sub-brands - of throat lozenges work. Ludens is the best, and the orange-flavored ones are better than the cherry...

Yes, I have a horrible sore throat.

Fortunate Son IS pro the troops

Re Bruce Springsteen's singing "Fortunate Son" at that big Veterans Day concert HBO put on, from The American Conservative:

The song is not an “anti-war screed”; it is a song protesting the unfairness of the draft, and how the burden of war-fighting fell disproportionately on members of the working class who were not in college, and couldn’t get, say, five Vietnam War draft deferments, like some former vice presidents we could name. In that sense, performing that song last night was perfectly legitimate, even laudatory.

Even if it were an anti-war screed, so what? The lyrics are written in the voice of someone who stands to be sent to Vietnam because of his class. It criticizes those who mouth patriotism, but who don’t want to send their sons off to die in a war they support. I think it was and is a perfectly valid and appropriate song to play at a concert meant to honor veterans. After all, they served. It is not critical of them, but actually defends them.

Absolutely spot on. And so is this, from the same place:

Fortunate Son is not “anti-military.” It is anti-elite. It is anti-politician. It is anti-Washington.

And yes, it is antiwar.

War is bad. This should not be a controversial statement. Most people of any ideology should be able to agree that even when war is necessary, it is a necessary evil. In 1946, General Dwight Eisenhower delivered an antiwar screed of his own: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Was Ike antimilitary? He was certainly antiwar.

War is brutal, futile, and stupid. Eisenhower saw battle firsthand. In “Fortunate Son,” John Fogerty asks why middle- and lower-class Americans are forced to see war up close while the political elite gets to keep a safe distance.

“Fortunate Son” is antiwar precisely because it is pro-military. It advocates for regular Americans who fight wars and against elites who make them.

There are all too many people in this country who seem to believe that supporting the troops means cheering the wars. It's good to see that not everyone on the right believes this.

O fer....

Jeeze Louise.

I know this opinion is being attributed to the guy we're not supposed to like rather than one of the main characters, but honestly. How keen do your ears have to be to hear someone pushing the keys on their phone (or massive tablet, what is that thing anyway?)? And calling it as disgusting and rude and intrusive as second-hand smoke?

Jeeze. Lou-ise.

The worst kind

Today we see Google committing the worst kind of error: the one that produces a grammatical English sentence ... or very nearly ... that's wrong.

Things like this "The beauty of censorship in that of Vladimir Putin's wife uhaživaniâh Xi in China, no one will know", or this "To transfer the shooter on an hour ago", or this "In the words of politicians promise more economic cars in Russia, in fact, are traded among themeselves who should first begin to punish: why the EU postpones sanctions against Russia" are obvious errors. You can't be sure where the mistakes lie, but you know they can't be right.

Here, though, we have

Автор "ЭП" описал доступным для всех языком, без эмоционального подтекста или моральных дилемм, для чего Россия вторглась в Украину.

Bing: The author of the "EP" described the language accessible to all, without emotional overtones or moral dilemmas, which Russia invaded Ukraine.

Google: Author of "VC" describes the available for all languages, without the emotional subtext or moral dilemmas, for which Russia invaded Ukraine.

Bing's almost looks right. Most people I showed it to think the mistake is that it should be "with which".

And Google's is worse (because it looks better). For one thing, there is no immediately apparent error at all, barring the superfluous articles, just a triflingly misplaced "available for all". And then VC? VC? What the heck? How did ЭП (EhP) - Economic Pravda - become VC?  And then somehow "language" became plural, and is the goal of Russia's invasion! They invaded for a language!

Both of them completely miss the point of the instrumental case here. It should be:

The author of "EP" described in language accessible to all, without emotional overtones or moral dilemmas, why Russia invaded Ukraine.

Yep, that pesky grammar. Those pesky case endings. He's not describing language at all. He's describing something in language.

The Boss

So, at the Concert for Valor, Bruce Springsteen and Dave Grohl sang "Fortunate Son".

And conservatives went apeshit.

I think it shouldn't need saying but here it is anyway: The troops != the war (or the government). Perhaps the best way to honor veterans and their courage is not to squander them and it. And "I Ain't No Fortunate Son" probably catches troops pretty well.

You can watch a fan-shot video here... and the crowd was into it.

Smooth move, guy

So, the Philae lander actually landed on a comet! Yay! Way to go, ESA! Way to go, team ...

Wait. WTF?

Yeah, Matt Taylor, Rosetta Project Scientist chose to wear a shirt covered in half-naked pouty girls with guns. And apparently no one at ESA thought this might be a bad idea for the guy on the television during the live landing.

Way to encourage girls to go into science. Way to demonstrate your contempt for half the human race.

Oh, sorry, my mistake. Apparently this shirt is "rad" and "bright" and "colorful" and "charming" and covered in "glamorous women". Or at least that's how the lads in the tech and business and British tabs and (in fact) solid papers like the Guardian see it. So, okay then.

Way to land on a comet, dude!

If no one knows...

Прелесть цензуры в том, что об ухаживаниях Владимира Путина за женой Си Цзиньпина в Китае никто не узнает. А раз никто не знает, ничего и не было:

Bing: The beauty of censorship in that of Vladimir Putin's wife uhaživaniâh Xi in China, no one will know. And if no one knows, nothing was:

Google:
The beauty of censorship is that of courtship Vladimir Putin for his wife Xi in China, no one will know. And since no one knows anything and was not

Bing's "in that" is entirely too literal. The TK construnction ( here в том, чтo) is how Russian subordinates clauses. The preposition в requires locative (aka "prepositional") case, and it's impossible to decline "no one will know". So the pronoun тот is used, in the proper case, and the subordinator что (that) introduces the clause. So it's "The beauty of censorship IS THAT ...". Looks like Google got it right - except that they slavishly follow the Russian word order, which becomes very difficult to follow in English. I'd suggest a cleft: the courtship IS SOMETHING no one will know about.

However, Bing and Google both miss whose wife it is. Google blows it with the missing possessive - they guessed at "his". Not a terrible guess, since if "his" was the right translation it probably wouldn't be there in Russian, but there is a possessive. Bing saw that Putin was in genitive, I think!, but got the reason why wrong, mangling the syntax. This isn't Putin's wife Xi (he's not married at the moment); it's Xi's wife (Peng Liyuan, wife of Xi Jinping (Si Tszin'pin  in Russian)) - oddly, both Bing and Google get his surname and completely omit his personal name. Xi doesn't decline in Russian, since it's a man's name ending in I but his personal name does and that confirms that Xi is in genitive.

Bing also can't handle ухаживаниях - advances, really, not courtship; "flirting" might work, and moves it quite oddly to modify "wife Xi".

And neither really does well with А раз никто не знает, ничего и не было, though Bing's better. I mean, Google, really? "no one know anything and was not"? This means "And if no one knows, then nothing happened" or "then there wasn't anything".

The beauty of censorship is that Vladimir Putin's flirting with Xi Jinping's wife in China is something no one will find out about. And if no one knows anything, nothing happened.

(The headline says "Chinese censors delete video of Putin's gallant gesture" rather than "advances" - paper versus Facebook! :-)  I should point out that all he did was offer her his blanket because it was cold (they were at a fireworks display). He was being gallant in the Russian style, and not really flirting. He did the same thing for Merkel a couple of years ago at a G20 summit.

Veterans Day

As Kurt Vonnegut remarked,

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

Eight 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; months of waiting for VA treatment; in fact, in this year's own scandal, we learned that some even die first. Need I go on?

What's more, we keep starting wars of choice and sending people to fight them. I know, I know: Freedom isn't free. No more it is, but let's stop pretending that any war we've fought since WWII was actually about our freedom. The president says he won't send troops to fight - "no boots on the ground" - but thousands of American soldiers are on their way now. And it won't stop there.

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.

And we really don't need some damned "Concert for Valor" on the Mall. That "gigantic display of patriotism" will not feed one homeless vet, put one injured one into a bed, or find one job. It will entertain some serving soldiers who are lucky enough to get down there, and (most importantly) put a lot of money into HBO's pockets. That's not what they need.

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 free dinners and tire deals, 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; Steven Vincent Benet's Minor Litany; and Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon.


This year I offer you Tom Greening's Nicht Neues im Westen:

Back in 1928 Erich Maria Remarque
confronted us with the image
of the beheaded soldier
still running,
with blood 'like a fountain'
spouting from his neck.
That's the statue we need
in every park and square
to commemorate what we do so well:
run toward war,
headless.

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Two lovely operas - first, at the Met, Die Zauberflote, in the Julie Taymor production but not the short, English Christmas one; the full-length German one. Kathryn Lewek owned the Queen of the Night, and Markus Werba was a terrifically good Papageno. Also, great puppeteers - especially the bears! Then in Baltimore, Madama Butterfly with a brilliant Chad Sheldon as Pinkerton (the cad!), Asako Tamura as a lovely Cio-Cio-San, and Mika Shigematsu knocking it out of the park as Suzuki - especially when she killed Pinkerton at the very end! Yes! Did not see that coming!

DVD: Rewatched LOTR, the extended edition.

TV: Grimm - too bad Adelind found a new helper, but I think Renard's mother may be her match. A lot is going on right now; I do like this show. Doctor Who - a nice twist on the perennial Doctor/Master rivalry. Good ending to the Clara Oswald arc; too bad about Danny even though they never really made me believe in them as a couple. Still, I'm looking forward to a new Companion and a new arc.

Read: About a dozen Libby Serjeant mysteries. I enjoyed them a lot, but now I'm caught up, almost. Still, there's a ton of stuff on my to-read list.

Sigh

Alex, as we all know, can't pronounce Russian. Neither can the Clue Crew, apparently. This one just said "Mee-kayl Gorbachev".

Mee-kayl. NO. Just no. It's Me-kheye-EEL GarbaCHOHFF  [mʲɪxɐˈil ɡərbɐˈt͡ɕɵf] .

I'm glad they didn't try pronouncing the Russian for "Trust but verify". Why can't Jeopardy! look up how to pronounce foreign words?

Jobs memorial may be saved

So, don't know if you heard, but there used to be a giant iPhone in St Petersburg, Russia, that was a memorial to Steve Jobs. Used to be, because the company that owned it (West European Finance Union ZEFS), according to its owner Maksim Dolgopolov, had to take it down because of Tim Cook.

Yes, you heard that right.

Dolgopolov cited the law against "homosexual propaganda to minors" and added, charmingly,

«ЗЕФС склоняется к акту публичного уничтожения этого символа нашей слепой и ложной веры в легенду о гениальности Стива Джобса, на пустом месте создавшего крупную мировую IT-компанию. Публичные и богохульные призывы к содомии со стороны Тима Кука стали последней каплей, переполнившей чашу нашего терпения»















ZEFS is inclined to publicly destroy this symbol of our blind and false faith in the legend of the genius of Steve Jobs, who starting from nothing created a major IT company. The public and blasphemous calls to sodomy from Tim Cook were the last drop, which caused our cup of patience to overflow."

But the Russian social networking site VKontakte (In Contact) have appealed to ZEFS, asking to take the memorial themselves and set it up somewhere, probably at their Petersburg offices, where it will be accessible to anyone who wants to see it.

Hopefully they'll be able to save it.


sources:
http://hi-tech.mail.ru/news/vk-pro-jobs-monument.html
http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/1258499/#ixzz3IQagATp1
http://lenta.ru/news/2014/11/04/jobs/

Ouch

But Clyde may be right...

Whaaaaaaaat?

I was quite stunned this morning when the tv in the cafeteria showed me a CNN anchor dismissing their crawl story, Market Celebrates GOP Triumph, by saying "more than half of all Americans don't own stock" and "wages are flat".

Not shocked by what she was saying. Shocked by the fact that she was saying it at all, let alone on the financial segment of CNN.

This is amaaaazing

The creative team of Shulock (words and plot) and Bolles (art) have definitely lost it. I don't know exactly what's going on but ... check on these three Apartment 3G strips (Monday, Tuesday, and today).



There is no way these two people are "at lunch" in any restaurant, let alone the upscale Tribeca Grill, who probably can't believe how much like Margo's father's apartment their place looks. I mean, seriously - they're standing up (doing that odd 3G thing where they keep spinning around in place) talking to each other in what is obviously an apartment. They're not eating or having wine or custard or anything. This is .... I don't know what it is.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Finished up Scott & Bailey series 2, which ended very strongly. I hope there's a three.

TV: The Middle was good - Brad's costume was fabulous, and Axl in the library talking to "LeBron" hilarious and sad, both. Modern Family was entertaining, especially Alex predicting Phil's reaction and Hayley's asking if she was from the future. Tried Constantine, but it doesn't make any sense - there's no flow to the plot - the characters are all unpleasant (that kind of dialog and attitude works better on the printed page), and right off the bat they give us the woman flouncing around in her teddy for no purpose except to look sexy for the audience. It's also dark - and I don't mean the subject matter, I mean it's very hard to see what's on the screen. The second episode had one or two shots in sunlight, but... anyway, I gave it a shot. Grimm - yay, it's back. Though I suddenly realized that down at the bottom of my DVR queue was the last two eps from last season - so I binged on four. I'm actually kind of glad I didn't spend the whole summer with that cliffhanger! That said... Wow. That snake. Sean and his mother. And fucking Adelind; I suppose I have a bit of sympathy for her, but not much. (And I said they should have told Wu!)  Lewis - very nice final episode, I really hope there'll be another season! And Doctor Who - so Missy is the Mistress. (Thank everything she's nothing to do with River Song...). The backstory on Danny was a bit predictable, but strong anyway. Next week will be good.

Read: A few more of the Libby Serjeant books; the second one was far too full of "I'm so old and fat and unattractive how can boyfriend really like me?" but it turned into "gosh I can't believe he likes me" and finally "gosh I'm so lucky he likes me", which is easier to accept :-) Also, the secondary characters are really well-drawn and the mysteries good.

The normative majority...

At Fred's, something re sexual ethics worth reading. After the main piece, a footnote, worth passing along:

as the normative majority, people like me enjoy the privilege of not being defined/bounded by our sexuality the way we insist everyone else must be. We’re free to go about our lives as though we don’t have a sexuality, just like we white people don’t have a race/color/ethnicity. It may be impossible to overstate how much time and energy this frees up, or how much psychic/emotional toil this spares us.