RilkeBlog

Short answer to stupid question

2012-01-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald writes,

(2) As for Drum’s insistence that it’s inherently wrong to ally with Paul for any reason, does that apply to Barney Frank, Alan Grayson, and Dennis Kucinich, all of whom have done exactly that? Indeed, in 2008 Kucinich said he would consider Paul for his Vice Presidential pick (Paul said the same about Kucinich).

Yes.Slightly longer answer: Greenwald of course confuses the position of a politician and that of an advocate. He writes, after a great deal of blather about "crazy" (refusing to consider Drum's argument that Paul's positions are in effect due to the paranoid strain in American politics),

why doesn’t Drum unveil the roster of national political figures with a serious platform who are making these points instead?

But as Drum showed, Paul is a bad advocate for the ideas Greenwald wants discussed, due to his racism, his nutty beliefs, his anti-Semitic/homophobic/etc comments, etc. etc. Plus of course that Paul's a poor advocate for Greenwald because he doesn't actually get to positions Greenwald likes for reasons he could countenance. Either Greenwald needs to find a (for some reason satisfactory) person with a national presence who's not a crank, or he needs to cast his lot with folks like Grayson and Sanders who, if not perfect in his eyes, can move the conversation in the direction he wants without deserved repulsion from the left.

randomly_1

2011-11-12T14:05:00.000-08:00

Links relevant to the previous post: the state defends a rapist, and an essay on another crime.

randomly

2011-11-12T11:56:00.000-08:00

Interestingly crappy thread moderation by John Scalzi here. People who disagree with the dominant view in discussions should be afforded extra protection, not less. Worse, in this case I judge that the suppressed minority voices were making trenchant points.

Also interesting for a conservative (I assume) reading of LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas" I hadn't thought of in political terms - that the ones should have walked to the nearest gun store. This I think runs into the problem of where responsibility ends - plenty of children in this world live in Omelan circumstances.

Re LeGuin, having reread _TLHOD_, _The Dispossesed_, and the Earthsea trilogy recently, I read _A Fisherman of the Inland Sea_ and found it about evenly split between preachy failures and incoherent failures, with one beautiful story, "The Kerastion", in the middle. Really high peak, long decline phase, in baseball parlance.

Rilkekind's dancer

2011-07-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

A dancer in time

Stupid New York Times health coverage

2009-03-16T20:17:00.000-07:00

Unbelievably, this article about high autism rates in Somali communities in the US manages to present a full description of the viewpoint of the anti-vaccine advocates without noting that the science is settled against them. The article says that the vaccine "theory" has "weaknesses" - but doesn't list any, only citing the case of one child who had seizures before being immunized.

Here's a theory - Donald G. McNeil, Jr. is deliberately misleading his readers. This theory has a weakness - Bob Somerby probably says he's just an idiot.

More music news

2009-02-17T22:30:00.001-08:00

The other day I had a hankering to listen to Schubert's beautiful D940 Fantasia in F Minor for piano four hands, so I dug it up from the bottom of the bottom box of classical music awaiting a set of shelves somewhere in our house. The cd also had the much less interesting Marches Militaires - during one Rilkekind looked up from his toys and said, "This is march music". Or something not unbelievably precocious which sounds similar, though I can't figure out what.

I/P conflict news

2009-02-17T21:52:00.000-08:00

Interesting if accurate: a Palestinian Center for Public Opinion poll says that support for Hamas in Gaza has fallen to 28% from 51% in November. And Fatah is up to 41%. There will be much gnashing of teeth in some quarters of the blogosphere if this holds up. Well, more likely it won't get discussed.

Also, the conflict reportedly got to a senior British diplomat, who allegedly said a few unfortunate but not psychotic things. I somehow hadn't realized this is the sort of thing one can get arrested for in the UK.

Music news

2009-01-21T23:03:00.000-08:00

The other day Rilkekind said, "Daddy, sing 'Oh My Darling' with bananas".

I was listening to Hindemith's _Mathis Der Maler_ recently and he remarked, "Big dustbuster [i.e., vacuum cleaner] music". I'll have to try him on the solo viola music, which I love.

The first movement (segment?) of _Mathis Der Maler_ ends as excitingly as any work I can think of. But the balance of the whole work is thereby thrown off for me. For that matter I've always wondered about e.g. Brahms putting the weightiest movement of say the 4th symphony first - it sometimes seems backwards.

There's a note in the first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto that seems wrong to me - it's rhythmically awkward. I wonder if a century of violinists and conductors have triple-checked the score there. But surely there's a good reason for everything in the piece. Sadly googling "wrong note in Brahms violin concerto" doesn't yield much of obvious use.

Listening to Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony recently I was reminded by what turns out to be the "statue theme" of the phrase in measure 16 of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for organ. A quick google doesn't reveal a link - guess I should sit down at a piano and figure out all those accidentals.

Frank Black's reading of the line "God willing I won’t put you in the ground" from "California Bound" off _Black Letter Days_ is great - he has an awful but expressive voice and he undersings the threat or prayer perfectly. Compare to Paul Hillier's reading of "That the wolf ate" from "Song for a Sea Tower" off bitter ballads - he uncharacteristically overemphasizes the line by putting a sort of chuckle into his wonderful voice. The two albums, which make an interesting pair, have taught me a lot about what one can do singing songs in a mode closer to speech than what one might call the usual Liederstimme.

Finally

2009-01-20T11:58:00.000-08:00

Finally, finally, finally.

Is that Daddy's left elbow?

2008-12-23T14:30:00.000-08:00

Yes, I believe it is!

As usual, click on images to expand.

Not learning about cryo stuff

2008-10-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

I need a small non-feedthrough linear actuator (with say a 1 cm stroke) or rotary stepper motor or just a stupid shutter that operates in a moderate vacuum at cryo temperature. Google is not helping. Guess I have to resort to the old remedy of finding an actual engineer.

(Being sick and having been woken up by rilkekind at 5 AM because, so he claimed, he needed a fingernail clipped might be as much to blame as google.)

Bring me the sweat of Rafael Nadal

2008-09-07T21:35:00.000-07:00

Anthony Lane writes in a recent New Yorker,

Hero worship, for all but a handful of Olympians, is the fleeting exception, whereas for tennis stars it’s the rule. Nadal, to his credit, looked delighted when he won the gold medal, but, as he tossed his wristbands to his fans, you could see, in their outstretched hands, a craving that no Olympics could ever sate: bring me the sweat of Rafael Nadal.

I wonder how many of his readers got the reference to Clive James's poem Bring Me The Sweat Of Gabriela Sabatini - 0.1%?

Every once in a while I'm tempted

2008-09-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I'm tempted to use a great phrase like "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" as the title of a poem, but doing so sets the reader's expectations very high and it's hard not be upstaged. Here's a Wallace Stevens poem, "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs", with the same problem.

Vulturing data

2008-09-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

The PAMELA collaboration is rumored to have evidence of dark matter. They have entirely understandably imposed radio silence while they check their analysis and prepare a paper. But

[t]hat hasn’t stopped physicists speculating for themselves. Today Marco Cirelli from the CEA near Paris in France and Alessandro Strumia from the Università di Pisa in Italy present their own analysis of the PAMELA data.

[...]

But given the PAMELA team’s reluctance to publish just yet, where did Cirelli and Strumia get the data? The answer is buried in a footnote in their paper.

“The preliminary data points for positron and antiproton fluxes plotted in our figures have been extracted from a photo of the slides taken during the talk, and can thereby slightly differ from the data that the PAMELA collaboration will officially publish.”

Zombie lie spotted in the New Yorker

2008-09-04T23:46:00.000-07:00

Peter Boyer once again repeats the unkillable falsehood that Gov. Casey was denied a speaking role at the 1992 Democratic nominating convention because he was pro-life, when in fact it was because he refused to endorse Bill Clinton. It'll be interesting to see if the magazine prints one of the letters to the editor pointing this out.

Korch the Torch

2008-08-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

Via this cool mostly-chess photography site, the above image of Victor Korchnoi, a hero to many chess players of my generation for his imaginative play, esp. as a counter-attacker playing Black.

Here's a game of his from 1953, against Suetin:

1.c4 Nf6 2.g3 c5 3.Bg2 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.Nc3 Nc7 6.f4 Nc6 7.b3
e6 8.Nf3 Be7 9.Bb2 O-O 10.Rc1 Rb8 11.Ne4 b6 12.Qc2 Nb4 13.Qb1
Ba6 14.Neg5 g6 15.h4 f6 16.Nh3 Qe8 17.Nf2 Rd8 18.h5 gxh5 19.g4
Ncd5 20.Rxh5 Qg6 21.f5 exf5 22.Nh4 Qe8 23.Nxf5 Nf4 24.Qe4 Bd6
25.Nxd6 Nxg2+ 26.Kf1 Qxe4 27.Nfxe4 Nf4 28.Rh2 Nbd5 29.Re1 Rd7
30.d3 Ne3+ 31.Kf2 Nxg4+ 32.Kg3 Nxh2 33.Kxf4 h5 34.Rh1 Ng4
35.Rxh5 Ne5 36.Kf5 Nc6 37.Bxf6 Rg7 38.Ke6 Nb4 39.Bxg7 Kxg7
40.Rg5+ Kh7 41.Nf7 Re8+ 42.Kf6 1-0

Iphigenia Clock

2008-08-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

Reading _Vanity Fair_ the other day I came across the following:

... and working at a huge piece of worsted by the fire, on the sofa, hard by the great Iphigenia clock, which ticked and tolled with mournful loudness in the dreary room.

This is in Chapter 42, page 442 of my edition. It describes Jane Osborne's miserable life attending to her father, who refuses her any real independence or chance at meeting a suitor because she is slightly useful to him at home. When I read the passage I was so struck by "Iphigenia clock" that I had to put the book down. I wondered if there could possibly be such a grotesque thing. Iphigenia was of course the Greek Isaac, the daughter of Agamemnon, sacrificed by him to placate the virgin goddess Artemis and allow the Greek ships to sail to Troy (this being the reason for his murder by Orestes). A little investigation revealed that I had missed or forgotten

When that chronometer, which was surmounted by a cheerful brass group of the sacrifice of Iphigenia...

(Chapter 13, Mr. Osborne about to ignore Amelia's request to wait for George Osborne to come before starting dinner.)

They were both so silent that the tick-tock of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia clock on the mantelpiece became quite rudely audible.

(Chapter 23, Dobbin nerving himself up to ask Miss Osborne to support George's marriage to Amelia, as Miss Osborne hopes he'll ask her to marry.)

And the clock, in the altar in which Iphigenia was situated, beginning, after a preparatory convulsion, to toll twelve, the mere tolling seemed as if it would last until one — so prolonged was the knell to the anxious spinster.

(More of the above.)

The first reference to the clock comes on page 121 of my edition. I read that chapter while we were in the hospital after rilkekindstrich's birth, so almost four weeks ago. It takes a very tired and distracted or a very careless reader to miss "a cheerful brass group of the sacrifice of Iphigenia", perhaps the least cheerful scene imaginable, and thematically of obvious (rather wildly overobvious in fact) importance in the context of Mr. Osborne's bullying of his son's almost fiancée. And then the theme is continued some hundred pages later in describing Jane Osborne's situation, setting up the passage I quote at the top of the post.

(Note that the first readers of the novel had to contend with its serialization - the first and last passages above were separated by something like eight months.)

Are we really meant to think that Mr. Osborne (or rather his agent, or the agent of the bankrupt man one imagines originally owned the clock) might have furnished his home with an object in such awful taste? Compare that symbol of Victorian awfulness, the bishop's bird stump in Connie Willis's masterpiece _To Say Nothing Of The Dog_, so who knows.

Also, are we expected to hear the "worst" in "worsted"? And "hard" in "hard by"? And is the fire noted in association with the altar?

Good writing, effective writing

2008-07-29T22:47:00.000-07:00

This is a good but not well-written post - but part of the goodness is the writing. Curious.

Rereading Vanity Fair

2008-07-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've been rereading _Vanity Fair_, and getting a lot more out of it this time. In part I've become a better reader over the last maybe fifteen years (including immersion in Austen), in part I read the introduction by Joseph Warren Beach in my ancient Modern Library edition. In _Tom Jones_ or _Tristram Shandy_ the constant presence of the author didn't bother me, perhaps because the writers were more sympathetic characters than Thackeray, with his moralizing and heavy-handed disdains. But Beach points out that the readers of the day were unable to read _Barry Lyndon_ with sophistication and Thackeray had to bear that in mind. It's not simple but there's a way of reading _VF_ that takes that into account and picks up irony in the very heavy-handedness noted above. How to clearly distinguish the layers of intention, though? It's probably not possible for the casual even close reader without knowing the literary and social environment of the time, but I'm seeing a richness of levels I don't recall in Dickens.

Housecleaning

2008-07-27T23:13:00.001-07:00

Maybe it's some nesting thing - I've finally gotten rid of my blogroll links to places I no longer read, due to their intolerance of atheism (Mark Kleiman), CDS and general mission failure (ObWi), inability to acknowledge blatant misuse of "mendacious" even when directed to a dictionary (Uggabugga), penchant for self-satisfied risibly-argued posts like this [and see comments] (Philosoraptor), or just lack of interest (etc.) - and without the detailed discussion my lack of energy for which was preventing said cleanup. Maybe I'll replace them with new links over the course of several tardy years if something better comes along. Suggestions (esp. for good poetry blogs) gratefully accepted.

The Unitarian Church in Knoxville

2008-07-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

is where we spent our Sunday mornings when I was a kid. That was in the old building, which had an odd smell and many strange angles and carpeted ramps we used to run up and down, and which was always overfilled with caring people. I don't think I've ever been in the new building; I keep imagining the horrible event today in the wrong place.

For the RLYW crowd

2008-07-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Yankees are 5-0 while he's been a fan.

I'm cute too

2008-07-26T20:43:00.001-07:00

Rilkekind

says, Daddy, I'm cute too!

As usual, click image for larger view.

Daddy's kind of picture

2008-07-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Click for larger image.

Mommy's kind of picture

2008-07-26T10:10:00.001-07:00

Click on image for larger view - using right-click and Save Image As... may be convenient.

Rilkekindstrich (aka "The Pi Prime"), born 21 July 2008, 3.19 kg, 52 cm.

Liberal blogosphere Alanis Morissettes satire

2008-07-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Read The Editors and Tom Tomorrow on the uproar in the liberal blogosphere over the recent New Yorker covering "The Politics of Fear".

Thomas Disch is dead; I hate the world

2008-07-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite poets, Tom Disch, has died in apparent misery and despair. I don't know whether to feel grief or rage.

A poem of his from twenty years ago - not his best, but fitting enough:

In Memoriam

Nothing, no one, gives me rest
I have put it to the test
And it is not an idle jest
The life I live must lead to death
An emptiness and end of breath
Though still my heart beats in my breast
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

The streets are filled with cryers crying
No end of them, nor yet of dying
Some men may smile a little while
If sellers sell and some are buying
But they will join the rank and file
Who decorate our ancient Nile
No end of them, nor yet of dying

Memorials are built and then
Time silts a harbor, forms a fen
And tells its immemorial jest
To the worst as to the best
The world will be as it has been
I am feeling so depressed
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, Gene Wolfe

2008-05-31T13:47:00.001-07:00

Lesch Nyhan and "Gene Wolfe" yields nothing in google. See this excellent report by Richard Preston in The New Yorker for a description of the syndrome. People suffering from the genetic disease are compelled to hurt themselves - they eat food they hate, they say no when they want to say yes, they bite off their fingertips, they rip off their own faces.

When I was perhaps thirteen I read Wolfe's _The Shadow of the Torturer_. In it, a character is subjected to a device called the revolutionary, which is described as waking an enemy in the condemned. The effect is exactly that of Lesch-Nyhan. The subsequent events in the novel disturbed me enough that after I finished the book I never thought about it again until, in college, I accidentally read another work by Wolfe and was lead back to _The Book Of The New Sun_. Surely he was thinking of Lesch-Nyhan.

Side-note - in college some friends played a game in which they asked each other if they would rather have x or y happen, where x and y were horrible. Something like L-N was x or y once. I never understood the appeal of the game, though they each had some self-destructive tendencies. Sadly one of them later drank himself to death.

Best post title ever nominee

2008-05-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

here.

Circles

2008-05-27T21:18:00.001-07:00

As usual, click to get a larger version.

Hendrick Hertzberg now officially a hack

2008-05-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

I was sad to see this remarkably mendacious and small-minded essay by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, but I've not been in the business of collecting the informed-only-by-groupthink attacks from liberals on HRC, and I figured that, ok, he's got a little problem, but after the nomination process he'll get back to being ok. But, no. Here's the great Digby on Hertzberg's praise of Chris Matthews.

This is the kind of post I've been not wanting to write, which is a big part of the reason I haven't been blogging much. The whole enterprise of public comment is just too depressing.

Clinton, Obama, McCain

2008-05-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

This interesting site runs simulations of the 2008 election based on recent polls (weighted by size and freshness). Currently Clinton wins 62% of trials vs McCain; Obama wins 53%. Basically the polls claim that HRC's old victory map trumps Obama's new map. November is far away, and I doubt McCain would do even this well against either, but the result is an even better argument for HRC than winning the popular vote in the primary according to metrics M, N, and O. And of course it's an argument in favor of the Unity Ticket BTD is (perhaps half-tauntingly) pushing on a more data-point-driven basis.

Memorial Day

2008-05-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

and I'm remembering Andrew Olmsted. It feels like very long ago that he died, and it's not even half a year.

In the obligatory lilacs from seque, Mrs. R. and I are looking forward to the imminent arrival of a little brother to Rilkekind - we refer to him as π', aka the Prime, for uninteresting reasons. I had proposed "Andrew" as a first name, but Mrs. R. wanted a clean slate, a name without associations for us, and really I didn't know him nearly well enough anyway, and I never will.

Don't look back

2008-05-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

- something might be gaining on you. [Satchel Paige]

Rilkebruder is reading a book called _The Name of the Wind_, so I checked out the back cover blurbs on amazon. Someone named Kevin J. Anderson writes, "Jordan and Goodkind must be looking nervously over their shoulders!" I see the book was published 27 March 2007. Robert Jordan died 16 Sept 2007; Goodkind died - wait, no, turns out I'm wrong, he didn't - his series just ended to "thank god it's over" reviews from loyal readers (Jordan's fans having been clamoring for an end for years - maybe a decade - now).

Another What Clinton Should Do Post

2008-05-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

I think Obama's campaign's most effective tactics have been despicable, and HRC has a pretty good case that she'd be the better candidate in the fall given Ohio and Florida and all the ammunition Obama has handed McCain lately, but I take it that the party (though not the Democratic voters) will chose Obama. So what should Clinton do now?

BTD has a good post on the subject here - basically saying that it would be reasonable for her to continue her campaign but run against McCain. He also suggests Wes Clark as Obama's VP, which makes sense, because Clark would be a good Clinton proxy, a good attack dog, and would add geographic/cultural balance while providing unquestionable experience.

I was wondering what Clinton could buy with a promise to effectively suspend her campaign for the nomination as above, and it occurs to me that in that case Obama could freely drop his strategy of disenfranchising MI/FL. This (presumably tacit) quid pro quo would help both of them save face and would go a long way towards healing the wounds in the party.

Nabokov, Turgenev, Yeats, pwnage

2008-04-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

In Ada, or Ardor Nabokov writes, apropos of nothing of particular interest to me,

We now pass into the music room with its little-used piano, and a corner room called the Gun Room containing a stuffed Shetland pony which an aunt of Dan Veen’s, maiden name forgotten, thank Log, once rode. On the other, or some other, side of the house was the ball-room, a glossy wasteland with wallflower chairs. "Reader, ride by" ("mimo, chitatel’", as Turgenev wrote).

On reading the supposed quote by Turgenev I was struck by its similarity to Yeats's self-written epitaph, "no conventional phrase": "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!". I wondered that was an intentional reference, if I was seeing things, if anyone else had noticed, if Yeats's phrase was in fact conventional; so I decided to investigate, but couldn't immediately figure out how to search Turgenev's works based on a short transliterated Russian phrase. As it happens, there are amazing resources on the web to be found using the most naive google possible, resources that mock my ability to do research. (More notes on the passage starting here.) If I understand the Ada Online notes, the French translation of the novel makes the likely intentional Yeats reference explicit, and I'm told Nabokov checked his French translations for accuracy.

Presumably the careful reader interested in things Nabokov is interested in finds such delightful surprises on every page of the novel. So far I've been noticing cross-references and small felicities (including some stuff about Mansfield Park) but mostly I'm finding the style tiresome, which wasn't the case in Lolita or Pale Fire that I can recall (it's been 15 or 20 years, yikes). Also the Borgesian theme makes me want to put the book down and pick up Ficciones instead. Probably not the right frame of mind to read in.

More on Nabokov in (I think) a similar mood from James Wood here.

Brief comment on The Dragons of Babel

2008-03-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

Michael Swanwick is perhaps the best SF writer working today. His masterpiece, _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_, is richer, more creative, more ambitious, and more beautifully written and designed than anything else in the genre in the last decade or two; but his novel _Stations of the Tide_ and many of his short stories are similarly successful. He earns the allusions to John Crowley's _Little, Big_ in _TIDD_.

His latest work, _The Dragons of Babel_, comes after a few fairly uninteresting novels. It is set in much the same universe as _TIDD_. Anyone who has read any Swanwick should go pick it up, so no further comments are needed - and in the interest of avoiding spoilers I add only this: if _TIDD_ is _Das Schloss_ (a comparison it perhaps in fact turns out to deserve), this new novel is _Amerika_.

Somewhat relevantly to the aims of the Swanwick novel, this sentence by Kafka is the greatest ever written:

Und morgens wie abends und in den Träumen der Nacht vollzog sich auf dieser Straße ein immer drängender Verkehr, der, von oben gesehen, sich als eine aus immer neuen Anfängen ineinandergestreute Mischung von verzerrten menschlichen Figuren und von Dächern der Fuhrwerke aller Art darstellte, von der aus sich noch eine neue, vervielfältigte, wildere Mischung von Lärm, Staub und Gerüchen erhob, und alles dieses wurde erfaßt und durchdrungen von einem mächtigen Licht, das immer wieder von der Menge der Gegenstände verstreut, fortgetragen und wieder eifrig herbeigebracht wurde und das dem betörten Auge so körperlich erschien, als werde über dieser Straße eine alles bedeckende Glasscheibe jeden Augenblick immer wieder mit aller Kraft zerschlagen.

It's a description of the life and chaos of New York City, and the light that scatters off everything "as if a dome of glass over the street were with total force at every moment smashed."

The End of the HRC Campaign

2008-03-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

Quick reaction to the news that FL won't hold a revote: HRC would have had a good argument going into the convention that she won the popular vote (and did much better than Obama in the Democratic vote) but that depended on the large vote delta she would have gotten in FL. With no revote, and thus I assume the disenfranchisement of FL, the Obama supporters won't accept that argument on threat of bolting, so it's all over strategically (assuming that the Rev. Wright matter or something else doesn't explode). I nearly agree with BTD in comments here and elsewhere in that thread. Probably withdrawal would be too precipitous a reaction (and surely the HRC side isn't thinking this way given their failure to fight hard for a revote), but a winding down or downshifting of the campaign is probably the course I'd recommend on the facts as I understand them.

Reading a Tell

2008-03-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

See Bob Somerby on reading a tell here. Also another in a rather tragic series of devastating links to Josh Marshall burning his reputation at both ends.

[I've used the label "learning to read" (which I intend to use a fair amount in the coming weeks, having been thinking about that for a while) because the phrase is such a nice metaphor and because the skill is essential in reading as in the more typically relevant forms of interaction.]

Fateful Choice on Iraq Army Bypassed Debate

2008-03-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

Let's play "spot the passive voice". Or rather, "spot the missing name".

Michael Gordon is widely regarded in the liberal blogosphere as a hack, if not a complete one. Here's an article in the NYT about the disbanding of the Iraqi army. It describes how that decision was made and approved. Well, no, it describes how mystified many of the main players were to find out the decision was made and approved. The article is an attempt to seem like the former, but all one needs to do is grep for the string "Cheney" in the article to read the tell.

Andrew Olmsted

2008-01-04T23:16:00.000-08:00

I was away from the web most of the day and so only just now learned the terrible news that Andrew Olmsted, a blogger I liked and from all accounts a very good man, was killed in Iraq yesterday.

A room lit from two sides

2007-11-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

Somewhere I read that people prefer to be in rooms lit from two sides. Recently Rilkekind got his long-awaited surgery to fix his insides, and everything went as well as could be hoped. Still, he wasn't very happy for several days. We were in a two-crib hospital room and were separated from the window by the curtain giving the other family privacy. Rilkekind spent a lot of time pointing out the door toward a glass door opening on an outdoor patio. Then on the second day there the other family went home, the curtain was drawn back, and the room was lit by the window and the door - and Rilkekind started looking happy.

The Art of Losing

2007-10-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

Roger Angell is the best prose writer about baseball. Here he quotes one of Elizabeth Bishop's greatest poems, One Art. Sadly he entirely misses Bishop's irony, the unbearable force driving the poem. Torre has (by the front office's standards anyway) lost and lost for years now, and his mastery of winning was questionable. It seems to me that in walking away from his players and millions more dollars than any other manager makes, and in attacking the team's ownership (and hence the team) in doing so, he has reached the pinnacle of losing.

Dodd goes from 0 to default in one hold

2007-10-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Dodd insists on no retroactive immunity for the telecoms.

In other news, the Obama campaign is catching up to the late 20th century.

SCOTUS Declares Bush the Nobel Peace Prize Winner

2007-10-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

Hilarious post here.

Shaming Calvin Trillin

2007-10-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

In this 2004 verse on the war, Calvin Trillin provides a good example of what Bob Somerby is talking about in today's version of his eternal refrain: the entire media had it in for Gore. Trillin's first verse starts:

We chose, in this millennium's first test,
Between two lesser heirs, who at their best,
If they'd been born as sons of other pops,
Might hope to be elected sheriff, tops.
(At school, Bush was a dunce, there's no denying.
Young Gore did not stand out--and he was trying.
A frat-house honcho, Bush reprised that part;
Young Gore portrayed a piece of chain-saw art.

I reflect that God is just

2007-10-08T19:31:00.000-07:00

Just awful:

Last Monday, in terse legalese, the court denied Mr. Williams’s now posthumous request that it consider his case. “The petition,” the docket entry said, “is dismissed as moot.” Moot, in other words, because the petitioner is dead.

Dead because he was executed before his case could be heard.

Brad DeLong's intellectual cowardice

2007-10-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

From one of my comments in the censored discussion here:

Profesor DeLong, what about Goldberg's argument makes you so emotional that you feel obliged to censor a plain summation of it from someone who (in a censored section above) expressed a lack of interest in the question of W/M's motives? If you're right, then make your case - it shouldn't be hard if the opposing side is obviously wrong. To carry a point you refuse to even begin to argue by censoring any discussion of it is, it seems to me, intellectual cowardice.

One of my censored comments:

Goldberg is probably fairly described by US standards as a centrist on I/P questions, having written a book sympathetic to but critical of both sides. In the essay in question he calls for a fair, well-sourced, reasonable book criticizing AIPAC.

"But in practice they cannot be debated because people who supported them would tend to be labeled antisemitic and their arguments discounted on that basis."

Would you discount an argument on that basis? Would you discount any argument saying something is anti-Semitic because it says that?

The Goldberg argument is basically: the text is fundamentally flawed in logic and evidence and approach, and blames a small set of (in large part) rich or prominent Jews for manipulating the US into a war and causing OBL to attack us, and uses arguments based on e.g. the fact that Howard Dean's wife and kids are Jewish - hence as a fraudulent work unfairly attacking the influence and works of Jews and making arguments based on the identity of Jews, it is anti-Semitic.

In fact it seems to me that some (not the above) of the criticism of those saying the text is anti-Semitic is made to silence any push-back at all.

Anyway I don't find the question of whether the text is or isn't anti-Semitic of much interest compared to the question of whether the thesis is of - I think Dan Drezner said "piss-poor" quality - or whether I have the wrong e.g. 10-parameter model of why we invaded Iraq or why OBL attacked us.

Another (which I failed to copy) noted that I believed we have a lot of data about the reasons for 9/11 and the Iraq invasion - enough to dismiss claims of unitary causes. I should also note that it's too bad that some excellent commentary by Ragout was deleted. His or her principled reaction:

Brad DeLong,

I am not that interested in whether M&W are antisemitic. What I would like you to do is delete the posts where *your* words appear under *my* name.

Psalm 23 and Coolio

2007-10-02T23:07:00.000-07:00

Odd juxtaposition - last week there was an article by James Wood in the New Yorker about Robert Alter's new translation of Psalms, with some interesting discussion of the famous 23rd. And this weekend Mrs. R. and I watched an episode of _Angel_ in which there's a snippet of the powerful "Gangster's Paradise" by Coolio (excellent video here). The song starts with the opening line of the 23rd Psalm, but except for the mordant "paradise" (and possibly something of gospel in the mournful chorus), God is conspicuously absent.

I'm not grumpy (for dutchmarbel)

2007-09-25T14:59:00.001-07:00

(as usual click for larger image)

Elegy for Sergio Vieira de Mello

2007-08-17T21:19:00.001-07:00

Four years ago, on 19 August 2003, twenty-two UN staff members serving in Iraq were killed by a suicide bomber. Among the dead was the leader of the humanitarian mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello. This as I recall was the first of many stunning tragedies in Iraq. I hadn't expected the invasion to turn out well, but I hadn't been prepared for something so horrible, and spent the next couple of days wandering around San Francisco feeling sad and angry and composing the following, which I post here because it's not getting any better sitting in a folder.

For Sérgio Vieira de Mello

Sérgio, it's been a week. I claim
the stranger's right to be growing more upset.
You're lying in state back home. It's winter there.
The trees must be restrained in splendor, the parrots'
cries in quieter Portuguese. But here
in San Francisco it's summer, not just in name;
girls in halter tops fill all the cafes
and Joseph Cornell stores on 24th,
Dolores Park's a beach of beautiful
male torsos and thighs, so many effortless
Michelangelos with faces of that rich
variety that men misname as race.

Sérgio, it's evening. I'm walking down
from Noe Valley to visit friends in the Mission.
Three ginkgos stand in front of an Irish pub,
The Liberties (as in Don't Be Taking, perhaps,
though Liberty Hill's not far away.) Amidst
the summer green are yellow hints of fall.
A few branches hang, broken and brown. Here
are pots of marigolds and foxglove. There
a manzanita's blossoms hang like pink
Chinese lanterns the size of nipples, a few
as red. A jacaranda, up here at least
the slenderest and loveliest of trees,
has lost its lilac blooms. The wilting rhyme
of the agapanthus stalks has been cut down.
Above, my country's flag is crossed with Castro's -
the field of stars on seven rainbow stripes.

Sérgio, perhaps you would have laughed -
a beggar - no, a homeless guy in a doorway,
autistic from hopelessness - by his side
his book of hours, a baby-blue pamphlet:
Some Basic Facts about the United Nations.
He must have picked it up for free downtown.
I hate the consciously inoffensive blue,
the trite coincidence, the pitiful man,
this magnificent beautiful city's failure to solve
the insoluble. Forgive the ugliness,
but this anger makes me want to puke.
Saddam, get of Hitler and Stalin, lives,
the spiteful madmen who killed you and your colleagues...
Arafat's New Year's "No" on peace to Clinton,
the sacrilegious green of Hamas's flag,
the "we wanna be a superpower" French,
Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, the neocons,
Bush's incuriosity - his complacent,
manipulated ignorance as good
as mendacity any day - "he often says
that life would be a lot easier if it were
a dictatorship." Even the dorky look
on the EMT's face as he carried an outraged child
from the skeletal bus the day that you were killed.
Seething, IQ plummeting, I've new
respect for all that you, with better grounds
for fury, accomplished in your life, and beyond.

Sérgio, you would have loved my friends,
Maarten and Chiara, too. I'd say
that they are people - smart and generous,
productive, in love - you could have been proud
to die for. But they wouldn't have asked, and you
didn't volunteer. Well, it's too late,
and better to think of happier things, like how
the other day my friends, out drinking, asked
for caipirinhas - in exchange for instructions, got
a round with Cuban rum in place of cachaça.
Going to bars with them is economical.
Strangers see them smile, hear them laugh,
and send us margaritas, a small blessing.

Sérgio, this neighborhood is rich
in people, poor in other ways - for San
Francisco, anyway. The dollar stores
are full. And here's a tall, sharp-spired church,
its unglassed windows boarded up and painted
gray, the great rose window slatted gray;
two motion-sensor lights point out the steps
are filthy - the only parishioners now are pigeons.
Chiseled into a column's base in German,
"Christ is the cornerstone."
I think that we
should build new churches based on men like you -
not houses of worship - places to meet and plan
a better world. And here, more random luck,
La Iglesia del Buen Samaritano.
Light spills from the doorway. It's dusk. Late
for a home-cooked Italian dinner, I hurry by
and pass a lone Monarch fluttering north.

Was Pat Tillman fragged?

2007-07-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

Maybe the apparently obvious conclusion is wrong, but at the moment this looks about as bad as possible:

Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

...

The doctors--whose names were blacked out--said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.

...

No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene--no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.

This is horrible for Tillman's family, but it's worse for our country.

Update at 22:27 PST, based on my ObWi comment in the linked thread:

I read the part about three closely-spaced bullet holes in the forehead and 10 yards and was filled with horror.

On reflection, and having read this article describing the incident, I'm inclined to be skeptical that Tillman was fragged in his first exposure to live fire in an apparently close-knit unit. And I'm certainly not going to draw any conclusions until I hear from people with combat experience.

The cover-up looks even more culpable regardless.

The history of the response to African AIDS

2007-07-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

From William Easterly in The New York Review of Books, this fine sentence:

The history of the response to African AIDS can be divided into two phases: (1) fiddling while Rome burns, and then (2) trying to use the fiddles to put out the fire.

I know too little about the subject to comment on the article, though a it's not reassuring to read a review that says the book in question's key claims are thin on evidence but plausible and convincing.

Bring Me The Sweat Of Gabriela Sabatini

2007-07-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

The following is a poem by Clive James, taken (with an obvious emendation) from the web, since I haven't gotten my hands on a copy of his book yet, plus some commentary of sorts by link as an experiment.

Bring Me The Sweat Of Gabriela Sabatini

Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
For I know it tastes as pure as Malvern water,
Though laced with bright bubbles like the aqua minerale
That melted the kidney stones of Michelangelo,
As sunlight the snow in spring.

Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
In a green Lycurgus cup with a sprig of mint.
But add no sugar, the bitterness is what I want.
If I crave sweetness, I would be asking you to bring me
The tears of Annabel Croft.

So let me drink deep from the bitter cup.
Take it to her between any two points of the tie-break,
That she may shake above it her thick black hair,
A nocturne from which the droplets as they fall,
Flash like shooting stars.
And as their lustre becomes liqueur, let the full calyx
Be repeatedly carried to me.
Until I tell you to stop,
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini.

Also

2007-07-15T12:03:00.001-07:00

Rilkekind at one

2007-07-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

As usual, click for a larger version.

DailyKos makes Max Sawicky look silly

2007-05-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

Re Sawicky's dataless complaints about the netroots, see e.g. recent front-page stories here and here.

First bad wikipedia experience

2007-05-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

Rilkekind has a case of otitis media, so I read the wikipedia article. It's pretty good, but there is (at least at least currently) a tarantula on the angel food: a non-mocking section on homeopathic treatment. The sentence "One study showed" etc. is particularly misleadingly written. There has been some effort to ameliorate the section by adding a tincture of rationality but the right thing to do would be to just extirpate it.

The Nagourney Number

2007-05-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

The Nagourney number of this article in the NYT - that is, how many paragraphs one must read before reaching the anti-Republican truth - is finite: 15. Only after reading 15 paragraphs does Nagourney note why the R candidates for president are cautious about being associated with Bush - his 32% approval rating. He doesn't manage to refer to Bush as "unpopular" directly - only indirectly via a qualified quote. Perhaps by the time one of the fine Democrats in the race has won he'll get to that point. For now it's like reading one of those long Latin periods with the weight of thought at the end - but Cicero or whoever meant the end of the sentence to be heard and felt.

More of the same at Ezra Klein's blog

2007-04-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

An excellent post from Ezra Klein on Obama and toughness, with a good discussion.

The state of the blog debate on Obama

2007-04-09T22:42:00.000-07:00

An excellent post by Neil at Ezra Klein's blog about skepticism about Obama, with a lively discussion in comments.

It's interesting how, after years of life on liberal blogs being simple (because Bush-directed) and ultimately stultifying, there's a return to debate.

Bad-tasting medicine and evolution

2007-04-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

If you are ever confronted by the choice between two otherwise equivalent antibacterial medications, choose the one that tastes bad. Fewer patients will have taken it (and some of them will have given up using it earlier), reducing the chance that drug-resistant bugs have had a chance to evolve.

Despair at Longs Drugs

2007-03-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

There's a poster in the window at Longs Drugs showing a street sign with three indicators - Live Happy, Live Healthy, Live Longs - each pointing in a different direction.

Rilkekind was diagnosed by a new doctor (who actually talked to us) and his problem seems more likely to require surgery but less likely to be of concern to him later in life. Also, we feel much better informed and in control of the situation. He seems to be on the verge of crawling so that sense of control may not last.

And the pediatrician says he ought to put on a bit of weight - as she described all the foods we should try, and in particular suggested putting butter on some, I thought of Hansel.

Why I was yelling last night

2007-03-13T17:30:00.000-07:00

The NYT's recent hit piece on Gore, that's why. For starters, the stuff on sea-level rise could only have been written by a hack. Tim Lambert, the folks at RealClimate, and whoever this is find deep flaws in the article at will.

Mark Kleiman on the psychiatrization of political discourse

2007-02-18T15:20:00.000-08:00

I've long been a nag at Obsidian Wings about using psychiatric terminology in argument with other commenters and in discussing current political figures. I think it degrades the discourse, plays to prejudice, and is generally useless. It's especially shameful when an actual doctor like Krauthammer does it. Mark Kleiman's trenchant post shows me I didn't know the half of it.

The AUMF and gay bashing

2007-02-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

As Kevin Drum notes, Michigan passed an ambiguous law against gay marriage, a wingnut A.G. said it empowered him to bash gay unions, the ACLU et al. claimed the law didn't say that, but the bad guys prevailed.

I'm with the ACLU on HRC's vote on the AUMF. I would have been opposed to any Democrat voting for the Michigan bill, but on the grounds it dangerously failed to rule out bashing gay unions. I would have understood such a vote on political grounds if I thought that was a reasonable defensive strategy. And I would harangue any liberal now claiming the ACLU was wrong about the vote.

Atrios on Kleiman

2007-02-15T13:34:00.000-08:00

I agree with Atrios here re giving the religious left special privileges - I have no idea what Mark Kleiman is on about here . A rather shrill post from me on the subject here, softened a bit here.

Kos chimes in here.

More on the Hillary bashing

2007-02-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

It's not surprising that Greg Sargeant can find a hack at the NYT.

And it's not surprising to see faux-liberal Richard Cohen embarassing himself.

And it's not entirely surprising to find stuttering anti-HRC litmus-test politics on the front page of Daily Kos (why bother to link), though I believe the blog's mission statement is against that.

And, well, few liberal bloggers like HRC and it shows a bit too obviously. Ok, people like their favorite candidate and that often means being unfair to the others.

But it's especially sad to see one of the smartest bloggers out there, Matthew Yglesias, looking monomaniacal and unreality-based. A lot. Really really a lot [ack, can't even find the best example because of MY's annoying archive setup].

UPDATE: apparently MY's comment links don't work. Grep on my handle in those threads to see my argument.

Late update: black is white from Big Tent Democrat - grep on "strategic sense".

Mansfield Park and Bush again, and Jane Austen

2007-02-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

Here I had a little fun with a few sentences of Mansfield Park. I never got around to making a(n even) better comparison:

Mrs. Rushworth, a well–meaning, civil, prosing, pompous woman, who thought nothing of consequence, but as it related to her own and her son’s concerns [...]

puts one in mind of Barbara Bush's comment

But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer.

Also,

It is quite settled. I am to leave Mansfield Park, and go to the White House, I suppose, as soon as she is removed there.

is amusing.

Also I should note that the last section of Chapter 11 is as beautifully-written a passage as I've read anywhere - the characterization and description are just perfect. It's with some mortification that I recognize this, having failed to on two previous readings. Jane Austen only grows deeper.

The Hillary-bashing at Daily Kos gets tiresome

2007-02-11T16:59:00.000-08:00

but then one finds heartfelt praise for Wesley Clark.

JFTR

2007-02-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

I'm curious to see if this comment at Brad DeLong's blog stays up:

For y'all's info, Prof. DeLong has censored some of my argument above, leaving a distorted record of my position. I keep forgetting that, while this is a fine blog, it's not always open to the free exchange of ideas that irk him.

As related in my family

2007-02-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know how much of the following is true. I'm told I had a great-great-aunt-or-cousin-or-something named Lethal, who lived in a little village in the old country. I guess her name was actually Lisel, and somewhere along the line of remembrance someone had a lisp, so I'll call her that. The name of the village is lost, and anyway it's not there anymore.

Lisel is said to have lived in a small house along a lane. She was remarkable for little except the roses she grew at the edge of her plot of land. The village was also of no note, being a poor and quiet place in a time of great upheaval. The one unusual resident was an angel. The villagers were much in awe of him and hoped his presence meant they were sheltered from politics and war. He was not the best of neighbors, though, for every spring morning at dawn he walked his dog along the lane, pausing to look at the roses in front of Lisel's house, roses which in their white and butter and crimson radiance were almost as beautiful as the long feathers of his wings; and every morning his dog made a mess there. So every morning Lisel would come out and clean the street, especially on Sabbath mornings, when people would be walking past in their good shoes and clean dresses.

Needless to say this led to grumbling in the village. But everyone acknowledged that the other side of the lane, muddy from a nearby stream, was unsuitable for walking, and the synagogue couldn't be moved, and no one wished to anger the angel by pointing out the trouble he was causing; and no one could convince Lisel to stop growing her roses in her front yard. The yearly tensions got so bad that Lisel's son, having scrimped and saved for ten years, packed his bags one spring and moved to America.

That's how we know what little we do about her. The son died childless and intestate and by law the money he left was to be divided among all his living relatives. Inquiries to his birthplace revealed only that men had come one day and torn up the rosebushes, and no one who had lived there was heard from again.

G. K. Chesterton makes the case for atheism

2007-02-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

I just reread The Innocence of Father Brown, a series of little murder mysteries set in upper-class British I guess fin-de-siècle society. The protagonist is a plain little Catholic priest who's much smarter and righter than everybody else; it becomes a bit grating quickly. When I read the book many years ago I had the sense of the argument it makes for Catholicism. Now, noting how Chesterton deals with the secondary characters (an atheist murders a man about to give money to the church; a charismatic sun-worshiper is an American fraud/murderer; a Hindu wants only pure annihilation; an Anglican curate is a murderer, and the Presbyterian blacksmith is maniacally intolerant) I have a sense of a man desperate to be right.

John Edwards and blogs

2007-02-02T21:07:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to learn that John Edwards has hired Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon (note the unfortunate "of all the candidates in the field, the only one worth my endorsement is x" rhetoric). I've commented in disagreement on her posts a few times and found her intemperate and unable to defend her positions. She's apparently scrubbed the site, but people have captures of embarrassing material I'd not want Edwards to get associated with. Fortunately he's also hired a very reasonable blogger, Shakespeare's Sister.

Unclear on the concept of waves

2007-01-17T22:56:00.000-08:00

During recent travels I spent some time staring at the back of airline seats. They've begun sprouting screens, and the airline in question has a little program no doubt intended to help passengers decompress after being jammed through the bottlenecks of security and boarding. The program showed images of waves coming ashore or striking rocks and so forth. But there would be only one cycle then a jump-cut to the next location. They don't understand that the whole point of watching waves is that each wave is like the previous but slightly different, with a varying pattern to the repetition. One wave is nothing. The effect was to agitate, not to calm.

Out of the blue

2007-01-17T22:50:00.000-08:00

Check out this post at the excellent American Footprints blog. Anything catch your eye? See my comment to the post for the unifying element.

From the continent for science

2007-01-17T22:41:00.000-08:00

Le Chien Salé takes a break from meeting the glitterati of Antarctica to send this beautiful picture of the autochthonous celebrities:

Is nobody going to pick me up ever again?

2007-01-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

Wrong metric

2007-01-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

Now behind the subscription wall, a NYT article noting that wearing a bike helmet increases the risk of getting hit by cars. Well, I have some doubts about the work cited, but regardless, wouldn't it be smart to mention the relative risk of getting hurt or perhaps seriously injured?

A similar mistake by Ezra Klein (see comments for weird denialism when that's pointed out).

And again.

Could probably do this all day with comparisons not adjusted for inflation...

Mansfield Park and the Bush Administration

2007-01-06T22:53:00.000-08:00

In the following excerpt from early in the novel, Miss Crawford (who I noted here ) asks Edmund about the estate of Mr. Rushworth, a young man of no good quality (the name now sounds to me like someone worth the stuff one strews on the floor) who has recently come into possession of great wealth:

“I collect,” said Miss Crawford, “that Sotherton is an old place, and a place of some grandeur. In any particular style of building?”

“The house was built in Elizabeth’s time, and is a large, regular, brick building; heavy, but respectable looking, and has many good rooms. It is ill placed. It stands in one of the lowest spots of the park; in that respect, unfavourable for improvement. But the woods are fine, and there is a stream, which, I dare say, might be made a good deal of. Mr. Rushworth is quite right, I think, in meaning to give it a modern dress, and I have no doubt that it will be all done extremely well.”

Miss Crawford listened with submission, and said to herself, “He is a well–bred man; he makes the best of it.”

“I do not wish to influence Mr. Rushworth,” he continued; “but, had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver. I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired progressively. I would rather abide by my own blunders than by his.”

As it turns out, making the best of Mr. Rushworth turns out very badly.

Stupid amazon spoofing

2006-12-02T14:26:00.000-08:00

Review of an exersaucer:

I bought this exersaucer when my daughter was 3 months old and had enough head control for an upright toy. We already had a jumperoo that I had received as a gift, and since she really enjoyed playing in that, I thought an exersaucer (with so many more toys than the jumperoo) would be even more fun. I also felt that the exersaucer would be a bit easier for her to use at first since at its lowest setting it's lower than the jumperoo and therefore better for slightly smaller children.

At first, the sheer number of toys was extremely overwhelming to my daughter. She would only stay in the exersaucer for a minute or two before she started to cry. We kept putting her in for a minute or two every day, and she quickly worked up to sitting in it for five minutes or more.

Review of a different model by a different reviewer:

I bought this exersaucer when my son was 5 months old and had enough head control for an upright toy. We already had a jumperoo that I had received as a gift, but it looked like my son was not really that interested in it,I really wanted something that would entertain my son for a bit so I could have a few minutes to do something I thought an exersaucer (with so many more toys than the jumperoo) would be even more fun. I also felt that the exersaucer would be a bit easier for him to use at first since at its lowest setting it's lower than the jumperoo and therefore better for slightly smaller children.

At first, the bright colors were a bit overwhelming to him.he would stay in it for a little while then start crying .Not wanting to pack and return this heavy item i would put him everyday in it for a minute or two then gradually working up to 10mins a day.

Maybe it's just copying - but it's also odd that both reviews are top-listed at Amazon.

I bit my tongue

2006-11-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

The other day, faced with a surfeit of hungry family members and a shortage of people eager to shop and cook, Mrs. R.'s folks had dinner single-handedly catered by someone they'd met on a trip to Patagonia (not the oddest place to meet a young chef from the Bay Area). The reckoning came to <$25/person, which is not at all bad for a good meal here, and exceptional for such an excellent one. Afterwards the chef sat and chatted with us. Someone remarked that they hoped she had gotten to eat something. She remarked that she had sampled the raw ingredients as she went along to judge ripeness and so forth and eaten bits to check for taste or doneness. I was tempted to chime in with a half-remembered anecdote from the Shoah or the Gulag Archipelago about a group of people in a camp who had picked one of their number to be the cook (more divider than anything else I think) of their meager food allowance. The cook was less starved-looking than the rest, who investigated and discovered that he was absent-mindedly eating the crumbs off the plate.

Bouc emissaire

2006-11-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

The other day the family R was out shopping on a lovely warm November day. I noticed a man at a corner holding up a sign advertising a sale at a nearby store. Usually when I see a person being employed that way it's scorching hot or raining; that day was so nice it was hard to feel bad for the guy. I wondered if in fact he was there for people to feel sorry for, and whether the strategy works better in bad weather.

I was reminded of Benjamin Malaussène, the professional scapegoat in a series of novels by Daniel Pennac (I've read _Au bonheur des ogres_ and _La petite marchande de prose_ which I enjoyed and probably another which wasn't as good) - he's paid to get yelled at by unhappy customers who then feel so bad about making the poor guy sad that they don't pursue their complaint against the company he works for.

There's a Lemonheads song I like a lot - "Paid to smile". Court jesters were once paid to be humiliated, whipping boys were kept so they could be put in pain - no doubt there are modern equivalents.

(The title is the French for "scapegoat" - somewhere in the bible one goat gets sacrificed and the other gets loaded with the tribe's sins and sent out to the desert - from the non-human perspective the good outcome - it escapes.)

World's cutest felon

2006-11-20T22:55:00.000-08:00

As usual, click to enlarge; the claimed cuteness may be difficult to perceive due to my continued struggle with baby photography.

Something perfect

2006-10-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

Your Face by Bill Plympton

Your face is like a song
Your sweet eyes whisper
And I want to sing along
Your features are in tune
Let's sing together
And turn every month to June
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only

Your lips with mine will rhyme
And when they touch me
It's a symphony divine
Your cheeks your nose your hair
Sing me a melody
A melody so rare
Your face has - makes me a happy fellow
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Loving you only

This is great.

Even more here.

Update - see comments for corrected lyrics and the source performance.

A new verse, free

2006-10-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

I learned a song somewhere or other - it's Rilkekind's favorite:

Up in the forest in a nest in a tree
Lived an old mother robin and her little chicks three.
"Chirp!" said the mother; "we chirp!" said the three;
And they chirped and were glad in their nest in the tree.

Out in the city in a cage in a zoo
Lived an old mother lion and her little cubs two.
"Roar!" said the mother; "we roar!" said the two;
And they roared and were glad in their cage in the zoo.

Down by the river on a bank in the sun
Lived an old mother toad and her little toad one.
"Croak!" said the mother; "I croak!" said the one;
And they croaked and were glad on their bank in the sun.

Well, the above is how I sing it, anyway. Rilkekind especially likes it when I roll the "r"s and do the first "chirp" etc. in a chest voice and the second in a head voice. No doubt I'll find a link to the melody one of these days.

Here's another verse I've started adding:

Out in the vacuum far away from the sun
Lived an old mother nothing and her little not none.
"Don't!" said the mother; "I won't!" said the none;
And they didn't and were glad far away from the sun.

Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker on reactions to Bush

2006-10-15T21:04:00.000-07:00

The essay's not online, but I want to point out one of the stupidest statements I've read in a long time:

There are two not completely congruent theories of the war in [the documentary] "Highjacking Catastrophe." One is that neoconservatives, who had been thinking for years about enshrining the United States as the world's lone superpower, and who had always felt that a disastrous attack could be used to mobilize the public, seized upon September 11th as the way to achieve the invasion of Iraq that they longed for. The other is that big corporations--especially oil companies--wanted war, and used their friends in government to get it. (The reason the two theories aren't congruent is that one rarely encounters oilmen in neoconservative circles, and vice versa[...].)

Emphasis added (and note that "congruent" here is just a fancy no-courage-of-its-conviction way of saying "consistent".) Lemann is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and either a) both incapable of using the simplest logic and ignorant of the commonest facts about the administration or b) the most feckless oh-those-"Bush-haters" broderist yet.

The great slit in Lydia Bennet's skirt

2006-10-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

Jane Austen has a way of kicking the reader in the head at the end of novels. I just reread a few and forgot to duck. In particular, there's Lydia Bennet, the out-of-control vulgar man-chasing girl who precipitates _Pride and Prejudice_'s closing actions, writing to a friend, "... tell Sally to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown ..."; there's Mary Crawford's "saucy playful smile, seeming to invite in order to subdue me" in _Mansfield Park_; there's Emma's slip of the tongue on Box Hill. The first two are surprising because of the intrusion of open sexuality, the third because few people get to say the simple truth in these novels. I was also greatly surprised by Darcy's "I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men" - it's just too rude to be consistent with the later part of the novel. Also Mary Crawford's late letters are impossible to imagine being written to Fanny - she's a modern character forced into a 1790s-1800s or whenever it is era, but even so she should be aware enough not to tell the kind of people scandalized by the idea of friends and family performing a play that an act of adultery was stupid or that an older brother's death has the positive benefit of making the younger son wealthy. But she's a wonderful character - I wonder if some later author has freed her from her bonds and seen what she could do.

Along with the hair issue

2006-10-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Rilkekind has an issue with his insides. Nothing too terrible, but he has to drink some yucky medicine and may need surgery in a year or two. To quote Bacon: He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

(As usual, click image to expand.)

Extraordinary admission

2006-09-24T00:16:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Senior ends her oh-those-Bush-critics-are-so-shrill review of two books on Bush with the following extraordinary admission: "Books like this one are a depressing reminder of how important it is for writers to have a slight sense of humor about themselves, if they want to be taken at all seriously." That's in fact the entire substance of the review - she finds an anecdote or two to quibble with, or a bit of humor she can miscast as "preen"ing, but basically her problem with the books is that they say a bunch of negative things about Bush and didn't entertain her.

It's odd how poor some of the reviews one reads in the NYT are - reading, thinking, and writing well is a rare skill, but so many people are trained in it that there ought to be an endless stream of highly talented reviewers eager to work for so prestigious an institution as the NYTSBR. One wonders if the editors are really looking just to publish the best possible reviews.

Magical thinking, pewter

2006-09-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

The other day I was doing the jumble puzzle in the paper because it was there, and unscrambled one entry into "pewter". I laughed, because Nancy Willard uses it either obsessively or perhaps out of an odd strategy to link poems by random words. Then a few days later Mrs. R's mother remarked about the door handles and other fixtures in the house we moved into a month ago that they had a pewter finish.

Rilkekind spends some time in a bouncer seat which reacts when he moves - fishes bubble and swim, melodies or sounds play. Lately though he seems to find the spectacle rather tiresome. He has not yet tired of the mobile on his crib. It plays Brahms's (slightly terrifying) "Lullaby" and rotates a small zoo of animals - but only for a short while, since it's wind-up. Rilkekind I think makes the same movements he uses in the bouncer seat when he's enjoying the mobile.

We make connections - sometimes that leads to strange results, sometimes not.

"Hush Little Baby" and Metallica's "Enter Sandman"

2006-09-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I'm the last person to notice this, but not only does Metallica's song "Enter Sandman" start with the first lyric of the traditional lullaby, the first theme is based on the traditional melody (shifted to minor). At least I think so - there's apparently some controversy about the song's materials, but I don't see a reference to this claim.

Interesting that the song was originally about crib death. I don't know if Mariano Rivera could use it as his theme if the lyrics hadn't been altered (though apparently he hadn't known the words the first four years).

p.s. Any rich crazy readers are welcome to buy me one of these.

And the fish was this long

2006-09-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

Click image for a longer fish.

Why death is bad, according to google

2006-09-13T22:22:00.000-07:00

If you ask google "why death is bad", it currently sends you here. Not exactly helpful for most people, I suppose. Of course I have to link to a famous argument why death is good (but not best). Oh, maybe most people want a famous philosophical argument.

Virus

2006-09-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Rilkekind is fine now, but last week he got an infection and spent several days in the hospital. The various tests and procedures were upsetting to the three of us, and I spent a fair amount of time during them trying to calm him with all the songs I usually sing him. I read some of Park's _A Princess of Roumania_ while sitting by his elaborate hospital crib and was reminded by the text of the "Papa's going to buy you a mockingbird" song. Having gotten tired of everything else, and rather concerned he was going to associate "La belle est au jardin d'amour" with being poked with needles, I started singing him a version of the mockingbird song. Now I find myself walking around compulsively generating new verses, which I promptly forget.

Hush little baby, don't say a word
Daddy's going to buy you a mockingbird
And if that mockingbird don't sing
Daddy's going to buy you an elven ring
And if that elven ring don't shine
Daddy's going to buy you a popcorn mine
And if that popcorn mine don't yield
Daddy's going to buy you a poppy field
And if that poppy field don't bloom
Daddy's going to buy you a Chinese room
And if that Chinese room don't talk
Daddy's going to buy you a cliff of chalk
And if that cliff of chalk don't write
Daddy's going to buy you some dynamite
And if that dynamite should smoulder
Daddy's going to buy you the town of Boulder
And if that town should raise its fees
Daddy's going to buy you the seven seas
And if those seven seas don't part
Daddy's going to buy you a tell-tale heart
And if tell-tale heart don't beat
Daddy's going to buy you a fishing fleet
And if that fishing fleet don't catch lobster
Daddy's going to buy you a job as a mobster
And if the mafia don goes to jail
Daddy's going to buy you a plastic pail
And if that pail is full of sand
Daddy's going to buy you a marching band
And if that marching band's too loud
Daddy's going to buy you a fluffy cloud
And if that cloud should get hurricaney
Daddy's going to buy you the soul of Cheney
And if that soul does not exist
Daddy's going to buy you a hawk for your wrist
And if that hawk should fly away
Daddy's going to buy you a sunny day
And if that sunny day gets cloudy
Daddy's going to buy you a church by Gaudi
And if that church is too moderne
Daddy's going to buy you a ring at Cern
And if that ring don't 'celerate
Daddy's going to buy you a pearly gate
And if that gate should be too squeaky
Daddy's going to buy you the bones of Leakey
And if you find that too absurd
Daddy's going to buy you a mockingbird

I do something awful to a poem by Nancy Willard

2006-08-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

I recently learned that the more moronic Red Sox fans refer to Mariano Rivera as "Fruit Bat". Coincidentally I started reading Nancy Willard's New and Selected Poems recently, having picked it up on the basis of reading a random page and loving the cover painting by Blake, and found a poem about a fruit bat.

The Fruit Bat

Because the air has darkened
like bruised fruit, you creep
down the bare branch

where you slept all light long,
gathered into yourself like a fig.
Little mandarin woman fleeing

under the stars on bound feet,
when your wings spring open
even you look surprised.

What are the raven's slick feathers
beside these pewter sails
raised in the foundry of your flesh,

burnished by light poured
from a wasted moon and a dipper
brimming with darkness?

This is a small, observational poem that doesn't do a lot for me. It seems a bit overwritten, as if it had aimed at haiku compactness but bulged out on a diet of adjectives. The contradiction between "creep" and "fleeing" bugged me, and anyway "creep" has a sense of body-to-the-ground that doesn't work here. Further, don't bats hang upside down, making the branch stuff nonsense? And "mandarin" is kind of random, isn't it? Then "poured ... dipper" doesn't work for me. And why is the moon "wasted"? And "burnish" means to polish by rubbing. Basically the last stanza has to grasp at significance and crumbles under the pressure.

The Fruit Bat

The air has darkened
like bruised fruit, so you sidle
down the leafless branch

where you slept all light,
gathered inward like a fig.
Wrapped in a plain shawl,

your feet to the stars,
when your warm wings spring open
you too look surprised.

The raven's feathers?
Crude beside these pewter sails
smelted in your flesh

from papaya juice
and the nectar of flowers
you see by starlight.

p.s. - probably superceded but amusing

People care about the (perceived) outcome in Lebanon

2006-08-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

I found this post from a Lebanonese Shia blogger amusing - it presents the most optimistic scenario I can hope for, kicked up a few dozen notches. Billmon responds as one would expect for some reason.

Don't waste your life

2006-08-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

Somewhat to my surprise I liked this article on housepainting, esp. the following:

Beige is for the fearful. Red can cause familial disharmony and should be used only sparingly. Blues and greens feel cool, serene. Yellow is cheerful . Don't be afraid of colors. Don't waste your life painting walls beige.

Generosity

2006-08-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Two of the best bloggers out there, Jonathan Edelstein of The Head Heeb and Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, are matching donations to charities for reconstruction of the damage in Lebanon and Israel. Respect to them for their generosity.

(I gave some more to Mercy Corps in response, which I mention in the hope it will encourage someone to do the same.)

En garde, monde!

2006-08-14T23:52:00.000-07:00