yoink
The term more than likely originated from the Simpsons:
I remember a friend in college discussing how her roommate completely failed to understand how to use the interjection yoink. I’m sure the friend had watched The Simpsons a few times, as anyone my age would have had ample occasion to do, but I wouldn’t have pegged her as a Simpsons fan. And yet here she was, trying to explain a concept that is widely considered to have originated on the show as if speaking the word yoink while stealing were as a natural a thing to do as, say, wincing when nails meet chalkboard or giggling when you watch a dog trip and fall down.
I don’t, however, remember thinking anything was strange about the alleged first yoink, spoken by Homer in the fourth season episode “Duffless.” (Keep in mind that it aired on February 18, 1993, when I was in fifth grade and didn’t know anything and essentially had to let The Simpsons teach me about the world. I kind of just took anything The Simpsons said as gospel and then repeated in an effort to make people think I had a sense of humor.) In the episode, Homer has just managed to withstand thirty days without a beer and decides to celebrate this fact by going to Moe’s.
Even if it didn’t originate, I think there is no doubt that it was popularized by the show.
Tennis on Television
There are no McEnroes in other sports:
McEnroe is the best. He’s not just one of the most observant color commentators, in any sport, he’s also one of the most genuinely emotional. He gets involved in the matches and the stories being told about them. It’s the sort of thing that hurt him sometimes as a player, but it’s perfect for the booth. At one point last night, in the fourth set, when the young challenger Juan Del Potro seemed to lose steam, and began to be moved around the court by the more experienced Federer, who started coming up to net and controlling the game from there, McEnroe said, of the immaculate Swiss: “I wonder when somebody is going to just try to knock his head off.” That is, when was someone going to hit the ball straight at him, and push him back from the net a bit–not literally try to knock his head off–but still it was a somewhat strange wish to express in the middle of the US Open final.
“Is that what you’d like to see?” teased Mary Carillo, McEnroe’s color commenting partner.
No, of course not, McEnroe was supposed to say. Instead: “It happened to me often enough.” Why shouldn’t it happen to Federer, too?
And in fact, Del Potro, who is very tall, and may possibly be able to hear McEnroe talking in the TV booth, proceeded to hit the ball much harder than he’d been hitting it, chasing Federer this way and that, and taking the fourth set by a hair and the fifth set convincingly.
quote out of context
From Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout:
Bob Dylan believes in God, and Richard Dawkins is never going to win an argument against Bob Dylan, cause you need a poet to discuss these things. So let’s just say I’m with Bob.
Nietzsche or Aristotle?
A long interview that about seven people will care about in which Alasdair MacIntyre describes the trajectory of his intellectual life and philosophical career. I feel great affinity for his thinking since he finds himself straddling the ancient celtic (for me, biblical and, oddly, the postmodern return to) narrative tradition and the modern, Anglo-Saxon utilitarian tradition. This man is one of the most strikingly brilliant, level headed, and relevant thinkers I have ever encountered.
In effect, at least since your book After Virtue, you have concentrated on restoring political legitimacy to the so-called great questions. How did these efforts contrast with those of the analytical establishment?
What analytic philosophy gains in clarity and rigor, it loses in being unable to provide decisive answers to substantive philosophical questions. It enables us—at least it enabled me—to rule out certain possibilities. But while it can identify, for each alternative view that remains, what commitments one will be making by way of entailments and presuppositions, it is not capable in itself of producing any reason for asserting any one thing over any other. When analytic philosophers do reach substantive conclusions, as they often do, those conclusions only derive in pan from analytic philosophy. There is always some other agenda in the background, sometimes concealed, sometimes obvious. In moral philosophy it is usually a liberal political agenda.
I particular love this snippet, if you would forgive me my vanity, since it reminds me of something I noticed about historical memory in culture:
Do you believe you have complete control of the ”ideological” net that governs your thought?
It was in the latter part of my analytic stage, around the mid-sixties, that I developed a new agenda. I had come to recognize that a second weakness of analytic philosophy was the extent of the divorce between its inquiries and the study of the history of philosophy, and that analytic philosophy, and more especially its moral philosophy, could only itself be adequately understood if placed in historical context and thus understood as the intelligible outcome of extended argument and debate [emphasis added]. So I wrote A Short History of Ethics, a book from whose errors I learned a lot.
Billionaires for Wealthcare
For Cindy.
quote out of context
I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg. It wouldn’t be worth wasting the urine.
hyperforeignism
The French pronunciation of the phrase is [kudə ɡras], but many English speakers mispronounce it ˌkuː deɪ ˈɡrɑː]. Omitting the final “s” is an example of a hyperforeignism: in French, this mispronunciation sounds like coup de gras, which means “blow of fat”, or cou de gras, which means “neck of fat”. Furthermore, this confusion is surely compounded by the familiarity of the phrases “coup d’etat” and “Mardi Gras.”
it’s called fascism, asshole
Invisible
A few years ago photographer Stephen Gills began a series on people who wear Day-Glo called Invisible.
Stephen says he got the idea for the series because he wears a fluorescent jacket when he’s taking photographs and doesn’t want to draw attention to himself – when he wears his fluorescent jacket, he says, nobody gives him a second glance.
captive cheetah land-speed record
Andy Awesome
Beneath the Fourth Lens
Dr. Jan Schall, Curator of Contemporary Art, led Amanda Mae, Danny and me on a very personal tour of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. What a passionate tour it was. Our many conversations over the weekend spun ’round it time and again.
Thank you Dr. Jan!
Belated Birthday Offering | Ricky Cameron Neece
HAPPY (BELATED) BIRTHDAY, RICK!
“A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam!”
Fifty-four years ago today, per Bumps Blackwell’s recommendation, Little Richard Penniman (seen above with Jet Harris, Gene Vincent and Sam Cooke) joined forces with Fats Domino’s band — which included the late Earl Palmer, drummer extraordinaire who performed at the 1st annual Ponderosa Stomp and served as Master of Ceremonies for Stomp #4 — at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio.
Loads more good stuff from the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation.
birds
Birds on our neighbors’ fire escape.
Campeón del mundo
lo llaman ahora a la “Torre de Tandil”, quien sumó su séptimo título en singles en lo que va de su carrera.
That is my anti-Swiss prejudice showing.
There’s your cownose
ACORN Employees caught helping hookers launder earnings
It’s going to be really tempting for conservative pundits to make totalizing claims about ACORN over this scandal.
You can never be too careful.
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In the RV park
Termites at work.
from the comments
The kitchen feeds the toilet.
quote out of context
Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology.
Hey
How long should it take a wart that’s been frozen to fall off?
That Federer Shot
You know the one.
