The Cutest Little Dictator Around
“We all have evil within us. Even small children are evil towards each other,” Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan tells Haaretz as she explains why she chose to dress up her baby daughter as the most evil historical figures of the 20th century.
Dear Clusterflock
I appreciate you guys.
Truth In Advertising
Got to love Hulu’s choice of tags for the “Seaver-Fever” segment on NBC’s Today Show.
Chat Roulette’s Piano Improv Man
One question: could our hooded hero actually be an incognito Ben Folds?
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Rewriting History
The NYT piece on the Texas curriculum rewrite is chock-full of little treasures:
Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”
Mr. [David] Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
I assume there’s no required civics test for board members?
Our Corrupted Blog-Language
Anal grammarians are taking bloggers to task. Take this email sent to Ezra Klein at the Washington Post as an example:
We at Masked Grammarian (a loosely-knit small group of grammar snobs) send corrections to sites on the web when we notice something that bugs us. Almost always, we do this only when it seems worthwhile — a site that we like with a significant error.
In this case, you used the word “impacted” to mean “affected”. Until just a few years ago, “impacted” was used only in a medical sense: unless otherwise stated, it was assumed to refer to fecal impaction. Of course, it could also refer to wisdom teeth, etc.
Due to the rise of MBA-speak, many nouns have become verbified, and we’ve all slipped into using words, such as “impacted”, which were formerly the domain of people who talk of synergy, best practices, 10,000-foot views, and the like.
We just wanted to point out your incorrect (albeit unfortunately well-accepted) use of “impacted” in your 1:08 PM post today. We also hope that we will not be impacted, in the traditional sense, by your light posting schedule, though it will negatively affect our day.
Consider it noted.
Musical Stairs
A creative way to promote exercise.
Dear Clusterflock
When did you realize what you wanted to do?
The Middle East — Blood
A friend just introduced me to The Middle East. This track is mesmerizing.
DFW, Annotated
Kottke links to the newly established David Foster Wallace archives at the University of Texas. The image above is the inside cover of Wallace’s heavily annotated copy of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.
Beard Law
In case you were curious about the steps one must take in order to grow a beard at Brigham Young University:
A student who wishes to obtain a beard exception must visit a BYU Student Health Center doctor by appointment. The doctor will fax his recommendation. The student then needs to come to the Honor Code Office to fill out some paperwork and receive the letter allowing the growth of the beard, if approved. If a yearly beard exception is granted, a new Student ID will be issued after the beard has been fully grown, and must be renewed every year by repeating the process.
I didn’t see anything about shape or length. I can only assume such deliberations are left to their shaven Mormon elders.
Reconciling Reconciliation
Bill Frist, a former Senate majority leader, called reconciliation an “arcane” procedure that Congress has “never used … to adopt major, substantive policy change.” Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee asserted that this parliamentary tactic was unprecedented for a bill like health reform. Senator John McCain of Arizona said that the use of reconciliation would have “cataclysmic effects.”
So, would reconciliation represent an anomalous and dangerous power grab? The accompanying chart, which lists 15 major reconciliation bills passed by Congress since the process was first used in 1980, provides evidence for assessing that charge.
Reconciliation was intended to be a narrow procedure to bring revenues and spending into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. But it quickly became much more. The 22 reconciliation bills so far passed by Congress (three of which were vetoed by President Bill Clinton) have included all manner of budgetary and policy measures: deficit reductions and increases; social policy bills like welfare reform; major changes in Medicare and Medicaid; large tax cuts; and small adjustments in existing law.
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Subway Sing-A-Long
Musicians in a Times Square subway station convince waiting commuters to sing along with the end of Hey Jude.
This Is A Metaphor For Something
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America’s Beer Belt
The red dots are the areas with a higher ratio of bars to grocery stores.
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Our New National Pastime Is Reviewing Avatar
Even Slavoj Zizek gave his critique:
Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality estored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.
In Cameron’s defense, after District 9, every Sci-Fi film narrative is sure to pale in comparison. His was just the more glaring of failures.
Tonight’s awards should be interesting.
We Have A Lucy, Don’t We?
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Faking It
Among the many trends covered by the NYT Freakonomics blog, this is certainly one of their most interesting:
We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.
Do our resident Texans attest?
The T
An acquaintance of mine took this photo on the T, which is Boston-speak for “subway.”
No, We’re Investigating YOU
The Church of Scientology has hired a crack journalism team to investigate the St. Petersburg Times, which ran some damning features on them last year:
[A] Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors — are taking the church’s money to examine the paper’s conduct.
The reporters hired for the study are Russell Carollo, who won a 1998 Pulitzer for Dayton, Ohio’s Daily News for a series on medical malpractice in the U.S. military, and Christopher Szechenyi, an Emmy-winning former television producer who has worked for the Boston Globe’s Web site.
From The Comments
You gotta beget while the begetting is good.
Dead Theory
Did anyone happen to catch the feature in The Atlantic about The Grateful Dead? Apparently management theorists and academics are using the band as a sociological case-study for business strategy and brand identity:
[The] musicians who constituted the Dead were anything but naive about their business. They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization. They founded a profitable merchandising division and, peace and love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and they adapted well. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.
Most enjoyable.
MURDER! and Descartes
Was Descartes murdered by a Catholic Priest? There’s reason to believe so:
According to Theodor Ebert, an academic at the University of Erlangen, Descartes died not through natural causes but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest.
Ebert believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison because he feared Descartes’s radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to Catholicism by the monarch of protestant Sweden. “Viogué knew of Queen Christina’s Catholic tendencies. It is very likely that he saw in Descartes an obstacle to the Queen’s conversion to the Catholic faith,” Ebert told Le Nouvel Observateur newspaper.
[...] Descartes, who had been summoned in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina, was regarded with suspicion by many of his theological coreligionists. His theories were viewed as incompatible with the belief of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine served during the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Christ. “Viogué was convinced that … his metaphysics were more in line with Calvinist ‘heresy’,” said Ebert.
Poison-laced communion wafers? Sounds like the punch-line to a really bad PZ Myers joke.
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There’s an Explanation for That
Vice Magazine, like everyone else, is checking the Creation Museum off of their to-do list. The above snapshot is from the museum’s explanation regarding the inevitable incest that would befall the family of a literal Adam & Eve.
It seems like science you could hang your hat on.
Imagery
I once watched a well-dressed gentleman physically tear the pages from a novel with his own teeth, then dispose of the remains into the rushing air through an open window.
– Nick Cernis, convincing us to read a book a week.
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