Daily Blague

From the current London Review of Books, the following hilarious paragraph from John Lanchester's review of The Blair Years: Extracts From the Alistair Campbell Diaries:

One of Campbell’s foci is ‘TB’s terrible sense of style, e.g. the awful pullover he wore on his walk with Bush and the dreadful creation he wore on the plane’. This becomes a running gag. ‘TB was wearing Nicole Farhi shoes, ludicrous-looking lilac-coloured pyjama-style trousers and a blue smock. After GB left, I said he looked like Austin Powers. He said you are the second person today who’s said that.’ The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. So men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly homoerotic about the governmental milieu described here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all coming to blows (Mandelson v. Campbell in the course of an argument about whether Blair should wear a tie), bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each others’ backs, and ruthlessly doing each other down while secretly knowing that they are mutually dependent. Anyone being sent to a girls’ boarding school would do well to prepare by reading The Blair Years. The cover photo is part of this, Blair looking up at Campbell with an expression of submissive yearning that verges on the pornographic.

The idea of a parent giving a thirteen year-old girl a copy of The Blair Years is asphyxiatingly funny.

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What is it about the American psyche that hates maintenance? Is it the reminder that we're still where we were? We haven't moved on to some fresh paradise, haven't built sparkling new cities in the middle of nowhere? Samuel L Schwartz, New York's chief engineer for four years twenty years ago writes an understandably impatient Op-Ed piece today. "Catch Me, I'm Falling," about how much money we would save if we took care of our bridges instead of waiting for them to crack. Not to mention lives.

Rather than lubricating the bearing plates that allow the Williamsburg Bridge to slide back and forth with changes in temperature and loads, we let the bearing plates jam, which cracked the concrete pedestal the span sat on. Twice a year we needed to stop traffic, jack the bridge up and slide the pedestal back in place. Instead of coating the bridge’s steel, we allowed it to become nearly paper-thin. This required the replacement of beams, which made the repairs eligible for federal funds, instead of merely a paint job with city money.

And what is a story about the whiff of corruption, coming from programs for studying abroad, doing on the front page?

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Reading The New York Times this morning was very strange. The paper is now a column narrower than it was yesterday (and forever before). The Times says that it's a purely pragmatic move that will have no effect upon content, but that's manifestly impossible. The paper certainly isn't going to reduce its ad space. I'm not really complaining, though. The Times has lost so much of my respect in the past seven years that I consider dropping it at least once a week. "The paper of record" - hah!

There's an interesting editorial about language: is it a uniquely human thing, or can animals talk, too? All right, what's interesting is that the Times is editorializing about it. It seems to me to be a totally religious issue, where "religious" means "believing that human beings are not animals."

In a new book called “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally catalogs the complex debate over language and includes one particularly revealing experiment in which scientists put two male apes who knew sign language together. One might have expected these guys to start grousing about their keepers, to wonder at beings that are all thumbs and actually seem to enjoy giving away bananas. But, no, they started madly signing at each other, a manual shouting match, and in the end, neither appeared to actually listen to the other.

So, are two creatures actually conversing if they’re both talking and nobody is listening? Where does talking-without-listening put one in the animal brain chain?

Let’s see, talking without listening. Many wives can think of someone who might qualify. Teenagers do, easily. And parents of teenagers. Also, a lot of successful politicians and talk show hosts.

Whoever wrote the editorial left out Woody Allen's movies. Have you ever noticed how rarely his characters listen to one another?

The narrower broadsheets are really unsettling.

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¶ My problem with freedom, in a nutshell: "Fatalities are, above all, a reflection of the type of dog that is popular at a given time among people who want to own an aggressive status symbol." (From Ian Urbina's "States Try to Weigh Safety With Dog Owners's Rights."

¶ Stanley Milgram's notorious psychology experiments in the early Sixties teach us that most people will do terrible things if they believe that they're acting under legitimate orders. George W Bush has been running a similar experiment at Guantánamo. Reading the story of one reservist's protest ("Military Insider Becomes Critic of Hearings at Guantánamo")  is sickening not because of the terrible abuses of justice that are clearly routine at the off-campus site, but because of the readiness of so many military jerks to pop up and defend the program. There seems to be nothing that the Go Along To Get Along brass won't say, as long as that's what the professor in the White House

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Thank heavens, Fossil Darling survived yesterday's steam pipe explosion. He wasn't anywhere near Grand Central Terminal yesterday, but hope does spring eternal. I spoke to him an hour ago, and he's just fine - isn't that nice.

If I don't worry much about terrorist attacks on New York, it's not because of optimism. It's because I live in a badly ageing city. The place is falling apart without any help from Osama. The one thing that we Gothamites share with the rest of the United States is a restless discomfort with the concept of maintenance. Upkeep. Do we have to?

It's  great to have Gail Collins back as an Op-Ed columnist. She gives great smackdown.

McCain campaigns have a history of misjudging the public. His advisers firmly believed his heroism as a prisoner of war would win him piles of votes. While that sounds perfectly rational, the fact is that with the exception of a few generals who actually ran a war, voters haven’t awarded points for military valor since we stopped having Whigs.

Here's a sentence for the ages: A O Scott on the new film, Hairspray.

The songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are usually adequate, occasionally inspired, and rarely inane.

Faint praise on steroids!

I saw an old movie last night. Random Harvest. One of those titles that I've always heard but never seen. Greer Garson, Ronald Colman. World War I. Amnesia, shell-shock. MGM house style almost suffocates the story before it can get going, but the atmosphere of cliché is agreeably perfumed by the two really magnificent performances.

The death of opera tenor Jerry Hadley (who sang Flamand at the first performance of Richard Strauss's Capriccio that I got to see) is strangely upsetting.

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Somewhere during my teens, I had an epiphany: I realized that the Soviet Union was really just Russia, under all that ideology. A harsh country hospitable to thieves and thugs. Reading Sarah Lyall's story about "deteriorating" relations between Russia and the United Kingdom brought a smile to my lips, despite all the polonium. Just as George Bush is a spoiled and sour frat boy - nice try, David, but no cigar for you - so Vladimir Putin is a gang leader in a tie. Democracy has advanced from childhood (patriarchal leaders who know best) to adolescence (popular zits with car keys). Will the planet survive?

You have to love the picture of Louisiana Senator David Vitter (O Editors: Rep or Dem?). Wendy Vitter's discomfort is very Walker Evans.

My favorite story is the clip about a whispered but overheard conversation that Hillary had with John. A totally mean-girls sort of pow-wow. "We should have a smaller group." I loved it. There really is no getting out of the high school cafeteria.

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The other day, Édouard, at Sale Bête, noted that the Times wasn't reporting the recent mortar attacks on the Green Zone.

Bien que le Times n’en parle pas sur la une, il est intéressant de noter que la Zone Verte a été atteinte d’une trentaine de tirs de mortier hier, et que trois personnes ont été tuées.

I wondered about this, too, having read of the strikes in Maureen Dowd's column. What gives?

¶ Complicity at the New York Times.

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At long last, the New York Times advocates US withdrawal from Iraq. In as orderly a fashion as possible of course, but starting now. "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit."

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

No cheering, please. This editorial is monstrously overdue, following years of journalistic go-along-to-get-along behavior. "A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago." This is true. It has not been that long since the majority of Americans gave up on our Iraqi misadventure. But you have to wonder: how capsized does the Poseidon have to be before people stop

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There's an Op-Ed piece in today's Times by a couple of editors at Le Monde, "There's a Word For People Like You." The word, apparently about sixty years old and of Quebecois origin, is "Etats-Unisien," meaning not just américain but someone who comes from the home of the brave.

I first encountered this term a few years ago and fell in love with it. I may be an American, but I am very much not an étatsunisien. Greater New York is about the largest political entity that I'm willing to sign on to.

You have to love the echo of "Tunisian."

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As a contribution to the national holiday, I'd like to offer my Fourth of July Game, which you can play only twice - now and next year. But who knows? The game is very simple: make a list of unconstitutional horrors that you are sure lie beyond even the reach of the Bush-Cheney axis of inc"evil"ity. Then sit back and wait to be unpleasantly surprised!

Happy Fourth - if you can swing it.

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Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind came out with a truly vulgar remark during the debate about AB 8590, the same-sex marriage bill that passed in the Assembly (it will not be considered anytime soon in the upstate, Republican controlled, Know-Nothing Senate).

If we authorize gay marriage in the state of New York, those who want to live and love incestuously will be five steps closer to achieving their goals as well.

Hasn't Assemblyman Hikind learned anything from the Nazi art of tribal slurs? The "five steps closer" is a truly gratuitous - meaningless - whack. The connection of homosexuality and incest is ludicrous.

David Pasteelnick, who writes Someone in a Tree, talked to the Assemblyman before the debate, and was all the more shocked by the remarks in the debate because Mr Hikind had been quite decent on the telephone. David wrote this linked letter, which ought to be read by everyone with a sound mind. Having noted that the Assemblyman claims that he would vote against the bill even if his constituents were for it, David muses on his hypocritical sense of representative democracy.

Putting that argument temporarily to the side, if you would govern as your faith dictates, why have you not put forward legislation that outlaws the sale of non-kosher products in the State of New York? I am sure a majority of your constituency would strongly support such a measure. Is it because while your district would be in favor, the majority of the citizens of this State would be against it? If you respect the majority in that regard, even though it flies in the face of a core belief of your faith, why is same-sex marriage any different? Recent polls show that a majority of the citizens of New York support, if not marriage, some type of formal recognition of same-sex relationships that offers them benefits on par with traditional marriage. Is your opposition to this equal treatment because, when it comes down to it, you just don’t like gay people? Or worse, you might even be afraid of them? Do you consider them, or rather us, a threat? Less than human?

My adoptive mother was quite vocal about the "fact" that blacks were "less than human." She felt that homosexuals were "sick." She didn't talk much about these views, however, because she was too preoccupied by her florid anti-Semitism. Sometimes you just have to wait for toxic generations to die out. Although that does seem a lot to ask of good people.

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Jane Perlez's front-page story about British Muslim women who have taken to wearing the niqab, in today's Times, got my blood-pressure going. I can't decide whether arrest and deportation would be my response to this hateful affectation, which is a frightful insult to all grown males, or whether I would just urge people to ignore, utterly and totally, the wearers of such garments, even if they were writhing on the pavement. A woman who ventures forth hidden behind baleful robes has elected to take advantage of the community while refusing to join it. It's not on.

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Doubtless I ought to be happier about New York Mayor Michael R Bloomberg's departure from the Republican fold in what many observers regard as the run-up to a presidential candidacy. I do believe that Mr Bloomberg would make a Great American President. He's very good at getting a grip on problems and convincing everyone that they must be dealt with. On the constructive side, his record is less impressive, but he seems to know when to give up on unpopular (bad) ideas. And there is a strange modesty to the man, an instinctive dislike of hot air. Which is all that his attention-hogging predecessor has to offer, in my humble opinion.

But the doctor tells me that I've got a serious Vitamin B-12 deficiency, even though I swallow an enormous B-complex horsepill every day. I'm scheduled for an injection at one-thirty.

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In his column today, "The Young and Exploited Ask for Help," Clyde Haberman writes about what looks to me like an equal-protection problem. Or, rather, a problem that ought to be an equal-protection problem, but isn't, because laws protecting immigrant children from sex traffickers don't, ipso facto, apply to American children. Underage prostitutes, if they were born here, are not victims but criminals.

The thing is that if Ms. Waters and Ms. Smith were Thai or Russian and were turned into teenage prostitutes after arriving on these shores, they would be legally judged the victims of sex traffickers. But they are in effect penalized by being home grown, deemed to have committed criminal acts under New York law and subject to arrest and prosecution.

Before I cry "Injustice!", however, I reflect on another column in today's Times, David Brooks's. In "The Next Culture War," Mr Brooks distinguishes between educated individualists, who may be liberal or conservative, and "neighborhood" Americans, who tend to support nationalist and community values. Mr Brooks is also writing within the context of immigration, as it happens, and his discussion helps me to understand how it came to be that where you were born will determine how our legal system will treat you if it catches you selling your body. Thai and Russian girls are of no interest to neighborhood Americans, who will probably never encounter any. Therefore it's easy for cosmopolitan elitists to stand up for them without facing any opposition. American girls are quite something else, at least in the eyes of neighborhood Americans.

It's funny that Mr Brooks thinks that he's writing about the next culture war.

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In celebration of the good news this morning, I'm going fishing. Catch you later.

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The other day, Jason Kottke posted an entry about the word "embiggen," calling it a "cromulent" word.

I had to look up "cromulent." I don't remember what it means, but I know that it comes from The Simpsons, a show that, like almost all televised entertainment, I have never seen.

The Simpsons challenges my sense of humor. I know that it's supposed to be funny, but I disapprove, massively. I am a complete prune on the subject of The Simpsons. Never having seen the show, I don't know what it is that I disapprove of, but that's not important. As my mother once said, when all my sister and I were doing was burning incense, "I'd know the smell of marijuana anywhere!"

As far as I'm concerned, the only constructive thing that the Federal Communications Commission could conceivably do would be to stop television altogether. That's right - no more TV for anybody! Given my draconian perspective, I didn't really give a damn about the Second Circuit's rejection of an FCC ban on "vulgar" language. The deck on the Times story, though, was amusing. "If Bush Can Blurt Curse, So Can Network TV."

When I got up this morning, the cable service was out. When I tried to place a call on the cell phone, the screen told me that I had an "unregistered SIM card." Both problems have been cleared up. The cable service came back on after a while, and rebooting the phone (if that's the way to put it) cleared up the registration problem. But I'm feeling a bit fragile.

To put it another way, I'm in no mood for cromulence.

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There are two stories in today's Times that got me thinking about nationalism, which is nothing but tribalism on a large scale, and the wicked fairy that curses democracy. Estonians are having problems with the ethnic Russians that Stalin planted in their country. Isn't it funny that these "Russians" don't want to go "home"? And we, of course, are having trouble with illegal immigrants, or at least with figuring out how to deal with the "problem." Isn't it funny that the nation that won't shut up about the glories of free markets lurches with cartoonish ineptitude in vain attempts to seal its borders to would-be workers? Yes, it's very funny. Ha ha.

But I'll let you think about it instead. I've been distracted by a fragment from a story in the Metro Section, "Car Crashed Into a Restaurant, Injuring Six." There's no byline, so I can't toast the writer/reporter who surveyed the damage at a Hamilton Heights branch of Popeye's, and noted,

An unfinished meal of fried chicken sat amid the wreckage, and tire tracks showed the path the car took from the street into the restaurant.

"An unfinished meal of fried chicken sat amid the wreckage" - it's pure poetry.

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The original Oxford English Dictionary goes straight from "socialistic" to "sociality." No "socialite." The Random House Unabridged Dictionary dates "socialite" to 1925-1930. (Where is Lighter when we need him?) It's a dreadful word, and I can't imagine that anyone relishes its application to herself.

(Most "socialites" are women, or, more specifically, wives or widows of rich men. Martha Stewart started out as a junior socialite, but nowadays she could go to every benefit in creation and still not qualify.)

"Real People Meet Real Design," is the unfortunate title of Penelope Green's story, in the Times, about rounding up four individuals from different walks of life for a tour of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits last weekend. The idea behind the story:four totally ordinary people, surrogates for you and me, cast their gimlet eyes on furniture with an attitude. But where do reporters find ordinary people? Mark Crispin Miller, NYU media scourge, was one of the quartet. I'm looking forward to meeting him at a book event at McNally Robinson in June, but I doubt that I will ask him about this faintly embarrassing exposure. Tony Shellman, an entrepreneur, and Leah Levy, a ninth-grader, were also part of the team. But what caught my eye was the billing that Frances Hayward got. "The Socialite." Ms Hayward is presumably the person most likely to buy, or to decide not to buy, the goods on offer at the Fair.

Would the fact that Ms Bayard is the tenant of Grey Gardens have anything to do with her Q? Perish the thought. 

In 1906, just over a century ago, Edith Wharton wrote, "The American landscape has no foreground, & the American mind no background." This is still,

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Science tells us that the Y chromosome, carried by most men, is shedding jeans. Typical! Researchers are looking into how long it will take for the chromosome to become totally clueless. In the event of which, need I say, the patriarchy will come to and end.

Along with the rest of humanity, you say; but not so fast! Five dollar word to the rescue: parthenogenesis! "Female Shark Reproduced Without Male DNA, Scientists Say."

Parthenogenisis has nothing to do with the Parthenon, but it is a reminder of how the goddess honored by that temple was born: without mating. As everybody knows, Athena was born from the head of Zeus, but not without mating. Zeus screwed the Titaness Metis, only then to learn from an oracle that, if Metis had a second child, it would be a boy who would displace his father.

Therefore, having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words, Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis, though he claimed afterwards that she gave him counsel from inside his belly. In due process of time, he was seized by a raging headache as he walked by the shores of Lake Triton, so that his skull seemed about to burst, and he howled for rage until the whole firmament echoed. Up ran Hermes, who at once divined the cause of Zeus's discomfort. He persuaded Hephaestus, or some say Prometheus, to fetch his wedge and beetle and make a breach in Zeus's skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout.

There is nothing like Robert Graves's The Greek Myths before you've had your first cup of coffee in the morning.

Men in a nutshell: the species that won't be relieved to hear that it's unnecessary for reproduction even though it's vaguely annoyed every time it makes some woman pregnant.

The "without male DNA" construction is pretty cute, too.

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When you figure out Benedict Carey's story, "This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)", in today's Science Times, let me know.

Have you ever heard someone tell his life story in the third person? This is supposedly the healthy approach. Similarly, you're a more outgoing and generous person if you alienate your struggles, converting internal problems into "black dogs" and then vanquishing them.

All of this sounds like those studies showing that intelligence and self-estimation are inversely related. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to think that you're not smart (enough). Dumb people think they're geniuses.

Is health good for you?

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From Sarah Lyall's story in today's Times, "Gay Britons Serve in Military With Little Fuss, as Predicted Discord Does Not Occur":

Some Britons said they could not understand why the United States had not changed its policy.

“I find it strange, coming from the land of the free and freedom of speech and democracy, given the changes in the world attitude,” said the gay squadron leader, who recently returned from Afghanistan. “It’s just not the issue it used to be.”

Ms Lyall notes that Britain was forced to adopt tolerance of gays in the military by the EU. Similarly, American courts have led the way toward implementing civil unions and gay marriage. What this suggests to me is that while voters may reject a progressive legislator, they don't get worked up about progressive developments.

What's that about? It's a matter - or mystery - of perception. Our judgments are heavily dependent on context. Voting for a pro-gay representative implies that the voter is also pro-gay (although Republicans are famous for their "hold my nose" discipline). Living next door to a gay couple doesn't imply anything.

Another story in today's paper, Adam Liptak's column, "Positive He's a Killer; Less Sure He Should Die," highlights the huge difference between the general and the particular. Americans are broadly (if lamentably) in favor of the death penalty - as a principal. But juries have been sentencing convicted criminals to death in greatly dwindling numbers. When it's up to you to decide whether somebody will live or die, your mind works differently. You might say that it works.

Thus the inherent worthlessness of polling. Calling up people at home is itself a problem. At home, people are "themselves," "relaxed," more likely to say the first thing that comes to mind. In other words, polling occurs in a context that incompatible with the deliberation required by participatory democracy.

More to the point, asking general questions about matters of no immediate concern might yield interesting, "disinterested" responses, but the answers are unlikely to to indicate what the responders would actually do if doing something were necessary. I'm reminded of the old joke about how the man in the family makes all the important decisions - who's president, how to fight a war, and whether taxes are too high - while his wife takes care of the little stuff - where the family lives, what it eats, and how it's clothed.

"It's just not the issue it used to be."

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This just in.

NEW YORK - a public school teacher was arrested today at JFK International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, the Attorney General said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-Gebra is a problem for us", the Attorney General said. "They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret codes names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the Axis of Medians with coordinates in every country

As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "if God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes." White House Aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the President.

(Thanks, Fossil Darling.)

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I always knew that Richard Snow would do something interesting. He was by far the cleverest kid in the class during my three years at Bronxville School. He wasn't a friend, exactly, but the friend of a friend, and I saw a fair amount of him. He was the first genuinely witty person that I ever knew, and I learned early to keep my own mouth shut when Richard was around. It was difficult to avoid his intentions entirely, however, as I was already one of the tallest guys in the class and he among the shortest.

Of course, I wish I'd found out what Richard has been up to all these years in happier circumstances. It appears that American Heritage, the Forbes publication that took on Richard in 1965, in the mail room, and of which he is currently the editor, is about to suspend publication. That's sad news, especially as the magazine has as many subscribers these days as it has ever had, if not more.

He said he was still unsure of his own fate, but if need be he could go back to writing historical novels. "I've written four," he said. "Two were loathed by everyone who read them, but two actually got published." And no matter what happens, he has worked out a crucial point in his severance. He gets to keep his Royal manual typewriter.

"That was the typewriter that I was assigned to in 1970, and it will follow me to the gave," he said, and he added, "I wish this were more a sign of granitic stability, but in fact it's a sign of my computer incompetence. I use it just to type labels, but it works beautifully. Every year somebody comes in and cleans in. I don't think he's paid by Forbes. He's some spectral presence who just turns up."

Good luck, Richard!

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Today's Idiocracy Prize for Journalistic Ineptitude goes to a story in the Times's Metro Section, "Where Beachcombers Should Proceed With Caution," by Jill A Capuzzo, who must share the award with her editors. This is a story about Jersey beaches that will be opening over the Memorial Day weekend, thank God, because the Army Corps of Engineers has dug up all the explosives. Hopefully.

"We've always discouraged deep holes; nothing will change," Mayor Huelsenback said. "Kids can use their shovels and pails. As for metal detectors, we would discourage people from trying to look for these things."

Explosives, you ask? Why are Jersey beaches littered with explosives? Here's the one-sentence explanation, which I think merits a pie in somebody's face.

Believed to have been dumped off the sides of ships sometime during World War I, the discarded military munitions lay on the ocean floor for 90 years or more, according to Mr Follett.

It's the "or more" that had me calling for the nurse. This sentence is the story. Who the hell was dumping "military munitions" off "the sides of ships" off the coast of New Jersey "during World War I"?

In the meantime, I encourage everyone with a metal detector to head for Surf City ("there's a person named Eunice?") and try out for a much more prestigious award than I can bestow: the Darwin.

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Take a look at this, from the front page of today's The New York Times. Kathleen was so upset by the ghoulish ring of photographers that she didn't even notice the hot-pink sheets. The hot-pink sheets excited my conspiracy-theory gland. What kind of hospital/morgue pays for hot-pink sheets? 

Below the fold is the story that made my Monday. It's about Alexandra Hai, a woman of Algerian/German background who has won the right to dance the forlana, or at any rate to pilot a Venetian gondola. The first gondoliera ever! In actual Venice! Reading the story, I savored a missed literary delight: the "Letters From Venice" that The New Yorker ought to be commissioning, at this cardinal time in the history of the Serenissima, from Donna Leon.

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When I studied the history of science in college, we were taught that Ancient Greek and Roman technology was long on theory (and concrete) and short on machinery. This turns out to have been a provincial misconstruction of an admittedly spotty archeological haul. In 1900, fisherman recovered the remains of an elegant little planetarium, a construct of fine-toothed gears that, almost seventy years later, I would learn couldn't have existed.

¶ John Seabrook on the Antikithera Mechanism, in The New Yorker.

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Today's weather: A grey day full of grey news from the Grey Lady. The Pope, Gonzalez, Cuba, the Cold War, even - sheesh! Doesn't anybody ever clean this place up?

Feh.

Posted by pourover at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sigh... If I were a cool New Yorker, I'd get this racy postcard in the mail. Jean-Claude Baker, the proprietor of the restaurant Chez Josephine, will be sending it to thousands of people next week. It's not inconceivable that I'm on the list. I have been to the restaurant several times, and I know from experience that Jim Dwyer is quite right to say that Mr Baker is "unburdened by excess modesty." There is no one to whom Mr Baker will not shill his boîte.

USPS objected to the - well, you know. Mr Baker proposed a compromise: a banner reading "Censored" in the place of a soutien-gorge. When that didn't fly, he called in the press.

The post office has a long and not terribly successful history as a guardian of shifting notions of morality and decency. In Mr Baker, it faced an adversary with a long and very successful history of self-promotion.

"In the end," writes Mr Dwyer, "all parties agreed: Under part 601-12.11, 'Unauthorized Decisions by Postmasters,' the breasts could show."

How many recordings of "J'ai deux amours" have you got?

Posted by pourover at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Incontournable!

(Straight from Joe.My.God.)

Posted by pourover at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In an editorial, "Dirty Tricks by Phone," there appears the following,

Congress has been considering legislation that could ban such calls by limiting voter intimidation by any means, including the phone.

"Limiting"? Just "limiting"?

Posted by pourover at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the very few antiquities that our legal system has abolished is something known as the "form of action." This was a requirement that a legal complaint set forth the specified elements of an offense. That may sound reasonable, but we're talking about an era that knew nothing of "emotional distress" or even much of "negligence." In order to be actionable - sue-able - a case had to follow the playbook. If something was missing from a complaint, the defendant could ask the court to find a judgment of "nonsuit." Nonsuit meant not only that the complaint had left something out, but barred all future litigation on the matter. The case was out and beyond appeal. You got it right the first time or else.

Nonsuiting was obviously an injustice to the poor and the progressive. We were right to get rid of it. But Roy Pearson makes me think that we ought to bring it back. Even though his $65 million case against some nice Korean dry cleaners in Northwest Washington, DC, claims to be based on a literal interpretation of the District's consumer anti-fraud protections, it is OBVIOUSLY de minimus - beneath the attention of the law. Forget about disbarring Roy Pearson. We need to get rid of the judge who failed to quash these proceedings at the start.

After all, without those pants, Mr Pearson as much as admitted that he was nonsuited!

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Much as I'd love to write about Maureen Dowd's report that six former CIA officials have written in protest to George Tenet, asking that he give at least half of the profits from his new book, At the Center of the Storm, to "wounded soldiers and the families of dead soldiers," or Rupert Murdoch's bid for The Wall Street Journal, or David Leonhardt's piece about Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating, I simply don't have the time. I'm totally taken up with making the arrangements for my twenty-martini lunch.

Have a gray date!

Posted by pourover at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Patricia Cohen's very confusing story in today's Arts section, "Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories From the South," mistakes the more complete stories that young historians such as Jonathan Sokol (author of There Goes My Everything) are beginning to tell for a new and different story. There is no new and different story. There is simply the new testimony of moderate whites who, in Mr Sokol's telling, felt that the enfranchisement of blacks would be their jobs, and in the due course of time. These whites were shocked when blacks "acted up." No, that is not a new story at all.

A more interesting thesis posited in the article is this "The idea that the South is exceptional, a region apart from the rest of the country, is no longer true." I recoiled when I read this - but then I remembered how the sweet-natured carpenter who rebuilt our country house, a New Englander with a clear Down East accent, never listened to anything but country music on his portable radio. Nothing if not the Manhattan elitist, I found this regrettable, and although I never said a word, I'm sure that my distaste was communicated.

To me, country music is not music. It is political statement. It's hymning that I have to listen to. Its ethos is very definitely not my ethos.

So I understand the fervor of secularist Turks who have rioted in Istanbul largely because the wife of the proposed presidential candidate, Abdullah Gul, covers her head. What's the problem, you ask. The problem is that the covered head bristles with a significance that, as with me and country music, is passionately rejected by people who refuse to wear their faith on their sleeve, or anywhere else. Your religion is not my business, and let's keep it that way.

Even though I lived in Houston to seven years, I can't really say whether "the South is exceptional." To me, it always seemed to be. But exceptional to what? The child of an affluent suburb almost as close to New York City as it is possible to be without getting to vote for the mayor, I'm inclined to believe that I'm the exception.

Posted by pourover at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The end of April - already?

In local news, the Claremont Riding Academy has closed "for good." I am not an equestrian, and I don't remember even passing by the Claremont, but it reassured me to know that the stables were there, proof that anachronism is viable. Well, apparently not. It seems that it's not much fun to ride horses in Central Park anymore, what with all the dogs and baby carriages.

A nutcase who suited up as a fireman and tied a coworker up in her Chelsea flat for thirteen hours is pushing the envelope of "neurolaw" in his defense. He doesn't deny doing what he did. He just claims that, because of bad brain chemistry, he never intended to do it. In the unlikely event that this argument persuades the jury, I will not join the chorus of commentators who will undoubtedly bemoan the end of personal responsibility. Our legal system, advanced as it is, rests on a folk wisdom about human nature that is increasingly out of touch with what we are beginning to know about ourselves.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, thanks to Robert Wright's Op-Ed piece, "Planet of the Apes."

We may more often have to resist the retributive impulse that worked fine in the environment where it evolved but now often misfires. We may have to appreciate how our moral condemnations - which can help start wars - are subtly biased in self-serving ways that, in some contexts, no longer serve our selves.

We may have to cultivate our moral imagination, putting ourselves in the shoes of people who hate us. The point wouldn't be to validate the hate, but to understand it and so undermine it. Still, this understanding involves seeing how, from a certain point of view, hating us "makes sense" - and our evolved brains tend to resist that particular epiphany.

I am going to work on my moral imagination to see why it "makes sense" for moms pushing gigantic strollers to hate me because I radiate the longing to banish them to the suburbs. The occasional kid is cute. The current plague of infants threatens to take the "Man" out of "Manhattan": Kinderhattan.

Posted by pourover at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Fossil Darling and I agree: a Giuliani Administration is about the only thing imaginable that would be worse than the Bush Administration. We don't worry about it too much, because true-red conservatives don't like Rudy Giuliani any better than we do. The man is a thug who has, over the years, become seriously addicted to adulation. There isn't anything he won't do to get it, wherever he can get it. Now he's back-tracking on all of his formerly moderate-Republican views, which he more or less had to espouse when he wanted to be mayor of New York City.

On 10 September 2001, he was a widely detested public figure here in Gotham. His my-way-or-the-highway manner had become grating. The city employed more, not fewer, workers, contrary to his campaign promises. There was a very embarrassing divorce. Then came 9/11. Despite all of the incompetence - not least of which was the uselessness of that second-story "bunker" at 7 World Trade Center - the day was glory time for Mr Giuliani. If I had suspected him of more foresighted cunning, I'd have demanded an investigation into his terrorist ties.

We pray that, in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr Giuliani will be found to be "too New York." This is one time when I'm actually hoping that the country will reject the City.

Posted by pourover at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What with the Dow passing 13,000, Wall Street jokes are blooming like crocuses. They're not as wicked as they used to be, back in the bad old Eighties, but they're still fun. Here's the latest from Fossil Darling.

A lesson to be learned from typing the wrong email address!

A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday, with his wife flying down the following day.

The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address, and without realizing his error, sent the email.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a minister who was called home to glory following heart attack. The widow decided to check her email expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted.

The widow's son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Subject:  I've Arrived
Date: January 13, 2007

I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

Your