H/T to Economicrot.
December 24, 2011
Repost: ‘Tis the season to hate the senders of boastful holiday letters
Gregg Easterbrook receives the perfect, perfect holiday letter:
Don’t you hate boastful holidays letters about other people’s fascinating lives and perfect children? Below is one Nan and I received last week.
Dear Friends,
What a lucky break the CEO sent his personal jet to pick me up from Istanbul; there’s plenty of room, since I have the entire aircraft to myself, to take out the laptop and write our annual holiday letter. Just let me ask the attendant for a better vintage of champagne, and I’ll begin.
It’s been another utterly hectic year for Chad and I and our remarkable children, yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It’s hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car.
Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel’s girls’ volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life.
Now the Big Decision looms — whether to take the early admission offer from Harvard or spend a year at Julliard. Plus the whole back of her Mercedes is full of dance-company brochures as she tries to decide about the summer.
Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes and his volunteer work. He just got the Yondan belt, which usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I really believe this!) they are reincarnated deities.
Modeling for Gap cuts into Nick’s schoolwork, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers.
What can I say regarding our Emily? She’s just been reclassified as EVVSUG&T — “Extremely Very Very Super Ultra Gifted and Talented.” The preschool retained a full-time teacher solely for her, to keep her challenged. Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young.
Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown at one of the leading galleries without the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned!
Then there was the arrival of our purebred owczarek nizinny puppy. He’s the little furry guy in the enclosed family holiday portrait by Annie Leibovitz. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we named him Mandela.
Chad continues to prosper and blossom. He works a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time supervising restoration of the house — National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict. Corporate denial consulting is a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies call him all the time. There’s a lot to deny, and Chad is good at it.
Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. This year I was promoted to COO and invited to the White House twice, but honestly, beading in the evening means just as much to me. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home my $14.6 million bonus, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and I caught her making a personal call.
Chad and I got away for a week for a celebration of my promotion. We rented this quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves — we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative and we could ponder rising above materialism.
Our family looks to the New Year for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome and Seville while Chad and Nicholas accompany Richard Gere to Tibet.
Then the kids are off to camps in Maine, and before we know it, we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel’s things to college. And of course I don’t count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions.
I hope your year has been as interesting as ours.
Love,
Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas & Emily(The above is inspired by a satirical Christmas letter I did for The New Republic a decade ago. I figure it’s OK to recycle a joke once every 10 years.)
Repost: Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
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December 21, 2011
“It’s A Wonderful Life is a movie that only an Occupod could love”
Michael Graham explains why the much-loved Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life is actually awful:
Consider George Bailey. In your mind, you see him after a lifetime of poverty, grief and bad luck, running through Bedford Falls shouting “Merry Christmas you old Building and Loan,” just happy to have a family he loves.
Well I agree that having a loving family can help us all get through crises. (Remember the stewardess in the disaster-film spoof “Airplane?” “At least I had a husband . . . ”)
But the name of the film is “Wonderful Life,” not, “Well, Things Could Be Worse.” And in George Bailey’s case, things are truly tragic.
Smart, ambitious George gets stuck at the modest Building and Loan back in Hickville when his brother marries into a cushy corporate gig and his father dies. After years of dreaming of going off to college, traveling the world and becoming a top engineer or architect, his life is spent scraping by, and helping others do the same.
Somehow the movie — like the Occupiers of today — tries to turn that into a virtue. Despite his wife and kids, George turns down $20,000 a year so he won’t have to work for that “evil banker,” Mr. Potter.
Occupy Bedford Falls!
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December 20, 2011
Reason.TV: Grandma got indefinitely detained (A very TSA Christmas)
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December 16, 2011
Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens – Bah, Humbug on Christmas
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.
I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.
As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.
The Toronto Star has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man’s range and wit:
5. About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”
6. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
[. . .]
8. About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
9. “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”
[. . .]
12. About Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
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A very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas
H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.
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December 13, 2011
The Zero Sum Fallacy
P.J. O’Rourke on the big economic issue that the Occupy folks always get wrong:
The “Occupy This, That and the Other Place” people are right about the sins of the financial system and right about the evil of government supporting and subsidizing this malfeasance. It’s not fair that 1 percent of Americans are rolling in dough while the rest of us are scrimping to pay for our Internet connection so we can go on Groupon.
But the Occupiers are wrong about something much more important. They believe in the Zero Sum Fallacy — the idea that there is a fixed amount of the good things in life. Anything I get, I’m taking from you. If I have too many slices of pizza, you have to eat the Dominos box. The Zero Sum Fallacy is a bad idea — dangerous to economics, politics, and world peace. It means any time we want good things we have to fight with each other to get them. We don’t. We can make more good things. We can make more pizza — or more tofu, windmills and solar panels, if you like.
The Zero Sum Fallacy is just that, a fallacy. Economic history since the Industrial Revolution proves — be the rich however stinking rich — we ordinary people can make more of the good things in life. But we have to make them ourselves, with our knowledge, skills and hard work. Government can’t give us good things. Government doesn’t make things, it just redistributes them. This brings us back to fighting with each other.
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December 11, 2011
QotD: Alcohol
It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.
In my opinion Kingers — which I was allowed to call him — was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In “real” life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for “a Dewar’s and water” instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trusted barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with “white wine”, a thing I still can’t bear to hear being ordered. If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.
Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
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December 9, 2011
“An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
December 2, 2011
QotD: “Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk”
I was at the urinal next to Bob Costas once. It was at the 2010 Winter Olympics, just before the Closing Ceremony, during which Canada said goodbye to the world with a nightmarish glowing dreamscape of giant beavers and plaid-wearing lumberjacks and dancing Mounties and flying moose and looming table hockey players and William Shatner, among others. Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk.
But Bob Costas was not drunk, because Costas is a sober and professional man who disapproves of you and your shenanigans, probably. Costas is among the great broadcasters of his generation, as witnessed most recently by his stellar on-camera interview with accused Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky. And despite some creases in his face, and perhaps a whisper of greying hair, Costas remains youthful, even boyish.
Like just about everything in television, however, that is at least partly a facade, as Costas’ monologue on Football Night in America on Sunday last week demonstrated. As if channeling Andy Rooney in 1978, Costas inferred that touchdown celebrations are basically ruining the minds of our children, with their iPhones and their pornography and their touchdown dances. If life is a football field, it is time to leave Bob Costas’s lawn.
Bruce Arthur, “NFL Picks, Week 13: NFL players can dance if they want to”, National Post, 2011-12-02
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November 27, 2011
Scalzi tweets the Lord of the Rings movies
Stream of consciousness tweets as John Scalzi has an at-home movie marathon:
“The Mimes of Moria” is the name of my next band.
Wife is at a rock concert tonight. I’m watching cable TV at home. Thus are illustrated the differences between us.
OSHA clearly has no jurisdiction in Moria.
[. . .]
The Two Towers now I on. I hold the minority view that it is the best film of the trilogy.
That said, I’d’ve trimmed back the ent scenes pretty severely.
I SWEAR I did not realize I was making a tree pun in that last tweet.
I am suddenly aware of just how little difference there is between Orlando Bloom’s Legolas and certain sparkly vampires one could name.
Orcs vs. Stormtroopers. GO. On second thought, never mind. Neither side aims well enough for it to be interesting.
[. . .]
Fun fact: Shadowfax, the horse Gandalf rides, had a younger, hipper sibling named “Darktweet.”
I wonder what dentists think when they look at Orcs. I suspect “that’s a sailboat right there.”
They could have just distracted the Wargs by throwing a bunch of red bouncy balls and yelling “fetch.”
The orcs would be awesome in a Road Warrior movie. The orcs probably WERE in a Road Warrior movie.
November 25, 2011
JourneyQuest virtues: Forgiveness and Eloquence
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Ever gone looking for the answer to a technical question online?
This xkcd installment is amazingly accurate, at least based on my experiences:
Wisdom of the Ancients
Remember to mouse-over the cartoon: you’re missing at least half the humour if you don’t read the mouse-over text of any xkcd cartoon.
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November 22, 2011
Acronym watch: “In the euro zone farmyard, it’s time to forget about the PIGS and start counting the broken EEGs”
The journalists will appreciate this new acronym:
The euro zone needs a new acronym. For the past three years, PIGS has served as a catchall for the cash-strapped states on the single currency’s periphery. But now that the crisis has moved to the core, a change is overdue.
PIGS has proved surprisingly durable. When it was first coined, citizens of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain were understandably upset at being lumped together in such a derogatory way. Yet as Ireland and Portugal followed Greece in seeking bailouts, their similarities outweighed historical differences.
Some felt the acronym was self-fulfilling, giving attention-deprived speculators a handy shortlist from which to select their next sovereign victim. However, its survival was also an accident. When Italy got into trouble earlier this year, it slotted smoothly into the slot previously reserved for bailed-out Ireland. Politically sensitive bodies avoided the zoomorphic insult by reshuffling the letters to create the GIPS.
[. . .]
A better idea might be to start with the one remaining euro zone member that isn’t under attack from the bond markets. Andrew Balls, head of European portfolio management at PIMCO, now describes the euro zone states being shunned by investors as EEGs: Everyone Except Germany.
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