A witch didn’t do things because they seemed a good idea at the time! That was practically cackling. You had to deal every day with people who were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably improved if you gave them a slap. But you didn’t because, as Miss Tick had once explained:
a) it would make the world a better place for only a very short time;
b) it would then make the world a slightly worse place; and
c) you’re not supposed to be as stupid as they are.Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith, 2006.
November 19, 2016
QotD: Dealing with people
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November 17, 2016
November 12, 2016
David Warren’s election postmortem
Unusually for David, he’s resorted to a numbered list this time:
1. How easily the college-educated go barking mad.
2. The most reliable “safe space” is a padded cell. The least reliable ought to be on campus.
3. The new administration might want to consider “transitioning” several Ivy League universities into mental homes to serve an urgent public need.
4. If you think Trump is bad, you should read some history. It wouldn’t take much. His views, in the main (as stated, not as falsely attributed), would have passed as middle-of-the-road liberal about one generation ago. On many of the issues, Trump is farther Left. By traditional standards for despots and demagogues, he strikes me as fey.
5. Which is why I despise him. I didn’t like liberal mediocrities then, and I don’t like them now.
6. On the specific question of his taste in fixtures and furnishings (including likely cabinet choices), we must be firm. On the basis of his Manhattan apartment alone, I’d be inclined to appoint a Special Prosecutor.
7. I will hope he is sufficiently Machiavellian to nominate Ted Cruz for the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court.
8. And then he could make a personal appearance there, shouting and waving his little hands. That could create three more vacancies.
9. Melania and Michelle should do a sitcom together. (“Transition Team.”)
10. As of three-thirty a.m. the night before last, I achieved a state of happiness I had not enjoyed for a long time. And this was with the help of only one (1) 750mL bottle of strong Belgian monastic ale. (Chimay, the red label, from the Pères Trappistes of Scourmont.) As I have indicated, I do not much care for that Donald fellow. But the defeat of Hillary was exhilarating.
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QotD: Trumphausen by Proxy
So a new entry in the lexicon of mental illness?
Trumphausen by Proxy – when parents instill in their children irrational fears to garner sympathy and attention for themselves.
Comment by “Anna Puma” on “Leftists Ruin Everything, Including Childhood [Warden]”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-11-10.
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November 7, 2016
QotD: American sports
If Football is Handegg, then Soccer is Divegrass. Basketball is FlopDunk, Hockey is IcePunch, and Baseball is CrotchGrab.
Dave Rappoccio, “Soccer Rules!”, The Draw Play, 2015-04-01.
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November 5, 2016
QotD: Gentrification
Virtually no one has a good word for gentrification. It is lamented in tones from angry to mournful, by political commentators across the spectrum, possibly including me. Yet many of those same people are … renting or buying homes in “up and coming” neighborhood, which they prize for their proximity to other young(ish), progressive, creative-class people much like themselves. Which is to say that they are gentrifiers. In a neat inversion of the old activist slogan, they are “being the change they don’t want to see in the world”.
Their location puts them in the paradoxical situation of wishing gentrification wouldn’t happen, while avidly rooting for all the stuff that gentrification brings, from farmer’s markets to dog parks. If they are homeowners, too, they are not unhappy about the local price appreciation (their financial plan may indeed require it), however much they may regret its effects in the abstract. As a practical matter, this is something like declaring that you hate the Yankees, but have $5,000 on them to win the World Series. Your loyalties are bound to be divided.
Megan McArdle, “My Love-Hate Relationship With Gentrification”, Bloomberg View, 2015-03-26.
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November 4, 2016
QotD: Fairy tales
The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about “a handsome prince” … was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for “a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long” … well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told…
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men, 2003.
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November 3, 2016
Rowan Atkinson Live – Award Ceremony Bad Loser
Published on 24 Jan 2014
Angus Deayton presents a film award as Rowan Atkinson plays the bad loser accepting the award on behalf of someone else.
Whether mesmerising us with the sheer visual mastery of Mr. Bean, beguiling us with the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder, or simply entertaining us as the suave, but rather hapless British Secret Agent Johnny English, you surely won’t have escaped the comic genius that is Rowan Atkinson.
In Rowan Atkinson Live, co-written with Richard Curtis (4 Weddings & a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and Ben Elton, Atkinson runs the whole gamut of his remarkably versatile 30 year career, with sketches, mimes and monologue’s that are guaranteed to have you shedding tears of laughter. Performing live on stage alongside ‘straight man’ Angus Deayton, the show features a number of original and familiar routines, including sketches that appeared in the original Mr. Bean series.
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November 1, 2016
The weirdness that is the year 2016
From Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “newsletter”:
This has been a weird year. But, frankly, things have been getting weird for a while now. For a few years, I’ve increasingly felt like someone was ransacking the conventional-wisdom warehouse and throwing away the old standards.
The D&D geek in me likes to imagine there’s some Gothic keep out there with a grand library full of jars containing the Unwritten Rules of the Universe, each filled with some kind of pixie or will-o-the-wisp free-floating within. Alas, a couple of precocious kids broke in, climbed up the sliding library ladder along the shelves, and then smashed each ancient jar on the floor. The ephemeral creatures within flew away, and took their rules with them.
The sci-fi geek in me imagines that maybe the code of the universal computer has been hacked or corrupted and so the dedicated and automated programs of daily life are weirdly misfiring. You laugh now, but let’s see how funny you think this is when Kim Kardashian cracks the formula for cold fusion or water starts boiling at 200 degrees.
[…]
As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot easily fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for good reasons we just don’t — and sometimes can’t — know.
Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if knowing the why will empower the how.
For example, we know that kids raised in stable two-parent, religiously observant families will on average do better than kids who are not. This holds true despite differences in race, class, and religion. We all have theories for why this is so — but too many people think that if we can just isolate the variables, we can take the good bits and discard the husks we don’t like.
An even worse — and more prevalent — mindset is to not even bother with the why. If we can’t immediately grasp why some old practice, some ancient tradition, some venerable custom or Chestertonian fence is worthwhile, we tend to instantly dismiss it as outdated and old-fashioned.
But again, as Chesterton and Hayek alike understood, simply because something is “old-fashioned” doesn’t mean it wasn’t fashioned in the first place. And by fashioned, I mean manufactured and constructed. Customs are created because they solve problems. But they get less respect in our present age because they have no identifiable authors. They are crowd-sourced, to borrow a modern phrase for an ancient phenomenon. The customs and institutions we take for granted are crammed full of embedded knowledge every bit as much as prices are. But most intelligent people are comfortable admitting they can’t know all the factors that go into a price, but we constantly want to dissect the whys of every custom.
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QotD: The goose-poop war
Canada geese have settled on the National Mall, and Canada geese, in the proud Canadian tradition of Tom Green and Celine Dion, spew excrement everywhere they go — up to three pounds per day per goose. (Celine Dion presented the scientific world with an interesting technical challenge: How to measure excrement in decibels.) Apparently, Canada is either still miffed about that unpleasantness in 1812 or — and this seems more likely — enraged about the acquisition of Tim Horton’s by Burger King.
Ergo, biologically engineered avian crap-bombs from Canada descend upon Washington.
Go ahead and draw up that treason indictment: I am siding with the enemy on this one.
If there is to be a plague of goose poop befouling an American city, it really could not happen to a more fitting municipality than our hideous national capital, and especially to the gallery of architectural malpractice and monumental grotesquery that is the National Mall, that eternal testament to the unfinished work of Major General Robert Ross, who had the good taste to put Washington to the torch but who tragically failed to salt the earth on his way out. General Ross later helped to establish what would become a proud American tradition: getting shot to death in Baltimore. His body was pickled in rum before being returned to Nova Scotia, an excellent end to a life well-lived.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Old threat: ISIS; new threat: geese”, National Review, 2015-03-29.
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October 31, 2016
QotD: Halloween stories
Just before Halloween my husband was talking about kids’ costumes (our favorite was when older boy was a dragon and younger boy a knight, with a plastic-sword-of-smiting brother. Good thing I padded the dragon head) and asked what I’d worn as a little girl. I pointed out we didn’t dress up for Halloween in Portugal and he asked what we did. So I started, “On Halloween night, you go to the cemetery–” and he said “Stop it. No story that starts like that ends well unless you’re Buffy.”
Sarah Hoyt, “Whistling Past the Graveyard”, According to Hoyt, 2015-11-07.
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October 30, 2016
QotD: Hunter S. Thompson’s nihilism
Of course in [Hunter S.] Thompson’s world the Big Darkness is always coming. Every day it doesn’t come means it’ll just be bigger and darker when it finally arrives. He’s the anti-rooster, bitching about the dawn: sure, it worked today, but one of these days the sun won’t come up, and then where will you be? Sitting on your nest popping out eggs like THEY want you to, completely unprepared for the Big Darkness! Which will be huge! And dark!
It would be funny if it was, well, funny, but it’s not even that. It’s just rote spew from the other side of the latter sixties. You had your Hopeful Hippies, the face-painters and daisy-strewers, convinced that human nature and human history could be irrevocably changed if we all held hands, listened to “Imagine” and realized that the war is not the answer. Regardless of the question. But the other side was the sort of dank twitchy nihilism Thompson spouts. It has no lessons, no morals, no hope. Imagine, Winston, that the future consists of a boot pressing on a face. Here’s the worst part, Winston — inside the boot is NIXON’S FOOT.
Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before.
He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn’t infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He’s the guy who made nihilism hip. He’s the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don’t trust anyone who believes anything. He’s the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.
James Lileks, Bleat, 2004-05-17.
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October 26, 2016
Zim Tzu on the faceplant in Philly
After every Vikings game, the Daily Norseman‘s chief Zimologist analyzes the finely crafted koans of Zim Tzu to tease out the finer, hidden meanings of the otherwise inscrutable and mystical words of the Vikings head coach. This week’s press conference followed the “game” that was “played” in Philadelphia against the Eagles:
The Vikings warrior poet/head coach dispenses his profane words of wisdom.
Rage.
That’s not a word or emotion a warrior poet takes lightly. It’s an emotion that if channeled properly can be used effectively, but if allowed to go unchecked leads to one’s own destruction. Rage most assuredly didn’t overcome the Vikings in Philadelphia did so much as incompetence did … but in the aftermath of the Letdown at the Linc rage is what consumed Mike Zimmer.
[ED NOTE: Also, if you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, don’t read the first paragraphs that has asterisks, or the asterisks, because I give away a spolier. And rage is what you will feel if you haven’t seen it yet. Also, bad language warning.]
And the warrior poet harnessed it, allowed to to grow into a fireball of genius on Monday, and will use it to light a fire under the asses of the Minnesota Vikings next Monday in Chicago. And it is a fire that will metaphorically burn Chicago to the ground once again, if Cubs rioters haven’t already done so. Because there is nothing Mike Zimmer can’t harness and ultimately use to his advantage. Not. A. Fucking. Thing.
Because he is Zim Tzu: High Septon Of Mankato, Eviscerator of Titans, Maître Fromager, Spinner of the Charlotte Web, Beanstalk Chopper, He Who Implodes The Lone Star, and Warden Of The North.
And speaking in front of the Great Unwashed Poletariat of the Free Press is the ultimate in rage control, as the questions they ask make you want to snap necks and go all Negan on Glenn. But you can’t. You must harness that rage, focus it like a laser, and aim it at your next opponent.
And that’s where we come in, The Greatest Blog In The History Of The World.* We take your rage, and unleash it for you.** We are Negan, we wield the baseball bat, and we give you some eye popping results.***
*Maybe a slight bit of hyperbole here
**We really don’t as we have undergone no formal training to do this. Is there formal training to do this?
***I don’t watch The Walking Dead so if you just read a spoiler HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA not sorry because this was a good joke and I warned you up top.
So what do we do in the channeling of rage?* It’s quite simple, really.** We take Mike Zimmer’s weekly day after the game press conference and interpret the true meaning of words that come out of his clenched jaws.***
*This is a rhetorical question as we literally do nothing.
**Writing sophomoric jokes is actually hard, man.
***We literally do nothing close to that. It’s just all made up, stupid shit. I’m stunned it’s as popular as it is, tbh.
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October 22, 2016
QotD: Snobbery
“Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.”
“No, actually it isn’t,” said Tiffany. “Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.”
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men, 2003.
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October 19, 2016
QotD: Presence
She sat silently in her rocking chair. Some people are good at talking, but Granny Weatherwax was good at silence. She could sit so quiet and still that she faded. You forgot she was there. The room became empty. Tiffany thought of it as the I’m-not-here spell, if it was a spell. She reasoned that everyone had something inside them that told the world they were there. That was why you could often sense when someone was behind you, even if they were making no sound at all. You were receiving their I-am-here signal.
Some people had a very strong one. They were the people who got served first in shops. Granny Weatherwax had an I-am-here signal that bounced off the mountains when she wanted it to; when she walked into a forest, all the wolves and bears ran out the other side. She could turn it off, too. She was doing that now. Tiffany was having to concentrate to see her. Most of her mind was telling her that there was no one there at all.
Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith, 2006.
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