January 1, 2015
Oh, yeah … Happy New Year (with apologies to Edward Hopper)
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December 30, 2014
QotD: Satire’s influence in the real world
[Satire] can’t [make a difference in the world]. Not a real difference. It can destroy, but it cannot produce. That’s the problem. You can destroy someone — it’s possible to that, if you’re very good. People have been politically destroyed by humor. But the problem is, you cannot create with it. It’s totally static in that way. It’s an act of demolition. Some things are just stronger than a laugh.
Fran Lebowitz, quoted by Lauren Ingeno in “Fran Lebowitz: I Am Not a Hostess. I Am a Prosecutor”, George Washington Today, 2014-04-20.
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December 28, 2014
P.J. O’Rourke is forced to watch an episode of Girls
I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t bowled over … at least not in a good way:
Ms. Dunham is 28. I was under the impression that “girls” is a demeaning term for adult women. The title must have something to do with this hipster “Irony” thing, which I confess I don’t understand. The root of the word irony is in the Greek eironeia, “liar.”
I had my 14-year-old daughter, Poppet, instruct me in how to watch an episode of Girls on my computer. (Turns out “content” is not completely “free.”)
Two seconds into the opening credits I was trying to get my daughter out of the room by any means possible. “Poppet! Look in the yard! The puppy’s on fire! Quick! Quick! Run outside and roll him in the snow!”
It turns out Girls is a serialized horror movie — more gruesome, frightening, grim, dark, and disturbing than anything that’s ever occurred to Stephen King.
I have two daughters, Poppet and her 17-year-old sister Muffin. Girls is about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters. These young people, portrayed as being representative of typical young people, reside in a dumpy, grubby, woeful part of New York called Brooklyn, where Ms. Dunham should put her clothes back on.
I lived in New York for fifteen years. No one had been to Brooklyn since the Dodgers left in 1957.
The young people in Girls are miserable, peevish, depressed, hate their bodies, themselves, their life, and each other. They occupy apartments with the size and charm of the janitor’s closet, shared by The Abominable Roommate. They dress in clothing from the flophouse lost-and-found and are groomed with a hacksaw and gravel rake. They are tattooed all over with things that don’t even look like things the way a anchor or a mermaid or a heart inscribed “Mom” does, and they’re only a few years older than my daughters.
The characters in Girls take drugs. They “hook up” in a manner that makes the casual sex of the 1960s seem like an arranged marriage in Oman. And they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit.
It’s every parent’s nightmare. I had to have a lot to drink before I could get to sleep after watching this show about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters.
[…]
Consternation has also been caused because Ms. Dunham admits to, as a child, having done with her younger sister what used to be obliquely called “playing doctor,” leading her to be condemned for trivializing sexual assault.
And I’m supposed to have an opinion about all this.
My opinion is that Lena Dunham created and stars in a television series on HBO called Girls, about young people who are only a couple of years older than my daughters.
I’m looking into Women-only military schools run by strict nuns for Poppet and Muffin. I think there’s one in the Philippines.
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December 26, 2014
QotD: Realism versus cynicism
I don’t think I have a negative assessment of human beings. I think I have a realistic assessment of human beings. I think people like to think that people are better than they are. It is true that I don’t live in a cloud of hope, which I have a certain contempt for. If people really thought about it, which they don’t, I think that they would agree with me.
Fran Lebowitz, quoted by Lauren Ingeno in “Fran Lebowitz: I Am Not a Hostess. I Am a Prosecutor”, George Washington Today, 2014-04-20.
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December 24, 2014
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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Jim Geraghty calls for “Regime Change in Christmastown”
Something is rotten in Christmastown, and Jim Geraghty demands regime change to fix the problems:
I lament that for all of the warm feelings [the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special] stirs … this children’s classic makes almost no sense.
First, I get that this is a parable about tolerance of those who are different, and appreciating “misfits” who “don’t fit in.” Perhaps that was a particularly powerful message in 1964. But the story’s need for an intolerant society to depict means that a lot of previously-beloved characters associated with Christmas get turned into absolute quasi-fascistic villains.
Donner, Rudolph’s dad, is one of the worst. He’s horrified by his son’s shiny nose, literally from the moment of his birth. Everyone just accepts that because of the shiny nose, Rudolph will never be able to pull the sleigh. Nobody ever explains why. They treat this as some sort of horrible genetic mutation. In the entire story, no one in Christmastown other than Clarice and Rudolph’s mother — who never even gets a name! — can tolerate it. Everyone else instantly reacts with shock, horror, and disgust.
Santa comes across as even worse. He’s a jerk who doesn’t care about the elves’ musical number. The first sign of snow — in the North Pole, where he really shouldn’t be that shocked — and he’s ready to cancel Christmas. He’s got one job!
Finally, when Rudolph is exposed at the reindeer games, Santa tells Donner, Rudolph’s dad, he should be ashamed of himself. For what? His son’s nose? A birth defect? For polluting the gene pool? Is this Nazi Christmastown?
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December 23, 2014
James Lileks reflects on the 50th anniversary of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Oh, he’s nostalgic enough:
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special. For those remembering how they stared with wonder and awe at the jerky stop-motion animation and shivered with delicious fear at the perils faced by the plucky buck with the incandescent schnoz, the notion that this program occurred a half century ago would be a marvelous testament to the enduring power of the show’s appeal … if it didn’t make you feel so damned old.
If it does, that is. For young kids today it’s a cultural artifact from a time so remote it might as well be the Renaissance. The snowman’s resemblance to Burl Ives doesn’t make them think of a hefty folkie howling with alcoholic rage in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; the concept of a “misfit” doesn’t echo a decade of neurotic intellectual culture celebrating the outsider who couldn’t find his place in the grey-flannel machinery.
It’s charming and tuneful and justly revered. So let’s spoil it by overthinking the details and applying the corrosive idiocy of modern standards, shall we? Herewith a few points to consider.
[…]
– Kids today are appalled by the brusque coach who regards Rudolph as a freak and clearly sides with the normal reindeer youth. Nowadays the character would recognize Rudolph’s specialness right away, and the entire show would have been about his fight to get Rudolph on the team, culminating in an impassioned speech before a congressional committee and the passage of Rudolph’s Law.
By the way, when I was a kid we understood the coach character’s nasty reaction — not because we sympathized with him, but because phys-ed teachers were jerks.
– The Abominable Snowman. Let us be frank: The moment when Rudolph sets out on a floe to draw the Snowman away from his friends is one of the more noble moments of childhood television, married with dismay: You know he had no chance. To a small child who has finally grasped the narrative, it was really scary, because Rudolph was going to die.
Parents watching along may have wanted to say “See what happens when you run off with your weird friends? This is what happens. You break your mother’s heart and your intestines are slurped up by a murderous albino.”
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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.)
QotD: Booze with coffee and cream
Here is a mixed bag of seasonable concoctions. First and foremost and indispensable, Irish Coffee. It’s a bit of a pest to make, but never was such labour more richly rewarded. To make each drink, stir thoroughly in a large pre-heated wineglass 1 teaspoon of sugar or a bit more, about a quarter of a pint of your best and freshest black coffee, and 1-2 oz Irish whiskey — no other sort will do. When the mixture is completely still, pour onto its surface over the back of a spoon about 2 oz chilled double cream. The cream must float on the other stuff, not mingle with it. If this goes wrong, take Michael Jackson’s excellent advice: “Don’t serve the drink to your guests knock it back quickly yourself, and try again.”
Other drinks have sprung up in imitation with the same coffee and cream content but with other spirits as a basis, like Benedictine, which gives Monks’ Coffee, and Drambuie, which gives Prince Charles’s Coffee — yes, that’s what the UK Bartenders Guild call it. Of those I’ve tried, none compares with the original.
Except for being warm, the next drink could hardly be more different. This is the Raging Bull, an Amis original, though no great powers of invention were called for. Make Bovril in a mug in the ordinary way and stir in a shot of vodka, a couple of shakes of Worcester sauce and a squeeze of lemon juice (optional). Thats it. Very heartening in cold and/or hung-over conditions.
Now an unusual evening warmer, the Broken Leg. Having had a real broken leg myself earlier this year I puzzle of the significance of the name but the drink’s straightforward enough. Slowly heat about a quarter of a pint of apple juice in a saucepan with a few raisins, a cinnamon stick and a lemon slice. When it starts to bubble, strain into a pre-heated glass or mug. Pour a couple of ounces of bourbon whiskey into the pan, warm for a few seconds and pour into the remainder. Formula from John Doxat.
Lastly. American Milk Punch. You drink this cold, but it’ll soon light a fire in you. The previous evening — this is the hard part — put milk instead of water into your refrigerator ice trays. On the day, mix thoroughly in a jug one part bourbon whiskey, one part French cooking brandy and four parts fresh milk. Pour into biggish glasses, drop in milk cubes, stir gently, dust with grated nutmeg and serve. This punch is the very thing for halfway through the morning of Boxing Day, when you may be feeling a little jaded and need a spot of encouragement before some marvellous treat like the in-laws coming over for lunch. In fact, it can be treated as a Snowy Mary, sustaining and uplifting, and much kinder to the digestion than the old Bloody Mary, a delicious drink, I agree, but full of acid fruit juices.
Remember the Milk Punch for the New Year as a heartener before air trips, interviews, etc.
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
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December 22, 2014
Repost – Happy Holiday Travels!
H/T to Economicrot. Many many more at the link.
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QotD: Celebrity gossip as a common good
Celebrity gossip is psychologically healthy.
It provides an outlet, a useful sublimation, of our self-destructive subconscious compulsion to lean over the back fence and cluck (or tweet) about the godawful things our relatives, friends, and neighbors do.
Celebrities are not our family. Although there are so many celebrities that we are probably related to some. But they’re not the niece looking daggers at us across the Thanksgiving turkey because of what we said to Uncle Bill about her hookup with that McDermott idiot. They’re not the daughter locked in her bedroom running up our Visa card bill with online shopping for new makeup, clothes, and other mall finds.
Celebrities are not our friends. They don’t borrow our money or power tools. They don’t forget it’s their turn to carpool the kids to junior high. They don’t come over when we’re busy watching The View and litter the kitchen table with used Kleenex, pouring their hearts out about their (remarkably frequent) divorces. They don’t get caught — unless Dean McDermott is late to the set for his televised therapy session on True Tori — necking with our spouses in the coat closet at our cocktail parties.
P.J. O’Rourke, “Welcome to Showbiz Sharia Law: No talent? Kind of dim-witted? No shame? Perfect. The celebrity industry needs you — just don’t ever veil your face”, The Daily Beast, 2014-05-04
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December 21, 2014
“Wicca is religion’s answer to the Liberal Democrats”
All the British newspapers have apparently decided that it’s worth column-inches devoted to the random Twitter comments of J.K. Rowling:
Of the various insights into the diversity of Hogwarts culture JK Rowling has been sharing on Twitter lately, one in particular caught my eye. It wasn’t the revelation, reported by the Guardian, that the school had Jewish wizards. (So what?) Nor was it that Hogwarts probably had a few poofs in it. (We knew that already, didn’t we?)
No: what tickled me was her remark that the only group she never envisaged in the achingly multi-culti Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was Wiccans, those faux-druidic attention-seekers and drop-outs obsessed with black candles, lesbianism and velvet gowns.
Wiccans and those oddballs who dress up in bizarro costumes, redolent of cheap seasonal medieval re-enactment camps, who believe in magic (or, as they hilariously insist on spelling it, “magick”) and the mystical forces of mother nature.
[…]
What most fans will have taken from that, I’m guessing, is: “Come off it, even by the standards of my totally invented fantasy-land full of mystical creatures, boy wizards and horcruxes, those people are off their trolleys.”
You can tell rather a lot about those respective newspapers by which details they chose to lead their reports with. The Guardian, with its creepy Jewish obsession, leapt on Rowling’s confirmation that Anthony Goldstein of Ravenclaw was semitic, while the Independent ran with her statement that “of course” Hogwarts would have been an LGBT-friendly place to learn how to magic up enchanted water.
What neither of them saw fit to give due prominence to, though, was the fact that Wiccans, hilariously, are the only group in the Harry Potter universe incapable of performing magic. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.
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Repost – “I want an Official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot Range Model air rifle”
H/T to KA-CHING! for the image.
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December 20, 2014
QotD: When it’s steam engine time
Ridcully poked at his pipe with a pipe cleaner and said, “Ye-es, that is a conundrum. Surely the steam engine cannot happen before it’s steam-engine time? If you saw a pig, you would, I think, say to yourself, well, here’s a pig, so it must be time for pigs. You wouldn’t question its right to be there would you?”
“Certainly not,” said Lu-Tze. “In any case, pork gives me the wind something dreadful. What we know is that the universe is never-ending story that, happily, writes itself continuously. The trouble with my brethren in Oi Dong is that they are fixated on the belief that the universe can be totally understood, in every particular jot and tittle.”
Ridcully burst out laughing. “Oh, my word! You know, my wonderful associate Mister Ponder Stibbins appears to have fallen into the same misapprehension. It seems that even the very wise have neglected to take notice of one rather important goddess … Pippina, the lady with the Apple of Discord. She knows that the universe, while it requires rules and stability, also needs just a tincture of chaos, the unexpected, the surprising. Otherwise it would be a mechanism — a wonderful mechanism, ticking away the centuries, but with nothing different happening. And so we may assume that the loss of balance will be allowed this time and the beneficent lady will decree that this mechanism might yield wonderful things, given a chance.”
“For my part, I would like to give it a chance,” said Lu-Tze. “Serendipity is no stranger to me. I know the monks have been carefully shepherding the world, but I rather think they don’t realize that the sheep sometimes have better ideas. Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.”
Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam, 2013.
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December 14, 2014
QotD: The voyage of the Rogue
Years ago, when I was young and inexperienced, I hired a yacht myself. Three things had combined to lead me into this foolishness: I had had a stroke of unexpected luck; Ethelbertha had expressed a yearning for sea air; and the very next morning, in taking up casually at the club a copy of the Sportsman, I had come across the following advertisement:
TO YACHTSMEN. Unique Opportunity. Rogue, 28-ton Yawl. Owner, called away suddenly on business, is willing to let this superbly-fitted “greyhound of the sea” for any period short or long. Two cabins and saloon; pianette, by Woffenkoff; new copper. Terms, 10 guineas a week. Apply Pertwee and Co., 3A Bucklersbury.
It had seemed to me like the answer to a prayer. “The new copper” did not interest me; what little washing we might want could wait, I thought. But the “pianette by Woffenkoff” sounded alluring. I pictured Ethelbertha playing in the evening — something with a chorus, in which, perhaps, the crew, with a little training, might join — while our moving home bounded, “greyhound-like,” over the silvery billows.
I took a cab and drove direct to 3A Bucklersbury. Mr. Pertwee was an unpretentious-looking gentleman, who had an unostentatious office on the third floor. He showed me a picture in water-colours of the Rogue flying before the wind. The deck was at an angle of 95 to the ocean. In the picture no human beings were represented on the deck; I suppose they had slipped off. Indeed, I do not see how anyone could have kept on, unless nailed. I pointed out this disadvantage to the agent, who, however, explained to me that the picture represented the Rogue doubling something or other on the well-known occasion of her winning the Medway Challenge Shield. Mr. Pertwee assumed that I knew all about the event, so that I did not like to ask any questions. Two specks near the frame of the picture, which at first I had taken for moths, represented, it appeared, the second and third winners in this celebrated race. A photograph of the yacht at anchor off Gravesend was less impressive, but suggested more stability. All answers to my inquiries being satisfactory, I took the thing for a fortnight. Mr. Pertwee said it was fortunate I wanted it only for a fortnight — later on I came to agree with him — the time fitting in exactly with another hiring. Had I required it for three weeks he would have been compelled to refuse me.
The letting being thus arranged, Mr. Pertwee asked me if I had a skipper in my eye. That I had not was also fortunate — things seemed to be turning out luckily for me all round — because Mr. Pertwee felt sure I could not do better than keep on Mr. Goyles, at present in charge — an excellent skipper, so Mr. Pertwee assured me, a man who knew the sea as a man knows his own wife, and who had never lost a life.
(more…)
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