Maggie's Farm

Saw this painting at the        
Metropolitan's Fra Angelico
show on Friday. It is a small
but intense special exhibition
of this late-Medieval/Early
Renaissance artist-monk.
A review of the show here. 

Advertising out of context might work. Hmmm. A VC

Australia's bad reputation? Huh? Tim Blair. Oh, because they aren't weeny defeatist Lefties? I can say that the Aussies' reputation around Maggie's Farm is very good - excellent.

The growing unrest in China. Am. Thinker

Where does John Kerry blog? Guess. Not at YARGB

Does Canada want conservatives, or just non-Liberals? Chequerboard

What does "INRI" stand for?

Mexican military continues to cross the border. BareKnuckle

Kelo comes home to NH for Souter. Yes, silly. But it dramatizes the main point: states and localities need to address Kelo.

Light in the Piazza, at the Vivian Beaumont (playing hookey from Aliyah In NY)

Leonard Bernstein in his Harvard Lectures on music, gave six criteria for judging good music: five were technical (beat, harmony and such); the sixth was does it hit directly to the heart. Light in the Piazza hits the heart, multiple times --despite its music and lyrics, because of its story of hope and its actors.
    I sat second row center. I saw the mother's, Victoria Clarke's, tears, quiet tears, sometimes noticeable as a glistening, or only as she touched her gloved hand to her cheek.  She appeared moved, as if living the story for the first time, despite performing eight times weekly.
    It's the story that can sound puerile if not performed well. When it is performed well, it raises hope, it touches heart.
    A mother and her young adult daughter visit Florence. Mother later tells the audience that she visited once before, with her husband before her only childm and warns us, never to visit Italy with dreams, for dreams can be dashed there.
    But in this tale, a dream is formed and brought to life.
    Her daughter, quite beautiful (Katie Clark, in her Broadway debut) receives distractedly, mother's guidebook lectures on Florence, on art, on the quality of light in Florence, which artists sought in order to see more clearly. Her daughter Clara, is seen clearly by a young man, Fabrizio (Aaron Lazar) in a Piazza, and he sees her as if
she were painted by a Renaissance artist. He falls in love, he stumbles through his English, falls backon his Italian and she gets it.  What he does not understand -- and her the language difference is a savior of love and hope -- is that Clara is a bit slow.  A head injury at ten left her a bit slower than others. She is bright enough to know, to feel this; perhaps she recalls a time when her brain worked better, as did a patient I once interviewed.  She demonstrates a naivete, a social simplicity in the way she approaches strangers, announces that this is their first visit, that she is from North
Carolina. Or in a frightening episode, she lights out to meet her Fabrizio at midnight, loses her way and is accosted by pimps and whores, then retrieved by her mother.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

Mark Twain

This piece is making the rounds today:

Number 10 - Life is a sexually transmitted disorder.

Number 9 - Good health is merely a term for the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Number 8 - Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.

Number 7 - Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they  won't bother you for weeks.

Number 6 - Some people are like a Slinky...not really good for
anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble  down the stairs.

Number 5 - Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Number 4 - All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

Number 3 - Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred
dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?

Number 2 - In the 60's, people took LSD to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2006 - We know exactly where every cow with mad-cow-disease is located  among the millions and millions of cows in America but we haven't got a clue as to where thousands of illegal immigrants and terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.

Was the American Civil War the first modern war? And what role did slavery play? New book by Stout: Upon the Altar of the Nation. NY Sun review.

The definitive new Beatles biography, by Bob Spitz. The author of the iconoclastic Dylan: A Biography spent years working on this Beatles bio, a magnum opus which has had excellent reviews.

And now it's...
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race!

Lyrics from The Producers, by Mel Brooks

The Bird Dog family did a comparison - the new Producers movie compared with the original with Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock and Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom. As you know, the Broadway show was based on the 1968 movie, and then the new movie was based on the Broadway show (!?!).

The 1968 version wins, hands down. If only on Mostel's amazing FACE. This is Marx Brothers-quality farce from the spottily-brilliant Mel Brooks.

Due to ferocious windstorms in southern New England (the second such storm in a week with gusts to 70 mph), Maggie's server in Connecticut was down until midnight Wednesday. Many trees down, power lines down, etc.

And FEMA was nowhere to be found! Sorry for any inconvenience. 

A liberal is someone who is so open-minded that he can't take his own side in an argument.

Robert Frost (H/T, Neo-neocon)

From Ten poor word usages which will expose our lack of education and could damage a career. Including "hopefully":

"Everyone uses "hopefully" as a shortcut for "I hope." It is not. Yes, the dictionary allows it, but that's just bending to popular usage. In my book, there is only one correct use for "hopefully." It's a synonym for "prayerfully"—as in, "She looked up hopefully and said, 'Dear Lord, please make it rain soon, or we'll have no harvest.'" Do you want to say "I hope"? Then say "I hope.""

Read all ten, including since and because, and .everyone and they.

12-23-05  Hermaphroditic Numbers: Learning Hebrew

Hebrew -- learning it -- I have said little about. I play in my head
what I might sound like if my Hebrew errors were in English.  I can
only approximate. In Hebrew, each verb has a connecting word following
it before  aproper noun; not entirely like English. One word, et, is
not translateable; literally it could mean 'to.' in some contexts.
But I might err in saying,  "I want to talk "on" you." Or, "May I ride
to you in your car."

I will try to sort out  a few more examples. But now to numbers.
Hebrew numbers are hermaphroditic, or perhaps have gender dysphoria,
or like some primitive life forms, change gender at puberty.  First,
Hebrew is a gendered tongue (unlike us simpler-minded English
speakers).  therefore, there are female and male numbers. Rather,
whena number is associated with a noun, it takes on the gender of the
noun.  Here, already we have a chameleon-like quality of numbers, a
readiness to take on the morphology of whom it is abutting.   But,
that's just the beginnig.  Feminine words generally end with ah, or et
--- unless they are numbers. Male nubmers generally end with ah; up
until they reach puberty -- eleven.  Then male nubmers lose their
ah's, a version of castration realization.  But, female numbers,  upon
reaching puberty, grow a tail, eh.  Perhaps a version of female penis
realization: hit puberty, get a tail.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln

We had a magnificent wind and snow storm last night in southern New England. Powerful, exciting, exhilarating, and humbling Yankee weather. Trees and powerlines down everywhere, and roads blocked all over the place. Church had no power and no heat - like in the old days -  so those of us who made it huddled in "The Upper Room" instead of the sanctuary and it worked just fine. Cozy. Those church candles found a real purpose - illumination, instead of atmosphere. And a sermon concerning the dark side of God which I will discuss on the blog one of these days, soon.

Listening to George Jones, Emmylou, Johnny Cash, and Alison Kraus, Norm, if you were wondering. Plus some of The Dylanologist's recent Dylan bootlegs which he gave me for Christmas. Will pick an opera later - not sure which yet. And putting off working on quarterly taxes as long as possible. Also wondering why no-one is commenting on my Truthiness piece - I thought it was a good take-off point. I guess not - damn. That's why I am not in the marketing business. Just no sense of "mass market." But we don't want to be a boutique blog: we want to be Walmart! Or, at least, Costco. The price is right, isn't it?

One more thing - the blog Humbug introduced themselves to me via email. They specialize in detecting fallacy and bullshit, and have a good sense of fun. I will not permit Barrister to read their stuff - don't want us to inadvertently plagiarize on our new Fallacy of the Week idea, which we arrogantly imagined was an original idea. Here's one of their latest posts - on Princeton's appalling Peter Singer.

And a final comment: Powerline is remarkable today. Too much good stuff. How do those guys do it? This one, to only single out one of many fine pieces.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
Mark Twain

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
Bob Dylan

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
Dr. Karl Menninger

What is Truth? 
Pontius Pilate

We posted briefly on this new word "truthiness" a couple of months ago, but it deserves more attention. The word stands more or less in contrast to the non-word "factiness," as I understand it. It brings to mind the comment of a friend who once described the processed cheese we were putting on burgers as "a remarkably food-like substance." "Truthiness" is a truth-like substance.

The Mixing Memory blog (which deals mostly with Cognitive Psychology) has a nice short piece on the subject, and I quote here:

"Truthy, not facty" strikes me as a pretty good way of describing the way we usually think about things. Most of the time, when we're thinking about the world, we're not trying to determine whether the information we're receiving from it is factual, but instead working to integrate it with the representations we've already got. The information that we're likely to notice, and keep, is just the information that fits with those representations, regardless of whether that information happens to fit with the facts. If something is truthy because it fits with our beliefs, but not with facts, then a lot of what we'll end up believing with be truthy, not facty. It's because of this that you get things like cognitive dissonance or the confirmation bias. Those involve searching for and emphasizing truthiness over factiness.

Thus a cognitive psychologist, or maybe any psychologist, might find the new word handy because it has to do with the way our minds deal with things - in a rule-of-thumb, experience-based way which expects or wants  things to fit our existing ideas and images. (A "representation" is what psychologists and psychoanalysts call a package of memory, image, idea and emotion. It's called a "re-presentation" because it's constructed on the inside, and thus necessarily colored and distorted to varying degrees for all sorts of psychological reasons.)

I suspect that, for a long time, the idea of a round earth contained fact but lacked truthiness for many people who walked around all day on flat surfaces. Indeed, it lacks truthiness to me that my flight from New York to Paris flies over Newfoundland. How many things are apparently facts - the existence of quarks, a curved universe, the flight of the bumblebee, the movement of electrons in a copper wire - yet all lack truthiness.

For another example, I think Dan Rather, this fall, was trying to tell us that the CBS forged records "lacked factiness but contained "truthiness". Similar to the Al Sharpton-Tawana Brawley business, if you recall that story.

So it seems to me that Mixing Memory has the correct idea: What feels "truthy" is something that fits our preconceptions. And our preconceptions aren't bad things - we could not function without them, but how many of them can we prove to be True? (We live in a world of ambiguities, but crave certainty and solid ground so as not to go nuts. As in Huxley's quote: "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad.") On the other hand, things that feel "truthy" can just as easily be lies, as happened this month with the Oprah Book Club's Million Little Pieces.

If we plan to use this word (which I do not, unless I use it with irony), let's use it with the connotation of an untruth or a lie - a "truth-like substance," and not as a watered-down version of truth. And let's view the professional purveyors of truthiness to be what they are - con-men, manipulators, and propagandists - whether they be advertisers, politicians, trial lawyers or journalists.

During his speech on Monday, Al Gore will demagogue, fear-monger, strike the podium, act santimonious, and decry Bush's Nazi Police State. But watch: the one thing he will not do is to demand that surveillance of terrorists, and information-seeking from terrorists, cease. He will Talk Loud, but Carry No Cohones. If he were to be consistent, he would demand that the US surrender immediately, and quit our surveillance of terrorists/

Why is the Left consistently soft on terror? We are always trying to figure that one out. Hornik gives it a try, at Am. Spectator

Birgit Nilsson died on Christmas. NY Sun

Hewitt has an interesting take on the coming changes on the Court, and the panic amongst the ACLU and the Left. He sees it as a Theist/Secularist issue. He thinks there's a great fear that people will begin to speak about morality and natural law in persuasive ways. Here.

Belgium thinks the American school system is rooted in an antedeluvian past. In Belgium, the $ follows the kid. Schools compete. Democracy Project.

Bobcat

My pal Walter took this remarkable photo in northern Litchfield County, CT, on Sunday. A hell of a photo of this elusive critter. Info about this wonderful predator here.

Site Meter

It seems as if most of the population of New England has hit the slopes today. I have always found this to be an annoyingly crowded weekend for skiing: by noon in Vermont or New Hampshire, you need skates, not skis.

So I am on duty at the olde blogge while everyone else plays in the snow, and I am here to inform our loyal and beloved readers that we finally have a Site Meter, which means that we will be properly listed at Truth Laid Bear in a week or two - if it all works. Not that we care....well, we do. Kinda sorta.

Hope I at least get the chance to do some shooting this weekend.

He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

G.K. Chesterton

Limericks are the Haiku of Western civilization. They seek associative, allusive, connotative, and humorous revelation, rather than the mystical and ineffable, mostly. I will get it started:

There once was a judge named Alito
Who the Left did dislike con spirito,
So they smeared him with slime,
But ran out of time,
So left crying in their beer and Doritos.

Update: Emailed from an Italian-American reader "Vinny in NJ":

There was a paysan named Alito,
To us Dems he's a nasty mosquito.
He's a working class wop
but he ain't union shop,
I'd rather vote for a friggin' burrito.

It's a difficult rhyme. One more, emailed in from who knows where:

There once was a judge named Alito,
They claimed he had gone incognito,
And hates women and blacks
Like all Reagan hacks,
But he stuck like a chunk of granito.

Waste some time. Send us more. Email, or via Comments.

Paul Berman's new book: Euro-leftys

A plug for the excellent new book by my college classmate Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists. It's about how Europe's Leftist elite came to power. Excerpted from an excellent review in Seattle's The Stranger:

How did Western Europe come to be ruled by monolithic ideologues? Short answer: the "'68ers," which is what Europeans call those who came of age in the radical movements of the 1960s, revering Mao and reviling the U.S. as Nazi Germany's successor. Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of '68ers—those who'd stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman's absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these '68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May '68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman's 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move "from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism"—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world's supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many '68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.