Bandarlog


	Baseball Names I watched the Sox get shut down last night by Cleveland’s emerging ace Fausto Carmona. My main response: That’s a great name! As always, a great baseball name recalled to mind the all time baseball name, Boston utility infielder Arquimidez Pozo. It turns out I am not the only one who feels that way [Ben A.: 7/26/07 05:56]


	You're pretty good at giving it, Spitz, but how are you when it comes to taking it? When a politician believes he owns a monopoly on virtue, then anything goes. After all, it is in the service of virtue! Scary righteousness doesn't belong to the left or the right exclusively. I fear McCain for the same reason. Doug, you probably believe that George Bush suffers from the same complex. In any case, it behooves voters to learn to detect this personality type and keep its avatars out of office. [Ben H.: 7/24/07 11:41]


	Nixon's the One So, so awesome. Above everything else these points will not be gotten across by gimmicks and you must lean hard on Safire on this. [Ben A.: 7/20/07 12:21]


	Golden Age Anyone who finds mass affluence anything less than awesome must deny this: a buzzing, glowing, lobster-shaped restaurant pager. Even more impressive in the flesh. [Ben A.: 7/20/07 00:57]


	Concert Note Went to see three young (early 20's?) musicians play Mendelssohn's first, Brahms' third, and Shostakovich's first piano trios. The best thing about the concert was that it turned us on to a whole series of concerts, "jeunes talents", that have good music and cost (much) less than fifty euros a pop. Good to know since these are rare in Paris. The best piece in this concert was the Mendelssohn. I can't remember having heard it before. To me it was typical of Mendelssohn (also of Schumann, to give you a sense of where my powers of musical distinction end) in a way that makes it perfect for "young talents" -- it's got lyricism baked into the notes so the individual players don't have to be experienced in squeezing emotion out of them, there's no super-complex contrapuntal interplay so the group doesn't have to have worked together for years and years mastering the logic of the phrases, and there's plenty of bombastic virtuoso writing that young players (who can cut it at the top conservatories) excel at. To some degree these things were also true of the Brahms trio, but to me that makes it unusual for Brahms. I didn't like the piece except for the charming third movement; I didn't see what he was getting at. It sounded like a bunch of rough drafts for his piano quartets (which I can't get enough of). I thought there was one interesting rhythmic idea in the last movement but he didn't develop it at all. The Shostokovich was great considering he wrote it (according to my calculations based on the program notes) when he was 17. [Doug: 7/17/07 17:20]


	Mansfield Park Ever since the whole plot became confined to the (idle rich) characters' preparations for a spot of mummery, almost a hundred pages ago (!), I lost interest. My experience as a teaching assistant in a sophomore great-books class has left me with great powers of relevance-finding. Alas, they are unequal to this task. The drama is apparently in the fact that putting on a play at home is a titillating, immoral indulgence. Some characters want to indulge, others to abstain, hence the drama. So what modern analog for the theatrics would I choose to put in the minds of sophomores? A cocaine orgy for the extended family? No, it's just too absurd. Also, did the writing get a whole lot flatter about the time the time the play idea is floated, or is it just that my interest starting waning at that point for lack of any way to identify with any of the characters? Let me slog through the rest of the book -- there is one part that I do want to discuss, namely the debate (between Edmund and Miss Crawford, I think) about the value of organized religious services. [Doug: 7/15/07 16:37]


	Party Like It's 1999 Is it just me or have we now officially gotten past -- i.e. back to the anterior side of -- 9/11? I mean, the stock market is booming, irony is blooming (vide infra), our citizenry has overcome its brief spell of being able to locate Arab countries on a map (apparently the subtitles in the "Transformers" must specify "Qatar -- The Middle East"), and the top news stories are things like "Mom and chatty toddler kicked off flight". (Incidentally, naming one's child "Garren" should be sufficient grounds for revoking all of one's civic rights, not just air transport.) [Doug: 7/13/07 00:55]


	The Cinema After the "Pirates of the Carribean" trilogy, and now the "Transformers", it is clear that no figment of childhood memory is too flimsy to convert into successful hundred-million-dollar movies. So I say we take some of the money in the care of the two Bens' financial institutions and make a trilogy, comparable in sweep and scale to the "Godfather", based on the life of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Beyond the drama of one half-man's life story, we get a window on the saga of modern Ireland. I'm envisioning Ken Loach as director. Chapter 1, early adulthood in the 1960s. Two young children are a burden on Lucky and his wife, who wants to start using contraception, but Lucky heeds the Archbishop of Dublin's commandment to use only yellow moons, green clovers, and blue diamonds imbued with the Holy Spirit. Lucky struggles with his faith, and ultimately leaves his wife and (now seven) children. Chapter 2, Lucky struggles with alcoholism. Occasionally his kids show up at his basement apartment -- "Oh no, the kids are after me child support! I'll make me a shillelagh, and bash their sodding heads!" Chapter 3, Modern-day Ireland, Lucky sobers up and manages a shift of Latvians at a microprocessor plant. It's true that not much happens in this Chapter, and the workers' rudimentary English makes for less than scintillating dialog. On the other hand we can get Bjork as lead Latvian and some guy with Parkinson's to hold the camera, and we can clean up all the European awards like Dancer In The Dark. And I think we can get Dave McAwesome, noted Lucky Charms expert, as executive producer. [Doug: 7/13/07 00:17]


	What evil have the infidels loosed upon the people of Iraq now? Man-eating badgers, naturally. [Doug: 7/12/07 11:04]


	The Lady Is Looking Greyer S&P cut the long-term corporate credit rating of The New York Times Company from BBB+ to BBB. Two steps away from junk. If a newspaper loses its investment-grade rating, must it switch to tabloid format? [Ben H.: 7/11/07 12:27]


	Congratulations Although you always describe your academic achievements modestly, Doug, we know better. Many congratulations. [Ben A.: 7/9/07 22:45]


	Lifestyles Of The Overeducated I forgot to mention that I successfully defended my 12-page mini-thesis, "A Geometric Approach to Dense Iteration of Sacks Forcing", and so should be getting a second master's degree in the mail at some point. In the last few weeks of the project I became one of those people whose infestation of 02138 was a main reason for my fleeing that zip code immediately upon graduation. That is to say, a humorless person, grimly pursuing some nugget of knowledge whose importance is in inverse proportion to its complexity. "Can't talk now, have to categorize the quasi-smegmoid Stroganoff curves," that sort of thing. Although my own project has a non-zero chance of radically improving our understanding of the physical universe, it also has a nearly-one chance of amounting to zilch, so I'm going to move to a more ludic approach to it now. Earlier on this blog I threatened to give it up the project if I didn't prove a certain result by Bastille day. Well, I'm not quite at the point of proving that result; I am going stop working seriously on the project, but since my mini-thesis has moved me in the right direction, I feel entitled to keep at it as a hobby. For the rest I have decided to get a job. Anyone hears of an interesting Paris-based job opportunity, please send it my way. (My initial plan, to secure a job at the "OECD", like half the anglophones one runs across here, but without knowing what "OECD" stands for or what it does, was foiled by my inference, proven correct, that it has something to do with economics.) [Doug: 7/9/07 09:23]


	Paying Off Already Austen's unimprovable description of two well-bred sisters on the verge of womanhood: Their vanity was in such good order that they seemed to be quite free from it (...) (On the other hand she might have spared us the ten pages of dinner-table discussion about plans for landscaping country manors.) [Doug: 7/9/07 07:33]


	Transformers: Indescribably Awful At least I am not up to the description. It's less a movie than fragments of schmaltz, cliche, and bad jokes cemented together by confused CGI and slow-mo montages of planes taking off carriers while stirring music plays. This fellow provides a fairly good summary. I can confirm the existence of a black-stereotype autobot who breakdances. And yes, he is the only robot to die. [Ben A.: 7/8/07 18:20]


	Mansfield Park Blog synchronicity. I just picked up Mansfield Park myself. Deb tells me it is her least favourite Austen, so I am proceeding with caution. If you don't recall Pride and Prejudice well, Doug, that might serve you better. [Ben A.: 7/8/07 10:40]


	Quai Branleur, trashed more comprehensively Having been to the museum myself now, I thought I'd see what the critical response was (I'm sure I read some articles at the time of the ribbon-cutting last year, but I've forgotten what they said). The New York Times' review trashes the place much more effectively than my little post below. It remains spot-on, a year after its publication. Getting to the point quickly -- "The place simply makes no sense" -- it continues: Jean-Pierre Mohen, the director of collections, has explained that the jungle theme is meant to seem mysterious and chaotic, but, like the jungle, to slowly reveal its logic, symbolizing the complexity of non-European societies that are closer to nature than we are. It is the old noble-savage argument. Heart of darkness in the city of light. Whatever. The atmosphere is like a discothèque at 10 a.m. [Doug: 7/8/07 09:42]


	Museum Review Thumbs down for the Musee du Quai Branly. Now one year old, this is Chirac's monument to his own broad-mindedness, featuring the handicrafts of primitive cultures from all five continents (I guess they tally them differently here) -- textiles, weapons, pottery, religious artifacts, basically anything falling into the category that anthropologists refer to as "schtuff". Finally went there yesterday. Now, despite the arch, dismissive tone I try to maintain on this site, I don't have anything against primitive cultures, or their schtuff. I'll watch a Yanomamo documentary on a rainy Saturday, and I'll enthuse over the aesthetic qualities of Dao's Maori pendant. The Quai Branly's problem is that doesn't go in either of these two directions. Go the documentary route -- set up some animatronic tribesmen in a hut and give me a sense of their lives -- or go the art route -- put the most beautiful art objects on pedestals -- and you can have a decent museum. Take a confused middle road and you get the Quai Branly. Certainly there are some interesting objects there. The shabbiness of the presentations and the annoyingness of the curatorial conceits prevent you from enjoying them in a British Museum sort of way, though. This does not look like a brand-new product of a vanguard museum nation. The interior is dark. There is a silkscreened jungle pattern filtering out the light from the windows. The cheap flooring material seems to be peeling up in places. The layout tries to avoid right angles in order to make it seem more "organic" (as if, as Dao pointed out, these cultures were unable to make straight lines, which is totally untrue!). Maybe this organic conceit would fly if they had worked in sandstone and clay; but if you make walls out of the plastic material that Disneyland uses for its faux rustic settings, you end up looking like, well, Disneyland. Finally, there is the fact that the long corridor leading to the museum is illuminated with a video installation, projecting vaguely Jenny Holzer-ish sayings onto the walls and floor. Truly, there is not a single outpost in the land of Culture where you are safe from retarded conceptual video artists. If they are trying to prove that there is no such thing as progress in art, point taken. In short, I feel I am now justified in using my nickname for this museum -- the Quai Branleur ("wanker"). (On the other hand, for something that does look like a brand-new product of a vanguard museum nation, check out the Musee Guimet -- coherent (focused on Asian art), attractive (light, modern-looking backdrop for the works), no sense of museum functionaries congratulating themselves for their cleverness and broadmindedness.) [Doug: 7/8/07 07:31]


	Might Some Good Actually Come Of A Bandarlog Post? I am going to download Mansfield Park for Dao's E-Reader so that I have something to say about the Jane Austen-F. Dostoevsky question. I read Pride & Prejudice about 10 years ago and remember nothing except a generally positive vibe. Dostoevsky is more familiar to me and I think the criticism you (Ben A) linked to does capture something important about him. He gets to the heart of why the thoroughly modern, scientistic worldview is incompatible with true happiness (excepting, of course, those people with whose happiness it is somehow compatible, the model of such people being, for me, The Churchlands) but doesn't do much to show a happy alternative. The moments of crisis in Dostoevsky's books are the most moving in any literature anywhere. They ring true. I'm thinking of the Crime & Punishment scene where Raskolnikov kisses the ground, in particular. But what comes after that scene struck me as a tacked-on Hollywood ending, with the characters riding off into the sunset, or I guess sunrise, since they're headed to Siberia. P.S. I remain frustrated with my inability to come up with an &-lit clue for CRIMEANDPUNISHMENT. It seems like there should be one since "CRIMEAN" could be encoded as "From a certain Russian region, ...". But DPUNISHMENT seems intractable. [Doug: 7/8/07 03:15]


	The Boston Herald Never Disappoints On the cover today: "who has better hair: Edwards or Romney?" [Ben A.: 7/7/07 21:56]


	Clarification of Comments That Provoked the Clarification I know that you weren't making that identification, Ben H, and I did not mean to accuse you of it (hence the "seem to" in my comment below). [Ben A.: 7/6/07 14:16]


	Caption Contest Check out Dr. Khalid Ahmed, member of the Al Qaeda UK All-Star Team: Care to suggest a caption? Hey, you guys* told me to get rid of flammable liquids before boarding!* "Nearer, my Prophet, to Thee" Here at Glasgow Airport, we mean it: No shirt, no shoes, no service! "I just wanted to meet my 99 virgins wearing a nice tan!" [Ben H.: 7/6/07 14:10]


	A Clarification I do not suggest that Arab is just another name for retarded primitive, but rather that most members of Islamist terrorist movements exhibit signs of aggressive stupidity and medieval world-view. That the UK and the US ought to pay more attention to screening immigrants who come from a part of the world with a disproportionate share of retarded, primitive, homocidal, anti-Western maniacs seems to me only common sense. Spend some time in London (or read Theodore Dalrymple, for that matter) and you will quickly discover a pretty shocking lack of selectivity about whom the Brits will allow to move in, with the result that a robust fifth column has formed up. Now, your average Arab grandmother probably would not enjoy reading an account of how the culture of her home country has not produced much beyond failure, misery, poverty, and violence in the past few hundred years; nor hear that her people, possibly thanks to their dysfunctional culture, lag almost the entire rest of the world on every relevant indicator of human development, in spite of generally good physical resource endowments. Yet, I don't think we ought to feel enjoined from making such points. For one thing, these claims are at least arguably true. I suggest, therefore, we rely on some other litmus test for decorum, in preference to asking ourselves whether an imaginary Arab grandma could read the post with equanimity. [Ben H.: 7/6/07 13:41]


	Sorry about that, will try to tone down the rhetoric. [Doug: 7/6/07 10:40]


	C'Mon People Now, Love One Another Elsewhere I am appropriately rebuked for allowing to pass without comment remarks like "retarded primitives" below, which seem to acuse all Arabs of mental deficiency. I will again play my appointed role of humorless scold, but didn't we agree to make this a site the grandmother of an Arab friend could visit? Or was that just my idea while drinking? Taxonomy of Christian Novelists For comment, a fascinating discussion of the distinction between "Jane Austen Christians" and "Doestoyevsky Christians." Contains this peach of a line: The greatest critic of irreligion ever, he [Doestoyevsky] himself is lacking in the vision of the good, unless, of course, you count his incessant parade of teary eyed hookers. [Ben A.: 7/6/07 03:16]


	Solar Update After a few fits and starts, the solar system on my roof is now truly up and running. Tuesday's results, 42kWh for the day, far beyond my typical use. Of course, Tuesday was pretty sunny and was one of the longest days of the year. [Ben H.: 7/5/07 09:37]


	I think it probably has to do with a good lawyer's tendency to identify with his client's interests. That, and probably the frustration of seeing Joe Wilson run around to every talk-show and op-ed page in town and spout a bunch of nonsense in direct contradiction to the report he filed after his Niger boondoggle. That might drive the most sober-headed fellow a little crazy. As for his fine, his legal defense fund will probably raise enough money to pay it off (his legal bills being a large multiple of the fine). Is that a Republican Corruption Fund? I don't know -- it's all fully disclosed and quite public, unlike, say, no-show jobs from Revlon or Yucaipa, or speaking fees. [Ben H.: 7/5/07 06:24]


	Anisonomy Maybe your friend can explain why, if Libby entered the government "with reluctance", he lied with such ardor to protect its chieftains! In any case I've drawn up a bumper sticker that will cheer you and other friends of the clan: I have some misgivings about this image since it suggests I have some special scorn for the Bush/Cheney clan, or attribute their current grip on power to lawbreaking. The truth is that money-and-power-hungry groups are a permanent fixture of humanity and this one just happens to have been written a blank check by the electorate. In fact if there's one thing I share with this clan it's their contempt for the current crop of American citizens, who saw what Bush/Cheney was doing to them, and said "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" Happy 4th of July, retards! [Doug: 7/4/07 02:00]


	The revolving door isn't exactly new or particularly exclusive to one party, but I take your point as a generality. With respect to Libby, I think you are off base. As I've written before, he is a friend of a friend. My friend had a lot to say about Libby well before he entered the administration (Libby was representing this friend on an EM legal matter). He had a very lucrative practice that was hardly founded on Clark Clifford-esque influence-lawyering. He entered the government with reluctance. And this administration, which apparently wasn't exactly long on brains, was lucky to have someone like him serving. Should guys like Libby get hung out to dry in the face of politically-motivated prosecutions for derivative crimes, I can't see how we'll get anyone to serve in government except pure opportunists dreaming of revolving-door opportunities. [Ben H.: 7/3/07 12:18]


	I don't mind a little sophistry, but let's stay in this world, and not in one where selfless lawyers like Libby forgo years of private-sector salary to "work for the government"! The Republicans' reign is founded on the disappearance of the distinction between government and their specific business interests; members of the clan move back and forth freely from Halliburton (e.g.) to government office. If Libby's $250K fine isn't paid off by "consulting fees" from various GOP corruption funds in six months flat, I'll eat my hat. [Doug: 7/3/07 11:59]


	What you say may well be true, but I can't see the Libby situation as evidence of a new partisan ruthlessness. Political pardons are not uncommon. Recall Bush 42's pardon of Caspar Weinberger (post-indictment, but pre-trial). Recall Clinton's pardon of Henry Cisneros, his HUD secretary, whom an arguably overzealous independent counsel indicted for -- surprise, surprise -- lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice. Or how about Clinton's pardon of the infamous Dan Rostenkowski? In the case of Weinberger and Cisneros, the pardon served to ensure that men who made sacrifices to work for the government (each had very lucrative opportunities in the private sector) should not have as their reward criminal sanctions. Political differences and point-scoring had a role in each of their prosecutions, and their bosses used a political power to protect them. To me, the Libby clemency has a similar justification, and as such, is nothing new. The fact that political figures get done up on these derivative charges all the time -- obstruction of justice, lying to a federal investigator -- and very rarely for actual crimes, suggests to me that the derivative crimes are far too broadly drawn and amenable to prosecutorial finagling -- not least when we are talking about an independent counsel, where the word "independent" denotes "unaccountable." [Ben H.: 7/3/07 10:05]


	I suppose your argument isn't bad as pro-Bush sophistry goes, but it seems to me that the point of Libby's sentence commutation is that such sophistry has become superfluous -- we crush our opponents in whatever way we see fit, and we no longer even need the pretense that laws or ethics apply to us. Incidentally, I have no choirboy illusions about presidential pardons and I think that, if you looked at the the two cases in isolation from political context, Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich would appear just as corrupt. But the Libby case is part of the endless stream of lies and corruption that has characterized the Bush/Cheney administrations. (Oddly enough, Scooter Libby was Marc Rich's lawyer in the years leading up to the pardon! I guess corruption can bring together what partisanship splits asunder.) [Doug: 7/3/07 08:26]


	I have to disagree with your take on the Libby clemency grant (it was not a pardon). Perhaps you could make the case of arrogant disregard for laws had Bush pre-emptively pardonned Libby; or had quashed the appointment of a special prosecutor. However, to merely commute a (pretty unusual and harsh) prison sentence, after letting the special prosecutor dig for months (even after the original leak source was found) and then hold a trial, and deliver a sentence -- this hardly seems an extreme form of avoidance of responsibility. If Libby wants to clear his name or get out of the two-year supervised release program, or avoid paying the fine, he will have to pursue his appeal in the courts. Given the nature of the "crime" here and the several good appealable issues, it doesn't seem inappropriate that Libby should have the chance to pursue that appeal from "the outside" rather than from prison. And in that the whole prosecution was such that it would never have happened but for political considerations, it also seems not inappropriate to me that the President should make a political intervention in the sentencing. [Ben H.: 7/3/07 06:05]


	Deterrence In The Age Of Proliferation Le Monde recently had a long piece by (or on, can't remember) a French nuclear policy expert, focusing on Iran. She pointed out another reason why the classic deterrence logic is inapplicable there: in the classical game theory, the players are supposed to regard suicide and the Apocalypse as bad things. For Muslim fundamentalists there are no higher goods (provided suicide takes place in the context of killing unbelievers). [Doug: 7/3/07 05:19]


	Primitive Clans I may have been too quick to say that what separates us from the Arabs is an evolution beyond the clan system (to, as Ben H would say, isonomy). Bush's pardon of Scooter Libby reminds us of the total contempt his clan has for the rest of America and the world. From the moment of the supreme court fatwa that created it, this administration's motto has been: laws are pointless since rightness is something that flows in our blood (and not yours). [Doug: 7/3/07 02:39]


	Deterrence Without States? Here is a pop summary of recent IR deepthink on nuclear proliferation. John Mearsheimer expresses a deeply unconvincing realist trope when he maintains that "any country that gave [nuclear weapons] to terrorists who would use them against the US would disappear from the face of the earth." This would indeed be comforting to believe, as it implies that deterrence will always offer protection from nuclear attack. Alas, this position assumes a) that states can always be tied to covert attacks, and b) that non-state actors will never acquire nuclear capabilities absent active state cooperation.* If we recognize that both of these assumptions are dubious, we are left with a deterrence program that requires measures to ensure that guilty cannot escape blame (Ben H, your joint liability/collective guilt provisions), as well as measures to ensure that states deny passive support/safe haven to dangerous non-state groups. These seem to me almost insuperable practical problems. The UK or US will not respond to a nuclear attack of unknown origin by devastating every state that might plausibly have aided the perpetrators. Nor will it be feasible for the Western powers to police all areas where weak or uncooperative states enable non-state actors to operate. For these reasons, I fear the age of deterrence has ended and the age of pre-emption has only begun. * Terrorist groups need not "get" nuclear arms from states. Even if states are now the only source of these weapons, there is no reason to think this will always be the case. Active state support is not required to supply criminals with guns. As the cost of various WMD technologies decrease, they will be within the means of non-state actors. [Ben A.: 7/2/07 23:37]


	Preaching to the Choir, Extreme Edition I spent this Friday evening at BAM's movie theater. Michael Moore's Sicko is one of the films now playing there. On the steps of the BAM building stood a couple of young people dressed in white doctors' coats. They asked passers-by if they had come to see Sicko and then proceeded to ask if they wanted materials on the question of national health insurance. As it turns out, they worked for some Socialist group (I forget the exact name). Now, what percentage of people who live in BAM's catchment area do you suppose support national health insurance? 90%? 95%? Now, further select for people who spend their Friday nights at BAM; and not just at BAM, but seeing a Michael Moore movie about the American healthcare system? I don't think the question these folks ought to ask themselves is "how many converts did we make?", but rather "did we in fact meet more than three people not already converted?" [Ben H.: 7/2/07 08:11]


	Multipolar MAD From even before Robert McNamara came up with the idea of "Mutually Assured Destruction", brainboxes at places like RAND have dedicated a tremendous amount of grey matter to game theoretic analysis of nuclear doctrine. Now that we live, as you point out Doug, in a world with numerous nuclear powers, and we face the likelihood that the numbers of nuclear-armed states will grow, the doctrine clearly needs an overhaul. Yet, I have neither heard nor read very much on this question. Do you guys have any ideas? For example, should we promulgate a notion of nuclear "joint-and-several liability" for violators and non-signatories of the NNPT? If there is a nuclear attack on the US, all the members of this group will be held responsible in the absence of immediately available, clear and convincing exculpatory evidence. Or, if all the countries were are worried about are Muslim, maybe we explicitly make Muslim holy sites hostage to good nuclear behavior? More ideas, my fellow junior Herman Kahns?? [Ben H.: 7/1/07 10:43]


	Retards You're right, the U.K. is lucky that its latest bunch of Pakistani attackers were retards. What's more troubling is that the Pakistani government knows its power is seriously threatened by barbarian clans. The risk of the outright lunatics taking power in Gaza never got much media play until it happened. But the danger is limited there because Gaza is a dung hill. In Pakistan it's unlimited, because they've got nukes. The threat of nuclear terrorism varies exponentially with the number of barbarian countries that have nukes, because you can't know with certainty who sold the bomb to the bombers. Right now, I gather that nuclear attackers would be assumed to have been equipped by North Korea or missing bits of the ex-Soviet stockpile. But when Iran gets the bomb, it's much harder to know with certainty where to point the finger, and if the barbarians get all of Pakistan's bombs, forget about it. [Doug: 7/1/07 04:05]


	Thought for Today I lack the courage of my cynicism. While I go through life getting to say "I told you so", it is usually myself I am addressing. [Ben H.: 7/1/07 00:20]


	We are really lucky that those out to destroy our civilization are, for the most part, retards. Now, why England or the US keeps allowing retarded primitives to immigrate and establish little Third World enclaves puzzles me. I spent much of last week in the UK and only came home on Thursday because I had to attend to an investor meeting and Friday's quarter-end. Had a stayed in London, I would have been present for a terrorist scare for the third time in two years. I wouldn't then blame the UK if it chose not to admit me for future visits! [Ben H.: 6/30/07 16:34]


	iPhone Mania My office building hosts an AT&T Wireless store. When I arrive at work at 5:30 this morning, two dweeby-looking dudes had plopped themselves down in lawnchairs on the sidewalk in front of the store. The iPhone mania had begun. Now, if you aim at nothing more than obtaining some scarce good, staking out the first place on line means that you've screwed up. You've come way too early. When the rest of my team arrived, between 8 and 9, they reported that the line had grown to maybe a dozen people. Just before the 6pm release time, we went down to take another look. The line now contained several hundred dweeby people and was attended by two news crews. I wondered what the news crew would ask the proud owner of the first iPhone. "Sir, so now that you have you iPhone who are you going to call first?" "Mmmm, I don't know..." "Your mother maybe?" "Oh, no, I'll see her as soon as I get home!" [Ben H.: 6/29/07 18:26]


	Sorry, I meant to imply that the guy followed up a hit with a miss. Both the hit and the miss are interesting. That a white professor -- in Madison, Wisconsin, no less! -- can disavow the line that anything involving blacks is authentic and hence irreproachable, is a good sign. As for his miss, it struck me that it's entirely explained by the typical way philosophers read novels. "Satire always has an intellectual point. The point here seems to be that war is a bad thing." Leave it to a philosopher to tear through the humor, looking for the logical kernel inside. Can't humor be valuable even when it's tied up with questionable moral content? ("Borat" was both deeply funny and deeply mean.) No, for philosophers the Serious Stuff in a work counts for infinitely more than the Aesthetic Stuff. A judgment that goes back to Plato, who figured (if I remember correctly) it would be safest to just outlaw fiction entirely. [Doug: 6/29/07 07:29]


	Imprecision The only bullseyes I really meant was the "My Humps" quote. I haven't even read Catch 22. His comments on it made me think of some Vonnegut I had read, however -- not so much the anti-militarism but the sneering immorality posing as moral superiority. And Speaking of Not Reading Catch 22 Is there some kind of designation for the "in high school or never" class of books? I missed "Lord of the Flies" and "The Scarlet Letter" myself. [Ben A.: 6/28/07 21:46]


	... Slightly Off The Mark, In My Opinion This Lester Hunt fellow certainly shares your pet peeve about sardonic anti-war fiction (I'm thinking of your hatred for MAS*H). I agree with those counts in his indictment of Catch 22 having to do with an excess of pages and a dearth of tricks. I don't agree that "the tone is wrong" or that the book is "ignoble". Rather, I agree only insofar as every novel must be judged as its author's all-encompassing testament about the universe, from heaven through the world to hell. Only if we judge Catch 22 as such can we conclude that Joseph Heller is blinkered, petty, ignoble, etc. If instead we take it as his impression of one salient aspect of life during wartime, then I think we have to grant that the author found his calling; he has a great knack for that kind of sardonic writing. He certainly doesn't help his case by dragging on his impression for hundreds of pages -- the closer you get to War and Peace's length, the more you beg comparison with it. He should have taken a lesson in brevity from Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner": From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. [Doug: 6/28/07 13:03]


	Bullseye Lester Hunt, a philosophy professor I will be reading more of, writes: You may remember a rap hit of 2005, “My Humps,” (see also here) by a group calling themselves Blackeyed Peas. One thing that distinguished this thing from all the other obvious candidates for the the office of Worst Song Ever was that it managed to be both artistically and morally bad. This by way of preface to a critique of the most overrated novel of the 20th Century. [Ben A.: 6/28/07 08:40]


	Tunguska Event A scientific team claims to have found a lake gouged out by a meteorite from the Tunguska Event (in Siberia in 1908). There are skeptics, though. "In my opinion, they certainly haven't provided any conclusive evidence it's an impact structure," commented Dr Gareth Collins, a Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) research fellow at Imperial College London, UK. He added: "The impact cratering community does not accept structures as craters unless there is evidence of high temperatures and high pressures. That requires evidence of rocks that have been melted or rocks that have been ground up by the impact." My question is the obvious one: how do I join the impact cratering community? [Doug: 6/26/07 16:15]


	Squeaker The political turmoil at Le Monde threatened to get worse today; if the journalists refused to approve the new president/vice-president ticket with at least 60% of the vote, as they refused to renew Colombani's mandate a few weeks ago, there would be nobody running the group, and then apparently the state would have picked someone off the street to run it in the interim. But they did approve it, with 61.7% of the vote. This is especially good news for Dao since she gets along well with the vice-president-elect, whose corporate strategy is going to be adopted (as opposed to the president's, but that's another story). [Doug: 6/25/07 14:41]


	The Award for Outstanding Dedication to Appliance Repair Goes To... ...Yuri, from Brooklyn Appliance. Recently, my refigerator died. For years, the refrigerator has stood empty for years, except for a bottle of soda and my holy bottle of transcontinental capers, making any technical fault of little relevance. A few weeks back, I hosted a barbecue at my house, which left the refrigerator and freezer full of meat. Right after the barbecue but before I disposed of the leftovers, the appliance died, leaving me to discover upon returning home from work one day a sloppy mess of ripening and deliquescing sausages. For the record, I am left without a single working appliance in my kitchen, the stove, oven and microwave having long since given up the ghost. I can do with out those, but I draw the line at going without a refrigerator. The refrigerator repairman came and diagnosed the problem, which would require a second visit to fix. On the appointed day, he came again, but when I arrived back home, the refrigerator was still dead. I called Yuri the repairman. "I am not sure what is problem," he said. "I want to come back again and bring my brother so he can take look." I told him that if indeed the refrigerator was so far gone that it demanded the attention of a specialist, I might well just buy a new refrigerator. "No, no, no!" Yuri insisted. "I want one more day to try to fix. This is really big puzzle. This is most interesting case I have all year. I want to fix. It is really bothering me! Don't worry about cost, if I don't fix, I charge you nothing. I want to figure this out!" The second and final round of Yuri vs the refrigerator is scheduled for Thursday, when I return from Amsterdam. [Ben H.: 6/24/07 19:10]


	"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" Singer Dies From the IHT: NEW YORK: Hank Medress, whose vocals with the doo wop group the Tokens helped propel their irrepressible single "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" to the top of the charts and who produced hits with other groups, has died of lung cancer. He was 68. In a related story, the Crimson reports that Harvard's a cappella groups are staging a memorial vigil in the yard, singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" one after the other for 96 hours straight. Luckily there are enough such groups that each one's turn only comes up once a day. [Doug: 6/24/07 15:49]


	Mood Enhancement Idea The following activity may have enhanced my mood only because I am so starved for things pastoral and practical; I haven't left the city in a long while, and my idea of moving from the abstract to the concrete is taking a homeomorphism from a Cantor space to a Euclidean space. Readers and writers of this blog are probably more likely than the average person to be in this same boat, though, so here's the activity -- shelling peas. I was surprised by how enjoyable this was. And I imagine fresh peas are coming on-line in the U.S. now as they are here. [Doug: 6/23/07 06:23]


	Blair Versus the Press It is time someone said it. Sentence of the Day A one-line review of "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince": I believe in you Severus [Ben A.: 6/21/07 20:53]


	It's As If The Colonel Divulged His Secret Recipe ... if, that is, he coated his chicken with ground-up liver. Le Monde publishes the recipe of a famous Parisian steak-only restaurant's mythic and mysterious sauce. (I'd go check it out but it's in the 17th, and I'm no more eager to go there from the 13th than I was to go the UWS from the East Village ...) [Doug: 6/21/07 16:57]


	If your co-workers are like me, they will be aware of the TV commercials you alluded to, but not 100% sure on the name of the actress who starred in them. You should keep in mind that your name-recollection powers are ten times better than the average white-collar worker's. Hence, incidentally, about sixty times better than mine. On the other hand my jingle-recollection powers are decent, as you can see in this fragment of a rap song I was writing (qua Obstreperous B): "Yo I did my time and I made my amends / Now it's time to get back into life with Depends ..." [Doug: 6/21/07 10:26]


	Sometime It Is Frustrating To Work With Only Kids and Foreigners When the market trades down steadily on consistent supply of paper, people often say that "the market is leaking." EM has experienced such a condition over the last two days. Yesterday, seeing benchmark Argentina bonds slip yet another half-point, I exclaimed, "this market is leaking worse than June Allyson's bladder!" Crickets. Now, tell me, was I being obscure or merely suffering from the consequences of surrounding myself with the foreign-born and the under-30? [Ben H.: 6/21/07 07:36]


	Belgian Arabesque You forgot the best feature. A true Middle-Eastern carpet's purchase price would go partly to fund some shoeless peasant's acquisition of a burqa and chastity belt the better to oppress his daughter; and partly to buy airtime for radio spots announcing a carpet store's umpteenth "going out of business sale" in umpteen months. On the other hand, by buying the Belgian carpet you supporting nothing worse than continental trade-unionism. [Ben H.: 6/20/07 17:49]


	The Ten Most Accurately Rated Artists In Rock History If I haven't been reading John & Belle's blog much recently it's not because its value as a time-wasting URL clearinghouse has dropped. Proof: today's link to The Ten Most Accurately Rated Artists In Rock History. [Addendum: as if to add to the luster of the above-linked article, MSNBC has just put on line a dull overrated bands piece] [Doug: 6/20/07 11:49]


	Le Mot Juste I place much importance on finding exactly the right pejorative term for politicians, which is why I'm so frustrated by Hillary. "Bitch" and "shrew" are too harsh; that's not the dominant facet of her personality, even if it catches the light now and again. An equally important facet, at least since her "listening tour" days, is her willingness to act in any way that seems likely to increase her approval rating. In the (admittedly few) televised shots I've seen of her recently, she seems to be thinking to herself "Must act folksy ... must act folksy ... ." It pains me that I can't come up with the right word to capture this. On the other hand, I think I've nailed Al Gore (dork) and G.W. Bush (dunce). [Doug: 6/20/07 11:32]


	Mazel Tov Congratulations on going solar. When I think my mathematics career is heading towards stillbirth (pretty often these days) I sometimes think I should reinvent myself as a green energy impresario, since that seems to be the bubble of the moment (unless the moment has already passed). Qualifications: Harvard physics degree, magna cum laude. Hard to argue with that! And there's no way anyone can prove that all I retain from my time there is a decent Hans und Franz accent. Sort of on the same home-improvement topic, I'm quite proud of an item I recently acquired -- a 100% Belgian polypropylene carpet: The carpet cost about one eighth what a handmade Middle Eastern one would cost, and is superior in so many ways -- the design is symmetric to a tolerance of about a half-centimeter, none of its price will be siphoned off to the Taliban, and it gives the whole room a nice new-car smell from the polypropylene. Thanks Conforama! [Doug: 6/20/07 11:20]


	It's Not Easy Being Green Installation of a solar power system on my house has finally reached a successful conclusion. It took a mere 5 months! At least 80% of the time related to applying for and waiting for approval of various permits. Then again, New York State paid for around 60% of the cost. Bureaucracy giveth and bureaucracy taketh away. Whether the system generates nearly as much power as advertised, only time will tell. [Ben H.: 6/20/07 06:53]