There we were, Friday night, out under the open, darkening sky at 8 p.m. in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The play was "The Importance of Being Earnest," and the weather forecast was: thunderstorms. As the winds stirred up the surrounding foliage, we of Row O had to strain to catch the Wildean witticisms. Lightning flashed, seemingly synchronized with emotional outbursts on stage. A particularly striking strike perfectly accompanied one of Cecily's exclamations, perhaps "Horrid Political Economy! Horrid Geography! Horrid, horrid German!"

The play continued, the actors utterly ignoring the wind and the lightning and even the rain, until the lights came up and a voice over a loudspeaker announced that a rain break was needed, at which point the actors halted, the audience wildly cheered them, and we all filed out to our separate shelters. The actorly voice on the loudspeaker radiated assurance of knowledge of the weather patterns: The break would be short. And it was. The play resumed, overlapping with the last minute or 2 of what we'd just seen. Perhaps Lady Bracknell repeated the advice "Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon.  Only people who can't get into it do that."

We didn't get very much further, only to Miss Prism's breakdown into tears. The loudspeaker voice knew that the lightning was about to get dangerous. I guess it wasn't before, when I'd taken comfort in the thought that the big lighting towers would take the hit and not some random audience member like me, not that I'd have enjoyed the play so much if someone else had taken the jolt, even that lady in the red shirt who got back from intermission late and walked across part of the downstage as Act II began. The happy ending for all was in sight, and it was after 11 p.m., but no one seemed willing to leave. Was it camaraderie with the actors or the fear that if we took the woodland walk from the theater down to the parking lot, we'd make good targets for that dangerous lightning?

We got back to our wet seats, and Miss Prism had to redo her waterworks. "In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself...." And soon all the mysteries were solved, the 3 sets of lovers had embraced in true love —  "At last!" — and Jack (AKA Ernest) had realized for "the first time in [his] life the vital importance of being earnest." The audience was overjoyed, not just at the perfectly happy ending but at the heroic thunderstorm performance of the actors, and we gave a loud, elated — wild/Wilde — standing ovation for everyone, including ourselves. Did we not deserve it too, we who sat in the rain, strained to hear through the rustling of leaves, we stood around for 2 intermissions and 2 storm breaks? We were kind of heroes too, heroes of a passive sort, and we were giddy by then, after midnight.

We tripped down the woodland path to the car and fiddled with the radio to get the baseball game  from the Pacific Time Zone to keep us going for the hour-long car ride home. It's the 6th inning. What's the score? The Giants already have 16 hits!

It was a good night to get out to the theater.


"What shall we do after dinner? Go to a theatre?"/"Oh no! I loathe listening."

"Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name 'Mouse.' This is merely Mr. Mouse's surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Obviously, Mr. Mouse is simply a man with a loving wife, Mrs. Mouse (a female human), and a normal Homo sapiens existence, just like the rest of us. He even owns a dog called Pluto! How many mice do you know who own dogs?"

Reaction to "Hello Kitty is not a cat..."

ADDED: There! This is the post that pushed me over the line to make a Hello Kitty tag. Going back into the archive to do the necessary retrospective tagging, I find 4 other posts:

1. January 3, 2006: "Cute!" looked at Natalie Angier's "The Cute Factor." She said:

Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in Japan, where it goes by the name "kawaii" and has infiltrated the most masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines on their dashboards....

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. "Cuteness is used to soften up the vertical society," he said, "to soften power relations and present authority without being threatening."

Watch out for cute.

2. June 24, 2007: "Is it wrong to tattoo your dog?"

On the positive side: The dog was under anesthesia. On the negative side: It was a tattoo of a cat, and not just any cat -- Hello Kitty.

Yeah, I need to update that, with the news that Hello Kitty is known to be not a cat, but a little girl. Good news for that dog. Also at that old post: likes to the Hello Kitty Hell blog and the Hello Kitty text, which I might want to re-take to try to get a better score, i.e., better than self-centered and evil.

(From the anti-Hello Kitty blog, Hello Kitty Hell, found via Metafilter.)

(And take the Hello Kitty test, which is cute and which told me people must think I'm self-centered and evil.)

3. July 17, 2013: "Does anyone in the Bible ever say 'hello'?" Somehow the last paragraph of this post is:

"Heil Hitler" is translated as "Hail Hitler." It's not "Hello Hitler," which seems edgily absurd. You could sing it to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," which has a comma, I might note, unlike Hello Kitty.

By the way, I put my fascism tag on this post after writing about the 2006 post.

4. April 25, 2014: "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist." Someone at Vox had written:

"RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!!," Avril tweeted. "I love Japanese culture...." In her defense, this kind of makes sense. Japanese pop does have a pretty camp vein running through it, one that "Hello Kitty" apes.

And I said:

"Hello Kitty" apes? I love those 3 words together, because I can picture "Hello Kitty" Apes... just like I can picture "King Kong" Kitties, but do not market a product called King Kong Kitties. That would be racist.

King Kong is not an ape. He is a... I want to say: He is a little boy. But I google "is King Kong fascist." That turns up a lot, including a book called — I know — "Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity," which quotes Theodor Adorno:

"While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person, just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber."

AND: I considered googling "Is Mickey Mouse fascist," but switched to "did Hitler like Mickey Mouse." I found many references to the Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a graphic memoir about his father, a Holocaust survivor, in which the father's memories have the Jewish characters drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. The second volume of "Maus" begins with a quote from a German newspaper article from the mid-1930s:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

ALSO: Here's "A Guide For the Purrplexed/How Maimonides explains the Hello Kitty controversy":

"Know that likeness is a certain relation between two things and that in cases where no relation can be supposed to exist between two things, no likeness between them can be represented to oneself," the old master wrote in his Guide For the Perplexed. "Similarly it behooves those who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of the Creator—namely, that He is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Him and to us in the same sense. According to what they think, the difference between these attributes and ours lies in the former being greater, more perfect, more permanent, or more durable than ours, so that His existence is more durable than our existence, His life more permanent than our life, His power greater than our power, His knowledge more perfect than our knowledge, and His will more universal than our will."

And that, of course, is wrong, because God is nothing like man. He hasn't a face or a temper or anything else we might recognize....

To paraphrase Maimonides, it behooves those who were outraged this week over Sanrio's revelation and who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of Hello Kitty—namely, that She is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Her and to us in the same sense.

"The mushroom brick is 'grown' by mixing together chopped-up corn husks with mycelium."

Wake me up when you actually grow a house. Right now the mushroom house is in the courtyard of an art gallery in NYC. So I think I'll just get very small and curl up for a long rest on my cushiony toadstool:



Here's a reading from R. Gordon Wasson, "The Hallucinogenic Fungi Of Mexico/An Inquiry Into The Origins of The Religious Idea Among Primitive Peoples" (1961):

Two psychiatrists who have taken the mushroom and known the experience in its full dimensions have been criticised in professional circles as being no longer "objective." Thus it comes about that we are all divided into two classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by our subjective experience, and those who have not taken the mushroom and are disqualified by their total ignorance of the subject! As for me, a simple layman, I am profoundly grateful to my Indian friends for having initiated me into the tremendous Mystery of the mushroom. In describing what happens, I shall be using familiar phrases that may seem to give you some idea of the bemushroomed state....

I shall take you now to the monolingual villages in the uplands of southern Mexico.... The men are appallingly given to the abuse of alcohol, but in their minds the mushrooms are utterly different, not in degree, but in kind. Of alcohol they speak with the same jocular vulgarity that we do. But about mushrooms they prefer not to speak at all, at least when they are in company and especially when strangers, white strangers, are present. If you are wise, you will talk about something, anything, else....

"Religious groups whose beliefs pervade their whole world view see everyone in terms of religion. Any assault they commit might be considered a federal crime," writes Noah Feldman, defending the 6th Circuit's reversal of the conviction in the Amish beard-cutting case.

The defendants in the Amish case asked the appellate court to rule that the law never applies to intra-religious disputes. This might have made sense as a matter of policy, but not as a legal matter in the case at hand. As the law is written, it covers hate crimes by co-religionists. The court instead pragmatically restricted the law's reach to cases where a religious motive predominates.

How do we know when people are co-religionists? Seemingly co-religionists have been attacking each other for thousands of years. Some of the worst disputes are over the scope of the religion — who's the heretic? — and the outsider's perception that they're in the same religion ignores the nature of the fight. Is it the same religion or different? It would be unwise to interpret the federal hate crime statute to force judges and juries to determine whether criminal defendants and their victims belong to the same religion. It's too close to having trials about religious orthodoxy. That's not what we do in America.

The 6th Circuit still leaves the courts looking into the minds of religionists and assessing the religiosity of their motivations, when it would be better to be "done with this business of judicially examining other people's faiths" (to quote the last line of my all-time favorite judicial opinion, Justice Jackson dissenting in United States v. Ballard). But we've got this federal hate-crimes statute, and it's stood up to judicial review, and what choice does an intermediate appellate court have but to muddle through?