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by Unknown on Friday 16 January 2015

Althouse


It's really painful to wince for 3 and a half minutes, but I'm afraid you must look at this.

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 07:30 AM PST



"Secretary of State John Kerry is in Paris after the White House apologized for not sending a high-ranking official to a massive unity rally after the terrorist attacks there," and he's using James Taylor to convey the message "You've Got a Friend."

I love James Taylor, so this is really difficult for me. But of all the douchebaggery in the history of the world... this takes the gateau!

AND: I felt compelled to write some parody lyrics, but then I heard Meade typing away. "Are you writing parody lyrics?" I ask. More typing. Meade: "First!" I see he's written:
I'll come running
to appease you again
Is parody even needed:
Close your eyes and think of me and soon I will be there
to brighten up even your darkest nights.
I'm overwhelmed by the absurdity of the idea that on one's darkest nights, it would help to visualize John Kerry.
Hey, ain't it good to know that you've got a friend?
People can be so cold.
They'll hurt you and desert you.
They'll take your soul if you let them,
Oh, but don't you let them.
Indeed. Kerry was cold. Don't let him take your soul! Is that what our dear James was thinking as he sang those holy words with his honestly bald head so steadfastly bowed down?

ADDED: James Taylor has helped Obama before. There was this from October 2012:



Can't you just feel the moonshine?

The boy came back to say that he didn't come back.

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 07:00 AM PST

He took it all back.
"I did not die. I did not go to Heaven... Please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short…. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention...."
 (And yes, as was always there in plain sight, the boy and his father's name is: Malarkey.)

ADDED: From the OED entry for "malarkey":
Etymology: Origin unknown.

A surname Mullarkey , of Irish origin, exists, but no connection is known between any person of that name and this word. Another suggested etymology is from modern Greek μαλακός soft, or its derivative μαλακία , in fig. use (see malacia n.).
From the OED entry for "malicia":
Etymology: In sense 1 < classical Latin malacia a disorder of the stomach, especially as experienced by pregnant women (glossed by Oxf. Lat. Dict. as 'sickness, nausea' but interpreted by earlier authors as denoting a craving for unusual or unnatural foods) < ancient Greek μαλακία softness, homosexual desire, sickness < μαλακός soft (see malaco- comb. form) + -ία -ia suffix1. 
Whoa!

"The French authorities are moving aggressively to rein in speech supporting terrorism..."

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 06:45 AM PST

"... employing a new law to mete out tough prison sentences in a crackdown that is stoking a free-speech debate after last week's attacks in Paris. Those swept up under the new law include a 28-year-old man of French-Tunisian background who was sentenced to six months in prison after he was found guilty of shouting support for the attackers as he passed a police station in Bourgoin-Jalieu on Sunday. A 34-year-old man who on Saturday hit a car while drunk, injured the other driver and subsequently praised the acts of the gunmen when the police detained him was sentenced Monday to four years in prison. All told, up to 100 people are under investigation for making or posting comments that support or try to justify terrorism..."

The NYT reports. 

(Photograph at the link shows the coffin of one of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre: It has cartoons drawn all over it.)

Mark Zuckerberg's book club isn't working out too well.

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 06:40 AM PST

"See, when Zuckerberg actually hosted the first book club 'meeting' — a Facebook Q&A yesterday with the book's author, Moises Naím — he faced a problem familiar to far more plebeian bookclubs: Hardly anybody showed up. (And of those who did, few had actually read the book.)"
"We're kicking off our Q&A now with Moisés Naím, author of The End of Power," advised whatever poor Facebook employee runs the "Year of Books" community page. "As a reminder, please keep all questions and comments relevant to the book."

Among the 137 "questions" that followed: several requests for a pirated PDF of the book, a conspiracy theory involving Saudi social media and the price of oil and a photo of a Maltese wearing a frilly dress, along with many more on-topic, but still fairly stupid, questions.

The Pope needs no telephone.

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 06:25 AM PST

A great comic juxtaposition by Drudge:

After the massacre, Mark Zuckerberg justifies Facebook censorship.

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 06:33 AM PST

"It wasn't just a terrorist attack about just trying to do some damage and make people afraid and hurt people. This was specifically about people's freedom of expression and ability to say what they want."
"That really gets to the core of what Facebook and the internet are, I think, and what we're all here to do. We really stand up and try to make it so that everyone can have as much of a voice as possible," he said.
The sleight of hand is: the greatest good for the greatest number. For "everyone" to have "as much" freedom of expression "as possible," some people need some silencing.
"There are limits and restrictions on these things, but across the board we generally are always trying to fight to help as many people as possible share as much as they want."
Again — "as many as possible" and "as much as they want" — this is the idea of the sum total of speech, shared by large numbers.
Click for more »

Vox is pleased at getting over 500,000 page views for re-posting a bunch of old stories.

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 05:39 AM PST

"In a five-day period, we ran 88 of these [2+-month-old] stories, and collectively they brought in over 500,000 readers. That was great to see... "
What was interesting — though not completely unexpected — was that no one even seemed to notice that we were flooding the site with previously published content. A lot of the articles were enthusiastically shared by people who had shared them the first time around, too. No one seemed gripped by a sense of deja vu, or, if they were, they didn't mention it.
Vox is so pleased that they're adopting a policy of re-running old stories as if they weren't old, to give them another chance to win traffic. Here's the spin on why this is a good — as opposed to lame and lazy — policy:
On the modern web, content tends to arrive via miscellaneous streams rather than coherent chunks. So the meaning of strict chronology is breaking down regardless of what publishers do. If we can use our archives as a way to deliver more great pieces to today's audiences, then that's a huge win — for us and for them.
Let me re-spin that in the opposite direction: The internet is completely incoherent anyway, and nobody's going to notice, so why shouldn't we take advantage of this strategy?

Question: Why call attention to the strategy? Answer: To immunize themselves from criticism if anyone ever notices and cares. Or: Because they actually do think they're very clever and deserve credit for this journalistic efficiency.

The Menopause of the "Monologues."

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 04:39 AM PST

"The Vagina Monologues" is — at long last — not a fertile text.

Young people have moved on and need to write their own plays, express their own ideas. They should feel free to steal the secret of the structure of Eve Ensler's play: 1. a set consisting of nothing but stools (it's cheap, actors conserve energy, and there's none of that crossing about the stage that requires directing and rehearsal), 2. lines read from index cards (so no one has to memorize lines or even pretend that they're not just reading), and 3. a series of monologues (so the actors just take turns instead of having to relate to each other, and the audience is distracted from the absence of a story arc).

When I wake up in the morning, I look at Memeorandum to get up to speed on what stories everyone's blogging about, and I see this one about Mount Holyoke ending its annual V-Day production of "The Vagina Monologues" because — as one blogger has put it — "it's not feminist enough," and I think: 1.  This is the ready-made bloggable story of the day (the story that prompts commenters to profess incredulity about its not yet having been blogged, so that I feel dogged into blogging it to keep you from thinking I'm out of touch), 2. The usual anti-feminist crowd is going to blog this the wrong way (so even though I could resist the pressure to blog it because it's the bloggable story of the day, it feels like my job to push back the inevitable misblogging), and 3. "The Vagina Monologues" was ALWAYS a bad play (certainly undeserving of annual productions everywhere, so congratulations to the young people who finally got the guts to say NO).

"Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone."

Posted: 15 Jan 2015 03:05 PM PST

The distance: 1 mile. The place: Silver Spring. The children: a 10-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. The parents:  a climate-science consultant and a physicist at the National Institutes of Health.
The Meitivs say that on Dec. 20, a CPS worker required Alexander to sign a safety plan pledging he would not leave his children unsupervised until the following Monday, when CPS would follow up. At first he refused, saying he needed to talk to a lawyer, his wife said, but changed his mind when he was told his children would be removed if he did not comply.

Google gives up on Glass.

Posted: 15 Jan 2015 02:50 PM PST

"Google has tried to present this announcement as just another step in the evolution of an amazing innovation. But make no mistake - Google Glass is dead, at least in its present form."
As I found when I spent a couple of months wearing Glass, it has a number of really useful aspects - in particular the camera. There is however one huge disadvantage - it makes its users look daft, and that meant that it was never going to appeal to a wide audience.

"maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it."

Posted: 15 Jan 2015 02:29 PM PST

"i've been watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY regularly for four decades, but it wasn't until a few years ago i started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays i decided to make my move. why now? I don't know. maybe i wasn't old enough to touch it until now. maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my — or anyone else's — help, but if it's not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it's tied for first. meaning IF i was finally going to touch it, i'd better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring...."

Writes Steven Soderbergh, and if you go to that link, you can watch his re-edit of "2001."

There's still not enough snow for skiing, and we do have those ice skates we bought 4 years ago...

Posted: 15 Jan 2015 01:26 PM PST

... that year when Lake Mendota froze into black ice.

But now I'm a little afraid to go out on the ice. And yet, if we don't skate today — it's finally sunny and it's a warm 32° — I'm never going to skate again. Completely insecure, I accomplished my goal: some forward motion and no falling.

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