Month: November 2010

Ben Casnocha draws this moral:

I believe a key reason so many people on the road to mastery call it quits is not because drawing a beautiful owl in pencil is superhumanly hard. It's because they thought it would be easy.

Steve Mirsky talks to Mary Roach about her new book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void:

On shorter jaunts into space, some of the stuff humans produce is simply chucked from the ship. The physiologically confusing term of art for one such action is the “urine dump.” And, believe it or not, space pee is pretty. “A number of astronaut memoirs mentioned how these flash-frozen droplets, illuminated, would look like this silvery snowstorm,” Roach told me. “I think three different astronauts mentioned how beautiful the urine dump was.”

A reader writes:

You said, "I didn't note Sarah Palin's verbal screw-up when she called South Korea North Korea in an interview with Glenn Beck."

You didn't?  What's this?

Damn. Busted right open. I guess what I meant to write was that I didn't make a big deal out of it (which is how my addled, over-blogged brain could write the sentence above). A simple post with a sigh attached isn't that big a deal, but I concede the point. Another writes:

What's even more bizarre about Palin's defense of her gaffe is that it was her Thanksgiving message. If she posted that at 4:35pm, does that mean she spent the whole day searching YouTube and crafting her response to a verbal gaffe? I can just see her in the study, pecking on her computer with the kids standing around cheering her on. I can hear her whispering under her breath, ala Bristol, "This will be like a big middle finger to all those people that hate me." This was the most inspiring message she could come up with for a national holiday?

Another:

On Thanksgiving Day, the ONLY thing everyone agreed with is when my 80 year old feeble mother-in-law shouted, "Sarah Palin an idiot!" In a multi-generational gathering of 30 rural Ohio Republicans, Mom was almost applauded at the dinner table. From the men who were in the garage drinking beer and frying the turkey to the wives and girlfriends who were in the kitchen, Palin is over. I was surprised to see her lose this group of FNC viewers.

Nick Carr wasn't happy with Virginia Heffernan's characterization of his view on attention spans. Rob Horning nails the real problem (of semantics) on the head:

[T]he metaphors built into an “attention span” or “paying attention” or the “attention economy” imagine a scarce resource rather than a quality of consciousness, a mindfulness. … It may be that the notion of an attention economy is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing into being the problems it posits through the way it frames experience. It may not be constructive to regard attention as scarce or something that can be wasted and let those conceptions govern our relation to our consciousness.

A reader writes:

Your darling Pet Shop Boys are guilty, too!

"Dictation being forced in Afghanistan
Revolution in South Africa taking a stand
People in Eurasia on the brink of oppression
I hope it's going to be alright
I hope the music plays forever"

Yeesh!

Another writes:

If you're going to nominate Aaron's favorite pop artist, fair's fair.

I'm including this as a token gesture of marital good will. But it's not fair. The song is actually expressly anti-political. Its brief set-up of political conflict and trauma is a prelude to an ode to mere music and its power to transcend everything. It was, as Neil Tennant put it in the Concrete album, a "rave classic" designed for druggy disco dancing and specifically about the priority of music over politics. Ergo it is a refutation of the very idea of pop singers having a social or political message. Hence the rather hilarious deadpan baby montage as a video.

And that has always been the PSB position (albeit with occasional libertarian protest songs like "Integral" or satire like "Shopping"). Moreover, a constant theme in the PSB oeuvre has been mockery of the pretensions of pop stars who think they are profound agents of social change or relevance. You hear that in the brilliant satire of Eminem in "The Night I Fell In Love", the mockery of Bono's pretensions in the PSB cover of "Where The Streets Have No Name" (the video itself is a work of pure genius), and the classic evisceration of Sting in "How Can You Be Taken Seriously?" Here are the full lyrics of that song:

You live upon a stage, and everyone's agreed
You're the brightest hope by far that anyone can see
So when you take the limelight you can guarantee
You're gaining fame and claiming credibility

Tell me baby, are you gonna get high as a kite?
Tell me baby, are you gonna let it happen every night
How can you expect to be taken seriously?

You live within the law, and everyone assumes
You must find this a bore, and try something new
You're an intellectual giant, an authority
To preach and teach the whole world about ecology …

You live within the headlines, so everyone can see
You're supporting every new cause and meeting royalty
You're another major artist on a higher plane
Do you think they'll put you in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame?

Tell me baby, how you generate longevity
Tell me baby, how you really hate publicity
How can you expect to be taken seriously?

Wow. Way to get me riled up on a holiday weekend. First Palin's Facebook, now this.

Adam Goodheart has a wonderful little essay on how Honest Abe joined a cultural revolution in the America of the 1850s:

By the mid-1850s, talk of a “beard movement” was sweeping the nation. In 1857, an intrepid journalist strolled through Boston’s streets, conducting a statistical survey: of the 543 men he tallied, no fewer than 338 had full, bushy beards, while nearly all the rest sported lesser facial hair of various sorts. Only four were “men of the old school, smooth shaven, with the exception of slight tufted promontories jutting down from either ear, as if designed as a compromise measure between the good old doctrine and modern radicalism.”

As that remark suggests, antebellum beards bristled with political connotations. American newspapers reported that in Europe, beards were seen as “dangerous” tokens of revolutionary nationalism, claiming that the Austrian and Neapolitan monarchies even went so far as to ban them. In England they were associated with the sudden burst of martial fervor during the Crimean War. When the trend reached America, connotations of radicalism and militarism traveled with it, spanning the Mason-Dixon Line. It was no accident that the timid Northern Democrats who sympathized with slaveholders – like President James Buchanan – were called “doughfaces.” Meanwhile, the Republicans’ first standard-bearer, John C. Frémont in 1856, had also been the first bearded presidential candidate in American history. (The most famous antebellum beard of all, though, was John Brown’s.)

Lincoln’s beard was only part of what made his physical appearance seem like a break with the presidential past. Compare the Alschuler photograph to Mathew Brady’s portraits of Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, both considered handsome men in their time. Each wears a high white collar with a tightly wrapped neck stock. Lincoln, with Whitmanesque nonchalance, wears his tie loose and his low, soft collar slightly open. The difference looks negligible to modern eyes, but in a 19th-century context, it was like changing out of a business suit and into a polo shirt…

Lincoln’s decision inaugurated what might be called the Bearded Age in the nation’s political history: for the next half century, only one man would be elected president without benefit of facial hair.

It's enchanting to think of Lincoln as a Whitmanesque bohemian, setting new trends of informality and change in American culture. The NYT also has a slideshow of Lincolnian facial hair.

A reader writes:

Unbelievable footage of some dude doing mind-blowing stunts on a bike in Scotland.  And I say this as a guy who hasn't been on a stunt bike since the 6th grade.  Slick production too.

The Reverse Dictionary will guess it:

[T]ype a phrase like “being tried twice for the same crime” or a category like “large birds” to receive a helpful list of suggestions.

Mac McClelland reports on the broken justice system on Native American reservations and why many hire their own "bruisers-for-hire":

[Ruben is s]ix foot three, 225 pounds. Neck like a waist. Friendly as you please. When I pointed to each of the healed-up gashes on his fists and asked what they were from, he replied, "Teeth. Teeth. These are all from teeth." He charges $1,000 for every one that he knocks out of a person's head. It's the same price for each bone he breaks in a face, a practice that's cost him a couple of knuckles. …

The rate of violent crime among Native Americans is twice the national average (PDF); on some reservations, it's 20 times higher. … A quarter of American Indians live below the poverty level; Ruben is on food stamps. His casino royalty check last year was for $8.