Month: April 2011

Bill James explores why our society churns out more star athletes than star writers:

We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don't genu­inely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day—fudging just a little on the definition of the word need. We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes. We have gotten to be very, very good at developing the same.

Stephen Von Worley zooms in on the past decade’s growth and decline, using the difference between the 2000 and 2010 census reports:

In urban areas, deep blue indicates that the population doubled (or more), pure red means that everyone left, grey denotes no change, and the intermediate tones represent the spectrum of increases and decreases in-between.

The new tract developments appear to be sucking the life out the older neighborhoods, which bear the scarlet tints of waning population… Ah, the classic flight to the suburbs, but with a twist! Click through and look closely, and at the very center of the biggest cities – within a stone’s throw of downtown – you’ll see a tiny, resurgent dot of blue. Apparently, at some point in recent history, a home address amongst the skyscrapers became desirable again. Even in the City of Detroit, which dropped a full quarter of its citizens in the last decade, downtown is flashing the signs of a comeback.

(Image: Detroit)

Shakesyear tracks the Bard's toilet humor:

I think that when today’s stand-ups call fart jokes “hack,” they mean that they’re an easy, lazy laugh. You’re a hack if you resort to them because it means you can’t be bothered to write better material. And “better material” means verbal material. Stand-up comedy is fundamentally about language. …

I suggest [Shakespeare] has a stand-up’s sensibility; he’s not afraid to be juvenile, but he won’t do hack. South Park’s Terrance and Phillip are juvenile, but they are also hack: when they want a laugh, they give us the sound—the raspberry—and pretty much all you can do with the sound is express contempt, provoke embarrassment, or punctuate. The Bronx cheer is nonverbal by its very nature, and nobody in world culture is more all about words than Shakespeare. As far as I can tell, there’s only one passage in which Shakespeare may be calling for the raspberry. Naturally, it’s in Hamlet.

Part Two delves into the real details.

Ron Rosenbaum gets real on James Joyce's "masterpiece":

Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it. … The thing that's so galling is, of course, that all Joyce's tired and antiquated modernist tricks had long been anticipated by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that amazing 18^th-century novel that eclipses Ulysses in every way and shows how we've lowered the bar for anointing innovative literary "geniuses" ever since.

I have to say I have tried reading Ulysses several times and had exactly the same reaction every time. And that's the thing about "difficult" art. It's often, though not always, a synonym for bad. My own personal breaking of this rule: T.S. Eliot.

Kwame Dawes considers exile:

For many Americans, the desire to expunge all memory of the old country amounted to a new expression of home. Rejecting all other loyalties, the pledge offers, they embraced America—starting from scratch, embracing exile. … The internet has effectively turned exile into something quite different—something that can be confusing. Many read routinely the newspapers of their different “homes”, they were in direct contact with relatives through Skype and facebook, they had chances to travel there, they could find all the food from their spaces as they could want.

Wenatchee, Washington, 8.15 am

Scott Adams has a devious idea.

Cassie Murdoch directs us to Conflict History, an interactive timeline of wars around the globe:

There you can get lost inside a fascinating world map that pinpoints the location of pretty much every conflict or war that's happened in history. Scroll through the decades, and you'll learn an awful lot. For instance, I figured out that Greenland is historically a pretty chill place.

Bruce Handy gets scientific on Trump's scalp:

My baldly-stated thesis: this could be evidence of a rarely-sighted, possibly unprecedented “double comb-over.” It looks as if a length of hair growing from the part on the left side of Trump’s pate has been combed left-to-right over the crown of his head, while a second length of hair, growing from the back of his head, has been combed back-to-front over the first length of hair. Salon-strength hair products likely play a role in the final construction of this lattice-like structure—which could also explain the “ship’s prow” look one sometimes sees in side views of Trump.

(Photo by David Shankbone/Wikipedia)