Month: December 2011

A gem from 1994 that is timeless as it ever was:

On one point of fact, too abstruse to detail here, I was right (as it happens) and she was wrong. But she would not concede this and so, rather than be a bore, I gave her the point and made a slight bow of acknowledgment. She pierced me with a glance. ‘Bow lower,’ she commanded. With what I thought was an insouciant look, I bowed a little lower. ‘No, no – much lower!’ A silence had fallen over our group. I stooped lower, with an odd sense of having lost all independent volition. Having arranged matters to her entire satisfaction, she produced from behind her back a rolled-up Parliamentary order-paper and struck – no, she thwacked – me on the behind. I reattained the perpendicular with some difficulty. ‘Naughty boy,’ she sang out over her shoulder as she flounced away. Nothing that happened to the country in the next dozen years surprised me in the least.

My out-loud thoughts on the Iron Lady here.

Richard Rushfeld critiques a recent trend of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rewarding actors who star in okay-to-bad movies:

Ultimately, great performances are not about acting as a self-involved exercise unto itself, but about creating great, rich, unforgettable characters. And if a film has a great, rich, unforgettable character at its heart, audiences will forgive it a galaxy of sins. But if the film is forgettable, how unforgettable can the performance be? In recent years, Oscar has bestowed its favors for various reasons—some political, some artistic—on performances in a collection of films that were almost erased from the public imagination while they were still on the screen: The Reader, La Vie en Rose, Walk the Line, Crazy Heart, and Capote, to name a few. Despite the alleged brilliance at their hearts, the films have managed to be forgotten. Perhaps that is a judgment Oscar should consider the next time it rewards good work in a failed project.

Mark Peckmezian explains how he fell in love with photographing dogs:

I was on psychedelic mushrooms one night and snapped this photo on a whim. I remember thinking: harsh flash on shiny black surfaces render well, produces rich chiaroscuro…. I had just graduated [from art school] last spring and was sick to my stomach with all the vacuous talk and misguided ideology of art school. I think I was so drawn to the dog photos because they were so earnest, from the heart, not complicated with pretty words, just straight, unselfconscious expression — what attracted me to art in the first place.

A Flickr gallery of Peckmezian's pooches here.

The old adage says that a guy thinks about sex every 7 seconds. A recent study shifts that estimate:

Among a college-age population of 163 mixed-gender respondents, the median frequency of sexual thoughts for men was just 19. Women, meanwhile, weren’t far behind at a median of 10 naughty thoughts per day. … [But] the researchers found that men think about biological urges in general (hunger, tiredness, and, indeed, lust) a little more often than women do.

However, [study author Dr. Terri Fisher] notes that this could be due to gender-specific socialization in our society that discourages women from expressing their physical desires openly, as opposed to a true sex-based distinction.

Stephanie Pappas provides more detail:

There was a broad range in the number of sex thoughts, from several participants who recorded one thought a day, to a male participant who recorded 388 thoughts in a day. Factoring in the participant's sleep time, his 388 thoughts broke down to having a sexual thought every 158 seconds, Fisher said, still far fewer than the "every seven seconds" legend would suggest.

Echo Lake's "Buried at Sea":

Steve Macone reports from the 2011 International Society for Humor Studies Conference:

There is that famous metaphor, E.B. White’s: "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." The profession of standup, the idea of "the comic" in the minds of the average person, exists in a similar state of delicate homeostasis. … The comic can be academic, explaining the profession to death, qualifying terms and remedying misconceptions, or she can joke around and be funny. But for reasons that are both revealing and mysterious, she can rarely do both. She is forced to decide. The comic is the frog. 

Alan Jacobs rejects Adam Gopnik's read on the fantasy author:

It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that’s primarily because Tolkien wasn’t especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren’t sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.

Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge.

He's taking the Palin route (to work for change from the outside) for the Palin reasons (further scrutiny of his private life would have been grueling and counterproductive). Money quote:

"These false and unproved allegations continue … to create a cloud of doubt over me and this campaign and my family. That spin hurts. It hurts my wife, it hurts my family, it hurts me and it hurts the American people because you're being denied solutions to our problems."

That "spin". But he's happy he made it to "the final four", and we can all be grateful if this is true:

"I am at peace with my God. I am at peace with my wife and she is at peace with me."

There's now 14 percent of the GOP base up for grabs. We'll find out pretty soon who gets it.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and his wife Gloria Cain arrives to speak during the scheduled opening of a local campaign headquarters on December 3, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. Cain took time to reassess the condition of his campaign 'because of all this media firestorm stuff,' adding, 'my wife and family comes first.' By Scott Olson/Getty Images.)

Kathleen Parker is the latest to throw in her two cents, with a lovely turn of phrase:

Most Americans would rather embrace a man who has fallen and climbed back to his feet than one who has never stubbed his toe on temptation. The successful protagonist is always flawed. In Romney breaking news: He removes the cheese from his pizza but has a weakness for chocolate milk. Mr. Squeaky not only has no skeletons in the closet; he has no closets.

He's in that uncanny valley. But I suspect Kathleen under-estimates what many readers have argued: that the appeal of Gingrich to many Fox News viewers is that he will finally reveal Obama as that empty-suited, know-nothing, affirmative action dunce that they believe him to be. Gingrich's genius ingredient is this Lincoln-Douglas debate idea, which combines a historical luster with the hint that Obama couldn't handle it.

Of course, when you actually imagine a Gingrich-Obama debate, and you are not living in a cocoon that insists that Obama is both dumb and a commie, you see how fatal a trap this could be for the GOP.

It's not just that Obama is a smart person whereas Gingrich is simply a dumb person's idea of a smart person. It's that Obama has always excelled up against a volatile, angry opponent. He is a master of allowing them to self-destruct. He got that Houdini-like master of political survival, Bill Clinton, to blow up in the primaries. In a matter of days, he got McCain to destroy his bid with his frantic response to the Lehman collapse.

I mean: who's gonna seem like the angry guy in a Newt-Barack match? Who's gonna seem like the old, rather than mature, one? Even when Gingrich was Speaker, he couldn't muster any grace or authority or calm: things we like in a crisis and a president.

I can't believe the GOP is going to fall for this yet another time. But their loathing of Obama seems to trump all reason, prudence, or guile. Once again, the jujitsu Obama model of politics emerges as his strongest weapon. Given the economy, it may not be enough. But man, does Obama get lucky sometimes in his opponents.

(Photo: A Newt Gingrich supporter waits for the Republican presidential hopeful as he enters to a crowd at a Hilton Hotel on November 25, 2011 in Naples, Florida. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)