The Dish

TDW:

(Almost) every one of Alfred Hitchcock’s 40+ own-movie walk-ons. (Missing: Easy Virtue, Blackmail, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn.) Full list of appearances here.

Jessica Crispin explains:

It's mostly women's work, and it's not a job from which you can retire comfortably (unless you are lucky and skilled enough to make it into the top echelon where publishers are interested to hear the new discoveries you made about a 400-year-old classic). When you do turn in a year's worth of work in exchange for what must end up being $.75 an hour — more likely to be a multigenerational soap opera than a work of art — you get the added bonus of the news that if you're an academic, translating can actually hurt your chances for getting hired or making tenure, or you get some jerk showing up at your reading to harangue you for translating the German "reise" as "holiday" instead of "trip," because obviously the author intended "trip" and by choosing "holiday" you have changed the meaning of the entire work. Or maybe you have some yahoo declaring that translation is an impossible act and philosophically suspect. After a 35-year career of this, I would probably be a little angry.

Buzzfeed:

The Monster Engine, a book and art exhibit created by Dave Devries, adds a professional touch to children's drawings. [Ed Note: The Monster Engine website first received attention in 2005, and Devries' art has had a fairly storied life on the Internet since then. Here's a selection of some of the coolest pieces.]

They are a vast improvement on the kind of kids art collected by Maddox.

Scott Adams sorts the crazies.

Clay Risen rejects the idea of an American a parliamentary system:

[W]hile the two parties don’t guarantee complete coherence, they play a vital role in corralling various levels of opinion and forcing Congress toward consensus. Just imagine if the United States had a parliamentary system like Germany’s. We’d probably have a center-left and center-right party, greens, libertarians, and progressives, too; but we’d also have a Texas party, a farm-labor party, a right-wing-fundamentalist party, an America First party–in a large heterogeneous society, the possibilities are endless. We’d be Italy, or India. There’s no end to the shortcoming of the Republican-Democrat duopoly, but it’s more effective than the alternative.

I just don’t get this:

The critical failure in all this was the failure to win public support. Cohn sort of acknowledges this. (“Public support would obviously help–a lot.” Yes, it would.) But that failure is not mainly the Republicans’ fault. I don’t think their criticisms carry much weight: Republicans are no more trusted by the public than Democrats. It is Obama’s fault, first for putting Congress in charge, and then for standing aside for more than a year.

Obama fault Number One: “putting Congress in charge” of legislation. Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the point of Congress to pass legislation. What is the legislative branch for if it isn’t to, er, legislate? In such a huge undertaking, will it be long and messy? Of course. So what? Is this plan super-liberal? It has no public option, it cuts Medicare, to trims the deficit and it bends over so far to please the drug and insurance companies it could get a job in the Cirque du Soleil.

I can imagine Clive writing back in the Clinton years the exact same conventional wisdom that the Clintons should not have tried to come up with an executive branch scheme and foisted it on the Congress. Same centrist world-weariness.

Now for this nonsense that Obama “stood aside for more than a year”.

Was Clive alive last September? See David Brooks here on one of the best pieces of presidential oratory – turning around public opinion on the subject. Atul Gawande here. Andrew Sprung here. Half the blogosphere here. The other half here. Even Mickey Kaus – who originally didn’t want Obama to give a big risk-taking health reform speech – here. Dish live-blogging here. My conclusion?

A masterful speech, somehow a blend of governance and also campaigning. He has Clinton’s mastery of policy detail with Bush’s under-rated ability to give a great speech. But above all, it is a reprise of the core reason for his candidacy and presidency: to get past the abstractions of ideology and the easy scorn of the cable circus and the cynicism that has thereby infected this country’s ability to tackle pressing problems. This was why he was elected, and we should not be swayed by the old Washington and the old ideologies and the old politics. He stands at the center urging a small shift to more government because the times demand it.

And he makes sense. And this was not a cautious speech; it was a reasoned but courageous speech. He has put his presidency on the line for this. And that is a hard thing to do.

But according to Clive, Obama “stood aside for more than a year”. WTF?

Brian Edwards watches:

The Iranian film industry has a long and illustrious tradition of high-quality dubbings.

In the post-Revolution era, and the ensuing rise of censorship, dubbing has evolved to become a form of underground art, as well as a meta-commentary on Iranians’ attempt to adapt, and in some way lay claim to, the products of Western culture. A single American film like Shrek inspires multiple dubbed versions—some illegal, some not—causing Iranians to discuss and debate which of the many Farsi Shreks is superior. In some versions (since withdrawn from official circulation), various regional and ethnic accents are paired with the diverse characters of Shrek, the stereotypes associated with each accent adding an additional layer of humor for Iranians. In the more risqué bootlegs, obscene or off-topic conversations are transposed over Shrek’s fairy-tale shenanigans.

Darshak Sanghavi doesn't think hand sanitizers work very well:

[W]e need to be realistic about what Purell can do to fight flu in the home and in public. To begin, the influenza virus mostly spreads via tiny droplets in the air (for example, from sneezes)—not by dirty hands or surfaces—which limits the role of Purell. It probably wouldn't matter even if flu transferred though hand contact, which is how most cold viruses spread. Though Purell kills them in the lab, hand sanitizers don't stop their spread in the real world. The average child touches his or her mouth and nose every three minutes, and both adults and children come in contact with as many as 30 different objects every minute. Even hospitals can't get staff to use Purell before seeing patients; it's impossible for day care staff, parents, or teachers to wash a child's hands 20 times each hour.

(Image: Creepy hand sanitizer ad from CopyRanter)

For some reason, Toby Lichtig feels compelled to finish books:

As a reviewer, I don’t have the option of not finishing books (the least I can do is read every word – especially if I’m then going to be unkind). But the compulsion is just as prevalent in my leisure reading. I often have several unfinished books sitting by my bed, staring at me accusingly.

I don’t have the will to put them away until I’ve finished them. It’s a sort of a pact: master me and I will release you. Maybe I hate the idea of missing out on some wonderful potential saving grace in the last sentence. Maybe I’ve got an unhealthily acquisitive relationship with culture. Maybe I’m just a bit weird.

This syndrome (Obsessive conclusion disorder?) is all the more exasperating when I think of how few books we get to read in a lifetime. 3,000? 4,000? And that’s for bookaholics. It doesn’t feel like many.