A History Of Farting

Medieval comics were adept at performance farting, according to a new book, "On Farting: Laughter and Language in the Middle Ages." Money quote:

Laughter is as historically contingent as any other kind of language. And farts are a kind of language. They are inherently social in a way that defecation is not. They tend to take your companions by surprise. Furthermore, farts are an occasion for self-examination, for questioning the extent of our freedom and the nature of self-mastery. We can’t help farting; it is a question of need. So part of what the Middle Ages wrestled with when people were talking about farts was this constant reminder of the needs of the body. Farting carries this reminder that the body behaves on its own, and there is nothing you can do about it. It reminds us that our bodily freedom is limited.

Farts carry anxiety and humor and disgust. People see themselves in the reactions of others and are thus intensely aware of themselves in those moments when farts manifest themselves. When you smell somebody you are closer to them than when you are just looking at them, but you are farther away than when you are touching them. Farts can create these moments rich with insight. I think much of the humor of farting is located on this very ordinary, humble level.

Squeaker!

Neocon Joke Update

Still coming:

Q.  How many neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A.  That’s an interesting question, one that I’m sure future historians will investigate in detail.  Look, let me address this issue up front: I don’t know who’s been installing light bulbs or who hasn’t.  That’s none of my business.  There’s a lot of different views, there’s a range of views, and a lot of concerns, and we are working to accommodate those concerns.  We know at this point that we still have some work to do and we are working very hard to address these issues.  We’re not making estimates. At this point what you’ve had are some fairly — you had some dramatic testimony and comments — by the way, you can expect people to be ventilating these differing points of views in coming days.  Our view is you have to have a resolution that offers a solution.  And you’re going to have people — there is sometimes, you’ll be surprised to hear, a disparity between comments made in public for domestic audiences around the world, and comments made in private, as well.  In short, we don’t want to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Poor Tony Snow. Would you want his job?

The First Ethnic Drug?

Not so fast, says Scientific American:

A close inspection of BiDil’s history, however, shows that the drug is ethnic in name only. First, BiDil is not a new medicine—it is merely a combination into a single pill of two generic drugs, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate, both of which have been used for more than a decade to treat heart failure in people of all races. Second, BiDil is not a pharmacogenomic drug. Although studies have shown that the hydralazine/isosorbide dinitrate (H/I) combination can delay hospitalization and death for patients suffering from heart failure, the underlying mechanism for the drug’s efficacy is not fully understood and has not been directly connected to any specific genes. Third, and most important, no firm evidence exists that BiDil actually works better or differently in African-Americans than in anyone else. The FDA’s approval of BiDil was based primarily on a clinical trial that enrolled only self-identified African-Americans and did not compare their health outcomes with those of other ethnic or racial groups.

(Hat tip: 3QD.)

Petraeus, Coopted By GOP Propaganda

If I were eager to maintain a semblance of military independence from the agenda of extremist, Republican partisans, I wouldn’t go on the Hugh Hewitt show, would you? And yet Petraeus has done just that. I think such a decision to cater to one party’s propaganda outlet renders Petraeus’ military independence moot. I’ll wait for the transcript. But Petraeus is either willing to be used by the Republican propaganda machine or he is part of the Republican propaganda machine. I’m beginning to suspect the latter. The only thing worse than a deeply politicized and partisan war is a deeply politicized and partisan commander. But we now know whose side Petraeus seems to be on: Cheney’s. Expect spin, not truth, in September.

The Limits Of Blogging

I have to agree with Ross:

The flip side of this is that blogging is the enemy of literary craft and intellectual depth. Arguments over tax policy and the proper interpretation of Knocked Up find a natural home in the blogosphere; attempts write a great novel or compose a paradigm-shifting philosophical treatise do not. If you want to be the next George Will or Paul Krugman, you’d be well-served to take up blogging now, because it’ll make you a better pundit. If you want to be the next Ian McEwan or Philip Roth, or the next Alasdair McIntyre or Richard Rorty, I’d advise you to rip your internet cable out of the wall now, before it’s too late.

The kind of brain activity that permits one to post two dozen items a day, keep track of countless more, and surf endless online reports and ideas and spats, is not conducive to also producing a long or reflective or deep work of philosophy or fiction or history or poetry. Even if you find the time, your mind cannot adjust that quickly. In retrospect, writing a book of political philosophy while blogging nearly cost me as many t-cells as brain cells. So why am I still here? Because the medium itself is worth pioneering, and in my eighth year of daily blogging, I’ve decided to give in to the impulse and take it where it wants to go. This kind of innovation only happens once in the lifetime of a writer, and to be there at the creation is too good an opportunity to miss. I keep telling myself that at some point, I’ll retire from all this, drag my poetry and philosophy and history tomes back from the shelf and think some more, and write, you know, maybe a long, well-researched article a year or a book every five years. And let myself have an unpublished or unexpressed thought, or allow it to gestate for a while, or simply kick it around in my head before kicking it around in pixels.

But the lure of tens of thousands of daily readers, many of whom know much more about any particular subject than I do, is irresistible. And I’m lucky. I’d already been given the chance to edit a magazine before blogging was born. And I’d written two books. And the collective intelligence – what Reihan calls the hive mind – of, say, Dish readers creates something new in the history of opining. So I’m pursuing intimations again. Until the siren song of an attempt at permanence calls.