The stolen heart: "It's completely bizarre."

"The thief would have needed metal cutters to prise open the iron bars protecting the wooden heart-shaped box holding St Laurence O'Toole's heart."

"Irish call for apology following 'Drunk Vomiting Shamrocks' clothing line."

"Urban Outfitters' St. Patrick's Day products, including a trucker’s cap illustrated with a drunk vomiting shamrocks and a 'Leprechaun P***' beer jug have, angered the Irish community in the United States and Ireland."

"Dublin dole office bans those in pyjamas."

"There is a psychological aspect and pyjamas are associated with sleeping at night and comfort in the home...  You have to get into the mindset of what you are doing that day. So if you are wanting to get a job, go dressed prepared to get a job."

Oh, come on. People dress to express themselves. These "pyjama"-wearers are telling the government something important about the way they feel about the "dole." Don't squelch the communication. Don't stanch the flow of information between citizen and government.

"He portrayed the Irish as drunken apes, and the image still remains today."

The New Jersey Ancient Order of Hibernians opposes inclusion of Thomas Nast — the great 19th century political cartoonist — in the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

Nast—whose drawings gave rise to Uncle Sam, Santa Claus and the elephant and donkey that symbolize the American political parties—was critical of the Irish as supporters of Tammany Hall. He pilloried the Vatican for trying to recruit children from public schools into parochial institutions....

Nast was an abolitionist who supported equal treatment for blacks and Asians. The anti-Irish tenure of his cartoons was a product of the times...

Here's Nast's "Uncle Same's Thanksgiving Dinner" in which Uncle Sam and Columbia serve murdered bird to a bunch of racial and ethnic stereotypes:



(Enlarge to see the outrageous details.)

Obama goes to the bookstore...

... and — using the credit card he only uses about 3 times a year — buys:

1. "The Bayou Trilogy."

Det. Rene Shade, an ex-boxer turned cop...  with a 10-year-old daughter and a killer on his trail. There's poetry in Woodrell's mayhem, each novel—and scene—full of gritty and memorable Cajun details. 

I don't know enough about this to speculate about whether Obama identifies with Shade, but I will note that Sasha is 10. 

2. "Brave New World" ... which is a book I carry around in my iPad and dip into frequently for inspiration. I know Obama is thinking about jobs as he vacations, and perhaps there's something in "Brave New World" about jobs. For example, there's the idea of depriving relieving people of the competition for better jobs and keeping 8/9 of the population in childishly simply low-level jobs where they will be happy:

No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True... they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes: Thousands of them... And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.

So... 1 + 2... the boxer and thinking outside the box.

ADDED: Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little soma...

"I’m Barack Obama, from the Moneygall Obamas."

"And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way."

"A hole is more honorable than a patch."

From a list of Irish proverbs.

"The protection accorded under Irish law to the right to life of the unborn was based on profound moral values deeply embedded in the fabric of society in Ireland and the legal position was defined through equally intense debate."

Wrote the European Court of Human Rights in Case of A, B, and C v. Ireland, which Linda Greenhouse discusses in the NYT:

No right under the [European] Convention was violated [where the plaintiffs were able to travel to another country to obtain an abortion], the court said by a vote of 11 to 6. Granted, “the process of traveling abroad for an abortion was psychologically and physically arduous” for these women. And granted also that in their particular circumstances, they could have obtained legal abortions in 35 to 40 other countries covered by the Convention. But because Ireland’s law is based “on the profound moral views of the Irish people as to the nature of life,” the court said, Ireland was entitled to an extra “margin of appreciation.” This phrase expresses a measure of deference toward a country’s right within the framework of international law to chart its own domestic course. With its extra margin, Irish law prevailed.

Greenhouse notes that the European Court accepted a situation similar to what would come into being if the United States Supreme Court withdrew the constitutional right to abortion and the matter were left to state law. She says the case gave her "the eerie feeling that I was peering into a domestic future."

Obviously, not all states would choose to join the anti-abortion bandwagon, even if they had the Supreme Court’s permission. California, New York, the District of Columbia, Connecticut and Massachusetts (once two of the most anti-abortion states, but times change) would remain places of refuge for desperate women, Englands to the Irelands that are Wyoming (which has no abortion provider), the Dakotas, or the Deep South, where a shrinking handful of doctors provide abortions in a hostile regulatory climate. More than a third of all women live in counties without an abortion provider, and that number is growing. Long-distance travel is made more onerous in the half of the states that require 24-hour waiting periods after “counseling,” necessitating two trips or an overnight stay.

The second commenter over there brings up Justice Kennedy's interest in referring to international law:

The right has roundly criticized Justice Kennedy for his interest in international law. Whaddaya bet they won't criticize him for citing the case of A, B & C v. Ireland? Watch the Court chip, chip, chip away at Roe & at Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Well, what about the left? What about those who approve of the use of the decisions from foreign court in the analysis of American constitutional law? Whaddaya bet they won't want to have to pay any attention to "the right to life of the unborn... based on profound moral values deeply embedded in the fabric of society"?

"There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama."

"I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do."

It's Giles Coren, getting "mightily pissed off" about copy editing — over the deletion of the word "a" — and with good reason. (Via Metafilter.) I completely understand the sentiment, and I love the thoroughly British tone of the complaint letter.

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best".

Well, you fucking don't.

This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons....

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?

Jesus with a bear? Some Christian iconography I haven't heard of? Or is that another one of his gay jokes, which it could be even if it is only a typo for "beard." I mean, I understand this Coren character is simultaneously fabulously subtle and crude.

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Scansion. Railing about scansion in prose. Metre is crucial. I agree!

ADDED: I've searched the internet for Jesus with a bear and found this very cool painting from Jim Woodring.



(Click image to enlarge.)

1925 is today's year that blog forgot.

Blogging the past today, I note:

The question whether women can be jurors.

Playing jazz to the head-hunters.

Snakes found in Ireland.

"A Thrill of the Old Prussian Spirit" as Paul von Hindenburg takes the oath of office.

Alec Baldwin has no idea how to get out of a jam.

Alessandra Stanley watched Alec Baldwin on "The View." He was trying to patch things up after that terrible publicity over his enraged phone message to his 11-year-old daughter:

Alec Baldwin said on “The View” yesterday that he wanted to quit that NBC sitcom to write a book about “parental alienation.”...

Mr. Baldwin told Barbara Walters and Rosie O’Donnell that he wanted to devote his life to exposing the injustices perpetrated on divorced dads, and that he hoped to publish a book this fall on divorce litigation. Mr. Baldwin’s long-winded, self-obsessed soliloquy on his usurped rights as a father and the fiendish acts of his ex-wife, Kim Basinger, was so impassioned that Ms. Walters had to remind him that his first concern should be his relationship with Ireland. (When he mentioned his daughter, it was to make a point about her mother’s perfidy.)

He was looking to persuade but was mostly painful to watch — a little like Captain Queeg melting down on the witness stand in “The Caine Mutiny.”

Oh, how painful. I wonder what ridiculous father's rights characters have taken him in, are writing the book for him, and think he'll be a good figurehead for their cause. And what's more "alienating" to the child than having a father blustering about how bad her mother is? The best way for Alec Baldwin to make us -- and, I'm guessing, the child -- love him is to do the thing he does so well: act. Put that wild passion into playing characters. Or is that too sad? No one loves him for the man he actually is. The book's not going to help though.

Michael Jackson onstage with Bob Dylan?

That's the rumor. Jackson is said to be in Kilkenny, Ireland, ready to do a cameo performance at Bob Dylan's concert there tonight. If the man is physically and mentally strong enough to appear on a stage, maybe he can find his way back to the artistically productive life he once had.

Massachusetts is not exporting gay marriage.

If gay marriage isn't legal in their home state, a gay couple can't get married in Massachusetts, says the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court:

In an opinion written by Justice Francis X. Spina, the court upheld a 1913 statute that says that no out-of-state resident can get married in Massachusetts if the marriage would be void in the person's home state, unless the person intends to live in Massachusetts....

The original lawsuit was filed by eight out-of-state couples and 12 cities and towns, claiming the 1913 statute was discriminatory and had been invalidated by the legalization of gay marriage in the state....

[Governor Mitt] Romney said in an interview: "This is an important victory for traditional marriage and for the right to each state to be sovereign as it defines marriage. It would have been wrong for this court to impose it's same sex ruling on the other 49 states of America."

Only one justice, Roderick L. Ireland, dissented, writing that "the commonwealth's resurrection of a moribund statute to deny nonresident same-sex couples access to marriage is not only troubling," but "also is fundamentally unfair."

Boys and your ineffectual subtle cues.

They might not get them:

"If teachers attempt to control boys by subtle means, such as raised eyebrows, and the boys ignore these cues, it may be that they simply are not able to read them and decode them accurately," explained Professor David Skuse, whose team at the Institute of Child Health in London conducted the research.

"It's not that they are being wilfully oppositional," he told the British Association's Festival of Science, which this year is being held in Dublin, Ireland.

The study on 600 children between the ages of six and 17 was actually undertaken to investigate aspects of autism, a predominantly male condition.

The institute hopes eventually to find the genetic factors that lead more boys than girls into this disorder....

The differences at school-entry were specifically to do with the facial expressions tasks.

"At six years, 70% of boys are below the mean for girls; so in other words, 70% of boys are worse than 50% of girls," Professor Skuse explained.

"It means there are a lot of boys at school entry who are very poor at differentiating other people's emotions from their facial expressions.

Males eventually catch up with females, however, so, guys, don't try to use this as an excuse your adult relationship gaffes.

Great milestones of stagecraft.

From a review of "Saint Frances of Hollywood," a play about the actress Frances Farmer:

The spare production consists only of a white oval platform bookended by two revolving white walls. Ms. Ireland is on stage for nearly every scene and spends an inordinate amount of time disrobing down to her chemise. (In one brief scene she actually takes off her clothes at one end of the stage, puts them back on, then walks over to the other end and takes them off again.)

Speak English.

Gregg Easterbrook writes in TNR that it's great when languages die out. [ADDED: The link is for subscribers only -- sorry.] The fewer languages the better. There's no interest comparable to the interest in biodiversity. It's better for more people to be able to communicate.

[T]he fewer languages, the better--and I say this not just because English may win the competition. Mandarin might win; Barbara Wallraff of The Atlantic Monthly devoted a lengthy 2001 story to the idea that Mandarin will best English in the struggle to be the global tongue. Okay, maybe Mandarin comes out on top. As long as the number of languages in common usage keeps declining, I'll be happy.

Well, I can't remember reading Wallraff's article, but I can't imagine what mechanism would drive the spread of Mandarin much beyond China. Easterbrook himself notes the recent NYT article about the drive to teach English in Mongolia:

Even here on the edge of the nation's capital, in this settlement of dirt tracks, plank shanties and the circular felt yurts of herdsmen, the sounds of English can be heard from the youngest of students - part of a nationwide drive to make it the primary foreign language learned in Mongolia, a landlocked expanse of open steppe sandwiched between Russia and China. "We are looking at Singapore as a model," Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia's prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed in graduate school at Harvard. "We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world."

Easterbrook:

Why is Singapore so much more affluent than its neighbors? In part owing to a long-standing policy of teaching public-school students English. Someone safely tenured in a comfortable Western university might idealize living a subsistence lifestyle speaking a rare language unintelligible except to one's tribe. For citizens of the developing world, speaking a top ten language opens doors to a better life.

If you were making policy in one of those countries, choosing a second language to teach everyone, wouldn't you, like Mongolia, pick English?

UPDATE: From Ireland, Paul Musgrave disagrees and has a lot to say, including a lot about Irish.