According to this L.A. Times article, which is illustrated, for some reason, with a photograph of Sheldon Adelson — a Romney donor — gesturing at some lit-up models of what are presumably models of casinos. (He's identified as a "casino mogul.")
A "mogul," which originally referred to "the successive heads of the Muslim dynasty founded by Zahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530), which ruled an empire covering a large part of South Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries," now denotes "An important, influential, or dominant person; an autocrat," according to the OED, which gives the early example "I am the Sultan of this place: Mr. Limberham is the Mogol of the next Mansion" — a line spoken by a character named Brainsick, in the play "Limberham (or The Kind Keeper)," by John Dryden.
The photo of Adelson in the L.A. Times makes him seem capable of moving skyscrapers like big chess pieces. What a manipulative fellow! He gave $10 million in June to a Romney super PAC called Restore Our Future. ("Restore" means to bring back. Back to the future.) Restore Our Future raised $20.6 million in June. Meanwhile, Obama's super PAC, Priorities USA Action took in only $6 million.
Romney's campaign raised much more money than did Obama — $106 million to $70 million (in June). So Obama is lagging in the fundraising and also spending much more.
Heading into July, Romney and his party allies were left with nearly $170 million on hand, while Obama and the Democrats had $147 million.
That's not that huge of a difference, but Obama is such a big spender. And what did he get for all that spending? I think the idea was to frame Romney as an evil capitalist, and it hasn't worked out that well. 1. Despite the heavy attack on Romney, Obama hasn't moved up in the polls, and 2. The attack on capitalism went too far and touched off an effective counterattack. Not only has Obama depleted his funds, he's depleted his argument against Romney.
The Obama campaign’s attempt to portray Mitt Romney as the villainous Bane from “The Dark Knight Rises” appears to be a big flop. And the problem for Obama is, he really doesn’t have a Plan B.
"... but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simple game, but it’s played at a higher level."
Quoted here. Worth contemplating. Seems like a metaphor for all kinds of things.
I like to write scholarly dissertations. I moved to the internet and nobody wrote scholarly dissertations there, but one blogger fisked one of my paragraphs. I always thought blogging was kind of a simple game, but I started a blog to defend myself. And that blogger shredded my first nine or ten posts. That’s sort of like living on the internet. It’s a simple game, but it’s played at a higher level.
This is email from a reader, which I am posting in full, without additional comment, except to say that it's a theory and I don't agree with every aspect of this theory, nor do I understand whether the statements made about the rules of basketball are entirely correct. This is a framework for discussion, presented in that spirit. (If you need more background on the incident, click the Wisconsin Supreme Court tag and scroll.)
A reader writes:
I admire your blog and, as a distinctly separate matter, some evident personal traits. You are willing to research, document and state clearly, the conclusions you draw from those findings. That, though important, is secondary to your tenacity. I have read every post on the Prosser-Bradley Affair known as the "Choke-Hold Incident" and until recently, every comment made to each. It is evident by the content of your posts that you have intentionally avoided a "post simply to post" redundancy, keeping it fresh by adding newly found material and incorporating new conclusions in their proper place, to include a summary and time-line when it became appropriate.
Still, even with such praise, I write with some objections because I believe that this issue is of major importance, not just for the city or your state but nationally, and this will only become obvious in time, when looking back on it. The principle reason that I have become reluctant to read every comment is not because of the sheer number of contributions, but their repetition and the rather narrow framework within which the issue has fallen, in the matter as it is addressed.
Perhaps I should tell you why I do not like or follow sports.
There were many new rules being crafted, and I won't detail them but will use basketball as an example. In one particular, very close championship game, I lost a bet with a friend. I lost because my friend was a coaching expert and had been called in to counsel a player on "How to get an opposing player to foul him." I later learned that this was a known "tactic," acknowledged and named as an "intentional foul" which was itself a violation having a penalty if caught doing it. It is, in and of itself, a foul because an intentional foul is recognized as an intent to break the rules (laws) that are the fabric of agreement for the game in an acknowledged attempt to gain illegal advantage and unearned gain.
What Bradley did, suddenly standing, the rushed approach, the confusing gestures, the close body proximity and even the unusual and unexpected language all read, almost word for word as those instructions for creating an intentional foul. Abruptly standing draws attention, the quick approach focuses that attention, the gestures are specifically intended to create the idea that one thing is going to happen while it will not, and the emphasized "BUDDY..!" cements the idea, the emotional response and, at its best, the target becomes both defensive and irate.
It is important to note that, while I learned this many years ago, like the steps of known "Con Jobs" each of these have now expanded in use and are so well known that they have individual names. From "The Fake" to "The Distraction" to "Trash Talking" each has predictable and reliable results. The gestures, in particular, practiced and done correctly, will produce the desired and unavoidable reaction; in fact even being told that a person will approach and "throw a punch" at your face I doubt that you could prevent a defensive reaction of some kind. Try it with a harmless ball of foam thrown at your face to verify.
I am not normally a conspiracy theorist but I propose that this is more, much more, than a spontaneous incident. This was not only planned but all indications are that it required coaching and possibly (repeated) rehearsal. Many of the remaining portions indicate the same, in support and intent, from the threat to "take it public" to the outraged emphasis on details of what and who was told and the perfect timing of each.
You have the correct handle on this: the origin of the leak to the newspaper columnist. You might suggest that all known parties volunteer to publicly waive any claims and support the disclosure by that columnist. No, I do not think that a biased columnist would do that, even under those circumstances, but as there are a limited number of first-hand possibilities that might force at least a "reassurance contact" from the responsible party. It would also leave the columnist at a loss for adequate, possibly awkward, explanation.
Good work, and keep at it. The matter of exposing those, in sports or in politics, willing to cheat the game for gain is important.
This issue applies to other sports as well, simply look at the newest rule changes, often being those to correct similar previous incidents. A switch to chess as player or observer, makes cheating much less a concern.
"We had no board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and afterwards we made a board from the side of a packing-case, and a set of men from buttons, Belgian coins and the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a passion for chess. It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are the same as the rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can win at the others. But he also said that if you have a chessboard you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case."
I hate [when people say something is just so wrong on so many levels that they can't even begin to explain why] because people that say that all the time always try to imply that they deal with multitudes of levels all the time.
But seriously – how many levels are there?
Two? Maybe three, tops?
I actually know a guy that commonly dealt with five levels, but he was from Bayonne, New Jersey.
But this idea that there are so many levels is pure post-modern, crit-studies rubbish.
It is all an urban myth that has its origins in a particular budget fight in the humanities department of an well-known Ivy League University.
The contrived outrage is ridiculous on so many levels I must put down my game of multi-dimensional chess and set aside my 3-D puzzle for the moment and stop multi-tasking this four-course luncheon while responding to this blog entry while doing laundry while simultaneously playing with my puppy to respond to this while keeping open ten other windows and holding three conversations through instant messaging and solving this crossword puzzle.
1) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the psychological level
2) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the political level
3) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the sociological level
4) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the economic level
4) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the international level
5) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the sexual level
6) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the contrivance level
It is hard in the West to recall that there was a brief moment when the ladygarden was left untended, and the female body celebrated and desired in its natural state. The actress Sienna Miller is now filming Hippy Hippy Shake, a movie about the Oz magazine trial, and photos have circulated of her naked, except for obligatory flowers in her hair. And yet for all the effortful re-creation of the Sixties, one glaring anachronism remains: the Hitler moustache of a Brazilian wax, which marks Miller out as a totally 21st-century girl. Perhaps Hair and Make-up couldn't manage a merkin.
Give me down to there hair Shoulder length or longer Here baby, there mama Everywhere daddy daddy
What was the "there" there, if not... "the ladygarden"? It says everywhere. Could it be any plainer?
Shining, gleaming, Streaming, flaxen, waxen
"Waxen" didn't mean you should be waxing your hair off. It meant it was fine for it to be waxy.
Here's the video for the song. You know, I remember when they were filming "Hair" in Central Park, and the call went out for people with a lot of hair to come out and be extras. I considered going — I looked like this around that time — but I was too busy or too aloof or — oh, who knows what I was thinking about in the mid-70s.
Back to the main article:
But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn't cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant.
Oh, yeah, before the mid-90s, you could wear a bikini and reveal pubic hair growing all down your legs! [CORRECTION: Ha, ha. I misread that.]
Let's get the history straight. The bikini hair that caused a stir in the mid-90s was brimming over the top like this — on the cover of The Black Crowes album "Amorica." Even The Black Crowes didn't go for the down to there hair — and neither did anyone in the 70s. Not in a bathing suit anyway.
(Hmmm.... maybe you could in Britain.)
The gyms of Britain were suddenly full of women waxed into weeny welcome mats, with all the stubble, bruises, pimpled hair follicles and burst blood vessels that accompany this excruciating sexifying of the sex.
Like a trend for comedy-size breast implants, inflatable lips, hair extensions, extreme nails and high street daywear revealing more tittage than a ten-quid hooker, waxing filtered down from the porn industry. Here defuzzing makes the action, as it were, easier to follow. And for male performers depilation adds the illusion of an extra inch. Maybe Hitchens had that in mind.
Now, I'm thinking of this banned album cover. (More banned album covers here.)
And don't you love Wikipedia? Check out the luxuriantly detailed article "Merkin." President Merkin Muffley — the (bald) President of the United States in "Dr. Strangelove" — came easily to mind for me. But there's so much more:
The narrator, Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), recalls, "Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl."
Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, says, "He wears a false cunt and merkin of sable both handcrafted...by the notorious Mme. Ophir."...
The 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? written by and starring Anthony Newley, is a veritable cornucopia of dirty-joke names. In addition to the two in the title, there's a character (played by Joan Collins), named Polyester Poontang.
Pearl Jam and Neil Young released a two-song companion to Mirror Ball called Merkin Ball....
In an episode of Family Guy, an advertising agent offers Joe Swanson a car, his pants and a merkin so that he will sign up for an advertising contract....
On the 1967 Chess LP The Baroques by the Milwaukee band of the same name, the word "merkin" is heard in the song "Bicycle." The lyric is "...I'll take back the merkin I gave you for Christmas, and you'll be sorry when the wind gets cold, 'cause it'll be hanging from the aerial of my bicycle...."
On seeing this news, I literally break down and cry for several minutes. The man was 89 years old.
ADDED: Let's look at the list of his films. Talk about the ones that meant something to you. I'll list the ones I remember seeing:
1. "Autumn Sonata." It's the subject of a wonderful discussion about art in (my favorite movie) "My Dinner With Andre." There's a line, something like: I could always live in my art, but never in my life. Ingrid Bergman says it to Liv Ullmann. Mother to daughter.
2. "Face to Face." Isn't this the movie in "Annie Hall" that Alvy Singer refuses to see because it's already started?
3. "The Magic Flute." Mozart! In Swedish.
4. "Scenes from a Marriage." I think of the scene with Liv Ullmann, playing a therapist, as she's listening to a patient describe her marriage. The patient talks about how the world has come to feel unreal to her. Perhaps she says it feels like paper, and we see a closeup of her hand trying to feel the edge of the table. Then we see a closeup of Liv Ullmann's eyes, with just enough terror showing.
5. "Cries and Whispers." Perhaps the best of them all. I think of the scene where they read "David Copperfield" to each other for some reason. And the broken glass and the blood.
6. "The Touch." Elliot Gould! In English!
7. "The Passion of Anna." I remember being bored. Sorry.
8. "Shame." Another one I saw and couldn't appreciate at the time. I should try again, I'm sure.
9. "Persona." This one is very sharp and simple. Great to rewatch.
10. "The Silence," "Winter Light, "Through a Glass Darkly." Hard to remember which is which now. These were the movies we saw in college and thought precisely exemplified what serious movies were.
11. "The Virgin Spring." Another one we saw in college days, but this one stood out as different.
12. "Wild Strawberries." This is the one they showed us in the dorm -- East Quad -- practically as soon as we arrived as freshmen in 1969. The message was: This is greatness in film. If you don't see why this is great, you have a problem you'd better fix!
13. "The Seventh Seal." Loved this at the time. Loved Woody Allen's spoofing of it in "Love and Death." Have it on DVD but only watched part of it. Let's watch this one tonight. It is about death.
14. "Smiles of a Summer Night." Beautiful, funny, and not that Bergman-y. Woody Allen has a beautiful tribute to it: "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."
“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”
The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.
“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”
His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:
“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”...
“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”
Much more at the link, including how he suffered from the fear of death and what completely cured him of that fear.
IN THE COMMENTS: My ex-husband Richard Lawrence Cohen writes:
Ann, after reading the NYT story my first impulse was to come here and find out your response, which is as perceptive and lively as I'd hoped. (I typoed "livly," which is a nice pun for the occasion!) My earliest Bergman experience was stumbling upon The Magician on WOR-TV in New York as a high school student. It was unlike any other movie I'd ever seen and it made me want to see every other movie like it -- movies that enchanted not only the senses and the emotions but the intellect and the aesthetic. Then Wild Strawberries during freshman orientation as you've noted: I thought I remembered that it was shown in the courtyard of the Quad, but maybe that was King Kong instead and maybe they showed Wild Strawberries in the little auditorium. Then several of his classics at Cinema Guild: among them, Smiles of a Summer Night thrilled me with its laughter-filled ideal of romance, and Virgin Spring with its sagalike bright medieval starkness. Just two weeks ago I rented Seventh Seal for my preteen kids because they were fascinated by the idea of playing chess with Death; they liked that scene well enough but it ended too soon for them and they kept asking, "When are they going to show more of the chess game?" before losing interest altogether. For me, the style of the movie felt a bit old-fashioned at this point but many scenes were still powerful, and I was especially taken with the character of the church artist who kept up a cheerful commentary while painting gruesome pictures influenced by the reality of the plague that was all around him.
A corollary memory: seeing Liv Ullman as Nora in A Doll's House on Broadway in the 1970s, with Sam Waterston as Torvald, Sam on crutches after an accident but still pacing back and forth across the stage, unrealistically, so that he could hit his marks.
Yeah, that was an insane Sam Waterston performance. At least he had historically accurate crutches.
"Wild Strawberries" was shown indoors in a fairly small room, where we had to sit on the floor -- which was one of the reasons I didn't enjoy it as much as I was supposed to.
AND: Richard, if the boys like chess movies, here's a list of 1,715 of them.
AND: In today's vlog, I talk about why reading about Bergman's death made me cry.
MUCH LATER: Having collected my "post-of-the-month" for each of the months of 2007 and chosen this for July, I settle down a reread this post, then go back to the top and read the first sentence and break down and cry once again.
Dressed in a gray sweatshirt over slacks, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and wearing no makeup, the spoiled 26-year-old bawled throughout the hearing. She dabbed her eyes, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and her body shook constantly. Several times she turned to look at her parents, who were seated behind her in the courtroom....
"The defendant is remanded to county jail to serve the remainder of her 45-day sentence," he said. "This order is forthwith."
That's when Hilton started screaming.
She's certainly figured out how to maximize the publicity value of going to jail. Didn't Paris Hilton originally find her way into the national consciousness by somehow become the victim of supposedly unintentional publicity?
MORE: The NYT -- which really is classier than the Daily News -- gives us not only more law but more politics. Excerpt:
“She’s a pawn in a turf fight right now,” said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles. “It backfired against her because she’s a celebrity. She got a harsher sentence because she was a celebrity. And then when her lawyer found a way out of jail, there was too much public attention for it to sit well with the court.”
The struggle between the judge and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, incited indignation far beyond the attention normally paid to a minor criminal matter.
Judicial and police officials here said they were inundated with calls from outraged residents and curious news media outlets from around the country and beyond. The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, decried Ms. Hilton’s release as an example of “double standards,” saying consideration was given to a pampered rich girl that would never have been accorded an average inmate.
Even the presidential candidate John Edwards found himself drawn into the debate. When asked about Ms. Hilton’s release on Thursday he said, “Without regard to Paris Hilton, we have two Americas and I think what’s important is, it’s obvious that the problem exists.”
"Pawn in a turf fight" is not a mixed metaphor as long as you consider chess a turf fight... which it kind of is. As for John Edwards... ask him a question and he's got an answer: two Americas.
I’m ashamed to say it, but sometimes John Lennon’s melodies feel a bit underwritten, while Paul McCartney’s relentless cheerfulness is depressing. The very jauntiness I used to love as a girl feels as if it’s covering up a sadder subtext. And what’s bleaker than a brave face?
The whole experience is uncomfortable, like realizing you can beat your own father at chess or arm-wrestling. I don’t want to go back and find that the carcass has been picked clean.
Are you watching the Scripps Howard Spelling Bee? It's the best reality show on TV, is it not? Over at Throwing Things, they've been blogging up a storm. They're asking who are your favorites. In these parts, we love Isabel Jacobson, a Madison 7th grader, who made it to the final 45 by spelling "affenpinscher" and "tangential." Yeah, "tangential" we all know. "Affenpinscher"? It takes flights of fantasy even to imagine what that means.
Over at Throwing Things, they can't seem to say Samir Patel often enough. Pay some attention to our Isabel!
Hey, Isabel has a blog. Here. She hasn't posted since Tuesday, though. Let's not needle her about getting her blogging done, though. She's got spelling to do. Let's see what she wrote on Tuesday:
Before coming here, I was curious about what the other spellers would be like. Now I've met a few of them, and there's quite a variety. Some are as normal as anyone at my school. But some are not so normal. Quite a few are geniuses in other fields besides spelling. One boy I talked to is a nationally ranked chess champion. Another girl seemed very normal, until she revealed that she's been taking college-level math courses.
I studied for four hours the day before we left, but now that I'm actually here I haven't studied much; I feel like I'm as ready as I need to be. My main goal is to make it into the top 45 spellers, who will go on to Thursday's competition. I don't really know what my chances of this are; I've never competed at this level before, so I don't know how tough the other spellers are. I guess I'll just have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
Well, you made your goal, so is it all just for fun now? I've got to think all 45 finalists really want to win. I can't help thinking she sounds way less hardcore than most of them.
UPDATE: A quote from Theodore Yuan: "It's kind of hard to enjoy spelling, but I do it because I'm good at it."
ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, Isabel made it to 14th place and went out on the word "symminct." The prime time final rounds went very quickly, especially when it came down to Fiola Hackett and Katharine Close battling for first place. Both girls seemed to know all the words and spelled them with few questions, until Fiola paused a long and hard before making the gaffe of spelling "weltschmerz" with a "v" ... when she knew it was German! How??? It was like the boy who had to spell "giocoso" and, knowing it was Italian, began with a "j." How can you get that far and not know such basic sounds in such common languages? Do they just hit the wall and get tired, get spellschmerz? So Fiola couldn't hack it, and Katharine didn't just come close, she won ... on that word she totally knew, ursprachte!
Found via the NYT, which has a giant article about attractive women who play in chess tournaments. The Times also points to the "Internet Chess Club" -- which makes me want to say "demented and sad, but social" (or demented and sad and not even social). It quotes a female chess player: "a large percentage of the comments [there] are about how hot the women are."
The Times tackles the issue of what to do when a male player accuses his female opponent of using her good looks to "distract" him:
"She was distracting... But there was nothing I could do. It was the beginning of April, right after spring break, and she was dressed appropriately for the time of year. It wasn't anything against the law. I told the guy, 'You are going to have to call upon yourself to overcome the distraction.' He ended up losing the game anyway, but I am not sure that was from being distracted."
I don't play chess, and I've never watched a chess tournament, but I've seen some film clips and photos of grand players, and I imagine that the physical presence of the opponent always has an unnerving effect of some sort. And isn't each player aware of the things about him that are a bit disconcerting, such as very large size, audible breathing, or nervous ticcing? And then there's the subtle question of whether a player is doing it on purpose. It must be distracting just to get sucked into thinking about whether your opponent is doing it on purpose.
Matt at Throwing Things convinces me to buy the "Wonderfalls" DVD collection: "a snarkier and agnostic variant of 'Joan of Arcadia.'" I've been a big "Joan of Arcadia" fan since the opening minutes of the very first episode, but I must say I'm getting tired of the repetition. How many problems can the earnest, hangdog dad have at work? How many times must Joan deliver a peck on the lips to her boyfriend before they head off to different classes? How many times will Joan seriously consider getting into a first tier college and then in the next show have to struggle with the problem of getting into any college? And how many times will God be able to seem cute telling her to do one thing and then another -- join the chess club, learn to juggle, be a cheerleader, play the piano -- before God seems to be a crazy sadist with attention deficit disorder?
Also over at Throwing Things (or whatever the hell they expect us to call that blog these days), Kingsley throws a nice douse of cold water on "American Idol"'s Bo Bice, and Adam predicts the night will come when it's Nadia as the only woman in a competition with five men. I wonder who's the one man he thinks is subject to early elimination? Scott? Constantine? Anthony?
Question to my word editor type readers: I've been putting TV show names in quotes, so how should I do the possessive of "American Idol"? I went with "American Idol"'s, but that looks awfully strange.
UPDATE: Answering that word editor question is Joe's Dartblog, but I read his solution to mean, essentially: that's why you never should have put TV show titles in quotes in the first place. Let me reword my question: assume a commitment has been made to putting TV show titles in quotes....
While I'm here fiddling with this post, let me state my theory why I don't think Scott Savol will go out easily. I see him as the combination of Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken. Like Ruben, he's the fat guy. Americans feel a special fondness for a fat guy. They don't want everyone to be fat, but if just one person is fat, marked as the underdog, we root for him. Also, we identify with the fat guy. We're fat! Like Clay, Scott is the completely unhip white guy who really does have a nice voice, and when he tries to dance, we're all what was that? I can really see a big bloc of American voters united behind a guy like that. The fact that he's made it this far shows this is happening.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Several emailers, answering the editing question, suggest the classic workaround. Don't say "'American Idol''s Bo Bice," say "Bo Bice of 'American Idol.'" I considered doing that, but I'm trying to write in a conversational style, and I wouldn't talk like that. The punctuation pile-up looks bad, I admit, but in a contest between looks and sound here, I'm going with sound.
YET MORE: Another emailer writes:
You drove me to the "Chicago Manual of Style" and that's never a good thing. I think everyone is working too hard on this and I propose the very simple:
"American Idol's" Bo Bice....
Using the CMS, 15th Edition, I'll refer to sections 5.26 and 7.13
5.26: Possessives of titles and names. The possessive of a title or name is formed by adding 's {American Idol's Bo Bice}. This is so even when the word ends in a sibilant {Dickens's novels}.
7.13 works in quotation marks. The plural of a word or phrase in quotation marks may be formed by the addition of an apostrophe before the s, with the closing quotation marks following the s (though rewording is usually a better option. A plural ending should never follow closing quotation marks. {How many more "To be continued's" can we expect? {not "To be continued"s})
That looks really weird to me. Of course, the apostrophe used to make a plural is really weird, but if that's right, clearly, the possessive "s" ought to go inside quotes too. But I rebel against that suggestion. The "s" isn't part of the title, so why should it insinuate its way inside the quotes? It's a quote crasher!
AND: I just reread this post and noticed a couple of punctuation errors, now corrected. What am I doing writing about a fine point of punctuation and making low-level errors? I am interested in word editing, and yet I'm writing -- a lot -- with no editor at all! Inevitably, I'm going to end up as a stickler-hypocrite.
This blog is a mix of things. Like many, perhaps most, blogs, the mix is based on what catches my attention and inspires me. I enjoy discovering what the mix turns out to be. Some of what catches my eye is political. A political observation, especially if it catches a presidential candidate making a mistake, draws a lot of traffic to the blog. I like to think some of these people will stay around for the other components of the mix, but I realize it will only be a small percentage of the people who are drawn by the political gotcha that got the link. But I was quite struck by comments on this post yesterday, taking the position one ought to avoid politics altogether:
The blogosphere is blatantly partisan. ... I think it's quite difficult if not impossible to find any well-reasoned political debate on the internet .... It's hard to appear to be an equal-opportunity offender or critic much less actually be one. I haven't seen any large-scale blogger who really effectively does either.
I know, politics is important, and potentially interesting, but when I see stuff like this I am reminded both of why the Supreme Court doesn't hear political questions and what a very wise famous computer named JOSHUA once said:
I think that's well put, but terrible if true. We should cede the political speech to the hardcore partisans? A moderate observer of political things ought to opt out of political speech because of the danger of being used by the hardcore partisans that somehow rule the blogosphere? That's far too big a price to pay and far too pessimistic. It's far too perfectionistic too: of course, no one can become completely balanced in the center and dish out criticism in precisely balanced portions. And what does it mean to be "really effective" as a blogger? It's always just one more day of assorted posts, one more sampling of the mind of this particular blogger, out there for the world to dip into. If I were more of a hardcore partisan, I suppose I would worry that I might somehow, in my meanderings, hurt Kerry/Bush, and then I will have lost the game. The demonstration of my nonhardcore, nonpartisanship, is I don't care enough about that to worry the way this commenter thinks I will.
CNN.com has the transcript of Colin Powell on Larry King from the other day. I just read the part about TiVo (which Throwing Things linked to). I love Larry King transcripts, because Larry has his own special way of talking that just seems so funny transcribed. And he seems like a bit of an idiot (doesn't know the word "Luddite") and a bit nutty (afraid of email). King views push-button phones as new technology: they came out in the 60s!
KING: Is it true -- I learned from sources, that you are a technocrat, that you like TiVo, that you like all of these -- you like it.
POWELL: Yes. I like TiVo, I like computers.
KING: Why?
POWELL: Because it makes work easier for me. It speeds up communicating with people. ... And I understand that you are an absolute Luddite.
KING: What's a Luddite?
POWELL: Nevermind.
KING: Sounds like some division of my faith. I'm a Luddite. No, I don't ...
POWELL: You don't do any of this stuff.
KING: I don't like computers, I don't ...
POWELL: How can you not like computers?
KING: I don't like e-mail. Because it's scary. Do you like cell phones?
POWELL: Yes. Cell phones, e-mail, TiVo ...
KING: Push-button phones.
POWELL: TiVo would change your whole way of viewing television.
KING: My wife likes it.
POWELL: Yes. We don't want to get into product endorsement here.
KING: Well, the ability to tape without tape.
POWELL: Yes, right. Right.
KING: So, you do that a lot.
POWELL: Do that a lot.
KING: "LARRY KING LIVE," you TiVo me.
POWELL: Yes, Larry, every night.
Aw, that's sweet. I wonder what TiVo "season passes" Powell has and what "wish lists." I was asked today what I used my TiVo for if I don't care about sitcoms. Reality shows? Not really. I watched "The Apprentice," and "American Idol" is different, but I don't watch any of those dating shows (everyone's boring!) and I don't watch "Survivor" (I watched the first season until the episode where there was a long contest to see who could stand on a stump longest: how is that entertainment?). I TiVo "Meet the Press" and "The Daily Show" and Letterman (so I can watch the part between the monologue and the first guest) and Conan and some other things that I usually don't watch (news and talk and non-sitcom comedy). I TiVo "Joan of Arcadia," but I've just about had it with God telling Joan to start something new (get a job in the bookstore, join the band, join the chess club, become a babysitter, join the yearbook, learn the piano, build a boat). Is that what God wants, shallow club-joining? Anyway, lately I've enjoyed HBO-on-demand more than TiVo. It's basically TiVo but out there somewhere, with all HBO. But what does Colin Powell TiVo? Probably a lot of C-Span. Maybe the History channel. Probably sports. Maybe he watches old movies with his wife.
Friday, February 27, 2004
The height of informercialism. The Apprentice reached a new summit in loathsome informercialism last night as the entire show served to introduce the entirely ridiculous product Trump Ice. It's just water, but somehow it's ice, even though it's not frozen, because ice is at least a type of water, though not the type found in the bottle, and ice is a slang term for diamonds, and, you know, diamonds are expensive and Trump is very rich, so it all makes some kind of sense, doesn't it? Who wants to drink water from a bottle with a picture of Donald Trump on it? His face doesn't exactly convey the idea of clean and refreshing.
But aside from that, it was a pretty good show last night. I marvel at the photography and the editing. I used TiVo to go back and study the key scenes of the two characters who were in the running for getting fired and these were beautifully done, with the chess pieces looming in the foreground in front of the calculating Nick and the People Mural suggesting the emotionalism of Ereka. Carefully watch the segment of the show where the contestants are performing the task. The editors know who the bottom three will be and who will lose and will craftily present key scenes to demonstrate the problem Trump will ultimately base his decision on. It will not jump out at you on first viewing, but if you go back, knowing who's going to be fired, you will see all the information was right there in the edit. So, watching the show is like reading a mystery novel.
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