The chameleon work

... of the illustrious Chip Ahoy, who explains his methodology for taking my photographs and perceiving the animal hiding therein. He found the chameleon in the hot peppers I displayed today:



It's that curled tail that gave it away! Chip points us back to the old poodle in the carpet:



The very well disguised elephant in the blue tile wall:



And my personal favorite, the giraffe in the woods:

"A 1-hour elementary school lesson on gender diversity featuring all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish caused a stir in Oakland..."

"... with conservative legal defense organizations questioning the legitimacy of the topic and providing legal counsel to parents who opposed the instruction. On Monday and today, Redwood Heights Elementary School students at every grade level were being introduced to the topic of gender diversity, with lesson plans tailored to each age group...  'That's a lot of variation in nature,' Gender Spectrum trainer, Joel Baum, told the students. ..."

Things watched just now.

There's this really cool Mickey Kaus ad:



I found that via Mickey's Twitter feed, where he thanked Instapundit for embedding it, so why didn't I see it on Instapundit too? Must have been that, scrolling, I got sidetracked by the monitor lizard. Anyway, I was over on Twitter to write:

Got M to watch the movie "Slacker," which made us look up "Growing Up Absurd" in Amazon, which recommended we buy the movie "Slacker."

We almost never watch movies. We're too fragmented. But "Slacker" is fragmented, and, thinking we could put up with that, we ended up watching the whole thing. In the end of the movie — and I realize I've watched the beginning many times and the end only a few — the camera flashes on the book "Growing Up Absurd." We were trying to remember the author's name, and Meade got it right. We were talking about what a verbal tic it used to be to call everything "absurd."
Thanks for coming over to the other side of the line? What did you think you'd find here? It turns out, it's a passage from an essay by the big old conservative Roger Kimball about Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd":

Goodman said virtually nothing new in Growing Up Absurd. But somehow, his method of recycling received opinions about the problems of youth culture in what he liked to call the “Organized System” struck a chord. His success was due partly to the way he combined the radical clichés of the moment with a traditional language of virtue. “My purpose is a simple one,” Goodman wrote in his first chapter: “to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men.” (Girls and women do not figure much in Goodman’s scheme of things.)

In other words, Goodman cannily blended rhetoric appropriate to a Marine recruitment poster with portentous fantasies about America being an “unnatural system” that warps young souls. Given current conditions in America, Goodman wonders, “Is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up?” But the pertinent question is whether it really was “desperately hard” for an average child to grow up in the United States in the 1950s—an era of tremendous prosperity, excellent public education, potent national self-confidence. Was it true, as Goodman insisted, that “the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted”?

Part of Goodman’s purpose was to sympathize with and exonerate those elements of youth culture that had chosen not to conform to “the dominant society”—the Beats and other fringe groups who believed that “a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife.” (Not so useless if one wishes to keep food from spoiling, of course, but Goodman never acknowledges that side of things.) 

"The man had 14 royal pythons and 10 albino leopard geckos under his clothes."

Smuggling:

[The pythons] were hidden in stockings duct-taped to the man's abdomen. The geckos were in boxes taped to his thighs.

"I don't want to be seen now, because I am like a lizard. It is horrible."

"I would like some way to disappear where people don't see me any more at some point."

Of course, there is a way, and Michael Jackson found it.

"Personally, I'm not going to be seduced by some dinosaur wanna-be..."

"... that thinks a laid-back demeanor and a shit-eating grin is going to convince me to sully my honor."

"Gilliam... was standing outside a restaurant in Soho when a car backed into him. 'Yes, a man can fly,' observed a bystander as he flew past."

Hilarious assholes they have in England, it seems.

He broke his back, but seems fine now, despite a cracked vertebra and dislodged disc. "Yeah, I'm a lizard," he says, cackling.

From an article on Terry Gilliam's seemingly cursed movie "The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus." Other problems: The producer died suddenly. And so did the star — Heath Ledger.

"It just isn't possible that he's dead," [said Gilliam.] "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense.... "

We're not all flying men/lizards.

"I ... looked at how to do the remaining scenes without Heath, and realised that, since his character goes through a magic mirror three times, we could get three actors to play the role."

He got Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, who are all donating their compensation to Ledger's 3-year-old child Matilda.

Other interesting things in the linked article:

1. George Harrison believed that the soul of The Beatles transmigrated into Monty Python when The Beatles died.

2. Monty Python broke up because the guys "got bored of each other."

3. "[Gilliam] renounced his American citizenship in 'disillusionment' with the Bush years, but he retains a pigtail which makes him look like an ageing hippy." You know what I don't understand? The role of "but" in that sentence.

4. Gilliam has never taken drugs, out of sheer fear of losing the distinction "between fantasy and reality." "It was only 15 years ago that I discovered I couldn't fly. I have such a 'sense memory' of flying around the world at the height of a table that when someone asked me to show them, I really thought I could do it."

5. In lieu of drugs: Dali, Ernst, Breughel, Bosch, and Mad magazine.

The Kit-Cat Clock brings out the Proust in Bird Dog.

A black plastic cat pricks the memories of a man who's named himself after a dog.

I see my room, the window, my bookshelf-turned-rock-and-fossil collection, the Revolutionary War prints on the wall, my little desk and chair with my chemistry set in one of the drawers, my first precious little transistor radio, the big aquarium set up with rocks and sand for my various lizards, and my bed that I hid my forbidden Mad Magazines beneath to read with a flashlight after lights-out....

***

Don't you want a Kit-Cat Clock?



If you do, support the Althouse blog on New Year's by using this link.

"Clintons are lizard people and they are punishing Obama."

Links mentioned:

David Icke's theory of the lizard people

Skeptoid on Reptoids

A few more thoughts about the Clinton ad with the letters "NIG" on the sleeping child's pajamas.

Writing about the letters "NIG" on the child's pajamas in the Hillary commercial yesterday provoked a lot of comments, and unfortunately, Blogger seems to have a glitch that makes it hard to get to any comments after the 216th one. It's not enough to click on "comments," you have to click on "comments," then "post a comment," then scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the tiny word "newer" and click on that. There are some very good comments beyond 216, so let me front page some of them here.

Alan adds a layer of interpretation:

I would go further. The child in question is shown just when the voice-over asks whom we would want in the White House when that crucial phone callcomes through. I think he's meant to represent Obama.

Who would we want in the WH? A sleeping (lazy) black (good nig) child (inexperienced)? Or Hillary Clinton?

The sleeping child is black, so I would agree that if the image was deliberately created, this was part of the idea.

Theo Boehm wrote:

"NiGERO"

That's what my lizard brain saw when I looked at that commercial full-sized on a 19" computer screen.

Seeing it on a better screen is important, since it is meant to show on television, and the YouTube version has much poorer resolution. Note that Theo is still watching the YouTube version, and what goes on TV will be clearer. He goes on:

I saved it from YouTube and watched it repeatedly. I tried to forget about the image and imagine I was looking at it with fresh eyes. I'm sorry, but it was pretty blatant to me. The letters from the word "good" above begin to look like "ero" in this context, at least to my brain, conditioned as it was in the days of blatant racism in this country.

First of all, the image is visible for nearly three seconds. It starts at second 10 and fades at the end of second 13. This is hardly some single frame flash measured in milliseconds. This image sinks in.

We are friends with a mixed-race couple who have a couple of kids, one of whom looks (or at least used to look) quite a bit like the child in the commercial. If I were truly paranoid, I'd say Hillary's campaign is at once infantalizing a possibly bi-racial kid by showing him depending on the National Parent Hillary for protection, and at the same time fear-mongering about blacks, as dissected ad nauseum upthread. Looks like a double-whammy to me: Here's little Obama asleep in his wittew beddy-bye needing a grown-up to protect him; but at the same time you gotta watch out for those pickaninnies.

I think Alan has just beat me to it with this interpretation.

In any event, I agree with Althouse. This is either incredibly foul or unbelievably stupid. I know a lot of people won't see it that way, including my wife, but my kids picked up on it instantly. I showed them the commercial after dinner and asked what they saw. My youngest piped up immediately, "That kid had the N-word on his pajamas." They then had a lot of fun making up variants, thankfully all non-racist. Not trying to congratulate ourselves too much, but my kids have NEVER heard the N-word in this house outside of watching "Roots," "Glory," and possibly a few other movies, but they know what it represents. FWIW, they have also NEVER said it themselves to my hearing.

In his most recent comment in a thread about shoe shopping, Sir Archy called the Presidential candidates, "Wretches." It thought that was a cute faux-18th century rhetorical flourish, but in reality going too far.

I'm now beginning to think he's on to something.

(I've added the link to the Sir Archy comment.)

Ralph asks 2 questions:

Can you imagine the response someone would get if they suggested this in a campaign strategy meeting?

Can you imagine the response if this were a McCain ad in October? I suspect few of the commenters above would dismiss it as coincidence.

On the second question, I think McCain would be pilloried.

Let me vary the first question. Assume the lettering has found its way into the footage either intentionally or quite by accident. (As some commenters are saying, it could be stock footage.) Then, campaign strategists are reviewing the ad and deciding whether to approve it or have it re-edited. Wouldn't they notice the lettering and freeze frame it to make sure it doesn't say anything that might be used to hurt the candidate? And once you do that and try to read it, aren't you going to see "NIG"? Now, try to imagine the scenario at this point.

Scenario #1: They feel a little guilty, but they know their candidate is desperate, and they think they might stimulate the anti-Obama vote and decide to run with it. If anyone tries to talk about it, we'll trash them. They're crazy!

Scenario #2: Great! Let it go out like this. It's bait. If the Obama campaign says we're going racial, we'll paint him as one of those nuts who sees racism in nothing. He's staring at a kid's pajamas? Shouldn't he be looking at the real problems in this world? Either it will have no effect, it will have a subliminal effect, or it will create opportunities for attack.

Scenario #3: ???

IN THE COMMENTS: I love this, from ace commenter Meade:

Scenario #2.1:

Great! Let it go out like this. It's bait. If the Obama campaign says we're going racial, we'll paint him as one of those nuts who sees racism in nothing. He's staring at a kid's pajamas? Shouldn't he be looking at the real problems in this world? Either it will have no effect, it will have a subliminal effect, or it will create opportunities for attack.

No effect? Can we really afford to take that chance?

Good point, "Tom." Say, that gives me an idea. You know a few things about those - what do they call them... blogs? - don't you? What if you were to plant a comment here or there? Whaddaya think? Doable?

LOL. I've thought that the commenter who prompted me to write the first post could be a campaign insider. His name, "Tom," doesn't connect to a profile page.

"The doctrines of so-called ‘animal rights’ ... violently interfere with the rights of an art work to be freely exhibited in an art museum."

So says the artist. "They completely ignored the concept and ideology behind this particular art work." But that art exhibit put the toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions in an environment designed to provoke them into violence. "It’s pretty clear that the intention is that the observer is intended to witness potential conflict between the animals which frankly I think is kind of sick," said the Humane Society spokesman.

That terrarium was "a microcosm of global conflict and power dynamics" that "functions as a metaphor for the conflicts among different peoples and culture — in short, human existence itself." That is to say the toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions were supposed to do vicious things to each other to express the artist's ideology. The SPCA people wanted to add water bowls and hiding places and transform the gallery into something more like a pet shop -- which would destroy the whole concept of Huang Yong Ping's "Theatre of the World."

So: Artist's expression versus the welfare of toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions.

In the end, the animals were removed from the exhibit, which I think was the right choice. They were being mistreated, and to stop mistreating them would wreck the artist's message. The animals won, yet so did the artist. His show -- in Vancouver -- has received immense publicity. 5,000 people have already seen it with all that toad/tarantula/lizard/cricket/scorpion strife, and now everyone's talking about it.

Isn't the interaction with the animal welfare crowd part of the artwork, the larger performance -- in the theatre of the world? I think that statement from the artist, quoted above, shows him intentionally stoking the conflict in the world beyond the terrarium. The idea that his rights were "violently" interfered with -- surely, he meant to set you off. How can violence to an abstraction compare to the violence of the toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions attacking each other? He made you think that. He made you subordinate art to insignificant creatures. A powerful performance.

Audible Althouse #31.

Today's podcast is about light things and enlightenment. There is talk of drugs and pop music and fashion. There is the moral problem of the beanbag chair, the philosophy "It's all good," and the pure joy of feeling anything at all, even the touch of a lizard on a windowpane. (Stream it here.)

Justice O'Connor.

Charles Lane has a terrific article in today's Washington Post Magazine called "Courting O'Connor/Why the chief justice isn't the Chief Justice." For law students who may resist thinking about the Supreme Court Justices as individuals, with their own styles of thinking, this would be a great place to start.



There is a lot of great information about her upbringing (living on a ranch, "[f]or playmates, O'Connor had lizards, a bobcat, horses with names such as Chico and Hemorrhoid, and a handful of leathery cowboys, who taught her how to ride and cope with cactus thorns"), her education (she was influenced by "an eclectic law professor named Harry J. Rathbun ... [who] taught business law during the week and led discussion groups on psychology, religion and ethics at his home on Sunday evenings"), her appointment to the Court ("much of her face-to-face meeting with Reagan was taken up by a discussion of horseback riding and mending fences on the Lazy B"), and her role on the Court.



Her importance as a swing voter is aptly explained. I liked this quote from Georgetown lawprof Richard Lazarus:

"What I do, and what I advise people arguing cases, is to treat all the justices with great respect," says Lazarus, who also practices before the court. "But . . . when Justice O'Connor asks a question at oral argument, every advocate would be well advised to answer in full, and pause and look at her, because nothing is more important to you than making sure you've addressed her concerns. With the others, it may not make a difference."

Wild animals in the city: 3 things.

The Capital Times reports this discovery in Milwaukee:

More than 70 ducks in a basement pen were only part of the menagerie authorities found in [Jamie L. Verburgt's] Milwaukee area apartment after other residents complained of the stench coming from the unit.... Others among about 200 live creatures in the apartment included snakes, rats, turtles, a pair of alligators, toads and scorpions. ...

John Walters, Verburgt's boyfriend, was prosecuted in 2000 for mistreatment of exotic animals. At that time, police found a female cougar, female leopard, silver-tailed fox, monitor lizard, two caracals, a coatimundi, chinchilla and a reticulated python in Walter's apartment in Greenfield, another Milwaukee suburb. ...

(Ah, see: there's someone for everybody.) (Mmmm... "reticulated"!) That story reminded me of this passage from "The Life of Pi":

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you'd be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without being seen by a soul.

And that reminds me of the movie "12 Monkeys," which has a great animals-in-the-city theme. (And to say that is to allow Brad Pitt to make a second appearance on my blog today. So I'll just add that I'm not really a Brad Pitt fan, but I do love a couple of his movies, "12 Monkeys" and "Fight Club.")