Speaking of being called to a higher law and speaking of speaking....

In the previous post, we're talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand and what he said out loud, in the New Testament story where the scribes and Pharisees present Jesus with the question of what to do with a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. In the Gospel text, we're told Jesus that wrote on the ground, but not what he wrote, and we're told that he subsequently spoke and said "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

I'm putting up a separate post because I found the scene that sydney said he loved in the movie "The King of Kings." Made in 1927, it's a silent movie, so no one is saying anything out loud. We see what Jesus says written out on the intertitles, and we also see what he writes in the sand.



Beautiful filmmaking, particularly as the sand-words, not written in Roman letters, transform into our English words, naming the sins that the men in the crowd realize they've committed, and that's why they all turn and walk away.

That's not an accurate depiction of what happens in the biblical text though. The movie shows a mob on the verge of stoning the woman and Jesus intervenes and announces his rule about casting the first stone. Only thereafter, does he write the names of the sins in the sand. But in the Bible story, there is no angry mob with stones in hand. There are scribes and Pharisees demanding that Jesus deliver a legal opinion. Jesus bends down and writes on the ground instead of answering the question.  Only after they persist does he stand up and pronounce his new rule, which causes the scribes and Pharisees to walk away — "beginning with the older ones." The movie would have you see the members of the mob acknowledging their sins and their consequent lack of qualification to cast the first stone. But the text has intellectuals trying to box Jesus in on a question of law, and Jesus getting the better of a conversation he didn't want to have in the first place.

It's not surprising that a movie plays up the visible drama, and it's also not surprising that when I — a law professor — read the text, I see something akin to a law school class. The professors try to stump the student and the student transcends their tricky game. To me, the part where Jesus bends over and writes in the sand is like what happens in a law school class when the lawprof poses a difficult hypothetical and the students bend their heads down and go through motions of writing. They don't want to answer. It's not that they're writing something magically revelatory and startling. But if the lawprof keeps pushing and calls on someone, an answer will be spoken out loud.

I guess the law-professorly interpretation of the text isn't terribly cinematic. It's no wonder the movies present an angry mob with stones in hand and Jesus miraculously knowing and changing the hearts of the sinners. (And the adulteress is an actress evincing exactly the form of sexiness that was fashionable in the year the movie was made. I love the eyeliner!)

But to me the lawprof interpretation is thrilling and dramatic. The professors think they've got the upper hand. They know the legal text and it's tough. And then the brilliant student who will soon be the greatest professor of all gets on top of the dialogue and says something they must accept as correct: If you're going to have strict rules and severe mechanisms of enforcement, you must apply them equally to everyone. This is the structural safeguard of equal protection of the laws that is the necessary component of a democratic system. If there can't be exceptions and special treatment for preferred people, legislatures will resist imposing harsh rules and painful punishments.

In this context, let me give you my favorite Justice Scalia quote, which happens to include one of the key words of Christianity: "Our salvation is the Equal Protection Clause, which requires the democratic majority to accept for themselves and their loved ones what they impose on you and me."

"Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest..."

"... and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight."

Yesterday, I told you I'd heard myself mutter "ah, there's a great gatsby sentence," and I'd wondered if I'd said "a 'Great Gatsby' sentence" or "a great 'Gatsby' sentence." I told you it was a doozy... a daisy. And now, it's today, and that's the sentence. Isn't it quite something?

A spooky gray, ghastly, ash-gray, swarming, leaden, impenetrable, obscure thing happens. We see... that we can't see it. It's invisible, out of sight, obscure,  screened, clouded, and impenetrable. So much about unseen sights and the one — only one — sound, a ghastly creak. What's going on? It's an operation, done with shovels. An obscure operation.

Occasionally an Obscure Operation. You can use that for the title of your next novel.

Tony Kushner thinks it's fine for a movie to "manipulate a small detail in the service of a greater historical truth."

"History doesn’t always organize itself according to the rules of drama. It’s ridiculous. It’s like saying that Lincoln didn’t have green socks, he had blue socks."

The green/blue sock equivalent ridiculousness in Kushner's screenplay was having Connecticut vote against the abolition of slavery when in fact it voted for.

Althouse unfair to F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Midway through my journey of isolating and writing about sentences from "The Great Gatsby," I find myself confronted by one creeley23 — a commenter within the confines of this Althouse blog — who says: "Hmm... rereading the first ten pages of Gatsby I see that Ann is picking klunky, atypical sentences out of the text."

I have chosen things like: "Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass." And: "A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

But, in my defense, I have also chosen: "A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar." And: "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

Remember, the original idea was:

What I like [about "The Great Gatsby"] is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration....

I feel like starting a blog devoted to individual sentences in "The Great Gatsby," chosen randomly, and continuing until all the sentences have been used up.

I didn't start a new blog, obviously, only a daily discipline on this blog. I confess to not proceeding by random selection. But I haven't gone searching for "klunky" sentences. I've flipped around in near-random style, though. I don't use the first thing I see. Opening up Chapter 1 right now, I see  "I told him" and "We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch." These are examples of non-"klunky" sentences that I would reject, but not because I'm gunning for F. Scott. My initial motivation was love. I thought of all the high school students — I remember being one — who were assigned this book and made to read the whole thing. That being the task, the really interesting sentences are speed bumps. They're completely annoying. You can't take the time to figure them out. What should be loved is hated. Later in life, I reread the book and enjoyed it, because of the worthiness of individual sentences.

Here's a way the book could be taught in a high school class. (But maybe they'd fire you!) Class, this is a book with some very weird sentences. Who can find one? Students read individual sentences out loud and the teacher cuts and pastes the sentences, so they are projected on the board. Encourage the students to pull out things that are the most outlandish and impossible to understand. Encourage laughter. Email the list of sentences to the class and have them reply to the email cutting out all but one sentence, the sentence they'd most like to talk about. Quickly read the email and pick a sentence that got a lot of attention. Puzzle through what it might mean with the students so that they appreciate the fun of getting wrapped up inside one sentence. Give them 20 minutes to write about one of the other sentences.

Must they read the book? Tell them they can read the book if they want. But tell them they can go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary and the list of characters there. The idea is to spend time with particular sentences and to figure out why someone would write like that. Must they love F. Scott Fitzgerald? No! They can be like Palladian — the original commenter genius of the Althouse blog — who said:

Has anyone calculated how long this Gatsby project is going to go on? How many sentences are in the book? How many sentences have been covered so far?

I ask partially out of curiosity and partly because I hate "The Great Gatsby". Why couldn't we have done Chaucer or "Paradise Lost" or something?

I said:

I don't think the project asks you to like "The Great Gatsby." It should work for the haters. Bring that hate!

Palladian said:

That's true! I think the general tone of the comments on these threads led me to think of them as reverential, but your writing about them is actually neutral and occasionally negative.

The watchword watchphrase of this blog has long been "cruel neutrality." And, indeed, I see that even before I responded to Original Commenter Genius Palladian, he was responded to by Upstart Commenter Genius betamax3000, who said:

"the Inquisition that goes on forever. Interminably."

(That's a quote from the post, which is about a "Gatsby" sentence that includes "interminable inquisitions.")

Ann has gone full Althouse Snow Globe Theory now:

"She sets the Snow Globe with cruel neutrality for us to shake and see patterns from the flitter. There is not the expectation of sentimentality. She is asking us to look, together; however, often there is no resolution, each reader seeing only his own flitter of understanding."

And there betamax3000 is quoting himself, from this earlier thread, about one of the least "klunky" sentences that has ever found its way into the "Gatsby" project:

"They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away."

When can we put this "Gatsby" project away, like a dinner and an evening consumed blandly and casually in the Midwest, where all the Gatsby characters belong?

"I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."

That's a sentence I've been saving, in my holding pen of sentences — "klunky" and not-"klunky" — that might get the nod some day on this project, and I guess I've given that one the nod today.

But is today the last day? Is it time to move on to "Paradise Lost" or "The Divine Comedy"?

If the assignment were — in this non-existent high school class — to read straight through "The Great Gatsby," you would know when you were done. The hard task your real teacher tasked you with has a knowable end. It's not interminable, even though the word "ceaselessly" is the 4th-to-the-last word. You get to "ceaselessly" and there's "into the past" and you are done. Your reading of "Gatsby" has receded into the past, like last night's huge, hard-to-digest dinner. You wake up with a stomachache. You can't take too much. You only want to nibble at the edges of some stale ideas, like maybe a blog post, a blog post about one sentence. You can nibble, and — in the comments — you can dribble. Like betamax3000 on last night's "Something was making him nibble" post :

Re: "Oh! For a minute there, I saw 'nimble,' and I was flummoxed."

I like nibble better. Not just because it makes me think of squirrels nibbling on a nosh. I often find myself nibbling at the edge of stale ideas. Of course, it is easier to nibble at the edges when the stale idea is square-shaped, like a behind-the-sofa-cushion Cheez-It: there are corners. Corners are the perfect nibble starters. Plus, Cheez-Its -- and the non-square Cheeto, for that matter -- leave your fingers orangey, like all the best ideas, stale or not.

So one morning when the sun was warm
I rambled out of New York town
Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for the western skies
So long New York
Howdy, East Orange*.

(*"Even when the East excited me most with sprawling, swollen orange fingers: you're gonna have to take notes faster, friends)

Which brings us back to a point: Naked Dylan Robot would love to hear Fitzgerald try to sing some of Fitzgerald's sentences. Naked Dylan Robot would laugh and laugh.

"Everybody's sturdy physical egotism must get stoned."

"When the winds of changes shift
May your malnourished peremptory heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever slightly worn, young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair."

For a writer whose rep is based in large part on making words sing his words just don't... sing. Maybe Naked Albanian Phonetical Dylan Robot could give a try, but I don't think it would get there. Nor Naked Phoenician Dylan Robot, for that matter*.

(*this is -- of course -- self-contradictory: per Wikipedia "in Phoenician writing, unlike that of most later abjads such as those of Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, even long vowels remained generally unexpressed, and that regardless of their origin". No Naked Dylan Robot of any proud heritage could forsake the long vowels: exps: oooohhhhhmaaa-ma is this reaaaaaaally the eeeeend, etc etc).

Perhaps Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow could make a go of the following:

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "MOO
And you say, "For what reason ?"
And he says, "Hoo?"
And you say, "What does this mean ?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home".

-- but Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow is a Talent. And not afraid to nibble, stale or no. Someone should make a Snow Globe for Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow: Ann could put it next to her Robot on her desk and take a picture. I would call in sick to work the next day.

Is your tummy feeling better now? Maybe saltines and ginger ale would help. That's what my midwest-born-and-raised mother would offer me when I was feeling queasy. But you've got to eat something. You must go on — ceaselessly, interminably — when the project is one sentence a day. One day at a time. One sentence at a time. One nibble at a time. One blog post at a time.

Michelle and Barack Obama look great in the Inauguration morning outfits.

Very nice. Love the blue. Love the matching clasped hands as — we're told — they approach the Episcopal Church. Michelle's checker-patterned coat is made of "silk jacquard based on a necktie fabric." Beautiful!

In church:

... Pastor Andy Stanley from North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., delivered the sermon. He spoke of Jesus washing his disciples' feet and saying "now that I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you should also watch each other's feet." The president, Pastor Stanley said, should follow that example and "leverage" his power for the benefit of others.

IN THE COMMENTS: Erika notes the typo in the blocked quote, which is from NPR.org:  You should also watch each other's feet. Maybe NPR misheard and didn't get what Jesus was supposedly doing. Some commenters thought Pastor Stanley didn't get what Jesus meant.

Palladian: "The washing of the feet was about humility and service, not about 'leveraging power.'"

Cheryl: "I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't need to leverage his power. Biblical teaching like this is why we don't attend Pastor Stanley's church, which is right down the road from us."

Bago20 reacted: "Nooooooooooooooooooooo! Please don't help anymore."

Maguro had a different problem: "I find it disturbing that even southern preachers are using 'leverage' as a verb these days."

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: I said: "The humble servant image is a little edgy when the President is black." And Palladian said: "The humble servant image is a little edgy when the President is a profligate, arrogant, narcissistic asshole."

"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

I picked that sentence after searching my Kindle copy of "Gatsby" for "potato" after betamax3000 said:

Yesterday was "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder," today is "tipped out a little of her warm human magic." Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And that was funny, because — before getting out of bed this morning — I'd been toying with the idea of saying: In that "Melody rose" sentence, Fitzgerald intended us to think of semen when we read about "warm human magic" that tipped out of the vessel that is the woman.
 
And betamax added:

My God: if we get to the sentence involving Daisy, the potato and the gardener I just don't know what is going to happen.

Which is what had me looking for "potato" in "Gatsby," not finding it, and suspecting that betamax was making a canny reference to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." I buy "Lady Chatterly's Lover" in Kindle just so I can search for "potato"! My literary pursuits are a tad — a tot — bizarre. I find:

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.'"

And:

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."

Champagne chair...

... contest.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lauderdale Vet said:

I passed that along to my wife, who seems interested :) She'd make a nice chair, I think.

Which made me think of this famous Thurber drawing:

>

There must be a comical drawing of a woman as a chair or an actual chair in the form of a woman. I looked for furniture in human form, and found some stuff in the general neighborhood — the Dali-inspired lips sofa — and this amused me:



And you can unburden yourself here:

"The biggest and weirdest myth out there about the $1 trillion platinum coin is..."

Matthew Yglesias debunks a myth without establishing that anyone believes it.

Clue to Matt: No one believes it.

This is one of those glaring examples of the attitude of superiority leading to missing humor and subtlety. You may think you're smart, but it's not smart to assume other people aren't smart too. I recommend a working assumption that other people are smart, and when you think you're reading something ridiculously stupid, go through the exercise of reading it with the thought that the writer is wonderfully clever. This is especially important when you are reading something concise/elliptical. Look at every word. Think before you mock.

Old news about "news" and dog-powered machines.

In the 19th century, there were lots of inventions like this:



I discovered that as a result of having looked up the word "news" in the Oxford English Dictionary and run across this sentence in Richard Burton's 1621 book "Anatomy of Melancholy": "As a horse in a mill, a dog in a wheele, they run around without alteration or newes." I could picture working horses harnessed to a mill, trudging around in a circle, but what was the corresponding situation for a dog?

How about a dog-powered car?



The reason I was looking up the word "news" was that it was the last word in today's Gatsby sentence, and Meade, reading what I wrote, asserted that "news" was a word that dated back to the early days of movie newsreels and was an acronym for "north, east, west, south." No way, I said, dashing into the OED for confirmation. The idea of the pluralizing the word for "new" to mean news, is quite old, much older than English:

Spec. use of plural of new n., after Middle French nouvelles (see novel n.), or classical Latin nova new things, in post-classical Latin also news (from late 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter plural of novus new (compare classical Latin rēs nova (feminine singular) a new development, a fresh turn of events).

Meanwhile, Meade found a Snopes item, which established a pedigree for the misconception.

"Models also pointing toward a significant winter storm blowing up across the Plains Christmas Day..."

Models also pointing toward a significant winter storm blowing up across the Plains Christmas Day, but let's get past #Draco first. #winter
— Eric Fisher (@EricFisherTWC) December 18, 2012

A tweet from The Weather Channel's Eric Fisher...



... who's so cute that it's easy to picture him surrounded beautiful women — models — pointing at storms.

"Psy Makes $8.1 Million By Ignoring Copyright Infringements Of Gangnam Style."

Okay, but $8.1 million isn't that much considering the magnitude of the success of the thing. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing that becomes successful in a system of virality. But that's not the other hand. That's the same hand.

It's that kind of thing. How much more of that kind of thing do you want?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says: "I'm not tuned in to it all, but I imagined that gangnam style meant wearing dyed cotton fabric."

Since Psy's not policing the copyright, feel free to make a goofy "Gingham Style" parody video. And since the copyright ran out long ago, here's the delightful Eugene Field poem "The Duel" — which, if you remember it, you might think is titled "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat":

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I was n't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I 'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw---
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate---
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.)

And here are many more of Field's "Poems of Childhood." (Try to find a copy with the Maxfield Parrish illustrations.) Did you memorize any of theses poems? I did! I had a beautiful Golden Book collection of children's poems when I was a child, and I memorized many of them, including this one. This was my favorite one. I often ended up reciting these poems around my parents. Even though they were the sort of people who didn't display how delighted they were by children's behavior, I realize now that they must have found these recitals adorable. I had no idea at the time. I just loved the poems and wanted others to hear them. That was virality, circa 1960. 

"Jerky 'sex scion' cops to Central Park lewdness."

Hard to read headline. You have to figure out that "cops" is a verb.

(I think this is what they mean by "crash blossoms" over at Language Log.)

"Y est-ce deux dés?"

"A brilliant French song from the 1960s about life in one of France's former colonies."

Yes, really brilliant. If you're impatient, be patient... and know that the fun starts at 0:59.

(Via Metafilter.)

"Obama steamed over Rice."

Item on ... no, not on a menu... on Politico's "most read" list.

Does the Supreme Court understand Orwell's "1984"? No!

Yesterday, I was studying United States v. Alvarez, the case, decided last June, about the Stolen Valor Act (which made a crime about lying about having received a military medal). In the process of explaining why the law violates the right to freedom of speech, Justice Kennedy, speaking for the majority, wrote:

Permitting the government to decree this speech to be a criminal offense, whether shouted from the rooftops or made in a barely audible whisper, would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable. That governmental power has no clear limiting principle. Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. See G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) (Centennial ed. 2003).... Were the Court to hold that the interest in truthful discourse alone is sufficient to sustain a ban on speech, absent any evidence that the speech was used to gain a material advantage, it would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom.

All right. Fine sentiments about free speech, but what is "1984" doing in there? Did it seem like a good idea to drop in a literary reference to look classy or something? Did nobody notice that the reference is completely wrong? The Ministry of Truth in "1984" wasn't a government institution that enforced truthfulness, which is the way it's used in that paragraph. Such an institution would be bad and inconsistent with American First Amendment principles, but it wouldn't be as bad as the Ministry of Truth in "1984"!

Here's George Orwell's description of The Ministry of Truth:

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem— delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling   

In Oldspeak (or Standard English) this might be rendered:

The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Re-write it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.   

Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother's Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an organisation known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no report of the matter in the press or on the telescreen. That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.

Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.

Am I the first person to point out this blunder? I see the Washington Post editors called it "a deft allusion to George Orwell’s '1984.'" Is "deft" Newspeak for clumsy?!

"There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president."

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."...

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" ... sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

UPDATE: Language Log responds!

"Let me give you a quote that he said just four years ago: ‘If you don’t have any fresh ideas, use stale tactics to scare people'..."

"... If you don’t have a record to run on, paint your opponent as someone people should run from. Make a big election about small things... That’s what Barack Obama said when he was running for president in 2008. That’s exactly what Barack Obama has become now that he is president in 2012, and we’re going to change it."

Said Paul Ryan, last night, in Daytona Beach, Florida. I think that's a bit unfair. What about Big Bird? Big Bird isn't little. It goes without saying: Big Bird is big.

Hey, remember that great old Neil Young song about Big Bird?

Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise
Big Bird flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless

The chains are locked and tied across the door... put y'all back in chains....

"Japan’s first masturbation bar for women opens in Shibuya."

That's the headline, but it's not what it sounds like. It's a place for women to talk about masturbation:

The wall behind the counter is adorned with dozens of colorful sex toys. Megumi Nakagawa, the bar’s proprietor, explains that typically a bar will have bottles of alcohol lining the wall. The appearance of vibrators, however, provides women with more confidence in speaking about spanking.

“Once they take a seat, customers are able to experience a pleasant place in which they can openly discuss masturbation,” says Nakagawa. “Since most people view female masturbation as something of a mystery or taboo, it is not a usual topic at typical bars.”

ADDED: Clicking around over at the Tokyo Reporter, I've finding other hard to fathom headlines, like "Erection of Tokyo Sky Tree leads to mobile prostitution service":

A 45-year-old who runs a tangerine (mikan) farm in Wakayama Prefecture encountered the operation towards the end of August, when he went to see the 634-meter-tall structure with three of his colleagues.

So... tangerines are involved...

"I believe in the Book of Revelation. I believe in disclosure you know?"

"There’s truth in all books in some kind of way. Confucius, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Torah, the New Testament, the Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many thousands more. You can’t go through life without reading some kind of book."

Why Biden acted the way he did at the VP debate.

Something just came into focus for me this morning. You know that I didn't think Obama was that bad in the first debate and that I watched the debate a second time and still didn't think Obama was that bad. I heard something on the radio this morning that hit me as a revelation. It was NPR's Morning Edition, and I can't find the specific quote that jogged my thinking, but someone said the reason Obama made such a bad impression was that looking down and taking notes, he seemed as though he was agreeing with what Romney was saying.



I never thought about it that way, perhaps because, as a lawprof, I'm used to seeing people looking down and taking notes on what I'm saying and it never occurs to me that this behavior signifies that the note-takers agree with me. When I saw Obama looking down and writing, even when he nodded his head and smiled, I thought he was taking account of Romney's points for the purpose of refuting them when it was his turn to speak. I thought his casual attitude expressed confidence that he did in fact have answers to whatever it was Romney was saying.

But I'll assume most people don't read that behavior as I do. They took it to mean Obama was agreeing with Romney. If that's the basis for the opinion that Obama was terrible at the first debate, it would explain the advice worked out for Joe Biden: Whenever Paul Ryan is speaking, remember you are on camera and you need to manifest that you disagree with him. Don't allow yourself to look as though he's making some worthy points and reasonable people might agree with. Don't dutifully wait for your turn to refute those points. Show that you object constantly.

It was a ridiculous display, but I can understand how people who thought hard and tried to be analytical arrived at the notion that it was a good idea.

ADDED: Like me, Obama taught law school classes. Perhaps he shares my interpretation of the meaning of silent note-taking.