"And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously, and he spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way."

I figured that "ducks will have something to eat" post has got you screaming please, please, give me a "Gatsby" sentence. I know many of you don't like or don't get the "Gatsby" project, in which we isolate and munch on a single, possibly turgid, sentence from "The Great Gatsby," more or less every day around here on the Althouse blog. But now, perhaps, you'd love one as an amuse bouche. The moods are orchestrated here on Althouse.

This sentence has us suspended in time. Time passed, servants waited, standing around, and the man is there, being awkward. Blink is a good word in relation to time. It expresses the shortest kind of time, and anxious eye blinking contrasts to the waiting around of the servants. They are patient and he is nervous, and then — cutting through the awkwardness — the man speaks — but his speech piles on more awkwardness, as he talks about the weather — rain — and we need to be told that this isn't relaxing talk-about-the-weather small talk. His weather-talk has a specific, unsettling attitude: He spoke of the rain in a worried, uncertain way.

How is the weather where you are? Is there much rain? Please watch out for the ducks... the hungry, hungry ducks. 

"I wouldn’t be wasting time on a Bob Menendez political obituary."

"I think Bob Menendez is a very tenacious person, and he has the advantage of six long years and a fairly forgiving political environment in New Jersey."

According to — who better to say? — Bob Torricelli.

Think of all the Bobs who've thrived in fairly forgiving New Jersey.

It's all about the time frame. Torricelli had to withdraw when allegations emerged in the midst of a campaign. He didn't have any leeway for riding out the New Jersey forgiveness arc.

Finally, after all these years, not since the 90s, we will have a name for our decade!

I just realized that with the arrival of 2013, a great void will be filled. There will be an end to the lack of a name for the decade. With '13, will be in The Teens!

Don't tell me we had a name for the first decade of the new millennium. We talked a lot about what it would be called, and then it came and instead of calling it something, we just worked around the lack of a name. Don't tell me we called it the "ohs" or the "aughts." We did not. And we entered the second decade of the new millennium with the same problem. 2010, 2011, 2012... Don't tell me we called that the "tens." Obviously, we didn't.

Relief from the torment of namelessness arrives on Tuesday. Don't worry about 13 being unlucky. That's superstition. I am talking about real life. We need a name for a decade. I have fond memories tied with the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. There's pizzazz and warmth and eclat and resonance in those terms. We've been empty and hungry for 13 years. The gnawing craving for meaning is over.

It's the Teens!

What time is the world supposed to end?

It is 12/21/12 at long last, I just noticed, after paying some some attention to the real, albeit mini, apocalypse that is Draco the Blizzard. I was going to note that the world hasn't ended, but there's the question of what time the Mayans pinpointed on this Day of Days:

I know the world isn't really going to end today, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would believe it is. But my 11-year-old brother thinks it's going to end, and I want to be able to go scream "I told you so!" in his face as soon as possible.

Thanks.

ABC is checking midnight in each of the world's time zones. Weather prediction noted:



I like NASA's reassuring web page. Excerpt:

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?

A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then — just as your calendar begins again on January 1 — another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Wikipedia has a huge article on the somewhat larger topic "2012 phenomenon." Excerpt:

Many assertions about the year 2012 form part of Mayanism, a non-codified collection of New Age beliefs about ancient Maya wisdom and spirituality.... Archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni says that while the idea of "balancing the cosmos" was prominent in ancient Maya literature, the 2012 phenomenon does not draw from those traditions. Instead, it is bound up with American concepts such as the New Age movement, millenarianism, and the belief in secret knowledge from distant times and places. Established themes found in 2012 literature include "suspicion towards mainstream Western culture", the idea of spiritual evolution, and the possibility of leading the world into the New Age by individual example or by a group's joined consciousness. 

Is there a bigger crock than secret knowledge from distant times and places?

Italian conceptual artist, bubble wrap cut in 3-minute, 5-minute, and 10-minute squares...

... people waiting at the bus stop...

It's the principle of "occupied time."

It's twelve twelve twelve.

Should I wait 'til twelve twelve to say that?

At twelve twelve today, what will you do? It's our last chance to line up the numbers, which we've been doing since January 1, 2001, which became especially satisfying when we could do it with double digits on October 10, 2010, something we were able to do again last year, and are doing one last time today — last time, unless you picture yourself surviving beyond the turn of the next century. Really, are you that optimistic? There are those who see all of us going down a week from tomorrow.

"Ode on Solitude."

Alexander Pope, 1735:

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest, who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.
Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mix'd; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Tammy and Tommy debated again last night.

We'd gone out to the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery to hear physicist Sean M. Carroll give a talk about the universe. The universe might give birth to baby universes. Who are you to say it doesn't? And time — time is a very obvious concept, he said, before portraying time in a way that was quite weird. These cosmologists, such comedians. You can read this: "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time." Here he is on "The Colbert Report" trying to get a word in while Stephen Colbert anxiously strives to make sure it comes out funny. I thought Carroll's solo explanation of everything was highly amusing. It's all about entropy. From the Big Bang on, it's movement toward entropy, and even when things become more complex — producing all the detail of the world we live in now — it happened along a path from less entropy to more.

We walked home, talking about and reframing the discussion. The moderator — a Madison media character — fielded questions from the brainy audience and inserted a question of her own: What do you have to say to these people who won't believe in global warming? Politics. Always politics in Madison. It's our own special brand of entropy. Meade and I blabbed about such things. Did Carroll say that we only "remember" the past because, since it had less entropy, we have the sense of knowing what it was, like when we see a broken egg — Carroll had a lot of PowerPoint slides of eggs — we know the egg of the lower entropy time — a whole egg — but there are many diverse possibilities for the egg's higher entropy time — scrambled, quiche, rotten — and so we can't "remember" it?

Home, I said, "You must want to watch the baseball game" and Meade said "I want to watch the Tammy and Tommy debate!" Both of these things, along with President Obama on "The Daily Show," were preserved on the DVR. So we watched Tammy and Tommy, and that was pretty funny too. The moderation was hilarious. They'd ask a question and Tammy and Tommy each had a couple minutes to answer. Then they'd declare a 6-minute period in which Tammy and Tommy could talk about anything, interact in any way, hog the time, interrupt, be as polite or impolite as they saw fit with absolutely no intervention from the moderators.

Tommy got all impassioned and began many sentences with "Ladies and gentlemen." He assiduously refrained from calling Tammy Tammy. She was "my opponent." And the message was: Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent is incredibly, unbelievably liberal. Tammy seemed nervous but never broke from her prim, schoolmarmish demeanor, as she repeated the message about Tommy: After he was governor, he became a lobbyist and made a lot of money.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it's a simple decision. What irks you worse: liberals or rich guys?

Now, back to your regularly scheduled entropy.

"Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all."

We're talking about "bizarrely low-key bacteria have been found in sediments 100 feet below the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean" — at least 1,000 and maybe millions of years old:

Their metabolism is dialed down to almost nothing, an adaptive advantage in a place with so few resources. The bacteria that survive are the ones that can satisfy themselves with minute traces of oxygen and a parsimonious diet of organic material laid down millions of years ago....

This made me think of the Beatles lyric: "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" Nowhere bacteria, please listen/You don't know what you're missin'...

“These organisms live so slowly that when we look at it at our own time scale, it’s like suspended animation,” said Danish scientist Hans Roy, a biologist at Aarhus University and the lead author of the study. “The main lesson here is that we need to stop looking at life at our own time scale.”

Yes. Exactly! I'm going to readjust to this bacteria point of view. It's a strategy....

"Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few."

"If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to [requests for just a few minutes of your time], they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!"

ADDED: That quote — from Robert Heinlein (via Instapundit) — contains an atrocious mixed metaphor. First, time is analogized to money — "your total capital" — and then demands for it "snowball" — and here we've got an image not just of snow, but of getting larger and larger by rolling downhill. This increasingly large ball of snow somehow reaches a point where suddenly it's parasites — some sort of bacteria or fungi? — and they're consuming... well, I guess all that money. Having eaten all your money, these parasites "squawk for more" — they have powers of speech. What kind of parasites squawk? Maybe some animation in a TV commercial for an athlete's foot remedy. It's possible! But what happened to all the snow?

See, this is why I can't read science fiction.

What's so terrible about internet comments?

Rebecca Rosen complains about the structure of the commenting systems, which, she says, tend to make even well-written comments feel "more like lists of unconnected ideas than genuine conversations." In other words, chronological order is such an old, boring, and obvious order. But it's clear and comprehensible. Do you prefer comments "nested" under the comments they're supposedly responding to or comments that are re-ordered based on commenters voting on comments?

Does chronological order bother you — in comments sections and elsewhere? You know, you have to live your life in chronological order. And that's what's so cool about blogging. Like life, it's in chronological order. I used to resist chronological order. I have an old fantasy of living life out of order, having the power to reshuffle one's allotted days. But you can't do it. And if you abandon chronological order for you blog, it's not a blog anymore.

Respect chronological order. It's the order to beat. You think you have a better order? Prove it.

IN THE COMMENTS:Peter Hoh said:

There ought to be a way to highlight or star a comment like Freeman's "weird out, future man" comment.

That way, someone who is part of this community, but having a busy day, could still read a comment like that without having to plow through the whole thread.

Of course, one could do like I do when there's a long thread -- use the "find" function in my browser to see if Freeman stopped by to leave a comment.

My way to highlight or star a comment is front-paging! Now, you might think I should front-page Freeman's comment, which — I agree with you — was great, but under the circumstances — "standing between two mirrors" — it makes more meta-sense to front-page you.

"In 1793, in an effort to sweep away the superstitious associations of the old method of timekeeping (you know how revolutionaries are)..."

"... the French National Convention established a new calendar with 12 months of 30 days each, followed by five (six in leap years) 'complementary days,' which belonged to no month."

Each month was divided into three 10-day "decades," and each day into two sections of 10 hours each. The hour was further divided into 100 "decimal minutes," which were in turn divided into 100 "decimal seconds."

The year began on the autumnal equinox, which happened to be the anniversary of the foundation of the Republic. Each month was given a descriptive name, e.g., Thermidor, July 19-August 17, "month of heat." Each day was also given its own name, some of which were less inspired than others, e.g., Eggplant, Manure, Shovel, Gypsum, Billy Goat, Spinach, and Tunny Fish. Even the French couldn't seriously have felt these represented a significant advance over old faves like Maundy Thursday. Also, on a more practical front, who wants to work a ten-day week?

Nontheless the French public made a valiant effort to implement the new system, going so far as to manufacture watches with concentric 10- and 12-hour dials. But ultimately the task proved to be beyond them. In 1806, after 13 baffling years of missed dentist appointments and overdue library books, they abandoned the revolutionary calendar. This was the only known defeat of Progress in the modern era prior to the establishment of the Illinois General Assembly. Gives you pause, when you think about it.

When we reread a book, we can "behave towards" it the way we behave towards a painting.

Think about why rereading a book is better than reading it the first time.

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.

"This is the size I wanted them to look at 19!"

There should be more stories like this about regretting breast implants. A very young woman is making a decision that binds the much older version of herself. Eh! I guess that's the way life is about all sorts of things. Time only goes in one direction. (Although I did once read a very cool book where the amazing realization in the end was that time actually goes in the other direction. I'd name the book, but the spoiler would ruin it.)

Anyway, the implant-regretter in the linked news item is mostly sad about breast feeding. I'm wondering what these implanted breasts look like 20 or 30 or 40 years later. I imagine young women thinking they won't care what their breasts look like when they are 40 or 50 or 60. But as the voice of the future, let me say: You will!

"I've really never understood the business... of sending these pictures to women."

Can someone please explain to Mark Schmitt — and everyone else with this comprehension problem — why some men send pictures of their genitalia to women?

AND: Here's an even more awkward effort by a Blogginghead to talk about erections. I especially love the way this clip — which I edited to enhance the humorous effect — begins with the diavloggers being all out of synch talking about how lovers can be out of synch. (Warning: the phrase "morning wood" pops up.)

It's not Lady Gaga unseating Oprah that disturbs me. It's Elton John and Bon Jovi in the top 10.

"The World's Most Powerful Celebrities"... according to Forbes.

We need better celebrities! It was bad enough back in the 80s when Elton John and Bon Jovi were the celebrities we had to settle for. But here they are. Still "powerful," whatever that means. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I really got the wrong impression of the speed of the flow of new celebrities into the popular culture.

Maybe this is why time has seemed to go faster as we (Baby Boomers) have gotten older. Or do you think it should be a reason why things should appear to be going slower? When nothing's happening and you're bored, time does seem to go slower. But uneventfulness also makes long stretches of time look shorter. It's a paradox. The paradox of the puzzling persistence of Bon Jovi and Elton John.

The favorite childhood joke of the brain scientist who focuses on the the perception of time.

A turtle enters the sheriff's office:

“I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts.

“Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies.

The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

Hey! What happened to Architectural Digest?

I remember when it was about, you know, architecture. Gerard Butler, eh? Who is he, and am I really supposed to believe he relaxes like that, curled up in that velvet chair, in tight jeans and bare feet and a shirt opened just so? Plus! Sting and Lance Armstrong!

So, it's all about people now. And why are they all guys? I guess this is the real architecture we magazine readers (women) are looking for these days. It all coheres if you think of the right word: erection. It's what we want: a house and a man.

But something seems... off. It's so blatant. The bearded "Joy of Sex"-type guy. His name is Butler. I need a butler. And a lance. And a sting. Ha. Or is it that little girl's watch he's wearing?

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

Our beer taste test.

We're comparing:

1. St. Bernardus Abt 12, our classic favorite over the last year.

2. Trappistes Rochefort 10, the new upstart. New for us.

I tasted blind. Meade, having set up the test, was non-blind. Meade picked the St. Bernardus. I favored the Trappistes Rochefort, for its fascinating extra dimension of flavor. It's been made by monks at he Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy since 1595. "There are approximately 15 monks resident at the monastery. The monks are very secretive about the brewing process, and the brewery is not open to the public...." Good work, secretive monks! "[T]he beer is only sold in order to financially support the monastery and some other good causes." Well, then! I feel like a real humanitarian.

***

And no jokes, please, about us (or me) being blind drunk. We attended a play last night, and, in that play, blindness was batted about:

I am blind.

Perhaps he can see into the future.... 

I woke up one fine day as blind as Fortune. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not still asleep.

And when was that?

I don't know.

But no later than yesterday—

Don't question me! The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.

Well, just fancy that! I could have sworn it was just the opposite....

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

"Real couples are satisfied with making love for between 3 and 13 minutes – and can find anything over 10 minutes tiresome."

Less than 1 or 2 minutes is, however, "too short."