What the...?  

Know Your Classics: In a New Yorker profile of Indian bioengineering mogul Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (behind paywall), the subject is described participating in a panel discussion of author Shobhaa Dé's latest autobiographical book: Shobhaa at Sixty.

Mazumdar-Shaw smirked. "I hope you'll permit me, I just thought of a song," she said, and offered an improvised rhyme. "Shobhaa, tell us. All modern women are jealous. How do you manage to look so terribly young, without Botox and suctions and treatments far flung?"

This is the chorus to Tom Lehrer's "Alma," from 1965's That Was the Year That Was, dedicated to the woman who married (in succession) composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and writer Franz Werfel.

Alma, tell us!

All modern women are jealous.

Which of your magical wands

Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

Politics  

Year of the Wild Hog: A story appeared the other day in the Washington Post about a perennial problem in Islamabad where wild boars foray into the city looking for food among the trash during the winter.

Something about the tone of the piece struck me as a little off. I mean, sure, Muslims don't eat pork, but are wild pigs really "many Muslims' worst nightmare" as author Nicholas Brulliard writes in the first sentence? Would it be the "worst nightmare" of Jews? Their religious views and dietary restrictions ragarding pigs are essentially the same, but I have to wonder if an infestation of pigs in Tel Aviv would be portrayed as "many Jews' worst nightmare" or if the opinion of a brickmaker who lived near one of the ravines the pigs came from would be said to avoid "even making eye contact with one" despite his claim of not being afraid of them. Who gets into a staredown with a wild boar, in the first place?

On the other hand, there's this video of a bunch of guys at IQRA University watching some rather fast boars looking for a way out of a parking lot. They've got sticks—presumably in case the hogs come their way—but they don't seem any more afraid than you might be when several hundred-pound-plus pigs are racing around at twenty miles an hour.

It almost seems like the story's a set-up for some sort of bright boy in the Pentagon to come up with a sort of reverse-"Operation Dumbo Drop", where pregnant pigs are parachuted from planes into Pakistani ravines in some sort of destabilization effort. Predictably, the anti-Islamic racist web sites are all over the story with jokes about how it's too bad for the pigs that they have to live near Muslims, that Muslims are jealous because they can't have as many "piglets" each year, etc.

Of course, if they (or the folks at the Washington Post) bothered to read, they'd know that The New Yorker sent Ian Frazier to cover stories of wild boar infestations in the US some six years ago.

As I leaned over the map and studied it with Joe Corn, suddenly my attention swerved. This map, with its intricate little counties and occasional whole states shaded green to highlight the potential disease-vector threat of wild hogs, reminded me of the red state -- blue state map of America. At first glance, the states that voted for George Bush in 2004 and the states marked on this map as having feral hogs seemed to be one and the same. I mentioned this oddity to Joe Corn, who, scientist-like, declined to comment beyond the area of his expertise.

Afterward, I could not get this strange correspondence out of my mind. I compiled '04 red state -- blue state data and matched it with SCWDS hog-population information on the map of that year. I found my first impression to be essentially correct. The presence of feral hogs in a state is a strong indicator of its support for Bush in '04. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight states with feral hogs voted for Bush. That's more than four-fifths; states that went for Kerry, by contrast, were feral-hog states less than a fifth of the time.

The solidly feral-hog South was, of course, solidly for Bush. The small islands there without wild hogs -- Little Rock, Raleigh-Durham -- voted for Kerry. Democrats who predicted a Kerry win in Florida in '04 might have been less confident had they known that all of Florida's sixty-seven counties, even its urban ones, have feral hogs. Texas, a gimme for Bush, is the state in the Union with the most feral hogs. Estimates of the feral-hog population in Texas are more than a million and a half, though nobody knows for sure. To go along with its high feral-hog numbers, Texas produced more than four and a half million votes for Bush in '04, the second-largest total of any state.

...

A prominent feature of the red state-blue state map is the sweep of red coming up from Texas and the South through the center of the country. Experts say that feral hogs are starting to do the same. They have increased their numbers in Oklahoma and appeared in counties in Kansas and Nebraska, where they weren't previously. An A.P. news story from last year described packs of wild pigs tearing up yards and destroying crops in Sumner County, in south-central Kansas. People there speculated that the pigs were formerly domestic animals that had been turned loose when hog prices crashed some years before. Sumner County preferred Bush to Kerry in '04 by a margin of sixty-eight per cent to thirty-one per cent.

What the...?  

Thanks to You, Readers: I started running those Google AdSense blocks on the right of my site back in early 2007, well after my posting had tapered off, but thanks to you all it's provided me with a little late holiday present. Arriving in the mail on this last day of 2011: a check from Google for just over $100, covering almost four years of AdSense displays.

Sadly, my best-ever earnings came in May 2007—way back at the beginning—and even that didn't break $10. It was just before I was laid off from the Last Director Job Ever.

I'm not sure what made that month's traffic high. Was it my correction of Jim Lehrer that ended up on the journalism site Romanesko? Was it the analysis of how Democratic Senators who voted against the Iraq AUMF had a better re-election track record than those who cheered the war on? Or was it the photo of me corrupting the youth of Springfield, Oregon with the evils of pencil-and-paper role-playing games?

There were seven months that followed where the average take was above $4.60, but only three months since January 2008 have made more than $2.50 (and never more than $3); nearly half the past four years has been under $1 per month.

Maybe I should write something people (at least briefly) think they want to read, again. $9 a month, man....

Politics  

Rounding Up Jon Swift: Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has once again posted the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, and despite my lack of blogging, I was asked once again to contribute my best post of the year. Plenty of good stuff in there, though.

Politics  

Bongo Fury:

Could there have been a more stunning contrast in newly-minted national leaders than we were presented with by George H. W. Bush in the US and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia?

Bush, despite his short stint as Director of Central Intelligence, wasn't considered to be much of a brain trust. Sure, compared to his son, George W.; his choice for vice president, Dan "potatoe" Quayle; and the addled old man he'd served under for the previous eight years, Ronald Reagan, Bush didn't seem like a complete idiot. Havel, on the other hand, was an actual thinker and writer, who'd been agitating against Communist rule of his country for a quarter of a century.

I'd been hoping to make a Christmastime trip to Prague with Barbara for my 50th birthday earlier this month but didn't manage to put it together. It would have been an even greater honor to have been there as the Czech Republic notes the passing of Havel this week, just before the end of Zappadan.

What the...?  

Birthday Song:

I'm so tired of your lies
And the evil things you're doing behind my back
Are there crimes that you have never committed?
I doubt it
Sometimes I wonder when will you die

You're insane
You are bad
You wreck everything you touch and you're a sociopath
There's just one thing that everyone's wondering
When will you die?

Schoolchildren stay at home
And all the banks will close
Each year we'll mark the date
On which we celebrate

I know how
I know why
I can picture every part of your comeuppance except
For the one remaining piece of the puzzle
Which is when you'll die

This is Dan and that's Dan
And there's Marty on the drums to complete the band
And I'm John and he is also John and all of us are wondering
When you're going to die

Still you live
You go on
But you're running out the clock and if we knew how long
I'd be counting down the days until the lovely one
On which you're gone

On that promised morning we will wake and greet the dawn
Knowing that your wicked life is over and that we will carry on

We'll exhale
We'll high-five
We will know at last how great it is to be alive
We'll be lining up and buying tickets and then we'll be
Jumping up and down on your grave

You're insane
You are bad
You wreck everything you touch and you're a sociopath
And the only way to mitigate would be to know the date
You're scheduled to vacate
When are you going to die?
Look me in the eye
Tell me when you'll die

"When Will You Die?", Join Us, They Might Be Giants

Politics  

The Spirit of 76 (With a Side Order of '72): Happy Birthday to Calvin Trillin, who has another birthday today. I have to wonder if he's spending it somewhere in the area, since he's speaking in Boise on Thursday.

On an unrelated note, best wishes to the man who lost in a landslide: George McGovern, who fell outside the library bearing his name in South Dakota last week. The thing that always goes unsaid in news reports is that the guy he lost to was so corrupt that he had to leave the White House before he was removed from office and that even his attorney general went to jail.

Politics  

No Bonus for Lister: Libertarian nutjob Dave Lister writes another long opinion piece for The Oregonian, this time on the Occupy movement compared to the 1932 Bonus Expeditionary Force. As usual, it's riddled with errors, lies, and wacky conclusions, but it's also just historically inaccurate. Not that I expect anything else from someone like Lister. The paper's already run a couple of letters in response, so I guess they're probably not going to run mine:

Dave Lister's comparison of 1932's Bonus Army to the Occupy movement is colored by the rosy lens of time and shows a stunning lack of knowledge of actual history.

Contemporary news accounts of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF) occupation of Washington DC show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and others claimed the protestors ranks were full of criminals and subversives, and that crime in the District of Columbia spiked during the occupation (DC Police Superintendent General Pelham Glassford refuted those charges). Army Chief of Staff Douglas Macarthur was convinced—despite the reports of his own intelligence unit—that the marchers were part of a Communist conspiracy to undermine the United States. Even before the marchers reached Washington, the federal government asked states to help stop their advance because the existing camp "constituted the gravest health menace in the history of the city" (New York Times, June 10, 1932, page 1).

The truth is that BEF was made up of men without much money (which is why they wanted their bonuses), without jobs, in the first years of what became known as the Great Depression. Their camp wasn't some fantasy vision of a Boy Scout Jamboree with veterans; it was cobbled together out of whatever materials and scraps they could gather. The country was full of other ramshackle encampments (Hoovervilles), with the primary difference being that the members of the BEF were owed money by the US government and they massed together in larger numbers to try to make their point.

Politics  

Shell Game: An article in The New York Times discusses how—in the face of reports that poverty in the US has exploded—the Census Bureau is planning to release "a long-promised alternate measure meant to do a better job of counting the resources the needy have and the bills they have to pay." The new method of counting the poor will reportedly eliminate half the rise in poverty since 2006 by counting safety-net programs that "have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship."

This is nothing more than a shell game: changing the metric by which poverty is measured in order to say that there aren't as many poor people. Whenever you reset any previously arbitrary measure to a new arbitrary measure, it becomes difficult if not impossible to judge progress over a long time.

More importantly, counting money and other aid given to the poor as a part of the measure of whether or not they are poor sort of misses the point that if they didn't have those programs, they would, indeed be poor. It's like claiming that people living in a famine zone aren't in danger of starvation because they're getting food aid. Sure, but what if the food stops?

This change is nothing more than an outgrowth of the Republican mantra that if the "poor" have refrigerators and cell phones then they can't really be poor.

What the...?  

Pereant qui ante...and all that...: Another idea from long ago that I never followed up on, getting press in the new millennium: Evie and Victor's blood-spattered couture.

Not exactly the same as my planned customizable line of "KasualTees" (featuring appliques of a variety of wounds on flesh-colored tee shirts), but close enough to cross it off the list.

Books  

St. Crispin's Day: Has it been a month since my last post, already?

And Crispine Crispian shall ne're goe by,
From this day to the ending of the World,
But we in it shall be remembred;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he to day that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother: be he ne're so vile,
This day shall gentle his Condition.
And Gentlemen in England, now a bed,
Shall thinke themselues accurst they were not here;
And hold their Manhoods cheape, whiles any speakes,
That fought with vs vpon Saint Crispines day.

Henry V, William Shakespeare

Books  

I Used to Get Paid for This Kind of Work, Part III: From The Trivia Pages, a laminated attempt to mix Guiness Book "facts" with advertising revenue found in a bar in Seaside last weekend.

First page, first column. "Underwater wonderland" indeed.

Politics  

Not-So-Gentleman's C:

"They made sure we understood at Texas A&M that being a freshman in the Corps of Cadets was not going to be one big fraternity party," he said. "They wore us out so much that not a single member of my freshman class managed to stay awake in class for the first few weeks." That, he added to ripples of laughter from the audience, was "kind of the start of why my grades were what they were."

So Rick Perry's now making the claim that his transcripts from Texas A&M weren't very good because—like a football player—he spent much of his time involved in extra-cirricular activities.

Does that mean that most members of the Corps of Cadets get crappy grades?

Politics  

Huey Long Died 76 Years Ago : It'll be nineteen years this fall since I published my review of T. Harry Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Huey Long in the first issue of Plant's Review of Books. The country at that time was in the grips of an economic downturn that had cast a pall on the off-the-chart job approval ratings then-President George H.W. Bush had in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Rumblings of populism were shaking Washington DC, with a down-South governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton and the seemingly-too-caffineated Ross Perot chipping away at the adminstration. It's just that simple, as Perot said many a time.

Times then seemed a bit tough, but they don't compare to the situation now. Even endless wars in the Middle East and Southwest Asia can't distract the public from nearly two more decades of decline in the health of American households. Everyone's a man (or woman) of the people during election season: MIchelle Bachmann and the couple dozen foster kids she maintained (she must have gotten to know them real well); Rick Perry, shootin' coyotes while he's out for a run; even Barack Obama, who starts talking in his "aw, shucks" voice and rolling up his sleeves out on the hustings. I think that deep down Rick Santorum is probably trying to be a populist, but he's so alien that he just can't pull it off. Ron Paul's basically channeling Perot's wired demeanor. Not so much a man of the people as the crazy uncle you can't get away from at Thanksgiving.

Every year at this time since 2005, I've marked the passing of a real populist: Huey Long. Long died on 10 September 1935 after being shot two days earlier. My review of the Williams biography has been on the web for so long that it's on the first page of results of a Google search for "huey long". This year, as in most, I'd like to invoke his "Share Our Wealth" plan that riled up even the "job-creators" willing to go along with FDR's economic agenda.

From Every Man a King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long by Huey P. Long, 1933

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE MADDENED FORTUNE HOLDERS AND THEIR
INFURIATED PUBLIC PRESS!

The increasing fury with which I have been and am to be, assailed by reason of the fight and growth of support for limiting the size of fortunes can only be explained by the madness which human nature attaches to the holders of accumulated wealth.

What I have proposed is:—

THE LONG PLAN

1. A capital levy tax on the property owned by any one person of 1% of all over $1,000,000 [dp: $15,716,000 in 2010 dollars]; 2% of all over $2,000,000 [$31,433,000] etc., until, when it reaches fortunes of over $100,000,000 [$1,571,600,000], the government takes all above that figure; which means a limit on the size of any one man's forture to something like $50,000,000 [$785,820,000]—the balance to go to the government to spread out in its work among all the people.

2. An inheritance tax which does not allow one man to make more than $5,000,000 [$78,582,000] in a lifetime without working for it, all over that amount to go to the government to be spread among the people for its work.

3. An income tax which does not allow any one man to make more than $1,000,000 [$15,716,000] in one year, exclusive of taxes, the balance to go to the United States for general work among the people.

The forgoing program means all taxes paid by the fortune holders at the top and none by the people at the bottom; the spreading of wealth among all the people and the breaking up of a system of Lords and Slaves in our economic life. It allows the millionaires to have, however, more than they can use for any luxury they can enjoy on earth. But, with such limits, all else can survive.

That the public press should regard my plan and effort as a calamity and me as a menace is no more than should be expected, gauged in the light of past events. According to Ridpath, the eminent historian:

"The ruling classes always possess the means of information and the processes by which it is distributed. The newspaper of modern times belongs to the upper man. The under man has no voice; or if, having a voice, his cry is lost like a shout in the desert. Capital, in the places of power, seizes upon the organs of public utterance, and howls the humble down the wind. Lying and misrepresentation are the natural weapons of those who maintain an existing vice and gather the usufruct of crime."

—Ridpath's History of the World, Page 410.

In 1932, the vote for my resolution showed possibly a half dozen other Senators back of it. It grew in the last Congress to nearly twenty Senators. Such growth through one other year will mean the success of a venture, the completion of everything I have undertaken,—the time when I can and will retire from the stress and fury of public life, maybe as my forties begin,—a contemplation so serene as to appear impossible.

That day will reflect credit on the States whose Senators took the early lead to spread the wealth of the land among all the people.

Then no tear dimmed eyes of a small child will be lifted into the saddened face of a father or mother unable to give it the necessities required by its soul and body for life; then the powerful will be rebuked in the sight of man for holding what they cannot consume, but which is craved to sustain humanity; the food of the land will feed, the raiment clothe, and the houses shelter all the people; the powerful will be elated by the well being of all, rather than through their greed.

Then those of us who have pursued that phantom of Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Theodore Roosevelt and Bryan may hear wafted from their lips in Valhalla:

EVERY MAN A KING

What the...?  

I Used to Get Paid for This Kind of Work, Part II: It's like they're not even trying. Email today from the "U.S. Department of Homeland Security."

This is to Officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly completed an Investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having a business transaction Consignment Box filed with united state dollars which is on held at custody of New York City police department, During our Investigation, it came to our notice that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you didn’t cover the fund with Original Deposit Clearance Certificate.

Seriously, Nigerians, if you're going to try to scam people out of money, at least take the time to make the introductory paragraph read smoothly. Show a little self-respect.

What the...?  

I Used to Get Paid for This Kind of Work: From The Logan Times: Serving the Airport Community, in a cover article about a trip to the French Rivera written by the paper's Vice President and Executive (I reproduce this term loosely) Editor:

We left during the inception of TSA’s newly added physcological security component – a more intuitive screening of passengers as they pass by TSA officers on their way to boarding.

I liked that, too.

It is defintely the way to go. [sic all the way through -DP]

That kind of editing probably explains the prominent notice in the masthead:

The Logan Times assumes no financial responsibility for typographical errors in advertisements....

One can only hope that the TSA screeners are more accurate in their reading of "micro-expressions."

Politics  

On Compromise:

Selling out is easy to do,
It's not so hard to find a buyer for you.
When money talks, you're under its spell,
Ah, but what do you have when there's nothing left to sell?

Selling out
(I'd rather call it compromise)
Is easy to do
(Sometimes you have to close your eyes)
It's not so hard
(Being rich is no disgrace)
To find a buyer for you.
(Put on your shoes and join the race)
When money talks,
(It has a very soothing voice)
You're under its spell,
(It's up to you to make the choice)
Ah, but what do you have when there's nothing left to sell?
(before you know it there'll be nothing left to sell!)

You can't always break the rules, people who try are fools,
When you get older, maybe then you will see.
I've always found ideals, don't take the place of meals,
That's how it is and how it will always be!

It's so nice to have integrity, I'll tell you why,
If you really have integrity, it means your price is very high.
So remember when you start to preach, and moralize,
That we all are in the game and brother its name is compromise!

—Tom Lehrer, "Selling Out", The Remains of Tom Lehrer

Politics  

Blog Post #1500: Happy 89th birthday, George McGovern.

What the...?  

Outliers:

I've gotta stop faking it
I've gotta start facing it
I'm gonna take my final bow
Then I'm gonna take my place in the crowd
I know I'll get used to it
I've gotta stop acting like a clown

I've gotta start facing up to what I really am
I've got to realize I'm just an ordinary man
I think that I'll just settle down
And take my place in the crowd
I don't want to lie to myself any more

Am I just a face in the crowd? Is that all I'll ever be?
I don't want to be anything that isn't really me
Mister can you tell me who I am?
Do you think I stand out?
Or am I just a face in the crowd?

—The Kinks, "Face In the Crowd", Picture Book (compilation)

Director  

Bedeviled by Bedeviled: It was two years ago today on a Friday before a holiday weekend just after a major iOS release that I made my splash on the iPhone app scene with Bedeviled: The Most Diabolical Sliding Puzzle Ever. A splash, followed by a quick sink to the bottom and my usual discouragement with new ventures that don't pan out.