I may have found it.

People don't understand when I say that the Joker gets it.

Victor Hugo, "The Man Who Laughs."

I was just led to this by the Washington Post and two glasses of wine. This may be it.

And by "it," those who get it will know what I mean.

Phrase of the day, perhaps of the month, plus word of the day.

I found this on the blog Whatever:

So, on one hand, I suppose Lady de Rothschild might know what an elitist looks like. On the other hand, her saying she doesn’t like Obama because she thinks he is elitist is so full of rich and creamy clueless irony that I feel like every person in the country who makes less than a quarter million dollars a year ought to drop trou, face away from Lady de Rothschild, and tell her to kiss our base and common puckerguards.

What a fantabulous phrase, and the associated image with puckerguards is breathtaking.

How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

Most excellent article for the numbskulls amidst us.

"Below is a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

• Stages of Denial,
• Scientific Topics,
• Types of Argument, and
• Levels of Sophistication."

My profoundest thanks to Beck for pulling all this together. Someone needed to do it. Taken from BoingBoing.

Censorship in Canada, and some observations about the United States.

"Censorship has always had powerful patrons and not always benighted backers.

"In the Middle Ages, pious men sought to silence heretics because they believed the Faith led to Paradise, while its loss led to Hell for all eternity. The Christian censorship we mock today was born of men's deepest convictions about the most important thing in life: salvation.

"Devout Muslims believe heretics and apostates should be put to death. Islam is the most important thing in their lives, and its truths are valued more than any freedom to mock them."

Priceless.

more graph humor and song chart memes

Quote of the day.

Cox: Thanks to your little gesture, she (Dr. Clock) actually believes that the Earth is full of people who are deep down filled with kindness and caring!

Kelso: Well that's absurd. People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.

Cox: Exactly!

Sock it to me! Sock it to ME!

Dick Martin, half of the lead of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, has passed away. I grew up on that show...well, sort of. I was so young that I got few of the jokes and almost none of the political humor. Watching it today, I see how critical it was of social conventions.



This is a sample of what Laugh-In was about. Unfortunately, it doesn't have anything about the final bit with the doors, which was always my favorite part. But it does have Ruth Buzzi bludgeoning people with her purse, and I had totally forgotten how funny and creepy the dirty old man was.

Best ad blocker ever.

Download this right now. Seriously. It replaces ads, including banner ads, with classic works of art.

Personality test results.

The following is from the VisualDNA test on the linked site. What, they don't look official?

Mood: Sofisticat

You’re romantic in your outlook with a bit of a taste for the exotic. You love feeling the sea breeze in your hair, sun on your skin…You always take the first dip. When it comes to art, you tend to have a traditional approach. You are passionate about history and true classics. Truly great art stands the test of time. As for music, it’s the soundtrack to your world. You’re up to speed with downloading, and your mp3 is always close by. Music helps you focus and concentrate. You probably find it hard to ever switch it off.

Fun: Thriller

You love to be far away from your everyday life. There’s nothing like catching some rays and slowing down—you know how to take things nice and easy! For kicks, you like to indulge in your great passions. You are happy to live highs and lows; you are fiercely loyal and passionate. You like to be part of the big picture. When it comes to holidays, nothing beats the bright lights of one of the world’s biggest cities. With the metropolis as your playground, you’ll never run out of things to do.

Habits: Back to Basics

You love being a little bit naughty. Nothing beats getting up close and personal with the object of your affection! When it comes to drinking, you have a taste for the exotic. You’re always up for trying the local tipple when you’re on holiday—it’s all about fuelling the fun! As for the home, you have an expressive personality with contemporary tastes. You like to be surrounded by the precious possessions that define who you are.

Social: Socialite

You’re a really sociable animal at heart. Nothing beats being surrounded by all your favorite people. And if the tunes are pumping, that’s even better. You’re a pretty worldly wise and realistic person. When you think of freedom, you think of the hard cash that can buy it for you.

The People Who Agree with Me Institute.

What a great name for a blog entry! This one's from Joel Achenbach at the WaPo. It's about how bad information can exist when we are supposedly surrounded by sources to verify said information. It's also about how easy it is for people to believe in bad information.

My favorite passage:

"Part of the willingness to believe spurious "facts" comes from a distrust of science...Except what they believe isn't true. That's not a political observation, unless insisting on objective reality can be considered political. And if it can, I'd like to sign up for the political party that's in favor of truth."

Amen, brother.

Unintentional Mythos quotes.

Great quote from Jim Woodring's blog:

"...and then the day will dawn when the time for speculation has passed and the time for fleeing has commenced."

Mexico: A Failed State?

Today's Stratfor article on Mexico and its drug smuggling problems has some interesting ideas. I think the following makes a case for Mexico legalizing drugs in its southernmost states. Not in its northernmost states, thank you, America has enough problems resulting from the drug trade there.

Or else we should man up and start nuking or landmining the northern Mexican side.

"There are examples in American history as well. Chicago in the 1920s was overwhelmed by a similar process. Smuggling alcohol created huge pools of money on the U.S. side of the border, controlled by criminals both by definition (bootlegging was illegal) and by inclination (people who engage in one sort of illegality are prepared to be criminals, more broadly understood). The smuggling laws gave these criminals huge amounts of power, which they used to intimidate and effectively absorb the city government. Facing a choice between being killed or being enriched, city officials chose the latter. City government shifted from controlling the criminals to being an arm of criminal power. In the meantime, various criminal gangs competed with
each other for power.

"Chicago had a failed city government. The resources available to the Chicago gangs were limited, however, and it was not possible for them to carry out the same function in Washington. Ultimately, Washington deployed resources in Chicago and destroyed one of the main gangs. But if Al Capone had been able to carry out the same operation in Washington as he did in Chicago, the United States could have become a failed state."

The problem of IKEA.

This is a Click Opera post from 8 May 08:

"Without critical design, without this restless process of legitimation-distinction (and I'm invoking Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu when I use those words), we'd be stuck in a wilting coffeetable world. It wouldn't really be such a bad world -- we'd have pretty colours and catchy shapes that we'd recognise instantly, the way we recognise the chords and arrangements in an Oasis song, the way it sounds familiar even on the first listen. But, like the creative world of Oasis, it would be a limited and lazy world."

This. It's why I find IKEA so annoying. It's why Fight Club works (the film, haven't read the novel yet).

Supernatural Horror in Literature.

H.P. Lovecraft's manifesto on weird fiction. Note that he uses horror, terror, and the like to describe what he means as weird fiction. He discusses what we now call horror because it was the source genre for what he and others later wrote within. S.T. Joshi maintains that Lovecraft thought mere horror writing was hack writing.

"Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx."

I am putting that sentence over the archway of the gaming room, whenever I build it.

Things for my to-read list.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
Miniature literary mindwarps from the world’s most famous blind librarian, a writer – like Kafka – whose work, once encountered, adds a new adjective to the mental lexicon. Unforgettable stuff, after which mazes and mirrors will never be the same again. Often beloved of the kind of person who agrees with its author that “there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition”, and none the worse for that.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
A book composed of the first chapters from other invented books. Either a classic work of literary snakes and ladders or a tiresomely recursive bit of postmodern sterility depending on your interlocutor. Italo Calvino was arguably better elsewhere.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
About what it means to think, and how that happens, this is written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Pattern recognition in the work of geniuses. Loved by maths geeks and anybody with Asperger’s syndrome and anyone with sense. But at root a chess textbook.

Taken from The Times, from a list of the top 50 cult books of all time.

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.

Your question was:

Oh, most omnimpotent one:

What the heck is my boss talking about?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

Like many senior managers, your boss has been immersed in management jargon for so long that he can no longer communicate normally. Here, let me provide you with a translation of what he said.

"We need to get the monkey off our back, get a heads-up on the benchmarks, hit the ground running and then belly up to the bar, while all swinging from the same branch on this one."

-- I have something to tell you.

"For some time, I've been maximizing one-to-one interfaces to explore non-vertical relationships while implementing state of the art, bespoke metrics to productize both front and back-end client experiences."

-- I'm gay.

"It's a wake-up call to stop solutioneering in terms of selling the sizzle, not the sausage. We need to be cutting edge, reach for the low-hanging fruit and push the envelope around client focus, but synchronously we need to eat our own dog food and capture the learns. From where I sit, the downside is repositioning ourselves in the marketplace and taking ownership of our own legacy re-branding. So I have identified a number of mission-critical options to harness the synergistic parameters for a corporate ecosystem-wide re-engineering of the motivational hub, to incentivize the delivery of a win-win across the infrastructure and proactively empower our intellectual capital. In other words, it's time to start the hard yards. We've got to stop being vegans, get that mother duck plucked and give it a good basting. Our primary colours must stick to the Velcro."

-- Yes, I know I've got a wife and five kids, but I'm tired of living a lie.

"I actualized this bilateral face time to run this thought grenade past you, as the bottom line mandates that it isn't rocket science to think outside the box. Transparent success barometers impact on the ballpark and you don't have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to brigade the sheep dip, get your ducks in a line and keep everything in swimming lanes while taking a helicopter view of the situation going forward. I mean, can you make chocolate from that?"

-- I'm telling you this because you always struck me as a sensitive type of guy.

"In a thought shower, right-brain left-brain context, let's throw all the ideas into the knowledge base wok and see if we get ourselves a stir fry. Are you ready to step up to the plate, bring your deliverables to the table and take it to the next level so we can all play in the corporate waterfall?"

-- In fact, I love you, man! Will you go out with me?

"Okay, this is a paradigm shift and we'll have to assess the granularity of your core competencies, eyeball the big picture and touch base with reality. But there are no quick win, out-of-the-box turnkey solutions to make you best of breed when it comes to leveraging a cohesive, copper-bottomed level playing field."

-- Yes, I know this is very sudden.

"Let's diarize a hook-up to unpack and meld when we've got a window, to strategize around what to reiterate to the key players in regard to the concrete deliverables so we end up dominating, in a total way, all the marbles."

-- Take some time to think about this before you reply.

"In the transitional period, the go-live is put in the freezer."

-- Have a nice day.

So the Oracle's advice is, at the office Christmas party tonight, catch your boss under the mistletoe and French him good and proper. Believe me, you won't regret it.

You owe the Oracle a copy of the video of your office Christmas party.

Hail Hellas!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQFLrqO41Vk

A little more than eight minutes long, and well worth it. I had problems embedding it and couldn't figure out where the missing tag or bracket was.

On a related note, I bought the Fagles translation of The Odyssey yesterday while at Duke University for Omer's law school reuinion. I'm still in the introduction (written by Bernard Knox) and it's terrific. I can't wait to get into the poetry itself.

Links to articles on Islam and science.

A small trove of articles lacking in windblown rhetoric, instead substituting comments and ideas from Muslim thinkers.

A Beginner's Guide to Muslim Bioethics

Is Science Dead in the Muslim World?

Science and the Islamic World--the question for rapprochement

The interesting thing is, the writers don't have a clear, pinpoint sense of exactly what went wrong, and when it did. Not really. There's no Luther with nails and a sheaf of papers anywhere to be found.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Most excellent essay on postcolonialism, by a post-postcolonialist.

A nice analysis and critique of postcolonialism.

"Perhaps I'd better start by making clear that it has little to do with the caricature of 'third-worldism' projected by the chorus of penitents in France. In truth, it's a way of thinking that derives from a number of sources and that is far from constituting a system because it is in large part being constructed as it moves forward. That's why it would in my opinion be an exaggeration to call it a 'theory'."

"...to make a fetish of the fact of having been a victim in world history often makes the person who has been prey to such a misfortune wish to shed blood, any blood; unfortunately, all too frequently, never that of the torturers but almost always someone else's, no matter whose. Because, in order to be able to function, the fetish requires endless sacrifices and thus fresh victims killed to appease the sacrificer-god. Central to the victimary economy is the desire for expiation: it takes the form of the spirit of vengeance - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – in line with the ancient monotheistic religions. Indeed, insofar as the transcendent is never grounded in one's own death, it has to be through the sacrificial killing of someone else that the sacred is established."

The author being interviewed, Achille Mbembe, is a post-postcolonialist thinker. His analysis reminds me of much of the analysis of the current state of feminism, i.e., that it's not monolithic and that it's colored by the circumstances of the critic. However, postcolonialism has more of a basis (for me, anyway) than does feminism; for some reason, feminism always seems to be awash in itself. I say that having done my undergraduate work in feminist literary theory, so back off, all you Lacan fans.

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The Illustrated President.

An article for today's art lesson.

"Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the 'Tolstoy syndrome.' That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive."

Sometimes, life is sweeter to us than we deserve. The title comes from the original source.

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