From the monthly archives:
The local alt-weekly has a good piece about the woes of the summer’s major concert tours. They do a good job of laying out all the fees in going to see (say) Kid Rock, concluding:
So let’s say you plan to take a date to go see the Kid. That’s $56 for two tickets, plus $42.15 in fees, of which Ticketmaster takes $18.15 and the Woodlands folks $24. Ring-ring, that’s $98.15, please, all before your first expensive beer or soggy nacho…
The recent discussion of blogs and their democratic characteristics (or lack thereof) prompted by Laura’s comments at Apt 11D in response to critiques of her blog study’s survey instrument has gotten me thinking about the comments option on blogs yet again. It is a question I have pondered numerous times already, probably ever since I started reading blogs and certainly since I decided to start my own.
For me, the question of whether a site that calls itself a blog has comments option turned on is actually quite directly related to what constitutes a blog in the first place. I realize this is a question that is probably impossible to answer in a way that would satisfy everybody, but it is one still worth asking especially if one is to do research on the topic (as I am doing now) where a definition would be helpful.
One of Laura’s concerns is that the blogosphere is not very democratic. That’s true (she mentions some reasons and others have discussed this point at length elsewhere as well). However, blogs can have a democratic component: Comments. Why is it that certain bloggers decide to go without comments? And what makes their Web site a blog in that case? (Clearly I am showing my bias here in that I believe comments are an essential part of a blog. That said, I do realize and accept blogs as blogs even when they do not have comments turned on.. but do so mostly because the community has decided to consider them blogs. You know which ones I mean.)
Talking of transatlantic language differences, I was quite surprised to see this headline in the Washington Post. And I thought Australians took sport too seriously.
Pursuant to a discussion of the recently popular Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, Will Baude makes the following remarks:
My friend mentioned that she has some trouble with all of those old Bogart films because she finds Bogart so physically repulsive that he detracts from the role. To be sure, H.B. was not Hollywood’s prettiest face, a fact that (unsurpisingly) seems to bother more female viewers of the films than male ones. [Female members of my family voiced a similar complaint about Something’s Got to Give last Christmas.]
This is funny to me for two reasons. First, though Bogart’s no beauty, he’s hardly replusive. Second, Bogart is perfectly cast in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon, a movie which is marred by the single most egregious miscasting of all time. (Perhaps it is not the worst in absolute terms, but it is a hideous flaw in an otherwise brilliantly cast movie.) I refer, of course, to the wretched, wretched Mary Astor. She was only 35 when the movie was made, but she looks much older. The character she plays, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is supposed to be a knockout who can wrap any man around her finger. A sexpot. Men’s eyes are supposed to pop way out on stalks and develop pounding hearts for pupils, while steam shoots out of their ears and they make various foghorn and train-whistle noises. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Mary Astor falis to plausibly elicit this reaction.
Someone has to make the announcement: Crooked Timber is one year old today!
Bill Clinton did a book-signing in Washington, DC, today. When I got to work this morning, fans were lined up around the block of the 12th St. Barnes & Noble. As they did in “New York”:http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Entertainment/reuters20040622_237.html, hundreds of people camped out the night before. They were under the mistaken impression that it would be hard to get in the next day. At 6:00pm, I walked down the street from where I work to see about all the hoopla. Turns out they were still letting people through the door. I hadn’t bought a copy yet, so I thought I was out of luck. You were supposed to buy one the night before to get in the next day. But five minutes later, and sans book, I was given one those magic wrist-bans, the much-publicized “credential”:http://finance.lycos.com/qc/news/story.aspx?symbols=INDUSTRY:87&story=200406281230_BWR__BW5243 that entitled me to the purchase of one–and only one–book, to have it signed, to a speedy presidential handshake, and to the feeling that I’d just experienced a windfall. I certainly wouldn’t have camped out for a book signed by President Clinton. Unlike this “fan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32380-2004Jul6.html, I also wouldn’t have camped out for “Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Frank Gifford.” Which makes me wonder: is there any signed book worth spending the night on the sidewalk? Yeah, maybe I would have camped out for a signed copy of the first edition of A Theory of Justice. Frank Gifford?
Congratulations to “Unlearned Hand”:http://www.unlearnedhand.com/archives/000807.html. That must have been some July 4th weekend.
Congratulations to “Unlearned Hand”:http://www.unlearnedhand.com/archives/000807.html. That must have been some July 4th weekend.
Blogger Jonathan Ichikawa has gotten an email back from Focus on the Family about their distribution of Michael Moore’s home address. His comments are very good.
I see that Mickey Kaus is asking of John Kerry and John Edwards, “When do they hold hands?” and “When do they kiss?” Lighthearted plays on homosexual panic haven’t always been a Slate trademark, but maybe they’re trying new things.
How time slips by. It was only two years ago that Mickey Kaus was warning us that this country was in for a wave of left-wing violence.
It only takes a few, we’ve learned — and if you figure that for every 500,000 pissed off and frustrated citizens (in either camp) one or two might resort to terror, then increased left-wing violence is something we can see coming down the road.
Mickey apparently faced some blowback, but found a way to back up his accusation: a year-old anonymous message on an unmoderated left-wing message board.
No danger on the Left? If you don’t think there’s any danger of political violence coming from the angry anti-Bush left, check out this creepy message-board post on the subject of how to seat Gore (the “duly-elected President”) in the White House. I’d repeat the money sentence here but I don’t want the Secret Service on my case.
As an anniversary present to M. Kaus, I’ve got an old post about how his research methods warn us of the coming violence from left-wingers, right-wingers, Dominique Moceanu fans, Beatles fans, Vietnamese people, Will and Grace watchers, and me.
My fiancee recently finished Helen Hanff’s charming memoir, Underfoot in Show Business, about her failed attempt to break into the New York playwright scene in the 40s and 50s.
At one point, Hanff is employed by a movie studio (which she gives the pseudonym “Monograph”) as a reader. Monograph would give her new novels. She would read them very quickly, write a summary of the story, and offer her opinion about whether the studio should option the book or not. I had to laugh when she read this story to me:
On the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here. I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each…
What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend- taking notes on all place names, characters’ names, and events therein- was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I’m spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read:
Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday…
and phoning several friends to say goodbye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.
I also remember the bill I turned in:
For reading and summarizing
TITLE: Lord of the Rings
AUTHOR: J. R. R. TolkeinVolume I…………….. $20
Volume II……………. $20
Volume III…………… $20
Mental Torture………. $40
Total…………………… $100
Whew! Monograph sure dodged a bullet on that one!
I haven’t seen that Michael Moore film yet; there were special previews in London on Sunday, but you couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money[1]. It strikes me, however, that those critics of the film who are currently doing such a sterling job (by using words like “deceits”, “cunningness”[2] and “misleading”) in convincing me that there are no actual factual errors in it, are failing to look at the big picture.
The big advantage of the “he’s implying this without saying it” critique, and the main reason I use I myself so often, is that since he isn’t saying it, you can chosse for yourself what you want to claim he’s implying. For example Jane Galt is cutting up rough about the timing of various Carlyle Group investments, compared with the timing of George Bush Senior joining the board. And indeed, Moore’s film would be deserving of censure if he had been attempting to make the claim that there were specific quids pro quo on those specific deals. But he doesn’t actually make that claim, as far as I can see. Now he might have been attempting to imply that claim without making it, which would be bad. But he might just have been using the revolving door between defence contractors, large investors and the highest echelons of government, to support the following assertion:
Wealthy individuals and capital have far too much influence in American politics, and members of the Bush family have provided numerous examples of this proposition.
Which would not be bad. Pace my esteemed colleague Mr. Bertram, the reason why Bush’s misleading implications are not on the same footing as Moore’s tendentious use of the facts, is that Bush was attempting to establish a specfic false claim (that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the USA) while Moore is attempting to support a general claim of opinion (that Bush as President has been bad for the USA and Americans should vote for someone else).
Footnote:
[1]Although actually, I can’t be sure of this since I only really offered money.
[2]The word is “cunning”, btw.
My preferred cure for jetlag is to arrive in the morning and spend a fair part of the day outside, resetting my body clock, then have as normal an evening as possible, before going to bed about 10pm. In most respects, my schedule fitted this plan perfectly. Leaving Paris on Monday evening, I got into Brisbane this morning (Wednesday) and the day was suitably sunny. With the State of Origin[1] starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up[2] .
The only unusual feature is that my normal Wednesday includes karate training. I can now report that this is a complete, if problematic, cure for jet lag. Whatever term might describe my post-training condition, it is not “jet-lagged.”
fn1. The high point of the Australian rugby league calendar, this is a three-game series between Queensland and New South Wales in which, as the name implies, players line up for their state of origin, rather than of current residence. The deciding match is being played tonight.
fn2. Wrong! The game was such a depressing walkover that I gave up and went to bed early.
Last night’s Newsnight had a nice what-he-said-then/what-he-says-now juxtaposition, and “the same quotes”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=538832 appear in today’s Independent:
bq. We are asked to accept that, contrary to all intelligence, Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. (Tony Blair, 18 March 2003)
bq. I have to accept that we have not found them and we may not find them. He [Saddam] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons. (Tony Blair 6 July 2004)
Matt Yglesias has been doing sterling work on the double standards employed by Michael Moore’s critics. So, as a supplement to my “two”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002112.html “earlier”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002127.html posts on the same topic, I’d like to draw attention to “his latest”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/good_points.html. He cites Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett, who has read “Kopel’s Fifty-six deceits in Farenheit 911”:http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm. Barnett “observes”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_07_00.shtml#1088978471:
bq. I was struck by the sheer cunningness of Moore’s film. When you read Kopel, try to detach yourself from any revulsion you may feel at a work of literal propaganda receiving such wide-spread accolades from mainstream politicos, as well as attendance by your friends and neighbors. Instead, notice the film’s meticulousness in saying only (or mostly) “true” or defensible things in support of a completely misleading impression.
Matt comments, fairly and reasonably:
bq. The funny thing, though, is that if I wrote “The 56 Deceits of George W. Bush” (as, indeed, many people have done) then some very intelligent Volokh Conspirator (as, indeed, many of the conspirators are) would doubtless have written a post in response (as, indeed, I’ve read at the Conspiracy) arguing that most of the alleged “lies” weren’t lies _per se_ (and, indeed, they’re mostly misleading juxtapositions of technically true information) and that these sorts of ad hominem attacks don’t really prove that the presidents’ policies are actually wrong.
Quite.
