John Holbo

Our Harry writes:

We had a scare last year; our eldest was warned that she might need very expensive orthodontistry in order to be able to be a fully-paid up participant in the ideology of perfect teeth.

It seems to me that the answer to this problem is to combine it with themes we have seen of late. Heterodontics will be like heterodox economics (heteronomics, if you don’t mind thorough butchery of etymology), but about your teeth. Then, if things get really bad, just go to a freakodontist. (Since poor dental care is a problem in America, as Harry points out, maybe you could get some right-wing thinktank money to sponsor a study of the surprising value, to the poor, of freakodontics.)

Emerson (not our John) writes:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

But, in honor of this panel from Tales of Woodsman Pete, with full particulars [highly recommended!] …

… I thought I would recommend a few good comics about people with powers. [click to continue…]

I just read Born On A Blue Day [amazon], by Daniel Tammet. It’s subtitled ‘inside the extraordinary mind of an autistic savant’. He really is pretty extraordinary – a high functioning autistic savant syndrome synaesthete of the first order. First paragraph: [click to continue…]

Kieran asks where John Holbo is. Ahem. (Longer wikipedia entry here.)

I make a strict point of never blogging anything in the nature of a student-teacher or colleague-colleague interaction, but when a civilian knocks on my office door, comes in and says something funny, it’s fair game boyo.

So this kid comes in the door. (And he’s not a student at my institution but he’s home for the summer.) And he wants to ask me about Wittgenstein and philosophy of language and ‘reclaiming Kant’. And so I ask him a bit about what he means by that (sounds reasonable.) And, well, there is a bit of confusion. And it transpires that the reason nothing he is saying about the Sage of Königsberg is making much sense to me is that actually he’s talking about some project to do with Eve Ensler and The Vagina Monologues, etc. I ended up telling him I didn’t think Wittgenstein was quite what he was looking for. Still, these sorts of linguistic questions are quite interesting. Anyhoo. There was a moment there.

[edited to shield delicate sensibilities, ward off search engines, and to make the post funnier, actually]

Our 5-year old, Zoë, is very bad at losing at games. Today she wept copiously, following a painful defeat in tic-tac-toe. (In her defense, she was exhausted and feeling frazzled for independent reasons. But really: one should chill, when it comes to this game.) Zoë: ‘It’s not FAAAAIIRRR!’ Daddy [against better judgment]: ‘Why isn’t it fair?’ Zoë: ‘Because I tried my very best, but I still didn’t have fun.’ There is something to that, as a theory of justice.

My Valve colleague, Scott, has the actual ‘is anyone still being made to read Shakespeare?‘ thing covered. This is about something else.

Matthew Yglesias has a 90’s nostalgia post, dissing Semisonic for their 1998 earworm, “Closing Time”. Matt is not feeling strangely fine; rather, finding it ‘weirdly hilarious’ that anyone would write: they were “no longer upstarts, underdogs or indie rockers. Instead they had a hit song and sales of two million albums worldwide to follow up.”

Here’s the thing. [click to continue…]

Gentlemen, in the 1960’s, representations of octopi in comics often bordered on the faintly ridiculous.

Having lately received my handsome copy of The Octopi and the Ocean [click through for preview], I am happy to report that the contemporary situation is much improved.

“One day, two monogamously dedicated archaeological octopi recovered an ancient artifact from the timeless ocean floor. The artifact was the power of true marriages. When activated by an inseparable pair, the two would be endowed with a certain unstoppable positive energy.” In the event, a small boy is called upon to etc. etc.

Here’s an interview with the author: “It’s actually the fastest thing I’ve ever done, other than some stuff I did faster.”

If PZ Myers doesn’t have a copy, he really should order one.

And the nominations for ‘best performance as a concern troll of the week’ go to – aw, hell with it. I clicked a link, taking me to this Michael Medved column. Don’t get me started. But then I did actually go to find the Rasmussen results he was citing. They are here:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Back to Medved: he is wringing his hands about the Dem numbers. But it is actually quite astonishing that 1 in 8 Republicans are, by implication, supporters of an organization that they believe significantly sponsors terrorism, since it sponsors Bush. (Knowing in advance and doing nothing would be aiding and abetting, at best, I take it.) By contrast, presumably the 35% of Dems who think Bush was in the know at least disapprove of the 9/11 attacks?

The meta point here is that I never post about numbers stuff because I have no expertise. It seems to me it is always the case that at least 20% of respondents have very strange views, or must have failed to understand the question, or – perhaps most likely of all – were taking the occasion of being asked the question to vent angrily.

What do you make of these poll numbers?

UPDATE: It seems like a significant problem with the question that ‘incompetently failed to act on warnings about the possibility of’ could be construed as ‘knew about in advance’.

So a former student invited me to give a talk on Plato at the Junior College where he now teaches: The Republic, in an hour and a half. So I’m busy condensing my notes and I’ve got this chunk about craft analogies: ship’s pilots and farmers and shoemakers and all that Platonic palaver. Bah. Shoemaking. Not relevant to today’s modern world (I don’t really know what I was thinking.) Then I went out to catch a cab to go give my talk and – I kid you not – the bottom of my shoe fell off. Well, not quite all the way off. But, like, halfway off.

Obviously the reason why old comics provoke a certain sort of joke is the underwear on the outside, plus dialogue that, apparently, dare not speak the name of whatever the hell it is the characters are trying to discuss. But sometimes this can really be taken to extremes:

What are we supposed to think? Johnny Thunder is a gay robot? But this isn’t really what I wanted to talk about tonight.
[click to continue…]

For I was not an aging, racist shock-jock.

Then they came for the ones who had ‘lost’ all that email, and I said nothing. For I had not ‘lost’ all that email.

It seems to me this has been a weak week for Republican push-back.

And now, back to your previously scheduled comics blogging.

Betwixt these weekend comics posts, I might as well make a plug for Top Shelf Productions, a (mostly) comics small press, which is having a 10th B-Day sale. The long and the short is, a bunch of titles are marked down to $3, even $1, until Weds, April 18, so long as you buy $30. I just bought several titles, including some for the kids. (If I didn’t already own all the “Owly” titles, I would have snagged those, at a slight discount. Plus there’s some marginally marked down Alan Moore, but I’ve got that already.) Most of the titles have previews so you can browse with a modicum of informed efficiency. I bought: [click to continue…]

I’m working up a longer post on this important subject. But, in the face of a certain natural skepticism, expressed in comments to my previous post, I have decided to seed discussion with a pair of frames from All Star Comics #24 (Spring, 1945):

If you happen to be at a scholarly institution with access to All Star Comics archives, vol. 6 [amazon], you can consult the original. Otherwise, you can wait for my update.

TONIGHT: Wildcat explains five fifteen centuries of German perfidy.