From the category archives:
Imaginary correspondent R. writes to say,
You seem to be going through your regularly scheduled bimonthly funk, in which you are frustrated with blogging. Why not work your way through it by writing a list recommending some of your favorite things, rather than waste everyone’s time with a “whither blogging” post? It’s quite charming when McSweeney’s does it.
Out of the mouths of imaginary constructs, as they say. As it happens, I have some recommendations…
After Flatworld, the sight of Oklahoma senator James Inhofe buckling on a virtual reality helmet at ICT headquarters seems positively old school. A technician shouts “Load the flying bats!” and the senator is transported to a damp tunnel near a farmhouse that may be an enemy hideout. Insects whir and water trickles in surround sound while digitized bats swoop and dive overhead. Inhofe is impressed. “It’s the closest thing to reality that I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “My feet felt wet.”
The senator is the institute’s most powerful advocate in Congress; he cosponsored the clause in the 2003 Defense Appropriations Act that gave ICT $7 million to build the Fort Sill installation. Last spring, the institute locked down another five-year contract with the Army.
A Republican who ran on a platform of “God, guns, and gays,” Inhofe revels in making statements that don’t play well in the liberal precincts of Blogistan. “I look wistfully back to the days of the Cold War,” he says, resting his cowboy boots on a chair after doffing his VR helmet. “Now someone very small can pose a greater threat than the Soviet Union.”
Is this thing on? OK this question is really more of a digression. The Poor Man’s proposed Bush reelection ad raised a lot of hackles … and a lot of questions. Specifically, I have long known that the English – perhaps all denizens of Great Britain and (some) former British colonies? – use the phrase ‘big girl’s blouse’ in a derogatory manner. But I don’t know how to pronounce it. I don’t know where the stress should fall. Presumably on the element that makes the item of apparel self-evidently bad. But I am afraid my moral intuitions fail me on this point. Is it bad to be a girl, or a BIG girl (hence the blouse is only bad by metonymic association); or is it bad to be a blouse, or a BIG blouse, or a big GIRL’S blouse, or a BIG GIRL’S blouse, or all of these at once? (In which case the stress would naturally fall evenly on all three elements?)
It all just goes to show that English is a tonal language. All answers should be formulated, likewise, as digressions.
UPDATE: Woah. I posted this thing after Kieran and Quiggin posted theirs, but here it is underneath. That’s time zones for you, I guess.
Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” contains a sentence fragment, which, in context, constitutes an answer to some such question as ‘what are we on about, eh?’ Typed it in today, and had occasion to consult MS-Word about spelling overall. And no way to do that without getting two-cents worth about grammar. So what do you suppose the Beast of Redmond thinks we should do about “That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature”? Answer: “consider revising.”
Has anyone else come across the new ads on the NYT’s website with both animation _and_ sound (I hit one reading “this piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/movies/oscars/27OSCA.html)? It’s offensive and obtrusive; when you’re trying to read an article, the last thing you want to deal with is some bloke yelling inanities about the latest box-office stinkeroo. We’ve moved from static banners to animated banners, to popunders, to popovers, to popthroughs, to flyovers to this. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t seem to block it. If this sort of thing becomes standard on the Times, it’ll be enough to stop me reading the paper (I use my computer as my sound system, so don’t want to have to disconnect my speakers).
Just a few links and announcements:
Via email, I discover that there is something out there called the Libertarian Green National Socialist Party, operating under the slogan that “National Socialism is neither leftist nor rightist; it is naturalist, and inherently environmental.”
Though their choice of URL does rather give the game away.
For heartless capitalists only: the Financial Times advises us that “stuffed kittens”:http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=031004000901&query=kittens&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form may be a sound investment. As long as they’re high quality stuffed kittens, of course.
The New York Times reports that a number of firefighters have been receiving treatment for stress at a clinic located near the site of the World Trade Center and run along lines prescribed by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The “detoxification program” has the Firefighters “take saunas, engage in physical workouts and swallow pills.” The precise composition of the pills is unclear. Tom Cruise has paid for many of the treatments.
Ah, Scientology. Was there ever a more entertaining belief system embedded in a more ruthless organization? (Apart from the obvious one, I mean.) And then there is L. Ron Hubbard himself — a man whose abilities and achievements were quite literally incredible. But don’t take my word for it.
Via “Laura”:http://apartment11d.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_apartment11d_archive.html#106333241625339719 at _Apartment 11D_ comes this fascinating “website”:http://cluster1.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=20. Enter your zipcode, and you can find out which cheesy and facile marketing categories inhabit your neighborhood. Are you going through difficult times along with other Hard Years Sustaining Families, or hanging out with hip and happening Successful Singles? Details also provided on the likely purchasing habits of your neighbours (‘Struggling Metro Mixes’ are likely to buy jewelry, and own more than four televisions). You could waste hours if you’re not careful.
Neal Stephenson and his uncle had a lot of fun with these kinds of marketing labels in their pseudonymously written _Interface_ (purportedly written by ‘Stephen Bury’). Among the subcategories that Interface‘s crazed political-demographic operatives identify in their efforts to manipulate the American voting public are:
* Mid-American Knick-Knack Queens
* Post-Confederate Gravy Eaters
* Frosty-Haired Coupon Snippers
* Mall-Hopping Corporate Concubines
* Debt-Hounded Wage Slaves
* Trade School Metal Heads
* Depression-Haunted Can Stackers
By their labels shall ye know them.
And while we’re being snippy with tech-crazy rightwing bloggers, has anyone checked out Steven den Beste lately? His topic du jour is how European males “don’t like”:http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Snippetsandcomments.shtml rugged, manly Harley-Davidson bikes, and have persuaded them to come out with a ‘castrated,’ ‘effeminate’ version. Whatever. I dunno – I’ve never been able to get the den Beste thing myself. He’s always reminded me of the bloke in Searle’s “Chinese Box”:http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/chineser.htm – parsing and recombining facts without ever understanding them. I imagine him locked in a cubicle somewhere, endlessly surfing the web for factoids which he weaves together into vast conspiratorial ‘explanations’ that are almost, but not quite, unlike real political analyses. His posts are vaguely interesting on the level of spectacle, but I can’t for the life of me imagine why anyone takes him seriously. Evidently, the WSJ _Opinion Journal_ disagrees.
Up until recently, I had rather arrogantly assumed that a lot of people were either terribly ignorant about world affairs or were telling lies on purpose. However, ever since the run-up to the war on Iraq, I have been troubled by a much more worrying possibility. In the first few months of this year, I read a number of short articles containing references to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s which, from the context, caused me to suspect that my internet connection was in some way dragging in material from a parallel universe; one in which the USA entered the Second World War in 1939 as a pre-emptive measure rather than 1941 in response to an attack. It just began to seem more plausible explanation than to assume that so many people were making precisely the same error.