Perfidy Attacks

Monday, May 01, 2006

Whores, actors, and dittoheads

Perfidy Attacks

Once upon a time, actors and performers were considered no better than prostitutes.  No sane or respectable person would ever imagined putting a prostitute behind a microphone to hold forth on matters of public policy, and the idea of listening to an actor do the same would have been only slightly less ridiculous.  As in many other instances, we have ignored the wisdom of the past.

No particular outrage sparked this rumination, though I am sure if I looked, sometime in the last day or so, some celebrity has said something tragically ignorant or wrong-headed or offensive.  If it’s Alec Baldwin, he usually gets a trifecta and covers all three.  (Googling… Googling… hey, today its Madonna.) You may be thinking, hey, Buckethead, you just don’t like it ‘cause they’re all liberals and shit.  Well, that plays a role, to be sure.  Ignorant liberal ranting is in fact more annoying to me than ignorant conservative ranting.  I hate celebrities holding forth on policy issues for precisely the same reason I hate call in talk shows.  Ignorance.

If I am going to waste my time listening to someone else’s opinion, I should like that opinion to be the finely honed product of a mind that has spent years, preferably decades, thinking deeply on the problem.  That opinion should be a balance of hard-earned knowledge, relevant experience, nice judgment with a leavening of insight and authentic genius.  That is very nearly the exact opposite of what I get listening to Tim Robbins, or some random jackhole who wants to hear his voice on the talkybox and can’t be bothered to turn it off when he goes on air.

Everyone has the right to an opinion, and the right to say it.  But not everyone’s opinion is worth listening to.  Including mine.  However, I don’t have Angelina Jolie’s lips, chest or hips, so people aren’t exactly breaking down my door for interviews.  Despite the fact that those (exquisitely formed) body parts and an ability to make faces at the camera are her sole qualifications for media access to talk about whatever flits through her empty head.


Posted by Buckethead on 05/01/06 at 05:42 PM
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Monday, April 17, 2006

I know it’s asking a lot…

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(Apropos all the sanctimonious sites that tell me I'm using a crappy browser and should "upgrade" to Firefox)

Any chance they'll now shut their damned cake-holes?

Oh well, even if they don't, Firefox clearly isn't "all that" - as a substitute for whatever else one might use, it's uninspiring, just as uninspiring as considering a switch in the other direction, e.g. to Internet Exploder. At least IE doesn't stake some claim to moral superiority, other than, well, by just working a bit better.


Posted by Patton on 04/17/06 at 12:34 PM
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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

This just in, requiring a statement of the apparently obvious

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From Tuesday's WSJ, a newsflash that's neither flashy nor, really, news: DeLay Withdraws From House Race. (sorry - I don't know if the link above is for subscribers only - it might well be)

As the story goes, "...he won't run for re-election in the fall so as not to hurt Republican chances, House colleagues said."

Hogwash, methinks.
A judge in Texas indicted Mr. DeLay last fall for his role in allegedly illegally routing campaign contributions into Texas during the 2002 elections.

Mr. DeLay has also found himself at the center of a broad Justice Department investigation into corruption by Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Mr. DeLay has said that he is innocent in both cases. But two of his former aides have pleaded guilty in the probe, as well as Mr. Abramoff, who once was Mr. DeLay's top fund-raiser.
A federal indictment seems imminent, no? Yeah, that's what I think, too, and yes, it does seem obvious. How the Republicans will do is soon to be so far from his mind that such an assertion by "House colleagues" is giggleworthy.

Indictment or no, good riddance to bad rubbish. And no, I don't just mean to a guy who's courted the lobbyists, or who's alleged to have re-gerrymandered Texas to correct the misallocation of representatives due to prior Democratic gerrymandering (which, itself, was of course to correct the misallocation... rinse, repeat ad infinitum). Those are, frankly, all part of politics. The Hammer has carried it a level beyond all that.

I mean good riddance to a guy who's been willing to play grab-ass with lobbyists to the complete exclusion of actually legislating - you know, the part where you propose a law and then defend it on its merits, rather than simply co-opting/inviting people to the trough or bashing them over the head in private with one form of blackmail or another. I can't honestly tell you what he's stood for on any meaningful issue, aside from his incessant need to acquire a majority. An utterly immoral man, I think, exercising power for the sheer sake of the exercise.

As previously retorted here, here, and (indirectly) here, the dubiously honorable alleged gentleman from the southern suburbs of my home town has been symbolic of much that's wrong in Washington today. If he's the last to fall on his sword for conduct unbecoming a representative of the people, then the game will have stopped too soon.

Not that there was ever a chance of the alternative, but I'm glad I ignored all his pleas for contributions to his primary campaign of several months ago.

Hammer, my ass. Next time you see him, say hi to Duke Cunningham for me, m'kay?

Posted by Patton on 04/04/06 at 12:46 AM
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Friday, February 03, 2006

But, but, legos are fun…

Crazy ForeignersPerfidy Attacks

You may have heard about the whole Muhammad cartoon contretemps.  Some Danish newspaper printed some cartoons which featured the visage of the Prophet.  Apparently, that alone is offensive, considering the iconoclastic tradition of Islam.  But those evil Danes went further.  They drew pictures mocking the Prophet.  So, a Danish newspaper prints the evil images.  And the whole Islamic world breaks out in rioting and shit, Islamic nations recall their ambassadors from Denmark whose government had nothing whatever to do with the original cartoons, and the faithful stop buying legos.

So I found a website that has all the cartoons.  The one that was on Drudge and elsewhere was cool, with ‘ol Muhammad as Bakunin wearing an lit anarchist’s bomb as a turbin.  Here’s a picture:

image

For some reason, though, this is my favorite:

image

I don’t know exactly what that reason is, but I dig it.

Now, I realize that posting these images on Perfidy could very well result in a Jihad being declared on the Ministry.  These images are offensive to Islam, and all the faithful.  Well, I had to look at endless pictures and video and stories about things like “piss christ” which is rather offensive to my religion.  I did not declare war on anyone, or even get out of my chair.  I might have blasphemed and utter some profance statements.  That’s about it.  See, I’m tolerant.  It is my central political belief that everyone has a right to be a completely retarded offensive loonytune.  All of our rights derive from this profound insight.  It’s easy to argue that someone making a serious political statement is entitled to, uh, make it.  Without getting shot, imprisoned, or beat up too much.  Extending that protection to the soi disant artist responsible for the potty-humor abomination we know as “Piss Christ” is a challenge.

I know the Islamic world has no tradition of tolerance or forgiveness, either politically, religiously or culturally.  But still, really, fuck off.  Get a life.  Pictures of Muhammad drawn by some not terribly talented or funny Danish cartoonists is not an existential threat to a billion-strong, millennia and a half old world-spanning religion.

Go play with some legos.


Posted by Buckethead on 02/03/06 at 04:12 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Whatever Floats Your Boat

It'll Be a Cold Day in HellPerfidy Attacks

Recently, antiwar activists in San Francisco proposed a measure that would ban all military presence from the city - recruiters, bases, what have you. Which is of course their right, no matter how stupid it is. It is also my right to flatten my testicles with a hammer.

Last year, that city’s supervisors voted to not bring the USS Iowa to town to serve as a floating museum for the same reason: miltary bad. But that proposal is now being revisited. A group of interested citizens are trying to get the Iowa docked in San Francisco Bay, but only if it’s a museum about the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered troops in the US military.

As a gay-loving liberal, I have to say… if the city of San Francisco is so coddled and complaisant in their absolute certainty that their freedom and security (including, importantly, the right to kiss who you want in public without fear of public execution) is a diety-given eternal guarantee free of obligation, vigilance or sacrifice that they want the military out out out, and not in the gay way, let them have it.

And if the Iowa does come to San Francisco Bay, I ardently hope that some interest group doesn’t strong arm it into being some floating testament to diversity. Bending over backwards to celebrate the diversity of every damn group from hare-lipped citrus growers of Korean descent to… frigging Baptists, who have fuck-all to complain about but still have some bullshit *persecution complex* that makes them feel holier or something (that’s what it is with everybody… suffering is holy, ennobling in some vaguely defined and mealy mouthed way)... makes a mockery of the best and brightest tenets of our society. I suppose the story of gays and lesbians (and transgendered folk! Don’t forget the transgendered folk!) in the military does need to be told, but does it need to be told in that fuzzy Barney-voiced good-for-you!! fight-the-power way that it undoubtedly would be in the suggested museum? Or can we just have a cool little low-key museum somewheres that covers the gamut of gender/sexual identity matters in the military, from women who fought as men in the Revolution and Civil Wars, the issues or lack thereof of foxhole companionship in the Great War, etc., the effects of the sexual revolution, the fallout from the post-Vietnam drawdown, don’t-ask-don’t tell on to the present day? That could actually be interesting. But I bet you a million dollars whatever exhibit they would put aboard the Iowa won’t be. Not at all.

Wait… which one of you crapped in my Wheaties?

[Wik] Not that it’s any of my business or anything. And not that this museum is anywhere near being established. But I’ve had about enough of holding hands and singing kum-by-yah as if it’s some sort of public statement of ideological purity, and this little damp squib was enough to set me off again. A few years ago I stood among a group of earnest white wealthy Birkenstocked New Englanders with their fists in the air shouting “Amandla! Owetu!” and other misappropriated slogans from actual struggles in which people died for their freedom, looked around, and realized that celebrating diversity very often amounts to a condescending pat on the head. So eff that.

[Alsø wik] If you haven’t seen the documentary “Murderball” yet, you just have to. Try to tell one of those wheelchair rugby guys that you feel his pain and celebrate his whatever, and he’s likely to punch you in the nuts and throw you off a tall building.

[Alsø alsø wik] Via Reason’s hit and run, comes news of a new law in Washington (the state) banning private-sector discrimination based on sexual orientation. Julian Sanchez points out the delicious helping of cognitive dissonance in the deliberations leading up to passage:

Sen. Dan Swecker, R-Rochester, said, “Discrimination against anyone is unacceptable, and it is wrong.”

“Unfortunately the bill before us today is not the magic tool that will end discrimination in our state,” he said. “In reality, it takes us in the opposite direction.

“The passage of this legislation puts us on a slippery slope towards gay marriage. The two are linked. ... Are any of us naive enough to think the court won’t take notice?”

So, if private discrimination is banned in the name of diversity, this means that the right of people to freely associate in homogenous groups has been abridged. Which is funny, as well as unconstitutional. But the real threat is that someday gays might associate for life with the buttsex and the stubbly kisses.

Guh?

[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] And don’t kid yourself. There are several compelling and trenchant arguments for approaching allowing gay couples to marry gradually, letting public opinion and time iron out the objections and unintended consequences. But you don’t hear those too often in the popular (read: dumbified and soundbyted) debates thereon. What you hear instead is a lot of pretty language about sanctity and tradition and nature that boils down in large part to “ewwwwwww.”

[See the løveli lakes...] See what I mean!? This WorldNetDaily piece is incensed that the new AOL Instant Messenger slogan is “I Am.” Because it’s blasphemy, see? God told Moses his name is “I Am.” And AOL’s marketing guys, remembering their days of Sunday School, thought it would be a lark to take the name of God in vain in a product name designed to appeal to the very broadest dialup using Churchgoing segment of the population. Because that’s what evil corporations do.

[The wøndërful telephøne system...] I wonder what the WorldNetDaily people are gonna do when they hear about my friend Dan. After he got his wife pregnant for the first time, he renamed his cock “The Supreme Creator.”

[And mäni interesting furry animals...] It’s like our national sport isn’t baseball anymore, but drawing fouls. You know, like that move they do in NBA basketball where someone’s jersey brushes you and you leap backwards ten feet as if hit by a truck, stagger, and fall to the floor with a crash, all the while screaming “Ref! Reeeeeeeeef!”

Which is pathetic.


Posted by Johno on 02/01/06 at 12:45 PM
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

WordPerfect Reborn slightly less limp

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Like many people who use computers, I was once a habitual Microsoft basher.  Complaining endlessly of the faults and manifest stupidities of Windows and Office seemed at the time a perfect way to waste an afternoon.  The foibles of word processors and other office applications are important to me in my work, because I am of necessity a “power use.” - my day to day work requires me to make more than typical use of the capabilities of a word processor.

Then, a new position at a new agency forced me to use WordPerfect.  I feel, to this day, that that version of WordPerfect is the most gawd-awful, user-hostile, clumsy and thumb-fingered abomination a major software company has ever foisted on a gullible public.  At every turn, WP foiled my every intention with obscure commands, unwieldy interfaces, and random behavior.  Nothing in WP was easy.  Making a template took days of my time and years off my life from repressed aggravation.  I learned - and quickly - to hate WP with a blue passion.

A coworker who had long ago swallowed whatever vestiges of pride remained to him, defended WP.  The only coherent points he could make were that a) It’s not Microsoft, and b) It’s got this nifty reveal codes feature.  As for the first argument, I am not about to willingly stab myself eighty times in the chest just to avoid the use of a Microsoft product.  If the serfs at Redmond can manage to make a usable product that does not leave me wanting to don a sackcloth tuxedo and rub ashes in my hair, well by damn I’ll use it.  Corel couldn’t manage that trick, so eff them sideways.

As for the second argument, I found this to be the most stunning example of well, not circular reasoning - more of a kind of retarded death spiral reasoning.  Reveal codes is, indeed, an essential feature for using WP.  The reason why it is essential is that the software is incapable of managing markup by itself.  Now, imagine that you are a software gnome.  You job is to grab the words from the writer as they fly off the keyboard.  Not too difficult, right?  Oh, wait, he backspaced!  Well, throw those letters away.  You are qualified to be Notepad.

Now imagine that you are Wordpad.  Occasionally, you are asked to mark certain parts of the typing as being “10 point” or “Times New Roman” or “Bold.” Again, not too terribly difficult.  If they overlap, fine.  Sometimes, you will be asked to remove the markup.  Great job, Mr. Gnome. 

The gnome who got promoted to be WP is apparently so confused by all the other nifty stuff he’s been asked to do, that he can’t handle simple things like formatting codes.  If you italicise something it marks it, in a manner similar to HTML.  But if you de-italicise it, rather than remove the first set of codes, it just puts “de-italicise” markers around the italicised text.  Make more than a few changes, and the whole thing becomes very screwy, very quickly - especially if any sort of even mildly complicated formatting is in use.

All these nested markers mean that changing one of them can make the whole document different.  Which is why the “reveal codes” function was so very, very, important.  You had to be able to see the codes in order to fix the mess that the software itself created.  Feggh.

The reason I bring this up is that the new version of WordPerfect has been released.  Among its many features are:

In addition to PDF import, Corel WordPerfect Office X3 offers features including, a new email client, a fresh new user interface, new online resources, enhanced multilingual character support and the ability to easily eliminate hidden metadata. These new capabilities are complemented by the suite’s RealTime Preview, context-sensitive toolbars, and task-oriented wizards.  [emphasis mine]

Do you think that that might have anything to do with the problem I described?  For their sake, I hope so, because unless they fixed that problem, the software will still be crap no matter how many other changes they made.


Posted by Buckethead on 01/18/06 at 12:17 PM
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Friday, January 06, 2006

I truly hate…

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Juxtaposed headlines from the Drudge Report:

PAT ROBERTSON: STROKE MAY BE GOD’S PUNISHMENT...

IRAN PRESIDENT HOPES FOR SHARON’S DEATH

I didn’t have the heart to read either article.  It is a cruel fate indeed that strikes down every peacemaker that Israel makes Prime Minister, while loathsome criminals survive for decades living off the fear, credulity and hatred they inculcate in their nations. 

Of the President of Iran, I expected no more - for someone who has both denied and praised the holocaust, wishing for the death of a single Jew (however prominent) ranks almost as loving kindness.

But I dearly wish to travel to wherever Pat Robertson is lurking, and beat the ever-loving crap out of his sorry, putrid carcass.  Either everything is God’s punishment - everything - or else it is the ineffable work of a loving God who wishes nothing but our salvation through means that we will by no means comprehend fully.  Robertson is either hopelessly banal or tragically wrong. 

Or knowing him and his works, he has managed to be both. 


Posted by Buckethead on 01/06/06 at 02:05 AM
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Thursday, December 08, 2005

Architectural Excrescences

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I was walking over to the post office on 14th street, and my eye was caught by this ridiculous building. 

stupid

Whatever possessed the architect to include one (1) column, and that at the very top of the building?  Hey!  It’s classical!  Of course, he got the proportions of the column wrong.  And it’s stupid.  Neoclassical design can result in some impressive, and beautiful buildings.  This is just neostalinist pancake architecture lite.  Crap.


Posted by Buckethead on 12/08/05 at 05:55 PM
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

But not a real gooey brain, that’s cruel

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In what has become a holiday tradition, the unhappy hordes of clenched-lip grinches have released their lists of toys and games deemed unsuitable for the fragile minds of our youth.  Unable or unwilling to feel joy, they seek to deny any glimmer of happiness in others.  Thanks to their never-flagging and unholy efforts BB guns, cap guns, action figures with spring-loaded projectiles and riding bicycles without helmets are now part of the dead past.  Challenging puzzles with small pieces were next.  A vast array of inherently fun toys have been banished, tarred and feathered with the labels ‘unsafe’ and ‘violent.’

We live in an unsafe and violent world.  Evolutionary psychologists have learned that (as common sense had long held) that play is just nature’s way of preparing our young for the vicitudes of adult life.  What better education is there than a childhood filled with guns, knives and imaginary bloodshed?

But now, the grim advocates of pacificism and perfect safety have gone too far.  They are even now attacking a time-hallowed and beloved, nay, essential part of American childhood.  They are insisting that cannibalism has no place in the life of a mentally healthy child.  Who among us has not joyfully and creatively relived in play the tragic story of the Donner party?  And who has not played explorers and headhunters?  Even small girls with their easy-bake ovens have traditionally joined in this wholesome fun, pretending to bake elaborate long pig quiches or presiding over tea and fingerbone parties with her dolls.

We need to preserve the last vestiges of this sacred tradition.  The only place that cannibalism now remains, the only place that children can partake of this feast of joy is in modern console games like “F.E.A.R.” and “Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse.” These soul-sucking killjoys partake of ritual and symbolic cannibalism on a weekly basis.  Don’t let them take this from us.  We must fight these hypocrites, fight them, tooth and nail so that we may enjoy our virtual cannibalism in peace.

Why do they hate our freedom?


Posted by Buckethead on 11/30/05 at 02:50 PM
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Monday, November 28, 2005

The new voice of the antiwar movement

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This just amuses the hell out of me.  Professional angstmonger and shrill leftwing nutjob Cindy Sheehan is seen here overwhelmed by her legions of fans.

popularity


Posted by Buckethead on 11/28/05 at 02:15 PM
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Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Liberal Calvinball

Crazy ForeignersFilthy LucrePerfidy Attacks

Holy crap. I swear I never thought I would be saying something like this right out loud (I might have to turn in my fellow traveler card to the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy), but some things just aren’t right. One is the current initiative in my fair Commonwealth, known unfairly by its detractors as Taxachusetts, to let the children of illegal immigrants attend state colleges at in-state resident tuition levels.

State Attorney General (and likely Democratic candidate for Governator) Tom Reilly is pushing this plan as part of his campaign bid. And now our Lieutenant Governer, Republican Kerry Healy, is getting crap for saying something about it.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Not in a million years. That’s my tax money. That I pay because I live here legally.

Now, I’m not a close-the-borders kind of guy. Immigration is what made this country great (that plus strategic genocide, but I’m not, really not in favor of repeating that part of our history), and I like it a lot when the best and brightest - or the most desperate and resourceful - from around the world come to our shores in search of a piece o’ whatever makes them happy. And maybe our immigration policies need a bunch of work to make it easier for people to be documented and cleared to enter, and maybe the slugs at the Department of Homeland Security who are responsible for visas and such could stop trying to make life as hard as possible for all supplicants at their grubby Formica altars. I agree. We need to get on that.

But in the meantime, we need to do something about the people here illegally. Yes, I know our economy could grind to a halt if we sent everyone home en masse. But guess what? The answer to that conundrum is not to decide the rules are meaningless. By “do something,” I mean ‘figuring out how to more efficiently police our borders,’ ‘how to more efficiently screen guest workers such as seasonal produce pickers,’ ‘how to streamline the visa process,’ and so on. “Something” is not giving away tuition breaks to the chidren of illegals. Do that, and the difference between legal and illegal immigration becomes less and less meaningful. If you get a drivers’ license (such as California proposes) and in-state tuition, why ever go to the goons at DHS to plead your case?

I get where the impulse comes from. The kids, it’s likely, aren’t generally here of their own volition; they haven’t broken immigration laws independently of the authority of their parents. This is America, after all, and people deserve a shot. If they’re bright, we can use them. Now that they’re here, sure, it would be nice if they got smart and educated, and stayed in the Bay State as hardworking, aboveboard and upright legal aliens. That’s a nice idea.

But until the day they get their visa or their green card, it’s also bullshit. 


Posted by Johno on 11/02/05 at 11:43 AM
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Thursday, October 13, 2005

The Stinkfinger Cometh

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The correspondence between Harriet Miers and the President - all of which is sappy cards and birfday notes since that’s the only stuff that doesn’t land behind some penumbral state sekrit curtain - is both sad and disturbing. Best governer evar! So cool!

You know what? I hope she gets confirmed. I want her sorry ass on the court for the next twenty-odd years. Because either she’ll turn out well and we all win (or, anyway, conservatives probably win), or she’ll be a quarter-century embarassment, a wet public fart of a Presidential legacy alongside a massive prescription drug benefit, a mind-boggling deficit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the decline of global American soft power. Somebody shat in my Wheaties this morning, and I want that bland cipher to stand for everything that drives people like me up a wall - the cronyism, the exaltation of the average, the notion that religion is a major qualification for public service, fiscal profligacy, the infallibility of the executive, the nannyish social-engineering moral tightassery - all of it, and I want the wing of the Republican party that thinks all that is a dandy way to be an American pants down and crying in the street by 2008.

When the stinkfinger comes, they will all be touched.


Posted by Johno on 10/13/05 at 11:28 AM
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Friday, August 05, 2005

To be culturally illiterate is to be less than fully human

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That’s my elitist line in the sand, elicited by a polemical editorial in - of all places - USA Today about how textbooks are making our children stupider. Readers of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police will be familiar with the contours of the argument, and I think everybody out there who reads weblogs at all has lamented at some point the sorry state of our public schooling. It’s as easy as poisoning pigeons in the park. But, MAN.

From the piece:

Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled “Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature,” followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes “Persian and Arabic Literature” and “West African Oral Literature” — and that’s only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it’s the same drill — short excerpts from long works — a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare’s plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard):

“Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language.”

They are? Well goody! And Leo DiCaprio stars!

Allow me to preen for a moment, because I got lucky in high school. Well not lucky in the usual sense; I was a Quiz Team geek and our type didn’t have willing groupies, but lucky in a larger sense. You see, my poor backward rural cow-town in the rust flats of Ohio was blessed with one Mr. Speece, an elderly English teacher who presided over Intensive English I-IV. Over four years, the curriculum went as follows:

Freshman year - American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Ann Porter, etc.
Sophomore year - British writers: Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Maugham, Chaucer (unexpurgated), Beowulf Junior Year - Continental and Russian writers: Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Turgenev
Senior Year - More of the same, but Frencher, plus drama: Balzac, Proust, Ibsen, Checkov.

Every finished book required a five-page expository essay explicating some aspect of the work. We were graded on spelling, grammar, clarity, cogency, and concision of argument. Our sophomore-year midterm consisted of memorizing and writing out in class 500 lines of poetry of our choice. The final: 1000 lines.

Thanks to Daniel Speece, I learned what Spanish Fly is, what “do a Cattleya” means in A Recherce du Temps Perdu, and how to fold and tear a calling card to convey to a lady I call upon that I’d like to have sex with her at some future date. Yes, I hated Hemingway and thought Anna Karenina was turgid and dense, but having read and though about those texts prepared me for college and in some very important ways for life. And without getting too snooty-snooty elitist about it, I’m very happy to have had the chance to read all these books and carry away from them a rich sense of the breadth of human experience. Revenge takes so many forms: Othello’s betrayal, Eustacia Vye accidental vengeance, Mrs. Treadwell watching herself dispassionately as she beats a pattern of crimson half moons in Danny’s unconscious face with her high heel. Ditto love; whether Anna K’s final solution, Hamlet’s roiling mix of love and hatred or poor Philip Carey’s pathetic mooning after his dull and worthless Mildred. None of these things would make it anywhere near most high school English curricula today, and I think we are poorer for it.

Reason mag has a good discussion of this editorial with some great comments including this priceless illustration of what I like to call “the problem:”

When I taught Shakespeare, I was saddened that the kids would laugh at “What ho!” but completely miss the sexual innuendo in something like Mercutio saying, “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.”

Part of what separates us from dogs and robots is our shared heritage, and without that we become something less than complete. This goes double if you can’t even recognize a simple dick-joke. It’s why I became a (failed, apostate) historian and it’s why I get so exercised about junk like this. I’d rather not homeschool my children; my wife and I both like to work. But it looks like I’m going to have to.

[Wik] One of the problems with blogging is that it’s so off-the-cuff. Some writers seem to thrive in that format; I don’t know if I do. My pieces come out better and more fully formed if I give them time to marinate.

My biggest problem, out of many, with the textbook example excerpted above is that the sentence “Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language” is in itself an empty assertion. A person cannot simply read that statement along with two pages of disembodied quotations from larger works and understand in any way why people think Shakespeare is so great, much less how they might think it is so.

I can tell a child that “fire is hot; it burns,” or “someday a woman will break your heart; you will want to die” but one of the tragedies of life is that we all have to live it for ourselves. If I could endure every burn and heartbreak for my (future; as yet theoretical) child, I would in a second. If I could open their eyes to the boundless invention and sheer joy of Shakespeare’s prose, I would in a second.

But for one thing. To know something, really know it, you have to go through it ready or not. That’s what life is all about. And for every burn, for every heartbreak, for every petty cruelty heaped upon an already straining back by the business of daily living, there is a Shakespeare, a Heinlein, a Chandler, a Bible, shit, even a Nightmare on Elm Street to show you there are greater and more wondrous things in the realm of human experience than you ever knew.

A teacher’s job, ideally, is to lead students to the point where they can realize this for themselves. For a teacher cannot instill; they can only create the opportunity for learning. But if we don’t give teachers even the chance to do that, if we deaden the pleasures and pains in the lessons in the name of ‘diversity’ or ‘moral hygiene,’ than we make it a teacher’s job to raise intellectual veals.

Shakespeare isn’t great until you’ve picked your wordy way through Othello or Macbeth, gotten inside the language, been smacked in the face with a wet woolen glop of alien-yet-familar genius and come away a little changed. Before that it’s just “fain prithee jakes petard; forsooth! bawdy bedpresser, for lo thine shivers I see!”

“Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language” in the same way that “it really hurts to break your leg.”


Posted by Johno on 08/05/05 at 01:48 PM
Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Friday, July 15, 2005

Access Denied.

Music WonkeryPerfidy Attacks

I was hoping in this space to offer an enthusiastic review of Ray Charles’ 1984 album of country duets, Friendship, recently reissued by Sony Legacy. Certainly, with guests like George Jones, Chet Atkins, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Ricky Skaggs it’s almost a sure thing that I would love it.

But I can’t. Unfortunately, Sony’s proprietary Digital Rights Management scheme has thus far prevented me from hearing the music on the disc. These days I mainly listen to music in three places: on my computer as quiet office background listening, and more seriously on my Ipod and on my car’s cd player. So far, my car stereo won’t even read the disc, so no go there. The disc informs me that to play Friendship on my computer, I must first let the CD install proprietary Sony software that will monitor and limit the number of copies of any kind I can make of the music thereon. This is distateful at best (even more so if I had bought this rather than gotten a review copy), but I want to hear this record: I’ll bite. Unfortunately, my computers, work or home, won’t just play the music even after installing the software; instead, rather than the little player starting up upon disc insertion, I must go into the disc’s menus to find the proper .exe file to make it work. And forget about using Windows Media, Real, itunes, or other media software to play it; you must use the disc’s own jukebox software only.

Similarly, to put the music on my IPod requires that I download further software, in this case ActiveX 9. I have the choice of ripping to a proprietary Sony audio format (ATRAC) or .wma. Given that Sony promises that ATRAC is “technology that compresses your music so efficiently it’s hard to detect the difference,” and given that .wma’s audio quality isn’t so hot either, Forget all that. My ears are good enough to hear the high-level compression dulling the hi-hat cymbal in some mp3s, so it’s a cinch that “hard to detect” isn’t going to cut the fricking mustard. In fact, I have tried – and failed – to get legitimately copied .wma versions of the album’s tracks onto my Ipod. Guess what: access denied.

Since it is now clear that I have a choice between listening to Friendship on small speakers at low volume in my office while I work (which is no way to form a serious opinion) or not hearing it at all, I am going to pick a third option: chuck Friendship in the trash and make sure never to pick up one of Sony’s pathetic, insulting, crippled, DRMed jokes again.

But I’m sure that the album itself is a winner.


Posted by Johno on 07/15/05 at 08:40 PM
Music Wonkery • Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Uh oh!  Somebody’s done gone and said it!

Perfidy Attacks

Mark Steyn, in a typically ambiguously phrased article in Tuesday's Telegraph, informs that "Islam does incubate terrorism".

On reading the article, it's clear that he's had difficulty forcing himself to just get out with his point. I don't know what the problem is - they gave him 1000 words (+/-) of space to speak his mind, and he got all tongue-tied. Like this:

Oh, dear. "Britain can take it" (as they said in the Blitz): that's never been in doubt. The question is whether Britain can still dish it out. When events such as last Thursday's occur, two things happen, usually within hours if not minutes: first, spokespersons for Islamic lobby groups issue warnings about an imminent backlash against Muslims.

In fairness to British organisations, I believe they were beaten to the punch by the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress whose instant response to the London bombings was to issue a statement calling for prayers that "Canadian Muslims will not pay a price for being found guilty by association".

In most circumstances it would be regarded as appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a non-existent one. But it seems the real tragedy of every act of "intolerance" by Islamist bigots is that it might hypothetically provoke even more intolerance from us irredeemable white imperialist racists. My colleague Peter Simple must surely marvel at how the identity-group grievance industry has effortlessly diversified into pre-emptively complaining about acts of prejudice that have not yet occurred.

If there's a point in there, I wish he could get himself to make it. Damned polite Canadians! He continues:

Most of us instinctively understand that when a senior Metropolitan Police figure says bullishly that "Islam and terrorism don't go together", he's talking drivel.

Many of us excuse it on the grounds that, well, golly, it must be a bit embarrassing to be a Muslim on days like last Thursday and it doesn't do any harm to cheer 'em up a bit with some harmless feel-good blather. But is this so?

He wraps up the piece (which I won't continue to quote because, after all, fair use is fair use and you really should just go and read the whole thing), with some veiled thoughts that, to some folks, might be read as his encouragement for Islam to pull its head out of its 1200 year old rectal cavity, before the decision is taken irrevocably from its control, because this P.C. bullshit has gone just about far enough, and the West had best stop allowing its best institutions, intentions, and tools to be used to its detriment.

But only to certain readers, I'm sure. (OK - just one more quote)

Shame on us for championing Islamic thought-police over Western liberty.

Heh. Indeed.

Posted by Patton on 07/12/05 at 01:33 AM
Perfidy Attacks • Permalink
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