Trivia that matter
There are still a few glitches, but it looks like I finally have my website back after a botched migration. (Thank you so much, InMotion Hosting, for a most memorable weekend.) To celebrate, here’s Sylvain Chomet to show why I am not a twit, featuring a cameo by President Selfie.
Update: It seems InMotion forgot to repoint both nameservers. Within 24 hours — in principle — everything should be working properly. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Update II: See also Terry Teachout.
• While I applaud most efforts to annoy prissy leftists, I’m not all that concerned about the “Sad Puppies.” I’ve never regarded the Hugo award as anything but a popularity contest, no more significant than the Nobel Peace Prize. ((It doesn’t help that they’re named for a lousy writer.)) ((The Nebula awards, which are chosen by writers, are more meaningful, but only slightly: in 1971, Gene Wolfe and R.A. Lafferty, the best writer and the most original writer of our time, both lost to Noah Ward.)) It’s hardly worth all the histrionics.
• A useful term: “gong farmer.” (Via Professor Mondo.)
• Yesterday was the twelfth anniversary of the launch of my first weblog. It was not my first website, though; I’ve had a web presence of some sort since the final years of the last century.
While reading about Memories Pizza, it occurred to me that what we have here is not so much “Selma envy” as “Salem envy.”
Just 28 days until Walpurgisnacht.
Curious what exactly the “jazz hands” are that feminists demand instead of applause, I searched for the definition. It turns out that it’s a term with many meanings (no pictures, but still NSFW). Yeesh. I think that violent, unrestrained applause would be less upsetting than most varieties of “jazz hands.”
Here’s a bumper sticker for next year. You can download a larger version here.
(This is not my own idea, but I forgot who originally suggested it.)
Some nonsense to pass the time while I wait for the plumber to replace the water heater so I can take a shower for the first time since Friday:
Everyone is linking to this, and so am I: I love the sound of a good fisking in the morning.
31. Ethereal Eggshell: Applied properly, this creates the absolutely vital impression that you do not sweat, menstruate, consume, or digest food.
32. Invisibility Indigo: Have you given birth to a child while not being a duchess? Are you over thirty in a town that is not New York or Los Angeles? Hush, you are a ghost. Ghosts are pretty when they are invisible.
…
42. Shame Scarlet: One of our favorite DIY looks! You can assemble it out of almost anything: fat deposits, acne scars, stretch marks, skin irregularities, makeup purchases, food preferences, and, our personal recommendation, failure to meet expectations compounded by the fact that you weren’t supposed to try.
I recently posted a little “spot the girl” quiz. Here’s another, more challenging one.
No, I don’t know which one she is, either.
Top Ten Unreleased Gaelic Whisky Names:
9 – Laphroaig Tigh-Eiridinn Loisgeach
Burning Hopsital – Intended for one of their special Feis Isle bottlings. But the producers felt that given their already pretty complicated distillery name the customers might be overchallenged by the pronunciation.
Tolkien’s original translation is justly famous and beloved. He treeherds an unwieldy ancient text into lyrical modern English and captures the vast scope and romance of the epic.
It is also deeply flawed.
Tolkien refers to Quendi people as “elves,” a common term in his time, but considered highly offensive today. And while Tolkien was a great scholar of the Quenya and Sindarin languages, his command of Late Vulgar Adûni was rudimentary at best, and his translation of the Red Book suffers for it.
Peter Jackson to film the Silmarillion, in 72 parts.
Sylvain Chomet, the creator of The Triplets of Belleville (recommended), tells the story of La Vieille Dame et Les Pigeons.
An evening with Richard Thompson:
Apropos of nothing in particular, Lord Dunsany.
IN ZACCARATH
“Come,” said the King in sacred Zaccarath, “and let our prophets prophesy before us.”
A far-seen jewel of light was the holy palace, a wonder to the nomads on the plains.
There was the King with all his underlords, and the lesser kings that did him vassalage, and there were all his queens with all their jewels upon them.
Who shall tell of the splendour in which they sat; of the thousand lights and the answering emeralds; of the dangerous beauty of that hoard of queens, or the flash of their laden necks?
There was a necklace there of rose-pink pearls beyond the art of the dreamer to imagine. Who shall tell of the amethyst chandeliers, where torches, soaked in rare Bhyrinian oils, burned and gave off a scent of blethany?
(This herb marvellous, which, growing near the summit of Mount Zaumnos, scents all the Zaumnian range, and is smelt far out on the Kepuscran plains, and even, when the wind is from the mountains, in the streets of the city of Ognoth. At night it closes its petals and is heard to breathe, and its breath is a swift poison. This it does even by day if the snows are disturbed about it. No plant of this has ever been captured alive by a hunter.)
Enough to say that when the dawn came up it appeared by contrast pallid and unlovely and stripped bare of all its glory, so that it hid itself with rolling clouds.
“Come,” said the King, “let our prophets prophesy.”
Did machines write Fifty Shades of Crap Grey? Perhaps.
For those who missed it, here’s Dave Barry’s review of the book.
… Why was this book so incredibly popular? When so many women get so emotionally involved in a badly written, comically unrealistic porno yarn, what does this tell us? That women are basically insane? Yes.
A further depressing note: I spotted some “Fifty Shades” etc. wine this morning. Um, no thanks. (I was tempted to pick up a bottle of “Bourgeois Pig” on a different shelf for the sake of the label.)
If the FEC makes rules that limit my First Amendment right to express my opinion on core political issues, I will not obey those rules.
For background, see Patterico and Dustbury.
I hope it doesn’t come to this, though. I’d really prefer not to discuss politics here more than absolutely necsssary. If I did, I would sound a lot like Mean Lizzie in her recent rant, and I’m already on blood pressure medication. I’d much rather post pictures of pretty girls cosplaying as battleships than contemplate old wrecks like Hillary.
(Via the Borderline Boys.)
Metallica may be a Big Name in metal, but I’ve never been able to take them seriously. ((When I do listen to their songs, I prefer Apocalyptica’s covers to the originals.)) Severian also finds them a bit silly, in an academic way.
Whoever was working on the project across the street either finished the job or got bored, and it looks like this is its final state. It’s too ugly to be graffiti, so it must be art.
The superior should rule and guide the world’s development.
Who said that? Was it a) a member of the president’s cabinet, or b) a bad guy in a very silly anime? The answer is below the fold.
I assumed that I would spend the latter part of my life listening to Bach, sipping scotch and watching western civilization slowly decline through a pleasant silver age. However, stories such as J.G. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time” (pdf) and Gene Wolfe’s “And When They Appear” often come to mind these days. It’s possible I’ve been too optimistic:
Paradoxically, the key strengths of civilizations are also their central weaknesses. You can see that from the fact that the golden ages of civilizations are very often right before the collapse.
The Renaissance in Italy was very much like the Classic Maya. The apogee was the collapse. The Renaissance status rivalry between cities through art and science and warfare and architecture was a beautiful disaster, and it only lasted about 150 years. The Golden Age of Greece was the same thing: status rivalry with architecture, literature, and all these wonderful things—along with warfare—at the end of which Greece was conquered by Macedonia and remained under the control of foreign powers for 2,300 years.
We see this pattern repeated continuously, and it is one that should make us nervous. I just heard Bill Gates say that we are living in the greatest time in history. Now you can understand why Bill Gates would think that, but even if he is right, that is an ominous thing to say.
(Via Isegoria.)
By Charles Lamb
Editor’s note: An old essay, but timely once again.
MANKIND, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks’ holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the east from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from ? — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell before — indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young fire-brand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crums of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world’s life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted — crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and, surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue’s shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued.
“You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog’s tricks, and be hanged to you, but you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, I say ?”
“O father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats.”
The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig.
Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out “Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste — O Lord,” — with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.
Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son’s, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter.