The New Paleolithic

I really enjoyed this article (because few things are as pleasurable as having one’s prejudices reinforced):

Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.

When your friends go to Facebook to write on your wall, does it look like a hand-painted Aurochs hunt?  Just curious.

(Chromatic) Fantasy

I went to sleep with sweet visions of the corpse of J. S. Bach rising from its coffin to take revenge upon Jay-Z.  Howerver, plaudits to Coke for use of Bolero.

England Doomed

Two stories caught my eye today.  One argues that “the other shoe” has yet to drop:

The London real estate bubble, arguably the biggest one of all, still hasn’t popped.  If history is any guide, it surely will. Burst bubbles typically fall a long way, in due course, and there is no reason to believe this one will be any different—despite the usual rationalizations you hear in this town today, and which you heard in, say, Florida in 2005 and Tokyo in 1988.

The other story I keep seeing in various guises, that London is now ninth circle of European anti-Semitism.  But this part made me chuckle:

In Yorkshire, strips of bacon were arranged in the shape of a star of David and stuck the fence of a home where a Jewish family lived with the word ”Jewboy” written underneath.

The bacon alone probably would have gotten the point across.

To my eyes England appears to be Russifying.  How long before they’re as sick, drunk, broke, and in the thrall of a political strongman as their neighbors to the north-east?

The new hit list

Attention gamers.

The joking “oh we’re just giant boys” charm of liking “bridge bunnies”, and the humorousness of  being obsessed with breasts, and all the bacon-related impedimenta…all of this dross is now punishable by death.

That is all.

The Cleanest Race

I might buy this book.  You remember B. R. Myers as the author of the Readers’ Manifesto in The Atlantic a decade ago, a classic of the genre.  Saith Hitchens:

Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

My goodness, it’s like Mordor.

Now for something really different!

I haven’t listened to overnight A.M. radio in years, but this captures well the flavor of the experience.  Thesis excerpt:

While I think this scene is very disturbing and I doubt if I can ever prove this but I think Stanley Kubrick is telling us something very definite with this alteration to the King novel.

I believe that the naïve side of him, represented by Danny, told someone that he, Kubrick, was faking the Apollo missions. He may even have told this person that he was faking the lunar landings for NASA while also appearing to produce the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Halloran is the representation of the person that Kubrick mistakenly revealed this most secret of all information. Because of that, Halloran, or the person who Stanley told, had to die.

The secret must remain safe. This also explains why Kubrick had to hide all of this crucial information inside the construct of the King novel. Kubrick wanted the story to get out, but he was also afraid for his life. Kubrick had to fake the making of the Stephen King novel so that he could reveal that he was involved in the faking the moon landings!

Fresh off the Turnip Truck

I’ve been cultivating an affinity to Caitlin Flanagan for some time now.  But this takes the cake:

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

Not for the first time have the fads of the upper class (home gardens! locavoration! healthy eating!) become the useless curricula of lower class children.  The rebuttals seem rather thin gruel: learning math by measuring plots of land?  Great, now what to do with the other 180 days of the school year?  Making the lessons “come alive,” you say?  Please.  If doing farm work is to be made educational, inform students after a day of picking beets on hands and knees in the hot sun that such is the fate that awaits them if they don’t pay attention to their lessons, then send them back to the classroom to copy their multiplication tables.  If hoeing and weeding not reading and writing were the path to knowledge, why would our ancestors bother to invent school?

And it was the kind of scene that would have Flanagan hearing not a whirring grindstone but chalk down a blackboard.

Sentiments like these are odious to me.  As though there weren’t a billion peasant farmers who would sacrifice whatever they could to see their children working chalk on slate and not grain on a stone.  Marie Antoinette’s little play farm isn’t all that far away from here.

Don’t Need a Weathervane

From the Times:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” because it forced the community to take steps to improve low-performing public schools, according to excerpts from a television interview made public Friday.

So dynamiting the levees was just an aspect of No Child Left Behind?  Too bad the current administration can’t take credit for the plan.

Never thought I’d use these two tags together

From the Times:

It’s true. “Inferno” is now a video game, with a brawny, armor-clad Dante as its protagonist.  But players may find that this version of that pitiless (if strangely satisfying) part of “The Divine Comedy” doesn’t necessarily correspond to their memories from comparative literature classes of yore. In the video game Dante is no longer a reedy, introspective poet but a knight who returns home from the Crusades to find that his beloved Beatrice has been brutally murdered. Her innocent soul has been taken captive by Lucifer, and Dante must chase the archfiend into hell, fending off wave after wave of advancing demons with a mighty scythe.

Next: Orpheus and Eurydice?  (Part Guitar Hero, part balance game where you lose if you turn around.)  Eros and Psyche the stealth shooter?  Agamemnon and Clytemnestra the horror/dating sim?

I might buy one of those books, though. Ne’r mind.  It’s the Longfellow.

State of Fear

I’m much more nervous about plans to fix global warming than about global warming itself.