France in a Funk

The New York Times reports that rising costs and uncertainty about the future have taken a toll on the French psyche.

The French are like “eternal children who return to school,” said Alix Girod de l’Ain, a columnist at Elle magazine. “There is a sacralization of vacation,” since nearly everyone takes August off, with la rentrée as “an important moment because we officially change our rhythm and enter a new cycle.” But “this is a particularly morose rentrée,” she said. “The French have the blues.”

The article also included this tidbit:

One novel, “Zone,” by Mathias Enard, consists of one sentence running over 500 pages.

Eat your heart out, Herman Melville!

If I were French I might feel the same way.  Napoleon’s dream of a tunnel to England came true, but there was no army to (re-)invade!  After Charles Martel, Descartes and Pasteur, do France’s best days lie ahead or behind?  We shall see.  By the way, the world’s most optimistic country is the People’s Republic of China.  Perhaps the French would feel better if they demolished a few villages and then re-built them a quarter-mile away.

The Louisiana Reimbursement

Do you think that France would consider taking back New Orleans?  If we act right away, we might even be able to get back our $15 million.

A Giant Step Forward

Whatever else you may say about Sarah Palin, she’s much hotter than Geraldine Ferraro.

Addendum: The “scandal” that sealed Republican victory.  -nb

Addendum 2: Holy cow, a shotgun wedding!  Yeehaw! -nb

The Other Half

I thought you might enjoy peering into the scrying pool to glimpse the inner anguish of the all-important demographic that made The Davinci Code a monster hit, Bitter White Women in their Forties.

…Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I’ve made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home’s traffic so that one day I’ll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he’ll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

Maybe one day, marriage — like the human appendix, male nipples, or your pinky toes — will become a vestigial structure that will, in a millennium or two, be obsolete. Our great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren will ask each other in passing, “Remember marriage? What was its function again? Was it that maladaptive organ that intermittently produced gastrointestinal antigens and sometimes got so inflamed that it painfully erupted?”

Yes. Yes it was.

Fear not that “Will” will take offense; if he’s the man she describes then he doesn’t read her columns anyway.

Watch the Skies!

I’m enjoying Flashman and the Mountain of Light now that the plot has moved at last from sex to violence.  The author has found a terrific formula for his sword-and-pistol Romance: the less Flashman enjoys his predicaments, the more I do.  Imagine if Tintin’s adventures had all happened to Captain Haddock instead.  Why haven’t these books been put to film?

Reading a Victorian adventure naturally brings to mind that queer new(ish) trend, the VSF, profiled recently in the New York Times [so you know it's on the way out--remember ska?].  I arrived at Sky Galleons of Mars late, and never shed a tear for the sunset of the British Empire; still, the romance of the setting is undeniable.  Who could argue with a giant heliograph orbiting Mars?  You could see it at night from Earth, signaling home!

Another late arriver (arriviste?) to the setting is Catalyst Game Labs, with their yet-unveiled Leviathans offering. Leviathans was a good name for a floating battleship game; the false etymology given by the “levi-” as in levitation is perfect.  We can predict that Leviathans will become the repository for Romance at Catalyst, now that BattleTech has been updated to match the current zeitgeist.

I’ve been thinking about the Watchmen comic a bit lately.  It too is nostalgic, set a New York City of glass-bottled milk, evening papers, and Zeppelins.  But also futuristic, full of electric cars and geodesic domes–as though it were set in the 1985 imagined in 1960.  The themes are maintained to perfection throughout: imagine how disconcerting it would be to see a Peace Symbol or an McDonald’s or a Walkman anywhere in the frames.  Those are artifacts of our world, and would seem an unnatural intrusion into theirs.

To the degree that the BattleTech setting has ceased to be a future as imagined in the mid-80’s, it has become less Romantic. The cyborgs and germ warfare don’t bother me nearly as much as do the blogs and computer viruses.  It was inevitable that if our favorite pastime were to survive it would change; stasis is death, after all.  But we ought to lament the passing of the old all the same.

Game Over!

What a relief!  The PRC have their gold medals and their flawless ceremonies, so there’s no chance they’ll invade Taiwan next week out of pique.

Anne Applebaum writes in Slate:

And here’s a prediction: In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, Londoners will complain about the traffic; politicians will carp about the cost; critics will call the ceremonies tasteless; no one will use the phrase Olympic triumph. But there won’t be arrests or police intimidation; there won’t be forced expropriation of property; there won’t be stony-faced acrobats marching in formation—and in the end, the whole thing will be a lot less sinister, a lot less damaging, and a lot more fun.

And how!  Although given the terrorism visited upon London of late, not an entirely safe prediction, that last bit.  I hope that the games don’t return to the United States for a very long time.

The Third Man

We were supposed to add a third member to our hyper-elite team of bloggers but he hasn’t shown himself yet.  Perhaps he’s waiting for the right time to make his grand entrance.

The Divine Comedy: Part 1

By some bizarre coincidence, I am actually re-reading The Divine Comedy this week. It feels, to my jaded modern eye, like Dante is writing fan fiction about himself. Consider, if you will: he goes and hangs out with the greatest poets of antiquity; the dead woman he obsessed over thinks of him constantly in Heaven; and everyone who opposes him politically is hell-bound. All that’s left is for Captain Kirk to fall in love with him.

Evolution Explained

From the New York Times:

On the projector, Mr. Campbell placed slides of the cartoon icon: one at his skinny genesis in 1928; one from his 1940 turn as the impish Sorcerer’s Apprentice; and another of the rounded, ingratiating charmer of Mouse Club fame.

“How,” he asked his students, “has Mickey changed?”

Natives of Disney World’s home state, they waved their hands and called out answers.

“His tail gets shorter,” Bryce volunteered.

“Bigger eyes!” someone else shouted.

“He looks happier,” one girl observed. “And cuter.”

Mr. Campbell smiled. “Mickey evolved,” he said. “And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is ‘selection.’ ”

One can appreciate the difficulty in teaching Biology to a high school class that would rather do almost anything else; even so, Mr. Campbell is leaving his students with the impression that some invisible hand guided the descent of man, as the artist tweaked Mickey’s design.  Perhaps 19th Century Naturalists would be comfortable with this assertion, but poor Mr. Dawkins is having a heart attack somewhere.

That’s the problem with Biology, as well as with Mathematics, with Music Theory, and with Literature–they aren’t like anything else, and a mind more comfortable with analogy than analysis will mangle the basics no matter how many lessons it suffers through.

“If you see something you don’t understand, you have to ask ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ ” Mr. Campbell often admonished his students at Ridgeview High School.

No, you don’t.  Not really.  One or perhaps two of your students will major in a hard science in college, or in Philosophy.  The rest will live perfectly happy, unexamined lives–those are worth living too.  We who are scientifically minded can’t imagine not wanting to know, but the majority feels otherwise.  My advice, Mr. Campbell, is that you drill your students in taxonomy and force them to memorize as much specific information as they can manage, and leave be the rest.  What profit to spend all year in convincing them that creatures evolve if they can’t say whether fish evolved from frogs or the reverse?

In the end it hardly matters whether students are educated in Biology, in Classical Mythology, or in violin performance.  After literacy and arithmetic, the only universally useful thing we learn in school is how to grapple with an unfamiliar, unpleasant or tedious task without crumbling.  It’s what we do as adults, however we earn our keep.

The Real Monsters

After watching (most of) Battle Royale last night, I’ve come to two realizations:

1. Japanese movie-goers are more interested in the inner lives of school girls than I am.
2. The Japanese entertainment industry still lets sick ****s make mainstream films, instead of shunting them into porn and cable TV.