Which is to say, of course, non-tortiously after what happened with the Hutton book.
I fixed the link. You don't have to thank me, though. The satisfaction of helping out behind the scenes is enough.
Who among the Unfogged commenters is most likely to be unmasked as a fabulist?
Halford. I'm guessing he's a baker in real life.
I'm convinced McManus works for Shell or Exxon.
I thought big publishers were better fact-checkers
Remember that whole A Million Little Pieces debacle?
7: Read the rest of the sentence. (And insert the "of" I left out.)
Gswift never became a cop. He still works at eBay.
There was never really a guinea pig.
The Bancroft Prize doesn't exist.
We can still trust Kitty Kelley's bios right? Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan did so have an affair!
I'm fairly certain that urple is actually Prince. The rain in his picture was purple not pink.
Gswift never became a cop. He still works at eBay.
He earned a degree in hotel management from Cornell
Aaaaaahahahaahahaoh boy
Dude the hotel school is one of your smoothest paths to a good life. Do you want to be boy-viceroy of a beach resort? You can be.
I bet ogged's not really Mexican. Hell, he's probably never even been to Mexico.
LB is a small-town lawyer in the Deep South.
I remain unshaken in my belief that Standpipe really is a standpipe, attached to an actual bridge. On a plate. Or something.
For some reason I find serial fabulists like this guy kind of charming. I mean, if they only do it once it's just dishonest and sad. But to continue on in the face of multiple people pointing out that you're making up things, admitting nothing, and make an entire career out of it by just saying "no I didn't" and writing another book filled with made up things? There's something kind of admirable about that.
Imagine if Frey, instead of admitting that he'd made up that memoir, had insisted in the face of all sanity that he hadn't, and had then released another memoir totally inconsistent with it that was also clearly made up and done the same thing about that one. And then imagine that he kept doing that for thirty or forty years. At that point it would just be kind of neat.
But to continue on in the face of multiple people pointing out that you're making up things, admitting nothing, and make an entire career out of it by just saying "no I didn't" and writing another book filled with made up things? There's something kind of admirable pathological about that.
A few things: first, this guy understood at least one key point of law, which is that the dead can't bring defamation claims.
Second, there's a reason besides public interest that there are a few 50s and 60s figures as to which publishers would publish literally anything -- mostly, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe and a few others, probably including Liz Taylor -- partly because, see (1) for the Kennedys and Monroe, but also because almost no one who would have standing to sue wanted to bring up discovery on the actual pretty disreputable things that they'd actually done. This is in addition to all the general rules about how hard it is to bring a defamation suit in the US. So it was generally understood to be open season on some celebrities but not others.
It is not open season on Ataturk. It turns out, though, that Turkish celebrity mags pixelate the images of the bottles on a table when they run photos.
There's a fine line between biography and slash fiction.
Wait, no—it's not a fine line; it's a wide, gaping chasm. But Heymann is determined to cross that chasm on Evel Knievel's rocket-powered sky cycle.
They may also be some weighting to people whose profiles get clicked on more often, leading to a hot young businesswoman feedback loop.
I don't know why there would be, though, except maybe to try to reduce the chances of dead people showing up on people's suggestions.
24b - See also Hollywood Babylon, which features a bunch of shit Kenneth Anger just made up about people he didn't like.
I don't want to post this on the other thread (where LB, MPHP (sp?) and others are doing yeopeoples' work, so am here off-topic to thank whoever it was (Smearcase i think?) sent us to the Brigadoon of accordions in uptown Oakland. What a place! Hopefully the dude will be finished fine tuning a restored Italian accordion by tomorrow so my kid can be removed from painful tenterhooks and strapped into his own squeezebox.
Best part of the otherwordly shopping experience may have been when Mr. Accordion Maniac explained how his involvement in Survival Research Labs led to playing the accordion. Okey dokey dude! Just another Bay Area career trajectory tale, from aircraft engineering to accordion restoration via proto burning man pyrotechnics and a punk band or two.
Also, the only French accordion on display was instantly spottable due to being drenched in gold glitter and looking like it had just come off the backing bandstand for a Sylvie Vartan tv special circa 1977. It was lovely.
27: there are lots of fake profiles on linkedin with photos of extremely hot women; you add them and then your personal info is slurped down. Not a tactic undertaken by linked itself afaik, but yes, a tactic.
22.2 is a lot more palatable than 22.1, since 22.2 involves memoirs of oneself rather than biographies of others.
That's how you get on the mailing list of the philosophical societies.
LinkedIn thinks I'm creepy.
Perhaps LinkedIn has RTFA.
32: But philosophically speaking we are all one so the deeper truth is that there is no difference between the two, only an interconnected sameness. When we defame others it is ourselves we are in truth defaming, which is not legally actionable.
Inspired by this thread, I checked my LinkedIn page and found that the head of alumni relations at the local private high school for young rich people has viewed my profile. I think she has me confused with a much more successful person of the same name whose kids went to that school.
36: Just saying. Are the women in the photos wearing sundresses?
But there were only two inexplicable hot women in my "people you may know" list.
And one guy who is apparently very high up on the Kasich administration.
There's a yoga instructor I have two connections with, both former coworkers.
Mine is almost entirely devoid of hot chicks. It is entirely devoid of hot chicks I don't know. I think we can safely conclude it's knecht. It does suggest one Unfogged person, which I'm going to go ahead and say is creepy, because we have no professional overlap.
42: have the Unfoggeder in question ever emailed you?
LinkedIn is indeed creepily efficient at suggesting people one has exchanged e-mail with once, years ago.
42: Yes, which makes it less creepy, but it was pretty recent, so they're fast at trawling the other person's e-mail! Everyone else recommended has two or three degrees of separation through someone I do know professionally. I spend almost no time on LinkedIn and opened it to see whether the "Connect to hot chicks" was a guy-only phenomenon. It was surprising to see someone from here. It mostly suggests former students and folks I know slightly from grad school.
44: Oh, right. Clearly I need to R(eview)TFA.
4: I'm actually Donatella Versace, I just hired some fat guy to show up to all those meet-ups.
Once I was out in that little park in Hayes Valley with a friend on a warm afternoon, and, surveying the many others who were also out at the park, I said to her, "look at all the people in their summer dresses". Or anyway, I intended to say that. What actually came out of my soundbox was "look at all the pieces in their summer dresses".
I have not yet lived that down.
I should put my picture on Linked In. I could use the one from Facebook. It has me next to James, from Thomas and Friends.
49: I have to turn my head until the darkness goes
49 is unimaginably hilarious.
I want a reality show of neb and teo cruising for ladies. Exquisite sensitivity crossed with soul-deep clumsiness*.
*he said lovingly
44: if you're not a summer dresses loving guy, I don't want to know you.
27: For awhile I had a string of FB suggestions/friend requests involving super-hot women, but I think that was a brief spam flareup they fixed. No such problems with LinkedIn, but I don't use it much.
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Among the liberal Unfoggedtariat*, is there anyone who doesn't find Krugman's blog charming? Set aside the wonky stuff, and what do you have? Dorky, self-aware posts, and a middle aged guy enthusiastically throwing off the trappings of his Boomerhood for new music that isn't exactly ground-breaking, but is also beyond the NPR-approved definition of "indie". That is, he's genuinely engaging outside his comfort zone. I know he's not linking Chomsky or trollblog, but still, for a guy who's reputedly prickly and arrogant, he seems to me to be a very engaging person(a).
*I know, I know
|>
55: Well, I took 27 to suggest Yes.
AB has had several jobs through LinkedIn. Actually she's probably in the sweet spot: a consultant* in a field without a ton of practitioners. I have no idea what people in normal jobs are supposed to be doing with it.
*so you don't need to hire her as an employee
"jobs" in 57 meaning projects/clients. Just in case the terminology is incongruent with people in regular jobs.
Hm. I read exactly one of Heymann's books. I was about 14. I thought it was astonishingly implausible, and figured I must be missing something, because there was no way that adults could be so gullible.
I've gotten cases through LinkedIn; just today I used it in referring a client to a former colleague. It's also a handy way to keep the address book updated. (The former colleague has her own firm now, her 2d or 3d job since we were at the same place).
Tell me more about this LinkedIn. I'm thinking more and more seriously about leaving my stupid job. Unfortunately the 5 yrs since my phd may as well be a lifetime, and the two kiddos haven't left that much time for external enrichment.
Is there anyone who will hire me for non-specific scientism? Besides the government, I mean.
Is there anyone who will hire me for non-specific scientism?
Plenty of philosophy departments!
61: if you've ever passed a stats course you can totally set yourself up as a data scientist.
Unless it was a stats course without calculus.
It was definitely with calculus. We started with kolmogorov and went from there.
You know, it would probably be better to call it probability than physics.
Erm. Than "statistics." We certainly covered statistics.
Just... really poorly.
I don't get random hot women on LinkedIn, so it isn't just a guy thing. Presumably it's a specifically creepy guy thing, and I just haven't yet fully gone past that cusp.
Summer dresses are very nice. This place really does have a lot of posts by men describing the sort of things they like women to wear.
65: that's definitely a prob course, not a stats one.
Continuing some other thread, us Americans should really be calling it "stat" for consistency.
So what summer dresses are not nice, nosflow?
Damn it. Well I did a coursera course on statistics and machine learning last winter. Got the certificate and everything.
The black one here, fershure. (First google image hit for "not nice summer dress"!)
I'm starting to think about potential other jobs because the grants are coming to an end next year. Ugh.
Hmm, I'd say the blue one is definitely worse and the one that looks like a Sexy Fried Egg costume is only better in that it looks like a sexy fried egg.
71: I'm also curious. If you take a summer dress and make it not nice it becomes something else.
72: I took the first semester of that when it was still just Stanford. Was fun. But I think it's only a stats class if it involves ANOVAs, whatever the hell they are.
I did not mean to suggest that I positively liked any of them.
Wouldn't that black one be a cocktail dress, not a summer dress?
I also don't like 78's implication that summer isn't the right time for cocktails, although the problem is really that dress nomenclature is inadequate. (Also don't like that I'm sublimating stress from fights going on elsewhere online and offline into talking about clothes on unfogged. Sigh.)
I've decided to look for my cousins and high school classmates in LinkedIn. Because productive.
82: Is it awkward if your cousins are perv-friendly hot chicks? Obviously less so for former classmates, I'd think.
It is awkward, but some of my cousins are much hotter than anybody I went to school with.
Summer is certainly the right time for cocktails , or at least some of them. Or really any of them. I thought summer dresses were bright, light (in weight) and informal; if it doesn't seem thematically appropriate for park lounging on a warm day it's something else.
Is there some other way you'd prefer to sublimate stress? We're here to help.
What's not nice about the black dress? It's better than the egg or the tablecloth or the blue thing.
Is there some other way you'd prefer to sublimate stress? We're here to help.
IYKWIM
85.2: What I really need to do is passive-aggressively do the chores Lee and I argued about before she stormed up to bed but I don't wanna given that they're her chores in the first place and so she shouldn't be asking me if she has to do them, et fucking c. I don't even want a pony, because that sounds like more work. None of this will sublimate anything or make me feel more than marginally better, but once it's all done I can go to sleep.
What's not nice about the black dress?
I suspect it of being cheaply made of cheap-feeling material, the shoulder straps are blecchy, it looks as if there's some ugly slightly contrasting material on the sides of the skirt, the bodice is blah and the whole thing is just depressing.
87 seems to not have the same understanding of distance that I do, but 89 is speaking my language.
I would volunteer to find out how cheap the material feels. Anyway, the others don't look any better to me.
I'm actually very curious about the handkerchief-type dresses like the third (actual legit summer dress) in nosflow's example. I've been sort of afraid to try one because of the skimpiness and the asymmetry in ways that are not appealing to me, but one sees them around online and possibly wearing something like that would hit my sexy-yet-caftanish sweet spot but I don't know.
88: having to do chores passive-aggressively is the worst. Sorry.
87: you've been really on with the erotic-reinterpretation recently. At some point you must've been the "in bed" guy among your peers.
Was there any non-in bed way to take that comment, though?
Yeah, I should've been SNERKing myself. SNERKing at myself. Goddammit.
My opinion isn't important, but I would say 2 and 3 are the best of the four dresses at that link, although I don't like the pattern in 3. All of them seem basically fine below the top half or so; the neck strap (?) instead of shoulder strap is what keeps the turquoise one from being the one I think looks best. The yellow one seems less egg yolk than banana. Black dresses definitely don't seem "summery", although I'm probably confusing sun dress with summer dress.
Yay, fake accent!
I've emptied, filled, and run the dishwasher and sorted three loads of laundry except that I'm not willing to sort socks after midnight. That seems sufficient and makes the point that I'm not crossing the line into self-martyrdom.
I just checked my LinkedIn account, and most of the people it suggests I may know are people I do in fact know, primarily from grad school. Many of them are in fact hot women, but I don't think this is the same phenomenon Knecht was describing.
I've don't even have a LinkedIn account.*
*And never have.**
**For a while, a friend of mine had a profile that consisted of a short note telling people he doesn't use LinkedIn but that interested parties could find out more about him and his work at various webpages where he provided such information. Eventually he just deleted the account altogether.
You must have been pissed when that bus driver thought you worked there.
Dang it, we did definitely do estimators and confidence intervals and information criteria. It was prob AND statistics... But it was pretty irretrievably badly taught.
The only reason I and all the people I went to grad school with have LinkedIn accounts is that the career counselor at our school encouraged us to. That was pretty much the sum total of her career advice, actually, which isn't as bad as it sounds since the job market at the time was so abysmal that there weren't really any better strategies. (Except "move to Alaska," of course.)
Anyway, I've never used my LinkedIn account to get a job or for any other purpose. The only time I ever log in is when I get e-mails saying people want to connect with me and even then I usually only stay long enough to accept the connection.
I'm pretty sure that's an indiscretion error. But also, I once got on their corporate shuttle by accident (signage on the shuttle I usually take is often poor and this was right after I started taking that shuttle), realized my mistake immediately and got back off.
teo, if you don't use LinkedIn, why do you connect to people? Because it helps them achieve their ends somehow? Because it saves you from getting the dozens of whiny emails from LinkedIn about how sad it is that you're ignoring these pleas?
I'm pretty sure that's an indiscretion error.
Oh, maybe it is. Sorry.
teo, if you don't use LinkedIn, why do you connect to people? Because it helps them achieve their ends somehow?
Pretty much, yeah. It doesn't require much effort on my part to accept the connections, and presumably the people who make the requests see some value in them so I don't see any reason to refuse. I sure don't see any value in it for my own purposes, though.
LinkedIn is pretty widely used in my field (and related fields). Or at least many people are members and there's even some active discussion groups through that platform that people I twitter-know are involved it at listserv-levels of commitment.
I didn't want to post a public CV announcing that I'd never held a "real job" for more than 8 months or so and that I'd spent roughly 9 years in graduate school without getting a Ph.D. (albeit with a few masterses) and that my best recent experience at the time of graduation from my last grad school was unpaid. I'd be ok with putting up work history now, but as long as I seem to be ok w/r/t employment I don't see the point.
as long as I seem to be ok w/r/t employment I don't see the point
Yeah, me too. I keep a minimal profile up, but mostly ignore it as long as I have a good job. I'm not sure it would be very helpful in finding a job in my field at this point, since it certainly wasn't earlier, but I can't see any other use for it.
I get my hair cut at the LinkedIn mobile barber shop.
I want a reality show of neb and teo cruising for ladies. Exquisite sensitivity crossed with soul-deep clumsiness
Heh. I'm game; neb?
We'd have to shoot it somewhere like Seattle or Vancouver, though, given our divergent geography. (Bella Bella seems to be the community closest to being exactly halfway between our respective locations, but I suspect the dating pool there is rather shallow.)
With a population of 1,400, Bella Bella is the largest community to be found on the Central Coast north of Queen Charlotte Strait.
A girl from Bellingham went to my high school during junior year before returning to Washington. Her mom was a folk singer and she did some singing herself, later going into music. I just searched for her name and the first link was her LinkedIn profile (where she's listed as a musician and an apartment manager) and the second is a youtube video of her singing along with a string quartet. No summer dresses are involved.
What I'm saying, is maybe you should film in Bellingham.
Bellingham certainly is a pleasant place. I could just get on the ferry.
111 etc -- I wouldn't think one finds a job on LinkedIn in your field -- although it's just possible that employers advertise there -- but wouldn't the more logical way it would be useful is you hear of an opening somewhere you might be interested in, and you do a quick search through your contacts to see if anyone you know works there, or recently worked there. This only works if you have a fairly deep inventory of contacts, and you can't just get that going when you think you're ready to look for a job.
I'm not advertising for the thing, or anything, or suggesting that it can take the place of actual networking and actually developing/keeping good enough relationships that when you want to ask a favor, someone is going to help you out. It's just a facilitation tool.
As noted above, yesterday, a Middle Eastern businessman asked a mid-level exec at a different Middle Eastern company if he knew a good US immigration lawyer. They guy asked me, and I was happy to hook him up with my former colleague because she's good, and because it's good karma to help people on both sides of a thing like that. I probably could have found her, and her contact info by googling, if I remembered how her last name is spelled. Or decided it was too much work and just said no.
115-120 -- Have you considered Kelowna?
I had not, but looking at it now it seems to still be significantly closer to neb than to me, while being further from both of us than Seattle, Vancouver, or Bellingham.
Tilting the distances comparably in my direction would put us in Ketchikan or Prince Rupert.
The Okanagan valley is supposed to be beautiful, plus about the closest Canada gets to the arid west.
I don't think I've met a Canadian from northern BC who's ever intended on going back there, or a Canadian from any other part of Canada who wanted to go back there. Everyone agrees it's beautiful, but...
I'm guessing that the sundress season runs quite a bit longer in Kelowna than Bella Bella.
Well, presumably you haven't met many who still live there.
I'm guessing that the sundress season runs quite a bit longer in Kelowna than Bella Bella.
I suspect it lasts longer in Bella Bella than in Anchorage.
128 me. The O Vally has considerable charm even outside it's fairly long sundress season.
The Okanagan valley is supposed to be beautiful
Confirmed.
Don't worry, we've got a tip-top entertainment lawyer on the case.
I do have to admit that if there's one thing I lack it's a certain je ne sais quoi.
But which je ne sais quoi? Can we get any tip-top scientists on the case? How about Turgid Jacobian, I hear he's good at sciencing.
I'm pretty sure knecht is to classy to just have that be code for penis, but not entirely.
Code for penis is pretty implausible. Knecht clearly knows exactly what a dick is.
Code for penis is like the less ambitious offshoot of the code for progress organization.
Speaking of making stuff up, I'm wondering if I should invent a pseudonym for myself for dance purposes. I mean, I never wanted to be one of those people who has an Asian name but asks you to call him Alan. But it would be nice to have a name that people can remember without you having to spell it. Like Vyacheslav, that seems like a nice compromise between making it easy for other people, but not too easy, you know?
I just searched for her name and the first link was her LinkedIn profile (where she's listed as a musician and an apartment manager) and the second is a youtube video of her singing along with a string quartet.
Huh, I know who you're talking about. That was enough to find her.
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The graduate students in my department surveyed themselves and just emailed a list of "helpful suggestions" to faculty. The main suggestions are: give them more free food, give them money for ice cream socials, and get "better professors" to teach their classes.
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And keep in mind that buying some donuts is much easier than being better.
Will somebody find me on Linkedin and endorse me in University Administration based on 148, 149.
There's a chance that the last one isn't ridiculous/unreasonable, right? I mean, what do I know context blah blah blah etc., and the ice cream socials doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But there's a tendency in research heavy departments at least for the more prestigious researchers to get teaching exemptions or just push off a lot of the teaching duties onto other ones (though I think the effect is a lot smaller for graduate seminars than for, say, physics for poets). In the more extreme cases you can even see the faculty more or less split up between 'well known professors who do research' and 'not so great professors who teach a lot of the classes.' Students hoping to take classes from the former group might not be entirely unreasonable in complaining, especially since at least part of their motive in seminars is to stand out a bit or impress someone prestigious (which may or may not be a good thing, but it is a thing).
Free food and money for ice cream is just sort of confusing though. The best I can come up with as a charitable reading there is "we have a big thing we want but probably won't get it so maybe we can at least get some food out of it?"
When I was a graduate student in a PhD program, the grad student representatives convinced the administration to fund a few more social events /w food - maybe 1-2 more per year - on the basis of improving morale. I think the standard departmental event was the start-of-year orientation/reception and then maybe a reception or something when prospective grad students visited in the spring. There may have been an end of the year thing too (not including graduation, which was more formal).
I think "better professors" is actually the most ridiculous of those requests. Not on rational, "what's important in academics" grounds, but on "yeah right, faculty are going to go for least effort, which is free food they don't have to arrange" grounds.
They specifically asked for better professors teaching the intro grad classes, which actually are mostly taught by senior faculty who are prestigious researchers. It's also a group of only three or four people they could be targeting. So, even if their request is reasonable, maybe they could have tried to bring it up with the department chair or the director of graduate studies, but a mass email complaining about a handful of people is politically really stupid.
Code for penis is like the less ambitious offshoot of the code for progress organization.
Hey, if you want to get girls interested in programming you have to give them some incentives.
Maybe they should ask for introductory political science classes?
Send them each a copy of Exit, Voice, Loyalty with cryptically applied underlines, circles, and/or stars near each of the words on the title page.
Don't the students have the end of course evaluations to make those types of complaints? Those were always anonymous. Or would have been but for everybody knowing I was the only student who ever used the word "shitterific".
The means of course evaluations, Moby.
OT: Speaking of biographies, has anyone been watching the new Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts? I go back and forth between being annoyed at seeming hagiography, and being ashamed that I don't know nearly enough about, in particular, the New Deal. Somehow I didn't realize that it ushered in a political realignment; somehow thought it was a reflection of an already existing realignment.
History! Who knew?
Speaking of biographies, has anyone been watching the new Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts?
Normally I'd say something like "Ken Burns is still alive? I thought he'd been buried under an avalanche of mournful fife-and-harmonica tunes by now," but I saw him at a restaurant a few months ago. His haircut is quite that bad in person.
Flip, Ken Burns has been on the talk show circuit for a week now, and his haircut is fine, and he's a good speaker as well. We don't really need to have a .. what would it be, a, a mortar and pestle fight? over what I consider his pretty good documentaries. Take 'em with a grain of salt, and all that, but I'm sure we're capable of that. Have you seen The Dust Bowl? Smirk all you like, that's good documentary work.
Anyway, are any New Yorkers going to the big climate change march in NY tomorrow? Or any non-New Yorkers?
what would it be, a, a mortar and pestle fight?
No, I'm pretty sure that isn't it.
Ken Burns is sooooooooo awful, just unspeakably bad. And that's not even taking the egregious haircut into account.
162, 167: [Reedy, plaintive piccolo music plays.]
NARRATOR: "In yonder site I shall stitch a thread," wrote the young commenter, "of ferocity, and weave around it warp and woof of the native genius of the Internet for controversy."
"And thus did parsimon and dairy queen take up their mortars and pestles and step grimly toward the field of battle."
167: As soon as you do better, or point me to someone who does better, I'll listen to that. There's room for improvement on the Ken Burns project, and model, but I'm not seeing anyone else doing it.
And what the fuck is this about his haircut? Who cares about his haircut? I think it's fine. He can do what he wants with his fucking hair. Good grief, people.
Parsimon, you may take your sepia-toned guilt trips in such flavors as you may choose but I'll be damned if I'll be lectured by some hippie with a shag.
Seriously, the National Parks one was OK but Burns is, how do you say? ah, yes, long-winded.
ANYTHING you find here:
http://m.youtube.com/user/MeadesShrine
Is much better than Burns it is possibly demeaning to Meades to make the comparison.
Although by the end of Isle of Rust I did think he might have looked at pinterest pages re Mendocino, but then I haven't myself.
Oh, thanks for reminding me that I have Burns' Baseball waiting on my hard drive. Hours of procrastination!
Flip, I don't get guilt trips out of Burns -- thanks for explaining the source of the resistance. I get the occasional lecturing, sure, but I sort of figure that any documentary filmmaker is going to be vulnerable to that charge.
Seriously, though, get over how he looks. What do you want him to look like? Don't be obnoxious.
Baseball should be renamed Baseball in New York.
I want PBS to put the Roosevelt thing on something streamable, so I don't have to devote my entire week to it sequentially.
PS: I watched the episode about 1910-1919 and it was good.
I find it hard to watch anything that's in multiple episodes unless I can stream them.
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Register communists, not guns!
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178.1: Agreed. A few of the episodes seem especially good, but a full week, daily, is too much, and I've crapped out on about half of them. I'm hoping they'll repeat the thing.
I could get behind this program if it were aimed at deterring grown men from adopting bowl cuts.
The persistence of whatever gene triggers that is the best evidence against Darwinism.
I saw a few minutes of the Roosevelt thing, but they had George Will as a talking head for some reason (he babbled generalities about martinis and jazz). George Fuckin Will.
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Tickled by the pettiness now on display in the CA GOP. After semi-moderate Kashkari eked out a win over a Tea Partier for the futile gubernatorial nomination, he got scheduled for Sunday morning at the state party convention, while prime-time slots went to Rand Paul and HML Kevin McCarthy.
Will there be peace when I am done?
Hott Man Lecher?
Heroic Military Legend?
Heavenly Moon Launderer?
To Natilo's 179: And yet, they seem not to be talking about this program as a way to identify other types of violent extremists who make no secret of their views, like this terrorist* running around rural PA right now.
*I use that word advisedly. It was the clear intent of his actions.
I'm a highbrow who's learned not to disparage Burns in front of friends and family. Bless you for relieving my loneliness.
What exactly is Frein's deal? I've read a few articles and they all talk vaguely about a grudge against the police and survivalism and a desire for mass murder not necessarily limited to police, but nothing about any ideological angles or even the source of the grudge.
There isn't very much good reporting that I've seen, maybe because it really is a rural area and there isn't much of anybody (let alone media) up there.
This article, which is NOT the legit Guardian but is some other weird site, has more detail but I don't know how reliable it is:
Frein is thought to have held deep seated anti-law enforcement views since at least 2006, which he openly expressed online and to people he knew. He also reportedly had fantasies of committing mass shootings and openly spoke about them....
Frein was reportedly a member of the rifle club in high school. His father, E. Michael Frein, reportedly served in the Army for 28 years before retiring, taught his son to shoot and, when questioned by law enforcement, praised his shooting abilities, and said his son had an "excellent shot" and "doesn't miss" his target. His father also said that a .308 rifle and AK-47 were missing from his house.
A friend, who only wanted to be identified as Jack said he had known Frein for "seven or eight years," described Frein as "extremely intelligent" and "a pretty rational guy." He admitted his friend was not a fan of the federal government. Jack also described him as a "survivalist," meaning he is able to survive independently without depending on government, electricity or society. His friend also said Frein was an Eagle Scout. Jack denied that Frein had ever made statements about wanting to kill law enforcement.Pennsylvania State Police, however, say Frein had, indeed, made such statements to people and some of the people they talked to about him were "not surprised." Police have not disclosed who told them about Frein's fantasies or when he discussed them.Pennsylvania State Police have also said Frein belonged to a "military simulation unit," where members reenact battles if they are soldiers fighting in World War II. Frein also participated in a number of war-making films. Police believe he may now be attempting to act out that fantasy in real life.In the past, Frein has been arrested for theft in another state, but it is not known what state, when or whether or not he was convicted of the charge.
In my moments of delusional optimism, I think the media is avoiding sensationalizing things like this to avoid encouraging copycats. But probably it's something else.
AND YOU SAY HE'S JUST A FREIN
AND YOU SAY HE'S JUST A FREIN
I've had an episode of The Roosevelts on in the background for about 10 minutes and it seems pretty dull but informative. Ken Burns haircut has not appeared. And it's weird not to hear David McCullough's voice.
And it's weird not to hear David McCullough's voice.
Thanks, Thorazine.
146: I didn't notice your comment earlier. I guess the world of northwest folk singing must not be very large? Or something.
I watched the episode about 1910-1919 and it was good.
Agreed. The details of TR's trip to the Amazon rainforest were new to me. I mean, I knew he was a devotee of manly adventurism, of course, but that trip was hard-core.
I believe I formed my first impressions of Teddy Roosevelt when, as a teenager, I happened across a Saturday afternoon TV viewing of "Arsenic and Old Lace." From that moment on, I was hooked. Hooked on Cary Grant, I mean (yes, I've since learned that Grant was a bit creepy IRL, but I cannot, I will not, give him up; and "His Girl Friday" remains one of my all-time favourite films).
I find Theodore Roosevelt an oddly fascinating character, which is not to say that I like him, much less admire him.
And I enjoy Ken Burns's documentaries. Hagiographical? Yes. Committed to an earnest American-exceptionalist mode of historical explanation? Yes, that too. Resolutely middlebrow? Of course. But he is doing a kind of public history that I basically support.
200.last: Yes. I watched the first episode of the baseball documentary today, the first thing by Burns I've seen in a while, and while it's slow-paced and sentimental, it's still a great piece of work, rich in themes and detail. And Burns doesn't let you forget that race underlies basically everything in the US.
I don't have very strong opinions on the overall quality of Burns's documentaries, and I've enjoyed the ones I've watched. I do think his haircut is ridiculous, though.
I basically enjoyed the Civil War one and the sections of the baseball one I watched. The Roosevelts really does seem more boring, but my tastes have probably changed since I watched the earlier stuff.
I basically am on board with JPJ in 200 last although the jazz one was straight up bullshit and the Civil War one had 10x too much weird fife music and 60x too much Shelby Foote.
I'm pretty sure it didn't have any George Will, though.
146: I didn't notice your comment earlier. I guess the world of northwest folk singing must not be very large? Or something.
It's just a world that I have some connections with. That's why I bothered to see if I could figure out who you were talking about.
For example I know the person who recorded her album with her sister.
204: The Roosevelts really does seem more boring
It is, unless you really are fascinated by the personal lives of TR, FDR and Eleanor while major world historical events were taking place. Burns apparently is so fascinated; his talk show rhetoric has teetered back and forth between a Great Man theory of history, and repeated observations (borne out by the narrative pressed in the series) that while you *might think* that world historical events have marched on inexorably, as though sans individual agency, in fact these here very human people were doing their various things because ... well, because TR was sickly as a child. And FDR found empathy and hence ushered in New Deal reforms because he had polio.
Maybe so, maybe so. The series is dedicated to providing an intimate portrait; criticizing it for not being what I would have preferred is silly. It's made clear to me that I don't know nearly enough about events during that time, and that's a decent enough service.
