Although it is also in the past that men could marry men and women could marry women. So, you know, it's tradition.
2: OPINIONATED TEVYE is gonna kick your ass, Fiddler.
NEW BIKE. Now with fenders. (Now that it's cleared up.)
Who knew it was possible to simultaneously maximize comfort, efficiency, and agility? I would have guessed the bike would sit at a saddle point.
Side constraints make it work, maybe.
So have you forgotten about the gridlock yet?
Shit, I suppose that even if you had, that last comment would have reminded you of it again. Sorry!
The pro-8 demonstrators were more numerous than the anti-8 folks?
The pro-8 demonstrators were more numerous than the anti-8 folks?
It seemed that way.
that in the past (they actually say "traditionally", but I don't think that the sign-bearers can really muster an argument that this specific thing that obtained in the past should also be called traditional) only men could marry women and only women men. But of course that isn't in dispute.
One of the really fun things about teaching the history of sexuality (and subsequently, of marriage) is kicking this tomfoolery to the ground and hoping that it will stay there, at least in the minds of my students.
NEW BIKE
Pretty!
And, just to make this one comment even more diverse:
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JRoth, I know in the past you've mentioned which books of myths, etc., you're reading to Iris, but I completely forgot. Have you seen this and this and/or like them? I'm sort of enthralled and wish I had them as a kid.
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Paren - I had the first one as a kid, and can confirm that it's a helpful baby step towards becoming a Dungeons and Dragons player who gets swirlies.
15: Sounds exactly like the sort of child I would want to raise! I love children's literature; when I think about having children, the main thing I think about is what books I would buy them. (Probably a good thing I'm not planning on children any time soon).
Sally has and likes the Norse one -- I can't remember about the Greek one.
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Further to the discussion of the Miracle Liquid -- I've been working on cleaning, rebuilding and painting the pantry. And let me tell you, it has been gross! Caked on filth from three decades worth of smoking, pets, spilled food and infrequent maintenance. And you know what works wonders? A spray bottle of hot water. Of course, it's not a disinfectant, but it sure gets stuff clean, which is all the hotel people in the article were really swearing to.
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The D'Aulaires' books are great for inscribing the dominant culture onto your kids. Which will help them later in life when small town sheriffs ask them what they're rebelling against.
The Official JRoth Position on D'Aulaire is that they're overrated. I find the writing somehow off-putting (wordy yet unsophisticated? I can't quite put my finger on it), and the artwork doesn't strike my fancy. Not that they're bad, but they seem to have become the Preferred Mythology books, and I just don't think they're all that.
That said, I've never found an omnibus Greek mythology that I like. There are lots of single-story books that I love, but somehow the omnibus ones never do it for me. Some of it probably comes down to my highly-developed, highly-idiosyncratic tastes, which are less likely to be fulfilled by a book intended for a (relatively) broad audience.
Somewhere in the archives I wrote a really long comment (or 2) with Amazon links and everything.
One other caveat: Iris isn't reading yet, so my preferences are definitely formed by what I want to read aloud - we'll see what she chooses to read, comes the day*.
* With less than 3 weeks to go, I'm resigned to the reality that, unlike her parents, Iris will not learn to read at age 4. Too much Waldorf, not enough Sesame Street.
Oh, and nice bike, Ben. Is it reasonably light? Commuter bikes can be real clunkers, but that one looks like it could be quite manageable.
18.last: Just curious, minne: do you mean the patriarchy, or the Great Western Tradition?
It's a hell of a lot lighter than my old bike.
You're riding that around The City, w-lfs-n? Hope you bought a good lock for it.
Oh, and since it's come up, and I just read about this last night:
Thetis is Iris' 3rd-favorite goddess (after Athene and, well, Iris), mostly because of the story of Hephaistos*. But Fagles, in his Iliad, suggests that Homer basically invented that story to provide H with and incentive to make Achilles' arms as a favor to T.
Kind of shocking. Not that I treat Homer as holy writ, but it's funny that this story - of all the incidental mythology in the poem - is singled out as little more than a plot device, when it has become so central to the stories I tell Iris.
* where he's thrown down from Olympos, and caught and nurtured by Thetis
19: Yeah, I wanted to ask you because I haven't read widely in mythology, and I didn't read any as a kid - I had Edith Hamilton's book, but I never really got into it. (Off-putting language issues). I saw these and thought they were much better than other options I had seen, but I do actually like the artwork, so perhaps that a plus.
I figured that since I was coming to them late, that they were probably somewhere in the category of over-rated or over-exposed. (As is much of the stuff that I find myself immediately enthralled with).
Paren - I had the first one as a kid, and can confirm that it's a helpful baby step towards becoming a Dungeons and Dragons player who gets swirlies.
Wow, me too.
Ben, that does look like a nice bike, and a manageable weight. How do you like Disc brakes? I like my v-breaks, but it does look like almost all new bikes these days have disc.
I don't have a lock at all, Josh. I just lean the bike against a wall and surround it with poisoned razor wire.
25: Last time I saw a copy, I picked it up thinking, "Am I really justified in disliking this?" And the answer was No. If you like the art, I see no reason to reject them - as I say, I don't know of any better out there. But I would highly recommend looking at large format, single-story books as followups. Some of them are so beautiful, and beautifully told (our edition of Odysseus' adventures is cowritten by a pair of professional storytellers, and it reads so wonderfully).
JRoth, you've got a free hand! And that's the way poetry traditions work, anyway. The Thetis tradition is essentially yours and Iris's, and no one can say a word against you.
21: Patriarchy, the Western Canon -- who ever got rich on the differences between them?
But seriously, one of the things I like about the D'A books is that, while they're not as gruesome as, say 300, there's just enough fucked-upedness in them to allow kids to form a resistant reading. I don't have my copies anymore (handed down to younger siblings and destroyed through over-reading) but my memories of reading them as a kid involve a lot of thinking to myself "Wait, that's not fair!"
I would second the idea that there are a great many less-market-hegemonic picture books of mythology which outdo the D'As, but as you say they're mostly single stories. (With some notable exceptions -- we had one really excellent collection of Scandinavian fairy tales that was a particular favorite of mine, not least because one of the characters had my first name.)
You do have to be careful though: I was at our local really-good-children's-bookshop a couple of years ago and found a version of the Baba Yaga story which was beautifully illustrated, but which had been bowdlerized to the extent that Baba Yaga was now just a misunderstood babushka who really, really liked children, and wished they would come and visit her so that she could be nice to them. I mean really! If you don't have a narrative that allows for evil to come in the form of little old ladies, how do you prevent another Margaret Thatcher?
This was my favorite book of folk tales. I had a bunch of others, all from different ethnic groups.
Quick googling and amazoning don't reveal which collection I was thinking of. Probably out of print. I will have to ask my mother.
Caroline really liked this The Magical Monkey King: Mischief in Heaven which is a retelling of the stories from the first part of Journey to the West. As far as I can tell, the author has not gone on to do any more tales from Journey to the West, which is too bad.
I got Blume an illustration from the 1923 edition of this, which has very little to do with what you all are talking about, except that it's a bowdlerized book of mythology.
I had both D'aulaires, and my kids were fine with them. And their Buffalo Bill.
Who knew it was possible to simultaneously maximize comfort, efficiency, and agility?
It looks efficient, but comfortable only if you prefer an efficient, hunched-over riding position (which I do, so, yeah, comfortable).
Turns out there are many lame renditions of the Greek myths for kids. The stories are going over well so far, though. Also, you know what's really great? U. Le Guin's Catwings series. The girls are going to be writing their first fan letters this weekend.
RE: Baba Yaga. Have any of you seen Alice Nizzy Nazzy, the Witch of Santa Fe? Very charming retell of Baba Yaga. When a friend of ours moved to Santa Fe a year and a half ago, Iris was very concerned that Alice Nizzy Nazzy would get her. Not bowdlerized.
We definitely cover the ways that the myths show bad behavior - which provides a convenient jumping-off point for covering bad behavior depicted in Disney, for instance. Iris already semi-gets that the protagonist may not be Good.
This was my favorite book of folk tales.
I was expecting this.
Right after Maddow's segment about the RNC disaster, Malia and Sasha were on TV with their palyground. Michelle was on the swing.
America must choose. Will it be Rush Limbaugh gassing away on the radio -- or Malia and Sasha on the swing set? This choice is stark and will decide our future.
If you want to know the future of the human race, imagine Malia and Sasha playing on a swingset—forever.
Change you can believe in:
This morning, walking home after dropping off Iris, I see a black Escalade with blackout tinting pull up to the door of the neighborhood school. Out jumps a little black girl and, I swear to god, my first thought is "the Obamas."
I told AB this, and she said, "Oh, don't tell me they drive an SUV." I explained that I don't know what their personal vehicle is (I think I saw it once - maybe a small SUV, like an Escape?), but I was thinking of the limos they use nowadays.
Anyway.
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No more masturbating to Surgeon General Gupta.
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On the topic of bikes, if there's anyone 6'2"+ who has money to spend on a bike this looks like a great deal. A complete bike, for less than the price of the components.
Man, the bar for masturbation just keeps getting higher and higher.
You can still envision him in his regular scrubs or lab coat, of course.
But without the admiral's uniform (an admiral for a general?!) it isn't the same.
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Because I'm sad that everybody who used to comment on unfogged is dead, I'm going to go ahead and link to The A.V. Club vs. the Times Style Section as a way of entertaining myself.
Watch out, if I stay this bored it could get weird tonight.
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That wasn't nearly as good as I had hoped.
I also learned today about sequential hypothesis testing under stochastic deadlines as a method for modelling optic flow detection in monkeys. Turns out the sequential hypothesis testing algorithm has a lot in common with option pricing!
I'm thinking I'm going to start a hedge fund where monkeys do the pricing.
The monkey sounds like a strange platform on which to implement optic flow detection, whatever that is.
Not at all! Monkeys are actually quite terrific at optic flow detection; if they aren't too worried about whether they're going to get their treat, they're nearly optimal.
Also interesting, the technique for proving the optimality of sequential hypothesis testing was developed by Jacob Wolfowitz, who presumably did his best work before he started to regret his no-good asswipe of a son.
You non-scientists are so cute with your butterfly-collecting.
Here I was being all random, and TJ has stumped me.
You seem to have misinterpreted my misinterpretation, S. Tweety.
SPRT has been formulated for use in the computerized testing of human examinees as a termination criterion
"Yes, Mrs. Doe, we sympathize and do understand that you weren't expecting the investment you made in your son's education to come to such a sad and untimely end, but our continued credibility as an institution of higher learning rests on maintaining stringent standards."
58: almost certainly. Are monkeys not strange?
57: IIRC, TJ is a physicist.
61: ah. Well, if it helps, the hypothesis test doohickey models the decision as a brownian diffusion process.
Also, taking Rutherford at his word, why are all the physicists so hyped up to go figure out new math for the various stamp collectors to use? Maybe there's something to this quantitative philately after all.
"Quantitative philately" appears to be well-trod ground, but per google just not "quantitative lepidoptery" is all mine.
If physicists see further than others, it is because they are surrounded by dwarves.
63: Yes. I was going to say that given that quote, it is ironic—for some definition of ironic—that my place of employment is chock one-third full of scientists who have decided that they would rather be, or at least that they would be better off, collecting stamps. The defunding of the Tevatron and the shaky status of Fermilab certainly didn't help things, to be sure.
PHYSICS IN PHILATELY by Jerzy H. Rutkowski Until now over two thousand stamps closely related to physics have been issued. Here are exhibited only those which appeared up to 1930. The oldest of them is the first United States postage stamp issued in 1847 which featuring a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, a great stateman and a well-known physicist
Stormcrow, you're in Pittsburgh, right? You're a real trooper for being up this late all the time, given that you seem to have a family and a real job.
66: three of my four stamp collecting professors originally went to grad school as physicists.
The one stamp collector I know was a physicist. Who collected stamps depicting chess and chess events. So obscure.
Ooh, I hate it when the West Coasters finally revive the conversation just as I hit my bedtime. Blasted 6 am wake up.
I collected stamps as a kid, but I never had anything as awesome as this Mongolian series showing the Jetsons.
You're a real trooper for being up this late all the time, given that you seem to have a family and a real job.
You misspelled "fucking idiot".
68: Ofttimes my job has a fairly significant component of working with folks in rather distant time zones, so that can get me on an odd schedule. However, tonight I am just unwilling to go to sleep and resign myself to the last fucked-up day of a fucked-up week. Being sleep-addled is the middle-class man's surrogate for being drunk at work.
Okay! So! Physicists: what is this time business, anyhow?
Flortl. Bleart. Glerepht. Okay. Almost done! Isn't everybody excited? Time to read about the hollow earth!
I take it back, actually, I'm going to read about Athanasius Kircher. That's always a good time.
In Oedipus Aegyptiacus he argued, under the impression of the Hieroglyphica, that ancient Egyptian was the language spoken by Adam and Eve, that Hermes Trismegistus was Moses, and that hieroglyphs were occult symbols which "cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters and figures." This led him to translate simple hieroglyphic texts now known to read as dd Wsr ("Osiris says") as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis"
New mouseover?
|| Linked various places, this:
Meanwhile, Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times seems to be toeing the line from GS about how we must spend tens if not hundreds of billions of additional tax dollars to bail out AIG and how the cripped insurance company cannot be resolved in receivership. As we told Sorkin in a comment, this is nonsense. (And BTW, all of the comments on Sorkin's article seem to have disappeared from the NYT web site.)
Not only is the State of New York and the other jurisdictions where AIG operates ready and able to deal with an insolvency, but we should not miss the opportunity to put the entire CDS market to the sword as well. Remember, once we begin the inevitable unwind of AIG and Citigroup (NYSE:C), the beginning of the end of CDS and the derivative nightmare on Wall Street will have begun.
More, the US government cannot fund the operating losses of Fannie, Freddie, AIG and C. We do not have the money. Between now and the end of March, IOHO, the markets are going to force a resolution of AIG and C. We may never even see the much discussed stress tests promised for April by Secretary Geithner.
As we discussed with Josh Rosner and will be writing about same next week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman Bernanke think they are driving this process, but in fact the markets are setting the agenda. Either we act now to deal with AIG and C and take these names off the table before the other zombies arrive for the dance party, or we risk being overwhelmed. If we have a choice between preserving the credit standing of the US Treasury and flushing AIG, C and every other CDS counterparty on the planet, we'll take the latter every time.
Indeed, yesterday we were slumming at the Four Seasons in New York. Among the dinosaurs we observed grazing in the tall grass of this Midtown Manhattan refuge for the transactional class was former C director Robert Rubin, former New York Fed Chairman Pete Peterson and Treasury Secretary Geithner, who apparently was there to get new instructions from his sponsors.
Before Geithner arrived for lunch, Peterson reportedly asked one NY real estate mogul: "How much of that toxic paper is there?" Now we may know where Geithner gathers his market intelligence -- over a luncheon table in New York with his owners. Next time we are going to bring the flip-cam.
It's just like Rush Limbaugh re-running his playbook. The only problem is, is 53% majority or not, guess who got the best of that previous encounter battle?
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max
['Ship of fooooooolllllss. Ship of foooolllllllloooolllsss.']
I'm going to go ahead and ignore max, because he's being boring, and suggest a band name: The Katzenklavier Kids! Great, right?
Sifu: if you are still interested in monkey option traders, let me suggest giving them a cephalopod CEO.
Monkeys can't structure the way cows can. Spherical cows, natch.
Mongolia also has a Three Stooges stamp.
And Max is telling us that after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression, and with solid political controll of the presidency and both houses and the presidency, of Congress, nothing will change.
It didn't take a genius to do the math, but I recently started thinking about the fact that Obama's landslide was made possible by the 3% or so of American voters who changed their minds about things between 2000 and 2008. Actually I didn't factor in the 3rd party voters or the voting turnout, but more or less 47% of the electorate was willing to elect McCain even though he's a silly, ignorant old man who thinks that Bush was too liberal and not militarist enough.
87 -- That's the country we live in. I'm not saying people shouldn't work for progressive change wherever they can, or give up fighting ignorance, or stop hoping for ponies. On the other hand, impatience at the amount of time it's taking to get to a land of rainbows and unicorns, or anger at politicians who pass up ineffectual suicide missions, seem to me to be worse than useless.
I should just have a standard code word for this rant.
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I'm giving a talk at Ole Miss near the end of the month. What do I need to eat, what should I see? Flying in and out of Memphis, probably spending a night there.
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Carp, it seems to me that Obama is going to fuck up the stimulus in a disastrous way.
Someone in the drivers seat can actually get out ahead of the voters at times. Republicans know that, Democrats seemingly don't. But it's worse than that. The people they're not willing to get out ahead of are their donors and the media.
Reich says that on March 18, 1993, Democratic Rep. Martin Olav Sabo of Minnesota, House Budget Committee chairman [and definitely on the liberal side], told him this about congressional Democrats: "We're owned by them. Business. That's where the campaign money comes from now."Of course, if you go to the article by Jonathan Rauch (budget price Kinsley, it seems) you'll find that Sabo denied saying that, and that the rather commonsensical statement is therefore of no interest to anyone.
And of course, the real refutation of what I've said is "Get used to it! Everyone knows that!"
Obama's landslide was made possible by the 3% or so of American voters who changed their minds about things between 2000 and 2008.
Slightly too simplistic: it was made possible by the x% of Bush voters who stayed at home (or in their graves, having died between 02000 and 02008), the y% of non-voters (too young or apathetic in 02000) who decided to vote in 02008, and the z% of Bush and third-party voters who switched to Obama. All of which added up to a 3% difference.
McCain's support was just under 60 million voters - 46% of the voters, but 30% of the electorate.
In any case it was a tiny shift. (As you know, I am pro-simplism. Without we end up spending our entire lives on the other-minds questions, in order to make sure that our conclusions on other topics are properly grounded.)
Reprocessing your statistics, about 30% of the electorate wants a third Bush term, and 35% doesn't care, whereas 35% wants Change as long as it's mild enough and doesn't disturb finance.
I'm going to go ahead and ignore max, because he's being boring,
Well, shit. I was gonna offer my poem in tribute to Megan McArdle yesterday (opening line: 'Oh..... Grody wart boy...' sorta Coleridge meets Emily Dickenson on CNBC), but it just wasn't droppin'. And then, I realized I really needed to go read some McArdle Queen Noor to get the right feel there, and then I realized I could just spend some quality time ripping hairs out of my arm with a pair of pliers instead.
and suggest a band name: The Katzenklavier Kids! Great, right?
Spitlerfugen! A Band to Admit to Steroid Abuse Later! No Titties in Mathematics!
And Max is telling us that after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression, and with solid political controll of the presidency and both houses and the presidency, of Congress, nothing will change.
I mean, c'mon. 20 years of looting the industrial base, the very basis of the long prosperity of the US, while telling everyone they could get new jobs sitting on their asses shoulda told you a whole bunch of people were in the tank. Chinese Communists are reforming! Saddam is Hitler! The Russians are playing a trick! We've reformed welfare! We'll build a bridge to the 21st century by installing porno generators on every student desktop! Blowjobs are legitimate grounds for impeachment! There's been a revolution in military affairs! We needs to get rid of tanks and airplanes and replace them with minds! You can make money on the internet! The only important people in the world are young attractive white women and elderly southern men who drool a lot! The stock market fell due to SEC overreach! &c. &c.
After all that, 'In the future, almost everyone will be employed as a lawyer and the rest will work at Taco Bell and it'll be a new economy,' probably seems... sensible. Instead of, you know, fucking deranged.
So, for all that to go on and not have the green eyeshades types yelling, 'What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you trying out the Home Brain Surgery Kits again? Have you seen this spreadsheet?', all those green eyeshade guys must all telling everyone else how everything is going to be fine. And they must be telling everyone all that because they're in the tank.
Larry Summers and Bob Rubin have never been wrong!
max
['Genius, I tell you.']
Two Picks for Treasury Dept Withdraw ...almost starting to feel sorry for Geithner, exceptin for he was seen this week having lunch at the Four Seasons with Rubin and...Pete Peterson
Do we want DeLong at Treasuy or not? Huh? Huh?
77 Okay! So! Physicists: what is this time business, anyhow?
Not something you want to read about in New Scientist.
Only if he leaks us interesting inside-Treasury gossip under the impenetrable disguise of "gnoLeD draB".
I may be fooling myself, but I think that maybe DeLong is discombobulating, in a good way.
Some say that DeLong was already on the fringe of [the orthodoxy of] his so-called profession, further out than Krugman. That obviously doesn't say much, but he seems to be moving farther out. He seems to want to dialogue with trolls.
DeLong should be appointed Secretary of Firing People At Will. Keep those journalists on their toes.
98: Don't you think will might get hurt if you fired a bunch of journalists at him?
Journalists do significantly more damage than shoes.
99: The journalists are being fired at George Will.
101: Oh, that's fine then. Carry on.
Which will help them later in life when small town sheriffs ask them what they're rebelling against.
Awesome.
99 & 101 get credited with an assist
Firing Will at People!
FWAP!!!!
88: Barbeque would be the usual recommendation for dining in Memphis. The Rendezvous if you like ribs, although they serve "dry ribs" so it may not be what you're expecting. The Barbeque Shop on Madison if you like pulled pork.
(I don't eat meat, so I'm just going by other people's recommendations wrt barbeque.)
Stuff to do, daytime: Graceland, pandas at the zoo, Civil Rights Museum. Stuff to do, nighttime: Beale Street.
Email me if you're looking for a local to show you around. I'm generally free weekends/evenings.
Only vegetarians can be objective about meat dishes. Rule 32, the oldest rule in the book. The basic principle of social science.
95: Judging by recent posts, I think the leaked gossip will take the form of elaborate chinoiserie.
