Teamwork

It's hard being a good dad:

Men involved with child care may hurt women's self-esteem

Should the father be the weak player on the team,
just to boost the mother's self-esteem?

Egri vs. Coward

I've been skimming The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, first published in 1942, and considered a classic in its field.

His 7th chapter is "Why are some bad plays successful?" and he tackles the problem, as he sees it, of Noel Coward's popularity:

A war-weary audience, surfeited with blood and death, gobbled up his farces. The lines seemed witty because they helped the audience to forget the battering the world had taken. Coward, and many like him, came and lulled the shocked audience into numbed relaxation. His reception today would be tepid.

In retrospect, this is funny, since Coward continues to appear on the stage, often to enthusiastic applause. And somehow his lines still "seem witty".

Egri glowered at Coward,
but Coward has not soured.

Limitations

My dog can look upon a star,
but he will never ask me why
a source of light so incredibly far
can be detected by his eye.

Daring to Compare

German scholars are going to produce a critical study of the text of the Qur'an.

What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.

I'm not sure how much variation there is. I gather there is some. You can see how it might creep in, especially if at first the text was memorized, then written down by different people, and later standardized.

Variations in a sacred text
can leave believers vexed.

Quatrains

This morning I spent a couple of hours talking with elementary school students about poetry. 9-12 year olds. It was great fun.

They had been working on rhyming couplets, so I talked to them about quatrains, close cousins to couplets. We wrote some, too.

Take 2 couplets, and intermix;
a quatrain will come along,
standing like 4 rows of bricks,
symmetrical and strong.

Booted

Desiree Rogers, Obama's social secretary, recently tendered her resignation.

She was frequently blamed in the press for letting those people sneak into a White House party.

A lot of people say she was forced out because of it. The White House says that incident was not her fault, and that she's not leaving because of that incident.

Who to believe?

A well known Chicago columnist has a different and much more gossipy explanation:

Is the real reason White House social secretary Desiree Rogers was stripped of her power and "pushed" to resign that she was stealing the thunder of first lady Michelle Obama and first friend Valerie Jarrett?

You bet.

I can't vouch for the theory, but it paints quite a picture.

You hear it said that men are more competitive than women.

Perhaps it's statistically true.
But women can be competitive too.

Boom

An article in The Weekly Standard begins by quoting the Speaker of the House:

"Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."

I guess we need free housing and food, too. Because those needs also force artists into day jobs. But leave that be. What really disturbs me is this comment by the article's author, Mary Katherine Hamm:

If liberal Boomers such as Nancy Pelosi insist on creating government incentives for a generation of people to be unemployed artists who nonetheless have their health care paid for by productive members of society, there will be fewer productive members of society.

Back it up right there. Nancy Pelosi turns 70 this month. She was born in 1940.

A baby boomer is one of the 76 million Americans born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom.

In 1940 World War II wasn't over. For Americans, it hadn't even started yet.

Pelosi may be a late bloomer,
but she's no baby boomer.

Oak Forest 5k

 
A pleasant run in the woods in the rain,
with an Irish theme and medals to gain.

I have often bicycled this route, but running it was new, and I was quited surprised, when we passed the wetland area, to see clear evidence of beaver construction activity. I had never noticed it when zooming by on my bike.

They've built a dam and flooded land - where it was merely muddy.
But did these rodents file their environmental study?

Self Exam

Some thinkers say there is no self.
To me it's clearly there.

Still, when you try to look at it,
it slips away from your stare.

Relax and let it shyly come
to stand before you bare.

Observation

A rhetorical flourish
sounds swell,
as well it ought,
but does not nourish
like careful thought.

Agamemnon

I was blown away tonight. I didn't expect to be. I expected to enjoy a night of theater, in the form of an intimate 2-person play. I expected to be given lots to feel and think about. I had attended a reading of the play, and remembered the high points of the plot.

But I was blown away. The play is Agamemnon, by Jeremy Menekseoglu, which is not much like Agamemnon by Aeschylus. This play is about the relationship between Agamemnon and Cassandra, the prophetess no one ever believes.

I'm not even sure exactly why I was blown away, except that the story is harrowing, the performances were stunning, the set was spectacular, and so on and so on. Everyone who contributed outdid themselves.

The whole play takes place on a ship at sea. Agamemnon, having led the Greeks to victory at Troy, is sailing home with the captive Cassandra. As the story opens, he wants her to be grateful to him, but she is not, and she fears the worst, and she is right to do so, since this is a tragedy. But like some of the great Greek tragedies, the doomed characters transition to a higher plane of understanding, particularly about themselves. That is the actual gift which they give to each other.

Courtney Arnett plays Cassandra with a down-to-earth manner, but she makes Cassandra mysterious nonetheless. You believe she has been touched with a special power. Jeremy Menekseoglu plays Agamemnon, a dangerous and commanding man, with profound restraint. You feel the vulnerability under the bristling ego.

I don't want to call it a love story. That would be wrong. It's a love-hate story. With magnetic performers.

Before the play begins, by the way, you must deal with Cassandra's Chorus, in the lobby and in the aisle. They, too, have lines written by the playwright, so listen to them. Anna Weiler, Alicia Reese, and Molly Gray guide you to your seat for the journey. They tell you that this is Cassandra's play, not Agamemnon's.

I think they have a point.

After all the deeds are done, and all the words are spoken,
hers is the spirit that truly remains unbroken.

Evolutionary Ecology

At book club we discussed The Mind of the Market by Michael Shermer.

He makes the case that our recent evolutionary past as "hunter-gatherers, living in small bands", "created a psychology not always well equipped to understand or life in the modern world."

He is not calling for a return to nature. He just thinks we should understand our own minds better. I liked the book. He makes an interesting attempt to integrate recent psychology research with free market thinking.

Of course, some do call for a complete return to nature:

Anarcho-primitivists advocate a return to non-"civilized" ways of life through deindustrialisation, abolition of the division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies.

We do not live
as we evolved.
Nor would I want to!
We have solved
the limits of
the tribal way
and stepped into
this global day.

If you prefer
to hunt and gather,
be my guest!
But I would rather
keep the gifts
of trade and science
while you starve
in blind defiance.

Tickle Fight

I love this sentence from the NY Times:

Representative Eric J. Massa, who resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, vehemently denied any wrongdoing during a television appearance on Tuesday even as he described having tickle fights with staffers in a house they shared.

He didn't grope - at least I hope
he didn't slide down that slippery slope.

All he did was give a tickle!
How could Congress be so fickle?

Oh Deer

It's fairly rare to hear
of an airplane hitting a deer.

It happened at a small Illinois airport - which has no fence around it. John Olson was in a private plane, ferrying 5 family members, including 2 grandchildren. He was coming in for a landing when 3 deer sprinted across the runway.

One deer fell to the ground in his path.

He pulled up and, for a second, thought he had cleared the animal. Then he felt a bump. His daughter saw the back wheel wobble. And he noticed oil on the wing.

"That's when I said this is definitely going to be a problem," Olson said.

He had lost his left landing gear. 

So he flew to a bigger airport nearby, and managed to land safely on one wheel.

Maybe they could put up a warning sign?


You may receive a lovely funeral benison,
if you make the mistake of colliding with venison.

Subtext

"Subtext", as we use it today, started out as a method acting term.

The actor, in his role, says one thing while thinking another. As real life people often do.

Mistakes were made,
but not by me.

(I'm afraid
of responsibility.)

Alpine Innovation

Not all squirrelly ideas come from California:

On Sunday, the Swiss will vote on a referendum that would compel all of Switzerland's cantons to hire animal lawyers. The rationale: If people accused of mistreating animals can hire lawyers, the victims of such abuse are also entitled to representation.

If you have a cockatoo
that's tired of having to bill and coo,
it may think it's time to sue
you.

Neglect

A lot of people we call "bad parents" are people who wound their children's minds. Then there are people like this:

A computer-addicted couple let their real life baby starve to death while they raised a virtual daughter online, police said today.

It happened in South Korea. They were spending their nights - 12 hours at a stretch - at computer cafes. Playing a simulation game.

Where were the grandparents? Well, they made an effort:

Worried about their addiction to the games, Kim's parents had been taking care of the baby - but, tragically, had returned her to her mother and father just two weeks before she died.

Why didn't someone call Child Protective Services? I did come across a study:

Korea has recently begun social intervention in cases of child abuse, but faces many difficulties resulting from cultural dilemmas. In particular, Korean society has the value of corporal punishment and negative attitudes toward social intervention into family issues.

But I'm sure this behavior is revolting by South Korean standards too.

It's five kinds of wrong
served extra strong.

Domestic

You can lobby against domestic violence by day, but you can practice it by night.

She is a registered lobbyist for an anti-domestic-violence outfit. She is charged with killing her husband. She is 45, he was 26.

Witnesses told police that Bridges was wearing a nightgown and a shower cap as she argued with Rankins on the sidewalk on North Avenue near West Peachtree Street around 10:45 p.m. Monday.

And moments later, witnesses said, they heard shots. They said she then "calmly walked away."

They had been married 5 days.

You know the honeymoon's over
when she leaves you pushing up clover.

Jolting Forward

Toyota is getting raked over the coals by the owners of GM and Chrysler.

Their cars "suddenly accelerate" sometimes. I know one way to make that happen. You stomp on the gas pedal.

...anyone who's looked at the problem knows that the vast majority of cases of sudden unintended acceleration are the fault of the driver applying the gas pedal when s/he thinks s/he's pressing the brakes.

Well, that's just a law professor talking. But I suspect he's right.

Why are those 2 pedals next to each other on the floor?

I'm used to that system, so I'm not eager to change it. But when you're driving, you can't actually see what your feet are doing. It seems ripe for error.

And those manual transmissions,
stick another pedal into position,
known as "the clutch".

Isn't that a bit much?

System X

Take the statement, "Social System X is good for everybody."

If true, it's a compelling endorsement for quite different ethical viewpoints.

Egoists will say "I want X because it helps me."

Altruists will say "I want X because it helps others."

Utilitarians will say "I want X because it helps produce the greatest good for the greatest number."

Hardly anyone thinks you should
oppose a universal good.

Nihilists maybe could dissent
and find a reason to lament.