Dr. Weevil

Being faced with unappetizing choices in a presidential election is nothing new. When I was seven and a half, my parents thought they were morally obligated to vote, but had great difficulty deciding which of the two major-party candidates was the lesser of two evils. (I don’t believe they considered for a moment voting third party.) They had disliked and distrusted Richard Nixon since they had first heard of him many years before, and had disliked and distrusted the entire Kennedy family since they had first heard of any of them, which must have been even longer. Eventually they flipped a coin and one voted for each. Their votes did not cancel each other out, since my father was in the Navy and they had kept their official residences in their home states, as military voters were (and I think still are) allowed to do. As it turned out, his vote, in Rhode Island, made far less difference than hers, in Illinois. When I asked them ten or so years later, they couldn’t recall who had voted for which candidate, so I don’t know whether my mother’s vote helped to widen or to narrow Kennedy’s slim margin in one of his closest states.

Les seules bonnes copies sont celles qui nous font voir le ridicule des méchants originaux.

The only good copies are those which show up the absurdity of bad originals.

(La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 133, translated by Leonard Tancock)

La plupart des jeunes gens croient être naturels, lorsqu’ils ne sont que mal polis et grossiers.

Most young people think they are being natural when really they are just ill-mannered and crude.

(La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 372, translated by Leonard Tancock)

Karl at Protein Wisdom quotes North Carolina governor Mike Easley as saying that “Clinton” (Hillary, not Bill, I presume) “makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy”. No one seems to have noticed that he appears to have stolen the idea from an aphorism of the late Frank Rizzo, two-term mayor of Philadelphia: “I’m gonna come on so strong I’ll make Attila the Hun look like a faggot”. Perhaps it’s an allusion or inadvertent reminiscence rather than conscious plagiarism: Rocky and Rizzo make for a double connection to Philadelphia. Either way, I suppose you have to be a Democrat to get away with this kind of thing.

On Pajamasmedia, Roger Kimball quotes a letter from a professor to her (former) students, threatening to sue them for poor course evaluations. Although he inserts one ‘SIC’ (why the capitalization?) in the second sentence of her letter, it really needs two:

I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws.

Neither Kimball nor nor any of his 6 commenters (as I write) nor any of the 43 commenters on the original Dartlog post notes the gross misuse of the relative pronoun: ‘whom’ should of course be ‘who’. An odd error for someone who “taught writing this year at Dartmouth College”.

This Chicago Boyz post on “Eatin’ Cheap” reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to post. I recently discovered how to make ramen noodles not just acceptable but downright tasty. Add a handful of bean sprouts, some fresh basil and cilantro leaves, and a dash or two each of lime juice and tabasco. In other words, add all the easily-procured ingredients of pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) except the beef. The result is only half as good as the pho at a Vietnamese soup kitchen like Pho Cali in Raleigh, but that’s still approximately four times as tasty as plain ramen, and it takes roughly three minutes to put together. It’s still quite cheap, especially if you buy the cilantro, basil, and bean sprouts at an Asian grocery store, and the added vegetables make it healthier, too. Other additions I’ve tried haven’t been half so tasty: an egg or some bits of green onion help a bit, but in my experience white onion, carrots, spinach, and mushroom (all uncooked) do nothing for ramen, singly or in combination, except make it more nourishing.

Ten or even five years ago, not one person in twenty would have been able to guess what the correct answers to these two questions would be today:

1. To avoid harrassment by government-supported censors, a political website in ___________ recently moved to a hosting company in ___________.
   
   1. Guatemala – Costa Rica
   2. Honduras – Belize
   3. Nicaragua – The United States
   4. Panama – Canada
   5. Canada – Panama
2. Considering only political and social freedoms, not agricultural products, which of the following is more accurately described as a “banana republic”?
   
   1. Panama.
   2. Canada.

17

On a more serious note:

A. J. Strata ponders the trainwreck that will ensue if the Democrats dump Obama and Clinton and nominate Al Gore:

The conservative in me says go for it, end the suffering of the democrat party quickly - bury it. I hesitate as an American because we need two viable parties. But if the dems go this route they are no longer viable anyway, so I would expect to see a far right wing party pop up to create some ‘balance’ as the GOP moves to the center.

I’m surprised that the Democratic Party has lasted as long as it has. I expect it to shrivel up into insignificance some time in the next 10 or 15 years, perhaps quite suddenly, though I don’t quite see it happening this year. I also expect the Republican Party to split in two, but I think these two will not be a moderate and a far-right party but a conservative party and a libertarian party.

My reason is simple. The economic question has been settled. With all its faults, capitalism works, and no alternative comes close to working. Socialism is dead, though (like a zombie) still walking around in some countries. However, that leaves a wide range of moral and social questions on which consensus seems unlikely. Issues such as abortion, the death penalty, pornography, gay marriage, vegetarianism, drug legalization, smoking bans, pâté de foie gras, consumption of dog and horse meat, cloning, the clubbing of baby seals, paying for transplanted kidneys, and so on, will continue to divide Americans, since they cannot be solved empirically. These issues should suffice to divide Americans into two economically-liberal parties for years to come.

The second comment on this post on The Little Professor recommends a bookstore called Caveat Emptor. What kind of name is that for a business? And what is their return policy? Do they pull a gun on you if you even look like you’re trying to return a book?

I know of three examples of this interesting phenomenon. Can anyone add more?

1. The second stanza of “The Wreck of the Old 97″:

Then he turned around and said to his black, greasy fireman,
“Shovel on a little more coal.
And when we cross that White Oak mountain,
Watch Ol’ ’97 roll.”

On at least one of this albums, Mac Wiseman changes this to “big ol’ greasy fireman”. Of course, the original text has nothing to do with race. Any man who spends his day shoveling coal into the open door of a furnace is going to be black from the soot and greasy as soon as he works up enough of a sweat to mix with the soot. Granted that some firemen may have been black to start with, there’s no reason to suppose that this one was, or that it would have made any difference to the song if he were.

2. One couplet of Bob Wills’ rather disjointed “Take Me Back to Tulsa” reads:

Little bee sucks the blossom, big bee gets the honey,
Dark man picks the cotton, white man gets the money.

On The Archive Series, Vol. 2, Dan Walser changes this to:

Well, the little bee sucks the blossom, but the big bee gets the honey,
The little man raise the cotton, but the big man gets the money.

3. One of Johnny Cash’s best-known lines is this, from “Folsom Prison Blues”:

I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

On Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash, Keb’ Mo’ changes this to:

They say I shot a man in Reno, but that was just a lie.

I can see why a black man might not feel entirely comfortable singing the original lyrics, but the change wrecks the song. It would have been better to pick another song if he couldn’t do this one ‘straight’.

Joanne Jacobs writes of a (not entirely serious) proposal that high school students be fitted with shock collars to encourage good discipline. That reminded me of something I overheard in a restaurant in Annapolis, Maryland 15 or 20 years ago. Two 40ish female teachers were lunching at the next table, and one of them said “I think we ought to bring back capital punishment to the schools! Sorry, I meant corporal punishment — I always make that mistake.”

Two policemen were lunching at another table, and one of them said “Hey look! We made today’s paper.” After a pause to read the story, he said “It says we ’subdued’ the suspect”, and the other policeman said in a satisfied tone of voice”Yeh, we subdued the Hell out of him”.

In a post on “Cover songs almost as good as the originals (and sometimes better)”, VodkaPundit writes “‘Nouvelle Vague’ is Portuguese for ‘New Wave’”. Actually, the phrase is French, not Portuguese, and was used to describe the movies* of Godard, Truffaut, and some of their contemporaries long before the band (which I’d never heard of) borrowed the name. According to Wikipedia, the band’s second album was Bande à Part, which is also a 1964 Godard movie, so the name must be homage rather than coincidence.

When the original ‘nouvelle vague’ appeared in the 1950s, the phrase puzzled Evelyn Waugh, who couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to mean ‘new wave’ or ‘vague novel’.

For the subject of VodkaPundit’s post, I nominate Dwight Yoakam’s cover of Baby, Don’t Go (with Sheryl Crow). It’s the best thing on the album Under the Covers. Until I heard it, I hadn’t realized that Sonny Bono had ever written a song that was any good at all. Yoakam’s cover of Kinky Friedman’s Rapid City, South Dakota is (in my opinion) slightly better than the original.

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Yes, I know, I should call them ‘films’ or ‘cinema’. Sorry, not going to do it.

The spine of Volume 5 of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists the contents as ‘Canon to Classic Rock’.

Austin Bay on Castro’s Mini-Me:

Chavez styles himself as South America’s new liberator, a new Simon Bolivar. Chavez’s “Chavismo” (echoing Fidel Castro’s “Fidelismo”) combines machismo, socialism, caudilloism, populism, anti-Americanism and the flamboyant dream of a new “Bolivarian state” in South America.

Etymologically, shouldn’t ‘Chavismo’ be ‘Chavezismo’? The -ez seems an essential part of the name. More important, do Brits find ‘Chavismo’ an amusing name? According to Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English, ‘chav’ is “derogatory slang” for “the lower class; uneducated and ignorant people” — derogatory British slang, I would have said.

InstaPundit quotes a story from the Des Moines Register:

A pizza deliveryman told Des Moines police that he shot a man who robbed him at gunpoint when he delivered a pie late Thursday to a south-side address.

My first thought was that the pizza deliveryman was late delivering a pizza on Thursday night, and that’s why he was robbed. Perhaps the buyer misunderstood the usual ‘30 minutes or free’ guarantee as allowing him to point a gun at the pizza guy to make sure the pizza was free. It was only when I reread the sentence that I realized that it probably meant that the pizza deliveryman was robbed late at night on a Thursday, and that he was (presumably) on time. We are often told that the difference between traditional and new media is that newspapers have editors to correct inaccurate and ineptly written first drafts. The system is far from foolproof, at least in Des Moines.

Ann Althouse writes of Sen. Charles Schumer:

He would not commit to any principle other than avoiding an “internecine” battle. Clearly, he came to Tim Russert’s table ready to use the word “internecine” to fend off efforts to get him to debate what the right rule is about the superdelegates and the Florida and Michigan delegates. I’m suspicious of people who suddenly start using and reusing a word that people don’t normally say. Schumer didn’t even know how to pronounce it.

Too bad he didn’t use the word ‘intestine’ instead — the rare adjective, I mean, not the common noun. It would have reminded us all of what he’s full of.

Barack Obama’s weirdly Messianic campaign could conceivably turn out to be useful in the War on Terror. Why not start a rumor that he’s the Twelfth Imam? That should freak out Ahmadinejad and his millennarian terrorist buddies. How better to be a ‘Hidden’ Imam than to arrange to be born in Hawaii, insist that you are not a Muslim, and run for presidency of the Great Satan? An imam can’t get much more hidden than that.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this in manuals of rhetoric or lists of figures of speech, but these three sentences all use the same rhetorical trick:

1. Nice we’re having weather, isn’t it?
2. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?
3. I’ve got high friends in places all over time.

The last is the title of one of the three good songs on what is apparently the only album by Scott McQuaig. Can anyone quote more examples? I have a feeling I’ve forgotten one or two.

The spam that fills my in-box is not only unwanted but remarkably inept. Here are a couple of things to avoid:

1. Describing the results of using your product as “incredible” or “unbelievable”. Or is this a clever legal defense against disappointed and litigious customers? “We specifically said that our claims were ‘incredible’, your honor.”
2. Promising “no more paid sex”. Some men like to be paid for sex. How do they expect us to pay our rent?

Of course, if they had either the brains or the diligence required for success in a more respectable line of work, they wouldn’t be spamming, would they?