The Virtual Stoa

Here’s the dramatic hammer-and-sickle effect that appears on the campus of the University of Chicago round about noon on May Day, photographed by Abbi Eichhorn:

[thanks! PM]

I was happy to get home, open my bag, and find a flyer from the Department of Homeland Security telling me that they’d been carefully through my bag while I wasn’t looking, presumably as part of its ceaseless fight against terrorism. It was quite a good pick, in fact, as - unusually - it was a bag mostly full of clean laundry, so it won’t have been either an especially unpleasant or complicated task.

In some respects, the authorities are getting more consistent: each time I boarded a plane, I had to remove my shoes once (and once only), in place of the irregular variation from zero to two times that seemed to be in force in the earlier part of the decade.

But the Feds haven’t made their mind up as to whether Josephine and I count a family or not (and therefore whether we can go through an airport together with the same customs declaration form or not). One border official thought that of course we weren’t a family unit, as we didn’t share the same last name. Another at a subsequent border crossing thought that that was absurd, and that being married was enough to qualify. You’d have thought the bureaucracy would have managed to come up with a consistent policy on this by now. It’s not exactly an unusual situation.

I was away in California (and, briefly, British Columbia) for a couple of weeks, hence the silence. (Actually I’ve been back for almost a week now, but I was quite enjoying the silence, so I let it linger.) I think I was on holiday, but I ended up visiting four university campuses while I was away (UC Berkeley, UCLA, Loyola Marymount and UBC), which isn’t especially holiday-like behavior. I only went to an academic session at one of them, though, so perhaps that makes it all right. We went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology and I saw some elephant seals on the beach, so, as you can imagine, it was a pretty good trip.

Only two people telephoned me while I was in the United States, and one of them was Barack Obama. (Well, someone from his campaign, anyway.) That was pleasing.

[from, thanks NB]

My friend Sasha Abramsky has been hanging around in Nevada brothels.

Over here.

[via comments here]

And I’ve just acquired a copy of The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity by Raymond Knapp, so - as you can imagine - I’m quite happy.

(Favourite snippet from the Preface: “I have often been asked what this project has to do with my other work, which has centered on such figures as Brahms, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. While I might hope some day to be asked what these others have to do with my work on the American musical, it seems for now to be a fair question…” [p.xvii])

A pop-up Graceland at Christmas:

From Conan O’Brien [via]:

Not bad, really. [From over here, via]

Reading this story reminded me of Sam the Eagle’s talk on the conservation of endangered species from this episode of the Muppet Show. I was going to link to it on YouTube, where I saw it again quite recently for the first time in absolutely ages, but some killjoy has removed it, so I can’t. But perhaps you remember it, too.

Apparently almost three quarters of American Mormons think that the Iraq war was not a mistake. That’s a lot of Mormons. Survey data over here [via].

Apparently Pete Seeger is still alive. Who knew?

How did the old song go?

“They gave him his orders at Party headquarters,
Sayin’, “Pete, you’re way behind time –
It is not ‘38 but 1957,
and there’s been a change in the Party line.”

Something like that, anyway.

Molly Ivins, born 30 August 1944, died 31 January 2007.

Following Richard’s recommendation in comments below, I got myself a copy of Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco, and am now halfway through. It’s alright, though it’s a bit heavy-handed, and I still prefer the reporter George Packer’s book (The Assassins’ Gate) to the stay-at-home-and-swap-emails-with-the-troops approach of Ricks.

Anyway: my  favourite detail so far concerns the role of PowerPoint in the run-up to the war:

[Army Lt Gen David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging, issue. He couldn’t get [Tommy] Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld. “It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD [Office of Strategic Defense] and Secretary of Defense… In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides… [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.”

That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning. “Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology - above all information technology - has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war,” commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. “To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness.” It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer’s glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

[Thomas E Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Allen Lane, 2006, pp.75-6.]

I’ve just returned home after a period of wandering over the last few weeks that has taken me to Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Houston, Las Vegas, San Francisco — and to the elephant seals on the beach outside Hearst Castle.

Oxford seems unchanged, and I’m pleased to learn from the telly that Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden with the slogan, “The film that is so funny, it was banned in Norway”.

He’s got a tapedeck in his tractor
And he listens to the local news
He finds out where the bass are bitin’
While he’s plowin’ to the country blues.
He was a cowboy and he knew I loved him well,
A cowboy’s secrets you never tell -
No, there’s nothin’ like the loving
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man.

He’s got a tapedeck in his tractor
While he’s plowing up his daddy’s land;
He’s got more horse sense
Than I ever seen in any man.
He was a cowboy and he knew I loved him well,
A cowboy’s secrets you never tell,
No, there’s nothin’ like the lovin’
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man

On Saturday nights we go dancin’ in town,
And all the boys’ll order up another round;
In the summertime,
We look forward to the rodeo.
On Saturday nights we go to town,
And all the boys’ll order up another round;
When he rides saddle bronc
I wait to hear that whistle blow.

He’s got a tapedeck in his tractor,
I can hear him when he’s comin’ home.
Then he holds me in the rocking chair
And sings me the love song.
He was a cowboy and he knew I loved him well
A cowboy’s secrets you never tell
No, there’s nothin’ like the lovin’
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man

No, there’s nothin’ like the muscles
Of a hard-drivin’ cowboy man.

There’s a story in today’s Observer about the children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on the true story of the love of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo. We bought a copy in San Francisco’s A Different Light last year for one of our nephews, and it’s a pretty good book, with lots of pictures of penguins in it.

The Observer article, however, does rather overdraw the contrast between “liberal Manhattanites” and “small towns in the American heartland”. Tango is basically a conservative text, which strongly implies that the gay penguins’ relationship is legitimated through the baby-penguin-rearing activity that transforms them into a family unit deserving of respect. So it’s basically an Andrew-Sullivan-inflected gay penguin children’s book.

What America needs is a book to celebrate the lives of queer and sluttish non-baby-penguin-rearing male penguins. This is a group that is strikingly underrepresented in America’s lucrative and high-profile children’s book market.

In addition to its pair-bonded lesbian geese (Alice and Gertrude, I think), San Francisco Zoo used to have a nymphomaniac lady penguin. I wonder what happened to her.

My basic assumption is that the House of Representatives seems to be so thoroughly gerrymandered these days that even a big swing to the Democrats is unlikely to dislodge the Republican majority. But I’ll be very pleased if Tuesday proves me wrong.

I’m wondering whether this would be a permissible entry for Norm’s Musicals Poll?

1. Oklahoma! [5pts] (where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…)

2. Oklahoma! [4pts] (and the waving wheat can sure smell sweet / When the wind comes right behind the rain…)

3. Oklahoma! [3pts] (every night my honey lamb and I / Every night we sit alone and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky / We know we belong to the land [yo ho!] / And the land we belong to is grand / And when we say, Yeeow! A-yip-i-o-ee-ay! / We’re only saying, You’re doing fine…)

4. Oklahoma! [2pts]

5. Oklahoma! [1pt]

OK?

(Entries to Norm by 5 November.)

A bit more over here.

Over here.

I thought the post below was my signing off for the festive season, but I’ve just returned from the Indian restaurant round the corner, having gone in there a couple of hours ago armed with a bottle of decent Rioja and a copy of the judgment in Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, and I want strongly to endorse Mrs Tilton’s opinion, in comments below, that this is very good stuff indeed. Lengthy legal judgments aren’t often minor masterpieces of comic prose, but this one is — laugh-out-loud funny in a few places — in addition to being thoroughly well-reasoned and very interesting throughout; and there’s something tremendously satisfying about the extent to which the partisans of “Intelligent Design” are shown to be as mendacious as they are moronic. Treat yourself this Christmas; it may be 139 pages long, but there aren’t many words on each page, and Judge Jones writes well. More on the case here. Now I just want to get hold of a copy of the ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, as I strongly suspect that every home should have one.