America! America outraged! America broken! America martyred! But America liberated!

 A sneak preview of Biden's inaugural address in just over an hour:

TWO IMPORTANT LANGUAGE NOTES

1) The proper English term for the Jewish celebrations in early adolescence is hereby termed "b'mitzvah" (both singular and plural). This allows easy sentences like, "when are your kids' b'mitzvahs?" or "we've been going to a lot of b'mitvahs lately", to say nothing of gender-noncomforming kids.

2) The word ducking is now an intensifier, as in "I can't ducking believe Pelosi actually had the guts to start impeachment hearings", and "I hope that the GOP is willing to do its ducking job and convict". Easier on kids & Apple ducking lets you type it.

Signed,

The English Language Academy

Stray Thought

In some (presumably hypothetical but perfectly realizable) language, the sentence You have to be a good speller to write a palindrome is, itself, a perfect palindrome.  It's funny.

But in a different (presumably hypothetical but perfectly realizable) language, it's one letter off from a perfect palindrome -- and is much, much funnier.

Stray Thought

Jorge Luis Borges's Library of Babel would contain a Vast number of volumes of ASCII art.

The Nature of the Primordeal Story

All children are magical realists; realism is a later development.

Obama and Lincoln Analogies

Obama came into office wanting to be Lincoln but ended up being McClellan instead.

If Wittgenstein Lived in the Twitter Age

...whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.

-- Ferdinand Kürnberger, cited by Wittgenstein as the motto to the Tractatus

...whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in 140 characters.

-- Modern version

Your Grumpy Pedagogical Thought of the Day

My students are engaging in the Audacity of Adequacy.

Sentences One Finds Oneself Saying During Class

Federalist 10 is about dealing with threats from the left; Federalist 51 is about dealing with threats from the right.

(PS: Yes, I know that this terminology is anachronistic.  Don't hock me a chonic.)

Tidbits, Short Takes and Links

• Overall, the Obama win feels less like a glorious victory & more like a near-miss car collision that you're thankful to have walked away from unscathed.

• So if Romney *had* shown his tax returns, would he have won? Or would he have lost even bigger? We'd have to see them to know...

• LBJ famously said, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that it would cost the Democratic party the South for a generation.  Perhaps he should have added, after signing the 1965 immigration reform bill, "...and this is how we'll get it back."

• Dear students: folding over one corner does not keep two pieces of paper together. Use a stapler. Love, a grumpy teacher.

• So I understand that we're now all supposed to be interested in former CIA director Petraeus's sex life, and his mistress's enemies lover, and so forth.  My inner paranoid thinks the media's obsessing over Petraeus to distract us from the robbery of the public under cover of deficit hype.

• If you remove Jindal's "we must not be the party that" qualifiers from in front of them, then these seem like pretty accurate descriptions of the Republican party today:

• "the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes"
• "the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"
• "dumbed-down conservatism... being simplistic... [and] insulting the intelligence of the voters"

Sounds about right.  In fairness, the first definitely applies to the Democrats too, albeit less so.

• NPR reporter misreads present-day novel as future apocalypse due to denial about climate change.

• Call it peace or call it treason, call it love or call it reason, but I ain't marchin' any more.

• Yglesias on the larger-picture problem with GOP poll denialism:

Common sense just turns out to be a poor guide to a lot of complicated social phenomena.... sociologically speaking, being on the same side as expert opinion is a high-status concept inside liberal and Democratic Party circles. This sociological embrace of expertise acts to temper the psychological mechanism of confirmation bias. On the right, the idea of academic expertise is held in low esteem. Conservatives accurately perceive that academia is hostile to nationalism and religious traditionalism and thus become much more prone to become out of touch with academic knowledge or to reject valid academic insights even on other topics. The same mechanism that can make you clueless about the meaning of "independent" self-identification can also lead to dangerously misleading public policy conclusions. Common sense and going with your gut are a poor way to understand the world.

• Wow. Or should I say 惊人.

• Buffy episodes summarized in limericks.  They're up to mid-season-three so far...

• I think the Walmart strikes are the most hopeful story in the news right now.

Damnable Heresy

I think I find Nina Simone's version of "Strange Fruit" to be more powerful than Billie Holiday's version.

<ducks>

Stray Thought

Old is the new new.

Who'd Have Thought We'd Have So Much In Common?

Scarily, I seem to have something in common with the base of the Republican Party: like them, I can't decide which of the clowns that are running for the Republican nomination I dislike the least.

Actually, it's even closer than that: like them, my order preference is roughly Romney-Santorm-Gingrich, but not clearly so, and without the slightest genuine like for any of the three. (And like them, there's a small, persistent part of me that finds Ron Paul attractive, but not nearly enough to settle on him, and thus in the end find that he is basically irrelevant to this calculation.)

I guess the only thing we disagree on is whether Obama is unspeakably better or unspeakably worse than the clowns.

Yeah, that's all we disagree on. Apart, that is, from absolutely everything else.

This Word Amen

When did "This." become the new "Amen"?

Or, since "Word." probably was the new "Amen", when did "This." become the new "Word."?

This Post Which Will Be 30 In the Year 2041

Teresa Nielsen Hayden links to olduse.net: a real-time historical exhibit*, which presents "usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago".

Shouldn't it expand as the net did, and eventually become the entire internet, updated in real time, thirty years after the fact? Which means, thirty years from now, it will contain within itself a rerecreated form of the usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago as it was thirty years ago. Which in turn will morph over time...

And so on, in an endless, iterative cycle, a 'net-flavored version of the Eternal Return.

And around the same time, of course, this post will be in there too: and perhaps someone inside olduse's recreation of the internet will google it up, wondering if anyone would have guessed it; and they'll see me (you, there, are seeing me now) waving across time, thirty years into the future.

Hello up there....**

___________________
0 Title footnote.

* And how marvelous is that concept: a "real-time historical exhibit"? (I guess the various reenactors would say they'd gotten there a long time ago, although I don't know if any given reenactment is really long enough to qualify.)

** Although this is all I've got to say, really.

File Under 'Unintentionally Humorous Juxtapositions'

The final sentence from Paul Krugman's (characteristically spot-on) column today, along with the editorial note that is appended to it:

The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

David Brooks is off today.

Yes. Right.

(Why it's funny, for those not following the story.)

Update: ...but I shouldn't stop with the funny. Scott Lemieux described a different section of Krugman's column as "the heart of the matter", and he's right that it's a key aspect:

The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

We have been terribly failed by our political institutions, and terribly failed by the sociopathic madmen of the Republican party and the hapless cowards of the Democratic party, but we've been terribly failed by the media too. It's part of what is going on in our current national game of chicken.

Rule of Thumb

If a google search for a book title and author's name (from a fairly full one like Stephen Jay Gould The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox* to a simple one like Adapting Minds Buller) does not bring up the Google Books page for the volume in question within the top ten results, then there is no preview (or only a basically-useless snippet view) of the book. If there is a preview of the book, however, then the google books page will be in the top ten google results.

Known exceptions: if the book is very new, reviews, sales and publisher's pages will sometimes crowd the top ten and crowd out the preview; and if the author's name and title is sufficiently general, then non-relevant hits might crowd out the preview.

___________________
* And no, Google, I did not mean Ghould instead of Gould. Oi.

Stray Thought

Poor Isaiah Berlin is remembered for just one sentence -- "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing". And he didn't even say it!

(But he did, however, offer an interpretation of it that is so persuasive that other possible interpretations are impossible to see through its mist. And I suppose he's better off than Archilochus, who's remembered for nothing -- not even the sentence that he wrote but Berlin is remembered for!)

A Stray Thought I Had On the Way To Class This Morning

To go, to teach--
To teach-- perchance to bore: ay, there's the rub,
For in our droning on what students we
May put to sleep, must give us pause.

[Apologies.]

Stray Thought

Personally, I think that instead of running a write-in campaign as she currently plans to, former Republican Lisa Murkowski should form the Alaska branch of the Connecticut for Lieberman party and run on its ticket. I see no reason why the "Connecticut for Lieberman" party should confine itself to a single state or candidate. I foresee the Connecticut for Lieberman Party fielding its first credible Presidential candidate in 2024, followed by its first Presidential victory in 2028.