Thursday, February 11, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"Until the World Trade Center was built, most skyscrapers were supported by simple steel or concrete frames."

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 12:06 PM PST

"But that meant that interiors were interrupted by columns. For the Trade Center, architects and engineers, including Mr. Robertson, sought to create column-free expanses for commercial tenants. He did that by making the towers giant steel tubes, with about half of the weight borne by exterior columns. The rest of the weight was carried by the towers' steel-and-concrete cores. Floors were supported by lightweight steel trusses linking the exterior columns to the cores, giving tenants column-free spaces measuring about three-quarters of an acre. According to Mr. Robertson, the buildings had been designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, but the planes flown into the towers were heavier 767s. And his calculations had been based on the initial impact of the plane; they did not take into account the possibility of what he called a 'second event,' like a fire. When the planes struck the towers, they sliced through the steel frames, but the buildings remained standing. Many engineers concluded that conventionally framed buildings would have collapsed soon after impact. The twin towers stood long enough to allow thousands of people to escape."

"[A]n unpopular hero to civil libertarians, the Devil incarnate to an unlikely alliance of feminists and morality preachers, a conundrum to judges and juries..."

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 11:17 AM PST

"... and a purveyor of guilty secrets to legions of men slinking off from porn shops or the mailbox with brown paper parcels."

Hustler's June 1978 cover caught the enigmas of a magazine that was at once salacious, satirical, perverse, decadent, gleefully immoral and hypocritical. It portrayed a woman upside down and half gone into a meat grinder, with a plate of hamburger below. A "seal of approval" noted: "Prime. Last All Meat Issue. Grade 'A' Pink." A caption quoted Mr. Flynt, "We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat."... 
[T]he feminist Gloria Steinem wrote a scathing denunciation on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. "A pornographer is not a hero," she said. "Hustler is depicted as tacky at worst, and maybe even honest for showing full nudity. What's left out are the magazine's images of women being beaten, tortured and raped, women subject to degradations from bestiality to sexual slavery." 
The images featured in Hustler were certainly graphic and often violent: Women were depicted crawling at the end of a dog leash, nailed to a cross, bagged like a deer and bound to a luggage rack. One cover showed a woman's head in a gift box.... 
A 1983 study financed by the Justice Department and conducted by Judith Reisman, the conservative author and academic, found that thousands of cartoons in Hustler, as well as its competitors Playboy and Penthouse, depicted rape, botched abortions and children in sexual poses. "Chester the Molester," a long-running Hustler cartoon feature about a pedophile, was denounced by many critics, but Mr. Flynt defended it as bawdy social satire.... After being approached in 1977 by the evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, President Jimmy Carter's sister, Mr. Flynt announced that he had become a born-again Christian, saying he had had a vision of God while airborne in his jet with Ms. Stapleton. He banned smoking at Hustler, gave the staff a raise, began a carrot juice diet and vowed to "hustle for God." But he soon resumed his ventures and vices, calling himself an atheist.
Much more at the link — the court cases, the First Amendment victories, the gruesome shooting, the movie Milos Forman made about him, the 5 wives, the success in business despite a lack of education. I'll just add the quote from his lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer , that I blogged when the lawyer died 6 years ago:
"Freedom is only meaningful if it includes all speech, no matter who is offended by it. It would be a hazardous undertaking for anyone to start separating the permissible speech from the impermissible, using the standard of offensiveness. The freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment is indivisible. You can't take it away from Larry Flynt and keep it for yourself. The real issue of this case is: Are we afraid to be free?"

It's a lot easier to answer that question now, unfortunately: Yes, we are afraid to be free.

"'Love is strange,' wrote Thomas Pynchon, citing the 1956 Mickey and Sylvia hit single, in his 1988 New York Times review of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'"

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 08:10 AM PST

"As we get older, he continued, 'we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teenage pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.' This sort of marginalization of love stories — that, for one thing, they don't qualify as 'legitimate' novels — threads through the 125 years of The New York Times Book Review. And yet there are lessons to be learned about the necessary ingredients for a good love story from even these sorts of condescensions — along with the review that took them more seriously, of course." 
 

Andrea, Jennifer, and The 2 Williams.

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 09:22 AM PST

I assured you that I would write this post. It's something that should be very fun for me, but I've made it obligatory. I said "It's one of my favorite stories ever." And then, fooling about in the comments:
Every task seems like more fun than the subject I regard as the ripest of the week, Andrea, Jennifer, and The 2 Williams. 
What is wrong with me? I just got up to make my 5th cup of coffee! 
Did William Shakespeare drink coffee? Did William Faulkner?... 
"He didn't have coffee, he didn't have vanilla, he didn't have cocoa. Imagine writing Hamlet without a cup of coffee. That's amazing."... 
Faulkner drank, but not so much coffee. 
"Jeezus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one"

So, yes, the "2 Williams" are Shakespeare and Faulkner. They were in the news last night because Andrea — Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News chief Washington correspondent — tweeted something so mind-bogglingly stupid — stupid, evil, and hilarious — and Jennifer — Jennifer Rubin, the WaPo columnist — lunged horribly after Andrea's tweet. These people — Mitchell and Rubin — are supposed to be the elite, but they are not even elite enough to keep from stumbling over a high-school level literary reference or even to think of making sure — with the quickest Google — they're not making a gaffe. 

Andrea saw what looked like it might be an opportunity to mock Ted Cruz.

He'd gone on Fox News and said: "The Democrats want a week of political theater raging at Donald Trump. Reminds me of Shakespeare. It's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

She tweeted:

@SenTedCruz says #ImpeachmentTrial is like Shakespeare full of sound and fury signifying nothing. No, that's Faulkner

Now, that's a bit restrained in its arrogance, and, of course, stupid. The Faulkner title "The Sound and the Fury" is derived from one of the most famous soliloquies in Shakespeare, which includes the longer phrase deployed by Cruz — "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

Jennifer immediately galumphs in. Only 6 minutes elapse before she's got this semi-coherent tweet published:

Now that's and it says volumes about his lack of soul. That's Any Thinking Person.

The coherent part is "it says volumes about his lack of soul." And your tweet, Jennifer? What does it say volumes about you? Who the hell do you think you are to make grandiose pronouncements about somebody else's soul? And what did you intend to say about Any Thinking Person? You, the specific person, did not think too hard before belching that out. 

Andrea Mitchell struggles to get herself off the hook with: "I clearly studied too much American literature and not enough Macbeth. My apologies to Sen. Cruz." That's not an apology, and it's not a good excuse. Mitchell has a degree in English literature (from the University of Pennsylvania). Stressing American literature can't explain away the mistake:  

1. First, that's high-school level literature. Mitchell is 4 years older than I am, and I can tell you my junior year high school English class memorized that particular Shakespeare speech. I can still recite it by heart. It's Macbeth! No concentration on other works of literature should have prevented her from encountering the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech. 

2. Even if you only studied Faulkner and never studied Shakespeare, you would read "The Sound and the Fury." You can't read that without wondering what the title means. There is no way you would avoid receiving the lesson that the title is derived from the Macbeth speech. The assertion that you are so tremendously learned in American literature is utterly unbelievable. You just sound like an abject liar, Andrea. It is a tale told by an idiot.

3. If you really were a person who reads and understands literature, you would know that — in the world of novels — a character who corrects other people curtly in that pedantic "No, that's Faulkner" manner is an icky prig. I've read a lot of novels, and characters who talk like that are up to no good. That snootiness, even when there's no mistake, marks a character toward whom you know instinctively you are not supposed to feel sympathetic. And let me just add that when the novelist makes a character utter words like "it says volumes about his lack of soul," the competent reader knows immediately that it is the speaker of those words who lacks soul. 

Imperfect rhymes.

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 05:57 AM PST

I don't know what poems and raps you are working on, but me, I needed a rhyme for "infinite." I resorted to using a website called Rhyme Zone, which informed me that there were no perfect rhymes, but it listed near rhymes, ranking them according to nearness, with 100 being a perfect rhyme.

First on the list was "pinion nut," with a 92 rating. Less near were "intimate," "indiscriminate," and "Berlin summit," at 88. The most interesting suggestion was "sinful lust," 84....

Conversation at Meadhouse:
ME: Do you know what a pinion nut is?
MEADE: Opinion nut?
ME: No! A ...  ... ...  pinion ... nut?
MEADE: Not some nutty guy with an opinion?
ME: No. Pinion. Nut.
MEADE: Like a pine nut?
ME: That's what I thought too. No. The hardware kind of nut. 


It's hard to move forward poetically from "infinite" to "pinion nut" but probably actually a better move than going for "sinful lust." Actually, the best solution is to use "opinion nut"!

Speaking of infinite, you're probably wondering whether it's going to take me forever to get to that story I will call Andrea, Jennifer, and The 2 Williams. If I'd seen that last night, I'd have jumped right on it. But I went to sleep at the Tom Brady bedtime (8:30 p.m.), so I missed my chance to be an earlier noticer of this ripe, ripe tidbit. I saw it first thing when I woke up (at 3:30 a.m.), but I knew it had been noticed all over the place. I'll have to bring more to the table than a simple acknowledgment of the evil, hilarious screwup. But I assure you I mean to get to it. It's one of my favorite stories ever. It's nearly 8 a.m., so I've been warming this place up for 4 hours. It's time to face the music. The next post will be "Andrea, Jennifer, and The 2 Williams."

Speaking of sons...

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 04:55 AM PST

"Instagram took down the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and prominent anti-vaccine activist, on Wednesday over false information related to the coronavirus. 'We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,' Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement. Mr. Kennedy, the son of the former senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, worked for decades as an environmental lawyer but is now better known as an anti-vaccine crusader." 

We say "motherly" and "fatherly" and even "daughterly" but not "sonly."

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 04:48 AM PST

 Discuss!

ADDED: "Sonly" is a word. The OED has it dating back to c1443. 

R. Pecock Reule of Crysten Religioun... He schal haue sonely drede to god lest he offende god.

"Sit high for a bigger view and better three-dimensional perception? Or lower, to sense g-forces more accurately?"

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 04:11 AM PST

"Being that our eyes and ears are at the same height (they're a package deal, right?—either they're all up or all down), they can't be split up and repositioned. Perhaps if our bodies were designed by racing car engineers, our inner ear sensors would have wound up around our navels (which is approximately our center of gravity)."


That was published last September. I'm seeing it this morning because I've been clicking on this and that after noticing a "recently published" item in the OED: "sit-up-and-beg." 

This is an adjective "Designating an upright posture or sitting position, esp. in a vehicle" — as in "The old-fashion 'sit up and beg' driving position is an irritation." (That's a 1991 quote from Time magazine, and it led to a discussion here at Meadhouse over whether "old-fashion" is illiterate. Conclusion: Not only is it not wrong, it usually expresses the meaning you want better than "old-fashioned.")

"Sit-up-and-beg" can also refer to "a bicycle which, owing to its relatively high handlebars, must be ridden in an upright sitting position." You can also just use it as a noun to refer to a bicycle that forces you to ride in that position: "You see people dressed up, wearing high heels.., pottering along on a sit-up-and-beg—that's the kind of cyclist I'd like to be." OED got that one from @MirandaFrance1 on Twitter in 2020. Good to know the OED is watching the development of the English language on Twitter. And it's that Twitter addition that caused this old word to make today's "recently published" list.

And I'm delighted to see I have a tag for "posture"! With 10 old entries! 10!

A funny thing about that OED entry is that it never mentions dogs. Surely, "sit-up-and-beg" comes the old dog trick.

 

Why do people want their dog to assume a begging position? A lowly urge, no?

The ambiguous "drops."

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 04:08 AM PST

Headline at Hollywood Reporter: "HBO Drops Pair of Mike Judge Comedy Series."

I know "drops" is supposed to sound cool, like when some pop star "drops" a new recording. But it's such a saggy, sad word, and sometimes — as in that headline — it sounds like the very thing they're trying to get us excited about just got cancelled. 

Oh, no! Wait. I'm reading this article now:
'QualityLand' and 'A5' will not move forward as the 'Silicon Valley' co-creator continues to juggle the new take on 'Beavis and Butt-Head' for Comedy Central.
These shows did get dropped in the old-timey sense of cancelled/rejected. The word has ambiguity whichever way you want to use it. 

And by the way, what does it say about America that something new called "QualityLand" is shunned and they're bringing back "Beavis and Butt-Head"? Personally, I loved "Beavis and Butt-Head" — as an MTV show in the early 1990s. It's a quarter century later, though, America. 

I thought I was a little childish watching that when I was in my 40s, but who would have thought that 20+ years later, a reboot of the thing would be what was happening on HBO? What was on HBO, 20+ years ago? Here's a list of the best of HBO in the 1990s, topped by "The Sopranos." 

Watching "The Sopranos" in the 1990s, I might have wondered, What would HBO be in the 2020s? If the only fact I had from the future was HBO will be generating new episodes of "Beavis and Butt-Head," I would have been terrified. What the hell will have happened to America?!

"TV coverage of the trial on Tuesday afternoon averaged 11 million viewers on broadcast networks ABC and CBS and the three main cable news outlets — CNN, Fox News and MSNBC."

Posted: 11 Feb 2021 03:06 AM PST

"NBC also aired coverage but its audience figures weren't available at publication time. The first day of Trump's previous impeachment trial in January 2020 also drew 11 million viewers across six networks, including NBC. Tuesday's average will obviously climb above that mark when NBC's total is added. MSNBC grabbed the largest audience with 2.87 million viewers from 1-5:15 p.m. ET, a little ahead of the 2.66 million who watched the trial on CNN. Fox News averaged 1.95 million viewers, followed by ABC (1.8 million) and CBS (1.74 million), according to Nielsen fast national ratings."
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