Althouse

---

• Helleborus.
• "Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Thursday people will 'likely' need a booster dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated."
• "Expect campaign rivals to pounce on the contradictions, while the eloquent Vance will try talk his way around it — banking on the fact that Ohio twice went for a populist billionaire."
• Thursday sunrise.
• "Congressional Democrats will introduce legislation Thursday to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices..."
• "Before hospitality was a business, it was more of a virtue — a barometer of civilization."
• "Azaria, who is White..."
• I'm so old-fashioned, I thought that, when Don Lemon said "I have a lot of support from the Big Guy," he was talking about God.
• "Mr. Jacobs’s parody of the Great American Songbook prompted Irving Berlin and a group of song publishers representing the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others to sue..."
• 6:23 a.m.
• "Ann: Used to be a frequent reader. But, it has become a waste of time trying to understand what you are attempting to cryptically express in your blog posts these days."
• "FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner) is going away."
• It's the time of year to go to Governor Nelson State Park and see the Dutchman's breeches.

Helleborus. Posted: 15 Apr 2021 11:22 AM PDT   I can never remember the name of this flower.    It's Helleborus. It looks a lot like another flower I have trouble remembering, Ranunculus. Ridiculous! I end up referring to it as "Homunculus," which I know is wrong, but amuses me to say. In truth, a "homunculus" is... ... a representation of a small human being. Popularized in sixteenth-century alchemy and nineteenth-century fiction, it has historically referred to the creation of a miniature, fully formed human....  The homunculus first appears by name in alchemical writings attributed to Paracelsus (1493–1541). De natura rerum (1537) outlines his method for creating homunculi: That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse's womb, or at least so long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed. After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse's womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller. That's rather crazy, no? Here's a picture of Paracelsus: Excellent! From the Wikipedia article about him: Paracelsus was born in Egg, a village close to the Etzel Pass in Einsiedeln, Schwyz.... That doesn't sound real — Egg... Etzel... Schwyz! He was prone to many outbursts of abusive language, abhorred untested theory, and ridiculed anybody who placed more importance on titles than practice... His hermetical beliefs were that sickness and health in the body relied upon the harmony of humans (microcosm) and nature (macrocosm)..... An example of this correspondence is the doctrine of signatures used to identify curative powers of plants. If a plant looked like a part of the body, then this signified its ability to cure this given anatomy. Therefore, the root of the orchid looks like a testicle and can therefore heal any testicle-associated illness....  Paracelsus viewed the universe as one coherent organism that is pervaded by a uniting lifegiving spirit, and this in its entirety, humans included, was 'God.'...  Paracelsus also described four elemental beings, each corresponding to one of the four elements: Salamanders, which correspond to fire; Gnomes, corresponding to earth; Undines, corresponding to water; and Sylphs, corresponding to air. Salamanders, Gnomes, Undines, and Sylphs — How exciting science was in the 16th century!

"Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Thursday people will 'likely' need a booster dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 10:56 AM PDT "He also said it's possible people will need to get vaccinated against the virus annually," CNBC reports.

"Expect campaign rivals to pounce on the contradictions, while the eloquent Vance will try talk his way around it — banking on the fact that Ohio twice went for a populist billionaire." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 10:17 AM PDT From "J.D. Vance tells associates he plans to run for Senate in Ohio" (Axios). Vance made his name as an author [of "Hillbilly Elegy"], but he's made his career as a venture capitalist, backed by many of the coastal billionaires he now plans to rhetorically run against.

Thursday sunrise. Posted: 15 Apr 2021 08:24 AM PDT 6:27 6:29:

"Congressional Democrats will introduce legislation Thursday to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices..." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 08:08 AM PDT NBC News reports. The Democratic bill is led by Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. It is co-sponsored by Reps. Hank Johnson of Georgia and Mondaire Jones of New York. The Supreme Court can be expanded by an act of Congress, but the legislation is highly unlikely to become law in the near future given Democrats' slim majorities, which include scores of lawmakers who are not on board with the idea. President Joe Biden has said he is 'not a fan' of packing the court.... Last week, Biden announced the formation of a commission of liberals and conservatives to study the structure of the Supreme Court, including the number of justices and the length of their service. "To study the structure" ≈ to quietly kill the idea. So Markey and Nadler are stepping on their President's subtle manipulation. Another way of putting that is they could see what Biden was doing, so now is precisely the time to get out in front of him. ADDED: I'm strongly opposed to enlarging the Court. I'm just saying I can see Markey and Nadler's motivation. (To comment, email me here.)

"Before hospitality was a business, it was more of a virtue — a barometer of civilization." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 08:21 AM PDT "And in light of the past year, and the extreme hospitality expected from workers during a global pandemic, it might be helpful to think of it that way again. Ancient ideas of hospitality were in place to protect pilgrims, travelers, immigrants and others who looked to strangers for food and shelter on the road. At the root of hospitality is the Latin word 'hostis,' wrote the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, which means guest, but also enemy.... Writing about the ethics and politics of hospitality, another philosopher, Jacques Derrida, claimed that 'unconditional hospitality is impossible.' It's never been reasonable to expect infinite generosity, but that idea has still shaped the industry in countless ways.... The art critic John Berger often talked about hospitality as necessary to his understanding of art and culture, to the act of storytelling, to being human. Hospitality, to him, was a continuous and conscious choice — to listen, to be kind, to be open. If an exchange relied on someone's exploitation? That wasn't hospitality at all." From "What Is Hospitality? The Current Answer Doesn't Work/The host-guest relationship puts all the onus on the server, particularly during the pandemic, and points to the dysfunction at the heart of the business" (NYT). FROM THE EMAIL: SGT Ted writes:  The author is conflating the modern Hospitality Industry of restaurants and hotels, which is a broad marketing term, with the ancient cultural notions of traveling guest/host relationships to force a political point. The latter is a social contract meant to foster peaceful relations between strangers and the former is an expectation of a particular level of service based on whatever the level of service is being sold. A fancy restaurant has a level of expected hospitality that is far above that of a cheap diner or a hotdog stand. Then, the article tries to expand the definition of hospitality in order to tie employer/employee relationships, working conditions and wages with the term hospitality. Those things have nothing to do with that word. The logic fails. Yes, I excerpted the part I found interesting, but most of the article is a plea for better pay for restaurant workers.

"Azaria, who is White..." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 07:08 AM PDT Is he? I'm trying to read the WaPo article, "Hank Azaria apologizes for playing Apu on 'The Simpsons' for three decades."  I've already blogged about this apology, so I'm not rehashing that. I just want to focus on the unsupported assertion that Azaria "is White."  If Azaria is White, maybe Apu is also White.  The question whether people from India are white has been litigated in the United States. From Wikipedia's article "Racial classification of Indian Americans":  Throughout much of the early 20th century, it was necessary for immigrants to be considered white in order to receive U.S. citizenship. U.S. courts classified Indians as both white and non-white through a number of cases. In 1909, Bhicaji Balsara became the first Indian to gain U.S. citizenship. As a Parsi, he was ruled to be "the purest of Aryan type" and "as distinct from Hindus as are the English who dwell in India".... In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that while Indians were classified as Caucasians by anthropologists, people of Indian descent were not white by common American definition, and thus not eligible to citizenship. The court conceded that, while Thind was a high caste Hindu born in the northern Punjab region and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Aryan race, he was not "White" since the word Aryan "has to do with linguistic and not necessarily with physical characteristics" and since "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences" between Indians and white Americans.... Much more at the link. It's complicated, but there is an argument that people of Indian ancestry are white. In 1989, the East–West Center published a research paper about Indian Americans that said that the term, "Asian Indian," one of the fourteen "Races" in the 1980 US Census, is an "artificial census category and not a meaningful racial, ethnic, or ancestral designation."... The 1990 U.S. Census classified write-in responses of "Aryan" as white even though write-in responses of "Indo-Aryan" were counted as Asian, and the 1990 US Census classified write-in responses of "Parsi" under Iranian American, who are classified as White along with Arab Americans and other Middle Eastern Americans. Maybe there's a "Simpsons" episode where Apu fills out the census form. If he checks "White" or writes in "Aryan," would it be okay for Hank Azaria to do the voice, or are accents always wrong? When British actors do America accents, are we offended? If not, maybe it's offensive to make a different case out of an American doing an Indian accent. Or is it the comic exaggeration that's wrong? Would it be wrong for a British actor to comically exaggerate an American accent? Now, back to my original question. Is Hank Azaria white (or "White," to put it in WaPo's format)? He is not a very light-skinned person and his name seems Spanish. I feel rather disgusting investigating a person's race, but I feel forced into it by WaPo's bland, blank assertion. I'm skeptical when I see a closed door like that.  I check Wikipedia: Henry Albert Azaria was born in the Queens borough of New York City on April 25, 1964, the son of Sephardic Jewish parents Ruth Altcheck and Albert Azaria. His grandparents on both sides were Jews from Thessaloniki [Greece], whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain following the Alhambra Decree. His family's spoken language at home was Ladino, also known as Judaeo-Spanish, which he described as "a strange, antiquated Spanish dialect written in Hebrew characters." Are Sephardic Jews white/White? Read about the Sephardic Jews here. I'll just say that the history of human beings is too complex, nuanced, and tragic to write "Azaria, who is White...."   *** To comment, email me here.

I'm so old-fashioned, I thought that, when Don Lemon said "I have a lot of support from the Big Guy," he was talking about God. Posted: 15 Apr 2021 05:27 AM PDT I'm in the middle of listening to the NYT podcast — which you can play and read a little about at "CNN Is in a Post-Trump Slump. What Does That Mean for Don Lemon?/The prime-time host on the future of cable news, the urgency of conversations about race and whether CNN is a boys' club."    Kara Swisher is interviewing Lemon about his ranting on his CNN show, specifically the time he called President Trump "a racist." That must have been difficult, hmmm?  Lemon pauses, then ventures: "I have a lot of support from... the Big Guy." Does Don Lemon get his strength from religious faith? That's what I thought.  But Swisher gets him. She immediately says, "Jeff Zucker?" and he says "yeah" blah blah blah.  *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Mr. Jacobs’s parody of the Great American Songbook prompted Irving Berlin and a group of song publishers representing the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others to sue..." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 07:23 AM PDT "... Mad's parent company, E.C. Publications, for copyright infringement. At issue was 'Sing Along With Mad,' a pullout section published in 1961 that consisted entirely of song parodies by Mr. Jacobs and Larry Siegel. Among them were 'Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady' (a lampoon of Berlin's 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody') and 'The First Time I Saw Maris' (a spoof of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'), about the commercialization of the Yankee slugger Roger Maris during the season he hit a record-breaking 61 home runs.... In his opinion, [2d Circuit] Judge Irving R. Kaufman (most famous for presiding over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's espionage trial) wrote, 'The fact that defendants' parodies were written in the same meter as plaintiffs' compositions would seem inevitable if the original was to be recognized, but such a justification is not even necessary; we doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.'" From "Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine Writer With a Lyrical Touch, Dies at 91/He deftly mocked pop culture, politics and more for 57 years/He also wrote new lyrics for familiar songs, which led to a lawsuit from Irving Berlin and others" (NYT). 1961 — I think that's about when I discovered Mad. I was 10! It was the first thing I ever subscribed to. The writings of Frank Jacobs played such an important role in the development of my young mind. (To comment, you need to email me — here.) FROM THE EMAIL: Retail Lawyer: I started reading Mad around 1961 as well! I was 10 years old. I think I may have been a bit "culturally deprived" because I think I often heard the Mad parody of songs before I heard the actual songs. Ha ha. Me too. And the parodies made a greater impression. "He tousled his hair so carefully, that now he the leader of the whole country." From Pirates of Penzance. About JFK. I believe it came out while the country was mourning his assassination. Now I believe that Gavin Newsom is my governor because he tousled his hair so carefully. AND: Craig wrote:  I have a 10-year-old son who could benefit from a subscription to Mad Magazine, the way it used to be. I want my kids to grow up questioning everything. He does read the newspaper comics every day, which I think is great for him, but in general there are too many sacred cows these days. As you say, it's the era of "That's Not Funny". I wonder how the erasure of subversive comedy from mainstream culture will affect the developing minds of the next generation. Kay writes:  I believe The Simpsons may have played the same role for kids of my generation that Mad Magazine did for kids of yours. But my dad introduced me to the magazine when I was pretty young, and I loved it immediately. In the 80's a lot of Mad (in magazine and also paperback form) had reprints of the classic Mads from the 60's and 70's. It taught me a lot about American pop culture and history in general. Love Sergio Argones, Antonio Prohías, Duck Edwing, Al Jaffee. The parodies, the illustrations, the fold-outs. Yes! The fold-out era is after my time. Or is it fold-in? Yeah, Wikipedia says "fold-in." Mad publisher Bill Gaines joked that he was a fan of the Fold-In because he knew that serious collectors valued pristine, unfolded copies, and would therefore be inspired to purchase two copies of each issue: one to fold and another to preserve intact. The oldest fold-ins were from 1964. I was 13 and had moved on to fashion magazines and music magazines.)

6:23 a.m. Posted: 14 Apr 2021 05:36 PM PDT

"Ann: Used to be a frequent reader. But, it has become a waste of time trying to understand what you are attempting to cryptically express in your blog posts these days." Posted: 15 Apr 2021 05:09 AM PDT "I wish to stay informed, not play clever head games. If you have something to say, just say it. I'm too busy to play your silly exercises. Otherwise, find a more productive use of your and my time. As judge and jury and former reader, I find you in Contempt. Case dismissed. Goodbye!" Someone wrote that and emailed it to me. It's not a name I recognize, just an email address that's a stray collection of numbers and letters.   I laughed out loud at "I wish to stay informed, not play clever head games." People read this blog to "stay informed"? That seems ill-informed. And as for that "judge and jury" and "Contempt/Case dismissed" business — that can't be a lawyer. Must just be someone cranked up about my being a (former) law professor and thinking I'm vulnerable to criticisms containing legalistic lingo.  But you need a specific charge if you want to find me guilty, and what is it? Failure to keep you informed?  Not having something to say and just saying it? The crime of playing clever head games? The infliction of silly exercises? Cryptic expression? Oh, there I go, asking questions when I don't allow comments. Oddly enough, the complaint you see above never mentions the abolition of comments. Is it possible the person thinks the blog "has become a waste of time" because there are no comments anymore — that the comments used to help him understand what I was cryptically expressing? Ha ha — I can't understand what the emailer is cryptically expressing. And now here I am imposing it on you! FROM THE EMAIL: Mary writes:  Um, that sounds like Trump! lol, too funny. With the exception of all caps, that could be a Trump twitter rant. And he's a man that's been more than knee deep in court cases his whole life so it kinda fits him. "waste of time", that's straight up Trump! What do you think? Yeah, complete with the stray capitalization. btw, your blog is 1000% better now, so much more interesting with curated comments. Thanks! And AZ Bob writes:  I've always liked your blogging style. It reminds me of being in law school many years ago. You frame the topic in a way that provokes a wide-open discussion. The comments provide much entertainment, if not insight. This may not be what the commenter was trying to say but I do miss reading the comments. The comments had a way of making the post complete. A while back, you asked us to be more judicious in our posts. I wish that had happened. It noticed prior to your change in format that one particular open thread became a slug fest. As moderator, you have your hands full so I see why you reigned in the comments. I hope you find a way to return to having comments. Asking for something would not work, because there were some bad faith commenters — commenters who were out to destroy the blog. They might even be inspired to do more of the very thing I said not to do.  AND: Bob writes: Neither you nor any of your audience will miss this Low-Information Reader. Tommy writes:  I actually prefer no comments, mostly because I'm more interested in your opinion than I am anything going on there. I think having comments resulted in your being more interested in starting a conversation and less likely to give an opinion, and it's that opinion I prefer to read. I think you actually like and prefer the conversation bit when it's civil, and history shows I'll read your blog no matter what you do, but I wanted to let you know there is at least one person that would prefer the no conversation just tell us what you think version. Comments (and the current version of sort of comments) have been around for awhile now, and I still miss the other style, anyone that wants to comment can start their own blog. Long time reader from back when George W. Bush was in the White House Thanks, Tommy! Stephen writes:  My wife and I both miss the comments. We enjoyed reading them to each other. Quite a few of the commenters had clever and pertinent things to say. Yes, sometimes I learn things about current events from your blog; there have been multiple incidences of you writing about a death of some prominent person before I see their obituary anywhere else. Your legal commentary is also quite good. Of course, your posts can't all be gold nuggets and diamonds; there have been many posts where your stream of consciousness writing made me think that you were talking to yourself and we were all eavesdropping. Those posts always seem to leave me cold and cause me to move on to something else. Thanks. That's a clear indication to me that I'm not the writer for you. I'm not here to feed news updates. If you dislike the posts that are in my personal voice, then you're not the reader for me. We still read your blog... Oh... all right.... ... but losing the comments have made it less enjoyable for my wife and I. Oh, well. I'm indifferent regarding posting any part of this on your blog. Further, I'm not going to sit down and compose an email to you whenever I feel I have something worthy to say. There was an immediacy to commenting which made it fun, and it was easy to say something. Emails not so much.... This is good.  People are more selective in what they will email compared to what they'll just drop in the comments. People — some people — would throw in comments without thinking about whether they "have something worthy to say." Nobody emails to say "Why are you still reading the New York Times?" or to ask, off topic, "Who shot Ashli Babbitt?" ALSO: Amadeus 48 writes:  Mixed feelings, here. I miss the comments, but if I am honest, I confess that things had fallen into a slough. In my own case, for the most part my comments gave me a chance to snark. There are other blogs for that, aren't there? So now I have a chance (not really given a choice) to write something at least somewhat thoughtful THAT ALTHOUSE WILL READ! Be still, my heart. Isn't asking an intelligent question the best way to make a point? Haven't generations of philosophers and law professors thought so? It seemed to me that questions like for whom did Althouse vote and why were pointless. The point was to make the reader ask himself or herself for whom were they voting and why. So, on to a brighter and more thoughtful tomorrow. Thanks for years of fun and provocation.

"FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner) is going away." Posted: 14 Apr 2021 05:22 PM PDT So I am told by Blogger, "because your blog uses the FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner)." The notice continues: "Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in July 2021. After July 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you'd like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts. Learn how." Ugh! I don't know if I can "learn how" to do anything like that, but I clicked through to "Feedburner help" and it says: How to export your email subscribers to a CSV  Once you have activated FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions service for your feed, you can easily export a list of your email subscribers. 1. Click Analyze, and select Subscribers. 2. Click FeedBurner Email Subscriptions, then click Manage Your Email Subscriber List. This opens a new page. 3. Under View Subscriber Details, click CSV (next to "Export"). Easily?!! First of all, that is all gibberish to me. Where do I click "Analyze"? Second of all, I'm just guessing that I could get a list of the email of all my subscribers but then it would be up to me to send them email every time I post. I don't see myself doing that.  Perhaps there's an easy solution here, and you're someone who can explain it to me, but please understand that I have very low tolerance of any discussion of anything technical about computers. I'm already exhausted just writing this post. And looking up "CSV."  You can email me here. ADDED: Here's an article at TechCrunch: "Google's FeedBurner moves to a new infrastructure but loses its email subscription service."  If you're an internet user of a certain age, chances are you used Google's FeedBurner to manage the RSS feeds of your personal blogs and early podcasts at some point. During the Web 2.0 era, it was the de facto standard for feed management and analytics, after all. Founded in 2004, with Dick Costolo as one of its co-founders (before he became Twitter's CEO in 2010), it was acquired by Google in 2007. Ever since, FeedBurner lingered in an odd kind of limbo. While Google had no qualms shutting down popular services like Google Reader in favor of its ill-fated social experiments like Google+, FeedBurner just kept burning feeds day in and day out, even as Google slowly deprecated some parts of the service, most notably its advertising integrations. I don't know that anybody spent a lot of time thinking about the service and RSS has slowly (and sadly) fallen into obscurity, yet the service was probably easy enough to maintain that Google kept it going. And despite everything, shutting it down would probably break enough tools for publishers to create quite an uproar.... Feed owners will be able to download their email subscriber lists (and will be able to do so after July, too). With that, Blogger's FollowByEmail widget will also be deprecated.... "If you're an internet user of a certain age...." No, I'm beyond that age. I never understood it in the first place. I just feel bad if my readers are losing something....

It's the time of year to go to Governor Nelson State Park and see the Dutchman's breeches. Posted: 14 Apr 2021 04:34 PM PDT     "Dutchman's breeches is one of many plants whose seeds are spread by ants, a process called myrmecochory. The ants take the seeds to their nest, where they eat the elaiosomes, and put the seeds in their nest debris, where they are protected until they germinate. They also get the added bonus of growing in a medium made richer by the ant nest debris."  "Governor Nelson State Park is a 422-acre Wisconsin state park... on the north shore of Lake Mendota. It is named for former Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson [founder of Earth Day]... Away from the lake one can find restored prairie and savanna, effigy mounds, hiking trails and ski trails.... A portion of the site of the park originally hosted a boys' camp called Camp Indianola. Orson Welles was a camper at the camp in his youth."

You are subscribed to email updates from Althouse. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States