Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"I want these fat guys off my detail. How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?" — said Donald Trump.

Posted: 11 May 2021 12:44 PM PDT

From "Trump family members got 'inappropriately close' to Secret Service agents, book claims Concerns over bonds involving Trump's then daughter in-law Vanessa and daughter Tiffany revealed in Carol Leonnig's Zero Fail" (The Guardian). 

The book also says that Tiffany Trump, "began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail" and Secret Service leaders "became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent."

"Under the new junk food controls, people will be rewarded with shopping vouchers for losing weight and exercising more under a 'fit miles' incentive scheme to encourage healthier living...."

Posted: 11 May 2021 12:18 PM PDT

"[T]he Queen's Speech promised a 'total ban online' for junk food. Food companies will be limited to factual claims about such products, such as price, ingredients and nutritional content, and will be unable to publish sponsored social media influencing about cakes, sweets, burgers and other unhealthy foods. Paid-for displays, web searches and promotional emails and text messages will also be banned. Advertisers believe that all social media posts about unhealthy products could be banned, although details have yet to be set out.... Critics say advertisements for avocados, smoked salmon, hummus, butter, cheese and some fruit could be banned if the rules are drawn too tightly."

From "Queen's Speech includes ban on online junk food ads to curb obesity" (The London Times). 

Here's the text of the speech. She actually refers to "obesity": "Measures will be brought forward to support the health and wellbeing of the nation, including to tackle obesity and improve mental health." 

Do American politicians ever tell us we're too fat? I think not, even though obesity has been a huge factor in coronavirus deaths, they're so much more comfortable telling us how close we should be to our loved ones that broaching the big bigness topic.

Black Obsidian Sound System (BOSS) — a collective of "queer, trans and non-binary Black and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism" — critiques the art industry that nominated it for the Turner Prize.

Posted: 11 May 2021 09:23 AM PDT

The London Times reports in "Turner Prize nominee paints Tate and awards culture as villains":  

It said the art industry failed to financially reward collectives, had an "in-built reverence" towards individuals, and regarded "black, brown working class, disabled and queer bodies [as] desirable, quickly dispensable, but never sustainably cared for."...

In a statement released this week BOSS said that while arts institutions were "enamoured by collective and social practices" they were not "properly equipped or resourced to deal with the realities that shape our lives and work."...

The Turner Prize jury were passionate about the work of all the collectives they shortlisted, recognising that these collaborative practices reflected the solidarity and community demonstrated across the UK in response to the pandemic....

I'm enamored by this phrase "an 'in-built reverence' towards individuals." I know it's meant as a criticism, but it seems like a good thing — an in-built reverence towards individuals. "In-built" sounds like a synonym — a good substitute — for "systemic." And I like "in-built" better than "built-in." I would have written "built-in," but it's perfectly easy to understand "in-built," and it feels like the familiar English words "inborn" and "inset."

I wonder if the criticism makes BOSS more likely or less likely to get the award. It sounds like the jury wanted credit for nominating a collective and the collective called bullshit on using them that way. It's not an honor just to be nominated.

"Banana skins have been trendy among vegans since at least 2019, when online recipes began circulating for treating the peels like bacon."

Posted: 11 May 2021 09:07 AM PDT

"At around the same time, the pulled not-pork had its first brush with internet fame, courtesy of the Canadian blogger Melissa Copeland, who published an explainer — and recipe — on her site the Stingy Vegan along with a video on Facebook. She'd developed it after learning that vegans in Venezuela use bananas' outer jackets for an alternative to carne mechada (shredded beef), and in Brazil a similar swap is popular in a dish known as carne louca (or 'crazy meat')." 

 From "Think Outside the Banana. Eat the Peel. After the British chefs Nadiya Hussain and Nigella Lawson developed recipes using banana skins, the British cooking public is perplexed" (NYT). 

Speaking of crazy, the NYT article fails to mention that commercially grown bananas have a lot of pesticide in the peels. When I've seen discussions of eating banana peels elsewhere, there's always been a prominent warning that you've got to use organically grown bananas. 

There's very little reason to eat banana peels (unless you're desperately starving). A caption there says banana peels are "[c]onsidered useless scraps by many home cooks," but many other home cooks know that they're great for composting... and growing some vegetables that are genuinely tasty. 

What's the point of eating the skins? That they're "trendy"?! If that's your reason, you're a mark. Good luck! There's also the idea that you should make a fetish out of not wasting anything. One of the "cooks" discussed in the article is said to be "an expert on no-waste cuisine," but what her expertise has led her to, when it comes to banana peels, is puréeing them and sneaking the resulting goo into cake batter and smoothies.

Is there a flavor contribution of any significance?

In truth, the flavor of the cooked skins isn't too pronounced — it's subtle, with a polite suggestion of bitterness, and a slight floral note on the finish.

The answer to my question is, apparently, no, but points to the NYT author for coming up with "a polite suggestion of bitterness." That's funny, and I get the point, which I take it is: Don't eat banana peels.

"Do we at least get some royalties out of this? I don’t remember signing away my life rights for your little song. What if I was going to use this as material for my novel?"

Posted: 11 May 2021 12:00 PM PDT

Said Paul, a real estate novelist, quoted in "BILLY JOEL PLAYS "PIANO MAN" FOR THE FIRST TIME AT THE BAR HE BASED THE SONG ON" (McSweeney's).

5:37, 5:43 a.m.

Posted: 11 May 2021 08:41 AM PDT

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IMG_4669

"In Athens... the puppet will befriend a minotaur and they will explore the city together. In Naples she is tired, has had enough..."

Posted: 11 May 2021 06:58 AM PDT

"... and will have a tantrum which, Vesuvius-like, releases energy, which will bring hundreds of dancers and musicians to join her. In Cologne, Amal will share apple pie with elderly people and hear their stories of growing up after the second world war."

From "Puppet of refugee girl to 'walk' across Europe along 12-week arts festival trail/Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugees" (The Guardian).

"I know of no study that more elegantly gets across a subtle but determinative difference between how black and white kids tend to process the school thing."

Posted: 11 May 2021 06:52 AM PDT

"A study in 1997... found that among eighth and ninth graders, most white kids said they did schoolwork for their parents while most black kids said they did schoolwork for the teacher.... For the black kids, school is something 'else,' something for 'them,' beyond the comfort zone; for the white kids, it is part of the comfort zone. This is not something the kids would consciously be aware of, but being really good at school – and this would include tests – requires that it becomes a part of you. To hold it at half an arm's remove all but guarantees that you will only ever be so good at it. Now, because Clifton Casteel's study wasn't about racism, the usual suspects see it as their responsibility to argue away such work.... [Casteel] is a black man... deeply devoted to helping the black community. Casteel's study pointed up a quieter aspect of something richly documented nationwide – a sense among black teens that school is 'white; and that real black kids don't hit the books. Black academics and media people tend to dismiss this as a myth, but based solely on an impatience with addressing black problems as due to anything but racism. The facts are plain: the idea that 'acting white' is a myth is, itself, a myth."

From "CAN WE PLEASE DITCH THE TERM 'SYSTEMIC RACISM'?/As a linguist I know we can't, but systemic racial inequities can almost never be undone by 'getting rid of the racism'" by John McWhorter (Substack).

"In 2016, during a trip to Zagreb, Croatia, he wandered into the Museum of Broken Relationships."

Posted: 11 May 2021 06:34 AM PDT

"As he studied the remnants of strangers' failed romances—photos of hookup spots; a diet book that a woman received from her fiancé—West came up with an idea for a museum dedicated to failed business products and services. A year later, in Helsingborg, Sweden, he opened the Museum of Failure.... One example on display at the museum was the Newton, a personal digital assistant released by Apple in 1993... also... Bic for Her, a line of pens... DivX, a 2003 trademark for 'self-destructing' DVDs that could be watched for only forty-eight hours.... West realized that if the experience of failure had expedited human innovation, then the experience of disgust was potentially holding us back. Could that aversion be challenged or changed? 'I just wanted to know, Why is it that even talking about eating certain things makes my skin crawl?'... The planning for the [Disgusting Food Museum] began with a more basic question: What counts as food?...Disgust may have originated as a food-rejection system, Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, 'but it has expanded into a vehicle for perceiving the social and moral world.' Rozin is the pioneer of a subfield called disgust studies. His favorite experiment involves dropping a cockroach into a glass of juice. Most people, of course, refuse to drink the juice, citing the dirtiness of cockroaches. 'What's amazing is that even if you disinfect the cockroach and convincingly demonstrate that the juice is harmless, people still won't want to drink it,' Rozin said." 

From "The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is 'Disgusting'/At the Disgusting Food Museum, in Sweden, where visitors are served dishes such as fermented shark and stinky tofu, I felt both like a tourist and like one of the exhibits" by Jiayang Fan (The New Yorker).

"And that’s all pretty ironic considering Franco was cultivating a kind of gender bender semi-gay gestalt to his audience."

Posted: 11 May 2021 05:30 AM PDT

Observes Roger Friedman in "The Astonishing Collapse of James Franco's Career Cemented Now by Former Pal Seth Rogen in UK Interview" (Showbiz 411). 

There are allegations that Franco has engaged in sexual misbehavior. He's been "sued by ex students, and railed against in public by young actresses on a variety of unsavory issues."

Friedman dopily muses that Franco may have "cultivat[ed] a kind of gender bender semi-gay gestalt" in order "to seem harmless to women while secretly on the prowl." 

I haven't followed Franco enough to have any idea what sort of "gender bender semi-gay gestalt" he gave off, but why bother to do all that to trick women into thinking you're "harmless" when you are "secretly on the prowl"? Just seem like an ordinary man, look like James Franco, and what more would you need to do?

"Hugh says that if we ever get separate bedrooms that’s it — he’s finished. I know this works for a lot of couples..."

Posted: 11 May 2021 04:58 AM PDT

"... they're happy being down the hall from each other, but I couldn't bear such an arrangement. 'This is what I'll miss after you're dead,' I tell him as I turn out the light, meaning, I guess, the sensation of being dead together."

 There's a new David Sedaris story at The New Yorker.

"[T]he Biden White House frequently demands that interviews with administration officials be conducted on grounds known colloquially as 'background with quote approval'..."

Posted: 11 May 2021 04:54 AM PDT

"[T]he information from an interview can be used in the story, but in order for the person's name to be attached to a quote, the reporter must transcribe the quotes they want and then send them to the communications team to approve, veto or edit them.... At its best, quote approval allows sources to speak more candidly about their work. At its worst, it gives public officials a way to obfuscate or screen their own admissions and words. The Biden White House isn't the first to employ the practice. Many reporters say it's reminiscent of the tightly controlled Obama White House. The Trump White House used it, too. But reporters say Trump's team did so less frequently than Biden's team — which also used the tactic during the campaign — and a number of current White House reporters have become increasingly frustrated by what they see as its abuse.... 

From "Reporters fume at White House 'quote approval' rules" (Politico).  

The article quotes NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker, explaining that the practice originated with reporters: "What started out as an effort by reporters to get more transparency, to get people on the record more, to use fewer blind quotes, then got taken by the White House, each successive White House, as a way of taking control of your story. So instead of transparency, suddenly, the White House realized: 'Hey, this quote approval thing is a cool thing. We can now control what is in their stories by refusing to allow them use anything without our approval. And it's a pernicious, insidious, awful practice that reporters should resist."

Zoom is ruining conversation because it's much harder to interrupt.

Posted: 11 May 2021 04:42 AM PDT

I'm reading "How the Zoom era has ruined conversation." (WaPo) Maybe you think it's better to disempower the interrupters. If so, you need to hear from those who understand the importance of overlapping conversation — collaborative conversation:
Suppose someone is speaking and another person, eager to express agreement, chimes in at the end of their sentence. Over Zoom, this tends to derail the discussion or narrative.... Then there's the turn-waiting....
[S]ociolinguist Deborah Tannen... describes cooperative overlap as "talking along to show enthusiasm, as a way of encouraging the other person to keep speaking rather than cutting them off." Her initial research focused on the difference between Jewish New Yorkers with an Eastern European background (who were inclined toward talking over) and Californians of a Christian background (who tended to feel interrupted).

Well, there you have it. California is winning.

Meanwhile, for people who don't particularly like the idea of fighting to be heard, the Zoom era — which creates more orderly queues for commenting during conversation — has been a boon.

The article doesn't mention Justice Thomas at this point, but should. He didn't speak at oral argument for a decade, and now, he's a full and equal participant. 

ADDED: Despite the usual eagerness to talk about race, this WaPo article avoids the subject. Because the idea is that overlapping, collaborative conversation is good, there's an avoidance of the possibility that it's part of white supremacy.  Thus we have Christian Californians on the anti-interruption side and Jewish New Yorkers as their opposite. Where are the black people?

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