Trendlist: Althouse

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Althouse

"And now, jorts—those frumpy jean shorts worn by beer-clutching dads behind the barbecue—have wormed their way into style."
"The adrenaline rush is so bad that it makes them forget the pain. Even seriously affected riders, such as Spaniard Marc Soler, both elbows fractured, Briton Chris Froome, with hip and chest injuries, or Swiss Marc Hirshi, his right shoulder completely disjointed, manage to finish."
"Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues..."
"In a stunning setback to regulators’ efforts to break up Facebook, a federal judge on Monday threw out antitrust lawsuits brought against the company..."
Heat exhaustion/heat stroke.
"Tarantino has turned his most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, into a novel: messing with the timeline, cranking up the backstories, mulching up reality..."
"Drinking not only allows wary, self-interested individuals to drop their guard and collaborate, he writes, it also facilitates the creativity and playfulness our species needs to innovate and survive."
Sunrise — eastern view at 5:28 and western view at 5:34.
A Meadhouse dialogue.

"And now, jorts—those frumpy jean shorts worn by beer-clutching dads behind the barbecue—have wormed their way into style."

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:57 AM PDT

A Wall Street Journal article calls out to me.

Nostalgia is also what pushed Aaron Levine back to jorts. "They harken back to a simpler time," said the 44-year-old menswear designer who until recently worked at Abercrombie & Fitch. Jorts are "a bit of a '70s situation, worn with a Faith No More T-shirt or a big polo," he said....

"You almost chuckle the minute you hear the word 'jorts,'" said Albert Imperato, 58, a classical-music publicist in Manhattan... The lightheartedness of jorts might actually be the secret to their surging popularity among younger men....

Will Rebholz, 29, a wine and beer salesperson in Grand Rapids, Mich., wore jorts "ironically" to rowdy tailgates in college. He still breaks them out at parties just "to bring some humor" to the room....

Do you believe you've got what it takes to wear clothes ironically/humorously? Or is that like saying "I meant to do that" after you fall off your bike?

And I must object to "They harken back to a simpler time." I've said it before, so let me quote myself, from a January 2016 article with the amusing/foreboding title, "Why there are so many things with titles like 'Why I still believe Donald Trump will never be president'":

"Hearkens back" (or "harkens back") is wrong (though common): "An old sense of the verb hark (which mainly means to listen) was used in hunting with hounds, where the phrase hark back denoted the act of returning along the course taken to recover a lost scent." We're not talking about listening back. Sound, unlike smell, doesn't remain on the trail and can't be traced. So please say hark back or just use normal English like it reminds me of.

"The adrenaline rush is so bad that it makes them forget the pain. Even seriously affected riders, such as Spaniard Marc Soler, both elbows fractured, Briton Chris Froome, with hip and chest injuries, or Swiss Marc Hirshi, his right shoulder completely disjointed, manage to finish."

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 06:39 AM PDT

Said the on-site surgeon, quoted in "French police fear woman who caused the Tour de France's worst-ever crash with placard written in German is UNTRACEABLE and has flown home" (Daily Mail).

I hadn't blogged about this incident yet, though of course, I've watched the video. Many times, in fact.

I'm not too interested in this dumb lady, and I don't particularly care whether she's caught or not. Can't they use computerized facial recognition? The article makes it sound like they're looking for someone based on her clothes and glasses.

I'm blogging today because I'm fascinated by the loony heroism of getting up and finishing the race with "hip and chest injuries" or a dislocated shoulder. Did somebody pop that shoulder back in for Hirshi, or did he just ride with a shoulder out of joint?

I'm not going to look to see if anyone is saying that that the cyclist who ran into the sign could have avoided the catastrophe. He seems a bit as if he's not paying enough attention. And these cyclists are choosing to ride very close together. They're taking the risk of losing control if one cyclist falls. And what's with leaving the fans in a position to jump out into the road with their wacky little signs? Either control the boundary between fan and competitor or expect the competitors to look out and maintain control. Leave untraceable German lady alone!

"Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues..."

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 05:43 AM PDT

"... or the decades-long quandary of federal immigration reform. He has also asked her to lead the administration's voting-rights efforts, which are in a filibuster limbo. According to The Times, he has her working on combating vaccine hesitancy and fighting for policing reform, too, among other uphill battles. It's gotten to the point that every time I see Ms. Harris, I immediately think of 'The Wiz' and hear Michael Jackson singing: You can't win, you can't break even/And you can't get out of the game/People keep sayin' things are gonna change/But they look just like they're stayin' the same...."

That's a NYT column, "Dear Kamala Harris: It's a Trap!" by a polisci professor named Christina Greer Ms. Greer is a political scientist at Fordham University.

Of course, it's a trap, a set up, and I don't know why Greer doesn't go the whole way and accuse Biden of white supremacy. But what interested me the most was the random appearance of Michael Jackson. Is he uncancelled now?

"In a stunning setback to regulators’ efforts to break up Facebook, a federal judge on Monday threw out antitrust lawsuits brought against the company..."

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 05:31 AM PDT

"... by the Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states. The judge eviscerated one of the federal government's core arguments, that Facebook holds a monopoly over social networking, saying prosecutors had failed to provide enough facts to back up that claim. And he said the states had waited too long to bring their case, which centers on deals made in 2012 and 2014. The judge said the F.T.C. could try again within 30 days with more detail, but he suggested that the agency faced steep challenges."

Writes Cecilia Kang at the NYT.

The top-rated comment over there, by a lot, is: "The swiftest way to eliminate Facebook's power is to disable/delete your Facebook account. And believe me, it's not very hard to do."

Ironically, that's a free-market answer.

Heat exhaustion/heat stroke.

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 04:30 AM PDT

I'm trying to read this WaPo article, "As Portland, Ore., copes with unprecedented heat, illnesses spike and roads buckle":

PORTLAND, Ore. — Kim and Kathy Stoughton thought they could wait out the record-breaking heat in their east Portland apartment, even though they don't have air conditioning.
But by Sunday, they couldn't take it anymore.
"I felt fatigued, extremely uncomfortable, mad," said Kim, who is in his 60s. He was also dizzy and confused, signs of heatstroke...

Heatstroke?! Come on, haven't we all seen charts like this?

Dizziness is on the heat exhaustion side, not the heat stroke side. And we're told:

So the couple headed to Sunrise Center, a community-center-turned-cooling-station open 24 hours through Tuesday.

That's the appropriate action to take for heat exhaustion. If it were heat stroke, they should have called 911. This is such basic and important health information. Why can't The Washington Post get that right?! It's so embarrassing.

That article has been up for more than 6 hours. Fix it!

"Tarantino has turned his most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, into a novel: messing with the timeline, cranking up the backstories, mulching up reality..."

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 04:31 AM PDT

"... and alt.reality pastiche, ladling in new episodes. The result comes packaged in something like those New English Library paperbacks that used to be on carousel displays in supermarkets and drugstores. In the endpapers he cheekily includes ads for old commercial paperbacks real and imagined, such as Erich Segal's Oliver's Story, sequel to Love Story ('Soon to be a major motion picture').... [T]he book is entirely outrageous and addictively readable on its own terms – even the wildly prolix digressive sections and endless savant riffs about movies and TV.... He's maybe not in the Elmore Leonard league but, like Leonard, he's refreshingly unconcerned with the literary mainstream. I read this in one sitting – just like watching a film."

From "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review – Tarantino's debut novel shines/The director's pulpy novelisation of his most recent film is entirely outrageous and addictively readable" (The Guardian).

Here's the book, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel." I put it in my Kindle.

I did not — as I usually do — add the audio version of the book. I listened to the sample and was sorry to hear that the narrator is a woman with creaky voice — an unusually heavy, perhaps intentionally exaggerated creaky voice.

Who is it? Oh, it's Jennifer Jason Leigh. Sorry, I am not amused. I am annoyed. No way I'm plugging that into my ear.

"Drinking not only allows wary, self-interested individuals to drop their guard and collaborate, he writes, it also facilitates the creativity and playfulness our species needs to innovate and survive."

Posted: 29 Jun 2021 03:15 AM PDT

"A negroni will essentially wipe out the prefrontal cortex, the site of pragmatic, grown-up thinking. Zap the same region with a transcranial magnet and you'll get the same results: happier, less inhibited, more childlike adults. Given that transcranial magnets are 'expensive, not very portable and typically not welcome at parties,' alcohol remains a handy, low-tech tool to get good will and fresh ideas flowing. For our ancestors, inebriation was especially essential, 'a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers.... It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers and trippers who emerged triumphant'.... Human society would not exist without ample lubrication."

From the NYT review of Edward Slingerland's book "Drunk/How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization."

I just put that in my Kindle. I enjoyed Slingerland's encounter with Joe Rogan. Here's a 14-minute segment of the show (which was 166 minutes):

There's a lot of historical detail in the book, looking into why human beings did so well over the millennia when we've been sloshing around in alcohol the entire time. The negatives are obvious, so there must be something quite positive.

I've written a few times about what I've considered the crucial benefit of alcohol: "freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority."

Here's the Reddit discussion of that Joe Rogan episode. Most interesting comment: "If you listen carefully, you can hear Joe's erection slamming into the underside of the table when that guy mentions gobekli tepe."

Here's the Wikipedia article "Göbekli Tepe." Oh, what am I doing, reading Wikipedia. I have the book in my Kindle now. From the book:

We've touched several times on what is possibly the oldest epic ritual site in the world, the stone enclosures and mysterious, monumental pillars erected at Göbekli Tepe. Over 11,000 years old, Göbekli Tepe must have been created by hunter-gatherers, since it predates the advent of settled agriculture. Its discovery a couple decades ago was therefore an important piece of evidence against the traditional view that certain key trappings of civilization—monumental architecture, elaborate ritual-based religion, and the brewing of alcohol—only could have developed once humans had attained the stability and access to resources brought about by the agricultural revolution. Beer before bread advocates see this site, with its stone basins that could hold up to forty gallons of liquid, scattered remnants of drinking vessels, and evidence of extensive feasting on wild animals, as an illustration of how ancient humans were first motivated to come together in large groups by the draw of intoxication and ritual, with agriculture coming after. It is revealing that there are no grain silos or other food storage facilities at Göbekli Tepe. "Production was not for storage," notes the archaeologist Oliver Dietrich and his colleagues, "but for immediate use." In other words, people gathered in large numbers at this site for temporary, epic, blowout feasts, accompanied by dramatic rituals, all of it likely fueled by generous quantities of booze.

The booze served multiple functions. The appeal of drink and food drew together otherwise widely scattered hunter-gatherers from far and wide, creating the kind of workforce that could move, carve, and erect enormous sixteen-ton stone pillars. The monumental architecture, in turn, must have lent incredible authority and power to the organizers, while the intoxicant-fueled rituals conducted among these pillars created a sense of religious and ideological cohesion. Periodic alcohol-fueled feasts, after which the participants scattered again until the next ceremony, thus served as a kind of "glue" holding together the culture that created Göbekli Tepe and other sites in the so-called Golden Triangle where agriculture, and civilization, had its birth.

Sunrise — eastern view at 5:28 and western view at 5:34.

Posted: 28 Jun 2021 07:35 PM PDT