Trendlist: Althouse

Friday, July 9, 2021

Althouse

Kayaker paddles into the sunrise.
"If your child is a football fan and likely to be up until after 11pm on Sunday watching the final, then let them stay in bed a little bit longer on Monday morning."
"Normally I buy the Audible package, sync up and try to quell waves of panic that I’m not better-read in key areas."
Mario is 40.
"It just doesn’t feel right... that company CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai get to decide which politicians Americans can hear and which ones we can’t."
Winning the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
5:22 a.m.

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 08:55 AM PDT

5:13 a.m.

5:16 a.m.

"If your child is a football fan and likely to be up until after 11pm on Sunday watching the final, then let them stay in bed a little bit longer on Monday morning."

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 08:44 AM PDT

"They must be in school by 10.30am and we would rather have rested children in school ready to learn than absent all day or grumpy children at home.... It is 55 years since England were in a major football final so this is a massive learning opportunity."

From "Euro 2020: Schoolchildren given extra time in bed after final" (London Times).

"Normally I buy the Audible package, sync up and try to quell waves of panic that I’m not better-read in key areas."

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 08:58 AM PDT

"The most recent went, like, 'Ahhh, I've barely read any Russian literature!' Though I was a Kafka nut as a teenager. So now I'm halfway through Maggie Gyllenhaal's reading of 'Anna Karenina.' Which is long."

From "How Ronan Farrow Spends His Sundays/For one thing, the award-winning reporter eats sardines and cottage cheese while on deadline. He's also into Mario Kart" (NYT).

Here's that audiobook of "Anna Karenina." Listen to the sample before you spring for it. Famous actors are not necessarily the best book narrators. I was just saying I couldn't listen to Jennifer Jason Leigh narrating "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." American actresses tend to have casual, idiosyncratic speech patterns — good for dialogue but distracting or irritating for the long haul through descriptions and multiple characters.

Farrow is 33. Maybe that's the key age for worrying that you're not better read. "Waves of panic" sounds extreme, but maybe people — some people — are deeply distressed that they haven't read all the books it seems you're supposed to have read. If there's anyone I associate with that feeling, it's Woody Allen. Maybe fear of not having read the great Russian classics is a displaced communion with his estranged father. The How-I-Spend-My-Sundays piece of literary fluff does have a reference to Woody — a veiled reference:

One photo that's definitely going up in this new apartment: an 8-by-10-inch glossy of Madonna in full cleavage-y glory that accompanied a letter she mailed me when I was 6. The year previous, Madonna had hung out with me a lot on a set in Queens where she was playing a trapeze artist in a movie with my mom, teaching me to roll down her fishnet stockings, so I learned that I was not straight. At that point she hadn't yet had kids and clearly wanted kids.

There's a link on "a movie" and it goes to a NYT review of the Woody Allen movie "Shadows and Fog." There's also a photo of the letter Madonna sent 6-year-old Ronan, whose original name was Satchel. The article doesn't quote it, but I can transcribe it: "Hello Satchel/I miss you so please grow up soon so we can be married!/Love, Madonna."

That's all in good fun, Madonna telling a 6-year-old he must marry her. Imagine the uproar if Woody had written such a thing to a 6-year-old. And if he'd taught her to roll down his socks.

ADDED: By the way, Woody Allen's wonderful spoof of Russian literature, "Love and Death," is sometimes shown in a double feature with a film version of "Anna Karenina."

AND: Notice that he says he "learned that I was not straight" when he was 5 years old. Unexamined and out there to be seen by us is the portrayal of Madonna attempting to sexualize a 5-year-old. And the man looks back on that and does not condemn her but rather seems to revel in the unique opportunity he had to be sexualized by a sexy adult woman. He says he could see that he wasn't heterosexual because he didn't respond to her invitation to enjoy her sexiness. To say that he did not respond and that it meant he was gay is to interpret the interaction as sexual. As long as he's learning to read heavy novels, perhaps he could write something deep about his childhood experience and how he perceived and how that correlates to the way he understood what happened between his sister and his father.

FROM THE EMAIL: Ficta points to this apt clip from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall":

Mario is 40.

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 05:35 AM PDT

"Donkey Kong is an arcade game released by Nintendo in Japan on July 9, 1981."

That was 40 years ago today.

"Its gameplay maneuvers Mario across platforms to ascend a construction site and rescue Pauline from the giant gorilla named Donkey Kong, all while avoiding or jumping over obstacles. Donkey Kong is the product of Nintendo's increasingly desperate efforts to develop a hit to rival Pac-Man (1980) and break into the North American market.... The game debuts Mario, who became Nintendo's mascot and one of the world's most recognizable characters" — Wikipedia.

Newborn, Mario looked like this:

And as long as I'm talking about Mario, let me once again show you this clip, from the movie "Putney Slope," containing what was for me one of the top-10 funniest things I ever heard in a movie, "How many syllables, Mario?":

The director of that movie, Robert Downey Sr., died 2 days ago. From the NYT obituary:

"Putney Swope," a 1969 comedy about a Black man who is accidentally elected chairman of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, was perhaps Mr. Downey's best-known film.
"To be as precise as is possible about such a movie," Vincent Canby wrote in a rave review in The New York Times, "it is funny, sophomoric, brilliant, obscene, disjointed, marvelous, unintelligible and relevant."...
"They're uneven," [Downey] said of the films. "But I was uneven."

"It just doesn’t feel right... that company CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai get to decide which politicians Americans can hear and which ones we can’t."

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 07:38 AM PDT

"Everyone mocking Trump's misreading of the First Amendment would be foolish to dismiss that feeling. Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube) barred Trump from their platforms after he incited violence on Jan. 6. They are private companies, and they had every right to do so.... But the fact that Trump failed so miserably to find alternatives to these platforms reinforces the common-sense feeling that they are not ordinary private businesses. Most people understand that they are private companies but also that, in today's America, if those three are silencing you, you are being excluded in a serious way from the public square. And many understandably wonder: Why should they get to make that call? Trump's lawsuits certainly don't point the way to an answer.... Yet that brings us back to the hard question: Do we want Facebook CEO Zuckerberg making those judgments?"

Writes Fred Hiatt in "Opinion: Legally, Trump's tech lawsuit is a joke. But it raises a serious question" (WaPo).

CORRECTION: I had the wrong name for the columnist and have corrected it.

Winning the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 04:52 AM PDT

ADDED: The winner, Zaila Avant-garde, considers herself more of a basketball player than a speller:

"Basketball, I'm not just playing it. I'm really trying to go somewhere with it. Basketball is what I do," Zaila said. "Spelling is really a side thing I do. It's like a little hors d'ouevre. But basketball's like the main dish."

She holds 3 records — having to do with dribbling multiple balls — in the Guinness Book of World Records.

As for her unusual last name, we're told that her "father changed her last name to Avant-garde in honor of jazz musician John Coltrane." ("The Avant-Garde" is an album title.)

ALSO: I'm sure Avant-garde knows how to spell "hors d'oeuvre," but it's misspelled in the article about her! That's an Associated Press article at NOLA.com. You would think that they'd take special pains about spelling when writing about a spelling champ. And everyone knows that "hors d'oeuvre" is a hard word. Check the spelling!

5:22 a.m.

Posted: 08 Jul 2021 05:02 PM PDT