Althouse |
- The most beautiful sunrise of this fall continues.
- "Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history’s songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91."
- Sunrise — 6:58, 6:59.
- "I feel strongly that the essence of Charlie Brown is premature existential despair and world weariness..."
- Sunrise, 6:55.
- "What's worse — talking about CRT or talking about the dog. It's the Scylla and Charybdis of conversation."
- Thanksgiving with Weird Al.
- "There was a time I loved riding the Hudson River Bikeway, but the metal bollards dotting the path made me phobic."
- "I just hope and pray that maybe Ms. Sebold will come forward and say, 'Hey, I made a grave mistake,' and give me an apology. I sympathize with her. But she was wrong."
- Me, at the secondary vantage point, at 6:53 a.m.
- "When is a racial hate crime not a racial hate crime? When it doesn’t advance the left’s, and the Democrats’, narrative."
- The spectacular Thanksgiving.
| The most beautiful sunrise of this fall continues. Posted: 26 Nov 2021 04:32 PM PST This was how it looked at 7:01 — 4 minutes before the official sunrise time:  I like that vertical beam. And that white strip — that was the most unusual feature of today's broiler. (I call it a broiler because it looks like a broiler you might cook meat under. It looks burning hot, but it was pretty cold. Wind chill 7.) And here you see it shockingly faded, at 7:18:  Anyway, that's all for sunrise pictures today. Feel free to talk about anything you want in the comments. And please think of supporting this blog by doing your shopping through the Althouse portal to Amazon, which is always right there in the sidebar. |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 02:52 PM PST |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 02:36 PM PST   |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 02:14 PM PST "... and both this song and the holiday special give you an inaccurate idea of the Charlie Brown ratio of despair to maudlin moments of transcendence. Then again, there's a sort of evocative melancholy in this song that's making me regret placing it here, scores of slots below 'Dominick the Donkey.' Eh, it's probably fine." Writes Alexandra Petri, explaining her placement of "Christmas Time Is Here" at #80 on "A ranking of 100 — yes, 100 — Christmas songs" (WaPo). I found her reasoning very amusing, throughout. Maybe you don't have access to WaPo, but — if you have Spotify — here's the whole list: The numbering is backwards though. "Little Drummer Boy" isn't #1, as it looks on this list. It's #100, and Petri "cannot stand it. Nothing will fix it, even the application of David Bowie to it. Every year I say, 'I hate this song,' and every year people say, 'Have you heard David Bowie's version?' Yes. Yes, I have. It is still an abomination." Speaking of objecting to David Bowie, earlier today, before encountering Petri's list, I was watching the trailer for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, "Licorice Pizza," and... ... David Bowie was getting on my nerves. The song is "Life on Mars," which — did you know this? — is said to express Bowie's irritation with the song "My Way" (after Paul Anka's lyrics were selected over Bowie's in making an English-language version of a French song for Frank Sinatra). You see the contrast with the bombastic pride of "My Way." As Bowie put it: "I think [girl with mousy hair] finds herself disappointed with reality... although she's living in the doldrums of reality, she's being told that there's a far greater life somewhere, and she's bitterly disappointed that she doesn't have access to it." And isn't that what Christmas is all about? IMPORTANT: The embedded list doesn't show the last 5 songs in Petri's top 100, even though the list ends at 100 in the written version. On Spotify, for a few songs, there is more than 1 recording, and the list actually goes up to 105. So even though "All I Want For Christmas Is You" ends the embedded list, it's only #5, as you can see from this screen:  |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 08:47 AM PST  |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 08:45 AM PST That's my response when Meade texts me these 2 items:  |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 08:17 AM PST
|
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 07:37 AM PST "If you're wondering when this dark terror took root, I can tell you exactly: The moment I slammed my bike into a metal barrier, shattering my wrist in five places. Some time after that — and after a collision with a cement Jersey barrier — I reluctantly gave up the Hudson River Bikeway. My once-relaxing path had become an obstacle course.... The great thing about New York, of course, is that there is no phobia for which you cannot find a therapist. My first was an instructor called Lance (really), who built me a set of Styrofoam bollards. I had absolutely no fear of hitting Styrofoam. Unfortunately, after the first lesson, Lance became unavailable.... An online search turned up someone promising, but her fee, for a 90-minute lesson, was a stupefying $475. I quickly moved on to Andrée Sanders, who bills herself as the Bike Whisperer.... She's never had a client with a fear as specific as mine.... Her fee is $200..." From "I Was Afraid of the Bike Path. So I Hired a Bike Coach. A nasty crash instilled a phobia of bollards. I called the Bike Whisperer" by Joyce Wadler (NYT). Then a "food delivery guy" yells the piece of advice that I think most cyclists know: You need to look ahead to the place where you want to go. (The corollary was stated early on in the column: "If you look at something, you ride into it.") But the column does not end there, as I'd thought it would. I liked the story arc of paying for an elite expert then getting the solution handed to her free from a working-class man on the street. But she keeps going to expensive Andrée, and instead of ending the article with the solution to the problem, she switches to telling us that she's added music — not with earphones but with a speaker attached to her bike. And she seems to think it's cool that what she inflicts on the public is "the Soviet national anthem sung by the Red Army Chorus, which for me evokes the Battle of Stalingrad... when the weather is fair, you may see me on the path, in my favorite spot near the George Washington Bridge, blasting the Soviet national anthem. I have retaken the bikeway." I'll just say this column belongs on one of my favorite subreddits: Unexpected Communism. |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 07:05 AM PST Said Anthony J. Broadwater, quoted in "Man Is Exonerated in Rape Case Described in Alice Sebold's Memoir/Anthony J. Broadwater was convicted of the 1981 attack in Syracuse, N.Y., in a case the district attorney and a state judge agreed was flawed" (NYT). Sebold is the author of the novel "The Lovely Bones," and the memoir is "Lucky." The exoneration came about because there was to be a film of "Lucky," and the executive producer, Timothy Mucciante, noticed problems with the story of the conviction of Broadwater.
Mucciante sounds like something of a hero in this story, but you can see how practical considerations would have been adequate motivation. Imagine if this movie, based on Sebold's telling of her story, had come out and the whole world suddenly took a hard look and considered things from Broadwater's point of view. Broadwater would have come forward, and the movie would have been destroyed. I question how the movie idea even got as far as it did. And how did the book sit out there for so long without a serious challenge? Broadwater has been "scrimping" for 20 years trying to get some attention to his ordeal, which goes back 40 years?! |
| Me, at the secondary vantage point, at 6:53 a.m. Posted: 26 Nov 2021 06:29 AM PST  What I saw:  Temperature: 17°. |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 04:29 AM PST "When white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse shot three white men who were violently assaulting him, it somehow got treated by the press and politicians as a racial hate crime. President Joe Biden (falsely) called Rittenhouse a white supremacist, and the discussion of his case was so focused on racial issues that many Americans mistakenly thought that the three men Rittenhouse shot were black. But when a black man, Darrell Brooks, with a long history of posting hateful anti-white rhetoric on social media drove a car into a mostly white Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring dozens, the press was eager to wish the story away. (The New York Times buried it on page A22.) Even when a Black Lives Matter activist connected it to the Rittenhouse verdict, observing 'it sounds like the revolution has started,' the media generally downplayed it." |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2021 04:21 AM PST
|
| 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 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.