more from sxephil

"GINGERS SCIENTIFICALLY NOT LOVED except for Christina Hendricks"

As always with videos from Phillip DeFranco aka "sxephil", the NS4W caveat applies due to occasional cursing and cheesecake imagery. I appreciate DeFranco keeping up with pop culture goings on so I don't have to. Also, he's a lot more entertaining than shows like Extra! or Entertainment Tonight, and his videos take much less time.


According to Yahoo:

In Morocco, the native Tamri goats are so enticed by the berries of Argan trees that they have become adept at climbing the branches to reach their food. Even stranger still, the goats' droppings contain seed kernels which local farmers then grind into an oil that is used in cooking and cosmetics.

I'm skeptical. Maybe the Morocco Export Council is thinking, "Oh, those stupid Americans. Surely if we post some pictures of native Tamri goats in trees, we will be able to sell more berries. They will never for a moment suspect we know how to use the photoshop because they think we don't understand these things. Ha ha ha ha!"

Ted Danson on CNN

"The Office of Letters and Light"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaNoWriMo

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

and now it's Tuesday

I seem to remember that we used to make fun of Abba in my high school days, but now people in their 40s and 50s wax nostalgic over them.

Consumer culture as a balm against reality, now in Hebrew

According to Noam at the Promised Land blog , the tagline of this Cellcom ad is “What do we all want? Some fun, that’s all”.

as Anya Achtenberg wrote in the comments there:

I wanted to find a shred of hope in this absurd commercial — the possibility of a communal game, Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Absurd. What is on the other side of the wall is meant to be hidden. Some sort of animals the IDF must keep in line. Playful at the moment. But still animals to be hidden, disappeared, kept behind a wall. A wall? A concrete monstrosity.

via Helena Cobban, who notes one commenter's view that the ad

"was most likely conceived and designed by high-ups in the advertising company-- and that they would have designed it to appeal to the broadest possible zeitgeist in (Jewish) Israeli society".

In other words, it wasn't calculated to shock Israelis, the presumption being most are OK with the wall. She also has a piece at the Boston Review on the decline of the Israeli peace movement, which she also discusses in her blog, in which she argues that in the past 10-15 years a lot of moderate to dovish Israelis have simply left Israel. She doesn't explicitly spell out the demographic consequence, nor does she see it as a principal cause(it was left out of the BR piece by the editors), but the meaning is clear.


Cobban:

How far has the peace movement fallen? One benchmark for comparison is the war that Sharon and former Prime Minister Menachem Begin launched against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. In September of that year, Lebanese Falangists, operating (as Ari Folman’s brilliant film Waltz with Bashir reminds us) with extensive support from the Israeli military, undertook a two-day massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis—as much as 20 percent of the population at the time—took to the streets in outrage, forcing the government to establish the Kahan Commission, which recommended serious sanctions for Sharon.
By contrast, pollsters found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the recent war in Gaza. Veteran peace activist Daphna Golan, who teaches human rights law at Hebrew University, recalled the anguish and isolation she felt during the Gaza war, especially in the face of widespread pro-war activism among Hebrew University students. Golan said university authorities did not respond to her complaints about posters she described as “extremely racist” hung at the entrance of the Givat Ram campus.

N.B. For some reason I had difficulty accessing the BR article directly through the linked URL, as it seemed their server was rejecting the hyperlink. So I had to go to their homepage, where the article, "Peace Out" is currently listed, although you can probably use their in-site search window if need be. Anyway it's worth reading, and if you have difficulty like I did the URL is here:

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.4/cobban.php

http://www.bostonreview.net/

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Mustafa Topaloğlu - Obama Video Klip

Maybe unintentional satire is the best, although it's also somewhat touching in its (probably delusional) optimism. Via Abu Muqawama.

two tales

"Backlash of the Hunter"(pt 1) was the pilot episode[streamable video] of The Rockford Files, one of the reasons that popular art from the 70s wasn't always as bad as you young whippersnappers were led to believe.(I've noticed that it's mainly the dreck of the 70s that gets recycled by Hollywood, like Charlie's Angels or The Brady Bunch.) In the first story Rockford(James Garner) takes on a pre-bionic Lindsay Wagner as his client, who's trying to find out why her father was killed. Billy Mumy appears in a secondary role. I don't remember if anybody was following Jim n' Lindsay when they stopped at the real-life Tail o' the Pup, although that sort of thing was typical in Rockford storylines.

Zadi Diaz and epic fu-- the middle eastern cable outages ...whatever

I will go ahead and post a video response to Ms. Diaz-- "Epic Fu", formerly the Jetset Show, is yet another example of how we young people are more likely to get news through non-traditional sources. I haven't made up my mind what I think of Zadi's presentational style, with its heavy emphasis on ironic detachment, seemingly communicating at two levels, suggesting underlying significance if you're predisposed to look for it, but just emanating apolitical cool for the rubes. (I never saw V for Vendetta, but my sense from the ads and my conversations with some who'd seen it suggested to me that it was a product of the same sensibility. )

Zadi's "take" on the cable cuts in the Middle East isn't very clear to me, although I'm guessing Roman Space Boy would probably dig it, and maybe suggest I was stuck in the agitprop sixties. Perhaps ambiguity is the new black.

Oh, incidentally: No, Hillary Clinton's people still haven't contacted me with offers of gobs of money, in case you were wondering. Maybe they had this sense that my intimation of support for her was somewhat less than earnest. (Also, I doubt Mike Gravel would shoot the promo with her as I wrote it, although Joe Biden does strike me as someone who'd eagerly hold her cue cards if he thought it meant he might score a cabinet post.)

B.A.D. blogging, etc.

"Maha Barb" O'Brien of the Mahablog informs us that today is "blogroll amnesty day" a day wherein lefty bloggers may pledge to freely blogroll somebody else in exchange for the same favor.Call it quid pro quo blogging, or networking, or what have you.

As a lowly nanoblogger with very little "traction" and a documentary project I've been trying to fund, naturally I owe it to myself to participate, so I am. As an added inducement to persons who might wish to "blogroll" me, I'm offering a free j-peg of virtually-rich, virtually-buttery Lorna Doone cookies.

The cookies are offered on the honor system naturally, and I can't exactly stop you from copying my j-peg without blogrolling me. But somewhere, there's a virtual Irish priest who will scold you for taking my virtual cookies under false pretenses, and he will haunt you in the long virtual night, so just don't do it. (Cheaters never win unless they're the New England Patriots, as fellow documentarian Terrell Owens reminded us last year.)

So, I say: blogroll me, and go Giants. If you want me to blogroll you, please leave a message in the comments below.


See also: Skippy th' Kangaroo: "blogroll amnesty day"
Jon Swift: "blogroll amnesty day,"
HZ(2005),"Lorna Doone blogging,"

Finally, I will have additional comments about "Iraqdoc 2008" later this week, by Wednesday.

the gnooze:Marta re Iran

I don't know what it is, but Marta Costello's phunny news shows are growing on me. Plus, it's a way to get phunny news without crossing a virtual picket line(ahem!).

Norman Mailer

As you may already know, Norman Mailer died yesterday. So I suppose if there's an afterlife he may well meet Marilyn(the Time cover is from '73. I think you can barely make it out if you're an abnormally good squinter.). Incidentally he came out with a novel earlier in 2007, his 1st in about 10 years, The Castle in the Forest. The stubby Wikipedia entry describes it as

"the story of Adolf Hitler's childhood as seen through the eyes of Dieter, a demon sent to put him on his destructive path. The novel explores the idea that Hitler had no Jewish heritage but was the product of incest."

You can decide for yourself whether or not that sounds promising. (Just based on the description, it sounds to me like psychic displacement masquerading as literature, designed to reassure readers that People are Basically Good and Hitler was a mere aberration. But hey, what do I know. If you've read it, feel free to comment below.)

I take a certain amount of perhaps morbid comfort from the fact that he somehow made it to 84, and lucidly, in spite of not seeming to have taken terribly good care of his health, although I suppose his reputation in that area may be exaggerated. There's an NPR interview with him (from January 2007), here: approx 11 minutes.

1942 DeSoto

photo via ned

from "learn to say ain't"(2005)

(via mike gerber)

John Rogers:
let's talk image. When I first started out on the road, I was a skinny guy with a big nose, a Boston accent and a Physics degree telling jokes in bars out West. I was hitting a wall of resistance in a lot of rooms. One night in Rawlins, Wyoming, the headliner -- a sweet road comic named "Boats" Johnson -- took me aside.

"You're a good joke writer. I mean, damn, there's some smart stuff in there."
"Thanks. But, uh..."
"They don't like you much." Boats handed me a beer. "Second show. Longneck. Always a longneck. Bring it on stage. Sip from it every now and then."
"I don't really drink on stage --"
"Fine. Fill it with water. Don't bring attention to it, just sip from it."
I shrugged. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. Learn to say 'ain't'. Don't change the jokes. Just learn to say 'ain't' every now and then."

The shows went, much, much better after that. I told the same gun control jokes, the same pro-gay marriage bits, the same making-fun of the culture wars jokes. But now I was killing.

There are two lessons to be taken from "Learn to say 'ain't'." First, the fundamental dynamic in all crowd interaction is us vs. them. Period. It's sad. Oh well. Get over it and win.

Now, the fine line here is that, the audience also always knows when you're being dishonest. That's worth hitting again. When you are on stage, the audience's collective mind can tell when you're not being yourself. And even more importantly, they can tell when you're lying to be one of "us". (Like Kerry hunting, or Dukakis in the tank). Changing yourself to fit the audience would be the wrong lesson to take from "Learn to say 'ain't.'" No, the lesson Boats was teaching me was that there's no problem with relaxing a bit and showing that you're not one of "them." He was teaching me that connection is a half-way game -- just extend out a little, and the audience will come the rest of the way. They will extend the boundary of "us" if you advance toward it.
[...]
Kerry was so, so far outside of "us" that, frankly it was a testimony to how badly Bush has screwed up that he even got THAT close.

there's a lot more and you should go read all of it.

put your mask back on

photos:bbc, buycostumes.com

"There's nothing we can do to stop you"
Torie Bosch, in Slate:

"A new survey reveals that of all the 2008 presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani would make for the scariest Halloween costumes."

breaking the sound barrier

the Bell X-1 flew faster than mach 1 for the first time on 14 October 1947-- 60 years ago today. In my usually cursory looking about for info about the day's topic, I found out that X-1 pilot Chuck Yeager is A. still alive(and married to a woman 36 yrs his junior of whom his kids apparently disapprove) and
B. Has recently endorsed Duncan Hunter for president.(!?)



Milestones like this one, and their assorted peripheral data make me think again of a topic I often return to, of how I used to be able to appreciate things like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier and how cool-looking the X-1 is without the disagreeable tangential reflections about all sorts of other stuff that kinda spoiled it-- how the US changed since 1947, from the New Deal and the country that mostly still manufactured our own stuff and cared about domestic job creation, to the present shaky state of things.


Yes, I recognize it wasn't all peachy in '47; desegregation was still waiting in the future and we did intern thousands of Japanese-Americans during the war years, just because people were scared and it was politically useful, to name just two things.

Still, the Bell X-1 did look pretty cool.

All those years ago

magnum photos from the 1967 war

some recent anniversaries, courtesy our wikipedia friends:

June 5th,1967 - Six-Day War begins: The Israeli air force launches simultaneous pre-emptive attacks on the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

June 6th,1944 - The Battle of Normandy begins. D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commences with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The allied soldiers quickly break through the Atlantic Wall and push inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history.

June 6th,1982 - 1982 Lebanon War begins: Forces under Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invade southern Lebanon in their "Operation Peace for the Galilee," eventually reaching as far north as the capital, Beirut.

June 7th,1981 - "Operation Opera":The Israeli Air Force attacked and disabled Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.

June 8th,1967 - The Israeli Air Force attacked the U.S. Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 and wounding at least 173.

Now, keep something in mind: none of these things actually happened. I'm not saying this because of the faults that many people lay at Wikipedia's feet-- the wikis held up their part of the telling, at least here. But if you watch the nightly news on TV, whether on CBS or NBC, CNN, etc, you won't hear about these things. I am lying of course; they did talk about the Battle of Normandy. CIA chief defense secretary Robert Gates was in Normandy, attending the ceremony, perhaps because the French discretely requested that it not be Cheney, after his dress code faux pas in Poland. Who knows, maybe they even scheduled the G8 shindig when they did so that George Bush,jr not be there either. The Europeans are subtle like that.

Katie Couric talked about how the father of one of the CBS nightly news staffers fought at Normandy, and they had a nice story about how dad went back to the little French town where he helped take care of a sick cow in ‘44. I’m actually not making fun, at least not in this instance-- it was a nice story.

The problem is not the story itself, nor occasional sentimentality-- but the lack of context. Television insists that we regard life as lacking context. Stuff happens, then, inevitably, other stuff happens-- not because of prior incidents, but because each day is a new day, requiring new content. And when anything bad happens it’s genuinely shocking, unpredictable, and unimaginable-- just like the last shocking, unpredictable and unimaginably bad thing.

Although I try my best to avoid keeping up with “dancing with the stars” or the latest misadventures of Paris Hilton, etc, I don’t think of myself as a snob who looks down on his fellow Americans for being dumber than a can of paint, as Xymphora very memorably suggested we were.
Yes, it’s difficult sometimes. Millions of us still believe Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Millions more voted to re-elect George Bush,jr in 2004, and supposedly over 50 percent of the US population believes the planet is no more than 6,000 years old .

Should the nightly newscasts be teaching history? Yes, insofar as current events inevitably occur in an historical context, the news readers’ reluctance to note this notwithstanding. People make fun of the news readers, although I suppose they’re a pretty easy target, shooting fish with really good hair in a barrel. We’re often told they’re excessively ambitious, possibly stupid, probably amoral.


Imagine a young reporter at a smaller-market tv station, say, in Terre Haute or Columbus or Buffalo. She isn’t exactly crazy about her job, but she’s young and maybe even comparatively naive idealistic, and even regards TV news as real journalism. So she appreciates her opportunity to gain experience and hone her skills. They ask her to do a bunch of “man in the street” interviews about some topic or other. Maybe it’s for opinions regarding a bill being discussed in congress or the state legislature. She needs to go back to the station with 3 or 4 good ones, whatever that means. She likes talking to people, and talks to well over 3 or 4, and submits 4 clips that struck her as thoughtful yet unpretentious, and edits that. The very next thing she knows, her producer is livid, chews her out, explaining that they’re all wrong, that wasn’t what she was looking for at all. The smart people make viewers self-conscious about their failings.

The producer wants, well, lunkheads. People you can laugh at for their sheer ignorance. Our young reporter reflects on all the people she talked to, and she doesn’t think ordinary people are uniformly stupid, but she also recognizes that her opinion isn’t exactly valued in this equation, and would like to keep her job(at least for now.). So she re-edits, and considers herself lucky that she did talk to some lunkheads, and doesn’t have to go out and shoot again, and manages to meet her deadline-- barely.

I’ve never worked as a tv reporter, and I don’t know if it actually works that way, but I can well imagine it might. Like our hypothetical young reporter, I don’t believe that Americans are uniformly unreflective and stupid, although distressingly many are. What’s even more distressing, however, is how big-time journalism seems like a hermetic, tightly-coiled mechanism, purpose-built to reinforce our sense of ourselves as unreflective and stupid. And apart from people getting most of their news from teevee, it seems like the other stations and programming are part of the mechanism.

A couple of examples-- one I wrote about before:
“they were the greatest generation, blah blah blah...”(feb 2003)

What is it with the History Channel? I just got back from the gym where the teevee was tuned to a documentary of sorts about the Normandy invasion entitled "Then and Now". They had the customary business of cutting between modern-day experts and stock footage of the events in question, only one of the experts sure looked like Dwight Eisenhower. ...Later they talked to Rommel's son, then eventually to Montgomery's son, and eventually cut back to the Eisenhower look-alike who turned out to be-- yes, Eisenhower's son.
(Apparently he wrote a book about the war too.)
How many documentaries about D-day already existed before this one, I don't know, but there must be many. Why this particular reshuffling of stock footage, at this time? What is this, Pavlovian conditoning? Are we supposed to respond to this procession of WWII sons as a suggestion about how "righteous" George W. Bush is, readying to liberate Iraq, the wheeling and dealing with Turkey and the counsel of the house of Saud notwithstanding? How about a program about, say, the My Lai massacre in the coming weeks? Do you think we'll see it on the History Channel? I'm not even asking about a show on the US role in Mazar-e-Sharif...

I will say one thing though. It would be nice if we had a president who was as articulate in English as Manfred Rommel is.

The second item is from the Speed Channel(which I believe is owned by Murdoch)from some time in 2005; they had a program about cars of the US presidents, including of course the fateful Lincoln Limo convertible JFK rode in. They discussed various personal and white house autos, with the customary cutting to car experts. At one point they discussed a Ford V8 convertible that FDR drove, which may have been the first car with hand controls for a paraplegic driver, and which is preserved today. Then the expert they cut to offered, just in passing, that “FDR gave people hope, even if he didn’t actually do anything about the depression.”

SON OF A BITCH. What, this car guy is suddenly an expert on the New Deal? If he was, they failed to discuss his credentials. I swear, the more you watch tv, the more you want to throw something at it.


FDR's 1938 Ford

I want to offer a solution, but I don’t have one. I don’t think it’s just an abstract problem, something for bloggers and op-ed writers to bemoan. Conditioning people to reject a sense of historical causality could help enable the nitwit-in-chief to launch a war against Iran, for one thing, and will very likely have more pernicious effects in years to come.

The other day I discussed some of these ideas with Arvin Hill, who is singularly pessimistic about it all. I tell myself that ordinary people had it far worse circa 1890, when Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to smash the railroad unions(which were still illegal), and he was the only democrat elected president from 1860 when Lincoln was elected, until Wilson came along in 1912, a period of even greater 1-party dominance.

Of course today’s 1-party state is slipperier, as it require large numbers of democrats to be shadow republicans, and the dynamic of what the parties(ostensibly) stand for today is very different from what it was in the 19th century. 21st century oligarchs have done their damnedest to learn the lessons of economics and the various social sciences, to make sure that they’ll never be caught unawares by a great depression or other phenomenon that might cast the obstacles they set for ordinary people in sharp relief.

Still. If there are any bright spots, maybe it’s found in discontent. Large numbers of people know something is wrong, even if they have a hard time articulating it. They can’t blame Paris Hilton forever-- eventually they’ll notice she never raided anybody’s pension fund or took away their health insurance. Will it happen in time? I don’t know. Will Americans look at the immigrant rallies, quit bitching about the Mexicans, and realize the illegals are doing a better job of being Americans-- demonstrating, causing a ruckus, demanding to be heard-- than most Americans?


also, see Gary Farber: “God Help Us”

Sarabeth, at 1115.org, "mirror, mirror"

Skimble:"desperate to kiss and be touched"
and the follow-up, "deleting the love"(and no, it's not worth noting just because he references me!)

Jonathan Schwarz(2005):“Now More Than Ever, It's Critical That We Learn Nothing From History”
in which he notes that Mike Gerber refers to it as the Learn Nothing From History Channel.

and, as one of Schwarz’s commenters reminds us,
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."--Philip K. Dick

Jeffrey St Clair, Counterpunch:"Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited"

Why I don't like "BSG"

left: c. 1956 Shelter, courtesy 3wheelers.com, right: James Callis, freaking out in an episode of Battlestar Galactica, courtesy the SciFi channel. And don't tell me to say it's James Callis's character who's freaking out. I know it's his character, for Pete's sake. But isn't is wearisome to always say, "James Callis's character, who is the only one who can see Tricia Helfer's character, blah blah blah..." Well, isn't it? Do you know how monotonous it is when people do that? I could go on, but this is only a caption... Yes, I'm fond of elipses. If you don't like elipses, frag off, as the characters on BSG might say...


1.There's something about the show, something a little hard to define-- whether it's the dialogue, or the acting, or the pacing-- that tells me the people doing it are constantly preoccupied with the darkness and supposed significance of the whole endeavor, like it's Alain Resnais in space or something. If anything, their hi-falutin' portentousness actually makes me miss Lorne Greene.

2. That guy with the British accent, lovesick over the tall outer-space chick only he can see. The actor may well a likeable person, and capable of real acting and range and all that, but I only know him on this show, and here all he ever does is mope about with that look of perpetual consternation. It's really tiresome.

2b. On the other hand, if they had an episode in which he was accidentally sucked out an airlock or something and we saw him drift out into space and explode, maybe I'd start watching. And they could even bring him back as his (non-moping) Evil Twin, so that the actor could keep up his condo payments. That would be ok with me too.