OMG! [UPDATED]
This is one bandwagon I had to jump on.
UPDATE: Last night Donna commented: “I don’t get it. Seriously.”
I wrote back: “I’m not sure there’s anything to get!”
This morning the dialogue continued, one-sidedly, in my head before I could get to the computer:
“That is, somebody just thought it would be funny to have an OMG-WTF spectrum, and stuck any old nonsense in between.”
[To Donna] “That just means you’re at the WTF end of the spectrum. If you posted this thing, your post title would be ‘WTF?'”
“OMG! This thing is entirely about itself! It’s a closed universe!”
“I GET IT!”
. . . “I think.”
“Which puts me right back at WTF?”
“It’s not a spectrum, it’s a continuum! Like political R and L, or a Möbius strip!”
“O-M-G.”
What It Takes
The three most important characteristics for success in life, it seems to me, are (in no special order)
- temperament
- entitlement
- perseverance
So what does that mean?
Everybody understands “perseverance,” and it is probably the single most important, and most broadly applicable, prerequisite for success. This was driven home to me when I was writing about the Hubble Telescope. (I know! You’ve read it already! But do read this book.) More than forty years from inception to execution, and then — already a billion and a half over its projected budget of $500,000,000 — finally launched — with a fatal flaw! The pressure to cut losses and leave the thing up there as orbiting space junk was strong. But, no! It took three more years, but they went up and put glasses on it! And it changed the world. Trust me, there’s a similar story behind everything — from vaccine to blockbuster — that changes the world. As @weirdralph said recently on Twitter, “Every giant oak tree is simply the result of a nut that decided to stand his ground.”
Perseverance can probably be acquired, although some people persevere by temperament (i.e. they have an obsessive streak), and having a sense of entitlement helps. The three are intertwined.
Temperament, I think, is a matter of nature and entitlement one of nurture, although certainly nurture can modify temperament (give your child too much of a sense of entitlement, and given the requisite temperament, you may create a narcissistic diva; too little, and you can quench a fire); and different inborn temperaments elicit different nurturing, as any parent of more than one will tell you. But without the inborn drive and some early approval of your using it, all the gifts in the world will just sit there like unbaked dough. Without drive, whether for creation or recognition or whatever, you won’t try hard enough. Without entitlement, you’ll give up too easily.
I Hate This.
It’s like hunting ghosts. It’s like eating in dreams. It’s like climbing a mountain and still being at the bottom, and then doing it again just in case it’s different this time.
Online. Isn’t that a prison term? Or is that “walk the line”?
This is not a life. It’s barely even the mirage of a life. It sucks the life out of life in exchange for an empty promise.
# # #
I wrote a post late last night and deleted it because it was churlish, ungrateful, insatiable, and inhospitable. If someone saw it at that late hour, and I hope not, know that it was intended for you least of all.
Damned with a Painted Phrase!
Proving that to get older is to get more outrageous and outspoken,
My old friend Barry Casselman is smokin‘!
Although some of the new president’s critics have tried to apply a number of sensational epithets to his domestic policies, especially as radical, socialist or quasi-Marxist, the reality is much more conventional and undramatic. In short, Barack Obama, rhetoric notwithstanding, is a classic academic liberal of a type, and from a milieu, which blossomed on elite university campuses and in parvenu liberal salons in the aftermath of the Great Society in the 1970’s. […]
Thwarted in the Reagan/first Bush years, and even during the Clinton years, and certainly during the second Bush years, these aging liberals have accumulated a constipated energy to pass a whole bookshelf of legislation which, in effect, “reforms” nothing, but does further redistribute the resources of taxpayers. Unfortunately, this redistribution is not from the rich to the poor to the benefit of the latter, but a transfer from all taxpayers to the most inefficient bureaucratic tangle of all times, an outcome so ultimately destructive that it is apparent, before the fact, to anyone who has basic mathematics skills. […]
The Democratic leaders understandably speak about their hurry to enact their liberal domestic legislation. [… The failures of the Bush Administration are discussed] The proposals, now being advanced by the administration and the Democratic leaders in Congress, and making their way toward enactment, are legislative zombies, i.e., they are walking but not breathing. Perhaps by intimidation, some of them will be passed into law, but only at the cost of a great political reaction in 2010 and 2012.
Who says centrists can’t be passionate and scathing? To me, Casselman’s indictment is far more devastating (because of its ring of truth) than fantasies of all the birfers and socialism scaremongers put together. Read the whole thing!
That’s Amore!
Received in a humor e-mail this morning. Some are better than others. Go ahead, top them!
For many years now, there has been circulating a continuously expanding poem. Its leaping-off place is the first verse of “That’s Amore,” the song by Harry Warren and Jack Brooks made famous by crooner Dean Martin:
When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie,
That’s amore.Around the turn of the century we are living in, Frank Rubin, of Wappinger Falls, New York, came up with the idea of writing some additional verses and inviting others to contribute theirs to his Web site. Soon, the science-fiction writer Spider Robinson picked up the idea on his site. Sure enough, something about the rhythm of the lines and the sounds of that last line inspired punsters to soar hilariously from the launch pad of the original. Sing along with the best of the take-offs:
Ray Charles gained so much fame
That his fans screamed his name:
“Sing some more, Ray!”When the yup bought his Deere,
All the neighbors did hear,
“That’s a mower, eh!”A New Zealander man
With a permanent tan:
That’s a MaoriIf your vitamins be
Mainly C, D, and E,
Take some more AWhen Canadians show
You their mothers, they go,
“That’s my mawr, eh.”He stole bases for thrills,
And his last name is Wills.
That’s a Maury.When an eel bites your hand
And that’s not what you planned
That’s a moray.When our habits are strange
And our customs deranged
That’s our mores.When your horse munches straw
And the bales total four
That’s some more hay.When Othello’s poor wife
She gets stabbed with a knife
That’s a Moor, eh?When a snack you desire
Toasted over a fire,
That’s a smore, eh?When your sheep go to graze
In a damp marshy place,
That’s a moor, eh?When you’re soaking up sun
At the beach, having fun
That’s some more rays.When “The Fonz” gives a shout
‘Cause he likes whats turned out,
That’s some more “Aaaayyyy”sWhen your boat comes home fine
And you tied up her line
That’s a moor, eh?When humidity’s high
Can’t see far with your eyes
That’s some more haze.When your paycheck augments
With more dollars and cents
That’s some more raise!When you want to cut grass
and it must be done fast,
That’s a mower, eh?When you ace your last tests
Like you did all the rest
That’s some more “A”s!When you’ve had quite enough
Of this bad rhyming stuff
That’s “No more!”, eh?When on Mt. Cook you see
An aborigine,
That’s a Maori.A comedian-ham
With the name Amsterdam
That’s a Morey.When the school says “Don’t worry,
Learn to dance in a hurry.”,
Thats A (rthur) Murray.
More From the Desktop . . .
For years I’ve wanted a T-shirt of this:
From this great Calvin & Hobbes strip.
I wonder if Watterson could ever be persuaded to license it.
Guess not:
Bill refused to merchandise his creation on the grounds that pasting Calvin and Hobbes images on commercially-sold coffee mugs, stickers and t-shirts would devalue the characters and their personalities.
More on this rare decision, by which Watterson “has forgone millions of dollars a year in additional income.”
This was “the only licensed and approved Calvin shirt to exist“:
There’s a lot of bootleg Calvin & Hobbes stuff, showcased here with a funny combination of prurience and disapproval.
Oh well.
Ouch. [UPDATED]
Obama undoubtedly has major accomplishments ahead of him, but in a real way the Obama presidency is over. His messianic hopey-changiness has been exposed for what it was, and what it could only be: a rich cocktail of pie-eyed idealism, campaign sloganeering, and profound arrogance.
As president, he’s tried to apply the post-partisan gloss of his campaign rhetoric to the hyper-partisan dross of his agenda. And he’s fooling fewer people every day.
Indeed, the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama’s relentless campaigning for a job he already has. That makes sense, because that’s really all Obama knows how to do. He’s had no significant experience crafting major legislation. He has next to no experience governing at all.
But he’s great at giving speeches, holding town halls, and chitchatting with reporters. So that’s largely what he does as president. The problem is that campaigning is different from governing. The former requires convincing promises about what you will do; the latter requires convincing arguments for what you are doing. He’s good at the former, not so good at the latter. Or as columnist Michael Barone puts it, he’s good at aura, bad at argument.
Of course, there’s more than a little partisan exulting there at seeing the enemy normally wounded. The infatuation is ending, that’s all; it’s just that Obama’s honeymoon verged on a religion. It was like one of those fool-for-love songs where the beloved is almost literally described as “divine.”
It’s not that Obama’s presidency is over; it’s that it hasn’t begun yet! Because he flew so high, Obama is going through a particularly rough reentry into reality (I’m watching Endeavour land flawlessly as I write). He’s going to have to find a style of governing that’s not a style of campaigning, and he hasn’t found it yet. He never had to before.
Oh, and:
Despite the strenuous objections to my comparison from both sides, I can imagine something similar — though different in the details — happening to a President Palin. As Darcy points out, Palin has governed. She is more practical. But I can see her saying or doing something impulsive, reckless, goofy, and arbitrary, and her defenders adamantly refusing to view it as such. We’re getting a taste of what happens when symbolism is paramount and qualification is very, very secondary. This is a problem that transcends identification and ideology.
UPDATE: Read “Why Sarah Palin Fans Feel Betrayed,” the John Hawkins piece Darcy linked in the comments. It confirms my hunch that “she’s like me” is a big part of Palin’s appeal. However, as Ron wrote to me in an e-mail, that’s no inconsiderable strength at the head of a much-needed populist rebellion:
A: The fact that her enemies are repellent doesn’t automatically make her qualified.
R: No, but it certainly makes her refreshing which I suppose may be a qualification. I also agree with worrying about her being “qualified”, but I worry more about “qualification” being diluted enough to mean “elitist rubberstamping.” We have not been critical enough about having a President not only not from any Ivy, but from beyond Harvard and Yale. We haven’t yet constructed a language of approval of non-elitists (we used to have one!) and thus have reduced “qualification” to a code word. Especially after electing the least-qualified candidate I’ve seen in my lifetime!The gravitas of “qualification” has been destroyed by the Bernie Madoffs (former head of NASDAQ!) and the John Edwards of the world.
Identification trumps qualification when elites fail to behave like elites; it [winds up] being perceived as just a con, a hustle that these fraudsters rise as high as they do.
That’s why I think we need a dose of populist energy; not necessarily to blow up Harvard, but to instill more fear in these institutions that they can’t just featherbed their nest and that they actually have to perform for the greater good of all and not just “own.” (class? group? gender? race?)
Cleaning Up My Desktop . . .
. . . will probably take months, because for months I’ve been recklessly downloading .pdfs, .jpegs and .tiffs onto it and leaving them there. It must be putting a terrible strain on my computer. What a jerk! Turns out on this issue of OSX you can riffle through documents very quickly, blow them up with a mouse click, check them out, and trash those you don’t want with another click.
But I’m finding some cool stuff I didn’t remember was there, because there’s so much junk on the desktop the computer no longer displays it. You can click any spot on the spiral galaxy that is my wallpaper and you never know what will pop up.
Here’s the lovely, eye- and mind-grabbing cover image my friend Marc Barasch designed for the paperback of his own book, The Compassionate Life. Sort of over his publisher’s dead body.
Here’s wry update of the evolution-accelerating slab in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And here’s a great pic of J from the wedding we went to about two weeks ago:
Will probably post more fuzz from my pockets.
I’ve Gone Mad(Men)!
Thanks to Ron. Doubt I could’ve done it better meself. He did Althouse, too! Do you!
Ambiance 