So recently…
… I found myself sitting at the table with the cool kids, playing all the little cool-kid in-crowd games. Having realized what I was doing, I stopped.
What’s the point of this? No point, really, other than to thine own self be true. (I’m pretty sure I read that on the back of a cereal box once.)
Everyone gets everything he wants.
I wanted a football game, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice game, and when it was over, I never wanted another.
Redundancy Alert
It occurred to me a while back that the term WASP – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – contains a redundancy. For how many non-white Anglo-Saxons exist? So the acronym should be ASP, for Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
What if?
There’s another controversy afoot. (As if there isn’t always, right?) This one concerns some comments made by some Lit professor in Toronto. You can read the story at the link, and you can read some other stuff over at Comment Home, which is where I read about it. Mostly, I don’t care. The professor in question (one David Gilmore, but not THAT David Gilmore) is basically teaching the stuff he likes, which is mostly stuff written by straight men. In this I don’t see any difference between him and the various [Blank] Studies departments that have sprung up all over academia in recent decades.
But one comment he made had me asking a “What if?” First, here’s a comment of Gilmore’s to give a little context:
I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women.
He went on:
What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.
I read this and thought,
What if Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov could be asked for their opinions about this? Assume that they understood the English language and modern North American vernaculars. Would they appreciate being described as not merely guys, or guy-guys, but as real guy-guys. Personally, I’m thinking Chekhov probably reaches for that rifle hanging on the wall….
Today’s Word of the Day
Fecaloid – read in Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. 5: The Struggle for Guadalcanal. From page 14 of the Castle Books edition:
That is why this large and fecaloid island [Guadalcanal] became the immediate and urgent Allied objective.
Nice way of saying “shitty” in the dignified manner befitting a Professor who taught at both Harvard and Oxford. Also, much less wordy than MacArthur’s description of New Guinea.
Is there anybody out there?
???
UPDATE: An interesting thing happened to one of the bigger blogging sites recently. In recent months there had been growing tension between Professor Ann Althouse and her commenting community. I’m not going to go into details, but eventually Althouse decided to blow up her commenting community, and shut down comments altogether.
This was upsetting for many of the commenters. A lot of people have invested a lot of their time and emotions there over the years. A few of us took to heart the suggestion that we start our own blogs as replacements. One of those spin-offs has now become the “go-to” site for a lot of Althouse commenters, and is doing a pretty brisk business at the moment. The site was originally called “Lem’s Learning Levity” but has changed its name (possibly temporarily) to “Comment Home“. It is an explicit effort to preserve a chunk of the old community, and Lem has now added several co-bloggers from the old Althouse commentariat.
I sympathize with this effort. Ultimately it is through Althouse that I came to have two friends, Amba and reader_Iam, and my own blogs and to co-blog here from time to time. So I’m very pleased to see this take off. So consider this an open invitation to those of you not already there, to join the Althouse Refugee Movement as we create a new online community. And it IS a community for commenters (though lurkers are always welcome, of course), so feel free to join the fray.
The lighter side of Florida crime!
First up:
Nude dude on beach fleeing deputies left ID, cellphone, shorts behind
Deputies arrived in a marked four-wheel-drive patrol vechicle to respond to a report of nudity on a public St. Augustine beach Thursday morning. Once there, they saw a naked man walking along the water’s edge ….
Okay, I’ve actually done that, once, long ago, when I was still young and at least arguably worth seeing nude. Several of us were talking about going skinny dipping, but no one else had the nerve. Actually it was great, as the water temps were very warm and the surf was light. Also? Didn’t get stung by jelly fish!
… in view of several beachgoers, according to an arrest affidavit from the St. John Sheriff’s Office.
Um, but I didn’t do that. It was the middle of the night (like 3 AM or thereabouts) and the only witnesses were the people I was with. Plus, I was auditioning, as it were, for two women I was interested in. I eventually ended up involved with one of them, and probably just mis-timed things with the other. Oh well, the follies of youth!
But back to our intrepid naked man. It turns out that alcohol was probably involved! I know, who would have guessed?
Also, witnesses told police that a SECOND naked man had been walking around the area. They eventually found the shorts, phones and IDs of the people involved. Nothing like getting plastered in the middle of the day and walking around naked at the beach. Other than getting arrested, the second most likely bad outcome would be some NASTY sunburn!
And that takes us to story number two:
Man running from deputies attacked by alligator
You would think the headline says it all, but not quite!
A Florida man fleeing a traffic stop was attacked by an alligator Thursday, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies attempted to pull Bryan Zuniga, 20, over for not driving in a single lane around 2:47 a.m. near the 7100 block of 78th Avenue North. Zuniga stopped the vehicle, jumped out of the passenger side and broke through a fence, deputies said.
He reached a water treatment plant between Westchester Boulevard and 71st Street North, which is where he said the alligator attacked him.
Deputies found Zuniga at a nearby hospital where he was being treated for multiple puncture wounds to his face, arm and armpit area.
He was arrested around 12 p.m., taken to the Pinellas County Jail and charged with breaking or injuring fences, fleeing and eluding a police officer, driving while licenses suspended and resisting an officer without violence, reports show.
He’s being charged with ‘breaking or injuring fences’! This guy isn’t exactly Keyser Söze.
The Down-side of Modern Criminal Forensics
Modern DNA detection is a great boon for people trying to solve certain crimes. But there is a real down-side risk involved as well: criminals working harder to destroy evidence.
Warning, what follows is disturbing, so I’ll put it ‘below the fold’ for the squeamish.
Ambiance 