Musing's musings

Yes, Virginia, it's safe to eat ice cream in public

In the issue dated tomorrow (which appeared awhile ago, obviously, or I wouldn't be talking about it now), The New Republic cast quite a bit of asparagus at the 577-page report of the President's Council on Bioethics entitled Human Dignity and Bioethics. There is certainly cause to cast asparagus. As TNR noted, a quick look at the list of contributors produces a list of people notable primarily for the fact that none of them, with one or two exceptions, actually works in bioethics or any related scientific field, while a preponderance of them are, wait for it, faculty members at Christian institutions of higher education (and mostly we're not talking about Notre Dame or Georgetown).

However, the big brouhaha that's come about on this report revolves around a quote that Steven Pinker attributes on page 4 to Leon Kass (University of Chicago, the American Enterprise Institute, and formerly a contributor to TNR), but which Pinker fails to source:

[Kass] is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

That second paragraph has had a huge airing around Left Blogistan in the last couple of days. And it is deservedly mocked, if for no other reason than that if we take it to its logical conclusion, the Hedgemony would have to shut down the entire restaurant sector, ban concessions at sporting events and other public venues, and mandate something along the lines of what Robert A. Heinlein described in his 1948 juvenile science fiction novel Space Cadet:

Tex wandered on into the second room. "Hey, Oz--come look at this."

Matt and Oscar joined him. There were rows of little closets down each side, ten in all, each with its own curtain. "Oh, yes, our eating booths."

"That reminds me," said Matt. "I thought you had wrecked everything, Oz, when you started talking about eating. But you pulled out of it beautifully."

"I didn't pull out of it; I did it on purpose."

"Why?"

"It was a squeeze play. I had to shock them with the idea that they were indecent, or looked that way to us. It established us as 'people,' from their point of view. After that it was easy." Oscar went on. "Now that we are accepted as people, we've got to be awfully careful not to undo it. I don't like to eat in one of these dark little cubbyholes any better than you do, but we don't dare take a chance of being seen eating--you don't dare even fail to draw the curtain, as one of them might come popping in. Remember, eating is the only sort of privacy they observe."

--Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1948, 1975, 1981), p. 188

A Boxing Day ghost?

After getting up at the ungodly hour (to me, anyway) of 4:30 this morning so I could take Dave back to the airport for his flight home, I stopped off at my mother's house to bring back a couple of things I'd borrowed and to get the place ready for the folks' return home tomorrow afternoon. While I was over there, I borrowed her printer to print out some special pages. But the whole time the printer was running, the print head, as it traversed the page dispensing the requisite ink colors, kept making a noise that sounded remarkably like someone saying "Holy Cow!" Surely the ghost of Harry Caray, wherever he may be, is smiling.

And so am I. I had a lovely four days with my best friend in the world. We didn't quite get to do everything we'd planned, but what we did get around to was just wonderful. The weather, while cold, was mostly cooperative. (Well, apart from the London-of-Sherlock-Holmes-style fog that socked in northern Illinois last Friday afternoon and delayed his flight by an hour and more. But on the other hand, that delay did let me get all of my last-minute cleaning done without having to kill myself to make it out the door in time to meet his original flight arrival time.)

Now I've got the rest of the week and the weekend to while away the hours doing exactly as I please. I'll probably put in some time on an overdue paper that I'd like to have out of the way before the start of the new semester, but otherwise, I anticipate watching a lot of television, reading some of my Christmas haul of books, and perhaps hitting the after-Christmas sales to see what little things I can pick up for our family Christmas celebration in a couple of weeks. (We had to put it off, what with the folks being in Florida and my sister's having to work.)

Regrettably, their claim will go on

Vladimir Putin's gang has egg on its face. Again. In a move reminiscent of the antics of Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, one of Putin's tame propaganda media outlets has been caught "sexing up" footage of Russia's recent alleged flag plant on the seabed beneath the polar ice cap with scenes lifted from the opening of James Cameron's 1997 movie Titanic:

Unearthly blue lights played across the ocean floor two and a half miles below the north pole as the heroic Russian explorers descended in mini submarines to plant a metre-high flag.

At least that's what the Russian state television company Rossiya wanted us to believe. The truth was rather different.

In an apparent attempt to "sex up" a news programme, the TV station has been caught passing off footage from the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster Titanic as a real life report on the Kremlin's recent attempt to stake its claim to the riches of the Arctic Ocean.

[edit]

It took an alert teenager in Finland with a Titanic DVD to spot the sham. Waltteri Seretin, 13, from Kemi, 450 miles north of Helsinki, recognised the images in the national daily Ilta-Sanomat.

"I was looking at the photo of the Russian sub expedition and I noticed immediately that there was something familiar about the picture," he told the paper. "I checked it with my DVD and there it was right there in the beginning of the movie: exactly the same image of the submer-sibles approaching the ship."

[edit]

Rossiya refused to comment on the "polar" footage, but the boy who identified it gave his damning indictment.

"I've heard they don't always tell the truth in Russia, but I didn't think they could have screwed it up that badly," said the teenager, who has watched Titanic at home on numerous occasions.

I really don't have anything to add to that last comment, except to say that the more I hear about the goings-on in present-day Russia, the more I find myself wondering if I'm not just having flashbacks from all the reading on the Stalin era I've had to do the last couple of semesters. Who knew a degree in modern European history concentrating on the first half of the 20th century was going to come in so handy as a guide to modern politics?

Not the best reading over dinner

I'm ready to come home. Today was not my best day in Europe. Awakened at 5:30 by the fire alarm in the hotel. (Turned out to be a false alarm, but couldn't get back to sleep for love or money.) Consequently, I was late catching my train this morning. Probably due to the confusion caused by lack of (a) sleep and (b) food for some 18 hours, I mis-read my map and wound up at the wrong station, headed in the wrong direction. After walking through what seemed like a mile of connecting tunnels, and climbing or descending approximately 47 staircases, I managed to get to the proper correspondance, only to find the line absolutely clogged with morning commuters.

All of which meant that, instead of having time to sit down and read the morning paper over a fairly leisurely breakfast before registering at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I got there, hot and sweaty, just in time to register ahead of the last-minute rush before the first entry at 9 a.m. They had the files I'd requested on Friday ready for me, but then wouldn't let me take pictures of them--if I wanted copies, I had to pay to have them photocopied or microfilmed. So I transcribed. All day. No breakfast, no lunch--and no dinner the night before. Finally on the way home, I seemed to wind up with every slowpoke, every elderly or handicapped person, God love them because I surely wasn't!, and every lost or confused tourist in Greater Paris directly in front of me or between me and where I wanted to go.

Got back to the hotel, and while the internet was working, it wasn't working well. The shuttle company that I'd found this morning to take me to the airport on Thursday so I don't have to manhandle a suitcase, a briefcase, and a shopping bag full of goodies through the Metro and/or the RER on the hour's journey to Charles de Gaulle, informed me that because my hotel was in the suburbs and not in Paris proper (a condition not mentioned on their website), it would cost me 90 euro instead of the 27 they'd advertised. I said "No, thanks." Went to the local pizza chain for dinner and asked the waitress for a quiet corner where I could read the paper and sip my wine in peace, only to have a talkative family group and an anxious baby seated within spitting distance of me--and I was about ready to spit, by that point.

Fortunately, dinner (and more importantly, a quarter-liter of a nice rosé from Provence) arrived and I became less interested in infanticide and more interested in the pleasures of the table. That's when I turned to page 9 of today's issue of Le Monde, and started breathing threats and murder again. Follow me below the fold for a discussion of why that happened.

It appears the silly season has started

Or, kiss any substantive media coverage of any substantive issue goodbye for the next four to six weeks--whereupon the media will start an almost endless series of horserace-and-handicap stories as we start the countdown to the midterm elections in November.

How do I know the silly season has started? The Royal Thai Police arrested a man wanted in connection with the murder of JonBenet Ramsay. New York City officials released more 911 and other tapes from 11 September 2001, a professional basketball player was arrested by the Secret Service when an unlicensed pistol was found in his back seat shortly after shots were fired in the vicinity of the White House, and, in a story that I believe was referred to by the anchor as "terror-related," a United Airlines flight from London to Washington was diverted to Boston under escort by armed fighter jets after a passenger had what appears to have been a panic attack. Those were the top stories I heard on NBC's evening newscast tonight, as I was sipping a glass of Merlot with my mom.

I'm sure we're going to hear non-stop JonBenet coverage for the next little while, and for the umpteenth time. I'm sorry she's dead, but really, how is this news, except perhaps in Boulder, and then only when the alleged suspect is actually tried and convicted? And, to echo a commenter at Big Orange, how many non-white, non-rich, non-American girls have suffered the same fate (or worse) in the 10 years since she was killed, who never got a column-inch in the newspapers, or five seconds of airtime on the nightly news?

Oh, bloody hell. Here we go again

Via Shakespeare's Sister, I learn that apparently another batch of education professors needs tenure and/or promotion. That's the only plausible excuse I can think of for why anyone would ever suggest retooling the way English is spelt:

WASHINGTON - When “say,” “they” and “weigh” rhyme, but “bomb,” “comb” and “tomb” don’t, wuudn’t it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?

Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.

I'm with the opponents. The last time something like this was attempted, my sister was just starting school. Some loon thought it would be a good idea to teach her and her classmates to spell English phonetically, using the Initial Teaching Alphabet for the first two or three years of school. After that, they were somehow magically supposed (apparently) to transition to the proper (and admittedly less-than-strictly logical) English spelling rules. End result? My sister and most of her classmates are lousy spellers to this day.

I know people who'd pay extra for that

The Associated Press has a story about the arrest of a California carpenter for working in the nude:

OAKLAND, Calif. - A carpenter who keeps his clothes clean by working in the nude was arrested after a client returned home early and found him building bookcases in the buff.

Percy Honniball, 50, was charged with misdemeanor indecent exposure this week for the October incident.

He told officers he stripped before crawling under the client's house to do electrical work because he didn't want to soil his clothes, police said.

Better my clothes get dirty than I get rocks up my bum, or chafe the pink bits, I think. Still, firing the carpenter and withholding $200 of the agreed price for the work he'd already done so the homeowner could change his locks, is a bit much. I don't particularly care what the carpenter wears while he's working, so long as he does good work. And it's not like he was running around exposing himself to little children in the park, either.

This could prove to be a brutal winter...

And now for something completely different... Stray dog killed by gang of hungry squirrels:

A GANG of bloodthirsty squirrels have attacked and killed a large stray dog in a park in eastern Russia, it was reported yesterday.

Starvation caused by a severe pine cone shortage was blamed for pushing the black squirrels to extreme measures.

The dog had been barking at squirrels in the trees when they suddenly ran down to the ground and attacked.

OK, we've been cold for a while (we were last above freezing November 27), and we're seeing more snow this early in the season than we've seen in several years (decades?). But our squirrels at least are sticking to nuts and such: they aren't turning on each other or other creatures.

Stop stealing our f**king Fucking signs!

There's a village in Oberösterreich that wants its city-limits signs back. Seems they're very popular with dirty-minded British tourists (Americans, of course, not being known for international travel to off-the-beaten-track destinations), for obvious reasons. I particularly like the (almost certainly not intentional) irony in the juxtaposition of these two signs, courtesy of snopes.com:

I wonder how you'd catalog that?

I spent three semesters getting up very early in the morning to confront the nearly 700 pages of AACR2R when I was in library school. (That's Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second edition, 1988 revision, to you non-librarian types out there.) It's the set of rules used for decribing and cataloging everything that goes onto a library's shelves.

There is a section in the book (Chapter 10, if you're following along in your hymnals) entitled "Three-dimensional artefacts and realia," which gives instructions on how to cope with "objects of all kinds ...including models, dioramas, games ...braille cassettes, sculptures and other three-dimensional art works, exhibits, machines, and clothing," among other things. But somehow I doubt the good folks of the American Library Association, the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, the British Library, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, the Library Association, and the Library of Congress who put together the book ever imagined a library would need to provide a catalog entry along these lines.

The Malmoe Library in southern Sweden allows patrons to "borrow" a live person for up to 45 minutes for a conversation in the library's coffee shop. The library collection "includes" a Muslim imam, a gay person, a journalist, and a Gypsy, and five others. The nine volunteers will be paid a small fee for their participation, and if interest proves sufficient, the project may be repeated next year.

If they tried that in this country, if my own experience in libraries is any indication, the gay person would be either mutilated or stolen unless kept in a secure location. These days, the same might be true of the imam and the Muslim woman. But wouldn't it be kinda neat to be able to "borrow" someone to ask all those questions you've had floating around in your head forever but didn't know where to turn for answers to them?