Fey Accompli

This is an excellent little article by David Sessions at Culture11 about Bambi and almost seventy years of environmental themes in children’s films. I particularly enjoyed the part about Ferngully, which we totally mocked as kids for being so blatantly political.

That sort of liberal-minded contextual environmentalism [in Bambi] got a makeover in the 1990s, and the invasion-of-nature trope began to get more obnoxious. FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) reached unsurpassed heights in green preachiness, telling the story of a community of rainforest fairies about to be annihilated by loggers and a terrifying, symbolic demon that feeds on oil and smoke. The film opens with a cave-drawing-style prologue about how humans once loved the forest, but have since hopelessly lost their way…

FernGully was a lone, green suicide bomber among 90’s animated films (it flopped thunderously), but the endearing creatures spouting environmental catch phrases seemed to start getting a little bolder [with Pocahontas].

Suicide bomber indeed. Like heavy-handed political films for big people, it didn’t hold up as art or entertainment.

I also find the notion of the “Environmental Media Association” really creepy.

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I realize after being a night showerer for maybe 10 years that I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone else that showers at night. Almost everyone associates showers with morning.

Since I end up explaining it so often, I thought I’d post about it. Here’s my philosophy; it’s really quite simple:

I accumulate dirt, sweat, and germs all day. I get the grime of the city on me; I have to use public bathrooms; I bump up against people in the metro; I may walk barefoot; i get sweaty from walking around, etc. Rather than marinate in all that as I slumber, I take a nice, hot, relaxing shower right before I go to bed. Then I’m clean from all the things that actually make me dirty, and I get into clean sheets - ones not soiled by the accumulated grossness clinging to me from the waking hours.

So I’m nice and fresh for bed. Then I sleep for 8 (or 10) hours and wake up. Guess what - still clean! I just rinse the sleep off my face, put on makeup, blow out my hair, and presto - I’m ready for the day in 20 minutes. Why do I want to go to bed dirty, then wake up dirty only to get clean right before I head out and get all grimed up again?

Most people’s argument is that showering wakes them up so they can start the day; many go so far as to say they can’t wake up without it. The only reason this is true is because you associate showering with mornings and waking up. It’s a Pavlovian response. I associate showering with relaxing before bed because it’s become my habit.

Showers, unless perhaps they are piercingly cold, do not have objective awakening properties. The act of preparing my morning tea tells me its time to wake up. Then drinking it aids in shaking the fog. Any old routine can replace the morning shower.

If anyone else is a night showerer, give me a shout-out. I seriously don’t know anyone. Maybe I should start a Facebook group.

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The Flobots are a strong exception to my rule that art with an explicit political agenda sucks, even if I may agree with the message.

The “Handlebars” song is killer, and check out the video.

Not only it is super-solid music and an excellent total album, I actually love the anti-authority message and skepticism of power. If only our generation can maintain that and not grow up into thinking we can use political power for good like most generations do that start out resentful of the people in power.

“Handlebars” is brilliantly woven to show the progression from innocently bragging about riding a bike with no handlebars to pursuing global power. To me, it is a perfect encapsulation of the male mind which needs to take risks, build, brag, and compete. But they treat it with nuance, allowing that the same impulse leads to great advances:

I can design an engine sixty four
Miles to a gallon of gasoline
I can make new antibiotics
I can make computers survive aquatic conditions
I know how to run a business

but unchecked it leads to violence and destruction:

I can guide a missile by satellite
By satellite
By satellite
and I can hit a target through a telescope
Through a telescope
Through a telescope
and I can end the planet in a holocaust

This Boulder-based group is totally worth checking out.

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I’m so glad a dried plant that, when smoked, makes people giggly, snacky, and lethargic has been deemed so dangerous by the State that it’s necessary to raid people’s homes and shoot their dogs. This latest occurrence is only one among thousands of such cases.

How many times does this have to happen before people start to question the methods and efficacy of the so-called “drug war?”

Cato@Liberty gives an update on the Maryland case.

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The Brits beautifully satirize education bureaucracy:

thx Bobby Bigman sending the Club for Growth link

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Camille Paglia fields a question about her pet name for McCain - “weird old coot” from - you guessed it - an old coot:

By the way, I’m going to form a new social/lobbying group to promote the coot agenda — it’ll be called “Curmudgeons Are Us.”

That already exists - it’s called the AARP and its one of the most powerful lobbies in the country; working hard every day to bankrupt America.

I also share her feelings about Tim Russert (same piece):

Most people in this country — especially those who attend church on Sunday morning — didn’t know or care who Russert was. I myself, despite my interest in politics, virtually never watched his show. I found him smug, manipulative and uncomfortably repressed, and I disliked his “gotcha” brand of inquisition.

I find almost all TV news personalities smug and insufferable.

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Dear AirTran,

I appreciate the marketing of your “ByePass” kiosks but there appears to be some mistake. I stepped into a fairly long line this morning in Dallas and saw most of the kiosks unused and inconveniently placed right in the line so I had to squirm and excuse myself passed the people in line to get to one.

Before doing so, I asked the woman in front of me if she was waiting to use the kiosk. She, having apparently already lapsed into travel coma (a medical condition caused by excessive line waiting and consistently terrible customer service associated with airline travel), said she didn’t know. So I did slid passed her, did my business on the kiosk, securing my “ByePass” boarding pass, then was instructed by the nice machine to proceed to the “ByePass” line for checking my bag.

But looking around, I saw nothing labeled “ByePass” line, just this one line of slack-jawed luggage-draggers (other travelers) and an empty Business Class line. Clearly I wasn’t meant to stay in the long line. My ByePass ticket said so! I hopped over to the business class line and waited for the sluggish agent to call on me.

At the counter, I told her I wasn’t business class but just needed to check my bag, the sticker of which had long since been printed and was lying in a stack of lonely bag stickers. She informed me that I had skipped the entire line and that that’s what everyone else was in line for.

“Really?” I asked. “The kiosks are mostly empty. Aren’t those people waiting for full service?”

“No, that’s the ByePass line. They’re waiting for the same thing you are – to check their bags.”

”That can’t be possible,” I reasoned. “There’s only one service line. Those people aren’t “Byepass”-ing anything. They’re standing in line.”

”I’m just telling you how it is,” she said, holding her hand out for my boarding pass.

She kindly checked me in anyway, taking the 30 seconds that piece of business required, and I went on my way after having apparently committing a moral crime against my fellow travelers – skipping the line. Thankfully in their collective coma, they neither noticed or protested.

I hold this ethical lapse at your feet, AirTran. Your misleading marketing appears to give me the option to go straight to a counter where I can simply check my bag, not get lost among the cow-eyed passengers lumbering along waiting for attention from your agents. If you see no distinction between those people needing assistance and those just checking bags, you are falsely advertising, inconveniencing your customers, and causing efficient travelers like myself to trespass against others.

I would ask you to amend your practices as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

Joanna Robinson

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Sorry to link to a Townhall piece, but I found this interesting about a possible constitutional convention in Illinois:

Toward this end, a question that will appear on the state’s ballot this November asks voters whether a constitutional convention should be called to make fundamental changes in the way politics and governance are done. This question is automatically placed before voters every 20 years. In 1988, voters said no. This year, polls show two-to-one voter support, but with a large percentage of undecided voters.

Citizen leaders from across the political spectrum — and the rare politician like Democratic Lt. Governor Patrick Quinn — favor a constitutional convention. This support appears to be based not on ideological hankerings, but on the obvious fact that Ol’ Honest Abe Lincoln wouldn’t recognize today’s Land of Lincoln.

In addition, there’s a near-universal belief that all hope for reform lies with the people and not their pretend representatives in Springfield.

A network of 300 religious, labor and civic groups, United Power for Action and Justice, argues for the convention on the grounds that it “would scare the devil out of the politicians and lobbyists,” and “allow citizens to make some fundamental, structural changes in the way Springfield does (or doesn’t do) business,” such as “recall, term limits, voter initiative and more.”

The Illiniois Citizens Coalition, a conservative group, supports the convention for many of the same reasons.

I often forget, being a resident of DC and in such close proximity to the federal apparatus, that the states have their own constitutions and own internal structures. I wish we could strengthen that again against the sweeping reach of federal power. It would be very interesting to see how Illinois handled a constitutional convention and grappled with these issues in the 21st century, especially if it actually resulted in considerable constraints on the power of politicians there.

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So i’m not a big fan of pepper, as in the spice that sits as the yin next to salt’s yang, but as I noticed the mixed pepper mill on my table this morning (used by my companion), I realized I did not know how peppercorns came to be.

Turns out they are rather like raisins, or coffee beans. They are a fruit that is soaked and dried to produce the small, hard peppercorn. Like tea, the same plant produces pink, green, white, and black peppercorns depending on how they are treated. The fruit exterior is either retained and dried for black pepper or soaked and removed leaving the seed only for white pepper.

On the etymology, pepper derives from the sanskrit pippali, and the English version comes from Old English pipor. And of course it is used also to describe “spirit” or “energy,” which in the 20th century was shortened to pep, second only to vim for that meaning.

The pepper plant (a perennial woody vine):

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no, i’m not writing the start of a gut-wrenching novel. i swam in a saline pool this afternoon. Apparently this is the hot new thing, to convert chlorine pools to saline. It’s mildly salty, not nearly as much as the ocean, and has none of the abrasive effects of chlorine. it is in fact like tasting tears.

we swam A LOT when i was a kid - every single day during the summer. we bought special shampoo to help prevent the damage to our hair and expected the red eyes and crackling skin feel after hours in the offending but entertaining liquid. Saline pools have none of that; your skin feels soft afterwards and you can open your eyes under the water without any problem.

Here are some of the marketed benefits:

– significant cost savings
– healthier
– more comfortable swimming environment

and of course, the most important quality for new products or innovations today: it’s “environmentally and ecologically positive.”

sign me up.

After experiencing it myself, I must agree that it is certainly a more pleasant swimming experience.

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they kill people. i know. it’s terrible.

over at Slate, Timothy Noah thinks it’s terrible too, and therefore has trouble understanding the constitutional argument against the DC gun ban that resulted in it being struck down today. well kinda.

UPDATE: and my Mayor doesn’t give a shit anyway.

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particularly in high school - “the canon” is so incredibly boring. but you can do fun things like this - c/o McSweeneys:

LIT 101 CLASS IN THREE LINES OR LESS.
BY BEN JOSEPH

- - - -

1984

WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals.

THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.

C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!

Moby-Dick

ISHMAEL: I’m existential.

AHAB: Really? Try vengeance.

ISHMAEL: I dig this dynamic. Can we drag it out for 600 pages?

The Great Gatsby

NICK: I love being rich and white.

GATSBY: Me, too, but I’d kill for the love of a woman.

DAISY: We can work with that.

Oliver Twist

OLIVER: Poverty ain’t so bad, what with all the Cockney accents and charming musical interludes.

ME: Thanks to movies, no books were read in the passing of this class.

PROFESSOR WATERMAN: You’re half right.

[thanks Ian via Montzter]

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this is a brilliant post by Steve Sailer about American education versus that of Germany, England, and other countries. it contains a fantastic explanation of why our K-12 is a disaster but our universities are still top in the world.

check this:

The top American universities now have such colossal wealth that Jim Manzi blogged at The American Scene:

“Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.”

The prestige of Harvard and the other apex predators at the lofty pinnacle of the American educational pyramid means that the vast K-12 bottom has been infected with Harvard’s values (such as abstraction and abstruseness) and rhetoric (equality uber alles)…but not, alas, Harvard’s brains. Most of the K-12 educators, much less their students, aren’t smart enough to get the joke. They don’t understand that the IQ elitists of America are pulling the wool over their eyes when they rattle on about their purported liberal beliefs about how everybody should go to college.

They don’t understand it’s all a big pyramid scheme. The Harvard professors’ graduate students become the UCLA professors whose graduate students become the Cal State LA professors whose students become the schoolteachers who browbeat their more gullible pupils into believing that everybody should go to college, no matter how obvious a waste of money and time it will turn out to be.

Students with below average IQs are just the cannon fodder that keeps the system churning along for the professors.

basically Harvard is Harvard because it doesn’t believe its own bullshit - haha.

can’t wait for the new Charles Murray book!

THANKS FOR THE LINK JORDAN.

UPDATE: On a related note, young basketball players may be going to play in Europe instead of putting in obligatory college time. I hope they do and avoid the stupid rule that you can’t go straight from high school to the NBA.

Would you like to spend your winter in, say, Syracuse, N.Y., playing against other teenagers, not getting paid and not allowed to make money in other ways, living in a dorm room, forced to go to classes you may or may not be interested in? Or would you rather spend it in, oh, let’s see, Milan, playing against men, making a few million, living in a villa and meeting supermodels?

it’s incredibly offensive to Lefty elites that someone would have a marketable, profitable skill outside some rubberstamped college degree, and the establishment has duped Americans into agreeing that without it you’re doomed.

h/t Montzter

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My friend Jordan just crossed one of the access roads at 15th and K. He was on the phone with me and just started walking against a do not walk sign when a man comes careening through in a convertible Volkswagon Bug wearing a bow tie and a short sleeved collared shirt, points at the pedestrian sign and yells out “I’m Jim Graham!”

That would be Councilman Jim Graham of Ward One.

Ah, small politicians, so jealous for their small and petty power. Wait…that’s all politicians.

The story brought to mind the scene in Oh Brother Where Art Thou? when that manic depressive bank robber known as “Babyface” is wildly driving the car and shooting his tommy gun while shouting his Christian name to his pursuers.

UPDATE: Jordan called Graham’s Chief of Staff to complain - haha.

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I have been using Facebook to reconnect with all sorts of people from my past. Just last month hopped on a plane to Seattle to see a friend from High School that I hadn’t talked to for 11 years until our first phone conversation, during which I booked the ticket to see him. We had an absolute blast and I’m stoked that he’s back in my life.

I’m now digging into college years since there are only a few threads left from those days that I didn’t cut. I just found out my friend Derek Turner is sailing around the world and documenting it here at the world by sea. this was his answer to the question many of us are asking after working into our late twenties and looking for the next step. Do i take that next job or do I go abroad and have an adventure? The wealth of our society can be stultifying, and the pursuit of wealth soul-crushing, but it also enables us to escape and seek experiences that are much more humane than anything found inside a cubicle or an office.

My Seattle friend, Brad, also travels the world for 3 months at a time. He just finished backpacking through Southeast Asia. Another high school friend is training for his first Iron Man and chafes at his law profession. Good friends from college are missionaries in Croatia. Another girlfriend went to Central America for several years and returned home after getting married there. She’s expecting her first child.

It’s wonderful to rediscover my roots and see what life paths people have taken. It also reminds me of how blessed we are to have so many options available.

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The NYT is saying the “economic stimulus” worked?!?

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BFF just sent me this link to this video about consumer jet packs - available this year!

I’ve complained before about the lack of jet packs before, but i can’t link to it because I’m still trying to get my 2007 archive back up.

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Saw this in an alley in Harrisburg, PA a few weeks ago with my future sister-in-law Anne. It must have been a vision just for us because we walked by later to show The Bro and The Lord was gone. But here’s our proof. It still makes me laugh every time I see it.

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After three months of criticism - and sometimes outright ridicule - at Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, Microsoft slinks away rebuffed. The consensus seems to be that the marriage would not only not provide much value but would create something of a bureaucratic nightmare. My buddy Tim Lee pointed out the importance of cultural differences between the two companies when we talked about it last week. That would have been a difficult integration.

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A few things I learned about recently.

I just bought an expensive bottle of worm poop at my local hardware store, but I was looking for something other than miracle grow to feed my indoor herbs i recently planted for use in cooking. Apparently it’s the Nantucket Nectars of fertilizer - a couple of Princeton grads figured out how to emulsify worm poop and bottle it. As an added bonus, it’s actually bottled in reused 2-liter soda bottles that they collect at local drives. I had to laugh, then i forked over twelve bucks to bring it home.

In my Flow Yoga newsletter (Flow Yoga being my yoga studio, which was recently named the best one in DC btw), I learned about 41pounds.org - a nonprofit that contacts direct mail companies on your behalf to get your name removed from lists such as catalogs and credit cards and gets your junk mail reduced by 80-95% for five years. Fourty-one is based on the fact that the average American receives about 41 pounds of junk mail each year. And, cleverly, for $41 they’ll work their magic for you. They provide the service and donate to your favorite charity when you sign up.

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