feline comedy: Pavlov in reverse?

This made me laugh:

your Sunday sermon

The forces of tyranny expand inexorably to fill the space made available for their existence. People who refuse to muster appropriately self-protective territorial responses are laid open to exploitation as much as those who genuinely can't stand up for their own rights because of a more essential inability or a true imbalance in power.

—Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

Translation: those who tend to bend over usually get fucked in the ass.

Don't be a cornhole.

a short disquisition on judo throws

I found this humorous video on why "Judo Throws Don't Work" on YouTube:

I love how the guy uses "MMA" to mean "Mexican Martial Arts."

While I'm pretty sure there are millions of judoka who would disagree with this dude's assessment, the dude builds a decent case in the brief amount of time he has (keeping in mind that this is basically a parody video: the guy's been associated with Master Ken). This has been one of my criticisms of styles like Brazilian jiujitsu: based on what I've seen in video demonstrations and Ultimate Fighting matches, it's a style that commits the fighter to one opponent so completely that, if the opponent has friends, there's little that the BJJ practitioner can do about them. To be fair, I don't know what the advanced syllabus looks like in BJJ; in taekwondo, for example, advanced students are expected to fight multiple opponents during testing, so they train for this. It could be the same for BJJ, but I've never seen a BJJ practitioner take on more than one opponent. YouTube to the rescue...?

ADDENDUM: here's video of Ryron Gracie taking on three opponents. The fight looks a lot like two slugs mating. (Some of the comments below the video are surprisingly intelligent, but you do have to wade through a bunch of chaff to get to them.)

grammar-police mode: when you're assaulted by an idiot

Good Lord. Jeff Hodges blogs about a comment he just received from a presumably female commentator who flaunts her utter inability to write decent English. I had written a comment to be appended to Jeff's blog post, but my comment was longer than 4096 characters, so I'm posting my reaction here. Go read Jeff's post in order to understand the context for my reaction. And my reaction is...

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Wow. This comment just drips with illiterate idiocy. A good portion of it is ad hominem garbage, and once you remove that, there isn't much substance left over. My concern, as someone who is now paid to pick on the quality of other people's English, is with the technical sloppiness of the writing. The aversion to commas strikes me as a British tic, given how even educated Brits seem to hate placing commas where they're needed. The lack of apostrophes could be chalked up to one of those cutesy feminine affectations... I dunno.

What I spotted as I struggled through this daffy person's prose:

Yes clearly Eve is the "Hero" though not in Milton's Poem.

• comma after "Yes"
• comma after "clearly"
• comma between "'Hero'" and "though": "the 'Hero,' though"
• lower-case "poem" (Wir sprechen Englisch und nicht Deutsch!)

I am not sure what you actually read to come up with that rather bold assertation.

Snotty tone, but I'll give this sentence a pass.

Milton went so far as to roofie Eve when the Arch Angel was bestowing all the wisdom of past and present on Adam because obviously that bitch couldn't be trusted.

• Does Milton spell "Arch Angel" that way? I thought it was "Archangel."
• I'm tempted to surround "obviously" with commas, but as a matter of style, I'll grudgingly let this go. The modern take is to smooth out the rhythm by eliminating commas, and as this trick is becoming increasingly common, it feels less and less like a "real" sin.
• That said, stylistically speaking, the sentence feels like a run-on. Technically, it could stay as it is, but I'd prefer to break it into shorter sentences.

In fact, from the moment that they "fell" all culpability fell onto Eves shoulders despite being a mutual fault.

• comma after "'fell'"
• apostrophe needed for "Eves" (cutesy feminine affectation? I say this because I'm pretty sure the writer knows an apostrophe goes before the "s" here)

You are supposedly a history/politics buff, bully for you.

• Rewrite: "You are supposed to be a history/politics buff. Bully for you." Don't misuse your fucking commas. It's fascinating and frustrating to see how the writer omits commas where they're needed and adds commas where they aren't. Incredible.

Me too.

• I go back and forth on the whole "comma before 'too'" thing. I'll give this a pass, but I'll chalk it up to British hatred of commas.

I have taken the same plank of classes you have only I went one step further and got my English Degree as well because politics as of late seems to be a fools errand.

• odd use of "plank" (Googling the exact phrase "plank of classes" brings up only one* result: this blog post!)
• comma between "have" and "only" to mark the start of an independent clause
• Why is "degree" capitalized? This is English, not German. We don't normally capitalize common nouns.
• apostrophe in "fools"
• Jeff Hodges has a degree in English literature, dumbass. I guess you didn't bother to read his bio, which is right fucking there on the blog's sidebar.

If you were such a History buff, perhaps you knew (sic "would know") that Milton had woman issues, not marrying until his mid to late 30's and when he did he married a teenager.

• good catch re: tense control
• "history buff"—lower case "h"! ("history" is a generic topic/concept, so as a common noun, it doesn't need capitalization; if, however, we were talking about the specific title of a university course, then we'd definitely capitalize the term)
• "30's" should be "30s"—no apostrophe.
• Put a comma before the phrase "and when he did": use a comma-conjunction to separate independent clauses. True: the locution "when he did" is a dependent clause, but immediately after comes an independent clause such that "when he did + [indep. clause]" together form a complex sentence, all of which must take a comma-conjunction as a separator.
• Put a comma after "when he did"—as I mentioned, this is a complex sentence, and it's one in which the dependent clause comes first, which means there needs to be a comma after the dependent clause. Examples of how this rule works:

If you do that again, I'll kill you. (dependent clause first = comma)
I'll kill you if you do that again. (dependent clause last = no comma)

He carried an over idealized idea of marriage so it lasted a whopping six months.

• should be "over-idealized" (add hyphen, especially as this is a phrasal adjective modifying the noun that comes after it)
• comma between "marriage" and "so" to separate independent clauses

Eventually they reconciled after years and years but my points the same, he was an interesting mess of weirdo who thought marriage was the perfect institution until reality slapped him in the face.

• comma after "Eventually"
• comma after "years and years"
• apostrophe needed in the phrase "my points"
• colon or em dash, not comma, after "the same" (comma splice)
• "interesting mess of weirdo" should be "interesting mess of a weirdo" ("weirdo" is countable)
• This again feels like a breathless run-on.

This reality is rather spelled out into Paridise Lost.

• I'll forgive the spelling error and chalk it up to a brain-fart typo.
• This particular use of "rather," along with the obvious comma hatred, is further evidence the writer is probably British.
• "spelled out in Paradise Lost," not "into"

He vilifies Eve much like he vilified his wife for years.

• Who is vilified for years? Eve or the wife? This is a misplaced modifier.
• "Much as," not "much like": use "as" in front of clauses.

History is an interesting thing, it's all there for you to find, you don’t need to try to read into long winded over glorified text to get into the inferiority complexes of it all.

• comma splice between "thing" and "it's"; replace with semicolon
• second comma splice between "to find" and "you don't need"
• This is definitely a run-on sentence. Chop into smaller bits for sanity's sake.
• Hyphenate "long-winded" and "over-glorified."
• Insert comma between the above two phrasal adjectives because they're functioning as coordinate (not cumulative) adjectives modifying "text."
• The final part of the sentence is sloppily ambiguous. I suspect the writer knew what she was trying to say, but she botched the execution. "Tripping over one's dick," as they say.

I'm saddened, Jeff, that you were assaulted by someone so obtuse and incompetent. She's obviously hilariously unaware of her incompetence, which makes her a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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*On Google, one result has become two because I quoted the full phrase in this post.




ADDENDUM: the woman's Blogger profile places her in California. This doesn't mean she doesn't have a British background and/or Anglophile pretensions.

after the beheading

This shouldn't have weirded me out, but it did:

today's luncheon: French sandwiches and seafood chowder

Et voilà:

The seafood chowder was a mega-hit: for the first time ever, I actually ran out of food today (well, I ran out of chowder, but not sandwich material). Even the one coworker from Maine, who knows a chowder when he sees one, gave it his seal of approval by going back for seconds. The French sandwiches were good, but I can't take credit for them because I didn't actually make anything: I simply bought the bread, the dry sausage, the butter, and the Brie, then showed my coworkers how to put everything together.

The chowder, by contrast, was a labor of love. In the end, I didn't end up using all the seafood I had bought: I decided there was no need for the jumbo shrimp since I was throwing in some mini shrimp, and although I had bought a beautiful load of huge shelled clams from Costco, I decided not to dump them into the pot until I learned more about clam anatomy: when I split one clam open (with the intention of dicing the clams into smaller pieces), I saw it had a bunch of black grit in its innards. However, when I smelled and tasted the grit, it seemed like an organic part of the clam and not something to be washed out. Temporarily unsure how to proceed, I eventually decided to nix the clams altogether for aesthetic reasons: had I diced the clams without de-gritting them and dumped them into the pot, the grit would have spread out and turned the lily-white heavy cream all gray and sooty-looking. So: no clams. I'm saving them for myself, and I'll make one of my favorite dishes, fried clams, with them this weekend. That's something to look forward to.

The seafood went into the pot last, of course: you don't want to overcook such a protein, which can seize up and become rubbery very quickly. I had to do a lot of slicing and dicing of the mushrooms, onions, and celery that went into the pot. I pan-fried those veggies to soften them, fried up some crispy bacon, which I crumbled, then tossed the vegetables, bacon, diced potatoes (pre-softened via boiling), and some corn into the pot along with heavy cream and the water from the can of sweet corn I had bought. I heated this base to a low boil on Thursday night, added a bit of salt and pepper for taste, then added the seafood (salmon, scallops, and shrimp)—plus minced celery leaves—this morning. I'd been worried that the scallops might get overcooked, but everything ended up perfect, and the office gave me a big thumbs-up.

The only real labor involved with the French sandwiches involved slicing the four dry sausages I'd bought into thin disks. This proved to be a hypnotic, almost meditative activity, despite the bad karma that supposedly comes with handling meat. At the office, I showed people how to slice their half-baguettes to create sandwich bread; everyone laughed when my knife bit into a baguette, and the crust shattered everywhere. "But that's how you know it's a good baguette!" I said. Which is true: a good baguette has a hard, shattery crust that stands in contrast with the soft, gossamer interior. Baguettes are all about contrast.

Lunch culminated with Krispy Kreme doughnuts brought in by a coworker. Heavenly. The whole office descended into varying degrees of a food coma, but after an hour or so, we were back to being fairly productive again (except for me, as I'm writing this blog post during work hours—naughty, naughty!).

Another success, this luncheon was, and my chef's reputation remains secure. (In fact, just yesterday, the boss said he wanted to have a tiny housewarming party for his new "man cave" apartment, a property he recently leased to give him some breathing room away from his family. He asked me to be his personal chef for the day; I told him that would be fine, as long as he told me what menu he was going for. I'm in demand, apparently.)

dispatches from the non-massacre:what happens when the system actually works

An excellent post at BearingArms.com titled "The Mass Shooting You’ll Never Hear About" has this to say (courtesy Instapundit):

...the teen made a threat, the police acted, and no one is dead.

That’s what should have happened in Parkland, but didn’t. In Gardena — a mass shooting no one will ever hear about because it was prevented — the efficiency of the local authorities saved countless lives. Why? Because they acted.

While the anti-gun left is focused like a laser on guns, there were numerous failures that led to Parkland. By now, most of us have heard about them. At every level, it seems, the shooter was given a pass by supposed adults who didn’t do their jobs. Some have blamed pressure from the Obama administration to end the “school to prison pipeline” and policies that rewarded schools for not reporting problematic behavior.

[...]

It’s a shame, but this case will be forgotten by next week. Meanwhile, we’ll still be debating about AR-15’s and 30-round magazines. We’ll still be arguing over whether someone should be able to buy a long gun at 18 or 21. We’ll still be having these discussions because the system that has nothing to do with gun control actually worked.

That’s probably the biggest shame of all of this. When everything goes like it’s supposed to, such as in this case, it’s quickly forgotten. It takes a Parkland for the discussion to last more than a day or two, and then it goes in the completely wrong direction. Then it becomes about taking away people’s rights.

No. Just no.

Use the system in place. Use it correctly. Making threats is a crime. It’s grounds for investigating further and, if necessary, arresting someone for more than making a threat. Use that to end these horrible tragedies.

Don’t punish people who had nothing to do with it.

No disagreement here. I heartily endorse every word of this article.

eggses!

Here's the latest "Basics with Babish" video, in which Andrew Rea discusses some of my favorite egg preparations: Scotch eggs, eggs Benedict, and shakshouka (also shakshuka and chakchouka... ah, romanization).

The shakshouka portion* is the least interesting because Rea is basically shilling for his sponsor, which is Blue Apron** for this video, but I thoroughly enjoyed his explanation of the prep for Scotch eggs and eggs Benedict.

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*Many, many commenters to this video are noting that the dish Rea made is not real shakshouka, mainly because of the conspicuous absence of one essential ingredient: tomatoes. Other commenters are being negative about Rea's Ser Jorah Mormont impression and the bizarre pallor of his egg yolks.

**An old classmate of mine from Georgetown started up her own food service, eGourmet Solutions. I always envied Ariane, who was already multilingual when I met her: she spoke natively perfect French and English, and she was majoring in Mandarin while also studying Spanish. Big brain. And now she's a big boss. You go, grrrrrl!

the sad twilight of Stan Lee

I saw a recent article stating that film director Kevin Smith has just offered to take 95-year-old Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee—whose health has been failing since the recent death of his wife—into his own home to protect the poor man from elder abuse by his emotionally unstable daughter and her avaricious friends. The old man is apparently being circled by vultures who only care about his money. Read more about this awful situation here.

One of the hazards of being old and having money is the inevitable arrival of the carrion birds. I saw this happen with my great aunt and great uncle. Whatever his kooky politics, Kevin Smith is a true mensch to step up and offer Stan Lee a haven away from all the nonsense, a place where he'll receive love and care and respect for whatever time remains to him.

ADDENDUM: this video talks in detail, and with sympathy, about Stan Lee's testimony regarding his daughter and her financial situation, among other matters. It sounds as though Lee's daughter, JC, is either mentally unstable (which isn't Lee's fault) or horribly spoiled (which is potentially Lee's fault). Without knowing more, it's hard to say anything for sure. But spoiled or not, JC sounds like a holy terror, which makes me think that Stan Lee would be wise to take Kevin Smith up on his offer of refuge.

Ave, Young!

Young Jin Chun, author of The Accidental Citizen-soldier (blogged about here), has just posted about another book review and interview (text, not audio) that he did with John Grant Ross of Bookish Asia. Yours truly even gets a tiny mention in the exchange.

shit can be found on both sides

Conservatives can be just as shitty as liberals when it comes to verbal viciousness. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel might use homophobic slurs to pillory rightie targets, but then there are conservative idiots like Jamie Allman who threaten to ram a hot poker up anti-gun high-schooler David Hogg's ass.

A conservative commentator who sent a tweet saying he would use “a hot poker” to sexually assault an outspoken 17-year-old survivor of the Florida high school shooting has resigned from a St Louis TV station and been taken off the radio after several advertisers withdrew from his shows.

KDNL-TV accepted Jamie Allman’s resignation and canceled The Allman Report, according to a brief statement from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates the TV station. Before the show’s launch in January 2015, KDNL-TV touted it as a nontraditional newscast with a conservative spin.

Allman’s radio show on KFTK-FM has been taken off the air while the company “looks into the matter”, said Esther-Mireya Tejeda, a spokeswoman for Entercom, which began operating the station last month.

Allman hasn’t responded to messages seeking comment.

Several businesses pulled advertising from Allman’s shows after he sent the 26 March tweet targeting David Hogg, who has strongly advocated for stricter gun control since 17 people were killed in the 14 February mass shooting at his school in Parkland, Florida.

In the tweet, Allman wrote: “I’ve been hanging out getting ready to ram a hot poker up David Hogg’s ass tomorrow.”

SMH, as all the kids are saying these days.

this is on my bucket list

I don't normally give a rat's ass about most sea creatures, but the octopus has fascinated me since childhood. It's an extremely smart invertebrate, which some peg at about the IQ level of a dog (although that's disputed; for more on cephalopod intelligence, see here). Meeting an octopus in the ocean, and actually interacting with it in some way, would feel like a sacred privilege to me; an octopus is so utterly alien in its brain structure and physiology that it's amazing to realize how a creature so radically different can engage in activities that we humans can recognize—hunting, hiding, fighting, strolling (yes, some octopi hilariously use their tentacles to "walk" along the sea floor)... and even playing.

The video I've embedded below leaves me green with envy: it's pretty obvious the octopus is having fun, and in a very non-random way. Watch how, though the diver moves his hand around, the octopus unerringly shoots toward it (trivia: octopi, when they swim this way, are actually swimming backwards).* I would kill to be in that man's place.

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*I know some of you will object that the man is actually putting his hand in the way of the octopus. Yes, I think there are some instances of that. But there are other instances when the octopus is clearly jetting toward the hand after the hand has moved, and it's only at the end of the video that the octopus seems earnestly intent on leaving the party—another indication that, earlier, it hadn't been trying to get away (note, too, the lack of inking).

own-goal

Facebook, as a platform, has been under siege of late. Accusations of extreme data mining and marked political bias have eroded both the company's credibility and its stock-market profile. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO and the face of Facebook, has been summoned to Washington, DC, to testify before Congress. He only just suffered a severe grilling from conservative Senator Ted Cruz (here's that link again), who relentlessly questioned Zuckerberg (whose surname is German for "Sugarmountain" or "Sugarpile"—a testament to the insubstantiality of his online creation) as to Facebook's tendency to censor conservative voices while allowing liberal voices free rein. It was during this questioning by Cruz and others that Zuckerberg made the following statement regarding Facebook's relationship to the content that is hosted on the platform: "I agree that we're responsible for the content."

Conservative talking head Ben Shapiro pounced on this immediately, as did legions of others. As Shapiro wrote:

Zuckerberg may have just opened himself up to a world of legal hurt. Platforms are generally not held legally responsible for the content posted on those platforms – so liability issues ranging from copyright violation to slander aren’t serious concerns for platforms. You can’t sue AT&T if somebody slanders you on a telephone call carried by their satellites. But that’s not the case with publishers. Publishers are responsible for the content that is added to their platforms. The Daily Wire bears legal liability for the content that goes up at The Daily Wire.

If the same were held to be true for Facebook, the company would immediately become subject to hundreds of millions of dollars in legal liability. For example, copyright violation bears a statutory penalty of between $750 and $30,000 per violation. How many unlicensed photos are posted on Facebook daily? On a minute-by-minute basis? Now, instead of a [photojournalist] suing the person who posted the photo, the [photojournalist] could sue Facebook itself. And Facebook’s pockets are a lot deeper.

I think it's premature for conservatives to declare victory. Zuckerberg's a crafty one, and he's got his own team of lawyers, so he certainly won't go down without a fight. Still, I think righties like Shapiro may have a point that Zuckerberg has scored an own-goal; he may indeed have opened up a legal Pandora's box by essentially affirming under oath* that Facebook itself can be sued based on the content it posts. Still, Zuckerberg the CEO probably has a board of directors who will vehemently disagree with his claim, thus making it difficult for the litigious to attack Facebook and draw blood.

Stay tuned. If we suddenly see a torrent of lawsuits against Facebook, then we'll know that Mark Zuckerberg did somehow manage to unleash hell upon himself and his empire.

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*Correction: Zuckerberg was not under oath.

"Braven": two-paragraph review

2018's "Braven" is a wintry actioner directed by Lin Oeding and starring Jason Momoa (you know him best as Aquaman, Khal Drogo, and Conan), Stephen Lang (the old-but-muscular baddie Miles Quaritch in "Avatar"), and Garret Dillahunt. The story is relatively simple: Joe Braven (Momoa) is a logger with a wife and daughter (Jill Wagner and Sasha Rossof, respectively) who is currently taking care of his father Linden Braven (Lang), a tough man now suffering from incipient dementia. Joe owns a cabin some miles away from his main home, and a group of criminals breaks into the cabin one night, leaving a huge sack of drugs that they plan to pick up the following day. Unaware of any of this, Joe takes his father to the cabin so they can have a heart-to-heart about getting Linden into supervised care. Unbeknownst to Joe, his daughter Charlotte has stowed away in the truck, which complicates the situation when the criminals converge on the cabin to recover their drugs. Joe and Linden discover the drugs and see the enemy approaching, so their immediate priority is to get Charlotte to safety, then to see whether they can escape this situation alive.

"Braven" hits all the usual action-movie beats. While we don't get any exposition as to why Joe Braven seems to be combat-trained, despite being a logger, we're given to understand, through muted dialogue, that the man is a badass who knows his way around weapons and the wilderness. Filled with all the usual hilarious implausibilities, not to mention the regular complement of stupid bad guys who are little more than cannon fodder, "Braven" is nevertheless fairly entertaining in spite of its utter lack of originality. Momoa and Lang do a good job of portraying the prickly relationship between a concerned son and a once-tough father who is angry at his own deterioration. Dillahunt makes for a good, burly villain; I remember his stint on the TV series "Burn Notice," where he played a similarly dangerous hombre. I was disappointed that the killings, when they happened, weren't gorier; the movie's preview trailer had led me to believe I was in for some blood-soaked vengeance, but alas, it was not to be, with the exception of one delightful axe-meets-cranium scene. It's also strange that the wintry location in the film is never named; I had assumed it was somewhere in Alaska, but it turns out that "Braven" was filmed in Canada. All in all, I'd call "Braven" a decent piece of light entertainment. It doesn't offer anything new, it's very weak on characterization, and it's utterly predictable, but I had fun watching the story all the same.

with thanks to Bill Keezer

My friend Bill Keezer regularly emails a group of us a series of articles, memes, and cartoons. Here's one image that tickled me:

Pretty much every celebrity, politician or not, who traipses around with armed guards while simultaneously advocating the disarming of the populace is a goddamn hypocrite.

does this seem logical to you?

One reason why I generally avoid reading articles in the Korea Times and Korea Herald is that, when they're written by expats, they tend to be pretty awful. Here's a good example from two days ago: a piece by a certain Adam B. titled "My thoughts on English language teaching" (note the lack of hyphenation for the phrasal adjective—a sign of things to come).

The guy seems to have a thesis, which doesn't appear until the second paragraph. The thesis appears to be: "Newspapers are ideal for chunk teaching" (by which he means teaching language in chunks, like phrases and other locutions, as opposed to teaching only individual words), but the rest of the piece focuses on pretty much everything except the value of newspapers as a language-teaching tool.

There is, for example, an immediate digression into the importance of teaching slang (without clearly relating this to chunk teaching), followed by a second digression, even further afield, into the concept of what counts as a native speaker (Adam titles this section "Nativism," perhaps not understanding that nativism, as a term, might make sense in discussions of anthropology or politics, but not so much in language teaching unless we're talking about Noam Chomsky's concept of nativism). The first sentence of the "nativism" paragraph strikes me as flat-out wrong: "Citizenship determines who is a native English speaker ― and who is not." A Korean who has become a US citizen, but whose English hasn't evolved beyond the pidgin level (see def. 2) after twenty years in country, is in no way a "native speaker" of English just because he has a US passport and US citizenship. That's arrant nonsense.

The piece then segues to a sloppy and superficial discussion of "intelligence," finally transitioning to the conclusion by noting that "the gifted need help[;] they need an intellectual incentive, otherwise their intellectual prowess is going to wither away in the classroom." This leads to the concluding paragraph, which begins with "Multilingual native English speakers are exactly what the gifted need[.]" This notion, which I freely admit may have merit on its own, comes out of nowhere in the context of the article. Up to now, there has been no discussion of the utility of being multilingual, but suddenly here it is: a concept that shows up only in the final paragraph, which ends thus:

Advanced learners have already mastered the intricacies of grammar. Immersing themselves in the language found in newspapers is a logical progression. We need the ELT field to be more newspaper-oriented.

So the very last sentence does indeed tie in, kind of, with the second-paragraph thesis that newspapers ought to be part of language teaching. But as you can see, there's been no mention of how any of this relates to chunking, which gets a mention at the beginning before being totally forgotten for the rest of the article.

Wow. My head hurts. This article, if we think of it as an essay, wouldn't pass muster in any decent high-school English class. If I were to try to reverse-engineer the article's content into an outline, I would fail miserably, as there's no overall, internally supporting structure—just a series of ideas, ladled like slop, one atop the other, with an untidy "conclusion" offering the barest hint of intro/conclusion symmetry.

This is, alas, indicative of the quality of expat teacher who flocks to Korea. And Korean parents have no clue as to what manner of person is teaching their kids. Thus does a broken system remain broken.

For the Korean side of this problem, see this old post.

I guess it's not a joke anymore

Pro-gun Americans are used to joking that, if there are enough stabbings, we'll need to ban knives. In London, that may actually happen. As you doubtless already know, London's murder rate recently surpassed New York City's despite much stricter gun control, hence the new push to disarm citizenry even further. You'll also recall that the Bataclan nightclub massacre in Paris took place in a country with very strict gun control, yet somehow people remain convinced that more laws are the answer, as opposed to a closer examination of the real causes of murderous violence, with or without weapons.

Here's Styx on the latest bullshit from London:

Hilarious quote: "The Shire you're not."

geometry problem fo' yo' ass

Here ya' go:

I wasn't able to solve this, but according to this video (click the link to see the solution; I watched the vid, so I now know the answer), a few Chinese 5th-graders solved the problem in under a minute. That in itself is a hint, by the way. If you solve the problem, leave your answer in the comments, and please show your work/reasoning.

"Faces, Places" ("Visages, Villages"): review

"Faces, Places" (titled "Visages, Villages" in French) is a French-language documentary from 2017 written and directed by 88-year-old filmmaker Agnès Varda and street artist JR (pronounced "zhee-air" in French), who met and decided to collaborate on a road-trippy project in which Varda would film while JR did his street-art thing, taking photos of people and objects (mostly people), printing them out giant-size, and plastering those images to the sides of buildings, or onto water tanks, shipping containers, etc. JR has been doing this as a tribute to the people he meets, and he delights in meeting new people. He and Varda strike up a cozy, amicable relationship as they travel through rural France in their big truck, which contains the cameras and printing equipment necessary for the project. Along the way, they discuss their respective philosophies of life, and as time passes, a tender friendship forms. The documentary—and it's Varda who takes the role of documentarian—allows us viewers a slice-of-life look at the sorts of French folk we don't normally see: the goat farmers who refuse to cut off the goats' horns (despite the risk that the goats might hurt each other), the old woman who refuses to leave an old apartment project because the place is "too full of memories," the dock workers who deal with shipping containers all day at Le Havre (and their feisty wives), the town mayor who looks with grim satisfaction at the enormous World War II-era German bunker that was deliberately sent off a nearby cliff onto the neighboring beach—where it landed, comically, upside-down.

Agnès Varda was originally part of the French New Wave, along with Jean-Luc Godard, who is a year younger than she is. We see tantalizing clips of some of her work, and the final segment of the film involves a trek to visit Godard at his residence (I won't spoil what happens, except to say that it's bittersweet). Varda herself comes off as a lively personality upset that her body is failing her. She most bemoans the fading of her sight, but at the same time, she demands that JR take off his infamous sunglasses so that she may have a good look at his unobscured face. JR resists and resists: his glasses are part of his look. But however fussy JR might be about his glasses, and however many times the pair might needle each other about this or that artistic detail, it's obvious, by the end of the film, that the bond between the young and the old artist is strong, and will last well beyond Varda's passing.

I found this to be a profoundly touching documentary. The dialogue between the two artists is far too cute to be unscripted, but that artifice didn't bother me because, as the two traveled across France, it was obvious that the people they encountered along the way weren't actors; the lives we were glimpsing were utterly authentic. I have to say, on a personal note, that I felt a deep pang while listening to those farmers and townspeople, and while watching the French countryside roll by: I miss France. I really do. I miss its people and the natural beauty. One of these days, I have to get back to France to recharge certain spiritual batteries that got depleted long ago. (I also learned a ton of vocabulary while watching the film, especially when some old ex-miners were talking about their experiences from decades earlier—the clothes they wore, the arcane equipment they used, etc. All of that was new to me. I need to rewatch the documentary, take notes, and make some vocab flash cards.)

"Faces, Places" preserves, sort of, the rhyme scheme of the original French title, "Visages, Villages," but the English is not a translation of the French, as you can see for yourself. The word Places is much more generic and abstract than is Villages, and in fact, the two artists did spend most of their time passing from village to village. The film has been structured by Varda as a sort of random road movie, with Godard as only an incidental destination at the end because, well, all trips must end somewhere. But as most artists understand, it's the getting-there that is at least as important as the destination.

why I left Twitter

From Instapundit:

THINK OF TWITTER AS A DEMOCRAT-RUN PARTISAN NEAR-MONOPOLY WITH A CONTROL FETISH AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Twitter Not Too Concerned About Death Threats Against Republican, Apparently. “A 38-year-old man was arrested Friday for tweeting death threats against Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), but Twitter’s response has been nonexistent. Not only has his account not been suspended, the dozens of tweets he posted directed at Goodlatte have not been removed.”

This nonsense has been happening for a while: conservatives who politely submit that "We ought to discuss border control" get banned as Nazis while Muslim tweeters advocating violent jihad tweet with impunity. This is happening across all sorts of social-media platforms: people are, for example, leaving Facebook in increasing numbers—for privacy/security reasons as well as because of unfairness—which means Twitter, with its own political bias and security problems, can't be far behind. Shitting on half the country is not a sustainable business model. All this does is fuel the continuing rise of the alt media, and when that beast attains full size, things are going to get very ugly.