First Looks category archive

Via Bart Blog.

Details here.

We seem to be getting sideswiped by the remains of the storm that had the temerity to interfere with the NFL. I hear it was penalized fifteen inches and ordered to sit out the next blizzard.

Time to hang the Christmas lights.

Joan Wickersham, writing in the Boston Globe, deconstructs the fashion for GLCBs (Greedy Little Christmas Books). A nugget:

6. Debase the English language. Do not use a verb without an adverb. “He asked curiously.’’ “She laughed merrily.’’ “She sobbed sadly.’’ “He yelled angrily.’’ Mix metaphors. Confuse “lie’’ and “lay.’’ Write sentences that sound like tricky SAT math problems. (“She had half a mind to call the police and half a mind to march across the street to give them a piece of her mind.’’)

7. Have your characters come to believe in something. It doesn’t matter what it is. The true meaning of this. The miracle and wonder of that.

8. Insist on the shallowness of materialism and the importance of treating other people with kindness, not contempt.

9. Undercut this insistence by writing the book.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a fascinating article on John Heisman, the Penn alumnus for whom the Heisman trophy of college football is named. A nugget:

For all his sophisticated strategies, Heisman allegedly was the first to come up with the hidden-ball trick, telling his quarterback at Auburn to slip the pigskin under his jersey and pretend to tie his shoelaces. Vanderbilt fell for it.

Heisman also once used a hidden team trick, in 1902, when he coached Clemson to a victory over Georgia Tech, two years before he switched schools. Wilkinson wrote how Clemson got off the train the night before the game, “checked into a hotel and proceeded to party until dawn.” Tech fans saw all this and bet heavily on the home team. Except the Clemson partyers were decoy scrubs. The varsity showed up well-rested the next morning and annihilated Georgia Tech, 44-5.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a fascinating article on current research into why pretty faces are pretty. Short verision: because they are average:

One is symmetry. The more symmetrical a face is, the more attractive it is — although some studies have shown it is the least important universal standard.

The second feature is averageness.

It might seem illogical to say that especially good-looking people will be more average, but it’s more a matter of not having highly unusual features, said Richard Russell, a face researcher at Gettysburg College.

(snip)

The third universal factor in attractiveness is called “sexual dimorphism,” which basically means more masculine features for men (bigger jaws, prominent brow lines) and more feminine features for women (smaller chins, bigger eyes).

How the researchers use computer technology to alter images and test theories is a gas.

Steve Chapman tells a story in the Chicago Trib:

I used to be a homophobe. I didn’t dislike gays a little; I disliked them a lot. Growing up in Texas, I didn’t know anyone who admitted to being gay, and I found the whole idea sick and repulsive.

On top of that, I was politically, religiously and socially conservative. So if you’d told me 40 years ago that in 2010, I’d be in favor of letting gays serve in the military and get married, I’d have thought you had dropped some bad acid.

Follow the link the find out what happened. It’s worth the two minutes.

But he can’t get past our warriors on drugs.

Meanwhile:

Investigators suspect a major drug cartel was the driving force behind two long, sophisticated tunnels connecting Mexico with the U.S. that were discovered this month along with more than 40 tons of marijuana.

Authorities said an underground passage located Thursday was similar to one found earlier — both running around 2,000 feet from Mexico to San Diego and equipped with lighting, ventilation, and a rail system for drugs to be carried on a small cart.

Frankly, I think this whole war on drugs thingee has been a colossal failure for decades. The drugs have won.

Serious rethinking is warranted.

Having watched pieces of a couple of football games yesterday, I can applaud this:

A pleasant counter is Lawrence (Mass.–ed) High School’s football team. Coach Mike Yameen has banned celebrations on the field, even chest bumps and high fives, and hauls players off the field when they overly gesticulate. It is a throwback to yesteryear, with Lawrence quarterback Nathan Baez telling the Globe, “When you score, you just hand the ball to the referee.’’

Follow the link for some other examples of school’s getting it right.

It’s been quite a gas watching the right wing rediscover another outrage that they can use as another junk you will pardon the expression talking point civil liberties as they cry crocodile tears over TSA searches, given that fomenting fear has been one of their major campaign strategies since the Red Scare of 1918.

No doubt they’re all going to join me in supporting the ACLU now.

Next up:

An AFV competition:

How many pigs can fly while this leopard changes its spots?

Dick Polman comments on the media’s shibboleth of objectivity that manifests itself as dueling talking points. He points out that the storied reporters of the past did not refuse to take stands even as they tried to report the whole story, A nugget:

Edward R. Murrow . . . , the CBS News icon of the ’50s, is routinely cited as the gold standard of quality journalism by those, like Koppel, who lament the current journalistic climate. But does anybody care to guess what was Murrow’s most indelible moment on CBS?

It was this moment, on camera, in 1954, during his special report on red-baiting smear artist Senator Joe McCarthy: “We will not walk in fear of one another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular…”

In much reportage, truth lies, not in the facts as events, but in the picture which the facts paint. Those pictures are often abstract and want interpretation.

From Southwest Virginia Today:

A friend at church likes to tell the old joke about a hiker who surprised a bear. The startled bear turned on the man, who lifted his hands in prayer. “Oh God, please make this a Christian bear!” Miraculously, the beast fell to its knees and began to pray. “Lord, I am thankful for this food.”

Follow the link and read the column this introduces.

As I waited in the dentist’s office yesterday, I pulled out my phone and continued reading Mark Twain’s Following the Equator on my ebook reader (hence this morning’s QOTD). It’s an excellent way to turn waiting time into useful, or, at least, bearable time.

Reading books on my phone tends therefore to be an intermittent activity–I may go several weeks without doing it, then do it frequently for a week. Following the Equator is an ideal book for intermittent reading: As a travelogue, it has narrative, but no plot to remember, er, intermittently.

Twain published Following the Equator in 1897, late in his life. He tells the story of a tour around the world roughly along the equator. So far, he has taken me from San Francisco to Hawaii to Fiji to Australia to New Zealand to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). I am presently his guest in Bombay (now Mumbai).

The contrast between the patronizing, almost contemptuous portrayal of things not American in his very early Innocents Abroad (1869) and the more mature reflections on Europeans’ and Americans’ treatment of what in the parlance of the time were commonly called “inferior races” in the last decades of the second age of imperial expansion is notable.

According to Twain, it was common for Western tourists in visiting India at the time to hire a “bearer”–a temporary servant–to tend to their needs and to help them negotiate the visit. He tells of seeing one such tourist, a European, casually “cuff”–today we would say “come upside the head”–his bearer because of some trifling error.

And it sends him back in time:

My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie–which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort.

He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature.

When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly–as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it.

Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

Persons sometimes speak of the “dehumanizing” effects of chattel slavery, commonly implying that it is the slave who is dehumanized.

In truth, the master becomes dehumanized.

With that in mind, consider what this report from the Booman tells us about Republicanism today.

Afterthought:

Dennis G., who blogs at Balloon Juice, frequently refers to the Republican Party as “The Confederate Party.” He has a point.

_____________________

*I have edited this passage by breaking it into paragraphs; in the original, it is one paragraph. Paragraphs were longer in the olden days when I was a young ‘un.

I didn’t need that tooth anyway.

Via Bob Cesca, who’s on a roll.