First Looks category archive

Drinking Liberally is a gathering place for liberals. Socialize and laugh in a friendly atmosphere.

When: 6 p., Thursday, March 14.

Where:
Lola’s Caribbean Restaurant
328 W 20th St (map)

Details here. Meetup page here.

Let Thoreau explain the genealogy.

This is fascinating.

In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal — a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel — worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon.

That’s because of a property known as birefringence, which splits light beams in a way that can reveal the direction of their source with a high degree of accuracy. Vikings may not have grasped the physics behind the phenomenon, but that wouldn’t present a problem.

“You don’t have to understand how it works,” said Albert Le Floch, of the University in Rennes in western France. “Using it is basically easy.”

Some persons are skeptical, with reason, given that the Vikings left little evidence of how they managed to navigate across wide stretches of the Atlantic.

Read the rest.

No, not the ones that Wall Street sells.

Real bags of real air.

Investigators say thieves seem to be targeting Honda cars.

Police say in most of the cases happen overnight.

Thieves are busting in passenger side windows and taking the driver’s side airbag.

We have all seen them.

Planes dragging banners with marriage proposals over sports palaces, elaborate invitations on AFV, and the like.

I probably would not have realized this, having been on the other side of the asking-girls-out divide, but Emily Hoeven raises an excellent point–there is a sadistic, manipulative element in the showiness. She writes of prom dates:

Sometimes huge crowds form a circle around a couple, cheering the boy on as he asks his special girl to the dance. While this group effort is encouraging, it also puts the couple in a very difficult position. Should the girl want to refuse the boy’s offer, she would have to do so in front of a large group of people.

This is nothing but public humiliation in its purest form, and it leaves the girl with few options: say yes or be viewed as coldhearted. That is not really fair, because the girl should have the option to say no. The boy should have the right to be turned down without a crowd as a witness. And both of them should be able to go to a dance with someone who really wants to be with them instead of someone who said yes under pressure.

Many years ago, Second Son acted in community theatre. After the last performance of one of his plays, the director ostentatiously proposed to one of the actors, on stage, before the audience, after the curtain calls.

She accepted on stage.

Second Son told me that afterwards, in the green room, she ripped her now-ex fiance a new one.

They did, eventually, get married, but it took him six months to recover the ground that he lost with that one ostentatious gesture.

Fun and fellowship for liberals. Join us and talk about anything in a relaxed atmosphere.

When: Thursday, February 28th, 6 p.

Where:
Croc’s 19 Street Bistro
620 19th Street (Map)

More here.

I have no interest in watching Hollywood pleasure itself.

Bunny Yeager is preparing to open an exhibit.

Glenn Garvin interviews her in the Miami Herald-Tribune:

It bugs Bunny Yeager just a little bit when people say she shot pinup girls in the 1950s and 1960s just as well as any man did. She shot them better than any man did, or any other woman, as far as she’s concerned.

Free room and board, that is.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow theorize that cats are smarter than dogs, then answer the crucial question:

If cats are so smart, why don’t we use them as police cats, military cats and seeing-eye cats? Maybe because they are too smart to be enslaved by humans.

. . . is prima facie evidence of guilt:

Burrell, 50, (stage name: M. C. Hammer–ed.) a multiplatinum recording artist who scored hits with songs like “U Can’t Touch This” and “Too Legit to Quit,” said on Twitter that an officer approached him in his car, tapped on his window, and asked if he was on parole or probation. A devout Christian who has spoken publicly about his faith on numerous occasions, Burrell has not had any public run-ins with the law.

The cop nevertheless filed some sort of trumped up charge against him which seems to boil down to

When I said “jump,” he didn’t ask “How high?”

Afterthought:

Pretty much all I know about M. C. Hammer as a performer, other than that he was one of the early rappers and a phenomenal success, is that he had a cute cartoon show for kids.

A web search tells me that a lot of persons think it was not very good, but First Son enjoyed it a lot. Frankly, it could not possibly have been worse than most of the Hanna-Barbara shows from the late 70s and 80s, which had all the production values of a Graham cracker.

The Miss American Pageant is returning to Atlantic City.

Will anyone notice?

Off to drink liberally.

Drinking Liberally is a gathering place for liberals. Socialize and laugh in a friendly atmosphere.

When: 6 p., Thursday, February 14.

Where:
Lola’s Caribbean Restaurant
328 W 20th St (map)

Details here. Meetup page here.

Taking the day off.

Family matters.

Spent yesterday watching the wonderful electrifying Super Bowl at my brother’s place, where the internet goes to die.

Read more »

Family matters.

Home improvements.

No, I didn’t install the steps; I’m flooring the attic now that it’s accessible. If you want the name of a trustworthy, competent, and meticulous “professional handyman” in these parts, I can help you out.

Tony Norman, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, thinks that part of the wingnut cartoon Obama is based on wingnuts’ having no idea what hit them in the last two Presidential elections.

The very unlikelihood of Mr. Obama’s existence atop America’s political world is what fuels the fear and loathing of the right wing. Because they’re already prone to superstition, they see a genie-like figure taunting them from an office he wouldn’t have a legitimate claim to under the old rules.

In response to Barack Obama’s unlikely presidency, many right-wingers have allowed their imaginations to run wild. Instead of appreciating Mr. Obama’s election as an example of the mad genius of the American electorate, many Republicans see sinister conspiracies afoot. They’ve erected a counterfactual fantasy as absurd as the prospect of Mr. Obama’s election once seemed.