Personal Musings category archive

Q. What creation of lawyers has annoyed more persons for a longer time more persistently than any other?

I used my bicycle for actual transportation today.

Usually I just ride around in circles.

Today, though, I dropped off the truck at Bucky’s because of a coolant leak (new radiator, 300 bucks). There’s a nice quiet residential neighborhood between there and here, so I bicycled back, admiring the houses outfitted in celebration of All Hallows Eve.

Karl Rove’s PAC keeps calling up my answering machine and telling it lies.

I am an avid Sherlockian. I have three different versions of the Canon, including William S. Baring-Gould’s monumental Annotated, as well as two biographies of Holmes, the Encyclopedia Sherlockiana, and several dozen pastiches, parodies, and what today are called “re-imaginings.”

I was mildly surprised Victoria Coren doesn’t like the idea of Lucy Liu as Watson in the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Elementary. Indeed, she was able to dislike it without having seen it:

Meanwhile, Lucy Liu is worried that people will see only the gender change to her character and miss another excellent improvement to the rubbish old original story, telling the Times: “It was a very big deal for me to play an Asian-American in Charlie’s Angels; Watson’s ethnicity is also a big deal”, as if someone had bet her £100 that she couldn’t cause at least three Conan Doyle fans to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

Personally, I’d like to press Liu’s face into a bowl of cold pea soup for that statement. It’s not just her failure to distinguish between creating a new character and mangling a beloved old one (Tread softly! You tread on my dreams!), but the triumphant tone over such an appalling and offensive racial change. Let me be clear: I rather like the idea of an Asian Watson, but American? God save us all.

Coren shows an uncharacteristic insularity (well, she does live on an island) that ignores the long history of Sherlock Holmes parodies, imitators, spin-offs, and rebirths, from Solar Pons to Naked is the Best Disguise. Indeed, somewhere along the line I read a story that posited Sherlock Holmes in a partnership with Teddy Roosevelt.

One suspects her ideal Watson to be the insufferable dunderhead portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the movies and on radio–the Watson of large walrus moustache and small IQ. (You can find many of the Nigel Bruce-Basil Rathbone radio shows at various OTR sites and the Internet Archive–see the OTR section on the sidebar.)*

Elementary is quite a skillful “re-imagining” of Holmes and Watson, fast-paced and, by the absurdly low standards of American television mysteries, well-plotted. It uses fewer plot gimmicks to get from body to arrest than popular shows such as CSI, NCIS, and Bones, which purport to use science and technology to track down clues but which, actually, use some kind of fictional science in which month-long lab tests are completed during the commercial break and in which agencies have resources that no actual government agency has, except perhaps the NSA (for example, what investigative agency would devote a team of four highly-skilled scientists and two FBI agents to investigate the death of a print-shop clerk, even it the remains were found in a post office? It was quite good fun to watch, but, really, give me a freaking break!).

I suspect that, if Sherlock Holmes were contacted in Sussex, where he has been quietly keeping bees and investigating methods of segregation of the queen since his retirement, he would suggest that Victoria Coren could benefit from cultivating her sense of playfulness, which seems somewhat underdeveloped.

Updated 2012-10-15: Edited for clarity.

________________

*The best portrayal of Holmes and Watson, the one truest to the spirit and characters of the Canon, was the one in the Jeremy Brett series, in which Watson, much like Lucy Liu’s Watson, was no bumbling idiot, but rather an intelligent person who just cannot keep up with Holmes–a Mustang to Holmes’s Lamborghini.

Rachel Maddow on fantasy worlds, both left and right.

Via Raw Story.

At Asia Times, Christof Lehmann wonders why cultural artifacts with little or no influence, such as the Mohammed cartoons of several years ago and the slanderous YouTube trailer of last week evoke such strong reactions from some corners of the Muslim community.

I think it likely that persons who wish to foment discontent wait for a pretext, then seize it when it come along. It happens in our own Wingnut World; why not in theirs?

But why are others so willing to join them?

Lehmann thinks that the best-known public face of the United States, its “entertainment” industry, has helped prepare the field. A snippet from the article:

Westerners and non-Muslims are seemingly so used to the scapegoating, stereotyping and denigration of Muslims and in particular Arab Muslims in art and entertainment that they don’t realize the degree to which the Western news and entertainment industry, and in particular Hollywood, is depriving an entire people and Muslims from their humanity.

(snip)

(Arab American scholar, D Jack Shaheen–ed.) Shaheen concluded that over 300 movies, more than 25% of all those he studied, vilified Arabs and Muslims in one way or the other, comparing it to World War II Nazi propaganda against the Jewish people. Shaheen argues that both have caused unspeakable human suffering due to the fact that it would be difficult to have a population accept the brutal treatment of an entire people without those people first being deprived of their humanity.

The article goes on to cite specific examples, including Disney’s Alladin (Disney’s Alladin!).

I think there’s something in his theory and will give my own example.

I’m a mystery buff–not suspense, not “action thrillers,” but mysteries: books, movies, television, OTR. I have long believed that what keeps long-running shows on the air is not the strength of the stories; it is difficult to produce quality scripts on a weekly schedule. (Contrast exceptionally well-written British mysteries, such as Morse and Inspector Lewis–they commonly produce four to eight shows a season, rather than 20 or more.) Rather, the success is in creating characters that the audience enjoys following.

I like the NCIS television show, primarily for the humorous interplay amongst the lead characters (anyone who actually behaved like the character, Tony DiNozzo, would have been disciplined for sexual harassment by the second episode and fired by the fourth). I came to the show in reruns on cable networks sometime during its third or fourth season. and found it enjoyable mental chewing gum.

I quickly learned how to recognize the earlier episodes: They tended to be ones in which the plot involved terrorism of some kind. As time passed and the folly of the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq became more apparent, the percentage of storylines involving “terrorists plots” declined drastically, as the show morphed more and more towards conventional murder mysteries (often straining the pretexts for having a military agency involved in the investigation).

And the “terrorists” were almost always portrayed as brown-skinned men with two-day-old beards and Middle Eastern accents. Common garden variety home-grown terrorists, the Timothy McVeighs of our world, the ones who “look like us” (at least, some of us), the ones who strike our society regularly, need not apply.

And NCIS is mild compared to many movies.

Hollywood, our largest export, has spent the better part of two decades telling us and the rest of the world that Muslims is teh scariest. Just as it can affect our attitudes, it can affect the attitudes of others.

We used to see these all along the road when we would go visit my grandmother in South Carolina in the 50s and 60s.

Now they are going away.

Tobacco barns once dotted fields and roadsides across the state (North Carolina–ed.). Often the only structure in a field of tobacco, it was a two-story log or frame building, sometimes covered in tin or tar paper, with low doors and a side shed.

Now the barns are vanishing from the landscape. Made obsolete by bulk-curing methods in the 1970s, many have fallen into disrepair. If you look closely, you can still see them by the roadside, being consumed by kudzu, sliding into a slow sideways collapse, or crushed under fallen trees.

“Catherine Bishir called them one of the most rapidly diminishing historic resources in the state,” says Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro . Bisher is a co-author of “A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina.”

I treasure history. I trained as an historian. One of the afflictions which afflicts us, as afflictions are wont to do, is the cultural inability to the remember further back than last week. It allows con artists and flim-flam men to ply their trade.

Nevertheless, I question the belief of some that, just because something is old, falling down, and useless, it transforms ipso facto into an “historic resource.”

It is most disconcerting to hear the decades of one’s youth referred to with the phrase, “in that era.”

The rightwing commentariat’s joy over Paul Ryan’s tremendous intellect’s winning the Republican veepstakes illustrates how deeply the Republican Party has wrapped itself in ideological bubble-wrap.

The Republican strategists who aren’t completely wrapped in bubbles know that economic ideology, especially sadistic economic ideology, doesn’t generally win American elections, but that bigotry can, has, and does, so expect a torrent of racist dogwhistles over the next three months.

(This is a slightly reworked version of a comment I made in this thread. It’s my comment; I can rescue it.)

Asia Times considers the creation of artificial worlds:

But the worlds created by Walt Disney and Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, are actually not that far apart.

The world of Disney is the closest thing to totalitarianism that the entertainment-industrial complex has ever produced. The founder, Walt Disney, created a saccharine, air-brushed utopia that has been a dystopic reality for so many who have worked in the many enterprises of the Disney universe. The affinity between Disneyworld and the world of North Korea goes beyond any taste for Western-style entertainment that Kim Jong-eun might have picked up during his Swiss education.

(major snippage)

The world of Walt Disney is the kind of social engineering that the North Korean regime has aspired to create. North Korea, too, has a founder who serves as a substitute father for all children, who established a governing template that his successors religiously maintain, and whose wisdom continues to be celebrated through word and image. North Korea projects a utopian vision of smiling, hard-working people that turns out to be very different in reality. The government attempts to maintain strict social control, particularly in Pyongyang, the showcase capital.

Some years ago, we took the kids to Disney World for a week, staying in a hotel on the property, immersed in Disney’s land.

It was eerie, life in an artificial bubble disconnected from anything not Disney. By the time we caught the train home, we had lost touch with the world.

Big Brother American style–not imposed, but wrapped in a bow, marketed, and eagerly purchased.

Some years later, while I still worked for the railroad, I was walking from our office adjoining the train station to the station itself.

I met a fellow who was staring intently at the work of architect Frank Furness. After a few pleasantries, he mentioned that he was studying the building because he designed buildings for Disney theme parks.

He pointed out a detail of the decorative brick work.

“It’s marvelous,” he said, “except where Furness has five decorative bricks, Disney would have three.”

Whenever I see one of Disney’s ads touting its antiseptic, sterile, and ultimately lifeless biospheres for the whole family, I remember that encounter.

A lot of the ambivalence over women’s feeding their babies the way God designed is because some men think they, rather than women, must control the breasts of the world.

I’m back from visiting First Daughter in Philadelphia (it was good to be back in Philly). I’ll post some pictures from the trip after I get a chance to prepare them for posting with the GIMP (I have a podcast on using the GIMP coming up at HPR).

She took me to a free art show at UPenn in which Stefan Sagmeister explores happiness. My first impression upon entering the tour was that it might be a bit self-indulgent.

It wasn’t; it was introspective, but also thought-provoking and fun, a difficult combination to achieve.

I recommend it highly. Learn more at the website.

When I grew up in these parts, we never heard speak of tornadoes. Not ever.

Tonight, as we watched our favorite Tivoed mystery shows, we were interrupted by three tornado warnings (not “alerts,” warnings, which mean tornadoes have actually been sighted, not that “conditions are right” for possible tornadoes).

So I have a question.

How the hell have those stinkin’ libruls managed to create actual tornadoes as part of their plot to convince the gullible public that the climate might actually be changing?

How?

Tell me how.

The Republican Party has become a political corporate raider.

It takes over governments, sells off bits and pieces, such as schools, public resources, prisons, and highways, to enrich its corporate masters, and leaves behind the ashes for the citizenry.

In Republican World, there is no such thing as the common good.

There is only the “For Sale” sign.

Washing machines are installed. Art just is.

If you have not listened to Night Beat, do so now.

You will not regret it.

I had forgotten just how bloody annoying Windows is.

Then I set up a computer for a friend . . . .

I listen to a lot of Old Time Radio (“old time” in this context means mostly 1940s and early 1950s, not “old time” to me, but, then, I’m old), mostly because it’s fun (see the links in the sidebar).

It reminds one of the days when writers were able to tell a coherent, concise story with a beginning, middle, and end, in half an hour. (This would appear to be a lost art–not just the “beginning, middle, and end” part, but also the “coherent” part).

One of the shows I sometimes indulge in is “Casey, Crime Photographer,” which under various permutations of that name, aired for a decade.

Somewhere in the introduction, the announcer would always say,

The Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation and its 10,000 employees bring you . . . .

You cannot imagine those words today, for, to today’s employers, employees are not partners in production.

Today’s employees are the enemy, to be vanquished, despoiled, and impoverished.

Especially impoverished, so that Wall Street bonus babies can get their bonuses for “cutting costs.”

Just ask Walmart, whose business model is based on exporting jobs to China and abusing employees.

Inquiring minds want to know.

War is not a board game.