The Spice Is Right 0
One thing I cannot understand is the “pumpkin spice” fad. Go to your local grocery store and browse the spice rack–I defy you to find “pumpkin spice” with a McCormacks label and, on the off chance that you do, you will find that it has a list of ingredients that have nothing whatsoever to do with large orange gourds.
Indeed, I have long held that anyone who has eaten a well-prepared sweet potato pie will not waste time on pumpkins again.
Frank Bruni tries to understand “pumpkin spice” and finds a metaphor. A snippet:
It’s invention run amok, marketing gone mad, the odoriferous emblem of commercialism without compunction or bounds. It’s the transformation of an illusion — there isn’t any spice called pumpkin, nor any pumpkin this spicy — into a reality.
Oh, hell, let’s just go there: It’s Donald Trump. I don’t mean the color of his hair, though pumpkin spice is as good a description of it as any. I mean that pumpkin spice became special by shamelessly insisting that it was and ruthlessly creeping into every corner of the culture that was docile, dippy or lazy enough to accommodate it.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
The hunt for politeness continues, and another gun fires itself–at least, that’s how the sentence reads.
Blaming the Victim 0
John Kim, writing at Psychology Today Blogs, demonstrates that women are not to blame for male predation. Furthermore, he suggests Harvey Weinstein and his ilk are far from being monstrous exceptions to the rule, but, rather, are far too typical.
Here’s a snippet:
Aside:
It’s not the best-written piece, but I think he makes points worth considering. And, in a related piece, Laura Gianino tells a tale of trolls.
QOTD 0
Taking It Easy 0
Another picture from my brother on Virginia’s Northern Neck.
We would frequently see these at Pine View Farm and, from time to time, would capture one, then always let it go.
Heard ‘Round the World . . . 0
.. . . and Noz is listening.
Tales of the Trumpling: Snapshots of Trickle-Down Trumpery 0
A Halloween Trumpling.
The demonstration, which included marching around the school twice, was a display of unity from the student body, a protest of administrative inaction, and a call for change, student leaders said.
Real Big Men 0
Letting their swastikas fly:
Police said in a news release Friday that Tyler Tenbrink, 28, William Fears, 30, and Colton Fears, 28, all of Pasadena, Texas, were arrested on charges of attempted murder. They were being held in the Alachua County Jail.
Follow the link for details.
Meta: A Little BASH Script for Scaling Media 0
You may have noticed that I rescale embedded media to 500 pixels in width. When I started blogging, 800×600 monitors were still not uncommon, and 500px seemed a sane choice. I’ve maintained the practice for consistency’s sake.
At one time, I maintained a spreadsheet of common dimensions and their scaled values. I could enter the existing values and it would calculate the scaled ones, then I could save it with the additional data.
Ultimately I replaced the spreadsheet with a command line alternative, which works quite nicely (if you can remember high school math, you’ll recognize the equation; piping the output to bc is necessary because BASH by itself can parse only integers):
Code:
echo 500/[original width]*[original height] | bc -l
This outputs the proportional height.
Here’s an example:
Code:
bash-4.3$ echo 500/640*423 | bc -l
330.46875000000000000000 <---I round the output to the nearest integer
Trumpling Weinstein 0
At the Boston Review, Bonnie Honig sees both similarities and differences between Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. The similarities she perceives are not surprising, but the differences are chilling.
Here’s a bit:
(snip)
. . . Trump has changed the rules of the game. Trump would never offer to get treatment to save his job. He would never ask for a second chance. If you are emailing your friends asking for support, if you say you will seek treatment, if you are hoping for another chance, you are already—in Trump’s grade school terms—a loser: reality’s victim, not its maker. The game is over.
Follow the link for the rest; it is quite worth your consideration.
The Gettysburg Depress 0
Werner Herzog’s Bear imagines a Trumpled Gettysburg Address.
