Google informs me that it's now the Lunar New Year. Growing up―and in fact until very recently―I'd always heard of it as Chinese New Year. Wonder why it changed. Sure, China isn't the only place that celebrates it, but it did originate there. And the colorful parades are Chinese in origin.
Anyway, the Year of the Tiger is starting, so let's celebrate.
"Bomb Cyclone" sounds like the name of a club DJ who's trying too hard. Apparently that's what we got, though. Low pressure, tons of snow, starting last night and continuing until late afternoon or early evening today. You can't miss it.
So today has been a rare day that I don't leave the house. Did leave my apartment to check the mail, but I've stayed inside the building. Tomorrow I'll venture out, which is something to look forward to.
There's a certain magic in establishing a whole other personality for what's essentially just your hand. There's also an opening for me to make filthy jokes about it, but I'll spare you. This made me laugh because of Señor Wences's timing, and also because it's just so weird in an engaging way. I remember him still popping up here and there when I was a kid.
Item one: in the wake of Hispanic voters' weakening alignment with the Democratic party, liberal pundits have begun to pinpoint Spanish language radio as a source of "misinformation" radicalizing older Latin voters and some younger ones as well. The relative conservatism of these broadcasters is a longstanding fact, and draws from the attitudes of its traditional listeners. In other words, the stations aren't making them think anything that they weren't already inclined to. But you can't blame the would-be political monoculture of Anglo-Saxon media for trying.
Item two: Neil Young has made an ultimatum―or at least tried to―toward Spotify, saying that he'll pull his music unless they drop Joe Rogan's podcast. This is over some vaccine-sceptic theories that Rogan has aired through his interviews but not exactly endorsed. It may also trace back to when Young caught heat for saying nice things about then-President Reagan, so that he's determined to never leave his left flank unguarded again.
What these two stories have in common is the concept of misinformation. But what does the word mean? I've always thought that it meant "something that isn't true," and I figured this definition was shared pretty commonly. But the working definition of late seems to be "something you're not supposed to say, true or not." Or if there is a truth standard, there's no commonly understood way of demonstrating something to be true or false.
Except for appeal to authority. And if the rule is that anyone disagreeing with Jen Psaki can be held to be a liar and punished accordingly, well, that's not sustainable. Not unless we've all fallen through the Earth's crust into hell.
Just started reading a book by the German-born priest and social critic Ivan Illich. The book is actually coauthored with Barry Sanders, and it's called ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. It traces the development of written alphabetic language from its roots in the Bronze-to-Iron Age. There's also, I think, some material on the degradation of same, but I haven't gotten to the polemics yet.
What I can say is that Illich brings a good hand to his writing about the past:
The transformations brought about by Greek literacy are well symbolized by the appearance of Sybil, who replaces her older sister, the Pythia, as the model of the prophetess. Her story is told by Heraclitus, a Pythagorean who, through Cratylus, could claim Plato as a pupil. He was the first to distinguish the consonants (which he divided into the unvoiced aphthonga and the sonant aphona) from the vowels. Plutarch has conserved the passage from Heraclitus in which the Sybil makes her first appearance. In the image of the alphabet, she wrests utterance from its temporal context and turns prophecy into a literary genre: "Sybil, in her mania, makes the oracle of the god ring out a whole millennium, joyless, odorless, and unadorned..." She spells out the future. For the Sybil writes out her oracle on leaves, then later on tablets. She brings stone slabs to King Tarquinas, who reigned over the Campagne, south of Rome―over Etruscan towns through which the Romans got their alphabet. No one need strain anymore to hear the ominous murmurings of the Delphic Pythia. The menacing future can now be read.
It is pretty much impossible at this point to determine if the Sybil was based on a real person, exaggerated or no. But it does seem like Heraclitus's description of her details something real that was happening at the time.
What can I say? It works.
To be honest it's kind of funny to me that you can find instructional videos on how to make shadow puppets with your hand. "Damn it, I need to make a bunny rabbit now and I don't know where to begin. What's this? Oh, thank God."
Think I remember seeing these steps on a poster years ago.
Mannequin on the Moon is a relatively new syndicated comic by Guy Boothby and Pia Guerra. Guerra does a lot of work for Marvel and DC and the like, so drawing New Yorker-ish gags may be kind of a change of pace for her. The two of them seem to make a good team, anyway.
As to the comic above, well, who hasn't had a day like that?
Rides on RIPTA buses are frequently punctuated with this creepy AI voice. On the more practical side it announces (some of the) upcoming stops. Also reminds passengers that they have to wear masks, and sometimes other policies. This voice is nominally female and--as is often the case with AI--doesn't know where to put stresses.
The announcement added most recently is about the fares. All paper products have been eliminated, so if you don't have a WAVE card or app you have to pay exact fare. And hearing this droid say the word "eliminated" is more than a little unsettling.
The same announcement in Spanish is just a recording of a guy. Not sure why they didn't go that route for the English.
Say you're starting to get peckish. Dinners not for another couple or few hours, and you don't want to spoil it by eating a lot. But hunger will distract you from anything else you're doing if you don't eat something.
Peanuts sometimes work. I tend to have a jar of roasted peanuts lying around. But peanut butter seems to be more efficient. Today one spoonful did the trick. Granted, it was a pretty big spoon.
The past few days we've had deeply cold weather. Definitely below freezing, and it felt like it. Today was relatively mild, like low 40s when the sun was at its height. Well, I was going to go out in the absence of anything truly freakish anyway, but the relative warmth was not bad. Meant I could go out in a lighter jacket anyway. See what tomorrow brings, shall we.
I've been a user, editor, and defender of Wikipedia since its early years. It's always had problems, certainly. Vandalism might get cleaned up within a few minutes or might stick around for years. Some band articles were obviously written by, like, the bassist or somebody in a desperate bid for publicity. But it's generally struck me as a good primer on various topics and guide to further readings.
For some topics this is still true. In other areas there are signs that go beyond troubling and into the realm of alarming. The article on Scott Atlas is illustrative. In terms of Atlas's work on COVID the article gives the last word--and most of the other words--to his critics. There's an entire section labeling his analysis and advocacy as "misinformation", including some things that are arguably pretty good information. At the very least there's still an active controversy.
Now yes, strictly speaking anyone can edit. But if you look at the article's talk page you see a lot of dissent not reflected in the article. Almost certainly some of these people have tried to influence the content of the article, ultimately to no avail.
When an open source authority is edited by disparate people at varying levels of knowledge, skill, and interest, it can be refined into something fair and informative. When a particular clique captures it and they're all working in one direction, it starts to approach the level where you should take it with a grain of salt.
Until she started singing, I didn't realize the woman in this clip was Natalie Merchant. Then it became pretty hard to miss.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is my favorite of the Victorian British poets. His melding of pagan imagery and Christian ideas was certainly an achievement. But really I just love the way he sounds. He brought a new rhythm to old forms.
We got our first substantial snowfall of the winter today. Christmas Eve we got something but it was only ever a dusting and the rain the next day meant it was gone instantly. This might stick around. It's not huge, though. Didn't seem to stop traffic or anything. We're probably lucky it happened on a Friday rather than a Saturday, otherwise I think the city would have taken its sweet time plowing.
So, what did I do? I'm not sure I had gotten any good snow pictures before with my pinhole camera, so I took it down to the river and took a picture of a spot where ducks and gulls hang out. Slightly makes up for me completely sleeping through Waterfire season. Soon I'll get to developing and we can see how everything turned out.
It's a nice, subtle thing about apartment living. Hearing other people go about their business.
Oh, there could certainly be downsides. If you're trying to get to sleep and there's truly incessant noise, that can be aggravating. But even at 2AM, the isolated bump here, floorboard squeak there is kind of a comfort. It reminds you that there are other people in the vicinity, fallible like you, but alive like you.
Scottish wildcats―or highland tigers as they're sometimes known―are extremely endangered. Hopefully the decline can be reversed. Who knows?
Mind you, cute they may be, but you want to be very careful if you're around them. They sometimes charge humans out of the blue, and they do have enough natural weaponry to do some damage. African wildcats, the ultimate source of our domestic cats, must have had a different quality.
"The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."
If you're watching out for the tenor of the times, it should be noted that the latter part of 2020 brought not one but two viral hit songs called "Fuck 2020." In a similar vein, John Oliver dynamited a giant concreted "2020" on his show about a year ago. I thought about embedding video, but there's only so much pondhopping smugness I can take. You can look it up under "John Oliver blows up 2020" if you're curious.
As you might guess, 2021 isn't getting off much easier. As to what kind of attitude the media will be displaying as 2022 draws to a close, I think we can all guess. In fact, we're in for a long spell of every year being the worst one, or close to it.
This anti-whatever-year-it-is bias has gotten very old very quick. It's basically just learned helplessness with a faux-defiant sneer. Nothing that's happened in the last two years has been any kind of unprecedented catastrophe for the human race. It's spawned a greater trend toward authoritarianism, but that could die down if more people defy it. There's a difference between being born at the worst point in history and being born at a regular time but listening to people who don't really care about you.
I knew Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin the Paranoid Android was a friend of mine. And Senator, you're no Marvin the Paranoid Android.
