The Flintstones lived in a little bungalow with a flat roof. I had forgotten this. I thought they lived in a cave. The BC Characters live in caves but the Flintstones do not.
Anyway, what sent me on that little dive was this short piece on the Stone House in Portugal. It's apparently rumored to be modeled on houses on The Flintstones. It doesn't really look like them, though. It doesn't look like anything else I've seen, really. Probably an interesting place to live.
There are a couple of people I know who sent away to get their genetic results from 23andMe. Basically for them it was just curiosity. Okay, whatever.
For some others it seems to have been a way to prove they weren't white, or at least not just white. The year 2020 and a few of the other years surrounding it saw a peak in the idea that being part of a "privileged" group was inherently shameful. Finding stray chromosomes that might belong to some other group was a way to ride the identity train without doing weird gender stuff.
Now the company is going bankrupt and erstwhile customers are worried about their data security. There's a lesson here. We're all better off just treating race as irrelevant rather than trying to litigate it.
I know little enough about Conrad Felixmüller's life story. That he was born Conrad Felix Müller and chose to combine his middle name and surname into one, yes. And of course that he was German. He was German and lived at just the right time to live under Nazi rule. This was a miserable circumstance, as you might guess. The Party deemed him a degenerate artist, something that no one of any artistic discernment would agree with, but who needs taste when you have power?
"Children's Carnival Bustle"―given the mouthful title of "Kinderfastnachtstreiben" in its original language―is a sprightly bit of nighttime color. There's also a bit of doubleness to it. While we're looking at them, the children are also looking out at us, at the adult world. Perhaps this is why the small boy in the lead is decked out in oversize grownup clothes, accessorized with clown nose.
Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.
Sohrab Ahmari is very perceptive in this piece. I think it's true that conservatives in the recent past were starting to question whether unfettered corporate power was a good thing. At the very least they were realizing that CEOs and tech high rollers didn't share their values. But now everyone's gotten distracted and the suits have gotten away with just making some tacky gestures.
It's still possible and important for right and left populists to cross barriers and hash things out between themselves. But some people who seemed into that before now aren't.
Not sure if I've talked about this here before. A number of years back I was out on a corner waiting for the bus. The bus came and let some people off, and when they were done I started boarding. But the driver spaced out and didn't think about new passengers getting on, just those getting off. So he closed the door on my arm.
I don't know if you've ever had the full force of a hydraulically operated door on one of your limbs, but I'm not ashamed to say that I screamed. The driver woke up and opened the door again.
But what sticks with me about that experience is that the girl standing behind me never took a break from the conversation she was having on her phone, or took any notice at all. I've held onto this because it supports some ideas I have about how technology can take some already present tendencies in society and make them worse.
Okay, so, Khalil Mahmoud.
Putting aside, for the moment, the specifics of the Israel/Palestine/Gaza issue, which is a lot to put aside...
And put aside as well the question of whether Green Card holders have First Amendment rights. It seems pretty clear to me that they do, and most reputable attorneys would agree, but never mind that.
The thing about this arrest and the serious attempt to deport Khalil is that it rests on the premise that publicly disagreeing with the government is itself grounds for legal punishment, even in the absence of an actual crime. Twitter randos are the only ones making any criminal accusations. The Departments of State and Justice are not.
Conservatives should be very wary of giving the government that kind of power. Do the last five years―COVID, January 6―really leave any doubt that Democrats would also use this kind of power to crush their enemies? Think ahead five minutes, please.
On a related note, Columbia University is continuing its record of being an absolute quisling. What do they have left to sell?
How did people in the Paleolithic live? We're getting a clearer picture on that, although it may never be entirely complete. Why did they do the things they did? To a great extent that's still a mystery.
The circular structure in Russia, built from the bones of at least sixty mammoths, is a case in point. Humans at the time hunted and ate woolly mammoths, which could feed an extended family or small tribe for quite some time. So the presence of the bones isn't a surprise. But their use in this structure is. What exactly was behind it?
It could well be an early religious impulse. An expression of gratitude to the beast for providing sustenance. Or to a higher power for providing the beast. Or perhaps both.
Even if I saw it―which I won't―and it turned out to be really good―which it wouldn't―Disney's new Snow White would stand as an encapsulation of just about everything wrong with the movie industry today. Not because of what's made everyone freak out: lead actress Rachel Zegler's comments on the original and the fairy tale back in 2022. It doesn't matter that Zegler is a sorority pseudointellectual. She'll grow out of it.
But start with the phrase "Disney's new Snow White." The world does not need Disney to redo "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Walt nailed it during the Great Depression. But Disney, the world's richest and most powerful media company, has started on the project of rehashing all their old hits, and they're not going to stop now.
Then consider that the cast was being grilled on production in 2022, and it's just coming out now in 2025. Let's be real. It does not take three years to shoot a movie. Not even if you count postproduction. What takes multiple years is scheduling. Getting permission from corporate HQ to release the damn thing. Because where Hollywood was once run by tyrannical businessmen who liked and sometimes understood movies, now it's run by corporate drones who don't.
Finally there's the absurd business with the dwarves. By going from live little people to a diverse range of races and sizes to CGI they've pleased no one. It could be counted as a failure of nerve, had there ever been nerve to fail.
Last week I emailed someone and they immediately replied. I didn't know about it―the reply part, I mean―until today. That's because they were apparently flagged as spam and thus caught in my spam filter. Not for any reason I can see.
Anyway, I moved the replay email from the spam folder to my regular inbox and I'm hoping that means any future replies will just show up as a regular email. But it just goes to show that the phenomenon of letters being lost or delayed isn't a thing of the past.
I was at the library today and I took a look through their latest copy of The New Yorker. It had an eye-catching cover by Christoph Niemann rather than one of the too-frequent Barry Blitt political caricatures, which was a plus. One article of interest was Anthony Lane's retrospective of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer books. (The illustrator visualizes Archer as Leon Redbone in an Inspector Gadget coat.)
But there's something hard to overlook when reading both the magazine and something like the Arts section of The New York Times. They tend to pander to a certain social and political class.
It's not good for anyone when the arts and coverage/criticism of them is equated with the politics that get lumped together with liberalism. Liberals just buy into the illusion that their bubble is classy. Artists get hooked into an unhealthy patronage system. Conservatives are passively encouraged to become and stay philistines.
Anyway, the last thing we need is more sectarianism.
Puffins, like auks, have really taken the subarctic zone and run with it. They've made their home at least as far north as Iceland and Greenland. So while Orkney, which has a lot of rocks and few trees, might seem an unlikely setting for a bird colony, it's not extreme for them. They've taken to it.
By the way, researching for this post I found out that at least one person has gone online to ask how puffins taste. I'm not hurrying to find out firsthand.
During last year's Presidential campaign, the Democrats' artificial Regular Guy substitute Tim Walz publicly said that misinformation and hate speech were not protected speech. Walz was rightfully ridiculed on that matter, of course. But as time goes on it becomes clear how much of the political spectrum agrees with him, at least on some issues.
On First Amendment grounds these policies are dead in the water. But look at our establishment. Neither our Gaza policy nor Trump's curbing of free speech to protect same has caused as much weeping and gnashing of teeth as his actually quite rational disengagement from the Ukraine war. That's among the politicians and celebrities. How different are things on the grassroots/street level? Time will tell.
It's interesting hearing songs you know redone without vocals. Some people―those who are musicians themselves―can no doubt lay out the notes or otherwise tell you what the players are doing. I can only go on impressions but I recognize things. For example there's this Joni Mitchell song.
And then there's this jazz cover by pianist Leslie Pintchik, about whom I know very little.
A couple of things to point out: By For the Roses Mitchell had already started incorporating jazz elements, which she'd been building up since she was a teenage hepcat. The original of "Banquet" isn't particularly jazzy, though.
Both versions of the song have heavy doses of piano, of course. In Pintchik's version it takes some of what were vocal lines in Mitchell's original. Jazz musicians are often said to learn the lyrics of songs they play even if they don't sing them, just to get the feel. This seems to be a case where the leader and band did that.
