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?
