I do aikido and iaido pretty regularly, and the top garment you wear, sometimes called your keikogi, is a pleated cotton jacket. More about that, below the fold
Month: June 2011
Kids These Days: Summer Reading
by Doctor Science
When I was a young ‘un (you whippersnappers), summer was for Goofing Off. The only kids who did homework over the summer were ones who had flunked in the spring and were trying to catch up.
The natural consequence of this care-free time was that we came back to school and had to spend most of September getting up to speed. Nowadays, students get homework assignments for the summer — a set of math problems they’re asked not to start until a few weeks before back-to-school (ETA: the Sprogs inform me that this is a middle school thing, it only happens sometimes in high school; also, there is sometimes social studies homework), and reading lists. The idea — and it’s a good one — is for the students to “warm up” before classes start, so they don’t have to re-learn to think like students, as we did.
I find it interesting to see what makes the reading list. This one is for Sprog#2’s sophomore honors English class, in a very good suburban NJ public school:
Required assigned reading: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston
The arc of history
has bent once more toward justice.
(by Doctor Science)
from twitpic
As Andrew Sullivan says, “This is the moment that marriage for gay couples became irreversible in America.” New York is too big, too rich, and too important for marriages made there not to be accepted elsewhere in the country. And the NY State Senate has a *Republican* majority, and the bill was promoted by a *Republican* NYC mayor.
You Are Now Leaving the First World
by Doctor Science
The United States is no longer a First World country, not all the way through.
A meme-engendering 1895 cartoon in “Punch”, by George Du Maurier.
We’re not a First World country because we no longer have one of their most important characteristics: a high and steadily-increasing life expectancy. A study released this week shows that in significant areas of the US life expectancy is no longer increasing, and in a shockingly large part of the country the life expectancy for women is actually decreasing.
How to tell harassment from the P Game
by Doctor Science
Now that Anthony Weiner has made a noise like a hoop and rolled away, I’ve been able to get someone to tell me, coherently, what he *did*. During the melee last week it was impossible for me to get information about the most important issue, because it was so hard to find anyone who would talk about it. I felt as though the entire news media was playing a game which I’m told is quite popular on middle-school buses these days, which (for the sake of your spam filters) I will call “the P Game”. At least 11-year-olds *know* they’re playing it for the thrill of saying R-rated words.
There was also the fact that news was broken by Andrew Breitbart & associates, and if Bretibart said water was wet I’d insist on getting a second opinion.
Now, let me be clear. For me, the *only* important issue is, “Did Weiner send inappropriately sexual pictures to women who weren’t expecting them?” That’s it. The *only* thing that matters in the public sphere is the recipients’ consent.
“Rooster Rock, Columbia River” by George Ottinger. Unexpected rooster is unexpected … and I rather think the name of the rock is a pun, don’t you?
Your Friday rainy season thread
Japan, my students tell me dutifully, is a country with 4 seasons, but I have never figured out which one they take out to make room for the rainy season. Fortunately, I was prepared for the whole concept by these torrential downpours we used to have in Southern Mississippi, but other places in the US … Read more
The Trauma of War: Going or Staying Behind
by Doctor Science An absolutely not-to-be-missed discussion is taking place in the comments to Ta-Nehesi Coates’ post, “The Great Trauma Of Your Generation”. TNC front-pages a comment on Shelby Foote: While other celebrated [the Japanese surrender] in the streets, Foote was devastated that World War II was over. According to Tony Horowitz, he had “missed … Read more
The distance to the past
by Doctor Science
While I’m working on something longer and more solid, a few sidenotes on historical topics.
Yesterday’s Metropolitan Museum Image of the Day was this picture:
The Met’s page on the picture (where you can do all kinds of fancy zooming) gives the date only as “1940s”, but in the spirit of Andrew Sullivan’s View from Your Window Contest, I wondered if I could narrow it down much, much further.
talking with leo…
by russell
Back in February, my wife and I went to NOLA to visit some friends, eat some good food, and listen to music. We stayed with our friend Leo and his family. Leo's not his real name, his real name is not important. We'll just call him Leo.
Leo is a former colleague of my wife's. He's a marketing consultant, works a lot with entrepreneurs who are trying to bootstrap their mom and pop operations into something they can sell. He's a very very bright and personable guy, funny, great ideas, knows how to run a meeting, knows how to talk to a roomful of people. He has, professionally, a very good track record. He's helped make some folks very wealthy.
We've known Leo and his family for a long long time. When they come this way, they stay with us, when we go their way, we stay with them. He's kind of part of the extended russell family, and vice versa.
One night after the wives and kids went to bed, Leo and I hung out, had a couple of beers, and discussed life. Eventually, we got on the topic of the sorry state of the national economic life, and Leo told me a story.
Tactician, Plan Thyself
by Eric Martin Given my oft–stated concern about what a potential post-Qaddafi period will look like (would there be purges/an insurgency, would it require a peacekeeping/nation building mission, overseen by which groups/nations, etc.), these paragraphs from a recent New York Times piece on the conflict in Libya stood out: …Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, returning from a brief … Read more
Your Friday open thread coming to you a day early
Tomorrow is going to be a bit busy and I'm a bit unsure about the wireless where I'm going, so here's an early thread from Hanoi, where it is hot, hot, hot. There is a way to have a post appear at a scheduled time, but I know most of you appreciate that these posts are hand crafted one of a kind jewels.
Naipaul follow-up post: On authors and authority
by Doctor Science
Hilzoy appeared in the comments to the previous post, saying
Wrong of me to say "it would be a mistake", just like that. I was responding on TNC’s thread, and should have said (what I meant): it would be a mistake not to read him because of what you see on this blog", which is what the person I was responding to said s/he was planning to do. I don’t think, and should not have implied, that there is any such thing as a book that’s good for everyone. (Personally, I am allergic to Wordsworth. I am reliably informed that I shouldn’t be, but there we are.)
Fair enough.
A Trinidadian friend told me that many people in Trinidad no longer read Naipaul’s books after his visit to the country in 2007, where he insulted and publicly humiliated schoolchildren who had been invited to a Q&A with him. At least some Trinidadian schools no longer have Naipaul on the high school reading list — in his tirade he said that literature is for adults, not children, anyway.
Derek Walcott, who numerous commenters at that Trinidad&Tobago News site mentioned as someone who they can respect whole-heartedly, wrote a poem, The Mongoose, expressing his view of Naipaul:
After its gift had died and off the page its biles exude the stench
of envy, "la pourriture" in French
cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian
then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian
Once he liked humans, how long ago this was
The mongoose wrote "A House for Mr Biswas"
Textile art by Clara Applewhaite-Mitchell, of Trinidad and NJ.
I could write about how knowing things about the author changes (or doesn’t) how we view a text, but I just don’t feel like it right now, it involves too much talking about people’s failings. Feel free to discuss in comments, but for the moment I want to talk about authors and authority.
On not reading V.S. Naipaul
by Doctor Science
It’s not often that I disagree with either hilzoy or Ta-Nehesi Coates, and rarer still for me to disagree with both of them at once, but today I do.
The source describes this as “1892 woman writing impressionist painting”, but I haven’t been able to figure out who it’s by. It’s in the style of Gauguin, but I can’t find it in any of the Gauguin archives online.
Backstory: V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize-winning Trinidadian writer, is known to be a giant, flaming dick. In an interview this week
Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.
He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”
The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.I don’t see that there’s any doubt about which body part to compare him to.
Coming out of the woodwork post friday open post
I'm headed to Kurume for a weekend. While I have been told that Kurume has the highest number of love hotels per capita in Japan, I'm going there for other reasons. What's up with your weekend?
Google wipes its maps clean of Indian Reservations
by Doctor Science
Stephen Bridenstine is a grad student at the University of British Columbia studying the image of Indians (aka Native Americans) in non-Native American culture. He noticed (h/t Sociological Images):
Sometime between the first week of February and the last week of May, American Indian reservations disappeared from Google Maps!