Back in high school—waaaay back in high school—I read Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Eighty-five percent of it surely went over my head, but the remaining 15 percent impressed me. A few years later, I essayed The Dog Years. I missed about 95 percent of that one, so I never made it to the end….
Günter Grass—What Must Be Said
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long What clearly is and has been Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors Are at best footnotes. It is the alleged right to first strike That could annihilate the Iranian people– Enslaved by a loud-mouth And guided to organized jubilation– Because…
Not “allow,” Peggy; “demand”
Over at the Wall Street Journal (subscription only), Peggy Noonan, wrapping up the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, complains that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, et al. “are allowing the GOP to be painted as the war party.” They aren’t “allowing” it to happen, Peggy. They’re demanding it. But thanks for putting in a plug…
Joyce Maynard, she’s entitled
Over at the New Republic, Tim Noah has a bit of fun with Joyce Maynard’s breathless account (for the New York Times) of the quasi-countless benefits this fifty-something gal has derived from her brand-new $800 haircut: “It’s only hair, of course,” Joycie tells us. “Still, two weeks later, I observed in myself a marked elevation…
There are markets, and then there are markets
I agree with the Wall Street Journal on a dismaying number of issues. Free trade is an easy one—increasing incomes abroad while decreasing the cost of living at home has always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Like the Journal, I have a hearty dislike of subsidies—farm subsidies of course, but energy as well. Clean…
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, don’t they?
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is Noam Chomsky’s classic example of a grammatical sentence that doesn’t compute, his way of demonstrating that the human brain processes linguistic information in several ways at the same time. But if we fiddle with Chomsky’s sentence, we can show that the English language is perhaps more flexible than is…
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. She isn’t wearing any underwear. Like I could give a shit. Let’s get on with it.” “Okay, Boopsie and Poopsie here, they want to get it on. So which one is which? That’s all I gotta know. Just tell me, okay, and then we’re home free.” “Now, it seems…
TRAVELING 2DAY Back on Monday
Spoiler Alert: “The 4 Dangers Destroying Men” is extremely boring
For the first ten minutes, at least. This is an ad showing a hot chick who looks seriously capable of destroying a lot of men, which I saw posted on the Weekly Standard. (Here, it’s “3 Dangers Destroying Men,” with the same babe. I don’t understand the change.) Anyway, I watched the first ten minutes,…
Sign o’ the Times? New Yorker fact-checkers don’t know the difference between a turbine and a cylinder
The current issue of the New Yorker has an excellent story on the Titanic by Daniel Mendelsohn, but even though Dan has been fascinated by the Titanic from an early age, he comes a cropper while describing a famous scene from James Cameron’s inescapable film: The scene in which the liner puts out to sea,…