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,…
Leave the window open, Hillary. Forever
“The window of opportunity will not be open forever,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently warned Iran and the world, demanding that Iran get serious about “negotiating” an agreement that will satisfy the U.S. and Israel that Iran isn’t trying to develop nuclear weapons. Clinton also said she doesn’t think that Iran is serious about…
Penelope Kibby—“Still We Dream” (vocal version of Monk’s “Ugly Beauty”)
What you missed by skipping the 2009 End of year Jazz Vocal Recital, at the New Zealand School of Music. With Kate Fausett (Piano), Callum Goldie (Drums) and Rory Macartney (Bass). Posted by missjazzgirl “zhokandawe” tells us that Mike Ferro came up with the lyrics for Carmen McRae’s 1990 all-Monk album. “Ugly Beauty” is Monk’s…
Cato Cuffs Kochs
At the National Review, more vituperation re the Koch boys, and their determination to teach the Cato Institute a lesson in humility, which has never really struck me as a libertarian virtue. Was Mencken humble? Ayn Rand? Milton Friedman? I’m thinkin’ Dave and Charlie have a tendency to confuse humility with, you know, oriental despotism,…