I See A Financial Transaction In Your Future

Just a sideshow mage, maybe a little too proud of his gifts considering his present station. Lodged in the little booth behind the round cloth-covered table in an obscure part of the arcade.

Here's one, you see, here's a good one now. All I ask is a quarter, the fourth part of a dollar, and for your trouble you can have a thousand dollars for it. You see? You see the attraction? A thousand dollars for a quarter: Yours! Oh, and but all you have to do is tell me what's under the hat…

You see? You see the potential of it now, the negligible loss balanced against the considerable gain? Eh? Eh?

Your wondering what might fit under the hat, whether there might be a hole in the table making room for a much larger object than you might at first suspect, whether between the tassles there you might get glimpse of whatever it might be. And it's only a quarter to guess.

And it's a secret, you see. And the mage, you understand, this is what I do, this is the thing handed down to me, for an additional quarter the mage will reply with utter truth to any question put to him by the seeker, and for a dollar answers a fifth question for free.

Time was it was a dime, and before that a penny. It was a dime when I was coming up, always a dime, but I was told about the penny I'm old but not that old, heh heh.

Yes, yes, it was always ten dollars to buy the answer from the mage, decline the chance to gain a thousand dollars with an independent guess but instead pay up and have the thing straightforwardly revealed by the simple offices of an ageless business proposition cloaked in the mysterium of initiation into the ancient ways of the mage.

Yes, yes, it's always been ten dollars to be a mage. The secret revealed, yes. It kept the number of new mages down back when guesses were a penny each, yes. Ten dollars was a lot then. Nowadays it's not so much, but nowadays who wants to be a mage? Who wants sit in a booth all day long giving true but necessarily unhelpful answers to the straggle of seekers happening by? They want their thousand dollars but they can't find it in themselves, you see? Still, a quarter here, a quarter there. It's a living.

Oh, but yes. Your ten. You've paid to join now, you'll have your secret revealed now, you're fit to use it or pass it on yourself, oh yes. All rights and privileges, just as promised.

It's my head, you see. It's my head that's under the hat.

Go on now.

Recently Sighted

Here's a caricature of Glenn Reynolds, writer of the well known (among people who know about these things) blog Instapundit. I photoshopped Reynold's head on the body of a robot stacking colored blocks (even though I suck at Photoshop), in response to a contest proposed by Brad Reed last year at Sadly, No!, who asked his readers, for his own sarcastic reasons, to submit images of a robotized Reynolds.

I'm pleased to see Brad's chosen to use my caricature a few times since then when revisiting yet another of Instapundit's pronouncements.

On his blog Reynolds is known for going on succinctly enough about the business of being wrong in public, frequently approaching the limit of what might be described as the greatest lower bound of words in any realized rhetoric needed to issue wrongness into the world, with the use of his trademark phrase Heh. Indeed. — words which by virtue of being unleashed on the internet have the power to incorporate a cleverly coded reference to some other more lengthily propounded wrong devised by someone else out there on the web, thereby economically encapsulating the greater amount of wrong in the smaller container of his famous phrase. I imagine on a good day, Heh. by itself is rhetoric enough for Reynolds, an elemental monad of wrong excreted on his blog along with its linked nonsense for the nourishment of his large and avid flock of readers.

Reading Glenn Reynolds and his asociates risks exposure to a debilitating dosage of wrong over time, and it's the chosen task of the folks at S,N! to fashion a palliative out of ridicule, contumely and if necessary, relevant information in an effort to helpfully disabuse readers of the sort of notions that regularly ingesting such wrong produces. Brad's contest to robotize Reynolds was, I suppose, in support of such efforts. Good times, good times.

UPDATE April 15, 2009: Blue Dog Texan, over at Firedoglake, resuscitated my Reynolds caricature today. Good to see its getting wider circulation. Take that, Sadly, No! Contest Winner Person! HA!!

An American Tune

 
Eric Rauchway links to a segment of the Colbert Report in which Paul Simon sings "An American Tune." Here's an earlier solo version from the Dick Cavett Show, bad hair and all:

I wasn't aware that Simon had lifted the tune from elsewhere, but this comment in the "more info" section of the above video points to the tune Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded (The Passion Chorale) by J.S. Bach. I gather plenty of people have heard about this over the years. News to me.

…the tune catches at me ironically in view of Simon's title. Not only did he crib it from J.S. Bach (I presume) but Bach cribbed it from Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). It's from his 1601 'Lustgarten, Deutsche Lieder zu vier, fuenf, sechs und acht Stimmen' (Pleasure Garden, German Songs for 4,5,6 & 8 voices) & appears there as a rueful little lovesong of at least 3 verses called 'Mein G'mueth ist mir verwirret' (My mind is confused). There the tune isn't solemn at all but one of the bouncy, syncopated dances popular then. Who knows? As our knowledge of truly old music deepens it wouldn't be surprising to find that Hassler borrowed an even older dance. So Simon also knows a good tune when he hears one. Understanding a tune's past uses deepens our appreciation of its present & this one's proved its universal staying power.

The tune of "Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded" is traced to Hassler in 1601, but the lyrics, epitomising mystical union with the suffereing godhead, are attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, and date to 1153.

If it was a bouncy tune before Bach got his hands on it, Bach changed all that, giving it a formal gravity that Simon's performance takes advantage of. Simon's lyrics don't lead to a mystical union with the suffering of the mediaeval Christian godhead Bernard mapped out in Latin 850 years ago, just the simple and more universally applicable recognition that sleep must come to each and all, that tomorrow will come another day to wend through, however much all doubts and disclocations and yearned-for transcendence may wrestle with one another for attention in the late of night. And the doubts are Simon's doubts, and the dislocations are implicitly America's dislocations, and the hoped for transcendence caught by his lovely dreamtime image of the Statue of Liberty sailing out to sea with all her freighted implications, out to greet the world, for whatever that might prove to be worth, make "An American Tune," despite strong prior claims to authorship, his own.

A Higher Quality of Low Humor

 
It's… The Monty Python Channel on YouTube.

Sadly, no "Spanish Inquisition" in the collection as yet, but then, what did you expect? An argument?

Holding The Medallion Holding The Medallion

We Are Wizards

 
Brad Neely's alternate reading of Harry Potter, in many, many YouTube parts. Recommended for the quality of Neely's voice as much as for his wit.


 

"I'm really going to miss those granite countertops…"

Scores of funny mashups have been made of this scene from Der Untergang and posted on YouTube. Here's one of the latest, and funniest:

Fire Joe Morgan Fires Itself

Sad news on the internet traditions front. The glorious tradition that was Fire Joe Morgan has come to an end.

Fire Joe Morgan devoted itself to skewering the pronouncements of baseball's raft of media "analysts" who never let actual, you know, analysis, get in the way of a dead cliché. The paragon of this practice for the site's purposes was ESPN's Joe Morgan, as the blog's title indicates, but its writers reached out across the country to other sportswriters deserving the back of the hand, and delivered in full measure. What great fun it was to read.

Fire Joe Morgan will be missed. Maybe, someday, like Fafblog, it will return. I can only hope. No, really. As a Giants fan, that's really all I ever get to do.

Armistice Day

I suppose the First World War was the last chapter in one facet of the great social upheaval ushered in by the French Revolution. It obliterated the last remaining wisps of the ancien régime throughout Europe, leaving behind a continent of resentful, exhausted survivors who, even in the face of the collective insanity of that horrible conflict, soon enough turned their nations to mutual slaughter once again. Everyone notices that the Second World War was caused by the First, and all the ancillary conflicts around the globe spawned by the outcome of the Second World War can be traced back through the Second and the First to The French Revolution and the utter transformation of social relations demanded by it.

If Chou En Lai didn't really say, "It's too soon to tell," when asked his thoughts on the impact of the French Revolution, history will insist that he would have had to have said that, being Chou En Lai, and ascribe it to him.

The Armistice, entered into on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, halted the age-old murderousness of Europe for a time, and for that we can all be grateful. Only a few short decades after Armistice had been achieved the murderousness returned, redoubled in viciousness and on a truly global scale, the Second World War, which we have not yet outlived, consequence of the First. But there is that oddly symmetrical moment, 11/11/11, the six ones of the Armistice, that pause of peace, to look back on in wonder.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Professional pollsters puzzling over the apparent lack of a Bradley Effect in last week's presidential race will be heartened to know that one of their fellows, Scott Rassmussen, has looked closely, very, very, closely at the election results and come away with the startling discovery that the majority of people who cast their ballots for Barack Obama were actually crossing their fingers behind their backs and voting for Ronald Reagan instead.

Which suggests that, as always, there is no news of any kind that is not, in some universe very much like our own, good news for Republicans.

UPDATE (11/11/08):

Two Comments!!!!111!!!!! Whooooooooooooooh!!
 

Pretty Blue Here

 
Related to the previous post, in Santa Cuz County Barack Obama captured 77.41% of the vote, McCain, not quite 20%.

UPDATE: Santa Cruz Frenchier than France! From Le Figaro:

If you were American, would you vote for McCain or Obama?

John McCain: 25.14%
Barack Obama: 74.86%

Cartographic projections of the Results of the 2008 Presidential Election

Mark Newman at the University of Michigan bends a map of the United States to reflect the size of the population in each of its counties — the heavily populated counties expand and the less densely populated ones contract — and then he paints the resulting map with colors ranged along the spectrum from red to blue representing the margin of victory in each country for McCain or Obama respectively. Pure red is for counties that gave at least 70% of their vote to McCain, and pure blue is for counties that went for Obama by 70% or more, with all the purples representing results in between. It's an arresting exercise in trying to visualize what our country's coming to.
 

Flowerbucket

Now what?

—Callie Schell, via Digital Journalist
 

The line it is drawn, the vote it is cast

Been A Long Time Coming

Soaring Rhetoric! Baseless Charges! Now Half Off!

 
On this day in history, there were only two days left until
the end of election season so they added an extra hour to the clock just to make it all last a little longer.

Penalty time, I guess.