Saturday Morning Cartoon Carnival

 

 

Not Contrary to Public Interest, Report Claims

 
Top Banks Paid $1.6 Billion in Excessive Bonuses, U.S. Finds
 

Opening A Bottle Of Wine The New French Way

Ah, you'll be pounding away at a jeroboam wrapped in a workboot before long, the way these French Ways go when brought over to America, is what I'm saying.

Death in the Gulf

View Larger Map
The orange tab labelled "A" is meant to indicate the whole Gulf of Mexico. The green arrow points to the place where the Deepwater Horizon once drilled.

image via NOAA

Keep in mind that all the estimates of probable landfall in the map created by NOAA are based on an assumption that the equivalent of 33,000 barrels of oil a day is gushing out of the ground a mile under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico where the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster took place, when it is currently agreed that two or three times that much oil is erupting into the waters every day.

The Futures Market for Violence in Afghanistan Holds Firm

Recently, for some reason I had cause to remark that some of the best political writing of the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Somehow, almost overnight, noticing Rolling Stone's political writing is the new black.

General McChrystal's sudden demotion followed almost immediately on his surprising appearance in Michael Hastings's article, word of which spread so fast that the General was already days gone from his post before the print version of the article even hit the street, although the gist of the piece, and even the magazine's own exact words, were more or less instantly available through the internet to anyone who cared to see them.

On principle, I would personally fire anyone who drank lite beer with lime flavoring in it, so McChrystal's removal doesn't trouble me. For his role in orchestrating the cover up of Pat Tillman's death he probably deserves to have his career crimped anyway, although the months I spent in the military years ago gave me the perhaps contrary impression that covering up such things was just one of the many duties thrust on those in command and which, when successfully accomplished, inclines the officer commissioned to deal with it toward rapid promotion rather than reprimand. Colin Powell earned his first star for polishing the turd of My Lai, giving up to his superiors in the Pentagon an earnest and workable telling of the tale that so enwrapped them all in asscoveredness that Powell's future career was assured.

And, again, even before the print version of the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands, it had already been determined that Obama must respond to McChrystal's impertinence directly and forcefully, that a line had been crossed and Obama needed to show the general the I'm in charge here clause in the Constitution. Fretting over whether he would actually do it or not dissolved when, only a few dozen hours after word of the story began to spread, he actually did remove McChrystal from command and replace him with General Petraeus of Iraq invasion fame.

This is a very peculiar episode. Hamid Kharzai, who many suspect is our ally in Afghanistan, bemoaned the loss of General McChrystal, while Obama gave a stay-the-mysterious-course speech in the immediate aftermath of the episode which among other things reaffirmed the ongoing resolve of the Administration to accomplish something or other in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months or maybe longer, depending, so help us God.

So in the national political Kabuki, firing McChrystal is the symbolic act by which it is revealed that Obama has the mojo necessary to commandingly announce the continuation of the current US policy of going on and on in Afghanistan, which he promptly does after disposing of McChrystal: the pledge of an endless future there is freshly and importantly reaffirmed in public, even before the story that sacked the general hits the street in printed form.

e to the i times pi

I guess the order of the exponents in Euler's famous identity doesn't matter, so that e to the italicized i times pi arrives at the same terminus as e to the pi times italicised i, which is another way of ordering those three fundamental mathematical objects, e, pi, and italicized i, when going on about the profound interrelation of those objects arrayed just so that resolves itself inexorably at long last into a confirmation that the mathematical value we call "minus one" actually exists, is, in fact, identical to the very same thing pointed to by those mathematical objects when so arrayed. And if minus one exists, well, there you are. All the rest of the numbers can be reached from that simple unit that we, QED, don't have one of.

Salman Khan of the invaluable Khan Academy wends his way toward a demonstration of the circuitous and lovely math involved here and here.

"Bloomsday" 2010

The Chairman of BP cares about the small people, and so do I most days, and especially on Bloomsday. Much of the charm of the character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's comic novel Ulysses is in the fact that Bloom is one of the small people, living a run-of-the-mill urban existence in a backwater city of the mighty British Empire. Not a general or a statesman or a great poet but a near-Chaplinesque character bumbling through the jumble of events that accrue on one relatively representative day, Thursday, June 16, 1904.

Although Bloomsday has been commonly celebrated (at first by a small pack of literary drunks including Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien in Dublin some years ago) each and every year on June 16, I continue to maintain that only the June 16 which falls on a Thursday is legitimately called Bloomsday. Is Bloomsday Thursday, or is Bloomsday June 16? It's both, forever both. The rest of those June 16ths, like today's, falling on a Wednesday, well, I don't know. Sure, you can call such a thing "Bloomsday" if you must, but just don't call it Bloomsday.
 

Relief for the Unread, An Anniversary

 
On this date in 1966, the Vatican abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, originally instituted in 1559 to keep good Catholics current on what it was they were forbidden to read. The Index went through 20 editions in its 400+ years of existence, the final refinement of its accumulated distaste printed in 1948, specifying 4000 titles and the entire works of over 500 authors. From the first, hand in hand with the Index proper went wide-ranging and variously effective efforts to expunge from the stock of available reading material works identified there.

Since the moment the Index was nullified, the whole domain of reading has been thrown open to the searching eye, more's the pity. A judicious list, however contentious, of what's safely left unread would really come in handy some days.
 

From The Wharf in Santa Cruz

The Gulf Oil Eruption of 2010, Day (n + 1)

 
Some of the best political reporting in America over the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, for some reason. Tim Dickinson takes the story of our oily Gulf for a spin in the latest issue, online here.

Here's a marvelous representation of Earth in cross-section in 5,000 foot increments, from more than 35,000 feet above sea level to more than 35,000 feet below. Scroll down toward sea level, and on the right you can follow a red line representing the descent of the drilling done from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. It wasn't plain to me until I saw this graphic that the site of the eruption of oil, at about 5,000 feet, is actually 13,000 feet above the deepest point reached by the drillers,the oil shooting out of that broken section of pipe on the sea floor carried under immense pressure from way, way down below.
 

History Channel

 
All the dead seem to be. There they are, clogging up our remembrances. They seem to be, the way we regard them, cognizant of all their influential remains. The dead seem to be. It's not that they are, no.

We are. They seem to be.
 

It's Not a Spill. Nothing Spills Up.

 
It's an eruption, folks. Stop calling it a spill.
 

Walking Over To Watch Some Guys Watching Some Guys Racing Through Santa Cruz

Some Guys Watching Some Guys Racing Through Santa Cruz

Some Guys Racing Through Santa Cruz

Comment Acknowledging Business As Usual for the Sentinel Goes Here

Sinead O'Connor Lets Her Hair Down

 
Blessed Sinead O'Connor, mother of four, weighs in on the recent distresses of the Catholic Church, via the Washington Post.
 

Werner Takes On A Plastic Bag

Local Angle

 
Two recent articles bring the Grateful Dead to mind.

One, in the New York Times, reports on a exhibit of Grateful Dead related memorabilia culled from the enormous archive of just about everything that passed through the band's office down the decades to be stored by Ellen Law, the perfectly postioned pack rat who worked for the band. Others may have advised her to off the stuff, but she remained undaunted down the years, resulting in the accumulation of an enormous archive which is now the property of the University of California Santa Cruz Library. The current exhibit at the New York Historical Society is culled from that collection of stuff.

The second article can be found in the Atlantic Online, and is titled, "Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead," and in fact resolves toward the end to a discussion of the curiously effective practices that eventually made the Grateul Dead one of the most profitable enterprises in the history of popular music. For the most part, though, the article is an examination of the gradual rise to a begrudged sort of respectability of the scholarly study of the Grateful Dead, a branch of inquiry that threatens to turn into a permanent field now that UC Santa Cruz has created a locus for the orderly interment of the band's cultural remains.

War Story Revisted

Once my mother and I were riding in an overcrowded train. It was Victory Day. The man sitting opposite us looked like a peasant and was crying bitterly, washing his tears down with vodka. Every once in a while he'd break off to tell the same story. I heard it many times and remembered it. Here it is.
 
During the war he and his sister lost everyone close to them. Their village was destroyed, and they took shelter in another village, in an empty house. They were very hungry, and went from house to house asking for something to eat. Then the sister got sick, and the boy went by himself. They stopped giving him anything. Just when things were getting really bad, a miracle happened: at one of the houses they gave him a piece of pork. The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister. They were able to hold out for a couple of days more, and then some distant relatives found them and took them to the town where he lived for many years.
 
On that day he had gone back to the village where the miracle happened, to find the people who had saved his life and thank them, even though he didn't know their names. He got off the train and found a big feast going on in the village. In the middle of the table was a ham, with bottles around it. He sat next to an old man. They drank. The old man looked thoughtfully at the table, then said: "I don't like this holiday. It's hard on me remembering the war, I have a great sin on my soul.
 
"During the war my son was sick. The doctor said he had to have meat. I sold everything I could and bought a pig. I slaughtered it, but the pig was sick. What could I do? In the village there was an orphan who went around begging. I decided I'd give him a piece, wait a couple of days and see what happened. If the beggar boy survived, I'd give my son the meat. I invited him to have some of the pork. But he didn't survive, he didn't walk around the village any more. We had to throw the meat away. My son died. It's a heavy weight on me that I killed those children."
 
The man took a swig from the bottle and started the story again.

—as noted by languagehat, who goes on to add:

Now, in the comments at the Shkrobius thread a couple of people said they remembered this story from an old magazine, and one of them found a link: it's Мелкие неприятности ("Little annoyances"), by Pavel Nilin. The plot is close enough that it would be surprising if the two were unrelated; the main difference is that in the Nilin story there is no sick son—the villager tests out the pork on the boy and sees it doesn't kill him; presumably he and his wife eat the rest. Either the fellow Shkrobius and his mother saw in the train (he says in the comment thread that it was in the early 1970s) had read the story (which is dated 1974) and was telling it as his own, or Nilin heard the same guy and made a literary story out of it. Or, of course, it could be coincidence. But the interesting thing is how much more effective the anecdote told by Shkrobius is; the Nilin story, with its careful scene-setting and description of neighbors and so on, just dissipates the power of it.

Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara is an old book that has all the stories in it, as far as I'm concerned. Admittedly, I've only heard second hand about Somadeva's book myself, so I have no way of knowing how accurate my characterization is. Nevertheless, not having read it allows me to continue to guess it has a story in it just like this story among all the rest, a story repeated over and over again not only on the train by the inebriated traveller, but also over and over again by countless other travellers in caravans all over Central Asia and beyond for millennia.

The story as told on the train has neatly concentrated moral elements: we see the seeming bit of charity in the offered pig meat for the ploy it actually is on the part of the villager who, otherwise indifferent to their fate, only wishes to know if the starving children will sicken or die when fed the bad meat of a pig he otherwise plans to feed his own sick son to bring the ailing lad back to health. Shortly after eating the pork, sustained in the last moment before starvation by their fill of the meat given them by the villager for his own reasons, the boy and his sister are found by relatives and taken away to safety. But the villager mistakes the disappearance of the boy and his sister for a sign that bad pork has killed them, forbids his sick son the meat that might have saved the lad's life, and watches, wretched, as his sick son soon dies. The villager's act of inadvertent true charity has, misunderstood, inadvertently committed his son to death.

The great existential question posed by specifying the meat as pork is, "But would you eat that if your were starving?" Pork is the normatively forbidden thing, standing in for all the other forbidden tainted stuff avoided for all the reasons that might, yes, just might be consumed if it came down to it, which in fact it has come down to time and again down the ages for countless many people, people who have confronted the question in lean unequivacal terms, starving with but the arbitrary anything to chew on. Would you overcome your disgust and eat that? If it were truly distasteful? Even if you'd been told over and over again just don't? If it were made available, and you starving?

It's no secret about pork. The people who eat pork without qualm are conscious of the revulsion commonly engendered in others by the practice. Presumably the people who eat dog are equally conscious of the revulsion commonly engendered in others by the transgression of feeding on fido. And even the people who eat such stuff agree that it can go bad. So there's that in the story, the prospect of eating anything, yes, even the bad thing, when it comes to it.

In the story, the serving of pork adds piquancy to the threat of starving to death faced by the boy and his sister. Children will eat anything, and there's always a lot of keeping stuff out of children's mouths in the early going, keeping them on the path of the actual foodways of the culture they're emerging into and avoiding the pitfalls of the literal scenery chewing they are capable of early on.

By their nature as children and their condition as starvelings, the brother and sister in the story must eat the offered pork, swallowing with it whatever taint it may be said to carry.

"The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister." Note the brisk moral calculus revealed by the phrase "there was enough left for the sister." The starving boy eats as much as he can. Luckily for the sister, there's a surfeit, such as it is, of pig meat, and she lives too.

Note also the nested structure of the narrative. You're being told a story which was told (over and over again) on a singular train trip taken some time ago on Victory Day to the person telling you the story. And the person telling the story over and over again on that train trip on Victory Day to the person who's telling you the story proceeds to retell in his story another version of his own story as told to him by another fellow entirely in a village he travelled to, coincidentally enough, on yet another prior Victory Day. This kind of story nesting, being told a story about a story that has yet another story in it, isn't unheard of when it comes to storytelling. It's a prime sign that the formal events belonging to it, the forbidden food and its consequences, have been consciously arranged by a storyteller.
 

Spring Fashion Preview

 

 

Past Ball

 

 

Searle at 90

 

 

Papa's Got A Brand New Rickroll

 
Enter Here to Win.
 

News From The World of Saints

If you take the set of all Australians and put the criminals and Irishmen over here, the remainder over there is your first Australian saint, Mary McKillop ("Mother" to her confederates).

It's noted in the news that during the course of a lifetime of good behavior Mother Mary of the Cross ("Mama Marie Delacroix" as the francophone would have it) was excommunicated briefly by a bishop for insubordination. I wasn't aware that the power of excommunication had devolved to mere bishops. I always thought only the pope or his designated staff could strike people officially from the rolls of the organization, but that may be due to my admittedly insufficient attention to what I'm sure are the condign rulings of the Church on the matter. Perhaps any altar boy has the authority when going about his appointed rounds.

I remember the story of the ex-seminarian who pressed the Vatican for an official certificate of excommunication, which he recieved in due course from whatever tribunal handles those matters back there on the home acres of the Roman Catholic Church, although not without a measure of bother on his part. It turns out that perhaps all along he could have just chosen one of the local platoon of bishops in the San Francisco Bay Area to get the job done with authority. Even those who've sidled away from the Church without engaging in the formalities observed by the ex-seminarian will appreciate, however, the coolness factor of having a writ directly from the pope's own penmen recognizing the sundered tie.

In the case of Mary McKillop the bishop apparently retracted his act of excommunication shortly after he issued it, retroactively nullifying its effect. Thus, after three days or so, Mary McKillip rose from those listed as dead to the Church,  it being revealed to all that she had only seemed to be gone during that time, when in fact she had been present  continuously in substance and spirit within the folds of Holy Mother the Church the whole while.