What does the NYT know about me?

I was scanning the front page of the NYT, looking for headlines to click, and I noticed that the Times had picked out a set of things recommended for me. I was pleased for an instant and genuinely ready to to share Penn Jillett's love for hot baths and cold watermelon, but...

 

... I don't like the implications of the rest of it. The kiosk and the toilet are okay — lowly and functional — but don't push Jeffrey Dahmer at me, and don't juxtapose him with a person with a mysteriously drooping face.

I go to read the Penn Jillette article and the word editing slows me way down:

"My dessert in the middle of the night was the idea for which I will win the Nobel Prize. I invented this."

"I took a lot of blueberries, like four big containers (this one is expensive), rinsed them off and then put way, way, way too much cayenne pepper on them. Way too much. Lots. I shook that around and then added way too much cocoa powder, no fat, no sugar. It’s like a Mexican flourless chocolate blueberry cake. It’s my favorite food. I went to bed with my mouth on fire and my belly full."

From "Penn Jillette Thinks Watermelon Is Magic."

Who said "I have tremendous respect for McCain but I don’t buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured. I thought the idea was to capture them. As far as I’m concerned he sat out the war"?

Al Franken! Back in 2000 in a Salon thing called "What's at stake in the 2000 elections?/Rosa Parks, David Duke, Steve Wozniak, Camille Paglia, Al Franken -- and dozens more -- talk about what inspires and frightens them about the political year ahead."

I wonder how many other old jokes are woven into the oddly woven head of Donald Trump.

I found that Salon piece via "Donald Trump Uses Old Al Franken POW Joke About John McCain/Franken 15 years ago: 'I don't buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured'" at Reason.com, where I went because of this tweet from Penn Jillette....

Donald Trump Uses Old Al Franken POW Joke About John McCain - Hit & Run : http://t.co/FvK6AbRFkn Al Franken! http://t.co/j3rReBx5Jm

— Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) July 18, 2015

... which I got to from a Bizpac Review article titled "Penn Jillette praises Trump as genius with no filter; libs go nuts trying to spin", which I only noticed because of my Google alert on "bob dylan":



From the Bizpac thing:

“Thelonius Monk [sic], the great jazz piano player, said — and it’s not a well-known quotation, but I love it — [Jillette] said, ‘The genius is the one who is most like himself.’ That’s what I love with Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Tiny Tim — they were completely like themselves. Trump, for better or worse, is in that category... I have talked one-on-one with Bob Dylan, and I have talked one-on-one with Trump, and they do not have filters. They speak honestly and from the heart.”...

I'm sure there's a joke at this point about how that thing Trump wears on his head — his hair hat — could be used as filter, but let's be serious. Trump is some kind of genius. We can grant him that. But at the same time, it's pretty obvious, we don't want a genius President! Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Tiny Tim... that's a hell of a list. Trump is flattered to be put on that list by as fine a man as Penn Jillette. But neither Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, nor Tiny Tim belonged in the Presidency.

Who would have made the best President?

Thelonious Monk

Bob Dylan

Lenny Bruce

Tiny Tim

pollcode.com free polls

"Do you have a skeleton already?"/"Is that a trick question?"

Penn Jillette, in a conversation about a skeleton — a second skeleton, outside his body — for his home decorating scheme which includes a nice Scrabble-themed bathroom and the color pink (because he tends not to look at things). Also, he's lost over 100 pounds.

ADDED: The video embed didn't work, so I took it out. You can watch it at the first link.

"If god (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your child — would you do it?"

"If your answer is no, in my booklet you’re an atheist."

"Competitive cheer may, some time in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX."

Wrote Judge Stefan R. Underhill of the United States District Court in Bridgeport:

“Today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”...

Underhill’s decision was a victory for the five women’s volleyball players who, along with their coach, sued Quinnipiac in 2009 after the university announced it was cutting their team and adding competitive cheerleading....

This is a complicated issue. Penn & Teller took it up in the first episode of the new season of "Bullshit!" I thought they woefully underplayed the Title IX legal issues, which they mainly cheaply disparaged by showing a feminist in an unattractive light and accusing her of wanting to force young women into her stereotype of what a woman should be, as this preview shows:



ADDED: The question shouldn't be what does "sport" mean in a general sense, but how it should be defined with respect to the pursuit of gender equality in education. As for the Quinnipiac case, the judge has to deal with the existing statute, regulations, and case law.

Post-feminist/post-sanity Darwinism read way too early in the morning.

Last night, between first and second sleep, I scanned the blogs for something to read and landed on "Love in the Time of Darwinism," by Kay S. Hymowitz.

There's an Instapundit post from 2:40 a.m. linking to it with the line "A REPORT FROM THE chaotic post-feminist dating scene." Post-feminist... or post-morality, post-sanity, post-... everything?

Is Glenn really up looking for new stuff to throw at us at 2:40 in the morning, or does he just set these things up to post at the times he sees fit... and if the latter: why this, why 2:40?

Hymowitz tells us us that men these days are angry -- angry that "young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging" and "that the culture disses all things male" and "that marriage these days is a raw deal for men."

SYMs [single young males] of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional...

As the disenchanted SYM sees it, then, resistance to settling down is a rational response to a dating environment designed and ruled by women with only their own interests in mind. “Men see all of this, and wonder if it’s really worth risking all in the name of ‘romance’ and ‘growing up,’ ” a correspondent who calls himself Wytchfinde explains. “After all, if women can be hedonistic and change the rules in midstream when it suits them, why shouldn’t men? Why should men be responsible when women refuse to look into the mirror at their own lack of accountability?”...

By far the most important philosopher of the Menaissance is Charles Darwin. The theory that human sexual preferences evolved from the time that hominids successfully reproduced in the primeval African grasslands can explain the mystery of women’s preference for macho—or alpha—males. At the same time, evolutionary theory gives the former wuss permission to pursue massive amounts of sex with an endless assortment of women. Finally, the emphasis that Darwinism places on natural selection encourages him to adapt to the brutal current sexual ecosystem. Culture, in both its feminist and Emily Post forms, hasn’t won him any favor with women, so he will embrace Nature in all its rude harshness.

(Paging Bob Wright.)

Hymowitz proceeds to tell us about something called the Seduction Community -- "a loose network of dating coaches, gurus" who teach something called Game, by which men can pick up women and use them however they like.

Teachers encourage clients to project confidence and sexual energy, what is called, depending on the guru, “cocky funny” or “amused mastery.” In The Aquarian, a New York–based music magazine, Kevin Purcell describes his experience at a Game workshop: “One of our first tasks was to walk around the hotel silent, repeating in our heads ‘I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about me.’ This mentality, it was assumed, would help lower the wall of anxiety and make us less prone to the pain of rejection. Like soldiers responding to a drill sergeant, when asked ‘What are you?’ we were instructed to loudly proclaim, ‘A fucking ten!’ ”

Wait! How much do guys pay for this training? Are Penn & Teller working on an episode of "Bullshit" on about Game? I'd say it's asking for it. I want to cameras at that hotel, pointed at those would-be pick-up artists wandering about thinking "‘I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about me." Presumably, they wouldn't object to the cameras, since they don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about them. To be fair, the guys are getting fucked... one way or another.

There's much more at the link. You can read it or not. Your call.

As I said, I read it in the middle of the night, in that strange mental peak between first and second sleep. And it freaked me out. Oh, so this is what life is like now, for those people in that most important part of life, the place from which the next generation springs (if it is to spring at all)? (I've been reading Mark Steyn's "America Alone," and that laid the groundwork for disturbing thoughts about a culture's failure to bring men and women together in reproductive success -- which is, of course, the real Darwinism.)

I clicked over to Metafilter for some fresh air, and the first thing I saw was a post about "Love in the Time of Darwinism." Everyone was trashing Hymowitz. It wasn't exactly comforting. In fact they sounded... SYMish. But it unfreaked me out nontheless. It broke the spell. And, anyway, my iPhone power was close to 0% and that's as good an indication as any that it's time for second sleep.

"Hillary just seems like Jerry Lee Lewis to me. And McCain just seems like a complete wackjob. And I guess Obama seems to have some sort of sense..."

Says Penn Jillette:

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t agree with him on anything, but he seems like a person that’s not about to just explode. And Hillary and McCain really seem that way to me. So that makes the election kind of fun.

He's vlogging now.

"It's only the losers named Dave that think having an unusual name is bad..."

"... and who cares what they think. They're named Dave." Says Penn Jillette, if you challenge him about the fact that he named his daughter Moxie CrimeFighter.

But while middle-class parents increasingly trade in standard names like Karen and Joseph for fancier ones like Madison and Caleb, movie stars seem compelled to push the baby naming further. The names may be merely distinctive (say, Maddox, Angelina Jolie's Cambodian-born adopted son) or bizarre, like Makena'lei Gordon, Helen Hunt's daughter, inspired by a place name in Hawaii. Celebrities may not so subtly be saying that for them ordinary rules need not apply.

If celebrities are the new American aristocracy, the exotic baby name can sometimes function as the equivalent of a royal title, a way for a privileged caste to bestow the power of its legacy on future generations.

"There's a sense of 'I'm special, I'm different, and therefore my child is special and different,' " said Jenn Berman, a clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills, who has worked with actors. "It's unconscious, but they think, 'We're a creative family, you have the potential to be creative, so here, I bestow you with the name 'Joaquin,' " Dr. Berman said.

Which celebrity started it? Frank Zappa?

Just as Frank Zappa proved himself the classic hippie prankster by naming his children Moon Unit and Dweezil in the 1960's....

Frank Zappa was a hippie? I guess the past looks fuzzy from such a great distance!

Think I'll just DROP OUT
I'll go to Frisco
Buy a wig & sleep
On Owsley's floor...
I'm completely stoned
I'm hippy & I'm trippy
I'm a gypsy on my own...
I'm really just a phony
But forgive me
'Cause I'm stoned...

Frank Zappa was a hippie?

Sorry, I got sidetracked. Anyway, you middle-class losers with kids named Dave, how about showing a little imagination? And, to get to the really important question, what do you think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will name the little pittster they're cooking up for the endless amusement of the world?

"Mr. Novak responded with a profanity."

Here's how the NYT describes Bob Novak's recent outburst:

After Mr. Carville tried to interrupt Mr. Novak twice, Mr. Novak said: "I know you hate to hear me. But you have to."

Mr. Carville interrupted again, saying of Mr. Novak, "He's got to show these right-wingers that he's got backbone."

A moment later, Mr. Carville said directly to Mr. Novak: "The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show them you're tough."

Mr. Novak responded with a profanity, before telling Mr. Carville: "I hate that. Just let it go."

He stood up, removed his microphone and walked off.

I say, it's ridiculous to report it that way. You should at least have the word with asterisks -- otherwise we're left to imagine he said something worse than "bullshit," which is, so often, the perfect word. Why there's that bestseller, "On Bullshit," written by a philosophy professor, and that Penn and Teller TV show "Bullshit!" Bullshit is pretty mainstream. With the Times's circumlocution, we might imagine Novak had called Carville a f***ing c***.

My son -- John Althouse Cohen -- says it's like that thing in McSweeney's. What? This:

MEDIA MOMENT 37: HURRY! BLOOMBERGCHUPAFAN.COM AND BLOOMBERGBREASTISBEST.COM ARE STILL AVAILABLE

"Among the hundreds of Web addresses owned by Mr. Bloomberg... are more than a dozen with names like NoBloomberg.org and IhateBloomberg.com.... Many of these names, including some registered last week, include a slang expression of contempt, labeled vulgar in some contexts by dictionaries. The pure-minded could construe it to mean that Mr. Bloomberg has a fondness for lollipops."

— The New York Times, May 12, 2001

"An Internet site for the posting of complaints about American corporations, celebrities and political figures can continue to use a Web address that denigrates Michael R. Bloomberg, the New York City mayoral candidate, according to a ruling a week ago.... The protest site, which is run by Dan Parisi, a pornography publisher, uses many addresses created by adding to the names of companies or politicians a slang expression of contempt associated in other contexts with baby bottles."

— The New York Times, June 14, 2001

The Times needs to get back to these more scrutable circumlocutions. Or just cut out the circumlocuting altogether. I know it's their thing to show off their "fit to print" standard, but a quote's a quote.