Hey, have you seen that new BT-16?
Testing stuff; ergo, content-free post in progress.
Features! We got yer features here!
I’m sure this is less-than-newsworthy to people reading this, but Blogger has upgraded with some really nifty new features. Like, you can have each post exist as its own archived page, much like the Movable Type blogs do. Blogger also apparently provides comments now, which I may activate sometime soon. (I feel a bit of guilt about possibly dumping YACCS, but I’m sure that will wear off in time!)
Anyway, all you bloggers out there who use blogger and who are reading this before updating your own blogs have some neat surprises in store for you.
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The things we do to women….
….especially when they’re dressed as giant bratwursts.
It seems that, in a sad coda to the most notable (and notorious) incident involving the Pittsburgh Pirates and a baseball field in the last, oh, twelve years, the woman who was attacked by a Pirates player while running the Milwaukee Brewers’ sausage race has retired from competitive, er, sausage-racing.
ESPN’s headline to this story, as of this writing, is the entirely appropriate — if journalistically disastrous — “Frank (Go No) Furter”. I am NOT making this up. And as always happens when I use the word “sausage” more than twice in a single blog post, I am now thirsty for a beer. If you’ll excuse me….
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Biology and Motherhood
If you’re wondering just what perspective an evolutionary biologist could bring to the festivities of Mother’s Day, go check out this PZ Myers post and the ones preceding it (or following it, depending on your perspective). The post about mother’s milk is especially fascinating. I wonder what the state of public health would be if infant formula was only available on a prescription basis.
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The Deactivation of Cynicism
I am currently in the middle of one of my periodic Lerner-and-Loewe listening binges, and in the course of doing a bit of online research, I’m noticing that apparently several of their songs have subtexts that are a bit unpleasant nowadays. What interests me just now is that none of this ever occurred to me. I can give two examples of this. First, consider the lyrics to “Thank Heaven For Little Girls”, from Gigi:
“Each time I see a little girl
Of five or six or seven,
I can’t resist a joyous urge
To smile and say,
Thank heaven-
For little girls!
For little girls get bigger everyday.
Thank heaven for little girls,
They grow up in the most delightful way.
Those little eyes so helpless and appealing,
One day will flash and send you crashing
Through the ceiling!
Thank heaven for little girls,
Thank heaven for them all,
No matter where, no matter who,
Without them, what would little boys do?
Thank heaven
Thank heaven
Thank heaven for little girls!
Those little eyes so helpless and appealing,
One day will flash and send you crashing
Through the ceiling!
Thank heaven for little girls,
Thank heaven for them all,
No matter where, no matter who,
Without them, what would little boys do?
Thank heaven
Thank heaven
Thank heaven for little girls!”
This song is sung in the film by Maurice Chevalier, an elderly Frenchman as he stands in the park watching little girls at play. And the funny thing is, until I found some review online a week or two ago that pointed it out (I’ve since lost the link), I never even considered the possible interpretation of pedophilia. I mean, this elderly guy singing about how captivating little girls are — how horrid!
And yet, since I’m raising my own little girl, these lyrics seem perfectly in line with what I see as she grows up, and in the context of the story of Gigi (an older man — not the one singing this song, but his nephew — eschewing every woman he meets, only to find love with a young lady he has known since her childhood), the song makes perfect sense, and not in any kind of creepy way. But maybe I’m wrong? Should I watch Maurice Chevalier singing “Thank Heaven For Little Girls”, and be reminded of things like the Catholic priest-and-altarboy scandals? Is it remotely fair to Messrs. Lerner and Loewe to interpret their song in anything remotely approaching this light?
My other example is from My Fair Lady, which is not just my favorite Lerner-and-Loewe musical, but my favorite musical of all time, period. (In fact, on my personal list of favorite movies of all time, My Fair Lady outranks all but two of the Star Wars films. That’s how dearly I love My Fair Lady.) There is a fairly minor character named Freddie Aynsford-Hill who meets Eliza Doolittle at the Ascotte opening day and becomes smitten with her. A little later on, Freddie turns up on Professor Higgins’s doorstep, bearing flowers for Eliza. She refuses to come out, because she is so mortified at how her first day in public as “a respectable lady” turned out (and no, I’m not going to spoil what is, to me, one of the funniest moments in a movie ever, if you haven’t seen it). Does Freddie go home, to try again later? Nope. He heads out onto the street corner opposite Higgins’s home and sings “On the Street Where You Live”:
“I have often walked down this street before
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before;
All at once, am I
Several stories high,
Knowing I’m on the street where you live.
Are there lilac trees in the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour
Out of ev’ry door?
No, it’s just on the street where you live!
And oh! The towering feeling
Just to know somehow you are near!
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear!
People stop and stare. They don’t bother me.
For there’s no where else on earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by,
I won’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live!”
And Freddie just stays right there. When next we see him, the film implies that he’s never left that spot, even though more than a month has passed. In short, by singing “On the Street Where You Live”, Freddie has announced for all the world his intention to stalk Eliza Doolittle. I mean, consider it: you’re a woman, you meet a guy for the first time, and that very night he takes to setting up camp fifty feet from your front door. Shouldn’t that be a bit creepy, as opposed to naively charming, as the song depicts?
I’m not objecting to these two songs on these bases at all. I’m noting that, in seeing other people point these things out, I wonder if we’ve gone too far in making jaded cynicism our default position. Or, conversely, if my own “cynicism meter” is not tuned high enough to pick up on stuff like this.
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Let’s hear it for capitalism. Or not.
It’s kind of a recurring theme these days, and it’s a depressing one. There is a chain of bakeries called Montana Mills that started in Rochester, NY and eventually grew to more than twenty locations in four states. The chain was so successful that it first went public, and then it was bought outright by donut-giant Krispy Kreme.
And then, Krispy Kreme’s stock took a big hit, which they blamed on all this Atkins-related foolery that’s sweeping the nation, and in an effort to cut as many costs as possible, Krispy Kreme announces that it’s pretty much killing off Montana Mills.
Local business gets bought by big national company; big national company strangles local business at the first sign of trouble. Hooray for the new economy.
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Penn IS in the Ivy League, right?
And aren’t they supposed to not do incredibly dumb things in the Ivy League? Like, oh, literally throwing out an entire department’s archives and library?
Jay Manifold posts the details. Any Philadelphia bloggers (James? Atrios?) or readers may find this interesting and/or depressing. I don’t know if anything can be done to help at this point, but in lieu of that, the Bright Shining Light of Ridicule is occasionally useful.
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Preliminary scans failed to detect a stately pleasure dome.
The NASA space probe Cassini has returned its first pictures of the Saturnine moon Titan, capturing views of a bright region on the moon’s surface that has been dubbed “Xanadu”. Titan is one of the most mysterious bodies in the Solar System; its surface is shrouded in methane-rich smog, leading astronomers to conjecture that conditions on Titan now may be similar to those on Earth before the evolution of life (the “prebiotic soup”).
Cassini enters Saturnine orbit on July 1, and it will train its cameras on Titan the next day; but the big event on Titan is set for next year, when Cassini will dispatch a smaller probe — Huygens — that will, if all goes according to plan, actually drop into the Titan atmosphere and possibly even splash down in the moon’s seas of methane.
[Insert obligatory paean to Carl Sagan here.]
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A year gone by (or, measured in posts, 19)
Aaron celebrates a year in Blogistan — a year which began after he succumbed to my incessant nagging. He says he may finally get round to the template redesign he promised one year and nineteen posts ago; when he actually does it, he should probably rename the blog in accordance with his posting practices. I suggest “Sporadica”. Heh!
I also note that I talked Aaron into blogging, and in some versions of the tale, I also sold him on attending college where he did. My sales pitch was pretty low-key — “Yeah, it’s a nice school. Quiet. Not too many dumb people.” — but Aaron’s pretty low-key himself, so there it is. Although I think he might still blame me for the fact that he ended up taking a course from the school’s single most boring professor in his opening semester, but hey, I can’t accept responsibility for everything. And since he got a gorgeous, drum-playing, motorcycle-riding, impervious-to-the-effects-of-age wife out of the bargain, I think the score’s pretty even on that particular account.
(I also take this opportunity to point out Nefarious Neddie‘s recent blogiversary, two months ago, which went by completely unremarked. This is probably part of Neddie’s plan to destroy all life on the surface of Pluto. I won’t tell him that there likely isn’t any life on the surface of Pluto. It’ll be funnier that way.)