The City Journal considers vaudeville, while in The Wall Street Journal Harold Bloom is talking Hans Christen Andersen.

Commentary flings poo at Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

And The Moscow Times reviews a new biography of Stalin that proves once again that totalitarianism and meticulous copy editing go hand in hand.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:39 AM  |

“So that’s the situation,” she said. “Will you take the case?”

No need to think about it. This was exactly the kind of case I’d been hoping for. I went through the motions of checking my schedule, though, and pretended to be shuffling a few things around. If you instantly agree to take a case, the client may suspect some ulterior motive.

“Luckily, I’m free until later this afternoon,” I said, shooting my watch a glance. It was eleven-thirty-five. “If you don’t mind, could you take me over to your building now? I’d like to see the last place you saw your husband.”

“I’d be happy to,” the woman said. She gave a small frown. “Does this mean you’re taking the case?”

“It does,” I replied.

“But we haven’t talked about the fee yet.”

“I don’t need any money.”

“I’m sorry?” she said, looking steadily at me.

“I don’t charge anything,” I explained, and smiled.

“But isn’t this your job?”

“No, it isn’t. This isn’t my profession. I’m just a volunteer, so I don’t get paid.”

“A volunteer?”

“Correct.”

“Still, you’ll need something for expenses.”

“No expenses needed. I work on a volunteer basis only, so I can’t accept payment of any kind.”

The woman still looked perplexed.

“Fortunately, I have another source of income that provides enough to live on,” I explained. “I’m not doing this for the money. I’m just very interested in locating people who’ve disappeared. Or, more precisely, people who’ve disappeared in a certain way. I won’t go into that—it’ll only complicate things. But I am pretty good at this sort of thing.”

“Tell me, is there some kind of religion or New Age thing behind all this?” she asked.

“Neither one. I have no connection with any religion or New Age group.”

The woman glanced down at her shoes, perhaps contemplating how—if things got really weird—she might have to use the stiletto heels against me.

“My husband always told me not to trust anything that’s free,” the woman said. “I know this is rude to say, but he insisted that there’s always a catch.”

“In most cases, I’d agree with him,” I said. “In our late-stage capitalist world, it’s hard to trust anything that’s free. Still, I hope you’ll trust me. You have to, if we’re going to get anywhere.”

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:19 AM  |

Crebase told investigators the men found the money in the gutter of a barn they were hired to repair, police said.

"We got an anonymous tip two days ago," Capt. Kris McCarthy told the Eagle-Tribune newspaper of Lawrence. "These guys are roofers. They found the money on the job site. They story after that was all made up."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:55 AM  |

The day Quixote and Sancho rode out from their unnamed village, a fictional blueprint came to life. Don Quixote is our prototypical text, the first story to emerge out of a self-awareness of its own fictional form, to take as its theme the gap between appearance and reality; to be, in our terms, modern. It is to the modern novel what Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis.
...
Fuentes illuminates well Don Quixote's suffering—that he must choose between the drama of make-believe and the mean necessities of reality—but the novel additionally lights the way of readers yet unborn through the knight's dual lesson of the choice he must make and the choice the reader must make about his fictional necessity (or not).

Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the empress of la Mancha, the unrivalled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me.

Reality, as Fuentes writes, "may laugh or weep on hearing such words." But reality also feels itself outmanoeuvred, outgunned by their appeal. After hearing them, we as readers can forever understand that there is more than one objective reality.

There is a view in literary-critical circles that Don Quixote's signal accomplishment was the victorious elevation of the novel over the romance. The deluded knight's attack on Master Pedro's puppet theatre for example, is, according to Bloom, "a parable of the triumph of Cervantes over the picaresque and of the triumph of the novel over the romance."

Yet this seems a limited reading of the novel. It is as unfair to say that the Quixote is merely a "critical parody" of the romance as it is to say that its eponymous hero is merely mad. The forms of Cervantes's moral thought are pointed to in his humour: the author is simultaneously satirising Quixote's belief in chivalry and commemorating it through the comic forms of his forgiveness...In the Quixote [romance] is the engine both of Quixote's folly and of our deepening sympathy—a reader's way of recognising a hero's predicament as latently his or her own. Through the innumerable possible readings of the Quixote, we can perhaps identify a core of distinct principles: that there is no reality without folly, and no underlying perception of reality without romance, of one kind or another, to draw out human curiosity.

But Cervantes could not know that in 2002, in a poll organised by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 writers worldwide would vote Don Quixote the "best and most central work" in literature, eclipsing the plays of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky's novels and Homer's epics.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:42 AM  |

Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath. Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.

To address this question, Melissa Hines of City University London and Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University turned to monkeys, one of our closest animal cousins. The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the "masculine" toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

Because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, the results imply that toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences. This divergence, and indeed all the anatomical sex differences in the brain, presumably arose as a result of selective pressures during evolution. In the case of the toy study, males--both human and primate--prefer toys that can be propelled through space and that promote rough-and-tumble play. These qualities, it seems reasonable to speculate, might relate to the behaviors useful for hunting and for securing a mate. Similarly, one might also hypothesize that females, on the other hand, select toys that allow them to hone the skills they will one day need to nurture their young.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:32 AM  |

For most Americans under 40, the dread that saturated the 1980s is indelible. It was part of the fabric of their childhood. One friend recently rediscovered a little booklet of poems and stories she'd written in the second grade. "About half of them," she says, "mentioned nuclear war and how scared I was that I was going to die. The specter of nuclear war absolutely terrorized me when I was young and I think it's to blame for the fact that I had horrible insomnia from the ages of about 5 to 12."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:19 PM  |

Robert Weil, the executive editor of W. W. Norton, considers the situation to be even more dire. "If you speak to publishers about the sales of literary fiction - I mean we're in real trouble in this country," he said. "Sales are shocking these days, even compared to 10 years ago. And publishers are seriously cutting back."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:58 AM  |

American Idol is the most watched television series in the world, but a pattern has emerged that makes the show pretty boring. The producers and judges pick one contestant to "pimp" and this contestant ends up winning, making American Idol less a show where the viewers pick the winner and more a show where the judges and producers get the viewers to vote for who they like. Borrrrrrring.

So, here at votefortheworst.com, we have a solution. Help us by voting for the worst that American Idol has to offer.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:01 AM  |

"Revenge of the Sith" is, quite simply, fucking awesome. This is the "Star Wars" prequel the haters have been bitching for since "Menace" came out, and if they don't cop to that when they finally see it, they're lying.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:47 AM  |

Why is a LifeGem Right For Me?

If you desire an everlasting connection and closeness to the one you have lost, the LifeGem is right for you. Each LifeGem, as a celebration of life, tells a unique story and represents a new beginning.

This closeness and mobility, offered only by a LifeGem, will help you keep your loved one with you and in your life at all times.

And of course, as the LifeGem is a one-of-a-kind diamond, it will be a treasured heirloom in your family for generations to come.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:38 AM  |

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

-H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:05 PM  |

In this uncertain atmosphere, Graham is a uniter, not a divider. For one thing, she's nice. In interviews, Graham comes off as kindhearted and eager to praise -- the sort of person you'd want as a colleague or mentor. She has friendly words for avant-gardists like Susan Howe; friendly words for formalists like Anthony Hecht; and friendly words for her tribe of former students (''I love all of them,'' she says, and it must be true, because they show up with remarkable frequency as winners of the many contests she judges). Moreover, as Shelley might say, if Graham fell upon the thorns of life, she'd blurb. A typical Graham book plug is so rhapsodic and inscrutable (one blurbee has ''an ear so finely tuned it cannot but register all the finest, filamentary truths the eye discerns'') that it practically yodels Poooeeetrrry! Which doesn't mean she's insincere. As Graham puts it, ''There are very few poets whose work doesn't, someplace in its enterprise, stun me.'' Poooeeetrrry!

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:14 AM  |

For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populist pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to enlightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The antagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the average American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxes; and the liberal elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipping their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy college degrees and their friends in the judiciary.

Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics—trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people even when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobilizes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of many of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the culture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood by liberals.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:01 AM  |

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

a) stereotyping nearly every character
b) constantly violating believability, including its own established rules and conventions
c) reminding its viewers of the current plotline with at least five minutes of reintroduction and reexposition every single week
d) completely retconning the plotline every five episodes, dropping entirely almost every plot thread that came before.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:57 AM  |

In the latest study, Dr Roth and his colleagues found that the mice stopped moving and appeared to lose consciousness within minutes of breathing the air and H2S mixture.

The animals' breathing rates dropped from the normal 120 breaths per minute to less than 10 breaths per minute.

During exposure their metabolic rates dropped by an astonishing 90%, and their core body temperatures fell from 37C to as low as 11C.

After six hours' exposure to the mixture, the mice were given fresh air. Their metabolic rate and core body temperature returned to normal, and tests showed they had suffered no ill effects.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:53 AM  |

I don’t like that book, “Seize the Day.” I never think about it, I never take it up, I don’t touch it.

Long before he led the botched and bloody anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, Brown, we are taught, was a moral visionary and a man of uncanny courage and integrity. Every one of his central moral convictions and most of his peripheral ones, too, have been vindicated by history. He was a dedicated feminist, who had his sons do the housework on terms of equality with his daughters; he was a farmer who had gentle and respectful relations with neighboring Native Americans, so that, even before he became famous as the fighting fury of abolition, they liked and respected him. Above all, he was convinced, throughout the eighteen-forties and fifties—a time when even most abolitionists were prepared to wring their hands and tolerate slavery if it could be limited in scale—that the practice of holding men, women, and children as property was an absolute evil, that it had, at all costs, to end, and that the race who had been enslaved were not merely to be pitied but to be respected and armed, as citizens and fellow-soldiers. Far from being an incoherent fanatic, he was an eloquent speaker and writer, who composed an entire alternative Constitution, one reflecting egalitarian values that did not become commonplace until our own time.

He was also, as even an admiring historian cannot deny, a man of violence and, by almost any definition, what we would now call a terrorist—a man who believed that the government of the United States should be met with violence because it supported and perpetuated oppression. He believed that there were no distinctions to be made between innocent and guilty in a society determined to perpetuate an evil. “It is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death” than that slavery should live, he declared. He led his sons out into the fields of Kansas at night to massacre unarmed men while their families listened, and insisted afterward that he had been right to do it: that where legislation and compromise had failed only violence would succeed. He is the man who made Lincoln possible, and the acknowledged spiritual patron of Timothy McVeigh.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:26 AM  |

The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world).

The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:26 AM  |

One result of nuclear secrecy has been a mythology and a bureaucracy which, to this day, are almost impregnable. The secrecy industry can be expected to fight for its survival, but the larger society deserves to know what is being protected, besides vested interests. The belief that keeping secrets will discourage nuclear weapons proliferation is widely held, but is it true? Are the secrets really secret in any practical sense?

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:22 AM  |

Regardless of what you could dream up, the game would find a way to make it work. Top-heavy characters would bobble along awkwardly, creatures with branching networks of a dozen legs would learn to walk, and animations for fighting and eating would be generated on the fly.

The editor was what Wright called an 'artist in a box.' It automates all the grunt work of modeling, skinning, and animating a creature. It's a "creative amplification of the player," allowing gamers to totally customize the experience even if they don't have any artistic skills. Moreover, because the creatures are defined simply and animated using these procedural techniques, the data files are incredibly small -- as small as 1K each! This makes creatures easy to move around, store, share with friends, upload to databases, etc.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:02 AM  |

As a young priest he was on the progressive side of theological debates but shifted to the right after the student revolutions of 1968.

In the Vatican, he has been the driving force behind crackdowns on liberation theology, religious pluralism, challenges to traditional moral teachings on issues such as homosexuality, and dissent on such issues as women's ordination.

He wrote a letter of advice to U.S. bishops on denying communion to politicians who support abortion rights, which some observers viewed as a slam at Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. He publicly cautioned Europe against admitting Turkey to the European Union and wrote a letter to bishops around the world justifying that stand on the grounds that the continent is essentially Christian in nature. In another letter to bishops worldwide, he decried a sort of feminism that makes women "adversaries" of men.

...

He is a lightning rod for church liberals who see the hierarchy as reactionary. Ratzinger was active in stamping out liberation theology, with its emphasis on grass-roots activism to fight poverty and its association with Marxist movements.

He once called homosexuality a tendency toward "intrinsic moral evil" and dismissed the uproar over priestly pedophilia in the United States as a "planned campaign" against the church.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:31 PM  |

The language Tho Fan sounds ancient and distinctly Asian. Its "sh" sounds come from the back of the throat, as they do in Chinese. Its "r" sounds are made with a tap of the tongue, echoing Mongolian.

But Tho Fan comes from Canada and was invented only last year. Created in four months, for just over $2,000, it is a real language spoken by unreal people in the Xbox game Jade Empire, released this week. Perhaps it is a sign that, these days, languages are not so much discovered as invented.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:41 AM  |

Hey, you! Yeah, you. Are you opposed to your government using torture to get information on terrorists? Do you think that organizations like Amnesty International actually do important work? Do you believe in the rule of law, due process, civil rights, and the Constitution? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the writers and producers of 24 would like you to know that you're a fucking pussy.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:11 PM  |

"I want everyone to love me," he said, half-mockingly, after explaining that he was once shocked to learn that the racial stereotypes and violence toward women he portrayed in his work were hurtful to many people. "Please love me," Mr. Crumb added.

A woman in the audience then shouted, "We love you!," and Mr. Crumb held up his hands, cringing, to stop the applause.

"O.K., you love me," he responded, laughing. "You're killing me, you love me so much. You're choking me. Now back off."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 6:32 PM  |

"Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," said Mesa Officer Sean Truelove, who builds and operates tactical robots for the suburban Phoenix SWAT team. "It would change the way we do business."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:19 PM  |

Bracket 1
Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1) vs. Heathers (8)
Sullivan’s Travels (4) vs. Animal House (5)
Some Like It Hot (2) vs. Repo Man (7)
Blazing Saddles (3) vs. The General (6)

Bracket 2
Modern Times (1) vs. Slap Shot (8)
Dr. Strangelove (4) vs. Trading Places (5)
The Ladykillers [1955 Alec Guinness version] (2) vs. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (7)
Waiting for Guffman (3) vs. M*A*S*H (6)

Bracket 3
Duck Soup (1) vs. To Be or Not to Be [1942 Jack Benny version] (8)
Caddyshack (4) vs. Royal Tennenbaums (5)
Airplane (4) vs. A Shot in the Dark (5)
The Philadephia Story (3) vs. Office Space (6)

Bracket 4
Annie Hall (1) vs. Bedazzled [Moore/Cook] (8)
Safety Last (4) vs. Hollywood Shuffle (5)
The Bank Dick (2) vs. South Park (7)
Raising Arizona (3) vs. The Incredibles (6)

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:20 AM  |

Trivia lives; it's generalist trivia, the kind of fluency that Trivial Pursuit prized, that's ailing. Just as the Internet splintered trivia into thousands of niches, Trivial Pursuit has contented itself with turning out games like "90s Time Capsule" and "Book Lover's," and, more frighteningly, those devoted solely to the vagaries of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Gone is the proud generalist of the original Trivial Pursuit, who knew the most common Russian surname (Ivanov) and the international radio code word for the letter O (Oscar). In his place is the specialist, who knows every inch of Return of the Jedi. There are many of us who have a nagging fear we belong to the latter group. "What jungle planet do Wookiees hail from?" a Star Wars card asks. Let's say, hypothetically and only for the sake of argument, that I know the answer. Who is supposed to be impressed by that?

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:46 AM  |

A researcher at the University of Alberta has shown that parents are more likely to give better care and pay closer attention to good-looking children compared to unattractive ones...

Harrell's findings are based on an observational study of children and shopping cart safety. With the approval of management at 14 different supermarkets, Harrell's team of researchers observed parents and their two to five-year-old children for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away. The researchers independently graded each child on a scale of one to 10 on attractiveness.

Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also noticed the less attractive children were allowed to wander further away and more often from their parents. In total, there were 426 observations at the 14 supermarkets.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:36 AM  |

Muppet Babies

In the presence of full-grown non-animated Garfunkel, who appears to have no real dramatic function, visibly frightened Muppet Babies retreat into their own private worlds, never have any adventures, never say anything cute or clever, and become very lonely.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:26 PM  |

Pope John Paul II is being reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants.

The first episode of the "Incredible Popeman" is about to go on sale in Colombia and shows the late Polish pontiff meeting comic book legends such as Batman and Superman to learn how to use superpowers to battle Satan.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:56 AM  |

Vonnegut is, in my view, the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us, in the intensity of his gaze, the kindness of his vision, and the width of the possibilties he considers, a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 2:20 PM  |

THE BEAT: I just reread the first few last night and was like "Whoa." What do you think is the appeal of noir and this kind dark, revenge driven fiction?

MILLER: It's going to sound odd, but I think it's the romance. Every Sin City [story] is a romance of some sort. They're very dark and the consequences are bad and they're usually futile, but I think that's at the heart of it. You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

4. Making actors act against screens, not other actors

Actors usually hate shooting scenes alone because they feed off give-and-take with other actors. But many Sin City sequences were created by piecing together footage of performers whose busy schedules kept them apart.

Brittany Murphy plays a barmaid who has an exchange with Bruce Willis, but she never met him until Monday's movie premiere. Jessica Alba's stripper character interacts with Clive Owen and Rourke's hulking bruiser, but they weren't really there, and Wood's mild-mannered serial killer pulverized Rourke in absentia.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:59 PM  |

George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:56 PM  |

A "bionic eye" may one day help blind people see again, according to US researchers who have successfully tested the system in rats ... A visual acuity of 20/20 is considered normal, while 20/400 is considered blind. Palanker and his team say their device could provide acuity of 20/80. “With 20/80 vision you can certainly read large forms and live independently,” Palanker says. “It’s a huge step forward."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:47 AM  |

A thorough analysis of the Koran reveals that the US will cease to exist in the year 2007, according to research published by Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi.

The study, which has caught the attention of millions of Muslims worldwide, is based on in-depth interpretations of various verses in the Koran. It predicts that the US will be hit by a tsunami larger than that which recently struck southeast Asia.

"The tsunami waves are a minor rehearsal in comparison with what awaits the US in 2007," the researcher concluded in his study. "The Holy Koran warns against the Omnipotent Allah's force. A great sin will cause a huge flood in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:15 AM  |