I’m beginning to think men’s gymnastics should revolve athletes daring each other to do ever-crazier stunts:
Should we be encouraging this?
Saturday, December 8th, 2018It is the end of an era
Friday, December 7th, 2018
The prospect was daunting. The 50-year-old medievalist found himself confronted with 70 boxes of unpublished work. Thousands of pages of notes and fragments and poems, some dating back more than six decades, were stuffed haphazardly into the boxes. Handwritten texts were hurriedly scrawled in pencil and annotated with a jumble of notes and corrections. One early story was drafted in a high school exercise book.
A large portion of the archive concerned the history of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, Middle-earth. The notes contained a broader picture of a universe only hinted at in Tolkien’s two bestselling novels, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Tolkien had intended to bring that picture to light in a lengthy, solemn history going back to creation itself, but he died before completing a final, coherent version.
Christopher took it upon himself to edit that book, which was published in 1977 as The Silmarillion. He then turned to another project drawn from his father’s papers, then another—ultimately publishing poetry, academic works, fiction, and a 12-volume history of the creation of Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin, published in August, is the 25th posthumous book Christopher Tolkien has produced from his father’s archives.
Now, after more than 40 years, at the age of 94, Christopher Tolkien has laid down his editor’s pen, having completed a great labor of quiet, scholastic commitment to his father’s vision. It is the concluding public act of a gentleman and scholar, the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings.
[...]
The Inklings (and such of their forebears as Chesterton) sought to explain that there was nothing absurd in the secular and the sacred living cheek by jowl. In fact, it’s quite likely that one may find oneself, in Woolf’s phrase, “sitting by the fire” alongside a wizard who witnessed the singing of creation into being — as indeed Bilbo Baggins does.
This is not to say that the Inklings simply fled into a nostalgic past. They rather sought to apply its lessons to a violent and difficult present. If the Bagginses resemble throwback Victorian gentlemen and the other hobbits suggest plain English country folk of ages past, much else in The Lord of the Rings, from Saruman’s terrible machines to the mangled bodies on the Pelennor Fields, resembles the 20th century. The story ends with the Shire, which Tolkien described as “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee,” ravaged by war. Frodo, experiencing a sort of spiritual shell shock, can find no peace even when the war is long over.
The Inklings weren’t escapists. They were, Flieger writes, “a response to a response, and thus a continuation of the dialogue…. If the period surrounding the Great War gave birth to modernism, it also engendered the reaction against it, the effort to ensure that ‘before’ was not wholly lost in ‘after.’”
The fashion industry was crucial to the election of Donald Trump?
Thursday, December 6th, 2018I find it fascinating that this is framed as “Cambridge Analytica weaponised the fashion industry“:
According to the data obtained (the majority of which came from US users), certain fans of American denim brands such as Wrangler, Hollister and Lee Jeans could be more closely linked to low levels of openness and mistrust — and therefore more likely to engage with pro-Trump messaging. This data also showed more esoteric fashion labels such as Kenzo or Alexander McQueen tended towards a more open and imaginative fanbase, which Wylie said leant more towards typical democratic voters.
Who could’ve guessed that a populist right-wing candidate would appeal to fans of Wrangler jeans?
How to resolve the so-called “paradoxes” of quantum mechanics?
Wednesday, December 5th, 2018
Meanwhile, I understand that Dr. Schantz is working on a popular physics book with some ideas about how to resolve the so-called “paradoxes” of quantum mechanics.
Yes, please.
Yes, please, indeed.
Libya has gone full circle
Tuesday, December 4th, 2018Some compare militia-dominated Tripoli with Al Capone’s Chicago, but the comparison is false, because Al Capone didn’t have artillery:
Seven years after Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed in the Arab spring revolution, Libya has gone full circle from dictatorship through revolution, democracy, chaos and back to a new kind of tyranny. Except this time there is not one dictator but dozens, in the form of the very militias who defeated him.
[...]
Driving through this city means navigating a political fog as you try to work out who among the rag-tag gunmen in assorted uniforms and battered pickup trucks are gangsters, and who constitute the official security forces of the United Nations-backed government. After a while you realise they are the same. One unit is freshly kitted out in smart blue uniforms of the interior ministry, but it remains a militia, as violent and threatening as before. Tensions are high after the body of one warlord was dumped by rivals outside a city hospital in the latest tit-for-tat killing.
[...]
Tripoli’s warlords are on the state payroll, through the simple expedient of gunmen threatening the bankers with kidnapping or worse. Similar pressure resulted in the government handing its all-important intelligence and surveillance portfolio to an Islamist militia. Even as militias fight each other in the capital, they also fight the army of the nationalist warlord Khalifa Haftar, a brooding presence far to the east.
Meanwhile, the citizens suffer: there are shortages of petrol, electricity, water and banknotes. Libya is rich, with £50bn of foreign reserves and booming oil production. But only a handful of banks — those controlled by militias — are permitted to dispense cash. Citizens form kilometre-long queues to collect it.
Bush was a prodigy of all-aroundness
Monday, December 3rd, 2018Steve Sailer looks back at George H.W. Bush‘s life:
A massive but usually overlooked theme in George H.W. Bush’s career was his goal of reversing 1938 and opening Mexico up to American business interests (in return for which America took some of Mexico’s surplus population off its hands).
[...]
WWII: Bush joined in the Navy in 1942 upon graduating from prep school. When he finished his training and was commissioned in June 1943, he was the youngest aviator in the Navy at age 18. He flew 58 combat missions in the TBM Avenger torpedo bomber, which was much improved over the TBD Devastator torpedo bomber that was wiped out at Midway. Still, any torpedo bomber was a big, slow target, and Bush got shot down by anti-aircraft fire once. He parachuted into the Pacific and was rescued by a sub after 4 hours.
In general, Bush was a prodigy of all-aroundness: e.g., after the war he graduated from Yale in 2.5 years while being captain of the baseball team and making it to the College World Series final twice. Bush was married at 20 and a father at 22. Overall, Bush was a superior individual without being supreme in any one aspect, rather like previous GOP previous Gerald Ford, whose record as the longest lived President he recently exceeded. (Jimmy Carter will likely break Bush’s age record early next year.)
I got them at Palessi
Sunday, December 2nd, 2018Shoppers at the Palessi luxury shoe store found out that the chic boutique was not quite what they expected:
If you serve fast food on white tablecloths in a tony-looking restaurant, people sometimes think it’s haute cuisine. (At the very least, it tastes a lot different than it does when you’re scarfing it down from a drive-through bag).
It turns out you can do the same for bargain kicks by showcasing the footwear against the kind of chic backdrop usually reserved for luxury labels like Jimmy Choo and getting people to pay outrageous markups.
That’s what Payless did recently in Santa Monica, taking over a former Armani store and stocking it with $19.99 pumps and $39.99 boots. The chain, via agency DCX Growth Accelerator, invited groups of influencers to the grand opening of “Palessi” and asked their opinions on the “designer” wares.
Party goers, having no idea they were looking at discount staples from the mall scene, said they’d pay hundreds of dollars for the stylish shoes, praising the look, materials and workmanship. Top offer: $640, which translates to an 1,800 percent markup, and Palessi sold about $3,000 worth of product in the first few hours of the stunt.
Payless, or “Palessi,” did ring up those purchases but didn’t keep the money. Influencers got their cash back, along with free shoes. Their reactions caught in the short- and longer-form ads — those shocked “gotcha” moments — are fairly priceless.
Consider buying N95 masks before an outbreak
Saturday, December 1st, 2018The New York Times explains how to survive a flu epidemic:
“Avoid crowds,” says Stephen C. Redd, director of the Center for Preparedness and Response at the C.D.C. If the flu strain is particularly virulent, you may be advised to keep a distance of at least three feet from other people. Research shows that virus transmission rates can fall by nearly 40 percent with mandatory social-distancing measures like closing schools and day cares. You may also be directed to isolate yourself and your family inside your home, a practice known among emergency-preparedness experts as “shelter in place.” Cache at least two weeks of food, medicine and water.
A global flu pandemic begins when a virus circulating in animals — like birds or pigs — mutates to infect humans, allowing it to spread quickly. In 1918, such an influenza sickened an estimated one-third of the world’s population, killing as many as 50 million people. During the next pandemic, practice cough etiquette (into a tissue or your inner elbow, not your palm); wash your hands regularly (20 seconds with soap and water); avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth. If someone in your home falls ill, minimize close contact. Designate a sick room. You may want to wear a mask; one of the most effective types for filtering floating flu particles is known as an N95. Consider buying N95 masks before an outbreak. “In a severe pandemic, there will be a global shortage,” says Redd, who served as the C.D.C.’s incident commander during the last flu pandemic, the H1N1 outbreak in 2009.
Producing a vaccine for a new influenza strain could take months; when one becomes available, get it as soon as you can, knowing that it will be distributed first to those most at risk. Beware rumors and fake news. “Misinformation online will be a big challenge,” Redd says. Get to know your neighbors and your community now: You’ll need one another’s help. Don’t let fear erode empathy. In 1918, the sick starved to death, not for lack of food but because people were too afraid to get close enough to feed them. “You can bring a meal to a neighbor who is coughing without having face-to-face contact,” Redd says.