Does Chrysler’s bankruptcy mean I can get a sweet deal on one of these new Challengers? You can take the boy out of upstate New York…
Archives for April 2009
Teetering on the Edge of Despair
April 30, 2009 by at 8:25 am
For some not too obscure reason, the fact that John Cleese has both a blog and a Twitter feed makes me want to give up the former and never even attempt the latter. It does not, however lessen my desire to interview him about taking on what is perhaps the most diabolical of devil roles, C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape. Back in the days when I had a contract to write a book about the devil in the modern world, that was going to be one of my best bits.
Glendon and the Laetare Medal, continued
April 30, 2009 by at 1:59 am
This article was written in response to an opinion expressed that Glendon’s “diplomatic style seems to be less suited for U.S.-Vatican relations and more for U.S.-Cuba relations.” The whole article is worth reading, but here’s one paragraph in particular that really sets the record straight:
Professor Glendon was to have been honored for not only for her scholarship, but for her second career, her pro-bono work — ranging from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the great civil rights issues of the present day — namely, the defense of human life from conception to natural death. Her concerns range from the aging and dying population to the unborn to the well-being and dignity of every life, regardless of race, religion, or economic status. Her outstanding work in this field has earned her the respect of the most brilliant minds of the international community, regardless of whether they agree with her position. So again, to see her merely as “strongly anti-abortion” instead of as a tireless defender of the dignity of life, is to reveal not only a lack of understanding of the subject’s work, but also the writer’s real interest in this question.
Furthermore, during his first 100 days in office, President Obama has worked tirelessly to undermine Professor Glendon’s lifetime of work; he is funding abortion out of the bailout package and planning to suppress the protection of conscience for health care workers.
Apprently Father Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, is now in search of an alternate recipient of the Laetare Medal. Would it not be better to just let the matter drop, and perhaps take it as an opportunity for meditating on what led to the impasse in the first place?
Zombies!
April 29, 2009 by at 4:04 pm
Today in Porn: Awesome Legal Edition
April 29, 2009 by at 9:11 am
Many thanks to the Manhattan Lawyer, who passed along this best-ever legal opinion from The Honorable Richard A. Posner, Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. It seems there was a scuffle between a couple of manufacturers of…well, take it away, Posner…”what the parties call ‘sex aids’ but are colloquially referred to as ‘sex toys.’ A more perspicuous term is ‘sexual devices,’ by analogy to ‘medical devices.’ The analogy lies in the fact that, like many medical devices (thermometers for example), what we are calling sexual devices are intended to be inserted into bodily orifices, albeit for a different purpose.”
So dry! And bonus points for the use of “perspicuous,” a word that has languished in many an uncracked thesaurus lo, these many years. And it only gets better. The disputed product was, according to the patent holder, a “sexual aid…fabricated of a generally lubricious glass-based material containing an appreciable amount of an oxide of boron to render it lubricious and resistant to heat, chemicals, electricity and bacterial absorptions.”
Posner goes to town: “By ‘lubricious’—a word whose primary meaning, appropriate for a sexual device, is ‘lecherous’—the patent means only ‘slippery,’ which is the secondary meaning of the word. The patent’s use of the word in that sense is confusing, because glass is smooth rather than slippery. But what is meant is that the glass, because it contains oxide of boron, is smoother than soda-lime glass and therefore becomes slippery with less lubricant than a device made out of soda-lime glass.”
At some point prior to this, all parties should have dropped the suit out of the potential embarrassment brought on by making a judge speculate on this or that device’s QLR (Quantity of Lube Required). But no. And so Posner rises to the occasion, and goes to the pertinent research (just imagine the lucky intern who got to go digging on this one):
“That glass has the properties that the patent claims for it, and one can see how those properties (even resistance to electricity, see M. Klintschar, P. Grabuschnigg & A. Beham, Death from Electrocution During Autoerotic Practice: Case Report and Review of the Literature, 19 Am. J. Forensic Med. Pathology 190 (1998)) might enhance the utility of sexual devices made out of it.”
(Good old Klintschar, Grabuschnigg, and Beham. All those jerks who made fun of them at the Medical Research Convention, who asked all those sneering questions about what exactly drives a person to investigate death from electrocution during autoerotic practice – where are they now?)
But getting back to the case in hand. Posner has little use for your “patented” lubricious glass, and cites KSR Int’l Co. vs. Teleflex Inc. to make his point: “If a person of ordinary skill can implement a predictable variation, § 103 likely bars its patentability. For the same reason, if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious unless its actual application is beyond his or her skill.”
If this hasn’t been made into an episode of CSI by Fall sweeps week, somebody’s not doing his job.
Christopher Buckley on being the son of Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley
April 27, 2009 by at 8:37 pm
Well, who needs Yahoo! News when we have The New York Times? Buckley has written a fine memoir of life as a Buckley. He proclaims his agnosticism in such a civil way (“I’m no longer a believer, but I haven’t quite reached the point of reading aloud from Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great””), but the entire excerpt is shot through with religious overtones:
I don’t think I ever once heard Mum utter a religious or spiritual sentiment, a considerable feat considering that she was married for 57 years to one of the most prominent Catholics in the country. But she rigorously observed the proprieties. When Pup taped an episode of “Firing Line” in the Sistine Chapel with Princess Grace, Malcolm Muggeridge, Charlton Heston and David Niven, Mum was included in the post-taping audience with Pope John Paul II. There’s a photo of the occasion: she has on more black lace than a Goya duchess. The total effect is that of Mary Magdalene dressed by Bill Blass.
To add to these Naturalist sentiments, Iet me just say that the ability to write must certainly have an hereditary aspect.
Things Should Start to Get Interesting Right About Now
April 27, 2009 by at 4:36 pm
On A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
April 27, 2009 by at 4:35 pm
A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to A Fire upon the Deep, and both are considered some of the best of recent science fiction. I liked AFUD a lot, especially in the way Vinge took the entire Milky Way as his canvas, and then made its spiral shape and the distribution of stars the primary element of what he called “Zones of Thought”. These Zones of Thought are such that life evolves more slowly near the center of the galaxy, while at the edge of the galaxy there exist Godlike powers – some of which are certainly the result of artificial intelligences created by men. Whether God actually exists is somewhat more in question, but not at all denied. Although I’m skeptical about the validity of all this, Vinge is writing about events tens of thousands of years in the future, when science has advanced far beyond the barely-beyond-the-stone-age age in which we now live. I also liked the planet he imagined within this system, where wolf-like creatures have crossed the threshold of symbolization and achieved a kind of civilization based on their ability to think in packs of four or more. Well, it seemed more plausible in the actual reading of the story.
DITS takes place some unspecified time earlier, when the most important starfaring civilization is on the verge of making first contact with aliens that have not evolved from earth. This civilization is made up of a federation of traders that seems based on the 17th century Hanseatic League, except that they’re actually called the “Qeng Ho” – a name that is more probably based on “Zheng He”, a 14th century Chinese sailor also known as “Sanbao”, or Sinbad. Vinge seems to have a fondness for Chinese culture, or at least Chinese names. His books are peopled with quite a few of them – most importantly “Pham Nuwen”, one of the main character is AFUD who is back again in DITS. This time it isn’t so much God-like powers that he’s up against, but another human civilization that has recently grown out of a dark age by developing what seems to be a fairly benign form of mind control, but which of course turns out to be pretty horrific.
This time the alien race resembles spiders rather than dogs. These spiders seem to be about the size and dimension of go-carts, and at the beginning of the book have managed to build up a civilization roughly equal to the advances achieved on Earth in the earliest 20th century. They have skyscrapers, cars, and airplanes. Life on Arachna (the name given to their planet by visiting humans) goes into a kind of hibernation mode for 200 years or so at a time, and the transition in and out of these long winters is traumatic in the extreme. The leading nation on Arachna maintains its advantage through science and a kind of scientific-military-industrial complex which makes the US effort look like a Cub Scout field trip. Most of these scientific advances are pushed by a genius spider named “Sherker Underhill”. Underhill utters the phrase that becomes the title of the book, in the midst of a public debate with a religious whacko who almost wins the debate by calling his children freaks. You have to read it to believe it. And actually, by the end, it was lost on me. Although Vinge has enjoyed a long career as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Programming, many of these ideas struck me as far-fetched in the extreme: spiders riding motorcycles, a planet with small moons made out of diamonds, and a main character that lives for tens of thousands of years. It’s all in good fun though – mostly anyway.
When it takes on a serious tone it only becomes more ridiculous. The book runs the gamut: from techonological prophecy to futuristic anthropology to enforced idiot-savantism as a version of mental slavery. But, hey, it’s science fiction
Devastating.
April 27, 2009 by at 4:13 pm
“I just felt that you don’t talk about a book until it’s written.”
– Nan Talese, recalling her objection to having New York Magazine writer Aaron Latham profile her husband Gay Talese while he was writing Thy Neighbor’s Wife, his somewhat involved study of the sexual revolution.
And why is it so devastating? Because she is sharing this recollection with New York Magazine writer Jonathan Van Meter, who is profiling her husband Gay Talese during the writing of his new book, “the subject of which will take him right back to the scene of the crime, to the spot where everything went off the rails: a book about his marriage.”
Father Stanley Ladislas Jaki, OSB (1924-2009)
April 27, 2009 by at 4:05 pm
The American writer Walker Percy, a convert to Catholicism, formulated the position Jaki came to espouse this way in his novel Lost in the Cosmos: “As Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation.”
I hadn’t heard of Fr. Jaki, but he sounds like quite a guy — and this reference to Lost in the Cosmos as a novel caught my eye.
The Onion gets religion.
April 27, 2009 by at 7:26 am
Well now. As the atheists shout it from the rooftops, my generation’s heroes duck and weave. First, on April 2, they reviewed William Lobdell’s Losing my Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America – and Found Unexpected Peace. Of course, it’s not as if they’re getting all friendly-like with the Jesus People – this is a story of lost faith, after all. (Thank you, priest scandal.) But look at this closing graf:
“The bookstores are full of screeds against belief and polemics against non-belief. In such a polarized moment, Lobdell’s book Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting On Religion In America—And Found Unexpected Peace, is an anguished tale of paradise gained and lost that provides a vital, revelatory human perspective. From the believers who inspired him to the institution that disillusioned him, Lobdell writes with page-turning urgency about a journey he finds simultaneously tragic and liberating. Because of his simple, honest style and ability to see both sides of the story, his audience should include Christians, atheists, and those hovering in the vestibule. It’s a primer on taking faith seriously enough to let it go, and it deserves to be read by everyone who cares about American religion, either as a promise or as a threat.”
As I said – well now. And then, a week later, they took up Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University:
“But the charm and emotional heft of Roose’s book lies in his honesty about how Liberty changed him. He not only sees the attraction of a university filled with like-minded peers who share a common commitment, but he finds solace in some of the practices that bind them together, like daily prayer. The ways his hallmates display depth and difference tempers his concern about potential brainwashing…When Roose’s off-campus friends and family send him messages that betray their fear and loathing for the people sharing his education, it’s clear that Liberty doesn’t have a monopoly on intolerance. The Unlikely Disciple serves as a refreshing cease-fire in the wearying culture wars, likely holding surprises for anyone—theist, atheist, or somewhere in between—who gives it a chance.”
What’s more, the comments are, as comments go, hotbeds of thoughtful, nuanced conversation(!)
Even a cheerfully impious piece like “Panicked, Sweat-Covered Pope Reverses Longstanding Ban on Abortion” works only because there is a certain regard for his “former” stance. Viz:
“‘My friends in Christ, brothers and sisters of the cloth, having an abortion is…err…not that big a deal,’ announced the anxious pontiff while reading from a series of hastily scrawled edicts. ‘In fact, it is written, uh, somewhere, that the taking of an innocent life might even be something of a blessing in some cases.'”
The line, creepy as it is, doesn’t work unless it really is the taking of an innocent life – or at least, if there is some reason for saying so. This one is even better:
“Pausing momentarily to take a drink of water, Benedict went on to stress that certain religious doctrines no longer apply in today’s world, and that, perhaps, they ought to be weighed against more modern considerations, such as making a problem go away.”
Compare that to Mother Teresa’s: “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
What’s going on over there?
Christopher Buckley at his mother’s deathbed.
April 26, 2009 by at 1:01 pm
“I’d brought with me a pocket copy of the book of Ecclesiastes. A line in ‘Moby-Dick’ lodged in my mind long ago: ‘The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.’ I grabbed it off my bookshelf on the way here, figuring that a little fine-hammered steel would probably be a good thing to have on this trip. I’m no longer a believer, but I haven’t quite reached the point of reading aloud from Christopher Hitchens’s ‘God Is Not Great’ at deathbeds of loved ones.”
(More here.)
From The YouTube Music Video Archives: People Got A Lotta Nerve by Neko Case
April 25, 2009 by at 3:50 pm
From her new CD, “Middle Cyclone”, which is great – amazing, really.
So the saying says, “An elephant never forgets.” / Standing in the concrete cage / Swaying sad and insane / They walked over the ocean in 5heir dreams they dream awake / Until the lights grew dim / until the cop cars came / Everybody tells me this is crazy / Yes, I know it / I’m a man, man, man, man, man, man eater / But still you’re surprised-prised-prised when I eat ya / You know / They call them “killer” whales?! / But you seem surprised / When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank / Where you can’t turn around / It took half your leg, and both your lungs / “When I craved I ate hearts of sharks / I know you know it” / I’m a man, man, man, man, man, man eater / But still you’re surprised-prised-prised when I eat ya / Yes, I’m a man, man, man / Man, man, man eater / But still you’re surprised-prised-prised when I eat ya / It will end again in bullets, friend
“Miki” spells it out for us over at www.songmeaning.net:
I think the song’s a little more abstract than actually being about wild animals… a maneater is basically “an irresistable woman who chews and spits out men after using them for some sort of gain — be it sexual, financial or psychological.” neko warned this guy that she’s no good for him and yet he didn’t listen and fell for her anyway. she has no apologies and points him to her previous warning. the “ending in bullets” is basically the harsh ending of the friendship/relationship.
More Moyo, Less Bono
April 25, 2009 by at 2:32 pm
Steyn on Bono’s tax sheltering:
It’s Bono’s money, not theirs. And who’s to say, even if he did give it to the government, that they’d stick it in the mail to some Afro-Marxist kleptocrat as opposed to squandering it closer to home? I’m with the U2 lads on this: I think the caterwauling rockers know better how to spend their dough than the state does.
On Africa:
in 1950, what was then the Belgian Congo had a higher GDP per capita than either China or India. But today it’s literally the last place in the world you’d want to start a business. Well, okay, a big chunk of the Congo’s been a war-torn hellhole for the last decade. So what about, say, Guinea-Bissau? Starting a business there requires overcoming 17 government hurdles, takes 233 days and costs 257.7 per cent of income per capita. Which is why Bono can’t put his money where his mouth is.
On the “aristorockracy”:
I love elderly rock stars—not for their “music,” which is mostly ghastly, but for their business acumen, which totally rocks. Sir Paul McCartney owns the publishing rights to Guys & Dolls. David Bowie was the first pop singer to hold a bond offering in his back catalogue and had $55 million worth of Bowie “Class A royalty-backed notes” snapped up in nothing flat after Moody’s gave them their much coveted triple-A rating. Madonna cleans up with a book of nude photographs featuring such unsettling sights as her naked bottom propped up like a novelty bike rest, and then decides to relaunch her literary career with some improving children’s stories, but, either way, is savvy enough to headquarter her business interests in the United States and United Kingdom.
Recent Comments