A wise fellow

A nod of appreciation goes to RLH, whose plainspoken wit always helps put the foolishness of bureaucratic egos in perspective, as in this recent listserv reminiscence.

(CISSYFOK. Heh-heh, heh-heh, he said CISSYFOK....)

Thee U., back in the news

Baylor U. Drops a Controversial Book About Its Recent History, but Denies Buckling Under Pressure (From The Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

Baylor University has backed out of an agreement to publish a book about a tumultuous period in its recent history. The book's editors, a former provost and a history professor, have vowed to find another publisher, despite irate e-mail messages from a former president who warned that the book was inaccurate and could "plunge the university into a new era of conflict and renewed animosities."...

The most bizarre element has to be the blackmail-like threats emanating from former president Herb Reynolds:

"In re: Sloan's chapter in the book, I will be releasing one or more documents which I have kept in my 'asbestos' files," Mr. Reynolds wrote. "Readers will quickly see an unvarnished picture of this 'Intentional Christian.'"

Referring to the editors and Mr. Sloan, Mr. Reynolds continued: "You and he, and most certainly others, have opened the door with both your much publicly touted 'Intentional Christianity' and ad hominems. I have placed strategic items in the hands of a trusted confidant who will release them timewise as I have instructed him, so they are now out of my hands."

Reynolds goes on to brag about his military experience in psychological warfare.

Disappointing? Perhaps to some. But not those of us who recognize that all institutions are fundamentally and irrevocably corrupt, and that all successful leaders are amoral thugs.

News noted

Michigan contemplates whether to preserve or abolish net-neutrality. (National Journal)

Adjuncts and academic freedom

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: An Adjunct Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to me that any such creature will ever exist. University administrators have a vested interest in keeping adjuncts powerless and perpetually cowed. And tenured faculty? Well, as the article acknowledges,

"...since tenured professors are guaranteed a full-time workload year after year, Jacobsen says, they have not felt threatened by academe's increased hiring of part-timers, and thus have looked the other way, feeling that the adjuncts' plight does not affect them. Full-timers, Jacobsen said, have their piece of the pie, and their primary goal is to hang on to it, and to make sure that no one else takes it away."

Of money and speech

You'd think that after its recent electoral drubbing, the Republican party would keep its head down for a while and re-assess its rhetoric. You would think wrong.

The Manchester Union-Leader reports that Newt Gingrich is still blatting out the same old anti-liberty platform, demanding that American citizens give up their traditional, vital freedom of speech. Or else... or else.... boogaboogabooga! The big bad terrorists will getcha! Booga booga!

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994.

As several commenters have noted, Gingrich seems to be blissfully, or willfully, unaware that the only city we have "lost" was lost due to Republican incompetence, arrogance, and willful failure to provide the kind of services that are government's only legitimate excuse for existence. And that's not the only irony afoot. The award dinner was intended to "honor people who stood up for free speech."

But of course Gingrich has a different definition of "free speech" than us Little People.

Gingrich sharply criticized campaign finance laws he charged were reducing free speech and doing little to fight attack advertising. He also said court rulings over separation of church and state have hurt citizens' ability to express themselves and their faith.

Restrict American citizens' freedom of speech, using terrorist boogeymen as an excuse. Eliminate restrictions on bribes from the corporate aristocracy. Censor criticism of politicians (i.e., "attack ads"). Establish a State Religion so that politicians can "express their faith" by favoring their co-religionists and persecuting others.

Yep, that'll protect freedom. Uh-huh.

Recent viewings

The Castle. A sardonic, witty Australian comedy about ... eminent domain?

Meet the Kerrigans.

They're perfectly happy in their ramshackle tract house adjacent to a busy airport, where the roar of jets passing overhead only occasionally drowns out conversation.

Dad's a tow truck driver and an amateur home-improver whose additions to the house, although not necessarily level or square, satisfy the family's needs. Also, those of his multiple dogs, who live in a multi-story kennel. He enjoys sitting in his back yard and gazing at his "view" of the immense powerline towers that overshadow the property.

Meanwhile, Mom keeps the family happily fed with recipes that only James Lilek could love, and fulfills her artistic ambitions by making lopsided pottery and garish knicknacks. Daughter Tracy has made the family proud by graduating from beauty school and marrying an accountant. One son spends his days trolling the secondhand ads in the paper, looking for bargains on ergonomic chairs and jousting sticks. Another son is in prison.

They are, in short, the worst possible nightmare for the kind of homeowner who worries that tacky neighbors might reduce his resale value.

When a notice arrives in the mail informing them that their home is being "compulsorily acquired" for the expansion of a politically-connected business, they face a dilemma. Surrender meekly? Or fight City Hall?

Darryl turns out to be stubborn. A man's home is his castle, after all. And he knows a lawyer! Shouldn't the same guy who handles property conveyances and has an office above the local cafe be able to handle this?

I'm not sure how accurate the film's portrayal of the Australian legal system is. But it's great fun watching blustering Darryl and his well-intentioned but grossly-outclassed neighborhood solicitor take on the impossible task of blocking the seizure of the family's home. ("It's, um, the vibe of the Constitution, your honor....")

And with a stroke of luck or two, perhaps things aren't quite as one-sided as they seem....

The production may look downright primitive to some viewers. There are practically no special effects, and the soundtrack is limited to a few pieces of music. Many scenes have no musical soundtrack at all. It doesn't matter, because the situations and the characters are genuinely funny, and the dilemma they face is genuinely interesting.

It's an enjoyable comedy with a worthwhile point. Even tacky people have rights, and be it ever so tacky, there's no place like home.

News noted

Database king dies in front of PC (The Inquirer - UK)

DONALD WILSON, who developed the Lexis Nexis commercial database service and introduced the idea of electronic research to law firms and news outfits has died in front of his computer at his home in Mitchellville. He was 82....

When lawyers refused to touch the system, Wilson pushed the database by giving law students free access until the database became part of US legal life....

Whittling away the DMCA?

The Copyright Office issues a ruling specifying six exemptions to the anti-circumvention restrictions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Among them are the use of film & video clips by professors of film & media studies, and "computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."

The ruling is otherwise notable for using the word "dongle" in an official government publication.

Beware of evil bookshelves

Bookcase 'trap' killed US woman (BBC)

More collegiate silliness

Don't criticize the theists. In fact, don't even criticize the leprechauns, or the "energy layers" that your fellow students think they inhabit. Or you will be expelled from such enlightened institutions as the Art Institute of Portland.

And more collegiate silliness

Dartmouth Official Apologizes for Inviting the 'Fighting Sioux' to Tournament.

Selected comments:

Indian mascots are racist imagery intended to promote white supremacy and anti-indianism....

Once again we have PC gone insane....

Too bad the NCAA cannot enforce high academic standards for university athletes, white and black and brown and red, rather than this issue.....

Heh. I wonder if Dartmouth would engage the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Or is that pugnacious little leprechaun not a racial stereotype?....

Speaking of PC – I’m surprised the Christian fundamentalists aren’t up in arms over my favorite team: Whitman College’s “Fighting Missionaries”....

My mother grew up in Denmark, and I’m offended by the use of “Viking” as the mascot of the Minnesota NFL team....

it should be noted that dartmouth regularly schedules the penn quakers and the holy cross crusaders, but apparently does not consider these cognomens to be “offensive.”...

I think I’m going to start petitioning PETA to get the fauna out of big-time prep, college, and pro sports. No more lions and tigers and bears (and bruins), oh my....

The Car Of The Future?

Deal reached to bring 2-seat Smart car to U.S. (MSNBC)

The ForTwo's three-cylinder, 700cc engine has significantly lower emissions than other cars and gets an average of 40 miles per gallon in combined city-highway driving and will sell for less than $15,000....

I've seen these little critters in Canada, and although I would feel cramped in one, and wouldn't feel particularly safe driving on crowded high-speed highways in one, I can see how they would appeal to urbanites who want a small personal runabout on a bargain budget.

Death of a university

(Edited version)

Thanks to Steph for pointing out that I was confused in the previous version of this post. This story came up in the context of a discussion of the University of Texas and its decision to remove all books from its undergraduate library and turn it into just another undergraduate computer lab. For some reason I got the impression, while reading the story, that it was also about the U-Texas library.

The story is still disgusting, even if it is in Massachusetts rather than Texas.

RIP: Milton Friedman

For those who haven't read it elsewhere yet. He was an influential advocate of freedom, both in economic terms and in social terms. Free to Choose, by Friedman and his wife Rose, influenced my thinking at an impressionable age.

Perhaps a cat

Here's the only TomKat article I will ever link to.

What is a Scientology wedding? (Reuters via MSNBC)

...In the old-fashioned language that marks the Traditional version, the groom is reminded that "girls" need "clothes and food and tender happiness and frills, a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat" — and is asked to provide them all....

Jackson Watch

According to Publisher's Weekly and other sources, Peter Jackson has announced that he will not direct a cinematic version of The Hobbit. Disappointing, sure, but as the PW writer observed in an earlier essay, maybe it's not a bad thing for part of the Tolkien canon to remain free of the thundering hoi-polloi and their tacky movie tie-in merchandise.

Recent viewings

Bowery Buckaroos (1947). Silly, lightweight comedy in which the Bowery Boys -- comical, wisecracking, "ethnic" denizens of the Bronx -- head west to find a lost gold mine and solve a murder... or, rather, a "moider". Mainly notable as an example of the "Bowery Boys" schtick of Leo Gorcey and company. Gorcey's cocksure, nasal-voiced persona may well have been the prototype for the character of Bugs Bunny. A couple of bit players from the movie looked familiar. Norman Willis (Black Jack, the villain) played numerous other roles, mostly bit parts in television series. "Iron-Eyes" Cody (the inevitable Indian sidekick) likewise appeared in dozens of shows, but achieved fame for his shortest role, as the Crying Indian of the famous 1970s anti-pollution advertisement.

Trivia: This is almost certainly the only film in which a Native American says "This not look kosher to me."

And it's not even Thanksgiving yet

Recent reads:

True Grit, by Charles Portis. The most notable and captivating characteristic of this 1968 western is the distinctive voice of its narrator, one fourteen-year old Mattie Ross "of near Dardanelle, Arkansas". The novel is told as if she is relating it in her later years, and Portis stays true to her precise, formal, and firmly opinionated voice even when conveying the words of very rough frontier characters who, the reader well knows, probably spoke in much looser and saltier terms. Mattie never glosses over the harrowing events of her tale, though, and the result is a captivating slice of 19th-century adventure, which gains rather than loses authenticity by being filtered through the mind of a believable person of that time and place.

The "true grit" of the title is what Mattie says she is looking for when she goes to Fort Smith, the seat of the nearest territorial court, to seek out a US Marshall or some other champion to help her avenge her father's death at the hands of an outlaw. The man she hires to track him into the untamed Indian Territory to the west is "Rooster" Cogburn, an aging, overweight, profane, whiskey-snorting, one-eyed veteran of Civil War guerrilla fighting who is, by modern standards, barely one step above the outlaws he hunts. But, Mattie concludes, he does have "true grit". Subsequent events prove that she, too, possesses this quality, as she insists on accompanying Cogburn and a Texas Ranger on their bounty hunt for the miscreant and the gang with which they think he may be associated.

The book was, of course, made into a movie in 1969, with John Wayne playing the role of Rooster Cogburn, a role for which he was perfectly suited in his later years. I haven't seen the movie (yet), but I note that New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby spoke slightingly of a scene in which Cogburn, facing multiple armed opponents, responds by charging them on horseback, blasting away with a revolver in each hand. This is pure fantasy, says the reviewer. And yet historians of the Civil War guerrilla fighting, such as Thomas Goodrich (Black Flag, et al) report that this was in fact a tactic frequently used by the Confederate partisans of that bloody conflict. Partisans, armed with a revolver in each hand (and sometimes several more stashed about their person), would seek situations from which they could charge on horseback, from relatively short range, at the more conventionally armed soldiers, taking advantage of their greater mobility and faster rate of fire to startle, disorient, and decimate larger and nominally more powerful forces. A Federal soldier armed with a relatively slow, clumsy long gun and only one pistol had little chance, at short range, against a mounted partisan in full charge, firing at will from dual revolvers and, when his ammunition was exhausted, discarding them to draw out a second, and then a third pair of such revolvers. It's already been established, in the novel, that Cogburn was among these guerrillas. And in one of his rare forthcoming moods, he's spoken thus to his teenage employer:

"I had to fly for my life [from New Mexico]. Three fights in one day. Bo was a strong colt then and there was not a horse in that territory could run him in the ground. But I did not appreciate being chased and shot at like a thief. When the posse had thinned down to about seven men I turned Bo around and taken the reins in my teeth and rode right at them boys firing them two navy sixes I carry on my saddle. I guess they was all married men who loved their families as they scattered and run for home."

"That is hard to believe."

"What is?"

"One men riding at seven men like that."

"It is true enough. We done it in the war. I seen a dozen bold riders stampede a full troop of regular cavalry. You go for a man hard enough and fast enough and he don't have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him." (pp. 143-144, book club ed.)

Is it any wonder if, faced with a tight spot, an aging guerrilla would revert to tactics that had worked in the past? Perhaps the reviewer from Noooo Yooorrk Ciiiity should have familiarized himself with his subject before labelling it a "fantasy".

Silence is golden

Or should I say, silents are golden? Lately, I've been on a sort of mini-binge of watching old silent films on DVD. Huzzah for Buster Keaton and D.W. Griffith! Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the Great Lakes Cinephile Society and their annual silent-film convention until just now. Oh well, maybe next year, if I'm still in the area.

I wonder -- If I listen to radio programs that feature sound-without-sight, and watch movies that feature sight-without-sound, do the two cancel each other out?

Recent viewings

Intolerance. D.W. Griffith's 1916 silent opus is, by any measure, a gigantic undertaking. The phrase "cast of thousands" is literally true; the sets are gargantuan; and both the plot and the structure of the movie are ambitious even by modern standards.

For three and a half hours, Griffith interweaves four separate storylines in four separate settings in a manner that's still regarded as avante-garde and challenging in modern films. Each storyline deals in some fashion with the problems caused by religious and social intolerance. Griffith cuts back and forth between the storylines like a composer interweaving musical themes, and even though the VHS copy of the film I saw is a wretchedly poor transfer, even though a couple of the stories are underdeveloped and all are marred by melodramatic excesses, even though Griffith has a tendency to preach at the audience in the title-cards as well as through the script, and even though his portrayal of Babylon and the conquering Persians is historically bizarre, I still found myself getting caught up in the flow of his titanic epic, especially toward the end as each storyline accelerates toward its conclusion in a crescendo of ever-shorter, ever-more-urgent scenes that bounce back and forth between storylines like a tennis ball in a four-way Wimbledon match.

It's one of the tragedies of cinematic history that when Intolerance proved a flop at the box office, it was recut into two separate, shorter movies and much of the excised footage was lost for good. However, what I saw was impressive enough, even in a dark, murky, blurry transfer with a monotonous and sometimes ludicrously inappropriate soundtrack, that I've ordered a copy of Kino's highly-regarded DVD release. I look forward to seeing the three-hundred foot tall walls of Babylon in something approaching their original glory.

An oddity of the film: it's the only silent movie I've ever seen which actually includes footnotes to the titlecards. Fortunately, the Kino release reportedly leaves the titlecards on the screen long enough that one can actually read them without stopping and rewinding and pausing.