Monday, November 24, 2008

A bunch of stuff to keep you going

Here's a quick post of links to this and that:

* Bryan Appleyard is back, and posting in amusing fashion about the rich and travel, the BBC and "risk taking", his ailments, and John Lennon's "Imagine" (he dislikes the song; so do I).

In fact, I seem to be in basic agreement with him about everything since his return. If only he didn't have that strange aberration of enjoying Olbermann!

* I have no idea whether the author of this article is a reliable pundit on China, but the picture he paints of the dramatic consequences of a serious economic slow down in China sounds plausible enough. (Basically, it's of social disruption on a pretty massive scale, as former factory workers return to the countryside to eke out a living in agriculture, or whatever.) I do get the impression that the West is overly optimistic on China being able to spend its way out of trouble.

* Victor Davis Hansen makes a list of ten politically incorrect complaints about America. Points 3 (about Hollywood being in a terrible creative slump at the moment) and 6 (about the American male accent not being what it used to be) are the most interesting. Here's a sample:
.....increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet.
Certainly, having read this, I could not think of one convincing, male action hero who is currently in his prime and particularly "manly" in the way Hansen complains. Matt Damon? I don't think so.

* A lot of his commentors to this post by John Quiggin think that a carbon emissions trading scheme is too open to the abuses of a trading market, and argue a carbon tax avoids this problem. JQ does not answer them. (He may have elsewhere, but he - and nearly every other economist - just seem to be taking an ETS instead of a tax as a "given".)

* Finally: did you know that Japan has an all woman musical theatre troupe, owned by a train company (!) that has been doing large scale shows for nearly 100 years? The women play the male roles, and about 90% of the audience is women (causing much speculation as to what it is the audience is responding to.)

Anyhow, I had never heard of the Takarazuka Revue before, but there is a detailed Wikipedia entry. The shows they have put on have included such oddities (remember, it's women playing men) as adaptions of The Great Gatesby, Tom Jones, and (from "normal" theatre) The Sound of Music and West Side Story.

Very strange if you ask me.

3 comments:

Geoff said...

222 (mostly laudatory) comments for VDH who thinks teaching Latin will solve his country's ills.

very strange

TimT said...

Geoff, you should read some of the political blogs out there.

Any commenters that don't support the orthodox position are roundly condemned by the others for not being supportive or taking the conversation 'OT', etc. Sometimes censored by blog moderation too.

Result: hundreds of comments along the lines of --

OMG YOU'RE SO RIGHT!

Hey, it's supportive!

Steve said...

Well Geoff, what redundant language would you chose to revitalise the United States? Esperanto? Ha!

Teach that and you have forgotten the lessons of the Gilligan's Island episode where they found the bush with the berries that gave them they all the ability to read each other's mind. Remember how badly that turned out, until Gilligan in his wisdom set the bush alight.

(Come to think of it, that episode had allusions to both the Tower of Babel and Moses - except I hope that Moses setting the bush alight himself was not the way the story got started.)

Now where did I put that medication? :P