Nazis, music and a dog

Courtesy of my daughter's involvement in the Queensland Youth Orchestra, we were offered a few free tickets to a performance this evening by Camerata - a youthful Queensland chamber orchestra - at the Performing Arts Centre.

I haven't seen them before, and assume that most of their shows are straight music.  But this one, at least, was sort of a mini play, The White Mouse, telling the story of famous World War 2 resistance fighter Nancy Wake.

It was pretty terrific:  2 actors on stage, one playing Wake, the other a guy playing several men in her life; they both address the audience and re-enact key events while the orchestra was also on stage for the many musical pieces interspersing the story. 

A dog makes a brief appearance too.  As does a female singer with a couple of French songs, and the show ending on (of course) Je Ne Regrette Nien.  The orchestra themselves were great, making you realise just how much musical talent there is in the world, when a place like Brisbane can produce this.

To be truthful, while I had read some articles about her in the newpapers years ago, there wasn't a lot I could recall in detail about NancyWake, and my teenage kids unfortunately had never heard of her.  This was a really good way for them (and me) to learn about her:  told with verve, humour and minimalist but effective staging.   A fair bit of "strong language" too - Nancy apparently swore like a trooper - but hey if it's accurate to her personality, I don't mind.  I wonder how much swearing there is in her autobiography?

As far as I can tell, though, this show has only been performed twice - once in Toowoomba, and once in Brisbane.   A great effort, yet a relatively limited audience.  At least half of the audience in Brisbane gave it a standing ovation.  I reckon they ought to take it to all the capital cities, at least.

Tom, a Mummy and technology (not necessarily in that order)

So, last night, due to another offer from Google Play on my TV for an "any movie" hire for .99 cents, we watched  the widely panned "The Mummy". 

[On a side note:  I feel very sorry for anyone who might have invested in DVD hire vending machines, thinking there would be a market for them after the disappearance of video hire shops.  I mean, I hired perhaps less than 10 times from a DVD machine myself, and thought it was a pretty good system.  Then I bought a Smart TV (Samsung - it's excellent), got the NBN connected (it works well at very acceptable cost), subscribed to Netflix, and now I just don't see much incentive to ever hire a DVD again.  If there is nothing we want to watch on Netflix, Google Play hire for even quite recent movies is usually around $6, and I don't have to drive to return the DVD.

Have I mentioned how sorry I feel for newagents, too?  And what is it with the occasional surviving one that stocks crappy, kitchy gift items?  Have you ever seen anyone in a newsagency buying a porcelain angel, or cat, for someone's gift?  I don't believe I have ever seen anyone even looking at the crap gift shelves.  It's one of life's mysteries...]

Back to the story:  surely The Mummy was worth .99 cent hire?   Yes, actually, I think I would go as far as to say it was worth a $4 hire.   Maybe not $5, but a solid $4.

It's hardly perfect, but it's not as bad as people say.   It looks expensive, has some good action, Tom Cruise running (as Honest Trailers says, it's in his contract for every movie - "must have running sequence") and I even liked some story elements.  (The use of mercury to contain a Mummy). 

On the downside, it does this strange thing where at the beginning, it feels too simple a story, and then towards the end, too complicated.  I don't think anyone quite understood the curse thing, and what exactly was going on with Cruise's flashbacks (I thought reincarnation was being suggested at one point.)   Maybe it would make more sense on a second viewing, but the screenplay was definitely flawed.   What was Tom meant to have become by the end?   Surely there could have been a better hint than the murmuring explanation of a very tubby looking Russell Crowe.  No doubt it was going to be explained in a subsequent movie in the Dark Universe, which I see Universal has now abandoned completely!  

On another minor note:  it was probably a mistake to have Dr Jekell as a key figure in this film, without giving some of his backstory to a young audience.  My son didn't even know the character from fiction, which is a bit of a worry, but I would be sure he would not be alone.

Anyway.   You could worse than watch this movie.  If you like Tom Cruise, generally, I don't think you're going to hate it.

And speaking of Tom, I'm feeling sorry for him having two underperforming movies this year:  the one I just discussed, and the much better reviewed (actually, well reviewed) American Made.  The latter seemed to have some sort of marketing fail, to me.   I'll watch it soon.

But as for proof that Tom is actually a good actor, I reckon that this performance with Conan O'Brien is not only funny, but actually a convincing bit of performance by Tom.   Watch it if you haven't before:

  

Super eruption worry

I think I saw a headline about this somewhere earlier in the week, but here's the summary at Nature:

Civilization-threatening super-eruptions may happen about every 17,000 years — more frequently than previously thought.

Jonathan Rougier of the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues analysed a database of 1,379 large volcanic eruptions from the past 100,000 years. They found that, in some cases, the magnitude of a large eruption had been rounded down, making it seem smaller than it actually was. They also concluded that the database is missing some eruptions.

By accounting for more and bigger eruptions, the team calculated that the recurrence rate of super-eruptions, which spew at least 1,000 gigatonnes of ash and rock into the air, ranges between 5,200 and 48,000 years, with a best guess of 17,000 years. Earlier estimates had placed this between 45,000 and 714,000 years.

The most recent super-eruption occurred in Taupo, New Zealand, 25,600 years ago.

A pretty serious letter for some psychiatrists to be writing

I'm surprised that he's prepared to go as far as he does in this letter, as the position of the author would indicate he's got some credibility in the profession.  From the NYT:

I am the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” We represent a much larger number of concerned mental health professionals who have come forward to warn against the president’s psychological instability and the dangers it poses. We now number in the thousands.

We are currently witnessing more than his usual state of instability — in fact, a pattern of decompensation: increasing loss of touch with reality, marked signs of volatility and unpredictable behavior, and an attraction to violence as a means of coping. These characteristics place our country and the world at extreme risk of danger.

Ordinarily, we carry out a routine process for treating people who are dangerous: containment, removal from access to weapons and an urgent evaluation. We have been unable to do so because of Mr. Trump’s status as president. But the power of the presidency and the type of arsenal he has access to should raise greater alarm, not less.

We urge the public and the lawmakers of this country to push for an urgent evaluation of the president, for which we are in the process of developing a separate but independent expert panel, capable of meeting and carrying out all medical standards of care.

BANDY X. LEE, NEW HAVEN

The writer is a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine.

Meanwhile, the outstanding hypocrisy of Republican politicians, who have fallen into line with the Trumpian "attack the media" response to concern about just how crazy he is to continue making repeated lies and incendiary tweets is just appalling.    Latest example, Lindsay Graham:

What a difference a year makes. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Thursday said he is fed up with the media’s portrayal of President Donald Trump. “What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” Graham told CNN. “It’s pretty frustrating for most Republicans, quite frankly, that it’s 24/7 attack on everything the president does or thinks. It gets a little old after a while.”

This is very different from the stance Graham took in early 2016, when Trump was running for president in the Republican primary. Back then, Graham, who supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign at the time and had previously run in the primary himself, called Trump a “kook” and “crazy” in an interview with Fox News. He said his party had gone “batshit crazy” because it was backing Trump. He also tweeted that Trump is “not fit to be President of the United States.”

Being affable isn't enough

In media appearances, I've usually found Senator Sam Dastyari affable enough, and pretty quick witted.  But I've said before that his cosying up to the inflexible, immature, ideologue of an accidental Senator with a myriad of bad ideas (David Leyonhjelm) in his already forgotten "Nanny State Enquiry" was a big warning sign of a lack of judgement.  Sam's reasons for being deputy chair on the enquiry:

Up and coming Labor Senator Sam Dastyari has agreed to be the inquiry's deputy chair because he said it would "provoke a fascinating moral debate".

"This is probably going to be Australia's largest ever inquiry into vice," Senator Dastyari said.

He said the issues being examined range from "reasonable to ridiculous" but declared Australians who "hold majority views" should always be prepared to "justify the case for regulation".

...just sounded like insincere posturing to me.   I presume it was involvement in that which also means Sinclair Davidson,  who has such a political tin ear that he thought Bronwyn Bishop was a good speaker, became a Sam supporter.  

Sam's latest problems confirm he's just to unreliable to be a Labor Senator, or even an independent one.   The summary:

Dastyari took money for himself from a Chinese businessman and Labor donor, Huang Xiangmo, who Labor (and the government) had been warned had links to the Chinese government. He disavowed the Australian government position, and the Labor position, on Chinese expansionism at a press conference, standing alongside Huang. He misled the public about the nature of those remarks. And he warned Huang his phone could be tapped, and, when visiting his house, suggested they talk outside and leave their phones inside in case they were being bugged by ASIO.

I don't see why the public, or Labor, should ever trust him again.  He has terrible judgement and has made himself look eminently bribe-able.  He should resign.  Some corporate dill will soon enough  employ him to act as their talking head.

And finally, in a very, very rare event, I will approve one of Chris Kenny's tweets on the topic, because it is genuinely pretty funny:

Really despicable

Trump is a gullible Grade A conspiracy monger about the nuttiest things, who doesn't have the common sense to keep his suspicions to himself (if he does genuinely believe some of them - who knows?), but tweets them out because he senses political advantage.

I would have to say, though, that his latest one, calling for Joe Scarborough to be investigated for a death that has plainly never been a mystery (and for which there is no evidence at all of sexual impropriety - read Scarborough's explanation of how little he ever had to do with this intern) would have to be the most despicable thing he has done to try to hurt a critic.

It is hard to believe he maintains supporters anywhere - but that's the idiotic culture wars for you.

Update:  yes, it is interesting to note that the original conspiracy mongering about Scarborough came from the left - including Michael Moore.   That was equally despicable, but they (Moore and Moulitsas) were never the President of the United States.

Update:  in The Atlantic, covering recent revelations of ridiculous claims being made by Trump in private, as well as via twitter, David Graham says its time everyone stopped giving him any benefit of the doubt:

Trump’s insistence on debunked arguments about Obama’s place of birth and about widespread voter fraud were once viewed as political posturing. For his critics, this kind of behavior was demagoguish, immoral, appalling, and divisive. For his defenders, it was perhaps a little boorish, but then again all is fair in politics; besides, they liked his willingness to throw a punch. Either way, the shared assumption for many (though by no means all) observers was that Trump was being disingenuous.

Since then, however, the president has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s not just posturing, and it’s not simply a cynical ploy. Trump isn’t being hypocritical simply for sport or political gain. His bigotry isn’t just an act to win over a certain segment of the population. Of course it wasn’t: Trump has been demonstrating that since he arrived in the news, settling a case alleging that he had kept African Americans out of his apartment buildings, up through his demand to execute the Central Park Five. He isn’t spreading misinformation just to twist the political discourse—though he may be doing that—but because he can’t or won’t assess it. It is not an act.

All of this has been clear to anyone willing to see it for a long time, yet some people have convinced themselves it’s merely an act. That includes the Republican members of Congress who shake their heads but try to ignore the tweets. It includes the senator who chuckles at Trump’s enduring birtherism. And it includes the White House staffers who, according to The Times, are “stunned” to hear their boss denying the Access Hollywood tape. It’s stunning that they’re still stunned.

He's probably right.

Yglesias sounding sensible, again

He argues here that the fundamental problem with the GOP tax plan is not cutting corporate tax per se, but cutting it way too far than anyone ever thought was necessary or wise. 

The GOP and its divorce from reality

Yes, the first tweet shows their pure denialism - or perhaps more accurately, plain lying; the second tweet just makes no common sense; except, perhaps to those ideologically determined to get to limited government, no matter how the economy and society is hurt getting there.   (I suppose that in their lizard brain, limited government is always good for the economy.  Eventually.  Roadkill on the way doesn't matter.  Just like Laffer said Kansas would all work out if you only gave it another 10 years.  Yes, 10 years while education was defunded, highways unrepaired, etc.)

Update:  this lengthy explanation at Slate at how the Kansas experiment went wrong, yet the GOP seems determined to try it again at a national level, is very good.

Update 2:  when even columns in the WSJ are raising the same concerns as Slate, you know there is something to it.

Milo's numbers

The professional troll Milo is best ignored, but the SBS report on his first, vacuous, Australian press conference says:

Yiannopoulos has sold 10,000 tickets for his speaking tour of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, the Gold Coast and Adelaide.

I find those numbers a little bit hard to believe, actually.  I presume they have come from his own publicist (or his own mouth?) 

Same sex marriage by the numbers

The Economist gave some numbers for gay marriage in an article recently:

One possible explanation for the nonchalance is that the number of gay marriages has been fairly small. When they were legalised in Britain in March 2014, the government expected more than 9,000 gay weddings in the following year, but fewer than 6,000 took place. “It hasn’t taken off as I would have hoped,” says Emma Joanne of Shotgun Weddings, a photography firm based in Brighton, Britain’s gayest burgh. American polling data suggests that just one in ten lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults are married to somebody of the same sex. Many gay people are young, and young people seldom marry, regardless of their sexual leanings.

Women have been keenest to go down the aisle. In Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands, marriages between women outnumber marriages between men. Women’s unions are also more likely to break down. In the Netherlands, which legalised same-sex marriage in 2001, 82.1% of opposite-sex marriages joined in 2005 were still intact in 2016, compared with only 69.6% of marriages between women. Gay men were the commitment champions: 84.5% of their marriages had endured.

Not sure I would read too much into what happens in the Netherlands, but it is a little surprising that the gay males were divorcing less than straight couples.

Actually, it's really hard to track down more up to date figures for same sex marriage in the UK.  The obvious website that should cover it is not accessible at the moment.

Just because!

One other observation:  watching both the path of the Republican tax bill in the US at the moment ( which has many, many problems) and the way Brexit has gone (a huge "divorce settlement" of £50 billion, and that's with lots of important stuff still to be negotiated), it is extremely hard to give any credit to the way the Right/conservatives deal with policy now.  

It all seems to be a matter of wanting to get their way again, never mind the details.   Nothing seems properly considered and honestly debated.    (Of course, Britain finds itself it in the very weird situation of Labor also supporting some sort of Brexit - it's like political and economic common sense has left the land.)   

It seems, I think, to all be tied up a churlish reaction to the culture wars - "you Lefties have had your way for too long, with your feminism, gay rights, transexual rights, climate change scaremongering, anti-smoking campaigns, and wanting to take my tax money for your so called health care and social safety net.   Enough of that - we're bringing in new policies because - they're not your policies.   No body cares about the details, losers."

A sporting observation

I can never envisage developing an interest in cricket, but it's unavoidable noticing some media commentary on the game at times.

I have recently released, listening to some fans of the sport talking about the recent Ashes First Test in Brisbane (I think that's what it was - I often would not even know which match is what in what series even if I see something is on),  that cricket fandom seems to have devolved into perpetual whingers - unhappy about the players, the pitch, the team management, the weather, how it's nothing as good as it used to be, etc etc.  And this general air of dissatisfaction with the state of the game seems to have been hanging around, more or less, for years now.

I'm really not sure why they are still devoted to following a game that can take up such an investment in time if they find so much to complain about in it...

Your bit of Kant for the day

I didn't realise how much Kant was "into" anthropology (or at least, what might be called anthropology in his day).  From an article at Philosophy Now:

Kant suggested that the most important question in philosophy was not that of truth (epistemology), goodness (ethics), or beauty (aesthetics) – the topics which so fascinate academic philosophers – but rather the anthropological question, ‘What is the human being?’ He also suggested that this question could only be answered empirically, and not by resorting to, say, metaphysics. This implies, of course, that we can learn more about the human subject by studying anthropology (ethnography), sociology, psychology, ethology, and now evolutionary biology, than by engaging in speculative academic philosophy about human beingness, in the style of Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida.....

Through his philosophical writings and with regard to his profound influence on subsequent scholarship, Immanuel Kant has rightly been acclaimed as one of the key figures in the history of Western thought. He had a deep interest in the natural sciences, particularly physical geography, but what is less well known is that he also gave lectures in anthropology for more than twenty years. We are told by his student Johann Herder that the lectures were in the nature of hugely entertaining talks. At the age of seventy-four Kant published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). (By ‘pragmatic’, he meant the use of knowledge to widen the scope of human freedom and to advance the dignity of humankind.)

In this seminal text Kant suggested that there were three distinct, but interrelated, ways of understanding the human subject: firstly as a universal species-being (mensch) – the “earthly being endowed with reason” on which Kant’s anthropological work was mainly focussed; secondly as a unique self (selbst); and thirdly as part of a people – as a member of a particular social group (volk). (Notwithstanding the last element, Herder always insisted that Kant, with his emphasis on universal human faculties such as imagination, perception, memory, feelings, desires and understanding, tended to downplay the importance of language, poetry and cultural diversity in understanding human life. But as a pioneer anthropologist, Herder also emphasized that anthropology, not speculative metaphysics or logic, was the key to understanding humans and their life-world, that is, their culture.)

Long ago the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, following Kant, made a statement that is in some ways rather banal but which has always seemed to me to encompass an important truth. Critical of dualistic nature-culture conceptions of the human subject, Kluckhohn, along with the pioneer psychologist Henry Murray, suggested that every person is, as a species-being (a human) in some respects like every other person; but they are also all like no other human being in having a unique personality (or self); and, finally, that they have affinities with some other humans in being a social and cultural being (or person). These three categories relate to three levels or processes in which all humans are embedded; namely, the phylogenetic, pertaining to the evolution of humans as a species-being; the ontogenetic, which relates to the life history of the person within a specific familial and biological setting; and, finally, the socio-historical, which situates the person in a specific social-cultural context. So Kluckholm, not unlike Kant, thought human beings need to be conceptualized in terms of three interconnected aspects: as a species-being characterized by biopsychological dispositions and complex sociality; as a unique individual self; and finally, as a social being or person, enacting social identities or subjectivities – which in all human societies are multiple, shifting and relational. For an anthropologist like Kluckhohn the distinction between being a human individual and being a person was important, for many tribal people recognize non-human persons, while under chattel slavery, the law treated human slaves not as persons, but rather as things or commodities.

Interesting, somewhat...

Islamic dog terrorism

So, it seems that in Jordan, a cleric's comments were taken as a fatwa to go out and kill dogs, which led to lots of people getting out to shoot up (or poison) stray dogs.   It was all started by a girl dying of rabies after being bitten by a stray.

Not that big a story, perhaps, except that the article in The Atlantic is interesting because of its discussion of the odd status of fatwas per se in Islam:

But the peculiar thing about Jordan’s “holy war on dogs” is that it doesn’t exist, according to Jordan’s Dar al-Iftaa, the institution that issues religious rulings. The mufti’s words were never intended as a command to kill, said Ahmad al-Hasanat, secretary general of Dar al-Iftaa. “It is forbidden to kill dogs like this,” said al-Hasanat. Contrary to portrayals of the fatwa as a brutal imperative to kill, the original fatwa only allowed killing of a dog that is threatening one’s life, al-Hasanat said. “If there are dogs living on the streets, no one is saying to kill them.”

The potential issue with fatwas is not that they are strict religious commands, but the opposite: They are non-binding religious opinions, only sometimes put in writing, that are left open to the individual’s interpretation and choice of whom he wants to obey. Typically given as answers to individuals’ specific questions, fatwas are based on deliberation and analysis by qualified religious scholars called muftis. The difference between fatwas and court rulings is that no one is obligated to follow a fatwa; it’s not a law, and ignoring it incurs no penalty.

“Religious authority is not forced,” al-Hasanat said. “We only give advice. If someone takes it, great. If not, what can we do? I give him a fatwa, and he decides.”

As for the status of dogs in Islam, it seems all kind of confusing:

Dogs have long been considered unclean in most schools of Islamic law, said Berglund, who published a paper on the status of dogs in Islam. But there is no basis in the Koran or hadith for mass killings of dogs—nor is there an imperative to do so in the fatwa. The driving force behind Jordan’s dog shootings is not Islamic government, it seems, but Jordanian people’s preexisting irritation with an uncontrolled stray dog problem. In 2014, for example, local media reported that residents were asking the municipality of Zarqa to get rid of strays after dogs attacked an elderly woman and several children, but that the officials refused, saying that killing dogs was forbidden and against Islamic law.

“Probably a lot of people in Jordan are just fed up with stray dogs. It’s a very human thing. You pick up this fatwa to get rid of the dogs harassing your family and stealing food,” Berglund said. “If this mufti had said it’s permissible to kill horses or donkeys, people wouldn’t have started to kill horses or donkeys. There are plenty of fatwas on helping the poor, too, but look how many people do nothing for the poor.”

In this case, religion may be serving people’s social aims, not the other way around. Whereas foreigners assumed the “war on dogs” was coming from the demands of strict religious authority, it may actually be the opposite: Jordan’s religious flexibility has allowed space for dog-haters to use a fatwa as an excuse to kill them.

Update:   I'm going to be very even handed here, and raise the question of Jewish attitudes to dogs.  If they aren't so keen on them either, it is just a Near East cultural thing that has spread further afield with both Islam and Judaism? 

Interestingly, there are lots of articles on the 'net asking whether Jews generally like dogs, or not.   The best article I've quickly read, so far, is perhaps this one in The Tablet, which notes that the evidence is strong for at least an ambivalent attitude towards both dogs and cats.  (I didn't realise before - while dogs get a mention here and there in the Bible, cats never do.)   Here are some interesting paragraphs:

For the most part, and in spite of some recent scholarly attempts at rehabilitation, dogs were held in contempt in Israelite society due to their penchant for dining on blood and carcasses (I Kings 14:11; 16:4, 21:19, 24, and 22:38). They were regarded as urban predators roaming about at night, barking and howling, in search for food (Psalms 59:7, 15), and such dogs could easily attack anybody who got too close (Psalms 22:17, 21) or bite those who foolishly tried to show them affection (Proverbs 26:17). Outside of the city there were wild dogs, busy devouring carrion and licking blood (II Kings 9:35-36; Exodus 22:30). Very few people would have wanted anything to do with them. The only hint of any positive role for the biblical dog is found in Job 30:1, which makes reference to “dogs of my flock,” perhaps indicating that in biblical times there were dogs who served as sheep dogs or herders.

The basically negative and at best ambivalent attitude of biblical Israelites was not that different from prevalent attitudes in general in the ancient Near East, which often stressed the impurity of the dog and its contemptible status. True, there were exceptions to the rule; some dogs did occasionally enjoy somewhat of a higher status, some Canaanite cults may have sanctified canines, the Hittites liked to use them in purification and healing rites, and the odd dog may actually have been kept as a pet—and if it lived in Phoenician Ashkelon might have been buried in the dog cemetery. However, these were exceptions to the generally negative stereotypes that existed in both ancient Israel and in neighboring lands.

 Dogs fared a lot better in some other ancient cultures:

 Greeks, Romans, and Persians loved dogs. Dogs were functional: They served as hunting dogs, sheep dogs, and guard dogs. Dogs could pull carts, and there were even performing dogs. Some dogs were said to be able to heal with a lick of their tongues. They were popular pets and companions for men and women of all ages: A “boy and his dog” and even a “girl and her dog” were quite common, and many women had a small lap dog as a pet. In Persia, dogs did all of the above-mentioned tasks and were popular, but they were also revered, taking on the status given to cats in Egypt—in part because the Persians mistakenly identified the spiny hedgehog as a dog, and this animal was instrumental in ridding houses of poisonous snakes.

 Cats, not so much:

Cats were a lot less popular, although as mousers and enemies of vermin they fulfilled an important function. Yet keeping them as pets indoors or even in the barnyard could be problematic since, in addition to mice, they had a tendency to attack or eat other pets in the home or chickens or fowl in the barnyard. Not only were they not “guard” animals like dogs, but it was often necessary to guard against their feral nature, even when supposedly domesticated: They were necessary but not loved. In Persia, though, they were khrafstra, noxious creatures, the same as the mice and the rats that they ate.

 Interesting, I'm sure you'll agree.

Not taking it well

The conservative cohort of Catallaxy (that's about 95% of them) are not taking the same sex marriage survey result at all well:

That's possibly the most ludicrous attempt at a put down of a politician I have ever read...  

Butter history

NPR links to a February post  reviewing a book about the history of butter.   Don't think I've heard of this before:

Even the first-ever documented student protest in American history is linked with butter. Harvard University's Great Butter Rebellion of 1766 began after a meal containing particularly rancid butter was served to students, who (not unlike modern college-goers) were frustrated over the state of food in the dining hall. As reported in The Harvard Crimson, Asa Dunbar (who would later become the grandfather of Henry David Thoreau), incited the student body into action by hopping onto his chair, shouting, "Behold our butter stinketh! Give us therefore butter that stinketh not!"

The Don

I'm sure there was some lengthy profile done in Fairfax, probably, while Don Burke was still on TV about how many people had left his show saying that he was a complete jerk to work with.   The details coming to light now show how much he was an intensely sexist, offensive jerk who, like Weinstein, sounds lucky to have avoided sexual assault charges.

But I have to say, guiltily, that some of the stories are so crude and so "real life Sir Les Patterson"  that I keep thinking how some of them done in a movie satirising such a character could play as shockingly funny.   Not funny to be a real women trying to fend him off;  it's more some of the ridiculously crude things he thought he could say to women and not have them take offence.

Marvel explained

Even though I'm not the world's biggest Marvel movie fan, it's hard not to be impressed with the "Marvel Universe" as an essentially good natured commercial success. It is therefore interesting to read in Vanity Fair how much of that is down to one young-ish guy - Kevin Feige - who I have never heard of, and whose photo doesn't even appear in this lengthy feature.

I suspect Jason is over there reading it now...

Amusing sarcasm

And Then There's Physic's twitter feed has a sarcastic go at the Matt Ridley's Global Warming Policy Foundation:

More random stuff

*   Had an anxiety dream last night in which I was in a university lecture theatre, where I had agreed to give a lecture (just introductory, I think) on black holes, but completely forgotten to prepare for it.  Some famous physicist was supposed to be coming to watch it as well.   My big concern was whether I knew enough to "wing it" with the lecture, which was due to start any minute.  Fortunately, the dream did not extend to the start of the lecture....

*  Have I mentioned before, but Japan, which is very big on cloth and fabrics, is the best country from which to buy nice but reasonably priced men's handkerchiefs.  I still do not understand how the modern youngster gets buy without one.

*  I like Uniqlo shirts, and shorts, too.

* The Washington Post has a story about a rare form of cancer which often gets initially mistaken for persistent jock itch (!):

For more than two years, Schroeder had been coping with an extremely rare, invasive cancer called extramammary Paget’s disease (EMPD), which had invaded his scrotum, requiring multiple surgeries. Women account for roughly half of EMPD cases; the cancer, often misdiagnosed as eczema or contact dermatitis, attacks the sweat-producing apocrine glands, including those in the genital and anal areas.

The slow-growing cancer, which in men is frequently misdiagnosed as “jock itch” — slang for a fungal infection — can be fatal. And while treatment is often grueling, for Schroeder the worst part was his sense of isolation: He had never spoken to anyone who shared his diagnosis.

 *  Man, there was a serious outbreak of nuttiness at Catallaxy on the weekend, with Steve Kates spending an entire post deriding a commenter there who is actually one of the more-or-less sane sounding ones.  Not to mention another commenter who spent ages going on about claiming he wasn't able to sleep because there was an evil presence in the master bedroom - for no clear reason at all.  (It was all a bit of "hamming it up" he says this morning.   The point?)

I'm sure that the site is a great example of the psychological phenomena that repeatedly saying things aloud convinces the speaker of the truth of the matter, even if was something was originally held in the mind with weak to moderate conviction.   Thus, for example, the repeated quip that "leftism is a mental illness" moves from what they may have originally sensed as a partisan witticism with some element of truth (I'm not saying I agree with that) to something that many on the site have come to genuinely believe as a an absolute truism, and with no humour in the observation at all.    This is why it such a harmful place - with no calls for moderation in comments from other commenters, or (rarely) from Davidson, it has become descending whirlpool for encouraging righteous certainty of wrong, obnoxious and uncharitable views. 

Now, must go prepare my lecture notes...