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Recycled Disinfo

By on October 25, 2007 2

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I just saw Lynne Cheney interviewed on the Daily Show, and she made the same argument as the one that Lindsey Graham made in January – that the lack of progress in Iraq is no big deal, since it also took the United States a fair while after the revolution to get a constitution.

What I said then still applies:

Sorry, no. The United States’ first constitution was adopted provisionally in 1777, and formally ratified in 1781. What is conventionally called “the” U.S. Constitution was the second one. … And if [Cheney] is suggesting that the level of civil chaos in Iraq today is comparable to that of the United States in the 1780s, I think the historians among us might venture a dissent.

No Cliffhangers Here

By on October 25, 2007 2

One of the reasons given for not filming Atlas Shrugged as a trilogy, Lord of the Rings style, is that, by contrast with Lord of the Rings, the middle book of Atlas ends with a cliffhanger (as Dagny’s plane, its engine failing, hurtles downward toward the crags of the Colorado Rockies).

That’s so true; there’s no way you could make a trilogy of movies out of a work whose middle part ends with a cliffhanger. Thank goodness, then, that the middle book of Lord of the Rings doesn’t end like this:

Samwise in Mordor The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.

And ditto for the upcoming Barsoom saga, likewise being filmed as a trilogy – which they’d never be able to do if the second book had ended like this:

fun on Barsoom And as she finished speaking I saw her raise a dagger on high, and then I saw another figure. It was Thuvia’s. As the dagger fell toward the unprotected breast of my love, Thuvia was almost between them. A blinding gust of smoke blotted out the tragedy within that fearsome cell – a shriek rang out, a single shriek, as the dagger fell.

The smoke cleared away, but we stood gazing upon a blank wall. The last crevice had closed, and for a long year that hideous chamber would retain its secret from the eyes of men. …

Ah! If I could but know one thing, what a burden of suspense would be lifted from my shoulders! But whether the assassin’s dagger reached one fair bosom or another, only time will divulge.

The story also mentions the Matrix and Star Wars trilogies. The second acts of those trilogies certainly didn’t end on cliffhangers either, did they?

Pequod Erat Demonstratum

By on October 24, 2007 1

It’s widely believed that a) the Starbucks coffee chain was named after the first mate in Melville’s Moby-Dick, because b) Melville’s Starbuck loved coffee. It turns out that (b) is false – Melville’s Burt Lancaster as StarbuckStarbuck has no particular affinity (caffeinity?) for the bean – but that (a) is nevertheless true: the founder was a Moby-Dick fan who wanted to name the store Pequod (the name of Captain Ahab’s ship) but was persuaded to switch to a different Moby-Dick reference because a place that sells stuff to drink shouldn’t have something that sounds like “pee” in the title. (I guess they never heard of Pinot noir?)

I will simply add that although (b) is indeed false, the text of Moby-Dick does contain the line “it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck.”

I wonder whether Galactica’s Starbuck (the 1970s one) was named after Melville’s? He might be (they’re both ship’s officers), but I suspect at least as strong an influence came from the charming con man named Starbuck played by Burt Lancaster in the popular 1956 film The Rainmaker. The fact that the name contains the word “Star” probably helped too.

Baby Logic

By on October 19, 2007 3

The first reference I ever heard to the song “Everybody Loves My Baby, But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me” was in a logic class, and at that time I assumed the professor had just made it up for the sake of an amusing logic example. But of course it’s a real song, and an excellent one. (I love these different versions.)

The reason the song is a good example to use in a logic class I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

I’d Like To Have An Argument, Please

By on October 16, 2007 4

I’m used to seeing this mangled phrasing from my students, but I would have hoped not to see it in a serious newspaper (I say “serious” to rule out, e.g., the Opelika-Auburn News, from which no fantastic garbling of English could any longer surprise me), and particularly not in the London Times: “Few would argue that the Dublin-born playwright, who spent much of his life in England, was the master of the clever quip.”

I’m not sure when people started using the phrase “few would argue that p” as though it meant “few would deny that p” or “few would argue against the proposition that p,” but in fact those who do have been saying the opposite of what they mean – since what “few would argue that p” actually means is “few would maintain that p” or “few would argue on behalf of the proposition that p.”

Strange Announcements

By on October 7, 2007 1

Our campus mail service recently announced, with no trace of irony, that any outgoing mail with an inadequate return address would be returned to the sender.

Oh well, I’ve seen worse. In my North Carolina days I lived in an apartment complex whose management used to issue notices like “February 12th is cancelled until further notice” (meaning that a meeting scheduled for that day had been cancelled) and “One-fourth of the residents will be exterminated each month” (meaning – one hopes! – that insect exterminators would visit one-fourth of the apartments each month).

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