For the other two readers of this blog

Seasonville

Excuse me?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that Kip Hawley is a lying bastard. On the off chance that you haven't heard of him, he's the administrator of the Transportation Safety Authority. Here he is explaining why TSA workers should continue to be denied collective bargaining rights:

“We require an infinitely flexible security regime that allows us to change what we do and where we do it,” Mr. Hawley said, adding that hiring staff members to handle union relations would cost $160 million. |link|

Now that I'm on the record, here's a question. How much does it cost to administer a union contract? I'm looking for an answer uninfected by spin from either the AFL-CIO or the Chamber of Commerce. Hawley's numbers work out to $3700 per employee, and would seem to posit hiring a staffer for every 50 or so employees under contract.

Addendum: I forgot to mention one of the most remarkable things about the Hawley quote, which is the way it pairs the truth about management's actual interest in maintaining absolute control with a wild exaggeration about the costs of the policy management opposes.

couvade

[French, from Old French, from 'couver', to incubate, hatch, from Latin 'cubāre', to lie down on]

n.
A practice among some peoples, as the Basques of Spain, in which a man, immediately preceding the birth of his child, takes to his bed in an enactment of the birth experience and subjects himself to various taboos usually associated with pregnancy.

Notes (mostly) on shorts

• How in the world did Binta y la gran idea get a nomination? Leaving aside the fact that it was awful, it was released in 2004.
  
• You would think that, what with youtube and all, we would now be in the golden age of shorts. That doesn't really seem to be so. But I wonder: what are the chances that a great viral video could make it into the Oscar running?
  
• Relatedly, are there technical requirements for shorts? For example, do they have to be shot on film rather than, say, digital video? The shorts I saw this year were pretty obviously distributed in digital format rather than film, and the showings suffered in exactly the ways you'd expect.
  
• The film I saw last year that I liked the best was The Science of Sleep. I can understand why people didn't like the film, but it seems to me that it should have gotten at least some recognition based on the fact that it was visually stunning. Just the other day I was talking to some fully bonded film buffs who not only hadn't seen it, but expressed no interest in seeing it. What's up with that?
  
• Relatedly, you'd think that shorts, or possiblly animated shorts, would be the Oscar category where eye candy was most likely to be recognized, and yet none of the nominees in either category were particularly interesting to look at.
  
• If I had a vote I would have cast it for The Savior, but I'm not really surprised that it didn't win. At the showing I attended, I was falling out of my seat laughing, but nobody else seemed to find the film remotely funny.
  
• It seemed to me that Eramos Pocos was the richest text among the nominated films, but it suffered from being a shaggy dog joke.
  
• Come to think of it, West Bank Story might have been the only nominee with a plot that wasn't a shaggy dog joke. Maybe that's why it won.

Really?

Note to Hillary: Your husband cheated on you and was fined $90,000 for lying about it to a federal judge. Everybody thinks he's still cheating on you. |The execrable Mickey Kaus|

...I mean, is this the conventional wisdom, or is Kaus just casually throwing around unsourced slanders?

James Cameron claims to find the coffin of Jesus

Seriously! Of course,

Crucially, he is not denying the resurrection - as there were no bones in the caskets.

...and hilarity ensues.

labile

[Origin: 1400–50; late ME 'labyl' from LL 'lābilis', from 'lāb(ī)' to slip + '-ile', a suffix of capability]

adj.
1. Apt or likely to change.
2. In chemistry, of a compound capable of changing state or becoming inactive when subjected to heat or radiation.

Please note

The reply, "yes, but my hand is a little bit cramped" is not an appropriate answer to questions about your weekend, as it cannot be assumed that your interlocutor will apprehend the connection between hand cramps and Guitar Hero.

Oscar prediction

The Danish Poet in a walk.

Attention pundits:

When Obama plays hardball politics there is some truth in saying that it reveals his call for a new kind of politics to be hypocritical. This is not, however, a stumble for the simple reason that Obama's hypocrisy is unlikely to be noticed by actual real voters. For evidence on this point, please recall that our beloved decider successfully campaigned as "a uniter, not a divider" while at the helm of the nastiest political attack machine in memory.

edited for clarity

Link

This post at Crooked Timber about the origins of surnames is neat, neat, neat. Don't skip the comments.

Blackface?

Remember my prediction?

I'm sure that guy pictured would say something like, "Dude, black is totally the color of mourning! Duh."

To which I say, get a clue. Self-righteous ignorance isn't an excuse.

On the "mistake" and other nonsense

Nothing has changed for Hillary, and John Edwards is seizing on that to try to get a little traction:

When Edwards spoke a few minutes later, he seemed to aim his rhetorical barrels right at Clinton, emphasizing repeatedly how he was, indeed, wrong to have voted for authorization of the war. “I should have never given George Bush authorization,” he said. Arguing that America needs a president who can is “honest, open, and moral” he said that after 6 years of Bush not taking responsibility for the war, it was no longer acceptable to dance around the issue as he implied Hillary was doing.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias--who claims he is saying something nice about Hillary--says that Hillary isn't avoiding admitting a mistake. Instead, she just thinks it wasn't a mistake. Is that really being nice, or is he actually being a dick?

Lastly, one of my favorite politicians weighs in on Iraq:

Dennis Kucinich got his licks in, trashing all the other candidates. “It must be hard for these politicians to say they were misled, tricked and deceived by George w. Bush,” referring to their positions on the war in Iraq. “Here’s one who wasn’t. I organized 125 Democrats in Congress to oppose the war and I saw all the same information these other candidates did.”

Lest the "realists" amongst us get bent out of shape, I don't think Kucinich can win, but I don't think his candidacy hurts anybody either. He's one of my favorites not only because of his honorable positions, but also for stuff like this:

He then ended his talk by saying he was the only candidate who had no strings attached to him. Then he lifted his arms up to his shoulders and slowly twirled around on stage repeating: “No strings. No strings. No strings.”

Hey!

Have any of y'all seen this video? It's on heavy rotation on public access hereabouts and is high-larious. The basic story is that that African Americans shouldn't vote for Democrats today because the Democratic Party was full of racists in the 1860s. For example, did you know that it is a historical fact that the KKK is an arm of the Democratic Party? It's true! Also, the Texas Republican Party was founded (mostly) by blacks!

Anyway, I'd post a video, but I can't find one. Maybe one of the many readers of this blog has better google skillz.

Gotta go. Don't want to miss out on any history. David Barton, our narrator, just suggested that reparations for slavery should be paid by the Democratic Party, rather than by the federal government, and I'm eager to hear his other awesome ideas.

Little Miss Sunshine

As long as we're talking about film, I would like to say that Little Miss Sunshine, while not actually bad or anything, does happen to be very trite and manipulative. I thought that perhaps I was the only one in the world whose pants were not charmed right off by the film, but today I read this:

The Top Ten Most Misunderstood Movies Ever Made

8. Little Miss Sunshine

What everyone thinks the message is: Life sucks ass!

What it actually is: Life rules!

I didn’t say you had to agree with the true moral of every movie, especially considering how sappy and mainstream the otherwise-adequate Little Miss Sunshine is, but them’s the breaks.

Despite cramming as much forced familial dysfunction and philosophical cynicism as humanly possible into the first 90% of the movie, the writers make a complete 180 at the film’s climax and decide that, despite the fact that one of the characters is dead and the rest have had their lives ruined in literally every way conceivable, that life is actually pretty neat!

Even if your gay lover left you for someone who now has your job, and even if you can’t realize your dream of becoming a jet pilot due to biological defects beyond your control, and even if your self-help program didn’t sell (thus leaving you nearly bankrupt with two kids to support), everything can be okay if you dance!

If the movie had gone on for another week, most of the main characters would have committed suicide out of depression.

Exactly.

Notes on film

• Children of Men - Honestly, it rocked my world. My only complaint was that the politics were hitting me in the face a little bit too often. Hard to say how that will look twenty years from now, though, when the images of Abu Ghraib aren't quite so fresh. Also, I forgave the film for it's optimism when the fighting started back up. All in all, a must see for anyone with even a passing interest in the cinema of post apocalyptic dystopia.
  
  
• Sgt. Bilko - In the opening scene Steve Martin's Bilko deliberately loses a $500 dollar bet so that he can double the stakes and win, triumphantly, $1000. Do the math.
  
  
• The Big Chill - I liked this film well enough back in the day, but have systematically avoided it for most of the last fifteen years. Seeing it again, now at more or less the same age as the characters, made me wonder why my college buddies didn't all stay so skinny.
  
  
• The Butterfly Effect - I'd say it was unwatchable, but I watched it.
  
  
• Pan's Labrynth - Pretty enough, and maybe worth seeing again, but at first blush the existentialism as answer to fascism stuff seems a little dated and naive.

shambolic

[Chiefly British slang, probably from alteration of 'shambles']

adj.
Disorderly or chaotic.