AP Headline of the Day

Chef Paula Deen Accidentally Hit by Charity Ham

The Royal Mail

The first letter to the editor in a recent issue of the London Review of Books came from a postman, who offered a relatively lengthy take on how the Royal Mail is misusing its employees. The first paragraph is below. It goes on for a while after that -- you can read the rest here -- and the whole thing is oddly fascinating. I thought so, anyway. What’s more, the postman’s name -- and we can only hope it's real -- is Pat Stamp.

Like Roy Mayall writing in your issue of 24 September, I am a postman and concerned at the absence in the media of any account of how mail delivery is organised and what Royal Mail’s modernisation programme entails. The programme was introduced because the popularity of email and texting has caused a drop in mail volume. Royal Mail’s first step was to reduce the number of walks. It did this by cutting some walks in each area and making the remaining walks longer. A postman who normally delivered mail to six streets, say, now found himself delivering to eight or nine. During the summer months, when mail volumes were low, he could, perhaps, just cope with this. But as autumn begins and the Christmas catalogues start to come out, every week and sometimes every day can be heavy. In the run-up to last Christmas, there were postmen who only finished their walks at 7 or 8 p.m., sometimes two or three times a week. In one depot alone, around 15 postmen phoned in sick. This Christmas, with the even longer walks, it could be worse. Royal Mail is a strong promoter of general health and safety, but as the walks lengthen and the loads increase, many of us feel that our own health isn’t being taken into consideration.

"Meeting Oprah will make you high."

Gabourey Sidibe, the star of Precious, visited Conan O'Brien last week (or the week before), and it was a treat. In case you missed it, part one of the interview, in which Sidibe hilariously describes meeting Oprah, is below. Part two can be seen here.

"My God. I didn't know I had a decadent jaw."

You may remember that I'm a big, big fan of actor Bill Nighy. Now, in advance of a new movie, he's profiled by the Guardian:

Nighy gets his manners, and impeccable tailoring, from his father. "My dad had a personal style which was very attractive. It was quite reserved and quite elegant and it was infectious." His father modeled himself on Bing Crosby. "He liked a good sports jacket and a good pair of trousers, with one hand in his pocket and a cigarette in the other. He couldn't understand why anybody would use bad language in front of a woman or a child. He would get up if a woman came in the room. I find myself doing that sometimes and I sit back down again because they are just going to think I'm weird. It is kind of over. Like offering someone your seat on the tube. You can't do it any more. It's just seen as condescending and stupid. Which I understand."

Nighy does not think his manners are exceptional. But he agrees they may help convey insincerity. "In life, if you have an enthusiasm for what they call good manners, sometimes people don't quite believe you. I've had that once or twice before, where they assume you can't be for real. That's useful, particularly for [playing] posh people with sneaky agendas."

Here's a clip of Nighy talking to Charlie Rose about performing (rather, not performing) Shakespeare:

Football Jerseys in Church & Catfish Heads

David Courtney writes an advice column as “The Texanist” for Texas Monthly. This month’s first two questions from readers are:

Q. Is it wrong to wear your football team’s jersey to church?
BILL BLEDSOE, DALLAS

and

Q: Texas is the only place where I have seen catfish heads on fence posts. Is this just bragging, or, as I was told by a friend, is it to ward off evil spirits?
JACK SHANAFELT, LAKE MCQUEENEY

Courtney’s answers can be found here. They somehow include this sentence: “If you have the occasion to find yourself outside a bus station in Oaxaca with time to kill, don’t kill it by hot-shotting a bottle of the stuff with a willowy bus driver named Gordo.”

(Via The Browser)

Freezing Hands and Bloodless Veins

Monday night, I was very lucky to see Neko Case play at the Beacon Theatre. My girlfriend's sister was unavailable for the extra ticket, so I got to tag along. It was an incredible show, with Case in a stunning red satin dress (she jokingly called the material a "poly-cougar blend") and her voice in fine form. There aren't many clips online that really do justice to seeing her live, including the one below, but for Wednesday, this is Case singing "I Wish I Was the Moon." Enjoy:

On the Rocks

My friend PF sent this story along. Her e-mail's subject line was "A worthy mission."

The first two paragraphs:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica's ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.

The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.

Eating Animals

Over at The Second Pass, I review Jonathan Safran Foer's latest, a book about his vegetarianism and the horrors of factory farming. A taste:

When Foer was nine, a vegetarian babysitter asked him, mid-chew, “You know that chicken is chicken, right?” For Foer, this was one of those “how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments.” That reaction is OK — even charming — at nine, but Foer is 32 now, and his years since have not been an uninterrupted protest against meat. In fact, soon after the babysitter posed her shattering question, Foer went back to eating meat. Then, at the end of his sophomore year at Princeton, he became a philosophy major and did his “first seriously pretentious thinking,” which led him back to vegetarianism. “I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason,” he writes. “You can imagine how annoying this made me.” Yes. You could say my imagination has rarely been less taxed.

An Ideal World

The latest college football poll is out. The top six teams are all 10-0. The top three of those -- Florida, Alabama, and Texas -- are almost impossible to separate from one another. Behind the top six are teams at 10-1 and 9-1, then a group that includes a few big-time programs (LSU, Ohio State, Penn State, etc.) with a couple of losses each.

Clearly, the best thing to do here would be to feed lots of abstract information about all of these teams into some type of supercomputer and have the supercomputer figure out which of the two teams should play each other to determine the best team. Especially pesky are those top three teams, so it would be particularly satisfying to see which of those three the supercomputer determines is unworthy of playing for the championship.

Wait, what? That's what they're going to do? The supercomputer exists? Oh. Whew.

“The next day, which I thought was the next day...”

Last year, my friend JF let me know about a no-hitter thrown by Dock Ellis in 1970, during which Ellis was high on LSD. Now, JF passes along this great video commemorating the event, in an e-mail with the subject line, "This is why the Internet was invented." Can't say I disagree:

Tonight, Tonight the Highway is Bright

For Wednesday, two great versions of the same song. “Racing in the Street” is a quintessential early Springsteen lyric. The first clip below was filmed 31 years ago at a show in Passaic, New Jersey. (When I watched it, the sound wasn’t perfectly synched up to the picture, but it’s still worth sharing.) The second clip is a cover by Patty Griffin, from a 1999 show at Fez, a New York club that sadly no longer exists. Griffin’s got one of my favorite voices, and with just that and a guitar she makes the song full. Enjoy:

"Not this gal! She had had it!"

Just some random comedy for Wednesday (a song to come later, fear not). Both of the clips below feature Paul F. Tompkins, the first a sketch from the great Mr. Show (get past the bizarre start) and the second a funny and touching bit about his mother's last days and her thoughts about religion.

Line of the Day

From a friend: "Aren't you glad the Berlin Wall fell without Twitter?"

Gallery 32

Photo by Graham Love, a finalist in the "This is Britain" category of the 2009 Digital Camera Photographer of the Year contest.)

Cameron's Pad

If you have $3.2 million laying around -- and really, who doesn't these days? -- you could buy yourself Cameron's house from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. You know, the one with the elevated glass garage?

(Via -- yes, my life has come to this -- Roger Ebert's Twitter feed)

“Your appendix is connected to your large intestine, which is connected to your small intestine, which is something that Karl Marx had.”

No, this isn't a post just to mark me as the one millionth blogger to link to Jon Stewart's very funny "11/3 Project" clip. It's also a post to point to this piece on a New York Times blog the other day. It covers a protest of the health-care bill in Washington. And OK, it's the Times, but that sign in the picture -- the one that says "Marx" with a red circle and a line through it (a la the Ghostbusters logo; I ain't afraid of no socialists) -- is of a type that doesn't seem hard to find at these protests.

A while ago on this blog, I wrote "I've never had any use for the 'Bush=Hitler' brand of sloganeering." I think that's pretty clear. Well, likewise, I think it's intellectually lazy (more like intellectually comatose) the way the grassroots right has reacted to the Obama administration thus far. Like all major policy debates, there's a lot to be said about health care -- the least useful of which is, "Trying to change the health-care system in the U.S. will turn the country into a Marxist stronghold." This is asinine on at least seven levels.

But what I really loved about the report in the Times was this summary of a common combination:

Some of the same people warning of too much government spending also complained that Medicare does not provide sufficient coverage.

That brought to mind a possible Onion headline. Something like this:

Beneficiaries of Government Help Complain Government Doesn't Help Enough at Protest Against Benefitting from Government Help

If Christians Try to "Save" Souls, Should Atheists Try to "Lose" Them?

My friend Lauren has a piece up over at Tina Brown's Daily Beast about atheists and their determining whether or not to "evangelize." A taste:

[Kurtz's] life's aim, he told me, is to “make it so a person can be a nonbeliever in our society and be respected and accepted.” As such, he thinks it’s counterproductive to preach against religion. “You can't begin by calling people names,” says the 85-year-old Kurtz. “It's self-destructive to nonbelievers.” When Kurtz’s own organization supported international “Blasphemy Day” in September (a day dedicated to openly criticizing all things God), Kurtz wrote a column in Free Inquiry magazine, an atheist publication put out by the Center for Inquiry, comparing the day to “the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era." . . . One of Blasphemy Day's supporters was, in fact, Tom Flynn, Free Inquiry’s editor-in-chief and Kurtz's colleague at the Center. Flynn sees a loud, proud, and socially unacceptable atheism as the best chance to achieve Kurtz's declared goals. He also draws constructive parallels to the raucous gay-rights movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. “If you think back to deliberately outrageous activism like ACT UP and Queer Nation, somehow after 10 years, gay was mainstream,” he says. “There were gay characters on sitcoms. How did this happen? That brashness and outrageousness, it desensitized America. It got everybody over that taboo.”

Lauren even spoke to godlessness' biggest rock star, Richard Dawkins. I find this issue of great interest, as you might imagine, and the comparison to the gay rights movement above is an instructive one. The idea that atheists should be socially accepted, should be allowed to (dis)believe what they (dis)believe, goes without saying. And raucously saying, "We're here, we don't hold God dear, get used to it" is great. But many, including Dawkins, obviously want to do a lot more than that.

And that won't likely change, since it's easy to see acceptance of an inherent identity -- "I'm black." "I'm gay." -- as an act of addition. But religious people and atheists both believe something, and it's natural to think of beliefs as a zero-sum game: If my belief is right, yours must be wrong. It seems to me that it would be helpful to think of religious beliefs (and the lack thereof) as more like sports than like math. If someone says, "I believe that two times three equals seventeen," well. . . . it might eventually be difficult to handle that person, socially. But if you're a Yankees fan and someone says, "I love the Phillies," it's OK to trade some good-natured barbs and then move on and continue to each be productive members of society. Which is just to say that a bar-stool sense of playfulness might be refreshing on both sides, rather than dogmatic screaming about settling on the right formula. Fat chance, I know.

1923 . . .

. . . 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1977, 1978, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2009

Jargon Generator

This is fun. Make your own academic sentence. Two examples that I just cranked out:

The historicization of the gendered body is strictly congruent with the reification of normative value(s).

The systemization of the gaze replays (in parodic form) the epistemology of linguistic transparency.

(Via The Browser)

Another Word for Procrastination

John Roderick, the clever, verbose leader of The Long Winters, talks to Maximum Fun about his band’s next album, due in spring 2010. (If you get a chance to see the band live, do it. The music is great fun, and Roderick’s between-songs banter is the rare good kind.) In the interview, he says:

I think the record we're working on now is by far the least intentional thing we've ever done, in the sense that there was no stated purpose, no governing aesthetic, no semi-conscious guidelines. The songs are all based on riffs that were recorded spontaneously in the middle of the night. The riffs were combined into songs at the last possible moment with a minimum of forethought. Once we started working we didn't throw anything away, so there hasn't even been curatorial culling. The result is as close to the unadulterated sound of The Long Winters in the studio as you can get. It's kitchen sink pop.

He also says something that’s useful (for rationalizing, at least) for people like me to remember: “Procrastinating is very hard to distinguish from ruminating.” And his last answer, to a question about the relationship between experience and songwriting, is worth clicking over to read.

Gold Won't Bring You Happiness

This song came on shuffle the other day (it's on one of the all-time great soundtracks), and I've been singing it to myself ever since. For Wednesday, this is Dean Martin doing "You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You" and goofing it up for the crowd. Enjoy:

AP Headline of the Day

4-Legged Movie Stars Vie for 'Canine Oscars'

Sports Talk

I'll just dump some disparate sports talk into this one post. I know how you love sports talk.

First, the World Series is shaping up to be as good as I thought it would be. What I love most, though, is that it's the "Jersey Turnpike Series" but none of it actually takes place in NJ. Ah, Jersey.

I'm not a big fan of bringing full replay to baseball, but it's true that the umps are making it very hard to avoid the issue. I'm not sure that last night is the best example of ineptitude this postseason, even though it had a big impact on the game. Ryan Howard's trapped catch was incredibly difficult to see in real time, especially with the ump behind him. And the call on Chase Utley the next half inning was one of those bang-bang plays that happen a million times during a season and only get the Zapruder treatment in the playoffs.

Three quick thoughts on NBA's opening week: It doesn't shock me at all that Cleveland is 0-2. What shocked me was how many games they won last year. The Cavs are still LeBron plus zero.

Everyone figured it would be a long year for the future Brooklyn Nets, but blowing a huge lead to the Timberwolves is extra humiliating.

I had a fantasy basketball draft this week, and with a couple of last-minute no-shows, the league has a grand total of eight owners. That meant much better players for the picking each round, and I think I have a really solid crew. They are: Kevin Durant, Dwight Howard, Paul Pierce, Baron Davis, Troy Murphy, Russell Westbrook, Jameer Nelson, Rashard Lewis, Al Horford, Hedo Turkoglu, Mike Conley, John Salmons, Richard Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace. Memo to the rest of the league: Bring it.

"Hello, Travis"

When The Onion first started a video news network, I had my doubts. That was stupid of me. Their latest hilarity:

Circling the Drain

I'm sure this will end well.

They Sound Good to Me

For this wet, gray Wednesday in New York, here's some sunshine. This is a clip (truncated at the beginning) of the Oscar Peterson Trio doing "You Look Good to Me" in Prague, 1969. Enjoy:

Ellipses

Movie edition:

Christopher Kelly says that the film of adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is "a movie so singularly unpleasant, so resolutely ill-conceived that it should bring Hollywood’s unlikely love affair with the iconic Texas author to an immediate end." . . . If you're an obsessive fan of Taxi Driver, New York City, or both, then this three-part series comparing frames from the movie with current-day street scenes is for you: Here, here, and here. (Via The Awl) . . . A review of A Serious Man, which I thought was better than the reviews it's been getting but still minor Coen. . . . A list of the 20 worst sequels to good movies ever made. It includes Babe: Pig in the City, which I remember liking, but it’s been a long time. In any case, it’s better than Back to the Future 2, which didn’t make the list. I haven’t seen the No. 1 selection, but it seems like a safe choice -- I remember my parents and sister going to see it in Texas; when they got back, I could hear them get out of the car in the garage, still laughing. . . . Terry Teachout re-posts his take on an anthology of film criticism. ("American Movie Critics will likely become the standard collection of its kind, for the most part rightly so.")

Gallery 31

Been a long time since I added something to the Gallery thread (nearly seven months, in fact), and I'll get it started again with a painting. Photographs shouldn't have all the fun.

Horse by George Boorujy
Currently on display at PPOW in New York

My Home Away from Home

Over at The Second Pass, a busy day today. First, James Chandler thinks that if you like the work of Jane Austen, you're almost certain to love Belinda, an 1801 novel by Maria Edgeworth. Also, I've written the second Editor's Note in the site's young life, partly to describe changes to the section called The Shelf.

Eisenhower Sees the Future

Near the end of World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower sent this letter to General George Marshall in Washington. In it, Eisenhower recounts visiting recently liberated concentration camps in Germany. The entire letter is beautifully, clearly written, and it includes this paragraph, startling in its prescience:

On a recent tour of the forward areas in First and Third Armies, I stopped momentarily at the salt mines to take a look at the German treasure. There is a lot of it. But the most interesting -- although horrible -- sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

(Via Freddie de Boer)

Condensation: James Cameron

It's been an awfully long time since I tried to kick-start a series that condenses New Yorker articles into three sentences. I'd like to try again. In this week's issue, Dana Goodyear profiled filmmaker James Cameron, he of Abyss, the first two Terminator movies, Titanic and the forthcoming effects orgy Avatar. In many ways, it’s a typically smart New Yorker piece: Goodyear implies she started preparing for it at least a year and a half ago, she did a lot of reporting, and the writing is plenty sharp. (“All directors have a God complex; Cameron takes his unusually seriously.”) Still, it’s hard not to wonder why Goodyear and the magazine would take 10,763 words to say what could be summed up in five: “James Cameron is a toolbox.”

So here it is again, in three sentences:

Each spaceship reflected the character of its pilot, and also Cameron’s instinct for the iconic, literal image; to the mother ship, Nell, he gave a curvaceous shape and a pair of heaving breasts.

[Landau's] T-shirt said something about Tommy Bahama’s Dive Bar; staying close to Cameron means embracing scuba culture in whatever way you can.

"We want to say that this arch formed as igneous rock, that it’s a lava formation that got eroded, but it’s fracturing out along the crystal planes of minerals."

Creed is What?

I'm as happy to be contrarian as the next guy. Happier, in fact. But Slate's habit of taking the other side has never been quite this crazy. I give you: "Creed Is Good: Scott Stapp's nu-grunge foursome was seriously underrated."

Come again, Willis?

It would take some serious rhetorical skill to rescue the reputation of the strange combination of bombast and sleep-induction that is the music of Creed. It would also help if the writer's audience was composed entirely of people who have lost the sense of hearing. Slate critic Jonah Weiner doesn't even come close:

In his lyrics, Stapp is a well-meaning, Bible-fluent doofus, easy to chuckle at but difficult to imagine hating. . . . The trouble wasn't that he was a blustery, would-be messiah (that didn't stop Bono's canonization) so much as the unrepentant hamminess he brought to the role: ample baritone quaking and churning, arms outstretched atop mountains and hovering, Christlike, above crowds in music videos.

So now, "difficult to imagine hating" is the same thing as "good"? And the "doofus" doesn't seem connected to "Bible-fluent." Just because you know the Bible doesn't mean you have to write lyrics like: "Well I don't know if I'm ready / To be the man I have to be / I'll take a breath, I'll take her by my side / We stand in awe, we've created life."

But maybe Weiner's just building up to his heavy artillery. Here we go:

Every surging riff, skyscraping chorus, and cathartic chord progression telegraphed the band's intention to rock us, wow us, move us. . . . One of the surprises involved in returning to Creed with a fresh pair of ears is how rocking, exciting, and, yes, moving, the songs can be.

Uhh. Rocking, exciting and moving? Those are some sharp adjectives. But OK, OK, once we dig down deeper, surely there's a case to be made:

"Bullets" is a furious blast of metal and one of the most galvanizing persecution anthems ever penned: "At least look at me when you shoot a bullet through my head! Through my head! Through my head!" he howls, presumably at the band's haters.

Oh, boy. I'm all for defending dynamic music that others might call dumb -- music that is, in fact, moving and rocking. But it will take someone else to convincingly defend Creed. In the meantime, one Slate commenter succinctly makes the prosecution's case:

People hate Creed because their infantile, derivative, boring music represents the absolute least-common denominator of modern rock (at least they did until Nickelback underbid them).

Goldy Prays

It's been a while since I've had mascot news to share. This nugget's pretty good. The University of Minnesota's mascot, Goldy Gopher, got himself in hot water last week. When Minny's opponent, Penn State, took the field, defensive end Jerome Hayes knelt in the end zone to pray. Goldy knelt, too. Fairly mild stuff, but charges of mocking religion led Minnesota to apologize for Goldy's behavior. The video is pretty funny. But the ensuing quote is even funnier:

According to the report, Hayes said he has seen video of the moment, and that he's not bothered by it -- although teammates have told him "the Gopher got the best of me."

A Little Baseball Talk

I suppose I should have said this a couple of weeks ago if I wanted to look prophetic, but I thought the Phillies were clearly the favorites in the National League. And once the Cardinals and their incredible one-two punch of Carpenter and Wainwright were eliminated, it seemed even clearer. The Dodgers were really ordinary in the second half of the season after their blazing start. The Phillies beat the Dodgers in last year's NLCS (also in five games), and this year they added Cliff Lee. They're the defending World Series champs, and they have what is commonly referred to as "an American League lineup," full of big boppers.

Now. I really don't want to get ahead of myself (unlike Joe and Evan on WFAN, who are jinxing this thing to high heaven at the moment, by comparing the Phillies and Yankees position by position), but if -- if -- the Yankees get past the Angels, I think this will be the first World Series in a while that matches the legitimately best teams from each league. And it will be very evenly matched (though I think the Yankees get the pitching edge). OK. Officially ahead of myself.

Here's a picture of the crowd outside Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston before a game of the 1903 World Series, between the Boston Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates:


Boston won that series 5 games to 3. A best-of-nine series is a good segue into Willy Stern's proposal for a new playoff structure. It's pretty unorthodox -- involving, among other things, a team with the better record having to win one less game in the opening round -- but I'm willing to consider anything to mitigate the effect of the additional divisions and the wild card. Citing the work of Craig Robinson, Stern shares these facts about the playoffs since the wild card was implemented in 1995:

* The team with the best record in baseball has only won the World Series once (1998 Yankees). The 2007 Red Sox tied with the Cleveland Indians for the best record and also won the series.
* The playoff team with the worst record has won two World Series (2000 Yanks and 2006 Cardinals).
* Only in 1995 did the teams with the best record even meet in the World Series (Indians and Braves).
* In only three seasons did the best eight teams go on to the playoffs (1996, 2002, and 2004).

Don't Blame it on Her

For Wednesday-Thursday, this is a strangely hypnotic clip of Stevie Nicks being prepped for a photo shoot and breaking into "Wild Heart." The woman singing back-up only enters the frame toward the end. Enjoy: