But no actual cats. I saw this animation the other day, and something in it resonated so deeply that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s viral, I think, in an infectious way. The only thing that’s left is for me to pass it on.
From the Broadsheet, without comment:
Bill Kristol: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment — it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.
[Laughter]
Juan Williams: Not me!
Brit Hume: Bill, for the record, I like white women.
Kristol: I know, I shouldn’t have said that.
Why is it that, even when I’ve realized that the book I’ve started reading isn’t the text I actually need to be reading — either it doesn’t do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere — I nonetheless feel the need to finish the thing before moving on to another book?
I swore I wasn’t going to miss it this year, as I did last year and the year before (and the year before that, and the year before that). I even went so far as to put it on my iCal, so that I’d remember to mark the occasion, but then I failed to look at the calendar yesterday. It’s a bit disappointing. I mean, this was moderately significant: the five year anniversary of starting things up here at Planned Obsolescence. I’d meant to mark the moment, but as wonky as my moment-to-moment understanding of what moment it is has gone, it’s not surprising that I missed it.
In any event, to mark the just-having-passedness of the moment: I’ve instituted a little “Five Years Ago” link, to be found at right. I’m curious what will happen on a day when, five years before, there was no post, but I guess we’ll see.
With apologies to the student who wrote it: I know something is wrong with what follows, but I can’t quite make my brain kick up information about what and why.
9% of the Senate consists of women…
When you say that something “consists” of something else, you’re usually saying that several something elses go into making up that something, right? So I think I’d be good with “The Senate consists of nine women and 91 men.” But to say that nine percent of the Senate consists of women sounds to me as though women are only one ingredient in that nine percent.
Am I right here? Or am I just getting dizzy from looking at the pile of grading in front of me?
The person who happened upon The Anxiety of Obsolescence by googling how long to bleed to death lacerated liver has me quite worried.
So word is spreading throughout the blogosphere this morning that the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon was produced (actually, that link seems to have disappeared, at least for the moment, perhaps victim of a metafiltering) by a group of filmmakers with a connection to a major Hollywood talent agency. And around the net, folks are crying “fraud,” “sham,” “bogus,” etc.
It’s that reaction that drives me a bit up a tree: not the drive to find out who’s actually making the videos, but the conviction that, if they aren’t in fact the home-brewed product of a 16 year old girl who is exactly who and what she claims to be, they’re a lie, and of no value whatsoever. I’ll blow this particular horn as often as I need to—which, alas, seems to be pretty often—but honestly, folks: have we never heard of fiction? That’s the thing where somebody makes up a story because it’s (a) entertaining, or (b) edifying, or (c) both of the above. Why have we as a culture gotten so locked in to the notion that the only value in narrative is truth value, and that the only truth value is that which can be demonstrated to be verifiably “real”? Are we all really that literal?
I’d go on, but I’m in a bit of a rush. Instead I’ll direct you to past maunderings on this issue, here, here, and here.
I had this dream the other night, which I’d almost forgotten, but which came back to me just now for a reason I’m not at all sure of. I’d been drafted to be the accompanist for some musical theater production that I was involved with. How I’d gotten involved, and who was producing the show, I’m not at all sure. But we were very, very close to opening, and yet no one could find the score, which obviously I needed if I was going to play. I tried to track down B.—my department’s administrative assistant—to find out what she’d been using in lieu of the score when she accompanied during rehearsals, and once I finally did (she was very hard to find), she showed me how the score was integrated into the script: the music was less melodic than it was about punctuation, key chords being played in tandem with key lines of dialogue. So, next to each line of the script was a little notation about the note or chord or brief trill that should be played. Easy peasy. Now I just needed to figure out what those little notations meant.
And that’s when it occurred to me, as if for the very first time: I don’t play the piano. Have never had piano lesson one.
So I’m very curious, now that I’m awake, what it is that I’m so unconsciously alarmed about having gotten myself into…
What’s the relationship between the Kantian sublime and Freudian sublimation? Is the apparent relationship merely a coincidence of translation? Or is there some deeper connection that I’d never noticed before? It sounds as though sublimation ought to be the process of making sublime, which makes me wonder whether Freud understood the sublime not as an amalgamation of beauty and terror but rather the containment of terror by beauty, the transformation of the chthonic into the aesthetic. Is there anything in this?
This post brought to you by the skin brightening face scrub in my shower that describes itself in French as “soin lissant sublimateur,” which got me wondering whether I really wanted my face to be sublime, or whether I was just channeling my libido into better skin care.
Strange and interesting things that I have learned from the NCAA website in the course of an extended email exchange with a colleague about college sports:
1. LSU has won the 6th highest number of national championships in Division I sports.
2. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are UCLA (97 national championships), Stanford (91), and USC (84).
3. The drop-off between the California schools and the rest of the pack is precipitous.* Oklahoma State comes in #4 with 46 championships, and Arkansas is not far behind with 42. (LSU has 40.)
4. Of the top 6 championship-winning Division I schools, LSU is the only one that has won more national championships in women’s sports (24) than in men’s (16). Neither Oklahoma State nor Arkansas has won a single national championship in a women’s sport.
5. LSU is ranked 3rd in the number of national championships in women’s sports, behind Stanford (34) and UCLA (28).
6. All 24 of LSU’s women’s national championships are in track and field, 11 indoor and 13 outdoor.
7. Somewhere down the line, LSU won one national championship in men’s boxing.
8. Football is not included among the sports that the NCAA counts in these championship figures, as “the NCAA does not conduct a championship for Division I-A football.” On a linked page of past Division I-A national championships in football, however, one can see that over the past 136 years, there have only been 27 seasons in which the championship title has been considered undisputed. Of those 27, 13 date from 1892 and earlier. Of those 13, 7 went to Yale, 5 to Princeton, and 1 to Harvard.
Make of that what you will.
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*I remain very curious about this concentration of championships on the west coast. Some of it is attributable, I suspect, to the inclusion of certain sports in west-coast athletic programs that simply don’t exist in the midwest or east; I’m thinking here in particular of water polo. Some of it may well be climate-related; California’s mighty conducive to sports in general, with its mild temperatures and low humidity. And some of it, no doubt, is a legacy factor, in which the championship-rich get championship-richer, through more easily obtainable funding and greater ease in recruiting. But I’m just not convinced that those three factors are enough to explain the nearly 50% dropoff between USC and Oklahoma State. Theories?
