¶ Crop Art of Japan. (Hoax Slayer)

¶ Tyler Coates tries ChatRoulette. (The Awl.)

¶ As God Is My Waitress! (@  Joe.My.God)

¶ Tourism spots from Lars von Drear. (The Onion)

¶ Matins: “Can psychiatry be a science?” asks Louis Menand in the current New Yorker. The welter of conflicting conclusions that he proceeds to lay out for us seems to require, at a minimum, an answer of “Not yet!” By the end of the piece, however, Mr Menand is wondering if science can ever be enough for psychiatry.

¶ Lauds: If the American embassy proposed for Battersea has any friends, they’re keeping mum. (Evening Standard)

¶ Prime: At 24/7, Douglas McIntyre expresses boilerplate outrage at the fees charged by lawyers and others to wind up Lehman Brothers — $642 million — but counsels against claw-back. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: s this the journalistic equivalent of coitus interruptus, or is there a really big story smouldering in Governor Paterson’s lap? A few weeks ago, the jungle drums promised a big Times story that might require the Mr Paterson to resign. ! Then, not so much. Now it’s hard to tell whose seat is hotter, the governor’s or the newspaper’s.

¶ Sext: Kevin Hartnett wonders how much longer young people will get to know their parents through old bookshelves. (The Millions)

¶ Nones: At The Economist, closing notes on a roundtable on the viability and desirability of a European Monetary Fund. By and large, the commenters don’t see the need for a new institution.

¶ Vespers: In an excellent piece on the faith of Flannery O’Connor, Terry Teachout illuminates the orienting role that O’Connor’s Catholicism played in her ongoing study of the Protestants all around her. (Commentary; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Compline: Ron Rosenbaum waxes rapturous about the — Dickensian? Dostoevskian? — moral tone of crime stories in the New York Post. (Slate; via Arts Journal)

Last week, I made a somewhat intemperate remark about sport, at Facebook. I wished for it to be as illegal as cocaine. Frankly, I’d rather that cocaine were as legal as sport. But what occasioned the comment was the hubbub of enthusiasm for the Winter Olympics, which I encountered wherever I turned.

What I object to isn’t sport. It’s the yearning for transcendence that moves so many people to whip up enthusiasm at Big Game time. There’s a dreadful collectivism about it: no matter how interested anybody says that he or she is in figure skating, the principal appeal is the fact that everybody else is watching. This is what explains the success of reality shows. We’re wired to believe that the bonfire gets bigger and warmer when more of us draw up to it.

We’re wired for a lot of things that don’t work in civilization, and here’s why: civilization is intended to take over most of the survival functions that in tribal societies (most places on earth today, in my opinion) are seen to by instinct and self-interest. Consider our health-care debate. It’s obvious to all civilized folks that a society that doesn’t guarantee some minimal level of health care to all of its members is wearing a big black eye. The tribals, more shrewdly no doubt, wonder why they ought to pay for other people’s problems.

The United States has never been about civilization. Civilization in the United States was from the beginning seen as a weakness into which the Eastern cities had degenerated. They were “soft.” Not that the United States stands for genuine tribalism, either. It is Calvinist through and through: Me and God, two for the road.

But our rugged individualism turns out to be a crock. Except for a few woolly mammoths, it is awfully boring. Even Americans like to have friends — and with friends come commitments. Because we like to pick our friends for ourselves, though, we’re hardly tribal.

Except at Big Game time! Then we gather to form one immense tribe, rubbing our hands lustily in front of the gigantic bonfire of common spectacle. Because sport is utterly devoid of internal meaning (as all games are — which is why we play them, those of us who play), and because its external meaning is, ultimately, a numerical matter of scoring (you can argue the fine points of a game, but respect for scoring is the one and only universal in sport), the Big Game makes for a perfect Big Tent. Everybody is welcome.

That is, everybody is welcome to check individuality and insight at the door.

What’s exciting about watching sport is awfully close to what’s exciting about watching a poor sod stand on a ledge with a view to jumping. Things could go horribly, arrestingly, fascinatingly wrong!. When they don’t, and something ineffably beautiful happens instead, you ought to turn off the television set and find other beautiful things to watch — Fonteyn and Nureyev, perhaps. A beautiful performance ought to be your signal to leave the pack, and cultivate your own idea of beauty and grace. Tell me about that, and I’ll not only hear you out on Davis and White but watch a clip myself.

¶ Matins: The exercise in “militainment” known as America’s Army may be the cheapest recruiting technique since the English kings fostered village archery.

The introduction of video gaming into military training is so hugely inevitable that there is no reason to have an opinion about it. We believe, however, that it portends a smarter and more effective military. Not to mention the opportunity to attain military glory in peacetime, through games that bring the honor described by Virgil in the Iliad. (Foreign Policy; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: David Cope, the creator of an AI program that composed plausible fakes of Bach and Mozart, is about to unveil its successor, Emily Howell. (Miller-McCune; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Prime: The author of Economists for Firing Larry Summers has a question for Fed Chief Bernanke: Remember? (How much easier it is to give advice when one doesn’t need any.)

¶ Tierce: Today’s truly with-it potager has to be a garden planted on a restaurants rooftop. As Jerry James Jones notes, hydroponics sidelines fertilizer production and runoff. (Treehugger; via Good)

¶ Sext: Cord Jefferson wonders if he ought to be dressing in “Old Money Green.” (The Awl)

¶ Nones: Not again! According to BBC News, the Argentians are calling the Falklands “Las Malvinas” again — at the United Nations.

¶ Vespers: Laura Miller proposes five rules for novelists who aspire to attract readers, but we think that her concluding paragraph could be repackaged as an all-important sixth, entitled, “If you have to try to be a genius, you’re not one; so give it up and get on.” (Salon; via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: Jonathan Gourlay, who might be accused of having gone native, pretends to be an outsider, as he brings us up to speed on adultery in Pohnpei, which is much like adultery anywhere, only watch out for women wearing trousers. (The Bygone Bureau)

I had dreams of bringing the late spate of light entries to an end this evening, but now that it’s time to write, I haven’t a thought in my head. I made the mistake of watching the second half of Honolulu after dinner, and it gummed up my brain. “Gum,” you may not realize, is an anagram, more or less, of “MGM.” Honolulu is a catalogue raisoné of the high-minded vulgarities to which MGM was prone in years around 1940. It’s all there, but never moreso than in the hula skirt worn by Eleanor Powell with her tap shoes. Kathleen is in a state somewhere between apoplexy and plotz.

I loved every minute.

But I’d probably love anything tonight, now that my latest slate of doctoring is over. Friday’s Remicade infusion had its effect on Saturday, as I sloughed off a dully inexplicable fatigue and worked hard enough to feel tired for a reason. This morning’s procedure was devoid of bad news. At my age, and perhaps at any, there is only one form for good news: the fact that you are as alive as you are today means that you will probably be alive tomorrow. This state of affairs could end at any time, and indeed it will. There will come a time when tomorrow looks unlikely. There does for everyone, or at least for everyone who is not crushed in an unforeseen catastrophe.

Quatorze met me at the flat afterward, and we set out for lunch — how good it was to chew! — and an hour at Westphalia, which more than ever hums with currency. Q was determined to gratify my desire to get an imposing portrait of Kathleen off the floor and onto one of the storage unit’s walls, and I was resolved to let him try for as long as he liked. What’s imposing is not so much the portrait itself, which nobody likes except Kathleen and the artist who painted it, as the frame in which the artist mounted it, a baroque object found on the street with a pope in its hole. Getting it off the floor opened up quite a number of shelves.

Then we went to Gracious! I used to call this UES hardware store  “Gracious Empire,” but now that I am thinking of writing a musical about the enterprise (with branches in Lincoln Plaza and Chelsea), I prefer the exclamation point. We went to the lighting branch first and then to the main store, and in both locations I placed bulky, low three-figure orders and had them delivered. (“Had them delivered” is New-Yorkese for “asked that they be delivered.”) Then I strode into Third Avenue and hailed a cab. There was nothing at all out of the way about my buying a dozen boxes of lightbulbs and a garment rack, but I felt, stepping into the taxi, that I’d bought a shooting box in Scotland. I was almost intolerably pleased with life. I have been in Tired-of-London mode for so many weeks now (Remicade withdrawal?) that I feel honor-bound to report this afternoon’s bout of gross insouciance.

Spring must be just around the corner.

¶ Photographs by Jesse Speer (via The Online Photographer)

¶ Writing at cross-purposes. (amassblog)

¶ HBO 1983: An unforgettable intro. But, you know, it really does look almost thirty years old. Not to mention what it sounds like. (Brain Pickings)

¶ The Litwit dusts off the Tour Eiffel.

¶ Matins: At The Second Pass, Michael Rymer appraises David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, and although he finds the book to be “hobbled,” he reminds us that cracked explanations appeal by telling a good story.

¶ Lauds: In one interview, or perhaps two, Ewan McGregor talks to the Wall Street Journal and to its popular-scene blog, Speakeasy, about working with Roman Polanski and his “upcoming projects.”

¶ Prime: Few pundits share David Brooks’s gift for papering over surprising omissions with a patina of reasonable patter that sounds comprehensive. In a recent column, for example, Mr Brooks finds regrettable drawbacks in the “meritocratic” nature of the American elite. He attributes the fact that respect for “our institutions” has “plummeted” to all sorts of interesting slippages among the alleged holders of power, from rootlessness to insensitivity to “context.” One factor that goes unmentioned, however, is an income disparity that has left too many Americans without much of a reason to respect anything. Chris Lehman rebuts with the suggestion that nation may have become even less progressive than it was in the 1950s. (NYT, The Awl)

¶ Tierce: At The Infrastructurist, Yonah Freemark considers alternatives to concrete in the paving of sidewalks. Brick and stone are more attractive, but brick is fragile and stone is expensive, and both make for uneven surfaces. Who’d a thunk it: the bane of recycling may do the trick.

¶ Sext: Having thought the matter over, Mike Johnston decided that merely crediting the maker of a YouTube clip that he embedded at The Online Photographer. And he sent Harlan Ellison $25. And he got a thank-you note.

(Information may want to be free, but it doesn’t have to eat.)

¶ Nones: Sebnem Arsu’s report on the latest arrest of alleged military conspirators in Turkey clarifies some of the complexity in which national sovereignty is entangled, as newly empowered religious conservatives seek an alternative to the militant secularism of Turkey’s Twentieth-Century past. The alignment of values is altogether unlike what’s familiar in the Christian West. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Now that some time has passed by, and the brouhaha is all but forgotten, Maud Newton pauses over The Original of Laura and finds it to be a fitting finale to Vladimir Nabokov’s career.

¶ Compline: Why unignited natural gas stinks: the New London School Explosion of 1937. (via MetaFilter)

Regular readers know what the header means.

Not a lot to report, you betcha.  I got very hungry, but, eventually, my stomach gave up. There’s still plenty of Jell-O. I finished the last of the nectar before nine.

I watched three movies. Le Patinoire is one of the funniest films that I’ve ever seen. So funny, in fact, that I’m not recommending it to anybody. It must be just me. To Kill a King was — like The Wolfman, it would have been better in Martian. Was today really the day for Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand again? Now it’s too late to watch Honolulu, a movie I didn’t even know about until just the other day, when Brooks Peters ran a clip. I love Eleanor Powell, but I bought the tape for George and Gracie. Not to mention Honolulu.

Amazingly, I completed tomorrow’s Daily Office. I worked. That has never happened on a Jell-O day before — and I estimate that there have been somewhere between twelve and fifteen of them. Jell-O days have always had a determined sort of Victoria-mourning-Albert inertia about them.

I am going to eat my head off tomorrow at lunch. Frites en ciel.

¶ Matins: Despite misgivings, we have set our fear of a Trojan Horse aside, and decided to take an essay from The American Conservative at face value: evidence of real discussion in the conservative community — no more. With fairly painstaking analysis of the numbers, Ron Unz dismantles “

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