The salt to Zoolander‘s pepper. To the advocates who have protested on behalf of the allegedly offended intellectually challenged, this film shouts, “Take a number!” 

Notice is herewith given of the following stylistic convention:

• one another is used of couples and trios: “Lovers love one another.”
• each other is used of groups greater than three: “The gang members looked at each other before dropping their gaze in shame.”

I am aware that some writers reverse the terms. To my ear, however, “one” suggests “one other,” or at most two, while “each” suggests a series, and, by extension, a group. Which is all the post hoc propter that you’re going to get out of me. Style is ultimately indefensible.

Morning

¶ Dolce far Niente: Susan Dominus writes about the pleasures of temps perdu: At summer camp in Maine, she and her fellow campers could while away the hours between four and six in any way they chose. No longer.

(Have a great weekend, everyone!)

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Morning

¶ Condi: You may recall that, during the hours in which she did not pine after a foregone career as a concert pianist, Condoleezza Rice was supposed to be an expert in Soviet containment. Evidently, that doesn’t have anything to do with Russia, as HuffPost writer Chris Kelly observes.

¶ Medals: Because watching television is against my religion, I’m forced to get my Olympics coverage from other sources. Happily, RomanHans is doing a prize-winning job.

Noon

¶ When, O When?: Why don’t we have gap years? Breaks between high school and college that give young people a taste of real life for a change? You’d think it would be an American specialty. Instead, it’s another example of lost mojo.

Night

¶ Dear Fr Tony: Father Tony has an advice column — and who better? If this opening Q & A is any indication, black and white will be giving way to living color.

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The second of the lectures at the 19 July session of One Day University here in New York, delivered by Stephanos Bibas, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, did not promise to teach me anything that I hadn’t learned in Criminal Procedure, the first-year law course that Mr Bibas teaches now. But “Law and Justice in America — A 250 Year History” had nothing to do with the intricate pleasures of law school. If anything, it was a presentation befitting a courtroom — not surprising, perhaps, given the Mr Bibas’s experience as a federal prosecutor. “When ninety-five percent of criminal charges are disposed of by plea bargains,” he intoned, “the criminal justice system is broken.”

That may sound like a vaguely interesting topic to you, but Mr Bibas placed it within such a soundly-based historical context that he wound up explaining a great deal more than what’s wrong with criminal justice in America.

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Morning

¶ Midweek Matinee: I’m off to the movies this morning, to catch the first showing of Tropic Thunder, and maybe get pelted by some demonstrators.

Noon

¶ Shot: Take your pick: four International Rescue Committee workers were murdered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party was murdered by an unidentified assailant in the United States.

Night 

¶ Arabic: Inspired by Eric, I picked up the 2-CD Michel Thomas Method Speak Arabic kit this afternoon — on my third visit to McNally Jackson in seven days.
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Aside from a great cover story (reviewing Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic, this week’s Book Review is unusually poor. Two pretty stinky books, by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Olen Butler, find themselves together under “No.” Even famous writers have to write good books to merit coverage.

Morning

¶ Sore Bear: You can cluck and tsk all you like, but Russia’s invasion of Georgia is driven by very high-octane belligerence, distilled from humiliated pride. Ideology not only has nothing to do with the case on the Russian side, but is empty rhetoric in the mouths of Westerners who preach that duly elected democracies are blah blah blah. The foolish expansion of NATO has finally met with Vladimir Putin’s freeze-dried resistance.  

Noon

¶ Lunch: Nom de Plume asked  me if I was free for lunch, and Migs asked what I’d be having. Here’s an idea!

Night

¶ Nada: Hey, it’s August. Nothing is going on — niente. That’s why God (in the person of E L Kersten, PhD) invented Despair.com, which, as my friend George wrote to tell me, has changed its Web site a lot since the last time we visited.

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Catching up with a bit of backlog (bit!?) that piled up during this year’s life-threatening bout of spring fever, I finally got round to saying a word or two about the last two shows in MTC’s 2007-8 season, From Up Here and Top Girls.

Morning

¶ Research: Sarah Kershaw’s story about Mark Cellura, a retired Merrill Lynch executive, put a crimp in my morning. With the help of a genealogist, Mr Cellura made contact with the adoptive family of his twin brother, Michael, who died of AIDS in 1987.

In a slightly more cheerful piece, Janet Maslin writes about First Globals, the rising generation that probably can’t wait to see the last of the likes of me.

Noon

¶ Thought for Food: Commodities development specialist Peter Baker asks some apt questions about food production, hitherto unheeding if not quite heedless.

Night

¶ Boycott: Retards of the world, unite — lobby Congress! Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know what it is, but NYRB’s series of reprinted novels hits me with all the authority of a magisterial curriculum: you must be prepared to defend to the death your decision not to read these books.

Notwithstanding all the intimidation, I’m glad to have read Howard Sturgis’s Belchamber.

I had the most awful sensation the other night, but I think that I ought to get used to it. I was, it seemed — I am — just another craggy, middle-aged man with a lot of strong opinions. I can argue the opinions well enough, but, let’s face it, who cares? And who doesn’t wish that, regardless of the evident world-historical acuity of my pronouncements, I’d just shut up? I’m another one of those bearded autodidacts who make it impossible for this country to settle down.

Seeing myself as just another guy with “brains” was truly unpleasant. And that, I guess, is the beginning of another conversation.

It’s just possible that Pineapple Express requires a special pair of glasses — like 3D glasses, only, in this case, the kind that comes naturally with being totally wasted. Not that it hasn’t got plenty of laughs for the cold stone sober. Only if you’re stoned yourself, however, will it seem to make sense.

A while back, Édouard ran a snap of these hideous, hideous statues, which stand outside a townhouse across Fifth Avenue from the Museum. I had been trying to keep their ugliness a neighborhood secret, but É has outed it.

Morning

¶ Cards: Judith Warner writes with sad lucidity about “playing cards.” As in, “the autism card.”

Now I’m off to the movies. Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Morning

¶ Collage: I’m not sure what made Girl Talk’s “rising profile” newsworthy today, but Robert Levine’s report, “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law,” reminded me of James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in this week’s New Yorker.

Noon

¶ YourNameHere: Take a break from the important stuff you’re doing and have a laff, courtesy of Cake Wrecks, Jen’s so-far inexhaustible stream of high-larious professional disasters (these cakes weren’t baked at home, you know).

Night

¶ Book Party: I went to a marvelous party…
 

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The other day, Father Tony wrote, of some opulently nouveaux villas in Forest Hills,

(It’s the sort of thing many of my relatives would have been proud to have built.)

It emerged in subsequent correspondence that Father T meant exactly what he said, and that the second preterite expressed part of his thought. His (dead) relatives would have loved to have built such houses. There is no faulting his grammar, which, in fact, is not what I’d meant to do, anyway.

But… Read the rest of this entry »

Click here for the full Darwin.

I don’t know many people who have seen Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I heard the other day that Mr Judge wanted to call the film The United States of Uh…merica. Yielding on that point didn’t help his movie, though; it got zip in the way of marketing. Idiocracy has had to make itself known by word of mouth. Maybe it ought to be called American Samizdat. That’s way too brainy a title, I suppose; but then non-idiotic Americans do seem to be the only demographic for the picture.

One friend duly rented the film on my say-so but couldn’t get past the first fifteen minutes. She was too horrified, not by Mr Judge’s vision of a bleak dystopian future, but by his cinéma vérité treatment of the world outside her window. If my generation of Boomers has anything to answer for (aside from living forever on medical miracles, which is not really our fault, thank you very much), it is the empowerment of morons.

The Flikr photograph made me laugh my head off. Really, I couldn’t get over it. Still can’t A moment of truly superb folly.

Morning

¶ Abandon Hope, Ye Who Can’t Enter Here: The big moment, the major rite of passage in the life of an upper-middle-class child in Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn and even the Bronx) occurs long before the agonies of adolescence: it’s the move from preschool to kindergarten. An old story! Now, at last, a few of the elementary schools are expanding. Winnie Hu reports.

Noon

¶ Introvert: A quick glance at Jonathan Rauch’s essay on introversion in The Atlantic suggests that the Blogosphere might be the hidden-in-plain-sight venue in which the introverts of the world — “a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population” — conspire to take over the world.

Night

¶ Split: From next Sunday’s Times Magazine, Matt Bai’s report on the reservations that prevent the elder statesmen of the Civil Rights movement from more forthrightly supporting Barack Obama.

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Alan Brinkley’s review of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side almost makes up for the indifference of the rest of this week’s issue.