Banc of America Securities recently started rating Novell’s stock. They’re a subsidiary of Bank of America. That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I mean, homophones just don’t make sense in business– just too confusing! Remember that group-purchasing site Accompany? I didn’t think so (You got that from a company? Which one?).
Month: March 2004
Linky Goodness
Holy Anorexia, or penance and bodily mortification through starving, has a long and complicated history.
John Ashcroft and separation of church and state. Remember, this is a man so disliked by the general public of (very conservative) Missouri that he lost an election to a dead man.
Neat flash thingy: Tulse Luper Suitcases.
I wanted to say something funny about this, but I’ve been saving it for long enough I should just link: Journal of Manly Arts. Found through doing research on boxing.
Department of the Obvious
Study Finds that Teenage Virginity Pledges are Rarely Kept.
Well, Duh.
Another obvious thing I encountered today: the admonition in a style guide for technical writers “Do not use italics or bold face to compensate for unclear text.” That would be equivalent to talking really loud so that the foreigners could understand you.
Non Sequitur: “Game Over” the new sitcom about video game people, is moderately interesting.
More Personal Mottoes
The Bloggies have a category for “Best tagline.” I’m rooting for MightyGirl with “Famous among dozens.” Although given her following, she might have to cop to being (gasp) popular.
My great-great-grandfather, “Texas” John Slaughter, a Texas Ranger, was known in his day for dispensing rough justice, and had an actual song composed about him. It featured the charming lines “with Texas John Slaughter men did what they oughter cause if they didn’t they’d die.” That may have been from the TV show (also listed on IMDB) but I think it was from movie (curiously, not featured in IMDB). Addie Slaughter, played in the TV show by Annete Gorman, was my grandmother. I should note that she was mortified by the disgraceful and inaccurate portrayal of her childhood; I know this because we made her watch one of the movies for at least ten or fifteen minutes before she got too frustrated with it and stomped out. I was pretty young at the time so I don’t remember a lot of what happened.
I’m not sure I have a real personal motto, but I often feel better when I remind myself of an old Chilean saying, one I learned early on but understood only after months of intensive drinking: “Filo, no importa,” “Eeeh, it doesn’t matter. When I say it, I allow myself to stop worrying about things that seem, momentarily, to be incredibly important.
Obit
Integrity, knowledge, and ability were hallmarks of every endeavor David Weber undertook. In addition he always maintained an ironic sense of humor, and his mantra that “There is never enough time, there is never enough money, and nothing ever fits” was legendary.
Status Anxiety, II
So, the first few bits of Status Anxiety are quite good, but I have a feeling that de Botton is going to fail to connect them all into any sort of coherent whole. His basic premise– that status is what we want when we claim to want wealth and material goods, and that modern society comes with a lot of anxiety about status– is more or less obvious to anyone who’s thought about it, which is basically everyone. And rather than use his premise as a starting point, he basically meanders around it for awhile and then leaves it at that. Hence the rather cutting review in the Guardian, and the straightforward but equally negative one in the Independent.
Comment Spam
It’s comments like these that make me wish comment spam weren’t such a problem. Mmmm, conspiracy.
OK, new topic: Lost in Translation
OK, really. No more posts about the gay marriage debate and how it’s just like the legalization of divorce, or birth control, or what have you. Let’s talk about, oh, movies. Apparently, some musicians are consorting with and doing business with adult film stars. There’s a surprise. No, really, a real topic. Something serious, not the usual crap banter.
I saw Lost in Translation, finally, and I realized two things: one, Bill Murray really deserved that Oscar. Sean Penn can play a hardass eight days a week without breaking a sweat– that’s just him being himself. Remember when he would beat up journalists for fun? Mystic River was a great movie, and he did a great job in it, but Bill Murray’s role was deeper, and required greater range and expression, was more of a reach, and I think he got shafted when the more popular picture won.
Two, I now understand my reluctance to see the movie, and to see a lot of other serious movies recently. The anomie expressed in the movie is my entire day-to-day life. There are brief instants when I glimpse life through my own eyes but for the most part I spend my days behind a shield of ironic detachment, foreign to actual living. Yes, this is overblown, but I do feel insulated from reality to a disturbing degree. I didn’t want to see that movie because it would remind me that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. I’m all too familiar with the feeling of being surrounded by signs and voices whose meaning I can only guess at: watching the expats in restaurants, streets, subways. The worst was the sex: the strip club, where he’s watching these women contort themselves; the unexpected arrival of a call-girl he can’t understand; even the pointless sex with the expat lounge singer, all represent sex at its least intimate, least arousing, least satisfying extent. Yeah, there’s a redeeming connection and a kiss at the end, but they just serve to highlight how miserable the rest of existence really is.
Since I saw the movie I’ve felt completely hollowed out inside.
Shorter Jeff Jacoby
Busy Busy Busy has taken the “Shorter…” concept from Crooked Timber’s Daniel Davies and run with it. In that vein, Jeff Jacoby’s shameful and intellectually dishonest column in this week’s Globe can be summarized as follows:
“It’s a universal truth that male and female are opposite, while black and white are equal.”
Anxiety
I just started reading Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton. It’s about how, given the possibility of rising above our stations, we suffer more greatly from jealousy. Serfs were not jealous of nobles, they accepted their miserable lives as part of nature’s way. Once people figured out that wasn’t so, they became fiercely unhappy with their lot, and improved it, by revolution if necessary.
There are two ways to remedy anxiety about your standing: achieve greatness (this is impossible– no matter how great you are, there is still anxiety) or give up (this is either defeatism or buddhism, depending on your point of view). De Botton quotes William James: “How pleasant is the day when we give up trying to be young or slender.”
The specifics of the desired greatness vary from person to person. For example, Pablo Escobar always wanted to be great, by which he meant, he wanted to be popular, he wanted to be admired, he wanted a big house and a fancy car and a big TV and teenage hookers. He had all those things for awhile, before he was hunted down and shot at close range, finally. The book Killing Pablo is an excellent and unbiased account of the hunt and eventual capture. What I like most about it is the way that the author chronicles the good things that Escobar did, as well as the bad, and the ways that the US and Colombian forces had to make compromises with their ethics to eventually capture him. The author doesn’t pass judgement on anyone involved, and doesn’t need to, because the story holds up on its own as a tale of suspense and investigation, driven by Pablo Escobar’s status anxiety– and that of his customers in the US.
Secretly Ironic 