The Speculative Sea Level Explorer by interaction designer Benedikt Groß investigates how the coastline and the territory of the world will be reshaped by a rise of the sea level due to Global Warming.
While the simulation, captured as a series of animations, is roughly accurate, it actually shows the consequence of more "dramatic" changes in sea level than what is currently expected by climate change models.
billtron@tyler
Like many of you, I’d imagine, I grew up listening to Raffi Cavoukian, the Egyptian-born Canadian children’s musician singing songs like “Baby Beluga” and “Down By The Bay”—I even have dim memories of going to see him in concert. He’s recently embarked on his first tour in ten years, and now, as both a Canadian and an advocate for children, he’s speaking out about the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, who hanged herself at 17 after she experienced bullying and social isolation after she was allegedly sexually assaulted and a picture of the assault distributed online—and about rape culture more broadly.
In a series of tweets today, Raffi wrote:
EDITORIAL: Anti-bullying efforts fall short | Chronicle Herald thech.ca/XFFire via @chronicleherald yes. quite an understatement.
— Raffi Cavoukian (@Raffi_RC) April 11, 2013
Father of Rehtaeh Parsons speaks out in emotional blog post soa.li/EWegwsU | NS Justice Minister Ross Landry should resign.
— Raffi Cavoukian (@Raffi_RC) April 11, 2013
“rape culture”? what has society become—who tolerates such violence & hideous insult to human dignity? men—SPEAK OUT! it’s way past time.
— Raffi Cavoukian (@Raffi_RC) April 11, 2013
The idea that men have a role to play in reducing sexual assault isn’t new, of course. But there’s something particularly powerful about hearing Raffi, who’s both an advocate for children and someone whose music has always been predicated on the theory that children have the ability to absorb big ideas about the world and their place in it, say that rape culture is unacceptable. If we’re going to teach boys more actively about gender roles and respectful and consensual sexuality, that’s a process that’s going to require a foundation to be constructed fairly early in childhood. That’s not to say that we need to start sex education at five. But if we’re going teach boys about the huge range of things they can be in the same way we’ve reexamined roles and options for girls, and if we’re going to try to shift the perception of what values make a person a real man, someone like Raffi, who knows how to speak to children directly and uncondescendingly, will need to be part of the conversation.
    
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In October, Edward J. Ward of Wisconsin pulled his rented U-Haul van up to the steps at 54 White Street and unloaded 46 giant plastic tubs containing hundreds of magazines, music folios, LPs and 46,000 forty-fives, mostly country. All of this material is now catalogued in our database and integrated into our ever-growing country collection.
Maybe every Ed on Earth loves country, because we launched this focused collection when Ed Salamon, the former Executive Director of the Country Radio Broadcasters Assoc., donated 11,460 singles, 3300 LPs, 250 CDs and 65 seventy-eights in ’02. Add in our materials of 600 books, 5,843 CDs (haven’t sorted the singles yet) and 2,313 LPs and it look like the beginning of a pretty serious group. All we need now is a patron to help create a named collection here like the Keith Richards’ Blues Collection! All suggestions welcome, as we wait for a call from Taylor Swift…
Of great interest are Mr. Ward’s 167 songbooks focusing on folks and country music, from the 1930s through the 80s. We’ve started scanning these, so here’s some snazzy covers just for fun and the list generated from our cataloging of the entire collection.
• 100 Great Country and Western Songs (Hill and Range Songs, Inc., 1962).
• 100 WLS Barn Dance Favorites (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1935).
• 33 Prison and Mountain Songs (Shapiro bernstein & Co., 1932).
• 39 Country and Wester Songs (Charles Hansen Pub., 1968).
• Al Clauser & Oklahoma Outlaws Songs of the West (American Music Inc., 1939).
• American Cowboy Songs (Robbins Music Corp, 1936).
• Arkansas Woodchoppers : World’s Greatest Collection of Cowboy Songs with Yodel Arrangement (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1931).
• Arkansas Woodchoppers (M.M. Cole Pub. Co, Chicago, Il, 1931).
• Arkansas Woodchoppers Cowboy Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., Chicago, Il, 1932).
• Arkansas Woodchopper Square Dance Calls (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., Chicago, Il, 1940).
• Arkansas Woodchoppers : World’s Greatest Collection of Cowboy Songs with Yodel Arrangement (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1932).
• Arlen & jackie Vaden, The Southern Gospel Singers (KXEL, Waterloo, Iowa, 1957).
• Arling Schaeffer’s Barn Dance (M.M Cole Pub. Co, 1933).
• Arthur Smith’s Original Folk – Folio No. 1 (American Music Inc., 1943).
• Arthur Smith’s Original Folk Songs (American Music Inc., 1943).
• Asher Sizemore and Little Jimmi (Asher Sizemore, 1934). Includes B&W glossy photo of Sizemore & Little Jimmie.
• Bill Scott’s Song & Photo Album – No. 1 (Kelly Music Pub., 1944).
• Blaine Smith Favorite Songsm, Poems, Pictures (Russ Hull’s Country Music, 1942).
• Bluegrass Favorites (Karamar Pub., ).
• Bob Acher’s Home Folk Favorites (Acuff-Rose Pub., 1943).
• Bob Miller’s Famous Hill-Billy Songs (Paull-Pioneer Music Corp, , 1933).
• Bob Miller’s Folio Full of Song Hits (Bob Miller Inc., 1934).
• Bob Nolan’s Folio of Cowboy Classics – No. 1 (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Bob Nolan’s Folio of Cowboy Classics – No. 2 (American Music Inc., 1940).
• Bob Nolan’s Folio of Original Cowboy Classics – No.1 (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Bob Nolan’s Folio of Original Cowboy Classics – No.2 (American Music Inc., 1940).
• Bradley Kincaid – Filio No .12 (Peer International Corp, 1941).
• Carson J Robison’s Mountain Ballads ╔ (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1930).
• Carson J Robison’s Mountain Ballads ╔ (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1930).
• Carson Robison Collection (Robbins Music Corp, 1936).
• Carson Robison’s Mountain Ballads & Old Time Songs (MM Cole, Chicago, Il, 1930).
• Charley Pride – His Most Complete Collection (West Coast Pub. Inc., 1971).
• Cliff Carlisle Cowboy and Mountain Songs (M.M Cole Pub. Co, 1936).
• Country Music Souvenir Scrapbook (1968).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, May, 1959).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Jul, 1959).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Nov. 1958).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Sep. 1958).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Nov. 1954).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Dec. 1956).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Feb. 1962).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Jul. 1960).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, May- 1962).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Nov. 1962).
• Country Song Round Up (American Folk Pub. Inc, Aug. 1963).
• Country Sounds of the Nashville Stars (Warner Bros, Sever Arts Music, 1968).
• Cowboy Ballads Folio NO. 4 (American Music Inc., Portland, OR, 1940).
• Cowboy Ballads – Folio No. 1 (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Cowboy Ballads – Folio No. 10 (American Music Inc., 1941).
• Cowboy Ballads – Folio No. 4 (American Music Inc., 1940).
• Cowboy Ballads – Folio No. 7 (American Music Inc., 1941).
• Cowboy Ballads – Folio No. 8 (American Music Inc., 1941).
• Cowboy Songs – No. 62 (American Folk Pub. Inc, July, 1959).
• Cowboy Songs – No. 64 (Nov. 1957).
• Cowboy Songs – No. 69 (American Folk Pub. Inc, Fall, 1962).
• Cowboy Songs as sung by John White (Pacific Coast Borax Company, 1934).
• Cowboy Tom’s Round Up Book – Book One (Bibo-Lang Inc., 1933).
• Dale Hunter’s Hill Billy and Cowboy Songs (Chart Music Pub. House, 1934).
• Deluxe Edition Mac and Bob Mountain Songs, Western Songs, Cowboy Songs (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., USA, 1941).
• Dick Foran’s Western Song Classics – Folio No.1 (Cross Music Co, 1943).
• Doc Hopkins & Cumberland Ridgerunners Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1936).
• Don White, Carolina Boys Westerm Hill, Country songs (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Dude Martion’s Songs of the Plains (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Eddy Arnold’s Favorite Songs (Hill and Range Songs Inc., Hollywood, CA, 1948).
• Eddy Arnold’s Favorite Songs No. 2 (Hill and Range Songs, Hollywood, CA, 1950).
• Eddy Arnolds Favorite Songs (Hill and Range Songs Inc., 1948).
• Eddy Arnolds Favorite Songs – No. 3 (Hill and Range Songs Inc., NY, NY, 1953).
• Elmore Vincent’s Lumber Jack Songs (M.M. Cole Publishing, 1932).
• Elton Britt’s Famous Recorded Songs (Bob Miller Inc., 1941).
• Ernest Tubb Favorites – Radio Songbook No. 3 (Ernest Tubb Pub., 1944).
• Favorite Old Time Songs & Mountain Ballads (Bradley Kincaid, Mountain Boy of WLS, 1930).
• Favorite Songs of the WLW Boone County Jamboree (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1941).
• Five Star Collection of Cowboy Songs (Chart Music Pub. House, 1947).
• Foggy River Boys (Hill and Range Songs Inc.NY, NY, 1955).
• Folk and Country Songs (Charlton Publication, Nov, 1957).
• Folk and Country Songs (Charlton Publication, Sept, 1956).
• Folk and Country Songs (Charlton Publication, Sept. 1957).
• Four American Indian Songs, Charles Wakefield Cadman (White-Smith Music Pub., 1909).
• Four Star Folio Cavalcade of Melodies (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1939).
• Fred Scott’s Songs of the Open Trail No. 1 (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Gene Autry and Jimmy Long Cowboy Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. , Chicago, IL, 1935).
• Gene Autry’s Cowboy Songs & Mountain Ballads (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1936).
• Gene Autry’s Cowboy Songs & Mountain Ballads (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1932).
• Gene Autry’s Folio of Western Songs (Movie Songs Inc., 1947).
• Georgia Crackers – Song Folio No. 1 (American Music Inc., Portland, OR, 1940).
• Grand Ole Opry WSM Picture – History Book (WSM Nic, 1977).
• Hank Williams Country Music Folio (Acuff-Rose Pub., 1948).
• Hank Williams Favorite Songs (Acuff-Rose Pub., 1953).
• Happy Chappies Collection of Outdoor Songs (M.M.Cole Pub. Co., Chicago, IL, 1933).
• Happy Chappies Greatest Collection of Outdoor Songs (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1930).
• Happy Jack Turner Cowboy, Home, Mountain Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1942).
• Hill and Range Hit Songs – Folio No. 2 (Hill and Range Songs, Inc., 1952).
• Hill-Billy, Prisoner & Mountaineer Song Folio No. 1 (DeSylva, Brown & Henderson, 1933).
• Hillbilly Hit Parade of 1940 (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1941).
• Hillbilly Hit Parade of 1941 (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1941).
• Hillbilly, Cowboy and Standards Songs (Pagani & Bros NY, 1935).
• Home and Hill Country Ballads – Folio No. 1 (American Music Inc., 1939).
• Home and Hill Country Ballads – Folio No. 4 (American Music Inc., 1941).
• Homer Rodeheaver’s Collection of Sacred Songs (M.M.Cole Pub. Co., 1953).
Various• International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada ╨ General Bulletins: (, ).
• Jimmie Rodgers (Southern Music Publishing, 1943).
• Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Folio – Volume 1 (Peer International Corp, 1967).
• Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Folio – Volume 2 (Peer International Corp, 1967).
• Jimmy Dean Song Favorites (Robbins Music Corp, 1958).
• Johnny Cash Show Souvenir Song Book (Southwind Music Inc. NY, NY, 1966).
• Lefty Friozzell’s Country Hit Songs (Hill and Range Songs, Inc., 1951).
• Log Cabin Songs by Johnny Crockett (Goodman Music Co, 1932).
• Louise Massey and the Westerners Song Folio (Peer International Corp, 1941).
• Lulu Belle & Scotty Hayloft Jamboree Songbook (Hilliard, Currie Corp., Chicago, IL, 1943).
• Lulu Belle & Scotty’s Happy Valley Songs (Lulu Belle & Scotty, Station WLW, Cincinatti, 1940).
• Lulu Belle & Skyland Scotty : Mountain Songs, Western Songs, Cowboy Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., Chicago, Il, 1941).
• Lulu Belle’s Skyland Scotty’s Home Folk Songs (Scott Wiseman, 1937).
• Mac and Bob (M.M.Cole Pub. Co., Chicago, IL, 1941).
• Mac and Bob’s Collection of Songs (Bob Miller Inc., 1935).
• Mac and Bob’s Mountain, Western ,Cowboy Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1941).
• Montana Slim (Wilf Cater) Songs of the Plains & Rockies (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1939). 
• Nashville Songbag (Hill and Range Songs, Inc., 1968).
• New and Original Favorite Songs of Famous Hill Billies (Bibo-Lang Inc. NY, NY, 1934).
• Newest Carson Robison Book (Carson J. Robison, 1936).
• On the Trail (Remick Music Corp, 1945).
• Palls of the Golden West Song Folio No. 1 (American Music Inc., 1942).
• Paul Howard’s Cotton Pickin’ Songs (Acuff-Rose Pub., 1945).
• Paul Howard’s Cotton Pickin’ Songs (Acuff-Rose Pub., Nasjville, TN, 1945).
• Play and Sing (M.M. Cole Publishing House, ).
• Prairie Ramblers & Patsy Montana’s Songs (Bob Miller Inc., 1935).
• Prairie Ramblers and Patsy Montana Collection (Bob Miller Inc. NY, NY, 1937).
• Prairie Ramblers Barn Dance Favorites (Chart Music Publishing House, 1941).
• Ranch Boys Songs of the Plains (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1939).
• Readers Digest Country & Western Songbook (Reader’s Digest Asso, 1983).
• Red Foley’s Cowboy Songs & Mountain Ballads (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., Chicago, Il, 1940).
• Rice Brothers and Their Radio Gang (Chart Music Pub. House, 1942).
• Round Up Memories – Songs of the Hill and Range (Shapiro bernstein & Co., 1946).
• Round Up Memories – Songs of the Hill and Range (Shapiro bernstein & Co., 1946).
• Roy Acuff & His Smoky Mountain Songs (Acuf-Rose Pub., 1943).
• Roy Clark’s – Big Note Guitar Song Book (Shattinger Intl Music Corp, 1978).
• Santa Fe Folk Songs and Dances (Mills Music, 1940).
• Santa Fe Rangers Western Songs (Leeds Music Corp, 1946).
• Santos Ranger Ensemble Songs of the Camp Fires (Don Santos Pub. Co., 1949).
• Songs Gene Autry Sings (Western Music Co., 1942).
• Songs of Jimmie Davis (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1937).
• Songs of the Pioneers (Albert E. Brumley, 1970).
• Songs of the Roaming Ranger (Tip Top Publishers, 1935).
• Songs of the Saddle (American Music Inc., 1942).
• Sons of the Pioneers Solg Folio (Cross & Winge Inc., 1936).
• Souvenir Program W-H-O Barn Dance Frolic (Central Broadcasting Co, Des Moines IA, 1936).
• Tex Ritter Mountan Ballads & Cowboy Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1941).
• The New Hank Keene Book (Hank Keene Inc, 1936).
• The Best of Country Music (Best of Country Music, 1984).
• The Big Round-Up of Cowboy Songs (Amsco Music Sales Co., 1934).
• The Carter Family Album of Smoky Mountain Ballads (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1937).
• The Lonely Mountaineers Cowboy/Mountain Songs (Wm. J. Smith Music Co., 1934).
• The Lonesome Cowboy Songs of the Plains and Hills (George T. Worth & Co., 1930).
• The Short Brothers, Jimmie and Leon (American Music Inc., 1943).
• The Wade Mainer Story Picture Songbook (WWNC, Asheville, NC, 1941).
• Tim Spencer’s Sagebrush Symphonies (American Music Inc., 1943).
• Tom Mix Western Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1935).
• Uncle Jack and Mary Lou’s Songs You Love To Hear (Southern Music Pub. Co., 1941).
• W.W.VA Radio Jamboree Songs (M.M. Cole Publishing Co., 1940).
• Walter Peterson’s Mountain Ballads & Old Time Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., 1930).
• Warner’s Old Time Songs of the Gay Nineties (Chart Music Pub. House, 1944).
• Webb Pierce, The Wondering Boy, Folio No. 1 (Hill and Range Songs, Inc., 1953).
• Wesern Classics (Chas. H. Hansen Music Co, 1946).
• Witmark’s Peaceful Valley Songs (M. Witmark & Sons NY, 1933).
• WSM Grand Ole Opry History Picture Book (WSM Inc., 1969).
• WWVA Radio Jamboree Famous Songs (M.M. Cole Pub. Co., Portland, OR, 1940).
Over at Slate, I have an essay about the existential pleasures of filing taxes as a gay married couple.
This footage of a NOLA Jazz funeral is a grimly appropriate way to tip the sombrero and say adios to Les Blank, one of the most gifted documentary filmmakers of the 20th century, if not the most. He died yesterday.
One of the strangest arguments people make against the right to privacy established in Griswold v. Connecticut is that judicial intervention was unnecessary because a ban on contraception could not be enforced in most circumstances. But to state the obvious, it’s bizarre to use the fact that a statute could only be arbitrarily enforced as a point in a law’s favor. (Which is one reason why the even more common argument against Griswold is to say “penumbras and emanations nyuk nyuk nyuk” although Douglas’s phrase expresses a point so widely accepted as to be banal.)
Kate Sheppard’s post on Ken Cuccinelli’s attempt to restore Virginia’s unenforceable sodomy law provides an excellent illustration of why having largely unenforceable privacy-violating statutes lying around like a loaded weapon is a terrible idea. Cuccinelli’s desire to violate the rule of law by ignoring Lawrence v. Texas is predicated on his attempt to engage in another violation of the rule of law. Admittedly, the target in this case — a man in his late forties who engaged in consensual oral sex with young women aged 16 and 17 — is not particularly sympathetic. Nonetheless, what the man did in the case, however creepy, was not illegal under Viriginia law. If Virginia wants to raise its age of consent, or to modify it by limiting the definition of “consent” for women who are over the age of consent but not yet adults to consensual partners of similar age, it’s free to do so – Lawrence applies only to consenting adults.* But the essence of the rule of law is that actions cannot be made retroactively illegal even if an official of the state considers them immoral. The fact that sodomy statutes can be used to target people who offend state officials don’t like for an independent reasons is an excellent illustration of why Griswold and Lawrence were right.
*As a commenter notes, this actually appears to the case — the age of consent of 15 in Virginia seems to apply only to cases where the partner is under 18. At any rate, either the action was not illegal, or it should be prosecuted under the applicable statute, not under a general ban on “sodomy.” And he should not be charged with a felony if the appropriate law categories the crime as a misdemeanor.
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Today began with projectile toddler vomit and ends with a gin and tonic and Bioshock infinite. http://bit.ly/123VljZ
What is “satire” anyway? When the whole Oscars/Onion fiasco happened, my friend Jonathan vented his frustration to me about what he saw as the term and its misuse; an amateur comedian himself, he had come to decide that “satire” simply isn’t a thing, and that when people say any variation on “Well, it’s clearly satire,” they are talking nonsense. There is nothing clear about satire, he declared to me–at great and convincing length–and this fact is central to what satire is (or, rather, what it isn’t). Because what satire isn’t is: a genre. Novels, tragedies, sonnets, horror movies, musical theater, and so on are all genres which you can identify as such by pointing to a fairly limited set of formal features that identify them, features which can be more or less treated as objective (a novel is a long, fictional, prose narrative, and so forth). But basically, if it resembles a sonnet even a little, it is a sonnet. If it resembles a tragedy, it is one. And so forth.
With these kinds of genres, the glass is always half full, and we always round up: a glass half full of water is a glass of water. Take the novel: “novel-ish” is good enough. The most interesting novels are often the ones that rest in the uncanny valley between resembling a novel and being not-quite a novel, but that fact doesn’t make them not-novels, but the reverse: it makes them more interesting. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate or Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, for example, are written in verse but that’s precisely what makes them interesting evolutions or variations on the novel form. The fact that they are also poetry does not make them less novelistic.
“Satire” is not this kind of thing at all. If something is not taken to be satire, it fails as satire. If the glass is half-empty, it is an empty glass: satire is a bomb that either goes off or doesn’t. In this sense, it’s an effect, and everything depends on how the joke is received, what the author intended, what the circumstances were in which it was made, and so on.
All of which is to say this: if you tell me that Pale Fire isn’t a novel (or even if Nabakov denied that it was), I’ll nod my head, and I will then continue thinking of it as a novel. You can’t convince me that it isn’t a novel; the total set of novels in the universe includes anything that is even the slightest bit novelistic, because being one thing (novel) doesn’t make it not another thing (poetry). It can be both, and I’d venture to say that all interesting writing is more than one thing. And that multiplicity is how genres grow and change; “poetry,” today, includes a lot of things that wouldn’t have fallen under that name a century ago, just as the “novel” includes lots of forms that are were not originally understood by that name.. Not only don’t we police these boundaries, but it would be nonsensical to do so. Pale Fire can be a poem and a novel, and it enriches both forms to see it as both.
The stakes are completely different when we talk about satire, and we do police those boundaries, for good reasons. For one thing, the difference matters. Whether to shelve Pale Fire in the poetry or fiction section of the book store is pretty much the extent of the dilemma. But if a statement is recognized as satire, we treat it differently than if we decide that it is not. When a tea party politician says something “crazy,” we get enraged; when Stephen Colbert says the exact same thing, we laugh. The former is monstrous; the latter is satire. When we read a headline and assume it must be from the Onion—or when an article from The Daily Currant is taken to be real, as seems to happen constantly—we react differently than we would have if we had known what it really was. And when we find out, we adjust our reactions accordingly. Watch the difference between Sarah Palin and Tina Fey saying almost exactly the same words, and note that when Tina Fey says it, it’s funny:
If you thought Tina Fey actually was Sarah Palin, though, you wouldn’t be laughing. The person who is saying those words and the context in which they said it are the things that matter.
This fact becomes a lot more important when we don’t know who the speaker is, or why they are saying what they are saying. When a link comes across your timeline, or someone shares it on facebook, you have to take its authenticity on trust, and you do. That makes it easy to be fooled by satire (or to take something real as satire). We are, in fact, strikingly bad at telling the difference: if you search twitter for “The Daily Currant,” for example, a very large number of the tweets are either clarifications that something is actually satire, or they are people mistaking a TDC article as “real” news. Even a blogger for the Washington Post made that mistake, but it also happens on facebook constantly (and it happened to me just the other day, in fact). The existence of the theon1on is a nice demonstration of the problem this inability to distinguish between reality and satire creates. And even Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the most classic example of satire one could come up with—I am told, again by my friend Jonathan Shelley—was far from universally understood as satire, at the time. You just can’t know for sure.
What this means, then, is that the statement “it’s clearly satire” is never true, and can never be true. If satire depends on context, audience, intention, and reception—and I put it to you that it does—then it’s impossible to say, of a tweet like the infamous Onion tweet last week, that it’s “clearly satire.” If you don’t take it as satire, it isn’t. Satire is like shooting an apple off someone’s head. If you do it right, it’s pretty cool and no harm done; if you do it wrong, telling people what you meant to do is beside the point, and no one will care. It either works or it doesn’t. And if you hurt someone while doing it, claiming that it was really satire is just special pleading, demanding that your speech-act doesn’t have to abide by the normal rules.
Comparing novels to onion tweets might seem like a stretch, but I do it because if helps clarify the principle at stake in determining how we interpret words, texts, and the entire range of speech acts: the distinction between what is “clearly” there—the words themselves—and the contextual framing around them. When we read a novel or a poem, we often include context (or we can introduce it, to everyone’s benefit, as in “Did you know that Herman Melville was actually a whaler? TRUE STORY!”) but we don’t require it. We can’t. The book stands on its own, and must, or it’s simply not very good. This has been a basic principle for literary criticism since the “new criticism” of the 1940’s, that any reading of a literary text has to be grounded in what’s actually in the text itself; if we found a diary entry from Herman Melville indicating that the whale symbolized his abiding hatred of pineapples, we would look for evidence in the text that this reading was tenable and could stand on its own. If not, we’d pretty much ignore it as a ridiculous misreading. And in such a way, we deny The Author the power to define the meaning of his own novel. We do the same thing when a reader of a text decides that such-and-such a thing in a novel means something, but can’t prove it.
Now, we can easily make this more complicated. When it comes to literary criticism, post-structural theory totally pwned the new critics sometime in the 70’s and 80’s, and the idea that there was anything “in” the text itself becomes much less tenable when you think about how indispensable framing and context and interpretation are to the making of meaning. Texts don’t have objective meaning; all meaning is subjective.
But let’s put that aside, not only because most readers—in practice—do put theory aside, but mostly because it only underscores the point I’m actually trying to make, which is that appeals to what a speech-act clearly is not only rely on some standard for empirically judging what’s there and what isn’t, but it’s impossible to actually find or define that standard, outside of ever-increasingly authoritative assertions that it is so. People have claimed that the stupid Onion tweet was clearly satire, but there is no evidence you can point to in making that claim; you end up, instead, relying on assertions of authority: the joke-teller might claim that it was satire, or a reader might try to explain to you that it was obviously satire. But what they really mean, simply, is that it was satire to them, and that, on that basis, it should be to you as well.
Twerking among Black women has recently emerged as a threat—to the “politics of respectability” that associate proficiency in art forms dismissed as “low class”/”ghetto”/”ratchet” with moral turpitude and intellectual degeneracy; to the notion that Black women (both cis and transgender) and gay men adept at dances that focus attention on the torso merit contempt instead of praise; to the belief that if a person (especially young and Black and/or Latino/a) provokes desire, whether purposefully or unwittingly, they/s/he deserves violent exposure to the worst of contemporary “rape culture,” from internet trolling to physical abuse; to the the idea that historically Black innovations (such as AAVE and queer men’s and trans women’s ballroom voguing) exist merely to be decontextualized, commodified, and jokingly imitated, rather than commemorated as collectively affirmed vectors of value and ongoing modes of resistance.
In the online exchanges concerning Black women’s twerking and the subsequent appropriation(s) of it by white performers, some have questioned the extent of its linkages to older African-derived dances. Others know far more about the topic from first-hand experience and have more to offer in terms of analysis. I would like to expand the discussion slightly to draw a few more connections across the African Diaspora—between African-American dances as currently performed and Caribbean movement traditions—than those I have seen elsewhere. For instance, I would propose comparison not only with the “limin,’” “wainin,’” or “winin’” of Jamaica and Trinidad, but also with Cuban dance styles that share with certain West and Central African forms an emphasis on the buttocks as punctuation marks for the narrative told by the legs of the dancer. Rumba guaguancó, with its characteristic thrusting vacunao, is a textbook example.
Another complex of dances that would reward consideration alongside twerking are of Haitian origin (and with which I am unfortunately less familiar, so I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies). For example, the lwa, or spirits, of the Gede clan enjoy dancing the hip-swiveling banda, and seeing it executed for them. Gage Averill relates,
The Gedes (including Bawon Samdi/Papa Gede, Grann Brijit, Gede Nibo, Bawon Lakwa, and others) are spirits who guard the secrets of death and the cemetery and also have a special relationship to crossroads. The dance of the Gedes is the highly sexual banda, with its accentuated rolling of the pelvis, and the Gedes have a privileged position from which to interject humor and sexuality into all of their interactions.
Yvonne Daniel disputes the interpretive focus on sex, arguing that banda communicates the need for “keeping life vital,” but not the importance of banda in ritual practice. While banda performance may also turn explicitly oppositional, as when the Gedes demand resources or rights from the powers-that-be, it is difficult to think of a celebration of survival among people of African descent that would not be—in multiple senses—political.
Similar movements are not confined to ceremonies explicitly centered on the lwa. As in the footage seen above, filmed by Maya Deren between 1947 and 1951, participants in the Lenten (usually Easter Week) festival called Rara visually cite banda and have developed genres of performance that strategically use the hips and hindquarters as tools of expression. The poses struck by these majò jon or ”baton jugglers,” convincingly traced to Kongo precedents, complement the bodily attitudes assumed by the ”queens” of Rara bands. Elizabeth McAlister observes,
A quality Rara queens seem to share with their hip-hop counterparts is their irreverence toward the dominant culture’s moral stance, which would seek to repress their sexuality as women. Rara queens, as well as rappers and other women artists in Black Atlantic performance traditions, fashion and perform a publicity that projects images of female sexual freedom and economic control.
She continues:
One common feature of many forms is the celebration of the African female behind. Future scholarship might well look into the possibility that the “bottom-heavy” hip-rotating dances like gouyad, whinin’, and “doin’ da butt” “had one meaning in African culture and came to be integrated into bodily performances of opposition in the American setting.”
At the end of this passage, McAlister quotes Judith Bettelheim’s 1990 paper, “Deconstructing the Mythologies: From Priestess to ‘Red Hot Mama’ in African and African American/Caribbean Performances.” This title hints at the work still to be done in order for twerking to be understood more widely as part of a larger family of Diasporic dances, and for its mastery to be appreciated as a unique recombination of skill, knowledge, and kinship.
David Bowie as Tilda Swinton, with Tilda Swinton as David Bowie
The "Polar Bear Ice Tray" is a sealed bottle that makes icecubes and then facilitates their easy removal. The sealed container keeps freezer flavors away, and once it's all frozen, you can dislodge the ice by giving the bottle a whack on a countertop and then pour it out of the mouth. Looks like a clever way of solving an old problem, though I haven't tried it myself.
polar bear ice tray (via Red Ferret) 
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So you've been bitten by a zombie. So long, conscious brain activity, hello craving for human meat. But the protagonist of the short film Cargo has bigger problems than his impending demise: he has to find a way to save his infant daughter, even if he has to die first to do it.
Works on Gnats too!
Items needed:
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of brown sugar
1 gram of yeast
2-liter plastic bottle
1. Cut the plastic bottle in half.
2. Mix brown sugar with hot water. Let cool. When cold, pour in the bottom half of the bottle.
3. Add the yeast. No need to mix. It creates carbon dioxide, which attracts mosquitoes.
4. Place the funnel part, upside down, into the other half of the bottle, taping them together if desired.
5. Wrap the bottle with something black, leaving the top uncovered, and place it outside in an area away from your normal gathering area. (Mosquitoes are drawn to the color black or white.)
Change the solution every 2 weeks for continuous control.
Thanks Cari
As most readers of Edible Geography will know, smell makes up to ninety percent of what we perceive as flavour, primarily through a process known as retronasal olfaction, in which odour molecules travel from the mouth to the nose via the throat as we eat.
In other words, we use our noses to smell food after it’s inside us, as well as before. But, in a fascinating snippet of news based on a presentation given yesterday at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting by German food chemist Dr. Peter Schieberle, it seems that our noses may not be not alone in that ability, and that other cells in our bodies are able to “smell” food too.
IMAGE: Retronasal olfaction illustrated, via this excellent explanation.
Dr. Schieberle’s research is focused on what he calls “sensomics” — identifying and analysing the individual compounds that, in combination, create the flavour of different foods. At the 2011 ACS meeting, for example, Schieberle reported on research showing that, of the more than 600 odour or taste compounds his team had found in chocolate, only twenty-five are “key”; together, they create a chocolate flavour that is indistinguishable from the real, more complex, thing.
IMAGE: Chocolate photographed by André Karwat, via Wikipedia.
But what of the other 575 odour and taste compounds in chocolate, if only twenty-five of them interact with nasal receptors and are experienced as flavour? Do they have any sensory impact, perhaps post-ingestion? In his presentation at this year’s conference, Schieberle explained that he and his colleagues have spent the past couple of years investigating this question, in order to discover “the fate of aroma compounds in the human body.”
Describing one experiment, Schieberle told ACS attendees that when he put “an attractant odorant compound” — some small volatile amides from chocolate — “on one side of a partitioned multi-well chamber, and blood cells on the other side,” the blood cells actually moved toward the odour through chemotaxis. Finally, Schieberle summarised:
Our team recently discovered that blood cells — not only cells in the nose — have odorant receptors. In the nose, these so-called receptors sense substances called odorants and translate them into an aroma that we interpret as pleasing or not pleasing in the brain. But surprisingly, there is growing evidence that also the heart, the lungs and many other non-olfactory organs have these receptors.
This discovery of non-nasal odorant receptors is seeming supported, Discovery News points out, by a 2006 paper in which biotechnologist Ester Feldmesser and colleagues found what they called “widespread expression of olfactory receptor genes” in tissues outside the nose, including the prostate, brain, and colon.
But, as Schieberle went on to ask, does the presence of odorant receptors, and even evidence of their response to particular aromatic molecules, mean that blood cells actually perceive flavour in some way?
Once a food is eaten, its components move from the stomach into the bloodstream. But does this mean that, for instance, the heart ‘smells’ the steak you just ate? We don’t know the answer to that question. [...] But we would like to find out.
IMAGE: Blood cells photographed in a scanning electron microscope by Bruce Wetzel and Harry Schaefer, National Cancer Institute, via Wikipedia.
Moving from science into speculation, it’s tempting to wonder about the possibility of hematogastronomy. For example, just as yoga gurus might learn to consciously experience and control the normally unconscious mechanics of breathing, could gourmets tune into flavour as a whole-body experience — one that starts in the mouth, but spreads throughout the body postprandially?
If so, just as Schieberle already uses his findings on nose-brain flavour perception to optimise chocolate, tweaking fermentation and roasting processes to raise or lower levels of different odour molecules into even more delicious combinations, could chefs or chemists one day spend as much time creating foods that are attractive to our blood cells as to our noses? What is gourmet for blood?
billtronReverse face analysis shows how similar two unrelated guys on one campus actually look.
billtronTen years ago, after someone broke into my house and stole my car, I became severely depressed. When my car was recovered by the police, I decided that then was as good a time as any to take a road trip. I ended up driving nearly fifteen thousand miles around North America, and being crazy, I decided to take a photo of my car every 100 miles. Now I'm putting those photos in a blog before they disappear or get destroyed. Enjoy.
Saguaro National Park, Arizona
billtronMy grandmother, yesterday
Wells Tower takes his Dad to Burning Man. (This is bliss.)
We pick a campsite in a quiet neighborhood on an outer ring of the city. To one side of us, some rather abject fraternity gentlemen cower in the lee of their Subaru having Heineken brews. Our closest neighbors are several women in their thirties whom James Dean promptly diagnoses as “horny” by means of divination lost on the rest of us.
The professors mix up a batch of gin and tonics while Cam and I lash our miserable little Walmart gazebo to the chassis of the RV. I am tempted to nap in its washcloth-sized patch of shade, but my father has other plans. My father is dressed in adventure sandals, cargo shorts, a muslin tunic he bought in Thailand, and a nouveau legionnaire’s chapeau complete with trapezius snood. Through a pair of dime-store spectacles ($4.99 price tag still on the lens) he is reading today’s schedule of events. We have a happy range of activities from which to choose. Something called the Adult Diaper Brigade is welcoming participants. There is also “Make a Genital Necklace,” “Fisting With Foxy,” “3rd Annual Healthy Friction Circle Jerk,” and “Naked Barista.” Not all the offerings are lascivious. Some are educational (“Geology of the Black Rock Desert”), creative-anachro-geeky (“Excalibur Initiation and Dragon Naming Ceremony”), culinary (“FREE FUCKIN’ ICE CREAM!!”), and spiritual (“Past Life Regression Meditation”). None of these options are seriously entertained.
We totally missed the ball on this project. It should have been run on April Fools’ day and you would have no idea if it were real or a hoax. That’s because the very serious performance given after the break is hard to watch without a least a bit of a chuckle. The instrument shown above is a Theremincello. It’s an instrument in the shape of a cello which functions in a similar way to a Theremin.
The instrument being played in that video clip is the first generation and the one pictured above is its successor. The creator wanted to refine the electronics so that the resulting sound wasn’t so ‘flutey’. The result can be heard on the video embedded in this Theremin World article and we think they’ve accomplished the goal; it sounds much better! In the clip [Thierry Frenkel] demonstrates changing notes on the fingerboard with the left hand. The right hand which would normally bow the strings operates the lever to adjust the volume of the note being played back.
If a single fingerboard isn’t enough for your needs you may consider building this four-track design instead.
[Thanks David]
billtronfrom left: me, my dad, my brother
or is my brother to my dad's left?
