Shortstops

Posted on April 26, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Ever since Willie Mays hauled down that drive off the bat of Vic Wertz in the ’54 World Series, running full-tilt with his back to the plate, I’ve had queasy feelings about the San Francisco Giants. It doesn’t matter that I was eight months old at the time. The team with the best record in baseball (111–43), the Cleveland Indians, ended up being swept—how could I not have noticed?

And it doesn’t matter that the Giants were actually the New York Giants at the time.

But this year I’ll be checking their box scores every night, right after I find out how the Tribe fared, just to see how their rookie shortstop Emmanuel Burriss is doing. Burriss was a classmate of my kid’s at Wilson High in the District, and he had Major League written all over him at the time. He went on to play ball at Kent State, where he was Player of the Year in the Mid-American Conference. As fate would have it, he’s a switch-hitter, just like his teammate Omar Vizquel, who made the nineties so enjoyable and memorable for us in Cleveland (in the extended sense of “Cleveland”), and who’s currently on the disabled list and isn’t even first string anymore (I don’t think).

Burriss stroked a double leading off the 13th inning on Wednesday, stole second, and scored the go-ahead run on a single in a game where Greg Maddox was denied his 350th win. Remembering how Maddox and the rest of the Atlanta pitching staff made monkeys of the Cleveland hitters in the ’95 World Series, I wasn’t particularly sad. (According to Wikipedia, “In 1995, the Cleveland Indians batted .291 as a team, led the league in runs scored, hits, and stolen bases, and had eight .300 hitters in their starting lineup. However, the Tribe was held to a .179 batting average in the World Series.”)

The Giants are in DC the first week in June. That will be additional incentive to get me down to the new ballpark.

Addendum 2008.05.04: There’s a nice profile of Emmanuel Burriss in today’s Washington Post.

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Taner

Posted on April 24, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

As they have been doing for almost a century, Armenians around the world today commemorated the genocide carried out by the Ottoman government under the cover of World War I.

In Moscow cars with Armenian flags drove in a column around the Garden Ring Road, but were prevented from entering the street where the Turkish embassy is situated. “Because there was no permit for this demonstration, they were asked to remove the flags,” said a representative of the law enforcement agencies.

As reported by Lenta.ru, acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is considered one of the conditions for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. This source says the “violent deaths” of approximately one million Armenians has already been acknowledged by the EU, the US, and Russia, but Turkey insists the violence was “mutual.”

While it may be true that the US is on record saying hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in Ottoman Turkey between 1915 and 1917, it continues to balk, officially, at naming it a genocide. Under pressure from Turkey and its friends, the US government continues to profess that the deaths and deportations were something that “just happened” in the course of a world war, where just about everyone was doing bad things to everyone else, and were not the result of a government policy that was deliberate, longstanding, and well thought out.

The Turkish historian Taner Akçam will have none of that. In A Shameful Act and other works making extensive use of primary sources in Turkish, Akçam methodically reconstructs the rationale and methodology of the genocidal campaign waged by the Committee of Union and Progress, using both official and unofficial (party) channels. There is much in Akçam’s book to give pause to us living in the United States during the George W. Bush years. The Young Turks knew they were engaged in illegal activities, but they counted on succeeding, in which case they felt it didn’t matter what was legal and what was not. History is written by the winners. When it became clear that Turkey would lose the war and was facing possible extinction as a nation, it systematically destroyed evidence of its wrongdoing. But as Akçam points out, in well-established bureaucracies, it is virtually impossible to destroy all copies of important documents and all copies of documents that refer to (and often quote from) those documents. The CUP was in the habit of issuing orders publicly (to mollify the European powers, who had taken a keen interest in the ethnic minorities in Turkey), only to countermand them secretly. Akçam presents abundant evidence of this practice, which would make the absence of certain key documents in the Ottoman archives perfectly understandable.

I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Taner Akçam this past January. He was the guest of honor at a memorial service and dinner on the first anniversary of the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul. He is a small man, with round horned-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline—the quintessential academic. As he chatted with the Armenians at St. Mary’s Church in Washington, DC, smiling and clearly enjoying himself, it was hard to imagine that he has received death threats and has been harrassed for his research into the genocide.

Akçam was friends with Dink and devoted much of his talk to reminiscences. But during the question-and-answer period, he tried to offer a ray of hope to a young Armenian guy who wanted to befriend a Turkish guy and ran into a wall—he felt no progress is being made in improving relations with Turks and Turkey. Akçam said more and more frequently groups of Turkish students in the US are inviting him to speak to them—just them, not in an open public forum. They want to know what this fellow Turk has to say about the terrible events in their nation’s past, but they need to hear it in an uncharged atmosphere—as if it were a family problem that needs to be discussed in private first.

Akçam sees this as a positive development, and I do, too.

He understood how the young Armenian felt, but he asked that when he feels inclined to see all Turks as stubborn denialists, to think of “his friend Taner.” On this April 24, I’m thinking of Taner Akçam and hoping he is well.

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YoKO’d

Posted on April 23, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

It’s one thing to be slipshod and sleazy in your depiction of evolutionary science and how it is taught in American schools. You might bore the pants off the general public and piss off a lot of scientists, but you may make a few bucks at it.

It’s another thing to use a copyrighted song without permission. And not just any song—John Lennon’s Imagine, the third-greatest song of all time, according to the bible of song, Rolling Stone magazine. By getting on the wrong side of Yoko Ono (and the Lennon boys, along with EMI Blackwood Music Inc.), the producers of the pseudodocumentary Expelled may find themselves on the painful end of a very expensive transaction.

Retribution most undivine, but well deserved.

[h/t to P.Z. Myers]

Addendum 2008.04.24: I should have noted that my natural aversion to such litigation is trumped in this case by the odor level of the product involved and, more importantly, the risk that the film will mislead the gullible on an important topic.

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Pseudoconservatism

Posted on March 23, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

The other day my friend Thomas (aka The Newsrack Blogger) got into a fistfight at a local bookstore over the question of impeachment.

Okay, it wasn’t a fistfight—he had shouting match with Eric Alterman, author of Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, during the Q&A at a book signing.

Okay, okay, the exchange wasn’t heated (as far as I know—I wasn’t there). Thomas merely asked Alterman a tough follow-up question. And Alterman continued to dismiss the impeachment of Bush and Cheney as not only politically stupid but a kind of “moral vanity.”

Alterman is wrong, of course, and Thomas is absolutely right. Bush and Cheney deserve to be impeached. Not only have they repeatedly broken the law, they have easily satisfied the lower standards that make offenses impeachable (i.e., significant and harmful political “misdemeanors”). But I think Thomas is wrong to frame it in the context of “liberalism”—viz., that Alterman as a putative “liberal” should, ipso facto, support impeachment. In fact, it is perhaps the highest form of conservatism to insist that the president of the United States is not above the law, and to seek removal when the laws, and the lawful prerogatives of Congress, are flouted by the executive branch. In this regard, I am conservative, despite my radicalism on other issues.

How diseased is modern American conservatism? One need look no further than its acceptance of a president who has arrogated kingly authority over the legislature, private enterprise,* and the public. Not long ago this same segment of the American polity sullied the Constitution with the tawdry, basely motivated and totally unjustified impeachment of Bill Clinton. These “conservatives” have poisoned political life in this country to the extent that a population that actually wants impeachment hearings calmly accepts inaction from their elected representatives. Yes, the majority wants impeachment, but not enough to insist on it. Is this because of sour memories of the nineties? Is it because they know the Democrats aren’t powerful enough to pull it off on their own? Maybe it’s because they watch TV. And read Eric Alterman. (Whose work I generally admire, by the way.)

The impeachment drive against Richard Nixon owed its success to the fact that many members of his own party were disgusted by his criminal behavior and put the political health of the republic above their narrow personal loyalties. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was almost risibly partisan, as well it should have been—it was garbage from the outset and should have gone nowhere. The fact that it almost succeeded says something about not only the debased state of American politics but also the concentrated power of the increasingly univocal, commercially prostituted mainstream media.

Again, the impeachment of Bush and Cheney goes nowhere because politics in this country is currently too sick to manage it. The Democrats are apparently convinced they will soon deal a death blow to the stumbling, stammering, bleeding creature that is Goldwater–Reagan–Gingrich–DeLay–Bush/Cheney “conservatism.” That is apparently one reason they choose not to do the constitutionally proper thing and impeach the president and vice president. They are also mindful of the fact that, although they constitute a majority in both chambers of Congress, they are not a “supermajority,” which makes them susceptible to an unprecedented level of obstruction by the dead-enders in the Republican minority. And although they would be fully justified in beginning impeachment hearings, they would be attacked relentlessly by the news corporations that continue to lick the feet of the Bush/Cheney cabal. (Not that the press should turn around and lick the Democrats’ feet. It would be sufficient if the “news” would simply convey factual, uninflected coverage of the issues that really matter to its consumers, not oligarchic and plutocratic spin.) And so the Democrats wait.

A Democratic president and a stronger Democratic majority in Congress could, if it mustered the will, find many ways to redress the imbalance that has developed between the executive and legislative branches, to identify and root out odious practices in federal agencies, and even to punish some wrongdoers. Will they? Much will depend on the conservatism that emerges from the decayed corpse of its current avatar—a Frankenstein monster of money, know-nothingism, and self-righteousness.

The truly shocking thing about the lawlessness we are living through is how few self-described conservatives have spoken out in favor of the proper constitutional corrective of impeachment. Bruce Fein has been one. Mickey Edwards has been another. This country needs a lot more than that. And until a truly conservative conservatism is reborn in this country, and the radical elevation of untrammeled, secretive, fear-mongering executive authority is universally rejected, Thomas and the rest of us are going to be very frustrated indeed. Impeachment is not a liberal thing. It needs conservatives to work.
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*E.g., illegally pressuring telecoms to hand over phone records. Of course, there’s a quid for every quo: on balance, Bush/Cheney has been very good for corporate America—and anyone, for that matter, who already has it made. [back]

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Pseudoregrets

Posted on March 21, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Another year, another anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and another dreary round of self-justifications from so-called liberals for having supported it. Glenn Greenwald discusses the drivel that came out of a Slate series of articles by the usual pundits and comes to a sad conclusion:

[N]ot a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not—and has no right to—invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: “Wars that aren’t directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn’t be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason.” Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

As long as the root premises of our endless war-fighting remain firmly in place, there will be many more Iraqs, “justified” by similar or only marginally different objectives. We need to invade to remove a Bad Government, or stop a civil religious or ethnic war, or prevent mistreatment by other ruling factions of their citizens, etc. etc.—as though we possess the ability and are blessed with sufficiently magnanimous, selfless political leaders to accomplish any of those lofty goals with military invasions of other countries.

As for me, I can’t really improve on what I said on the third anniversary of this tragic debacle, which echoes Glenn’s point: I would have been against the invasion even if it had succeeded—or rather, especially if it succeeded. As damaging as this episode in our history has been, there is a decent chance we will recover, more or less—if we come to our senses. The damage would have been much greater if our unprovoked, arrogant incursion had enjoyed immediate and relatively painless “success.” As some “regretful” pundits have pointed out (ruefully!), our lack of success in Iraq has made it all the more unlikely that other countries will support a US attack on some other country worthy of our well-meaning (of course!) “corrective action”—for instance, Iran (a more obvious enemy could not be imagined!). Talk about lessons not learned.

Not that the lack of international approval would stop some people (after all, it didn’t stop them from perpetrating—or cheering on—the Iraq invasion). They puff themselves up with the idea they are cogs, big or small, in “The World’s Sole Superpower.” They think this gives them license to do whatever they please, literally (as political poobahs) or vicariously (as keyboard commandos). There’s a word for such people, and the word is “bully.” Those who did not want the US to have its way in Iraq are branded “defeatists.” It’s a good word. I accept it. Doesn’t hurt a bit. I admit I like it when bullies lose. Sorry if you happen to be a one, or sympathize with them. Gosh, it really, really pains me when I hurt a bully’s feelings.

I’ll reserve my sincere sympathy for the people who have truly suffered physical harm at the hands of The World’s Sole Superbully, and will continue to suffer, both here and in Iraq. And the huge financial burden working Americans will bear for decades to come will be appropriate, though not compensatory, penance for allowing it to happen. It matters not that you were against it, or were not even born yet. You will pay.

Addendum 2008.03.24: Tom Tomorrow, on the other hand, gives us “regrets” from the neocons at the five-year mark.

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Echo

Posted on March 17, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

And now for another installment of the popular Basement feature “Gee, Where Have I Heard That Before?” The trigger this time was Strangers With Candy—specifically, the episodes where Jerri Blank joins a cult. The members sing a song repeatedly—relentlessly, one might even say. (After her ride in the van to Safe Trap House, Jerri says, “Boy, you people sure are fond of that ditty.” And that night: “Seriously, you people really need to learn a new song.”) It’s an old spiritual called “Welcome Table” and it goes like this (in the TV show):

Repeat fifty times and go slowly insane. And what did it trigger? This:

It’s the horn call from the overture to Oberon by some guy named Weber.

Okay, that’s all. Oh, wait: here’s another version of “Welcome Table,” from a Smithsonian collection:

The melodic line is a bit more nuanced. I don’t know which version is more common.

Okay, now we’re really done. I’m gonna sit at the welcome table …

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Lost

Posted on March 4, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Maybe it has happened to you—it finally happened to me. You open an attachment directly in Outlook Express, edit it, and hit Save. Not Save As…—Save. Good luck trying to find the edited document.

I thought I could find where the document was saved by clicking on the attachment again, hitting Save As…, looking at the folder name in the address bar, and clicking up through the folders to the root of the C drive, noting the path traversed in reverse order. But, try as I might, I could not find that folder in the Windows XP file system. In fact, the drill-down came to a grinding halt halfway down: a folder that was supposed to be there wasn’t (and I’ve got my system set to display hidden folders and files, including “protected operating system files”). Hmm.

I looked for the folder using the Windows search function. No dice. Very strange. I double-checked the folder name, tried again. Not found. Weird.

As a last resort, I fired up the command prompt. I have to admit, it always feels good. It’s like an old friend—still “DOS prompt,” as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t get my hopes up, though, as I started down the path I had jotted down:

C:\>
C:\>cd documents and settings
C:\Documents and Settings>cd my_login_name
C:\Documents and Settings\my_login_name>cd local settings

Okay, the next folder—I mean, directory—I need is Temporary Internet Files, but guess what? It’s not there when I run the dir command (even with the /ah switch, which includes any hidden files in the directory). I go ahead and try to change to that directory anyway …

C:\Documents and Settings\my_login_name\Local Settings>cd temporary internet files

… and it works!

C:\Documents and Settings\my_login_name\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

(Folders with this name exist in various places on the hard drive, but supposedly not here, even though Outlook Express said it’s here.)

Clearly, I’m getting at directories and files that are beyond “hidden.” It’s like string theory or something. So I drill down to the last two directories (again, not visible with the dir /ah command):

C:\Documents and Settings\my_login_name\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files>cd content.ie5*
C:\Documents and Settings\my_login_name\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5>cd a1b2c3d4

(The last directory/folder is a random string of eight alphanumeric characters generated by Windows.)

Sure enough, the file I’d edited was there. Why Windows programmers in their infinite collective wisdom decided to put it there instead of some reasonable and readily accessible Temp folder is beyond me.

To sum up: using one method, I could find a file but couldn’t get at it; using another, I could get at the file but couldn’t find it; using both, I could retrieve the goddamn file.

And with this we conclude Geek Time Radio Hour, brought to you by the makers of LAMP.
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*Using the Windows file system explorer, I couldn’t see this folder, so that’s where the drill-down stopped during that phase of the research. For some reason, Temporary Internet Files—the folder just above it—was visible (it was not when I explored using the command prompt, as noted).

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Shanty

Posted on March 3, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …

I always imagined fifteen guys stomping up and down on some poor guy’s chest. Maybe I’m the only one—I never really checked with anyone else. Well, today I came across this translation at a Russian blog: пятнадцать человек на сундук мертвеца, which back-translates nicely to “fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” but here the chest is a wooden thing you put stuff in, not the place where you breathe in and out (while you’re alive, anyway).

That certainly makes more sense. Still a tight fit, but more reasonable than fifteen pirates standing cheek-to-jowl on any person, prone or upright, living or dead. So, is that the correct interpretation?

Google to the rescue once again. Using the entire phrase as input, I found this:

Dead Man’s Chest is a tiny island that forms part of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea. Pirate legends of the Caribbean claim that the notorious pirate Edward Teach (Blackbeard) marooned 15 of his pirate crew on “Dead Man’s Chest” as a punishment for their mutiny and desertion.

Can I trust this source? Let’s Google “virgin islands” + “dead man’s chest” … voilà: a nice Wikipedia article about Dead Chest Island. Apparently the name got shortened in the intervening years. At any rate, if you look at the photo of the island, you might imagine the thoracic cavity of a dead man floating in the water—if you have a particularly morbid turn of mind. So it would seem I was right all along. It’s just that the chest was metaphorical, and a whole lot bigger.

But wait! There’s an island south of Puerto Rico called Isla de Caja de Muertos—Caja de Muertos for short, which can be rendered in English as “Coffin of Dead Men” or “Dead Men’s Chest.” A wooden thing again! And really—why do I think I see an anatomical chest in the Virgin Islands and not a treasure chest (or chest of drawers, for that matter)? Round and round we go—maybe the Russian translator got it right.

I really thought the blogger had cleared up a problem I never even knew I had. Но, увы …

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Plagiarism

Posted on February 29, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

The recent news coverage of Barack Obama’s supposed “plagiarism” stirred up once again the confused pot of ideas I have or seem to have about originality and the overselling of same in the form of “intellectual property rights.”

Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, the thought occurred that Obama might be using a passage he had delivered in the past (whether he personally wrote it or not) that his friend Patrick Duval had borrowed and used during his campaign in Massachusetts. So Obama might actually be “plagiarizing himself.”

I’m not saying that’s what happened. In fact, that probably did not happen. I’m just saying it can happen, and certainly has happened.

Richard A. Posner, in his informative and entertaining Little Book of Plagiarism, offers several amusing instances of “self-plagiarism.” Anyone who has read Tristram Shandy cannot fail to be impressed by the range of its author’s scholarship—until you learn that Laurence Sterne lifted most of the recondite passages virtually intact from secondary sources. So he was a bit of a copyist, to say the least. But did he go too far when he “sent letters to his mistress that he had copied years earlier from letters he’d written to his wife”? As Posner notes, “His plagiarism could do no harm to anybody; only the discovery of it could.” [pp. 41–42] Just as with modern American politicians.

The Roman poet Martial makes note of a cockeyed version of self-plagiarism. According to Posner, in the first century A.D. “[a] plagarius was someone who either stole someone else’s slave or enslaved a free person.” In one of his epigrams, “Martial applied the term metaphorically to another poet, whom Martial accused of having claimed authorship of verses Martial had written,” Posner says. “It is unclear, however, whether he meant that the other poet had passed off Martial’s verses as his own or had claimed sole ownership (the verses were his slaves), precluding Martial’s claiming authorship.” [p. 50]

In our theoretical modern example of Martial’s dilemma, Obama would be censured for stealing Patrick’s words, when in fact he was the author. Again, this was almost certainly not the case. Probably what made me think of this possibility was the not-at-all-theoretical problem faced by Ambrose Bierce when he collected his sarcastic definitions, written over many years and printed in the periodical press, and published them in book form as The Devil’s Dictionary. As Bierce writes in the preface to his book:

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way and at long intervals until 1906. In that year a large part of it was published in covers with the title The Cynic’s Word Book, a name which the author had not the power to reject nor the happiness to approve. To quote the publishers of the present work:

“This more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of ‘cynic’ books—The Cynic’s This, The Cynic’s That, and The Cynic’s t’Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, the brought the word ‘cynic’ into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was discredited in advance of publication.”

Meantime, too, some of the enterprising humorists of the country had helped themselves to such parts of the work as served their needs, and many of its definitions, anecdotes, phrases, and so forth, had become more or less current in popular speech. This explanation is made, not with any pride of priority in trifles, but in simple denial of possible charges of plagiarism, which is no trifle. In merely resuming his own the author hopes to be held guiltless by those to whom the work is addressed—enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour and clean English to slang.

Continue reading →

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Terser

Posted on February 13, 2008 by WorldWideWeber

Okay, I’ve got a thing about verbal economy, but maybe this is too damn parsimonious.

A while back the online magazine Smith presented a six-word “story” by Ernest Hemingway:

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

A remarkably concise tale indeed—pathos concretized pithily. Smith invited its readers to go mano-a-mano with Papa, and six-word memoirs from its readers came pouring in. The best were culled, and a book was born: Not Quite What I Was Planning, now available from your neighborhood bookseller.

Here are a few examples from the Amazon blurb:

  • Found true love, married someone else.
  • After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.

A few more from the Smith site:

  • This place is getting borderline crowded.
  • Married with children (and second thoughts).
  • Brush with Death; Comb with Life.
  • Interrupted invisible burnings always bright beneath.
  • I grew into an abusive child.

I’m trying hard to like these things. Some are clever, but something is bugging me. Maybe it’s the preponderance of abstract words. Or maybe it’s the syntax—too many words need to be supplied by the reader. Is that what makes them start to sound like snippets from the personal ads, or telegrams? Maybe six words is six words too few. Maybe twelve is really the lower limit for a reasonable intellectual or emotional payoff. Even then, what we get might be more like an aphorism or witticism than a “memoir” or “story.”

I think Hemingway’s sixer was pretty darn good (even though it, too, reads like a classified ad). I don’t know if I’ll seek out more.

Addendum 2008.03.02: Last week Salon got into the act. The results to date are not encouraging.

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