Oh hahaha. When this story ran in Gawker a while ago it was discovered that the mother ran down a child on his bicycle and then hid her (very damaged) car. A very well publicized manhunt ensued for the hit-and-run driver. Car stayed hidden in her garage under a tarp until someone called in an anonymous tip to the cops. Rich old lady's excuse? I don't even have a tv!
She and her mom can easily be all that and worse.
I tried to replace my computer with a butler, but it is hard to get a butler than can do matrix algebra with sufficient skill to complete even one OLS regression model in an afternoon.
I BEG YOUR PARDON MASTER BRUCE; WERE YESTERDAY'S REGRESSION MODELS NOT TO YOUR LIKING?
she snapped her left Achilles' tendon while doing squats.
Wow. My first thought was that either those were some insane squats she was doing, or she has one of those degenerative diseases so fashionable among the aristocracy. But then I don't know squats.
Also, I kept thinking "yep, it sure is easy to roll with the punches when you have basically unlimited funding."
And in this photo the groom looks like a cartoon version of a posh dimbulbed twat.
7: Right, it's easier to bounce back OFF A HUGE MATTRESS OF GAJILLION DOLLAR BILLS. It isn't really about resiliency.
The groom is supposed to look like a twat.
You guys are so mean. This lady is an inspiration to us all, and you have no idea how tough she's had it.
Anyway, if you don't want to groom to look like a twat, you have to have an evening wedding.
Further to 6, while a torn Achille's tendon does indeed suck, I was hardly shedding any tears over the fact that she had to find some other obscenely overpriced gown to wear. Big giant gaping potholes indeed!
Surprisingly modest honeymoon.
No volcanoes. Also, I'm sure they'll find plenty of ways to spend their money, conspicuously, in South Beach.
9 is inaccurate. The groom is supposed to look like a penguin.
I don't know if shooting clay pigeons is really a form of hunting. But they are harder to track down than Dick Cheney's quail.
13: I guess my point was the groom is supposed to look worse than the bride.
I guess when you don't have a computer, it's hard to get the up-to-the-minute weather forecast that would tell you not to put your antique tablecloths out on the lawn that day.
Just to turn the catty up to 11, I look at this description of the bride:
a Size 2 beauty who loves fashion magazines
The groom is supposed to look like a twat.
One does generally get the impression that the people involved in putting together the Vows column just barely manage to conceal their contempt for their subjects.
Of course, this has been discussed at length on Unfogged, which one would know if one would only read the f&*king archives.
5: Lower Merion, home of the friendly spycams? What is with that town?
She couldn't close the deal until she was 41? Whatever happened to the pencil-moustached fortune-hunter so popular in novels and films set in the beau monde?
Whatever happened to the pencil-moustached fortune-hunter so popular in novels and films set in the beau monde?
Off carrying the luggage of a pastor.
4: Achilles tendons are surprisingly easy to tear.
22: And without gay marriage, there isn't a quick way to get a fortune in that.
"Investigators originally believed the driver was a woman about 30-40 years old."
Perhaps it was actually our blushing bride?
Also, Clarence Diffenderffer is my new favorite name.
She couldn't close the deal until she was 41?
DO SHUT YOUR BIG, GAPING, GIANT POTHOLE.
25: I was wondering . . .
(PS Mr Blandings -- Have you had the 2009 Mas de Gourgonnier rosé? Nom nom nom.)
I must say, you had a better class of careless, wealthy hit-and-runners in Gatsby's day.
17: Is that not she in the not-particularly-flattering white dress in the couple of images in the article?
Also, "[t]heir wedding consultant"? Marjorie Meriwether Post is spinning in her grave.
25.last: Curse you! I was just firing up the keyboard to mock that name!
The only way it could be better is if his first name was "Topher."
28: Is there are better metaphor than wealthy hit-n-runners? Tale of Two Cities, Gatsby, Bonfire of the Vanities -- doesn't Tanaquil run someone over in her chariot thingy in Livy?
31: it seems to happen in real life with some regularity, too.
33: Every 15th driver to hit a pedestrian tried to speed away.
"BY age 12, Alexandra Victoria Lammers knew how to bake bread from scratch, braid a horse's mane, pin a kilt and set a dinner table correctly. "
This is nearly true of me. Well; by 14, certainly; clean a hoof more than braid a mane; and there's a wrong way to pin a kilt? I go for 'closed'.
Nothing else in the article applies to me.
34: by that time, the pedestrian was pretty put out.
"Her stride was nearly flawless and there was no thumping sound, like peg-legged pirates in the movies."
This sort of thing is why no one wants to pay for your content, New York Times.
27.PS: Not yet, but I've bought it the last ten vintages or so, so I expect I will soon. Best I've had so far this year is the Bernard Baudry Chinon rosé. Always great, but exceptionally delicious in 2009.
Also, you should totes be drinking the rosé pêche, made by adding a bit of this to your glass.
You know what's really weird? Is going to some friends of a friend of a friend's place in Manhattan to watch a rough cut of their new documentary (which is on a topic you know more than a little about), and realizing that it was these people. People you've mocked mercilessly before ever meeting them.
Even more awkward when the film is not good.
23, 4: Achilles tendons are surprisingly easy to tear. I tore mine last year playing tennis. I can imagine a tear resulting from squats and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Well OK, maybe my worst enemy ....
I can't figure how you would tear your achilles heel doing squats (and if that's what the youtube clip shows, I'm not about to watch). Must be front squats, right?
39: Holy crap. Ahahahaha. I read the first sentence and was like, OMG -- them!
38.2: Oooh. Will try. I have a bottle of their cassis in my fridge right now, but no peche.
"Pollyanna, like Proust, would have hated these two."
Ah, Veiled Conceit.
They're certainly infamous among people who like to take apart the Vows column every week.
48: Society would benefit more from a government program distributing recurrent and thorough ass-kickings to those guys than from confiscation, on balance. Administrative costs, mainly.
46: If you know anything about my academic area, you could figure out which of the guy's films it is.
I only read the Vows column when I was also reading VC, but I don't remember them as being especially noteworthy (though reading the VC post again they were familiar).
53, 54: Way to miss a golden opportunity to introduce the self-supporting ass-kicking model to the U.S., folks: e.g., the feds (directly or via the corresponding college town authorities) issue letters of marque authorizing the bearer to take, sink, burn or otherwise destroy a specified number of laxholes, following a Dutch auction process conducted in the late August/early September time frame.
Uh, but doesn't that make the asskickers pay, rather than funding the asskickers with money expropriated from the asskickees?
Relevant prior work on the topic.
Everyone is making me laugh.
This unrelated thing also made me laugh:
Obama stopped by Duff's wings in Cheektowaga, a suburb of Buffalo, where he ordered "five regular, five extra spicy" wings on the recommendation of a customer. He was then approached by Luann Haley, who spoke these immortal words to the 44th President:"You're a hottie, with a smokin' little body."Obama told her that Michelle would be watching, so Luann said, "Eat your heart out, Michelle!"
57: No such thing as a free ass-kicking, son. It's just a question of who pays whom.
55 is brilliant and should be implemented immediately.
No such thing as a free ass-kicking, son. It's just a question of who pays whom.
Well, yes, and I think it makes more sense to have the people who merit the ass kicking pay the people who are taking the trouble to kick their asses.
62: We have to let the mighty powers of supply and demand serve the greater good.
If ass kicking is outlawed, only outlaws will kick ass.
You see, Flippanter, I just think that there are some problems that government intervention is competent to address.
OT: Nerd scum...the filth of the galaxy.
I really think the only fair way is to implement Single Kicker.
But what about the states as laboratories of democracy? Are you afraid of a race to the, um, bottom?
and if that's what the youtube clip shows, I'm not about to watch
There's absolutely nothing gruesome about it. It's video of David Beckham tearing his Achilles; all he does is step backwards.
OT: Quick, someone give me a verb that means to take the (metaphorical) depth out of something. I wanted to say the "shallowing out of X" but I am getting red-lined by my word processor, since "shallow" hasn't been verbed yet.
73: Depends on context. "Dumbing down" would be one option in one direction, for example. It really depends on the nature of the enshallowing.
You can stop now, Sifu. I'm right. Got it in one.
"Dumbing down" does not mean the removal of metaphorical depth. "Shallowing" was an approximation to the target, not the target.
You could also say "the taking of the piss out of X".
I mean, is the thing in question naturally, or normally, deep, such that rendering it shallow is an active thing, or is the thing in question often treated shallowly (say, superficially), such that the enshallowing in question merely passively declines to endeepen? You see. You'd want different words for these things.
We're talking metaphorically here, parsley. Questions of whether the thing in question is "naturally" deep are likely misplaced.
Think I'm going to go with "thinning," but thanks all.
"Deflating" doesn't indicate taking the air out of something that's naturally, or normally, deep, or in this case large or inflated? We refer to (what we consider) normal states and the doing of things to those states. That doesn't particularly line up with literal or metaphorical meaning. I assumed that CB just meant by "metaphorical" that he wasn't looking for a word to describe, say, draining the water out of the ocean.
Are you quite sure you have to describe the concept in a single word?
88: no, it doesn't.
Is the concept of truth naturally, or normally, deep? I have no idea what the question means. But I know that the deflationary theory of truth is one which seeks to remove pretensions to metaphysical depth from the concept.
Nor are people, or their senses of self-regard, naturally, or normally, deep or inflated. But we know what it is to deflate someone.
Nor are expectations naturally, or normally, inflated. Yet the air can be let out of them as well. Nor even might the expectations of a particular person, on a particular topic, be naturally (whatever that would mean here), or normally, inflated. But some particular expectation might be! And it could be deflated.
Are you quite sure you have to describe the concept in a single word?
No, but I believe in a low-maintenance revision process.
According to the OED "shoal" can be a verb meaning "to make shallow," but rarely metaphorically, and I doubt people even know the literal meaning. A short phrase that might serve as an alternative is "robs X of depth."
The post title reminds me of John Cale's "Chinese Envoy".
90: But we know what it is to deflate someone
We know what it is to deflate someone's ego, yes. To use the word "deflate" is to suggest that said ego was, had been, operating in a state of inflation, what I'm suggesting was considered to be its natural -- but let's go with "previous" -- state.
Okay, revise my previous remarks to appropriately substitute "previous state" for "natural/normal state."
I maintain that words that involve the taking of something (depth) from something -- note that this was central to CB's initial query -- depend on whatever is considered to be the previous state of that thing. And that you'll want different words to describe this taking, depending on whether you're saying that the previous depth (in this case) of the thing in question was its rightful state or its wrongful state.
Are expectations or egos ever rightfully inflated? How about balloons?
(Or, if you think that expectations or egos are sometimes rightfully inflated, are they ever wrongfully inflated?)
39: So in real life did they seem as horrible as their Vows story might lead one to expect? It's hard to imagine that the article wasn't a product of selective malice, but based on the extensive quotes, the bride at least had it coming.
95: You'd have to ask Megan about that.
I would think, actually, that if I asked you, you'd have to get a response, since you seem to think that you need a different word depending on the rightness or wrongness of the prior state of affairs. I take it that one can deflate a balloon, and that balloons can be rightly inflated (er, I guess; it's actually a pretty strange way of talking, but let's say the cause for which the balloon was inflated was just). I also take it that one can deflate expectations and egos. Ought not, then, it be the case that egos and expectations are, when inflated, rightly inflated? But can't they also be wrongly inflated, i.e. inflated without justification? Doesn't this in fact destroy you utterly, body and soul?
Doesn't this in fact destroy you utterly, body and soul?
Good lord, I hope not. It's just a blog.
As for balloons: did you let the air out of the balloon? Or did you pop the balloon? Both of these are forms of deflation. Is it a hot air balloon? A hot air balloon that was inflated for purposes of a flight is rightfully inflated.
I'm going to leave egos to one side: there's no objective saying whether a given ego is rightfully inflated. There's only a subjective saying whether one feels that one has deflated a wrongfully inflated ego, or (perhaps) one has wrongfully deflated an ego that was justly inflated. I think you'd use different words to describe those situations.
I think you'd use different words to describe those situations.
You just used the same word, namely, "deflated". Moreover, I don't see why you can't have wrongfully deflated an ego that was wrongfully inflated, or rightfully have deflated an ego that was rightfully deflated. The concept of deflation does not discriminate with respect to the justice of the being-filled-with-air of its object. That is not part of the metaphor. Your persistent wrongness on this subject is making me very wroth.
Your persistent wrongness on this subject is making me very wroth.
I might say the same. We can drop it. I think the last time we touched on this subject I suggested you review Austin's "A Plea for Excuses."
To be kinder: yeah, you can technically describe the deflation of an object regardless of the justice of its previous inflationary status. It's just that we don't often speak that way.
Can you have an ego blowout? On the highway? Is it dangerous?
As long as we're being catty: South Beach? So vulgar. That's just Myrtle Beach for rich people.
Anyway, I suggest you review parts of "Perfect Pitch and Austinian Examples", by Martin Gustafsson.
Just the beginning, really, about the metaphor reflected in the title.
97: They were nice enough to me, though I'm sure I manage to cross the 'one of us' bar. I actually liked her a lot better than him.
Mr. Blandings back at 25 suggested that perhaps the mother was taking the rap for her daughter. Perhaps. The mother looks like a tough old bird who could do 90 days standing on her head. And it might not come to that. She's hired one of the top state criminal lawyers. Maybe he can put together a jury that's reluctant to send a 75 year old up the river and maybe he can so frame things as to give them an excuse. The daughter, on the other hand, is at 41 described as a portfolio assistant -- not the top of a profession -- and is just now getting married. A conviction might devastate her, and even prevent the marriage. There might not be another chance at marriage. She's no spring chicken.
If this is the case (and there's no articular reason to suppose it, except for the witness report that the driver seemed younger), I have to admit to a certain admiration for the mother.
112: Hm. You know -- I think? -- that I admire Cavell and McDowell. I'm having trouble so far finding a place to view the paper. I need to have dinner.
Ok. I'm tired. I'm half-energetically looking for a copy of the Gustafsson paper, and am getting all nostalgic and shit, because I saw this. My ex-advisor is in there, and a huge number of other people.
neb, could you just send me a link or copy of the Gustafsson?
I am getting red-lined by my word processor
You're taking advice from the wrong people.
could you just send me a link or copy of the Gustafsson?
Mats Gustafsson is the only Gustafsson I know of.
I met Martin Gustafsson at a conference, and on the closing night of the conference The Thing was playing in a different part of town. I neglected to ask either if he was aware of the other.
neb, you're not going to help me out with the link to the damn paper? Gah.
The Gustafsson's should perform together. While Martin read a paper, Mats could improvise around it.
I was in the shower. To be honest, it isn't that relevant. But I'll get a copy.
Er, I'll try to anyway. Stupid misbehaving firefox.
To be honest, it isn't that relevant.
Buh? Dude, don't do that! If I obnoxiously say "Read Austin" and you say "Read this guy's paper on Austin," I'm going take you seriously! Especially if the subtitle invokes Cavell.
I'd like to read the Gustafsson nonetheless. And you do know that I respect you philosophically.
you do know that I respect you philosophically.
Memory (and Google) suddenly fail me. In one episode Spock woos some sexy alien with the line "I admire your mind." But which one?
I observe that I'm unused to reading lengthy papers in pdf format. Fucking endnotes! wtf! I'm supposed to scroll all the way down to the end of the paper to see the note?
I don't know what the grabby hand symbol means in Adobe, actually. It seems to be the default setting. Is it helpful in some way?
Oh, sorry. The grabby hand just scrolls the page up and down. Sorry.
130: Open it twice, in two different windows. Keep one window in the footnotes.
Make a copy of the pdf, then have one copy at the text and the other at the notes, then delete one of the copies when you're done. If you don't have space for two copies of the pdf, you probably have bigger problems than having to scroll down for endnotes.
I find the grabby hand much more useful for scrolling than the pointy arrow or the rectangulary magnifyy glassy thing.
"I admire your mind." But which one?
The dirty one.
Have your butler mMake a copy of the pdf, then . . . .
Yep, opening it twice seems to be the thing.
As for the grabby hand, it seems redundant. There's a scroll-bar right there to the right, which you use for most scrolling up and down purposes. I'd like to have a function whereby you point and click on the footnote/endnote number and it opens a little window, preferably to the right, showing the note in question. This seems obvious.
136: pdf is a format primarily designed for printing.
129: Google tells me it's that fanfiction parody that gave the world the word "Mary Sue." No idea if it's a quote from an episode, though.
Back to the OP:
She was sitting on the rail, he remembered, and wave after wave crashed onto her, like pies being thrown in her face. She just kept smiling, and he said he knew then that he wanted to marry her.
At last has been revealed the tropes of the WASP version of bukakke videos.
There are pdfs that take you to the endnote, but my experience has been that getting back to the text doesn't work very well. Since I rarely have two copies of printed books, I usually read pdfs the same way I read books with endnotes, by looking at the notes in bunches (or just looking at individual notes only when I'm really curious) and then turning back to the text if one seems really interesting and I've forgotten what it refers to.
If the endnotes in a book are important and informative enough, I sometimes photocopy them to save having to flip back to them.
137: I did not know that. I swap a lot of things with people in pdf format, and it's extremely useful.
There are pdfs that take you to the endnote, but my experience has been that getting back to the text doesn't work very well.
The back button in Preview usually works for me.
141 made me laugh.
fake accent, don't you just put a bookmark or a post-it note at the endnotes section in a book so you can easily flip to them?
I think you don't have to save two copies of a pdf in order to open it twice. You can just open the same copy twice, and have it open to two different places. I'm pretty sure.
142: I swap a lot of things with people in pdf format, and it's extremely useful.
I find that people in pdf format are not open to change.
I think I have some setting enabled that makes it so that when I open a pdf already open, it just brings that window to the front. I actually prefer it that way, since sometimes I have a lot of pdfs open and I don't actually want to open any of them twice (but might not remember which ones are already open). It can also depend on the pdf reader, I think.
I've only done the two copies strategy a couple of times. Mostly the scrolling doesn't bother me that much - I use the arrow buttons, which scroll much faster than the scroll bar because they jump whole pages rather than just screens, when I want to jump a bunch of pages ahead.
For physical books, I don't like bookmarks or post-its, so I just flip back and forth, and if I want to check a bunch of things in a row, I leave a finger, preferably my own, at the endnote page I'm currently checking. I used to read choose-your-own adventure books like that, with a different finger marking a branch until I either ran out of branches or free fingers.
For physical books, I don't like bookmarks
This is making me smile. I wouldn't be able to function, book-wise, without bookmarks. You wouldn't like to see what my bookshelves look like. The books all have little stubs of paper sticking out of them. Only I, or my former self, knows what they refer to.
OP: NYTimes article prompts mother of the hit-and-run victim to speak out. The wedding was at a church less than two blocks from the accident.
If the endnotes in a book are important and informative enough, I sometimes photocopy them, cut them apart, fold them up accordion-style, and paste them at their corresponding referring locations in the main text. It makes for a nice pop-up book effect.
Wow. Has Vows hit a new low? Signs point to maybe!
I had no idea the accident was that recently.
I fucking hate end notes because they break up the flow of text. Blah blah that's the point blah blah that dude who killed himself, I don't care. Make your text digressive as you want, but don't make me be all nonlinear.
You're not crowing about the Cs? That's just...odd.
152: talking about Boston sports on unfogged is kind of tiresome. Plus, I mean, the Cavs suck. Nothing has changed. Why people thought it would change, I do not know, but it has not changed. I guess I could argue more with PGD about that, but basically talking about Boston sports here inspires this whole litany of "oh man Boston fans are the worst, man, I'm such a rebel in that I don't like Boston sports" which whatever.
Now, when the Cs beat the Lakers in the finals, we'll talk.
I fucking hate end notes because they break up the flow of text.
Nah, they're at the end so you can ignore them if you like. You want footnotes instead? You want no notes? Harsh, man.
Can we talk about how Lakers vs Celtics would be a finals worthless to watch? Yawn. Actually, there's nothing more to say about that.
Footnotes are better than endnotes. But unfortunately, endnotes almost always win the series. It's not even a rivalry, really.
The problem is that those little numbers are hanging out there and there's no way you can avoid wondering when you see them, "Am I missing something extra there? Am I missing something important? What mysteries are contained in the back of the book?" Endnotes foment angst.
For a great many scholars, the lower margin of the page exerts a fascination bordering upon mania. It is surely absurd to overcrowd these margins, as they do, with bibliographical references which might largely have been spared by a list drawn up at the beginning of the volume; and worse still, through sheer laziness, to relegate to them long explanations whose proper place was indicated in the main body of the text, so that the most useful part of these works must be looked for in the cellar. But when certain readers complain that a single note, strutting along by itself at the foot of the page, makes their heads swim, or when certain publishers claim that their customers, doubtless less hypersensitive in reality than they would have us believe, are tortured by the mere sight of a page thus disfigured, these aesthetes merely prove their imperviousness to the most elementary maxims of an intellectual ethic. For, apart from the free play of imagination, we have no right to make any assertion which cannot be verified and a historian who in using a document indicates the sources as briefly as possible (that is, the means of finding it again) is only obeying a universal rule of honesty. Corrupted by dogma and myth, current opinion, even when it is least hostile to enlightenment, has lost the very taste for verification. On that day when, having first taken care not to discourage it with useless pedantry, we shall succeed in persuading the public to measure the value of a science in proportion to its willingness to make refutation easy, the forces of reason will achieve one of their most smashing victories. Our humble notes, our finicky little references, currently lampooned by many who do not understand them, are working toward that day.
157: The angst can be assuaged by a quick look in the back of the book, which pretty quickly tells you whether you have a lengthy endnote writer on your hands, or just a citator.
153: I'm such a rebel that I don't think Boston sports fans suck. (Actually, taken as a group, sports fans in every city suck in their own special snowflake-y way). I'm just a little saddened* that Cleveland could not put together more of a team around LeBron** after getting to the finals two years ago (and for the Cleveland PTSLD*** sufferers in general). But why anyone thought they really had a better shot at the title this year is beyond me.
*And already coming off the Pens melting down.
**Also annoyed that there will be now be added oomph to the pat little LeBron "betrayal" narrative that will emerge.
***Post-Traumatic Sports Loss Disorder
158 is sweet, particularly this: a single note, strutting along by itself at the foot of the page
Enough people have said this -- though not here, I suppose -- that it's probably not even worth repeating, but the truth is that Danny Ferry is an almost impossibly shitty GM and a perfect example of the perils of nepotism. If you can't find a way to surround LeBron with a team that can beat this iteration of the Celtics, you're not doing your job. Either that or Boston really was playing possum during the second half of the season, has now hit the on switch on their phenomenal defensive intensity, and will follow Rondo to victory against Orlando. But I doubt it. I'm sticking with the Ferry-should-be-tarred-and-feathered line.
Also, being a Cleveland sports fan? Not especially rewarding.
163: Frank Ryan* to Gary Collins on the post pattern! Party like it's 1964.
*Who finished his PhD in Math from Rice the next year--dissertation was A Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc,.
111: too fucking right. they should have gone to Nevis, at least, as a bare minimum.
For some reason I misread "GM" as "DM" at the start of 162 (and also, don't follow sports at all), and had a whole little reverie about some, apparently, awful (yet publicly known) Dungeon Master who was appointed to the position through family ties and WHAT? Oh, Lebron, sports, GM, ok.
Ferry's actually not a bad DM, though he's not especially generous with his pot, the dick.
re: 71
One of the guys at my martial arts club tore his Achilles in his first ever fight. Not through any gruesome violence. He and his opponent were at opposite sides of the ring, he took a little step and felt a crack, and it had gone. He's in pretty decent physical shape, and as far as I know, had never had any problems with it before. It was quite freakish.
I was there at the time, and when I spoke to him I thought he was exaggerating some minor cramp, as I couldn't see how he could have injured himself, and he didn't seem to be in much pain. But he'd completely severed it, and has only just started training again after about 8 months out.
165. Al, is that Nevis in the Caribbean, or some posh resort on the east coast I've never heard of?
Completely tangentially, W/pedia tells me that "The five parishes of Nevis are:"
Saint George Gingerland
Saint James Windward
Saint John Figtree
Saint Paul Charlestown
Saint Thomas Lowland
I shall venerate all these saints from here on in.
Blume's link in 39 features a masterpiece in the art of photo-captioning:
The wedding party reacts with confused pleasure as the bride suggestively sucks the best man's finger for more than two minutes. His erection was evident, but unimpressive.
160 and 162 are plausible, and if I had remembered that ari was a Cleveland sports fan, 153 would have been nicer (seriously, making fun of LeBron fanatics outside Cleveland? Worthwhile. Making fun of Cleveland sports fans? Straight-up puppy-kicking). That said, I think the answer to the implicit question posed in 162 is that it was a little of both; the problem with the Cs is that they're old. The solution to that is to hang back until you really need to muster your energy. But I'm also willing to believe Cleveland has a shitty, shitty Dungeon Master.
174: it is a very delicate time.
I'm pretty sure Ferry's goal this offseason wasn't to beat this iteration of the Celtics. This iteration of the Celtics just isn't all that good (side note: Shaq and Jamison were not part of the winning formula here. The Celtics are old and creaky and couldn't have handled Varejao/Hickson at the 5 and LeBron at the 4 for more than 20 minutes in the series; fortunately for them they didn't have to). The goal was to put together a team that could beat the Magic, which they might've had a decent chance at doing given the opportunity. It's somebody's fault that they looked past the Celtics so egregiously, but I'm not sure it's Ferry.
148, 150: I don't know, the Vows section is horrible, but if you like it or once you take its existence as a given, it seems unreasonable to remove any reference to anyone involved in anything that would offend someone. The paper should definitely Google or search their own archives and memories for anything really egregiously horrible about the people an article focuses on, but if something slips by or falls beyond that and winds up being offensively insensitive, then it will... fit right in with all the other petty bourgeois junk in these parts of the paper.
If the groom is a priest who was defrocked for pedophilia, sure, sensitivity would demand not covering that wedding on the Vows page. The mother of the bride committing a hit-and-run a year before, though, seems beyond the limit of what the writers and editors can reasonably worry about.
I once read somewhere that in an opinion poll 70% of the population of the Dominican Republic would emigrate to the US if it could. But wouldn't it be easier if the US just annexed the Dominican Republic? Then they really could be part of the East Coast.
Making fun of Cleveland sports fans? Straight-up puppy-kicking.
All of Cleveland should be made to pay for the insult that is Chief Wahoo.
One of the guys at my martial arts club tore his Achilles in his first ever fight...It was quite freakish.
My younger brother, who just had his reattached on Monday, reported something similar. Playing softball, overextended just a bit to grab a ball, felt a tug but not particularly bad pain, completely severed. Weird.
152: talking about Boston sports on unfogged is kind of tiresome. Plus, I mean, the Cavs suck. Nothing has changed. Why people thought it would change, I do not know, but it has not changed. I guess I could argue more with PGD about that, but basically talking about Boston sports here inspires this whole litany of "oh man Boston fans are the worst, man, I'm such a rebel in that I don't like Boston sports" which whatever.
Actually, talking about Boston sports anywhere inspires that litany. Except Boston I guess. You need to stop having boringly good teams that get lucky all the time. This year's Red Sox are a good start.
Actually, talking about Boston sports anywhere inspires that litany.
Anywhere in the Pennsylvania-Charlotte Metropolitan access, I guess. Nowhere I've ever lived.
Metropolitan "Axis". The words, they des(s)ert me.
Well, the litany only started about five years ago.
I don't really understand 174 -- Pittsburgh's done pretty well for itself sportswize, present state of the Bucs excepted. Certainly better than Cleveland.
I'd actually say that the Cavs did fine in terms of talent acquisition around LeBron, given their resources and the folks available. That was a really good Cavs team; there was no clear number 2/Pippen/Gasol, but the team as a whole had more than enough talent to beat anyone in the leauge It looked to me like the loss was a result of (a) terrible coaching (WTF is Shaq doing out there in the playoffs, slowing down their whole athletic style against an aged Celtics team; (b) LeBron slumping, for him at just the wrong time; (c) off the charts anomalous games from Rondo and, given his age, KG.
I hate the Celtics, but to be honest I'm still blaming them for their 80s teams and fans.
is that Nevis in the Caribbean, or some posh resort on the east coast I've never heard of?
Neither: Ben Nevis, Britain's highest and dampest mountain. Honeymoon in a B&B in Fort William*.
*The Flint, Michigan of the West Highlands.
136: pdf is a format primarily designed for printing.
Explain why my dissertation is required to contain literally infinite quantities of internal citations and links, then. Bloody information science people.
And, just to piss off Tweety, the problem with Boston fans isn't their obnoxiousness (fans everywhere are obnoxious) but (a) the overreperesentation in the media of annoying Boston homers like Peter Gammons and Bill Simmons; (b) the fact that many Boston fans expect the rest of the world to care about, and even root for, their teams. Yeah, 2004 was fine, but I frankly don't give a shit about the "Sox," and I'm not asking you to root for the Dodgers, even though I love them.
If you'll note, my initial contribution to this sports subthread was to explain why I was not interested in talking about Boston sports on unfogged, and you homers managed to prove the point remarkably efficiently. Now, I think the Lakers fucking suck and have always fucking sucked, I think the Yankees embody a great evil in the universe, I think the Steelers QB is an overrated rapist, I think LeBron would not be nearly as good if he didn't have the refs sucking his dick all the time, and I think... well, actually, I don't really pay that much attention to hockey. Bobby Orr, though, man. What a guy.
But in fact, I am aware that all of this is in the nature of regional sports fandom, and does not make for interesting or edifying conversation. So really, I'll stop talking about it if you will. Boston has been very lucky in sports over the past decade or so. Get over it!
130 reminds me of something annoying about my e-book reader. Any endnotes in the text (and footnotes, I think, although I'd have to find a paper edition of one of these books to see how they are published as) show up as hyperlinks. In books I read at a larger font size (and I think exactly what font is how big varies from e-book to e-book), I have to push on the screen at least once or twice to get to the endnote and the same to get back. In books with a smaller optimal reading size, I have to push the screen half a dozen times if I want to read the note. (Yes, I can change the font size and setting it to maximum fixes this problem completely, but unless I want to read the entire book at the Reader's Digest for People With Cataracts size, I'd have to change the size before and after every endnote. This just replaces one problem with another.) Good idea, very bad execution.
189: Not bringing it up at all is an even better method than complaining about how talking about it is tiresome.
Now, I think the Lakers fucking suck and have always fucking sucked
Just because the Lakers won more of those 80's matchups and then the Celtics went through some truly horrific dark times is no reason to be bitter. Ok, maybe it is.
Lakers are really all I have left to watch. L.A. has no football teams, and the thought of becoming a Jazz fan makes me want to vomit.
I didn't bring it up.
Also grrr!
I feel like I'm the kid in 8th grade who gets totally impotently angry when you make fun of his braces and who ends up getting pantsed.
Man, I hate when people say they hate the Steelers. I think it's just because they're jealous, or Republican, but now they have the Rœthlisberger thing to complain about. It's so tiresome to talk about. Don't you agree? :-D
189, 193: God, you Boston fans think it's all about you, don't you?
Skim (pdf reader) can split a window so that endnotes appear where footnotes would.
This makes it even more obvious that a portrait monitor would be more useful for me, or that journals should now be laid out in landscape.
Man, I hate when people say they hate the Steelers. I think it's just because they're going to burn in hell.
I don't understand what Cyrus is describing about e-book readers in 190.
In books I read at a larger font size (and I think exactly what font is how big varies from e-book to e-book), I have to push on the screen at least once or twice to get to the endnote and the same to get back. In books with a smaller optimal reading size, I have to push the screen half a dozen times if I want to read the note.
Eh? You "push on the screen"? Is it, like, a touch-pad screen? (Ew.) Wouldn't you have to push on the screen *more* times if the font is larger? I don't get it.
I've never used an e-book reader, as will be obvious. I always thought that footnotes/endnotes would make them problematic, though.
198: I'm guessing you tap the number to jump to the endnote and in small fonts it's hard to hit the right point on the screen.
148 is horrible. The NYT fucked up and should do a correction.
I never heard of the main line before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Main_Line
Being able to read a footnote or endnote by hovering over or rightclicking the superscripted number would be a nice feature. So nice in fact that I'd bet it's been implemented, probably numerous times. But what do I know?
199: Ah. It's the fat fingers problem! Not to suggest that Cyrus has fat fingers, but I see. A person might could need a stylus. But really, a split (or splittable) screen would be ideal for these situations, per 196.
Is there a general verdict as yet on whether the existing e-book readers out there are suitable for reading scholarly material?
Verdict from whom? I've been waiting for Plastic Logic for years because they're the only one promising a letter/A4 screen. But do they deliver? No!
Something else you'd think would be widely available: a zoom that zoomed away the whitespace margins, none of the printed material.
201: ...Skim does show a link target in a frameless window on hover, but the PDFs I have looked at so far link references to the "References" heading, not the specific reference, so not actually useful. Cute, though.
200: 148 is certainly horrible. I don't know about a correction, but, as someone pointed out to me in a very sanctimonious off-blog communication, there is a certain about of disingenuousness to constructing the narrative of the wedding around "Golly! All those things that went wrong in the year before her wedding! So stressful and crazy!" and entirely leaving out what certainly had to have been one of the biggest, wrongest things -- namely mom running over a kid, gravely injuring him, pulling a u-ey, hiding her car, then getting ratted out and arrested. Feh.
You don't know amount a correction?
202 reminds me I'm supposed to reply to a survey from a journal about this. The bottom line for me though is that a laptop and an iPhone are enough for me; I don't want to haul a third device around.
203: Verdict from whom?
Oh, just a verdict from those who might be interested in using an e-book reader for scholarly reading, and who have experience using the existing models. There's Amazon's Kindle, and the Sony Reader, and I guess the iPad. Discussions of these things abound in the bookselling world, but people don't necessarily address the target audiences for them: I see that they may be fine for linear reading. Not so much, I surmise (I wonder, and wonder aloud!), for non-linear reading.
Either e-book reader producers will glom on to the needs of non-linear readers, or they'll remain fixated on those who want to read the latest NYT bestseller. Fine with me, of course, if they stay in the latter mode.
205: How dare you violate the sanctimony of off-blog communications!
203.last: Yes indeed.
Also should exist: a browser that lets you stop all autoplay content without having to block all flash. I'd like to never again open a web page and have it commandeer my speakers without my explicit permission.
173: Making fun of Cleveland sports fans? Straight-up puppy-kicking.
It's easy to be gracious about these things when you're from Boston. But Pittsburgh?
Should have explained, born and raised in Northeast Ohio and have complicated and compromised sports team allegiances (I have not embraced the Steelers, for instance, and was probably the only person with significant history in both Pittsburgh and Cleveland who unapologetically cheered for the Ravens in the best Super Bowl run evah). A few paragraphs in to this post is a litany of sports loss disasters that I have contrived to be on the wrong side off.
I never heard of the main line before:
It's a pretty cohesive geographic concept. Everyone knows what you mean by "main line", in the area.
Main line colleges: Bryn Mawr, Haverford, St. Joe's, Villanova and a bunch of small Catholic places.
211: I do a lot of scholarly reading, and I'd never buy an e-book reader for the purpose. The overwhelming majority of scholarly work I encounter is just fine in linear fashion, and would be made only slightly easier with hyperlinked footnotes, endnotes, and references.
Adding in a bunch of things that pull you away from the narrative of the document is a net step backwards if you are trying to understand what the author is saying. It's a scientific paper, not a choose-your-own-adventure book, fer chrissakes.
The Main Line is also the home of that school with the spycams!
Also the home of Betty Draper!
The Main Line is also the home of that school with the spycams!
Wait, VoyeurSororityHouse.com is based at a real school??
Also, Jesus is on the Main Line.
198
I don't understand what Cyrus is describing about e-book readers in 190.
199 is right, I tap on the screen. When the thing I'm trying to tap on is big enough - chapter titles are hyperlinked in most books, for example, or the buttons that appear on the screen for some functions - it really does take just a tap, firm but light. (Sorry for sounding like the Harvard person whose writing was being mocked 150 comments up.) On most endnotes, though, it takes more than one tap. And there is a stylus that came with it, but using it doesn't help unless I've been misusing it somehow.
Fat fingers? No. That makes it sound like there are a bunch of buttons side by side and I push the wrong one or multiple ones. (I know no offense was intended, none was taken, etc.) Instead, there is often only one endnote per page, and the unsuccessful attempts to press it result in either going forward or back one page, or nothing happening at all, just a second in which the screen freezes and "thinks" but does nothing.
Like I said, good idea, bad execution. If they couldn't make the intuitive way to use the screen work reliably - just touch the highlighted thing and go there - then they should have left the feature out, or they should have accommodated it in some way that does work reliably, even if it doesn't follow exactly the same format as a printed page. Collect the links as larger, more visible buttons at the bottom of the screen, say.
Hmmm. This makes me wonder about yet another feature I haven't bothered using much: the "notes" thing, with which a reader can make notes in e-books. Maybe that would help. Yet another thing to try to remember to figure out over the weekend, I guess.
Re: 202/211, the brand I'm whining about here is the Sony e-book reader, FWIW. Maybe they are all equally bad about this, or maybe my fingers are unusually clumsy, I don't know.
The Main Line is also the home of that school with the spycams!
Kobe's alma mater.
216: We're talking at slight cross-purposes. In philosophy (say), as well as in sociology, political science, and so on, there are often interesting endnotes, and you often do want to read them, so you may well do a lot of flipping back and forth.
Doing so may pull you away from the narrative flow of the main text, but that's okay: you probably want to be pausing and considering, and then returning to the main text, anyway.
My point was just that making that kind of reading not quite a complete pain in the ass on an e-reader would be essential. Now, if you think that kind of reading is a pain in the ass even within a printed book, well, uh, you have different needs.
217: Also the home of Betty Draper!
And her college, allowing Benjamin Schwarz to sniff in The Atlantic.
So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities.But of course.
To be clear, I do like it overall. I wish I had shopped around a bit more before settling on a model, but that's more about a general sense of responsibility than anything I specifically regret about this thing, and might be nothing more than a "road not taken" kind of thing. I've bought 11 books on it and it takes up about as much space as one paperback. I wouldn't have mentioned it all if people hadn't already been talking upthread about endnotes in eletronic media.
Going to Bryn Mawr bestows "at least some upper-classiness"? In the 1940s? I think it bestows virtually infinite upper-classiness. Holy crap.
As I get older The Atlantic's sensibility seems to be getting older and older, veritably sprinting away from me into an obsession with traditional artisan foods, traditional sexual morals and how we can only wish we can recover them again, and pontificating about the 21st century from the point of view of Tacitus. Caitlin Flanagan's new article about how now, far more than ever before, teenage girls are being pressured to have sex but don't want to, could start a good thread.
I was thinking about it, but it just seemed so grim. She's so insistent that teenage boys really, really despise girls, and the only way for a teenage girl to get affection and caring from a teenage boy is, um, it's unclear. But fucking around certainly won't do it, you little whores!
Her picture of the world is just so hostile.
224: Heavens, are you apologizing for something? No need. I'm a bookseller by trade now, so I'm interested.
225.last: Quit pressuring the girls to start a thread, Ned.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to sex Caitlin Flanagan.
OT: I'm working in my office today for the first time in months (I'm usually at home or in a coffee shop) and have discovered 2 things:
1) I'm not very good at sitting at a proper desk anymore; and
2) Splenda makes your coffee feel all weird in your mouth.
227: Apologizing for, um, giving a negative impression of a product I have overall good feelings about? No, that would be dumb, considering that the problem I have with it actually does matter to you. For disturbing a thread of the conversation that had been resting peacefully, maybe? That doesn't make too much sense either.
My roommate's dad gave her a subscription to The Atlantic for some reason, so we've been getting it for a few months now. I never read it, but I do look at the cover when it comes. On the latest one I saw "Caitlin Flanagan: Why Teen Girls Endure Hookup Culture" and was like, seriously? "Endure"?
now, far more than ever before, teenage girls are being pressured to have sex
Now, be fair. I'm past halfway on the actuarial chart already and don't have time to play games.
233: So that's why you keep suggesting we play "Point the Bottle"?
BETTER APO THAN THOSE HORRIBLE TEENAGE BOYS.
I traveled to the future and on the next Atlantic cover I saw "Caitlin Flanagan: Why your rich entitled daughters who play lacrosse endure being murdered by your rich entitled sons who play lacrosse."
236: I almost noted above that the hit-and-run victim plays lacrosse.
The Atlantic is a pretty good magazine except for the crap by Caitlin Flanagan, Sandra Tsing Loh, Megan McArdle, and that guy who loves the military and wants China to attack us. The new issue has great articles about the Conficker malware, and by James Fallows about Google's intentions for the news industry.
I found this paragraph particularly weird:
Unlike the girls of my era, who looked forward to sex, not as a physical pleasure (although it would--eventually--become that for most of us), but as a way of becoming ever closer to our boyfriends, these girls are preparing themselves for acts and experiences that are frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst. These girls aren't embracing sex, all evidence to the contrary. They're terrified of it.
"See, while the girls of my era were having sex, we weren't sluts who wanted to. It was so our boyfriends would like us! Anyway, girls now who are having sex for any reason other than getting approval from their boyfriends are in for a world of humiliation and misery, even if I have to go around humiliating them myself."
238: I was all ready to make a caustic comeback to this, but I don't recognize all the writers you name and wasn't patient enough to read through Fallows' article just to find something wrong with it. However, that did prompt me to Google "conficker", and I was amused by one guess about where the name for the worm came from:
The origin of the name Conficker is thought to be a portmanteau of the English term "configure" and the German word Ficker, which is cognate to a common English language term for "fornicator".
239: I think your last sentence is pretty much a "shorter" for her entire oeuvre.
242: Well, except, I guess, for the stuff about how women should do housework, except for her, because she's too busy and important.
The Flanagan article also has a big "this novel is truer than that non-fiction book" section. I hate that. Novels are made up.
Hopefully, Linda Hirschmann has written something recently as well, so we can have an old-timey party here on Unfogged.
She really loves her YA fiction, doesn't she? That was where the 'rainbow party' nonsense came from, too.
Not to say that Flannagan doesn't suck. She does. But only in anticipation of a boyfriends's love.
So in other words, the name "Conficker" means "fucking configure". Or maybe "the configurer is fucked up"
I don't think this is quite what it means.
I'd never read a Caitlin Flanagan essay all the way through before. My goodness, how awful.
I particularly like the way she first dismisses a book about an admittedly rather awful, er, hook-up that is written based on interviews with people from the school in which it took place--the book is so lurid, obviously the interviewees are lying--and then says that a novel on the same unpleasant incident by a 63-year-old novelist expresses the truth of adolescent sexuality today. For no particular reason except that the novel matches her opinions and the actual interviews do not.
Based on reading blogs and talking to my younger activist women friends--early twenties, lots of hooking up, have experienced more coercion and sexual assault than you'd want to believe--I certainly have my doubts about what we're calling hook-up culture. But they're pretty much the same doubts I had about the situation when I was that age, back when email was a novelty.
I do wonder about this whole "everyone has seen lots of fairly hard-core porn as a matter of course" factor. But the only commentary one reads is so appallingly reactionary that it seems untrustworthy.
I WILL CONFIGURE THE FORNICATOR
CONFIGURATE
CONFIGURATE
The House did pass mandated ass-kicking. But it got negotiated down to this alternative in conference.