"Fashion Jews Upset That Fashion's Night Out Overlaps With Rosh Hashanah". They're sort of like Jellicle Cats crossed with Fashion Bugs.

"I'm not sure they really were slaves", says a pool-playing Egyptian chauvinist chemistry teacher at the Café Royale of the builders of the pyramids in ancient Egypt; "I heard they were just farmers in the off-season."

(They—the Egyptians—were the first to figure out that the world was round—then everyone forgot. They figured it out from shadows, and trigonometry.)

So, this is special:

As Chilean government rescuers prepare to start the monthslong task of digging out 33 miners trapped half a mile below ground, questions are emerging about whether the men will be paid during their ordeal.

The firm that ran the mine, Cia. Minera San Esteban Primera, has said it may have to declare bankruptcy, because of the shutdown of the mine and the flurry of government investigations and civil actions it is facing. The local mining union has asked the government to step in and meet the San José payroll starting in September. But on Monday, government officials said that, while they are keen to assist the miners, the government isn't legally permitted to pay their salaries.

It's a good thing we have a Labor Day in this country—and in the full balm of September, no less! How that May event other people do would grate on the senses.

Anyway, solidarity and hot dogs this weekend, y'all.

Somebody requested a new earworm! What fun. Here's what I've been singing.

Wow. I thought I hated rape, but these guys really hate rape. And may I say that this little dance number is not flaccid?

Let's plan a meet-up! I think Thorn expressed a preference for an afternoon.

Update: Looks like brunch now? Next Sunday?

It came up in conversation tonight: I'm a morning-sex person. No knock on the other times. Those are great times, too.

Hard at work on important personal tasks (such as cleaning my desk—it turns out I had like $600 worth of uncashed checks piled up; oops? huzzah?), I've been ignoring a growing pile of interesting links that have made their way to my inbox, which shortcoming I would like now to redress:

1. Witt sends along this interview with Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult. Excerpt of Weiner talking:

Now, say I'm a reader of chick lit and I happen across Sarvas's review. I'm probably thinking, "This guy's an idiot." Or, if I'm kinder, I'm thinking that the paper of record cares so little about my tastes that they won't even acknowledge that the books I read, and love, exist. How seriously am I going to take the paper's critics when they start beating the drums for Gary Shteyngart, or Colson Whitehead, or Charles Bock? Answer: not very. By willfully ignoring commercial women's fiction, the Times has made itself, as an institution, an unreliable narrator. I don't trust it, and I won't buy what it's selling.

2. Very occasional commenter Otis sent along this compilation of nerdy jokes, many of which were repeats for me, but there's a few gems in there.

3. Did we talk the Glenn Beck thing to death yet? I found this article interesting, but I may have a bizarre insatiability for this story. Anyway:

At the Daily Beast, Reihan Salam says Beck -- and Sarah Palin -- are promoting a return to a "more homogenous" nation of yore:

"The country has long since been transformed by powerful demographic and economic forces that very much threaten what we might call Glenn Beck's America.

"Instead of accepting or embracing this transformation, a large and growing number of white Americans are, knowingly or otherwise, taking a page from minority protest movements of the past by asserting themselves and demanding recognition from political and cultural elites. Many on the left find this sense of anger and alienation risible, seeing in this movement of 'are-nots,' as opposed to 'have-nots,' a class of ignoramuses duped by Fox News into acting against their supposed economic interests.

"Yet it seems more plausible that Fox News is following its audience rather than leading it -- that this anger and alienation has existed for years, and has only now found a decidedly unconventional tribune in the form of Glenn Beck. Though this is a class with economic grievances, it seems more concerned with psychic injuries -- with a profound sense of disempowerment in the face of centralized political power. [...]"

4. Witt (who wins the prize for link sending this week) also clued me in on New York's new Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, signed into law yesterday:

The law requires overtime pay for nannies, housekeepers and companions to the sick and elderly after they work 40 hours in a week, or 44 hours for those who live in their employers' homes. The domestic workers will get at least 24 consecutive hours off each week and, after they are on the job a year, three paid days off annually. The bill's sponsors said it subjects employers to state law for complaints of unwelcome sexual advances and also applies New York's minimum-wage provisions.

What else is happening?

1. Using twitter hashtags, complete with mesh, as an adjective or noun to signify the subject matter whose discussion is generally marked with that tag. It bespeaks an aesthetic insensitivity so great as to beggar belief. (Even just omitting the '#' would be a blessing.)

2. Writing ostensibly aimed at those who have or shortly will have advanced humanistic degrees but in which nevertheless the important stuff is bolded so that you really notice it's there and can easily see the main points.

3. Descriptions of alternate career paths for those trained as academics that manage to say vanishingly little about the nature and availability of the careers in those paths. [1]

4. The phrase "digital humanities". It just seems so graceless and clumsy. (The substance of what is denoted with the phrase I of course exempt, having, to be honest, little exposure to it.)

Look, here they all are, together! (Except that actually the bolding seems to have been undertaken with very little systematicity.)

[1] A different post, offering advice to new graduate students (in the humanities), is more expansive:

Such positions could include what Bethany Nowviskie and others have taken to calling "alt-ac," alternative academic careers that include, as Bethany puts it, "administrators with varied levels of responsibility for supporting the academic enterprise; instructional technologists and software developers who collaborate on scholarly projects; journalists, editors, and publishers; cultural heritage workers in a variety of roles and institutions; librarians, archivists, and other information professionals; entrepreneurs who partner on projects of value to scholars, program officers for funding agencies and humanities centers, and many more."

It goes on to acknowledge that "graduate schools are not yet very good at preparing you" for such positions. I find it a stumper why a department of religious studies (e.g.) should ever become even moderately good at preparing its Ph.D. students for jobs as administrators, software developers, journalists, or librarians.

Hey look, your childhood home stars in the new Arcade Fire video.

Back when I was getting that skin cancer taken off my neck, I thought "This must be less common than it was twenty/thirty years ago, when people weren't as careful about sunscreen, particularly on children." Come to think of it, though, I've never seen that story -- there's been a significant change in behavior for the purpose of avoiding skin cancer, and it's been a couple of decades: shouldn't I have seen some reporting on the resultant drop in cancer rates?

Same question for lung cancer -- people started smoking a lot less in the late eighties. My parents smoked two packs a day as a baseline, three if they were doing anything social. No one smokes that much now; there are fewer smokers, and a pack a day is unusually heavy. Somehow, though, I haven't seen reporting on the resulting drop in lung cancer cases, and some light googling isn't coming up with anything dramatic.

What gives?

No, it's not that Cee-Lo joint. The thing is, I just broke my nose on the bottom of my pool, trying to show little sister how to do a front somersault while, and this is crucial, holding one's nose, as this is her preferred mode of hydrolocomotion. Crunch! Ah, that sound/feeling, how I know it well! You see my nose had already been broken 5 times, in situations as diverse as getting mugged, getting an elbow in the face from a drunk friend, and being bonked with the forehead of each of my children while I was lying down and they were doing adventure nursing. To be perfectly fair, they were drunk. And I had it re-set (ergo broken under anaesthesia) after the 2 first times but before the second 2. I mix it up like that. And I swore at the time I would never do it again, because that hurt like a birch. Fuck it, I'm fixing it this time, and maybe I'll get new tits too. Do you know what these ER motherfuckers just gave me? Some celexa coxibullshit. Do I look like a fucking grandma in the "before" part of a late-night ad for some foam gardening stool, whose arthritis is preventing her from tending to her prize hydraengas in her sunset years? Because I don't fucking think so. I came to a private hospital for a reason, and it wasn't so a bitch-ass triage doc could do me wrong like that. Fuck you and your motherfucking Crocs. I demand sympathy in comments. Well, I mean, unless a Singapore lurker wants to bring me some Demerol. Mt. E A&E Radiology. I have a cute navy-and-white striped top and a pixie cut and I look like I want to start mowing everyone in the hospital down with a pair of SKS's, Chow Yun Fat style.

+----------+
|  PLEASE  |
|  DO NOT  |
| FEED THE |
|  TROLLS  |
+----------+
    |  |    
    |  |    
  .\|.||/.. 

I just realized the little black pellets all over my desk are probably mouse droppings.

I can't think of anything non-depressing to blog about, so let's start in with election season.

But John Boehner is very likely to be Speaker of the House of Representatives starting next year and then we'll really start to see the degree to which Beck is able to sway events in Washington.

It's a fait accompli that the Republicans will take the house?

As far as I can tell, pillow shams are much more interesting pillow covers than things sold as pillow covers, but they're intended solely for giant overstuffed pillows that you're supposed to put on the floor when you stay at someone's guest bed?

I bought some pillow shams for our regular pillows because they were colorful and paisley. The pillows are kind of swamped by shams, but they're bright and pretty.