Can You Not?

This is really a fabulous expression of being an ally.

Started "by white men, for white men," the Can You Not PAC is meant to complement existing organizations, like EMILY's List, that support women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks running for office, by telling white men to take a step back.

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out

Lots of attention for this article about Ben Rhodes, the former MFA student who is a big cheese in US foreign policy these days. Drum hits the highlights, but my favorite response has to be this pitiful meltdown by Thomas Ricks, who is so disturbed that Rhodes isn't Henry Kissinger that he practically accuses Rhodes, who works in an administration that exists partly on the strength of having always opposed the war, of having started the damn war himself. Amazing stuff.

!!!!

Aristotle's hitherto lost On Trolling, albeit only the first page, since I cannot presently access the remainder.

(A fitting pendant to the discussion of Ken M's old-fashioned trolling infra.)

The devil you don't know

Everyone loves to be horrified by how unprepared Trump would be as president. Let's be clear: he would not be less prepared, nor worse, than Bush. He would be a better president than anyone who has the backing of the Republican Party and acts according to their agenda. (Obviously I still think this is all hypothetical.)

Guest Post - Ken M

Minivet writes: A sensibility most fine, and with some overlap with ours. (Warning: Vox video.) I notice there have been posts on this same guy (Horsey Surprise) in the past, but the video is new.

Is there point on the continuum at which trolling becomes so gentle and good-natured it deserves a different name?

Heebie's take: He calls it "coward's improv". It's truly great. Go watch it. Also it's subtitled.

Also it happens to be adjacent to one of my very, very favorite genres: pretending to be stupid to get other people to reveal that how stupid they think I'm actually capable of being. His version doesn't quite work as well, because it's comments between strangers. But still.

Don't use Apple music!

I mean, wtholyf?!

What Amber explained was exactly what I'd feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users' computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple's database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn't recognize--which came up often, since I'm a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself--it would then download it to Apple's database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

It feels like we haven't talked about music and who owns what in a while; thought I'd dust off this old topic.

Here's a defense from imusic:

If you choose "Remove Download," it will send the local file from your hard drive to your Trash, but leave the reference in your library -- so that you can stream that track directly from iCloud Music Library. It won't delete the file until you empty your Trash.

Their defense is basically that it wasn't deleted. It was just stored in the Trash.

All the ways to say eff off.

Spite houses are super charming after a century has elapsed.

My understanding of the French Fry Sculpture at UF is that they were originally mirrored, but the artist got into a fight with the university, and so painted them bright yellow instead. Every job needs a way to grab two beers and jump down the inflatable airplane slide.

Lead plus acid.

Kevin Drum's lead hypothesis meets Flint, Michigan:

Lead pipes caused way higher murder rates in the 1920s, but only in cities with acidic water.

Graph and link to the paper at the link.

A finer point, but no less controversial, is being made about the optimal way to include a tweet in a blog post.

Via Brad Delong

Tigre Unmasked!

I think we all know who this guy really is:

Malofiy's lawsuit is the climax of an intensifying drumbeat of similar allegations leveled at Led Zeppelin over the years. American blues and folk songwriters from whom the British band drew inspiration have brought legal challenges for decades, often successfully. Since its 1969 debut album, Led Zeppelin has altered the credits and redirected portions of its royalties for some of its biggest songs, including Whole Lotta Love and Babe I'm Gonna Leave You. A copyright infringement suit over Dazed and Confused was settled in 2012. Now the band's biggest hit is under scrutiny./

Malofiy gives the impression he'd like to be a rock star, too, and not just your run-of-the-mill intellectual-property litigator.

Sporting a beard, leather jacket, and a white bandana topped by a trilby, he looks like a cross between Frank Sinatra and Keith Richards. As an attorney, he brings flourishes to his cause that might get others laughed out of court. His original complaint was filed using a typeface based on Led Zeppelin album-cover art. His attaché bags are sawed-off, velvet-lined Fender guitar cases (one tweed, one black), and they match the harmonica boxes he uses to store his courtroom supplies.

Now, Malofiy just needs to get to the airport. The lawyer's 1972 Chevy pickup, parked in front of his building, won't start. He summons a friend who works at Philadelphia's Navy Yard. Minutes later, a 1984 Oldsmobile lowrider with peeling, red paint pulls up, and we jump in. Arriving at the terminal with only minutes to spare, heads turn as Steely Dan's Hey Nineteen blasts from the car's custom sound system.

I have no particular opinion about the case in the article -- a claim that Stairway to Heaven is plagarized from some earlier song called Taurus -- but Led Zeppelin does seem to have infringed a lot of copyright over their careers.

CV Of Failure

I don't have time for a proper post, but want to open the discussion. Here's a little background, with a link to the CV everyone is talking about. And here's a CV from an adjunct who says, I'll show you failure.

Musing on bathrooms

I'm trying to figure out whether I feel personally targeted by all these bathroom policing weirdos. It turns out: I don't like going out without my fake boobs on (or a camouflaging shirt). I don't know to what extent this is because I personally like to dress very carefully and am very particular about how I look, and how much that's a product of being extremely averse to confrontation and worrying what people think, ie if I were in Portland would I enjoy flaunting my androgyny? Or would I still prefer to seem feminine?

There is a lot of chatter about these bathroom nazis on my FB group for women who skipped reconstruction. A lot of them have short hair, often from chemo. A lot of them have gotten confronted in bathrooms. (The conversation tends to split along those women who want to assert, "No, this is from cancer! I'm biologically female!" and those women who want to say something that doesn't sell out transgender women, like "Fuck you, you're not the bathroom police." On the whole it's a very lbgt-friendly group, though.)

Guest Post - Pointy points

Lurid Keyaki writes: I snapped this picture on Solano Ave in Berkeley this weekend and thought I would put it to the group:

1) how are these points earned?
2) for what can they be redeemed?

Imagining some kind of caption-contest-style prize, maybe with categories like "best anecdote" and "pithiest answer combining 1) and 2)".

Heebie's take: Life points! It's hard to tell whether these guys are taking themselves seriously or not. Art imitates life.

Off The Grid. Cleveland, Even

This is a good, short piece about how much easier life can be if you're willing to settle somewhere other than the coasts, with some self-awareness about the relative privilege that makes even that possible. Many things to say, but two quick thoughts: if you'd asked me to name a place that's cheap but has excellent schools, I could have named Shaker Heights, but it's pretty much the only such place I could have named. But now that I think about it, surely she's right and there are other rust belt cities that have tony suburbs that stayed tony despite the central city all but collapsing. What are those places?

Second, why is it so unthinkable to so many people to move to a place like Cleveland? Maybe it's just as simple as: when you're young you're afraid that no one has fun or sex in Cleveland, and by the time you're not so young, the place you've been living feels like home. Maybe it's just unfamiliarity, or a kind of naivete, that doesn't understand that there are cool people around every mid to major metropolitan area. A more cynical reading would be that people think the place they live rubs off on them, and they're scared that living somewhere uncool makes them uncool, and that's way worse than being in debt.

I Have A TV

I'd formed the belief that Game of Thrones is a TV show about Kevin Spacey as president, but I kept seeing screencaps on Twitter that made me think, "that doesn't look like a DC drama." Today I googled. Ah. Good now. Thanks.

But you can still help. I've discovered, about fifteen years after everyone else, that watching something on the iPad makes time go faster on the elliptical. But I have a hard time coming up with things to watch (Netflix or Hulu). Pulp Fiction turned out to be good: engrossing; enough action. Then I tried Jason Statham's The Bank Job and I generally like Statham, but that was just too dumb and actually kinda slow. Serenity was good, and so now I'm watching Firefly which is annoying and clever in the ways Whedon is annoying and clever, but generally ok for elliptical viewing. What else? Movie or TV show, just not hopelessly dumb and with plenty of plot.

Biggest Metabolic Rate Losers

I knew that dieting wrecked havoc on people's base metabolic rate, and of course contestants on The Biggest Loser are basically completely decimating themselves and will have the most extreme consequences, but this is still a shocking effect:

Amanda Arlauskas 26, wellness coach and social media consultant, Raleigh, N.C. Weight: Before show, 250 pounds; at finale, 163 pounds; now, 176 pounds Metabolic Rate: Now burns 591.1 fewer calories per day than would be expected for a woman her size.

Royalty

One silver lining of Prince's death is that people no longer feel constrained to keep his music off YouTube. In just three minutes of looking, I came across this cover of What If God Was One Of Us, and this song, which I'd never heard, but is great, and this roof raising performance on Arsenio. What a loss.

Two more things: here he is being interviewed by the squarest of squares, Larry King, and he's a devout, thoughtful, completely charming guy. Last: my guess: he had cancer or something; not a simple OD.

Skee's prosaic wishes indicate, on one hand, his regular-guy approachability and, on the other, the sadly limited scale of his imagination

What are the best-annotated songs on Genius? Songs that I'd know, preferably. I just read Skee-Lo's I Wish and realized I should be spending a lot more time on this site.

Throw Your Ekranoplan Into The Dustbin Of History

This is so awesome it makes me smile. Apparently it produces 1000 horsepower, is powered by jet fuel you carry on your back, and has to be flown by a trained surfer, so perhaps not quite ready for the morning commute, but I'm still smiling.

Just being mean for the sake of being mean

How are members of Heebie's gym fighting social injustice? Their methods include:
- liking where they live
- perpetuating light and happiness and smiles
- explaining the writing prompt
- and one or two more!

Updated to add:

Lonely Days, Sad Nights

I follow Peter Nickeas on Twitter, and sometimes worry for the young man's mental health. Overnight reporter in Chicago seems like a hell of job.