Starting to feel a little bit better, and was up and about for 3-4 hours today before I had to take a nap.
I don’t know if when I was drinking I just powered through colds with vodka or what, but this was seriously the worst cold I think I have had since I was on active duty and in the field down at Baumholder in the middle of winter and just dying for a week and a half.
Schlemazel
Oh BOY! Cole on the thread, that should open the floodgates of whining and poutrage! John, I bet you didn’t know the web site is not working perfectly and will be stunned by the number of helpful suggestions coming your way.
EDIT: I should add, politely to headed your way
BillinGlendaleCA
You probably didn’t notice the symptoms as much when you were drinking, I know that’s the case for me.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Schlemazel: Heh.
BTW, Cole; about the site…
Mike E
My niece’s family is going thru whatever that is…more of a stomach virus tho.
WereBear
Glad you are feeling better!
gogol's wife
The buttons are back!
Are you sure it wasn’t the flu? I heard there’s a bad respiratory flu going around.
Benw
Just because everybody hates it doesn’t mean it’s not good!
p.a.
What happend to the button that credited my bank account $5 every time I commented.
p.a.
Commented
Corner Stone
@Benw: “Survey says!”
Debbie
@gogol’s wife:
I thought I had that respiratory flu, but it turned out to be walking pneumonia. Lousy way to start the winter season.
Corner Stone
Still have no idea why DEN brought Vernon Davis onboard.
satby
Glad you’re feeling better John. Don’t overdo, let yourself heal.
Thoughtful David
Glad you’re better, Cole.
And I like the new website pretty well. Hoping to see the comment numbers come back, and some other glitches fixed, but I think it’s looking good.
Elizabelle
@Debbie: Walking pneumonia.
Wishing you a speedy recovery. Arrgh.
Hearing of that illness: reminds me of actress Susan Dey (the Partridge Family; no longer remember which bird): she found it ironic that her mother, a nurse, died of walking pneumonia. Fairly young.
Also, Ms. Dey said she ate Milk Bones to keep her teeth white. Cannot say whether that was the truth, or if she was sick of dealing with interviews.
Debbie
@Elizabelle:
Oh, please let that be a joke.
p.a.
@Elizabelle: I tried a nibble once; bet most people have (mostly guys- we be stupid). Crispy cardboard. Now Beggin Strips… ;-)
srv
@gogol’s wife: I particularly like the white text on very light gray background. And I even have flu.x installed.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Elizabelle: Back in my days working for Satan, that happened to one of our attorneys.
raven
@Debbie: I got a pneumonia shot, damn it hurt.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: I just got the flu shot.
BillinGlendaleCA
@p.a.: Once going through the checkout line at Costco, buying Jerky Treats, the guy putting the purchases back into the cart said, “Hey those are pretty good”.
Elizabelle
@Debbie: The Milk Bones or the illness?
Anyhoo, it’s what I think of immediately re Susan Dey. Milk Bones.
Re our more recent “Susan Dey” type: my sister informs that Jennifer Anniston has been appearing in some Emirates Airlines commercials. On NBC TV. Sister wonders who those commercials are for. I don’t watch primetime. Have you seen them?
Settling in to maybe watch “Let the Right One In” on Indieplex. First line of dialogue: “Squeal. Squeal like a pig.”
rikyrah
Feel better, Cole.
I am getting used to the redesign. Definitely growing on me.
Corner Stone
The ageless Adam V for the go ahead FG!
Gin & Tonic
@raven: I was thinking I should get one.
Gin & Tonic
@p.a.: Yeah, Milk Bones aren’t very tasty. Luckily Beggin’ Strips didn’t exist back when I was stupid.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
It may have been a joke, but she’s also had issues with eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia), so who knows? I’ve heard of eating disordered people doing weirder things.
Elizabelle
@BillinGlendaleCA: Walking pneumonia, I assume. Sounds like nasty stuff.
Once, when I was long-term temping as a legal secretary, member of opposing counsel was mauled by a bear in a northern national park. My attorney was alternately horrified by the violent end and relieved at the delay.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I hope you continue to feel better Cole. Don’t overdo.
Renie
@rikyrah: that story you posted about the nurse not being allowed to help that sick baby – where did that happen?
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: Beggin Strips. Mmmmm.
Corner Stone
INT Colts!
debbie
@raven:
I can’t get shots due to autoimmune issues. But there’s a 1 in 3 chance I picked it up in a doctor’s waiting room. Ticks me off.
HRA
I am glad you are getting better, JC.
As long as I was able to get on and read the posts, I have no problem(s) to write about.
.
MattF
@debbie: I recall, back at the time of the Ebola panic, a wingnut of my acquaintance was revving up his ‘blame Obama’ siren… and I mentioned a little fact that epidemiologists tend to point out– that you have to catch a disease from someone in order for it to spread. That actually shut him up long enough for me to leave the room.
ETA: And get better! Soon.
JPL
Take care, John.
It will be great if Indy were able to hold on for the win.
Germy Shoemangler
@MattF:
it ended right after election day, didn’t it?
Elizabelle
@MattF:
Sounds like a lyric from Werewolves of London.
If President Obama ever wanted to take up meth after leaving office, after all the perfidy he’s been accused of, I would be sympathetic.
Corner Stone
@JPL: I am so torn. I need DEN to win this game but want Duck Dynasty Peyton to lose.
Renie
I posted a comment to rikyah asking:
that story you posted about the nurse not being allowed to help that sick baby – where did that happen?
and it got put in moderation??
Corner Stone
That was really stupid, DEN.
Elizabelle
@Germy Shoemangler: Very next day. Amazing, that.
I see NBC and others salivating over possible military response to the possible bomb that brought down the Russian airliner, en route home from Egypt.
That’s gonna hurt Egypt. A lot. People still remember the terrorists with guns at — OK, I don’t remember precisely which pyramid/historic site. But the prospect of violent death, possibly fomented by terrorists, is not appealing.
p.a.
@BillinGlendaleCA: @Gin & Tonic:
Bet they’re a regular item in the food pyramid of some frats.
Germy Shoemangler
@p.a.: wouldn’t a food pyramid contain only grain?
Corner Stone
See ya later Broncos.
JPL
Well that defensive holding call, just sealed Indy’s win.
p.a.
@Germy Shoemangler: just don’t get this kind of quality snark everywhere on the ‘tubes. Almost laughed up a lung.
Corner Stone
Manning holding his hipbone/kidney area??
ruemara
Looking at key scenes and… the DP gave me wides & mediums for shots calling for MCU to CU. Importan emotional content from the actors visible? Sure, just from 12 feet away. I gave DP & AC a storyboard over a week prior to shooting and had a meeting on how to read & shoot it. And I’m missing on scene VO with ambient so I have to sort through his sort, to see if he called it trash. I’m not happy, but I am concentrating on not being mad unless it’s ruined utterly. GRrrrrr. Do guys just not listen at all?
JPL
@raven: The weather sucks.
Germy Shoemangler
@p.a.: Is Carson still the frontrunner? Or are we back to Trump? This is the strangest election cycle I’ve ever seen. Too long, and too weird.
JPL
@Corner Stone: Manning had serious neck surgery and my fear is that we’ll see him carted off the field someday.
Another Holocene Human
Probably just a nasty rhinovirus season. I got a cold in October that gave me two nasty migraines and of course more downtime during the fever phase. Just fucken sucked and I was so weak I thought maybe I had some other kind of disease.
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: That sounds really incompetent.
p.a.
@JPL: on a field goal try, wtf. Talib to get a little vacay for the obvious eyegouge? Doubt it.
max
@Germy Shoemangler: wouldn’t a food pyramid contain only grain?
Only stone.
@Elizabelle: I see NBC and others salivating over possible military response to the possible bomb that brought down the Russian airliner, en route home from Egypt.
My dog slobbers all the time, but I don’t take his advice on relations with the state. Not that he ever gives me any.
max
[‘Military action by whom? Are we supposed to bomb the Russians (Assad?) in retaliation for their losing a civilian airliner to … somebody? (Presumably not us.) That sounds so … Cheneylike.’]
Another Holocene Human
@debbie: “Nuh uh, I ain’t takin’ one of yer shots for virus’s. Now kin ah get some anti-biotics? My boy won’t stop coughing.”
Corner Stone
@JPL: I have a number of comments here on this site last year claiming outright that Peyton was injured and we were not being told. I got pushback on that but it was simply obvious.
Peyton just can’t rotate and get his power base underneath him on more than about 1 out of 5 throws.
I hope he hangs it up before someone hangs it up for him.
JPL
Three undefeated teams left. I’d say that New England is the best of those remaining but without a healthy offensive line, I don’t know how long that will last. If Dion Lewis is gone for the season that will hurt.
Mnemosyne
@Renie:
In the threads below, people are saying that the nurse is refusing on Twitter to say who she is or where this happened because she doesn’t want the publicity. Plus it would probably be a HIPAA violation.
Gin & Tonic
@Germy Shoemangler: I don’t think there’s any meat in Beggin Strips.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Well, that sucks. Any chance you can get him to sit down with you and show him the footage so he can try to explain himself?
Corner Stone
@p.a.: That Three Stooges eye gouge should get him suspended for a few games. That was completely uncalled for.
JPL
I’m not watching Greg Hardy’s team play tonight. I was hoping that the Eagles would show up wearing purple cleats.
p.a.
@Germy Shoemangler: I believe they’re pick ems in Iowa & NH, but the BigMoneyBoyz (h/t Digby) are funding shots at Carson (even on Fux). Trump’s past (wobbly) pro choice statements have not hurt him yet. Oppos my just be keeping their powder dry. Most of my info comes from TPM. Too depressing to try to unskew MSM news.
Wordpress Developers
Folks, should anyone find themselves mysteriously locked out of commenting or posting (for Front Pagers), please email [email protected]
– Alain, the other WordPress developer. I do more back-end stuff.
Corner Stone
Man, if Rodney Harrison is calling someone else a dirty player…that must be a 200% dirty play/player.
Calouste
@Germy Shoemangler: Carson has only been the frontrunner in 2 polls, which got a lot of attention because they were by the WSJ and the NYT. All the other polls have been Trump, although the gap has been closing. The most interesting in the recent polls IMO is the slow rise of Rubio and Cruz at the expense of Bush.
Germy Shoemangler
JPL
@Corner Stone: Who’d he call out?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Germy Shoemangler: I’m sure that’s just a coinkidink.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@JPL: I’m wondering how many cases there are like this in the NFL that we just haven’t heard about. My husband wants to watch the game and root for Philadelphia to beat Dallas like a rented mule because of Hardy. But I just wonder how many players on the Eagles are guilty of the same damned thing.
p.a.
@JPL: They really do seem to overcome o-line issues. Management’s decision to fill the defensive backfield from the dollar store will do them in (except McCourty; he’s fine). It’s like 2006; who needs Branch & Givens? (expiring rookie contracts). Doug Gabriel, Reche (the Bugeyed Sprite) Caldwell, and an on-his-last-legs Troy (I genuflect here) Brown. $ cost them then, I predict it will this year too.
(Can you tell I’m a Pats fan? Since Jim Plunkett)
Germy Shoemangler
Accusations flying all over the place.
Carson: “I’ve been scrutinized because I’m a threat to the progressives.”
Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal is publishing more stories on discrepancies in his autobiography. Who owns the WSJ? Progressives?
George F. Will accuses Bill O’Reilly of being a “tool of the left” because of his new book on Sir Ronald. And yet his attack is labeled “sensible conservatives confront the far right in their party” which makes me wonder, if he’s too far right, why is George labeling him a tool of the left.
I can’t keep up.
Corner Stone
@JPL: Rams Coach Jeff Fisher and the player who elbowed Teddy Bridgewater on his slide. Mainly saying it’s systemic in that org.
BillinGlendaleCA
@ruemara:
Eh?
Corner Stone
@Germy Shoemangler: Trenchant, my man. Damn trenchant.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Also, too, as predicted, people online of all colors are wondering why the “Project Greenlight” director didn’t listen to Effie. Because on that show, the director is always an asshole and the producer is always the hero. All hail Effie!
Schlemazel
Oh man, anybody watching 60 Minutes?
Corner Stone
@BillinGlendaleCA: Say what?
sparrow
tips for surviving a cold: take magnesium. It helps you sleep (and if you were a big-time drinker, you’re probably deficient anyway). ALSO, chicken broth made from bones and cooked for hours is really really good. Apparently helps with muscle aches you get when you have the flu.
Germy Shoemangler
@Corner Stone:
My best comment ever. The sound of one hand clapping.
Renie
@Germy Shoemangler: that’s a joke WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Also, three, if you need a break, you can always take a minute to appreciate Daveed Diggs, one of the stars of “Hamilton.”
Because yeah.
Schlemazel
@Germy Shoemangler:
“The Left”, “Liberal”, “progressive” all mean the same thing to the wingnuts, “You said something of which I do not approve, You proved I am a liar or that I am ignoring well proven facts” That explanation works every time one of those shitballs uses one of those terms.
Corner Stone
@Germy Shoemangler:
Matt McIrvin
@Germy Shoemangler: Carson has never been the frontrunner. He led in a couple of outlier polls that got tremendous publicity.
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
It’s not on for another 2 hours here. Are you ready to join the Hamilfans (or Hamimaniacs) now?
Germy Shoemangler
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
p.a.
@Corner Stone: if you turn the hand around, it will at least look like someone else is doing it for you.
MattF
@Germy Shoemangler: Well, George Will’s main political asset was his close relationship to St. Ron. If it turned out that Ron was suffering from dementia at that time, it lends a certain… je ne sais quoi to Will’s political story.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I’m going to have to handle it delicately. He’s a friend, I respect him and maybe I should have had one more thing on my already full plate. He has a lot of problems hearing criticism because he’s used to being considered a genius at everything, so kid gloves. It’s learning for both of us. These are scenes I had to act in and you’d think with everything else I had to do, I could have let the man do his job. MEh. Half the feedback I’ve gotten is that people were afraid I’d be a tyrant as a newb, the other half was that I wouldn’t do the work as a director to let them know what I wanted. I work myself to a nub to fill out every single thing and no one even refers to the storyboard except me. *breathe* You know what, the shots themselves are beautiful, so I’m gonna just work all the rough edits on the scenes and see what happens.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
No, that story is third. The first story is on security clerances with particular attention to Mr. Alexis, Ms Manning & Mr. Snowden. I thought it would generate a reaction here
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Schlemazel: Not us. Why?
Corner Stone
@p.a.: Would you happen to have a graphic newsletter to which one could subscribe? Or possibly a 24/7 cam that would give one a hand in understanding your viewpoint?
JPL
@p.a.: The NYTimes had an article mentioning the defense. According to the article they appear to be always moving and ready. I only get a few Pats games in GA, so haven’t really watched to see if that is true. I saw a replay today of Brady taking down a few guys.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
You might be able to finesse it with an invitation to come watch a rough cut with you, but that’s a tough one to negotiate. A good DP can really elevate a film, but sometimes they’re a little too convinced of their own genius to listen to the director.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: I thought he was leading in Iowa, which is hardly surprising given the love for Huckabee there in the last cycle. (And for Santorum.)
ruemara
@BillinGlendaleCA: *punch*
@Mnemosyne: She’s my new hero. There’s this photo meme “I will be as confident as a mediocre white man”. I feel a little bad about it, but I do laugh. I am trying to be convinced I’m a geniyous like the locals around me, no matter what crap they put up there. But it’s not my style. Killing myself to excel, that’s my style.
Corner Stone
That Peyton throw to Emmanuel Sanders throw may be one of the best throws PM has made all season.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: I thought his shtick was making conservative cruelty (social darwinism, austerity) sound intellectual and even prudent, just, and Christian.
redshirt
Any guesses as to why you’re always sick, Cole? Do you lick surfaces at elementary schools or something?
Schlemazel
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:
The focus is on the failure to properly investigate people with security clearances. They tore apart Manning, Snowden & Alexis as unfit for the jobs they were given; troubled people who were just waiting to cause grief.
lamh36
Ugh…only two days left in my stay-cation…I’m not ready!!!!
http://33.media.tumblr.com/551bf08eea29a88ebf791f40d174e536/tumblr_inline_nww6b7VZ3u1rgu8or_500.gif
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
We never watch “60 Minutes” but are making an exception tonight to see the “Hamilton” package, so we may catch the other stories as well.
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: I feel for ya. Good minions are excruciatingly hard to find.
I don’t really have any advice because I haven’t figured this shit out myself. It’s hard. It’s frustrating. Some days, it makes you want to quit. But then you see stuff you did paying off.
Germy Shoemangler
test
https://vimeo.com/144773963
Another Holocene Human
@Schlemazel: Yeah. They need to do something about that. (Still feel like Chelsea Manning did the right thing in the wrong way, because there was some truly dirty shit going on. Fuck Assange.)
p.a.
@Corner Stone: I don’t want to go commercial: tax issues. And to be honest I’m inconsistent with my meds, so my viewpoint changes. Sometimes hourly.
Germy Shoemangler
@sparrow: How do we know we’re taking magnesium when we take magnesium? I don’t trust the magnesium on my supermarket and pharmacy shelf anymore. More oversight and regulation is needed in the industry.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
You don’t have to convince yourself that you’re a genius — you just have to convince them that you think so. I’m sure even Steven Spielberg has his oh, crap, WTF am I doing? moments on set. I think G has a little crush on Effie now, but confident, creative women have always been his weakness, so it’s cool with me. (Emma Thompson is another of his big crushes, especially after Sense and Sensibility.)
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
I’m old enough to remember when 60 Minutes was significant & they still occasionally find and acorn so I still watch it for those moments. That and I don’t see anything else on while I digest Sunday dinner & just veg.
I’d be interested to hear people’s reaction to the take on the 3 big failures of OPM mentioned in the first story.
Another Holocene Human
@Schlemazel: Not fair, it’s also a taunt towards people they perceive as society’s losers. “Don’t you know oil companies rule the world? Environmental activists–what a bunch of crybaby LOSERS. Not a winner like me.”
Tommy Young
@redshirt: I hope Cole won’t mind me saying this. I got an infected salivary gland over here, not operating 100%. John came on the phone and we’re like dude you are really, really sick. You should not be here, you should go to a doctor. I am not sure I can recall hearing a person that sounded that sick.
MattF
@Another Holocene Human: It’s more a combination of faking expertise on a variety of subjects, and a rather random collection of conservative pet peeves and ax-grinding. I used to keep track, but it’s really not worth the effort.
Germy Shoemangler
@MattF: It was sometimes fun to see George Will compelled to reveal (on ABC roundtable discussions) his wife’s role as a GOP campaign advisor. I think she was working with Rick Perry. It seemed to really bug him to have to say that before launching into his argument as to why the GOP should win.
Schlemazel
@Another Holocene Human:
Tru dat (to maintain street cred!)
But seriously, this has been going on for years now, I noticed in in the early 90’s. Hitler did things I disagree with == he is a liberal. Scientists proved that climate change is happening and caused by man == science is liberal. A jury found a black man innocent == the jury is liberal. It would be funny if it were not so sad and damaging.
p.a.
@JPL: they can go nickel/dime with up to 4 safety-types instead of lb’s/corners. It can look like a 2-5-4. 2 legit d-linemen, 2 d-end/linebacker types, 1 or 2 linebackers, 1 or 2 close safeties, 2 corners, 2 safeties.
ruemara
@Another Holocene Human: That’s my goal. get through it with enough desire to work on the next project. And get more photo gigs to fund the next project.
Tommy Young
@Germy Shoemangler: I did not see that but wish I did. People ought to be able to say their influences.
lamh36
Watching the 60 Minute segment on “Hamilton”.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Elizabelle:
We saw one of them (maybe there’s a series). She was sleepwalking or something in a towel on an airplane. Looking for the shower. Because Emirates has showers on their planes. Because of course they do.
:-/
Sheesh.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tommy Young
@lamh36: Same here. I love him saying he went to school and was the stupid person. All smarter around him. He was just treading water. Asked why 60 Minutes is talking to him and not his classmates, he says well he picked a lane and ran to it. If that isn’t a great piece of advice I don’t know what is.
The Other Chuck
Well I’ll be damned: right after I complained long and loud about giving up on the comment backlink fix, I go back, pop open the script, close it, and it works now. So now I’ll go plug away.
I give you Even Betterer Balloon Juice, a userscript. Like MBBJ, it requires a browser plugin to install, and the process is very much like installing MBBJ.
On Firefox, install GreaseMonkey. On Safari and Chrome, install TamperMonkey. Then go install Even Betterer Balloon Juice and links will behave normally again. Future versions of this script will add more fun features, but right now it’s just to fix annoyances that plain CSS can’t.
MomSense
@Schlemazel:
Heading to overtime now to see the rest of the Hamilton story.
My 12 year old is wide eyed and is bugging me to go see it in New York.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
Apparently they’re opening a new block of tickets for July 2016 through October 2016 on 11/11.
That’s right, folks, this show is already sold out almost a year in advance. And if the live performance is even half as good as the cast album, it deserves to be.
MomSense
@lamh36:
I’m obsessed with the show.
Debbie
@Mnemosyne:
Just watched the 60 Minutes segment. Hamilton seems as groundbreaking as Lion King was. Can’t wait for the RWNJ faux rage to start.
rikyrah
@Renie:
I do not know.
Mike J
@The Other Chuck: I read some of the gripe threads on GOS. Too much whitespace, type is too light, no serifs.
Of course some people were complaining about Kos trying to kill community, and often the same people were complaining that comments didn’t collapse, forcing them to read other people’s comments if they wanted to see what responses their own comments got.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
Lin-Manuel says he’s trying to figure out a way to film a performance with the current cast because it’s so insanely popular. No details whatsoever, but if the Metropolitan Opera can do a simulcast …
Mike J
@MomSense: Jar Jar Abrams will fuck up the movie version.
Mnemosyne
@Debbie:
Apparently Dick Cheney is a fan, so they’re going to have to reach to find something to be outraged about.
The RWNJ complaints I’ve seen online have all been that Hamilton was an evil monarchist who enslaved us all to the banksters, but no one has been able to point to any actual inaccuracies other than the usual compression/rearranging of events needed for better drama (for instance, the show shows Hamilton’s son dying in a duel prior to the election of 1800 when it actually happened the following year).
And if they’re going to complain about the race-blind casting, well, the Broadway ship sailed on that about 15 years ago, so try and catch up with the modern world, guys.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
I find rap really annoying )why, yes, I am old) so while I find the story interesting I think I would end up with a headache by the end of the evening. BTW $56 million in ticket sales?!?! Apparently you have to be the treasury secretary to afford tickets. Hamilton deserves a lot more love than he gets, maybe this pop culture stuff can help.
Tommy Young
How about a Sunday night story ….
A few years ago mom got really sick. I am standing on my parents front porch and this couple comes over. The night before a lot of cop cars and ambulances.
They were like wish this was on better terms, but we just moved in across the street and wanted to say hi. Had moved here from NC to run this business development thing. As you might guess I kind of latched on to this.
Told him this idea I have, that all the oil wells in the corn fields, way not put in a wind turbine? I get all animated. In the end he is matter of fact. He was hired by “big oil” and to suggest for a second wind or solar, a no go. No chance it would/could happen. I am like this is fucked up, and he just said yes it is, but you ought to understand how the world works.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
I would assume the line of attack would come from Hamilton’s support for a strong central government and a national treasury/bank. His contemporary opposite was the idolized Jefferson so all those people who willfully misunderstand the founding and ignore Jefferson’s faults & failings have a ton of items to hate on Hamilton.
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
If you have Amazon Prime Music, you can stream the cast album for free. Calling it a “rap musical” is a bit of an exaggeration — there’s rap in it, but it’s a mix of styles, including pop and R&B.
Here’s the White House performance that Lin-Manuel Miranda did in 2009 — if it gives you a headache, then you’re excused on the grounds of oldness. ;-)
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
I wanna go to NYC and see it…
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
I just finished the Ron Chernow biography that the play is based on, and you might enjoy that. It’s very well-written and does a good job of explaining why Hamilton is so important to US history while not concealing his weaknesses. You can tell that Chernow really admires Hamilton (because you kind of have to in order to write 900-page biography of someone) but there are times when he just wants to reach back through history and slap some sense into him.
This quote at the end of the preface really hit me:
Elie
The buttons are back! (thanks!)
Just came back from what I think is the damned best film of 2015 — The Experimenter — about the Milgram experiements and Milgram himself. It is a drama (not documentary) that is a deep and though provoking movie that every effing American should see. It covers the experiments that Milgram set up about obedience to authority where the subjects were asked to give shocks to other subjects who got answers to questions incorrect. 65% of the “teachers” (who meted out the shocks), were able to not only shock their fellow subjects giving incorrect responses, but were able to escalate the intensity of the shocks as more incorrect responses were given. These were not evil people, but were obedient to authority, The movie is deep, complex, examines a number of our group following behaviors and the criticism and lack of acceptance that Milgram received for this work. Peter Saarsgard deserves awards for this IMHO. Winona Rider gives a strong performance as his wife. Please don’t miss this… required viewing for all Americans esp in these days….To me also, as important as the 65% who could do the shocks, is the unexamined 35% who refused… think about that.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
I think I have to try to buy some tickets. Kids you get to enjoy your Christmas present in 8 months. Think they’ll go for it?
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
I’ve promised G that we’ll go to New York and see it for his graduation because neither of us have ever been to NYC. That will probably be in the spring of 2018, so I should be able to get those tickets sometime in 2017.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
If your son is as enthusiastic as you say, I think it’ll be like those videos where parents tell their kids at Christmas that they’ll be going to Disney World that summer.
Steeplejack
@The Other Chuck:
Use EBBJ instead of MBBJ or in addition?
gogol's wife
Last episode of Home Fires just ended, I’m in withdrawal already. I wish they hadn’t left Alison’s story line as a cliffhanger.
Still scratching my head about her dog, though.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
Oh a simulcast would be fantastic.
Tommy Young
@Mnemosyne: NYC rocks. Only been there a handful of times. Never seen a show. I can’t find the time to see a show because when I am there I can’t stop myself from just walking around and seeing the city. Grew up in small towns so when I moved to DC I had to live in the city. Wanted that experience.
But NYC is another thing all together.
The first time there I might have cried a little at the sheer scale of the place. It just rocked. And when folks said it is a “city that never sleeps” and all the noise I found it welcoming.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Schlemazel:
Normally, I do, too. I love this cast album. I think that, for me, it’s the orchestration that makes the difference.
Elie
@Tommy Young:
I share your love of NYC. The scale of it — the detail and color… amazing.
It was the city of courtship with my husband…. We lived in Baltimore at the time. He was from Brooklyn… as we got more involved, spent more and more time —
I traveled there for business frequently for a few years and explored its nuances. Particularly the double f’s — Food and Fashion —
Gotta go back soon… gotta.
Another Holocene Human
@Mike J: Where have I heard that specific list of complaints before? Wait–it’ll come to me.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease
Elie
Best quote from the Experimenter: “To understand life you have to look backwards, but you must live forward” (actual quote from a philosopher who I can’t remember)
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne:
I have or had a Czech friend and part of the reason we haven’t talked much is that the last time I saw her she was talking about how someone had put on a live theater of some monster franchise, Dracula or something like that, and the person cast as the vampire was Black, and just how weird and unbelievable that was. I was so weirded out, I mean, it’s fiction about magical creatures, it’s made up anyway.
But I guess she taught me that some people do feel that way. (Weird!)
Brachiator
@Schlemazel:
The crazy thing about the founders is that they really were a group of diversely talented people.
Jefferson and Madison were genius political scientists. Just the people you wanted to help synthesize ideas of how a government might work. But they were empty headed dopes as political economists, a subject that Hamilton just nailed. I mean “drop the microphone.”
Jefferson’s idea of a nation of small farmers was naive. And he was blind to the degree that the US and Britain, not the US and France, were natural trading partners. And so, our modern economy owes far more to Hamilton than it ever could to Jefferson and Madison.
Another great, and big book, that deals with the practical influence of the founders, and deals with Hamilton’s essential great work as the first Treasury secretary, is the award winning Age of Federalism, which focuses on the period between 1788 and 1800.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
I saw that performance & trying to understand what he is saying annoys me . . . now get off my lawn.
Thanks though, I totally understand the appeal but it misses me, my fault I know.
Glidwrith
@Elie: Actually, there is considerable doubt about how valid those experiments really are. There is a book out “Behind the Shock Machine: the Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments”, which details Milgram cooking his data and seriously deviating from script to coerce his subjects into administering the shocks. It gives me hope that we are not as warped as those experiments make us out to be.
beltane
@Tommy Young: It’s funny, but I grew up in Manhattan just a quick bus ride (or walk) from the Broadway theaters, and I don’t believe I ever saw a single musical. I did see “Dancing at Lughnasa” and some off-Broadway dramas, but that was about it. My big regret is not going to more concerts and ballet performances at Lincoln Center. A wealthy great-aunt of mine was always offering me tickets to the Met and NY Philharmonic which I usually turned down thinking it was “old people stuff”. Now that I live in rural isolation I feel like kicking my younger self in the butt.
Tommy Young
@Elie:
That is what I will always take away from the city.
There is a story I tell. I was in Penn Station. I was confused and looking at the board trying to figure out how to get back to DC. This women notices how confused I am and asked me where I am going. I say DC and she is like same here, come follow me. She had a really nice bottle of sake which we drank the entire way back.
I hear folks from NYC are assholes. My exact opposite experience.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
The book is on my read pile but I became a fan of Hamilton while in high school and being forced to do independent research by my history teacher. He and I would discuss history and we challenged each other to the point it annoyed him. He pulled me aside one day and said his class was a waste for me & he would only pass me if I wrote several papers on topics he selected. He was kind enough to offer books I should read but it was up to me to pick a hypothesis and defend it. It would have been great prep for college had I gone but it ruined me for normal American society because I learned so much real history instead of the myths we all believe,
khead
First losing Sunday in DE in a while. Bring on the zombies. TWD had better not suck.
Schlemazel
@Another Holocene Human:
I attended a play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in ’65 or ’66 that was race blind casting. They had a young black actor in their group (sorry I do not remember his name) and they plugged him into roles he was good for. The play I saw (Chekhov I believe but thats lost too) had him share a kiss with a white actress & I remember an audible gasp from the audience.
Elie
@Glidwrith:
Dr Milgram was very controversial in his life. That said, the movie is powerful on many levels. Even if you believe that people would not administer shocks as set up, wouldn’t you (knowing what we see around us every day about group think and obedience behavior), at least consider that obedience to authority is a factor that may account for some negative mass behavior? How do you account for genocide and experiences where neighbors such as in the Balkans –who were once relatives and friends, murder each other? How do we frame examining what drives this? If Dr Milgram “cooked the books”, what is the explanation that we can appreciate from what we know to be incredibly fratricidal behavior?
This is a not a documentary, but the questions it asks us to ask ourselves are totally valid. I think that while I am unprepared to explore the methodology around his experiments, the profound questions that they raise are very salient to our lives today and need to be asked and examined bluntly. If Dr, Milgram’s work is incorrect and wrong, how do we account for what we see about our brothers and sisters who are able to sustain racial injustice and torture and kapos in concentration camps? Where does that come from?
JPL
@Elie: It’s available for streaming on Amazon. I’ll invite a friend to come over to watch it.
MomSense
@beltane:
Go back now if you can. I went last summer and had so much fun.
Tommy Young
@beltane: Oh I can totally see that. You have something amazing right near you and you don’t use it. When I lived in DC, my life before in small towns, I came to know the Kennedy Center like the back of my hand. I often went to see things I didn’t like so much just because I could.
With season tickets I got one of the most amazing things ever. I got to see Dr. John play the room in the Kennedy Center where normally people playing violins.
Elie
@JPL:
Awesome!
I look forward to hearing what you think about it…
The Other Chuck
@Steeplejack: Addition. EBBJ is just for fixing things MBBJ can’t.
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
You’ll like the book, then. Chernow did a lot of original research (including scouring the archives in Nevis and St. Croix) and uses some materials that weren’t available until the late 1980s. He also references a lot of the recent books about the founding fathers, like Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx (about Thomas Jefferson) and of course McCullough’s John Adams.
He does debunk one persistent rumor about Hamilton — he probably was not part Black. All available documentation shows that his father immigrated directly from Scotland and both of his mother’s parents immigrated from France. Though the epilogue where he details and thanks all of the researchers says that he has donated money towards a Hamilton genome project that could solve the question once and for all, so one never knows.
Personally, although I understand the impulse to say that some historical anti-slavery figures were themselves part Black, it sometimes annoys me because it comes across as inadvertently saying that white people couldn’t view slavery in action and decide for themselves it was horrific — only someone who was personally connected to it by blood could decide that. And, frankly, that’s how the accusation was used for a few hundred years (and why, say, Lincoln was accused of being part Black — after all, there was no other reason someone could find slavery morally reprehensible, amirite?), which is why it sometimes gets on my nerves.
(For the record, Beethoven and Alexandre Dumas were definitely part Black — they have the documentation to prove it.)
raven
There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. . .
Mnemosyne
@Elie:
The main complaint about Milgram is that he put a lot more pressure on his subjects than he revealed, so his data isn’t quite as useful as he claimed for how “ordinary” people might react. Other people have had trouble replicating the experiment for that reason.
I remember seeing an Afterschool Special type of movie called “The Wave” that was based on a true story of a high school teacher who created a fake fascist movement at his high school that was much more successful than he planned, and got a little carried away by his own creation. It obviously had a major influence on me since I still remember it vividly more than 30 years later!
Renie
@beltane: I can understand. I grew up and still live on Long Island. During my teen years 1970’s NYC was crime infested and reading the crime stories, people on LI did not go to NYC for fun. Moved to Brooklyn in the 1980’s and worked in NYC, spent a bit more leisure time there but then moved back to LI at the end of the 1980’s. If you are on the trains and subways going to work all week, you don’t want to be on them on weekends. Now that I’m much older and my kids are in their 20s its odd to see them going into NYC all the time with no concerns about crime and/or safety that I had at their age. Funny how cycles go.
Schlemazel
@Mnemosyne:
I would assume the rumors about Hamilton’s race were part of the political smear campaign against him. It is interesting that many people want to believe that whites had no problem with slavery unless they were religious nuts that came along in the early 1800s. Only black people cared about slaves in their mind, sad really.
I know he had many good points but Jefferson lost some luster when I learned he really didn’t write the Constitution but was given credit because Adams was so unpopular people would have been against it had he been given credit. What tore it for me was when I found out he freed Sally Hemmings children on his death but none of the other slaves he owned. He knew those were his children, that changed him in my mind from being a man of his time to a shitheel who knew damn well he was doing evil.
beltane
@Tommy Young: I once saw Dr. John at a free concert in Damrosch Park behind Lincoln Center. It was easily one of the ten best shows I’ve ever seen.
@MomSense: I don’t think I could deal emotionally with going back. It’s not the same place I left in 1997, and there is a residual sense of bitterness at being pushed-out to make way for “better” folk. The one time I went back, shortly before 9/11 I became almost physically ill and vowed never to return.
raven
@beltane: such a night it was
Glidwrith
@Elie: I didn’t say there had not been atrocities committed, but if Milgram cooked the data it calls into question just how many people would go along with harming another just because someone told them to do so. I regard “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer as providing greater insight into the rise of little Hitlers and the followers that elevate them to that status.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
The Wave was a superb TV movie — and, alarmingly, based on a real incident, high school teacher Ron Jones’ `Third Wave’ exercise designed to show his students how the German population could accept and even celebrate the actions of the National Socialist Party in the 1930s.
Source: Wikipedia entry for “Third Wave Experiment.”
Even more disturbing to me: Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment from 1951:
Source: “Asch Experiment,” Simple Psychology website, 2008.
Asch’s experiment explains much of the behaviors of the Balloon-Juice commentariat, and the American electorate.
Elie
@Mnemosyne:
Thanks for the background on Milgram. That said, his research question is totally unchanged and probably the direction of the results as well: What makes average normal people who are decent and usually kind, be able to do or allow bad things to happen to other people who they immediately have in their environment? How did people watch lynchings? More curiously, how did people who were countrymen in Africa, (Hutus and tutsis) murder even those with whom they now lived and intermarried? Even if we think that Milgram put a thumb on the scale, so to speak, does that mean that there is NO validity to what he found? No, we can’t say that, because we see the behavior every day all around us. So ok, we have to set up the experiments differently… When you say, the results could not be duplicated, M – do you know if no one was able to show any of the similar trends or patterns? If these were totally unreproducible, then we have a more profound mystery of human behavior. That would mean that we have no idea of what separated the 65% in his experiments from the 35% who would not do what was asked. To me, its the 35% that pose the most important question to be explored….
Thanks for the suggestion on the Wave — will check it out!
beltane
@Renie: The mid to late 1980s were my teenage years. I used to walk home from the East Village to my mom’s apartment in midtown in the wee hours of the morning on an almost daily basis, often while drunk or stoned, listening to my SONY Walkman. Nothing bad ever happened to me. Ever. I wish I could share some of those experiences with my own kids, who are chaperoned to all their social events and who have never gone clubbing or cut school to take the subway to Coney Island or even had the pleasure of sitting on a stoop with friends, just people watching and shouting insults at anyone we didn’t like the looks of.
Elie
@Glidwrith:
Ok — fair enough.
Probably the most important question is about the 35% who could not be convinced to administer the shocks..
Anyway — its still a damned good movie. Worth seeing what it did to his life also. He died of a heart attack at age 51
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Heathens.
:)
WaterGirl
@ruemara: Well, I have to admit that I don’t know what DP, MCU, CU, AC and VO are… but I do know frustration when I see it and I’m sorry this process has been so rough. I am hoping this is one of those things like my bathroom remodel where nothing went the way I expected and I had to make compromise after compromise and I was sure it was going to be a (very expensive) disaster. But when it was done, it was everything I hoped for. It’s just that the details were all different.
Big hugs.
Ruckus
@Tommy Young:
As you know there are assholes everywhere. And if there are assholes everywhere they have to have counterparts, the non-assholes. Now I’m not sure that there are an equal number and some places seem to bring credence to the idea that they are not equal and cancel each other out. But it’s fun finding those whose idea of life is to try to not be an asshole every waking moment.
I noticed a similar thing in the navy. When in a foreign port some would come back on board and bitterly complain about everyone they interacted with were assholes, didn’t speak english, etc. My stock answer was “Did we just climb the gangway from the same place? I didn’t meet anyone who was and asshole, in fact everyone was the exact opposite and they all spoke english to me.” All of which was true. OK the two guys who tried to rob us at knife point in Naples, Italy could probably be considered assholes. But they did put their knives away and leave when kindly persuaded by the six of us.
mclaren
@Glidwrith:
Efforts to argue Milgram’s results out of existence abound. Alas, the Stanford Prison experiment provides similar evidence for the ease with which humans can be turned against once another.
The most alarming such experiment, however, seem to me Jane Elliott’s 1968 blue eyes/brown eyes classroom experiment:
Source: Wikipedia article for Jane Elliott.
Before America is done, I fully expect our country to hunt down and kill anyone wearing eyeglasses as a sign of “intellectualism” and “social deviancy” and “excessive learning leading to an unnatural self-regard requiring thought reform.” In other word, Pol Pot’s Year Zero.
Elie
@mclaren:
Thanks for the info on Asch (whose work on this is also referenced in the movie)
As for the BJrs who you cite as being group thinkers, well you know, we humans tend to be like that. It shouldn’t be a surprise. What should we do about it? THAT is the salient question….
The Other Chuck
@Ruckus: There’s an old saying: If one person you meet is an asshole, then you met an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you’re the asshole.
WaterGirl
@WordPress Developers: Alain, I really appreciate your communication with us!
Ruckus
@The Other Chuck:
Quite true and exactly my point. It’s just that I like to tell stories rather than quote someone else. Keeps my typing skills polished.
WaterGirl
@Corner Stone: I have no idea who Rodney Harrison is, but your comment reminded me of my father.
Toward the end with my dad, he walked so slowly that it was kind of hard for me to slow down enough but still keep moving. One day my dad told me he gone to the grocery store on the van from his retirement community and that he would never do that again (!) because the old ladies walked so slowly. I was speechless. How slow did someone have to walk that even my dad thought they were slow!??!!
Edit: thanks for the nice reminder of my dad. 20 years and I still miss him.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Ruckus: And good stories they are, also too!
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@BillinGlendaleCA: It must be “dad” night for me on BJ. I had forgotten that my dad used to say that, and I have never seen the word in writing before. thanks for that
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Watching the final “Great British Baking Show.” Since I’ve heard some people in the UK were dicks when the winner was announced, I’m assuming that either Kimberley or Ruby wins it, but don’t tell me.
WaterGirl
@redshirt: Cole hangs out with the guys from the frat, for one. College kids are walking germ mobiles just as much as young kids are, I think.
Steeplejack (phone)
@The Other Chuck:
Got it. Thanks.
Villago Delenda Est
Ah, Beautiful Baumholder! My PMS wished me an assignment there…he almost got his way, but lucked out and did my SigO job in Wiesbaden, with only an occasional visit to Baumholder. Albeit one time it was three weeks in February and the ground was frozen the entire time…which was a good thing! The mud there sucks!
Renie
@beltane: How opposite it is from me to you. I was afraid to go into the City as a teen and you had no problems roaming around. Now my kids go with no concerns anywhere which freaked me out a bit when they first started doing that. Your kids are chauffered and you would prefer they wander. Strange how that goes. Here’s another example: I grew up as a ‘latch-key kid’ since my Dad died young and my Mom had to go back to work since there were 5 kids. I was the odd kid with a working Mother. So having this kind of childhood I had no kids until we could survive on just one salary and I stayed home with my kids. They became the odd kids with a mother who didn’t work. Cycles come and go.
mclaren
@Elie:
The detail and color of New York City is indeed amazing. I recall vividly my first sight of NYC, driving in a car with my mother as a young child toward what looked like a hellscape composed of knotted grimy freeways into a vast necropolis seemingly designed by creatures whose sole desire was to inflict ugliness on the human soul. As the sewage-stench and rotting reek of the immense necropolis loomed up on a diseased mud flat littered with detritus, I cried out in horror and begged her not to proceed farther.
New York City comes straight out of a Daumier etching of the infernal regions. The grime, the filth, the subhuman glass towers, all combine with the degraded masses of humanity crushed together in fascistic brutalist architectural Brobdingnagian filing cabinets for lost souls to paint a portrait only adequately limned by Dante in Canto VIII:
New York City is the crematorium of talent, the mortuary of hope, a mecca for failure, and a vast hemorrhoid on the anus of American civilization. I don’t believe in the afterlife…but even so, I must admit that it seems very likely that if people have done many supremely evil things in their lives, they go to NYC after they die.
Elie
Of equally great relevance and impact is the opposite of this kind of conformity. Its called, “the normalization of deviance” — where consistently abnormal findings are accepted and normalized by the group. This was researched by Diane Vaughn in relation to the Challenger accident with the space shuttle where launch managers continually ignored evidence that the O rings that held the shuttle together could be disrupted under certain launch temperatures… another type of groupthink
Elie
@mclaren:
Excellent comment, McLaren!
beltane
@Renie: Well, being a latch-key kid is something we both had in common. Being an only child with divorced, very eccentric, parents and no other family, I spent most of my childhood in almost total solitude and more than a bit of squalor. My reaction was to have a big family and be a stay-at-home parent. In my own way, I ended up being every bit as “different” as my own parents.
Glidwrith
@Elie: Altemeyer didn’t offer much in the way of solutions on how to deal with right-wing authoritarians, other than the need to socialize them and thus allay their worst impulses and fears. Follow-up work in “The Debunking Handbook” by another set of experts building on his work offers more understanding of the tribalism involved and how to talk to them in their language.
I won’t go into much detail because this is heavy reading that doesn’t lend itself to short synopsis, but our wingers are VERY literal-minded. As an example, when they say we liberals are destroying families, it is quite real to them and not hyperbole. Family means very specific duties and obligations, specific gender roles and no flexibility whatsoever. By allowing women to step outside those roles, letting men enjoy child raising, making obligations to extended family more fluid (aided and abetted by government programs that help create that fluidity) they see a destruction of those duties and obligations that would otherwise see that they are taken care of.
PurpleGirl
@Tommy Young: Thank you for saying you like NYC. So many times people say it’s too big, too noisy, too crowded, just too everything. I was born here, have lived in Queens my whole life and I really like the potential of things to see and do. (Even when I don’t do them, I like that I could.)
redshirt
@WaterGirl:
Perhaps that’s a factor. I wonder if some people are just predisposed to getting sick, and others are not, regardless of behavior.
Or, maybe it’s all behavior. I’d like some lab rat volunteers.
NotMax
@PurpleGirl
Although a giant bottle of Airwick on every corner wouldn’t hurt.
Renie
@mclaren: i think you are remembering new jersey
PurpleGirl
@Another Holocene Human: One of things I like about the movie The Hunt for Red October is just that race-blind casting. Courtney B. Vance and James Earl Jones were great in their roles. But if you read the book, there is nothing really describing them. But they added to the story and film.
Renie
@beltane: sounds like we both did fine in the long run :-)
beltane
@redshirt: Some people’s immune systems are more robust than others, at least when it comes to particular pathogens. A certain percentage of the population is even resistant to HIV.
Glidwrith
@mclaren: I live in hope that it won’t come to that, however with respect to Elliott’s experiment, those were children. I view that as a case, not of groupthink, but of how children must be carefully taught the racism and bigotry of their elders. At the end of the quote, Elliott even stated those kids learned what it was like to walk in a colored child’s shoes.
With that, I’m off. Have a great evening!
redshirt
@beltane:
Why would evolution allow this?
schrodinger's cat
@PurpleGirl: I love NYC. I love big cities Chicago, Mumbai/Bombay. I also like tiny picturesque New England towns. Its the featureless suburbs that I find boring.
PurpleGirl
@beltane: I haven’t gone to a ballet performance in a few years but I used to do so quite regularly. And while it was at the end of his career, I will always be happy to have seen Rudolph Nureyev live.
beltane
@redshirt: Everything is a trade-off. Being that a species cannot know what nasty surprise nature is going to hurl at them, success depends on being prepared for everything even though no one individual will be prepared for everything. For example, the B blood type is said to confer a degree of immunity to cholera. This is wonderful if you live in an area where cholera is endemic. Otherwise, type B blood is associated with an increased risk of blood clots and venous thrombosis which is not so good. It is the circumstances we find ourselves in that determine what is good.
redshirt
@Glidwrith: I think your hope is misplaced. Don’t we see, every day, examples showing Republicans are now programmed to adopt whatever belief comes down the puke funnel as theirs? And not just accept it, but fight for it. If the right wing were to decree that mandatory use of seat belts was government over-reach, it’s guaranteed a significant percentage of republicans would stop wearing seat belts.
JPL
@redshirt: good There are consequences for those actions. I doubt that they would endanger their children though
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane:
Wonderful preparation for Balloon Juice.
redshirt
@beltane: Wouldn’t this only be true in our recent history – that is when worldwide travel became fairly commonplace, and swift migration as well, thus mixing diverse people in ways never possible before. When I say recent I mean the last 2 thousand years or so.
Your example is best shown by the European entry into S. and N. America. The subsequent die off must have happened fairly regularly in the past when two formerly separate populations finally met. At different totals, of course, based on the starting numbers.
BillinGlendaleCA
@mclaren: So I take you didn’t care for the city.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: mclaren doesn’t care for the US.
ruemara
@PurpleGirl: Jealous. As a kid, I adored Nureyev. He seemed so ethereal, where Baryshnikov seemed superhuman. I’m a Queens gal too, but I was born in Kingston, Jamaica. No, I have no accent.
I love NYC, but it has always been too expensive, now it’s even more so. I may be heading back if nothing here works out, only because my parents still live in Queens.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Beethoven? I’ve seen the claims, but never thought there was any conclusive evidence for it.
I don’t think that this is the main or even secondary reason for the claims.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
There are two different motives — African-American activists like W.E.B. Dubois wanted to re-insert black people back into world history by claiming famous figures as Black, while racists did it to smear people who opposed them. I think that sometimes the two motives overlap in a distressing way.
(Edit: I do think that racists say it because they think that Black people find/found slavery horrifying only because it happened to them, so therefore anyone who found it horrifying must have had an ulterior motive.)
It also doesn’t help that language changes over time, so the fact that Adams called Hamilton a “Creole bastard” is taken as proof that he was mixed-race, when “Creole” was used at the time to refer to anyone from the Caribbean regardless of race. (And when you bring in the fact that the “one drop rule” wasn’t codified until after the Civil War, it gets even more confusing.) According to Dubois, he was assured by the people he talked to in St. Croix and Nevis that Hamilton must have been mixed race because all of the illegitimate children there were mixed race, but Dubois visited 150 years after Hamilton was born there and, as we know, cultures change over time.
Here’s some of the Beethoven talk on the “yes” side — it seems like each side is pretty dug in on Totally! vs. Nuh-uh!, so there probably won’t be a way to prove it short of a DNA test. It comes down to whether you believe his mother was Moorish or not, and there doesn’t seem to be enough existing documentation to definitively prove it either way.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
This oversimplifies the issue. And also does an interesting reversal. It is not just that activists like Dubois wanted to re-insert black people into world history. Black people are part of history, always have been, always will be. It is rather a pushback against the racist attempt to erase black people from history and to deny reality.
And it is not just that the meaning of words like Creole change over time, it is that some whites and some blacks passing for white wanted Creole to mean something that excluded black ancestry, and historians and ethnographers have often been complicit in this nonsense. The one-drop rule has rarely been as absolute as people claim, nor has it been a legal standard, but society and custom enforce segregation and spurious distinctions. Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s advisors, could be described as mixed race because of her ancestry, but in the idiocy of common parlance, mixed race often is taken to mean that a person’s father and is demonstrably of different “race.”
Finally, Dubois may have been wrong about Hamilton, but this is not just because he was coming along 150 years later. Dubois was depending in part on oral tradition, and this tradition has often been more right than wrong, as DNA testing and other investigations have shown. But there is a long history of slaves (and servants of all colors in class-dominated societies) knowing secrets and being privy to the hypocrisies of the upper castes, but having what is often plainly known ignored or denied successfully by those in power.