Because the old thread is long and growing tired.
Pancakes for breakfast! Who’s got a great recipe / cooking technique / reminiscence?
Very Late Night/Early Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (83)
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Little Nuts & ACORN
Latoya Peterson at Jezebel has the best concise explanation I’ve seen of the Great FOX News ACORN Scandal. She finds five key questions, and answers them, with an efficiency I can only wish the “established, professional” Media Village Idiots would use more often:
What does ACORN do?
Why did they come up in the 2008 election?
What’s happening with the current controversy?
Where have we seen James O’Keefe before?
What are the mitigating/aggravating factors here?
The comments are well worth reading, too. A number of people discuss their own history with ACORN, stressing the fact that a network of 1200 separate offices with a policy of hiring from the low-income neighborhoods they support, and the usual non-profit-organization tendency to underpay and overwork its staff, will inevitably offer a few soft targets for a right-wing Borat wanna-be with an unlimited budget and no more edifying hobbies to distract him. Since I, unlike Ms. Peterson, am not trying to be scrupulously unbiased, there was one comment I particularly enjoyed:
[T]here are two other “not-malice” possibilities that come to mind as well. 1) As has been pointed out, obvious real-life trolls were obvious and she was fucking with them. 2) When you work in community service in low-income and underprivileged communities, you are often helping people with various mental health problems and people who are just… off. You don’t want to just outright dismiss them, you want to welcome them and accept them, and you kind of develop an attitude of “let’s just hear this guy out.” You can wind up “hearing out” some genuinely messed up and terrible people, because you just kind of get used to folks coming in with very, very, very weird and sketchy claims.
I’m sure Mr. O’Keefe would appreciate the irony that he might just have been mistaken for a genuinely brain-damaged petty criminal looking for a sympathetic audience…
Thursday Night Open Thread
Until John gets around to posting pet pictures, and/or Bad Horse Filly’s “Menu for the Weekend.”
*** Update ***
Thanks, Anne Laurie. I forgot, yet again. The menu:
Seared Ginger Tuna Rice
Mint-Papaya-Pineapple Salsa
Tossed Salad Sliced
Apples w/Caramel dipping sauce
And the cute:
New Dog Book I’m Looking Forward to Reading
Cathleen Schine, whose novel The New Yorkers was a perceptive window into the difference between a person and a-person-who-lives-with-a-dog, reviews INSIDE OF A DOG: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know for the New York Times:
Dogs are, says Horowitz, “creatures of the nose.” To help us grasp the magnitude of the difference between the human and the canine olfactory umwelts, she details not only the physical makeup of a dog nose (a beagle nose has 300 million receptor sites, for example, compared with a human being’s six million), but also the mechanics of the canine snout. People have to exhale before we can inhale new air. Dogs do not. They breath in, then their nostrils quiver and pull the air deeper into the nose as well as out through side slits. Specialized photography reveals that the breeze generated by dog exhalation helps to pull more new scent in. In this way, dogs not only hold more scent in at once than we can, but also continuously refresh what they smell, without interruption, the way humans can keep “shifting their gaze to get another look.”
Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing “gaze” also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction — but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.”
When I got my first dog, specifically because I wanted a partner for AKC obedience training, my friends in science-fiction fandom wondered why I’d choose such a demanding and un-nerdly hobby. But the fascinating thing about dealing with dogs, for me, is that it’s as close as I’ll probably ever get to an ongoing, two-way, working communion with a non-human intelligence*. The fact that so much of the First Contact conversation is going to involve (non-verbal) dialogue like “Huh? LOLwhut?” or “Nope, don’t feel like doing that right now, get back to me later” or “Nag, nag, nag — why is this relationship never about MY needs? ! ?” is no doubt a salutary reminder about the fictitiousness of science fiction.
New Dog Book I’m Looking Forward to ReadingPost + Comments (45)
Best Possible Comment on Glenn Beck’s “9/12”
Today Alex Pareene is my hero:
On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as “great” as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed… And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.
So thank fucking christ that the Commander in Chief is no longer subjecting the nation to death porn.
No, this year it’s limited to a nutty little cult leader on basic cable who is encouraging his radicalized band of fanatical followers to invade the cities where the tragedy actually happened in order to shock the populace back into fear.
Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America.
Best Possible Comment on Glenn Beck’s “9/12”Post + Comments (160)
Late Night / Early Morning Open Thread
“I have not the least expectation that the plan will be adopted. In South Carolina there is less enterprise, less public spirit, than in any other state; and that, Heaven knows, reduces it low enough.”
Theodosia Burr* was writing (to her father) about prison reform, not health care reform, and there were fewer states in 1808, but it would seem that certain proud Sothrun traditions change slowly if at all.
Although, if you’re feeling indignant enough, here is a site where you can contribute to Wrong Joe Wilson’s opponent.
As for last night’s speech, it should always be remembered: President Obama started his career as a community organizer. Which means he is used to (and most excellently skilled at) running an organization by “working for consensus”, a set of skills quite different from the ones needed for running the more usual top-down business/military/GOP organizations. In an authoritarian organization, for better or worse, at the end of the day what the Big Kahuna says goes is what goes. Even if he’s the best, most open-minded Big Kahuna in the universe, heading up a team of uniquely gifted & prickly talents – he can ask for input, he can get input he hasn’t asked for, but when hammer meets nail it’s the Big Kahuna’s hammer that gets to choose the nail. And the other members of the team are always aware of this reality; barring things get so bad that grenades get rolled into the colonel’s tent, no private in the army forgets for long that the colonel is the one setting the agenda.
Late Night Open Thread
Our new foster papillon “Gloria” got turfed from her last home because she made the dog-logical mistake of attacking their tiny, elderly Queen Bee girl dog. In the three-days-and-counting she’s been here with us, Gloria has given our elderly, imperious (and much larger, tho still smaller than Gloria) Princess Buta-Hime-Sama a very wide berth, even while scrumming cautiously with our two boy dogs. This is good news for readers of the Media Village Courtiers, because it proves that a born lapdog can learn from its mistakes, given sufficient impetus.
On the other hand, Gloria doesn’t drink out of the toilet bowl, even though she’s physically capable of doing so (and let me state for the record that when I fell in love with papillons, I never expected to meet one tall enough to achieve this). So it’s possible that she’s just got more naturally discerning tastes than Dean Broder, Dick Cohen, or David Brooks…