Mary Kay,
I did the same thing with Hitch. As for the Newton/Williams resemblance, I don't see it for some reason. Frederick the Great looks like, I don't know, an Escher drawing or something.
My nominee for "most what you'd imagine": Dante.
Jo Walton,
Seconded.
I'm not sure I can say how completely I disagree and stay polite.
Patrick, I don't want to assume what your reasons would be for censoring yourself here, but don't stay polite on my account. I'm not going to have my feelings hurt by anything you might say to me, and would, in fact, welcome a rebuttal (you'll notice I also said I'd be happy to be wrong).
I was thinking, when I made that comment, of how the world sees our flag now, not how we see it, and I still feel that no matter how many t-shirts we wear, it's not going to redeem the Stars and Stripes in the world's eyes. It will take a lot more to do that. And in the meantime, a flag on a shirt is likely to be misinterpreted, unless the rest of the message is unambiguously non-right-wing, which Teresa's Old English text, translated or not, doesn't seem likely to be. And I would not want to reinforce, however unintentionally, the rah-rah knee-jerk patriotism associated with our flag.
Now, a t-shirt with a flag and your statement, as quoted by Mary Kay--that would be another matter altogether.
melissa and Larry Brennan:
My high school Spanish was what taught me about English grammar. Most of what I can actually articulate about English grammatical structures comes from my study of Spanish (and later linguistics), as opposed to any English class I ever took.
And Xopher, I have to agree with you about the grammar checker in Word. I find it worse than useless, unless I want to amuse myself with its ridiculous results.
Well, I am a U.S. citizen, and I'm still uncomfortable with using the flag. It means too many bad things right now, and, imo, it can only be redeemed from those associations from the top down: by the dramatic change in government, in policy, in our national direction and actions that we are longing and working for, and not from the bottom up, by a grassroots campaign.
Yes, we must start at the grassroots level to bring about that transformation; but I am concerned that in the meantime, the flag has been so thoroughly despoiled in its symbolism that its use on this shirt would be more likely than not to be (badly?) misinterpreted, thus undermining "the point," as Patrick says. The message as a whole could be all too easily understood as some sort of "united we stand against the terrorists" pseudo-patriotic thing.
That, at least, is my fear. I would, of course, be happy to be wrong. If the flag is to be used, though, I would vote for an archaic font (but not script--nothing that looks like our founding documents), as the anachronistic effect is perhaps more likely to forestall or disrupt the misreading I foresee. And actually, regardless of background, I think the old-style font would be cool.
"Be of good cheer"
And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Sooner or later. Hopefully sooner, starting tomorrow night.
Amen.
Mary Kay,
Re right-wing disinformation: I was doing GOTV calling to Ohio on Saturday, and I spoke to one woman who had been leaning Kerry, but was concerned about his support for "human cloning."
Turned out she'd gotten a mailer alleging that, along with some other lies. The force of print is still such that voters can be credulous; this woman's refrain, every time I gave her Kerry's true position, was, "Oh--I guess I read this thing wrong." I was able to gently point out that she needed to consider the source, and that, sadly, sometimes people send out information that isn't exactly accurate.
We passed the word along to the Ohio folk (I'm in California), so I'm hoping some of the last-minute cash can cover the cost of a follow-up mailing from the Kerry campaign, and that this voter will be able to correct her neighbors if any of them bring the phony charges up. But of course this sort of thing will be going on in every battleground state.
On Rovism (not just Rove) as the real problem:
Some good analysis/commentary here.
And, what James said about voting. The best thing we can do in the short term is get people to the polls; an overwhelming Kerry victory is the only thing that will stop the presidency from being decided by the Supremes again, as the linked material above makes clear.
Stefan,
According to Atrios, when they showed that ad on Crossfire, the audience laughed.
He's now calling it the "puppies" ad . . .
I see that Zara Baxter and Lis Riba were posting my thoughts while I was so carefully composing them.
But Larry Brennan's idea is the really scary one.
The problem with them having Osama is that they haven't demonstrated that much patience in the past. They blew our undercover guy in Al Qaeda's identity, simply because they wanted to reassure us that the most recent threat level hike was genuine and not a political ploy. If they see potential political gain in something, they tend to go for it immediately if not sooner. It really seems to me that if they'd caught him, Bush would have insisted on trumpeting it to the world immediately, and screw the long-term benefit. This is not a man with good impulse control, and Rove can't override him when he wants his way (see Fallujah, attack on).
I think the not-mentioning-Osama phenomenon is better explained in terms of Bush's inability to admit mistakes, and concomitant unwillingness to be questioned about why we left Afghanistan to go into Iraq. Hence his infamous "I don't spend that much time thinking about him . . . I'm just not that concerned about him." Besides, having Osama "out there" somewhere helps create the psychological atmosphere of fear and dependence that Bush is counting on to get elected.
As for what the October Surprise will be, we've got the Sinclair smear job, which I've no doubt Rove is behind 100%. The voter suppression activities going on in all the battleground states are also classic Rove. The other possibilities are another terrorist attack; the threat of a terrorist attack in Democratic voting areas; and further Kerry smears (or some combination of the above). The only thing I'm sure of is that there are no depths to which Rove would not go; his ability to pull off something sufficiently horrific is what's in question.
Shelly Rae:
Early Drama and Feminist Theory: I did a paper a couple of years ago on protofeminist rhetoric in Julian of Norwich, and another on Hroswitha. I'm technically a Victorianist, but tend to wander; recent topics include sentimentality in The West Wing and blogs as political dissent. Supposedly it looks better if you publish all in one area while working toward your PhD, but I might have trouble with that . . .
If it's not impertinent of me, what's your dissertation topic?
I second Kip M.'s endorsement of Josh Marshall. Good sources, good analysis.
James McDonald: Personally, I don't think the two motives--avenging Daddy and showing Daddy up--are at all incompatible in Bush's psyche. I think he wants to do both.
Erik: Bush as figurehead--absolutely. I hadn't known until recently that the person in charge of Bush's Veep search during his campaign was, in fact, Dick Cheney. After exhausting all possibilities, he was reluctantly forced to conclude that he was really the best person for the job. What an amazing qwinkydink.
A couple of wrinkles that haven't been mentioned here yet: There's one report that when the King of Jordan was here a few days ago, he brought with him hard evidence that Chalabi was an Iranian agent; that's what resulted in Chalabi's $340,000 monthly allowance finally being shut off. There is, of course, no love lost between Chalabi and the Jordanians.
And re: the midnight raid, there have been hints that after it was announced Chalabi would not be part of the new Iraqi government, he began planning to overthrow whoever was given nominal control on June 30. The papers being sought either relate to those plans, and/or contain damaging information about the administration that they need to get their hands on before they cut Chalabi loose for good.
My cousin keeps asking why Chalabi wasn't arrested in the raid if they know he's a double agent, and I keep telling her it's because he has the goods on them. His Iranian connections have been suspected for years--another bit of inconvenient information the administration chose to overlook. He was almost certainly a double agent who was given classified information, and there are relatively few people in the administration who could have provided it to him.
Josh Marshall reports that the FBI has opened an investigation into identifying the sources; the top candidates--amost the only candidates--are Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their immediate underlings. If proof is found, they're going to wish they were back in the good old days of the Plame scandal.
Chris Q: up until the "I work for Katy" part, it should continue: "My friends all have Porsches, I must make amends," mais no?
Bravo, Mike. Hilarious, brilliant, superb.
Okay, I'll play:
BA with double major in theater and linguistics, most of an MA in English lit, now slogging along the PhD path in English and wondering if I want to stay on it.
Theater and linguistics both create transferable skills in the areas of communications and analysis, which are useful in life as well as formal employment, but I've done nothing that officially used either one.
Xopher: the branching diagrams of NP and VP and the like are still in use; not so the realization lines. There are still competing diagrams/theories of language production, not to mention acquisition. If I'd gone on to grad studies in linguistics, my holy grail would have been trying to produce unified theories of language acquisition and production processes.
bryan: :: snort::
Now I'm going to be late to class because I was enjoying this thread too much. Do they give degrees in procrastination?
The discussion of poetry.com and its ilk brings back memories. When I was about 14 or 15, I sent in three poems to a similar contest. I was excited by the possibility of actually being published until they responded with an offer to print one of the poems in their compilation, which I could purchase for only $50 or some such outrageous price.
Even that young, I was cynical enough to see through them. Besides the money issue, I was made suspicious by the fact that the poem they wanted to publish was by far the worst of the three (not that the other two were stellar, but they were at least honest efforts. The "winning" poem was a bipolar monstrosity, first stanza literal nonsense, second stanza self-righteous indignant tripe; I had sent it in only at a well-meaning friend's urging). It was, however, the only one that rhymed, which may have been why they chose it.
Since I would have been frankly embarrassed to have that poem in print, even apart from buying the compilation, I didn't bother to return the permission form. Of course, the odds of anyone ever actually reading it would have been miniscule, but the mere possibility was mortifying enough to overcome the ego gratification of having a publishing credit to my name.
Teresa, are you going to leave us in suspense indefinitely about the provenance of the title? Inquiring minds and all that . . .
Claude, the Sixpence lyrics were also what I came up with, but the Card and Quimby quotes seem like better possibilities to me.
Good point, Connie. I also had enough cultural context to get the gist, and thought the fox was a seal, but when I imagined the picture extending just far enough for its ears to be visible, then I could see it as a fox.
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