The above-the-fold portion of this Language Log post:
There's been a new development in the BBC parrot-telepathy story. Last year, the reference to telepathy was silently removed; but now the whole parrot has been airbrushed out of the journalistic record.
So Joyful Joe Hippo is a plush Bible toy. He comes with a toy Bible with his favorite verse.
AND, the Bible contains a little recordable sound module, which parents can use to record Bible verses in Joe's "cute and funny" (TERRIFYING) voice from the website.
Sample verses include:
Alligator--elsewhere you allude to the bit of A Moveable Feast in which F. Scott Fitzgerald gets so worried about the size of his penis that he makes Ernest Hemingway look at it. The scene in question:
Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, 'You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.'
'No, I didn't.'
'I thought I had told you.'
'No. You told me a lot of things but not that.'
'That is what I have to ask you about.'
'Good. Go on.'
'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'
'Come out to the office,' I said.
...
We came back into the room and sat down at the table.
'You're perfectly fine, I said. 'You are O.K. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'
'Those statues may not be accurate.'
'They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.'
Stanislaw Lem, on twentieth century fiction. From this interview:
ICR: In some ways, you are one of the most modern writers. Your fiction is usually based on the contemporary scientific problems and paradigms. But in other ways, you seem to have more affinities with 19th-century writers, what with your citations from Swinburne, your invocations of Schopenhauer, your Nietzschean problems. Do you find you admire 19th-century fiction more than 20th-century fiction?
Lem: The literature of the 20th century has lost its battle, or at least finds itself in retreat. I can see more and more books in bookstores, yet fewer and fewer ones that I would like to read. The tales of refugees from totalitarian countries reduce themselves to an exhaustive catalogue of social and psychological suffering that such systems treat their citizens to. These books cannot pick their readers up, and the lessons they teach are not pleasant. One could say that the job of literature is not primarily to entertain, move, and cheer us up, but as Conrad said, to "bring the visible world to justice." Well, in order to bring this world to justice, it is first necessary to understand it with one's intellect, to appreciate the wealth of its diversity. That, however, is now impossible, at least for any narrative convention involving plot, the sort that was crafted into perfection by l9th-century prose. (A fine exemplar, if not pinnacle, of this sort of prose is Tolstoy's War and Peace, for it contains both a sweeping historical view and a focus on individual people and groups.) Since I consider this epic approach no longer feasible today, if only because a microcosm of a few individuals does nothing to reflect the larger macrocosm of our planet, I aim instead to create models of the major problems that lie ahead of us, problems that humanity will have to face right now and in the coming decades.
Perhaps the retreat from the epic form was unavoidable, but it need not have meant sliding into escapism. I don't believe that literature should not entertain and humor us, but the goal which it must never surrender is that of being a medium for the intellectual, the philosophical, and the reflective (about the human condition). This is why I hold in contempt the nouveau roman and other assorted exercises of the avant garde, including whatever tortures human speech is subjected to by the lot of current experimenters. The writing of little poems for beautifully decorated fat monthlies like The Missouri Review, where they appear on glossy paper, is infantile.8 The fact that the mass production of these little poems never ceases is to me a symptom of the boundless naïveté of their authors and editors. At any rate, we happen to live in decadent, declining times, a fact that can be readily seen in contemporary music and art. It is impossible to envision either one in the 21st century, because "everything has been tried already." Not knowing what is ahead, I write in order to find out a little about it.
You, on the other hand, looked like a French peasant. But clean, as far as that goes.
This article in The Register astounded me. Apparently, the US military is working towards a massive simulation of the entire planet:
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR....This whole project reminds me of the Stanislaw Lem story "Non Serviam," in which simulated beings begin to debate their proper relationship to their creator. Lem, if you haven't read anything by him, is one of the best science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. His short stories are akin to Borges', with more investment in probable futures as a means of interrogating philosophical problems.
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors....
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
Hippo, I just wanted to tell you that you looked dashing last night and that the quail eggs were a good choice.
As for black tights, yeah, what's up with that? I know that when I wear opaque black tights on my little crocodile legs, I look svelte. The tights, along with the pregnancy tops and 1960's-style tunic dresses allow a forgiving silhouette--the ladies who wear the tights now are just trying to prolong the magic and hide their winter weight into summer.