Smirk

 While looking up Shea Butter on Wikipedia, I ran across the following disambiguatory disclaimer:

 ”Karite” redirects here. For the religious movement, see Karaite Judaism.

Also, be sure to check out the table of “Edible Fats and Oils” at the bottom of the page.

(Hmm…maybe I should just go ahead and inaugurate and “cosmetics” category…nah.)

Mathematical “Purity”

This is a riot. I guess when God said, “Go forth and multiply,” some people got the wrong message…

Morning notes

I’m rather amused at one reaction to the recent bout of sub-zero wind chill we’ve been having here in the Chicago area. All the brow-furrowing and idle chattering about global warming–which used to be a by-word back in October, when it was so hot that people running the marathon were dropping like flies–has suddenly ceased. Of course, that’s not to say anything at all one way or the other about the scientific underpinnings of the issue…but given the nearly hysterical attention received by one side (sometimes at the expense of dispassionate accuracy), it’s slightly schadenfreude-licious to see all the shivering.

In other news, my gym has recently posted amicably clever exercise-related messages in various places, one of which on the fronts of two sequential stairs reads something like:

Before the Stairmaster

There were Stairs.

See? That’s mildly witty and enough to get you started along a decent mood curve for physical activity. But as I was pedaling away at the recumbent bike, it occurred to me: What if instead of that, it read:

Before the Stairmaster

There was the Master…

Impressionable

This article reproduces the following quote from Seventeen magazine [emphasis mine]:

“Sex is so confusing. On the one hand, you’re being told not to do it (by parents and teachers) — that it’s ‘wrong,’ that there’s no way you’re ready, or that it could lead to diseases. On the other hand, you see (in real life, in movies, and on TV) that sex is a natural, healthy, and fun part of loving relationships. You also have information about birth control coming at you from every direction: friends, TV commercials, maybe sex-ed class. You think you know how to protect yourself, but it seems like such a hassle when all you want to do is focus on those totally romantic, wonderfully tingly feelings you have about your guy!”

Um…prescinding entirely from the question of adolescent sexuality, is anyone else bothered by the fact that movies and tv shows popular with the high school female demographic are asserted as accurate representations of the content and consequences of “real life” in explicit contrast to the advice of parents and teachers?

Intriguing. Fascinating. Exciting. Depressing.

How the world views Obama.

Harry Caray

This is wonderful.

Statistician quote

Commenting on a statement by his friend, John Derbyshire writes,”  ‘If you use a fat line you don’t have to be as accurate.’   That should be inscribed over the door of some Academy somewhere.”

Far better than I could have done

This is precisely why I’ve been banging on and on for years now about things like The Daily Show and why the “It’s only a joke”/”Free speech” argument isn’t quite as airtight as most people I’ve talked to about it seem to want it to be.

Toasty

…is a decent description of me at the moment…but that’s not of importance.  The point of this post is to swing this blog back to interesting literary matters, it having dwelt a little to much lately on inconsequential miscellany and on matters rather close to my heart and therefore somewhat inappropriate for the oh-so-professional tone you readers (all 3 of you, being generous) have come to know and love and mourn the recent departure thereof.

Spiel gespielt, here’s a poem by Philip Larkin that I initially disliked, but have grown to appreciate.  It’s called “High Windows”.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

John Derbyshire (a writer I like only very intermittently, but then do extremely like) once labeled Larkin a “conservative” poet.  I picked him up for that reason about two years ago and was somewhat disappointed, not exactly having banked on Derbyshire’s use of the word “conservative” in the more austere English sense.  I’ve since grown to appreciate Larkin much more, and I see this poem as a fundamentally conservative statement of the old saw that the “the grass is greener…”.

But what is quite different from that adage and all it entails is that fact that the poem explicitly eschews quaint verbal formulations and recognizes that life occurs to one with an immediacy beyond the spoken word: “And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows”.   In other words, there are no words.  Or at least, no ultimately effectual words.  It puts me in the mind of the following from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” explaining Max Weber:

    No matter what conservatives may think, traditions had a beginning  that was not traditional.  They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist.  the fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation.  The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator.  Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinizes charisma.

Now, Bloom of course doesn’t buy into Weber wholesale, to say the least; nevertheless, there is a point to Weber’s analysis that’s expressed quite nicely in Thoreau’s maxim that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, namely, with the idea that there is something more out there to be got and savored.

I get the impression that one of Larkin’s points in this poem is to parody the naive version of that idealism in the rather childish image of the “long slide”.  As though if only you could do A, B, and C, 1, 2, 3, lickity-split, Bob’s your uncle, and there you go, down the long slide to happiness, having chuck out the window all the inhibiting thoughts and habits the former generation crammed down your throat such that it becomes difficult to actualize your every whim.  There’s also something rather base and typical about his description of the young couple having intercourse that jars with the notion that it could be a desired “paradise”, as he terms it, in the deeper sense of that word.   Fixating upon “high windows” looking out at a peaceful oblivion is to ignore the illuminated indoors of one’s actual surroundings, where life actually happens in all its unfair and non-ideal semi-glory.  I believe Larkin recognizes the temptation to consume the lotos, and the nonetheless rejects it.

Duuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

People get published for this…?

“The researchers found that playing drinking games, having a personal history of binge drinking, attending a party with many other intoxicated people, and attending a themed event all predicted higher blood alcohol levels.”

(Hat Tip: Jonah Goldberg at The Corner)