Category: Uncategorized

Set in New Zealand, Hunt for the Wilderpeople tells the story of a recently adopted teenager’s flight through the wilderness with his adopted father to evade child protective authorities and the police. Saying more about the plot would reveal too much, but this is a very humane portrait of an adoptive mother, father, and orphan. New Zealand is a beautiful place and I’m always amazed by the way the timing of humor just “works” across English-speaking countries. I would definitely recommend this one; very diverting. If you appreciated JoJo Rabbit, you’ll like this one–it’s the same director, Taika Waititi.

mawkish – sentimental

ultra vires – (latin) outside of (beyond) one’s authority

intra vires – (latin) within proper authority

The word “especially” has no pronounceable “c” sound. Saying “eckspecially” will subject you to judgment by grammar snoots.

The phrase is “home in” not “hone in.” Saying “hone in” will also subject you judgment by grammar snoots. You can hone a knife, you can hone an argument (sharpen an argument). But you must home in on the answer.

Apparently a restaurant sponsored a haiku contest for poems about udon (a type of noodle). A few friends and I had an sms thread where we exchanged udon haiku. My friends George and Neil had much better entries than I did. Here are a few that I contributed. Correct, the last one has nothing to do with Udon. I also introduced rhyming which has nothing to do with haiku and everything to do with you, dear reader.

1. Udon is noodles
   Feudal lords bring the soy sauce
   Soy bomb, soy haram.
   
2. You cast chopstick sieve
   To catch the udon, to live
   Here, my child, a bib.
   
3. A gentleman’s C.
   A child of a legacy.
   Until SAT

One of the galling things about this pandemic is the degree of politicization. It’s so bad that the Chronicle of Higher Education, in its ongoing feature that lists colleges and universities that require the vaccination for students or employees, uses the familiar blue/red state designation.

The tabular view also includes the state’s electoral college vote:

I wrote the author of the article to ask, “why the politicization?” The answer was that there is evidence that the state’s political leaning has affected the state’s vaccine rollout strategy and college policies. Makes sense, but wow.

If you do tend to lean towards conservative beliefs, the Chronicle of Higher Education is a fun mailing list to be on. Every day there are articles in which academics express worry about the degree of conservative influence at colleges. Pretty much the mirror image of what conservatives worry about with regard to academia.

If you don’t like the electoral college it may partly be because you are WEIRD – western, educated, industrialized, rich (by world standards), and democratic. This means that in a red state, your values likely differ from a majority of your fellow state citizens and that your perspective differs from the democracy-phobic founders who put the electoral college in place to prevent straight up democracy that would negate the will of rural states in favor of national rule. In the 2016 election, even though he had fewer votes overall, Trump won a majority of votes in 2,626 counties to Hillary’s 487. From a more localized perspective, it would be strange for someone who has the support of so many counties to not be the winner.

We have given so much power over our lives over to the executive branch bureaucracy that it is hard for us to imagine that local rule is more important or that it is important to ensure that all *kinds* of people have an impact on the national election no matter how many people represent the “kind.” So many Americans are aligned with the values of professor Netflix and the national news media that they are disconnected from their neighbors and care more about the national will and the national historical story than the local- the electoral college seems like a quaint barrier to an unqualified good, democracy. But democracy is a dangerous form of government for minorities (two wolves and a sheep voting for what’s for supper) and fear of it is what drove the way American government was designed, to put checks on majority rule locally, to completely negate the tyranny of high-population centers nationally through the electoral college, and to only allow state legislators to elect senators. That last protection was chipped away by the 17th amendment. The electoral college is one of the few protections left.

Even if you don’t triage in the same way Reno does, his article is a good reorientation: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/say-no-to-deaths-dominion

In a frontier agrarian world, if you steal a man’s horse you may as well have killed the man and his family.

This is my first post in the post-COVID era.

I will write more later, but this is a real test of our mettle. God bless those of you who are still going to work and who are still making things, cleaning things, starting companies, hiring people, etc.

This photo is not of my first car, but it is the exact make, model, and color I had:

The funny thing is that I have not had a more futuristic-looking car since.

When I was a kid, the Chiquita banana logo looked like this:

The old one, as you can see, has an anthropomorphic banana with a fruit bowl on its head. I grew up in the 1980s, so maybe you’ve never seen that logo if you are much younger than I am.

But I didn’t see the anthropomorphic banana. Here’s what I saw:

Notice, it looked like a Kermit the Frog or Cookie Monster type monster.

For a while, I’ve been perplexed about why I saw it that way as a kid. Because, as an adult, I kept seeing the lady, but not the monster. I was perplexed, I now know, because they changed it at some point to a human lady with a fruit bowl on her head, Carmen Miranda style:

Mystery solved. And for the record, it took a long time to track down a photo of the original logo, adding to my confusion. I’ll admit, I still see the monster in the original one at first glance, especially if I see it at a smaller size as it would have been on a banana held by a younger me.