...more recent posts
Ellen Willis rip.
ed bradley, rip.
i am so happy i am in tear's
http://www.nytimes.com/
(skinny)
Such self-loathing is, of course, nothing new. “Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?” Henry Miller once asked. But Mamet has a ready answer for Miller: everyone else. The world hates the Jews, he writes, always has, always will. Liberal Jews who read The New York Times or listen to National Public Radio may not think so, but they are naďve; when the pogrom comes, he predicts, even lapsed Jews will search frantically for doorways with mezuzas. In fact, apart from various Internet wackos, anti-Semitism, at least the American strain, has waned; how else to explain the very assimilation Mamet so detests? But he writes as if Father Coughlin is still on the radio, Henry Ford still hawks The Dearborn Independent and Fritz Kuhn’s German American Bundists still march through Yorkville.
With equal fervor, Mamet depicts lapsed Jews as figures from Dante, full of pain and guilt and “anomie,” languishing in an ethnic limbo, scorned by Jew and gentile alike. Pathetic, self-lacerating losers, he calls them (sort of like gay Republicans). Naturally, no one’s fooled: to both themselves and those who hate them, they’ll always be Jews. Mamet subscribes to what an old Jew from Chicago — one a generation older than he — once told me: “You can change your noses, but not your Moses.”
But as near as I can tell, few wayward Jews feel such angst. We are no longer in the age of “The Jazz Singer,” where children steeped in Jewish learning break their poor pious fathers’ hearts by trading pulpits for prosceniums. They may feel a pang or two around their Christmas trees, but as assimilated children of assimilated parents, their Jewish ties were pretty attenuated already. Here, too, Mamet seems a generation or two too late. Given his prodigious talent and insight, one wonders why. Maybe it’s a bizarre form of nostalgia, for a time when, thanks largely to their enemies, Jews felt more fraternal, and many were shtarkers — tough guys — rather than the deracinated wimps he thinks we’ve become, people whose favorite Jew, as he puts it, is Anne Frank.
finally broadway is taking the tom moody demographic seriously. this makes sweeney todd seem like, um, musical theatre? angela lansbury eat your heart out, or at least let somebody else do it.
gameboy
san francisco hip-hop slang alert
Tejano Music Star Freddy Fender Dies
Hey New Yorkers, Lee Smolin is great. I highly recommend going to this panel if you are free tomorrow night.
THE COOPER UNION
EDGE NYC EVENT TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17!
INTELLIGENT THOUGHT: SCIENCE VERSUS THE INTELLIGENT DESIGN MOVEMENT
Panel discussion
|Jerry Coyne (Moderator), Neil Shubin, Lee Smolin, Seth Lloyd
Tuesday, Oct. 17, 6:30 pm
The Great Hall
7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue - Free
Intelligent design, the concept that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection, is a controversial topic sparking disparate views across the nation. An overwhelming majority of the scientific community views intelligent design as pseudoscience. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions and propose no new hypotheses of their own.
friday 13th bonus post
small aircraft crashes into high-rise nyc apartment building.
Suposedly Google just bought YouTube for 1.65 billion.
more surprising than noko setting off an atomic bomb?
yacht rock
i try to steer clear of the gratuitous news stories but i caught one line about the amish girls case. sounds awful.
As far as I know, this is not a joke. Shamrock City, the new Dublin. Who do they think they are, Dubai?
It’s the ultimate experience for kids – a night in an alternative universe at the Kids Sphere Hotel in Belgium. Known as the Atomium, a replica of an iron molecule with nine aluminum spheres (built for the World Fair of 1958), the complex has been renovated and updated to include overnight accommodation for children – dubbed the Kid Sphere hotel - set amongst the fascinating sci-fi exhibitions and original spheres. Kids are entertained by a packed calendar of events including films and there’s a restaurant at the top of the structure boasting panoramic view of the city of Brussels.
It seems some members of the Portland, Oregon police department murdered my dear old friend Jim-Jim.
I think I posted about this years ago, but I can't find it, and it's the anniversary again: Stanislav Petrov. Phew.
Interesting WWII story. I'll reserve judgement until I hear Bruno's opinion, but it sounds convincing:
In all this time however, every attempt at biological warfare has been essentially offensive. The idea has always been to incapacitate or kill the enemy. Except once, in Poland, during World War II, where a pair of quick-thinking doctors used a little-known organism to keep the Nazis at bay.
The microorganism is Proteus OX19. In most ways it’s an entirely ordinary little bacterium. Its one remarkable feature is that human antibodies for Proteus OX19 cross-react with the antibodies for Ricksettia – the bacterium responsible for the deadly disease typhus. Blood from a patient infected with Proteus Ox19 will give a false-positive in the most common typhus screening method, the Weil-Felix test.
Enter the Nazis into Poland....
Implementing the new homepage design is held up because the submitted design uses CSS code that happens to completely break on Mobile IE. Mobile IE may be a terrible browser (even worse than regular IE), but it's (sadly) popular. Determining what exactly is causing the break is non-trivial.
it's the last day of summer.................... so long summer of 2006