A night dark and cold as no other night in no other place could be,
Domestic dogs barking into the subzero oxygen;
Though the earth is growing warmer this place has never been colder,
The pure, murderous stillness of heat-death reigns supreme.

A young man is slaying orcs with his guild from the comfort of a basement.
Four layers of insulation and warm electric light surround him.

An old man is counting his presidential dollars in neat golden stacks
And reminiscing of the days when a dollar bought a meal.

This is the planet Hoth, this is the land of Melkor,
This is Siberia, this is a Yukon River homestead,
Could a Hawaiian ever understand it?
Could a Puerto Rican ever grasp it?

Wisconsin, January 19, 2012

I've stopped reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet at page 126.  David Mitchell tries really, really hard to scrub all Orientalism from his story, but the fact remains that he chose to write about a (married) white man falling in love with an unattainable Japanese woman.  This is supposed to generate some kind of deep human sympathy for the white man, and I won't go along with it. 

Doctor Marinus, the most interesting character, punctures the novel's own hackneyed sentiments in this piece of dialogue:

'It is not even Miss Aibagawa after whom you lust, in truth.  It is the genus "The Oriental Woman" who so infatuates you.  Yes, yes, the mysterious eyes, the camellias in her hair, what you perceive as meekness.  How many hundreds of you besotted white men have I seen mired in the same syrupy hole?'
'You are wrong for once, Doctor. There's no--'
'Naturally, I am wrong: Domburger's adoration for his Pearl of the East is based on chivalry: behold the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race! Behold our Occidental knight, who alone divines her inner beauty!'

To y'all semi-literate denizens of the Internet:

I know homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings) can be tricky.  But for crying out loud, "rain", "rein", and "reign" should not be.

RAIN:  watery precipitation that falls from the sky.  German cognate regen.
REIN:  a strap used to control a horse.   Latin cognate frenum.
REIGN:  the period of rule by a king, emperor, or powerful principle (e.g. "reign of terror") Latin cognate regnum.
 
Perhaps it's the fact that hardly anybody outside Mongolia rides horses on the job anymore that causes this silly confusion.

This is my preview / non-review of the movie Anonymous, coming out this Friday:

The idiots who believe Shakespeare didn't write the plays of Shakespeare are no more respectable than the idiots who believe President Obama was born in Kenya.  Both kinds of idiots have a hard time accepting that talent sometimes comes from obscurity and villainous* backgrounds.  One kind of idiot is concentrated in the base of the Republican party, the other kind in Hollywood circles of actors whose egos have grown tumescent.

If you were tempted to see this movie, I advise you to watch The Princess Bride instead.  It will have much more of reality in it.  That is all.

*I'm using the word in the pre-modern sense, which meant someone of common birth and inferior education.  See Henry VI:  "base dunghill villain and mechanical, I'll have thy head for this thy traitor's speech."

People who hate Rachel Maddow for being "mannish" aren't talking about her short hair, I suspect.  It's those opinions she has, and those books she reads.  A real American goodwife (and she is actually a wife) should lock her mind away and not sully her character with book-learning....

The NY Times reports:

The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, will travel to Zimbabwe this weekend as part of an African tour and will seek to persuade President Robert G. Mugabe to help end a rift among the country’s Anglicans, according to the archbishop’s office here. Archbishop Williams, the spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, wrote to Mr. Mugabe this year and urged him to stop “the continuing bullying, harassment and persecution” of Anglicans who support the global Anglican Communion rather than a breakaway group led by Nolbert Kunonga, an excommunicated bishop and ally of the president. Mr. Kunonga, an American-trained priest, broke with the church, one of Zimbabwe’s major denominations, in 2007, saying that gay priests and congregants had gained too much influence...

I'm all for dialogue and listening, but this seems like the very definition of a doomed mission.  Hopefully it won't give Mugabe an excuse to imprison or torture more dissenters in his country.

Worth noting that in 2007, when Kunonga broke with the Communion, there was just one openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church, out of 110 dioceses.  Too much influence, indeed.

Actor Mark Ruffalo has some choice words for those who superficially attack the Occupy Wall Street protesters:

When people critique this movement and say spurious things about the protesters' clothes or their jobs or the general way they look, they are showing how shallow we have become as a nation. They forget that these people have taken time out of their lives to stand up for values that are purely American and in the interest of our democracy. They forget that these people are encamped in an urban park, where they are not allowed to have tents or other normal camping gear. They are living far outside their comfort zone to protect and celebrate liberty, equality and the rule of law.

He goes on:

Their message is very clear and simple: get money out of the political process; strive for equality in taxation and equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, social status, sexual preference or age. We must stop poisoning our food, air and water for corporate greed. The people on Wall Street and in the banking industrial complex that destroyed our economy must be investigated and brought to justice under the law for what they have done by stealing people's homes and savings.

My criticisms:  "Getting money out of the political process" is perhaps not the first thing we should be aiming at.  It's "sexual orientation," not "sexual preference."   And there is no "banking industrial complex," because the biggest banks aren't industrial.  They are parasitic, sucking from the economy of real goods and necessary public services.  Nonetheless, I thank Mark for trying to articulate the goal of this movement.