Thanks to Boxjam for an impromptu Quiz on the Friday that Wasn't.
No, the Wombat family didn't go shopping. We went to the Central Park Zoo, because there is something so delicious about the fact that right at pretty much the heart of Manhattan Island there is a Monkey Island is just too great.
We learned in the Penguin House that the only time the volunteer had seen the Chinstrap penguins and the other kind of penguins (I forget their species) separate into two species-specific groups was when they were really scared, as a whole, by something, and that this had happened twice in his many years at the zoo. When pressed to say what had scared them, he let on that it was some kind of Major Zookeeping F-up, and furthermore he dare not say as he has been Warned About Having Too Big a Mouth Already.
I felt in that moment quite bad for the frightened penguins.
Also, that night Gavin and I went to see The Dying Gaul, which was great except it is now in my mind that there is this odd sort of particular genre of small-budget-psychological thriller-but-slick-and-starring-moderately-big-but-not-too-big actors things. The Deep End; Swimming Pool; Sexy Beast (OK, Sir Ben is a little bigger star than the principals in these others, but you get my drift).
Here's the weird thing -- swimming pools play an important role in all but one of the above, and in that one Lake Tahoe is central to the film.
Is it just me?
In haste I type. Answer the following, and be lauded.
What Calcutta-born writer gave us A Shabby Genteel Story, On Being Found Out, and a tale adapted by one of the most famous filmmakers of the 20th century, (for which special cinematographic equipment was used)? As a bonus: he recorded that his ten-year-old daughter's favorite book was a popular work by a contemporary, and that she demanded to know when he would write one like it. What was the book?
First correct guess to comments wins a salad with house dressing. No Googling or doing ingesting the memories of the dead a la The Book of the New Sun. One guess per comment but comment as often as you like.
If one could step back and view the currents of panic, denial and aggression which are convulsing the Bush Administration these days from some kind of Olympian remove, it might be possible to shake one's head and wryly marvel at the sight. The bizarre arrogance of Bush's recent formulations -- which amount to the argument that anyone who acknowledges recorded history is aiding and abetting the enemies of freedom -- ought to be the occasion for amazed laughter at the naked absurdity of his case.
It's not, however, working for me. I'm mostly just sickened by the development that the Senate is working hard to rule out habeas corpus, one of the crucial bulwarks of individual liberty, with regard to "enemy combatants." The "compromise" described is better than Senator Graham's reprehensible, Soviet-style original proposal, but still a needless and dangerous rejection of openness and the pursuit of justice. The consequences of how we've been handling the most basic questions about detainees -- do we have any defensible reason to suspect any given person we hold in custody? -- are stomach-turning.
As is the leak panic with regard to the reports of overseas CIA detention and torture facilities. The "fury" over the leaks is clearly an attempt to change the subject away from the pertinent question: precisely, why this ethically monstrous, legally murky and (from a standpoint of national security) amazingly short-sighted practice was undertaken in the first place? (And, yes, the President had the gall to mention the "gulags" in good old Evil Empire in his Veterans Day speech.)
Finally, there's the memory hole into which the President insists we thrust everything we might recall about the lead-up to war. Dr. Green makes the pertinent point (scroll down to the Nov. 12 entry for the full Mikey). I excerpt with, I hope, his approval:
Republicans claim that there was a near consensus supporting its opinions. Its contention that Iraq was pursuing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons was widely supported in the US and European states. Furthermore, most of the leading Democrats voted for the war. Democrats claim that Bush lied about the intelligence on Iraq or, at least, that he manipulated the information that he had. The Republicans’ claims are true but irrelevant. The Democrats’ claims may or may not be true, but they are also irrelevant.
My reason for saying that is quite simple. No one seriously maintains that, say, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Hilary Clinton … (name a Democrat) would have gone to war against Iraq on the basis of that information. No other government in the world pushed for war against Iraq. The only major political figures on Earth who thought that war was a sensible reaction to the information available are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
Every other “supporter” got in line behind the administration, conceding that it had the authority to engage in a war, not the substance of its decision. None were independently pressing for it. The buck stops there.
OK -- the setup for today's quiz is a little lengthy, but by gum-arabic it's worth the trip. And if it's all too much more boring even than usual, why not skip on down to the free-for-all coda (about codas) below?
Roland Lawrence LaPrise, born in 1912, was granted the copyright to a composition that he and his his Sun Valley, Idaho-based band The Ram Trio, played for the entertainment of the ski-lodge crowd there in the late 1940s. In the mid-1950s, it became a nationwide sensation when it appeared as the B-side of another hit by Ray Anthony's big band.
The original act of creation that brought the hit to light is, however, in some dispute. The British songwriter Jimmy Kennedy claimed to have written a nearly identical song during World War II. Laprise was later sued by another man who claimed a 1946 authorship, and they settled out of court.
Finally, lyrics to a very similar song -- with a somewhat different title -- also appear in the 1940 anthology of Shaker folk culture, A Gift to Be Simple.
What was the title of LaPrise's hit song? For a bonus point, name the hit on the other side of the Ray Anthony single mentioned above. For double bonus points and the admiration of all, name the hit song Jimmy Kennedy wrote that was inspired by a holiday picture postcard he received.
First correct answer posted to comments wins a rare, slightly foxed copy of Selected Works of Deep Purple as Transcribed for the Concertina (missing the last page of "Smoke on the Water", but once you get that far you can pretty much work out the rest of it, I think). No Googling or doing Flowers for Algernon-like experiments on your child's hamster in the hopes of breeding a superintelligent hamster equipped to help you answer this question. It's been tried. Anyway, one guess per comment but go wild with the comments.
THE CODA: So, a recent re-listen to the New Pornographers Twin Cinema prompted me to realize how commonly (and I think, pleasingly), they employ codas to their songs. Some (as in their very first single "Mass Romantic") have a line or two of vocals, often repeated, as if a second chorus. Others (see "Miss Teen Wordpower" on The Electric Version) are instrumentals.
This got me thinking about codas in rock/pop in general. Excluding straightforward rave-up endings (which don't always employ or introduce a new musical theme), how common are they? I think they're rare, but perhaps I'm overlooking many examples. I can only think of a few off of the top of my head: Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love", Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain" (which almost seems too close to just an extension of the chorus) and maybe Rush's "Spirit of Radio" with its little "Sounds of Silence" parody tacked onto the end.
What am I missing? Feel free to mix the coda-suggestions in with the quiz answers. I'm feeling anarchic.
I had fully intended to post something about the administration's apparent strategy to turn the page from the Scooter Libby indictment by aggressively pursuing our status as "That Country That Might or Might Not Be Torturing People." (Or, as Jane Mayer's new article helpfully reminds us "That Country Whose Justice Department Officials Are All So Wrapped Up in the Can-We-Torture Thing That There Is Literally No One Available to Prosecute Accused Torturers.")
But, what exactly should I be most enraged about? Our failure to prosecute well-known abuses? The CIA's own little gulag archipelago? The blank check for interrogators Cheney insists we write?
Then there's the Alito nomination. He may or may not be the devil incarnate, but what boggles and frustrates the Wombat is the general failure to properly parse his dissenting opinion on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which Alito argued that spousal notification (as a pre-requisite to an abortion) was justifiable because it was meaningless. Given that we knew this nominee would be a card-carrying conservative, I'm hardly shocked by where he came down in the case. But his reasoning should be greeted with sterner analysis than I've been hearing (although this isn't bad.)
Meanwhile, the nightmares continue.
It's all too much. And what did I really want to post about? The propensity of some rock bands to end their songs with codas.
Maybe next time.
Over at MeFi, there's quite the obnoxiously braying chorus around Dahlia Lithwick's recent essay about the Samuel Alito nomination. Apparently Lithwick's strong (and to my mind completely appropriate) rhetoric toward the conclusion of her piece are damning in the eyes of even posters who ostensibly agree with her main position.
Lithwick has been an absolutely indispensible writer on SCOTUS throughout the entire Bush administration; the fact that she's been allowed so much room to work is in fact a tribute to Slate's strong commitment to covering the courts. Few newspapers or magazines have featured such consistent attention to the courts, in a readable style, when there isn't a nomination fight going on. And when there is, Lithwick's attack is always to question the nature of the narrative being obsessed over by everyone else -- and what that reveals.
As for the pile-on of cavils over at MeFi -- one of the ironies of the age of the blog is the frequent criticism of journalists for their excursions into anything other than just-the-facts reporting by...wait for it...amateur non-journalist opiners who not only don't have personal expertise in the area under discussion, but show resolutely little interest in reading anything other than punditry.
I'm not saying that Lithwick's writing is wholly "objective," and her biases -- which are toward a significantly more moderate vision of jurisprudence than is embodied by the current nominee -- are not hard to discern. But she's no simple ideological warrior, as this informative Rehnquist retrospective makes clear.
Those who can't distinguish a fundamentally useful blend of analysis and opinion, based in actual reporting and expertise, from the standard level of position-taking one finds on, say, the Op-Ed page of the paper of record, might please shut the hell up long enough to read a bit and learn to make the distinction.
The staff of the New York office took a much-needed team-building excursion last Friday night and saw Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. We hadn't been to the movies in about twelve and a half years, although it was still familiar enough from our hazy memories to be a comforting experience.
We have nothing much to say about the film, other than while it doesn't quite rise to the level of "The Wrong Trousers" (surely one of the most satisfying animated short films ever made), it would be churlish to suggest that simply because it hasn't outdone that gem, this fine feature-length farrago is anything but lovely. The puce lower eyelids sported by the bloodthirsty Victor Quartermaine are by themselves a rich source of viewing pleasure. To say nothing of the customarily ingenious array of Goldbergian devices, mutely expressive animalia, and generally beneficient worldview. A restorative of the first order.
Sorry this is so late. Make a guess and pour yourself a Ward Eight (scroll down the page for recipe, courtesy of Wombat Imbibing Consultant D. Wondrich).
Arguably, the term of Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th U.S. President, was tainted by his election, in which he actually lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden and only squeaked through the Electoral College after cutting a nasty deal with four southern states to more or less end Reconstruction then and there. However, on February 15, 1879 he did something that moved in a small way down the road to equal rights in the U.S., at least with regard to our justice system. What did "Old Granny" make legal on that day?
For a bonus point, three days prior to that act, the first facility of its kind in North America opened in New York City. What was it?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a set of reel-to-reel "Whale Songs" tapes originally marketed by the Thalassa Society in 1972 to members and their extended families. No Googling or taking off of work to make a last minute road trip to Fremont, Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes center. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.
I'm spending the morning with Helena visiting some friends. The Quiz will appear roughly simultaneous with naptime.
A conundrum posed to our regular attendees (and sundry passers-by). I pose it here because not a few of you are among those who treat these matters with professional interest.
The Wombat blushes to admit that he has for some time been working on a novel for young adults (even though the Wombat isn't even really sure what that means; but maybe simply that it's the sort of thing he could have imagined reading at the age of twelve or so).
It has of late seemed an attractive proposition to put the first draft of this project, in installments, up on the File in some quiet corner or other, for the perusal and even comment of those that are interested. It would make what I have now seem more real and it would, presumably, help spur me on to completion, while also inviting potentially useful noises from an audience of (I like to think) more than middling taste and discerment.
However, I don't know if there aren't risks. Is it harder to get a publisher interested once you've shared it with the world already on your website? Does that even matter anymore? And, thinking more broadly, is it too much of a breach of the necessary isolation of the imaginative work? Too much chatter in the study, too much talk about the thing before the thing is a thing? A risk of undermining the already fragile construction of an artificial reality before it's ready to have other people handling it? In short, is it creatively penny-wise but pound-foolish?
So, I ask: what do people think about such an idea? Should I share, or continue to keep Project X under wraps?
Oh, by the way -- it's a fantasy novel. Uh-huh. The Wombat blushes to admit, really, really blushes.
I spent my "this is when I get to write for the weblog" time tonight over at Planned Obsolescence, adding a long and loopy entry to a comment thread on KF's bartending fantasies. It's all the whining I've been promising to do over here, but on Kathleen's bandwidth instead. Enjoy!
At the very bottom of this New York Times article on a recent court challenge to the NTPD's new subway random bag-search policy, there comes this:
The most dramatic moment of the day came at the end of Mr. Cohen's testimony, when two men in the audience loudly began to demand why he had not been cross-examined.
In any case, it was -- as reporter Sewell Chan indicates -- the dramatic high point of the day. So why toss it in at the bottom? Why tantalize us with the taste of the drama we were kept from experiencing? Why, Sewell, why?
