A BBC presenter doing live narration for a documentary on whales has just finished explaining why they haven’t been able to spot any whales and aren’t likely to do so today when behind him a blue whale, having been waiting for just the right moment, spouts.
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Actually, it’s Bad Lip Reading’s dubbing of some debate highlights, a lot of it quite funny:
by According to the latest CNN poll released yesterday, Trump leads the rest of the GOP field among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents with 24 percent versus 13 percent for runner-up Jeb Bush. In addition, he was the second choice of 14 percent of voters. (Full details of the poll can be found at this link. Other recent opinions surveys show similar results.)
What I found particularly interesting (and surprising) is that the poll shows Trump even farther in the lead on specific issues: 45 percent rate him the best choice on the economy, 44 percent on immigration, and 32 percent on dealing with ISIL (the self-declared “Islamic State” also known as ISIS). No other Republican candidate comes close. He’s also the top choice on “social issues,” but by a much smaller margin (19 percent versus 15 for second-place Jeb Bush).
When only those polled who identify themselves as conservatives are counted, Trump wins even more overwhelmingly as the best choice on the economy and immigration, with 50 percent support in each.
Trump is the top choice for president among both men and women surveyed who favor the Republican Party, but by a significantly bigger margin among men. Surprisingly, though, women rate Trump a bit higher than men do in terms of favorability, with 60 percent of Republican women viewing him favorably versus 57 percent of Republican men, despite the widespread impression that publicity about Trump’s insulting remarked about women would seriously hurt his standing with women (not to mention men who respect women).
Months ago Trump’s poll numbers were much, much worse, so obviously his standing with rank-and-file pro-Republican voters has greatly improved over the past several months despite strong opposition to him from the Republican establishment, including Fox News and leading pundits, who keep predicting that something — attacks on Mexico, McCain, or women — will sink his campaign any day now.
So here, in honor of the Republican frontrunner, is Josh Groban singing some of Trump’s most notable tweets, which prove once again that he’s the man who puts the twit in Twitter:
[Updated to correct my embarrasingly dumb misspelling of Josh Groban’s name.]
by One of the clearest consequences of global warming is the rise is sea level. For now this is being driven mainly by thermal expansion of warming oceans, but the melting of glaciers is contributing as well, and that’s almost certainly going to worsen as the planet continues to warm. At this point at least some amount of continued warming is inevitable — we’ve waited too long to prevent it entirely — so we have to deal with the consequences.
Many farmers around the world live in coastal areas subject to increasing flooding with salt water, which is deadly for conventional crops. (For the record, though, it’s very likely a myth that after the Romans defeated Carthage they salted its fields to prevent anything from growing, though this apparently was a symbolic practice in the ancient Middle East. See The Straight Dope and Wikipedia.)
Research is underway with a modest amount of funding to find “halophile” (salt-loving) crops that can grow in salty conditions. There are millions of subsistence farmers who would benefit from this. Their only likely alternative would be to relocate, and it’s not at all clear where they could go.
An Associated Press article by Katy Daigle describes the problem in more detail and what’s currently being done to try to find a solution.
by The current (August 17/24) issue of The Nation magazine has a good article by Ari Berman titled “The Voting-Rights Counterrevolution” (link). It’s excerpted and adapted from Berman’s recent book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. It’s worth reading.
Berman gives disturbing examples of thousands of people turned away from polling places because their registrations had been canceled without advance notice to them. In Leon County, Florida, in 2000, for example, the elections supervisor went through the state’s purge list and discovered that of 697 persons identified as supposed convicted felons, only 33 could be verified. It isn’t possible to say what the error rate was in other counties because no other elections supervisor bothered to check. Statewide, voters were purged even if their names only loosely resembled those of felons.
For one example, a man named Will Steen, who had taken his ten-year-old son to the polls to teach him about democracy, was told he couldn’t vote because he was a convicted felon. In fact, Steen, a US Navy veteran who has served in the Persian Gulf War, had never even been arrested. His name was confused with someone named “O’Steen.” (Voters were deemed felons even when they had a different middle name, race, and even sex from the criminal they were mistaken for.) Steen was told to call the Board of Elections but they never answered the phone. Finally he had to leave without voting.
That same year, many other people were illegally stopped from voting in St Louis, and when a judge ordered the polls kept open an additional three hours to give time to correct at least some of the problems, the Bush campaign managed to get an appeals court to cut off voting after just 45 minutes and about a hundred ballots.
Since then, bogus claims of voter impersonation fraud — the rarest typing of voting fraud, with only a tiny number of known cases (just two here in North Carolina since 2000, for example) — have led to strict voter ID requirements that are no problem for most people but prevent many poor and elderly persons from exercising their legal right to vote. Probably around ten percent of voters lack a government-issued ID that meets the requirements.
(As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve heard people say that if you need an ID to get on a plane or pick up a registered letter, why is it so bad to demand a specific ID to vote? Because, in fact, you don’t need one of a narrow set of government issued photo IDs to board or plane or pick up a registered letter. They make it a easier, but there are alternatives, as you can verify for yourself at the TSA and Postal Service websites.)
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I’ve known dogs who would bark at visitors not when they arrived but when they left, and other dogs who would take pillows with them when they went outside, apparently meaning to liberate them into the wild.
I particularly like the dog mentioned above who would bring a toy to each visiting human.
by A notice in English from a Japanese hotel.
(My usual disclaimer on this sort of thing: I’m not making fun of whoever produced this notice. Using a foreign language is not easy and full of pitfalls, and if I tried to write something in Japanese, even after years of study, I’d probably do far worse, and it wouldn’t bother me if it gave somebody a laugh.)
by Political commentators Jackie Broyles and Dunlap (in real life Travis Harmon and Jonathan Shockley) review this past Thursday’s two GOP debates in Cleveland, or as Dunlap puts it, the losers’ debate and the winners’ debate (total running time 6 minutes, 21 seconds):
Finally, for residents of Cleveland wanting to get the taste of the debates out of you mind, here’s the full version of “Cleveland Rocks” from The Drew Carey Show:
(Anybody else notice that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame looks remarkably like the entrance to the Louvre Museum? Who’s copying whom, aside from both ripping off ancient Egypt, I mean?)
by I’ve never seen the original stage musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine that debuted back in 1986, but this is reportedly a pretty faithful adaptation, with script by Lapine and all changes (mainly for running time) approved by Sondheim. The stage version was a huge, award-winning success in New York and London with multiple revivals. The film was a commercial and critical hit as well.
I hated it.
The premise isn’t a bad one: Several of the Brothers Grimm’s best-loved fairy tales — “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Little Red Riding Hood” — tied together by a new story concerning a baker and his wife trying to appease a witch so she’s lift the curse that has made them childless.
The cast is quite good. Anna Kendrick (Cinderella) and Lilla Crawford (Little Red Riding Hood) have voices that approach Platonic ideals. There are a lot of other talented people and big-name stars here—Emily Blunt as the baker’s wife, Christine Baranski as Cinderella’s stepmother, Tracy Ullman as Jack’s mother, Meryl Streep as the witch, and Johnny Depp as the wolf (looking like a zoot-suit-wearing wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon). Chris Pine, the new Captain Kirk, plays one of the nameless princes, and during one song (“Agony,” his duet with other prince about the pain of unrequited love) he inserts a William Shatner impression. I don’t recall any bad performances.
Sondheim’s lyrics are full of ingenious wordplay. His music, on the other hand, is generic Broadway of the sort once mocked on The Simpsons. There’s not one song I’d care to hear again.
The plot preserves the darkness of the original fairy tales (though in the film the violence and sex of the play are said to have been toned down out of concern for children in the audience), and it’s clever in how it ties together the various stories. But as with the lyrics, I’d have preferred something more than cleverness. I forced myself to keep watching until the depressing bitter end, and that was not one of my better decisions.
Given how many other people loved the movie, I won’t tell you not to see it. But this isn’t a case of my not liking something because of extraneous matters that depressed my mood or something when I saw it. On reflection I really do think it’s crap, and I’ve discovered I’m not alone in finding it at best boring.
I should mention one thing in particular that bothered me, namely the way the film handles the “Little Red Riding Hood” story. The original folktale is sometimes interpreted as a metaphorical warning for little girls to be wary of child molesters, and Into the Woods makes the sexual innuendo pretty obvious, both in the duet “Hello, Little Girl” and later, after her rescue, in the song “I Know Things Now.” Here’s how the latter begins:
Mother said, “Straight ahead,
Not to delay or be misled.”
I should have heeded her advice…
But he seemed so nice.
And he showed me things
Many beautiful things,
That I hadn’t thought to explore.
They were off my path,
So I never had dared.
I had been so careful,
I never had cared.
And he made me feel excited—
Well, excited and scared.
When he said, “Come in!”
With that sickening grin,
How could I know what was in store?
Once his teeth were bared,
Though, I really got scared—
Well, excited and scared—
But he drew me close
And he swallowed me down,
Down a dark slimy path
Where lie secrets that I never want to know.
I gather than on stage Miss Hood has usually been portrayed by a young woman in her late teens or twenties. (Anna Kendrick reportedly expected to be cast as Red rather than Cinderella.) That makes it possible to interpret “I Know Things Now” as the expression of a young woman’s ambiguous feelings about her first seduction. But Lilla Crawford was much younger — only 12 when the film was shot — so we have a pre-teen girl saying, in effect, that being molested was a bit scary but also exciting and educational. I find that pretty creepy. It’s far from the only thing I disliked about the film (I was already severely bored and annoyed by this point), but it’s certainly one of them.
And the trailer looked so promising…
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