Thursday, March 28, 2024

Acrobat Costumes

The originals of the superheroes which have survived often had costumes that they had to change into before they could perform their great feats. The costumes were often curiously like circus acrobat costumes from the previous era.

Their earlier feats were much more acrobatic as well, flying, swinging, twisting, somersaulting to land in just the right spot by surprise, ready for action. Superman and Batman have gotten more jacked as time has gone on, but early on they looked less like weightlifters, more like swimmers or gymnasts.  What were the capes for, anyway? Flashy decoration, as in performance.  Those capes may owe something to the more secretive superheroes as well, moving quietly through the shadows in disguise. The Superman could still lift enormous amounts of weight - heck, so could supergirl - but that was considered more of a magical ability like the X-Ray vision than an extreme form of what your best local athletes could do. The latter was more Caped Crusader stuff.

That doesn't seem to be why those costumes have persisted. They are clearly intended to display idealised sexual characteristics now.  Some of that was clearly present in the circus costumes as well - everybody's got to make a living, you know - but there was a clear functional aspect as well.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The Sadness of NPR Christmas (in 2006)

Reposted from December 2006.  I have come back to this many times, as it is one of my most-visited posts. It is some of my best writing, looking back. I captured something that resonated with other people over the years. 

I have no idea what they do for Christmas at NPR now. I suspect the mask is increasingly off.

*******

Year-round, NPR tends to the bittersweet, the witty rather than uproarious, the world-weary rather than the cynical, the poignant, the melancholy, the wistful. These are the attitudes of the Arts & Humanities crowd, roused to righteous anger only against those who try and rouse them to righteous anger, charmed by everything but tending to observation rather than full-bore participation. NPR has the best describers of the vignettes of daily life, of which Garrison Keillor is the archetype.

Christmas kills them. They can access faith only via nostalgia, and that well soon runs dry. Real traditions include Mom, and going to church, and immersing yourself in that whole crowd of idiot relatives. Far better to have your Christmas carols instrumental, where the mood can grip you without the trouble of the lyrics. The programs at NPR are dignified, properly appalled at the deterioration of the season into commercialism and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer;" into the violent games or garish decorations.

This works well enough for that percentage of their audience that still holds to the Christian faith. We fear no nostalgia, and deplore many of the same things about the season. Instrumental carols and lights that don't blink are fine with us. The secular audience must be okay with this approach as well. Perhaps with NPR guiding the tour they can trust that however close the bus gets to the edge of the road it will not go over into actual religious assertion. We'll get out and take pictures of the view.

I don't have the same sense in my bones for what the Jewish storytellers are experiencing, but it seems much the same. They grew up slightly alientated from the culture's holiday, but having something of their own to build nostalgia around. Now they seem alientated from that as well. And those who had little or no faith tradition - they're trying to find something worth saving in all this. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in your shoe - it's supposed to be for weddings, but they try to make a holiday out of the same sort of elements.

Emotional distance has its advantages, and these makeshift Christmases don't seem to be tragic. There is a sort of courage about them, and shafts of real joy, and the nobility of those who refuse at least to be hypocrites. But story after story in December, as these deeply artistic and sensitive people try to capture the season, carries the theme of searching, of something missing, of arranging the dried flowers as beautifully as possible because no new ones will bloom.

Those of us who are believers are tempted to throw up our hands and say "Oh for Pete's sake! Relent for just a few days a year and allow yourself to be immersed in the faith of your youth. You'll get more out of Christmas that way. It'll do you good. Why is Jesus the one thing you can't keep?" But I think it is our own inattention to the season, our own taking it for granted, that causes us to think this way. We are so aware of how many things pull us away from Christ at Christmas that we have forgotten how dangerous it is for those outside to look in. They sense, as we should know but have forgotten, that to step inside might mean never coming back. If emotional distance does not bring warmth, it at least brings memories of warmth, with no danger of burning.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Bobbleheads

Bumped:  The bobbleheads have been found.

The Pittsburgh Penguins announced today that the shipment carrying the Jagr bobbleheads for tonight's game has been stolen en route to Pittsburgh.

To which Son #2 observed "I don't know what's funnier, the idea that someone deliberately stole 10,000 Jagr bobbleheads, or the idea that someone just robbed a truck at random, opened a box, and discovered that they now own 10,000 Jagr bobbleheads and are going to be hunted down by the Pittsburgh Penguins organisation."  I mean, where can you sell them now?

"No matter what, you will not get in my way. But if it's you or those Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads, I will not hesitate. Not for a second." (A movie reference I do not get, but Ben and bsking's husband Tim assure me is perfect.  And they should know.)

The Triumph of Easter

The Triumph of Easter by Dorothy Sayers.  Second story on the PDF.

Also a Youtube Video 

She wrote in 1938, and it is about God's transforming evil rather than abolishing it.

Ilia Malinin

Ann Althouse carried this today, and I almost passed it by.  This is not a sport I am much interested in. I recall women (I'm lookin' at you Cindy Garman) swooning over John Misha Petkavich at the '72 Winter Olympics because of the new athleticism he brought to the sport, but I was unimpressed. Is that the best you guys can do? In the subsequent fifty years I might recognise a name or two. Like ballet, even the most athletic moves still have a touch of a feminine quality. The women are performing more like male gymnasts every year, so I always thought they were rather meeting in the middle. Fine.

I am glad I clicked through.  Part of it is the music, sure, and the design and progression of the routine.  But you have to be able to live up to that once it is put in place, and this kid does it.  He has that reckless got-energy-to-burn-sweetheart energy that girls get breathless over and older men nod approvingly at with a smirk. Well played, lad. Well played.  I think this will work out for you.



Icelandic Elections

"Iceland has a web page for the upcoming presidential election. You can go in and enter your name in support of a candidate. In an attempt to do so, apparently 11 people accidentally registered as candidates and are now running for president. Looking forward to the TV debates."

Yrsa Sigurdardottir on X 

AVI: I have always cared deeply for the Icelandic people and promise to work for them with every fiber of my being.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

The Quotable Chesterton

I asked for, and received The Quotable Chesterton for some holiday - a birthday, a Christmas before this last - and it has been lying around while I read other, "more important" things.  I picked it up today, and this was the first entry:

                                                        ACADEMIA

Though the academic authorities are proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to describe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern* State has educated itself in a series of ephemeral fads.

Well, that was so good that I thought I'd have another.

                                                ACCOMMODATION

When modern sociologists** talk about the necessity of accommodating oneself to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything.  At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.

*This was a century ago

**I suspect we would identify this group somewhat differently now than confining it to academic sociologists.  Yet it will do, it will do.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

This Man Must Be A Prophet

 From Elijah the Middleborne on X:

Me to my wife, as she is putting on my jacket "Where is your jacket?" 

Her " I don't have a jacket"

Me "You are right to say that you have no jacket, for you've had five jackets, and the jacket you have now is not your own."

The Liverbirds

 Never heard of 'em

The German girls at the Beat Club have the same facial expression as the girls on Top of the Pops: sullen, bored, almost angry. I'm not sure what that was supposed to convey.



Links From Late 2006

A remarkable new treatment for depression - from Russia.

Christopher Hitchens explains Why Women Aren't Funny. Terri had a funny response.

Using Geography To Kill Time at Boring Meetings.

I look prescient, suggesting it might be good if Donald Trump were president for one year in wartime, as the Romans used to do. 

I speculate on the neurology of Insight and Misattribution.  I was doing this stuff for a living then.  I only partly understand what I said now.

Wyman Family Christmas Letter 2006.  We really are fascinating people.

Civility

I was noticing a change in rudeness as far back at 2006. Does this mean that there has not actually been any recent change, that online behavior almost inevitably promotes a deterioration in discourse, or that the recent change I have been noticing is just the modern tendency to rudeness because of no accountability simply penetrating deeper into society, including people who used to be polite?

BTW, that post includes a comment from Copithorne, who had trouble staying on the topic, as usual.

In my post "Not Their Tribe," I suggested there was some alternative motive which partly explains why the A & H Tribe is not supporting OIF. They might be loyal only to their own tribe, and not America as a whole, perhaps. I don't leap from this to say that they are traitors, or cowards, or selfish. Each of those, while possible, would require high levels of evidence. An actual traitor might well hide behind the principle of freedom to criticize the government. A real coward might adopt religious pacifism as a cover. But this does not mean that all who criticize the government are traitors, nor that all religious pacifists are cowards.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Offer

When you subscribe on substack you usually get a few trial subscriptions to give away, most frequently for a month.  That is usually enough to go over to the archives and pull out the things that are most promising to see if you like them. I linked to one of the few posts of his that is not behind his paywall back in February, about asceticism. Anderson is an assistant professor at Baylor, D.Phil Oxford, founder of Mere Orthodoxy and podcaster on Mere Fidelity, who writes a heckuva lot about Catholic theology for an evangelical. The substack it The Path Before Us, and you get his book if you subscribe.

I've got three free monthlong subscriptions if any of you is interested.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

NYT Games

 

Alex on X "The NYT is a game company with a news section."

More Susan

We have "The Problem of Susan, once Queen of Narnia," again.  I mentioned in early February the YA novel Once a Queen by Sarah Arthur.  You will remember that Granite Dad had ordered it and promised to read it and get back to me.  He has not done so. 

The CS Lewis Society also authorised a play by Kat Coffin called "Lost and Found: The Lamentations of Susan Pevensie." Doug Gresham loved it. Both works seem to have avoided going for the quick everything-works-out-just-fine plot and treat the subject in more complicated fashion. It will be staged in 2025 and they are hoping to have it live-streamed. It seems that people deeply want to see her in heaven, even if Narnia is lost to her as Eden is to us. That would be um, impressive for a fictional character. The theology of it seems a bit sketchy, but apparently there is a significant groundswell of Jesus, we have to find a way to make this work

My wife became so upset by the pressure that a character in a James Clavell novel was under in the 1980s that she prayed for him after putting the book down for the night. I had a friend who prayed that Gandalf would be okay after Moria.