Eric The Blue

At the movies: "I, Tonya"

My stepdaughter loved it.  My own opinion is that, but for the figure skating, I, Tonya would be a cinematic version of one of those journalistic "deep-dives" into the world of Trump voters.  Someone said that our president got a hundred per cent of the vote among people who smoke cigarettes while pumping gas.  How many of them could there be?  Well, let's start by counting the parts in this movie.

It's the figure skating that doesn't go with the hardscrabble stupidity of these downscale Oregonians, and on this point the movie is maddeningly silent.  It's as if Harding was one day a 3-year-old whose sociopathic mother, a waitress by trade, hustles her into a skating class at the local rink and, next you know, she's in the Olympics.  How did this happen? Were one to judge from the movie, you'd have to say it must have something to do with being abused by your only present parent, molested by your half-brother, and beat up a lot by your husband.  The movie's mindless shorthand for Harding's athletic achievement is a lot of loose talk about triple axels.

Really strong performances by the entire cast, however--especially, to my mind, Allison Janney, as Harding's mother.  

 

 

American stories: John Updike's "Separating"

 

Of the serial creations of John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom is easily the best known, and the Nobel laureate Henry Bech must hold the second position.  I, however, am partial to Richard and Joan Maple, characters to whom Updike returned again and again in short stories written over the course of around twenty years, starting in the mid-50s.  Eventually these fictions, sometimes called "the Maples stories," were collected in a volume called Too Far to Go, which was published in 1979.  The title refers to the far shore of marriage--the death of a spouse, when the wedded partners necessarily part.  The Maples didn't make it.  They, and their marriage and world, are the subject of eighteen stories. "Separating," the fourteenth, was first published in the June 23, 1975 issue of The New Yorker.

The story may have been finished before that and held back till solstice time, for it commences:

The day was fair.  Brilliant.  All that June the weather had mocked the Maples' internal misery with solid sunlight--golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only strain in Nature.

The narrator is of the third person variety and has it seems special access to Richard's consciousness.  A paragraph later:

In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never come.  

Now it was here.  A Friday.

The "it" is the day to tell the kids, of whom there are four.  The story's most impressive achievement may be the evocation of Richard's dread, which almost cannot allow that the children will get the news on a bright June Friday, the oppressive burden of the task being better fitted to some parallel time when there aren't seasons or named days.  The story indicates that the Maples have been waiting for "the perfect time."  The main obstacle is the oldest, Judith, who has to get home from a school term in England.  And you can't just drop this news on her soon as she's back.  She has to get acclimated.  Without directly saying so, the story makes you understand that Richard is thankful, or temporarily relieved, that this seems wise, since it puts off the day he dreads.  But now Judith is acclimated.

The plan was to inform each kid individually.  Richard had assumed there would be a general announcement, but Joan thought each kid deserved their own conversation.  In a kind of paradox, the partner who seeks the divorce, Richard, is also the one who takes it hardest.  Joan is comparatively prim, efficient, and reasonable.  Her cool ease registers almost unconsciously on Richard and adds to the reader's consciousness of his misery.  It wasn't her idea to break up the family!  I had the thought that Joan may have advocated for separate conversations in order to inflict four times the pain on Richard, who, in the afternoon of the evening when the bad news is to be unveiled, distracts himself by working assiduously, and a little clumsily, on a household repair.  It is something like Updike's calling card that the details of this repair are more thoroughly described than they would be by almost any other practitioner, but there is also here a dual purpose: Richard's immersion in the task is part of how his acute discomfort at the prospect before him is communicated.  It's very hard for him.  He has to distract himself.

In the event, it's too hard for him: he fouls the plan, which had been to tell Judith first after separating her from a brother and sister at the conclusion of a family dinner of lobster and champagne meant to celebrate her return home.  But Richard breaks down and cries before the dinner can end.  The big revelation scene Updike renders:

Between them, Margaret, no longer called Bean, thirteen and large for her age, gazed from the other side of his pane of tears as if into a shopwindow at something she coveted--at her father, a crystalline heap of splinters and memories. It was not she, however, but John who, in the kitchen, as they cleared the plates and carapaces away, asked Joan the question: Why is daddy crying?

Richard heard the question but not the murmured answer.  Then he heard Bean cry, 'Oh, no--oh!'--the faintly dramatized exclamation of one who had long expected it.  

John returned to the table carrying a bowl of salad.  He nodded tersely at his father and his lips shaped the conspiratorial words 'She told.'

So, not according to plan, and all a little off key.  Joan covers for Richard by reciting--"levelly," "sensibly"--the prepared remarks:  Mom and dad agree ... a trial separation for the summer ... need space and time to think ... don't make each other happy enough.  The desired effect, I believe, is of words that sounded right in the study falling flat on actual delivery--anyway, that's how it works on me.  Judith, trying too hard to copy her mother's tone, says she thinks it's silly, they "should either live together or get divorced."  John is put off by his younger sister Bean having suspected what was coming and loudly insists that they should have been told that mom and dad weren't getting along.  Instead of risking the wrong authentic response, the children fall into a sophistication contest.  John, his parents realize, is a little drunk on the champagne, and he and Richard go for a walk on their property and have a conversation to which the narrator at one point attaches the adverb "stiltedly."  When the memorized  inadequate words are used, the unmemorized inadequate words are left.  At least it's done, the dreaded task for better or worse accomplished.

But it's not.  The Maples' fourth child, the eldest boy, "closest to [Richard's] conscience," is at a rock concert, and the plan was always for his father to pick him up in the wee hours at the train station and tell him on the drive home.  So Richard's ordeal continues.  The narration is infused with by now familiar undercurrents.  The train is due at 1:14, so Richard sets the alarm for 1:00.  While Joan sleeps soundly beside him, his mind churns.  At one, he gets up, dresses, goes downstairs, turns off lights that, on account of the evening's consternation, had been left on.  The car engine starts.  We're told he hoped it would not.  On the short drive, he sees happy revellers pouring out of a bar.  He arrives at the train station a little early and hopes that the train will be late, but it rolls in right on time.  He sees his son disembark.  On the bright side, two of his friends get in the car with him.  Dropping them off at their houses will supply a brief reprieve.  He really doesn't want to drink of this cup.

Updike's handling of the close is restrained and the effect, heartbreaking.  Stunned by the news, the boy, Dickie, repeats questions.  He woodenly declines his father's bland offers of kindness, such as calling in sick for him the next day.  At the house, he walks directly to his room.  Richard thinks maybe the door will slam, but he hears it quietly click shut.  Later, he enters the room to comfort the boy, and the story ends:

Richard bent to kiss an averted face but his son, sinewy, turned and with wet cheeks embraced him and gave him a kiss, on the lips, passionate as a woman's.  In his father's ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word: Why?

Why.  It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness.  The waiting white face was gone, the darkness was featureless.  Richard had forgotten why. 

Though some sophisticates seem to regard it as irrelevant and a breach of etiquette even to mention it, Updike and his first wife had four children, like the Maples two boys and two girls, lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the topography of which seems consistent with what we learn of the Maples' property, and, also like the Maples, were divorced in the 1970s.  In "At War With My Skin," an autobiographical essay, Updike, afflicted since youth with psoriasis, describes how he suffered a flare up at the time of his divorce--"my face broke out, my shoulders and neck became so encrusted I couldn't turn my head without pain."

 

 

Trolling Power Line

 The other night, bored with the Winter Olympics, I began trolling Power Line, a right-wing blog I sometimes read for amusement.  I admit it's a low entertainment, but you might be low yourself, so here in case you're entertained is a bit of what I wrought.  The original post, by John Hinderaker, is here.  You can scroll down to see all of the comments.  I'll reproduce threads involving me below.

 

   

 

 

 A second string of commentary :

 

 

 

 

    

Stewing over the Second Amendment

Two sentences:

i. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

ii. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The first sentence is of course the Second Amendment to our Constitution.  The question is whether the second sentence is what the first sentence means.  Gun-rights advocates, including five of them sitting on the Supreme Court in 2008, the year District of Columbia v Heller was decided, answer that question in the affirmative.  But that doesn't seem to me very persuasive.  Imagine, say, Wayne LaPierre, of the National Rifle Association, being able to transport himself in time so that he could advise the drafters of the Second Amendment.  Would he urge adoption of above version (i.) or (ii.), or would he be indifferent?  

Obviously, he'd prefer version (ii.).  There then would be no question that the Second Amendment established an individual right that, a couple hundred years hence and forever, may not in any way be limited or "infringed" by, for example, duly elected representatives sitting in legislative bodies who want to address the public safety concerns of their constituents. 

But version (ii.) wasn't adopted.

The problem with the adopted version, from the perspective of someone like LaPierre, is that it places the right being established within a military context, and this military context makes it hard to see how the right belongs to all people.  Such an interpretation is augmented, I think, by the phrase "bear arms," normally applied to soldiers, who are sometimes said to be "under arms."  The most famous English-language translation of The Aeneid commences

Of arms and the man I sing

and no one is under the illusion that the work is going to be about hunting or home defense. 

I have to wonder, too, about the opinion of "constitutional originalists" who think the framers enshrined a right to bear weapons, such as the AR-15 rifle, that hadn't yet been invented when the Amendment was proposed, ratified, and, on December 15, 1791, adopted.  Mass murder is with difficulty accomplished by someone bearing a muzzle-loading musket.

Trump plays the field

Press was invited to get on Air Force One, then rushed off and hurried back inside as Melania Trump's motorcade pulled up. Some screaming from a White House press aide. No pictures allowed of first lady's arrival.

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) February 16, 2018

 

Let's see, anything going on for us Trump-haters to rant about?  I see he says that the indictment of a bunch of Russian nationals and the troll farms where they worked in 2016 proves there was NO  COLLUSION with his campaign.  This seems roughly analogous to the CEO of the widget company saying at supper to his wife, after she's made an irrefutable case that the widget higher-ups are all boinking the support staff, "Well, yeah, but now you can rest easy about the crazy notion that I'm sleeping with your sister!"  

While we're on the topic of sleeping around, I wonder whether there is any connection between the Post reporter's above tweet on February 16 and this New Yorker article, published on the magazine's website earlier the same day, about Trump's 2006 affair with Karen McDougal, Playboy's runner-up for Playmate of the 90s (behind Pamela Anderson)?  That Melania hasn't divorced him is probably a good advertisement for the lawyer who drafted the pre-nup.  I'm not an expert on the timeline, but it appears that Trump's affair with McDougal began in June, 2006, which is a month before he met Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, one of the stars of Spreading My Seed, and three months after Melania gave birth to his youngest son, Barron.  Busy times!

McDougal made a written record of her affair with Trump, which the New Yorker acquired.  I was struck by the following segment:

 When I say I was "struck," I mean it's unusual to have mashed potatoes with steak.  Being dweebish, I'll admit further to being impressed by the author's straight-ahead prose style, which stands in charming contrast to her rather poor penmanship.  She is indeed special, and who could have predicted that her new beau would be elected president of the United States with the help of all the dear "values voters"?

Books of the Bible: Ephesians

 

Except for recent immigrants, we Americans are mainly monolingual, and therefore inclined perhaps to overlook certain kinds of questions and problems.  With respect to the Bible, many Americans think its text is divine and, in some meaningful way, dictated by God--it's "God's word," whatever the details.  That God spoke in Hebrew and Greek doesn't seem to concern anyone very much.  Still, it seems worth mentioning that there is a translator, a human intermediary, between American Bible readers and the supposedly inspired text.  Is it the officially approved fundamentalist view that only the original Hebrew and Greek texts qualify as the word of God, or are all the various translators divinely guided in their work so as not to spoil the effect?  

And what does this have to do with Ephesians?

Well, sometimes when you're reading something that's been translated from another language, and you feel that your powers of comprehension are being routed, your suspicions might fall upon the translator.  That's my experience of Ephesians, and, turning for assistance to the people who might be able to render a verdict on the hypothesis, I find that, with one voice, they say that the problem is the other way 'round.  That is, the most widely used English translations--King James and Revised Standard--are actually doing a favor for the original text, which is a shoddy mess.  Ernst Kasemann, for example, said of Ephesians 1:3-14 that "the most monstrous conglomeration of sentences in the Greek language is found here," and that "any successful translation of it is a tribute to the translator's ingenuity." [quoted words are Norman Perrin's rendering, in his Introduction to the New Testament, of Kasemann's German]

This provides a taste of the challenges facing the usually forgotten translator, who, when we think of him at all, is usually imagined marching to and fro on a linguistic cross walk.  But if that was all there was to it, then the opening to Ephesians would be a case of GIGO--garbage in, garbage out.  The real task is to use one's knowledge of Greek to wrest meaning from the mad jumble of the original and then "translate" that into English.  Being "faithful to the original" is widely regarded as the translator's first responsibility, but, in the case of Ephesians, fealty to that principle interferes with another pretty basic obligation: that of producing something intelligible.

To evaluate the merit of the above you'd have to be able to read Ephesians in Greek.  Since I can't, I'm taking on faith the word of scholars, an attractive option inasmuch as it supplies a flattering explanation for my incomprehension.  You can see, however, why the general messiness is embarrassing for our fundamentalist friends.  Honest perplexity lives uneasily with the notion that the text is a transcript of the mind of God intended for our edification, for why then should there be any barriers to understanding?  Did God make a poor grade in freshman composition?  Close textual analysis, and the results it yields, suggest that we're dealing with a text like others instead of with something supernatural--probably that is the root of the discomfort.  

The conclusions of scholarship should at least not be embarrassing for those concerned about the reputation of Paul, to whom authorship of Ephesians has traditionally been assigned.  The known letters of Paul are characterized by a strong, plain, often intimate style--a sufficient reason to doubt he could have written Ephesians.  Moreover, there are in Ephesians, which is only a few pages long, something like forty words that are never used elsewhere in the Pauline corpus.  The whole backdrop is entirely different from what we're accustomed to in Paul's letters, where he is invariably addressing a particular church in a particular location that needs instruction on some particular doctrinal or ethical question.  When the word "church" occurs in Ephesians, the reference is not to the local congregation at Ephesus but to the universal Church made of the body of all Christian believers.  Thus there are no personal touches, such as the greetings and blessings extended to named individuals that frequently occur in Paul's known letters.  Paul's great theme of justification by faith is present, though in a way that might strike some as suspiciously perfunctory, and even for the unsuspicious there is no reason therefore to reject the view that Ephesians was written by a Pauline disciple after Paul's race was run.  There is in Ephesians no discussion of the timing of the Second Coming, a frequent topic in Paul's letters; this absence might plausibly be attributed  to the passage of time and consequent shift in attention away from an imminent conclusion to history and toward a new epoch defined by the activity of the unified Church.  For these reasons, it seems that Ephesians is best understood as a document of emerging Catholicism rather than one from the hand of Paul.

Discarding the notion that Ephesians is another of Paul's letters makes it easier to see that it's not actually a letter at all.  Writing on Ephesians in Peake's Commentary on the Bible, Henry Chadwick notes that the book is "a theological manifesto addressed to everybody in general and to nobody in particular."  It's possible to make out, though with difficulty, that the subject of the manifesto is baptism, and the parts that might sound familiar have to do with a new man who "takes off the old and puts on the new."  Wayne Meeks, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Paul's writings, thinks "Ephesians was intended to be read to new converts in a group of churches in the southwestern part of the province of Asia (modern Turkey), as a written substitute for a personal address by the apostle to the newly baptized."  The specific hortatory advice to these new Christians, supposing Meeks's surmise to be correct, is a mixture of the discredited and dated with the arguably sublime:

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.

Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart. . . .

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Puffery

Listening to politicians, and the people who talk about them on tv, I am often either annoyed or amused by the way in which they inflate their expressions with words and phrases that seem to me meant for another occasion.  I've been collecting some examples.

I think massive should be reserved for nouns that can be weighed, at least theoretically: a desk, the edifice of a building, the whole building, a "mobile" phone in a 30-year-old movie.  It doesn't describe things that are concepts or mental constructs.  No to massive deportations, electoral victories (or defeats), voter defections, purported fraud, and heart attacks.

On cable news shows, you see again and again the same reporters holding court with the host, and one of their favorite ways of starting a sentence is, "According to my reporting . . . ."  First, they are on tv so much that it's hard to understand how they can fit in the "reporting" that they do.  Second, what they call "reporting": isn't it really just talking to people and then relaying what they said?  Just say, "Three dudes, all well-dressed and Ivy-educated, told me the same thing, which is X."

It seems that events in Washington, D.C., are of such weight and solemnity as to require a Latin pedigree:  they don't happen or occur, they transpire.

News flash: unique is not a synonym for unusual.  The former does not admit of degrees.  If you want to say that something is unique, and then in the interests of accuracy begin considering "fairly unique," just say "unusual" or, if you must, "highly unusual."  This is basically just another hyperventilation problem--reaching for the superlative when the item in question doesn't qualify.

Hang with me on this one, and then I'll be done for awhile.  What the hell is a parameter?  I resorted to looking it up, and here's what merriamwebster.com says:

1(a): an arbitrary constant whose value characterizes a member of a system (such as a family of curves); also: a quantity (such as a mean or a variance) that describes a statistical population
(b) an independent variable used to express the coordinates of a variable point and functions of them--compare parametric equation

2: any of a set of physical properties whose values determine the characteristics or behavior of something--parameters of the atmosphere such as temperature, pressure, and density

3: something represented by a parameter: a characteristic element; broadly: characteristic, element, factor--political dissent as a parameter of modern life
health care is a universal parameter, ... a ubiquitous concern across every age, occupation, and class line.--Wayne Biddle

4: limit; boundary--usually used in the plural--the parameters of science fiction--The investigation stayed within the parameters set by the court.

A possible theory of the case would be that politicians and pundits always have in mind meaning 4 and that the reason they say parameter instead of boundary or limit is that they're trying to borrow the aura of sophistication hovering over meanings 1(a), 1(b), 2, and 3.  A secondary theory would be that, strictly speaking, meaning 4 is incorrect, but there are so many tv talkers for whom boundary is too everyday that finally the dictionary people relented.   

Maybe more later when I've had another dose of cable news.

On seeing Dr Strangelove again

I recently saw Dr Strangelove for (I think) the third time.  It had been at least ten years since my last viewing, and I'm not sure what I thought before, but I'm pretty sure I didn't think the movie was in any way realistic.  This time I thought that the humor and satire tend to obscure documentary aspects of the movie. 

For example, the doomsday machine that sets off the sequence of exploding bombs and burgeoning mushroom clouds with which the movie ends did not come out of the mind of Stanley Kubrick. According to deterrence theory, no one will launch a nuclear first strike, since it would elicit a nuclear retaliation--everyone is protected by this doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" with the unintentionally apt acronym (MAD).  But what if a first strike is launched anyway?  This is the general situation depicted in Dr Strangelove, and the movie plainly indicates that the reason for launching the retaliatory strike vanishes once deterrence has failed to prevent a breach of the nuclear threshold.  The targeted country is doomed by the incoming missiles.  It doesn't make any moral or strategic sense to retaliate in the minutes before doom settles in.  Why should the body count be twice an unimaginable number instead of just an unimaginable number?  Moreover, the retaliatory strike might include the explosions that trigger nuclear winter, thereby bringing down the curtain on human civilization.  The whole point had been to prevent the weapons from being used.  Soon as they are nevertheless used, everything crumbles. The logic of deterrence is self-cancelling.

Nuclear strategists like Hermann Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War, put forward, without recommending, a doomsday machine to repair this hole in the logic of deterrence.  Instead of relying on a human actor to order a senseless retaliatory strike, you determine beforehand to make the senseless response automatic.  In Dr Strangelove, it's revealed that the Russians have accomplished this with buried atomic bombs connected to a computer network and an instrument, akin to a seismograph, that can detect a nuclear explosion anywhere on Russian territory.  Once the instrument detects a nuclear explosion, the buried bombs, which are coated with cobalt to increase radioactive fallout, are detonated by the computer network, and the earth is rendered uninhabitable by an enshrouding radioactive cloud that doesn't dissipate for around a hundred years.  That should deter a first strike by a rational actor.  In the movie, however, the Russians hadn't yet gotten around to informing the US that they had constructed such a device.  

Kahn thought that the US could construct an actual doomsday machine for around ten billion dollars.  It would have the benefit of making a retaliatory strike automatic and thus wholly credible.  On the debit side, it would remove a final decision from the realm of human rationality, since what we call "human rationality" would already have been irrevocably exercised in the decision to construct and deploy the doomsday machine.  There is also the danger of an accidental triggering of the handiwork.  Kahn didn't recommend the construction of the doomsday machine, but he took seriously what he considered to be its principle advantage--namely, the need to augment the logic underlying deterrence and MAD. 

Some have said that Kubrick based the character of Dr Strangelove on Henry Kissinger, which is impossible: at the time the movie was written and produced--1963--Kissinger was still an academic who had never worked in government or formulated policy.  A better candidate is Hermann Kahn, whose field guide to nuclear war had been published by Princeton University Press in 1960.  Dr Strangelove shows that a relatively straight treatment of the ruminations of nuclear war's most respected theorists falls easily, outside a think tank, into the genre known as black comedy.  

 

The science guy

I've been watching episodes of Bill Nye Saves the World on Netflix.  They're a  half hour long, so you can almost fit one in during halftime of a basketball game that you're not really interested in anyway.  Nye, the host, emcee, science demonstrator, and interviewer, is animated, funny, and engaging: it's easy to see why Bill Nye the Science Guy was such a hit kids' show, winning 19 Emmy Awards over its 6-year run (1993-1998).  The pilot of the new show, aimed more at adults, is a broadside against climate change skeptics, and the hard political edge has attracted attention to his own biography and credentials.  This turns out to be an interesting topic, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect.

Nye is actually a mechanical engineer.  He grew up in Washington, D.C., went to Cornell, and, upon obtaining his BS, took a job at Boeing, in Seattle.  He worked there for a few years and invented something called the hydraulic resonance suppressor tube, which became a staple of the 747 airplane.  While at Boeing, he applied repeatedly to NASA's astronaut training program, never with success, and moonlighted as a stand-up comic; he also volunteered with Big Brothers, Big Sisters and, on weekends, as a "science explainer" at the Pacific Science Center.  These were signs of a restless spirit, and in 1986, age 31, he quit his day job in order to pursue comedy full-time.  Someone he had met at an open mic night hired him to write and act for Almost Live!, a sketch comedy TV show in Seattle.  His stage repertoire included humorous demonstrations of scientific principles, and one night, when he ad-libbed a correction of a fellow actor's pronunciation of "gigawatt," the ad-libbed riposte made an impression on him: "Who do you think you are, Bill Nye the science guy?"  In 1993, he conceived of a science tv show for kids and pitched it to the public station in Seattle.  He obtained underwriting from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy--your tax dollars at work--and proposed the name, "Bill Nye the Science Guy," who would dress in a lab coat with bowtie while explaining, or demonstrating, science ideas in energetic and fast moving segments that owed something to the methods of MTV.  It was a huge success with both kids and adults, broke through to commercial stations from its initial home on public tv, gained even more exposure from wide use in schools, ably hyped itself with spin-off type products such as books and CD-ROMs, and, as mentioned above, won 19 Emmys (23 nominations).   Bill Nye the science guy attained meme-like status, the answer to a question on a cultural literacy test.

For most of the above specifics, I'm following the Wikipedia article on Nye, which includes the inevitable "personal life" section.  The frenzied activity in his 20s, and then leaving a high-paying engineering position at Boeing when just 31 to pursue sketch comedy, is not the profile of a family man, and indeed Nye did not marry until 2006, when he was 50.  Or maybe I shouldn't say he married, for it's more ambiguous than usual.  The conclusion of the personal life section, wherein Wikipedia explains:

Nye announced his engagement during an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and was married to his fiancée of five months, musician Blair Tindall, on February 3, 2006.  The ceremony was performed by Rick Warren at . . . the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.  Yo-Yo Ma provided the music.  Nye left the relationship seven weeks later when the marriage license was declared invalid.  In 2007, Nye received a protective order against Tindall after an incident in which she came onto his property and used herbicide to damage his garden.  Tindall admitted this but denied being a threat to him.  In 2012, Nye sued Tindall for unpaid attorney's fees he incurred while he went to court in 2009 to enforce the protective order against Tindall after she allegedly violated it.  According to Nye's court filings, she was ordered to pay these fees and, to date, has not paid any of it.  

Nye is an avid swing dancer and describes himself as agnostic.  

It seems there is more here than swing dancing and agnosticism for Rick Warren to disapprove of.  But how much sense does it make?  As far as I can tell, Google alone will not dispel the mystery, but making the effort has its rewards.  Musician Blair Tindall is an oboist who's played for several prestigious orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.  Though she's received a Grammy nomination in the jazz category, she may be best known as the author of a memoir, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, which is apparently a really smart dissertation on the economics of the classical music biz with substantial digressions that justify the subtitle.  She met Nye when he called her after reading the book.  It's fun to make the obvious inference--Bill Nye, science guy, reading along, being alternately and favorably impressed by the author's brains and "fun factor," and then at some point determining that he needs to place a call.  Probably there was a photo of the author on the dust jacket. 

Well, as many teenagers could tell you, it's great until it's not.  The details about the garden incident and the invalid marriage license remain obscure.  Concerning the legal status of the marriage, Nye has said: "We got a letter from the state of California, with the great seal affixed, saying we were never married.  So shortly afterwards we both agreed it was not a good idea."  Yes, science guy, you agreed, and then she poisoned your garden.  Regarding the letter, everyone would be more interested in the words than the seal.  Tindall's public statements indicate she's confused, distressed, and brokenhearted.  Ah, science guy!  Ah, oboist!  Ah, humanity!

Bridger Winegar tweets

I follow this guy on Twitter, Bridger Winegar, who I think is hilarious.  He writes for TV--Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson: not sure what his current gig is.  Here comes a sampling of his tweets; if they inspire you to follow him, or join and follow, I get nothing, but you may get a few laughs, which according to The Reader's Digest is the best medicine.

Dating is interesting because often it ends up you've just been doing undercover research on your future enemy.

On my way to Home Depot to return my Christmas tree. [posted on January 15, 2018]

If I can just be patient and hang on for a few more hours, I think I can waste my entire day.

Riding a deer through a moonlit forest, quietly wondering what I'll watch on TV tomorrow.

Weddings are expensive, but ultimately, I can't think of a better way to introduce your coworkers to your parents' neighbors.

OK, time to turn this year around. [posted on December 30, 2017]

I just need someone to get me close enough to Trump so that I can throw up directly into his mouth.

No time to explain--I need someone to support me financially for the rest of my life.

My mom is the one who starts the fight on Thanksgiving but naturally I'm the one who gets removed from the casino.

I feel like the gown in hospital gown sort of oversells the glamour of what's going on there.

Sometimes I wonder if the corporation that's trapped me in this endless cycle of buying overpriced telephones even cares about me as a person.

It appears that, as usual, out of all the people at the museum I'm the one who appreciates art the most.

Just paid $5.2 million for this at auction. [his caption for the picture at the top of this post]

I came to this outlet mall looking for deep discounts on my favorite brands, but ultimately, what I found was myself.

I  could go on and on, because he does, but enough.  I think I read that he was raised Mormon, which may have contributed in some way to his squinty-eyed take on things--like, he maybe rejected everything about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints except for its dim view of the prevailing culture.  Twitter recently doubled its character limitation but he usually doesn't need it.  In fact, for a lot of his tweets the sharpness seems connected to the way in which there are layers within the extreme brevity.  In that last one, for instance: just 21 words, but he lands two solid punches, one on consumerism and another on the tendency of contemporary Americans to mistake their narcissism for the fourth great monotheistic faith--and then there is the suggestion, too, of how personhood has disintegrated into a mere "brand," all tossed off casually in a tweet.    

Super Bowl

I feel a little guilty about liking football, because it's by now very clear that the players are harming themselves and their prospects for a long, slow slide into senescence such as is enjoyed by their socioeconomic peers.  But what a game yesterday!  It would have been awful to care who won, but now that the Patriots didn't, I'm reminding myself that their owner and their quarterback are sort of chummy with Trump, whereas the Eagles as a team voted beforehand not to go to the White House in the event they should win.

Speaking of the Patriots' quarterback: if, before the game, you could have known what his passing line was going to be--28 completions on 48 attempts, 505 [sic] yards, 3 touchdowns, no interceptions--how much money would you have bet on his team to win?

I have a tendency to get all obsessive over in-game strategy.  Everyone is talking about the end of the first half, when the Eagles went for it on 4th down at the Patriots' 1-yard line and scored the TD on a pass to the quarterback out of a reverse.  Hard  to forget that one.  But something sort of interesting happened toward the end of the game that went uncommented upon so far as I know.  After the Eagles retook the lead, 38-33, on the reviewed touchdown pass to their tight end, the Patriots got the ball back with just over two minutes to play, a timeout left to use, and me and a gazillion other people feeling sure everything was aligned for Brady to be the hero again.  That's when the  Eagles forced him to fumble and recovered it well within field goal range.  On first down, they ran for around a 3-yard gain.  The Patriots immediately burned their last timeout, stopping the clock with 2:03 to play.  Wasn't that a mistake?  They should have let 3 more seconds run off and saved their timeout for after the two-minute warning.  A first down by the Eagles would have effectively ended the game, but they weren't going to risk a pass, because an incompletion would be like handing Brady another 30 or 40 seconds--lots of extra snaps.  But by calling a timeout with 2:03 left, the Patriots opened Philadelphia's play book: the Eagles could have--and, I think, should have--passed on 2nd-and-7.  A completion for a first down (or for a touchdown) would have clinched the win, and an incompletion wouldn't have hurt them, since thanks to the Patriots' ill-advised timeout the clock was now going to stop for the two-minute warning anyway.  With 2:03 to play, an incomplete pass kills as much time as an off tackle slant.

The Eagles, however, ran on second down and again on third, did not get a first down, kicked a field goal, and gave Brady another chance.  That last hail-Mary: it seemed to take the batted ball about a minute and a half to fall to the ground, and there were a couple of Patriots in the vicinity.  My impression is that the chance of scoring a touchdown on a long high heave into the end zone is somewhat higher than people imagine.

Paul Ryan tweets, deletes

Yesterday, Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin and Speaker of the House of Representatives, posted to Twitter the following:

A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week ... she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.

The claim checks out: a one-year Gold Star membership costs $60 per year, so, saving a buck-fifty per week, this secretary can shop at Costco all year and, with the remaining $18, buy close to a half tank of gas, too!  It's even better than that, however.  Republicans are always telling us that people know best how to spend their hard earned dollars, and I can imagine that the secretary's neighbor, less fond of Costco, might like to have a latte at Starbucks every month, while her sister-in-law socks away $78 in a Health Care Savings Account for when she gets breast cancer.  

The mystery, of course, is why Speaker Ryan thought the secretary's story was a good advertisement for the tax package the Republicans passed earlier this year.  The Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, had deployed the word "crumbs" to describe the savings realized by a "typical" taxpayer, and Ryan, who criticized her for that, must have eventually comprehended that he was validating her point, because after a few hours the tweet was deleted.  His epiphany was likely abetted by some of the tweeted commentary.

Hey Paul Ryan, a lot of teachers have memberships at Costco to buy supplies their schools won't pay for.  Get out much?

Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake."
Paul Ryan: "Let them shop at Costco."

Forget Costco memberships.  You can buy Paul Ryan's soul on eBay for $1.50.

Coincidentally, there is this week at Costco a sale on Paul Ryan's awareness.

And you get a Costco membership!
And you get a Costco membership!
And you get a Costco membership!
[This tweet was accompanied by a GIF of Oprah gesticulating wildly at her audience.]

What could she buy each week with the extra $1.50?
1/2 bag of Albanese Gummi Bears
17 minutes of the movie Hostiles
1/2 gallon of gas
1.5 items on McDonald's value menu
1-1/4 lb all beef hot dog at Costco
100% of Paul Ryan's integrity

I know I have nothing to fear
Now that Costco is paid for this year;
And I won't complain
While Paul Ryan drinks champagne:
I have money left over for beer!

I know that among my millions of readers there must be a few with refined sensibilities, so I won't quote my absolute favorites, but, to indicate the general flavor, one of Ryan's respondents imagined him posting his tweet and then, feeling satisfied with himself, retiring to an easy chair in his home half way up the colon of one of the Koch brothers, where he proceeds to pleasure himself while reading Ayn Rand.  My own meager contribution to the fun--though someone somewhere has probably already commented on it--concerns the gratuitous detail of how the secretary works at a public school.  Had she worked at a private school, or a business, it would not have mattered in the least for the "argument" being advanced, and it must have been included only to suggest that the tweeter is a real Man of the Common People.

The memo and more

Now that the Nunes memo has been released, it appears that Republican talkers have switched from

The memo will vindicate Trump by proving that those investigating him are of Satan

to

The hysteria of the Democrats and the FBI over the release of this dud is unfathomable.

They might be on to something with the new talking point, but shouldn't they still be worried?  The president must know what Mueller could discover, and he is very obviously desperate to derail, shut down, discredit--anything!--the investigation.  A shoddy memo written by his stooge that unintentionally confirms that the investigation into him is vital--well, any port in a storm!

It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that Trump thinks it would be very bad for him if the truth came out.  Given what was known about this Carter Page character back in 2013 and 2014, the FBI would have been criminally negligent not to want to find out as much as possible about him.  And Team Trump hired him as a foreign policy advisor!  If I worked for the FBI, and had a mistress, I'd be texting her about what a moron he is, too.

On the local scene, many Republicans are cheered at the news that TPaw is evidently eying his old desk in the governor's mansion.  I've always thought that he was a poor governor and, as a candidate, something of a paper tiger.  His presidential campaign in the Romney year was woeful, and, while it's true that he was twice elected Governor of Minnesota, he never won as much as 47 percent of the statewide vote.  In 2002, he got about four of every nine votes, but won by eight points because the Democratic vote was split between the endorsed candidate, Roger Moe, and former DFL congressman Tim Penny, who, running as an Independent, picked up more than 15% of the vote.  In his 2006 re-election, Pawlenty defeated DFLer Mike Hatch by 46.69 to 45.73 percent.  I doubt that his subsequent work as a Washington lobbyist has made him more formidable, and he is anti-Trump, which also puts him in a bad place since in Minnesota, as elsewhere, the Republican rank-and-file is drunk on Trump.  TPaw might reasonably hope that the president will stand revealed as a criminal before he would face Republican voters in the primary, but in that case it will likely be even harder for any Republican to win a statewide general election in Minnesota.