swashing the buckler
The Master of Ballantrae (1953) is a swashbuckler done right; from a book by R L Stevenson. Technicolor, of course, though not as luminous as in Scaramouche.
Fifteen years after Robin Hood, Errol Flynn is my age, which gives me an idea.
Being indecisive by nature, I arrange my Netflix list by date, but I could instead arrange it by the age of the director or lead actor. I could even write a Python program to probe the Internet Movie Database for that information; I wonder how long it would take to go through all the titles from title/tt0000001 (Carmencita, 1894: “The noted dancer, who goes through her graceful act exactly as she does at Koster & Bial’s, New York”) to title/tt0500200 (Bernadette Peters in Concert, 1998).
The castle of “Ballantrae”, by the way, also appears in an episode of The New Avengers (1976).
no guru, no method, no logo
The Fly Bottle: Crest, Colgate, Autonomy, Alienation, Not Voting, Etc.
The traditional Marxish theory of consumer culture is that the dark arts of marketing and advertising germinate within us ‘false’ desires. A false desire is one whose satisfaction serves not one’s own ‘interests,’ but the interests of those in the business of servicing (for a pretty penny!) the psychic ‘needs’ that they themselves have planted. So we are supposed to be wary of Nike, Starbucks, etc. lest we surrender our autonomy to the cigar-chomping moneybags. No Logo!
This idea has never done much for me. . . . However, I am beginning to find the Marxist critique quite pertinent to America’s duopolistic political system. . . .
Since the policy bundles we’re offered represent only a tiny slice of the possible range, they will only very improbably reflect most ‘authentic’ combinations of political preferences. Most people would be unsatisfied with the choices, and ill-motivated to vote. So the parties must implant false desire. . . .
I’ve got to say that it’s just sort of embarrassing to see the AdBusting, culture jamming, No-Logoites wandering my neighborhood armed with clipboards marching door-to-door plumping for John Forbes Kerry, as if Civilization Depends Upon It. . . .
Great Hackers
quoth Paul Graham:
But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.
Tehee. In the same essay:
Because you can’t tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can’t tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.
Why, that’s just how I feel! Do you suppose . . . ?
(Perry Metzger pointed me to Graham’s essays.)
language is bluffing
One David Mortensen observes:
. . . language is a code employed only by code-breakers: that none of us knows the language we speak as a fully explicit system. Instead, we bluff our way through, filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the code with an inference here and a leap of logic there. This capacity to extrapolate from the known to the unknown is, in essense, grammar. . . .
(Cited by languagehat)
mixed message?
Seen on the tail of a car:
I CAN TELL WHAT YOU’RE THINKING
AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF
and below that
Show Me Your Tits
the inherent instability of euphemisms
I nearly received (but for the grace of Pobox filters, which are very good) a spam entitled more pleasure for you and her erasmus stairwell.
Is that what the kids call it these days?
