Lecher fingers due the blogging
.In the ad from shampoo maker "Biomen," archived video of former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is played in which he is seen yelling and gesturing wildly with his hands, while a fictional text translates his message across the screen."If you are not wearing a woman's dress, you should not use her shampoo either," Hitler says in the ad. "Here it is, a real mens' shampoo, Biomen." The video then cuts to a picture of the shampoo bottle with the on-screen message, "Real men use Biomen."
Scott • North Berwick, Maine •Lather, rinse, repeat history.
"BioMEN in." - Jingle from commercial.
Adolf's Scalp Tenderizer - from the people who brought you Hair Hitler shampoo, Barbarossa hair salons, Putsch Beer and Reich Guard deodorant.
Perhaps the makers of Uncle Sam cereal might want to launch a rival shampoo brand against Biomen, or a hostile takeover bid, on June 6.
Real Men, apparently, know a follicle symbol when they see one.
ScottAw, that's so effin' sweet - I almost dropped my pipe.
"Okla. court strikes down ultrasound abortion law"
If the law really was "ultrasound", how could they strike it down?
In her feature in the department at The New Yorker devoted to The Wayward Press, Lauren Collins chronicles how The Daily Mail conquered England.
Spooktacular: James Bamford, leading author on the National Security Agency (The Puzzle Palace, &c.), in Wired on how the agency "is building the country's biggest spy center (watch what you say)".terrorist bomb anthrax anarchist knock on door
George Steiner by David Levine in the NYRoB, 1975, for the review by D.S. Carne-Ross of After Babel
In the TLS for March 30, Ben Hutchinson reviews The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan by "the high priest of high art", George Steiner, who has been called an "impostor of Parnassus" (by Daniel Bell) and said to represent "a common type on the Continent ... rather rare in England ... a genuine charlatan" (by Isaiah Berlin); the first sentence below has often enough been levelled at Steiner himself:
As Steiner recognizes, however, the danger is that style might overshadow substance, that poetry might inhibit thought. Steiner takes Henri Bergson's philosophy as a test case, suggesting that it is characterized by "an underlying paradox: that of a stylistic gift so eminent and entrancing that the necessary roughage and density of philosophic content suffer". Freud, similarly, is held to endure not as a thinker, but as a writer who emerged from the particular tradition of Austrian philosophical literature: Freud's virtuosity as a "conjuror of myth" marks a kind of modernist Faustianism, where the very magic of linguistic style threatens to occlude metaphysical meaning. That Val̩ry Рwho, in Cioran's telling formulation, "does not forgive himself for not having been a philosopher" Рshould write Mon Faust was, as Steiner notes, "virtually preordained".
John Gray in the underrated UK monthly Literary Review, reviewing The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen & Sonu Shamdasani:
There are numerous accounts of how Freud's work became the focus of a cult. To my mind the most vividly illuminating are Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984), both by Janet Malcolm. Of course Malcolm deals mainly with contemporary practice, while Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are concerned mostly with psychoanalysis's early years. But the difference in style is telling. Malcolm's is terse and graceful, while the tone of the present volume is illustrated in a comment the authors make on some gaps they detect in an edition of Freud's letters: 'The result of this omission', they tell us, 'obscured the connections between these scatological hypotheses on the ontogenic recapitulation by the individual of the erotogenic zones abandoned in the course of phylogenesis and the theory of infantile sexuality put forward in the Three Essays in 1905.' Ugly, coagulated sentences of this kind - of which there are many - may be no more than instances of the professional inability to write, which has become a requirement of academic life. But I think the objection to this kind of language is not simply aesthetic. Such clogged, periphrastic discourse testifies to an obscurity of thinking and purpose that runs right through the book, and through the Freud wars that the authors laboriously rehearse. In contrast, Freud is the most lucid and direct of writers - not least when what he is saying departs from what he has said in the past. Could this persistent clarity help explain why Freud's writings continue to be so troubling, and why his detractors cannot let him go?
Hacky sacs: historian of medicine Howard Markel in The Book at TNR, reviewing Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor:
In the 1980s, scientists confirmed the once revolutionary concept that nicotine is extremely addictive. The tobacco companies publicly rejected such claims, even as they clandestinely took advantage of cigarettes' addictive potential by routinely spiking them with extra nicotine to make it harder to quit. Indeed, their marketing memorandums document advertising campaigns aimed at youngsters to hook whole new generations of smokers. Sadly, that is just the tip of the filter when it comes to what is added to or included in every puff of a cigarette. From arsenic, lead, and pesticides to artificial flavorings, moisturizers, and even radioactive isotopes, Proctor paints a disgusting picture that would have sickened Upton Sinclair.
Trevor Butterworth - not the pancake-syrup heir, apparently - at Forbes with a Cancer Warning Over Cancer Warnings:
It should not ... come as too much of a surprise to find that endless bad news about health is, itself, a possible health risk. A new paper in the journal Lancet Oncology draws attention to the risk of obsessing over new cancer risks, as reported in the hypochondriac media. Why? Very simply, the more the media reports on hypothetical cancer risks, the more you are likely to ignore actual avoidable cancer risks.As the author, Professor Bernard Stewart, an internationally-noted expert in cancer causation, points out, there is a remarkable scientific consensus on the causes of avoidable cancer, and they relate to lifestyle choices that people can actually do something about: smoking, poor diet, excessive drinking, obesity, physical inactivity, and exposure to the sun. But, he says, by focusing on the "insidious" causes of cancer – pollutants, chemicals in food and consumer goods, the media, activist groups, and even some scientists, create the impression that this is where the action is – both in terms of causality and remediation. Yet, in almost every case there is no evidence that you will reduce your risk of cancer by removing the alleged carcinogen.To take one example, Stewart points out that the trends in breast cancer incidence between 1980 and 2006 – particularly for tumors triggered by estrogen receptors – parallel changes in the patterns of breast cancer screening. But the research simply fails to implicate pollution or chemical exposure in these trends, even though these are the causes frequently promulgated by activist groups through the media. Such messages, warns Stewart, risk diverting "attention from proven means of cancer prevention."Is Stewart justified in worrying about the risk of worrying about the wrong risks? His citations make for fascinating reading. Take this comment from a 1999 paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs: "Most members of the general public are far more worried about minuscule, hypothetical risks presented by environmental contaminants than about the far greater well-established hazards that they inflict on themselves." A frustrated oncologist? No, a frustrated veteran New York Times science and health reporter, Jane E. Brody. She recalled trying to explain the minimal risk of one pesticide by saying it was no more dangerous than eating two raw mushrooms a day, a comparison to which "many of [her] readers cried, 'Now I can't eat mushrooms'!"
Jezu, Joie of Mots' Downsizing: from a customer review at Amazon.com in 2005, of One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings by Anthony Burgess, who served therein Roast Tongue with Thinly-Sliced Gallic:
The French seem determined to destroy their Roman inheritance by chopping up words until they become as short as possible, and as capable of being confused with other chopped-up words as only a genuinely morbid condition of language can allow. Even when a French word or name bears some visual resemblance to its classical original, the spoken form submits to the axe. I can never grow used to pronouncing 'Jesus Christ' as 'Jezu Cri', and I feel that if the French could cut the holy name down to something like 'Je Cr', they would.
The last time, it would seem, he complained of a headache when called to perform.
In JCS, he was billed as Philip Toubus; among the later of the several hundred films in which he either played or directed Peters of other sorts was WMB: Weapons of Masturbation from 2003, a film which, with its topical echoes of Saddamy, if not in the ease with which it doubtless found the knucklear whoreheads it promised to unearth, found itself, however thick its industry's casting calls now are with Nair-thee/do-them-wells, at one with Bush.
Regarding JCS, we can only hope that the producers dealt with Mr. Thomas wholly on, so to speak, the up and up, the better to avoid being charged with robbing Paul to play Peter.
The Match Game sometimes held all-celebrity weeks. From left: Bennett Cerf,Henry Morgan, Robert Q. Lewis, Joan Fontaine, Betty White, and Peggy Cass.
From the article at Wikipedia on the oft-resurrected Match Game (Goodson-Todman), the section on the show's early years (1962-1969) reveals a key turning point that made it a turnkey operation in turn:
The questions used in the game were commonplace: "Name a kind of muffin" or "John loves his _____." In 1963, NBC canceled the series with six weeks left to be recorded. Question writer Dick DeBartolo came up with a funnier set of questions, like "Mary liked to pour gravy on John's _____", and submitted it to Mark Goodson. With the knowledge that the show couldn't be canceled again, Goodson gave the go-ahead for the more risque-sounding questions – a decision that caused a significant boost in ratings and an "un-cancellation" by NBC.
What's past was prologue when, four years after the 1969 cancellation of the show's original, differently-structured incarnation, Goodson and Todman returned it to daytime life as Match Game 73 (&c., through 79)
The first few weeks of the show were somewhat different from the rest of the run. At first, many of the questions fit into the more bland and innocuous mold of the earlier seasons of the original series. In addition, many of the frequent panelists on the early episodes were not regulars later in the series, including Klugman, Arlene Francis, Bert Convy and Steve Allen, who was host of The Tonight Show when Rayburn served as announcer. (Convy would later be chosen as host of the show's 1990 revival before being diagnosed with a brain tumor which eventually took his life.)However, with the double entendre in the question "Johnny always put butter on his _____" marked a turning point in the questions on the show. Soon, the tone of Rayburn's questions changed notably, leaving behind the staid topics that The Match Game had first disposed of in 1963 for more risqué humor.
Paul Berman in TNR in 1994, reviewing A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald by Michael Wreszin, caught one signature aspect, virtually acoustic, of the Wildean critic as artist in Macdonald:
In the days when Dwight Macdonald was not only editing and co- publishing Politics magazine but also writing whole sections of each issue, he used to amuse his readers by composing letters-to- the-editor to denounce and correct his own opinions. That was a charmingly self-deprecatory thing to do. It was funny. The self- denunciations showed that Macdonald, alone among political commentators, knew himself to be human, and was happy to share the secret with his own subscribers. The world is full of political writers who claim to be supremely independent, but Macdonald was independent of even himself. In his biography of Macdonald, Michael Wreszin quotes with approval a judgment by Czeslaw Milosz, who described the quality as "a totally American phenomenon" (which would be nice, if true): "the completely free man, capable of making decisions at all times and about all things strictly according to his personal moral judgment."
The habit of heckling his own opinions was a main element in Macdonald's prose style, too. He was always posting footnotes or intruding parentheses into his own sentences in order to add a second point of view, normally quite skeptical of the first. You could almost imagine that "Dwight Macdonald" was actually two persons: a Macdonald from Yale who was urbane, relaxed, witty and intelligent, and a second Macdonald from Yale who was even more urbane, relaxed and so forth. Delmore Schwartz's judgment was this: "antagonism for its own sake is his appetite and neurosis, and none of his political predictions come true, but he is a master of expository prose." And the source of that mastery was, I think, the doubleness in his approach. Macdonald No. 1 expressed judgments; Macdonald No. 2 judged expressions; and the writing came out stereophonic.
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