My sick/grim sense of humor is on full display here — I find all of these amusing, and would even if made into haggis (a month late).
- It looks like cows have free speech, too. And certain Congresscritters have skin too thin for representative government (and, therefore, inappropriate for fine leather products) — they aspire to power as of right, and incontestible.
- Sort of like uppity athletes. I'm reasonably sure that Messrs Smith and Carlos never expected to have this kind of company — company that merely quietly kneeled. It's rather shocking that the man defending Kaepernick is the white man whose job Kaepernick took in the first place… which says something profoundly disturbing about "talent evaluation" in the NFL. And meanwhile, the owner of a team that damned well could have used Kaepernick and his skill set this past season further profits from disasters; only time, and detailed reporting, will show the, umm, anticipated imbalances in the population of those most exploited.
- Then, we continue to celebrate antisemites in American letters. They just have to avoid being acquitted of treason on grounds of insanity. The Cantos are not distinctively, explicably lesser than The Wasteland; there were and are other things at work… including, admittedly, inability to stomach the overt vileness of one author compared to the other's genteel bigotry, and that's not a sufficient explanation. It actually gets much murkier than that when one starts looking at 1930s through 1950s academic articles and musings and curricula, but only by reading between the lines (and listening to the silences, especially those silent-but-embarassed agreements all too common in certain self-nominated cultural centers).
- Both preceding sausages (or at least their ingredients) are likely to become excessively footnoted without engaging with content or context. The irony that the footnote was originally not to document sources, but to actually engage with the subject matter in a more personal way — Swift's "use" ("parody" isn't quite right) of footnotes in A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and other essays is one method bearing further consideration — has escaped the law-oriented source of that commentary. But then, irony usually escapes law-oriented sources, only to be run down and reimprisoned; for example, for the first decade after it was issued, Gideon was essentially available to those most in need of its protection — the indigent, the uneducated, the disproportionately minority and/or ne'er-do-well — as rumor, or at best by implication from a Miranda warning (same problem). Not even in a footnote.
- From the Very-Late-to-the-Party-Indeed desk, consider the problem of e-mail trackers, which I've been concerned about for about a quarter of a century. <SARCASM> Yeah, they're "just" for marketing purposes. Riiiiiiiiiiiight. </SARCASM>