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Since Friday Follies deals with humorous or idiotic matters with some arguable tangential relationship to the law, I will point to citizen journalist Corey Heidelberger and three separate posts by the omnipresent PP on the folly of the South Dakota “blogger bills” (HB 1277 and HB 1278). I see no need to recreate the will and, besides, I’m kind of tired of sausage grinding.
The (Dutch) times are a’changing. Until this week, sex with animals was legal in the Netherlands, as long as it could be proven the animals were not injured. Now such activity has been banned, leading Reuters to observe that the interweb will “lose one of its main sources of bestiality videos.” (Via.)
The Heart Attack Grill in Arizona sues the Heart Stoppers Sports Grill in Florida for allegedly infringing on its concept of “the medically themed hamburger grill and restaurant.” Showing my lack of any knack for advertising, I kind of wonder about a “theme” based on high-fat, obesity-inducing fare. (Via.)
While I can see it being appropriate in many circumstances, the California Commission on Judicial has publicly censured a judge for ordering that attorneys in a class-action lawsuit be paid the same way their clients would be — in $10 gift vouchers to a local clothing store. The actual censure, which indicates the gift vouchers would be paid in installments, says the judge’s conduct displayed “bias and embroilment” and was an abuse of authority.
“Robert Frost Elementary in Washington State canceled the touring theatre-troupe Studio East’s production of the Emperor’s New Clothes and demanded several edits to Snow White and the Black Forest due to fears that students would imitate the bad behavior of some of the characters. The plays, according to the school, violate its Human Dignity Policy.”
“You know when the case name is Anonymous v. Anonymous that things are going to be interesting.” Short version: husband hires private investigator who discovers wife is having an affair with the family priest.
There is no credit to being a comedian when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts.
Will Rogers
The individual experiences of soldiers during the Vietnam War are the basis of some excellent books, whether the nonfiction combat memoir, combat experiences as the basis for fiction or the recollections of soldiers who deserted and went to Canada. With his novel Get Out of the Way, Daniel Dinges presents a different perspective, that of a young man trying to use the draft to avoid Vietnam. Yet an untraditional perspective alone can’t ensure success with readers.
 Although he’s been relying on student deferments, Tom Daniels, the novel’s protagonist, learns there are 20 support personnel, 10 stateside, for every combat soldier in Vietnam. He also discovers most of the draftees in combat are 18 and with no more than a high school diploma while he is about to turn 21 and has two years of college. He decides that those factors, his wits and good fortune may be enough to avoid carrying a rifle in Vietnam. In December 1967 he gives up his deferment and we follow him as he pursues that goal at the same time troop strength in Vietnam is climbing toward its peak.
One of the biggest problems, whether intended or not, is that the book seems to reflect what one might imagine to be the languor of the stateside military base, especially for someone assigned to support duty. This isn’t because we demand the danger or uncertainty of a combat zone or that we are comparing the story to those set in a combat zone. It’s because there actually isn’t a lot to engross us, whether in basic training, on military assignment or in the details of Daniels’ life prior to the military. The result is a pallid feel that is exacerbated by a seemingly flat and detached tone. At times, Get Out of the Way has the resonance of a vanity press-quality memoir cast in the guise of a novel.
The book may actually contain the best explanation of what gives rise to this. At one point Daniels is explaining to someone why he prefers the computer programming to which he’s been assigned over his efforts at songwriting when he was a performing musician. “I think it’s the difference between dealing with emotions and texture instead of facts,” he says. Get Out of the Way likewise seems to better portray and describe places, things and processes than people or emotions. It’s not that Dinges writes poorly. His prose is straightforward and he isn’t one of those debut novelists whose thesaurus is about to fall apart from overuse. It’s more a lack of vitality combined with secondary characters who just don’t seem fleshed out enough to feel real.
Dinges deserves credit for taking an uncommon approach toward a Vietnam War story, one often forgotten unless it shows up in the news or nonfiction works about those from upper income families who had the National Guard or other mechanisms to avoid the draft. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough texture to the concept on paper to make Get Out of the Way a notable addition to the canon of Vietnam-related literature.
It was a time when remaining true to yourself, your country, and standing up for your most strongly held beliefs had become almost impossible.
Daniel Dinges, Get Out of the Way
One of the problems with the interweb is often you at times see the ultimate layout only after the fact, especially if another site or server is populating the page with ads. At least that’s what I’m attributing this bit of ad placement to in a Slate blog post aboutHarper’s Magazine:
Adding some irony to this is that the post examines whether Harper’s would be better off “letting go” (e.g., killing) its magazine format for a new media model. Of course, who knows? Maybe the ad is there to hint that is the only way for Harper’s to “take care of your family.” I’m sure its subscribers would grieve, although perhaps not to the extent of the woman in the picture.
By the way, when I went and looked at the site later, the ad aimed at investors. Is that perhaps another hint?
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
I need to get back in the habit of doing this series and thought I would do so with an approach a bit different than before. It is prompted by a statistic I came across in the last couple weeks. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “people tend to most prefer musical recordings that were released when they were teenagers or young adults, with their interest peaking at about 23½ years of age, according to studies by researchers at Columbia University and Rutgers University.”
The first part didn’t surprise me since that is the time period in which we’re most likely to be listening to and exploring music. It was the second statistic about being roughly 23 or 24 that intrigued me. I’m don’t know the methodology of the university research but thought I’d take a shorthand approach to calculating when that would be for me.
I took the dozen albums on my Desert Island Discs list and calculated my average age based on their date of release. Since these are my favorites, I figured they were a handy synopsis of the universe of my musical tastes. The result? I’m still in college — and barely. The average is 18½ years. To me, that signifies one of two things. Either my musical tastes began stagnating or music was a helluva lot better “back in the day.” I lean toward the latter because that terminal point coincides with the onset of disco, one of the greatest ever banes of American culture and music.
The age range, though, is almost as surprising. I was a month shy of three years old old when Kind of Blue was released on August 17, 1959. I was days shy of 45 when Rockin’ the Suburbs was released on September 11, 2001. The middle point of those ages is 24, putting me quite close to the average identified in the university studies.
By the way, the latter ages end up being about the same time people realized what a huge p.o.s. disco was. You think there’s any correlation there?
I like pop
I like soul
I like rock
But I never liked disco
Everclear, “AM Radio,” Songs from an American Movie, Vol. 1
What has proved to be an ongoing controversy today had a major portion of what little legitimacy it had taken out from under it. The Lancet, a British medical journal, today “fully” retracted a February 1998 article linking the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination to autism.
According to The Lancet‘s editor, it was “utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false.” The retraction comes on the heels of the conclusion of a lengthy investigation by Britain’s General Medical Council. The organization’s ethics panel concluded last week that the conduct of primary author, Andrew Wakefield, in the research that formed the basis of the article was ““irresponsible and dishonest.”
The problem is that this action comes after 11 years of ever-increasing “vaccines cause autism” hysteria, one occasioned in part because some people pay more attention to Playboy playmates than scientific facts. As is so often the case, the retraction will not catch up with the damage caused, which in this case includes a dramatic resurgence of measles cases. And, sadly, despite the lack of scientific support, we can all rest assured that the anti-vaccination fanatics will not disappear.
We fully retract this paper from the published record.
The Lancet, Feb. 2, 2010
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