What an ancient Greek looked like

An eleven-year-old girl (via Coudal).

The Sharpie Liquid Pencil

Stephen at pencil talk has an excellent review of the far-from-excellent Sharpie Liquid Pencil. I bought a few SLPs last year and was utterly disappointed: this pencil, so-called, writes like an uncooperative ball-point pen, skipping and blobbing. Says Stephen, “It is hard to understand how this product was released to market.”

A related post
Liquid graphite pencils

Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin

WisconsinEye has video of yesterday’s vote on Special Session Assembly Bill 11. What the newspaper accounts I’ve read don’t make clear is that the vote took place as Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca said, repeatedly, that the meeting was a violation of law. Seeing, sad to say, is believing.

Not so fast

Wisconsin State Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller:

In thirty minutes, 18 State Senators undid fifty years of civil rights in Wisconsin. Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten. Tonight, 18 Senate Republicans conspired to take government away from the people. Tomorrow we will join the people of Wisconsin in taking back their government.

Wisconsin State Senate Passes Anti-Union Bill (TPM)

A related post
Boycott Koch

Recently updated

More details on Van Dyke Parks’s forthcoming single releases.

Word of the day: aegis

The word-of-the-day from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is aegis (EE-jis):

noun: Protection, support, guidance, or sponsorship of a particular person or organization.

From Latin aegis, from Greek aigis (goatskin), from aix (goat). Aigis was the name of the shield or breastplate of Zeus or Athena in Greek mythology. It was made of goatskin. Earliest documented use: 1704.

The aegis makes a dazzling appearance in Odyssey 22, where it drives those suitors yet unkilled into a terrified frenzy. It appears again in a quieter way at the poem’s end, when Odysseus and the dead suitors’ male relatives come to terms:

ὅρκια δ᾽ αὖ κατόπισθε μετ᾽ ἀμφοτέροισιν ἔθηκεν

Παλλὰς Ἀθηναίη, κούρη Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο,

Μέντορι εἰδομένη ἠμὲν δέμας ἠδὲ καὶ αὐδήν.

Do you see the aegis at the end of line three? “Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο” — that’s aegis-holding [αἰγίοχος] Zeus. Pallas Athena [Παλλὰς Ἀθηναίη] has borrowed the keys to the aegis from Dad. In Robert FItzgerald’s 1961 translation:

Both parties later swore to terms of peace
set by their arbiter, Athena, daughter
of Zeus who bears the stormcloud as a shield —
though still she kept the form and voice of Mentor.

A new Van Dyke Parks project

The guy’s on a roll: Van Dyke Parks plans to release five singles, each a collaboration with a visual artist: Frank Holmes (who did the cover art for the Beach Boys’ never-released SMiLE), Sally Parks, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Art Spiegelman, and Billy Edd Wheeler. Says Parks, “We’re calling it Nouveau Niche."

[I know: that’s six artists.]

Update, March 9: Some more information, from Van Dyke Parks: there will be five 7"-vinyl singles released in 2011. The first: “Dreaming of Paris,” b/w “Wedding in Madagascar,” with art by Ed Ruscha. Another song title: “Katrina,” with art by Sally Parks. A concert at the London Islington Union Chapel (May 16) will launch the series.

[“Backed with,” “b/w”: an expression from the analog past.]

Some recent Van Dyke Parks posts
Van Dyke Parks at Daytrotter
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons, on the radio
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons, on the radio again

Domestic comedy

“I think a sandwich tastes better cut on the diagonal.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

“Going Up the Country,” corrected

There’s a clever faux-documentary from the future airing on YouTube, The Beatles: 1000 Years Later. A sample: “The Beatles rose to prominence when they traveled from their native Linverton to America to perform at Ed Sullivan’s annual Woodstock Festival.” I thought of this documentary while reading WCBS-FM’s description of Canned Heat’s 1968 song “Going Up the Country”:

It was the heart of the 1960s, when the first wave of Baby Boomers were reading Steinbeck and Kerouac and romanticizing life on the road. Delivered in [Bob] Hite’s warbling, almost embarrassed falsetto — complete with jug and recorder as accompaniment — “Going Up The Country” invites us to “pack [our] leaving trunk” to go to some unknown place where “the water tastes like wine” and jump in and “stay drunk all the time.”

Could there be a more romantic, utopian and fantastic picture of life in the country?

“Steinbeck and Kerouac”: Kerouac, okay, but Steinbeck? I suppose the writer might be thinking of Travels with Charley (1962).

“Hite’s warbling, almost embarrassed falsetto”: Alan Wilson, not Bob Hite, sings on “Going Up the Country.”

“[C]omplete with jug and recorder”: neither jug nor recorder can be heard on the record. There is a flute though, played by Jim Horn. Where do the jug and recorder come from? From this lip-syncing performance, which features beer bottle (not jug) and wooden flute (not recorder).

“Could there be a more romantic, utopian and fantastic picture of life in the country?” Well, yes. Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” comes to mind. What the WCBS-FM writer overlooks in “Going Up the Country” is the urgency of flight:

Now baby, pack your leavin’ trunk, you
    know we got to leave today
Just exactly where we’re goin’ I cannot say
But we might even leave the USA
’Cause there’s a brand-new game I don’t
    want to play

I remember thinking (back in the day) that these lines carried a suggestion of fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. Perhaps that was the start of my life as a close reader.

Other Canned Heat posts
Alan Wilson
Canned Heat (in east-central Illinois)
Forty years apart (“Bull Doze Blues” and “Going Up the Country”)
Hooker ’n Heat

Infinite Jest and Mike Huckabee

Hal Incandenza is working out a taxonomy of liars:

“Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Hal’s observations might help one to understand Mike Huckabee’s statements earlier this week about Barack Obama’s childhood. Huckabee began with the claim that Obama grew up in Kenya:

“And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. . . . But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.“

And later:

“In my answer, I simply misspoke when I alluded to President Obama growing up in Kenya and meant to say Indonesia.”

And later:

“I do think he [Obama] has a different world view, and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.”

See? Not Kenya. Indonesia. And madrassas. Obama did not attend a madrassa, and he spent most of his childhood in Hawaii. Scouting and Rotary, by the way, are alive and well there, as they are in Indonesia and Kenya. Mercifully easy to see through? I hope so.

As Andrew Sullivan observes, Huckabee is “Palin without the figure.”

Related reading
Huckabee’s “Kenya” clarification (Washington Post)
Huckabee: Obama Was Raised in Kenya (Mother Jones)
Gerakan Pramuka Indonesia (Scouting in Indonesia)
Kenya Scouts Association
Pramuka Indonesia (Wikipedia)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas (The Daily Dish)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas, Ctd (The Daily Dish)
Rotary Clubs vs Madrassas, Ctd (The Daily Dish)
Rotary in Indonesia (Rotary First 100)
Rotary in Kenya (Rotary District 9200)