en dasher

Um, has anyone else noticed that Google's gone Saussurean?

2008-05-20T13:55:00.004-04:00

This has been happening for weeks now, but it remains irreconcilable with anything decent or holy, and I fear just by talking about it I will be struck down. Anyways, go to any site that uses Google's spell-checker (gmail, blogger, etc.). Spell a world correctly, then right-click on the word. No matter what word you choose, you will see the following suggestions:

Signifies
Signifier
Signifier s

WTFWTFWTFOMFG!? I'm not sure what's the scarier possibility: that this "bug" (easter egg?) has been happening to every Google user and no one has noticed it, or that it's only happening to me (on multiple computers, no less). I repeat: WTFWTFWTFOMFG.

Did she actually just say that?

2008-05-19T14:15:00.003-04:00

Elizabeth Edwards, via the Politico, about how her statements supporting HRC's health plan over Obama's do not constitute an endorsement of the former (or a repudiation of her husband):

“If I say I like chocolate ice cream better than strawberry, it doesn't mean either (1) that I like chocolate or strawberry as much as vanilla or (2) that I dislike strawberry. I say what I mean. Hillary's health care plan is closer to what I want to see than Barack's,” she wrote. “As a spouse, it is not surprising that I have a very small change purse of political capital and I have repeatedly said that I was going to use my capital, such as it is, for the issues about which I care and not on an endorsement.”

So, she'll never like chocolate or strawberry as much as she likes vanilla. Glad that's settled. By the way, this was a written email, so like, she saw what she wrote and pressed send anyway.

Also, "change purse of political capital"?

Blackmail of the Enlightenment

2008-04-18T01:41:00.009-04:00

So, Endasher was updating zer Facebook profile tonight when ze noticed the following:

Why, in 2008, are we still forced to acquiesce to the fantasy that religion and politics make up the most "Basic" attributes of selfhood? I had to dig all the way to the "Relationships" tab before actuating the real stuff of identity—that is, declaring that I'm looking for "Networking" (née "Random Play"). This will not do. No, Facebook is not as non-dialectical as it was just a few months ago, but here's predicting Zuckerberg will still be one of the first four or five against the wall.

I also added a drop shadow to my picture! Therefore, I am existent—and accepting friend requests@! Poke, however, at your own peril.

Julia Allison, Eat Your Heart Out

2008-02-27T23:17:00.003-05:00

Editors:

William Safire is running scared, haunted by the specter of the en dash. Crumbling under the evident shame of his foray into "postpartisan" stylistics, he waxes inoffensive this week in a Clinton-tinged bit on "bird-dog minutes" and their rhetorical reappropriation. Fair enough: Safire has realized, or been shown, that punctuation is utterly outside his purview, and he will restrict attention to language as such or face the consequences.

But traces of last week's backfire impregnate the bird-doggery at hand: they circulate, collide, and threaten to implode the whole sorry exercise. As Safire hedges and triangulates, looking over his parenthetical shoulder at the recent farce — "nonpartisan (not postpartisan[!!])" — and welcoming, again within the safety of parentheses, a one-off exchange with his beleaguered copy His refusal to give explicit justification for the hyphen in "bird-dog minute" or, for that matter, in "bird-dog" the verb, would under other circumstances be a refreshing endorsement of his readers' presence of mind — compound adjectives, different usage, etc., etc. — but here it merely throws into relief Safire's meekness, his fear, his outright humiliation and final acknowledgement that one man's syndicated meta-pedantry is another's common sense. editor, he appears more emaciated and discreditable than ever.

Sad though it is to see a columnist of Safire's putative stature, or at least age, curl up in resignation, these foregoing moments mold only the general affect of this latest entry "On Language," not its moment of critical collapse beneath the deferred pressure of the en dash — and his proven inability to cope with it. As he trails off, cold-shouldered by the Clinton camp, surrendering to the (consistently impressive) Dictionary of American Regional English, he foretells the many "dialectical delights" lurking behind the etymology he refuses to investigate. Not "dialectal," linguists' preferred term for all things of or pertaining to dialects, but "dialectical," that philosophical catchall cherished (and, admittedly, abused) by enough of Safire's academic–political enemies to fill the University of Wisconsin several times over. Certainly "dialectical" can refer to dialects, but the word is so colored (overdetermined?) by theoretical currents from Moscow to Frankfurt to the Left Bank and beyond as to render its plain-clothes linguistic application comical, a quiet kowtow to the en dash's transformative promise, which Safire conspicuously flouted last week. But perhaps this is just what the author so quietly aspires to harness.

The en dash, in a selected category of usage, summons a vibrant, polyvalent, and entirely value-neutral dialectic between the terms it links. Whereas the hyphen routinely venerates hierarchy — understood in at least a grammatical sense: prescribed order of words — the en dash levels it. "Singer–songwriter," to take a familiar example, could just as easily, and as correctly, be "songwriter–singer": the terms are on equal footing, and any conventional ordering we maintain is only that — conventional. Singer and songwriter: it is a simple, unmarked pairing. It is infinitely and productively reversible, always in motion or pointing toward its possibility: dialectical. And in those en-dash cases which manifestly do report hierarchy — "master–slave," for example, from Safire's good friend Hegel — the imbalance is no fault of the punctuation, but of the terms themselves. See also "philosopher–king," "work–life balance," "Clinton–Obama": "and," "with," even "versus," but always corralled into a dynamic relationship that demands consideration on its own terms while demanding the aggressive scrutiny of each individual term, its fissures, its overlaps, its vulnerabilities. The en dash is, in this way, the escape route from the ideology presupposed by the catchall hyphen that installs and reproduces and renders unquestionable an entire legion of hierarchies.

Why did he do it? Ever the sober linguist, why not say "dialectal"? Why sacrifice precision; why wander down the tortuous theoretical road of the dialectic? Last week, monkeying with "postpartisanism," Safire sinned upon disavowing a different en dash. His frustration over the phrase "post-baby boom" could easily have been resolved: the en dash can stand in for a hyphen when multiple words are being joined on one side. Functionally, "post–baby boom" is quite apart from the delights enabled in the internal workings of, say, "philosopher–king." But one context of use associatively slips toward the next, and Safire's "dialectical" proclivities this week suggest that he was ready, apprehensive, for this crucial step all along.

Leaving a trail of wreckage on account of his tenuous, overextended work with hyphens, and now jittery at the prospect that this might be his legacy, Safire seeks refuge. This week's bird-dog column is not only the pitiable capitulation of a punctuational know-nothing; it is a cry for help. That help lies in the en dash — help that the hyphen-wise, en dash–foolish Times, strangling expression by the day, seems unwilling to supply.

Peter Ekman
Queens

BREAKING... B. Hussein Obama Wants to Eat Your Puppy

2008-02-25T20:10:00.007-05:00

Whoever's running Hillary's oppo department should be fired immediately. Because obviously no one in this country cares anymore about what you inhaled or even insufflated as a boy. But while the interns were paper-cutting themselves through Dreams from My Father searching for crack, everyone seemed to have missed the shocking admission on page 37 of the memoir, recounting Barry's childhood in Indonesia:

...I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner...and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat...

!!!!!! Apparently, Snoopy tastes "tough." I'm just as tolerant as the next guy, but America is not ready for a dog-eater in the White House. Of course the media's not asking the tough question on this. But make no mistake: a vote for canine-fusion cuisine is a vote for the end of the Enlightenment. Ugh, I can't look at him now without seeing the tail wagging in his disgusting flabby stomach. How could you?

Are you there, Daddy? It's me, Matilda.

2008-02-21T00:29:00.002-05:00

Sorry, that was in hideous taste.

Fit for a Meme.

2008-02-14T14:26:00.004-05:00

Associates of the 'dasher know that for months now, yours "seriously profound" truly has been periodically crowing about HRC's uncanny evocation of Eva Peron, or at least the Madonna version I've seen dancing once with Antonio Banderas. Surely, I thought, someone would pick up on the resemblance to the similarly blond, two-for-the-price-of-one, mostly fascist, vaguely tubercular former first lady of Argentina. [The difference being Evita actually achieved something resembling universal health care.]

But even as Hillary cleverly tweaked the old Rice–Webber standard for her "Don't Cry for Me [Crying for You], New Hampshire" routine, the MSM ignored it all, seemingly content with the obvi casting of Obama as Jesus Christ Superstar. (Ron Paul is Cats.) Well, thanks to an offhand and off-putting comment from a Clinton aide-de-camp, the story's finally hit the big time this week:

The Evita Factor [New York mag]

And Starring Hillary Clinton as Eva Peron [Slate]

Since said MSM has to come up with silly reasons to point out the fact that one thing looks like another thing, the idea in the above is that Latinos, grown up in a culture of dynastic lady leaders like Evita, are predisposed to support Hillary. (Why this hasn't made her poll numbers higher among gay men and 16-year-old girls from New Jersey, no one could say.) Also, like most things Clinton nowadays, it's both racist and illogically so: last time I checked, wasn't the stereotype machismo?

Well, I suppose those people do really love their mothers. Wait, that's the Italians. Which, incidentally, is what Madonna is. Oh, swarth is so hard to parse!

A Writer Living in Queens...

2008-02-14T14:17:00.004-05:00

Editors:

William Safire's send-up of "postpartisan" politics and their nomenclature marks a notable improvement on the last major Times entry on the hyphenation beat, Charles McGrath's ill-begotten musings from October 7, "Death-Knell. Or Death Knell." Where McGrath smugly assumed, on the basis of the OED's sudden elimination of 16,000 antiquated hyphens ("bumblebee," "crybaby" – musty forms viscerally awkward in Century 21), the wholesale erosion of the hyphen as such, without regard for context, function, or flavor, Safire is more in tune with the incremental nature of punctuational change: when tentative and new, a term might carry a hyphen, then surrender it with increasing familiarity. McGrath evinced a muted recognition of this process, yet the uptake of his piece — O, controversy! — was, repulsively, that a macro-level flight from the hyphen would prevent new new terms from ever starting out with one.

Safire knows, as McGrath doesn't, that not all hyphens are created equal: the grammatical and the stylistic kinds are simply not subject to the same tectonic forces. His parenthetical is comforting: the just among us, and the strong, speak of ice-cream trucks, hot-dog stands, and, yes, hat-trick hyphenated usages. The sort of hyphens that birth compound adjectives belong to a qualitatively different category from those cobbling together neologisms; if they are to disappear, it will be for reasons unaligned with the puncture of "water-beds."

Yet Safire is entirely too content to guard his impish dance on "post[-]partisanship" behind the slogan of "style, not grammar." A slew of factors constrain our punctuation, liberating though the mirage of free choice may seem. Of course the hyphen in "post-partisan" is immaterial; the hyphen is really no more there in any essential way than the hyphen that could crop up at a line break between syllables. But this ambiguous presence does not authorize the term's division into "post partisan": while the base "partisan" may trace its lineage to the Latin, it is not a term directly plucked from Latin in the way that "partum," another of Safire's examples, most assuredly is. Foreign terms remain unhyphenated — a priori, bona fide, and so on — even when modifying; they are outside the realm of our punctuational caprice.

Safire seems so eager, in fact, to tie the lesson into a neat hat trick and be done with it (or simply blockaded by a word limit — shame in either case) that he misfires irrevocably when it comes to the 2006 Times quote on Barack Obama. The third term, "post-baby boom," is indeed awkward: the meaning is distorted and divorced from the intent, and we're left squawking about "post-babies." Certainly, this "hyphen before a phrase" does not accomplish everything we had hoped.

But it happens that we already have a punctuation mark for precisely such a situation: the en dash. En dashes operate in three main contexts: ranges (2001–08; A–Z), substitutes for hyphens when multiple words are linked on one side (post–baby boom; pre–World War II; trans fat–free), and the non-hierarchical yet dynamic linkage of terms in the spirit of "and," "with," "to," or "versus" (see Safire's egregious fourth paragraph: it should be "Ford–Carter," just as it would be "U.S.–Mexico," "Giants–Patriots," "military–industrial," and so on). Longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash, the kind that signals a pause in speech, the en dash is a powerful tool, albeit one foreign to The Times (and, unthinkably, even the Magazine — glossies across the board employ it). So what we are left with is not a question of hyphen versus no hyphen — the care[-]free situation of "postpartisan" — but rather hyphen versus en dash. Safire misdiagnoses the source of "post-baby boom"'s awkwardness. For intuitive reasons, no one would consider writing "postbaby boom." His following sentence, regarding the Washington news media, is an utter non sequitur; it operates along an unrelated axis.

Whether the fundamental blame rests on Safire or his crusty (copy)editors might seem purely academic, but the fifth paragraph dispels any doubts: the author appears in willful oblivion of the fertile crossroads of style and grammar, and ultimately unconcerned with questions of the distribution of meaning, a fact which alone disqualifies him from writing on this topic in the first place. Safire's introduction of "bi-partisanship" quietly presents a foil to his stated ruminations on the "post-partisan" condition. The problem is the "-ship" bringing up the rear. When only one hyphen lurks in an expression, it always imposes a bifurcation in how we parse the meaning. Here, "bipartisanship," unhyphenated, carries a special ambiguity. Imagine a silenced hyphen before "ship": we have three units of meaning to reckon with, and as a result the hyphen after "bi" is not purely stylistic. "Bi-partisanship," strictly, denotes a state of two partisanships, not a state of bipartisan politics or feeling. ("Postpartisanship" is relatively unproblematic: the situation described is both a situation ("ship") in which a type of politics called "postpartisan" prevail and a time or situation past the concept of "partisanship.") If we are committed for stylistic reasons always to insert a hyphen after a prefix, and if we also mean to describe a state of bipartisan attitudes, then perhaps an en dash would be most appropriate: bi-partisan–ship.

This may be moot beneath the paper's tyranny of typesetting, a consistently vague and undemocratic campaign to foist the hyphen upon en dash–appropriate contexts, but it is not insignificant in a broader sense. Safire has so assimilated the publication's ideological apparatus — if there is no en dash, all is permitted — as to reproduce similar fraught hierarchies within apparently neutral illustrative examples. He may himself write this off as so much speculation, a mere artifact of The Times' punctuational inertia, but this would be to surrender responsiblity for what amounts not simply to a slackening, but to a new and frightful hierarchy of meaning.

Peter Ekman
Queens

It's coming...

2007-09-24T16:54:00.001-04:00

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 3:31 PM
subject: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Incorrect and alternate definitions

One em is sometimes said to be equal to the width of a capital "M" in a particular typeface, as the "M" was commonly cast the full-width of the square "blocks", or "em-quads" (also "mutton-quads"), which are used in printing presses. However, in modern typefaces the character M is usually somewhat less than one em wide. Moreover, as the term has expanded to include a wider variety of languages and character sets, its meaning has evolved; this has allowed it to include those fonts, typefaces, and character sets which do not include a capital "M", such as Chinese and the Arabic alphabet.

:::::::

Likewise for the en dash. Can we say, do you think, that em and en now correspond to M and N in a digitized age of type? If not, we can no longer do the graffiti thing.

(This doesn't take away from the fact that most en dashes, such as those in the NYC subway, are too short. If a letter M is actually narrower than an emdash, and an en is half of one em, then the en dash should always be at least half as wide as the letter M.)

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 3:43 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

it's interesting the orientalizing use of Chinese and arabic examples there. in fact, the term "gothic" to refer to sans-serif fonts (and not blackletter, for which it is sometimes also used), comes from a japanese type that got rid of the traditional finishing strokes at the end of characters. more generally, the em-width is in many ways script-independent; in fact, gutenberg's invention almost sqaures the alphabet in the same way traditional east asian block printing squared (and made discrete) monosyllabic characters.

i would say, that pre-printing, a dash was a dash. but since an emdash situation involves trailing off, while the hyphen was a direct joiner, there was probably some sort of natural tendency to come into different lengths anyway. graffitos came to age in a time when the en dash existed; they should be expected to use it.

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:01 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

But we haven't resolved our policy: whether our en dash is the width of a capital N, or a little bit wider.

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:07 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

our endash is half an emdash of whatever font we use. i think tying it to letterform width is only a useful heuristic. the point is: larger than hyphen, smaller than emdash. entirely distinct from both. there will certainly never be an endash thinner than the capital N, which makes it easy to judge if the duck used is the duck needed.

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:13 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Useful, and enforceable? I think so. I think that, reliant on computers and not block type, this should be the rule, if it is not already

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:15 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

And did you know about this? This is precisely what Queens addresses would need. It is, however, almost exactly the same width as an en dash, depending on font.

Figure dash

The figure dash (‒) is so named because it is the same width as a digit, at least in fonts with digits of equal width.

The figure dash is used when a dash must be used within numbers, for example with telephone numbers: 634‒ 5789. This does not indicate a range (en dash is used for that), or function as the minus sign (which has its own glyph).

The figure dash is often unavailable; in this case, one may use a hyphen-minus instead. In Unicode, the figure dash is U+2012 (decimal 8210). HTML authors must use the numeric forms ‒ or ‒ to type it unless the file is in Unicode; there is no equivalent character entity. In TeX, the standard fonts have no figure dash; however, the digits normally all have the same width as the en dash, so an en dash can be substituted in TeX.

[MESSAGES MISSING]

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:44 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Possibly. Did you know that Oct. 18th is Meat Loaf Appreciation Day? The edible kind – but we could have our power-ballad party that night!

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:46 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

imagine a Power–Ballad Party.

from : [NAME REDACTED]
to : [NAME REDACTED]
date: Sep 24, 2007 4:49 PM
subject: Re: Important
mailed-by gmail.com

Knowledge is ballad, as they say.

Shockingly Domestic

2007-08-28T13:44:00.002-04:00

Just like that Flaming Lips album, but more powerful and ballady, try simultaneously pressing play on the following (may require calisthenic mouse skills.) Then, watch (maybe with volume off?). Also, probably NSFW suckas lolz.

Spoiler Alert!

2007-08-12T19:07:00.001-04:00

In a most definitive sign that the long-dreaded phased redeployment of the Enlightenment—that is to say, the epochal obsolescence of a certain Clinton-era barfly counter-intuition—is already rather underway, Christopher Hitchens, twelve sloshy, warry, heretical years after the century-defining appearance of The Missionary Position, has finally gone there: yes, a vehicular-manslaughter-with-exacerbating-CNS-factors takedown of Harry Potter in the Times Book Review, a publication whose recent paper-stock and brain-cell cutbacks have made it squarer than ever. (Zing!)

The objections raised are going-through-the-motions shite that Hypegeist had long ago introduced into the conversation (if not quite online, because he refuses to be a blog, because he somehow believes in blogging), and what Hitchens' front-page placement this week proves is nothing so much that, unlike every other 10-year-old girl, 45-year-old girl, heroin addict, and rancid MTA metrosexual/MetroNorth commuter in the world, it took Hitch weeks, not days, to finish the Deathly Hallows. Now, I understand that me complaining about this is pretty unforgivably pot-calling-the-kettle-a-Harry-Potter-(which-is-to-say-holocaust-) denier (Hitchens unhelpfully asks, "Are the Malfoys as black as they have been portrayed?", which means nothing to me, because, as is now cliche, the cliche doesn't make sense), but shouldn't Scotch-and-Trotsky goggles in fact make whatever you're looking at more attractive, if also harder to read?

So yes, I agree, insomuch as I care or it matters, which it doesn't, which may be the point of Hitchens taking the time to write this and cashing the check and spending it on totally not food or shelter, that Rowling doesn't focus enough on puffy, blossoming girls, the fascist problem, or the sensitivities of expat two-score-and-eighteen-year-old neighborhood-watch bogeys (in roughly that order). But why submit yourself to the scrutiny of non-chattering-class muggles, or more to the point, the worst muggles in the chattering classes, who pretend to love the fun, yay!, super-fun liberation of ta(l)king juvenilia seriously? Oh, Chris(t), why?

The ban on sexual matters is also observed fairly pedantically, though as time has elapsed Rowling has probably acquired male readers who find themselves having vaguely impure thoughts about Hermione Granger (if not, because the thing seems somehow impossible, about Ginny Weasley).

Of the 2,000 or so people in the forecourt, perhaps one-third had taken the trouble to wear prefect gowns and other Hogwarts or quidditch impedimenta. Many wore a lightning-flash on their foreheads: Orwell would have recoiled at seeing the symbol of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on otherwise unblemished brows, even if the emblem was tamed by its new white-magic associations. And this was a sideshow to the circus, all across the English-speaking and even non-English world, as the countdown to the witching hour began.

I would give a lot to understand this phenomenon better.

That the main characters nonetheless have a strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment will be a mystery to some — like his holiness the pope and other clerical authorities who have denounced the series — while seeming unexceptionable to many others. As Hermione phrases it, sounding convincingly Kantian or even Russellian about something called the Resurrection Stone:

“How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of — of all the pebbles in the world and test them? [black swan sighting] I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.”

...

As one who actually did once go to boarding school by steam train, at 8, I enjoyed reading aloud to children and coming across Diagon Alley and Grimmauld Place, and also shuddering at the memory of the sarcastic schoolmasters (and Privet Drives) I have known. The distinctly slushy close of the story may seem to hold out the faint promise of a sequel, but I honestly think and sincerely hope that this will not occur.

The thought of Hitchens as a boy—or reading to boys— is one only an ethical sadist like Hitchens would conjure. But after copying and pasting (and making different colors!) the Hogwarts longings of the biggest waste of prodigious talent ever, perhaps I do now kind of see the point of him dipping his disgusting, divine hobbit toe into the tar stream of educational culture (broadly conceived). Indeed, what better rejoinder to the relativists who care about J.K. and her billions, than paragraphs about "Ginny Weasley" and "Wizengamot" and "Dumbledore" that read like they're important without having to convince oneself to be a good sport?

Charitably, then, let us consider Hitchens' performance one of those deadly serious pranks meant to instill the ramrod of Empire in the English boarding school, or, you know, whatever people pretend to say about that kind of stuff. "A boring subtext, about the wisdom or otherwise of actually uttering Voldemort’s name, meanwhile robs the apotropaic device of its force."

Yes, infantiles, leave prose to the pros.

Sturm und Drang: A Walking Tour of German Romantic New York

2007-07-31T19:21:00.000-04:00

STOP #1.
In case you'd forgotten about signing that lease, here's a bust of Goethe in Bryant Park. He is facing the carousel on 40th Street.

That is all.

Two Years Late in Hypegeist: Machinima, the Machines of God

2007-07-03T14:17:00.000-04:00

Clearly retaliation for that umbrella song right?

Quarter- (okay, Third-) Life Crisis Update: I Will Never Have This Much Fun

2007-07-03T00:51:00.002-04:00

"Sk8er Boi"–era Avril: Critic. "Girlfriend"-era Avril: Genius.

Note how she scrunches her nose when saying "remix."

Live Blogging the Dubya/Putin Mandate

2007-07-02T13:24:00.000-04:00

No. No grand bargain has been reached. I mean mandate in the old homosocial sense—lobster, fishing, hanging out at dad's house. CNN's showing the press conference live with Vlad and George talking in their respective mother tongues (interpreters off-screen) in front of a beautiful coastal-Maine backdrop. Bush made small talk (does he make another kind these days?) about how Putin was the only guy who caught a fish this morning. Putin riffed back that it was a team effort and that credit has to be given to the captain of the ship—"the 42nd president of the United States."

Bush's giggles hid the reporters' stirrings, but I trust they were there. The 42nd president? Was Clinton clandestinely on the Bush family vessel, he and H.W. divining away below deck for another tsunami to get people to care about the brains in the family again? The only other explanation is that Putin counts Grover Cleveland (generally considered the 22nd and 24th) as one person, which obviously makes more sense than the more typical counting method but still seems awfully, with apologies to Sulky, Russian.

Then Putin offered, unprompted, that they let the fishy go. The coverage cut away before any Chechens could get ideas.

UPDATE: According to CNN, George H.W. Bush gave Putin a Segway (as a token of American culture? Its like McDonald's in Moscow all over again). Putin rode the Segway around the Kennebunkport compound. Umm, WTF?

What I'll Be Wearing Next Spring

2007-07-01T13:08:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Electress Cathy Horyn's transcendent On the Runway blog, I've learned that my friend Junya Watanabe (right) and others at the Paris shows have decided to dress me in manpri high-water pants next season. It's about time! Somehow when Horyn overcomes what must be an awful case of carpal tunnel and gets on AOL to tell me this is a trend, it makes sense in a way, say, David Skulls Skulls Skulls Colman's article last year on the same short-pantsed subject did/could not. Or as commenter Anjo writes re: Cat's flood-pants entry:

Cathy, I think it does matter—unless you think it doesn’t, in which case I concede the point—but cropped trousers have been on nearly all the runways this season.

Unless you think it doesn't, in which case I concede the point! I AM WHATEVER YOU SAY I AM, IF I WASN’T THEN WHY WOULD I BE WEARING THIS? [Incidentally, the designer most cited as the foremost theorist–practitioner (or practitioner–theorist) of male ankle nudity is a guy named Thom Browne, whose schooldays were likely an unrelenting series of noogies and wedgies and growth-spurt rejection.] In any case, now that Rorty's dead (lol!), let us again praise Horyn as the one public intellectual we have left who really improves the conversation and whatnot. A poster on On the Runway named Autre:

RAF SIMONS’ SS COLLECTION: THE BIG HOMECOMING

My, my, what shall we do with this...There is a problem with amazing designers that go back to reality, to the “material”, rediscovering (= key word) the street like Ghesquiere, youth tribes (”the alternative chic is only chic” as we call it here, from pseudo-rebellious collegiates, to hackers/travelers/ globetrotters). Usually, it comes down to nothing but showing just fashion (no wonder it was Prada-esque, just a bit harder, edgier)...

If anything, the idea behind the material is simply wrong, and even desperately naive. Plus, it relies on a truly childish alternative between the globetrotting youth that are out there, discovering and rediscovering Mother Earth, constantly moving, with large backpacks not being in the way, “writing it with actions” (Raf by Raf Simons slogan), and the inertia of the “www-generation”. What I immediately thought of was Immanuel Kant: the man practically didn’t leave his hometown all his life, looked like a living mummy, yet he gave us something that will be read and read and read. Because the mind travels farther.

No strategic essentialism on the runway! Tactical universality! The critique of pure fashion continues for hundreds more words, leading an Alex W. to write to Autre: "It’s late but I wanted to add, I thought your post was brilliant, you completely touched on decontextualization (the African Queen in Paris/Paris in African Queen)...To be honest [w/r/t Galliano] I didn’t even pay attention to the clothes, so much as the overall message." I'd probably still wear socks with that outfit.

BTDubs: I suspect "SS" stands for Spring/Summer (Spring–Summer?) and not, you know, SS.

A Million Little Blue Pills

2007-07-01T02:46:00.000-04:00

Question: how does a notorious fabulist rebuild his confidence after the humiliation of a Quaker justice campaign led by America's emasculator laureate Oprah Winfrey? If this correspondent's Gmail spam box is any indication, the answer's obvious: start shilling cut-rate E.D. drugs. Sneaking a peak, I discover that "[i]n fact, more than half of all men over 40 have difficulties getting or maintaining an erection. This issue occurs with younger men as well!" Yeah, right. Fool me once, shame on you; fool my twice, Mr. "Jame" Frey, shame on me!

Not Organic, But Rich in Antioccidents

2007-07-01T00:13:00.000-04:00

From the food court of an alcohol museum (!) outside Taipei, another lesson in cultural relativism. That is to say, whole-food fetishism is as much an Austin aberration as George W. Bush; it turns out most of the world finds putting unmodified nature in one's mouth positively ga-ross. Your faithful ethnographer must report, however, that this particular stall does not in fact sell Biotech,Baked Food. "Biotech Baked Food" would be similarly misrepresentative of the establishment's wares, as would, regrettably, "Biotech-Baked Food."

In conclusion, let us just say that the ~~ideographs~~ ~~characters~~ words above advertise a biotech–baked food (or baked food–biotech) joint. Meaning, if memory serves, they sell cupcakes with vitamins inside.