In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world—the joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—we shall yet find that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose, full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, “Should I be in order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?” Here is a glorious example of Irish humour—the bull not unconscious, not entirely conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman’s humour would have been logical: he would have said, “The orator denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a good example!” What the Scotchman’s humour would have said I am not so certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability of making such speeches on top of someone else’s hat. But American humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.
This is from Chesterton’s essay on Bret Harte, in Varied Types.
A while ago I came across an interesting video from RazörFist called Hollywood Was Always Red. (A warning: RazörFist uses very salty language.)
One of the things that really struck me from it was when RazörFist pointed out that Joe McCarthy did not run the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the first clue should have been in the name: the House Unamerican Activities Committee. How, he asks, would Senator Joe McCarthy run the House Unamerican Activities Committee?
If you look it up, what Joe McCarthy ran were called the “Army-McCarthy Hearings” which were held by the “Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee” (see here). They had nothing to do with Hollywood blacklists and, as the name would suggest, were investigating communist infiltration into the Army.
The House Unamerican Activities Committee, or more properly the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was formed in 1938—9 years before Joe McCarthy would become a senator—and was initially chaired by Martin Dies Jr, a Democrat from Texas. (Check out the Wikipedia page on it.)
When he pointed out that the first clue should have been the name and highlighted the “Senator” in Senator Joe McCarthy and the “House” in House Unamerican Activities Committee, I was stunned. It’s so obvious, just from that, and yet somehow I had never considered that and just went along with the fake history I was told about how the House Unamerican Activities Committee was part of McCarthyism and McCarthy led to blacklisting in Hollywood and the like.
I don’t get stunned watching YouTube videos often. In fact, I’m not sure I have other than with this one. But it’s so strange to have realized that something that was commonplace among everyone I knew wasn’t just wrong, but obviously wrong. Not just obviously wrong, but we had all the information to know that it was wrong and just never put it together. The “House Unamerican Activities Committee” was just a name, not a collection of meaningful words in a meaningful order. But it really should have been.
I ran across an interesting TikTok on Twitter which I think is a useful jumping-off point to some practical aspects of how to interpret low-context things on the internet:
I am not alone in this experience. Many women have been in this exact same position. The work required to manage a home and a family is not something that one person should ever have to carry alone. It is possible to change these dynamics. It is hard but with the right tools and support it’s possible and it’s so much better on the other side. #marriageadvice#mentalload#mentalloadofmotherhood#divorced#divorcedmom#parentingadvice#default
The first question you need to ask about anyone making almost any kind of argument is who are they and why are they making this argument. In theory this shouldn’t be necessary because arguments are supposed to stand on their own. And some in fact do. It doesn’t matter who is making the argument for God from contingency and necessity because that argument actually does stand on its own. You can simply examine its premises and the logical links in it and that’s sufficient. But for most arguments that people make, when you examine the argument, you will see that people use themselves as an authority in their argument. In technical language, their argument uses premises whose truth value can only be known by themselves, so you can only know it by trusting them when they vouch for it. The TikTok above is exactly such a thing; the premises in her argument are very much things no viewer can evaluate apart from her trustworthiness.
So the first question is: who is this woman? Of course, I’ve no idea who this particular woman is, but we do know a few things about her just from the video. First, we know that she is publicly complaining about her spouse, so we know that she has bad judgement. Second, if you’re familiar with human beings, you don’t even need the sound on to see that she is neurotic, but if you do turn the sound on, you can tell with near-certainty that she is highly neurotic. (You can also tell from how she’s dressed and the house that she filmed this in that she’s upper middle class and very concerned with status.) All of which means that she is not to be trusted on any premises she offers which require good judgement, stability, courage, or humility to be correct about.
She begins by talking about how she does all of the household work, and while I don’t necessarily doubt that she does almost all of the work that she notices, what I don’t trust her in the slightest about is that most of this work needs to be done.
Don’t get me wrong, kids are a lot of work. I’ve got three so I’m quite familiar with this. What I’m also quite familiar with is that it’s easy to multiply the work that needs to be done if you set up rules for yourself that don’t match reality. And this is where her bad judgement and neuroticism come in. It is not even a little plausible that her workflow is streamlined and matches reality. Indeed, her evident desire for status and suspiciously immaculate kitchen very strongly suggest that much of her workload in the morning is about conforming to rules that, in her mind, gives her the status she craves.
A very strong indication that what she wants is not, in fact, help with the labor is the that she complains that, when she told her husband she was overwhelmed, that he asked her what she wanted him to do (i.e. how he could help). If her actual problem was more work than she can do, the last thing in the world she would want would be someone just starting to do things without coordinating with her. No rational person wants someone to take over randomly selected jobs from them without coordinating first. Equally, no rational person thinks that another person magically knows, without communication, everything he does and how he does it and how all of the details fit into each other. Moreover, any even slightly competent adult who is overwhelmed by work and who wants help will identify which tasks they can offload with less work than doing them themselves and directly ask for help with those. The woman in this video may be unpleasant, but she’s clearly an adult and not a complete idiot, so the obvious conclusion is that what she wants is not, in fact, help with some of the household work.
(Some additional evidence of this is the particular example she cites of when she considered divorcing her husband: a particular time he didn’t take out the trash in the morning because he was running late and so she took it out and ended up being late to work as a result. Now, the odds that she was late to work because she took out the trash are, in themselves, tiny, unless their garbage cans are a quarter mile hike over difficult terrain away. But even more to the point is that she can’t possibly have needed to take out the trash in order to do anything necessary in the morning. In a reasonable worst-case scenario if she needed to throw something out that couldn’t just be left on a counter she could have just pulled out another garbage bag and left it on the floor. If they didn’t have a spare garbage bag, she could have put it in a spare plastic grocery bag. Or in a ziplock bag. Nothing irreparable or unsanitary will happen to garbage left in a bag on the floor of an empty house for eight hours. She can only have been forced to take out the trash and therefore be late to work by some unnecessary rule she has imposed on herself.)
Given that she’s got bad judgement and is almost certainly neurotic and status-seeking, what she almost certainly actually wants is someone to force her to calm down. That is, she wants someone to override her worrying so she doesn’t worry so much.
In theory this could be her husband, if he’s sufficiently manly and confident and she’s willing to trust him. Far more likely to be successful, though, is another woman that she respects. A good friend might work, but an older female relative that she respects would probably be the most effective at it. She needs to feel like she has permission from the society whose status she craves to not do these things, such that she won’t lose status for doing them. So it needs to be someone who, in her mind, can grant her that permission.
There are, of course, almost certainly some other things going on too. She’s going to want to feel valued and appreciated, but she probably can’t feel those things as long as her life and her interactions with others are dominated by status-seeking unnecessary work because very few people are any good at thanking somebody for them wasting their time, in theory on your behalf but in reality for their own sake. But this is only probable based on how human beings behave; it is less in evidence from the video.
But, to bring it back to the general: when you’re not dealing with someone wise, the problem is almost never the stated problem. As a Lindy Hop instructor of mine once put it: when you see something go wrong, the problem is usually two steps earlier.
I came across an interesting article which gave evidence for the proposition that Modern Art is a CIA “psyop”. The short-short version is that, during the cold war, the CIA funded modern art to show off how free the west is because communist countries wouldn’t let artists make anything that ugly. I am not really in a position to evaluate the evidence cited by the article, but this is a very interesting explanation because it’s more plausible than anything else I’ve heard.
The basic thing that needs to be explained is how such bad art ever came to be popular. There are various partial explanations, most having to do with the trauma of the two world wars and the influence of recreational drugs interacting with rich snobs who wanted to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses who recently gained access to art through technology which made reasonably faithful reproductions inexpensive. These explanations never really satisfied me, though. It just didn’t feel like enough of a motivation.
The CIA promoting this art feels more plausible. It gives the right kind of perverse motivation—an outright competitive motivation completely decoupled with having to live with the consequences of one’s decision. If a real art collector pays a million dollars for a bad painting he’s going to have to keep looking at the awful thing. If a CIA operative pays a million dollars for a painting, he never has to look at it again. Plus, it’s not his money.
The basic approach will work, too. If you have tens of millions of dollars per year to burn plus patience and some basic understanding of human nature, you can make a style of art prestigious. You can’t make it popular, but that’s not at all the same thing. To be prestigious means to convey status to that small subgroup who is obsessed with status and will do anything to get it. You can make galleries, you can put on gatherings with good food and nice amenities, you can pay select artists.
It’s also plausible because it doesn’t take that much money to get a largish number of people to do something as long as you’re careful to make everyone in the large group think that they have a chance of being one of the lucky few. Reality TV shows demonstrated that the right kind of person will do a huge amount of work for the chance at not all that much money.
And such things inevitable take on a life of their own. Once people think that there’s money in something, some people will add their own money in the hope of making more. Speculation can drive prices up, for example. Some people who want to purchase status will jump on the bandwagon.
And then there’s the interesting question of how much of the current art market is just money laundering. Bad art is very easy to produce. If I want to pay you money for something illegal in a way that looks legitimate (since governments pay attention to large transfers of money), buying the illegal thing plus a bad painting and claiming that all of the money was for the bad painting works well for laundering. I even came up with this idea on my own for a story about an assassin, where to launder the payments he would see a modern art painting to the people paying for the hit. (This also enabled him to report the money to the IRS.) How much of the current market for modern art this is I am in no position to say, but I’ll happily believe north of 99% of it.
I recently came across a very interesting video where a woman named Susan Kare demonstrates the 1984 Mac user interface:
The show was called Computer Chronicles. It was a half-hour show that ran from 1984-2002 on PBS.
I find the hosts quite interesting:
Much of the discussion is about how the Mac, being graphical, makes it easy to learn. Karen explains terms like “window” and “menu” to the hosts. It’s all extremely formal, too, with everyone taking this very seriously.
It’s also funny to hear about things being modernized described as “bring it into the 1980s.”
A friend recently told me about Angela Lansbury’s exercise video. It’s really quite fascinating:
I’m not entirely sure that “exercise video” is really the right word to describe it. The actual title is Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves. It’s subtitled, A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being At Any Age. It reminds me of some of the videos I’ve seen of old people doing Tai Chi in public parks in China—mostly slow, deliberate movements through a fairly large range of motion.
Given the popularity, today, of moving quickly and lifting heavy things (or even of lifting heavy things quickly) it’s easy to look at a video like this and scoff. Is it even an exercise video? At the time (1988) it was possible to cover oneself neck to foot in spandex, throw on some leg warmers, and move with a great deal more vigor to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. Or you could sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons. And if you didn’t have the spandex and leg warmers, you could do the same thing to Jack Lalanne’s TV show—and you could even buy one of his “glamour bands,” which was basically a modern resistance band before they were popular. (If you could get reruns; his TV show ended its long run in 1985.)
So why get Angela Lansbury’s tape where, by modern standards, she barely does anything?
The thing is, there’s a lot embedded within those modern standards. It’s not just what we do, such as pumping iron. It’s also what we want. Those of us who grew up in the 80s, 90s, and beyond have different goals for our bodies than people who grew up in the 1930s and 40s did. Even those of us who don’t work out want to be muscular and strong. That was not nearly so much a goal of people who grew up in the 1930s and 40s. Especially by the time they were in their fifties and sixties in the 1980s (by “grew up” I’m referring to when they were old enough to remember cultural influences). Not all of them, of course. Charles Atlas and other strong men had a market back in the 1930s. But for a lot of people, and especially women at the time, they had no great interest in being strong and muscular; mostly what they wanted, if they had aspirations of fitness at all, was to not fall apart. You have to remember that they grew up at a time when medical advice often featured the health-promoting benefits of rest. Women might be prescribed weeks of bed-rest after giving birth; there’s a family story of my grandmother finally being allowed to dangle her legs over the side of the bed several days after giving birth to my mother (or one of her sisters; I can’t remember which).
Angela Lansbury’s exercise video makes a great deal more sense for that kind of goal. Moreover, if that’s a person’s goal, they might already have weakened to the point where Positive Moves is actually challenging. There are various points at which Angela gives alternatives for if the movement she’s doing is too strenuous or the viewer otherwise can’t do it. And thinking back, they were movements it seems possible that both of my grandmothers in the 1980s might have found challenging. It’s something to consider that there are people who haven’t sat down on the ground and gotten up from it in years.
If a movement is too hard to do, and by doing a modification you’re able to work up to it—that is, by definition, building strength. It can be misleading, to us, that the maximum amount of strength that someone wants to build is so far below the maximum that they’re capable of, but I think it’s interesting to try to imaginatively enter into this kind of mindset. The more difficult it is to imagine, the greater the benefit to our ability to see things from another’s perspective in trying. I’m not going to stop squatting with a barbell loaded to hundreds of pounds on my shoulders in favor of doing Angela Lansbury’s positive moves, but I think it is useful as a workout video for one’s imagination.
If you go to any KFC (formerly, Kentucky Fried Chicken), you will notice the image of Colonel Sanders. Take this example from their website of a family meal:
It’s not just a drawing, though. Back when I was a child I remember commercials with the Colonel in them, like this one:
You never know how long YouTube videos will work, or if they will work embeded, but here’s a KFC commercial from 1980 featuring him:
As a child I had assumed that he was a fictional character, like Ronald McDonald or The Burgher King. But it turns out that no, he was very real. He was even a real colonel, if, granted, not a military colonel. He was a Kentucky Colonel, which is a title of honor bestowed on prominent citizens by the state of Kentucky, analogous to modern knighthood in Britain. He was even the guy who developed the KFC method of frying chicken using a pressure fryer and their secret “eleven herbs and spices”.
He led a curious life; he grew the facial hair and wore the white suit to play the part of the character of the Colonel in relation to his restaurant franchise. Apparently he wasn’t much of a businessman but actually was a good cook.
Jenny Nicholson has an interesting 4-hour video on the Star Wars hotel (officially, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser):
It’s an interesting and entertaining video on the rise and fall of Disney World’s star wars hotel. If you’re in the mood for that kind of thing, I recommend it. If this is too long for you, the tl;dw is that the Hotel opened in spring of 2022 as a Star Wars sequel trilogy themed LARP hotel where there’s a running story with actors who sometimes walk around the “ship” and you, in theory, get to take part in the story. It seems like the taking part in the story is mostly theoretical, much of it being done with dialog trees on an app where characters are texting you, and after a few successful months interest faded quickly and the hotel was shut down permanently in the fall of 2023.
I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the thing.
Galactic Starcruiser looks very much like an idea which was going to be super cool and somewhere about three quarters of the way through implementation Disney realized that they couldn’t do it, and so scrambled to come up with something that could plausibly be considered a version of what they promised. They had wanted an interactive story, and that is doable if you have something like a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests. That would be expensive, but Galactic Starcruiser was. It was roughly $3000 per person for two days and two nights; that’s inclusive of food but still in the right ballpark to pay for a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests.
But for whatever reason, they didn’t go that route. Maybe they ran afoul of occupancy limits, maybe they couldn’t reliably hire enough actors. Whatever the reason, they ended up going more in the direction of a 1:20 actors to guests ratio. At that kind of ratio, it’s not possible to have any kind of interactive story where most guests are more than just extras. “Come pay a lot of money to be an extra in a star wars story that only you see” is not really a promise of “live out your star wars story,” so they had to come up with something. Enter the app.
Disney World has an app for using the parks and this was extended with gameplay for Galactic Starcruiser. Human beings can’t meaningfully interact in a dramatic way with 200 people, but a computer can. Well, not meaningfully, but it can interact with them, anyway. And so all of the interactions which had consequences consisted of texting back and forth with characters in the app going along dialog trees and doing miscellaneous activities which can be supported on a pre-existing phone app such as scanning QR codes on crates, ostensibly to help the characters you’re texting with. Of course, since the actors aren’t going to do anything differently based on how around 200 people interacted with an app, the consequences of these actions were mostly limited to scheduling you to appear at various scenes that would happen throughout the “ship” at different times. The actors’ dialog would be set up to be as compatible as possible with people thinking that their actions had affected the story, but that can’t be very much, at least for people over 8 years old.
Curiously, Disney didn’t even really commit to this approach. Most of your immersive experience being on a screen isn’t wonderful, but they didn’t even give you an exotic screen from the hotel. They just had you use your own phone. So you spent $3000 to go to a hotel where much of your time was taken up staring at your phone. I like my phone but I don’t go on vacation to spend more time with it.
It would have been easy enough to provide the guests with tablets that had star-wars themed cases (that beige metal with rounded corners which screams Star Wars, for example). That wouldn’t be a huge improvement, but it would have been an improvement and would have given guests something in their hands which is in-character and special.
It also wouldn’t have been that hard to make a recombining branching storyline. You can’t make it branch based on individual actions, but you could based on cumulative actions. For example, you could have guests on the First Order side look for hidden contraband, and depending on how much they find the resistance would smuggle some or most through, and the characters may have to do something different if it’s only most of the contraband. You’d still go to the next major story beat no matter what, but how you get there would be different and people would feel that they contributed to the outcome, much in the way that individual soldiers contribute to victory in a battle.
I find it weird that Disney did none of this nor anything like it, and relied on generic, ambiguous dialog to allow people to persuade themselves that they did something if they’re inclined to do that.
This weird course change also explains some of the really strange things, like how the hotel was quite small and everyone was expected to play the game that existed. This is an absurd design, since with a 1:20 actor-to-guest ratio it’s necessarily not a good game. It would have made far more sense to have a much larger hotel, with more things to do such as a pool, an arcade, etc. which cost a lot less and participation in the actor-driven game was a significant up-charge. That would make the cost structure far more bearable, make the actor-to-playing-guest ratio much better, and also make it more fun since there would be people watching the people who paid extra. And the people watching wouldn’t feel left out because they know that the people who are participating in the storyline paid like three times what they did for their stay. Plus most people don’t actually want to LARP anyway. If I, for example, was forced to stay at a hotel like this, I’d pay an upcharge for some kind of badge to wear which made the actors leave me alone.
There’s another really curious issue: did anyone like the sequel trilogy well enough to spend money to have a vacation themed with it? (The fact that the hotel closed does suggest an answer is no.)
I have a hard time believing that anyone could, or that at any time the answer could plausibly have been yes. This isn’t just about the sequel trilogy having been really bad. I mean, that certainly didn’t help, but apart from that the sequel trilogy wasn’t even coherent.
I haven’t seen The Force Awakens but plot synopses make it clear that the main driver of its plot is the search for the map left by Luke Skywalker in case the galaxy should need him. The Last Jedi simply throws this out. Luke Skywalker is a depressed old loser, the Jedi are terrible and should die out, etc. Love it or hate it (and there’s something wrong with you if you love it), this story simply doesn’t go with the first one. Worse, by the end of the film it is clearly established that there is no hope left in the galaxy and the Resistance has been so destroyed that it now fits on a single small ship. If you like this tale of incompetence and defeat, I don’t see how you can also like The Force Awakens, which is a hopeful story about main characters who are at least competent and striving to make the world a better place with some success. Yes, it is normal for the second movie in a trilogy to be a setback for the heroes, but not for it to be a complete defeat, due in no small part to their radical incompetence. Those are just dissonant, unless you pay no attention.
Then we come to The Rise of Skywalker, which again throws out a bunch of stuff from the second movie. Luke Skywalker straight-up says that he was wrong about stuff he said in The Last Jedi, and the galaxy is established to not be hopeless, and the good guys win through gumption, courage, and competence. Oh, and while the second movie claimed that Rey was no one—gutter trash whose parents sold her for drinking money—The Rise of Skywalker establishes her as the granddaughter of the Emperor. Again, this is just dissonant with the second movie. It also has minimal continuity with The Force Awakens, though I am on shakier ground, there, since I didn’t see the first one and only read detailed plot synopses. There is the redemption of Kylo Ren, so admittedly that is one through-line in the two movies. Turning Rey into a Palpatine is absurd and quite at odds with the first movie, but then so is Palpatine being alive. Again, these movies don’t really go together unless you pay no attention.
And the problem that I see, when it comes to marketing, is that people who don’t notice that movies don’t go together because they pay no attention don’t seem like a promising place to look for people who want to pay $3000 for a two-day vacation filled with stuff related to these movies.
The timing of the hotel with the movies is also a bit odd. They want Kylo Ren, and they want him in his Darth Vader knockoff mask because that makes casting easier, so they are forced to set the hotel inbetween the first and second movie. Except they can’t do that, because there was only about a day between the first and second movie and they also want Rey and she was off on Achtung at the end of the first movie. And Kylo had destroyed his mask halfway through the second movie and was dead by the end of the third movie, and had only rebuilt it for a little while during the third movie. So really, there’s no plausible time to have set Galactic Starcruiser. Now, this fits in with people who pay no attention and don’t care about details, but again that seems an unlikely place to look for people who will want to pay $3000 for a two-day “immersive” experience. What’s the point of immersion if you’re not going to pay any attention to it? Why pay $3000 for something you don’t intend to remember?
It would have been different had the movies been good, or even if they were just coherent with each other. I’m not in the target market for this, so I can’t draw on my own intuitions, but I can at least imagine someone who loves a trilogy of movies spending a lot of money for a day or two of pretending that he’s in them. But other than that one who who did the trailer reaction where he was crying at the beauty of everything equally causing many people to question his manhood and most people to question his sanity, I can’t imagine someone loving these movies. They just don’t cohere enough for that to be possible.
And given the spectacular failure of Galactic Cruiser, I guess I’m not going out on much of a limb.
I recently bought a copy of Errol Flynn’s autobiography. Supposedly he wanted to title it “In Like Me” (in reference to the famous phrase, “in like Flynn”) but his publishers insisted on a different title:
My Wicked, Wicked Ways is not a promising title, but I suppose it probably was more likely to sell more copies.
I’ve skimmed portions of it and I’m not likely to read the whole thing. From everything I can tell, Errol Flynn was not a good man and to some degree he was realistic about this. He did agree to the title—and not ironically, as far as I can tell. This is always sad. As Leon Bloy said, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” It can still be interesting when the man who is (so far) a failure in life has insight and can tell you with precision where he as gone wrong. That makes it all the sadder, in one sense at least, but it rewards you for the reading. When the bad man doesn’t see where he went wrong and wants your sympathy—this is merely sad and nothing else.
At the close of the book he answers the question of where he is now. He just turned fifty and bought himself a birthday present—a house in the Caribbean. The final words are written sitting on his porch there, looking out at the sea he loved so much. And the final line is:
The second half-century looms up, but I don’t feel the night coming on.
Less than four months later, he would die of a heart attack with cirrhosis of the liver listed as a contributory factor on his death certificate and this book would be published posthumously.
According to the introduction, portions of the book are certainly fiction and some others likely to be so. Oddly, many of these parts are the more lurid stories, such as killing a man in New Guinea. The thing is very much played up—for example, before the first page there’s both lyrics from a song suggesting that young men sow their wild oats when young so they can be happy in their old age and quotes from the bible about how there is no peace but sorrow for the wicked.
Of course, the autobiography was actually written by a ghost writer by the name of Earl Conrad, so however far one trusts Errol Flynn—and I’m not sure that should be very far—there is no reason to trust Earl Conrad, whose only real motivation was to sell as many books as possible. And certainly this was the motivation of the editor, whoever that was. And of the original publisher.
The result is a book it is impossible to trust, which has no really good object anyway. Flynn was charismatic and everyone in his life used that to make money. He did, Hollywood did, and finally his publishers did. I suppose this is fitting, in a sense. He set no higher value on his life than to derive benefit from being liked and to enjoy those benefits as much as he could. Why should anyone else have set a higher value on it?
Which brings us back to the fact that the saddest thing in life is to not be a saint.
I was recently at a pharmacy where there was a small TV tucked into a corner displaying something I found rather odd:
If you have a hard time reading the text, it says:
Things To Remember When Lifting Weights When doing squats, remember to keep your knees behind your toes at all times. You also want to make sure that your back is straight and strong and your head is faced forward. —The Ginger Marie Blog
Those who are familiar with how to squat properly will know that the advice to always keep your knees behind your toes is a myth. Nothing bad happens if your knees go in front of your toes and many people need their knees to go in front of their toes to get full depth—especially olympic weightlifters who regularly bottom out their squat (so called “ass to grass” squatting). Like all lifting, it’s a bad idea to suddenly do it with near-maximal loads instead of working up to it, of course—but that’s true of all ways of doing all lifts. Walking up to a lift you’ve never done before and maxing out on it is a useful ingredient in maximizing your injury risk—though it should be born in mind that strength sports have pretty low injury risks compared to most other sports. But still, do work up to your maximal lift attempts. You’ll also lift more that way.
Also, does anyone really need to be told to keep their head facing forward when squatting? I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to look over their shoulder while squatting.
That’s not really why I bring this up, though. A pharmacy is a very strange place to get strength training advice in a corner overlayed on top of a picture of people on exercise bikes. To give a sense of how odd this is, imaging walking into a powerlifting gym and behind one of the machines is a TV which shows a picture of technicians putting someone into an MRI machine and the text on top says:
Things To Remember When Taking Medicine: When taking an antibiotic, always drink a large glass of whole milk with it, finish the antibiotics course unless otherwise directed by a doctor, and stand upright on the ground while taking it.
This, by the way, is the front page of The Ginger Marie Blog, as of the time I’m writing this post:
I do not say a word against Ms. Ginger Marie, but I must confess I’m curious as to why this particular site was chosen as the place from which to get advice on proper squat technique.
Though, to be fair to Ms. Marie, when I try searching the site for the word “squats” I don’t come up with anything. A google search for “The Ginger Marie Blog” and “squats” and “knees” also turns up no results, though that may not mean much since Google has been pretty bad for the last year or two. Still, it’s possible that the random TV in my local pharmacy is misattributing its dubious advice to Ms. Marie.
I wonder if we can blame AI for this? Perhaps a large language model mangled a quote from a publication like Marie Claire and then mangled the attribution, as well. This seems like the sort of thing that AI might do.
As dystopias go, this is a much nicer one than what most dystopian movies portray.
There’s a song by Ricky Nelson which was on a mix tape that my mother used to play for me when I was a child. Called Travelin’ Man, it’s got fairly simple lyrics but it’s an interesting song:
In case you don’t have time to listen, here are the lyrics:
I’m a travelin’ man and I’ve made a lot of stops All over the world And in every port I own the heart Of at least one lovely girl
I’ve a pretty señorita waiting for me Down in old Mexico If you’re ever in Alaska stop and see My cute little Eskimo
Oh, my sweet Fraulein down in Berlin town Makes my heart start to yearn And my China doll down in old Hong Kong Waits for my return
Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea I remember the night When we walked in the sands of the Waikiki And I held you, oh so tight
(It repeats the last two verses and then has a coda where he repeats that he’s a travelin’ man, whoa a travelin’ man, etc.)
Ricky’s performance is interesting, as he imbues the vocals with a tinge of boasting and a tinge of sadness which seems very appropriate. The boasting is appropriate to the natural virtue of being attractive. The sadness is appropriate to the moral vice of being deceptive and unfaithful.
The character in the song is going to greatly disappoint all but one of these women, and since they’re waiting for him they’re not just going to be disappointed, they’re going to waste possible years of their life in finding their real vocation. This could easily result in not having as many children or not getting as good a father for their children as they could.
And in practice, we know that he’s going to disappoint all of them, of course, because he’s not the kind of man to make a good husband to anyone.
All of this does serve as an interesting kind of observation on just how powerful romantic attraction can be. It’s often easier, in art, to highlight the magnitude of something by illustrating how terrible it can be, rather than how great it can be, and this song makes subtle use of that.
The Critical Drinker recently put an interesting review of a movie his Dad recommended to him twenty years ago and he finally watched a few weeks ago:
Indian, here, refers to an Indian brand motorcycle. If you didn’t watch the review I linked above, the tl;dw is that it’s the story of Burt Monro who is a New Zealand retired farmer, motorcycle salesman, farmer, and motorcycle racer (he did various things to earn his living) who now, in his sixties, spends much of his time tinkering on his old Indian motorcycle. He dreams of traveling to the Bonneville salt flats and setting a world record, eventually saves up barely enough money to try, goes, and eventually succeeds. (It’s based on a true story.)
In the Drinker’s review, there’s an interesting quote (salty language warning):
The story of a little guy with big dreams given a once-in-a-lifetime shot at glory is the stuff of cinema legend at this point and it’s been done so many times that it’s easy to become cynical about movies like World’s Fastest Indian. What, prey tell, is the angle? You might ask. What makes it stand out from the crowd? How does it subvert the tropes of the genre? The answer, quite simply, is that it doesn’t. And fuck you for asking. Because it doesn’t need to. Because not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel just to get your attention.
This is an interesting point. I think that this is related to the difference between watching movies as a reviewer and watching them as an ordinary human being. Reviewers watch a ton of movies, and moreover they watch them with an eye to evaluating them. That is, they watch the movies for the sake of the movies. Ordinary human beings watch movies for entertainment or enjoyment or to witness art—in short, as a means to something else. We watch movies for the sake of humor, or to have pretend friends for a few hours, to be inspired, to be reminded that happiness is possible, to consider human sadness, for the thrill of romance or the romance of adventure—whatever it is, we watch movies for the things that they depict. If what we want is to be inspired by seeing a man defy the world for the sake of something nobler or even if we just want to see a proud man humbled by being hit in the balls, the things that we want are timeless. Different movies will bring out different aspects of these timeless things, and some will do them better than others. Variation helps us because at times we need different help in contemplating the timeless truths, whether they’re big or small. But the variation is only helpful because the help we need in contemplating the timeless things varies. The variation is not good in itself and variation from what we need at the moment is anti-helpful.
A man who has watched a thousand movies about two a man and a woman falling in love may be desperate to be reminded that there is humor in a man being hit in the crotch with a baseball, but very few of us watch a thousand movies about two people falling in love. We watch however many we need to be reminded of what we wanted to remember, then we get on with life.
So the Critical Drinker is right. Movies don’t need to surprise people who are tired of their genre to be good. They just need to be good at their genre. If a genre has gotten less popular, that means that there will be fewer people who are interested in it, but that’s OK. Sometimes you have to wait twenty years until you’re in the mood for it a movie. The nice thing about movies is that they’ll still be there when you’re ready.
My friend Tzvi put up a video in which he gave a reading of the Robert Louis Stevenson essay, The Lantern Bearers. You can watch it on his substack.
It’s an interesting essay and Tzvi reads it well. I especially like the part where Stevenson discusses the interior life of the miser, though it’s only next to the main point of the essay. The main point, or at least what I take to be the main point, is that the makers of art are too apt to think themselves full, because they know themselves, and to think other men empty because they do not know them. (Admittedly, Part 1 of the essay is a little slow, though it was appropriate to the style of the day, which was necessary to make the point it made in the time in which it was written. It very much rewards bearing with it.)
This is a bit of a tangent, but the essay calls to mind this section out of G.K. Chesterton’s book The Well and the Shallows:
It is not an idle contradiction to say that Mr. Shaw is flippant because he is serious. A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing. A man who is only amusing himself need not be amusing. Generally, when he is a perfect and polished stylist, he is not. And there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the relative moral attitude of the two types; especially in connection with the old morality of modesty. Most persons, listening to these loud flippancies would say that Mr. Bernard Shaw is egotistical. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself would emphatically and violently assert that he is egotistical; and I should emphatically and violently assert that he is not. It is not the first time we have somewhat tartly disagreed. And perhaps I could not more effectively perform the just and necessary public duty of annoying Mr. Shaw than by saying (as I do say) that in this matter he really inherits an unconscious tradition of Christian humility. The preaching friar puts his sermon into popular language, the missionary fills his sermon with anecdotes and even jokes, because he is thinking of his mission and not of himself It does not matter that Mr. Shaw’s sentences so often begin with the pronoun “I.” The Apostles Creed begins with the pronoun “I”; but it goes on to rather more important nouns and names.
Father Ronald Knox, in his satire on Modernism, has described the courteous vagueness of the Oxford manner which
…. tempering pious zeal Corrected, “I believe” to “One does feel.”
And though I have much of such courtesy to be thankful for, both in conversation and criticism, I must do justice to the more dogmatic type, where I feel it to be right. And I will say firmly that it is the author who says, “One does feel,” who is really an egoist; and the author who says, “I believe,” who is not an egoist. We all know what is meant by a truly beautiful essay; and how it is generally written in the light or delicate tone of, “One does feel.” I am perfectly well aware that all my articles are articles, and that none of my articles are essays. An essay is often written in a really graceful and exquisitely balanced style, which I doubt if I could imitate, though I might try. Anyhow, it generally deals with experiences of a certain unprovocative sort in a certain unattached fashion; it begins with something like. . . .
“The pond in my garden shows, under the change of morning, an apprehension of the moving air, hardly to be called a wave; and so little clouding its lucidity as to seem rather vacuity in motion. Here at least is nothing to stain the bright negation of water; none of those suburban gold-fish that look like carrots and do but nose after their tails in a circle of frustration, to give some sulky gardener cause to cry ‘stinking fish’. The mind is altogether carried away upon the faint curve of wind over water; the movement is something less solid than anything that we can call liquid; the smoke of my light Virginian cigarette does not mount more unsubstantially towards the sky. Nor indeed inaptly: it needs some such haven of patriarchal mildness to accent sharply the tang of mild tobacco; alone perhaps, of all the attributes of Raleigh’s red-haired mistress, rightly to be called virginal.”
I think I might learn to do it some day; though not by a commercial correspondence course; but the truth is that I am very much occupied. I confess to thinking that the things which occupy me are more important; but I am disposed to deny that the thing I think important is myself. And in justice not only to myself but to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Belloc and Mr. Mencken and many another man in the same line of business, I am moved to protest that the other literary method, the method of, “One does feel,” is much more really arrogant than ours. The man in Mr. Shaw’s play remarks that who says artist says duellist. Perhaps, nevertheless, Mr. Shaw is too much of a duellist to be quite an artist. But anyhow, I will affirm, on the same model, that who says essayist says egoist. I am sorry if it is an alliteration, almost a rhyme and something approaching to a pun. Like a great many such things, it is also a fact.
Even in the fancy example I have given, and in a hundred far better and more beautiful extracts from the real essayists, the point could be shown. If I go out of my way to tell the reader that I smoke Virginian cigarettes, it can only be because I assume the reader to be interested in me. Nobody can be interested in Virginian cigarettes. But if I shout at the reader that I believe in the Virginian cause in the American Civil War, as does the author of The American Heresy, if I thunder as he does that all America is now a ruin and an anarchy because in that great battle the good cause went down — then I am not an egoist. I am only a dogmatist; which seems to be much more generally disliked. The fact that I believe in God may be, in all modesty, of some human interest; because any man believing in God may affect any other man believing in God. But the fact that I do not believe in gold-fish, as ornaments in a garden pond, cannot be of the slightest interest to anybody on earth, unless I assume that some people are interested in anything whatever that is connected with me. And that is exactly what the true elegant essayist does assume. I do not say he is wrong; I do not deny that he also in another way represents humanity and uses a sort of artistic fiction or symbol in order to do so. I only say that, if it comes to a quarrel about being conceited, he is far the more conceited of the two. The one sort of man deals with big things noisily and the other with small things quietly. But there is much more of the note of superiority in the man who always treats of things smaller than himself than the man who always treats of things greater than himself.
Dogmatists, being fallen creatures, have faults. But I think it worth saying that among their faults, one does not find that they assume other men’s interior lives to be empty merely because they do not know them. Dogmatists are the great democrats of life, in the Chestertonian sense of the word “democrat”—they believe all men equal before the Law. Quite annoyingly to their neighbors, they also have a tendency to believe that all men are equally interested in the law. This may annoy their neighbors, but at least it does not insult them.
After a bit of googling, I found an interesting post on a blog called Murder, She Watched. (As a side note: female fans of Murder, She Wrote have a definite leg up when it comes to naming their writing about it.) It contains Jessica’s family tree as portrayed on all the episodes.
(Out of respect, I’m only posting a thumbnail. You have to go to her blog for a legible version, which she clearly put a lot of work into.)
Some of the notes on it confirm a suspicion I have about this project: a lot of the episodes are very vague about Jessica’s connection to her relatives. Many of them we don’t get last names or maiden names on, so there are a lot of possible family trees which would match.
Another interesting thing which I learned from the chart and should have known but never thought of is that Grady Fletcher, Jessica’s favorite nephew and far-and-away most often shown relative, is actually Frank’s nephew and only related to Jessica by marriage.
One other thought on this is that Jessica actually had a lot fewer nieces than one gets the impression she has. Murder, She Watched counted twenty relatives seen on screen, of whom only eleven are adult nieces or nephews (I’m not counting the two young children of one of Jessica’s nieces). That’s actually less than one per season.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 callouts often involved references to movies, television shows, commercials, and other things in popular culture which the writers expected people to recognize. Since MST3K ran (scripted) from AD 1989 through 1999, and since people tend to assume that most people recognize things they experienced as universal, and since the writers were adults at the time MST3K started, and since people remember things since they were about five years old, this means that the writers tended to reference things from, roughly, 1965 through 1999. That’s not quite accurate, though, since in the 1970s and 1980s re-runs of television shows were quite common. So the references tended to be of things, roughly, 1960-1999. Since I grew up in the 1980s, I get a lot of these references, but there are also plenty I don’t get. And it can be very interesting to look these up.
For example, in Manhunt in Space there was the callout:
“Hazel, will you cook up something for dinner?” “OK, Mr. B.”
Each was done in a voice that was not the host’s, especially the “OK, Mr. B,” so it was clearly a reference. I threw “Hazel OK Mr. B” into google and discovered that there was a TV show called Hazel which ran from 1961-1966. It was based on a single-panel comic strip of the same name and starred Shirley Booth as the eponymous Hazel. She was a live-in maid for the Baxter family and referred to Mr. Baxter as “Mr. B.” The comic strip upon which it was based was created by a man by the name of Ted Key in 1943. The strip finally ended in 2018. (Key was born in 1912 and died in 2008.)
Looking it up on YouTube, it looks like it was a funny show:
In possible the funniest video that TIK has ever done (to be fair, most of his videos are completely serious history), he describes Joseph Stalin’s quest for Human/Ape hybrid super soldiers:
It’s only 10 minutes long and every minute is worth watching, including the ending and closing song.
A while back, before the final Disney Star Wars sequel was released, they released a trailer for it, and some guy on the internet put up a trailer reaction video on his YouTube channel. His reaction was… well, you kind of need to see it for yourself to believe it.
Much was said about it at the time; I’m commenting now because I think enough time has elapsed that this can, in no way, be considered timely. Timely commentary is often prone to getting caught up in the prevailing emotions of the moment, as well as the factions that form around everything that gets talked about on the internet. Also, at this remove, this reaction is all the more interesting because we know what the movie was like.
By all accounts, the movie was absolutely terrible.
In full disclosure, I was reminded of this because, after mentioning my 17 kiloword review of The Last Jedi, a friend was trying to recommend to me that I watch The Rise of Skywalker and review it because it was, somehow, even worse than The Last Jedi. (I also mentioned how my oldest son wants me to watch it and review it.)
Anyway, I’m not quite sure what to make of the video above. It has been called the ultimate example of consumerist culture; the man is ecstatic with pleasure he cannot express at the trailer for a movie which reasonable people expected to be bad. I do tend towards believing the old saying de gustibus non disputandum est — there is no arguing matters of taste. That said, something seems off with this reaction.
On the other hand, if a man can feel a childlike sense of wonder and amazement over this, there is something good about that. It is possible we do not marvel at grass enough, and if one can marvel at grass, perhaps one could marvel at this trailer, too. But the thing which troubles me about this trailer is that that’s backwards. Grass is, properly considered, a more amazing thing than this trailer.
The real problem is not that he’s so amazed at this trailer, but that he is more amazed at this trailer than at the chair he’s sitting on and the trees he can almost certainly see outside of his window. He was not giggling in giddy exultation over the blue sky and the clouds at the beginning of this video.
The real problem is not that the man in the video finds the trailer to be very good. The real problem is all of the great things in real life that he is missing.
Back in the early 2000s, there was an interesting web comic called Undefined. If you’re in the mood for an entertaining and occasionally philosophical web comic, I suggest you check it out.
I have the feeling that many of the things they’re referring to are pastiches of conspiracy theories people proposed from time to time, but being American, I never heard many of them, so I can only infer from the sketch itself. They’re mostly self-describing, though.
I also love the plotting around a circular blue-light table.
Mitchell and Webb have a really funny sketch about mannerisms in a galactic empire:
I love the overall work that they put into the aesthetic—nice touches like the space station behind them and the guards standing in the hallway, motionless.
I also find it funny that there are gullible atheists of the dim-witted but aggressive sort who will think that this is an accurate description of why people believe in God, and how traditions came to be more generally. They’ll think this sketch is funny because, “see, that’s just how religion got formed!”
Whereas I think it funny because it’s obviously not how religion came to be, and such ideas are absolutely absurd when you put them into practical form.
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank may be my favorite episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. There are a lot of interesting things to talk about in this episode, but I’ll have to do that later. For the moment, I want to share some interesting things I find in researching the episode.
I had a hunch, based on the apparent budget of Overdrawn, that none of the scenes of African animals were filmed for the movie. Most of them were close-cropped enough that they could have been filmed at a zoo, but it just seemed unlikely. I couldn’t find out what movie they came from, though—it’s not credited in the credits and no one seems to list it.
I then tried to find out whether “maruba fruit” is real. It turns out it is, though its actualy name is “marula fruit“. If you scroll down to the “Use by Other Species” section, you find:
In the documentary Animals Are Beautiful People by Jamie Uys, released in 1974, some scenes portray elephants, ostriches, warthogs and baboons allegedly becoming intoxicated from eating fermented marula fruit, as do reports in the popular press. While the fruit is commonly eaten by elephants, the animals would need a huge amount of fermented marulas to have any effect on them, and other animals prefer the ripe fruit.
One scene depicts baboons, elephants, giraffes, warthogs and other African animals eating rotten, fermented fruit of the Marula tree. The animals are then intoxicated, and they stagger around to comic effect, before nightfall comes and they fall asleep. In the morning, we see one baboon wake up, disheveled, next to a warthog, and quietly exit the burrow, as not to wake her.
Well that’s quite promising. So jumping over to YouTube and searching for “Animals Are Beautiful People drunk animals” we find this clip:
And yes, this is definitely where they took the footage from. Some of the scenes are easy to recognize.
Interestingly, Overdrawn changed the order of the scenes. In the documentary, the elephant knocking the tree with the monkey in it happened while the marula fruit was ripe but not yet over-ripe. Later on the fruit over-ripened and started fermenting, and this when we get the drunk animals. (In Overdrawn, the drunk animals come first and the elephant knocks the tree after, which is the precipitating incident for Fingal to demand removal with override priority.)
I just came across an interesting article from, of all places, vice, titled, A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia. The tl;dr is that the woman, who had the username Zhemao, pretended to be a scholar of Russian history, which is a thing that Chinese Wikipedia had little of. It apparently began when she tried to understand real scholarly articles but couldn’t, and so started off filling in the missing pieces.
By the time she had written around 10,000 characters, she had gotten attached to it and didn’t want to delete it. Eventually she had a network of sock puppet accounts to boost herself, and had written or contributed to over 200 articles. She got very good at producing scholarly-sounding citations that were extremely difficult to verify. For the most part no one will spend the effort to verify citations to print books that are hard to get, especially on obscure topics that not many people are interested in.
This is, in general, the best way to deceive people—make it easy to believe you and hard to disprove you. The upshot of that is that one should be most careful about things that are easy to believe and hard to disprove—the more that is the case, the more important the trustworthiness of the source is. What can be dangerous is that this sort of thing can bootstrap itself. If you learn of a person through something that’s easy to believe and hard to disprove, and conditionally believe them, the more this goes on the more you will tend to feel like you’ve already trusted them and haven’t been disappointed, so they must be trustworthy.
Incidentally, this applies remarkably well to Science—by which I mean the academic industry of publishing papers. It’s all well and good to say that people’s results can be independently verified—but for the most part no one independently verifies them. When people actually try to, well, there’s a reason that if you Google “reproducibility crisis” you’ll get a lot of results.
Wikipedia gets a lot of criticism because “anyone can edit it,” but that’s not actually all that different from what the industry of scientific paper publication is like. Yes, there is peer review. There’s also peer review on Wikipedia, at least much of the time. In both places, the amount of rigor varies highly. And peer review, in academia, never includes actually running the experiments described in the paper to see if one gets the same results. No one has the money, or even the time, to do that. For some reason a lot of people think that “peer review” in science means “this paper is guaranteed to be good,” when in fact what it means is, “this paper is not guaranteed to be garbage.”
There was a Christmas Carol which I had first heard in the George C. Scott version of Dickens’ story, A Christmas Carol. I didn’t hear the whole thing, only the first lines, and because this was in the 1980s I had no real way to find out what it was. It finally occurred to me to google the line I remembered, “On Christmas night all Christians sing to hear the news the angels bring,” and discovered that it’s the first line of the Sussex Carol. Armed with the name, I threw it into YouTube and there are quite a few versions of it. Here’s a version with several ages of boys to make up the various registers:
By the way, the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol is, to my mind, still the best movie version of the story ever made. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth the time to watch it.
A while ago I came across an excellent sermon from Bishop Barron which I forgot to post:
The subject is about God writing his law on our hearts, but that doesn’t really do justice to the sermon. It’s very much worth listening to in its entirety.
Another great sketch from Mitchell & Webb is this fake advert for a football TV network. An extra layer of humor, for me at least, is that absolutely nothing in the words would need to be changed to make it about American football instead of what Americans call soccer:
It’s really funny (you need to stick with it to the halfway point to figure out what the joke is about).
It also brings up the very interesting question of why it is that people do useless things as a kind of symbolic sacrifice. It’s a curious instinct; probably born out of simple desperation, though I think that, at the same time, it’s often the case that it’s done because it’s preferable to real sacrifices.
I was recently trying to find a quote from G.K. Chesterton on how the point of a wedding is the marriage vow, and the point of the marriage vow is that it’s daring. I wasn’t able to find the original, what I did find was a newspaper called The Holy Name Journal which seems to have been from Michigan. In the August 1921 edition, someone quotes Chesterton’s article almost in full. Since it was only available as a photograph (though, thanks to Google, a text-searchable photograph), I transcribed it for easier quoting:
A writer of the Westminster Gazett recently made the proposal to alter the marriage formula: “As to the vow at the altar, it seems conceivable that under other conditions the form of words ordained by the Prayer Book might be revised.” And the writer adds that may have omitted the words “to obey”, others might omit the words “til death do us part.” The following is Mr. G.K. Chesterton’s rejoined to The New Witness:
It never seems to occur to him that others might omit the wedding. What is the point of the ceremony except that it involves the vow? What is the point of the vow except that it involves vowing something dramatic and final? Why walk all the way to a church in order to say that you will retain a connection as long as you find it convenient? Why stand in front of an altar to announce that you will enjoy somebody’s society as long as you find it enjoyable? The writer talks of the reason for omitting some of the words, without realizing that it is an even better reason for omitting all the words. In fact, the proof that the vow is what I describe, and what Mr. Hocking apparently cannot even manage, a unique thing not to be confounded with a contract, can be found in the very form and terminology of the vow itself. It can be found in the very fact that the vow becomes verbally ridiculous when it is thus verbally amended. The daring dogmatic terms of the promise become ludicrous in face of the timidity and triviality, of the thing promised. To say “I swear to God, in the face of this congregation as I shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, that Maria and I will be friends until we quarrel” is a thing of which the very diction implies the derision. It is like saying, “In the name of the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven, I think I prefer Turkish to Egyptian cigarettes,” or “Crying aloud on the everlasting mercy, I confess I have grave doubts about whether sardines are good for me.” Obviously nobody would ever have invented such a ceremony, or invented any ceremony, to celebrate such a promise. Men would merely have done what they liked, as millions of healthy men have done, without any ceremony at all.
Divorce and re-marriage are simply a heavy and hypocritical masquerade for free love and no marriage; and I have far more respect for the revolutionists who from the first have described their free love as free. But of the marriage service obviously refers to a totally different order of ideas; the rather unfashionable [stuff?] that may be called heroic ideas. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect the fatigued fatalist of this school and period to understand these ideas; and I only ask here that they should understand their own ideas. Every one of their own arguments leads direct to promiscuity; and leaves no kind of use or meaning in marriage of any kind. But the idea of the vow is perhaps a little too bold and bracing for them at present, and is too strong for their heads, like sea air.
Chris Lansdown 
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