By way of the usually reliable Mr. Kottke comes this fun mash-up:
Rainbow Connection, a Benoit Blanc Joint
Reply
Monthly Archives: February 2023
“Of all the gin joints in all the world…”
Lexicon. From the movie Casablanca. Once, I would have thought this was such a widely seen film I wouldn’t need to explain, but as the years go by, even societal memory fades.
Like many quotes from this movie, somewhat mangled. It should be, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world… she walks into mine.” The towns, alas, get dumped.
Usage: Something incredibly rare and unexpected happens.
“My god!”
”What?”
”That car that just cut us off, like an asshole?”
”Yeah?”
”It’s a Bugatti Veyron.”
(respectful pause) “Of all the gin joints, in all the world…”
How not to do a re-brand
It’s been two years now since Angie’s List renamed itself Angi. This was done because, allegedly, “(W)e’re not just a list anymore. Customers were confined and constrained by the literal nature of the name.”
But both their TV ads and their website all but scream, “We used to be Angie’s List!” If you’re still encountering so much resistance from your customers after two years, perhaps it’s time to concede they’re comfortable with being confined and constrained.
What one fool can do…
Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.
Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.
Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.
— Calculus Made Easy, Silvanus Thompson, 1914 (yes, still in print)
Dramatic bust
Rummaging through my old photos is this, a bust in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. I have no other notes, other than I made the photo in October, 2015. I’d say it’s Roman, but what do I know?
Nicky K. and running shoes
Here’s a cute ad from Brooks shoes. Back in 1979, 1980 or so, they would take the back cover of Runner’s World.
Эти туфли убивают меня.
(Eti tufli ubivayut menya)
It’s Khrushchev (Хрущёв) banging his shoe on the podium at the UN. A fairly famous incident.
The slugline reads, “Sometimes a comfortable shoe can make all the difference in the world.”
Not being a Russian speaker, I took the magazine to my high school cross-country coach, Greg Baranoff, who is. And he started laughing at great length. When he finally caught his breath, he translated:
“These shoes are killing me!”
Rhino snot pie
Lexicon. Mildly derivative of Bill Cosby’s routine of having a rhino for a pet. This takes it one step further, and refers to how servers sometimes get stuck with specials they know are dubious, but they have to flack to the diners anyway.
“Tonight we have artisanal, free-range rhino snot pie as our special dessert…”
By extension, anything hoisted on service people as something they have to enthuse over:
“Well, they seem all-in for the 7-cylinder hybrid sports wagon.”
”Rhino snot pie. I just loooove this car!”
Asps
Borrowed from our friends David Levine and Kate Yule. It’s a line from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Indy: Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?
Sallah (peering into the tomb): Asps. Very dangerous. (pause) You go first.
Usage:
“That rhino snot pie on the menu looks interesting.”
”Asps.”
(Kate died in 2016. We miss her a lot.)
Gruff and lovable
Lexicon. No real context, just oft cited. It’s from Trout Fishing in the Reflecting Pool, or The Fireside Watergate. A mass market paperback, Nicholas von Hoffman wrote the text, and Garry Trudeau did single-panel, editorial page style cartoons. One shows senator Sam Ervin saying,
Ah am not bein’ harassin’ towards the witness. Ahm bein’ gruff, and lovable, and yew know it.
The book also has the only drawings I know of Nixon by Trudeau. (Nixon was always shown speaking without being seen, in Doonesbury.)
Doing things together
I’m going to give you a great example of taking one line out context. Do you remember the single sentence out of this speech that got a lot of play?
(L)ook, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together. (Applause.)
I think Mr. Obama is absolutely right. There have been many things we, as Americans, are very proud of, but we’re blinded by the ideology of every person for themselves.
I’ve been reminded of this speech by Mr. Obama because of this very insightful essay by Umair Haque.
Americans really believe. A certain ideology. Every person for themselves. Society stops at the boundaries of the family, which is about the only form of collective action or public good allowed. Beyond that, sure, maybe there should be public roads and schools, and that’s about it. I won’t “take responsibility” for that person, because they might be a layabout, a liability, a parasite, who costs me money, and I don’t have enough of that to begin with. The strong survive, and the weak perish, and that’s how we advance as a society.
And yet, in his final paragraph…
The old myths aren’t working. It’s time for a new identity, a new form of self-belief. Hey, if we’re not just rugged, manly individualists, who are we? We could also be the America that saved the world, went to the moon, freed the slaves, and lives up to its ideals. None of those, after all, which shine like a beacon, even in these dark times, to the world and to history and to you and me — democracy, freedom, justice, truth — say anything about “only the strong survive,” do they?
It’s something to yearn for, anyway.
(There are other things in Mr. Haque’s essay having to do with economics, but it’s a diversion from these points. Maybe later.)