From the Telegraph:

Michel Lotito (France) (b. 15 June 1950) of Grenoble, France, known as Monsieur Mangetout, ate metal and glass from 1959 until his death last year. His diet since 1966 included 18 bicycles, 15 supermarket trolleys, seven TV sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a low-calorie Cessna light aircraft and a computer.

If I have my French correct Mangetout = omnivore.

I guess you could say that he spun a record.

I’d guess that she’s not claustrophobic.

What a waist.

Starts here.

H/T Oyvay Blog

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

You might remember, a few weeks ago there was news about the “Real Genius” weapon. Well now different scientific news recalls another movie.

CERN - the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire – the same organization where the World Wide Web was born, is about to start testing the Large Hadron Collider in an effort to recreate conditions after the Big Bang.

However there are those who fear that the experiment could destroy the world and have filed lawsuits to prevent the activation of the device.

The device is designed to replicate conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and its creators hope it will unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

However, opponents fear the machine, which will smash pieces of atoms together at high speed and generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade, may create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.

Does this remind anyone of this dialogue from Ghostbusters?

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

So if you’re reading this next week, the experiment has been so far successful. But if not, apparently the black holes were a bigger problem than the researchers anticipated, but at least we were first with the news.

h/t Secular Blasphemy, who lives in Norway, which is a lot closer to the collider, so if there are any problems maybe he could send out a warning e-mail.

UPDATE via Instapundit: An item about debunking the doomsday scenarios.

Several rounds of scientific studies, considering increasingly outlandish scenarios, have ruled out the black-hole threat. The evidence shows that the collider is absolutely safe, and poses no chance of cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the hysteria continues: Part of the reason for that is that scientists say it’s conceivable that a less threatening breed of subatomic black holes could be created. But another factor is that there’s so much science-fiction appeal to the tale of the black hole that ate the earth.

But this is also fascinating:

Speaking of time travel, Cramer has been in the midst of a real-life experiment in retrocausality - a kind of backward flow of information from the future to the past. I first wrote about this experiment almost two years ago, and Cramer recently told me that he’s still trying to get the apparatus to work. Perhaps what Stephen Hawking said is true: Nature abhors a time machine.

And if Cramer’s successful he’ll write an article about it last week!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

UHF television used to feature re-runs of shows like Hogan’s Heroes and the 3 Stooges. Hogan’s Heroes was a vehicle for mocking the Nazis. I found it surprising that a number of the actors in Hogan’s Heroes were Holocaust survivors. But they saw it as their revenge. Werner Klemperer who played the Nazi commandant even had it written into his contract that the Nazis could never prevail.

The American comedians, the Three Stooges - all Jews who changed their names for show business - though, lived during the Nazi era. Even though the studios maintained neutrality for feature films, the Stooges made some short films mocking the Nazis.

But that didn’t deter the Three Stooges and Columbia Pictures from making “You Nazty Spy!,” written by Clyde Bruckman and Felix Adler and directed by Jules White. Historian Lynn Rapaport, writing in the San Diego Jewish Journal, points out that film shorts were not as closely regulated or censored as feature films, so perhaps the Stooges’ efforts were unnoticed or ignored.

“You Nazty Spy!” was released with a disclaimer, “Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle,” which was patently ridiculous because the short depends on Moe’s physical resemblance to Hitler — particularly after he pushes his hair back on one side and gets a piece of black tape stuck to his upper lip.

Though others, including Walt Disney also lent their talents to fight the propaganda war, the Stooges made their film in 1940. Others got involved later.

h/t Meryl

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Jonathan Last points out the Battlestar Galactica angle on the Republican slate:

Watching Palin’s introduction it became immediately clear that she looks uncannily like a young Laura Roslin.* This can only bode well for Palin. But the parallels don’t stop at her looks. Like Roslin, Palin was basically a private citizen (Roslin was a teacher, Palin was a reporter) before being pulled into politics. Neither seems to have had any larger ambition, until events pulled them into prominence. And both were immediately discounted by outside observers as being unequal to the demands of their new positions.

Jonathan, you’re such a geek. (And I say that very fondly, as I have all of season four on my DVR and am going to use every wile I have to not let Comcast make me change DVRs when I move next week.)

Like Adama and Roslin, McCain and Palin should complement each other well. I eagerly await the moment in the VP debate when Palin is asked what she would do with Osama bin Laden if he were captured. One assumes her answer will be some variation of, “Put that thing out the airlock.”

It’s a slam-dunk.

I’m getting emails from Hillary supporters telling me they’re now going to vote for McCain. Now we can shoot for the SF fan base.

Hat tip: Chris H.

We were up in the Catskills today for visiting day where I saw a billboard for a concert. It was a triple billing of Journey, Cheap Trick and Heart at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. (It appears this isn’t even the original lineup of Journey!)

These groups who were big in the 70’s and 80’s are now doing what are, effectively, oldies shows.

And what’s the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts?

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a $100 million outdoor performing arts center and museum located approximately 90 minutes from New York City at the site of the original 1969 Woodstock festival in Bethel, NY. The 15,000 seat outdoor performing arts venue and The Museum at Bethel Woods are set within nearly 2,000 bucolic acres.

So these no longer current rock bands are playing at the site of the legendary Woodstock concert. Like they’re trying to recapture past glory.

I know it’s not nice, but for some reason I started thinking about the famous Danger Kitty commercial with this hard rock band playing at a Bar Mitzvah.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Comic giants, Stan Lee, Joe Kubert and Neal Addams have turned their attention to getting a woman’s paintings back from the Auschwitz museum.

As all-star comic-book team-ups go, this one beats the first meeting of Superman and Spider-Man. Three of the elder statesmen of comic books — Neal Adams, Joe Kubert and Stan Lee — have joined forces to combat what they see as a real-world injustice.

The men are lending their talents to tell the tale of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who survived two years at the Auschwitz concentration camp by painting watercolor portraits for the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele. Some of the artwork also survived, but it is in the possession of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland. Now 85 and living in California, Mrs. Babbitt wants the artwork back, but the museum has steadfastly refused to return it.

This is what they’ve done:

Now Mrs. Babbitt’s story has been captured in a six-page comic-book story illustrated by Mr. Adams, who helped take Batman back to his dark roots after the ’60s television show made him seem campy; inked partly by Mr. Kubert, whose comics career stretches back to the 1940s and who has drawn everyone from Hawkman to Sergeant Rock; and featuring an introduction by Mr. Lee, a co-creator of the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and many other Marvel heroes.

The text was written by Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which has championed Mrs. Babbitt’s cause. Mr. Medoff and Mr. Adams have offered the story to DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment in the hopes of getting it published, but no deal is yet in place.

I can’t say that I’m totally unsympathetic to the museum’s point of view:

Auschwitz museum officials, in a statement issued in 2001, indicated that they had bought six of Mrs. Babbitt’s watercolors in 1963 from an Auschwitz survivor and acquired a seventh in 1977. In 1973 the museum asked her to verify her work but did not offer to return the items. The museum has argued that the artwork is important evidence of the Nazi genocide and part of the cultural heritage of the world. (The museum did not respond to telephone calls and an e-mail message requesting comment.)

However Mrs. Babbitt did paint the pictures in question. And, more remarkably, her artistry saved her life and the life of her mother.

Surely the Auschwitz museum could work out a deal to return the artwork to Mrs. Babbitt for some time and then seek to get on loan after a specified period of time. Perhaps the museum could even display replicas and allow Mrs. Babbitt to have control of the art that she created under inhuman conditions.

The Times has made Mrs. Babbitt’s story available. (pdf)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Both Sens. McCain and Obama passed their all important interviews with entertainment weekly. (via memeorandum)

I have to admit that Sen. Obama’s choices were not pretentious as I had expected. I should have given him more credit. In fact Marc Ambinder focuses on certain choices and observes:

In some ways, Obama has the tastes of a 72 year old man; McCain has the tastes of a 47 year old whippersnapper. Who knew?

However for their choice of on-screen Presidents McCain prefers Dennis Haybert’s David Palmer:

“He’s fabulous,” McCain says. “He’s a guy who makes tough decisions, he takes charge, he’s ready to sacrifice his interest on behalf of the interest of the country.”

Sen. Obama prefers the president played by Jeff Bridges in the Contender:

“He was charming and essentially an honorable person, but there was a rogue about him,” Obama says. “The way he would order sandwiches – he was good at that.”

So one admires a President who puts the country first; the other admires the way a President orders sandwiches. (Someone else, I can’t remember who, noted this disparity too.)

Both like the not so superheroes, with McCain favoring Bat Man and Obama preferring both Bat Man and Spiderman.

The choices are contrasted at Political Punch.

I don’t know how much to read into their choices, but I’m sure it says something about both their characters. (It is a little worrying that McCain likes Dexter a series about a likable serial killer.) I just don’t know what.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Sarah sent me a link to the Hokey Pokey Hulk toy.

It’s so bad it’s good.

Meryl want.

More info here.

More info here.

I won’t tell you whether or not Mr Rogers was a sniper in the U.S. Army. Take the test and find out.

But she was a sniper! More here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Happy Father’s Day, Lionel Richie:

It’s not easy raising a celebutante. Take it from Lionel Richie.

The singer was accepting the “Icon” honor at Sunday night’s taping of the TV Land Awards, when he got applause and a laugh at daughter Nicole’s expense.

“Forget about surviving 40 years in the music business,” Lionel Richie told the audience. “Just surviving 27 years of Nicole Richie has been a struggle-and-a-half, I want to tell you. I stand here as a survivor, I want you to know, for all the parents out there.”

Gee. Maybe he should have been more of a parent and less of a celebrity himself. Other celebs seem to manage to raise normal kids.

If he wasn’t joking, he’s a jackass.

Via Glenn, Mars is adding a scientific division.

All the talk about chocolate being good for your health is starting to get serious. Mars Inc., of chocolate bar fame, has established a scientific division.

And a group of researchers, some in Germany, others with the new Mars division known as Symbioscience, has just published a report showing that an enriched hot cocoa beverage can improve blood flow in people with type 2 diabetes.

“The study is the first of its kind in terms of its rigor, as well as the population studied,” said Harold Schmitz, chief science officer of Mars. “Diabetics treated as well as they could be treated with pharmaceutical intervention did see, on average, a 30 percent improvement in vascular function.”

Out of the goodness of my heart—and purely in the interests of advancing science—I am hereby offering myself to join any and all of Mars scientific testing. Particularly the ones involving Milky Way bars.

Please, Glenn. Let Mars know that I’m with them, 100%.

The next time someone tries to tell you how culturally superior Europe is to us, send them to YouTube to see the entries in this year’s Eurovision contest.

Pay particular attention to the Russian entry. It won.

Snoopy, if you can enlighten me as to what on earth the ice skater is supposed to represent, I’d be grateful. If you want to see the Russian entry in its entirety, feel free. I’m thinking there isn’t a single straight man in that video, but hey, book, cover, etc.

As for the rest, well, check out Estonia and Belgium. Oh. My. God.

I’ll be discussing the Eurovision contest in my upcoming Shire Network News contribution.

Oh, I almost forgot: I have something in the recent SNN, which is actually hosted from the Shire this week. I’ll split out my essay later this weekend.

Charlton Heston is gone. The article didn’t mention cause of death. I have my suspicions that it was a deliberate early exit due to Alzheimer’s, and if so, more power to him. Alzheimer’s a horrible way to die.

But while we’re talking about Heston, what’s your favorite line of his? Or your favorite film?

My all-time favorite is “Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty apes!” from, of course, The Planet of the Apes (the good version).

Yours?

What did the Spanish diplomat, Eduardo Propper de Callejon have in common with Raoul Wallenberg, Frank Foley and Aristades De Sousa Mendes? Like the others, Propper de Callejon risked his life and career to issue visas to Jews to escape the Nazis.

As German troops marched into France in the summer of 1940, Propper de Callejon, then first secretary in the Spanish Embassy in Paris, stamped and signed passports for four days nearly nonstop to allow refugees to escape to Spain, and from there to the relative safety of Portugal.Propper de Callejon, a Franco loyalist, defied Spanish Foreign Ministry instructions not to issue such visas. In 1941, he was demoted, and never promoted to be an ambassador. He retired in 1965 and died in 1972. The exact number of visas Propper de Callejon issued remains unknown, but Yad Vashem Director Avner Shalev said it was believed to be at least 1,500, both Jewish and non-Jewish. ”He was signing papers with both his hands. He signed so many that his hands hurt so much, my mother had to bandage them at the end of the day,” said Elena Bonham Carter, his daughter. ”It was extraordinary. He said those were the most important days of his life.”

Like De Sousa Mendes he paid for his heroism with his career.

Wallenberg came from one of the wealthiest families in Sweden. (And it’s still quite wealthy.) Propper de Callejon, though, also has a famous relative, his granddaughter.

Israel’s Holocaust memorial on Wednesday posthumously recognized a prominent Spanish diplomat, who was actress Helena Bonham Carter’s grandfather, for his role in saving hundreds of Jews during World War II.

(Yes, her name differs from that of her mother by one letter.)Not entirely related, you might remember that two other Harry Potter cast members have contributed to a Holocaust memorial event.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Solomonia and Israelly Cool write about the Greek singer, Glykeria, who gets a lot of grief back home for her support of Israel.I don’t know if he loves Israel as much, but singer Joe Jackson is excited to have some upcoming concerts in Israel.

It’s taken almost thirty years and nearly two dozen albums and countless tours, but Joe Jackson is finally coming to Israel.The Grammy award-winning jazz musician and composer says he’s always wanted to play here, and has tried to arrange it “at least two or three times I can remember,” he says over the phone from Paris,” for some reason it never worked out logistically.”

He’s clearly found a way to please the touring gods this time round as the tour for his most recent CD, “Rain,” will take him to several places he’s never been before, including Israel.

Unfortunately his big thrill with playing Tel Aviv is:

A strong advocate of smokers’ rights, Jackson has heard of Tel Aviv’s healthy appreciation of tobacco. “A friend of mine recently went to Israel for a wedding, and he said that not only could you smoke everywhere, but he went to the gym to work out and there was an ashtray next to the exercise bike. Which I thought was brilliant!”

“Healthy appreciation of tobacco?” Ironic. Still is that why he’s coming? To experience the land of Milk and Tobacco?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Here are a couple that Paul Simon didn’t think of.April Wormly threatened to blow up the plane her (soon to be ex-)boyfriend was boarding.

A woman who called in a bomb threat to an airport in an attempt to break up with her boyfriend was sentenced to two years in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office said Wednesday.April Wormly, 36, of Hobbs, N.M., also was ordered to pay $19,761 in restitution for phoning in the threat to San Antonio International Airport.

(h/t Betsy’s Page)

Finland’s PM text messaged his “Dear Susan” note.

It was a Nordic fairytale that began with an internet date, developed between the shelves of Ikea, and ended when the Finnish Prime Minister texted “that’s it” to his lover on his Nokia.Now it is payback time for Susan Kuronen, a 36-year-old divorcée. Only days before the Finnish general election on Sunday, she has published a kiss-and-tell book designed to embarrass Matti Vanhanen, who was once dubbed “the sexiest man in Finland” by Jacques Chirac.

BTW, those Finns are really handy with text messaging, they’ve written novels with them and unlock public toilets too!

Consequences: jail time and tell all book. No wonder Paul Simon didn’t recommend them.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

This one goes out to a very dear friend of mine.

Okay, not really. But it’s been on my mind a lot the last few days for some reason.

If you’re really geeky, all episodes of the original Star Trek series are available for download at CBS. (h/t Crossing the Rubicon3)BTW, why is this on CBS and not NBC, as you might recall.

Mr. Spock: Here is the readout, Captain. The computer has identified the alien vessel as a 1968 Chrysler Imperial with a tinted windshield and retractable headlights.Captain Kirk: And the little blue and orange numbers?

Mr. Spock: That’s called a “California license plate”, and it’s registered, or was in 1968, to a corporation known as “NBC”. Wait.. there’s something more.. The computer isn’t sure, but it thinks this NBC used to manufacture cookies.

So my best guess is that CBS has a hand in the producing the upcoming Star Trek movie so it’s hoping that making the original show available will generate interest in the movie. (Though CBS and Viacom have split there’s still a production company called CBS Paramount.)

(The main post is about the Church of Spock, which Daled Amos figures is one of the more mainstream tourist sites in Lynchburg.)

If you’re super geeky here are Star Charts of the whole Trek Universe. So if you want to trek through the Romulan Empire or vacation on Bajor, here’s all the info you need. (h/t Colossus of Rhodey)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Not.

And amid all this hype, Winehouse’s representatives said late Friday that she won’t attend tonight’s Grammys in Los Angeles. Although she resolved her visa issues with the U.S. Embassy, she’ll still appear via satellite from London. Winehouse apparently decided not to stray too far from the very place she sang about never entering: rehab.

The New York Times tells the story of
a new principal at a troubled high school. (h/t Shalom USA.)

On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up.

Who is he?

Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.. . . “It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”

Teachers, parents and students at the school, which is mostly Hispanic and black, were equally taken aback by the sight of their new leader: A member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke.

“The talk was, ‘You’re not going to believe who’s running the show,’ ” said Lisa DeBonis, now an assistant principal.

Not surprisingly, not everyone has accepted him, though it seems that most of the critics are no longer with the school, so it might just be that they have an ax to grind.

When an etiquette expert, Lyudmila Bloch, first approached principals about training sessions she runs at a Manhattan restaurant, most declined to send students. Mr. Waronker, who happened to be reading her book, “The Golden Rules of Etiquette at the Plaza,” to his own children (he has six), has since dispatched most of the school for training at a cost of $40 a head.Flipper Bautista, 10, loved the trip, saying, “It’s this place where you go and eat, and they teach you how to be first-class.”

In a school where many children lack basic reading and math skills, though, such programs are not universally applauded. When Mr. Waronker spent $8,000 in school money to give students a copy of “The Code: The 5 Secrets of Teen Success” and to invite the writer to give a motivational speech, it outraged Marietta Synodis, a teacher who has since left.

“My kids could much better benefit from math workbooks,” Ms. Synodis said.

Mr. Waronker counters that key elements of his leadership are dreaming big and offering children a taste of worlds beyond their own. “Those experiences can be life-transforming,” he said.

One of the themes in the report is that Mr. Waronker has a personal touch. For example:

So when Emmanuel Bruntson, 14, a cut-up in whom Mr. Waronker saw potential, started getting into fights, he met with him daily and gave him a copy of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”“I wanted to get him out of his environment so he could see a different world,” Mr. Waronker said.

My guess is that despite the problems, Mr. Waronker is having some success. And it comes from his seeming religious commitment to the school.

Back in Crown Heights, Mr. Waronker says he occasionally finds himself on the other side of a quizzical look, with his Hasidic neighbors wondering why he is devoting himself to a Bronx public school instead of a Brooklyn yeshiva.“We’re all connected,” he responds.

Gesturing in his school at a class full of students, he said, “I feel the hand of the Lord here all the time.”

* Yiddishe Nachas could be translated as “Jewish Pride.” It’s something I get when I read of someone like Shimon Waronker, but not a spoiled, self-destructive pop-singer.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Obviously, this did not happen at rush hour. They’d have been knocked flat by the crowd otherwise.

Flash mobs are apparently the actor’s greatest friends.

Monopoly - the board game - is looking for a new cities to feature. (The classic game, of course, is based on Atlantic City New Jersey.) If I understand the goal, Hasbro/Parker Brothers is looking for 20 cities to feature in a global Monopoly game. The top 20 cities of 68 pre-selected cities will make it onto the board. Also a later round of voting will net two “wildcard” cities for inclusion. (If you want you may nominate a city to be one of the wildcard cities, but this has no bearing on the 20 main cities.)Right now Jerusalem is ranked at 26, so why not register and vote for Jerusalem? You may vote once a day. (The website is not very easy to navigate.)

I should have realized that Yehuda would have something to say about this. He’s skeptical.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

via memeorandum

Chess champion Bobby Fischer died

Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.

I first learned of Bobby Fischer when I was about 9 or 10 and someone bought me “The Jew in American Sport” that featured profiles of 3 chess players: Emanual Lasker, Sammy Reshevsky and Bobby Fischer. Given that Bobby Fischer first gained notice as a chess player when he was only a few years older than I was at the time, he became something of an idol. Of course my chess playing abilities were never championship caliber. But I don’t think that I comprehended that at the time. (See Just One Minute too.)

(It did happen that I had the opportunity to play Sammy Reshevsky at a demonstration as a freshman at YU. He played 30 students at once and won 29 games and drew one. Needless to say he beat me with ease. Bill Jempty, though, got a chance to get drubbed by Fischer. Of course, he’s also a more serious chess player than I am.)

In the Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer Bill Ordine writes about the state of sports and, I guess, detente at that time:

I was there for Fischer-Spassky. I was in the Navy, stationed at the NATO base in Keflavik doing pretty much what I still do. I was a Navy journalist. In between my normal duties, I occasionally got to go to the big city down the road. One of those days, I covered the chess match. I recall it went on forever and the hot dogs were made of lamb. And even with the confrontation being what it was — the young, brash American genius from Brooklyn against the established Soviet champion — it became increasingly difficult to root for Fischer as his eccentricities overwhelmed even an overwhelming sense of nationalism many of us felt at the height of the Cold War.

In short, Fischer was a jerk complaining about everything, making incessant demands. Spassky was gracious and urbane. Imagining what might happen to the Soviet back home if he lost, you could almost have some sympathy for him. In the end, Fischer prevailed and it was a great triumph for the U.S. But at the same time, the Summer Olympics were going on in Germany. The United States lost that controversial basketball game to the Soviets. And, of course, the Munich Massacre, where members of the Israeli delegation were killed, stunned the world and obliterated everything else going on in sports.

It’s funny that he was there. We flew over Iceland one of the days the match was going on; though I don’t know if a match was going at the time or if we even flew over Reykjavik. We were on our way back from Israel at the time.

A few years ago, amateur chess player and (one time) professional psychiatrist, Charles Krauthammer asked “Did Chess make him crazy?”

Why such proximity between genius and madness in chess? There are three possible explanations. One is that chess is a monomania. You study it intensively day and night from childhood if you are going to rise to the ranks of the greats, and that kind of singular focus constricts your reality and makes you more vulnerable to distortions of it. “A chess genius,” wrote George Steiner, “is a human being who focuses vast, little understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality.” Plausible, perhaps, but there are lots of folks who are monomaniacal in other “trivial” spheres and who come out psychically intact. Tiger Woods was raised from infancy to be a great golfer and is not just intact but graceful and charming. The ranks of great golfers, swimmers and Dominican shortstops are not more noticeably skewed to the deranged than the general population.

Well, then, this must be monomania of a certain sort. Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity. It’s not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connections to the real world outside–a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say, volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly. As Stefan Zweig put it in his classic novella The Royal Game, chess is “thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance.”

But chess has a third–and unique–characteristic that is particularly fatal. It is not just monomaniacal and abstract, but its arena is a playing field on which the other guy really is after you. The essence of the game is constant struggle against an adversary who, by whatever means of deception and disguise, is entirely, relentlessly, unfailingly dedicated to your destruction. It is only a board, but it is a field of dreams for paranoia.

However in Bobby Fischer’s perfect death Gabriel Schoenfeld concludes not:

And while there have been several deranged grandmasters, whether the frequency of mental illness in this group is higher than the average rate among geniuses is doubtful.

But not before he recalls the contents of a disturbing letter that Fischer wrote to the Encyclopedia Judaica.

Two years later, he wrote to the Encylopedia Judaica asking for his entry to be removed (the underlinings are as in the original): Gentlemen:Knowing what I do about Judaism, I was naturally distressed to see that you have erroneously featured me as a Jew in ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA. Please do not make this mistake again in any future editions of your voluminous, pseudo-authoritative publication. I am not today, nor have I ever been a Jew, and as a matter of fact, I am uncircumcised.I suggest rather than fraudulently misrepresenting me to be a Jew, and dishonestly abusing my name and reputation as a kind of advertising gimmick to improve the image of your religion (Judaism), you try to promote your religion on its own merits — if indeed it has any!In closing, I trust that I am not being unrealistically optimistic, in thanking you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

Truly yours,
Bobby Fischer
The World Chess Champion

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

Whatever the source of his madness, Bobby Fischer was once the best in his field.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

My six year old decided to dress Clifford up.

In a skirt and blouse.

Who knew?

Maybe he found Emily Elizabeth’s clothes.

Maybe it’s a John Ritter thing.

Crossdressedposted at Soccer Dad.

I seem to remember that sometimes when he left J. Jonah Jameson, Spiderman would say “See you in the funny papers.”

Apparently that’s where we’re now going to see the U.N. In the funny papers. With Spiderman. (via memeorandum)

He has fought against foes ranging from the Green Goblin to Doctor Octopus, but Spider-Man now faces an even more formidable challenge: improving the battered image of the United Nations.In a move reminiscent of storylines developed during the World War II, the U.N. is joining forces with Marvel Comics, creators of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, to create a comic book showing the international body working with superheroes to solve bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.

The comic, initially to be distributed free to 1 million U.S. schoolchildren, will be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature superheroes such as Spider-Man working with U.N. agencies such as Unicef and the “blue hats,” the U.N. peacekeepers.

HotAir exclaims:

This is a waste of a perfectly good ficticious super hero.

comments:

The UN has to resort to fiction to bolster its image because a book about the UN doing any good would by definition have to be a work of fiction.

and asks:

Why not set the book in an actual war-torn country and highlight the heroic acts of real, actual US military men and women to help the people who live there? There is no shortage of those real heroes. We don’t need to credit their deeds to made-up comic book characters.

While this doesn’t quite answer his question, Marvel did sort of honor the military, with a special series of comics including the recently deceased, Captain America:

Captain America may not be back from the dead, but he’s back — sort of.Four months after Marvel Comics unexpectedly killed off the champion of liberty and the American way, he appears in a comic made exclusively for U.S. soldiers. He is seen on a videotape made before his death.

One million copies of “The New Avengers: The Spirit of America,” the fifth in Marvel’s series for the military, will be available free starting Saturday at military base stores worldwide.

The impetus for the series comes from a boy.

Marvel Comics started the military series in 2005 after getting a call from a young boy, saying he could no longer afford to send comics to his two brothers serving in Iraq, Sabouni said.Marvel sent the boy a box of comics but wanted to do more, so the company started working with AAFES to develop something just for soldiers. The military series has been very popular, with books selling quickly after their release.

“You have the fantasy aspect, but they’re staying true to our culture,” said Lt. Col. William Thurmond, an AAFES spokesman. “You can’t ask for anything more if you’re a comic book fan.”

Blue Crab Boulevard really lets Marvel have it. Ed Driscoll notes that this isn’t the first time Marvel has engaged in dubious propaganda.

Let’s finish up with semi-related items:

OK so if you want Spiderman check the UN. But it you want spider webbing, check out Israel.

Now totally off-topic, a member of the U.S. Military got a writing gig with Marvel!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Chris Muir has been a friend for some time, and I love his Day By Day comic strip. He’s selling a Sam calendar, and, well, the feminist in me is standing on one shoulder screaming “SEXIST!” while on the other shoulder is the fifty-year-old realist who says, well, guys like hot chicks. That’s nature.

So go check out his Sam calendar, which is fairly artsy and fairly sexy, and then buy it. Just go to Day By Day’s main page and see for yourselves.

The original episodes of Sesame Street have been issued on DVD. But our children better not watch them. It wouldn’t be right.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Virgina Heffernan explains in Sweeping the Clouds away:

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

What?

Well for one thing, there was Cookie Monster doing his Allistair Cooke impersontation:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Cookie Monster? wrong behavior?

As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

No we wouldn’t want our children to follow his example.

Unfortunately one of the examples does strike as a reason to be careful.

Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Some of the reasons why Sesame Street isn’t fit for children sound like warmed over political correctness. The last one mentioned here, though, reflects the our society’s loss of innocence. At the same time that our society has become overprotective of children in silly ways, in other ways new hazards have appeared that we must protect them from.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll adds:

Forty years from now, when the current season of Sesame Street is being assembled for release on whatever the successor format to the successor format of DVD is, how much of it will have to be reshot to comply with how much further the nanny state is sure to have expanded further?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Media Backspin writes of the documentary To die in Jerusalem, which somehow balances the death of Rachel Levy with the death of the girl who killed her. (My guess is that the movie ignores the hero, Haim Smadar, who died that day.)

Backspin notes that the source material, the article in Newsweek was just as wretched as the portrayal of the two girls in the NY Times. Someone else noticed this at the time, Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post.

There’s a hero to this story. She’s a quiet, studious, beautiful Palestinian girl, with a rich and mysterious inner life, who one day bids a nonchalant farewell to her classmates, leaves a “grim warren of alleys and tightly packed dwellings,” and commits something perfectly abrupt and terrible, in the stylized manner of ritual Japanese suicide or a French art-house film. The Rachel Levy of Greenberg’s telling is, by contrast, just another transplanted JAP. More problematic is that Greenberg’s evident concern for balance is such that he tells us nothing about Akhras save the details of her life that mirror Levy’s. Which is to say, everything about her that’s banal. But it is not a banal girl who walks into a supermarket with explosives wrapped to her waist to detonate herself and every other living thing within a 20 meter radius. To limit the profile of Akhras to the fact that she went to school and did the laundry is a little like telling us that Charles Manson likes mustard on his burgers and is a huge fan of the LA Lakers.

Absent from Greenberg’s account is some idea of how a young woman can be raised, educated and eventually recruited to become a suicide bomber. What were her family’s politics? On what diet of literature was she schooled? How did the suicide squad find her? What sort of training did she get? What kind of society makes murderesses out of its future mothers?

But we get none of it, except that Akhras “was quite normal.” Within that artless remark there’s a story worth telling about this killer and the world that made her. Too bad Greenberg misses it.

…

Yet for all this, Hammer’s story disappoints. “There was something about staring into the almost-twin faces of the bomber and her victim last week,” he writes, “that moved the seemingly unending tale of strife in the region to a deeper and even more unsettling place… Martyrdom - or, depending on your point of view, murder - is becoming mainstream.”

Depending on your point of view?

“To die in Jerusalem” is not the first dramatization of this terror attack. A few years ago, there was a play “Paradise” that was being produced in Cincinatti and upset the Muslim population there. I found out about this in an obscure blog, David’s Israel Blog.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I blame the seventies. Most of these shows were on in the seventies. Go. Click the link. Cringe. Laugh.

Now go here to see the best ones.

File this under: Never underestimate the power of a Trekkie to write yet another treatise on an aspect of Star Trek (TOS) that you never really thought about. This guy has analyzed the statistics on the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.

The basic stats:
The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.

Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

• Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
• Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
• Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
• Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.

Please do follow the link. It’s funny, entertaining, and informative.

Hat tip: Janet P.