50,000 Football Fans Screaming 'Vagina'

from Deadspin

Fans of the Oregon Ducks football team like to form an 'O' shape with their hands, indicating the letter of the alphabet that adorns their team's helmets.

The American Sign Language teacher at the university loves to point out that if your hands are not arranged in a rounded enough formation, you may be trying to say "Go Oregon" but really you're saying "vagina."

Little Engine with Wings

from Slate

One could even argue that [Michael] Lewis, having fallen in love with one story, missed a second, possibly more interesting one, in which the Little Engine That Could grows wings and flies too close to the sun (or something).

I like this description of a faux-underdog from a Moneyball review. Or maybe it's an underdog that becomes an overdog. Icarus turns up in funny places.

The New Originals

Originalism is the vision of the U.S. Constitution as having the same meaning that it had when it was signed. For centuries this argument had no purcahse at all on constitutional scholars, but then Edwin Meese invented it and Reagan appointed a right-wing Supreme Court justice. You know, the guy with the dictionary from 1787 on his desk.

Now crackpot ex-anchorman Glenn Beck is touting the eighteenth-century compact. He tops the charts with "The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century."

But hold on, Beck. How can you "adapt" the Constitution while at the same time insisting on the sanctity of its content in 1787? You can't get any more original than Original. Unless you're David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel.

Sparks to be Tapped

from LA Times

President Obama called unemployed people "sparks waiting to be lit," whose ignition can set the economy ablaze. Then he said that they have "talent to be tapped."

This one bothered me because an unlit spark is a non-entity. Obama's effort to praise the value of these "churning" workers presents them as dumb flakes of antimatter. But then once these workers' productivity gets harnessed, you have a crackling fire, which is usually understood to be a destructive force.

The comparision harkened back to Bush 41's even vaguer "thousand points of light." These are American volunteer organizations with inspirational value. Praising volunteers is a pretty limp gesture for the leader of the free world, but it became his favorite slogan.

So both presidents recognize flickering particles of national importance. Sparks have thermal (economic?) value, while points of light are merely dazzling, inspiring, or disorienting.

Voters, our great nation in the year 2011 is a strobe light, a roman candle, a cornfield lit by fireflies, a supernova, the Burning Man playa, and a refracting disco ball. My opponent characterizes it as an Arizona wildfire, a box of strike-anywhere matches, and a recently-blowtorched saucepan of Bananas Foster.

The Fake Statue of Liberty

from the Christian Science Monitor

The Postal Service's new stamp has an image not of the statue in New York Harbor that welcomes the tempest-tost masses, but of the knockoff in Vegas, at the New York-New York casino that welcomes tourists with cash to burn. Since no one can tell the difference, the stamp will not be redesigned.

But it kind of gives me that "Dude, where's my country?" feeling to see this important symbol bowdlerized. On the other hand, the swaddled copper lady with the secular halo has not been initiating new Americans for a long time. They enter through airports, or on foot through the Mexican border.

New York-New York is probably the best example of a style of architectural obscenity that Las Vegas has pioneered: the jamming of an entire skyline into one building. The France-themed casino and the Excalibur also have kooky cosmetic projectiles. Beholding these casinos is really different than taking the Staten Island ferry past the Statue of Liberty, believe you me.

The Silent Mouth

from an interview with portraitist Donny Miller

How does he capture the right mood in his faces? "I change their emotions -- making them look unsure, or even mean, by drawing their eyebrows a different way. The mouth doesn't really say that much. What a person is really thinking is in the eyes."

The graphic designer discusses his work Beautiful People with Beautiful Feelings, an acerbic look at modern self-absorption. Like Ed Ruscha or Roy Liechtenstein, it's pop art with trenchant captions. But the quotes don't really come from the tearful faces -- they seem to emanate from some unseen essence, as in the work of Jenny Holzer. We humans think we use language to communicate, but to Miller, a silent face conveys more.

Brave New What?

from the National Review

The War Nerd beat me to Victor Davis Hanson, so I will spare you any summary of the work of America's most nauseating public intellectual. But I had to take issue with the above editorial. There is a consistent 180 degree difference in what Hanson is trying to say with the literary/historical allusions he employs to say it.

1) Title of article: Every Man a King. It's the borrowed slogan of America's most famous socialist tyrant. Who notably espoused an economic philosophy that runs directly counter to Hanson's neoliberal bent. Huey Long's vision never came to pass, but apparently the slogan can still be sloppily appropriated.

2) And then the cryptic assertion that thanks to widespread telecommunications technology, we now have access to L'Inferno. Are people using their phones to get familiar with medieval epic poetry? Or is access to this material only possible because of some new techno-breakthrough? Or maybe Hanson is suggesting that in spite of Lyndon Johnson's program of Civil Rights legislation, we can now take remote teleconference tours of our incipient eternal damnation?

3) Finally, Hanson pins his dismissal of the "archaic" notion of measuring wealth numerically by claiming that we live in a "brave new world." You see this Aldous Huxley reference all over the place. Usually the writer is only trying to vaguely suggest that things are different than the way they used to be. But the title was meant to be ironic, because the novel is about a hellish dystopia. The "brave new world" got to be that way because of the misuse of technology. The irony of which is lost on Hanson, who wants to celebrate how gadgetry can rid the world of social ills.

Ascendant Trolley

from Slate

Why is the trolley ascendant as the monorail declines?

This article compares the relative merits of trolleys and monorails. The key difference between these two modes of transport is that the monorail whizzes past you in the sky while the trolley rumbles alongside you, earthbound and familiar.

But when Tom Vanderbilt notes that the ground-based system is winning more approval than the sky-based one, he refers to the trolley as "ascendant." This spatial metaphor could mean that rather than gaining more popularity, there has instead been a trend of trolleys blasting off into the heavens, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Streetcars also ascend, on page 2.

But what is a flying trolley, if not a monorail? And isn't a declining monorail a subway?