Archive for 25th April 2007
From Moonbattery (the story’s pretty funny too):
Moonbats oppose genetically engineered crops, possibly because the crops alleviate hunger in the Third World, thus depriving children in quaint multicultural villages of their picturesque potbellies.
and flour, and butter, and eggs, and powdered sugar . . . so why aren’t I making these?
Lemon Bars
1 c. butter
2 c. flour
1/2 c. powdered sugar
4 beaten eggs
2 c. sugar
4 tablespoons flour
1/4 c. lemon juice
1 T. finely grated lemon peel
sifted confectioners’ sugar
Preheat oven to 325.
Blend butter, 2 cups flour and 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar. Pat into ungreased 13×9x2-inch pan. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes.
Blend together eggs, sugar, 4 tablespoons flour, lemon juice, and lemon peel. Pour over first layer. Return to oven and bake for 20 minutes. Loosen around edges, cut into bars and sift confectioners’ sugar over the top while warm.
No, not the show. Ninety years ago today, the First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald, was born in Newport News, Virginia. From the wikipedia entry:
Ella Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as Lady Ella and the First Lady of Song, is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th Century.[1]
With a vocal range spanning three octaves, she was noted for her purity of tone, near faultless phrasing and intonation, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. She is widely considered to have been one of the supreme interpreters of the Great American Songbook.
Of her, people said:
“Man, woman or child, Ella is the greatest of them all.” - Bing Crosby
“I call her the High Priestess of Song.” - Mel Torme
“I didn’t realize our songs were so good until Ella sang them.” - Ira Gershwin
“She had a vocal range so wide you needed an elevator to go from the top to the bottom. There’s nobody to take her place.” - David Brinkley
“Her artistry brings to mind the words of the maestro, Mr. Toscanini, who said concerning singers, ‘Either you’re a good musician or you’re not.’ In terms of musicianship, Ella Fitzgerald was beyond category.” - Duke Ellington
“Play an Ella ballad with a cat in the room, and the animal will invariably go up to the speaker, lie down and purr.” - Geoffrey Fidelman (author of the Ella Fitzgerald biography, First Lady of Song)
Her official site is here. Her wikipedia entry is here. And here she is in 1979 singing St. Louis Blues:
And there’s a compendium of Ella (and similar) clips on YouTube.
I don’t know how I missed this piece about “intellectual” gobbledygook, but this is a gem–even for Jonah Goldberg. There are so many money quotes here, I don’t know where to start:
Who’s Homi Bhabha? Where’ve you been, buddy? Homi’s one of the hottest “post-colonial theorists” in the world — which is not unlike saying “the best Octoberfest in Orlando.”
Or:
Denis Dutton, the editor who launched the bad writing contest (and who launched the incalculably valuable site Arts & Letters Daily), summed it up nicely: “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.”
Or:
Today, the situation is reversed. Here in America — the very place the Homi Bhabhas and Judith Butlers denounce as “hegemonic” whatchamacallits and “enunciatory” thingamajigs — there are no totalitarian crimes. They do not exist. America is a lovely place. We are not “transferring populations” or anything of the sort.
In Orwell’s day, the fog of jargon was a smoke screen to conceal real horrors; today the jargon is just so much smoke, to hide the fact that there’s no fire. Read pretty much anything by Cornel West and you’ll find all sorts of euphemisms brimming with racial or anti-capitalist sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Or:
Today’s intellectual elite — the stars of Harvard and Berkeley — speak in such gibberish precisely because if they spoke plainly, clearing the smoke from their ideas, we’d learn that their views cover the spectrum from boringly unoriginal to sand-poundingly stupid.
Dialectology has never been my thing, really, though I had to take courses that included it, and it’s interesting. Many people are surprised to discover that the United Kingdom has a great deal more dialectical variation than the United States, and that’s not counting immigrant populations. Here is a cool site. You can click on any of the “people” on the UK map and hear them speak.
The Carnival of Education is posted.
The first earth-like planet has been discovered. Hat tip to Ace.
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