Obscene shape

Children protected from sight of phallic object.

Thanx to The Agitator

Life imitates art

Jacques Berlinerblau writing about fewer Jews in Congress reminds me that most people don't know that there was an American political figure exactly as Jewish as Leopold Bloom: Barry Goldwater.

Thanx to Chronicle for the link.

Take them at their word

Geek Feminism links to a discussion of how John Cage tricked the experts into saying that "4'11"" "isn't music," thus expanding the definition of music at least as far as it should have been. In perhaps the most delayed example of treppenwitz in history, I suggest that the critics should have said, "Yes. This is music. And since it contains at most homeopathic quantities of what people value in music, it may be the worst music ever. Let's never listen to this asshole again."

Beyond Dilbert

Working with cats

Thanx to andrewducker

Nu?

Is "Why shouldn't a Jew answer a question with a question" a Zen cohen?

With friends like that...

The asshole formerly, and I guess again, known as Prince just loves Islam:

It's fun being in Islamic countries, to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that." But what about women who are unhappy about having to wearing burqas? "There are people who are unhappy with everything," he says shruggingly. "There's a dark side to everything."

Thanx to oursin

ETA: Prince doing Orientalism, like Satoshi Kanazawa discussing black women, has taken up a stupidity that was once purely a white privilege. I can think of better forms of progress.

Peter Falk (1929-2011)

But then Death turned around and said, "Just one more thing…"

Closely reasoned, but insufficient, adulation

Someone on Feministing wrote a review of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Talents, praising the book for many of its strengths and encouraging people to pick it up as both a story of family relations and "a must-read for feminist visionaries." Elsewhere, that review is excoriated for not "discussing, in depth, her contribution to feminism in general and black feminism specifically" not to mention class, gender, and sexuality (which the second writer certainly does). I conjecture that the original review would do a far better job of getting the book to people who would be entertained, instructed, and illuminated by it.

Thanx to Geek Feminism.

Evaluation

I forget whether it was the real Stanley Fish or one of the parodies who said that an artist is an instrument for generating critical writing that can be judged by the quality and quantity of the product, but it is not a bad metric.