Category: Uncategorized

The scene where the dwarves sing the Roaring Pines number is one of the great dramatic musical bits in non-musical movies.

It would be a great musical bit among musical movies.

The movie is full of weird dramatic contrasts. It’s too long, and yet there are moments of brilliance in there. It relies too much on special effects, and yet they’re great.

LC is down on my home wifi but not elsewhere. I don’t know why.

Doing debugging things.

In the Army an E-5 is a Sergeant. An E-6 is a Staff Sergeant, and an E-7 is a Sergeant First Class. All may be referred to as Sergeant ****.

“Sergeant Smith, where’s the whatever?”

That’s a perfectly acceptable polite form of address for SGT Smith, SSG Smith, and SFC Smith.

In the Marine Corps, it’s different. One calls the NCO by their specific rank.

“Segreant Smith, where’s the whatever?”

“Staff Sergeant Smith, where’s the gadget?”

“Gunnery Sergeant Smith, what’s the contraption?”

You pick the appropriate one. This is cultural.

The bounds of these cultures are well defined. The Army does is one way, the Marines do it another, etc. Joint forces often specify this in formal doctrines of address, though arguments ensue. Off duty servicemembers fight about this a lot. But off-duty fights are, of course, off duty and not professional anymore.

There is absolutely no chance of a formal doctrine of address in the civilian world such as what exists in the military. There are merely conventions, and these are subgroups of cultue.

Right now, the president-elect’s wife has a PhD. There’s a brewing culture clash over the appropriate form of address for her: is she Dr. Biden or Mrs. Biden? (In the US, we put the period after Dr. and Mrs., in the UK and most other commonwealth countries, they don’t)

The WSJ published an op-ed to the effect that only MDs should be addressed as Dr. Twitter reacted Twitteresque. No one impressed me.

WSJ has consistently reserved the address Dr. for medical doctors, so they take refuge in that, but the article is pretty sanctimonious, bordering on trolling. Joseph Epstein was clearly instigating. But the NYT and others wasted no time in rising to the bait. Obscenity and accusations of sexism followed like light bulbs coming on after a switch is flicked.

Two cultures are colliding, and the bounds of these cultures are nebulous. People exist in both, and the bounds of them are not well limited. My old rule, call people what they want to avoid a fight, is merely my rule. Should the WSJ writers be impelled to alter their terms of address in the WSJ? Should the First Lady accept not being called her preferred term of address?

Again, I go back to the military. You call a Marine E-6 Sergeant ****, and you’re going to get an earful. But when we’re sitting around in our hootch, trying to figure out who to go to to get something resolved, we fell back on traditional modes of expression if that Marine wasn’t there.

I don’t think anyone has any moral high ground. Bush got called a terrorist. Obama got called a terrorist. Trump got called literally Hitler (which was weird because he’d be, like, a hundred and thirty something). No one’s given the other side enough respect to demand it in turn.

Furthermore, there’s an odd bit of cultural imperialism at play. People are demanding others do things their way. Now the First Lady is clearly part of one culture, and she’d gone on the record as establishing her preference in address. But she’s also part of American Culture, and there isn’t one American Culture. There’s a ton of them. Most are arguing with each other. What’s weird is that the anti-imperialists, generally the left and Democrats, are demanding that others adopt their culture and their modes of address. They have anointed themselves the correct culture, and fight to compel others to adopt their ways. You can follow the Twitter threads if you want; they’re basically codified in the NYT (though the more overt obscenity and threats of violence are not included).

The right, WSJ, and Republicans, which complained bitterly and relentlessly about the lack of respect for Trump, are indulging immediately in the same. Now there’s a little less hypocrisy in this side as both sides have been utterly vile to each other for years. But Epstein starting picking before Biden even got inaugurated. Of course, this was an opportunity for WSJ to play to its base (stick it to the libs!) even while criticize the Biden administration for playing to its base. That’s pretty stark hypocrisy too.

The way I see it, both sides are quarreling over how many imaginary jerk-points the other side has.

The Republicans say, “You have twenty jerk-points and we only have ten, so we’re better!”

The Democrats rebut, “No, no. We have twenty, but you have fifty! We’re better.”

I don’t care. You’re both jerks.

The imperialism thing is odd. It makes the Democrats seem like strangers in their own land.

I am certainly a stranger in my own land. I don’t get this place.

Stay safe, everyone. We’re in September, 1918. Some safety is coming, and we’ll have to live with each other in the morning.

So I think it would be Morgoth.

Buy the rumor, sell the news?

Quite possibly.

For a few weeks, there’s been a significant rally in US equities and many international markets. One ostensible cause was the imminence of a vaccine for Covid. Now the vaccine is here and the market is going down. Why?

An old truism is buy the rumor, sell the news.

News rarely lives up to the hype. A successful vaccine probably isn’t going to be the light-switch for Covid people are making it out to be. Problems are arising, and while those problems look manageable, or at least expected, they’re nontrivial. So the rally, which may have been supported by vaccine-optimism, is now retreating a bit in the face of vaccine-reality.

Rallies objectively happen. Motivations are speculation. We don’t know if the rally was vaccine driven. There are millions of people in the US equity market, so assuming they’ve all got the same motivation is a bit unreasonable. That some people bought equities due to vaccine-optimism is near certain. That the rally was driven primarily by vaccine-optimism is much more debatable, and that vaccine-optimism looks the same to all people is wrong as certainly as that it drove some action at all.

Jan 1 isn’t actually a hard Brexit deadline. It can be postponed.

The consequences of blowing past Jan 1st are that there would be trade disruptions. Until a deal is reached. Or another postponement. Or whatever.

I’m not a country music fan, so I never really knew about Charlie Pride. He seemed like a good dude.

I really like that spur of mountains that shoots north from Quandry towards Frisco. As I’m heading eastbound on 70 past Copper, the ridge looks like a wall.

The problem with conte is you need significantly more stuff to draw with it, at least if you want to take advantage of the advantages.

Conte blends really well. You can get gradations in color that are near impossible with charcoal or pencil. To do that, you need at least one blending thing, two is better: one for putting on and one for taking off, as well as some kind of cloth, possibly another cloth if you don’t want it on your fingers, something to sharpen your blenders, and if you need different tips, you need different blenders. You run into carrying a small kit. This utterly neglects erasing.

My pencil drawing kit is a mech. pencil, eraser, and paper. Sometimes I’ll throw a 6B graphite stick in a case, but that’s it.