AdamSmith

P.S. Interesting piece on Macaulay (in -- tellingly? -- The Weekly Standard). http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Lord-Thomas-Babington-Macaulay

Vehement resistance to change of any kind.

Feature on Perelman's cartoons, which I had not known about. Scroll down past the material on J.H. Donahey, then click the page images to enlarge to readable size: http://jeffoverturf.blogspot.com/2010/06/nemo-6-jh-donahey-and-early-sj-perelman.html

R.I.P.

Well, you're the one with the dirty pictures.

This reeks of entrapment.

"...that certain air of savior faire In the merry old land of Oz!" Probably my favorite line from the whole thing.

Yes.

So humor writer Richard Armour (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Armour) in either his book English Lit Relit or The Academic Bestiary, can't recall which, has a passage that goes somewhat like this (reconstructing from memory): "...Of course the struggling young academic's teaching burden will necessarily include trying to catch out those students who think they can get away with turning in others' writing and calling it their own. "So, for example, the history lecturer can expect to come across a passage in a student essay that sounds possibly like something vaguely recalled from somewhere in Gibbon. After a weekend of combing through dusty pages, the suspect material is finally located, deep in the fourth volume of Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James the Second. "It is worth all the trouble, not to mention one of the peculiar rewards of the profession, to be able then to write on the hapless student's paper, 'This was clearly lifted wholesale from Macaulay, History IV. Should you wish to plagiarize in future, I suggest you utilize a more obscure source.'"

One begins to ponder whether the bottomless barrage of beguiling moppets adorning your posts comes from some private stock that we, or the authorities, really might should know more about. Or not.

Hah! Great. Necessary, I can see. Rundown of some of that plagiarism detection software: http://elearningindustry.com/top-10-free-plagiarism-detection-tools-for-teachers When I needed to turn out a quick and dirty article recently, I tried a somewhat similar approach to Sinister Buttocks. I patched together a draft blatantly lifted from several sources on the topic, then ran it back and forth through several online translation engines. Say, from English to French to German to Cape Verdean to etc. etc. Changing from one translation engine to another each time. Then of course finally back into English. Naturally the end result required some manual fixing of nonsense that had gotten in. But that was a lot easier than an honest week's work writing an original piece from scratch.

I just about posted that grocer line myself!

The Paris Review interview: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4536/the-art-of-fiction-no-31-s-j-perelman

"Dental or Mental, I Say It's Spinach" About a visit to the dentist: http://madmadrileno.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/dental-or-mental-i-say-its-spinach-s-j-perelman/

In another essay S.J. sends up some then-fashionable advice about child-rearing by first recounting it (can't recall the details right now) and then saying something like: After considering the situation, I decided my children could find their own way to Hell. P.S. Found it! S. J. Perelman, one of the great old New Yorker humorists, had the pleasure of reading [Diana] Vreeland's "Why Don't You" pieces when they were brand new. In April, 1938, he was moved to a rebuttal. A couple of choice slices: "If a perfectly strange lady came up to you on the street and demanded 'Why don't you travel with a little raspberry-colored cashmere blanket to throw over yourself in hotels and trains?' the chances are that you would turn on your heel with dignity and hit her with a bottle. Yet that is exactly what has been happening for the past twenty months in the pages of a little raspberry-colored magazine called Harper's Bazaar. "The first time I noticed this 'Why Don't You?' department was a year ago last August while hungrily devouring news of the midsummer Paris openings. Without any preamble came the stinging query 'Why don't you rinse your blond child's hair in dead champagne, as they do in France? Or pat her face gently with cream before she goes to bed, as they do in England?' After a quick look into the nursery I decided to let my blond child go to hell her own way, as they do in America." Just one more: "'Why don't you try the effect of diamond roses and ribbons flat on your head, as Garbo wears them when she says goodbye to Armand in their country retreat?' asked Miss Sly Boots in a low, thrilling voice." Perelman describes how he took up this suggestion; it ended badly. http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/why-dont-you-by-diana-vreeland/

BEAUTY AND THE BEE S.J. Perelman It is always something of a shock to approach a newsstand which handles trade publications and find the Corset and Underwear Review displayed next to the American Bee Journal. However, newsstands make strange bedfellows, as anyone who has ever slept with a news- stand can testify, and if you think about it at all (instead of sitting there in a torpor with your mouth half-open) you'd see this proximity is not only alphabetical. Both the Corset and Underwear Review and the American Bee Journal arc concerned with honeys; although I am beast enough to prefer a photograph of a succulent nymph in satin Lastex Girdleiere with Thrill Plus Bra to the most dramatic snapshot of an apiary, each has its place in my scheme. The Corset and Underwear Review, which originates at the Haire Publishing Company, 1170 Broadway, New York City, is a magazine for jobbers. Whatever else a corset jobber is, he is certainly nobody's fool. The first seventy pages of the magazine comprise an album of superbly formed models posed in various attitudes of sweet surrender and sheathed in cunning artifices of whalebone, steel, and webbing. Some indication of what Milady uses to give herself a piquant front elevation may be had from the following list of goodies displayed at the Hotel McAlpin Corset Show, reported by the March, 1935, Corset and Underwear Review: "Flashes and Filmys, Speedies and Flexees, Sensations and Thrills, Snugfits and Even-Puls, Rite-Flex and Free-Flex, Smooth- ies and Silk-Skins, Imps and Teens, La Triques and Waiki- kis, Sis and Modern Miss, Sta-Downs and Props, Over- Tures and Reflections, Lilys and Irenes, Willo-th-wisps and Willoways, Miss Smartie and MisSimplicity, Princess Youth and Princess Chic, Miss Today and Soiree, Kor- dettes and Francettes, Paristyles and Rengo Belts, Vas- sarettes and Foundettes, Fans and Fade Aways, Beau Sveltes and Beau Formas, Madame Adrienne and Miss Typist, Stout-eze and Laceze, Symphony and Rhapsody, Naturade and Her Secret, Rollees and Twin Tops, Charma and V-Ette, La Camille and La Tec/ My neck, ordinarily an alabaster column, began to turn a dull red as I forged through the pages of the Corset and Underwear Review into the section called "Buyer News/' Who but Sir John Suckling could have achieved the leering sensuality of a poem by Mrs. Adelle Mahone, San Francisco representative of the Hollywood-Maxwell Company, whom the magazine dubs "The Brassiere Bard of the Bay District"? Out-of-town buyers!— during your stay At the McAlpin, see our new display. There are bras for the young, support for the old, Up here for the shy, down to there for the bold. We'll have lace and nets and fabrics such as Sturdy broadcloths and satins luscious. We'll gladly help your profits transform If you'll come up to our room and watch us perform. Our new numbers are right from the Coast: Snappy and smart, wait!— we must not boast— We'll just urge you to come and solicit your smiles, So drop in and order your Hollywood styles. One leaves the lacy chinoiseries of the Corset and Un< derweai Review with reluctance and turns to the bucolic American Bee Journal, published at Hamilton, Illinois, by C. P. Dadant. Here Sex is whittled down to a mere nub- bin; everything is as clean as a whistle and as dull as a hoe. The bee is the petit bourgeois of the insect world, and his keeper is a self-sufficient stooge who needs and will get no introduction to you. The pages of the American Bee Journal are studded with cocky little essays like "Need of Better Methods of Controlling American Foulbrood" and "The Swarming Season in Manitoba." It is only in "The Editor's Answers, a query column conducted by Mr. Dadant, that Mr. Average Beekeeper removes his mask and permits us to peep at the warm, vibrant human be- neath. The plight of the reader who signs himself "Illi- nois" (Fve seen that name somewhere) is typical: I would like to know the easiest way to get a swarm of bees which are lodged in between the walls of a house. The walls are of brick and they are in the dead-air space. They have been there for about three years. I would like to know method to use to get the bees, not concerned about the honey. The editor dismisses the question with some claptrap about a "bee smoker" which is too ridiculous to repeat. The best bet I see for "Illinois" is to play upon the weak- ness of all bees. Take a small boy smeared with honey and lower him between the walls. The bees will fasten themselves to him by the hundreds and can be scraped off when he is pulled up, after which the boy can be thrown away. If no small boy smeared with honey can be found, it may be necessary to take an ordinary small boy and smear him, which should be a pleasure. From the Blue Grass comes an even more perplexed letter: I have been ordering a few queens every year and they are always sent as first-class mail and are thrown off the fast trains that pass here at a speed of 60 miles an hour. Do you think it does the queens any harm by throwing them off these fast trains? You know they get an awful jolt when they hit the ground. Some of these queens are very slow about doing any- thing after they are put in the hive.— Kentucky. I have no desire to poach on George Washington Cable's domain, but if that isn't the furthest North in Southern gallantry known to man, I'll eat his collected works in Macy's window at high noon. It will interest every lover of chivalry to know that since the above letter was published, queen bees in the Blue Grass have been treated with new consideration by railroad officials. A Turkey-red carpet similar to that used by the Twentieth Century Limited is now unrolled as the train stops, and each queen, blushing to the very roots of her antennae, is escorted to her hive by a uniformed porter. The rousing strains of the Cakewalk, the comical antics of the darkies, the hiss of fried chicken sputtering in the pan, all com- bine to make the scene unforgettable. But the predicament of both 'Illinois" and "Ken- tucky" pale into insignificance beside the problem pre- sented by another reader: I have been asked to "talk on bees" at a nearby church some evening in the fall. Though I have kept bees for ten years, I am "scared stiff" because not a man in the audience knows a thing about bees and I am afraid of being too technical. I plan to take along specimens of queen, drone and worker, also a glass observatory hive with bees, smoker and tools, an extra hive, and possibly some queen cell cups, etc. Could you suggest any manipulating that might be done for the "edification of the audience"? I've seen pictures of stunts that have been worked, like making a beard of bees; and I've heard of throwing the bees out in a ball only to have them return to the hive without bothering anyone. But, I don't know how these stunts are done, nor do I know of any that ] could do with safety. ( I don't mind getting a sting or two my self, but I don't want anyone in the audience to get stung, or 1 might lose my audience.) I've only opened hives a few times at night, but never liked the job as the bees seem to fly up into the light and sting very readily. That makes me wonder whether any manipulating can be done in a room at night. How long before the affair would I need to have the bees in the room to have them settle down to the hive?— New York. The only thing wrong with "New York" is that he just doesn't like bees. In one of those unbuttoned moods everybody has, a little giddy with cocoa and crullers, he allowed himself to be cajoled by the vestrymen, and now, face to face with his ordeal, he is sick with loathing for bees and vestrymen alike. There is one solution, however, and that is for "New York" to wrap himself tightly in muslin the night of the lecture and stay in bed with his hat on. If the vestrymen come for him, let him throw the bees out in a ball. To hell with whether they return or not, and that goes for the vestrymen, too. It certainly goes for me. If I ever see the postman trudging toward my house with a copy of the American Bee Journal, Fm going to lodge myself in the dead-air space between the walls and no amount of small boys smeared with honey will ever get me out. And you be careful, American Bee Journal— I bite. http://archive.org/stream/bestofsjperelma00pere/bestofsjperelma00pere_djvu.txt

In a 1963 Paris Review interview, S. J. Perelman declared that the “comic writer is a cat on a hot tin roof. His invitation to perform is liable to wear out at any moment; he must quickly and constantly amuse in a short span, and the first smothered yawn is a signal to get lost.” Influenced not only by noted humorists Ring Lardner and Robert Benchley but also by the novelist James Joyce, Perelman easily surpassed his own definition by matching an erudite wit with allusions to Greek and Roman antiquity, pulp novelists, show-biz esoterica, and other arcana. Contributing nearly three hundred pieces to the magazine between 1930 and 1979, he also spent several years in Hollywood writing gags for the Marx Brothers (he co-wrote “Monkey Business” and “Horse Feathers”). After Perelman’s death, William Shawn wrote of his chief humorist: “Along with being funny, his allusions and wordplay could be as recondite as Joyce’s, Pound’s, or Nabokov’s. The English language was his element: he dwelled in it, was nourished by it, loved it—revelled in it…. When people suggested that he might have a higher calling than humor, he sensibly paid no attention to them.” Perelman often got inspiration for his casuals from news items or magazine pieces. In 1955, he read an article in the Times about Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s father having his laundry sent to Paris. This intrigued him, and he wrote a satirical piece, “No Starch In The Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait,” consisting of a series of fictional letters between an angry Pandit Motilal Nehru and a bemused Parisian launderer: Paris July 18, 1903 Pandit Motilal Nehru Allahabad, U.P., India DEAR PANDIT MOTILAL: I am desolated beyond words at the pique I sense between the lines in your recent letter, and I affirm to you on my wife’s honor that in the six generations the family has conducted this business, yours is the first complaint we have ever received… Only yesterday, Marcel Proust, an author you will hear more of one of these days, called at our établissement (establishment) to felicitate us in person. The work we do for him is peculiarly exacting; due to his penchant for making notes on his cuffs, we must observe the greatest discretion in selecting which to launder. In fine, our function is as much editorial as sanitary, and he stated unreservedly that he holds our literary judgment in the highest esteem…. Yours cordially, OCTAVE-HIPPOLYTE PLEURNICHE Allahabad, U.P., September 11, 1903 DEAR M. PLEURNICHE: Spare me, I pray, your turgid rhetoric and bootlicking protestations, and be equally sparing of the bleach you use on my shirts. After a single baptism in your vats, my sky-blue jibbahs faded to a ghastly greenish-white and the fabric evaporates under one’s touch…. Five or six days ago, a verminous individual named Champignon arrived here from Pondichéry, asserting that he was your nephew, delegated by you to expedite my household laundry problems. The blend of unction and cheek he displayed, reminiscent of a process server, should have warned me to beware, but, tenderhearted that I am, I obeyed our Brahmin laws of hospitality and permitted him to remain the night. Needless to say, he distinguished himself. After a show of gluttony to dismay Falstaff, he proceeded to regale the dinner table with a disquisition on the art of love, bolstering it with quotations from the Kamasutra so coarse that one of the ladies present fainted dead away…. He was gone before daylight, accompanied by a Jaipur enamel necklace of incalculable value and all our spoons…. Your well-wisher, PANDIT MOTILAL NEHRU http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/eighty-five-from-the-archive-s-j-perelman

So don't blame me -- this was CNN's headline! Why the Earth is farting By Alan Weisman updated 7:58 AM EDT, Tue August 12, 2014 A crater in the Yamal Peninsula, in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia. STORY HIGHLIGHTS Recently, three mysterious craters were discovered in the Siberian permafrost Alan Weisman: Hot summers caused Earth to spew methane, resulting in explosions He says airborne methane is more potent in producing greenhouse effect Weisman: Such stunning global flatulence is deadly if we don't embrace green energy Editor's note: Alan Weisman is the author of "Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?" (Little, Brown and Co). He is also the author of "The World Without Us," a 2007 New York Times and international best-seller translated into 34 languages. (CNN) -- Every day, you have a close personal encounter with methane, a key ingredient of something we don't usually mention in polite company: farts. Perhaps that's why methane is also called "natural gas." Unfortunately, neither propriety nor intestinal discipline can suppress its unpleasantness lately, because now not just us, but the Earth itself is farting. Recently, three new craters, one of which measured approximately 100 feet wide and over 200 feet deep, were discovered in the Siberian permafrost. The explanation for them is even more alarming than asteroid strikes: Apparently, after two consecutive summers averaging 5 degrees Celsius hotter than normal, frozen methane is not merely thawing, it's exploding. Scientists fear that, like chronic bad digestion, this phenomenon could be ongoing. Methane in the air surrounding these craters already measures 53,000 times the normal concentration. Alan Weisman Then, just a week into a research trip, a team from Stockholm University found "vast methane plumes" shooting from the sea floor off the Siberian coast. Columns of gas bubbles, they reported, were surfacing around their icebreaker in waters saturated with 10 to 50 times more methane than usual. This was the marine equivalent of melting permafrost, the undoing of frozen crystals called methane hydrates, locked solid for millennia by the pressure and temperature of deep oceans. The U.S. Office of Naval Research calculates that methane hydrates hold trillions of tons of hydrocarbons, from two to 10 times the amount as all conventional deposits of fossil fuels, but they're probably too costly or unsafe to harvest. Now, as ocean temperatures rise, they've begun collapsing, spewing as much gas skyward as the thawing tundra. Mysterious crater baffles scientists Airborne methane produces 86 times the heat-trapping greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Although CO2 remains in the atmosphere far longer, after 100 years methane is still 30 times more potent. With sea level increases from 3 to 6 feet already predicted by the century's end, such stunning global flatulence isn't merely embarrassing, but devastating for civilization. So what do we do? First, we recognize that the reason this is happening involves a misleading term: positive feedback loop. It's misleading because for us there's nothing positive about it. It means that as temperatures rise, warming land and seas fart (belch, if you prefer) more methane -- which then warms things further, so dangerous eruptions accelerate. Feeding back on itself, warming begets more warming. Second, we admit that this loop began with us. By now, the link between fuel that jet-propels our industrialized civilization and excess CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is challenged only by those who profit obscenely from it. Third, we stop compounding the problem by ceasing to pretend that energy derived by shattering our bedrock to squeeze even more natural gas from it is somehow "clean." Not only does burning methane crank planetary heat higher, but fracking wells also inevitably leak. At least 2% of their methane output, the EPA conservatively estimates, seeps into the atmosphere, thickening the gas layer that's already turning Earth into a hothouse. Nor will the other 98% go to heat our homes. Enormous pipelines are now proposed to transport fracked methane through New England's conservation lands and orchards, through northern Minnesota's prime tourism and wild rice lake districts, and across the Ogallala Aquifer-fed farms of our nation's heartland. Each will terminate at a port, where its gas will be exported, not used domestically. What will remain is scarred land and the methane that escapes or explodes (most recently on June 26, in East Bernard, Texas, into 150-foot flames). Such pipelines will be subsidized by rate-payers, not by vastly wealthy corporations that own them -- unless we refuse to let them be built, and instead commit our energy funding henceforth to truly cleaner options, like wind and solar. The last time there was this much atmospheric CO2 was 3 million years ago, when seas were 80 to 100 feet higher. Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric methane has more than doubled, and the amount now gushing from the seas alone is 34 times what we thought just seven years ago. Until we stop putting more carbon dioxide and methane overhead, prepare for more rude farts to foul your air, and our future. With coastal cities, fertile deltas and much of the world's rice crops threatened by floods or salination from encroaching seas -- and with grain harvests predicted to fall 10% for each added 1 degree C of average temperature -- passing greenhouse gases isn't merely vulgar -- it's deadly. http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/12/opinion/weisman-craters-methane/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Making assumptions about your priapic status is above my pay grade.

If you were me (all right, I ), I would suspect you of having had a liquid lunch today.

Depends on the two objects' relative diameters, obviously.

Good luck!

The annual Perseid meteor shower, the year's best other than the comparably rich and bright Geminid shower every December, peaks tonight. The radiant of the Perseid Meteor Shower is high in the sky by 11 p.m. for observers at mid-northern latitudes. Sky & Telescope diagram. Sky & Telescope magazine's coverage: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/observing-news/perseid-meteors-vs-moon-08052014/

Instead of the dreamlike vision you recount here, what I had recalled was that I -- not TY -- nominated you, then you self-deprecatingly recused yourself. On checking the record, I find this: If you believe that squares with your summary above, well...

Also, hours spent logged in has no necessary correlation to participation. As Oz noted yesterday, with the proper browser settings it is possible to remain logged in all the time, even when your browser is closed and your computer is off.