Certainly the children have seen them in quiet places where the moss grows green

[sovay]

Just as derspatchel and I decide to leave the kitchen table to watch a movie, Autolycus leaps onto my lap and falls asleep within five seconds. He is out cold, a warm trusting weight, flickering his ears and paws a little in his dreams. Ladies and gentlemen, the cat.

Rob: "M'SIEU LE BUTT! THE BUTT ABIDES! IN HIS LAP IN SOMERVILLE, SWEET AUTOLYCUS LIES DREAMING. SNUFFLE SNUFFLE SNORT!"

(We get punchy when the cat gets cute.)

1. Courtesy of gaudior: I do not know the origins of the "dick: out" meme, but I approve mightily of this ancient Roman variation.

2. I've been seeing this photo going around on social media: a menorah against the swastika, 1931. I have also been seeing this article: "A People's History of the Third Reich." I don't think it misses the point to consider the ways in which Trump and his supporters behave like the kind of authoritarians we have seen before, but I agree that the important question is then: so what are you going to do about it?

3. Since it is still the time of year at which people have conversations about "Baby, It's Cold Outside": I felt a lot less weird about the song knowing that Frank Loesser wrote it to be performed by himself and his wife Lynn Garland as a party-closer, signaling to their guests that it was time to gather their coats and go home. Then I felt weird again learning that Garland was furious with Loesser for selling the song to MGM, because it was their duet and their in-joke and the context was everything. Indeed.

4. The Brattle Theatre has just announced an upcoming series on the occult in cinema. Yes, please, awesome. Of the movies I have never seen/in a theater, I am definitely planning on Night of the Demon (1957), The Devil Rides Out (1968), and The Holy Mountain (1973), but I would love to see The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) again and I think it would be really instructive to rewatch The Devils (1971) and A Field in England (2013) in close proximity. handful_ofdust, you want to visit Boston for a weekend?

5. I think Tablet just built a golem: "We Built a Bot That Trolls Twitter's Worst Anti-Semitic Trolls."

Last night YouTube recommended me a video entitled "Intelligent People Have Fewer Friends, Here's Why . . ." I didn't watch it. I assume the answer is "comma splices."

Comments

[sovay]

Re: #2 -- is it my imagination, or are Hannukah posts this year a lot more focussed on the fact that it's a "they tried to destroy us and failed" holiday?

I do not think it's your imagination. ("They tried to kill us; we won; let's eat!") Hanukkah until the twentieth century was a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish calendar; I believe it gained its recent significance at least in North America not just from the proximity/alternative to Christmas, but because it is explicitly a story of resistance and cultural survival. What little I know of the actual history of the Maccabean Revolt is more complicated than oppression and miracles, but it doesn't matter because the core of the story is the light speaking back to the darkness, saying you can kill us, outlaw us, destroy our holy places, but we're still here, so fuck those guys and let's fry something.

Re: #3 -- my take on "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is that the situation in the song is consensual (and also that it may actually be a post-coital debate about whether she can risk staying over, rather than fixing her hair and going home to throw the gossips off the trail), but that the society it comes from does cause date rape by requiring women to put up a token show of resistance, no matter how eager they really are.

Agreed: I don't believe the song is joking about date rape, I do think the cultural norms it came out of and summarizes are a huge problem. I also think it was kind of a dick move of Loesser's to sell the song knowing how his wife felt about it—I understand the impetus as an artist, because it was an instant hit and achieved the kind of lasting popularity and (for better or worse) cultural ubiquity that it would never have gotten anywhere near if he had just stuck to performing it with Garland at private parties, but I also understand her feeling betrayed. I've heard that he needed to replace a song in a hurry—"I'd Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China" had just been pulled from Neptune's Daughter (1948) for being too suggestive, although if that's true, I feel like the censors missed the point with its replacement—but even so.

Re:#3b (the importance of context) -- I nearly intervened yesterday in what looked at first like a hate crime against a wheelchair user, but after a couple of seconds observation, I think it was just two bros whose affectionate nicknames for each other were "Fucktard" and "Buddy." Hope I was right about that.

I have occasionally glanced off interactions like that and they are always weird. Sympathy.