According to this article in Slate, brain scientists have recently begun to study an emotion they call “elevation.” High-falutin’ rhetoric, like that associated with Barack Obama, can inspire it. The closing paragraphs point out that when seen in other people, elevation can look ridiculous or disgusting. Of course, the same is true of other emotions as well. But we need all of them, if not always in the ways we get them. So perhaps we need elevation too.
All posts by acilius
Relatively Obscure Emotional States
Posted by acilius on December 3, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/03/relatively-obscure-emotional-states/
Unlikely Comic Book Characters
Some time ago, LeFalcon posted a picture of a comic book cover featuring supervillain “Paste Pot Pete.” Unfortunately this image is no longer available. Here’s another:
Paste Pot Pete teams up with the Wizard
After the jump, some other, equally unlikely, comic book characters.
Posted by acilius on December 2, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/02/unlikely-comic-book-characters/
Ken Middleton, Master Ukuleleist
In the comments of my post that included some huge number of youtube performances of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” I included probably the best of all such performances, Ken Middleton’s ukulele version. To make up for that strange oversight, I add a few more samples of Middleton’s work.
Stompin’ at the Savoy, written by Edgar Sampson
The Scientist, by Coldplay
Posted by acilius on December 2, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/02/ken-middleton-master-ukuleleist/
The Nation, 8 December 2008
“The Fall Books Issue“- it seems a bit late this year… but worth the wait.
Torie Osborn wonders how California could have passed anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8. Her view is that No on 8 forces neglected Los Angeles County, despite decades of experience showing that antigay measures win or lose based on the margins in that county. She also has some harsh words for the Obama campaign for allowing voters to believe (mistakenly!) that Mr O backed Proposition 8.
Christine Smallwood reviews a new edition of George R. Stewart’s 1945 book Names on the Land. A collection of anecdotes about how various places in the USA got their names, this highly regarded work inspires Smallwood’s unreserved praise. She goes on at some length about Stewart’s other works, including environmental fiction like Earth Abides, “the first American postapocalyptic thriller,” and Ordeal by Hunger, a novelization of the Donner Party. She tells us that Names on the Land was Stewart’s own favorite of his books. It raises no less a question than “what is America?,” Smallwood says. And answers that question: “Not the leader of the Free World and not the scourge of the world, but a history of settlement.” This answer would hardly have been extraordinary in 1945. The book does sound interesting. The cover of the first edition illustrates Smallwood’s review, and is reproduced below.
Posted by acilius on December 1, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/01/the-nation-8-december-2008/
Chronicles, December 2008
Giotto painting reproduced on the cover of this issue
(image)
Three articles about Christmas in this issue of Chronicles. Editor Thomas Fleming, who I seem to recall occasionally describes himself as having been raised an atheist, then converted to arch-traditional Roman Catholicism, describes in the third person the attitudes of an unnamed man who was raised anatheist, then converted to arch-traditional Roman Catholicism. As a boy, this anonymous person disliked Christmas. The months-long buildup, the morning moments unwrapping toys that could never live up to the expectations that buildup engendered, the endless anticlimax of the day as of adult relatives hung on and bored him with their chatter. Far better Halloween, an ordinary day that ended with a burst of total anarchy. As he grew, he preferred the moral atmosphere of Halloween to that of Christmas. The Christians he knew pretended that death was nothing to be afraid of and embedded that pretense into the holiday, while Halloween began by taking the cold terror of death and everything touching death for granted. Evidently this preference remains with him in his religious phase, as the terror of death gives Easter its power.
Contributor Thomas Piatak defends Christmas, not against the severe theology of Fleming, but against opponents of public piety at Christmastime. Apparently it was Piatak who coined the phrase “The War Against Christmas.” While Fleming inveighs against a religious Christmas that soft-pedals or denies the hard truths of lifeand thus denatures Christianity, Piatak fears a secular Xmas that is “devoid of religious or cultural significance or indeed of beauty, with nothing left but multiculturalist pap and tawdry sentimentalism.” As examples of this creeping insipidity, Piatak cites a case in Columbus, Ohio in 2003, when the school district banned a performance of Handel’s Messiah unless equal time were given to “Frosty the Snowman” and “Jingle Bells.”
Columnist Aaron D. Wolf has little use for the idea of a secular “War Against Christmas,” though he does agree that such a thing exists. He tells us of wishing a store clerk “Merry Christmas.” “She looks directly at me, smiling, eyes narrowed, and nods. “Yes. Merry CHRISTMAS!”… It wasn’t a bright, elven (sic) “Yes! Merry Christmas!” She spoke with a knowing, in your face, liberal America air of defiance.” Later: “That Merry Christmas seemed more like a countercultural protest statement, that kind that says, yeah, you’re one of us, or yeah, I’m one of you. One of you… what? Believers in Christ Jesus? … Or perhaps it was one of you proud white Americans.” Wolf’s suspicion that many of those most exercised about the “War Against Christmas” are in fact not very much devoted to Christ at all, but are only interested in sticking it to educated secularists, gains verisimilitude from the high December sales of mugs bearing the slogan “Don’t be a Pinhead.”
Posted by acilius on December 1, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/12/01/chronicles-december-2008/
A Thanksgiving Song
Happy belated Thanksgiving and thanks to ukulelehunt for this song that proves the jumping flea’s ability to make any subject matter sound cheerful. The artist calls herself “Ukebucket.”
Posted by acilius on November 30, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/11/30/a-thanksgiving-song/
Funny Times, December 2008
I’ve never objected to corny jokes, and this issue includes quite a few. The corniest are to be found in Richard Lederer‘s “Blessed be the Children,” a collection drawn from his “Revenge of Anguished English” of startling things children have said about religious topics. Some of the funniest:
A teacher was explaining the story of Noah and his ark to her young students. She asked the class if they thought Noah did a lot of fishing during the Flood. “No,” said a bright boy, “he only had two worms.”
A woman was trying hard to get the catsup to come out of the jar. During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her four year old daughter to answer it. “It’s the minister, Mommy,” the child said to her mother. Then she added, “Mommy can’t come to the phone right now. She’s hitting the bottle.”
A friend of mine took her four year old daughter to a baptismal service at her church. Later that night, her daughter took all of her dolls into the bathtub with her and held her own “baptism.” As she dunked each doll under the water, she repeated, “Now I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and hold your nose.”
These may be true stories, they may not be. It scarcely matters. One case where it does make a difference is the first item on the list:
A little boy’s prayer: “Dear God, please take care of my daddy and my mommy and my sister and my brother and my doggy and me. Oh, and please take care of yourself, God. If anything happens to you, we’re gonnabe in big trouble.”
If you actually heard a little boy saying this prayer, it would be very funny. But it sounds so much like a joke a preacher would make up to open a sermon that the phoniness gets in the way of the laugh.
Jon Winokur’s “Curmudgeon” column has some good quotes on the topic of work. Robert Benchley: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to bedoing at the moment.” Benchley made this claim decades ago, but in the last 12 years the world’s bloggers have established the truth of it beyond doubt. Don Marquis: “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him ‘Whose?'” Well, ask away- I doubt you’ll get much of an answer. Robert Frost: “By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be the boss and work twelve hours a day.” Lane Kirkland: “If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”
Posted by acilius on November 27, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/11/27/funny-times-december-2008/
Convergence
Thanks to ukulelehunt for this video of “Hot for Words” on the origin of the word “ukulele.”
Posted by acilius on November 26, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/11/26/convergence/
Sad news for ViewMaster fans
Viewmaster
(image)
News in the latest email from Las Vegas’ 3D Stereo Store:
View-Master Closing:
On a sad note, Mattel/Fisher-Price has announced the permanent closing of the Custom/Commercial/Scenic View-Master division of View-Master. Scenic reels and the Classic Model L will cease to exist. All of the special special 3 Reel sets such as Old TIme Cars, and the on-location ones such as Grand Canyon will no longer be produced. No more commercial Reels either.The economic downturn and Mattel/Fisher-Price’s association with China has claimed another victim. And even though, at least, executive salaries and bonuses will be saved by pending layoffs in excess of a thousand U.S. workers, an era that lasted almost seven decades comes to an end.
Children’s titles produced with Wal-Mart’s approval are planned to be continued for the present.
What’s to be done? I don’t know. It sounds like a done deal.
Stereoscopy in general and Viewmaster in particular have a great deal to offer adults. To peer into the viewer and tease out 3D effects is a meditative exercise. Not only is it an extremely relaxing use of a few minutes, it also trains the eye to take a more attentive look at the world. Trade with China, disparity between workers’ wages and executive compensation, the recession, the power of Walmart, etc, all play into the decline of the medium, but the root cause is something deeper. The people in charge of corporations like Mattel just don’t believe that American adults are interested in sitting still and using their minds. They may be right. But if they are, it becomes a vicious circle. Loud entertainment systems that allow their users to be passive sell quite well, so capital devotes all its resources to promoting loud entertainment systems that allow their users to be passive. After a while, we as a society forget the use of quietness, the value of stillness, the importance of simplicity.
Posted by acilius on November 25, 2008
https://losthunderlads.com/2008/11/25/sad-news-for-viewmaster-fans/
Who writes this?
acilius
believer1
lefalcon
losthunderlads
vthunderlad
Panther Red 
