AdamSmith

If that headline didn't deter readers from clicking into this thread, this photo surely won't offend... Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The Washington Post) By Al Kamen Question No. 58 in the transition team vetting document for the Obama White House asks that applicants: "Please provide the URL address of any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e.g. Facebook, My Space, etc.)" Question No. 63 asks that applicants "please provide any other information ... that could ... be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect." For a while there this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama's immensely talented chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, might have been pondering how to address that question. That's when some interesting photos of a recent party he attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down -- along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot. Asked about the photos, Favreau, who was recently appointed director of speechwriting for the White House, declined comment. A transition official said that Favreau had "reached out to Senator Clinton to offer an apology." Favreau is not the first campaign aide whose online presence has proved awkward. Last March, John McCain aide Soren Dayton forwarded an anti-Obama YouTube video to his private Twitter feed linking Obama with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, leading to his suspension from the campaign. And in 2007, two bloggers hired by former North Carolina senator John Edwards stepped down after blog posts they had written before he hired them became a subject of controversy. Favreau's case seems unlikely to be so dire; Clinton senior adviser Philippe Reines cast the photos as evidence of increased bonhomie between the formerly rival camps. "Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon's obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application," he said in an e-mail. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail...e_question.html

What AdamSmith wants for Christmas, apart from more twinks... A way with words: Lexical wizard Henry Hitchings on the crazy history of our language 'Margarine' comes from the Persian word for pearl, Edmund Spenser coined 'blatant' and many of our naval terms come from the Dutch. By Suzi Feay It's rather nerve-racking, interviewing an acknowledged master of the English language. I tell Henry Hitchings that I feel as though I'll have to take extra care with my choice of words. "Don't," he says briskly, as he ushers me into his book-lined 13th-floor Bermondsey flat. Fortunately, his attitude to language is anything but stuffy, snobbish or prescriptive. His latest book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, has just won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35 (past winners include VS Naipaul, Angela Carter, David Hare and AL Kennedy). A strong shortlist included The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won this year's Man Booker prize, Ross Raisin's acclaimed novel, God's Own Country, and Adam Fould's book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word. However, Henry Sutton, this year's chair of judges, says that it was the only book to win "universal praise" from the judging panel. "It reminds us of just how important etymology is to understanding the history of a fractured world," he comments. Hitchings' focus is not just on the rarefied and literary, however. "I'm not saying I hang around on street corners talking to young people," he announces, "but I have noticed a lot of Romany words around these days. You hear a lot of young people saying they're going round to somebody's drum. Things like that I find quite intriguing. I don't know what the exact significance is, but I like the idea that your flat is a drum and that you roll around in it like a pea." London spreads out under the windows of Hitchings' drum; from St Paul's to the London Eye and Battersea power station. He points out a long brick wall, near the foot of his block, which is supposedly the last visible remnant of the Marshalsea prison. Given that Mr Dorrit's travails continue on BBC1, it seems appropriate to ask what Hitchings thinks of Dickens' use of language. "I think he's a wonderful writer at the level of the sentence," he enthuses, confessing that he finds the longer novels difficult to get through. "But at the micro level he is incredibly rewarding." It's the micro level that concerns Hitchings the most. Of contemporary authors, he singles out Edward St Aubyn and Alan Hollinghurst. "They're probably the two English novelists where I just feel that every single page of their books has an insight which is not only really trenchant, but which is expressed much better than one could ever express it oneself." In non-fiction he admires Robert Macfarlane, whose book The Wild Places was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize last year (when I was the chair of judges). "He's a very close friend of mine," confesses Hitchings, "but I particularly like the way he writes about things that are really quite banal, like stones, or the sky. I remember him once referring in conversation to a 'gin and tonic sky'. I'm not sure if I could spell out to you why that's so good, but I love it." So where did this fascination with words come from? Hitchings can remember his mother, a gifted linguist, teaching him the Greek alphabet in the bath when he was "probably about four". His father was a barrister, "someone who's quite particular about language being used accurately and with clarity. My parents didn't put me under pressure academically, but they were very keen to stimulate me. I'm an only child, and from quite an early age they treated me as an adult and had adult conversations with me." He picked up an interest in language "by osmosis". "Etymology was something that came from that; that idea that a large chunk of the English language comes from other places. Often in English we have several words for the same thing that come from different sources, each of which has a different set of associations. So you've got dead, which is a word of Germanic origin; you've got deceased, which is a word of Norman French origin, and you've got defunct, from Latin. You would use them in very different circumstances." You can see exactly the same pattern in shit, ordure and excrement. A stint reading English at Oxford led to a PhD on that ultimate words man, Samuel Johnson, at University College London. This fed directly into his first book, Dr Johnson's Dictionary, written for the dictionary's 250th anniversary in 2005. The Secret Life of Words is filled with fascinating nuggets. Everyone knows about Anglo-Saxon being overwritten with Norman French after the Conquest, but who knew about the superior Dutch seamanship that, in the 16th century, brought us skipper, boom, deck, sloop, reef and hull, not to mention landlubber and keelhaul? We all know about the Raj giving us pyjama and bungalow (which simply means "belonging to Bengal"), but what about shampoo, "the imperative (champo) of the Hindi champna, a verb that conveys the idea of kneading and pressing the body to releave fatigue and stimulate the circulation" . So that modish head massage your salon insists on inflicting isn't so newfangled after all. "The life of words is very interesting," he says. "I thought, almost everyone is interested in words, and yet we take them for granted. What I mean by 'secret'," he elaborates, "is that beneath the public use of words, there are all these submerged stories to do with where things come from, which are often very unexpected, and which may even cause one to rethink how one uses certain words." However, he cautions: "I don't think one should use words in the strict etymological sense, otherwise candidates would have to be dressed in white! You don't go around adhering to the root meaning like that, but I think a sensitivity to where words come from makes one more selective about which words one uses." Despair at the erosion of the English language is not a new phenomenon, as he demonstrates time and again in the book. "Purism is a bit of a nonsense because so much of the language one uses was borrowed once, and it always seems to me that when people argue about usage, they're really arguing about something bigger: standards, morals. People talk about the 'decline of the English language' – and it's not in decline. People have been exercised about these issues for as long as we have written records. You only have to look at the antipathy there was in Shakespeare's era to words coming in from the Spanish, Italian, French and Latin. The hostility to French words is almost a given in the English language!" Borrowings are not necessarily straightforward like-for-like switches either. He points out that, though we get bra from the French brassière, "in fact the French use soutien-gorge, and a brassière is a life-jacket." Shakespeare was another Bermondsey/ Borough resident. He gets a rather brief mention in The Secret Life of Words, and I ask why. Surely he's the great word-mint of the English language? "No. No," Hitchings demurs. "It's very often exaggerated. There's no doubt that a lot of Shakespearean phrases have entered the common currency of speech, as have phrases from the King James Bible, and Shakespeare does coin words, but I think he was probably more of a populariser of things that were already there. It's not a particularly useful way to think about Shakespeare, or about English, to say he is the architect of modern English." There's a distinction to be drawn, he points out, between your active vocabulary (the words you actually use) and your passive vocabulary (the words you recognise). "'Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 50,000 words' seems to me to be a fatuous statement, and it doesn't translate into 'Shakespeare is responsible for 50,000 words', or anything like that. The thing about being a playwright is, you're displaying more of your vocabulary in order to be novel. The other thing is, our impression of the past has, until comparatively recently, been based on written records, so you might say there's been an excessive emphasis on Shakespeare and other dramatists and poets as a source for what Elizabethan and Jacobean English was like. There must have been all kinds of things going on orally, but we have no sense of that." Though his first book was a biography of Dr Johnson's dictionary, he acknowledges we are in a new age as far as lexicography is concerned. "Recently I have perused Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang. Impressive books in their way – the Green book is amazing – but by the time it's set down in hard covers, slang is already out of date. When you hear something and don't know what it means, you don't look it up in a book, you look it up on the internet: Urban Dictionary, places like that." He foresees a two-tiered system, with a place for printed works and vetting by committee, but ultimately, he says: "The internet is the future of lexicography." His next book, due in 2011, is a history of the controversies of English usage. "A lot of the time, people say 'this word is a bastard word', or 'I'm really upset about split infinitives', but these arguments are not new." (I suspect that, as he's also the author of an entertaining bluffer's guide called How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Hitchings takes a relaxed view on split infinitives himself.) It's amazing where a conversation about words can lead you. In an hour we've covered the literal Chinese translation of "monosodium glutamate"; the fact that you order a schooner of beer in Sydney but a pot when in Melbourne; the Japanese practice bukkake; and Google's failed attempt to stop people using its name as a verb. ("They wanted people to say 'conduct a Google search'; but 'googling yourself' would have to be 'conducting a Google search for your own name'. And it really does feel like a verb.") Hitchings is still fizzing with ideas and enthusiasms when the interview ends. I leave him brooding over the Italian for football. "The fact that they call football calcio is extraordinary to me. The root is the same as calcium. It's thoroughly curious..." The Secret Life of Words, By Henry Hitchings (John Murray £16.99) '...We may well enjoy knowing that botulism comes from a Latin word for sausage, that muscle is related to mouse (a bunched muscle being a bit like a quivering mouse), or that mortgage literally means death grip; in each case the link is unexpected and droll. An album is, in the strict etymological sense, something white, like a blank writing tablet, and to prevaricate means to plough crookedly.' http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...ge-1038141.html

Their web-site hosting services are like that, too. If you need customer support, forget about it. And the latest sign of their sinking ship: Their web hosting services used to keep backup snapshots of your web site at regular points in time, dating back for at least a year. But recently, with no notice to customers, they deleted all the snapshots older than one month. Caught me by the balls on one site I help to maintain. Methinks they will now have a hard time getting anything like the valuation that Microsoft first offered for the business.

The lollipop pictured would be the giveaway. Also, myself in media res:

I will collaborate with Ben/LA, our resident quant, to graph the function you so aptly describe.

Mea culpa. "It takes two to tango, but only one to squirm." -- S.J. Perelman ...I did get one rejoinder, though, from an escort who thankfully was not offended. He offered: Not your typical escort -- I'm actually good at it!

Unquestionably in turn. And one who (in Obama's commendable spirit of appointing prodigies and geniuses) can likewise go on to a successful ambassadorial career. Meanwhile, for the near term, I will take your cue and boost my spirits by hopping aboard The Good Ship Lollipop. That is to say, just scheduled an overnight with Andre in a couple of days! http://andrehasablog.blogspot.com/

Oof! Almost too much sunshine to bear. Maybe a middle way can be found in my agèd Mama's treasured library of the timeless wisdom of Helen Steiner Rice.

Dilbert could not have said it better... Yahoo co-founder Yang stepping down as CEO Search is on for successor; company’s stock has fallen in 17-month tenure SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang is stepping down as chief executive, ending a rocky reign marked by his refusal to sell the Internet company to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion — more than triple Yahoo's current market value. The change in command announced Monday won't be completed until Yahoo finds his replacement. The Sunnyvale-based company said it is interviewing candidates inside and outside Yahoo in a search led by its chairman, Roy Bostock, and the executive recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles. "Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level," Bostock said... (Emphasis courtesy AdamSmith) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27775703 ...ROFL. For "next level" read "basement." Creative destruction, anyone?

I hang hope on the possibility that Obama is acutely aware of that. Thus Rahm Emanuel, for starters. Some saw that as signaling hyper-partisanship from the get-go. But others, even unto Lindsey Graham and Peggy Noonan, noted Emanuel's proven ability to moderate the Democratic party's own excesses, for example nominating House candidates who might actually have a shot at getting elected in their district, even if they did not pass every last party-platform litmus test. Thus those commentators and others observed that Emanuel's appt suggests BO laying plans to prevent his own party scuppering his chances for success in the long run.

Illuminative disquisition on the pluperfect subjective (subjunctive): http://www.jstor.org/pss/3083451

Precisely why I found their pessimism so striking. Indeed. I anticipated many pleasures great and small from Obama's victory, but not this schadenfreude over The Economist's comeuppance.

The Economist does not seem too hopeful of any imminent return to sense by the Republican party at large... Ship of fools Political parties die from the head down JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party†now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans. There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South. The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution. The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart†rather than his “headâ€. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job†Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics. Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda. This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionalsâ€. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit†intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy†will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate. Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour. Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research. Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americansâ€, with their “volkish†wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “gâ€s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause. Time for reflection How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash prideâ€. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack jobâ€. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th). But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequencesâ€; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too. http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstate...ory_id=12599247

HWP = Height/Weight Proportional. In theory: If 6'0"' in height, then perhaps 165 lb. But often, in reality, Mrs. Six by Six. As Julia Child so eloquently put it.

lookin, you make me almost too self-conscious ever to write another hiring email! LOL! The helium-argon escort -- totally unreactive. One has had a few of those. My read: it shows he has wisely elected not to waste time on that part of the listing form, which seldom correlates to reality in any event. A few addenda... Handsome: Plain, but my ego compensates. Model looks: So self-absorbed, you’ll pay me to leave. Not your typical escort: Your typical escort. Open-minded: Willing to listen to your requests before I tell you all the things I won’t do. Very open-minded: Either (1) PNP and/or bareback, or (2) still weirded out by having to touch strangers.

Notes toward a glossary for escort ads. Feel free to embrace and extend! Can host: I share a 1-bedroom apartment with 2 other guys. Discrete: Discreet. Discreet: I will write about you on my blog. New to the business: My 4th stage name in as many months. Prefers email contact: I may respond to your inquiry in a month or two. Seeking generous gentlemen: Prepare to be upsold. Selective: Usually meaningless. Occasionally means: I will see you if you send a face pic and I like your looks, or if the rent is due. 29yo: 37yo. Versatile top: I will top you, or I will lie there while you get yourself off, whichever you prefer. Versatile bottom: See Versatile top. The occasional exception – Boyfriend material! Versatile: Marriage material! Disclaimer: The rude & disrespectful entries above in no wise reflect my real feelings toward escorts, most of whom I would marry if they would have me. Still needed: A glossary for client responses...

He: Do you smoke after sex? She: Don't know; I never looked.

On the other hand, one can imagine that craiglist's suit against its minority owner eBay may be consuming whatever energies it feels like throwing into the legal arena at present. (Assuming this is still ongoing; I've seen no news that it has yet been resolved.) And with craigslist revenues estimated at $80 million or so (a pittance of what it could have if it decided to be just a tad more venal), the eBay thing could well be soaking up some considerable chunk of what management sees as available litigation monies.

...not that one necessarily has a problem with this, at least to a point...

Indeed it is. When you next compose a post or a reply, note the link "Show All" at the top of the box that contains the icons. Click that link, and bounty! There appears a panel with (for whatever reason) many more icon choices than you get by clicking the "Next" link at the bottom of the box containing the icons. ...One that I'm still seeking occasion to use:

Promise? La Dole's defenestration was, for me too, the cherry on last night's cake.

Stu's synopsis, actually (tho I would be glad to take credit for most of his posts). My view is not quite as dire as Krugman's or, I take it, Stu's. I look forward to some fairly immediate arguments within the GOP in which moderate voices are raised rather louder than in recent times. Perhaps even to some productive schisms that prefigure real power shifts within the party, and reconceptions of the "base." (All too apt a word, it strikes me!) Ah -- you reminded me of something I left out. I have a dedicated Yahoo email account that I created specifically to use in registering for sites such as these. I glance at it now and then (and indeed, as reported, have not seen NYT-identifiable junk in it). But I don't really have to care whether it gets spammed or not, as it is not one of my primary email addresses, and I did not enter any of my real bio-info when I created it.

Just possibly, this was the lesson learned from '00 and '04? Together with: Ignore Ralph Nader.

Just a footnote on accessing the New York Times online: Both Stu's first link above and my own are accessible via free registration on nytimes.com. No paid sub required. And I have not noticed any deluge of spam due to having registered there.