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Cliopatria

  • Jan 28, 2005

    The Littlest Rebunker: Richard Holmes, Esq.

    by Cliopatria

    Rebunk is pleased to announce the addition of a new blogger. I feel a bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz – we went off looking far and wide for new bloggers, and our first new addition comes from my hometown of Newport, New Hampshire. Richard and I first met when I was a junior in high school and he was a precocious 6th grader who was talented enough at the trumpet to play in the high school jazz band. I sort of took him under my wing a bit, or at least protected him from bullies.

    Fast f

  • Jan 28, 2005

    Dumbest Headline of the Year Frontrunner

    by Cliopatria

    Perhaps this could be a regular feature, but I want to nominate today's New York Times sports section for the dumbest headline of 2005:

    Eagles' Plan: Stop the Run, Stop the Pass.

    Why yes, that is a cunning strategy. It is much better than the original Philly plan: Let them run, Let them pass, block a lot of punts.

    And of course the article is a lot more sophisticated than this daffy headline.

  • Jan 28, 2005

    Payola Among the Ink-Stained Wretches

    by Cliopatria

    How does it go? One is an isolated incident, two is a coincidence, and three is a trend? Or did I just make something up?

    Why is it that those who spew the"liberal media" nonsense (we're talking about folks who apparently aren't good with numbers, because for all of the handwringing, the Wall Street Journal has about the same circulation as the New York Times and Washington Post COMBINED) and who have elevated the alleged sins of Dan Rather beyond all proportion of t

  • Jan 28, 2005

    Past Tense Echoes

    by Cliopatria

    So, what happens when you take a country -- wracked by underfunded central government, armed and disorderly forces, natural disasters, old-regime loyalists, separatists, foreign predation (often under the guise of foreign investment) legitimized by international law and treaty, with no common ideology or civil culture -- out of autocracy and give it a dynamic republican form of government? It's very important to hold elections, obviously, and to have a leader capable of appealing to many cons

  • Jan 28, 2005

    On Rockers, Movie Stars, and Politics

    by Cliopatria

    Boycott Sun City! Many did during the 1980s in response to the campaign to isolate South Africa and its noxious apartheid regime. It is easy to engage in selective memory about the role of pop culture and the end of apartheid, or in alleviating African famine, or what have you. With the recent release of the Live Aid DVD set, there has been a lot o
  • Jan 27, 2005

    President Bush and Europe

    by Cliopatria

    In today’s Times, Thomas Friedman dispenses some advice regarding president Bush’s impending trip to Europe. The whole thing is worth a read, but the gist can be captured in the following three paragraphs:

    Let me put this as bluntly as I can: There is nothing that the Europeans want to hear from George Bush, there is nothing that they will listen to from George Bush that will change their minds about hi
  • Jan 27, 2005

    Word and Flesh ...

    by Cliopatria

    Misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo has a nice exhibit of alphabets composed of human figures. I learned from him that they are the inverse of calligrams, or pictures formed of words.

    The relationship of word and flesh is important to me as a Christian. Our understanding of it, that the Word became uniquely Flesh once in the human experience, is probably the single thing

  • Jan 26, 2005

    When Did the Word "Holocaust" Come into Wide Use to Describe the Horrors of WW II?

    by Cliopatria

    John Mullan, in the Guardian (1-25-05):

    In the week that sees the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an argument about some of the most terrible events in human history turns on a preference for the definite or indefinite article. The Muslim Council of Britain is to boycott this week's public commemoration of the Holocaust because, in effect, our usual word for the Nazi's mass extermination of Europe's Jews implies its singularity. Iqbal Sacranie, the council's
  • Jan 26, 2005

    Is Bush Repeating the Mistake of LBJ?

    by Cliopatria

    40, 50, 60 years ago it was an assumption of the governing class that poverty caused resentment and resentment caused instability and instability led to war. Hence: we must address the problem of poverty in 3rd world countries. Here's Ike in his second inaugural:

    In too much of the earth there is want, discord, danger. New forces and new nations stir and strive across the earth, with power to bring, by their fate, great good or great evil to the free world's future. From the
  • Jan 26, 2005

    Rice and Gonzales

    by Cliopatria

    Two interesting--and historically significant--votes in the Senate today. Thirteen Dems voted against the confirmation of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State--the highest number ever to vote against a nominee for the position during the last 100 years.* And in a straight party-line vote, the Judiciary Committee forwarded Alberto Gonzales' name to the Senate by a 10-8 margin. While Judiciary's Dems are more liberal than the party as a whole, the tally suggests that perhaps 35-40 senators will v
  • Jan 26, 2005

    The "New Media" vs. "Old Media" Debate

    by Cliopatria

    I suppose that Rebunk counts as part of the new media. OK, we review movies months after they appear, we get into unseemly shouting matches with other blogs, and a good number of our links come from the old media in new skins, by which I mean the online versions of newspapers. Nonetheless our quality control is lax and we can make fun of Dr. Phil without facing his burly murderous man-breast wrath, so I guess that counts as “new media.”

    Yet sometimes the new media takes itself a bit too s

  • Jan 26, 2005

    On the Fear of Suits ...

    by Cliopatria

    On the wall, next to my desk, hangs a picture of me from Durham, North Carolina's Morning Herald. It's dated Friday, 16 March, 1962. The young fellow in that newspaper clipping is holding open the Exit Door to Durham's Carolina Theater and a group of African American students are shown rushing through that door. Subsequently, about thirty of us were sued by the Carolina Theater's management. $30,000 was the demand, as I recall. More money in those days than it is now. And I had nothing bu
  • Jan 26, 2005

    Speechwriting 101 ...

    by Cliopatria

    Of all the commentaries on President Bush's second inaugural address, David Kipen's"To Quote Bush, Being Original is Hard Work" in the San Francisco Chronicle strikes me as the most interesting.

    There was a time, says Kipen, when speechwriters would"strive for the rhythm, cadence and crescendo that would singe a line into everlasting memory." But, in recent years, memorable lines wit

  • Jan 26, 2005

    Bring it to the masses

    by Cliopatria

    It's nothing new -- hasn't been for decades -- to say that we live in an era of mass consumption. But there keep being new and different variations, which are interesting. David Nishimura, one of my favorite (i.e. most useful) bloggers for his tireless scouring of news sources for historical interest items, notes two new examples, though he hasn't tied them together yet: