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Music trivia

The song "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" is actually an eighteenth century French folk song called "Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre," and was a favorite of Napoleon.

Friday artwork

Astronomer by Candlelight by Gerrit Dou

The grammar way-back machine

Erik Peterson reports on the abandonment of the two-spaces-after-the-period rule. I, for one, will stick to it in formal writing and leave it to the editors to screw things up if they insist. As Peterson writes, "This is amazing to me. This is like being told that i stopped being before e fifty years ago."

Ron Paul the creationist

"I don't accept it [i.e., evolution] as a theory."--Ron Paul. This alone disqualifies him from the presidency in my book.

My previous criticisms of Ron Paul are indexed here.

Update: Shawn Klein: "At some point folks are going to have to realize 1) this guy isn't the pro-liberty guy everything thinks he is and 2) even if he is, he's a loon who's giving libertarians a bad name."

Christmas as a national holiday

According to the History Channel special on Christmas, the holiday was seen as such an English tradition that after the American Revolution it fell into some disfavor in the United States. Congress even held sessions on Christmas Day, and it was not until the mid-nineteenth century Christian revival (also responsible for “In God We Trust” on the currency) that it was declared a federal holiday.  So much for America A Christian Nation.

Of course, we know that Christmas is really a day created by capitalism: the Victorian age created everything from Santa Claus to the American “spirit of childhood,” and subsequent generations have seen the free market elaborate even further on the concept: Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus, Edison’s Christmas lights, Montgomery Ward’s Rudolph, and so forth. But I had not known that Congress was even in session on that day for many years.

The embarrassed atheist

dgm's kid, that is, who has learned a tragic lesson about what it means to be honest in a world that doesn't want to hear it. Hey, Merry Christmas, folks!

The adventures of Aquaman

This blogger is reading every issue of Aquaman comics and posting plot synopses. Just in case you have some spare time.

Friday artwork

Santa Claus by Thomas Nast

The 2007 Tally

This year I read the following. (a) signifies an unabridged audio book.

Kasparov responds to Time's naming Putin man of the year

From The Other Russia:

Putin’s regime has crushed dissent, rigged elections, and systematically destroyed democratic institutions and civil liberties, processes that only accelerated in 2007. Despite record oil and gas prices that sent the Russian GDP skyrocketing, the vast majority of Russians outside the major capital cities have seen little or no improvement in their standard of living, largely due to runaway food prices and a decaying infrastructure. With most of the corporate and state revenues leaving Russia for western real estate and personal bank accounts, the gap between rich and poor here has reached staggering levels.

The Time announcement praises their selection for restoring his country to prominence in the international arena, dispelling “anarchy”, and recovering national pride. The magazine does express concern about his “troubling” record on human rights. The same things could have been said about Adolf Hitler in 1938, when he took his turn as Time’s Man of the Year. “Fascism,” Time wrote then, “has discovered that freedom - of press, speech, assembly - is a potential danger to its own security.” Again these words apply equally well to this year’s winner....

[F]or all of Putin’s attacks on the West, this will be promoted widely within Russia and around the world as a victory and an endorsement by the West of Putin’s policies and practices of dictatorship. It’s an early Christmas present to the Kremlin when what they really deserved was a lump of coal.