About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

Odd Words: Cartomancy

Posted on 24 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

Welcome to page 41 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition! This was a difficult page, but I found a great one in the last word of the page: cartomancy.

The Grecian Blues

A good quarter of the page was taken up with cardio– words: words that were based on kardioeidēs, the Greek word for “heart.” There was only one variation that I wasn’t well familiar with: “cardiomegaly.” It is the “pathological enlargement of the heart.”

An enlarged heart has always had a special creepiness factor for me. I don’t know quite why it is. Maybe it is just because the rib cage makes it seem like the heart is trapped. Thus, an enlarged heart might burst, like a pimple. Anyway, I never knew the word for this.

Fleshed Out Latin

The page also contained a number of words that were based on carnaticum, the Latin word for “flesh.” But, being the poor sinner that I am, I knew most of them. The list included some pretty common words: carnage, carnal.

But it also included some words I didn’t know. Some of it was pretty specialized like “carnification.” It means “the conversion into flesh of other tissue.” But there was also “carneous,” which is “resembling or having the color of flesh.” There was another (non-flesh) color word in the mix: “carmine.” It is “a rich crimson color.” It’s not surprising that I didn’t know these words, given that I’m very male in that way — having never had much of a color vocabulary.

Other Words

Outside the heart and flesh words, this page was pretty random. And I’m not even sure I didn’t know them. In particular, there was “carcanet”: “an ornamental jeweled circlet or neckband.” Similarly, “cardamom”: “the aromatic seed of various Asian plants used as a spice or condiment and in medicine.” I can almost convince myself that I actually did know these words.

The Future of Cartomancy

None of that was too interesting. Today’s word was much more interesting: cartomancy.

Car·to·man·cy noun \kar’-təmansē\

1. fortune-telling or divination by the use of playing cards.

Date: Late 19th century.

Origin: from French, cartomancie — where carte means “card.”

Example: To me, these fields of cartomancy and astrology are not definable as science but as pseudo-sciences. –Antares Stanislas, Practical Cartomancy for All

Image cropped from Tarot Reader by Chris Gladis. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Odd Words: Capa

Posted on 23 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

We have reached page 40 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. It was odd. There were a lot of words that I didn’t know, but none were all that compelling. I settled on the first word of the page: capa.

Turtles!

You may recall a few days ago, we had two odd words that related to different edible parts of the turtle. Well, today we got another turtle word: “carapace.” It is “the tough upper part of a turtle’s shell.

That’s fine; I can definitely see a need for such a word. But it makes me wonder if the editors of the dictionary didn’t have a special fondness for turtles.

Technical Words

The reason it was hard to find a good word was that this page was filled with technical words — those associated with some kind of specialized endeavor. That’s even true of the chosen word today, “capa.” And it is true of “carapace” too.

Statistics

One such word, which I assume comes to us from statistics, is “capitation.” It is “a method of assessment or enumeration on the basis of individuals.” It’s kind of odd that the word was a mystery to me, because I’m pretty up on statistics. What’s more “per capita” is something that pretty much everyone knows. But whereas “per capita” is a word for outsiders looking in, “capitation” is a word for those who practice the art.

Sailing

One area that is always good for arcane words is sailing. And today, we had “caravel,” which is “a small, two or three-masted vessel, used by the Spanish and Portuguese during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Interestingly, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he brought two caravels with him: the Niña and the Pinta. The Santa Maria was a carrack, a larger boat — which the big man himself used.

Chemistry

Another word of this type is “capilarity,” which is “the action by which the surface of a liquid in contact with a solid is raised or lowered, depending on surface tension and the forces of cohesion and adhesion.” Unfortunately, I knew that word. Normally, I wouldn’t. But the work I did for my MS degree was all about permafrost. (It was titled something like “Trace Gas Emissions From Permafrost in the Warmer World,” which was actually kind of a hot topic for a while — and one I still see people writing about.)

The way that water resides in soil is fascinating. Soil is filled with capillaries, where the water resides (assuming it is wet). The capilarity causes a lot of interesting effects in permafrost. It isn’t as simple as heating a bowl of water; you have to take a lot of things into account. I miss working on that kind of stuff!

Do Not Chase the Capa

Although today’s word is technical, I think it is interesting: capa.

Ca·pa noun \kā’-pə\

1. the red cloak carried by a bullfighter.

Date: Late 18th century.

Origin: from Latin (via Spanish), cappa.

Example: The capeador calmly trots his horse up to the bull, and, when within a few feet, jeeringly waves his capa before its very nose. –Otis Mygatt, The Real Bull-Fight — An Englishman’s View of Bull-Fighting

Image cropped from Bullfighting in Aguascalientes by Tomas Castelazo. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Odd Words: Canopic Jar

Posted on 22 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

Today, we tackle page 39 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. Unlike yesterday, there were few unknown words on this page. Thus I ended up picking something that isn’t even a word: Canopic Jar.

The Bells!

Page 39 contains two “bell” words, and I can’t say whether I knew them or not. There is “campanulate,” which means “shaped like a bell.” And there is “campanology,” which I think you can figure out. These are words I’ve come across before, but it is hard to say whether I would have known them in the middle of an SAT exam.

There were some other music-related words, although ones I knew well. They were all based on the Latin word canticum, which is their word for a song (more or less). So we get words like “canticle” (hymn or chant), “cantilena” (simple melody), and “cantillate” (intone or chant).

That took up a good 20 percent of the page. It’s good to know that a little Latin will still go a long way in English. After yesterday, I was concerned.

Other Words

There were, of course, other words that I didn’t know. I was particularly struck by “campestral,” which means “pertaining to the countryside.” It sounds so familiar, like it is a word I use every day. But it isn’t. It isn’t even in the online Oxford Dictionary. I don’t know if others have the same feeling about it.

There are a couple of words that relate to the eye. There is “campimeter,” which is “an apparatus for testing the field of vision of the human eye.” Much more interesting is “canthus,” meaning “either of the angles formed by the junction of the upper and lower eyelids.” I always find it interesting when there are words for things I’ve never really thought of as existing. At the same time, I can well imagine that “canthus” is a very useful word in anatomy.

One word I knew, of course, was “cannabis.” But it’s worth highlighting because I get flack from people for using it rather than “marijuana” or “weed” or whatever. The reason I do that is because I want to be precise and objective. In particular, “marijuana” was a word coined to associate cannabis use with Mexicans. I don’t want to be party to such racist distortions.

It seems we can’t go a whole page without some kind of military word. Today it was “cannonade”: “continuous, heavy artillery fire.” That one makes sense, though. The “cannon” construct has always struck me as artificial.

You’ll End up in a Canopic Jar

Enough of that! Today we have: Canopic jar.

Can·no·pic jar noun \kanō’-pik\

1. a vase used by the ancient Egyptians to hold the entrails of a deceased person.

Date: Late 19th century.

Origin: from the Latin name of Canopus, a town in ancient Egypt.

Example: Initially discovered in the Valley of the Queens, all that remains of the mummy is a well-preserved head, a few pieces of bandage, and the Canopic jars that contain his organs. –Josh Davis, Face And Brain Of 3,800-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy Recreated, IFL Science!

Image cropped from L0058461 by Science Museum, London. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The Out-of-Towners: Review and Analysis

Posted on 22 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

Last night, I watched Neil Simon’s 1970 hit The Out-of-Towners, starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis. I had only the vaguest memory of seeing it when I was 6 years old. Strangely, I have a fairly clear memory of finding it very funny at that time. So it seemed like a good choice.

The Out-of-Towners Summary

The film is funny. It tells the story of George Kellerman and his wife Gwen. They are going to New York, where George is going to be interviewed for his dream job, which will move them from their quiet lives in Ohio with two young children to an exciting life in the big city. But things go wrong almost from the start.

Their flight is forced to land in Boston. Then, with some effort, they manage to get a train into New York. But once there, they can’t get a taxi, because there is a strike going on. So they walk to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where they find that their room has been given away. And so on. Somehow, George manages to make it to his interview and lands the job. But he decides not to take it; both he and Gwen have decided that they are happy with their lives in Ohio.

Writing and Rendering

I’ve never been a big Neil Simon fan. That’s not to say that I disliked his work. As I said, I liked this film when I was a kid. And I loved the film Murder by Death when I was younger. Today, I enjoy its companion film The Cheap Detective. But overall, Simon is just a dialog writer. And he’s pretty stylized. I really have to be in the mood.

Sexism

A bigger issue is that most of his stuff is dated. And The Out-of-Towners certainly suffers from this. It’s kind of hard to imagine that people like this really existed. The sexism of George is really amazing. On the plane, both at the beginning and end of the film, we find Gwen pleading to be allowed a cup of coffee.

But on a deeper level, Gwen is a very strong character. How it is she puts up with George’s behavior is anyone’s guess — especially at the end of the film. But both of the characters are pretty typical of the insular world of Neil Simon.

Class

Throughout The Out-of-Towners, George collects a list of everyone who he believes has harmed him. He is going to launch a major lawsuit if he manages to survive the night. But the truth is that almost everyone in the film is actually nice to the couple. For example, the guy managing lost luggage does everything he can, but their luggage is in Ohio. There’s nothing more he can do than he already has.

This is a recurring theme throughout the film. And the truth is that the film would only be about a half hour long if George weren’t so difficult. They could have just stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria lobby until 7:00 am, when it would have had a room for the couple (and the luggage would have been delivered at 8:00 am). But George insists upon acting like a child.

There is a nice moment in the film when George arrives at his interview on time and the person he’s meeting with says he’s amazed — that with the strike and the weather, he didn’t figure George would have been there. So all of George’s anxiety and histrionics was for nothing.

Acting

The performances by Lemmon and Dennis are outstanding. And it really made me wonder about the script for this. Obviously, by 1970, Neil Simon was a star. Otherwise, I doubt the script would have been shot. I can only imagine that the dialog lays there on the page. There is very little that is really funny all by itself, but the stars and the impressive supporting cast make it shine.

Directing

The Out-of-Towners was directed by Arthur Hiller, who just so happened to direct probably my favorite comedy ever, The In-Laws. He shot this film in a cinéma vérité style. This adds enormously the feeling of anxiety in the film, and ultimately to its comedic impact.

Music

The score for the film, by Quincy Jones, is unusual. Its only real flaw is in being too good — too interesting. It is rare that the music in a film becomes so compelling that it takes me out of the film. But that happened once here. Just the same, Jones’ use of extreme dissonance also adds to the whole feeling of dread in The Out-of-Towners, which is so import to it.

Summary

Overall, The Out-of-Towners is one of the best things that Neil Simon ever wrote. I may be under-appreciating what he created on the page. Regardless, Arther Hiller and the rest of the gang that worked on it clearly understood what he was going for. At the time of its release, it stood as an excellent example of cutting edge comedy. Today, the edge is worn. But it still works remarkably well.

Image cropped from one found on Wikipedia. Licensed under Fair Use.

Yes, Trump Will Cause a Constitutional Crisis

Posted on 21 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

The Post and The New York Times are both reporting on what appears to be a serious escalation in the Trump team’s intentions to constrain the investigation of special counsel Robert S Mueller III, and The Post is also reporting that President Trump has privately been exploring the possibility of granting pardons to his family members, and perhaps even himself.

Which means the possibility that we are sliding toward a constitutional crisis needs to be take seriously. Now what?

In an interview with me this morning, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — a hard-charging Democrat on the Intelligence Committee — sounded the alarm in a big way, suggesting it’s time for Democrats to begin serious outreach to Republicans in Congress about sending a united message to Trump: any effort to remove Mueller is unacceptable and will be met with a forceful response.

“What’s important, now, today, is finding a path to send the strongest possible message that firing Mueller without cause would be seen as an attack on democratic values and the rule of law and that there will be negative consequences,” Wyden told me.

[…]

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s unlikely that Republicans will act to send a forceful message to Trump that such a course of action is off limits. Yesterday, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that he had talked to a number of GOP senators who are very critical of Trump’s comments to The Times, in which he suggested that he would not have selected Attorney General Jeff Sessions if he had known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia probe. But most of them would voice their concerns only under cover of anonymity.

Still, Wyden insists it is imperative that Democrats try to get Republicans to speak up. We must “send the strongest possible message to the president now, today, that there will be consequences,” Wyden says.

–Greg Sargent
Are We Heading Toward a Constitutional Crisis?

Image cropped from his official image at The Washington Post. Licensed under Fair Use.

Odd Words: Calumet

Posted on 21 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

Today we are at page 38 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. Interestingly, I knew a surprisingly few of these words — and some are quite useful! But I’ve chosen to use a specialty word, mostly because I could find quotes and images for it: calumet.

Whole Lot of Ignorance

I knew so few of the words on this page, that it’s hard to know how to make any kind of coherent narrative out of them. There aren’t many shared roots in the words. But I guess I’ll make due.

I’m always interested to see the arcane words of specialists. On this page, we had “caltrop.” It is a word of warfare. The military is always good for odd words. “Caltrop” is “a small spiked iron device used to obstruct the passage of cavalry.” They look kind of like the tokens you pick up in the game Jacks. I feel somehow that these things don’t deserve their own word.

Similarly, “camouflet” is “a bomb, mine, etc, exploded underground, which makes a cavity but does not break the surface.” Now that is a very specialized word! But I can well see that in mining it is one that would be of use. But it still makes me think of Shaw’s idea that every profession was a conspiracy against the laity.

Moving on to religion, we have “callotte.” It is the word for the skull caps worn by Roman Catholic clerics. In this case, of course, the word is hard to justify. It’s not like there would be any confusion if we referred to a cleric’s callotte as a “skull cap,” right?

Other Words

I probably should have chosen “cambion.” It is “the offspring of an incubus and a succubus.” But if you are like me, you don’t believe in demons. So we have two words for mythical creates — and then a third for their spawn. Of course, we need to remember that people have taken these demons to be very real in the past.

In fact, if you listen to Pat Robertson, you will hear a lot of explicit references to demons. This is also true for most of the people on my mother’s side of the family. Just imagine if they ever got to create a society without restriction. It would be a return to the Inquisition. We really haven’t progressed very much.

“Camelopard” is another word for a giraffe. It is a combination of “camel” and “leopard.” This is because it is shaped like a camel and spotted like a leopard. This is one of the silliest words I’ve ever seen.

I’ll end this section with a useful word, which I’m surprised I didn’t know, “calumniate.” It is “to malign; accuse falsely; spread malicious reports about.” I can’t image that I haven’t run into this word dozens of times. Yet I can’t remember it!

Put That in Your Calumet!

But today, our word is: calumet.

Cal·u·met noun \kal’-yəmet\

1. an ornamented ceremonial pipe used by North American Indians.

Date: Late 17th century.

Origin: from Latin (via French), calamellus, which means “little reed.”

Example: Incorrectly known as “smoking the peace pipe,” the use of the calumet formed an important part of the ceremonies surrounding many forms of negotiations. —Family Life in Native America by James M Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo

Image cropped from Calumet Della Pace by Giorgio Marziani de Paolis. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Odd Words: Callet

Posted on 20 Jul 2017 by Frank Moraes

I’m trying to get Frankly Curious moving again. To help in that, I thought I would get back to my reading through The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. When I last wrote about it, I did the word “caducity.” That brings us to page 37 and the word “callet.”

Is It Hot in Here?!

Roughly half of page 37 is dedicated to “cal—” words: those that come from the Latin calor, which means “heat.” It’s where we get words like “calorie.” But the dictionary doesn’t waste any space on words found on cereal boxes. One word I don’t recall seeing before is “calefacient.” It means: “a medicinal substance producing a feeling of warmth.” On the other side of the page was “calorimeter.” I think you already know what that word means.

When looking at these words in this context, it’s easy to see them in an SAT sort of way. If you were forced to, you could grab hold of “cal—” and figure it was something having to do with heat. And in context, it is always going to be clear. “The doctor used a calorimeter to measure my temperature after they gave me a calefacient.” Kind of boring, really.

Other Words

There were some other interesting words, both known and unknown. One known, but interesting, word, was “caldera.” You can’t have studied much earth science at all and have missed it. It is “a large crater formed by the collapse of the center of the cone of a volcano.”

Two words were completely new to me. And they related to turtles! The first is “calipash,” which is “an edible greenish-colored gelatinous substance lying beneath the upper shell of a turtle.” The second is “calipee,” which is “an edible, yellowish colored gelatinous substance attached to the lower shell of a turtle. Geez, biologists and cooks!

Another interesting word is “callipygian.” It means: “having well-formed buttocks.” Greek-based words tend to upset my sense of what is right in language. This one comes from the Greek word kallipūgos, which is a word that describes a famous statue of Venus, the goddess of love and all that. It is combined with pūgē, which means “buttocks.” So “Venus-like buttocks.” I won’t forget that one!

Onto Callet!

But okay, onto our word for today: callet:

Cal·let noun \kal’-it; kā’-lit\ (British dialect)

1. a prostitute.

2. a shrwish, sharp-tongued woman.

Date: Late Middle English (early 17th century).

Origin: I don’t know. It is a regional word, however. It’s hard to keep track of them.

Example: I don’t really have one. The word is obscure. And it is also a common name. And it is more popular in French than in English. But how about something like, “That callet will never be tamed.” That has a good Shakespearean feel to it.

There is something offensive about the word: that it more or less equates a sharp-tongued woman with a prostitute. But what do you expect from such an old word?

Image cropped from Prostitute / El Salvador by Paulien Osse. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

How Conservatives Remain Republican

Posted on 29 Jun 2017 by Frank Moraes

The other day, my father was watching television and he heard about the new Republican healthcare bill. He was outraged, and he said, “There’s no way they will be able to get that passed.”

Now there are a few things about this. First is that conservatives, not to mention, Republicans themselves are very much against this bill. Second is that my father is very naive. But mostly, the comment reflected to me that this was typical of how Republicans like my father manage to live with themselves while voting for a political party that is so consistently vile.

Republicans Are Consistent — Really!

It’s all very simple for my father and Republicans like him. The idea here is that, sure, the Republicans are kind of mean, but they (and by extension those who vote for them) aren’t heartless. My father, who is, at rock bottom, something of an ol’ softy, can vote for a party that is cruel, hateful, and vile. And so my father can continue on voting for the GOP, and pretend that sentencing to death hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime is to be poor as a mere aberration instead of its core philosophical nature.

This is not to absolve my father. He should know better. Now at 84, I suppose he can be forgiven, because his mental functioning has really gone down in recent years. But he was the same way twenty years ago. Regardless, I’m not just talking about him.

I’ve long been fascinated that Republicans vote for this. Forget Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas. In that book, he was talking about something else: people allowing social issues to trump the economic issues they traditionally care more about.

What I’m talking about here is Republicans voting for a party that consistently votes against what they believe in. And I think this is the mechanism. They’ll convinced themselves that the Republican Party really does vote as they would like. It’s just that now and then they vote in an odd way.

It’s like going to the same mechanic that you father went to when you were a kid. The GOP may claim that they actually believe with their base of voters. But that isn’t the case. The Republican Party really has changed.

Republicans Really Will Destroy Obamacare

Despite what my father thinks, the Senate will vote for its vicious healthcare bill and tens of millions of people will lose coverage. It isn’t an aberration. It’s what they actually believe. And by extension, it is what my father believes it because he votes them into office.

He can pretend that what the Republicans actually vote for isn’t what they believe, but it is what they believe in. I’d love to give my father an out — an excuse for voting for an authoritarian who wants to see children and the old folk and weak die. But there is none.

Republican Is Republican — Trump Is Nothing Special

And let’s not forget: from a policy standpoint, things are no different now than they would have been in 2013 had Obama won. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up. Call it corporatist money management or nationalistic bigotry. It all ends the same: poor people die and rich people get tax cuts.

This is the Republican Party. This has been the Republican Party for at least four decades. They don’t just hate people like immigrants and black-skinned people; they hate people like my father. The only question is whether people like my father will figure it out before it’s too lake.

Don’t count on it.

RNC image from Republican Party. It is licensed under Fair Use.

We Have a United Democratic Party

Posted on 22 Jun 2017 by Frank Moraes

Bernie Sanders - We Have a United Democratic Party Yesterday, I heard a bit of Majority Report. This sometimes amazes me because it goes along with my thinking so much. I hear from other people that I’m really rare, yet here is this very popular podcast with people who agree with me almost all the time. Ultimately, I think we have a united Democratic Party; it’s just some who can’t stand minor differences between us.

What I heard was another podcaster calling in. He was a Bernie Sanders’ supporter, and he was complaining that the show wasn’t being harsh enough with Hillary Clinton or positive enough for Bernie Sanders. That’s an outrageous claim.

Their position on Sanders and Clinton is the same as mine. They supported Sanders during the primary. They still would have preferred to have had him as the Democratic nominee. They have many problems with Hillary Clinton. Just the same, they fully supported her during the general election.

(And let’s be clear: how could you not be in favor of Clinton in the general election? There were two parties running. If people want to make themselves feel good by voting for Mickey Mouse — or Jill Stein, who had as much a chance of winning — fine. That’s their choice. But the most important thing about that choice is that they are choosing not to be a factor in the election. A vote for Stein was certainly not a vote for Trump; but it was a vote for no one. So the position of the Majority Report folks just seems obvious to me.)

“The Election Was Stolen!”

But this guy who called in went on and on about Democratic Party malfeasance during the primary. His proof? The Democratic establishment wanted Clinton to be the candidate from the beginning. Who cares? Really! Who cares? Isn’t this what we expect? The fact that they set up the debates to make it easier on her is expected. But the truth is that the Republican Party actually did worse to Trump, and he still managed to get the nomination.

It’s sad for me to say, but Sanders lost the primary because he lost the primary. And I really think that had he been our candidate, he might be president right now. But this is hardly the first time that the Democratic establishment has convinced the voters to choose the “electable” candidate, only to lose. Remember how we chose electable John Kerry rather than unelectable Howard Dean, even though political science shows that if any Democrat would have won that year it would have been Dean?

“I Hate Sanders ‘Cause Some Idiots Like Him”

Hillary Clinton - We Have a United Democratic Party On the other side, I hear almost nothing about Sanders except as it is filtered through this caller’s lens. Because that’s all Sanders is. Take his most wacky supporters and define him as such. Matt Yglesias pointed out that the populist demographics in the UK went along with Hillary Clinton voters, “Corbyn’s electoral map, in the end, turns out to look a lot like Hillary Clinton’s. He did well in the most diverse and most educated parts of the United Kingdom and worst among older voters.”

The truth is that most people who prefer Sanders still like Clinton and vise versa. And generally, liberals are becoming more economically liberal. It makes sense. The truth is that economic inequality is the greatest tool that conservatives have against gender and race inequality. The whole of the Democratic Party has turned left — including Hillary Clinton. (Who thinks that Bill Clinton circa 1992 could win a Democratic primary today?)

We Have a United Democratic Party

I’m getting tired of this. Yes: both sides can find people on the other who are annoying as hell. But I think we have the most united Democratic Party in my lifetime. I also think it is more economically liberal than it has been in decades.

One thing that unfortunately also seems to be true is that most of the Democratic Party elite is afraid of this left turn — just as they were in the UK Labour Party. I think that has more to do with their wrong assumption that moving to the left is bad politics. They’re wrong, and they will eventually learn that — or they’ll figure out that they aren’t actually liberals and move to the Republican Party.

The Change Has Already Come

I think I’m a typical Democrat. I think the people on Majority Report are typical Democrats. And yes, I would prefer that this tiny minority of Sanders supporters would run for office rather than try to litigate the 2016 Democratic Party. And I would prefer this tiny minority of Clinton supporters who can’t find it in themselves to support Sanders would do the same thing.

But if not, I don’t suppose it matters. We have a united Democratic Party. We don’t need to change to come.

Sanders image cropped from Bernie Sanders by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Clinton image cropped from Hillary Clinton by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Democrats Lose When They Talk About Nothing

Posted on 21 Jun 2017 by Frank Moraes

Ossoff, like so many losing Democratic candidates over the years, was brought down fundamentally by arguments grounded in identity politics.

Karen Handel didn’t argue that the Republican Party’s healthcare bill is a good idea (it’s very unpopular) or that tax cuts for millionaires should be the country’s top economic priority (another policy that polls dismally). Instead, her campaign and its allies buried Ossoff under a pile of what basically amounts to nonsense — stuff about Kathy Griffin, stuff about Samuel L Jackson, stuff about his home being just over the district line, stuff about him having raised money from out of state — lumped together under the broad heading that he’s an “outsider.”

Much of this was unfair or ridiculous. And the stuff that wasn’t unfair — like the location of his home — is honestly pretty silly. None of this has anything to do with the lives of actual people living in the suburbs of Atlanta or anywhere else.

Ossoff’s team was aware, of course, that the district is not accustomed to voting for Democrats and that he was vulnerable to this kind of attack. They attempted to counter this move by positioning Ossoff as blandly as possible — just a kind of nice guy who doesn’t like Donald Trump — and dissociating him from any hard-edged ideas or themes. It’s a strategy that makes a certain amount of sense, but it also makes it hard to mobilize potential supporters. And by lowering the concrete stakes in the election, it also makes it easier for trivial and pseudo-issues to end up dominating in the end…

Ossoff’s effort to stay bland and inoffensive let hazy personal and culture war issues dominate the campaign — and even in a relatively weak Trump district, that was still a winning formula for Republicans…

If your opponents are unpopular enough, it’s certainly possible to win elections this way. But especially for the party that has a more difficult time inspiring its supporters to turn out to vote, that’s an ominous sign. Right now on healthcare and many other issues, Democrats suffer from a cacophony of white papers and a paucity of unity around any kind of vision or story they want to paint of what is wrong with America today and what is the better country they want to build for the future. And until they do, they’re going to struggle to mobilize supporters in the way they need to win tough races.

–Matt Yglesias
Jon Ossoff’s Georgia Special Election Loss Shows Democrats Could Use a Substantive Agenda

Image of Jon Ossoff cropped from his Twitter image. Licensed under Fair Use.

OCD Editor: Dealing With Weird Quotation Marks

Posted on 15 Jun 2017 by Frank Moraes

As an editor of online materials, I find myself with a curious problem: how to deal with single and double quotation marks. Because I suffer from a mild form of OCD, I like these always to be represented by the typewriter keys ' and ". Then I let WordPress, or whatever other content management system I’m using, convert these characters into the typographic symbols with left and right sides.

For example:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

And:

‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.’

But as an editor, I get text in many forms. Rarely are single and double quotes delivered as ' and ". Instead, they are entered as ‘/’ and “/”, as well as ‘/’ and “/”.

If those last two sets are confusing you, they are just how HTML actual stores these right and left quotation marks. All you need to know is that writers actually do submit text with these symbols in the text and they are perfectly correct.

The problem is that I don’t like them. I like my text to be straight ASCII7, and so I like my straight ' and " keys. If I had to choose from the other sets, I would take ‘ over ‘.

The other day, I was talking to a fellow editor who was complaining about this. She didn’t mind ‘ so much, but ‘ drove her crazy. It’s understandable; they really do make the raw HTML harder to read.

Since I was no longer alone in my complaints, it occurred to me that I should write a program to fix this problem. At first, I thought I would write it in PHP, given that I really like its string (short for “text string” or more generally a collection of characters) library. But then I thought it would be downright trivial to do with JavaScript.

One great thing with JavaScript is that you don’t even need a server. You can just run the program locally on your machine. And a few minutes later, I had the following program:

Remove Annoying Quotation Marks

This program removes annoying special quotation marks and replaces them with normal ASCII7 characters. The characters are:

Text Box

Source Code

I often pine for the days when you had to really get inside a machine. But I have to admit that it’s pretty cool to be able to write a program that solves an annoying problem like this with almost no thought or time.

Here is the entire program. All you would have to do is put it in a file with an html extension and then run it in a browser on your computer.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Remove Annoying Quotation Marks</title>
  <script>
function Clean() {
  var t1, t2;
  t1 = document.getElementById("text1").value;
  t2 = t1.replace(/”/g,"\"");
  t1 = t2.replace(/“/g,"\"");
  t2 = t1.replace(/“/g,"\"");
  t1 = t2.replace(/”/g,"\"");
  t2 = t1.replace(/‘/g,"'");
  t1 = t2.replace(/’/g,"'");
  t2 = t1.replace(/‘/g,"'");
  t1 = t2.replace(/’/g,"'");
  document.getElementById("text1").value = t1;
}
  </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Remove Annoying Quotation Marks</h1>
    <p>This program removes annoying special quotation
    marks and replaces them with normal ASCII7 characters.
    The characters are:</p>
    <ul>
      <li>&rdquo;</li>
      <li>&ldquo;</li>
      <li>&rsquo;</li>
      <li>&lsquo;</li>
      <li>“</li>
      <li>”</li>
      <li>‘</li>
      <li>’</li>
    </ul>
    <h2>Text Box</h2>
    <div style="text-align: center;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;"><textarea rows="5"
    cols="50" id="text1"></textarea></div>
    <p style="text-align: center;"><input
    onClick="Clean();" type="button"
    value="Clean" /></p>
  </body>
</html>

You can download the program if you wish:

RmQuotes.html

Conclusion

I realize this is pretty arcane. It combines a number of things people don’t care about: computer programming, editing, and my neuroses. But I still think it’s interesting.

Image cropped from one found at Pexels.