Wow, what a terrible day for birthdays! But at least I don’t have to lower my standards for today’s winner. But before we get to that, and with a great big yawn, let’s get on to the other birthdays.

On this day in 1863, the co-founder of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Charles Edward Ringling was born. Is that a big deal? Probably not. There were seven of them. But to his credit, he was the Kermit the Frog member of the family. He managed the crazies and everyone really liked him. So let’s give him a great bit, “Yea!”

I don’t normally do politicians, but how can I not note that Harry Reid is 74 today. Look, the man ended the filibuster. He made it happen and I’m very pleased. I’ve had my problems with him over the years. But the truth is that he is an effective majority leader just as Nancy Pelosi was an effective speaker. That’s one thing we Democrats can be proud of: our people are capable.

The British actor Brendan Coyle is 50. He plays John Bates in Downton Abbey, who is the only reason I watch the show. In general, I don’t care about the show. But Bates is the most noble of characters. He plays Lord Grantham’s valet. In general, Grantham is a good guy. But every time something happens that calls Bates’ past into question, Grantham just lets him go. It isn’t that Grantham is a total asshole about it. But who is the noble man? It certainly isn’t that man born into nobility; it is the man who has lived his difficult life with grace and honor. But all is not bad, because he ends up married Joanne Froggatt. Happy days!

Other birthdays: painter Otto Dix (1891); character actor Bill Erwin (1914); film director Vilgot Sjoman (1924); actor Julie Harris (1925); actor Lucy Liu (45); and singer Britney Spears (32).

The day, however, belongs to the great Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat who was born on this day in 1859. He was the guy who painted with little dots of paint, a technique he pretty much invented called pointillism. But that’s all technique. What matters is the result. And the result is really interesting. It’s hard to know which of his work to highlight. I’m rather fond of his more stylized work like The Circus, but I think Bathers at Asnieres is more indicative of his work:

Happy birthday Georges Seurat!

One scenario that might preserve the status quo for the United States would be for its nations to follow the Canadian example and compromise on their respective cultural agendas for the sake of unity. Unfortunately, neither the Dixie bloc nor the Northern alliance is likely to agree to major concessions to the other. The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters simply aren’t going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor, or environmental protections, public schools systems, and checks on corporate power in politics. Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite the creation of a public health insurance system; a universal network of well-resourced, unionized, and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities where science—not the King James Bible—guides inquiry; taxpayer-subsidized public transportation, high-speed railroad networks, and renewable energy projects; or vigorous regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with strict financial, food safety, environmental, and campaign finance laws. Instead, the “red” and “blue” nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy, each doing what it can to woo the “purple” ones to their cause, just as they have since they gathered at the First Continental Congress.

—Colin Woodard
American Nations

See also: Regional Violence and American Nations

The worst thing about society is our tendency to want to see justice done. The problem with this is that the universe is unjust and our society is even more so. I have heard a number of supposed feminists gloat about the idea of a rapist going to prison and being raped himself. Even apart from that not being an example of justice, the fact is that rapists who go to prison are far more likely to be rapists there than they are to be the victims of rape. That’s the way things work in our “justice” system.

Our prisons exist to meed out retribution, not justice. Right now, there is a continuing over-crowding and healthcare crisis going on in California prisons. But the question is how did this come to pass? The people wanted to get “tough on crime,” but they didn’t want to pay for it. Because people in jail just don’t matter. Addicts are left to detox in great pain in prison with nothing but a couple of Advil every four hours and a private cell if they are lucky. Others are allowed to die because their healthcare needs are not taken seriously. As a society, we just don’t care about these people. They are “bad” even though most would be better defined as simply “unlucky.”

An amusing story regarding this comes to us from Sweden. A 51-year old prisoner at the Ostragard facility was at the end of a one month sentence for an undisclosed offense. He was having a problem with what appears to have been an abscessed tooth. That’s no joking matter. It can kill. The prisoner said, “My whole face was swollen. I just couldn’t stand it anymore.” So he broke out of jail. Then he made his way to the nearest dentist and had the tooth removed.

After the procedure was completed, he called the prison and had them pick him up. The authorities decided to increase his sentence by just the one day that he was gone. He’s since been released. He joked, “Now I only have to pay the dentist bill.” That’s a great story and I’m glad it all worked out. But it gets at a very important point about how we treat prisoners and other marginalized people. In his case, it was clearly more important to keep him locked up than to take care of his needs. He was a product not a human being.

There are many people in my life—Good people who I love!—who are much too caught up in seeing justice done. And certainly, I’m not immune. I think we should try to create some justice in our society. But there are great limits. Mostly what we get is the appearance of justice applied to people who have lived lives that are the result of a deeply unjust society. I know this is the case of the Swedish man. First, he was in jail for a month. In general, only the poor and weak go to jail and that short term must indicate that he didn’t do much. Second, he got his tooth pulled—not saved; and he’s worried about how he will pay for it.

In our society, justice is something that is applied to the poor. It is rarely something done for the poor. In a world where that’s what passes for justice, we would be better off with less justice.

There are a lot of great birthdays today and I’m afraid that many of them get short shrift, especially the older ones, many of which could have won the day. But we have lots of great musicians that I just didn’t want to miss out on adding some music here. And then, of course, the day goes to one of the greatest comedians, probably of all time. So onto the birthdays!

On this day in 1933, the great singer Lou Rawls was born. In the end, his most important work was the fundraising and consciousness raising for the United Negro College Fund, which he was highly involved in for the last 25 years of his life. But most people remember him for his gorgeous baritone voice, which is well on display in “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”:

The great Philadelphia soul singer Billy Paul is 79 today. I mostly know him for his mega-hit “Me and Mrs Jones.” I was quite old when I figured out what the song was about. I was having an affair with a married woman when the song came on the radio and I thought, “Oh!” I can be slow. Anyway, I’ve always thought that “Me and Mrs Jones” would go together really well with “You’re Still a Young Man.” Regardless, Tower of Power does a great version of “Mrs Jones”; they’ve just never put them together. Anyway, here’s Billy Paul:

The great comedian Richard Pryor was born in 1940. It’s hard for people to appreciate today what a comedic innovator he was; I think he was the successor of Lenny Bruce. Here is a good compilation of his stand-up work:

Bette Midler is 68 today. With all of her work as an actor, I think people forget what a great singer she is. Here she is doing the best version of “Beast Of Burden”:

Singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan is 67. He’s kind of the Irish Harry Nilsson. Here’s his mega-hit “Alone Again (Naturally).” It’s another one of those songs I didn’t get until I was older:

The actor Jeremy Northam is 52 today. I’m a big fan of his. But it isn’t like he’s better than other English actors. As I point out all the time, the English train their actors better than we do here. But mostly I just think that Northam is one of the ideals of male beauty. (Antonio Banderas is another.) Here he is as Mr Knightley very cross about Emma’s interference in Harriet’s relationship with Robert Martin in Emma:

The comedican Sarah Silverman is 43. I’m not a huge far of her comedy. It tends to make me uncomfortable. But I really like her political videos like the following one, “Let My People Vote”:

Other birthdays: early Classical composer Franz Xaver Richter (1709); Rococo sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet (1716); chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743); wax sculptor Marie Tussaud (1761); mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792); expressionist painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884); detective novelist Rex Stout (1886); actor Mary Martin (1913); and actor Emily Mortimer (42).

The day, however, belongs to the man of my childhood, Woody Allen, who is 78 today. When I was a kid, all three of his stand-up albums had been combined into a single double-album Standup Comic. I had it on a cassette and I listened to one side of it every night for at least a year. I think I had it pretty much memorized. Such was my devotion to this man. I also loved his short stories. I learned a lot from those—in particular, what I ought to read to be the intellectual that I considered myself to be. And, of course, there were the movies, which were and still are great. To this day, I still like his little films like Broadway Danny Rose and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and even September. There isn’t anything he’s done that’s bad. But more important: there is nothing he’s done that wasn’t worth doing. Even when he fails, it is an honest artistic attempt. Allen and Martin Scorsese are the two great American filmmakers—men who never waste the audience’s time and never just go through the motions. Our culture is so much richer for both men. And in the field of comedy, I don’t know that anyone has compared to Allen. He is as funny as Chaplin with the technical prowess of Keaton. Here he is doing some of his best stand-up comedy:

Alright, that’s not enough. Check out this clip from Broadway Danny Rose. This is a single shot. The three of them are walking toward the camera. It’s a long shot and Danny (Allen’s character) stops right in a close-up when Lou says, “Like management.” That whole ending still makes me cry, “Acceptance, forgiveness, and love.”

Happy birthday Woody Allen!

One of the things I was looking forward to on Thanksgiving was watching The Heat with my family. I didn’t know anything about the film except that it starred Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, both of whom I like. The beginning of it was typical enough. Bullock plays FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn, a very capable person with no people skills at all. Think: Miss Congeniality, but much less likable. I figured she’d learn through the course of the movie to be a decent human being. I was wrong. Soon we meet McCarthy’s character: Boston Police Detective Shannon Mullins. She is quickly established as a woman who has no regard for the law in her pursuit of a man trying to get a prostitute and another who is smoking a joint.

Here’s the thing. Even I can get into a movie like Dirty Harry, because the cop is being an asshole in pursuit of a serial killer. This shtick doesn’t work in a comedy when the “bad guys” are unfaithful husbands and kids getting high. But Mullins is worse than that. There is a whole tiresome back story about how she sent her own brother to prison because he was on drugs. She justifies this to her family by saying, “Well none of you got him off the streets!” That’s really amazing. Prison is probably the worst place to get someone off drugs. For one thing, there are plenty of drugs in prison. But more important, after people have felonies on their records, they don’t have a lot of employment (or many other) choices. So after getting out of jail, her brother is likely to be thrown in with the same people he was with before. And this turns out to be exactly what happens in the movie. (Of course, there is no realization in the film that Mullins “solved” her brother’s problem in the worst way.)

Another extremely repellent aspect of the movie is how it dumps all over FBI interrogation. The FBI has the best system for doing interrogations and they are highly successful. But in our pop culture world where 24 is how real men interrogate, the FBI system is wimpy and ineffective. It depends upon rapport-building and also what’s called tit-for-tat. There is a wonderful example where “one terrorist surrendered valuable information in exchange for a heart transplant for his child.” But in The Heat, being an asshole was always the key. They don’t need no stinking effective negotiation techniques!

The film goes on to have exactly the villain you expect. In terms of the “police story” aspect of the film, it is just a series of cliches from movies, but mostly television shows. And at the very end, the villain acts totally stupidly as though all he wants to do is kill the lead characters and doesn’t need to worry about then being arrested. It also uses the myth that air embolism will kill you. This is injecting air into the blood stream. It will kill you, but it would take about a hundred full syringes of air to do it. Regardless, if you managed to succeed at that, the two cops who had been shot to death in the same room would probably raise red flags.

While watching the film, I was reminded of a great comedy The Man with Eugene Levy and Samuel L Jackson. In that film, Jackson plays the McCarthy part: he is really not likable. But instead of teaming him up with a straight laced cop who gets poisoned by his influence, he is teamed up with a sweet, morally heroic dentist. In the end, it is Jackson who learns valuable lessons about life. And this is the fundamental problem with The Heat. The characters start off being unlikable and end up even more so.

This is not to say that the film isn’t funny. McCarthy is funny despite the material. But it isn’t nearly as funny as it would have been if the script had done anything to make me feel that the characters were redeemable. Bullock, on the other hand, was miscast in this film. She puts in a fine performance, but it never seems to gel, and she doesn’t have much to do in the movie other than be outraged and finally won-over by McCarthy.

Look: it would be different if there weren’t real cops acting like they were above the law. But I read about them every day of the week. Hundreds of thousands of people’s lives are destroyed every year by this kind of behavior. So when I see it being held up as an ideal, it gets my back up. Things I would normally find amusing I just bristle at. And that was especially true after the negotiation scene. My advice: rent The Man

Afterword

Of course, The Heat received generally good reviews from the “critics” and did huge box office. The Man was panned by “critics” and did almost nothing at the box office. But I predict that people will quickly forget The Heat. For one thing, how long will it take before people get tired of Melissa McCarthy’s one character act. (Identity Thief was pretty good, but it was exactly the same thing.) For another thing, The Man ages well, and I think it’s silliness will appeal more as people’s preconceived notions about Samuel L Jackson fade away.

Update (5 April 2014 6:01 pm)

I mistakenly wrote above that Eugene Levy’s character in The Man was a dentist. He was actually a dental supply salesman.

On this day in 1803, the great physicist Christian Doppler was born. He is the man who explained the Doppler Effect. This is what you hear when a train passes by you. As it approaches, the frequency of the sound is high and while it moves away from you the frequency of the sound is lower. It’s really simple: as the train approaches you, the sound waves get bunched together and so they have a higher frequency. Think of a guy on top of a train throwing baseballs at you every second. They would hit you more than once a second as the train is approaching and less than once a sound as the train departed.

Doppler wasn’t looking at this problem at all. He was looking at stars. He noted that if a star was moving toward us, its color frequency would be higher and thus bluer; if it was moving away, it would be be redder. It would take Einstein’s work 52 years after Doppler’s death to fully work out the theory.

The great film director and choreographer Busby Berkeley was born in 1895. He created such iconic musicals that his name has become a descriptive term. I always assumed he was gay, but that was really silly. You can tell by the way he shoots women that he loves them. And plenty of them! He was married six times! Here is “We’re in the Money” from Gold Diggers of 1933:

The writer C S Lewis was born in 1898. He is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m not a big fan. But I’m really interested in his Christian apologetics. Some time ago, I came up with an idea, Jesus: God or Nut? The idea is that Jesus claimed (or at least heavily implied many times) that he was God. So he was either God or some deluded guy. Well, I later found out that Lewis made this exact same argument in favor of Jesus being God. I guess the idea is that no reasonable person could claim that Jesus was insane. Personally, a man who walks around telling people the end is nigh has more than a few screws loose.

Other birthdays: naturalist John Ray (1627); the first female physics professor at a European university Laura Bassi (1711); philosopher Andres Bello (1871); composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797); Russian Neoclassical painter Alexander Brullov (1798); neurology pioneer Jean-Martin Charcot (1825); Rocky’s crazy mother Jackie Stallone (92); the great musician John Mayall (80); actor Diane Ladd (79); musician Chuck Mangione (73); the great wrestler Jerry Lawler (64); comedian Garry Shandling (64); the great filmmaker Joel Coen (59); comedian Howie Mandel (58); actor Andrew McCarthy (52); actor Don Cheadle (49); and actor Tom Sizemore (49).

The day, however, belongs to the great jazz composer Billy Strayhorn who was born on this day in 1915. He is closely aligned with Duke Ellington and it is sometimes hard to decouple them. Strayhorn is the ultimate artist; he didn’t especially want recognition. And there are clearly times where he should have got full credit but only got partial or none at all. But there is no doubt that he needed Ellington who really did treat him well. Here is the man himself playing “Take the ‘A’ Train”:

Happy birthday Billy Strayhorn!

People sometimes ask me why I cook with chicken so much. I think it is a stupid question. You might as well ask why someone eats bread or rice. Chicken is the easiest meat to cook with because it has relatively little flavor. Other meats need to prepared in such a way that compliments their distinct flavor. I think of other meats as I do broccoli. Have you ever noticed how broccoli isn’t generally used in soups? It’s flavor is too distinct. You really have to cook especially for it, whereas potatoes or cauliflower go in pretty much everything. Ditto for chicken. And as someone who likes making sauces, chicken is just easy.

Chicken is also cheap. Pretty much all beef, pork, and sea foods are more expensive than boneless chicken breast. Ground beef is slightly cheaper. So why not cook with chicken? In general, I don’t see the need to try different meats. After all, I am always doing something different with it. It isn’t like it is fried chicken every night. (It is actually pretty much never fried chicken. And it is only chicken about twice a week anyway.)

I am not alone in this respect. According to data collected by Matt Yglesias, Americans eat almost seven times as much chicken as they do turkey. He notes:

He is certainly overstating this for effect. For one thing, I know that Andrea claims to really like turkey. And it is certainly true that part of the reason we don’t cook more turkey is that it’s a pain. They are big and who needs that much food except on Thanksgiving and Christmas? And turkey is more expensive. But it is also true that if turkey were distinctly better than chicken, people would go to the trouble of preparing it.

When I think about the dishes I usually make with chicken, they are things like cashew nut chicken and chicken pot pie. I rarely make a whole chicken, although chicken stuffed with saffron rice is really great. Only one dish I make is even associated with turkey: chicken tetrazzini. I don’t think this has to do with the fact that turkey parts aren’t commonly sold. I think it works the other way around. There is nothing special about turkey. So given the choice of buying smaller chicken parts for less money and larger turkey parts for more money, people go with the former.

So when it comes to America’s kitchens, the turkey stays around for one reason only: tradition. And if that works for people, great. As for me, I don’t need to hassle with a big bird that mostly tastes like the chickens that I cook with on normal days. On special days, it should be something like beef with a red wine demi-glace. But since I’m not cooking today, I only get the beef. But at least it isn’t turkey.

Look at that fetching bird! Do I want to harm a feather on its body? Of course not! Especially after what happened to my chicken Fred. But what’s with this tradition of presidents pardoning turkeys? To begin with, a pardon implies a crime. What did these turkeys ever do to deserve a death sentence? Perhaps it is a good metaphor for our society where punished crime is mostly something you are born into. Born poor and black? You may need a pardon before you are through. Born rich and white? Forget about it! You’re untouchable.

Yesterday, President Obama pardoned a turkey named Popcorn. I think we can all agree that no animal with a name should ever be killed and eaten. But Obama noted that the pardoning of Popcorn was not one of the important jobs of a president. I might take exception to that statement. After all, much of what a president does is provide photo opportunities for the press. We don’t have any royalty to do that job here, so he’s stuck with it. And he knows this. He even prepared a joke for the event.

But it bothers me. Obama seems to take his obligation to pardon turkeys a good deal more seriously than he takes his job to pardon human beings. As Think Progress notes, Obama has increased his pardons from zero last year to 17 this year. “But those few pardons did not change his record of the lowest clemency rate in modern history.” Obama is also the deportation king. He is also the drone civilian murder king. If I agreed with him about any of these policies, he’d be my hero. As it is, not so much.

Looking back on the history of turkey pardons, we naturally land on the conservative icon Ronald Reagan. He didn’t actually pardon any turkeys himself. But at the end of the Iran-Contra scandal, he was asked if he would pardon the criminal Oliver North. Reagan deflected the question by joking about pardoning some turkey named Charlie. Most likely as a result, George Bush Sr started the tradition the first year of his term.

So we can see the whole turkey pardoning business as an example of how the media get sidetracked from important business to trivial photo opportunities. The Iran-Contra Affair was a very big deal. I have absolutely not doubt that both Reagan and Bush were involved in it. And it represents a far worse crime than anything that Nixon ever did. Yet it came to nothing. And it made Oliver North, who absolutely should have been tried for treason, into a conservative hero. But then, being a conservative hero comes pretty cheap. All one have to do is publicly shit on everything that America is supposed to stand for.

I don’t mean to suggest that Obama has done anything so terrible—at least to Americans inside US borders. But his record is far from stellar. And I am really tired of hearing people apologize for him. Somehow he just can’t be liberal because he’s black or because he used drugs or because he’s a Democrat. (That’s a great irony in US politics: conservatives can’t be liberal because they’re conservative; but liberals can’t be liberal because then people might accuse them of being liberal. The horror!) Regardless, Obama is fooling himself if he thinks he will go down in history as a great president. People might point to Obamacare. But like with Johnson, they will be scared away from his conservative governance and the bad economy. And no one will care at all about the turkeys.