It is somewhat heartening to know that men like Harry Reid are in positions of power:
I’ll update regarding what comes of this.
Update
Today, the Senate passed the Flood Insurance bill without Rand Paul’s amendment. You go Harry!
Scott Lemieux has an excellent article over at The American Prospect about yesterday’s ruling on Arizona’s SB 1070—the “Show me your Papers!” law. He spends most of the article talking about Scalia’s angry dissent. I don’t pay enough attention to the Supreme Court, but even I’ve noticed that Scalia has abandoned reason. Corey Robin has a whole chapter is The Reactionary Mind about how dangerous conservatism is in Scalia’s brilliant mind.
Lemieux explains that, shockingly, Scalia argues that Arizona is a sovereign with more or less equal rights to the Federal government. It is arguments like this that make the Court’s decision on the ACA so dangerous. Scalia has given up any pretense of even following his ridiculous “originalist” doctrine. As we saw in the hearing on the ACA, he brought up the conservative talk radio canard that if the government can force you to carry health insurance, it can force you to eat broccoli. Well, Scalia is still at it:
I often despair about the people I meet on the street. The fact that people like Scalia are in power (And of course people with his kind of personality are in power!) means we are lost—at least for the foreseeable future.
Nora Ephron, writer and director of many successful “chick flicks,” died from pneumonia earlier today. That’s sad, she was only 71. But I have never thought much of her work. She kind of epitomized professionalism without depth. I rather liked some of her films in that “watch them in bed while you doze off” way. And I was impressed that she made You’ve Got Mail work as well as it did.
I suppose she will always be remembered for When Harry Met Sally—a film that I think really doesn’t work. How can anyone get to the end of this film and think it is a happy ending? The two are bound to break up and if they are very lucky, their friendship will survive. Or they will get married and end up hating each other. Regardless, it is not a happy ending.
But there is this scene:
Personally, I’ve always hated women who make a lot of noise in bed. It makes me feel vaguely violated and pandered to. “You don’t have to shout, I’m right here! What’s the problem? You got somewhere to go?” I will allow that I wasn’t always so wise.
Rest in peace, Nora; your time on this earth was not wasted. Yes! Yes! Yes!
Wes Anderson has a film coming out called Moonrise Kingdom. This is not exactly big news:
What I find interesting is that this film looks good. I think that Anderson has a lot of talent, but the only film of his I’ve liked was The Royal Tenenbaums. I think there is something about his worldview that I just can’t relate to in any fundamental way. There is a kind of hatred for his characters that screams out. Somehow, in The Royal Tenenbaums it works, because all of the characters were so sad and disaffected. Still, Tenenbaums ought to be a great film, and it is not. I suspect that Anderson doesn’t have greatness in him. (This is not a slight; I wish I had his talent.)
Moonrise Kingdom could be another film worth spending some time with. Even at his worst, Anderson still produces films that are a good deal better than almost every other thing that comes to the multiplex.
I went to watch the newest Crash Course video from the Vlog Bros. And by the way, I’ve come to think that they aren’t nearly as good as I had once thought. John Green, in particular, is very interesting and funny, but not very informative. In particular, I didn’t think his recent Renaissance video was good, insightful, or right. But that is a matter for another day.
Here is part of a screen capture of Hank’s most recent video:
Note the lower left hand corner: it says 302 views and 497 likes. How is it that more people like this video than have even viewed it?
It must be that YouTube updates the view total more slowly than it does the likes total. For example, when I reloaded the page just now, it still said 302 views but the likes were updated to 507.
Still, this is crazy. Who writes code like this?
Corporations are things owned by people. This is what Mitt Romney meant when he said, “Corporations are people, my friend!” (Don’t you love the condescending tone of that “my friend”?) I don’t accept this, of course. Another example of how wrong this is, is that we can’t set up our cats as employees, pay them, and then have them give $2500 to a candidate of the cats’ choice. If corporations are people because they are owned by people, why aren’t pets people because they are owned by people?
It is a serious question. I don’t know why.
Jonathan Chait says what few in the mainstream media will: the GOP think healthcare is a privilege. He writes [Bold is mine. -FM]:
It is a good article that you really should read. He doesn’t go into the implications of this belief, however. I think about this all the time. The fact that I do not have access to healthcare probably means that I will die many years—perhaps decades—before I normally would. So that whole thing about rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is just a lie. All modern Republicans and a large share of Democrats are more conservative than the men who founded this country.
We’re number one! We’re number one!
Before getting to the burning question of whether Bugs Bunny is a rabbit or a hare, let’s take a step back and take a look at this colorful character.
On 30 April, all the way back in 1938, Bugs’ Bunny was born. Well, sorta.
Note that I used an apostrophe after what has become his first name. It is in reference to the director of the first cartoon to feature the character, Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was Bugs. Thus, animators started referring to the nameless character as “Bugs’ bunny” (and later “Bugs’s bunny”) — not a name, a description. But the name stuck, even if the apostrophe didn’t.
The cartoon in question is Porky’s Hare Hunt. But the bunny in that film is not much like the Bugs Bunny we have grown to love.
For one thing, he sounds like Woody Woodpecker — literally. In 1940, Mel Blanc moved the voice from the one character to the other.
Also, this early character doesn’t have the intellectual sophistication that he will eventually develop. (Although he’s still way smarter than Porky Pig and most humans I know.) He’s mostly just a spaz, like Daffy Duck in his early versions. (He was first introduced in the similarly titled, Porky’s Duck Hunt.)
In addition to this, Bugs doesn’t look the same. He’s quite short — again, like the early Daffy Duck. And he is all one color. But there is a continuity. It’s kind of like the ship of Theseus: if all parts of a ship are gradually replaced, is it still the same ship? There isn’t one answer to that; it is just a way of thinking about what is is.
But in the case of Bugs Bunny, I think we can say that this little Woody Woodpecker laughing bunny is indeed a form of the iconic character.
This is not the consensus view, however.
Porky’s Hare Hunt was from the Looney Tunes series, and Bugs Bunny really is a Merrie Melodies character. Thus, most people consider the first appearance to be in the 27 July 1940 film A Wild Hare:
And he evolved from there. Frankly, I believe at some point he crossed a line and became uninteresting. It’s hard to set a precise moment, because there is no such moment. But it was when Warner Bros Cartoons went postmodern. That’s when there was Bugs Bunny the actor and Bugs Bunny the part he played.
Not that good postmodern cartoons weren’t made. Duck Amuck is one of the best things Warner Bros Cartoons ever did.
It’s more that Bugs Bunny became so sophisticated and so in control that he lost his zany. But there’s a lot more great Bugs Bunny than meh.
As far as I know, I was the first person on the internet to ask and fully answer the question, “Is Bugs Bunny a rabbit or a hare”? People go their whole lives without asking the really important questions.
It was a question that had burned in my mind since I was a child. Rabbits and hares look similar, but they are very different animals.
But I was surprised that almost to a person, my friends found the “rabbit or hare” question absurd — just Frank being Frank. However, since I published this article back in 2012, it has been one of the most popular pages on this site of 8,000 pages.
Clearly: a lot of people had the same question.
And several years after this article was first published, a number of other people published similar articles. There’s even a video that deals with the issue, although in a roundabout way.
So let’s get to the question: is Warner Bros Cartoons’ most famous character a rabbit or a hare? The question must be answered!
I know what you’re thinking: his name is Bugs Bunny, so he must be a rabbit. And yet, most of the cartoons have titles like Hare Brush and Fallin’ Hare and Bill of Hare.
What’s more, just look at the titles of the two films that people argue about being the first to feature Bugs Bunny: Porky’s Hare Hunt and A Wild Hare (both embedded above).
And the truth is that “bunny” is an ill-defined term. But not because it isn’t defined as (generally a young) rabbit. Rather, because most people lump rabbits and hares together.
So the situation is far from clear.
Before we get into this, I should tell you a little bit about rabbits and hares.
Despite the fact that they look quite similar, they are, in fact, not just different species, but different Genera.
In fact, rabbits (and I always kind of knew this because you just can’t trust rabbits) are in 8 different Genera.
This depends on the exact kind of rabbit. Most Americans will know the rabbits in the Sylvilagus Genus, which includes the cottontail rabbit.
Hares are all in one genus: Lepus.
Rabbits have 44 chromosomes, while hares have 48. So they really are fundamentally different.
So rabbits and hares are only in the same family: Leporidae. So they are as related as humans are to gorillas — very related, but far from being the same.
Part of the problem is that five of the 32 types of hare are called jackrabbits. (Five different kinds of rabbits are called hares.)
This reminds me of all the confusion about the dormouse. The dormouse is not a mouse. In fact, they aren’t even the same Family; you have to go up to the Order (Rodentia), which they share.
When I was younger, I wondered why the jackrabbits I see everywhere here in Northern California seemed so different than domesticated rabbits. It is because they are only distantly related. And personally, I find hares much more interesting, even if I’m personally more like a rabbit.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between hares and rabbits is how they are born. Hares are born with hair (Ha!) and are fairly independent. Rabbits are born blind and hairless.
Unfortunately, his does us no good in our search for the truth about Bugs Bunny, because no film survives from his early days. But all hope is not lost.
Because of the fragility of young rabbits, they are forced to live underground in burrows. And Bugs Bunny lives in a hole. This almost seems like a smoking gun. See this Pete Puma cartoon:
We have seen that Bugs lives in a hole in many other episodes. This does suggest that Bugs is a rabbit. It is about the only thing that does, however. And The Flintstones live in houses, not caves. The hole seems clearly designed to give Bugs Bunny a sense of place, and in later episodes a sense of his being human-like (note that neither hares nor rabbits easily outwit humans).
Bugs is gray, and hares tend to be grayish. Bugs has long ears, and hares have longer ears. Bugs is fast, and hares are very fast (jackrabbits can run up to 40 miles per hour). Bugs is quick witted, and so are hares — they have to be given they live out in the open. But by far, the most compelling evidence that Bugs Bunny is a hare is that hares do not live in groups — they are loners.
The argument for Shorty is perhaps better. For one thing, he looks like a rabbit. And he doesn’t speak English like hares normally do.
In the end, I suppose we shouldn’t depend upon cartoons for our biology education. Bugs seems to be both a rabbit and a hare. But the evidence points more toward him being a hare.
What is clear is that the crew at Merrie Melodies saw hares and rabbits as interchangeable. Given that Warner Bros Cartoons was based in Los Angeles, California, the main experience of the people working there was likely the jackrabbit — a hare that is called a rabbit.
And obviously, given that Bugs Bunny was first paired with Elmer Fudd, and Elmer Fudd was first paired with the proto-Bugs Bunny (Elmer’s Candid Camera), of course they would use “rabbit” to make fun of Fudd’s speech impediment (it was 1940).
I think Bugs Bunny looks and acts more like a hare than a rabbit. But what he really looks and acts like is a cartoon character. One of the very best.
Now all I have to do is get the scoop on that Trix “rabbit.”
I was kind of hard on Chris Hayes yesterday about his book Twilight of the Elites. But he is still an exceptional political observer. He is great at the beginning of this clip:
As my regular readers know, I like Chris Hayes. He’s smart. He’s knowledgeable. And he’s cute as a button. If I had a son, I’d want him to be just like Chris Hayes, even though I know he would be much more like Ezra Klein. I was really looking forward to his new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. Alas, it was a disappointment.
I think that Hayes is fundamentally misreading the history of our country. There haven’t been more failures over the last 30 years because the elites are worse than they used to be. Rather, in the past, we had elites on the left and the right. As long as that was the case, they kept each other in check. But since Carter (and especially since Clinton) the left has largely joined with the right.
Hayes is part of this problem. In the final (and best) chapter, he talks about how the anger on both the right and the left can be harnessed to fix our political problems. But I think this passage is very telling:
Hayes, and I dare say most of the staff at The Nation and MSNBC, has a skewed sense of what “upper middle class” means. I think in terms of quintiles—and so does Hayes. The bottom 20% are the upper class; the next are the lower middle class; the next are the middle class; the next are the upper middle class; and the last are the upper class. It doesn’t matter to me how you want to subdivide that last category, if you are in it, you are upper class. It makes no difference that even Bill Gates has problems admitting that he is rich, if you are in the top 20%, you are upper class. This means if your household income is over roughly $90,000 per years you are upper class. I’m sorry if this puts editors at large at The Nation into that category. Yes, Chris, you are upper class, and until you admit to this, you won’t be able to remove the very real blinders of your class.
The other thing that has happened recently is that people like Hayes have accepted the idea that we are a meritocracy. We are not. We never have been. The idea that we can create a society in which there is equality of opportunity is as absurd as the idea that we can create a society in which there is equality of outcomes. The dumb child of a rich man will almost always do better than the smart child of a poor man—at least as long as we have an economic system that looks anything like the one we now have.
This always reminds of Tevye in Fidler on the Roof singing “If I Were a Rich Man.”[1] He notes that all the men of the villiage would come to him for advice. Why? “‘Cause when you’re rich they think you really know!” And even though Hayes admits that many of the elite should be traded in for new models, he still holds onto this idea that the elites were and could be again the “best and brightest.” It is a shockingly naive, and self-indulgent, belief—very much like the rich and famous who discover libertarianism because it tells them just what they want to believe about themselves: that handsome devil in the mirror is the best!
Despite all of this, Twilight of the Elites is a well written and thoughtful book. If you can get past its basic assumptions, there is much to like. The biggest of these is Hayes’ solution that we must strive for both equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. I don’t tend to favor middle-way solutions, but this one strikes me as rather good. Unfortunately, it is about as likely to be implemented in the United States as is socialism. I won’t be holding my breath, nor will I be expecting an intellectual awaking from the Tea Party.[2]
I really like this quote from the first chapter of the book:
The sound you hear is the founders rolling over in their graves.
Indeed.
[1] The song by the master, Zero Mostel :
[2] Hayes has a strange believe that the Tea Party folk are starting to wake up to the dangers big business pose to personal liberty. I think this too is extremely naive. We really need to look at the psychology that drives people. There is a reason that people would watch passively while hundreds of billions of dollars were given to the banks, but who organized the moment a black president tried to give healthcare to poor people. That shows this is not that they are unhappy about elite failure.
I was listening to my Jacques Brel channel on Pandora. I am used to a lot of (too much) Django Reinhardt and Edith Piaf. But suddenly, I was hearing Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday?! I switched over to my Pandora tab and immediately, I was face to face with… an ad for Santa Rosa singles between the ages of 30 and 39.
I don’t understand this. I am 48 and I know they know this. Why do they think I am looking for such young women? And why would I want one in Santa Rosa? I’m only here to prove to myself how low I can sink:
That’s from Jim Carroll’s City Drops Into the Night.[1]
Finally, I get my bearings and I see the song is J’ai Deux Amours by Madeleine Peyroux, a wonderful singer who doesn’t always channel Billie Holiday, but certainly does on the Careless Love album. Her last name appears to be pronounced like “Peru” but with a guttural “r.” Here is a nice bit of live music from her:
Up next on Pandora was Brel’s Les Bonbons. Does anyone have any insight into this song? It seems to be a meditation of the ephemeral nature of love: Je vous ai apporté des bonbons; parce que les fleurs c’est périssable. (I brought you candy; because flowers are perishable.) That seems to go along with the, “Hey! There’s my current girlfriend! There’s your current boyfriend!” Followed by, “Okay, go away with him. Hey Germaine [his old girlfriend], I brought you candy!” It’s all quite delightful. Ah, to be Frenchish.
[1] I’m sorry, but there seems to be no live version of the song:
I hate Norton Security Suite. Don’t buy it. Get Microsoft Security Essentials—it is far better and free.
However, I think this Norton commercial, Grandma was a Hottie, is really good:
But it’s no reason to buy their terrible product.
