Terry Teachout wonders why music is sometimes used to torture prisoners, while other genres of art are not:

I’m . . . struck by the fact that music is, so far as I know, the only art form used for such purposes. No doubt it would be unpleasant to be locked in a windowless room that had bad paintings hung on all four walls, but I can’t envision even the most sensitive of spies blurting out the name of his controller to escape the looming presence of Andy Warhol or Thomas Kinkade. Yet I have no trouble imagining myself reduced to hysterical babbling after being forced to listen to shred, grunge and “I Love You” [as sung by Barney the purple dinosaur] for 16-hour stretches, a technique said to have been employed by Guantanamo interrogators.

Andy Warhol? Thomas Kinkade? What we need is not so much art that is bad, as art that is disturbing, and not just esthetically. I don’t know one-hundredth as much about painting as Teachout does, but I do know that there are some serious and not-so-serious works of art that would freak me out if I had to live with them round the clock: some of Lucian Freud’s nudes (Google “Freud nude shatters price record” for a disgustingly obese example) and one or two of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, just to name two specific categories. Other possibilities that might well work on a fanatical Muslim terrorist, even if they don’t bother me much: some of Dali’s weirder paintings, almost anything by R. Crumb, the Pompeian wall-painting of Priapus with a set of scales and a big grin, weighing his enormous organ — I’m sure there are plenty more.

There are also some movies that would be very likely to disturb the sleep of a high percentage of prisoners. I haven’t seen Freaks, and terrorists would probably enjoy Faces of Death (haven’t seen that, either) and even the bloodiest gangster movies, but Killer Klowns from Outer Space seems like a cheap and easy shortcut to the confessional. Again, I’m sure there are plenty more.

“The dead weep with joy when their books are reprinted.”

“Everyone can see the future, but no one remembers the past.”

(The Stranger, in Russian Ark, 2002)

“Unhappiness is our own invention. At times I’m sad that I lack the imagination for it.”

(Général André de . . ., in The Earrings of Madame de . . ., 1953)

In his commentary on Horace’s Soracte Ode (1.9), David West writes:

“Horace says sententiously, ‘When winds stop blowing, trees stop shaking’, meaning of course that unpleasant things do not last for ever. This could be said of a plague of locusts or a broken ankle or a professor with tenure” (Horace Odes I: Carpe Diem, Oxford 1995, 42-3)

The third unpleasant thing is odd at first glance, and suggests that West had at least one unpleasant colleague to put up with until he either died or retired.

The Blogosphere is busy arguing whether Tom Daschle should be approved as Secretary of Health and Human Services, despite being an obvious tax cheat. I would have thought that was a no-brainer: of course not. The question people ought to be arguing is whether he should be hauled away in handcuffs or at least grilled further about his finances, not by the Senate but by someone with the power to indict him. I lean towards ‘yes’ on the second question. Why is no one — or no one of importance — even asking it?

InstaPundit is duly impressed that Amazon sells bacon-flavored jelly beans. I’m more astonished by the last two things listed under ‘customers who bought this item also bought’: the bacon wallet (imitation bacon, I presume) and the Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu Action Figures (making Tofu a Frenchman is a particularly nice touch).

Dustbury mentions a professional basketball player named O. J. Mayo. If you’re going to have a name consisting of a food and a beverage, it helps if they actually taste good together. I can’t think of any food with a significant quantity of mayonnaise in it or on it that would taste good with a glass of orange juice.

Until I sat down today to compile a review worksheet on Latin prepositions, I had never noticed an inconsistency or inconcinnity in the names of the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. If non-visible frequencies of light are seen as metaphorically going beyond or falling short of the visible spectrum, the opposite of ‘ultraviolet’ should be ‘citrared’. On the other hand, if they are seen as metaphorically placed above or below the visible spectrum, the opposite of ‘infrared’ should be ’suprared’. I wonder if other languages are more logical or (if you like) more pedantically Latinate.

Which reminds me: when I first saw the word ‘infrared’ in (I suppose) 5th or 6th grade, I thought it was a disyllable, the perfect passive participle of a verb infrare* that I had somehow never run across before. I wonder if that is a common misapprehension.

And speaking of illogic: why does the spell-checker tell me to write ‘pedantically’ rather than ‘pedanticly’? There’s no such word as ‘pedantical’. I suppose I could research this, but I have more worksheets to put together before I go to bed. I would have thought that two Snow Days in a row would be enough to catch up on my work and my blogging, but apparently not.

Three pieces of advice, the first fairly urgent:

1. When I put a particular movie at the top of my queue, I expect it to be the next one I receive. I do not expect to receive #2 instead, with no explanation and without being asked if I’d rather have it instead. Obviously, I would rather have #1 than #2: I put it first because I want to see it next. This has happened five times in the last six months, including the last three movies shipped. Every time it happens I have a strong urge to cancel my membership. So far these urges have been momentary, but that could change.

2. Please add another box to your rating system: ‘I own this movie’. This should be checkable either with or without selecting a one-to-five-star rating. (I haven’t actually watched everything I have on DVD.) If I check ‘I own this movie’, stop recommending it to me. You’re just wasting my time. Why should I rent it from Netflix when I already own it? If I check the box and also give it a rating of four or five stars, do feel free to recommend similar movies, as long as I don’t own them either. If I check the box and give it a rating of one or two stars, try to avoid recommending similar movies.

3. Please allow me the option of not seeing specific categories of information currently offered to everyone. If programmed properly, your computer could already have told you that my taste in movies has little resemblance to the average taste of other people who happen to live in the same town. I am therefore not interested in knowing what they’re watching. Case in point: today’s ‘local favorites’ are: Jeff Dunham Very Special Christmas Special; Sex and the City: the Movie; Miss Potter; Run, Fat Boy, Run; and The Nativity Story. Sorry, not interested.

I am also emphatically uninterested in knowing which movies have been recommended by Roger Ebert. On the other hand, I would be interested in a feature that allowed me to select specific critics whose recommendations I could see, e.g. James Bowman or Terry Teachout. Of course, I already get such information from their websites. (I wonder if Netflix sees a detectable surge when (e.g.) Terry Teachout or Eve Tushnet plugs a movie, with some members adding it to their queue, others moving it to the top, and a few doing both.)

InstaPundit, that’s who. Here’s the beginning of something he posted yesterday:

NETBOOK UPDATE: I stopped at Circuit City to pick up some stuff today and tried out some netbooks. The Acer Inspire was nice, and so was the little Lenovo, but the best keyboard by far — better than my Asus, too — was on the HP Mini 1035.

He helpfully links the last bit so readers can read more about his favorite netbook and possibly buy one. Does he link to Circuit City’s page on the HP Mini 1035? No, he links to Amazon’s, though their price is only $5 (1.1%) less than Circuit City’s.

I’ve posted on this before, but it’s gotten particularly bad recently. Four times in the last week, the National Weather Service has displayed a current temperature for my town higher than the expected high for the day. Surely if the current temperature is 68^o F, the expected high cannot be 62^o, it must be at least 68^o. Is there any programming language in which that cannot be fixed with a single line of code?

Today the expected high was 49^o, while the reported temperature around noon was 63^o, which is what it felt like. A fourteen degree discrepancy is impressive, even for government bureaucrats.

A subtler problem seems equally serious. Tomorrow’s expected high (or “hi”) is 34^o, while tomorrow night’s expected low (or “lo”) is 35^o. Is that mathematically possible? Surely a nightly low cannot be higher than the high in a directly adjacent day, either before or after? I don’t know when the official switchover from day to night is (sunset?), but if the temperature in the last minute of day is 34^o or less, can it really be 35^o or more in the first minute of night? If anything, we would expect a relatively sudden drop in temperature at sunset, but today’s forecast implies a sudden jump.

I would feel a lot more confident in estimating the chances that tomorrow will be a Snow Day if I thought I could trust the NWS website.

Ethnic Gourmet’s microwavable Pad Thai with Tofu would be quite tasty if they would remove the carrots, or at least figure out some way to keep them semi-crispy. As far as I’m concerned, mushy carrots make Pad Thai not worth eating, much less buying and eating.

D. A. West, in Horace Odes I: Carpe Diem, Oxford 1995, 6-7:

In Horace the tone is often elusive. Perhaps the nearest thing in English is the parody [of Odes 1.1] by Kipling in ‘A Diversity of Creatures’:

There are whose study is of smells,
    Who to attentive schools rehearse
How something mixed with something else
    Makes something worse.

Some cultivate in broths impure
    The clients of our body; these,
Increasing without Venus, cure
    Or cause disease.

Others the heated wheel extol,
    And all its offspring, whose concern
Is how to make it farthest roll
    And fastest turn.

Me, much incurious if the hour
    Present, or to be paid for, brings
Me to Brundisium by the power
    Of wheels or wings,

Me, in whose breast no flame has burned
    Life long, save that by Pindar lit,
Such lore leaves cold; nor have I turned
    Aside for it,

More than when, sunk in thought profound
    of what the unaltered Gods require,
My steward (friend but slave) brings round
    Logs for my fire.

Another British policeman (Pumphrey) interrogates the headmaster (Crumwallis) of a worse than mediocre private school:

‘Hmmmm’, said Pumphrey. ‘You seem to do a lot of classics.’

It was not the remark Mr. Crumwallis had been expecting, but he perked up, as he frequently did in interviews with parents, when an opportunity for fraudulent self-congratulation presented itself.

‘Yes, indeed’, he said. ‘We lay great stress on them. So sad to see their decline — their so rapid decline — in other schools, elsewhere. But if the private schools will not be custodians of the great classical tradition, who will be?’

Mike Pumphrey did not feel called upon to reply. He wondered whether, in view of the decline of classics elsewhere, classics teachers might not be in a state of glut upon the market, and therefore to be had cheap. He rather thought they might be. He looked cynically at Mr. Crumwallis, swelling with spurious pride.

(Robert Barnard, School for Murder, 1983, ch. 9)

A British policeman is looking for a millionaire at a posh hotel in Bradford:

It was called the Royal Edward, and for once it lived up to its name. The foyer was all white and gold and plush pink, with spotty mirrors in gilt frames; scattered around were pink and gold velvet sofas, on which one could imagine Royal Edward perching his ample frame, perhaps placing his hand on a not-unwilling knee the while, or pinching a bebustled bottom while whispering an assignation. Through the door to the left I caught a glimpse of an oak-panelled dining-room, where one could imagine him eating one of his piggish meals. It was all rather daunting — as if I’d strayed on to the set of one of those BBC historical serials for television.

(Robert Barnard, The Case of the Missing Brontë, 1983, ch. 8)

Was ‘bebustled’ an attempt to make it into the next revision of the OED?

Waking up at 4:20 in the morning singing (inaudibly, I hope) Travis Tritt’s “The Whisky Ain’t Workin’ Anymore”, just the one line, but with “Nyquil” substituted for “whisky”. If you’re awake at 4:20, it’s definitely not workin’.

I gather from various English novels read over the years that public-school boys routinely called each other by their last names (perhaps still do), and that brothers were called (e.g.) ‘Smith major’ and ‘Smith minor’. I’ve always wondered what they did for more complex cases. Specifically:

1. What if two unrelated boys had the same last name? Was the elder, or taller, ‘Major’ and the other ‘Minor’? I’ve taught as many as three unrelated Smiths in a class of 13 in Alabama.
2. What did they call three or more brothers? This must have come up now and then. When the third one arrived, were the first two renumbered ‘Smith primus’ and ‘Smith secundus’ and the third called ‘Smith tertius’, like ancient Roman daughters?
3. What did they do for twins, identical or fraternal? (When I was in graduate school, one of my friends had a pair of red-haired 5-year-old identical twin boys living next door. Since she couldn’t tell them apart and their names were Pat and Dan, she called them both ‘Pan’. They were as mischievous as their age, gender, and hair-color suggest, so it was a very suitable name.)
4. I assume at least some of these schools are now co-ed. Has that affected the question, or did the last-name rule go out before the girls arrived?

Do any of my readers happen to know the answer to these questions?

Sometimes bloggers miss the most obvious rhetorical opportunities. Jammie Wearing Fool writes a post entitled ‘Obama’s Useful Idiots Discovering They’re No Longer Useful’, and neither he, nor any of his first 16 commenters, nor InstaPundit, who links to it, makes the obvious joke: No Longer Useful, Still Idiots.

Belatedly wondering if anyone else had quoted Kenko’s proto-blogger manifesto, I did a Google search on “Kenko + blogger + Idleness + flatulence”. The first result of “about 93” was my own 11:57pm post, dated (timed?) “9 minutes ago”, which means that Google had it in their database approximately 25 minutes after I posted it. I would be less impressed if I had even 0.1% of (e.g.) InstaPundit’s traffic.

I’m not sure why my comments aren’t working, and why I can’t even use FTP. Until I can fix that, readers may contact me by e-mail at the following address, after carefully reversing it: gro.liveewrd@liveewrd.