Sunday, January 23, 2022

At the Snowfall Cafรฉ...

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... you can write about whatever you want. 

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"What's Up With The Ignorant Tattoo Style?"

I learned a lot from this fascinating video:

 

I became aware of this phenomenon yesterday, when I saw this and this at the subreddit r/shittytattoos.

Here's video of the "[c]reator of the famed Ignorant Style tattoo style, Fuzi... a street art legend."

And here's an Instagram collection of Ignorant Style tattoos.

I'm pretty amused by the concept and, especially, the name — though I think most examples of this sort of thing are a mistake. Many years ago, probably in the 1990s, I saw a young woman on campus that had a tattoo of a bathtub on her neck. Just a dark line drawing of an old-time claw-footed bathtub with the pipe extending upward for the shower head. I felt so bad about it. And I love bathtubs. But now I can see that it was an early example of the Ignorant Style!

ADDED: Back in 2009, I blogged about a tattoo artist that did things that he might characterize as Ignorant Style. It's at least adjacent to Ignorant Style. I said "I love these scribbly tattoos!" You can see a lot of his things at Instagram, here.

"Could we have had a more unsuitable man in charge? Sloppy, lusty, blind to details..."

"... just look at the piteous footage of Boris Johnson as he apologised to the Queen last week, nearly weeping, entirely out of self-pity. Nobody, he moaned, told him the massive party he had personally attended was 'against the rules.' If it wasn’t a 'work event,' he said, he couldn’t 'imagine why on earth it would have gone ahead.' I can tell him why: it went ahead because no one at Downing Street ever gave a toss about the rules. Not a single one of the scores of entitled, cashmere-hoodie-toting Tinder-swiping gin-in-a-tin-chugging junior staffers who flocked to the basement disco gimpfest the night before Prince Philip’s funeral gave a second thought about what was happening in the rest of the country. It says everything that even when Johnson came out of hospital, one of the earliest things he did wasn’t to tell Carrie to tone down the fire-pit heart-to-hearts; he went to what one MP described as a 'welcome back' party in his garden. He ignored Covid and nearly died from it but came back and still ignored it and licked everything. Who does that?"

From "Keeping up with the Johnsons is exhausting — life is lived at 10,000 miles a minute" by Camilla Long (London Times).

I do enjoy reading The London Times. The writing is different from what we get here in America. Apparently, in the U.K., a classy paper will print the word "gimpfest." And every other sentence makes me want to diagram.

"To celebrate his birthday, he had also brought along his mandolin, foie gras and champagne...."

From "French adventurer, 75, dies in attempt to row across the Atlantic/Jean-Jacques Savin, a former paratrooper, wanted ‘to laugh at old age’ but got into difficulties off the Azores" (The Guardian).

I don't much celebrate birthdays — do you? — but I don't think I'd even consider celebrating my birthday while alone, and if I did, I might come up with the idea of champagne and some special food, but not of picking up a musical instrument and serenading myself. 

It's so charming — don't you think? — that mandolin, foie gras, and champagne. I look to see — when was his birthday? Did he get to that birthday before the deathday popped up in the timeline of fate? Yes, he did. His birthday was January 14th. He died on the 21st.

"Some senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it."

"Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming. Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological. Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy."

Writes Robert Reich in "Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts" (The Guardian). 

Is it "whacky" or "wacky"? The author of "Common Errors in English Usage" says:

Although the original spelling of this word meaning “crazy” was “whacky,” the current dominant spelling is “wacky.” If you use the older form, some readers will think you’ve made a spelling error.

But the OED has the oldest example as "wacky," in 1935, though "whacky" also appears early on, in 1938. "Wacky" looks predominant, but "whacky" is also good. Still, a "whack" is a hard hit, so you might think about whether you want that image infecting the meaning which is just "Crazy, mad; odd, peculiar." 

The OED tips me off that "wackier" appears in John Irving's "World According to Garp." I'm printing it here because to me it's much more interesting than Reich's going on about the mental aberrations of Sinema and Manchin:

There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed [spoiler deleted] by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King, and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader. And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.

I like the phrase "drive [them] even wackier or simply away." There must be a Greek word for that structure, the intentional and surprising lack of parallelism ("wackier" being an adjective and "away" an adverb).

"Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools."

The ACLU tweets, quoted in "The ACLU Suddenly Reverses Its Support For Transparency/The long-time civil liberties organization continues its partisan transformation" (Inquire).

The ACLU tweet links to this NBC News article, "They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.' Conservative activists want schools to post lesson plans online, but free speech advocates warn such policies could lead to more censorship in K-12 schools." From that article: 

[T]eachers, their unions and free speech advocates say the proposals would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and would lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism....

“It’s important we call this out,” said Jon Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America, a nonprofit group that promotes free speech. “It’s a shift toward more neutral-sounding language, but it’s something that is potentially just as censorious.”