On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Woah!! Photograph of the year 2016 by Bob Burton – Chief photographer of National Geographic / @NatGeo pic.twitter.com/ks5lqJwrde
— Paul Sewell (@paul_w2s) December 4, 2016
Open Thread
R-Jud
Pretty sure that shark is thinking “Gotta dance!”
Mary G
Appears to be a fake.
Time Travelin'
It’s a Shutterstock illustration
https://gizmodo.com/2016s-supposed-photo-of-the-year-is-a-big-fat-fake-1789669787
Patricia Kayden
@Mary G: That’s good to know. Otherwise it’s a metaphor for the nightmarish 4 years to come under Trump.
OzarkHillbilly
If it looks too good to be true…..
HeartlandLiberal
Well, all I can say is, we will not be renewing our subscription to National Geographic, for the first time in about 50 adult years. Thanks to acquisition by Rupert Murdoch. I cannot support it any longer. I expect the National Geographic will decline soon, and we will see increasing articles on why the polar bears love global warming, and how increases in CO2 are natural and good for plants.
Elizabelle
Looks like a shark encased in a frost curl.
Good morning, all.
satby
@Patricia Kayden: I was thinking that’s why it appealed to Richard.
Baud
@HeartlandLiberal: FWIW, the photo’s reference to Nat Geo is also fake. Click on the link at # 3 for more info.
Baud
@Elizabelle: Morning, EB.
Shantanu Saha
So does this mean in a Trump administration, the shark jumps you?
Schlemazel
@HeartlandLiberal:
Not to make you change your mind because I think you probably are correct – but – that fake is not National Geographic’s photo of the year. it is a twitter lie with the fake attached
rikyrah
Morning, Everyone????
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
Marmot
Yep, that’s 2016 jumping out of the water to bite us again!
Schlemazel
@rikyrah: @rikyrah:
so nice you said it twice!
Good morning to you & to all
Baud
@rikyrah: You traded a face for a “Good.” Morning, r.
Keith G
@HeartlandLiberal: Just wait. If you enjoy the current content and structures of the magazine, support it until you detect changes not to your liking.
Immanentize
@rikyrah: Wow. You added A “Good” today. Things are looking up! Although no smiling faces….?
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s probably Baud! 2020!
OzarkHillbilly
@Keith G: That’s where I am at.
Schlemazel
Heartland does make me think of something that bothered me at the time (but not enough to actually research) The NG magazine has always been an expensive product, quality photographs from expensive expeditions, high quality paper stock carefully printed and, because of the paper, an expensive piece to mail. Yet they never took large ads that would have defrayed the cost. I assumed they got foundation money to support it. Now they have their own TV network & that has to be making money (they have crappy “reality” shows just like every other channel now). So, what happened that they suddenly decided to sell their flagship to Satan? Their revenue should have been up, They could easily have added more advertising. WHat really happened?
Keith G
Ben Carson has just been announced as Trump’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary (nominee). Fun times ahead.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: After Trump! 2016! anything is possible.
Baud
@Keith G: At least he’s not a horse trainer.
satby
Good morning back atcha @rikyrah: and everyone else.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: It would be irresponsible not to speculate! ;-)
Keith G
@Baud: I’m hoping his appearance before the appropriate Senate panel will provide at least a few lighthearted moments.
Baud
@Keith G: “Jesus is my Undersecretary.”
satby
@Keith G: At this point I hold tightly to the thought that the professionals who will actually run these departments will be able to keep things going almost normally in spite of the incompetents PGiC is naming to head them. It’s got to really piss them off that none of these picks have one iota of experience (or interest) in these areas they will supposedly head.
Central Planning
I was woken up out of a nice sleep by the hotel fire alarm. Emergency exit leads to the patio of an outdoor bar with no easy exit
I hopped the fence and am now drinking shitty coffee at Panera. Good fucking morning!
Schlemazel
@Keith G:
Makes sense, the colored guy would know all things urban. Why else would Trump tap him for that job? Not his field of expertise, not his experience, nothing he has said recommends him for the job.
OzarkHillbilly
@Central Planning: Whadya expect for a Monday?
satby
@Schlemazel: exactly. Such an obvious racial insult that it’s stunning that Carson would accept it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: Did he not himself say he was unqualified for the job?
PsiFighter37
@Schlemazel: Hopefully Democrats point this out during his confirmation hearings.
I think Mattie as SecDef is the only semi-reasonable announcement that has been made re: the Cabinet, and that’s not really a great pick either.
sharl
@satby:
This speaks to a big concern of mine. The collection of grifters, wackaloons, and sycophants the PEOTUS is gathering around him (as predicted) is gonna make me miss the days when Cheney and his neocon pals introduced that reality distortion field that brought us our Glorious Iraq Adventure.™
Even if the bureaucracy is largely successful as a buffer against the worst impulses of this crowd, they won’t stop everything, and the damage likely to be incurred by (already flawed) bureaucratic institutions won’t help anyone. And since Big Orange and many of his top people are of the type who cannot fail, but can only be failed, the upper several layers of bureaucrats in the most visible agencies should keep their resumes updated and gather packing boxes.
Gvg
These “picks” change so frequently that I have been wondering who is announcing them as picks. In other words are all of them really from Trump? If this is the way he keeps acting none of them will be picks long enough to be confirmed and the simple appointments will be replaced so often that nothing will get done. The confirmations are going to be nonsensical.
I speculate that the reason he is picking so many that contradict his campaign rhetoric, is that he doesn’t actually know many people in multiple areas. Most semi competent people are avoiding him n won’t work for him. The only ones who will are very different from him but just as dumb IMO. These radical finance types are more numerous and broadly similar to each other and look like they will dominate his appointments. This would be a problem with anyone who is outside the previous mainstream of the parties and is something to keep in mind for the future.
Sunny Raines
Fake is the new reality
Baud
@Gvg: Most presidents rely on a team to recommend most picks.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gvg:
Occam’s Razor says he lied. He’s been doing that his entire life.
Baud
Where is AL?
satby
@Baud: probably sleeping, blissfully unaware that whatever she scheduled for this morning didn’t post.
Baud
@satby: I wish I were blissfully unaware.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I fear the worst. The Trump purges have begun.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: He who controls the morning thread controls the day.
sharl
Oh goody, they’re getting Dubya’s band back together: just heard Armstrong Williams on NPR, commenting on the Ben Carson nomination. Now there’s a guy who would be a good fit for an Administration like this; he has certainly made his bones, and beyond that has a rather curious history.
I wonder what other horrors are in NPR’s “Rolodex” of media contacts?
Brachiator
@Schlemazel:
from The Guardian
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Ya know, Bliss is here in town.
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
Baby steps
rikyrah
@Keith G:
Completely unqualified
Central Planning
@OzarkHillbilly: Not that. I’m back in my room, no alarm but the strobe is still going.
I put on CNN, and Chris Cuomo has Darrell Issa on. I know we all know it, but Issa is such a tool. He’s on board with the millions of fraudulent votes. Jesus, they just don’t stop talking. Cuomo finally gave up trying to correct him.
The appropriate response needs to be to cut Issa’s mic and put up some text that says “He’s lying” over his face. It’s nice to dream.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: Is that someone I should know if I were cool?
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
For any government job, actually.
rikyrah
@satby:
Stunned Carson would take it? Are you kidding me, with the ridiculous song and dance that he did during the campaign?
debbie
@sharl:
I heard that interview. I love when it was pointed out that Carson objects to anti-discrimination measures as “social engineering.” I wish the interviewer had asked Williams what exactly he thought segregation was.
Baud
@rikyrah: I’m stunned because I thought he’d be on the grifting circuit.
rikyrah
@sharl:
Williams is nothing but a grifter . Would not shock me if he told Carson to go for it because he already has a scam in the works to skim off that HUD money.???
OzarkHillbilly
Trivia of the day: I found this picture of a building in Taranto, the caption stated,
Taranto sounded familiar but being unable to place it, I googled it and went to the wiki page for this medium sized city on the the sole of the boot that is Italy where I read this:
Every now and again the internet is some kind of cool.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: No, but it’s interesting trivia. The last streetcar stop on the LA-Glendale line was called Bliss(corner of Brand and Mountain).
satby
@rikyrah: Well, I’m not really stunned by anything this craven pack of thieves would do I guess.
Betsy
@sharl: Back in the W days, my liberal friend had a bumpersticker that said “I Never Thought I’d Miss Nixon”.
I think we might be looking at a new bumpersticker …
Patricia Kayden
@Keith G: Ben is qualified because he grew up in urban America, or so he believes.
**rolls eyes**
rikyrah
@Central Planning:
I don’t tweet, but I wish someone who does would tweet him and ask why he didn’t call Issa a LIAR.
Hillary winning the popular vote by such a wide margin is absolutely justification for why the Democrats should never find “common ground”
Botsplainer
@HeartlandLiberal:
I made that decision last week, too.
Latest “regular” NatGeo had an article about the power of faith in healing, as well as a Putin/Russia tongue bath with happy ending by Julia Ioffe from Politico (her first contribution to NatGeo).
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: The small town of Times Beach MO was destroyed by a man named Russell Bliss. He was hired for dust control on the towns dirt roads during the 70’s and used dioxin laced waste oil for the job.
Kay
How’s our budding banana republic shaping up? I saw we found out Ivanka was cutting a merchandising deal with Japan about 20 minutes after her father was elected.
The sleazy Trump Family will smear shit on every government institution they brush up against. If someone doesn’t rein them in now it will never happen. It’s now or never, so I guess it’s “never”.
It will get worse. Much worse.
Patricia Kayden
@Central Planning: Issa came so close to losing his seat, if I recall correctly. He has a nerve to put himself out there as a paragon of virtue given his criminal past.
Baud
@Kay: No one of giving speeches for money, which is the worst thing ever, so that’s good.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: And no email server in the basement; there is no greater crime.
liberal
Interesting tweet on Trump and China
Turner Hedenkoff
The fact that the shark photo is a fake should make it an automatic finalist for 2016’s picture of the year.
liberal
@PsiFighter37: Best detailed critique I’ve seen on that one is from Daniel Larison over at the American Conservative.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: Trumps email server is covered in gold gilt and has a penthouse apartment all it’s own in Trump Tower.
Kay
@Baud:
If they’re not reining them in now they won’t be reining them in later.
The new norm is the President’s family lobbies world leaders on behalf of the family business. That’s now acceptable.
It’s actually worse than I thought it would be. They’re falling in line so fast! The truth is our institutions were really weak if they’ve crumbled this fast. They were rotted out. We just didn’t know it until they all failed at the same time.
It’s sad to watch.
Botsplainer
@Kay:
I’m pretty sure the Standing Rock Army COE decision is not a done deal. Trump can undo it, through the force of will.
I was looking at our cheery Christmas decorations this morning (many made in China, natch-an irony missed by many pro-Christmas warriors who hate China), and I found myself wondering what I’ll do if/when North America gets EMPed by angry people. Do I harbor futile hope, holding out and conserving diminishing food resources for a return to normality while being unable to go more than several miles on foot, or do I have a blowout drunken cookout and set of remembrances that ends with a bang?
I wouldn’t want to live in a world that would be after the bright flashes.
debbie
@Botsplainer:
If he has any sense (yeah, I know), he’ll be mindful of the optics of those vets standing against the pipeline.
Baud
@debbie: As raven pointed out, vets overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
debbie
Kay:
Kay, they’ve reported this morning about backlash against Borges as the head of the Ohio GOP. If he’s tossed for a Trump-supporting RWNJ, do you think there will be a chance for the Dems to come back?
Baud
@Kay: They can rein him in later but not before much damage is done.
debbie
@Baud:
Not these guys.
Baud
@debbie: Doesn’t matter.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer: I am just going to quietly disappear from the universe.
hedgehog mobile
Is anyone else reminded of the scene in Blazing Saddles where Hedley Lamarr is picking his posse? I think the thing is using that as the model to pick its cabinet.
Baud
@hedgehog mobile: Good analogy.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: That was my original plan.
p.a.
@OzarkHillbilly: Battle of Taranto a sign of things to come.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I can not imagine why anyone would want to stick around.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: I’d stick around if I could do it on my terms. But I can’t, so that’s that.
albertZ
Next you’re going to tell me THIS is fake too.
Jeffro
@Keith G:
Makes sense…Banno…er, excuse me, Trump nominated someone with no experience with public schools (didn’t attend; kids don’t attend; never taught) as Secretary of Ed, why wouldn’t he nominate a retired neurosurgeon to head Housing and Urban Development?
This is why I sometimes refer to him as Donald Arsonist. He, guided by Bannon, truly does just want to burn it all down.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: The only reason I can come up with is my wife and our children, with emphasis on my wife. Our children are going to have to make do with out us sooner or later anyway.
Kay
@Botsplainer:
I think people should prepare- not for some dramatic implosion but for real degradation. You know the drill-pay down debt, limit risk, look for escape routes. Just prepare for bad times. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. It looks bad to me- I thought “standards” would put up more of a fight, frankly.
My husband asked me this morning about the DC/pizza parlor conspiracy theory and I was impatient with him. I feel as if people don’t have time to focus on the sideshows that will happen during The Great Collapse. I mean that sincerely- they have to focus. This is going to get very bad very fast because it will speed up as it collapses. They have to drop extraneous bullshit. Jettison. Travel light.
OzarkHillbilly
@albertZ: No, that’s totally authentic. A real man’s man like Putin would never fake anything.
Richard Mayhew
@PsiFighter37: I would say Haley as UN Ambassador is perfectly plausible for a third tier of importance position. The proposed head of CMS is also perfectly plausible. Mattis makes enough sense but yeah, I am expecting epic clusterfucks as we’re going to get a government led by the Brietbart Comment Section All-Stars
Jeffro
@Richard Mayhew:
Have you copyrighted that yet? You should, unfortunately…
Another Scott
@Schlemazel: I was a subscriber for decades and gave gift subscriptions, but dropped them about 10 years ago. They had 10s of millions of members at one point, IIRC, so they really could break even with a $12-19/yr subscription (and I’m sure Canon paid a pretty penny for their ads in it).
I finally gave up on them because they wouldn’t quit sending me thick letters every couple of weeks asking me to renew starting in, what, March? I think they even had return postage on the envelopes. They were wasting a mountain of money and wouldn’t quit, even after I wrote them a letter. (Not surprising, but still).
Getting tied up with Murdoch is disappointing, and IIRC they say that they’re still independent editorially, but the TV show has been going off the rails into fake science and the like for a while. (Though they did do a great job with the Cosmos reboot.)
Such is life.
Cheers,
Scott.
Botsplainer
@Kay:
That bit about those goons that decided to intimidate the UNITE sign-making event in NKY by going in strapped and taking photos hit me in a way I didn’t expect – youngest daughter is involved in a number of those types of activist groups, and I’m sure some Nazi assholes are going to be targeting her pretty shortly.
I don’t feel like she’s safe in Cincinnati.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: And is running Windows Me, because it’s always about “Me” with Donnie…
Cheers,
Scott.
hedgehog mobile
@Baud: Thanks!
Kay
@Botsplainer:
Activists will have to be much tougher so there will be fewer of them and there really is safety in numbers so it will be riskier. It isn’t static, right? It’s chaos so there are downstream effects and they compound risk.
I can’t function in fact-free climate. I just can no longer deal with things like the Pizza Parlor Conspiracy. People will have to create a kind of fact-based microclimate. locally. That might be interesting.
Kay
@Botsplainer:
There isn’t going to be some national announcement from media or anywhere else that this is officially a shit-show and rolling downhill fast. They would rather fucking die than drop the sophisticated observers pose. People will have to recognize it when they see it.
Kay
@Botsplainer:
Scary stuff. They’ll be running things after the 20th and it’s one Party rule- no real dissent.
Regular people should prepare.
Botsplainer
@Kay: @Kay:
Scales have sure in hell fallen from my eyes about the actual levels of goodwill employed by American flavored Christians and the WWC.
rikyrah
UH HUH
UH HUH
From Reuters:
Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.
Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.
The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership – a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.
The tribes have rights to use the land, but they do not own it. They can drill it and reap the profits, but only under regulations that are far more burdensome than those applied to private property.
“We should take tribal land away from public treatment,” said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican U.S. Representative from Oklahoma and a Cherokee tribe member who is co-chairing Trump’s Native American Affairs Coalition. “As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country.
Elizabelle
Shark done gone. Not at top of blogpost; not found, I am told.
@Kay: Yeah. That’s sickening. The pizza fake news is rotten fruit of the Wikileaks dump, and believing it is probably some sign of how off the rails one is.
Lucky no one was killed. So far.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
It’s too early in the morning to try and wrap my head around this.
P.S. Morning, Rikyrah ?
Major Major Major Major
Good morning.
In my news feed I saw an article about how the senate dems are planning to make things really annoying for Trump by obstructing high- and low-level executive nominees (good!) with the not only stupid but dangerous headline “Democrats to give Trump Cabinet picks the Garland treatment.”
And I’m upset about that and I figured you guys would understand.
mkro
In the future, alien archeologists will label The Internet as the first real extinction event of our human race. We are completely blurring the lines between fiction and fact. Our education and media institutions are not strong enough to fight against this tide of misinformation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/pizzagate-comet-ping-pong-edgar-maddison-welch.htm
http://www.thepatriotherald.com/single-post/2016/12/04/Fake-News-Can-Cost-Lives
Botsplainer
I’m in my favorite coffeeshop across the street from my office, and some fucking dipshit in the vicinity of 40 years old is sitting their reading his fairytale book of lies (aka The Bible, that collection of the oral myths of semiliterate Bronze Age goatherds).
Literally every customer is giving him a glare and wide berth.
Major Major Major Major
@mkro: Yes yes, never before have we seen disruptive information technology
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
QFT. I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how central this is to the fact that our democracy is flat-lining. Such far-reaching consequences for such an absurd and pathetic factor.
mkro
@Major Major Major Major: “Disruptive Information Technology” ?? The kind that leads people to put Donald Trump in charge of the country and to storm a pizza shop with rifles? You put that on the same level as, say, spreadsheets ??
Major Major Major Major
@mkro: I’d put it more up there with ‘widespread literacy’–also an information technology–but the notion that it’s an extinction-level event is absurd.
GregB
@Kay:
Remember Al Gore talked about digital brownshirts, maybe digital redhats instead.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer: Why would merely reading the bible bother anybody?
Botsplainer
@Betty Cracker:
Kay is very correct about the rate at which institutions are failing.
We had partial failures during Bush (I’d argue that the elevation of Flynn appears to have been one of those), but there were some core competencies which remained. The big failures for me were FEMA, the Schiavo bit, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and Mahmoudiya.
To the plus side on Bush, I would say that some ideologues with agendas that came from the lobby side held at least basic knowledge of the tasks they took on as cabinet secretaries and deputies.
Trump is flipping this by hiring people who aren’t even familiar with the subject briefs of the departments they’ll be leading. People like Carson and Chao will be incapable of doing anything but failing in the “nuts and bolts” departments, all while Sessions, Bannon and whatever psycho he appoints to DHS work the real harm.
There are no Murrows, Cronkites, Sevareids or Schorrs in the MSM anymore, and if any want to rise, they’ll get crushed.
We are truly fucked.
Botsplainer
@OzarkHillbilly:
Because it is showy and weird, particularly for someone in this place and at his age.
It isn’t as if there’s any actual wisdom or new nugget that it could impart.
Major Major Major Major
@Botsplainer: what’s wrong with Chao? She’ll be perfectly capable of running a competently managed republican DoT.
ETA: @Botsplainer: you don’t know that. Christ, let the man read a book.
Iowa Old Lady
@Botsplainer: Bush destabilized the Middle-East by getting rid of Saddam. There was a reason his father didn’t press on to Baghdad. We see the results. I fear Trump is doing the same thing with China.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer: There is plenty of wisdom in the bible, even a hard core atheist such as myself can attest to that. As far as showy and weird, reading the bible in public pales in comparison to reading Ulysses in public and some people make a great show of doing that at least once a year.
Seth Owen
@Botsplainer: Actually there is plenty of wisdom in it, but the intolerance of your remarks is disturbing. If you substituted the word ‘Quran’ for ‘Bible’ how does it sound?
Это курам на смех
@Baud: Helluvajob Brownie was not a horse trainer, which takes real skill. He headed an Arabian horse trade association but was kicked out for ethics violations (which characterized his career as a lawyer in general). Ben Carson is probably not as corrupt, if just as inept. That’s good, right?
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@OzarkHillbilly:
James Joyce’s unreadable doorstop or the original?
Major Major Major Major
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Joyce, I’d imagine, unless there’s a day where people wander around the Aegean Sea every year I didn’t know about.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Joyce’s, of course, and the worldwide celebration of it known as Bloomsday. :-)
Hal
There’s a great irony in a man who regularly complains about government hand outs and people working for, and earning their success being nominated for a government job he is completely unqualified for and is only getting because of his connections.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Seth Owen:
I’m OK with being intolerant of the American flavor of Christianity. I spent so much of my lifetime marinating in it, I feel as if I’m drowning in it. I even claimed it as my own for a time.
In this city, there are ways to withdraw from the Bible culture of the exurbs and greater surrounding ruralities, primarily through choosing where you do business (and in particular, where you eat and drink). This particular coffeeshop was one of those oases.
The “Bible Reading Show” in secular public places is a totem of sorts. It is partially about networking and partially about outreach.
Ajabu
@Schlemazel:
We have to remember that at one point in his childhood Ben Carson & his single mom lived in public housing so he’s totally qualified.
And, I pay taxes every year so I should be in charge of the IRS.
QED, mofos.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@OzarkHillbilly:
I once despised a literature professor for foisting that on us. If it weren’t for the hot blonde that sat across a row from me, I’d have dropped or withdrawn.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: I tried reading it twice. I’m still working on the 3rd attempt…. which consists of reading the spine and saying, “Naaahh, not today.”
Major Major Major Major
@Ajabu: did they live with his buddy Jesus too? Talk about cramped!
Ajabu
@Major Major Major Major:
Yes, but when they were there he pronounced it Hay-Soos.
Gotta be ethnic in the projects.
Brachiator
@Kay:
But at least the shit smear will be gold plated.
I didn’t watch “60 Minutes,” but one of the episodes supposedly featured Paul Ryan talking about how well he and Trump were getting along.
The GOP leadership could have stopped this mess at any number of points. But now their eyes are sparkling with the opportunity that it presents.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: I really wanna see how Trump is gonna fuck Ryan over.
Brachiator
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Good to see that Joyce’s little gem still frightens off some folks. Can’t imagine how you would deal with “Finnegans Wake.”
An Irish Catholic co-worker from a Pennsylvania steel town decided on a whim to check the novel out. He loved it and found that for him some of it worked best when he read it out loud.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Reading the Bible was one of the things that convinced me I was not a Christian. I recommend it for anyone who’s curious–the stark differences between what it actually says in there and what people are told it says are instructive.
But I see your point about public Bible-reading as a performance.
Brachiator
@HeartlandLiberal:
Crap!! I didn’t know that Murdoch had acquired it.