Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Major Major began writing at Balloon Juice in 2018.
Looks like we could use an open thread; here’s a prompt: what are some songs that you like to listen to on New Year’s Eve or Day? I’ll start.
This Year by The Mountain Goats:
Kings by Steely Dan:
Discuss.
I Am Gonna Make It Through This Year If It Kills Me (open thread)Post + Comments (61)
My family does presents and the big dinner on Christmas Eve, so today we did the traditional Czech goose/dumplings/kraut meal my grandma always used to cook. All went well. Present-wise, I got socks and a new set of Switch controllers. And throughout it all, we were accompanied by my mom’s very good boy, Bear.
As a result of the Christmas Eve preëminence, I often travel on Christmas, and indeed, I’m heading back home to NY tomorrow (I almost typed SF just then!). But perhaps some of you are staying up late waiting for/being Santa, so I figured we could use an overnight open thread. Hope your Christmas Eve was as Bear-y as mine!
The nice thing about solar holidays is that there are so very many global traditions around them. I recently stumbled upon a picture book about some such customs. It’s not quite new, but I’d certainly never seen some of these before!
The Bizarre, Eye-Popping Costumes of Europe’s Wild Men
Every winter, something strange happens in the snowy mountain communities across Europe. Between December and Easter, tiny villages spanning all the way from Romania to Portugal become overrun with humans who shed their human form completely. Dressed like bears, goats, stags and monsters, the people of the village jump, shout and reenact wild hunts as part of the annual festivals that celebrate the winter solstice and beginning of spring.
Over the course of two winters, France-based photographer Charles Fréger visited 19 countries and more than 50 villages to document these strangely dressed animals.
The photos, which are available on Fréger’s website, show an impressive diversity of costumes and characters. So as you make your way through the longest night of the year, be thankful–or sad?–that you are (probably) not having to sit next to one of these things.
Both pictures copyright Charles Fréger.
Open thread!
Many of us suffer occasional bouts of imposter syndrome*. Michelle Obama is one of our number.
Former first lady Michelle Obama confessed she still suffered from “imposter syndrome,” even as her memoir, Becoming, broke sales records last month and became the year’s best-selling book 15 days after it was published.
[…] Asked at the event how Obama felt about being seen as a “symbol of hope,” she said: “I still have a little imposter syndrome, it never goes away, that you’re actually listening to me,” according to the BBC.“It doesn’t go away, that feeling that you shouldn’t take me that seriously. What do I know?”
When I’m dealing with this, I’ll think on past successes, or remind myself of times when I’ve succeeded by soldiering on. Sometimes, yes, I’ll think about the ways I’m more capable than others. Mrs. Obama has a much better tool for this than I do.
But Obama offered a “secret” to young women everywhere: “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of, I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the U.N.: They are not that smart.“
I’m going to assume she’s using an absolute scale and not a relative scale (it is hard to be smarter than her, after all). And that does make me feel better about myself… but maybe not about like, the world?
In unrelated news, here’s something interesting from the world of data mining.
A Cure for Your Imposter Syndrome (Open Thread)Post + Comments (85)
I found pictorial representation of how I feel several times a day, having started a new job, and moved to a new city, that feel far above my station.
I shouldn’t say too much about work, but everything you’ve seen on Silicon Valley is true. Folks seem to have collectively decided work was over around four. Now my remaining coworkers are drinking old-fashioneds, playing shuffleboard, doing puzzles… we apparently have a guitar in the office, as somebody is practicing it.
We are, literally, trying to finish off the week’s avocado delivery.
And so I’m accessing Balloon-Juice for I think the first time on the office network. Hi! I’m going upstate to see Samwise this weekend. There will be pictures.
Do any of y’all have anything fun planned?
My mom always said “wave bye-bye to Denver!” when we’d leave town, when I was a kid. (She still does, but winkingly.) I’m here at the airport, ready to wave bye-bye to San Francisco. So long, old frenemy. It’s been real. But I have to go make different mistakes elsewhere now.
Open thread! Anybody else got anything fun planned, now that our collective crippling anxiety is slightly less crippling?
Looks like we could use an overnight thread. Possible discussion topic: Which picture of this cat better represents your feelings about the season?
Who’s ready to twickOtweet wif ze kitty devil for Meowlloween????? #CatsOfTwitter #cats_of_instagram #catsagram #FridayFeeling #catdevil #Halloween #FlashbackFriday #9gag #animalsofinstagram #BuzzFeed #cat_features pic.twitter.com/mh0Jnv3BsS
— TarsuszeExotic (@TarsuszeExotic) October 19, 2018
FBF to when I was a scared wittle bebe before Meowlloween??? pic.twitter.com/VltBiBBMar
— TarsuszeExotic (@TarsuszeExotic) October 12, 2018
I think I’m right about 50/50, actually.
Hello and welcome to Recommended Reading, the feature where we talk about books! In honor of October, and the impending election, I would like to recommend a book about clawing your way out of Hell to exact revenge on the people who sent you there: Sandman Slim (Sandman Slim #1), by San Fransiscan Richard Kadrey.
It tells the story of Stark, a sorcerer brut and member of Southern California’s hidden, magically-attuned society. His erstwhile friends banish him to Hell, and after ten years of gladiatorial combat, he murders his way out seeking vengeance.
But he wonders: are Los Angeles, and this mission, really all that different from his last decade?
It’s a bloody good read, with some of the best hard-boiled imagery that I’ve ever come across.
When I was Downtown, I learned a lot about making threats. Make them big. Make them outrageous. You’re never going to kick someone’s ass. You’re going to pull out their tongue and pour liquid nitrogen down their throat, chip out their guts with an ice pick, slide in a pane of glass, and turn them into an aquarium.
Oh, and there’s loads of old movie references, if that’s your thing. (More quotes, the kind that might make even certain commenters blush, can be found at Goodreads.)
I’m usually loath to recommend the first book in a series, but it works as a standalone. Four out of five stars, seasonally appropriate. Content warning, extreme violence and Satanism.
What are some of your favorite pieces of revenge porn? What else have you been reading? I’m on book 1.5 of Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy.
As always, if you’re going to buy anything, go through the Balloon-Juice Amazon Affiliate link (or support your local bookstore)!
Recommended Reading #3: Revenge, Served SatanicPost + Comments (45)
This silly guy will be flying (in the cabin) soon.
I need to get him a carrier. I don’t know anything about this. Help! The airline requirements are:
For pets traveling in the cabin, hard-sided carriers must have maximum dimensions of 17″ x 11″ x 7.5″ (43 cm x 28 cm x 19 cm) and soft-sided carriers must not exceed 17″ x 11″ x 9.5″ (43 cm x 28 cm x 48 cm). They must be leak-proof, have adequate ventilation, and be lined with absorbent bedding.
What brands do people like? Thoughts on hard/soft? I want to get him a soft one? I think he’ll like it better.
Also, people who’ve flown with cats before: anything I should ask for from the vet, other than the usual gabapentin/diphenhydramine/whatever sleepytime drugs?
Lastly, open thread!
Yesterday, there were some polls–from NPR/Marist, NBC/WSJ, and Gallup–that had some folks here concerned. According to their data, over the last week, GOP approval has increased, as has GOP voter enthusiasm, to the point where both measures roughly equal the numbers for Democrats. These are real numbers, worthy of the same consideration we give any trend-busting single data points, namely, some, and with cautious skepticism.
They also aren’t the only polls in the world. Nate Silver has a good piece walking us through the bigger picture.
From a 35,000-foot view, the story in the generic ballot numbers is largely one of stability.1[…] Trump’s approval ratings have largely followed the same trajectory as the generic ballot, having slumped in early-to-mid September and since rebounded slightly. It’s not clear how much of that is Kavanaugh-related, however, as the president was dealing with a lot of other news in August and early September[…] Merely staying out of the headlines while Kavanaugh was the lead story may have helped Trump’s numbers revert to the mean.
The 538 model’s numbers are also largely unchanged, except in the Senate, where Republican chances have improved somewhat. This is based largely on new polls on Heitkamp’s re-election bid in North Dakota. Who knows why! That’s not what the polls measure!
Is the enthusiasm gap closing? Maybe a little?
But one hint comes from polls that publish both registered- and likely-voter results; the difference between these numbers is a good measure of the enthusiasm gap or turnout gap. Currently, we’re showing that likely voter polls are only about 0.4 percentage better for Republicans than registered-voter polls. That’s much smaller than the typical gap between likely- and registered-voter polls, which usually favors Republicans by anywhere from 1 to 6 percentage points in midterm years[…] It is, however, slightly improved for Republicans from the numbers we were seeing earlier this year, when there wasn’t any gap at all.
If it is closing, then by this measure, it’s not doing so by a lot. Certainly it’s not reverting to a normal year.
Overall, I’m inclined to conclude there’s actually something there for Republicans — that their position has genuinely improved from where it was a week ago (although, not necessarily as compared to where it was a monthago). But[…] it wouldn’t take much — a couple of good generic ballot polls for Democrats, plus a handful of good state-level results in places like North Dakota — to reverse the GOP gains in our forecast. There is truth in the idea that Republicans have had a decent week of polling, but it can also be exaggerated by cherry-picking data that’s consistent with a particular narrative.
In short:
…vote!
Tonight on Balloon-Juice After Dark: Strong women!
The Many Faces of Women Who Identify as Witches
The witch is often understood as a mishmash of sometimes contradictory clichés: sexually forthright but psychologically mysterious; threatening and haggish but irresistibly seductive; a kooky believer in cultish mumbo-jumbo and a canny she-devil; a sophisticated holder of arcane spiritual knowledge and a corporeal being who is no thought and all instinct. Even more recently, the witch has entered the Zeitgeist as a figure akin to the so-called nasty woman, who—in the face of a Presidential Administration that is quick to cast any criticism as a “witch hunt”—has reclaimed the term for the feminist resistance[…] The muddled stereotypes that surround witches nowadays are, in the end, not so very different from those used to define that perennial problem: woman.
In her portrait series “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” which will be shown at the ClampArt gallery, in Chelsea, beginning October 4th, the photographer Frances F. Denny seeks to explore the figure of the contemporary witch beyond the cultural chestnuts that have shrouded and obscured it. In the course of the past two years, Denny, who holds an M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (where I taught her for a semester a number of years ago), has travelled in California, Louisiana, and along the East Coast, taking the portraits of dozens of women who identify as witches.
It’s a photo feature, so click through and take a look. I’d include a sample here but I’m too tired to remember how copyright works.
Open thread!
Updated because I remembered this:
I've never wished so hard that Alyssa Milano was a real witch. pic.twitter.com/Oqaw7210eq
— Meredith B. Kile (@em_bee_kay) September 27, 2018
Unlike some people, I actually did just quit my job. As I stepped out to clear my head, what did I see but majestic deer and scampering lizards on a beautiful Bay Area September day?
How’s your Monday going?
Or don’t; it’s up to you! But here’s a place to stretch out and relax, and maybe talk about something other than Judge Rapey McShitweasel, or the deep state conspiracy to keep Trump from incriminating himself/destroying an active investigation.
In other words, let’s try to be like Samwise.
Open thread!
And now, for some completely different things…
Thing the first: The Times ran, I kid you not, a delightful obituary yesterday.
Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94
Alan Abel, a professional hoaxer who for more than half a century gleefully hoodwinked the American public — not least of all by making himself the subject of an earnest news obituary in The New York Times in 1980 — apparently actually did die, on Friday, at his home in Southbury, Conn. He was 94.
I wonder how long they’d been working on that headline and lede?
Long before The Onion began printing farcical news articles[…] there was Alan Abel. A former jazz drummer and stand-up comic who was later a writer, campus lecturer and filmmaker, Mr. Abel was best known as a perennial public gadfly, a self-appointed calling that combined the verbal pyrotechnics of a 19th-century flimflam man with acute 20th-century media savvy.
He was, the news media conceded with a kind of irritated admiration, an American original in the mold of P. T. Barnum, a role model whom Mr. Abel reverently acknowledged.
Today, in the internet age, anyone can be a Nigerian prince. In Mr. Abel’s time, however, the hoaxer’s art — involving intricate planning, hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.
I recommend reading the whole thing. It’s an engagingly-written look back on an interesting man’s life.
Thing the second, I made a sign-up form for the Minecraft whitelist, so, if that’s for you, yay.
What’s everybody doing to unwind tonight? I might watch teevee or keep working on that Vinge book.
On a Lighter Note, Check Out This ObituaryPost + Comments (36)
Julia Salazar is one of the latest young, Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated insurgents to defeat an establishment Democrat in a primary. She is also my potential future state senator, as that primary was in New York Senate District 18. Also too, she is a bizarre serial fabulist.
The New York Post condemned her personal story — a big part of her appeal — as “wildly exaggerated.” Salazar has said she immigrated from Colombia when she was, in fact, born in Florida; asserted a “working-class background” that her brother strongly denied, offering photos of the family’s four-bedroom riverfront house; said she went to work at 14 to “make ends meet,” which her mother contradicted; implied her mother hadn’t gone to college when her mother got a degree when Salazar was 8 years old; asserted a very confused timeline about her conversion to Judaism; and claimed Jewish ancestry nobody could verify.
Eve Fairbanks at Buzzfeed has an article up about what she sees as a generational issue: Well-Off Millennials Are All Julia Salazar. I Wish We Weren’t.
Rolling Stone seemed baffled to have to report last night that “the constituents of District 18 were apparently untroubled” by that. But I wonder if the supporters — certainly the young, mostly white, recent college graduates who flooded her victory party — didn’t recognize, at least subconsciously, that this kind of thing is just way more common than we’d like to admit.
The article limns something I’ve seen a lot of.
I’ve described my paternal grandfather as a man who “grilled armadillo roadkill” to suggest he was a Southern hick, and it’s true he liked armadillo and at least occasionally foraged killed ones — but he was also the head of the archaeology department at the University of Florida. I’ve told people my maternal grandmother is an illegal immigrant who came to America illegally, alone on a boat from Poland, like an orphan Fievel the Mouse, conjuring hardscrabble images of tenement life, not mentioning that she married into a wealthy family.
I suppose I’ve lightly participated in this myself. “Did you know my mom grew up poor on a family farm?” I sometimes say, bristling at claims that we’re anything other than very recently well-to-do. It’s not unbelievable if you meet her–she’s an often-foul-mouthed animal lover who likes to shoot guns. But just looking at her C.V., you might have a hard time seeing it, other than the decidedly non-elite education. However, I am a creature of privilege. What’s important is that I don’t cover myself with her history, or use it to claim imaginary oppression. (Lord knows I have enough actual problems anyway.)
I’ve also observed the true cliche that nobody seems to have gone to Harvard or Stanford, but rather “college in Boston/the Bay Area.”
I will say that there is significant social pressure, at least among some Millennial groups, to just shut up about fixing oppression if you’re privileged. (I encounter this mostly on social media and rarely in person, so it could be an Online Mean Girls issue.) That doesn’t excuse lying, but it may explain the prevalence of this particular lie. On the flip side, there really is a problem with the most vocal ‘socialists’/’leftists’ being the ones with the least skin in the game–I’m looking at you, Chapo Trap House. (I’m actually not, because I find looking at them unpleasant.)
Anyway, thought y’all might enjoy the (hate)-read. I will now be re-enabling my Millennials-to-Snake-People browser plugin.
Onwards to more pressing issues: The Minecraft server is up! It’s at 108.170.20.186:55045, and if you leave your username (not email) in the comments, I can whitelist you. It’s running Spigot with a land-claims plugin on easy. This IP will eventually be DNS’d to a balloon-juice subdomain, but I’m still working out the kinks.
Non-sports open thread!
Cosplay Socialists Open Thread (+Minecraft address!)Post + Comments (84)