During commercial breaks at the Olympics viewing parties I’ve been at in the past week, one company’s ads have consistently sent the room into a round of existential questions. What is reality? Aren’t we all actors? Just how excited can a normal person get about J.D. Power awards?
As The News Wheel reported in 2015, some of the “real people” were actors by profession, a fact explained away by a GM representative who claimed this was just because they scouted for people in LA. Struggling actors who know that faking enthusiasm could yield a better paycheck could explain this.
Phew, that was a close one!
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And every actor surely knows Shakespeare, no? Jaques, in As You Like It? All the world’s a stage? In the Globe Theatre, motto: All the world enacts a play?
But forget Shakespeare and the more things in heaven and earth than are dremed of in his existential philosophy — I think I know what the Chevy ads boil down to:
[ by Charles Cameron — the Q-snake almost bites itself, but it’s tail trails, here, look-see ]
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If I was someone who flies the Gadsden flag, I might not be happy to see its Q variant. Fror myself, however, it;’s the fact that the Q Gadsden variant is pretty damn close to an ouroboros — Don’t Bite Myself? — that catches my attention, hence this DoubleQuote:
As someone on Ari Melber‘s The Beat said two days ago: Q is a member of the Deep State within the Deep State..
[ by Charles Cameron — this is / was all written on 29th (“today”), but has been tidied up before posting late today, really a rich day! ]
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Today has been a rich day for me for language, and I’d like to share some of what I’ve found. I’ll use a series of my own tweets for this purpose, since the tweets include both the particular phrases or sentences that caught my eye, and links and images I’d otherwise have to fish for, giving you an idea of the articles themselves in which I found the items of interest..
This one’s pretty fabulous, with plants living inside animals — I suppose we are fauna with flora inside us too, though, but the coral instance really hit home:
"Her professor explained that corals, which are tiny animals, had even tinier plants living inside their cells" https://t.co/4wLox4ARJ6 Ah, the this inside that of it!! Bravo or brava as the case may be..
That was the first one that really delighted me, this one cinched (clenched?) the deal:
The stately bird ignores Crowe, reshuffles her storm-cloud-gray wings, and snakes her head gracefully to the ground, looking for something tasty to eat. https://t.co/y8H2Fl2pRe a bird "snakes" its neck, eh?
The bird snaking (its neck), which caught my eye as a companion to the coral (animal) planting (inside its cells), I noted in the tweet, making these two taken together a DoubleTweet. What I didn’t mention was the positively Homeric echo in “reshuffles her storm-cloud-gray wings”..
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which leads me inevitably to my other Homeric finds today, with both the Odyssey:
"Odyssey had long since stripped the boat of documents and equipment that could provide clues to the identity or location of the Black Swan. " https://t.co/0Z3CBAGZJK Odyssey! Black Swan !!
Even Zeus, the company’s eight-ton, two-million-dollar remote-controlled deep-sea robot, which is used for lifting treasure from the ocean floor, had been partly dismantled. https://t.co/0Z3CBAGZJK Zeus! aboard the Odyssey!! a robot god!!! dismantled!!!! and treasure, gold, loot
Two beach umbrella impalings in about a week seems less than plausible by coincidence — it looks like there’s a master plan at work, and while the first umbrella pierced an ankle, the second reached the chest. It is time to take notice, and prepare appropriate defenses..
Instance #1:
A pleasant day at the Jersey shore turned into a bloody nightmare for a British sunbather when a gust of wind blew an umbrella straight through her ankle, officials said.
Margaret Reynolds, 67, of London was impaled by one of the tips of the aluminum umbrella, which turned into a projectile about 4:30 p.m. Monday in Seaside Heights, police Detective Steve Korman told The Post.
Instance #2:
OCEAN CITY, Md. — A spokeswoman for a Maryland beach town says a woman has been accidentally impaled in the chest by a beach umbrella.
Ocean City spokeswoman Jessica Waters said it happened Sunday afternoon on the beach. She says the 54-year-old woman was conscious, but that her condition is not known at this time.
A bolt-cutter was used to help withdraw the projectile from the British tourist in Instance #1, whiln a helicopter airlift to a nearby hospital was required in instance #2.
A pleasant day at the Jersey shore turned into a bloody nightmare for a British sunbather when a gust of wind blew an umbrella straight through her ankle, officials said.
[ by Charles Cameron — continuing from Metaphors, more ii — which has become seriously overloaded and is listing, seriously, to port ]
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Almost all of these are references to Trump’s press conference with Putin, which seems important enough to call for its own post — there may be a couple of earlier statements dropped in..
For example:
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jump to 17.10 in the video, answering “What was your view of Vladimir Putin today?” “Well, Ari, it’s All Star week here in Washington DC. He won the Home Run Derby of all Derbys, Vladimir Putin .. I think this was a big victory for Vladimir Putin..”
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This too:
WILSON: “I do think, though, that a lot of people today saw the real Donald Trump. They saw the Donald Trump who comes out acting like he’s the swaggering alpha male and he sat there on the stage like a whipped dog. I mean, he wanted Vladimir Putin’s approval. He didn’t care about anything else. He wanted Vladimir Putin to pat him on the head and to tell him he’s a good boy and nothing else mattered. He was defending himself with these wild haymaker punches trying to bring Hillary Clinton back into the conversation, but it was very clear today who the boss was in that room and who wears the dog collar. And it’s Donald Trump.”
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And these:
not taking one on the chin..
i don’t know if they’d show up in his ofice and say, game’s up…
trump made a game-time decision to play things his way ..
he could have hit a home run, I’m ashamed he didn’t ..
it was a game-time decision that virtually no one in his white house approved of – ashley parker
was the white house awaree that they were likely gamed .. ?
trump has outgamed himself ..
the democrats are charlie brown, the republicans are lucy — sen chris murphy
the informational dark side of the moon in that meeting..
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Trump & Putin took turns on the tire swing yesterday — rachel maddow
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. British economists prove it: Sports destroy happiness
Sports make the world a sadder place. Seriously. We’ve got data.
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Armed with 3 million responses to a happiness monitoring app, plus the locations and times of several years worth of British soccer matches, University of Sussex economists Peter Dolton and George MacKerron calculated that the happiness that fans feel when their team wins is outweighed – by a factor of two – by the sadness that strikes when their team loses.
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Which means, assuming a roughly equal number of fans on both sides, Sunday’s World Cup final between France and Croatia made the world less happy than it was the day before. On net, soccer is a destroyer of happiness.
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Bob Kerrey
He got played by Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin is going to play you, and play you he did ..
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Ari to George Will:
We go into this baroque fugue state
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this sort of Potemkin gun group in Russia ..
while we’re playing bingo.. [Ari]
here’s an easy one for you, here’s softball on hardball .. [chris matthews]
coming up: spy games ..
they do a walk back and a half twist ..
this is a very simple pattern ..
a russian diplomatic vehicle / miracle — and then, game over ..
trump torpedo
moral equivalency, tit-for-tat ..
The people of #Montenegro boldly withstood pressure from #Putin’s Russia to embrace democracy. The Senate voted 97-2 supporting its accession to #NATO. By attacking Montenegro & questioning our obligations under NATO, the President is playing right into Putin’s hands.
there’s a lot of tit-for-tat in this .. [Jonathan Chait]
this kind of contrition theater ..
keep your bingo card open for a few more minutes, nicolle ..
gone beyond a goat rodeo ..
[ new terms ] helsinki republicans, helsinki humiliation ..
this is a velcro, not a teflon situation for him ..
appears to have walked back his walk back ..
“think of it as a player-trade” 11th hour/ swapping mcfaul for russians
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.@HardballChris says we have a man sitting in the White House singing Moscow's song, sounding as much like Vladimir Putin as Simon sounds like Garfunkel. https://t.co/2eDgNnva0j
By playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands, the leader of the free world actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign that legitimized Russian denial and weakened the credibility of the United States to both our friends and foes abroad.
Axios’ Jonathan Swan broke down how things are, um, movin’ right along in the White House at the end of this very chaotic week, but the way he described it was just too much for Nicolle Wallace.
Wallace brought up how Dan Coats sounded “unshackled” yesterday and asked, “What is the collective feeling among the White House staff about the fact that Donald Trump’s own appointees, who head arguably the most important government agencies… are no longer pretending that Donald Trump isn’t ridiculous?”
Swan noted how some officials are still “pretty buttoned up,” citing DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, before telling Wallace the following:
“We’re finding more and more often that when we talk to people who work in the White House or at a senior level in the administration is we’ll ask them why did Trump do this thing, whatever it might be… In the early days of the administration, you could expect an answer that rationalizes, tells your game theory and whatever. Now they’re just like [makes an ‘I dunno’ noise].”
Wallace burst out laughing and Swan made the noise a few more times before saying, “They’ve stopped bothering trying to explain him.”
Game theory, see?
But you can hear that laugh, and Swan’s noise, at Mediaite, though I can’t find a way to bring the video here — if I could, I’d have a marbelous DoubleQuote with Andrea Mitchell‘s interview with Dan Coats and the interruption by a White House tweet:
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