The Original Endasher

Major meaning-of-life question which struck, and woke me, in panic, during this week’s (first) saturday-afternoon nap:

Like all of you, I’ve seen a lot of videos of people and other simians riding unicycles in my lifetime. The trick—or “crux,” more charitably—seems to be counter-pedaling backwards to maintain side-to-side balance in forward motion or, as seems to be the more common use of unicycles, see-sawing back and forth on the pedals to stay in one place, like a two-dimensional hover. Does this mean all unicycles are necessarily fixed-gear? Is that what fixed gear means? Do people riding fixies hotdog it by pedaling in such a way so as to remain a) stationary and b) upright, without having to tripod with a human leg as one has to on bikes with freewheels? Or, most incredibly, is this last not hotdogging but just a common everyday move that I’ve somehow missed seeing people doing?

Relatedly, as a child who, like most children, once believed he’d regularly have to travel up and down mountains with at least twenty-one distinct grade conditions, I think the simultaneous shift (ha!), in bicycles and motorcars, to fewer gears as the choice of eco-lifestyley prestige to be dangerously undertheorized. Sure, Lexus and BMW still arms-race each other with 7! 8! 9! forward ratios on their dinosaur sedans, but after using conventional 5-speeds or CVTs (don’t get me started on those!) for a few generations, all electric cars, and even hybrids—from the Prius to Tesla’s new and wonderful Model S—seem to be coalescing around a single speed only. This of course has a lot to do with electric motors simply able to spin faster, unaided by gear ratios, than gas engines, but surely electric motors aren’t physically more like human legs moving in a circle than either’s like internal combustion, right? So there is something of fashion involved, the perverse pleasure of “gotcha! what we made you used to think was better is now worse!” I’m reminded of the introduction of “analog” direction-control sticks on video game consoles, in the original Playstation/Nintendo 64 generation, and seeing kids, riders of 21-speed mountain kids, having to rationalize their minds around this being an incredible advance in the development of their digital lives. 

attempting to escape the naïve metaphysical projects of non-agency mortgage-backed securities

• mortgagez: "In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. Différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors."
• mortgagez: i wish i could buy bonds in some analogous way
• ---
• Wait, doesn't "tranche," in the French, simultaneously mean traunch as in a slice (positive portion) of something, and trench, as in a hole (present absence) in something? Why else would you use that word?!
• Also, I am disappointed that mortgagez apparently reads quaternary sources on post-structuralism!

By comparison:

Duration, Occupy Wall Street (ongoing): 53 days.

Duration, Paris Commune (1871): 72 days.

It’s said that when the Soviet Union reached day 73, thus outliving the previous longest-lasting workers’ state, Lenin let everyone drink the entirety of the Czar’s stash in the Winter Palace cellar. Oh, how our horizons have narrowed!

The trouble with anaphora (and ladies!):

I’m not really linguistically literate (in the non-redundant sense) enough to know if this is truly an example of everyone’s fav generative grammar mind-bender donkey anaphora but, still, gigglez:

Trending topic or trending target? Selena Gomez, Bieber’s girlfriend, received Tweeted death threats just for dating the pop star. How did the girl who filed a paternity suit against him fare? Several outlets have rounded up examples of Yeatercentric cyber-bullying.

Wrote one Bieber devotee quoted on the Washington Post: “we fans are on your side, and Mariah Yeater will pay for your lies.” 

[via canada.com, obvi] 

History lesson apropos the video of the judge beating the daughter for file-sharing:

WE ARE NOW AS FAR REMOVED FROM THE SHUTDOWN OF NAPSTER AS THE SHUTDOWN OF NAPSTER WAS FROM THE SHUTDOWN OF THE SOVIET UNION. 

Because words have meaning…

Dear Internet Discourse,

Surely, you didn’t really mean to call the Ralph Lauren-clad man, or phenomenon, or epiphenomenonal formation known as The Hipster Cop “The Hipster Cop,” right? While there is a certain irony in the term “hipster”—i still use hepcat myself, but whatever—coming to simply mean “a male human being with something of an aesthetic sense,” I believe the far more appropriate, if cachet/SEO-deficient, sobriquet would be “The Dandy Cop,” as an interest in fine tailoring is, if certainly minoritarian (1%, if you will), certainly not oppositional or counter-cultural even in the West Bushwick sense. It’s important that you use the right words, because sometimes I read you on devices that don’t show the picture properly.

Not to engage in slippery slopeism, but i am haunted, above all, by a near-future dystopia in which even GQ and other fine publications start throwing around “philistine” and “dilettante” interchangeably, when in fact the opposition between the two—like that between the bourgeoisie and the (real) nobility—is basically the foundation of everything we know, and experience, and should care about.   

Thanks,

Endasher.  

Better Commonwealth Succession Law Proposal:

Why not just, as the Frankish kings did, practice equal inheritance (this time gender-equal)? There are 16 different countries already—is it really fair that one kid gets them all, even if he’s a lady?! 

I suspect the kids themselves wouldn’t mind shaking slightly fewer hands and if they do, we’d at least be able to enjoy watching Harry and Wills kill each other over Antigua like Charlemagne’s grandsons. 

Well, one of my demands was met!

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, also supports the change. “If Prince William and Catherine Middleton were to have a baby daughter as their first child, I think most people would think it fair and normal that she would eventually become queen of our country,” he said this year.

—-

The British Commonwealth (nee Empire) has been totally scared about changing its antiquated succession rules on gender and Catholics forever, under the assumption that bringing up the fairness and normality of a boy outranking his older sister might encourage the subjects to wonder about the fairness and normality of any newborn being the presumptive (or apparent) eventual king/queen of their countries. But in a year of revolutions, the British once again prove their brand of misrule as the most admirably adaptable on Earth. (Poor Habsburgs!)