Listening to Andrew Hill's Black Fire. Does anybody know what "cantarnos" means? I'm assuming it can be traced back to canto and canzone. But the Spanish dictionaries I've consulted come up empty. "Cantaro" however means jug. Perhaps my jug of song is empty?
[Update: Jonathan has the answer (in comments): "To sing to us."]
I really like Jonathan's 300 jazz albums series. Tonight, I've decided that what I mean by jazz is somehow marked (but not bounded) by Cannonball Adderly's Somethin' Else and Andrew Hill's Point of Departure. That's a rough gesture, of course. But it means that a song like "I'm Just a Lucky So and So", which I love and sing for my children before they go to sleep, isn't quite "jazz". What I'm saying is probably that when someone says "jazz", as in "I don't like jazz," or, "I love jazz," I assume they mean something that was recorded in the late 1950s or (especially) early 60s.
The worst story I ever heard about Jack Kennedy was that he sat on his boat one day eating chicken and threw the half-chewed bones into the sea.Norman Mailer (PP, p. 101)
The worst joke I ever heard Barry Obama tell was the one about Rahm Emanuel teaching poor kids how to swear. He didn't say it like that, of course. What he said was:
This whole myth of Rahm being this "tough guy" mean is just not true. At least once a week he spends time teaching profanity to underprivileged children.
And he really did put the word "profanity" in italics (watch the video). There was nowhere to go with the joke after he had used such a sanitized term for swearing. He delivered the two key facts in the wrong order. But my complaint is not about his knack for standup; it's about his sense of humour. The joke used "underprivileged" in the most patronizing way possible, i.e., as a simple backdrop for an act of charity. Hi guys, I just got off Airforce One ("it's niiiice!") and now I'm making a poor joke. But he didn't even have decency to call them poor. A poor joke, indeed. Then again, he was on TV, so what do you expect? But these are the things one was worried about.
Throwing a chicken bone into the sea is bad because it shows no feeling for the root of death, which is burial. Of course Kennedy might have muttered, "Sorry, old man," as he tossed the bone. That is the difficulty with anecdotes. One cannot determine the nuance. (PP, p. 102)
I don't know what Obama might have muttered to restore our hope in his nuances. But we'll be watching.
John Thune's ability to "put things very simply in perspective" is exemplary. Josh Marshall at TPM perceives an opening for some work across the aisle. I also have a somewhat modest proposal. A trillion may seem like a lot of money, but it's really only about 3500 dollars per American. Okay, that's a lot of money for some people and it wouldn't help the stagnant economy very much if the government just appropriated it. But the idea gets me thinking. A trillion is only a million million dollars and there are something like 10 million millionaires in the US. So if they each "gave" 100,000 dollars (i.e., if they were expropriated) you'd have the trillion right there. Of course that wouldn't be fair to those who just barely have a net worth of a million. That's fine. Just scale the program to net worth. So a billionaire would pay more than a mere multi-millionaire. These guys will probably earn it all back anyway by hook or crook, so the adjustment would be temporary, but at least the proverbial "taxpayer" won't get the bill. The reduced purchasing power, meanwhile, would only be felt in the "high-end" market, so it would be a truly progressive program. Alternatively, yes, Americans could just stack up their unemployed somewhere and eat their kids.
