Zoo in the head

Wow. Just, wow.

Christopher Tayler offers 10 of the weirdest sentences in David Brooks's The Social Animal. The one with most relevance to this blog's areas of interest runs:

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellent.

But every one of them has something - fallacy, solecism, outright meaninglessness - to marvel at.

Gaudy seed-bearer

The latest issue of GQ Style asks an interesting question:

In case you can't make it out, it's about halfway up on the left: "Robert Pattinson - Is he the Brando of his generation?"

There are two possible answers to this question. 1) "If you mean 'Is Robert Pattinson doomed to become a bloated, hysterical parody of his former self?', God yes, I hope so." 2) "No. You idiots."

Coincidentally, Pattinson - the sexually restrained vampire heart-throb of the Twilight films - is the same age, 24, that Brando was when he became famous playing Stanley Kowalski in the first production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Here's how Tennessee Williams' stage direction introduces Stanley:

Stanley throws the screen door of the kitchen open and comes in. He is of medium height, about five feet eight or nine, and strongly, compactly built. Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying centre are all the auxiliary channels of his life, such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer.

Literally anybody could fill those boots better than Pattinson: me, you (it doesn't matter if you're a woman), my dog, Daniel Radcliffe. No, not Radcliffe, but you take my point.

Annals of fringe medicine

From an email sent by felixbadanimal to the Phonography group at Yahoo!:

sorry for the extremely random nature of this post... my Dad is a GP and just sent me this email:

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I have a charming patient with chronic pain in his neck arms and shoulders with no releif from neurosurgery who has found that he gets extra-ordinary releif from the sound of screaming children.
In the absence of progress with the pain clinics and the neurosurgeon he is keen to explore the "sound therapy" avenue further.

Pass me that child and that book of matches, there's a good fellow.

Tyranny of the majority?!?

I've been puzzling and puzzling over an argument deployed by Megan McArdle in a wail of agony at the passing of the healthcare bill in the US Congress last night. Describing this turn of events as "pretty worrying", she goes on to ask: "Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all." She goes on to refer to the Democrats' "contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate".

What are we to make of this? The fact that Obama, and other Democrats, have stood for election promising healthcare reform is, apparently, unimportant: if the opinion polls suggest opposition to reform, promises should be abandoned. The lurking premise seems to be that elections don't confer legitimacy, polls do. This is, in fact, how many politicians behave, here and in the US; and it is one of the things that has fucked our politics up so comprehensively. Democracy is not simply a matter of more versus less: it is, at least as importantly, a matter of law and procedure, of sticking to the rules.

To take the electorate at their word - to say, that is what you voted for, so that is what I'm doing - is not to treat them with contempt; it's to treat them like adults. And Megan McArdle is a big baby.