According to The Writer’s Almanac, yesterday was the anniversary of Brigham Young’s leading his people into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (1847). They were tired of taking sh*t as Mormons in Illinois and were looking for a new settlement. Young got sick during the journey from eating spoiled herring (we’ve all been there), and was lying prostrate in a wagon when they reached the Valley. Legend has it, he was able to describe the scene below without looking. After he sat up, he said, “This is the right place. Drive on.” No disrespect, but if they’re counting that as a miracle, it’s pretty weak, no? Part some waters or do some stuff with fire and then come back to us. [I made up the detail about the herring to zhuzh it up.]
Here’s the Valley, with sort of a religious-looking sky. Thanks, Philly!
Can something be funny and horrific at the same time? As a follow-up to yesterday’s note about DeSantis’s middle school curriculum noting that slaves benefited from picking up skills on the job, Andy Borowitz had the following headline today: “Unskilled Florida Man Regrets Missing Out on Being Enslaved.”
In a desperate, but hopelessly doomed, effort to stay in touch with the zeitgeist from under my rock, I read the review of the Barbie movie at Ebert.com, just to pick a site I have heard of. It’s by Christy Lemire and is an across-the-board rave. If you’re interested, it’s at https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/barbie-movie-review-2023. Today’s review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker was favorable but less so. It says “watching the first half hour of this movie is like being water boarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He concedes the movie is fun, though, albeit in fragments.
According to The Times, Barbie far exceeded ticket-sale expectations. Some theaters ran out of snacks and drinks! The audience was only 65% female. One Warner Bros. hotshot said “for a film this pink” you’d expect 90% female.
As you may have noted, its clear feminist empowerment theme has the right wing up in arms. Fox News has repeated attacks on the film over everything from “wokeness” to inclusivity. One such segment amplified the call against “Barbie” coming from Movieguide, a Christian movie review site, that read, “Warning: Don’t take your daughter to Barbie.” The segment criticized the film for the inclusion of a transgender performer (actor Hari Nef) and for presenting “LGBTQ stories.”
Are you troubled by the implication that trans actors should not be given roles? Does anyone else hear an echo of Nazi regulations barring Jews from professions? Hello? Anyone?
AOC posted: “Love how Republican Congressmen are just now hating on Barbie because she’s ‘too woke’ …like, hello, this was a doll made for little girls who was a DOCTOR and an ASTRONAUT before women in the US were even allowed to have credit cards without their husband’s permission. Of course they’re mad! They want the old days back.”
They thought they could do damage with a call for a boycott like they did with Bud Light. But beer drinkers tend to skew right, while Barbie-goers are all pinkos. [Owl Chatter is proud of that line.] The boycott call had about as much effect as a burp in a windstorm.
May Haaf, below, said seeing the movie with her 9-year-old daughter, Arya, was a bonding event and a way to celebrate female empowerment. Both wore matching white and pink “Barbie” T-shirts. “It’s like a new generation of movies where women can be individuals and not be married, and you don’t have to settle for anything,” Haaf said.
Amen to that. Phil! — OMG, this may be the sweetest shot you’ve ever turned in. You da man!
Readers, are you familiar with this cartoon? It’s called “Cow Tools.”
It’s by Gary Larson from The Far Side and was published in October of 1982. Rex’s guest blogger Malaika included it in her write-up yesterday, sans explanation, perhaps because TOOLS was in the puzzle and her first thought about the theme was that it might be bovine-related (it wasn’t). I don’t “get” the cartoon — do you?
There’s a big difference between finding a cartoon not funny, and not being able to see what it’s getting at. Most New Yorker cartoons these days, IMO, are just not funny. For example, in the issue I just received, there’s one with a husband and wife talking in their sun room, and he’s saying “I wouldn’t say I’m an indoor person or an outdoor person. I’m more of a screened-in-porch person.” Again, IMO, anyone who thinks that’s funny should not be in charge of cartoons, amirite? But at least I understand it. The “cow tools,” above, just eludes me. And I’m not the only one, and it’s gotten kind of famous.
According to Wikipedia, immediately upon the cartoon’s publication, Chronicle Features, which syndicated The Far Side, was inundated with queries seeking an explanation. “The phone never stopped ringing for two days.” Larson himself received hundreds of letters. In one, a reader from Texas wrote that they had shown the cartoon to “40-odd professionals with doctoral degrees,” and none could understand it.
In response to the uproar, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the cartoon was “an exercise in silliness,” and its thrust was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would “lack something in sophistication.” He had read that one thing that separates man from animals is the use of tools, so it got him thinking of what sort of tools a cow would come up with. I kinda like it. Larson did concede that he erred in making one of the tools resemble a crude saw, which misled many readers into believing that to understand the cartoon’s message, they needed to decipher the identities of the other three tools.
The cartoon has become a popular internet meme, hence Malaika’s use of it in her discussion.
But that didn’t get her into hot water. Another comment of hers ruffled some feathers, unreasonably, it seems to me. Here’s the story: As I reported in yesterday’s Owl Chatter, for the clue “‘That’s hilarious!,’ in a text,” the answer was LOL. Malaika wrote: “I get that it’s boring to say ‘Will Shortz (70 yrs old) has a different frame of reference from Malaika (26 yrs old)’ but here I am, beating a dead horse around the bush, or whatever the saying is. That is simply not what LOL means anymore because language changes and evolves etc etc okay I’m done now.”
First of all, people wanted to know what LOL does mean now, if not “laugh out loud.” And she was charged with being ageist. Here’s a comment by Anonymous:
“yes, language changes. lol used to mean little old lady. if it doesn’t mean laugh out loud any longer, why didn’t you tell us what it does mean?
also, why are you dissing on will shortz age when you can’t come up with an adage? your ageism is unbecoming.”
Ouch!
Another comment read:
“Ah, the ever-online youth…
LOL now is used as an addendum to indicate that a statement should not be taken seriously, which is SO much different that it requires ageism and generational mockery. The main thing that irks me is that our guest blogger seems to think that only the usage by 26 year-olds in year 2023 is legitimate. Enjoy it while it lasts, 16 year-olds are mocking you as you type…
Ouch 2.0!
I think those comments are very unfair. It’s not ageist to note that different generations have different frames of reference. There was a long New Yorker article on that about 7 years ago. And it is on point to note that the clue is out of date if LOL is not currently used as it used to be used. The consensus was that Malaika was not saying that LOL has taken on a particular new meaning, just that’s it’s no longer in use as “ha ha.”
Enough nonsense for today. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 