Bachelor in Paradise meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The New Neo Posted on by

Some read detective novels for escape, but I’ve never cared for them. Some gamble, some drink, some look at porn online.

My vice is a bit different: every now and then I follow a reality TV show. I’ve written about some of these before (nope, I’m not going to provide the links), and now I have another reality TV confession to make.

Never the Kardashians; but the one I watch isn’t much less trashy. Maybe it’s even worse: I’ve taken to watching this year’s group of young and beautiful and in some cases quite empty-headed singles, cavorting about on a Mexican beach and falling in and out of love and lust and angst.

“Bachelor in Paradise.” Yes. My degradation is complete.

Why? Why do I do it? Maybe it’s the perfect escape from Trump and Hillary, maybe it’s my substitute for a soap opera, which it much resembles. But it struck me recently not only how silly and manipulative the show is, and how much I enjoy it nevertheless (or maybe for that reason), but also how certain moments in it remind me of the eternal verities of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

You may laugh. Indeed, you might do well to laugh. “Neo,” you may say, “are you kidding me? Don’t you just want to put a veneer of culture on this terrible piece of trash so that you can feel better about your nasty habit of watching it?”

Well, maybe. But I’m actually quite serious about the connection. The play—one of my favorites—is about the intensity and yet the absurdity of unrequited love, and in the play there’s a magical flower that makes everything right and has the lovers all happy and coupled up at the end. In “Bachelor,” the resolution is not that simple, although there have been very real marriages that come of meetings on the program.

And by the way, this is the first time I’ve ever watched it. This season’s “Bachelor in Paradise” features a woman named Ashley who has been in love (for a year, because this is her second time on the show) with a man named Jared. Hopelessly in love, that is. Where once he led her on a little bit, now he’s trying desperately to head her off. But Ashley’s having none of it.

Rather much like the characters Helena and Demetrius in “Dream.” So I started to think that what the TV show really needs is Puck with his little squeeze of flower power. What ABC wouldn’t give for a squirt of that!

If you’re still with me here, I’ll illustrate what I’m talking about with a short clip from “Paradise” and one from “Dream.” First, let me point out that each lovers’ roundelay takes place in a sort of fantasy world, where the young lovers are taken away from their usual environments but then become subject to manipulations by powerful beings (in the case of “Paradise” it’s the producers and host Chris Harrison; with “Dream” it’s Oberon and Puck). The dance of love becomes very intense quite quickly.

Here we have Ashley and Jared talking. It ain’t Shakespeare, more’s the pity. But the sentiment is the same, although I wonder whether either of them has ever seen “Dream”:

And here’s a rather unconventional 1968 production of “Dream,” with quite a cast from the Royal Shakespeare Academy, including Diana Rigg here as the spurned Helena chasing after Demetrius (later on, the Titania is the young Judi Dench and Helen Mirren is Hermia, but in this scene the guy looking on intermittently is Oberon). Demetrius is a good sight meaner than Jared:

Perhaps the most famous line in the entire play is uttered by Puck on watching (and orchestrating) some of the ins and outs, backs and forths, of love: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” Puck feels above it all because he’s not human. But for the rest of us (and that includes me) there’s no reason to feel so superior.

10 disgusting facts about ancient Rome

The New Neo Posted on by

The facts listed are mostly about lack of hygiene, and those really are pretty disgusting.

I already knew about numbers five and two. Re number five, I remember when I was a teenager and went to Europe with a large tour group of other teens, when we visited Pompeii the boys were allowed into the exhibits with the pornography and the girls were not. Those were the days!

[ADDENDUM: After I wrote this post, I started to doubt whether my memory of the restriction of the pornographic art of Pompeii to just the male tourists was correct.

And so I checked it out, and yes, that’s the way it was. Here’s the scoop (along with photos of some of the art):

This art caused a stir that has yet to be stilled. It was hidden from view for years in a number of ways. Much that was taken from Pompeii and instilled in museums was hidden away in secret rooms. One such room was called the “Cabinet of Obscene Objects” later renamed the “Cabinet of Restricted, or Secret, Objects.” In Pompeii itself, women tourists weren’t allowed to view some of the major works of art until the second half of the twentieth century – to protect their delicate natures.

There wasn’t just some erotic art in Pompeii, either; there was a lot of it, and it was just about everywhere, apparently, according to the article.]

The Titanic election

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed that a lot of news aggregate websites are completely consumed by links to articles about this election? That happens every election year to a certain extent, but this year it seems completely out of hand. Remember how, when Trump first announced his candidacy and was campaigning during the summer of 2015, pundits kept writing that he was “sucking the air out of the room”? Well, it’s still happening, only now it’s Trump vs. Hillary that’s sucking the air out of the newsroom.

I think there’s a reason for it. There’s something surpassingly strange about this election, and it’s not just Trump. The basic idea is that nearly everyone detests both candidates, and yet those appear to be our choices because the third party candidates have failed to catch on as well and people don’t want to throw away their votes.

So, why do the country’s voters find themselves at such an impasse? It’s easier to explain the Hillary nomination, I think, because compared to Trump she’s a conventional candidate, despite the fact that she’s a woman (or maybe at this point because of it) and despite her unpopularity.

Before the summer of 2015 the conventional wisdom was that the GOP was on the upswing after 8 years of Obama, ready for the election of nearly any mainstream GOP candidate the party might have nominated, and probably about to keep the House and perhaps keep the Senate as well, and therefore experience a rare few years of power. In addition, the GOP was doing very well at the state governor and legislative level. Hillary was felt to be an example of the moribund nature of the Democrats, its lack of new blood and its reversion to the old guard of the Clinton years. Plus, Hillary as female candidate was seen as a continuation of the winning “trailblazing” formula that helped propel Obama into office as the first black president. Whatever else you can say about Hillary, she would be the first woman president if elected.

The Democrats also had matters well in hand with the superdelegates controlling the convention. A populist anti-Hillary uprising in the unlikely person of Bernie Sanders had no chance to express the will of the people if that will ran counter to the will of the Party to elect her. So Hillary was the choice of the Democratic powers that be, the true “establishment” candidate.

Trump was (and is) different, very very different. And the process that selected him was very different, involving many opponents rather than a couple, and expressing the will of the people because of the relative lack of superdelegates. But the people whose will was being expressed—who were they? First of all, they were not a majority of the party. They were also a combination (as best we can tell) of people who saw themselves as at war with or at the very least angry at a Republican Party that had betrayed them, some nihilists, an undisclosed number of white supremacists, and a smattering (or perhaps more than a smattering; we’ve never really determined) of Democrats and Independents who crossed over to vote in the GOP primary.

The party leaders were aghast but could do nothing or perhaps chose to do nothing as their party was taken over by a nominee who seems antithetical to many of its causes and erratic in his behavior, who has never had a particle of political experience.

So the GOP campaign year, which had set out full of promise, turned into the current mess that threatens not only a GOP presidency but also Congressional control. Although we don’t know for sure, Trump may indeed lose and lose big, and drag the rest down with him. And the GOP leaders seem powerless and paralyzed, unable to do a thing about it.

So that’s what I mean about the Titanic election. It’s Titanic in the sense of being big and seemingly important. It’s Titanic in the sense of the voyage having held great promise at the outset. And it’s Titanic in the sense that we see the iceberg ahead and feel we are on a course to strike it, but can’t seem to turn this huge huge ship of state around in time.

[NOTE: I wonder sometimes whether this year’s disaster was inevitable or avoidable. The Democrats’ decline seems baked in the cake, and the GOP’s internal war has been brewing since at least the middle of the 20th Century. So maybe the answer is “inevitable.” Then again, Trump is so unique that I see him as something of a black swan.]

Europe vs. homegrown terrorists: it’s not easy

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve grown used to criticizing Europe’s intelligence and police systems for letting homegrown or home-dwelling jihadis slip through the cracks.

But it’s not easy to deal with this problem, not at all, while attempting to keep the countries themselves from becoming police states and at the same time preserving relative freedom of movement between European countries. The US faces its own version of the same problem, although in the US it’s been somewhat easier so far because we are further away from the Middle East and don’t have as large and constant an influx as Europe does, nor is the Muslim proportion of the our own population as large.

Here’s an article by Michael Hastings Fellow Mitch Prothero on the subject of Europe’s efforts to get this under control:

Since 2010, the Belgian and French authorities have been faced with a jihadist problem both more entrenched at home and more deeply interconnected to the international scene than had been previously understood. After last November’s attack on Paris, in which 130 people were killed, the full extent of the problem ”” not just for Belgium and France, but for the European Union ”” become tragically clear: An international network has exploited inherent security weaknesses of the EU’s open borders and brought French-speaking militants from Europe into the forefront of international terrorism. Between 2011 and the end of 2015, an estimated 12,000 people from 81 countries joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq, including 1,700 French and almost 500 Belgian residents, according to a comprehensive study of foreign fighters by the Soufan Group. The French S list ”” a database of suspected extremists and security threats ”” has grown to nearly 10,000 people, and those are only the people who have been identified.

ISIS militants threaten Europe with a wave of violence not seen since the heyday of 1970s political terrorism, and it appears to have the potential to be far more deadly…

…European counterterrorism officials seem overwhelmed by the thousands of names of suspects, stymied by a lack of integration across the EU, and caught on the hoof by perpetrators who often appear to lack any prior extremist links. And in the towns and cities where new jihadists are being recruited and cultivated most fervently, authorities lack the kind of surveillance techniques deployed by their American counterparts.

Please read the whole thing. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

The essential Trump According to Neo-neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Thomas Doubting” has made a request in the “Mr. Trump regrets” thread:

Neo, it seems you’ve been writing about this for some time and I’ve missed a number of good posts. If it wouldn’t take much time, could you link a post or three (or whatever number) that lay out the basic situation as you see it? Particularly comparing the choice of HRC and DJT?

That got me to thinking. There are plenty of relatively new readers here, or even old readers who don’t come here so regularly that they read everything (or close to it) I write. So although I often assume that everyone is familiar with all the points I’ve made over time, of course that’s incorrect and probably no one is familiar with all of them or perhaps even the majority of them. So it makes sense to have a post that pulls together all the previous ones that I would consider my most basic reflections on this Year of the Trump/Hillary.

The task turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. A total of close to 200 posts on Trump are hard to wade through, especially since most of them aren’t just trivial asides (I can do trivial asides, but it’s not my forte). And of course, a lot of the discussion here happens in the comment section in which I often participate. It would be even more difficult for me to wade through that and try to pull out the most important summary comments, so I didn’t even try. I’ll add that most of the posts comparing Trump and Hillary wouldn’t have occurred until after it was clear that Trump would inevitably be the nominee, and that only became the case sometimes in April or May, so posts prior to that focused on Trump’s nature and the comparison was more to the other GOP candidates.

Whether I included too much or not enough or the right or wrong things, here’s my effort at a summation. In typical blog fashion, it’s in reverse chronological order. I’ve put a star in front of posts I think especially relevant or comprehensive:

★ It’s the character.

★ The shotgun election.

Things fall apart.

Populism is the opiate of the people.

★ Dealing with the consequences.

Taking Trump seriously.

★ It’s all mutable.

Did they manage to “burn it down”?

★ Trump the Alinskyite.

★ Trump is neither Dole nor McCain nor Romney.

★ Politicians, deception, and Trump.

Trump, the GOP’s Frankenstein’s monster.

Trumps a tyrant.

Trump can’t be bought and so what?

Trump loves the regular folk unless their homes happen to stand in Trump’s way.

Who are Trump’s supporters?

Democrats for Trump.

The Trump addiction.

An old animus.

Black voters and Trump.

★ Twitter nation holds an election.

The new Clinton emails and the Osgood election

The New Neo Posted on by

The FBI has announced the discovery of 15,000 heretofore undisclosed Hillary Clinton emails from her tenure as Secretary of State. That’s a lot; half again as many as the 30,000 to which Clinton has previously owned up:

The documents were found during the course of the FBI’s investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee’s use of a personal email server during her time as secretary of State. The number is almost 50 percent more than the 30,000 work-related documents that Clinton’s lawyers turned over to the State Department in 2014.

The agency has pledged to release the approximately 14,900 documents and State Department lawyers told District Judge James E. Boasberg on Monday that the agency is “prioritizing” the appraisal of the new emails.

But it remains unsettled whether the full set will be out before the presidential election on Nov. 8. Lawyers for the conservative watchdog group that has demanded the release have accused the agency of slow-walking the production.

“FBI found almost 15,000 new Clinton documents. When will State release them?” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton tweeted Monday morning…

State Department lawyers said Monday that they expect the agency to begin releasing the documents in batches every week beginning Oct. 14.

Now, there’s an October surprise. Or is it? Is anyone surprised at any of this anymore? Do Hillary supporters care?

My impression is that—just as many of Trump’s supporters are so anti-Hillary that it wouldn’t matter if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue—so many of Hillary supporters are so anti-Trump that nothing she has done or will ever do matters. I’ve heard people refer to this campaign as a race to the bottom, and I agree. It’s just a question of who reaches the lowest low, and when, as well as which candidate has the highest number of supporters with strong stomachs.

In the title of this post I call 2016 the “Osgood election,” and the reference is to the Joe E. Brown character, “Osgood,” in that wonderful last scene of the movie classic “Some Like it Hot”:

[ADDENDUM: See this. By the way, Judicial Watch has earned a great big “thank you.” They’re the ones whose lawsuits led to the Hillary email disclosures.]

Those itty bitty repetitive copy errors

The New Neo Posted on by

I try to write these posts as fast as possible, for obvious reasons. But even when I write fast, they take a long time to turn out at a good clip.

But you should see them before I proofread them. Yikes! It’s not easy to be your own writer, editor, and copy-editor at the same time, because the eye gets accustomed to seeing what it expects to see and doesn’t always spot the errors that Spell Check misses (I know; cue the world’s smallest violin).

Writing a blog day after day after day for years and years and years, you discover your signature errors—that is, the ones you tend to make over and over and over, day after day after day. Some are spelling errors; until computers and Spell Check came along, I never realized how poor a speller I was, for the simple reason that for decades I was spelling certain words wrong without anyone ever noticing or telling me. But the errors I’m talking about in this post are the ones in which a person substitutes one actual and correctly-spelled word for another. Spell Check thinks those errors are just peachy-keen.

My personal favorites appear to be “if” for “is” and “thing” for “think.” Both involve the careless and near-reflexive substitution of a single letter that turns one commonly-used word into another. (And by the way, I just caught the fact that, in the previous sentence, I originally typed “My personal favorites appear to me” rather than “appear to be.”) Those are the errors that slip by oh-so-easily, and proofreading can easily miss them.

The most common one that you see even from excellent writers who know their grammar is “it’s” for “its.” The error almost always goes in one direction only, and it seems an odd direction: the addition of an apostrophe where it’s not needed rather than its omission when it’s called for (and of course, I had to check this sentence several times to make sure I’d done it right). I once wrote an entire post on the “it’s/its” problem, in which I offered the following explanation for what’s going on:

Why do we do this? Are we all just stupid! No, no, a thousand times no! We are actually very smart, because we are extrapolating a general rule to include this word, and that is the rule about forming possessives. Usually we do this by adding an apostrophe and an “s,” as you no doubt well know. But with the words “it’s” and “its,” we choose to reserve the apostrophe for the contraction, and that leaves the possessive hanging out there, alone and forlorn and apostropheless.

In this, however, we’re following another rule (are you still with me? or have I already bored you to tears?), that of the possessive personal pronoun: hers, his, theirs, ours, yours, for example. All lack apostrophes. But they’re not confusing, somehow””perhaps because, unlike “its,” they clearly refer to people, and are never given an apostrophe because they never become contractions.

I know the rule very well. I’ve known it since grade school; I had an excellent and traditional education in grammar, involving (among other things) very rigorous sentence-diagramming. But I still violate the rule sometimes through a combination of habit and haste.

Ballet mime in “Swan Lake”—a dying art

The New Neo Posted on by

No, not whiteface mime of the Marcel Marceau type. Ballet mime, which is quite different and more like sign language. Ballet mime is almost never used anymore, which I think a pity.

Ballets used to contain a lot more mime, by the way. But now even the remnants have been eliminated by most ballet companies and replaced by not-especially-great dance passages. I find the mime very poignant and effective when done well, even if I don’t always understand every single gesture-word. And this wonderful video from Britain’s Royal Ballet explains with great style and flair the mime used in the second act of “Swan Lake”:

I said that very few ballet companies keep the mime, although many of them produce ballets such as “Swan Lake” that used to contain passages of it. But on YouTube, I found two versions of “Swan Lake” that do retain it (the only two I could find on all of YouTube that did, although the quest involved watching tons of them).

The first is from American Ballet Theater, and I’ve cued it up to start with the mime passage that occurs right after the Prince first meets the Swan Queen:

This is the Royal Danish Ballet (cued up to start at the same point):

All three videos in this post appear to have been made relatively recently (I would guess they all are post-2000, anyway), although I don’t know the exact dates. To my surprise, all the Russian videos of “Swan Lake” that I could find on YouTube dispensed with the mime sequence, as do certain other American Ballet Theater productions, as well as some of the older Royal Ballet videos. So even those latter two companies haven’t always included the mime.

A no-Trump no-Hillary day

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, not really. You can discuss him or her or both or neither in the comments section of this post, if you like.

But I thought I’d give Trump and Hillary a well-deserved rest today—at least, a rest from being discussed on this blog by me. Ah, would that neither was a nominee, and we could rest from discussing them permanently, because they’d be retired from public life and enjoying their grandchildren.

Ooops—did I just discuss them? Seems I no sooner got on the wagon than I slipped off of it. Well, the road on which the wagon is riding is awfully bumpy these days.

So let’s all have a nice weekend. It’s summer. Go out with your families, enjoy the scenery, go to the ocean, go to the lake, stay home and veg out in front of the TV, whatever suits your fancy.

All that glitters is not gold at the Olympics

The New Neo Posted on by

You know those Olympic gold medals?

If they were made of solid gold, they’d each cost $21,200.

And so they’re not. That doesn’t make them cheap, because they’re made of silver plus about 1.2% gold, and they’re worth $565, which is not chump change. The silver medals are (no surprise here) 100% silver, worth $315, so that tiny bit of gold in the gold medal adds an extra $250.

The bronze medals, on the other hand (made of 95% copper and the rest zinc) are like trinkets you win at the fair: worth $2.38 each. But they still has a lot of symbolic value to those who own them.

For example—India, one of the world’s most populous countries, would love to win a few more of those bronze medals. India would love to win a few more of any kind of Olympic medals:

India has managed just one gold medal since 1980, when shooter Abhinav Bindra became the first individual to win gold for his country at the 10 meter air rifle event in 2008. The country’s previous gold medals, eight between 1928-1980, were all in field hockey…

Granted, the 2016 Games are still on-going. So far, badminton star P.V. Sindhu has won the silver medal at the women’s singles competition on Friday. Thursday saw Sakshi Malik take bronze at the 58kg women’s wrestling category, India’s first medal at Rio.

The article offers some theories as to why India is so abysmal at Olympic sports. But it seems to come down to the idea that India isn’t interested in pushing those sports, and has very few programs to develop Olympic athletes. In other words, the cause seems cultural, but no one really knows why most of the world is pretty sports-mad and Indians seem content with cricket and field hockey.

And who knew—I certainly didn’t—that many countries pay their gold medal winners a financial bonus up-front?

Why are the top women 100-meter hurdlers so beautiful?

The New Neo Posted on by

Seriously.

Actually, I’ve noticed recently that a lot of the female athletes are beautiful, and I don’t remember that being so true in previous years. Male pulchritude has always been a feature of the Olympics, but the females have lagged somewhat behind, to the best of my recollection anyway.

And I’ve also noticed that the female track and field athletes this year almost all have long long hair, usually tied back in swinging ponytails or up in buns. That seems newish to me, too, at least within the last decade or so. I remember that when Florence Griffith-Joyner was running back in the 80s, her long hair, complicated manicures, and devotion to fashion (including uni-leg running outfits that she designed herself) seemed a novelty and drew as much attention as her extreme speed:

flojo

I tried to find a good video of the 2016 Olympic 100-meter women’s hurdle finals to show their speed, because they most certainly are fleet of foot. However, I couldn’t find a single one where you could see them clearly, so the following will have to do; it shows the three American winners (gold, silver, bronze) at the very end of the race and shortly afterwards. And to top it all off, embedding is disabled, so you’ll need to go to YouTube to view it.

Here are a couple of still photos:

hurdlers

hurdlers2

That last photo seems to me to encapsulate the idea of jumping for joy.

[ADDENDUM: During the Olympics I often have the TV turned on and set on “mute” as I blog, and now and then I glance at it to see whether there’s something especially interesting going on. Just now I saw a men’s bicycle race called the BMX, which I’d never heard of before. Whoaaa! Thrills and chills! It was won in an upset by an American, Connor Fields, who explains the sport here:

I can’t find any videos of the race I just saw yet, but here’s a different one (can’t be embedded) to give you an idea of what the sport looks like in slow-mo (obviously, in real life it’s much much faster):

These people seem to be made of different stuff.]

Meanwhile, in Turkey…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the purge continues:

Turkey on Friday detained dozens of academics suspected of backing Fethullah Gulen, the alleged mastermind of last month’s failed coup, while pressing ahead with raids on businesses linked to the US-based Muslim preacher.

Turkish prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for 84 academics nationwide, the private Dogan news agency reported, while the state-run Anadolu agency said Istanbul authorities were separately hunting 62 academics from the city’s main university…

A total of 74 scholars had been detained so far in both operations, media said.

A large majority of the suspects in the nationwide raids were from Selcuk University in Konya, central Anatolia — a conservative bastion of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) — including the university’s former rector, Professor Hakki Gokbel.

To the alarm of its Western partners, Turkey has pressed ahead with a vast crackdown on alleged coup plotters in the wake of July 15 military action seeking to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said this week that more than 40,000 state employees had been detained in the purge, with more than 20,000 remanded in custody.

More than 5,000 civil servants have been dismissed and almost 80,000 others suspended, he added.

It just goes on and on and on.

I find that phrase “to the alarm of its Western partners” interesting. Yes, this is all very “alarming,” but it should not be the least bit surprising. And “alarm” is an emotional reaction: so, what are you going to do about it, Western partners?

Zip. Zilch. That’s my prediction, anyway. Remember, also, that Turkey is part of NATO and has been since 1952, before Islamists such as Erdogan gained control of the country.

I’m not sure how a nation gets kicked out of NATO (or whether the NATO nations would even want to do that to Turkey), but there are certainly criteria a nation is supposed to fulfill in order to join. Among them, countries are required to:

…[have] stable democratic systems, pursue the peaceful settlement of territorial and ethnic disputes, have good relations with their neighbors, show commitment to the rule of law and human rights, establish democratic and civilian control of their armed forces, and have a market economy.

Commitment to the rule of law and human rights? I doubt that Turkey was ever big on that score, but what’s been happening since the attempted coup is egregious. And of course, the way that Erdogan became “democratically elected” was also not cricket, although most people (and the MSM) seem to ignore all of that.

This and this describe what most people seem to determined to ignore: Erdogan’s history of power grabs.