Falling flat on your face

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never before really thought about the origins of the phrase “to fall flat on your face” before. It was just an expression; what reason was there to take it literally?

What’s more, the face isn’t flat. There are protuberances there; most obviously the nose, and less so (but still important) the forehead and chin.

But last Saturday I had reason to ponder it, because I did just that: I fell flat on my face, and not just in the metaphorical sense.

It happened while I was doing my daily walk at my usual fast clip—although it wasn’t exactly daytime, and that almost certainly had some significance as well, because dusk had substantially impaired visibility. I was walking on a sidewalk that’s notoriously uneven, with periodic ridges where the blocks of pavement aren’t flush with each other, and then I was distracted by a group of four people walking nearby.

And so I tripped, with my toe catching on something-or-other. And for reasons I fail to understand even now—and probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint unless I watched a slo-mo video of the proceedings—I fell hard and fast and was unable to effectively break my fall with my hands.

There was a strange moment when I sailed through the air, flailing a bit before I landed, knowing I was in a slight dive position with my head/face leading and probably likely to contact first. In that split-second, it was frightening to anticipate what might happen. My life didn’t flash through my mind, but questions like “will I have a concussion?” and “what will happen to my face?” certainly did.

I hit with most of the force of the blow centered on the right side of my face, especially my forehead and nose, and my right knee. I did get my hands down, but only enough to scrape my pinky and ring finger on my left hand ever-so-slightly.

But I didn’t know all that at the time; my main sensation was of hitting my head quite hard. I was then able to stand up and turn to the group of people who’d been watching in horror, strangers who were put in the odd and unsettling position of having to answer my question: what do I look like? What have I done to myself?

In other words: what do you see when you look at me?

The face is a psychologically sensitive area to us. It’s not for nothing that T.S. Eliot wrote, “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” The thought of permanent (or even temporary) injury there is especially frightening and disturbing, and I was frightened and disturbed on many levels simultaneously (including my fear of a concussion).

The people looked searchingly at me and their expressions were very concerned, which didn’t reassure me much. Nor did their words, “Well, you’re got a big gash and bump on your forehead, and one there [pointing to my nose]…” at which point I summoned the courage to put my hands to my face, and felt a huge goose egg on my forehead and my nose swollen to about twice its usual size. My hands were covered with blood when I withdrew them.

The scrape of my knee was as nothing, although it stung; it was my face and head that concerned me. Luckily, I was very near home—and very luckily, also seemed to have no issues with fogginess or double vision or any of the more ominous signs, although my nose had swollen enough to be encroaching on my vision a bit. I did the usual things when I got there: called my doctor cousin for advice on whether I needed to go to the emergency room (no), used ice for hours and hours, and tended the wounds for the next few days as he advised, with Vaseline and sunscreen and various bandages.

I looked like a prizefighter for a while, swollen and abraded forehead and nose and cheek and lip. And then black and blue eyes, with an interesting dark-purple tint to the upper lids that looked for all the world like the eyeshadow I ordinarily use. Now things are much, much better, and the doctor says I may escape without scarring, although time will tell, and I have to wear major sunscreen whenever I go out for a couple of months.

I consider myself lucky. But the whole thing has left me with a feeling of vulnerability in general, and especially when I walk. Why did it happen? Was it just that I need to stop walking when it’s getting dark? Is it that simple? If so, then why did I fall (much less spectacularly) in a similar manner about a year ago when it wasn’t especially dark, my foot catching on an uneven paver on the sidewalk? Should I walk looking down at all times? It’s not that I’m so clutzy that I’m constantly tripping and stumbling, but even twice is too many times for me.

And what of my failure to put my arms out in time? Was it a question of simple mechanics, just the way I happened to fall? Or was it because I tend to walk with my hands in my pockets, because of my chronic arm injury? Am I protecting them too much?

I took a day off from walking, but then decided I had to get back on the horse. So I’ve been walking again. But I must admit I’m a lot more nervous when I do my fast walking than I used to be, although I hope most of that will fade—with just a little extra wariness left over, enough to protect me in the future.

One thing though: if I’m walking on a sidewalk, it has to be before sunset. That’s my new rule, and I think it’s a good one.

[ADDENDUM: I appreciate everyone’s good wishes expressed in the comments section.

Just a few extra words of clarification: this doesn’t seem to have been a fall from any sort of unsteadiness or lack of balance, it was because I didn’t see the ridge of the pavement in the dark and as a result I was catapulted forward, face first, because of my previous forward momentum from walking very fast. I actually don’t think there was any way I could have broken my fall to avoid it, even if I’d been 18 years old, although of course there’s no way to tell. But the only way I can describe it is that I was hurled forward and had the brief but terrifying sensation of sailing or flying, at the same time knowing my face/head was leading the way slightly, and I was likely to fall on it. Mrs Whatsit seems to have had something similar happen to her, because she describes it pretty well here.]

The self-esteem movement for designated-victim groups

The New Neo Posted on by

One thing that Romney’s supposed “gaffe” in Israel highlights (as though it needed any further underlining) is that it’s no longer possible to speak truth about any designated-victim group for fear of offending them and/or being called racist.

The furor over Romney’s words reminds me a bit of what happened to Bill Cosby when he tried to finger certain attitudes within the black family and culture as part of the cause of the problems black people face today (as opposed to problems they faced historically, when the oppression and discrimination against them were both overt and serious). And although Cosby (unlike Romney) had the advantage of being a previously popular member of the very group he was addressing, it did him little good once he spoke the unspeakable truth.

It also reminds me of what happened to Larry Summers when he tussled with the feminist PC crowd at Harvard. Even that supposed bastion of learning, ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth, couldn’t stomach the truth he voiced when it hurt the feelings of the feminist professors and their sympathizers there.

Liberals love the phrase “speaking truth to power.” But apparently, speaking truth to lack of power (or perceived lack of power; designated-PC-victim groups and their hurt feelings actually have a great deal of power these days) isn’t allowed, especially when the supposedly powerless have the power of leftist popular opinion and the press on their side.

But when we can’t tell the truth we do ourselves no favors—and we do members of the designated-victim groups no favors, either. Instead, we make sure they remain both victims and now victimizers, licking their wounds and nursing their grievances and striking out at those whom they think are to blame, instead of doing what might be necessary to help change their lot.

Those sluggish hunter-gatherers

The New Neo Posted on by

Can this really be true?:

The research team behind the study, led by Herman Pontzer of Hunter College in New York City, along with David Raichlen of the University of Arizona and Brian M. Wood of Stanford measured daily energy expenditure (calories per day) among the Hadza, a population of traditional hunter-gatherers living in the open savannah of northern Tanzania. Despite spending their days trekking long distances to forage for wild plants and game, the Hadza burned no more calories each day than adults in the U.S. and Europe. The team ran several analyses accounting for the effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. In all analyses, daily energy expenditure among the Hadza hunter-gatherers was indistinguishable from that of Westerners.

I do remember learning, back in anthro classes long ago, that many hunter-gatherer groups actually don’t have to use a whole lot of energy to get their food— certainly not as much as one might think—and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that the really grueling work began. Hunter-gatherers tend to expend a great deal of energy in spurts, with a lot of resting in-between.

But still, Westerners today seem to be such relative couch potatoes that it’s difficult to believe that the Hadza can expend the same amount of energy and live, unless they happen to be sitting in the middle of the Garden of Eden. The article is a bit murky as to the mechanism by which this human conservation of energy is accomplished, because it indicates that the Hazda do spend more of their daily energy needs in performing physical activity. So, what makes up the difference? Do the more lethargic Westerners have a higher basal metabolism? And if so, why? Does the body have a sort of homeostatic mechanism in terms of energy needs?

It doesn’t make much sense to me, but there’s an awful lot we don’t know about these things—including the fact that this study might be incorrect, or the Hazda might be atypical.

After I wrote the above, I got curious about the Hazda, and found this National Geographic piece with the following passages:

The Hadza diet remains even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world’s citizens. They enjoy an extraordinary amount of leisure time. Anthropologists have estimated that they “work”””actively pursue food””four to six hours a day…

The things they own””a cooking pot, a water container, an ax””can be wrapped in a blanket and carried over a shoulder. Hadza women gather berries and baobab fruit and dig edible tubers. Men collect honey and hunt. Nighttime baboon stalking is a group affair, conducted only a handful of times each year; typically, hunting is a solo pursuit…

People sleep whenever they want. Some stay up much of the night and doze during the heat of the day. Dawn and dusk are the prime hunting times; otherwise, the men often hang out in camp, straightening arrow shafts, whittling bows, making bowstrings out of the ligaments of giraffes or impalas, hammering nails into arrow­heads.

Quite a few hints there.

[Hat tip: Instapundit.]

James Holmes’ psychiatrist and the duty to warn

The New Neo Posted on by

James Holmes’ psychiatrist Dr. Lynne Fenton warned the university’s threat assessment team that he might be dangerous, and, tragically, nothing was done to stop him—at least, nothing effective:

Sources have told KMGH-TV that the threat assessment team never had a formal meeting and never intervened, believing that it had no control over Holmes once he’d left the university…A CU spokeswoman declined comment to KMGH on Fenton or any threat-team team actions, citing a gag order.

Dangerous people often become more dangerous, not less, when they’ve left an institution or job at which they’re having difficulty. But dangerousness can be difficult to evaluate in the absence of very clear signs, and the remedies are not always all that obvious even then.

For example, a mental health professional is required to give what’s called Tarasoff warnings if a person offers threats to a specific individual. That works for stalkers and their ilk, but it’s doubtful that Holmes specified to Fenton who his targets were, since he probably didn’t even know himself. Did he describe his modus operandi in any detail, or did he just mention vague thoughts of violence? Was he specific, or was it just a hunch on Fenton’s part?

Civil commitment is not that easily accomplished these days, although it would probably have been possible in Colorado if Holmes were to have been judged to be dangerous to himself or others.

I can’t even imagine how Dr. Fenton is feeling. One of the heaviest and most difficult responsibilities a psychiatrist has is to predict the violent behavior of patients under his/her care. In the case of Holmes, we don’t know for how long Fenton saw him prior to the murders; it might have been only a very short time. She seems to have properly sounded the alarm. But if and when the ball was dropped and by whom, or whether the threat assessment team’s hands were tied by the law, remains to be seen.

Gymnasts’ bodies: form follows function

The New Neo Posted on by

The bodies that excel in different sports are not randomly chosen, they are selected by the needs of the activity. One would never mistake a professional basketball player for a jockey (except maybe the highly unusual Spud Webb, and at 5’6″ even he was almost certainly too big to be a jockey).

Even within sports, there are differences. In baseball, playing first base cries out for characteristics that almost inevitably mean that those who play it are much bigger than shortstops.

I’ve been watching the women’s gymnastics competition at the Olympics. As a former dancer, I have a certain special interest in the sport, so different and yet somehow similar. Like ballet, gymnastics requires a certain body type to perform its formidable physical feats, and then the training itself shapes the body even further toward that standard. Like ballet, gymnastics dictates the need for both strength and flexibility as well as leanness. But it’s strength and flexibility of a very different type, and the bodies it calls for and then further develops are very different as well.

The two disciplines didn’t always diverge quite so much. But as the tumbling skills required in gymnastics have increased dramatically, the balletic aspects of the sport have decreased almost to the vanishing point (although here and there one sees a remnant in one athlete or another), and the bodies have changed correspondingly, especially in the hip.

One of the most basic requirements for ballet is what’s called “turn-out.” The prospective dancer must begin at a very early age to reshape the hip joint, especially the ligaments and muscles surrounding it, to achieve the ability to rotate the leg outward in a way that’s the opposite of pigeon-toed. It part of what gives ballet its open, expansive stance, and allows dancers to move freely in almost any direction. Female ballet dancers are thin—often very thin—but their hip shape is nearly always very conventionally feminine, with at least a slight outward curve, because that’s the type of hip formation that can best achieve the desired turnout, and they tend to have better turnout than male dancers, as well.

This shape can more easily be seen when the dancers perform in leotards:

Both dancers and gymnasts tend to be short, and their breasts are relatively undeveloped, although gymnasts tend to be significantly smaller, and dancers tend to look taller on stage than they really are. A more compact body is easier to handle in both endeavors, but for gymnastic tumbling it is absolutely necessary.

It wasn’t always that way. Back when I was a young, the great Russian gymnast Ludmilla Tourischeva had a body that was rather ballet-like, except for the greater musculature in her shoulders and arms and across her upper back. Her style of movement was balletic, too, and she was considerably taller than today’s gymnasts, although I’ve had trouble finding her exact height. But whatever her height, she had a more conventional female body, albeit a finely-honed and exceptionally fit one:

Here’s Tourischeva doing her floor routine in 1972. It would never pass muster today, but I like her grace and flow and long stretched line. The floor was of a completely different type, by the way; nowadays it is much springier:

The passing of the guard occurred in 1976, when Tourischeva was upstaged in popularity by the far more diminutive and girlish fellow-Russian Olga Korbut. Korbut was cutesy and much tinier—with slimmer hips, the better to tumble. But note that her hips still possessed a slight feminine curve, despite her more extreme thinness:

The same was true a few years later of the even-younger Romanian, Nadia Comaneci:

For a while, gymnasts kept getting younger and slighter and more per-pubescent. But America’s Mary Lou Retton represented a new and different body type. Compact, chunky and solid, although not the least bit fat, she was built for strength and speed and explosive tumbling. Note that her hips are not conventionally feminine; the curve has pretty much disappeared:

In the last decades of the twentieth century, a slow revolution came to women’s gymnastics that made the Retton body more commonplace and meant that the teeny tiny pre-pubescent kidlets were far less common. The cause was a series of rule changes that made sixteen the minimum age to enter the Olympics in the sport. That reversed the trend toward lighter and younger girls and helped set up the situation as we see it today, when what one might call the Retton hip type is in the ascendance.

The five US women who won the team gold medal the other day are almost perfect exemplars of this. It is striking to see them together, not a conventional feminine hip among them, although of course they are recognizably teenage girls. But they represent five variations on a single theme: breasts almost non-existent, with shoulders far wider than hips which in turn form nearly a straight line with their waists, above powerfully muscular legs (most notably the thighs):

Here are some closeups of individual members:

These are not men; they are clearly women. But their bodies are as unusual and uncommon as their achievements. The narrow hips are not an accident; unlike ballet, gymnastics is a turned-in sport. Imagine performing insanely difficult tricks on a 4-inch-wide balance beam, and it’s obvious that hips which stick out would be an unbalancing disadvantage; the same with tumbling in floor exercises. Anything that decreases the strength-to-volume ration would detract from a gymnast’s ability to achieve the extremely high levels of difficulty now required, and the upper body and legs bear the brunt.

How high are the levels of difficulty now? This high:

I admire the strength, skill, dedication, hard work, and sheer guts of today’s astounding gymnasts. But I’d still rather watch Tourischeva.

The 50 greatest movies of all time?

The New Neo Posted on by

Boy, I really really really don’t agree with this list of the 50 greatest, as decreed by 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors asked by the British Film Institute.

Beginning with their #1, “Vertigo,” a ho-hum Hitchcock movie with really bad acting by Kim Novak and some nice visual effects.

But then again, I’ve never even been a “Citizen Kane” fan, either. So I guess that makes me a bona fide film rube.

I noticed that the list lacks anything one would call a chick flick, and I’m a bit partial to those (the older ones anyway, such as “Wuthering Heights“). And where’s “The African Queen”? For that matter, where’s “Gone With the Wind” (a movie I can take or leave, but even I can recognize it might be worthy of the list for its scope, if nothing else)?

The only films on the list that I’m especially partial to are numbers 6 (“2001: A Space Odyssey”), number 10 (“8 1/2,” but only because I’m a big Mastroianni fan), 26 (“Rashomon”), and the wonderful number 42, “Some Like it Hot.” And although I haven’t seen every single one of them (“Gertrud”?), I’ve seen a great many.

My list would have to include two of more recent vintage, “Groundhog Day” and “The Lives of Others,” as well as the earlier “The Great Escape,” “The Day of the Jackal,” “High Noon,” and an outlier, “Midnight Run.” Let’s also throw in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and “Life of Brian.”

Note the number of comedies on my list. “Some Like it Hot” is the only one I can find on the British Film Institute’s (although some of the ones I’ve never heard of could be comedies, I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it). They are a serious bunch, aren’t they?

Planning ahead: Obama and the suburbs

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been one of many people who have long said that in an Obama second term, unconstrained by the need for re-election, Obama would be free to undertake the more radical parts of his agenda. And it won’t really matter all that much if Congress is controlled by Republicans, either, because he’s been refining ways to circumvent that process successfully, and has learned what works and what doesn’t fly.

And so it may be of interest to read Stanley Kurtz’s piece in the National Review on Obama’s plans to make the suburbs into a cash cow for the cities—spreading the wealth and all:

Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

I recommend reading the whole thing; it sounds very plausible. Here’s another excerpt:

The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.

One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis”“St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.

The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.

And this commenter makes a good point:

Once again we are reminded that we should have asked what candidate Obama meant when he promised to transform America, as I doubt this is what most Americans had in mind.

At this point, voters ought to know. But it doesn’t seem that enough of them are paying attention, even now.

Of course, Harry Reid’s tax returns are an open book

The New Neo Posted on by

Not:

[Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi]…are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records. Just 17 out of the 535 members of Congress released their most recent tax forms or provided some similar documentation of their tax liabilities in response to requests from McClatchy over the last three months. Another 19 replied that they wouldn’t release the information, and the remainder never responded to the query.

The widespread secrecy in one branch of the government suggests a self-imposed double standard. Yet while American politics has come to expect candidates for the presidency to release their tax returns, the president isn’t alone in having a say over the nation’s tax laws. Congress also stands to gain or lose by the very tax policies it enacts, and tax records ”“ more than any broad financial disclosure rules now in place ”“ offer the chance to see whether the leaders of the government stand to benefit from their own actions…

To Pelosi and some other top Democrats, the focus is on Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, who’s released his 2010 return and 2011 estimates and plans to release his 2011 return when it’s completed, but refuses to release any more. They say the very refusal to release more suggests that he’s hiding something.

“He could not even become a Cabinet member for that lack of disclosure, and now with that lack of disclosure he wants to be president of the United States,” said Pelosi, the House minority leader, who’s from California.

Apparently, though, he could become Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader.

Romney’s defense has been that he’s released everything he’s required to, and more—and funny thing, that’s the defense of Pelosi and Reid as well (except for the “and more” part):

[Pelosi, Reid, and Wasserman-Schultz] refused repeated requests from McClatchy to release their own returns, requests that started before the flap over Romney’s records.

Pelosi aides refused, saying she’s disclosed all that Congress requires.

“The leader has filed a complete financial disclosure report as required by law that includes financial holdings, transactions and other personal information,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said…

Challenged at a recent news conference to release hers, Wasserman Schultz said she wouldn’t because she wasn’t running for president. “I file full financial disclosure required under the law,” she said.

What’s required by law is written by Congress itself, a broad financial-disclosure statement that offers no direct information on tax liabilities and no requirement for reporting spousal income other than the source ”“ but not the amount ”“ of any income above $1,000. There’s little way of knowing whether that spousal income is $1,001 or $1 million…

When it comes to the valuation of investments or reporting of income on the annual disclosure forms, what’s required are broad numbers such as between $250,000 and $500,000 or $1 million and $5 million. That makes it hard to determine how much benefit a lawmaker might get from competing tax plans.

“They just don’t provide the same level of detail as a tax return,” said Darrell West, a specialist on governing and a vice president of the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center in Washington.

Most members won’t release that kind of detail.

The hypocrisy is staggering, but hardly surprising.