Graphic illustration of why the rise of photography…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has coincided with a rise in the rate of depression.

The ravages of time didn’t used to be so well-documented.

Then again—there’s a genre of YouTube videos that feature the morphing of photos of the same person over a long period of time, showing the aging process with its attendant sags, bags, folds, and blotches. But watching a bunch of them, my strongest impression was one of continuity rather than change. The person—eyes, expression, essence, je ne sais quoi—remains.

And if you start out beautiful/handsome to begin with, sometimes you end up pretty beautiful/handsome a lot of years later. Here’s a married couple morphing:

From “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

If I Loved You

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve become a teeny bit obsessed with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel,” while indulging in one of my favorite procrastination habits—watching YouTube videos.

Now, the musical “Carousel” was stupid in a lot of ways, especially the movie version. I tend to detest movie musicals anyway, and “Carousel” contains some special abominations. For instance, it added a prologue, set in some unspecified after-death location—was it heaven? purgatory?—that foreshadowed the fact that main protagonist Billy Bigelow died during the course of the story, so that his death, which had been such a shock in the stage play, comes as no surprise at all.

And then there was how Billy died. Instead of yelling out Julie’s name and committing suicide because he knew how he’d messed up, he falls on his knife by accident (I can’t find exact documentation for all of this, but that’s it if memory serves me). Dumb change, typical of the 50s.

And that wasn’t all that was changed. Some of the lyrics were cleaned up, as though they weren’t clean enough already. For example, in the incredibly moving “Soliloquy” (one of the few songs ever written about becoming a father), the word “virgin” (in the line “a skinny-lipped virgin with blood like water”) is changed to “lady.” Ugh.

The movie’s sound stage and lip-syching don’t help, either. Where does the following scene take place? It looks like some weird combo of the Washington DC mall at cherry blossom time, a Florida swamp, and a lake. Not coastal Maine, where it’s supposed to be set (and where some of the film was beautifully filmed).

But—and but and but and but—the excellent John Raitt of the stage version became the transcendentally-voiced and even handsomer and sexier Gordon MacRae in the movie, and the stage’s Jan Clayton (yes, she of later “Lassie” TV fame) became the more beautiful and sonorous-toned Shirley Jones (TV and “The Partridge Family” being in her very distant future, as well). MacRae and Jones conveyed more sorrow in their voices, even from the beginning.

MacRae is simply spectacular here. I’ve watched many YouTube renditions of this song, old and new, pro and amateur, and I’ve not seen one to compare. MacRae wasn’t the greatest with the spoken word. His acting is servicable and nothing special. But when he sings, not only does his voice pour like honey, but singing releases something within him that allows him to act wonderfully, too. In the role of Billy Bigelow—and especially when singing this particular song. “If I Loved You,” the theme of which is hidden longing and love that can’t be expressed—his slight problem with emotion in speaking and his facility with emotion when singing are a perfect fit (just hear what he does with the word “longing”):

The musical contains a reprise of the song, occurring after Billy has screwed everything up and died. He gets a chance to come back to earth for a day and visit the wife he left behind and the daughter he wanted to love but never met. He mucks it up again for a while, and then—well, here’s MacRae as Billy (or Billy’s ghost, or Billy’s spirit or shade), trying to tell his wife how much he really did love her. Note how well he expresses the profound regret of a man who knows now what he didn’t know then:

And here, to be fair, is John Raitt in “If I Loved You.” He’s no slouch, either; what a beautiful voice! He’s really really really good. But as good as Raitt is, to me MacRae remains superior in every way. This is the entire song, a more complete version than the one I cued up in the movie; well worth watching the whole thing. But Raitt’s part starts around 6:11:

Pigs fly, and the WaPo writes the article I thought they wouldn’t write about Newt Gingrich’s divorce

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not perfect. But Paul Farhi offers a relatively fair narration of the events in question—you know, the ones I’ve been writing about (here and here) concerning the rumors that have been spreading for many years to the effect that Newt Gingrich blindsided his first wife by serving her with divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery.

Does Farhi read neo-neocon? I very much doubt it, although I suppose it’s not outside the realm of remote possibility. But at least he’s tackling something few in the MSM have gone near, and he indicts the press along the way:

The story has been trumpeted by Gingrich’s political opponents, endlessly recycled by the news media and repeated even by would-be allies, including social conservatives, who have long had doubts about the thrice-married former House speaker. As candidate Gingrich has risen to the top of some polls in the past few weeks, the story has inevitably surfaced again. Variations have turned up on MSNBC and in National Journal, various columns and blogs and two British newspapers in just the past week.

Farhi’s story covers much the same ground (although his is more expanded) as I did in yesterday’s post on the subject. He also manages to answer a question I asked yesterday (although he does not cite his source, so I’m still not sure whether the information is correct) as to whether Gingrich’s wife had a history of cancer prior to the surgery in question, which was for a benign tumor. Farhi says that she did.

There are three big problems I see with the piece, although two of them are not Farhi’s fault. The first is that it’s on the “lifestyle” pages. That means it probably won’t get much traction, although the WaPo can point to it as an example of their fairness. The second is that even if it were on the front pages I doubt it would change the fact that much of the MSM and media on the left will continue to milk the original misleading story dry, because it is so useful, and that at any rate the damage has already been done and the meme has had a long life of its own and is part of the background of what so many people think they know about Gingrich.

The third is that Farhi neglects to quote Gingrich’s story about what happened that day. This is subtly misleading [emphasis mine]:

Over the years, Gingrich himself has declined to comment on the story’s details, although when asked about his divorces and extramarital relationships, Gingrich has usually relied on some variation of the comment he made to the New York Times earlier this year: ”˜’There are things in my life I’m not proud of, and there are things in my life I’m very proud of.’’

Yet while the thrust of the story about his first divorce is not in dispute ”” Gingrich’s first wife, Jackie Battley, has said previously that the couple discussed their divorce while she was in the hospital in 1980 ”” other aspects of it appear to have been distorted through constant retelling…

Accounts of what happened next vary in detail, but primary sources agree on a central point: Gingrich wanted to talk divorce with his hospitalized wife.

But Gingrich has commented on it and denied that version, which makes it “in dispute”:

In the Mother Jones story [written in 1984 and where the tale originated], one-time Gingrich press secretary Lee Howell is quoted as saying that while Mrs. Gingrich was in the hospital, “Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.”

Gingrich said the account was not true.

So the genesis of the story was one of those “former staffer tells all” things. Not surprising.

Gingrich goes on to explain:

“What did happen in the hospital room is something that any couple who has gone though this can totally identify with,” Gingrich said.

“She was recovering and I actually went by with the girls (Jackie and her sister, Kathy Gingrich Lubbers) to see her and be with her, and I was trying to be helpful. And we got into an argument, which I think people who have gone through divorces can probably identify with.”

He said that in retrospect, going to the hospital that day, let alone arguing, was “stupid.”

Divorcing couples don’t even need an excuse to argue; they do it very naturally.

So, why did the WaPo decide to come out with this correction now? Is it, as commenter “Occam’s Beard” suggested, because “they think Newt is done, and so there’s no harm in lifting the leftist curse on him”?

Perhaps. Or perhaps, somewhat paradoxically, they’re trying to temporarily promote the Gingrich candidacy because they think he’d be easier to beat than Romney. Oh, who can fathom the Byzantine workings of the MSM?

Or maybe, just maybe (could it be?) somebody out there actually wanted to do some decent reporting?

The oldest photos

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Althouse.]

Here’s a fascinating look at the world’s oldest photos. They’re probably older than you think:

But they’re not older than I’d think. That’s because my mother has in her possession a bunch of family photos from the 1850s. If we’ve got personal photos that old (mostly tintypes, I believe), it stands to reason that photos themselves (or to be technical, daguerreotypes) came years earlier.

What’s more, I’ve got something even more rare: home movies from the 1920s on both sides of the family. Each is short, but astounding, at least to me. In one, my mother the thirteen-year-old gets out of the family Model T (or something like that; I’m no car expert) along with her parents and grandparents. My mother, a bit awkward but hammy, poses like a model (and looks like one, too, because she was very slender at the time) in her flapper outfit and cloche.

In the other movie, my father is incredibly handsome and eighteen years old. He’s playing some sort of mini-golf, dressed to the nines in a suit. But then the film segues to a shot of his parents (neither of whom I ever met since they died before I was born) in New York on their way to a Mayday parade. The camera later pans up and down that wonder of wonders, the Woolworth building, tallest in the world.

The sages at TNR chime in: again with the “Newt served his wife with divorce papers when she was in the hospital with cancer” yada-yada-yada

The New Neo Posted on by

Surely there’s enough truth with which to attack Gingrich without resorting to lies. But apparently not, just as I predicted (don’t mean to blow my own horn, but…). First on TNR’s list of terrible things Gingrich has done and said is the following [interpolations mine]:

Gingrich divorced his first wife for Marianne Ginther, whom he began courting while he was still married [true]. He informed his first wife of his plans while she was in the hospital receiving treatment for cancer [false].

There’s no question that Gingrich, who has been married a whopping three times, was unfaithful during his marriages and then married his paramours and made each his next wife. That’s certainly behavior that can be attacked and criticized (although those who defended Ted Kennedy’s and Bill Clinton’s affairs might be subject to a charge of hypocrisy for doing so). But the other story makes for a much more juicy tale in these days when ordinary unfaithfulness has become rather ho-hum.

So, this is our choice: is TNR ignorant of the real story? Or is it fully cognizant of the truth and ignoring it for its own purposes, trusting that its readers will not know the difference and that the lie will achieve its purpose?

It almost doesn’t matter which the answer is; this is not responsible journalism either way. But, as I’ve said before under similar circumstances, don’t sit on a hot stove for them to issue a correction.

Speaking of corrections (and in case you haven’t followed the explanatory link), here’s an excerpt from the article by Gingrich’s daughter, who certainly ought to know what happened:

And as long as I can remember, media coverage about [my father] has contained misstatements of facts. The vast majority are simple mistakes that are easily corrected, understood and rewoven into an ongoing storyline.

But one of them seems to have taken on a life of its own, and simple corrections have not sufficed to set the record straight. Why does this happen? I can’t be sure, but I suspect that the narrative created by these untruths proves to be so much more compelling and more dramatic than what actually happened that it proves irresistible.

I’m talking about the story of my father’s visit to my mother while she was in the hospital in 1980.

…[H]ere’s what happened:

My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested.

Dad took my sister and me to the hospital to see our mother.

She had undergone surgery the day before to remove a tumor.

The tumor was benign.

Ah, says the left, but Gingrich’s wife says otherwise!

Actually, she doesn’t. For the most part, the two accounts agree on the major facts. Here is Gingrich’s wife’s statement, based on a 1985 WaPo interview:

He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery ”¦ To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year.

So the divorce was already in the works before the surgery: check. Gingrich brought the girls to see their mother: check. Nowhere is cancer mentioned.

Gingrich’s daughter doesn’t say whether the terms of an already-in-the-works divorce were discussed that day. But the main (and seemingly only) point of disagreement between Gingrich and his first wife on what happened is that he denies he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce during the visit, but concedes they did have an argument. Not all that surprising, if you know anything about divorcing couples.

I’ve also seen reports that Gingrich’s wife had already had some form of cancer prior to this surgery, and had recovered. But I can’t find any credible source on this—although at this point, I must say that I’m not sure what a credible source on the subject would be, since so many media outlets have proven themselves willing to lie or to show callous disregard for the truth.

Oh, and as for the TNR article that started this whole rumination? Once you get past terrible thing #1 and on to the other fourteen they list, you’ll find that many of them contain valid bad marks against Newt (no angel, he). But some of them will make you scratch your head and wonder what’s so terrible about them—except for the fact that they speak some un-PC truths, especially about the left and its agenda.

I’m with Ann Coulter on Romney and Romneycare

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m with Ann Coulter on Romney.

Ordinarily Coulter is hardly a favorite columnist of mine, although this isn’t the first time I’ve agreed with her. But it very much surprises me that she’s touting Romney; I would have thought she’d consider his candidacy anathema because of his supposed RINOism.

Although I very much disagree with her assertion that Romney’s nomination is inevitable—and I also very much disagree with Coulter’s first sentence quoted here—I very much agree with the rest of the following [emphasis mine; the highlighted portion is one of the things I discovered when doing research for the post on Romney and Romneycare that I have yet to write]:

No one is worried Romney will double-cross us on repealing Obamacare. We worry that Romneycare will make it harder for him to get elected.

But, again, Romney is the articulate Republican. He’s already explained how mandating health insurance in one particular wealthy, liberal Northeastern state is different from inflicting it on the entire country. Our Constitution establishes a federalist system that allows experimentation with different ideas in the individual states.

As governor, Romney didn’t have the ability to change federal laws requiring hospital emergency rooms to treat every illegal alien, drug dealer and vagrant who walked in the door, then sending the bill to taxpayers…

The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, supported Romneycare at the time. The biggest warning sign should have been that Gingrich supported it, too.

Most important, Romney has said — forcefully and repeatedly — that his first day in office he will issue a 50-state waiver from Obamacare and will then seek a formal repeal.

Romney is not going to get to the White House and announce, “The first thing I’m going to do is implement that fantastic national health care plan signed by my pal, Barack!”

I would imagine that some people who read this blog think that’s exactly what Romney will do; that he’s such a RINO and flip-flopper that at heart he’s really a liberal in disguise. But when I look at his record, I look at the entire thing (including an exemplary private life, by the way) and I just don’t see that.

Is Romney my favored candidate? No, no, a thousand times no. But I think, for example, that he’s a much stronger (and more inherently conservative) candidate than John McCain was. McCain seemed old and worn out by the time the 2008 campaign was half-finished, and McCain had neither the brainpower nor the accomplishments in the private sector and business sense that Romney has.

Sometimes I think the reason so many people dislike Romney so much isn’t just Obamacare, it’s the fact that he looks as though he was sent from central casting to play a president. He doesn’t seem quite real—nor does he seem to be 64, his actual age.

Nevertheless I’m with Coulter (again!) on this:

Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama.

I think those who think otherwise are dreaming; none of the other candidates can do it, and Romney actually can. The electorate is not a conservative echo chamber, although some blogs are.

I’m not suggesting you vote for him in the primaries if you prefer another candidate. But to refuse to vote for Romney if he’s the nominee against Obama seems very wrong. I think that’s a short-sighted effort to preserve your own purity and that of the Republican Party (even though that purity doesn’t exist, never existed, and never will exist, except if Republicans become a marginal third party someday) at the cost of setting the nation on a better path now—before the changes are irrevocable.

And don’t tell me both parties are interchangeable. They’re both highly flawed, indeed. But there are differences, and I consider that right now the Republican Party represents the lesser of two evils. And right now my plan is to vote for that party’s nominee.

Pilot trapped in bathroom

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems both scary and embarrassing in equal measure:

“The captain has disappeared in the back and, uh, I have someone with a thick foreign accent trying to access the cockpit right now”¦,” the co-pilot reported.

“What I’m being told is he’s stuck in the lav,” the co-pilot continued. “Someone with a thick foreign accent is giving me a password to access the cockpit, and I’m not about to let him in.”

Not willing to take any chances themselves, air controllers on the ground ordered the plane, operated by regional carrier Chautauqua Airlines, to make an emergency landing.

Before the co-pilot was forced to make that emergency landing, however, the pilot was able to open the bathroom door, and calm his anxious colleagues.

But what I do not understand is why the pilot didn’t press that little alarm/call button they have in all the bathrooms on airplanes. Aren’t pilots supposed to be noted for presence of mind in emergencies? The solution this pilot came up with—giving a passenger the code for entering the cockpit—seems an extremely poor one, bound to cause consternation and even panic in the crew.

My guess? Embarrassment won out, and the pilot didn’t want to make a big fuss by sounding the alarm. Of course, he ended up making a much bigger fuss, and the news (and this blog) as well.

Another public service announcement on shingles

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: A while back I wrote this post to warn readers to be on the alert for the rash of shingles, because the illness can be devastating and early detection and treatment can help avoid the worst of the complications. Doctors and sufferers seem to often not recognize the first signs, so I am moved to post a warning again because of the following event.]

A while back I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine and she happened to mention that she had a small rash on her face. It looked like little blisters or pimples, and was really disturbing to her because, after all, wasn’t adolescence supposed to be over now that she was in her 50s? From whence came this foul acne resurgence?

Because of certain previous events in my life, I’ve become shingles-vigilant, and so I asked her whether she’d thought of shingles as a possibility. “It can be on the face, you know,” I said. And since I was at my computer anyway, I sent her some photos of facial shingles for comparison to her affliction.

No, she said, it didn’t really look like what she had. Well, maybe a little. Maybe just one or two of the pictures. And then she read a link I sent her about shingles in general, and she didn’t think it quite fit.

We didn’t see each other for a while (busy, busy, busy!) and I promptly forgot about our exchange. And then a couple of days ago I got a call from that same friend.

She sounded distraught. No, forget distraught: she sounded absolutely dreadful, as though she were being squeezed in a vise.

“For the last four days I’ve had the world’s worst headache,” she said, her voice barely recognizable, so tight with pain it was. “And I’m terribly nauseated and haven’t been able to sleep.”

This was alarming. It sounded to me like status migrainosis, where a migraine gets locked in and just goes on and on and on.

I encouraged her to go to the doctor again (she’d been two days earlier and they’d said she had a sinus headache and had given her antibiotics). It didn’t sound like any sinus headache I’d ever heard of, nor did it sound like she was being a wimp. It sounded dreadful and perhaps even dangerous.

I didn’t hear from her for a couple of days, despite my leaving several messages on her phone with mounting concern. And then I got the news: she’d been in the hospital. She was still there. And they now were saying it was herpes zoster: shingles, with its sequel of neuralgia.

But when I went to visit her I discovered the news was even worse: the diagnosis was actually herpes zoster ophthalmicus. In other words, shingles of the eye.

I’ll skip some of the details except the most salient ones: it can damage vision. It can cause long-lasting, intractable, and extremely severe pain that is very difficult to treat. It can (as you already know from this story) be hard to diagnose at first, and difficult to distinguish from more ordinary rashes.

My friend is still in the hospital. Right now the only thing that seems to control her pain is to knock her out. They’re trying to get the right combination of drugs to help her so that she can be released. I hope that her pain will ultimately resolve and her vision will be unaffected, as is true of most sufferers. But in the meantime her anguish is profound, and this could go on for a long, long time.

So what’s the point of this post? Simply this: please be aware of what shingles looks like [link warning: upsetting photos] and how it works. And even if your rash doesn’t seem to quite match the photos or your symptoms the descriptions, hie yourself to a doctor immediately and let him/her take a look.

And if you’re in your 50s or 60s, consider getting the vaccine.