Snarky, like it was a good thing

I'm not familiar with the etymology of the word snarky but it was immediately clear from context what was meant. And very quickly the word became as annoying as the tone of writing that it describes.

And then there's James Wolcott.

If everyone did snarky like he does snarky, I'd be all for it.

From Gop Goes Fellini:

The wolves, it has been explained to us (since the media assume we're idiots), symbolize the terrorist threat lurking in the shadowy darkness. Bush will contain and kill the wolves. Kerry will presumably ignore them until America is a feast of bloody feathers. Or maybe pet them, thinking they're Huskies, only to lose an arm. Liberals are so gullible.

I am probably not the target audience for this spot, since my sympathies are with the wolves, which were slaughtered and tortured by Western settlers and hunted to near extinction. Is there an Elmer Fudd hunter in this commercial symbolizing Bush? I sincerely hope not, because in a fateful standoff between a hunter and a pack of wolves, I will find myself cheering for the wolfpack to rip the hunter to pieces, and this could be construed as a desire to see harm befall our president. I saw what happened to poor Nicholson Baker and I don't need that kind of grief.

Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh

I've seen some mentions lately of George Lakoff in political news,
of the Rockridge Institute and his book Don't Think of an Elephant.

But this John Brockman interview really got my attention.

Excerpts:

What we discovered was fascinating: Each major philosopher seems to take a small number of metaphors as eternal and self-evident truths and then, with rigorous logic and total systematicity, follows out the entailments of those metaphors to their conclusions wherever they lead. They lead to some pretty strange places.

Plato's metaphors entail that philosophers should govern the state. Aristotle's metaphors entail that there are four causes and that there cannot be a vacuum. Descartes' metaphors entail that the mind is completely disembodied and that all thought is conscious. Kant's metaphors lead to the conclusions that there is a universal reason and that it dictates universal moral laws.

These and other positions taken by those philosophers are not random opinions. They are consequences of taking commonplace metaphors as truths and systematically working out the consequences.

and

We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.

Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. This is what we have to theorize with. Is it adequate to understand the world scientifically?

Ken's miniature engines

They're a little bigger than your hand and you can actually watch 'em run. A V-twin, an inline four, a V-8, and even a blown V-8. What red-blooded American boy wouldn't love it?

Main site frame here.

Gods of the slide guitar

Dave Alvin on Ry Cooder:

I think Ry Cooder is so great that the American Gov. should give him $ just for getting out of bed. I would be too imitated to ever work with him. He's a genius!

David Lindley on Jerry Douglas:

Jerry Douglas was another matter and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d heard him on recordings but that was another matter entirely. No one really knows how good he really is until you hear him play all by himself...and watch him play. It scared me to death! I had to remind myself to breathe several times. He never repeated himself! And it was all good and musically rewarding! He never made any mistakes! And one would think that someone who plays faster than you yourself can think would sound mechanical? Hell no! It was like Django and Charlie Parker meet Speedy West! He tore everyone a new pooper with what he played! (Later in the tour Jerry came to the gig in Salt Lake City and sat in on two tunes. He’s the best Dobro player there is, hands down. Nobody else can play like that.)