the Common Place

By special request - a post today for Chris of the underverse. He’ll understand the oblique reference , I think. Video by legendary Soviet/perestroika band Aquarium. English translation courtesy of Anti-War Songs

Thus queried my life partner, the Bicycle Repairman, this morning as I was unglueing my eyelids over my first cuppa.

I guessed Douglas Adams*, wrongly. Actually it was Stephen Fry (Jeeves & Wooster, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, The Ode Less Travelled, &c &c.)

Mr. Stephen Fry continues to obsess about technology and all things non-Microsoft, as well as write brilliantly and expansively about language, literature, the universe, and everything at The New Adventures of Mr. Stephen Fry.

And later today, I’m going to see his old buddy, Emma Thompson, in “Last Chance Harvey.” You see, everything really is connected.

Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Paul Shearer ,Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson

* This is the answer to the question “Who bought the first Macintosh computer in the UK?”

I spent some time last week fighting off a hack attack on a client’s Wordpress blog. The site was running an old version of wordpress, and basically what the hacker did was upload a new wp-config file to the uploads folder. This vulnerability allowed the hacker to post thousands of links to what appeared to be zombified blogs generating posts with links to websites selling cheap prescription drugs.

I’ve learned much more than I want to know about hijacking Wordpress blogs: apparently it is now the technique of choice for black hat SEO. Now I’m seeing zombie blogs everywhere on google. I assume they dominate the long tail of search results - mostly you notice them when you search some rare term with less than a page of results. For instance, I came across the misspelling “jaundist” as in “I take a jaundist view of this.” I was interested to know whether this was an eggcorn rather than just a misspelling - I imagined someone imagining the “jaundists” as the followers of some French intellectual with a jaded, blasé outlook on life - so I googled it.

Anyway, the term “jaundist” led me to a blog with a plausible url consisting of nothing but scraped, scrambled, and badly machine-translated text, all food-related. (Possibly why I clicked, I love me some foodie porn.) Anyway I like random patterns and nonsense and nuggets of wisdom such as “Jaundist and randomness which can be misunderstood as sillyness is not good toast” and “Dwarvish bums smell awful more than daffodils in october leaking many little wet porridge flavoured weasels dipped in treakle and cream with hundreds of sprinkles” please me inordinately.

Also, some recipes (from the German, via Babelfish or similar):

1 1 / 2 times the amount of chocolate cake recipe floor
1 glass cherries
2 tsp agar-agar
Pk 2 (600ml) aufschlagbare soya cream
2 Pk Sahnesteif
1 cocoa heated swimming EL

* The cake-floor platform in the form of a spring bake on a cake and allow to cool grid with a long knife to cut into 3 floors.
* The cherries (12-16 not crushed prior to the side) with juice in a pot to boil.
* Agar-agar with a little touch cold water, to the cherries, and boil 1-2 minutes kocheln.
* Cherry mass to cool until it begins to gel.
* To the lowest floor, cake-cake ring put the cherry on mass.
* If the cherries are quite firmly become the second floor of cake to the fact very cool.
* The cream with the Sahnesteif detail.
* The cake ring from cake and remove about 1 / 3 of cream pie on the second floor.
* Third gates lay on top floor, the remaining cream on top of the page and distribute.
* The previous cherries in a circle on the cake distribute.
* Cocoa with the help of a fine Siebs sprinkle on the cake.
* Up to be eaten cold.

Decorate with chopped Spam!

Spam and aufschlagbare soya cream- two great tastes that taste great together! Also, click here for another great recipe: Fluffy Mackerel Pudding!

By now, I suppose everyone* has seen and formed an opinion about Barry Blitt’s illustration for the July 21 New Yorker cover:

No one really disputes that it is only a slightly exaggerated depiction of the way some Americans view the Obamas. But people who think it is a Bad Thing are worried that it reinforces and perpetuates the outrageous claims it attempts to satirize.

Chris at the Underverse reviews a particular tin-eared critique of the cover by Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard psych professor:

… it’s not hard to detect a note of fear-mongering (no doubt unconscious) in Banaji’s words, which conjure themes of infiltration, hidden intrigue, contamination, and subterfuge, bracingly reminiscent of just about every fear campaign ever run. Her implicit argument, then, is that human nature demands that we purify our information stream to keep out harmful imagery, which, once loosened, can never be eradicated. This, I confess, suggests a branch of psychology that is unknown to me. At one point she goes as far as to state that any imagery we are exposed to, under any conditions, is fairly compared to Pavlovian conditioning:

Learning by association is so basic a mechanism that living beings are jam-packed with it — ask any dog the next time you see it salivating to a tone of a bell.

If only we had a cultural weapon against this mechanism, something that could subvert the meanings of these associations by calling close and precise attention to them. But such is not our fortune, alas.

I commented glibly that my reaction to the cartoon was “Wouldn’t it be cool if Obama really did have a hidden agenda to undermine the American empire?” I had the same reaction when Hillary was described as a dangerous radical feminist bent on forcing us into socialized medicine: if only!

(Here I must clarify that my first impression of the cartoon zoomed in on the depiction of Michelle as a black revolutionary complete with Angela Davis ‘do, machine gun, and combat boots, rather than the portrayal of Barack as a fundamentalist madrasseh grad. So my comment doesn’t really reflect sympathies with radical Islam but rather my persistent 1960’s nostalgia complex.)

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log comes down on the side of the cover as Bad Thing, but his problem is more specific, and I think, more justified than Dr. Banaji’s. It centers precisely on the gesture that unites the black revolutionary and the Islamic radical in the cartoon:

In the cover, the fist bump is presented along with clear signifiers of anti-Americanism, Muslim identity, and terrorism, suggesting that it is another such signifier. That’s just wrong, and presenting the gesture this way is pernicious. The primary social-group signification of the gesture is, or at least was, “African-American”, and it’s never been associated with either Islam or terrorism, so that linking the gesture to anti-Americanism and terrorism (and, via another link, to Islam) promotes a (groundless) slur on African-Americans. I’m sure this is not what the New Yorker intended — quite the contrary, in fact — but its depiction of several signifiers together encourages this interpretation, and so advances a slur on African-Americans as treacherous anti-Americans.

Of course, it wasn’t Blitt’s cartoon that first made the association between an innocent gesture of greeting/congratulation with terrorism. That distinction apparently belongs to a commenter on Human Events, a right wing site. (Behold the power of the blog commenter!)

It was then picked up by the host of Fox News’ America’s Pulse:

…host E.D. Hill teased an upcoming discussion by saying, “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.”

[Read the transcript on Media Matters]

Zwicky’s point, then, is not that the cartoon viewers will have the image of the Obamas as jihadis implacably seared in their brains. He grants that most people will get that the cartoon is a satire of “sleazy slurs on the Obamas.” No, what bothers him is that the fist-bump - culturally specific to African-Americans but innocent of political or terrorist associations - will be taken at face value as “just another signifier of Islam, terrorism, or anti-Americanism.”

That’s rather charitable to the many Americans for whom “America” means “white America. ” (After all, there weren’t any black characters in “Little House on the Prairie ” or “Davy Crockett” were there?) To those voters anything specifically “black” about the Obamas is as threatening as the sound of Barack’s middle name. The well known terrorist news network , Al Jazeera, interviewed some of these voters back in May. The key to their attitude is expressed by the guy at 2:02 in the video:

It is a race problem… the white people have put the Negroes at the back of the bus for years, and if we’re not careful, we’re going to be at the back of the bus and they’re going to be in the front.

I think this is a fear shared by many who would not be so forthright in expressing it as this Kentuckian. But it won’t stop them from flinging all the mud they can at the Obamas, especially Michelle, I fear. Already she’s been portrayed as next door to a Black Panther for writing honestly about her experiences as African-American on an Ivy League campus.
Finally, here’s another example of satirizing an attitude by pretending to espouse it - Hayes Carll singing She Left Me For Jesus:

She left me for Jesus and that just ain’t fair
She says that he’s perfect, how could I compare
She says I should find him and I’ll know peace at last
If I ever find Jesus I’m kickin’ his ass

She showed me a picture; all I could do was stare
At that freak in his sandals with his long pretty hair
They must think that I’m stupid or I don’t have a clue
I’ll bet he’s a commie, or even worse yet, a Jew

She’s given up whiskey and ah taken up wine
While she prays for his troubles she’s forgot about mine
I’m a gonna get even, I can’t handle the shame
Why last time we made love she even called out his name

Now, how could a true lover of Jesus possibly be offended by this? You’d have to be a prude, or be offended by the idea that Jesus had a kickable ass - which is funny if you take seriously the whole point of incarnation.

But I’m sure the petty umbrage-takers who pass for his followers these days will summon up some outrage for Mr. Carll.

*******************************************************************
*Except my dad in Omaha, because I asked him last night. I asked because in the ordinary course of events, it’s highly unlikely that he would ever see a New Yorker cover. Indeed the whole tradition of the New Yorker cover has never penetrated into my parent’s world. The very name of the magazine implies, to them, “people who are likely to despise us.”

Language Log’s Barbara Partee writes about a new kind of Internet slang born from switching back and forth between international character sets when keyboarding:

I have a Live Journal account where my “friends” are mainly young Russian linguists, so most of the posts are in Russian, in the Cyrillic alphabet, but user-names, tags, etc., are all in the Roman alphabet. There was one tag that I had often seen in one particular user’s posts, “lytdybr”, and I had just guessed that it was some private code word of her own (I even invented a romantic etymology for it as an abbreviation starting with “love you”.) But then last week I suddenly saw the same tag on a post by another young Russian linguist, and realized that it wasn’t just one person’s private tag.

So I googled it and discovered what it really is: it’s how the Russian word дневник, dnevnik ‘diary’, comes out if you’re typing on a QWERTY keyboard with the keystrokes you would use on a Cyrillic keyboard. There’s a Wiktionary entry about it; and I didn’t even know such a category of — of what? I guess I’ll call it slang — existed.

So on my LJ, I asked if there were any other examples, and it generated some interesting discussion. One person told me about usus for гыгы (gygy ‘laughter’ — think hee-hee); someone remarked that the “usus” of usus is fun in itself. Another example is ghbdtn, which is привет, privet ‘hi’ or ‘greetings’, common in instant messaging, with ICQ, Google Talk, etc.

One common example goes in the other direction: Russians typing in Cyrillic often use З.Ы. for P.S. so as not to have to switch out of the Russian keyboard. And one person told me they even sometimes use Ж-) instead of : -) for the same reason!

The phenomenon even has an example in contemporary fiction. In one of Boris Akunin’s detective novels (set in Imperial Russia and featuring the Byronic detective hero Erast Fandorin) there is an English character named Фрейби (freyby). Freyby is what you get if you type Акунин (Akunin) on a QWERTY keyboard.

lytdybr/лытдыбр has also acquired a specific meaning relating to blogging, as Partee explains.

One of my students commented that lytdybr, even sometimes transliterated back to лытдыбр, has become a word of its own, with a meaning more specific than the original ‘diary’.

It is often (but not always, there is a neutral meaning too) used to tag posts in blogs that are nothing more than boring retelling of author’s life. For example, something like “Just eaten some apples. Cool.” is a typical lytdybr in its negative meaning.

I am still working out what sort of posts will go here in my commonplace book - there may even be some reshuffling in the near future. However, I sincerely hope to keep the “lytdybr” type of post (in its negative meaning) to a minimum! Ж-)