On eating vomit and music criticism

Was I right or wrong in not liking the music of Pierre Boulez or Elliott Carter?  If, 50 years from now, Boulez and Carter are admired composers, constantly in the repertory, I was wrong. 
Harold C. Schonberg, "A Life of Listening," New York Times, 8 February 1981.
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I have known Schonberg's 'retirement piece' for a long time (it was reprinted in his book Facing the Music) but I still cannot make sense of the above quoted passage.  How can one be wrong in not liking a composer's style or specific works?  Factually wrong?  Morally?  Legally?  Medically?  None of these options make any sense to me.

No less puzzling than Schonberg's semantics is his reasoning.  He seems to think that the rightness of wrongness of one's liking or disliking something may depend on whether enough people have (or will have) the same or the opposite attitude toward that thing.  For the life of me I can't understand this either.

THE TRUEST FACT OF ALL

Americans struggle to ID true facts

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and HANNAH FINGERHUT

14 November 2019

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True facts???  But then why not?  After all, the truest fact of all is that the once respectable news agencies now employ stupid imbeciles incapable of using their vocabularies of words in ways which avoid superfluously redundant adjectives.

Has there ever been a better time for human people with pathetically stunted mental minds?

From tragedy to farce and back to tragedy, all in a single word

First the tragedy:

29 April 2019, JACKSONVILLE, ARK. (AP)

A baby died after escaping from a truck while visiting a central Arkansas military base for a family event.

Not really a newsworthy tragedy since millions of babies die every year all over the world.  Still, it must have been a tragic event for the baby's relatives and at least a traumatic one for those present at the mentioned family event.

Except that it wasn't because in the above quoted sentence I omitted one word.  Here is the complete headline as it was published by AP (italics mine):

A baby kangaroo died after escaping from a truck while visiting a central Arkansas military base for a family event.

Now start with the trivial observation that kangaroos can no more visit family events at military bases than they can visit friends in state prisons or grandparents in retirement homes.  Then count the questions one can ask about the meaning of this sentence.  If you think of language as a biological organism's most important evolutionary gift, this brief exercise will take you right back to what you started with: the tragedy of death, albeit this time the rapidly approaching death of language.

Giving the C-word its due

chasm, n.,

a deep fissure in the earth, rock, or another surface;

 figurative.  a profound difference between people, viewpoints, feelings, etc.
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In her review of a recent Netflix web series, Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer for The Atlantic, tells us that

... it’s hard to square the chasm between the philosophical comedy the show begins as and the discomfiting farce it becomes. (italics added) 1

Perhaps Ms Gilbert's observation reflects her conviction that, in this era of endless possibilities, we should be doing a lot more with chasms than just bridging or closing them.  If so, I'm one of those not yet convinced.  But if she proves to be right, I would love to learn how to sauté a chasm.  Especially the chasm between the supposedly high reputation of The Atlantic and the magazine's employment of incompetent scribblers like Sophie Gilbert.

Sadly, Ms Gilbert's illiteracy may not be her only professional shortcoming.  She also seems genuinely dimwitted for someone paid to spill her thoughts on the pages of a reputable magazine.  On her website she has a section where she shares with the world what people have said about her.  And the quote she proudly puts first is "Finally! A woman." 2

I leave it to you, my dear reader, to decide what should be done with the chasm between a writer's pride in the acclaim received by her work and Sophie Gilbert's pride in being praised for having two X chromosomes.

Questions...

Baby Asian elephant born at upstate New York zoo

January 26, 2019

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Baby?  When has the world last witnessed the birth of an adult elephant?

How do such illiterate dimwits get writing (or editorial) jobs with major news outfits?  Have they been taught anything in their high school and college English classes besides their obligation to join the new Hitlerjugend cohorts clamoring for public executions of those who doubt the existence of white privilege, toxic masculinity, and global warming?

If the emergence of language was the most important development in our evolutionary history, perhaps its now on-going disintegration signals the approaching end of the human species?

No place for amateurs...

Dozens of professional goats briefly took over a neighborhood in Boise

by Karin Brulliard August 3 at 11:18 AM (URL)

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Clearly the days of amateur goats are over (as are the days of literate journalists).  Today's world is a highly demanding and dangerous place where only a team of professional goats can get the job done.

A victory for modal metaphysics!

 13-year-old boy bitten by possible shark off Fire Island

By Aaron Katersky, Joyeeta Biswas, Jul 18, 2018, 1:29 PM ET

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No-one will now laugh at philosophers who spend sleepless nights worrying about the ontological status of possible objects.  As the above headline shows, possible objects are as real as the actual ones, and are capable of causing considerable harm to those who pay no attention to modal metaphysics.

I wonder if the metaphysical awakening initiated by ABC News will soon lead to Nobel Prizes for possible vaccines, long prison sentences for possible crimes, and a Netflix remake of Steven Spielberg's first blockbuster classic, albeit with this metaphysically updated title:

"Me Tarzan, you Jane" English wins...

The syntax in this headline from USA TODAY convinced me that in  today's America the words "journalist" and "fucking retard" have become synonymous.  I wonder if such degradation of language in mainstream media is exclusively an American phenomenon...

Texas teen who cop pulled gun on at pool party speaks

Rrrrreading the news

Sept 12, 2014

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Man died in a fatal accident early Friday

Man died in a fatal accident early Friday

Man died in a fatal accident early Friday

Can one survive a fatal accident?  Or die in a non-fatal accident?
     Well... since Fox News, especially in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma, caters to America-loving microcephalic neanderthals (presumably to counter-balance MSNBC, which caters to America-hating hydrocephalic imbeciles), I didn't think much of that sorry linguistic encounter and have completely forgotten about it until yesterday, when I came across  this:

06 Mar 2015

Angry mob lynches rape suspect to death in India

Lynch to death?  Where do they get such illiterate journalistic retards to write headlines for a supposedly respectable British newspaper?  And where do they find editorial mongoloids who approve such headlines?

Whoever these dimwits on both sides of the Atlantic are, let's hope they will soon be assassinated to death by murderous killers, and their lifeless cadavers buttfucked in the ass by villainous evil-doers.

More homicidal than Taliban and Somalian pirates!

Somalian pirates kill four Americans

(The Telegraph, Feb. 22, 2011)

Taliban kill seven Afghan police

(Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 2014)

New Year rice cakes kill nine in Japan

(BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, Jan. 5, 2014)

Homicidal rice cakes? Couldn't the imbeciles at BBC News have worded the headline in a saner way, e.g., "9 choke to death in Japan while eating New Year rice cakes"?  Oh well...

The final nail in Jean Piaget's coffin...

Boy, 2, accidentally shoots and kills mom in Idaho Walmart

The Associated Press  

Posted: Dec 30, 2014 3:29 PM ET

What a thrill it is to live in a world in which a fatal shooting by a 2-year-old is described by the media as accidental.  Could this act have been intentional?  A revenge for infrequent diaper changes and cheap baby formula?  A cold-blooded publicity stunt to secure a seven-figure book deal for the future memoir "The tot who fucked Jean Piaget and the entire field of Developmental Psychology"?

While the world contemplates the plausibility of such alternatives, I'm sure the retards at AP, BBC, Reuters, and other news outlets are struggling right this very moment to come up with headlines for the first day of the new year.  I feel like being helpful on this New Year's Eve, so how about this one: 

Cheerleader at Bennington College accidentally fellates six members of the basketball team.

It's only as bad as it sounds...

A hatchet-wielding man who attacked two police officers in New York City before he was shot to death was likely “just an angry guy” ...  a police source told ABC News.


And I thought "just an angry guy" is an expression suitable as a tagline for a Robin Williams filmy...

Ways to use one's senses...

In a recent article from The Telegraph, Victoria Scott, a British woman living in Qatar, describes various worthwhile things one can do to feel more at home in that tiny country.  One of such things (italics mine) is to

... watch the Qatar Philharmonic play.

I expect that after Ms Scott gets to live in a few more places around the world, she will suggest for us to

smell the Bolshoi Ballet while in Moscow,  

listen to Rothko paintings while in Houston, and

taste the pyramids while in Egypt.

In the mean time, congratulations to The Telegraph (founded in 1855) on filling their editorial positions with hopeless cultural retards...

Language on holiday

Horse gives birth to twin girls

April 12 - Horse owners in Oklahoma celebrate the birth of extremely rare twins, but worry about the health risks. 

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Girls?  When did Reuters begin to employ as writers and editors such hopeless imbeciles?  Not only do they seem ignorant of a perfectly good English word - filly - for a young female horse under the age of four, but they also see nothing wrong with a headline that belongs in a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer.

Lest you think I made this up, here is the URL of that Reuters webpage.