62 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2024
  2. Oct 2024
    1. But isn't that what the confirmation process is all about here in Washington? And isn't that what the confirmation process is all about? Weeding out the truly qualified to get to the truly available.<br /> —Jon Stewart, White House Correspondents' Dinner 1997

  3. Jun 2024
  4. Apr 2024
    1. My writing is directed against the indolence of the heart and the stubbornness of the mind.

      Erich Kästner (1899-1974) was a "singer of the little man and the poet of the little freedoms” (Marcel Reich-Ranicki). With his witty and reflective verses that appear so simple, he guaranteed the continuity of the literary cabaret of the twenties into the postwar years. Following his first performances with his "utilitarian poetry” during the post-inflationary era of "new objectivity” prior to 1933 in Berlin cabarets such as Küka, the Tingel Tangel, Cabaret of the Comedians (Kabarett der Komiker) and Werner Finck’s Catacombs (Die Katakombe), he was only able to publish during the Third Reich with a special authorization or under a pseudonym. After the war, the pessimistic enlightener continued work of the Berlin era, now in Munich. With his melancholy and poetic songs, scenes, and sketches for the Showbooth (Schaubude) and Little Freedom (Kleine Freiheit), he influenced the cabaret of the years immediately following war until the foundation of two German states. His ideal of the cabaret as a moral and philosophical institution and a lyrical theater of the times anticipated the political and satirical ensemble cabarets of the fifties. "My writing is directed against the indolence of the heart and the stubbornness of the mind.” (Erich Kästner)

    2. the best way to be silent is to talk

      Otto Grünmandl (1924-2000) was the cranky philosopher of the outlying districts, who told his stories about the lunacy of banality with stoic calm but with complicated intellectual processes. During his work as the head of entertainment for the Tyrolean broadcasting network, he presented his first solo program for the Austrian Radio in 1967. The grumpy comic made the lack of punch lines his punch line, for "the best way to be silent is to talk” (Grünmandl in "My Name Isn’t Oblomow”). Bizarre paradoxes and parodies taken to absurdist extremes characterized the "Alpine Interviews” ("Alpenländische Interviews”) with which he earned his reputation on the radio from 1973 on. Here, the everyday phenomena included a canary that tumbled to his doom while mountain climbing. "What tongue-twisting weasel-like swiftness is for Jandl, tapir-like slowness is for Grünmandl. His one-man barroom gang could grace any performance of Horvath—torture from the Vienna Woods. … Here reason and logic are mercilessly taken to the point of higher nonsense. If one could invent an absurdist cabaret, then he has done it.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1980)

    3. “Not an entertainer, not a sentimentalist, nor a dry reciter of revolution, but rather a militant artist of our times. When Busch sings political songs, they retain their humor in all their seriousness, and their seriousness in their humor. They keep us alert. They are hits and others keep singing them.”

      Ernst Busch (1900-1980) was the singer of the proletariat and of proletarian history, a nuanced king of the democratic worker’s song. As the “singing heart of the working class” (according to Hanns Eisler), he performed songs of Tucholsky and Kästner in the Berlin cabarets Stuff and Nonsense (Larifari), the Catacombs (Katakombe) and in the Cabaret of the Comedians (Kabarett der Komiker); he also sang at demonstrations and worker’s meetings. After emigrating in 1933, he took part in the Spanish Civil War, and when interned in France, he led the theater group at the camp Gurs and performed in Peter Pan’s cabaret. He was extradited to Germany in 1943 and sentenced to a life term in prison. After liberation, the “Gründgens of the GDR” revived his career as a powerful actor of the people in numerous films and in Berlin ensembles. “Not an entertainer, not a sentimentalist, nor a dry reciter of revolution, but rather a militant artist of our times. When Busch sings political songs, they retain their humor in all their seriousness, and their seriousness in their humor. They keep us alert. They are hits and others keep singing them.”

    1. I believe in the immortality of theater. It is the blissful hiding place of those who have put their childhood in their pockets and then left. Max Reinhardt

      Max Reinhardt on Cabaret.

      Cabaret as a form of satire, its literary, political, philosophical and poetic content are at the forefront of documentary interest; the ongoing collection and scientific utilization of its diverse manifestations is the central task of the German Cabaret Archive

      The playful, satirical form of cabaret and its literary, philosophical, and poetic qualities are the focus of our documentary interest. The central task of the German Cabaret Archives is the continuous collection and the availability of these materials to academics and historians

  5. Mar 2024
  6. Jan 2024
  7. Dec 2023
  8. Nov 2023
  9. Jul 2023
    1. Consider, for instance, this episode fromScoop, Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on the occasionalwaywardness of journalism’s most celebrated and romanticizedcorps d’elite, the foreign correspondents.

      Story of William Boot and description of Wenlock Jakes who "made" (up) news.

  10. Jun 2023
  11. Apr 2023
    1. Samuel Butler had made the phrase ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’immortal in his satirical poem Hudibras.

      While the original proverb appears in King James Version of the Bible, Book of Proverbs 13:24, the satirical poem Hudibras is the first appearance of the quote and popularized the aphorism "spare the rod and spoil the child".

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudibras

      https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spare_the_rod_and_spoil_the_child

      syndication link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hudibras&oldid=1148518740

  12. Feb 2023
    1. It is not necessarily bad for technology companies to take a leaf from sci-fi, but if you really have to, at least try picking the utopian stuff, like Amazon’s Echo, blatantly modeled after Star Trek’s chirpy talking computer, over the unsettling dog-eat-dog hellscape of Snow Crash.

      Is the inability to parse satire related to the inability to understand something is a dystopia? I suppose dystopian fictions are simply satire at the core 🤷‍♀️

  13. Jan 2023
  14. Dec 2022
  15. Oct 2022
  16. Aug 2022
  17. www.janeausten.pludhlab.org www.janeausten.pludhlab.org
    1. he dropped the arms of both to hunt after a weasel which he had a momentary glance of, and they could hardly get him along at all.

      Re-reading the novel after viewing Persuasion (2022), I was partly focused on finding the kind of comedy that Cracknell's adaptation foregrounds, which verges on slapstick at different moments, especially when Anne is involved. Anne's humor in the novel remains in the familiar realm of the satirical. But this scene with Charles Musgrove, Mary, and Anne is one of the few moments where it's possible to see some silliness in the narrative. The image of Charles chasing after this small animal to disengage himself from Mary's complaints is charming and makes him look quite silly: he is disarmed by her tenacious complaining and rather than endure them prefers to run after a small animal. The humor is turned against the couple, not at all an exemplar of marital respect. These two spouses might be found bickering but they are also conflict-averse, unable to enter into honest dialogue. The movie is inclined to giving Mary the upper hand. In the novel, Charles' possibly threatening masculinity is suggested through his persona as an avid sportsman. Hunting for weasels was not silly in and of itself at the time. These small and slender creatures had (and still do) a reputation for being ferocious predators. Thomas Bewick, who Austen would have known, describes them as follows in his A General History of Quadrupeds (1790): "The Weasel is very common, and well known in most parts of this country; is very destructive to young birds, poultry, rabbits, &c.; and is a keen devourer of eggs, which it sucks with great avidity" (219).

  18. Apr 2022
    1. Yeshiva teaching in the modern period famously relied on memorization of the most important texts, but a few medieval Hebrew manu-scripts from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries include examples of alphabetical lists of words with the biblical phrases in which they occurred, but without pre-cise locations in the Bible—presumably because the learned would know them.

      Prior to concordances of the Christian Bible there are examples of Hebrew manuscripts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that have lists of words and sentences or phrases in which they occurred. They didn't include exact locations with the presumption being that most scholars would know the texts well enough to quickly find them based on the phrases used.


      Early concordances were later made unnecessary as tools as digital search could dramatically decrease the load. However these tools might miss the value found in the serendipity of searching through broad word lists.

      Has anyone made a concordance search and display tool to automatically generate concordances of any particular texts? Do professional indexers use these? What might be the implications of overlapping concordances of seminal texts within the corpus linguistics space?

      Fun tools like the Bible Munger now exist to play around with find and replace functionality. https://biblemunger.micahrl.com/munge

      Online tools also have multi-translation versions that will show translational differences between the seemingly ever-growing number of English translations of the Bible.

  19. Mar 2022
    1. வரலாற்றை ஒட்டுமொத்தமாக ஒரு அபத்தப்பின்னலாக ஆக்கிக் காட்டும் இந்நாவல் வரலாறுமேல் அது என்னவென்றே தெரியாமல் ஒரு வழிபாட்டுணர்வு கொண்டுள்ள தமிழ் உள்ளத்திற்கு அவசியமான சில கீறல்களை அளிக்கிறது.

      devotional myth mindset of tamilians about our history

  20. Feb 2022
  21. Jan 2022
  22. Dec 2021
  23. Nov 2021
  24. Oct 2021
  25. Jul 2021
    1. A satirical take on John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book Black Like Me

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs </span> in Writing a Life | The Hedgehog Review (<time class='dt-published'>07/22/2021 12:15:27</time>)</cite></small>

  26. Jun 2021
  27. May 2021
  28. Mar 2021
    1. satire

      Satire was often times used as a method of critiquing the power structures of the day, as well as making comments on other aspects of society. Direct criticism was frowned upon, and often times punished, but you could get away with veiling your criticism as humor.

  29. Oct 2020
    1. big bite of her bread-and-butter

      This alliteration highlights the naivete and childishness of Laura's understand of class distinctions. She believes that taking a "big bite of her bread-and-butter" is a form of rebellion against "stupid conventions" and makes her feel "just like a work-girl." Yet contrary to her intentions, the fact that she is able to eat without concern for how the food came to be on her table shows her privileged status. The sheer ridiculousness of the situation clearly steers this depiction of Laura as satire.

  30. Sep 2020
    1. 4.… 9.7

      You know, they say, all Supreme Courts are created equal, but you look at the court now, and you look at the court in 1868, and you can see that statement is NOT TRUE. See, normally, you propose something like an Expanded Supreme Court, you got a fifty-fifty chance of passing it. But Majority Leader McConnell is a genetic freak, and the Congress as it stands is not normal.

      So, right now, you got a 25% chance AT BEST at beating this do-nothing Congress and passing something. But then you add Election Day to the mix? You the chances of passing the expanded court drastically go up. See, at the three way on Election Day (where the Senate will either be Republican Majority, Democratic Majority, or tied, because of course that can happen), you got a 33 and a third chance of the Republicans winning! But Democrats! Democrats got a 66 and two thirds chance of winning, 'cause President Trump KNOOOOOWS he can't win fairly, and he's not even gonna try, and he might take some of his party's senators down with him. So, DAVID, you take Republicans 33 and a 3rd percent chance of winning minus Democrats 25% chance of passing something through the Senate (if they was to go one-on-one right now) and you've got an 8 1/3 percent chance of Republicans defeating court expansion! But THEN, you take Democrats 75% chance of passing something through the House, plus the 66 and 2/3 percents, they got a 141 2/3 chance of expanding the court!

      Senator McConnell! The numbers don't lie, and they spell 17 1 5 4 5 7 3 12 for you at Sacrifice!

  31. Jan 2020
    1. a feisty 217-year-old Vermont senator

      Barry develops caricatures by describing the qualities and traits of the presidential candidates with extreme exaggeration to emphasize their flaws.

    2. Since then Guzmán has been in hiding except for an interview with Sean Penn, a guest spot with Jimmy Kimmel and a series of commercials for Buffalo Wild Wings. Mexican police finally are able to track him down during his four-week stint as a guest judge on “America’s Got Talent.”

      Exaggeration and hyperboles are frequently utilized by Barry in his effort to create a satirical piece.

    3. In a fad even stupider than “planking,” millions of people wasted millions of hours, and sometimes risked their lives, trying to capture imaginary Pokémon Go things on their phones, hoping to obtain the ultimate prize: a whole bunch of imaginary Pokémon Go things on their phones.

      Conveys the idea that people place too much importance on the small things and that sometimes what we see as a huge part of our life isn't actually that big of a deal. Barry uses humor to develop a piece of writing like satire, where he portrays human values in comedic descriptions and comparisons to reveal how trivial they really are.

    4. Then there was 2003, when a person named “Paris Hilton” suddenly became a major international superstar, despite possessing a level of discernible talent so low as to make the Kardashians look like the Jackson 5.

      Barry's tone shifts as he moves from a flippant tone to a sarcastic one by abruptly changing his topic from something serious (the 2000 presidential election) to something much more casual and less important to the country. This shift lightens the mood of the topic, and alludes to the fact people often place trivial parts of life (the Kardashians) in a place of importance when there are much more serious and significant matters at hand (the election). Barry conveys human flaws through humor to reveal truths in a way that people can accept, and even laugh at themselves for. Barry's method is similar to satire.

    1. Audiences had strong reactions to the new disturbing themes the horror plays presented. One of the most prevalent themes staged at the Grand-Guignol was the demoralization and corruption of science. The "evil doctor" was a reoccurring trope in the horror shows performed.

      Development idea: Bring back the Grand Guignol, but have evil politicians instead.

  32. Aug 2019
    1. Both artists, through annotation, have produced new forms of public dialogue in response to other people (like Harvey Weinstein), texts (The New York Times), and ideas (sexual assault and racial bias) that are of broad social and political consequence.

      What about examples of future sorts of annotations/redactions like these with emerging technologies? Stories about deepfakes (like Obama calling Trump a "dipshit" or the Youtube Channel Bad Lip Reading redubbing the words of Senator Ted Cruz) are becoming more prevalent and these are versions of this sort of redaction taken to greater lengths. At present, these examples are obviously fake and facetious, but in short order they will be indistinguishable and more commonplace.

  33. Nov 2018
    1. Create a note by selecting some text and clicking the button

      My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

  34. Jan 2018
    1. “effective altruism.”

      Derogatory style for referring to these terms so embraced by tech entrepreneurs. We could argue that his interpretive lenses for this same topic are not the same as the ones of an average tech entrepreneur.

    2. the Earth went around the sun.

      This exaggeration further sets the tone of the story - an ironic tone.

    3. Rich people gave their money to museums and churches and opera houses and Harvard.

      The use of humor sets the tone for a satiric style

    4. “hacker philanthropy”

      More satire. He doesn't grasp such terms.

  35. Oct 2017
    1. various ways internet comedy and music keep alive the prospects of change in her home country, Egypt, encouraging young people to remain skeptical of entrenched power and ready to mobilize for revolutionary change when the moment is right.

      Comedy/sarcasm/satire is often viewed as a means of avoiding real issues, but I agree that these can be key societal preparatory tools when revolutionary change is needed. Looking forward to Yomna's work!

  36. May 2017
    1. The FCC is investigating Stephen Colbert for a line he delivered during his monologue, addressing Donald Trump: "The only thing your mouth is good at is being Vladimir Putin's c--k holster."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaHwlSTqA7s

  37. Apr 2017
  38. Dec 2016
    1. Poe’s law also played a prominent role in Facebook’s fake news problem, particularly in the spread of articles written with the cynical intention of duping Trump supporters through fabrication and misinformation. Readers may have passed these articles along as gospel because they really did believe, for example, that an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s private email server died mysteriously. Or maybe they didn’t believe it but wanted to perpetuate the falsehood for a laugh, out of boredom, or simply to watch the world burn. Each motive equally possible, each equally unverifiable, and each normalizing and incentivizing the spread of outright lies.

      Both Vectors

      Fake news was spread by both people who believed it and people who thought it was funny. Interestingly, it was spread on both vectors simultaneously.

      Poe’s law also played a prominent role in Facebook’s fake news problem, particularly in the spread of articles written with the cynical intention of duping Trump supporters through fabrication and misinformation. Readers may have passed these articles along as gospel because they really did believe, for example, that an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s private email server died mysteriously. Or maybe they didn’t believe it but wanted to perpetuate the falsehood for a laugh, out of boredom, or simply to watch the world burn. Each motive equally possible, each equally unverifiable, and each normalizing and incentivizing the spread of outright lies.

      For some purposes it doesn't actually matter whether people believed it or not -- and this is where it gets interesting. The spreading of lies as hoaxes or lies as disinformation both undermine the idea of truth, and, as the author states, the "normalizing and incentivizing of outright lies.

  39. Sep 2015
  40. Feb 2015