Other: There's Something Wrong With This Picture

Can you figure it out?


Actually, I can think of a few things that are wrong with it, but I was referring to how an ad for a Christian singles site got put on an atheist blog. Good work, Google!

And I'm still waiting for that damned agnostic dating site.

Other: Hair Today, Gone Today

I cut my hair today. When I say that, I literally mean I cut my hair. I've had it cut professionally about twice in the last 12 years. I am by no means going to qualify for a beautician's license, um, ever, but my hair is wavy enough to cover minor flaws and my standards low enough and my motivation to try to convince a hairstylist not to poof up my hair non-existent enough that I'd rather just do it myself.

I plan to donate the hair for the second time to Locks of Love, an organization that makes real-hair wigs for children who have lost their hair due to medical conditions. They ask that the hair be at least 10" long, and I was getting seriously impatient waiting for it to top that and still have a little left for myself.

My hair will probably look a little different tomorrow as it will get a chance to dry without as much fussing or because I will get annoyed and do a little more snipping. I figure that it's just hair and mine will grow back. And whether or not I did a particular good job cutting it, I managed not to cut off an ear, because that would not grow back.

Other: Art As War Crime

Michael Bay gets to keep making movies and Cartman gets his own theme park; there is no God.

-Kyle Broflofski

While I can only hope that someday Michael Bay will pay for his cinematic crimes against humanity, there is another filmmaker whose punishment for more artistic but less ambiguously vile films received a less direct and arguably incomplete punishment.

Leni Riefenstahl certainly received the fame she felt she so richly deserved, but not in the way she would have wanted. She is venerated in some circles as an innovative film artiste by some, and certainly she was influential. Others celebrate her as a feminist icon, a judgment I find not only questionable on its face as she didn't give a rat's ass about anyone but herself and did nothing to advance the rights of women as a whole, but also very distasteful.

Who was she? She is best remembered today as "Hitler's filmmaker." She may have steadfastly denied being a propagandist, but Triumph of the Will, the "documentary" of one of Hitler's Nazi rallies of Nuremberg, stands over 70 years later as perhaps the most effective use of film as political tool. She also directed Olympia, the Reich-produced documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. While many people didn't see how it could be seen as Nazi propaganda, they may not have realized that several minutes of footage of Hitler had been excised for the international release.

Steven Bach clearly wrote the biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl with an agenda: systematically and definitively to uncover almost 60 years (she died at the age of 101 in 2003, perhaps cardinal proof that sometimes really only the good die young) of lies, chiefly about her involvement and active collaboration with the Nazi party and particularly Hitler himself. While it is true that she never actually joined the Nazi party, her father did and received many favors because of his daughter's connections. Bach's exhaustive research, which includes personal papers of both the subject and people who worked with her and knew her well, official government documents (oh, yes, the Nazis kept meticulous records), press articles spanning nearly a century, and even taped interviews from the 1970s of many prominent Germans and Nazi officials, now long dead, made by then-PhD candidate Peggy Wallace, form an impressive bibliography. More importantly, they provide an inescapable indictment. Such a work should not have been necessary to cement Riefenstahl's culpability, but there are still those who would believe her innocent of collaboration and who claimed her role of artist absolved her of whatever use the Nazis had for her film.

After the war, [Riefenstahl] and [then-husband Peter] Jacob visited what was left of Hitler's mountaintop hideaway at the Berghof with Friedrich Mainz, the Tobis executive who had distributed Olympia and facilitated Tiefland. He thought Leni "a foolish Nazi: a Nazi for Hitler, not for the Party," but when he remarked in Berchtesgaden that Hitler had been "an idiot," Leni was so incensed she stormed off into the cold and snow. "After about two hours she came back frozen," Mainz recalled, "and said quietly, 'Excuse me, but you must accept that he was a very powerful man. He ruined all Europe!'" Mainz deadpanned, "I accept that," but she failed to appreciate his irony.

From Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl

Riefenstahl was placed under house arrest for a time after the war but was not tried for war crimes, instead being officially labeled a "fellow traveler," which did not carry any legal consequences. She used that fact to show herself as a martyr and to proclaim her complete innocence of any wrongdoing whatsoever.

Even if you buy the absolution of art from any political consequences, perhaps the most stunning indictment of Riefenstahl comes from the production of her film Tiefland. The movie, which she directed, produced, wrote, and starred in (she wanted more than anything to be a successful actress) was her final feature, made during the war, and was funded by the Reich, a fact which Riefenstahl long got away with denying as the paperwork was somewhat convoluted. The government provided her, for a fee, with interned Gypsies to use as unpaid extras in the film. After the war, she claimed on the record that "we saw nearly all of them after the war. Nothing happened to a single one of them." In fact, they had been shipped off to concentration camps shortly after filming, where many of them perished. A few weeks before her centennial, certainly not by coincidence, a group of Gypsies filed a complaint against her of Holocaust denial, a serious charge in Germany. In the face of overwhelming evidence, Riefenstahl agreed to a court injunction of her claim in order to avoid a trial. Unfortunately, it was only one lie of many that was exposed, although the timing ensured it got the press coverage it deserved.

Riefenstahl was effectively blacklisted by the international film community after the war. Her name was poison. Tiefland was not released until 1954, 9 years after production had ended, and was an artistic, critical, and financial failure. She was innovative with her cinematographic technique, but somehow she was always a much more successful actress and writer in "real" life than on-screen. She did manage to sell some controversial "documentary" footage of primitive tribes she made in Africa, but her main source of income for several decades came from the film that had been her undoing. The West German government ended up with the rights to the Nazi films, including Triumph of the Will, after the war. Although it is still illegal to show the film publicly in Germany, after the war curiosity about the film, both for its political implications and its technical innovations, increased international interest. The West German government, embarrassed to make money off of the film, assented to Riefenstahl's strident demands for the royalties she felt were due her for the film. While anyone with any sense or even a small amount of distaste for her past association with the Nazis would have done everything they could to distance themselves from the film, she still wanted to squeeze it for every bloody mark she could.

One might be tempted to see the documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, filmed, if not edited, with the subject's cooperation a few years before her long-overdue death. I have no interest in watching the woman spew her self-serving fiction for three hours. By all reports, the film-maker didn't soft-focus her narcissism but did leave her precise culpability ambiguous enough that those who never dig deeper into her life are likely to come away with too much sympathy for a woman who doesn't deserve it.

Bach quite effectively dismantles her lies and shows her for the opportunistic, mendacious, anti-Semitic (oh, but she had so many Jewish friends!) narcissist, unwavering in her admiration of Hitler, that she truly was.

Pandora's Litter Box: My Highly-Specialized Lobe-Finned Fish

For reasons which now elude me (oh, I remember now¹), I ended up perusing the wikipedia article on tetrapods. While discussing classification of various tetrapoda (Greek for "four-legged critters") throughout various geologic periods, the article throws out the note, "Each of these lineages, however, remains grouped with the tetrapoda, just as Homo sapiens could be considered a very highly-specialized kind of lobe-finned fish."

As Pandora was draped across my lap (part of the reason I was perusing wikipedia articles at nearly 2 in the morning -- she was too cute to disturb), it struck me that she is just as much a highly-specialized lobe-finned fish as I am. I suspect that will be my new pet name for her, replacing the current favorite of Ms Fuzzy Pants ("Ms Pants" for short).

Added: Things I would have mentioned originally had I actually been awake when I posted.

• Green Dam's full name is "Green Dam Youth Escort." The Chinese government claims the software is necessary to keep their youth clean ("green") from exposure to pornography, except, well, that's not all the Great Firewall of China is blocking at the moment, is it? The computer's user also has no way of finding out which sites are on the software's internal (and remotely update-able) black list.
• American PC makers Dell and HP⁶ still have not agreed to pre-install the software, although they also haven't categorically refused to do so. There are plenty of places you can go to sign petitions telling them not to cave in. You can find one here, complete with a typo in the first line of the message. (I'm sending them an email right now to tell them to, oh, send another set of eyes over those things before posting syntactically incorrect notices in an attempt to change the world.)
  
• Spoon is not so much a highly-specialized lobe-finned fish as he is a highly-chubby lobe-butted cat.

---

¹How I ended up reading the wikipedia article on tetrapods:

1. This article on "Green Dam," China's software for Windows PCs that would allow them to restrict and spy on their citizens' Internet usage with greater ease than their border firewalls do today², had a "Most Popular in Science" sidebar, where...
2. ... this article on the long-beaked echidna was #3! Take a look at that picture and tell me that's not some creature out of Doctor Who! Anyway, the long-beaked echidna is, with the short-nosed echidna and our wacky pal the platypus, one of three surviving monotremes, extremely archaic mammals. I was trying to figure out where they (or we) branched off in the mammalian family tree, so I started poking around to see if I could find an actual, well, pictorial family tree. That's when I came across
3. The Tree of Life Web Project, and working backwards from the Mammalia page, hit the terrestrial vertebrate ("Stegocephalians") page, and
4. Actually, I'm really tired, but moving even one limb lower on the tree came up with a lovely picture of our wacky, great-great-...-great-great-aunt, the ovoviviparous coelacanth, and I said, "That's wacky!" (it was really late, but not as late as it is now). Anyway, you and I and great-aunt Coel³ there are all sarcopterygians, so deal with it.

²Note the NY Times article nowhere mentions that the software is Windows-specific. Those goddamned Apple (Steve Jobs is seriously the antichrist, and no, your only other computer choice is not Bill Gates) commercials aside, I see "PC" and my brain automatically assumes that, were I given access to the box, Linux and/or FreeBSD would be installed on the thing forthwith. Vista even makes it easy to shrink existing partitions so you can have space for another OS without needing third-party disk management software! Does the Chinese government also block sites from which one can download Linux or FreeBSD? Because you can put all the nasty software on the Windows partition that you want, and it's not going to matter if you're running another fucking operating system.^4
3I actually have a (twice-over) great-aunt Ceil, although I actually have no idea how she spells her name. (I'm guessing.)⁷ But she doesn't look like that great-aunt Coel, at least no more than you or I or Pandora.
⁴Yes, I'm cranky. Just because you may have to water a few things down (notice I did not say "dumb down") to make science writing digestible by a nonspecialized audience doesn't mean you, the writer, have a right to be, well, dumb. The absence of mention of a specific OS actually confused me further, because then I had to start wondering if they were confusing "software" with "firmware" and meant the filtering took place at the hardware level. I had to look up Green Dam elsewhere to figure it out.^5
5Note that if I didn't believe Intelligent Design was created by morons, I probably would have been in bed an hour ago.
⁶Smack yourself if you saw that and immediately thought "Harry Potter."
⁷Answered: I asked my mother and it's "Cile."

Knittin' Crap: Camera Hog Mania!

After a delay caused by a temporary dearth of 6mm eyes, I finished my rendition of Roman Sock's Pass the Piggies game (which I know as Pig Mania!) today and took some lovely, sun-lit photos. This evening I realized I didn't have any photos of the piggies with but outside the box, so I set up to take some more with the flash. Spoon "helped." Spoon then learned that if he insists on getting in the picture, he better be prepared to become an active part of the picture.