Boys to Men

Earlier this week, I read Two Across (Bartsch) a book that explores the lives of Stanley and Vera, who met at a spelling bee when they are fifteen and, at which, they became co-champions.  Over the course of a few annual reunions, they became close friends and start an on-again and off-again courtship.  During their off-periods, both developed into accomplished crossword puzzle creators and sent each other coded messages through nationally-syndicated puzzles (e.g., “Aloe ___” and “Early _____ Gardner”). The book follows Vera and Stanley through college, graduate school, and beyond while exploring the question – will their lives cross* again?  I really, really wanted to love this book but sadly, it isn’t very good and I can’t recommend it – too many clichés and the story doesn’t carry when not dealing with the crossword elements. (I agreed with this NPR review, which I should have considered BEFORE reading this book: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/05/427827286/-two-across-spells-out-a-charming-love-story-in-crosswords).

I can, however, recommend the following books Never Let me Go, Middlesex, and The Kite Runner.

Bildungsroman: a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.

The books I recommended above are bildungsroman. For other examples, check out this site: https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/bildungsroman

Query  -- what the hell happened in 1950 that can explain the explosive growth in the use of bildungsroman as per the usage chart from Google below? Maybe a post WWII boom in stories of boys becoming men?

Rebus Life

As I’ve noted here before, I enjoy the NY Time’s crossword.  My favorite day – by far – is Thursday, which can be challenging because of the different types of themes it may contain.  A few weeks ago, the Thursday puzzle was rebus.  This means that some answers have more than one letter in a box.  The example below is one such puzzle.  The theme of this puzzle was Mary Poppins and the rebus answer was Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which made me think of my favorite non-words used in songs.  In order, with a brief explanation, they are:

1.       mama-say-mama-sa-mama-coosa: Michael Jackson, Wanna  be Startin’ Something:  generally accepted etymology was that Jacko lifted the phrase from Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa (the two settled copyright charges out of court) and the word Makossa means dance in Doulala.

2.       Koo-koo-ka-choo: Simon and Garfunkel, Mrs Robinson: Appears to be closely associated and possibly derived from goo goo g’job used by The Beatles in I am the Walrus.  There are two definitions. The first is that it is up to reader to interpret what it means given the context.  The second is a slang way everything is fine.

3.       Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Robert and Richard Sherman, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and -docious "educable" – The word was added to the OED in 1986.

Flumadiddle

utter nonsense

Insider Trading

Yesterday, the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to review the Second Circuit’s insider-trading decision, Newman, from earlier this year.  Insider trading is a fraud-based crime, meaning that there needs to be a breach of duty for liability to attach.  The main question presented by Newman is when does liability attach when material information is passed along a network of contacts, often referred to as tipper-tippee liability. In simplest terms, liability under such a scenario attaches when the person receiving the information (the tippee)  knows that the person disclosing the information (the tipper) is violating a duty AND a benefit flows from the tippee to the tipper. 

There were two questions presented by Newman.  First, does every tippee in the network need to know about the original tipper’s breach of the duty. Second, what constitutes a benefit. The government has argued that benefit can be money and also intangible concepts like increased social standing or friendship. The Newman court held that to prove insider trading the government must establish that every tippee knew that the original tipper was violating a duty and the benefit must be consequential, although not necessarily financial, and rejected ephemeral concepts like friendship as a benefit, at least for purposes of insider trading. These are the two points that the administration has asked the SCOTUS to review. It is unclear at the time of publication whether SCOTUS will accept the case for arguments.  I’m not a Court watcher but I strongly suspect it will take the case.

Finally, to all of the attorneys and aspiring attorneys on here, let’s agree to let any minor legal mistakes in the write-up slide for this week.

mountebank

 a person who deceives others, especially in order to trick them out of their money; a charlatan.

 historical

a person who sold patent medicines in public places.

Origin "a doctor that mounts a bench in the market, and boasts his infallible remedies and cures" [Johnson], 1570s, from Italian montambanco, contraction of monta in banco "quack, juggler," literally "mount on bench" (to be seen by crowd), from monta, imperative of montare "to mount" (see mount (v.)) + banco, variant of banca "bench" (see bank (n.2)). Figurative and extended senses from 1580s.

Monica and David

Earlier this week Twitter (TWTR) announced second-quarter revenues of $502M, up 64% year-on-year, which exceeded the average analyst estimate of $481.1M.  During the conference call, however, Twitter co-founder and interim CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter has problems, including that it is too complicated and people don’t really know how to get value out of it (these aren’t minor problems).

I HEART Twitter and am regularly surprised to see the gap between which articles are shared on Facebook versus Twitter.  One example, in today’s WSJ, there’s an article on GM and Ford flourishing out of the public limelight.  The article was shared 288 times on Facebook and only 28 times on Twitter.

Both of this week’s words come via Twitter (after years of Twitter, these were the first two words I’ve seen in tweets and didn’t know what their meaning).  The first entry is from New Yorker reporter David Grann discussing the patently absurd  suspension of Tom Brady.

shibboleths

1.      a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.

Speaking of cover-ups being worse than the original sin, our second word comes from Ms. Monica Lewinsky, in which she tweets about this week’s death Bobbi Kristina Brown, daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown.

busker

chiefly British

a person who entertains in a public place for donations

Contemplation

Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement, which originated in Europe around the end of the 18th Century and peaked between 1800-50.  In simplest terms, Romanticism was an effort to balance individualism and emotion against reverence of nature and therefore God. With respect to landscapes, one of the leading painters in the movement was Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).  

Some Romantic landscapists would use fierce scenes of natural disasters to evoke an individual's emotions, while others, like Friedrich, preferred the naturalistic approach. As illustrated (quiet literally) below in his masterpiece Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist, he preferred to paint landscapes where the reverent, pious man contemplated nature and his small place in it.  The man below, whose back is to the viewer, stands atop a mountain ruminating on God's creation.  The man, who can travel no further up this mountain, is meant to remind us there is only so much one can achieve in the physical world -- the real challenge lies in the journey to the next.

All art is, obviously, subject to the interpretation of the viewer. This particular interpretation is based on, among other things, the work of one of Friedrich's students, Carl Gustav Carus. In Letters on Landscape Painting, published a few years after the Wanderer was drawn, he wrote "Stand on the peak of a mountain, contemplate the long range of hills ... and all the other glories offered to your view, and what feeling seizes you? It is a quiet prayer, you lose yourself in boundless space, your self disappears, you are nothing. God is everything."

Ruckenfigur

The Rückenfigur, or figure seen from behind, is a subject of painting, graphic art, photography and film. In it, a person is seen from behind in the foreground of the image, contemplating the view before them, and is a means by which the viewer can identify with the image-looking figure and then recreate the space to be conveyed.

Note - I have tried to piece together the eytmology of this word and the best I have come up with is it is German for back figure or man. And, according to a few free online German to English translators the English word for ruckenfigur is ruckenfigur, which sadly, is not in the any of the online references I use.