"Hello, I’m Tom Hanks. The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine."

 Said Tom Hanks in "The Simpsons Movie" (in 2007), quoted in "‘The Simpsons did it first’: Tom Hanks’s video for Biden likened to cameo" (London Times).

From the London Times article:

In a two-minute video released by the Biden Inaugural Committee yesterday, the Oscar-winning actor narrates the accomplishments of the Biden administration in its inaugural year — pointing to the distribution of vaccines and that “shops and businesses are buzzing again all over the country.” 

Here's the new video, which I clicked off — muttering "Oh, jeez" — at the 3-second mark: 

 

I'm going to try again to watch it, for the sake of this post, but I'm going to publish first, because I don't know how many on-and-off clickings it will take for me to reach the end. 

ADDED: Okay. I've finished. It was long, but it mainly said we're dealing with Covid and the economy is coming back. It would have worked just as well as a Trump ad. Maybe the Democrats realize they need to squirrel away the divisive issues.

"When Polka Dots Signal Both Optimism and Disquiet/The motif has long been associated with a certain brand of American cheeriness but, as its recent ubiquity attests, is most visible during times of turbulence."

A headline in T, the NYT Style Magazine, for an article by Nick Haramis.

The history of polka dots. This is the article I want to read. I feel some pressure to write about Biden's 2-hour news conference yesterday, which I watched, but I'm loath to blog it without a complete transcript. I have seen the "5 takeaways" pieces and the "utter disaster!!!" stuff, and it's propaganda on top of propaganda. Until I find a transcript, I'm holding off, I'm in the ellipsis... and therefore: polka dots!

Haramis writes delightfully:

Though a staple of Central European folk art, and named for a dance popularized in mid-19th-century Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), polka dots have played an outsize role in defining America’s national identity over the past century. For a country constitutionally preoccupied with happiness, the print has proved a useful and recurring signifier of optimism, especially when it seems furthest from reach. Polka dots are the uniform of the ever-perky Minnie Mouse, and of a relentlessly high-spirited Shirley Temple in 1934’s “Stand Up and Cheer!,” released in the midst of the Great Depression. During World War II, when Westinghouse Electric produced a poster to boost the morale of female workers, it depicted a factory employee with her hair wrapped in a red polka-dot scarf, ready to get the job done. (The refined New Look — rounded shoulders, cinched waist, billowing skirt — that Christian Dior developed in the postwar years was in many ways an expression of European distaste for Rosie the Riveter’s earnest vigor.) By the 1950s, polka dots had come to symbolize, for better or worse, the dogged cheer of midcentury America. Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball wore the print with such frequency that it became the visual equivalent of apple pie — comforting but predictable — and in Billy Wilder’s 1961 political satire, “One, Two, Three,” East German Stasi officers torment a suspected spy by playing, on repeat, a caterwauling version of the 1960 Brian Hyland song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” Too much of a good thing can be wonderful; it can also be torture. 

Ha ha. I remember when that song came out. There were so many novelty songs at the time, and they were wonderful to me when I was 9. As for bikinis, though they were very controversial until the 1970s, they'd been around since 1946, when the designer named them after the atomic bomb test that had just taken place on the Bikini Atoll. And that drags me back into contemplating Biden's new conference, in which I believe he advised Putin that the only way for him to succeed in Ukraine would be to use nuclear weapons. I need the transcript....

Here's the Wikipedia article on polka dots, where, among other things, I learned about Polka Dot Man and the fact that because the dots on his costume are different sizes and colors, they are not actual polka dots:

Apparently, Polka Dot Man can peel off those dots and turn them into useful weaponry. He looks a little like Biden, don't you think? That smile! Those eyes... speaking of dots....

But the ultimate use of polka dots to keep us giddy in times of turbulence has got to be "The Polka-Dot Polka" — the "surreal finale" of the 1943 Busby Berkeley musical "The Gang's All Here":

 

ADDED: 2 years before "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini," there was that other novelty song about skimpy clothing for women, "Short Shorts." On the piano, that's Bob Gaudio, who co-wrote the song and went on to co-write all the most famous Four Seasons songs:

And as long as I'm extending this post with extra video of songs about wild things women are wearing, here's the most famous number from "The Gang's All Here," "The Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat":

That moved the classy critic James Agee to write: "There is one routine with giant papier-mache bananas, cutting to thighs, then feet, then rows of toes, which deserves to survive in every casebook of blatant film surreptition for the next century." And here we are in the next century, talking about it.

AND: From the OED entry for "polka dot":

1966    Mrs. L. B. Johnson White House Diary 3 Apr. (1970) 382   A young newspaper-woman in a black-and-white polka-dot bikini, with a figure to suit it....

1957    V. Nabokov Pnin vi. 138   Amber-brown Monarch butterflies flapped.., their incompletely retracted black legs hanging rather low beneath their polka-dotted bodies.

1996    Esquire June 38   A model whose nom de spume was Big Ginger bobbed her lush mangoes perkily against her polka-dotted bikini top.

 

 

"'They’re coming to take your gas stoves' is a central message of Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions (C4BES), an astroturf group formed to push back against electrification in California...."

"It’s all part of a large, broad, and well-funded campaign against electrification being waged by the [gas] industry. APGA has the Media and Public Outreach Committee, set up by the industry with the goal of 'winning the communications war' over electrification. AGA has the Sustainable Growth Committee and the Building and Energy Codes Committee fighting against electrification.... This industry campaign... comes in response to a rapidly spreading grassroots 'all-electric movement' that has dozens of towns, cities, and counties passing new building codes or ordinances to encourage electrification or, as in Berkeley, California’s case, simply prohibiting gas hookups in new buildings. It’s getting ugly. When the city council in San Luis Obispo planned a vote on an energy code to encourage electrification in buildings, the leader of the opposition (a worker at a gas utility and a board member of C4BES) threatened to bus in protestors and spread coronavirus at the city council meeting.... [F]or the individual homeowner, as for society at large, managing harmful pollution eventually starts to seem a little silly when equally effective, affordable, and pollution-free alternatives are available. It’s time to start making new buildings all-electric and switching out all those existing gas appliances, including gas stoves, for electric alternatives."

From "Gas stoves can generate unsafe levels of indoor air pollution/An accumulating body of research suggests gas stoves are a health risk" (Vox).

"They’re coming to take your gas stoves" is the message, we're told, but the article shows that the message is true. The question is how unhealthful is a gas stove and how sound is the belief that a gas stove is better. People are into seeing the blue flame, so there's a psychological advantage. That psychological advantage can be destroyed by the fear of pollution. All of that belongs properly to the realm of advertising and propaganda.

We've addressed this topic before. A year ago I blogged a NYT article called "Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet/To help solve the climate crisis, we need to electrify everything."

"I’ve been arguing that philosophers don’t need to believe in their arguments in order to make them. But what they do need to believe in is..."

"... the project of philosophical inquiry itself. A philosopher might offer up her argument in the absence of conviction but in the hopes of furthering the philosophical discussion around it. This is very different from someone who offers up a controversial claim in order to stir the pot of internet discourse, or enrage his opponents. While belief in one’s position can be laudable, it’s not the only laudable motive for doing philosophy. One can aim at truth even while reserving judgment on whether one has hit it this time."

Writes philosophy professor Alexandra Plakias in "Let People Change Their Minds" (OUPblog).

This got me thinking about an essay in The Atlantic that I was just reading: "Cool It, Krugman/The self-sabotaging rage of the New York Times columnist" by Sebastian Mallaby:

In [a 1993 essay], Krugman reflects on his approach to academic research and emphasizes his facility with simple mathematical models that necessarily incorporated “obviously unrealistic assumptions.” For example, his work on trade theory, which helped win him the Nobel Prize, assumed countries of precisely equal economic size. “Why, people will ask, should they be interested in a model with such silly assumptions?” Krugman writes. The answer, as he tells us, is that minimalism yielded insight. His contribution to economics, in his own estimation, was “ridiculous simplicity.”

That same contribution distinguishes his journalism.... But Krugman should surely be the first to admit that his journalism, like his research, is founded on radical simplification. Like those economic models that assume people are perfectly rational, he presumes that his adversaries are perfectly corruptible. ...

In the end, one’s judgment about Krugman the columnist depends on the test that he applies to economic models: Their assumptions are allowed to be reductive, but they must yield a persuasive story. If you accept that almost all conservatives are impervious to reason, you will celebrate Krugman’s writings for laying bare reality. But... [m]ost people [have motives that] are mixed, confused, and mutable..... Krugman’s “ridiculous simplicity” produces writing that is fluent, compelling, and yet profoundly wrong in its understanding of human nature. And the mistake is consequential. For the sake of our democracy, a supremely gifted commentator should at least try to unite citizens around common understandings....

Are Mallaby and Plakias taking different positions? Would Plakias support what Mallaby says Krugman is doing?