Done With Snow Crying

OK, all done with complaining about the snow. It's what sets us apart from those pansies down in Arizona. We did some driveway shoveling today, I went and let the friends' dog out, and I went grocery shopping. All has returned to normal.

I watched the documentary End of the Century this morning, about the career of The Ramones. Real good film for anyone even slightly interested in the early punk rock scene. Good thing they got those interviews when they did. Joe Strummer was interviewed, and told a story about some Ramones gigs in the U.K. that were attended by The Clash and The Pistols before they hit it big. I'll have to look into that further.

Here's Unlocked Wordhoard on the question of the gayness of Paraguay. Excerpts: One serious drawback to being a textual scholar is that I find it hard to see text anywhere without some part of my mind analyzing it. Yes, unfortunately this includes restroom graffiti. On a wall in my building, some scribe decided to immortalize the sentence "Paraguay es en Sudamerica"... ...The next change that followed was someone scribbling the words "is gay" over the latter half of the sentence, making "Paraguay is gay."... ...The next phrase, with an arrow pointing to the "Paraguay is gay" reads, "You wish fag."

Here's Arnold Kling at TCS on How Thinkers Influence Us. Excerpt: If folk beliefs were popular music, then one of the biggest rock stars of the 1950's and 1960's was Sigmund Freud, who had died in 1939. Freud dominated the charts, with hits like "Oedipus complex," "sibling rivalry," "phallic symbol," and many others. What strikes me about Freud is both how spectacularly pervasive his ideas became in a relatively short period of time -- and how quickly many of them have faded. The idea of unconscious desires has survived, and with it the term "Freudian slip." Overall, however, the prevalence of Freudian concepts in popular discussion among people born after 1980 is far lower than among people born before 1960. The scholarly impact of Freud may persist, but in the decades to come Freud may turn out to have no more cultural significance than Herman's Hermits.

OK, tired now. Must sleep.