Category Archives: falling in the mud

presentation tricks & tips from the US presidential & VP debates

Posted on by hlanthorn

presidential 1: ”no, i wouldn’t have gone over the time limit if you hadn’t interrupted me to point out the limit.

VP: ”no, i can’t give you more specifics but i can repeat the same thing, slower and with hand gestures. (or try link here.)

presidential 2: don’t do this while other people are talking. the slower, non-defensive response can work quite well. also, how you listen is important.

presidential 3: actually, the third debate was pretty upsetting. maybe the daily show will pull me out of it. a few things:

  • clever lines and the now-ubiquitous ‘zingers‘ stick, even if they are untrue (and, yes, i thought obama had some good ones but, no, they weren’t fully accurate). this actually makes the lesson of romney’s leaked first debate strategy not that one shouldn’t spend time coming up with zingers, it’s just that you shouldn’t let anyone find out that you are doing so because it sounds silly if you have to practice.
  • can we stop pretending that ‘flip-flopping’ is such a horrible thing? i agree that saying different things to different audiences is bad, as is the need to change one’s opinion because you spoke too hastily the first time around. but changing one’s position or, i don’t know, updating one’s prior based on new information, should be accepted, if not rewarded.
  • can the phrase ‘you’re all over the map’ be stricken from foreign policy debates? first of all, because that should simply be a statement of fact in a foreign policy debate. and, second, because it was not a statement of fact about last night’s debate. if we were talking about a map that, say, alexander the great (actually, erosthenes) had, then, yes, perhaps the conversation on 22Oct would have appeared to be ‘all over’ it.
  • really, nothing on ‘development’ efforts? no hearts and minds and bodies and lives and livelihoods? geez, mcgovern for president.

i am not sure that means what you think it means (origins of metaphors in development, german folk-stories edition)

Posted on by hlanthorn

thanks to having professors who are curious about the origins and use of phrases, i have recently had the occasion to consider two phrases in common use — and likely mis-use. these would be hilarious mid-understandings as the basis of a sit-com or, as here, folklore. as the basis of policy, not so much.

1. magic bullets.

to be sure, i learned about this one because i went to see the black rider, not because i can claim a love of german opera or a deep understanding of german folklore, though both would be good life goals. the underlying story of ‘magic bullets’ – from the German freischuetz (marksman) folk-narrative – is a faustian bargain in which someone needing to prove hunting prowess takes n special bullets from a stranger, n-1 of which will do what the bargainer needs and 1 of which is under the control of the devil. oops.

why ehrlich would choose ‘magic bullet’ to represent the quest of his research, i am not quite sure. in the end, magic bullets may be a fairly apt metaphor for much that we actually do in public health (and development — targeted, purposive actions in one area with unintended consequences in another) but as a description of what we are trying to do, it seems less desirable.

silver bullets (from ancient Greek mythology) seem the slightly more appropriate aspirational metaphor (also good for killing werewolves); however, maybe this whole confusion with the unintended consequences and deal-with-the-devil thing is a good reason to drop the idea of looking for single causes &/or solutions?

or else, we need to have charlie daniels’s fiddle skills involved in a whole lot more of our work.

2. pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.

bootstraps are those loops on the back of your boots that help you pull them on. using them to pull yourself up, on the other hand, is apparently physically impossible (“for a force to accelerate an object it must come from outside it. you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. anyone who says you can is literally wrong.”).

which is why it made for such a hilarious story as originally told — it’s an adynaton (new word of the day!).  the original version came in one of two forms. either from tales of davy crockett who, along with other feats, was said to have pulled himself over a fence by his bootstraps or from the german tales of baron muenchhausen‘s adventures, who described how he fell into a swamp and lifted himself out by pulling on either his ponytail or his bootstraps. if you watch ‘house’ or are just otherwise savvy, you’ll recognize that his name also serves as the  basis of the disease of fictitious disorders.

there may well be counterparts to these stories in other literary traditions — i’d be happy to hear about them!!!

(the end of one of the referenced posts also reviews daily show’s coverage of candidates out-bootstrapping one another (not an actual over-the-fence, out-of-the-swamp competition, although that would be amazing and i would like to suggest it in place of one of the debates). surely it owes something to monty python’s four yorkshiremen sketch, which culiminates with, “right. i had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before i went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing ‘hallelujah.’”)

(thanks to guenther fink & josh salomon for raising these issues, as well as the magic of wikipedia)

traveling pants (absolutely nothing to do with a sisterhood)

Posted on by hlanthorn

From a letter home from India in 2008:

The topic of this section is pants.  It requires a small introduction.  For the most part, I wear my own pants and have purchased some of the long tops with slits up the sides (kurta) that most of the girls with whom I work (unmarried, so generally pre-sari) wear.  Most of the girls buy entire outfits, with coordinating pants, top and shawl (salwar kameez).  I do not do this.  First, I think the shawls can a pain to wear all the time.  Second, I am not used to ‘outfits.’  I like trying different pants and tops together.  The outfit concept seemed quite stifling.  Third, I despise the pants.  They come in two basic varieties, neither of which stretches or moves with you the way pants do at home.  The first are mildly balloony at the top and then tight all the way down – basically, jodhpurs (churidar).  These don’t do it for me.  The currently fashionable pants are huge, with a zillion pleats at the top and then ballooning out and coming in tight at the ankle.  To be sure, they look quite elegant on some woman.  However, those will always and forever mean only one thing to me: they are MC Hammer pants, and I cannot wear them.

Anyway, I had been trying to do my own laundry.  Then, I accidentally dyed two pieces of clothing the wrong color.  I guess I wasn’t thinking that the dyes here were quite so strong — or just wasn’t thinking in general.  Frankly, it is probably the best tie-dye work I have ever done, except that since it was unplanned, it is only dyed in some places.  Besides this, I just felt that my clothes were never really clean.  So, I have in and took them to a laundry/dry cleaners.  As far as I can tell, laundromats are not are not an option here.  And, I had been putting off using the laundry for another reason.  They keep your clothes for a week, so I had to go on a shopping trip so I had enough clothes to last for the week while the other half were being washed.  Once that was done, off the first round of clothes went.  About an hour after I left the clothes, I got a panicked call from the man at the laundry.  ‘The green pants you left?  The bottom hem is gone.  I mean, it is entirely gone.’

‘Oh dear,’ I replied.  ‘Well, please wash them anyway.’  That’s what I said.  What I was thinking was: Of course it is gone.  I bought them that way.  They are created to exist without the bottom hem.  It is supposed to be cool.  I had a similar conversation with Aberna about my J Crew-orange pants that, when they were brand new, looked like they had been faded in the sun.  ‘Oooh, these pants are very faded, aren’t they?  That is not good.’  I am never sure in these conversations when to do a bit of cultural teaching and explain precisely how much I paid for the pants to look just they way they do.  This is a similar conversation as to when we talk about the fabric of my clothing.  Aberna will touch my clothes and say, ‘Oooh, do you think this fabric is good?’  What she is asking is, ‘This is not 100% cotton, is it?’  Again, there is no good way to explain that being 100% cotton is not necessarily a status symbol in the US or a weather-dictated necessity and that the only reason I check the cotton content of clothes when I am purchasing them is to see if they will shrink in the wash.

Anyway, back to distressed and faded clothes.  There was an article in Vogue not so long ago about a similar topic.  It discussed the rise of jeans as an appropriate dress-up outfit and how it worked because people knew that you could afford to wear something fancier or nicer, but you had chosen not to do so.  Moreover, I remember John telling me about some similar confusions with antique shopping in China – ‘why would you want to buy something old?’

The lesson applies here as well: the distressed, the vintage and so forth only works when it is clearly an option, not when for most people it is a necessity.  That is, it does not work here.