o to be a blogger

1. In writing my piece yesterday on Elon Musk misinterpreting The Lord of the Rings as a tale of the heroism of "hard men" like Tommy Robinson, I left one point out. If the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor don't actually qualify as "hard men" by Musk's standards, you know who does? The ruffians that Sarumen sent to the Shire. Those were as hard as you could want, and rather reminiscent of Tommy Robinson. But you wouldn't want them. Let's not take Musk's reading, shall we?

2.Well, the election results are encouraging. I don't have much to do with New York City, but the place is a large spectacle difficult to ignore, and I hope that incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani has better luck with his sweeping reforming agenda than have previous reforming NYC mayors like, say, John Lindsay. Judging from his recent interview on the Daily Show, Mamdani's plan for overcoming institutional barriers is to try really, really hard.

According to the Washington Post, Mamdani "says Israel should not exist as a Jewish state." No further elaboration on what he means by that. That's disturbing, and crosses a line that should not be crossed, but it's not in keeping with the judiciously balanced criticism I've otherwise heard from him. So I'm not sure whether to believe it, or indeed what it means as to the reliability of the Post as a source.

In other mayoral news, people are still trying to make excuses for Andrew Cuomo. "Cuomo had baggage, to be sure, but he was a “single Italian male” from a different era." I don't know what being Italian has to do with this, but don't give us that "different era" nonsense. Cuomo was born in 1957 and reached maturity in the 1970s, as did I. That was the heyday of second-wave feminism, and I and my male friends were steeped in that rhetoric. Our implementation was flawed and imperfect, to be sure, but we were taught to be respectful of women and certainly not to sexually harass our co-workers and employees. Because that would be wrong.

3. Joshua Kosman writes about a play depicting a thinly-disguised Fleetwood Mac creating Rumours, and thinks the only explanation for the thing's appeal is its depiction of what's involved in making a rock record. That might intrigue me. Despite watching much of the Beatles' Let It Be footage (and being stunningly bored by most of it), I know little of the creativity involved in this process, except that it's very different from how classical musicians work. I might like to know more.

4. Pretty much the last word on Dick Cheney.

5. I haven't had time to listen to all of this yet. It's a 90-minute oral history interview with Warfield M. Firor. He was a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and I presume the interview is mostly about that (the beginning describes his own medical school days), but I wonder if it gets into his distinctive hobby. In the post-WW2 years when rationing was tight in the UK, Dr. Firor would send - purely as spontaneous gifts - canned hams to C.S. Lewis, who was apparently one of his favorite authors. Lewis would have these prepared by his college chef and served to his friends at invitational suppers, and rendered himself nearly speechless trying to write letters of thanks for this largess. Is there anything about this story from Dr. Firor's point of view?