"Armed police pointed their guns at Prince Andrew and ordered him to 'put your hands up and get on the ground'..."

"... after mistaking him for an intruder in the gardens of Buckingham Palace."

Royal protection officers were said be "jittery" after a genuine intruder had been found in the Palace’s state rooms two days earlier....

[A] royal insider said: “Everyone is talking about these two incidents and can’t quite believe what has happened. The fact that this guy was able to wander off unchallenged and not be spotted by anyone is bad enough. But then to mistake the Duke for another intruder is almost incomprehensible. There is a high turnover of the police on duty at the Palace, but you’d think anyone would know what Prince Andrew looks like."

I've looked at the photo at the link, and I have to say, Prince Andrew looks like some guy. Would you recognize him outside of his natural habitat? Yes, he was in his own "gardens," but if he were unaccompanied and dressed nondescriptly, would you know it was him and not one of the "genuine intruders"?

Is "real" sarcasm or is "real" real?

The latest food article in the NYT stimulate, in me, a hunger for an understanding of "real" — not like some what-is-reality? philosophy/stoner college student, but as a connoisseur of language and humor. In 2 different articles, the modifier "real" is appended to a noun, first "milk" and then "vegetables."

1. "Pots and Pans, but Little Pain/Making Lunch With Michael Pollan and Michael Moss," written by Emily Weinstein, has the Pollan (author of books like "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto") and Moss (author of "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us") wandering judgmentally through the kind of crowded grocery store that people in NYC call a "supermarket."

Mr. Moss and Mr. Pollan considered the mozzarella choices, skipping the pre-shredded kind in favor of a cheese that advertised itself as a product of Amish country and that cost the same as the more generic ball beside it.

“Real milk, no hormones, no antibiotics,” Mr. Pollan said, reading aloud from the label. “I love the term ‘real milk.’ I wonder if we can get fake milk anywhere here.”

2. "The Frankfurter Diaries," by Mark Bittman was about Bittman eating a hot dog. (Somehow, when I clicked on the link, I was hoping for something about Felix Frankfurter, even though I know Bittman is a food writer. I love his cookbook, "How to Cook Everything."). Bittman — like Pollan and Moss in the grocery store — comes across as an elitist out of his normal environment. He's on "a drive to the Jersey Shore" and looking for something to eat at a parkway restaurant.

My first inclination was Burger King; [a friend who largely shares my weaknesses and prejudices] pronounced it “poison.”

O.K., but what wasn’t? Where was the real food? It didn’t exist....

I’m well aware that we’re light-years away from a rest area without any junk food. It might be nice, however, if there were one offering a vegetable wrap or a big fat falafel sandwich with real vegetables. Would you not think there’s a market for that?

#1 is the distanced, humorous way to use "real" to express lofty/prissy/elitist attitudes about food. #2 is the colloquial, earnest way to use "real" to express longing for a better world. I wonder if Bittman really thinks rest-stop falafel would be any good. Even in decent ethnic restaurants with nicely deep-fried falafel, I've only encountered shredded iceberg lettuce, there for the crunch, not for any wholesome goodness. But Bittman's vision of great falafel at the rest stop goes perfectly — like  lettuce on deep-fried bean-mush — with his non-humorous deployment of the adjective "real."

There's no right and wrong here. Myself, I'd use "real" both ways. I'm just interested in the word "real," which has been big in the Baby Boomer era (and Bittman, Pollan, and Moss are all, like me, Boomers). Be real. Get real. It's been real. He's a real nowhere man. I got to laugh halfways off my heels/I got to know, babe, will you surround me?/So I can know if I’m really real.

According to the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest meaning of "real" — now obsolete — connects to the words "regal" and "royal." In reference to a thing, it means: "befitting a monarch; sumptuous, fine, beautiful, noble, excellent." If we're hearing elitism in those NYT quotes, it resonates with the history of the language. That makes me want to quote Bob Dylan again:

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

But the familiar meaning of "real" — actually existing — is also old. "Free from nonsense, affectation, or pretence; genuine" — a meaning that Pollan's sarcasm presumes not to exist — goes back at least to 1747. And look at this quote from "House of Seven Gables" (1851): "Phoebe's presence made a home about her... She was real!" It's like Nathaniel Hawthorne was a Boomer.

The OED has separate entries for a few familiar phrases, notably, "it's been real," which it defines as: "'it's been memorable,' 'it's been an experience'; used as a farewell, with varying degrees of sincerity or irony, and sometimes simply as a formulaic phrase." See! With varying degrees of sincerity or irony. The phrase was first encountered (by the OED) in Wright Morris's 1954 novel "Huge Season": "He stepped forward and bowed to Lou Baker, took her hand, kissed it. 'Doll, it's been real.'"

There's no food-related entry for "real" in the OED, but there is a drink one: "real coffee n. coffee made from ground coffee beans, as opposed either to a substitute or (now esp.) to instant coffee." That goes back to the 19th century:

1877   H. Ruede Jrnl. 13 June in Sod-house Days (1937) 99   Most people out here don't drink real coffee, because it is too expensive... So rye coffee is used a great deal—parched brown or black according to whether the users like a strong or mild drink.

Finally — and say what you will about Pollan, Moss, and Bittman — there's a separate OED entry from "real man" — "a man who fulfils traditional expectations of masculinity in his behaviour, attitudes, or appearance; a virile or masculine man." That goes back to 1872:

1872   Titusville (Pennsylvania) Morning Herald 23 Sept.,   But society is full of shams shoddy and tinsel. The real man puts on no airs at all....
1926   Times-Signal (Zanesville, Ohio) (Electronic text) 17 Oct.,   It's out here in the lonely places that you get the real-man type. There's nothing sissy about it.

That was some earnest "real," back then. Pop forward to the 80s, for some classic Boomer "real" sarcasm:

1982   B. Feirstein Real Men don't eat Quiche ii. 13   In the past, it was easy to be a Real Man. All you had to do was abuse women, steal land from Indians, and find some place to dump the toxic waste.

That's enough for now. Kisses. It's been real.

Earth Day.

The Google doodle is charming.

What are you doing for Earth Day?

Me, I'm waking up pre-dawn, making a cup of coffee, and watching the sun rise through the larger window that is my picture window which is partly blocked by the smaller window that is my computer screen, and I'm blogging about the happenstance that what the window to the larger world displays is a story about an oak tree as the window to my smaller world looks out onto an oak tree.



Our oak tree, which I hope will stay upright for many more years, is very old, but nowhere nearly as old as the oldest oak in Wales, which got blown down last Wednesday night:

The oldest oak in Wales – and probably one of the oldest oak trees in northern Europe – has grown in the Ceiriog Valley near Chirk, north Wales, since 802 and measured 12.9m in girth. Legend states that the Welsh prince Owain Gwynedd rallied his army under the tree in 1157, before defeating the English King Henry ll at the nearby battle of Crogen, and that the tree was spared when Henry had his men cut down the Ceiriog woods in 1165.

"Strains credulity to think that ice releases thousands of illegals..."

"... and no one there ran it up the food chain. Not even a 'heads up?' Hmmm."

The old buzzword "deniability" popped into my head.

ME (out loud): "Deniability. Who do you associate with that word."

MEADE: "Nixon."

ME (having Googled, reading from Wikipedia): "Kennedy. 'Plausible deniability is a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular activities by the CIA became public knowledge.'"

I love Wikipedia. I love that there's a whole long article on the topic "plausible deniability." The name Nixon comes up — in a list of 6 "major flaws" in the "doctrine." The Nixon-related flaw is:

It rarely worked when invoked; the denials made were rarely plausible and were generally seen through by both the media and the populace. One aspect of the Watergate crisis is the repeated failure of the doctrine of plausible deniability, which the administration repeatedly attempted to use to stop the scandal affecting President Richard Nixon and his aides.

Also at the article, under the heading "other examples":

The Murder of Thomas Becket

King Henry II of England is often said to have stated of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Becket was indeed murdered, although the king denied that his plea was to be taken in such a way.

We don't live in a monarchy, and efforts to insulate a U.S. President from criticism should fail and will fail if we haven't lost track of our role as citizens.

(And, as noted a few posts ago, these Washington writers are nauseatingly dependent on clichés. The food chain, heads up. "Food chain" isn't even the right cliché. Perino meant the chain of command. That other chain. Django Unchained. Chain of Fools. Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Ball and chain. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Chain smoking. Hey, I'm only yanking your chain.)

Richard the Lionheart's heart... preserved in a lead box... analyzed by forensic experts.

The English king died in 1199.

After his death, his body was divided up - a common practice for aristocracy during the Middle Ages.... [The] heart was embalmed and buried in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen....

The heart, which was wrapped in linen, also had traces of myrtle, daisy, mint and possibly lime...

"That consciousness of using very high-quality herbs and spices and other materials that are much sought after and rare does add to that sense of it being Christ-like in its quality... Medieval kings were thought to represent the divine on Earth - they were set apart form other lay people and regarded as special and different...."

"Lincoln" smears Connecticut.

"I could not believe my own eyes and ears," said Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney. "Placing the State of Connecticut on the wrong side of the historic and divisive fight over slavery is a distortion of easily verifiable facts."

"It is historical fiction -- a noble genre going back to Shakespeare and well before -- not history," [said Columbia University historian Eric Foner].

And yet we're pressured to go see that movie because of the way it explains history. 

By coincidence, Shakespeare is getting some negative press this week, after bones found under a parking lot in England were determined to have belonged to Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, supplanted by the Tudors, whom Shakespeare had reason to flatter as he portrayed Richard III as a villain.

No “bunch-backed toad,” no “slave of nature and the son of hell,” no “bottled spider,” the exhumed Richard is enjoying a remake as a physically challenged fellow with spinal curvature who might have starred in last year’s London Paralympics if given the chance.

Alas he got clobbered several times with a halberd (presumably wielded by a halberdier ignoring late 15th century safety regulations), and may have suffered the ignominy of being sodomized with an unlicensed dagger while being carried naked on horseback to Leicester. ....

“I’ve spoken to scoliosis experts and they say acute scoliosis like that was painful,” Philippa Langley, a Richard III enthusiast, told The Guardian. “So we know that he was working through the pain barrier every day just to do his job.... He had an incredibly powerful, strong work ethic. This man never stopped. He was on a horse every day, fighting skirmishes, doing everything they had to do.”

Imagine a movie about Lincoln that does not cater to the tastes of the present-day dynasty. There's plenty of old material to rake over. He wasn't called "bunch-backed toad" or a "bottled spider," but he was called "The obscene ape of Illinois." And:

The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion. People now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world. The European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President. The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy.

"A team of archaeologists confirmed Monday that ancient remains found under a parking lot belong to long-lost King Richard III..."

"The verification came after scientific tests were used to match DNA samples taken from Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, a direct descendent of Anne of York, Richard’s elder sister."

Richard III supporters such as Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and member of the Richard III Society, were driven to find the lost king’s remains by a desire to reopen the debate over his place in history....

“I think the discovery brought the real Richard into sharp focus,” Langley said. “People are realizing that a lot of what they thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building.”

Why does finding the body have anything to do with the historical project of finding out what really happened in the past? There's something in the human psyche that makes us care about an ancient controversy because we are confronted with the man's bones. But there is also some relevant evidence:

Trauma analysis of the skeleton found 10 battle wounds, eight on the skull and two on the body, which were inflicted around the time of death, according to Jo Appleby, project osteologist of the University of Leicester. Many of the wounds provided evidence of “post-mortem humiliation injuries,” exacted on Richard III after death by his adversaries.

It looked a little something like this:



Warning: That was propaganda. And Class A scenery chewing.

By the way: As I was setting up that clip for the embed, Meade came over and said: "From just the audio, I couldn't tell if that was Laurence Olivier or a Monty Python parody."

ADDED: There's a Richard III ward in the Hospital for Overacting:

"It is with the greatest confidence that I will pass on the throne on April 30 to my son, Prince of Orange."

Says the Queen of Purple.



I mean Queen Beatrix.

"Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?"

The New Republic promotes its "redesign" in email that says I "signed up to get an early look at." (I did?) I'm sent to this interview with Obama, which takes so absurdly long to load that I go off and write other posts before rediscovering the open tab. I see Obama's smiling eyes peeking out over the top of the headline "Barack Obama is Not Pleased." I pause and contemplate 2 things: 1. Do the redesigners not understand the rules of capitalization? and, 2. Did they intend to allude to the famous Queen Victoria quote "We are not amused" — that is, did they intend to imply that Obama uses the royal "we"?

The subtitle is "The president on his enemies, the media, and the future of football," so I guess that's what he's "not pleased" about. I can see not being pleased by one's enemies, but how can he not be pleased by the media? The media fawn over him. What more can he want? And the future of football... I guess TNR threw that in to signal that there's going to be some fun somewhere on this page that took so long to load.

I scroll down past 6 paragraphs of introductory text to get to the actual interview, and that's the first question: "Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?" See what I mean about fawning? My first bite of the "redesign" is thoroughly cloying. It seems to be cloying even to Obama. He says:

I'm not sure it's an intellectual exercise as much as it is reminding myself of why I ran for president and tapping into what I consider to be the innate common sense of the American people.

I wish I could read what went through his head when he heard that question, before he said, in so many words, that's a stupid question. I think it was something like: These elite media guys are so in love with their idea of me as an intellectual. 

That first question was asked by Chris Hughes. It took 2 fawning elite media guys to interview Obama. The other one is Franklin Foer, and his first question is: "How do you speak to gun owners in a way that doesn't make them feel as if you're impinging upon their liberty?" Later, FF comes up with:

Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players.

Wait. We were talking about the "culture of violence" when we talked about gun rights and we're continuing to talk about "the culture of violence" when we talk about football?! Noted.

By the way, credit to FF for extracting from Obama that he shoots guns "all the time," "up at Camp David," where "we do skeet shooting." I never hear about Obama going to Camp David. Where are the photos of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David?

There's some mystery within that pronoun "we."

Danny Boyle has declined a knighthood.

He's about being "an equal citizen," he says.

Who else has declined a knighthood? Among others:

David Bowie, musician
Francis Crick, physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Michael Faraday, scientist
Albert Finney, actor
E. M. Forster, author and essayist
Michael Frayn, novelist and dramatist
John Galsworthy, playwright and novelist
Graham Greene, novelist
Stephen Hawking, scientist
David Hockney, CH, RA, artist
Aldous Huxley, author
Rudyard Kipling, author
Henry Moore, sculptor
J.B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
Paul Scofield, actor
Ralph Vaughan Williams composer
H.G. Wells, writer

Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."

The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?

Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Said Thomas Paine.

"Kate Middleton's pregnancy: 10 stories I don't want to read."

Aw, come on. We're not supposed to amuse ourselves with the reproduction of the royals?

"The Duchess of Cambridge is expecting a baby..."

"... St James's Palace has announced."