The Dahlia Lithwick Theory Fails

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“Pick up the nearest book to you, turn to page 45.
The first sentence explains your love life.”

Does that make any sense at all? Of course not. She writes for Slate.

OK, so the nearest book — atop a stack of books on my desk, to the right of my laptop — was Fred Siegel’s analysis of liberal urban policy failures, The Future Once Happened Here. Page 45 occurs in Siegel’s chapter recounting the 1960s Ocean Hill-Brownsville school battle, one faction of which was the African American Teachers Asssociation (ATA). Here is the first sentence on that page:

“The ATA’s mixture of Marxism and racial nationalism
was far less contradictory than it appears.”

Patterico is the consigliere. We RICO racketeers must obey him.

 

49 comments

  5. “After a while, it was down to me and two other actors.” It’s a book about the making of the 1984 movie Dune. The quoted person is Kyle MacLachlan.

  6. public static string Replace(string input, pattern, MatchEvaluator evaluator)

    (O’Reilly’s Regular Expression Pocket Reference, roughly a book on computer programming.)

    Yeah, I’m not feeling it either.

  7. Psychiatrists from Valley Forge General, Jackson,Ionia, Northville, Battle Creek,and the forensic center came to Leary’s trials and hearings during the five-year period and testified repeatedly, unequivocally, that Robert Leary was suffering from paranoid schizophenia, an essentially incurable mental illness.

  8. “Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 share a common startup process.” So, my love life is like the Windows startup process? Or is my startup process cheating on me. Or am I supposed to be involved with hot young Windows 7, old Windows Server 2008, and that aged Vista bimbo?

  14. I opened “City” magazine to a wordless photograph of Bobby Kennedy looking at a small black child in Bedford Stuyvesant. I think it means that I have a disturbing dream life of liberals screwing generations of minorities. Interpret that for me, Dahlia. It really turns me on when you get all cray-cray like that.

  16. Main Currents of Marxism: This dialectic of self-cancelling exteriorization is a direct anticipation of the Hegelian schema, but it is also rooted in the whole history of neo-Platonic theogony and in all doctrines that present God as coming into existence through his own creative activity.

    Ladies?

  20. ‘We must have a critical grasp of the ideology of the New Left. Its ideological manifestations are of two kinds: unsystematic, spontaneous outbursts of ideological language, imagery, prejudices from the rank-and-file, and coherent and systematic ideological writings of the intellectual leaders.’

    -Gerhart Neimeyer, Aftersight And Foresight, The Homesickness Of The New Left.

    Well…I certainly enjoy critically grasping Mrs. B. during her, ah, ‘spontaneous outbursts’.

  22. “Waveform 3 describes how the voltage evolves across the inductor.” Christophe P. Basso, Switch-Mode Power Supplies, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2008, p.45.

    I’m shocked, shocked!

  27. “I made it a family event.” Sarah Palin “Good Tidings and Great Joy”.

    Nailed it. No, no, not that way. Every time we start to get busy, the kids are right outside the door. “Mommy, whatcha doin’?” “I want to come in.” And from the teenager, “Ewww”. (slams their own door)

  30. Lessee … closest is in my desktop Kindle reader, “Slowly the trembling subsided. The hare wasted no tears for the one that might have been its mate. Though the female was dead, the male would live, for the nonce. It would feed, even as the raptors fed on the corpse of the female.”
    Kratman, Tom (2008-04-01). Caliphate Baen Books. Kindle Edition.

  31. “Some people live in big cities.”
    — Tiger Cub Scout Handbook

    This may require postmodernism to interpret.

  32. “You strike;…in another moment a mass of iradescent silver shoots into the air” – Tales of Old Florida

    While waiting for my fiancee to join me in bed following our Friday date night, I saw the blog and immediately plucked to book from my nightstand. Would’ve posted it then but…….

  33. And she wonders why I’m usually engaged in two or three books in any given week….
    I will now point out to her my co-commentors reading habits . Heh.

  35. Page 45 of “The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything”: “You can add to this list smaller things.”

    Not my day, is it?

  36. Page 45 of “The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything”: “You can add to this list smaller things.”

    Not my day, is it?

  43. “What at first appears to be a simple process, fulfilling an order, turns out to be a very complicated series of business processes that require the close coordination of major function groups in a firm.” — Management Information Systems by Kenneth Laudon and Jane Laudon.

    Hrm… I don’t like the implications here, hah!

  45. I can’t help it. My home office is in the library. It contains all of my parents’ books and quite a few of mine. My Desk chair puts me almost exactly in the middle of all of the ones close by.

    I have my Grandfather’s McGuffy readers, and a complete copy of our state laws, circa 1985 or so. Of course, my Mom loved Danielle Steele, and I haven’t brought myself to get rid of them, even though I normally wouldn’t crack them open if I knew the Golden Dollar was in one.

    Let’s see, if I try a random Danielle Steele novel…

    “I’d like to talk to Philip Wald after he sees him, Schwartz went on.

    Not what I expected. Maybe it’s a reference to Spaceballs.

  46. Hah! Of course, the entire floor to ceiling bookcase filled with my Dad’s religious and Bible studies books might tend to keep the temperature low.

  47. Planning on doing some work on a VAX sometime?

    Don’t feel bad. I still have my system 370 Assembler book. But I’ve been fairly relentless in tossing old Windows books. I have a buddy who bought almost every single one of those typical, fat, $35 to $75 books on everything Windows from 3.11 up through XP. That’s one sad looking collection.

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