Director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is set for release on August 14th.  I think it’s likely to be a surprise hit. 

The South African director’s science fiction film recounts the arrival and confinement, to the title’s residential district in Johannesburg, of a group of peaceful extraterrestrials who land nearby.  They languish in District 9 for years, useful only for their skillls, talents from which humanity hopes to learn and profit. 

The film is about fictional extraterrestrials, who arrived on Earth by accident, intending no harm, yet are confined in a South African ghetto, scorned by humans, of whatever ancestry. 

There’s nothing about this movie that should, by any connection, remind anyone of Whitewater, Wisconsin.   

Yet, if even for a moment, anything about this description made anyone in Whitewater uncomfortable, about our small city, then I would suggest that they look to themselves.    more >>

I’ve received the following press release that I am happy to post —

The Walworth County Genealogical Society will meet Tuesday, August 4, 2009, 7:00 PM, for the Annual Ice Cream Social at the Community Centre, 826 E. Geneva Street, Delavan.

Members will bring a variety of toppings for and the Society will furnish the ice cream and beverages.

There will be free items from the Walworth County Genealogical Library to give away such as genealogy newsletters, magazine and books. Attendees may bring genealogical and/or quality craft items to sell.

The monthly Society meetings are open to the public. Anyone who would like to know more about their ancestors is encouraged to attend. There are several members of the Society that can help you get started on your family tree.

For additional information, please call the Society’s Vice President at 275-2426.

Shocked?   

I’ve heard people espouse all sorts of rules of conduct, of propriety.  One will hear that people should not chew gum, talk about religion or politics at table, etc.  It’s always a lecture about what’s appropriate, proper, civilized. 

Often, it’s about what’s not appropriate, from a scold’s point-of-view — there’s often someone to out-Victorian the Victorians.  Prissy, starched, lifeless, and as such, contemptible as a distortion of the natural and unaffected.  Many times, the people who insist on these rules are a pretentious lot.  

Worse, It’s not enough for some people to lived cramped lives; they cannot bear that you’ll not do the same.  That’s the problem with Mrs. Kravitz, from Bewitched.  

Sometimes, the busybody’s sense of proper and improper is laughable, and should be embarrassing to him or her. 

Sometimes that sense reveals an odd preoccupation.  Consider the notorious (and they are notorious) views of Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, on ice cream cones.  Kass was more than a physician and bio ethicist; he had views on appropriate human behaviour, right down to the objectionable tendency of some to enjoy licking ice cream cones. 

Here are Kass’s original remarks, from 1994, in which he complains about people licking ice cream cones: 

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone –a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. 

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America’s rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions — their reasons long before forgotten — that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners….But eating on the street — even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat — displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one’s food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.”

 
(Hat tip — www.classicalvalues.com) 

If it’s disagreeable to Kass that people enjoy ice creams cones, because it reminds him of a cat’s tendency to lick things, I am not sure what Kass would think of a photograph of an actual feline, licking an ice cream cone.  Less offensive, because it’s just an animal, or more so, because the cat-like behavior comes from the very animal, delivered as satire?  I’d say less offensive, but then, perhaps he’d not appreciate the satire.      

Ice cream cones, though?  They’re much a part of America, aren’t they?  They’re just not part of Leon Kass’s America, I’d guess.  

Well, that’s Whitewater, isn’t it?  The idea that some things are just wrong, improper, inappropriate.  No one should do them, because to a few, they seem wrong, disgusting, revolting.  Even if they’re commonplace elsewhere in America, they should be unacceptable, in Whitewater, Wisconsin, because some small-town grandee is sure that no one should be doing that.  

Not in public!

There’s story, entitled “Cats ‘exploit’ humans by purring” on the BBC website.  The study to which the BBC refers, one conducted at the University of Sussex, contends that 

Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a “soliciting purr” to overpower their owners and garner attention and food. Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a “cry”, with a similar frequency to a human baby’s. The team said cats have “tapped into” a human bias – producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

 There’s a video on the BBC site of Pepo the cat purring in the way researchers contend is distinctively designed for humans.  

Candidly, it sounds like any ordinary cat’s purr to me.  That hardly discredits the British research; if anything, it suggests that the cats may be even smarter than the reserchers understand, if an ordinary domestic shorthair can convince a British Ph.D. that a conventional purr is a special one.  It didn’t even take a Siamese, or Rex, or Persian to dupe these reseachers; any cat would do.  

I’m not surprised. I’ve always had a particular admiration for cats, even more than for dogs.  (Plus, the British are way, way over-rated.) 

Cats are very American, too — both cities and towns have cats aplenty, and no farm would be complete without a few. Lincoln is reported to have liked cats, as did Twain, and countless other Americans.  

Why am I writing about cats?  Because in a later post, I’ll contend that dislike of cats and their habits is odd, fussy, and that the dislike of feline behavior is also a fitting metaphor for much of the fussiness, the insistence on the ‘appropriate,’ etc., that afflicts my hometown, Whitewater, Wisconsin.