Sod -- How Dirty Is It?

January 24, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was taken aback when I noticed this license plate on the car in front of me.


I’ve posted before about an off-color vanity plate that sneaked through the NY DMV. That one was in French. But this is English – albeit British English.

I had thought that sod was a fairly offensive word. I had heard that it was short for sodomize, and I had heard phrases where it was interchangeable with fuck in meaning if not strength. “Sod all” to mean nothing; “sod off,” or “sod that.”

I sent the photo to a native informant, my colleague Faye Allard, born and raised in Walthamstow, East London, who natively informed me that on a scale of one to ten, sod would be about a 3. Maybe the DMV is more linguistically aware than I am.

Googling around, I discovered that there’s a Bjork song called “Sod Off.” Then, in a letter published a few days ago in the Times (UK), a woman wrote, “My runner's high has sod-all to do with endorphins.” And a Guardian interview with newscaster Jon Snow (“the moral anchor”) begins with Snow looking at his bicycle tire and exclaiming, “Sod it. I’ve got a puncture.”

So my sod-off shotgun misfired. Still, Faye got a kick out of the shot of the license plate.

Doing Research on Weed . . . Not

January 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Todd Krohn at The Power Elite yesterday had a nice commentary on the lack of scientific research on marijuana – a post in which Todd manages to use a different soubriquet for the drug each time he mentions it (and I can think of several he didn’t get around to). Todd’s point is that Big Pharma is putting the kibosh on such research because there’s no profit in it for them. As California shows, even when marijuana is legal, the production and distribution remain decentralized.

A Times article about this on Tuesday (in the News section, not in the Science section) blamed the lack of research on the conflict between different wings of the federal government – medical/science vs. law enforcement:

Bureaucratic battles between the D.E.A. and the F.D.A. over the availability of narcotics — highly effective but addictive medicines — have gone on for decades.

Federal officials have repeatedly failed to act on marijuana research requests in a timely manner or have denied them, according to a 2007 ruling by an administrative law judge at the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Todd links to an article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. The headline asks, “Is Marijuana a Medicine?”

To answer that, we need research, and if f the Obama administration means what it said about taking science seriously, researchers may have some grants approved. But (as pot smokers say . . . not) don’t hold your breath. As the Times article puts it,

So medical marijuana may never have good science underlying its use.

And by the way, the online version of the WSJ had this image, which sort of jumped off the screen at me.



Oh wow, man. Like what a flashback. Was it just me, or was the WSJ deliberately trying to blow my mind?


Milton Glaser’s 1967 Dylan poster that came folded in the Greatest Hits LP. Groovy.

The Nabes

January 18, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Now playing at a theater near you,” say the movie ads. How do they know?*

The distinction between “downtown” movie houses and“the nabes” has gone the way of the double feature and the newsreel. Most movies open everywhere. Still, not all neighborhoods are alike, and theater owners have a good idea of which movies will play well in their neighborhood.

Neighborhood patterns show up even when the geography of film distribution is not a factor – when you’re renting or downloading from Netflix. The Times has a cool interactive map that shows a film’s Netflix rankings in various neighborhoods. Here are the graphs in the New York region for “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Vicki Cristina Barcelona.”

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Paul is the negative image of Vicki. Areas that are dark for Paul are light for Vicki, and vice versa.  Did you see both these films? Did anyone see both these films?

Some films have no discernible pattern. The map of “Benjamin Button,” for example, is solid orange throughout. Others, like “Mad Men” are mostly white but with a few predictable shaded areas, like Manhattan and Montclair – a similarity that shows up in the map of just about every film. Montclair is basically the West Side but with lawnmowers.



On the Times site, you can choose from a dozen different metro areas. Take a look at the movies in a city near you, a city whose demographics you’re familiar with, for in most cases, the movies are proxies for demographic variables. Not all films follow the same patterns. Here’s “Last Chance Harvey” in New York and Boston.


Notice the concentric circle pattern in both cities, darker as you get farther from the center. Somewhere, Burgess, Shaw, and McKay look down and nod.

*I once heard a comedian use this line (can’t recall who it was).

Pleasure and Value

January 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

We have a campus listserv for political discussion. Recently, someone started a thread about the Swiss minaret ban and other European responses to demographic changes. But here’s what leapt off the page, to me at least:

I recently saw an article in the NY Times about a project sponsored by French president Nicolas Sarkozy to initiate a discussion of what it means to be French.

The man put in charge of this project, Eric Besson . . . went on to say that the debate was grounded in “the idea that there is a pleasure in discussing”. Yes, this is true, but I would have agreed even more strongly if he had said “there is a value in discussing.”

Where the M. Besson thought in terms of Pleasure, my American colleague wanted Value. The idea that there is “pleasure in discussing” is just not an idea that comes easily to the American mind. We discuss things, but we don’t do it for pleasure. We have a much more utilitarian view. Discussion, as the above quote implies, should have some practical “value”; we should be able to cash it in on some tangible goal.

The French apparently see pleasure as a legitimate end in itself. We tend to be a bit more suspicious of pleasure. Something can be pleasant – good food, good sex – but we might add some utilitarian justification (health, energy, self-enhancement, etc.). We are, after all, the culture where people talk about taking a vacation to “recharge my batteries” – so they can return as more productive workers.