Ordinary Sunday Brunch

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has been the Managing Editor of Ordinary Times since 2018, is a widely published opinion writer, and appears in media, radio, and occasionally as a talking head on TV. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter@four4thefire. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew'sHeard Tell Substack for free here:

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22 Responses

  1. LeeEsq says:

    Mu1: From what I can tell, most people love “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” They perceive it as a fun romantic, seductive song or think that the the MeToo movement is going too far even if they don’t like it. There is the Facebook meme that is attacking other Christmas songs for glorifying hit and runs or exposing kids to adultery. The anti-“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” faction is correct that lyrics are problematic from a modern standpoint but they are coming across as wanting to kill other people’s fun.

    The ultimate issue is how much should art and entertainment be politicized. For ideologues, the personal is political. They analyze relentlessly. Nothing is to escape the gaze of the intellectual. Everything perceived as bad must be thrown out. For ordinary people this is a bit much. The ideologues come across as domineering, puritanical, and fanatical.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

      “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” is obviously a story about domestic violence that lead to spouse murder and the lies told to children to hide extremely unpleasant truths from them.

      And we play this song to children.

      Every year.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to LeeEsq says:

      I think the ultimate issue is that we lack a Supreme Court of the Arts to resolve the final and proper interpretation of the song.Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to LeeEsq says:

      When it was written in 1944, it was an amusing song sung by a married couple at private parties for the rich and/or famous. Singers/musicians attending such parties were expected to perform a song or two, but as in “among friends”, which they largely were. According to reports of the time, the wife was outraged when the husband sold the song to MGM.Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to LeeEsq says:

      Out of idle curiosity, do the same sort of people who object to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” also object to libraries offering, or schools assigning, books like the original Sherlock Holmes stories or Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books? Both of which are racist and anti-feminist as hell, reflecting the time and places where they were written.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

        You’d have to read to be offended by them.

        So no.Report

      • Maribou in reply to Michael Cain says:

        In my experience, as for what’s in the library, no.

        Because the people I know who object to it are mostly women who read a lot, don’t care what others read (or listen to!!!), but don’t want to have to listen to a song that they find extremely creepy every fucking time they turn on the radio or walk into a grocery store.
        They couldn’t care less what’s in the library.

        Schools do not EVER assign Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe, at least not often enough for me to have ever noticed it, partly because they are racist and anti-feminist as hell, so I have no idea why the fuck you would bring that into it.

        (And I actually enjoy the song, myself, but I’m really fucking tired of people complaining about people complaining about it.)

        Oh, sorry.

        Fishing.Report

        • fillyjonk in reply to Maribou says:

          well, also, they’re mystery novels, so genre, so most “general school English” classes wouldn’t assign them. I think the closest thing to a mystery I read for class when I was in grade school was “Two Bottle of Relish” (which I was later surprised to realize was written by Lord Dunsanay, who I later knew better as a fantasy author)

          Maybe I’m more tolerant than many, but I can read and laugh at Nero Wolfe stories. I think part of the point is that Archie is sort of a jerk. Never did get into Holmes much.

          I find “All I Want for Christmas is You” kind of offensive, but for different reasons than “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

          And, oh gads, what I call the “Jesus Shoes” song – about the dying woman whose last wish is to get nice shoes to “meet Jesus” in so, IIRC, her kid gives up all his money to buy them. It’s so crassly designed to jerk tears alongside of being what I consider bad theology that it sets my teeth on edge every time. But people ’round here LOVE it.Report

          • Maribou in reply to fillyjonk says:

            @fillyjonk I’m never sure about the genre piece because I grew up in a different school system, even though I’ve known plenty of kids here in the US by now (and none of them get assigned stuff with these issues unless it is A Venerable Classic That All Schoolchildren Must Read). I know we did get assigned some genre stuff in middle school in Canada, but it was fairly rare.

            I actually enjoy both Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes. Same as I enjoy Baby It’s Cold Outside.

            I’m just so sick of people reacting so grumpily to women not liking something and not wanting to hear the damn thing, and thus doing something about it. I find their grumpiness more objectionable than the song. Perhaps if we eventually get to a place where random dudes DON’T act like they’re entitled to free holiday gropes and other bullshit and get away with it on the regular, I will be less sympathetic to the people who would prefer not to be hearing stuff that bothers them on top of all the other “fun” they get to deal with an extra helping of, this time of year. As life actually is, I’m pretty mama-bear-ish protective at the moment.Report

  2. PD Shaw says:

    [Hi2] I have Blight’s Frederick Douglass bio on my Christmas list, should be good and I don’t really likely biography for the most part. Blight has a broad perspective on the history of the era.Report

  3. PD Shaw says:

    Technical note: The State of Discussion appears to be updating differently on different pages. Right now, on the front page, Jaybird’s 11:25 AM comment is the most recent. On this page, my 11:48 am comment is the most recent. On the State of Discussion page, LeeEsq has replied to my 11:48 comment, but the comment isn’t here.

    Lee has entered some sort of stealth mode where he can be wrong on the internet with impunity.Report

  4. Michael Cain says:

    Mu3: [Confessions to certain IP crimes ahead…] I buy most of my books in e-book form these days. I break the encryption, if present, and convert them to the open EPUB format. I am steadily replacing the existing paper library with EPUBs or PDFs, in anticipation that Mrs. Cain and I will be downsizing our housing at some point in the future. Replacing does not generally mean “buying another copy”. At least every six months I dump the whole library to DVD. Every year or so a copy of the DVD goes to the safe box at the bank. To be blunt (and crude), I simply don’t trust the bastards.Report

    • Maribou in reply to Michael Cain says:

      @michael-cain FWIW last time I checked “fair use” (which includes format shifting of media you own) had been restored as a good defense in the case where it violates the DMCA. That wasn’t originally the case but it was one of the last things Billington fixed during his tenure as Librarian of Congress, to carve fair use encryption-breakings back out of the DMCA. (Note: I am, of course, no lawyer and this is not legal advice.)

      (Note to the copyright-interested – you probably want to go tell your senatorial critters to keep copyright under the jurisdiction of the librarian of congress, rather than the whims of the president, for this and other related reasons…. I know plenty of you are against increasing the president’s powers and this is a bill that is likely to go through if it doesn’t get significant pushback…. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/tell-senate-not-put-register-copyrights-hands-president)Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Maribou says:

        @maribou Your opinion is certainly better informed than mine — I haven’t followed copyright stuff professionally for years. Has the Librarian specified any conditions under which cracking encryption is legal? AZW to EPUB to read on a device where Amazon already provides an AZW application might be an interesting test case [1]. For books, another interesting question of whether scanning, OCR, plus software to examine where text falls on the page(s) to reconstruct paragraphs and such is allowed “format shifting”. Especially if, after doing so, my original printed copy is tossed. Same question as to whether owning a print copy entitles me to download a scanned OCRed copy from the internet — if it is legal for me to do it, does it matter how the file comes into my possession?

        [1] The software I use to read the EPUBs uses my choice of font, vertical and horizontal spacing, and paragraph properties (first line indented, specified white space following). At least the last time I checked, the Android Kindle app left things in the (too often) ugly format chosen by the publisher.Report

        • Maribou in reply to Michael Cain says:

          @michael I’m a bit fuzzy on the specifics since it’s been a year or two since I reviewed them. From what I remember, the cases that got the Librarian to change the DMCA provisions had to do with folks cracking DVD encryption for their own fair-use purposes… it caused quite a feather-fluffing among the MPAA types.

          Were it me, I’d be very comfortable doing what you’re doing under a fair use defense, which would not, of course, mean that a judge would agree with me. I don’t think there’ve been test cases of that specifically yet. It’s also possible that your license from amazon has you signing away your fair use rights (since I don’t buy OR pirate Kindle books, I haven’t read the fine print on it in the last 5-10 years or so), in which case contract law would trump copyright law anyway…Report

  5. aaron david says:

    MU3 – Tangential, but as I was driving around yesterday, listening to a playlist I put together on Spotify (all good music, all the time) an unfamiliar song came on. A Christmas Song! I hate X-mas music and set this list up partially so I wouldn’t have to hear that stuff. But somehow it had been added and when I checked my saved file, I noticed a bunch of stuff I had never heard of had been added. And not in an “If you like that, you will like this” way, but dreck. Utter shlock. Needless to say, I was not amused.Report

    • Maribou in reply to aaron david says:

      @aaron-david A person whose newsletter I read had the same problem – er, not the exact problem, but utter dreck she would NEVER have listened to being added to her Spotify account – and it turned out that she’d been hacked for like 8 hours back in October…. might be worth checking in to?Report

      • Aaron David in reply to Maribou says:

        That’s what I am starting to think. I have a family account with the wife, so I need to get the details from her to get the whole thing straightened out.Report