The Julia Set

In case you are enthusiasts of Benoit Mandelbrot, this is not about fractal geometry, not about the geometric Julia Set, not about anything at all, actually, since it flips back and forth in my mind like a cheap holographic gizmo.

The word “set” is a red herring, designed to throw you off the trail, and all because I edited a previous post. I had a post previously wherein I mentioned a friend who referred to Ann Coulter as Julia, meaning Julia Streicher, because of the intemperance of her remarks. Now Julius Streicher was, if I remember correctly, a rabid and foul early leader among the SturmAbteilung in Germany in the 1920s. I really cannot approve of throwing Nazi nomenclature around as so many of us do.
I was just reading about opposition to the presence of Iran’s president at the World Cup in Germany. A lady referred to him as the worst thing since Hitler. Well, that’s a condemnation so presto! out-of-the-can, as it were, that it runs the risk of being dismissed as hackneyed by its hearers. I really do not like doing that.

So I removed the passage about Ms. Coulter and my friend. Then she becomes front-page news for being intemperate, foul-mouthed, and generally acting like her namesake, Julius. Apparently she is widow-bashing, upset that 4 ladies in New Jersey have had the absolute good luck to have had their husbands die cruelly in the World Trade Center.
This upset her sense of fairness. People usually say “widows AND orphans” when using old saws about bad luck and cruel villains – like Enron. Surely there must be some people orphaned by 9/11 whom she could rip on. That would be choice Coulter.
I saw her interview with a completely befuddled Matt Lauer, who is apparently not used to being roundly abused by authors of books, who are usually more like Clifton Webb than Roberto Duran. She was wearing a skirt that seemed awfully short, and all in all was sort of a brainy Paris Hilton from Hell’s Cote d’Azur. She was movie star aesthetics right in your face and you definitely felt that the make-up people had mistakenly left her fuse too short again.

However, if The Producers is ever re-done again, she would be a great leading lady in “Springtime for Hitler.”