Dolphins, Pythons, and Belly-buttons

Things came together the other day, as I listened to Natalie Haynes standing up for Delphi (which presumably had something to with dolphins, I thought).

<stay-tuned>
That's the second thing; Hold your horses – I'm coming to that.  First of all there was Pythian.

</stay-tuned>

Etymonline entry for Python

I had long wondered – though never intensely enough to do anything about it – why people who lived in Delphi were called 'Pythian'.  The thing is, as a Wikipedia article explains, the place originally took its name from its foundation myth, in which Apollo slew a dragon (or serpent – there were no reliable eye-witnesses at the time):

In Greek mythology, Python (Ancient Greek: Πύθων; gen. Πύθωνος) was the serpent, sometimes represented as a medieval-style dragon, living at the center of the Earth, believed by the ancient Greeks to be at Delphi. He was killed by the god Apollo.

...Python, sometimes written Pytho, presided at the Delphic oracle, which existed in the cult center for its mother, Gaia, "Earth" ... Greeks considered the site to be the center of the Earth, represented by a stone, the omphalos or navel, which Python guarded.

Python became ... enemy of the later Olympian deity Apollo, who slew it and took over Python's former home and oracle.... Like many monsters, Python was known as Gaia's son. In turn, Apollo had to eliminate him before he could establish a temple in Delphi.

So the Pythians lived in  Delphi before it was Delphi, and the sacred place was renamed after Apollo bagsied it by killing the child of the previous dedicatee, Gaia. But why Delphi exactly amd what's it got to do with dolphins?

Well, it's all quite simple really. After killing the dragon/serpent Apollo stood awhile ('in uffish thought', probably) and wondered where to get priests for his new shrine:

Delphi was in fact Apollo's chosen land. Soon after his victory over the serpent Python he built an altar in harsh Pvtho. in the midst of a sacred grove. The place was deserted and Apollo was wondering where he would find priests for his new cult when he perceived in the distance on the dark sea a ship manned by some Cretans. Immediately assuming the form of a dolphin,...                                                                          

<parenthesis>
The choice of sea mammal was not entirely fortuitous. Wikipedia says:

In Greek myths, dolphins were seen invariably as helpers of humankind. Dolphins also seem to have been important to the Minoans,...

<tangent author="HD">
You've no doubt been wondering about the acuity of Apollo's eyesight. This Minoan angle explains why – seeing that the sailors were Cretans – Apollo chose the form of a dolphin.
</tangent>

...judging by artistic evidence from the ruined palace at Knossos.... Dolphins are common in Greek mythology, and many coins from Ancient Greece have been found which feature a man, a boy or a deity riding on the back of a dolphin....The Ancient Greeks welcomed dolphins; spotting dolphins riding in a ship's wake was considered a good omen.

</parenthesis>          

...he sped after the ship and leapt on to the deck, to the great terror of the sailors, who were even more terrified when their ship suddenly ceased to obey the oars and, deviating from its course, rounded the Peloponnese, entered the Gulf of Corinth and ran aground on the shores of Crissa. Apollo then reassumed his his [sic]...

<tangent subject="1963 printing technology">
The type for this book was set in the days when people made decisions about line-breaks, and a 'loose' line (one with large spaces between the words) followed a line that ended with  'his'. The typesetter fixed this by starting the following line with a rogue 'his', thinking that no one would notice. Well he should think again – although I must admit I missed it on a first reading and only noticed it when proof-reading an OCR transcript that had different line-breaks.
</tangent>

...divine appearance and told the Cretans his will. 'From now on none of you will again return to your pleasant city. You will see your rich dwellings and your cherished wives no more; but you will guard my temple. You will know the designs of the immortal gods and, by their will, you will be perpetually honoured. You will have in abundance all that the illustrious tribes of men bring to me. And since you first beheld me on the dark sea in the shape of a dolphin, you shall invoke me by the name of the Delphinian.'                                                                                                                  

  New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology

Now we come to the belly-button. What the serpent/dragon was doing to attract Apollo's herpeticidal...

<AI_schmAI>
Google's AI Overview says of my new-coined word (not quite new-coined – there is a rarely used medical term that means 'killing herpes') 'it playfully or erroneously refers to the killing of reptiles or snakes'. Well all I can say to that is PSHAW.                                     </AI_schmAI>

...attentions was guarding the Omphalos – the Earth's navel (and who could object to Gaia's wanting to protect that?). This reminded me etymologically (how else?) of this:

<autobiographical-note date="1972">

In my first year of Spanish...

<old-news type="?">
I may have said before why I had to take up Spanish after leaving school. I'd studied French to A-Level, and started German in the Lower VI^th (or Year 12 as I gather they're calling it nowadays). But Cambridge decreed that – as French and German were so popular as choices for their two-languages course...

<tangent>
On reflection I prefer the requirement (applied I think, by the University of York at the time [or maybe it was Lancaster _{[but another indent would make this unreadable]} for one European or Slavic language and one completely unrelated one. 

</tangent> 

So I had to take up another. For social reasons (cherchez la femme, or in this case busca la chica) I chose Spanish. 

</old-news>

... I sat a translation exam discussing a scholarly debate about whether Adam had a navel. At that stage I didn't know the Spanish for navel (derived from the Greek omphalos – Spanish ombligo). Undeterred, I got by with a bit of scholarly periphrasis: cuerda umbilical.
</autobiographical-note>

Is that the time? Guitar practice calls. 

b

Zidane, you're rocking the boat

 (He hasn't yet, but when he does – and he's not the most equanimous of ex-footballers, so give him time – there's a ready made bon mot. You're welcome.) 

Earlier this week, listening to the latest The Rest is Politics, I had the satisfaction of foreseeing a reference to a bit of old news (vintage 2004).

<autobiographical-note>
In September 2004, retraining as a teacher...

<tangent>
(because the skinflints* at HP had got rid of me a few months before they'd've had to shell out for my 20 years' service award)

* You heard, skinflints. They are among the very few companies who choose not to index-link pre-1999 pensions. As a result the pension accruing from the first ⅔ of my service is a minuscule fraction of what I get for the last ⅓. For a longer whinge about this, see the last screenful of this, and for a fuller analysis of my erstwhile employer's penny-pinching skulduggery see here (a YouTube channel run by the HPPA).
</tangent>

... I was expected to have read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested everything the then education minister did (and in some cases ignored). In this case what Ruth Kelly ignored was the report on the future of education, commissioned by one of her predecessors.
</autobiographical-note>

In a comment about his hopes for the Burnham government...

<tangent.
On Burnham's first day in office, incidentally, the  BBC Radio 4's 6 o'clock news started as usual with a number of headlines, and then continued 'Returning to our st... top story'. A close shave. It would have done nothing for the Beeb's alleged lefty leanings if the newsreader had persisted in the Spoonerism and greeted the arrival of a proper socialist in No 10 with the words

 'stop Tory'.

</tangent>

...Alastair Campbell said he hoped Burham's new education minister would dust off and update (of course – for one thing it was pre-AI) 'a 22 year-old report' about the future of education. Aha, I thought, Tomlinson.

The report was truly radical. Wikipedia's summary lists these key proposals:

• Provide courses which stretch children.
• Ensure that children have basic literacy and numeracy skills.
• Raise the status of vocational qualifications.
• Reduce the amount of assessment and the number of exams.
• Simplify the system - make it easier to carry over achievements from one course of study to the next.
• 14–19 diploma to replace GCSEs, A- and AS-Levels, BTECs and AVCEs.

 But as Campbell said in that podcast, the Labour government were running out of steam, and the environment (and 'events, dear boy') were not such as might favour the upturning of so many vested interests, nor at such expense. The proposals were watered down ....

<parenthesis>
(Ruth Kelly's fanfare must take the biscuit for mealy-mouthed timidity:

"For the first time we are going to take on and tackle the intellectual snobbery which has relegated vocational education to a second class, second best education," said Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, as she prepared to publish a White Paper responding to the Tomlinson report.

 )
</parenthesis>

...and surfaced, almost unrecognizably, as a bit of tinkering (Wikipedia again):

The Government's response, led by newly appointed (December 2004) Secretary of State Ruth Kelly, was to largely reject these proposals. Most notably absent from the government's white paper was the Working Group's suggestion for an overarching diploma system. In the run up to a General Election, and in the face of strong resistance from the Confederation of British Industry, they chose to reform existing qualifications by making them harder, and more clearly tied to basic skills.

Tomlinson dismissed this at the time as a missed chance. Meanwhile NEETs mount up (another TRIP+ podcast has one such saying that she would prefer 'LEETs' – LOOKING for Employment Education or Training.

L'Envoi 

Resurrecting an occasional feature of this blog, here is a report on The State of the <thing>, of which this post is the 600^th . In recent months visitors to the blog ('page views', as reported by Blogger) have increased in a near Trump-ian way (more than ever before):

That spike last September was the record, more than in the heyday of Harmless Drudgery (when the progress of dictionary work justified the reference to Samuel Johnson: 

'Lexicographer: a harmless drudge'

) And the most recent 12 months have included all 6 of the peaks greater than 20,000.

Not an overnight success; over-decade, perhaps.

b

This is what a T-shirt looks like

A quickie before  I head West in search of coolth.

If I didn't have graphics turned off by default I'd have missed this bit of casual sexism in a bit of mail I  just received (in connection with a maintenance contract):

Before this mail was sent, some early reviewer – I presume – pointed out that this was an offensive (and out-dated) cliché, and the graphic was changed (hastily, so it's a fairly generic bit of clip-art):

But in their haste, the coder of this bit of HTML didn't update the Alternate text, which (in the words of the indispensable index DOT Html} has these attributes:

Standards Details: In all HTML 4.x/XHTML DTDs

Required? Yes

Description:
This is text to be displayed in place of an image for browsers that can not handle this ability or for browsers that have disabled this ability.

Values: CDATA.

Note the second line; it is required. So if a coder is going to change an <IMG> tag's Src (the attribute that says where the source is), they'd better change the Alternate text too. Otherwise there'll be egg on someone's face (as in the case of this fossilized sexism – it's not visible on the surface, but in the right light... oops)

b

Magnifica Humanitas

The point de départ for today's offering is this selection of quotes from Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical:

• “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.” 
  
  

• “Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much  who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
  
  

• “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”
  
  

• “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon…
  

  <AC-elision>
  This elision is made in the original selection. But I think the original reference to the mega-rich entrepre-nerds is worth repeating.
  

  ...phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today...

  He's a good man, our Leo. 

  </AC-elision>

  ...Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.”
  
  

• “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

The selection was made by Alastair Campbell, who famously 'doesn't do God', which accounts for His (sic) absence from the chosen text. The encyclical itself (which Campbell recommended in a recent-ish The Rest Is Politics) contains 97 references to 'God' (not counting a further 2 in the contents). So this selection is quite impressive: I would be hard-pressed to choose so many God-free words from such a God-rich document

L'Envoi 

I know that AI and spellcheckers aren't the same thing, but giving the computer more initiative than it deserves is a temptation common to both. And it's at least possible that an AI agent generated this bit of spam and called on a spellchecker in the process:

You won't be surprised to learn that the mail with this header went straight to the bin, so I don't know what largesse I've missed out on, but as with John Collier – who I remember accusing (in my long distant clothes-buying days) of 'catering only for fat dwarves' – I don't think I've missed much

There's more to come on this subject, but that's enough for now.

b

Aught to know better

 A few years ago I wrote (here) about "for aught I know". And I'd been chewing away at this piece of gristle for some years before that: in my 2014 book When Vowels Get Together V5.2 I wrote  this, in a note about words that use the spelling -augh-:

<prescript> 

(... the less common words aught and fraught [are] not included in the main /ɔ:/ section, as even the most advanced student is unlikely to need these. They might very occasionally meet them, but chiefly in the idioms 'for aught I know' and 'fraught with difficulty/problems/ danger...'. Even then, in the first of these the archaic 'aught' – meaning 'anything'...

 <2026-correction>
(or 'nothing'[cp Mr Micawber's 'twenty pounds, ought and sixpence']; I was led astray by the initial a)
 </2026-correction>

... – is often replaced by 'all'; the British National Corpus lists 55 instances of  'for all I know', but only 2 for the earlier form.)

<correction date-"2026">
In fact the words 'not included in the main /ɔ:/ section' are wrong there. But although I've known about the mistake for some time I haven't been able to correct it – for various reasons having to do with operating systems and reverse compatibility; don't ask. TBH, as we hip-cats say, I don't remember the details.
</correction>

</prescript> 

My latest foray into this bit of linguistic archaeology is to compare the fortunes of the two phrases "for aught I know" and "for all I know" using the Google Books Ngrams Viewer:

A tale of two fortunes

In the mid-nineteenth century the version with 'aught' was 5 or 6 times more common than the version with 'all'. Shortly after the turn of that century the two were equally common. Almost immediately "for all I know" established a healthy lead, staying at 3 or 4 times as common as its rival, until the turn of the twentieth century, when it suddenly shot up, increasing its lead to 7 or 8 times. In another few years, the 'aught' version will exist only in the speech of a dwindling few old fogeys and in historical texts.

What's the reason for this change? Part of the answer, as it applies to the USA, is here (quoting from my 2022 post):

<prescript>

The Department of  Security's Yearbook of Immigration Statistic 2012  shows this pattern of immigration since 1820 [HD: 2026 when that Google Books Ngrams Viewer graph picks up the story]...: 

It's not difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of the ESOL speaker: they hear a first-language  English speaker saying 'for aught I know'. The second syllable is a word they don't know (or think they may have misheard) starting with the vowel /ɔ:/, so when they reproduce the phrase they use the 'all' version. 

</prescript>

But what caused the steep rise in the 'all' usage noted in the Ngrams chart  in the first quarter of this century? I have no (mature) idea, although I suspect computers are involved in some way. 'FFS' as they used to say in the OSI standards world when something needed further study.

And another thing: the story with 'for aught I care' and 'for all I care' is very different (but with a similar recent steep rise for the 'all' version): 

Curiouser and curiouser.

Time to return to the madding crowd.

b

 

A picture paints a thou...

No it doesn't. 

<parenthesis>
The saying 'A picture is worth a thousand words' started to make an impression on Google Books – anachronistically, but you know what I mean – towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it really took off in the twentieth:

The value of a picture
(and the meaningless arriviste)

 

It's a useful rule of thumb for any writer:  showing is much more effective than telling. 

But this century, mercifully – for the most part – since I hung up my pen (professionally, that is; I still knock out the odd word), a meaningless variant has reared its ugly head. If I were writing for a living now I fear I would repeatedly be 'reminded' that 'a picture paints a thousand words'.
</parenthesis>

Composers of music have a tool that does the same sort of job: word painting. Choral singers are constantly reminded of this. I have written many times about this. One of my favourite examples of this comes in Fauré's setting of Libera me: Libera me... in die illa tremenda ... quando coeli movendi sunt... et terra, dum veneris judicare saeculum ("spare me ...on that terrible day... when the heavens move... and the earth [too ...

<word-painting_note>
It's the music that underlines this addition: Quando coeli movendi sunt (reaching the tonic, after a repeat)...

<human-reaction>
A clap or two of thunder never hurt anyone.
</human-reaction>

]...et terra...(plunging down a seventh –  not quite an octave)

<human-reaction>
Oo-er. Feels more like an earthquake. Maybe I should be taking this more seriously
</human-reaction>

</word-painting_note>

]... It's the music that underlines this implied too.

<word-painting_note>

...dum veneris... (Now it's a full octave.)

<human-reaction>
!!!

<language-teaching-note>
English is unique in my (limited – the few languages I have studied in any detail are all Indo-European) experience in that it treats verbs in this sort of future as being in the present tense. But the future here is important; we make this sort of point in English by saying something like 'And it's a matter of when rather than if'. The octave drop makes it clear that this coming is inevitable.

<forthcoming-concert>
Coincidentally, I was impressed during a rehearsal for A night at the movies (see below) by Stephen Sondheim's exploiting of this in the words to America, which I have previously mistakenly 'corrected' in my memory to 'I think I'll go back to San Juan'. Sondheim needed to maintain the rhythm of da-da-da-'go back...'; so the singer says, in her Puerto Rican accent, 'When I will go back to San Juan...'. Brilliant.
</forthcoming-concert>

</language-teaching-note> 

</human-reaction>

</word-painting_note>

.... In an earlier post...

<deja-lu>

Longtime readers may get a feeling of having read this before. They have; but I wrote this before fully realizing how useful these pseudocode chunks are. So I've tried again.
</deja-lu>

...I concluded that an octave represented the distance from heaven to earth . But during our recent performance of Beethoven's Mass in C, with an orchestra, I noticed a bit of word painting that made me revise this view.  In the Credo, after the words descendit de coelis ("he came down from heaven") there are a few instrumental bars before the soloists take over from the choir. And just before the words et incarnatus est ("he was made flesh") a bassoon solo steps down two octaves:

The two octave plunge

So the number of octaves isn't relevant. The descent is represented by a number of octaves (or, if acoustics is your Thing, division of the frequency by 2 or 4 or...).

Returning to our forthcoming concert, a choral suite based on songs from West Side Story...

<forthcoming concert>
A night at the movies features vocal classics (some choral, like 'O Fortuna'...

 

 

<tangent>

from Carmina Carmina .../Let's Carl the whole thing Orff

(not my joke, but a good one)

</tangent>

 

...as used in many a horror film, some less formal like 'Siddown you're rockin' the boat': 

 

) 

</forthcoming concert>

... is the centrepiece. And West Side Story is my preferred source of singers' mnemonics...

<singers-device>

To make sight-reading less daunting, a singer often remembers intervals with  reference to particular songs. A perfect fifth, for example, is 'Ba-ba black sheep'. That's a common one. But each singer will have their own list. For me, a minor seventh is Andy Williams's 'I'm a home-loving man'. (Very fond of minor sevenths, Mr Williams; 'Now solitaire's the only game  for me', etc.)
</singers-device>

for the tritone 'bane of a child violinist's life', as I have said elsewhere:

<pre-script>
(bane of a child violinist's life, especially in the key of Bb if memory serves*, not that I stuck at it for more than a year or two; couldn't stand the noise) 

<footnote repositioning-rationale="for later post"> 

*  Close, but no cigar. I was thinking of the key of F major  (which involves a tritone stretch on the A string. (It all comes flooding back: An inch boy, an inch. Don't you know what an INCH looks like? My teacher, a dreadful old woman, was a fan of neither Galileo ... 

<clarification>  

(the father, that is, though doubtlesss the son "helped" with his father‘s experiments on string lengths and pitch) 

</clarification>

...nor Pythagoras.)

<eppur-si-muove date="2026">
Come to think of it though,  Bb would probably work as an example, as I seem to remember it involves a similar stretch. But F major was the one that came to mind – as it was my first exposure to the dreaded tritone.
</eppur-si-muove> 

</footnote>  

</pre-script>

But my thoughts about tritones in West Side Story will have to wait for an update. There's stuff to do in the garden.

b

PS

Don't miss the concert on 10 June.

Update: 2026.06.07.19:10 – added PPS

PPS

Early in West Side Story Tony sing's 'Something's Coming'', and although this song precedes 'Maria' in the story, it was written much later; so Bernstein already knew what that something was; it was Maria. In Humphrey Burton's biography, Leonard Bernstein, quoted on WestSideStory.com

 The melody of “Maria” begins with the tritone interval Bernstein pinpointed as the kernel of West Side Story “ . . . in that the three notes pervade the whole piece, inverted, done backwards. I didn’t do all this on purpose. It seemed to come out in ‘Cool’ and as the gang whistle [in "Prologue”]. The same three notes.”

The song "Maria", written originally as early as 1949 for the aborted East Side Story (though with lyrics written much later by Stephen Sondheim). As I wrote in that earlier post:

<pre_script>
[I had just referred to something striking me]  And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...

Could be,  

Who knows?

... before deciding to sing. 

<tangent>
Readers who have seen only the Spielberg remake should note that this mise-en-scène refers to the original. The remake may have been a pop-free zone – I don't remember.
</tangent>

Each ...

<inline_pps>

Correction: only the second – I misremembered.

</inline_pps>

of these lines includes a tritone [HD 2026 I had peviously glossed this as 'three whole tones', but I now find it more useful to think of it as six semi-tones: a perfect fifth is seven semi-tones; a perfect fourth is five semitones; a diminished fifth and an augmented fourth split the difference at six.].... 

[And] In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something)  the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling  augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...

<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>

...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,

<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>

...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to....
</pre_script>

Changing the record

The Dickswinger-in-Chief (DiC – sorry, I can't take this clown seriously) has had the crass mixture of temerity and effrontery to usurp the memorial to Jacqui Onassis's first husband and rename it the Trump-Kennedy Memorial Center. 

<up-to-a-point>
Well, this is what the Center's website calls it. The wording on the building tells a different story:

The shadows (of the scaffolding?) reduce the punchiness of this picture,
but you'll get a (nasty) taste of the braggadoccio and 
bare-facedness of the DiC's coup.~ the second 'the' sticks out ;ike an prange thumb

</up-to-a-point>

I do hope someone sues – for a billion or two, perhaps. There must be a Kennedy or two left  who resents this usurpation? (Not Bobby of course; he's drunk the Kool Aid.) Has the Incredible Orange Hulk no shame? (Rhetorical question: Of course not.) 

 I have been aware for a few weeks now of the DiC assault on Culture, mostly informed by The Rest Is Politics (US). But I've been waiting for a more measured critique (Anthony Scaramucci –  'The Mooch' to us insiders [and indeed to anyone else] – is amusingly vituperative, but I wouldn't call his views measured.)

A recent episode (13 February) of the Guardian's Politics Weekly America provided the well-researched nudge I was waiting for.

Also from the Guardian (but not that podcast):

Trump announced a two-year closure of the Kennedy Center, citing construction needs to make the “finest performing arts facility of its kind, anywhere in the world”.

Writing on Truth Social on Sunday evening, Trump added that the center’s closure will pave way for a “new and spectacular entertainment complex”. 

<parenthesis>
(The DiC's 2-year moratorium is presumably a face-saving exercise – giving the adminstrators a chance to put together a programme of artists who don't mind supporting white supremacist homophobes ...

<tangent> 
These cancellations are a two-way street (though there are dozens more who pull out than are told their services are not wanted) The Wikipedia list  of cancellations includes the withdrawal of an invitation to the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C.
</tangent> 

...in a monument to 'Murrican tastelessness. Wikipedia's list of those who pulled out before the closure later this year stand at 40 [and counting?])
</parenthesis>

You have been warned. 

But the idea of an autocrat slapping his (a female perp doesn't spring to mind) name on anything that... doesn't move isn't new. The ICC T20 World Cup final last Sunday was played in the Narendra Modi Stadium in  Ahmedabad. And the tradition of autocrats eponymizing (don't bother looking this one up; it's all my own work... 

<parenthesis>
[at least, I thought it was. A few dictionaries recognize it.]
</parenthesis>

...) willy-nilly goes back at least as far as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. (I imagine Mausolus helped draw up the plans.) And only a few years later Alexander named his new capital Alexandria. Autocrats name things after themselves; they always have done, and they always will do. (Come to think of it, there's a red flag here: if a ruler starts eponymizing,  stand by to protect your constitution.)

That's all she wrote.

b