Word to your mother

Okay, so I've used Word 2019 a few times now. It's not that big a change from previous editions of Microsoft Word. Maybe a little smoother in some areas.

One thing I've noticed is that it recognizes "lightbulb" and "snowbank" now. Before, the spell checker would put wavy red lines under the word unless you separated them into "light bulb" and "snow bank." So that's a welcome change regardless of what prompted it. I do remember a few days after the 2008 election it started recognizing "Obama" and "Biden." So I look forward to seeing which election the Lightbulb/Snowbank ticket won.

Giant steps

A friend of mine invited me to see They Might Be Giants with him. (The band, not the movie, which too few people seem to remember.) His wife was going to go with him, but she's out of town for work reasons. While the show was last night and I had to get up somewhat early this morning, I jumped at the chance, I mean come on.

And it turned out to be a great show. They've lost none of their playfulness. John Flansbergh, the more thickly built one* is the more talkative of the two, but both relish playing for an audience.

This song was probably an inevitable play, given its current resonance.                       


This one is always nice to hear. They used a rather different arrangement, partly due to having a proper six piece band now.


They don't really seem to do the same show twice, or at least switch it up from tour to tour. I'm glad I caught this one.

*For a long time you could call him "the one with the glasses" but Linnell wears spex onstage now too.

How many Friedrich Nietzsches does it take to change a light bulb?

But this is the wrong question, neither answerable nor in any way meaningful. It assumes a state of equilibrium where there is only struggle, the struggle for self-mastery. For when you change the light bulb, the light bulb also changes you in turn. Tomorrow a man will awaken with new lighting fixtures and a sense of mortal peril, and it is that very danger which shall be his only true friend.

No white stuff

I heard a woman say today that she'd heard we were going to get three inches of snow tonight. Looking out the window and not seeing it. Oh, there are a few hours left in the nighttime, sure, and it's possible that we could get something. But something that's going to require the presence of snow plows? Doubt it highly. Sounds like the weatherman is having fun with his listeners.

Music for nighttime

Debussy is enrapturing in a quiet way. Often quiet, at least. A good companion for drifting off.

If there were any bombast to this piece it would sound like the Star Wars theme. But there isn't.

That old familiar clank and hiss

My friend Peter drove me home tonight. He had the heat on in his car. When I told him the heat hadn't come on in my apartment yet he was shocked. It's actually a building-wide thing, and as it happened the furnace hadn't been fired up yet.

Anyway, when I got home tonight the radiator in my living room was warm, so that kind of made a liar out of me. Not that I mind. It's nice to be a little toastier. So there's another seasonal marker.

Here's the story of a sinner

Hans Fallada, a nom de plume used by Rudolf Ditzen, is an author I've only just found out about. Mainly a novelist, he was a rough contemporary of Berthold Brecht and the Austrian-born Hermann Broch. Unlike them, he stayed in Germany all through the Third Reich and World War II. Despite his left-wing politics, he was never officially declared an enemy of the state. The politics of the era weren't good for him, though, and all sorts of self-destructive tendencies came to the fore.

There seems to at least be an element of autobiography in Fallada's novel The Drinker. A wholesaler who hardly even touches beer has a few reversals in his business life, deals with them through drinking, and soon cares for nothing else. While I don't know if Ray Davies ever read the book, the plot roughly parallels this song.


What's implied in the Kinks' song is fairly obvious in the book: that neither the wife nor the "floozy" can really be blamed. In fact while Sommer, the protagonist, quickly descends into alcoholism, drink seems more a symptom than anything else. His real problem seems to be a sense of worthlessness and impending failure, fears that he needs to hide from and deaden any way he can.

Add in encounters with unsavory characters he's not prepared to deal with and stays in both prison and an asylum and you've got pretty rough going. It's probably a good thing this is a fairly short book, between 250-300 pages.

Previews of coming attractions

Longer post coming tomorrow. Like, at least a few paragraphs, and maybe including a multimedia component as well. I want to make sure I have a clear head while writing it, and now I'm too much in the neighborhood of sleep.

Also it's on a book I'm reading, and I'll be closer to finished. But not closer to Finnish, because I could never handle that many diacritic.

Traces

I'm currently on a library computer. The guy who was on it before me―or maybe someone earlier in the day—logged into his Google account and never logged back out. His Google name is "________ the Magician" (redacted for privacy reasons). Avatar shows a pair of hands holding a pair of cards, so it's not just a name, I guess? Kind of exciting knowing there are magic doings afoot, somewhere in the area.

Ratites, man

Ratites are a special, peculiar kind of bird. Flightless, they've developed common strategies to compensate. Also all very strong. They include ostriches (from Africa), rheas (South America), emus (Australia), and the extinct moas (New Zealand).

New Zealand, because of its pre-human isolation, is rich in flightless birds. The other places aren't so much. Yet there they are, seemingly related and spread out over the globe. Scientists are torn over whether they have a common geographical origin, perhaps on the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, or if it's entirely a matter of convergent evolution.

They are enchanting to watch, I know.

💡

There are weird ideas and grand ideas and funny ideas, and some that have a bit of each quality. You can get them and find the results just don't add up. Or worse, there might be no results at all. Getting ideas is the relatively easy part. Then you have to see them through.

I recently had an idea and was able to work it into...something at least. It wasn't as drawn out and painful as the process can be. So hopefully I've done something right, hit upon a process that might be productive in the future. The experiment is ongoing.

PB&J

While the Punch and Judy show has roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte, where the traditional figure of Pulcinello first appeared, it's in practice one of those irreducibly British cultural practices. I kind of have a feeling that this was one of those things I tried talking to my friends about when I was a kid and pretty much got blank stares. I'm not British but I sort of had that background, and they didn't.

Notice that in this instance the puppeteer uses his natural, very masculine voice for Judy. This could be either to downplay the domestic violence which is surely in the offing or just to give his own larynx a break.

Blessed relief

Numerous times in the past I've gone out when it was overcast or drizzling, taking my umbrella along. Ah, but then it either stops raining or never starts. The day weather might even clear up, the bastard! Which if that happens I might clean forget to bring the umbrella home with me.

Tonight I thought that might have happened, but then I checked the bag I was carrying and found I'd placed the umbrella in there just to avoid that situation. So I've started thinking a step or two ahead, even if I momentarily forget doing so.

Years past

From Bringing Up Father. The comical Irishman's dowdy ballbusting wife threatens to crowd into his workplace, so he sets to work covering up evidence that he spends his workday in a drunken stupor. I mean,  you could get offended by something like this, but it might be healthier to just stand back and marvel. 

One for the books

There comes a time in every year where it becomes obvious that my allergic sniffles aren't just that, and that I've picked up an autumn cold. The good thing about this is that I find I'm somewhat "weatherized" by the time winter starts. Yesterday and especially today made for a clear starting point of that time this year.

It was inconvenient to me that this very day the local bus routes were delayed beyond all recognition, and for shady and apocalyptic reasons at that. Still, for me personally it's probably better that this happen today than tomorrow. For reasons.

But the dealer just stares...

The Clash's epic song "The Card Cheat" impresses me more and more as time goes by. At the time they recorded it I'm sure no one was expecting them to venture so far into Elton John territory, to the extent that doing so posed a real risk.

I've never considered the possibility of having stuffed animals act out the lyrics. It's a memorable effect. Kind of reminds me of Stepan Chapman's "Revenge of the Calico Cat".