Dee and Dum

Geoff Shullenberger has written an excellent article on the rise of wokeness, the attendant rise of anti-wokeness, and the failure of either to offer any satisfying solutions. It's fairly long, being as it is a review of a handful of books, but it's well worth whatever time it takes to read. Should be noted that it's also a complex subject, with a few different theories of how the present situation developed. 

For me the problem with woke―aside from but related to its focus being on providing boosts to the professional classes―is that offered no way to unite disparate groups. Explicitly did the opposite in fact.

Given that, a serious and constructive opposing movement would have sought a way to find common ground between left and right and move forward without all the cultural and ethnic baggage. Obviously, this didn't happen. Most professional anti-wokes have just tried to promote their usual rightist hobbyhorses: plutocracy, neocon foreign policy, and some ancient grudges dating to when their parents used to go around beating up hippies. Andy Ngo, for example, has exposed himself as the kind of neurotic superpatriot who used to scribble down gossip and send the journals to J. Edgar Hoover. No one's building bridges.

Crash

I've started reading, and am still in the early chapters of, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. Curious title if you don't know the context. But yes, that was about the time that most established societies suffered a catastrophic breakdown, ending what's commonly known as the Bronze Age.

It's long been theorized that the Sea Peoples were responsible for the collapse. They weren't a single people but rather a confederation of residents from islands to the west. They did attack Egypt and other big civilizations, but it doesn't seem like they were actually the root cause. In essence they just had the misfortune to be displaced.

This is an odd time period to think about. There was already a sophisticated system of trade, and densely built cities. Yet the players on the world stage weren't the ones we'd recognize. For example, it wouldn't make sense at this stage to talk about Europe and Asia in the way we know about them. The Iron Age and the rise of the Roman Empire really would change everything. As the letters in which you're reading this show.

And away he went

Watched a Jackie Gleason Show tonight. It was about the Honeymooners characters, but it's from the hourlong variety show. One result is that the story is longer than a Honeymooners episode would have been, about forty minutes without commercials.

A new boy in the neighborhood looks up to Ralph. The kid is played by Van Dyke Parks, whose subsequent musical career may well have been influenced by Gleason's mood music albums. Anyway, Ralph is initially uncomfortable with this kid idolizing him, but warms up to the idea. He also gives a very creative account of his own past and athletic prowess.

There's a scene where Ralph and Ed go to see one of the kid's teachers. Ralph is bothered by the sound of chalk on blackboard. Ed picks up a stick of chalk and scrawls on the board. At the squeak of chalk on graphite Ralph makes these weird, unnatural motions. It's almost like a modern dance recital. 

The Honeymooners, and the variety sketches that preceded it, was as impoverished-looking as any American sitcom would ever be. The stage set had the rough textures of a tenement apartment, and the actors acted like tenement dwellers. Some of Gleason's odder, hammy choices may have been meant to inject a quality of escapism, just for leavening. Art Carney's reassuring presence certainly helped.

...and in conclusion

 

How did A Charlie Brown Christmas get to be a beloved classic, shown every year for decades? The response quite likely surprised the producers, who made it quick and cheap. Still, it deserves every bit of success it's gotten. In the end it's faithful to the spirits of both Christmas and Charles Schulz. And Vince Guaraldi serves both with aplomb.

Location scouts

I was just thinking, sort of unbidden, about a nearby part of town. It's a place I went to just earlier today. And yet the picture in my mind was obviously embellished into something else. I had to concentrate on certain blocks and storefronts to make the image in my head look like the real place again.

Maybe it's just me, but I think this is a function of the unconscious mind. It reconfigures places we know into different ones, through editing a few things out or combining it with someplace else. And it's not necessarily even a bad thing. This is an especially active process in dreams, of course.

Got 'em just where we want 'em

Wow. What can I say? If you actually believe that Palestinians in Gaza getting slaughtered is some kind of play for world domination―and a successful one at that―you need to be kept away from cutlery, heavy machinery, and any active role in caring for...anything really. Of course the obvious attitude is that only the suffering of one side matters, for only one people actually exists.

I seem to remember that the author of this piece had a beat writing about how the political establishment was screwing over Donald Trump. Which given current events many sane people could get onboard with. I guess that one's no fun anymore, then.

The works

Quite a day. Part of a day, part of a night?

It rained for about 24 hours, by my estimate. Now when it started yesterday afternoon it was just spitting. By the time I went to bed the rain had gotten a lot heavier.  Like curtains of rain.

But at some point the wind kicked in, and wow. Nothing like walking down the street and seeing that not only are Stop signs lying on their side, but so are some realtor's signs from the front lines of homes. Those always seem indestructible, so it's pretty freaky.

SAQ

During the general Advent season it's always been the tradition for the Salvation Army to post people outside big stores like Stop & Shop to make collections. And I think I remember seeing one this year in late November or early December. Other than that they haven't been around. 

Now I'm not a member of the SA, although I have relatives who are or have been. My relationship to the sect has basically just been buying secondhand clothes. But the collectors seemed pretty wholesome. Wonder what happened to them.

Just sitting and thinking

I'm a bit under the weather tonight. The main symptom I have is that while I know it's cold out and some of that cold has got in here, I feel even colder than I should, all things considered. Experience has taught me that when I try to post after taking something for a cold, the results can get pretty incoherent. So I'm doing so before I take anything.

Actually that's about it. Except for an open question. Why is it that power―military, economic, what have you―so often winds up in the hands of people who can't be trusted with it? It seems to be a constant for most of my lifetime, if not longer.

Bridge to nowhere

Monday evening I got on a bus in Rumford bound for Providence around 6 p.m. I got off said bus at about 8:40. Mind you, I still had one more bus to catch before I got home. What was the cause? A last minute bridge closure, of course. 

The best part is that you just know there was money "earmarked" for inspections and repair, and that it wound up in some guy's pocket. After all, the sunken pool in my backyard is infrastructure too, is it not?

Yet another Red Scare

 

Elise Stefanik, an Upstate New York Representative who will inevitably inflict herself on some Presidential primary or other, has words for the university presidents who have been getting a bipartisan grilling over the past week. These school officials quite probably are rather mediocre, as people in their position often are. But make no mistake. What's gotten them into trouble is that they haven't been cracking down on free speech enough. Evidence that there are actual threats of genocide being made on campus is remarkably thin, but there's an information war to be fought, and for that reason alone heads must roll. So rolling they are.

As for this standard of "moral clarity" being thrown around, well, it has some history behind it. But does it mean "being clear and consistent in your morals"? Um, no. Very much not.

Mikadorable

 

One thing that it's very difficult to find on the Internet is a decent performance of "Mi-ya Sa-ma" from The Mikado. Modern companies always seem to get Katisha wrong. Perhaps out of some kind of half-assed feminism, they try to turn her into a cute jokester who undercuts the pompous Mikado. But if she's not scary, she's nothing. If she is, you can start to respect her.

The actress who plays the actress who plays her in Topsy-Turvy gets it exactly right. While only audio is available unless you have time to watch the whole movie, the way she wields her fan like a deadly weapon is something to behold.

That time of year

The weather widget on my laptop says that it's 24 F. I believe it. During the day it was somewhat blustery, somewhere in the 30s. So while we're still a couple of weeks away from the equinox, winter has in fact arrived. And that's good. A couple of months hopping from cave to cave, trying to keep warm, has a way of focusing the mind.

Saw a few snowflakes falling in the late morning, but nothing accumulated.

Sense of place

The above is a landscape by Fairfield Porter. I'm not sure of the title, or if there even is one. It's a very interesting piece, though. You can tell it's in a rural location. The single story white building marks something close to a halfway point. It, the car, and the red house (and most brightly colored object) dominate the right side. The left is ruled by fields, hills, one side of a barn or shed. So the presence of unseen people is much more apparent on one side.

Porter was a twentieth century American artist. He was a contemporary of Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and Rothko. He was a representational artist himself, in some ways a traditionalist. Still, he could work in elements of abstraction. 

Power play

I recently saw "Dead Weight", and episode of Columbo from its first season. A decorated veteran soldier and businessman (Eddie Albert post-Green Acres) kills an Army officer who could implicate him on bribery charges. An art teacher out sailing (Suzanne Pleshette pre-The Bob Newhart Show) sees him from the boat she rented. There's no evidence to back up her claim, though, and her confidence has been worn down over the years by her epically awful mother (Kate Reid.) Her certainty is even more shaken when the old codger takes an interest in her and moves his general onto her battlefield. So while Columbo comes to believe her story, he can't get her to cooperate.

It's not bad, impressive looking, fun to watch as most 70s Columbo is. One of the main flaws is that the evidence he uses to close the case isn't something he's been mulling over and pulling at the whole way through, in his usual style; but is rather a deus ex machina that turns up at the last minute. There's also a certain distance between him and the other main actors, and it turns out the story behind this is kind of interesting.

Peter Falk had signed onto the series with an understanding with Universal that he'd get to direct an episode. At some point he sensed they were reneging on him. Miffed, he stormed off and essentially went on a blue flu strike, doctor's note included. When he returned he found that wherever possible his scenes had been filmed with his photo double, and he wasn't allowed to reshoot. 

What surprises me about this story is that Falk had only just started playing the role on any kind of regular basis, and the show was in its first season (small batch of TV movies, really,) Usually actors don't start playing hardball until they've been on the job for at least a couple of years. If they start earlier it's at risk to either the show or their own employment on it. (See David Caruso getting canned from NYPD Blue for an example of the latter.)

Falk didn't actually get what he wanted from his walk-off and pissed off several of the other people involved. Still, the show wound up lasting for seven years, then got revived later. Even fighting to a draw is rather significant.

...and on a (somewhat) lighter note...

Got a book from the library recently, The Best of R.A. Lafferty. Some of the stories I've read before. Some are in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I have in paperback, somewhere or other. Others I'm reading for the first time now.

Each story has an introduction by another writer. Lafferty's tales don't really need introductions, but it's a nice gesture. Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction for the whole collection, and two stories besides. One of them is called "Ride a Tin Can", which I did read here in fact for the first time. It's got Lafferty's wild humor, but also kind of hurts. Two folklorists are sent to an alien planet in order to find out more about the goblinlike natives. One of them goes native. But the real problem is the agenda of the sponsors of their trip.

These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.

And another quote from the man, from the introduction to another of his stories:

Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches). 

False prophecies

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father, which is in Heaven; for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

It's a difficult ideal, but a very clear one. Christ doesn't only call on us to care for our friends and family, or for other Christians, or even those we believe to be good. He calls on us to care for everyone.

One of the more distressing aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict, outside of the battlefield itself, has been seeing how easily many Christians―some quite prominent―either discard the idea of Christian charity altogether or restrict it only to favored groups. If our governments respect the rights of the Israelis but not the Palestinians, well, who are we to argue?

Someone like John Hagee is bad enough, but he's an obvious peacock. But seeing a humble and up-until-now decent-seeming English vicar declare that it's always sad when innocent people must be killed in an ethnic cleansing but―hip hip―one must simply get on with it is dispiriting almost beyond belief. In fact I had to read it over twice to make sure Fraser actually said what I thought he was saying.

Should hasten to say that there are honorable exceptions, and the pastor being interviewed in this podcast seems to have kept his head. But overall the faith is not being really well represented now.

Board meeting

Here's an interesting overview of the famed seance accessory, the Ouija board. Originally spawned from the nineteenth century's Spiritualism craze, it gradually got to be decried as an instrument of Evil. It's been depicted this way for about 80 years now, figuring in numerous horror movies. I think a recent one is just called "Ouija", although I haven't seen it.

Of course it's a mass-produced and mass-marketed item now. For me that makes it doubtful that it would provide much of a genuine mystical experience, for good or ill. I do like, though, the tidbit that James Merrill used one to compose poetry. He was a very nifty poet, and I might have to highlight his work here later on.

FM sometime in the AM

The other night I was woken up by my clock radio going off. 

OR WAS I?

I was lying in bed when I heard blaring music. It was still very much in the night stage of the AM hours, so I wondered why it was going off. But the immediate priority, of course, was turning it off. But I found it hard to turn over. Really hard.

This difficulty in moving is usually a sign that I'm not fully awake. And in fact once I did make it over to the clock radio, I tooled with it for a few seconds but found that it was just sitting there silently. The blaring music had been a dream or something hypnagogic. In my head, either way.

So I turned over and went back to sleep, which was uneventful for the rest of the night. But it just made me think, "weird."

Aldo arid Slav

This is a painting by Salvador Dali. He entitled it "Neo-Cubist Academy (Composition with Three Figures)." The name is a little puzzling. It's a very striking picture. What it's not is a cubist picture. Not, at least, if you're expecting to see something like Picasso in his best-known Cubist phase, or Georges Braque. Maybe Dali meant that he was reducing the amount of visual information in a comparable way. It makes for drama and beauty here.

Roadside assistance

I saw the above bumper sticker earlier this evening, on a car that matched it alarmingly well. It raised a couple of questions for me.

1. Where did this "bestie" thing come from? It sounds kind of mockney to me, although I've no confirmation it's of British origin. The Merriam-Webster website dates it to 1991, but I've only started hearing it in the last decade.
2. How good a friend do you have to convince other drivers you are in order to keep them from T-boning you? Is that where we're at?

The empire strikes back

Nikki Haley. The name, appropriately enough, ends in a "Y." Because, you know, why?

But there's a reason she's rising. Trump taking the nomination in 2016 was a shocking populist uprising. However well or poorly, it centered something aside from tax cuts and forever wars. Some Republican state leaders followed suit. Including Ron DeSantis, although in his Presidential campaign he's seemed hard-pressed to remember.

So there was a statement coming from rank-and-file conservatives that they weren't going to take shit from their corporate overlords anymore. And promoting Haley is a way of saying "Oh yes you will!" That's appealing to someone. A lot of someones with deep pockets.

Further dystopias

The Aldi store in East Providence was located next to a mattress store. Not too long ago the mattress store closed. They decided to buy the vacated property in order to expand their own storefront. 

The store remained open through the early stages of construction. Then they closed for, I'd estimate, about six weeks. 

Before the expansion they had four checkout stations, with one being in use during light business and two when it gets busier. Now, with the increase in space, they just have two. Two that staff might work at anyway. There are a good eight or ten miniature self-serve stations. So if the hope was that they were going to bring on more employees, I guess not.

The trio

I just today finished reading Leanda de Lisle's The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, a book about Ladies Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey. It covers many of the same events as Allison Weir's The Children of Henry VIII, which I also read not too long ago. One difference is that Weir's book was focused on the Tudors proper. It was primarily about Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Lady Jane Grey was its fourth subject, as she undeniably had an effect on the aforementioned monarchs. Weir didn't really say anything of substance about Katherine or Mary, while de Lisle does.

Jane can still fairly be called the first among equals in this book's telling, exactly because she was the shortest lived of the sisters, or rather because of the reasons she died so young. She's a troubling figure in some ways. She was serious, humble given her social position, an avid reader. She was also, by any objective standard, a religious zealot. Her vision of Protestantism was markedly similar to what the Cromwells would promote the better part of a century later. Elizabeth I was no sweetheart, but she did bring some kind of religious equilibrium to England during her reign. It's hard to imagine Jane doing the same.

Even given more attention than I've seen them get before, it's harder to get a read on Katherine and Mary. Lady Katherine Grey could have potentially become queen if Elizabeth's bout of smallpox in 1562 had gone worse for her. And at that point it was pretty much Katherine's only hope for freedom. What kind of queen would she have been? Unlike her older sister she hadn't made any big political or theological statements. She loved her husband Edward (like bunnies, I tell you), she loved her two baby sons, and she loved dogs and monkeys. As queen she might have deferred to Edward, but even he was more of an upper class striver than an aspiring ruler.

Then there's Mary. Like Katherine, she had married without Elizabeth's knowledge or permission, and was punished for it. An odd match, as she was a borderline dwarf and husband Thomas Keyes was a borderline giant, but they seem to have clicked on some level. While she was at the top of the succession chart after Katherine's death, she plainly had no great interest in usurping the throne. Elizabeth eventually realized this and freed her. Sadly it wasn't too much later that she was struck down by the plague.

The book is a triumph for de Lisle. She makes her mostly lesser-known historical figures come to life.

Pet

 

It's called Cockatoo and Corks, dating from 1948. The artist is Joseph Cornell, who was from New York State. He specialized in these little boxed assemblages. This is a jaunty little interior. The bird is there, ready to greet you when you get home, and honestly a little overwhelming.

Now in stereotype

There's an extensive review here of the Censored Eleven. These are a selection of Looney Tunes shorts that have been officially kept out of sight. This is partly because of legal and rights issues, but also because their depiction of black characters is now an embarrassment. Remember, it was a less enlightened time, when the South was still segregated and Nazi apologists couldn't even write for the Jewish Chronicle.

While these particular cartoons seem to have been buried since before I was born, a couple nonetheless sound familiar. Familiar as types anyway. The syndication packages did include shorts featuring mammies and tours of "Darkest Africa." And needless to say, the less said about, say, Chinese characters the better.

Did these cartoons make me racist? No, and I doubt that by themselves they did so to any of my peers or the kids who had come before. As the song in South Pacific says, you have to be carefully taught. The animators, writers, and voice talent at Warner were entertainers, not careful teachers. If some of their entertainment doesn't pass muster now, that's just part of the win-loss ratio.

Also thanks to Coagulopath for providing a still from The Black and White Minstrel Show, a British variety series that was still running during the early years of my lifetime. The blackface on it is almost too divorced from reality to be offensive. Like, what are you supposed to be?

Little friends

In my judgment this is a fetching little puppet show. Despite the title they seem to be rod puppets rather than marionettes. They have a refreshing handmade quality, whatever you want to call them.

My French isn't good enough to tell what the kids are saying. Did you catch it?

Communiqués

Special election tomorrow to replace Representative David Cicilline, also the former Mayor of Providence. And you know what that means. Yes, at-home robocalls. Oh what a thrill. I've gotten two today on behalf of Democrat Gabe Amo and one on behalf of Republican Gerry Leonard.

In the Leonard call he talks about his 30 years in the US Marine Corps and promises to "fight extremists" and we get it already. One of the two for Gabe Amo features the voice of Barack Obama and I wonder if he actually recorded it or if they have an AI for that now.

Dogs and cats living together

My downstairs neighbor has a cat. A rather large tomcat, as I've seen, and one she dotes on. My other downstairs neighbor recently got a puppy. Small―at least so far―excitable and adorable. The cat must have at least heard the dog. How he's adjusting I'm not sure, but he will. Anyway, they both add something to the building's ambience. 

Like clockwork

One aspect of modernization is the increased interest in measuring time. While there's always been day and night, the four seasons, etc., a precise account of the time of day wasn't always a priority. Now we measure fractions of seconds. 

This transition isn't an unmixed blessing, but one has to appreciate the craftsmanship that has gone into clockmaking. The clock in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg (not Paris) is one example. The numerals are brightly done, and it comes with an astrolabe.

There's a legend that the clockmaker was blinded when his work was done to keep him from creating an equally stunning clock for someone else. The author of this article notes that the same story has attached itself to almost every European clock of note. Well, I can see why.

🎃

There may be a greater than usual need for release this year. For fun. So if Halloween has gone anywhere for the past few years, I think it's back.

Lot of college kids walking around in costume today. And some borderline cases. When you don't have all the cultural references it can be hard to tell who's wearing a Halloween costume and who just has unusual fashion sense. That's cool too, though.

I had coffee at a place where one lady behind the counter was dressed as the joker. I use the lower case "j" because with her jester's hat and big rosy circles of rouge she didn't look like the Batman villain. Instead she looked like the figure on a wild playing card. Or maybe she was Mr. Punch, but her posture seemed too good.

What a quartet

 

I just got Gene Wolfe's Free Live Free from the library and I haven't started reading it yet. I dearly love the cover, though. As with most of Wolfe it's a science fiction book but the art style looks much more like a 1970s reprint of a 1940s mystery novel. The jacket copy describes the four main characters as "a private detective, a witch, a salesman, and a prostitute." So let's see.

The witch, a definite Liz Taylor type in plunging neckline, is doing a perfect "raise the roof" move. While it's probable that she's supposed to be in a different scene, the prostitute appears to be checking her out. She also looks much more inviting than the vast majority of prostitutes.

Of the two men, I'm not sure which is supposed to be the salesman and which is the private detective. The guy on the left combines a sharp city slicker suit with a mustache that yells "yee-ha!" The guy on the right, in the tan overcoat, seems like the artist ("Enric") modeled him on William Holden but is a dead ringer for what Tom Hanks looks like today. That's serendipity for you.

Nothing but a pack of cards

Once again our government has chosen to prove its valor in the Middle East. And once more there's a hostile watch on people Not With The Program. But if anything things have gotten stupider since the early 2000s. Stupider and meaner. And the fact that we're coming off two or three moral panics from the other side of the political spectrum (sort of) makes it hard to know whom to trust.

The air of censoriousness comes so close to being amusing in the case of Greta Thunberg. The twentysomething eco-activist is an annoying scold, to be sure. But the post that got her in trouble was the most anodyne kind of protest, if Israel hawks could accept any kind of protest as inoffensive, that is. As to the supposedly well-known history of the octopus as an antisemitic symbol, well, first of all her octopus was a little plushie whose "tentacles" were the size of a pinkie knuckle. Also when I think of sinister octopi I associate it with the Spirit's nemesis. Does that mean Will Eisner was a raging antisemite? Huge if true.

Perhaps a more serious development is the University of Florida's shutdown of students for Justice in Palestine. According to Chancellor Ray Rodrigues the school system will use “all tools at our disposal to crack down on campus demonstrations that delve beyond protected First Amendment speech into harmful support for terrorist groups.” Is there more than a semantic difference between the former and the latter? Some of the group's materials regarding 10/7 are suspicious enough to possibly justify extra scrutiny, but the law is pretty clear on rights of speech and association.

On Sports Night the boss character, Isaac, had a good speech where he said, "If you're dumb hire smart people. And if you're smart, hire smart people who disagree with you." This ties into what may be Ron DeSantis's great failing as a leader. As he's launched his ambitions he seems to have shrunken his circle of advisors to true believers only. If you're DeSantis then someone like Chris Rufo isn't an internal critic, he's your id made manifest. This might be satisfying, but it's not always helpful.

Our oldest companion

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the one who coined the phrase about naturing being "red of tooth and claw." Since then it's been used to illustrate the point about nature being cruel. It certainly is true that living beings in the wild can fall prey to any number of awful fates. And our own violent natures―more pronounced in men―has evolutionary roots.

Still, there's another side. The consolations of nature are constant. Rain remains rain, and continues to have that soothing sound. Different types of birds sing us to sleep and sing us awake. We can count on the different winds of the four seasons. 

In the end I think we live in a world that loves us and forgives us.

RIP Liberal Blogosphere: c. 2001-2016

Not long ago I figured I'd peruse the remaining liberal blogs to see what they had to say about the current sitch in the Middle East: Hamas atrocities, Israel leveling Gaza, and whatnot. It all had to give them something to talk about, right?

Except apparently it didn't. I saw a post Alicublog that made passing mention, but that's it. Nothing as far as I could tell on Lawyers, Guns & Money or the Rude Pundit. It just didn't register. Same with big liberal social media accounts.

There was a time when I might have attributed this to Islamophobia―a term I might deconstruct in a future entry―or kowtowing to same. But that's really not it. 

The truth is that "issues" aren't really the blogosphere's thing anymore. There have been other public matters like the East Palestine spill, Lahaina, Ukraine. Areas where someone in the left-to-center-left could make their mark and maybe change some minds. But they're just left sitting on the table. 

It was a long process of decay, but the election of Donald Trump was probably the final blow. When the unthinkable happened the world was cleaved into Left and Right. In practice, though, that just meant Democrat and Republican. So now with some sui generis exceptions like columnist/cartoonist Ted Rall―who very much does address issues of substance―they can only focus on Benny Hill-level stuff like the GOP tossing out the House Speaker and failing to select a new one. In a year no one will even remember, which seems to be part of the point.

A Tale

 

One Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, runs down the street of a strange city, a haunted look on his angular face. He comes to a structure of stone and glass, a building he has never seen before, except perhaps in an obscure dream. Finding the door unlocked, he enters and rides the lift to the top floor.

Once ascended, he walks down the corridor and comes upon a door. The one word inscribed on the door which his weary mind can comprehend is "agent." This is good. A man of action is exactly what his situation requires. He knocks. Sounding put out, a man inside bids him enter.

The man, balding and Hebraic, gazes at him in puzzlement. Could he really be the confidant Lovecraft requires? But there is no choice, no time left. He ignores the dubious splendor of the office and speaks.

"I must tell you of the goings on I have seen in Arkham, Massachusetts and elsewhere."

"Go on," the agent prods him.

"Fiendish rituals, held by the seemingly respectable in conjunction with the obviously base. The chanting of blasphemous and obscene hymns, some in a language never meant for human tongue. Hideous beings are brought forth. There are gods that have been sleeping since before the dawn of time, and they are hungry. As their time renews, ours becomes ever more tenuous."

The agent rises to his feet, intrigued.

He whistles. "That sounds like a hell of an act. What do you call it?"

Lovecraft claps his hands in sheer delight.

"THE ARISTOCRATS!"

Who you calling a liar?

This song was originally by Argent, a hard rock band formed by former members of the Zombies. I like Three Dog Night's version. It's catchy, and Danny Hutton's raspy growl suits the lyrics well.

The visuals are quite the time capsule. Full-fledged videos were still rare at this time, especially in America. So you get largely live performances, but with this weird blue screen acid trips going on in the background. .It's a relief when the band isn't washed away by it.

What inning is this anyway?

Without too much ado here are a couple of thoughtful pieces on the recent fracas in the Middle East: one from Sam Kriss and one from Freddie deBoer. de Boer doesn't mention it, perhaps because he thinks it's common knowledge, but Amy Schumer is the cousin of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, which adds an extra level of absurdity to her Instagram whine.

On a personal note I also have to say that I have more patients with Israelis―a large number, to be sure, but not all―who crave vengeance than with westerners who think that life's winners should have license to kill the losers. If you like that kind of jungle law try it in your own country first. And make no mistake, it's the latter who enforce the loyalty oath. Statements that would pretty much make you a person of interest if you made them about any other group become mandatory in some circles when they're applied to Palestinians.

EDIT: This column from Jonathan Cook is also good, and raises interesting/disturbing questions about what kind of options other governments in the world want open as regards their own people.

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From The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch:

When the British liberal L. T. Hobhouse objected that pragmatism―with its confusion of truth and "cash value," its cavalier indifference to principles, and its preference for action over thought, as Hobhouse saw it―could easily encourage collective irrationality and mob rule, James tried to correct this "travesty" of pragmatism ("by believing a thing we make it true," as Hobhouse put it) and then added, in effect, that the quarrel between Hobhouse and himself arose out of differing assessments of the modern predicament. For Hobhouse, the victory of the Enlightenment was precarious and the danger of relapse into barbarism always imminent. For James, on the other hand, the victory of the Enlightenment was so complete that it had almost eradicated the capacity for ardor, devotion, and joyous action. "We are getting too refined for anything," he wrote elsewhere, "altogether out of touch with genuine life." Accordingly, he told Hobhouse, "Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation."

I like this William James guy, and feel like I want to hear more from him. Is/Was he right in this dispute? It sounds like they both made some points.  But those who fear superstition above all else have gone out of their way to stop it at its source, and it's amounted to tossing the baby with the bathwater.

Sides

A lot of people seem to like taking sides. I guess it's the feeling of being on a team. All well and good, but if you take someone's side, you might be tempted to agree with them in all cases, even when what they do is stupid or in other ways not good. I prefer the freedom of being able to speak my mind, which might put me off anyone's team.

Am I talking about anything in specific that you would have heard about? I might be.

Clued in

Frequently after solving a crossword I'll hop onto the XWord Info to see if the creators or anyone else have anything of note to say about it. I did that with this one, which has a fairly clever gimmick of the long answers being puns for grammatical terms. 

Like I said, it's a good puzzle. The designer Joel Fagliano for some reason feels the need to publicly angst over one of the (non-theme) clues having "Ann Coulter" as the answer.

Now while I'm not a dedicated reader of Coulter she's an interesting figure. Like a number of prominent conservatives she's been critical of Donald Trump, but unlike, say, William Kristol, she hasn't bent over backwards to exalt the Democrats either.

More to the point, crosswords are about testing your general knowledge, often with a healthy dose of lateral thinking. Whether you, I, or the designer disapprove of a person or thing mentioned in it is immaterial. I don't need to like avocados to recognize them as an appropriate subject for a clue.

Kerfuffle

Columbus Day? Indigenous People's Day? Regardless of what you want to call it, this October holiday turns out to be an...interesting time to take the bus.

I was riding down Thayer Street and a guy making a turn cut off the bus driver. He turned out to be a DoorDash driver. He was still in front of the bus when he stopped. Stopped in the middle of the street and went into a Chinese restaurant. Got into a tiff with the bus driver on the way. Stayed inside for several minutes. When he got out and got back in his car, he still didn't move. The bus driver let a lady running late for work off the bus so she could go up to this guy's car and yell at him. To no effect. It wasn't until people further back in the developing traffic jam got out of their cars and started walking forward that he finally got the message. 

I swear to you I am not doing justice to how much mayhem was going on here. And at some point I had to laugh because this felt like a story that would make someone say, "Only in New York."

Well, not anymore.

Duet for a couple of instruments

 

I enjoyed this bit of music a lot. It's a real eye-opening performance from the bassoonist. I'd like to know what the percussionist is sitting on/playing. Is it a custom instrument or just a stool. I mean, he is getting a lot of tones from the front.

Awaiting instructions

Ah, the importance of flexibility. 

In general, manuscript formatting for publication is a pretty formalized practice. You use fonts and spacing and all the rest of it in the manner of Shunn. Aspiring writers get to know the rules and get comfortable with them. It's part of the process.

There are always exceptions, though. I recently sent a story off through email. When I looked through the submission guidelines right before sending it off I saw that they don't accept .docx files, which are now the default in Word. Even more of a surprise, you can't use headers with the page number, name, etc. I sent something to this place before and think I may have overlooked these rules the first time.

That's workable, though. The real nerve-wracking business is when they don't want attachments, just the document pasted in the body of an email. Sounds easy, but a 4,000 page story won't look good pasted in an email.

Minitrue Ltd.

To anyone paying attention, "misinformation" and "disinformation" are two of the slimiest weasel words in circulation. To be misinformed in the true and general sense of the word is to believe that you have reliable knowledge of something when you don't. But "misinformation" is wielded by government and media entities with less than no interest in seeing you well-informed. 

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is one of the groups allegedly dedicated to fighting all this malicious info out there. In effect their job is to provide talking points for those who want to censor. Often tied to COVID and vaccines, but it could be anything. How much they even maintain a façade of dealing with "digital hate" (fingers that don't like toes?) is open to debate. 

Founded by a British figure in the UK's Labour Party. This country can't even produce its own propagandists anymore?

Things to giggle at

 

I'm always up for humor that mixes high and low subjects, styles, what have you. Provided that it's funny, of course. The comics of R.E. Parrish are a good example. And an addictive one. She seems to be a generation younger than I am, so maybe the kids are alright.

Success is a dangerous drug

Safe to say Stephen King has written things that I like. Notably The Shining, Misery, and the stories in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. But with the volume he's put out I haven't read everything he's written. From the excerpts of it that I've seen, his latest, Holly, looks quite dire.

This article by Kat Rosenfield reviews it and looks at the recent authoritarian turn King seems to have taken. And if I may, there are a few other things that might be going on here. For one thing, having that much money would tend to isolate you, even if you don't want it too. This is the root problem of a lot of celebrities (and wannabes) who express disgust at the corona-spreading MAGA hat people they assume make up the general public. You could call this A-List Syndrome.

Addiction might play a role too. People with substance abuse issues often displace that energy onto other foci. Social media, the chance to gain millions of Twitter followers within days and have them hanging on your every word? It's basically free crack.

No place

I have to admit, I'm wary of utopians. Have been for a long time, I think, although I wasn't able to articulate why. But it comes down to this. There's making improvements, and that's very nice. But when people want to create a better world, who for? You may find that you and yours―and for that matter, people as they actually exist―don't have a place in this future.

This has played out in many areas, I think. Whether it's the idea or the immaturity of those pursuing it is debatable.

Their mark

 

The above picture shows a Minoan seal with what is known as Cretan hieroglyphs. It's rather beautiful in its way. You hear the word "hieroglyph" and right away you think of Egypt. But Crete, off the coast of Greece, had a different set. There were also hieroglyphs in Anatolia, which to us is part of Turkey but which hosted a number of civilizations before that. You could probably call some South American scripts hieroglyphs as well.

Cretan hieroglyphs later developed into Linear A and Linear B, the latter of which was the script for Ancient Greek before they adapted the Phoenician-based Greek Alphabet. I don't know if the other Old World hieroglyphs could have been influenced by the Egyptians'. Obviously a lot was already being said.

Paws for effect

Today while waiting for a bus I saw a woman carrying a small dog. White with brown splotches on the coat, with a sort of pointy snout. As I say, very small. I don't entirely know if this was a puppy or just a small breed. Quiet and well-behaved for either. 

The woman started telling me about her nephew, who had offered to get her some things from the store but apparently (according to her) was just looking for an excuse to get out of the house. Not long after she started my bus showed up, so her story got cut off. I don't regret that.

Still, she was keeping a nice dog. Have to hand that to her.

Men without hats

Current reading: The Mad Hatter Mystery by John Dickson Carr.

Carr was originally from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, which I guess would be considered a suburb or exurb of Pittsburgh. He moved to England, though, because he believed it to be the best place to write detective stories. Moved back and forth between countries a couple of times.

The Mad Hatter Mystery is one of Carr's novels featuring Dr. Gideon Fell. Fell is based on G. K. Chesterton, right down to physical appearance, i.e. heavyset with mustache and eyeglasses on a ribbon. The plot is quite entertaining. And it's a success for Carr as a mystery writer and tourist, as he gets to use the Tower of London as a crime scene.

And I call that education, sophistication

I recently came across an article that was written a couple of weeks ago about David Byrne, a personality in whom I have some interest. The author is evidently a fan too, albeit a disappointed one. And it's true that Byrne's quirky vision seems to have given way to standard wokeness in recent years.

If that's a tragedy, though, it's one that's common to life. There's always been an element of elite judgment to Byrne's work. As Collins himself notes, "The Big Country" expresses disdain towards the natives of America's heartland. It just does so in a bracingly honest way. 

The difference is that in the late 70s and 80s Byrne was a genius, and now he's someone who has been a genius in the past. The spark of divine madness isn't there now.

Again, it's an old story. When was the last great Dylan album? I mean the last that could stand with Blonde on Blonde. It could be argued that David Bowie went out on top with Blackstar, but he certainly had some fallow years. 

So maybe sometime in the future Byrne will return to form and amaze the world with something no one was expecting. Or perhaps not. How much can you fairly expect?

More of the same

Why do the same American politicians keep getting elected, even when they're discredited and/or incapacitated? Polarization, mostly. Most states and congressional districts aren't competitive as regards the major parties. That means that in almost any circumstance, people elected from the favored party can count on being reelected in the general. That being the case, their primary opponents are stymied from making the argument that they'll have a better chance in the November election. And officeholders who don't have to worry about competition from the other party or their own will just keep running until they drop.

How did the states get so polarized when most people aren't extremists? Dunno. Is there a solution? I'm not sure anyone with power even wants one.

John Fetterman beat a weak opponent in 2022 and since then has shown numerous signs of still being afflicted by the stroke he suffered in the middle of the race. The Senate's change of dress code may have been put forward to accommodate him. Whether Pennsylvania is sufficiently blue to reelect him in '28 will be revealed in the fullness of time. 

As for Lauren Boebert, she won't lose her House seat for being a fun date. There's no one in Washington with the right to expect she will be.

Carrying on

Since I came home this evening I've been having hay fever symptoms. Sniffling, sneezing, you know the drill. There is a bright side, though. At least I didn't get all allergic-like on the bus. It was a crowded bus, so you can imagine how popular I'd be.

Different look

As I believe I've mentioned before, I sit on the side with the Spanish-language TVs when I go to the laundromat. Reason being, I find the Anglophone programming―especially news―intrusive. With Spanish I'd have to concentrate to understand what's being said, so it's easier to let it slide into the background.

Just as I was readying to empty the dryer and leave tonight, I saw that a telenovela was playing. I know that these are in the same general genre as American soaps, but I noticed a difference. Daytime soaps in this country are―or in most cases, were―shot on soundstages, and tend to have a kind of underwater look. This was filmed in a real indoor location, with available light. It was a more natural look. Albeit with flawlessly pretty people, because it's still TV.

Mutant follies

David Strorm lives in a farming community in Labrador, Canada. Except that "Canada" doesn't really seem to exist anymore, and is never mentioned. Because John Wyndham's The Chrysalids isn't just a postapocalyptic novel, it's long past the apocalypse.

Humans where David lives are in an open war against mutation, be it of crops, livestock, or other humans. That means that the former two are destroyed, while the last are banished to "the Fringes" even if they're still infants. David's own father cheers on this regime from the pulpit. But David is different himself, part of a circle of telepaths. They're going to have to escape.

The Chrysalids was published in 1955. By my count this puts it eight years ahead of the creation of Marvel Comics' X-Men. I note this because its persecuted, "mutants against everyone" tone is eerily similar to what writer Chris Claremont brought to that comic in the 70s and onward. It doesn't take away from the novel's literary quality, but you can't unsee it once you've noticed.

Parallels aside, the book encourages the reader to identify with a new kind of person. Not just new, in fact, and not just different, but actively better than all those who came before. As they say, the golden age of science fiction is 15.

Something had to give

What can I say about this past week? If it hasn't been the hottest week of the summer, it's at least been hotter than any week in August. Days in the 80s and 90s, nights not much cooler. 

This afternoon we had a thunderstorm. Having been caught out in it while I was grocery shopping I can testify that the rain got thick enough so that some streets you couldn't cross without dipping your feet in a flooded curb. That might cool things down some. I'm hoping for a comfortable sleep.

Drama llamas

There were a lot of news stories in 2020, and most of them were stupid, so it was a difficult time to keep track of all the stupid news. So while I think I did read about the foundation of We See You White American Theater* at the time I'd forgotten it until reading this Tablet article yesterday. Anyway, this "Won't someone please think of the theatre kids?" organization has been in business for three years now. Since then there's been a lot of anti-white American theatre that no one will ever see because why the fuck would you? Mission accomplished I guess. 

One thing that has happened in many institutions is a kind of political treadmill. The loudest critics within and without are doctrinaire leftists, so leadership adopts by adopting their demands as its own. So the only permissible critique is from the left. But eventually these radical demands become so homogeneous that no meaningful dissent is even possible. This seems to have happened to much of American theatre. 

While you could say that conservatives have been frozen out, the truth is that in most cultural and artistic matters like this they just don't show up for the fight. They're either not comfortable with the subject or don't think it's important. More enthusiasm for spreading gay rumors about a man who will never again have to stand for election. Those are some priorities.

*No, really, that's their name.

♥

The thing about loving thy neighbor is that it's not just a nice cliché that appears in the Bible. A society that doesn't at least hold it up as an ideal is not going to survive, not as anyplace you'd want to live. 

But no political faction favors people loving each other. Quite the opposite, if you look at the most vocal. The idea has no bloc or sponsor. Which is actually often the way in important matters.

L+L

The team of Richard Levinson and William Link make up one of the more interesting behind-the-scenes creators in TV history. They worked together as fiction writers and playwrights as well, so must have had good chemistry. Among other things they were scriptwriters on Alfred Hitchcock presents, and it was on their advice that Hitch would later read the book that he'd adapt into his final movie, Family Plot. Among the works they can take credit for:

Mannix: I haven't seen much of this, but it had an interesting history. The first season had Mike Connors's title character working for an investigative firm called Intellect which relied on computers to reach its solutions. Only Mannix was an old-fashioned PI who ignored the computers and went with his own hunches. So a variation on the rationalism-vs.-romance theme that's really at the heart of classic mystery fiction. From Season 2 onwards they'd drop the computer angle and make Mannix a private detective.

Columbo: A biggie, maybe the biggie. They first created the LAPD lieutenant for a TV play starring Bert Freed as Columbo. But of course it was after Peter Falk stepped into the role that he really became the character we know and love. And actually Falk needed a practice run. He's off, a little too standard a cop, in the movie Prescription for Murder. In the follow-up, Ransom for a Dead Man, he's more disheveled and disarming. This seems like it could work.

Ellery Queen: Interestingly they took two stabs at Dannay and Lee's mystery writer detective. The first was in a TV movie starring Rat Packer Peter Lawford as Ellery, helping police track a serial killer. They used a pseudonym for this one, perhaps not approving of the changes made to their script. Their second try starred Jim Hutton (Timothy's dad) as Ellery, with David Wayne as his police inspector father. It only lasted one season plus a pilot movie, but hasn't been forgotten.

Murder She Wrote: Their last commercially successful series, as Levinson died a couple of years into production. Also features a mystery writer as the lead, making it something of a Queen companion piece. It's not a period piece, so 80s aesthetics permeate everything. (Femme fatales wear so much product in their hair that they can't even smoke!) Angela Lansbury plays Jessica Fletcher with a mix of warmth and reserve that helps to sell fairly standard crime stories. Then sometimes it pays off with a truly bonkers episode, like one where Jose Ferrer plays a hypnotist who gets murdered in a roomful of hypnotized subjects.

The pair ventured outside of the genre sometimes as well. TV movies they've scripted include That Certain Summer, with Hal Holbrook as a gay father, and The Execution of Private Slovik, a docudrama about a young GI executed for desertion in World War II. They had some impressive accomplishments.

Words upon words

Archive.org gets a lot―probably most―of its content from other video sites. YouTube seems to be a big source. Then they get removed from the other place, but the Internet Archive has them, so that's definitely a good thing. 

Of course, there are occasional snags. If you watch a movie on YouTube and it has subtitles that you don't need, you can turn them off. On Archive.org if the movie has subtitles you're stuck with them. I guess if it doesn't have them and you're prefer to see them you're sort of screwed too.

Ah well, maybe I unconsciously brushed up on my Spanish tonight.

"It's got 'United' on the side, you can't miss it"

 

I get the feeling that air traffic control started to enter the public consciousness around the 1960s. In the very early days of commercial flight the idea that the pilots weren't entirely in control, that they needed help from some guy who wasn't even there, would have delegitimized the whole enterprise in the minds of many potential passengers. Eventually, though, it became a source of comfort and something you could afford to joke about. 

Certainly it helps if the person making the jokes is an acknowledged master of speaking into communication devices for comedic effect.

As it happens

Not too surprisingly summer leads the other three seasons in days you can sleep with the windows open. Days you pretty much have to as well. So things that happen in the street you can hear loud and clear. I don't pay attention to the details, which don't really make sense out of context anyway. A few weeks ago a drunk woman was freaking out at her boyfriend sometime in the AM. Luckily, it was a weekend. He was in his car, though, so I had to wonder why he didn't just drive away sooner.

Hear today

All bestsellers today, and really any book that wants to sell, will come out in audio format. Naturally. This is how many people today "read." It allows them to multitask, do things like drive and work out at the same time.

I have to wonder, though, what the technology does to standards of writing. Nothing good, I suspect. There's a kind of alchemy that happens when you read with your eyes. A false sentence, be it description or dialogue, will grate on the brain. In audio an actor with bills to pay can take a stiff drink or two and wallpaper over the flaws.

Training and taming

During the Summer of 2020 unrest following the death of George Floyd, I was fairly sanguine. Whatever else resulted, I was sure, at least the public encouragement to go and join protests meant that COVID panic must be over. 

Needless to say, this did not turn out to be the case. But as to why we continued to live under the thumb of public health after they'd seemingly voided their authority, well, that's a rich topic. It's one that Matthew Crawford addresses here, suggesting that both COVID and the racial reckoning shared a common purpose. A new―or at least unfamiliar to us―ethic was being put into place, placing the utmost importance on deference to authority.

This antihumanism, as Crawford calls it, also extends to the apocalyptic embrace of artificial intelligence in recent years, which is based on the concept that human thinking and mechanical computation are in essence the same thing, a task the machines do better. In the opening anecdote a Google engineer sees the malfunction of one of the company's autonomous cars as prove that humans need to become "less idiotic." Sadly this does not seem to have been self-deprecation on his part.

Tudor Jeep Wrangler

One of the books I'm currently reading is The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. Weir is a meticulous researcher, and she really nails the soap opera aspect of royal history. 

One thing that many people don't realize is that Henry considered himself a Catholic his entire life. And at one time he'd had an honored place in the Church. He wasn't trying to split England from Rome so much as he was holding out for a better deal from a more amenable Pope. The first ultra-Protestant monarch was his son Edward VI, who started reigning as a literal child and had a boy's inhuman level of commitment. He was followed by Catholic traditionalist Mary and Elizabeth, who nudged the modern Anglican Church into being.

Edward was the son of Henry and Jane Seymour. The Seymours were a colorful bunch. Edward Seymour (well, this particular Edward Seymour) was Lord Protector for the young king, and a truly harried bureaucrat. The Lord Protector's younger brother, Thomas, emerges as the villain of the early chapters. Whether this is a fair assessment of the man, one could ask, but he certainly seems like a great role for hammy stage actors. Marrying Henry's widow Catherine Parr made him the young Elizabeth's stepfather and...let's just say he wasn't exactly an all-star stepfather.

Nacre

Brian Eno has always stated that Stranded was his favorite Roxy Music album. Which is big of him to say, since it was the first album they made after he was basically canned from the group. I'm not sure it's their best, but it is quite good.

This song in particular sounds like something Eno would be involved in, starting at freakout and ending at hush. Probably would have sounded a little different if he were still with them, but still feels like his kind of thing.

Vices of all kinds

It's from a few days ago, but Jamie Kirchick has a pretty good rundown of how pink-tinted organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign have grown more censorious and oppressive. Taken in isolation this phenomenon is alarming. Looked at in a broader context it's less surprising, but no better. 

Is choosing a side and then becoming less tolerant of everyone not on it simply what institutions do? Manifestly it's what they've been doing lately. And it goes beyond purported "LGBTQ+" issues into foreign policy, COVID, etc. Elites simply don't respect neutral values, including honesty. And rights never extend to their opponents.

Switches

Until recently I always assumed that Queen Victoria had been the daughter of George IV.  It seems like the obvious conclusion. But I was wrong. George was her Uncle. Her father was aristocrat Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. 

Not exactly a commoner by birth, but at the same time reigning over Britain wasn't in her plan for most of the time leading up to her reign. She had to catch up and become a queen that Britain would take seriously. So it's definitely a British story.

Veritas or something

Tonight at a bus stop I heard a very short, slight man say that his tour of duty in the Marines had ended the day the Twin Towers came down. This was apparently on September 11, 2011. Just before that I was on a bus with a rock star who'd been on <i>The Ellen DeGeneres<i> show and met Elizabeth Montgomery there. Everyone's favorite nose twiddler died eight years before Ellen got a talk show, but you can't keep a good woman down.

If you want to talk to guys who turn into Baron Munchhausen after four beers, take public transit on a holiday only your state observes, and pretty much just government workers at that.

There is nothing like a dame

 

A tangential header to be sure, but Laura Knight was eventually titled, which resulted in her being Dame Knight.

Before that, she was an painter. An interesting and significant figure in the world of British art in the early twentieth century, she was catholic in her taste of subjects. The world of the theatre makes its presence known in her work, through the music hall performers such as those shown in Motley (above), as well as many commedia dell'arte performers and ballet dancers. She also painted sunlit landscapes and outdoor genre scenes. Later in her career she created journalistic paintings like her depiction of the Nuremberg trials.

Knight brought a nice balance of composition and looseness to her work. She also had a great eye for light.

It came from Waukegan

The Ray Bradbury Theater aired on the USA network in the 1980s. This was before original-for-cable shows had much cachet, so it kind of flew under the radar. I've watched a few episodes over the last couple of days.

Bradbury is an absolutely indispensable writer, of course. I would recommend that you track down and read any story of his before you watch an adaptation. They come from his mind and his voice.

The TV show mostly seems to do right by him, though. It should, since he's also the one writing the scripts. Some translate better to the screen than others.

What I said about cable shows not having much cachet yet? They didn't have much of a budget either. the adaptation of "The Town Where No One Got Off" looks for much of its duration like a shoestring student production. It's also the best episode of the ones that I saw, which has a lot to do with Jeff Goldblum starring in it.

The show's also an interesting relic because it's obviously shot in Canada. Eventually Vancouver would be a central shooting location for American TV production, really second only to the LA area. When this was made that process seems to have been in a very early stage.

Home of the Brave

I just recently finished reading Amerika or America by Franz Kafka. Which is quite interesting. According to the short afterward by Kafka's friend Max Brod he loved reading travel memoirs and was a big fan of Ben Franklin's diaries. The tale of travel to the United States is entirely fanciful, as Kafka never left Europe during his life.

Is it what one would call "Kafkaesque"? Certainly parts of it are. The part where protagonist Karl Rossman loses his job as a hotel lift boy demonstrates how far systems will go to destroy people who are trying to do well by them. The ending is surprisingly positive, though, and it seems Kafka would have developed it even more if he'd spent more time on the book.

Name's not Polly

 

Not your average musical duo, I reckon. You have a parrot on the song, the parrot will do some improvising. Tico is the parrot, and has a kind of contagious good cheer. I wonder if Mick and Keith have heard this version.

Unsayable

The idea that residential schools―essentially specialized parochial schools―were engaged in the slaughter of First Nations children is a horrible one. Fortunately the evidence doesn't really support that conclusion. Unfortunately, the government does. So strongly that they're weighing the option of codifying it into law, leaving anyone who denies it a criminal.

The term "denialism" does indeed recall Holocaust denial. And that leads me to the conclusion that Holocaust denial shouldn't be criminalized either. Oh, it happened all right. And saying it didn't is an insult to the survivors and their families. But those points can be claimed by any government who want an excuse to restrict speech.

It's a slippery slope, and they're holding ski poles.

Bone to pick

One book I'm reading now is Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne. In it, Pyne provides detailed narratives for as many human/hominin fossil finds that have occurred in the last 200 years. These include Piltdown Man and the Taung Child. And there's a certain interrelation there. 

Raymond Dart was assigned to a post in the early twentieth century, when it was not the place to be for a natural historian interested in human origins. Good thing for him, because he wound up finding the Taung Child, the first recognized Australopithecus skeleton. His discovery and his conclusion weren't universally accepted, certainly not at first, but he wound up adding more evidence to the idea that human life began in Africa, as Darwin had thought.

By that time it was generally accepted in the scientific community that Darwin had been wrong on that point, and that humans had begun in Asia or possibly Europe. And Piltdown Man seemed to supThport that theory, being a skeleton with humanlike and apelike features, as much of a missing link as anyone could ask for, and found in Britain. So perfect that it, of course, turned out to be a hoax.

This is a brief rundown of the case, but it does go to show just how much of a consensus-based practice science isn't, or at least shouldn't be.

On the march

Catching a series of buses and having to wait A great deal of time for three out of four of them is highly annoying. Not least because it takes what one might hope will be a brief errand and makes it...not so brief, not really brief at all.

Still, being on a bus that stops because a gaggle of geese are crossing the street, well, that's just charming. Doesn't matter that they're delaying you even further. Nor does it matter that they tend to be a little on the hostile side. It just speaks to the part of the soul that needs poetry.

Rising steam

Okay this might be too much information, but when I got out of the shower and toweled off I never actually got dry. That's the kind of heat/humidity combination we had today. Walking to breakfast I didn't wear my glasses because I figured sweat would constantly be dropping on the lenses from my hair. 

Later I wore a windbreaker, otherwise unneeded, for a shopping trip on foot because it was raining. Rain didn't last, though. Well that one didn't. Tonight after I'd been in for a while we got a lightning storm. We'll see what effect that has.

See you in the funny pages

When I was a kid, and probably into my young adulthood, Sunday was the sole day that the newspaper comics section was in color. From Monday to Saturday the comics would be in crisp black and white. Printed larger than they are now, but monochrome.

At some point the situation changed and comics ran in color seven days a week. I suspect this was a Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch attempt to hold onto readers. Because while there might be a shinier feature here and there, newspapers as a whole have not been in healthy shape for some time.

And this is a shame. You might think the MSM deserves whatever it gets, and on a national and international level it's pretty hard to defend them. But lack of local media means that local stories frequently don't get covered, and that distorts everyone's view of even the places they live. 

If you have neither on your side, pound the table.

None of it was clever. The circular reasoning. The new restrictions adopted at the drop of the hat, with no indication that they'd ever worked anywhere. The shaming and ridicule of doubters and stragglers. All to the stated purpose of halting a virus that had been in the general population at least since January, probably longer. So not just closing the door after the horse had left, but the door was more destructive than the horse. 

Increasingly the way to win political arguments at the highest level isn't to have the best facts or the most impeccable logic. It's not to show integrity, or for that matter belief in what you're saying. It's simply to own everything. Everything and everyone. 

And increasingly people outside the corridors of power conclude their best move is not to engage. They might be right.

Surf

When Edith Sitwell sat down to write a poem, damn the torpedoes, she was going to make it a POEM. Throughout her career, really, but especially in the early stages. Of course she performed her verse as well, and it has that theatrical aura. This is "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside."

When
Don
Pasquito arrived at the seaside
Where the donkey's hide tide brayed, he
Saw the banditto Jo in a black cape
Whose slack shape waved like the sea—
Thetis wrote a treatise noting wheat is silver like the sea; the lovely cheat is sweet as foam; Erotis notices that she
Will
Steal
The
Wheat-king's luggage, like Babel
Before the League of Nations grew—
So Jo put the luggage and the label
In the pocket of Flo the Kangaroo
Through trees like rich hotels that bode
Of dreamless ease fled she,
Carrying the load and goading the road
Through the marine scene to the sea.
'Don Pasquito, the road is eloping
With your luggage, though heavy and large;
You must follow and leave your moping
Bride to my guidance and charge!’

When
Don
Pasquito returned from the road's end,
Where vanilla-colored ladies ride
From Sevilla, his mantilla'd bride and young friend
Were forgetting their mentor and guide.
For the lady and her friend from Le Touquet
In the very shady trees upon the sand
Were plucking a white satin bouquet
Of foam, while the sand's brassy band
Blared in the wind Don Pasquito
Hid where the leaves drip with sweet . . .
But a word stung him like a mosquito . . .
For what they hear, they repeat!

Flo the Kangaroo? Seems like a very kiddie-lit touch to us, and maybe to readers back then as well. But the crucial thing is that it helps to keep the reader just a little bit off-balance.

Customer disservice

Nigel Farage is something of a political entrepreneur in the UK, having led a few fledgling political parties for brief but high-profile periods. He's been identified as the mastermind of Brexit, although it's debatable whether he drove the train or mostly just rode it. He's been called a number of other things, many of which I can't mention up here or they'll close the place. And as of recently had his account closed by Coutts, his bank.

What's notable about this incident is that internal documents show that executives at Coutts were concerned about Farage being a customer because his stated and assumed positions didn't line up with their values. One might think that a bank's highest value was the trust they earned from customers who kept their money there. One might think.

Something that has become apparent in recent years is that institutions and organizations across the board, including many for-profit businesses, have subscribed to the same general set of values. Progressive values. And the whole notion of inherent rights has become unfashionable. The average person is privileged, has privileges which can and should be taken away from time to time. You don't want to overindulge the house pets.

The level of hostility to people who were not too long ago revered as good customers and necessary voters varies. The true vanguard is Antifa, who apparently see Nazis and collaborators on every street corner. But even short of that most individuals don't hold as much value as favored political causes do, which means that once unthinkable acts against them are on the table. That leads to a very low-trust society.

Here comes Peter Cottontail

I live in a big(gish) city, so I don't know if you'd expect to see a lot of wild rabbits here. We have them, though. They come and go rather quickly, being somewhat built for speed.

While rabbits aren't rodents―a fact that's been clarified since I was a kid―their faces look somewhat similar to those of squirrels. Their ancestors might have looked more similar still, before one took to a life in the trees and the other stayed on the ground, or occasionally under it.

Sticky situation

If you buy a nonstick pan, you may get spared from having food stick for a while. That's because it's coated with Teflon of some other friction-reducing substance. After a while, if you keep using it, the surface substance will crack and corrode. 

By a regular pan and you're still likely to have a few dishes cling to the pan, either because you overcooked them or the nature of the food. If it happens,, you just do a little scrubbing. 

I'd stop short of saying that nonstick cookware is the biggest scam around, when all this is around. Still, beware of false promises.

Corrective

That time of year has come when it's often still hot and humid through the night. Which can do a number on your attention span.

What were we talking about? Oh yes, the heat, the humidity. Well I don't really feel the need for air conditioning at home, which strikes me as too much of a too much thing. But I'm glad I have a nice strong fan in my room. I used to try to make do with a little desk fan, which didn't really cut it.

Time trippin'

I'm now reading a curious little book, a novel called The House on the Strand, by Daphne du Maurier. You may recognize the name because her work was twice filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Rebecca and The Birds. Strand depicts a businessman* who goes back in time and gets involved in political intrigue in Cornwall. 

One thing worth mentioning is that the protagonist doesn't step foot inside a time machine. He takes a drug which an old school chum of his has developed. This book was written in the late sixties, and the idea of a time travel drug seems kind of native to the time. Philip K. Dick used it at least once, in Now Wait for Last Year. 

The book isn't crazy psychedelic fantasy or Phildickian paranoia, though. du Maurier incorporates the premise into her own style, which is more staid.

* In a previous edit I stated that the protagonist was a scientist. In the course of the novel it becomes apparent that he isn't, although his friend is.

Fair game

One thing you could say about Sarah Jane Baker is that her choice of post-transition name isn't doing Doctor Who fandom any favors. And that she's a psycho. There's that, too.

Then there's the response of the authorities in London, which is troubling. Even if we were going by ideal American standards of free speech, a released felon and obvious basket case openly advocating violence would be pushing it. And Britain doesn't have those standards, but at best a notion of less repression being better. 

So Baker is being protected and the terven are, for the most part, not. So who's making this call, and on whose behalf? Who benefits? Questions that are going to keep arising.

No sour grapes

Sitting here, mentally preparing for bedtime, I found myself thinking about Aesop. As one does, of course. Specifically I was wondering who he actually was. The short answer is that no one knows. He is said to have been born in Mesembria, which might mean that he was of Thracian descent, or not. Some have described him as a Black African, but this might just be a misunderstanding based on his name.

The stretch of time is funny. Aesop's lifetime at the tail end of the Iron Age was just a minute ago in geographical time. And indeed the tales, the fables, have survived, although they were probably heavily revised when Latin and Ancient Greek were still being spoken. But it was long enough ago that the doings of individual people have become quite mysterious.

I love you, you big dummy

I just watched the 1978 film Magic tonight. First time seeing it. You've likely seen it or at least heard the basic outline, so I won't go into plot synopsis. I will say that Fats is one nightmarish puppet. They didn't fall short there. Anthony Hopkins apparently wanted to get rid of the prop, but obviously they couldn't until the movie was complete. Suffering for your art and all that.

Burgess Meredith is quite good as the concerned agent. Who smokes some long-ass cigars. Meredith seems to have gotten typecast as characters with Freudian smoking habits.

Woman of at least two names

I recently read The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, by Gladys Mitchell. It's the second book featuring her series detective, Dame Beatrice Adele Lestrange Bradley, who generally goes by the simpler name of Mrs. Bradley.

This book has been described as a parody of Agatha Christie's plots. The central crime is so gruesome and gory that someday everyone is going to think it's a parody of Tobe Hooper and/or Wes Craven. But it's presented in that Good Olde English Mystery way. The crime takes place in a village that has more than its share of cads and nitwits.

One thing that's very entertaining about Mrs. Bradley as a character is how spooky and off-putting she appears to be within the world of the story. She laughs at inappropriate places and her air of knowing much more than she lets on leaves others unsure of where she stands on the moral spectrum. She's good, but on her own stranger terms. While her psychiatric practice and mention of a grown son mean she's not a complete outcast, she is somewhat alien. The narration often compares her to a bird of prey or a saurian.

In the late 90s the BBC aired a television series starring Mrs. Bradley, played by Diana Rigg. The character would have been much better served by never having her adventures adapted into any other medium. For some reason they thought that she'd dress like a flapper and spout progressive banalities from three decades or so in the future. All it proved to me is that the Beeb is fully capable of the Hollywood practice of adapting books which no one involved has read.