In the spirit of saying something nice...

Okay, the latest Windows update added something that I actually find useful. Now when you hit the numeral lock key an icon appears onscreen saying either "num lock on" or "num lock off." The caps lock key has always had a light that goes on when your caps-locked, but for some reason the num lock didn't. But now it's okay.

The thing is, I never want to have the numeral lock on. I prefer to use those ten buttons on the side for scrolling shortcuts and use the number keys at the top of the keyboard. This is apparently a weird preference, as I'm reminded whenever I work in an office.

Catch a falling star

Well this week has made a statement. Between the campus police riots that have been going on nationwide and the vilification of the students involved, Israel has tacitly been declared as the third rail of American politics. And since what America says goes, that means they can do what they want. 

This is unsustainable, though. The unipolar world ushered in by the fall of the Soviet Union is already dying. China and Russia are building their influence. And while the US will remain influential for years to come, our pro-I politicians aren't winning hearts and minds. Certainly not among the young. 

Thus far the Israeli establishment has been in denial about all this, or alternately, acting in a blind panic because they can't deal with it. But at some point they'll have to.

Sky high

I only found out about Rayleigh scattering recently. It's an interesting phenomenon. In essence, light from the sun is scattered on its way coming from the sun. We, with the way our eyes and nervous systems are oriented, perceive this distorted light as a blue sky. 

So is the sky blue? There are other ways that it could be perceived, and the cause is something else. But yes. The sky is blue to us, and that counts for something.

At last

 

It's refreshing to see Tucker cutting loose. If he'd said anything like this when he was employed at Fox News they would have shot him into the sun. It is true that he backtracks on Bari Weiss specifically, and I'm not really focusing on her here. But it's definitely true that a lot of people who pose as champions of free speech suddenly get suspicious of it when their pet issue is at stake.

In days of old

 

The narration in this clip is more than a little melodramatic. But the part about platypuses being considered a hoax when they were discovered. English naturalist George Shaw took some convincing.

The platypus is a throwback among mammals, and not just because they lay eggs. Arising during the time of the dinosaurs, they formed before the most common forms of mammal life were established. That's why they still have bird and reptile/amphibian traits. That and the fact that they can survive with such.

Questionable

It was this past weekend that I read―I believe in the hard copy New York Times―about a bestselling novelist who's retiring from fiction writing in order to devote his time to political activism. And the activism thus far is put in terms of opposing Donald Trump.

And of course it's his choice. But if you're going to retire from what you've been doing and had success doing, I think there are better reasons to do so than just being against one guy. One guy whose political career is in its final stages one way or another. And if Trump is reelected it doesn't seem to me that he'll be short of critics.

It's a persistent problem that I see. Many people are elevating very superficial things into supposed matters of great importance.

Local update

I had occasion yesterday to go to Chalkstone Avenue, which is one of the big streets in the North End of Providence. It looked a little different than I remembered it from my previous visit. The neighborhood has been trending Latino for a while now, and there are a couple more signs of that.

The Castle Cinema used to be a great second run movie theatre. It ran dry years ago because there's no parking around it and because no one wants to walk anywhere. (Maybe the end of peak oil will change that?) Anyway, when I saw the building a few months back it was housing a pizza restaurant. Now it's a church. By my guess Evangelical of some kind, definitely not Catholic.

On the other side of the street is what for a long time was a Dunkin' Donuts. Now it's something called the Caliente Grill, next door to a chicken restaurant. Both places looked like they serve good food. If you have a hankering for the coffee chain that now insists on calling itself just plain Dunkin' there are plenty of locations still around, including one close by on Smith Street.

How dry

Saguaro cacti are only found in the Sonora Desert, which covers much of the Southwestern US and part of Mexico. Yet much of the public thinks plants like this can be found in any desert. They've become intertwined with the whole idea of deserts.

There's some irony in that. Think of the Spanish explorers who surveyed the Sonora Desert. They were familiar with the concept of deserts. They were not prepared, however, to see these giant, spiny, non-trees. We think of them as generic but they were once wildly novel.

Doorstopper

When you get books from the library on an interlibrary loan you don't always know what you're going to get. I recently borrowed a book on the Bauhaus. It's mostly made up of original documents, and can be a little dry, but has an extensive and good-looking collection of photographs. And Wassily Kandinsky, a painting instructor at the school, wrote very well on art and teaching too.

What I really hadn't been prepared for was how big this book would be. Big and heavy. If I ever dropped it on my foot I'd be wearing a cast.

Seen and not seen

 

Félix Vallotton was a Swiss-French painter, and a masterful one. In the late nineteenth century, when he was coming into his own, Vallotton was a member of Les Nabis, an avant-garde group who, among other things, were influenced by Japanese woodcuts. Vallotton was a maker of woodcuts himself.

Of course this is not a woodcut, but a tempera painting. Still, I think the influence shows. The textures, the way things are placed.

Of course color is a big part of this story as well. The bright passionate red of the tablecloth. The warm peach wallpaper. And off to the side are a man and a woman in darkness, him talking and her not looking him in the eye. These models are not eager to meet the viewer and have their business known. There's a neat restraint here.

⚫

I stopped by the library earlier today because, as it turns out, they had some eclipse viewing going on. Basically in back there was a librarian sitting on a blanket and loaning out eclipse glasses. They'd apparently been giving them away before but ran out and kept enough on hand for patrons to borrow and give back. Anyway, it was interesting. I did get a good look at what the sun was doing. Of course if glasses are thickly coated enough so that you can safely look at the sun, even during an eclipse, that means you can't see anything else through them. Don't use these while crossing the street, in other words.

In a way, the real exciting part came afterwards. As I left the library I could sense that the sky was darker than it would otherwise be on a clear April day. And amid this ambient darkness there were little crowds of people with their special glasses. How often do you see so many people excited for something nowadays?

Layers

I don't want to go to the John Michael Greer well too often―strictly for matters of pride―but his idea of lenocracy scratches a certain itch. No, this does not mean absolute rule by Jay Leno, which would probably be more benign. Literally translating to "rule by pimps", it means that in any number of exchanges, there are third parties who add nothing but who manage to get their own presence mandated. 

It's a disturbing problem because it's a political problem, and there's no political will to fix it. In small-d democratic myth when the system becomes counterproductive the people empower a charismatic leader to do what needs to be done. FDR and Reagan are popular exemplars from opposite ends of the political spectrum. But at present the political system is filled with operators fully invested in the status quo and others who are too unfocused to really understand the problem, much less come up with a realistic solution. And thus we have the 2024 Presidential Election.

The separate but related problem of credentialism has reached ridiculous levels as well. To his credit, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has tackled that one by drastically cutting the number of jobs that require a college degree. One sector of one state, but a step in the right direction. Maybe we'll see steps in the right direction on "lenocracy" as well, but it's an even tougher nut.

Own business

My issue with cancel culture isn't inconsistency as such or hypocrisy as such. Rather, it's arrogance. It's inevitable that people are going to separate the art from the artist. Almost no one actually wants art and culture to simply be expressions of public virtue, and those who do you really don't want to spend much time around. So just...let me make my own choice. You can hang and forgive who you want, and I'll do the same.

On the subject of Kevin Spacey, I wouldn't vouch for his innocence, but a lot of the accusations against him feel opportunistic. I also suspect that Bryan Singer threw him under the bus in order to put off the day when people looked into his own closet full of skeletons.

About Low

 

There are a small number of artists/bands who I regret never having seen live. Low are one of them. The thing is, I didn't really start paying attention to them until they had released their last album and embarked on their last tour. Also, of course, drummer/singer Mimi Parker, wife of guitarist/singer Alan Sparhawk, wound up dying within a year or two. Kinda sad.

My feeling is that they should have been bigger considering how good they were. On the other hand, they were strange enough so that in another sense they should have been even more obscure.