LD musings

So today has been Leap Day. Every four years an extra day is attached at the end of February. Which made me think of why February is so short in the first place when the months could be more even. One theory I've heard is that they wanted to make the winter seem shorter, but that doesn't make sense to me because it just extends further into March that way. Not that I really mind winter in the first place, but still.

Tomorrow is St. David's Day, which is hard to find ways to celebrate in this country. At least I'll be wearing a flannel shirt.

Information, please

Goblin Market, by Helen McCloy, is a crime novel by Helen McCloy. McCloy created a murder-solving psychiatrist named Dr. Basil Willing. I've heard that he makes an appearance in this novel, but he hasn't yet. It's about a couple of reporters in South America digging into some skulduggery.

One plot point is that the hero finds a note reading "fyi max." He has no idea what it means. He  needs the heroine to explain to him that "fyi" means "for your information." Which struck me as kind of weird, because that's pretty much common knowledge. But apparently the acronym only dates bac to 1941, and this book was published in 1943, which is pretty close to the origin. Just something interesting to see.

people...

I continue to believe that people as a whole aren't good or bad. Being optimistic or pessimistic about human nature is an oversimplification, and not very productive. People just do what they do, for reasons that make sense to them. And you can only control your own behavior, and your own reactions.

Nature as fun house mirror

This is not a brand new article, but it does deal with a topic that's of evergreen interest. Well to me at least. There's a phenomenon known as island dwarfism, whereby species that live for long enough on an island can become greatly smaller in size. The discovery of homo floresiensis fossils early in this century reminded people of that. Yet paradoxically animals like rats and rabbits can become much bigger on an island than they do on the mainland. The natural world offers no end of mysteries and oddities.

There was only one person who could halt the inextricable rise of Elvis Costello.

As it's kind of nice―if that's the word―to be reminded, Elvis Costello's album Get Happy!! turns forty this year. And how often do you see anything followed by two exclamation points? It seems like it's always either one or two.

And in honor of the anniversary comes an article by Elizabeth Nelson, who herself leads the band the Paranoid Style. She gives background on the troubled background of the album and the fact that it was a commercial disappointment when it came out, with some critical lambasting as well. Part of this was the backlash that almost no one is immune to. Part of it was other stuff. Anyway, it's full of songs that haunt decades later.

Happy Hump Day

Camels are creatures that might look and could be ungainly in certain contexts, but they are entirely well adapted to where they are. They might also be amusing companions. Some very definitely seem curious at least.

What's out there?

Last night I woke up to my clock radio blaring some song, I don't remember which one. Point is, I wasn't ready to get up. I hit what I thought was the snooze bar, but it didn't have any effect. The music kept playing.

Then I opened my eyes and the radio wasn't playing. Because whatever time it was, it was still way too early for the alarm to go off. I had just dreamed that it was making a racket, trying to get me up.

Now every once in a while, I have what you might call a dream. They're really more like hypnagogic states. I'll be lying in bed and there will be some unusual stimulus, usually noise, especially loud metal clanking. And again, I'll open my eyes and it will become obvious that none of this was real.

This was kind of like that. But not really. When my eyes had been open for a minute or so, and before I rolled over and went back to sleep, I heard noises from upstairs. Talking, things falling  or being knocked over, and erratic bursts of music. So while I'd been asleep, information from the world outside me had penetrated my headspace.

Protagoras deserves recognition for being.the first philosopher in Western history to explicitly address the problem of error, if only by denying its existence. For most of us, though, his position on perception is intrinsically unsatisfying (much as relativism more generally can seem frustratingly flaccid in the face of certain hard truths about the world). Plato, for one, thought it was nonsense. He noted that even a breeze must have its own internal essence, quite apart from whatever it blows o, and essentially advised Protagoras to get a thermometer.  But Plato also rejected the whole notion that our senses are the original source of knowledge. Since, as I mentioned earlier, he thought our primordial souls were at one with the universe, he believed that we came to know the basic truths about the world through a form of memory. Other philosophers agreed with Protagoras that the senses are a crucial conduit of information, but, unlike him, they acknowledged that perception can fail. This seems like a reasonable position, and one we are likely to share, but it raises two related and thorny questions. First, how exactly do our senses go about acquiring information about the world? And second, how can we determine when that information is accurate and when it is not?  

(Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Ecco Press/HarperCollins, 2010, pp. 55-6)  

Philosophy tends to be thought of as somewhat abstract, removed from our actual lives. But epistemology, which has been the study of how we know what we know, has been  of vital importance since Ancient Greek times. Philosophy has a place in the world, and is a natural activity.

Incubators

I talked to a waitress today, who's also part owner of the place. Another waitress, to whom she's related, had to take the day off. Her son's sick. He's in kindergarten. I guess anything you can catch you pretty much will. Kids are great vectors.

Anyway, I gave the family my best wishes. Generally this stuff goes away after a few days, but it's a tsuris for the parents.

▢ Mile

Working in―and thus spending time in―Central Falls is interesting. I'd had no direct experience of the city until very recently. I knew that it was physically very small, even by Rhode Island standards. It's also had a reputation as a hellish slum town. Some sincerely try to promote civic pride there as well.

To me it just looks the way a city should. Dense with a lot of small businesses. It seems to have kept its flavor even as some parts of Providence haven't. 

Xaos

This is a musical tidbit I found recently. From Albert Ayler, a saxophonist who had an apparently very short but productive life. It's antsier than I usually like my jazz to be, but quite interesting. Partly because there's a harpsichord buried somewhere in there, still a rare instrument in jazz. Also it uses the space where it was recorded in an intriguing way. Like, there's real echo, not just studio reverb.

Pawprints

Tonight I saw a flier for a lost cat. These always sadden me, because as capable as they are, cats are also tiny. Dogs, especially dogs midsize and up, strike me as having a better chance of being found. Which got me to wondering how many lost cats turn up later.

According to this source this source it's about three quarters. Less often than dogs, yes, but at least it's a majority of cases, even if the keeper of a lost cat may be expected to fret. So, that's something of a relief.

Vintage sleaze

I've read a little James Ellroy before. A short story collection based around his novella "Dick Contino's Blues." Contino was a real musician and actor, one of his movies having been immortalized on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Speaking of movies I've also seen the 1997 adaptation of LA Confidential. And I once read an interview with him where he kept bringing the convo back to how much manly heterosexual sex he was having with his girlfriend, which tends to make one wonder.

The Big Nowhere shares the Confidential format of jumping from the POV of one protagonist to another, three in all. Danny Upshaw is a sheriff's deputy investigator, and the most ethical of the three. Mal Considine works for the DA's office and is marked by ambition and being in an ugly custody battle. Buzz Meeks has connections to both Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen, and has a certain laid back rogue appeal.

Between them and other figures in LA's, um, justice system, they follow two cases. One is a Res Scare investigation against a film industry union that does have Communists leading it, but which is mostly under fire so that studio bosses can stiff them on contracts. (It's more timely now than you might expect.) The other is a sex-murder case with a jazz musician as victim, a crime the details of which break the Yikes Meter. Upshaw is initially the only one interested in the latter, which is why I'm calling him the most ethical, but there are signs the two cases might not be completely separate.

It's a dark and cynical story, but in an engaging way. There's a sense of things always moving in the background. And a lot of fascinating if none-too-sweet minor characters, like Terry Lux, an alleged doctor with a clinic and maybe not the strongest set of morals.

Wlking déjà vu

Ever see someone you think you know, start to say hi, and they just look at you weird because it turns out to be someone else, a stranger? Weird that this is something you almost have to apologize for. Like greeting someone you don't already know is some kind of act of aggression.

Then there are times when it is someone you know, they just don't remember you as well as you remember them.

Language

I speak English, in case you hadn't guessed. I work with a lot of people who speak Spanish. Which I'm slowly but surely reacquainting myself with. It's interesting to note that if Julius Caesar came back he might hear the Spanish as a distant rustic strain of his own tongue. The English would be barbarian gibberish to him. Interesting and humbling, in a gentle way.

Toying

There's an early Peanuts strip where Schroeder is noodling away on his piano, rapt as always. Charlie Brown comes up to him and asks if Beethoven ever wrote anything for cigar box banjo. Charlie Brown is actually holding a cigar box banjo when he says it.

John Cage actually did write serious―albeit not overly serious―music for an equally unlikely instrument. Decades later, concert audiences sit in an auditorium watching a young woman play his instrument on a toy. That's an accomplishment worthy of respect.