Up there

Interesting if brief article here on studies into echolocation in bats. Specifically the way certain sounds may be optimized for open or wooded environments. 

Bats are the only mammals with true flight, of course. The fossil record is spotty and we don't know all the steps that led to them being such. The question of why they can fly and no other animals can is as much philosophical as scientific. The way that they use echolocation seems to suggest that the mammalian approach to flight is quite different from the avian one.

Fulfilling

Today I learned that you can still walk into a drug store and buy cold medication--including the kind that puts you to sleep--and the workers won't freak out. Well, not this time out anyway. Kind of a relief.

(Edited to de-gibberish my second paragraph.)

In honor of it being Halloween weekend I also watched a horror movie. Picked a kind of strange example, which I'm still pondering. If we speak soon you'll be hearing about it.

Doesn't repeat but it rhymes

 Novelist Ann Bauer has published a piece that I think I really can call a must-read. It's both quite personal and historically informative. Takeaways:

1. Bruno Bettelheim, who I was a bit familiar with but not all the details, should have stuck with literary criticism. His attempts to heal children's souls almost certainly did more harm than good, especially to their families.

2. There are and have been more theories on what causes autism than there are stars in the sky. A shocking number have been used to punish parents and bring their families under outside control.

3. The manipulation, bullying, and gaslighting that Bauer experienced as the mother of an autistic child did seem to prepare her for life in the COVID era. Would I wish these experiences on anyone? Hell no. But she knows how to recognize patterns.

Cinderblock gothic

Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" is somewhat bittersweet. It's about kids huddled on Venus who only get to play outside one day per year, and the kind of behavior this ultimately provokes in them. Bradbury wrote it when Venus was thought to be gloomy and probably uninhabited, but before we found out that it was completely inimical to life. (Named after the goddess of love. Scores of poets are laughing in the great beyond.)

The short film above is billed as an adaptation. Literally it is no such thing. How can it be? There's no cast, and two minutes isn't long enough to tell the tale. Still, it does take advantage of the fact that even the most sterile and featureless environments can evoke a mood. Consciousness abhors a vacuum.

Moseying

 

That's Mose Allison on piano, of course. The album has a subdued Abstract Expressionist cover. Very fifties artifact, of a sort. It's unusual in that he only sings on a couple of tracks. But it works.

On the back cover of the CD he's quoted as saying that tenor saxophonist Lester Young "was more of an influence than any piano player." Kind of a show-offy statement, but he could afford to do that.

Unhappy in its own way

I've been quite taken with what I've read so far of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. Archer is named after Sam Spade's dead partner but probably has more in common with Philip Marlowe. He's more of a subtle operator than you expect from a hardboiled detective, but he's also quite honest.

The one I'm reading now, The Chill, seems very much like a high point to me. It takes place in a Southern California college town. Archer is approached by a man desperate to find his bride, who's run out on him. As you might expect, it opens out into a murder case, or two, or three.

Won't go into the plot, really. It just has to be read. But Macdonald builds an almost Medieval world of clans and coteries. There are "good" families and "bad" families, but members of the former can be trapped as well as the latter. And where all sorts of safety nets fail, Archer has to act on behalf of a suspect who is out there on her own.

Ninety-something in the shade

My latest gig they have me taking my temperature every morning. Now of course this is a digital thermometer, which means you don't have to stick it in your mouth or...anywhere. Just pump this little lever while it's pointed at you and you're all set.

Strange thing is that it's shaped a little like a purse gun, so taking your temperature is like shooting yourself in the head. And then you get to walk away from the experience. Eerie.

Severe hay fever doesn't raise your temperature, evidently.

Home away from home

I'm currently reading The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, published in 1989. Oldenburg's subject is the third place, a place distinct from the home (the first place) and the workplace (the second place) where people can gather socially on a somewhat equal footing and an informal setting. Oldenburg sees this kind of place as a necessity for civil society and democracy, and I'd be hard-pressed to deny it. Here's an excerpt:

Over many centuries, communities had refined and made highly effective those means of controlling local influences, but means of controlling the newer external ones were almost nonexistent. For example, an enormous amount of red tape might be thrown in the way of a pub owner wanting to stay open later than usual on Coronation Day. Meanwhile, a national newspaper could put a falsified, deliberately slanted and misleading story in the hands of millions and few would ever know. "The newer institutions," wrote the investigators, "are simply out for profits, and they have a pretty free hand."

The situation is familiar. In the United States, municipal officials can intimidate any tavern owner, close any park, declare establishments undesirable and put them off limits, and clean up their towns as election time approaches. Whether "for real" or "for show," local control over local influences can be effective. But the same officials and agencies who come down hard on local influences stand impotent in the face of mass media. Programming objectionable to millions of parents continues to be shown on television, while experts dryly and endlessly debate the effect--those experts, too, are remote from the life of the community.

Oldenburg is undoubtedly and old fuddy-duddy. In the very next paragraph he laments the effect that foul-mouthed comedians like George Carlin, Eddie Murphy and...Buddy Hackett are having on the nation's youth. But he does have a good sense of who holds the cards and who is allowed to do what. And if the whole idea of community and third places has been under assault for the past year-and-a-half plus, it's not something that Oldenburg would have been completely shocked over.

People say...

The Monkees were hugely popular in their day but also had a certain stigma against them because they were a prefab group and it wasn't a secret. For one thing they had auditioned at a Hollywood studio--other auditionees including Paul Williams, John Denver, Stephen Stills(!), and Van Dyke Parks(!!). And much of the music actually came from faceless session men. 

Their initial revival in popularity in the 1980s simplified their appeal. Perhaps for Gen X the idea of a prefabricated rock group wasn't so wrong. Although the New Monkees crashed and burned after a few months, so also perhaps there are limits.

Anyway, I like the above song. Partly because it provides a spotlight for Peter Tork, the most creatively frustrated member of the band, having been an actual gigging musician and a friend of Stills.

Short age

Monday I went to Aldi's. Mostly a routine grocery shopping trip. I did spend several minutes trying to find some kind of breaded fish cutlets, but alas my search was in vain. A woman was grabbing all the packages of ciabatta bread rolls, although she was kind enough to leave me one. Looked like panic buying, although buying more than you need of a highly perishable good is never good.

The next day I went to CVS. At the checkout the manager was grousing about Halloween products. Outside of some of the candy they have none. It was never delivered.

Little and not-so-little absences from store shelves have gotten a lot more common over the past few months. There are a number of reasons for it. How much the federal government is responsible is up for debate. Most of the media is unwilling to really interrogate the Biden administration on it, or anything else. If that's supposed to be a favor I suspect it's going to backfire eventually.

Krypto-nightlife

News from the DC Universe. Superman likes boys now. 

To catch you and myself up, the old Kal-El/Clark Kent Superman is in retirement for now. The Superman referred to above is his adult son. Yeah, it's been a while.

If I were still reading comics, this wouldn't make me stop, but it's not going to make me start again either. Diversity among the character roster makes sense from both a business and an artistic perspective, yes. But the Big Two have ridden that train pretty much as far as it will go. Both have had LGBT characters long before this. There comes a time to think less about who you're representing and more about how you're relating to your audience.

Also, judging from the art on display here and elsewhere the art has gotten really Uncanny Valley. How can two men kiss when they don't have mouths?

Abiding

Something just came back to me. It's about the filming of The Big Lebowski. Before any given scene, Jeff Bridges would ask the Coen Brothers whether his character had just smoked a joint. If they said yes he would rub his eyes until they were red.

What made me think of this? Just one of those associations that pop into your head when your allergies are mildly acting up. A hay fever flashback.

In-hand

I'm currently writing a story about a puppeteer. It took me a while to decide that she should be the main character. Anyway, I'm checking out puppet show videos by way of research.

The character has a background in doing more sophisticated puppetry than seen above. I do have to say that the voice work is very engaging.

note to self

As I think I've noted before, my library likes three day weekends, so that if Monday is a holiday they're apt to close for Saturday as well. Saturday is the day I'm most likely to go, but what're ya gonna do.

I had gotten pretty good about remembering this quirk, but what with the recent scheduling craziness in everything I'd lost the knack. There's another three day weekend coming in a few days. Since my need to use the place is a little more urgent than the standard "have to wait two days to pick up my book" thing, I wrote a note on my calendar to make sure I don't forget. This post might help me remember too.

Life's little ironies

It was raining when I took out the trash last night and when I went to bed. It was still raining when I had to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and when I somehow dragged my ass out of bed for real in the morning. It hasn't quite stopped raining yet. 

They're working on the plumbing, though, so none of us in this building have running water right now. Without, yet not within.

Do appreciate the weather system's protestant work ethic, though.

Degenerates

Just saw The Gambler tonight. James Caan in a very different role from Sonny Corleone. Well, self-destructive in a different way. Won't go into detail on the plot, as if you're reading this there's a good chance you've already seen it. But I was impressed. Lauren Hutton, for one, was a lot more naturalistic than I would have expected.

Will say that if you're a pimp and you get beaten half to death by an English professor, you may want to look into a different career.