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.

Virtual stage fright

I recently submitted a short story to an anthology. Like, really recently. Probably be a while before I find out if it's accepted. 

The process was a little different than usual. The submission was in the form of a Google Doc, made shareable with the editor. Which I could figure out how to do easy enough, but I quickly found that I couldn't actually write in Google Docs. It just felt too public and exposed for me to be creative. I wound up doing 3-4 drafts in Word and finally copying and pasting into Google.

Something bright

Lucky break yesterday. From my apartment I could see a Northern Cardinal perching on an overhead power line. Switched from one to the other, presumably trying to get a better view.

This bird was such a bright red that it had to have been a male. That said, Northern Cardinals are unusual in a way. Females tend to be redder than in other cardinal species. Certainly more than in the Vermilion Cardinal.

This bird must have been around all winter, since they're not really known to migrate, but I hadn't seen him.

Howlers

This isn't the most recent Ecosophia entry anymore, but it's worth reading and rereading. I do like learning that the wolves that have moved onto the land once occupied by the Chernobyl reactor are living and doing their thing without showing the cancerous effects of the radiation that so many expected. You never know with life.

As for Yuval Noah Harari, sheesh, I dunno. His much quoted provocation about how human rights are a fiction isn't as bad as it sounds when looked at in context, but I don't think it stands for anything good either. At the end of the day he seems to be in the business of assuring the managerial class that they can and should control their fellow humans. As someone who would prefer to evade control I'm not really down with that.

UnRed

I find perception to be a highly interesting topic. When I first started attending college I intended to major in psychology. I changed my mind, but I did love the class in perceptual psychology. And colorblindness is a reminder of why.

Note the two color wheels at this link. On the protanopia wheel blue and yellow aren't much affected. Red is greyed out. Orange becomes yellow and purple, blue. But what's strange is what happens to green. Its essence is leeched out, so that it's barely identifiable as greenish.

Now if you see the two versions of one photograph above―the one depicting a redhead kid in a field―you'll notice that the grass is green in both. So apparently people with protanopia aren't entirely incapable of perceiving green. But it seems a complementary opposite does make something more noticeable.

Any old port in a storm

Fact 1: We get a lot of crows in this area. Certain streets and stretches of parkland, especially. And being a big fan of crows, I like to see them fly and congregate, and listen to them caw.

Fact 2: We had a heavy rainstorm today, pretty much all day.

Put together, these two facts made me wonder where crows go during a big storm. And according to this, what they do is take cover within conifer trees and shrubs. Sounds like it makes sense for them, anyway. And it's good to know they can keep relatively dry.

As for the picture of a marabou stork in a bathroom, it's a neat bonus.

Phil speaks

The story of Groundhog Day is colorful and interesting, and not just because part of it takes place at Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania, hands down the filthiest-sounding place name in America. It's a little bit of Americana that coincides with some older European traditions. The truth is, though, that the question of whether Punxsutawney Phil is right or wrong in his predictions is rather subjective.

As I write this, we're weeks past Groundhog Day. And in fact we just passed the Vernal Equinox. It hasn't been a particularly chilly March. But the temperature today barely got over the freezing point, and it's a few degrees below it outside now.

It actually doesn't mean much for a rodent or anyone else to predict a long or short winter, because everyone won't agree on when winter ended even after it happened, due to it happening in fits and starts. That's not to say the tradition's not fun, though.

Gentleman's agreement?

Pinterest is sort of a microcosm of how the web has gone downhill. The original idea of it had a definite appeal: the opportunity to "pin" images from around the internet to a public or private board so that you'd have them for future reference. Obviously it didn't meant that you owned them, just that you liked and approved of them.

Over the years, though, they've just degraded the whole experience. Features have been disabled, and it's not a tradeoff where you lose one thing and get another. You just lose options one by one. Also their content and censorship policies have tightened to the point of just nuking entire boards out of existence.

Not a great humanitarian disaster, but it makes you wonder. Another company could probably have huge success just by offering what Pinterest did, say, twelve years ago. Nobody's going there, though.

It's the little things

It's funny how things just come back to you sometimes. When I was a little kid I had a book, or someone had it, and I could look at it. Ownership isn't really my point here. But the book was this poem, The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast. Even as someone who gets a little antsy ha-ha when a lot of insects are around I'd have to admit the illustrations were gorgeous. 

Now if you'd asked me when this had been written, I'd have said probably the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Couldn't be from before Victoria's time, right? But as it turns out that it was first published in 1802, when George III was still King. Also that the poet, William Roscoe, was an influential abolitionist, which is pretty cool.

Discordant message

While I'm sometimes tempted to use ad blockers on sites like YouTube, I generally accept ads as the cost of doing business. So a lot of times I let them play through, hitting "skip" when they turn out to be long or really annoying.

There's a weird one I've seen lately. It's for Stop & Shop. A voice over says "Uh-oh (couple names I can't remember) are shopping hungry again!" And the man and woman go nuts throwing things into their cart.

The weird part is that it looks like they're supposed to be high with the munchies. Like, I'm pretty sure that's the intended effect. But it doesn't quite come off because they're so skinny and cadaverous that it genuinely looks like they haven't had solid food in weeks. The ad creators landed on something more disturbing. Maybe someone was feeling prankish.

A return

A while ago RIPTA changed their bus pass system. Instead of getting a new pass made out of thin cardboard every month, you can get a plastic card that you keep permanently, reloading it with money every month.

In practice, the plastic is so cheap that it will eventually break. Once that happens the card can't be read by the sensors, so you have to get a new one. Which happened to me this week.

I found out that the store where I'd gotten these bus cards before didn't have any on-hand. What I was happy to learn is that RIPTA again has a customer service office in their downtown depot, and that the nice lady I used to buy bus passes from is back. So I bought a new card from her and transferred the funds from the old card.

Nice to see her. Also good to know that some more sanity is returning post-COVID.

狐仙

I was talking to a gentleman today―second time I saw him this particular day―about Chinese mythology. He did more of the talking, because while I've read a little about it, I couldn't bring much to mind. So I decided to give myself a little refresher.

The figure of Huxian is quite interesting. A trickster figure who can make you wealthy but will also steer you onto the wrong path. The idea of foxes being untrustworthy apparently crosses over between wildly divergent cultures. There's a practical reason for this among farming communities, of course. But it also feeds a human need for deceit, I think. In this case projected onto other creatures.

Wind you can hear

The Russian artist Marianna Vladimirovna Veryovkina had a fascination with Germany, a country which gave the world German Expressionism during her lifetime. She in fact Germanized her name to Marianne von Werefkin, which is the name she's been known by since then. As a member of the Russian nobility she pretty much had to indulge her curiosity about foreign lands, as the Russian Revolution made her homeland a dangerous prospect.

The title of the above painting has been translated as "Storm Winds." The winds are palpable, causing trees to lay almost on their side. This is nature at its most forbidding. It does exude a kind of fascination, though, in the sliver moon. Still, you can't blame the small human figures for gravitating to the light and warmth of the tavern or cafe.

Primary primer

I got a mailer recently from the Board of Canvassers. A reminder that we in Rhode Island have a Presidential primary on April 2, and where to vote. I appreciate this. Still, what to do?

Obviously Joe Biden is going to win the primary. He'll get the nomination, unless the Democrats convince him to step aside. And in truth, nobody in the party with a snowflake's chance of replacing him is that much better. In the general, Trump may be a better, but there's still going to be a historic lack of good options.

I'll probably vote for a hopeless dark horse candidate. Someone who I can at least support and look at myself in the mirror.

Do I hear another bid?

Am now reading Sotheby's: Bidding for Class, by Robert Lacey. It's about Sotheby's, as you might have guessed. Lacey's first chapter is an extended vignette on the auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's estate soon after she died, and provides some justification for the adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

After that Lacey backtracks to deep background, the auction house's founding in London during the eighteenth century and the history that followed. They've always been in competition with Christies, but both sides have had to remain dignified in public. During the early years Christies specialized in art and Sotheby's in books, but it was inevitable that the two would start to step on each other's toes.

Another interesting detail is that Peter Cecil Wilson, one of their top auctioneers of the twentieth century, served in British Intelligence with none other than Ian Fleming. He often claimed to be the basis for James Bond. Weird if true, but who knows?

Losing face

Of course I still see them, although thankfully not as many as there were before. The masked, that is. But when I see them it's in some bizarre contexts. A guy on bicycle or a woman walking onto the porch of her house, neither of them within six feet of anyone, for whatever that meant in the first place.

The thing is there was never any logic to it in the first place. COVID wasn't sold to people the way you convince grown-ups to do things. It was always just fear and guilt, limbic system abuse. So a few souls are just married to it now. After all, when do you stop? The very question makes you a bad person.

Riches of embarrassment

A giant pumpkinhead monster gazes into a bomb shelter filled with teenagers. It wades in. Seconds late a wave of blood rises. It looks like you didn't secure the lid on the blender while making your cranberry smoothie.

This is Dark Harvest, which I remember being a pretty good book by Norman Partridge. The movie is filled with baffling dialogue, incompetent fights, and yes, moronic CGI gore. Best things to say about it are that it's relatively brief and good for unintentional laughs, except for those unfortunate times when it's trying to be funny.

I only just caught up on the news that the Coen Brothers are not only getting the band back together but working on a horror movie. Good news, because after tonight I'm convinced that the genre could use whatever they have to bring to it.

Get a load of this guy

Did the West learn the right lessons from the Holocaust? Or much of anything? One would like to think so, but it's unclear at best.

After World War II, as the camps were liberated and the world found out what the Jews of Central Europe had suffered, it was inevitable―and probably necessary―that antisemitism would be a major focus for the civilized world. The problem is that we seem to have gotten special pleading and nothing else. It should go without saying but still needs to be said that persecuting Jews for being Jewish is wrong. The obvious corollary, both logical and moral, is that the same should hold for any other ethic and/or religious group. And the past few months have made it obvious just how many people just can't make that leap.

Germany is where this gets most bizarre. The government is investigating the two filmmakers behind the documentary No Other Land for being antisemitic and overly sympathetic to Palestine, despite one of the two being not only Jewish but Israeli. In fact the Deutsch have clamped down on criticism of Israel all over, and dissident Jews have been disproportionately targeted.

Germany has a rich history, has made many contributions to poetry and music, etc. But if they think sending the Unteroffizier out to reeducate those they find guilty of Jewish self-hatred is any kind of path to redemption, they're fooling themselves.

It came from the drawer

 

The concept of trompe-l'oeil ("trick the eye") is a well-established one, popular during the Renaissance, which you can bet also means it had precedent in Ancient Greece. But it underwent another huge revival in the nineteenth century. This time out the objects seemed to be presented for their own sake. The idea of painting as straightforward narrative was breaking down. 

The painting above is "Time and Eternity" by American artist John Haberle. Who certainly had a way of painting realistic wood grains. It almost seems to invent surrealist anti-narrative. 

What's wrong with this picture?

I'm not going to stop you if you want to have a good laugh at Google's Gemini fiasco. It's both embarrassing and funny that it proved almost entirely unwilling to create images of white people, even where appropriate. A search for "America's founding fathers" returned a George Washington who looked like Barack Obama in the middle of a wig party (not to be confused with the Whig Party.)

But I have to ask, what even is the purpose of this thing? Assuming they get the bugs out, what then? An AI-generated image isn't informative in the same way a photograph is, because it doesn't focus on an object outside of itself. It's not in and of itself art, although an avant-garde artist could conceivably use it in a larger piece. 

If this is going to be treated as a big deal, it sounds like an admission that flesh-and-blood human beings are giving up on creating anything themselves.

Can you dig it?

This list of theme parks doesn't have a date on it, so I don't know how long it's been hanging around online. It's got some color to it, though.

Dickens World is certainly a specific twist on the living museum. It's got Dickens-themed animatronics as well. One hopes none of them forget Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

Diggerland is the one that really tickles my imagination. Who's the absolute visionary who thought up letting young visitors drive around in construction vehicles? At this point it's a hard-to-find sensation.

Dog days of winter

I don't have firsthand experience of pregnancy and childbirth, certainly, so I can't testify to how uncomfortable they can be. Saw something to put this in perspective, though. Today when I ran out for a quick trip to the grocery I saw a lactating pit bull. Now I can only imagine that having everything hang down like that when you're so low to the ground to begin with could make you grumpy. She seemed to be handling it pretty well, which is good, because pit bull.

Schroederific

One question that has been asked many times over the ages is, "Can you play jazz on a toy piano?" I decided to investigate on YouTube. This couple-minute video is actually pretty encouraging on the topic.

I also confirmed that some of my recommended videos are things like "The life and sad end of X" where X is a person who's still alive. AI obituaries, gotta love 'em.

Form/Function

I've read some contemporary mystery novels in recent weeks., in large part to reassure myself that writing about mysterious crimes is still possible. And there's something I've noticed in regards to their narration. 

There are two big types of third party narration. One is third person omniscient, in which the narrator seems to have a godlike perspective on all events, statements, thoughts, etc. The other is third person limited, where the narrator is separate from any character but limited to describing things through their perspective.

A popular way of writing murder mysteries now―possibly the default―is to use third person limited, but rotate it. That is, the perspective switches from character to character with each chapter.

This seems to me a counterproductive way to write a whodunit. Say you just killed someone. You'd probably be thinking about it quite a lot, right? But in order to not give away the solution, a writer using this model will have to make sure their killer doesn't think anything in the privacy of their own head that wouldn't give everything away if they said it out loud. I'm not sure that works.

Snow show

The blizzard we got on Tuesday felt something like the Main Event. Just about everything was closed. I did go out for a bit, but not entirely without regret. The thing is, if your insulated boots don't keep the water out, the insulation doesn't do you a hell of a lot of good. And walking through deep slushy snow, nobody's boots are waterproof. 

Today the temperature dropped, below freezing most of the day. That meant that the snow solidified, so it wasn't as likely to get your feet wet. You just have to watch out for those treacherous shiny bits on the sidewalk.

The New Old Normal

2020 will stand in history as a great playtime for our news media. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 had allowed them a greater-than-usual degree of self-dramatization. With the post-George Floyd reckoning and "mostly peaceful" protests a number of them now went full leftist guerrilla...at least within the confines of their own skulls. And on the other side of the political spectrum some of the people who made hay on being anti-Covidian or gender critical weren't really putting anything on the line if you looked closely.

As of now it's no longer 2020. Playtime is over and it's back to work. Part of this work is selling the Israeli line on their Gaza war. But it doesn't end there.

It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

On the subject of cozy mysteries I would say that Otto Penzler is half right. By and large they do suck, although I'm sure there are exceptions. But it's not because they're mostly written by women. It's because the formula encourages authors to make little variations like which state the small town setting is in and what kind of quaint business the amateur sleuth runs, while not taking creative chances anywhere else.

On the larger question of what to do with someone like Penzler, the obvious answer is "nothing." If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you believe that being an artist means you should never have to deal with people who disagree with you, you won't be a very good one.

Rosenfield notes that when Penzler was bounced from editing the Best American Mystery series he  started his own anthology series that immediately outsold theirs. The man knows what he's doing. You want to keep people like that around.

Wrong move

Over the past couple of years this country has trying to rally its people together by playing up the rightness of its foreign policy. I could say "Biden" but really it's a number of politicians and politician-adjacent people in both parties. And regardless of party or stated ideology, it seems like a counterproductive step. 

I have my opinions on the Middle East and on the Ukraine. Other people have theirs. One problem with interventionism is that it declares to your own native population (and everyone else, of course) that you've thrown in with a foreign government or faction. If you want national unity, even just to the extent of people getting along with each other, the last thing you want to do is pressure everyone to agree on some other part of the world.

Forbidden

How pervasive is racism? And can you repress it out of existence?

I recently had occasion to see a couple of training videos meant to educate new employees away from prejudice and harassment. The very white, 1950s-sounding VO narrator and the very 2020s multiethnic actors seemed to be in competition who could be more stilted. 

Beyond that, think about this.

In the middle of the twentieth century, everyone in professional life had to wear a suit and tie whenever they were out in public. A backlash counterculture rose who believed that t-shirts and grease-stained jeans were appropriate for all occasions. They eventually won.

Around the same time and a little later politicians and men in respectable trades had to be family men with doting wives, children preferred if not absolutely necessary. But of course a hundred gay and lesbian and "queer" subcultures bloomed. 

So if you make racial guilt and constant apologies a condition for employment, what will the downstream effects be?

Totally cyber

In a recent issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine I read a story by Erica Obey featuring characters of hers that have also appeared in a novel. These are librarian Mary Watson and Doyle, the latter being an AI she created to write mysteries. Needless to say, the pair get involved in real crime cases somehow. 

While this sounds like a cutting edge 2024 idea, oddly there's a precedent for mystery series featuring AI detectives. In 2011 Dave Zeltserman published a collection called Julius Katz & Archie, featuring a lazy investigator (as the wiki article notes he has a Roman emperor first name and an animal themed last name, so spot the parallel) who has an AI assistant loaded into his tiepin. And way back in 2002 there was Turing Hopper, an itinerant AI detective created by author Donna Andrews.

Truth to tell this is not the kind of fiction I would write myself. The idea of artificial intelligence solving crimes sounds a little too much like something they'd dream up at Davos. But I do think it's interesting that "AI as crime solver" appears to be an established subgenre going back to the beginning of the century. With roots that may extend even further, including some stories by Isaac Asimov.

Snowy scene

This picture bears the name "Snow in New York." Did you really doubt that was the setting? It was painted in 1902, and already the buildings are vertiginous. 

The painter is Robert Henri, an artist originally from Cincinnati. And yes, he was of French descent, but he pronounced it "hen-rye." He was associated with the Ashcan School, who focused on urban realism. That doesn't describe everything he did―he painted portraits, although they looked more spontaneous than other portraits―but seems to have been a good foundation for him.

On balance I don't know that he was fond of winter.

Ni!

Things that are familiar enough might become invisible, at least virtually. Looking around at the neighborhood just now I noticed how many houses have evergreen shrubs out front. The reason why is not too mysterious. Evergreen means a lot less raking, which is especially a relief when you're talking about shrubs and bushes where it's harder to get under. But is this a common practice all over the world? Probably not. Maybe not even all parts of the country.

Taken for a ride

Today while getting lunch I heard a guy talking. Talking about Uber and Lyft, both of which he's driven for. The deal now apparently is that they don't pay you benefits because according to them you're not an employee, you're an independent contractor. But you're not really an independent contractor because you can't negotiate. And they go out of their way to hire younger drivers because the older, more experienced ones know how much more they used to get paid.

None of this was all that surprising in the light of what I had heard before. Still, I had to wish him luck when he talked about joining a nascent labor movement for rideshare drivers. We'll see how that goes.

Homogeneous

Not too long ago it was reported that the music review website Pitchfork would be "folded into" the web-based content of the men's magazine GQ. This journal covers a lot of the event's aspects.

Truth to tell I didn't go there that often. In its aughts heyday Pitchfork was dedicated to reviewing and promoting music that might be well-known to hipsters or not, but which in most cases hadn't come anywhere near the mainstream. Some of it was quite interesting, although they would struggle to say anything interesting about it. Later on they dedicated more time telling you about stuff you should like because everyone else likes it and what's wrong with you, which is basically what is meant by "poptimism."

So despite my feeling for writers who are losing a gig, it's not like I'm losing a limb here. My problem is more just that there's another one down.

A few weeks ago I saw a tweet saying that (paraphrasing) it seemed okay when all the magazines started going out of print because websites would take their place, but now there are only six websites. That's only a slight exaggeration. When pixels started to replace paper the promise was that there would be even more voices heard, and now everything would be interactive. That was sort of true, to an extent, for a while. But at this point it's just kind of a bad joke. It's impossible to imagine anything like Factsheet Five publishing now because they'd have nothing to cover.

Pitchfork isn't the only institution to go all in on "diversity" that's only diverse in the most superficial sense. And it's not the only one to ultimately fall victim to the same logic. If new media doesn't keep us well-informed about anything or provide encouragement in pursuing our own unique interests, that's by design.

Thanks but no thanks

If you're a Democratic candidate looking to distinguish yourself from the current leadership, there are certainly good ways to go about it. But going all in on AI and crypto? Not the way to go about it, at least not for me. 

Phillips is basically giving voters the standard Democratic platform, only creepier and more transhumanist. Not surprisingly, it also opens up new ways to curry favor with plutocrats. So while Biden has had it and the party's efforts to protect him from a free election are a little hinky, there are no saviors here.

Equilibrium

I was out earlier and saw that it had started raining. Soon after that I saw a little snow mixed in. Then it all got to be snow. But after the sun went down I lost track of the fact that it was still snowing. That's because not only was it dark but the screen windows can play tricks with the light, so sometimes it looks like it is when it isn't. But now it definitely is.

The temperature is about freezing, maybe a little over. So we're not getting accumulation, and certainly not on the road. But lawn and hill snow, the kind that kids play with, that might get a little more for kids to play with. It's a good balance.

Farewell tour?

And so Ron DeSantis exits the stage. Vivek Ramaswamy has already left. Which might mean there are a few more voters available for Nikki Haley, but I think the handwriting is on the wall. Within the Republican Party no one has ever figured out how to run against Donald Trump. 

And there's a good chance they no longer have to. The most alarming thing about the Trump Era may be that it's ending. 

If DJT wins the general election he's limited to one more term. That's hard constitutional fact, and not something you can bluster past. If he loses, he may feel the need to plead out to one of the many politicized charges against him in return for no prison time but a promise not to run again. Either way the clock is counting down.

So what comes next? It may be that both major parties will be firmly back in the hands of their most venal and authoritarian members. Or maybe something else.

One thing I do know is the way the primaries currently run is a recipe for disaster. What we have is a system where 20+ people announce that they're running two years ahead of time, and most of them drop out for lack of money and hope way before any actual voting takes place. This places too much power in the hands of big donors, and it needs to change. Which doesn't mean it actually will.

Shifting ground

Okay, so there's a place around here. It's primarily known as an ice cream parlor, but it's also a coffee shop. And until recently they also served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Good omelets, which I made a habit of picking up there during lockdowns. 

Well, at some point they lost the food angle. I think they just weren't able to pay the cook enough to stay. Something like that.

Sometime last year they put up a sign announcing that another restaurant in the area would be taking over their food services. Sounded good. Maybe they could start offering meals again. That wouldn't take effect for a while, though. 

It turned out that the new partners would control the side of the store with the majority of seating space. They closed their side off for renovations, with plywood separating the two. Meanwhile the old owners arranged some tables to seat as many people as they could, which to be fair has worked okay so far.

When I went back most recently the new partners had put up a permanent plaster wall, which a guy was painting. The new people are just running a completely separate business now. On top of that, their side has the public bathrooms.

It's just weird to me how the deal keeps changing, and every change leaves the old place worse off. What kind of Darth Vader "pray I do not alter it any further" business is going on here?

to pieces

Cities, big cities, are great and exciting. Potentially at least. When they're allowed to fall apart, as often seems to be happening, they can be kind of a drag.

I remember first seeing pictures of La Sombrita, a mesh-y little metal wall that looks like it does absolutely nothing. It's one example of many of public features being reduced to nothing, even as they officially continue to exist. 

As Arnade says, this is in large part a way to avoid the homeless from taking over bus stops, train stations, etc. But there are other things that could be done without any new legislation. Most big cities already have public nuisance laws on the books, but many have stopped enforcing them. 

That would be one way of addressing the problem. But those for whom the problem is a problem aren't really the people for whom the cities are being run.

Neat trick

A severe attack of acid reflux is not good. Especially because, in my case at least, what tends to trigger it is sleep. Just that, simple sleep. So once you finally relax and drift off to sleep again, it's Welcome to Round Two.

In the abstract I've known for a long time that having dinner earlier can help prevent acid reflux. Out of habit, though, I've been eating in the last part of prime time. Until a few days ago, due to having a bad week. It really does seem to be a game changer. In fact when I eat seems to be a bigger factor than what.

Getting needled

I've made a deal with YouTube. I don't use any kind of ad-blocking software. Videos have ads running before most of the time. I'll let them play out and at least pretend to pay attention, most of the time. If the ad approaches or surpasses the one minute mark, though, I'm likely to skip it. Or if it's particularly annoying, then all bets are off.

Botox ads are generally in this second category. And I'm not sure who they think their customer is here. I don't want to look younger. Looking older actually gets me a modicum of respect, at least most of the time.

So you don't have to

Sam Kriss has a funny and rather engaging review at the point of a new biography of Elon Musk, written by Walter Isaacson. I would not have time to read this book if tomorrow I found out that I was immortal. You may well feel the same way. So I appreciate Kriss taking the bullet on that one.

On Musk's role as the CEO of Twitter (or, okay, X,) there's not too much to be said. regardless of who runs it Twitter has always been a prime illustrator of Carlin's Law. "Think of how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are stupider than that." But the rather tatty business plans of his other businesses are a revelation. And his father sounds like an alarming scumbag.

Isaacson, the biographer, is also a founder of the Aspen Ideas Festival, a sort of stateside equivalent to Davos. The "ideas" at these festivals of ideas are always luxury items no one has ever actually thought about. Bringing the biggest idea is like showing up with the most luxurious jet or the youngest wife (or failing that, the most reconstructed.) These are people who should not have any influence outside the walls of their own homes but needless to say, have a good deal more than that.

A good time had by all

 

The title of the above painting is "Merry Company," and the painter is Gerard van Honthorst. Honthorst used variations of that title a number of times, and it does appear to be a strong theme for him. The patrons at the table appear to have overindulged somewhat, and it makes one wonder what the popular hangover remedies in seventeenth century Holland were. Still, it's a friendly gathering, not a debauched one.

Note the balance of chiaroscuro with splashes of color. He knew how to make light his friend.

Cottontail

It started snowing last night. By the time I went to bed it was already obvious that we were going to get some accumulation. I looked out the window and across the street saw a white rabbit. No, not that one. Just a bunny looking to get home, I guess. Hopped across the street, where there luckily was no traffic. 

If the rabbit lives in an underground hutch the snow could have made it a problem getting back. I hope it was able to find some workable solution. Probably did.

Temptation to just use a facepalm emoji as header

Not too long ago, in the midst of widespread campus activism in opposition to Israel's actions in Gaza, allegations of pervasive antisemitism spread. Congress had big hearings on it and everything. University presidents were called on the carpet about the supposed problem, and at least one fell on her sword. BY COMPLETE COINCIDENCE Harvard President Claudine Gay, who seemed likely to keep her job. Pushed by entirely disinterested observers like Bill Ackman, what looked like plagiarism turned up in her past. As a result Harvard has a new president now.

At the time of her resignation Gay got space in the New York Times to tell her side. Her editorial sounded big but didn't really say anything, proving that she's an academic after all. Others were less helpful than that. Ibram X. Kendi, for one, blamed the ouster on "racist mobs." There are two problems with that. One is that Kendi and others have just gone to that well too many times, and it's dry. The other is that the mob that went after Gay was all about de facto censorship and chilling effects. Race was a peripheral matter, if that.

When companies and institutions both public and private have diversified, they've tended to do it in a sneaky way. The candidates often have little substance, just shopworn jargon. Which means that when some billionaire asshole comes for their jobs they have no way to defend themselves. What seems like a victory quickly turns to defeat.

There's also a problem with progressives refusing to defend free speech on its own terms because it's become associated with people they hate. And also, of course, because they like to keep control over who gets canceled. What they haven't yet started to deal with is that not only can two play that game, but in some cases the other team plays it better.

Loan words

This evening at the laundromat I had just started a couple of wash cycles and I heard a Univision anchor speaking on the teevee set. In the middle of her report she said the words "fear of missing out." Those exact words.

I don't really have anything to say about FOMO in itself. It basically seems to be a standard youthful angst that's been extended via technology. But as an English speaker it's interesting to hear English in non-Anglophone contexts. French speakers are of course used to hearing their words and phrases turn up on the lips of others. And Germans must know their language has the reputation of being exacting and somewhat terrifying. I'm curious about the connotations the English language has for people who don't primarily speak it.

Armed floof

 

This is a creature I just learned about recently. The Pallas's cat, also known as the manul. As the narrator notes, their spending so much time in the cold hunting for food that can so easily get away must grate a little.

I've read Jared Diamond say that all domesticable animals are alike while every non-domesticable animal is non-domesticable in its own way. (Probably a paraphrase on my part.) My understanding is that domestic cats come from African wildcat stock. Could these cats found in Central Asia and Russia have been domesticated? They're gorgeous, but I don't know who would volunteer to be the first to try it.