Now I know my ABZs

Ah, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book. My parents brought home a copy of this book when I was a kid. Couldn't tell you my exact age but we're not talking little kid. Not young enough to take all the entries at face value. I thought the book was funny, and I was right.

I didn't, at the time, know about Shel Silverstein's career as a singer-songwriter. But that's what a lot of people know him as primarily. In fact "A Boy Named Sue", one of Johnny Cash's best known songs, is technically a Shel Silverstein cover. You can see where they came from the same mind.

Product to move

In recent ads for Grammarly, a digital typing assistant that touts its AI components, an executive looks for some of her top employees in the office. Someone else who works there tells her that they're all lost in the composition of emails, sucked into a time-consuming task. Visually this is represented by their being sucked into literal space vortices, only their feet visible. 

This is not a thing that happens. Email is mostly used as an internal form of communication in the workplace. Workers only send each other the bare minimum. Nobody is spending upwards of an hour on an email.

Whether or not AI represents an innovation into actual artificial intelligence (it doesn't) there is something artificial about the process. That something is artificial demand. This is a product that was yoked together with no real concept of whether anyone actually wanted or needed it. Now there's a full court press to convince you that you asked for it.

Poetic Justice (not the movie)

The pantoum is a Malay poetic form, i.e. from the island nations of Southeast Asia. It seems difficult to do at all, and certainly to do well. Nevertheless, a few have.

Donald Justice was a poet mostly in the latter half of the twentieth century, and he has consistently wowed me. This is him reading his noted "Pantoum of the Great Depression." He's got a great delivery too.

Hello up there

One of the wildest manmade sights on Earth has to be the Nazca Lines (not to be confused with the NASCAR lines, which are better understood.) These are figures etched into the earth in Peru, in the Pampa Colorada. They depict a spider, a killer whale, a monkey, and other animals. These lines are estimated at about 2,000 years old, some perhaps older. And they can only be seen whole from the air. Who was expected to see them at the time? Makes you think.

It's worth thinking about them in the context of the average people of the Nazca tribe. The would see that something had been etched into the ground. They couldn't see what it looked like exactly. Nonetheless it was part of where they lived. A shared connection to...something.

Petting zoo

Is Donald Trump getting good advice? Maybe not. He managed an upset victory in 2016 while breaking all the apparent rules, so he might think another such victory is inevitable. But it is possible to screw this thing up, and he might be doing it.

The Haiti/duck/rabbit thing is a case in point. There was never even much natural smoke there, never mind a fire. It's an urban legend, and while you can see making an offhand joking reference to it at a rally, there's something suicidal about insisting this is really happening at a televised debate when you're surrounded by hostile fact checkers. 

Then there's the AI slop, which can make one regret having eyes. It's great for advertising the concept of virality, but not much else. This is the kind of thing that happens when you think Elon Musk is your bestest buddy. But Musk is like Israel in that he's got his no matter who's in office. What are his real incentives?

Turning yourself into a caricature does appeal to people who are already on your side and/or who like the caricature. But it doesn't broaden your appeal.

Inevitable September post

Allergy season has started up again, as we all knew it would. (If you're in the Southern Hemisphere I'm sure the spring hay fever scene is here or very close.) The good news for me is that the first time this month that I took antihistamine it worked right away. Relaxing. Now probably just have to hold out for a few weeks until they fade again.

It adds up

Grocery visits where you actually buy something take longer now. Specifically those where you're just getting one or two things, or not much more than that. This is because long term the COVID lockdowns ended up killing the whole idea of express lanes. The only (allegedly) faster and more convenient option are the self-checkout aisles, which I don't want to use for various reasons. It would be nice if the stores hired enough to replace the cashiers they know longer have, How to make this happen I don't quite know.

Such a split

I'm rereading a book that quite thrilled me the first time I read it, Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It still works its magic. At this point Murakami will probably never win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he doesn't need to. Name a recent winner outside of Bob Dylan anyway.

Among other things it's a great turn on the idea of the unreliable narrator. While the narrator―like the other characters, never given a name―may not be crazy or intentionally deceptive, his descriptions and introspection give the impression that he's leaving something out, perhaps without being aware of it. 

Another aspect I like―and in truth I'm not sure how much of this is Murakami and how much is translator Alfred Birnbaum―is the division of narrative tenses. The more cyberpunky half taking place in the scientific complex is told in past tense. The half taking place in the doomed fantastic arcadia is told in the present tense. It's kind of the opposite of what you'd expect, keeping the reader just a little off balance.

Polls apart

There's a lot you could say about Tablet, and the dismal swamp that is its current homepage. But Armin Rosen is genuinely one of the best writers on American electoral politics out there. His hard look at how elections currently work in this country as distinguished from many others in the world.

The thing is, we were told in 2020 that the election had to be changed to de-emphasize in-person voting because COVID presented an unprecedented risk to health and life. Never mind if that was actually true. The point is that back then nearly everyone with a profile said it was, and most people seemed to believe them. In 2024 COVID is a hobby for terminal worrywarts. Almost nobody anywhere on the political spectrum is treating it as a lifechanging crisis. So why do we need to keep what we were told were emergency measures in place when the emergency has passed?

That question can be answered with another: Cui bono? For the Biden Administration, currently trying to launch itself into the Harris Administration, the election of 2020 went exactly how they wanted it to. Naturally, it's being treated as a model.

The problem is that if one side openly optimizes election laws for their own sole benefit, it makes it hard to trust the system for those outside the party. That should concern you regardless of who you intend to vote for, if anyone.

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"Don't Hang Up" is a bittersweet listen. It's the last song from How Dare You!, which was their last album with the original quartet. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's the last song they recorded, but combined with the lyrics it does carry an air of finality. Of course it's a gorgeous song of course.

The video above is interesting. It came out years before the premiere of MTV, which popularized the idea of concept videos. And since there's no concept, the initial impression is that it's a real or "realistic" performance by the band. But it's not quite. For instance, no one is seen playing the drums. In reality Kevin Godley, the hirsute lead vocalist on most of the song, was also the band's drummer. Given their Beatlish approach he almost certainly didn't do both at the same time, but it's kind of eerie to have snare sounds coming out of nowhere.

Hats off to Lol Creme, who seems to have a different interpretation of "She's got a rocky terrain" than what I always thought it meant.