Headscratcher

"Fade In to Murder", the episode that kicked off Columbo's sixth season, is weird. You might know it as the one where a TV detective actor kills the producer of his show and plays at being his character for real as Columbo digs into him. What's weird about it is that it works when it shouldn't. Not to the point of being an all-time classic, but it's certainly enjoyable. Despite having many factors that could potentially sink it.

Despite what some might say, William Shatner's performance is not one of these potentially fatal flaws. He tones his trademark hamminess down enough to be a quite credible murderer. High marks also go to the other major players: Bert Remsen as Shatner's addled alibi; and Lola Albright, much icier than she had been on Peter Gunn as the murder victim.

What does present a problem is the lack of challenge. At the end of the day, Columbo is a cat and mouse game where the cat seems very dim but still catches the mouse. If the criminal doesn't seem up to it, there's no payoff. Case in point "The Most Dangerous Match", where Laurence Harvey's paranoid chess player is too off the wall crazy to get the job done right and the story drags as a result.

If Ward Fowler's (Shatner) crazy act is just an act, he is in fact very stupid. He stages the murder as a robbery but uses his own voice in front of both the victim and a witness. He also leaves his ski mask disguise lying around smeared with actor's makeup. If Columbo's near-constant laughter isn't lack of discipline on the part of Peter Falk, it might indicate that the Lieutenant can't even pretend to take this guy seriously.

There are other pitfalls. The parallels between Fowler's show and Columbo itself are clever but get used too much. And the evidence that finally allows Columbo to get his man is just dropped in at the end without being introduced beforehand.

So why does the episode work? It might be because the cast and crew had built up enough energy that they could coast for a while. Or it could be something else entirely. Art sometimes rises and falls on mysterious bases.

Big data

On first blush, so much obfuscation and frivolity in the media today seems to be descended from the substance-free electronic culture of the very late twentieth century. And that's true, but only up to a point. 

On June 12, 1994, former Buffalo Bills quarterback OJ Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a waiter Ron Goldman. The news traveled worldwide in hours if not minutes, and in the same span of time everyone across that wide world had an opinion on the case. I was on the opposite coast from Los Angeles and I certainly found out about it soon enough. But in material terms, the case had exactly as much of an effect on me as I had on it, which is none. The details were awful, but they were being conveyed to people who could get nothing out of them except for titillation.

Was this a first? In the underlying principles, far from it. So says Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourses in the Age of Show Business. Postman finds the onset of the process in the nineteenth century spread of telegraphy and photography, which may appear to be unlikely culprits from the perspective of 2026.

But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory. You may get a better sense of what I mean here if you imagine a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vermiform plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. And if you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with anything?" imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a photograph I want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on Aldononjes. "Ah yes," you might murmur, "now I see." It is true enough that the photograph provides a context for the sentence you have been given, and that the sentence provides a context of sorts for the photograph, and you may even believe for a day or so that you have learned something. But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it. You will, in fact, have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving a crossword puzzle, but nothing more.

Postman elaborates on the growth of newspapers in this time, which of course made their living on the reporting of news. But in order to fill their quota, they needed to create news to report. Or at any rate, to gather news only available via the use of these new technologies. The news would not have been found worthy of attention by anyone outside of the immediate vicinity of the events before this time.

From here, the development of our own rootless media product was natural enough, although it took time. And there are gratifications to it. I have no plans to give up crossword solving. But we should know that our knowledge is only considered knowledge because of a rather twisted history.

After these messages, and these

At breakfast today I saw the start of an infomercial. It was for some kind of dental-related practice. That's as specific as I can get right now, but it got me thinking. 

Infomercials are an annoyance when you're waiting for and expecting something else. Say, if it's 11:30 at night and you know The Twilight Zone is scheduled and it might be one you haven't seen before or not, but you like The Twilight Zone. Because infomercials get slotted in at the last moment, and the things they replace have some viewers, but not enough so that the station owners are worried about annoying them.

Conversely, these spots might strike you as funny. Groups of two or more people have been goofing on their canned awkwardness basically forever.

And a third reaction is just wonder. Some of these things are so odd that you can only ponder what unintended messages they might carry, how they reflect the unconscious of technological civilization. One might even find a kind of inspiration in them.

Infomercials aren't something I'd spend a lot of time looking at, but it's interesting to think about what they imply. In the streaming world they're probably doomed, as hardly anyone would be interested in ordering them in a service. But then streaming itself, at least its most heavily promoted side, shows signs of being a bubble. So who knows?

Exemplar

In Pawtucket, there's a mural on the side of a two-story building. In bright colors sure to draw the curious eye, it reassures the viewer of human things that it's okay to do. This is obviously a well-intentioned work, responsive, made by and for people who have been there. So what could be the problem?

I've thought about it for some time now, and I think Ashley Frawley might have stumbled on it. If everyone is always thinking about mental health, what else is there?

This is a microcosm of where the rest of the world is headed or has already gone. In England and Wales, where mental health promotion has been in overdrive for decades, working-age claimants of incapacity and disability benefits rose from 2.9 million in May 2019 to 4.5 million in August 2025, with mental-health conditions driving the increase. Meanwhile, in the United States, young people self-diagnose from TikTok reels whose creators doubtless feel they are doing a public service. After all, they are only echoing the common sense of our time: There is no shame in seeking help; “the more awareness, the better.”

That's about the size of it. There are vulnerable people out there taking drugs so strong that they'd have once gotten the dealer a life sentence, ceding control over who they talk to and how they live. Our society encourages this and will never stop, because it's a plainly virtuous and necessary mode of treatment. The whole cycle becomes self-justifying and self-perpetuating. The increased availability of resources for the mentally ill is a good thing. The outsized public focus on their maladies is not.

Vive quoi?

It is beyond bizarre that France has outlawed drinking at state-sponsored events, as well as banning unplanned gatherings in general. In response to a heatwave, so the measures could be temporary, but they're set down as law, so who knows? And this is on top of an outdoor smoking ban. If France wants to completely refute its own nationhood the only thing left to do is order their women to stop putting out.

It's another mark against the EU. Governments all over the place are getting bolder in deciding how for their citizens how they should live, yes. But the official governing body of Europe is especially addicted to nanny state authoritarianism, and it's hard to believe that hasn't had an effect on France.

Under your spell

One of the most interesting role-playing games out there is Mage: The Ascension. This is part of the World of Darkness, a shared world that dates back to the peak-Trent Reznor years of the 90s. The game centers on magical warfare between different camps of wizards, so obviously it's in the fantasy zone. But what's most interesting about it are the ways it's grounded in reality.

To begin with, there's the actual practice of magic in the game. You can't actually, for example, just point at someone and make them disappear to Elsewhere. People who have been doing magic for a very long time might be able to do something like that, but player characters start out as newbies, so it's out of their league. Besides which, big shows of force are called "vulgar" and the universe tends to punish them. So what the player's character actually does is a variety of small rites and procedures that may influence things in a supernatural way, but not so's anyone would notice.

Morality is relative, but the mages most aligned with "good" values of freedom and equality are in the Council of Nine Traditions. The Nine Traditions are aligned but varied. There's a shaman tradition, a witch tradition, a tradition that draws on the beliefs of Western religions, and a couple of "magic from science" traditions, for example.

The players on the other side(s) provide the second dose of realism. While the Nephandi are the most evil and the Marauders are probably the most dangerous, the most persistent opponents are the Technocracy. Descended from the groups who first invented money and agriculture, among other things, they've made their form of magic so commonly accepted that it just gets called "science" and "technology." The technocracy can be represented by telecoms who've vanished phone booths so that their mobile phones will have a place in every pocket, and pharmaceutical companies who can "treat" any idiosyncratic belief with SSRIs.

Are corporate America and the tech world literally run by sinister warlocks with a tight grip on arcane powers. No, I don't believe this. Again, not literally. But on another level, maybe? The COVID panic felt like something akin to the Technocracy flexing its muscles.

Young, man, there's no need to feel down

I was listening to a DJ today and could tell by her voice that she was in her twenties. At one point she said that she had "missed the blog era". I'd known for some time that blogging wasn't the craze it once was, but it hadn't occurred to me to think of it as a bygone era, one that youngsters don't recall. Welcome to my fossil collection.

That's as good a setup as any to a music post. I've been thinking about the late 60s emergence of Neil Young as a solo artist, something of a classic reversal. Just a couple of years earlier, he had been a guitarist and secondary vocalist in Buffalo Springfield. And in that time, at least as I see it, he was in Stephen Stills's shadow. Stills, who'd turned down the chance to be a Monkee*, had a great husky voice and a precocious collection of songs. Young was clearly talented, but seemed destined to be in the background.

Once the band broke up, things changed. Stills didn't stop being a good singer or songwriter. But it started to become apparent that the gawky Canadian was just on another level. Which might be why Young didn't have a consistent interest in being the fourth side of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. He was already flying.

*The guitarist job in the Monkees went to Stills's fellow Texan Mike Nesmith, although Stills sounds a lot more Texan than Nesmith when he talks.

Bye for now to the big blue box

One recent bit of news is that Doctor Who's 2026 Christmas special has been cancelled. With several other factors―lead Ncuti Gatwa leaving with no replacement, Russell T. Davies stepping down, Disney pulling its stake, etc.―this essentially means that the second age of Doctor Who is coming to a close. The age, that is, that started in 2005 when Christopher Eccleston debuted as the Ninth Doctor. 

There are many things that could be said about Doctor Who and the artistic decisions that led to this point. But what I feel more like talking about now is the Whovian culture war.

When I started paying attention to the fandom early in the century, when rumors started that the show would soon be revived, I found that a number were quite right wing. This is meant as a statement of fact, not an insult. These were often more personable than the average internet poster. But they had very set notions, one being how the Doctor should never be played by a woman or by a person of color. Now that both things have happened and the show has been canceled, you might expect them to be very smug. If you could still find them, that is.

These attitudes have more to do with history than anything else. Doctor Who has always been a fairly liberal enterprise, taking stands on war, pollution, and economic exploitation since the early 60s. This form of conservatism is really a kind of nostalgia for the British Empire. The Empire was dead by Doctor Who's 1963 premiere, being one big casualty of World War II. But it would stay in living memory for years afterward.

More recently a rival ideology has arisen amongst Who fans. Inevitable, perhaps. These have taken an extremely forward, borderline nihilistic line on social progress. Doctor Who must always make itself queerer and more rainbow-colored, in order to lead humanity to its post-gender and post-whiteness future.

The thing is that this newer ideology is just as much a product of historical forces as its opposite. It's a product of Britain's folding into the American Empire, and then copying the trends and manias that arise in the States.

And that historical circumstance is also changing. The 21st century's exact balance of power is still being decided. But what is for all intents and purposes certain is that China will ever rise as an economic and military power. Some others might as well. In any case, neither the UK nor the US will be an unrivaled power. If Doctor Who comes back for a third go-round―which is likely―it will be into another new world.

All the people

Leo XIV is not only the Pope. He is, of course, also the first American pope, as in, from the US. (Francis, as an Argentinian, was American in a more general sense.) That brings a couple of things to the fore, especially when he weighs in on something like AI.

Firstly, while various waves of immigration have made the US more Catholic in a demographic sense, it remains in a real sense a very Protestant country. A Catholic prelate reflects in public in what the right thing to do is, what it means to follow the example of Christ. But for those who believe on some level in predestination, this moral angst is faggoty at best and possibly blasphemous.

Secondly, more specifically, a kind of Protestant ethic―certainly not endemic to all Protestants, but prevalent―sees wealth as a virtue in itself and an earthly measure of wisdom. Thus Silicon Valley honchos have leveraged being billionaires with at least one trillionaire among them into a new status as public sages. This is not a first.

This thoughtful article gives a counter-read on the Dark Enlightenment, possibly the most common philosophy used in justifying the elevation of tech CEOs into a new aristocracy. Which is something that they support for obvious reasons, but there's no reason for the rest of us to roll over for it. At the very least we can dare to call it the Dork Enlightenment. 

Formidable guardian

King Edmund, also considered a saint, remains an important figure in Bury St. Edmunds, which is named after him. It's a rather wild story. The Vikings killed Edmund for not renouncing his religion and threw his head into the briars. There, the head was guarded by a wolf, and became a relic.

Doris Zinkeisen does justice to it here. She was a theatrical costume designer in addition to being a painter. A sense of the theatrical is what it needs. You can hardly miss that the head is in a spotlight.

Back & forth

Earlier today I read Lisa Selin Davis on Democrats and gender medicine. That's a subject that I'm not going to go into because I don't think too often about it. But it did make me think about debate, and what's happened to it.

Public debates on hot topics became a big thing (again) in the 60s. And they were not the kinds of debate where liberals tiptoe around other liberals. Very often what you'd see is, "Norman Mailer and Random Black Panther call each other the Antichrist, agree women belong in the kitchen." You don't miss it until it's gone. 

And nobody expected it to ever be gone. Because what it was was open argument. Whether or not they had explicitly agreed to disagree, everyone knew they'd be disagreeing. There was no reason to hold back, to be anything less than honest.

"Liberals tiptoeing around each other" was more a feature of turn-of-the-millennium rhetoric. And of course smartphones have made the problem worse because the groups who discuss things amongst themselves are now so much more homogeneous.  And then when a truly extreme idea arises, no one knows what to do with it. Except maybe give in.

Shifty character

I'm currently reading The Impostor Heiress, by Annie Reed. It's about Cassie Chadwick, who was born Elizabeth Bigley.

Chadwick was Canadian by birth, but mostly operated in the bigger cities of Ohio. She had a varied career, which included both a pretty much run-of-the-mill check kiting scheme and a clairvoyant act. Her biggest caper was attempting to pass herself off as Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter.

How did all of this work out for her? Not well. While there are careers that strive for immortality, impostors and con artists prefer to remain anonymous. This doesn't really require explanation. But if Cassie Chadwick wasn't exactly a success in her choice of criminal enterprise, she did manage to make the world a more colorful place while she was in it.

Rock dwellers

 

Pikas are, as stated here, relatives of rabbits. They look it, too. So it's interesting that their survival strategies are so far apart. Rabbits burrow into the soft ground, the low ground. It can be in country, city, or suburb. Pikas live high up, among rocks. And it's through that difference that they have ultimately become a different creature.

Our betters

Know that at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a professor has been suspended and is under investigation because she mentioned Palestine in a class assignment. No, really, that's what it's about.

It's also not the first time the SAIC has brought down the hammer on that particular topic. They did some shutting down just back in April.

We're also at a point where war-wary combat veteran Graham Platner has become the presumptive nominee for US Senator in Maine, and both parties are ratfucking his campaign to death. Well, trying to, anyway.

I remember in the 2000s being told that real Americans were all for kicking ass in the Mideast, and only subversives and hipsters were concerned about Arab lives at all. Even then, that was a crass generalization. Still, more recent turns of events have been weird. The broad American populace is now markedly dovish on things like Israel and Iran. And the institutions? Don't care at all. They're backing the neocons all the way, often at the expense of things like free speech.

Something garish

Like I was hoping, I managed to get to sleep the last couple of nights without taking any cough medication. It looks pretty good for tonight, as well. 

There's a reason I prefer this. Besides the taste, which is never particularly good and often wince-inducing. The other thing is that it seems to make my dreams more violent. For instance I dreamed about walking through a door and knowing without looking that the guy who was walking behind me didn't have his head anymore. 

Some of this can be useful for a self-styled creative type, especially if you deal with somewhat dark subject matter. But every night? Nah, take it down a notch.

snap-snap

 

If you asked me who my favorite black comedy cartoonist is, I'd have to say Gahan Wilson. But I have to admit that Charles Addams was a true pioneer in that area. And a very funny one.

One thing I hadn't know is that he lived and created up until 1988. Some of his works―largely single panels and covers for The New Yorker―came while I was in high school. Changes your perspective. 

It's also kind of funny that he looked an odd bit like Gomez Addams but with a bigger wardrobe.

Picturesque

Portmeirion is a colorful Gwynedd village, as seen on TV. It is, of course The Village featured in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner. Its Mediterranean flourishes and children's book elan made it both quaint and otherworldly. Later on, Doctor Who would also film there, in a serial called "The Masque of Mandragora" and actually set in Renaissance Italy.

But while these pieces of iconic British telly probably made Portmeirion more famous than it otherwise would have been, it always would have had a reputation. It looks like nowhere else. 

Its big moment in the sun came when it was only a few decades old. The village was the passion project of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, a very accomplished Welsh architect. The whole thing must have been a peak experience for him.

Is this your card?

A few minutes ago I took an online test using virtual Zener cards. A brief test, I only opted for five deals. I got three right. What does this mean? No idea. It's probably about average, maybe a little above, but not a statistical slam dunk. I certainly don't credit myself with great powers of remote viewing.

But the story of the cards is interesting. Most of us probably learned about them from Ghostbusters, where Bill Murray uses them as a pretext to reward an attractive female test subject and punish another subject who doesn't meet that description. Dr. J. B. Rhine, who had the idea for the tests, was a curious man, and inspired by a talk from Arthur Conan Doyle. He had a hot streak and then things started going cold for him.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. This includes weird science stuff and more spiritual matters. We'll never know everything, but we can always learn.

Respite

While out walking today I saw a flier taped to a pole. It announced a new club, a "no phones" club as it happened. Not that you're not allowed to own one. Just that you don't bring it to this particular place. Aptly enough the flier appeared to have been written out by hand.

I wonder how much of this is going on. Sure, people as a rule seem to like having everything at their fingertips. But the human mind and the human being weren't intended to be in the middle of an electronic communications grid 24/7. It makes sense that some feel a need to get away, if only temporarily.

You mean you can't take less

You might expect to see a major sculpture based on Alice in Wonderland in London. The idea seems even more native to Oxford, where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson actually taught. Offhand it might sound a little random in the context of New York City. But of course, there it is, smack in the midst of Central Park. And it must be said that it complements the Big Apple. Manhattan is a serious place and can be more than a little nerve-wracking. Having a place where kids can play on a giant rabbit is a healthy outlet.

What's so funny?

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert just breathed its last, and what is there to say? Late night talk shows started as a way to be amused in the hours where you couldn't quite get to sleep, and as long as they hewed to that purpose they were in good shape. When they started functioning as a validation of the politics of part of their audience that was the beginning of the end. I think this is coming to be generally acknowledged.

Anyway, it's in relation that event that this post has resurfaced. Feser has some pretty solid ideas of what comedy is and isn't. 

The problem is not that the progressives in question look at humor through the wrong political lens.  The problem is that looking at humor through any political lens, including the right one, is simply to misunderstand the nature of humor.  The fact is that there does not seem to be any essential connection at all between something’s being funny and it’s conveying some truth, uncomfortable or otherwise. 

There is much truth to this. Duck Soup is often remembered as a masterful satire on the absurdities of war, and sure you can take that message from it. But if that's really what the Marx Brothers were trying to do, rather than―as Groucho put it―"four Jews trying to be funny", it probably would be a lot less watchable.

As for black comedy, I think that is funny because of the relief factor. The very fact that you're not supposed to make jokes about certain subjects makes it funnier when you do.

Just a li―l

A while ago a friend told me that a linguist had told him that there was something about the dialect in Rhode Island that this expert wasn't aware of anywhere else. That is, Rhode Islanders frequently drop the T sound in words and replace it with a glottal stop.

Well, not to malign the expertise of this linguist, but I had to point out that this was also a practice in much of England. His wife's friend backed me up, pointing out that it was a subplot in Love, Actually.

I didn't say or even necessarily think this at the time, but it seems likely that my introduction to this dialect quirk was the Kinks. There's a good chance that Ray Davies was playing it up, but there'd have to be something real to play up to begin with.

Tuxedos

 

Maybe my mind is just wandering to places that are less muggy, especially around this time of year. New Zealand is deep into autumn at this point.

And the South Island has penguins, which is cool in a couple pf senses. The catch, of course, is that if you have a dog you definitely need to keep it leashed. There are always tradeoffs.

∞🐒

From what I understand, the infinite monkey theorem―that a monkey given infinite time at a typewriter will produce the entire works of Shakespeare―is not mean to discount the Bard's specialness and importance. In fact, if Borges was correct, some form of the theorem existed for more than a millennium before Shakespeare was born. It's intended to prove that given an infinite amount of time, seemingly impossible or at least improbable events will occur. Of course monkeys tend to have a short attention span. In the real world, there's always a limiter.

Don't want to sign off without noting that the Mekons made a pretty funny visual joke about it.

Strange is your language and I have no decoder

 Writing about characters with amnesia is tricky. Full-on, "who am I" amnesia especially. You spin characters out from what they do, say, and think. The absence of knowledge about who they are is toubh to build on. Tougher than it looks.

Then too, there's the danger that the mystery about their identity will be too absorbing. If the main thing about them is that they're a big question mark, might not the answers be a letdown?

Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Fiends takes an interesting approach to the subject. In a brief prologue, he introduces his hero Peter Duluth in his own life with his own wife before a smash cut to him being bedridden with three women telling him he's someone else. And Duluth had appeared in several books before this. So there's really no mystery about his identity, at least not for the reader. Unlike Duluth, we know that. Like him, we don't know how he got from there to here.

I haven't finished the book yet, so I couldn't say how it turns out even if I wanted to. The setup is pretty engaging, though.

Germ of an idea

Some tentative good news. If they were trying to make hantavirus the new COVID, it doesn't look to be working. It is a nasty disease to those who get it, but it's not a credible pandemic. And I think for much of the population there's a feeling of "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Maybe I'm wrong, but I hope not.

There's some irony in me writing this post while sick. It's just some kind of cold, though. I'm hoping to send it packing within a couple of days.

He sure is

Okay, I know I'm leaning a little hard on video posts lately. Still.

This song I've heard in the past couple of days. Not for the first time, but everything about it hit me this time. The shouts (barks) Muddy's band let out, maybe inspired by church revivals but mostly just adding to the immediacy. The very authoritative drumming. This came out in 1955. Rock 'n' roll mostly wouldn't rock this hard for some time. Just imagine how this must have sounded and felt back then. It still packs a charge.

Interesting to note that "Mannish Boy" was cowritten by Bo Diddley. Years later, George Thorogood would write the very similar "Bad to the Bone." The song's video shows a pool match between George and Bo.

Nexus

 

Is this the ideal place to be? Not necessarily in a physical sense. The recording was made in Leipzig, and not everyone can travel to Germany. But there's a nice balance here. Church bells and some kind of motor. Birds chirping. Human voices, and with them, a dog. This is where nature meets culture. Maybe this time they can be friends.

Pālule maikaʻi

The aloha shirt, also known as the Hawaiian shirt. Where, I wondered, did it come from?

There's an answer. Apparently a certain mania for Hawaiian things had already hit the mainland by World War I, decades before Hawaii became a state. Ukuleles were a popular instrument through to the end of the 1920s, at least. And the shirt became a craze over the next decade, during the Great Depression. 

Fads are fads, though, and usually burn themselves out pretty quickly. The ubiquitous 20s image of college men wearing raccoon coats to the football game had become a period piece by the start of the 40s. But I have a few aloha shirts, or at least light button-down short sleeved shirts with printed designs that evoke the tropics. So do a number of people with a considerably more credible claim to being cool. So how did this particular fad last? Well, there's the comfort factor, but the truth is you just never know.

#couplegoals

Did you know that Edward Lear wrote a sequel to The Owl and the Pussy-cat in which the cat dies? By falling out of a tree, of all things? The Victorians, man. Or something that happened in his life.

This animated rendition of the original is kinda nice. I like the crumpled paper figures of the main characters.

...all at once

These worlds were soon joined by others – there was Earth-3, an evil mirror universe where all "our" superheroes had supervillainous counterparts and Lex Luthor was the only superhero, Earth X (originally intended as Earth [swastika] before a last-minute change) where the Nazis had won and the superheroes were fighting in an ongoing resistance... and when DC bought up other companies, like Charlton Comics or the characters from Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel line, their stories were claimed to have occurred on other earths in the multiverse too.

This also allowed DC to do stories that they could never do with the main versions of the characters – Superman could get married, or Batman die, and it would be the "real" Superman or Batman, in fact the original ones who had been in the very first stories about those characters, but it would still not disrupt the status of the characters in their own comics.

And this state of affairs lasted for about twenty years, until DC made the mistake so many entertainment companies make. They started listening to the complaints of fans.

While there are a few not-unexpected wokeisms, this blog post presents a good overview of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the twelve issue "maxiseries" from 1985-86 that DC used to wrap up their multiverse and start what they hoped would be a cohesive new single universe. That includes an explanation of why there was a multiverse in the first place, which is an interesting chain of events in itself.

In a way, Crisis marked a fall from grace, the beginning of the end despite it's being a good comic story in itself. This has little to do with the presence or absence of multiple universes. As Hickey notes, DC would eventually bring back the idea of the Multiverse. Marvel would, in time, openly start doing multiverse stories as well. It's a durable concept.

No, the problem is that it taught both major comics companies that permacrisis was the way to go. If you could draw in new readers―or at least maximize the readership you already have―by doing an extended crossover that Will Change Everything, then there's no reason to not be doing that all the time. Or at least that seems to be the thinking of editors and publishers. The result is that eventually, pretty much no one is allowed to tell any other kind of story. Which can get pretty wearing after a while.

Bling

Interesting. A pendant from about 15,000 years ago, identified by great British geologist as being made from a wolf or badger tooth, has been reidentified as belonging to a seal. The seal obviously came to a hard fate. But there's still some nice craftsmanship apparent. 

The Magdalenian, still part of the Paleolithic Era, had an apparent burst of creativity, leading to some beautiful artifacts that are still in existence. Of course the British Isles would have felt very different at the time from what they are now. The population, however dense or sparse it might be, spoke no language we'd even vaguely recognize. It would be fascinating to see firsthand what daily life was like for these people.

Escape attempts

Today, disappearing seems virtually impossible. This, I think, is what accounts for our renewed fascination with it. We are burdened with our search histories and purchase histories and data stats that constitute our profile, to then be lumped and farmed out and sold to the highest bidder. Disappearing means disconnecting―unimaginable yet totally captivating. Precisely because it has become less feasible, that deep urge to be anonymous, or even to be someone else, exists ever more powerfully within us. The desire to disappear doesn't go away just because times change and technology strangles us. That we cannot fulfill the urge as easily is perhaps the greatest tragedy.

That's from Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood. The act it studies certainly isn't for everyone. While most of us have parts of our life we might like to walk away from, faking your death means walking away from all of it, which is a less appealing proposition for most. A loved one who knows that you're still out there might be squeezed for information on where you are. Still, some have attempted it, and it seems likely that some have succeeded. 

There's a broader fascination with people who break or at least tweak the rules. How could there not be? Every day brings more evidence that we're not the ones making the rules. Did you choose the law that all new cars have to have surveillance equipment and kill switches? Probably not, but if you buy a new car, it will certainly affect you.

Of course as more of these new cars are built, the old kind that only you could drive look better all the time. One skill that could become valuable in the next few years is the ability to shut off or better yet spoof these detectors so that they don't know what you you're doing at all hours of day and night. 

Ach, was für ein Star!

Earlier this evening, I was talking to someone about Chinese checkers. It wasn't really the main topic, but it came up. Which got me wondering about Chinese checkers and its history.

As it turns out, the game actually comes from Germany. America imported it in the 1920s. As it happened, there was something of a vogue for Chinese things at the time. And the star theming could convincingly be portrayed as Asian. But the actual origin of the game had nothing to do with China. Go figure.

Pick your poison

There was a gradual cultural change among metal and hard rock musicians and fans.

At one time, the subculture set itself apart visually by having long hair. They weren't the only people―specifically, the only men―to have long hair, of course. But it was notable that metaloids almost always did wear their hair long, regardless of whether it was in fashion that year or not.

At some point tattoos replaced long hair as the primary visual marker. Again, it's not like only a particular subculture has tattoos. But there's a certain kind of design that's endemic to metal/hard rock people.

With the former, rockstars eventually had to start wearing wigs or admit that they could no longer grow their hair that long―or in some cases, at all. With the latter, once in advanced age you may find yourself with arms that look like Denny's placemats colored by a toddler with no muscle control. If it sounds like I'm making fun, I'm really not. Self-presentation is tricky for all of us.

Oh, and if you're interested, there's a new webpage that's handy for days when the Archive Today sites are out of commission.

Thanks but no thanks

At this point it feels unsporting to bring up anything related to xoJane, an online women's mag that Time Inc. shut down a decade ago after buying it at a fire sale price. But the Tempest Challenge recently floated back into my brain, so I need to vent. 

Speculative fiction writer K. Tempest Bradford issued a challenge to her readers, and I quote, “I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year”. Does cutting all meat out of your diet make you more pliable to stuff like this?

Another writer online soon defended the idea in the following terms:

It’s only a year

It doesn’t have to start and end on any particular date.

In the grand scheme of publishing, it’s extremely unlikely that a large enough group of people will be avoiding white straight cis male authors to ruin anyone’s career. If I don’t read a book by John Scalzi (or some relatively unknown white straight cis male) within a particular span, nothing says I can’t read it once the year is up. There are unlikely to be a ton of people doing it the exact same time as I, so White Guy will still sell pretty close to the same number of books within a given year as he would have otherwise.

These things are true as far as they go, but miss a couple of important points. For one thing, if you follow through with this kind of thing, it tends to overwrite the things you'd ordinarily look for in a book―writing you enjoy, a topic you're interested in―with matters like the race of the author, or whether they agree with their original birth certificate on what gender they are. This is, I assume, the whole point.

And you have to wonder if this actually helped any "diverse" writer. The "challenge to avoid books by whitey" has a quality of "eat your veggies." Would you really want to be the veggies everyone is supposed to eat? The truth is that voluntary return readers only become return readers out of love. It can't be forced.

Anyway, I just started reading Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett. Everett is  a seeming rarity in that he's a substantial literary writer of the 21st century, but he's also enjoyable to read. He doesn't need any more justification than that.

Ruins

When animator Don Bluth worked for Disney in the 1970s, he was struck by the fact that much about the studio’s 30s/40s hot streak had already been forgotten. It wasn’t just the spirit of those old movies that was missing, even basic techniques were falling through the sands of time.

The Nine Old Men were going gray. Walt himself had been dead for half a decade. Nobody was preserving the hard-won knowledge and craft of the studio’s RKO years. He would ask questions like “how did you do the rippling water in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?” and be astonished that nobody could tell him. In some cases, even the technique’s inventors had forgotten!

Ever since the failure of Sleeping Beauty, Disney had been fighting a war against budget overruns. Animators were urged to cut costs, to reuse footage, to do more with less. The result was that old knowledge and techniques atrophied because there wasn’t the money to apply them. What doesn’t get used gets forgotten: and soon you’re doing less with less. Bluth had arrived in a dying place: its animators the caretakers of an ancient language they could no longer read. Almost like Plasmo himself, trying to reach the sky with old scraps of the past.

Disney is, of course, huger than huge. As a business, that is. They've certainly got a great number of revenue streams. At the same time, their cultural impact has been hollowed out. The movies and TV shows they release and that get any kind of attention are from acquired properties (Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) Did you know that they still make a "canon" animated feature every year? Maybe, maybe not, but if you're anything like me you'd be hard pressed to name a recent one. Did you know that they've spent the last decade or so making diminishing returns live action remakes of their classics from yesteryear? Yeah, that gets attention, but not necessarily the kind you want.

Apparently the downfall was a long time coming. When Bluth worked there, replacing all cel animation with CGI wasn't a plausible option. That doesn't mean that no one was thinking along those lines already. They finally made that move in the 21st century, after an anomalous traditional animation renaissance that lasted through much of the 80s and 90s. 

The larger point is true, of course. Collectively, it's easier to forget old methods of creation than it is to bring them back. Or to come up with new ones, for that matter. Something to keep in mind with the current push to stop doing pretty much everything. 

The post where I got the above, by the way, is the first time I've ever heard of Plasmo. Apparently it's just an Aussie thing. His cartoons sound charming, though.

A little goes a long way

There should be a pane of thick, darkened glass between idol and audience. To be accessible was to lose. The man who sits in a cafe all day, mumbling as he reads the papers: he’s accessible. A taxi driver is accessible. A star shouldn’t even be seen eating.

That's a quote by Chris O'Leary, in a post about David Bowie, a subject on which O'Leary has done a lot of very good writing. Specifically about Bowie's internet ventures of the late 1990s. But it has me thinking beyond that field.

A while ago I started seeing people―mainly girls and young women―talking about "feeling seen." As in, "Thank you, that really makes me feel seen." But is this always a good thing, and is it a rare thing? We live in a world of both extensive surveillance and voluntary (more-or-less) self-exposure on social media. Everyone's seen. Everyone's seen a lot.

There's something to be said for stars going the Greta Garbo route: making movies or records or whatever and retreating to a private realm the rest of the time, while your image floats through the world on posters and covers. For the rest of us, it's probably better to blend into the physical world, not trying to sell yourself. It's definitely better for children and teens. 

And it's probably not happening anytime soon. Still, worth trying.

Missing in action

There's something weird that I've noticed lately. Recently I was inside the Providence Public Library on 150 Empire St. for the first time since a renovation/reconstruction they did a few years ago. It's a big library for the city, and it's still pretty well stocked. But the rather extensive reference section I remember isn't where I remember it being. As far as I can tell, it's not anywhere else either.

Much the same thing happened in the Rochambeau branch where I usually go. Their entire reference section is now the Oxford English Dictionary.

Some of this is understandable. Britannica and other encyclopedia concerns no longer produce multivolume hardcover editions. But there used to be all sorts of books that didn't circulate, but that were on display to the general public, who could freely look at them. Not having that anymore feels like something vital has been discontinued.

Drop

It can be a creepy experience being in a modern tall building. By "tall" I mean five stories or more. Because the kind of modernism I mean, and one that's still pretty dominant in architecture, opposes all outer ornament. That includes ledges. If for any reason you go outside the window, there's nothing for you but a straight drop and "splat!" 

Of course these windows aren't supposed to open. Everyone is supposed to be inside, protected by all that stone, steel, and glass. Well, one hopes, anyway.

Where barley grows

 

What happened to Syd Barrett? The short answer is drugs and madness, I guess. LSD has been used to treat certain ailments, but is less than great in treating schizophrenia. In later life he laid low and stayed out of trouble, but seemed to have sealed off the part of his brain that had started Pink Floyd. 

Possibly necessary for self preservation, but sad nonetheless. He had been inspired. His gift carried him unsteadily through two solo albums, and as late as 1974 he created some interesting guitar demos, albeit not developed into anything. And of course there were early Floyd songs like "The Scarecrow", both eerie and touching.

Brillig

Alice had one adventure by falling down a rabbit hole. She then went on another by walking through a mirror. Were they the same place? Or two entirely distinct ones? Adaptations tend to smash characters and events from both books into one gestalt. But there are also sources that explain something called Looking-Glass Land. 

I'm not looking to settle this argument or even enter into it. Just pointing out that there's a reason for the ambiguity. Carroll knew it didn't matter. The word "worldbuilding" hadn't been coined yet. The idea that his fantasylands had to have consistent backstories would have been laughable to him. As it would be to most writers and readers of his time. 

RETVRN

A league of their own

This article, which went up on UnHerd recently, tackles the less than impressive performance of heterodox, anti-woke institutions like the University of Austin. It's a rich enough analysis to be worth reading a couple of times. 

The fact that it never mentions Israel, Palestine, or Iran does slightly give the article the feel of a game of taboo. It might not be the immediate cause of the downfall, but it's a factor. UATX was cofounded by Bari Weiss, who founded The Free Press before being hired to run CBS News (into the ground). FP, like Tablet Magazine, Quillette, and Spiked!, were part of a new wave of―to go back to that word―heterodox media outlets that promised to host lively debate and challenge stale liberal pieties. But since 10/7/23 and the start of the Gaza War, they've shown less interest in challenging orthodoxy than imposing one, and a rather extreme one at that. It tends to discredit the whole enterprise.

The other thing to look at is that, just like Rome, academia wasn't built in a day. Oxford University is over 900 years old. Harvard already had moss on its foundations when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Some of these schools have indeed squandered their integrity and reputation in recent years, among other problems. But it took a lot of patient effort to get them to where they were at their heights. It's not likely to be matched by pundits and investors with an ax to grind.

Louped

I don't know Victor Brauner's art that well, in general. From one telling of his life story, I know that he got in the middle of a fight between two other artists and lost an eye, which is an awful thing to happen to anyone, much less an artist. But depth perception or no, he kept painting throughout his life, which you have to respect.

The sculpture above, Wolf Table, is a well-known piece by him. It's also very good. It captures a twoness that can happen in dreams. Also, note that one of the table legs is bent and has a paw. What phase of the moon is it, anway?

Ears up

Seeing as we're on the eve of a holiday with a bunny mascot, I just searched for "rabbits playing jazz." The idea popped into my head. Funny bunny rabbits playing sax and standup bass and the like. I don't know what I was thinking. Jim Henson could have done something with the idea, but he's long gone. In 2026, you can imagine what a video answering to that description would probably be like.

The silver lining is that the search term indirectly led me to this subreddit of people posting their pet rabbits. Which I'm guessing have been more accommodated than domesticated. In any event, everyone looks to be happy.

True North

Mr. and Mrs. North comes from the early days of American TV, starting when Harry Truman was still technically president. It ran a couple of seasons and was largely forgotten after that. You can tell by watching old episodes on YouTube or Dailymotion, because they almost all have scratches and blotches. 

It still tends to be a diverting show, though. The lead characters are adapted from a then popular series of mystery novels by Richard and Frances Lockridge. The plots are fairly simple so as to fit in a half hour running time, but they're varied. Whodunits predominate, but they also did other kinds of thriller plots. Leads Richard Denning and Barbara Britton also showed a notable amount of chemistry.

Not the world's most physical guy

Something that recently penetrated my headspace, somehow, is the tiff between Moby and the Davies brothers, caused by the former Richard Melville Hall calling "Lola" (deep weary sigh here) "a gross and transphobic song."

Now it must be said that this characterization was part of a Guardian feature, and one of their prompts was "The song I can no longer listen to." If you give it some thought, it should be fairly obvious that at least some of their interview subjects were going to use that part as an opportunity to virtue signal. And here we are.

Dave Davies has jumped in to defend his big brother, and there have been other rebuttals. But justifications for "Lola" aren't what's needed. What is needed is for more people to tell the HR regime to take a hike. Ray Davies's songs reflect the thoughts and emotions of a human being, which is what music should do. Take it or leave it, but don't try to hector it over Zoom.

Q as in question

I just found this interview with Chuck Palahniuk where he reminisces about a youthful enthusiasm for Ellery Queen, both in the books (he slightly exaggerates their number) and the Jim Hutton-led TV series. It's interesting to see how they might have shaped his own identity as an author, particularly as both the Queen series and The Big Valley―with which I'm not really familiar―depicted single-parent families.

I just reread Double, Double. This is a good mystery but an oddity in the series of Ellery Queen books. A young woman hires him to investigate the death of her father, which seems a little off considering that he's a novelist and not really a PI. His father, Inspector Richard Queen, only makes a one-paragraph cameo despite his importance in the series overall. The new client also briefly works as Ellery's secretary, so Nikki Porter seems to have been forgotten for the time being. I sort of suspect that Danny and Lee roughed this out for another character and added Ellery later. The bare bones of his personality do appear, though.

Ten Days' Wonder, by contrast, could only be about Ellery Queen. It might be the most psychological book its authors ever wrote. The amateur sleuth's wit and background give him hints, but also cause him to have blind spots about the other characters, leading to tragedy. Claude Chabrol filmed this one, although for some reason he replaced Ellery Queen with an alternate fictional character.

A trip to 1960

 

I watched this out of curiosity last night. It's the first ever appearance of the character of Columbo. The episode's story would later be expanded as Levinson and Link adapted it into a stage play, and that play itself would be adapted into Prescription: Murder, the 1968 TV movie that introduced Peter Falk in the role.

It's interesting to note that "Enough Rope" is in color. NBC was in business with RCA, which made color TVs, and while the majority of their lineup was black-and-white until 1966, they always had a few exceptions. It's a dainty use of color, quite different from the garishness of a lot of later 1960s TV, or the deserty look of the 70s. 

The $64,000 is how Bert Freed does as the Lieutenant. Well, it's weird to see a guy who looks so much like a thumb in the role. But he does pretty well. He's kind of sneaky, which is good. Peter Falk didn't really catch fire in the role until the second pile, Ransom for a Dead Man.

Definitely more of a curiosity than anything else, though.

Human persons

Not going to really go into it right now but suffice it to say that Jacques Maritain had quite an interesting life. It probably helps that―for a time, at least―he was a pupil of one of my favorite philosophers, Henri Bergson. 

I've been reading a collection of Maritain's works, The Social and Political Philosophy of... and several bits of it wow me. Here's one.

The end of society is the good of the community, the good of the social body. But if this good of the body is not understood to be a common good of human persons, just as the social body itself is a whole of human persons, this conception would lead in turn to errors of a totalitarian type. The common good of the body politic is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the good of the whole which, like the species with respect to its individuals or the hive with respect to its bees, draws the parts to itself alone and sacrifices them to itself. It is the good human life of the multitude, It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to the whole and to the parts; it flows back to the parts, and the parts must benefit from it.

Dense stuff, perhaps. But the central theme―that the good of the people can only be applied to that which respects their life as humans, with all that includes―is as relevant as ever.

Heavens!

Do we live in a clockwork universe? I would say that the fact that we're not clockwork says no.

But clockwork representations of the universe can still be very cool, Besides their considerable aesthetic charm, they show makers engaged with the big and little questions around them. And this craft goes back a long way. At least to Ancient Greece with the Antikythera mechanism. That's a wild story.

Orrery makers in our own century would have their hands full with updates. A few years back we had the first new planet adapted as part of the solar system since Pluto in the 1920s. Then they tried rounding out our new 10-planet solar system with asteroid Ceres and Vulcan, a near-Mercury planet no one had ever actually seen. Then it all collapsed and we wound up with an eight planet system.

那很好笑

I found this to be an interesting story. Jesse Appel studied in China. As he gained fluency in Mandarin, he started doing comedy there. In fact, he had a Chinese mentor. 

I can't judge whether he's funny in Mandarin Chinese. But there's a good chance he's a harbinger of upcoming trends. China is thriving in many respects. Even as they're a rival country, there could be a lot of Americans and Westerners in general living there in the near future. And they'll be doing all sorts of things. From the Chinese perspective, "American" may become an ethnicity, more or less.

Self-justifying

Lewis Mumford is a new name to me, but this overview does a very interesting job placing his work and ideas in the context of modern society. Specifically, society's relationship with technology.

The most striking evidence of the myth’s cultural pervasiveness is that many avid accelerationists do not deny that AI could mean the end of humanity. They merely differ from the doomers in believing that this risk is necessary—even desirable—to achieve the spectacular increases in efficiency and productivity promised by AGI. Mumford foresaw this extreme endpoint. “The myth of the machine,” he wrote, “the basic religion of our present culture, has so captured the modern mind that no human sacrifice seems too great provided it is offered up to the insolent Marduks and Molochs of science and technology.” 

Those branded as skeptics or doomers also still accept the premises of the myth of the machine. The stated aim of many organizations concerned with avoiding the worst AI outcomes is that we should “realize the benefits while mitigating the risks” of the technology. Mumford would argue the first half of this statement concedes too much, accepting the basic premise of the myth of the machine while presenting the task as removing the obstacles to realize its benefits. Many skeptics also share a basic misanthropic premise of machine superiority, focusing as they do on the biased, irrational, and flawed nature of human beings that needs machinic augmentation. 

This is it, of course. There's a new generation of business tycoon. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Alex Karp are representative. While he has a nicer demeanor, Dario Amodei probably fits here too. While they are government contractors and, to a lesser degree, producers of goods for the consumer market, they're not satisfied with being seen as the widget makers they are. So they've taken it upon themselves to redefine the role of humanity. And of course that role is subservient to their machine god.

Sixty-odd years ago, on The Jetsons, mundane sitcom suburbanites were depicted as living in splendor above the skies. A homey kind of splendor, to be sure. They had a robot maid, but she sounded just like Hazel. Now, in order to get that level of futuristic ease, we're expected to submit to robots we're not allowed to question. Have they done a good enough job at changing and replacing the audience that people will take this deal. Some probably will. Time will tell how many.

Big sound

The gentleman playing the rather Seussian-looking musical instrument is also the man who invented it. His name is Gorkem Sen, and he's a Turkish musician and instrument maker. It's called the yaybahar, and it's only been around for a few years. It's the twenty-first century and we don't expect to see new instruments invented that aren't synthesizers or otherwise somehow electronic. Which is also in some ways a surprise because that big echoing effect sounds like something you might need to go to a studio to get. 

In the coming years―assuming the years continue to come―it's interesting to ponder if this thing might take off the way steelpans did in the 20th century.

Horseshoe vs. horseshoe

The other day I was in a bookstore looking in vain for a decent book of crosswords.* While in that part of the shop I saw a weighty tome called Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by Jason Zengerle. Reading the jacket copy didn't convince me that it was much more than a hatchet job, and nor do the glowing reviews. The publisher being founded by former Obama staffers doesn't help.

Carlson was also lampooned on SNL as a paranoid Oscar commentator, although if you can take more than thirty seconds your tolerance is higher than mine. This comes at a time when talk is being floated of prosecuting Carlson for not being down with the war effort. It's all just a wacky coincidence, I'm sure.

In recent years, there's been a different kind of anti-establishment movement on the Right, Tucker included, which has more than once aligned with dissident voices on the left (Glenn Greenwald being one example) and free agents like Joe Rogan. The people who have power in both major parties and consider themselves responsible stewards of public thought aren't keen on this. Big Lib does its best to make these people seem icky. Big Con is less shy about being openly authoritarian, and so threatens them with jail. It's a process that can be used and reused against many different targets, which seems to have at least someone at Daily Kos rightly worried.

* Sad to say, crossword content outside of The New York Times tends to be wan. I wound up turning to Thriftbooks. 

Temperance and friends

It's interesting to find out that the Tarot began as a deck of playing cards and wasn't associated with divination until the eighteenth century. That doesn't mean that the use of cards―playing and otherwise―to divine the future doesn't go back further. But these particular cards had been around for a few centuries before they picked up that reputation. 

The Visconti-Sferza deck is quite pretty and distinctive. There's obviously a lot of craft involved in these things. An almost lost craft at that.

As you wish

The Princess Bride has to be in the running for the most Jewish American movie of all time. At least among popcorn movies. Written by William Goldman, adapting his own novel, which has autobiographical elements―or at least the framing device does. Directed by the late Rob Reiner, son of Carl. The cast isn't entirely Hebraic―the two leads are quite Aryan―but includes Mandy Patinkin, Peter Falk, Fred Savage, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, and Carol Kane. (I don't think you could get away with casting Irish people as Miracle Max and his wife.)

On the other hand, I only thought of this recently. Watching the movie never gave me the feeling that I was being immersed in someone else's culture. (I'm not Jewish.) In some ways it may have been someone else's culture, but didn't seem that way, which probably makes me something like the typical viewer. And it doesn't demand any a commitment to any particular kind of Jewish politics. One might add that Shawn's political stances haven't endeared him to the Zionist faction. 

But I digress, maybe. The point is that regardless of who it's by, it feels like it's for everyone. It's very American that way.

Future shocking

Up until last week I don't think I had ever really read John Brunner. Not a matter of conscious avoidance, I just hadn't gone beyond hearing the name and some titles.

Over the past few days I've read The Shockwave Rider. It's an interesting read, about a rebellious spirit named Nickie Halflinger who flees from place to place, using a few other names. It's known for foreseeing the development of the internet and being sort of a proto-cyberpunk novel. Brunner did guess well at how the 21st century would actually feel, although his Midwestern United States may feel more British than he intended. It's sort of a more optimistic 1984, in part because the O'Brien figure (Paul T. Freeman) is redeemable. 

Cue Porky

The Paramount-Warner Brothers merger which seems almost certain to go through is depressing but also weird. And for the record, Netflix buying Warner out was also a glum prospect, but in a way made more sense.

Larry Ellison, who's certainly involved, wants to add CNN to his pro-Israel network of networks, this much is obvious. This despite the fact that no one under 40 pays any attention to CNN, or CBS, or what have you. It's still an area where he wants to flex his muscles.

Netflix didn't want CNN, though, which probably means that the Ellisons could have bought it separately. So Larry Ellison seems to be supporting the ambitions of son David. And David actually does want to be a big studio head.

Looking into Skydance Media, though...They've backed some hits, but these were mostly part of established franchises. Other movies weren't hits. But in both cases, they've been silent partner financers. They haven't actually been in distribution, which is what a film studio primarily does. What I take away is that while the Paramount people have the money to do this takeover, there's not much reason to expect it to work in the long run.

Swapping out (Warning: some 90s ahead)

 

Seen above: a screenshot of a recent Google search. Specifically, the AI Overview that got spit up in the course of said Google search. According to Gemini, the lyric "Life is hard, and so am I. Better give me something so I don't die" has been appearing in forum posts since 2006 but isn't derived from anything identifiable. 

It is actually not hard to find the source, at all. And now that AI has been embedded in Google searches, these overviews usually do produce germane results for quoted song lyrics. But in this case the AI basically said that it's not really anything in particular. 

You've seen more flagrant AI fails than this one. So have I, although most of them aren't recorded. It's a technology that brings very quick results, but a lot of the time not high quality ones. Aside from factual errors, there's not really a mind there. 

Which is why when you hear about jobs being eliminated in favor of AI, it suggests a certain preference. The question is, "Can LLMs do the job better than humans, or even as well?" And the answer is very often, "No, but who cares?"

Greer has an interesting take on what's behind this. Namely, technology―overhyped as it is―is being used to clear out deadwood that couldn't be gotten rid of any other way. If so, the people making these decisions aren't really more valuable than those their getting rid of/automating, and in some cases much less so. But that's how it often goes.

Center ring

 

In discussions of Einar Jolin, the word "naive" seems to come up a lot. And there's something to that. His faces tend to be cartoony, for one thing.

But if he remained crude in some ways, he was a curious artist and truly applied himself. His pictures have a snap to them and make an impact.

"At the Circus", above, is a nifty composition. It uses its space well. And the horses are gorgeous in their simplicity. You can see why the audience members nearest us are so rapt in attention.

How it plays out

Conservative anti-interventionist Tom Woods has written that "No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Which is to say, office seekers love to talk about how they will prioritize American interests and end regime change wars, and then when they actually take office they develop a strange case of amnesia about all these promises. 

So it's happening once again. Sohrab Ahmari:

Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!

Now, I'd be a knave and a fool if I'd ever believed that Bari Weiss's foreign policy priorities were the same as mine. But the anti-woke movement ―and in truth, the anti-lockdown movement as well―did have a lot of people who sounded indifferent to or skeptical about foreign adventurism. Until, that is, it came time to promote a new war.

One of Donald Trump's tragic flaws is that he's incapable of saying "no" to his big money contributors. Of course in the face of that kind of money and those kind of demands, his recent predecessors have only maintained a fig leaf of dignity, and he's just been more blatant. But it's also important to recall that that wasn't the promise.

Plink!

Prepared piano is an interesting method, altering the tone produced by the keyboard by placing objects between the strings. Its modern use has been credited to John Cage, who wrote his piece Bacchanale for percussion ensemble but found it was being performed in a space that didn't have room for one. As the Wikipedia page shows, there were precedents before that.

This performance of a cage piece is a good example. Likely not all good pianists are good at prepared piano. This one gets a lot of mileage out of it.

999

Today I started rereading Pale Fire.

A lot of Nabokov's novels start with author's notes warning the reader not to apply the theories of Freud (identified as "the witch doctor from Vienna" or some such) to the book. This always seemed a little weak to me. If you've written a compelling work, you needn't fear fashionable critical theories. You can wait them out until they're no longer fashionable. 

Pale Fire has no such warning. You could read that as a sign that Nabokov was really in the zone with this one, which he was. What it does have is an epigraph from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which sets the tone and gets you scratching your head. But I repeat myself.

John Shade, the author of the 999-line poem within a novel, does in one stanza provide a list of things he hates: aside from Freud and Marx, there's also jazz. The same things Nabokov hated, in other words. For all that, there's a certain irony between the real author and the fictional one. Charles Kinbote, another fictional author providing commentary on the poem, is a whole kettle of fish in himself.

Cabin fever

Huh. Okay.

Being stuck indoors all day, and apparently limited to maybe a few blocks tomorrow, is certainly not fun. How are the people who lost power making out, I wonder? 

One odd distraction. There's a car parked in front of one of the houses across the street. It's had its taillights blazing all day, and seems like it will have them going all night, too. If the car has the juice to keep them going. No one seems to know what to do about it, or why the owner has left it like that.

Peak experiences

I read a crime story today. It was about a modern day expedition climbing Mt. Everest, a client determined to reach the top, and someone else in the party looking for revenge against that person. It's a good story in itself―the author's name is William Hall―but it also started me thinking about those who climb big mountains like that.

Some Sherpas do climb Everest without bottled oxygen. Ang Rita Sherpa did so ten times. No sane Western climber would attempt that. It's also true that the the Sherpa culture's religion holds that the Himalayas are sacred. 

There's probably a connection between these two things. Sherpas revere the mountains as loci of godly activity. This encourages a certain carefulness. 

Little black and white birds

As has been said elsewhere, they sound somewhat like they're laughing. They seem to be social birds, as well. These little auks are congregating, as they do, in the Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard didn't really have a population until the 17th century. I wonder what the first human settlers made of these cackling birds.

Impact

Recently confirmed: in the aftermath of a violent event like a random shooting, those immediately effected are traumatized. People on the periphery go through something different. Some are rubberneckers, of course. But a lot are just trying to get through their day and avoid the wreckage. 

For my part, I was on a RIPTA bus, coming back from a light shopping trip to Rumford. The bus driver stopped when we were in sight of downtown Pawtucket. Detour, end of the line. He didn't tell us how to get to our destinations. We were just on our own. The Pawtucket/Central Falls commuter rail station wasn't far off, but any halfway direct route was blocked off by police. I followed a mother and adult daughter who lived near the station and thus were going in the same general direction. They kindly gave me directions when our paths diverged.

When I was on the bus for home, a guy got on a few stops after me. He was already talking about the shooting. I didn't learn anything from listening to him except that the rumor mill was still in good working order.

Only after getting home did I look up any media reports on what happened. It was bad. Every time I read about it, it seems to get worse. Condolences to everyone who was close enough to it to be considered a survivor. Peace to those who didn't make it.

Up and out

The bottom line is that space is a frustrating, ungiving environment, and you are trapped in it. If you're trapped long enough, your frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. An astronaut has three from which to choose: a crewmate, Mission Control, and himself. Astronauts try not to vent at each other because it makes a bad situation worse. There's no front door to slam or driveway to speed out of. You're soaking in it. "Also," says Jim Lovell, who spent two weeks on a loveseat with Frank Borman during Gemini VII, "you're in a risky business and you depend on the other guy to stay alive. So you don't antagonize the other guy."

from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach

Space travel and the preparations people go through in order to get into space are always interesting. In a way, the Gemini program was the last great moment of midcentury American culture. And certainly there are still people willing to take the risks needed for space travel.

One wonders, though, how far this thing can be taken. As a species we evolved for the conditions prevalent on Earth. Some have taken a step or two off the planet. But colonization is a whole other basket of fish. Does anyone really want to live in the void? In theory, there are plans to settle Mars and then move on from there. This would require long periods, maybe lifetimes, of voyagers denying their human side. In practice we're not really exploring space as much as we're throwing our toys into it.

Good vibes

It's been about eight and a half years since I put some Milt Jackson on this blog. Looking at that post now I see a notice on the square where the video should be telling me that it's unavailable. On the internet, as in life, pleasures are often ephemeral.

Anyway, this is the Modern Jazz Quartet, and they seem to like what they do.

Philosophical problem

On Taxi, when the Sunshine Cab Co. is temporarily shut down, the drivers reunite a few months later to talk about what they've been doing in the interim. Louie has essentially been stoking a boiler room, selling stock over the phone. He quickly loses the job, because regardless of how much money he pulls in, he's still Louie De Palma. But one of his pitches keeps coming back to me.

Tom, listen to the words that are going to send you to an early retirement: Genetic research. You know, cloning and stuff like that. Listen, today they're doing it with rats. Tomorrow, they'll be cranking out Cheryl Tiegs by the dozens.

Ah, I know what you're going to say. I know, you got a philosophical problem because there'sa possibility that something maybe could go wrong. I mean, some mutant virus could wipe out half the world. If you're in the half that's still around do you want to be rich or not?

And what makes me think of this is, of course, artificial intelligence. There is, in practical terms, no difference between AI doomerism and AI boosterism. The theorists with their dark theories tell you that it's going to make us all obsolete and end humanity as we know it. The salesmen and advocates say exactly the same thing, and then they pass the hat. It's the same spiel Louie was doing, only without the charm.

Realizations

A few interesting observations here:

As the Center for Working Class Politics found, her “democratic threat” message was resoundingly unpopular. Especially with working-class voters. That’s no doubt because the #Resistance philosophy behind it dripped with condescension. It reminded everyone that liberals think Trump voters are a bunch of irredeemable fascists.

Ganz might argue that Harris’s failure was in pushing her democracy-mongering without an attendant economic agenda. In this way he could try to rescue the utility of his thesis. This won’t do. The social challenge is much more basic: if you think the person you are trying to win over is an Untouchable, they will smell your hatred from a mile away. Even if you insist that you just want to give them healthcare.

"Fascism" is a handy epithet. It evokes the dangers of a relatively recent past without being quite as blatant about it as "Nazi." Leftists calling out things as fascist are the photo negative equivalent of rightists saying that everything they don't like is communism. And as has become increasingly clear, it's just about as useful in the long run.

Night critters

It's an interesting hypothesis. From the Triassic through the Cretaceous, mammals were somewhat marginal. A lot of burrowers, and they were by-and-large nocturnal. Dinosaurs might have seen them as nocturnal pests. Since dinosaurs―or at least non-avian dinosaurs―some mammals have adopted diurnal lifestyles. Some, but not most. 

Again, it's a hypothesis, not a confirmed fact. But it highlights some interesting facts about us. One is that humans are much more visually oriented than other mammals. We have more acute vision than most mammals and can see in three colors. (If we had UV vision we might find it more trouble than it was worth.)

Then there's our ambivalent attitude toward the night. We don't, most of us, operate primarily at night. Some are afraid of it. But night also appears to us as a time of possibility, not bound by humdrum rules. That could be the old part of us calling out.

Cellar Septet

For all his Midwestern charm, Ray Bradbury could be disturbing even when he wasn't working in Weird Tales mode. One example is "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse." It's a tale of exploitation, addictive fame, self-mutilation, and the loss of self. I'm not the only one who remembers it, and the text can be seen here. (While he wasn't the loudest Cold Warrior, Bradbury may have been surprised to see his work memorialized on an international computer network by Russians who leave Cyrillic comments.)

It might be overly dramatic to say that we are all George Garvey now. Still, it's true that the kind of image consciousness that was once limited to entertainers and aristocrats has spread to the general population. And many have found that they have no natural defenses against it.

Magic 👁

Ever wonder about Chinese typewriters? I have.

The Chinese writing system is pictographic. Written characters represent entire words, not just phonemes as in our Latin alphabet. There are currently more than 100,000 of these characters. The advantage of this is that people who speak entirely different languages can understand what each other write if both are familiar with Chinese writing.

One disadvantage is that mechanical reproduction of this language isn't exactly straightforward. If a Chinese-language typewriter (or computer keyboard) were made on the same principle as an English-language one, it would be about the size of a truck and no one would be able to find anything on it.

In the forties, a Chinese author named Lin Yutang had a remedy. He invented a typewriter where a relatively small number of keys could be used to select from a much larger number of characters. The invention actually took some time to take off, but it was absolutely crucial in spreading the language.

Yodeling with a capital J

 

I don't know or much care how Dame Edith Sitwell is ranked as a poet these days. She speaks to me, anyway. She pursued her vision with verve, and it remains infectious.

Façade came early in her career. She'd do many other great poems. But this suite with accompanying music is a terrific example of her having fun.

Travelin'

I just watched Obsession. That's Brian De Palma's Obsession. De Palma had gained attention with a few thrillers in the preceding years, very much descendants of Hitchcock. This one feels like the first time he had something of a big budget. As a couple of examples, the middle of the film is shot on location in Venice, and he got to work with composer Bernard Herrmann.

The story is a bit of a midpoint between Vertigo and Oldboy, and it doesn't always make sense. Genevieve Bujold is quite lovely, though, and gives an engaging performance once she appears as the second of her two characters. John Lithgow is good too. Oddly enough, he was actually younger than Bujold.

Oh Aubrey

 

Aubrey Beardsley, avatar of Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement. He may be the best remembered of Oscar Wilde's collaborators. Certainly he's left his mark on the world of illustration in the years since he worked. 

One thing I didn't realize about him until very recently. Besides his getting a free bowl of soup with his haircut, I mean. With all the drawings he did, prints he made, all the indelible images, he was only 25 when he died. Who knows what he would have gone on to do.

In his death throes he begged his publisher and a friend to destroy all of his obscene drawings, which by some standards would be the majority of them. They didn't obey, of course. He could still tell St. Peter that he'd given it the old college try.