Hey what're the odds

The full title of Joseph Mazur's book Fluke is Fluke: The Math & Myth of Coincidence. The cover of the 2016 Basic Books edition shows a man in silhouette, walking his dog. A lightning bolt descends from the word "Fluke", aimed at the man's head. Wouldn't it be crazy if he had been hit by lightning before and was about to be so struck again?

An excerpt: 

By definition, coincidences are events that happen without apparent cause. Apparent to whom? It does not mean there is no cause. The world generally moves by cause and effect. I say generally, because there are acausal phenomena in physics, psychology, and religion. But the word apparent tells us that the moment we learn the cause of a coincidental phenomenon, its status diminishes to a simple time-space event. That must mean that coincidences are relative to the people affected by them. It also means that the unapparent cause is there, waiting to be discovered. If there is no cause at all, then it happens by chance. 

This is graspable in theory. It doesn't necessarily make this "unapparent cause" easy to pin down. There are probably some coincidences where the actual odds for and against remain a topic of hot debate.

One interesting thing I learned about in this book is the birthday problem, meaning that the probability of two people having the same birthday reaches 50% when there are 23 people in the group. This threw me at first. I would have guessed that this point came at 183, which is about half the number of days in the year. But the numbers check out when you look at it.

Might have beens

There used to be an easy listening station here in the Providence area. It eventually converted to a talk format, but held on through most of the 90s I think. 

Anyway, among the old records they played was "Amapola", sung by Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. It struck me as a very good performance.

Eberly's story is an interesting one, and for him must have been frustrating. When the Dorsey brothers split up, he stayed with Jimmy's band. Tommy would soon enlist a young Frank Sinatra. So could Eberly have been as big a star as Sinatra, with movie roles and his own record label? Maybe. He had a great voice, as heard here with unavoidable pops and hisses. And he was good looking in a slightly androgynous way. 

It wasn't quite to be, though. Mostly it seems to have come down to timing. When he died in 1981 he'd mostly be remembered by Big Band Era diehards. That's quite a sentence, but there are probably worse fates.

World without rocks

 

There's a famous anecdote about Samuel Johnson. It's said that he was so irritated by a mention of George Berkeley's assertion that there is no reality except for what is perceived that he kicked a rock and said, "Thus I refute Berkeley." 

What's the problem with arguing on the internet? Some people think it's that no one respects experts anymore and that leads them to spread misinformation. But in truth, most experts are fatuous idiots and liars, and it's actively a good thing that people ignore them.

A more serious problem is that there's no way to appeal to objective reality. You're not face to face with anyone. You're not sharing space with them. Cyberspace isn't space. So you do see people assert some things and deny other things in a way that would entirely collapse if they weren't alone with their reflections.

Men in white

I'm reading a Ray Bradbury collection called A Medicine for Melancholy. Not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time. And one thing about Bradbury is that he can launch into a bunch of different kind of stories.

When it was published, "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" probably wasn't what people were expecting from Bradbury, known to be a science fiction guy. It's about a half-dozen men who all go in on buying a gleaming white suit that none of them could afford on their own. Ultimately it's a very affecting story about friendship.

Could he have published it now? If he weren't already established as a big name, I mean. I don't know. The main characters are all Chicano. While wokeness isn't really rampant among American Latinos, editors might hesitate, saying that they'd "prefer a story like this from someone in the community." To which this hypothetical Ray Bradbury might respond, "Okay, but I'm the one who did write it, so how about evaluating it on its own terms?"  So again, I don't know what would happen.

Remember what I said about Bradbury's versatility? The next story in the collection is "Fever Dream", a scary story about a boy at the start of adolescence who gets sick. But that's not all, as the ad say.

Plant corner

Monkey puzzle trees are quite interesting both because of their unusual crisscross branches and because they're conifers native to the Southern hemisphere. They're not the only conifers from the Southern Hemisphere, but conditions in the southern temperate zones have almost certainly shaped them into what they are now. In any case, as they're endangered, may they soon be unendangered.

It's theorized that they're spiky branches evolved as a defense against dinosaurs. Crazy to think about how aspects of such a long-ago world are still with us today.

We got a jumper

 

I love this song. It's got an aggressively angular sound you wouldn't necessarily associate with Simon & Garfunkel, but they wear it well. It's also a really good example of storytelling in song. A real "you are there" feel, and an ending that raises some question. 

This blog post about it is very good too. (Remember blogs?) "Another Paul" has always been able to draw a lot out of the Simon songs he writes about. Marilyn Manson is an interesting addition to the mix.

Cat's entertainment

Well, the known animal kingdom just got a little bigger, and it's always cool when you can find out about that. The tilcayo tiger cat was just discovered in Bolivia. Its Latin binomial is leopardus tilcayo, which sounds not unlike a Chicano rapper with an Ancient Roman theme.

One of the researchers who discovered the tilcayo notes that it's "smaller than a housecat." But how can that be when it's of the genus "leopardus"? Well, actual leopards, which mostly live in Africa, have the genus "panthera." The "leopardus" genus describes South American native cats, most of the species being quite small. 

Anyway, here's hoping the tilcayo tiger cat's habitat remains sufficiently intact for them to thrive.

Melancholy Danes

Take a look at the picture of the Helsingor train station. It was built in a time of great artistry and craftsmanship, definitely. But there's something more about it.

"Helsingor" has an English cognate in "Elsinore", i.e. where Hamlet takes place. And Helsingor knows this, which is why right outside the station stand statues of Hamlet and Ophelia. The linked blogger describes them as "bearing grotesque expressions." His face looks a little wimpy, although the same can't be said of his muscular legs. She has a thousand yard stare and a jaw that looks ready to fall off.

The nineteenth century is when Shakespeare's reputation went from "a great playwright" to "the Great Playwright." By the latter part of the century, Denmark knew how big he'd gotten and about their connection to what was widely considered his greatest play. They picked a classy way to cash in.

Happy accidents

You might remember a man named Bob Ross, a Floridian Air Force veteran with a white guy afro who attained what might be called a viral fame in the last ten years or so of his shortish life. He wasn't PBS's first happy-go-lucky painting instructor―that was Bill Alexander―but he defined that role for the public and is a rich subject for parody.

A friend today told me about Bob Ross Painting Parties, which I hadn't heard of before. It seems to have started in the late 2010s and is still going on. People get together, project Bob Ross videos on the wall, and have a go at painting.

If you're an actual artist this probably sounds more like dressing up as Brad and Janet for Rocky Horror screenings than what you do, and you're not wrong. But the crucial phrase here is "people get together." Social traditions have been disappearing and shrinking much faster in the 21st century than new ones can be created. So if a new one springs up, why carp about the sillier aspects? May the painting parties spread like wildfire from YMCA to church basement to parks in the summertime. Let a million Bobs bloom.

Into the hard stuff

Some might think it treasonous to spend the night of September 11 watching a movie about New York City junkie life in the early 70s. But it's always been a warts and all kind of city. 

Born to Win (and you can see the young Roger Ebert's take here) was filmed before the Twin Towers were even completed, so it's no surprise they don't figure in it. George Segal was always a very funny and charming actor, and his character in this repeatedly calls himself a charmer. His faded tattoo (from which the movie gets its name) suggests he might have been in the military. He was definitely married to Paula Prentiss before that somehow went bad, and he sometimes still sees her in scenes where it's ambiguous whether she's actually there. For now he's with Karen Black, who seems to have no idea what she's letting herself in for.

It's a diverting movie. Things are funny and exciting, and obviously in a few minutes they won't be. J's dealer finds him amusing and sometimes useful but knows he'll eventually put him down like a dog. One of the cops is played by a then unknown Robert DeNiro, and they're their own kind of trouble.

Curiouser and curiouser

I remember when I first read Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, I liked the scene where the Gnat tells Alice about the insects found in Looking-Glass Land. There was the Bread-and-butter-fly, the Rocking-horse-fly, and something very festive called the Snap-dragon-fly.

The thing is, I was familiar with food, so I knew what bread and butter were. And I knew what a rocking horse was. But a snapdragon? Those were flowers, weren't they? What did that have to do with this thing with a raisin head?

There is, of course, a story behind that. The game of snapdragon had a long and august history even in Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's time, and was still in vogue. Again, it would be years―nay, decades―before I learned of any of this. But the other thing is, my lack of knowledge about the game didn't stop me from liking the reference to it in the book. It was something just a little different from the everyday, otherworldly and yet of the world.

A screaming comes across the sky

I just started reading Gravity's Rainbow. A lady at the bus stop asked me what I was reading. I told her the title and showed her the cover. All I could tell her was, "It's weird." She wasn't going to press me for details, thank God. In fact, she walked out of the bus shelter a few minutes later. 

If you've ever read the book you know it's very dense in a way that at least courts complete incoherence. But Thomas Pynchon studied engineering physics in college, so it does have that kind of solidly researched background. But in essence, since it's set during the Blitz and imitates the Blitz, I'm just letting myself get bombed by it.

Hic sunt dracones

It's interesting to learn that maps didn't actually warn "Here be dragons", be it in Latin, English, or any other language. But did the people of the time believe that dragons were out there on the open seas? In a way, they wouldn't be wrong thinking that. That is, aside from questions of literal belief, a dragon is nifty shorthand for adverse sailing conditions. Say there's a spot where your ship stands a better than average change of being either capsized or becalmed. If you say that dragons are there, that's a pretty vivid way of describing the conditions.

That's not getting into the fact that there were and are some unusual creatures in the sea, some of which we may not have discovered in our own time. 

As for the dragon fighting a giant lobster, I don't know what to say. Big fan of shellfish?

Is on my side

Helen McCloy wrote her mystery series about Dr. Willing, a psychologist who works with the NYPD, for some time. The first novel came out in 1938, the last in 1980. I recently felt like reading one of the books in the series, or possibly rereading them. The library couldn't help me there, as it didn't have any of them. But they used to. I know this because I've borrowed a couple before. So since then they've apparently cleaned out the entire system, either by selling or just chucking. I can see pruning, but it seems like they should have kept one or two titles at least.

The good news is that I was able to borrow another McCloy book, A Question of Time. It's a thriller with some non-overpowering Gothic touches. The plot concerns a girl brought from Italy to live with her grandmother in Boston. At a young age, she develops a seemingly irrational fear of the ballroom that contains an intense Goya painting, despite never having seen it. Years later, she returns to Beantown and things develop from there.

The book came out in the latter half of McCloy's career, and must have been written when she was about 60. Still and all, she takes an interest in her child and young adult characters, and seems to have fun writing their dialogue. A sort of snapshot of posh Northeastern Boomers in their youth.

Split

Okay, so what does make politicians take the 20 side on 20-80 social issues? You can't completely rule out conscience in all cases, but in most it's not a very good explanation. 

This article by Lisa Selin Davis addresses some things I was curious about. Notably, Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey recently defeated challenger Seth Moulton by taking a maximal position on trans rights, and especially by supporting trans athletes in student sports. Now is this a majority position among Bay State residents? I actually wasn't able to find the raw numbers. I suspect that the majority are more moderate, but when you're talking about primary voters it's a different story. Talk about blue state Democratic doners and it's a very different story.

Davis highlights Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton as a counterexample. Acton has vocally opposed boys in girls' sports, and still won the nomination. Ohio being more of a conservative state has probably changed the math on that, as Davis clarifies at the end.

This may be the pattern in elections to come. Red-state Democrats will find it easier to articulate a majority position; blue-state Democrats will still have to appease primary voters at the ideological extremes. Expect more Markey-style lean-ins in liberal states, and lean-out moderates where conservatives hold sway.

Again, the politics of the issue are pretty conservative nationwide. But in a state like Massachusetts, Democratic candidates get the benefit of the doubt even from a lot of voters who disagree with them on specific issues. That opens the door for activists who want to push them to the extremes. This doesn't happen as much in states where they have to fight for a chance.

Legs that wouldn't quit

...because they had to tell time. 

I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a nudist resort in Indiana, even though that Midwestern state isn't the first place I'd guess one would be. It was started by a German immigrant, which feels right for the Hoosier state. Eventually it passed into the stewardship of Dick Drost, an especially unfortunate name when you learn why he had to leave Indiana.

But it's the leg that really interests me. A giant female leg, crooked just so, casting shadows on the numbers of a sundial is a brilliant idea. It's not necessarily one that needs to be limited to clothing optional settings, either. Imagine if something like this was erected in any of the country's remaining town squares. Certainly seems like something that would make you sit up and take notice.

DP

When I was a kid, Dolly Parton jokes were―like a couple of other things―pretty big. But I learned early on that she was a great singer and songwriter first of all. Learned it with my own ears. Much respect.

There are those who still hold against her some things she said and did during the COVID year. Well, what can I say? Big propaganda campaigns can pull a lot of people in, and that one certainly did.

Andean stimulant

Had a good laugh today on this page of miscellany, and particularly on the explanatory note for the 23-Down clue:

The coca plant is native to South America, and is similar in appearance to a blackthorn bush. Coca leaves have been chewed by humans for centuries, perhaps even as far back as 3,000 years ago. Chewing the leaves apparently produces a pleasurable numb sensation in the mouth and a pleasant taste. The most famous alkaloid in the leaf is cocaine, but this wasn’t extracted in its pure form until the mid-1800s. The extracted cocaine was used in a medicines and tonics and other beverages, including the original version of Coca-Cola! Before 1903, a glass of Coke would contain about 9mg of cocaine. Coca-Cola still uses coca leaves, as the flavor is prized, but the cocaine is extracted before it arrives at the bottling plant.

Now I've always thought that the flavoring in your basic bottle or can of coke was strictly derived from sugar, kola nuts, and carbonation. But apparently they're still using coca leaves for flavoring as well. Ah, but "the cocaine is extracted before it arrives at the bottling plant."

Now all that cocaine they're extracting has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Of course those whose job it is to extract it just pour it all down the drain. Riiiiiiiiiight.

Meanwhile Coca-Cola is having afterparties that sometimes last until sunrise.

ἔντομον

Okay, this is the strategy I have for bugs. For summer and probably into early autumn, you gotta have one.

If it's in my apartment, I'll do my best to kill it. I have to live here. I've relocated some moths to the outside in the past, but there's not always time.

If it's already outside, I'll let it be. As an illustration, if there's an ant where my foot is about to come down, I'll do my best to miss it. The ecosystem does need them.

Obviously, those that try to sting or bite me are an exception. And I've grimly accepted that I have to put the kibosh on lanternflies whenever I see them and am able to get to them. Although I'm still hoping our birds acquire a taste for them.

Foxy

Sly Stone hit some lofty heights in the early days of his career. For a while it seemed he could do no wrong. It didn't really last beyond the early 70s. In 2011 he put out an album called I'm Back!, but it didn't really prove he was. That's true in a lot of cases. The downside of achievement is the struggle to equal it. But at least you've achieved.

As to the title of this song, it's still summer, not as hot. Bit better for sleeping.

Up & down

Let me describe a sliver of a dream I had recently, and the effect it had on me. 

There's a balcony or a deck. It's impossibly high up, A sci-fi skyscraper, like out of Metropolis. A cat is out there. It either climbs the guardrail or someone lifts it, that detail is unclear.

And there I shake myself awake. I don't have an irrational fear of heights. I have a very rational belief that you don't mess with heights past a certain point. And while cats are graceful, there are limits. 

Side 3

In short, this is an unprecedented moment in paleoanthropology. For the first time in the history of science, a form has been distinguished by its genes and nothing else. Can it therefore be considered a species?

From The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals by Silvana Condemi and François Savatier

As that very brief passage points out, Denisovans have been defined by their genes. Actual skeletal remains have been minimal. Genes can sometimes be a blueprint that wasn't actually followed in construction. Therefore, our understanding of Denisovans is very limited, and will be expanded―knock on wood―by further discoveries. Ideas will have to be revised.

Still, they were a very significant find, and a recent one. The finger bone fragment from which they were identified was only found in 2010. Yet the largest portion of the world's population is probably related to them, if distantly.

This is a good book. It has to take some rather arcane biological subjects and make then comprehensible to the lay reader. At the same time, it's respectful to the general public in a way that surprises me for a book published in 2025.

It also has beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations from Benoit Clarys, who seems to be very familiar with this kind of subject.

Am I missing something?

Science can be cool, when it's not dreary, as it frequently has been in recent years. And it's not a bad thing to try and perceive new things. But this "new color", olo? Man, I just don't know. It's a highly saturated blue-green, which seems to look nice. But apparently you can only really see it when a laser is shot into your retina. How often do you think you can make time for that?

It sounds like something that will be semi-remembered as a crazy fad in a few years. But making a new color name out of the middle three letters in "color" is kind of clever.

They are the eggmen

 

If you see a walrus's snout up close you see all these little bristles. Those are to feel along the ocean floor for food like clams and such. They're very good at surviving in the far North. This video was shot off the coast of Svalbard. They're also quite graceful in the water.

Anyway, just wanted you to see that. There was another walrus video I could have shown, but the background music was a little distracting.

Tempting tales

In our souls, we need to know that wild things are out there. "Wild things" is a pretty general term, and can cover all sorts of weirdness.

The legend of Haunchyville is florid and violent, like a half-remembered synopsis of Tod Browning's Freaks. A group of little people are employed by the circus. Their boss is an abusive prick. When they've had enough, they kill him by cutting off his arms and legs. Then they make their own settlement in Wisconsin's Waukesha County. An albino child visits the town and they take him in. He becomes their guardian, a deadly one if needs be.

Stories like this, even warnings like "Here be dragons", individualize the world. They make it possible to believe that more than one kind of place exists.

A writer on his second professional trip to the part of Wisconsin where all this was supposed to have happened found a disappointing sequel:

Returning to the site on a bright and clear early afternoon five years later, I find my old fears confirmed: what was once a tantalizingly wild and undeveloped area—perfect for a colony of vindictive little people!—is now an upscale and bland subdivision. Pre-fab houses dot the bulldozed landscape. Front lawns the size of golf courses stretch on for miles.

The word for this is "Empire". Power expands far from where it was before, and reshapes its new settings in the image of the one it just left.

But empire can't expand forever. Eventually the new logos fall off and the land is in new hands.

Big yellow

Here's something to see. It's a giant public sculpture in Rochester, New York, known as Threshold. The color is what they call safety yellow. Whether it's actually the color most easily registered by the brain, which the article asserts, I don't know. But it is a color that comes up a lot in children's media of all kinds.

On the other hand there are the shadows it casts. Shadows and light, the brightness of the mellow setting up a contrast. A very neat use of negative space, as this was all left-over material.

Wish-ship

I only ever saw the first two episodes of Stranger Things and it didn't really grab me. But reading in this column about the fans known as Bylers doesn't surprise me. 

My first exposure to the term "queerbaiting" came through Supernatural. Supernatural, which was on a smaller network for fifteen years, was a horror-adventure show where two all-American boys with frayed psyches and shotguns hunted demons and vampires all over America, almost entirely filmed in Vancouver, BC. Anyway, in the later seasons "Destiel" became a big thing. "Destiel" was the shipping name between Dean (Winchester)―one of the two brothers at the center of the show―and Castiel―an angel who helped them in their fight against evil of all kinds. A number of fans, some of whom had toyed with a brother-brother angle I won't go into right now, had convinced themselves that these two characters should be a couple. Of course Dean was pretty flagrantly heterosexual and in the context of the show getting romantically involved with an angel was always a bad idea. Anyway, the writers made the mistake of acknowledging the fan's desires but never fulfilled them. Resulting in much denunciation.

Fandom is a double-edged sword. These days almost nothing has what would have been considered a big audience in the 20th century. If some of the people who do watch get really involved and talk about your work on social media, that would seem to be a good thing. But in a number of cases they have expectations, and don't like being told no. Look at the world of fanfic. Now some people who write fan fiction may be good writers, or could develop into such. But as a rule it takes what is already a fantastic environment and pushes it further towards simple wish fulfillment. Sometimes this is sexual, which gets all the attention, and sometimes not. But a lot of this stuff is united by an attitude of "I want this to happen, so it will happen."

If, as deBoer says, this approach has been spreading to real world politics, that's not a good thing. Politics is a two-way street. You have to recognize that other people will want different outcomes from the ones you want. If you just expect to be indulged and you don't pay some respect to those who dissent from you, the long term results will be destructive whether or not you get what you want in the short term.

Just get on back to the twilight zone

Something I read a few years ago and am somewhat heartened to see is still online is a blogger's track-by-track review of The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, which I think on balance is the best Bonzo Dog Band album. She's pretty on-target that the Bonzos were satirizing the popular pretensions of the time, and found a striking and funny way to do so. Most of those pretensions lived on, but what can you do?

I'd add a couple of things. First, it's true that John Lennon adopted some counterproductive attitudes toward Art in the latter half of the Beatles' career. Luckily, something in him knew better than to completely follow through with them. His solo work contains wordplay and quirky musical touches, even if he thought or at least claimed to think that they shouldn't.

Also, the "We are normal and we want our freedom" line apparently comes from Marat/Sade. Love was actually the first band to make use of it, in their song "The Red Telephone".

Language just keeps getting weirder

Here's a sentence you wouldn't have heard fifty, or even twenty years ago. "I just ate an edible." Congratulations? It might be more worth mentioning if you had eaten an inedible.

This is of course a result of cannabis culture, which has expanded since many states started on the road to legalization but which doesn't interest me. As for what they call edibles, even if you can retain the flavor as you add the stuff that contains THC, I'm not sure I'd want to eat anything that could make me paranoid. Or drowsy, beyond the usual. But to each his own, I guess.

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕

Rahko is a creature in Finnish mythology. This Rahko being is connected with the moon, but exactly how is a question. 

In one version, he is a thief who was bothered by moonlight, which can perhaps be a nuisance if you are a thief. He decided to paint the moon black with tar. This results in the new moon, and also the face you may see when looking up at the moon. 

In another version, spirits known as kapeet eat the moon, and the Rahko forges a new one out of cow hooves and fat. 

So in the aggregate, the Rahko is responsible for either the moon being there or for it not being there. Or perhaps both. After all, the phases of the moon are cyclical.

What the market will bear

Say what you want about this:

It does prove that the sixties were weird on a level you don't often hear about. Of course when people talk about the sixties, what they often mean is the early seventies, when bands in faded jeans were all over FM radio and All in the Family proved that hippies were just your annoying son-in-law.

But in 1967, it was apparently all about ad men and publicists going down Sunset Strip and trying to convince the freaks that commercials are a real happening, man. There's a bit of the put-on in all this, but it was also real. An actual agency commissioned these skits and songs. From the sounds of it, they even got Thurl Ravenscroft involved. It all adds up to a huge "What the hell am I listening to?"

Purple shoes to fill

Uh-oh.

A Broadway musical of Purple Rain. Huh.

I have affection for the movie, but the story is a little trite. What advantages does it have? Prince as a performer, obviously. Morris Day makes a good foil. There's a good rapport between Prince and the actors who play the Kid's band, the Revolution, who also happen to be Prince's actual band, the revolution. And Clarence Williams III is also an asset as the Kid's troubled father.

Most of these advantages are pretty much impossible to reproduce. Find a guy who looks sort of like Prince and can sing like him, and he still isn't the real thing. Maybe put him in a biopic.

Keys

Johnny Staccato is an odd duck in TV Land. It started in 1959, when Peter Gunn had been on the air for a year, and it seems to have given itself the challenge of out-Gunning Gunn. Thus while one show featured a private detective who hung out at a jazz club and dated the chanteuse, the other had a detective who actually sat in with the band. John Staccato, played by John Cassavetes, was the pianist at Waldo's, alternating with John Williams. Yes, that John Williams. And it was pretty vanguard jazz, aspiring to Dave Brubeck/Sonny Rollins levels of sophistication. 

Cassavetes apparently didn't like the show, which may be one reason why its only season ended in March rather than May. It probably doesn't say much about the quality of the show, since he doesn't strike me as someone who'd want to be tied down to any TV show. He did still direct several episodes.

The quality of the episodes varies, but it has a pretty good batting average. Cassavetes's twitchy intensity was well suited to playing an eccentric gumshoe, believe it or not. They could also pull in some impressive guest stars. The second episode is an entirely obvious murder mystery, but features Martin Landau in a key role, providing a cool to Cassavetes's hot. And yes, offscreen wife Gena Rowlands shows up, in an episode that really drives home how different air travel was during the Eisenhower era.

Digging that crazy sound

"Art of Noise" refers back to both a Futurist manifesto and a British electronic group most influential for the fact that they really weren't a band at all. Currently it's also an exhibition at New York's Cooper-Hewitt museum. Some of the old music players are quite striking, suggesting in a few instances a fictional history a la Steampunk or Dieselpunk. 

I read a review of this show in the hard copy edition of the New York Times. The article suggested that the era of owning music is ending. Could well be, but if you're able to resist this trend, you probably should. Consider that there are words that there are words artists or record companies could want to censor out, or feel pressured to do so. Or perhaps worse, feel a need to insert words that weren't there. Or, say, the single edit of a song is such a hit that the album version eventually disappears. A world of streaming-only music probably would be quite a bit smaller by comparison.

More scenes from the end of the Internet

I was recently locked out of my email account. It had happened a couple of times before and blown over after a couple of days. This time it was looking like more of a long-term thing, and in the event it lasted the better part of a week before I got in touch with the provider and restored usage.

Why did it happen? It seems to fall under the broad category of "suspicious activity." I've gotten a number of phishing emails, to be sure. Everybody has. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone else had gotten these phishing attempts but dummied up to look like they're from me.

But it also may have thrown the system out of whack if I logged in from something other than my home computer. The library, say. An increasing number of websites get paranoid if you log in from someplace other than your home computer. They might require you to log into your email and respond to something they just sent you. But your email provider might get a little freaked by that as well, and send a request to confirm your identity.

This can complicate things in terms of editing a wiki or commenting on a blog. It may, in fact, prevent you from doing these things at all. Luck of the draw. But people expect a certain amount of mobility in connection with the internet. Take that away and they might start losing interst.

Why do I keep this blog? This is why.

A bird, nesting, right over the doorway.

I first saw the bird in the nest a couple of days ago, above the door I generally use to get to the sidewalk. The bird didn't move, so I figured it must be artificial. Some kind of garden decoration somebody had planted up there either for a gag or because they just liked the way it looked. Although the nest was a little messy for that.

But today I came back and the building's Russian handyman pointed the bird―which looks like some kind of columbiform―out to me. It's real. She's real, and had a chick next to her. Maybe there's a daddy bird out there getting food for them? We don't know. 

Late afternoon, early evening, we had a thunderstorm. I went downstairs to look at the bird through the little window over the door. This time I did see her head move. And later on, at night, her head was turned so she could look inside. 

How could this not be a blessing?

You beat everything, you know that?

Here's another story from while I was out getting breakfast. A man―he was black, and that's a relevant detail for reasons I'll make clear―was sitting with a young woman and talking to her. From context I don't think she was his daughter, but I don't think they were an item either. Maybe a niece. He was telling her about The Andy Griffith Show, and he was a big fan. When he talked about Deputy Barney Fife I said "Don Knotts" and he was glad to have someone else who knew about the show. Which the waitress did as well. 

At this point it feels like anyone writing about The Andy Griffith Show for a magazine or a website would have to keep an arm's length from it. They'd call it out for its overly rosy portrayal of the Jim Crow South, or for its lack of characters of color. From what I understand Griffith was a desegregationist and didn't want the cast to be all white, but the network thought they understood the South better than he did and overruled him. Of course if Mayberry had been a friendly integrated town, someone would be complaining about that, too.

Anyway, my point is that while the internet is everywhere and seemingly in everything, people in real life are still different.

Well-nested

Matryoshka, those Russian nesting dolls. You ever think about them? Sure you do. Ever wonder if they're still made by hand? Well, someone has to ponder things like that.

Actually, the process, if this video is any guide, is still refreshingly physical. Of course these dolls are huge. Real statement dolls.

Proof

With the realization that I can be kind of a broken record on this topic, I'll keep it brief.

Do you remember "15 Days to Slow the Spread"? I do. In at least one business that was closing down for that period of time on government orders/strong suggestions, I remember saying "See you in a couple of weeks." Because as dismal as the idea of a central authority ordering all face to face social activity suspended was, at least they'd put a time limit on it.

Of course the fifteen days came and went. Without a word of explanation, the suspension was extended. Now there was no fixed endpoint, and no admission that there ever had been. Anyone who spoke or acted with the expectation of being allowed to return to their regular life was shamed into silence.

That's why, outside of some limited hangout, there will be no reckoning on the COVID era. Nothing actually went wrong. It was an experiment, and at root it had nothing to do with masks or vaccines, very little to do with COVID itself. The object was to see how much the population would tolerate gaslighting, Orwellian memory-holing, and leonine contracts. A lot, it turns out. Experiment successful.

Fool your friends

Have you heard of puzzle jugs? They were essentially joke shop fare, regardless of whether there were actual joke shops back then. The most popular tended to be something like a dribble glass. The unwary toper would lift them to take a drink, and then find himself drenched.  But there were other variations. According to Kovel's American Antiques (2004 edition):

One jug, the simplest of puzzles, had a frog on the bottom. When the unwary tippler drank his grog, the frog appeared―a startling, lifelike visitor. Many hard drinkers must have had a real fright from this jug.

The urge to prank goes back far, further than this entry might indicate. It's a healthy instinct, in the right context. One hopes that the wags have not been forever stilled.

Penned up

Out of curiosity, and looking around for ideas, I've been doing some research into inventions that either never caught on, or which had their day and then were forgotten. This search led me to the baby cage, which was an eye opener.

The theory behind it was that babies and very young children need fresh air, and needed to be exposed to the elements in order to give them a healthy metabolism. This is true. The developers also said that not all families have sufficient outdoor room as part of their homes. This was true then and is very much true now.

The solution was a small structure, enclosed but open to the air, aka a cage. And it was to be placed outside the window. It raises questions. How firmly is the cage attached to the building's facade? How much do you trust the structural integrity of the cage itself. These are important matters, given how high some of the cages were placed. 

In any case, enough parents had enough anxiety about dangling their babies out the window that the fad soon died out. In retrospect it seems like an imperfect and perhaps unworkable solution to an ongoing problem. In the real world there probably isn't one fix that will work for everyone.

Artist of the Second World

 

Aleksandr Gerasimov was not just a Russian artist, he was a Soviet artist. It's not a coincidental distinction. He was intimately tied to the regime during its most autocratic stage. Aside from some operatic depictions of Lenin, he also painted official portraits of Stalin, some of which could make one wonder whether Gerasimov had to paint them over to erase apparatchiks who had fallen out of favor.

But whatever his political role, he was still an artist. A very good one, too. "Boat Trip", seen above, has long been one of his most sought-after works. Several kinds of sensuality are at work here. The mist and spray that rise from the water feel real enough to make you think of the way flecks of cool water feel on the skin. There are also the Russian women relaxed in the sun, one extending her legs, the other leaning forward into the wind. They're mostly turned away from us, enrapt in a grand picture of their own. The man had a real feel for his subjects.

Message received

Now here's kind of a strange incident. Yesterday I was checking my email. I saw what was apparently an email sent by a friend of mine. It didn't really say anything, though. There was just a screenshot jpeg that I was apparently supposed to look at. Which I could only do by downloading it.

Said friend hadn't said that he was going to send me anything like this. (Like what? Exactly.) If he did mail me some kind of image he'd almost certainly give me a hint as to what it was, either saying so beforehand or putting something in the body of the email. The clincher was that the email had been sent at 11:30, when he'd be at work. There was just no way.

I deleted it, of course. There have been times before when spambots have poorly imitated people I knew. The "get me to download stuff" part was new, though. They must be getting older and assuming everyone is stupider.

Wise guys?

It's hard not to notice a certain pattern in the videos and―more importantly―the people that YouTube promotes to me.

Sam Harris: Uses fake erudition in the defense of the kind of bigotry you can practice just as well without literacy.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Undoubtedly an intelligent man in person, but never produces anything but thought terminating clichés.

Adam Conover: The show title "Adam Ruins Everythng" is the kind of self-deprecation you practice when you think highly of yourself.

I'd gotten used to classing them as the stupid person's idea of a smart person, but then it hit me: There's no other kind.

The purpose of smart people at this point is to keep you stupid. Intelligence is indeed not just the memorization of facts and figures. It starts with questioning things. It continues with being able to see those questions through. No one really wants a bunch of people who are smart by those criteria. The safest thing is just to give them a bunch of false idols.

...but a hero nonetheless

Doing a crossword today I came across the name of Jim Thorpe. It made me think of what I'd originally learned about Thorpe in school.

Thorpe had a distinguished athletic career in school and outside of it. This led to him competing in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, in the Pentathlon and Decathlon events. He won gold in both events, an impressive achievement by any standard. But when his past playing baseball in the Eastern Carolina League went public, the International Olympic Committee rescinded his medals.

I'd always learned of this as a racist institution dismissing the achievements of a Native American athlete. But there's a problem with this interpretation. The IOC was right. The ban on professional athletes in the Olympics exists, and it's there for a reason, the US's absurd decision more recently to populate its basketball teams entirely with NBA champs notwithstanding. To be fair to Thorpe, the sport he had professionally played in was not an exact match for the Olympic events in which he participated, so there was ambiguity on his end. But the decision was the right one.

What does this prove? Only that rushes to judgment can happen in any direction.

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.