Web sight

 

Now here's something I just saw tonight, and don't at all regret the time spent.

A lawyer (Edmond O'Brien) shows tenacity in a case against a wealthy businessman (Vincent Price.) The businessman, impressed, hires the lawyer. But not as a lawyer, as a bodyguard. Apparently there's a man out there who just got out of prison for stealing from the company and he blames poor widdle Vincent for ruining his life? Can you believe such a silly thing? Anyway, the lawyer finds himself killing this man in a shootout, which rouses the suspicion of his detective friend. (William Bendix). And he needs to pump the businessman's among-other-things secretary (Ella Raines) to get to the bottom of the case.

This is the basic plot of The Web, a 1947 Universal Pictures thriller. Price had already mastered the balancing act of being charming and nasty. The rest of the cast is quite good too. O'Brien is obviously pulling Bogart mannerisms, but it works for the part. It unfolds in a very tight, stylish way as well. Free on Archive.org. 

Can such things be?

For whatever reason―my thought processes are quirky―I Googled Arcade Fire today. After I put in the search I was reminded that their freakishly tall front man is under some scrutiny and, dare I say it, opprobrium right now. Over what? I may have read somewhere and forgotten exactly what it is, but I don't find it interesting enough to look into again.

But anyway, what it was that reminded me of this was seeing a headline that asked the question (wording as best as I can remember it) "Is it possible to be a poet and a scumbag?" 

Now, there's a lot you could say about this question. What I would say is that it sounds like something you'd ask if you could number all the poets you've heard of on one hand. Do any reading on the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and it's impossible to route for either of them because they were both objectively awful. The world would have been a much poorer place without their work, though.

Winging it

Penguins are native not just to Antarctica but to the Southern Ocean as a whole. The  people Māori of New Zealand have long been familiar with them. Another interesting tidbit about them is that anatomically speaking, they're not flightless. Not airborne, but their motion in the water has more in common with flying than what we consider swimming. As Art Wolfe puts it in his book Penguins, Puffins, And Auks: 

The fact that penguins fly through the water, and do not just paddle, is easily confirmed by a glance at their skeletal structure and musculature. Flying birds are the most specialized of all invertebrates [sic]. To provide support for the wings, their backbones have been fused into nearly rigid rods, to anchor the large muscles needed to move those wings, and to keep the center of gravity low in the body, their breastbones have been provided with an immense, jutting, blade-shape addition to the sternum known as the keel. Truly flightless birds such as the ostrich and the emu have lost their keels, or at best have only rudimentary ones. Penguins' keels are large and solid.

Penguins are, of course, very well adapted to where they live―while not exclusively Antarctic, they do favor cooler climates―and to how they live. Their grace in the water demonstrates that.

Balmy

It's gotten above 60F during the day the last couple of days. If the weather widget on my laptop is to be believed it's 66F now. It feels cooler than that, but the real cool days of autumn are taking their time getting here.

One thing I can be pleased about is that the high-allergy period seems to have passed. Hope I didn't just jinx it.

How nice

This is an excellent article by Mary Harrington. The main topic is an Atlantic article proposing (cajoling?) amnesty for COVID maximalists. While I may have more to say on that subject later on, I currently want to direct your attention to the final sentence. 

"Kindness is everything" actually is one of the adages listed on those lawn signs that are ubiquitous in blue states and cities. And a lot of people dot their Instagram/Twitter bios and Facebook signatures with "Be kind" and instructions of that nature.

Adopting "kindness" as your guiding political principle seems unwise to me. If everything you believe in can be reduced to kindness, you're justified in doing just about anything, to promote it, right? Pretty soon your allegiance to kindness relieves you of the responsibility of actually being kind in your daily interactions. Bombs away.

So keep mum and do something.

Hats off to (Roy) G. Biv

 

Seen above are a representation of the visible light spectrum and the color wheel. They overlap, but there are a couple of telling differences.

For one thing, we pick up as children that the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. And when you're mixing finger paints or crayons, that certainly checks out. Then when you're older, at least if you take a physics class, you find out that green is the other primary color, and yellow is one of the secondary colors. It's kind of a shock.

But that's on top of what may be an even stranger phenomenon. The color wheel tells us that red and violet/purple are right next to each other, aptly enough since there's a red component to purple. But red and violet lie at opposite ends of the spectrum. How can this be?

The answer comes down to the difference between sensation and perception. The spectrum is an expression of the frequencies of visible light, which may be sensed by the cones in our eyes. But frequencies aren't something that affects us, at least not in a way we know about. So our perceptual brains modify the information in a way we find more useful and pleasing.

One interesting hypothetical: What if our vision were altered so that we could see a low-frequency color in the ultraviolet spectrum, but not red? I believe it would still fill that niche on the wheel between orange and violet, in place of the absent red. But would it be red? No. For one thing, because of where its higher place on the spectrum, it would present to us as a cool, receding color rather than a warm, advancing one.

Maxwell plays the fool again

I just...

Look, at this point, the Pelosis are millionaires many times over. She's the second in line to become President.  They don't just have a nice three-bedroom in a Tenderloin walk-up. Their home must have unfathomable amounts of security.

So if some peanut in his skivvies barged into their house toting a hammer, somebody's getting fired. A few somebodies, really. But I have major doubts that's what happened.