Up there

Interesting if brief article here on studies into echolocation in bats. Specifically the way certain sounds may be optimized for open or wooded environments. 

Bats are the only mammals with true flight, of course. The fossil record is spotty and we don't know all the steps that led to them being such. The question of why they can fly and no other animals can is as much philosophical as scientific. The way that they use echolocation seems to suggest that the mammalian approach to flight is quite different from the avian one.

Fulfilling

Today I learned that you can still walk into a drug store and buy cold medication--including the kind that puts you to sleep--and the workers won't freak out. Well, not this time out anyway. Kind of a relief.

(Edited to de-gibberish my second paragraph.)

In honor of it being Halloween weekend I also watched a horror movie. Picked a kind of strange example, which I'm still pondering. If we speak soon you'll be hearing about it.

Doesn't repeat but it rhymes

 Novelist Ann Bauer has published a piece that I think I really can call a must-read. It's both quite personal and historically informative. Takeaways:

1. Bruno Bettelheim, who I was a bit familiar with but not all the details, should have stuck with literary criticism. His attempts to heal children's souls almost certainly did more harm than good, especially to their families.

2. There are and have been more theories on what causes autism than there are stars in the sky. A shocking number have been used to punish parents and bring their families under outside control.

3. The manipulation, bullying, and gaslighting that Bauer experienced as the mother of an autistic child did seem to prepare her for life in the COVID era. Would I wish these experiences on anyone? Hell no. But she knows how to recognize patterns.

Cinderblock gothic

Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" is somewhat bittersweet. It's about kids huddled on Venus who only get to play outside one day per year, and the kind of behavior this ultimately provokes in them. Bradbury wrote it when Venus was thought to be gloomy and probably uninhabited, but before we found out that it was completely inimical to life. (Named after the goddess of love. Scores of poets are laughing in the great beyond.)

The short film above is billed as an adaptation. Literally it is no such thing. How can it be? There's no cast, and two minutes isn't long enough to tell the tale. Still, it does take advantage of the fact that even the most sterile and featureless environments can evoke a mood. Consciousness abhors a vacuum.

Moseying

 

That's Mose Allison on piano, of course. The album has a subdued Abstract Expressionist cover. Very fifties artifact, of a sort. It's unusual in that he only sings on a couple of tracks. But it works.

On the back cover of the CD he's quoted as saying that tenor saxophonist Lester Young "was more of an influence than any piano player." Kind of a show-offy statement, but he could afford to do that.

Unhappy in its own way

I've been quite taken with what I've read so far of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. Archer is named after Sam Spade's dead partner but probably has more in common with Philip Marlowe. He's more of a subtle operator than you expect from a hardboiled detective, but he's also quite honest.

The one I'm reading now, The Chill, seems very much like a high point to me. It takes place in a Southern California college town. Archer is approached by a man desperate to find his bride, who's run out on him. As you might expect, it opens out into a murder case, or two, or three.

Won't go into the plot, really. It just has to be read. But Macdonald builds an almost Medieval world of clans and coteries. There are "good" families and "bad" families, but members of the former can be trapped as well as the latter. And where all sorts of safety nets fail, Archer has to act on behalf of a suspect who is out there on her own.

Ninety-something in the shade

My latest gig they have me taking my temperature every morning. Now of course this is a digital thermometer, which means you don't have to stick it in your mouth or...anywhere. Just pump this little lever while it's pointed at you and you're all set.

Strange thing is that it's shaped a little like a purse gun, so taking your temperature is like shooting yourself in the head. And then you get to walk away from the experience. Eerie.

Severe hay fever doesn't raise your temperature, evidently.