Cooties!

So my preferred football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, did not beat the Oakland, um, LA, um, Oakland, um, Las Vegas Raiders in a Christmas Day football game. On the one hand, this is depressing. On the other hand, even when the Raiders win they lose, because they still have to be the Raiders.

But in the wake of the loss, we have opinions from two men I usually enjoy ignoring: Sports trolls Clay Travis and Skip Bayless. Both suggest the blossoming romance between star Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and singer/songwriter Taylor Swift had become a “distraction.” See, when guys turn their minds from pure football to things like girls, they stop thinking straight or being able to play well. Or so this thinking says. You may remember it from when you were six and did your best to exclude the opposite sex from anything you could because they were icky. But then you grew up.

Unless, apparently, you think like Messrs. Bayless and Travis. Travis, in fact, goes on to dredge up the Yoko Ono comparison. But Ms. Ono did not break up the Beatles - their own egos did a much more thorough job than she ever could have. And Ms. Swift has not jinxed the Chiefs. A less gifted offensive coordinator, an iffy receiving corps that has a bad case of the yips, defenses that are collapsing on Kelce because one defender apiece can handle the other guys? Yeah, those things have jinxed the Chiefs.

Sports reporters will explore some of those issues in upcoming stories. But not Mr. Bayless and Mr. Travis, who are too busy proving to the world they don’t have girl germs like Travis Kelce does.

Internalize

I have done internships as a part of the educational requirements for both of my professions and degrees. At one, I had a bed in the corner of the rec room in my uncle and aunt's house -- which was great, because that internship paid squat. In another, I rented a "studio" that had started life as parts of several rooms in a bungalow and had a heating system that excited no atoms or molecules into heat-energy producing motion ever.

Interning is about gaining job experience in a situation where you can fly or fall with people around you who will guide you about the falling. Political internships involve even less actual work within the field, although statements made by legislators and politicians frequently share similarities with the work of untrained 19-year-olds. They are dodgy, incomplete, marginally accurate and largely defensive about the inadequacy of the work itself.

Earlier today I read a news item that some 40 White House interns wrote a letter -- unsigned, natch -- taking the President of the United States to task for not demanding Israel stop trying to kill Hamas terrorists. Now, they didn't phrase it that way, but that's because they're young and don't know very much.

I got into a nice late middle-aged rage about the gall of young people who know so many things and who have yet to let time and experience help them unlearn them so they can know stuff that's real and true.

I wondered about the proper response to the interns, but turns out Noah Rothman at National Review has the right idea: Fire the lot of them. Yes, the letter is anonymous, so some interns who held back might be let go and it's not particularly fair they get sent packing along with their willfully blind co-workers. But it's just an internship, they're very young and have the time to get over this, and maybe it can show the folly of knowing your co-workers are about to do something stupid and not standing up to call them out on it.

One of the funniest things about these silly people is that they are writing this letter as "the fall 2023" interns. Meaning their service is about up anyway. So rather than speaking truth to power, they are more like leaving power a note to find after the custodian cleans out their desks.

Every now and again society shows us how dumb an idea it is to listen to people without experience. They may be the brightest human beings in many a moon, but without experience they, as former President Reagan said, "know so many things that aren't so."

Cureth post-Thanksgiving!

One of the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving is the "food coma." People eat enough to get sleepy and then doze away the afternoon watching football or placeholder soap opera episodes. Or, of late, they prepare to talk with their family members who think differently about how wrong those members are, knowing that the ties of blood will prevent their being sat outside on the porch with the smallest possible slice of pumpkin pie.

Nicholas Culpeper offers a solution for the former; the solution for the latter is better candidates so we can discuss them instead of howling about them. Ask the Past brings us his Culpeper's Last Legacy from1655, where he writes that there are various cures for this "lethargie." Among them are burning brimstone under the nose, frequent provocations to sneeze with "white Helleborne," shaving the head and pouring "Vinegar of Roses" upon it, preferably letting it "drop down from some high place upon the crown of his Head." Ladies either never suffered from lethargie, or had different cures such as shaving their husbands' heads while they slept and pouring rose vinegar on it from the balcony.

For my money, the most likely method to work is "burning assa foetida to wake him." The name alone awakens my inner middle schooler to tell me a thousand jokes and explain the origin of the phrase, "that smells like ass." Given that it's nicknamed "devil's dung," I can't imagine anyone could sleep through the stench.

A Voice About Nothing

I’m somewhat concerned to still be posting about one of my favorite football players and the world’s biggest pop star, but interesting things still crop up. For example, on Thursday The View’s resident sage, Joy Behar, opined that she doesn’t want to see Taylor Swift end up with Travis Kelce. The reason? Some tweets Kelce made in his early 20’s, back when Twitter was just a place people sometimes tossed out random thoughts.

It seems the young Kelce spelt not well, and, moreover, made judgmental statements about women’s appearance. Such tweets offend the author of SheetzuCacaPoopoo: My Kind of Dog and SheetzuCacaPoopoo: Max Goes to the Dogs. Said she, “He’s illiterate is more to the point. He’s obsessed with the girls looking good, that was his thing.”

Now, evidence suggests Ms. Behar was never a young man. Her only child is a daughter, but she does have a grandson nearing the teenage years. The number of young men “obsessed with the girls looking good” is sizable, and if she was previously unaware of that he may demonstrate it to her soon.

But all of this is moot, because these are the tweets from a dozen years ago. Had that young man come calling at a concert a dozen years ago, I suspect Scott and Andrea Swift might have shown him the door too. In Joy Behar’s world, though, dozen-year-old tweets define who you are forever. Even if you learn to spell.

It’s in memes all over social media, but it’s true: Thank goodness I didn’t have an online youth.

Rider on the Storm

Several science-related websites noted the long, fast and high flight of a male shearwater bird caught up in Typhoon Faxai back in 2019. Shearwaters generally fly just over 300 feet around the ocean, while during this particular daredevil made it up to around 16,000 feet higher than usual. And it traded in its usual speed of between 3 and 37 miles per hour to almost 125 miles per hour as it made five circles with the typhoon. During the period the eye of the storm was over ocean, the bird landed and rested on the waves.

And stoners with their gummies think they get high...

All Hallows' Eve

As we come to Halloween, I rejoice in the end of the foul slurry of the entertainment industry, horror movies, shall slow for a few blessed months. But Friar, you say, is not slurry merely a mixture of water and particulate matter that accumulates when the unwanted material is cleaned away from the desired material? And I say it is, and you have spoken wisely. 

Collateral Damage

I've seen some posts about one of the many stories that explain why we shouldn't make fun of or annoy old people. As this is a status I shall attain sooner rather than later, I'm interested in the subject matter. But this story is basically ugly through and through.

As it goes, the elderly person is in the drive-through line at McDonald's. The person in the next vehicle behind starts laying on the horn when the older person isn't as quick through the line as she wishes (the story is almost always told with the rude youngster being female). The old person then pays for his order at the payment window and for the rude woman in the following car. The clerk tells her that the older person has paid for her order, which is said to motivate her with gratitude, which she attempts to show. And then the punchline is that the older person shows both receipts, takes both orders, and leaves the woman with nothing when she gets to the food window.  Now -- chuckle -- she'll be forced to go to the back of the line and start all over again! Kneeslap, kneeslap, what a witty response!

My gut says the story's not true, but it either event it sucks. If it is real, think about it. This is a woman who honked to get someone to move faster in the drive-thru line. Does that action suggests she would be the kind of person to accept the prank with a self-deprecating chuckle and a good natured, "Got me! Guess I'll go around again!" Of course not! She's going to berate the clerk and the manager she'll ask to see. She'll hold up the line for everyone else and not really care about people behind her. She'll wind up with her food and she'll probably bully them into giving it to her free even if only to get rid of her.

Paying for her food would have done exactly what needed to be done. Show kindness in the face of rudeness and maybe change some of her habits. Who knows why she's honking? Long day at the office? Dinner's late for the kids and this is all she can pick up? Going back into the office and this is her only chance to grab food? I don't know, and neither does the story. She's just a tool to help all of the snowtops and those of us not far away show how we're still clever! And we're sure smarter than all of those brash, rude young people who honk the horn!

So I guess there is a moral to the story. Some old folks will demonstrate their cleverness instead of the courtesy they say ran rampant back in their day. And they're sure they'll get one over on that rude whipper-snapper, no matter who else has to have a lousy day because of it. Just collateral damage , an unavoidable consequence of us getting what we want.

Why am I thinking of November 2024 all of a sudden?

Cool…if You’re Not the Owner

For the first time in the history of spacecraft, a satellite owner has gotten a fine for “failure to de-orbit.” as David Shepardson writes at the link, the Dish network had a satellite that was no longer useful. They’re supposed to put it into a certain disposal orbit by using the satellite’s onboard motors, Dish claimed that because of the limited fuel, they couldn’t reach the disposal orbit and their Echo-7 satellite is considerably lower than it should be.

In the lower orbit, the satellite could become an obstacle to satellites that still work or other space missions. So the FCC, which covers this matter because the satellites involved are communications tools, fined Dish $150,000.

When space travel has gotten to the point that we’re writing tickets, it has become a truly mature industry.

Biiiiig Show

There’s not much of Las Vegas’ usual entertainment that interests me, so I don’t know that I’ll ever visit. But I’ve been watching videos of U2’s show at The Sphere, a Vegas domed venue covered with video screens inside and out, and if I had the bucks…

Questions and Answers

Question: Would Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz be any different if he were a talentless clone of Jack Nicholson portraying a skeevy preacher who gets elected to the United States House of Representatives?

Answer: Pick a fictional Gaetz every time -- confine the damage to lousy movies.

Question: Would you shake hands with New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez?

Answer: Yes! Maybe some of the cash hidden in his suits would stick to your hand.

Question: Is there any reason in the world to vote for the nominee from either major party if they wind up being the senescent grifters currently leading the polls?

Answer: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been in touch with the Libertarian Party.

Question: Should the Writers Guild of America union have gone on strike in May of 2023?

Answer: No. Two men "wrote" Saw X during 2021. The strike should have happened before then to strangle this example of the ordure oeuvre in its fetid crib.

Question: Should Donald Trump become the Speaker of the House of Representatives?

Answer: Well, they deserve it.

Whaa?

Once upon a time, the Daily Caller was a slightly above-average culture-warrior web publication of the right. Since about, oh, 2016, they have been a sold-out Trump populism dumping ground, so it's not surprising that Daily Caller Chief National Correspondent Henry Rodgers would, on a flight to a speech in Detroit, ask Donald Trump his opinion on the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce situation.

The man who cheated on his first wife with the mother of his next child -- before his last child with his first wife was born -- and who dumped said second wife when her child with him was four and is credibly accused with an affair with a porn star while his third wife was still nursing his youngest child said, he wished them both happiness, together or not, then said, "probably not."

Now, stuff like this is what I (don't) go to the Daily Caller to (not) read. So normally, I'd never know about it. Except...

The Today Show sight featured the DC story. As did AOL's entertainment section, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Mail, Yahoo's "Lifestyle" section, The Hindustan Times (?!), MSN, and so on. Once again, the people who will say they want Donald Trump gone will follow the Les Moonves model, summed up in this quote from February 2016 when he was the CEO of CBS: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS."

Moonves referred to the way the Trump's shameless charlatanism always draws eyeballs, whether from haters or supporters.

We're past talking about the few ideas he brings to the table. For one, there's every reason to believe a Trump second term would focus on revenge for everyone he things wronged him and his modest adherence to actual conservative thought would wither away. For another, few if any Republican figures will work for him this time in key policy positions and the practice squad players he taps for the roles will struggle in meeting his mercurial demands.

I'm not a very good predictor. But I, along with quite a few others, think Donald Trump will probably win the Republican nomination. He will almost certainly not be president. He is a singularly unlikeable person of no character unfit for the office of President of the United States. Had he not faced another singularly unlikeable person of no character in 2016 he would have never been the President of the United States. He commands the loyalty of a large enough portion of GOP voters to surge past a crowded field. But nobody else likes him (maybe some of those followers don't either). 

And if we all -- including the outlets listed above -- stop paying attention to him, he might just disappear.

PS -- Both Kelce and Swift have been relatively apolitical but when their leanings have become visible they seem center-left. Perhaps Trump's prediction of relationship failure will spur them to try harder and, united, they can buy Mar-a-Largo and raze it.

Fun News?

Of course, the biggest news of the Kansas City Chiefs' dominating win over Chicago was a 33-year-old spectator sitting in the club level. Watching the game alongside Donna Kelce, whom we Chiefs fans refer to as Mama Kelce, was one Taylor Alison Swift, who may very well be the biggest music star on the planet.

If you live under a rock, you might not know that Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce -- who is clearly one of the top players at the position and one of the key reasons the Chiefs play at the elite level they do -- has expressed a crush on Swift, and they have been what every news story I've read has called "hanging out."

Lots of 33-year-olds hang out. But when one of them is NFL royalty and the other is music and cultural royalty, then it becomes something people talk about. And do more than talk, for that matter -- sales of Kelce's jersey rose four hundred percent since Swift was spotted in her club box seat with Mama Kelce. For KC folks, Mama Kelce is perhaps even more beloved than her yardage-generating son. When she wanted to see son Jason play for the Philadelphia Eagles as well as Travis play in KC on the same day, the mayor of Kansas City offered a police escort from the airport so she could arrive in time. For Taylor to sit with Mama Kelce is a kind of seal of approval all of its own.

Writing for Poynter, Tom Jones also suggests that a big chunk of the interest stems from the meeting of the two biggest shows on Earth. He also asks this important question.

Whatever the case, doesn’t this beat some of the depressing news we hear on a daily basis?

And yes, it does. Two relatively nice people meet, get intrigued by each other and hang out a bit to see where it goes. Only difference is they're famous. On the other hand, all I have to do is list names: Trump, Biden, Harris, Menendez, Biden H, and so on.

I'll pick "Traylor," "Tayvis" or "Swelce" any day of the week.

Agree to Agree

In the course of trying to slodge through a new Quanta article about the importance of modular forms (what are they? Hey, I said "slodge" for a reason), I ran across a different article by about how mathematical proofs have a social dimension.

Quanta writer Jordana Cepelewicz interviews mathematician Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal about this in an August Q&A. The jumping off point is the claim by reclusive Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki to have created a proof solving something called the "ABC Conjecture" that has do to with a relationship between addition and multiplication. Mochizuki's 2012 proof was 500 pages long and pretty dense, even for a mathematical proof. After two other mathematics professors visited Mochizuki in 2018 and found out what seemed to be fatally flawed gaps in the proof, Mochizuki dismissed their claims by saying they did not understand his work.

While "I'm right and you're too dumb to know it" might work in conversations with politicians and many celebrity figures, it's not an acceptable way of discussing mathematical proofs. In order to be useful, they must be held to be valid by a large group of mathematically knowledgeable people, so that when those people rely on the proof in their own work it won't fall apart.

According to Granville, Mochizuki's response hit on a key feature of mathematics and proof writing. The only way a math person may prove a proof is by convincing other math people their answer is accurate and not missing anything. Now, the other math people obviously have knowledge everyday folks lack. Ask me to evaluate a complex proof and my answer will be a single word: Hellifino.

But even the math people start with understandings that might be different from the proof writer.  They are the people who can say, "You cannot use that squiggly line in this spot! It must go here instead, and if you don't see that you breathe through your mouth and your knuckles drag the ground when you walk." They may say that because they know better. Granville points out that they may also say that because that's how they learned or because that's how their equations work properly.

The upshot of his understanding is that a social factor among mathematicians plays a much larger role than anyone might have thought it would in this discipline seen as the realm of cold logic. Perhaps it once was, but work in the first part of the 20th century opened the door to letting the community of mathematicians put their thumbs on the scale. It could have been a detriment to their work, but Granville sees it as a way to build closer ties among different mathematical disciplines and ideas. 

I Hate When Things Are Over

 

The above picture is from the last song ever to be played at Oklahoma Scotfest by the North Texas band the Selkie Girls. Band members will still make music (singer Alli Johnson already has a solo album), but the sextet will disband in a few months. I first caught on to the Selkie Girls at a Scottish festival in Sherman, Texas, a few years after they had begun to play. The jazz-influence percussion, dual vocalists and harp were an instant draw that set them a bit apart from a lot of Celtic bands, and their live performances were worth catching whenever possible.

This photo is not from the last song the Tullamore trio played at Scotfest, but it is from their last set. My journey with them, as friends and as a fan, has lasted almost 26 years since I first saw them play at the Medieval Fair in Norman, OK in 1997. The band will call it a career after a Celtic Cruise in 2024, making this their last Scotfest also. Tullamore has morphed several times over its career, but the mainstays have been Mary the hammered dulcimer player and Mark the guitarist, and they are good friends. Between shows of theirs I have caught in Norman, Edmond, Arlington, TX and Tulsa, I've literally never been disappointed with a performance. I've also always been happy to see my friends Mark and Mary (I liked the other band members too, by the way, but they were as I said the constants).

The post title comes from the early '90s one-hit wonder Deep Blue Something. Their song, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" includes the line. Despite the fluff that was Deep Blue Something, the song's always stuck with me and the line sums up my reaction to endings of good and pleasant things.

Sláinte to both bands, and thanks for all the music.

Fight, the Power

I come now to address a pet peeve I have when watching political commercials or hearing political claims and endorsements.

Of course this is rich ground for plowing, as the next political commercial I see that is of any value beyond helping one spell a candidate's last name will be the first. But I come not to disdain their dishonesty, trickery or complete lack of substance. No, my problem today is with one word: fight.

Candidates for every office in the land promise that they will fight for their constituents. They will fight for the middle class, they will fight injustice, they will fight the forces trying to destroy the country or those who are blocking attempts to save it. Everyone fights. We, the listeners who have gone to get chips during the commercial, are meant to be impressed by the conviction and grit demonstrated by someone who will fight.

But I'm not -- although I might be if it meant any of these meatheads would literally fight each other in a ring with gloves, headgear and a hip replacement doctor on standby No, I think saying one will fight for something is just a way of trying to convince a voter that the candidate is serious about their attempts to help them.

The problem of course, is that there is literally no way to measure the effectiveness of such a claim. a senator or representative will certainly claim they fought for or against something, depending on their party's preferred position about the something. They can fudge that. They fought, but the special interests of the other side were just too strong. Or dark money did them in. Or the deep state, the illuminati, Hollywood, the press collaborating with the other side or whatever else can be used as a scapegoat for the failure of their fight. They might even blame an actual goat. There is that diagram that shows how a goat's head fits into a demonic pentagram, after all.

And fighting, of course, can be done by making sure the candidate or incumbent got a lot of TV hits -- you know the candidate is fighting because he or she said so frequently on camera.

Lastly, fighting never gets anything done. Now, considering what Congress, say, has done may make people, including me, believe that's not always such a bad thing. But the truth is, there is legislation and work that a legislature is supposed to do. Also an executive. Also a city councilman or a county commissioner.

But passing a complicated appropriations bill is not fighting, It's work. TV hits get nothing done in negotiating a budget agreement. Clever quips and putdowns against opponents get no work done. And in fact, the work is what you and I consent to let the IRS take our money to fund. Not fighting. Fighting is against. Working is with.

We have to be careful -- a clever politician could say "work" but mean as little about it as they do when they say "fight." So I don't want a candidate to tell me he or she is working. I want them to tell me what they're working on. I want to hear what actual Article I work will be accomplished by them at the end of their term if they're running for Congress. I want to hear how they're going to update an antiquated city charter if they're running for city council (yes, that's an oddly specific request, and yes, it describes the community in which I live).

Because if a "No Fighting Allowed" was a good sign to put on the school playground, it's probably a good one to put on every frickin' campaign in the country.

What's in a Name?

I spent a big chunk of Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning talking to myself. OK, not really.

Many years ago, I searched for my name on Facebook and found a profile of a man in New Zealand who spelt his name exactly the same as I did, which happens to be an uncommon spelling. In those days, FB had some of your likes on your front profile page and I saw we'd read the same book. I messaged him to say so, he friended me and we've confused people ever since by wishing each other happy birthday and commenting on each other's posts.

Tuesday, during an American road trip, he (or I) and his lovely wife (definitely him) dropped by the church and we tested the structural bonds of the universe by shaking hands. When it didn't blow up, we had a great chat. We both like bluegrass as well as a number of other things -- religion, antipathy for politicians and a belief that much of the time, the governments of both of our nations were far too invested in things they need not be.

We sat at a table in a local restaurant for about two hours Wednesday morning (tipped accordingly) chatting before they were to be off and traveling again. I got to hear how he and his wife met. how beef-raising is done in New Zealand, what it's like in a country where 5.1 million people spread out over 104,000 miles and 2 million of them live in three cities, and so on.

Thus one of the original (and long lost) principles of the internet was fulfilled, as it brought people from distant lands together and showed we are more alike than we thought.

Of course, he and I had a head start.

When, and How Large?

A couple of articles in the magazine Astronomy highlight that science is about changing and reacting when researchers encounter new data.

In its September issue. Richard Turcott wrote an article about how the galaxies visible to the James Webb Space Telescope were among some of the oldest in our universe. But they were quite a bit larger than they should be. Modern cosmology's most widely accepted theories suggest that old galaxies would have been small. This was a tough piece of info that doesn't match most accepted theories of the creation and development of the universe. Were they wrong? Should they be re-thought?

Then, in an August 31 article on the website (which came out later than the issue because of print publication deadlines) Paul Sutter describes how astronomers may have been using an inaccurate measuring stick to determine distance. Rather than being far away, those galaxies were closer and thus of appropriate size.

Now astronomers and cosmologists have to study the matter to see which is which. If the galaxies are old and far away, some theories need changing. If they are close and ordinary, then the measuring methods for a lot of galaxies might need to be changed. Either way, people who understood things one way had to change their ideas when new evidence cropped up.

That's action that can be worthwhile in a lot of places.

Biiig Music

Today I received my gift for my investment in a Patreon project for a long-beloved but semi-defunct band named Caedmon's Call. They did write mostly for the Christian music market, but the primary songwriters had a telling gift for imagery and ideas that had wide appeal. Recently, for an anniversary of their initial album, they decided to reunite and re-record it. Through Patreon they offered several different gifts to help fund the project. My choice included, among other things, a vinyl double album of the release.

I'm not the guy to tell you that vinyl is superior to a CD. For one, I'm not sure there's that much difference and for another, too many loud shows in too many small clubs make sure I'll never hear whatever difference there might be. There's also the way vinyl records were pressed as CD sales rose. The records themselves became thinner and thinner -- cut a hole in the middle of one and glue it to the bottom of a top hat and you could set yourself up as Oddjob forthwith. I sold my collection about 15 years ago because I move too often and I owned about 700 heavy albums. I just kept a few and have added the odd title here and there.

The album I was sent today is a double album, gatefold cover. It's a big old chunk of memory. The ginormous photos, compared to a CD cover or worse, a digital music thumbnail. Checking out which disc is the first half and which is the second. Sliding it into place among some other remaining albums. All things that take me back to a world where cassettes were OK for cars and 8-tracks had their day, but if you wanted to listen to music the right way, you laid it on a spinning platter, cued up the needle and let it play.

Here's hoping Caedmon's Call does their second album the same way -- the first one is good but the second was my favorite. Either way, this evening sounds real, real good.

Bag of Grab

-- Ted Gioia notes that the commercial promise of artificial intelligence (AI) hasn't measured up to the hype surrounding the release. As with any number of internet advances, it has proven of most use in shady schemes to steal money from people.

-- My two favored presidential candidates right now are Tim Scott and Nikki Haley. Depending on which reaction story you may read, Scott did OK or poorly. I still like his optimistic vision for a presidency that suggests we have problems to solve, not existential crises to use as bludgeons against those with whom we disagree. I already liked Haley after her two years as ambassador to the UN, but I would like her even without that after opening up Vivek Ramaswamy's goofy, insubstantial marketing campaign and showing the box was empty.

At 37, Mr. Ramaswamy is the first millennial to campaign for a presidential nomination and his debate appearance ticked all the boxes of the stereotypes held of that generation. One of the primary and, for me, most fatal problems is the idea in this quote:  "If you have a broken down car you don't turn over the keys to the people who broke it again, you hand it over to a new generation to actually fix the problem,"  First of all, "again" should appear before "turn" or after "keys." Second of all, it's hard to see the most prosperous nation on earth as a "broken down car." It's got plenty of issues, but it still seems to be running. And third of all, Mr. Ramaswamy has done zip-a-dee-doo-dah to suggest he knows how to fix a car, let alone a nation. In fact, his appearance full of snappy put-downs and radio show call-in policy positions suggest he is part of the problem and would make it worse.

-- In surrendering to the charges brought against him in Georgia, former president Donald Trump decided his mug shot should be a ferocious scowl. It looks ridiculous. It looks like the kind of overdone response by a comedian playing a dad on a TV show when confronting his erring children, giving him the change to use his catchphrase as a non sequitur punchline. 

Dad: "Just what is the meaning of this, you two?"

Daughter: "Well I'm rebelling because you waited almost a year after knocking up my mom to marry her and then you left when I was four."

Son: "And I'm rebelling because you were sleeping with her mom before I was in kindergarten!"

Dad: "Oh, you two! I was just trying to Make America Great Again!"

(Cue laugh track for audience. Add rifle-ratchet noise if audience not loud enough)

Maybe We Do Need Some Education

In Scientific American, writer Lucy Tu describes a project that may one day help people speak who have lost the ability to do so. That condition, called "aphasia," is often a side-effect of injuries to the brain. People with damaged vocal cords can have the same condition.

Eye-movement-detecting computer screens allow many people to communicate, as did the late physicist Stephen Hawking. People without full use of vocal cords might touch a vibrating wand to their throats while speaking to make external sounds. Both techniques can sound mechanical.

But researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have gone several steps ahead of even that advance.

The team, led by researcher Robert Knight, used the electrical impulses read from research subjects as they listened to "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1", from The Wall. The subjects wore electrodes in the study so the electrical activity in their brains could be measured for another experiment on epileptic seizures.

Knight's later experiment involved people wearing the electrodes while they were undergoing surgery and the song was played during the procedure. All of the data was fed to an AI trained to decipher them, so researchers had a record of how the brain reacted to "Part One." It could distinguish which brain response reacted to which music sound. A different pitch made a different electrical response. Changes in rhythm -- which in "Part One" happen quite subtly -- also change what the brain does and the electrodes read.

Then the researchers used another AI to take the brain signals and change them into musical notes. The result, Tu writes, was a "roughly intact" melody and "garbled but discernible" lyrics. If you already know what's being sung, then you would probably be able to pick out the words. Ironically, this is the same technique used by religious rock-haters when saying that a Led Zeppelin song backwards is an homage to Satan. Sort of.

Knight said the research is in early stages and may one day actually allow people to speak in a normal human voice. He said the team chose "Part One" because it's musically complex and can bring a lot of responses in brain activity. And they like Pink Floyd.

In fact, Knight says, they might soon be able to have enough data to create a whole Pink Floyd album. Which almost certainly will get them sued by Roger Waters.

PS - Yes, I know that the post title is actually taken from lyrics in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2." All the lyrics in Part 1 deal with the wartime death of the singer's father. Didn't want to be that much of a downer.

Royal Mulch

In recent weeks I have not been able to play my solitaire game in its free mode without seeing ad after ad after ad after ad for a cheeseball little 3-match game called "Royal Match."

Of late the ads have upped their game, using known actors as shills spokespeople. But just like the generic spokespeople found in earlier ads, they promise the same thing: A game that is ad-free (Irony alert!), cost-free and featuring smooth animation and great graphics. Often some of those features are only available on desktop console ads, but Royal Match promises them on a free app game.

The shortcomings of the game can be found anywhere from review sites to Reddit. For one, it really is just a simple 3-match game like Candy Crush and a dozen others. The storyline is the only difference, and although the plague of ads describes matches that have to save King Roger from diabolical traps, most of the matches actually just allow the player to help the doddering twerp redecorate his castle. And although the game is free to play, the upgrades that allow players to complete higher and more difficult levels do cost money to buy.

But if I had a major gripe (oh, and indeed I do), the problem is the way the game is advertised as a way to take a player's "mind off things." The idea of distracting the mind from worrying about issues is not weird in any way. It's just that there are as many other ways to do that as there are Royal Match ads. And so many of those ways are creative -- a person can read, draw, write, listen to music, play an instrument, paint, plant, cook, volunteer, study something (I have a Book to recommend) or literally anything other than smearing fingerprints across a phone screen. Putting our minds on something good or creative is a fantastic way of getting them off something stressful or upsetting.

Ah, but some may note that I play some app games to. I just confessed to playing solitaire and I have elsewhere sung the praises of Wordle. Wordle, however, besides requiring some logical reasoning, is over and done with once per day. It's a pretty good way to kickstart my brain after my alarm goes off, and then it's done. Solitaire's also a logic puzzle mixed with luck. Although my app has recently added a "solve" button. After I press it (and watch yet another Royal Match ad), all I have to do is click on the highlighted cards. I may need to find a new solitaire app if they keep going in this direction.

In any event, go ahead and let King Roger get suffocated by slime, drowned in a pool, burned by a dragon, drilled to pieces by a mining machine or toasted alive in a fire. Then maybe whatever country that's been burdened with him can switch to democracy and elect people who won't drown in a transparent sewer pipe.

Inside Outside

Over at Nautilus, a site I didn't read as much as I should have during the Long Sleep, writer Erik Hoel suggests why novels are a richer form of storytelling than are movies.

Hoel's answer is pretty straightforward. It's pretty tough to get inside the minds of the people we meet or read about in the news. Even when they tell us what's on their minds, we can get only the small piece that they intend to share. But not only can we not get any of the unspoken parts of their minds and hearts, we can't know how much of what they have said is accurate. We can't know if they simply spoke in error or from a lack of knowledge or if they flat-out lied.

Although movies might try to get behind the barrier with narration, skillful acting or flashbacks, we're still required to guess what's going on. An actress weeps and depending on her skill we might know why the character in the story is supposed to cry. Hoel says such knowledge is shallower than that available in novels.

In novels, Hoel says, we are presented with fictional characters whose motivation is laid bare by the author. The story shows us why they do what they do -- unless of course the writer's a hack, but that's a whole different problem. This could be one reason we so often say that the book is better than a movie made from it -- because the book had a flavor of the imagination that the movie could not have. 

There's a lot to this, I think. On the other hand, a skillful script and director can do some things more quickly and efficiently that a novelist can. The novelist can describe Penny's inner struggle over re-starting an affair with Maverick. The battle between desire and genuine feeling set against the bad experiences of the past and Maverick's own here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle. And then relay her decision.

But the writers, director and actress Jennifer Connelly, with less than a minute of screen time, just a few lines and a very important door, can indeed convey what is going on inside Penny's head with extreme clarity. My survey sample is every guy I know who says, "ohhh," when we discuss the movie and anyone brings up the open door. The door, for those unaware, is the one Penny leaves open after Maverick has given her a ride home on his motorcycle. It's a door she shut after an earlier ride.

I guess my take is that when a movie is made sui generis, without any adaptation, skill can bring us to the hidden space inside a character's head and heart -- because there's no deeper understanding around to make a comparison. But when a novel is around to show the depth a great writer can unmask, the movie may be great, but it will fall short. Every musical or movie made based on Les Misérables, whether awesome, awful or indifferent, does not repay the work of fighting through about 1,200 pages of the novel.

Of course, for me sometimes the opposite happens too. I've watched the Kevin Coster, Robert Duval, Annette Bening movie Open Range more often than I can count. I've read Lauran Paine's The Open Range Men exactly once.

Four-Year Saviors

Note: I actually wrote this post yesterday but it slimmed down (and cooled down) considerably once I slept on it. Taking these steps makes me an internet apostate.

A couple of things I've seen recently have reminded me of one of the flaws in how we perceive our presidents over the last forty years or so. In recent days, I've overheard and read a large number of people who plan to vote for former president Donald Trump in spite of the likelihood he will spend much of the campaign as a defendant. The rationale: Things are so bad that "Trump's the only one who can save us."

Conversely, I have friends and family who think that President Biden is doing a poor job in many areas and also believe that he is too old to be an effective president, but they will vote for him if he is the nominee to "save us from another four years of Trump." The focus is narrower, but the idea is the same: We must vote for this candidate not to be an executive as described in Article II of the Constitution but to be a savior. Article II describes presidential duties, and the word "save" or "savior" appears therein only if you cut all the letters in the article apart, mix them up and pull out the ones needed to spell the words.

The notion of voting for a savior has long roots in our national history. Many say Abraham Lincoln saved the union -- but what he did was lead those who did the work, bloody and otherwise, of defeating the Confederacy and thus enabling the end of slavery along with the end of the rebellion. It's true that without Lincoln the many who desired the end of the rebellion and of slavery would still have worked for it, but without Lincoln's conviction and leadership they may not have succeeded. But without the many who desired, worked and bled, Lincoln would have done nothing. Similar caveats adorn FDR's record, or should.

In modern times, the transformation of president into savior probably began with Ronald Reagan. People who share my political persuasion see many accomplishments and many undoings of problems left by previous administrations. People who do not share my persuasion also do not have any notion of Ronald Reagan as a savior. In any event Reagan hired and appointed the people who got those things done. Again, he and others did the work, which is probably better conceived of fixing stuff rather than saving the nation.

But by the time Bill Clinton ran, the campaign made it clear he was to be voted for in order to save us from four more years of Republican presidencies. George W. Bush would save us from Al Gore's robotic goofiness and John Kerry's stentorian emptiness. Barack Obama saved us from all of the Republican evil, which at that time was concentrated in John McCain and Mitt Romney. Later, when a guy who actually was the kind of guy McCain and Romney were accused of being, everyone let them off the hook. A great deal of savior language would be applied to then-President Obama during his terms.

Many Donald Trump supporters believed he was a bad choice but he could save us from the possibility of President Hillary Clinton. And it is at this point the idea of president as savior completely falls apart. If in fact someone voted for Donald Trump for that reason, he achieved all they asked for as soon as he took office. But once taking office, presidents generally remain in that office for at least four years and we have to deal with their (usual lack of) ability during that time. In 2020, many people who thought Joe Biden was a lunkhead voted for him to save the nation from four more years of Donald Trump. And next year, we will be implored by both parties to vote for people who will peak on day one and get worse until their term ends.

Naturally, someone in my job recognizes an entirely different Savior, but many don't. I do believe that accepting the Savior I follow would improve a lot of things, but I'm not into forcing anybody. I just wonder, though, if it's too much to ask to say, "Try voting for a President rather than a savior. Just try, and let's see what happens."

Because if everybody else does the same thing in 2024 that they did in 2020 and puts two ancient grifters on the ballot again, I'll do the same thing I did and try to make the Libertarian Party nominee President of the United States.

Lycanthropy!

The condition of the title can be recognized, Johannes Actuarius tells us in his 1340 Therapeutike Methodos, by examining a person and discovering ulcerated feet and legs from nighttime hours spent wandering among tombs.

As recounted in Ask the Past, the afflicted person makes such wanderings as a wolf before returning in the morning in human form. Actuarius describes the condition as a "melancholy," which means something different to him than it does to us, but in any event the people suffering from the condition often remain silent and sad. All the same, one shouldn't try to comfort them in their wolfish form, as no amount of offered treats and "Oh, sad doggie!" are likely to curb their lupine appetite for, ah, fresh food.

Strangely, no mention is made of the clothing worn by sufferers. The snazzy dressing that makes survivors interested in the werewolf's tailor was apparently a later development.

Notes from a Cave on Chat GPT

You might not be surprised that longtime musician Nick Cave, an Australian pioneer of what is thought of today as Goth rock, would pretty much reject the idea that the Chat GPT AI has any role in creating music.

You might be surprised that a large part of Cave's argument rests on the idea that God's resting on the seventh day of creation implies "creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place." But Cave, one of secular music's few confessed Christians, has been long fascinated with the Old Testament and the struggles found therein.

His argument is simple as he answers a question from a fan who talks about hearing a songwriter praise how fast Chat GPT enables him to create lyrics. If there is no artistic struggle that he suggests is a part of all of creation, then what good is what is produced? You don't have to believe in a six-day creation to follow this idea, either. A good, old-fashioned Big Bang and evolutionary development vision of Earth will work just fine, as long as you entertain the idea that God's hand was at work. Spoiler: I sort of do.

Back in May I made fun of the way the Writers Guild of America strike might produce no noticeable dropoff in the quality of movie and TV writing, and in fact we might be better off if some of the Guild's members reduced their output.

But their reasoning is sound: Among other things, writers don't want studios to replace them with AIs  Even though so very much of modern TV and movies are written by hacks or by people performing an amazing imitation of them, the shows are still being written by people. There is a minute but real probability that whichever wordsmith threw the paint-by-numbers chum onto the screen in one of  Dick Wolf's retreads could get better.

Could Chat GPI? Not in any real way that counts. If someone is more specific in their requests -- a task which suggests a knowledge of language that ought to be put to use on a keyboard instead of a query box -- and if we feed the maw of the disposal more real words and real work, then it might produce something "better" than it does now. But it would be the same as the difference between finding a completely smushed tomato and a miraculously whole one that survived the reducing knives of the InsinkErator. It's still stuff that came out of the drain.

Chat GPI is less messy on your carpet. But like Nick Cave, I believe it robs humans of the work of creating. And, for myself, it involves giving up a piece of the image of God written into all of us, and exchanging it for speed. It won't be a good bargain.

Lament, Grave-Dancing or Warning?

I frequently read some very online writers, especially in the entertainment media, who lament and warn that Elon Musk will destroy Twitter -- or X as he calls it these days. Some of the stories gush schadenfreud at the predicted death of the company because Mr. Musk is pretty into letting people say what they want on his recently-acquired platform. Such users are very into letting people say what such users want and nothing else. Personally I don't care how it dies, I just want it dead. In the meantime, I can't figure out how I am supposed to approach a multibillionaire's purchase of a specific set of lines of code how he treats his purchase. My gut is to roll with the fact that this year marks 300 years since the birth of Adam Smith and just let a private individual do what he wants with what he bought as long as it's not illegal.

Besides, this is the only X I care about anyway

LEGO Science!

If you were a reader before I hibernated, you know that I enjoy the science writing of the German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. While I was sleeping, Dr. Hossenfelder added a newsletter with regular videos, a Patreon page and, as I discovered in a recent newsletter, a podcast as well as a second book.

In last week's newsletter, Dr. Hossenfelder picked up an item about biophysicists at the University of Arizona who needed what's called a "gradient mixer" to help purify something called DNA nanostructures. If you remember your high school science (or X-men movies) you might recall that DNA is a double-helix shape of protein molecules -- a twisty ladder. Scientists assemble these arrangements into larger shapes called nanostructures. The nanostructures can be made to carry information, leading to the possibility of biological computer processing. As well as a bunch of other things I am nowhere near understanding.

Anyway, to purify the structure, the biological material must be rotated in a "gradient mixer." Such mixers can be made of finely-tuned expensive parts. Or they can, as the team at Arizona learned, be made from LEGOs for much much less. I confess I find myself less fascinated by the science involved and much, much more interested in the way LEGO parts make up the equipment.

I'll keep my shoes on if walking around the lab in the dark, though. Stepping on those is still painful, even if they're being used for science.

Database

My posting was spotty the last several days due to some fun transferring a membership roll from an existing Excel spreadsheet to a new one in which the data were organized completely differently. The old one had merged cells, data not required in the new one that was linked directly to the data I wanted from the old one, and other sundry inconveniences.

Some of my transfer problems come, of course, from my limited ability to navigate Excel. I'm sure there are experienced users who could have gone "click, click" and had everything done before their coffee was cold. But some of the problems come because Excel is a spreadsheet app being used as a database, and those are two different things.

The electronic heirs of Messrs. Webster and Merriam identify a spreadsheet as "a computer program that allows the entry, calculation, and storage of data in columns and rows." The word first appeared in 1981. Whereas a database is "a usually large collection of data organized especially for rapid search and retrieval (as by a computer)." That word goes back to 1962. The entry also tells me, erroneously, that "database" can be used as a transitive verb. 

They seem very similar, of course, but as one who has used both Microsoft Access and Excel I can assure you that they are different. Access is designed to organize and sort data. Doing so on the program is intuitive and the rows and columns of a database can be sorted, organized and changed around very simply. Had our church's list and the requested format both been in Access the transfer would have been a lot quicker and a lot easier on my eyes.

But...Access is not offered for Mac users nor is it offered on Microsoft's home computer package. Most home users might not need it, but it seems to me that enough Mac-based businesses would probably buy it to make the conversion worth the while. Although maybe Microsoft knows things I don't that would make it not as easy as I believe it would be. Apple does offer database software but it's not bilingual, as it were, either.

So we are stuck with Excel -- which can be used as a non-accounting database most of the time even though the non-most times are a considerable pain -- because Excel is one of the programs Microsoft makes for Macs. We can all muddle through with a lesser tool because it's available for everyone.

This is just one of the things I remember every time I see or hear a Mac or PC ad that talks about how their products are designed with me, the user, in mind. Very little of the online or computing world is designed with the user in mind, except when the user is a source of revenue. For a continuing -- and better-written -- version of this rant focused on Facebook, see this post from Ted Gioia.

Maybe the Enemy is, But...

In recent days Fitch Ratings downgraded the debt of the United States from its highest standard, AAA, to AA+.  One possible consequence is a sell-off of U.S. securities, which are our instruments of debt. People buy them so the government has cash to start its tailgate bonfires, with the idea that one day, the government will buy them back at an increased price and the person who bought them in the first place will make money. Which, OK, everybody has to believe in something.

A couple of things should be noted -- Fitch Ratings says it has taken this move because of "a steady deterioration in standards of government." In the immortal words of John McLain, (no, not those), "Welcome to the party, pal!"

Our tendencies in government have been towards crowning our president, pundityfying our Congress and turning our Supreme Court into a super-legislature. The "steady deterioration" has been going on for a long time. The leaders of our parties are people who work for jobs they can't do and, apparently, don't want. Yes, Nancy Pelosi was pretty good at getting votes out of her party's members and Kevin McCarthy has rediscovered Article 1, Section 1 and is putting on a pretty good King Josiah act. But think back to the years between the election of Barack Obama and the death of Senator Ted Kennedy.

The Democratic Party controlled the White House, House of Representatives and had a veto-proof majority in the United States Senate. Yet it took then-Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi and then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid until 2010 and any number of parliamentary shenanigans to get the president's number-one desire, health care passed. If you remember the 1980s, do you have any doubt that had Tip O'Neil been around he would have had some kind of health care reform passed before Mitch McConnell came in to work and John Boehner finished his smoke?

The fuss should not be that Fitch has noticed steady deterioration in 2023 -- it should be that these standards have been deteriorating for quite the while now. Plus, AA+ will still let you buy a few tanks and such on credit; it's not that bad.

To close, several opinion pieces about the downgrade seemed to give it more impact than it has - as professor Don Boudreaux notes in this piece, our government has been downgraded. We're just fine.

...As Lonely Does

I have become an immense fan of Bari Weiss's The Free Press website, featuring a ton of great articles on fascinating things going on in our society. One that grabbed my attention was a recent item by Jenny Powers, an author who had been researching a book on the phone-sex industry in a time when no one actually calls on their phones.

Powers made an fascinating discovery -- large numbers of the men who call are not calling to talk dirty, but just to talk. And especially to talk to a woman. Our society has not lost the image of women as more ready to listen and more caring, and Powers says that many of the operators create what are called "vanilla" profiles in order to capitalize on the lonely guy market.

COVID might have played a role, Powers says, but Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that on a 2014 listening tour of the country he encountered a lot of people who felt invisible and alone. Robert Putnam wrote about civic disengagement, reducing the number of places where people might connect, in 2000's Bowling Alone.

The post title is taken from a song on The dBs third album, Like This. Called "Lonely Is (As Lonely Does), it makes the point that some of the cause of our loneliness rests on our own shoulders. And that's certainly true. I live alone and try to take steps to give myself some personal contact so it doesn't fall into the $1.99-a-minute category. The other youth leaders on Wednesday eat together but I eat with the kids. They asked how I could stand the noise and I said that almost my entire life is quiet. The noise they bring kind of energizes me.

But a lot of our lonely has come from the way our society has been moving towards atomization. Our own phones, our own music, our own entertainment, our own wrapped-up little world. It takes work to stop it -- eating with noisy kids who are one explosion away from throwing Cheetos. Eating out about once a week, just to be around people and talk to some of them.

And the work is a constant -- as Mr. Holsapple says, "Lonely's with us every day."

Astronomical

 I am an avid fan of the magazine Astronomy. Earlier versions of their online format were oddly, for a magazine devoted to science, awful. But I didn’t hesitate to go back to paper - and my local library is grateful, as they receive past issues.

Today I was reading one of their brief snippet stories and it spoke of something some millions of light years off. If you don’t know, that’s something so far off that light takes millions of years to get to us - it may look nothing like what we see if we were able somehow to see it in real time.

I read these figures frequently in the magazine but this evening for some reason the immensity and vastness of the universe truly struck me on this occasion. I’d sit out tonight and contemplate it but it’s going to be 93 degrees at 10 PM so I’ll imagine.

We really are small. I really am small. But my way of thinking gives me a Creator who can encompass both the vastness of the universe and me at one time. You, too. 

Somehow, that’s an even bigger “Whoa!”

The Book, Dramatized

I've been a fan of the multi-season biblical drama The Chosen, written by Tyler Thomson, Ryan Hopkins and creator-director Dallas Jenkins. Some of that is because it focuses heavily on the disciples, the normal human beings who have to try to navigate life while following Jesus. Some of it is because it features a vision of Jesus I like -- funny, wry and mountain-strong against the injustices the Pharisees and Romans inflict on the people.

Jenkins is the son of writer Jerry Jenkins, who tried to write about the second coming of Christ but was hampered by Tim LaHaye's rigid dispensationalism. After some failed commercial filmmaking Dallas found himself drawn to making religiously-themed movies, but without the preachiness or stodgy demeanor found in many of these films. Asked to provide a video for his church for Christmas 2017, Jenkins created The Shepherd, which became the pilot for The Chosen.

Genuine actors show up on the screen of these episodes -- the first season featured well-known character actor Erick Amari as Nicodemus in a poignant role. Frequent TV guest star Jonathan Roumie exults in humanizing Jesus, Shahar Isaac shows Peter as the leader Jesus needs him to be as well as the uncertain man who will one day deny his Lord. Oklahoma's own Elizabeth Tabish absolutely nails the pivotal role of Mary Magdalene, one of the most important women in Jesus' ministry.

Anyway, The Chosen has been around for awhile now and I didn't intend to write about it. It just gave me an idea. A professor at Westmont University in California named Sandra Richter did a video study on the biblical book of Ruth that could create an excellent screenplay. The Moabite woman who accompanied her widowed, childless mother in law back to Israel and left her own people and homeland. Through a course of fortuitous events -- and some nudging from the mother-in-law -- she catches the eye of a wealthy distant kinsman named Boaz. Eventually they marry and have a son, Obed, who was the grandfather of King David. She is one of the five women named in Jesus' genealogy.

Richter's understanding, which is drawn from 20-some years of studying the Old Testament and the environment of its people, suggests that rather than a romantic entanglement, Boaz takes Ruth in marriage because of her great devotion to her mother-in-law and her own cleverness in getting his attention. The next part is of her own devising, but Richter envisions a union of legal custom and respect growing into love, despite the age differences.

Neither filmed version of Ruth and Boaz's story takes this angle, focusing on romance (1960's The Story of Ruth)  or the sanctifying of the biblical characters (2009's The Book of Ruth).

I just kind of thought I'd like to see that version filmed because in my mind, it matched some of the mindset of the creators of The Chosen and it turned Ruth into my favorite book of the Bible. Every now and again, I guess I'm still going to ramble.

A Big Winner!

Maybe I'll be taking weekends off. Who knows?

Anyway, almost every morning in my email I get a couple of notices from the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes. They have four or five mailings they can do that will earn you an entry, but I'm self-limited to the main sales pitch and a search engine. The only one of the others I tried seemed to take about five minutes to finish, which is more time than I want to spend on an infinitesimal chance to win a jackpot.

The two I do take about three minutes. The search engine has a "matching number" type game the entrant plays four times (by which I mean makes one click apiece and watches a 30-second commercial), after which the entrant types something into the search window. I usually type in "(current president's name) worthless," and I have done so since I began entering sometime in 2009. If you're thinking that I, as a conservative person, might have changed my entry between January 2017 to January 2021, you did not read some of the posts before my hiatus.

Anyway, two things before I close: Awhile, I noticed a distinct change in the main entry, which is a chance to buy items from the PCH catalogue. Formerly, when one completed the three pages of stuff-you-could-get-cheaper-anywhere-else, it was somewhat implied that one must also navigate three pages of magazine subscription offers in order to make one's entry. But sometime around six weeks ago, the page that popped up when the entrant finished the merch pages said that there was no need to click anywhere else. My guess is someone reported the company, but I have no idea when because I can't find any news stories anywhere. Whatever, it shortens my entry time by about 90 seconds.

I am also an actual PCH winner. About three years ago, they mailed me a check for ten dollars. Not much? I quote the sage Geddy Lee -- "Ten bucks is ten bucks."

Lazarus?

This past week, an odd thing happened. Counting today’s self-referential post - which you’re free to not count if that’s your way of things - I’ve blogged each day since Monday.

Before this week, I’d posted twice all year. I’m not patting myself on the back, I’m just surprised it’s happened. A number of issues in ye olde personal life as well as my profession had left me not that interested in posting since apparently February 2021. I wondered if I had just passed the part of my life where I threw my thoughts into wherever thoughts go when we blog. But recently, it seems like that’s changed. Permanently? Completely unknown. 

But the post rolled out, and looking up info went smoothly. This particular cyber-homestead has been in my care since January 2008. Maybe I’m taking up residence again. If so, and you’re a former reader who found your way back, thanks. There may be plenty of action in this keyboard yet.

On Second Thought...

Yesterday I made fun of the way a woman who bought one of Hunter Biden's paintings had found herself appointed to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. I also made fun of the commission, since it focused on Eastern and Central European areas that have been extensively explored in movies that involve pale gentlemen with a fondness for red and nighttime.

I've since learned that a great deal of the Commission's work instead focuses on the preservation of things like Jewish cemeteries and memorials to Holocaust victims, as well as archives and documents relating to them. This is not by itself a bad thing. Large numbers of people who have come to the U.S. were victims of oppression by both the Nazis and Soviet-dominated regimes. Others had been smacked around by the dictators' predecessors.

So in essence, the commission's goals are not bad ones. When the bill containing it was sponsored in 1985 by then-Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and signed by Ronald Reagan, there was significant worry that the totalitarian regimes of those areas would work pretty hard to destroy the past. Because that's what dictators do, just like the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Yes, we kicked their tails after they moved on to skyscrapers, but as we learned when the current administration brought back the old Saigon Helicopter Shuffle in August of 2021, American tail-kickings have an expiration date.

But...it's not the government's job -- our government's job, anyway. While the description of its mission says it's to work with the State Department to help obtain assurances from other governments that these sites will be preserved and maintained, I live among a bunch of people who can tell you what government assurances are worth. There might be a ton of private donation money and nice smiles and pats on the head. But there's no way to insure some of these governments will honor any assurances unless we hang a picture of a "Your Secret Hideout" -marked ICBM in whatever language required in that president or leader's office.

While Commission members themselves are unpaid, their travel and hotel stays and meals are covered. The Commission staff average salary is $125,000. There are other staff, of course, so the total cost is probably higher than that. When created in 1985, the Commisson received no federal funds. In 1990, after Reagan was gone but while Lugar was still in office, the Commission received its first federal appropriation. For FY 2023-2024, it has available $1.03 million to spend.

The point is not saving the government money. The points are that this is not a task for government and that even an agency begun without any government expense, created by a couple of those mean old pinch-penny Republicans, will eventually start costing something. 

Things might get so bad someone would buy an ugly expensive painting just for a chance to sit at the table and listen to chairwoman Star Jones lead the meeting.

Painting Hunter

There is a to-do because the identity of one of Hunter Biden’s painting purchasers has been discovered, and she is a significant Democratic Party donor who received a presidential appointment.

The buyer is a woman named Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali and she paid an unknown sum for one of Biden the younger’s works, priced anywhere between $75,000 and a half a million dollars. In 2022, Ms. Hirsh Naftali was appointed to the United States Commission on the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad, and whatever part of me is still libertarian just broke out in hives.

As Jim Geraghty’s piece notes, the USCPAH “identifies, protects and preserves cemeteries, monuments and historic buildings in Eastern and Central Europe that are associated with U.S. heritage. I have no idea how this works. I was under the impression that cemeteries, monuments and historic buildings in Eastern and Central Europe were all older than the United States. I was also under the impression, thanks to Christopher Lee, that the residents of the cemeteries in many parts of Eastern Europe are perfectly capable of maintaining them without U.S. assistance, as they leave their graves for evening strolls and, um, dinner.

What American heritage are we preserving? Was Dracula staked with a filed-down Louisville Slugger that needs a little varnish now and again? Is China sneaking some contraband O-neg to all the toothy crowd and underselling good old red-blooded American…blood?

Anyway, the question now seems to be whether or not Ms. Hirsh Naftali obtained this plum membership as a result of her purchase. The White House denies this, saying that Ms. Hirsh Naftali was recommended by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. I have a simple solution to determine this. Find out where the painting is hanging. If it’s in the guest bathroom, things look a little iffy. If it’s in the house of a least-favorite in-law who might have voted for Reagan, then it’s clearly a grift.

Gravitee, Gravitoe; What It Might Be We Just Don't Know

Ever since experiments revealed the quantum nature of much of the universe, most physicists have assumed that all of the four forces -- electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravity -- could eventually be "quantized." In simplest terms, they believed that all four forces would one day be explained by quantum theory.

After many decades of theories and experiments, three of the forces are indeed explained by quantum theory -- the idea that at its most basic level, everything is made up of infinitesimal particles that work together to create the effect of a field. The only force not playing along is gravity. There have been some supposin's about why this is the case.

One is that gravity, even though it plays a very important role in everyday life, is the weakest of all the forces. Waves in all the three forces had been discovered early in the history of this research. But although gravitational waves were first proposed in 1905, they are so weak they were not actually detected until 2015. As it is so weak, the idea goes, our ability to examine it to find out if it is quantized and how so is also very weak.

There are other reasons suggested for why we have not been able to develop what is usually called a "theory of quantum gravity." But some physicists, like Jonathan Oppenheim of University College London, have offered a much simpler reason that theorists can't quantize gravity: Gravity can't be quantized.

This possibility has been around as long as quantum theory has, but it's been exiled to the fringes because it requires reality to be explained by a mix of quantum theory and classical theory. But none of the thinking going on in quantum land allows that to be true, because quantum theory's new discoveries and experiments all hinged on the idea that quantum would replace classical Newtonian physics. It explained so many things so much better that it just had to explain gravity too.

But Oppenheim offers several conundrums about what things might look like if quantum gravity is ever discovered, none of which I understand well enough to relate with any confidence. We can just sum it up by saying he believes the universe has three quantum forces and one non-quantum force.

His suggestion is, of course, about as popular as a co-ed dorm would be to a dad with a daughter in 1962: Classical and quantum don't mix, and neither do my precious princess and those slavering Lotharios in button-downs and penny loafers.

It could be interesting to see how things happen. Gravity may not be a force like the other three. Some as-yet-unknown experiment could reveal the path to quantum gravity. Or something else entirely. The goal for a scientist -- despite the language they may use to title a paper -- is simplicity. A hybrid quantum-classical universe is not as simple as a fully quantized one, but it may be as simple as it gets.

Small, as in Town

The recent Jason Aldean song "Try That in a Small Town" has caused a stink. Because some people can stretch any idea into the territory of evil thoughts, country artist Aldean is now accused of preaching the idea of lynching as a proper response to civil unrest and rioting. Most of the dust-up happened when the video was noticed, since it played scenes from recent unrest and rioting projected onto a small-town courthouse while Aldean sang about the contrast between urban and rural life. He focused on the difference between the kind of unrest and rioting recently prevalent in cities and the firm resolve to "act right" held by small town people -- specifically, "good ol' boys raised up right." CMT, the country music video channel, pulled the video from rotation because some people decided Aldean was, indeed, singing the praises of lynching. The video currently has 16 million views on YouTube and the song is one of the top downloaded tracks on several music sites.

Some folks see proof of the lynching call by the video's use of the Columbia, Tennessee courthouse - the site of the 1927 Henry Choate lynching. I don't think Jason Aldean knows that much history. While the song doesn't promote lynching, it is awful. Although Aldean is a star, few, if any country musicians of the 2050s are going to be singing a song called "Jason Aldean" the way Aldean covered the song "Johnny Cash."

Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing in National Review, points out that "Try That in a Small Town" picks up none of the small-town attributes that could actually help make our nation and culture better. She cites John Mellencamp's  "Small Town" from 1986's Scarecrow as a song that proclaims the kind of gentle, slowed-down vision of small-town life that actually counter the Instant Rage that is so easily created by people on every side of every issue at any time.

As a bona fide X-er, I'm also on board with Mellencamp's understanding of the actual virtues of small town life, although I think Alan Jackson's semi-biographical ode to his father, "Small-Town Southern Man" from 2008's Good Time, is just a hair better. Neither shows the whole picture. But which has the best potential of helping people heal the hurts society and hatred have put on them? Being "raised on ways of gentle kindness" (Jackson)? "Yeah I can be myself in this small town/and people let me be just what I wanna be" (Mellencamp)? Or "See how far you make it down the road" (Not actually Aldean because he doesn't write his songs)?

Neither Mellencamp nor Jackson dwell on the totality of small-town life (for that, check into Lora Webb Nichols photographs of her life in small-town Wyoming). And neither spend any time on the underbelly of rural life. They do in fact leave out unemployment, racism, cronyism, alcoholism and drug abuse, the sexual assaults covered up to protect the "good boys who made a mistake," and other such sins as may be found wherever there are human beings. And the way a small-town can twist such sins by everybody cementing their evaluation of a person based on the worst thing they've ever done or that everyone thinks they've done.

The virtues they extoll are not the whole picture, of course. But "Small Town" and "Small-Town Southern Man" do extoll virtues. All "Try That" does is tell you, "We'll beat your ass if you do stuff we don't think is right." That's the message that rioters and anarchists know well, and adding fuel to that fire helps nobody and nothing.

Plus, as mentioned above, it's a lousy song and it's tough to believe it took four guys to write it.

Writers' Revelatory Strike

Two friends -- one from college and one from high school -- responded to my Facebook suggestion that, after seeing lists of shows delayed or even canceled by the current Writers Guild of America strike, I was not exactly unhappy with the strike's fallout.

The suggestion arose that TV show reruns from the past. My female high school friend suggested M*A*S*H* and I added China Beach, and my male college friend seemed OK with both. He's also the one that noted networks are likely to respond with rafts of "unscripted" reality shows, so I cast evil spirits out of him and he's resting comfortably.

One part of the fallout was that I learned China Beach is not streamed anywhere. So I bought a boxed set of DVDs that has a sexualized box cover that kind of goes against what the show tried to do with TV nurses. No problem, I won't need the box and there's recycling in the next town over.

Another part of the fallout was that some other people in the discussion in real life disagreed with the idea that shows from earlier eras might stack up as well or even higher than today's "Prestige TV." This is an idea that TV today -- or perhaps just a few years ago -- is the best television ever in terms of writing, acting and concepts.

The exhibits are usually listed thusly: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, The Wire, Mad Men and several others, depending on the lister's preferences. Qualities they are said to share are morally complex protagonists, great acting, questionable behavior on the part of the protagonists and such.

They sometimes play fast and loose with the truth. Arizona school teacher Walter White would have had some pretty good insurance when he was diagnosed with cancer, meaning he did not need to sell a chemical that ruins hundreds of thousands of lives ands ends thousands of others. And his willingness to do so indicates he did not "break bad" so much as "continue to be bad and actually get worse."

Organized crime is not dominated by colorful and conflicted people like Tony Soprano, Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri or the latest entry, Sylvester Stallone's Dwight "The General" Manfredi. Stallone's character is the lead of Tulsa King, a show shot almost exclusively in Oklahoma City. Organized crime is filled with people who will addict people, prostitute people (mostly women), kill people and do whatever else needs to be done to make money legally and otherwise.

Ranchers do not brand their workers and murder and beat people up before breakfast. Ask a real rancher to take someone "to the train station" and you'll likely hear, "Can't. That closed down years ago."

Anyone who wants to like any of these shows should do so, of course. Almost every one of them have some fascinating characters, situations, or scenes. Ray McKinnon, Timothy Olyphant and John Hawkes create a marvelous three-minute vision of the meaning of friendship in the episode "Mr. Wu" of Deadwood.

But there's almost always a flip side. The same Deadwood  features a scene in which Powers Boothe's character brutally beats two swindling children on camera. They suffer permanent brain damage before he kills them.

As I ramble to a point, I guess I'm stuck with the idea that making villains into protagonists produces ugly entertainment. Best to elect them to public office in state and national capitals. Reality is all too often ugly enough, and they fit in just fine.

Reason to Hope

Signs of life!

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter there have been many, many people who have suggested that his management will run Twitter into the ground and kill it. I'm mystified -- not because I think Musk is somehow infallible -- but because everyone who says this seems to be trying to warn people about Twitter's demise. Or, more often, cast themselves as prophets by picking out some negative news about the company and saying, "See, I told you so," in an attempt to convince readers they are indeed the people smart enough to see what was inevitably going to happen.

Although since the ruin of Twitter was supposed to be inevitable once Musk purchased it I can't see how pointing out the signs of that ruin verifies their "told you so" status.

In any event, this talk of Twitter's demise is all cast as though it would be a bad thing. I could not disagree more. I don't believe that a great deal of our modern animosity was caused by Twitter, or that the current pathetic state of journalism directly stems from journalists' use of the platform. But I do believe that Twitter has enabled the worst elements of cultural disagreement to push to the front of our national stage. And I do believe it has enabled the herd instinct of reporters who all go to the same schools and come from the same economic backgrounds to metastasize into the group-think that passes for political and national-issue reporting at most major news outlets.

When you acquire a kitten, you notice immediately its habit of attacking things that aren't there, as well as its habit of attacking things much larger than itself, such as the foot of the human who feeds it. This total hostility towards so many things can be ignored because kittens are cute and because they weigh less than a pound. Should someone for some reason find a way to enlarge young kittens with the size and weight of, say, an elephant, then they could do major damage. They would now have the size to allow their psychopathic tendencies to matter.

Twitter has become whatever the thing would be that would change tiny homicidal fuzzballs into six-ton homicidal fuzzballs. Anything that lessens its ability to magnify and instantly transmit some of the worst of humanity should be welcomed.

Besides, you can't even calm it down by scratching its head.