Ten-Seven

My Facebook header pic of an Israeli flag has been up for 10 months and will remain so until every living hostage is at home and every murdered hostage rests in native soil.

But on the first anniversary of the terror attacks by Hamas, I also think of my own country, and how in far too many places, even pictures of those hostages are not safe. We often consider ourselves and our views of the 21st century as far more enlightened than previous days, and how our understanding of other cultures is more inclusive.

In this one area, though, I think a figure of the 18th century might teach us today, and the words of the first president could prove fruitful for his successors’ contemplation. George Washington’s letter “to a Hebrew Congregation” in Rhode Island in 1790 during the second year of his first term is a response to a letter of congratulations from The Congregation of Khal Kadosh Yeshuot Israel, sent to mark Washington’s visit to Newport, RI. In it, the new president quotes the synagogue leader’s words back to him and assured that the in the new nation, there would be “to bigotry no sanction; to persecution no assistance.” He closed with this paragraph:

“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Of course we note how far short Washington fell of his own standard, especially when it came to racial attitudes and slavery. But at least he held a standard, and claimed it, and it is one when it is kept could be an aspiration of all of us toward all of us.

The standard so visible on college campuses and in the tearing hands of poster vandals is a different one, I fear. An older one, come round again at last, that seeks not a lasting solution, but a final one.

No, Really, I Come to Bury Oscar

Excitement over the Killers of the Flower Moon movie made in my community translated in me being interested in the Academy Awards for the first time in many a day. I was especially interested in Lily Gladstone, nominated for best actress, and Scott George, nominated for the best original song.

Gladstone was nominated for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart, the woman whose bravery and determination eventually helped expose the murder of Osage people by white men trying to secure the wealth of their oil. George's song "Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” was featured in the movie in a scene showing modern Osage dancing.

George and several Osage singers and dancers performed the song onstage, a historic moment in itself. "Wahzhazhe" is the name of the Osage people in their own language before it was Franco-fied by the French-speaking traders who met them, and Osage people shot off fireworks near town when the performance aired.

He lost to "What Was I Made For?" from Barbie. Academy members often pride themselves on their liberal or even progressive attitudes about most social issues, but they have always been gun-shy about going all the way to elevate something entirely from another culture and in another language. The first movie not shot in English to win a statue was the Korean horror move Parasite in 2019.

While "Jai Ho" won best song from 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, it was an English translation of the song in the soundtrack. "Naatu Naatu" from the 2022 Telugu-language action movie RRR was the first and only non-English song to have won an Oscar. The vaunted progressivism goes out the door when given a chance to reward music from Native Americans -- and correct the gross caricatures of  "Indian music" from movies of years past. The Academy's songwriting members went with a hit song from a hit movie about one of the most ubiquitous toys in America.

Gladstone, along with Annette Bening (Nyad) and Carrie Mulligan (Maestro), played a historical character. Diana Nyad is an out LGBT journalist who, after several tries, swam from Cuba to Key West in 2013 at the age of 64. Mulligan played Costa Rican actress and activist Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, the wife of composer Leonard Bernstein, the maestro of the title. Winner Emma Stone of Poor Things and Sandra Hüller of Anatomy of a Fall played fictional characters.

Despite my antipathy towards the awards, I've always believed that the nominees for different acting categories are generally good performances from talented people. Yes, Whoopi Goldberg won the Best Supporting Actress category in Ghost, but every theory has holes.

But when given the chance to make history and buttress its progressive bona fides by rewarding Gladstone's performance, or to honor actresses who brought two other extraordinary women's lives to the screen, the Academy's acting members thought it best to laud an actress who plays a woman given the brain of her unborn child who then indulges in lots of sex and socialism.

Over the last 25 years or so, women playing characters in normal situations or playing historical characters have occasionally won Oscars, but it's not the way to bet. When there's weirdness or excessive sexuality (or both), lay your money on the actress playing that character. Because the Academy voters probably will.

Prodigal Returns?

An update on my wandering package: At 10:32 AM today it made it back to Tulsa and now has a reasonable chance of reaching my mailbox. Of course, Tulsa is where it went awry before, so who knows?

In any event, I’m looking forward to hearing about what the New Orleans suburbs are like.

Neither Snow nor Rain nor Sleet...

So on February 8 I ordered a book. It was in a store near Houston. ABEbooks sent me the tracking number, so I could see what our mighty Postal Service was doing with the book. I've looked things up before like this, because sometimes it's interesting to watch them come from distant places.

This time it was very interesting. The book made it's way up through Texas to reach Oklahoma City by February 10. Later that day, it went to Tulsa, and the expected delivery date showed Feb. 11, which was early. The next day it was still in Tulsa and showed a delivery date of Feb 12. Instead, on February 12, my book from near Houston arrived at the United States Postal Service Shipping Center in New Orleans, and the due date disappeared, replaced by a message that my package was "moving through the system" and would be delivered late. All through today it showed "In transit to the next station." It arrived at the next station -- Saint Rose, LA, at 8:58 PM local time. Saint Rose is a suburb a short way west from New Orleans.

So I tried to figured out why my package started heading towards Louisiana, and your guess is as good as mine. The city of Roseland, Louisiana, has a ZIP Code that has the same digits as mine except the second and third digits are switched, which right now is my best guess. Fortunately my exact street address does not exist in Roseland, so there is a chance someone will wake up and send it back to Pawhuska.

There are days when I neither want to send anything through the United States Postal Service nor order from anyone who ships with them. So far, all of the days since the original expected delivery have been those days. And counting.

An Interesting Idea

Writer Leah Libresco Sargent reviews a book in the latest edition of National Review on how the efforts to use social media algorithms to keep users scrolling have “flattened culture.” I haven’t read the book, by Kyle Chayka, but Sargent’s opinions on the same issues are interesting in themselves.

Other books and articles have shown us that social media algorithms are designed to keep our eyes on the app, and that they exploit some of humanity’s most atavistic traits to do so. We evolved to keep an eye out for danger, so we are drawn to bad news. It’s more informative than good news in terms of identifying threats. That’s why many of the articles we read have clickbait ads at the bottom such as one that tells us sugar doesn’t cause diabetes - this does! Or that doctors beg Americans not to eat this food. Often accompanied by grotesque pictures that have little to do with the subject at hand but which activate the part of the brain that wants to slow down and see the wreck, they are junk science at best. But the advertiser doesn’t care if these ads are true - only that you click on it.

Chayka says that social media as it currently exists is just a more genteel version of the same thing, designed to grab eyeballs with less grotesque but equally intriguing lures. Sargent says both hide an identical hook, and neither proprietor gives a durn about the impact of their offerings. Her suggestion that we think of Big Tech offerings as another so-called sin industry - like alcohol, tobacco or pornography - probably goes a little too far. But creating the idea that social media is best used, if at all, in sparing doses by grown-ups would probably make a bunch of things better.

The Sophie’s Choice Election

In the Norman Styron novel and Meryl Streep movie of the name Sophie’s Choice, the title character carries with her a dark secret. On being sent to the Auschwitz death camp, she was told she could keep one of her children and she sent her daughter Eva to the gas chambers.

I can’t be the first person to compare an election to the horrible choice forced on the fictional Sophie Zawistokawa. But I think this election merits it. We seem overwhelmingly likely to be forced into a 2020 sequel in the presidential election, and we will probably have to experience January 2025 through January 2029 with either a sack of raging overbronzed suet behind the Resolute desk or a President who gets told “Good boy” when he finishes signing a bill without a nap.

Much is made of how the primary voting system allows the people to speak on their candidates, taking the choice out of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of the days of undemocratic (small D) party bosses selecting the “right person” (non-political use of the term ‘right’). But no smoke-filled room ever produced two men so completely unsuitable for the office of President or so uniquely incapable of doing the job.

Recently, Republican candidate Nikki Haley was asked if she would accept a vice-presidential spot on a ticket with Mr. Trump. She said she wasn’t running for second place (a significant overestimation of the vice-presidential role). That was smart, because saying, “My body couldn’t stand the weight loss of all of the barfing I’d do whenever I was on stage with this offal” might have looked bad. Yes, she worked in his administration, but as the Ambassador to the United Nations in New York. Not Washington. 

Even though he’s likely to win the nomination, Mr. Trump couldn’t let Ms. Haley say she wouldn’t take the job - he had to say it wouldn’t be offered. At a rally in New Hampshire, he said she wasn’t “presidential timber.” Sticking with that metaphor, Mr. Trump isn’t either. Unless “presidential timber” describes an empty shell of bark on the forest floor that crumbles when touched.

President Biden is simply a different kind of awful. His reversal of what he believed to be Mr. Trump’s unfair border policies has resulted in a deluge of people crossing the border unprocessed - in numbers large enough that Senator John Fetterman equated them to “essentially Pittsburgh showing up at the border.” Pres. Biden, in a brief Q & A with reporters, said there is indeed a problem at the border, and he’s been saying so “for the past ten years.” He said - ostensibly to Congress, otherwise that reporter’s on the hook for a lot of dough - “Give me the money.” But there isn’t any money, Mr. President. You gave it away at the beginning of your term in a third Covid-relief package that brought us Saturday Night Fever-era inflation rates.

President Biden could truly serve the country by selecting a running mate that could be President, since he’s almost certain to become unable to perform his duties should he win in November. But acknowledging that Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t do the job would require him to admit to a mistake and to piss off most of his base. No modern politician has that kind of courage, so it won’t happen. It would get him my vote, though, because I could claim I did not vote for a senescent grifter, I voted for the competent understudy. 

If Mr. Trump truly loved the country he wants to make great, he’d step aside for either Ms. Haley or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Either of them would build on his seemingly unintentional first-term victories and have the advantage of 1) Not mounting a batshit insane revenge party and 2) Not being batshit insane. But again, he’d have to admit mistakes, see reality and act for the greater good of someone other than himself - courage and vision impossible for a modern politician.

The choice in my headline is this lousy pun: Vote for awful? Or vote for offal? On the page, the words sound the same but mean different things. The horrid reality of November 5, 2024 is the reverse: They sound different but mean the same thing: Four years of dreary rage.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."