At the Appointed Hour

A friend posted pictures of her daughter at the prom, resplendent in a lovely red gown and dancing with her handsome date.

One of the pictures keyed the memory of what I always considered the best time of any dance, especially one where you had to start out in a jacket and tie. Maybe an hour or so in, maybe a little more, when the jacket is somewhere draped over a chair that you might remember, you've perspired your way through the starch in the shirt so it's noticeably more flexible than when you started, your sleeves are up at least a turn and your tie is at half mast. Girls have traded heels and pumps for Chucks or running shoes or maybe just bare feet. The frequency of slow dances has increased but some top 40 jive still remains and you'll have a few more chances to rip it up.

I didn't know dances worked that way anymore -- seems like lots of prom pics show girls in dresses they can't really walk in, let alone dance, and guys eschewing ties or even tuxes for blazers and jeans. It's nice to get an inkling that the important things are still the same.

An Overlooked but Essential Point

Many online pundits and commenters today have kicked around what it might mean were billionaire Elon Musk to purchase Twitter outright, as he has made an offer to do. Musk says he will take the company private and make many changes.

On the one hand, this is a fun fracas to watch. Musk's commitment to free speech bothers folks who are less happy with it, and their reactions have ranged from disapproval to angry denunciation to weapons-grade tantrums. These are amusing because the number of people who use Twitter regularly is still a small percentage of the world's population and there's a certain glee in watching people get bent out of shape over something you don't care about. Folks appreciative of irony can note that among those shapes most bent out are persons who claim the title of journalist -- people whose right to work and say what they think is protected by the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and a free press.

On the other hand, even if Musk does buy the company and spends a glorious several weeks making a bunch of its employees get jobs, the end product will still suck. Because the end product of a drive to make a better Twitter is, unfortunately, still Twitter.

General Relativity Works...Change My Mind

A popular meme has comedian Steven Crowder sitting behind a table with some statement on a piece of poster board in front of him. Underneath the statement is the phrase "Change my mind." It comes from a segment Crowder does on his Louder with Crowder program. The meme offers users the chance to insert their own opinion phrase and some clever folks will Photoshop new faces onto Crowder's body or just an entirely new person behind the table.

In a recent Back ReAction blog entry, physics professor Sabine Hossenfelder notes that Albert Einstein's what seem to be absolutely correct formulations of special and general relativity have been proven correct with many experiments -- dating back to just after he published the papers containing them through today. But, Dr. Hossenfelder notes, many physicists spend a great deal of time and energy trying to prove both theories wrong. Why?

Well, she notes, both theories deal with what is called classical or Newtonian physics. Such a study rests on Isaac Newton's famous laws of motion which describe the behavior of moving and stationary objects we might encounter in daily life. But when the objects of study are incredibly small or incredibly fast, Newtonian physics do not apply and researchers turn to the fields of quantum physics and quantum mechanics. Not unexpectedly, theories based on Newtonian physics also do not work well when applied to quantum studies, and that includes both theories of relativity.

Hossenfelder sums up several different areas of inquiry that have proving Einstein wrong as their ultimate goal. The problem is that he was indeed brilliant and his theories have a way of showing true during experiment after experiment -- we lack the ability to make the kind of observations and measurements of quantum phenomena that would show where he erred.

It is as though Einstein himself responds to the efforts to show him wrong with a frequently repeated, "I may not be right, but I'm still closer to it than you are."

This kind of thing interests me because it shows that self-examination is always a part of science and the idea of "settled science" is not a particularly serious one. And it highlights a very important aspect of my day job as a clergy person. Questions designed to investigate and uncover the truth ought never be unwelcome, especially when one claims to be following a God who claims to be in all things exactly that: True.

Ain't A-Gonna Pay No Toll

From the days when our country still had enough of a common culture that a single novelty song could send a mid-level fad into a national craze. Even my aunt bought a CB radio. Let them truckers roll, C.W.  

Blue Texas?

The post title does not represent the biennial wish of the Texas Democratic Party -- at least until they realize they might be saddled with Governor Beto. No, it's helping me point you to a link on Ted Gioia's Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker.

Gioia describes how a couple of books let him to give a talk on Mississippi Delta blues music while in Austin, and how thoroughly he was then castigated by another speaker for omitting any reference to Texas' own blues history and tradition. In the post, Gioia helps you avoid his mistake by offering some representative and potentially defining tracks of Texas blues for your listening. Which you should, by the way, do.

Much of the time, writing about music gets to be a little tiresome once we wander outside the purposeful realm of the review or critique. The difficulty of describing something aural with words links up with the malleability of the words themselves to create what's just as likely to be fannish fog as focused insight. Check out any of the blurbs for entries from the old Daytrotter Sessions at Wolfgangs.com for numerous examples.

Gioia, however, seems to have been granted the gift of fog removal and sharpening focus and is, as usual, worth reading on the subject while listening to the tracks he suggests. As mentioned before, as long as Substack puts Ted Gioia's thinking and writing about music within my reach, it justifies its existence.

The Virginian Meets Tony Soprano

Recently the free TV streamer Pluto TV -- it's free because they insert commercials, and I wish I could remember where I'd heard of that before -- began airing the first three seasons of Taylor Sheridan's modern Western Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner. I watched the first season and a few other episodes.

The post headline gives you a picture of what you're watching. Set on the sprawling Yellowstone ranch, owned and run by Costner's clan patriarch John Dutton, Yellowstone calls to mind the 1962-71 series The Virginian, starring James Drury and Doug McClure. Drury was the foreman on a ranch owned by Judge Henry Garth (Lee J. Cobb) and McClure was his top hand, Trampas. Like the Duttons, Judge Garth often faced schemes to acquire part of his land or his cattle and was always battling the folks in second place to keep them from pulling him down. The Virginian's fast draw (Drury's character never had a name) or perhaps Trampas's would finally be called on to end the threat.

Yellowstone's Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) combines Drury and McClure's character, but Dutton's daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly) is a far cry from Judge Garth's charge Betsy. She's a borderline sociopath fiercely loyal to her father and other family members. She's devious, manipulative and when holding the power in a relationship clearly a bully herself. Wheeler himself has little to no hesitation about killing John's enemies when required or when John directs him to, and violence seems to be the first item in his toolkit when handling about any situation.

Borrowing a little bit from Dallas, Kaycie Dutton (Luke Grimes) is the good son, married to a local Native American teacher and father to Tate. His past as a Navy SEAL often haunts him, even though he is mostly content with life. Bad son Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley) is loyal to his father but has his own ambitions that don't always parallel the family's. Dutton's recurring opponent is Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) of the nearby Broken Rock Indian Reservation. The tribe seeks the return of large portions of the Dutton ranch to their ownership.

The show offers a lot of trappings of a Western drama and characters are regularly framed against gorgeous Utah-standing-in-for-Montana scenery. A lot of the Western ideals about self-reliance, protecting your own and standing for the rights of the individual against faceless corporations or bureaucracies feature prominently. But as the other show in the headline might indicate, the people espousing these ideals rarely hesitate to set them aside if need be. The code is held most strongly when it is to their advantage, otherwise it's a tissue to be held up and imperfectly cover bloody violence.

Yellowstone suffers from the tendency to bring forth Great Philosophical Pronouncements from its characters (especially when they are framed by the aforementioned gorgeous Utah-as-Montana scenery), as well as all too frequently having them declare that the previous nasty fight wasn't nasty and now things will really get nasty. The acting hits a wide range. Costner is essentially playing himself, and while Grimes and Kelsey Asbille as his wife Monica bring a lot of layers to their characters, Bentley is all too often not much more than a handsome profile -- what's meant as conflicted appears more as wooden -- and Reilly chows down on more than her share of scenery. Perhaps Beth is supposed to be larger than life but she usually just winds up as over the top.

In more ways than one, Yellowstone also recalls the nighttime soaps of the 80s: Dallas, Dynasty, Knot's Landing and others. Perhaps its storylines are a little more realistic and perhaps its setting a little more believable than the sprawling mansions inhabited by the Ewings, the Carringtons and the denizens of Seaview Circle. And perhaps cowboy hats, Wranglers and aviator shades look cooler than the padded shoulders wielded by Joan Collins and Linda Evans. 

But even so, Yellowstone seems to be a chef's salad of several other dramas, pulling violence and language from The Sopranos, outrageous family drama from Dallas and the like and the ranch-against-the-world setting of The Virginian. The seams show, the blend is off and the show...can be skipped.

Lessons Learned in the 2020's, #236

Those who call a meeting on Zoom do not always mute rabbit-chasing conversations as readily as they might. If Zoom doesn't include that ability, then I have just learned Lesson #237.