Someone mentioned that they didn't think I had a very high IQ. I usually place in about the top 2% unless the test is purely verbal, in which I generally ace it. This test below is timed, you get 15 minutes, max. It has some odd questions in it (the spatial ones are weird because it asks you to discuss what folded paper are going to look like, but it doesn't say how far the paper will be folded, which made those questions ambiguous in at least two instances).
At any rate, take this test and see how you do. Make sure nobody can interrupt you for 15 minutes, and then go through it. I got a 134. I aced the verbal and the math portions of the test, but goofed up all the spatial ones. Apparently I suck at manipulating spatially. However, I think those questions were poorly worded, and the diagrams weren't clear. I wonder if George would get all of those right.
At any rate, I'm in the top 2%. Which proves that this week hasn't completely killed me, at least mentally. My spirit is just about gone. But people keep telling me about all the horrible things that happened to their parents. One had a freight car flip off a truck and smash her mom. Another got diabetes and they had to chop off her legs, arms, nose, over a 15-year period, until she died. Another one is still alive at 95, but can't bear to go on living. "What have I got to live for? all my friends are dead, and all I have to live for is the past."
Life's stupid, and having a higher IQ isn't necessarily any kind of advantage, in the long run. Because you might just see how stupid life is all the more clearly. Still, you might have fun taking the test, and it might take your mind off how stupid life is. Who knows.
http://www.intelligencetest.com/convert.htm
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
THE GM PLAN AS SYMPTOM
My local paper The Daily Star reports that General Motors plans to eliminate 21,000 workers, 2,600 dealers, and four brands, including Pontiac.
It's an odd reversal. Jobs are shipped overseas, while illegal aliens continue to arrive in America, apparently looking for the jobs. But where are the jobs going?
Meanwhile, "if the plan is approved, the U.S. government would own at least half of the top domestic automaker."
In our county, quite rural, the last GM dealer went out of business about six months ago. It had been a thriving business, but now the enormous building is simply empty, with two mechanics still working at the eastern end of the building.
I asked my older brother to explain what's going on with the economy. He runs a bank, and obviously knows more than me. He said to read a book by Kevin Phillips called Bad Money. Phillips argues apparently that America is going to become something like the Netherlands, England, and France -- former super powers that continue to have a good quality of life. But the real power is on its way to China.
Which means the fate of not only Tibet, but many other countries in that area of the world, is sealed?
It's an odd reversal. Jobs are shipped overseas, while illegal aliens continue to arrive in America, apparently looking for the jobs. But where are the jobs going?
Meanwhile, "if the plan is approved, the U.S. government would own at least half of the top domestic automaker."
In our county, quite rural, the last GM dealer went out of business about six months ago. It had been a thriving business, but now the enormous building is simply empty, with two mechanics still working at the eastern end of the building.
I asked my older brother to explain what's going on with the economy. He runs a bank, and obviously knows more than me. He said to read a book by Kevin Phillips called Bad Money. Phillips argues apparently that America is going to become something like the Netherlands, England, and France -- former super powers that continue to have a good quality of life. But the real power is on its way to China.
Which means the fate of not only Tibet, but many other countries in that area of the world, is sealed?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
THE FINAL TRIP TO SEE MY DAD
We took off on Tuesday to attend my father's funeral. My father died on Saturday following an eighteen-hole golf game, lunch (a ham sandwich followed by ice cream), and then when he was packing up cardboard to take to the dump, he exclaimed, "My back!"
He sat on the steps down to his basement, and my mother said, "Maybe you should lie down."
He said, "I don't think I can," and he crumpled. My mom called the ambulance, and he was still breathing when they came. Twice they lost his heart beat in the hospital, but couldn't find it a third time. I still don't quite understand what happened. Did someone say it was an embolism? Was it a heart attack? Is there a difference?
We arrived on Wednesday in Pinehurst after breaking down in Carlisle, PA just twenty miles south of Harrisburg. A company called Keller Bros. in Carlisle fixed the car for 289 dollars. The water pump had gotten dislodged, which tore out the serpentine belt. These items were restored, Vicky who talked to us for the company was very nice, and we drove another 9 hours to arrive in Pinehurst, NC, where my older brother's wife had rented three condos for my brothers and I to stay in.
My three brothers arrived, with their various families. My mother's sister had come, too. We tried to be stoic, but at any one time, someone was sobbing. My father was a really nice man. He didn't drink or smoke, he never raised his voice, and he was probably the nicest guy on earth. I was lucky to be his kid.
Warren Landis, who had been his golf partner for 42 years, led us to the viewing in his car. There was a photograph of my smiling father next to the strangely reduced individual in the casket. The only thing I could still recognize was his hands. I touched them. My brothers touched them. My mother touched them. All his various grandchildren touched them. His hands were cold. It was no longer my father, and yet it was.
Somehow, whatever is vital about a person disappears when they die. My older brother, who is in general a pronounced atheist, talked about heaven with us, and of his hopes for same. All of us stood around, weeping, but unable to leave my father there. At the same time, we were confused. Because clearly my father wasn't actually there. He was in heaven. Or he was with us. Or he was on a boat, on a great dark sea. Or he was down a hallway, trying to talk to me. Or he was waving hello. All these images occurred concurrently and in bewildering succession. I said the Lord's Prayer a thousand times during the week.
My kids kept hugging me, and my wife kept hugging me. This made the pain bearable. My wife kept everything functional. She kept feeding the kids, and took photographs, and somehow had put together a video of my father's life, but we didn't know when we would watch it.
We then went to the funeral service at a Lutheran church. We sang Amazing Grace, and read from Isaiah. I was a little discombulated, but decided to try to speak. The first to speak was Joe Oxendine, a beautiful friend of my dad's. He's now nearly 80 but is thin and works out every day, and is in terrific condition. He looked just like he did fifty years ago. I hadn't seen him since at least 40 years ago. Joe Oxendine and my dad shared an office at Temple University in the late 1960s. They were assistant professors in the Physical Education Department. Joe talked about how my dad never had a harsh word for anyone. Bill Cosby was their undergraduate student, and he was already lighting the hallways and cafes of Temple University with his ingenious humor which didn't depend on filth or meanness, (unlike much of the humor of the sixties, which took on the establishment, Cosby's humor was about family life, and had a lot of affection in it for mothers and fathers and uncles, even then).
Cosby was a uniter.
My sister-in-law Jen gave a beautiful talk about my dad. My younger brother Steven gave a nice talk. Warren Landis talked about my dad, and how he was an absent-minded professor, who didn't always remember where he was supposed to be on any given day, and who would collect worms to put in his garden, and then forget where he had placed them, and run over them.
No one talked during the service about a terrible day in my dad's life in the late 1960s when he was mugged and nearly killed. We nearly lost him over forty years ago.
My father was mugged by three men at the North Philadelphia train station in the late sixties. He had missed his train, and was correcting papers, alone on the train platform. A man put a butcher knife to his throat. My dad grabbed the blade and pushed it away from his throat. The man yanked the knife away -- tearing his hands in the process -- and demanded his wallet (12 dollars) and his watch. He refused. Another man got my dad in a headlock and choked him. The other two pulled his watch off his bleeding left hand. But my dad never said a harsh word against the men. He never talked about the incident. He just went on, and focused on the fact that a black doctor had helped him sew his hands back together. He always liked each person on their own terms. Over many years he had many surgeries and his hands always looked mangled, and still hurt, but he didn't complain. His hands looked unusual, and I always worried about them, so when I saw them at the viewing, I looked again at them one final time. I looked especially hard at his hands this time, because I had always wanted to look at them. There was so much history in those hands. His thumb and forefinger were intact on each hand, and this enabled him to continue to play badminton and golf.
Joe Oxendine didn't talk about all these things in his actual talk, but we talked about them after the service, because I had never gotten the full story from my dad. My dad wouldn't talk about anything unpleasant because he considered it a waste of time.
My dad didn't talk a lot in general and it was hard to get him to talk unless he was talking about sports scores, and his favorite teams. His teams were the Philadelphia Phillies, Eagles, and college teams were University of Northern Iowa and University of North Carolina. I don't understand why people talk about sports scores. What do they mean? My second-grader gets up every morning and watches ESPN at 6 am. As soon as I get up, he tells me all the sports scores. Kobe Bryant made 38 points, and his team won by 12. It seems there are some people who tune into different things, and my son is cut from the same cloth as my father. I AM interested in particularly beautiful plays, but these are rarely recounted by true sports fans. What seems of interest to them are the quantities, not the qualities. Perhaps it's because my father (and now my son) are terrific at math, while I struggle at it, and wonder often why it exists. Why does anybody want to know about quantities? I seem to only be interested in qualities. My dad had lovely qualities!
He was a stoic, like my mother, but they are both interested in beauty, even if they never talk about it. My dad gardened, and liked it when the flowers came up. He liked pretty golf courses. He liked my mom, who was a beauty queen in northern Iowa in the forties. They were from small towns in Iowa, where stoicism is the norm. But there was a hidden kindness, too, and the unspoken in aesthetics. My dad played beautiful holes in golf. My mother is a dancer, and likes to choreograph. And beauty for them is closely allied to ethics. Driving me to first grade on the first day my dad said to be sure I was nice to the kids who felt left out and to be sure to talk with them.
That was the only direct advice that I think he ever gave me. It has held me through my entire life. It's good advice because it gives you an active role, and makes you less self-conscious.
He told me he thought talking just got you in trouble, so he rarely indulged in it. After years of pestering him to tell me a story about his childhood, he told me that when he was little (his own dad had died when he was 2), his older brother and sister put robins' eggs behind his butt, and when he woke up, they would tell him that he had laid them. One day his mom found out about this, and gave his older brothers and sisters extra yard work.
When I was in 12th grade, I was trying to force an exercise machine to move. It had a handle and you had to pull the rope. It was stuck, so I was yanking at it. My dad said, "Never force things."
That became another imperative.
I thought my father would live another ten years, but he had gotten sick: very sick. He got dehydrated after a college reunion party in Iowa a few years ago, and became incoherent for about a day or two. We almost lost him then. He's had many kidney stones. He had adult onset diabetes. He wasn't able to enjoy all the food he wanted. Last Saturday during his golf game, his friend Warren Landis told us that he complained that he had pains in his right arm. How intense were the pains? It's hard to know. Warren thought it was the left arm that made for heart attacks. I had never heard about arm pains and heart attacks or how one was a symptom for the other. Why are there so many things I don't know? I have constant pains in my arms, and now have had a very heavy heart for the last week. Does it mean I'm having a heart attack? How do you know? We all feel guilty that we didn't do something, or know something. I feel guilty I didn't talk with my father more often. But it was hard to get my father to talk, and he talked in quantities, a foreign language to me. My father wasn't one to make a fuss. After he had passed, blood tests revealed his heart attack had been in progress for at least six hours. Sometimes heart attacks have no symptoms at all. We just don't know. Warren Landis wept with us at the viewing, and later stayed with us at the church service until the very end. I was so grateful to him. Had my dad gone to the hospital instead of continuing his golf match, he would probably still be with us, but perhaps he was saved from some other, worse fate. Did God help him by giving my Dad a wonderful last day? He played golf with his very best friend (he had many many fine friends, but he was particularly fond of Warren), had lunch with his wife of 56 years, and then passed away peacefully and quickly. You never know how long people are going to be with you, and every minute is a kind of miracle, and against all probability. What are we even doing in this universe? Why do colors such as brown exist (my five-year old son asked me this last night in the car home). Why can't you lift yourself up off the ground (he also asked). It's amazing that we can ask questions. We are the animal that asks questions.
My father was a math and sports professor. He did analytical movement studies of optimal golf swings using a computer model in the 1960s. In the classroom he would kneel next to each student when providing help.
I've wept on an hourly basis for a week. I've never cried like this. Even as a baby, I was a stoic. I cried more this week than I cried in the rest of my whole life together. I saw my dad in older men in gas stations along the I-81 corridor, and wept. I wept when we passed a van that looked like his. Every time I see a golf ball, or see the Rockford Files, I weep. I weep over the grass and the bumblebees and the rivers and bridges because everything reminds me of him. Somebody mentioned August, which is my dad's birth month, and I wept. My brothers also wept, but their cries were probably triggered by different memories. I joked that if only our dad had been a terrible alcoholic who beat us and was a serial killer, we wouldn't miss him so much. They laughed. But my aunt corrected me. She said that everyone weeps at their father's death. I had to concede this point, but I wonder if it is true. Isn't the pain we feel proportionate to the love we felt? My dad was a fact of life since I was born, just as the sun is a fact of life. Perhaps everyone has such facts of life but my dad was qualitatively superior other dads. I can't imagine that anyone else can go through this much pain and still live.
After Thursday, the family had another day together. We went to a park and my older brother played with the kids. I talked with my two younger brothers. At night Steven's daughter Bridget played violin (Haydn), which was soothing. I didn't want her to stop, because it distracted me, and gave me a sense that life had a past and could continue, too. We watched my wife's video, which had a very emotional song by Luther Van Dross in the background called Dances with my Father. We all wept, and my older brother hugged my wife, Riikka. My baby Sofia crawled into my brother's lap, and liked it there.
Without my dad, I feel disoriented, and yet: he does still orient me and orient us. Maybe this will bring us all closer together. My dad was from a generation in which service to others, work ethic, the notion of the good, were still intact. The sixties tore those things down as a bunch of cornball lies and tried to substitute a government that would do everything for us, as families were torn apart, and each person was out for themselves, and the government was there to bail out the increasingly non-functional who had turned to drugs or crime as a lifestyle. Now as you drive down the freeways you see ADULT BOOKSHOP, on every horizon. But an older America still exists where family love and family commitment have priority over solipsistic lusts. It's in all the good people who came to my dad's funeral and told me he would be missed, and who vowed to support my mom, and it's in the Lutheran pastors who gave the funeral address, it's in my mom herself, who's weeping, but still strong, and to a large extent, it's even in me. I had been pulled into the Beat ethos as a kid, and thought they were right about many things, but now I wonder if they were right about anything. The notion of a nation that was ready to sacrifice to higher values, instead of to merely personal pleasures, is what has kept the nation from being merely a bunch of self-absorbed wastrels.
I was and am and will always be his Son. He was and is and will always be my Sun!
He sat on the steps down to his basement, and my mother said, "Maybe you should lie down."
He said, "I don't think I can," and he crumpled. My mom called the ambulance, and he was still breathing when they came. Twice they lost his heart beat in the hospital, but couldn't find it a third time. I still don't quite understand what happened. Did someone say it was an embolism? Was it a heart attack? Is there a difference?
We arrived on Wednesday in Pinehurst after breaking down in Carlisle, PA just twenty miles south of Harrisburg. A company called Keller Bros. in Carlisle fixed the car for 289 dollars. The water pump had gotten dislodged, which tore out the serpentine belt. These items were restored, Vicky who talked to us for the company was very nice, and we drove another 9 hours to arrive in Pinehurst, NC, where my older brother's wife had rented three condos for my brothers and I to stay in.
My three brothers arrived, with their various families. My mother's sister had come, too. We tried to be stoic, but at any one time, someone was sobbing. My father was a really nice man. He didn't drink or smoke, he never raised his voice, and he was probably the nicest guy on earth. I was lucky to be his kid.
Warren Landis, who had been his golf partner for 42 years, led us to the viewing in his car. There was a photograph of my smiling father next to the strangely reduced individual in the casket. The only thing I could still recognize was his hands. I touched them. My brothers touched them. My mother touched them. All his various grandchildren touched them. His hands were cold. It was no longer my father, and yet it was.
Somehow, whatever is vital about a person disappears when they die. My older brother, who is in general a pronounced atheist, talked about heaven with us, and of his hopes for same. All of us stood around, weeping, but unable to leave my father there. At the same time, we were confused. Because clearly my father wasn't actually there. He was in heaven. Or he was with us. Or he was on a boat, on a great dark sea. Or he was down a hallway, trying to talk to me. Or he was waving hello. All these images occurred concurrently and in bewildering succession. I said the Lord's Prayer a thousand times during the week.
My kids kept hugging me, and my wife kept hugging me. This made the pain bearable. My wife kept everything functional. She kept feeding the kids, and took photographs, and somehow had put together a video of my father's life, but we didn't know when we would watch it.
We then went to the funeral service at a Lutheran church. We sang Amazing Grace, and read from Isaiah. I was a little discombulated, but decided to try to speak. The first to speak was Joe Oxendine, a beautiful friend of my dad's. He's now nearly 80 but is thin and works out every day, and is in terrific condition. He looked just like he did fifty years ago. I hadn't seen him since at least 40 years ago. Joe Oxendine and my dad shared an office at Temple University in the late 1960s. They were assistant professors in the Physical Education Department. Joe talked about how my dad never had a harsh word for anyone. Bill Cosby was their undergraduate student, and he was already lighting the hallways and cafes of Temple University with his ingenious humor which didn't depend on filth or meanness, (unlike much of the humor of the sixties, which took on the establishment, Cosby's humor was about family life, and had a lot of affection in it for mothers and fathers and uncles, even then).
Cosby was a uniter.
My sister-in-law Jen gave a beautiful talk about my dad. My younger brother Steven gave a nice talk. Warren Landis talked about my dad, and how he was an absent-minded professor, who didn't always remember where he was supposed to be on any given day, and who would collect worms to put in his garden, and then forget where he had placed them, and run over them.
No one talked during the service about a terrible day in my dad's life in the late 1960s when he was mugged and nearly killed. We nearly lost him over forty years ago.
My father was mugged by three men at the North Philadelphia train station in the late sixties. He had missed his train, and was correcting papers, alone on the train platform. A man put a butcher knife to his throat. My dad grabbed the blade and pushed it away from his throat. The man yanked the knife away -- tearing his hands in the process -- and demanded his wallet (12 dollars) and his watch. He refused. Another man got my dad in a headlock and choked him. The other two pulled his watch off his bleeding left hand. But my dad never said a harsh word against the men. He never talked about the incident. He just went on, and focused on the fact that a black doctor had helped him sew his hands back together. He always liked each person on their own terms. Over many years he had many surgeries and his hands always looked mangled, and still hurt, but he didn't complain. His hands looked unusual, and I always worried about them, so when I saw them at the viewing, I looked again at them one final time. I looked especially hard at his hands this time, because I had always wanted to look at them. There was so much history in those hands. His thumb and forefinger were intact on each hand, and this enabled him to continue to play badminton and golf.
Joe Oxendine didn't talk about all these things in his actual talk, but we talked about them after the service, because I had never gotten the full story from my dad. My dad wouldn't talk about anything unpleasant because he considered it a waste of time.
My dad didn't talk a lot in general and it was hard to get him to talk unless he was talking about sports scores, and his favorite teams. His teams were the Philadelphia Phillies, Eagles, and college teams were University of Northern Iowa and University of North Carolina. I don't understand why people talk about sports scores. What do they mean? My second-grader gets up every morning and watches ESPN at 6 am. As soon as I get up, he tells me all the sports scores. Kobe Bryant made 38 points, and his team won by 12. It seems there are some people who tune into different things, and my son is cut from the same cloth as my father. I AM interested in particularly beautiful plays, but these are rarely recounted by true sports fans. What seems of interest to them are the quantities, not the qualities. Perhaps it's because my father (and now my son) are terrific at math, while I struggle at it, and wonder often why it exists. Why does anybody want to know about quantities? I seem to only be interested in qualities. My dad had lovely qualities!
He was a stoic, like my mother, but they are both interested in beauty, even if they never talk about it. My dad gardened, and liked it when the flowers came up. He liked pretty golf courses. He liked my mom, who was a beauty queen in northern Iowa in the forties. They were from small towns in Iowa, where stoicism is the norm. But there was a hidden kindness, too, and the unspoken in aesthetics. My dad played beautiful holes in golf. My mother is a dancer, and likes to choreograph. And beauty for them is closely allied to ethics. Driving me to first grade on the first day my dad said to be sure I was nice to the kids who felt left out and to be sure to talk with them.
That was the only direct advice that I think he ever gave me. It has held me through my entire life. It's good advice because it gives you an active role, and makes you less self-conscious.
He told me he thought talking just got you in trouble, so he rarely indulged in it. After years of pestering him to tell me a story about his childhood, he told me that when he was little (his own dad had died when he was 2), his older brother and sister put robins' eggs behind his butt, and when he woke up, they would tell him that he had laid them. One day his mom found out about this, and gave his older brothers and sisters extra yard work.
When I was in 12th grade, I was trying to force an exercise machine to move. It had a handle and you had to pull the rope. It was stuck, so I was yanking at it. My dad said, "Never force things."
That became another imperative.
I thought my father would live another ten years, but he had gotten sick: very sick. He got dehydrated after a college reunion party in Iowa a few years ago, and became incoherent for about a day or two. We almost lost him then. He's had many kidney stones. He had adult onset diabetes. He wasn't able to enjoy all the food he wanted. Last Saturday during his golf game, his friend Warren Landis told us that he complained that he had pains in his right arm. How intense were the pains? It's hard to know. Warren thought it was the left arm that made for heart attacks. I had never heard about arm pains and heart attacks or how one was a symptom for the other. Why are there so many things I don't know? I have constant pains in my arms, and now have had a very heavy heart for the last week. Does it mean I'm having a heart attack? How do you know? We all feel guilty that we didn't do something, or know something. I feel guilty I didn't talk with my father more often. But it was hard to get my father to talk, and he talked in quantities, a foreign language to me. My father wasn't one to make a fuss. After he had passed, blood tests revealed his heart attack had been in progress for at least six hours. Sometimes heart attacks have no symptoms at all. We just don't know. Warren Landis wept with us at the viewing, and later stayed with us at the church service until the very end. I was so grateful to him. Had my dad gone to the hospital instead of continuing his golf match, he would probably still be with us, but perhaps he was saved from some other, worse fate. Did God help him by giving my Dad a wonderful last day? He played golf with his very best friend (he had many many fine friends, but he was particularly fond of Warren), had lunch with his wife of 56 years, and then passed away peacefully and quickly. You never know how long people are going to be with you, and every minute is a kind of miracle, and against all probability. What are we even doing in this universe? Why do colors such as brown exist (my five-year old son asked me this last night in the car home). Why can't you lift yourself up off the ground (he also asked). It's amazing that we can ask questions. We are the animal that asks questions.
My father was a math and sports professor. He did analytical movement studies of optimal golf swings using a computer model in the 1960s. In the classroom he would kneel next to each student when providing help.
I've wept on an hourly basis for a week. I've never cried like this. Even as a baby, I was a stoic. I cried more this week than I cried in the rest of my whole life together. I saw my dad in older men in gas stations along the I-81 corridor, and wept. I wept when we passed a van that looked like his. Every time I see a golf ball, or see the Rockford Files, I weep. I weep over the grass and the bumblebees and the rivers and bridges because everything reminds me of him. Somebody mentioned August, which is my dad's birth month, and I wept. My brothers also wept, but their cries were probably triggered by different memories. I joked that if only our dad had been a terrible alcoholic who beat us and was a serial killer, we wouldn't miss him so much. They laughed. But my aunt corrected me. She said that everyone weeps at their father's death. I had to concede this point, but I wonder if it is true. Isn't the pain we feel proportionate to the love we felt? My dad was a fact of life since I was born, just as the sun is a fact of life. Perhaps everyone has such facts of life but my dad was qualitatively superior other dads. I can't imagine that anyone else can go through this much pain and still live.
After Thursday, the family had another day together. We went to a park and my older brother played with the kids. I talked with my two younger brothers. At night Steven's daughter Bridget played violin (Haydn), which was soothing. I didn't want her to stop, because it distracted me, and gave me a sense that life had a past and could continue, too. We watched my wife's video, which had a very emotional song by Luther Van Dross in the background called Dances with my Father. We all wept, and my older brother hugged my wife, Riikka. My baby Sofia crawled into my brother's lap, and liked it there.
Without my dad, I feel disoriented, and yet: he does still orient me and orient us. Maybe this will bring us all closer together. My dad was from a generation in which service to others, work ethic, the notion of the good, were still intact. The sixties tore those things down as a bunch of cornball lies and tried to substitute a government that would do everything for us, as families were torn apart, and each person was out for themselves, and the government was there to bail out the increasingly non-functional who had turned to drugs or crime as a lifestyle. Now as you drive down the freeways you see ADULT BOOKSHOP, on every horizon. But an older America still exists where family love and family commitment have priority over solipsistic lusts. It's in all the good people who came to my dad's funeral and told me he would be missed, and who vowed to support my mom, and it's in the Lutheran pastors who gave the funeral address, it's in my mom herself, who's weeping, but still strong, and to a large extent, it's even in me. I had been pulled into the Beat ethos as a kid, and thought they were right about many things, but now I wonder if they were right about anything. The notion of a nation that was ready to sacrifice to higher values, instead of to merely personal pleasures, is what has kept the nation from being merely a bunch of self-absorbed wastrels.
I was and am and will always be his Son. He was and is and will always be my Sun!
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
LIGHT
¶ And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Light is a strange thing. No one knows exactly what it is: whether it's material, or shall we say, spiritual.
If the world begins as scientists now claim 15 billion years ago, and if the universe is 15 billion light-years wide, as scientists now claim, then the universe is expanding at the speed of light.
Are we light? Are we made of light? If so, what is light?
And what are we?
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Light is a strange thing. No one knows exactly what it is: whether it's material, or shall we say, spiritual.
If the world begins as scientists now claim 15 billion years ago, and if the universe is 15 billion light-years wide, as scientists now claim, then the universe is expanding at the speed of light.
Are we light? Are we made of light? If so, what is light?
And what are we?
Friday, April 17, 2009
SPORTS & Aesthetics
My father was a sports professor at East Stroudsburg University, and before that, at Temple University, and the University of Illinois, and at the University of Oregon at Eugene. He was one of the first to track a golf shot on a computer, using his experience on an aircraft carrier in the Korean war with sonar devices, and adapting it to tracking golf swings (I don't know how he did this).
I grew up throwing baseballs with him, sitting on the front steps at 811 Pelham Ave., in Warminster, ten miles north of Philadelphia, waiting for him to come home from his job at Temple University. It was summer in 1962, and I was six years old. It was hot, but the air was dry, and I was watching the ants walk in and out of cracks on the sidewalk. I had a baseball glove on, and was throwing the ball into the mitt, thinking about catching pop flies and hitting triples. My father was also my Little League coach. I pitched a few innings here and there, but my older brother was the star pitcher.
Even though I wrote left-handed, I had a glove for a right-hander, so I threw with my right hand. I wasn't that good. Maybe I would have been better with my left. I would throw two strikes and then throw one over the backstop. I was much better as a first baseman. Over the years I learned to pick almost anything out of the dirt to get the out.
In the backyard, the neighborhood kids would assemble to play soccer. We'd play for hours, with an Italian kid, a Polish kid, and many others: Russians, Swedish kids, Jewish kids. I was faster than many of the others, and could zip past them to tuck a ball into the corner of the goal. Back then, we never played sports with girls. We did play kick the can with the girls, and they could run fast, and were clever.
I never liked football. I can't stand rough contact. I always thought it was a stupid game for people who in another life had been cows, or crash test dummies. I was too small to play the game. I did go to a try-out in junior high, but I was hit by a 250-pound crash test dummy, and didn't get up for ten minutes.
In the summers we'd spend hours in swimming pools, throwing frisbees, playing tag, jumping off the high dive.
My father wrote a book on badminton, and later on, I played it a lot. In Finland, among my best memories are playing badminton in long tournaments, with the Finns, many of whom I saw only once, when I either lost, or beat them. I generally beat them. One Finn pretended to be terrible, and wasn't. He was up by 13 points before I realized he was terrific. He later revealed to me that this was a trick he used in all his matches to jump ahead, using sympathy to get his opponents to take it easy on him.
In high school I wrestled at 103 pounds, and won most of my matches. I pinned a guy once in seven seconds. It turned out that he was in special classes. In the autumns, I played soccer, and was all-league three years in a row. In the winters, I played indoor soccer. I played with semi-professionals and college players, and could hold my own.
At home, we'd watch every kind of game. We'd watch ice skating with my mother, and football with my father. We went to see actual Phillies games some Sunday afternoons, and at night, I'd lie down next to my dad in the twilight of his room listening to Johnny Callison, catching a pop fly from the Giants' Willie Mays. I had read several biographies of Willie Mays. He was my favorite player, but when he played against the Phillies, I wanted him to lose!
I'm reading a good book by Hans Gumbrecht called In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Harvard UP 2006). He was a German raised in the 1930s on soccer. He is interested in Hitler's '36 Olympics. He's a literature professor at Stanford, and watches the college football and baseball games there. He's fascinated by sports of every description and attempts to develop notions of grace, and canons of taste. He thinks that Ali had more grace than Frazier. He did, didn't he? But how would you define what Ali had that Frazier lacked?
Gumbrecht doesn't deal with the legal limits of sports. There are ethical boundaries, and legal boundaries, such as cockfighting, and siccing dogs on one another. Those games are illegal, and I think for good reasons. I think Michael Vick deserves a longer sentence. To make dogs hurt each other would be like arming babies with razor blades and having them go at one another, while betting on the outcome. Sports in countries like the Aztec cultures in which death is the eventual outcome, are not dealt with, but it's interesting to think about how sports reflect the legal and ethical lives of nations. The Aztecs were psychos. Gumbrecht's dealing with his own life as a spectator, with only a few historical divagations (19th century bare knuckle boxing has come up a few times, and ancient Greek Olympiads have gotten some coverage).
He argues that sports have beauty in them much as literature does.
And that genius in sports is something like genius in literature. Kant argues that genius changes the whole rules of an art, and in sport, something similar happens. I don't think that Kant ever writes directly about sports, so Gumbrecht is adapting Kant's lessons on aesthetics (the fine arts) to how they might be used to think about sports.
Gumbrecht doesn't use Aristotle's notions to define tragedy to define a sporting contest. He also doesn't talk about Martin Heidegger, and the Nazi Olympics of 1936. To my knowledge, Heidegger doesn't deal with this in any of his writings. Surely he had seen Leni Riefenstahl's Greek renderings of the '36 Olympiad? Surely Heidegger must have been interested? Heidegger was apparently a decent skier, but perhaps sports were just of no interest to him. It's difficult for me to understand a human being who's not interested in sports. It's like dealing with someone who isn't interested in humor, or can write 50 books without apparently ever wanting to tell a joke.
Gumbrecht argues that as a spectator he's not interested in women's sports. The only woman's sport that interests him is tennis. I confess that I rarely watch women's sports. I have seen some women's tennis, and some women's basketball, and last evening I watched the women's softball team get beat by Herkimer Community college 10-4. A foul ball went a hundred feet in the air and came down on the back window of a brown sedan and smashed out the entire window. That was probably the highlight in terms of sheer beauty. In a lot of the game we saw fumbled pop flies, grounders that hopped past a second baseman while she fiddled with her glove, and other misadventures. I don't know how to characterize the event.
This morning I spent hitting pop flies to my son, who's now 8. Last year he couldn't catch them. This year he gets most of them easily, and looks like a ball player when he throws them back to me. Then we played soccer for an hour. He has the idea of how to cut back and forth, and how to turn, and hide the ball, so I can't get it, and then suddenly kick the ball forward and sprint after it, socking it through my goal.
I'm still ahead of him on experience and strength, but have a feeling of melancholy that he will one day soon surpass me. He has a lot more stamina than I have. This makes me yearn for the days I could play eight hours in a row, stopping only for a cup of Gatorade and a cheeseburger. But the feeling of melancholy is mixed with pride, and a love for the beautiful shots he makes, and how good he looks as he speeds past me, while I chug behind him, my 52-year old legs still pretty good.
My daughter takes less of an interest in sports. She sits on the swings reading books about mythology. When she runs, though, she can move. But she gets easily frustrated, and if the ball hits her too hard, she cries. My son is a much more rugged kid. His other interest is astronomy.
What would my life have been without sports?
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
My Simplistic Number Theory Goes Awry
I had a math hypothesis which may or may not be too simple for your minds to bother with.
While counting for my children by threes every night (to put them to sleep), I noticed that all numbers in which there are three alike in a row, are always divisible by three.
Thus, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999, are divisible by three.
Secondly, I wondered if this would be true for all the numbers. Would 3333 and 5555 be divisible by four? This, sadly, does not seem to be the case. So it seems to be true only for 3s, up to 999. Why is this the case?
There may be other patterns for which it works, but I wondered why it works so well for threes, and not for other numbers. My original hypothesis was that any time therefore that you had eight of the same numbers across, you would be able to divide it by 8, and get a clean result.
Thus, 77777777 should be divisible cleanly by 8. However, this does not work out. There might be some other pattern at work in some numbers where this works, but it just doesn't come out neatly for any of the others that I've tried except for 3s. Isn't this sad?
Even if you try to do twos up to 99, it doesn't work, because you hit the odd numbers of 33, 55, and 77.
The world is so sad!
Except for the fact that our snipers cleanly blew the heads off those 3 pirates yesterday, I would be rather depressed. That was a neat trick! We turned them all into zeros, in a twinkling. Which is also sad, if you think about it too long, or think about it in the framework of the brotherhood of man, or also, poor Africa, instead of merely thinking that the brave captain had been saved, and think for once American military strength actually accomplished something, instead of being merely stuck in another debacle, where the two sides blathered on and on, lawyers got involved, and no real justice resulted.
I wish things would always work out so neatly as that anti-piratical exploit -- three shots, three clean hits, and the captain's wife has her hubby back.
Oy vey.
I hope that you all enjoyed Easter. I went four times, and my daughter who's now 9, wanted to go a fifth time. She got her first communion, and now can't get enough of the wafer and the wager, with the wine.
While counting for my children by threes every night (to put them to sleep), I noticed that all numbers in which there are three alike in a row, are always divisible by three.
Thus, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999, are divisible by three.
Secondly, I wondered if this would be true for all the numbers. Would 3333 and 5555 be divisible by four? This, sadly, does not seem to be the case. So it seems to be true only for 3s, up to 999. Why is this the case?
There may be other patterns for which it works, but I wondered why it works so well for threes, and not for other numbers. My original hypothesis was that any time therefore that you had eight of the same numbers across, you would be able to divide it by 8, and get a clean result.
Thus, 77777777 should be divisible cleanly by 8. However, this does not work out. There might be some other pattern at work in some numbers where this works, but it just doesn't come out neatly for any of the others that I've tried except for 3s. Isn't this sad?
Even if you try to do twos up to 99, it doesn't work, because you hit the odd numbers of 33, 55, and 77.
The world is so sad!
Except for the fact that our snipers cleanly blew the heads off those 3 pirates yesterday, I would be rather depressed. That was a neat trick! We turned them all into zeros, in a twinkling. Which is also sad, if you think about it too long, or think about it in the framework of the brotherhood of man, or also, poor Africa, instead of merely thinking that the brave captain had been saved, and think for once American military strength actually accomplished something, instead of being merely stuck in another debacle, where the two sides blathered on and on, lawyers got involved, and no real justice resulted.
I wish things would always work out so neatly as that anti-piratical exploit -- three shots, three clean hits, and the captain's wife has her hubby back.
Oy vey.
I hope that you all enjoyed Easter. I went four times, and my daughter who's now 9, wanted to go a fifth time. She got her first communion, and now can't get enough of the wafer and the wager, with the wine.
Monday, April 13, 2009
WHEN DID RADICALS GO BAD?
Andrea Dworkin writes,
"Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it. In life, they commit it."
Dworkin was a very popular feminist in her day. Her books sold millions of copies.
Every revolution begins by pointing out the rottenness of those in power. But when they are replaced, the newly empowered are often even worse.
Valerie Solanas is the woman that shot Andy Warhol. Many women at NOW supported this act, which eventually killed one of America's greatest artists (it took him ten years to die from the wound). Solanas wrote,
"As humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.”
Once one demonizes another group, murder swiftly follows. A not-too-close unpacking of Solanas' paragraph reveals that she is a female supremacist.
Neither Solanas nor Dworkin were academics. I don't know if they ever taught in college classrooms, or what the state of academic feminism is at this point across the board. When you read an anti-Marxist feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers, or Daphne Patai, you get the sense that many within the academia are as bad as Dworkin and Solanas. But are they picking on the weakest members of a herd, and arguing that they represent the mainstream of a body of thought? SdB's The Second Sex, which is considered to be the Bible of the field, opens with a call to murder men. I know it's hard to believe, but here's the sentence:
"The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males" (xxv).
At least as I read the sentence, it appears to be a call to do just that. Within twenty years, Solanas, at least, is thinking that men must be destroyed. And Dworkin, too, who is selling millions of copies of her books, is also thinking about destroying men. To what extent do they represent a tendency within feminism? I find the likes of Solanas and Dworkin to be so upsetting, that I can't read them. And I can't read Katherine McKinnon, who teaches at places like U of Chicago and Harvard, and who often co-authored books with Dworkin. The Wikipedia page on Valerie Solanas gives a brief indication of some of the support she received from the feminist community after she had attempted to murder Andy Warhol:
"Feminist Robin Morgan (later editor of Ms. magazine) demonstrated for Solanas' release from prison. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the New York chapter president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), described Solanas as "the first outstanding champion of women's rights."[6] Another member, Florynce Kennedy, represented Solanas at her trial, calling her "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."[6]"
With Ward Churchill, and many other leftists, you get the sense that everybody in the WTC is evil, and should be destroyed, as they are ALL "little Eichmanns." And that they are somehow better, perhaps simply because they say they are. If this isn't dangerous, then what is? I can't read Ward Churchill's work. It's too disturbing. I've read the summaries by the committee called upon to review his work, and those are disturbing enough.
I worry that thought is not what is being presented in many new departments of study on university campuses. It's instead bigotry, which is excused because it's a reversal of the previous bigotry. Naturally, there are some, probably in every one of these areas of study, who stand up against it, and urge instead a sense of community, and equality. Daphne Patai, for instance, in Women's Studies, has argued against the intense bigotry of much of contemporary feminism. But even reading Daphne Patai, for me, is a very harrowing experience, because it hurts to read about minds that have gone so far away from truth.
To think carefully means to think slowly and to reserve judgment until there is proof. Churchill showed in his scholarship that he didn't care about proof, or truth. Careful thinking is difficult, and accurate thinking is almost impossible to achieve, but it's an ideal that should be revered. Locke offered four human rights: life, health, liberty, and property. But he forgot the truest and most important human right: the right to think clearly. I'm not sure if it's a right, or a duty.
Too often, it is one of the first things that disappears in Marxist countries. The only duty is to take the party line. Those that don't, are disappeared.
The Duke 88 group revealed in their witchhunt that they had no care for accurate thinking. Even the District Attorney revealed this lack of a sense of duty to the truth. At least Nifong was sacked. We are used to such parodies of thought in places like Zimbabwe, or in Ceausescu's Romania, where the conclusion has already been reached before the research ever even begins. How can it now happen here, and how can it be defended by Stanley Fish, in the nation's most important newspaper (has the paper always been this bad, or is it now a shadow of its former self?). I don't believe that academia has always been this bad. Maybe it has. Is there any way that our country, and our profession, can reassert the primary necessity of thinking clearly, at least as clearly as possible? A programmatic rethinking of the curriculum should de-emphasize French thinkers (wooly-headed and goofy, the French think of the Marquis de Sade as one of their most important novelists). I'd rather we went back to Aristotle, and continued up through to Locke, and ending with Mary Midgley, in philosophy (bypassing Marx, but indicating a deep swampy pit, in which millions of souls have already been lost).
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/ward-churchill-redux/
"Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it. In life, they commit it."
Dworkin was a very popular feminist in her day. Her books sold millions of copies.
Every revolution begins by pointing out the rottenness of those in power. But when they are replaced, the newly empowered are often even worse.
Valerie Solanas is the woman that shot Andy Warhol. Many women at NOW supported this act, which eventually killed one of America's greatest artists (it took him ten years to die from the wound). Solanas wrote,
"As humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.”
Once one demonizes another group, murder swiftly follows. A not-too-close unpacking of Solanas' paragraph reveals that she is a female supremacist.
Neither Solanas nor Dworkin were academics. I don't know if they ever taught in college classrooms, or what the state of academic feminism is at this point across the board. When you read an anti-Marxist feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers, or Daphne Patai, you get the sense that many within the academia are as bad as Dworkin and Solanas. But are they picking on the weakest members of a herd, and arguing that they represent the mainstream of a body of thought? SdB's The Second Sex, which is considered to be the Bible of the field, opens with a call to murder men. I know it's hard to believe, but here's the sentence:
"The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males" (xxv).
At least as I read the sentence, it appears to be a call to do just that. Within twenty years, Solanas, at least, is thinking that men must be destroyed. And Dworkin, too, who is selling millions of copies of her books, is also thinking about destroying men. To what extent do they represent a tendency within feminism? I find the likes of Solanas and Dworkin to be so upsetting, that I can't read them. And I can't read Katherine McKinnon, who teaches at places like U of Chicago and Harvard, and who often co-authored books with Dworkin. The Wikipedia page on Valerie Solanas gives a brief indication of some of the support she received from the feminist community after she had attempted to murder Andy Warhol:
"Feminist Robin Morgan (later editor of Ms. magazine) demonstrated for Solanas' release from prison. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the New York chapter president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), described Solanas as "the first outstanding champion of women's rights."[6] Another member, Florynce Kennedy, represented Solanas at her trial, calling her "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."[6]"
With Ward Churchill, and many other leftists, you get the sense that everybody in the WTC is evil, and should be destroyed, as they are ALL "little Eichmanns." And that they are somehow better, perhaps simply because they say they are. If this isn't dangerous, then what is? I can't read Ward Churchill's work. It's too disturbing. I've read the summaries by the committee called upon to review his work, and those are disturbing enough.
I worry that thought is not what is being presented in many new departments of study on university campuses. It's instead bigotry, which is excused because it's a reversal of the previous bigotry. Naturally, there are some, probably in every one of these areas of study, who stand up against it, and urge instead a sense of community, and equality. Daphne Patai, for instance, in Women's Studies, has argued against the intense bigotry of much of contemporary feminism. But even reading Daphne Patai, for me, is a very harrowing experience, because it hurts to read about minds that have gone so far away from truth.
To think carefully means to think slowly and to reserve judgment until there is proof. Churchill showed in his scholarship that he didn't care about proof, or truth. Careful thinking is difficult, and accurate thinking is almost impossible to achieve, but it's an ideal that should be revered. Locke offered four human rights: life, health, liberty, and property. But he forgot the truest and most important human right: the right to think clearly. I'm not sure if it's a right, or a duty.
Too often, it is one of the first things that disappears in Marxist countries. The only duty is to take the party line. Those that don't, are disappeared.
The Duke 88 group revealed in their witchhunt that they had no care for accurate thinking. Even the District Attorney revealed this lack of a sense of duty to the truth. At least Nifong was sacked. We are used to such parodies of thought in places like Zimbabwe, or in Ceausescu's Romania, where the conclusion has already been reached before the research ever even begins. How can it now happen here, and how can it be defended by Stanley Fish, in the nation's most important newspaper (has the paper always been this bad, or is it now a shadow of its former self?). I don't believe that academia has always been this bad. Maybe it has. Is there any way that our country, and our profession, can reassert the primary necessity of thinking clearly, at least as clearly as possible? A programmatic rethinking of the curriculum should de-emphasize French thinkers (wooly-headed and goofy, the French think of the Marquis de Sade as one of their most important novelists). I'd rather we went back to Aristotle, and continued up through to Locke, and ending with Mary Midgley, in philosophy (bypassing Marx, but indicating a deep swampy pit, in which millions of souls have already been lost).
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/ward-churchill-redux/
Sunday, April 12, 2009
KITCHEN MIGRATIONS
It's spring, and there is a migration going on in the kitchen. We had carpenter ants about five years ago, and the nest must still be somewhere close by. Because every spring about a hundred of these ants infiltrate our kitchen. However, I kill them, not only by hand and by foot, but also using a product called Amdro.
Carpenter ants have a communist power structure, which makes them easy to defeat. They are not allowed to think for themselves, or even to feed themselves, unless the matriarchal queen is in on it. So each foraging ant has to bring the food back to the queen, and the queen divvies it back to the ants (gives each ant a cut). To each according to their need, from each according to their ability. "Redistribution," could not be more aptly represented than by a colony of carpenter ants.
So Amdro's product resembles ant food, but it's poison. The workers take the pellets back to the queen, who ingests them, and croaks.
This is splendid. If you try to kill individual ants you'll be at it all summer because a carpenter ant queen can lay 100,000 eggs in a day. So you have to kill the queen, and the two back-up queens, and then you've destroyed the colony. Then, no more ants.
I think I know where the nest is. A yellow-throated flicker goes there to dig out ants all afternoon. (The majority of the yellow-throated flicker's food happens to be ants.)
It used to be the ant migrations would continue all summer. Now we only get a trickle, and then they stop. We've cracked the communist code, destroyed the nest at its inception. Thanks to Amdro!
It's fortunate that ants cannot read, or they would read this, and develop a defense. I don't think that there is any way for the ants to discover how I am laying waste to their colonies, which, except for the illiteracy, have something of the engineering genius of Rome.
You can't really say anything to animals. A bright green bug strolls by. It's not as if I can say hello. The woodchuck pops out of his hole. It's not as if I can say, Happy Easter!
A fly tries to get in the window, but is stopped by a screen. It's not as if I can say, go somewhere else. Take a mass migration to Mars, or your intrusion will result in the death penalty. Human beings can sometimes be animals, but you can generally deal with them rationally. Even a baby, who does not know yet any words, is already developing its rationality. In slurping noodles, it can manipulate more than one into its mouth. It can learn. I don't think ants can learn.
Therefore, I don't think insects can be Lutheran Surrealists.
Whole tribes of army ants in Brazil will never be blessed by us!
But as for all of you who can read this: Happy Easter! May God bless you!
Carpenter ants have a communist power structure, which makes them easy to defeat. They are not allowed to think for themselves, or even to feed themselves, unless the matriarchal queen is in on it. So each foraging ant has to bring the food back to the queen, and the queen divvies it back to the ants (gives each ant a cut). To each according to their need, from each according to their ability. "Redistribution," could not be more aptly represented than by a colony of carpenter ants.
So Amdro's product resembles ant food, but it's poison. The workers take the pellets back to the queen, who ingests them, and croaks.
This is splendid. If you try to kill individual ants you'll be at it all summer because a carpenter ant queen can lay 100,000 eggs in a day. So you have to kill the queen, and the two back-up queens, and then you've destroyed the colony. Then, no more ants.
I think I know where the nest is. A yellow-throated flicker goes there to dig out ants all afternoon. (The majority of the yellow-throated flicker's food happens to be ants.)
It used to be the ant migrations would continue all summer. Now we only get a trickle, and then they stop. We've cracked the communist code, destroyed the nest at its inception. Thanks to Amdro!
It's fortunate that ants cannot read, or they would read this, and develop a defense. I don't think that there is any way for the ants to discover how I am laying waste to their colonies, which, except for the illiteracy, have something of the engineering genius of Rome.
You can't really say anything to animals. A bright green bug strolls by. It's not as if I can say hello. The woodchuck pops out of his hole. It's not as if I can say, Happy Easter!
A fly tries to get in the window, but is stopped by a screen. It's not as if I can say, go somewhere else. Take a mass migration to Mars, or your intrusion will result in the death penalty. Human beings can sometimes be animals, but you can generally deal with them rationally. Even a baby, who does not know yet any words, is already developing its rationality. In slurping noodles, it can manipulate more than one into its mouth. It can learn. I don't think ants can learn.
Therefore, I don't think insects can be Lutheran Surrealists.
Whole tribes of army ants in Brazil will never be blessed by us!
But as for all of you who can read this: Happy Easter! May God bless you!
ALL HAIL ZERO
If zero fell out of a bag
& obliterated the universe
If the A-bomb was a smoking zero
Releasing the power of the void
If cameras caught a zero by the tail
And it said let me go or I will wail
Then life would be _____.
January 1, 2008
& obliterated the universe
If the A-bomb was a smoking zero
Releasing the power of the void
If cameras caught a zero by the tail
And it said let me go or I will wail
Then life would be _____.
January 1, 2008
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Murphy Tedisco Race
Murphy - D and Tedisco - R are coming down to the wire. As of this moment, Murphy - D is ahead by about 35 votes. Still ahead to count are about a thousand military votes, and about 400 absentee ballots, of which the majority are certified Republicans. Whoever wins, it will be a squeaker. About 78,000 votes were cast in this ten-county area for each of the candidates.
Has it always been the case that such close electoral contests are popping up, only to be decided by the House, or some judicial body?
Or is this a new phenomenon? If it is a new phenomenon, why is it happening with such frequency now? Both sides allege that the other side is cheating in the recounts, but the votes are now overseen by commissioners, lawyers, cameras, and many other whistle-blowers, most of whom I believe to be sane (I know two of these people -- one Democrat and one Republican -- and they are sane).
I think part of the issue is that people are no longer voting on a strictly party-line basis. Last night I had dinner with a traditional Republican in another department of my college, and he told me that he voted for Obama because he was afraid that McCain had gone soft in the head.
Meanwhile, I voted for McCain (only the second time in my life that I've voted for a Republican) mostly because I don't see how the Democrats can put together any kind of a sensible government policy on anything if their only criterion is tolerance. It doesn't make any sense.
I THINK the Republicans are still using Locke's four criteria: life, health, liberty, and property, and that they are instituting it more or less free of bias. A small number of multicultural intellectuals are joining with them -- Thomas Sowell, most particularly, and Clarence Thomas, and a few others, to try to institute a level playing field where competence matters more than compassion.
It's not that I can't stand compassion. It's ok when dealing with children. When I play soccer against my children (five years old and eight years old) I don't care to run up the score too high. And if they start to cry, I do actually stop and let them have some free kicks until they cheer up a bit. I like to teach them competition, and how to compete, but I think it's ok to give them some hope.
But I don't think there's room for choosing a car from a crummy American company out of compassion for the idiots who work and manage such a place just to give those dopes some hope.
I don't think a student who didn't do their homework, failed every test, and slept through my class when they weren't interrupting it because they were out drunk all night deserves compassion when another student paid attention, read everything in the book twice, aced every test, and worked hard from alpha to omega.
I'm not sure why companies that aren't regulating themselves deserve bailouts and bonuses. Tedisco wants to stop the bailouts, so I voted for him. He's currently three votes ahead in this county. One of those votes is mine!
One place where the Democrats can still speak to me is in energy policy. I'm not enamored of the Republican notion that the nuclear industry is the way ahead to make cheap, non-polluting energy. Obama claims that it is, too. But he's at least willing to think about greener forms of energy. I'm trending Republican in some ways, but have a green side that may yet pull me back toward the Democrats. I'd like to see some innovation on energy policy, and to move toward renewable resources. Nuclear energy gives me pause especially in an age of terrorism.
But what does it really matter? Our galaxy is currently being intepenetrated by two smaller galaxies, according to a program I watched this morning. Within thirteen billion years, most of the stars in our galaxy will have been sucked into the black hole at its center. Presumably, that will include ours. So we have 13 billion years to figure out an exit strategy. That's not a very long time. A billion used to be a big number, but now that I keep hearing of trillions in the bailout, I have to wonder if a billion is a big number after all.
Meanwhile, I'm going to church tonight to hear another, more heartening story, all about compassion, in a sense, but with lots of competition thrown in (the rabbis didn't like Jesus much because he was competing with them for authority, and winning, so they got the crowd to vote for Barabbas).
There are lots of stories going on about what's going on. I rather like the Christian story, and right now at least, the Republicans are making more sense to me.
In the same way, I believe that western civilization is better than any other (especially in its Protestant versions, in the northern hemisphere, at least). The story is qualitatively superior to other versions of events, and I think leads to kinder, better people. After that, I rank other stories in this way (from the top down):
Catholic
Eastern Orthodox
Buddhist
Islamic
Communist
Animist
Pagan (New Age)
Anarchist
Has it always been the case that such close electoral contests are popping up, only to be decided by the House, or some judicial body?
Or is this a new phenomenon? If it is a new phenomenon, why is it happening with such frequency now? Both sides allege that the other side is cheating in the recounts, but the votes are now overseen by commissioners, lawyers, cameras, and many other whistle-blowers, most of whom I believe to be sane (I know two of these people -- one Democrat and one Republican -- and they are sane).
I think part of the issue is that people are no longer voting on a strictly party-line basis. Last night I had dinner with a traditional Republican in another department of my college, and he told me that he voted for Obama because he was afraid that McCain had gone soft in the head.
Meanwhile, I voted for McCain (only the second time in my life that I've voted for a Republican) mostly because I don't see how the Democrats can put together any kind of a sensible government policy on anything if their only criterion is tolerance. It doesn't make any sense.
I THINK the Republicans are still using Locke's four criteria: life, health, liberty, and property, and that they are instituting it more or less free of bias. A small number of multicultural intellectuals are joining with them -- Thomas Sowell, most particularly, and Clarence Thomas, and a few others, to try to institute a level playing field where competence matters more than compassion.
It's not that I can't stand compassion. It's ok when dealing with children. When I play soccer against my children (five years old and eight years old) I don't care to run up the score too high. And if they start to cry, I do actually stop and let them have some free kicks until they cheer up a bit. I like to teach them competition, and how to compete, but I think it's ok to give them some hope.
But I don't think there's room for choosing a car from a crummy American company out of compassion for the idiots who work and manage such a place just to give those dopes some hope.
I don't think a student who didn't do their homework, failed every test, and slept through my class when they weren't interrupting it because they were out drunk all night deserves compassion when another student paid attention, read everything in the book twice, aced every test, and worked hard from alpha to omega.
I'm not sure why companies that aren't regulating themselves deserve bailouts and bonuses. Tedisco wants to stop the bailouts, so I voted for him. He's currently three votes ahead in this county. One of those votes is mine!
One place where the Democrats can still speak to me is in energy policy. I'm not enamored of the Republican notion that the nuclear industry is the way ahead to make cheap, non-polluting energy. Obama claims that it is, too. But he's at least willing to think about greener forms of energy. I'm trending Republican in some ways, but have a green side that may yet pull me back toward the Democrats. I'd like to see some innovation on energy policy, and to move toward renewable resources. Nuclear energy gives me pause especially in an age of terrorism.
But what does it really matter? Our galaxy is currently being intepenetrated by two smaller galaxies, according to a program I watched this morning. Within thirteen billion years, most of the stars in our galaxy will have been sucked into the black hole at its center. Presumably, that will include ours. So we have 13 billion years to figure out an exit strategy. That's not a very long time. A billion used to be a big number, but now that I keep hearing of trillions in the bailout, I have to wonder if a billion is a big number after all.
Meanwhile, I'm going to church tonight to hear another, more heartening story, all about compassion, in a sense, but with lots of competition thrown in (the rabbis didn't like Jesus much because he was competing with them for authority, and winning, so they got the crowd to vote for Barabbas).
There are lots of stories going on about what's going on. I rather like the Christian story, and right now at least, the Republicans are making more sense to me.
In the same way, I believe that western civilization is better than any other (especially in its Protestant versions, in the northern hemisphere, at least). The story is qualitatively superior to other versions of events, and I think leads to kinder, better people. After that, I rank other stories in this way (from the top down):
Catholic
Eastern Orthodox
Buddhist
Islamic
Communist
Animist
Pagan (New Age)
Anarchist
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Sensible Utopian Societies
Coleridge, Wordsworth and many of the other Romantics initially wanted to set up a utopian society. Called Pantisocracy, it was at one point to be founded at the confluence of the Susquehanna and the Chenango Rivers (at the present site of Binghamton, NY).
"Their wants would be simple and natural; their toil need not be such as the slaves of luxury endure; where possessions were held in common, each would work for all; in their cottages the best books would have a place; literature and science, bathed anew in the invigorating stream of life and nature, could not but rise reanimated and purified. Each young man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for his wife; it would be her part to prepare their innocent food, and tend their hardy and beautiful race."
Sounds good.
By the end of their lives most of the Romantics had come to take a dim view of the French Revolution, and had turned toward some variety of conservativism. The poets in general moved in this direction. Many of the modernist poets were conservatives. Pound and Eliot moved very far in the direction of fascism. Marianne Moore was a Republican throughout her life.
Allen Ginsberg and many others in the period of the Vietnam War moved far to the left, and drew inspiration again from the Romantic poets. Ginsberg drew from Blake, Corso from Shelley. The notion of utopia arose anew.
A few poets in the period of Vietnam actually thought communism was a good idea, but not many. Ron Silliman edited the Socialist Review.
The more romantic poets, like Corso, never apologised for Cuba. The apparent disdain of poets may have something to do with not wanting to sacrifice the idea of individualism to the notion of redistribution as directed by a single authoritarian party, driven typically by a single tyrant.
Today, again, we have poets who think of Hugo Chavez as progressive (Venepoetics blog is about the actual facts regarding Chavez as an inspiration to poets).
In the academy, there are many who look to the likes of Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze (Steve Shaviro's newest book from MIT is called Without Criteria -- see his blog for a link to some of the chapters).
I suppose to be contrary I wonder instead of Whitehead about the Blackfoot (Indians), and instead of Deleuze, I think about competition. Why should we be de losers with blackfeet and Whiteheads as our inspiration?
Like Kierkegaard, many poets want to posit the individualism of an uncollected Bohemian movement. The trouble is, they always lose out to more organized collectivists. The Bolsheviks slaughtered the Mensheviks, and swiftly put their foot on the neck of the nascent avant-garde in Russia and throughout the East Bloc.
The avant-garde survived only in the capitalist west, but increasingly became careerists, following the example of Avida Dollars (Salvador Dali) and Andy Warhol.
Shaviro's title (it's the only part of his book that I've read so far) is Without Criteria. This refers at least to some extent to Kant's notion of aesthetics as being an area of inquiry in which there are no permanent criteria. Genius reconfigures the playing field. No one had seen boxing such as that of Mohammed Ali's "rope-a-dope," no one had been able to foresee rock music until it suddenly exploded in the frame of Jerry Lee Lewis' piano finger-banging toe-tapping madness.
Two ideas continue to militate within the avant-garde -- the individual notion of genius, and the notion of the creative collective, sharing many things, as in the paragraph above, a small cottage industry, apparently shipping their books and other artifacts back to industrial civilization, from which they could then draw royalties, which would allow them to survive in the middle of nowhere.
Every avant-garde has done this ever since: the Beats lived off royalties, and prior incomes, and speaking engagements at universities, while living in what seemed like nature colonies (Ginsberg's outpost in Cherry Valley, NY). The surrealists had similar colonies and outposts in France. Codrescu's book Road Scholar investigated small outposts of utopian ideals such as that of the Bruderhoffs and Oneida and poet colonies in Santa Fe and San Francisco and artistic neighborhoods in Detroit. He admits towards the end that he found utopia in a functioning middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins. The normal people of the suburbs have got it right. At least in the summer evenings, when it's time for barbecue and baseball!
It's not like I've rejected utopian visions. I accept them to some degree, but I have never been willing to countenance authoritarian dictates from above in terms of communism, and have had to admit to the fact that anarchism doesn't really work (no one picks up). Universities are increasingly being taken over by the militant left, authoritarian as hell, and unapologetic as Satan himself. Where does one find heaven on earth?
Codrescu in his most recent book on Dada from Princeton UP argues that it is an individual discovery having to do with Dada (Dadaists in his view have a corollary with Kierkegaard's Knights of Faith, as they both are valiant perpetrators of the Absurd). Maybe that's so, but I like his earlier view that utopia on earth is in the small towns of Arkansas, and in the suburbs of the big cities. The people in such places may not be trying to create utopias (which means no work, and all play), but they are the best at actually creating them. In the same way, Lutheran congregations are a lot about working, and having a work ethic. But they are simultaneously extremely playful about it.
And sensible.
For Lutheran Surrealists, they are the best habitat: inspirational, still drawing on the most sagacious of humans, the great avant-garde of Christ, who could walk on water, multiply loaves, and remind us of the Ten Commandments. Luther was a Bohemian and also a practical man, and an academic. He set up clear reasonable rules, and his societies have thrived everywhere they have become dominant. If you want heaven on earth, or at least a little touch of the Scandinavian social democracies, a Bohemian habitat par excellence, it's in your local Lutheran church, right down the block.
"Their wants would be simple and natural; their toil need not be such as the slaves of luxury endure; where possessions were held in common, each would work for all; in their cottages the best books would have a place; literature and science, bathed anew in the invigorating stream of life and nature, could not but rise reanimated and purified. Each young man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for his wife; it would be her part to prepare their innocent food, and tend their hardy and beautiful race."
Sounds good.
By the end of their lives most of the Romantics had come to take a dim view of the French Revolution, and had turned toward some variety of conservativism. The poets in general moved in this direction. Many of the modernist poets were conservatives. Pound and Eliot moved very far in the direction of fascism. Marianne Moore was a Republican throughout her life.
Allen Ginsberg and many others in the period of the Vietnam War moved far to the left, and drew inspiration again from the Romantic poets. Ginsberg drew from Blake, Corso from Shelley. The notion of utopia arose anew.
A few poets in the period of Vietnam actually thought communism was a good idea, but not many. Ron Silliman edited the Socialist Review.
The more romantic poets, like Corso, never apologised for Cuba. The apparent disdain of poets may have something to do with not wanting to sacrifice the idea of individualism to the notion of redistribution as directed by a single authoritarian party, driven typically by a single tyrant.
Today, again, we have poets who think of Hugo Chavez as progressive (Venepoetics blog is about the actual facts regarding Chavez as an inspiration to poets).
In the academy, there are many who look to the likes of Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze (Steve Shaviro's newest book from MIT is called Without Criteria -- see his blog for a link to some of the chapters).
I suppose to be contrary I wonder instead of Whitehead about the Blackfoot (Indians), and instead of Deleuze, I think about competition. Why should we be de losers with blackfeet and Whiteheads as our inspiration?
Like Kierkegaard, many poets want to posit the individualism of an uncollected Bohemian movement. The trouble is, they always lose out to more organized collectivists. The Bolsheviks slaughtered the Mensheviks, and swiftly put their foot on the neck of the nascent avant-garde in Russia and throughout the East Bloc.
The avant-garde survived only in the capitalist west, but increasingly became careerists, following the example of Avida Dollars (Salvador Dali) and Andy Warhol.
Shaviro's title (it's the only part of his book that I've read so far) is Without Criteria. This refers at least to some extent to Kant's notion of aesthetics as being an area of inquiry in which there are no permanent criteria. Genius reconfigures the playing field. No one had seen boxing such as that of Mohammed Ali's "rope-a-dope," no one had been able to foresee rock music until it suddenly exploded in the frame of Jerry Lee Lewis' piano finger-banging toe-tapping madness.
Two ideas continue to militate within the avant-garde -- the individual notion of genius, and the notion of the creative collective, sharing many things, as in the paragraph above, a small cottage industry, apparently shipping their books and other artifacts back to industrial civilization, from which they could then draw royalties, which would allow them to survive in the middle of nowhere.
Every avant-garde has done this ever since: the Beats lived off royalties, and prior incomes, and speaking engagements at universities, while living in what seemed like nature colonies (Ginsberg's outpost in Cherry Valley, NY). The surrealists had similar colonies and outposts in France. Codrescu's book Road Scholar investigated small outposts of utopian ideals such as that of the Bruderhoffs and Oneida and poet colonies in Santa Fe and San Francisco and artistic neighborhoods in Detroit. He admits towards the end that he found utopia in a functioning middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins. The normal people of the suburbs have got it right. At least in the summer evenings, when it's time for barbecue and baseball!
It's not like I've rejected utopian visions. I accept them to some degree, but I have never been willing to countenance authoritarian dictates from above in terms of communism, and have had to admit to the fact that anarchism doesn't really work (no one picks up). Universities are increasingly being taken over by the militant left, authoritarian as hell, and unapologetic as Satan himself. Where does one find heaven on earth?
Codrescu in his most recent book on Dada from Princeton UP argues that it is an individual discovery having to do with Dada (Dadaists in his view have a corollary with Kierkegaard's Knights of Faith, as they both are valiant perpetrators of the Absurd). Maybe that's so, but I like his earlier view that utopia on earth is in the small towns of Arkansas, and in the suburbs of the big cities. The people in such places may not be trying to create utopias (which means no work, and all play), but they are the best at actually creating them. In the same way, Lutheran congregations are a lot about working, and having a work ethic. But they are simultaneously extremely playful about it.
And sensible.
For Lutheran Surrealists, they are the best habitat: inspirational, still drawing on the most sagacious of humans, the great avant-garde of Christ, who could walk on water, multiply loaves, and remind us of the Ten Commandments. Luther was a Bohemian and also a practical man, and an academic. He set up clear reasonable rules, and his societies have thrived everywhere they have become dominant. If you want heaven on earth, or at least a little touch of the Scandinavian social democracies, a Bohemian habitat par excellence, it's in your local Lutheran church, right down the block.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Ward Churchill Exonerated
Ward Churchill was exonerated this week by a Colorado court that awarded him a nominal one dollar in damages for having been fired at CU-Boulder.
Soon, the judge will decide whether CU-Boulder must reinstate him at $100,000 salary, with full teaching responsibilities.
At a time when many are losing their jobs throughout industry, this reinstatement of Churchill makes you wonder how it is that the multicultural industry got started, and what it means to America. Churchill, like many of his ilk, doesn't believe in America. He believes that America should face a thousand Mogadishus, and that we are a racist Nazi country that should be on trial, as Eichmann was, and condemned to death.
There is an entire industry of Churchill's thought in America. Churchill was to be a scapegoat for that, and his termination was to be a symbolic blow. But that industry is probably now America's most vital at least in terms of job creation, and government spending. What does 60,000 such jobs times $100,000 come to? It's probably a budget that is now larger than the military's.
Frustration is growing in this country that tax-payers are having to foot the bill for the likes of Churchill (who's already cost over ten million dollars to the state of Colorado in their attempts to get rid of him). However, I'm with the jury not because I like Churchill (I can't stand him), but because you can't do selective enforcement of a law and remain within the spirit of the law. A special committee at CU-Boulder spent a year combing through Churchill's schlarship and found abundant irregularities, sleights of hand, and outright plagiarism. In addition, he apparently applied to the university under the guise of being Native American, when he is not on a legitimate tribal roll. But that's not a crime. You don't have to be a Native American to teach in a Native American Studies department, any more than you have to be a woman to teach in a Women's Studies department. Generally, the one follows the other, but it is illegal to hire someone on the basis of their demographics. If he was hired on such a basis, the hiring committee was wrong to have done it.
It's not Churchill's fault that he has a job. CU-Boulder, and the archipelago of 6,000 colleges, has put the sub-altern industry in motion in the first place. At least 10 such scholars as Ward Churchill exist on every campus in America. Why should Churchill be the lone scapegoat for a pervasive viewpoint just because he is the one whose visage got caught by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and others, and made into a target?
The multicultural cartel is an enormous industry. It was apparently founded by the incidental remark by Edward Said that we should listen to the other ... by which he meant repressed minorities. Colleges saw in this a rationale, and set up -- in addition to women's studies, ethnic studies, which now include African American, Native American, Hispanic, and others (the list is going to keep on growing). We now have hundreds of thousands of people employed in these departments. If you've ever been on a campus in the last ten years, then you'd know that Churchill's viewpoint is more or less the consensus.
"merikkka is evil, merikkka must be destroyed... merikkka is a bunch of Nazi jerks..." I've heard this so often that it's like a mantra to my generation. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard it, I would be able to buy a new Honda Odyssey. I actually believed the mantra myself when I was young and just out of college (because it was what everybody there seemed to think). At Naropa Institute in Boulder, where Allen Ginsberg was one of my professors, it seemed that even our greatest cultural figures believed our country should be terminated.
How did I Houdini out of this strait jacket? I think I got out of it because I lived in Finland. Not only did I respect and deeply admire Finnish patriotism, but I missed stuff about America: oat bars, and peanut butter, and the American robin, the American bluebird, and the ability to converse in American English.... And my patriotism was reborn. I love America! I even love the woodchuck out back. I love James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln, I love Emily Dickinson, and Helen Keller! I love Jesse Owens, and Billie Jean King! I love Hulk Hogan, and Shirley Temple, and boxes of raisins, and cartons of chocolate milk. The multiculturals try to tell us that America is just the smell of napalm in the morning. But there is so much else to it!
To my mind, the challenge to the American state by the multiculturals is reaching a crisis point, since they have almost a stranglehold on higher education. Students have to take their courses. And it has had an effect. The last president was almost certainly voted in purely because he was a sub-altern. It was the college vote that put him over the hurdle. But President Obama, I believe, is at the very least a patriot. Even if his wife has only been proud of America since her man won the Democratic nomination, at least that's a beginning. Many of our multiculturals will never be proud of America, even after it has been destroyed.
The multicultural cartel is one of the strongest cartels in America. It has substantial protections provided by the American legal system (which they largely detest and are determined to overthrow).
Getting rid of someone like Ward Churchill will probably be more difficult than getting rid of someone like Pablo Escobar was for Columbia.
Escobar ran the powerful Medellin Drug Cartel. His reach extended into the military, the government, and the highest police echelons of Columbia. When he started shooting higher-ups, the government of Columbia finally moved on him. He blew up nine bombs in Bogota, killing thousands, in retaliation. He was finally taken out by a sharp shooter and killed, after a very long search (I saw this last night on the History Channel). His only weakness was worry about his own family. When a paramilitary group called Los Pepes started shooting his friends and family, his cartel crumbled.
Churchill and his ilk are probably going to be much harder to get rid of. What they are doing, what they are saying, is largely within the law. They may undermine that law, but at least as of now, they haven't got very much power to do that, so their jobs will remain intact. The only way to fight them is with words.
It's part of the reason that this blog exists. For the longest time I was with the multiculturals. But they are now almost like an organized crime cartel. They are beyond the reach of the law which they both sneer at, and use to protect themselves.
I think Americans will have to reach way down into our Protestant roots, and into the Founding, to create a countervalent vision of America, and its mission. We will have to create alliances with Catholics, and with other conservatives, and what's left of the muddled middle, and what's left of true liberalism. Such groups exist all through multicultural America, too. There are Native American Lutherans, for instance. Meanwhile, we also have to listen to boring Marxist buffoons like Churchill.
The debacle of the sixties created a watershed of bad thought which is currently in power in the universities. Chairman Mao was their avatar. In about ten years, many of these people will begin to die off. Their legacy, however, will remain for a hundred years. They created permanent changes in American society and in American thinking. We will have to deal with the Sexual Revolution and the diseases and instability it created. We will have to deal with the lack of patriotism that the 60s left espoused, such that even Howard Dean and Bill Maher believe that Islamic terrorists who threaten Judeo-Christian countries and smash planes into the WTC can be brave soldiers, fighting for a worthy cause. We will have to deal with the utter lack of criteria that the left espouse, and with the drugs that they smoke and take, and the illusions it created, for a long time to come.
The left cannot come up with a single criterion that they are willing to stand by. Their weakness is intellectual: they cannot think, and they are further weakened by the fact of groupthink. But they are tough and determined, and there are millions of them.
It's not just one guy. Churchill is a good symbolic figure because he incarnates everything that's wrong with the left. But I believe that Churchill being reinstated at CU-Boulder will force good Americans to think harder, rather than to believe that with one symbolic victory, the left has been defeated, and that we can relax. I want Churchill to continue to speak, to continue to teach. America will never be safe. Thomas Jefferson reminded us that it is only with eternal vigilance that our torches will remain lit. Churchill wakes people up. Even if he's bad, that's good.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
What Makes a Squirrel Squirrelly?
I've never known quite where to place squirrels vis a vis dogs, ducks, and rats. To some extent, squirrels appear to be domesticated. I remember the writer William Burroughs befriended squirrels in Boulder, Colorado in the summer of 1977. They would climb up his gray suit, and sit on his shoulder, while he fed them nuts. This appeared alarming to me, a daredevil stunt. I would never trust a squirrel to that extent.
Squirrels have the boa-type feathery tail, which makes them appear to be further from the rat and closer to something festive or decorative.
But I think that squirrels in fact are rats. They appear more "squirrelly" than rats thanks to their slightly chaotic method of running across lawns. They partake a bit in the butterfly chaos as they dart from tree to tree. Whereas rats can beeline, squirrels don't appear to be able to make up their minds. First here, then there. What is going on?
One is tempted to say that they are nuts (you are what you eat), but I'm not at all certain that there isn't a deep logic in their peripatetic motion having something to do with their eyes being placed so far on the side of their heads that they are not really certain whether or not they are moving in a straight line. Perhaps their zigzagging progression doesn't connote a lack of logic at all, but rather, something designed into them, and perhaps they are more likely to find food through the very irregularity of their progression.
Likewise, the way they run around and around a tree, like a screw is loose, as they proceed upwards, appears batty.
Dogs you can trust, because they have patterns that they repeat. Throw a frisbee, and the dog will let its tongue lollygag out, and it will go and get the frisbee and return it. It will enjoy being petted.
You can't pet a squirrel. You can't teach it tricks. And yet, Burroughs did get some to climb up his suit and fetch nuts out of his hand. But are squirrels susceptible to human affection, or did they merely want the nuts, and once fed, depart, without holding in their hearts any loyalty for the man in gray who had given them dinner?
Squirrels are an unknown quantity. You can't keep them as pets (some do, but they are liable to revert to wildness at the merest provocation), and yet they appear in almost all parks. We regard them with affection, but do they regard us with affection? I think cats are capable of affection. I am certain that dogs are capable of affection. Some children own rats and mice, which appear to enjoy being held. Does this mean that they are affectionate? I doubt rats and mice. I doubt squirrels, too. I do not think they are capable of loyalty in the manner of the dog (again, I'm not sure if cats have LOYALTY per se, but I do think they can be domesticated, and when they sit on your lap and purr, I am almost certain that they are contented).
Whatever is going on in the mind of the squirrel, it appears to be very far from human. When I look in their eyes or think about what's between their ears, I experience largely a sense of terror. Chipmunks are perhaps less squirrelly, and perhaps closer to humanity? It is hard to tell, and perhaps I am thrown off by Alvin and the Chipmunks, and do not really know the minds of chipmunks, but when they look at me, I sense that they are somewhat more affectionate, somewhat less crazy, than squirrels.
When we say that someone is "squirrelly" it indicates a person who is a little out to lunch, but this is still a friendly term. We don't mean a true rat, like Charles Manson. Manson is a rat. Bruce Dern, on the other hand, is a bit squirrelly. Cyndi Lauper is a bit squirrelly. Madonna is a rat.
Can you imagine a sports team that used squirrels as its totem?
Squirrels are animals that are very close to us, and yet very far at the same time. They are difficult to evaluate, difficult to know. The swagger of the peacock is easy to understand. The straightforward orneriness of the rhinoscerous is at least comprehensible. Horses make sense, and you can ride them, and many people can feel close to horses. "Black Beauty" celebrates the mind of a horse. "Charlotte's Web" shows that we can even love pigs. But squirrels? Squirrels appear to be of no use whatsoever (in the distant past some people shot and ate them, but this appears to be a very eccentric repast). Squirrels nevertheless have their niche, and do not appear on any endangered lists. What do they represent to us? What exactly are they up to? What am I supposed to think about them? Our daily lives would be poorer without them.
100,000 Hits
My blog site meter says 99,360 hits. I'm getting about 460 hits a day. This means that probably some time early Tuesday morning at about 4 am, I will hit 100,000. Quantity is not very interesting, of course. The huge quantity of comments at Ann Althouse's blog, or the firestorms at Ron Silliman's blog (largely in the past) can't hold a candle to the more scintillating conversations that have occasionally lit this blog into incandescent quality. Thanks to all of you for conversing with me. I haven't converted anyone, and that's fine. I just think we should try to go deeper, and further into quality.
Friday, April 03, 2009
SOLVING FOR INEQUALITIES
Where inequality exists, some are tempted to created equality, or symmetry. The sign of "greater than" is banned in communist circles.
The communist formula runs, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need," which translates in praxis to, "From each according to the dictates of number one, to each according to their proximity to number one."
It is especially tempting for many to argue against any and all inequalities. But inequalities exist in nature, and are the basis of evolution.
Last week at my child's talent show, some kids could sing better than the others. They were on tune, or had stage presence. Some had actually practiced their routine, and the practice was apparent. Others just screeched, while looking at their shoes. One could hear tiny differences in applause, but equality was the norm that was sought. After all, we love all the children equally, talented and non-. Still, did we love their performances equally? Secretly, I ranked the children. Naturally, my child came out close to the top. She had one close rival who sang very clearly, a capella, and rocked the place.
Against equality, there is quality.
Quality is difficult to measure. We can measure quantity, but an intuition of quality? It may not ever be precise, but I believe that it is universal.
Almost all fans of boxing would say that qualitatively Ali was superior to Joe Frazier. He had the better chin. He also won quantitatively, and we tend to remember him. Without Ali, Frazier would be forgotten.
In sports there is a clear winner and a clear loser. Therefore, the quantitative side of the analysis helps us, even when the qualitative side remains imprecise and murky. In sports, the two are clearly related.
In art, quantity is perhaps the price. There often is a link to quality. In music, number of copies sold could stand in for quantity.
I saw a cover of BTO's "Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" by someone named John Otman.
Otman is a punk rocker. He can't really sing, and can't really play, but the punks were anarchists who attempted to level hierarchies, and bring quality down to sheer energy. Otman was playing in a tiny room to about thirty others.
Compare Otman's version to Randy Bachman's original, and then imagine yourself as a musical executive, and think about which one you want to sign. Which one is greater than the other?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7miRCLeFSJo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX9qBREGjWM
Apparently, Bachman Turner Overdrive was originally signed on a fluke. A music exec had gone on vacation and come home from Europe. He sat at his desk and swept the stack of tapes into a trash can. One fell out. It was BTO. He listened to it, and signed them after listening to one song.
To some extent, all art IS supply side. If you can get your work out there, you can get interest. You need an institutional pipeline.
No doubt there is something about the architectonics of the song and the superiority of Bachman's voice that make it superior to Otman's version, and make it memorable, and make it rise into the level of a classic. Bachman's version made millions for its owners. This means that millions of people must like it.
Kant argues that genius is absolutely individual and yet is universal.
Pound said that a poem is "news that stays news." Anything classic, whether it's in sports (Ali vs. Frazier) or in art, manages to remain forever fresh, exciting: it's a moment at which the form and the passion that it contains, or the data and the concept, manage to combine.
Twiggy was a genius in fashion. Shakespeare was a genius in theatre. Herman Melville was a genius in the novel.
Genius is individual, and yet, it is also a universal.
What we want is greatness for a small price. So we want something that is > than, and yet it costs <.
All things being =.
But in church, we reverse the polarities. Christ washes the feet of his disciples. Eternity comes to earth, and cares for the seemingly insignificant.
As talents, as commodities circulating in the social text, we are not equal. We can take heart in the equality of our souls. I know that I will never be a great rock singer or a great boxer, nor will I be a great soccer player, or astronomer. I don't have to go on a rampage. The talents I have been given are more than sufficient. At least I can recognize greatness. I can enjoy the BTO song, I can enjoy all the hits and classics of our common culture. I may never contribute a hit, but I think if I ever do, it will be recognized universally.
I'm not sure how to compare a hit with having an immortal soul. Communists see one's worth as how much one makes. And so they want to redistribute income so that everyone is worth the same amount. Lutheran Surrealists see everyone as of infinite worth, and as an end in themselves. Therefore, whether they make beans, or whether they turn out hits, doesn't matter. Otman's music isn't worth much. However, that doesn't mean that HE's not worth anything. He has an infinite value. Just not as a musician.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
CARS II: Democrat Comes Up with Good Idea
Charles Schumer D-NY has proposed a new plan called "Cash for Clunkers" that will offer 2,500 to 4,500 dollars for cars that get less than 18 mpg, if you trade them in, and get instead something that gets better than 30 mpg, and is newer than 2004. The resolution hasn't passed yet, and is a bipartisan effort, which Obama has given his endorsement (one area where I largely agree with President Obama is in environment).
The Dodge Caravan that we now have gets 16 mpg in city traffic, and 22 on the highway, for an average of 18 mpg. This makes it apparently eligible for the program.
We've been thinking of hanging on to the Dodge Caravan for another few years, and nursing it through sickness and health.
One of the down sides to Schumer's plan is that he wants the old cars to be scrapped. This makes me very sad, because this car has been quite good to us, and I would hate to think of it being compressed by a compactor and sold for scrap metal in some junk yard. It feels very disloyal. And yet, it is a traitor to the environment, and maybe isn't such a good friend after all.
I'm not certain that our clunker will be considered to be under the mileage necessary. 18 mpg is the combination for city and highway driving. Which standard do they use? My local paper wasn't clear on this. It has to be mpg AT TIME OF SALE. It probably gets less than that, now. Far less? Like 14?
But we don't use it much. Just to ferry tots to school, and for an occasional shopping trip. Once in a while we take it in to NYC, but it's getting so unreliable, that that's a dare. But we like dares.
When you trade in your old car, you have to buy a new car (newer than 2004), (according to the Schumer proposal) and the new car has to get 30 mpg or better. We were thinking of getting a scrappy old Volvo from the early 90s, and this would force our hand and make us buy a newer model Toyota, Honda or Hyundai (they haven't stipulated that the car has to be American).
Plus, you're permitted to buy a used car.
Today, I'm liking the Democrats again. They may yet prove to be allies in two things: my personal phynances, and the environment.
The Dodge Caravan that we now have gets 16 mpg in city traffic, and 22 on the highway, for an average of 18 mpg. This makes it apparently eligible for the program.
We've been thinking of hanging on to the Dodge Caravan for another few years, and nursing it through sickness and health.
One of the down sides to Schumer's plan is that he wants the old cars to be scrapped. This makes me very sad, because this car has been quite good to us, and I would hate to think of it being compressed by a compactor and sold for scrap metal in some junk yard. It feels very disloyal. And yet, it is a traitor to the environment, and maybe isn't such a good friend after all.
I'm not certain that our clunker will be considered to be under the mileage necessary. 18 mpg is the combination for city and highway driving. Which standard do they use? My local paper wasn't clear on this. It has to be mpg AT TIME OF SALE. It probably gets less than that, now. Far less? Like 14?
But we don't use it much. Just to ferry tots to school, and for an occasional shopping trip. Once in a while we take it in to NYC, but it's getting so unreliable, that that's a dare. But we like dares.
When you trade in your old car, you have to buy a new car (newer than 2004), (according to the Schumer proposal) and the new car has to get 30 mpg or better. We were thinking of getting a scrappy old Volvo from the early 90s, and this would force our hand and make us buy a newer model Toyota, Honda or Hyundai (they haven't stipulated that the car has to be American).
Plus, you're permitted to buy a used car.
Today, I'm liking the Democrats again. They may yet prove to be allies in two things: my personal phynances, and the environment.
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