This and that from re Thai r ment, by 3Th. 25 Joey 0011. (April 15, 2021)

“Pleasant surprises seemed to get rarer as you got older.”

               Abercrombie, Joe. The Trouble with Peace: 2 (The Age of Madness) (p. 114). Orbit.  

On April 15, 1452 in Vinci, Italy Leonardo da Vinci was Born. Happy Leonardo da Vinci Day to all.

 

 

 

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

 

 

POOKIE’S APRIL ADVENTURES:

Sadly, on Easter Sunday morning Naida’s beloved artist brother Roger died of a massive heart attack. She had called Roger earlier in the morning to wish him a Happy Easter. The phone seemed to be answered. She heard a slight sound and the phone was quickly hung up. Naida assumed it was her brother’s middle-aged, schizophrenic  and uncommunicative son that Roger had cared for all his life who had decided he did not want to speak with anyone that day. She surmised that Roger was out singing at one of the churches in the area as he often did every Sunday morning especially since it was Easter Sunday. In addition to being an artist, Roger also was an accomplished singer and in demand by the churches as a soloist . She decided to call back later. A few hours after that, she received a call from Roger’s ex-wife that he had suffered a massive heart attack that morning and died.

 

     She had written in her memoir, “A Daughter of the West” that Roger was her close companion and support during their childhood as they, often alone, faced hunger, loneliness, and fear together. As I typed this, Naida had been listening to a phone message Roger left a few days ago asking for her assistance in searching for someone to donate a kidney needed for his son’s kidney transplant operation. She had misplaced the phone during our trip to Mendocino and now was upset that she was not there for him during this final call of distress. 

Some of Roger’s paintings and a recent photograph of Roger and Naida with Clear Lake in the background.

Today we woke up a bit late. The day was spring sunny and warm with the temperature hovering around seventy degrees. After breakfast we decided to take advantage of the weather and go for a long walk through the Enchanted Forest. For the first time in the three years since I have been living here we reached the opposite end of the subdivision. Usually, when I set out for the other side of the subdivision, I either get lost, turned around on the paths, or just exhausted and give up and return home. Many of the trees were flowering this morning. The decorated cement duck that had disappeared ever since the pandemic began had returned festooned today with bright flowers on its head. Boo-boo the barking dog behaved himself for the most part.

Some of the flowering trees we encountered during our walk, Naida and Boo-boo standing before the fence marking the end of the Enchanted Forest, and the cement duck with his floral headdress.

In a preliminary return to normality yesterday, I had my hair cut at Great Clips. With the temerity of someone emerging from a bomb shelter, I requested only slight trimming in an effort to avoid errant unruly strands from flying about. The next day, I had the tooth repaired that I had chipped on an olive I bit into at Maryann’s house in Mendocino last week.

Before, after, and my new smile.

Now one may think I have gone a bit batty or around the bend taking photographs of my hair-do and repaired teeth and posting them for all the world to see. If one does so, then that person does not understand the purpose in life for someone reaching my age and decrepitude. The purpose of the very old is not, as some believe, to become a repository of wisdom but rather an example of the folly of misplaced ambitions and social dictums that diminishes one’s joy in a long, happy, and peaceful life. Alas, it never seems to work as a lesson to anyone but it does give some pleasure to those of us teetering on the edge of senility. 

 

    Tonight Naida and I ate dinner at a place we had not eaten at before, Allora on Fulton St. here in Sacramento a few minutes from Campus Commons where we live. I have not had a better meal in years, nor as expensive. Although the cuisine was Italian, it was prepared in a more French style — lots of sauces and small portions. It is a shame to see Italian food which was made to be tasty and inexpensive become what it was never intended to be. 

 

     Later after we got home, Naida, while playing the piano, demonstrated how the chords in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata translates directly into How Much is That Doggie in the Window. 

 

     Besides playing the piano and writing novels, Naida sometimes regales me with stories about politics.Recently, she told me about a Cabinet meeting Ronald Reagan had called when he was Governor of California (Her husband, Kirk West, was a highly placed member of his administration at the time). There was a single item on the calendar. the electric power development of Round Valley, a major Native American reservation. The development would flood the valley and displace the Native American Community living there. The meeting was held in Round Valley and no Native Americans were invited. At the meeting, the entire Cabinet was in favor of the development except for the Secretary of Resources, Ike Livermore. Reagan overruled his Cabinet saying, “I am tired of always taking Native-American Lands.” It should be noted that Rich Wilson, the largest private landowner in the valley and a member of the original prop 20 Coastal Commission, a friend of both Livermore and Reagan and a big supporter of Governor Reagan also vociferously opposed the power plan.

 

I have noticed, since we have become more mobile after our vaccinations, that I seem to have gotten more feeble. I  carry my walking-stick now not so much to assist me in walking but as additional support should I stumble. Recently, my balance seems to have deteriorated so much that my need for the walking stick has progressed from a caution to a necessity. Also, chronic fatigue has turned my joyful anticipation of traveling into a wary suspicion of all movement. Our memories, Naida’s and mine, have decayed, progressing from a forgotten word here and there to speaking in halting sentences as though we are learning a new language.

 

I fear I am becoming one of those bent and feeble little old men needing assistance crossing the street. That is not so bad when attractive young women try to help, but, when 70 year olds also do so, their offers of assistance drive me into the depths of despondency. They, the people at the community center, tell me the pools may be opened next week. That has cheered me up. It has been my fading hope that more exercise, a return to swimming laps, will halt and perhaps reverse my decline — a forlorn hope at best.

 

That evening along about the witching hour, Naida told me a true but eerie story. It seems that one day a few years ago she was sitting at her desk in the historic farm house that she lived in on the banks of the Cosumnes River. Her husband Bill resided at that time in a nursing home. She was typing a draft of her Memoir when she looked up and out the window and noticed it was getting on towards evening. The sky was streaked with the rose-orange lite of the setting sun. She checked the clock also. She returned to her typing, holding her fingers lightly on the keyboard and stared at a word she had begun typing. She felt her mind was drifting. She glanced at her clock again. It had advanced ten minutes since she last looked at it. She then looked out the window. The sky remained streaked with rosy-orange, but the sun seemed to be in the wrong place. She got up to look mere closely. All her joints were stiff and painful. At the window, she realized the sun was rising not setting. She did not believe it but when she checked further, it was true. It was morning. She had lost an entire night.

 

The following day in the early evening we walked Boo-boo along the paths the snake through the Enchanted Forest in a direction we do not often take.

   It is azalea season.

The following day, I drove into the Golden Hills. Haden drove us in the Mitsubishi to Subways for lunch. He has done wonders to the car. What was dirty and unkempt, and seemed one block from a breakdown now appeared shiny and new, and purring like a contented tiger.

Today marks, for me, the day summer begins — I wore my first Hawaiian shirt of the year — I also was the first to sign up to use the newly open pool tomorrow. Boo-boo and I walked this morning to the Nepenthe ClubHouse to register. He was very well behaved and deserves to be noted and commended. This has been a special morning, from the delightful diversion in bed, to the magnificent weather and ending with an invigorating walk through the Enchanted Forest. May the afternoon and evening go so well.

Damn! The pool remains closed. Something about the heater not working. I did not know it had a heater. Why would the pool need a heater? Why would I need or want a heated pool? Well, I guess I will have to try again on Thursday.

This morning,(Thursday, I do not know what happened to Wednesday) at 10 AM I went for a swim in the small pool off Dunbarton Circle. I believe I am the first person in the subdivision to do so since the pools were closed due to the pandemic. It was great. The temperature was about 60 degrees. The water appeared warmer (Heated?) then the air. Two ducks had taken-up residence in the pool. They kindly exited the pool when I entered and returned when I vacated it

The swimming pool with the resident ducks.

 

 

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

 

Eleven years ago, the late Irwin Shatzman and I exchanged a series of correspondences. I about my adventures in Thailand and he about his on Los Jardines Street, Fountain Valley, CA. The following exchange was prompted by Irwin’s question  about how I do and get away with whatever it is he thinks I do.

 

“You have now asked me twice how is it that I do whatever it is that you think I do. That can be answered in one word, “RUN”. When the going get’s tough, Joey runs. I would rather die a thousand deaths given the alternative. It is those who stand and fight that die.

 

“I, at this advanced age,  now live in a world of three dooms. I love that word doom (words are such Hoes, they will do anything for anybody at any time and for free). Dooooom. Stretch it out and it is one of the essential sounds emanating from the bowels of the cosmos like the Maharishi’s ohm. Anyway my three dooms: 

 

First is the doom of retirement. I always believed that we (men at least) are held together by stress and fear gifted to us by our jewish caveman ancestors. Stressed because our hunt for food may fail and we and our families may starve to death. Fear because some woolly mammoth may emerge from the bushes and step on our head. If we stop to smell the flowers, we fear a saber-toothed tiger will immediately bite our sorry ass. Then about a hundred years ago they gave us “RETIREMENT” and for a brief moment the fear and stress we think disappears. Then we die.

 

The second doom is the “REAL DOOM”. Earlier in our life, death was some remote possibility, so we planed and dreamed (most [all] of which failed to occur). Now, it is an onrushing certainty and planning, at best, means for that day only and our dreams are just what happens (if we are lucky) in our sleep.

 

The third doom is what I call my personal existential doom. I live here in this place (Thailand) at the sufferance of my greedy, mostly insane ex-lover in whose name I stupidly placed the deed to the house. At any moment I can be out on my ass. And then what will I do? Run, I guess.

 

On that note, ciao for now.”

 

Irwin responded:

 

“i think you are right-on with this “doom” thing! in fact i think you are overlooking an opportunity to make a bundle. you should create a (men’s) board game (e.g. monopoly) titled “doom”. i can imagine some of the squares now as i roll the dice and watch my life being fucked before me with my very own eyes. somehow i think it’s also tied in with that story-joke i emailed to you earlier today about the “husband store”. the funny part about that joke is i believe it to be 100% true which is why, i guess, it is so funny and i think the male “doom” is because we gave women the right to vote.”

 

Alas, the “husband store” story-joke Irwin refers to has been lost from my records. There was, however, in our correspondence a vague reference to him opening a store in Chiang Mai where he would, “Sell photos and have a limited food menu.”  

 

 

 

DAILY FACTOID:

 

During the evening of April !5th 2021 having nothing better to do, I decided to check and see if perhaps April 15th was more interesting ay sometime in the past. I discovered that, on this day in the last 110 years, the following occurred :

 

2019: Just two years ago the historic Notre-Dame de Paris caught fire during a restoration campaign, and the blaze destroyed most of the cathedral’s roof, the 19th-century spire, and some of the rib vaulting.

 

2013: Near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two homemade bombs were detonated in the crowd of spectators; 3 people were killed and more than 260 were wounded in the terrorist attack.

 

2003: US President George W. Bush declared that the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq had fallen.

 

1989: Tragedy occurred at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, when a crush of football (soccer) fans resulted in 96 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

 

1980: French novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a leading exponent of existentialism, died.

 

1955: The first McDonald’s opened.

 

1947: Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s racial barrier, played in his first major league game for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field.

 

1912: the British luxury passenger liner Titanic sank en route to New York City from Southampton, Hampshire, England, after striking an iceberg during its maiden voyage; some 1,500 people died.

 

 

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

 

A. On Top: Sticks and Stones Can Break our Bones and Names Can Hurt Us Too:

 

In my never ending quest to avoid boredom, I often search the internet for facts and opinions that may tickle and invigorate whatever part of my brain that may be atrophying from an overdose of ennui. Of those bits and pieces of information that often make me stop, read, and at times regurgitate are articles discussing the causes and effects of prejudice and racism. I often focus specifically on that prejudice suffered by Italian-Americans because, 1. I am old enough to have experienced it myself and 2. we Italian Americans have passed that magic barrier that separates one from enjoying the full glories of citizenship in the USA — the freedom to hate those who have not yet passed; the right to  despoil our nests with happy abandon; the ability bear military weapons and shoot those who have not yet passed but are clamoring to do so; and the passion to become as rich as Croesus.  That barrier, being classified as being non-white (olive, khaki in our case), We passed  in the 1940s and 50s due especially to the efforts of Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, and the release of the Godfather I movie. Having passed that barrier and being firmly ensconced as white allows someone like me to contemplate the effects of racial bias somewhat objectively having no more skin in the game, so to speak,

 

Recently, I have come across and article in the Journal of Pragmatics entitled, Slurs and stereotypes for Italian Americans:A context-sensitive account of derogation and appropriation by Dr. M. Croom.

(https://doctorcroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/croom-2015-slurs-and-stereotypes-for-italian-americans.pdf)

 

Despite his use of academic jargon and great difficulty in coming to the point, Dr. Croom unequivocally concludes that words can hurt and certainly can screw up your whole day. 

 

Italian slurs

Although no general account of slurs for Italian Americans has so far been proposed, there are in fact a wide variety of such slurs that would be useful for us to consider. For example, common slurs that have been used to target Italian Americans include 

  (a) dago,

  (b) eyetie,

  (c) greaser or greaseball,

  (d) guido,

  (e) guinea, ginnie, or ghinney,

  (f) hunkie or hunky,

  And (g) wop or whap.

 

  Concerning the slur guinea in particular, John Marino from the National Italian American Foundation claimed that it is ‘‘a pejorative term, which reinforces a negative image and harmful stereotype of an entire ethnic group,’’ Rosanna Imbriano from the Center for Italian and Italian American Culture claimed that it ‘‘portrays Italians in a negative light,’’ and  Lewis (2011) from the Department of History at Stanford University claimed that it is ‘‘the most vile racial slur that can be used against an Italian-American’’ (McKay, 2011). The perceived offensiveness of the slur guinea is demonstrated, for instance, by the fact that Italian Americans have campaigned to have it removed from place-names in New York since as late as the 1960s (Roediger, 2005, p. 40) and the fact that Alfred Catalanotto, an Italian American owner of the Central Market Grill and the Central Market Chill in New York City, was targeted with the slur ‘‘guinea bastard’’ and further discriminated against by being unfairly denied a renewal lease for his restaurants by MTA executive Nancy Marshall (Cohen, 2009).

 

Another popular slur for Italian Americans is guido, which de Stefano (2008) has characterized as ‘‘a pejorative slang term for a young, lower class or working class, Italian-American,’’ with Conley (2010) further explaining that ‘‘the primary intent behind use of such terms is to belittle’’ some (Italian American) group member and maintain the presumed

‘‘superiority of the one using them to the one against whom they are used, who are implicitly identified as belonging to an inferior class of  beings’’ (p. 21). Arthur Piccolo has even suggested that ‘‘the very term Guido is so offensive that it ought never to be uttered, much less studied and discussed, by an Italian American, not even a scholar trained to analyze social facts’’ (quoted in Viscusi, 2010). 

 

The expression greaser is another popular slur that CUNY professor of sociology Tricarico (2010) described as applying to ‘‘Italian Americans with stereotypically dark and ‘‘oily’’ complexions,’’ and which Roediger (2005) has colorfully identified as a ‘‘bar-room brawl word’’ or a ‘‘racialized ‘‘fighting word’’’’ (p. 42). 

 

Concerning the slur dago, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000) explains that it is commonly understood and ‘‘used as a disparaging term for an Italian, Spaniard, or Portuguese’’ person, and the Random House Dictionary (2010) further notes that, ‘‘This term is a slur and should be avoided. It is used with disparaging intent and is perceived as highly insulting.’’ Dinnerstein and Reimers (2013) for example have explained in Ethnic Americans how Italian Americans targeted with the slur dago by ‘‘old-stock Americans’’ were often considered ‘‘the Chinese of Europe’’ who are ‘‘just as bad as the Negroes’’ (p. 62; see also Barone, 2001, p. 143). Seiler (2014) also proposed that the slur dago is ‘‘an irredeemable ethnic slur on Italian-Americans,’’ Shattuck (2009) proposed that the slur dago ‘‘can be hurtful regardless of the context,’’ and Jones (2013) further proposed that language users should remove the slur dago from their vocabularies, effectively ‘‘toss[ing] it in the trash heap along with other now offensive — but once widely used — monikers’’ (Shattuck, 2009).

 

The perceived offensiveness of slurs for Italian Americans is demonstrated, for instance, by the fact that the New York Racing Association forced the Wandering Dago food truck to remove itself from the grounds of the Saratoga Race Course because of its potentially offensive name (Seiler, 2014) as well as the fact that the state Office of General Services rejected an application from the Wandering Dago food truck to sell barbecue supplies on the Empire State Plaza because of its potentially offensive name (Seiler, 2014). The Office of General Services argued that allowing the Wandering Dago to set up shop on the plaza could place the state at risk of suits alleging that it allows a hostile workplace environment due to the appearance of the slur dago (Seiler, 2014). Indeed, uses of slurs have often been implicated in verbal threats, physical violence, and hate-motivated homicide (Fitten, 1993; Hoover, 2007; Shattuck, 2009; Nappi, 2010; Guerriero, 2013; Beswick, 2014). For instance, Sheldon Canova, an Italian miner from Dominion Coal Company, reports that fights were often initiated at work through the use of slurs, mentioning one example where he fought someone for calling him a ‘‘chicken-head eatin’ dago’’ (Beswick, 2014). Henry Garofano, a member of the national Order Sons of Italy in America, also reported that, ‘‘From 15 years of age, I was in fights, because of the discrimination and being called wops’’ (Nappi, 2010). In describing his boxing experiences at Gramercy Gym in Manhattan in the 1950s, Louis LaMorte likewise reports that ‘‘I also had Italian American boxing friends who did get into fistfights if someone they did not know real well, called

them wop, dago or guinea — it all depended on the relationship and how it was being used’’ (Guerriero, 2013).

 

Consequently, Ronald Fitten (1993) has argued that slurs like guido and wop should be considered ‘‘fighting words’’ since they have often been used to initiate violence and carry out hate crimes, and Jeshion (2013b) likewise proposes that ‘‘Slurring terms are used as  weapons in those contexts in which they are used to derogate an individual or group of individuals to whom the slur is applied or the socially relevant group that the slur references’’ (p. 237; see also Hall, 2006,p. 136; Davis, 2001; Enger, 2014; Gratereaux, 2012; LaGumina, 1973; Luconi, 2001).

 

After considering in this section the various ways that the use of slurs has often been implicated in verbal threats, physical violence, and hate-motivated homicide, it should be clearer now why slurs more generally, as well as for Italian Americans more particularly, have been considered by many to pack some of the nastiest punches natural language has to offer. The next section turns to address how it is that slurs are able to do the kind of dirty work that they do.

 

 

 

Face threatning acts and the paradigmatic derogatory use of slurs

One’s knowledge of the application-conditions for the expressions common among their fellow language users is of paramount importance for their successful communication and interaction with others, and speakers typically learn the norms governing the differential use of various expressions during their socialization into a linguistic community (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Garrett and Baquedano-Lopez, 2002). Prior work in the linguistics literature has suggested, for instance, that paradigmatic descriptive expressions such as male and Italian American are primarily used and understood to be most apt for neutrally picking out public items of the shared (inter-subjective or objective) world, that paradigmatic expressive expressions such as fuck and ouch are primarily used and understood to be most apt for expressing one’s own heightened emotional state, and that paradigmatic slur expressions such as guido and wop are primarily used and understood to be most apt for targeting certain members on the basis of descriptive features (such as their race or sex) in order to deprecate or disassociate (or in cases of appropriation, affiliate) with them on this basis (Croom 2011, pp. 345–349; 2013, p. 183).

 

Concerning the application-conditions of slurs more specifically, Croom (2013) proposed in ‘‘How to Do Things with Slurs’’ that:

 

As speakers we have strong expectations that uses of slurring terms such as nigger will correlate with the speaker’s being in a heightened derogatory state with respect to some features of their target (or wishing to create that impression). In turn, we use it only when we are in such a state (or wish to create that impression). The total effect of these assumptions is that a slurring term such as nigger is a prima facie reliable signal of derogation on the basis of target features. Knowing its use conditions largely involves being attuned to this information. (p. 183)

 

So in referring to a person with an expression like guido, and thereby ascribing the category G to that person, one may

presumably be taken to accept and allow into the communicative background certain obligations, expectations, and feelings that are commonly considered apt or fitting for typical members of the category G (Samra-Fredericks, 2010;

Croom, 2011). 

 

Importantly, Brown and Levinson (1978) proposed that a speaker S that conveys through their use of language that they are of higher social status or more powerful than their hearer H is thereby engaging in talk that ‘‘is risky, but if he [S] gets away with it ([and] H doesn’t retaliate, for whatever reason), S succeeds in actually altering the public definition of his relationship to H: that is, his successful exploitation becomes part of the history of interaction, and thereby alters the agreed values of D [social distance between S and H] or P [relative power between S and H]’’ (p. 228; see also Croom, 2001, 2013, 2014c, fn. 18). 

 

In accord with this proposal, Anderson (1999) has suggested that shows of deference from others can make one feel more self-confident and secure (p. 75) so this might serve as one reason for why a speaker S might choose to strategically indicate through their use of derogatory language more generally, and slurs such as guido or wop more specifically, that they are more powerful or of a higher social status than their target H. Further substantiating this point, Croom (2014c) conducted a critical review of recent empirical evidence from linguistics, sociology, and psychology on racial slurs and stereotypes, arguing from these findings that:

 

insofar as through the application of a slur towards a target an associated negative stereotype can threaten that target by (a) increasing how much they are worrying, (b) reducing their working memory, (c) decreasing their motivation to learn, or (d) degrading their ability to encode novel information necessary for skillful action, and insofar as (a)–(d) can negatively affect ones life chances, then it follows that the application of a slur towards a target can resultantly affect their life chances. (Section 3 in Croom, 2014c)

 

There is therefore good reason to believe that since our social identities are in part determined by the way members of society perceive us and consequently interact with us (Goffman, 1967; Brown and Levinson, 1978) the derogatory use of slurs like guido or wop can actually harm the individuals that they attack and constrain the range of action-possibilities that they can exercise in society. So a speaker S that derogates an Italian American target H on the basis of their presumed possession of negative features stereotypically attributed to Italian Americans through S’s ascription of the slur guido toward H, might thereby effectively work to support and contribute to a history of derogatory acts that actually harm the social identity of Italian Americans, increase the difference in asymmetrical power relations among S and H more specifically, and even increase the e the difference in asymmetrical power relations among their respective groups more generally (Croom, 2011).

 

 

 

B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

 

It is better to travel joyfully than it is to arrive.

 

 

 

C. Today’s Poem: “Song of the Xianbei Brother”.

In my ongoing search for intriguing poetry, I came across a translation of the reputed  earliest poem written in a Mongolian Language (there are several related languages). It was a popular song of the Xianbei composed by Murang Was in 285 AD. I searched a bit for an example of the poem written in the original Xianabel script without success. I did, however,  find some interesting history about these peoples. ( see,  https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-dan14.htm#Xianbei for a fascinating but lengthy article).

 

Song of the Xianbei Brother

 

My brother went away and has not returned

It is so easy to leave

But so difficult to come back

Horses kick out, we, humans, should not

 

Hostility can be found in humans

And hostile too can horses find themselves

My brother you went to Mount Bailang

A thousand miles away

 

Mount Lung is so very high!

Mount Ing is so very cold!

There is no sign of my brother

And my heart is sore

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia has some additional background about the poem:

 

 

The separation of Tuyuhu from the Murong Xianbei occurred during the Western Jin Dynasty 265-316, which succeeded the Cao Wei 220-265 in northern China. Legends accounted the separation as caused by a fight between Tuyuhus horses and those of his younger brother, Murong Wei. 

 

The actual cause was intense struggle over the Khanate position and disagreement over their future directions. The fraction that supported Murong Wei for the Khanate position aimed at ruling over China, whereas Tuyuhu intended to preserve the Xianbei culture and lifestyle. The disagreement resulted in Tuyuhu being proclaimed as Khan, or Kehan, and he eventually undertook the long westward journey under the title of the Prince of Jin, or Jin Wang, followed by other Xianbei and Wuhuan groups. 

 

While passing through western Liaoning and Mt. Bai, more Xianbei groups joined them from the Duan, Yuwen, and Bai sections. At the Hetao Plains near Ordos in Inner Mongolia, Tuyuhu Khan led them to reside by Mt. Yin for over thirty years, as the Tuoba Xianbei and Northern Xianbei joined them through political and marriage alliances. 

 

After settling down in the Northwest, they established the powerful Tuyuhun Kingdom named to his honor as the first Khan who led them there, by subjugating the native peoples who were summarily referred to as the” Qiang” and included more than 100 different and loosely coordinated tribes that did not submitted to each other or any authorities. 

 

After Tuyuhu Khan departed from the Northeast, Murong Wei composed an” Older Brother’s Song,” or” the Song of A Gan:”” A Gan” is Chinese transcription of” a ga” for” older brother” in the Xianbei language. The song lamented his sadness and longing for Tuyuhu. Legends accounted that Murong Wei often sang it until he died and the song got spread into central and northwest China. The Murong Xianbei whom he had led successively founded the Former Yan 281-370, Western Yan 384-394, Later Yan 383-407, and Southern Yan 398-410.

 

D.  Tuckahoe Joe’s Blog of the Week: Punctuating Penelope for Pedagogical Purposes.

 

Way back in 2012, while I was writing my own version of Ulysses home coming (https://papajoesfables.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/on-travel-and-the-real-story-of-ulysses/), I ran across the following in a blog called “erringness for perfection.” The blog written by Elizabeth Kate Switaj, the Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at the College of the Marshall Islands who completed her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast with a dissertation on James Joyce later revised and published as James Joyce’s Teaching Life and Methods (Palgrave 2016). It is a fine example of pedagogy gone mad.

 

 

 

“Punctuating Penelope for Pedagogical Purposes.”

 

“This week, I finally had the chance to use an adapted version of an activity I first read about in Geri Lipschultz’s “Fishing in the Holy Waters” (College English 48.1 (Jan. 1986)), an article I mention briefly in my thesis. The core of the activity amounts to having students add standard punctuation to the text of the final episode of Ulysses. While Lipschultz describes using this activity in the composition classroom, I used it in a literature class that was reading selected parts of the novel.

 

Instead of asking them to add in the punctuation as an assignment, I had them do the entire activity in class: first they worked individually, and then they worked as a class with one student retyping the text into Word on the computer at the front of the room. Due to time constraints, they only got through 1-2 pages as individuals and a few sentences as a whole group, but given that one of the major reasons I wanted to try this activity was to show them how slowly one needs to read Joyce, I think of that as a success rather than a failure.

 

The greater success, however, came in the brief discussions held after each step in the process. My students demonstrated a strong understanding of both the content and style of the passage they worked on. They were also able to see different sides of questions that have no definitive answer—such as whether Joyce’s depiction of Molly is insulting or admiring.

 

The activity showed students who were put off somewhat by the difficulty and reputation for obscurity of Ulysses that they could, in fact, understand it.”

(https://www.elizabethkateswitaj.net/2012/05/punctuating-penelope-for-pedagogical-purposes/)

 

 

 

 

E. Giants of History: Maryann Petrillo.

 

During our recent visit in Mendocino, while discussing with my sister Maryann the Mormon obsession with a particular style of underwear that led to a broader conversation regarding the changes in fashion of undergarments, she gifted us with the following bit of wisdom:

“One should not keep their underwear for more than twenty-five years. Just saying.”

We all agreed.

 

 

F. Tito Tazio’s Tales From “The Stranger Times” by Caimh McDonald.

 

The great Caimh McDonald (C.K. McDonnell), author of the amusing and enjoyable Dublin Trilogy and McGarry Stateside books featuring that indefatigable copper Bunny McGarry, has written a new and fascinating book for those who like their detective and monster stories humorous and enthralling . The eponymous newspaper of the novel,  a newspaper based in Manchester England and dedicated to reporting the weird and wonderful from around the world, can now be read at, https://thestrangertimes.co.uk/. The editorial team live inside the head of author C.K. McDonnell. 

 

“The paper is like the Fortean Times’ unloved trashy cousin that gets drunk at a wedding and throws up in the mother-of-the-bride’s handbag.”

 

“The managing editor is Vincent Banecroft, the former darling of Fleet Street. He has had a fall from grace that makes the Hindenburg look like a largely successful flight.” 

 

   Here, below are two of their feature stories.

 

I.

Michael Portillo (no relation), 46 of Dunstable, was left shaken by a most peculiar encounter of the third kind. 

He claims to have been out walking late at night in an effort to reach 10,000 steps when he was pulled into the night sky by a dazzling bright light. 

“Next thing I knew, I’m in this white room, strapped to a chair, naked – and these big grey lads with massive eyes and no genitals were standing over me making clicking and burping noises,” he said. 

“I noticed there was a distinct smell of alcohol in the air and I myself am a strict non-drinker. 

“Then, all of a sudden, like a switch had been flicked, I could understand what they were saying. 

“The most pissed one, Tarquin, kept trying to get Arnold to touch something – but I wasn’t sure what he meant. 

“Then the third fella, Douglas, rolls his eyes – which was impressive as he’s got a lot of eye to roll there, and said, ‘this is weird. Could we not just mutilate a cow like a proper stag do?’ 

“Honestly, the whole thing felt like three guys who’d grown up together and really had nothing in common any more. 

“They dropped me in the middle of a field and I was relieved to get out of there. 

“Tarquin had just said something about Douglas’s ex and it was getting tense.”

  (https://thestrangertimes.co.uk/news/shaken-and-stirred-by-gang-of-grey-guys/)

\

 

II.

Hello and welcome to this week’s column. I put a shout out on Twitter yesterday on this topic and I was inundated with questions, so let’s dive in…

 

Margot Moonbeam Marks

My two-year old daughter refuses to eat anything but Monster Munch and those little plastic things that you find at the end of shoelaces. She also keeps escaping and throwing poops at next door’s Prius. Is it possible she is possessed by the devil?

@AConcernedMum234123

Dear Concerned Mum, 

Don’t worry this is all perfectly natural. Children often develop weird eating habits and the poo throwing is almost certainly a territorial instinct that manifests itself in many primates. I suggest getting the neighbour to throw a few poos back in her direction and seeing how she likes it. 

My son is a very well behaved and quiet four-year-old. He actually spends all of his time staring at me with a weird look on his face. 

Often, I wake up and he’s standing there doing it. We took him to church and he totally freaked out, kicking and screaming and speaking what sounded a bit like ancient Aramaic to my uncultured ear. Should I be worried?

@TerrifiedDaddy14 

Don’t worry TerrifiedDaddy14, this is perfectly normal behaviour. All religious services are incredibly boring for a child and at that age, a father is always the apple of his son’s eye. Children have an incredible capacity to pick up languages, he must’ve just turned the TV onto one of the many channels that broadcasts in Aramaic. 

Dear Margot,

Animals become terrified in my son’s presence, whining and cowering if he comes near. Every time we bring him out to the park, birds drop from the sky dead at his feet. If he gets angry it often coincides with violent thunderstorms and his father has been involved in nineteen near fatal accidents since I gave birth. Please help! 

@Damo’sMammy

Ha, honestly Damo’s Mammy, if I had a pound for every time I’ve heard this one. It’s probably a virus or just a phase he’s going through. Animals are always playing hijinks and I’m not in the least concerned about your husband’s little oopsies — new parents are always suffering from a lack of sleep so being a little clumsy is only to be expected.

Dear Margot, 

My son is a delight but he just does not find SpongeBob SquarePants funny. Should I worry? 

@HappyClappyNappy

Dear Happy Clappy Nappy, yes — your son is the spawn of Satan. You know what must be done or he shall surely bring about the end of days. 

Thanks for all the questions everyone, I hope that’s put your minds at rest a little.

● The Stranger Times does not condone infanticide. 

We would also like to go one edition where we did not have to point this out — Vincent Banecroft, Editor.

(https://thestrangertimes.co.uk/news/how-do-i-know-if-my-toddler-is-possessed/)

 

 

 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

 

 

“My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. Sometimes the game might seem easy. Even fun. Other times it might be so difficult you want to give up and quit. But unfortunately, in this game you only get one life. When your body grows too hungry or thirsty or ill or injured or old, your health meter runs out and then it’s Game Over. Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it. To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels. Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone. —Anorak’s Almanac, chapter 77, verses 11–20

                Cline, Ernest. Ready Player Two (Ready Player One) (p. 25). Random House Publishing Group.  

This and that from re Thai r ment, by 3Th. 9 Joey 0011. (April 2, 2021)

“Namaste, life. The rest of the world can kiss my arse.”

Giordano, Mario. Auntie Poldi and the Handsome Antonio (An Auntie Poldi Adventure) (p. 214). HMH Books.

 

 

 

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

 

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES

 

This morning, Naida told me a wonderful story about meeting with the granddaughters of Elitha Donner the main character in the second book in her masterful California Gold trilogy, River of Red Gold. 

 

It has been almost a week since I have written here. Yesterday, a brief hailstorm crashed down on the Enchanted Forest but today is warm and sunny again. I guess yesterday constitutes this year’s one day winter.

 

Last night, we went to sleep listening to an old tape of the first Suspense Theater radio program. It was directed by  none other than Alfred Hitchcock. Interestingly, it ended without resolution of the mystery. That was what I had intended to occur in my unfinished novel “Here Comes Dragon,” only to discover half-way through that indeed there was a mystery, two dead people in fact, without a suspect in sight. Then of course, I am no Hitchcock.

 

The days have drifted by. I am beginning to lose track of them. It is Sunday morning. The dog is asleep on Naida’s lap. She is recovering from her second vaccine shot yesterday. I am sitting here trying to remember what, if anything, of interest occurred recently. Alas, nothing. Since we usually better remember the bad that occurred to us than the good, I guess my lack of recall tells me things have been going well.

 

Today the weather was a little cooler with temperatures in the low 60s. I drove the Mitsubishi into the Golden Hills to pick up some medicine and to have lunch with Hayden. We ate at the Spaghetti Factory. 

 

The Ides of March — the recognition of the rise of the March full moon or the celebration of dispatching would be Roman emperors — passed by me without notice or comment. Similarly, my onomastica, my name day, Saint Joseph’s Day March 15 flew by without celebration. Sad really. In Italy it is your Saint’s Day and not your birthday that is celebrated. That is a sound custom. After all, once childhood ends who really wants to be reminded how old you’ve become.

 

On Saint Patrick’s Day evening, we watched TCM’s festival featuring movies about Ireland — of course. The Quiet Man (John Wayne drags Maureen O’Harra and fights Wallace Beery across Ireland), Young Cassidy (Sean O’Casey biopic), and Odd Man Out (James Mason’s finest performance). All enjoyable — Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

 

Now that Columbus Day is no longer a suitable excuse for Italian-Americans  to parade down the streets to honor their hyphen, we need another day to celebrate ourselves. September is a good month for a holiday. How about a holiday in September to honor Frank Sinatra? Yes, I know he was born in December and died in May but remember it’s a long long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September. (I am ashamed at myself for writing that.). Frank Sinatra — Something else my great grandchildren will know nothing about. 

 

The following morning we woke up at about 11 AM. Boo-boo, our usual alarm clock, seemed to have decided to take the day off. Outside, the sky was  overcast and the temperature bounced around the cooler end of the 60s. The morning news shows appear to have gotten beyond flooding us with images of history being made as we watch. It now titillates us with hints that somewhere just behind the scrim something momentous is happening that will be revealed as soon as the hungry hot lights of the media illuminate it. In other words, not too much is happening that we know about. 

 

One bit of news that did not make it into the media’s clutches was that the bannister on the stairway to our bedroom pulled out from the plaster-board and crashed down upon the stairs. A handy-man (I am not very handy or, I admit, much of a man anymore, if I ever was,) was called and he proved to be both handy and manly and repaired the thing lickety-split. (No one knows where the term lickety-split came from or why, but there is general agreement it arose in the American midwest or south sometime between 1817 and 1849. There is some confusion about when it went out of general use except by smart-alecs like me.)

 

Now, the origin of “smart-alec is another kettle of fish entirely. “Alec” was actually a real person, named Alec Hoag. He was a pimp and a thief in New York City in the 1840s.  Partnered with his wife Melinda and another man known as “French Jack”, they would rob his wife’s “customers” while she otherwise distracted them.

 

“Melinda would make her victim lay his clothes, as he took them off, upon a chair at the head of the bed near a secret panel, and then take him into her arms and close the curtains of the bed.  As soon as everything was right and the dupe not likely to heed outside noises, Melinda would give a cough, and the faithful Alec would slyly enter, rifle the pockets of every farthing or valuable thing, and finally disappear as mysteriously as he entered.” (George Wilkes editor of the Subterranean who spoke with Hoag in prison.)

 

“Sometime after that, Alec would bang on the door and Melinda would make out that he was her husband who had returned early from some trip.  The victims would hastily grab their clothes and escape through the window.”

 

“The police, who Hoag was paying off, soon discovered he was cheating them out of their share  of this con and arrested Hoag and Melinda.  Hoag promptly escaped from prison, with the help of his brother, but was eventually recaptured.”

 

“Alec Hoag was then given the nickname “Smart Alec” by the police for being too smart for his own good.  The thought is that the police then used this term when dealing with other criminals who seemed a little too smart for their own good, often thinking of ways around giving police their payoffs: ‘Don’t be a Smart Alec’”.

(http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/07/origin-of-the-term-smart-alec/)

 

On Thursday March 18, 2021, I, obviously, had nothing to do and so I wrote the above and no, I will not research the derivation of “kettle of fish” except to point out that in 1785 Thomas Newte published A Tour in England and Scotland. In this he referred to fish kettles: “It is customary for the gentlemen who live near the Tweed to entertain their neighbours and friends with a Fete Champetre [a picnic], which they call giving ‘a kettle of fish’.

 

While I was busy stupefying myself with etymology for idiots, Naida occupied herself with writing a few wonderful paragraphs of her memoir about the night in the 1950s she and two friends went to Nepenthe, the gloriously situated restaurant in Big Sur. After the restaurant closed, the restaurant staff turned up the speakers hanging over the terrace and they and the other hangers on danced various line dances. Kim Novak, and Henry Miller nearby Big Sur residents were also there, much to the surprise of the excited tourists. Another evening she wrote about, she and her date travelled down Highway One to the old hot springs later to become Eselen to attend a get together held by the aged Miller, his 19 year old wife, and his hangers on for more dancing. The ancient bathtubs and lead piping of the old spa were still there then. 

 

Her story prompted me to recall that my friend Chris Ames, who was also a friend of Hunter Thompson, told me that he was at the old spa when Hunter, stoned and drunk, so enraged the other people at the spa, that they tried to throw him off the cliff. Chris managed to calm them down and save him from becoming famous only for his Gonzo way of death.

 

Today, I visited Hayden again in the Golden Hills for our usual lunch at Subway. Nothing new to report except he is supposed to get his driver’s  license on April 10. 

 

On the way back to the Enchanted Forest, I thought about how sad it was that we 70, 80 and 90 year old decrepits will have no one to tell our stories to about how we spent our time during the Great COVID Pandemic Quarantine. Not to our peers. They have experienced it along with us. Not to our children or grandchildren either for the same reason. Most of us at our age will have passed on before our great grandchildren are old enough to appreciate our adventures in confinement. We will just have to leave the storytelling for future generations to our children and grandchildren and content ourselves with swapping tales with our cronies.

 

On Saturday morning at about 10:30, I was awakened by a phone call from my daughter. She seemed in good spirits. We talked about her efforts to analyze and integrate protections against various contagious viruses into the United States foreign aid programs. When I finally got out of bed and went downstairs to prepare myself some breakfast it was noon. Outside, the sun was shining and the temperature in the upper 60s. 

 

I finished my breakfast of blueberry bagels, cream cheese and salmon at about 1:30 and played on my computer for a couple of hours before again looking through the window and realizing it was a shame to waste such a pretty day. So, I decided to take the dog out on a long walk. 

 

And walk we did. Nice and long, through the Enchanted Forest and along the river. Along the way, I took a photograph of our shadows who kindly agreed to accompany us.

The next day, I drove into the Golden Hills to pick up Hayden and his friend Ethan and take them to lunch. When I got to the house, I found them with “Uncle Mask”(Dick) in the garage. Hayden had gone to a local junk yard and removed the cylinder cover from a junked four cylinder Honda, taken in home and painted in Ferrari red. Once he inserts the spark-plugs, he intends to hang it on the wall of his room to hold keys and things.

Today I washed the clothing I will be taking with me to my for our week in Mendocino, while. Naida  played some Beethoven concertos on the piano. The azaleas are beginning to bloom everywhere in the enchanted forest, except in our yard.

 

Off to Mendocino for our first post quarantine visit, a week with my sister and George. Last minute packing. Drive the Mitsubishi to EDH so that Hayden and the gang can detail it and make minor repairs while we are gone. And then we were off for an exhausting drive of five hours or more.

 

We arrived in Mendocino after a pleasant but tiring five hour job. I immediately took a nap until dinnertime. We had a pleasant dinner with my sister where we remarked on how strange it seems after a year to be having dinner with more than your house-mates. (Naida and I, of course, had had dinner with Peter and Barrie every six weeks of so when I traveled to San Francisco for treatment.) Then, after watching an episode of Montalbano we all went to bed.

 

The next day, it was sparkling clear outside. If was an exquisitely lovely day in Mendocino except for the gale force winds that raced across the headlands. Naida, Booboo, and I walked into town for breakfast. On our way back to the house, my foot slipped out of my Crocs, tangled up with my other foot and sent we tumbling. On the way to the ground, I thought, “Oh no, here comes the broken hip.” I slammed my shoulder into a fence and thought, “Oh no, it is not the hip that will break but my collar-bone.” Bouncing off the fence, i continued sliding along until I jammed my thumb into the ground. “Oh no,” I thought, “it’s a broken thumb instead.” While lying there, as Naida tried to help me back up, I realized neither my hip or collarbone seemed broken but, my thumb hurt like hell.

Back at the house, where, as coincidence would have it, George had just gotten off a Zoom conference on emergency treatment of traumatic injuries and put me through the protocol to determine whether or not I had broken my collarbone, hip or thumb. I passed but my thumb still hurt. So, George prepared an Ice-pack and I sat on a rocking chair for an hour or so waiting for the pain and embarrassment to subside. I then went upstairs and took a nap. It’s always something.

That evening, George made Broccoli Scacciata a calzone like peasant dish from Sicily featuring a broccoli and sausage filling. We had a long discussion during dinner beginning with economic development in Mendocino, continuing on  with the history and defects of Mormonism and ending with authors, novels and Naida’s influence on the Sacramento literary scene. Tomorrow is another day.

 

The day broke sunny and less windy today. I spent  the early morning sitting where I usually do by the large window overlooking the yard and the ocean. Later we walked to a coffee house behind Beaujolais restaurant for breakfast. On the way back, I bought a new pair of boots, the first pair of shoes I have worn other than my Crocs for six years.

In the afternoon we drove into Fort Bragg to pick up the framed painting of the garage doors of Roccantica done by Alexandra Leti that I had given to Mary and George for Christmas. Then we went on a brief walk along the Fort Bragg Waterfront Park, in part a Conservancy Project that created what, in my opinion, is the greatest urban waterfront park in the world. While walking along we stopped to watch a woman standing on the rocks just above the raging surf doing some odd but fascinating exercises.

That evening we had a pleasant time sitting around the fire on the front patio, and drinking prosecco. I bit into an olive and a piece of my front tooth broke off. Enjoyable as it has been so far, this trip has been a trying one for me physically — yesterday’s trip and fall and todays loss of almost one half of my front tooth. I am a little worried about what today has in store for me.

 

This morning after breakfast Maryann, George, Naida, I, and the two dogs Finnegan and Booboo went for a long walk along Big River. Big River is a drowned river, a river subject to the oceans tides for a significant portion of its course. It is not a long river,10 miles or so, but surprisingly wide for so short a watercourse. It winds through heavily forested steep hills on both sides. Along one side, behind the hills a road passes. Along the other, a popular broad hiking and biking trail clung to the side of the hills.

 

About 47 years ago, newly arrived in California and living in San Francisco, a New York city boy, I drove in the early morning with John Olmstead along the road passing along the south side of the river to very close to its headwaters. There, we placed canoes into the water and spent the day paddling back down to the ocean. Along the way, John in his crackly voice would describe, sometimes scientifically and at others mystically, what we were seeing and feeling. It was a trip that changed my life.

 

Today we walked along the path on the north-side until I grew to tired and we returned.

Then we drove to Noyo Harbor for a delightful lunch of fish and chips at a fisherman’s outdoor restaurant that we like a lot.

 

After a nap, Maryann whipped up one of my favorite dishes for dinner, pasta piselli from my mom’s secret recipes. After that, we had a Zoom call with Alexandra Leti our cousin in Australia. She and her brother are well known artists in Australia. We called because Maryann had just hung up in her home Alexandra’s painting that I had given to Mary and George for Christmas. The framer had just finished framing it.

The very pleasant and interesting day ended with Naida falling down the stairs requiring a visit from a Mendocino Fire and Rescue squad led by George himself. They were concerned. Naida was embarrassed and frightened. George was appropriately empathetic. The dogs were hysterical. Maryann was businesslike. And, I was useless as usual. 

 

Ultimately, it seemed Naida suffered nothing more serious than a bruised knee, a wrenched ankle, and a shattered ego. The MFD people left and we all went to bed. All in all, it was a fitting day to end a year long quarantine. Life is back.

 

Sunday morning the sun shone brightly but soon a light fog rolled in  that hung around for most of the day. Brendan, Maryann and George’s son arrived. We took the dogs to the dog park and watched a group of people playing the French version of Bocci. We then drove up coast to Pacific Coast Winery, drank some wine, ate some snacks, bought a rock painted to look like a frog, talked and laughed with Sally the owner of the winery, and drove back home. 

 

That night after dinner, Mary brought out some home movies taken by my father about seventy years ago, and some, I was surprised to learn, taken by me. I was more than shocked to see that I had taken moving pictures of my honeymoon in Puerto Rico with my first wife. I admit I thought I was much better looking than I believed I was then. Given the amount of trouble I have gotten into in my life, however, I cannot imagine how much more trouble I could found myself in had I had such an inflated belief in my hotness.

 

The next morning, it was sunny and crystal clear outside. We walked into the town for a tasty but expensive lunch at a restaurant named Millennium. On the way back to the house we stopped at a shop and bought Naida new shoes. She seemed very pleased. Later I took a nap. 

That night we watched a few more old home movies — me of my high school and law school graduations and a 1968 family trip to Italy.

 

The following morning broke bright sunny and warm. We packed up our suitcases, hugged my sister and brother-in-law good-by and drove off for out long drive into San Francisco for my treatment at UCSF.

 

We arrived a Peter and Barrie’s house in Noe Valley. I was exhausted. After another great meal prepared by Barrie, Peter told us our fortunes using Tarot cards designed by a friend of my brother. After a discussion about editing we went to bed. 

 

The next day I spent the entire day at UCSF for my various tests, meeting with my doctor and infusion. Everything seems to be going well. That night we had our usual great dinner a Bacco. The next morning we returned home.

 

In the week we had been away summer seems to have descended on the Enchanted Forest. Even the ornamental fruit tree in our backyard which had be bare was now in bloom.

 

 

 

 

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY: 

 

Hippiedom and the Counterculture.

 

(Most people consider Hippies and Counterculture to be synonymous. My experience indicated to me that there was a significant social change in the early 1970s that I prompted me to divide them in order to emphasize that change.)

 

Continuing my deep seated need to obsess on irrelevancies, I thought I would write down my thoughts on the cultural difference between Hippies and members of the Counterculture. 

 

For at least three hundred years and perhaps from time immemorial, the juvenile members of the leisure class, recognizing the often extreme difficulty of their penetrating the small entrenched class of humans who they believed really ran things, revolted in one way or another. This syndrome seems to be most apparent among those living in societies dominated by northeastern-european cultures.

 

Usually, this itch to reform or replace the existing social structures begins with or are coopted by those believing themselves to be of more advanced artistic or intellectual temperament. For example, in the late 18 early 19 centuries, Keats, Shelly, and Byron revolted against the academic poetry of the day. Or, in the mid 19 Century, Marx, Engles, and a host of others to protest the social inequities of the mid-19th. 

 

In America, another northeastern European dominated society, following the Second World War during what has been described as the greatest economic advance in human history, a small group of artist-intellectual auteurs, predominantly poets, decided the standard forms of poetry needed revision and reform. That included, the abolition of standard forms and a focus on social issues. It also, included certain lifestyle changes such as the adoption of French working class dress (berets), hanging-out in coffee houses, and to a lessening interest among the males to the annoying custom of daily maintenance of facial and cranial hair. They also demonstrated their independence, artistic, and social affinity with certain cultural groups by adopting the smoking of leaves from the cannaibis plant. 

 

By the mid-1960s, this revolt was taken up and altered by the next generation. The artistic forms and aesthetic of the beats were retained and expanded, in music, life style and consciousness. (Sex, drugs, and rock and roll) Their dress codes no longer were an aping of the attire of working people, but, became colorful and outlandish. In other words, the breaking of conventional aesthetics in art permitting accessibility and experimentation that the beats encouraged were carried into many other areas. Also, the beat revolution carried out in smokey coffee houses expanded into the sunlight of impromptu music concerts and festivals.  A form of intellectualism still remained. It differed from the focus of the beats concentration on artistic revolution in its mania to make the world better by remaking it. (The Whole Earth Catalogue, Buckminster Fuller, Eselen and experimenting with almost every aspect of life and life styles from vegenism to binging, from cannaibis to psychedelics, from communes to solitary sojourns into the wilderness, from social-demonstrations to meditations — all was permissible as long as it differed from what was considered establishment.) Like most obsessions of hippiedom, however, it often degenerated from simple experience and experiment to mania.

 

While many of the Beats during their childhood experienced the depths of the depression, the hippies as saw the chaos of the war and its immediate aftermath, and the next group, the denizens of counterculture, mostly grew up during the halcyon days of material gain, social conformity, and fear of annihilation. These  last children often cosseted in environments of high but narrow ambitions, some  graduated in to the attractive personal freedom and complex experience of hippiedom. As usual, in the case where one group succeeds another, it modifies the mores of the previous group’s behavior and aspirations to reflect their own childhood and adolescent customs even while believing they are rejecting them.

 

Conformity does not beget non-conformity as much as it begets a different and often conflicting conformity. The Beats emerging from a society of destitution and despair, invented a society that mimicked destitution (working man’s clothing) and despair (read their poetry). The Hippies, during whose early childhood experienced from afar the assault of total war and nuclear destruction on the basic verities of life, saw the age of conformity of the 1950s as unreal at least. They relished and accepted the  unmooring of their lives, customs, behavior and goals. 

 

In the early 1970s the children of the counterculture generation, appeared to be attracted by the seemingly liberated lives of the hippies — but with a difference. The clothing, became more subdued, from the simple colors of eastern religions to designerly fashions (Bell Bottoms) and hair conformity (Afro or super straight). Instead of experimentation with various life styles and religions those styles and religions became their normality upon which to cling to and measure their reaction to social changes going on around them. For example, vegenism and commitment to some eastern or domestic type of cult began to no longer be a lifestyle experiment but a lifestyle.

 

Revolution and Reaction is a common meme used by many to describe certain social and historically significant changes in society but it is incomplete. We drag our childhoods along with us even as we seek to alter what we perceive as their undesirable aspects. The seeming reaction of the 1980s, that engendered Reaganism and the sad destructive rightist social and political movements that still threaten our existence often find their genesis in the unnoticed and unappreciated verities of our collective childhoods. Those born in the first two decades of the Twenty-first Century in America, have experienced an ever increasing period of chaos and hatred and while many of us born before the turn of the century hope for a return to normality, a normality defined by the simple, unquestioned, and unrecognized certainties in the social environment in which we were immersed during our childhoods and in which we maneuvered like tadpoles in a pond.

 

 

 

 

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

 

A. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

 

The lie everyone unaffected by hidden preconceptions believes is if your ideas hold merit they will win out despite your situation.

 

B. Today’s Poem:

 

I love Taliesin’s poetry. Although, he lived over 1500 years ago and wrote in old Brythonic, once you get beyond the knights and medieval imagery there is a modern feel to it like the poetry behind Dylan’s music. I often think of it as ancient Celtic Rap*.

 

The Raid on the Otherworld

The Book of Taliesin XXX.

              The Four Ancient Books of Wales

 

 

I WILL praise the sovereign, supreme king of the land, 

Who hath extended his dominion over the shore of the world.

Complete was the prison of Gweir in Caer Sidi,

Through the spite of Pwyll and Pryderi.

No one before him went into it.

The heavy blue chain held the faithful youth,

And before the spoils of Annwvn woefully he sings,

And till doom shall continue a bard of prayer.

 

Thrice enough to fill Prydwen, we went into it;

Except seven, none returned from Caer Sidi

 

 

Am I not a candidate for fame, if a song is heard? 

In Caer Pedryvan, four its revolutions; 

In the first word from the cauldron when spoken,

From the breath of nine maidens it was gently warmed.

Is it not the cauldron of the chief of Annwvn? What is its intention?

A ridge about its edge and pearls.

It will not boil the food of a coward, that has not been sworn,

A sword bright gleaming to him was raised, 

And in the hand of Lleminawg it was left.

And before the door of the gate of Uffern [hell] the lamp was burning.

 

And when we went with Arthur; a splendid labour, 

Except seven, none returned from Caer Vedwyd.

 

 

Am I not a candidate for fame with the listened song

In Caer Pedryvan, in the isle of the strong door?

The twilight and pitchy darkness were mixed together.

Bright wine their liquor before their retinue.

 

Thrice enough to fill Prydwen we went on the sea,

Except seven, none returned from Caer Rigor.

 

 

I shall not deserve much from the ruler of literature,

Beyond Caer Wydyr they saw not the prowess of Arthur.

Three score Canhwr stood on the wall,

Difficult was a conversation with its sentinel.

 

Thrice enough to fill Prydwen there went with Arthur,

Except seven, none returned from Caer Golud.

 

 

I shall not deserve much from those with long shields.

They know not what day, who the causer,

What hour in the serene day Cwy was born.

Who caused that he should not go to the dales of Devwy.

They know not the brindled ox, thick his head-band.

Seven score knobs in his collar.

 

And when we went with Arthur of anxious memory,

Except seven, none returned from Caer Vandwy.

 

 

I shall not deserve much from those of loose bias,

They know not what day the chief was caused.

What hour in the serene day the owner was born.

What animal they keep, silver its head.

 

When we went with Arthur of anxious contention,

Except seven, none returned from Caer Ochren.

 

 

Monks congregate like dogs in a kennel,

From contact with their superiors they acquire knowledge,

Is one the course of the wind, is one the water of the sea?

Is one the spark of the fire, of unrestrainable tumult?

Monks congregate like wolves,

From contact with their superiors they acquire knowledge.

They know not when the deep night and dawn divide.

Nor what is the course of the wind, or who agitates it,

In what place it dies away, on what land it roars.

The grave of the saint is vanishing from the altar-tomb.

 

I will pray to the Lord, the great supreme,

That I be not wretched. Christ be my portion.

 

 

This is that most famous of poems, the “Prieddu Annwn,” wherein only Arthur and his seven warriors raid Annwfn (the Otherworld) for a magic cauldron.  It stands as a sort of mid-way point between The Mabinogi’s Cauldron of Regenneration, and the Holy Grail.

 

This Poem and the other poems contained in the Book of Taliesin (Prieddu Annwn) are thought to have been originally composed by the bard himself even though our knowledge of them comes from a document written much later in the middle ages. The the translation used here comes from The Four Ancient Books of Wales, by W. F. Skene, 1858. Unfortunately, they are probably not the most accurate translations, but they seem the only ones which are in the public domain. (Even at that I’m not sure, although the book is long out of print.)

 

* Speaking of Rap, here is a part of one song by RA The Rugged Man – Uncommon Valour. It is pretty impressive.

 

Call me Thorburn, John A. Staff Sergeant, Marksman

Skilling, killing, illing

I’m able and willing

Kill a village elephant, rapin’ and pillage your village

Illegitimate killers, US Military guerillas

This ain’t a real war, Vietnam shit

World War II, that’s a war, this is just a military conflict

Soothing, drug-abusing, Vietnamese women screwing

Sex, scampling and booze, and all the shit is amusing

Bitches and guns, this is every man’s dream

I don’t want to go home, where I’m just a ordinary human being

Special OP, Huey chopper gun shit, run shit

Gook run when the mini-gun spit, won’t miss, kill shit

Spit four-thousand bullets a minute

Victor-Charlie, hit trigger, hit it

I’m in it to win it, get it 

 

Thrice enough to fill Chicago there went from America,

Sixty-thousand did not return from Viet Nam.

 

 

 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

 

“As he wrestled with these ideas, Poe perceived the fundamental problem of the mystery genre, which he was then in the process of inventing. The mystery is created by presenting a series of baffling facts, the meaning of which must be preserved until the end; but the author cannot, in his own voice, deceive the reader or use any artificial means of concealing the secret. As long as the story is conceived as the story of the murder itself, it cannot be told without anticipating the denouement or withholding critical facts. What was needed was a new conception of what the story is.”

 

“What was needed,…was a detective. The story could then be the story, not of the murder itself, but of its investigation. The Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin was born.”

               Hartman, Bruce. The Philosophical Detective Returns (pp. 205-206). Swallow Tail Press.

This and that from re Thai r ment, by 3Th. 11 Capt. Coast 0009. (April 28, 2020)

 

“Any system can be corrupted as long as people will pretend it’s not their problem.”
Mayne, Andrew. Dark Pattern (The Naturalist) (p. 78).

 

Happy Birthday — Naida, Nikki, and George.

 

 

 

 

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

 

 

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES DURING THE GREAT EPIDEMIC OF 2020:

 
The weather was warm and sunny today, the temperature reaching into the 80s. We decided to go out wander along the edge of the nearby American River. Although we were breaking confinement, we were sure we would not violate social distancing guidelines because usually there were not too many people wandering around there. We walked to our favorite spot on the riverbank. Along the way, Naida, as usual, instructed me on the local flora.

We sat on some dry grass and watched people on the opposite bank launch a boat and the birds taking off and landing on the water. Naida recited a part of a love poem that featured rabid cormorants. She also, for some reason, sung an old Sam Cooke tune:

Every day, along about evening
When the sunlight’s beginning to pale
I ride through the slumbering shadows
Along the Navajo Trail

 

The American River by the Enchanted Forest.

 

Before she became an accomplished novelist, Naida obtained a Ph.D. in sociology. Her 1978 thesis, entitled Leadership, and Gender: A Comparative Analysis of Male and Female Leadership in Business, Politics, and Government, She had previously published a book on the early results of her study, Leadership With A Feminine Cast. She interviewed such people as Ivy Baker Priest US Treasurer in the Eisenhower Administration who famously quipped, “I’m often wrong, but never in Doubt”; Ruth Handler of Mattel fame; Jess Unruh the powerful leader of California’s Assembly and over 70 other well known civic and business leaders.

We spent much of the day reading sections from the thesis. It was fascinating for me to learn that an overwhelming majority of these leaders, most of whom were and still are household names, were the children of immigrants or, in the case of African Americans, had migrated from the South. Another consistent element in almost all of their lives was the presence of a strong mother. One female leader commented:

“My grandmother never wanted to come to the United States. She made my grandfather unhappy some of the time. For instance, she wanted to see the Panama Canal. So she left to see it. She said. “If all these kids can’t take care of him, something is wrong (fourteen children) My grandmother went off to more places than you can imagine in those days when traveling was difficult.”

 

What seemed to differ in the lives of the women leaders from the men, other than the resistance of the latter to the aspirations of the former, was that women generally worked harder to get where they were. As for management and leadership skills, the men mostly learned and honed their skills in the military and tended to manage their institutions in a hierarchical top-down manner. The women, on the other hand, generally tried to encourage a feeling of family in their organizations with her as the matriarch. In fact, the woman leaders overwhelmingly reveled in being considered different in how they dressed, behaved, and led. (Note — because women leaders overwhelmingly were the children of immigrants Naida specifically choose male children of immigrant parents to balance it out. She said, in either case, women or children of immigrants [including people of color] had a more difficult time of it than white males [and they were aware of it])

Days have rolled on by with little to comment on other than that the days of our confinement have increased. We have begun losing track of the days of the week, We have been in self-quarantine for about 50 days now — almost 15% of the year.

Interesting — the retirement village not too far from the Enchanted Forest that has been actively promoting us to choose them when we inevitably divide it is time to ender an assisted living facility, called today and offered us a free dinner from the local restaurant of our choice delivered to our home this evening. We chose Zinfandel a somewhat expensive Italian-American restaurant that we enjoy eating at.

I drove up into the Golden Hills to see Hayden. I arrived just as he returned with SWAC from buying flowers for planting around the house. I put on my mask and rubber gloves and keeping my social distance when with him as he showed me what they had been planting these past few days. In the side yard, they had planted about eight trees — a Japanese Maple, an orange tree, a lemon tree, apricot and peach trees, pomegranate, and some Thai fruit trees. I do not know how well some of these trees will do in that environment.

The front yard, actually a slope from the garage up to the road, has been planted with many flowers and an olive tree. On a bare area between two massive redwood trees next to the driveway had been used for burying pets — Pepe and Pesca the two Bichons, a crayfish, a couple of lizards, a tiny snake and a large goldfish named Sharky. A few clumps of flowers have now been planted on that hallowed ground.

 

I then returned home. Shortly after my arrival, our free dinner that I had been eagerly anticipating arrived. It was a hamburger for me and chicken tacos for Naida. I was disappointed and pissed. What’s worse, the meat looked and tasted like it came in a can.

This afternoon we took Boo-boo the Barking Dog on a long walk through the Enchanted Forest. It was sunny and warm, in the upper 70s. We tried to find paths we had never walked before and we did. At one point we found ourselves by the lake and sat there awhile enjoying the view.

 

Land Park is a large park in Sacramento. The Sacramento Zoo is located there. According to Naida, the developer of the area created it as an amenity for his development. He went on to be elected mayor of the city. We decided to visit it today, taking all the care necessary to avoid breaching social-distancing guidelines. Equipped with masks and rubber gloves we walked around a lake and through the rock garden.

The story about the rock garden: In the late 1930s a woman began planting the garden in the public park. The city did nothing to stop her. They even gave her an award. After she died, the garden she worked so hard on was taken over by the city. I do not know if any of this is true, but history is story and if the story is good enough then it is good enough. As Pratchett writes, “We make up our world according to the stories that we tell ourselves, and each other, about it.” (Pratchett, Terry. The Globe: The Science of Discworld II: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.)

For the next few days, the weather hovered in the mid-80s. Sunny with a slight breeze. I placed a folding camp chair in a spot of shade in the back yard and spent much of the afternoon dozing with the dog lying at my feet and now and then typing things like I am doing now. I wonder why lazing away outdoors in sunny weather is so pleasant and not boring at all, while sitting indoors often feels tedious and uncomfortable. Perhaps Peter knows. He understands things like this. I consider him a master keeper of obscure and unconventional notions.

 
I think I will go up to bed. Napping also is neither boring nor unpleasant.

That night after I got up, we watched The Sunshine Boys for perhaps the fifth or sixth time in the last month. I did not want to. I thought of going back to bed. I couldn’t. I love that movie. One could say I liked it because of the timing between the actors, the directing, Neil Simon’s script, seeing Gorge Burn’s again on the screen, or Matthau tearing up the scenery. No, I liked it because it was about old guys. Also, because once, at a Coastal Commission meeting, I was mistaken by the press for Walter Matthau. I would have preferred being mistaken for Rock Hudson.

Last night, I had a dream. No not a dream about freedom from four centuries of oppression. Instead, I was riding a bus. I do not know where that bus was or where it was going, but something about it made me think it was somewhere in San Francisco. I was sitting as usual in one of the reserved for seniors and handicapped seats that are generally filled by 20 somethings or the mentally ill. Anyway, the bus was full of men — stuffed full. They started hassling and ultimately punching me. Eventually, I fought back, swinging my cane and discovered they were all ghosts because when struck they each disappeared in a puff of smoke — except for four big heavyset men. They were real and, hopeless as it may have seemed, I waded in, punching them with all my might only to wake up and discover I was punching Naida. Having experienced this before, she knew enough to avoid my punches and calm me down until I fell back to sleep.

The next morning I felt physically, mentally and emotionally like dog shit so after breakfast and a bit of news about our Commander in Chief recommending we shoot up with Clorox to cure us of the plague and stop us from criticizing him, I drove into the Golden Hills to visit HRM in hope that it would cheer me up. Donning my mask and gloves, I met him and Jake in front of the house and accompanied them on a walk through their most recent plantings at the back. Haden now has a bedroom on the bottom floor with a large deck extending into the backyard. He has festooned his deck with flowering plants everywhere, hanging from the rafters, on the floor, and in the backyard. He has included a large wisteria bush that he plans to train to extend onto the deck.

The next day or perhaps the day after, we packed some soft drinks, a box of Fig Newtons, some coffee and Boo-boo the Barking Dog into the car, and set off for a ghost town on the banks of the Mokelumne River Naida had visited a few years ago. We drove through the Gold Country on Route 49, until we came to the turnoff to the town. Alas, the road was closed. “Let’s walk” I suggested. “How far can it be?”

So we parked the car and set off. The walk started out delightfully. The route ran along the banks of the river that snaked through the foothills of the Sierra’s. California Poppies, Lupine, and many other spring wildflowers covered the hills. A blue oak and Digger pine forest grew along the banks of the river.

 

     

 

 

The Mokelumne River through arches of blue oak.

 

 

The town we were heading to was originally built to house the workers building a hydroelectric project on the river. Now and then small groups of hikers passed us along the road some of them looked like they had been bathing in the river. As the walk lengthened, I began to grow tired. I asked a group of young men coming down the path how far it was. “Not far,” they responded. Of course, “Not far,” for some 20-year-olds and “Not far,” for an eighty-year-old are two entirely different concepts.

 

 

My plan was to walk as far as I could. Not too far (80-year-old far) from where we passed the young men, I had reached my limit and sat, exhausted, in some shade at the side of the road. I realized my plan to only walk as far as I could was flawed. I still had to walk back.

Naida, being healthier and more athletic than I, felt no such fatigue. Nonetheless, She agreed we should head back. And so we did. I walked from shadow to shadow and collapsed at just about everyone we came to. At one point I considered keeling over and forcing Naida to call for an ambulance.

Naida discovered an unusual poppy along the way.

 

She also found some bush lupine growing by the road.

 

 

Once we left the path to walk a few steps to the river so the dog could get a drink. (Did I fail to mention that despite bringing copious amounts of water and juice and Fig Newtons along, we left them all back in the car) While the dog was drinking his fill, a big black snake with golden stripes slithered out from under some detritus just after they passed. I thought it might be the California version of the east-coast deadly coral snake except 10 times larger. Not being much of a woodsman, I did the only thing I could think of. I screamed. “What’s the matter?” Naida responded. “A big snake,” said I. “What color?” she inquired. The snake had disappeared into the grass by now. “Yellow with black stripes,” I said. “Oh, no problem, they eat baby rattlesnakes” she explained. Not knowing if that made me feel any better, we slowly and for me agonizingly made our way back to the car without further mishap except for me almost stepping on an evil-looking thing that Naida said was an alligator lizard that she said grew much larger than the specimen I almost stepped on.

Just after taking this photo, the snake appeared from beneath some fallen piece of bark at the foot of the tree.

 

 

(In case you wonder about my relationship with the natural environment, I am a city boy. As Neuwirth said, “We get nose bleeds if our feet are not touching cement.” We may love the wonders of nature but still prefer to sleep in our beds at night. We like the wonder better than the feeling of nature on our skin. That is why for some of us, our knowledge may be deficient but the wonder never dies. Sort of like, believing in God is a lot more pleasant than actually meeting the bearded old bastard.)

Back at the car, we drank copious amounts of water. Naida drove us back while I dozed and recovered. Back home we discovered the Fig Newtons were missing. We had not eaten any. We suspected the culprit was Boo-boo the Barking Dog, but we could find no evidence. (He is a very sloppy eater.) Perhaps if was the alligator lizard.

The next day, fully recovered from my adventure, I set off for SF for some CT scans. Traffic was so light, I was able to get back by early afternoon in time for lunch. After lunch, I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting and dozing on a chair in the back yard. I one point, Naida woke me from my reverie to inform me that she had just discovered a nest of black widow spiders in a cranny in the wall near where I had been resting.

That evening we watched every episode of Ricky Gervais’ network series After Life. It was great. One of the best things I have seen in a long long while. It was about a man with deep unrelieved depression and a group of extremely odd but often engaging characters with which he was involved. It resonated with me. It seemed to say a life of pathological depression is livable and amusing. See it you’ll like it.

Finally, this morning I awoke, the room was dark, Naida’s body was pressed against my back. “It must be early,” I thought. Boo-boo the Barking Dog had not yet barked his wake up bark. I turned over to give Naida a hug and as I did so I heard a low growl. It was the dog in my arms. I looked up at the clock it was almost noon and the shutters on the window were still closed.

Later the doctor called about the results of the CT scan he said the cancer in my neck has not grown but a nodule in my chest had thickened and he will be speaking with the surgeon about removing it.
That was how my day began today. I wonder how the rest of it will play out…

And, that was my past week or two of self-confinement. How was yours?

Take care.

 

 

 

 

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

 

 

 

A. On Top: A Few Brief and at Times Amusing Essays for Understanding Some Basic Science with Which to While-Away Your Time During Self-Confinement (continued).

 

 

Part III

INFORMATION, ENTROPY, AND THERMODYNAMICS
A central concept in Shannon’s information theory is something that he called entropy, which in this context is a measure of how statistical patterns in a source of messages affect the amount of information that the messages can convey. If certain patterns of bits are more likely than others, then their presence conveys less information, because the uncertainty is reduced by a smaller amount. In English, for example, the letter ‘E’ is much more common than the letter ‘Q’. So receiving an ‘E’ tells you less than receiving a ‘Q’. Given a choice between ‘E’ and ‘Q’, your best bet is that you’re going to receive an ‘E’. And you learn the most when your expectations are proved wrong. Shannon’s entropy smooths out these statistical biases and provides a ‘fair’ measure of information content.

In retrospect, it was a pity that he used the name ‘entropy’, because there is a longstanding concept in physics with the same name, normally interpreted as ‘disorder’. Its opposite, ‘order’, is usually identified with complexity.

The context here is the branch of physics known as thermodynamics, which is a specific simplified model of a gas. In thermodynamics, the molecules of a gas are modelled as ‘hard spheres’, tiny billiard balls. Occasionally balls collide, and when they do, they bounce off each other as if they are perfectly elastic. The Laws of Thermodynamics state that a large collection of such spheres will obey certain statistical regularities. In such a system, there are two forms of energy: mechanical energy and heat energy. The First Law states that the total energy of the system never changes. Heat energy can be transformed into mechanical energy, as it is in, say, a steam engine; conversely, mechanical energy can be transformed into heat. But the sum of the two is always the same. The Second Law states, in more precise terms (which we explain in a moment), that heat cannot be transferred from a cool body to a hotter one. And the Third Law states that there is a specific temperature below which the gas cannot go — ‘absolute zero’, which is around-273 degrees Celsius.

The most difficult — and the most interesting — of these laws is the Second. In more detail, it involves a quantity that is again called ‘entropy’, which is usually interpreted as ‘disorder’. If the gas in a room is concentrated in one corner, for instance, this is a more ordered (that is, less disordered!) state than one in which it is distributed uniformly throughout the room. So when the gas is uniformly distributed, its entropy is higher than when it is all in one corner. One formulation of the Second Law is that the amount of entropy in the universe always increases as time passes. Another way to say this is that the universe always becomes less ordered, or equivalently less complex, as time passes. According to this interpretation, the highly complex world of living creatures will inevitably become less complex, until the universe eventually runs out of steam and turns into a thin, lukewarm soup.

This property gives rise to one explanation for the ‘arrow of time’, the curious fact that it is easy to scramble an egg but impossible to unscramble one. Time flows in the direction of increasing entropy. So scrambling an egg makes the egg more disordered — that is, increases its entropy — which is in accordance with the Second Law. Unscrambling the egg makes it less disordered, and decreases energy, which conflicts with the Second Law. An egg is not a gas, mind you, but thermodynamics can be extended to solids and liquids, too.

At this point we encounter one of the big paradoxes of physics, a source of considerable confusion for a century or so. A different set of physical laws, Newton’s laws of motion, predicts that scrambling an egg and unscrambling it are equally plausible physical events. More precisely, if any dynamic behaviour that is consistent with Newton’s laws is run backwards in time, then the result is also consistent with Newton’s laws. In short, Newton’s laws are ‘time-reversible’.

However, a thermodynamic gas is really just a mechanical system built from lots of tiny spheres. In this model, heat energy is just a special type of mechanical energy, in which the spheres vibrate but do not move en masse. So we can compare Newton’s laws with the laws of thermodynamics. The First Law of Thermodynamics is simply a restatement of energy conservation in Newtonian mechanics, so the First Law does not contradict Newton’s laws. Neither does the Third Law: absolute zero is just the temperature at which the spheres cease vibrating. The amount of vibration can never be less than zero.

Unfortunately, the Second Law of Thermodynamics behaves very differently. It contradicts Newton’s laws. Specifically, it contradicts the property of time-reversibility. Our universe has a definite direction for its ‘arrow of time’, but a universe obeying Newton’s laws has two distinct arrows of time, one the opposite of the other. In our universe, scrambling eggs is easy and unscrambling them seems impossible.

Therefore, according to Newton’s laws, in a time-reversal of our universe, unscrambling eggs is easy but scrambling them is impossible. But Newton’s laws are the same in both universes, so they cannot prescribe a definite arrow of time.

Many suggestions have been made to resolve this discrepancy. The best mathematical one is that thermodynamics is an approximation, involving a ‘coarse-graining’ of the universe in which details on very fine scales are smeared out and ignored. In effect, the universe is divided into tiny boxes, each containing (say) several thousand gas molecules. The detailed motion inside such a box is ignored, and only the average state of its molecules is considered. It’s a bit like a picture on a computer screen. If you look at it from a distance, you can see cows and trees and all kinds of structure. But if you look sufficiently closely at a tree, all you see is one uniformly green square, or pixel. A real tree would still have detailed structure at this scale — leaves and twigs, say — but in the picture all this detail is smeared out into the same shade of green.

In this approximation, once ‘order’ has disappeared below the level of the coarse-graining, it can never come back. Once a pixel has been smeared, you can’t unsmear it. In the real universe, though, it sometimes can, because in the real universe the detailed motion inside the boxes is still going on, and a smeared-out average ignores that detail. So the model and the reality are different. Moreover, this modelling assumption treats forward and backward time asymmetrically. In forward time, once a molecule goes into a box, it can’t escape. In contrast, in a time-reversal of this model it can escape from a box but it can never get in if it wasn’t already inside that box to begin with.

This explanation makes it clear that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a genuine property of the universe, but merely a property of an approximate mathematical description. Whether the approximation is helpful or not thus depends on the context in which it is invoked, not on the content of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And the approximation involved destroys any relation with Newton’s laws, which are inextricably linked to that fine detail.

Now, as we said, Shannon used the same word ‘entropy’ for his measure of the structure introduced by statistical patterns in an information source. He did so because the mathematical formula for Shannon’s entropy looks exactly the same as the formula for the thermodynamic concept. Except for a minus sign. So thermodynamic entropy looks like negative Shannon entropy: that is, thermodynamic entropy can be interpreted as ‘missing information’. Many papers and books have been written exploiting this relationship — attributing the arrow of time to a gradual loss of information from the universe, for instance. After all, when you replace all that fine detail inside a box by a smeared-out average, you lose information about the fine detail. And once it’s lost, you can’t get it back. Bingo: time flows in the direction of information-loss.

However, the proposed relationship here is bogus. Yes, the formulas look the same … but they apply in very different, unrelated, contexts. In Einstein’s famous formula relating mass and energy, the symbol c represents the speed of light. In Pythagoras’s Theorem, the same letter represents one side of a right triangle. The letters are the same, but nobody expects to get sensible conclusions by identifying one side of a right triangle with the speed of light. The alleged relationship between thermodynamic entropy and negative information isn’t quite that silly, of course. Not quite.

As we’ve said, science is not a fixed body of ‘facts’, and there are disagreements. The relation between Shannon’s entropy and thermodynamic entropy is one of them. Whether it is meaningful to view thermodynamic entropy as negative information has been a controversial issue for many years. The scientific disagreements rumble on, even today, and published, peer-reviewed papers by competent scientists flatly contradict each other.

What seems to have happened here is a confusion between a formal mathematical setting in which ‘laws’ of information and entropy can be stated, a series of physical intuitions about heuristic interpretations of those concepts, and a failure to understand the role of context. Much is made of the resemblance between the formulas for entropy in information theory and thermodynamics, but little attention is paid to the context in which those formulas apply. This habit has led to some very sloppy thinking about some important issues in physics.

One important difference is that in thermodynamics, entropy is a quantity associated with a state of the gas, whereas in information theory it is defined for an information source: a system that generates entire collections of states (‘messages’). Roughly speaking, a source is a phase space for successive bits of a message, and a message is a trajectory, a path, in that phase space. In contrast, a thermodynamic configuration of molecules is a point in phase space. A specific configuration of gas molecules has a thermodynamic entropy, but a specific message does not have a Shannon entropy. This fact alone should serve as a warning. And even in information theory, the information ‘in’ a message is not negative information-theoretic entropy. Indeed the entropy of the source remains unchanged, no matter how many messages it generates.

 

 

B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

 

 
The internet provides the opportunity to create a world-wide society or culture with its own stories, customs, and biases. The question is whether or not it will be any better than what we have now.

 

 

C. Today’s Poem:

 

Along the Navaho Trail
Every day, along about evening
When the sunlight’s beginning to pale
I ride through the slumbering shadows
Along the Navajo Trail

When it’s night and crickets are callin’
And coyotes are makin’ a wail
I dream by a smoldering fire
Along the Navajo Trail

I love to lie and listen to the music
When the wind is strummin’ a sagebrush guitar
When over yonder hill the moon is climbin’
It always finds me wishin’ on a star

Well what a ya know, it’s mornin’ already
There’s the dawnin’, so silver and pale
It’s time to climb into my saddle
And ride the Navajo Trail

I love to lie and listen to the music
When the wind is strummin’ a sagebrush guitar
When…
Sam Cooke

 

D. Pookie’s Musings: Something somewhat more that risqué but a smidgen less than pornographic.

 

 

While reading The Science of Discworld II with which you should all know by now I am somewhat obsessed, I came across the following sentence by the author in the midst of his attempt to explain quantum theory or evolution or something like that:

“The Hedgehog Song, a Discworld ditty in the general tradition of Eskimo Nell, first made its appearance in Wyrd Sisters with its haunting refrain ‘The hedgehog can never be buggered at all’.”

The reference to The Hedgehog Song apparently referred to the author’s contention that:

“Stories have power because we have minds, and we have minds because stories have power.”

 

Which makes sense in a quantum world.

Having been intrigued by the reference to “the general tradition of Eskimo Nell” and its possible importance to a possible unified theory of everything, I looked up Eskimo Nell in Wikipedia. There I found a poem, The Ballad of Eskimo Nell, the last stanza of which, if not a unified theory, nevertheless expressed the almost universal status of males of my age. I guess that is a unified theory of sorts

When a man grows old, and his balls grow cold,
And the tip of his prick turns blue,
And the hole in the middle refuses to piddle,
I’d say he was fucked, wouldn’t you?
The Ballad of Eskimo Nell

 

What was even more amazing to me was that two movies have been made about that apparently fascinating young woman.

 

 

 

E. Giants of History: Peter on the benefits of Sloth during times of crisis.

 

 

To my paragraph ending with, “I feel like what those old mountain men must have felt like while being trapped all winter in a snow-covered cabin in the wilderness” Peter responded with:

I remember, many years ago when we were living in Boston, a friend moved up to northern Vermont to live. Never mind why. Anyway, we met a couple of his new friends; I recall one was living solitarily. He was very talkative; I imagined that living alone in semi-wilderness might engender an inclination to volubility when one infrequently is in contact with other humans.

As for me, the daily routine of arising, ablutions, dressing, breakfast — first big decision of the day: eat minimally or have more — reading the newspaper and e-news, and — ta-da! morning is half or mostly gone already. Barrie back from walking Ramsey, lately at MacClaren Park – mostly empty and beautiful. Today, though, I went out to pick up one of my various prescriptions at Walgreens. Wore a mask during the pick-up. Staff was fully garbed and covered. Stood the requisite six feet behind the person in front of me in line. Another periodic routine.

A vague memory of early 1972, playing tennis and sightseeing and learning the city and hanging out stoned after having moved to SF. Different times.

 

I wrote about breaking quarantine and gamboling in the Oak woodlands with Naida. That take ended with, “Following our visit we drove back into the Enchanted Forest.” Peter responded:

 

 

We, on the other hand, have transformed sloth into fine art. However, still, several big steps removed from solitary crypto-holiness meditation with endless recitations of the Diamond Sutra and slurping gruel. Although, this week, in a sudden paroxysm of activity, Barrie decided to clean up her office. She is now about 90% done; prodigious effort, but apparently very satisfying. My “office”, however, needs no such treatment. Anyway, it would interfere with my reading of the portion of Robert Caro’s tome about Lyndon Johnson about his election to the Senate in 1948. Talk about Texas!

Meanwhile, I got notified that our next periodic teleconference of the CMIB board (the CA Maritime Infrastructure Bank, of which I am a member — still!) is canceled for lack of a quorum, due to the virus disruptions. We’ll wait a couple of months +/-. Put the file back in the drawer…..

 
After describing another escapade of flight from incarceration I wrote, “We returned refreshed if a bit concerned that we may have snared a coronavirus or two along the way.” Peter wrote:

We get to walk around the block; practically no one out except a dog walker or two, or some Latina pushing a baby carriage with some gringa’s kids inside.

Although, the New Neighborhood Thing!: two houses down live a couple who moved in a few years ago, relatively recently. Affluent. He’s on the phone all day. Turns out she owns a winery business. With this house arrest fiddle, she has now set up a children’s lemonade stand in front of their house, except it’s her wine selling table. $20/bottle, red, white, rose. Fairly decent stuff, in fact. 3-6pm daily, more on weekends. I’ve purchased a couple of bottles, and hung out and gossiped with her. Quite pleasant, and my kind of practically effortless productive activity. Proper distance, masks, wash hands, all medically kosher. The Ernest Winery. right here on 25th St. Careful not to make it a habit.

 

Having a had jaunty run through some amusing and risqué aphorisms of the ancient Sumerians that ended, “That is civilized. And, the abominations of Utu to you to too,” Peter added:

Interestingly, you refer to the Sumerians. I was recently looking at various maps, which I enjoy, these were of ancient civilizations, in particular those of the Levant and the Middle East, including, of course, the Sumerians! There were entries about the “collapse of civilizations” around 5,000-3000 years ago. Perhaps you picked up on the very recent article in the Atlantic about the United States as a failed state. The author nailed it perfectly. It’s really horrifying, infuriating, and frightening. I can imagine what the Europeans are thinking and saying. The outlook for our children and grandchildren is grim. I don’t like to think about it.

 
At one point during my description of our trip to the Sandhill Crane refuge, I commented, “We saw huge flocks of geese and other birds feeding in the wetland.” Peter interjected:

 

Sounds delightful, all this outdoorsy touring. It’s too built up where we are, even with very little traffic, but parking lots are all closed, and anyway, we are too slothful.

Peter

 

 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

 

 

1. The importance of “our group”. When times are hard, our group is primary. When times are disastrous, group loyalty disintegrates. When famine strikes, one will even eat one’s children. Nothing has changed. Perhaps, someday, they will really engineer human genetic make-up. Then the degrees of villainy will Really shine.
Peter Grenell

 

 

2. Hollywood is a potential gold mine for anthropologists because it’s the only culture in the world where educated and rich and powerful people have the mind-set and manners of Southern white trash.
Burke, James Lee. Robicheaux: A Novel (p. 95). Simon & Schuster.

 

 

 

 

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

BOO-BOO the BARKING DOG and POOKIE spend a pleasant Sunday morning in bed.

This and that from re Thai r ment, by 3Th. 18 Joseph 0009. (January 6, 2020)

“Remember, write to your Congressman. Even if he can’t read, write to him.”
Will Rogers

 
MAY YOUR NEW YEAR BE YOUR BEST YET.

 

 

 

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES DURING THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS:

 

 
A. CHRISTMAS:

 
Christmas morning arrived dark and dank in the Enchanted Forest. Last evening, under a crystal clear sky, we attended a Christmas party at Naida’s daughter’s home in Land Park. It was fun. We sang Christmas carols, ate Chinese food, and opened presents. For a present, I got a throw blanket to remind me how old I am while keeping me warm in the evenings watching old movies on TCM and sipping egg-nog laced with brandy. I also received a book by Donald Hall entitled A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety also to remind me how old I am becoming. The book contains a series of short essays by the author, who also used to be the nation’s Poet Laureate, about how it feels to be ninety and still alive, the famous and not so famous people he has met, and his sometimes trenchant thoughts on various unconnected things. To quote the author on the nature and tenor of his opinions, “Why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?” I loved the book.

Today we drove into the golden hills to give HRM and Dick (or as we refer to him Uncle Mask) their Christmas presents. When we arrived, we learned they were both down with the flu. Hayden was nestled in bed in his teen cave. I went downstairs and gave him his Christmas presents, eight 5 by 7 wood-backed photographs of him and me over the years, also a pocket all-purpose tool, all separately wrapped. He unwrapped them one and a time and thanked me profusely after exposing each one.

Leaving him to ponder the meaning and significance of my presents and wrestle with the physical and psychological miseries of being sick on Christmas Day, I returned upstairs to find Naida and UM in the kitchen making coffee laced with Kailua. For the next 3 or 4 hours, we sat around the table and discussed ancient native-American society, the origin of bees, turkeys and grapes in California, petroleum development, coastal regulation, Willie Brown and related subjects. About halfway through our round-table discussion, H, having resolved whatever quandaries I had left with him, emerged from his sickbed and told us he was off to the skatepark. The skatepark I concluded must be a miracle remedy that can cure certain adolescents of whatever psychological, physical or existential issues they may have to wrestle with during that brief and certainly not beloved few years of raging hormones before recognition sets in as to how bad life can really get.

Eventually, Naida and I returned to the Enchanted Forest and watched a thoroughly silly movie starring William Powell and a far too young Debbie Reynolds. I wrapped myself warmly in my throw. It was warm. I was happy.

 
B. BOXING DAY:

 

 

(“In Britain, it was a custom for tradesmen to collect ‘Christmas boxes’ of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year… This custom is linked to an older British tradition where the servants of the wealthy were allowed the next day to visit their families since they would have to serve their masters on Christmas Day. The employers would give each servant a box to take home containing gifts, bonuses, and sometimes leftover food.” [WIKIPEDIA])

Boxing Day (or if you will St. Stephen Protomartyr Day or the first day of Kwanzaa) broke, as our mornings usually do, with Boo-boo the Barking Dog, our reliable alarm clock, barking. Every morning at 9AM he begins at the upstairs window then running as though his fur was on fire down the stairs, high pitched almost hysterical barking following, to the living room window for a few moments then to the sliding glass doors by the garden and finally back again to the upstairs window where he then sits quietly and, it seems to me, smugly waiting to see if one of us responds and lets him out for his morning pee and breakfast. If not, he leaps onto the bed pawing at Naida’s arm until she gets up and staggers down the stairs to do his bidding.

Thus, unless we wake up at 7:30 or 8:00 this leaves little time for shagging. For those who wonder about shagging over 80 be advised while perhaps the more athletic positions are a dim memory, we decrepits remain quite able, at times, to enjoy all the pleasures of that activity with little of the self-consciousness of youth.

This morning, for my viewing pleasure, Naida provided me with a brief fashion show of the tennis outfits she had received as Christmas presents from her daughters. After this, she presented me with a nice cup of cocoa.

Later we went shopping for pants for me — a belated Christmas present. All this excitement so exhausted us we went to bed at 8PM. St. Stephen Protomartyr would be proud.

 

 

C. SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST DAY OR FOR THOSE NOT OF A RELIGIOUS BENT YOU MAY CHOOSE TO CELEBRATE ONE DAY OF THE FEAST OF THE WINTER VEIL OR LIFE DAY (THE WOOKIE CELEBRATION OF LIFE) OR NOTHING AT ALL AND JUST CHILL OUT.

 
What was different this morning than all other mornings? This morning Boo-boo the barking dog did not bark. I woke up alone in bed. Naida and the dog had slipped out of the room without a sound and were enjoying an early breakfast together in the downstairs studio.

The only thing that happened today that may be of interest to Johnny the Saint or Chewbacca the Wookie is that I learned that today’s adolescents are experts in the gastronomical merits of various fast food joints.

 

D. HOLY INNOCENTS DAY:

 

(“On this day it is custom to give the youngest child in the household the power to rule the day. From what to eat, where to go and what to do, the youngest is in charge. In Mexico, it is a day for children to play practical jokes and pranks on their elders.” National Day Calendar.)

Today also happens to be National Download Day. I do not know what that means. It is also Saturday, the day of the Saturday Morning Coffee at the Nepenthe Club House here in the Enchanted Forest. Alas, we missed it. Naida was having a long, long conversation on the phone with someone, so I decided to make my breakfast and write this.

I did nothing the rest of the day — not anything notable, nothing, not even a nap. Nothing is hard to do. Try it sometime. We did walk the dog this evening, however.

 

 

E. TODAY, DECEMBER 29, I HAVE LEARNED IS: BARBIE DOLL BIRTHDAY, SECRETS DAY, SENDING SHORT MESSAGES TO UNKNOWN NUMBERS DAY, INTERNATIONAL NUTCASE DAY, AND, SPARKLER DAY.

 
(Note: I can find no reference on the internet for any of these days. I did find a site that indicated that this was, Still Need To Do Day. [I thought that was every day.] If one were really interested, one could check the Catholic Saints Calendar and find about 50 saints whose celebrations are listed for this day including Albert of Gambron, Trophimus of Arles and Ebrulf of Ouche [Ouch?] Ouche is a river in the Cote-d’Or in France.)

At about 11 AM today I set off for Peter and Barrie’s home in The Big Endive By The Bay to spend the night before my appointment at UCSF for my treatment. Naida stayed home to work on Volume II of her memoir and attend to the needs of the dog.

That evening Jason, Hiromi, and Amanda joined Peter, Barrie and I for dinner. Barrie prepared a delicious shrimp and Polenta dish for dinner. Unfortunately, she added jalapeño peppers making it too hot and spicy for me to eat, so I contented myself with a banana, a pear, a Japanese yam and a slice of coconut pie. I was happy and sept well.

 

 

F. DECEMBER 30, NATIONAL BACON DAY:

 
(It is also National Bicarbonate of Soda Day, Falling Needles Family Fest Day and the last day of Hanukkah. Or, if you would prefer you can celebrate the feast day of Saint Raynerius of Aquila Bishop of Forconium (modern Aquila), Abruzzi region, Italy who was noted for his excellent administrative skills, but little else. Does this make him the patron saint of bureaucrats?)
In the morning, I drove to Mission Bay for some CT scans, meetings with the doctor and my infusion. As I walked through the newly built areas of Mission Bay, I could not help feeling like I was participating in a movie about a dystopian world of the future. I strolled through long narrow public spaces with monolithic facades rising on each side. The view of the new development along the shoreline with their bulges and sharp edges looked like cartoon renderings of the city of the future. Unlike most cities, there were fewer people drifting along with you as you walk down the streets and sidewalks. Instead, they seemed to pop in and out of various doors of the buildings as you walk by. There was a small market at the edge of the bay where shaggy Dead Heads sold their wares, mostly dope paraphernalia. Strange tents filled a few spaces that appeared to have been intended to be parks. One seemed to require playing a round of miniature golf before shopping in the tents for something to eat. Odd I see.

My meeting with the doctor went well — no evidence of the cancer spreading.

After my infusion, I met my grandson Anthony. We walked to The Ramp one of the two old hippy hang-outs that still cling to the edge of the Bay. Today they are filled with somewhat less colorful patrons. We sat outdoors and enjoyed the view of the bay, boats and the old shipyard that included a large tanker under repair.

I then set off for the Enchanted Forest and ran into a traffic jam as soon as I crossed the Bay Bridge in Emeryville. I heard on the car radio the entire freeway had been closed in Vallejo for a “police action” and drivers were advised to find alternative routes. I took 680 and eventually arrived home three hours later. There were no news reports that evening about what the “police action” was all about.

 

G. HOGMANAY AND NEW YEAR’S EVE.

 
On New Year’s Eve, we attended a party at the Nepenthe Club House. It was scheduled to end at nine PM when the ball was dropped on Times Square in New York. It was planned like this so that we decrepits could get home at a decent hour. Even so, most of the people had left long before the Times Square ball did its thing. We stayed to the bitter end, however.

 

H. NEW YEAR’S DAY, AND ST. ZYGMUNT GORAZDOWSKI DAY.

 
I did nothing at all today. I took a long nap in the afternoon. Watched a bit of television. Perhaps I was resting up from 2019 and getting ready to tackle 2010 — then again perhaps not.
I. NATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION DAY, NATIONAL PERSONAL TRAINER AWARENESS DAY, ST. BASIL THE GREAT DAY, ST. BLIDULF DAY AND ST. CASPAR DEL BUFALO DAY.
This morning broke sunny and relatively warm for this time of year. The arrival of the garbage trucks and the leaf blowers drove Boo-boo the Barking Dog into paroxysms of hysterical barking and sent him running like crazy throughout the house.

Determined to approach the new year with greater vigor and determination than I evidenced yesterday, and to escape the unholy racket both inside the house as well as my realization that we were out of my beloved English Muffins, I left the house and strode vigorously and purposefully through the Enchanted Forest to where I had parked the car. I drove to the nearest shopping center where I stopped at Starbucks for breakfast after which I went to Safeway to buy the English Muffins, a few other necessities (e.g., frozen ravioli and several bars of dark chocolate with sea salt) and a bouquet of flowers for Naida. I then returned home with a sense of accomplishment that I was convinced equipped me to successfully face whatever the current year throws my way.

I put the groceries away and went upstairs for a nap. I had enough vigor and determination for the day.

 
J. TODAY JANUARY 3 IS 10TH OF THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS. IT IS ALSO THE FEAST OF THE HOLY NAME OF JESUS AS WELL AS OF KURIAKOSE ELIAS CHAVARA IN THE SYRO-MALABAR CATHOLIC CHURCH.

 
On the 10th day of Christmas, I picked up Hayden, Kaleb, and their snowboards and drove them to Northstar near Lake Tahoe for a day of caroming down the snow-covered slopes. It was a sunny and surprisingly warm day, about 50 degrees. After we arrived, the boys set off for the slopes and I set about seeking amusement in the pseudo-alpine village at their base.


Ready to hit the slopes.

 

first ate a breakfast of pancakes that cost as though they were made of gold and tasted like it also. I then wandered about and ran into Jake and his family. They were leaving because Jake’s friend from Arizona, Kaden, had fractured his arm snowboarding yesterday. Jake’s mom said the emergency room when she visited yesterday looked more like the results of a terrorist strike than a room full of holiday vacationers. Skiing seems to be hazardous duty for recreation seekers.

I then found a Starbucks where I was surprisingly given a free cup of coffee. I took my free coffee over to a seat by a window where I watched the crowds strolling by while I slowly sipped my drink. I had drunk enough coffee that morning that I amused myself by contemplating the possibility of dying here of caffeine poisoning.

After a while, I left and strolled through the faux village and inspected the wares in a few shops. Tiring of this, I sat on an upholstered bench by a fire pit near the skating rink. I watched the skaters, some gliding by and others whose by was something less than gliding. I also listened to a female twosome singing western tunes on the stage next to the rink.



Just as I was about to drift off into a mindless reverie, HRM called to say that they had finished snowboarding and were waiting for me nearby. I found them and we were soon heading off for home.

 

‘

K. TODAY WE CELEBRATE THE DAY OF THE FALLEN AGAINST THE COLONIAL REPRESSION (ANGOLA), DAY OF THE MARTYRS (DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO), HWINUKAN MUKEE (OKINAWA ISLANDS, JAPAN), OGONI DAY (MOVEMENT FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE OGONI PEOPLE), AND WORLD BRAILLE DAY.

 

 

It is Saturday today and Naida and I attended the Saturday Morning Coffee at the Nepenthe Clubhouse. It went as usual and I paid little attention, drifting off into a semi-dream state while the others talked. Winnie sat down beside me. We talked about the state or our health. She observed that I needed a haircut and recommended the stylist she uses. She then invited me to join her and a few of the girls for a drink after the meeting I declined. Naida and I returned home and vegetated for the rest of the day. We did not celebrate those who had fallen opposing colonial oppression in Angola. But I did think about them. I, however, did not think very much about the martyrs or the Ogoni I am afraid.

 

 

L. TODAY IS THE TWELFTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS AND THE TWELFTH NIGHT OF CHRISTMAS, NATIONAL BIRD DAY, AND HARBIN INTERNATIONAL ICE AND SNOW SCULPTURE FESTIVAL (HARBIN, CHINA).

 

 

The Twelfth Day of Christmas arrived in the Enchanted Forest as bright as springtime. After breakfast, I felt the need — an itch — to do something, anything, even to just take a walk. And so I did. I hooked up Boo-boo to his leash and set off. It wasn’t much of a walk but it will do for me.

It is now a day after writing the preceding paragraph. I tried to recall what else I did yesterday. Failing, I turned again to Naida and asked, “Do you recall what we did yesterday?”

“Not much” she replied, “and I enjoyed it.” After a moment of reflection, she added, “We did see a marvelous movie with wonderful music.”

“Do you remember its name” I inquired.

More reflection. “Fiddler on the Roof,” she eventually declared.

There you have it. Pookie’s Twelve Days of Christmas, such as it was.

 
You have fun too and remember to always keep on trucking.



 

 

 

 

DAILY FACTOID:

 

 
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge signed into law a draconian piece of legislation severely restricting Italian, Greek, Jewish and Eastern European immigration to America on the grounds the people from these areas were inferior to those white Americans who emigrated from Europe’s northwest. They, these descendants of immigrants from Northwestern Europe, also believed these newcomers were more susceptible to crimInal and violent behavior, abuse of drugs and alcohol and prone to shirking work in favor of abusing public welfare.

As an descendant of Italian-American immigrants myself, I am ashamed that so many of my generation of descendants of Italian-American immigrants have bought into the slander by the Trump Administration and the white nationalists of the far right that the immigrants of today, the Mexicans, Caribbean Islanders, and Africans, are guilty of the same malicious conduct that our ancestors were.

 

 

 

 PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

 

 
A. Salmon Idaho, Sacagawea’s home town and a shattered family.

 
Leaving the big hole we crossed the Bitterroot Valley entered the Lemhi pass through which Lewis and Clark passed on their way to the Pacific. We dropped down into Idaho and the town of Salmon. Salmon Idaho is a smallish western town, near the place where Sacagawea was born and the home of some family members of the Smith branch of Naida’s family. The patriarch of this branch Don Ian Smith was the town’s Methodist minister and the principal author of two books published and substantially revised by Naida, Simon’s Daughter, and Murder on the Middle Fork. Two of his children Heather and Rockwell still live there.

Heather, a tiny woman, who in her mind seventies still rides out into the fields herding cattle. We arrived at the ranch just as Heather and her daughter rode in from herding some stray cattle into the corral.
Heather is also an accomplished author writing many books on the care and training of horses. She is also one of the most amazing pack rats I have ever met. I doubt whether she had thrown anything away in her entire life. Even the detritus lying around outside the ranch seemed to include farm implements going back to the nineteenth century.


 

Heather’s daughter Andrea, a woman who lives her life as she wants to — untamed and tempestuous suffers a devastating injury almost 20 years ago. I wildfire, one of the largest and most disastrous in Idaho’s history began on a hill near the ranch. She and a friend quickly jumped on a tractor and sped off toward the fire intending to dig a firebreak in an effort to halt its advance. Alas, the wind changed driving the fire towards them. She jumped off the tractor and attempted to outrun it. She did not succeed. The fire swiped over her leaving third-degree burns over much of her body. She was eventually transported to the burn center in Salt Lake where she remained for a few years. She then spent the next eight years or so receiving skin grafts. It has been only a year or two since the worst of that process was finished. Now, unless one gets close to her and looks closely her scars are barely visible.

Naida West
Lynn Thomas, Naida, Heather, Andrea, and Andrea’s most recent boyfriend whose name we forgot.

 
We also visited Rockwell Smith and his wife who live further up the canyon. Rockwell was a noted radio personality at the major Boise radio station who now, in his retirement, still conducts a popular talk show on the local Salmon radio station.


Naida, Rockwell, and Beverly.

 
Rockwell is also a sought-after Santa Clause during the Christmas season in Salmon.

One eventing, Naida and I had dinner at the Junkyard Bistro, Salmon’s premier restaurant. It actually is a bar with a few tables in the back. The food, however, is very good (a great gnocchi dish) and the good California wine goes for only $9 a bottle.

THE JUNKYARD BISTRO.

 
Finally, it was time to leave and return home.

 

B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

 
As citizens of the United States of America, our allegiance is to the Constitution. The Constitution of the United States creates neither flags nor banners, nor pledges, nor anthems to worship.

 

 

C. Today’s Poem:

 

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
Donald Hall

 

 

 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

 

 

“Some miles to the south, close to the picturesque little village of Cothersley, dawn gave the mist still shrouding Cothersley Hall the kind of fuzzy golden glow with which unoriginal historical documentary makers signal their next inaccurate reconstruction. For a moment, an observer viewing the western elevation of the building might almost believe he was back in the late seventeenth century just long enough after the construction of the handsome manor house for the ivy to have got established. But a short stroll around to the southern front of the house, bringing into view the long and mainly glass-sided eastern extension, would give him pause. And when further progress allowed him to look through the glass and see a table bearing a glowing computer screen standing alongside an indoor swimming pool, unless possessed of a politician’s capacity to ignore contradictory evidence, he must then admit the sad truth that he was still in the twenty-first century.”

Hill, Reginald. Good Morning, Midnight (Dalziel and Pascoe) (p. 101). Harper Paperbacks.

 

 

 

TODAY’S CHART:



 

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Sicily.

This and that from re Thai r ment, by 3Th. 0008 (December 4, 2019)

 

“Just don’t take any course where you have to read Beowulf.”
Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) to Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in Annie Hall.

 

HAPPY NATIVE AMERICAN AND ITALIAN PRIDE DAY.

 

Happy Birthday to my son Jason, to Annmarie and to Kesorn.

 

 

 

 

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

 

 
A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN THE BIG ENDIVE BY THE BAY:

 

I type this while riding on the train on the way to my tri-weekly immunotherapy infusion at UCSF. Later we will spend the night at Peter and Barrie’s house. We are approaching Suisun-Fairfield. The sky is overcast, gray and dark. Next to me, Naida naps. I think I will join her.

It is now the following morning. We’re sitting around Peter and Barrie’s home eating breakfast and watching Marie Yovanovich’s testimony in the impeachment inquiry. My treatment yesterday was same old, same old. They did discover my thyroid continues to underperform so they upped the dosage of whatever magic concoction they had me on. After the treatment, we headed off to Peter and Barrie’s. I enjoyed traveling around the Big Endive by the Bay on public transportation observing the antics of my fellow riders and watching the brief melodramas of the City as we pass by.

We arrived at Peter and Barrie’s home and spent a pleasant dinner together telling stories and laughing as we often do. The following morning, after breakfast, we all set off for North Beach. None of us had been there for many years. I used to live in North Beach for a few years but had not been back in over a decade. We passed the restaurant where I used to sit at one of the outside tables and eat lunch or dinner several times a week. It is also the site where, in my unfinished and never to be finished novel the main character, Dragon, would sit and conduct business lacking an office to do so. The novel opens with Dragon sitting at one of the tables when Mavis the beautiful Tattoo artist retained him to find her missing boyfriend. Dragon leaves the restaurant to pursue his first clue only too return a few minutes later bloody and frightened having been beaten by two mysterious fat guys. And so, the novel continues on to its non-conclusion. (I will be happy to send anyone interested a copy of the uncompleted novel.)

We also passed several of the sites where Carol Doda, she of the large naked breasts and hydraulic piano, and I during her declining years would meet now and then for dinner and tell each other stories, reminisces, and lies and laugh a lot.

We stopped first in front of a restaurant I intended to have us all eat lunch owned by a man who immigrated from the same town near Avellino in Italy where my grandfather grew up and whose wife was the chef and cooked some of the best Neapolitan food in the area. Unfortunately, it was closed.

Ultimately, we chose Cafe Sport on Green Street. Fifty years ago, when I first visited it, the place was a simple cafe with a pool table in the back room. Antonio (perhaps his name was Franco. I do not remember which), the owner, began also serving some full meals and added brightly colored tables. He also began decorating the place with whatever oddities he could find. Eventually, the pool table was replaced by more tables and more odd decorations. It became one of the favorite hang-outs of the Prop-20 Coastal Commission staff. For a short period, another room was added. To get there, one had to pass through the kitchen where Antonio, a cigarette in his mouth with its long ash drooping over the large pots of sauce simmering on the stove, held court. We would joke that it was the ash that made to food taste so good. That room became an unofficial meeting place of the Coastal Staff until the Fire Department realized it lacked fire exit and closed it down.

The four of us had a good meal, talked a lot and joked with the waiter. We then piled back into Peter’s car and he drove us to the Downtown Transit Station where we boarded the bus to the Emeryville train station to catch the train to Sacramento.

 

 
B. A DREAM BACK IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST:

 

For the past two nights, I have been having a pleasant dream set in the dream world of my ancestral home in Sicily. It is nothing like the real place I have so often visited. In my dream life, I have several places that over the years I return to. They are nothing like the real places they are supposed to represent. For example, San Francisco in my dream world has no Golden Gate Bridge. Instead, when I look north, I see a crowded harbor filled with large ships and pleasure craft. Further north, there is a mountainous island or peninsular. I sometimes climb those mountains and stare at the endless ocean beyond.

Another dream place seems like a combination of Mendocino and Eureka. Strangely when I face north the ocean is in my left as though I am on the East coast. I spend a lot of my dream time here. On the way to the town, there is an old hotel or resort sited a short way from the ocean. It’s a bit rundown down and the owner is a mysterious dyspeptic man who alternately frightens and annoys me.

The Sicilian town of my dreams appears like it had just emerged from the middle ages or had just been bombed during WWII. Both the women and men wear dark clothing — the woman generally long dresses, the men old working men’s clothing. My friend Vittorio, Naida and I were in a tumble-down house. A middle-aged woman (perhaps the owner) acted strangely, perhaps angry at us for some reason.  Fortunately, she took a liking to Vittorio and pulled him off into the bushes. At the back of the house, there was a large shed open on three sides. The shed operated as an impromptu cafe and meeting place for the neighborhood. In the evening, parties were often held there with a lot of singing, dancing, and storytelling. We had a great time and I woke up happy.

 
C. A FEW TRIPS INTO THE GOLDEN HILLS TO MEET WITH HRM:

 
HRM and I got together several times during the past few days.  The first time we met, while sitting in Subway’s eating a meatball sandwich and discussing his schooling, he mentioned he was enjoying High School and liked all his teachers because they each keep a toy for him that he is allowed to play with in class. It seems that since he had been diagnosed with ADD and refuses to take his meds, the teachers have decided it was best to allow him to release some of his excess energy by fiddling with these during class.

A few days later, I returned for the opening of the newly remodeled skatepark. A large herd of young boys and a few girls on scooters and skateboards crammed the place. After, watching things for a while, Naida and I went to lunch in Town Center.

One day I picked him up at the skate park. On the way to lunch at Subway, I inquired about his welding class. Some time ago I had told both him and my daughter Jessica that between adolescence the onset of adulthood they should develop competence in science, art, math, sports, social science, as well as a trade. I believed given the changes we go through in our lives and the changes the society we live goes through,  flexibility is needed for our sustenance,  health, and happiness. In my daughter’s case art became photography, science virology, math (the statistical analysis necessary for her virology doctorate), sports soccer (she continued to play competitively until very recently), and for social science her minor was semantics.

H then showed me his unfinished steel cube designed to look like a die. It was quite heavy and obviously unfinished. He explained he still needed to file down the welded joints.

On Friday, we went to have lunch a Panda’s a fast-food place we favor. He showed me his finished cube. It looked great. We discussed his upcoming Thanksgiving vacation and the possibility of he and I going away somewhere for a few days.

Another time, I picked up Kaleb and him and took them to the hot dog place in City Center for lunch. They had buffalo wings and IItalian a sausage sandwich called “The Godfather.” Like teenagers everywhere they seemed at sixes and sevens about things to do, a bit bored but unwilling to give up the general comfort of home and running off into the woods or onto a ship and sailing away into an adventure.

 

 

D. ODDS AND ENDS:

 
Days pass, my short term memory slowly continues to shred. I have read a number of books these past few weeks (see E. Below). This is notable because, for about a month or so, I, for some reason, had substantially slowed my normal reading regime.

Naida and I continue our regular routine of spending most days and evenings sitting on our reclining chairs and watching either the impeachment hearings or old movies on TCM. In the early evenings, we walk Boo-Boo the Barking Dog through the Enchanted Forest or to the nearby dog park where instead of playing with the other dogs and running around with them helter-skelter he just sits and waits at our feet staring at us until we give up and take him home for his dinner. When we do go out somewhere to shop or to dinner and I get a chance to see us reflected in say a shop’s glass window I see two slightly dotty old people shuffling along on one of those mysterious errands the aged seem to enjoy.

One evening we watched the movie “Marty” on television. I had always liked it for its dialogue and portrayal of the social lives of young Italian-American men in the 1950s in the Bronx. And yes, I found Marty’s relationship with Clara endearing and appreciated the loneliness experienced by the two central characters, but I had not recognized or appreciated the fear of isolation that pervaded all the characters in the film. Angie’s anger and desperation of losing Marty’s companionship, the mother’s fear of abandonment by their sons and so on permeate the film making it less a comedy and more a caution.

It has been raining and cold for the past few days. The weather reports describe it as an atmospheric river flowing across California bringing with it the weather change. One morning when I went outside it was quite misty. The mist appeared almost solid giving in bulk what it takes away in substance.

We have spent the past few days inside, avoiding the cold and the rain. Naida works on editing portions of Volume II of her memoir while I write this or read a novel on Kindle. At other times we watch the news and political commentary on television. In the evening and at times during the day, we watch the flood of holiday movies on television. We also saw the Battle of Algiers, Giant, the silent film version of Joan of Arc and several other non-holiday fare. I am bored. If the rain and cold keep on much longer, I think I will shoot myself.

 
E. NOT REALY BOOK REPORTS:

 
As usual most of the novels I read are candy for the mind. I guess since I no longer ingest spun sugar, cotton candy for the mind will have to do as a substitute. Well, that’s not true, I have always preferred to flood my mind with fluff. I believe living in a fantasy world is every bit as rewarding as living in the real world — perhaps even more so

I am currently reading, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl by Theodora Goss the third in a series whose principal characters include Mary Jekyll the Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, Diana the daughter of Mr. Hyde, Beatrice Rappiccini the daughter of a man who raised her on a diet exclusively of poisons leaving her “as beautiful and she was poisonous,” Justine Frankenstein, a significantly over six-foot woman created by the famous doctor Frankenstein originally to wed the equally famous monster, and Cathrine Moreau a puma transformed into a woman by Dr. Moreau. They find each other during the course of the first novel and decide to live together in Mary Jekyll’s home, name themselves the Athena Club and with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson set about solving arcane crimes. Cathrine is the Dr. Watson of these estimable ladies’ adventures. One of the many conceits in the books is to have members of the club interrupt Cathrine as she writes criticizing and commentating on her work.

Another book I just completed by one of my favorite authors, Joe Abercrombie who in “A Little Hatred” begins a new series continuing the tales set in a world living in something similar to medieval England with a dollop of magic thrown in. Abercrombie clearly intended to feature a bit more magic in his series but his main character, The Bloody Nine, was so compelling, he focused more on the Barbarians of the north of which The Bloody Nine was one and their ceaseless slaughter of one another in the Ring, a battle to the death between two heroes to determine who would be king. These are adolescent boys novels which is probably why I enjoy them so much.

“Dark Pattern” by Andrew Mayne features a mathematical biologist who gives up his post as a college professor to track down serial killers using the techniques of his academic specialty to do so. He is as obsessed with pursuing them as they are in their chosen profession of murder.

“Not my Fae” by Tom Kelly a multi-book series about a Las Vegas cop who discovered the city is really run by fairies (Fae) and demons and what is worse he learns that he is a fairy and even worse he is a son of Gaia and the King of the Fairies. Needless to say the stories deteriorate in each successive novel to such an extent that the author has to explain why in the afterward of his most recent novel.

“The Vital Question” by Nick Lane sounds like another trashy detective story, but it is not. Lane is a biologist. I think it is best that he explains what his book is all about

For me the best books in biology, ever since Darwin, have been arguments. This book aspires to follow in that tradition. I will argue that energy has constrained the evolution of life on earth; that the same forces ought to apply elsewhere in the universe; and that a synthesis of energy and evolution could be the basis for a more predictive biology, helping us understand why life is the way it is, not only on earth, but wherever it might exist in the universe.
Lane, Nick. The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (p. 16). W. W. Norton & Company.

It is a slow read, but I think important to help clarify my thoughts about the biosphere.

 

 

F. THANKSGIVING:

 
On Thanksgiving, I picked up HRM in the Golden Hills and drove him to Naida’s daughter’s home for Thanksgiving dinner. It was very enjoyable and the food was wonderful. I had to leave a bit early to take HRM back home. Naida, later told me the family spent a few hours after dinner playing word games and singing rounds.

         

 

 

 

 

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

San-Francisco-from-Space-Station-by-André-Kuipers-Portrait.jpg

 

 

The above photograph of the San Francisco Bay Area taken from space demonstrates not only a marvel of technology but the beauty of this corner of the earth. When I look at the photograph, however, I notice the grey urban developed areas. It reminds me of mold in a scientist’s petri dish devouring the agar until it is all consumed and the mold first cannibalizes itself then dies. In fact, the photo may indicate something very much like that on a global level may be happening. Like the mold in the petri dish, the principle organism remaining the white areas of the photograph ( humans), having exhausted the resources in the area, seeks out additional resources (agar for mold and in the case of humans, a variety of other organisms and inert materials) and energy in order to convert them into substances of use (chemically and mechanically) ultimately producing waste and energy (usually in the form of heat.)

The organisms in the dead zone (us) now lacking resources and energy send out filaments (roads, railroads, electric transmission lines, etc.) to transport resources and energy back into the dead zone so that the remaining organisms living there can flourish while the resources and energy at the source are eventually used up.

Meanwhile, waste in the form of unusable garbage and energy build-up everywhere until all the living organisms gradually die. In the interim, the organisms (us) slaughter one another in competition for the resources. This may be a good thing if it reduces demand enough the resources have an opportunity to renew themselves.

A stable population, renewability, and technological advances that promote a reduction in per capita use of resources and energy is “good” technological advancement. Whether humanity, as it has evolved, is the organism that can recognize develop and implement the “good” technological advancement remains to be seen. If not, then, like the mold setting about to devour the last bit of agar in the Petri dish, it is time to be getting ready to begin chanting kaddish.

 

 

 

 

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

 

 

 

While drifting through some old files on my computer, I came across an article I had written back in 1972. Shortly after I had helped put on the 1971 Buckminster Fuller’s World Games Workshop, I had a brief career as an education consultant, primarily for the Sonoma County Board of Education. During that time, I co-authored the following article. Only a brief portion was available through the internet. If I wanted to view it all, I had to go through some elaborate verification dance. I, to quote the members of the Scooter Gang, “Boring.” Nevertheless, I include here what wnNas immediately available.

 

 

“ENVIRONMENTAL STUDY WITH BUCKMINSTER FULLER’S GEOMETRY

MARTIN J. COHEN and JOSEPH E. PETRILLO

Cybernetics Systems Program, 125 South Seventh Street

San Jose State College, San Jose Ca. 95114

An experimental program in geodesics and Energetic and Synergetic Geometry was carried outwith third, fourth and fifth-grade students. This experiment was followed by a workshop designed to help elementary school teachers incorporate Fuller’s concepts into their teaching programs. Both programs included the building of geometric models, construction of geodesic domes, the study of basic structural patterns in the world, and the application of these patterns to environment and nature studies. In addition, the teacher’s workshop discussed methods of implementing the new studies through integration of study in mathematics, natural science, and social science. Both programs emphasized “learning through doing” — playing with, building, and experiencing physical models and structures and made extensive use of replicable media and learning aids.

 

 

 

 

 

DAILY FACTOID:

 

 
SET — WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

I include this simply as an aide-memoire: there are more meanings for this innocent-looking trinity of letters than there are for any other word in the English language—fully 62 columns’ worth in the complete Oxford English Dictionary, and which naturally include such obvious examples as the condition of what the sun does each evening; a major part of a game of tennis; what one does if one embarks on a journey; what one does if one puts something down on a table; a collection of a number of items of a particular kind; and a further score, or more, of other disparate and unconnected things and actions. Set is a term in bowling; it is what a dog (especially a setter, of course) does when he is dealing with game; it is a grudge; what cement does when it dries; what Jell-O does when it doesn’t dry; a form of power used by shipwrights; what a young woman does when she wants to secure a man’s affections; the direction of a current at sea; the build of a person; a kind of underdeveloped fruit; the stake that is put down at dice … need I go on? In the search for a synonym it is worth pointing out, and only half in jest, that it is quite possible that one or other meanings for set might fit the bill, exactly, and will have you all set, semantically, and quite neatly, without nearly as much effort as you supposed.
Simon Winchester

Also, Set is an Egyptian God.

Set, also known as Seth and Suetekh, was the Egyptian god of war, chaos, and storms, brother of Osiris, Isis, and Horus the Elder, uncle to Horus the Younger, and brother-husband to Nephthys. His other consort was the goddess Tawaret, a hippo-headed deity who presided over fertility and childbirth. He is one of the first five gods created by the union of Geb (earth) and Nut (sky) after the creation of the world. His name is usually translated as “instigator of confusion” and “destroyer” and he was associated with disorder, foreign lands and people, and the color red. He is sometimes depicted as a red-haired beast with a forked tail and cloven hooves or a shaggy red dog-like animal. His symbols were the griffin, hippopotamus, crocodile, and tortoise, but he was mainly associated with the serpent. Epithets for Set include “Lord of the Desert” and “Ruler of the South” as he was originally a god of Upper Egypt (the south) and the barren lands beyond Egypt’s borders.

So, let us all set ourselves down and praise the great god SET.

 

 

 

 

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

 

 
A. Pookie and Naida’s Journey through the Northwest (continued) on Top:

 

Yellowstone Park and Gardiner Montana
The next morning, we woke up and left the BHB intending to return to Yellowstone Park and visit Tower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. As we left the building we were greeted with a magnificent view. A large valley spread out in front of us dotted with herds of elk and pronghorn antelope munching on the green and brown grass. On the far side of the valley, large hills rose up and beyond them, snow-capped mountains and the blue sky.

 

 

We had a pleasant breakfast at the BNB, talking with the owners and other guests before setting off back into the Park to visit Tower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. As we passed back through the town of Gardiner on our way back into the Park, we passed herds of Elk along the roads and grazing on the lawns of the town. The town itself was a mix of western picturesque and tourist ugly. After entering the Park we passed additional herds of Elk and Bison grazing the rolling grasslands accompanied by gaggles of cars parked along the roadway disgorging piles of tourists taking photographs of the herds. We also passed some of Yellowstone’s more beautiful vista’s.

 

 

The falls and the canyon were both impressive and picturesque.

 
Naida and I got separated as she misplaced her purse and walked back to find it and I ambled off along the path above the canyon. It became a bit comical when she returned and saw me ahead on the trail and tried to catch up but for one reason or another, she got close but then fell back again. Eventually, she caught up and celebrated doing so.

 
We returned to Gardiner with a stop at one of the mineral springs.

 

 

That evening we ate dinner at a pleasant restaurant with mediocre food. We enjoyed sitting before the fire listening to western music.

The following day, we set off for Yellowstone Falls. We found it, along with hundreds of other tourists, marveled at its beauty and took off for the lakes.

 

 

 

Along the way, Naida told stories and entertained me identifying the plants and animals we passed by. To Naida, Yellowstone was in her backyard when she was a child. Her father would take her there often on day trips. During a stop for a quick lunch, she pointed out the bear-proof garbage cans. At one time Park garbage was piled up in large open dumps. The bear population of the Park exploded as the bears spent their time scrounging the dumps and the unsecured garbage cans. The park administration believed the bears and other animals were losing their wildness and becoming dependent upon the refuse so they stopped dumping refuse in the park resulting in a radical fall off in the bear population because they lost their ability to live in the wild.

Yellowstone Lake, a large expanse of water that fills a portion of the ancient Yellowstone crater was quite beautiful.

 
We spent some time enjoying the view before retiring to the old hotel on the lakes where we bought some books and had a snack.

 
It was at this hotel or perhaps at one in the Grand Teton’s National Park we visited a few days ago that Naida told me the following story:

Perhaps 70 years or so ago, Bill Geyer, Naida’s husband who passed away almost two years ago stopped at the hotel for a few weeks. He was about 11 years old at the time. He and his buddies found a small mouse inhabiting the room with them. They befriended it and even gave it the name Crunchmiller. When it became time to leave the boys became concerned that their friend Crunchmiller would be mistreated or killed by some future inhabitants of the room, not knowing he was a friendly and playful little rodent, so Bill decided to write a letter to the Hotel Manager pleading for the Crunchmiller’s life on the grounds he had become a rodent of character and discretion. The Manager becoming so impressed with the letter promptly sent it off to Reader’s Digest, the Fox News of its day where a few weeks later it appeared in print. Bill’s mother, so proud of the letter and her son’s compassion she wrote a book about it. When I enquired about what became of Crunchmiller she responded, “No one knows and no one seemed to care.”
On the way back to Gardiner we passed through the Park Headquarters at Marathon where a herd of elk grazed on the lawns including this big fella:

That evening back at the BNB, we prepared for leaving the next morning to visit one on Naida’s relatives a cousin Julie Madison in Alder Montana. Unfortunately, she did not have her cousin’s phone number. Nevertheless, although people may no longer use phone books, Naida was able to locate her cousin’s phone number in the one-horse town of Alder Montana by calling “Chick’s Bar.” The bartender, sure enough, knew her cousin’s number and gave it to her. The next morning after saying goodbye to the BNB owners, we left to plunge into old-time Montana.
(To be continued)

 

 
B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

 
Taxes never can be set so high that they could ever discourage the wealthy from pursuing their efforts to become even richer.

 
C. Today’s Poem:

 

Tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl
I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely—

As the very least
Were infinite—to me—

.
I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time ’twill be till six o’clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman—When the Errand’s done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—

.
Therefore—we do life’s labor—
Though life’s Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—
by Emily Dickinson

D. Tuckahoe Joe’s Blog of the Week:

 
Another snag from Jason Colavito (http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog) in his unending battle with the lunatic fringe. Today he pursues Nephilim hunters and SkyWatch.tv.

Steve Quayle Claims Fallen Angels Will Return Soon to Kill Us All
11/13/2019

This week, Nephilim hunter and Christian bigot Steve Quayle visited the Evangelical extremist broadcaster SkyWatch.tv to discuss UFOs, cataclysms, and giants, as well as the True Legends conference he held in America’s conservative entertainment capital, Branson, Mo., a few weeks ago. The True Legends conference builds on Quayle’s True Legends brand of Christian Ancient Aliens knockoff products, which like much of the Christian entertainment market involves copying something secular, adding sanctimony and hypocrisy, and reducing the quality by 40-50%. Things got off to a great start when Quayle told viewers that he believes that we live in a holographic universe dominated by demons who have created a “hell-o-graphic” world, and that UFO disclosure is imminent because Satan is using demon-driven flying saucers to undermine belief in Nephilim giants.

 

 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

 

“The difference between our rich and poor grows greater every year. Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. A man can make a million and he is on every page in the morning. But it never tells you who gave up that million he got.”
WILL ROGERS

 

 

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

IMG_E7572.jpg

This and that from re Thai r ment, by 3Th. 9 Capt. Coast 0004 (April 24. 2015)

 
“There’s nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.”
Caldwell, Ian. The Fifth Gospel: A Novel (p. 103). Simon & Schuster.
In Memory of the Armenian Genocide — 1915:

Armenian Women Crucified During the Genocide*

 

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

A. POOKIE’S SLIGHTLY MEMORABLE OVERNIGHT ADVENTURE:

On Wednesday, I left the golden hills for the Bay Area to meet with the trustee of some coastal property in order to advise him about options available to the trust. We met for lunch in a building that survived the ’06 earthquake. The building was the home of a men’s club established in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.

Club membership includes the captains of industry and commerce in the area. About 50 years ago many doctors and dentists were also allowed to join, as well as some Italian-Americans. I recall that when I was growing up the emphasis was exclusively on the word before the hyphen. Then, through the efforts of some of the least ethical and most dourly aggressive and greedy members of our community, some of us gained enough wealth that American began to gain prominence in our minds and in the minds of many of those exclusively pale hyphenated Americans whose ancestry did not include the word Native.

I remember when the darkness was bleached from my soul and I simply could call myself an American and look down in sadness at the dark souls of members of other hyphenated communities who had not yet received the miracle of the Blessed Bleach. I remember fondly that day when I noticed that my skin had gotten two shades lighter than it was the day before

In all likelihood, there are only one or two members of the club that are Democrats. On the other hand, most of the staff are.

I learned that many of the members also belong to an organization called the Greco-Roman Dentists’ Fishing Society (truly, it was organized by the Greek and Italian dentist in the club). They gather once a year somewhere in the northeastern part of the state for a weekend of fishing and other things.

Since I was to sleep that night in one of the club’s guest rooms, I ate dinner there and met a few of members. One guy was referred to at the “Corn King,” another owned a string of radio stations. He was forced to sell because Rush Limbaugh was not pulling in the listeners like he used to. I had a pleasant conversation with a man whose parents came from Genoa. Like many of the club members, he had a few vacation homes. One was on the beach in the Italian Riviera.

I met the manager of the club. He used to manage the well-known men’s club in Sacramento. When I worked in that city, I received some minor notoriety by refusing to attend meetings and conferences there because of their policy on women members. Of course, I would periodically slip in there for lunch. My moral standards permit minor acts of hypocrisy and one or two large ones now and then.

All the governors that I was familiar with had been members and used the clubs facilities extensively — except Jerry Brown who refused to step foot into the place. Apparently, Governor Arnold used to impress the club members by carrying a large marble chess table from room to room. The members were not so thrilled when the same immigrant governor placed armed guards at the elevator and prevented the members from using the floors where he lounged about — relaxing, I assume, between feats of strength. The members told the muscled one that, if he ever did that again, he would be publicly thrown out of the club.

That night after dinner we played poker. I also thought it would be appropriate to celebrate the recent diagnosis clearing me of lung cancer by smoking a cigar. At the table with me were the Corn King, the Media Lord, a dentist, a retired gynecologist and a few others whose professions I did not know.

Now, as a rule, I do not like gambling and avoid it whenever possible. It was one of my father’s most appalling vices. However, when I do play poker, I have a few rules:

1. It is always preferable for the other players to believe you do not know what you are doing.
2. Fold early and fold often. Unless by the first bet you know you have the best hand on the table, fold. Hoping to improve your hand is as worthless as drawing to an inside straight.
3. Never raise someone else’s bet.
4. If the game chosen by the dealer allows wild cards, quietly fold before the first bet.
5. Never forget that it is not how much you win that counts but how little you lose.

The retired gynecologist was the big winner followed by the Corn King. I was the only other winner.

That night I spent in the club’s guest room. For some reason, I was unable to sleep well and woke up muzzy. After breakfast, I headed back to the golden hills. Because I was so out of it, I kept taking the wrong turns and ended up in Stockton by way of the Delta. Normally I would enjoy a ride through the Delta, but not today. I was lost. This being California I knew that as long as you do not drive around in circles you will eventually cross a freeway. And so I did, except the on-ramp was closed for construction. So I continued east and eventually found another freeway and wound my way home, where I immediately went to bed and slept the rest of the day.

The weather is warm enough now in EDH to begin wearing the $2 shirts of many colors that I bought at the flea market. It makes me happy. I enjoy looking in the mirror at myself dressed in my new shirts.

Another weekend slid by — breakfast in Roseville, a trip to Denio’s, a flag football game, one or two books, a lot of naps and, of course, a lot of time to feel sorry for myself — then it was Monday. Two days gone from the 3000 or so the actuaries say that an average man of my age has left to live.

The pool at the health-club was closed this weekend for annual maintenance. Perhaps that explains the depression gnawing at the edges of my consciousness.
__________________________________________
During the past few days the weather has cooled and I have come down with a cold so I spend most of my day in bed. This more likely explains the malaise I mistook for depression.

The photograph at the top of this page shames me. Given the nature and extent of the suffering going on in the world, here I sit (SOS) complaining about feeling bad because I have a runny nose or the pool is closed.
__________________________________________
The weather continues cool and the skies overcast. While I wait for my cold to pass, I spend most of my days puttering around the house. I have even taken to watching television to pass the time. I watched Rambo III. In it the honest and brave Americans befriend the engaging, non-Muslim, soon to be Taliban, noble natives in Afghanistan and slaughter the gross and evil Russians who for no apparent reason have been torturing and killing the peace loving Afghanis especially their non-combatant women and children. A few years later in the movie of life, it is the Americans who get to portray the Russians in the sequel and slaughter their erstwhile allies, the murderous, suddenly Muslim Taliban. The question, I asked myself was who got to play John Rambo?
_________________________________________
Speaking of glorious wars and martial memories, EDH is planning to build a large memorial park to celebrate, not those who have given their lives but the military as a whole. In it will be large memorials to, the Viet Nam War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Cold War, the War on Terror (but not the War on Drugs or Christmas) with seemingly smaller memorials commemorating WWI and WWII. No mention or memory is made of The Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, or the Civil War or the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War or any other American imperialist military victories. I guess the good citizens of EDH are secret Anti-America radicals ironically seeking to celebrate wars we lost rather than those we won. I assume, however, if I complain vigorously enough I could get them to include memorials to the wars against Grenada or Panama.
_____________________________________________
As long as I’ve begun to rant I may as well get this off my chest. No matter what you may think of Hillary Clinton — the Devil’s Handmaid or the patron Saint of Feminism (there does not seem to be a middle ground) — don’t you think it odd that the speculation, even if true, that she somehow gave special consideration to the rich in order to take their money to give to the poor is somehow worse than the fact that almost every political critic of her alleged actions including those currently running for the presidency has also taken money from the rich, bragged about it, given them special consideration, but kept the money for themselves.

Also as to the Russian uranium deal in specific, besides it having to have been approved by many independent governmental entities other than the State Department, isn’t it odd that those in Congress complaining about this sale of American uranium assets to Russia never publicly objected to it at the time, even though they presumably knew or should have known all about it.

 

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

A few months ago I wrote a series of posts here in T&T in which I pointed out that the current turmoil in the Near-East is, in many ways, a replication of events 1400 years ago when, following the drying up of the grasslands, some Arab pastoralists adopted an ideology (Islam) encouraging them to invade lands of the more productive societies nearby, take over their wealth and overthrow the ideologies and governments that controlled those lands.

According to Scientific American’s article regarding the Defense Department’s 2014 review of the effect of climate change on the area:

“Drying and drought in Syria from 2006 to 2011–the worst on record there–destroyed agricCulture, causing many farm families to migrate to cities. The influx added to social stresses already created by refugees pouring in from the war in Iraq, explains Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who co-authored the study. The drought also pushed up food prices, aggravating poverty. “We’re not saying the drought caused the war,” Seager said. “We’re saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Arable land in the area has been drastically reduced over the past 20 years and expected to continue to decrease. Population, on the other hand, has exploded and estimated to double over the next two decades.

It appears more and more apparent that the immediate goals of the modern Arab insurgents (ISIS, Al Qaeda and so on) is, as it was in the Seventh Century, to capture the wealth of the richer societies that control the littoral areas of the Near-East (Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE, Israel, Yemen and the like) and replace the ideologies of those countries with their own.

It is no Arab Spring but it well may be the beginning of an Arab Winter.

Yemen, a country much in the news recently, is a key in the insurgents strategy. It has the second largest population on the Arabian Peninsula, dominates the southern entrance to the Red Sea and if controlled by the insurgents, forces the oil sheikdoms to face threats on two fronts.

The insurgents in Yemen have toppled the government and appear to be on their way to subduing the entire country. The Saudis responded with air strikes but shied away from commitment of troops. Without troops on the ground, they may impede but not halt the insurgency. Unfortunately, heavily militarized societies that spend a lot on military hardware have only too often proven incapable of successfully engaging in armed combat with a highly motivated adversary. American or other Western nations’ involvement with “boots on the ground” may defeat the insurgents but not the insurgency. I suspect some of the oil sheikdoms now are considering payment of “protection” in the form economic support for ISIS activities in Syria/Iraq in return for temporary relief from attack. This is the same strategy used 1400 years ago. It did not work then and it will not work now. Eventual adoption of the ideology, however, did preserve their wealth and power.

Of the three major non-Arab or non-Sunni regimes on the periphery, Turkey, Iran and Israel, none of them sees ISIS as a significant threat to its physical integrity. All of them see political and economic gains in the prolongation of the conflict and all three would be pleased if the oil sheikdoms find themselves preoccupied and under stress.

(It should be pointed out, the particular form of Islamic terrorism and ideology practiced by ISIS and others appears to be lacking [or at least, weak] in most non-Arab Muslim countries except perhaps Iran.)

 

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

A few years ago I traveled to New York City for some reason. I arrived in NY on the A train. After a few days, I left it by taking the A train again to Far Rockaway. “Far Rockaway.” It sounds exotic. One could almost imagine emerging from the subway onto a sandy beach by clear blue waters — perhaps there is a boatload of buccaneers waiting offshore to attack. One does not usually associate NY with broad sandy beaches. Actually, it is one of those few major cities with large beaches within its city limits, like Rio. True Rockaway Beach, Jones Beach and Coney Island do not quite conger up the same images in one’s mind as Copacabana or Ipanema, (or even Venice Beach in LA) but they do have their own quirky and gritty charm. In the summer, those beaches were packed with beach-goers and sunbathers like subway cars during rush hour.

When the train emerged from the tunnel and into the sunlight over a section of outer Brooklyn or Queens (I never could remember which it was out here near JFK) we rode above the rows of brick attached homes and trees, lots of them, and passed Aqueduct Raceway. I left the A train at Howard Beach and boarded the AirTrain, taking it the last mile or so to the terminal at JFK.

Boarding the car with me were two New Yorkers dressed in SF Forty-niners shirts on their way to SF to see the Niners play the Giants. One of them was a large pear-shaped man with a pencil thin mustache and wearing a Joe Montana shirt. He announced to everyone in a very loud voice that he was a Niner and Montana fan for all his life no matter what his friends and coworkers thought about it. In an accent that could only be from Brooklyn, he told several of the other passengers that he was a scraper, someone who scraps the paint off bridges in preparation for repainting and that this was only the second air flight he had ever taken.

So while listening to the two of them express their excitement and their plans about what they wanted to see when they get to SF (Fisherman’s Wharf and the Crookedest Street), I pleasantly passed the time until we arrived at the terminal where I boarded the plane and left NYC behind.

The Niners lost that game.

 

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. Quigley on Top:

“Reich, a 42-year-old professor of law at Yale, is concerned with the mutual interpenetration of public and private power which constitutes the American way of life today and determines, within constantly narrowing limits, how resources are used, how we live, and what we hear, eat, wear, believe, or do. This nexus of anonymous and irresponsible power, which Galbraith called “the New Industrial State” is called by Reich “the Corporate State,” both unfortunate terms because the chief feature of this monstrous system, emphasized by both writers, is not public authority but a fusion of public and private power in which the private portion is by far the more significant part. The combination brainwashes all of us, influencing our outlook on the world by mobilizing social pressures and organizational structures to coerce our behavior and responses in directions which are increasingly destructive.”
Carroll Quigley. Review of Greening of America by Charles A. Reich.

B. Xander’s Perceptions:

“Whenever my kids made disparaging remarks about labor unions, I politely informed them that hundreds and hundreds of people DIED for the rights they take for granted today — child labor laws, minimum wage laws, mine safety regs [which are roundly ignored even today, since the fines are a pittance], job safety regs and laws, and on and on.

Millennials ought to study the goddamned history of this country and see just what “rights” they enjoy today came at a horrific price over many many years of suffering. The early 1900s were an especially violent time, when union organizers and strikers were clubbed by thugs hired by corporate owners, whether it was UMW miners, or Teamsters being beaten and killed, or UFWA grape pickers working for slave wages in horrendous living and working conditions, the short-handled hoe and pesticides just being two of the many horrors.

When the brave men who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” they were committing treason for which they could have been hanged.

Could you imagine wealthy white men in America today, pledging THEIR fortunes for the benefit of common people and for doing the right thing?”

C. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

“In America today. you can make more money inventing a new conspiracy theory than you can by curing cancer.”

D. Today’s Paraprosdokian:

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

(Paraprosdokians are found in the darkest places of the mind right next to the root cellar where puns are kept.)

E. Today’s Poem:

From childhood’s hour
I have not been
As others were;
I have not seen
As others saw;
I could not bring
My passions from
A common spring.

From the same source
I have not taken
My sorrow;
I could not awaken
My heart to joy
At the same tone;
And all I loved,
I loved alone.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “ALONE.” (excerpt)

 

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“A little mixing of genes never hurt the species.”
Naida West

In the late 1950s when I was President of the Catholic Interracial Council, all sides rushed to assure that equality did not include sexual relations or marriage between the races. At a conference of the major civil rights organizations at the time sponsored by CIC, I gave the welcoming address in which I said:

“We can never achieve true equality, if one of the central features of what it means to be human, the love between two people, forever remains segregated. Racial harmony would reign in America if everyone had a spouse of a different color and a Jewish mother.”

 

TODAY’S CHART:

As usual, with graphs of this type, it confuses more than it explains. It would be more informative if it also included student performance by country. According to the OCED, the top performing students come from Korea, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand and Austria. Among the poorer performing students are those from USA, Mexico, Greece, and Spain. Those countries not listed above include Canada, China and Poland among the best and among the worst Brazil and Russia.

Based upon the above, neither teacher hours worked nor relative pay appear to be very determinative of student performance.

 

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

Painting by the Blind Artist John Bramblitt.

 

*Note: Regarding the photographs of the crucified Armenian women that begins this post, it is important to mention that a few compassionate Turkish Muslims managed to save some of those women by taking down from their crosses those women that had not dies before their crucifiers had left.

It should also be noted that Hitler acknowledged his debt to the Turkish approach to ridding themselves of their hated Armenian and Greek compatriots for many of the ideas he used to rid himself of the Jews, Gypsies, non-Nazi homosexuals and Slavs living on land slated for German Lebensraum (In the US it was called Manifest Destiny**).

By the way,it seems to me, for some Turks to justify the Genocide as they do by claiming it to have been caused by some Arminians who vigorously opposed governmental policy and sought international assistance would be like Americans justifying lynching all African-Americans because the protests in Ferguson against police brutality caused foreign press to express sympathy with their plight.

** In Manifest Destiny, because the US was somewhat more democratic, we allowed citizens to kill or enslave the non-white, non-protestant inhabitants living in the lands conquered, with the government stepping in only when the native reaction was too strong or effective for the good white citizens to handle.