Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

🕞  Question: Before 13th-century engineers invented clocks with hands, how did people describe rotation?  There being no clockwise (and likewise no counterclockwise), what did our ancestors say when they wanted to twirl one way or the other?  Sundial-wise?

🇺🇸   Republicans, led by rich ideologues like the Kochs and the Ziklag Group, have been hard at work for decades to put in place voter identity laws (to suppress black votes), partisan redistricting (to disenfranchise Democrats), parental vetoes on public education (to maintain white christian dominance) and bathroom/sports legislation (to put their personal stamp of disgust on gays and transgenders).  Democrats, tragically and near laughably, continue to ignore the long game, still preoccupied with digging for nuggets in the social justice mine.  I’ll know the game is over, and indeed lost, the day I start to get called Whitex.

📉 Victoria Freile, a reporter for Gannett Media, set out to quantify how Trump’s recent speech to Congress impacted his approval rating and that of Congress.  Freile wrote that “Trump’s approval rating nudged down slightly from 47.8% … to 47.6%” while Congress “showed an increased approval from 27.8% to 28.6% and disapproval rating edging from 54.4% to 54.1%” [emphasis added].  Ms. Freile must be getting paid by the word, because I would have simply said “Unchanged.”

🦄 Hey, fellow old people!  Just asking on behalf of a friend: If I get a root canal, will the Tooth Fairy still leave a quarter under my pillow?  Or was that only in effect during the Biden Administration?

🎈 When one is on top of the world, one finds pleasure in art, flavors, intimacy, travels and beautiful skies.  When one is not, all those may be forsaken for a warm blanket and a comforting hand.  Rediscovering Maslow.

🥕 Every time I make a salad, and I have to cut off and discard some marginally-imperfect part of a vegetable, I can’t help thinking that someone on the other side of the world would have eaten this scrap.  Not that such attitudes have ever put such scraps in the mouths of those who — in our haughty First World paradigm — would supposedly appreciate them.

💻 Quiz:  Something is new and different with this familiar Windows screen — what is it?  (Hint: it’s not the direction that the dots twirl.)

What’s different is that Windows Update used to say, “Don’t turn off your computer” instead of “Please keep your computer on.”  Apparently, some middle-manager at Microsoft decided that don’t was too harsh, so he had his team change it to please.  Because Microsoft wants so badly to be your friend!

🤖 The next time Martians visit Earth, one of two things will happen: (a) the Martians will express their confusion about why we say Sword Swallowers with different sw sounds; or (b) they will rightfully ask, how did Earthlings ever come up with that idea?  In either case, I’m uneasy where things will go from there.

💡 Speaking of our planetary friends, Jupiter is so massive that it pulls back on the Sun.  As a result, both bodies orbit a point in space — their mutual barycenter — that is hundreds of thousands of miles outside the surface of the Sun.  May this fine point of physics provide you some comfort the next time you curse the fact that everything revolves around Trump. I am being serious here, in that there must be a barycenter outside of Trump’s sphere that both he and we orbit.  Donald Trump is not that huge — we have pull too.

🎭  I’m considering writing a play.  The major characters would be Ali Khamenei of Iran, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Donald J. Trump of the USA.  In Act I, an unusual confluence of circumstances causes each of these autocrat’s airplanes to crash on the same deserted island in an unspecified ocean, with all parties surviving.  Act II allows the principals to joust with one another for dominance, each being granted a long soliloquy in which some parties are elevated and others are ridiculed.  Act III reveals the wants and needs of each of the castaway tyrants and how his fellow island-mates fail to satisfy them.  The play ends tragically and ironically in that the weakest man survives, being that he is the most desperate among them.

🔥 On a lighter note…

•  Last week, I went to our local library and checked out the six-disc set of The Civil War  by Ken Burns.  The librarian told me the set was due back in seven days, and I thought, “Seven days?  For a war that lasted four years and a film that was made 30 years ago?”

The librarian reassured me that I could renew it online, which led me to ask my spouse after the first two discs, “Do you want me to renew The Civil War?”   That is when it hit me that Donald Trump no doubt wondered exactly the same thing.

•  I want to share something I never told my children:  TV sets once had knobs (!) that let viewers adjust vertical hold and horizontal hold to try to improve picture quality.  Before you start getting nostalgic about exotic TV controls, I should point out that the knobs were always located in the back, where only The-Man-of-the-House was authorized to reach.  My theory is that vertical/horizontal hold knobs didn’t do that much for picture quality but were a big selling point for the self-important men who bought the family’s television sets.

•  The most mysteriously-gotten human trait is resiliency.  Many who have experienced bad times (and who of any age hasn’t?) claim that their resilience is the product of those bad times, the “what-doesn’t-kill you” take on life.  Nietzsche, 1888: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.”

I’m surprised that Nietzsche made such a logically weak claim — and in German, no less.  Life’s challenges can’t selectively build resilience in some but not others without a second, random factor coming into play.  So I call bullshit on those who glamorize struggle and self-reliance while denying vulnerability and hurt, all so that some self-honorees may feel proud of themselves.

Resilience is not a pass/fail test or some life badge of honor.  It’s not something we should automatically expect of each other.  And it’s not something we should celebrate, as if those who have less resilience are somehow lesser people.  It’s a coping mechanism, period.

•  Shifting gears, here’s some data on the response time of cops.  In movies, the response time of the authorities is usually minus 10 seconds — that is, we are already hearing sirens when the bad guy raises his weapon and delivers his rant-against-humanity soliloquy.  Whereas the average response time of real-life cops to active shooter situations is 14-15 minutes.  The obvious TrumpWorld answer is to get shooters to deliver more soliloquies.

•  In social settings involving atheists and believers, it typically (and ironically) falls on the atheist to make nice when the believer gets the urge to profess the tenets of his/her faith.  For harmony’s sake, I make a point not to challenge believers when they make assertions that I don’t buy into — whatever lifts your spirits, is my attitude.  However, when a believer tells me they are going to pray for me — while fully aware I don’t believe in it — what is this atheist supposed to say?  (A) Thank you!  (B) If you insist!  or (C) Don’t waste your time, I’m well down the road to Perdition!  I waver between (B) and (C).

Seriously, I don’t understand how I seem to care more about the sensibilities of believers than they care about mine, but that’s the perverse thing about American evangelists.

•  I’ve pretty much given up on pointing out hypocrisies.  Thanks to Donald Trump, being labeled a hypocrite is hardly more consequential than failing to cover your mouth when you yawn.  Acting in a way that contradicts what you say is now viewed as a survival skill, not a sin.  In recognition, I hereby declare 2025 to be the Free Pass for Hypocrites Year.

In the Free Pass for Hypocrites Year, all Amish people will be allowed to wire their homes for telephone and electricity, so that they no longer have to search for phone booths or ask neighbors if they can store food in their freezers.

In the Free Pass for Hypocrites Year, Republicans will be allowed to embrace Blacks while making it harder for them to vote, and Democrats will be allowed to embrace Hispanics while insisting that they should call themselves Latinx.

In the Free Pass for Hypocrites Year, Trump supporters who claimed they voted for lower prices and a better economy will be allowed to admit that what they really voted for was the brown-people-won’t-get-my-stuff stuff.  And in that spirit, Vivek Ramaswamy will also get a free pass.

•  We received several Christmas cards from old acquaintances expressing their sympathy about the effects of tropical storm Helene in our hometown of Asheville.  Helene brought its destructive winds and rains to Asheville on September 26, 2024, a full three months before Christmas.  We lost power and communications for 16 days.  We lost water service of any kind for 19 days and potable water service for 52 days.  But for the most part, our household has been “operational” since the week before Thanksgiving.

I’m trying to reconcile how some of our acquaintances could have serious concerns about our well-being, and even the existence of our address, but wait until it was time to send out their Christmas cards to reach out.  Just saying.

•  It feels like for the past ten years I’ve been wishing that the new year will be better than the one that just passed, simply because it has to.  Just for the record, I think my score on this account is 0-10.  So even though the captain has turned on the Happy New Year sign, we advise that you keep your seat belt fastened in case of unexpected turbulence.

•  I am surely not the first casual tennis fan to note that the score 30-30 (two points apiece) is situationally equivalent to the score 40-40 (three points apiece) — in both cases, a player who scores consecutive points wins the game.  But whereas the score 40-40 is called deuce, 30-30 has no special name despite its status.  I suggest they call 30-30 Prince Harry.

•  A haunting memory of mine involves my navigating the dark and eerily-quiet hallways of Kodak’s film manufacturing building, which were illuminated by the palest of pale-green baseboard fixtures.  The zigs and zags of the hallways were such that, practically speaking, one had to memorize turns and count doorways to find your lab.  The rooms had numbers but they were visible only if you held your dim flashlight up to the door.

The reason I mention this is that my present-day dreams too often involve my wandering those creepy hallways, or some other barren and crumbling version of Kodak Park, trying to find my way back to wherever I parked my car so I get can get home.

I’m 71 and I left Kodak 20 years ago.  Why the hell can’t I just dream about picking grapes and playing softball?

•  In that light:  A topic worthy of study might be, what kind of life should one lead — and what experiences should one try to avoid — in order to have pleasant dreams in later life, or is that an impossible ask?  A similar study might establish whether having unpleasant dreams is associated with less healthy lives, more stress and/or shorter lifespans.  If you’re the kind of person who wants answers to such questions, you might check out The Dream Library Foundation of Portland, Oregon (no shit), not that I buy what they’re selling.

•  Fellow word mavens, please describe the formation rule for this list:  abracadabra, babble, coccic, diddled, effervescence, feoff, gagging, hashish, indivisibility, juju, knickknack, loblolly, mammogram, nonwinning, octoroon, poppy, quinquennia, referrer, stresslessness, tattiest, unununium, vulvovaginitis, williwaw, xerox, yay, zzz.  Answer below.

•  Ready for an old-man-shakes-fist-at-clouds item?  This one’s about the rock band called the Butthole Surfers, and I regret even typing that.  This Texas band was founded by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary in the 1980s and was still active as of 2020. 

Per Wikipedia, Haynes “would often strip throughout a show until he was down to his underwear, or less, by the end.  At other times he would hide condoms full of stage blood in his clothes and repeatedly fall to the floor, appearing to bleed profusely.”

“In 1981, Haynes and Trinity classmate Leary published the magazine Strange V.D., which featured photos of abnormal medical ailments, coupled with fictitious, humorous explanations for the diseases.”  Humorous or humerus, not sure which applies here.

The Guardian recently weighed in on the Butthole Surfers: “Given they were more akin to a travelling freak show than a band, with live shows that often devolved into riots, their greatest achievement may be surviving – not just as a band, but actually staying alive.”

What a world.  With a nod to Rodney Dangerfield, I just don’t get “no respect.”

•  Taxes.  Some people hate, I mean HATE, the idea of paying taxes, even though taxes fund our defense, schools, roads, air traffic control, etc.  If you ask tax-hating Americans why they object to paying taxes, they rarely mention defense or schools or waste — instead, their anger is directed toward free-riders, the people (invariably of different color and/or culture) they believe are getting something for nothing at their expense.

I might forgive those of meager means to question whether others are getting more from their taxes, except that the loudest complaints always come from America’s millionaire and billionaire class, amplified a thousand times by the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business News.

In today’s United States, being anti-tax is not a high principle but a fetish inherited from puritanical privilege and indulged in mostly by the people who can most afford to pay.

•  The formation rule for the word list presented earlier:  the shortest word that starts with the letter x and has the most instances of the letter x, where x is the letter of interest.

•  Consider the photo below, which I took a while back in a Cincinnati, Ohio, bar and grill:

Opinion: What Elvis song is being sung over the urinal?

(a)  All Shook Up
(b)  Burning Love
(c)  Kentucky Rain

•  It’s depressing to me that the likes of Elon Musk, J. D. Vance and other wing-nuts with a burn-the-place-down and blame-others attitude are going to outlive me.  I tell myself that my children will somehow manage these bizarre and scary times, and that the bizarre and scary people fomenting the chaos will sooner or later be treated as the crackpots they are.  I fear however that Pandora’s Box is open and there’s no going back.  Your time will tell.