Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

• If I want to believe something, then it must be the truth.  Or so everyone says.

• On several occasions, I have been inspired to contact the author of a given physics or math paper and offer my thoughts or ask a follow-up question.  I won’t namedrop, as these people are not celebrities in the usual sense, but experts in their field.  (Besides, they would probably deny having heard of me, or from me.)  My point is that each time, without exception, the scientist promptly, cordially and personally answered my layman’s inquiry, which I appreciate.  It is both unfounded and outmoded to view people-of-science as having no personality or patience for social interactions and concerns.  Quite the contrary.

• By the way, one of the little treasures in my file drawer is personal correspondence from the late Martin Gardner, author of the Scientific American column Mathematical Games.  Sadly, Mr. Gardner is no longer in a position to deny having heard of me.

• If I hear Donald Trump complain one more time about people “not being nice” to him, I’m not going to vote for him.  Otherwise — I’m still not going to vote for him.  He’s sick.

• Now circulating on Facebook, a photo of a mossy gravestone bearing an epitaph to a cat named Dewey: “He was only a cat but he was human enough to be a great comfort in hours of loneliness and pain.”  No matter what one thinks of cats (or how one tries to avoid it), this is a touching expression.  But it got me thinking (always a bad sign): why should I not make gravesites for the things that were important in my life?  For example, should I bury my copy of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee?  Should I find a field to plant my vinyl single of Strawberry Fields Forever?  Why should I just recycle the items I once loved, when the human thing to do would be to put them in the ground and put a stone on top that tells the world how much they meant to me?  Not narcissistic, no, not at all.

• I specifically want to point this out: specifically may be an adverb, but there is no such adjective as specifical.  The Lords of Linguistics have bent the rules.  But don’t thank me.  That’s what this blog is for — to investigate items like this, or Benghazi.

• Why is self-deprecation such a surefire way to get people to like you?  Because it tells others that you are not a threat to their superiority.

• Oftentimes on this blog, I use words that The Grammarist thinks I should not use, such as oftentimes.  Even more often, I will leave a train of thought decoupled or disconnected.  While it may appear that I have invited the reader to draw her own conclusions, the reality is that I have run out of steam, leaving the reader to mop things up.  I could cite examples, but I would rather you discover them on your own.

• I find that time passes much more slowly when the television is off.  For people-of-age, this is an important finding.

• When I am dead, it is not going to matter to me how many times you visit my grave or what flowers you place upon it, which is the reason that I will not have one.  People visit graves for their own purposes.  If you choose to do so, make it a good one… for you.

• Whenever I eat baby carrots, I feel like I should apologize to the mother.  “Your son is tasteless — but crunchy,” I would say to her, offering a slim ray of hope.

• The City of Pittsburgh is planning to redevelop the site where its Civic Arena once stood, the venue where I saw The Doors (once) and Chicago (twice) from up in the crow’s-nest section.  The plan calls for restoring part of the Lower Hill street grid.  If and when they do, I hope they bring back Epiphany Street.  Who wouldn’t want to live on Epiphany Street?  It would be…  what’s the word I’m looking for?

• Television shows (like Dr. Phil, CBS News, The Today Show and Ellen, among others) have to stop anointing themselves as family-reunion facilitators.  I thought this genre had exhausted itself fifty years ago, but some producers still seem to think it is all right to manipulate people and record their raw emotions for others’ entertainment.  If reuniting lost relatives is such a noble endeavor, it is worth forgoing the proceeds of broadcasting their tears.

• The harder the winds of change blow, the deeper the diehards dig their storm shelters.

• The Pittsburgh Pirates are leading major league baseball in batters hit by the pitcher — the team is averaging one hit batsman every 14-plus innings.  Some maintain that this is part of the game — if so, then the game they must have in mind is hockey.  For the sake of avoiding injuries and dugout-clearing brawls, I concur with those (going back at least as far as Carl Furillo of the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers) who have called for awarding two bases, not one, to the batter who is hit by a pitch.

• The only thing I can say about being dead is that I wouldn’t know what I was missing.  Other than that, how can I, or anyone, speak with authority about that state of un-ness?  For instance, will I need to be fitted for my halo (I mean, horns) or is it one-size-fits-all?  How will I keep from accidentally stepping on thin spots in the heavenly clouds and falling back to earth?  Does God speak English or will I have to learn Esperanto?  If we are stuck with silly answers, we may as well ask silly questions.

• MLB baseball teams that lead after five innings go on to win the game 80% of the time [2015 data].  NFL football teams that lead at the half go on to win 77% of the time [2007]. NBA basketball teams with a six-point lead at the half win 80% of the time [1993-2009].  The protagonists and major antagonists of Shakespeare’s tragedies die at the end of Act V 85% of the time (Julius Caesar dies at the start of Act III and Marc Antony during Act IV).  It may not be over till it’s over, but most of the time, it is.

• Politics knows only the logic of politics.  As with the addition of positive whole numbers, the domain of political operations is closed: the outcome of any  political calculation is another political result.  The real political revolution that we need is for people to solve problems, not jockey for power.  But just as adding whole numbers can never yield a fraction, this is not a result politics alone will ever produce.

• As I make art, my forces and intentions are in tension: surprise but do not indulge; inspire but do not impose; intrigue but do not ingratiate.  Some artists (Mapplethorpe, Duchamp, Picasso, Warhol) were determined to reject those tensions, to break the cables.  So we remember them, for having broken them — just as we remember bridges that fell, and not the ones yet standing.  It is my nature to be among the ones yet standing.

• I am going to stop using the perfect and past perfect tenses for a while.  I have had it with all those haves and hads.

• In films about The Holocaust, Jews have at times been depicted as complacent, or even complicit, with the horrors being inflicted upon them.  If you ever find yourself asking the outsider’s question, why didn’t Jews fight back, I would invite you to watch the Academy Award winning film Son of Saul.  Certain scenes in that film had a greater impact on me than any other drama or documentary on this subject.  Asking why Jews didn’t fight back is plainly the wrong question, as well as the wrong conclusion, when one sees that the real fight was to preserve humanity, not humans.  That fight, Jews won, conclusively.

I encourage you to read this interview with the producers of Son of Saul, conducted last year by Terry Gross of Fresh Air, after you see the film.

“History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.  The will to power, the will to use human beings in social experiments, is to be distrusted at all times.  No greater cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured, that they are doing good.”
Christopher Hitchens, from Arguably.

• Country music star Merle Haggard passed away on April 6.  Pop music star Prince died on April 21.  Between those days, 2,275,000 other people died.  It’s been a sad April.

• True confessions: my social memory is like a dry sponge.  If I remember a personal detail about you, it’s only because you told me three or four times and somehow put up with my inability to soak it up the first and second times.  I seem to be able to store one important item about a person per encounter.  I hang onto your years-old emails to remind myself of the names of your children and what your interests and concerns are.  If only I were so loosely tethered to my own concerns.

• Humanity is about being humane.  What is the corresponding term for other members of the animal kingdom?  Do dogs have wagacity?  Do pigs have baconity?

• Last night, I dreamed I was a staff member at the United Nations, and they told me to draw a map of the messy parts of the world.  My first impulse was to get out my crayons and color the whole thing mud brown, but then I figured that some gradation of tone was in order.  So I started to think about things that make life messy.  Like poor sanitation.  Disease.  Wars.  Abusive relations.  Feeling like you don’t belong.  Were there some places in the world free of all that?  I just went ahead and colored the whole map mud brown.  How nice, for me, that this was just a dream.

• Earlier this week, former Navy SEAL Kristin Beck lost her primary bid for a Maryland congressional seat.  She ran as a Democrat, but her positions sounded very Republican.  She probably lost the vegetarian vote when she said this: “The IRS is above all law. They have their own laws, their own courts and they meat out punishment for both economic and political reasons.”  And how do I know this?  Because her website is one of the handful of results one gets when searching for the term meat out punishment.

• I have this thing about reciprocity: if other people invite me to care about them, maybe they might also care about me.  This has landed me in (horrors!) social-media purgatory.  Recently, one of my Facebook friends shared a post by Sen. Elizabeth Warren discussing her husband’s birthday and his skating lessons.  Now, I favor Ms. Warren’s progressive stances, but she is not a cult figure to me as she is to others, and her relationship with her spouse is not my concern, just as ours is of no interest to her.  She is a political figure, not a personal friend.  I decided to add a comment to that effect on her Facebook post.  One of her fans promptly responded: “If you don’t like it, stop reading.”  Okay.

• I don’t really understand the appeal of Trader Joe’s.  Especially its wine, supposedly one of the best deals in the store.  Based on a online review, I decided to try the “Velvet Moon” Cabernet Sauvignon.  I was, to put it tactfully, vastly unimpressed.  It is priced about the same as Jacob’s Creek (usually on sale for $5.99 in our supermarket) but it is thinner and more juice-like, which makes it a great communion wine for pass-the-chalice Unitarians.

• Speaking of religion, or lack thereof: I find it interesting that it takes a foxhole to convert an atheist, but it only takes a mixed-religion betrothal or that new church down the street to convert the faithful.  Even then, it’s more like flipping a pancake.

• If I have insulted anyone, then those I did not insult just wasted their time reading this conditional clause.  The non-insulted should have stopped at the comma.