Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

• Yes, you youngsters are right, this decade is all about pandering to Boomer nostalgia.  Example: the Wikipedia entry for “Celebrity Jeopardy” (Saturday Night Live skit of the 1990s, featuring Norm McDonald as Turd Ferguson) is paragraphs longer than the entry for the eminent physicist Roger Penrose.  Oh well.  Let us old farts enjoy the ride.

• I continue to learn things about being 60.  The latest thing is that it’s not such a good idea anymore to make non-refundable, pay-in-advance hotel reservations.

• In ancient times, the ellipsis had six dots.  But the Roman Emperor Augustus vainly stole one of them from February to add to his own month, leaving five.  Several centuries later, the Black Ink Shortage of 1455 forced printer Johannes Gutenberg to shrink the ellipsis to four dots.  Finally, in the early 1900’s, overwhelmed immigration officers at Ellis Island shortened the ellipsis to three dots, where it remains to this day. . .

• Consider nice vs love.  We are romantically conditioned to prefer the idea of love.  But being nice involves action that benefits another, whereas feeling love does not necessarily affect anything outside one’s own cranium.

• Success and failure are superposed quantum states.

• We have a pet betta fish.  It is orange-yellow and its name is Carotene.   We feed it two bits of food in the morning and one bit at dinner time.  The way this fish attacks its food, you would think it had the DNA of a brook trout.  That’s the end of this story.  It is sort of like a Garrison Keillor story in that it just ends, wistfully, crafted so as to make you sit back and think, ahh, isn’t life quietly wonderful.

• One of the more disturbing ideas I’ve had lately is that my “Thoughts at Large” posts are the blog equivalent of the 1970’s  McCartney song, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.”  If so, I’m so sorry.

• As the American public grows ever more weary and cynical of “advocates” (those who stake out positions for which only one side of an argument is ever presented), it learns to distrust and tune out, and it eventually loses the capacity to evaluate evidence, if such a loss has not already taken place.  It seems our democracy’s much-vaunted war of ideas is to be won not by fact but by enhanced insistence techniques.

• Talk Soup: a good thing to forget about the 90’s.  You don’t remember Talk Soup?  Good.  One less thing you have to think about on your Day of Atonement.

• I live only a few miles from I-240, The Billy Graham Freeway, and I drive it every week.  Whenever I see its roadside dedication sign, I find it hard to forget these words exchanged in April 1973 by President Nixon and Rev. Graham, on the topic of television coverage of Nixon’s speech announcing the resignations of his top aides and cabinet members:

Nixon: “What did CBS do?  Did they knock it?”
Graham: “I felt like slashing their throats, but anyway God be with you.”

I-240 in Asheville should be rededicated as The Robert Frost Freeway.  A road that reminds us of promises to keep and the miles to go before we sleep.

• The next time you watch a lecture on television, observe closely when the speaker takes a sip from his or her water bottle.  Invariably, the person will start screwing the cap back onto the bottle before he or she has even finished swallowing.  Are people afraid that the contents will evaporate or be spilled?  Or are they worried about things falling out of the sky (or maybe their hair) and into their drink?  You don’t see such compulsive behavior when a glass of water is involved.  This is such an automatic and universal response, you have to wonder where it comes from.

• Every time a U.S. city or county government goes bankrupt (most recently, Detroit), one hears the usual Tea Party refrain, “If government were run like a business, this wouldn’t happen.”  Of course.  When businesses are run like businesses, what happens is Enron (bankrupt in 2001), Worldcom (2002), NHL Buffalo Sabres (2003), Trump Hotels (2004), Delta Airlines (2005), Silicon Graphics (2006), American Home Mortgage (2007), Lehman Brothers (2008), Chrysler (2009), Blockbuster (2010), American Airlines (2011), and Eastman Kodak (2012).  There have been 30 municipal bankruptcies since 2001, out of roughly 39,000 municipalities in the United States — a rate of 1 bankruptcy per year for every 17,000 cities, counties and townships.  For comparison, 40,075 businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2012 alone, out of some 5.7 million business entities, a rate of 1 bankruptcy for every 143 businesses.  The Tea Party places the blame for this on labor unions and government interference, never on poor management decisions or reckless activity.

• For a nostalgic reminder of what the web once was, look no further than this website by a music lightshow outfit.  The site has every animation and effect that was possible (tasteful or not) in the HTML 1.0 days.  Quaintly enough, the site also belongs to a web ring, a group of like-themed sites who agreed to link to each other, a faint promise of eye-traffic in those pre-Google years.

• One of the early-web sites that I hope does not disappear is this collection of analyses of all the Beatles songs by musicologist Alan W. Pollack.  Mr. Pollack wrote his essays over a 12-year period from 1989 to 2000.  I like them because (a) I am a Beatles enthusiast and (b) Mr. Pollack is very analytical and (c) I am also analytical but have no background in music theory.  So I find Mr. Pollack’s deconstructions both entertaining and educational.  There may have been rock composers as deserving as the Beatles of such exhaustive analysis, but please go ahead and name one.

• The image at right was taken by Scott Stewart, staff photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, to illustrate its March 18, 2013 story on how the federal budget sequester is affecting housing for low-income families in Illinois.  One of Mr. Stewart’s specialties is fire photography, as seen in this video collage.

On May 30 of this year, the Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff in order to “evolve with our digitally savvy customers” as the Sun-Times put it.  The shot at left, by Sun-Times reporter Sam Charles, accompanied its July 20 article on the recent deadly shootings in the Chicago area.  Are you savvy enough to notice a difference in photo quality?  I thought so.

• I’m thinking of joining the Masonite Church.  Its creed: we warp when we weep.

• Someday, in some alternate universe, I will be a restaurant reviewer for a city newspaper and I will be expected to use the word “redolent” as a fancy-pants way of saying “a lot.”

• High co-payments and high deductibles discourage people from seeking medical care, there can be no doubt about this.  People who have to pay their own way in the U.S. health system are induced to make trade-offs that the wealthy and well-insured do not concern themselves with.  Is my vision bad enough to justify the price of these procedures?  Can I live with my heart palpitations or should I keep ignoring them?  When a person knows that seeking care will have a major financial impact on his life, he or she is more likely to delay care until it is so obviously needed that it is too late to preserve or restore health.  But isn’t this what we want?  Our citizens deciding the market value of their own lives?

U.S. health care “reform” does not address this and, it can be argued, exacerbates this with its focus on the health marketplace rather than health outcomes.

So much is made by the conservative elite of the “moral hazard” of seeking unnecessary health care if it is “free” (which means the conservative elite think they are paying for it) but so little is made of the moral hazard of having frugal people deny themselves care only to be subject to more expensive procedures, lower quality of life, and shorter lifespans in the long term.  The answer is, and should have been, Medicare for All.

• Unwritten rule of the road: when two cars are approaching an unsigned intersection, the car with the right-of-way is the one going the fastest.

• I always tried to avoid telling my children I was “proud of them” for one or another of their accomplishments.  As I was growing up it seemed to me that my parents’ pride in what I did had mostly to do with my actions having conformed to their expectations.  So instead, I tell my son and daughter that I am happy for them, which I am.

• My college buddy Eric and I decided to create and exchange CDs of our favorite tunes, some 39 years after we graduated.  The one song that by chance appeared on both of our mixes was not by the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, Grand Funk Railroad (please!) or Led Zeppelin.  It was this one by The Beach Boys.  I must say, we had some good music.

• Speaking of old music, What’s for Lunch (click on link to play) is the last song I wrote and recorded on my four-track tape recorder in my college dorm room in 1974, with my friend Rob playing cymbal and the final guitar solo.  It was the best guitar work I ever did, which isn’t saying much.  The drum set consisted of my mattress, a padded chair with aluminum foil taped to the seat, and the aforementioned cymbal.  I produced the bass part by playing the low strings of my guitar with my tape recorder running at 2x the normal speed, so that the guitar part would be an octave lower upon playback.  As John and Yoko said, play loud.