Sleepwalk

 

Is this driving away music or driving home music?

Boston TV

Reposted from 2009

My mother discouraged us from watching this show, as it might be too scary. Such were the times.



But we watched Boomtown all three hours every Saturday. If you were sick and stayed home from church on Sunday, you learned that Rex Trailer was on three hours then, too - and played hymns on his guitar.

My brother and I tried the rope tricks. That is, I made him stand across the room with one of Mummy's cigarettes in his mouth and I would flip a hunk of rope and knock it out. I can't imagine I never missed, but I don't recall any accidents.

I don't know all of the words to "Hoofbeats" or "Boomtown," I'm afraid, though I could get part of them down.

Ten Rats

In the context of discussing the very poor evidence in favor of the toxoplasma idea - that contact with cats increases human risk of diseases such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder - Tom Chivers of The Studies Shows said categorically "I'm not going to pay any attention to any study involving only ten rats."  This seems sound. The cat ladies are safe after all.

There is a wonderful site on X justsaysinmice, that appends the proper qualifier IN MICE to news reports of study after study.  Great fun. 

"Exercise in pregnancy protects children from obesity, study finds."   IN MICE

"A new study shows that high-fat diets are linked to anxiety and depression" IN MICE

Should Books Be Banned From School Libraries?

 A good answer from Quora.

There was also one people were oohing and ahhing over on FB locally, of a librarian  patiently explaining that books found there way into age-inappropriate sections because the publishers are trying to expand their markets, people. What do you expect? She was irritated.  To that I say "That's why we hire librarians."

Of course there are books on the margin, which could perhaps benefit the occasional eight-grader but is generally inappropriate for middle school and belongs in the high school, or the high school section of the public library. Having those discussions is appropriate. But there are people on both sides of this who are crusaders, who want to make sure there is nothing in the high school that discusses LGBT students in any way, versus those who want to make sure that the poor fourth-grader trans boy has books that make him feel supported and affirmed. (And how dare your forbid it, because this book won an award! Those books always win awards.)

As a practical matter, most problems can be solved by factoring in age-appropriateness. Political/social questions need to be treated as a different animal, because the personalities are often more important than the content.

Guys and Stuff

 I was walking in the neighborhood.  Sullivan is sitting on his porch.

"So, do you like Corvettes?"

"Not particularly."

He motions me over to show me the 2024 that his friend just bought and describes its features to me. He goes on to talk about Shelby, '61 Impalas, GTOs, an '87 Harley, and various muscle cars that old guys here in the park own.

Guys and gear. Guns, boats, camping, knives, fishing...GEAR.

Till We Have Voices

Still thinking much about Till We Have Faces in preparation for the conference on the 11th.

When the main character chooses to veil herself because of her ugliness, and the god who weds her beautiful sister hides his appearance as well, you can expect that all mention of faces should be noted, even when the faces are not theirs. But when faces are hidden, voices take on greater importance.  Orual finds that her voice is attractive.  A suppliant prince even flirts with her in the dim light. The God of the Mountain, the Shadowbrute, is revealed to have a voice of great beauty and majesty. The shouts of crowds or the murmurs of them in the distance express a great deal. 

I noticed it from two poignant, connected passages, and was able to double back and see the subtle reference to voices, or natural sounds that seemed like voices, throughout the book. I hope to notice more on further readings.

I never heard weeping like that before, not from a child, nor a man wounded on the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spear to reach her. (Orual, speaking of Psyche) Pt 1 Ch. XV

But the situation reverses, or seems to, in the end.

The woman held out her hands to Psyche, and I saw that her left arm dripped with blood. Then came her voice, and what a voice it was! So deep, yet so woman-like, so full of passion, it would have moved you even if it spoke happy or careless things.  But now (who could resist it?) it would have broken a heart of iron.

'Oh Psyche,' it wailed. 'Oh, my own child,my only love. Come back. Come back. Back to the old world where we were happy together. Come back to Maia.'

Psyche bit her lip till the blood came and wept bitterly. (Orual, in Pt. 2 Ch IV)

If you notice similarities in this story of Orual to elements of Beauty and the Beast, it is because both are based on the Cupid and Psyche myth.  Orual would be one of the jealous sisters. 

Also, whenever you hear a bird sing in Lewis's fiction, pay attention.  The plot is about to move in a different direction.

Have You Seen Her Face?

This does not fit Till We Have Faces in the least, but has been running through my head the whole time while listening to a podcast about it.  Fortunately, not during the reading itself.

Though actually, it might fit for Psyche. Yes, that Psyche - the one in the Cupid myth. The Lewis book is told from the POV of one of the jealous sisters.

The Origin of Horseback Riding

Tracing The Origins of Horseback Riding by Kambiz Kamrani

Am I just being picky here, or is "rewriting" too strong a term?  The evidence undermines confidence in the Kurgan Hypothesis in the usual method of "Not so fast.  Don't overclaim here." 

Horseback riding can indeed leave subtle marks on the human body. The study, conducted by archaeologists, utilized evidence from medical studies of modern equestrians and examined human remains spanning thousands of years. Their findings suggest that activities like horseback riding can influence skeletal structures, particularly in the hip joint, where the ball and socket may become elongated over time. However, the researchers caution that this type of skeletal change is not exclusive to riding; other activities, such as prolonged sitting or riding in carts, can also produce similar alterations.

But it doesn't provide support for any rival hypothesis that I can see. Well, it could be horseback riding.  It might even be exclusively horseback riding. But it could be other things as well, like sitting or riding in carts. That doesn't seem to be "rewriting" our understanding. I know science progresses by small increments, each important, but this one doesn't move the needle much, to my view.

Monsieur Chouchani

Updated and Edited.  From 2009

There are figures in the world who are so much like characters in fairy tales that one doubts they are real. Monsieur Chouchani, teacher of both the French-Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas and author Elie Wiesel (among dozens of others, less well-known) is such a one. He was the archetype of the wandering wizard, the mad sage: Teiresias straight out of the pages of the Odyssey, Gandalf, or Merlin, or Obi-Wan. An Eastern European Jew born in the late 19th C, he was possessed of a prodigious memory, teaching Talmud, higher mathematics, classical literature, philosophy of language and meaning.

Friends and students knew him only as "Mr. Chouchani" (pronounced "Shoushani"). He would sometimes call himself "Prof. Chouchani," but that was apparently only one of the names he used. He spent his life traveling in East Europe, France, the United States, British Mandatory Palestine, North Africa and South America. A solitary, eternal wanderer, he always wore pauper's clothes and sought food and lodging among friends. He zealously concealed his past, yet wherever he went, he left behind many admirers who were astounded by the scope of his knowledge - in both Jewish and general fields - and his skill at integrating various realms to produce stunning innovations. Yair Sheleg, 2003

His real name and nationality remain uncertain. (But see below.) The reasons for his wandering unknown.

His privacy was obsessive, he had some sort of contamination fear, he was angry and dismissive - a "cruel teacher" Levinas called him, though he voluntary engaged Chouchani as his master. More about this fascinating character here and here. These include recent evidence of his real name and provenance

Getting a Job

 

Myself, I had no gumption. Story of my life and my terrible jobs.

The True Self

(language alert) Over 40 years ago someone told Bill Cosby that "cocaine is wonderful because it intensifies your personality," to which he replied "But what if you're an asshole?"

There is much sentimental nonsense spouted about finding our True Selves® by people who seem convinced - based on no evidence visible to those around them - their own TS is going to be lovely. I have deep suspicions mine, frankly, is not. I am rereading Till We Have Faces in preparation for the conference on October 11-12, and much discussion in the newer commentaries on the book reflect the modern idea of how wrong it is that Orual puts on a false self. Yet near the end (minor spoiler alert) she discovers that it is her true self that is the real problem, and the false selves only attempts to deal with that, dishonest in varying degrees. There is a CS Lewis quote which is popular on the internet. Out of context, it is indeed quite inspiring.

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.”

Yet one wonders if those quoting it have actually read the book. It is from one of her wise, but ultimately false teachers, The Fox, who represents Greek Wisdom. Orual describes it as a glib saying.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words.

Oodle

Update:  My wife discovered that an Oodle is 40g of dry pasta.

How much is an oodle, do you think?  It has to be much less than 33% of the maximum total.  When someone has oodles of something, you don't think of that as being two parts out three, even though that technically works.  Is it 1% of the total, then?  That would make it a superfluous term.  So it is more than, or less than, 1%?

3% = 1 Oodle.  Let's take a look at that. If you have oodles of poodles, that would mean some goodly percentage of the number of poodles a person might be reasonably expected to have. A breeder might have what, fifteen? If someone has thirty-seven poodles we begin to suspect that they aren't really paying the amount of attention to each one that they should, right? Breeders my do a somewhat creditable or competent job, but there must be a maximum number of oodles of poodles a human can manage.

I don't think we have a credible case in the other direction.  I don't think that 0.2 items = 1 Oodle.

What say ye? What is the rule for this measure? It it like a thum, or a rod, or a parsec, or a kilopond?

Incurvatus in se

"Turned in upon oneself," attributed to Augustine, though the concept goes back to Paul in the NT. It is spiritually tied deeply to the ideas on original sin, and fallen humanity. 

CS Lewis mentions in a few places, especially in The Great Divorce, that to be able to focus on any thing outside of ourselves is a step away from complete damnation, and even unworthy objects are far better targets for our affection than our own selves.

Loud Exhaust

Mike over at Chicago Boyz writes about Loud Exhaust and Public Space. I had not known about aftermarket additions which can create backfires on your muscle cars that sound like a 12-guage. He talks about research into personality characteristics which did not find correlations with narcissism as expected, but with sociopathy and psychopathy. 

… that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.

This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest, if those making a nuisance of themselves recognize one another as like beings, bound up in a common fate, and notice also that the space vacated by those sufficiently annoyed or intimidated is now theirs, collectively.

I may get into the quality and meaning of the study later, as there are immediate questions about definition and representativeness, but for now, it's just a topic of conversation about a well-known phenomenon. 

The loud muscle cars are not unknown here, but in NH that's mostly classic cars, and you want to keep those out of the salt and keep the mileage down. We mostly see those at road rallies or other events. With each added decade they handle them more delicately. And those guys don't tend to go that loud anyway, because the drive for authenticity take them out of the aftermarket add-ons.

It's hard to separate my personal preferences from what I think should be law.  That is only a moderately good guide.

Up here its some motorcycles and some pickup trucks, where the aggressive use of noise is clearly part of the charm to the owners.  You know the ones I mean: the guy tailgating you when you are doing 80 in a 65 zone in the far left lane, while you are passing three cars in the next lane doing 70, and as you switch lane he really jumps it, so that if you accidentally hesitated your switch he might clip you, and revs loudly to show his displeasure.  I am pretty tolerant of big pickups in general.  People need them - and I can construe "need" quite broadly, as it "tows something quite large every couple of years, but that's it." I don't inquire as to the guy's need for power and size. But it is clear that sometimes the noise is not the fun, but the aggressiveness and direct challenge are the fun.

Motorcycles are a bit of an irony. The real scofflaw "networks" are largely into the drug trade, and tend to avoid drawing attention to themselves. For real transport they use pickups, and I suspect not loud ones. But one of my simple pleasures is eating outside in nice weather at a restaurant or friends house and having conversation. During bike week, you might have to interrupt your conversation at regular intervals for over a minute at a time all afternoon.  I find that an unfair imposition on my rights. I can put up with a lot, but some guys are looking for the line where others get offended, because that's the fun part.

It's like the guy in the bar who loudly says "I ain't lookin for a fight...but if some guy wants to mess with me..." Dude, you're looking for a fight.

Because of this I reflected on what sensory offenses get tolerated and which don't. The breakdown is pretty clear. Offensive taste - just don't eat it yourself Jack, leave us alone. Offensive texture - don't touch it.  Offensive smell - well it's harder to get away from that. People might put up with the application of chicken manure for one week every year, but they consider even that to be on sufferance. When the paper mills supported the who city of Berlin, NH, a consistently poor town, people put up with it. But Westford MA, and expensive suburb, no longer has the two abattoirs in the town center it did in my father's day. 

Offensive sights are tricky.  We have argued  lot about such things in my lifetime, and the lines have moved.  It used to be that people didn't want some things, like pornography, to be in the community at all, because children might possible see them. In the politics of sex and violence in particular, we get much more upset about what is required versus what is merely available.

Sound spreads far. Loudon Raceway can be heard for miles. Amplified graduation parties likewise. 

Of course, sometimes it is a matter of perspective.

Carry Me, Carrie

 

I think perpetually stoned.

Duck Pins

From 2009. I always thought duckpin bowling was an old New England thing, found more frequently in Massachusetts. We had both candlepin and duckpin in my town, but only one of the latter, in a dingey basement downtown where our mothers wouldn't let us go. Because who knew what might happen to you there, they said, leaving us to use our imaginations what horror that might be. I always figured she meant some creep would rub our shoulders and ask us to look at some pictures in the back, but she may have just meant we'd catch some disease.

Guys liked candlepin because you could get higher scores, occasionally breaking 100 even as a kid; the longer pins would fly into the others and knock down a few extras. I heard of people breaking 100 in duckpin, or more likely, read of those scores on the bulletin boards and plaques at the alleys, but I don't think I ever saw anyone do it. They played about equal amounts of candlepin and duckpin in MA. I suppose it was a town-by-town thing, but duckpin was generally the older, downtown places. In Maine I once played a kind of duckpin that had thick bands around the fattest part, and those fell down a little easier. But even more than candlepin, you had to really whale that sucker down the alley at high speed. Those cute scenes with the tenpin balls, where a little kid rolls a ball slowly down the lane and lucks into a strike, the pins falling into each other one-by-one? That seldom happens in candlepin, and never in duckpin. A frustrating game.

I wondered, for no particular reason, whether duckpin bowling still existed. Isn't wikipedia great? How did we ever answer such questions before? It is still played in MD, and at a few spots in MA, including in Billerica. Which figures, if you know Billerica. Maryland claims to have had the game first, but apparently earlier Massachusetts references have been found back to 1893. And - that type of duckpin with the rubber bands is still played in Quebec. So I wasn't imagining that.



Yep. That was about how interesting it was in real life, too. The pinsetter and ball-return mechanisms were about as interesting as the game itself. If you were with your friends, it was a nice social game. If you went with day camp and got stuck with jerks by random assignment, it could be pretty deadly.

Surplus Safety

The Evolutionary Importance of Risky Play, Kambiz Kamrani 

I like the conclusions.  I want this to be true.  The argument seems plausible. And I like the idea of surplus safety.  But if you push hard on this there's a lot of  "Wait, are those two things the same?" about it.   Still...

In their paper published in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health1, the researchers argue that this type of play fulfills an evolutionary need inherited from our ape and early human ancestors. The study suggests that modern playgrounds may prioritize “surplus safety” at the expense of children’s ability to push their physical and cognitive boundaries, a process that is fundamental to developing resilience and confidence.

The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (full pdf here) by Dallas Willard was published posthumously in 2020. Willard had died in 2013 with it about 90% finished and considered it his most important work. It was completed by three of his many doctoral students at USC, where he taught philosophy for many years. He may have had too many irons in the fire.  He was a busy man, writing many books, monographs and chapters, both in philosophy and Christian living. 

A friend who is active in Renovare assures me that it is hard to get even those acolytes interested in studying the book, despite its reputation as Willard's favorite, even masterwork. Yet I can understand this, as it requires a great deal of knowledge about philosophy and philosophers, from the Greeks to Rawls and McIntyre to even get a foothold. Many of Willard's devotees come solely from the spiritual formation side, with less interest in Ethics than in practical programs for sustained growth. I am much that way myself. 

Willard traces moral thinking from the early 19th C to the early 21st, with continual reference back to the earlier foundations (it is clear he is partial to the ancients in many ways).  About a century ago, he claims, there was a great reversal, so that now there is not only no science of ethics now, but most serious thinkers today would deny that such a science is even possible. He thinks this is terribly wrong and sets out to make a detailed historical and philosophical case that moral knowledge is both possible and necessary.

It is not easy to imagine that all the older writers, from Socrates and Plato, and on through the centuries to G. E. Moore and his fellow twentieth-century “Intuitionists,” were so intellectually limited that they simply got it wrong about the possibility of systematic moral knowledge and something like a “science of ethics.” That would have been a huge intellectual blunder, to say the least. Not that it would have been strictly impossible; indeed, radical “revolutions,” which presupposed that such a massive blunder had actually occurred, were announced for philosophy and for ethical theory 4 in the first part of the twentieth century. But surely anyone who seriously thinks that the older thinkers and writers, through all those centuries, made such a huge mistake owes us some plausible account of exactly what the mistake was and of how they were led into it. None has been forthcoming.

I did not finish it.  Not my jam and I finish few books these days.  I read almost a quarter, then skipped about, trying to catch up at the end and see if I could get the Best Part on the cheap. I doubt that I did.

We Are The World

 I just have to keep reposting this every few years

Let me count the ways. There is apparently a pop music critics debate about whether this song, which was a bigger deal at the time, or "Do They Know It's Christmas?" the earlier English attempt at charity schlock rock which has a stronger melody and has weathered well, was better. Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I know the answer, teacher! Call on me! Call on me! My arm is soooo tired from holding it up waiting for you to call on me! The answer is "Don't call this a question of any importance whatsoever!"

I bring prejudices to this performance. We had long since gotten rid of the TV and I did not listen to popular music stations on the radio. I may have heard it before it showed up in Gethsemane Lutheran Church one Sunday in 1985, with charming 14 y/o girls signing it for the deaf along with a cassette tape as the special music that week. We had no deaf people, of course, nor were we embarking on a deaf ministry, much as that was needed at the time. At least it wasn't liturgical dance. 

Lots of the money raised went to teaching about birth control and food production, and much of that which went for food went to officials who promised to make sure the food got to the right people.  I think some did get through to actual hungry people. You could make good arguments that such education was more needed and would do more good in the long run but...that wasn't what they said they were doing. 10% was kept in America for domestic poor food programs. It had very little effect.

I also noted right up front a certain vacuity, which PJ O'Rourke summarised better than I could in his excellent book Give War A Chance.

We are the world [solipsism], we are the children [average age forty]. We are the ones to make a brighter day [unproven], so let’s start giving [logical inference supplied without argument]. There’s a choice we’re making, so let’s start giving [true as far as it goes]. We’re saving our own lives [absurd]. It’s true we’ll make a better day [see line 2 above], Just you and me [statistically unlikely]. That’s three palpable untruths, two dubious assertions, and nine uses of a first person pronoun, not a single reference to trouble and anybody in it and no facts. The verse contains, literally, neither rhyme nor reason. And these musical riots of philanthropy address themselves to the wrong problems. Death is the result of bad politics.

Thanks PJ.

Yet I know that what irritates me most powerfully is how it still strikes a chord in the rock-music liberals of my own generation.  I have one quite close to me who has made numerous references to it over the years, both what an important moment it was in the history of America waking up to its responsibilities in the world and noticing that we were not the only people on the planet, but also, what a pivotal, transitional time it was for rock music in general, of the older, established musicians handing the baton to a younger generation, who were going to carry the dream of the 60s forward and make it a better world.  They way those younger singers asserted themselves, even in the presence of these august elders...

No really.  He talks like this, as recently as last year. He's 67. And he is not the only one, if you check in on people who write about the history of rock music. They choke up about this. Bob Dylan wasn't going to even come, until he heard that Ray Charles was coming.  Ray Charles! He saw that the real Civil Rights crowd, not just the young ones, were getting involved! (seeing that this was the third multi-star charity concert Dylan had come to, I find this hard to credit.) It was the first time that so many big name celebrities had devoted themselves to a cause (Uhh, WWII?  USO?)

Okay, I thought America noticing what was wrong in the world and thinking we had important responsibilities about that was what had the CIA involved in overthrows and got us into Vietnam, which were considered bad things by this group. Every schoolchild in the 50s and 60s heard their parents say "Eat your dinner.  There are children starving in India/China/Africa." I think we did actually know.  Maybe it was mostly rich pop stars who had forgotten and needed documentaries on TV to remind them.

As for passing the baton, well there were some Jackson brothers younger than Michael...and Sheila E was 27...but I think people mostly mean the thoroughly-irritating Cindy Lauper, who was nearly 32 at the time, because she had that weird hair and seemed like a kid, and it was such a surprise when she asserted herself when it was her turn, as if she had talent. Like right in front of Paul Simon and Dionne Warwick and everything. Maybe Huey Lewis & the News, who were born around 1950 but had only recently become stars? That younger generation? Have we noticed that any particular baton was passed to them? Or Lauper? Or the Jacksons, excepting Michael? If so, they seem to have dropped it and left the track. 

But it was a twofer. You could pretend you were helping African hunger and show you were still keeping up with what's hip. It's both a candy and a breath mint, Darlene! 1985 is not looking so accidental...

It was not in any way the first virtue-signalling.  That has likely been around since about two days after the world's oldest profession got started. Nor was this novel with American liberals. Once they figured out that the 60s protests in Selma and the like were going to be filmed and on the news, and there was going to be police protection that didn't want a riot, you suddenly couldn't keep those earnest white people away. I suppose there was something to Live Aid being famous black people who got to virtue-signal right along with famous white ones - that hadn't happened much before, and it was a mark of cultural unity and progress. Conservatives had their own virtue-signalling of course, because it's very equal-opportunity, but this was going to be an MTV, modern-media event, which meant repeated airplay. Turkish Delight, really.

There was a Mother Earth News article in the 1970s that was a shortened version of Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television. One of its points was that politics was going to become increasingly performative, like the Munich Olympics, and less based on real events. Terrorists as well as politicians were going to play for the camera. Whoa, did that ever turn out to be true, and this video is front-and-center. The commodification of caring.

Let me suggest that the unrecognised but probably dominant reasons that made this necessary were that Vietnam was too long ago to get people excited, and Reagan was just starting his second term, despite everyone knowing that he was going to bring in fascism - any day now! But they didn't care. So the good people of the world had to show that they not only cared, but they Cared, and they CARED. We are the world, not you bastards. 

The Simpsons get the last, best word.

Politicized Scientists:

Credibility Cost of Political Expression on Twitter. Alabrese and colleagues, for the Center For Economic Studies in Munich.

Unsurprisingly, it's not great. 

 Eleonora Alabrese and colleagues examine scientists’ political expression on Twitter and public perceptions of their credibility. Analysing 98,000 scientists between 2016 and 2022, they find that most are politically neutral, but a sizeable minority have very liberal views. Those with both very liberal and very conservative views are perceived as less credible by the public.

Aporia Magazine includes a good graph. It also put me on to the next two articles.