Eurovision 1964 and 2024

 Guess which is which

The Return of Flamingos

I posted many flamingo photos years ago.  I had plastic flamingos in my office, in my yard. I suppose they went out of fashion, and it was no longer ironic to flaunt them.

They seem to be making a comeback. 

GK Chesterton And Paradox

The ability to invert a concept and see the wisdom in the reversal is very rabbinic: "Perhaps the opposite is also true." It is much of what attracts me to Chesterton. A friend and poet in his own time had apparently had enough, however, and penned this:

O Gilbert, I know there are many who like
Your talks on the darkness of light,
The shortness of length
And the weakness of strength
And the one on the lowness of height. Edward Anthony

Partly Off The Hook

Reposted from 15 years ago. Tracy and I will be going down for our 50th college reunion next month.

There are a full dozen beautiful places to propose in Williamsburg: Crim Dell, a little back nook behind the St. George Tucker House, the Wren Porch...

I missed all of those and picked a really dumb place to propose. Tracy had once said that she had told me where she had wanted to be asked for her hand. All these years, I thought she meant the little nook. On the way to Williamsburg, she told me it was the bridge over the canal at the Governor's Palace. Now, I would have remembered that, because I don't like the Governor's Palace, and would have tried to find something better that I liked. That is, I would have done a different stupid thing than what I actually did. She admitted she might not actually have said what she wanted, but this was what she wanted. While there, she set me up to propose in the proper place, and Kyle took the picture.

Well, that's a little better. I still have to own terrible taste in romanticism for where I proposed (Camm Dormitory. When Jonathan saw it when he was 16, he shook his head sadly at his father. Pretty sad when a 16-year-old can instantly see your style is lacking), but at least I'm off the hook for not listening, and the Governor's Palace in specific.

And we have this.

Mime - Teatro Hugo & Ines

Hugo's good



and here's Ines

Lent

The pinch of cravings reminds me to pray. In the EO tradition, Lent is a time of doing battle with the devil.  

Grim has a short post up on something similar about Lenten observance.

60s Retro Band

 Carroll County sang this in 1972.  We were on the cutting edge of 60s retro.  Got in on the ground floor. 

 

Also "Walk Away Renee"

It's a Marriage Crisis, Not a Fertility Crisis

 Rob Henderson at City Journal writes another summary article about a shift in thinking about what is driving fertility down, Want Higher Birthrates? Promote Marriage.  I've been seeing a run on this idea lately, with what look like good numbers to back it up.

 The real drivers of falling fertility rates in wealthy countries, it turns out, aren’t professional women but younger, poorer women, who are delaying childbirth and ultimately having fewer children. In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college. Even among those not going to college, birthrates are down. In 1994, the average first-time mother without a college degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their twenties still haven’t had a first child.

Yes, I just mentioned urbanism and housing verticality as causes, but I think those are related. It has long been easier for a single person to live in an urban area than a rural or suburban one. 

Imagine A Mystical Limpet

From Miracles, by CS Lewis

Why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet's words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.

2010 Links That Are Surprisingly Timely

 Make Bureaucrats Justify Their Spending 

Government Budget Discussions. If the people in charge of agencies do not make cuts with a scalpel, someone else will come in and do it with an axe.

The Receiving End of Abuse

 Change Is Difficult means "Things aren't better because some people won't get in line."

Now You Know

Why there was no "French Invasion"


or "Finnish Invasion"


in Rock 'n Roll.

Food for Thought

By replacing your morning coffee with green tea, you can lose...

 

 

up to 89% of what little joy you still have in your life.

Love Is A Fallacy

 For some reason, this story has stuck with me since 8th grade. It shows the limits of logic.

Max Shulman: Love is a Fallacy

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these.
My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a
scalpel. And—think of it!—I only eighteen.

It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Bellows,
my roommate at the university. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice
enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable.
Impressionable...

Grok 3 and Wokeness

Via Scott Alexander at ACX

If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, it will say Elon; if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, it will say Trump (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.

I admit I feel better that Grok doesn't do this because it is nefariously trained to, but as a byproduct of something else.

Or do I? Dangerous statements that have an understandable origin are easier to detect and ferret out, aren't they?

Steven Pinker Resigns from APA

Steven Pinker resigns from the American Psychological Association after 43 years for "virulent Jew hate."

Housing and Fertility

 A study on housing and fertility. I should mention that this is in Brazil.

We find that obtaining housing increases the average probability of having a child by 3.8% and the number of children by 3.2%. For 20-25-year-olds, the corresponding effects are 32% and 33%, with no increase in fertility for people above age 40. The lifetime fertility increase for a 20-year old is twice as large from obtaining housing immediately relative to obtaining it at age 30. The increase in fertility is stronger for households in areas with lower quality housing, greater rental expenses relative to income, and those with lower household income and lower female income share. These results suggest that alleviating housing credit and physical space constraints can significantly increase fertility. 

Housing for family formation has frequently been put forward as a key item, and verticality is supposed to depress birthrates in cities worldwide.  Cities themselves depress birthrates anyway, and have for centuries.

Gondolas in Sugarland

Sugarland TX, in response to rapid growth, is trying ski-lift gondolas for public transport. Roads, tunnels, and elevated trains are expensive.  These are cheaper.

Not sure how you do that in Boston in winter, but hey, skiers are used to it and may adapt quickly.

ABBA Reposting

I've been putting up music that I posted fifteen years ago, but nothing from ABBA, which was a staple then. Notice a Swedish group, singing on German television, is choosing to not only sing in translation, but compsing entirely in English in 1975.

 

The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld

We Confess Our Small Faults Only To Convince People We Have No Greater Ones

Rob Henderson extracts some of his favorite maxims from the collection.

And you thought I was cynical about human motivations?

Adoption Series

 The 2010 memories of the adoption from Romania in 2001.