Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

The phrase was a new one on me, though I picked pretty quickly what Alexander was talking about when I started reading.  I doubt I'll be using the word hyperstitious much, though I like the feel of that "slur cascade" phrase. Scott Alexander over at Astral Codex Ten discusses how words become slurs, and whether there is any sense in fighting such trends. Apparently Whoopi Goldberg just got suspended for using the word "gypped," because people who know precisely no Roma people and have never inquired whether any are offended (or even recognise that is where the English word comes from), have complained about the egregiousness of the offense.

In discussing words becoming slurs, he notes early on

Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.

This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.

But what about when a word is not a slur, but a few people are trying to get everyone to start treating it like one? We see a fair bit of that these days.  Use of pronouns is an area where I am wondering how much energy I am willing to spend on a pointless rearguard action. If history is any indicator here, I will spend too much energy on pointless actions and not be especially repentant about it. Though sometimes I have seen the point and switched immediately. 

Yet we also accept that some phrases that used to be used commonly are in fact offensive, and others have become offensive by sheer weight of popular demand, and would never use them now.  Alexander discusses where along that line do you get off one train, how long do you just stand around on the platform waiting to see where the population is going, and when do you get on the train headed back in the opposite direction?

If you are an early adopter of taking offense, everyone starts to roll their eyes (or clench their buttocks) whenever you come in the room, but if you are one of the last holdouts, you really are intentionally offending people in order to make your point that no one should ever have been offended five (or twenty-five? or a hundred?) years ago and you are going to insist on purity of language. 

He gives an estimate that is not based on measurable data, but is probably still better than most people's estimate and decides that's where you will be happiest.  As always, it is fun to watch his reasoning and wonder if you agree.  I imagine he is right if we want to live at piece with all mankind, but it does seem to be giving in too easily sometimes.

What Worked on Covid

I have not read the comments. I already know what they will say. Tom Frieden writing at the Wall Street Journal is pretty forthright in his estimation of what reduced the number of deaths during the pandemic. Death is indeed the first number to look at. It continues to be reasonable to weigh this against lost jobs and financial hardship. Those were real and continue to have effects. Though as I never tire of pointing out, much of that was not government doing, but individual voluntary responses. I am less impressed by the claims of lost academic progress. Schools don't much matter to begin with, and individual student losses over the years, such as to extended illnesses, usually rebound within two years. I get it that some people have real mask hardship because of speech or hearing problems, and more occasionally impaired breathing, but mostly, it was an inexpensive minor solution that people just didn't like. 

Long covid likely exists, but all of us have tendencies to stuff our explanations for bad things into whatever basket is at hand. Measuring the number of years of life lost to it is going to be uncertain for a long time to come. It is also going to be difficult to separate from the increased traction that the Scientologists and other anti-vaxxers got through this, convincing people not to get vaccines, and thus decreasing health and lifespans that way.  Do we blame that on the illness, the government, the public, or those advocates? But the vaccination numbers are down, and we will pay the price.

Maple Syrup Again

This is bskings brother, making the local news for his sugar house. Video of cute child eating pancakes closes segment. 

We were there last weekend, and know the others in this video as well. Sap is still flowing, and this is a record year for every producer in the area.

Chinese Pie

My wife had chinese pie made with brisket and creamed corn at the restaurant tonight. I will sometimes throw in 50% peas to go with the corn, and sometimes broil the top of it considerably at the end, maybe with a little cheese.

There are a few theories where it comes from, including China, Maine, as it clearly comes from either Northern New England or Quebec, but the one that makes most sense to me is the Canadian railroad one. The owners of the railroad were English, and they wanted their shepherd's pie, made with lamb (yes, Grim's post today inspired this) and the carrots and peas common in England in addition to the potatoes. They hired Chinese cooks to feed the workers on the line because they were cheap. The Chinese cooks didn't much care about tradition, and they figured out pretty quickly that there wasn't much lamb to be had, so they substituted beef. Peas and carrots had some availability, but nothing like the corn that sprung up right away, in quantity, across the plains. 

The workers on the line building ever westward in Canada were Quebecois, and when they came home they brought the idea of "Chinese" pie, thinking that it must be some oriental version of the shepherd's pie that rich English people ate. There was lots of coming and going between Quebec and the northern parts of 802, 603, and 207, and once the mills came in in the southern cities of Manchester, Nashua, and even all the way down below the Mason-Dixon line into Massachusetts in Lowell and Lawrence, they brought the dish with them even more frequently.

Taylor the Nahamsha Hiker

She is just starting out.  The name caught my eye, but I don't know a thing about her.  I doubt I'll watch much, but I wanted to give her a shout out. She is from Gilmanton, locally famous as the eventual home of Grace Metalious, nee deRepentigny, author of Peyton Place. She was uh, known to our family and I wrote about her in 2006. But perhaps there's no scandal anymore. Grace died when I was ten, after all, and no one reads Peyton Place anymore. Maybe Taylor will be the name the small town is known for now.

This is her second through-hike, and she had a third interrupted. 

She is originally from Hopkinton, MA, where the Boston Marathon starts.

Lists of Lies

You can guess the topic that was featured on this one, but I'd like to stay away from that and talk about the journalism cheat of making such lists to begin with. It's a headline driving the story.

I like lists.  In fact, I love lists, and am uncertain whether to classify it as an OCD or Aspie symptom in myself. They organise things into nice piles. They give you the illusion of more control than you actually have over a situation. They create an artificial sense of accomplishment.  My roommate in college used to live by his daily list, and within a few weeks he had settled into a form that read 1. Get up. 2. Brush teeth. 3. Take shower. 4. Get dressed. 5. Have breakfast. 6. Read list.  He was already doing the first five without forgetting already, but found it very satisfying to cross off so many things right away every day.

I carried a yellow legal pad with my to-do list on it the second half of my career. I wrote "Don't Take It Personally" across the top of every page, not because it is the most important advice in the world, but because it is the principle I was most likely to forget in about thirty minutes every day. It was useful, not just an emotional crutch. There were things I could leave off the list if I had thirteen patients or less because I would just remember them, but abbreviations I had to put in if it were more. I've made lists ranking baseball players in history, lists of songs I might sing on stage.  I have nothing against lists.

But it was making my own lists here on the blog that exposed what's wrong with them as a device for publication.  If you are doing a Top Ten, one of two things will happen. You will either have only 7-8 real ones (which is why you mentally estimated there might be ten), and you are stretching to fill the list.  Or, you find that you have too many and have to create a three-way tie for one of the slots in order to fit all twelve in. If you make a list of ten best songs of the 60s, then 70s, then 80s you will very quickly see how artificial all the boundaries are, and that your framing is a mere advertising convenience. 

Top Ten Roman Emperors

Top Ten Sights in New York

Top Ten Bikes in India* 

Ten Best Life Insurance Companies*.

So if it's got the word "list" in the headline, we're already in trouble.  

But I read the list of lies anyway. A few of them were real qualifiers. Yep, those were lies of some sort.  Things that if people didn't know they should have, or have known not to appear so certain when they couldn't be. Maybe three of the ten fit that. Then another four were acceptable if you squinted a bit.  Sure, some people said that but we are making the word "they" do a lot of work here; or some other word besides lie would probably be more accurate, but I take the point. Then lastly, there were three that were almost entirely unfair. In fact, I thought, it's a lie to call that a lie, because you know (or should know) that hardly anyone said it. And that next one is actually based on a true statement, you are just rewording it in exaggerated form. They aren't just padding the total to make a catchier headline, though that is bad enough. They are lying to themselves, and thus to us, about the subject in general. Their list of lies ends up being about 60% true.

Is that worse?

*Those last two are going to be spam-attractors, I'd bet. I got them from auto-complete.

Slush

It ended up being 16" of slush, the most I've ever seen of that. The hardware stores have now sold out of shearing pins for the snowblowers.  I got the 2nd-to-last set. And you mostly just give up because the machine won't clear it more than a few inches to the side anyway, and you spend all your time clearing the chute. (And you'd better.  You don't want that freezing solid in there.)

When you downsize your house after retirement, most people think of less space and less to clean and repair.  But less driveway and less lawn is what I am all about at this point. This would have been a nightmare at the house we left three years ago. I imagine it was a nightmare for the single mom who bought the place. She has a sixth-grade son, but I've had five of those, and they ain't as much help as you'd hope. By the time they are driving themselves they suddenly acquire improved ability to clear snow.

To be fair, that does tend to match their improved musculature at that age.

Wilt The Stilt

In the Bill Russell biography, I recall that Bill's eulogy for Wilt included something like "He wanted to be the greatest basketball player of all time, and I wanted to be the greatest champion.  We both got what we wanted." I can't find the exact quote now, but the sentiment is pretty understandable in any wording. 

Still the GOAT, and I say that as a Celtics fan.  He said angrily to Michael Jordan in the 90s "They changed the rules to make it harder for me.  They changed the rules to make it easier for you.  Who's the greatest?"

I still have him on my Mars team, no matter who has come along since. 

Nicknames like "The Stilt" come across as pretty lame these days, but so do ones such as "Death to Flying Things" and "The Galloping Ghost" from other sports and eras. Someday CP3 and Matty Ice will seem similarly ridiculous.

Exemption

In NH, the bishop has granted an exemption in Lent for Catholics who want to eat corned beef with their cabbage and potatoes this Friday, St Patrick's Day. This seems sensible and I imagine it is widespread throughout the country.

Yet if it isn't in your diocese, is it considered acceptable to bishop-shop and find something nearby where you can have what you think is reasonable, or is that considered worse than mere sinning for venal reasons?  I would tend to the latter myself, considering sins of the will more serious than those of the flesh, but it's not a specialty of mine.

Corned beef background, in case I haven't covered it before: It was not originally an Irish tradition. In Ireland, corned beef was an export because it was so precious.  It brought in the few pennies a packer might have, wistfully watching it go out the door to either Manchester or London. So when they came to America and made a little money, the pain of that corned beef going to "rich" people elsewhere stuck in the mind, and they bought corned beef when they could as a luxury. Eventually, it became so strongly associated with Irish Americans and St Patrick's Day that the custom made its way back to Shannon and Dublin and is now a tradition even there. tourist dollars and all that.

Traditions that made it to America from Europe are often like that.  I can't testify to the ones from Africa or India, but the idea that "this is what they used to do in the Old Country" is usually a lot more complicated.

The Boy Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn

 

The song goes back to at least the 30s, and was sung by the standard folksingers of the 50s, the Pete Seegers, the Burl Ives. It's fun to listen in the earlier version that the young woman "gave him the mitten" in rejection. I remember seeing it occasionally in PG Wodehouse, of one young man telling another that the engagement is apparently off.  That would usually be "handed you the mitten."

The origin is unknown but goes back at least 200 years to Britain, with suggestions that it came from a French custom of a young man giving a woman a pair of gloves as an engagement present, symbolising  two hands holding each other. Were she to break off the engagement, however, she would return one of the gloves to announce it. As there was a similar custom in Scandinavian countries of returning a single glove to break off an engagement, it might support that idea.  Plus I just like it.

Tyminski's version is quite dark, and the young man's exit threatening, even chilling.  I don't know that other versions also have that.

Nor'Easter Coming

12-18 inches coming. I find that the weight of the snow matters more to me than the height of it. I don't know if we should learn to think of snow more in that way, but it matters.  If the snowthrower won't even clear it a foot away from the machine, you might have to shovel wet cement.  But if it's light and it does throw, a foot of snow ain't much.

Update: this was as bad as I have seen.  Shoveling slush here.

Years ago I noticed that every year people talk about what a strange winter it's been.  It became a standing joke with a psych nurse who came over the same mountain I did to get to work, once I mentioned it to her.  She told her husband, and her children grew up with it, and it has even come back to me a few times from other avenues. "Yeah, but we always say it's a strange winter." If it ever catches on and becomes my legacy to NH I will consider that an honor.

Which reminds me.  Someone else passed on another meme making fun of the Live Free or Die motto. There are people in NH who are deeply embarrassed by the saying, but most of us make fun of the people making fun of us at this point. We are just saying the quiet part out loud. Lots of states have the same sentiment - Alabama, Massachusetts, and Virginia off the top of my head - but a bit more implied. Maybe the NH motto, like my heading, should be "Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud."

Who We Were Then

There was an argument years ago at First Things* about a youth sports team that had run up the score on a smaller school (also, perhaps significantly, a special school that was an alternative placement for boys with emotional difficulties) and whether that was acceptable. My son Ben was on a junior-high basketball team that regularly lost by scores of 86-12, and once even 104-4, so I have some experience with the concept. But I did not enter the discussion until there was a shift to the idea that such things might inspire the boys who lost to work harder, and specifically to men reminiscing how losses in sports at considerably older ages and in different circumstances had been deeply formative for them, so there was nothing wrong with running up the score. There's a lot to discuss about the issue in general, and you can have a go at that at any of these five posts from early 2011. There actually are reasons it would be okay - just not the ones put forward.

Running up the score

Respecting the game

Teaching Virtue

 Penultimate

 Limping Home

This may have been the height of my taking too long to get to the point and making sure I nailed down every corner.  If you want to comment on any of those five I recommend you do it here, or no one will see it.

But the point from that discussion that I want to bring forward here is how often men asserted confidently that what they thought at seventeen - or believe they thought then - was applicable to themselves at twelve. I came back the next year prepared after working out all summer...I talk about how unlikely those memories are to be quite as accurate as we think. Nor is it only men.  When the students at my son's very small Christian school were moving on to a larger one, one mother of a fifth grade girl asserted how happy she had been to go to a larger highschool and change classes frequently back in her day.  It made her feel older and more competent.  Well, sixth grade is not tenth grade, nor are all children identical. It can be a big deal, as it figures in to sexual age-of-consent law and abortion-choice legislation. And tattoos, and alcohol...Yes it is good for children to move out from under their parents' supervision. But what is our basis for thinking that twenty-eight is better than eighteen is better than eight?  Numbers, please.

In the nostalgia tour I have several times encountered people remembering what they think they were like, erring always in the direction of applying what they thought or did at nineteen to their sixteen-year old selves. Retrospectives lie somewhat.  I recall in my own past reading a letter or a song or a school paper I had written just two years earlier and being shocked at how young it sounded. 

This is a general human tendency, not some unfortunate lack of clarity that affects us only in our worst moments. We perceive the continuity with our earlier selves because we are living in this head, and can also go back and visit it at will. If we were described as self-confident by outsiders when we were a senior, and can see evidence of that because of having belonged to the Outing Club and taking risks the last two years, we will apply that retroactively, that we entered school self-confident.  After all, we thought about joining the Outing Club before we actually did it...it was just that we couldn't the semester before because of a heavy lab schedule...

We believe we had mastered parts of our job well before we actually had.  "Whenever I had occasion to counsel someone about making a sideways move in a company..." Except that it never occurred until two-thirds of the way through your career.  We err on the side of giving ourselves credit for more wisdom and maturity.  Perhaps we would do better to give ourselves credit for how hard-won these lessons were.

I think it first requires suspicion about our need to fluff ourselves up in order to counteract the halo tendency, then specific grounding facts such as photographs, records (and frankly even unsupported assertions that sound more likely to be true than what we have been claiming), and finally, willingness to interact with others who might modify or even contradict our recollections. I admit, not everyone likes this as much as I do. My friend Sam correcting a couple of impressions, even though I had long since worked them into entertaining stories was one of the reunion highlights. People remember things you said that they have thought wise and clung to as advice over the years - and you now think it's not true. Gee, did I actually say that stupid thing?

Best to assume you have bent your narrative in the direction of something more complimentary to yourself, and made it a bit worse each time to recalled something and reconsolidated it. Reconsolidation is powerful.  When we bring something to mind, it really is fluid and up for grabs, which is how both false memory and recovery from memory work.

Does it matter? Well no.  Not unless you have an interest in understanding who you are and where you came from.  Not everyone does.

*I think there was one at Volokh Conspiracy as well.

Contrarianism

I was listening this morning to Ethan Strauss defend himself against the charge of being merely a contrarian. "I believe a lot of things that other people believe.  I believe the sky is blue.  I think that people love their children.  I just don't see why anyone would spend money to hear me talk about that."  GK Chesterton was accused of being a contrarian, and to a certain extent this was fair, as he was ever alert for things that were commonly believed but the reverse of the truth. Yet even more, he was alert for ideas that were once widely believed but were now abandoned. He wondered whether the reasoning for the abandonment was any good, and often noted that it is usually easier to trace how an idea came to be discarded - usually recent - as opposed to tracking down how it ever came to be believed - often very remote and obscure.

CS Lewis followed this tendency of GKC's and I took to it immediately when I read him so thoroughly in the 70s and 80s. Lewis had also picked up the similar idea of "chronological snobbery" from Owen Barfield. We are still very much in a culture that believes a new idea is clearly more moral and an old one not only obsolete but regressive.

It was not always so. Three of the four founding British cultures in the American colonies include in their literature explicit rejection of "novel" interpretations of Scripture. Only the Quakers accepted such a possibility, and even they certainly did not extend this openness to all new ideas.

Metal Detectors

According to Dr. Leszek Gardela, senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, it is illegal to use a metal detector in Poland unless you are an approved researcher. This would seriously hamper archaeology, as it is amateurs looking for things who make a lot of the finds in West Europe (especially England and Scandinavia) and America. 

To an American especially, it just seems like a silly infringement on individual rights. What do they think is going to go wrong if citizens are wandering the beaches looking for lost jewelry?

Smart People/Stupid Beliefs

That Gurwinder substack site The Prism that Eric put me onto for my previous post has some good articles.  It is another one that might make its way to my sidebar, though I am not hasty about such things. (Treebeard's voice is supposedly CS Lewis;s in Tolkien's mind, BTW.) His article Why Smart People Hold Stupid Beliefs is excellent. He links to research showing that the best-informed people on any side of an intellectual debate are more likely to be ideological and biased, not less. We speak to others as if answering their logical flaws is the key to changing their minds. Apparently it is secondary - or worse.

An absurd ideological belief is a form of tribal signalling.It signifies that one considers ideology more important than truth, reason, sanity. To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty.  To enemies, it is a threat display.

This is similar to the idea of foxhole friends that I have written about a half dozen times over the years.  Politicians and cause leaders look for these sorts of people in order to enlist them.  Anyone can support you when you are right, but you want followers who will stick with you even when you are talking nonsense. 

Gurwinder's addition, which I had not considered but makes sense, is that last line about the threat display to enemies. It is that as well. It is equivalent to those useless but decorative peacock tails that signal to the peahens "I've got energy to burn, baby!  Sign up on this while you can." If you signal that you are willing to fight for this side even though you are capable of knowing it's irrational, you are saying that you and your pals are going to be a tough out, like Bigwig burying himself to his neck in the floor of the tunnel in the defense of Watership Down.

We all hope it is not us. One of the great rabbis, I believe it was Rashi, used to pray every morning "Let me not use my powers of persuasion in the defense of a lie."

From the essay 

...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.

Exactly

Entertainers

I will not link, but it will be easy enough to check it out if you are interested.  I have mentioned previously that while entertainers shape culture, it may be even more true that audiences shape entertainers. I made especial reference to the comedian Taylor Tomlinson, who I binge-watched about a year ago but grew increasingly disquieted by. Because of the binge she still shows up in my YouTube sidebar a lot.  Or perhaps she is very popular now and is showing up in everyone's sidebar.

Her shtick is "nice girl becoming increasingly whorish," and I wondered if this need to degrade good people is more commonly applied to women, or is neutral. She has become quite skilled, with good timing and some spontaneity, but especially good at facial expressions and postures. As she became increasingly raunchy in her routines, I wondered where it would go next. There's only so far one can go in the direction of jokes about what you do in bed. Yet it was only a year ago that I described her as "nice girl who says outrageous things," which is milder, indicating she has gone downhill fast.

There was a clip on the sidebar that looked like it might be less sexual, so I gave it a click, hoping that she is going for a wider range of humor as her career expands. Where she has gone is simple meanness. In a manner similar to late-night hosts, she is better and better at giving the impression that she is saying something humorous because such is her skill that she can deliver it that way, but is really just saying mean things. No joke involved. 

Hayley Morris makes me wince sometimes with how bluntly scatological she can be, but her routines of imagined conversations among the parts of her body continue to have actual humor in them. I worry it won't last, but for now it's still funny. 

Update:  First commenter Eric has a great link, The Perils of Audience Capture. We (or at least I) immediately think I would never do anything that ridiculous. And yes, I wouldn't do that. But i have been Assistant Village Idiot for over fifteen years now, and I wonder how much all of you have shaped David Wyman into some more composite character between a realspace and online persona. I see Glenn Reynolds as quite different from the person he was fifteen years ago, and last I checked in on his wife, it is even more true for her.

Well, if I have influenced you at your sites, that can only be for the good, of course. You're welcome.

Oy

John McWhorter points out that both of them use "oi" for "er" in the middle of words, illustrating that our stereotypes about accents - that they were blue-collar or well-do-do; that they were New York area or Midwestern; that they were black or white - are often not accurate. Armstrong says "woith" for "worth," and Durante says "toins" for "turns."

But you can ignore that and just enjoy watching them if you prefer.

Following Sports

I got a few minutes into a podcast and the interviewee was talking about how he didn't follow sports, didn't like sports, didn't see the point of sports, and had gone viral in because of complaining about the attention that Americans put on sports.

Well, I'm complaining about the attention that Americans give to people who say such stupid things, that they haven't thought through and are merely socially signalling.  Don't get me wrong here. If you don't like sports, don't follow them. Some people don't like sports. I pay little attention to TV and movies even though they are clearly culturally important. Furthermore, I do recognise that they are legitimate art forms that express some types of ideas particularly well and can provoke thought. I even made a movie reference over at Grim's from the narrow band of years back when I was dating. It's good stuff. Just not my stuff. I have too many other things and have to make the cut somewhere.

When one studies anthropology and they try to define culture there will usually be a list of things that every culture has, a list that is sometimes two dozen elements long: everyone has mating customs, everyone has religion, everyone has artistic expression, everyone has housing customs, everyone has economic exchange...so if you are objecting to people having those things at all, you're just an idiot. They don't have your religion or your sports or your economic preferences.

Cultures have sports. They vary. Animal violence, like cockfighting and bear-baiting used to be big and things like it are still popular in places. (In case you didn't notice, that is Martin doing the juggling.)

Animal racing, or motorized racing, is big in other places. Even in "primitive" cultures that don't have an NBA or a Premier League people lift things, or throw things, or aim at things, or run up mountains and down. If Bilbo's birthday party is any indication, you could have had a "Dancin' with the Tooks" TV show, or "Bree's Got Talent." In America in 1950 it was boxing, and horse racing, and baseball, but even then there were people - indeed whole regions and classes of people who didn't care about those things. We use sports to practice for war, like the biathlon (a sport that is impossible to watch but still impresses the hell out of me); people show off their verbal facility with crossword puzzle tournaments or charades; or abstract reasoning in contract bridge or chess. Now it is video games with the intense need for reflexes and fine-motor coordination.  Even the noncompetitive sports beloved by those who find competition unfair to...someone...have a hidden element of competition in them.

It's fine not to like sports, but if you have to keep telling me that you "don't care about sportsball"or turn up your nose at other people's pleasures you are not saying you don't like competition, you are saying that you prefer the social competition of knowing what's in intellectual fashion and being able to insult others cleverly. Showing how much you hated the mean girls you had to put up with in high school by being able to put them down now, from a safe distance (Janice Ian made her career out of it, and Tina Fey rode that wave quite a ways) is just telling everyone that you finally won that competition, and are drinking the blood of those girls from their skulls now. Or writing novels or TV scripts about how stoopid those football players were. 

It's similar to Post 6000 which I recently quoted.

An extreme of this was discovered from Norwegian news by the marvelous David Thompson, of competitive disability and disadvantage.

It's popular anthropology, popular sociology, popular psychology. You just need to see what's in front of you and not virtue-signal about it.  Plain signalling, to let potential mates in a dating app, or at a bar, or at work or the church social or in class - that's all fine.  that's just saving everyone a lot of time that you like fishing or listening closely to the cellos or trying new South American foods. But the people who are signalling that they are really proud of being from near Philadelphia, and know the recent history of the NFL draft, and think the interplay of violent collisions with graceful fingerwork catching footballs is exhilarating, they can have that, without your snarking about it.

GF IPA

I have mentioned before that most GF foods are not that good.  I have learned that many of the supposed GF beers, like Omission, are gluten-reduced, not GF. That matters to some people but not others.  Glutenberg is actually GF, and the IPA is fine. At this point I am quite happy with something that is what it says on the label, and you can just drink it and go on with your evening without noticing it any further. Not something that you taste and immediately think "Oh, not an actual IPA.  This is a consolation prize IPA. pretending to be the real thing.  I wonder what the hell it's made from?"

YMMV

Fathers

I had three fathers in my childhood, none of them very good. Making an effort to see the best in them that I can from this distant perspective, I did gain something from each, though none of them reached even 50% of the complete package. I don't think I ever wondered much what it would have been like to have a good father, but I did notice, almost with surprise, when anyone referenced having a good father, whether in conversation, or in a song or book. Huh. Looks kinda nice.

"Field of Dreams" is not even really about having a good father, but of finally getting something from a bad one, but I couldn't leave the theater the first time I saw it, sitting there weeping. Of course, I have always been able to go from completely callous to sentimentalist in a flash, so maybe that doesn't count.

My father-in-law ended up being the best of my fathers, even though they didn't like me much at first and it was nearly twenty years after I first dated my wife for them to really warm to me. But he was a very decent man, who tried to be kind to everyone, and that would especially include anyone brought into the family. I was the only one missing from the family bulletin board, which I thought was pointed at first but eventually decided was just an unfortunate oversight. At the end they liked me very much.

In talking with my old highschool and college friends during my nostalgia tour, a few have wanted to talk about fathers, and I noticed only recently that I may have been steering the others to talk about theirs. Only this year have I started to wonder "What would it have been like to have that father?" A couple of them would have been nightmarish, but most would have been fine, and a few I think would have been excellent, enough to wonder how my life might have been better with them. I never thought that at the time I knew them, playing in their yards or dating their daughters. I was off on a mission to found my own family. For a long time I didn't much like most men a generation older than me anyway. I did worse with those professors and bosses.  All their fault, of course. Grandfatherly types I did great with.

When I was middle-aged I would tell young men hurting about their own bad fathers or lack of fathers that you can get some of it back by being a father. Not all of it - all losses are real, even if better things come of them. But being a father can be an opportunity for repair. I stopped saying that years ago, I don't know why. Maybe just being busy with five sons put me in Garrison Keillor's Civilization mode.