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Puppy-pocalypse

L

oyal readers of Third Age Thoughts will well remember, but new recruits (and disloyal old readers) might not know, or care, why I stopped putting out new blog posts in 2020. There were probably many reasons, but the proximate cause of my stopping was Louis. We had recently gotten him as a 12 week old adorable puppy, and what with walkies, poopies, feedies, and cleanuppies, I suddenly found myself deep in the red, creative-writing-time-and-energy-wise.

Baby Lu-lu

I’m not complaining. It was a good time, if exhausting. Louis, who is incredibly cute, was even cuter as a baby, as this picture shows. (The picture also shows that I was much balder back in 2020 than I allow myself to believe I am now. Fortunately, memories, especially memories of how much hair I don’t have, are mercifully short. I’m starting to forget already. But I digress.)

When Louis was a baby and had to pee every few hours, I would stay up late with him to take him for his midnight stroll. I would put on the TV something with a little slow movement and soft voices, to keep me from falling asleep too deeply while simultaneously not jarring me or Louis awake with sudden noises. This was December, and the Curling finals were on each night late, and they suited just fine. While I started airing them almost as a backg­round screen­saver, I soon found myself sucked in to that fascinating, if weird, sport. I thought it was like shuffleboard, but really the eye and skill demanded make it seem more like pool, like those trick pool shots that are always popping up unrequested on Facebook. Sorry, on “Meta”.

I picked up the lingo: Curling is one of the few professional sports in which the command “Whoa!” is part of the official patois. I learned that each inning is called an “end” no matter where it occurs in the game, and that the speed at which you slide a stone is called not its speed, but its “weight”. The curving trajectory that a player imparts by spinning the stone isn’t called “English” like in pool, it’s called “curl” (hence the name, Curling). I don’t know why they don’t call it English; maybe it’s because the term originated in English Canada and it’s the same reason they don’t call them French fries in France. (Third-agers will remember decades ago when Congress tried to change the name of French fries to “Freedom fries”, because they were miffed that France didn’t like that we invaded Iraq. Don’t you wish Congress was as states­man­like now as it was then?)

Kerri Einarson

I even picked a favorite team: Team Canada women’s curling team, hailing out of Manitoba and captained (or “skipped”) by Kerri Einarson. She identifies as Métis, which is an officially recognized Canadian indigenous group, interesting (to me) because of its mixed European (mainly French, I think) and native American ancestry, formed in the mid-18th century during the height of the North American fur trade.

*   *   *

ANYWAY, why am I waxing nostalgic for 2020 and puppy Louis? Because we have decided, against the advice of virtually everyone we’ve told, and our own better judgement, to get another new puppy. Or maybe I should just say we’re getting a new puppy, because Louis, cute and playful though he still is, isn’t really new, or a puppy, any more.

Our journey to second-puppyhood has been plagued with so many setbacks that it’s hard not to believe that the universe is sending us a message: Don’t do it! In December, Louis bolted while walking with Kathleen (there were extenuating circumstances; it wasn’t pure Louis evil), and Kathleen took a very bad fall and broke her pelvis. We were working with other ailments that were active at the time, maybe related to her auto­immune diseases, and the new injury and old diseases each made the other much harder to manage, and to live with. We’ve had a very hard time, one of the worst six months of our lives together (and we’ve been through some hard patches in our over forty years of matrimonial bliss).

We had picked out a puppy, a cute baby sister for Louis, and were only four days from bringing her home when Kathleen had her accident, and it forced us to scuttle the whole deal. She had a significant period of immobility and constant pain, and a much longer time of convalescence, ahead of her, and we just couldn’t have a puppy underfoot. It was hard enough with Louis, who spent a lot of time during the next few months in Doggie Day Care.

Kathleen

Six months later, Kathleen is still not fully healed, but she’s up and walking short distances. Our first choice puppy had long since gone to a different forever home, so we restarted our search despite the wailing of well-meaning friends and neighbors (these people said we were crazy to get another dog before Kathleen’s injury—you can imagine what they’re saying now).

Tom Hanks

The Day Care that Louis patronizes somehow found itself with a brown miniature poodle as a permanent guest. I think the circumstances were similar to those in that movie where Tom Hanks couldn’t get out of the airport and had to set up house there. We thought about this situation for about a week, then called: “We’d like to come up and take this doggie off your hands! We’ll be up in fifteen minutes!”. Less than five minutes later, they called back. “I’m sorry, while you and I were on the phone earlier, my coworker was finalizing a deal with another family to take the dog. He’s gone.”

That’s twice now that Fate had prevented us from adding a dog to our family at the last minute, but we kept trying. We saw another little schnauzie-looking thing at a small dog rescue site, but once again, by the time we were able to make it down there, he had been snatched up.

Sean Connery

Now that’s three times, and you know what they say: “Once is happen­stance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” (And by “they”, I mean Ian Fleming in the James Bond masterpiece Goldfinger.)

But we would not be deterred from our quest, despite all reason, and a clear message from the universe! The heart wants what the heart wants, and in this house, what the heart wants is PUPPIES!

So we reached out to where we got Louis, a farm where they not only breed dogs, but also train them (some of them) to be service dogs. We picked out a little Cavapoo who they promise will never grow beyond half of Louis’s current size, and we arranged that she would stay there to get obedience and self-discipline training for about three months before we pick her up. We named her “Phoebe”.

Phoebe

We’ll be getting her after she has mastered the fields of heeling and sitting, with a minor in not knocking Kathleen over and breaking her pelvis. Meantime, we’re having long awkward talks with Louis so he won’t be surprised or jealous to have a new baby in the house, and understands the importance of being a Good Big Brother. I’m sure that’ll go just fine, but I’ll keep you posted.

Toodles,
Dorn
5/29/2024

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Flamy Malibu

— in which Dorn subjects the reader to family photos.

K




athleen has been watching
shows about Swedish Death Cleaning, or as they say in Sweden, Din mamma är norsk grisuppfödare. For those of you for whom this blog post is your first foray into the internet in several years, Swedish Death Cleaning is the new house­keeping meme, taking over from Marie Kondo’s The Unbearable Magic of Tidying Up, or whatever it’s called. It’s a uniquely Third-Age-and-up concept that starts with the premise that by your age you have filled your house to the brim with useless stuff.

When you pass away (that’s the “death” in Death Cleaning), your kids have to get rid of it all. They have no use for it, and are not bound to it as you were by habit or sentimental attachments. So if you really loved your kids (the premise continues), you would do them a favor and relieve them of this unpleasant bit of posthumous housekeeping. Throw it out now, and everyone wins!

We’re not zealots, but we have been cleaning out stuff that we’ve kept for so long it’s hard to imagine life without it, especially as it will never break or wear out, because we never actually use it. A case in point is the large collection of photographs we’ve accumulated over the years, documenting weddings, births, graduations. And vacations, oh so many vacation photos.

Our most recent pictures are online, stored somewhere in the cloud. It wasn’t that long ago (in Third-Age time) that we were storing all our pictures on CD. Remember those heady days when digital photography first replaced film, and your camera could suddenly take thousands of images at a time instead of just 20 or 30? You could take hundreds of shots of that mountain goat, or sunset, or halloween costume, secure in the knowledge that when you got home you would discard 99% of them and just keep the one or two perfect gems. Yeah, right.

For sheer cubic footage, our photo archive is dominated by film-based, printed-on-paper pictures, and the most treasured of these were always carefully mounted in a Family Album. Kathleen’s been saying for years that we should get a good quality scanner and, if we can’t bring ourselves to just throw away most of these pictures, then at least digitize them so they don’t take up any physical space, and throw away the redundant paper copies. I finally gave in, and found that she was right (as usual).

So I have been scanning in our photos, one Family Album at a time. I say one at a time, but actually I’m still scanning the very first Family Album. It’s our oldest, containing pictures of Kathleen’s childhood and long-departed relatives. Back in those days, every photograph was the culmination of someone’s hard work and planning, so I’m expecting many fewer “should-never-have-bothered-keeping” photos than I’ll find in our later Family Albums.

Here are some highlights I’ve come across to far. This is Kathleen’s mother Rose, somewhere around 1920. Kathleen tells me she heard that back in the early 20th century, itinerant photographers with ponies would prowl the streets of Brooklyn looking for children to pester their tired parents for a picture on horse­back. It was the in-person, on-foot equivalent of what we Third-Agers will remember from the commercials-disguised-as-cartoons that hypnotized us every Saturday morning, or the Tik-Tok clickbait that today’s kids must navigate. Will the children never be safe?

This is Rose’s lifelong friend Rosemarie Carbone in 1930. She’s noted for two things: first, years after this picture she became god­mother to Kathleen’s brother Joseph. Second, she’s related some­how to the Carbone spaghetti sauce empire that’s still going strong today. There’s a whole saga in there I’m sure, but I don’t know any of it.

Nanny

Kathleen sometimes recounts stories that her maternal grandmother “Nanny” used to tell her when she was very young and they would do chores together. Mostly they were about people that Nanny knew. She told the story of their neighbor Maria, who worried that she would never get married. Every night Maria would pray to St. Catherine (Nanny would pronounce it “Kat-a-RINE”), the patron saint of old maids.

(Interesting side note: Catherine was a 4th century saint who was sentenced to die for her faith by being placed on a revolving torture machine. She was saved from this fate when the torture wheel miraculously broke. So they just beheaded her. I don’t know exactly what the torture wheel did, but I can imagine it was pretty grisly, given that they named the “Catherine Wheel” firework in its honor.)

Maria (Nanny’s story goes) had a St. Catherine statue, before which she prayed dutifully, but to no avail. Finally, in frustration one day, she said the good italian girl’s equivalent of “screw it!”, and threw the statue out the window. Soon she was summoned to the door by an angry knocking. A young man was there, red with fury, carrying in his hands the pieces of the broken St. Catherine statue. “You nearly killed me with this! It just narrowly missed my head!” Apologies were made, tempers were cooled, and eventually, Maria married this young man. “And” (Nanny would beam), “he owned an entire apartment building!”

This story is too good to be true!, you may think, but no, it’s real, and here’s the proof: Maria’s wedding photo. That’s her, third from the left.

Below is another shot from the Family Album. Young Kathleen is with her parents (in the top row), her Aunt Josie, and her paternal grandparents Giuseppe and Vincenza. Kathleen was almost named Vincenza, she says, but happily avoided this fate when her mother fixed on Kathleen instead, to prevent fighting over naming rights among relatives (not the grandmothers themselves, they were too genteel for that).

Giuseppe was by all accounts an awful man, but he did provide some of the genetic building blocks for Kathleen and our kids, so I’m grateful for that. He also had the foresight never to bother getting naturalized when he immigrated from Italy, right around the turn of the last century. By Italian law, this means that his descendants, even though born in the United States, are eligible for Italian citizenship, and need only demonstrate their relationship to Giuseppe to be recognized by the Italian government as citizens.

I’ve been working (very slowly) on getting Kathleen’s italian citizenship recognized. This is for purely selfish reasons, you understand: by another Italian law, anyone married to an Italian citizen can themselves apply for Italian citizenship! I can see myself in my sun-baked villa in Sienna, with grape vines and chickens running around, enjoying my breakfast of espresso and a cornetto in my coffee-stained white t-shirt, ready to sit around the piazza with the other old men watching the world go by. Crazy, you say? Yes, crazy come una volpe!

I would write more on my quest for a new foreign identity, but I suspect I could stretch it into a blog post all its own some day, especially if I actually make any progress. So I’ll end my exploration of our Family Album here with a little puzzle. I’m sure you’ve realized that the title of this post, “Flamy Malibu”, has nothing to with what I actually wrote about. That’s because that isn’t really the title. It is in fact an anagram of the title. Can you possibly guess what the true title is?

Thanks,
Dorn
5/2/2025

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Schrödinger’s Hair

— In which Dorn navigates the physics and metaphysics of loss—specifically, hair loss.

Author's note
Before getting into our regularly scheduled blog, I really have to share with you something I read last night in the April 20 Washington Post. I like to try to keep abreast of the evolutionary turns the language is taking, but I gasped out loud with delighted surprise when I read this sentence (not even the full sentence, really) that Chris Richards had written in his review of Taylor Swift's latest album: "...Swift’s new ballads are sour theater, fixated on memories of being wronged and stranded, sodden with lyrics that feel clunky, convoluted, samey, purple and hacky." "Samey"! What a wonderful word, immediately obvious in meaning, but less than half the letters of its predecessor, "repetitious", just the thing for tired young thumbs. How'd I miss that? I'm'a have to look into this more, and maybe post about it. Now back to "Schrödinger's Hair".

I take Louis on a good long walk every day that I can, and it does us both good. We walk on local roads, Bayside boardwalks, park trails and forest hiking paths. If I’m not mistaken, it seems like there is less litter along the pathways than I remember in times past, which is very heartening. But there’s still some. There is one item in particular that I seem to find more often than any other, by far. Care to guess what it is? I won’t reveal the answer until the next paragraph.

Paragraph separator and pause-forcer

It’s not candy wrappers or empty cans of Red Bull. It’s those little elastic black cloth-covered rubber bands used to hold ponytails together. They’re sometimes known, I believe, as scrunchies. It seems like I see these on fully half the walks I take, and I have no idea why.

Is there some sort of fundamental flaw in its structure that causes it to work its way loose while the wearer is walking, then drop off without being noticed? Does its drab black color and unadorned design give off some “worthless” vibe that makes it prone to being thoughtlessly discarded, the way smokers used to carpet the ground with used filters and butts?  I just don’t know.

I probably first noticed these scrunchies on the ground because I use one for my own ponytail. I confess my first thought when I realized how abundant they were was “Neat! Instead of buying them at Walmart, I can just pick one up whenever I need one! Live off the land!.” Fortunately, my second thought was “eww. Cooties”

I have a ponytail because stopped cutting my hair in the Covid year, when Kathleen and I were strict quarantine observers. After the quarantine lifted, I noticed that my quality of life had not been impacted in any way by my lack of hair cutting, so I thought screw it! I just won’t bother cutting my hair any more since the act is not doing me any good.

I was perhaps channeling my inner child a bit when I decided this. Fellow Third-Agers will remember that back in the Age of Aquarius, hair was the medium of choice for expressing one’s defiance of one’s parents and society in general. I was a bit young in the 1960s for full-out rebellion, but I did make my dad crazy by refusing to wear my hair short. Ah, fun times.

In an attempt at compromise, my dad suggested had I could keep it long on the top if I cut it short on the bottom. Or maybe the suggestion was to cut it short on the top and keep it long on the bottom, I don’t remember.  At any rate I do remember being absolutely horrified to my bones at the thought of his suggestion. Funny about what horrifies you when you’re young. 

Now that I’m old, I’ve developed prejudices of my own. I particularly don’t like how the young people these days sport huge bushy beards they look like they are trying to mimic civil war heroes except with shaved heads. Kids!

I have this one hair style prejudice that is so specific that it feels like it came to me in a vision. When I was younger (I can’t remember if this happened when I was 5 or 50 or somewhere in between), I developed an abhorrence at the prospect that some day I would simultaneously have both a ponytail and bald spot.

This of course is exactly the look I’m sporting now, at least from the back. One of my neighbors pointed it out, and my forgotten vision came flooding back to me. Oh well, I’m old now, I don’t have to be horrified by anyone’s fashion choices, including my own.

From some angles, it’s not at all obvious that I’m nearly bald on top. Growing up watching the inexorable deforestation of my dad’s head, I was pretty confident of what was in store for me, but I feel like my hair has gotten something of a stay of execution. I’m not sure I’m any less bald than my dad or my baby brother, but I inherited from my mom (who probably got it from her Irish ancestors) the tendency to go white early, and my white hair captures more light, and gives a better illusion of fullness, than my brother’s or my dad’s darker tresses.

The discussion might be enhanced at this point by a picture of me. Because this post is all self-report (as opposed to, say, facts), it would be more informative if I provided a picture of how I see myself, rather than a photograph of how I objectively look. I assure you, though, the differences between the two are practically negligible.

I am required to disclose that this picture was generated artificially, by asking AI to create an image of Sean Connery with thinning white hair and a ponytail. It is not an actual photograph of me.

It’s now been five years since the Covid hit, and almost five years since I stopped cutting my hair, and I’ve noticed something remarkable: I’m pretty sure that the overall amount of the hair on my head hasn’t changed in that time. Yes, my ponytail has grown longer, slowly. But at the same time the number of hairs making up that ponytail, and the average thickness of each individual hair strand, have reduced by an amount that seems to exactly counterbalance the length increase.

Amount of hair =
(length of hair) * (no. of hairs) * (thickness of hair)
= constant

Were I to graph the length of my ponytail length against the number and thickness of the hairs that comprise it, I predict it would extend asymptotically to an infinitely long ponytail composed of an infinitely small number of infinitely fine hairs.

I can already anticipate your objection to my prediction: both the number of hairs on my head, and my hair’s thickness (measured in, say, atoms), are positive whole numbers that can’t keep getting smaller forever. Sooner or later, one or both of these quantities must go from one to zero, and the asymptote ends.

Or does it?

I believe the hair on my head is getting so fine that it can no longer accurately be described using Newtonian concepts of particles and mass. As my hair gets finer and finer, its properties are becoming less particle-like more wave-like, and quantum effects must be considered. In other words, my hair is getting wavy. (Ha ha ha, “wavy”, see what I did there?)

Anyway, I have developed a theory that the material that inhabits the top of my head is approaching the point where it is best described as a probability cloud, and I’d like to figure out a way to test my quantum-hair theory.

If I cause my hair-cloud to interact with a macroscopic object, for example by dragging a comb over it, I find the hairs have collapsed back into their fully particle-like form and are stuck in the teeth. I believe this is called “quantum entanglement”. But there is a simpler explanation—that the comb simply yanked out some weakly-anchored normal Newtonian hairs from my dome—and Occam’s Razor requires that I select the simplest explanation. (Speaking of which, I gave up shaving years before I gave up cutting my hair, and that process has a physics all its own. For example, did you know that, like the poles of planet Earth, the human head has two cowlicks?)

I wish I could come up with experiments that could prove or disprove the existence of my hair probability cloud, but so far I haven’t thought of any. If any readers have suggestions of how I can further explore the quantum physics of hair loss, I would love to hear them. But I won’t shoot electrons at my head, or sit in a box with a cyanide pellet that will kill me if I am observed to be bald, so don’t bother suggesting anything along those lines.

Thanks for reading,
Dorn
4-23-2024

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Fáilte ar ais!

*Irish gaelic for “welcome back!”

Hello, faithful and exceedingly patient fans of Third Age Thoughts! This is where the wisdom of age is dispensed to the world’s young (who don’t care) and old (who already know it). After (what’s it been, three years?) of silence, we’re going to try to start up again. Hopefully we’ll be better received than the 2011 reboot of Charlie’s Angels.

Charlie

It’s been a long while since I’ve written anything, so I’ll start off with something easy. Here’s a story from a vacation Kathleen and I took to Ireland last summer. It was just a short trip to the Emerald Isle, a little over a week. Our plan was to see the western side of the island by car, staying at hotels, hostels, or airbnbs as the fancy took us.

When renting the car, I got to choose if I wanted automatic or manual transmission (apparently manual transmission is not extinct outside of North America). The prospect of driving on the wrong side of the road was a bit daunting, so the idea of gear-shifting on top of that, with my left hand no less, was downright scary. But it’s an adventure, so what the hell!, I opted for stick.

First day there was a long drive across the country from Dublin to Killarney and the west coast. I soon found that the left-hand driving wasn’t a problem, nor was the stick shift. The problem was that the roads were very narrow, and everyone driving east was a speed demon! It was even faster because they were driving in kilometers, which as you know are about 60% faster than miles (it’s true! Look it up!).

And on top of that, almost all the roads seemed to be lined with either big gangly Irish trees or old stone fences. So I spent the drive frantically calculating in real time the exact route to avoid crashing head-on into each oncoming maniac, while still missing the rocks and trees on my left, mere inches (or even meerer, centimeters) away.

*   *   *

We stopped for an early lunch (or late breakfast) in the village of Abbeyleix (pronounced “Abbi-leesh”). It was a pretty little town, not too sleepy but not too busy, not too touristy but not too drab, just the right place to settle down for a month or two if you wanted to try something different with your life, we thought, in a little rented studio flat above the coffeeshop.

We sampled their wares. There was an open-air fishmonger’s stand set up in the town square, with a guy energetically chopping the heads off a big pile of fish, one at a time. (We didn’t actually sample these–the prospect of driving for hours with a bag of fish heads didn’t seem too appealing, especially as we’d have nothing to do with them once we reached our hotel.)

We checked out the local Quickie-Mart equivalent, looking for some Cheetos or other munchies, but the idea of corn-based junk food doesn’t seem to have penetrated into central Ireland. I’m guessing Big Corn doesn’t have a stranglehold on agri­business in Ireland the way it does in our country. Instead, Big Potato seems to hold sway here. All the junk food, including the ones shaped like Cheetos, seemed to be potato-based. It was all strange and new, but at least the sullen, studded teenager with blue and black hair behind the cash register was like a familiar piece of home.

Interesting tidbit: the Irish invented the flavored potato chip. True fact, it was invented by Joe “Spud” Murphy(I’m not making this up) and Seamus Burke in 1954, in their shop in Dublin.

We had our best luck at the Mueller and O’Connell Bakery, where the sticky buns and sourdough loaves were fresh-baked and still fragrant. We breakfasted on sweets and cups of cappucino with little designs stenciled in cinnamon on the top. Thus fortified, we resumed our drive. Hope to see you again some day, Abbeyleix!

*   *   *

Westward ho! We were getting comfortable enough with driving the Irish roads to be able to relax a little and enjoy the rural scenery. We made it to the Torc Hotel in Killarney in plenty of time for a hearty dinner. I felt it was my duty to order Irish Stew, which was heavenly! It was rich with Guinness Stout, and had a kind of beef I almost couldn’t recognize. I think it might have come from a real cow, the kind you keep in a field where it eats grass and brushes away flies. It was like a taste of red meat from my childhood, before genetic engineering and bovine growth hormone.

The table next to us was filled with a large extended family of aunts, cousins and nieces who seemed to be planning, speculating on, and in general anticipating the upcoming wedding of one of their number. I call them the Een family, because all of their names seemed to end in “een”. There was Helen the matriarch, Colleen, Pauline, Maureen (she was the one getting married), Norine and others.

That’s Kathleen there fourth from the right. Next to her in green is Maureen the bride.

When they learned Kathleen’s name, they realized she must be part of the clan too, and invited her over. (I wasn’t invited, but that was okay because this was clearly a ladies-only celebration going on here. They did allow me to take their picture.) Kathleen caught up on all the latest news from her long lost family, gave the young bride-to-be her share of sage advice, laughed at the foibles of women present and men absent, and had a wonderful evening.

And that was, more or less, day one of our Irish adventure.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully it will be less than three years to the next post!
Dorn
April 12, 2024

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Gardening

Besides veggies, my little plot in the community garden is providing me with plenty of artistic inspiration, and my three most recent paintings are shown above. One positive result of the pandemic was that I started walking down by the river once or twice a day. The way down to the Potomac passes by the community garden, bringing it into my “zone”, so I decided to do a plot, even though I had failed to keep up with one about a decade ago, because it was too far out of my zone. It’s working so far! I have fresh home grown organic stuff to eat, beautiful flowers to appreciate and even health benefits. One researcher did a study of centenarians around the world and found that the pastime that they all tended to share was gardening! Hopefully I’ll be doing it for a long while.

Lona

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Louis’s day at the zoo

– In which Dorn fights the law and wins.

Spring was blossoming all around us, it looked like the number of vaccinated people was reaching a local maximum, and Kathleen and I got the urge to go out and see something!, like the old days. We felt like those people in the City of Ember [ref] who had spent two hundred years underground to avoid a plague that ravaged the surface world: in a word, antsy.

The Washington Post said that the Smithsonian was reopening its buildings and facilities, and further said that dogs were welcome in most of their outdoor places, so we thought, Let’s take Louis to see the National Zoo!

Although the zoo was open, entry was controlled by access passes that you had to get online. They were free, but were quickly claimed up weeks in advance, when they were offered. If you wanted a parking pass to go with that, you were talking more than a month in the future. And if on top of that you wanted a “Panda Pass”, the wait was almost two months if you could get it at all. The pass requirement was a hassle, but at least when we got there, the crowds would be lighter than back when they let just anyone in.

Special pandas

I haven’t been following zoo goings-on this year, but I reasoned that if these Pandas needed their own passes to go see, they must be something really special. Maybe like Fiona the baby hippo at the the Cincinnati Zoo, who is so adorable that it makes us want to go visit that zoo also, despite the ten-hour drive to get there.

Flash forward a month or two, when the passes we had ordered finally became valid. Kathleen, Louis and I drove into DC (which was in itself an adventure—we hadn’t been into DC in well over a year. Had it changed much? What’s this new bridge going up over the Anacostia River? Am I even going to be able to find the zoo from memory?)

My first impression on arriving at the Connecticut Avenue National Zoo entrance was the hordes of people going in! Couples, families with all their survival supplies balanced precariously on strollers, school or other groups with matching t-shirts in various stages of dishevelment (and this was just as they were arriving at the zoo–I shudder to think what they’ll look like by the time they’re leaving!). The place seemed as crowded as I’d ever seen it before the plague year. That’s a good sign that things are returning to normal, I guess.

We parked (it’s lucky they required advance parking passes; at least we knew we’d find a spot), and strolled in.

Louis was an immediate hit! It makes sense since the zoo audience was animal lovers, and Louis is an undeniably photogenic labradoodle puppy. “Best looking animal here!” one bystander told us.

(This is no exaggeration. Every time we’re out walking anywhere, I estimate about 90% of the people we meet feel obliged to say, “Aw, what a cute puppy!”. They all use the same word, cute, and of the 10% of the population that don’t exclaim how cute he is, I bet 90% of them are thinking it. I sometimes forget when I’m up late with puppy diarrhea or cleaning up yet another TV remote that’s been chewed to bits, but Louis is undeniably one cute animal. He’s got a puppy bouncy enthusiasm, a winning personality, and long, soft chocolate dreadlocks. He’s like a little grizzly bear cub, only even cuter.)

You decide:

Everyone at the zoo wanted to come admire Louis, and many, especially the kids (of which there were many), wanted to pet him. Louis was having a great time despite the heat, and he hardly noticed that he was surrounded by animals he had never before seen or smelled.

We found the “Asia Walk”, which led to the Panda House. A couple of young zoo interns were taking a break at the entrance, so I asked if dogs were allowed on this Walk. “Well, yes, if they’re service dogs. Otherwise they aren’t allowed in the zoo at all.”

Uh oh! I guess I should have done a little research on whether the zoo fell into the category of “most Smithsonian outdoor places” that allowed dogs!

Louis was in plain sight next to me, at the other end of the leash, but I calculated that these interns were too comfortable sitting in the shade drinking their big gulps to pose a threat to our day out. “Well, thank you, forget I asked,” I mumbled, and we hot-footed it away from the Asia Walk.

It may have been coincidence, or I may have underestimated the interns’ dedication to law and order, but soon after we ran into a uniformed zoo guard. Like everyone else there, he was instantly enraptured by Louis’s cuteness, and before talking to us he had to give him a good rubdown and tell him several times what a good boy he was. Then he spoke to us.

Guard: Cute dog!
Us: Thank you.
Guard: And what kind of service dog is he?

Kathleen was more prepared than I had been with the interns.

Kathleen: “He’s not a service dog yet, he’s just a puppy. He’s in training to become an emotional support dog. I get very nervous.”
Guard: “Yes, I see that.”
Kathleen: “He’s not really very good at it yet.”
Guard: “Yes, I see that. Okay, enjoy your visit.”

Great answer, Kathleen, not least because it was true—we do have him in training (leash walking, and coming), and we do hope he will provide us emotional support. How could he not, he’s so cute!

I was grateful that we had left on Louis’s seat belt halter, because it looked a little like a service dog harness. But we were starting to get nervous. We tried to stay on the less-frequented paths of the park, but there didn’t seem to be any. People were everywhere, and they all wanted to ooh and ahh at Louis!

We passed the elephant yard, and Louis finally noticed the animals. Several elephants were ambling lazily outside, and one big bull also saw us—and Louis! He didn’t make any obvious behavioral changes, he was too cool and had been around too long for that, but he kept his eye on the little brown pup at our side. Louis saw him too, and just stood and gawked as the bull elephant casually sauntered over to the hay tree, which just so happened to be near where we were standing.

The air was charged with mano-a-mano nonverbal messages zipping back and forth between Louis and the elephant, even across the stretch of barrier that divided us. That old bull kept his cool, and never batted a huge rheumy eye. But the conversation was too intense for Louis. His resolved snapped, and he dissolved into a spate of nervous barking.

Busted! We quickly turned up our collars to prevent us from being recognized, and skulked off. I was intently watching the animals, Kathleen was engaging with the interested people we met, and we both were trying to project the auras of two service trainers disguised as ordinary tourists taking our student for a field trip. I didn’t feel very convincing.

Louis, meantime, was happy just scouring the grounds for other dogs to sniff and people to pet him and tell him how cute he was. His search for other dogs was unsuccessful, because as I’m sure you already knew, dogs aren’t allowed in the National Zoo.

Finally the stress of living a lie got too much for us, and we lammed it for home. We had missed a lot, hadn’t made even one complete circuit of the campus, and didn’t see any indoor animals at all, but it was still a fun adventure.

The moral of this story is that when you are planning a trip, you’d be smart to do a little research on your destination, to make sure you’ll be welcome—unless you’re really, really cute, in which case you’re welcome anywhere.

*   *   *

Here’s a joke I stole from myself [here], adapted to this post.

A cop pulls over a car and notices that there is a grizzly bear cub riding in the back seat. "What a cute bear cub! But you know transporting grizzly bears this way is completely illegal. I'll tell you what, we're not far from the National Zoo, I won't arrest you if you immediately take him straight to the zoo with no stops on the way." The driver (in the original joke this was a Norwegian pig farmer, so let's keep that) promises to do so, and the two part company.

Several weeks later, the same cop pulls over the farmer again, and again there is a grizzly bear cub in the back seat. The cop tells the farmer, "You promised me you would take that bear to the zoo!"

"I did!" she replies, "and he had such a good time that today I'm taking him to the Botanical Gardens!"

Thanks,
Dorn
7/20/2021

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Thank You For the Berries

It was in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that I first became aware of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address still given by Native Americans. The address gives thanks for many worthy things, but the one that sticks with me is “thank you for the berries.” We’ve had a great year for the berries here and were able to gather mulberries for multiple pies, muffins and even mulberry ketchup. Yesterday I gathered many cups of red wineberries, which together with blueberries I hope to make into a patriotic 4th of July pie. On this morning’s walk, I saw blackberries starting to come in. Yes, there are a lot of berries to be thankful for!
The painting is of an especially memorable evening when grandkids and I discovered some mulberries growing right at the river’s edge.

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Luck for Beginners

˜OR˜

Easy experiments in phyto-providen­tiality

I only recently learned of the good luck properties of the four leaf May Apple (first chronicled here). Since then, I’ve been on quest to see one of these elusive bringers of good fortune for myself. My search was finally rewarded in spades on one of my countless dog-walks with Louis, through a damp, shady patch of lowland. I stumbled on a small patch of ground that sported quite a few of the lucky May Apples!

Why, after it being so hard to locate even one four leaf May Apple, did I find such a large number of them in a single spot? Surely that’s not just coincidence!

Lucky real estate


I can think of a couple of possible reasons why so many lucky May Apples would be clustered so close together. One possibility is that all of the four leaf May Apples there are related, descending from a particularly lucky bloodline (sap-line?). I call this my “Skywalker” hypothesis. The second possibility is that the patch of ground itself is somehow lucky enough to spawn a whole flock of these quadri-foiled lucky charms. This is my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. (On a side note, did you ever notice that “Shangri-La” is an anagram for “Sri Lanka”? Especially in Sanskrit.[1] Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?)

I tried to think of a way I could experimentally determine if either of my hypotheses were correct. I reasoned that if the luckiness of these May Apples was due to the location itself, then I might be able to find some other manifestation of luck there.

Not being a trained botanist, the only other lucky plant I knew of was a four leaf clover, so I scoured the area for that. Never having found a four leaf clover in this neighborhood, I reasoned that if I actually found one in my four leaf May Apple patch, it would lend strong credence to my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. But I couldn’t find any, which didn’t really support or contradict either of my hypotheses in my genetics-vs-environment mystery. So for now, I can’t say why all these four leaf May Apples are living so close together.

It might have been fun to harvest some of the lucky May Apples and measure how my good fortune improved, but I decided I would leave them as they were, and see what developed. I visited the same spot a few weeks later, and found something strange and fascinating had occurred: some of them seemed to be trying to morph into five leaf May Apples!

One looked like it had budded a small fifth leaf, starfish-style, that was starting to grow next to the other four. Another had apparently started the process of spontaneously splitting one of the leaves down the middle (“blattfurcation”), leading again ultimately to a five leaf May Apple.

What in the world was going on?! Were the May Apples trying to morph into less-lucky varieties, and if so, why?

I developed two theories to explain this.

(1) Karmodynamics tells us that luck can’t be created from nothing—the plant must expend effort to produce the luck that might some day benefit the creature that harvests it, be it fieldmouse, caterpillar, person or leprechaun. It’s less clear to me how (or even if) this luck benefits the plant itself, so maybe it is just expending effort in an activity that has no real purpose. So perhaps evolutionary pressures favor the four leaf May Apple that can transform itself into something that doesn’t produce luck, so it can devote its energy into producing May Apple seeds or pollen or whatever such plants normally do with their energy. I call this my “Poison Pill” theory.

(2) My second theory is related, but it posits that the May Apple isn’t really changing its luck, perhaps it cannot change its luck. But it is changing its appearance to fool predators or harvesters that specifically target four leaf May Apples. (These harvesters are not just superstitious people or other two-legged sentient beings. Even an insect might develop such a dietary preference, if larvae who happen to prefer to munch on a four leaf May Apple are incrementally luckier in the fight to survive to become an adult, thus producing more luck-hungry larvae.) I call this my “Sad Sack” theory.

I confess I don’t know enough biology to figure out a way to distinguish which of my theories is true, or if there is a completely different explanation for these self-mutilating four leaf May Apples. Advice from any professional botanist among this blog’s readership on the subject would be gratefully accepted, and if this scientific mystery is solved, full credit will be given in a future post.

Next time: the mixed blessing of finding a four-leaf poison ivy.

Sharpen your vocabularity

Shibboleth

It’s a truism (maxim, bromide, commonplace) that you can never have enough words, right? This week’s word-building section involves words with international antecedents.

The English of England is not exactly a foreign language, but when I used to read P. D. James mysteries, I would keep a notepad handy to write down the many unfamiliar words, like “numinous” and “importuning”. (On a side note, I love P. D. James mysteries because they are so severely unsentimental. They aren’t gritty or noir, just extremely staid and British. In one story, part of the murder plot revolved around whether tea should be brewed loose, or in tea bags. But I digress.) I’m sure you’ve experienced someone offering a boast disguised as a complaint—perhaps you’ve even tried it yourself now and then! If you have daughters, perhaps you’ve heard them complain “Oh, I just couldn’t get anything done! All the boys kept wanting to talk to me! It was very annoying.” There is a word for this structure of speech: it’s called Importooting.

*   *   *

Kathleen and I both struggle with hoarding issues, but we’ve been getting better. Last week we finally dumped an old rusty folding metal University of Maryland stadium chair. It only had three legs (the fourth had rusted through), was un-sittable, and in fact had never been sat on, had anything placed on it, appeared in a scenic yard tableau, or been put to any use whatsoever in all the time I knew of its existence, which must be more than 40 years.

Still, it was a tough decision—it was an antique and a survivor (until now), perhaps the sole survivor of its entire clan of chairs. And it had a rickety charm to it, at once nostalgic and sad, kind of like Eeyore’s house in Winnie the Pooh. There is an adjective that describes this shabby broken-down appeal precisely: that chair is Wobbly-Sobbly. (The word derives from “Wabi-Sabi”, the Japanese term for craft or art that is intentionally crude, rustic, or incomplete.)

*   *   *

A Herptile (sometimes “herpetile”) is most simply defined as a creature who is the proper study of the science of herpetology: that is, an amphibian or non-avian reptile. (Wait, what? I thought all reptiles were non-avian reptiles! Are you telling me that birds are reptiles? I mean, I know they descended from dinosaurs, I’ve seen Jurassic Park, but I thought birds were in a class of their own. Some quick in-depth research (I googled “are birds reptiles?”) quickly settled the question in definitive internet fashion. The first four entries I read had the following three answers:
 (1) Birds are in the class Aves (“birds”).
 (2) Birds are in the class Reptilia (“reptiles”)—there is no class Aves.
 (3) There is no class Reptilia, because if there were, it would have to include birds, and that’s just crazy talk. Glad that’s cleared up!)

*   *   *

How often have you found yourself approaching a couple pushing a baby carriage down the street? “Oh, what an adorable baby!” you gush. You don’t really know anything about the child, but it’s an easy social responsibility to fulfill—at least in English! But there are some languages where you can’t even say that sentence without guessing the sex of the baby, and woe betide you if you guess wrong! The Italian for baby is bambino—unless it’s a girl, then it’s bambina. What do you do if it’s so swaddled up that you can’t tell? Guess wrong and insult the whole family?

Fortunately, the Italians have borrowed from another Latin community to provide the solution: if you find yourself in this fix, just say “such a lovely Bambinx (pronounced ‘bambinex’)!” The parents will take your caution in addressing their scion in such a gender-neutral way as a sign of respect.

*   *   *

Let’s see, how about ending with something germanic? Thanks to friend-of-the-blog (and friend) Kelly Samek for teaching me the German word for the comfort food you eat to make you feel better when you’re sad. It’s Kummerspeck, which is usually translated as “grief bacon”. It’s a near-perfect word that is only marred, in my view, by the fact that bacon is not my go-to food of choice for cheering me up. I don’t need fat, I need carbs! Or better, fat and carbs! Like macaroni & cheese, for example. That’d be, uh, “Kummer-käsen-nudeln”? I’ll keep working on that.

Thanks,
Dorn
7 June 2021

Footnotes
1. There is actually no reference supporting this assertion, and I’d be grateful if you don’t fact-check it.

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Evening by the River

I can’t believe that in my pandemic year of taking two daily walks – mostly down by the Potomac River in Piscataway Park – I only now have realized that it can be a lot more dramatic if you go late. Maybe the fact that that park closes at dusk has something to do with that. But if you park outside the gate, you will not get locked in. I took a great photo in the evening hour that I thought would make a good painting so I did it. This is the first time I looked at my notes since the cloud painting workshop I took from Sara Linda Poly just before the pandemic,  so I referred back to them and tried to do something like we learned in the class.

My niece informs me that “Golden Hour” is a thing, and it is now a fad to do selfies in Golden Hour too!

Lona

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New Book Illustrated by Lona

It’s here – A book I illustrated is published!!! Once before, I illustrated a book and it turned out to be a lot of work so I said to myself that I wouldn’t do that again unless I wrote my own book. However, I started putting some of my pandemic journaling pages on Facebook and Labar Laskie saw them and became convinced that I was the person to illustrate her remarkable story. She succeeded in persuading me and, friends, I have to admit that this is just the sort of book I would have written if I had a life-threatening disease, and if I wasn’t wary of heights, and if I could sing, and if I had lost my mother at a young age to breast cancer, and if I was a better ice skater…many more ‘ifs’ but, yes, it’s all here, along with over a hundred full-color illustrations. Some of the pictures were challenging for me but that made the project fun – as is the book itself. Here’s the link to the book’s page: https://henschelhausbooks.com/product/above-the-din/

-Lona

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A young dog’s fancy

˜OR˜

Cower-no-more


Trentin Quarantino’s
 DOG ALMANACK 
Springtime Edition

The long covid winter is over, and with spring comes the promise of people, places and activities long banned and forgotten! Maybe, for me, it’s also time for blogging again!

Louis, the puppy we so rashly acquired around Christmas, proved such an inescapable drain on my time, brain- and blog-power that I couldn’t get it together enough to write. Our grandchildren are now adults, mostly, and I had completely forgotten the exhausting and sometimes heart-wrenching 24-hour attention one needed to keep babies (of any species) from inadvertently harming themselves or others.

But now, finally, two things have happened to change that: (1) Kathleen, Louis and I have all gotten our species-appropriate vaccinations, so at last we can leave the house and interact with the outside world, and (2) Louis is starting to grow up.

The relationship of dog-years to people-years has been extensively covered in this Almanack [here], but those discussions were all about physiological years. We haven’t discussed psychological dog years.

Louis is six months old, which we at the Almanack are told makes him the psychological equivalent of a “rotten teenager”. Our job has now morphed into watching him 24 hours a day to keep him from intentionally harming himself or others. Just as exhausting, but not as heart-wrenching because he’s a rotten teenager so we don’t care as much.

And Louis is a boy rotten teenager, which means he’s only concerned with two things: eating, and you know.

We’ve lost, or nearly lost, to his bottomless omniverous appetite: several dog beds, human chairs, stuffed toys, hard toys, all our throw rugs, a couple of remotes and my cell phone.

He’s also made “special friends” with all the legs in the house (chair, table, and human) as well as his stuffed animals and dog bed.

We talked to the vet about his manic incessant humping, but she allowed that this isn’t a medical issue—it’s a “lifestyle choice”. Then she gave us more bad news. We had been holding on to our sanity (barely) with the knowledge that when Louis reached six months, it would be time to get him fixed. But the vet said she’d just been to a vet seminar on the topic, and the new current wisdom is that it’s better to wait until he’s ten months, to give his bones time to grow right.

“How much does Louis really need bones?” we pleaded, but she would not be moved. Then she twisted the knife further with the observation that his humping is a learned behavior, which he would probably continue even after he’d been de-oystered. In fact the longer he does it before the cut, she said, the harder and harder the habit will be to break. (HA HA I said “harder”.) (I’m so tired.)

Louis’s favorite paramour is a big, boneless, shag-covered dog bed that makes him feel just right. I should have known better when I bought the thing—in hindsight, it’s so obvious that the product title, “Cozy Calming Bed” is just a thinly-disguised euphemism, like the “happy ending” offered at a certain kind of massage.

*   *   *

New Dog Products

“COZY” “CALMING” BED

Pamper your pet with our self-warming and “soothing” bed that is finished with a luxurious faux “shag” fur! Paired with deep crevices that allow your pet to “burrow”, your fury kids will have full, restful “sleep” for improved “behavior” and better “health”.

3D PRINTED STEAK

The world’s first slaughter-free ribeye steak has been produced using 3D bioprinting and real cells from a cow. Israeli company Aleph Farms has teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to cultivate a lab-grown ribeye intended to have the qualities, textures and taste of a real steak without killing an animal. “It incorporates muscle and fat similar to its slaughtered counterpart and boasts the same organoleptic attributes of a delicious tender, juicy ribeye steak you’d buy from the butcher,” Aleph Farms said in a statement.

*   *   *

Dog Walk Botany
with Professor T. Quarantino, BsD.

POPCORN BUSH. On a walk with Louis I came across what I think must be known as a movie popcorn bush, because that is what its smallish yellow-white blossoms most resemble. God, how I miss movie popcorn! We tried to make our own with some extra fine salt I bought on a quarantine ordering spree and that yellow powder in the Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese Box. It was pretty good, but it was more like convenience store popcorn than movie popcorn. (I also haven’t had convenience store popcorn during the Time of Covid, but I don’t miss it as much.)

MAY APPLE. Thanks to eminent biologist and faithful reader Leon Cammen for identifying last week’s mystery plant, a picturesque ubiquitous ground cover boasting up to 9 radially-symmetrical leaves, as the May Apple. Dr Cammen points out that 4-leaf May Apple DNA possess about 40% as much luck as 4-leaf clover, and since a May Apple is much larger than a clover, finding a single 4-leaf May Apple about as lucky as scoring a small handful of 4-leaf clovers! I have yet to see a 4-leaf May Apple on our dog-walks, but my search continues.

Figure 13. Two-, 6-, and 7-Leaf May Apples. (The 2-leaf May Apple, although extremely rare, is unfortunately not lucky. Not that it’s unlucky: the plant is fortuity-neutral, or in botanical terms, “afortunate”.)

GRASS CAKES. If your walk takes you by a newly mowed lawn, you may be lucky enough to see some of these little patties that were ejected by the mower, made up of thoroughly chopped and matted together grass and leaves mixed with a healthy portion of rich loamy soil, and a bit of lawn mower oil to hold it all together. Dogs love these tasty treats.

Grass cakes also enjoyed a period of human vogue when I was young back in the age of Aquarius, providing the basis for the original veggie burgers in the seventies. The ingredient humus is often mistranscribed in modern recipe books as hummus.


Happy Spring all! Louis has been repeatedly been rescuing Kathleen and me from the twin evils of sloth, boredom, and sleep, and with our (and others’) new immune powers we are looking forward to emerging from our covid hibernation and maybe reconnecting with the outside world again. No more cowering-in-place for us, until the next catastrophe. See you then!

Thanks,
Dorn
2-25 April 2021

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New Normal

It seems like I am actually in a slow return to ‘normal’. Too bad I forgot what that is! But my first painting of the pandemic was one of Willow representing social isolation and my post vaccination painting is also of Willow. Seeing her in her white overalls and yellow boots (yes, I had a real, in person, grandchild visit!) somehow made me want to paint her as Alice in Wonderland – I guess that can represent the strange world we are trying to emerge from – or is it where we are going? Good luck to all of us as we burst forth and gradually get back to doing whatever it was that we did!

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Zoomed Out

In yet another pandemic themed painting, I wanted to register the ‘zoomed out’ feeling of being not just tired of the pandemic in general, but also tired of the ways we now communicate over the internet. Experts say that we get especially fatigued because a lot of the non-visual cues that we usually use to communicate have become much more difficult or impossible to read. The ‘zoomed out’ feeling seemed to be perfectly exemplified by my brother Roal, as recorded in a recent screen shot of a family video chat. That became the subject for this painting. I am really hoping that the time when we can get together again in person is not too far away!!!

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Pop’s Paintings

Many people who have been following my Social Isolation journal on Facebook think of my Dad, Pops, a.k.a Quick Carlson, as a poet, but he also has impressive artistic achievement of other kinds. I was amazed the other day, when I was looking for something in his basement, and stumbled upon a map drawer filled with dozens and dozens of his beautiful watercolor paintings from the 80s and 90s. “How come these are just living in a drawer?”, I accused. “Oh, those are my rejects”, said Pops. Maybe time is also the great healer of self-criticism, too, because when I showed him some of the photos I had taken of the paintings he admitted that they weren’t too bad. “There’s enough to have a show”, I said, but he had zero interest in that or in selling any. So, I have turned my attention to getting them to live on the walls of his descendant’s homes by introducing them in the family chat and getting response that way. The scribbly picture above is what I am getting to sort things out. In the meantime, Pops said I could make a 2021 calendar, free for download, for anyone that is interested. It’s done! Get it at

https://thirdagethoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pops-2021-Calendar.pdf

My walls are very full, but I couldn’t resist claiming this one that reminds me of the shore walks that I take so often these days.

Thanks Pops!

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Half-mune: cower in place 44

– In which Dorn gets shot.

Preface
It's REAALLY DIFFICULT to write one of these posts with a puppy underfoot! I can see now why raising babies is a young person's game. You don't get any sleep at all, do you? Even our Louis, who is so much better and smarter than all the other puppies, still only has the bladder the size of a peanut, and has to go out every couple of hours day and night. I haven't slept this poorly since I had to work for a living. No, not even then--it's since we had babies in the house. This morning I was taking Louis out for his third walk of the day, and I noticed he was trying to hide something in his mouth. He finally admitted that it was a chewed-up Tootsie Pop. I don't know where he got it--it's been many Halloweens since we had them in the house--and I don't know if he found it all chewed up like that or did it himself. It looked like most of the chocolate center was still present, but I've heard about chocolate and dogs so I worriedly called the vet. They weren't worried. "You know that Tootsie Pops don't really have any chocolate in them, don't you? Just chocolate flavor and brown food coloring." "er, uh, sure, I knew that!" "Just keep an eye on him and let us know if he vomits or acts funny". He didn't, so I stopped worrying about him and looked up Tootsie Pops to see if I had been lied to all these years. I learned (a) they do have some cocoa in them (a bit more cocoa than salt, which can't be that much), and (b) Tootsie Rolls were invented in 1908 but it took a hundred years for them to be certified Kosher.
Now here's our story.

Kathleen has a superpower. She can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, any complete stranger, and within five minutes they are fast friends who have shared all of their deepest secrets, things they might not have told even their spouse. She can build a bond of intimacy over a shared wait in line, a serving of eggs at a greasy spoon diner, or a “shushh” from the presiding librarian. She can learn things from a coworker of mine she met two minutes ago that I hadn’t gleaned in ten years of working side-by-side. (I’m aware that this may also say something about my own super-antipower.)

Kathleen uses her powers only for good, and recently she decided she was going to do some good for herself. Having seen on the news that doses of covid vaccine had started to be available beyond medical professionals, but not finding any mention of it locally, she struck up a phone conversation with one of the staff at her doctor’s office. Within minutes she had built that magic bond, and gleaned that there was some talk of doctors being able to alert the Calvert County Health Department of patients needing (and therefore eligible for) covid vaccination as soon as practicable. Kathleen is immuno-compromised (lupus) so she certainly qualifies, and her new friend promised to nag the doctor until he sent Kathleen’s name in.

When her friend alerted her that the necessary name-dropping to the Health Department had been effected, she began her second campaign. She called up the County Health Department and found someone in the office handling covid who would speak to her. Again within minutes, she made fast friends with that person, who promised to scour the recent communications to the office and, finding Kathleen’s name, she would proceed to nag her boss until he translated this doctor’s request into an appointment to receive the vaccine.

I’ve seen this amazing instant intimacy of Kathleen’s work many times in our years together, but never with so focused a purpose planned from the start and executed so efficiently. Within a couple of days, Kathleen had an appointment to get her first shot, right along with all those people who had conscientious doctors!

Oh hooray! The year-long nightmare might finally be coming to a close! Imagine shopping in a grocery store, being able to pick out the non-damaged fruit from the rejects rather than relying on a staffer there. Being able to go to the dentist, or the hair-cutters! Visiting our grand-kids!!

So last week, we took the trek to get Kathleen her first vaccine shot from the County Health Department, who had cleverly set up a drive-through vaccinarium in a local industrial park.

We were nervous. What if something goes wrong? We double-checked her paperwork and her ID, bundled Louis into the car, and off we went. The lines were relatively short, unlike the Florida horror stories we had seen on TV, and seemed well organized. Louis got a little overwhelmed from all the cars and masked health department workers, and started a non-stop barrage of yapping that made it hard to hear our instructions. At one point I panic-dropped Kathleen’s drivers license, and it quickly scuttled into an unreachable crevice between the front seat and the center console, but fortunately she had another valid ID in her wallet. Disaster averted! And just like that, Kathleen was next in line, and then was receiving her shot, with me sweating anxiously beside her and Louis going apoplectic in the back seat. A brief wait to make sure she didn’t drop dead from the injection, and we’re off for home, mission accomplished!

My own first injection would have to wait another week, mainly because (a) I don’t have Kathleen’s persuasive superpowers, but also because (b) my risk factors weren’t as high as hers, and (c) my doctor’s office seemed less amenable to referring me to the County (although (c) might just be a manifestation of (a)). At one point, my doctor’s office told me that they were expecting a load of vaccine themselves any day, so weren’t referring anybody anywhere else. I observed to them that this sounded like a business decision designed to benefit them rather than a medical decision designed to benefit me, and that finally softened their hearts and they referred me.

Yesterday we did the same drill for my vaccine shot as we had done for Kathleen’s, but without any of the panic. Even Louis seemed laid back in the presence of all the strange cars and people. After all, we were seasoned veterans at this now.

So now we both have had our first of two Moderna vaccination shots, with the second shots (supplies willing) coming in February. What a freeing experience! I feel so much better now after the shot, even though my arm is sore. My confidence that I can re-enter the world is returning. I know intellectually that it will take both shots before I am as immune as modern technology can make me, and further that even the partial benefit I get from one shot will take some time to materialize, but even so!

It’s funny, but my new-found feeling of invincibility actually started when I first received the email inviting me to the vaccinery to get the shot! Just because there’s no scientific evidence that any immunity is conferred by the vaccine before the shot is actually injected, that doesn’t mean that no extra protection is present. I refer you to a Harvard study that showed that a placebo could provide medical benefit even if you know you are only taking a placebo. They suggested that the mere act of participating in the ritual of medical care was enough to provide the benefit. If it works for taking a pill labeled “placebo”, it should work for signing up for a vaccine appointment too.

The word “immune”, by the way, is from the Latin im (not) • munis (serviceable). The parent word “mune” means not immune, or vulnerable. My current condition, and Kathleen’s, where we have some but not all of the immunity conveyed by the vaccine, is termed “half-mune”.

But being vaccinated doesn’t mean taking stupid risks. We both still wear our masks and wash our hands, and will continue to do so even after we get the second shot and our antibody titers rise to the full level.

And you should too! It’s only common sense, and common decency. A vaccinated person can still carry the disease to an un-inocculated (or “full-mune”) person, and can still act as an incubator for millions of little covid bugs to reproduce and mutate. When you think about almost a billion people around the world providing test chambers for those coronavirus germs, it’s no wonder we’re starting to see new and more dangerous variants emerging!

So continue to keep your distance, wash your hands, and for heaven’s sake wear the damn mask when you’re around other people! Provide the benefit to others, even if you don’t want it or don’t believe in it yourself. Apply the lesson of the old story about physicist Niels Bohr (or in some versions, Albert Einstein): when a visitor observed a horseshoe nailed over the great scientist’s door and asked if he really believed the superstition that this brought good luck, Bohr/Einstein replied, “No, of course I don’t believe that. But I’m told that the horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not.” As with horseshoes, so with facemasks.

Thanks for listening, and stay safe,
Dorn
1/20/2021

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Tribute to the Bakers

I wanted to paint a tribute to the bakers of the pandemic. I asked my niece, Hallie, of the Wordy Baker blog, to pose a reference photo for me and the painting became a lot more: a tribute to baker Hallie, to kanelbolle, a kind of Scandinavian cinnamon roll, and to our Norwegian heritage. She is wearing an ethnic costume that she made, and I put a scene that I took from the window of Oslo City Hall in the background. I felt like I was on the right track when I kept getting hungry every time I worked on this painting. The Joy of Cooking has a term I like for fancy baked goods: “…Begin, if you like, with a loaf of whole wheat, which requires neither sifting nor kneading, and go on from there to more cunning triumphs”. Hallie’s blog post on how to make kanelbolle is here. I haven’t tried it yet, but the next time I want to be triumphant about something, I think that is a good candidate.

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When dogs fly: cower in place 43

– in which Louis’s adventures as a Carlson begin.

Kathleen met and fell in love with our new puppy Louis (pronounced “Louie”) from a picture of him she found on the internet. Just like Archie before him. And just like me, 45 years before that.

Louis was living at a labradoodle breeder/trainer’s house with his brothers and sisters. We had been thinking about adopting a new puppy to help complete our pack. Nobody could replace Archie, but we recognized we were better, happier people with a dog in the family.

We closed a deal as quickly as we could, then waiting anxiously until Louis was old enough to leave his mom and start a new life on his own. He would be 11 weeks old and ready on December 22, and we wanted him immediately after that. What could possibly be better than a puppy for Christmas!

There was but one significant obstacle to our plan: Louis lived in Kentucky, 700 miles away. That’s a good nine-hour drive, google says. We couldn’t just drive over and pick him up without violating our self-imposed coronavirus safety protocols, which included importantly that we don’t go into any public restrooms, anywhere, ever, until we’re vaccinated.

Why, oh why, didn’t we think about how we were going to get him when we arranged the adoption? It had been well into the fall and we had many month’s experience in not traveling anywhere that we couldn’t get back from before we needed a pee break. But too late now, we’ve made virtual eye-contact with Louis and now no one else will do, whether he lived in Kentucky or another world.

The breeders had the solution. For a few extra bucks they would arrange for an “angel” to fly from Kentucky to DC, round trip, bringing Louis as carry-on luggage. Pricey, but not as pricey as it could have been, and probably not any more expensive than us working out our own corona-proof road trip. We had a brief period of worry that nobody would be willing to brave an airplane flight so close to Christmas, but they found a stalwart soul. Problem solved!

*I’ve christened the new variant of covid-19 “covid-1Q” as a call-out to a fascinating novel I read a few years ago, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The book (more…)

Or almost solved—the question remained: were we brave enough to go to the airport to pick Louie up? Second only perhaps to a public restroom, it’s hard for us phage-o-phobes to imagine a scarier place than a large international airport at Christmastime, full of people from all over the world. Including people from England, home of the new improved (from the virus’s point of view) coronavirus variant that I call “COVID-1Q”*.

The things we do for love! We made sure our travel “angel” was willing to meet us outside the airport buildings, at the passenger pickup curb. We bought some hazmat suits to supplement the face shields, masks and gloves that we wear to ordinary public places. We brought along some anti-covid wipes, and asked them to apply Louis’s flea medicine to his coat several days early, so we could give him a good covid wipedown the minute we got him without interfering with its effectiveness.

Then we waited. The days ticked by so slowly, as we waited for Louis to take up his new position in the Carlson pack. It was more stressful than waiting for Christmas! I practiced not getting any sleep (apparently Louis liked staying up until midnight, and then rising at 5 or 6 AM the next morning), and we bought two of every toy, treat, bed and jail we could think of, just in case.

The fateful day rolled around, December 23. Everything seemed to be “go” in Kentucky. We debated hopping in the car first thing in the morning, to make sure we weren’t late for the late-afternoon arrival, until we calmed down enough to realize that we’d be safer from the coronavirus vampires sitting at home than idling in a parking lot. We gave ourselves a reasonable amount of time and took off. And let’s just leave those tyvek suits behind, ‘kay?, they’re just too unwieldly (not to say silly-looking).

But where’s the beltway exit to the DC airport‽ Have they rearranged the entire city in the two years since I retired? We (Kathleen, Google maps and I) wound our way through the scenic part of Alexandria and finally found where they had hidden the new secret passageway to the airport. Some of our built-in spare minutes were lost, but we were still okay.

New scares awaited. The airport authority had apparently decided that the zombie apocalypse, with its drop in airline passengers, was the perfect time to set up construction crews to spiff up the airport. (This caused us some worry, but on reflection seems like a sensible decision.) Among the disruptions—the cell phone parking lot where we were to wait for our angel to let us know she’d arrived was closed for construction! More of our precious buffer minutes were lost!

The signs told us to go to the short-term parking lot, which they said was free if you were just waiting for a pickup. But that was within a multi-storey parking structure, which Kathleen felt was just too close to being trapped indoors with all those covid germs. So we exited there and headed for passenger pickup, planning to wait there. But oh no! Passenger pickup was closed for construction too! And unlike the cell waiting area, there were no instructions or detour signs here.

Prison Drawing, c. 1780
Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Where to go? The minutes were ticking by, and we were getting panicky! What if we can’t make contact and the travel angel has to make her scheduled flight back to Kentucky without making the dropoff! It’s hard to think when you’re frantic, and the whole airport complex, which must have circumnavigated four times looking for an opening, was starting to resemble one of those “imaginary prisons” that Giovanni Battista Piranesi drew (in the throes of a fever-induced delerium, it is said) back in the late 1700s.

The only place to pick up a passenger seemed to be at the passenger dropoff curb. We pulled in, immediately behind an airport police car with lights flashing, and hoped he was too busy with some other problem to notice that we were waiting right under the “No Waiting” sign.

We were in time. We called our angel, who was already wandering the airport, and told her of our new rendezvous point, and shortly after spotted her walking toward us with a bright orange backpack over her shoulder. In the backpack was Louis.

Louis took to me immediately, scoring me an immediate first goal in the “favorite parent” contest. I attribute this to my foresight in mailing the breeder a stinky T-shirt a couple of weeks ago to throw into Louis’s pen. (I offered to send something of Kathleen’s too, but she eschewed the idea. Ka-ching!)

Once he hopped into Kathleen’s lap, we forgot about our wipedown protocol. I told Kathleen, “he can’t have any covid, he’s TOO CUTE”. This isn’t dramatic license. I literally said those words out loud. (Don’t judge! This year, in this country, that is not the stupidest covid risk assessment I’ve heard. Not even close.)

The drive back home was mercifully uneventful. We let Louis sleep in a travel crate in the back during the drive home (“poor thing, he must be exhausted, taking two flights to get here”).

We (and Louis) took a while to recover from our respective travel adventures and start to get to know each other, but that’s a story for another day.

Thanks for listening, and Happy New Year!
Dorn
12/31/2020

Editor's note: this post contains an anachronism and an Easter Egg. Did you spot them?

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The (K)9 Days of Christmas

Trentin Quarantino’s
 DOG ALMANACK 
* CHRISTMAS EDITION! *

It’s Christmas time! Are you and your dog ready? I think we can all agree that if anyone deserves to enjoy Christmas, it’s our dogs. They’ve got that good cheer even when the rest of us are grumpy, as might happen now and then, especially in a year with no movies, no restaurants, no travel, and no physical contact with non-nuclear loved ones. In fact, one could argue that they deserve Christmas more than we do!

So why shouldn’t they get it? A dog-year is only 52 days long (by the old rule that one human year = seven dog years). Why shouldn’t every dog-year include a dog-Christmas? If you agree, then your dog should be celebrating Christmas not only on Dec 25, but also on Feb 15, Apr 8, May 30, Jul 21, Sep 11, and Nov 2! Have you been short-changing your pooch??

Recent advances1 in biological science involving telomeres and mammalian DNA methylomes and whatnot have shown a logarithmic relationship between dog aging and years as measured by humans (I mentioned this before here). That relationship can be expressed by

agedog-years = 31 + (Loge[agepeople-years] * 16)

Maybe, if you really want to do right by your pups, you should start by synchronizing their dog-Christmases with their physiological ages, using the above formula. This will result in more Christmases per people-year when they’re younger, balanced by fewer when they’re older.

Here’s a handy calendar of nonlinear dog-Christmases, each indicated by an orange highlight. It assumes Fido was born on Jan 1, 2021. These logarithmic formulas go kind of crazy when you put in values close to zero, so I started counting only when the dog has reached one nonlinear dog-year old, on Feb 26 (let’s face it, anyone younger than one year old doesn’t really get Christmas anyway).

This is great! When the dog is just a puppy, it seems like almost every day is Christmas! This is so great, in fact, that I’m thinking maybe it should be applied to humans too. Imagine if when you were young, you didn’t have to wait a whole 365 days for the next Christmas to roll around?

So I took the above dog formula and stretched it out to match a human life span, and produced a formula that provides more Christmases when you are young, balanced out by less when you are old, so that by the time you reach age 70, you will have experienced 70 Christmases.

If you used this formula to calculate when to celebrate human-Christmas:

when-does-Christmas-roll-around =
[ 31 + (Loge[agepeople-years] * 16) ] / 6.12

    you’d get 38 Christmases by the time you were ten years old!! You’d celebrate another eleven by the time you were twenty. Each decade there­after would be fewer, until in your seventh decade you’d only get three. That’s not very many Christmases for us old folks, true, but you got ’em while you were young and could enjoy them better. That’s fair, right?

But I’ve strayed from my topic of dog-Christmas. Okay, so whenever you plan to celebrate Christmas with your dog, what’s an appropriate present? Here’s the list of what’s most popular with pups in 2020 (to be fair, this list is pretty much the same every year):

favorite
unfavorite

FIRST CHOICE: treats or any food.

SECOND CHOICE: toys, sticks, shoes, or any other object in the world.

THIRD CHOICE: dog DNA test, a dental cleaning, or fake antlers. Literally, the best you can hope for with these gifts is that they don’t mind them much.

And what to watch when celebrating dog-Christmas? I looked, but found relatively few dog-centric Christmas offerings on TV. The 12 Pups of Christmas sounded promising. It’s a Hallmark-y romcom that was redeemed (IMO) by having both romantic leads be unapologetic jerks that got to stay that way even after they found True Love. But the titular Labrador puppies, while they provided high-grade puppy eye-candy whenever on screen, actually had nothing at all to do with the plot. Come to think of it, Christmas didn’t have anything to do with the plot either.

Raised by Wolves, a new sci-fi series on HBO, while it seems good, didn’t fare any better as a dog-Christmas show. But at least it didn’t have a bait-and-switch title. The protagonists were rationalists who didn’t believe in religious sentimentality, and the wolves turned out to be metaphors for . . . well, I won’t spoil the plot by giving too much away.

Max

My best dog-Christmas find was that old stand-by, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. (Not any of the new, dreadful movies, though: it has to be the 1966 cartoon version, with Boris Karloff reading the story. Also acceptable would be simply reading the original story aloud to your doggie.) Now, this is a tale that can grip a canine’s imagination—the hero Max has adventures (snow!), existential crises (he has to wear fake antlers), and a satisfyingly triumphant conclusion (roast beast).

However, whenever, and with whom- or what-ever you are celebrating the holidays, may they be safe and joyous, and virus-free!

Till next time,
  Trentin “Tin-tin” Quarantino

Editor's note: did I happen to mention that Kathleen and I are getting a new puppy for Christmas? His name is Louis, and he'll be arriving on Christmas Eve Eve. What could be better than finding a new puppy under the Christmas tree! (Except of course there's no tree this year because, well, there's a new puppy.)
Thanks, Dorn 12/15/2020

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Ch-ch-ch-changes, part 2: cower in place 42

– Dorn’s transformation continues (from part 1) ….

My friend Elizabeth revealed to me some arcane wisdom that has been passed down from father to child in her family for generations: that the hair on an adult human body may change color, length, or distribution pattern, but the total amount remains constant throughout life. So far, at least, I can personally vouch for the accuracy of that observation.

For months now I have passed the long hours engaged in that pastime so popular among those of a particular age and culture in this country: making fun of people on TV who don’t take the coronavirus pandemic and protective measures seriously enough, or who are serious but just get it all wrong.

You know the people I’m talking about—those who cover their mouth but not their nose with their face mask, or vice versa; those who wear a mask into the grocery store but take it off to sneeze; and those who not only don’t wear a mask at all, but give you dirty looks if you do, as if you wearing a mask was somehow infringing on their right to catch covid.

It’s a wonderful game, the kind that othering was invented for: it’s lots of laughs, but only as long as the people you are making fun of are others, people in some category to which you yourself do not belong. The fun and games ended for me recently, when I realized that I was in that category.

I learned in Hazardous Waste training decades ago that a face respirator didn’t protect you from those toxic fumes if you tried to wear it over a beard. Though I haven’t trucked in HW for many years, I still always knew this truism, somewhere in the back of my mind. It has niggled at me all summer, but only broke through the surface tension to my waking mind a week or so ago. “Gee, I wonder if my beard is interfering with my face mask’s ability to filter the air I’m breathing?”

A quick test by holding my mask’s edges tight with my hands revealed the awful truth: because of my vanity and laziness (I hate shaving), I had basically been wearing a placebo on my face all year! Time to shave that sucker so my mask can do its job!

Despite the fact that if I didn’t shave I was going to die, I was hesitant. “What if I look silly?” My beard was pretty short, so maybe it would be all right. To see how I’d look, I decided to Photoshop a selfie and take the beard out, or at least the parts around my jaws where the face mask was gallantly trying and failing to seal the aerosol germs out.

Well, that’s not so bad! A casual observer might not notice any change at all (luckily my beard turned white years ago, and blends in with the natural Scandinavian pallor of my cheeks). I’m going do it!

There is another truism, knowledge passed down through the generations in my family, and known I suspect by all men with beards who have reached their third age: there is a point in one’s life when shaving a man’s beard no longer makes him look younger. Instead, it makes him look older. And not in the good way.

There’s no way to know in advance when this gaunt milestone will be reached, even with the technological miracle of Photoshop. But anyone with a beard to shave off will immediately know if he has passed that milestone since the last time he was cleanshaven.

I have.

Well, nothing to do for it but to mail-order some bigger masks designed to cover more of the face (I should have thought of that first!), and start letting the beard grow back in the newly-safe areas. Fortunately, I’m quarantined so the number of people I will shock with my newly haggard visage until the beard comes back will be small. And it doesn’t include you, gentle reader—every horror story writer knows the most terrifying parts of a story are those left to the imagination.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of my head…

*   *   *

…the hair on the rest of my head has continued to repartition itself, always observing the law of conservation of hair mass (see above). The number of strands continued to decrease, while the fact that I hadn’t gotten them cut since the pandemic started meant that the average length of each strand was considerably longer now than at the outset of our national trial.

I wonder if it’s long enough yet for… a ponytail‽ Not one of those sissy Eurosexual man-buns, but a real he-man coonskin-cap ponytail!

I remember back in, oh, maybe the 80s, I was fascinated by a number of movies that came out where the protagonist sported a ponytail. If I remember right, in each movie, the guy was somehow more than human, or at least other-than-human. The movies symbolized this by each guys’ man-tress, and when the time came for him to discover or reveal his humanity, the ponytail came down. Let’s see, what were those movies?

One of them, I think, was a Steven Seagal action flick where he played a cook on a train or a boat that was hijacked by villians. He turned out, of course, to be secretly a ninja or a Navy SEAL or something like that, and handily kicked bad guy butt while never messing up his do.

Another movie of the time that I liked a lot better (and remember better) was The Fisher King, starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. It was a sometimes funny but mostly poignant movie about trauma and loss. Jeff Bridges was this shock jock who presented a macho coolness (and a ponytail) to hide his pain and guilt over an awful crime. Robin Williams played a mentally ill man who finally gets Jeff to let his hair down.

But my favorite man-ponytail movie of the era, the one that got me thinking at the time that maybe I should sport one, was the hilarious if amoral Witches of Eastwick, starring the one and only Jack “Heeere’s Johnny!” Nicholson playing, as he puts it at one point, “just your average horny devil”. There’s a priceless vignette in it, only a second or two long, where he’s preening in front of a mirror while holding a hand mirror in each hand, trying to triangulate a line-of-sight to admire his own little pipsqueak ponytail. The movie’s not for the faint of heart at a few points, but I found it a real hoot. And an inspiration!

So anyway, I tried, and yes, my hair is long enough for a ponytail now, but just barely. Here’s me in a tableau vivant of my favorite scene from the Witches of Eastwick:

Watch out, Willie Nelson!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/13/2020

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Ch-ch-ch-changes, part 1: cower in place 41

– In which Dorn is transformed by the pandemic in small but insignificant ways.

Theme music

Overall, I feel that I’ve come through 2020 and the covid pandemic relatively unscathed, so far—if it’s been alternately frightening and boring, at least it hasn’t been devastating to me and mine, as it has for some. If my retirement travel plans and ability to see my family have been upended, at least we are still covid-free, and receiving our pension checks.

That’s not to say that the experience hasn’t changed me psychically and physically. When the news of the virus first came out in February, and no one knew exactly what to expect, and toilet paper and hand sanitizers vanished from the shelves of grocery stores, Kathleen and I went into zombie apocalypse mode. We didn’t seal ourselves into the basement (couldn’t—don’t have one), but we did stock up as best we could on survival-type items like food and no-fridge-needed milk, just in case. And why not? Who knew when next we’d be able to enter a grocery store?

We started on a diet regimen that, looking back, I see was rather spartan compared with our usual gourmand lifestyle. We prepared our meals with a limited palette of ingredients that were selected for hardiness and longevity rather than sumptuousness. After a few months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had lost a significant amount of weight. Bully for me, I thought. If I can keep this up, I’ll be at my healthy goal before the year’s out, without even trying.

But the hysteria and hoarding subsided, businesses reopened, and grocery stores perfected the art of online ordering and curbside pickup. Huzzah! We could now get most of what we bought before. So now, we could add a new activity back into our daily routine: fancy cookin’! You’ve probably guessed where this is going: since I wasn’t really trying to lose weight, and the external circumstances that allowed it were going away, by mid-summer I noticed an alarming trend. My weight was inching back up! If I didn’t want to regain it all back, I needed to get more mindful about my weight-watching.

Fortunately, one of my late-summer activities was to clean out the shed in the back, which had been gathering junk indiscriminately for the last 15 years. I’m not kidding, there was some OLD stuff in there. There was my entire collection of cheap tourist thermometers from around the world, and even an old 45 of the forgettable “Edge of the Universe” by the BeeGees.

(Children, by “45” I’m not referring to a gun from the Old West, but rather a data storage medium that went obsolete long before you were born. It was designed to store mainly audio data, and was in vogue about half-way between the Compact Disk or ‘CD’ (remember those?) and the piano roll, that rolled-up scroll of paper with holes punched in it that you fed into your player piano. You can still find 45s in use today if you look hard enough for them. Piano rolls too, for that matter.)

But more importantly for this story, I found a photocopy of a diet given to us by Kathleen’s old family doctor, Dr M—. This was so long ago that I bet that when Dr M— was just a young upstart, he knew a old doctor that claimed that he used to make house calls. (“House calls”, children, are another obsolete technology. They were kind of like Door Dash or Instacart, except instead of groceries, they delivered a doctor to you who gave you medical advice or treatment right in your home! You can imagine how long a business model like that was able to sustain itself.)

It’s a relatively simple diet, consisting of three days’ worth of meals, showing exactly what you should eat (do they even make saltines any more? Or beets?), and how much, and not allowing any deviations. I could tell this diet was a relic from a simpler time, because it said right on the diet itself, “This diet is based on science, and is proven to work.” Such confidence makes me nostalgic for the days when we had things like science to believe in.

  Before and after.

In a shocking plot twist that I’m sure none of my readers could have anticipated, this story doesn’t conclude with me actually using this diet and re-losing all the quarantine weight I had re-gained. No, just finding the copy of the diet has made me confident enough in my ability to lose this weight that I no longer worry about it. Besides, Christmas is coming!

The next change in my story, though, resulted in a much different conclusion…

TO BE CONTINUED … Here!!!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/6/2020

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Der Gestank der Angst rollte auf die Straße – cower in place 40

– in which Dorn shares his deepest fears.

We got a hot tip from our neighbor, the one who knows everything and everybody about the neighbor­hood, that the covid has visited several families living six or seven houses further down our street. 

I’ve known a few people who have had covid (including famous Immunata E— R—, whose bout with the disease left her unable to communicate, except in memes). Learning of someone’s illness would trigger my sympathy response and my anxiety response for their well-being (depending on the timing; most of them had the disease and recovered from it before I even heard about it).

But when I got this new knowledge of people just down the street with the disease, my overwhelming response was FEAR! They could infect ME! I mean, sure I like them fine, the few I know who have it (the grapevine had some gaps in its bulletin, such as most of the individual names), and I feel bad that they’re sick and all, but when danger strikes too close to home, some primal self-preservation instinct kicks in that tells you to RUN! HIDE! SAVE YOURSELF!

The fear that washed over me felt a bit like déjà vu, from back in March when covid was a huge, dangerous mystery, and all the precautions—the hand­washing, the masks, the hoarding of toilet paper—were brand new and fraught with ominous meaning. 

And now it was even worse. All year while we’ve been precautioning, we’ve been keenly aware that (a) the longer we did the Anti-Covid Rituals, the harder it would be to keep up this level of vigilance, and (b) Winter Is Coming, and with winter the virus will get a boost of new contagious energy. So there’s been a slow but steady uptick in dread throughout summer and fall, fighting a losing battle against the fatigue of being skeert all the time. 

The dread struck me so forcefully because it was fully emotional, with no rational component. It’s like what I feel when I stand too close to a sheer vertical drop. No matter how safe I am, no matter how well my mind knows it would be impossible for me to fall, the sensation is gut-wrenching. When the virus is finally beaten down, we’re going on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and we’re going to the “Skywalk”, a huge overlook structure made out of transparent glass, where you can not only look out, but look straight down into the chasm below. 

(We don’t really have a plan to do that. I wrote that to see if just writing it down would raise my pulse and blood pressure. It did.)

Or it’s like that helpless fear that I get whenever there are hostile bombers flying overhead. This has never actually happened except in terrifying fever-dreams as a child, brought on, I think, by that 1939 anti-war cartoon, Peace on Earth. Given the date of the cartoon, it didn’t do much good at preventing war, but it sure made a big impression on me! It’s one of my most vivid fake childhood memories. 

So anyway, now we were too scared to walk down our own street, so I asked Kathleen if she wanted to walk over in the park?  Kathleen was vehement: “No!! It’s cold, I’m comfortable, I don’t want to take my slippers off and put on boots!”

Half an hour or so later, she asked me, “Aren’t you ready yet?” “For what?” “You said you wanted to go for a walk in the park!” 

For a moment I was at a loss how to respond, because (a) I never said I wanted to walk, I just asked her if she wanted to, and (b) she distinctly and adamantly said no she didn’t.

I reasonably and calmly pointed this out, and she replied that of course she didn’t want to go walking in the park, she was quite comfortable where she was, and it was cold outside. But she recognized the value of a healthy brisk walk, so she would do it for the sake of her mental and physical well-being.

This was when I finally learned a valuable lesson in vocabulary, after only 41 years of married life: to Kathleen, the phrase “do you want to” means “are you feeling warm and fuzzy about the idea of”, and doesn’t in any way mean “do you intend to”. It was a real MAFMWAFV* moment for me!

Here’s another Kathleen story, maybe more to the point of this post.

Last week Kathleen was especially afraid of a box that was addressed to someone that I’ll call A—, a few houses down the street, but was mistakenly left by the UPS guy on our stoop. I treated it with the same care, and the same quarantine protocols, that we treat our own deliveries, but the fact that it was addressed to someone else made it seem (to Kathleen) especially dangerous. “Don’t touch it!”.  

“Don’t be silly” I chaffed, and suited and gloved up and plopped the package on the stoop of their house, and left, no prob.

But she was right! As usual! Flash forward a week, to when we got the chilling news of the covid cases down the street. As I said, the news didn’t include the names of those sick, except for one: this self-same A—! What a narrow escape! I hope!!!

I’ll never doubt Kathleen again! I made a promise there and then that on my tombstone I will order the words inscribed “She was right after all. Here I lie, but I stand corrected.”

Thanks,
Dorn
11/16/2020

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IT RETURNS! A Halloween Tremble-in-Place

– In which Dorn spins a terrifyingly true tale of a fight to the death—and beyond!

he wounds, both physical and emotional, from my bloody battles since July with Arum Italicum are slowly mending. The blisters on my hands from ripping these agressive aliens out of the ground by the throat have broken and healed, and the angry red weal on my leg where I was splashed with their alien acid-blood has gradually faded to the dull pink-gray of an ancient war injury.

I had hoped my repeated skirmishes with the wily Roman weed were now behind me, only fodder for whispered tales (retold here, here, and here) to scare the virtual children around the virtual campfire on a cold dark night.

Yesterday I was puttering around in the yard, and something out of place caught my eye—there in the yard, towering high (well, several inches) above the struggling grasses and weeds that make up our turf, was a single broad, variegated leaf growing straight up from out of the ground.

What could it be? I wondered. I hadn’t seen a weed like that before in our yard. Do we have a new immigrant? Suddenly, I felt my stomach drop and a wave of paranoia washed over me (you know, like when you first see the zombie out the window illuminated by a lightning flash on a dark stormy night)!

During all my fights with Arum Italicum (also known as “Italian lords and ladies” by those who have fallen under its imperious grasp), I was always fixated on the bright festive cluster of berries that make it such a sought-after ornamental plant in its native country of Transylvania. Well, that, and the hard-to-extract corms buried deep underground like frozen tundral mastadon corpses, from which the heinous herb shoots out its fruiting bodies. I realized I didn’t even remember seeing any leaves, or if I did, what they looked like.

Google to the rescue! With trembling thumbs, I did a quick query of variegated spear-shaped leaves” that brought up a page full of images. “Maybe“, I told myself, “it’s some harmless plant, like spearmint, or, I don’t know, arrowroot. After all, this is far from my old Arum Italicum battleground. It’s not even downstream from it.” I held my breath as I clicked on the image that most resembled my lawn find, only much, much bigger.

See the source image

ITALIAN ARUM!” screamed the caption! It was the same fiendish fern that I thought I had consigned to a deep earthy grave in the local landfill!

So I was donning my hazmat suit (fool me once, you acid-spewing triffid!) for another turf war (ha-ha, get it?) with this invasive, Facebook-friending herbaceous hooligan, when I had another chilling thought: “If one of the plants was able to escape and propagate way over here, what might be happening at the original invasion site?”

So I calmed my trembling limbs, crept carefully over to the area of the original landing of these invaders, and peered at the ground illuminated with a single flickering candle (and the sun, of course)….

They were EVERY­WHERE! An army of them! They were my own personal Bir­nam Wood coming to destroy my Dun­sinane! If anything, it seemed like there were more of them than took part in the original invasion.

And all pretense of finery was gone—no bright berry caps raised up on jaunty stalks, just row upon row of these fierce jagged leaves, coming at me, closer, closer, CLOSER…
AAAA­AAAA­AAA­AAAA­AAAAAA­AAAAAA­­AAAAAA­AAAAAA­AAAAAA­AAAAAAA­AAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

Happy Halloween!

Thanks,
Dorn
10/21/2020


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More and better updates! Cower in place 39

– in which Dorn again avoids thinking of new topics.

1 In my post looking forward ten years post-Covid (here), I joked that Facebook had achieved the status of a sovereign nation. I’m now reading a book that takes this conceit to a whole new level: Qualityland by the writer and (apparently) cabaret artist Marc-Uwe Kling. Reviews have called it “hilarious and terrifying” and compared this book to the love-child of a three-way between George Orwell, Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams.

The premise of the book is that the newly-renamed country of “Qualityland” has allowed all the commercial and information-management techniques of Amazon, Facebook, and Google to run to their logical extreme conclusions. All citizens are fully characterized by ubiquitous AI algorithms, to the point that all the goods and services they want or need are predicted and delivered to them “without the hassle of having to ask for them”.

But warning: the book is so chock full of clever ideas that it gets headachy to read sometimes, and the consequences of business decisions that seem plausible in today’s world, while almost always funny, are also sometimes horrific to Third-Agers like me who grew up in a world without AI. Also it trash-talks Pride and Prejudice.

Still, give it a shot for a good funny, scary read. Or just wait—I hear HBO has already signed for the movie rights to the book!

2 I now have objective proof that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil. After my bloody battle with invasive Arum Italicum, (chronicled here and here), I had hoped that I’d seen the last of that particular invader from the Old World.

But the evil Arum showed up again to get me when I was at my weakest—reading Facebook! I was innocently checking up on the doings of my friends and relations, when up popped an unsolicited ad, actually tempting me to pay money to get some new Arum Italicum plants. Oh, insidious! See how the invaders get in your head—if they can’t invade by one route, they find another.

3 I mentioned my own miminal contributions to finding a Covid treatment here. When I agreed to lend my computer’s down time to a massive computing project searching for Covid antagonists (literally, it’s the least I can do!), they gave me access to online statistics that claim to show the size and importance of my contribution. (That sentence ended up sounding pretty cynical. Can I believe nothing from the internet any more?)

Anyway, my contribution must be pretty significant, because they awarded me a medal for it. And not just some cheesy participation medal, this is a Gold medal for 90 days of partipation! Why, I have returned almost 600 computational results to the Open­Pandemics project, and am now ranked as the 234,099th most prolific contributer worldwide (no lie!). It’s still not too late for you to join!

4 It would seem that the Illustrious Order of Immunati (revealed here) has a new member. President Trump yesterday announced his Covid immunity amid congratulations from his fans, skepticism from the medical community, and a flag from Twitter for “misleading Covid-19 information”. As a courtesy to my millions of micro-readers*, I will not make jokes that support or disparage any individual candidate, but I will repost an unattributed quote I saw on Facebook: “I got the China virus and I beat it, beat it very badly. Do you think Sleepy Joe would’ve beaten it? I don’t think so. Weak on crime, weak on immune systems. SAD!”

Illuminati spokes­being E— R— would not come out from under the bed to comment.

Editor’s note: E— R— did not really refuse to come out from under the bed. In the patois of modern medical pseudo-journalism, she has been “Fauci-ed”.

Thanks, and, depending on your bent, Happy Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day.
Dorn
10/12/2020

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Higher power: cower in place 38

– in which Dorn looks at another tool in the covid fight.

On a recent Zoom chat, one of the people mentioned that he had been out from work for the past week with a bad cold. I hope you don’t have “the big C” I quipped, then immediately worried that he might think I was asking if he had cancer. He didn’t misunderstand me, of course—it was obvious to all that I was asking if he had contracted COVID.

I’ve had cancer on my mind lately because a few days earlier we ended our six-month record of not entering any other buildings by visiting a dear friend in hospice. When we got there, her unmasked husband hustled us into the living room to say high to visiting family members, all unmasked, before heading to the back yard for an all-too-brief visit. Her spirits were high, though her energy was low, and it was good to see her. Still, afterward, we were rattled by the idea that we had gone into a house full of unprotected individuals who had gathered from all over.

I can totally see why corona­virus pro­tection wasn’t high on the minds of our friend and her family—they had bigger and more immediate concerns. But it wasn’t just pre­­occupation, they seemed genuinely un­worried. They are Republicans, so they might have some skepticism about the covid’s conta­gious­­ness and severity anyway, but more important, I think, is that they are devout Christians, and their faith is allowing them to see the bigger picture in a way I cannot.

I’ve heard some faith leaders try to explain the covid epidemic. The more sensational consider it a message, warning, or punishment from God for some discretion that the speaker, coincidentally, also thinks punishment-worthy.

More commonly, the message is to have faith that even the covid is part of some master plan that is a mystery to us mortals. The question of what caused the epidemic is left to natural science to explain. In this regard, the religious approach to covid is pretty much the same as the 17th century approach to the plague, as I discussed here. Daniel Defoe wrote of the Great London Plague of 1665:

We must consider it as it was really propagated by natural means, nor it is all the less a [divine] judgement for its being under the conduct of human causes and effects; for, as the Divine Power has formed the whole scheme of nature and maintains nature in its course, so the same Power thinks fit to let His own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgement, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes.

Now, as back then, prayer is encouraged, to avert the disease, or to understand it, or simply to make one’s peace with the epidemic and its ravages.

An interesting paper was published online by Jeanet Bentzen recently on VoxEU, in which the author measured the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on prayer by counting Google hits. In her abstract, she writes:

In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily data on Google searches for 95 countries, this column demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis has increased Google searches for prayer (relative to all Google searches) to the highest level ever recorded.

Strong words indeed! But Bentzen’s data seem to bear her out. Google searches related to prayer follow an annual cycle, peaking around the most common religious holidays (Easter, Christmas, and especially the start of Ramadan). One of her graphs shows the normalized fraction of Google searches for prayer from the beginning of February 2020, when the world was just learning about covid, to April before the expected seasonal spikes for Easter and Ramadan:

To provide a sense of the magnitude of the prayer searches, Bentzen compared them to other searches that had massive increases this year as the world was shut down. The increase in prayer searches was greater, she found, than the increase in searches for takeout food, and was even in the same ballpark (about 1/8 the size) as the increases in internet searches for Netflix.

Of course, googling prayers is not the same as praying, any more than googling Netflix is the same as subscribing to it. A recent Pew survey addressed self-reported changes in actual prayer behavior. It found that over half of all U.S. adults say they have prayed for an end to the spread of the coronavirus. Among those who said they’ve prayed were Americans who don’t identify as Christian or any organized religion, and people who say the rarely or never pray.

I fall in the categories of people who don’t identify as Christian, and of people who rarely or never pray, so I can’t speak from personal experience about the place of prayer in the country’s response to the pandemic. But that could easily change, if the threat of covid became more personal. There have been times of great stress, when someone in my family has been sick or injured, where I’ve felt the emotional need to pray just in case, and I have done it, fervently and with all my heart.

But for now, I’m concentrating on staying healthy, being careful and listening to the medical experts. For those who can also draw on a higher power to get you through the pandemic, more power to you.

Thanks,
Dorn
10/4/2020

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Archie

Archie Coopersmith Carlson
March 29, 2006 – September 24, 2020

I loved Archie dearly, but he was always Kathleen’s dog first. Our relationship with him started as an internet romance. Kathleen had spotted an online picture of his face as a 6-month old pup, and it was love at first sight. Archie’s naturally sweet and people-oriented disposition was enhanced by his early education. He was in training to be a therapy dog, which he would have excelled at, when his human partner had to drop out, so he had to drop out too.

Archie grew up alongside our grandsons, and identified with them and with humans in general. When he first came to us, Archie was completely silent no matter how excited he was. It was only after playing with our young grandsons and witnessing them get into a shouting match that he gleefully joined in with a full-throated bark that he continued to apply, when the situation warranted it, the rest of his life.

Archie’s friendliness and sensitivity made him a natural ambassador for his kind. By the second year after he came to live with us here, it seemed like every other house on the street had gotten at least one family labradoodle. None were as good at the original though!

As Archie matured, he developed a more sophisticated bond with us. He could be impatient, sardonic, or skeptical, but he was always joyful. He had an appetite for good company, good food (when he could sneak a bit) and a good cup of coffee, of late sleep-ins and walks in the snow that matched, and helped shape, our own.

From almost the very beginning, Archie was plagued with medical problems, and multiple doctors assured us that he would not live past four years old. But through­out his life, Archie never knew or cared about the sono­grams of his heart, or the regular liver function tests, or the barrage of pills we snuck into his food. And as he grew old with us, he didn’t even know that he was the dog-equivalent of 100 years old! He was still walking and sniffing in the park, and running after tossed tennis balls, on the day he died.

*   *   *

I wrote a silly blog post a couple of months ago, in which I attempted to play “The Glad Game”, and point out all the good things that the global coronavirus epidemic has brought. I couldn’t find any, of course—that was the whole point of the post.

But now I have one good thing the covid brought, and it’s a true gem. The epidemic and the resulting quarantine that we have undergone put Kathleen, Archie and I together every day, nearly 24 hours a day, in a way that even our recent retirements didn’t manage. Being denied the ability to travel far or to be physically close to anyone, even our kids and grandkids, without elaborate preparations, the three of us became almost inseparable.

Our chores, our playtimes, our sleep piles, all of the rituals that kept our lives moving, bound us together into a self-sufficient pack of three that kept us all stronger, happier, and more loving. I read somewhere how dogs everywhere have loved the quarantine, and I’m not ashamed to say that I loved it too, for the seven months (or four whole dog-years!) that it gave us to be close, really close, to Archie.

*   *   *

In addition to all his other sterling qualities, Archie was also a good looker, and sat as a model for several of Lona’s paintings over the years.

Thank you for coming into our lives, old friend.

Thanks for listening, it felt good to tell you that,
Dorn
9/27/2020

I’ve mentioned Archie from time to time in my posts. If you knew Archie or are feeling especially sentimental, maybe you’d enjoy revisiting those posts.

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Fill My Cup Again, This Night Will Pass, Alas

“Britain Turns to Drink” ran the headline recently in the Daily Mail. I have a feeling that they are not alone, so I wanted a painting featuring alcohol in my pandemic oeuvre. I have to say that I, too, have found myself imbibing somewhat more than usual. That said, I will point out that there are also other healthy ways of coping, like good diet, exercise, meditation, strengthening connections, and creative activity. The painting features my niece, who is really good at what I was trying to capture. In the execution, the title that kept going through my mind was ‘Practice Painting Glasses’, but later I found a title in a verse from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
The caravan of life shall always pass
Beware that is fresh as sweet young grass
Let’s not worry about what tomorrow will amass
Fill my cup again, this night will pass, alas.

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Summer re-run

– In which Dorn reports old news.

Sorry for the long hiatus between posts, rabid fans. I blame a computer malfunction (and certainly not this endless covid-induced sentence of near-house arrest and near-solitary confinement, which has lasted so long now that I’m totally bored of every activity I used to do, and every new activity I took up to pass the quarantine time, and feel completely brain dead and uninspired). And it’s right that I blame the computer, for two important reasons:

(1) there’s an element of truth in there. When I recently tried to log in to work on a new post, I got an error message saying I could not access the site. Between finding the error and fixing it took less than an hour, true, but my momentum was completely lost!

(2) More importantly, the primary function of computers in today’s paperless world is to take the blame for any errors or inconveniences. This is embossed on page one of every federal employee’s orientation manual, and I’m sure applies to non-feds as well. The only standard excuse that comes even close to the computer one—and it’s a distant second—is to blame all problems on the guy who just retired. Ah, fond memories of when I retired…. (but that’s a story for another day).

Anyway, my writer’s block might be easing a bit because I’ve thought of several possible posts. They aren’t written yet, so to keep you from abandoning the blog entirely while you are patiently waiting, here’s a rerun of a post I did last summer, back when I had just been retired a few months and working was still fresh in my mind, and long before covid-19 was invented, even in China. Enjoy!

Warning: this post is from early in my blogging days, when I was even worse at being brief than I am now.

*   *   *

From July 24, 2019:

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 1)

– In which Dorn spins a work yarn.

This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.

I call this story I was a fugitive from the NCIS. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)

Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.

Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.

That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I  would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation. 

The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.

In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.

It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did. 

She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.

I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now. 

But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking). 

One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!

CONTINUED in part 2 . . .

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Pets As Solace

I wanted to paint my brother in law and the reference photo that I found that I liked had his pets in it. I thought that is appropriate for my pandemic oeuvre – since pets have been a solace during this time. I know giving Teddy his daily walks has been instrumental in getting me through this! But the photo was a few years old and the pictured pets have departed – so I added his current pets in a painting on the wall and one on the mantle, creating a curious juxtaposition of past, present and future. A big thank you to all the pets!

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Taking charge: cower in place 37

– in which Dorn stops cowering from the covid, and starts to fight back.

To misquote Mark Twain, “Everybody talks about the coronavirus, but nobody does anything about it.” This isn’t true, of course: doctors, nurses, first responders and medical researchers are all working overtime to stop the worst ravages of the disease, and find ways to stop the disease altogether. And this is to say nothing of all those who are working as hard as they can to keep the pandemic from hurting people economically, socially, or educationally. Heroes all, as I’ve said before, but today I wanted to talk about people who are taking a very particular stand against the progress of the disease: those who are offering themselves up to further the research into treatments and vaccines.

I’ve mentioned my friend E— R— (here) who is an actual survivor of the coronavirus. Elizabeth, I mean E—, and other Immunati (as they secretly call themselves), are giving their time and their antibodies to find better ways to fight the disease. I find this amazingly courageous, especially as it involves getting blood drawn in a medical setting. I myself haven’t been brave enough even to set foot in any building since February, but especially in a medical building which covid sufferers might plausibly frequent.

Immunati can bring unique resources into the fight against the disease, having successfully beaten back the virus in their own bodies and now sporting covid antibodies, but non-Immunati also have a trait that is uniquely theirs to offer, and that is vital to developing a covid vaccine: they are uninfected, and vulnerable to the disease.

Hundreds of research groups are working on vaccine possibilities around the world, and every one of these that proves promising enough in early trials must undergo human testing. For that a large population of volunteers is needed. The volunteers are innoculated with a test vaccine, which is probably safe, and might offer some protection from covid, or with a placebo, which almost certainly will not.

These volunteers are risking possible unanticipated side effects from the vaccine for only a slight statistical increase in their own safety against covid. They are mostly altruistic and I’m proud to be of the same species as these volunteers. They increase the average honorability of the whole human race (including my average honorability—I’m actually feeling more noble just writing about it).

Vaccine researchers need a group of volunteer testers who, absent the vaccine, had a fair chance of coming down with covid. Otherwise, they can’t tell if the test vaccine is making any difference. Covid infection rates swing up and down, and researchers’ plans to conduct human trials have frequently been forced to change to new locations, as the rate of infections at their original planned location dropped too low for an effective test.

Brazil is now a popular test area, I’m told. The United States will probably continue to be fertile ground for vaccine tests as long as weak-kneed political leadership and selfish “I know my right to be contagious!” individualism allow the disease to spread nearly unchecked here.

But there’s another way to test new vaccines that doesn’t depend on natural spread of the disease, and which is even more rapid and effective. This type of testing calls for an even more heroic type of individualone willing to be intentionally exposed to the coronavirus, to see if the vaccine can prevent being infected by it.

The bravery of volunteers willing to do this is simply mind-boggling to me, especially given the fact that we still don’t have fully effective treatments for the disease, which can be fatal, and can leave survivors with permanent lung, heart or circulatory system damage.

I haven’t yet reported on what I hinted at the start of this post: my own way of contributing to the fight against covid. You may have guessed that I haven’t gone down any of the above avenues that have been taken by more intrepid individuals. (It’s not entirely a matter of me being too chickenI am in regular contact with an immunocompromised, high-risk individual who I don’t have the moral right to put in danger.) I have not volunteered to put myself at risk of virus infection, but I have volunteered to put another there.

That “other” is my personal computer. I have hooked it up to the World Community Grid, an IBM-organized project that coordinates people (over 650,000 of them and counting) who are willing to contribute CPU time on their computers to tackle massive parallel computing tasks that might otherwise be prohibitive.

I am working on a project (or rather, my computer is) to conduct simulated biochemical experiments on a large number of compounds, to see which might have the right shape to interact with the proteins that the coronavirus uses to infect humans. Any such compounds found are prime candidates for laboratory experiments, to determine if they can actually prevent the coronavirus protein from carrying out its insidious work.

Joining the World Community Grid and participating in this project, called “OpenPandemics”, was surprisingly easy. I just had to download some coordinating software and set it to running. It’s been going for a couple of days now and I’ve seen no difference in my computer’s performance, but I can see from the statistics on their website that I am successfully delivering valid results to their project.

The biggest worry I had about doing this was from having to download someone else’s software, and the inherent risks of picking up a virus, Trojan worm, or whatever hackers are trying to infect computers with nowadays. But I did what homework I could to satisfy myself that this was a legitimate, safe download. I reasoned that I face a similar risk with every single program that I put on my computer, and the main difference is that I am not using this program to do anything for my own immediate benefit, convenience, or amusement. The benefit, if there is one, is “only” to humanity at large.

I felt surprised, and a bit guilty, that the decision to run this altruistic program on my computer was harder than the decision to run Facebook or Candy Crush. But I gritted my teeth and did it, so now I am among those risking (a little) to fight back against the tyranny of covid! Yay me!

If you or your computer want to try this, here is a link to volunteer for the World Community Grid on the Covid project or the other medical or public good projects they are coordinating, from cancer and AIDS research to predicting African rainfall patterns. This particular link somehow allows the Grid to know that I am the one who sent you, which I think gives me extra karmic points or something when the final accounting takes place.

Thanks (and I really mean it, thank you!)
Dorn
8/15/2020

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UPDATES: cower in place 36

– in which Dorn adds some postscripts to some, uh, post scripts.

1 My post that peered ten years into the future (here), talking about face masks that translate what you say, was off by ten years in how long it would take them to come to market. According to an article in CNN Business last Monday, a Japanese tech form started making such face masks, that translate what you say into eight different languages.

Apparently the firm Donut Robotics was working on a robot until the epidemic dried up that market, so they repurposed their communication technology into a more of-the-moment product. Smart move, although they could do something with the product look, so that it less resembles a Jason horror-flick hockey mask!

The flexible screens that made me think of moving mouth images on a future face mask already exist, of course. The military has had them for years (the flexible screens, not the face masks), and lately I’ve seen ads for new smartphones that bring back that nostalgic concept of a cell phone folding in half, right across the view screen. Sounds like a gimmick to me!

*   *   *

2 My brain still hasn’t unfrazzled, apparently. A few days after writing this confessional about my mental state (here), I sent my beleaguered wallet on a trip through the wash cycle.

On the whole, this might have had more of an up side than a down side. My old leather wallet is now clean and fresh, the credit cards and license seem intact, and all those old business cards and bus tickets from when I worked for a living are now in such a state that I am forced to do what I should have done when I retired—throw them out! One must not cling too hard to the past.

*   *   *

3 I ended my post about the invasive species in my back yard (here) with the admonition that I had to KEEP WATCHING for more invasions. Good thing I did, too. Nothing has reappeared at invasion ground zero, but a couple of days ago, about 25 yards away and vaguely downhill from there, I was admiring what I first thought might be wild elderberries (I think they turned out to be Pokeweed, a poisonous but at least American native plant). Hiding a little ways behind the Poke, I saw the pretty red head of one of those invasive Arum Italicums cautiously peeking out!

I dug it up—carefully this time so as not to be splashed with its toxic alien acid-blood—and looked around for any of its invasive brothers. I didn’t see any, but the area of this new sighting is so large, swampy, and thorny-weed infested that I despair of inspecting the entire area.

Now I worry that some day I’ll wake up and find a hundred new Arums in that patch, more than I can possibly hope to eradicate by hand. Oh, what dangers one careless fling of unknowns seeds can bring! Let that be a lesson for all of you!

Thanks
Dorn
8/11/2020

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Trucknapped! Cower in place 35

In which Dorn tells of gripping adventure.

Rated S (for Shocking!)

I can tell that this long quarantine has really frazzled me. I don’t feel frazzled, but I can tell by objec­tively anal­yzing my recent behavior. I attribute my state to the corona­virus epi­demic in general, and in part­icular to the the fact that, for various reasons, Kathleen, Archie and I have not been able to perform our ritual daily morning walks in the park lately.

“Well, there’s no sense in us both getting a lobotomy.” (New Yorker)

I find my temper is short, and can be set off by the oddest in­con­sequential things. Kathleen and I have been married over 40 years, and you’d think we’d have all of our dis­agree­ments worked out decades ago. But this week, we actually snapped at each other, and had vehement arguments like brief but violent summer storms. (This is the “shocking” part of the post.)

And I can’t even remember what the arguments were about—something about whether the duvet folds on the left or on the right, I think. If I could remember, I’d be sure to tell you, because you know how I like to tell stories where I’m right and the other person is wrong.

There were other evidences of my brain being fried this week too. I’ve had inconvenient memory lapses. I’m not talking about the normal what did I come into this room for? lapses that all of us Third Agers bear as a badge of honor for sticking it out this long. No, these are weird.

For about a day, I could not find my wallet. I had a distinct memory of opening my wallet to do something, but no clue what that was, or where I was when I did it. Being painfully aware of the headache that canceling all my credit cards would be, I looked pretty hard for it, but no luck.

Night was closing in, and I was starting to resign myself to the prospect of all those cancellations. I went outside to put some yard tools away before the rain started, and found my wallet lying on the table in the back yard, with all the credit cards splayed out. Prompted with this evidence, I’m almost positive that I did that to my wallet, not some nefarious neighbor or errant gust of wind, but beyond that, it’s just swiss cheese up there.

There’s an old saying that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. My brain again took action against me very soon after. I woke up the next morning and found that my pickup truck was not in its normal parking spot in front of the house. I searched as best I could both my inner world (I racked my brain) and my outer one (I looked up and down the street), until I had exhausted all explanations I could think of, other than my truck had been heisted!

So I called the State Police and reported it. He asked me what must be the standard questions for such a call—When did you last see it? Does anyone else drive the vehicle? Are you sure you didn’t park it somewhere else yesterday? I assured him that no, I didn’t just forget it somewhere, this was a legitimate car theft, and gave him the identifying information.

About ten seconds after I hung up, what really happened yesterday came back to me like a movie flashback.

A Cunning Plan

Frequent readers will remember that Archie is also a Third-Ager, if dogs count Ages in the same way humans do. He is getting set in his ways: he will walk with us in the park if we cajole him properly and don’t make him walk too long, but at home he’s no longer interested in a stroll around the block. Since the park was temporarily closed to us, I devised a cunning plan to get him his exercise: he and I hopped in the car as if we were going to the park, but instead I drove about half a mile down the street with a hill between us and home. I reasoned that Archie might not be willing to walk half a mile away from the house, but he would readily walk that far toward it.

I was right, too: Archie happily did the distance and got his afternoon constitutional. My plan was to walk back to the truck later and drive it home. I think you can figure out the rest…

So I called back the police dispatcher and shamefacedly admitted that my truck wasn’t stolen after all. He wasn’t at all put out. “Happens all the time,” he told me. What he might as well have said, but didn’t, was “Happens all the time to me when dealing with doddering old people.” Young upstart! I’m not in my dotage, it’s just the coronavirus!!

*   *   *

Today’s post title is, of course, a play on that great adventure novel, Kidnapped! by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Before Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, before the Hardy Boys of my childhood, even long before Tom Swift of my father’s childhood, Robert Louis Stevenson was thrilling young readers with tales of pirates and buried treasures, high lords and desperate rebels.

I confess I’m much more familiar with Stevenson’s other great swashbuckler, Treasure Island, simply because I’ve watched that old 1934 movie with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper so often.

Jackie Cooper, who played the young Jim Hawkins in the movie, was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor (for a different film) at age 9, and kept the record of youngest Oscar nominee for over 50 years.

I used to always get Jackie Cooper mixed up with Jackie Coogan, another famous child star of the 20s and 30s, who starred with Charlie Chaplin in several silent films, including The Kid. Jackie Coogan grew up to play Uncle Fester in the 60s TV comedy The Addams Family.

The other star of Treasure Island was Wallace Beery, whose interpretation of Long John Silver set the gold standard for acting like a pirate captain that was not touched again, arguably, until Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Every time you observe Talk Like a Pirate Day, you are really talking like Wallace Beery. Aarrrgh, says I!

(Don’t forget, International Talk Like a Pirate Day is less than six weeks away, on September 19! Mark your calendars and shampoo your parrots!)

Thanks,
Dorn
8/7/2020

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Ten years after: cower in place 34

December 1, 2029. It has been 10 years since “patient zero” developed the first known human case of the coronavirus that swept the globe. Now’s a good time to look back, and see how our popular culture was changed.

As was predicted at the time, businesses that depended on people being in a specific physical location, especially on many people being in the same location, took a huge hit during the pandemic, from which many never recovered. The goods and services provided by these bygone companies are now largely supplied by new thriving industries, some of which didn’t even exist pre-covid.  

In-building movie theaters no longer exist, having gone the way of video arcades half a century before. Drive-in movies are back, of course, with every city and town boasting at least one, modeled after (and usually built out of) multi-storey parking garages no longer needed for commuters. In cities still lucky enough to have an active in-person business district, these theaters still provide a daytime service as vertical parking lots.

For viewers who prefer a more immersive experience than can be gotten while sitting in a car, virtual home movie theaters became the rage. The competition between virtual reality home movie viewing and actual home movie viewing was fierce for a couple of years, but the balance was finally tipped by the incorporation of massive-multi-player capability into the VR experience, allowing one to watch in the company of friends. (This innovation was also credited with single-handedly keeping professional sports viewing alive).

VR made it possible to sit in a crowded movie theater or baseball stadium with a group of your friends, or your best girl, or famous players from history, even though they live across the country, or they died 25 years ago, or they never lived at all. Most viewers agree that the audience experience now is even better than in-person theaters and arenas provided back when they existed, especially when you consider that back then you couldn’t even program the rest of the audience to stay quiet, or to not complain when you are loud, or to laugh at exactly the parts of the movie you think are funny. It’s strange to think what we settled for way back then!

Not all new technologies designed for a post-covid world worked out. You may remember the “no-scent perfume” craze of a few years back, which promised that when you finally met your love match in person, you would smell exactly like you did during your torrid Zoom dating sessions: NOT. AT. ALL. The business model seemed sound enough, correctly reasoning that months and months of never leaving your house and doing all of your socializing via the internet resulted in a breakdown of personal olfactory hygiene norms and regimens. This caused mass panic when society started re-opening. What even are people supposed to smell like? was a common headliner in popular and health magazines back in the early 20’s. 

The death stroke for no-scent perfumes was probably the same immersive sensation technology that helped VR movie and sports viewing become a hit. The scents that you purchase for personal use can also be subscribed to for remote transmission, so that whenever you videochat with your special someone, a subtle whiff of that self-same fragrance is released. This helps, so the advertising goes, imprint your aroma onto your hoped-for significant other, to cement the bonding experience when you actually meet in person. The best defense against body odor, as they say, is a good offense. 

Nontherapeutic face mask wearing has become fashionable, especially among tweens through twenty-somethings. They are taking face-selfies, photo­shop­ping out any acne and poofing the lips, or photo­shop­ping in what you thought the moustache would look like when you started it, and having the new improved face printed on your mask. 

Becoming increasingly popular (if you can afford it) are the new “smart” face masks, whose mouth image moves as yours does, guaranteed to be comprehensible to anyone versed in the art of lip-reading.

Nowadays, no one who goes through the enormous expense of chartering one of the few remaining commercial planes to visit a foreign country would think of doing so without a smart face mask with built in real-time voice-to-voice translation (although the deluxe enhancement of simulating appropriate facial expressions, from the japanese scowl to the french sneer, never really captured the public’s imagination)

most pundits of the time correctly predicted that the social isolation imposed by the pandemic would bring about an enormous increase in the usage of electronic social media outlets (with an accompanying increase in wealth for their companies). Some also predicted that when the threat passed, and conventional forms of social interaction were available again, these electronic outlets would continue to grow in popularity and social influence, to the point where they eclipsed many countries and world religions. 

It’s easy to forget, for example, that before the epidemic, the idea that Facebook could apply for sovereign nation status with the United Nations would have seemed incomprehensible. Now that Facebook Nation can claim physical existence with its purchase of the Maldives, its eventual confirmation as a member nation seems all but assured (despite the fact that these same islands will disappear under the rising Pacific by 2100)

Should this happen, Mark Zuckerberg has promised to resign from the Presidency of the United States to assume the mantle of leadership over his new nation-state. “Being President of the United States is largely a powerless, ceremonial position anyway,” he was recently quoted, “ever since the reforms of the early 2020’s made it illegal for a President to do all the things that everyone in the twenty-teens assumed were already illegal.”

Thanks,
Dorn
12/01/2029
(pre-publication copy 7/26/2020)

P.S. A blood-curdling epilog has been added to the recent post, Invaders!

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Things fall apart: cower in place 33

– in which Dorn battles against entropy.

I’ve written before about my fear that circumstances will force me to do something that puts me at risk of catching the covid bug. Following the fashion of human-being psychology, I only really worry about the things that I haven’t done yet, my lizard-brain[what?] telling me that if I did it even once and didn’t die, it’s probably not worth worrying about.

What I haven’t done since February, not even once, is to have enter any building other than our house, or invite someone to come into our house, and what I’m fearing these days is that something will break that will require me to do one or the other of these things. And because it is a universal law that Things Fall Apart, I know I’m living on borrowed time.

Yesterday this warning light came on in the car while we were driving to the park for our daily walk. (See, even though we encounter other people, including gasping, spitting runners, while walking in the park, my lizard-brain doesn’t recoil. My spock-brain knows that our covid risk is only slightly mitigated by Kathleen and me wearing masks, since the runners without exception don’t wear them, but because it hasn’t sickened us yet, I don’t have the same visceral fear that it will.)

I’m not sure I could get my car’s warning light fixed without entering the shop building, and that fills me with dread. So I handled the situation in the government-approved manner: I ignored the warning signals, did nothing, and hoped the problem would magically go away by itself.

So far, I’m having better luck than the federal government in my risk-mitigation strategy—the warning light did go out, and so far has stayed out. Probably was just a glitch, or a hoax.

That technique also worked on our refrigerator. The ice-maker seemed to have stopped working a couple of weeks ago, which could signal disaster for our ice-tea sipping rituals during the heat of the day. But I hoped really hard for a magical cure, and sure enough the fridge healed itself, and started pumping out ice again.

Our fridge is pretty old and has multiple symptoms of breakdown. The other one I’m actively ignoring right now is its tendency to emit a loud pained groan every time I open or close the door. It probably means the door is about to fall off, but until it does, I’m sure not letting any repair man into the house!

Our pup Archie likes the cold, and loves to sleep directly under one of our air conditioners. The unit started dripping water the other day. Archie liked the cold water drip even more than he liked the continuous blast of cold air (no judgement, but eww), but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how the AC is supposed to work. In this case I couldn’t bring myself to just ignore the malfunction and hope it would heal itself in time. So I’ve turned the unit off, but haven’t been brave enough to call the HVAC guy. Poor Archie!, now he just has a fan.

Archie is getting pretty old himself (75 year-equivalents, by one count), and when he has to get up from a nap makes pretty much the same groaning noises as the refrigerator door. He does this stretchy thing that creates an alarmingly loud popping sound, just like that thing that Mr. Smith, the villainous computer program in The Matrix, does with his neck.

Archie’s aches and pains are not a breakdown that we’re willing to ignore. Fortunately, Archie is not saddled with my reverse-agoraphobia, so is willing to go into other buildings. His vet will see him in his office without requiring any humans to accompany him, so Archie has been able to pass his routine senior exam.

Me, I’m still stuck at home. I’ve developed a cavity. I’ve been able to feel the spot with my tongue for months, but the tooth hasn’t degraded to the point where I absolutely have to do something about it, so I haven’t. I’m not afraid of the dentist in non-pandemic times, but even so I’m glad I have a valid excuse ready for when he eventually asks why I waited so long to have this seen to. It was the coronavirus! Woo hoo, scott-free! (Damn! If only I had thought of this when I way playing the “Thank God It’s Covid” game!)

I’ve got other examples of things and people falling apart here, particularly related to our old house, the building style of which might generously be referred to as “rustic country”, but might more accurately be called “drunk fisherman”. But I think our house merits a post all its own, so I’ll save the rest for later.

*   *   *

Writing this post made me think of a good book I read, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It’s not a new book—it’s a classic of African literature, and is so old that it is almost as old as I am (published in 1958).

It’s the story of life in the Nigerian village of Umuofia, and especially of Okonkwo and his family, at a time when British overlordship of Nigeria has happened, but the effects have not yet been felt in the remote villages.

Okonkwo is respected by his neighbors as a good man, although by our standards he might be diagnosed with toxic masculinity. He’s a fierce warrior, having killed several men from other villages during their frequent wars, and kept their heads as souvenir drinking vessels. He’s a good husband by their standards—he is able to provide food, shelter, and a domineering discipline for all of his wives and children (there’s a surreally touching scene where Okonkwo worries that his son will not grow up mean enough to beat his wives when required for proper decorum).

The book is full of snippets of precolonial Nigerian village life that I found fascinating. Their world was as full of memes, mores and legends as ours, and much of the book’s actions are explained by references to fables that are only incompletely described. This left me with the sense of the observing a rich and strange culture often without knowing exactly what I was seeing.

Their codes of conduct could seem silly, or deadly, or both at the same time. Men in the village who had earned the honorific title of ozo were forbidden to climb trees. Twins, and people who developed certain diseases, were considered abominations and cast into the Evil Forest to die. It was acceptable, honorable even, to murder a child if the village oracle told you to, but if you killed a fellow villager without such sanction, even accidentally, you were banished and your houses and crops were burned.

If much of the societal motivations of the villagers of Umuofia were alien to me, they were also mutually incomprehensible to their Christian missionaries and British governors, who through much of the book appeared only as rumors about things that had happened in other villages. The eventual clash between Umuofia and the British was chilling to me not for its violence (there was some, but not much more than seemed to be daily Umuofia fare), but for the fact that throughout out it all, neither side understood the other, or even tried to. As often happened when pre-industrial villagers confronted Imperial Britain establishing its colonial rule, the collision was disastrous for the villagers of Umuofia, and amounted to scarcely a footnote in the annals of the British “civilizing” the dark continent.

Sad ending, but an engrossing, sympathetic book.

Thanks,
Dorn
7/19/2020

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Invaders!

– in which Dorn spins a tale of gardening gone wrong.

My story starts many months ago. A dear friend, whose name I with­hold to pro­tect the guilty, offered us a doz­en or so black seeds, like little wrinkled baby peas. “Plant them! You’ll like what you see!”

Our (es­pecial­ly my) skills at gar­den­ing ornamentals are com­men­su­rate with our (es­pecial­ly my) in­ter­est in it, so we weren’t holding our breaths for a spectacular result. After the seeds sat around the house get­ting in the way for a suf­ficient length of time, I tossed them out back, and promptly forgot about them.

Today, in the heat of high summer, it was time to hack down the undergrowth that was taking over our back, uh, 40. I was donning my protective gear and scoping out a plan of attack, and I saw that among the usual morass of weeds and vines was peppered here and there a squat stem, atop of which sat a cluster of bright berries in the process of changing from green to red. “How pretty! Why have we never seen these before?”

Kathleen figured it out. “It’s those seeds you threw back here last year! They sprouted! Now, what the heck did she say these were called?” Neither of us had any idea, so we sent a query out on Facebook. Several people said they were Jack-in-the-Pulpits, but that didn’t look quite right. One friend called them Lords-and-Ladies and said they were a popular garden ornamental in England. Another helpfully pointing us to the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board. Uh-oh…

It’s Italian Arum, in the same family as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and also known as Lords-and-Ladies. It’s also a class-C weed (whatever that is) in Washington State, poi­son­ous, and an invasive species.

Now, I don’t like to brag (shut up), but at one time in my career I was quite the high mucky-muck in the world of invasive species. I was hired by NOAA to work on their invasive species efforts at a time when (a) after years of warnings by scientists, their damage was finally starting to cost big bucks, and (b) NOAA’s research arm, and especially the Sea Grant Program, was one of the only significant sources of federal funding for invasive species research and outreach.

Those were good times, when I was responsible for designing and executing the program to hand out invasive species grant funding! Back then, within a certain audience, my insights were wiser, my scientific observations were astuter, my jokes funnier, and my boondoggles boon-dogglier. Ah, memories!

But nothing lasts forever, and the funds appropriated by Congress for Sea Grant to give out for invasive species work slowed to a trickle, much too little to justify my job of managing said funds. My audience followed the money elsewhere, and I moved on to other things. But my pulse still quickens when an invasive species emergency looms!

And now I had my own invasive emergency of sorts. Apparently, this stuff thrives in the environment where I threw the seeds, and it can grow and propagate, not just by seeds, but also by sending up new shoots if you pull out the plant, but leave the root ball, or “corm”. So I had to dig out all the plants—there were 15 or so—while being careful not to let any of the seed-carrying berries fall off and roll under the brush, and not to pull too hard on the stalk and break it, leaving the corm behind to sprout again. That corm, by the way, is a woody, round, tendrilly, creepy looking thing that resembles a coronavirus, if a coronvirus were two inches in diameter.

corm

I was more successful at capturing all the escaping berries, I think, than at rooting out all the corms. Sometimes, the stems broke and I just couldn’t find the woody corm at the bottom. So I think we’ll have to stay vigilant next year to see if new Arums pop up.

We destroyed all the plants, seeds, and corms I could find, except for one survivor, which we let live so it could tell the others what happened here, and to warn them to keep their old-world tuberous toxic selves away from our shores!

Is my language species-ist?

Thanks,
Dorn
7/17/2020

*   *   *

EPILOG – July 22, 2020

The Arum italica got its revenge. As it clearly says on the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board webpage, “avoid skin contact with Italian arum as plant parts may cause skin irritation, which can be severe for sensitive individuals”

(I will be writing to the WSNWCB about the vagueness of the warnings on their website. Clearly, that sentence should have ended with THIS MEANS YOU!)

Anyway, sure enough a few days after my hand-to-hand combat with the Arum, I got this rash that morphed into blisters after a while on the back of my hand. I got a few spots elsewhere too, but I didn’t include photographs as they don’t really add to the story (read: not gruesome enough). I had worn stout leather gloves, but when I would accidentally break a stalk and have to root around in the dirt, my sense of touch wasn’t sensitive to find the corm unless I took them off.

So I guess the Arum got the last laugh. Or maybe, the fight isn’t over even yet—any seeds or corms I missed could still sprout up to taunt me, or worse! So I must KEEP WATCHING. KEEP WATCHING THE YARD. KEEP WATCHING. (That’s a homage to the closing line from that great 1951 movie about another invasive plant, The Thing From Another World .)

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Black Lives Matter 2

Last weekend ushered in our country’s 245th year of independence from Britain. “Independence” and “Freedom” are two of our country’s rallying cries (as well as the names of the two space shuttles that nuked that earth-killing meteor in the Bruce Willis classic Armageddon.) Well, America is still independent of foreign rule, but is it free? Was it ever, or has that just been a dream?

Like many of my tribe struggling to fully understand the Black Lives Matter movement and the abuses perpetrated on Americans of color that are excused or ignored, I reached for a book. Several sources suggested Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015 Random House), so I started with that. I’m glad I did—this is easily the best book I’ve read on any subject in a long time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a MacArthur Fellow and a Pulitzer-nominated writer. He’s a sometime contributer to the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the NY Times, and my friend Jon E. reports he’s also the writer of the Black Panther graphic novels.

I didn’t know that he was also a poet, but I thought he must be as soon as I started reading his book. His command of the language, and his care with every word he uses, made me think of Margaret Atwood. I was hooked from the first page.

Between the World and Me is an exploration of Coates’s world as a black man in America, written as an extended letter to his son Samori. The book is thoughtful, deeply personal, and true. By true, I don’t mean this is a history or objective analysis of the black American experience (although it is full of references to real, well-known events that revolved around Coates in his life). It is Coates’s own story of his experiences and beliefs, and it is made powerful by the effort he makes to speak only the truth as he knows it to his son.

A central theme of the book is the systematic authorized brutality on black men and women in this country by police and others. The title refers to the separation he and his fellow black Americans feel from the “real world” of the American Dream. The anecdotes he tells of casual or planned violence done to black men and women start when he was a child in Baltimore in the 1980’s, and continue up to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown in the 2010’s. It was chilling to read these stories, and realize how little has changed in forty years.

Coates’s thesis is that not only is this brutality accepted or ignored by most of those living the American Dream; it is that the American Dream itself requires this brutality in order to exist. His struggles with the American Dream, first to reach for it, then to build a better alternative to it, and finally to transcend it, form the story arc, and his message to his son is that he, too, must find a way to look beyond any dream and understand the reality of his life.

Between the World and Me has won several awards, including the National Book Award in 2016. It was not without critics, including some that found it too pessimistic, ignoring the progress that had been made (this book was released in the sixth year of Obama’s presidency). But I think those critics forgot that the book was his own story, not the country’s. And in this post-Obama world, his more fatalistic view of black people’s “progress” seems to have worn better than his critics’.

I’ve written enough about this great book. I should let the author speak for himself.

On police reform in 2015:

At this moment the phrase “police reform” has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people.

On the pervasiveness of sanctioned violence and murder in the American Dream:

[My mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me…. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.

On the harm that the American Dream causes even to those privileged to enjoy its benefits:

The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

And on his message to his son:

I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance [between black men and women, and the world of the American Dream]. Was it Mike Brown? I don’t think I want to know. But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. It is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. . .

Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto. — I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness.

Thanks for listening,
Dorn
July 6, 2020

BLACK LIVES MATTER

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Driftwood Rhinoceros

I’ve always wanted a rhinoceros. I mean, who hasn’t? I also have wanted to try making a driftwood sculpture, so I had the happy idea of making a driftwood rhinoceros back in the Fall. Initially, I prepared for the project by watching a youtube video of a guy who made his mother a driftwood horse for her birthday – in only two days! I started collecting four pieces of driftwood every time I took Teddy for a walk down by the river. Then, when I had amassed what I thought was a huge pile, and armed with my youtube knowledge, I started the project. I made a rough sketch and a plan for a sort of armature (see below). I had some used pressure treated 2x4s lying around so I used them for the armature by screwing some pieces together. When the proportions didn’t seem quite right, I sawed a little off of each leg, then did it again. Once the proportions were right, driftwood was added piece by piece, with 2 screws going in each piece. I soon found out that my huge stash of driftwood was inadequate, since I had been collecting big pieces and more smaller pieces were really what was needed, after just a few big pieces were in place. I kept taking this as far as I could go with the pieces of driftwood that I had on hand, then going for more walks to increase the collection. That became a very pleasant hobby and I loved finding pieces that looked like a rhinoceros horn or foot or ear. My sole cost outlay was for about 4 lbs of screws in different sizes, from 2 inches to 3 ½. I used a Ryobi Power Screwdriver to do most of the work. Instead of two days, it took me around six months.

 I call him Huey. Just as I was writing this it occurred to me that I should help out his species, since they are critically endangered so I gave a contribution to the International Rhino Foundation at Rhinos.org

the plan

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Bad idea: cower in place 32

Trentin Quarantino’s
 ALMANACK 
Inside my vault of abandoned and should-be-abandoned blog ideas


I. Norwegian Plague Jokes.
After the success of my posts on Norwegian Pig Jokes1, 2, 3, and learning from a frequent commenter about the whole genre of Plague fiction, I had the idea to do something up on Norwegian Plague Jokes. I wasn’t sure I’d find any starting material, but figured if I could find some generic plague jokes, I could just Norskii them up a bit.

I didn’t have any trouble finding plague jokes on the internet; in fact, there were (in my opinion) far too many sites dedicated to them. The problem was that they were uniformly awful—racist allusions to “black” plague or “yellow” fever, juvenile tortured puns on body parts à la boob-onic plague, and even worse. Who knew the concept of the plague would be so unfunny? In all that morass, I only found one joke that I’m even willing to repeat, and that one’s not even funny:

Q. Why were the Egyptians optimistic after the Nile turned to blood?
A. Because it was "B-Positive"

(During my brief research, I discovered that the Bubonic Plague had largely spared the Norwegians in the 14th century, until a trader ship carrying wool out of England came down with the plague, killing everyone on board. The “Ghost Ship” eventually ran aground near Bergen, some of the rats escaped to the mainland, and brought the plague with them. Creepy stuff!) (Source)


II. Discomfort Food
Upon noticing my own diet’s tendency to drift towards certain kinds of “comfort foods” during this forced isolation, I tried performing some gastronomic calculus to discover the perfect comfort food. I researched the four basic comfort food groups: (1) fats, (2) carbs, (3) sugar, (4) salt, and the comfort-enhancing additives (or “comfort vitamins”, if you will):

   COMFORT VITAMINS

Vitamin As found in
C1 = cocoa chocolate
C2 = caffeine coffee
C3 = capsaicin chili peppers
C4 = creosote anything charcoal-broiled

I thought a complete comfort food might be: macaroni and cheese made with home-made Cheetos pasta, cooked into waffles, then made into an ice cream sandwich with chocolate covered salted-caramel coffee ice cream inside.

I was going to try making this to test my hypothesis, but I was unsuccessful—I just couldn’t make Cheetos pasta. Every time I bought a bag of Cheetos (which took several days because of curbside pickup), I would eat them before I got around to making spaghetti.

(Cheetos pasta is makable, by stouter hearts than me. See here.) Any report on my own further experiments will have to wait until I get faster ingredient delivery, or stronger will power.


III. T.G.I.C.
I thought there might be some mileage in a “Thank God It’s Covid” post, playing off my old Glad Game skills to expound on the up side of a global pandemic that especially preys on old people and the poor. Maybe new technologies developed, or new insights into the human condition, or new heights of human compassion and cooperation, could compensate for the huge suffering and loss.

Nope, in the light of day, this idea seemed pretty much dead on arrival. The benefits of intro­ducing the possi­bility of eating bats to the world (outside of Palau, who already knew) wasn’t even close to, say, the invest­ment of $288 billion by the NASA moon program that ultimately led to the development of Tang.

Many people have shown heroism on the front lines, but that heroism has been in a battle that could have been so much less dangerous if our political leaders had stepped up, instead of reacting in a way that displayed their moral cowardice, political avarice, and abdication of critical reasoning skills.

Huh. I don’t think I’m currently in the proper place to play the Glad Game.


Thanks for letting me post things that I admit aren’t good enough to post,
Dorn
7/01/2020

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Caution fatigue: cower in place 31

– In which Dorn is just getting tired.

In these days of self-isolation, social distancing, and a greatly reduced number of activities available to pass the time, various forms of fatigue are an ever-present risk. I’ve succumbed to baking fatigue, reading fatigue, TV fatigue, opera fatigue, and writing-blog-post fatigue. (Calling something you have gotten bored with a “fatigue” gives it so much more gravitas, don’t you think? Plus it’s no longer your fault—it’s like a syndrome, which you picked up from working so hard.)

One of the most prevalent characteristics of everything we do these days is caution. It’s no suprise that everywhere, “caution fatigue” is on the rise.

Caution fatigue is defined by Wiktionary as a “desensitization to alarm signals, caused by lengthy or frequent exposure, and resultant slowed or absent responses to new alarms.”

We’re certainly saturated with alarm signals, with levels of sickness and death from covid that seem to break records every day. Nothing of our former lives, it seems, is without danger—not working, playing, visiting friends or family, not even mundane tasks like reading the mail or gassing the car.

I need only to look out the window at our little beach to see the throngs of non-mask-wearing, non-social-distancing swimmers, sunbathers and partiers increase every day. The virus is still here, moreso than ever if one thinks about it, but they’re just tired of thinking about it.

Kathleen told me once of a accident she saw, where a woman pulled out from a stop sign in front of an oncoming car, and was immediately hit. When asked why she pulled out when the approaching auto was clearly visible, she said, “I had been waiting at that stop sign for a break in the traffic for like five minutes. I just got tired of waiting.” That poor woman was suffering bad from caution fatigue.

I can see how caution fatigue could have some evolutionary survival value. If any situation is unavoidable, now matter how depressing or dangerous, perhaps it’s better to be able to step back from it, try your best to function without focusing too hard on the tiger in the room. Maybe it’s a variant of the instinct that is seen in everything from humans to flatworms, that tells you that if something doesn’t work, eventually you’ll have to try something else. Even so, we’re hardly at the point yet where we can’t go on as medical experts say we should. Four months without seeing a movie or eating my favorite Nick’s sausage is annoying, but it’s hardly cause to abandon all common sense, yet.


I am hoping that the country will be hit with a new wave of fatigue soon: “denial fatigue”. It must be hard to continue to deny the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears concerning the seriousness of the pandemic. I’m really hoping that those working so hard at denying it will soon tire of their labors, and start behaving in a way that will make living in a post-covid world safer for me.

Even in parts of the country where the number of cases is still just in the hundreds, and the number of deaths is in the tens (like my own home county), one can’t really avoid seeing the signs everywhere—shops are closed, masks are required in grocery stores, public buildings and parks all literally bear large warning signs.

Sure, it’s easier to deny the evidence when you are surrounded by like-minded people, and you haven’t been personally impacted by the threat. You may be able to dismiss the warnings by as conspiracies by foreigners, or scientists, or worst yet foreign scientists to make you believe something untrue. But not to believe even your own doctor on an issue of your health and safety, what an effort that must take! Surely many covid-deniers must be close to worn out from the hard work of covid-denying!

So that’s how I get through a day when it seems so exhausting to take care not to get infected—I hope for a time over the rainbow, when others are equally tired of denying the need to distance, to wash, to mask. I really think that when everyone does it, being careful will become easier and less fatiguing for all of us, and maybe as an added side benefit, less people will sicken and die!

Here’s hoping!
Dorn
6/28/2020

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See one epidemic, … cower in place 30

– In which Dorn tries to learn from history.

I

thought it would be interesting to see how the corona­virus pan­demic com­pared and con­trasted with famous pan­demics of the past. The most famous pandemic I knew about was the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, so I started looking around for books about that. I especially wanted books written around that time, where the disease was a current event, rather than a historical analysis of a distant calamity.

The first book I found was ­America’s forgotten pandemic: the influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby. It came out in 1976, so didn’t meet my criterion of a contemporaneity, but at least it was a book I could get ahold of, from the trusty Internet Archive, my go-to source for all old books.

Trouble was, the thing was so dense and so dry that I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sure it is very scholarly and informative, but it wasn’t at all what I was looking for in light epidemic reading. So I kept searching. The second book I found had more of a reputation as a good read (it’s touted as a “New York Times Bestseller”), The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry. Sounds like a thriller from the title! And it’s available digitally from the local library!

Unfortunately, I guess a lot of people stuck at home had the same idea, so the best I could do was get on the wait list for a copy of the epic story. I am currently at position number 69 on the list. So while waiting for my turn with this e-book, I decided I had to expand my search further back in time. This time, I struck pay dirt, in A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.

This is the story of the Great London Plague of 1665, written “by a citizen who continued all the while in London”. Daniel Defoe published this book in 1722, more than 50 years after the plague. Indeed he was only five years old in 1665, but he claimed that he was publishing an actual journal of someone (perhaps his uncle) who lived through the plague. The debate continues to this day whether this is a book of fiction or not.

The London plague of 1665 was certainly a whole different kind of catastrophe than our coronavirus epidemic. A quarter of the city’s population died from the plague that year. Much of Defoe’s story is grim and sometimes horrifying (there are descriptions of pain and despair sometimes to the point of insanity, and lots and lots of dead bodies, if you are horrified by such things), but the book also brought out some thought-provoking parallels to our own pandemic.

The unnamed Narrator of the story started his experience of the epidemic as we did, stuck in his house, afraid to go out for fear of catching the contagion. Initially he passed his time like we did, in some ways: baking bread and trying to hoard-buy meat and supplies.

This difficulty and danger of getting food and supplies was mentioned, but they had their own version of contact­less shopping—if it’s too risky to go to the store yourself, just send a servant:

When I first read this, I was grateful that we now have the internet and online ordering and contact­less delivery, so I wasn’t put into the ethically question­able situation of sending my servants out to risk their lives for chores that I wasn’t willing to risk mine for. It was hard to suppress the realization that there wasn’t really much moral difference between using people employed by me to perform these risky tasks and using people employed by Amazon, Fedex, or GrubHub, but I did my best!

There were a lot of parallels in the socio-medical response to the plague. The medical experts then, like now, warned the population of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission of the disease:

Social distancing was practiced widely, al­though the protocols were a bit different, such as the rule (thank­fully not needed now) that one should cross the street rather than step­ping over a dead body on the side­walk. I expected to read some­thing of the ancient equiv­alent of the face-mask, that bird-shaped con­trap­tion that plague physicians wore with the beak stuffed full of perfumes, but I don’t recall there being any mention of it.

The almost sacred spot reserved in our daily rituals for hand sanitizer was filled back in 1665 with an assortment of perfumes, aromatics, and smoke-generators. There was scholarly debate about just the right kind of fire to build to create the proper prophylactic smoke haze. Pitch, sulfur and gunpowder were all popular combustants. (This debate isn’t as pointless as it might sound. The plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats. Smoke or other smells that repelled insects or other pests probably did increase the safety of a household.)

The narrator wrote movingly about the economic hardships. As always, these fell squarely on the poor. Massive unemployment was caused by businessmen responding to the epidemic by shuttering their shops and staying at home, fleeing the city, or dying.

That the poor were able to find food and work at all, the narrator gives effusive credit to the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen, who undertook their jobs with courage and compassion. The book describes the city government’s work at this time chiefly as distributing charity for the poor, maintaining the public order (such as by locking infected people and their families in their houses), and taking over the task of burying the dead from the overwhelmed churches.

The book tells many stories of the noble work of the Lord Mayor and his staff fighting the plague and its effects. Of the work of the national government (what he calls “the Court”), the narrator is charitably brief. (What parallels one might draw with the current pandemic on our country, I leave to the reader.)

My poor recollection of the history of science received a lesson in this book. The microscope had been invented 75 years before the London plague, and men of science had become acquainted with microbes. The risk of contracting the disease from someone with no symptoms was already well-known, and physicians and scientists of the time attempted to design a test to be able to tell if someone was infected but pre-symptomatic, a side story I found chillingly parallel to the efforts of our own medical community.

The Narrator, and apparently all the intelligentsia at the time, recognized that the plague was a biological contagion, and was spread by natural, rather than magical, means. They also were certain, however, that the plague was a warning sent from God to tell Londoners they must return to the proper Christian path. They saw no contradiction in these two beliefs—as the Narrator put it,

Then as now, the workers on the front lines of the battle against the disease were rightly praised as heroes. The Narrator includes clergymen in his list (indeed, they are the first group he calls out). As now, clergy played a crucial role in the comfort of the afflicted and their loved ones, but they played an even more crucial role back then as the interceders requesting supernatural help on behalf of the Londoners (which, the Narrator reports, was occasionally provided), and in shepherding the citizens back to the necessary proper path (which they were happy to return to, at least for as long as death was all around).

The story draws to the close with the end of the London plague, to the great jubilation of the survivors. Sometimes, the Narrator complained, their celebrations were too early and too carefree, when the grip of the plague had dissipated (the death count was down to “only” 1800 a week!) but not vanished entirely.

Daniel Defoe’s Narrator says he wrote his journal for the edification of any who find themselves in a recurrence of the plague. I don’t know but that the book holds a few valuable lessons for us even now, 350 years later. Plus, it was a fascinating story. If you’re curious, you can find it at Project Gutenberg, here. (It’s currently Daniel Defoe’s most popular book on the site, with more than twice as many downloads as Robinson Crusoe!)

Thanks,
Dorn
June 16, 2020

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Path by the River

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” – A. A. Milne

I guess our main challenge in these days of pandemic is staying safe. But we seem to be equally challenged with keeping it interesting – despite the restrictions. This is where I am really grateful for all the Potomac River access paths we have in Piscataway Park, which I’ve taken to walking on a mostly daily basis. I’ve found it a little difficult to paint during this period, but after meeting with my art group I was inspired to haul my paints along on a walk and paint one of my favorite spots down by the river.

-Lona

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Black Lives Matter

It has been hard this last couple of weeks to think of anything light-hearted to write about. Not because of the virus--for all the death and suffering, at least it's natural. No, I'm talking about the televised murder of George Floyd, and the popular uprising from this last straw, which brought to light even more brutalities captured on video. I'm sick and saddened by racists who insist that the possibility of systemic racism in our policing doesn't even need to be looked into (I'm talking to you, Bill Barr), and by liars and sophists who claim that holding police accountable for their brutality amounts to mere "political correctness" (I'm talking to you, Jeff Sessions). And by those who have been made complacent by white privilege, who needed a global protest movement to awaken them to the need to address a problem that's been festering all their lives (I'm talking to you, Dorn). Abuse of the powerless by the powerful has been part of the human condition since forever. Like it or not, the systematic abuse of non-whites is a cornerstone of the American story. We can't change the past, but we must change the future. Changing our story hasn't been easy or gone unopposed, and won't be completed without more mis-steps and backslides, but it has to happen. If you believe that the system needs to change, take heart, and work to make it so. You are doing right! If you believe that law and order is so important that the risk of an occasional abuse is justified, at least come to the table and work to minimize that risk, and ensure that all enjoy the benefits of law and order, and the risks of abuse aren't disproportionately passed to people of color. I did a post a while back (here) about the human tendency to want someone else to pay the price for our own good fortune. This started way back with human sacrifice, and some will argue (and I agree) that we are still practicing that today, under other names like Law & Order. We need to stop the sacrifice of human lives! And if you believe that the benefits to you of a strong (even militarized) police justifies the risk of injury or death to someone of color, then you are saying that black lives don't matter to you as much as your own life and comfort, and you should carefully read your Bible or the Declaration of Indepen­dence, or whatever you draw your spiritual identity from. If you still aren't swayed by reason or compassion, then I hope you will be swayed by force of numbers this election day. Thank you, I had to say that. Next time, I'll be back with another post on the lighter side of living each day in fear of the deadly coronavirus. Thanks for listening. Dorn 6/11/2020 BLACK LIVES MATTER.
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Covid campers -or- The Folly of Youth: cower in place 29

– In which Dorn cruises down the back roads by the rivers of my memory.

B
Art courtesy Lona

ig Brother Zuckerberg is definitely still listening in. Kathleen and I were driving one morning recently, and Kathleen says out of the blue, “I think we should get an RV! I’m sick of staying at home, and an RV is really the only way we could safely travel around and see things!”. We were in my pickup truck, which has no internet or even a fully functioning radio, but somehow he heard, because the very next day on the internet was an unsolicited article from Bloomberg, “Scared Americans Desperate to Travel Are Buying Up ‘Covid Campers’”.

Jeff Green explains in the article:

Cooped-up Americans desperate to get out after months of lockdowns are dreaming of doing something—anything—that resembles a vacation. But a majority of them worry a second wave of the coronavirus is coming, and think politicians have pushed too fast to reopen. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to getting out of Dodge, the close-quarters of an airline cabin are a no-go. That’s where the “Covid camper” comes in.

Toad, Mole, and Rat satisfy their wanderlust in Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows

Too true! Kathleen’s argument for a Recreational Vehicle made sense to me, as it apparently has done to stir-crazy covid shut-ins all across the country. Though how to implement such a step right now, when we haven’t even gone into a building other than our home since February, will take some thinking.

But there’s nothing to stop me from taking a trip down memory lane to times past when we’ve worked or played in mobile digs. As Toad says, “Oh, the open road!”

Back when Kathleen and I were first courting, we decided it’d be a lark to go camping on Asso­teague Island. And by camping, I mean driving there in her new Chevy Vega hatch­back with the back seat folded down, and when we were done frolic­king on the dunes or what­ever, we’d just sleep in the back. And it worked, in theory.

In practice, by the end of the day of fun and sun, one of us was completely bright red with sunburn (who knew that could happen?) and the other was covered head to toe with mosquito bites. And the back of a Vega hatchback with the seat folded down is (a) so cramped that two people couldn’t lay side by side in the back, (b) not really flat, and (c) hot, if you didn’t want to open the window and let the insects in. But we were young and in love, so everything worked out all right in the end.

Note on pictures: none of these are the actual vehicles from my past. In fact, they might not even be the same models. But they are a good likeness for what I see now in my mind's eye.

A bit later when we had settled into married life, we bought a big hulking used Jeep Wagoneer station wagon, which we called “the Whale”. One of its chief selling points was that our girls would someday be of driving age, and I thought it would be useful to have a car which when they said “Daddy, I need to borrow the car”, I knew they really needed it. The thing screamed Family Car—it even had fake wood exterior paneling, as I recall.

This was our vehicle of choice for our camping excursions when the kids were young. It was our first 4-wheel drive car, and we were immensely proud of that. I remember once we had gone on a jaunt to somewhere in Virginia, where they let you park and pitch your tent anywhere, and we decided that the best place was at the top of a grassy meadow only accessible up a 45° grade (I am exercising dramatic license here. I call the slope 45° to give my story credibility, but I distinctly remember it was at least 75°, maybe even 95°. Especially on the way down.)

(Our Jeep did not have treads)

We were too tired to think clearly when we arrived, but hell, we had 4-wheel drive, so up we went! By morning, we weren’t nearly as tired or careless, and the prospect of driving down the slope we drove up the night before was positively terrifying. But there was no way around it, so eventually we did it. We backed down, because (a) we couldn’t turn around or I was sure halfway through the car would start rolling down sideways, and (b) anyway I sure didn’t want to look down the slope we were driving on.

On the way back to civilization, we lost the rubber on one of the tires and had to limp back on the steel belts because we didn’t have a working spare (Did I mention I was still in my “foolish” phase? This was the same road trip where I hopped out of the car at one point to pick up a snake skin on the road to impress my woman with my man skills, only to realize that the snake wasn’t done using it yet).

My parents had taken us on several extended driving-camping trips across the country when I was a youngster, and I wanted to recreate something like that for our own girls. One year, back in the 1980s, there was one of those gas-shortage summers we used to get back then. But there were some signs that it wasn’t as bad out west. We reasoned that this was the perfect year for a driving trip, because (a) maybe there wasn’t really a shortage out there, and (b) everyone will stay home because of the gas shortage, and we’d have Yellowstone Park and the Rockies and the Grand Canyon all to ourselves!

So we did it. To maximize our out-west time, we flew into Denver, where we rented the biggest car on the lot for our trip. It was a shiny new Chrysler Cordoba with genuine Corinthian leather interior! We packed our family tent and all our supplies (which we had cannily mailed ahead to save on airline luggage) into the spacious trunk, along with the rented snow chains that were de rigueur wear for some of the places we planned on going. The thought of driving such a posh car through the rocky wilderness just added to the adventure!

The trip was a great success. We saw all the best western parks, we made friends with a chipmunk in Yellowstone that turned the Cordoba into his mobile home for a one-way trip to Arizona, when we finally flushed him out, and his hoard of our chips and sunflower seeds, during a trip to a laundromat. (Hey! I was obviously still not out of my foolish phase, and hadn’t yet heard of invasive species, or plague squirrels.)

The girls liked it for the most part, but sometimes bemoaned the lack of such amenities as curling irons and flush toilets. (This happened before cell phones were invented, so no one complained about not having one of those.) One of the girls’ favorite stops was late in the trip, when we were tired and dirty from camping and decided to just crash in a motel. With a pool! I can’t blame them for liking it. Though this didn’t occur to me at the time, for them a motel was as big a novelty as a geyser or a gorge. Bigger, since they had now already experienced those.

This motel stop presaged a new phase in our lives, where the kids got too busy to come along, work made for short vacation windows, and our bones grew increasingly achy. This caused us to transition away from camping and other mobile-house trips to vacationing at hotels, motels, farm­houses and hostels.

We returned to the caravanning life, sort of, when Kathleen’s job as a nurse included a regular mandatory on-call weekend, where she was required to stay within 30 minutes of St. Mary’s Hospital (which was about 60 minutes from our house). We got ourselves a beat-up old trailer, and set it up on a friend’s property down on Breton Bay, MD, 20 minutes from the hospital. Here Kathleen would stay when she was on call. Sometimes I’d stay too.

A third of a century later, my memory can classify those times as fun. The trailer was snug, even for just two. It was almost warm enough if you kept under the electric blanket, and staying there gave off an aura of adventure. If Kathleen wanted to make a phone call, she had to climb a nearby telephone pole à la Green Acres. (If you aren’t familiar with the Green Acres telephone pole meme, then you are clearly not old enough to be a Third Ager, and what are you doing reading this?) Incoming calls weren’t an option (still no cell phones), and more than one night’s sleep was interrupted by a knock on the door by the State Police bringing word to Kathleen of some medical emergency. Good times!

Let me close with a link to my favorite mobile-home cartoon, Mickey’s Trailer, even though I’ve shared this before (here). I’ve got to put it up again because (a) it’s just so good, it bears watching twice, (b) it perfectly captures the whole mobile home vibe, and (c) when I was young and my parents took us on those cross-country roads trip in our popup tent-trailer, one of my most vivid memories was going to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and seeing this movie short playing at the nickelodeon arcade there.

Thanks! Happy trails!
Dorn
June 2, 2020

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FLUSH: cower in place 28

– in which Dorn dabbles with commodities futures.

I had talked (here) about my strategy for scoring some toilet paper before our stockpile ran out. I had orders to sellers with uncertain supplies, made six weeks ago, four weeks ago, and two orders made one week ago. I also had a couple of unsolicited volunteer offers. By some alchemy of time and commerce, many of these gambits were coming to fruition—if they were going to be successful at all—last weekend.

The six-week t.p. order from Amazon arrived, as did one of the one-week orders from the local grocery store, and one of the volunteer offers. All the packages of toilet paper were quite large, so I think we’ll be set maybe until the supply chain restabilizes. So our strategy for solving the Cottonelle conundrum has got to be called a success.

*   *   *

We haven’t had as much luck with our handling of some other commodities. Kathleen ignited a Facebook firestorm when she bemoaned our continued inability to order spaghetti online or from local stores. All we can find is the dreaded American Angel Hair pasta.

Among the many re­sponses she got were: commis­eration from those with similar stories, gloat­ing from those whose local stores seemed well stocked, some sugges­tions for online ordering of over­priced pasta from gourmet sources (which haven’t worked for us, yet), and several remi­niscences, recipes, and remon­strations about making pasta from scratch. Mark Zuckerberg helpfully offered an unsolicited news article about why spaghetti is so scarce.

We tried making some pasta at home. It came out pretty good, although Kathleen thought it tasted suspiciously close to Angel Hair.

A little research proved her taste buds were right, as usual. Spaghetti is typically about 2 mm in diameter, while angel hair pasta is about 1 mm. By A = (π/4)d2, a typical spaghettus has a circular cross-sectional area of about 3.1 mm2, while an Angel Hair pastum has a cross section of about 0.8 mm2.

From my pasta roller settings, my spaghetti was rectangular in cross section, 2 mm wide by 0.6 mm thick. (The pasta purists among you will rightfully argue that the very lack of circular cross section makes it not spaghetti at all, but rather a “modified fettucini”.) Whatever you call it, my pasta’s cross-sectional area of about 1.2 mm2 made it much closer to Angel Hair than to the desired product. Next time, I’ll roll the stuff out thicker to get a spaghettier flavor, I’m sure. Still don’t know what to do about the rectangular aftertaste, though.

*   *   *

We were too successful buying red meat futures. We heard the news that the corona­virus was making its way through the meat packing facilities, resulting in meat shortages. So I broadcast orders for red meat among multiple meat-ordering pathways, hoping that at least one of them might still have a supply. 

Unfortunately (for us) the word that beef was scarce had not yet reached the meat delivery pipeline, and every one of my orders was successful, resulting in a full stone (look it up) of beef showing up at our house in the space of two days. 

This might not seem like much, but it was something of a calamity for us when you consider (a) I had sworn off cow meat last fall (here), and although the duration of the beef-fast (or cow-lent, if you will) was now long over, it had its intended effect of reducing my craving for red meat; (b) Kathleen has never been that much of a carnivore; and (c) our refrigerator and freezer were already completely full from all the other hoard-buying we were doing. 

But we managed to squeeze what we didn’t barter away into our freezer by sacrificing the sacred space reserved for ice cream (if we could just figure out how to get that mail-order) and kicking all the vodka out. Desperate times call for desperate measures, y’all.

Thanks,
Dorn
5/21/2020

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Interview with the Immunati – cower in place 27

– in which Dorn talks with one of the Fraternity of the Recovered.

A

s time goes on and the pandemic continues its inexorable spread, the number of people who have recovered from the virus mercifully continues to rise. What must it feel like, I wonder, to go through greater or lesser amounts of misery and uncertainty, and emerge on the other side? How heady is the realization, “I survived it, and I’m now immune and uncontagious!”?

Soon everyone will know someone with a story of a successful fight against the disease, but for those of us who aren’t there yet, here’s my promised interview with an actual covid recovered. 

To preserve her privacy, and to protect her from the ever-present threat of plasma-poachers, I will refer to her only by her initials ER in this interview. Without any further ado, please enjoy the Interview with the Immunati.     –Trentin Quarantino

*   *   *

TQ. Thank you for speaking with me today, ER. I know my readers must have many questions about what life is like post-covid.
ER. It’s a pleasure to be here, Trentin. Or it would be, if I were actually here, and not conducting this interview by videoconference. You know I’m not contagious, right? Probably?

TQ. It must be a very freeing feeling to not have to think twice about who you come within 6 feet of, or who might have touched the railing before you did. I know I still have trouble wrestling with the idea of reducing social distancing, even if I rationally believe I’m not at risk.
  Do you find that becoming immune to the coron­avirus has changed the way people treat you? Do they look at you with a mixture of awe and envy, perhaps tinged with a bit of horror?
ER. That’s right Trentin. I’m the new variable in the equation, a new curve in the modeling. I think some people are still wary of my ability (modesty prevents me from calling it a ‘superpower’) to walk among the living without worrying about who might be carrying the virus.
  Most, like you, continue to treat me the same way they would treat anyone else they interacted with—that is, with caution, or without, depending on if they believe in the corona­virus in the first place.

TQ. I see. Does peer pressure force you to continue to wear a facemask and engage in protective health measures, even though for you they have now become empty rituals?
ER. Yes, I usually find it easier when engaging with people who are still susceptible if I dispense with trying to explain that I’m not contagious, and instead just wear the mask and exhibit the other appropriate cues of social responsibility, even though medically these rituals don’t benefit them or me (probably).

TQ. That’s twice now you’ve said probably. Is there some doubt as to your immune status?
ER. There is, actually. The virus is so new that we don’t know for sure whether recovering from it even conveys immunity, and if so, for how long it lasts. Experience with other coronaviruses, and common sense, tell me that if my antibodies won the internal battle against covid-19 once, that critter will think long and hard before it tries messing with me again. But you never know.
  Plus there’s an additional complication. Every indicator says that I wrestled with the coronavirus for weeks, and have now recovered, except one key one: I test negative for covid antibodies. I’m a “stealth” Immunati. Probably.

TQ. (Unconsciously moves chair a few inches further away from the video­conference screen). Yes, well, um. Elizabeth, I mean ER, you mentioned that some of the people you meet don’t even believe in the coronavirus, or at least don’t believe in its unprecedented health dangers. Do you find more people with this belief in your home state of West Virginia?
ER. I’ve told you before Dorn, I mean Trentin, I don’t live in West Virginia, I live near West Virginia, in western Maryland. But yes, when I go to West Virginia I rarely see a face mask. It’s a relief to be able to take mine off and still fit in.

TQ. In addition to the emotional freedom it can provide, there must be a significant financial advantage to no longer needing face masks, gallons of hand soap, sanitizer and toilet paper. Has being freed from these expenses significantly boosted your standard of living? What do you spend all this money on instead?
ER. I still use soap and toilet paper, Trentin. I’m an Immunati, not a savage. With the money I save on face masks we’re remodeling our house.

TQ. Your husband Mr. Rohring spent several weeks coated in a film of your virus-infested cough droplets, without developing symptoms. Do you consider him also recovered and immune, asymptomatic, or just a ticking time bomb?
ER. Oh, Bill has always been a fire­cracker! Seriously, we’re just hoping for the best.

TQ. While you no longer face health risks from the coron­avirus, the threat of economic disruption is still equally present for Immunati and non-Immunati alike (what do Immunati call them anyway? “humans”? “mortals”?). Do you find yourself weighing the pros and cons of re-opening the country differently now?
ER. We Immunati call those uninfected and unrecovered from covid-19 “muggles” to their faces. Among ourselves, we call them “virgins”.
  And while it does lift some of the personal worry to believe oneself immune, the health risks for my friends and family are still very real, so I don’t think my views on that have changed much. The economic hardship being felt by many during the pandemic is also real, and there are no easy answers, no matter how hard some try to convince themselves that there are.

TQ. Well, thanks so much for sharing, ER. As a token of my appreciation for you taking the time to be with me virtually, here’s a (virtual) T-shirt with a logo I designed myself, that might make it easier to say it loud! Immune and proud!
ER. Thank you, Trentin. My pleasure at talking with you is every bit as real as this T-shirt.

*   *   *

That’s it! Thanks,
Dorn
5/17/2020

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Spoons: cower in place 26

– in which Dorn explores flatware iconography in the time of pandemic.

L

iving in pan­demic-induced iso­lation for two months now has had some strange effects on us. A few days ago we decided that we needed some grape­fruit spoons. Never mind that in the past we rarely ate grapefruit (the last time I remember craving them was when the doc had given me a course of pills with the in­struc­tion that I couldn’t eat grape­­fruit while I was on them, and suddenly I yearned for them). We got a couple of ruby-red grapefruit in one of our curbside-pickup orders and they were delicious, and now we’ve vowed to live on nothing but grape­fruit, and to eat it as it should be eaten, with a grape­fruit spoon, small side up, in a dedicated grape­fruit tureen.

The stores might only just now be re-opening, but Amazon and others have been there for us stir-crazy consumers all along, so lickety-split, before I had a chance to rationally weigh the pros and cons of the decision, I ordered us a matched pair. They’re arriving tomorrow.

I wonder if the relationship between being quarantined and pining for specialized spoons has ever been studied scientifically? It has certainly been lauded in song and story often enough (and by “often enough”, I mean at least once, which I think you’ll agree might be enough).

We saw a simulcast last year of the Metro­politan Opera production of The Extermin­ating Angel by Thomas Adès. It was one of those modern operas sung in atonalities, about guests who are trapped by their own tortured psyches at a dinner party, and can’t leave it. Like us, perhaps, they felt a foreboding of doom so strong that they couldn’t just open the front door and walk out.

Alert: spoilers about the opera follow.

Disclaimer: these spoilers won’t answer any questions about the plot or outcome of the opera. In fact, they won’t really help you understand the opera at all. I saw it, and even watching the whole thing didn’t really help me understand it (though I did really enjoy it).

In one of the opera’s most famous scenes, the counter-tenor sings a frantic ode to coffee spoons, and bemoans his tragic fate at being forced to drink coffee with a tea spoon. (The coffee spoons are back in the kitchen, see, and are therefore beyond their reach.)

Though they can’t get to the kitchen, luckily they can make it to the bath­room (although one couple uses the bath­room for a tryst, and as a conse­quence feels they must com­mit suicide). During the course of the story, the company breaks through the dining room walls to find the water pipes so they can drink. And for food, they slaughter one of the sheep from a flock that fortuitously wanders through the room (did I mention that I didn’t really understand this opera?).

Extermin­ating Angel is noteworthy for including the highest note ever sung in the history of opera: high A about high C. I couldn’t find a working link to this achievement, but here is a link to a number of sopranos singing the second highest note in opera, A-flat above high C. This pleasant little ditty is from Jacques Offenbach’s tuneful Tales of Hoffman. The singer is supposed to be a mechanical doll with whom the hero has fallen in love (don’t get me started on the whole history of sex-bots in opera!).

absinthe spoon
Absinthe spoon

We have a personal emotional link that ties spoons with being trapped, in a way. Back when Kathleen was first diagnosed with lupus, much less was known about it than is now, both by the medical community and the general public. The Lupus Society of America called it the most unknown common disease, and we’ve spent a good amount of time since then trying to learn more about what it is, how to cope with it, and how to talk to others about it.

One touching article that we found very useful in under­standing the disease was a blog post by a fellow lupus sufferer called The Spoon Theory. In it, Christine Miserandino asks the reader to imagine that each morning, you are handed a number of spoons. When you have lupus, every activity (and that’s every activity, including waking up, and getting out of bed) costs you a spoon. When you are out of spoons, your day is over, period. You can’t hoard spoons and use them the next day—in the morning you will get your allotment, whatever it is for the day, and the care you took yesterday with them won’t help you today.

There’s nothing magical about spoons being the item with which your daily activities are counted, of course. The point is that they are discrete, tangible objects, and there is never any flexibility to how many there are, no matter how badly you want there to be more. They represent the hard limit lupus imposes on how much you can do in a day, that you can’t tough, bluff, or finagle your way past. It was a hard lesson to learn, and we still find it hard to teach others.

And on top of its incapaci­tating charac­teristics, those with lupus are especially vulnerable to other diseases, like covid. So now, in addition to all the limitations lupus had already put on our lifes­tyle, we are trapped by the knowledge that if either of us were ever contract the coronavirus, Kathleen’s “under­­lying health issues” make her a prime candidate for not surviving it. So we take every precaution, and take it double, to try to prevent ever catching it. It’s a pretty frightening place to be.

Not to end on too stark a note, here is one more spoon association. This is a picture of a banged-up, misshapen spoon being sold at a premium price (I could buy 8 grapefruit spoons for the cost of one of these!) because it epitomizes wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. I am a firm adherent of this aesthetic, especially when Kathleen, in the throes of cabin fever, suggests that it’s time to repaint the walls, or shine all the furniture, or re-sculpt all the topiaries. I can heartily recommend it!

May the eleventh be with you!,
Dorn
5/11/2020

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Year of the pig: cower in place 25

The un­­pre­ce­­dent­ed nature of the corona­­­virus lock­­­down has resulted in new heights of bore­­­dom. I blush to ad­mit it, but lately I’ve even been bored at the ter­rible, aw­ful news we get each day. More deaths? A new category of disaster? Ho-hum. (Yes, I hate myself for the feeling, but it’s there if I’m honest.)

I had congratulated myself on all the library books I scored before the library closed, but I find I’ve become bored of the whole concept of reading a book. In an attempt to revive some literary enthusiasm, I’m trying to resume my study (if you can call it that) of hanzi, the Chinese written language, which I had originally taken up to dispel the almost-as-bad boredom of commuting two hours by bus to work. It was a good time-passer, even if little of what I “studied” actually stuck.

The commute to work took even longer before the bus route was established.

It was so fun because I didn’t use just any old Chinese lesson book: my study was from something I had downloaded from Google books called Progressive Lessons in the Chinese Written Language, written by Oxford Professor T. L. Bullock back in 1902.

This treatise teaches written Traditional Chinese (not that decadent Simplified Chinese introduced by the communists in 1949). At the time the book was written, China was still an empire, and I swear that a good 20% of the vocabulary must be different words for imperial decrees and punishments for disobedience. And it uses sayings of Confucius in its sentence lessons. It’s really quite arcane and neat, and sure to take a lo-o-o-ong time!

Here’s a sample:

I’ve still got that poorly-scanned PDF of Progressive Lessons that I downloaded all those years ago. My only problem is it’s 300 pages long, and I don’t seem to have any e-book reader that handles it very well, so it’s hard to read (even the English parts!). My biggest regret about retiring is that I didn’t print the whole book out at work when I had the chance. I’m sure not going to do that now when I’d have to pay for it.

You should try it. As incentive, here is a Norwegian pig joke that you will be able to enjoy only after you have mastered Chinese hanzi. (Or you could paste it into Google translate, but it won’t seem as funny if you don’t work for it.)

當員警把他拉過來時,拉爾斯和他的豬正開車在路上。
員警問他:「你不知道在卡車前面和豬一起騎車是違反法律的嗎?
拉爾斯說:”我不知道。員警說,
「如果你答應到城裡時帶豬去動物園,我這次就放你走。
幾天后,同一個員警又拉過拉爾斯,豬又在前面。
員警說:「我以為我告訴過你帶這頭豬去動物園。
拉爾斯回答說:”我做到了,我們玩得很開心,所以今天我帶他去特羅姆瑟。

Thanks for indulging me,
Dorn
4/30/2020

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Tough choices: cower in place 24

– in which Dorn has to decide between two misgivings.

s I mentioned in the last post (here), we’ve started hearing strange noises in our attic. They’re mostly early in the morning, but can happen any time. Kathleen can have just lit the candles, turned on Calm Radio, and slipped into the scented bathtub, when suddenly she hears a caterwaul of scratching and rasping that sounds like Gollum frantically clawing a tunnel through our roof to get to his preci-i-i-ious (well geez, I don’t know, how would you spell it?).

This would be enough to unnerve the hardiest soul, but Kathleen and I both get especially spooked at unexplained sounds in our house, for good reasons that I’ll explain in some future story (best told on a dark and stormy night).

So we had a desperate choice to make: live with our fear of things that go bump in the night, or face our fear of exterminators (or anyone else) entering our house and breaking our covid isolation safety shield.

Things in the attic can do more than unsettle us, of course, they can carry germs, bite the wires, leave a stinky mess, die, and generally mess up the smooth internal workings of the house. So we had to opt for discomfort number (2), and called in an exterminator. 

We called Tommy’s Pest Management because we had used them before with success. We had originally picked them because of their ad in the yellow pages (you won’t remember these of course, as this was long before you were born, but they used to publish thick books of telephone numbers of all the local companies. By social convention, these books were printed on yellow paper, and consulting it was how you knew how to contact someone you wanted to do business with, before Gooogle.)

We picked Tommy, as I was saying, because in their ad in the yellow pages, they had included an exterminator joke about alligators. I wish I could relate the joke, but I just can’t remember it, so instead I’ll provide a Norwegian alligator joke I found while researching my master’s thesis on Norwegian pig humor (here).

Lars is walking down the street one morning leading an alligator on a string, when he meets up with Ole.
“What on earth are you doing with that pig?” asks Ole.
“That’s no pig!” Lars exclaims.
“Hush Lars, I’m talking to the alligator.”

Anyway, we arranged for the exterminator to come out, but he wasn’t allowed into the house–external inspection only. That was fine with Tommy, he got paid either way. 

Tommy brought an assistant with him. The assistant was garbed for the season in face mask and gloves, but Tommy wasn’t. With only one of them masked, I figured, my chances of getting the virus were about half of what they would be if neither was masked, and I decided this would have to be good enough. They weren’t coming inside anyway and I was properly protected and keeping my distance from them. (I did feel, though, something like when I reduce my chances of my car getting broken into by 50%, by only locking the doors on one side.)

They looked around outside some, and pronounced, “mice!”, and pointed out where they were probably getting in. They offered to come in real carefully and place some traps and materials inside, as well as set some outside traps. I said no thanks on coming indoors, just tell me where and how and I’ll do it. 

So now I have some rodent death traps, that ironically I’m leaving in quarantine until I feel like any virus on them has died of old age and they are harmless enough to deploy. Full story at eleven (or when something interesting develops).

Thanks,
Dorn
4/xx/2020

*Journals will be collected periodically and will be graded at the end of the semester.

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Looking ahead: cower in place 23

In which Dorn tries to plan for the future.

E

verybody these days is struggling with new kinds of planning for the future. In the most basic sense, we are all doing what we think is needed to prevent a painful and debilitating disease from slowly claiming us, or someone we care about. I’ve found that my lizard brain—the oldest part of the brain, responsible for primitive survival instincts like fear—doesn’t really seem able to get the concept of catching the virus. I think about it a lot, sure, and it controls (or at least colors) every decision I make these days.

But the fear and anxiety that I feel is much more immediate: I feel fear about doing something that will disrupt the routine of safeguards that we’ve put in place. When I have anxiety dreams at night, they aren’t about getting sick, they’re about forgetting to wash my hands or change my clothes, or accidentally touching something, or being forced to call a repairman into our house*, or to visit a doctor.

My lizard-brain priorities make sense to me. Our survival mechanisms evolved to urge us away from behaviors that could kill us at that moment. Our higher thought processes are the ones devoted to working towards longer-term future goals. I’m gratified (I think) that I’ve internalized the threat posed by not washing my hands right down at the lizard level, so don’t have to rely on my logical Spock brain to keep me conscientious.

*   *   *

The part of my brain responsible for logical thinking already has plenty to keep it busy. Like grocery shopping. When I used to shop, I would forecast my meals and other needs about a week in advance. But now I buy my groceries online, and there’s sometimes a week or even two between when I order my stuff and when I get it. So I am now planning meals three or four weeks out.

Plus there’s the added complication that stores are often out of certain things (like toilet paper!), and I have to plan for the possibility that something I waited a couple of weeks for doesn’t arrive, and if I didn’t have contingency orders in, I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks for even the possibility of getting it.

We had luckily stocked up on toilet paper right before the decree went out that everyone should immediately go buy every existing roll, and we’ve been living on that stockpile ever since. I ordered some about six weeks ago from a place that promised they’d deliver it in six weeks, and did the same thing about four weeks ago. Plus every grocery store order I makes includes toilet paper on the list (and every grocery delivery so far has come in without said toilet paper). My strategy has been to keep requesting it in every venue, and hope something comes in before I’m all out. That time is getting closer.

Yesterday, Kathleen got a message from a well-stocked friend who’s offered to bring over some of the precious paper commodity, and we also got a call from our daughter who said she’s scored a source and is mailing some to us. Plus the 6-week and 4-week orders, and three grocery store orders, are all falling due in the next seven days. So by this time next week, we’ll either have more t.p. than we know what to do with, or have almost none at all, or somewhere in between. At this point my ability to forecast my situation has completely broken down. But we’re not out of t.p. yet, so my lizard brain is still completely happy.

*   *   *

Let me switch to a more serious kind of forecasting for a minute, where my lizard brain falls short. We’ve all been seeing or hearing forecasts of when the number of coronavirus cases will start to go down, so we can start going back to work, seeing family members, and generally resuming something of our former lifestyles. The need to protect ourselves and our loved ones from both illness and from joblessness and poverty affects us on both the logical and the visceral level.

And unfortunately, for many there’s no clear way to do both. Many jobs require human contact, but resuming higher human contact levels is forecast to increase the severity of the pandemic.

But not resuming increased human contact means that the jobs that require it can’t fully (or even partially, sometimes) reopen. And these businesses are running out of time—most have less than 30 days of buffer funds.

Clearly some middle course is needed that will keep both the threat of disease flareup and the threat of bankruptcy and penury at minimum possible levels, but this sort of balancing is not something that our lizard brains do very well. We, all of us, need to work as hard a possible to find a solution that is reasonable for everyone, and not just comforting to our emotions. It’s hard to keep our lizard brains in check when very real threats are all around us, but we’ve just got to try!

Thanks,
Dorn
4/24/2020

*Coming up: our worst fears realized—we need to call an exterminator for something in our attic!

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The Nurse

I’d done some sketchbook tributes to Ysa, my niece the brave nurse that is on the front lines of the Covid-19 epidemic, but I thought such heroism deserved a real painting. She took a selfie for me while all suited up so I could have a reference. So I painted her from the photo and then I added the butterflies. I’m not sure exactly why I added them, but when I looked up butterfly symbolism after the fact I got this:  Around the world, people view the butterfly as representing endurance, change, hope, and life. That works! Stay safe, everyone.

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Emily Post-apocalypse: cower in place 22

– Dorn asks why aren’t we better at following the safety rules?

B

etween the news, social media, and just trying to get groceries, it’s impossible not to be aware of the new three command­ments of social engage­ment: stay home, keep six feet from others, and wear some kind of face covering. But we as a country don’t function very well on rules decreed by experts—we act they way that social pressures dictate we act.

I’m starting to see and feel the strain of the new rules of society colliding with the old ones. Although on my forays to the grocery store I now see almost everyone wearing face covers of some sort, it still hasn’t caught on in our home neigh­bor­hood.

Our house is right across from a small sandy Chesapeake Bay beach, and our road ends a little ways beyond in a picturesque inlet overl­ooking a bird sanctuary, so we see our fair share now of people and families taking a break from being stuck indoors together 24-7. Despite the fact that face masks were recommended three weeks ago for anyone going out, it was only yesterday that I finally saw someone other than Kathleen or me on our street in a face mask.

It was a young boy riding his bike, alone. On closer look, it seemed he was wearing something like a toy plastic nose-and-mouth covering that might have come with a Star Wars game set, but even so, I was encouraged. It told me that somehow, this young boy had picked up on the social cues that made wearing a face mask a thing to do. Maybe that’s the first step towards the hard-headed adults around here trying it. (I have seen one adult here wearing a mask since then, so good news.) And just maybe, some time after that, even the teenagers will join in!

Here’s a shot of the young pioneer. I didn’t want to show his face or give other clues to his identity because he’s just a kid, so you can’t see the mask very well, but you can see that he’s wearing it.

*   *   *

One of the reasons people resist face masks, I think, is that they violate an unwritten social rule about openness. If people can’t see your face, maybe you’re hiding something. Maybe you’re even up to something nefarious (see Zorro, here). I thought of a way around this—nowadays, any image can be printed easily on fabric, so why not print your nose and mouth on the face mask that is covering your real nose and mouth?

As with so many of my brilliant ideas, someone has already thought of this one. In fact, many people have, and have already commercialized it, and have discovered a whole new market for such masks—people whose smart phones won’t recognize their faces and unlock. They look pretty creepy to me, but hey, gotta keep the phone happy!

*   *   *

I saw an example the other day of Kathleen being conflicted between the old rules of social eti­quette and the new, stray­ing too close to a neigh­bor and fellow dog-walker, who was not masked. And she even petted his dog!

It seemed to me at the time that she was being too old-school polite to ask our friend to stay back, and keep his dog further away. I’d never do that!” I thought to myself at the time. Of course, what I didn’t think to myself at the time was that I also didn’t tell him to back off, and didn’t even suggest to Kathleen to back up. I didn’t want to be rude!

Then the very next day our positions were re­versed. We had decided to take a drive over to Jef­fer­son Pat­ter­son Park, closed except for the walk­ing trails, and take some dif­ferent fresh air.

Another car pulled along side us and opened their window. In it were an old couple (and by old, I mean older than us, or at least more decrepit-looking). They were flailing around with a map brochure, and asking for directions. I opened my window and tried to help, but couldn’t figure out what they were looking for. So I got out of the car(!!) to get a closer look at the map. Kathleen says I actually touched the map, but I didn’t, I swear! Anyway, after all that I couldn’t help them and they went on their way. Kathleen was having the exact thoughts I about me, that I had had about her the day before! And she reacted in exactly the same way I did, by thinking about it, but not saying it.

Editor’s note: I did so say it! I just didn’t say it in a way that was forceful enough to get into Dorn’s thick head what I was so obviously hinting at! -K

Jeff-Pat Park and the Patuxent River

The moral is that the new three golden rules have got to supersede the old rules of courtesy at least for a while, and if you don’t stay mindful of what you are doing, you can start letting the old rules take sway and not even know it.

Neither Kathleen or I had the presence of mind to tell the other people to stay away or just pull back ourselves, because we didn’t want seem rude to strangers. And we couldn’t even tell each other to pull back, because we didn’t want to seem rude to each other. If we haven’t learned from our mistakes, I guess they can put that on our joint tombstone when they bury us from the covid: “They were polite to the end.”

Thanks,
Dorn
4/20/2020

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Stand by your best friend: cower in place 21

Trentin Quarantino’s
 DOG ALMANACK 
Special Coronavirus Edition!


Am I putting my dog at risk? Is my dog putting me at risk? These are some of the first questions a dog owner might ask regarding the corona virus. A trending question on Google is “can dogs get corona­virus?”. The standard answer, found on sites from the American Veterinary Medical Association to the American Kennel Club, is COVID-19 is not believed to be a health threat to dogs, and there is no evidence that they transmit the disease to humans.

The principle of online plenitude demands that everything exists on the internet, so you know that at least one study that covid 19 originated in dogs is reported on the internet (here). The news article about the study says that health professionals have expressed skepticism at its underlying science. I found that the most noteworthy aspect of the study was that it focused on the “zinc finger antiviral protein”, or ZAP. This allowed the news article to contain the interesting phrase, “This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 may have evolved in a new host (or new host tissue) with high ZAP expression”.

My own research points to the opposite conclusion: having a dog actually decreases your risk of contracting the virus. I plotted the percentage of households that have a dog (by state) against the number of Covid 19 cases per million people in that state. The results are compelling—the fewer dogs per household exist in a state, the more covid cases per capita! Figures don’t lie, gents:

data sources: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/, https://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/07/07/states-where-people-love-dogs-the-most-and-least/

Product reviews

Speaking of zinc finger antiviral protein, as a dog owner during the time of coronavirus, you know that one of the most urgent problems we face is how to get the poop bag off the roll and open without licking your fingers. These things are nearly impossible to open with your bare hands unless your hands are greasy (which they won’t be, because you have just washed them six times before going walkies), or wet. And how in the world can you wet your fingers if you can’t lick them because you have a face mask on!?

You could put your finger inside the mask and lick it (I know, I’ve done it), but that of course defeats the whole purpose of the mask. You might as well dip your finger in a vial of coronavirus saliva.

But fortunately, there is a solution. Costco carries Finger Pads for the very reasonable price of $3.78 per dozen, and their supplies have not (as yet!) been decimated by panicked hoard-buying. These helpful tools are ideal for separating the thin plastic of a commercial doggie poop bag roll. As near as I can tell, the original use of these handy items was to help in separating close-clinging pieces of paper, from back in the days before your time, when offices actually had papers in them. They must have had a huge stockpile when the paperless office was invented, so they are now able to offer them so cheap. In “standard” and “deluxe” varieties.


Helpful hints

Sneeze Guard. Here’s a new use for an item you almost certainly have lying around, if you are anything but the newest newbie dog owner: that clear plastic anti-lick cone your vet made you buy when you brought your pooch in for (whatever). Your pup hated it, and you stopped using it almost immediately, but you were determined that you would never shell out good money for another one, so you hid it in the back of your closet just in case.

Well, good news! That cone makes an ideal sneeze guard! Used in conjunction with a face mask or all alone, it will keep those nasty covid germs from getting all in your face, not least because you will be too embarrassed to get within shouting distance of anyone while you were wearing it.

Kathleen agreed to model it for this blog post. Originally she was reluctant, until I reminded her that I already had a picture of her wearing a colander on her head that I could use instead, and she didn’t want that aired because it looked silly. Notice that, unlike with a face mask, you can be perfectly safe and still enjoy a nice cup of coffee. Or, of course, lick your fingers to open a poop bag for Fido.

Fashion-conscious covid protection

Covid-conscious leash length calculator. Social distancing rules tell you to stay at least six feet away from anyone other than the people (or dogs!) you live with. But what does that mean for the length of the leash you use during walkies? Most of the other people you meet on your walk will also be dog owners (because, really, who else would brave the foul and pestilent congregation of vapors outdoors, except a dog-walker?), and even if you and he or she honor the six-foot rule, your dogs won’t care about it.

You might think at first a three-foot leash is sufficient, because if your have three feet, and your fellow dog-walker has three feet, then you’ll still be six feet away when your dogs touch noses, right? Wrong!

The real risk of violating social space is when your dogs are done with nose-touching, and move on (as you know they will) to butt-sniffing. Then, depending on the orientation and length of your dog, even with a standard three-foot leash, you could find that the other dog’s head is less than three feet away from you, which means that the other human will be less than six feet away from you!

The solution is simple. The length of your leash should be:

leash length = (collar-to-butt dog length) + 3 feet

If all dog walkers will stick to this formula, we’ll all stay safe!

That’s all for now from Trentin Quarantino! Keep sniffing, but not too hard!


*   *   *


Have you bought anything from the Post Office yet? They continue to work to provide a vital (if old-fashioned) life-line to all of us currently Cowering in Place, despite deep financial problems.

If we all just bought a book of stamps from the Post Office, they’d be out of their financial straits. Think about it—if we don’t do it, who will? It looks like our government won’t!

The Post Office doesn’t yet have any Covid stamps, but they have a couple that look like the coronavirus. Sort of. Give ’em a try!

Thanks,
Dorn
4/19/2020

Next time: Behind the veil of the Immunati: I interview an actual Covid-19 recoverer!

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Just like old times: cower in place 20

– In which Dorn tells a non-covid story, for a change.

T

oday I got to do a job that had nothing to do with the coronavirus. We’re well into spring, with the new life appearing and buds budding and birds singing, blah, blah. For me, one of the harbingers of this fertile season is that the lawn starts to need mowing again.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like mowing the lawn, especially now I’m retired. I find it to be kind of like walking meditation. I bought one of those old-timey push mowers, which means that you can smell the grass when you cut it instead of gasolene, and you can hear the wind and birds around you instead of engine noise, or, if you feel like it, you can hear the inspirational audiobook you’ve plugged your head into.

But today is not the day for the push mower. Before the first mow of the season, the lawn is always pocked with overgrowths of grass and weeds. Some of these have grown into tufts a foot or more high. I suspect these are where a dog peed once, and ever after every dog who wandered by felt it must pee in the same place. For a lawn this feral, I had to break out the old electric mower. With luck, and if I am conscientious, maybe this will be the only time this season I have to use it.

I wore my respirator. Not a covid respirator, but my normal, Ace hardware-model dust and (more importantly) pollen-stopper. I have grass allergies that can get me to sneezing so bad I throw my back out, and even with the daily doses of Singulair, I dare not tackle a lawn mowing job without my respirator and a preventative dose of Benedryl on top. It makes me sleepy afterward, but what greater pleasure is there in summer than taking a nap after you cut the grass?

It was pleasantly cool and breezy today, and even with the power mower noise, it was a fun workout to tackle the growths that had invaded our yard since last fall. I think I did the job without thinking about coronavirus even once. What a vacation from the covid lockdown!

And the lawn looks so nice once it’s done. One of the things I like best about our new-mown lawn is that when it is cut short enough, the weeds (which make up at least 60% of our yard’s ecosystem) look just like the grass that I can never get to grow in their place.

*   *   *

I’ve finally thought of a good pen name! Long-time readers might recall my search (here) and (here) for a decent pen name, thwarted when I found that my brilliant inspirations had already been appropriated by quicker thinkers than me, or I realized they were cognates of old-person memes.

But my new nom de plume is great—it’s edgy, classic and yet of-the-moment, and has that sort of familiar ring to it that makes it feel just right. And as far as I know, no one else is using it yet. You heard it here first!

Thanks for reading,
Trentin Quarantino
4/10/2020

Next time: does coronavirus make a good sourdough starter?

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Social Isolation Amongst the Forsythias

Social isolation is an obvious subject these days. As I write, I am on day 25 of social isolation. I feel especially sorry for the extroverts, and have sometimes thought that the situation is easier for me, who, even in normal times is somewhat socially isolated. But I miss people! Remember places? I miss places!!! Maybe we will appreciate everything more when this is all over.

I found this a hard painting to complete, despite the familiar subject matter. Just focusing can be difficult when there is low level anxiety going on. Somehow my brushes all seem crappy, too, even though they were the same ones I was using before! But, in the interests of normalcy, I am calling this done and posting it so I can move forward. Stay safe, everyone!!!

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Dress for the job you want: cower in place 19

– in which Dorn makes a statement with his face.

ike many people these days, Kathleen and I are trying our hand at making face masks. It has finally vindicated our hoarding tendencies.

I’m not talking about the now-popular plague hoarding of toilet paper and hand-san, I’m talking about what’s been our habit for years now, that just recently we’ve decided to stop.

But maybe not just yet! We had fabric to sew into masks, and some elastic (some big hair scrunchies if nothing else works), but I didn’t know where we’d find the flexible piece of metal that shapes the mask around one’s nose.

Aha! A few years ago, I was replacing a worn out windshield wiper on our car. As you may have noticed, some windshield wiper blades have a thin piece of metal maybe 1/8 of an inch wide, sitting immediately behind the rubber squeegee part to stiffen it. That metal piece is called, apparently, the flexor. “I wonder if this metal would ever be useful for anything,” I mused at the time. “I’d better save it, just in case.”

And sure enough, five years and one zombie apocalypse later, I really did have a need for that thin metal strip. I had another source too, from another hoarding action. You know those metal reinforcers that are glued inside hanging file folders? Well, we didn’t hoard those reinforcers (that would be bizarre), but Kathleen and I both hoarded a bunch of work files from jobs we had 10 or 15 years ago, and by golly some of those files were in folders, and some of those folders had those metal reinforcing strips. Pay dirt! Proof that “Hoarders Always Prosper”, if you wait long enough.

I’ve made a couple of masks now, but they’re not much good. I’m still relearning how to follow sewing directions and patterns (I used to be quite facile at it, back in my hippie, make-it-yourself days in the distant past.)

Kathleen and I wear face masks when we take Archie for his walks. I know they say that face masks are primarily to protect other people from your contaminated body fluids, and not to protect you from them, but I don’t buy that. I can think of four ways that wearing a face mask will reduce your risk of catching the coronavirus.

(1) Even a simple cloth mask or bandana does afford some protection, stopping maybe half of the airborne particles that would otherwise collide with your face. And a 50% reduction in risk from this particular pathway is (ahem) nothing to sneeze at.

(2) A face mask makes it harder to touch your face. You have to really work to get to your nose or mouth, so you’re not going to do it without thinking, and if you think about it, you’ll probably decide not to do it.

See the source image

(3) A face mask, like a uniform, is a form of wordless communi­cation—it transmits a message about you to other people. “I’m taking this whole virus thing seriously,” it says. “Keep your poxy self six feet away!”

(4) Wearing a face mask can exert peer pressure on others to also wear their face masks (and that’s where the real protection to you comes in!). We live in a semi-rural, semi-“red”, quiet older neighborhood, and the number of people we’ve seen wearing face masks in this neighborhood is exactly two: Kathleen and me. There are careful people here who take the virus seriously, we’ve talked to them, but they come out of their houses very rarely if at all.

And clearly the hardest social hurdle to wearing a face mask is you don’t want to be the first one in your neighborhood to do it, or you’ll look silly. But Kathleen and I, as a public service, have relieved our neighbors of that burden. We’ll be like the lone applauders in the audience before everyone else joins in, and march proudly with our faces covered.

Here’s one of the masks we made. To show it in the best possible light, I’ve photoshopped it onto the face of Tyrone Power, star of that great swashbuckler, The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Basil Rathbone and Linda Darnell.

This is from the one scene in the movie where Zorro wears a mask covering his nose and mouth, instead of his more iconic bandit eye-mask (). I thought I remembered that this scene was the first time he went out as Zorro, and I figured that he just hadn’t invented his signature eye-mask yet at this point in the movie.

But while fast-forwarding through a youtube of the movie looking for this image, I saw that his eye-mask was actually introduced in an earlier scene when he tore down the poster about taxing the peasants. Then he robbed the evil Alcalde wearing the protective face-mask in the scene above, and then in all the later scenes he was back in his eye-mask. So I don’t know what is going on in this scene, maybe his other mask is in the wash or something, but this whole thing bothers me probably more than it should.

So the moral of this story is if you’re not staying at home, wear a face mask in public. If you don’t have one, make one, it’s not that hard. Protect your neighbors, and maybe they’ll get the message and protect you too!

Thanks,
Dorn
4/7/2020

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Cower in place 18: the new normal

– in which Dorn covers old ground.

I

t’s funny how things have progressed for me and these Cower in Place blog posts. At first I was just stuck at home with more time on my hands to think of things to write about. Then as the pandemic situation got more dire, it was hard to feel anything was important enough to write about except if it related to the coronavirus.

Now the virus and our response, especially the physical distancing and the stay at home order, are ordinary enough that days can go by with no new shock on the news (the news is still awful all over the world, it’s just not as shocking any more), or new experience to internalize. In just a couple of weeks, where we are now has begun to feel normal.

Before I do anything else, let me say a big THANK YOU to those of you who have settled into a different new normal. People like my niece Ysa in the medical profession (as well as your relative working there, and you, maybe), whose old jobs never stopped when a new, exhausting and dangerous job was added on top. And people like my grandson Chris (and maybe yours) in technical professions, who are still out making sure equipment works, air conditioners are still functional, especially in hospitals and places where failures could be deadly, even though the job puts them at risk every day. And those who are helping just by staying at home, even at great cost to their own livelihood. You’re all heroes to me.

*   *   *

As part of the new normal, I took another trip to the store to pick up online-ordered groceries curbside (first trip here). This second curbside pickup felt to me like, well, like just a trip to the grocery store. The weirdness of packing gloves, masks sanitizers for a trip out, and the decontamination protocol upon returning, had already worn off.

This second time, Safeway had gotten much more efficient at the the whole online ordering thing. I got an email notifying me that my order was ready for pickup, and this time it included an inventory of everything I ordered, what they provided, what substitutions they had made, and what items were not available at all.

The parking at the store lot was light again, but not strikingly so. As I sat in the truck waiting for the guy to come out with the bags, I noticed that now about 1/4 of the people there were wearing face coverings of some kind. So that’s progress.

Almost all of the mask-wearers were older people. I don’t think this means that people were only wearing masks to protect themselves. I think older people, being more at risk, are simply more attuned to the epidemic, and more aware of the latest expert guidance coming out about how useful masks are. I fully expect younger or more oblivious shoppers to catch on to the mask fashion trend by the next time I go—peer pressure is a powerful thing!

We stay at home pretty much all the time except for a couple of exercise walks in the neighborhood, with Archie. We picked our walk times to minimize the chance of contact. This neighborhood is usually pretty quiet except on sunny summer days, and even with schools and many businesses being closed, there were still times when no one is about. On our walks lately, we cross paths with about one person per walk on average, and that person is always walking a dog of his or her own.

*   *   *

I don’t know how many people actually read my posts, but clearly Big Brother Zuckerberg and his robot army are reading it. Loyal readers (if any) will recall that I recently wrote (here) about the sub-genre of Norwegian pig jokes (I believe the etymological term for it is “Norcine”). I got an email yesterday from Pinterest, suggesting that if I logged in, I would find all kinds of Norwegian jokes there. I confess I did bite at the click-bait, and sure enough there were a bunch of items there that I will stipulate that someone considered to be Norwegian humor. I didn’t see any actual Norwegian pig jokes, but I did see a Norwegian physical distancing joke of sorts:

*   *   *

    HOARD-O-METER:
Frozen green beans   green
Milk   green
Velveeta green
Toilet paper green
Coffee green
Broccoli green
Twizzlers green
Green peppers yellow

Well, that’s it! Let’s see if next time, the pandemic is such old news that it doesn’t even make it into the post.

Thanks,
Dorn
4/4/2020

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Cower in place: 17: it’s all in the game

– in which good investments are examined.

With all the shifts in the economy all over the world caused by the coronavirus, many companies are struggling, but some must be experiencing a windfall. Kathleen and I were talking about what would have been good investments, if we had made them months ago before we knew the virus was coming. Hand sanitizer manufacturers, obviously, medical face mask makers, toilet paper companies for some reason.

Service industries too have winners and losers. Big winners, that might have been good to invest in, are companies that can provide goods or services (their own or others’) with a minimum of human contact. Instacart, GrubHub and such, restaurants that are set up to deliver, grocery store shopping services.

I thought that the software companies that make the apps that put a pirate eye­patch or a tiara on your face when you video­chat should also be able to make a killing, if they just modify the apps slightly to cater to the new work-at-home crowd—have it automatically blank out all the mess in the room behind you, and make it look like you are wearing a business suit instead of your pajamas, or nothing.

Something else that it would have been smart (in retrospect) to invest in would have been some of the video-entertainment companies, as home-bound people all over the world look for new ways on the internet to entertain themselves, now that they can’t just go to a game, hear a concert, or play board games with friends. The online gaming platform Steam would have been a good investment, I imagine, or Twitch (which, if I understand it right, is a thing that lets you live-stream a video of yourself playing a video­game to other self-isolaters).

*   *   *

Speaking of gaming, a random article popped up today about a really fun board game I played once with my work friend Jon E—, who is a real game aficionado. He brought this game to a business conference years ago, and we all played after-hours. The game is called Pandemic (you can see why someone might write an article about it just now).

The game board is a map of the world. Each player had a specific, movable location, and a different set of resources (medical, logistical, financial, I forget exactly what). The object, as you might have guessed, is to prevent a newly emerging disease from turning into a Pandemic and devastating the world.

Operation! (not Pandemic)

What I really liked about this game, and what made it unique in my experience, was that the players were not playing against each other. All the players worked together to defeat the disease. If the disease was contained or cured before it had spread through the entire world, everybody won. If the disease managed to spread everywhere and wipe out mankind, well, obviously then the disease won, and all the human players lost.

It’s a cooperative concept that I think would be a good framework for all sorts of games, but I’ve never seen another quite like it. (though I’m no game expert).

Although the game was a lot of fun, I don’t think I’d enjoy playing it as much right now, because (a) it was hard! and (b) if any of the players weren’t in top form, the disease usually won. And I worry about that scenario enough in real life that I don’t also need to be experiencing it in my play time as well.

But I thought then that the non­competitive play meshed well with the we’re-all-in-this-together premise of the game, and I think so even more strongly now. We all have to fight the common enemy in order to defeat it, we all have to be top form in whatever our role is, and we can’t be wasting energy sniping at each other. Now that we’re in the middle of an actual pandemic, the message of common cause in the game Pandemic is even more obvious, and more urgent. If the game sounds intriguing, here’s the article I saw:

“No single player can win this board game. It’s called Pandemic.”
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/pandemic-game-covid.html)

Jon tells me that the makers came out with a followup board game in 2015 called Pandemic: Legacy. He tells me the game added a second unique twist: irreversible changes can happen as the game is played. Institutions or resources that were once available can be lost, and never recovered. Not ever, even if you play the game a second time a year later! Like the cooperative angle, this concept of things never going back to how they were before also seems to predict our current predicament rather spookily.

An article about Pandemic: Legacy, which according is considered by some “the best board game of all time”, is [here].

*   *   *

But back to what I was talking about originally, economic winners and losers in the pandemic. There are a lot of losers—companies that just can’t operate in this lockdown environment, and who might not be able to last long enough to ever open their doors again. Workers who have to choose every day between staying home and keeping themselves and their families safe, or bringing in a salary to keep their families solvent. And workers who don’t even have that choice, who have been laid off or furloughed.

Op-ed pieces sometimes forecast that for many, many people, the economic damage done by the pandemic will far outweigh the medical damage.

Kathleen and I are at higher risk than many from the coronavirus medically, but fortunately we are both retired, and our pensions will come in whether we stay at home or not. When we think of how to help, we usually think of helping with financial hardships people may be having.

Governments have a big role in helping people and businesses, of course, but we who are able can help too. It’s a good investment in your community.

Shop local. Patronize businesses that are still open, if you can. If you have a contract or subscription to a product or service that the virus has stopped, consider letting the company keep your money until they can start again, rather than pulling it back. We’ve told the Washington Post that we don’t want our paper subscription delivered throughout April, but we would like to keep paying our carrier at the same rate as if they were still delivering it.

Remember, there are more ways to be vulnerable to the coronavirus than just being elderly or having medical conditions!

(from https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821580191/unemployment-claims-expected-to-shatter-records)

As always, thanks for listening,
Dorn
4/1/2020

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Cower in place 16: extra-vehicular activity

– In which Dorn ventures out of the house again.

faced death! That claim might have had more punch it we weren’t all of us facing death from invisible microbes every day now.

My particular death-defying feat today was to go back to the grocery store. I’m in that high-risk group known as “old”, and Kathleen is immuno-compro­mised to boot, so going out isn’t just risking spread in general, it’s facing bad consequences for us if we don’t do it right.

My curbside grocery pickup yesterday was a success, as I mentioned (here). Yesterday from the safety of my vehicle, with virtually no contact between me and anything in the outside world, I had managed to score almost all of our most vital grocery supplies.

“Almost” is the key word. One thing that Safeway could not supply was frozen green beans, which Archie eats every day as part of a healthy (for him) life­style. Last night we tried giving Archie a different green vegetable for supper as an experiment, but it resulted in serious discomfort to him (and to anyone else in the same room). So green beans it is!

Minimal-risk options for getting some were weighed and discarded as impossible, which left only one real path forward. Giant Food had frozen beans, but their version of curbside delivery had more or less collapsed from all the unpredictable shortages. But, they said, store patronage was pretty light right now, so I could come shop in person if I wanted.

Some rapid risk-assessment/risk-management calculations were in order. Risks varied by the hour: the later in the day I went, the more likely they would run out of beans, and the more people there would likely be in the store.

Waiting longer seemed only to increase the danger: each day the number of local cases of coronavirus went up, and they will probably keep going up (and even accelerating) for longer than our meager bean supplies will last. If I am going to go out in person, I should go out right now!

“I can’t put my arms down!”
(from A Christmas Story)

We did a quick check for other essential items I could get, consistent with the plan to spend as little time in the Red Zone (the store) as possible.

I suited up in layers (so I could strip off the outer layer outdoors when I got home and still be decent), got a hat and a face mask we had saved from a doctor’s office visit a month ago, grabbed my home-made hand sani­tizer, and prac­ticed some dry run germ avoid­ance and field decon­tamination moves. Then I set out for town.

Prince Frederick was different even from what I saw yesterday (not surprising, as yesterday there was no statewide lockdown order and today there is one). The store parking lot, probably filled on the lighter-than-average side yesterday, was definitely emptier today.

I saw maybe a dozen people in the store, and of these, I saw two people in face masks, one staffer and one customer (two customers if you count me). Yesterday, there were no masks. I predict the face mask is a fashion trend that will catch on big here—at least as big as the supply can support, especially as more and more people figure out that those countries with face-mask-wearing cultures are doing much better against the virus:

Our Giant has those hand-held scan guns so you can clock your purchases as you put them in your bag. This always seemed to me at best a minimal time-saver, but today it was the reason I elected to shop at Giant. It allowed me to assure no one at the store had contact with my stuff after I picked it off the aisle.

I got my frozen beans (yay! Still there! I grabbed six bags), then did my quick circumnavigation for the other almost-as-essentials on the list. I mostly avoided the temptation to do any browsing, but I confess I did throw a carton of non-essential ice cream into the bag while I was in the freezer aisle.

I checked out without going near anyone (easy to do at the self-checkout because I was already scanned and bagged), and made my escape. It was pretty nerve-wracking, but I felt I was in as much control as I could be, most of the time. When the need arises, I could see doing this again!

    HOARD-O-METER:
Velveeta green
Toilet paper green
Coffee green
Broccoli green
Green peppers green
Milk green
Frozen green beans green
Twizzlers red

Thanks! May your hoard-o-meter be showing all green,
Dorn
3/30/2020

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Cower in place 15: first contact

– in which Dorn visits the outside world.

oday is Monday, which means it’s time to go into the big city of Prince Frederick and pick up our curbside delivery of groceries. I’ve got all my Personal Protective Equipment, and a plan in place to avoid all interchange of molecules with store staff, or, well, anyone. The groceries will go in the back of the pickup, loaded by a store loader, while I supervise by phone from the cab with the windows rolled up and the ventilation turned off.

On the drive up, I wondered what I would see in town? Martial law? Smoking ruins? Flying cars and jetpacks? I felt a little like I was channeling Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day: if the streets were bare except for the occasional masked and gloved figure furtively rushing on some unavoidable errand, then six more long weeks of viral winter await. If, on the other hand, the streets were full of clusters of people going about their business without a care in the world, then (I could deduce) we are not practicing our physical distancing or taking other precautions to “flatten the curve”, and the covid tsunami will come fast and hard, and then be over (for the survivors) more quickly. Neither scenario seemed very attractive, but I was hoping for the first one.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcRKgzHjTbveDNoPB4XVMxR4IcBKdP-y4GJEoog_FLOOXIgKb_TU&usqp=CAU

But things looked almost the same as they always look in Prince Frederick. The restaurants and stores that were closed were dark, true, with only one or two cars in the lot, but the open stores—the Walmarts, the Safeways—seemed as busy as they ever are on a Monday mid-morning.

I didn’t see a single person with a mask or gloves on going into or out of the stores, although I also didn’t see any groups of more than two people standing within six feet of each other. If I weren’t watching for it, I don’t think I’d have noticed any difference from a normal Monday.

The normalcy of it all reminded me of one of those shows where the hero spends the whole show in the bomb shelter expecting there to be nothing left of the world outside, then at the end he goes out, and everything is all fine. Surely that was the plot of some Twilight Zone episode!

Once in the Safeway parking lot, surrounded by strolling shoppers in ones and twos, I was surprised to feel suddenly pulled by a strong desire to behave as if this were just an ordinary plague-free Monday. Maybe just pop in the store and pick up the few things I didn’t remember to put into the order, or help the young clerk load my bags into the truck. I didn’t actually think this was a good idea, and didn’t actually do it, but the feeling was still there, strong. That herd instinct’ll sure creep up on you, won’t it.

So I stayed in the car, and the young lady came out an put several bags of groceries in the back, we waved through the window-glass, and I was off. The second I was out of sight of all those shoppers acting like we weren’t in a covid-lockdown, the herd instinct evaporated and I was my old skeert self again.

Recipe Roulette | random recipe finder, what should I cook for dinner?

I was curious to see which groceries I had actually received, and which they were out of, or put limitations on. It felt kind of like having one of those scratch-off cards that promises every one’s a winner, but you don’t know if you’ll just be a normal winner of a 25¢ off coupon, or a big winner of everything your heart desired.

At home, after the required sterilization procedures of myself and my produce, I took stock. I made out pretty good—I got almost all the fresh fruit and veggies on our list. Only a few important items were missing, which we weren’t yet out of. All in all, the hunting expedition seemed a success.

Of course, we won’t really know for five to ten days, when it becomes clear whether I dodged all the virus germs during my time out.

*   *   *

Our pup is celebrating a birthday! Archie turned 14 human years old yesterday, which, depending on how you calculate it, makes him the equivalent of somewhere between 73 and 98 dog-years old. I tried out different dog-year formulas on Archie (here), and decided I liked best the one that makes him 73. That seems about right for his current energy level and attitude about life—he’s starting to get cranky and unwilling to listen to helpful suggestions about what he should do and not do (kind of like me, who is also in that age ballpark). Happy birthday Archie!

    HOARD-O-METER:
Velveeta green
Toilet paper green
Coffee green
Broccoli green
Green peppers green
Milk yellow
Chocolate red
Twizzlers red

Thanks,
Dorn
3/30/2020

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Cower in place 14: social distance

– in which Dorn asks, how did we come to this?

Rated P for preachy.

A friend of mine announced today that he was tired of all the political vitriol he was getting every day on Facebook, and was cutting loose those of his FBFs (Face Book Friends) from whom he was getting it. I was glad to hear that I was not one of the to-be-unfriended, even though our political beliefs are pretty much opposite, but still it made me a bit sad.

One of our country’s problems today is this huge rift that’s developed between people who identify as ‘red’, and people who identify as ‘blue’ (there are plenty of other group names that people call themselves, and even more that they call those who don’t agree with them). There’s always been a distance between them, of course, or they wouldn’t have identified into two groups in the first place.

But lately it seems to have gotten so bad that our country’s social, political, and emergency response systems can’t even work right any more. This is partly due, I’m sure, to the stakes involved: whether you think the other side is malevolently playing down the danger of the coronavirus for political gains, or you think they are malevolently playing up its danger for the same reason, the results could still literally be fatal to you or a loved one.

And Facebook can show us at our worst. The phenomenon where people who are normally polite and thoughtful transform into attack dogs when on FB reminds me of nothing so much as road rage, and perhaps stems from the same reasons in human psychology. Here’s a bit of a 1950 Disney short about mild-mannered Mr. Walker, who transforms into a demon when behind the wheel:

The dysfunctional way political discussions play out on Facebook (and don’t even get me started on trolls, bots, info-mongers and foreign interference!) has become so bad that I’ve been tempted several times to drop out of it myself, even though it’s my most effective communication line to far-flung friends and family, as well as being the pretty much the only way I publicize this blog.

Still, I’m sad that my friend is taking his step, because it means that he will lose a means of communication with those of his friends that differ from him politically, and it seems that could widen the rift even further.

Public health announcements have started to replace the phrase “social distancing” with “physical distancing”. That’s more accurate, of course; it’s the physical separation that reduces the risk of coronavirus transfer.

Social distancing is a better description of what’s happening in our country and the world, both in person and online, when we dismiss those who disagree with us as not worthy of our attention and respect.

And this kind of social distancing a Bad Thing, I believe, not just for our country, but for each of us to have those corrosive feelings running rampant inside. So stop it! And if you don’t agree with me, I hate you and you should eat worms and die. (Just a little political extremist humor there to lighten the mood.)

Thanks for listening, I just had to get that off my chest.
Dorn
3/29/2020

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Cower in place 13: adaptation

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 13 (3/28/2020).

This morning we heard a sound that transported us back to better times: a knock on the door! (Remember those?)

“Oh, wonderful!” we thought. “One of our neighbors has come by with some free home-made pastries and champagne, like in those other magical neighbor­hoods that other people describe in their self-isolation journals!” (YOU know who you are!)

It was our neighbors all right, but they were just stopping by to tell us that my car window was open, and I should close it before the rain starts. What they didn’t know was that I hadn’t touched my car in days, since before the last big rainstorm. Any damage they thought they were preventing had already happened. Good thing we’re all now trapped in our own houses and the very concept of transportation to some other location is now obsolete, or I’d be pissed!

*   *   *

See the source image

We’re starting to adapt to the new normal, I think. For the first week or two, I remember the start I would feel every time I realized “there’s a way that I could do that without coming into contact with anyone!” Now, it’s almost natural.

We canceled all our in-person doctor visits, and interact with them by phone or on their internet Patient portals. We haven’t tried a video-consult yet, but it will be just a small leap.

We’ve been getting our medicines from a mail-order pharmacy for years now (our insurance mandates it), but just yesterday we received our first mail-order supply of dog medicine for Archie. I had canceled my periodic run over to the vet and just had them arrange to mail it.

When we think of restaurant food now, we think of take out. Some of our favorite restaurants seem to be shuttered for the duration (at least, they aren’t answering the phone. We haven’t been there in person to see, of course), but some still do curbside service.

For those restaurants who still open, we have our decontamination protocol down pat now. For those that are closed, well, we just try to make it ourselves, or do without (often, these two options amount to the same thing, in the end).

We’ve tried our hand at ordering our groceries online for curbside delivery from Safeway. The ordering part seemed to work fine, although they are so busy that we couldn’t schedule our actual pickup until next Monday. I guess that’s a good thing, their workers are still working and not on unemployment. And I imagine it’s easier to keep safe protocols in a store when there aren’t all those customers underfoot.

We started the last roll in our normal cache of toilet paper this morning. Soon we’ll be dipping into our apocalypse stash of Brand X (“now extra shreddy!”) toilet paper, which I picked up a few weeks ago in one of our last shopping excursions, back when the rumors of vanishing toilet paper were just starting. But before that happens, we can enjoy the gift-wrapped roll left at our house at some point last week when we weren’t looking, by good neighbor and local hero M—. You see, our neighborhood can be magical and Mr-Rogers-y too!

Here’s a toilet paper hoarding joke from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

*   * *  *

We got a post-card today from our relations visiting our ancestral Norwegian home. (Strictly speaking we got it yesterday, but we give all our mail a 24-hour quarantine before reading it.) It was mailed from Norway several weeks ago, but it took so long to get here that all the travelers have since returned and completed their 14-day quarantine before we ever saw the card. Welcome back! (One of those travelers is co-blogger Lona, who didn’t have blog-posting access from her quarantine site, which is why she’s been so quiet.)

*   *   *

Big shout-out to Kathleen and to ex-work friend Elizabeth (ex-work, not ex-friend) for passing on this wonderful song, about staying indoors and defeating the coronavirus. I think that’s something we could all get behind. Here’s the link, but be warned it’s Not Safe For Work. It uses raunchy language and some dirty words, as you can deduce from the title, which is also the song’s refrain: “Stay the F**k at Home”.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/28/2020

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Cower in place 12: Norsk

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 12 (3/27/2020).

ccasionally Kathleen gets to worrying a bit about how this whole virus thing is going to affect us, or our kids, or our retirement, and has trouble sleeping. But last night she slept well. She sometimes asks me to wake her up in the morning—a sort of “pay it forward” for Archie waking me up to go on pre-dawn walkies—but this morning I just couldn’t, she was snoring so peacefully.

I told Kathleen about this after she woke up, and she was curious. “How do I snore?” You can’t be married for 41 years without picking up a few tricks, so I told her, “like an angel.”

She observed that I snore in all sorts of different ways—“like a rainbow”, she says. Sometimes I snore like the three stooges.

(For those of you too young to remember or care, the Three Stooges snored like this: “SNOO‑OO‑OORT wee‑be‑be‑be-be‑be‑be‑be‑beep”. The Three Stooges were an afternoon TV staple when I was young, mostly enjoyed because they were STRICTLY FORBIDDEN by Mom, who rarely forbade anything. She banned them because their humor consisted chiefly of hitting and otherwise damaging each other, which she was afraid would give us kids ideas.)

Other times, Kathleen says, I snore like a Norwegian pig. She is referring to this joke, which we learned from brother-in-law Chris, who attributes it to Garrison Keillor.

Ole goes into town of a Saturday night. Much later he stumbles home, completely lit. In the dark, he misses his own house and wanders into his neighbor’s pig pen, where he finds his neighbor’s prize pig lying peacefully asleep. It’s a cold night, so Ole snuggles up next to him, and listens happily to his contented snoring. After a while, it occurs to Ole that it sounds like the pig is snoring in Swedish. The longer he listens, the more he becomes convinced that that pig is really talking, in Swedish, in his sleep. Finally his curiosity can stand it no longer and he jabs him in the belly and demands, “Är du svensk?”. The pig rolls over and grunts sleepily, “NOOOOOORSSSK!”

The Norwegian pig joke constitutes a rich branch of Scandinavian literature. Here’s another, from my ex-boss Leon:

Danish guy went to visit his Norwegian cousin who was a farmer.  The cousin was showing him around the farm and the Dane was amazed at how healthy and plump all the pigs looked. The Dane asked what his secret was and the cousin said he’d show him. He took him and one of the pigs out to his apple orchard, picked up the pig and held it up to where it could reach the apples, which it ate happily. Wow, said the Dane, I understand now, but doesn’t that take a lot of time? Sure, said his cousin, but what’s time to a pig?

I am a firm believer in the Liebniz’s principle of online plenitude, which states that everything that can exist, must exist on the internet. Armed with this faith, I set out to find the website of Norwegian pig jokes. Oddly enough, I could not. There was a page devoted to pig jokes, and plenty of pages for Norwegian jokes, but none dedicated specifically to jokes that combined these two principles of humor. This only shows, I believe, how far our search engines have to evolve before they can reveal to us All Knowledge. The truth is out there!

All of the many Norwegian joke pages, it seemed, included a version of the same pig joke, which indicates to me that this joke is perhaps the archetype of all N/p jokes. (Please note: I am a proud descendant of Norwegians, and am therefore legally entitled to make jokes like these):

A Norwegian, a Swede and a Dane made a bet about who could stay the longest in a stinky pig barn. They all went in at the same time. After only two minutes the Dane came running out. Five minutes later the Swede stumbled out the door. After ten minutes, all the pigs ran out.

I feel like I had best quit now. Thanks for reading,
Dorn
3/27/2020

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Cower in place 11: slap her, she’s French

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 11 (3/26/2020).

Nothing much happened today. The hours just seemed to drag on, especially compared to all the wild partying of the days before. To demonstrate how dull the day was, one of our most exciting moments came when Kathleen asked Siri, “what was that movie where the man went back in time and fell in love with a beautiful British woman with long hair?” Siri told her the movie was Slap Her, She’s French.

I think Siri is cracking from the pressure of cowering in place too. This movie seems to have abso­lutely nothing to do with time travel, or anything else Kathleen said. Variety called the movie a “relent­less­ly low­brow outing which plays like ‘Clueless Does South Fork’ with a side order of garlic”. That’s all I can tell you about it–it seems too uninteresting for me even to find out enough to recommend or pan it.

I realized today that sometime in the last couple of weeks I had stopped wearing my watch, no doubt because time doesn’t really matter any more, does it? Does time even exist any more? But I tracked down my watch and put it back on, not because I need to know what time it is, but because I need to know how many steps I’ve taken. My earlier resolve to work out on that elliptical monstrosity in our exercise room has proven, uh, irresolute, so I need to figure out a new plan to keep my body moving.

We did manage a walk or two up the street with Archie today. Saw some friends and neighbors on the way so got to chat a bit, although the “what have you been up to lately?” conversations had a kind of surreal sameness to them.

The weather was so nice that we decided it was time to get out, really get out, and we started plan­ning what would be our first sub­stan­tial emer­gence from our panic house in a couple of weeks: maybe to­morrow we’d take a jaunt over to near­by Jeffer­son Patter­son Park, to walk some of the trails there. To play it safe, we first called over to figure out the best time to go. We needed the hours it was open, but more importantly, we needed to know when all the stir-crazy parents would bring their high-energy children over to play there. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but they’ve got those symbiotic side deals going with cold and flu germs, that have been closing schools since time began. My hats off to all of you navigating this new landscape with kids underfoot!

The City of Ember.jpg

Planning our escape from the house for the joy of getting into the open air made me think of a children’s book I enjoyed: The City of Ember by Jeanne DePrau (2003). It’s about a small town that lives deep underground. It has done so for so long the inhabitants don’t know any other way, but a heroic boy and girl follow clues to discover the town’s history and dangerous fate! It won the 2006 Mark Twain award, and I think it’d be good reading for a 10-year-old or a family, or really anyone of any age stuck bored in the house longing to get back out into the outside world.

We made peanut butter and jelly cookies for dessert tonight, that was nice. Well, here’s hoping that tomorrow proves more exiting!

Thanks,
Dorn
3/26/2020

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Cower in place 10: happy returns

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal day 10 (3/25/2020).


he festivities continue today!
It’s Kathleen’s birthday! We picked our wedding day to coincide with her birthday, so that no matter how long we were together, I would never have an excuse for forgetting either Important Date. (The reason our anniversary is off by one day from her birthday is itself an interesting story—for another day.)

I had some really good presents lined up for K’s big day, including a fancy restaurant meal, and a night at the opera. And not just a cheesy movie simulcast of an opera like I like so much, but a real, in-person opera at the Kennedy Center! And not just any opera, but Mozart’s Don Giovanni! You know the one, it’s where (spoiler alert) at the end, the devil drags the wicked Don down to hell, right onstage!

Great stuff, right? The virus put a kibosh on all those plans. Restaurants are shuttered, and the Kennedy Center canceled all performances for March. And unfortunately, I didn’t have a boffo backup plan.

So instead, we’re having a quiet day together enjoying each other’s company. And as anyone who’s been married over 40 years, and who since retiring a year ago has spent 24 hours a day in each other’s company, there’s just no pleasanter, more relaxing way to spend a day, especially if you’ve picked up a few tricks along the way (see my post on going deaf).

After our big fancy birthday foamy lattés, we breakfasted on leftovers. One of the leftovers was some buttered linguine that we mixed with leftover chicken soup. There was some compacted, oily linguine in the bottom of the container, that looked to me for all the world like folded ramen noodles before you cook them.

Brainstorm! I bet if I dried these in the oven, they would turn into ramen noodles, or a reasonable facsimile. (We already have a stockpile of ramen noodles in with our other stockpiled supplies so it’s not really a survival necessity, but still, the results might be interesting.) So I took the whole blob of congealed linguine and put it on a rack in the oven at low heat.

Figure 1. (before)

It was done in about an hour. And by “done”, I don’t mean that it was dried out into a perfect ramen-cake. I mean when I took the half-dried mess out of the oven to inspect it, I dropped it onto the floor, with a side stop on the way down all over my new suede slippers that Kathleen had given me for my birthday. Experiment over!

Figure 2. (after)

But a new experiment began (that’s the circle of life). The internets say that the way to clean oil stains off of suede is to bury the item in cornstarch, and leave it there until all the oil is absorbed into the starch (I forgot how long it says that takes). Then brush all the cornstarch off and the shoe is as good as new! The results of this experiment will be reported in some future post.

*   *   *

Like many people, we have a few waste bins in the kitchen and around the house, and when these get full, we empty them into the big trash can in the back, which we pull down to the curb every Wednesday evening. Today, I went out and was surprised to see that in an entire week, we hadn’t put a single trashbag in the can. Nothing in there but yesterday’s pizza boxes!

This could mean (a) rising to the crisis, we’ve gotten all pioneery and waste-not-want-notty, and just aren’t generating much trash any more, or (b) we’ve gotten all bachelor-y and lord-of-the-fliesy and aren’t even bothering to put our trash in a bin.

Fearing there was more (b) than (a) in the answer, we said maybe we should hire someone to help us keep the place clean. The problem was that we were both scared to let anyone in, for fear of virus spread.

We decided we were much better off just sticking with our current help, Kathleen Jr., who you met here. In fact, we thought of a whole new advertising campaign for her and her sister robots: “Quarantined? Human contact denied? Lonely? Get a Roomba, and enjoy a friendly, sympathetic and efficient household helper! Now certified 100% non-corona-infected!”

*   *   *

We debated whether to snap our fingers at danger and pop over to the local convenience store and get some birthday ice cream. We ultimately decided not to snap at danger. Instead, we made a rude gesture at indigestion, and cooked up mac & cheese for supper. Bold move, I know, especially after the pizza binge of yesterday!

We signed up for a free trial month of CBS All Access (or, as it should be known, the all Star Trek channel) and binge-watched some old and some new Star Trek episodes. Just the thing for a rainy day in front of the fire! Star Trek: Discovery seems more interest-holding than Star Trek: Picard, but so far we’ve only seen a couple of each, so maybe things will pick up.

Thanks! Birthday shoutout to Kathleen!
(Kathleen says “no need to shout, I’M not the deaf one”)
Dorn
3/25/2020

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Cower in place 9: celebrate!

– Dorn’s isolation journal, day 9 (3/24/2020).

It’s our anniver­sary today! Kathleen and I are celebrating 25 bliss­ful years together! Not bad at all for a couple that’s been married over 40 years. (Ha ha, get it, what I did there? That’s an unhappily-married joke of the sort in vogue from a place called the Catskills that no longer exists in our universe, from an era long before you were born). Actually it’s our 41st anniversary, and we’re both pretty happy with ourselves about it. Even the cancellation of all the things we were going to do today isn’t really that much of a downer.

We started the day with foamy lattés and home-made blueberry scones (which I overcooked a bit because I was too lazy to cook them the proper way, in the barbeque grill out back). Then, since we were feeling really perky, we decided that monthly schedule be damned! and we’d bathe and get out of our pajamas for the day!

ledo pizza
they never cut corners

We’re thinking of picking up a Ledo’s pizza, in honor of an anniversary date we had planned with another couple, before our plans were cut short by the (you know). We can ditch the box without bringing any virus germs into our house, but what about the pizza itself? We searched the internet in vain for a method to wash the pizza without making it all soggy and soap-tasting, until finally we had a great idea! If only we had a way, maybe a chamber, where we could heat the pizza up hot enough to kill all the virus molecules! That’d work, surely! Now we just have to figure out how to operationalize that brilliant concept, and we’ll be all set.

I got Kathleen a present of the kind every homemaker dreams about—a new top for our kitchen range. (This wasn’t intended to by my ONLY anniversary present, but (you know).) This wasn’t an easy score, because our Jenn-Air range/oven was old and discontinued, practically mythical, even when we moved in twenty years ago. Even the replacement parts got discontinued in 2007. Thank heaven for eBay, where no matter what piece of junk you’re in the market for, somebody is trying to sell it to you.

It came, as all the best presents do, as something of a kit. A big cardboard box was left at our door by a deliveryman too cautious of germs to even ring our doorbell, so we’re not sure exactly when it showed up. But we subjected it to our standard package quarantine protocol by not touching it for 24 hours, so it sat in the rain all day yesterday.

Today we broke it open (which wasn’t hard, as the packaging was now all soggy wet cardboard) and assembled it all on the top of our range. Very nice looking, and I’m sure our food will be even tastier from now on (except that Kathleen says our stove now looks way too nice to cook on, and we’ll have to keep all the old parts and put them back on the stove whenever we want to cook something).

*   *   *

According to holidayinsights.com, there is an official gift category for the 41st anniversary: land. We bought ourselves some potting soil for the shrubs, flowers and aloe plants we want to plant or replant, so I think we’ll claim victory on that social obligation. (I can’t wait until the 44th anniversary, the “groceries” anniversary!)

*   *   *

Eventually we figured out an ingenious way to heat-treat our pizza, so I put in an order to Ledo’s. Kathleen decided she wanted a Greek salad too. You heard right,

Safety-first
 Risk-averse
  Former nurse
Kathleen

(That’s a little anniversary poem I wrote for her.) Yes, Kathleen decided she wanted a raw, uncookable, un-washable, 95%-surface-area salad. Her justification? “They make the best Greek salad around!”

In a real good news/bad news twist to the story, Ledo’s told us that they had discontinued the Greek salad from their menu. Nooooooo! Sobbed Kathleen. On the bright side, she dodged certain death from having eaten that Greek Salad.

Public Service Announcement
Eating salad from a restaurant does not cause certain death, even in these troubled times. But the experts do say that all things being equal, hot foods are more incompatible for the virus to lurk on than cold foods, so are a slightly better take-out bet.

Thanks!
Dorn
3/24/2020

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Cower in place 8: old man worry

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal day 8 (3/23/2020).

oday is a cold, wet, dreary day, and I find my mind turning to all the things I could be worried about. They say it helps to talk about it, so here goes. (I assume that means it helps ME to talk about it. I’m not so sure this will help YOU, gentle reader, so feel free to skip this whole post. I’ll probably be more chipper tomorrow.).

Over and above the new-normal everyday worry of me or Kathleen getting sick…

(1) Archie is running low on his pills. He’s about 75 dog-years old (as I calculated here), and takes almost as many pills as the humans in the family. The prescription has been waiting for him for about a week, but I’m not ready to go out yet and pick it up—I feel like I should wait until I have a lot of things I have to do out there before I brave the Dangerous Outer World.xxx

(2) I also didn’t drop off my Dad’s malfunctioning hearing aids at the repair place because of the same fears, despite my promise to do so. Instead, I just mailed them in, and forced the postman to assume my risk. Will they get there all in one piece?

(3) Our daughter and granddaughters arrived home last night from what felt to us like a suicidal Wyoming-to-Michigan road trip. She says they are all fine, and were extra careful for the entire trip. I’m relieved they got home safely, but I have set my mental counter to “day 1”, and for the next two weeks I’ll wait for periodic updates on how they’re feeling. Stressful!

(4) On Friday, NOAA reported that an employee at the building I used to work in had identified positive for the Covid-19 virus. He or she was last in the building two days before testing positive. On Saturday NOAA announced mandatory telework for all eligible employees in light of the situation. I don’t know who it is, or where in the building, or if this affects anyone I know there. It’s been over a year since I worked there, but I feel a kind of survivor’s guilt for clearing out well before the threat hit.

*   *   *

That’s enough for now, I think. Thank you for listening to me count off my worries, you’re true friend (not like all those who DIDN’T read this post, they’re just fair-weather friends and we heap scorn in their general direction). Now I feel better.

As a reward of sorts, here’s Bing Crosby singing “Count Your Blessings” from the rather corny, rather camp movie White Christmas (1954), which was obviously made to cash in on the continued popularity of an earlier (and better) Bing Crosby flick, Holiday Inn (1942).

And as a reward for listening to that, here’s “I Put a Spell on You”, by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/23/2020

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Cower in place 7: good intentions

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal day 7 (3/22/2020).

t’s getting harder to think of anything funny to write about each day. We’re pretty well stocked up, we’ve canceled all our upcoming doctor’s and other appointments, and are resigned to spending days or weeks here if needed. (We haven’t traveled anywhere dangerous lately, so this isn’t a quarantine that ends in 14 days. Our isolation is open-ended.)

Cabin fever is starting to set in, and from our window we watch the sporadic cars drive to the world beyond Long Beach Drive with envy, and not a little curiosity. What is so urgent that it’s forcing them to face the contagion of the big city? Medicines, food, just the need for physical proximity to other humans? But I’ve got to maintain my Safe Distance, so I don’t even have an opportunity wave them down and ask them. Especially without pants on. (Thanks for that coping tip, Scott!)

Our news comes from the TV and the internet, and they only seem to report on one topic now: the coronavirus. The news seems more dire each day. Even beyond the medical issues, this is going to have a terrible economic effect, especially among people who don’t have an adequate safety net.

We feel we should help, but how? Keep patronizing local places of work, maybe, so the businesses don’t have to lay off people, or worse, go under? But that’s near impossible when those workplaces are closing precisely because we must all social-distance! The same thoughts must be occurring to a lot of people, because internet stories on how you can help, even if fully quarantined, have started to pop up. Here’s one.

https://forge.medium.com/what-you-can-actually-do-to-help-right-now-91afb961cdca

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Fortunately (for this post), I checked in with my Dad this morning. He’s doing fine, but wanted to ask if he had missed Easter. He and I were both still plugged in enough to know today was Sunday, but beyond that I couldn’t help him. I suggested that if it really was Easter today, the TV would stop talking about the virus long enough to mention it, so it probably hadn’t happened yet.

I confessed that I couldn’t be sure, because my trips to the grocery store had become so rare that I couldn’t assess whether the jelly bean stocks had all been depleted, or if the remainder had gone on 75%-off sale yet. So not only did I not have any jelly beans, but I couldn’t gauge exactly where we were in the canonical cycle. He said that he had a huge store of jelly beans, of just the kind he liked best (jet black!).

“Hoarder!” I cried.
“No, no, it wasn’t me!” he pleaded. “My granddaughter A— bought them for me! SHE’S the hoarder!”

(note to self: don’t tell my Dad about any crimes I plan on committing.)

*   *   *

    HOARD-O-METER:
Good intentions green
Toilet paper green
Coffee green
Pickles yellow
Concrete helpful actions yellow
Jelly beans red
Velveeta red

Thanks,
Dorn
3/22/2020

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Cower in place 6: blue

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 6 (3/21/2020).

W

e had to let someone we didn’t know into our house! We had a broken window that needed repair. It’s funny how something that used to be so everyday can now send a frisson of panic through my body. But only for a moment. We were pretty sure that Steve from the window repair shop was taking his virus precautions seriously, because he wouldn’t come in until he was satisfied that neither Kathleen nor I had left the country recently. Good for him! Just the same, we kept our distance, and when he was done, we washed the windowsill and doorknobs.

*   *   *

Kathleen’s iPhone battery chose yesterday to die. The phone still works fine, it just has to stay plugged into the charger. But even though we, and the phone, are currently home-bound, this made me uneasy. It just seems like especially now, it doesn’t feel safe to be without a fully functioning cell phone, amiright? After some panicky phone calls (seems every local phone store is closed for the virus!), I finally arranged for a replacement to be mailed out, stat.

We had had the hint of a start of a plan to go see the cherry blossoms in DC this morning—get us out of the house while not forcing us to have any physical contact with anyone. But we couldn’t, not today, because we had to wait for the replacement phone to show up.

The new phone just now arrived at 5pm. The UPS guy skedaddled after dropping it on our porch, not even waiting for the signature they said would be required. After I brought in and opened the mailing box, I remembered to wash my hands before tackling the inner box (which I assume was packed at the factory months ago so, corona-free).

The DC cherry trees will have to wait. But Kathleen got some gorgeous shots of one the cherry trees down our street here in full bloom.

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We made some pickles a couple of weeks ago that we have been enjoying. As I finished up one bottle of them, I reflected that it may be a long while before I go to the grocery store again for something as non-urgent as cucumbers. I tried to savor that last pickle, knowing that it could be summer before I have another.

Deja vu! or something. I bet our pioneer ancestors had felt that same way many times in Marches past, when their preserves stock was dwindling and summer harvest was still months away. I felt a moment of solidarity with them, and then a longer moment of embarrassment at comparing the hardship I was going through (which was almost none, really) with what they experienced. Every action is a lesson!

*   *   *

I decided to pass the time by coloring my hair blue again. Only this time, I can do it more easily, because of the imposed social isolation. I don’t have to physically dye my hair, I can just virtually dye it—by telling everyone that my hair is blue. Since we are socially self-quaran­tining, who’s to know I’m wrong? I believe this technique of describing one’s person inaccurately was perfected during the rise of the Dating App.

So anyway I’ve virtually dyed my hair blue again, and given myself a virtual mohawk to boot. Here’s proof:

Thanks,
Dorn
3/21/2020

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Cower in place 5: noticing

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal, day 5 (3/20/2020).

Public Service Announcement

Kathleen and I try to keep these posts upbeat, but the coronavirus is no joke!

It’s up to all of us to keep the rate of spread of the virus slower than the capacity of our hospitals to treat it. As a headline in today’s Washington Post put it, “Fate of outbreak in hands of 328 million” (that’s us!).

Please: If you absolutely have to go out, stay 6 to 10′ from others, and wash your hands obses­sively, and do what health profes­sionals and experts tell us to do.

And if you don’t absolutely have to go out, don’t!

The social distancing imposed by the virus has left us with plenty of time for the three W’s (Waiting, Watching, and of course Washing). We’ve started to notice things….

We’ve noticed, for example, that the shrubbery bushes out front that form a barrier and no-parking enforcer between our yard and the street are starting to show dead brown branches. We can’t really tell what caused them. It could be that I gave them an over-aggressive trim last time in a vain effort to make them look like boxwoods (although “aggressive” is not an adjective often used in the context of me doing house- or yard-work). Or it might be that the fumes from the cars and delivery vans that pass by are slowly asphyxiating the bushes. Or maybe some plant disease, or maybe just old age, or maybe the fact that each of the shrubs has grown about twice as tall and three times as wide as the label said they were intended to grow.

Whatever the cause, we now have to think of what to do about the problem. Prune the dead spots and hope the living ones will fill in the holes? Uproot all the bushes, and start afresh with new plants? Something in between? Just put up a fence? When we need a break from worrying about issues of medical and economic health of us and our loved ones, we re-invigorate by arguing about what to do about the bushes.

*   *   *

I also noticed for the first time a delightful anachronism in Stella Gibbons’s comic novel Cold Comfort Farm (which I raved about here). This book was written in 1932 and the action seems to take place around 1920. The book is not in any way futuristic or science-fictiony: as I mentioned, it’s a silly comedy of class and manners mashed up with a tame gothic horror novel. It’s like P. G. Wodehouse tried to imitate Jane Austen channeling the Brontë sisters.

But there’s this one single encounter exactly halfway through (page 163 of 326), when the heroine Flora is talking with her quasi-boyfriend Claud. At first it seems like a phone call, but it becomes apparent that they are actually videochatting:

“Squalid or not,” said the small, clear voice of Flora, fifty miles away (for she thought she would answer his letter by telephone, as she was in a hurry to get the affair arranged), “he is all we can find, unless we have that Mr. Mybug I told you about.”

Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora’s fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine’s future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials.

What in the world is going on here? They didn’t even have television in 1920, or even 1932. Did they?

Well, it turns out they did. Television was invented in the late 1920s, and by the early 1930s there were demonstrations of videotelephone “booths” at various world expositions and in post offices. I’ll bet Stella Gibbons attended one of the expositions, and was so enthralled with the modern technology that she slipped it into her book! Aren’t people clever?

Source: Wikipedia article “Videotelephony”

*   *   *

It’s a blistering hot day today (well, for March—it’s 80° outside). More folks are starting the exodus from their homes/quarantine cells down to the beach. The percentage of them that appear to be practicing social distancing, while greater than zero, does not fill one with confidence.

*   *   *

HOARD-O-METER:
Toilet paper green
Coffee green
Library books green
Dishwashing soap yellow
Root beer yellow
Velveeta red

Thanks,
Dorn
3/20/2020

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Next move

When I came back from Norway in the midst of the pandemic I was a little struck by how prescient the painting that I had left on my easel now seems (below). Aren’t we in a complicated situation with a Corvid, er, COVID, now where it’s hard to figure out the next move?

The best advice I saw today was from a children’s book by Charles Mackesy where a boy and a horse are apparently lost in a wood.
“I can’t see a way through”, said the boy.
“Can you see your next step?”
“Yes”
“Just take that,” said the horse.

My next step is ten more days of quarantine. I’m hoping we can all find our next steps through the pandemic and Everyone can stay healthy!

 Please take the social distancing seriously.

-Lona

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Cower in place 4: Carhenge

– Self-isolation journal, day 4 (3/19/2020).

Image result for Michigan State Logo

Our daughter and granddaughter have embarked on a quest, Mad-max style (i.e., driving) to bring home their sister/daughter from Michigan State University, where they have closed down classrooms and eateries, and generally disrupted the whole college-student experience. The trip from their home in Wyoming to Lansing, Michigan takes about 20 hours.

I couldn’t convince them to take a mere 100-mile detour while transiting the Nebraska panhandle, in order to visit Carhenge in Alliance, NE. I told them they should see the Toyota Coronas there in honor of the corona virus, but they were having none of it: “Everyone knows that Carhenge is built from 100% AMERICAN cars!!”

Riddle: What rhymes with orange?
Hint:

*   *   *

I’m starting to discover cracks in my hoarding. I’m well stocked up on powdered toilet paper and homeopathic hand sanitizer, but I realize I forgot to get a stash of hearing aid batteries! Now I’m out, except for the ones in my hearing aids right now. And they don’t last as long as they used to, I think because I am listening harder. (You’re familiar with the principle that things wear out faster with harder use, right? Like how the driver side windshield wiper always goes first, because the driver is always looking through that window.)

I’ve ordered some batteries from big-A, but if they don’t deliver soon, I’ll have to set foot outside my door again (yikes)!

*   *   *

During my time set aside each day for worrying, I thought of a new threat—drought! I’ve been practicing my 20-second hand wash, and soon realized that my habit of leaving the water running while I scrub was wasting an extraordinary amount of water. I’m trying to stop that, but old habits are hard to break. What if everyone is doing that?

Lake Mead is at historically low water levels

Bathroom faucets put out about 1.5 gallons per minute. Let’s say people might ought to be washing six times a day. If they forget to turn off the spigot while singing “Happy Birthday” or “All You Need Is Slugs” or the Doxology, they waste on average 3 gallons of water a day. The population of the US is what, 330 million? If we don’t all get our act together, we’re talking a billion extra gallons of potable water literally down the drain every day! At that rate, we could empty Lake Mead less than a decade, and it’s already at historically low levels!

We can’t let it run out! Let’s get with it, Covid-eers!

*   *   *

My sister and Third Age Thoughts co-influencer Lona has also been keeping a quarantine journal on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t these days among us Third-Agers?), you can access it here.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/19/2020

Day 3Day 2Day 1

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Lona’s quarantine journal

My sister and Third Age Thoughts co-influencer Lona has also been keeping a quarantine journal. For reasons she explains in the journal, her quarantine site doesn’t have a computer to make it easy to create posts, so she’s putting her journal in a Facebook album.

If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t these days, among us Third-Agers?), you can access her entries here, and follow along as she posts new ones.

Sample:

-d

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Cowering in place, day 3

– The adventure continues…

ill this mind-numbing monotony ever end? The days have started to blend together with a maddening sameness that I’m sure will eventually send us screaming into within less than 6 feet from another human being, for the sweet release from all this waiting, waiting, waiting.

It’s true that it’s only been three days, and we’re both retired so we are pretty much spending our days like we normally do, but the fact that we have to stay huddled at home due to an external threat, rather then just our normal lethargy and misanthropy, is vexing.

I haven’t read this. Any good?

The Metropolitan Opera (whose simulcast performances I used to love to attend at the local cinema, back in the Days of Normalcy) has shut down for the entire month of March. Instead, they are offering free streaming of old performances to opera-starved fans. I tried to log into one of these, but got a message that there would be a delay connecting, so please be patient, and I was number 22,483 in line. I disconnected and tried my luck later, and it said I was number 391,044 in line. So much for that!

Scott L——
courtesy Wes L——

Other knots of survivors are slowly sending out messages of hope. In solidarity with them, we are no longer wearing pants.

Since our gym is now closed like most everything else, I decided to try out the big eyesore elliptical machine that impedes movement into and out of our bedroom. We got it decades ago in some self-delusion that we could get fit if we just spent enough money. I don’t remember how it got in, but it is too big to move now even if we wanted to. But at last it has come in handy! I pumped on it for about 45 minutes (don’t want to overdo it or I won’t get back on tomorrow), then had a bracing shower. Felt good!

We’re not exactly alone—the solitude I observed early yesterday morning didn’t last. By the afternoon, many of the kids who would have been in school if the schools hadn’t shut down decided that a jaunt to our little beach would be in order (and who can blame them, or their harried mothers?). So they frolicked and footballed while we watched from our house, counting the number of physical contacts and mentally measuring the social distance between each little germ-carrier. 

(Photo: Twitter user @BDStanley)

Thanks!
Dorn
3/18/2020

Day 2
Day 1

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Cowering in place, day 2

– Day 2 of Dorn and Kathleen’s Cower-in-place journal (3/17/2020).

hen I woke up this morning and took a look around outside, the air was clear and calm, and the bay was still. Because most of our neighbors either work for a living, or have only their “weekend” house down here, this weekday morning was like many: there wasn’t a soul in sight. I didn’t see anyone for the time it took me to drink a whole cup of coffee. I could easily imagine that the disease had already passed through, and I was looking out at an unpopulated landscape. It was calming and creepy at the same time.

Peg O’ My Heart (1933)

We watched an old movie in bed. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, they were showing Peg O’ My Heart with Marion Davies as an Irish orphan—or is she? It included a timely (but bad) influenza joke from the comic relief character, who described it as a jolly good “wheeze”:

“I opened the door, and in flew Enza!”

(This was apparently a stale joke even in 1933. It seems to have been a common skip-rope chant in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu pandemic, and had its roots well before that.)

Later I had to break quarantine to get some medicine from the vet, so I also stopped at the Giant. There was milk there, but no meat, flour but no sugar. Still no hand sani­tizer or toilet paper to be seen, but I did find the last bottle on the shelf of rubbing alcohol—with winter­green!

I was there only to get the items we abso­lutely needed for an ex­tended iso­lated stay, so I didn’t dally. We had agreed to full Andro­meda Strain proto­col, where I would march straight into the shower when I got back and do a full head-to-toe before even taking the gro­ceries out of the car.

I wasn’t nervous going into the grocery store—everyone seemed normal and unpanicked out in the real world (but every single customer wiped down his or her shopping cart handlebars). But then Kathleen called me to remind me of the shower protocol, and how important it was to take it seriously because of all the risk factors and the lack of hospital capacity, and the store (which I was still in the middle of) started seeming more and more sinister. Get me out of here!

Back home, we watched more black and white movies, and tried to make a dent in the (virtual) pile of library e-books we had remotely checked out. In keeping with our psychological need to eat differently from when we weren’t under plague alert, we cooked some chili for supper. And that’s about it.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/17/2020

(Day 1)

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Cowering in place

– In which Dorn records his and Kathleen’s experiment with self‑isolation.

Prologue:

I. The libraries and schools in our county have been shut down since last week, due to the threat of coronavirus. Today our governor ordered that restaurants, bars, gyms and the like are also to be shut down, at least through the end of the month.

II. Some of my siblings and niblings just returned from a jaunt to our ancestral grounds in Norway. (That trip, and its harrowing escape back to the US as the virus was closing borders all around them like the jaws of a gigantic bear trap, is a hearty adventure tale in itself, that I’m hoping one or more of them will write.) They are all back in the US now, and in accordance with the latest wisdom, they are self-quarantining for 14 days before visiting any old people.

One of those siblings is Lona, and one of the places she’s quarantined out of is her own house, because her husband Gordon, who is fully as old as she is, lives there. Today Lona started sharing her quarantine journal on Facebook.

Kathleen and I haven’t been out of the country lately, or (to our knowledge) in contact with any corona-positives (or “Cee-Pees”), but decided it would be wise to socially-distance ourselves away in our little country cottage, “The Lotus Eatery”.

Lona’s example has inspired us to start our own “Cowering in Place” journal.

Cowering in Place, day 1 (3/16/2020).

Having joined in the fun of panic-buying last week, we are confident of having enough toilet paper to last out several extra days of the zombie apocalypse. We’re stocked with foods fresh, frozen, and imperishable. No milk, but plenty of that kind of canned tuna that we don’t like.

One of the universally acknowledged rules of cowering in place is that you have to eat differently than you would normally. So, we pulled the old Spiralizer off the top shelf, dusted it off, and made lo-o-ong strings of spaghetti out of all the veges we could find: zucchini, carrots, beets, pickles. We weren’t brave enough to process the broccoli in the fridge, and the celery and mushrooms just wouldn’t cooperate.

Mixing this with some lemon juice, feta and oil made a tasty salad, that when cooked became a delicious mirepoix. We learned that the safest (perhaps the only safe) way to eat it was with a snail fork (perhaps a tuning fork could be substituted) in one hand and a pair of kitchen scissors in the other.

*   *   *

The stock market has been spooked by the whole coronavirus thing,  which has sent my IRA teetering. I had calibrated my contributions to it down to the penny, so that I didn’t have to work an hour longer than needed to give me an IRA that lasted exactly as long as I did.

You would think that the fear of an unexpectedly early demise from the Chinese Flu would cancel out the fear of living longer than my IRA, but oddly enough it didn’t. Instead, by some weird calculus of human psychology, the two fears were added together! (Bet you didn’t see that coming!)

So we called our IRA guy and asked him to advise us about the money in the IRA. He came armed with charts, graphs, and future projections. ˆ”See?” he told us, “you’re still on track for meeting your retirement goals, despite this market tumble.”

“But what if one of us gets sick?”  I asked. “Excellent question! Let’s plan for that! How about we have Kathleen go into a nursing home at this point, and then die at this point three years later. Let’s re-do the math, and …. great, you’re still fine!” (He really said that.)

This was very comforting to me, although Kathleen didn’t seem as reassured. “Why am I the one who gets to die?” “It’s only reasonable,” I said, “I’m the one who arranged the videoconference.”

But she still didn’t seem reconciled to our new plan. I didn’t say it aloud, but i think she was letting her cabin fever jitters get in the way of rationally planning what was best for All Concerned. And it’s only day 1!!

Are you keeping a Cowering in Place Journal? If so, it seems like a good topic for a GUEST POST! Let us know!

Thanks,
Dorn
3/16/2020

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I slept on ice cream last night

– In which Dorn indulges in chore nostalgia.

saw a notice of a new book published just last week, How to wash dishes by Peter Miller. From the blurb, it sounds to be full of be-here-now wisdom, to teach you how to find joy in the simple things. It got me pondering the highs and lows of my 60+ years of washing dishes.

(Admittedly, the highs aren’t that high and the lows aren’t that low. It’s washing dishes.)

Buddhists (well, one Buddhist at least) say that washing dishes can be contemplative, even zen. Thich Naht Hanh wrote a piece (here) describing the benefits he gains from washing dishes.

He says “the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren’t doing them. Once you are standing in front of the sink with your sleeves rolled up and your hands in the warm water, it is really quite pleasant.” This sounds plausible, though it strains my credulity when he describes the pleasure of washing dishes every day for a hundred monks in an unheated mountain monastery, where the only materials he had to scour the dishes were, apparently, ice, and dirt. 

Another story of washing dishes hard way is found in the delightful movie Cold Comfort Farm (1995) with Kate Beckinsale and Ian McKellen. The movie reminded me of a P. G. Wodehouse comedy, without as many intricate plot twists but otherwise with all the class spoofing and other satisfactions. It was based on a 1932 book of the same name by Stella Gibbons, about newly-orphaned Flora’s visit to, and transformation of, the bleak and dissipated Sussex farm of the title. 

One of my favorite scenes from the movie was Flora’s attempt to get the handyman Adam to use a scrub brush, instead of a twig pulled from the thorn tree in the yard, to wash the dishes. Here’s how that’s described in the book:

“Oh, Adam, here’s your little mop. I got it in Howling this afternoon. Look, isn’t it a nice little one? You try it, and see.”

He took it between his finger and thumb and stood gazing at it. His eyes had filmed over like sightless Atlantic pools before the flurry of the storm breath. His gnarled fingers folded round the handle. “Ay. . . ’tes mine,” he muttered. “Nor house nor kine, and yet ’tes mine. . . . My little mop!” He stood staring at it in a dream.

“Yes. It’s to cletter the dishes with,” said Flora, firmly, suddenly foreseeing a new danger on the horizon.

“Nay. . . nay,” protested Adam. “’Tes too pretty to cletter those great old dishes wi’. I mun do that with the thorn twigs; they’ll serve. I’ll keep my liddle mop in the shed, along wi’ our [cows] Pointless and Feckless.”

(It’s funnier in the movie (and the book) than this little snippet does justice.)

To stray a bit further off-topic, my favorite running joke from the movie (and the book) is the war-cry of crazy Great Aunt Ada Doom: “I SAW SOMETHING NASTY IN THE WOODSHED!”

Moral: if you haven’t, see the movie, or read the book!

*   *   *

not my childhood chore wheel

My own memories of washing dishes are fond. When I was growing up, I had a regular chore of washing the dishes in the house. We had wheel-of-fortune like chore wheel to decide how the jobs were to be distributed among the five kids each day. One was washing the supper dishes, so (I assume) I must have washed dishes approximately one day out of every five. 

Only we didn’t call it a chore wheel. It was known in our house as a “Kaper Chart”. This term originated in the Girl Scouts, and I have to admit that as a branding idea, it’s genius. Nobody likes doing chores, but kapers, now, that sounds zany, adventurous and a bit capricious (the words “capricious” and “kaper” come from the root, clearly). Taking out the trash? Watch out for bandits! 

You ask, how do I know so much about Girl Scout arcana? My mother was a Girl Scout leader, my three sisters were Girl Scouts, and I and my brother were younger brothers to girl scouts. If you didn’t grow up with Girl Scout big sisters, it’s hard to do justice to the inexorable pressure you felt to do things the Girl Scout Way. 

Back in the day there was actually a Girl Scout merit badge for making your little brother do things. Here is the actual badge, shown for scale next to the Washing Dishes merit badge.

Younger Scouts might be excused for not knowing about the Bossing Your Younger Brother merit badge, because its name was changed sometime in the late 60’s with the reemergence of feminist activism, to a more ambitious name like “Leadership” or something like that. I’m pretty sure all three of my sisters earned the BYYB badge.

When I was a bit older, I remember trying dishwashing as a pick-up line. We were in some sort of pseudo-domestic setting that young adults sometimes find themselves in, perhaps actually washing dishes, and I got into a debate with an attractive young woman about the proper temperature to do the rinsing. She espoused a good cold-water rinse; at the time, I was a hot-rinse man.

Nowadays, the debate would quickly devolve into an internet search, and indeed now there are treatises on that very subject available, such as this article. Apparently the whole thing is a trade-off between the mechanical force provided by the water (which is higher for COLD water) and its dissolving power (which is higher for HOT water).

But I had no access to such facts back then, and a good thing too, because if I had offered it I would have come off as a pompous know-it-all (which those of you who don’t know me might be willing to attest I am not).

Instead, I choose to believe that what I actually argued was, “Yes, I think you might be right. You are very insightful.” Whatever I said, it clearly didn’t work, because I never saw this young woman again.

*   *   *

Let me close with the subject of not washing the dishes. There are three instances where washing dishes are not advised:

(1) I heard somewhere, probably an old Columbo episode, that when you are making fine aged whiskey, you don’t want to wash out the barrels in between use. I don’t know if that’s really true, and frankly I don’t want to risk finding out it’s not true, so I’m not looking it up.

(2) There are cultures where the keeping and using of dirty dishes is considered a sign of manliness. Witness the following scene in a rowdy Klondike bar, from an averagely-funny example of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road” movies, The Road to Utopia (1946):

(3) There’s only one instance I know about from my own experience. But I really know it—it was pounded into me every day for the twenty years that I spent working for the Navy. Thou shalt NOT wash thy coffee cup!

I worked for many years at Navy R&D labs, and every day I fortified myself with a several cups of strong, thick Navy coffee, and I never washed my mug, if I knew what was good for me. The only maintenance that mug got was that every few years, when its holding capacity got measurably lower, I would send it over to the machine shop to be re-bored. I’m not making this up: here’s a whole thought-piece on the subject.

That’s it! Thanks for reading. Stay well!
Dorn
3/13/2020

P.S. Readers who have persevered to the end of this post: (a) thank you, you have great staying power; and (b) you probably noticed that this post was really about washing dishes (if it can be truly said to be about anything), and didn’t have anything to do with having slept on ice cream. You deserve an explanation.

My sister Tara (who, being younger than me, earned her BYYB merit badge on our brother Roal) asked me where I get my ideas for posts. I don’t always know, but sometimes I think of a title first, and then try to figure out if I can write a post around it.

I didn’t do that in this case. I had started writing the post, and had a working title (“Lemonadein a dirty glass!”). Then Kathleen contributed the title sentence, while she was describing the effect that eating a cup of caramel swirl ice cream late the night before had on her insomnia.

“I slept on ice cream last night” is just objectively a better title than my original in every way but one. (That one way being, of course, that it bears no relation to the content of the piece.)

I have a list of other possible titles, including some that seem really good but I can’t think of any appropriate content, so be warned this could happen again.

-d

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The man behind the tree

or

  There are no others

– In which Dorn tries to talk politics.

This post is rated P (for preachy)

I

 recently read an article touting an efficient way to cut carbon emissions from raising and eating beef. It had to do with reducing the overall amount of meat eaten by Americans, but in an innovative way: the report noted that the amounts of beef eaten by individuals varied significantly, and the 20% of the population that ate the most beef actually accounted for half of its consumption. 

The article reasoned that by targeting this group for behavior modification (by whatever method you try), you’d effect a reduction in total beef consumption with significantly less effort than if you applied this effort to the entire population. 

graph: greenhouse gas emissions aren't evenly distributed among consumers

This seemed like a great idea to me, at first. It just makes sense—why spend any effort trying to convince near-vegetarians to eat less beef? But then I thought more about what made the concept so attractive to me, and I soon realized what it was: I’m pretty sure I’m not in that high-beef-eating bracket, so this approach doesn’t require me to change my own behavior at all. Clearly, the best way to solve the problem is to make someone else change their lifestyle!

Admit it, you thought the same thing too, didn’t you? Why is it that we are never so ready to adopt measures that call for sacrifices for the greater good as when that sacrifice is borne by someone else?

Do we need a new power plant, or landfill, or half-way house? That’s fine, but don’t build it near my back yard—build it way over there, those folks won’t mind it.

Not enough jobs to go around? Let’s just make it so some people can’t get those jobs, so there are are more for us. They’re foreigners anyway, so it matters less if they are jobless.

Fossil fuel burning destroying the planet? Don’t reduce my ability to travel whereever and whenever I want to, but rather provide me with newer and cleaner alternatives to driving or flying. And if producing those alternatives pollutes some other part of the world, or if buying those alternatives is out of reach for some people here, well, we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good, don’t we?

We all see this, and do this, every day, in matters large and small. It’s part of the tendency to distinguish between “us” and “them”, sometimes referred to as “othering“. It’s a quintessentially human reaction, but if one isn’t careful it can also be as insidious a human reaction as rage, envy, hatred, or indifference.

One of my favorite books is The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso. My sister Lona gave it to me about 30 years ago, and I still haven’t finished it, or really understood the parts I have read. I love it because it’s so incomprehensible to me. It seems to be about the evolution of culture and society from pre-history to the present, especially the replacement of divine-right rule with various types of “-ocracies” that have taken place over the last three or four hundred years. A central theme of the book, I think (did I mention that I found it incompre­hensible?), is the universal human desire to effect good results for ourselves by ritual human sacrifice. The person being sacrificed represents us symbolically, but isn’t us, not really. His or her sacrifice won’t bother us much personally, but we’re hoping the gods will mistake him or her for one of us, and reward our “sacrifice”.

And one doesn’t need to believe in any gods to believe in the wisdom of sacrificing someone else’s time, or resources, or peace of mind for the good of our own. Somewhere during my Second Age—my work life—I learned a jingle that provides a good rule of thumb for how politicians and the public want to handle issues of revenue: 

Don’t tax you
Don’t tax me
Tax the man behind the tree

This poem is attributed (with variations) to Russell B. Long, a colorful Democratic politician and United States Senator from Louisiana from 1948 until 1987. One of Russell B. Long’s claims to fame is that he is the son of that famous politician Huey Long, who is thought to be the inspiration for Willie Stark, the central character in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Kings Men. I never read it, but I saw the 1949 Oscar-winning movie starring Broderick Crawford.

What a harrowing movie! In the story, Willie Stark rises from corruption-fighting activist to powerful politician and wildly popular demagogue, along the way becoming just as corrupt himself, and at the same time corrupting his supporters and apologists.

Stark did this by promising his power base that their problems were someone else’s fault, and their solutions rested in making these other people change, or quit the scene.

Robert Penn Warren said at the time that the Willie Stark character was not really based on Huey Long, and it certainly wasn’t based on any politicians in power today. But the lesson of the corrupting influence of political and popular power seems just as true now as it ever was.

We are hot into the presidential campaign season, and many of the leading candidates of both parties find willing audiences for their claims that today’s ills will all be cured by imposing on other people—the poor, the rich, immigrants, the uneducated, the boomers, the millenials, the progressives, the prejudiced, the snowflakes, the deplorables.

I’d ask that as you work through all the claims and promises being slung around this year, take a moment to recognize the part of you that wants to see the sacrifice needed to tackle today’s problems borne by somebody other than you and yours. This recognition won’t let others off the hook, but it will help your conscience make more informed and objective decisions, and differentiate what’s good for all from what just feels good for you.

And yes, I am talking to you, gentle reader, not just to those hard-headed guys behind the tree who can’t see how wrong they are and how right we are! The country and the world have enough problems to go around, that’s sure, and different problems effect each of us more or less severely. But to tackle them, our country and our world are going to have to get more united than we have been. I don’t think that can happen as long as every faction is working hard so to believe some other faction to blame.

This random poster popped up on my screen the other day (well, probably not really random, the Zuck knows all my (and your) thoughts). To me, it says in under a dozen words what I’ve been fumbling for this whole post:

Gimme an amen!

Thanks for your patience,
Dorn
2/28/2020

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Java quest

– In which Dorn talks about his Jones for a good cup of Joe.

A

 mysterious package arrived in the mail today—a box about the size and shape of, say, a squat 1-quart milk carton. It contained a package of delicious “Two Volcanoes” coffee. There was no note, but we skillfully sluethed out that my Aunt and Uncle must have sent it. This was primarily from two clues:

(1) The coffee was from Guatemala (the Two Volcanoes of the brand name are Tacana and Tajumulco in San Marcos), which is a known favorite stomping ground of this globe-skipping pair, and

(2) the box was mailed from Kentucky, and almost the only people that we know live in Kentucky are (a) this family, (b) Mitch McConnell, and (c) Amy McGrath. (I almost never talk politics in these posts, but let me just say that if I was voting between those two people for who should represent my state in the Senate, I would vote for the one who wasn’t in the employ of the Kremlin.)

THANK YOU!! Kathleen says drinking it was like a little trip to Guatemala! I found the smell and taste of the coffee triggered a lot of memories (as the best smells and tastes do) of all the coffee I’ve enjoyed over the years, which is quite a large amount. Coffee has been a staple of my diet as far back as I can clearly remember.

Volcanic fumarole

I didn’t like coffee’s bitterness as a child (no surprise there), except when we were camping. The coffee we made on camping trips was brewed so crudely (even for the pre-Keurig 1950’s) that it must have been intentional, as part of the “roughing it” experience. No high-falutin’ percolator for us, just a pot into which was thrown some ground coffee and water, to be boiled on the camp stove, firepit, or (if we were in Yellowstone) the nearest handy fumarole.

I can’t remember now whether camp etiquette demanded that the grounds be spit over the right shoulder into the underbrush, or just chewed and swallowed, but I loved it. I remember trying to drink coffee at home in between camping trips and being amazed at how foul it tasted. Must have been because I tried to make it using an electric stovetop and a real coffeepot, I guess.

Speaking of java, a really great book is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, written in 2004 by Simon Winchester, about the catastrophic volcanic explosion of 1883. He’s a great storyteller, and he spins a yarn that mixes coffee and spices, history, politics, natural science, heroism, villainy and adventure with a genuine apocalypse-scale (for many in that hemisphere) disaster. I heartily recommend it.

But back to my story. As I matured, so did my taste for coffee. My lifelong relationship with the beverage was really cemented when I started working. Having to get up so early every single day (no kidding, they really make you do that when you work for a living!) made a morning cuppa practically a necessity. I worked for the US Navy, the best coffee drinkers in the world, so no matter where I was during the day there was always a coffeemaker or a pot on the hotplate with as much hot, tarry coffee sludge as I could stomach just for the taking. Times were good!

I developed a habit of milk in my coffee, not for reasons of taste, but because I had a vain (I was young then, and allowed!) desire not to stain my teeth brown. I’ve kept that habit to this day, and while my teeth are no longer pearly white, I’m sure they aren’t stained as bad as all those tons of coffee I imbibed over the last 40 years could have made them, if I hadn’t taken this simple precaution.

Juan Valdez

I’m not sure it is more accurate to say of those days that I liked coffee, or just that I needed a steady infusion of it throughout the day. The flavor of it was usually agreeable enough (I like it scalding hot and bitter, like my women), but I knew that what I was drinking wasn’t exactly the best.

We got to travel a good bit because of my job at that time, and I couldn’t help noticing that sometimes restaurant coffee was much much better than my usual home- or work-made fare. A few places still stand out in my memory: Disneyland, Kona in Hawaii, many restaurants in European cities, and literally everywhere, down to the meanest gas station, in New Zealand.

Somewhere along the way I developed another coffee-brewing habit, this time not to protect my teeth, but my blood vessels. Studies show that coffee contains a great number of biochemical compounds (yum!), including some lipids that might actually increase your cholesterol. But the good news was that many of these compounds will stick to the paper in your coffee filter, if you use a paper coffee filter. So I always do, even when french-pressing coffee: I cut out a little circle of filter paper and put it right in the french press between the coffee and the screen.

Over the years I had tried different store brands, different coffeemakers, and different brewing tips, but I could never get my home-brewed coffee to rise about its stalwart average home-made flavor. Until one fateful day!

Bag of starbucks coffee

I was picking up coffee and other groceries at the Safeway, and they were having a manager’s sale on a Starbucks seasonal blend. I didn’t usually drink Starbucks—it was too precious for my Navy-honed tastes—but the price was right so I got it. I can’t remember the exact name, but it had “Antigua Guatemala” in the title.

I was floored by it! It was unlike any coffee I had ever made in my life, at work or at home! The only thing close was one of those mythical coffees I had gotten at restaurants around the world during magical pseudo-work-trip vacations. I had made it in our cheap old Walmart coffeemaker in the same way I always did, but the ambrosia that dripped out was other-wordly! And it wasn’t just a fluke: every pot of this stuff I brewed was as good as the one before!

This was a life changer for me. I suddenly realized that I could make coffee with complex, aromatic flavors I had never dreamed of. I went back to the Safeway and bought every bag of that coffee that was there, and continued to buy it every time they restocked. (Recall, this was a seasonal coffee, so I needed to stock up for the long cold months when it wasn’t available.) During the rest of the year when this coffee wasn’t offered, I would watch my supply slowly dwindle, and wonder if it would last until the Starbucks Guatemala coffee season started again (it never did, so then I subsisted on ordinary coffee, or as I came to think of it, “Soylent Brown”).

I also wondered each year whether changing tastes or market pressures would result in my coffee not showing up on the grocery store shelves at all next season? I was lucky for a couple of years, and then the inevitable happened. The coffee was gone from Safeway, from Starbucks, from the internet, everywhere.

Ad for Borg coffee

This was the start of my quest to recover that transcendant flavor of really good coffee made at home. I started researching coffee, and searching out internet coffee stores to try different kinds. I got myself a coffee grinder, and started ordering whole-bean samplers.

At first, I limited all my attempts to Guatemalan coffees, reasoning that while there may be many stellar types of coffee in the world, the one that rocked my particular senses was grown there. But I had little luck—the Guatemala coffees I tried, while tasty, were just not magic. So I broadened my search, and found several types that I swear by to this day, including a single-origin Kenya AA, and a Tanzania peaberry.

A peaberry and a normal flat coffee bean (source)

(Coffee beans normally grow in matched pairs, which is why they are round on one side and flat on the other. But a small fraction—maybe 10%—of the beans grow without a twin. These so-called “peaberries” are smaller and rounder than the rest of the beans, and can be picked out from among the rest and sold at a premium, if you can find someone willing to pay that premium. The theory is that the size and shape allow more even roasting and therefore better flavor. I don’t believe it, but I like the Tanzanian coffee and the place I buy it only sells the peaberry version of it.)

So mostly I would buy my Kenya AA and my Tanzania peaberry, and every so often I would experiment with some new type, or try again with a Guatemalan bean just in case. I finally realized that I had been brewing the Guatemalan coffee wrong—it was much milder than those African coffees, so I needed to brew it a lot stronger. Once I started doing that, I finally was able to recreate the experience of that fabulous Starbucks coffee I had lucked onto many many years before.

And that’s where I stand today, with a stable of several favorite really good coffees, and a reliable source to get more, and the hope that that inevitable day when my nerves, or my stomach, or my heart, will force me to cut back on coffee is as far away in the future as possible.

Thanks,
Dorn
2/20/2020

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Tribute to Insects

This morning I caught a news story about a study on insect die off. The study counted the numbers of insects that splat on car windshields, which the study shows have declined dramatically. This is not to be sneezed at since the implication points to an imminent collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. Another study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams. And the global warming news keeps getting worse and worse! Entities that are in power don’t seem to want to do anything. I just finished Robert Heinlein’s short story “The Year of the Jackpot”, which is online at the link. While not exactly comforting, it is a great 1952 short story of an actuary, who makes a hobby of tracking zany news stories, and correlates these stories in a way that points to an inevitable worldwide catastrophic climax. How prescient!

My tribute to insects, “Butterflies and Ironweed”, is below.

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‘Sup, Dawg?

– In which Dorn expounds on the Archie health diet.

A

rchie will turn 14 next month. It’s a wonderful achievement for him, and a blessing for us, especially considering all his health issues over the years that vets have told us would shorten his life. He’s got some kind of heart anomaly, liver problems, bile duct “sludge”, heat intolerance, and poor defenses against water-borne infections (bad luck for a pup who loved to swim in the Bay!).

And now he’s developing the standard old-man issues: he can’t see or hear as good as he used to, he’s going bald (especially the end of his tail), and one eye is starting to droop. He is getting less able to handle cold as well as heat, and much more interested in short walks as opposed to long walks, and short games of fetch-the-ball as opposed to long ones. And he’s developing a little of an old man’s crotchety-ness, though he started out so sweet that he’s still better natured than his canine neighbors (or, truth be told, his human housemates sometimes).

I attribute Archie’s vigorous Third Age to his dinner regimen. His supper every night consists of the same three things:

(1) Some ridiculously expensive veterinary “Hepatic” diet especially designed for dogs who can’t keep their liver bloodwork values down where they should be;

(2) A big bowl of green beans, preferably french-cut, cooked to softness; and 

(3) Just a little bit of everything else in the world that comes through our house, considered edible or not. Except chocolate or raisins, ‘cause they’re poison.

Archie

I can’t think right now of anything Archie isn’t willing to eat. He used to turn up his wet nose at celery, but in the last couple of years he’s acquired a taste for it, and now it’s his second-favorite snack (tied for second place with almost every other food in the world).

His first favorite snack is broccoli, which he loves boiled, steamed, grilled, nuked, puréed, deep-fried (I’m sure, tho’ we’ve never tried) or raw. His favorite beverage is water used to boil broccoli. I’m pretty sure I could tempt Archie away from a steak that has fallen on the floor with the promise of a broccoli floret. One time we needed to train him to go up and down some stairs, and the only effective incentive we could find was to give him a bit of the broc every time he took another step.

Albert R. Broccoli with a James Bond poster of Moonraker
Albert R. Broccoli

Archie is also quite partial to other broccoli-like vegetables, which is not surprising since they are all really the same species of plant, Brassica oleracea, that has been bred into different shapes and sizes over the centuries. These veggies are all “cultivars” of the same plant as broccoli: cauliflower, kale, collard greens, regular cabbage, Savoy cabbage (but not Napa cabbage), brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and broccolini (but not Broccoli Rabe, which is the same plant as Napa cabbage).

Once we had a friend over for supper who was allergic to “nightshade vegetables”. I had to look up what vegetables were in the nightshade family (the Solanacaea family, taxonomically speaking), and found to my dismay it included almost every plant we had envisioned as part of the supper menu: all kinds of potatoes (but not sweet potatoes), tomatoes, eggplants, and all kinds of peppers (but not black pepper).

Fortunately, we had a few representatives from the Brassica clan in the fridge and were able to redesign the dinner. But who knew that so many of the wide variety of veggies we eat come from so few families? You biologists probably knew that, but I didn’t.

I’m sure Archie doesn’t know or care how closely related tomatoes are to potatoes, or kohlrabi is to kale, as long as he gets a sample of each and every one of them now and then. His enthusiasm for everything he can sink his teeth into, from stinky old crab parts on the beach to the scientific rice-based “hepatic” brown nuggets that make up most of his meal, keep him happy and young, I think. I hope I’m in as good a shape when I’m his equivalent age.

What is his equivalent age, exactly? Following the folk wisdom states that one year in a dog’s life ages him as much as people age in seven years, Archie will be like 98 in March. But according to the American Kennel Club, that old rule of thumb is wrong. Different breeds and different dogs age differently, but they a better effective age for old dogs can be given by the formula:

agedog-years = 14 + (agepeople-years * 5)

By the above new-and-improved formula, this March Archie will be the equivalent of 84 years old. The article goes on, though, to provide an even more better formula (and by better, I mean more sciencey and complicated), developed at the University of California San Diego:

agedog-years = 31 + (Loge[agepeople-years] * 16)

UC San Diego developed this formula by studying the “epigenetic clocks”, the systematic altering of DNA by addition of methyl groups, that occurs in the aging process of both humans and dogs. By this formula, next month Archie will be only the equivalent of 73 years old! I like this formula best by far, and from now on I’ll only use this one, to keep Archie young and sprightly!

Thanks,
Dorn
2/6/2020

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Goldilocks

I think I blogged about my 15 portraits in 15  weeks challenge a few weeks ago here. As I come upon the last week of the challenge, I’m a little tired of doing portraits but I’m quite grateful to the project for helping me solve the retiree’s dilemma of too much free time. For the last week of the challenge, tired of doing mostly fairly standard portraits, I decided to paint my youngest granddaughter as Goldilocks. For the record, she is exactly the type who could sneak into someone’s house, wreak all kinds of havoc, then fall asleep looking like a little angel. Side note: when I went on the spirit journey with some grandkids, that I previously blogged about here, it turned out that my spirit animal was a bear, so I had been wanting to paint one of them too!

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Searching deep within

– In which Dorn finally concludes his search for his mystery illness.

W

hen we left off this now quite long story about my mysterious gastro-intestinal tract bleeding (here), I had just finished undergoing a Balloon Endoscopy, where the doc had sent his scope down my throat, and used the balloons at the probe’s end to shimmy about half-way down my GI tract. He examined every inch of real estate along the way, but ended up finding nothing that shed light on my mystery illness.

The logical next (and just about final) thing to try was to have a probe repeat this mapping of my internal landscape, but start from the other end—“swim upstream with the salmon”, as they say, “drive North on the interstate”, “drain the bathtub counter-clockwise”, “watch the swallows leaving Capistrano”, “tuck-point the chimney in anti-Santa mode”. Whatever your favorite expression for it is, they all mean the same thing: undergo a Retrograde Balloon Endoscopy. 

In many ways the procedure seemed about the same as the previous endoscopy, but there was at least one important difference in my experience. My work to prepare for the procedure took longer and was more unpleasant.

The preparation started with a requirement to ingest nothing but clear liquids on the day before the procedure. I decided I was going to do even better than that, to assure a sparkling GI tract in which no anomaly could hide, by starting this liquid diet three full days before the scoping. Part-way into my first day of clear liquids, I broke down and enjoyed a real meal. “I don’t REALLY need to start my liquid diet todayeven if I start tomorrow, I’ll still be one full day ahead of the directions!”

The second day I only cheated a little. I had bought a small bag of those ruffle-y potato chips to pack in our hotel kit, for when you really want a nosh but don’t want to leave the room. I broke into the bag around noon. I figured this was hardly a cheat at all, because what are potato chips anyway but a thin little bit of potato and a lot of salt and oil? And oil’s a clear liquid, after all. And salt must be okay, because if you dissolve it in water (or heat it to 1473°F) then that’s a clear liquid too, right? So the only illegal part was the potato, and let’s be honest, potato chips probably have almost no actual potato in them nowadays anyway. It’s like maple syrup in that respect (don’t get me started!).

National Potato Chip Day - March 14
Don’t forget! Only 51 shopping days left!

By the third day (the actual day that I was supposed to start my liquid-only fast), I figured I was at least a little ahead of the instructions. I complied that day, even when Kathleen’s breakfast was rewarmed rib-eye steak and baked potato. What else could I do?

This was the day we (Kathleen, Archie and I) went to hotel room in Baltimore for the night before the procedure, because it was scheduled so early the next morning.

Between the packing, getting ourselves and Archie ready, driving, and moving into the hotel room, I didn’t have much time to think about cheating on my diet most of the day. But once we were settled in, I took Archie for a walk around the block, and stumbled on the Helmand Kabobi Afghani restaurant. I poked my head in and asked for a carryout menu (for Kathleen). “Come on in! Your dog can come too, there’s nobody here yet.” 

Jodhpuri kabuli

The whole place was awash with the most delicious smells! Spices, meats, garlic, and things I couldn’t recognize. I don’t think it smelled this good just because I hadn’t had a decent meal (or any meal, really) in several days. They had dishes with cardomom (my favorite spice), cinnamon, turmeric, mint, Shalgum and sabzy (whatever they are). It was hard to stay in there, even long enough to grab a menu! 

I made it back to the safety of the hotel room! No aromatic aush, shorwa or dwopiaza here, just some Gatorade (don’t ask), tea- and coffee-bags and, if I felt I needed a special treat, a bottle of sparkling San Pelligrino

Eventually it was almost time to take my final medicine, that would get me fully prepared for tomorrow morning’s endoscopy. But before that, I’d better take Archie out for one last walk. He seemed to like the city as much as the last time he was here, and seemed to remember the little park at the side of the hotel. 

After he had done what we came for, he rushed back toward the hotel so fast the he nearly tore the leash from my hands! “Isn’t that neat!” I thought. “He remembers the hotel from last time and considers it his home-from-home.” 

We ran/walked back to the hotel entrance as quickly/slowly as Archie and I could negotiate, but he barely paused a moment at the front entrance, and continued straight on as fast as he could manage, with only cursory sniffs at the little tree islands along the sidewalk. He didn’t slow down until he got to his real destination: the Helmand Kabobi. That’s one smart dog! But we both had to turn around and return to the hotel unsatisfied. Maybe tomorrow, after the endoscopy, we could hit it again.

Of the rest of the day, perhaps the less said the better.

The procedure itself went off without a hitch, except at one point the head nurse there decided to tell Kathleen that she would be attacked and killed if she set foot on the street outside the hospital, and the only safe way to get to and from the hotel was to use the nurse’s “secret passageway”. Which, by the way, can’t be accessed without a nurse ID card. Way to keep the family calm, Nurse Laura!

Immediately after the procedure came the part Kathleen had been waiting for: the exit interview with the dreamy Dr Bollywood! (She literally had dreamed about him the night before.) But alas, he didn’t show up. Instead, he sent out a perfectly serviceable but definitely non-dreamy other doctor, who told us that, as they feared might happen, the endoscopy showed up nothing useful to discerning my illness. They had warned me in advance that this was likely, but I felt I needed to get this endoscopy even so, as this was really the final test in their arsenal.

He was quite pleased to note, though, that my mystery illness and all my tests had kept his interns and fellows occupied for quite a number of clinical peer reviews, and they looked forward to every time I came. So it was all worthwhile, I guess.

Afterward, I was feeling too crappy to want any Afghan food (drat!), so we packed up and Kathleen drove me home.

When I first got this illness (described here), I had vowed not to stop looking until I had found its cause. But I seem to have come to the end of the search. My symptoms ended months ago, and they said that (if this is what they think it is) it’s hard to find even when it’s active, and mine has been dormant for many months now.

Reluctantly, I’m calling my search off, until some new clue presents itself. A clue which, if it comes, I hope isn’t too painful or dangerous to me! And so here ends my tale….or does it??

Thanks for your patience,
Dorn
1/23/2020

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Meditation

For many, many years I tried to meditate but was unable to be disciplined enough to be regular about it. Finally, the cell phone era arrived, and with the Insight Timer meditation app that I downloaded on it, I was able to develop a regular practice. Insight Timer is mostly a simple timer app that keeps track of your minutes and your consecutive days – and you get *stars* for your milestones. The dedicated Buddhists that use the app say you shouldn’t get too attached to your stars, but I have to think that is what helped me get to 29 consecutive days and 27,600 minutes (as recorded by the app right now). On the app, there are also thousands of guided meditations that I ignored for years but lately I have been appreciating more. Here are some favorites:

Yoga Nidra For Sleep by Jennifer Piercy – for when you can’t sleep. Its rare for me to even get to the end of this one without falling asleep.

Developing Loving-Kindness by Bodhipaksa – If you are mad at someone this has an almost magical ability to dispel that conflict.

Morning Meditation by  Bethany Auriel-Hagan – a great six minute start to the day.

Meet your Animal Spirit Guide by Kristen Acciari – this is the fun one I did with the grandkids. They had amazingly detailed experiences and Granddaughter #3’s tale of meeting her spirt guide, the Arctic Fox, inspired the painting below.

Modern science acknowledges the many benefits of meditation, including reducing stress, sharpening focus and improving memory. For third agers a special benefit accrues: “There was a study reported at the American Geriatric Association convention in 1979 involving forty-seven participants whose average age was 52.5 years. It found that people who had been meditating more than seven years were approximately twelve years younger physiologically than those of the same chronological age who were not meditating.” (Gabriel Cousens, M.D., Conscious Eating, p. 281.) So, if you’ve ever wanted to establish a meditation practice, there’s an app for that!

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Old tech and new (part 2)

– In which a new gadget joins the stable.

PART 2: NEW TECH (old tech is here)

here may have been a time when a vacuum cleaner was an acceptable gift for a husband to give his wife. Perhaps this was during the post-WW2 “golden age of capitalism”. All sorts of so-called energy-saving devices were making their way to the mass market, and the novelty of new gadgetry might have outweighed the implication that a wife’s biggest Christmas wish was to vacuum the house. At least, that’s what ads from the time try to tell us.

But by the time this husband was buying presents for his wife, such gifts would be looked upon as evidence that (a) you were a male chauvinist pig who thought the woman’s place was in the home, and (b) you thought she would be happy to be viewed as your domestic servant. No thank you ma’am!

Times and sensibilities continue to evolve, though. Kathleen and I do a pretty good job of sharing cleaning chores, and we are both annoyed by the pet hair and 75 years of unidentifiable dust that seems to rain down continuously inside our house. (Kathleen is annoyed because of her fastidious sensibilities; I am annoyed because of my allergies). So I figured, correctly, that any gift that reduced that problem would be most welcome.

So I got Kathleen an Autonomous Floor Suctioning Vehicle (AFSV) for the house, to regularly give our floors the once-over and keep the dust and hair from proliferating too badly.

It’s a Roomba, of course. Kathleen wasn’t insulted at all to get one for a present, but she was skeptical that it’d work. “We’ll have to be constantly rearranging the furniture to get out of its way, and it’ll be more work than just vacuuming ourselves!” But I said that a Roomba can navigate just fine around furniture, and we should at least give a chance before we send it back.

So we set it up. In an obvious effort to get you to anthropomorphize the thing, when you initialize it, it records that date as its “birthday”, and asks you to give it a name. We decided on the obvious—Kathleen Junior. 

And the thing works like a champ. As long as it avoids a couple of key areas where the carpet is too thin to bump against and too thick to just drive over, it operates just fine. I don’t know exactly how it finds its way around without any seeing or (I’m told) internal map-memorizing functions, but it does. The search algorithm it uses seems to allow it, eventually, to wander into each room on the first floor and suck up all the dust, even along the walls.

Roomba pathways

Mostly we tell it to vacuum in the wee hours long after we’ve gone upstairs to bed (like 8 PM). But sometimes I like to start it up just to watch it work, helping it out of tough spots, or nudging it with my foot to encourage it into a room or an area I want it to pay special attention to. When I seem to be getting too solicitous, Kathleen pouts, “You love Kathleen Junior more than you love me”.

“That’s not true, honey”, I reassure her, “I love you both EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT”.

Thanks,
Dorn
11/11/2020

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Frieda Kahlo as Muse

My first Frieda Kahlo inspired painting was about a decade ago when I found a cute little Mexican dress at the thrift store, so I posed and painted my little granddaughter as baby Frieda. More recently I caught my daughter wearing flowers in her hair and it inspired me to pose her for a Frieda inspired portrait. We couldn’t find any monkeys, but I thought her little dog Pumpernickel could fill that role. Why is it that Frieda is so iconic in art? It seems to me that suggesting Frieda is a good way to represent women’s inner strength and a certain amount of staying true to yourself. Both portraits are below.

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THEY!

In which Dorn muses on gender lexico-politics.

One of my niblings wrote not too long ago that the word of the year was the singular “they”. They didn’t say if this was their own nomination, or if they were reporting on the designation by Merriam-Webster of “they”, used in the singular, gender-neutral sense, as its 2019 Word of the Year.

source: Wiktionary

The American Dialect Society, which holds an annual popular vote for its Word of the Year, beat Merriam-Webster by several years, designating “they” as their Word of the Year in 2015 (link). According to the American Dialect society, singular “they” has been a part of the English language for hundreds of years:

The use of singular they builds on centuries of usage, appearing in the work of writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. In 2015, singular “they” was embraced by the Washington Post style guide. Bill Walsh, copy editor for the Post, described it as “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.” .​.​. voters in the [2015] Word of the Year proceedings singled out its newer usage as an identifier for someone who may identify as “non-binary” in gender terms.

This newer usage of “they”, to designate a person who identifies their gender as non-binary is, of course, why the word is currently famous. Prieviously, use of the singular “they” was mainly for when the gender of the person to which the pronoun referred was unknown or irrelevant.

A couple of decades ago I was writing regulations for EPA during a campaign to reduce the amount of bureaucrat-ese used in official writing intended for the public (I know, good luck with that). They had an official name for the plain English that was supposed to replace the bureaucrat-ese: “Plain English”. (Yes, it was treated as if it was capitalized, and a new invention of government management. Bureaucrats work that way.) 

Singular “they” didn’t make the cut. Plain English said to replace “he/she” (the popular bureaucrat-ese gender neutral singular pronoun at the time) with the slightly longer but more conversational “he or she”, as in, “if an employee wishes, he or she may…”.

I can remember even further back in my career, when linguistically and politically it was acceptable, even mandatory, to use the pronoun “he” as the singular gender-nonspecific pronoun. The official reason was that the tacit “or she” was easily understood. The unofficial reason, which I never heard voiced but I’m sure was widespread, was that these business communications were probably going to be read almost entirely by men anyway, so the “she” was unnecessary. 

Back then, such assumptions about the gender of anyone involved in certain lines of work were so universal that they weren’t even recognized as assumptions—that was just the way the world was. Back then, not just pronouns, but the nouns themselves that described professions, were highly genderized: seamstress, stewardess, actress, governess, empress, professoressa, influenceress

And this wasn’t just a linguistic reality—jobs themselves, and the expected qualifications and characteristics of job candidates, each had a default gender. I am old enough to remember when job vacancy announcements were segregated by sex. “Male” jobs required competence and ambition, “female” jobs called for attractiveness and congeniality.

Hmmm.... Back in my day, girls weren't encouraged to have "dream jobs"

The New Republic had a recent thought piece that described some of the more egregious sexist liberties taken with job announcements in the past: Help wanted—female. My sister Lona provided her perspective on gender-based job expectations in a blog post that is more efficient and eloquent than I can match.

*   *   *

This type of workplace discrimination continues today. After all, many of today’s business and government decision makers are as old as I am, and grew up with the same influences. But at least most people now know that this type of pigeonholing people into certain occupations based on their gender is wrong (or if not that, at least they know that it is CONSIDERED wrong, and if they do it, they have to hide their intentions).

Today’s battleground involves attempts to pigeonhole people’s social, interpersonal, or sexual tastes and behaviors based on their biological gender. While not all of society has recognized the errors of doing this, I’m encouraged that at least there is now an open public debate as to whether this kind of pigeonholing is acceptable. The public prominence of the singular “they” is evidence of this.

Will tolerance of personal behavior choices out­side of a gender-based norm become generally accepted, as tolerance of choice of career has? Time will tell, and maybe before that, science fiction will.

Science fiction is well known to push forward the boundaries of the status quo. The best science fiction imagines a situation, sometimes separated from our own by time or vast distances of space, where different rules of reality (physical, technological, biological, or social) apply, and explores the personal and societal responses to that reality by human or human-like characters.  

Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 classic sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness explored these questions beautifully. The story imagines a world like ours in many ways, but where the inhabitants had no fixed gender, but flowed regularly between male and female personas. The protagonist of the book was a human male who had come to the planet as an envoy, and the story concerns his struggles to under­stand the inhabitants. His attitudes were much like those of American males in 1969; for example, he spoke and thought of these gender-fluid people as all “he”s.

At the time the book was written, the hero might have been intended to reflect the reading audience in general. Today, though, he comes off as sexist, even misogynistic. Still, it’s a good, thought-provoking book, providing even more things to think about now that it has aged 50 years.

See the source image

I just finished a space opera trilogy by Ann Leckie that starts with Ancillary Justice (2013). It had a completely different treatment of the issue of gender identification: in this imagined universe, a person’s gender has become so irrelevant to their work, social, or sexual expectations that gender-specific pronouns have dropped completely from the language.

The author uses “she” as the gender-neutral pronoun for all the characters. They still fall in love, have sex, and engage in sexual politics, but you don’t know if they are straight, gay, gender-fluid, or if binary, what sex they are.

I spent a lot of time trying to guess the genders of the characters, until I accepted that it wasn’t relevant to the narrative, just as it wasn’t relevant in the universe of the story itself. It’s a stimulating concept to think about, even though it had very little to do with the plot. Good books!

https://www.bing.com/th/id/OIP.VMbtz6G4MStvO2433a-BjgAAAA?w=139&h=160&c=7&o=5&cb=11&pid=1.7

I tried to mimic the conceit in Ancillary Justice by not giving the name of the nibling who started the conversation about gender pronouns at the beginning of the post, or any clues to their gender. Did you notice? Did knowing, guessing, or not knowing their gender indentification make any difference to you in how you read the post? There you go!

Thanks,
Dorn
1/4/2020

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The Glad Game

– In which Dorn reveals one of his inner demons.

T

he 1950s and 60s were in many ways a simpler and more sentimental time to grow up in than today, or at least it seems so to me. But I remember a certain movie that even back then I found too schmaltzy to stomach. It was Pollyanna, a live-action 1960 Disney movie about a young orphan who comes to town and wins the hearts of all the embittered townspeople with her unstoppable optimism. Oh ugh. Even as a kid, I agreed with the movie’s screenwriter David Swift, who is quoted as saying that “Pollyanna was so filled with happiness and light that I wanted to kick her.”

The movie was an adaptation of the book by Eleanor H. Porter. It was the first of her “Glad books”, published in 1913 when the children in books were angelic, optimistic, and dutiful, and in the end were always rewarded for their goodness. With this as the norm, it’s small wonder that subversive stories like A High Wind in Jamaica (I raved about it here) met with such simultaneous outrage and acclaim.

One of the ways Pollyanna accomplished this optimism was to play what she called “The Glad Game”. One plays it by imagining all of the good things that have come about because your dog died, or whatever situation you find yourself in.

As a kid, I would be mortified at anyone accusing me of being a Pollyanna, or (shudder) indulging in The Glad Game. But I confess I recently found myself doing it, and not just once but on three separate occasions. As with many of the Things of Importance in a Third-Ager’s life, they all had to do with my health.

The third incident happened just the other day. I had completed my required endoscopy to find the source of my internal bleeding (chronicled here). The doctor had told me before-hand that they would be looking for the cause of the problem, and upon identifying it, they would zap it, snip it, clip it, or take a piece for a biopsy, depending on what they found. (I told my doc that “biopsy” sounds like cancer, and asked had she avoided ever mentioning that possibility because it was so unlikely, or just because it was so scary? She said they—doctors—don’t like to talk about it because it’s scary. That answer in itself is kind of scary.)

Well anyway, as I mentioned in my previous report, my upper GI tract inspection showed no serious problems of any kind. The goal of the procedure, at which it completely failed, was to find and fix the problem causing my bleeding, but I couldn’t help thinking, “This is good news! No cancer in the upper GI tract, and when they do the other half of the procedure, I’ll have a complete clean bill of health for the entire food tube!”

My second example was last year when I was recovering from a knee injury. The scans showed something that was “probably nothing, but you should check it out”, which is doc-speak for “don’t sue me if you ignore it and it turns out to be cancer.”

So I arranged a bone scan, although I was pretty confident that I didn’t have cancer (the main cancer indicator was knee pain, and I already knew where that pain was coming from—I BUSTED IT!), and I thought to myself, “what a stroke of luck! This bone scan covers my entire body, so now I’ll get a complete skeleton cancer scan, all free-like!” And I did!

My first example stems from a cardiac incident many years ago, that started me on a cycle of regular tests with my cardiologist. Every test came back fine since that first incident, and after a few nervous years, I finally decided that with all this testing, I’ve probably lowered my risk of being surprised by a heart attack! “Good thing I had that thing that sent me to the cardiac ward!”

*   *   *

I actually had those thoughts. The true offense of The Glad Game is, of course, not to think it, but to tell others about it, preferably with personal examples, so that they will learn how wrong they were to feel bad when their house burned down. I am telling you about it now, it’s true, but not to encourage you to adopt the approach. Far from it! But if your subconscious points out some silver lining in a storm cloud, you might as well take it—you’ll need it when the real disaster hits!

Frameless

To balance out the cosmic glad scale just a little bit, I’ll play a little of the misère version of The Glad Game. The misère version, I’ve decided, is like the misère version of Hearts, or Sprouts, or a number of other games where you are allowed to turn the rules upside down, so that if you can force your opponent to “win” by the normal rules of the game, he or she loses, and you win! Plus I think a word like misère is especially apt to apply to The Glad Game. Serves it right, so to speak.

So here goes. Ever since I got my new hearing aids (here), I’ve been a nervous wreck. I’ve gotten much clumsier—every time I put a glass down on a table, I can tell from the sound that I’ve hit it so hard that I’m sure it will explode in my hands. And my car and most of my home appliances with moving parts are all on the verge of total collapse, judging by the racket they make whenever you turn them on. I know I can just hear better now, but it’s no comfort to realize you were constantly teetering on the edge of mechanical disaster before and didn’t even know it!

The way I use The Glad Game to bolster my own health self-image (I wrote all about unrealistic optimism here) reminds me of a famous quote by Nietzche: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger”. That was the opening quote of a movie I’m proud to be a fan of, that 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, Conan the Barbarian. Now if you ask Conan what makes him glad, he’s got a ready answer for you: “Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentation of the women”. What a guy!

Here’s wishing you get whatever makes you glad in the coming year, with much thanks for listening,

Dorn
12/31/2019

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Winter Solstice Time

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to visit New Grange in Ireland and experience their simulated solstice experience of the shaft of light that comes into that great Neolithic bunker on exactly the solstice. It was very powerful to experience that in the same way our 5000-year-old ancestors did. I felt like trying to recapture a little of that, so this year I looked around to find a solstice ceremony to go to. The ceremony I found was nice – but a little disappointing to me. I thought it would be more elemental! But we were in a cozy heated room, seated on comfortable chairs, and when it came time to light our flames, we fumbled for the little switch at the bottom of our electronic candles. In the ceremony we completed a dispacho, which is a little ritual offering that, according to The Four Winds website, is “a gift for the organizing principles of the Universe”. From that website I also learned that traditionally, in the Andes, this despacho ceremony is performed after each earth cycle to renew and re-imprint the powers of nature on our luminous body, to connect with the Universe and accomplish perfect balance and reciprocity – not for us personally, but for the wellbeing of our group. So, group, I was happy to do what I could to help all of us maintain our wellbeing.

Thinking of the solstice also made we want to add an elemental touch to my latest portrait, so granddaughter #4 gets to be a solstice girl and wear antlers.

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NOW HEAR THIS!

– in which Dorn comes to his senses. One of them, anyway.

will always remember the day I came home with the results of my first audiogram that showed I was starting to lose my hearing. Some gentle readers (especially those who are married) will find this hard to believe, but Kathleen had said to me, and more than once, “You’re not listening to me!”. 

That day I came home too excited even to take my coat off first, and I told her proudly, “AHA! I AM listening to you, I just can’t hear you! Here’s proof! BUSTED!”

And I showed her the audiogram, that clearly showed this drop in acuity especially around a certain mid-high frequency (which I call “the Kathleen frequency”). The odd shape of the graph, the audiologist told me, indicated that the deafness was probably hereditary. My dad was hard of hearing then, so I blamed him for it (as I do for the fact that I’m tottering ever on the verge of baldness)

Back then, my hearing wasn’t bad enough to take any action; it just gave me a ready excuse whenever Kathleen accused me of not listening. I remember exactly when I realized that my hearing had gotten so bad as to need intervention. I was at work, at one of those innumerable and interminable meetings that all Federal bureaucrats must attend. My friend and boss Leon leaned over and whispered something in my ear. 

Now, everyone who has ever been subjected to these things knows that the most important parts of any meeting are the things whispered to you while you’re pretending to pay attention to the Powerpoint. But I found to my horror that it was impossible to make out anything he said! I couldn’t pull out a single word or phrase from which I could fake a vague but meaningful-sounding response! I had lost one of the most fundamental tools of any functioning bureaucrat.

So I sprang for some hearings aids. My health insurance covered the testing, but didn’t pay anything for the hearing aids themselves. And they weren’t cheap! They cost several thousand dollars, easily the most expensive (per pound) thing I owned.

They served me well over the next few years. They occasionally they had to be adjusted upward (though they have been at their maximum setting for a few years now).

They’ve been lost and found many times, survived a hot shower and, amazingly, a full-cycle trip through the washing machine. Their engines finally gave out and had to be rebuilt about five years ago, so I knew they were probably coming to the end of their useful lives. 

A month or two ago I learned that some hearing aid manufacturers had cut deals with my insurance company, so that new hearings aids, and all the hearing tests, would be be absolutely free to me. 

I knew that hearing aids had gotten much more sophisticated in the years since I had bought mine. They could be controlled and fine tuned by a smart phone app, rather than having to tote them back to the audiologist. The hearing aids could interact with each other via Bluetooth, they could stream sounds from phone calls or other devices directly into your ears, and even tell you where you lost them. My old hearing aids weren’t dead yet, but this seemed like a deal too good to pass up, so I decided to upgrade my oto-tech. 

I talked my Dad into getting new ones too. He’s deafer than I am (did I mention that my deafness is HIS FAULT?), and he’s also more of a social butterfly, so he needs his hearing even more than I do. But he rarely wears his current hearing aids because they’re cumbersome and don’t work that well. They’re over 20 years old, so he’s certainly due for some new ones—especially as his insurance has the same deals that make them free to him too!

We went together to the hearing aid store, where an attractive young audiologist* gave us each hearing tests, took measurements and asked our preferences, and recommended which hearing aids to order. (*Full disclosure: I’m 65 and my dad is over 90, so to us virtually every woman is young. And attractive.)

My Dad has an iPhone, which all the modern hearing aids are compatible with, but I had a cheap old Samsung phone that didn’t work with most of them. After a some searching for hearing aids that worked with my phone, I realized I was basing my selection of four- or five-thousand-dollar hearing aids on compatibility with my $99 phone, which was completely backwards. So I resolved to go out and buy a more modern phone, and selected a hearing aid model based solely its features and quality (cost not being an object).

In a couple of weeks we went back and got our new hearing aids. Or I did, anyway; my Dad’s were not set up right and had to go back to the factory. “I’m sorry”, she said, “for some reason I forgot to check the box for iphone compatibility.” 

(I know the reason she forgot. She was being age-ist: my dad is a nonagenarian, and she just assumed the most advanced thing he could possibly own was a flip phone, or more likely just a rotary-dial phone on the wall at home. (For the record, my Dad DOES have a rotary phone on his wall in addition to the iPhone in his pocket; in fact, he also has a hand-crank phone on his wall, but that’s a story for another day.))

So I got my new bionic ears yesterday, in time for Christmas. What a difference! Before when I had my old ones tweaked, I would notice for a few days how sounds were just a little bit sharper (like when you first put on glasses with a new prescription). But with these, I could suddenly hear everything! She assured me I was just hearing what normal-sounded people always hear, but to me it was like everything was clear, and understandable, and way too loud. 

We had friends over last night, and I had to ask Kathleen if everyone (including me) was shouting, because it seemed so loud to me. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and when I was peeing, it sounded like I was clanging a cow bell in there! My first thought was that everyone must be able to hear me!

My second thought was, don’t worry, it just seems so loud to you because of your new hearing aids. You’re not peeing any louder than you were before. 

My third thought was, but now you have normal hearing, and before you were deaf, so this is how loud you really are, and for all these years you were making this big racket in the bathroom and didn’t even know it. Now I know why people talk so loud at dinner parties!

I’m sure I’ll get used to the hearing aids soon, both the sounds, and the social implications, and it is really nice to be able to hear at what I imagine must be a normal level (it’s been so long, I can’t really tell from memory). And Kathleen is certainly looking forward to being able to address me in a normal tone of voice. So this has been a great present for me, and that doesn’t even count the cool phone app to play with that lets me adjust the hearing aids while I’m wearing them! What a Christmas!

Thanks for listening,
Dorn
12/20/2019

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Happy Holidays and Link to Calendar for 2020

It’s almost time to welcome a brand new year! For fun, I have made a 2020 calendar with embedded pictures from my seasonal series and it’s something anyone who wants to can download, print and have a great “Lona’s Grandchildren” calendar. The link is here: https://thirdagethoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/calendar-doc-2020.docx

Here are thumbnails of what’s included:

To those who’ve read any of the blog posts this year: Many thanks!!!! To Dorn, who really outdid himself with content: You’re the greatest!!! Hoping everyone has a new year filled with tons of positive energy!

-Lona

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Endo-cation

– in which Dorn and Kathleen have a themed mini-vacation.

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his is an update of my adventures with my mystery illness (last mentioned here). Despite the confidence my doctor voiced at the time, the video-capsule endoscopy didn’t help. The capsule-cam simply didn’t see the cause of my bleeding as it tumbled through my GI tract. Maybe it was looking in the wrong direction at a critical moment. It did spot some damaged-looking areas, though, so the next step was to send an endoscope down the throat to inspect those areas, and if the bleeding cause was there, fix it. 

The endoscope, I was told, would be equipped with two balloons at the business end, for gripping the intestines from the inside, and scrunching them up onto the endoscopy pole in the same way one might scrunch up the draperies all onto one end of the curtain rod. This technique lets one explore about half way down my GI tract. (For the other half, they do the same thing, but start at the other main access point.)

The endoscopy was to take place at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Kathleen needed to be with me, but she also needed to be near Archie. So we got a dog-friendly hotel room in Eager Park for a couple of nights, and made a mini-vacation of the event. It was fun walking around the city before and after the procedure, for us and for Archie.

There was a little grassy area right next to the hotel for Archie to frolic in that was outfitted with short trails lined with shrubs and a park bench or two. It seemed to be designed to resemble a city mini-park, but it was also equipped with discreetly hidden access pipes and raised gravel beds that very much resembled the tertiary septic system and field in my back yard (or would resemble it, if I were a better landscaper). Still, Archie didn’t care what the square’s real purpose was, and if Archie was happy with it, so was I.

The Eager Park neighborhood seemed pretty safe to walk through even at night, though an internet search didn’t include it on the list of the safest neighborhoods in Baltimore. (It also wasn’t on the list of coolest neighborhoods in Baltimore, but we liked it anyway.) 

I really don’t remember much of the endoscopy itself, as I was under the influence of sedation drugs.

My first memory after the procedure was Kathleen telling me that they still couldn’t find the source of the bleeding, and they might have to look again from the other direction.  Either the source of the bleeding was further down than the scope went, or it was completely healed (the bleed had taken place six months ago) leaving no trace.

She didn’t seem particularly bothered by the news that I would likely have to come back. That’s not really like Kathleen, but she later explained why—the performing doctor looked and sounded, in her words, like a Bollywood movie star. I don’t remember it, but I can imagine him giving Kathleen the results of the endoscopy with a rakish smile and a twinkle in his eye. (All I can remember about him was that he wore glasses. Either the sedatives messed with my memory, or he just didn’t make as strong an impression on me.) 

The hotel was close enough that we could walk back after the endoscopy. (Or rather Kathleen could walk back. She tells me that the best I could do was amble aimlessly, while she kept pulling me from in front of cars and urging me in the correct general direction.)

After my drugs mostly wore off, we had a night on the town with our niece Haven, an up-and-coming young cusper (on the millenial/gen-Z cusp) who lives in Baltimore. She’s a vegetarian, which she proved by only ordering drinks with basil leaves in them.

We tried to cajole Haven into telling us the hot spots in town that all the young people go to, but she insisted that her idea of a wild night was making soup at home, or if she was in a really crazy mood, baking cookies. I think she was just trying to keep our elderly frames from having conniptions upon hearing her shocking lifestyle. We had great fun with her anyway, even without frequenting any mosh pits or flash mobs or speakeasies, or whatever the young people frequent these days.

And that’s the story of our little endo-cation in Baltimore. Nothing really spectacular happened, but when the central theme of a vacation is getting a hospital procedure done, that’s just where you want to end up.

Dabangg!,
Dorn
12/14/2019

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Goals and Mom

I read an Iris Murdoch novel recently where the retired protagonist was described as existing in the ‘relaxed banality of a life without goals’. I was definitely feeling like that after my retirement, so I started to pick up various challenges presented by social media. Some weeks ago there was ‘Inktober’, where you draw something in ink every day, according to various prompts, for the month of October and then post it. That was fun and somewhat challenging, but, guess what, October ended as it always does, on October 31. So, after that what I found to do was the #15weekportrait challenge hosted on Instagram by artist @ajalper. It’s just like it sounds – you paint a portrait a week for 15 weeks, posting it on Instagram with appropriate hashtags, and hopefully you improve your skills as you go along. That has brought me to week seven, almost the halfway mark, and a portrait of my Mom that I thought I wouldn’t let go by without a blog post.

I had painted my Mom several times, but never my ‘young’ Mom, the way she looked when I first met her back in the 1950’s. So, painting her this way was a little like looking at her through my baby eyes many, many years after the fact! She was quite an influence and taught us to be honest (see my brother’s post on how honest he is), industrious (that’s why I like having goals, I guess) and creative. We lost her five years ago now and she is the first person, that, when she died, I had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t dead at all. I could see her face in every flower and still feel her in the elements, and certainly she has gone on living in her descendants.

7 weeks of Portrait challenge subjects from the upper corner down and across: My friend’s granddaughter, my niece, granddaughter #2, granddaughter #5, granddaughter #4, the hub, and Mom.

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Hallmark Russian Literature Christmas Romance Channel

Even with so many channels to choose from, Kathleen and I were getting tired of the same old thing on TV. We’d had enough of the Hallmark Christmas channel, British-Village-Quaint-Murder station, the Forensic-Crime-Scene-Investigation network, and the all-Star-Trek channel. We needed something new, so we cranked the selector wa‑a‑a‑ay up into the second thousands, to find some channels with new themes. 

We came across our new favorite: the Hallmark Russian Literature Christmas Romance Channel! 

Here’s today’s lineup. 


The Christmas Express (9 hours)

Kelly doesn’t believe in Christmas, because she is an atheist. When a blizzard shuts down the Nizhni Novgorod train station on Christmas Eve, she is forced to share a room with Bradimir, a young divinity student who was so traumatized by his drunken abusive father that his is unable to open up about his emotions. 

Kelly and Brad spend the entire night, and all the next day, arguing and debating about religion, destiny, and human and divine love. By the time the storm clears on Christmas night, Kelly believes in Christmas, and Brad believes in Feelings. They declare their undying love for each other and kiss under the mistletoe in the train station, before boarding trains heading East and West, never to see each other again. 


A Cookie Cutter Christmas (7 hours)

Megan runs a little bakery that used to be her working-class father’s, until he was killed in the Napoleonic Wars. Times are hard and food is scarce, so she enters the Tzar’s baking contest. The winner of the best gingerbread Faberge Egg will become the Tzar’s Imperial Pastry Chef. 

She takes an instant dislike to another contestant, Lieutenant Gregory Pfeffernov, the scion of an aristocratic baking dynasty. She sees him as autocratic, conceited, and French-speaking, while he sees her as uppity, pushy, and common. Each must admit that the other is an excellent chef, though. By the end of the contest, the two put aside their class differences and start to plan a life together, as they listen to, off in the distance–are those Christmas fireworks? No, they’re the guns of the Decembrist revolutionaries!


Crime and Punishment and Christmas PART ONE (9 hours)

Anna has just been fired, and is trying to decide the best way to commit suicide when she is accidentally offered the job of nursemaid to young Pavel, who lost his legs in a playground duel. She has no medical training, but every time she tries to explain this to Pavel’s brooding tormented widowed father Boris, circumstances, or her own reluctance to be cast into the street, seem to interfere.

Her warm heart and skill with a wheelchair soon endear her to Pavel and Boris. She begins to think that there may be a future with this god-forsaken family, but then the servants catch her dancing the Mazurka with Boris even though they are not betrothed, and she is forced to flee in shame. Boris spends the next four years searching until he finds her in a convent. He confesses his love, and though he is now penniless from gambling debts, they marry and are briefly blissfully happy until he dies. 


So if your provider doesn’t already carry it, tell him that you want the Hallmark Russian Literature Christmas Romance Channel! And if he won’t add it, then despair at the mindless cruelty of the universe!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/5/2019

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Memory bank

In which Dorn remembers and forgets.

T

alking with Kathleen while driving home from a visit with family and friends this weekend, we thought of a perfect Thanksgiving blog post. It was humorous and insightful, based on past and present experiences with said family and friends, and it was both personal and universal. As I drove and we talked, I wished I had a way to write the post right then—I didn’t trust my memory to retain all the interesting facets of the topic we were exploring.

Sure enough, by the time we arrived at home, I had forgotten that I wanted to write this great idea down immediately. And by next morning, we had this conversation:

“Remember that great blog idea we talked about?”
  ”Yeah, that was great. What was it?”
“I have no idea. You?”
  ”Uh, no.”

So instead of that post, I’ll write one about memory.

My memory has always given me trouble. There were some things like numbers and certain classes of facts that I have no trouble retaining. For example, I can remember almost every phone number I ever dialed. But for the most important stuff—the things involving people—my memory is really spotty at best. I have trouble remembering names and birthdates I should know, shared experiences, and the intricacies of evolving personal lives and interactions of my friends, family and acquaintances.

This manifests itself in all sorts of little inconveniences. I have to write down lists of things I want to do, or include in a letter, or shop for, and I have yet to figure out how to remember to read the list when I need it. The best I can do is to have lots of lists lying around (Kathleen hates that), in the hopes that I will be continually reminded of their existence.

And there are a few perks–I think it’s easier for me to forget a past injustice, argument or insufferable encounter. And I suspect (though I have no way of knowing first-hand) that I sometimes find myself surprised and delighted by a new discovery multiple times, provided I wait long enough between revelations for the previous memory to fade.

In balance, it’s a shame, though. My people memories are the things that I love best, but I even have trouble keeping track of things as simple as which grandchild has which birthday. (This is mostly my daughters’ fault, because my grandsons’ birthdays are within a week of each other (different years of course), and so are my granddaughters’.)

I’m pretty sure this is a real deficit, and not just me not settling for a normal, functional but imperfect memory. My friends and fam seem to be able to pull up memories of the past without even trying, while I feel like I really have to work at it. It’s not debilitating, but it does make me feel a twinge of loss, similar to how I feel when my mild deafness prevents me from fully engaging in a conversation.

As an adaptation over the years, I developed a healthy appetite for being engaged in the present moment. I suspect I am no more successful at “being here now” than other people, but at least I try to be conscious most of the time of this goal to be present. This goal coincides with New Age and popular Buddhist philosophies, but I am just trying to get the most from each experience in the present because I don’t know how well I’ll be able to access it again once it’s in the past.

Now that I’ve entered my Third Age, I have to wonder if I should have worked harder at developing my ability to make and keep the kind of memories I wanted. Has my so-called “adaptation” just been a cop-out? Will a time come when I really need to draw on those memories, but I won’t have access to enough of them?

The retirement classes I took always stressed the importance of depositing money into your IRA account regularly starting at the very beginning of your professional life, to assure that by the end of it there will be enough to support you. Is there a similar rule for one’s bank of memories, that I blew off? By adapting rather than trying to improve my memory skills, have I fallen behind in making my deposits to my mental IRA? Will I be able to withdraw enough memories as needed to meet my psychic needs?

There’s no answer to this of course, and I that’s probably not even a very apt analogy. Experiences and memories aren’t like money, you can enjoy them both now and later. The best I can do is to cherish all my experiences, and all my memories, as if they are rare treasures. Which of course they are, no matter how perfect one’s memory is. Happy Thanksgiving.

*   *   *

I’ve been musing on memory lately because I just read a novel that had memory, and the loss of it, at its core: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. It was a 2019 National Book Award finalist, described on Goodreads as a “hypnotic, gentle novel that begins as a surveillance-state dystopia, and ends as something more existential: a surreal and haunting meditation on our sense of self.

The book is all that, and I enjoyed reading it, but I can’t recommend it without a caution. You know how when you’re reading Japanese fantastical fiction or watching a Japanese movie, even while part of you is enjoying the show, another part is hoping the story doesn’t get all melancholy and creepy by the end, like Japanese fiction sometimes does? Well, this is one of those stories that gets that way. But it sure held my attention!

Here’s a book with a theme of remembering and forgetting that I can recommend whole-heartedly: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (the same Brit who wrote The Remains of the Day). It an easy and fairly short book (maybe 300 pages), and it reads like a dreamy adventure story from Dark Ages England. An old man and his wife decide to go on a trip to visit their son whom they are having trouble remembering, and have all sorts of natural and supernatural experiences on the way. Reading it was an unmitigated pleasure, like listening to the retelling of a thousand-year old myth. Get this one from the library and enjoy it!!

And since I seem now to be writing about loss-of-memory fantasy stories, let me mention two movies I’ve enjoyed over the years. If you missed these, you should catch them on Netflix.

The first is Memento (2000), a noir thriller about a man trying to hunt down the man who murdered his wife in an attack that also left him unable to hold onto any new memories for more than a few minutes. It’s fascinating to see how he even manages to survive, much less conduct a murder investigation, and to see how the people around him enable or exploit him for their own ends. The movie plays out in anti-chronological order, so the audience experiences something of the same continual dis­orientation that the hero is going through. 

The other is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which was also excellent even though it starred Jim Carrey. It’s a love story of what can go right and wrong when technology is invented that allows surgical removal of unhappy romantic memories, and how hard someone can fight for memories they value. 

I like stories of people trying to remember, or sometimes trying to forget, perhaps because of my own challenges. Do you have a favorite remembering or forgetting story, your own or someone else’s? I’d love to hear it.

Thanks,
Dorn
12/4/2019

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Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation

I was a little hesitant to post the comic below because I really think we need to all come together as generations and work together to address the common problems we face. I am even suspicious that any fostering of divisiveness is really the work of “The Man” who may be trying to foment generational warfare to divert attention from oligarchy and corporatism. However, when my grandkids were teasing me for being a baby boomer I just had to stand up for my generation! Third agers – I know you would too because we really are the BEST!!!

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Catchups and closure (part 2)

– in which Dorn continues updating some previous posts.

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EGETARIAN’S PROGRESS

In past posts, (Cold turkeyHerbivore log), I promised to report on my experiment to give up all cow meat until Thanksgiving. It’s not quite T-day yet, but I’m pretty confident that the experiment is a success. Even though I REALLY LIKE BEEF, stopping it didn’t produce any irresistible cravings, and I plan to continue excluding it from my diet indefinitely.

I’ve had two lapses. First was when I bought a box of beef broth for a soup I was making. Once I realized that beef broth is made from beef (duh), I still used it and ate the soup anyway.

The second was only today, after the entire draft of this post was written, when I had a pastrami sandwich with dill pickles and saurkraut. I thought pastrami was some pig product and had written a comment in my post about it, but I looked it up just to make sure. Drat! It’s made of beef brisket, so (a) that doubles the number of failures I have to report, and (b) I can’t eat the rest of the pastrami in the fridge!

I also had a near miss: before my video-capsule TV appearance (described here), I had to fast for 36 hours. When I was allowed to eat again after the procedure, I spent much of the long drive home anticipating a stop at the Sonic drive-through, which has GREAT burgers. Fortunately or unfortunately, before I got there I remembered that I had sworn off that sort of thing, and I diverted to a different fast food place to get different junk food.

My “meat tooth” is adequately satisfied by meaty things like portobello mushrooms, and even more so by chicken soup, bacon, eggs, turkey and fish. Recall, I didn’t swear off all meat, just cow. So I’m not really a vegetarian, but what am I, and what is my food regimen called? None of “cow-free”, “nonbeefetarian”, “anti-bovinotroph”, “extra-taurustrial” sound exactly right. 

The closest real word I can find is “flexitarian”, meaning a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat. I’m a little put off by the “flexi” part of it, because I used to be a complete omnivore, and now I’ve added some rules and restrictions to my diet, so it seems like I have become more inflexible in my eating. But I suppose the word is just right when applied to a strict vegetarian who has eased off a bit.

“Flexitarian” was selected as the 2003 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society (https://www.americandialect.org/woty). The word is in impressive company, including 2017 Word of the Year “Fake news” and 2014’s “Black lives matter”. (It seems like life and language have gotten much tougher since 2003, haven’t they?).

These Words of the Year have retained their power, but others haven’t really lived up to their potential. One such is the verb “To be Plutoed”, which means to be de­moted or de­valued, with a conno­tation (to me at least, ’cause I like Pluto) that the de­motion was ill-considered. It was the Word of the Year in 2006, but never really caught the public’s imagi­nation, de­spite the fact that Astrono­mers con­tinue to this day to argue about the wisdom of down­­grading Pluto to dwarf planet status.

Googling “plutoed” yields almost no hits after 2007, and virtually none ever with the verb being used in its intended meaning (all are stories about its Word of the Year selection). The fact that language and society have moved on so easily after Pluto’s retirement from the Brotherhood of Planets leaves me inexpressibly sad. Speaking of which…

MY RETIREMENT (last updated here).

Things continue satisfactorily. I’m still doing a little bit of consulting work, and I recently signed up with a new government contractor. So far my biggest task there has been to go through orientation.

The orientation presentations—work ethics, sexual harassment, etc.—were pretty much the same as those I saw every year as a Fed, but it was encouraging to see something that I had never seen before in a sexual harassment Powerpoint: that intentionally failing to “pronoun” a coworker correctly can be considered a form of harassment.

I prefer to think that I’m finally seeing this because of a general increase in respect for all individuals’ workplace rights even when they don’t match conventional gender stereotypes, rather than because the orientation came from a private company that’s more woke than the Federal government. And maybe societal norms really are changing for the better: the use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun was the Word of the Year in 2015.

In general, retirement is still a pretty easy gig. There have been bumps, but mostly not caused by retirement, and in fact often made easier to navigate by being retired. But I can see looming the need to address the Bigger Questions—what am I here for? What should I be doing, in the broadest possible sense? These questions, of course, face us all at all stages of life, but they are good to re-address periodically, especially at times of transition. I’ll keep you posted, perhaps in a future post called something like “Be Who You Are”.

Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving,
Dorn
11/21/2019

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Catchups and closure (part 1)

In which Dorn provides some updates on past posts.

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orn’s mysterious illness

The good news about having a fancy city doctor is that they have access to esoteric information and equipment that the country folk might not have. The bad news is that it can take a long time to make use of it.

I had a six-week wait between when my new doctor identified my mystery illness (first described in this post) and when I could take the video capsule endoscopy that would confirm it. But the day finally came.

artist’s conception

They fitted me with a belt containing a receiver and a little TV monitor, and gave me a video camera pill to swallow. It was the size and shape of a large vitamin capsule, or a small Weeble, and one end had a clear dome, inside of which was a flashing strobe light and (I assume) a camera. I swallowed it and we watched it descend my throat on the little monitor. (And “no”, they said, “you can’t watch it progressing through your system all day. The monitor is just for the initial check.”)

Without the Dorn-cam to watch, the rest of the day was pretty dull. I was up near Baltimore, too far to drive home just to turn around and drive back for the procedure closeout. I wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, sleep, sit still, or exercise, so I went to the library for the day. At the end of the day, they took their receiver belt back and sent me home. They didn’t want the camera-pill back, and said I’d know when it was expelled. 

When I asked how to be sure the camera was really gone, they said they could order an xray of the area. That certainly didn’t seem very efficient to me. With the wonders of modern digital miniaturization, I figured they could make the capsule start beeping or something after 8 hours (or however long the expected transit time is). Or even better—it could vibrate! Then its presence would be announced more discreetly and more, um, agreeably. 

In a couple of days, the doc reported that the pictures had confirmed and located the damage in my intestine. Now I’ve got another procedure scheduled to send another Mars rover up and zap the problem (“zap” is apparently the technical term of art for the procedure). That will happen in another a few weeks. If anything interesting happens then, I’ll let you know. 

Rapper name

(Update of this post.) The same day as my internal video debut, in the parking garage by the library, I saw painted on one of the walls the logo of the 2015 Superbowl. It looked like an ad, but what it was doing on a concrete interior wall in Towson I have no idea, especially considering neither Baltimore nor any other local team was playing (it was, I think, the Seahawks v the Patriots). But what most caught my eye was the Roman designation for the 49th Superbowl: XLIX. 

Now there’s a rapper name for you: X-LIX! It sounds kind of naughty, vaguely demonic even, and it rolls off the tongue easily. And it sounds familiar, like a real word, even though it isn’t. 

The sound of the name reminded me of Bela Oxmyx (“OX-mix”), a space alien/south Chicago gangster who appeared in a 1968 episode of the original Star Trek series called “A Piece of the Action”. What a great episode, in which Mr Spock speaks that memorable line, “I’d advise youse to keep dialing, Oxmyx!”.

What a great show, in fact! I remember wanting to quit my Boy Scout troop because they insisted on meeting on Thursday evenings, when Star Trek came on. And in those days, children, if you didn’t see a TV show at the one time it was broadcast, you didn’t see it at all until six months later during summer reruns (which were also aired on Thursday evenings)! And there was no Youtube or social media to read about it, you just had to admit to your friends in school next day that you missed it, ask them what happened, and let them gloat. The kids these days, they don’t know how easy they’ve got it!

But oh, the horror! It’s occurred to me the real reason why the rapper name X-LIX sounds so familiar to me! It’s not Oxmyx at all, it’s that it is only one letter away from that constipation medicine Ex-Lax! Oh cruel fate! That’s the stereotypical old man medicine, and a death sentence for a hipster rapper wannabe! My rapper routine might as well consist of shuffling across the stage muttering about you young hooligans! while wearing my fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe over an “I’m for Joe” t-shirt. Oh well, can’t have that. The name search continues.

Side note: I’m noticing that the fraction of my posts that deal with my GI tract is disconcertingly high. If I had known things would trend this way, I might have thought twice about starting to blog at all (or about getting old). Still, “write what you know”, as they say.

Continued in part 2, with updates on my semi-vegetarian conversion and other news. 

Thanks!
Dorn
11-13-2019

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Retiree Journal

Inspired by artist Steven Reddy (see his new kickstarter here), who does a visual journal sketch every single day I actually sketched my day yesterday, which is included below. That sort of made me confront some things. Like, when I first started this blog, I figured it would be obvious in a couple of months what it was about (but it still doesn’t seem that obvious). And sometimes when you watch a movie and you get impatient when you can’t figure out what it is about is sort of how my life in retirement seems to be going. I’ve been kind of vacillating between wanting it to have more meaning and being glad it is so unstructured. After all, as the soothing voice in the guided meditation that I have been listening to in the morning says at the end, “All you have to do is breathe”. So far so good!

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Breaking news

– In which Dorn turns breaking things into a virtue.

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One of my duties at my last job was to break things. When a new computer program, website, or procedure was created by the office, I would dive into it and test it to the breaking point if I could. I followed the instructions as laid out, but tried think of ways they could be mis­interpreted or mis-applied, resulting in the failure of the whole system. The theory was, of course, that it was better to find and fix these weak points while the product was in house than after it was made public.

I liked my job of breaking things, partly because it was like puzzle-solving, and partly because I had a knack for it. I understood the feelings of Nick Naylor, the “hero” of the 2005 dark comedy Thank You For Smoking. He’s a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, and when asked by a lung cancer victim how he can work at such a job and even enjoy it, he says the job gives him satisfaction because he is so good at it. (This is a very funny movie, and I recommend it if you missed it the first time around, unless you are offended by slurs cast on the health virtues of Vermont cheddar cheese. It’ll be on HBO over the next week or two.)

Of course I’m not suggesting that there’s any moral equivalency between trying to break things that people have worked to make unbreakable, and trying to get people addicted to a nasty life-shortening habit for money. The latter is odious, while the former is perfectly respectable. As Phil Johnson points out in his essay “Failure is just data“, testing out a new product is like a scientist testing a scientific hypothesis. If the product fails to perform as expected, it just means that the hypothesis (that the product is ready for rollout) is disproved.

“If this were to happen to a scientist,” Johnson explains,”the reaction would be that they are doing their job well, as long as they capture the data about why the hypothesis was wrong. It’s not out of the ordinary, it’s expected and necessary. The key is framing a failure as an informative versus negative outcome.” (Johnson may have a few blind spots himself about the mental and emotional makeup of scientists.)

His point is that there’s an emotional bias against experiencing a failure which is frequently misplaced—it often should be welcomed as a stepping stone towards ultimate success. This emotional bias is a form of confirmation bias (my favorite bias), which causes us to seek out information that confirms what we already believe, or what we want to believe.

This bias is present even when we don’t have pride of ownership in a product we are testing, or any objective stake at all in the success or failure of the process. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt describes an experiment performed by the originator of the term “confirmation bias”, where the process for determining a simple sequence of numbers is investigated:

In 1960, Peter Wason published his report on the “2–4–6 problem.” He showed people a series of three numbers and told them that the triplet conforms to a rule. They had to guess the rule by generating other triplets and then asking the experimenter whether the new triplet conformed to the rule. Suppose a subject first sees 2–4–6. The subject then generates a triplet in response: “4–6–8?” “Yes,” says the experimenter. “How about 120–122–124?” “Yes.”

It seemed obvious to most people that the rule was consecutive even numbers. But the experimenter told them this was wrong, so they tested out other rules: “3–5–7?” “Yes.” “What about 35–37–39?” “Yes.” “OK, so the rule must be any series of numbers that rises by two?” “No.” People had little trouble generating new hypotheses about the rule, sometimes quite complex ones. But what they hardly ever did was to test their hypotheses by offering triplets that did not conform to their hypothesis. For example, proposing 2–4–5 (yes) and 2–4–3 (no) would have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending numbers.

Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession—your child, almost—and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.

My knack for breaking products and processes at work might have been related to my ability to suspend any pride of ownership (which of course is easier if it’s not my own product that I’m testing).

Now that I’m retired, though, I find I don’t have as many chances to practice this skill—there just aren’t that many things around that need me to test them to the breaking point, unless I want to failure-test my own work (which I’m not confident I could do objectively), or to tell Kathleen all the ways that the thing she is doing isn’t working. And that way madness lies!

Happy Halloween!

Thanks,
Dorn
10/31/2019

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Manon

– In which Dorn touts a French opera.

Kathleen and I went to the movies today to see the NY Metropolitan Opera’s live simulcast of Massenet’s Manon, and it was so good I felt it deserved a post, or at least a mini-post. We have been seeing Met Opera simulcasts at the local movie theater for a couple of years now, and I think this might have been the best performance I’ve seen yet, which is saying a lot. The music was superbly sung by the romantic leads Lisette Oropesa and Michael Fabiano, who were both at the top of their form. They were outstandingly well matched both musically and dramatically, and had a definite charged chemistry on stage. If I had taken a trip to New York and sprung for full-price live opera tickets, I would not have been disappointed.

I especially wanted to rave about it because the simulcast is being repeated at many theaters next Wednesday, October 30, and if you have been thinking about seeing one of those Met Operas at the movies, I recommend this one to you. More info about next week’s event is here.

Here’s a few necessary disclaimers, though: (1) It is full-blooded opera, and not one of those operas where you can sing along “Hiya Tora!”, or sit back and enjoy the scenery if you don’t like the music. So if you don’t like opera, this is probably not for you. (2) Like most operas, it ends tragically. (3) It’s a big investment—we spent over $20 a ticket, and 4-1/2 hours in the theater (although I felt the time flew by). If that all sounds like too much for a Wednesday afternoon or evening, keep an eye out for it and it might show up one day on PBS Great Performances. But if you think you’d enjoy seeing and hearing it at the movies, then I’m betting you will and I urge you to go!

Thanks,
Dorn
10-26-2019

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Honest

In which Dorn paints a self-portrait, metaphorically speaking.

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ona’s self-portrait post (here) prompted me to want to try one of my own. I can’t really paint or even sketch that well, so I thought I’d try a written sketch. Maybe I could come up with a brief description of something I’d done, thought, or said that would provide a picture of me. 

Earlier this week I was grocery shopping and bought a huge megapack of paper towels on sale. When I got to the parking lot, I saw the paper towels in the bottom of the cart and realized I had not paid for them. They cost like fifteen bucks, but I was in a hurry, so I loaded them in the car and left, and promised myself I would pay for them the next time I went shopping. I cut out the bar code from the package and stuffed it in my wallet.

The next shopping trip, I paid at the self-checkout. I found myself migrating toward the unit closest to the self-checkout helper station, and being a little miffed when it was closed and I had to use one further away. I realized that I had the ridiculous hope that the helper there would notice I was scanning a cut-out bar code and ask why, so I could tell them and they could admire how honest I was. I further realized that I hadn’t gone to one of the manned checkout lines because then I would have had to tell the checker why I was scanning this bar code, and it would seem like bragging. Oh vanity, thy middle name is Wendall!

*     *     *

So that’s my self-portrait sketch, capturing my desire to be seen as: (a) honest, and (b) humble enough not to flaunt it except if asked. I realize now that my selection of this particular vignette to write about—although the grocery checker never knew that I Did The Right Thing, you now know—also captures me in pretty much the same light.

This attitude doesn’t really set me apart from most of humanity. We all like to think of ourselves as basically honest, and—mostly—we are. According to Daniel Ariely in The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, we are all continually presented with opportunities to cheat, and how we deal with them depends on (a) whether the stakes are above a minimum amount below which our conscience doesn’t prick us (apparently that’s $15 in my case), and (b) whether we think others will witness our behavior.

This is a consequence of being social animals. In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind (which I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, including here), he describes the unconscious “sociometer” that all humans possess, that constantly scans the social environment for indications of how one’s relational value is being measured by others. One of the functions of the sociometer is to continually recalibrate our moral compass; another is to help us maintain an optimum relationship with our community. It’s an evolutionary advantage to be seen as moral, just as it’s an advantage to be seen as powerful, attractive, smart, or not-to-be-messed-with.

The concepts of morality, and of social communication of one’s morality, manifest in more significant ways than my paper towel sketch, including religion and politics. We have a friend who sincerely believes that if you don’t believe in God, you can’t be moral. I used to think that this was just a simplistic belief that no one would be good unless they thought they’d ultimately get a reward for it. But now I think her belief might be more sophisticated, and is an expansion of the sociometer concept. She might believe, though she may not express it this way, that people’s moralities are unconsciously tempered by what their sociometers tell them others think of them, including the Other from whom believers can keep no secrets.

There’s a quote in Ariely’s book that goes a long way toward explaining why Americans are so divided about Trump’s impeachment. I think the analysis applies equally to Democrats and Republicans:

It seems that the social forces around us work in two different ways: When the cheater is part of our social group, we identify with that person and, as a consequence, feel that cheating is more socially acceptable. But when the person cheating is an outsider, it is harder to justify our misbehavior, and we become more ethical out of a desire to distance ourselves from that immoral person and from that other (much less moral) out-group.

Some day, when I feel self-assured enough about this whole blogging business to take on some controversy, I would like to post more thoughts on both religion and politics. But that will have to wait until I’m more confident about the effect such writing would have on the readings of my sociometer.

Thanks,
Dorn
10/22/2019

PS: My search for that perfect pen name (mentioned here) continues. I just heard that Mitt Romney has already taken the name “Pierre Delecto”. So I’ll have to keep looking.

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Circles of Time in Self-Portraits

My brother Dorn’s recent post about the circles of time (see it here) somehow made me think of a self portrait I made back around 1980. At the time, my Dad and I were both studying portraiture at the Torpedo Factory with Danni Dawson. The self-portrait on the left is something I did back then and I remember my Dad thinking I had over-aged my twenty-something self in the painting. “Maybe in 50 years you’ll look like that!”, he said. I guess I did pass through that phase at some point. Just thinking about the time passage made me realize that now is the time to do some more self-portraits – it’s not like I’m going to look any better in another 50 years!

The self-portrait on the right is my recent effort. Interestingly, it is inspired by the long dead Swedish artist, Anders Zorn, whom I have somehow been following on Instagram. I’ve been wanting to try something called the Zorn palette. Back when we studied with Danni, she was always pushing us to use more color and we didn’t even have black on our palette so we could make it out of colors. Anders Zorn is just the opposite and had an amazingly simple four color palette: black, white, cadmium red and yellow ochre. That’s it! I know they say the ancients didn’t see the color blue, but how odd to leave it out. My usual palette includes not only blue, but it still has all the colors Danni taught us to use. These colors you need for portrait painting, she said, were the same colors that you would use to paint a McIntosh apple. So it was a challenge for me to approach a self-portrait using just the Zorn palette. I kept thinking I would have to cheat, but I didn’t! – even though I fell short in getting my hair as purple as I like!

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Call me ‘Beau’

– in which Dorn almost breaks into the rapper industry, but has branding issues. 

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eaching the Third Age is all about thinking about new careers. With Kathleen’s encouragement I decided it was time to become a rapper. I had already done most of the heavy lifting for the job—everyone knows that 90% of rapper success comes from having the right name, and I had picked out mine: “Beau Tox”.

But before I started, I had to make sure that some upstart rapper hadn’t already claimed this name, so I did an exhaustive search (using both Bing and Google). And it turns out the name is already being used by a Belgian techno-rapper. At least, I think he’s a rapper. There’s little background info on his site, and his tracks seem like easy-listening electro-pop background music with inoffensive (I don’t speak Belgian, but they sound inoffensive) lyrics delivered in rap style on a few of them.

Beau_Tox logo

I could probably survive a co-named competitor in faraway Belgium, but I had a bigger pig jostling for space at the Beau Tox trough: a social media star already has that name. He is apparently quite famous, mostly for being a lovable dog with a somewhat disfigured face.

Beau Tox the dog

Not encouraging. There are also Beau-Tox cosmetic surgery salons in Palm Beach, FL, Tribeca, NY, England, Australia, and probably elsewhere. I suspected this might be the case—the name is just too apt for that type of clinic to pass up—but I didn’t think this association would be close enough to be fatal to my career. After all, they sell Ice Tea and Ice Cubes in the grocery store, and those guys did fine.

More interestingly, there’s a Dick Tracy villian, the plastic surgeon “Dr. Beau Tox”, who gives new faces to criminals No Face and Prune Hilda. A vain Tess and Dick Tracy come in for facelifts as well, and criminal hijinks ensue, as they say. The comic can be read here, or there’s a short synopsis here.

comic: "Meanwhile... 'I gotta have a new face, Doctor Tox. But I can't decide between a Salvador Dali, or...' "

But my favorite name pre-empter (or I should say pre-emptress) was Carlötta Beautox—“actress, thinktress, influenceress”—whose adventures trying to make it big in Hollywood can be followed in an apple podcast. It’s a funny, friendly little number full of pop culture references and silly running jokes (like everyone pronouncing her stage name byew-tox).

I couldn’t stand up to this kind of competition. I thought about reverting to my runner-up rapper name (and believe me, it was a distant second), “Butt Tox”. But I ran the mandatory Google due diligence on it and found that it also had been pre-empted, and not even by fashionable items like those above! There was Butt-tox the toilet seat sanitizer, and an ad for buttock botox injections that includes this enticement,

IS BUTT-TOX THE INJECTION YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEEDED? There’s lots of reasons you should be sticking Botox in your butt. And while I’ll examine a few of them here, with 100 degree days coming and WAY TOO MANY OF YOU leaving sweat stains on the subway, we’ll start here.

I know when I’m beaten. I’m giving up on the rapper business for something where the name competition is not as as cut-throat.

Maybe I’ll be a writer! Now, if I can only think of a pen name…

Thanks! Tell your friends about us if you like us!
Dorn
10/17/2019

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Linda’s Garden

My friend Linda has a beautiful garden that I tried to paint twice this season. I say ‘tried’ because I think both times, I failed to capture the actual beauty that she created. Linda is the real artist here and trying to paint her work did kind of make me feel like a bumbling amateur. Both times I tried, it made me think of Plato’s denunciation of art as a copy of a form that he disliked for further removing one from the reality or truth of something. But, although I didn’t quite capture it, it seems like the counter argument to Plato is that at least the copy of the form will remain when the real form has long since withered. Also, in the process, I got to spend some pleasant hours exploring the ‘truth’ of the beautiful flowers.

Linda’s Garden, End of Season
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Circles of time

– In which Dorn’s dreams come true.

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udiobooks made it possible to commute all the way to Silver Spring and stay sane. The best of them can be engrossing, sometimes dangerously so. I was listening to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, read by the author (or by his computer-generated voice), and at one point I got so caught up in the narrative that I ran off the road. I was on the beltway at the time, so this could have ended badly! Luckily it didn’t, and I righted myself and continued home.

It wasn’t just me, it was the book. Kathleen told me that she was listening to the same audiobook on the way to her teaching job, and she was concentrating on it so hard that she ran off the road (again, luckily, with no permanent consequences).

Stephen Hawking suggested in his book that if you allow for the possibility of imaginary time (time measured in imaginary numbers), our universe’s entire history can be described as a higher-dimension sphere with no endpoints, rather than a time “line”. (Apologies for my crude paraphrasing. His concepts are hard for me to describe or even understand, especially while navigating a car at 60 miles per hour.) 

The book was mostly beyond me, but it left me with a sense of wonder at the ways of the universe and the human mind. What if time wasn’t an arrow with a beginning and an end, but a circle? 

*       *       *

I’ve had my own direct experiences with imaginary time, and I can confirm that it can travel in a circle. Many of you, I suspect, have experienced time circles of your own, and it’s got little to do with physics or metaphysics.

I’ll describe two time circles, one with a diameter of about 40 years, and one of about 20 years. 

I entered the first time circle when I was about six or seven years old, so it was 1960 or 1961. I had recently learned about how years work, and someone told me about the end of the century coming in about 40 years, when the odometer would click over from year 1999 to year 2000. I was fascinated by the idea, and I tried to imagine what that would be like. I tried to imagine what I would be like. I would be 45 or 46 years old, so a grownup, like my teacher or my parents. Maybe I’d be a parent myself. I might wear a suit and tie and have a crew cut and wear glasses. I tried to picture what I might look like, and imagine how I would feel, and “be”, as an adult. This imagination game went on for several days, until my mind was distracted by some new thought, and eventually I forgot about it. 

My life progressed, in ways both predictable and suprising, and eventually I found myself in the year 2000. The memory of the young me picturing his 46-year-old self came pouring back. I pictured myself at six, and I remembered what it was like to be six, picturing me at 46. 

My memory of the young me was spotty, and much of what I had imagined back then didn’t come to pass (no crew cut!). So neither old me nor young me was too spot on about what the other was like, but after 40 years I was still as much me as I was back then, despite the missed predictions and lost memories. I felt as if a vast circuit had been completed, and I had come back to where I started. I mentally smiled at my young self and wished him well on his future, as he congratulated me on my past. (Regular readers will know I can be smug. This started, apparently, at quite a young age.)

*       *       *

The second time circle started about 20 years ago. I was transitioning jobs, and had found what seemed like a good opportunity with the Navy out in Port Hueneme, California, when I got a call from my daughter. “Guess what Dad, I’m pregnant!” She and her husband were living in northern Virginia, so the prospect of moving anywhere away from the mid-Atlantic area immediately lost its allure. I had a daydream that was startling (for me) for its power and clarity. Some day, I imagined, I’d be leaning on the railing of the deck at my house with my 20-year-old grandson as the sun went down, and we’d be drinking some beers and yakking about the kind of stuff families yakked about–cars, girls, jobs, whatever. 

Unlike the memory from my first time circle, this one stayed near the surface, and every now and then I’d take it out and savor it. Our daughter had a boy, who was bright, loving and happy. At about three years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. We all knew that from then on, his life would take different turns than it otherwise would have, and I quietly stored my daydream away as something that might have been. 

With the love and support of his parents, he grew up a good person, mostly healthy and mostly happy, as we hope all children will be. He sees the world differently than I do, but as I watched him mature, I saw the universal human condition as he learned who he was and how he fit in the world, and in all his struggles and triumphs. 

He’s about twenty now, and earlier this year he had come over to spend a few days with us and help out with some house cleaning chores. It was hard work, but the days were pleasant and the evenings watching the sunset light up the other shore of the Chesapeake Bay were magical. He had developed an intense interest in automobiles and machinery, and we were on the deck relaxing and discussing the pros and cons of new and older engine models, and my daydream came bursting into my consciousness! We were drinking sodas, not beers (had I thought about it when creating the daydream, I would have realized that even back then the drinking age was 21), but in every important way, this was the closure of that mental circuit I had created twenty years earlier. I nearly cried. 

The second time circle started shortly before the first one had completed, and I like to think of them as forming two links in a time “chain” that describes my life. I like this idea because it implies that I’m now in a third time circle, and someday I will be surprised and delighted to be brought back to something from my past. I think about the future like everyone does, I guess, and I don’t have any idea which of my forward thoughts might be the basis for the next link in my time chain, but just knowing the circle might be forming around me even now makes the present a little lighter, and the future a little more worth reaching for.

Thanks for listening, from me and from younger me.

Dorn
5 October 2019, 1999, and 1960

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Herbivore log

– In which Dorn records his switch to an extra-taurustrial diet.

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ERBIVORE LOG.

Day 1 (Oct 1). Twenty-four hours into my eat-no-cow pledge (made here), still no irrational meat cravings, which I worried might happen. I tried to remember the rules of vegetarianism from 40 years ago. Is “protein complementarity” still a thing? (Google says no.) What’s good for protein? Beans, rice, hummus, uh, quinoa? What’s easy enough to make that I’ll actually do it?

And what about the beef already in the freezer—is it out of bounds? The environmental damage is already done. Still, best not to eat it if somebody else will, to keep to the spirit of the rule. If no one else will eat it (e.g., the chili), I probably should, so the cow’s (and the rainforest’s) sacrifice isn’t in vain.

What about other kinds of meats? The promise was only for cow meat (mainly ’cause we’re getting into chicken soup season). I nibbled some bacon from a recipe Kathleen was making. That’s allowed, right? A pig is not a cow. Pigs and chickens don’t burn down rainforests, they just pollute and kill the Chesapeake Bay. And I can’t be expected to solve both problems single-handedly!

Supper: red beans and rice.

Day 2 (Oct 2). Not craving meat yet, but thinking a lot about food. I realize I’m mentally approaching this like I approach being on a diet, which experience has shown does not work in the long run.

I need to develop a new mindset. I should be approaching this as a cooking challenge. I like cooking, and I like trying out new recipes. The days when I didn’t have enough time or energy after work to prepare anything complex are long gone. So the main reason I couldn’t sustain my youthful vegetarianism (or at least the main reason I admitted to myself) is also long gone. The biggest thing holding me back now is probably just inertia. The Post reported on squid salads and armenian chicken meatballs today—I gotta get me some recipes!

Supper: shrimp salad.

Day 3 (Oct 3). An article in the Washington Post today reported a drop in Amazon rainforest fires. My cow-free diet is working! More likely, the press attention of the fires that led to my diet is also working in more direct ways. Either way, good news.

Supper: macaroni & lentils.

Day 4 (Oct 4). It’s Friday, so my body is craving movie popcorn! I’m not ready for The Joker—the murderous white sociopath meme feels too close to home these days. And we already saw Ad Astra (spoiler alert: the Brad Pitt character talks about his feelings for three billion miles).

The Washington Post online had a timely article, “Impossible vs. Beyond: We tested cook-at-home versions to see who makes a better vegan burger”.

They felt that the Impossible Burger was the best of what they tested, and good enough to be more than just the “least bad” of the contestants. I’ll store that info, but right now I’m too busy experimenting with real food ingredients. I’ll turn to fake meats when I’m tired of plant-based plants.

Supper: chicken mushroom soup.

Day 5 (Oct 5). Today was my first real challenge. Cleaning out the freezer, we found a flank steak begging to be charred rare on the grill for breakfast, with sides of broccoli and jacket potatoes cooked just right. Man that looks good!

Stay strong, homie! I let my mind drift back to my college days, where I’d learned my iron discipline. Sunday night was always steak night, but what I liked best about it were the baked potatoes, covered with melted butter and sour cream. That’s roughing it. I concentrated on my baked potato, which was actually really good, though we didn’t have any sour cream. We’d baked it British style for about 3 hours to get that crispy outside and soft inside.

And maybe I cut up the broccoli on the cutting board. And maybe the broccoli touched a little of the flank steak juice there. By accident. But I held firm!

Supper: veggies, and mac & cheese.

Day 6 (Oct 6). This showed up in my Facebook feed today:

Man, that Zuckerberg knows your every thought, doesn’t he? Nothing else interesting meat-wise happened today.

Supper: salmon.

Day 7 (Oct 7). Weekly grocery shopping. Got some beef (for others), picked up some commercial veggie-burgers (but nothing that claimed to be imitation meat).

Nothing remarkable happened today, even by my low standards for what’s worth remarking on. Maybe this a-bovine thing has already settled into my new normal. This’ll be my last log entry until something interesting happens (if ever).

Supper: a Field-burger™.

Thanks for your patience. Next post, something interesting.
Dorn
10/8/2019

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Take a chance—dance!

– In which Dorn and Kathleen face the music.

athleen and I caught that 1937 Fred Aistaire/Ginger Rogers classic Shall We Dance Sunday morning, on one of those oldies channels that fill cable these days (more evidence that cable is a dying business, catering mainly to people who have been watching it so long that it’s too much trouble to change). We caught it at the very end, at the odd number with dozens of Ginger Rogerses dancing with Fred to the title song (this number:)

Kathleen reminded me that we used to dance, and suggested I write a blog post about those days.

It’s true. We were never much good, solely because I was never any good (Kathleen was a natural, but I was always a geeky stiff Scandinavian). Kathleen would sometimes try to teach me to dance better, but her lessons always seemed to involve exhorting me to “just feel the music”. (This was quite beyond me, but I got her back—once when she wanted me to teach her some aspect of calculus, I told her she just needed to “feel the math”. Ha!)

When the County offered ballroom dance lessons, we signed up for them. They were taught by an amazing old character, Neil Valiant, a ballroom dancer from the Old School. He told us he was the man who brought the Salsa to the US from Cuba in the forties. He claimed he could teach anyone to dance, and he was right. Under his tutelage, he even taught me to dance (poorly) the Foxtrot, Cha-cha, Waltz, Samba, and my personal favorite, the Tango! I was still Scandinavian (and hence wooden), but at least I knew the steps.

Luckily, as Kathleen pointed out, you don’t have to dance well to enjoy dancing. We would sometimes dance in the aisles at the grocery store, when the muzac playing over the store PA system was right. It was fun and romantic, and when our young daughters were with us, it had the additional positive effect of mortifying them.

When we decided to have a re-wedding, we invited Neil to be the reception entertainment: he brought his collection of ballroom oldies, and after he performed some of his teaching magic on the guests, we all danced to them. Kathleen and I kicked it off with a Tango first dance. We all had a lot of fun and it worked out great.

We had our own Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers experience at a swanky hotel in Switzerland. We were doing a budget-tour of Europe tacked onto a business trip to a conference in Germany. We decided that at one stop, we would splurge and stay at a multi-star hotel, under the shadow of the Matterhorn in San Moritz. It was quite swanky (for us) and even a bit intimidating—I remember the table settings having more utensils than I had ever eaten with before, and wondering the purposes of the extras.

But when they started piping in the music, we plucked up our courage and waltzed through the hallways, up the grand stairs, and out onto the balcony. The setting could have been one from those Fred Astaire high-society dance fantasy movies, except it was in color.

We weren’t magically transformed into Fred and Ginger, but we didn’t embarrass ourselves either, and when other dinner guests there saw us dancing, although they didn’t rise and join us, they did watch and smile. We were content.

My Fred Astaire (or maybe Sean Spicer, if I’m honest) moment was many years ago now (we were the youngsters at the hotel, back then), but it still warms my heart. Maybe more than ever, as my mis-steps fade from my memory and only the courage and the triumph of the dance remain. Thank you, Kathleen.

And thank you!
Dorn
10/7/2019

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Our House

In which Lona reminisces about building a house…

The inktober (where you draw and post something in ink every day of October) prompt for today was “build”, which makes me think about the biggest building project I ever had: my house. It didn’t start out as a personal building project back in 1977. My husband, Gordon, and I picked out a pretty modest plan from a home design book, ordered the plans, and took them to a contractor. He wanted $60,000 to build it, which was a fortune to us, so we went back to the drawing board, literally. The problem with the plans we had was that I didn’t know how to build it so our new course of action was to design something so simple we could build it ourselves. In this case, the government was there to help with a $1.25 book from USDA called Low-Cost Wood Homes for Rural America – Construction Manual. Everything we needed to know was in the book! Following the instructions in the book I sketched out a little house, only 20’ x 24’, before ‘tiny houses’ were even a cool thing. A friend of ours who worked in drafting made official looking copies of the plan so we could get a building permit. We marked out the house corners on our lot with four posts and string and had some foundations poured and some block laid by a local brick layer. We went down to Bryans Road Building and Supply and old man Lund was willing to give us a line of credit because Gordon’s mother had gone to school with him back in the 1920’s. The supplies all came in one truckload. To start building, we enlisted our friend, John Greene, who had been working framing houses, who said he could do ours but he needed $6.00 an hour and we had to hire an assistant, too. We decided to save money by me being the assistant. Gordon wasn’t eligible because he had to keep working to bring home the bacon, so to speak. Luckily my mother-in-law was a very willing and free babysitter to our one year old. Contrary to what one might think, the framing of a house goes up pretty easily and this was done in a couple of weeks. We made one major change when we realized that we could have an attic bedroom just by changing the pitch of the roof. We decided to just do it and hope the building inspector wouldn’t give us a hard time. After that I remember putting in insulation, building cabinets, putting down tile on the floor, and doing the wiring even though it was Gordon, not me, who knew enough to pass the test that you need to pass if you want to do your own wiring. It sounds crazy, but by this time we were seriously into saving money, so I even made our own doors and windows. We hired and fired a drywall guy that didn’t seem to know what he was doing. My sister-in-law helped me with some drywall and showed me how to do it. The worst plumbers in the world tried to put in the bathroom sink by attaching it just to drywall and they also drilled a huge hole to run pipe right through our main supporting beam and they forgot to slope the sewer line! I failed the electrical inspection the first time and had to redo things in a way Gordon said was a worse way to do it – but by this time I was more interested in listening to the inspector than Gordon so I would pass. My brother helped us with siding and painting the outside. (I don’t want to forget that other friends and family had been helping all along! Thanks!) At some point all the tasks seemed interminable, so our mantra became, “it’s just a shack”, which is what really helped us finally call it finished. After some inspection ups and downs, we got an occupancy permit and chased the squirrels out and moved in. (Never mind that some stuff like the baseboards would take another 35 years to finish.) I believe we had spent around $20,000.

That was forty years ago. Over the years we’ve added on, built decks, replaced most of my crummy windows and doors, put in central heat, re-roofed and even added some closets which were egregiously missing initially. In the end, I believe the main qualities that helped us complete this project were perseverance and a certain lowering of standards. It may not be the fanciest house, but after all the work that went into it, it has always felt like ‘home’.

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Cold turkey (mmm, turkey!)

– In which Dorn battles with his inner carnivore.

S

unday dinner last week was a grilled ribeye steak, cooked just right—starting to char on the outside, still pink and dripping on the inside. It was SO GOOD. It’s really a psychological superfood, like chocolate! It is for me anyway. 

The great thing about steak, or meat in general, is you don’t have to work at it to come out with a delicious meal. It’s tasty seared, sauted, spitted, stewed, fried, roasted or even raw. And when it’s cooked up right, it’s just out of this world! 

Back when Kathleen and I were first married, long before you were born, I was a vegetarian for a while. I’d learned a little about ecosystem dynamics in college, including the rule of 10s: 100 lbs of grass = 10 lbs of herbivore (cow) = 1 pound of carnivore (me). Even back in the seventies, it was simple math that the more population we had, the less sustainable was the idea of eating meat.

My vege-plan soon collapsed—I found it was just too hard making tasty nutritious meatless meals, and meat was so easy. When a cow or pig seemed almost designed do the work of turning vegetables into a delicious meal for me, why should I slave away at trying to make a meal out of soybeans and lentils? I shouldn’t! So I’ve been living off the metabolic labors of other animals pretty much all of my adult life.

Every now and then I get a twinge of guilt. The latest one was triggered by a joke/rant by Bill Maher, who noted that the Amazon rainforest was being burned down by cattle ranchers to make room for hamburgers. My first thought was how awful it was that they would destroy the rainforest. My second was how awful it was anyone would support cattle ranchers doing that, by buying their meat. But surely that’s not me! I don’t eat so much meat that my habits would have any effect on South American cattle economics or rainforest survivability! Do I?

I checked it out. From quora.com, I found that a steer might yield the equivalent of 1800 hamburgers. 

(Irrelevant side note: When I googled “how many burgers are in a cow?”, another hit also came up, the answer to “how many cows are in a burger?”. It varies with the processing methods used, but McDonalds says that each of its burgers could have the meat of maybe 100 different cows in it. [*]

If I eat 360 burgers a year—I don’t (I don’t think!), but it keeps the math simple—that amounts to about 20% of a cow’s meat. Each cow needs about 35 acres of grassland[*], so my appetite for meat needs about 7 acres of grassland to satisfy. 

Every acre of the Amazon rainforest can absorb about 1.3 tons of CO2 annually[*], so if the grassland used to raise my hamburgers was created by destroying rainforest, it resulted in about 10 extra tons of CO2 a year in the atmosphere.

Satellite image of burning rainforest
Satellite image of South American rainforest fires

This is twice the carbon footprint I produced by commuting to work[*], which was already high because I chose to live 75 miles south of my job (though I mitigated my choice by telecommuting and using public transportation)

I told myself that I had to commute because I had to work, but I can’t claim that I have to eat meat! I’m pretty much an omnivore, and I pretty much like everything I eat. 

Ironically, almost the only thing in my entire 65 years that tasted so bad to me that I had to take it out of my mouth rather than swallow it, was one of the early commercial plant-based meat substitutes (a vegetarian hot dog) that came on the market maybe 40 years ago, and that I tried out of curiosity. 

(Irrelevant side note: The only other time I ever had to do this was when I tried to eat “Phoenix feet” I had ordered from the greasy-spoon Dim Sum restaurant on New Hampshire Avenue near where I used to work.)

But nowadays, with plant-based “Beyond beef” and “Impossible burgers”, I don’t even have to give up the taste of meat. I’ve tried the impossible burger at restaurants, and it really tastes like meat. Although it didn’t really taste like good meat. I got it at a restaurant that was known for its hamburgers, but this one tasted more like meat loaf. Passable meat loaf, to be sure, but it wasn’t a match for a greasy, umamic, carcinogenic, char-broiled burger!

Even so, the bottom line is that it is harder and harder for me to excuse my failure to do my part for the planet by giving up, or at least cutting back on, the meat in my diet. It’s not even a sacrifice, not really, just an inconvenience that comes with any lifestyle change. 

I’ve heard that if you want to successfully change the way you eat, you must set yourself simple absolute rules and follow them absolutely. “No more french fries, ever” might be a successful rule, but “No fries except on special occasions”, or “Always leave about half the fries on the plate” are almost certain recipes for backsliding into old habits. 

But I’m not ready to say “No more meat!”, that’s too absolute. I can’t think of any clever argument to justify this reluctance, I just don’t want to give up this guilty pleasure completely.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do: 

No more cow meat until Thanksgiving. Then I’ll take stock (ha ha, stock, get it?), see how I’m doing, and decide where to go next. Plus to make cheating less attractive, I’ll report how I did in a post so everyone will know my lapses, or lack thereof. 

Thanksgiving is about two months away, so by my crude calculations this commitment will reduce my carbon footprint by about ⅙ of ten tons, or 1.7 tons of carbon dioxide. We’ll see.

*   *   *

This was a difficult post to write. I first decided I should do something about my environmentally irresponsible carnivorous ways, and then I decided that I might be able to write a good blog post about it. But then (over a bowl of chili con carne) I weakened, and thought maybe I wasn’t ready to make such a big lifestyle change. Maybe I better forget the whole thing, even though I already had an outline of the post in my head. 

I reached my lowest point when I thought, maybe I could not drop the meat from my diet at all, and just write about my internal struggles with the concept of going meatless. I could score some karmic points by just thinking through the process honestly, and not making excuses when I failed to muster the strength to change. I pretty much had no shame by then. 

But as I wrote, I was forced to think through the implications of my diet, and my reasons for not wanting to do the right thing. The implications were undeniable (even if the math was sloppy), and my reasons were indefensible. So by the time I was done, I decided I would do my best to conquer my weaker, hungrier self. 

The writing was a good experience for me. So far at this blogging business, I’ve been writing about something I had done, but this time, it felt like instead I was doing something I had written about. It made the experience more powerful for me, and I think it—and the promised followup post—might increase my chances of being able to make a permanent change for the better. 

Thanks as always for listening. If my posts are getting too self-absorbed or navel-gazey for you, please let me know in a comment. 

Dorn
9/30/2019

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Optimist prime

– In which Dorn loses THE argument with Kathleen.

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One of the things I like to feel smug about is my enlightened skeptical view toward my own beliefs. I have even started accumulating notes for a blog post on healthy self-doubt. I’ve already got a cool quote to use by Oliver Wendall Holmes, “Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not true” (from a Wash Post review of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky). I’m debating whether to include in that blog post the concept of confirmation bias, where we reinforce our own beliefs by hungrily ingesting supporting evidence, but ignoring, to the extent we can, any contrary evidence.

I’m also an optimist. Some might say smugly so, certainly intentionally so. I work hard at it. Many’s the time when Kathleen and I have debated philosophical points that she’s said, “You’re such an optimist!”. “No, you’re just a pessimist!”, I might reply. “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.” “No, I’m the realist.” “Are not” “Am too” “Am not” “Are too” and so forth.

My smugnitude was tested recently. I was poking a stick into the internets to see what I might pry out, and I found a scholarly review article, “Costs and benefits of realism and optimism” (Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2015 Mar; 28(2): 194–198.) In it, I found that “unrealistic optimism”, also referred to as “optimism bias”, is “a robust phenomenon across a variety of tasks and domains” that is accepted widely enough to be the topic of multiple papers in psychiatry and philosophy. Uh-oh, I don’t like where this is going!

Apparently, the question of whether unrealistic optimism exists has long been settled (“yes”), and now thinkers are pondering whether it actually does any good. There is a theory, which the paper didn’t really embrace, that unrealistic optimism, while making one’s view of the world and his or her place in it less accurate, nevertheless conveys some sort of benefit to the optimist.

The notion of “benefit” was picked apart. Does unrealistic optimism make you feel better, psychologically or maybe even biologically? Or does it make your situation (in society, for example) objectively better? Philosopher types talked of “epistemic” benefits, which as near as I can understand means it gets you closer to evidence-based truth. 

It is well-known in clinical circles that people experiencing depression tend to have a more realistic understanding of some situations, such as their own present and probable future well-being, than people, including optimists, without the condition. Most people, and especially optimists, apparently underestimate with alarming predictability the chances that something bad will ever happen to them.

This put me in a real spot. Do I stand up against confirmation bias, and accept that I have optimism bias? Or do I give in to it, and continue to tell myself that my optimism is real realism, and just ignore any evidence to the contrary?

Well, I did what any thinker would do in such a situation: I scoured (well, I browsed) the internet for more evidence that supported the conclusion that I wanted to believe. Okay, so “unrealistic optimism” is a thing. It will take me a while to un-learn that, but maybe it’s counterbalanced by “unrealistic pessimism”? If I can’t win my philosophical debate with Kathleen, maybe I can at least tie?

Turns out there’s a lot less discussion of unrealistic pessimism out there. It exists, apparently, but only in extreme situations. I found the abstract to an article, “Unrealistic Pessimism”, from the Journal of Social Psychology, Jul 1, 2010: 511-516. Here’s the abstract in its damning entirety:

Various data suggest that individuals tend to be unrealistically optimistic about the future. People believe that negative events are less likely to happen to them than to others. The present study examined if the optimistic bias could be demonstrated if a threat is not (as it has been researched up to the present) potential, incidental, and familiar, but real, common, and unfamiliar. The present research was conducted after the explosion at the atomic power station in Chernobyl, and it was concerned with the perception of threat to one’s own and to others’ health due to consequences of radiation. The female subjects believed that their own chance of experiencing such health problems were better than the chances of others. Thus, in these specific conditions, unrealistic optimism was not only reduced but the reverse effect was obtained: unrealistic pessimism.

So it would take a Chernobyl-scale event for me to even score a draw in the philosophical debate with Kathleen I mentioned earlier. I’m sunk. The only thing I can think of to do is to drop my smug superiority of my mastery over confirmation bias, ignore the facts and try to retain some shred of my optimism bias so I don’t get trounced too badly by Kathleen. And I’ll either fail, and be able once again to feel smug about my optimism, or I’ll succeed, and be able to feel smug about conquering my former smugness about my optimism. It’s a win-win! (It’s working already!).

Here’s a funny comic about confirmation bias from a funny online strip, Wondermark.

Thanks,
Dorn
9/22/2019

PS. On reviewing this post, Kathleen points out that her arguments wouldn’t seem so pessimistic if she didn’t have to spend so much time injecting reality into my optimism. How can I answer that, now that Science has confirmed it?

Here’s a joke from Kathleen:

Socrates about to drink the hemlock, saying 'Is this glass half empty or half full?'
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A High Wind in Jamaica

– In which Dorn reads a seafaring yarn.

T

he Bookshop was on TV this week. It’s a nice little movie about a British widow in the 1950’s who opens a bookshop and runs afoul of the local Powers That Be. At one point she befriends and hires precocious young Christine to help out in the store. While she is trying to interest the rest of the town in Lolita, she gives Christine A High Wind in Jamaica, saying it’s a book about “good pirates and evil children”.

That piqued my curiosity, so I looked around for the book. Not in the local library, and not available in the digital library either (a frequent occurrence with books published before e-books were commonplace). Richard Hughes wrote it in 1929, so it was old enough that it might be available in one of the free digital resources. It wasn’t in Project Gutenburg, but there was a legible copy from the digital library of India in the Internet Archive.

It was a great short summer read, and over too soon. The story is of children sent to England after a hurricane destroys their Jamaica home, who on the voyage are captured by pirates. It’s brimming with playful insights into the minds of children, parents, and pirates. There are a few shocking moments, a few brushes with darker themes, and some casual racism of the kind apparently allowed in the early parts of the 1900’s.

The central theme of the book was the amorality of children, which didn’t really make them evil, just innocent of the whole concept of good and evil. Several of the reviews on Goodreads suggested the story was a mix of Peter Pan and The Lord of the Flies, with perhaps a bit of Heart of Darkness thrown in.

But I found it much lighter reading than that–to me it seemed like a mixture of the satire of Mark Twain with The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place (one of my all-time favorite stories), with a dash of Bonfire of the Vanities sprinkled on top.

In its time, A High Wind in Jamaica was a best-seller, and considered quite controversial and ground-breaking for its unsentimental portrayal of children’s psyches. It made some “best 20th century literature” lists, but I had never heard of it. I’m glad I stumbled on it, though, and I commend it to you. You can get a PDF of it off of the Internet Archive.

Thanks,
Dorn
9/19/2019

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A Sense of Place

In this painting I’m returning to a theme I explored once before, many years ago, with my nieces as subjects. The current painting has my grandkids waiting at the Ice Cream Window at B&Js Carryout.

One reason I have painted B&J Carryout in Accokeek many times is that, to me, it seems the one location in “downtown” Accokeek where there is a genuine “sense of place”.

A “sense of place” is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some do not. The term is often used in relation to those characteristics that make a place special or unique, as well as to those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging. It is hard to fake and too often planned development fails to take it into account. Right now, Royal Farms is proposing a chain gas station/convenience store across Livingston Road from B&Js. Besides being out of scale with our little center (the project has 58 parking places!) and its likelihood to interfere with the ability of the Accokeek Volunteer Fire Department to aid the community with fast responses to emergencies, I think the real reason I oppose the project is that it will be detrimental to our sense of place. Once a sense of place is destroyed, it doesn’t really come back.

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Supercalligraphic

– In which Dorn misinterprets an Art Show.

I

 didn’t expect to be writing about art again so soon, but yesterday evening we went to an art show of one of Kathleen’s old friends from her days teaching at GWU, that turned out to be a lot of fun for me, and worth remarking about. 

It’s a two-person show called “Umbra” by Kathleen’s friend Becky Bafford and fellow sculptor Kini Collins, at the Horowitz Center at Howard County Community College.

As the title suggests, the show is about shadows, and every piece is created and displayed in a way that allowed its shadow to be part of the art. The pieces themselves are sculpture, so you have a nice three-dimensional foreground and two-dimensional light-dark background going on.

The show is also about “fossils, relics, and memories”, according to the brochure, and I thought it did a good job of evoking things past and gone. Many of the pieces are representative (or partly so) of objects found in nature, as the wall of chrysalis shapes above.

What I liked best were some shapes by Becky Bafford that triggered my delight response at two things I enjoy contemplating–(1) art that I don’t quite understand at a rational level, and (2) written languages that I don’t know. There were a series of shapes there that to me felt like they were three-dimensional calligraphy, spelling out a message I couldn’t quite grasp.

Looking at these shapes, it was possible to imagine the pushes, pulls, and gestures that went into forming each one. It was like watching one of those TV documentaries with a closeup of a Chinese national treasure slowly composing text in freehand chinese characters with a sumi brush, only with the added complexity that the character strokes all had depth, as well as width and height.

What a rich language that would be, that it had to be written in three dimensions! It was a conceit that really appealed to me, despite my suspicion that I had probably missed what the artist was envisioning when she created them.

The works by the two artists complement each other extremely well, both in mood and in the skill and subtlety of the use of surface and shadow. Moving from Ms Bafford’s room to Ms Collins’s, I was delighted to see another piece that reinforced my interpretation–there was a wall devoted to what looked the world to me like three-dimensional Babylonic cuneiform! (My photo doesn’t really do it justice.) The title of this piece was “Letters”, which makes me optimistic that maybe here I was even thinking along similar lines to the artist.

Even setting aside my personal twist on the work here, the show was a treat to see–the works are well made and artfully displayed, and evoked strong emotional reactions in the audience there. An evening well spent! Here’s the show info, if you find yourself near there with a few minutes to spend. The show runs until Sept 22.

Thanks,
Dorn
9/13/2019

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A tale of four emergency rooms (conclusion)

In which Dorn’s Mystery Illness is revealed. Sort of.

(This concludes the story started in Part 1, here).

ER VISIT 3.

I

t was a record-setting year for rain in 2018, and by summer our yard was saturated. Living right on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, with the hills that in other places make up Calvert Cliffs right behind us, we were seeing a torrent coming down onto or property every time it rained, with more precipitation in the forecast. I was busy trying to divert some of this wash off of our back yard by digging a berm and supplementing that with sand bags. It was heavy work, and by the time I was done I was aching all over.

Big doses of Motrin helped.

I slept hard that night, but woke up in the middle of the night feeling funny. I was dizzy with cold sweats, faint-headed and a bit disoriented. I’ve never had a heart attack, but I didn’t want my first to be my last, so we high-tailed it to the emergency room again!

It wasn’t a heart attack, but the illness I was suffering from did seem to somehow involve a lot of bleeding into my GI tract. So they sent me home from the ER, with instructions to check in with my gastro­­enterologist (and my cardiologist, just in case).

The next day, I got an appointment with my GP, Dr B—. I told him I had already scheduled a colonoscopy in a couple of days, and a visit with my cardiologist a couple of days after that. He hit the roof! “You can’t go around getting a colonoscopy, or any other invasive procedure, until you get your heart checked out! Even if it wasn’t a heart attack, you still need to clear that first!!” When he wasn’t convinced that he was making his point strongly enough to me, he interrupted my consult to call my gastro­enterologist himself, and tell him not to poke me with anything until I’d gotten a clean bill from my cardiologist.

That’s what I like about Dr B—: he cares enough to get worked up if something’s going on that puts me at risk. The laconic country life is great for most things, but I had already learned (in part 1) that I like a little nervous tension in my medical relationships. I also like that if Dr B— doesn’t know something, he’ll tell me rather than pretend that he does. (What I don’t like so much is that there are things I wish he knew that he doesn’t. Like what was wrong with me.)

Anyway, I got a bunch of tests and scans (in the right order, with the cardiogram first), but nothing showed what was causing the GI bleeding. Over the next few months as these tests progressed, I slowly recovered, until finally my doctors and I concluded that the original culprit was probably the Motrin I took, so let’s cut that out of my diet completely, and hope that this Mystery Illness was a one-time thing that won’t plague me again.

That strategy worked–for about six months.

ER VISIT 4. When Kathleen and I retired this last winter, we had planned on taking a road trip up the coast and into Canada as soon as we could. I had some knee damage from an old injury that made driving longer than an hour or two painful, so I scheduled an arthroscopy to fix the internal damage.

I had the outpatient procedure in July, almost exactly one year after the onset of what I referred to as “the Motrin incident”. The work seemed to proceed without complications, and I was assured I’d be walking by the end of the week. That night, though, I went into shock–I suddenly felt extremely cold, and couldn’t stop shaking. Kathleen said it looked like a seizure. So, back to the ER we went!

There they found that my blood pressure was so low that they had to strap me to a bed upsidedown-ish, with my head lower than my feet. I had had extensive bleeding into my GI tract again. Well, so much for the swear-off-Motrin-and-hope-it-doesn’t-recur strategy of medical management. It was time to start the care and diagnostic cycle all over again, and this time, I wasn’t stopping until I knew exactly what was causing the Mystery Illness (and then fixing it)!

I had my trusty GP Dr. B—, a GI specialist, and a blood specialist all working the issue. We did all the standard and some not-so-standard tests and scans. Again. A pattern developed: see the doctor, suggest a test that might inform us, wait for the scheduled test appointment, wait a few days for the results, make a new appointment with the doctor, find out that test didn’t tell us anything useful, repeat.

Meantime, the bleeding had stopped, and my anemia, which had plummeted to about half of minimum “normal” blood count values, slowly started improving again. I was glad to start feeling better, but worried that the longer the investigation failed to find the cause of my illness, the more healed I would be, and the less likely that future digging would spot it.

Until the next incident, that is, which I was now reasonably confident would occur, sometime when my body was stressed. What frightened me was, what if the stress that triggers the bleed is something that has already put my body into a weakened state? Like a car accident, or emergency heart surgery?

I started to despair that, despite our best efforts, this incident might also end like the first, without knowing what caused it and so not being able to prevent it or keep me safe when it happened again. It was time to abandon my attachment to the laid back ways of country medicine, and go find some hot-shot city slicker doctor with some new ideas.

I found Dr G— at Johns Hopkins Depart­ment of Gastro­enterology and Hepa­tology, and presented all my symptoms, test results, specialist notes and speculations to her. You can picture my relief when she said, “Oh, it looks like you have   *   . I see that all the time. Let’s set you up with this specialized test to confirm, and if that’s it, we can fix it.”

This test is still several weeks away, and if her prediction is confirmed, there will be treatment procedures to undergo after that. But if the Illness isn’t banished yet, at least I have hope that the Mystery is. Maybe now I can think about something other than the next scanning or scoping (like planning that road trip!).

So that’s my story, at least to this point. Thank you, as always, for listening.

*(I intentionally didn’t say what the mystery illness was, as this story turned out not really to be about the illness, as much as about my experience of navigating it and the medical community here. If you’re really curious what Dr G— thinks I have, it’s the same thing the guy in this case study has.)

Thanks!
Dorn
9/10/2019

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A tale of four emergency rooms (part 1)

– In which Dorn talks about his ailments.

W

hile I was negotiating a serious Mystery Illness this summer, several people suggested that I should write a blog post about my experience. I hesitated, because I struggled with finding a way to do so that didn’t come off as just an old guy talking about his ailments. Maybe I’ve found a way now. I’ve organized my story into four vignettes, each involving a trip to the emergency room.

ER VISIT 1. In the summer of 1999, Kathleen and I had just bought our current house, and hadn’t moved in yet. It was someone’s old summer fishing house, but we planned eventually to live in it full time. When Hurricane Floyd threatened the Chesapeake Bay, we were determined to defend our new castle from the elements.

The hurricane was miles offshore, but we got plenty of wind and rain. I was on attic detail, emptying the pots and pans we had collecting water from dozens of leaks in the roof, when I took a wrong step, between the rafters, and crashed into the dining room below. I was scraped, cut, bruised and contused, and Kathleen had to drive me through the storm to the local emergency room.

They washed up my cuts, x-rayed me for breaks, gave me some painkillers and told me I could go home. “You’re lucky you didn’t break any ribs!”, the ER doc smiled. “Er, doctor, aren’t that and that broken ribs?” asked Kathleen, pointing to my x-ray.

“Good catch!” he said. “They are! Yeah, you have some broken ribs there. They’ll hurt! Bye!”

I felt I had to speak up. “Er, excuse me, I’m no doctor, but shouldn’t you give me a tetanus shot before I go? I fell through a 50-year-old ceiling and got pretty cut up.” He agreed. “Great idea! Let’s do that!”

This was Calvert County in a nutshell. After years of working in DC, and living in a DC bedroom community, one of the things I loved best was the more laid-back pace of life further south. But now I was on notice that that same easy attitude could be found in the local medical care. Uh-oh!

I finally got my fill of laissez-faire doctoring with an ER visit about a decade later.

ER VISIT 2. I settled into the life of a long-distance commuter and weekend Country Gentleman. My GP was Dr A—, who personified the easygoing country doctor. This was okay with me because I was young-ish (I was still in my Second Age), and relatively invulnerable.

One afternoon I suddenly started feeling like I was developing a bad flu. My temperature shot up to a value I hadn’t seen since I was a kid (with a lot less body mass to heat up), and red blotchy spots started to appear on my feet. So I bopped over to Dr A—. He said to take some aspirin, and let’s see how you feel in the morning. After he left and the nurse was drawing blood, I noticed a note the doc had written to himself and left behind. It said simply “RMSF?“. What was he thinking?

So of course, as soon as I got home, I googled Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It turns out that the tick-borne disease does occur in Maryland, and has my exact symptoms: headache, high fever and red blotchy spots that start at the feet and slowly spread up the body. It also said that the disease is not fatal if you start treatment quickly enough, within a few hours of first symptoms. There is a definitive test for R.M.S.F., but if you wait for the results, you’ve already waited too long. Yikes!

My fever wasn’t going down, and the spots were indeed starting to move up my legs, so I rushed to the ER, and told them I was worried maybe I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. They said yes, maybe you do, and admitted me to the hospital. I ended up spending several weeks there. And even though the test ultimately came back negative for R.M.S.F., I resolved that once I got out, I would fire Dr A—’s complacent ass, and find me a doctor who could muster up a little more enthusiasm for keeping me alive.

I found one too, and he’s my GP to this day. He was my GP when, about a decade later, the Mystery Illness that I’m still dealing with now first sent me to the ER.

The story is concluded… here!

Thanks,
Dorn
9/9/2019

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Peace Wish

There is a retired women’s Facebook group that I joined that suggested we all make a ‘peace painting’ to post on September 11. Mine is below.

As we approach another 9-11 anniversary, it’s  shocking to think that the Global War on Terror is now in its 18th year! I remember when continuous war was not the norm. When I was in college in 1970 we understood this and I believe we spent almost as much time on anti-war activities as we did on academics. That doesn’t seem to be the case these days. I was trying to understand why perpetuating a war that it not leading to any positive outcomes is seemingly impossible to stop and I came across this rationale on the antiwar.com website: “the alliance between defense contractors, retired generals, fundraising-crazy politicians, and a pliant corporate press creates a systemic and vicious cycle of warfare rationalization”. I’m looking for a chance to do some antiwar work, but given what we’re up against, I’m not sure what will work. In the meantime, I can paint a picture that includes a peace symbol…

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Another Sunflower Painting

So I already painted sunflowers once this summer, which I blogged about at https://thirdagethoughts.com/sunflower-maze/. Yesterday I finished a second sunflower picture, inspired by the same experience. This one was a little out of my comfort zone because of the small figure, which I’m not sure I’ve done before. But I am a fan of expanding the comfort zone! I thought maybe I now have sunflowers out of my system but then I read that Van Gogh painted them 15 times. He wrote in a letter that he used sunflowers to express ‘gratitude’. I think I have plenty of reason to express that!

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It’s more an art than a science

– In which Dorn explores his interest in art, and artists.

K

athleen and I went to the National Gallery of Art last weekend, and saw two fantastic shows. One of them, The LIfe of Animals in Japanese Art, was (a) spectacular, and (b) over and done–Sunday was the last day. It’s going on tour to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next, I think. We just noticed the “last chance to see it!” article in the Post this weekend and rushed over. It was totally worth it!

The other great show there, that we didn’t even know about till we got there, was of works by American painter Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935). It’s running for another month or so in the East Gallery.

Seeing these two totally different shows, one expected and one totally unexpected, reminded me about what I like about being married to Kathleen. There are many things, but the one I remembered specifically that day was that I like being married to an artist.

I was a bona fide scientist when I met Kathleen, and I figured I liked art, and life with an artist, because it was completely different from science, giving me a chance to experience a whole separate universe of experience. This was a contrast, I thought, with many scientists I knew who were married to other scientists, and so missed out on some of this diversity.

But over time I decided maybe the worlds of science and art aren’t so different after all. They both are endeavors to describe how the universe works and our place in it. They both have rules for how the process is to be conducted, and have widely agreed-upon conclusions that could nevertheless be changed or discarded over time as our understanding grew. The main difference (and it’s big one), as I saw it, is that science seeks to describe the world in ways that are independent of human biases and experiences, and therefore constant no matter who was measuring or experiencing them, where art seeks to describe the world in ways that are completely dependent on human biases and experiences, with all the chaos and unpredictability that brings.

On 9/11/2001, Kathleen was at work teaching at GWU in DC (across the street from the State Department, a viable possible secondary target) when the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings were hit. During the days after that, she watched the news and analysis of the attack, and waited alone for me to get home from a Sea Grant meeting half way across the country, in a car because of the total ban on commercial flights. During the nights she painted.

She produced a still life from an apple we had in our fridge at the time, which she called “The big apple still shines”. It was a faithful rendition of the apple, but it was more–

'The big apple still shines', Kathleen Carlson, watercolor, 2001

The Big Apple, of course, is a nickname for New York, which was the meta-subject of the artwork. I don’t know how well this small picture does it justice (the original is almost two and a half feet wide), but the stem of the apple feels like it is descending into a shadowy vortex. The apple is sound, but dark and foreboding. When I first saw it, I could feel something starting to try to pull down the apple, make it less bright than it was.

This is what art does for me: it captures the human experience in ways that science cannot. The feeling of danger, both immanent and long-term, was pretty universal in America right after 9/11, and I feel Kathleen captured that, as well as a sense of resiliency, in “The big apple still shines”.

Other art doesn’t describe a galvanizing moment in history or an easily identifiable human thought or feeling, but I can still feel its power even if I know that most people might see something completely different. This happened with one of the paintings by Oliver Lee Jackson this weekend, which struck me deeply enough to want to try to write about art.

Oliver Lee Jackson, Painting (11.30.10), 2010, water-based paint and metallic enamel paint on canvas, courtesy of the artist. Photo M. Lee Fatherree. © Oliver Lee Jackson

This work is untitled, so I have no idea of the context of the painting. For me, it evoked a feeling of supernaturality. The blue figure on the right and the red one on the left seemed almost human to me, but dreamlike. But the black one in the middle really captured my imagination. In form, it was very like the other two figures, but it was completely unhuman, while still seeming (to me) to be very much alive. The picture made me feel like I was experiencing human and other spirits communicating together through a ritual dance.

I don’t know if what I saw bore any relationship to what the artist was trying to show. But that’s all right, because art is intended to be filtered through human experience, which is different for me, him, and everyone else.

I can feel the validity of the work even if I can’t begin to describe it in the scientific language I am more used to. And it’s the idea that I can feel the rightness of an artwork, or an artist, even if I can’t yet understand why it’s right, that keeps me coming back for more.

Thanks,
Dorn
8/21/2019

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The strong shall not eat the weak

– In which Dorn searches for a buried memory and a moral truth.

Reading several different books lately, I was surprised to find that they all contained a theme that tugged at the same half-memory. They brought to mind a vague recollection of a national or world leader speaking at some monumental event or great sacrifice, saying that this had been done to build a world where “the strong shall not eat the weak”.

As vague as this memory was, I have the sense that it had such a finely tuned emotional choreography that I think it must have been staged. Perhaps it came at the end of some epic movie, say about World War II, and I was remembering a voice-over by an actor reading from a speech by Churchill or FDR as the screen went dark. I remember most the use of the verb “eat”–​not exploit, oppress, take advantage of, or terrorize. The word seems so straightforward, and yet so evocative, that the phrase stuck deep in my memory ever since. 

The memory was brought near the surface when I read The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion by Jonathan Haidt, which I’ve mentioned before (here). To explain why he thought conservatives and liberals think the way they do, he described his search for the funda­mental building blocks of social morality. One block was the principle that all people in the community are treated fairly, and even the weakest are protected from undeserved harm. He described how this principle had been around since the dawn of recorded morality.

The very first sentence of the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE) includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.” (p. 167)

Haidt described half a dozen universal building blocks of morality, and posited that different cultures make use of these in different amounts to construct their moral codes. Liberals, he said, put a very great emphasis on the principles of avoiding harm and treating all people fairly. As a card-carrying liberal, I can confirm this. I find that a powerful person or group using their power to take advantage of someone weaker can get my outrage up like almost no other situation. 

I share this feeling with the famous Pirates of Penzeance, the good-hearted if ineffective protagonists of Gilbert and Sullivan’s great comic opera of the same name. At one point, the pirates try to understand why they are not more successful:

SAM.  Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us.  We don’t seem to make piracy pay. I’m sure I don’t know why, but we don’t.
FRED. I know why, but, alas! I mustn’t tell you; it wouldn’t be right.
PIRATE KING. Why not, my boy? It’s only half-past eleven, and you are one of us until the clock strikes twelve.
SAM. True, and until then you are bound to protect our interests.
ALL. Hear, hear!
FRED. Well, then, it is my duty, as a pirate, to tell you that you are too tender-hearted. For instance, you make a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger party you invariably get thrashed.
PIRATE KING. There is some truth in that. (https://gsarchive.net/pirates/pirates_lib.pdf)

I read another book recently, Nature’s Mutiny: How the little ice age of the long seventeenth century transformed the west and shaped the present, by Philipp Blom. I expected it would mainly be about that period of rapid climate change, but there was very little about the climate (other than a description of large-scale repeated crop failures). The book was mostly about the societal changes that took place in the 1500s to 1700s that transformed European culture from a largely agrarian feudal system to one of competing mercantile states driven to philosophical and technological advances and global conquest in pursuit of commercial interests. The concept of the strong eating the weak came up repeatedly in this book, and not in a good way. 

In medieval agriculture Europe, even the lowliest peasants had a rightful place in society. The landowners knew that their power came with a responsibility of care over their vassals, defined by centuries of tradition. The shift to a colder climate and resulting crop failures triggered a revolution in culture, commerce and technology that largely destroyed the subsistence lifestyle of the peasants. The powerful landholders changed and adapted their own culture to immense financial gain, and unilaterally severed the bonds of care and service with the no-longer-useful peasants. They redefined their own morality to justify their own opulent wealth, and the extreme destitution that the former peasants had been cast into, as the natural order of things:

“the pomp of Buildings, Apparel, and the like, in the Nobility, Gentry, and other able persons, cannot impoverish the Kingdome; if it be done with curious and costly works upon our Materials, and by our own people,…” This blessed vision, however, was endangered by the serious character flaws exhibited by the monarch’s subjects, especially the poorer ones, who appeared sadly unable to cope with even the most modest trappings of wealth…. The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: “As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious.” Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it….(p. 133)

If I was surprised to find stories of the strong eating the weak in a book I thought was going to be about climate, I was fully expecting it in the next book I started: Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States. This famously subversive history, first published in 1980 and updated many times since, is about American history from the side of the “losers”. Howard Zinn elaborates:

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. (p. 9)

The book has so many examples of what could be considered the strong eating the weak, from the 1490s up to the 2000s, that I hesitate to try to pick one or two to describe. I’ll instead commend this fascinating book to the reader. Many of the stories can induce indignation, in a helpless, it’s-too-late-to-redress-that sort of way, but some are inspiring, even optimistic. You can read a copy of it online at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html.

Having an early memory of my moral ideal awakened in one book, and then promptly squashed by reality in two more, I wanted more than ever to find that memory of mine. The stories I read were horrifying to me not only for their calculating brutality, but also for their familiarity. From the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, I could not find a time or place where I could say, “Here is the point at which we made the turn, and started to create a world where the strong do not eat the weak.”

I very much wanted to find that memory, that quote, that event which was the turning point, so I started searching the internet. The search wasn’t completely straightforward, because I wasn’t even sure I was remembering a speech that had occurred in real life–it could have just been some screenwriter’s tear-jerky conclusion to a sentimental but fictional movie.

I was encouraged when I found a quote by the nineteenth-century Chancellor of Germany and quote-factory Otto Von Bismark: “It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong”. This was so close to my memory’s opposite that it seemed plausible that a real person might have made the counter-statement, especially to mark a wartime defeat of Germany. But maybe I had my quote a bit wrong. Was it not “eat”, but “devour”? Maybe it wasn’t “strong”, but “powerful”? I kept looking, trying different word combinations, and concentrating on Germany and the World Wars. 

I finally found what might be my remembered quote somewhere else entirely, at a press conference by John Kennedy in 1961 to mark the opening of a conference of non-aligned nations in Belgrade: 

We believe that the peoples represented at this conference are committed to a world society in which men have the right and the freedom to determine their own destiny, a world in which one people is not enslaved by the other, in which the powerful do not devour the weak. 

I was only seven in 1961, so if I actually heard Kennedy say this, on the news or something, I’m surprised I remember it at all. But if this is the source of my memory, I’m glad it was a real promise by a real person, and not just a movie line. 

But was what he said back in 1961 true? Were people and governments so committed to this ideal? If not then, is it true now, or will it ever be true? Will the meek ever inherit the earth? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but as long as they continue to be asked, and self-serving rationalizations of oppression and exploitation of others continue to be challenged, I have hope. 

Thanks,
Dorn
8/12/2019

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Dome Update

Those who are old enough may remember that geodesic domes were a popular fad in the sixties and seventies of the last century. I admit to being caught up in this fad and, in fact, the first structure that we built when we bought land in Accokeek in 1977 was a smallish geodesic dome. However, time was not kind to my little dome, especially around the round windows that I had made out of old industrial light fixtures. Sometime last year I looked on in despair at my forty-something dome and decided it was time to tear it down. This is where my facebook friends intervened, after I posted my intention, some even giving me teary eyed emoticons! Friends, this really helped me see it in a new light – as a building with historic value! I decided to restore, not destruct. Last year I replaced rotten panels and struts and redid the shingles, and this year I have cleaned up the floor, and installed, for the first time in its life, an actual real door.

So far, so good, but I had actually no idea what I would use the building for. I thought it wouldn’t be that great for an art studio since, because of the previous window problems, I now had only three small windows and a small skylight. This is where the original thinking of granddaughter #2 came in handy with an idea I never would have thought of on my own: “We should hang aerial silks from the ceiling!”

Aside: for anyone who really wants to embrace the dome lifestyle, my friend has a great dome for sale – see details at https://domeinthemarylandwoods.vpweb.com/pictures

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Crabbing for Mercury (part 2)

– In which Dorn describes a vision that few have experienced.

Here is the second promised story of a magical nature experience I’m grateful for, which I never would have had if we didn’t live where we do on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. (My first story is here.)

2. Many years ago (May 6-7, 2003 to be precise), when we hadn’t been living here long, there was a news blurb that a transit of Mercury across the sun was to take place that would be visible from the east coast of the US at about 6 AM. At that time I was working in Silver Spring, a 75-mile commute, and I got up before dawn to get ready to catch the bus into DC. 

Because the Bay is to the east of us, we get to see some wonderful sunrises. That morning started out cloudless but hazy, and before I left for work I could watch the sun come up. Looking closely (which I could safely do for at least a few minutes as the sun came over the horizon), I was able to see a little tiny black dot on the surface of the red sun, slightly off center at about 4:00. I really don’t know for sure if it was Mercury that I was seeing, or maybe just a sunspot, but I told myself (and still tell myself to this day) that I was privileged to see something almost no one had seen since the beginning of time: the planet Mercury, backdropped by the sun, unaided with my naked eyes!

(This is just what it looked like back then, but it’s actually an “artist’s conception”. It’s a picture I took at sunrise yesterday, onto which I placed a small black dot with Photoshop.)

As always, thanks for listening!
Dorn
7/30/2019

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Thrift and Laundry

My family wasn’t a religious one, so my Mother kind of substituted the Girl Scout Laws for the ten commandments. One was “a Girl Scout is thrifty”. When I first ran into this, I didn’t even know what ‘thrifty’ was.” It’s when you don’t waste your money on frivolous things”, said Mom. “What’s ‘frivolous’, I wondered…but I eventually figured out the thrifty thing. It was actually easy to be very thrifty on 10 cents a week allowance! This has carried over into adulthood and a few years ago my daughter introduced me to saving a bundle by making my own laundry detergent for just pennies, which I have done ever since. The site I found the recipe on had actually tested it against major brands and found the homemade version is a winner. See the tests at https://cornerstoneconfessions.com/2013/11/laundry-detergent-comparision.html.  This laundry detergent is not hard to make and I’m happy to include it as the first Third Age Thoughts money-saving tip:

By the way, the old Girl Scout laws that I grew up with seem to be retired. Modern Girl Scouts don’t have to be ‘thrifty’, per se, but they do need to ‘use resources wisely’.

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Sunflower Maze

In my quest to get visiting grandkids to do something other than screen time I located a sunflower maze at Goldpetal Farms in St. Mary’s County. “We should do this,” I suggested, and luckily, they seemed willing enough. Later, I was rewarded by GD #1 saying, “Mazes are FUN!” when we were actually there walking the path under the towering flowers. Three was a good number to do the maze thing because every time we got to a branch of the maze, there was someone to break the tie if we couldn’t get consensus on which way to go. Yes, it was fun, but we sure were running into a lot of dead ends! And we drank up all the iced tea I had prepared! And it was HOT! We prided ourselves on not using the map, but it seemed to me we kept stumbling on places that we had been before. I spotted three teenagers clutching a crumpled bit of paper. Could they be using the map? I couldn’t tell, but the next time I had to break the tie about what direction to go I pointed to the way I had seen the teens go. Soon after, we made it out! At the exit they had a painting station so you could do a watercolor after your sunflower immersion experience. Later, back home, I was able to also complete a sunflower oil painting of GD #3.

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I was a fugitive from the NCIS (conclusion)

– Dorn concludes his adventure.

THE SCENE: In the Environmental Office of a nearly-abandoned Navy base, NCIS agents have just confronted the protagonist with what appears to be evidence of his guilt.

(You really should read part 1 and part 2 of this story first.)

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (conclusion)


Like all Navy bases, we had done a thorough environmental survey of the base property, and we had identified a small number of spill and dump sites that we were in the process of cleaning up. We gave each site a name. Some were just descriptive, like “maintenance garage parking lot” or “building 13”, and some were a bit more fanciful, like “the blackberry patch”. I reported on our progress cleaning these sites regularly to EPA, and we had press releases about them and regular well-attended public meetings for the neighboring community. 

The accusation they were following up on, the NCIS agents said, was that in addition to the list of six or eight contaminated sites that the public knew about, I was keeping a secret second list of other sites, that were never mentioned to EPA or the public. 

They showed me the evidence that was provided with by the accuser: a note in my handwriting, describing half a dozen contaminated sites in the kind of language we regularly use, but with descriptions that not only didn’t match anything we had told the public about, but which I didn’t recognize at all. 

It wasn’t hard for me to guess who had made the accusation–my document organizer. She had stumbled upon this note among the boxes and crates of reports, and convinced herself that she had found proof that we (or at least, I) were keeping deadly secrets about environmental contamination from the public. No wonder she had been acting so weird around me! She wasn’t lonesome, she saw herself as a crime-bustin’ reporter hot on a case! And I wasn’t a prospect, I was a SUSPECT!

I thought about this as I read through the list, trying to remember when I had written it and what it meant, when I saw a contamination site whose descriptive name I remembered, because it struck me as being so idyllic and picturesque, like a vacation destination. The name was “Hideaway Pond”, and it was one of the cleanup sites at a different Navy base. I took the investigators over to our Public Affairs office, where we dug up some of the public brochures about that base’s cleanup projects. All of the sites on the handwritten list were described there (phew!). I must have been taking notes at some meeting about their cleanup, and whoever had found those notes assumed I was writing about my own base.

This seemed to satisfy the agents that their work could be satisfactorily concluded, and they said they had one last question before they would be out of my hair forever: about four years earlier, one of my staff was writing up a report of a base inspection, in which they had said they found an old chemical drum out in a field, and I had edited that report, replacing the word “old” with “rusty”, and could I please tell them why I had made that change? 

I sort of remembered the report, but I didn’t have to rely on my memory because of the copious notes I had always taken. I eventually tracked down the message where I had suggested to drafter of the report that he ought to call it a rusty drum, because it was true (I said that in the message), and because it gave a more accurate picture of the situation out in that field. All those years of taking reams of notes, vindicated in one easy question!

I asked them if they would now exonerate me, but they said that their rules forbade them to pronounce me innocent and unjustly accused. They would be saying in their report that they found no evidence that I had engaged in any criminal wrongdoing, and hopefully I would be content with that. Having no other option, I was.

AND I NEVER SAW THEM AGAIN. 

The story has an epilog. I was told later that the document organizer had apparently decided that the Navy was colluding in my coverup of my secret contaminated sites, and had been stopped at our base’s gate trying to smuggle out boxes of my office’s documents, perhaps to break the story to the world. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but at the time I uncharitably felt that it served her right for suspecting me of being a criminal, instead of just hitting on me like a normal decent person would have done.

Thanks for reading!
Dorn
7/24/2019

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Crabbing for Mercury (part 1)

– In which Dorn describes a halcyon stay-cation.

Y’all have probably seen news of that recent study that showed what everyone knew all along–being in touch with nature has real health benefits. After some recent surgery with a side of complications, I’m really grateful to live where we do on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. I had already decided to post something about what it’s like living here in semi-rural semi-solitude communing with nature, but for now I’ll just share two extra-magical nature events that we’ve enjoyed here. (I’ll split my stories into two posts to strengthen my resolve not to make my posts too long.)

1. Ten summers ago or more, we had our grandsons with us for about a week, and it seemed that all of nature, especially the Chesapeake Bay, was cooperating to help keep them entertained. While they were here, we had extra-high winds that made it possible for teen/tweens to get a surfing experience on the beach out front, and still calm days just right for kayaking along the shore. We saw dolphins jumping in the air in front of our house, something I’ve probably seen less than five times in the 20 years we’ve been here. Eagles and hawks would swoop down and catch fish right in front of us and take them to their aeries down the street. We spent days stalking a manatee that had somehow strayed up north into St. Leonard harbor (we never caught a glimpse of it, but we saw its lair, and it was fun searching).

It was a great week of swimming, boating, and other playing, from before the time when our grandkids got too cool to wear their enthusiasm on the surface. By the final morning, we were spent and happy and out of ideas, and we were wondering if we could find a topper for their visit, or if we could just be tired and crabby until it was time to take them home (which still would have marked an overall successful vacation).

There was a commotion of people on the beach in front of our house, unusual for so early. The Bay was experiencing a red tide, and fish and shellfish were straying close to, and sometimes on, the shore to get enough oxygen. We saw flounders hiding in the sand, and scooped up a dozen crabs which we had for breakfast. What a perfect finale!

(This is what our catch looked like all those years ago, but it’s actually a picture of the crabs I caught for breakfast this morning, as we’ve had another red tide.)

(part 2 is here)

Thanks!
Dorn
7/30/2019

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I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 2)

– Dorn continues his tale.

THE SCENE: In a dimly-lit, nearly-abandoned Navy base, a skeleton crew is working to organize the base’s environmental records. Conspiracy theories are posited, secrets shared, triplicate forms collated and stapled.

(If you haven’t read part 1 of this story, you should start there.)

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 2)

Poster of James Cagney movie, Public Enemy


One morning as the base shutdown was progressing, I welcomed into my office a couple of polite young beefy men in dark suits. They showed me their credentials: they were agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), and said they had some questions for me, and would like to look at some of my records. Our environmental office records (and indeed the whole base) got inspected regularly without advance notice by Navy, the state and the US EPA, but this was the first time I had entertained a criminal investigator in my office. 

Back then I was 25 years younger and had a much much cleaner conscience than I do now, and it literally didn’t occur to me that I could have done anything to attract the interest of NCIS. So I said sure!, and answered their questions, and gave them access to all of the records we were working on.

They came back repeatedly after that over several weeks, sometimes asking new questions about how the environmental office worked or about some record they had found, sometimes carting away whole boxes of notebooks or other documents. When I asked what this was all about, all they said was that they were not at liberty to say.

The weeks stretched into months, and the NCIS agents’ continued visits started to get under my skin. Sometimes they would take away documents we were in the middle of archiving, or active records that I would need to produce if an environmental inspector visited. And although they assured me I would get everything back, I had not seen a single page returned. Plus they still wouldn’t tell me anything about what they were looking for, and I was starting to feel the pressure. It was obvious that I was a “person of interest”.

I started mentally reviewing all the environmental compliance training I had taken, and second-guessing my judgement calls about about what spills needed to be reported, or how to handle a pollutant or a hazardous material. Maybe I had done something after all, or failed to do something, and not realized it?

What if they demanded a vital record, but in my paperwork incompetence I mis-filed it somewhere and couldn’t find it? But surely if it was an accidental oversight, they wouldn’t send the criminal investigators in? What if I had inadvertently sent some Hazardous Waste to a shady disposal company, who dumped it at the side of the road?

Still from movie, Public Enemy


It was a stressful time. At least I was doing a good job of avoiding that document organizer and her amorous advances. Or maybe she was avoiding me, seeing the handwriting on the wall that my time as a free man was ending!

Finally one day, the agents announced that they had done all of the investigating that they intended to do. They said they hadn’t developed any new leads, so they were just going to ask me about it. They showed me their smoking gun–a list of place names on a yellow legal pad in my handwriting.

They had gotten a complaint that this note showed that I was keeping a secret set of records of polluted sites on the base. The Navy is governed by hazardous waste cleanup laws like everyone else, and one aspect of those laws is full public disclosure, so having a secret list of sites would have been a serious criminal offense on my part! I would be in deep trouble, not just because I was the base’s “designated jailee”, but because the secret records had clearly been written by me personally!

STORY IS CONCLUDED! . . . here!

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Piri Portrait with Animal Totem

From the www.spiritanimal.info site: “The owl spirit animal is emblematic of a deep connection with wisdom and intuitive knowledge. If you have the owl as totem or power animal, you’re likely to have the ability to see what’s usually hidden to most. When the spirit of this animal guides you, you can see the true reality, beyond illusion and deceit. The owl also offers for those who have it a personal totem the inspiration and guidance necessary to deeply explore the unknown and the magic of life.”

I don’t know if everyone has an animal totem but I always thought my daughter Piri did. I feel sure that her animal totem is an owl because when she was a baby, a particular barred owl living in our woods, got obsessed with her and seemed to be constantly watching her. He would even perch on a low branch outside the living room window so he could stare into the house when we were not outside. At night he perched on the hip of the roof and made those wheezing owl noises that are not hoots. When she was pre-school age her favorite dress, that she insisted on wearing almost every day, had an owl on it.

So when I painted Piri, I wanted to include her animal totem. -LP

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Retirement Strategic Plan

The thing I am having the hardest time getting used to in retirement is all the free time. Not long ago, while I was in the work force, I was getting up at 4 AM every weekday. That was what I needed to do to get everything done! With all these looming extra hours that I have now, I find that I feel a little guilty at not using my time efficiently. But there is so much of it! I would also like to be more in a routine, but I haven’t even figured that out. For a few brief moments I entertained the idea of using productivity methods left over from my work experience to gain retirement efficiencies…

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I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 1)

– In which Dorn spins a work yarn.

This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.

I call this story I was a fugitive from the NCIS. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)

Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.

Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.

That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I  would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation. 

The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.

In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.

It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did. 

She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.

I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now. 

But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking). 

One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!

CONTINUED in part 2 . . .

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Career Aspirations

I read about these career survey results today: “Number One Career Choice For American Kids is to be YouTubers, For Chinese Kids It’s an Astronaut”.

The slant of the article was that this was more evidence of American decline. However, it made me think of a recent conversation between me and the grandkids, which I have cartoon-ized below. What I didn’t put in was that after the woman’s movement made it realistic for girls to have career aspirations, there was a wave of the ‘drop out’ movement which kind of negated it for me. By the time I really did get a career, as a computer programmer, it wouldn’t have been my childhood dream job because it wasn’t really a career that could be imagined back then. So, in spite of the Chinese having the more science-y aspirations, it seems like progress has been made in that at least half the kids aren’t left out anymore in having career aspirations. And being a you-tuber is probably nice work if you can get it!

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Aminos update

– In which Dorn demonstrates the power of the post.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Modesty prevents me from claiming it must have been my mention of coconut aminos in a post less than a month ago that brought it such instant acclaim, but the facts speak for themselves. In today’s Washington Post, food columnist Ellie Krieger wrote that “Two formerly fringe ingredients go mainstream: Nutritional yeast and coconut aminos” (Washington Post Food Section, 7/18/19).

Her story concentrates on coconut aminos’s composition, flavor, and uses, mainly casting it as a substitute for soy sauce when the latter’s saltiness, gluten content or lack of Paleo-credentials disqualify it from the menu (you blog readers knew of these qualities of aminos already!). While generally positive about its place in the kitchen, Ms Krieger is skeptical about the health claims made by some coconut-aminophiles:

People are also buying into coconut aminos because they believe the many false and misleading claims they read about the ingredient online… though fresh coconut sap contains vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, scant — if any — are retained in the processing of the sap into coconut aminos, and there are no studies to back up any disease prevention benefits.

In other news (specifically, other news on the same Washington Post online page), food and culture reporter Maura Judkis reports that “KFC’s Cheetos chicken sandwich looks toxic and tastes like a missed opportunity” . (Washington Post online, 7/17/19). She allows that eating the sandwich did not kill her, and in fact it actually tastes better than it looks (which recall from the article title is “toxic”), and she reminisces about the food she enjoyed when she was young: “In the early part of this decade, stunt food used to be stuntier.”

To be fair, Cheetos is a notoriously difficult ingredient to work into a recipe, compared to, say, Twinkies. My grandson K— showed me Good Mythical Morning, a YouTube show that subjected several ingredients to the same culinary test: each ingredient was substituted, one at a time, for almonds in the process used to make almond milk (basically, soaking in water). Twinkies made a passable twinkie-milk beverage; so did fried chicken. But cheetos-milk just didn’t cut it (“too greasy”).

I’ll bet two successful Cheetos substitutions are: (1) for Rice Krispies in rice krispy treats, and (2) for cornmeal in corn dogs. I haven’t tried either of these, but if I do, I’ll let you know.

Thanks!
Dorn
7.18.2019

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Kids on Devices and the Point System

I had the pleasure of having four grandkids over last week, however, I couldn’t help but notice that they were all glued to their devices (as shown below).

I thought they were here to have quality time with ME!!! This led me to invent the point system, where a kid could earn points by doing non screen time activities. Points were easy to earn it just had to be by doing something active. Going down the zip line earns points!!! They loved it. They actually got really greedy for points. GD #1 helped me hang a door but when I dropped a screw I heard, “I’ll pick it up for an extra point.” I agreed to everything because for me ‘points’ are a fiat currency. At one point when they were tallying up their points GD #4 started crying because she did not have as many points as GD #2, her sister. “Well, I made the pancakes and you didn’t!”, exclaimed GD #2. But Gamma is a magnanimous ruler, so I said to GD # 4, “You get five points because you are making such a big fuss!” You may wonder what the points are good for. You trade them in for minutes you can stay up past your bedtime. Perhaps this is a deterrent to an actual parent in implementing the system, but it works for me!

Thanks to the point system I had a lot of takers when I wanted help walking the dogs down by the river and I was able to catch GD #1 in a Gaugin – like pose for my most recent painting.

Note: Thanks to Dorn you may see an email signup on the blog now. Please sign up so we can figure out if it works!

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Epithets and expletives (part 1)

– In which Dorn tries on some new descriptors.

This post is called part 1, not because I have more to say on the subject that I’m saving for later–it’s debatable whether I’ve got anything worth saying now on the subject–but because it seems like a topic that could lend itself well to revisiting. It’s my short list of words or phrases that seem like they would contribute more to the English language if they were used as expletives or epithets. My rule for eligibility is that they have to be real words or phrases that I actually heard said or saw written recently.

My list is pretty short, but hey, this is only part 1!

1. “Horseradish mayonnaise“.  Stuff and nonsense. (source: Deb Naylor, reporting on her lunch at a Netherlands restaurant, April 2019)

Used in a sentence: “Your argument for global warming is just so much horseradish mayonnaise.”

This phrase has the same meaning, and falls in the same class of food-based epithets, as “gammon and spinach”, which found its way into the chorus of the nursery rhyme, “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go”. I found this 1885 drawing of Froggie, Mr. Rat and Miss Mousie from the rhyme, where they actually seem to be dining on roly-poly, gammon (ham) and spinach, so I’m not sure if the phrase was actually being used epithetically in that poem.

Drawing of Mr Rat, Froggie, and Miss Mousie from "A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go", 1885, New York Public Library

(I grew up with a different version of the rhyme, Frog went a-courtin’ on an old Burl Ives record of folk songs and nursery rhymes. I used to love that record, but that song didn’t have “gammon and spinach” in it.)

My first acquaintance with “gammon and spinach” clearly used as an epithet (decrying the basing of work choices on anything other than gain) was probably in the 1951 B&W Christmas Carol movie starring Alister Sim. When I was growing up, this was the scariest, and I thought the best, Christmas Carol version available on TV.

“Gammon and spinach” has pretty much fallen out of the English lexicon, as food epithets have evolved over the years. I’m sure it’s a direct antecedent of the theme song of the 1990s show Frazier, “Tossed salad and scrambled eggs”.

In “horseradish mayonnaise”, the next generation can now carry on the noble tradition of food epithets. And because when my good friend Deb Naylor reported this phrase, she helpfully provided the Dutch translation (mierikswortelmayonaise), it is ready-made to be used as a bilingual epithet when needed.

2. “Epithetic”. Worthy of being described by a (derogatory) epithet. (source: the dictionary, looking up the definition of “epithet”, the other day)

Used in a sentence: “Our state representative is so epithetic!”

The official meaning of epithetic is just the adjective form of the word “epithet”, but it sounds so much like a fusion of epithet, pathetic, and apathetic that I think it deserves to be an epithet in itself.

The antonym of epithetic, meaning being so blameless as to be hard to apply a derogatory epithet to, would be “hypo-epithetical”.

When trying to thing of a sentence to use for an example of this epithet, I found that all the subjects that came to mind were from the Federal government. This may say something negative about my own feelings. Or it may simply be that our current governing officials are all just epithetic.

3. “Honey nut cluster crunch”. A disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking. (source: a store brand breakfast cereal box, June 2019)

Used in a sentence: “The initiative at work quickly degenerated into a total honey nut cluster crunch.”

Military types will recognize “cluster crunch” as a G-rated version of the term for an operation in which multiple things have gone horribly wrong. The military term, as I understand it, is sometimes abbreviated “Charlie-Foxtrot”, with a more serious disaster termed a “Royal” (charlie-foxtrot).

In the 20 years I spent working for the Navy, I learned to respect the military’s mastery of epithets, especially their way with acronym-epithets. Many of these, such as SNAFU, FUBAR and BOHICA, have worked their way into mainstream language.

4. St. Lucy’s eyeballs“. I’m shocked!  (source: Kathleen describing a piece of jewelry, April 2019)

Used in a sentence: “St. Lucy’s eyeballs! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

This expletive falls in the category containing saint evocations, which includes “Great Caesar’s ghost!” (from the 1950s Superman TV show), “St. Dan in a pan!” (from Serafina, a very good YA book about a girl trying to negotiate a peace between humans and dragons), and the doubly-euphemized “Jiminy Christmas!” (heard in the 1937 movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and again in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz). It is also related in some way to the expletive “My eyes! my eyes!” (as heard on Friends, and a million other places).

St. Lucy is a legitimate saint in the Catholic canon. Her name can mean “light” or “lucid”, and she is the patron saint of the blind. Icons often portrayed St. Lucy with her identifying attribute, her disembodied eyes. Her eyeballs are a motif represented in jewelry, and even in recipes. If “St. Lucy’s eyeballs!” hasn’t been used as an expletive before now, it really should have been!

That’s my list…. so far!
-Dorn
7/13/2019

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Three dog-years after the mast

– In which Dorn checks on his progress.

It has now been 157 days, or three dog years, since I retired, so I thought I’d take stock. How has my life been upended? How has it stabilized? How is my bucket list doing?

Food. I have always loved to cook, especially to bake, and especially to bake bread. One time during my working days I decided I was going to master the perfect rustic loaf: crusty and crunchy outside, chewy and feisty on the inside. I had gotten pretty close too, but then I got busy, and the skills were eventually lost. I could still bake bread, just not the bread.

But since I retired, I’ve started my quest up again. This time, I was armed with a luscious stinky sourdough starter and tips from my good friend S.C— T— (also an adept of the Doughy Arts), and a great recipe for bread in a Dutch Oven. Equipped as I was with ingredients, tools, arcane know-how, and most of all time, I quickly started making progress.

Then one day I stepped on the bathroom scale and realized that I was paying a heavy (get it?) price for my knowledge, that I was not willing to pay. Since then I have scaled back, and am content to make incremental progress toward bread perfection, at a rate governed approximately by the rate at which my friends and neighbors are willing to take the loaves off my hands. Stay tuned!

Clothing. Once freed from the tyranny of “dress codes” and “business casual”, I’ve been able to discharge a Debt of Honor to my sister Tara.

When Tara’s daughters were a bit younger, they started to experiment with hair dye. These were hues completely outside of the crayon box that mother nature provided her children: neon pinks, blues, purples, greens. At that time, I told my sister that she should dye her hair like that too, and to sweeten the deal, I said that if she would, then I would. But Tara called my bluff and took the neon plunge! And so did my other sister Lona! And my other sister Innes!

Kirk Van Houten (the Simpsons)

I was still working then, and I confess that I was worried how a not-of-this-earth hair statement might be viewed at my workplace. They weren’t prudes there, but there were certain unspoken lines that it took more courage than I had to cross. But now I’m retired and can do as I please, so I got my hair dyed an electric cyan-blue that would do Milhouse’s dad Kirk proud.

Shelter. Kathleen and I have been looking into perhaps a small house trailer, inspired by a dream to travel the world in a way that allows us to bring our dog Archie everywhere, and partly spurred on by Lona’s recent post-retirement purchase of a cool retro-looking Scamp trailer. We’ve only made a little progress on our own mobile home dreams, but we almost closed a deal on a new (to us) pickup truck that I think could pull a nice Teardrop, if we get one. Baby steps!

Walt Disney cartoon, "Mickey's Trailer"

Wherewithal. The government was shut down right before I retired, so some of the tasks for which I was responsible had to go un-transitioned. I told them at work that if they arranged a contract, I would help with some transitioning later on. They did, and I’ve done just a little bit. It gives me an excuse to see some old friends, and it doesn’t seem like it will have too great an impact on my time (or my income).

CAC Card

But one wrinkle I had forgotten about was that as part of this contract, I will need a Common Access Card (CAC), which is a government-issued photo ID. If I had planned it better, I might have gotten this card before I honored my hair-promise to my sister. We’ll see how that goes.


Thanks!
-dorn
7/8/19

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Drawing Lesson Circa 1959

I know exactly when I learned to draw. It was April 1959 and I was six and a quarter. I had just drawn a man in a hat that I was rather proud of and I showed it to my Dad. He suggested that I really look at how a hat set on a man’s head. I had drawn it fully on top of the head, kind of balancing up there and he drew an example sketch to show how it really came part of the way down the head! (Remember in 1959 it was before JFK convinced men that they did not need to wear hats!)

I was able to copy his lesson pretty well. Wow! What a concept! To draw something all you really had to do was really **look** at it. I’ve had many art classes as an adult that said basically the same thing. The book I was looking at by Kevin Macpherson to try to get back into landscape painting says it too: “Paint what you see, not what you know”.

So when I started the painting below on location in Piscataway Park, I was trying to really look at the water since that seemed challenging. Kevin also says, “All paintings are lessons for the next.”

Accokeek Creek
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Joseph Campbell and the Myth of Comeuppance

– In which Dorn demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect while retelling an archetypal myth.

I really like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Not the real Dunning-Kruger effect, but the one that’s most portrayed in popular culture. This interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect describes the path of learning of a typical “know-nothing”, who, shortly on being introduced to a field of knowledge, assumes he has become an expert, and is insufferable (and wrong) until he learns enough to realize how little he actually knows. 

The real Dunning-Kruger effect is reported in the experiments they published in their 1999 paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, J. Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121.

I believe that the experiments, for which Justin Kruger and David Dunning were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology in 2000, actually point to a slightly different interpretation. This graph shows one of the results of one of their experiments, plotting perceived and measured skill at a specific task.

This graph says to me that most people in this study thought they knew about as much as the average person person participating in that study, or maybe a bit more (or maybe, since the measure in question is about skill relative to a group, that most people thought that other people in the field knew as much as they did, or almost.). As one becomes more knowledgeable in the field, one’s self assessment becomes more accurate and more positive, and strays further from the population median. 

The interpretation seems supported by the experiments, and by common experience. But it just doesn’t tell as good a story as the first interpretation, and I’m convinced that that is why the first Dunning-Kruger curve predominates the online popular discussion. 

Why is the first story better? 

Joseph Campbell knew the answer, and he explained it to Bill Moyers, and the rest of us, in a 1988 PBS documentary series, The Power of Myth. The conversations between the two seem dated now–back then, the cultural touchstones were the Star Wars and Rambo movies, LSD and peyote were still controversial drugs, and the Vietnam War and even the assassination of Kennedy were still in the common living memory. But as Joseph Campbell would be the first to point out, the myths of the human condition transcend differences of region and era.

The TV series’s companion book, also called The Power of Myth, is still interesting reading today for the revelation (or reminder, depending on your age) of what contemporary views on myth, religion, and their role in American culture were thirty years ago, long before 9/11 placed culture and religion on a war footing that we’re still struggling with.

Here’s a brief snippet.

MOYERS: What did you think of the outpouring over John Lennon’s death? Was he a hero? 
CAMPBELL: Oh, he definitely was a hero. 
MOYERS: Explain that in the mythological sense.
CAMPBELL: In the mythological sense, he was an innovator. The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let’s call it, for meditation and Oriental music. Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it’s about. We are hearing more and more of it, and it’s being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That’s what the Beatles started. 
MOYERS: Sometimes it seems to me that we ought to feel pity for the hero instead of admiration. So many of them have sacrificed their own needs for others. 
CAMPBELL: They all have. 
MOYERS: And very often what they accomplish is shattered by the inability of the followers to see. 
CAMPBELL: Yes, you come out of the forest with gold and it turns to ashes. That’s a well-known fairy-tale motif.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth (p. 163). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I believe the first interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect better resonates with a myth that has been told countless times over the centuries in a thousand variations. I’ll retell the myth in the variation that I learned–the federal employee version:

A career federal employee has worked hard for years to master his or her field, and is now a well-respected expert. Then one day an obnoxious political appointee or elected official comes in, and thinks he knows best what the agency should be doing and how it should do it. But he doesn’t really know, and he messes it all up. The myth has two alternate endings: 

(a) the career professional comes in and saves the day; 

or the more common ending, 

(b) everything is ruined, and the career professional has the bitter satisfaction of knowing what evil might have been averted, and what good accomplished, if only someone had listened to him or her. 

The myth doesn’t necessarily require that the jackass political appointee get his public comeuppance, or ever see how wrong he was. It’s sufficient that the career professional, the real hero of the myth, sees it. The wise man knows the fool is a fool, even if the fool doesn’t. I call this story the Myth of Comeuppance.

Note 1. Please note that I am speaking here of universal archetypes, not my own experience, at least not recently. I would have to go back many years and several jobs to find a time when this particular myth resonated personally with me. 

Note 2. I wanted to call my myth “The jackass effect”, but that’s taken: Dr Lawrence Rubin describes the jackass effect in the Psychology Today blog as the increase in self-destructive or just plain stupid behavior for thrills or laughs brought on by the Jackass movies.

Thanks!
Dorn
7/5/19

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Mansplain-spotting

– In which Dorn explains, uh, Dorn explaining.

There’s a term in popular use now that I have mixed feelings about, “mansplaining”. I realized how much I didn’t like it during a recent conversation with my learned friend Kelly Samek. The conversation was about a website called AreMenTalkingTooMuch.com, which contains an online version of a sort of chess timer that you can use at a boring meeting if you want, as the website says, to:

Image the question, "who's talking?", and two timer buttons, labeled "a dude" and "not a dude"

Few people will try this online experiment, I suspect, without having a good guess of what the answer will be, which is kind of the point. Like the term “mansplaining”, the point is that men overexplain things to women and under-listen to explanations from women, regardless of topic or the relative expertise of the men and women involved.

During the conversation with Kelly I felt like I needed to defend myself against being guilty of practicing mansplaining, even though she didn’t accuse me of it, and I agree that men in general (including me) do indeed do it.

I immediately felt guilty about feeling defensive about mansplaining, because hey, with all the societal advantages that being a guy brings, I should be able to suck up a little harmless ribbing. And that’s not just my feeling–it’s the zeitgeist. I tried a search on gender based stereotypes, and my first hit (MDHealth.com) informed me that stereotyping male attributes (sex-obsessed, lazy at home, presidential) is “fun”. The search didn’t yield any hits that were outraged by the male stereotyping, just as I wouldn’t expect to find any sites outraged by lawyer jokes.

Why should I feel bad about the word “to mansplain”? Well, for one thing, it’s a derogatory stereotype, which we liberals are supposed to hate (unlike all those conservatives!). (That’s irony, you got that, right?) I remember being shocked the first time I heard someone use the verb “to jew”. I’m not shocked by, and in fact have used myself, “to gyp” and “to welch”, but now I know their origins, I know intellectually what’s wrong with them.

For another thing, the word allows someone who doesn’t know anything about me to draw a negative conclusion about me based solely on my gender. The fact that it’s a true conclusion just makes it worse.

I don’t mind being characterized accurately even when it’s unflattering (he said self-importantly, if not very self-awarely), but I’d rather people use what they know about me to describe me, and not just a stereotype. I have a word that I think better captures what I used to do at work, and what I still do now, and I would appreciate it if everyone added it to their lexicon:

“Dornsplaining”. OK?

thanks!
-Dorn
7/3/19

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Nightmare on 210

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl


My brother’s recent post on Impossible Maps (see it at https://thirdagethoughts.com/impossible-maps/)  inspired me to make a loose map of the dominant highway in our area, Route 210. I believe 210 was built during WWII because bombs were being made at the Naval Ordnance Station at Indian Head and they needed a speedy way to deliver the bombs. The road was built straight for maximum efficiency without regard for what was already there – that’s why Livingston Road crosses 210 so many times. The family farm was also bisected during the construction because ‘have bombs must travel’. Today, people can only dream of efficient travel on Route 210. There is a popular facebook group for local commuters called ‘Nightmare on 210’ where people recant their commuting woes. The themes depicted on my map all come from this group of clever people who, apparently realizing you can either laugh or cry about a dystopian situation, have decided to laugh. And vent! And if you don’t drive nicely, they will take your picture and post it!

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Human Adding Machine

I got a request to make my “game” of Human Adding Machine described in a previous post more fun-sounding. I have done that below (if you define “more fun” as “more complicated”). As foreshadowed in that post, my version 2 game does involve bottles of beer, but it still does not require partial nudity or body painting (unlike Human Chess).

Caveats. To play this game, someone in the group needs to understand base-7 arithmetic (here is some info on it). It isn’t necessary for the players of the game to understand base-7 arithmetic, or even know that the game is performing arithmetic.

To read the blog post you are reading now, however, and have it sound like fun (my original task), the reader has to have at least an interest in other-base arithmetic, or an equivalent amount of math-geekiness in other areas. You’ve been warned.

Note in press. Shortly after publishing this, my learned friend Pete Boundy correctly pointed out that the H.A.M. game would be 16⅔% more fun if it used base‑7 arithmetic instead of base‑6 as originally written. So this post is a base‑7 revision of what I originally posted.

Players.

One player is called the User. He or she sets into motion the transfer of beer between players.

The other players, called Players, make up the components of the adding machine. The game can have any number of Players, although the more Players you have, the more beer you need.

One person (who can be the User, or one of the Players, or someone else) is the Judge. The Judge’s job is to decide on the addition problem to be solved, and adjudicate at the end whether it was solved correctly. The Judge needs to be able to understand base-7 arithmetic.

Initial setup.

The Judge determines a base-7 addition problem to solve,
for example, 1524(7) + 653(7) = ?

The Players line up, and the Player at the far right of the line is called “Player 1”. Each Player receives a six-pack of beer from the User. The six-pack can have any number of beer bottles in it from zero to six, determined by the User.

Rules of Game play: Players.
1. Each Player can only receive more beer from the User, or from the Player on his or her immediate right.
2. Each Player can only give beer to the person on his or her immediate left.
3. Each Player can receive only one new beer at a time. When a beer is received, it is put in the Player’s six-pack.
4. A Player can receive a beer at any time, but a Player can only give away a bottle if rule 5 applies.
5. If at any time a Player receives a beer and can’t put it in his or her six-pack because it’s already full, all of his or her beer is forfeit. He or she must immediately (a) give the bottle of beer just received to the Player on the immediate left, and (b) take all the bottles of beer out of the six-pack and recycle them, and be left with an empty six pack.

Rules of Game play: User.
1. The User is given the two numbers making up the addition problem, 1524 and 653 in our example.

2. The User sets the initial conditions by giving out six-packs to the Players based on the first number, say 1524. “Player 1” gets a six-pack with 4 bottles in it to correspond to the right-most digit, 4. The next Player over gets a six-pack with 2 bottles, the next a six-pack with 5 bottles, and the next a six-pack with 1 bottle. Any further Players get empty six-packs with zero bottles. (If you have many Players getting zero beer bottles, and you have enough beer, you should pick a bigger starting number to maximize the fun–having no beer isn’t that much fun)

3. Once the initial conditions are set, game play begins. The User starts handing out beer to Players, one beer at a time, based on the second number of his or her addition problem. If the number is 653, the User gives 3 bottles of beer to “Player 1”. The User gives the next Player 5 bottles of beer, because 5 is the next digit. The next Player gets 6 bottles, and the Players beyond that get no bottles in this example.
Note 1. If a Player needs to give away beer, you should give him or her a chance to do that before giving him or her any more beer.
Note 2. there is no required order for the User to give out the beer, as long as he or she gets the totals right. One could give one beer to the first Player, two to the second, then go back and give another to the first before giving some to the third, etc.

4. When the User has handed out all the beer corresponding to the second addition term, his or her role in passing out beer is complete (unless you’re playing Extreme Human Adding Machine, in which more than two numbers are summed!)

5. After all the Players have done all the allowed moves that they can, the game is over. The User then counts the number of beer bottles in each six-pack and converts it to a number: the count of bottles in “Player 1″s six-pack is the right-most (units) digit of that number, the next Player’s bottle count is the next-left digit, and so on.

How to win.

VARIATION 1: The User generates a number from the final distribution of beer bottles as above. The Judge determines if this number is the correct answer to the addition problem.

In the example used above, 1524(7) + 653(7) = 2510(7).

If the addition was performed correctly, everyone wins! and all drink beer. If the answer is incorrect, everyone loses, and all drink beer (but unhappily).

VARIATION 2: In this case, all of the rules of the game are the same, but the object of the game is to maximize your own personal beer supply. So the Player with the most beer in his or her six-pack when the game ends wins, and gets to drink more beer than the losers.

Note that in variation 2, winning the game has nothing to do with whether the addition problem was solved correctly. But because the Players really have no choices to make during the entire game, the problem should be solved correctly anyway. Unless a Player cheats! (Which is exactly what has happened when a computer program you wrote does not run as it should.)

In both variations, the Players don’t need to know or care that they are solving a math problem for the addition to work, just like the little nanogates or quantum wells or whatever they make computers out of these days don’t know they are doing math for you when you run your computer.

Thanks, and sorry!

-Dorn
6/30/19

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Impossible maps

– In which Dorn ponders games and other fictions, the Real World, and the mapping of one to the other.

The Bellman’s Map, from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. Rendering by Sharon Daniel (http://people.duke.edu/~ng46/topics/lewis-carroll.htm)

Just as Lona learned about Bitlife from her granddaughters (see her post), I learned something about current videogame culture from my grand­daughters when they last visited us. They showed me how to play Pokémon Go. In the game, you wander around in the Real World, and you look for Poké-monsters. They’re invisible to the naked eye, so you use a special detector that visualizes them.

The “detector” is just an app on your smart phone, that uses the phone’s GPS to compare your location with a database of where the Pokémon are, and if one happens to be where your phone is pointing, it superimposes the image of the Poké-monster onto the image of your surroundings generated by the phone’s camera, thus:

A photo of a pokemon cartoon fish superimposed on a camera shot of a sidewalk

It sounds to me like the creators of this game successfully mapped their Pokémon population data onto a map of the Real World at what is effectively a 1:1 scale.

There’s a lot going on in Pokémon Go, but the idea of a map with a 1:1 scale is what really caught my imagination. A life-size map, rendered at one mile to the mile, is the basis for apps and augmented reality glasses, but would have made almost no sense before digital data visualization was a thing. Lewis Carroll spoofed the whole idea of a 1:1 map in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

Mein Herr looked so thoroughly bewildered that I thought it best to change the subject. “What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked.
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.
source: Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)
(http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48795 )

Lewis Carroll has another map spoof that I like even better, in his classic epic poem, The Hunting of the Snark. The subject map (reproduced above) was procured by the captain to aid in their hunting expedition.

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
     Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
     A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
     Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
     "They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
     But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best--
     A perfect and absolute blank!"
Lewis Carroll – The Hunting of the Snark (1874-76) (http://people.duke.edu/~ng46/topics/lewis-carroll.htm)

If you’ve never heard Boris Karloff’s narration of The Hunting of the Snark in his very best Grinch voice, you really should. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhcE3zc7V-8

I’ll end by mentioning a couple of books that I liked, whose stories depend in part on their weird, maybe unmappable, topography.

The city & the city by China Miéville (2009) is a wonderful murder mystery that takes place in the the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, somewhere on an unnamed coastline in Eastern Europe. The two cities resemble West and East Berlin economically and politically, but they co-exist in exactly the same location.

This isn’t parallel-universe science fiction, it’s political fiction: the only reason the two very distinct cities can be at the same place at the same time is that their respective citizens agree (under some duress) to believe that they do. Pockets of one city abut pockets of the other, with many places “cross-hatched” so the area is simultaneously in both cities. It’s a great story that I heartily recommend, and I would love to see a map of the twin cities and their fractal shared border.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2010) reads like a historical adventure-romance of Napoleonic England, except that England has a long and now-dormant history of interactions with the land of fairies, that seems to be exploding into life again as the story progresses. I love the way the entire novel is peppered with footnotes and references to magical textbooks that manage to sound both officious and not quite sane at the same time.

The fairy lands can be reached from England on “fairy roads” that pop up at random throughout the countryside. I imagine a map of the setting of this story would have two planes, one (Faerie) hovering over the other (England). Occasionally gravity wells would form in the upper plane and spiral down to England like tornadoes, and terminate in a new fairy road. That’s how I visualize it anyway!

Thanks,
Dorn
6/29/19

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Plein Air

So I have been painting more. My successful artist friend says he paints every single day! His work is quite beautiful so I presume a side benefit is ‘practice makes perfect’, but I’m afraid right now I’m motivated because it gives me something enjoyable to do. I like being outside and I like walking my dog. So my methodology is often to walk the dog while carrying my travel easel and to pause when I see something interesting to paint and then paint it. There is some necessity to work fast because the light will change too much if you don’t. That works for my dog. There is a special term in French for this painting outside activity: Plein Air. This landscape of a farm road was painted earlier this week.

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Stand Up for Yourself

While sorting out my post workforce life, in the first couple of weeks I felt like something was off. I now think one of my problems was that I wasn’t standing enough. At work I had made a standing desk out of a tray table and at home, I didn’t think to replicate it at first. It was about four years ago that a facebook friend posted about loving her standing desk. “Hmmmmm, that might be worth trying”, I thought, since she was really raving about it. By coincidence, there was an empty paper box in the hallway on my next day going into the office and I was able to test out the concept on the cheap by putting my keyboard and monitor on the box. I have to say it took a while to get used to. My legs were sore at first but I became accustomed to standing within a few weeks. I also had the problem of leaning my thighs on the desk rim that I had to overcome – lest they acquire a permanent ridge! Once the concept was proven I was able to upgrade by getting approval to order a $32 tray table.

Once I identified this problem, I just needed to fix my desk at home. I was able to do this with just a couple of stools, one for the monitor and one for the keyboard. My low budget set up is shown below.  These days, back at my old office, every new workstation is automatically a desk which easily converts from sitting to standing, because even the government is realizing the benefits of a healthier workforce. The proven benefits of a standing desk are that it will reduce the risk of diabetes, heart disease, early death (Um, OK, maybe we in the third age are immune to that one!), weight gain and obesity. They have been proven to reduce back pain as well. If you want to avoid being too sedentary, it’s easy – consider standing up for yourself!

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Bitlife, part 2

– In which Dorn riffs on Lona’s recent “Bitlife” blog post.

I thought I’d take a break from parallel blog play, and try to continue (sort of) the theme of Bitlife that Lona’s post so elegantly contrasted with being In the Real World (IRL). Thinking about a game that simulates the Real World reminded me of a game we played as kids, one we invented for ourselves, which set that simulation on its head: we in the Real World simulated a board game. We had this huge pair of wooden dice and we decided our basement was a similarly expanded game board. We were the game pieces, and we had to scramble over the game “squares”: chairs, tables, boxes, TV sets. (I have no idea why we had those huge wooden dice. At the time I perhaps thought it was just de rigueur 1960’s home decor. They were probably made of Norwegian Wood.)

Playing the game (which we called “Game“) felt something like I imagine participating in a Human Chessboard feels, but our game was much simpler, maybe about equivalent in complexity to a Human Candyland. One had to move the required number of squares and race to the end. One couldn’t use the basement floor, not because it was forbidden or boiling lava or anything, but simply because, just like in the Candyland universe, moving game pieces outside the squares had no meaning.

(Human chessboards have been played on for centuries and can be found all over the world. The picture below from Wikipedia shows human chess at the World Bodypainting Festival in Pörtschach am Wörthersee, Austria.)

Photo by JIP – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41470182

So we have board games that simulate being IRW (Hasbro’s classic Game of Life is an example), and IRW activities that simulate board games, like human chess and our Game. Bitlife is a computer app that simulates being IRW–I wondered if there were IRW activities that could simulate a computer app?

I thought of one almost immediately. Given that smart phones actually have an app that allows them to act as a telephone, maybe that old party game Telephone counts? But since Telephone actually predates computer apps (and computers, and maybe even telephones), that feels like a cheat. Instead, how about an IRW activity that simulates a simple digital adding machine?

I thought of a human digital adding machine “game”. I don’t know if I am inventing it myself. I have never heard of it, but that might just be because it’s no fun. It sounds awfully math-geeky, even to me. In a pathetic attempt to make it sound more fun, you could mentally replace the word “ball” where-ever I use it below with “bottle of beer”.

Human chess can be understood by learning the moves that chess pieces can make on a chess board, and then letting people take the places of the pieces and move by the same rules. My human digital adding machine can be understood (I hope) in the same way.

The humans playing Adding Machine all stand in a line. Each human might receive a ball during the game from another human. If a human ever receives a second ball, he or she must give one ball to the person to his or her left, and throw the other ball away.

Another human plays the adding machine User. He or she inputs the numbers to be added by handing out balls to the people playing the Adding Machine components. At the end of the process, the User gets the answer to the arithmetic problem by seeing by who is left holding a ball, and who is empty-handed.

Here is the machine that these humans are simulating. Marbles fall down tracks, and the humans (except the User) correspond to the little wobbly wooden switches that cause marbles to fall to the left (passed on to another switch/human) or to the right (thrown away). The wooden switches and humans each have a value, from right to left 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., and the arithmetic performed is in binary, just like most computers. Watch this video to see the adding machine in action.

Can you imagine a line people standing in a row passing balls back and forth, and then the User checking to see what answer they came up with? Does it help to imagine them half-naked and covered in body paint?

This whole idea of an addition problem being solved by a group of people who don’t know what the problem is, and don’t even need to know how to add, or speak the language of the User, reminds me of a delightful conceit found in the Pulitzer prize-winning book Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

In the book, Hofstadter explores many wonderful and fantastical concepts, including conversations that are held with a sentient ant colony. The ants aren’t sentient, but the way they move and interact with each other reveals an overarching organization, and even intelligence. Here’s an excerpt (Aunt Hillary is the name of the ant colony). It’s long (as is the book), but if it grabs your imagination, give the book a try! Thanks!

Anteater: Silly fellow! That's not the way it happens. Ant colonies don't converse out loud, but in writing. You know how ants form trails leading them hither and thither?

Achilles: Oh, yes-usually straight through the kitchen sink and into my peach jam.

Anteater: Actually, some trails contain information in coded form. If you know the system, you can read what they're saying just like a book. 

Achilles: Remarkable. And can you communicate back to them? 

Anteater: Without any trouble at all. That's how Aunt Hillary and I have conversations for hours. I take a stick and draw trails in the moist ground, and watch the ants follow my trails. Presently, a new trail starts getting formed somewhere. I greatly enjoy watching trails develop. As they are forming, I anticipate how they will continue (and more often I am wrong than right). When the trail is completed, I know what Aunt Hillary is thinking, and I in turn make my reply.

Achilles: There must be some amazingly smart ants in that colony, I'll say that.

Anteater: I think you are still having some difficulty realizing the difference in levels here. Just as you would never confuse an individual tree with a forest, so here you must not take an ant for the colony. You see, all the ants in Aunt Hillary are as dumb as can be. They couldn't converse to save their little thoraxes!

Achilles: Well then, where does the ability to converse come from? It must reside somewhere inside the colony! I don't understand how the ants can all be unintelligent, if Aunt Hillary can entertain you for hours with witty banter.

Tortoise: It seems to me that the situation is not unlike the composition of a human brain out of neurons. Certainly no one would insist that individual brain cells have to be intelligent beings on their own, in order to explain the fact that a person can have an intelligent conversation.

– Dorn
6/26/19

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Bitlife

Everytime I spend time with my grandkids I learn something about popular culture. Apparently the latest craze is a text only game called Bitlife. Bitlife is everything you do in real life (IRL) but it is compressed into about half an hour!

“I’m walking my dog”, says Julia. I already walked my dog this morning IRL, I’m thinking.

“I have six grandchildren,” she says. Hmmmm, IRL I only have five.

“Do you talk about your lives with your friends”, I ask.

“My friend had to kill her father because he was a pedaphile”, says Julia.

Yikes!

They are begging me to play but as a person of the third age I feel like it’s just IRL. Most of it seems to be ‘been there, done that’ territory (except for the pedaphile father!), but they find it fun. When they scream out that they are getting a car, I say, “I have a car”.  At first I thought that there was some altruism build into the game because I heard things like “I’m helping my grandson pay for college”, but then I hear Willow talk about having a life of crime next time she played so I’m not sure.

“I’m 104!!!”

Maybe there is something to it. Willow insists that I help her play out her life of crime next round so I will ‘improve our relationship’, as Bitlife calls it, by joining in. I hope nobody gets hurt!!!

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Be brief!

– In which Dorn contemplates the virtues of blog brevity.

Maybe you’ve noticed that I often put headers on paragraphs in my blog posts. I used to do this with my work emails too. You might think this is evidence of how organized I am, but you’d be wrong–it’s an indication of how I can get so wordy that if I don’t introduce some kind of organization into my message, the whole meaning can get lost.

To counter the trend for my posts to get ever longer, today I’ll write about, and try to epitomize, the concept of using the fewest words to completely convey the message I want to send.

Message content, of course, is measured in C-units, short for communication units, according to Prof. Alfred Valdez of New Mexico University: “Communication units are defined as ‘an independent clause and its modifiers’. A communication unit is an utterance that cannot be further divided without the disappearance of its essential meaning…” *

You know what, please mentally strike that last paragraph. You can tell a communication unit when you see one, even if you don’t call it that. That will shorten this post by two paragraphs (counting this one)!

I learned to respect, if not practice, brevity from that old standby, Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I hope they are still using this in schools, it’s great. And very short–only 43 pages!

E. B. White is perhaps best known for Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. William Strunk isn’t better known for anything, to my knowledge. I include here a picture of the cover of Charlotte’s Web, so that when I link this to Facebook there will be a nice picture on display.

Book cover of Charlotte's Web

Strunk and White said of brevity,

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

Please do not confuse Elements of Style with Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen’s book, Elements of F*cking Style, which addresses many of the same C-units of Strunk and White’s work, but also includes significant raunchy subtext (I’d be interested in figuring out how to measure the C-unit value of subtext).

I won’t repeat Mark Twain’s famous quip excusing the length of his writing, nor quote Cicero comparing overlong discourse to liquid overfilling the brainpan of one’s listener. I’ve already written more than I envisioned when my whole plan was to be pithy, so I’ll just say thanks!

-dorn
6/24/19

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Landscape Painting at Marshall Hall

I have a lot of memories Piscataway Park’s Marshall Hall site, former site of an amusement park and Southern Maryland gambling mecca, and also the current site of burned out historical mansion. I remember going there as a child in the amusement park days and once accidently wandering into a slot machine building where no one under sixteen was allowed. My husband worked the toy helicopters there as a teenager so that may have been our real first meeting, although I don’t actually remember riding the toy helicopters. I liked the mini-roller coaster better. My son was married there in an outdoor winter wedding where it was only about 10 degrees F outside. My late mother-in-law was born there in a long-gone house where she remembered as a baby sleeping in a room with snow blowing in through the cracks in the siding. There are still old amusement park rides rusting in the woods. I got the chromium for my element collection from an old rusting truck where the chrome trim was practically the only thing left. I remember riding my bike down to the site in 1981, when the mansion caught fire, with baby Piri in the rear bike seat, arriving in time to watch it smolder.

There is now a rutted old dirt road remaining that winds past the Marshall family cemetery and really doesn’t go anywhere. At the end of this road, I painted the scene of some trees overlooking the Potomac.

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Adios aminos

In which Dorn free associates on condiments and cleansers, rock musicals and the psychology of morality.

Coconut Liquid Aminos. How come in all my years I never came across Coconut Liquid Aminos? The fact that I know of it now is merest serendipity. Kathleen herself doesn’t know what whim prompted her to pick up a bottle of “Bragg Coconut Liquid Aminos” at the local deli with our olives and Italian sausage.

The first ingredient in Bragg Aminos (the nice lady on the Bragg customer service line told me it’s pronounced Ah-MEE-noze, named after amino acids), “organic coconut blossom nectar”, is intriguing–I thought only bees turned flower nectar into human food. But the “Coconut Secret” brand of coconut aminos says that theirs is made from coconut tree sap. Is that a different product? Sap and nectar are two completely different plant substances, at least according to the Lehigh Valley (PA) sports page. But from the Coconut Secret website, the process that collects the coconut plant liquid used in aminos seems to have elements of both sap and nectar extraction. So I don’t know.

Coconut Liquid Aminos is brown and slippery with a tangy, fermenty bouquet reminiscent of soy sauce, so I tried it on things one might put soy sauce on, like meat, and salad, and rice. It’s really good! It’s salty, but not as salty as soy sauce, and is sweeter, with light teriyaki notes. Pert, I would say, but not impertinent. And it’s gluten-free!

Paul Bragg. The information about the Bragg Healthy Lifestyle on the label and on their website is as interesting as the flavor. The product seems to be part of a health food dynastic family that stretches back, well, to the dawn of health food dynasties. It says Paul Bragg created the first health food store, introduced pineapple juice and tomato juice to America, and his message of health and fitness was credited with “getting women out of bloomers and into shorts, and men into bathing trunks”.

Jack LaLanne, a fitness guru from the fifties (sort of the Richard Simmons or, I don’t know, Jillian Michaels of his time) credits Paul Bragg with his success. He’s quoted as saying “Bragg saved my life at age 15 when I attended the Bragg Crusade in Oakland, California”.

The message laid out on the bottle and website is compelling, and sometimes a bit weird, being based partially on health theories that went out of vogue a half a century ago or more (like germs and viruses aren’t attacking you when you’re sick, they are scavenging the detritus left in your body after incomplete cleansing). Bragg’s healthy living promised a vital life to the ripe age of 120, a figure taken from Genesis 6:3. Paul Bragg himself died of a heart attack at age 81–but to be fair, my sources suggest that this may have been a complication following a surfing accident a few days before.

Dr Bonner. The blend of sciencey-sounding theory, humanist philosophy, religion and a bit of occult surrounding Bragg’s Coconut Liquid Aminos brought to mind a product I remember well from my youth: Dr Bonner’s “Magic” 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap. The product is still available, and as near as I can tell, the message on this label hasn’t changed in the more than 50 years since I first saw it. The label spares a little space for required information like ingredients and a bar code (that must be new), but most is still devoted to the main message of “Dr Bonner’s Magic All-One-God-Faith”*.  

The “message” comes in the form of a hundred or so small mini-sermons squeezed onto the label, sometimes so abbreviated as to lose all sentence structure–but the spirit of the messages shines brightly through.

My hippy youth. Dr Bonner’s is known as “the soap of campers and hippies everywhere”. I can’t claim to be a hippy, but I certainly knew about them in my formative years–I was 10, and paying attention, during the “summer of love”. Our house had Dr Bonner’s soap on the shelf (in my parents’ defense, we were also avid campers), a Whole Earth Catalog on the coffee table, Foxfire Books on our bookcase, and an LP of the soundtrack to the musical Hair in our record cabinet.

(An “LP” is a non-digital music recording medium shaped rather like an oversized DVD, for those of you old enough to remember DVDs.) I remember some of the lyrics from Hair better than I remember passwords I composed today. One was called “My Conviction”, and I think it stuck as one of the building blocks of my adult philosophy of life:

I wish every mother and father in this theater
Would go home tonight and make a speech to their teenagers
And say kids be free, no guilt
Be whoever you are, do whatever you want to do
Just as long as you don't hurt anybody, right?
 
https://www.streetdirectory.com/lyricadvisor/song/pooeuo/my_conviction/

Do no harm. Interestingly (I sure hope!), I read a fascinating book recently about about “do no harm” as a basis of morality. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt proposed that all human morality includes do no harm as one of its very few standard building blocks, along with (2) be fair, (3) respect authority, (4) be loyal to one’s group, and (5) recognize and respect the sacred.

The book also theorized why liberals and conservatives can’t ever seem to agree: liberals (like me!) make their moral decisions relying heavily on the do no harm and fairness building blocks, and less so on the other blocks. Conservatives, he posited, make heavier use of the other three blocks, in addition to do no harm and fairness. Each side sees the other as not living up to moral standards, but really their standards are built to different specifications.

Science and politics. Jonathan Haidt has a related project I stumbled on: a website called the Heterodox Academy. On this site he posts research results addressing political bias by academic community in the way they treat research results. I think he might be right.

Try this little thought experiment about bias: read the following two sentences, and think about how you feel about the research that Jonathan Haidt is posting on the Heterodox Academy website:

  1. Jonathan Haidt, a politically liberal psychologist, posts research showing that academia is biased against conservative researchers and conservative research findings.
  2. Jonathan Haidt, a politically conservative psychologist, posts research showing that academia is biased against conservative researchers and conservative research findings.

The above sentences differ by only one word, and I don’t know which is true. Knowing nothing about Haidt’s research other than what was in the two sentences, did you feel differently about whether you would trust that research? If so, are you biased?

Someday I’d like to explore how I, and other scientists, ex-scientists, and non-scientists feel about science, alternative science, scientists, and scientism, but this post has dragged on even longer than the last one, so I’ll quit. Thanks!

-Dorn
6/22/19

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Trivia Night

One thing being in ‘The Third Age’ does is give you plenty of opportunity to store up trivia. That’s pretty much what’s up there!  That’s why when my ex-daughter-in-law, Chrissy, asked me to be on her team for trivia night I enthusiastically said ‘yes’. (That, and, I am trying to do new things – and it’s not always easy to figure out what the ‘new things’ are so this was a readymade ‘new thing’ for me.) It turned out to be a lot of fun and our team had just the right amount of thirty-somethings, fifty and sixty-somethings, and ninety-somethings (I brought Pops, too!) to not do too badly. Of course, you always want to WIN – maybe next time!

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Music for the Brain

Side Note: I hope readers were excited to notice that my brother, Dorn, is now sharing the ThirdAgeThoughts blog. Dorn followed me into the world by 13 months but somehow managed to precede me in retirement by five months! Check out his first post on writing, below. I’m hoping he will find it fun to keep contributing whatever he wants to write about!

One thing sixty-somethings seem to talk about when they get together is what they are doing that is good for the brain. Or if they don’t talk about it, they should! I started trying to play my mandolin after learning that music is the best brain activity! I have a beautiful mandolin made by luthier, Wilber Arce, that has mostly been languishing in the case in the years since I’ve had it. But now I am motivated to play it although attaining some level of musical proficiency has always been a kind of a struggle for me. But…I have great hopes that the amount of aptitude of the musician for music is inversely proportional to the amount of benefit the brain derives by trying to master it!

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Well, blog me down!

In which Dorn writes on writing a blog.

Thanks to my big sis Lona for letting me “guest post” on her blog. I also retired recently and am in the process of figuring out who and what I am now that I’m no longer a federal bureaucrat. I’ve never blogged before, so I thought maybe I should start out by writing about why I’m trying blogging.

Letter writing. I’ve taken to writing letters to my grandchildren. When I started it seemed like the most natural thing in the world–some of them have left home for the first time to live on campus, and all of them are far away.

But I very quickly realized that a letter was a very old-fashioned way to communicate. With email, messaging, and a phone in every pocket, people just don’t need to write letters any more. It’s no wonder that mail deliveries since 2000 have plummeted to levels not seen since the 1970s. *

But the other thing I realized was that I liked letter writing precisely because it was old fashioned. I don’t really feel old, but I do, apparently, feel old-fashioned. Many things I did as a kid that I like doing now fall into that category, but even more than that, I like doing things that I considered old-fashioned as a kid–the stuff I saw (or imagined) my grandparents doing. Like letter-writing.

Fountain pen. Kathleen found a box of old fountain pens at the thrift store for a dollar. Intellectually I remembered why fountain pens fell into disuse once ball-points appeared: they needing continual cleaning, they skipped and blotched, and if you used one for long your shirt would fall victim to the dreaded “black spot”, unless you used a pocket protector. (The pocket protector, of course, was the necessary nerd/geek fashion accessory for scientists and engineers in my youth; there’s a webseum of pocket protectors here, if you’re interested.)

But despite the headaches of fountain pens, when they worked as designed, they produced a clean elegant line, and it felt good in the hand to write with one. And using one certainly felt old-fashioned, like the proper way to write a letter. So I cleaned one up, got some ink, and tried using it for my new-found letter writing passion. It was great, until it started skipping and blotching and I couldn’t fix it by cleaning it, so I gave it up and got a Pilot gel pen. Sometimes you have to let your feelings sway your intellect, sometimes not. And at least I was still writing letters longhand.

Cursive handwriting. Long-hand, now that’s something that’s really old-fashioned, just the ticket for me. It’s suitably outdated: I’m told the Common Core academic standards for English language education include age-appropriate standards for mastery of keyboards and digital equipment even in grades 1-3, but they don’t any more include any standards for cursive handwriting.

I remember learning how to do block lettering from my Dad, who did engineering stuff for a living, and who could (and still can) reproduce that blocky engineering font to perfection. (Check out Lona’s info-graphic blogs and you’ll see she learned from him too!). But for letter-writing, nothing beats a good cursive hand, and I think I learned this from my Mom, and from her mom.

I especially remember one particular letter I learned from watching my Gamma Jo write: the “Palmer final t”. This was a variation of the Palmer cursive script which was only allowed when the “t” fell at the end of a word. It looks like this:

As a boy I thought that was just the neatest, so quaint and ancient, just like my gamma, and I tried always to use it whenever I wrote longhand. Though I didn’t always remember to use it, I did it enough that it became a habit that sticks with me still.

The Palmer Method of Penmanship was popular at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century, so was just the thing my grandmother would have learned–she was born almost exactly at the start of the century. I have no idea what method was in vogue when they taught me cursive handwriting, but if Palmer was good enough for grandma, it’s good enough for me. Perfectly old school!

I had a brief moment where I thought maybe even Palmer wasn’t antiquated enough, and took a look at Spencerian penmanship, which according to online was the standard writing style starting around 1850. To me, it looks like it could have been used to write the Constitution, if you write your “s”s like “f”s. But I tried to write like that and it was too much work, so I quit.  

(Turns out I wasn’t the only one. According to www.campaignforcursive.com,

Platt Rogers Spencer, considered the father of American penmanship, first published his Spencerian script in 1848 and taught his model of penmanship throughout the United States. With time, people found the elaborate Spencerian script too slow to write, and more simplified scripts were designed. By the early 1900s, the Palmer and Zaner-Bloser methods of penmanship were the most common.

Blog writing. So I had my activity picked out, I had my medium, my tools, and my method, and I had a built-in audience. And it’s been great! Not all the grandkids are particularly interested in getting a missal from old grandpa, but enough of them are. So that’s working out just fine. But as I think about topics, I find there are things I’d like to write about, that I can’t believe even the most doting grandchild will want to read about in a letter from me.

For example, how did I get to be 65 years old and never know about Coconut Liquid Aminos?? Is it really coconut tree sap, or coconut blossom nectar, or both, or neither? Is it pronounced like the plural of amino, or does it rhyme with vámonos? Is its existence really a secret, as stated on the label of one brand? Does it really make you live to be 120 years old, as claimed on another label? All I know is that it’s tastier than soy sauce (incredible, I know), and it’s inscrutable in vaguely spiritual ways. I would very much like to investigate it, and write about it, but not to my poor grandkids who have their own, better, spiritual mysteries to navigate right now.

So maybe I’ll write about it in a blog.

This came out longer than I planned. Thanks for reading, if you got this far!

-Dorn Carlson
6/19/2019

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On Running

On Running

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of being in the same 5K race as my granddaughter, Lorelai. The race was aptly named “The Tortoise and Hare 5K”. Of course, she trounced me! I tried so hard, but I couldn’t catch her, and she is only seven years old! Later, when my daughter posted separate pics of both of us on social media, I began to see my problem. My run appeared to be kind of a shuffle,  or staggering, toward the finish line, while Lorelai’s feet didn’t even seem to touch the ground! So, I have learned from that experience and now try to pick my feet up more!

I think I was almost 40 when I began running at the instigation of my friend, Bonnie. I remember that first run with Bonnie I kept thinking things like ‘Are we there yet?’, ‘How far are we going, anyway’, and ‘Surely, this is far enough!’. But that was about half of what I do now, which is 5K. And I just run once a week, on the weekend – sticking to that weekend schedule because, hey, now that I am retired it’s one of the few routines I have left, so I seem to be kind of clinging to it. And for me, more is not better, since I got a painful case of plantar fasciitis the one time that I tried to do a 10K.

I’m not running because it’s the funnest thing you can do. My motivation comes from a small battered and stained clipping that I’ve had stuck on my refrigerator for a couple of decades now that reports on the results of a 20 year study of running over the age of 50. That study says those who run cut their risk of premature death in half. It also found that those who run have less cardiovascular disease, fewer cancer deaths, less cognitive decline, and better immunity. Even their joints are in better condition! The article says that running is the single activity with the most bang for the longevity buck. So, there I go. And there is a side benefit in that, not infrequently, during a run, I find you can get into kind of a zen-like state, where it is just you and the surface, and nothing else matters! Except for cars…Don’t zone out and not notice the cars!

Lona

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Learning to Do Nothing

Learning to Do Nothing

So I almost made it through my first week of retirement feeling good about everything but a couple of days ago some unease reared its head. I thought I might be missing social interactions at work so I went to see my friend Linda. Linda showed me her system for getting things done – basically a notebook and a way to separate out long term and daily tasks. That was good but didn’t really solve my problem. Upon closer self-examination, I think my problem is that I haven’t learned to relax and be OK with nothing going on! This is another thing to practice getting good at!

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Following An Algorithm for Visual Harmony

Following an Algorithm for Visual Harmony

It wasn’t too long ago that I read an article by Iwo Zaniewski on social media that purported to explain an algorithm for visual harmony:

∀ei ∈ Sn C(ei, Sn\ei) = Cmax (Sn)

Now the article was long and since social media rather encourages short attention spans I just started skimming it. As an artist, I was interested to read enough to get what I think was the gist of it: For every element in your composition, you want to maximize the contrast between that and the other elements. Maybe this is where my recent interest in painting things with strong shadows came from. Anyway, in this latest painting I am working on, I am again exploring shadows and light. It was an interesting challenge painting the face completely in shadow, then adding the points of light. Two times during cherry blossom season I tried to get out there and paint them in person, but got rained out both times. So I’m working on this in the studio from a photo I took of beautiful granddaughter number two.

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Plein Air Painting

Plein Air Painting at Marshall Hall

Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day so I decided to paint a landscape at Marshall Hall. In Piscataway National Park, Marshall Hall is the site of the ruined colonial house of George Washington’s doctor. Others may remember it at as a one-time amusement park. Anyway, the scene attracted me because of the high contrast shadows under the trees. After a couple of hours this is what I ended up with. i

I wasn’t really satisfied with it because it seems like the values aren’t quite right in the near tree. Also that tree is not as “present” as in needs to be. So I’m not quite happy with the painting but I also had thoughts that just the practice of doing it brings you closer to a future successful painting. I’ll either try to fix it a little or paint over it. It’s all a learning process! While I was painting, I had people stop by and complement it or at least complement me for making the attempt. One lady watched me a while and said her mother used to paint. I saw then that the end product painting of a painting session is not the only way you can please people, that just giving people a chance to see you doing it can make them happy. We need active pursuits – or at least to be able to see others being active. Plein air painting is a great one because it combines being outdoors, looking at attractive scenery and producing something. You just need a small travel easel, some paints (I used six colors here) and brushes, and a surface. If the perfect picture doesn’t show up now – it’s there in the future, waiting for you at another painting session.

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Goodbye to Work

Welcome to my new blog which I decided to start on my first real day of retirement. So I’m not a ‘retiree’, I’m a ‘lifestyle blogger’! I will post thoughts here that will help myself and others navigate this period that is filled with so much incredible potential.

Goodbye to Work

Since I am so new to this status as a non worker, I will include a complex diagram I made a while back to navigate the pitfalls of work. You see there is a breakthrough space at the top that I have achieved via a recent retirement! But even before breakthrough, the diagram points to the importance of looking for positives. Work is like everything – full of contrasts where the dark and light sides compete and it is the individuals’ responsibility to make the most of it! The Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance Scale that shows up in the center of the diagram was a key survival tool for my best friend at the office and myself. If we noticed ourselves going over to the left we worked to push ourselves over to the scale on the right. Survival came down to living this work life we had as a kind of game. As philosopher Alan Watts puts it, life “must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents.” I’m not sure who the natural antagonists will be at this next stage, but I am grateful for the experience gained that will help me move forward no matter what is encountered!