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Here are some things you don't want to see when you check your retirement account, especially if the market went into the toilet that day. 

(Don't cry for me.  I've got a year's supply of tuna fish and a waterproof sleeping bag.)

Dean Phillips: Political Cassandra

The article (www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/us/politics/dean-phillips-biden.html) states that Biden had trouble articulating his own agenda during his 2021 visits to Capitol Hill to push for his domestic program.  From the article:

“It was an unmitigated disaster, and it was the first jarring moment for most of us in the caucus,” Mr. Phillips recalled.

The most upsetting aspect of this for me is that I read columnists in the NY Times who had talked to Biden and claimed that the President was as astute and clear as he'd always been.  Woodrow Wilson's exposure to the public after his stroke was tightly controlled by his wife and his physician.  Were those around Biden doing something similar?

Was Biden OK for 20 minutes before sliding downhill?

When I mentioned this to a right winger he said that the media he consumed had been saying that for years.  My only response was that it was not easy to separate bias from news on his choice of media.

We'll know in a few years.

'Press this button to die'/David Blue

 Who knew?  A Do-It-Yourself suicide machine (https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20240717-first-suicide-pod-use-soon-in-switzerland-campaigners).

It's not yet available, but Switzerland may be the first place you can off yourself for only $20.   By quickly replacing the oxygen with nitrogen in the capsule the user dies of hypoxia in about 5 minutes.

I spent an hour searching in vane looking for a reference to a song with the lyric remembered as a "suicide machine strapped across their chests".  

Thinking it was from David Blue song I ended up reading David Blue's Rolling Stone obit  (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/david-blue-singer-songwriter-mystery-bob-dylan-joni-mitchell-1005073/) with a side trip reading about Judee Sills before finding that what I was misremembering:

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Road" on his “Highway 61 Revisited” album.

One fact in a BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162) mesmerized me: text in the body of the story indicated that the blueprints for the capsule would be available for free. Under the picture of the capsule I saw this:

I can see adapting part of it for my Engineering Drawing class.

I passed along articles about the Sarco Capsule to people as a franchise opportunity.

Venus Outline

A piece by Riley Black bidding farewell to a park in the current issue of Sierra magazine (https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2024-2-summer/eyewitness/arches-national-park-one-last-day-utah-slickrock) has a reference I don't understand.  What is a "Venus outline" as in "If there weren’t so many other hikers at Double O Arch, I would have thrown off my clothes and left a Venus outline in the cool, orange sediment."

I've a bad habit of trying to understand what I read.  Accordingly I searched the web for "venus outline".  This is what was returned:

A free image by Design Circle from freepik.com (www.freepik.com/icon/venus_983300) is what I'll associate with the term.  Did the writer intend to create a similar image to generate a theory about aliens leaving a symbol of  their planet?  

On the other hand, given that the writer is referred to as "she" is "Venus outline" a sly mirrored reference to guys "writing their names in the snow"?  

Another great mystery of life to which I can be blissfully ignorant.

Wokeness

This came from  Quora

Dustin Hertel

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B.A. in Public Policy & Economics, Mount Royal University (Graduated 2021)Jan 8

Why do liberals love wokeness?

I’m going to start with a bit of advice my first Philosophy prof gave us in our intro class. He said, “If you can’t paraphrase somebody else’s position in a way that they would agree with, you don’t understand it, and if you don’t understand it, you can’t debate it.”

I would bet good money that’s the problem you’re having: you don’t really know what one (or either) of these terms means.

If you stop just taking on-board how right wing outlets and pundits represent those words and look at what they actually mean, the answer is pretty obvious.

In short, “woke” means someone is aware of biases and systems in our society that create biases and inequality.

What you call “liberals” (and isn’t actually what that term means) is almost certainly what most people would call “leftists” or “progressives” - a group for whom one of the main shared values is equality/justice.

So now, let’s rephrase your question based on these definitions: “Why would people who care about equality be aware of, and want to fix, systems that create inequality?” …..sounds pretty obvious, right?

"Famous author ripped after trashing the Bible"

The headline comes from an article is on Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/media/famous-author-ripped-after-trashing-bible-work-fiction-fertile-ground-for-hypocrisy), but I got it from MSN (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/famous-author-ripped-after-trashing-the-bible-as-a-work-of-fiction-fertile-ground-for-hypocrisy/ar-AA1mViRw) 

From the article:

"Oates declared, "The bible, as you call it, is a work of fiction; or rather, an anthology of fictions. It is not ‘the’ bible for much of the world's population & those who claim it as their own select those verses that appeal to them while ignoring other verses. Fertile ground for hypocrisy."

Various right wing and religious people weighed in.  My own feeling is simple.  Joyce Carol Oates is renown as a brilliant author.  Who better to recognize a work of fiction, an anthology based on the variety of styles, and the use of selected quotes for misuse?

I rest my case.

Trust Jealousy/Lenny

Aria Yang's article ("When I get jealous of people, I use that envy as a guidepost. Here's how it led me to quit my prestigious Big Law job" https://www.businessinsider.com/big-law-associate-quit-job-jealousy-career-life-goals-2023-12) puts a neat twist on jealousy. In her case it showed her what she really wanted to do.

It made me think have I been jealous of someone? I remember being envious of a childhood friend who knew when he was only eleven that he wanted to be an electrical engineer. It might not qualify as jealousy because I realized all the dedication that went into his success.

He was a good story.  To avoid the draft he got a job in a defense company.  He remarked, "It's amazing:  they're paying me to do this stuff."  He was the living embodiment of the saying, "If you never want to work a day in your life, do something your love."

He'd "steal" parts from work, work on them in his home lab at night, and bring them back to work.

He was kicked out of his college's honors program because he was working at the same time.

Besides the "stealing" the incident which stands out to me was his buying a stereo system which had a hum.  He diagnosed the problem, fixed it with a resister or capacitor, and sent them a bill for his labor. (Memory says it was a McIntosh component.)

Rest in peace Lenny.

"Incompetent dumpster fire"

 The quote in the headline was from a quote from Dawn Beattie, a state committee member in  an article about the Michigan Republican Party.  (https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/politics/michigan-gop-financial-turmoil-infighting-invs/index.html).  

My first thought was, is an "incompetent dumpster fire" better or worse than a ""competent dumpster fire"?  (Youth wants to know.)

It is remarkable that Joel Studebaker, the party’s deputy chief of staff, was quoted as saying “We come to the table with almost no political experience and we don’t view that as a bad thing, but it does increase the learning curve in terms of politics.” 

The article makes it appear that the party is riven with factions accusing each other of conspiracies.

My own take is that it makes it more obvious that politics is reflective of a national mental health crisis.

Giulia Cecchettin's Killing Sparks Italian Reckoning Over Femicide

The title is a BBC headline (www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67514334).

Giulia Cecchettin was stabbed to death by a possessive ex-boyfriend, Filippo Turetta . From the article:

"Ms Cecchettin's sister Elena said she had been concerned about his possessiveness, but never imagined he could hurt her.

She pointed to a patriarchal culture of violence and control over women that normalises men's dangerous behaviour.

"Filippo is often described as a monster, but he's not a monster," Elena told Italian media. "A monster is an exception, a person who's outside society, a person for whom society doesn't need to take responsibility.

"Monsters are healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture," she added."

Once again I don't understand.  Was it a conscious act, rage, or something for which I have no term?  It doesn't make sense.

The Advance Man - Jerry Bruno

I thought I'd check on the critical reception of Jerry Bruno's "The Advance Man" before submitting a recommendation for a book on politics.  I expected to be writing "Although the critical reception was disappointing, I felt the book was an unvarnished insider's look at politics, with a Jeff Greenfield polish.  

The first link that came up was The New Yorker story.  The first thing I saw was the typo or was it a scanning error?  I'll see if I can find the microfiche.

Photopea - A Piece of My World Crumbles

For every semester each course gets a new image in our LMS (learning management system).  One course, the gaming course ("The Art and Science of Computer Games"), took a bit more time because I'd program a list of objects to create a pattern, e.g., a list of fish with each fish rotated slightly from the previous one.  The only concern was getting the image cropped and resized.  

For many years, Photopea.com, a free online graphics editor was a quick reliable way to do image editing.  The default file type is PhotoShop's PSD file.  For the minimal needs of myself and my students Photopea was fine.  By minimal I mean cropping, magic selection, and exporting an image at different qualities to see the relationship between file size and quality.  Everything else was, as far as I was concerned, a bonus for those who had artistic ability.

When I tried to use Photopea yesterday the app froze, weird things happened when I tried to crop the image.  I loaded the image (left below), used the magic wand to select and then delete the background.  The crop started out fine, but froze when I tried to remove the pixels (right below).

||

I thought it might be my computer - it's about 6 years old, but I had the same problem with the laptop which is newer.

In the end I searched for free online graphics editors and eventually found a far from intuitive Total Photo Editor  (freetoolonline.com/photo-editor.html) with which I created the image I needed.

What had been a 10 minute dalliance (the graphics editing being an excuse to listen to music) turned into about 4 hours of frustration.  Sigh.

And speaking of entrails ...

There are economic indicators and then there is this from the last day in July in 2023: an index which tracks the price of luxury watches on the secondary market.  Finance.yahoo.com led to a story by BusinessInsider (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rolex-recession-luxury-watch-market-prices-falling-fed-interest-rates-2023-7) entitled "The great Rolex recession is here: How the Fed crushed the luxury watch boom". 

Some talking heads believe it augurs ill as it indicates the wealthy are so concerned that they aren't spending wildly.  Others contend it is people coming to their senses.  Still others think it is "flippers" who bought watches intending to resell them for more who have learned that not all investments go up.

And I?  Well, given that I didn't even know that WatchCharts existed, I just find it amusing and look forward to erstwhile MBA students undercovering correlations with my favorite economic indicator, the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) (tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic).

New York Times Cheesecake?

A reference to female swim suits in a NY Times article a few weeks ago about a female marketing executive instigated an online search about swim suits.

Since then ads with attractive young women in bathing suits have appeared in my browser on a wide variety of sites.  I certainly didn't expect this to appear in the middle of the page of NY Times on line:

I appreciate the eye candy, but it was, in this instance, just one more thing I had to scroll past.

Cleaning My Desk

This was originally started sometime in late 2022.

In languid preparation for an office move I started sorting the papers on my desk into check later, store, and recycle.  

There was an end-of-year financial statement from 3 years ago - not the sort of thing I'd normally leave around,  a lot of hard copy quizzes (some were pretty clever), and the sort of flotsam I treasure: scrap paper - paper with parts of an essay written by an unknown hand - on which I scribbled something. 

There was part of a treasured verse from James Alley Blues by Rabbit Brown I first heard sung by Willie Watson:

I done seen better days, but I'm putting up with these
I done seen better days, but I’m putting up with these
I would have much a better time, but these girls, now, is so hard to please

His take is more mournful than the original:

I done seen better days but I'm puttin' up with these
I been havin' a much better time with
These girls now I'm so hard to please

On the back of lined paper which had an assignment dated this past January from a student whose name I didn't recognize (she must have dropped the course) I saw this:

As I typed in "fairtale of" into the search text box Google up popped:

 Isn't that wonderful?

Wait!  There's more: "Aaron Schiller - charred house on Martha's Vineyard"   It seems to be named Chilmark House after the adjacent pond( https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5915/5799/e58e/ceff/6b00/005d/newsletter/2016DS52.485.jpg?1494570849).  Looking at it now I can't understand why I made a note of it.

it might have been the next story about Anthony Esteves using the Japanese shou sugi ban technique to burn boards for a house he built in Maine (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/t-magazine/design/anthony-esteves-soot-house.html).  Now I know why this attracted me.  The transparent structure in the background will be "is a classic New England barn — to be finished in soot-paint, of course — which will serve as the family library, home to their collection of over 7,000 books."  
Yo

u had me at 7,000 books.

Napolean / La charge à Eylau

At the beginning of a trailer for the film Napolean with Joaquin Phoenix there's a depiction of a cavalry charge.  Right away I remembered a clip of a cavalry charge from a film starring Gérard Depardieu, but couldn't remember the name of the film

It took an inordinate amount of time, but I went through Depardieu's filmography until I found the wikipedia entry for Le colonel Chabert (1994).  What made the film so memorable was the depiction of the cavalry charge.  At one time I thought the clip could be used in schools to have students imitate the cavalry officers by trying to hold their arms up for the duration of the charge.

That clip from Depardieu's film is on YouTube: "La charge à Eylau" -Le colonel Chabert (1994)

Book Flotsam

 Stuff I got from the web about books:

The best decoration is a room full of books.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Them: You have too many books.
Me: More like not enough shelves
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nothing says "I mean business like using a shopping cart in a bookstore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I tried everything to get to sleep last night.  Well, everything except closing the book and putting it on the night stand.  Let's not get too crazy,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Books don't just go with you.  They take you where you've never been.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Love without Disguise/She's Gone

Posted as a comment to Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson Greatest Hits (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOVJZhOHMVI)  Could not find the reference for  quote by AguiaImperial.  Later I found this was a lyric from Willie Nelson's "She's Gone".

She is gone
But she was here
And her presence is still heavy in the air
Oh what a taste
Of human love
Now she's gone and it don't matter anymore
Passing dreams
In the night
It was more than just a woman and a man
It was love
Without disguise
And now my life will never be the same again.

Skate Parts [sic]

 As a congenital proofreading non-social media person it finally dawned on me that the way to communicate with authors is through their social media accounts, not an email or a comment to an article online.

I spotted a typo in John Blake's article, "Predictions about the decline of Christianity in America may be premature" (https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/08/us/christianity-decline-easter-blake-cec/index.html).  The article stated that church buildings were converted into skate parts instead of skate parks.

There was no place to post comments.  Clicking on Blake's name took the browser to a page showing links to Facebook and Twitter.  So there it rests, a typo.

Maybe I'll ask someone with an account to let him know.  On the other hand, maybe not.

Disney Advertisement / ChatGPT

Billing itself as the place "Where Technology, Imagination and Innovation Collide" it seems that an unintended consequence of the collision was a grammatical displacement.  

A link on the NY Times website lead to Disney Advertising (https://www.disneyadvertising.com/technology-innovation/).  Just a brief scroll down where Disney touted its "strategic approach" to "quality measurement providers" they demonstrated a woeful inability to master common English language advertising idioms, e.g., partnering WITH more than 100 ..." was garbled.

It is unlikely that the AI program ChatGPT would create such an egregious grammatical error.  

Somebody paid good money to setup that web site and play for the graphics. How can people, professionals in their field, make such stupid errors?

And lest someone repeat a Grammar Nazi accusation with overtones of superciliousness, let me add that when I notified Disney Advertising there was a typo in my subject line.  It happens.

Knots Palomar

I found this video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCkOQpjbn8k).  It made me wonder whether I should learn a knot a day.  Is there a benefit?  Perhaps I should just find out an efficient way to tie stuff down on top of the car.

I'm expecting that in a few weeks one of the techs will take a last fond look at crates full of old extension cords, video connectors, and such and ask me if I want them.  I'll be unable to say no.  What then?

Perhaps the Fine Arts department will have a need.  Time to check with them.