Happy Birthday, Truman.

Truman Streckfus Persons, Tuesday, September 30, 1924, New Orleans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_capote

Double Rainbow in Grand Rapids Thursday September 9, 2011

Some pictures and a video taken just after 7pm outside the Meijer corporate offices, Building 985, 2929 Walker Avenue, NW Grand Rapids, MI 49544.

The rainbow was complete from horizon to horizon; I've never seen one quite like it.





Click to enlarge.

Meet George the Cat

I was going through some photos recently while looking for Tom's Famous Breakfast. (Don't know what that is? Well, you'll have to wait.)

George, named after George Dub-ya, is my brother's cat.

He is probably the friendliest, biggest, best-mannered cat I ever met. He's so friendly, you'd think he has some dog in him. (Sorry cats, that was probably species insensitive wording, but you'd do well to emulate George.)

These pictures were taken in Norlina, NC in 2004. I happened to catch George enjoying a sunbeam.

Click to enlarge.

That was a great trip. Here's me and Dad on that trip at the North Carolina State Fair:

CBS Radio Mystery Theater Offers Worst and Best Back to Back

Edgar Allan Poe

I'm slowly working my way through (and slowly savoring) each episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

It just so happens that I listened to one of the worst and one of the best (so far) back to back.

Nearly unbearable: "Conspiracy to Defraud," about an American narcotics cop in France. Maybe an attempt to be "The French Connection," sans grit, Popeye Doyle, and car chases.

http://www.cbsrmt.com/episode-33-conspiracy-to-defraud.html➚

Outstanding: "Deadly Hour." Very Edgar Allan Poe-ish, it is one of the few radio dramas that truly gripped me, had me hanging on almost every word, and gave a subtly gruesome and satisfying conclusion that was perfectly timed; it has many hallmarks of "The Tell-Tale Heart," and in some ways it may actually be better.

http://www.cbsrmt.com/episode-34-the-deadly-hour.html➚

(The person or people behind CBSRMT.com have done an outstanding job, so I'll just link to their summaries and streams; however, I listen to these episodes without any preview and research the people myself, so any overlap is coincidental. Their recordings may be different than the ones at archive.org but I suspect they are mostly the same.)

Something even more interesting: Some of the episodes I'm listening to include 6 minutes or so of news at the beginning: Nixon, Watergate, Patty Hearst, Vietnam - all reported matter-of-factly, without the judgement or perspective that time affords, and since they are not repackaged for a modern audience, they are left totally to the listener to interpret.[1]

A local story got me interested: Two women shot at 33rd and Troost in Kansas City (http://g.co/maps/jbqee): 30-year-old June Oglesby of 2139 East 15th in Kansas City, who had gunshot wounds to the chest and stomach, and Kay Sue Hammond of 5814 Olive, Kansas City, who had gunshot wounds to the pelvis and right leg. Oglesby was reported in critical condition and Hammond was in fair condition. A suspect was in custody but his/her identity not released.

I tried to learn more, but the few minutes I spent with names and places didn't turn up anything. I was surprised that they reported the full names and addresses of the victims, but 40 years later those small details connect us with a past that wouldn't be same without them. With the magic of Google I can walk along 33rd and Troost, which looks very secluded today, and wonder what led up to those events, how long they waited for help, and who arrived and when and what happened after. I'm sure it's all stored on paper in Kansas City's basement, but it will one day be online along with every other historical detail, searchable with a word or keystroke.


[1]
There is nothing worse than listening to someone package the past and present it as a comedic or sardonic look at our shared bad taste. It was difficult to listen to Mo Rocca, for example, expound on the 1970s on VH1's "I love" series; Mo is great on NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" but he or whoever wrote his segments obviously didn't understand the decade well enough to share it with those that weren't there.

It's too easy when looking back to be critical. We make fun of 70's bell bottoms and the teased hair of the 80's because we don't have anything intelligent to say, not because those things deserve criticism. There's a website, which I think is appalling, which features portraits from past decades of mostly unattractive or uncomfortable people in awkward shots - yearbooks, proms, weddings, families, etc. Someone actually brought this up on a projector while we waited for a meeting to start at work (this was a long time ago), and everyone guffawed around the table at the mullets and wide lapels and crooked smiles.

I looked around the table at who was laughing: they had been the cool kids in high school - quick with a joke, popular, athletic, smart (and likeable, nice people today) - all good things to be sure. I looked back at the screen as someone clicked through the pages. Each photo subject had dressed up for those pictures, gotten a new haircut or style. They may have spent a lot of money and time coordinating their clothes and the photographer, and some of them, God bless them, just couldn't please the camera no matter the angle or lighting.

I felt sorry for those folks in the pictures, even if they might have laughed at themselves, because we should not have laughed at them, and in fact, I didn't, and asked that we stop the show, which my coworkers did, through perplexed scowls, as though we were at the theater and I'd said we'd run out of pop corn.

Google Alerts Goes Bonkers

As of this morning, I'm getting strange YouTube results for my Google Alerts, and they cannot possibly be accurate.

For example, I set up alerts for some unique sentences in "Centerfolds for Dummies" so I'd be alerted if someone plagiarized some or all of it. I used "quotes" to be sure I only got alerts on matching strings.

Atomic Theory and Evolution Described 2,000 Years Ago

This was written over 2,000 years ago:

... moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. ... There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.

All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully, endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited, die off quickly. But nothing - from our own species, to the planet on which we live, to the sun that lights our day - lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal ...

The author was Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius.

I can't imagine that terms like "natural selection" and "intelligent design" are there by coincidence; a translator with a modern sentiment no doubt by design or benign accident reflected modern thought. (I suspect it was intentional.[1])

Listen to Robert Krulwich report on "Lucretius, Man Of Modern Mystery" (NPR doesn't credit the translator):

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/09/19/140533195/lucretius-man-of-modern-mystery


[1]
I heard long ago that "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" was not John F Kennedy's invention, but actually Cicero's. I suspect we might reverse that order today. It's a different world than the one Kennedy observed. Certainly the opportunities to serve are many and people are needed, but the enormous shift in wealth, job security, declining health and affordable health care options, discarded children and ignored schools, etc, have me looking to my government to solve some of this mess (as well do what good citizens can do), especially when 100th of 1% control the majority of wealth (recent statistic I heard on WPRR http://www.publicrealityradio.org/) and hence the most immediate influence to affect change.

NBC New interview with Warren Buffett in which he says his tax rate is lower than his secretary's:

Memories: Dad and the Orange Fish-Shaped Fishing Pole

Many years ago, before there were shopping malls, the big stores were downtown. Woolworth's and The Boston Store and Halle's and more that few remember, and others you wouldn't know because they never left Erie, unless you're from Erie, and even then you may not remember. I went in Woolworth's a lot while waiting for my bus home from school. There wasn't much there by that time, it was essentially a large Rite Aid as I recall, but it still had a soda fountain.

On the west side of upper Sate Street[1] as you descend to the dock (now called Dobbins Landing[2]), in the window of small hardware or sporting goods store, were a couple plastic orange fishing poles. The handles were shaped like fish and the poles were very short, perhaps 18 inches. During a very rare family outing together downtown, brother Tom and I spied them and immediately asked for them. We were very little, perhaps only 5 or 6 years old.

Mom and Dad didn't buy them for us right then, but Dad did go back later and got them for us. Now, in those days, Mom and Dad didn't have two pennies to rub together that weren't accounted for. They had no vices, we ate frugally, and they both worked like dogs to support us. But they found some money for those fishing poles.

Not long after, my Grandpa Grandy (LaVerne E Grandy, Mom's dad) offered to take me and Tom fishing. I immediately went and got my new plastic fish-shaped fishing pole and proudly said I was ready. Grandpa Grandy said that was very nice, but I'd probably want to use a bigger pole, and he had one for me.

I never did fish with that plastic fish-shaped fishing pole. Mom and Dad may have wondered why they spent their money on them, but that money bought more than fishing poles, it bought one of my most vivid memories of earliest childhood, and also an adult's humbling realization that two people spent what little they had on a couple toys and a few smiles.

It wasn't about using them. It was about receiving them.

This is my dad in 1948, 9 years old. He made this for his mother for Christmas. It's a 1949 calendar.

Click to enlarge.

This is Dobbins Landing, formerly known as the Erie Dock, in Erie, PA.

Click to enlarge.

This is view down (or up) State Street that I took from the top of the tower at Dobbins Landing.

Click to enlarge.

[1]
I was always confused about what "upper State" and "lower State" meant. I still am. I think "upper" means toward Presque Isle Bay, as street numbers get smaller, and lower means away from the bay, as street numbers get higher. However, State Street slopes down to the bay, so "lower" in my mind has always meant "toward the bottom," ie, as you approach the bay. I'll assume that I have always been wrong about this and that "upper" means toward the bay, north, small street numbers, etc. However, if I'm walking "up" State Street, I'm definitely walking uphill, away from the bay, I think.

It also took years for me to understand what "mild" meant in regard to the weather. It was always used to describe a cold day, so as a child I associated it with cold, but in reality, it meant that the cold day was unusually warm for the time of year. So even though my little brain was thinking "this is a cold day," the adults were saying "this isn't as cold as you might expect for this time of year." It was mild.

[2]
The dock at that time, and still to some extent today, was popular with fishermen. As nice as Dobbins Landing is, it was built after I left Erie for college, so to me it will always just be "the dock," a place my parents and grandparents took us, the berth of Little Toot and a couple tug boats, a concrete runway dotted with hunched fishermen who were probably out of work and catching their dinner, and a little shop under the stairs that sold hot dogs and stuffed animals and cotton candy. It turned into a teen hangout eventually that had to be patrolled by police on weekends, but by that time I was a teenager and the dock was no longer held the same fascination. Eventually it fell out of fashion with teenagers and was returned to parents and fishermen.

Bad (Weather) Chart

This is the weather chart for Thursday September 9 from the website of a local radio station, WOOD 1300 http://www.woodradio.com/pages/grr_weather_5day.html :

Click for Larger

• 60% AM what? Rain? There are no rain drops. This time of year with overnight lows in the 30's, it could just as well mean snow.
• What do the clouds mean? They are obviously variations on a  theme, stretched or smooshed by Photoshop to imply more or less cloud cover, but why the extensive variation? I have no idea what two clouds mean Friday and one cloud slightly thicker means for Saturday. Does Sunday start partly cloudy and get cloudier? Is Monday cloudy all day? How is Tuesday different from either of them?
• And finally, why do two forecasts from the same weather team look so different and contain different data? Storm Team 8 is also the team behind WOOD TV8. Their chart for the same day is very different http://www.woodtv.com/subindex/weather :

Click for Larger

I do like most of the personalities behind Storm Team 8, especially Bill Steffen. And I wish I got paid to be right half the time. I'd even share half my salary with someone who is right the other half of the time.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.[1]

[1]

Thank you, Mr Veith, my 5th Grade math teacher at Vernondale Elementary School at 1432 Wilkins Road, Erie, PA, who was still alive but frail a number of years ago when I encountered him at the annual Millcreek 4th of July Parade. I'm sure he is gone now. He didn't remember me. 

He had this posted on his wall, along with the clock aphorism, a couple generations before such usage would be common in tween vocabulary:

A Beautiful and Arbitrary Grand Fabrication

I'm listening to Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain[1] and he just concluded a chapter with the death of Candice Newmaker that resulted from the practice of quack "attachment therapy."[2]

He says the "therapists" were not evil, but victims of paternicity - behavioral responses to patterns that are wired into our brains - eg, recognizing faces by only 4 data points (2 eyes, a nose and mouth), and so we get the Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars.

I'm not so sure that explains Candice Newmaker's death, I want something deeper, darker, satisfyingly punishable. But if it DOES explain it, it says much more to me. It says that some of us sometimes are mere victims of a poorly wired brain, or a combination of poor wiring and an unfortunate assortment of events and people, or we are simply receptive victims influenced by such people, with no more moral accountability than a shorted circuit.

And if that is true, there is no more reason we should mourn the death of Candice Newmaker than we should the mosquito I stepped on this morning, and that is nearly unthinkable unless you are the Buddha.[3]

There is likely a middle path in which some of us are accountable for our actions and some of us are not (or not as much), having been denied (by nature or nurture) the basic tools to critically evaluate ideas and people and events and ourselves.

If all of us are accountable, there is no need for mercy, bell curves, forgiveness, second chances, etc.

If none of us are accountable, everything we are and react to is a grand fabrication, beautiful and arbitrary.


[1]
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies---How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315963811&sr=8-1

[2]
Attachment Therapy on Trial: The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker
http://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Therapy-Trial-Newmaker-Psychology/dp/0275976750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315963872&sr=1-1

[3]
I am the first to insist that you can't dismiss something just because it is too terrible to imagine, but the death of a child at the hands of ignorant monsters crosses any boundary behind which I might have some sympathy and mercy. Buddha, BTW, if I recall correctly, was so moved by the destruction of a termite hill that he wept; I don't know much about Buddhism, I'm going by memory of something I saw on PBS.

How Should We Then Live?

I just finished listening to an interview with noted Christian-turned-atheist Dan Barker who mentioned Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis Schaeffer, who's made some interesting decisions about faith. I haven't read Frank's books, but I watched his father's film series "How Should We Then Live?" as a teenager, both at Bethel Baptist Church on 736 E 26th Street in Erie, PA, and again at Bethel Christian School in that church (before it moved to the other side of town on West 38th Street), so I saw many segments twice.[1]

Francis Schaeffer was a colorful and soft-spoken person with a wealth of knowledge and insightful opinion on the decline of the West. I can't say I share his view, but it's intriguing. (Going by memory, but it often boiled down to "order is better than disorder in human expression and disorder heralds decline," hence Romanticism, rock-n-roll, expressionism, etc, are symptoms of decline and we will fall like Rome if we continue on this path[2]).

I love the 18th Century neo-classic wits (Pope, Dryden, et al) and a there was a similar criticism of the subsequent ages that saw departure from rigorous meter and elevated topics. I love it all, actually. I'm edified by Alexander Pope and transported by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and though I never experimented with recreational drugs (whether you believe that or not), I'm attracted to the image of the secluded poet discovering words and images under the influence; I'm a child of the 60s, I'm wired to be sympathetic to this picture.

The difference between the 18th Century and the 19th is very similar to the much more rapid back-and-forth in popular culture we see today, which bounces between order/familiarity and disorder/irreverence. The Cosby Show ushered in Married with Children, Leave it to Beaver led to The Munsters, the feel-good bubbly 30s and 40s gave us the Beat Generation, the hippies moved aside for the punks, etc. In other words, each "generation" rebels against the previous and creates something different with the same tools (which often includes anger).

I put "generation" in quotes because those changes could once be measured in hundreds of years, then dozens, then a few. It used to take a couple lifetimes to create towering figures like Milton or Pope that could define an era. We now tend to divide things by decades for the sake of convenience, but of course humanity changes at its own speed and pays no attention to the calendar. The dizzying ping-pong effect can be as short as a year.


Listen to the Interview
Dan Barker - U-Turn on the Road to Damascus
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/dan_barker_u-turn_on_the_road_to_damascus/

Books by Frank Schaeffer
http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Schaeffer/e/B000AP9HNQ/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1315875849&sr=8-1

How Should We Then Live?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+should+we+then+live%3F&aq=f


[1]
I have very fond memories of watching Flame in the Wind (1971), a film out of Bob Jones University, shown at Bethel Baptist Church during Watch Night Service (which, to the uninitiated, is New Years Eve). We took friends with us, Rich Nickel and Dave Nickel, with whom I've lost contact now. The film was very powerful for my 9-year-old mind; some images stay with me still, including Mr Henry yelling at all us kids for leaving a trail of popcorn from the kitchen downstairs back up to the sanctuary where the film was shown. 9-year-olds aren't very concerned with those things, and we were treating the sanctuary like a theater, since most of us weren't allowed to go to movies and going to a movie at church where you get to see guys burned at the stake was like a birthday and Christmas all wrapped up in one. All that was missing was an alien and some pretty girls in shiny clinging costumes. By the way, the building at 736 E 26th Street was in fact designed to be converted to a theater in the event the owners or buyers ever wanted to do that. My Grandpa Cairns told me that. The sloping floor and vast interior would seem to confirm this.

Flame in the Wind
http://www.baptisttop1000.com/Video-Flame_in_the_Wind.html

[2]
All things come to an end, including countries. I recall reading in college accounts from the Roman countryside written only a few years before Rome was sacked. They wrote of their expansive beautiful vineyards and idyllic lives, completely oblivious to the changes that were coming.

There's Enough Food, Shelter, and Sex to Go Around for All of Us

Why do we need to compete over everything? We fight over grades, sports, business, land, the opposite sex (and the same sex), parking spaces, homes, status, and so forth etc ad nauseam.

There is certainly enough room for everyone that can care for a home to own one, whether they can afford it or not, and among 300 million Americans or so there are certainly enough compatible couples for everyone to find a faithful partner, and there are just as many people happy being sergeants as there are happy being generals, and there's enough money and goods for all of us to be wealthier than any of us ought to be.

Unlike simply finding enough food, shelter, and sex to keep our reptilian brains happy, the ego is never satisfied, and has legitimized itself with intellectual arguments that deny other egos' basic needs like healthcare, education, sanitary living conditions, food, etc based on one thing and all the other things that revolve around that one thing: Money.

Example: "If you don't work, you don't deserve to get what others get by working." Certainly a good value to have, but if I'm not equipped to work, or don't have the education, or am too old, too young, or infirm, or was never wired with the right set of values that combine to create a good worker, what then? And who decides what sort of assistance I get, if any? The privileged and wealthy make those decisions, and they've convinced most everyone else that this is right, indeed, that we are fortunate they have this role, for if they didn't, we'd all be much worse off than we are now, and since we have nothing to compare "now" with, we accept it.

I do believe most of the intellectual constipation that passes for socio-economic insight on FOX and similar outlets is so ingrained that most of the pundits and listeners are oblivious to any logic or counterexample that would, if seriously considered, change their minds.

And then my gray matter takes over, the thinking layer that has thickened and convoluted over years of trial and error and speculative accretion, and I wonder if there is any Entity that directs any of this and gives it meaning, or is it just an unfortunate byproduct of Evolution that those who rely more on their reptilian brains often manage the fates of those that more often use their gray matter.

The stories behind the blog:
(A few that have haunted me lately)

Christian Choate
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Casey Anthony
Matthew Shepard

Pity, mercy, tolerance, fairness, etc are all gray matter qualities.

ETON Satellite 750 AM/FM-Stereo/Shortwave/Aircraft Band Radio with SSB (Single Side Band) reduced at Amazon

Now $260.17. I've been wanting this for a long time, but still too steep, and I'm troubled by the reviews of it being light and cheap feeling, though they've made improvements.

Changes Coming to Clarence

Stay tuned.

Tweason[1]: IHeartRadio

I am constantly amazed that adoption of new ideas depends so heavily on the limited knowledge of the adopters. (Not laziness or dumbness or anything like that, more just lack of time and knowledge, but those offering the services know that).

Case in point: IHeartRadio

Anyone who spends even a little time playing with Internet tuners has found a handful of places that provide thousands of radio channels so they can listen to dozens in the niches they enjoy (Live356 , tunein, Pandora, etc).

Yet IHeartRadio bills proudly proclaims they offer over 750 channels, and in their very hip hop best that they are better than Pandora. 

Well, they are not Pandora, they are something different. And who are they talking to? Conventional radio listeners who regard radio as a dead technology (even though it powers their wireless devices), and satellite radio listeners, who start salivating at the thought of paying for ear candy.

I think IHeartRadio is a great idea. It (and services like it) may just save "radio" as a concept in which a faraway stranger with a pleasant voice and interesting idea or song or story gets my attention for a while and advertisers tag along for the ride knowing I'm actively listening.

I will miss the old radio towers and radio antennas, but they will slowly be replaced with cell towers and wireless devices; that will take time, but it will happen; I think conventional radio will be here for a while, certainly for a couple generations, but by the time my grandchildren are contemplating their mortality as much as I do, that world may belong to the hobbyists, and most conventional radio will be local, short range, and most of it consumed online, like microbrews at specialty pubs. (How many people are getting only over-the-air digital TV? Some. Enough to support a business model? Probably not, or not very many.)

So the idea behind my tweet was that millions will be satisfied with 750 station in the palm of their hand because they've been told that's all they need and it's better than the next most popular app. Just like back in the day when millions turned on their computers and sat in front of AOL and said "Hey, I'm on the Internet," when in reality they never left the portal.

There are many that simply don't have the time or desire to sort through 1000's of stations to find what they want, and IHeartRadio suits them just fine. The time/money/entertainment balance is a fine one that can be tilted by many factors. Offering one flavor of ice cream at Burger King makes enough people happy to sell enough ice cream to make it worth the effort. Some want three choices and go to Mcdonald's, and get chills when they offer minty shakes at St Patrick's and egg nog shakes at Christmas. 

Like an infant galaxy, the Internet is slowly coalescing into clumps of recognizable structures; only instead of solar systems and nebulae, they are business models where content is being collected and collated and repackaged, some free, some for a price, for people who do not want to do the collecting and collating. From the farm to the grocery store, I guess. Once you're detached from the earth and no longer getting your hands dirty with mulch and fertilizer, it's difficult to go back.

[1]

The reason behind the tweet.

The Day the Sun Stood Still in Grand Rapids

I know a man who recently found out he didn't have cancer. Of course, that didn't make the months of doctor visits any easier. He fretted as much as someone who did have cancer, worried just as much about his finances, his health insurance and life insurance, his parents being forced to watch him die as they themselves faced health challenges, a dependent and loving wife, and children so little they wouldn't even have memories of a father.[1]

Many years ago the Grand Rapids Press movie reviewer John Douglas wrote an article while sitting in local restaurant about watching a glowing red sun rise over the city skyline; the restaurant had a lot of glass and was near downtown, may have been the Big Boy near the YMCA on Pearl, which I like myself, but I don't recall. After a while he realized that the sun wasn't moving, and hung just as bright, just as low, as it had a few minutes earlier. As the sky lightened, he realized he'd been looking at the Grand Rapids Weatherball, which used to be atop the Michigan National Bank building.

http://www.wzzm13.com/weather/article/118804/14/The-Story-of-the-13-Weatherball➚

His point was that it didn't matter at that moment that he was looking at the Weatherball and not the sun. His emotional connection was just as real, perhaps even more real, especially for a movie reviewer, since the Weatherball probably captured something quintessentially "sunrisy" at that moment, just as the unnaturally vivid colors of an old Technicolor film lends a suspensive[2] quality that real life simply doesn't have.

I groaned when I read that, as did some coworkers at the time, since we didn't have much regard for his reviews[3], but he was right. His opinions of movies affected my ability to appreciate his opinion of the sunrise, and I interpreted things much more starkly in those days.

[1]
He said the worst part was the thought that his children would not remember him, and that he would not be here to protect them.

[2]
I'm going to alter usage a bit here; I mean this in the sense that Technicolor lifts the suspension of disbelief a little higher. There is only one processing plant that still turns out Technicolor prints, last time I looked; it was in China, and it may not do it anymore. Any color enhancement of course can do this; films about the Old West are often filtered to enhance browns and yellows.

[3]
Mr Douglas was very eloquent on the radio and a joy to listen to; in fact, it was difficult to imagine that the man behind the voice was the same man behind the newspaper column. I don't think he's still on the air, but he used to do movie reviews on a local radio station. His website hasn't been updated for a while, but he is still working with movies.

http://www.johnadouglas.com/➚