Wikiwackiness

Some time ago, after exposure to cats for the first time in all my born days, I'd been wondering what the purpose of purring† is, if there's some evolutionary advantage in it. I finally remembered to look it up and found this: Purring also "was a popular English folk sport practiced from at least the 16th century and likely before" whereby two opponents fought by kicking each other in the shins.

The British, man.

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† Likely a sign that the cat is contented and is no threat. (For whatever it's worth, kneading, a similarly cat-distinct behavior I was baffled by, may serve an overlapping purpose: to show contentment – but to also prepare a surface for comfort, a partly retained but not-exactly-still-needed action, a "remnant instinct".)

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What's good for the market, is good for America™

After John Kerry's defeat for President in 2004, Terry McAullife, then head of the DNC, gave a bland, platitudinous interview saying something on the order of Bush will need to work with Congress and we have to work together, etc., etc. I complained to my father that this statement may have been politically expedient for John Kerry to give, it didn't speak to the moment at all – that McAuliffe seemed not to get it. The failed candidate can say such things, but the head of the opposing party cannot – someone has to provide a clear-eyed and frank assessment of what had been lost and what was at risk.

My father replied:

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"Sure they already have an agenda. Republicans have been planning for this since FDR. Remember that when Roosevelt came into office he had to break the stranglehold the rich had on the country to keep people from starving to death. Everything he managed to do with the New Deal will be reversed or relaxed. What we're going to see is the Anti-New Deal. […] There are two basic views of governance. They can overlap in places but their extremes are perfectly opposed. One is the view that governments have a responsibility to soothe the brutality of nature; that the reason we form governments is to provide a safety net and for that we agree to pay taxes. The other view is that governments should be limited in their abilities and the market should be left to function on its own. The second extreme - pure monetary greed - will now be allowed to function freely. Workers' ability to unionize will be limited; punitive damages will be arbitrarily limited (as has already happened in this activist Court, regarding, for example, a person's ability to sue over first-time excessive discrimination [long example excised]); tax-laws for companies, which are already anemic, will be further relaxed; and everything will be commercialized, including and especially Social Security - which will disappear as we know it. You're right McAuliffe doesn't get it; Bush's handlers now have no limits. And they all agree so there's no hope of repeating Clinton's first two years. Bush is better than Coolidge for the Rightist elite - well, that's redundant - for the elite in this country. Coolidge at least had an understanding of economics. Bush knows nothing, so he'll do and say whatever Cheney et al. want. He's too stupid to think things over first."

I added, elsewhere: Call it the Old Deal, watch the country slip back into our ugly, plutocratic past, and remember: What's good for the market, is good for America™.

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This was taken, give or take verbatim, from a conversation with my dad, which is a dumb skill I have: reciting lengthy quotes from memory. (Someone I kinda online-knew seemed to not believe me, that this was spoken and then written from memory, which is the primary reason I remembered this at all, once I'd posted it. Still don't really understand that reaction, but perhaps she was impressed? She was some type/form/fashion of a journalist – I think. Anyway, odd.)

A key factor neither my father nor I knew at the time, but has become startlingly and increasingly evident with Republican administrations since (W's second, the election of which preceded this conversation, and Trump's in the meantime) is their level of incompentence has, to a non-zero-degree, scuppered the full-enactment of these plans. W, almost immediately after Election Day, failed to enact his plans to privatize Social Security, and his second administration never accomplished much else afterward.

And yet we can see the bones of my father's argument, built and standing, evident in today's USA. They have a long way to go, the Republicans – and have since re-focused their agenda on dismantling American democracy itself to move it all along faster – but what he predicted, while not entirely fulfilled, is evident, about 20 years later, a steamy, festering pile of restrictive and retrograde shit the rest of us have to dig our way out of.

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A thing I'd forgotten

I know I knew this because I wrote about it. But I'd since forgotten it completely. From Keith Olbermann, in a long-ago deleted post on MSNBC's website:

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One further historical curiosity missed by The Record [perhaps defunct] and others researching the Red/Blue phenomenon. Before World War II, when there were only about five national radio networks, NBC owned not just one, but two of them. They were each identified as NBC, with the only differentiation being that the one originally owned by RCA was called the NBC Blue Network, and the one purchased by RCA from AT&T was called the NBC Red Network. The government later forced RCA to sell one of the networks (Blue) to the man behind Life Savers candy – he re-named it ABC in 1946.

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A long entry

Been reading an old blog (hence the uptick in posts: things reposted) and it's almost totally embarrassing. The (like-me-dammit) tone is off-putting and the jokes aim but miss. The below is my longest post (to the point at which I've paused reading, chronologically) and... it's not that bad. It's clumbsy and needs editing, sharpening, but the points I was trying to make I made well enough. (This may be a case of expectations: when I started reading it, I expected to be fully embarrassed by the end, but I mostly made it thru unscathed, which surprised.)

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Edith Hamilton wrote that every generation that has ever lived has claimed things were worse than they have ever been. While it's true that certain things are worse than they've been in recent years, lots of things have improved and continue to improve. The rich and corporations have a greater say in the direction and greater pull with the leadership of this country than does the typical voter (or bloc of voters even), but it hardly compares with the 1890s. We're wantonly making wars all over the world, but it's hardly the first time we've done that - look for example to post-Tonkin Vietnam. Minorities and women still have a long way to go to reach equality in this country, but look at how bad things have been. Hell, gay people can get married in Canada! [I'd full-on forgotten Canada was out in front on this, but of course they were. Sorry Canadians.] Things are getting, slowly to be sure, better.
I think America's greatest (endemic) problem is that we're so strongly capitalist. There's lots to admire about capitalism, but it does lead to the choices of the masses dictating everything. And dictating it into a kind of pure-form Darwinism: What sells rules; what struggles dies. This affects everything from movie stars to popular music to plastic surgery to home styles to clothing to news stories: That which the masses favor becomes the sole option (and the cheaper it is to produce - think reality TV - the better it is for those who are uninventive enough to pander shamelessly).
There are still true artists making true art – and probably to the same degree as before – but unless they're popular at the start, they're likely to remain cult hits to the finish. Mix Oscar Wilde's comment that The people will forgive anything but genius, and Emerson's Every hero becomes a bore at last, with capitalism's inherent distaste of anything erudite or esoteric and you've got a great chance for special people/products getting marginalized; and the outlook being less than brilliant for everyone who wants something transcendent – or at least novel. There are exceptions of course, but in this way, I will concede that things don't seem to be improving. (But is this new? How often has a truly great anything been popular? Remember: Van Gogh never sold a painting; Beethoven was ridiculed as a crazy old man; Kafka died unknown; Richard Strauss was a Nazi.
Sorry - it sounded better with four examples.)
All this is true, but it is also true that time passes: the leadership will change, the current crap fads will fade, Pontiac will one day stop producing the Aztek. Things will improve.
Remember also that what gets reported is always the result of some agenda. Either an editor wants to see an article on a subject that interests him, or a company wants to push a new pop singer they've signed. Nothing makes news without someone first deciding it should. And in this way (at least), the media distort what is really going on. I listened to a radio show tonite where a lady from India spoke of the growing (Indian) opposition toward most things related to globalization and the abusive World Bank/WTO. Then she commented about how little of this growing opposition is making news in India. I assume that's the way it is in most nations of the world now. The people aren't bad, when you get right down to it, but their governments and forms of big-business media aren't representative of their better sides. So things continue to look bad – even increasingly bad – even when they might be improving. (But again, is this new? Think Hearst's papers pushing his agenda, and those of his friends.)
Or at least this is what I must tell myself so that I can get from day to day.
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20 years later, I'd write this entirely better (wasn't then, still not, a writer), but my view hasn't changed a whole lot, and I'm not ashamed of the, as we say now, take. For whatever that's worth.

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Regarding regret

From a former coworker of my father's, a couple of decades ago:

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I thought of you today and how you would laugh at the funny things my daughter said so I have to tell you one that happened today.

She is in summer camp and today they are performing in a little play. She's been telling us the last week that she doesn't want to be in this play because she feels silly but we still feel she needs to be there with the rest of her class. Today she put up a real fit and didn't want to go to camp because of the play but Tom [her father] took her there anyway and this is what she said when she arrived "I am going to regret this the rest of my life, and I don't even know what regret means".

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Art? Fair.

20 years and 6 months ago today, I wrote this:

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There's a University-sponsored fair this weekend in town [In the years since, it was killed by Covid], and my aunt asked if I'd like to join her and her kids in a sidewalk-chalk contest, for 4$. I said sure, thinking it might be fun. So this morning we all go down, get our boxes of pastel chalk, and our designated square, and we go to work on our pictures. I had no idea what I's going to draw, so I started with colored squares in what turned out to be the middle of my... well, I hesitate to call it art. Mine looked so bad after the first few squares, that I wrote "First, I'm sorry." above it, so people wouldn't be too harsh in the "Ohmigod - and [sic] adult did this" vein.

A lady just called me and said I won first prize. FUCKING SHIT! FIRST PRIZE! I've never won anything before! I'm freaking out!

I get a 75$ savings bond, apparently. [It's a 30-year bond that I still have; just nine more years!]

This is cracking me up.

The drawing - which looks extra shit in this picture because of a tree which blocked lots of sunlight, and created that dark pattern overlay - is really vibrant, and that isn't clear in this image. But there it is. [If I can locate the picture, I'll link it.]

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I may be in tomorrow's local paper! Or, anyway, a photo of my chalk-art may. [I have no memory of this part. Maybe it/my name was in the paper, but I sure wasn't.]

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This cracked up my father and he would occasionally bring it up. He, for whatever it's worth, liked the drawing. I... did not.

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Surprising Update

Related to my McGovern and McCarthy post below:

Looking thru a folder of old and random shit, I found a Word.doc I made for my dad (he understood Word.docs and had folders filled with them; some with similarly labled photos – we like what we like) of photos taken of each of the speakers on these nights: George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, mentioned above, and former Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR), unmentioned above, who hosted both men (and perhaps others in the series). I've screengrabbed and posted it as a picture here.

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Interesting distortions

This morning, I rewatched “When We Were Kings”. I think I've seen it three times and it's still terrific. But for the first time, I decided to see if I could watch the actual fight afterward: Ali vs Foreman, in The Rumble in the Jungle, in Zaïre, in 1974.

In the movie, they (especially, Norman Mailer and George Plimpton) romanticize the rope-a-dope – Ali's strategy of tiring out Foreman by leaning on the ropes to get away from his punches, which Ali definitely did a lot of.

But watching the actual fight was kinda wild, because I think Ali wins every round. He spent most of the earlier rounds absorbing Foreman’s body shots and slipping nearly all of his head shots. Then, whenever Ali had openings, he absolutely punished Foreman with his extremely quick combinations, almost all to the face/head.

Maybe Foreman won a round or two, but those were surely close. Regardless, it was an incredible fight, definitely worth all the hype at the time, but not so accurately represented in the documentary. I'm glad I watched it.

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I’ll have more comments about 1974 sporting events coming soon….

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2023.Cycling.Distance

2023 wasn't my year. Early on, I was busy on all the nice days and free on all the shitty/cold/windy days. Then, I dunno, life kept getting in the way. Then, a trip home to the States, etc., etc. It wasn't the best of years for me (but it aslo wasn't that bad).

I really started to ride in mid-August and September and I managed to get up to 1239.36km for the year. I hoped, blandly, to make it to a thousand and I did manage to get beyond that.

I will not repeat this in 2024. My goal is 4000km, a distance I have not yet reached. And I should be able to get there, barring catastrophe.

We'll see.

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Weird Playlist

Here's a weird thing I started 20 years ago and never got back to. I'ma built this in Music and add to it when I think of vaguely-related/-similar songs.

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In Old Mexico - Tom Lehrer
Lonely Apache - Los Straitjackets
Louie Louie - Sandpipers
Guantanamera - Sandpipers
Llorando (Crying) - Mulholland Drive Soundtrack
Desconocido Soy - David Byrne / NRU
Manifold de Amour - Latin Playboys
Hotel California - Gypsy Kings
Outta Gear - Los Straitjackets
Spanish Bombs - The Clash

Possible additions:
And I Love Her - Sandpipers
1970s Chiquita Banana commercial....

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¯\(ツ)/¯

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Odd what you forget to remember

I didn't recall this little moment until I read this just now, a memory from a far-off time (mid-July of 2003) in a far-off place (Corvallis, OR, USA).

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My father and I gathered up the telescope-stuff, tossed it in the Xterra, and took off to find a dark, light-pollutionless hillside from which to watch the Moon occult Mars, only to get out there and discover pretty quickly that the angles were wrong and the Moon was most likely going to pass under Mars - which it did, by a considerable number of degrees.

So we repacked everything and came home.

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Nobody said we were geniuses.

Actually, joke aside, this would not have been terribly difficult to have figured out at the time, but, with smartphones and apps, it would be an absolute breeze to figure out now.

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I totally paused!

There are dates I wish I knew; this was one of them. Turns out this happened June 17, 2003:

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First Warning!

I've gotten 4 or 5 (heretofore, speeding) tickets – one in Oregon, the rest in Texas – but tonite marks the first time I've ever been pulled over and gotten off with a warning. The ticket would have been for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign - even tho it was 2:10 in the morning and there was no one else around. Aside from the nearby cop....

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The cop was nice enough - he let me go after watching me look for the registration for a few minutes, saying only that if you drive a car you should know where everything is. That is, of course, absolutely correct. But I still don't know what the hell the registration looks like. Last time I was pulled over, dude said he didn't need to see it, and I'm pretty sure I never have. I never needed a copy when I got pulled over in Texas (theirs might be a sticker that's adhered to one's car's windshield).

Whatever. I didn't get a ticket. I'm jazzed. And tired as hell.

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I should add that at one point the cop asked how my day was going "otherwise". I laughed at this. This may have been part of the reason he let me go: maybe may have found my laugh disarming, or he may have appreciated my enjoyment of his subtle, late-night humor. I dunno which.

Anyway, I drove the rest of the way home like an old lady: Slowly and with my turn signal on.

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I'm the only one in this left alive

I got my father saying peeps (short for people, if you're fucking 90). There's something completely hilarious about hearing a nearly-57-year-old white guy stick peeps into his conversations. He was talking to his mother earlier today, and he said (of whom I know not), "Well, he is good peeps."

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Also earlier today (yesterday, technically [June 15, 2003]), I was browsing a websiteful of obscure words. He and I are both word fans (lexiphiles), so as I was browsing I was copying choice words into a Word document for his entertainment.

When I finished, I handed my father the pageful of nifty words and he enjoyed them, commenting occasionally. Then he said, "I'll use these. I just hope the definitions are right. If the definitions are wrong, these words are lexifuckupimous."

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2023.Random.Phrases

This is the best thing I keep track of, if not the best thing I do altogether:

Here are 2023's bits of random phrases, some from me, most not, that struck me interesting for whatever reason; all were seen/heard in 2023.

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Fuckable foot
Fuck off, he hinted
Galvanized us in the watching
Either failed immediately or failed eventually
Cream & Bastards Rise
Disconcert the shooter
Diplomatic evasion
Attitude of attentive repose
Your sorrowing friends
Heeled absolutely cleanly
Capering women and monkey-faced men
Useless in retail
Bubbling cauldron of creativity
Layout judgment
Solid spine of decency
An Administration of the vengeful
Culture catch on
Superman and The Idiot
Cosmetic discoloration
Abort Retry Fail
Pausing for data lag
Losses are lessons
The closer the knit, the tighter the fit
Got my candle relumed without danger
Weak monarch in a dangerous interregnum
Radical transparency
Pure vision of an invented world
Brutal and summary injustice
More apparent than sincere
Headbutt your mouth’s face
Comet-haunted emptiness
The horns of the cuckold
Contagious abortion in cattle
Gentle hills, planted in wheat
Sin-guilty consciences
You have a problem I don’t have and I have a solution you don’t need
Creates the entertainment perfect
Russia's sunless orbit
The tenement den
Innocent and magnificent
Consistent system
White gaussian noise
Gross hugging
Shine my halo!
Fantastic pistachio
A moment to learn, a life to misunderstand
Lay low and wear beige
A matched pair of neurological events
The N-word situation
You’re on the wing; I’m out the way
Good Conservative nonsense
The stage of dignified reluctance
Lyrical beauty and ethical depth
Repertoire of adornment
Unconscious thought
World’s oldest glacier mummy
A high pitch of excellence
Parlor bolshevik; armchair bolshevik
Toweringly disagreeable people
Serially cascaded
There remained things unchanged
Getting plowed in the dumper
Smattering of indifference
Literate rudeness
In a transport of agony and ecstasy
As shattering as buggery
Solipsistic whimsey
Grotesquely ornamental shins
Itinerant typesetter
An air-conditioned demonstrator
Smeared by high velocity
Inharmonious with the mood of the lounge
An orgy of masochism
Both barrels of the Interstate
Withered balloon of an old man
Gymnasium shoes
A tissue of misunderstandings and impossibilities
The possible and the aspirational
The best revenge
Fully-deployed John
When I attended her dying
Mothers and things
A succession of embraces and escapes
Wonderful for the vanity
The sharp sunshine of the dusty street
The new sincerity
An expensive coach with a bad team
Spectacular tedium
A somber condo

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Here are 2022's.
And 2021's.
2020's.

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