2011 annual letter

December, 2011

Greetings.

            As I began to work on this letter the day after Christmas, 2010, we were surrounded by piles and piles of snow.  As of Christmas week, 2010, it was the snowiest December in Minneapolis since they began keeping records in 1891.  The snow piles next to my garage were at the level of my head, and my back told me several times it did not like it when I have to toss snow above the level of my head.  The joy of living on the tundra.  Meantime, Krystin was in Singapore at that same time, enjoying the warmth of temperatures in the 80s.  Sigh.

            As I finished work on this letter the week after Thanksgiving, 2011, we had just come through a holiday with the temperature tied for the highest on record.  I wish I could believe that were a good thing.  And then a little snow came afterward, making the scenery very picturesque.  Sometimes even winter looks good.

* * *

            Just for fun, and to do something a little different, I'm going to weave Mark Twain quotes into this letter.  (I meant to do them last year, on the 100^th anniversary of his death at age 74, but I forgot).  I have always admired Twain's witticisms and observations about life.  I'm going to include not the well-known ones but rather those that have not received much attention—but that I think are fully worthy of being repeated.  If some of them seem to bear on the preceding text of my letter, it is entirely accidental.  Maybe.  The first one follows directly on my comments about the weather and its impact on Minneapolis in the spring.

This is the only place in the world where the pavements consist exclusively of holes with asphalt around them. And they are the most economical in the world, because holes never get out of repair.
- Speech, sometime between 10/15 and 10/17/1907

There would be a power of fun in skating if you could do it with somebody else's muscles.
- Letter to Thomas B. Aldrich, 18 December 1874

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
- Notebook, 1894

Sometimes Elliott sends me interesting text messages.  I kept a few to include in this letter because they amused me.

From his first week of classes last January, he wrote this:  "I can tell my astronomy class is going to be awesome.  It's funny, too.  He uses a microphone because otherwise his voice would give out from teaching 6 classes in one day.  And since he naturally has a deep and commanding voice, we now have this surround sound voice-of-god type thing giving the lecture about the universe."  I have to say that I never had that experience.

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.
- Mark Twain's Own Autobiography (North American Review, 3 May 1907)

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.
-"Corn-pone Opinions"

Elliott and I were talking one night about drug use patterns and history and whether or not the Founding Fathers knew about marijuana.  I surmised they knew about the opiates, which date back centuries, but I wasn't so sure that marijuana would have been particularly well-known (or much used) in colonial and revolutionary times.  He sent me a text message the next day reporting that "'in 1619, Jamestown colony law declared that all settlers were required to grown hemp or cannabis.'  So the Founding Fathers would have known about it."  I asked him how he knew that; he said it was from Wikipedia, "legal history of cannabis in the U.S."

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

- Following the Equator

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it.  Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.
- Mark Twain's Notebook

He sent me a text message last December, seemingly just at random, that expressed a sentiment most of us who live in the north share, even if we've lived here all our lives:  "It is really depressing to see the sky getting dark when it's only 3[:00]."  He also expressed frustration in another text message to me at about the same time, when we had a very brief power outage:  "How did people function before electricity?  I can't play games.  I can't cook any food.  I might have to play a board game or something >:(  "

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1898

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French!  We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
- The Innocents Abroad

Elliott also sent me last year a message about one of his first courses:  "I like psychology.  I've learned more about how our minds work in the past 3 class days than I have in the rest of my life."  Apropos of his college work, he told me one time that "assuming all my grades stay the way they are, that will put my first semester GPA at 3.5.  More than a point above my high school GPA.  How odd."  I sent him a text back asking why it would not be higher (he accepts my questions like this with good humor); he wrote that "because there is no way in hell I'm getting an A in psych."  We later determined that it wasn't odd at all that he was doing so much better in college, because while he found high school classes mostly dull and boring, he found quite the opposite in college classes.  (I never knew, before that, that he found high school so boring.  He'd never said that.)  What surprised him as much as anything about college courses, I think, is that he even found the science courses this year to be interesting--because he, like me, doesn't have a great interest in practicing science.  He's interested in reading about its findings, not doing it.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
- 4th of July speech 1873

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, 1910 ed.

Elliott takes the bus and light-rail train to school.  He texted me one day that "I just had a fifteen minutes discussion on the train with a priest (yes, he really was) about the evidence of creationism.  He wanted to convert me."  I asked Elliott what happened.  "We agreed to disagree.  He attributed various feelings of happiness to God's influence.  I, being a good student, attributed them to measurable psychology."  Elliot later reported that had a difficult time with the evolution discussion:  "The main problem is that he (and people like him) is very rehearsed in the arguments he uses in his favor, whereas I (not a biology major or anything) cannot so eloquently make my point.  Which makes me appear ignorant."  Now maybe you understand why I think Elliott should become a lawyer.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.
- "On the Decay of the Art of Lying"

Constellations have always been troublesome things to name.  If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.
- Following the Equator

You may have read about Fred Phelps, the "minister" who brings his church members (mostly family members) to picket military funerals and such.  There was a news article about him picketing at the funerals of those shot in Arizona early in the year.  Elliott's response:  "Good to know Fred Phelps doesn't plan on letting his 'Biggest Douchebag in the Universe' title go to someone else any time soon."  Amen.  Early in March, the Supreme Court ruled (8-1) that the pickets were protected by the First Amendment clause guaranteeing free speech.  I told Elliott in an email that I thought the decision was correct, distasteful though the speech is.  Elliott wrote back "Unfortunately the First Amendment does not have an annoying-douchebag clause."

So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
- Innocents Abroad

Not a text message, but Elliott made another funny comment when he, Kathy, and I watched "Casablanca" one night last winter.   (He's decided to watch every movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture, although he isn't sure how far back he'll go.  We told him that if he's going to be a movie expert/buff, he had to see Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.  (He'd already decided he needed to see Citizen Kane.)  So I made a deal with him:  If he'd watch those two movies, I'd watch Inglorious Basterds, which he had been bugging me to watch for some time.  After watching Casablanca, he related that he had been thinking that it was filled with an enormous number of movie clichés—and then realized that those clichés came from Casablanca originally and were only clichés after it was released.

As for Inglorious Basterds, I decided I'm not a Quentin Tarantino fan.

In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.
- "A Humane Word from Satan"

Adam and Noah were ancestors of mine.  I never thought much of them. Adam lacked character.  He couldn't be trusted with apples.  Noah had an absurd idea that he could navigate without any knowledge of navigation, and he ran into the only shoal place on earth.

- Speech, November 9, 1901. Reported in The New York Times, November 10, 1901

If it had not been for him [Benjamin Franklin], with his incendiary 'Early to bed and early to rise,' and all that sort of foolishness, I wouldn't have been so harried and worried and raked out of bed at such unseemly hours when I was young. The late Franklin was well enough in his way; but it would have looked more dignified in him to have gone on making candles and letting other people get up when they wanted to.
- Letter from Mark Twain, San Francisco Alta California, July 25, 1869

            All my life I have marveled at this.  Kathy and I went to a Minnesota Orchestra concert last winter, an all-Mozart concert that included five short pieces of sacred music (so the performance included the Minnesota Chorale as well as the Minnesota Orchestra).  One of them, Veni Sancte Spiritus ("an invocation of the Holy Spirit to descend to earth, bringing comfort, rest, mercy, salvation, and joy to the faithful"), he wrote when he was 12 years old!   His brain functioned in a way that I cannot comprehend, and did so at a very young age.  (I can vaguely understand what Albert Einstein did to reach his paradigm-shifting conclusions in physics—could never in a million years do the same thing, but I can sort of understand what he did.  I have no conception of how one would determine that one needs 4 violins, 2 flutes, a drum, 2 cellos, and a clarinet for this movement, and some to be quiet and others to play in a different movement—much less then add multiple human voices to the music.  I will never understand that.)

Even popularity can be overdone.  In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn't see him do it.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about 'the working classes,' and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they all know about the one, but haven't tried the other.  But I know all about both; and as far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too.  Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation and its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work. . . .  The law of work does seem utterly unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.

- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Mid-winter Kathy and I enrolled in a class to learn how to make stained glass.  Something each of us had wanted to do for years but had never gotten around to.  So now we have.  It's not especially difficult; it's just somewhat time-consuming.  I made two additional panels after our first one made in class, and I worked from patterns.  In theory I could do my own patterns, but given my utter lack of creativity along those lines, and given that there are thousands of patterns available, I don't feel compelled to be original.  I've tried to talk Elliott into drawing me a pattern, but he's not been excited about doing so.  My goal is to have a stained glass panel hanging in most windows in the house.  (Kathy decided that she'd rather make glass panel lamps—a.k.a. Tiffany lamps—than the stained-glass panels.  So we'll at some have lamps with stained-glass shades all over, lamps that the cats can then knock over.)

There are certain sweet-smelling sugar-coated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate.  One of these is, that there is such a thing in the world as independence:  independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action.  Another is that the world loves to see independence--admires it, applauds it.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
- On the Decay of the Art of Lying speech, 1880

Last February, because Krystin very much wanted us to do so, we contemplated going to visit Krystin in August in South Korea and then going with her to Japan for a week or so.  Upon learning we were thinking seriously about the trip, she wrote on her Facebook page, "My daddy is coming to visit in July!! Not 100% sure yet, but... my daddy MAY be coming to visit in July!!"  ["Daddy"?  My goodness.]  To which Kathy responded, on Facebook, "And what am I, chopped liver?  That's ok, I'll get over it.  Somehow.  :-P"  Krystin quickly wrote back "lol Kathy of course I would be excited to see the rest of you!"  I think she was excited that we were thinking about coming. . . .

By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.
- Notebook, 1902

I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

 [A sentiment with which Kathy and her mother, both opera lovers, are in complete agreement.  So I haven't seen any of the Met Opera productions over the last two years of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.  I have suggested to Kathy that we could go to Bayreuth, Germany, to see the Bayreuth Festival production of the four operas, but that travel plan has been met with a cool reception.]

After much hemming and hawing about it, we decided to go to South Korea and Japan.  [I am hereafter going to refer to Korea, rather than repeatedly keying "South Korea."  We didn't go to North Korea—no one does.]  We had at one point decided not to go, and to go to Scotland and Ireland instead (a lot less expensive), and then thought about going to Melbourne to visit my friends Rowland and Stella Evans.  Then we had dinner with a friend of Kathy's, Gayla Marty, who pointed out to us that it would be unlikely that we would ever again have the opportunity to travel as a five-some, our two boys plus Krystin, to a place that all of them wanted to see (Japan).  After she made that point, we realized we had to make the trip.  We were going primarily because Krystin wanted me/us to come—and because the two boys are both enamored of Japan and things Japanese.  They were both really excited about being able to go.

            I was more wary about this trip than any I have taken before, primarily because this would be my first trip outside the bounds of Western civilization.  These would be places where the language and the food would be utterly alien.  We had dinner with a couple of faculty friends whose fields are Japanese history and culture, and they told us that very few people in Japan speak English (contrary to what one might believe, given the westernization of Japan since WWII).  They were correct.  The same was also true in Korea—few spoke more than a few words of English.  I would normally make an attempt to learn at least a few important phrases in a local language, but both Korean and Japanese are such complicated languages, and so dramatically different from European-based languages, that I didn't even try.  I worried I might inadvertently insult when I intended the contrary.  (One saving grace for us was that a fair number of the signs—streets and establishments—are also in English, so we could at least figure out some things.)

            I should say, at the outset, that all of my impressions from this trip are jaundiced by the fact that we rarely saw a temperature below 90 degrees.  Because the vast majority of our trip was spent in urban areas, surrounded by asphalt and concrete and tall buildings, the heat was even more oppressive; we had no temperature readings while we were out and about, but I would not be surprised to learn that on several days the ambient temperature in the cities was over 100.  The humidity levels matched the heat.  Every time we went outdoors, we were walking into an oven.  Intellectually, we knew before we left that it would be hot and humid when we were there, but had resolved that we'd just put up with it.  What we didn't think about was how debilitating the heat and humidity are when one spends much time out in it—in our daily lives here, when it is hot and humid, we simply don't go outside very much.  When one is being a tourist, in places where many of the sites are outdoors, it is more difficult to escape.  Several times during the trip we decided not to see something because it would mean more time spent outdoors, and we also retired to our hotel for a nap on some afternoons because we were so exhausted by being out in the sun and heat.  Even the kids were affected and were glad to get back to the hotel.  We also slept longer every night than we ever do at home.

            An aside:  After this experience, I recalled reading in Before the Dawn, a book about the history (development and spread, based on evidence from DNA) of human beings prior to the beginning of the written record of human history, that it seems humans (mostly in Northern Europe) developed lactose tolerance only in the last 5000 years or so, because of the reliance on cow's milk.  That led me to wonder if that same group of people, those who migrated to Scandinavia and surrounding areas, might also have developed an INtolerance for heat.  I consulted with a couple of genetics experts at the University, who said the hypothesis was quite plausible (although, I infer, there isn't any research that documents such intolerance—which could be rather difficult research to conduct if, as I suspect, temperature sensitivity is a multi-genetic trait, if it has any genetic component at all).  When I see people (mostly of darker skin colors and most likely from some parts of Africa) in the Twin Cities driving around in mid-summer with their car windows open when the temperature is in the 90s, in cars that are clearly fairly new (and thus have air conditioning), I conclude that some of us are more heat tolerant and others of us are not.

            And another aside:  Much to my surprise, I'm probably the one who was least affected by the heat.  That may have been because I wore the goofy-looking broad-brimmed hat I bought years ago in Australia.  It kept the sun off my head and shoulders.  The others often looked on the verge of wilting.  (But I confess that I have never worn so many sweaty clothes without washing in my life.)

            After the 12+ hour flight, that left us like zombies because we didn't sleep, we had a 2-hour bus ride to Cheonan, the city south of Seoul where Krystin lives and teaches.  We stayed in a "love motel," a place where adult couples go to get away from it all (and where, I suspect, assignations occur as well).  But it was just like any reasonably decent hotel I have ever been in and the accommodations were fine.  It was also far cheaper than any of the other options, none of which were close to Krystin.

            My first impressions after landing and riding in the bus were that we had landed in Los Angeles (minus the palm trees) and that Korea has the same bushes and weeds that we do.  We also saw mile after mile of 20-30-40-story apartment buildings, often in large complexes where the buildings were identical.  I found these huge complexes depressing because the thought of living in one of them, all the same and with no lawn and garden of one's own, would be depressing.  I know that people grow up in large cities in the U.S. in apartment buildings, and that the fact many of us have our own city lots is a reflection of the fact that the U.S. has much more space per capita by far than Korea and Japan, but I would find living in one of those buildings aversive.  These complexes exist all over Korea and Japan, I learned as we traveled.

            In Korea we relied almost completely on taxis, which are remarkably inexpensive.  The cab drivers, however, like everyone else spoke virtually no English, so initially we had some trouble conveying to the drivers where we wanted to go.  We visited Krystin's school our first full day in Korea, and she had one of the Korean teachers write out the school address on a slip of paper in Korean, something we could give to cab drivers when we were going to meet her.  We also used one of the hotel business cards to get back.  So the routine was to get into a cab and hand the driver one of our slips of paper.  Many of them then turned to their GPS to find the location.

            Our first major tourist stop was Independence Hall, a huge complex of buildings spread over hundreds of acres devoted primarily to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.  It was not a happy time for Korea and it amply demonstrates why there is, even to this day, little love lost between the Koreans and the Japanese.  It was a brutal occupation that Koreans remember.  We were hot and sweaty walking up the very long entrance promenade (i.e., 3-4 football fields in length with memorials and monuments) before we even got to the museum portion of the site.

            We joined Krystin a couple of evenings after her work day ended (at 9:00) at her local "pub."  The teachers go there frequently, and the owner, Mr. Lee, joined us one night (and kept on providing us complimentary beer that we didn't really want).  He spoke enough English that we could carry on a conversation.  I learned that in Korea, I was already 60, because one is born age 1 there; I told Mr. Lee that I declined to accept the Korean practice in that regard; he laughed.  The boys were too tired to join us, and since neither of them drinks anything alcoholic, they were uninterested in coming to a pub; they stayed in the hotel and went to bed.  (I doubt either of the two boys were ever in bed as early and as often as they were on this trip.  They were wiped out most days by the heat, and ended up turning off their lights at 8:00 or shortly thereafter.)

            We visited the imperial palace in Seoul, home to Korean emperors up until 1910.  A large complex of buildings, much of it was destroyed over time and by the Japanese during the occupation.  Korea is slowly reconstructing the buildings and grounds; they are about 40% done now and hope to be finished by 2050.  What struck us was the lively painting all over, especially on the ceilings and beams.  Some group of people spent years and years painting all those repeating patterns all over the buildings. 

            Kathy and I saw the height of cocktail-hour elegance.  One night about 5:00, long before Krystin got off work, we decided we wanted a beer.  (Somehow, during this entire trip, beer always sounded better than wine or scotch.  At least for us, it always does when it's hot and humid.)   We wandered around the neighborhood near our hotel but could not find a pub.  So we went into the 7-Eleven at the end of the street our hotel was on and bought a couple of beers and sat on red plastic chairs under a red plastic 7-Eleven umbrella in a nondescript part of Cheonan and had our cocktails.  It was hot, but since we were shaded by tall buildings, it was tolerable.  (There are 7-Elevens all over Korea and Japan.  The ones in Korea were among the few places that had international ATMs where we could get cash.)

            Among our more interesting experiences in Korea was a half-day tour of the DMZ.  We again took the train to Seoul, took the subway to Itaewon (part of the megalopolis of Seoul, the location of a large U.S. military base), and had a bus tour of the DMZ.  There were a lot of memorials to troops killed during the war, an exhibition hall tracing the onset of the war and events afterward, and many plaques expressing a desire for Korean reunification.  Koreans are acutely aware that theirs is the only divided country left after WWII.  We also went down into one of the tunnels that have been dug by the North Koreans under the DMZ to provide for a means of troop entry for a sneak attack from the North.  It was a long way down, and we (Elliott and I, mostly) had to walk slightly bent over for the length of the tunnel, about 800 feet.  We wore construction helmets, which was a good thing because both Elliott and I bumped our heads on the rocky ceiling several times.  The tunnel was blasted out of rock and only about 5-6 feet wide; the estimate is that North Korea could get 30,000 troops per hour through it.  We were skeptical.  The North Koreans have dug four such tunnels that have been discovered; the South Koreans are no longer looking for more on the ground because they can now use GPS technology of some kind to identify any additional ones the North Koreans might try to dig.  The walk in the tunnel was the only time on the entire trip that I was even faintly chilly.

            It is funny, in a sad way, that the two tallest flagpoles in the world are at the DMZ.  The two Koreas each have one at the DMZ, and over the years have competed in erecting the tallest one.  I don't know which, North or South, has at present the taller one.

            Also rather bizarre is a ghostly train station.  At one point North Korea had agreed to train transportation between north and south, so South Korea built a spanking new train station.  Then the North Koreans changed their mind, so there is a sparkling, clean, unused train station at the border.  Elliott and Spence walked out on the tracks—figured that was the only time in their lives that they'd be able to do that.  It was a rather poignant place, with direction signs pointing to the correct track to get to Seoul or Pyongyang.  One can buy souvenir train tickets; if the station were in operation and one could take a train through North Korea, one could get from Seoul to Lisbon on the trains (through China and Russia and back south into Europe).  Elliott kept his ticket and figured someday he'd try to come back and take the ride to Lisbon, if the route ever opens.

Our guidebook noted that we are given notice when entering the DMZ—which we were—that it is a military site where enemy action may occur and that we risk the possibility of severe injury or death when we come close to it.  We saw only a bright, sunny, hot day.  The DMZ has spawned a cottage industry in tourism—ours was by no means the only tour bus there—and there is a museum shop where one can buy the usual tourist stuff.  We got a couple of t-shirts.

            Our guide, who attended high school in the U.S. and attended the University of Nevada, so spoke perfectly good English, also gave us one chilling fact:  The North Koreans reportedly have 2100 missiles aimed at Seoul, and in the event of a full-fledged attack by the North, there would be no one left alive in Seoul after the missiles all landed.  I worried about Krystin being in South Korea for a year because of the lunatic who runs North Korea; now I was just going to be glad to be out of Korea after our trip so we weren't there in the event the North decides to attack.  I know, hasn't happened in 60 years, but with people like Kim Jong-il in charge, one never knows what he might do.

           

            One thing I decided while on this trip was that I do not care for central urban areas with their congestion, dirty streets, noise, and complete lack of greenery (Korean, Japanese, or U.S. cities).  The population is so densely packed that there are always people everywhere.  And noise.  We were grateful when we got home to be in the quiet of the back yard, surrounded by plants and trees.  (Even though we lived in Edinburgh for 5 months, that's a small city by comparison—perhaps 500,000 people—and filled with green and parks.)  It also may be that I was somewhat sour about being in a congested urban area because of the heat and humidity.  Big cities are big cities—too much concrete, too many people, too little green.

            All three of the kids like Asian culture and people.  Krystin has said that if she can't find a job when she returns to the U.S., she'd consider another teaching gig and would return to Korea (rather than go to Europe or elsewhere).  Elliott said that he could envision himself living in Japan (but only planned to visit again).  Spence said he thought he'd live in Japan at some point.  I find this fascination with Japan/Korea puzzling, because it is so unrelated to anything in their lives.  I have never had any great interest in Asian cultures or society or history—nothing against the Koreans or Japanese or Chinese, I just haven't been particularly interested in their countries.  For whatever reason, I'm a Europhile, and that's that.  (Having said that, I did find both Korea and Japan interesting experiences and I don't regret the trip at all.)

            At the end of the stint in Korea, on Saturday morning (July 30), we met Krystin and took the train from Cheonan (in NW Korea) to Busan (a port on the SE coast).  The train ride was in essence a long tunnel interrupted by occasional valleys with towns/cities in them.  Korea has spent a fortune blasting tunnels for the trains.  The ride illustrated for us exactly how mountainous the country is.  We took a hydrofoil from Busan to Fukuoka , on the southwestern coast of Japan.  It took about two hours, went very fast, and was like riding on an airplane—sit in the seats, buckle your seatbelt, and buy stuff from the attendant if one wished.

            We encountered a significant problem when we arrived in Fukuoka in the evening:  No international ATMs.  We had no Japanese money; we'd assumed there'd be an ATM available on arrival.  Only after a great deal of messing around with the port staff and taxi drivers (none of us understood each other very well) did we get to the kids' hostel and find ATMs.  (Which, for international travelers, are not very widespread generally in Japan.)  All this in dark.  We then checked into our traditional Japanese inn, with futon mats for sleeping laid on bamboo mats, robes, and bathroom and shower located in different parts of the building.  Upon entering the inn, one removes one's shoes and puts on slippers; one removes one's slippers on entering the bedroom, and one wears one's slippers to the bathroom or shower and switches to another set of slippers when using the facilities.  I neglected to remove my slippers when entering the guest room; the innkeeper said something in Japanese and pointed to my feet.  Oops.  I guess to my culturally narrow-minded point of view, this was a lot of changing of footwear.  One also hopes that the last person who wore the slippers didn't have any fungal diseases of the foot.

We didn't really take advantage of what one should do in such an inn; we arrived too late to do much other than go out and have a beer and go to bed.  The whole process from arrival to getting checked in took over 3 hours; we needed a beer!

Inasmuch as there's not a lot to do in Fukuoka for tourists, and because we wanted to get to Hiroshima, we got up and out on Sunday morning and got on the train.  It was an 8-block walk to the train, and even in the late morning it was so hot and humid that I thought Elliott, Krystin, and Kathy were going to faint. As with the ride from Cheonan to Busan, it was a long tunnel interrupted by (lush, green) valleys.  We initially got on the wrong class train, which we figured out as we were riding, so we got off at the first station and got on one that our Japan Rail pass was good for (fortunately, they never seem to check passenger tickets, probably because one has to go through turnstiles with the appropriate card to even get to the tracks to get on the trains).

            The large museum in Hiroshima dedicated to the dropping of the atomic bomb was extraordinarily well done.  It was balanced, judiciously neutral, and included remarkable displays and pictures of before and after as well as the reasons that led up to the event.  The large peace park, across the street from our hotel, was also well worth the time spent walking around in it.

            Before we left Hiroshima, we hopped on the train to go to the ferry to go to the island of Miyajima.  We saw the Itsukushima Shrine, a large orange "gate" set in the water outside the island, originally built in the early 600s, as well as the  other temples and a pagoda.  Also a lot of "wild" deer that are all over the place—wild, but well accustomed to tourists who feed them.   That's one interesting thing about Korea and Japan; except for a few Roman ruins in northern Europe, there's not much there that dates from such early times.

Then off to Kyoto, the capitol of Japan for about 800 years, up to 1868.  The city that everyone said we should make the center of our visit (not Tokyo). 

            Two of the spots everyone recommends one see in Kyoto are the silver temple and the golden temple.  We went first to the silver temple, up in the hills around the city.  It actually wasn't much to look at, for something so famous.  I learned later that the "silver" was never actually put on the exterior, so it's just wood.  From there we went on the "philosophers' walk," two kilometers next to a little brook.  It was actually pleasant, under the trees, even though it was hot, and we found a marvelous little gallery where Kathy and I both purchased prints.  We later in the trip went to the Golden Temple, which really is covered in gold.  We were, however, looking at a "replica," because the original was torched by an unhappy Buddhist monk in 1950 and was completely rebuilt (including all the gold gilding) at enormous expense.  The gardens surrounding the temple were gorgeous, and we would have lingered in them had it not been so hot and humid.

           

            Nijo Castle was the 33-room home of the shoguns, who ruled Japan until they were forced to give power back to the Emperor in 1868 (which is when the capital moved to Tokyo).  It was ornate, and we had to take our shoes off to go through it, but it certainly didn't begin to compare to the gaudy standards of European palaces.  It took me awhile to figure out a rather potted history of Japan, but I learned that the shoguns ruled Japan from the early 1600s until 1868, at which point the Emperor regained power.  Emperor Meiji took power (the Meiji restoration); his great-grandson is the current Emperor.

            As advised by several, we took a train to Nara, site of the major Buddhist shrine in Japan.  The heat, as usual, was brutal, there were no clouds, and the train station was at the other end of town from the shrines.  Of course, the first major shrine was shrouded in plastic and scaffolding—being renovated.  So we went on to others, and saw an enormous amount of (very dusty) Buddhist statuary (in a French Renaissance building!) and the largest Buddha in Japan.  I know little about Buddhism, but I was amazed at the endless variety of Buddhist sculptures/statues.  I don’t understand Buddhism to be polytheistic, but I did not know what all these sculptures of different Buddhas and other worthies represent.

            One suggestion we received before we left was to tour the major department stores in Japan.  We did.  They looked just like major upscale department stores in any U.S. city.

            Kathy and I discovered a little pub down the street from our hotel in Tokyo where the beer was moderately cheaper than elsewhere.  It was sort of a dive, but it sure was popular with the locals.  We also ate there a couple of times, and the food was remarkably good, considering the place.  No wonder it was locally popular.

            One of my most brilliant decisions was to decide, on the spur of the moment one morning in Tokyo, to reserve 3 seats on an all-day Gray Line tour of the city.  Kathy and Spence were off taking a tour of their own, so we were on our own.  It was brilliant because we could see some of the major sites, in short stints—and then get back on the air-conditioned bus!

            One of the highlights of the trip for Kathy and me was the Tokyo National Museum, one of the major collections of Japanese art.  It took us half an hour to figure out how to get out of the subway station to get to the museum, but we finally made it.  We spent several hours there looking at (more) Buddhas, ceramics, lacquerware, prints, and a lot of other things.  As I have often found, the museum store was a great place to pick up a couple of small gifts/mementos.

            One odd development during the trip was that the two boys discovered they like curry, and found a chain restaurant that they frequented when they didn't want to eat dinner with us.  Elliott hasn't eaten in a curry place since he got back, however.

            As we would sit outside in the morning in Tokyo at a local coffee place, we learned that the work uniform for men is black pants and white shirts; there were some jackets but very few ties.  For young women it is white blouse, black or navy skirt, nylons, and low pumps.

            Elliott and I one morning went to the major electronics district in Tokyo, where he saw a lot of games he wished he could have, but they are not available in the U.S. and don't work on American game machines.  He was despondent that all these nifty and interesting games are available in Japan but not the U.S.

            At the end of 16 days, we were ready to come home.  Back to a familiar culture and temperatures we could tolerate.  Fortunately, we had decided to pay a little more and get a direct flight from Tokyo to Minneapolis.  That overnight east-to-west trip is the most disorienting one that humans have devised, but on Judith's advice, several years ago, we take melatonin before and after such flights and can get through the jet lag reasonably quickly.

Krystin returned home three weeks after we did.  Her teaching contract was completed.  With the wonders of modern technology (and the fact that we brought her her US cell phone), she kept me posted on where she was on her trip from Seoul to San Francisco to Minneapolis.

I have found out there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
-Tom Sawyer Abroad  [Fortunately, we found out we liked one another.]

It liberates the vandal to travel--you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.
- The American Abroad speech, 1868

I am saddened to report the death of my long-time and close friend Judith Martin, professor of urban geography at the University and wonderful addition to many a dinner party here over the years.  She was a lively conversationalist and good listener when one needed to talk.  (And sometimes a talker who needed a good listener, which I tried to be.)  We shall miss her a great deal—and so will the community at large if the attendance and participation at her memorial service are any indication.  She probably did as much as anyone in the last 50 years to bring thoughtful and people-friendly change to the Twin Cities.

When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court       

One should not pay a person a compliment and straightway follow it with a criticism. It is better to kiss him now and kick him next week.
- Inscription written on fly leaf of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the L. M. Powers collection. Reported in Kansas City Star, April 10, 1911, p. 6.

                                       

To any foreigner, English is exceedingly difficult. Even the angels speak it with an accent.
- written in Clara Clemens copy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

            Elliott pointed out to me the oddity of the English phrase "a near miss."  That says you nearly missed, almost missed—but didn't miss.  So if you didn't miss, you hit.  So the meaning of "a near miss" is exactly the opposite of the meaning of the words suggests.  What one means is "a near hit," I think.  Another one of those examples of why English is difficult to learn for a non-native speaker.

Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

We easily perceive that the peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart--and we consider this one of the signs of savagery. But we are so stupid that we can't see that we thus plainly admit that no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.
- Notebook, 1895

We had a delightful weekend on Leech Lake in June with our friends Rolf and Roberta Sonnesyn.  The highlight of the weekend was that I won the official bocce-ball championship, 2 games to 1, against Rolf.  I pay no attention to the fact that after our "tournament," Rolf beat me 2-0 in non-conference play, and beat me 11-0 and 11-3.  Uff da.  Not only that, the Sonnesyns won both games of Chronology—Rolf won one, Robert won one, and Kathy and I won none.   If it weren't for the great company, I'd say Kathy and I need to find other people to socialize with, people whom we have a reasonable chance of competing with at games of skill.  A coda to the story is that I have been on a two-year quest for nymphs and fairies (stone/concrete) for the garden, and we always look when up north with Rolf and Roberta, but thus far have never found one.

We returned to Leech Lake in October.  Rolf beat me in the bocce tournament.  We decided that next year it will be a triathlon:  bocce, croquet, and horseshoes.  I need help from the more-athletic Kathy.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900

Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows that he did not know how to tell them.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography; Mark Twain in Eruption

            Kathy moved into my house (to become "our" house in the near future) this summer, so we have combined possessions.  One such combination occurred when we set out to plant flowers in the back yard:  We brought all our flower pots to the site.  We discovered, when we were done planting flowers in the pots, that we had 42 pots between us—and we'd filled them all up.  Those filled flower pots represented a number of trips to the garden stores, but the effort, we concluded, had been worth it:  We felt, when sitting out on the deck last summer, as if we were in a conservatory (albeit one with a rather limited and random set of plants, annuals that can flower with little direct sunlight).  Or perhaps it was a jungle.

            The one drawback to the combination of households is that we now live in Gary and Kathy's furniture warehouse.  We put many of her belongings in storage, in the faint hope that at some point in the near future one of the three children will move into an apartment and need furniture.  But some of it we brought into my/our house.  Our tastes in decorating are not the same, and mine has evolved over the years, from art deco to prairie to Victorian, so the house was largely a potpourri.  With the addition of some of Kathy's furniture it is now simply jumbled.  Feng shui it ain't.

Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
- "Chronicle of Young Satan"

The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors I would drown him.
- quoted in My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens

Kathy and I decided last summer to invite a few friends over from time to time to sit out on the deck for cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.  The weather was a challenge, since summer was cool and rainy well into June, but we managed to have a few such events.  One of my faculty friends of long standing, who had been here a number of times before over the years, with various combinations of people, declared after joining us in June that he and his wife were great fans of the salons de Engstrand (his italics).  We love the appellation, although Kathy gets the lion's share of the credit because she produces the food.  I just clean the deck and try to be entertaining.  The former I can do well; the latter less so.

The observance of Thanksgiving Day -- as a function -- has become general of late years. The Thankfulness is not so general. This is natural. Two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their enthusiasm.
- Following the Equator

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par.
- Notebook, 1904

            Kathy was kind enough to throw a 60th-birthday party for me.  I was not keen on turning 60 (yes, I understand that the alternative is worse), but at least the event included the very pleasant announcement to our friends that we got engaged.  Our friends Geoff and Mary have invited us to come to Muskoka, Ontario, where they have a family cottage; that may be our destination honeymoon.  Kathy was supposed to get her engagement ring at the party, but what with traveling to Asia and general busyness, she didn't get it until mid-November.  

            And at the party, Rolf and Roberta were kind enough to bring me a little stone cherub, which may be about as close to a "nymph" as I get.

What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson  [Yikes, I hope not!]

I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them.  The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude.  I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society.
-Mark Twain, a Biography

            One of my favorite emails each day comes from Delancey Place, and I cited a couple of the posts last year.  There was one this year that caught my attention, that dealt with the "two competing visions of the future from British authors George Orwell (1903-1950) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)."  Orwell, of course, wrote 1984, and is better known, but "Huxley's Brave New World has proven more relevant. . . .  Neil Postman contrasted the two visions in the foreword to his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and [Orwell's] prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

A depressing but I am sometimes afraid accurate depiction of the world in which we live.

A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.
- "The Czar's Soliloquy"

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.
- Mark Twain's Notebook

            Krystin's working a seasonal temp job at Toys R Us this fall.  She managed to draw 8:00 p.m. Thanksgiving night to 6:00 a.m. Friday morning.  She said it was actually very busy until about 2:00 a.m., then slowed some, and picked up again about 4:00 a.m.  People are nuts.  I could not save enough money on something that I'd go shopping at 3:00 in the morning to buy it.  Maybe a new house, but I don't think they sell real estate at that time of the day.  At least not yet.

My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry, which is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average.
- "Answers to Correspondents"

He had arrived at that point where presently the illusions would cease and he would have entered upon the realities of life, and God help the man that has arrived at that point.
- Jack Van Nostrand speech, 1905

           

To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

Gail Collins, in one of her columns in The New York Times in September, summarized the Republican primary contenders and contests.  Although I am not conservative, I know several thoughtful conservatives with whom I enjoy talking politics and the philosophy of government.  We can find areas of agreement.  But what we confront now is so depressing that Kathy and I have actually talked about what it would be like to live in Denmark or Sweden were one of the truly anti-intellectual candidates actually to be nominated and win the 2012 election.  Collins recalls, among other things, that

Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president. . . . Perry told the students, 'God uses broken people to reach a broken world.' What does that even mean?

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party.  In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.

So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity?  The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.

One of my political science colleagues wrote to me recently that "Perry is the demagogue that the Framers feared.  Very few politicians actually scare me.  He does."  Since that was written, however, Mr. Perry seems to have fallen back in the race for the GOP nomination.  Given some of the alternatives, I can't tell if that's a good thing or not.

            That virtually all of the candidates deny that humans are causing global climate change, which is in all probability global warming, despite the fact it is as established as scientific findings ever get, makes me despair.  Of course there remain disputes among scientists about the meaning of certain data, and how it can be used and interpreted, and what additional data would help, but the scientific community is not doubt about the fundamental premises. A science is dead if there it has no disagreements and debates.  (I see that the International Energy Agency, a rather staid outfit, has issued (November, 2011) its predictions about global climate change and predicts a catastrophic 11-degree (Fahrenheit) increase in average temperature (I believe within this century) unless certain policy steps are taken by 2017.  The IEA is not known for its dramatic statements on climate change.)

  That the GOP candidates almost all also deny the validity of evolution, which is the foundation of all of modern biology—and thereby of most of modern medicine—is so discouraging and depressing that I've sometimes just quit listening to the news.  When I go on to consider the appalling income disparity in the country, I worry even more, because eventually it is these kinds of disparities that lead to revolution.  But the GOP seems to believe it essential to protect and enhance the wealth of the wealthiest among us.  The fact that the middle class is shrinking and the "under class" growing should make all of us alarmed for our children, our retirement, and the country.

The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.
- "Is Shakespeare Dead?"

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.
- Mark Twain in Eruption; Mark Twain's Autobiography

I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.
- "Foster's Case," New York Tribune, 10 March 1873

            I have over the years contemplated writing an autobiography.  Not because I expect it to be a best-seller, or even something that large numbers of people would want to read, because my life has probably been among the less interesting on the planet.  More, rather, to (1) pass along to the kids a history that they wouldn't read, either, or (2) to see if I could trace my own personal and intellectual development in such a way that it made sense to me—and that might, someday, be at least mildly interesting reading to the kids.

After I began pulling some materials together—I have all my life been an inveterate saver of letters from others as well as copies of my own, in addition to other notes and whatnot—I realized I might not want to write this story.  I started with the assumption any such narrative had to be truthful and unvarnished, to the extent writers can be truthful and unvarnished about their lives.  Then I realized, as I began to compose, that I do not want to relive in unvarnished fashion the painful or embarrassing (or both) emotional and romantic episodes in my life or the mistakes I probably made in life choices.  They are buried and should remain so.  There is a reason that these kinds of life events fade into distant memory, and even fade away almost completely:  We would be depressed and in psychological pain were we obligated daily to confront our past mistakes.  What most of us do is pick up the pieces, try to learn from the experience, and get about our lives. 

So maybe what I'll do is set aside the emotional/romantic/relationship events and educational/career-path choices in my life and focus on why it is I've come to think about and view the world the way I do, given where I started and what I encountered along the way over the last six decades.  Which might be interesting for my kids, since we have regularly talked about all kinds of ideas ever since they were young.

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

There has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else's.
- Letters from the Earth

It is not in the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it.
- Mark Twain's Notebook

            One day early this fall I was sitting in a committee meeting with a group of faculty members who were discussing whether the University should consider adding contextual information to student transcripts.  At Minnesota, as at virtually all other institutions of higher education in this country, grades have inflated so that one can argue that way too many students receive an A in courses.  (Grades are compressed, really, because they bump up against the top of the scale; as one of my colleagues once observed, what the faculty need to do is add a new grade Z, above the A, which would mean super-duper performance, and when too many students receive a Z, add a Y, which is super-fantastic, unbelievable performance, and then when too many students receive a Y, add an X. . . .)  (The serious "inflation" of grades actually began during the Viet Nam war, when college instructors realized that giving a student (male) a low grade might very well mean he would be drafted and sent to Viet Nam.  Quite a few instructors didn't wish to put themselves in that position.)  Adding context to a transcript would mean something as simple as indicating the average grade in the course as well as the student's grade, or the percentage of students who received an A, or whatever.  It isn't clear where this idea is going, although both North Carolina and Cornell have added contextual information to their transcripts.

            During the meeting when this discussion was going on, I received a text message from Elliott (my cell phone makes only a very quiet sound when it receives a text message).  So I surreptitiously looked at it; he wrote:  "Got an A on my psych exam.  Meaning I officially have an A in all my classes."  I am afraid that I chuckled a little bit aloud right in the meeting, which is, of course, unprofessional as well as rude.  (I later sent the group an email message about why I had laughed; the message elicited a number of LOL reactions.)

When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.
- Following the Equator

Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being 'loyal' to a thousand iniquities, whereas the true loyalty should have been to themselves--in which case there would have ensured a rebellion, and the throwing off of that deceptive yoke.
- Mark Twain's Notebook

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
- Notebook, 1898

            Elliott received his first paycheck in late November; he took a part-time job at Davanni's, a local pizza-and-hoagie chain.  As of the time I compose this, he is assigned to hoagies when he goes in to work.  But he'll be rotated around as he gains more experience.  I told him that most of the people I know, including me, started out with a job like that, at the bottom of the heap.  It's a humbling experience, and it also gives one great sympathy for people who have those low-paying mostly-boring jobs as their way of making a living.  Elliott commented over Thanksgiving weekend, when we were driving somewhere, that the job also reinforces for him the value of staying in college, because he does not want to do this kind of job for the next 40+ years.

            I wonder, however, if it isn't unusual (at least in the statistical sense) for someone his age (21) to have never held a job that carried a paycheck.  He's done considerable pet-sitting, when Pat had pet jobs that she could give him, and he's done odd little projects from time to time to earn a few bucks, but never a "real" job.  As he pointed out, his wants in life are simple—video games and equipment, the occasional DVD, and the cost of ordering music from iTunes—so he's never needed a lot of money.  It isn't clear to me why he suddenly decided to get a part-time job, except that perhaps he decided it simply was time, so that he had at least some kind of experience on his resume when he goes to look for a job after college.

I, like all other human beings, expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

The noblest work of God? Man. Who found it out? Man.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

I end the year satisfied and happy and delighted with my relationship with Kathy.  We are planning a post-nuptial party, probably for February, and once we set the party date, we'll get the nuptials done so the invitations will be correct and it really will be post-nuptial.

I wish you a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2012.