2014 annual letter

December 1, 2014

Greetings, my friends.

            My best wishes for the season.

            I had a question from a friend last year:  why don't I write a blog instead of this letter?  There are a couple of reasons.  One, I don't know many people who read blogs.  Two, because I'm still a believer in paper and sitting on the sofa to read.  Three, probably most important, because I work and rework quite a bit of the letter as the year goes on, which would not be possible with a blog.  Another friend described it amicably as "stream of consciousness."  Actually, that's probably one thing it is not, inasmuch as I edit and add and delete a fair amount.  It's much more reflective than what I think of as "stream of consciousness" writing.  So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

            Following recent years' practice, I've interspersed amusing (to me, anyway) quotations through the letter, this year they come from Oscar Wilde, the Irish author and playwright.  Master of the epigram, coincidentally Salon had an article in October of this year contending that Wilde invented Kim Kardashian:  Wilde was, initially, famous for being famous.  He came to the U.S. when he was 27, before he had done anything of note, did a year-long cross-country tour, attended parties everywhere, was his own best PR agent, and made sure he was seen with celebrities (e.g., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Henry James).  He gained fame first and then built on it to advance his literary career.  (Wilde came to a sad end:  he was convicted of "gross indecency" (for homosexual liaisons) and sent to prison.  He didn't really recover from the prison experience and died three years later.  Today, of course, he could have married the guy.)  You will be quite familiar with a number of the quotations; what surprised me about some of them is that they were Wilde's. You should know that I don't always agree with the sentiments Wilde expressed.  If he were pressed at the time, I'm not sure he really would, either.  Sometimes wit trumps veracity.

I should note that Dorothy Parker once wrote a short poem about him:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

            As I've also done occasionally, I've interspersed a few drawings that Elliott has sent me.

            My apologies to those who last year told me they expected me to reach 100 pages this year.  I couldn't make it.  I just stop when the end of November approaches and I have nothing more to write about.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

            At our annual New Year's Eve dinner at our friends' the Dixons, one of the regular attendees, my friend Tim Harrington, had a copy of my 2013 letter in hand and said he had a question for me.  In a quizzical tone, he asked (I paraphrase, but I'm close) "did you put something in just to see if people were reading and would catch it, or did I misunderstand what you wrote, or did you just screw up?"  Actually, he probably said "did you make a mistake?"  He pointed out that I had referred to "Huxley's 1984."

            If I were really smooth and quick of thought, I would have said "so you found it."  But I didn't; I confessed that he did not misunderstand and that I had just written too quickly and wrote Huxley rather than Orwell.  Besides, I told him, as I have told many, I do not test whether any of my friends read the letter or not.  I have fun with it, and if others enjoy it as well, so much the better.  But I did screw up.

            The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.

          A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

            You may recall that I ended last year's letter without any denouement to Elliott's intersection with the criminal justice system (for mistakenly selling a beer to a minor at the pizza & sub place he worked at).  In mid-December of last year, we went to court for his arraignment; we got there at the appointed time in the morning and then sat there on one of the benches (reminded me of church pews) for over an hour because for all the cases (these are not felonies), one just signs in on a clipboard and waits for a conversation with one of the city attorneys.

            Elliott had hoped to qualify for a public defender, but at least in Hennepin County (perhaps all of Minnesota), one really has to be destitute to be eligible.  His small savings account, which he accumulated by his frugality, disqualified him.

            Elliott's turn came, he went off to the side to talk with the young woman city attorney, and then came back and told me she had offered a 2-year suspended sentence for the gross misdemeanor charge, a $300 fine, and after the 2 years the sentence would be vacated and dismissed.  But:  it would remain on his record forever, even vacated and dismissed.  Elliott and I didn't think that was a great deal, so he declined it, he got a court date at the end of January, and we left.  He now knew he would have to retain an attorney, so got back in touch with a guy he had talked to earlier.

            What was interesting (disturbing) about the experience for me was the ethnic division of the courtroom.  The front half, where sits the judge's bench, the city attorneys, and the public defenders, was entirely white people (and all but one of them, one of the public defenders, were women).  The back half of the room, basically about a dozen rows of benches, had perhaps 25-30 people seated on them, awaiting their turn for the conversation with the city attorney, and that population was people of color except for Elliott, me, and a couple of others. 

Except for the fact that I notice these things (probably because I did so much work to try to advance opportunities for women in college sport much earlier in my career), it seemed to be of no remark or interest or importance that all but one of the professionals in the courtroom were women.  I am quite sure that had Elliott and I been sitting there 25 years ago, the professional crew would have been almost exclusively male.  I regard this as an entirely positive development in our society.  What was not so positive, however, was the ethnic makeup of the defendants and their friends or family.

In early January Elliott went back to court with his attorney.  The upshot of the negotiations between lawyer and prosecutor was that Elliott would plead guilty to a misdemeanor, which would be vacated and dismissed after a year.  The matter will remain on his record forever, but one other change apparently makes a difference:  he pled guilty to violating a Minneapolis ordinance, not a state law.  So he got the matter settled 4 days before he went off to school at Moorhead State.  I wasn't thrilled that this remains on his record, but he can truthfully answer "no" when asked if he has been convicted of a felony or gross misdemeanor.  Elliott's summary:  "So basically mission accomplished as far as I was concerned.  It couldn't get much better than that since they weren't going to throw it out entirely."

Elliott learned of the absurdity of the justice system, as one must have fewer than $1500 in total assets to qualify for a public defender, and most regular attorneys will charge at least between $1500 and 2000 for any kind of case like that, so if one happens to have just above $1500 in assets, you either pay everything you own just for legal representation or you take the full weight of what the court throws at you because you can't afford to fight it.  Elliott concluded it is not exactly a fair system for people who are not well off, and not surprising that people who are poor are charged with a greater number of crimes.

            The well-bred contradict other people.  The wise contradict themselves.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

            Back to the past:  No sooner had I mailed last year's letter than there appeared in the New York Times an op-ed piece by Margaret MacMillan, the author of one of the three books of the "trilogy" on World War I that I read last year.  She drew interesting parallels between the last decade plus (that is, 2000-2013) and the decade or so that preceded WWI.  One of her more ominous observations was that all of the leaders before WWI were certain that war would never come because they had managed to avoid it for so long—but, of course, it did come.  MacMillan wonders, apropos of the modern world, if we think that major war won't happen anymore and we think we're all done with that.  But she muses, with the niggling little problems, especially the terrorist world versus the first world, if I can put it that way, if a major eruption could not occur again.  Heavens, I hope not.

            I write at the end of December, 2013:  Unless something really interesting is written during the 2014 centennial year of the start of World War I, I won't belabor the subject further.  I am certain there will be much written during the upcoming year, and especially around June 28 (the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand) and early August (when the guns started firing); it will be interesting to see if there is anything novel or more insightful than what has already been written in the (voluminous) 100 years of WWI history and literature.  (MacMillan estimates 32,000 books and articles in English alone.)  I noted with amusement that Bloomberg Business Week Daily, in its "Six Very Unlikely Predictions for 2014-and Many More Sensible Prognostications" on December 31, 2013, included this among the unlikely ones:  "World War I sets off a travel boom."

            Of course thought-provoking comments were made as the year progressed.  One came early, in a New York Review of Books review of several books on WWI (including all 3 of the ones I mentioned last year), and the review author made this comment about the books:  "They leave us in no doubt that—for our generation at least—it’s the play of personality (and mainly of personalities in high office) that signifies most in the countdown of the years and months to Armageddon."  That's a frightening thought, although I suspect that it gets remarkably close to the truth.

            Another also came early, in the New Yorker in February, and while not making a new point, adds emphasis to a view I advanced as well:  "Thus was unleashed the calamitous conflict that, more than any other series of events, has shaped the world ever since; without it we can doubt that communism would have taken hold in Russia, fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany, or that global empires would have disintegrated so rapidly and so chaotically."

            On this same topic, Elliott and I were talking about the origins of WWI and WWII and he made the interesting observation that we think about those conflicts as the U.S. and other countries against equals, but "we forget that most European countries are equal or smaller in size than most U.S. states, so imagine us being in a war against Wisconsin to get an idea of how close it would be--the proximity of things is much closer in Europe where the battles took place, so being in Spain during WWII, for example, would be for us like having a massive war going on just over in Wisconsin.  Just because it is 'a different country' over there does not mean far away, unlike here."  I checked the square mileage, and it was more like the U.S. against Minnesota and Wisconsin combined, but the point is the same.  Says something for the Germans, I suppose.

            In April the Economist reviewed MacMillan's and Clark's books.  It was an excellent review.  It also provoked many reader comments, a couple of which caught my eye.

We will argue the "cause" of WW I -- who was responsible -- until the world ends or historians shut-up. The first is unlikely at present, the second alternative unattainable at any time.  [The causes were being reargued at length in the reader comments to the book review—it's not just historians.]

We can, though, argue that one of the most fascinating things about the Great War is how little it fascinates Americans. I knew veterans of the AEF, men who participated in a war that in the days of my youth was no further distant in time than Vietnam is for us today. But, they were overshadowed by the far greater numbers who had fought in the just ended Second World War. The veterans of the 1941-1945 war were young (still in their 'twenties) and post-1945 America largely belonged to them. There was already something musty about the Great War experience in the American imagination. It was slightly comic (funny, shallow tin helmets and goofy biplanes along with a cartoonish Kaiser with his waxed mustache) compared to the technological gee-whiz of radar and the atom bomb.

Americans simply shrugged off the Great War. . . .  America's cultural legacy of the war was "Over There" and novelty songs like "How Ya' Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm." The Yanks returned to Over Hear singing "Hinky Dinky Parlez-Vous" with its grateful acknowledgment of the Mademoiselle of Armitiers "who got the Palm and Croix de Guerre/For washing soldier's underwear."

And that -- with the exception of bonus marches -- was about it for the Great War and American culture.

I agree with the writer's observation.  My great uncle Orv (who, with his wife Inez, lived in the house we live in now) used to recount his experiences in France in WWI.  (My father recalls hearing the same stories over and over.)  When I was growing up, however, he was the exception; the vast majority of war stories and recollections I heard were indeed WWII.  It was so much closer in time, and so much more dramatic (atomic bombs, the Holocaust, and both Japan and Germany as enemies), and those telling the stories so much younger and more energetic, that we did indeed mostly forget about WWI.  From what I've read of American history from 1918 to 1941, there wasn't much attention to WWI then, either—Americans seemed almost to want to block it out of memory.

            Purely coincidentally, indulging in my appetite for British murder mysteries, I began reading a series that features a Scotland Yard inspector who fought in the trenches of WWI and who's haunted by the experiences.  His flashbacks to the trenches form a notable part of his character; the authors of the series (a mother-son team, which is unique in mystery fiction as far as I know) clearly did a lot of research on soldiers' lives in the trenches of France.  So in addition to the histories, I'm also reminded of the awful (both physically and psychologically) experiences of the soldiers.

            The man who says his wife can't take a joke, forgets she took him.

(model)

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements.  They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

            The Boston Globe reminded us that 2014 is also the 200^th anniversary of the end of the War of 1812.  It began as an offshoot of the Napoleonic wars—the British were impressing American seamen into the Royal Navy and they were interfering with American overseas trade, both part of their struggle with France—and they were encouraging Indian attacks.  The end result of the war, however, was almost entirely status quo ante when the Treaty of Ghent was signed in 1814.  The U.S. gave up no territory, nor did the British (in Canada), and the biggest losers were American Indians, who no longer had British protection against the advances of settlers from the eastern U.S. 

            It had not, however, been a shining moment for the U.S.  The Senate only approved a declaration of war 19-13, with New England and New York bitterly opposed because of the effect on trade, so the country went into the war divided.  It didn't do well militarily, either, and would have done much worse had not Britain been so preoccupied with Napoleon.  But when the treaty was signed and the war was done (which occurred in that order:  fighting went on for some months after the treaty was signed because it took so long for the news of a treaty to reach the U.S. from Europe), the two countries quite promptly became allies.  As the Globe writer put it, even the insult of burning the White House "did not prevent the special relationship from developing between the United States and Britain over time, thanks to some strategic amnesia on both sides."

            The Globe writer also notes with amusement that "To an impressive degree, the mythmakers of the era were able to turn its indignities into a lasting set of symbols, including the USS Constitution, 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' and 'Don’t give up the ship!' which turned a bungled naval engagement into a rallying cry."

            At the same time I was reading the mystery series set in England in 1919-20, I was reading another series set in Regency England, in 1811-12.  In addition to marvelous depictions of daily life at that time (especially among the wealthy and nobility, although not exclusively so), there were also occasional references to the damn Americans declaring war and trying to take advantage of British engagement with Napoleon to lure or capture Canada (which did in fact happen, and at which the Americans failed miserably).  The author of the series, C. S. Harris, a former faculty member with an M.A. and Ph.D. in history, also has the protagonist in conversations with Benjamin Franklin's son (who was a loyalist in the Revolutionary War and lived out his life in England).  She doesn't focus on the effects of the war very much, except for occasional allusions to its effect on British politics of the time, unlike the series set after WWI, but the books do a good job of conveying what life was like in ways that reading history may not always do.

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.

Bela Lugosi (aka Count Dracula)

            I sent this drawing to a fair number of friends and posted it on Facebook and asked people to name him.  I was amazed that only two people, my brother and a long-time friend, knew who it was.  When Elliott sent it to me, I knew instantly.  Maybe that's because I watched too many Dracula movies when I was younger.  As a number of friends pointed out, they hadn't imagined Elliott would reach back so far in history, and were trying to think of someone more current than Lugosi.

Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.

[A cynic is] a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

            December is a month we regard with anticipation and dismay, simultaneously.  With anticipation because we have friends for dinner from time to time, other parties and events, and of course the holiday gatherings.  With dismay because we have friends for dinner from time to time, other parties and events, and of course the holiday gatherings.  It seems, especially to my introverted wife, a hectic time.  When we get to early January, we look back with great pleasure on the good company and good times we had in December—and are glad we are in January and (we hope consistently) headed to Florida for a week.  (Although not this coming January because we committed last December [2013] to go to India with our friends the Sonnesyns in January [2015]).

            The day of taking down the tree and putting away the stockings and decorations is always a little depressing, for me, just because it means the holidays are done and we face the bleakest (cold, dark) days of the year.  A sentiment that I am sure is not unique with me.  There is also a certain level of what I might call "dark optimism" that accompanies the careful storage of the ornaments and decorations in their boxes so that they can be unpacked and used next year:  one assumes one will be here next year to unpack them.  I'm not particularly morbid or fatalistic but it always occurs to me, while storing the boxes, that I may not be here to see them the next Christmas.

            We only put 380 ornaments on our Christmas tree this year (Kathy counted as she was taking them off, just out of curiosity).  We promise to do better next year; we have quite a few we didn't hang, including some cute little red ones that my sister-in-law gave us after Christmas.  Elliott says we have to reach 400, at least.

Friendship . . . is not something you learn in school, but if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship you really haven't learned anything.

If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

            We went to Florida in early January.  We unwittingly picked a wonderful time to be gone, meteorologically speaking:  Minneapolis for part of the time saw daytime high temperatures of -13 and wind chills another 20-30 degrees colder.  It was a polar vortex, we all learned, which brought much of the country record lows and the coldest temps in 20 years.  While it wasn't all that warm in Naples every day, it was still 70-80-90 degrees warmer than Minneapolis.  (One day while we were in Naples, there was a wind chill warning; we laughed and laughed.) 

We were on the beach one afternoon, after the polar vortex had made its way through the Midwest and was heading south and east, and saw this wall of white puffy clouds advancing slowly across the Gulf from the northwest.  Really quite a stunning cloud formation, almost all across the horizon north and west.   Our meteorologist friend Kenny affirmed that the clouds were the leading edge of the cold air, the last gasp of the polar vortex—"much more dense than the air it was replacing, so the warmer, more humid air was displaced upwards, which initiated the cloud-building process."  The temperatures dropped as the clouds rolled in.  That was one of the most direct visual effects of weather I have ever seen from such a distance (both looking across the Gulf and thinking about how it came all the way from the North Pole!).

            One of those odd coincidences:  we went to the Ford/Edison summer estates and took the historian's tour.  It was exactly 100 years ago on the date we went that Henry Ford announced the $5-per-day minimum wage at his plants, about double the going rate at the time.  He did it to reduce turnover and increase production, not because he was a nice guy.  He wasn't.  This wasn't a site that was worth the $25-each charge for the "historian's tour."  Edison had a summer home and lab there; Ford acquired a house next door but only visited about two weeks per year, around Edison's birthday—so hardly a Ford "estate."  It's two homes and a guest house, all quite modest, on some nice real estate on a river.  Ho hum.

            Another odd coincidence.  While poking around Sanibel and Captiva, and gathering shells for nefarious purposes, we also went to the Mucky Duck for lunch (a fun bar and restaurant on the Gulf coast) and to the Bubble Room for a drink later (a funky restaurant and bar on Captiva).  The latter requires a short story.  One of the things that many people comment on when they come to our house during the Christmas holidays is the bubble lights on the tree—most people have not seen them since they were kids or have never seen them at all.  Our friends the Collinses told us that we really should visit the Bubble Room because it has bubble lights hung all over the place.  We did and it does.  Just so I could say I had bubble lights from the Bubble Room, I bought a couple of replacements.  The next morning at the condo Kathy happened to be looking at the package and discovered that the bubble lights were made in Cannon Falls, MN.  We went a long way to get something made at home!

            I have decided that shelling and golfing are similar:  an excuse for a pleasant walk.  Golf is just more organized and more expensive.  I think there should be Olympic shelling, with judging of shells conducted in the same subjective way that figure skating is, with "impartial" judges, that considers size, shape, color & hue, rarity, and so on.  Shells developed without flaw, and undamaged, are one of nature's most perfect and beautiful creations, in my opinion; it's too bad there's no tasteful way to use them decoratively.  We love to walk the beach collecting shells, then we bring them home and they sit in plastic bags in the basement.  While we were washing the sand off the ones we collected, I realized I can make shell Christmas tree ornaments!

            No sooner did we get back from Florida than I had in my email inbox, in a daily email with research news from the major research universities in the UK and US, a report from the University of Florida on a small preliminary study on the potential ecological harm from tourists moving shells from beaches.  According to one of the authors of the study,

Although significant research has been done on the impacts of human activity on live shellfish, including, recreational harvesting and curio collecting, we are still lacking rigorous studies estimating the scale of shell removal by humans.  Shells are remarkable in that they serve multiple functions in natural ecosystems, from beach stabilization to building materials for bird nests.

The report noted that "shells also provide a home or attachment surface for diverse marine organisms, including algae, seagrass, sponges, and other micro- and macro-organisms.  Hermit crabs use shells as their protective armor, while fish use shells to hide from predators.  These discarded exoskeletons of mollusks, including clams and oysters, are also important because most are made of calcium carbonate and in many coastal habitats they dissolve slowly and recycle back into the ocean."

Humans may play a significant role in altering habitats through activities that many would perceive as mostly harmless, such as beachcombing and seashell collecting. It is important that we continue to investigate the more subtle aspects of tourism-related activities and their impact on shoreline habitats.

            A thought along those lines actually occurred to me while we were walking the beach, but I didn't pursue it as we were looking at thousands and thousands of washed-up shell remnants.  But I suppose it's worth investigation.

            As I look out the window in late November at an early snowscape in Minnesota, I've decided I've been deluding myself for decades.  One should really not live in this climate in the winter, with the slop, ice and snow, long, dark nights, and bleak gray and brown landscape.  Or at least one should get away from it for an extended period between January and April.  Which is what we intend to continue doing.

Not a lot more to say about the trip, other than to once again warmly thank our friends the Dixons for the use of their condo.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.

            Our spare time in January and into February was devoted to bringing out Kathy's button collection (that is, clothing buttons) and getting parts of the collection mounted.  She was a serious collector earlier in her life, but since then the vast mass of buttons has been in boxes, now in our basement.  I've never known much about, or even thought much about, buttons, but I have been impressed by the buttons that she has how attractive and creative many of them are (and Kathy tells me that her sample, maybe 1500 or 2000 buttons, probably represents less than 1/10,000th of the buttons that exist in the world).  Kathy had expressed concern several times that some of the buttons—those made of cellulose, of which there are many—were deteriorating because they need to be exposed to air, and being sealed in bags and boxes was slowly destroying them.  I couldn't stand the fact that this neat little collection was going to self-destruct—and that after all her work, most of it was just sitting in boxes.  So I urged that we sort them and put the interesting ones in frames.  Kathy agreed.

            In the course of unpacking the buttons, I was astonished at the diversity of color, composition, shape, and size of buttons.  I had never imagined.  I also learned, to my surprise, that there is an NBS (National Button Society) that sets standards for displaying and measuring size (for those enter competition) and an MBS (Minnesota Button Society).  Kathy had been to meetings of the MBS and has a remarkable knowledge of the different kind of buttons.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised—there are societies for philatelists and numismatists and so on.  Is there an NSS?  (National Shellist Society?)

            (After I wrote that, I did a quick web search.  Why am I not surprised?  It's "conchology" and there is a Conchologists of America as well as a British Shell Collector's Club and the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland and various other national organizations of shell collectors.  I also learned that there are 147,076 photographs of shells on one website alone that includes 11,252 different species.  The Encyclopedia Britannica has an article on shell collecting.  Heavens.)

            We did have a difference of opinion on how the buttons should be displayed.  Kathy wanted artistic combinations; I was more interested in volume.  We compromised.

            So now we both have button collections hanging on the walls of our home:  she has clothing buttons and I have presidential campaign buttons.  Are there some additional buttons we could collect?

            I sometimes wonder what urge leads people to collect things.  I'm not a serious collector of anything but I have little collections of presidential campaign buttons and 1930s silhouettes on glass.  Kathy was at one time a serious button collector.  I have many friends who don't collect anything, to my knowledge; why us and not them?  I don't plan to start collecting shells.

            With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

         

Viggo Mortenson (aka Aragorn)

The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

I exchanged emails with a colleague, a meteorologist, who sends out episodic messages about the weather.  I mentioned him last year.  He maintained that the "polar vortex" weather in early January used to be quite normal for Minnesota.   I responded that I grew up here, and walked to school all through K-12, 1956-1969, and I don't remember a lot of -50 wind chills.  -20 and -30, yes, but not -50.  I said I thought that was a little abnormal even given warming trends.  He disagreed and pointed out that "the air temperature only got down to -23 here.  We used to beat that all the time, often multiple times per year.  Granted, the winds are usually calm when it's that cold, but not always.  In terms of cold and wind, we had something similar in 2009, 2004, and 1996.  1994 had one that was longer and more severe, and we did something similar or worse at least three times during the 80s and a whole bunch of times during the 70s."  The winters (as we knew them) are "going away," he wrote, and the evidence for that proposition is huge.  But when it hits -5, that's still damn cold, and people don't recognize that such temperatures are becoming less common. 

Kenny followed up our exchange with a message to his email list, and noted this:

The polar vortex is nothing new.  You know that jet stream that you see entering on the left side of your screen and exiting on the right?  It's part of the polar vortex!

Virtually every serious cold air outbreak in our region has gotten us "inside" the polar vortex, with the jet stream well to our south.

That [-23 in early January 2014] is tied for the 173rd coldest day in 142 years of observations.  So there's your historic outbreak:  Minneapolis has 172 days on record colder than last Monday.  So the temperatures were not unusual.  When you add in the winds, conditions were slightly more unusual, but by no means unheard-of.

What did make it unusual is that our recent winters have been notable for *not* having these sorts of events.  So now getting one is a big deal.  We haven't had a temperature colder than last Monday since 2004, 10 winter-seasons ago.  No other such cold-lacking streak exists in the record.  The result is that now, we actually get all freaked out about it hitting -23.  Did you see the stat I just put up?  We have been colder than that 172 times, what's the fuss?  The Associated Press recently ran [a story] about how not amazing, from a historical perspective, the "Polar Vortex" cold outbreak was.  It was cold and nasty, and also formerly commonplace.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's.  It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

It was interesting to realize (I probably much later than many) that my laptop and cell phone are really only a collection of software programs that have no content (although I guess my text messages are on my phone).  My documents are all in the cloud (both personal and work), my personal and University email are all on Google servers somewhere in the world, and of course everything else we all look at is out on the web somewhere.  In a way, it is reassuring that nothing's on my laptop, so if it is stolen or falls in a puddle, I've lost nothing except the software.  But it's also a little scary, because if for some reason all those servers and backups ever all go down, I have nothing.

            I horrified myself after I had composed only a few pages of this letter:  I accidentally deleted it.  Oh no!  I learned, to my relief, that the cloud also stores documents even when deleted.  (That, of course, is both good and bad; if I ever really wanted a document deleted, gone, non-existent, I don't know what I'd have to do to make that happen—not that I have anything I'm determined to extinguish.  I did discover that it seems one cannot go back more than 2 months to find deleted documents, but I don't know if that means they've been permanently deleted or if they're just off somewhere else in the cloud.)

            The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

          Moderation is a fatal thing.  Nothing succeeds like excess.

            Jefferson's ringing affirmation in the Declaration of Independence (as edited by the committee that issued the final version) that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is one of the most oft-cited lines in American political history.  But there is at least one major conceptual problem with it.  Whose creator?  The answer will be different depending on who you ask; a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Taoist, Hindu, and Jew will not agree on who the creator is, or even if there is only one.  For non-believers, the question is irrelevant if not silly.

            Even if one grants there is a creator that people could agree on, which is impossible, what is the citation for Jefferson's declaration?  The Bible?  Where is it written there?  The Koran?  The Talmud?  The Bhagavad Gita?  Some other putatively divinely-inspired text?  I'd like to be pointed to the texts that set out those rights that Jefferson proclaimed.  (We can set aside, for this purpose, the fact that the authors of the Declaration were not including women or people with darker skin color, although those are rather major omissions from the perspective of the 21st Century.)

            Finally, where was it decided that those are the rights that this creator settled on, rather than some other ones?  Some argue that Jefferson took the list from John Locke, who articulated it as "life, liberty, and estate" (property) in one place and in other formulations in other writings.

            It still seems to me that this is a precarious footing on which to build a civil society that includes guarantees of individual rights—or aspires to do so.  If the premise is that these are creator-granted rights, what the rights are is uncertain, who has them is uncertain, and who can change them is uncertain.  Far better to acknowledge openly, I think, that we only have whatever rights we are prepared as a collective ("we the people" in a democracy) to give each other—and, in theory, anyone can leave a society when they don't like the set of rights it has adopted.  In some cases, rights are minimal or non-existent (authoritarian and totalitarian states); in others, they are constrained; in yet others, they are part of the fiber of the society.  In practice, of course, the vast majority of people are not free to leave the society they were born into, no matter how awful it is—they haven't the means to leave, or the society won't let them leave, or they have attachments (such as family) that make it impossible for them to leave, or they are more afraid of going to a place they do not know than staying where they are.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.  There is something unfair about its use.  It is hitting below the intellect.

Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

            For no identifiable reason I've been puzzling over the order of first names we use to identify couples we know.  With my parents' generation, it was almost—but not always—the male first:  Don & Hellen, Ralph & Adeline, Vern & Esther, Bill & Helen, and so on.  In only one case I can recall did the female come first, Phyllis & Allan.  Moving ahead to my own generation, I find myself mostly following the same practice.  Scott & Christie, Joe & Genie, Elmer & Ginny, Holger & Dagny, Rolf & Roberta, Geoff & Mary, etc.  But I can think of a few cases, among my friends, where the female name rolls off my tongue first:  Ann & Brian, Marion & Gordy, and Marti & Michael.

            I would be interested to know why we pair the first names of couples we know in the order that we do.  I suppose one could posit long sexist habit or the reflection of a patriarchal society, but that doesn't seem like a very satisfactory or altogether complete explanation.  It certainly isn't a reflection of the relative strength of personality or "dominance" of one person or the other in the couple, at least not of the couples I can think of.  It also is likely the case that the order I use to refer to a particular couple may not be the same order as others may use; Geoff & Mary obviously could be Mary & Geoff to someone else.

My one hypothesis is that, at least in my case (I don't know about my parents'), the first name I use is the first person of the couple who I met.  (I thought of this when contemplating the order I use for my siblings:  Tracy & Joan, Holly & John.  Obviously I knew my siblings long before they got married.)  That hypothesis holds true in every case I can think of; in those cases where the female name comes first naturally to me, it is the female of the couple who I knew first.

Clearly a non-problem in the larger scheme of life, but a funny little puzzle.

Actors are so fortunate.  They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears.  But in real life it is different.  Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. . . .  The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

            I enjoyed spending 7½ hours in the car in one day transporting Elliott to Moorhead State and driving home.  Said no Gary ever.  But we did manage to talk for the entire 3 and ¾ hours the trip up took.  In that amount of time we covered a lot of topics, in particular upcoming college life far away from home for the first time.  We agreed that someone is really smart if they can earn a Ph.D. in something like theoretical cosmology or computational chemistry.  Earning a law degree or medical degree or a Ph.D. is a slog but it doesn’t necessarily signify that you’re really smart.  (Those degrees certainly do not mean someone is not smart, but they do not necessarily guarantee really smart, although people who earn such degrees are probably not on the bottom half of the intelligence bell curve.  We could agree on that even if we know we can’t define what “smart” is.)  Nor, of course, do such degrees indicate that the recipient is necessarily a better human being, kinder, wiser, etc.  We then moved on to the importance of falsifiability in making claims about the world.  And so on.

            Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.

          Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

            Elliott got to Moorhead and classes began January 13.  His 4th day of classes was cancelled because of blizzard conditions and dangerous wind chills.  Later in the month, when Minnesota was sunk in another deep freeze, the University (Twin Cities) cancelled classes for a day and a half—but, oddly, Moorhead did not.  The temperatures in Moorhead, however, prompted a few text messages from Elliott to me (here condensed into one paragraph):

I don't know how Moorhead functions.  Every time I walk outside I gag on the first breath because the fluid in my lungs flash freezes and every road and sidewalk is steep and

slippery. . . .  I imagine people who live in places where it never goes below zero think that once it's cold it all feels the same.  It doesn't.  -20 is cold but it's bearable and can be very effectively mitigated by dressing appropriately.  -50 cannot.  It burns through everything. . . .  I'm making this up but I'm pretty sure every ten degrees you lose below 0 becomes exponentially more and more deadly and unbearable.  I'm almost tempted to find a place where it hits -60 just so I know what it's like.

            I thought his speculation about an exponential increase in effect as the temperature drops was interesting, so I forwarded it to my friendly climatologist friend Kenny, who wrote back to me:

I don't know enough about our physiology to say much, but I do know he is onto something.  I don't know about the exponential part, but I would agree that the difference between 0 and -10 is nothing like the difference between -30 and -40.  An inflection point seems to be somewhere in that range.  We lose heat so quickly after that, every few degrees will matter.  It's an interesting observation though.  In parts of the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, it does get that cold annually.  Even Winnipeg is a step up from what he's experiencing in Moorhead!

At the end of February, Elliott texted "I should've gone to school in California."  Fortunately, as is true for most of us, once the harshest winter weather passed, his willingness to stay in Moorhead increased.  Kathy's response, when she saw the text, responded "I should have gotten a job in Hawaii."

            It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.  People are either charming or tedious.

          Questions are never indiscreet.  Answers sometimes are.

            I won't belabor our winter.  It was long and oppressive, and one of the worst since records have been kept in the late 19th Century (according to the "Winter Misery Index" maintained by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources), and the most "miserable" since 1983-84.  The scale of misery is based on calculations involving both snow and temperature; in mid-March, we were at 195.  Severe is 151-221; very severe is 222+.  1983-84 was 275.  Neither Kathy nor I can remember it in particular (but winters and summers for both of us tend to blend and blur unless there's something really startling about one of them).  Because it has been so long since we've had such a high misery index, however, people groused all winter.  The season did produce, for me, at least a couple of amusing comments.

            *I* was complaining about the weather in an email to a colleague at Indiana University, just before we both attended a meeting in Tampa Feb 28-March 2.  He wrote back "I’m embarrassed to show how little I paid attention in grade school, Gary, but remind me:  why are there human settlements in Minnesota?"  And the guy whose office was next door to mine put up a picture with a pained face and the lines "The air hurts my face.  Why do I live in a place where the air hurts my face?"  I was reminded of these comments as I finished up this letter on December 1, when it was much colder than it should have been.

            All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does. That's 

           his.        

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

            Elliott sent this to me last winter.  Said he was just doodling with colored pencils and thought I might recognize it.  (His original was in color, mostly blues and yellows.)

            Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

            Where does he come up with these hypotheticals?  Elliott asked me one time what I'd do if someone offered me a brand-new Ford F150 pickup truck, free, but with the restriction that I couldn't sell it and the obligation to drive it as my primary vehicle.  I couldn't decide; the idea that I would drive a pickup truck is so alien that I would recoil at driving the thing, even if it were free.  We agreed, however, that if he received such an offer, he'd take it—it would be a free vehicle.  I think I'd probably not take it.  Just as I doubt I will never wear a baseball cap—and certainly not a baseball cap on backwards, which really makes a guy look like a brainless doofus!

Prayer must never be answered:  if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.

A long-time friend had his first book of poetry published early in the year.  I wrote to congratulate him but told him that one aspect of my life, I suppose unfortunate, is that I just don't do, don't get, poetry.  Opera, classical music, some pop music, fiction here and there, non-fiction, movies on occasion, concerts, art and museums, architecture, but not poetry.  And not ballet.  I am just an ignoramus in those two areas of the arts (and not a lot better in many of the others, either!).

            He wrote back that "what you say is true I think of most other American readers as well. I've been tuned into it from an early age, and I mainly credit my mom for that, the relish with which she read A. A. Milne and Dr. Seuss aloud to us on the living room couch. For me, opera is one of those dead zones of personal appreciation, and I think I should be able to get into it because it's another mix of language and music, but I probably just can't get past the out-sized acting style, over-the-top costuming and such."  Even Kathy, life-long opera lover, agreed with his description.  So do I, but on the other hand he's also correct in observing that opera is just words and music in form different from others.  My problem with opera is that I can never decide if I'm following the plot or listening to the music, and I don't seem to be able to focus on both simultaneously (which is a little odd, I admit, especially since the "plot" in opera is negligible).  But novice that I am, I am coming to enjoy opera the more I see/hear it.  Whether I'll ever get to poetry and ballet is an open question.

            A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Krystin wrote to me and her mother in late January.  She had been hospitalized in the fall with 3 different viral infections (simultaneously), and any plans for a pancreas transplant (which eliminates diabetes) had to be put on hold because the doctors will not do a transplant when a patient has a viral infection.  She had also been advised by her endocrinologist to wait on the pancreas transplant, given all the surgeries she's already had and her continued medical travails. 

There is also the problem that pancreas transplants are not as successful as kidney transplants.  The transplanted pancreas has a higher failure rate (within the first 5 years), but some transplants are successful over the longer term.  At my suggestion, Krystin contacted Dr. Elizabeth Seaquist at the University, who is heading up a project called "Decade of Discovery," a joint effort between the University and the Mayo Clinic to find a cure for diabetes within ten years.  Dr. Seaquist was kind enough to write back to Krystin outlining the factors she should think about as she makes a decision about a pancreas transplant.

Krystin reported to Pat and me that one of the viral infections had recurred.  (I quote her message with her permission.)

This also means that I can't be reactivated on the pancreas waiting list yet.  I don't know how long my system has to be clean of CMV and EBV [two viruses], but I know it's at least a month, maybe a month and a half. . . .  So, speaking of pancreas waiting list, I want you to know that I am going to go forward with it.  I will only accept a pancreas that is in 'excellent' condition [which was Dr. Seaquist's advice], but nevertheless, I'm going for it, even if it's against my endocrinologist's advice.  Like with the kidney, I need to do this.  I know the success rate and lifespan of a transplanted pancreas is not as high as a kidney, but I need to try.  And if it rejects right away or 5 years down the line, I will be OK, because I will know that I tried.  I would then go back on the pump (hopefully by then they will have released the pumps with the continuous glucose monitoring, where the pump delivers insulin for my, based on my BG, without me having to do anything - like wearing a bionic pancreas on my belt).  If you don't support my decision to do this, that's OK, because it's my decision to make.  I just want your understanding as to why I need to do this.

I told her I wasn't going to argue with her, that it was her call.  I think she expected me (or perhaps her mother) to question her judgment.  This is so subjective, however, that as long as I was certain she had made herself acquainted with the pros and cons, it had to be her decision.

What does the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

            It has been interesting to watch the evolution of public views and state actions on gay marriage.  This sea change in our society, and, for example, the unusual decision by the Virginia Attorney General to join plaintiffs in that state seeking to overturn the Virginia constitutional provision making gay marriage illegal, led me in late January to wonder about another element of civil law pertaining to associations:  if the laws and state constitutional provisions barring gay marriage are deemed to be an unconstitutional infringement on fundamental rights, why are not statues and state constitutional provisions barring polygamy and polyandry not also unconstitutional?  I can't ascertain any conceptual difference.  If long-barred marriages (between gays and lesbians) are now seen as legally permissible, why not long-barred marriages between multiple men and women?  (My long-time friend and constitutional law professor Fred Morrison explained to me that it is "fundamental" rights that are at issue.  "Those rights that are fundamental merit 'strict scrutiny' [by the courts], i.e., a 'compelling public interest' test.  Those that are not fundamental get lesser scrutiny.")

            Justin Morrill—he who drafted the land-grant act that endowed colleges/universities across the country—also drafted a federal anti-bigamy statute that was passed by Congress and signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862.  The Supreme Court heard a case in 1878 (Reynolds v. United States) based on the statute; a Mormon was convicted of bigamy and appealed adverse decisions to the Court, claiming religious freedom.  The Court upheld the conviction unanimously.  The First Amendment prohibits laws barring the free exercise of religion; the Court distinguished between actions and opinions and maintained that if polygamy was allowed, another group might claim human sacrifice was also protected, so Congress was permitted to legislate against actions but not religious opinion.  The Court, if a case were brought today, would have to explicitly overrule Reynolds.

            It gets even more interesting when one contemplates a combination of polygamy and polyandry:  what if 3 men want to get married to 3 women (collectively)?  Or 5 men and 7 women?  As I understand the general approach the courts take, the state (that is, "we the people") has to have a compelling interest in restricting the fundamental rights set out in the constitution.  Courts are rapidly concluding that there's no compelling state interest in prohibiting gay marriage.  Why, then, would there be a compelling state interest in prohibiting collective marriages?

There may be one or some compelling state interests.  Perhaps child welfare?  (I could make an argument that child abuse might be less prevalent in collective marriages—as soon as one member of the marriage started abusing a child, the other members of the marriage might well toss him/her out—that is, "divorce" the person.)  Health care coverage could be a challenge (that wouldn't exist under a single-payer system, of course), as could wills and Social Security payments and retirement benefits, but those are details that would have to be worked out if the legislature and courts concluded on constitutional grounds that collective marriages could not be prohibited.  Rewriting divorce law could be a challenge.

            Of course, sometimes the courts (including the U.S. Supreme Court) have made sophisticated legal arguments, with all kinds of precedents cited, that basically boil down to "we think not."  The concept of collective marriages may be so alien to our culture that the courts will simply say "nah."  The "originalists" on the Court would certainly gag if the question of collective marriages came before them.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.

            Early February was a sad time for Kathy's family.  As Kathy wrote on her Facebook page,

My one and only uncle and the man who was like a second father to me, Phil Pagel, died peacefully on February 6. He had just turned 80, an age none of us ever thought he'd see.  A paraplegic since 1970, he lived a full life in Blair Nebraska and will be missed by my mother - his sister and amazing caregiver for the past 13 years.

And, of course, missed very deeply by Kathy and her brother, and their spouses and children.  I had known Phil only about 4 years, as a result of visits to his house in Blair, Nebraska, to see him and Kathy's mother.

It's one of the cases—as is sometimes the case with those who reach an advanced age—where the death was bittersweet.  Phil, as Kathy wrote in her FB post, was paraplegic from age 36 because of a malignant tumor in his spine.  Surgery to remove the cancer and relieve pain was successful but it left him in a wheelchair.  But he had a full and active career—from his wheelchair—as a college administrator at a small private college in Blair and also led an active civic life, serving on local, state, and national boards.  Then because of serious illness about 13 years ago, he had to have both legs amputated, and Kathy's mother (whose husband, Kathy's father, had died a few years earlier) went down there to take care of him—so had been providing 24/7 care for years.  Kathy's mom is in good shape but was getting very weary of the burden, and Phil was in an emotional and intellectual place where he no longer wished to live, although he remained in full possession of his mental faculties.  Medical complications led to his death in February. 

Kathy and her brother were his "kids" and they were all extremely close.  So there was great sadness, but also great relief.  He wanted to exit, and Kathy's mom could return to the Twin Cities, which is where both her children and her grandchildren live.  I liked Phil a lot; he was a really nice guy and interesting to talk to.

(I sent Phil a copy of my annual letter the last couple of years—since I've known him—and heard about it at his funeral.  Apparently he'd commented to friends of his about it—yes, about how much he enjoyed it!—and those friends remembered that and told me, once they figured out who I was.)

I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

           

Cate Blanchett (aka Galadriel)

            A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

In addition, the mother of my long-time bridge partner and friend, Ann Sonnesyn, and her brother Rolf, Eleanor Sonnesyn, died (at age 95) the day before Phil.  I knew Eleanor for over 40 years and thought the world of her (and of Ann's father Cliff as well, who died a number of years ago).  One of my fondest and funniest memories of Eleanor was from the bridge table.  You must understand that Eleanor never used profanity or vulgarities.  In the mid-1970s, when Ann and I were socializing together, we one night played bridge at Cliff and Eleanor's home.  Eleanor was declarer on one hand and in the course of the contract play, she lost 3 finesses to me.  After the third one, she let out a "damn you, Gary!"  She was immediately extremely embarrassed—and the other 3 of us at the table laughed and laughed.

Moreover, a few days before Phil and Eleanor died, the mother of my bridge and otherwise friend and University colleague Laura Koch died in New York.  I never met Laura's mother, but this was the third death to which I was somehow personally connected within a week.  That phenomenon brought to mind the "old wives' tale" that death comes in threes.  I don't give the tale much credence, but I did wonder about the phrase itself:  is it sexist?

I wrote to a few good friends (women) who are highly educated and also think about this kind of stuff.  One of my friends wrote back as follows:

These days, I'd call this an "urban legend," which does seem less sexist than "old wives' tale," a term I'd be more than happy to see written out of the lexicon.  Here's the Wikipedia entry (not an authority, of course, but indicative):

Old wives' tale is a derogatory epithet used to indicate that a supposed truth is actually a superstition or something untrue, to be ridiculed. The phrase comes with the assumption that a story told by old women could not have credibility, regardless of the particulars of the story. The phrase is used in the context of unvalued women's knowledge. It can be said sometimes to be a type of urban legend, said to be passed down by older women to a younger generation.

Of course, "urban" legend is a little restrictive in its own way!

            I wasn't so sure.  I thought "urban legend" implies recency or currency, whereas these kinds of sayings have arisen over decades or even centuries, and Wikipedia had the same take:  "the term is used to differentiate modern legend from traditional folklore in pre-industrial times."  So I thought maybe "adage," which the dictionary says is (1) "a traditional saying expressing a common experience or observation; proverb," or (2) "a traditional saying that is accepted by many as true or partially true; proverb."

            Another friend chimed in: 

I think that "geezer's tale" might be more inclusive, however possibly ageist.  It's hard to find a phrase that captures the meaning of "old wives' tale."

A third friend summarized:  "I think y'all have taken care of 'old wives tale' and I join you in wishing it banished from the lexicon."  I concurred; it's a phrase we can eliminate.

But after all this back and forth, my question was still whether death in threes is a common experience or a notion "accepted by many as true or partially true"?  One of my friends addressed the question and I think she's right:  "The thing about threes I suspect shows up with respect to many things, not just death.  Fact is, we tend to notice confluences of bad things, but not of good.  And given random possibilities, there will definitely sometimes be threes."  The general response of the statisticians supports her conclusion:  deaths are random.  But we make connections and remember them.

            Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won't be invited to cocktail parties.

Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art.

            It seems that sometimes the role of parent never ends.  I suspect all of my friends who are my chronological peers would chime in on this.  Early in the year Krystin asked if I would meet with her endocrinology physician and be part of her support group.  I told her I did not want to do that; I had been "part of her support group" for 15 years or more, and that that basically meant I nagged at her to take care of her diabetes, and since she didn't want to, all being "part of her support group" meant was that I was irritating her—and getting irritated myself in response.  I told her I was done with that role and reluctant to reprise it.

            She wrote back frankly.  "I know, and I understand. The problem before was that I didn't WANT the help.  Now I'm in a different boat, and I'm ready to reach out for help.  I discussed it with Nancy last night at my appointment, and I told her that I kinda feel silly asking for help, like I'm a kid again, but she pointed out that when it comes to one's health, you are never too old to ask for help, especially when it can be beneficial.  And I believe this time around it can be beneficial."

            So we tried it out; all that the doctor wanted was for me to play a role in reminding Krystin to do blood glucose tests (to monitor blood sugar levels in order to have an effective insulin administration schedule—the part of managing diabetes she has always hated the most.  I said I would be glad to handle that with text messages during the day.  We tried that and it seemed to work.  (I have never blamed her for hating to do blood glucose tests.  I have done them myself a few times over the years, just to see how my blood glucose numbers compared with hers, and those damn pricks in the finger hurt!)

There is a luxury in self-reproach.  When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.  It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Elliott sent me this:

          

          Or the Founding Fathers suddenly appeared from the 1780s.  But I told Elliott there are two things wrong with the answer.  One, the "entirety of information" is not available digitally.  There are many, many books that have not been digitized, along with back issues of many scholarly and general-readership journals.  Much of the information may be historical, or may be fiction and literature, but it nonetheless is part of information we have.  Two, who in 2014 would write "known to man"?  Most people, in the circles I move in, anyway, long ago dropped "man" as a surrogate for all of humanity because it's sexist.

America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.

In the odds-and-ends category for the year.

--          In a very small study at the University of Florida, the researchers reported that "you may have only had one glass of wine with dinner, but if you’re 55 or older, that single serving may hit you hard enough to make you a dangerous driver."  They looked at how the "legally non-intoxicating levels of alcohol affect the driving skills of two age groups:  36 people ages 25 to 35 and 36 people ages 55 to 70. They found that although neither age group imbibed enough alcohol to put them over the legal driving limit, a blood alcohol level of 0.08, just one drink can affect the driving abilities of older drivers."  Their smart-aleck conclusion was that "so, baby boomers, what you suspected is true:  you can't party like you used to."  Even though this was so small a study that it will need to be replicated with more subjects before one can reach firm conclusions, and with sufficient numbers to differentiate among groups (e.g., men versus women, Caucasians versus people of color), it does align with my personal experience:  even a couple of glasses of wine makes me wary about driving. Ugh.  [Alfredo L. Sklar, Jeff Boissoneault, Mark T. Fillmore, Sara Jo Nixon.  Interactions between age and moderate alcohol effects on simulated driving performance.  Psychopharmacology, 2013; 231 (3): 557]

--         I must confess I'm guilty here:  in a report from the University of Buffalo, a professor of Emergency Medicine found, in what can be a surprise to no one, that "distracted walking results in more injuries per mile than distracted driving. Consequences include bumping into walls, falling down stairs, tripping over clutter or stepping into traffic. The issue is so common that in London, bumpers were placed onto light posts along a frequented avenue to prevent people from slamming into them. Though injuries from car accidents involving texting are often more severe, physical harm resulting from texting and walking occurs more frequently, research shows."  The physician goes on to surmise that the actual number of accidents and injuries is considerably higher than the official statistics suggest because "patients tend to underreport information about themselves when it involves a behavior that is embarrassing."  Moreover, the accidents aren't just due to texting; people also scan their email or check social media while walking as well.  "The study also found that the age group most at risk for cell-phone related injuries while walking are adults under 30 -- chiefly those between the ages of 16 and 25."  [University at Buffalo. "Think it’s safe to type a quick text while walking? Think again."  ScienceDaily, 3 March 2014.]

I've decided I should be more cautious about reading email or texting while walking; the consequences of an injury, as we all know, become more serious the older one gets.  (The worst that's happened to me is that I've tripped over uneven pavement while using my cell phone, but I haven't fallen down.  One feels like an idiot when that happens, but the only harm is to one's dignity and comportment.)

--          Many of you who have children, or who have dealt with or cared for children, are familiar with Margaret Wise Brown's book Goodnight Moon.  We read it to both our kids (over and over).  On a fun website called Burrito Justice, the guy examines the path of the moon in the pictures in the book. 

            First he figures out, using geometry, that the moon as depicted in the windows is only about 49,000 km from earth, which is about 10 times closer than it really is.  He then calculates, given the progression of the moon, that the moon is drawing closer to the earth as the book progresses, at about 10,000 km per hour.

The Roche limit is the point at which, if the moon were close enough, "the Earth would cause such extreme tides on either end of the Moon that it would break apart and Earth would have a ring, which would be cool except for the lunar debris bombarding Earth and even higher tides, both in the ocean and the crust of the Earth itself (and increased earthquakes and volcanic activity) as the Moon drew closer."  He concludes:

Goodnight tides 
Goodnight air 
Goodnight life everywhere

because "if the Moon is moving towards the Earth, the little bunny has about three hours sleep before the moon is torn apart by the Roche limit, and four hours before another extinction event."

            We won't tell the kids about that.  They can grow up to be astronomers and figure it out themselves.

--          One of the minor irritants in our lives has been squirrels, which dig up all the gardens.  So I quizzed two faculty friends who are plant experts, and then went to the web.  I learned that a solution of hot pepper sauce, water, and dish detergent sprayed everywhere is supposed to be a good deterrent that also doesn't harm the soil or environment.  So I tried it.  I found I have to reapply it frequently, so it's not that great a solution.

            Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.  [Hence this letter!]

            Like many of my friends and colleagues, I've been increasingly alarmed at the rising income inequality in this country, now as bad as it was in the 1920s before the stock market crash, and heading in the direction of levels of inequality we saw in the late 19th Century and the age of the robber barons and the violent suppression of labor unions.  A remarkable study published this year by Gregory Clark and colleagues, researchers at Berkeley and Harvard, however, puts the changes in a larger historical context (which does not make the levels of inequality any more palatable nor does it mean, in my view, that we should not adopt public policy measures that help ensure those at the lowest end of the scale be able to live decently and have the opportunity to advance).  The researchers looked at voluminous data on surnames—which are a "surprisingly strong indicator of social status" in eight countries around the world, including Chile, China, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and the U.S.  They reported, apropos of surnames, that "rare or distinctive surnames associated with elite families many generations ago are still disproportionately represented among today’s elites."  Clark wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times and reported that what they found in their study was that

When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.

They go on to point out that this doesn't mean people can't control their own lives and that "in modern meritocratic societies, success still depends on individual effort."  But it seems that "the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited."  They contend that the effect is significantly genetic and declare that "alternative explanations that are in vogue — cultural traits, family economic resources, social networks — don’t hold up to scrutiny."

            (The authors looked at, among many other things, average income of people in Sweden who had rare noble names, traced since 1626, and those who had common names; the surnames of descendants of graduates of Oxford and Cambridge going back to the 12th Century; and in the U.S., descendants of pre-1850 graduates of Ivy League colleges and universities.  In all the cases, and in the others they looked elsewhere, there was a clear relationship between status then and status now.)

            Here's how the research in Sweden was explained in a piece in Slate by Matthew Yglesias.

           

It used to be that Sweden created new noble titles and new noble houses, but that process ended in the 17^th century. So if you have a noble surname in Sweden today, we know that your father's father's father's father's father's father's father (or whatever) was a member of the Swedish elite more than 300 years ago. By contrast, if you have the last name "Andersson" then that means that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather wasn't a nobleman and probably didn't practice a skilled trade either. That's why he wound up with the generic surname. So we can look at the present-day incomes of people with noble surnames and compare them to the present-day incomes of people named "Andersson" and get a picture of the long-term persistence of the noble/Andersson class gap. 

The graph of the results is striking, particularly when, as Yglesias points out, surname is a rather attenuated factor after 300 years.  "A person with a noble surname could still be of mostly lower- or middle-class ancestry . . . and vice versa, so the surname thing should underestimate the long-term persistence of the class gap in Sweden."

            The Chinese case is perhaps the most interesting. 

In China, there are only about 4,000 surnames; the 100 most common are held by nearly 85 percent of the population. Yet we were able to identify 13 rare surnames that were exceptionally overrepresented among successful candidates in imperial examinations in the 19th century. Remarkably, holders of these 13 surnames are disproportionately found now among professors and students at elite universities, government officials, and heads of corporate boards. Social mobility in the Communist era has accelerated, but by very little. Mao failed.

They also observe that "late medieval England was no less mobile than modern England."  That's something I never would have guessed; one things of medieval society as one where people were frozen in place by occupation and social status.

            Clark wrote that the upshot is that "my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage.  The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average—what social scientists call “regression to the mean”—but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past."

            The nature versus nurture question arises, of course.  Is the inequality passed down because of family culture or because of genes?  They conclude, for a variety of reasons, that social status is more a matter of genetics than upbringing.  Clark reaches a conclusion with which I concur.

The idea that low-status ancestors might keep someone down many generations later runs against most people’s notions of fairness. . . .  [Citing philosopher John Rawls,] innate differences in talent and drive mean that, to create a fair society, the disadvantages of low social status should be limited. We are not suggesting that the fact of slow mobility means that policies to lift up the lives of the disadvantaged are for naught—quite the opposite. Sweden is, for the less well off, a better place to live than the United States, and that is a good thing. And opportunities for people to flourish to the best of their abilities are essential. . . .  Large-scale, rapid social mobility is impossible to legislate.  What governments can do is ameliorate the effects of life’s inherent unfairness. Where we will fall within the social spectrum is largely fated at birth. Given that fact, we have to decide how much reward, or punishment, should be attached to what is ultimately fickle and arbitrary, the lottery of your lineage.

            There are (at least) two moderating factors that come into play.  Clark and colleagues note that if cultural rules do not bar marrying across socio-economic lines, social mobility will be greater.  Assortative mating (people choosing people like them) will occur in any case—the rich and beautiful and smart will more likely choose the rich and beautiful and smart than the less wealthy and less beautiful and less smart.  (The close-relationships literature documents that phenomenon as well.)  Second, it's 50-60% of the variation, which means that 40-50% of one's socio-economic status is dependent on other factors, which include hard work, ambition, etc.  (And luck can't be discounted.)

            In an interview in the British Prospect magazine, Clark commented on what effect education can have on social mobility.  He contrasted the U.S. and Sweden.  "In a society like the US, there’s a lot more private expenditure by people on education than in a society like Sweden, where it’s mostly provided by the state. So you’d expect, on normal accounts of social mobility, that the US would be a more rigid society with slower rates of mobility. But we don’t see any sign of that. So my interpretation here is that whatever educational system you set up, however fair and however open-access it is, there are just families that are better equipped to figure out what they need to do in the system, how you get ahead. And it’s impossible to stop those processes."

            He repeated for Prospect what appeared in the research report, and along the way pretty much (by implication) trashes the libertarian outlook on politics and society.

One of the strong conclusions of the book is that if it really is the case that more than half of people’s outcomes are predictable, then we really have to rethink the idea that it’s OK in a society to make the rewards or penalties from the accident of [who] your parents [are] as large as the market is going to throw up. I started off my life as a free-market economist. But studies such as these have these have convinced me that, in some sense, the Scandinavian or Nordic model has many attractions. If you’re going to be at the bottom of the social order, it’s better to be at the bottom in somewhere like Sweden than somewhere like the United States.

            My Swedish great-grandfather’s name was Olav Olson.  So I guess I know where my ancestors likely fell on the Swedish social scale.  (The apocryphal story is that he and his wife changed their name from Olson to Engstrand on the boat on the way over from Sweden because the food was served to people in alphabetical order and they wanted to be earlier in the serving line.  If the story is true, it is highly likely that Engstrand—“meadow by a stream” in Swedish—was a place name, probably near where they lived before they emigrated.)

            [I should note that many are unhappy with Clark's work and disagree vigorously with his conclusions.  In broad outline, however, it makes sense to me.]

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.  Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

From my friend Denise Ulrich's Facebook page.  I could not agree more.  Of the hours in possession of my faculties that I have left on the planet, I want as few as possible devoted to cleaning.  But alas, we must eventually dust, or pay some other poor soul to do so, or we'll be sneezing and wheezing and dirty all the time from the dust!

Roger Cohen of the New York Times sketched an interesting but depressing, if rather far-fetched (one hopes), scenario ("The Unlikely Road to War").  A 19-year-old Ukrainian nationalist "falls into the 'Young Ukraine' movement, a radical student circle in which feelings run high over the shotgun referendum that saw the people of Crimea vote with Orwellian unanimity for union with Russia. At night, he fingers the hand-engraved Browning pistol that was once his father’s."  He travels to a site where the Russian foreign minister and his wife are visiting and, in a combination of luck and official ineptitude, manages to assassinate them.  "Desperate diplomacy fails."  Russia invades the rest of the Ukraine, believes it is provoked into attacking Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, triggering a response from NATO, and China invades Taiwan pre-emptively.  But we know this could not happen, in an interconnected world.

Cohen's point was that this is almost exactly what happened in 1914.  Gavrilo Princip was the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist who assassinated Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, setting off the string of events that led to World War I.  Cohen observes that no one in 1914 believed that war would ensue, that it could not happen, because it had been avoided numerous times in the preceding decade and the world at that point was too interconnected.

I write this in late March; I will be hoping that Cohen's analogy, however it might develop, does not come to pass.  It probably will not involve a 19-year-old nationalist, but there are countless other events that could occur.  On the other hand, as one reader comment pointed out, the Iraq war could have started something, either the Americans or Russians in Afghanistan, etc.  Moreover, many in the public of the European countries were clamoring for war, but certainly few Americans are today, and even fewer Europeans.  Perhaps the most alarming omission in Cohen's speculation is that in 2014 we still have thousands of nuclear weapons; no such potential haunted the leaders of 1914.  So we will continue to hope that sane and cool heads prevail.  (And in the West, recognize that there is nothing that can be done militarily in Crimea in response to Russia.)

The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

Interestingly, there appeared an article in Quartz reporting on the amount of time men do housework in various countries of the world.  The men [women in brackets] of Slovenia, Denmark, and Estonia lead; they do 114, 107, and 105 [212, 145, 190] minutes of housework per day, respectively.  At the bottom are Korea, Turkey, and India, where the men clock in 21, 21, and 19 [138, 261, 298] minutes.  (U.S. men came in at 82 [126] minutes.) 

            This is an OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) study, so it's not some independent and perhaps methodologically weird research.  The data are from an OECD time use study (which I did not read), and while self-reports on time allocation can be suspect, if the number of those surveyed is sufficiently large, the data are probably reasonably reliable.  The OECD excel spreadsheet indicates that "routine housework" does not include shopping, care for household members or others, or travel related to household activities; what it does include is cooking, laundry, other housework, animal care, yard care, home maintenance, etc. 

Kathy and I determined that we are not average; I am quite sure that I do not spend 82 minutes per day on "routine housework"—and Kathy is equally sure she does not spend 126 minutes.  We must have an unkempt house by comparison with most Americans.  Nor do either of us want to get up to average.  So much for dusting too much.

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity.  Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

            I was struck by a little essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Notre Dame English professor John Duffy titled "The Ethics of Metaphor."  Duffy takes aim at the "demonization, poisonous analogies, and historical slanders" that have become so prevalent in American political discourse.  (One suspects, however, that this phenomenon is nothing new; I haven't studied historical political campaign literature, but what I recall from various readings in U.S. history going back to the presidential election of 1800 and ever since, abuse by exaggeration isn't novel.)  One favorite metaphor in recent years, of course, has been to compare one's opponent to Hitler or the Nazis.  Duffy observes that those seem to be in constant use "in the toxic tides of American public discourse," but slavery and the KKK rank close behind.

            Duffy relates that he talks to students "about how argument is more than an instrument for persuasion, that it is equally and perhaps essentially an ethical activity. By this I mean that in making arguments about such topics as health care or government surveillance we can choose between language that expresses such virtues as honesty, accountability, and generosity, and utterances that rehearse the spleen and intolerance currently passing for normal discourse."  He does not disdain or discourage the use of metaphors because they can generate new insights by making new kinds of comparisons and cites George Lakoff to the effect that they can be "novel poetic language."  "Metaphors are meant to unsettle."  However, making a metaphor of his own, he cites Justice Stewart's famous comment about pornography, "I know it when I see it," to contend that "some metaphors we know—we just know, as Justice Potter Stewart just knew about pornography—are misleading, malicious, or worse. How do we decide? How do we determine what counts as an ethical metaphor? What criteria apply?"

            Duffy has developed four tests for judging whether or not a metaphor might be considered ethical. 

"1. The History Test.  How closely does the metaphor correspond to the facts of the case, as best we understand them?"  For example, when someone uses the term "genocide," is the context in accord with what actually happened at different times and places around the world?  "2. The Resonance Test.  Certain metaphors and similes have a unique cultural power to incite."  Here he notes the references to Hitler, or lynching, or apartheid that can evoke reactions that go beyond specific events.  "3. The Proportionality Test.  Is the seriousness of the metaphor proportional to that which it is applied?"  Some are sensational—and grossly disproportionate to the events being compared. 

Duffy's fourth test, "The Quiet Room Test," is one that only the speaker or write can use, not the reader or listener.  "I use 'Quiet Room' here to indicate a place for writers’ self-examination. . . .  Deep down, we know—do we not?—when we are arguing to incite or to enlighten, to inflame or to understand."  Unfortunately, some who use metaphors often do so precisely to incite and inflame rather than to ask people to reflect and reason, and they are the people least likely to subject themselves to the Quiet Room test.  That does not mean that we, the reader or listener, however, cannot judge whether the writer/speaker should have used it.

I have found these rules to be useful in considering statements by those who participate in the country's (world's) political discourse.  One ends up discounting a significant number of utterings as unhelpful in advancing sound public policy.  To put it charitably.

I wonder if Professor Duffy is aware of Godwin's law.  Here's a condensed definition from Wikipedia:

Godwin's law . . . is an assertion made by Mike Godwin in 1990 that has become an Internet adage.  It states:  "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."  In other words, Godwin said that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably makes a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis.

The article also reports that "Godwin's Law" has become an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

            I like what is reported as a tradition in some online discussions and news sites, that any time someone draws a comparison with the Nazis, that discussion thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses the point of the debate.  At the same time, it is bad manners to make the comparison in an attempt to end the discussion—and so recognized.  Obviously, the intent is to discourage and denigrate "inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as 'playing the Hitler card.'"  It would not come into play if a discussion thread is about Nazis, characteristics of totalitarian regimes, genocide, etc.  While some may complain that it essentially bars comparisons of events today with actions of the Nazis, that seems to me not an accurate charge.  Godwin's law meshes neatly with Professor Duffy's rules:  is the comparison historical, does it resonate, is it proportional, and does it pass the "quiet room" test?  Godwin quite appropriately urges that people think before they draw analogies with Nazis.  I agree.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured.  Sins of the soul alone are shameful.

I made a rather momentous change this year:  I resigned from the job I'd had for 26 years (and 2 months) to take a new position in the University's College of Education and Human Development (CEHD).  I had grown somewhat weary of institutional governance, although not of the people involved.  I had thought for a couple of years about finding something different to do my last few working years (I don't know when I will retire—when I don't want to work anymore, I think), and the provost's office was kind enough to help with obtaining the position in CEHD.  Several people asked me if I was eased out, or asked to leave; I certainly was not.  It was all my idea.

            On leaving, I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.  One of the primary meeting rooms for University committees is 238/238A Morrill Hall.  (Morrill Hall is the building that houses part of the University's central administration, including the president, the senior vice president for academic affairs, the general counsel, the vice president for University Services, the vice president for finance, and so on.)  238 (and A) was originally the room used for the meetings of the Board of Regents (238A was separable from 238 by a sliding partition), from 1925 until about 2000, and used by numerous other groups and committees when the Board was not meeting (only 1.5 days for about 10 months of the year), including those that I worked with.  When the rooms were remodeled after the Board acquired new digs in the McNamara Alumni Center, 238/238A remained meeting rooms.  So I figured out that over the course of my career as Secretary to the Faculty, I spent approximately 4700 hours in those rooms, or well over two full working years at 40 hours per week.  I'm not sure that anyone else in the history of the University has matched or will match that record (of rather dubious merit), although I can't be sure.

            In any case, it felt very strange to walk out of Morrill Hall on March 18 for the last time that I would have my own office in the building.  Except for the period January 1988 to June 1991, when I was housed in the academic departments of the elected senior faculty leader, I had been in Morrill Hall since July of 1975.  I suspected when I took the new position, however, that I might end up back in the building for meetings.

            What astonished me more than anything, once the announcement of my departure had been made (the president's chief of staff sent out the message to the groups with which I worked), was the response.  I was deluged with emails expressing regret and thanks and admiration for my work.  And when I sent out my last missive, which went to about 1500 people on campus, I was deluged again.  After the first dozen or so messages, I decided to copy and paste them into a Word document, no doubt in part because all these messages were giving me a big head and in part because I wanted a record for my never-to-be-written memoirs or autobiography.  In any case, the messages took up 37 pages.  Among the ones that touched me deeply was a tweet from one of the committee chairs I had recently worked closely with (and with whom I remain friends):  "When an icon moves on, with rue for their loss you thank 'em, and with sincerity you wish 'em well."

            Life is too short to learn German.

Sean Bean (aka Boromir)

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys, . . . but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

            I noted last year Paul Meehl's famous finding that in psychotherapy, statistical models almost always yield better predictions and diagnoses than the judgment of trained professionals, a finding that has been discovered to be equally valid in a number of fields.  Last spring the Guardian had an article titled "How algorithms rule the world," and algorithms, of course, are nothing more than Meehl's statistical models.  Another phrase I've seen is "predictive analytics."

Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is
much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also.

            "TMI" is one of the more useful and clever acronyms of the texting age, in my opinion.  While it means the provision by someone of much more (and usually personal or awkward or embarrassing) information than the receiver wants to know, it's also a descriptor of the human brain as we age.  All of us of a certain age were no doubt pleased to learn of the conclusions of a study headed by Professor Michael Ramscar from Tubingen University that the usual measures of cognitive decline in adults are flawed.  Our brains work more slowly as we get older because they've accumulated more information over our lifetimes.

            As I understand the findings, a comparison with a computer helps.  If you give a computer more information, but do not expand its processing power, it takes longer to search its database.  That's what happens to humans:  our processing power doesn't increase but we accumulate a large and increasing amount of information over the decades, so by the time we hit our 60s and later, we have a larger database!  So it takes longer to think.

            I wish I could say that as a result of this study I am confident that aging adults are thus not subject to cognitive and neural decline.  Unfortunately, the decline may be real anyway.

            Did Professor Ramscar ever talk with Professor Jostein Holmen, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)?  The latter found, in a very large study of Norwegians, that men forget more than women and that they are just as forgetful when they are young as when they are older (so are women, just less so).  The study authors acknowledge they have no idea why men are more forgetful than women.  They also report that memory problems accelerate with age, beginning in the 60s and 70s.

            Now, the question is whether they are memory problems or TMI.  I prefer the latter explanation.  The reason that men forget more than women is obvious:  men know more than women—their databases are larger—so they have more to forget! J  And if you believe that. . . .

            Another large study casts light on cognitive functioning, also from Europe, a study of six countries that looked at differences in compulsory education schemes.  What the authors found was that the longer people were in school, the better their cognitive functioning 40 years later.  More education early means better functioning even late in middle age.  They didn't report (and certainly did not study) what happens to people as they get older:  does the relationship between length of schooling and cognitive function last as people get into their 70s and 80s?  If their findings hold up, they certainly suggest the value of education; the study seems to have been conducted because of European concerns about dealing with declining cognitive function in an increasingly older population.  If more education means better functioning later, that could mean a significant savings in national health care costs, so it's not a trivial matter. 

Nor is it trivial at the personal level, and I am glad our kids all went to college.  (I wonder if there's a point at which more and more education has diminishing returns in continued cognitive function:  do people with J.D.s and M.D.s and Ph.D.s better retain cognitive function than those who only completed a 2-year or 4-year degree?)

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomat - the problem is entirely the same in both cases.  To know how much oil to mix in with one's vinegar.

            One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.

            This may fall in the "duh" category, but it sometimes seems to me the world would like to believe otherwise.  In a book on cities, the author wrote about the value of proximity, of people seeing each other in person rather than by electronic connection (Skype, Google hangout, email, Twitter, etc.).  He noted that the industry that could best make use of electronic communication—the computer industry.  Even though they have the best and newest technology, the industry has tended to concentrate in Silicon Valley—so the companies are locating where the real estate is among the most expensive in the country instead of in less urban areas or smaller towns.  He also cites statistics to the effect that people who have face-to-face interactions also talk more on the telephone, suggesting that the in-person interactions lead to the need for more personal communication than email or texting.

            I've certainly found that to be true in both my professional and personal life.  One hears an insistent and recurrent drumbeat that meetings should be minimized so people can get their work done and because they are a waste of time.  I think the opposite, to a certain extent:  people often "get their work done" through the vehicle of meetings and the give-and-take of discussions.  One can have a limited give-and-take with one other person by email, but as soon as a third and fourth person is introduced into the discussion, email becomes hopeless.  (I know that from long experience!  Email discussion chains become hopelessly confused and tangled when 3-4 people are trying to carry on a "conversation" about something, particularly when the exchanges are not nearly simultaneous.  They spend far more time trying to catch up with previous comments and writing new responses than they would if they were all sitting around a table.)

            Interestingly, the day I was composing these paragraphs in late March I also chanced upon a tidbit from Bloomberg Businessweek.  The estimate is that employees across the country (collectively) have spent over 10 million hours while at work watching the NCAA tournament basketball games.  Bosses, of course, see this as time not spent productively and take actions to prohibit it.  However,

But let’s think about the March Madness effect more broadly. What if, rather than employees just sitting at their desks glued to their monitors, March Madness gets people talking to their colleagues, walking around the office, and generally creating the kind of camaraderie and information flow that companies need to flourish? . . .  Communication is the most important thing that happens at work, even if it’s not work related.

            The guy who wrote the piece in Bloomberg has a sociometric consulting company and also works at MIT; he looks at social interactions in the workplace.  After studying the behavior of employees in his own company (a very small sample, he acknowledges), and seeing more interaction during days when tournament games are being broadcast, he concluded that

This increased interaction is important. Rather than indicating we’re being unproductive, these results argue that we’re more productive in the long term thanks to March Madness. As we’ve seen in many organizations, more interaction within a tightly knit group yields higher performance and higher job satisfaction through increased trust and the development of a shared language.

            Seems to be an exclamation point of sorts to the argument that face-to-face conversations remain among the most valuable ways people can interact.

            As it turns out, the matter of conversation has been the focus of work of an MIT psychologist.  Professor Sherry Turkle's academic focus is human-machine relationships, and most recently she's been studying conversations.  It strikes me that this research, on its face, at least, would come to the attention of members of Congress who like to identify and mock apparently ridiculous research, especially when it receives federal funding.  (The Atlantic article reporting her research didn't mention whether she'd received external funding.)  But this would be an instance, in my opinion, when such criticism would be unwarranted.  (The author is also quick to point out that Turkle herself texts, emails, has several iPhones, and works with robots, so she's not technophobic.)

            What Turkle has found in her ethnographic research (that is, basically studying people in situ, eavesdropping on conversations, talking to people about talking, observing people in social settings) is that

We’re talking all the time, in person as well as in texts, in e-mails, over the phone, on Facebook and Twitter. The world is more talkative now, in many ways, than it’s ever been. The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.

She notes such phenomena as watching families in restaurants not talking to each other or mothers in parks not talking to their children or texting while pushing a stroller.  The article author, after his discussions with Turkle, finds he can't not observe the same things once aware of them, such as "the pair of high-school-age girls walking down Boylston Street, silent, typing.  The table of brunchers ignoring their mimosas (and one another) in favor of their screens.  The kid in the stroller playing with an iPad.  The sea of humans who are, on this sparkling Saturday, living up to Turkle’s lament—they seem to be, indeed, alone together."

            The argument that Turkle makes is fairly simple.  "Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness.  But the messiness is what allows for true exchange.  It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights.  'You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,' Turkle says.  'It’s like dancing:  slow, slow, quick-quick, slow.  You know?  It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.'  Occasional dullness, in other words, is to be not only expected, but celebrated."

            But what happens in much of electronic interaction (observations posted on websites, selfies, and so on) "is fundamentally different, favoring showmanship over exchange, flows over ebbs.  The Internet is always on.  And it’s always judging you, watching you, goading you.  'That’s not conversation,' Turkle says."  She urges (in what some of us would say is good manners, if nothing else) that the use of electronic devices be limited in "sacred spaces" such as the dinner table because they impede "intimacy and interaction."  People need to look at each other and interact.

            Sometimes, of course, personal interactions are limited to the telephone or email or Skype.  Kathy can't be seeing her mother in Blair every week, so the phone has to do.   I couldn't see Krystin at all while she was in South Korea, but Skype remedied the lack to some extent.  While these media are better than nothing, they certainly don't replace being in the same room, whether having cocktails or a meeting.  Sure would be fun to have a dinner party by Google hangout. . . .

            I do wonder a few things.  One, is there a generational difference in reliance on electronic devices & media?  Two, what's "good" behavior?  Three, is she even right?

            As for number one, our sons certainly rely on electronic communication with their friends more than we do with ours—but they also spend time with them in person.  What's the right ratio?  I don't know that there's any right answer to that question, other than that "none" or "very little" can't be right.

As for two, "rules" of good behavior are invariably ambiguous and situation-specific.  I am sure that people have seen Kathy and me at a restaurant texting (and it's invariably with our kids), but that doesn't mean we aren't setting the phones down and also talking to each other.  What also plays into the equation, in each relationship, is whether there is sufficient time spent in Turkle's kinds of conversations; Kathy and I spend quite a bit of time over a glass of wine after work some days catching up on our work, our kids, our ideas about life, the universe, travel, politics, whatever.  So for us, a small amount of time texting while at dinner is no reflection whatever on whether we have conversations.  We do all the time.

            And three, I'm not sure that the global conclusions reported in the article are even correct.  Just because two people are walking along texting doesn't mean they don't otherwise talk.  One would have to do a rather sophisticated time study of people's behavior, ideally including the time before the advent of cell phones and email, which would now be quite a challenge, to determine if people actually talk less or if they are in communication more, with texting, email, etc., simply added to talking.  (In my own case, from which I certainly wouldn't generalize, that is exactly what's happened.  I have the sense that I still talk to people as much as I ever did, and in addition I communicate with them by other means as well.  The one way I spend less time talking to people is on logistical arrangements:  shall we have dinner together, where, what day and time, and so on.  That is where email works just as well as talk.)

"Email is frozen conversation" — Virginia Postrel

            Never love anybody who treats you like you're ordinary.

Class model

I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

            I am not a fan of Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve with Richard Herrnstein and who's a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an outfit whose assumptions about politics and the organization of human societies I believe to be fundamentally wrong (and contradicted by 50+ years of social science research as well as political experience around the globe).  Having said that, I concede that no one is wrong all the time, and Murray wrote an interesting little piece in the Wall Street Journal summarizing his advice to young people just out of college and in their first jobs (drawn from his experience doing same).  He related that it began in fun, such as advising them to drop the word "like" from their lexicon, and then got more serious over the years.  

               I found his advice interesting—and not just for the youngsters, but also for those of us somewhat beyond college graduation.  For those of us who found ourselves needing to remarry later in life, a couple of his observations are pertinent to us as well.  Here are the four tips, with Gary's editorial comments.

1. Consider Marrying Young

Murray isn't talking 18, he means mid-20s rather than 30s.  He describes a younger marriage as a start-up and marriages of people who've reached their 30s as a merger.  This makes sense to me.  I wasn't married until age 30 (almost 31), and while it wasn't exactly a "merger," it probably wasn't a start-up, either.  And that later marriage meant having kids later.  I have sometimes been wistful about not being in a position to have children when I was in my 20s because I would have had more energy to devote to them.  "Lots of things can be said in favor of merger marriages. The bride and groom may be more mature, less likely to outgrow each other or to feel impelled, 10 years into the marriage, to make up for their lost youth. . . .  What are the advantages of a startup marriage? For one thing, you will both have memories of your life together when it was all still up in the air. You'll have fun remembering the years when you went from being scared newcomers to the point at which you realized you were going to make it.  Even more important, you and your spouse will have made your way together. Whatever happens, you will have shared the experience. And each of you will know that you wouldn't have become the person you are without the other."

Kathy's and my marriage is a merger.  How could any marriage later in life not be?  I will say, however, that while I think Murray's points about the advantage of the start-up marriage are valid, that doesn't mean that merger marriages later in life cannot be equally happy and successful. 

2. Learn How to Recognize Your Soul Mate

This part has several elements.  One is to "Marry someone with similar tastes and preferences.  Which tastes and preferences?  The ones that will affect life almost every day."  Murray maintains that if one of you likes ballet and the other doesn't, that's not so important.  But if you don't share a sense of humor, or like one another's friends, or don't share the same sense of ethics, then forget it.  I would add politics, at least for people who pay attention to them.  I cannot imagine a marriage like that of James Carville and Mary Matalin, each an activist in one of the two major political parties. 

Murray also cites Jacques Barzun on differences in personal habits that ultimately wreck a relationship:  "punctuality, orderliness and thriftiness."  Where you fall on those doesn't matter as much as that you are mostly in the same place; "Some couples are very happy living always in debt, always being late, and finding leftover pizza under a sofa cushion."  Moreover, the two people can evolve together.  Kathy and I have both been drifting away from the orderliness that characterized both of us when we were younger.  And something we all learn at some point along the way, I think:  "What you see is what you're going to get."

            "It is absolutely crucial that you really, really like your spouse. You hear it all the time from people who are in great marriages: 'I'm married to my best friend.'"  Yep. 

"Another cause for worry is the grand passion. You know a relationship is a grand passion if you find yourself behaving like an adolescent long after adolescence has passed—you are obsessed and a more than a little crazy."  I found myself thinking about this when dating (and recalling my own experiences while in college and just after).  My grand passions when younger came to naught.  I wondered if I'd encounter the phenomenon again in my 50s—and decided that if I did, I'd be concerned about the development of any relationship.  It may not be true for everyone, but I can fall very much in love and become deeply attached without the emotional upheaval of the grand passion.  I trust my reactions and judgment more without the grand passion. 

Murray also claims that "A good marriage is the best thing that can ever happen to you. Above all else, realize that this cliché is true."  Here he is supported by the data:  by most measures of success and health and mental state, the statistics for married folks are more positive than for those who are single.  "The downside risks of marrying—and they are real—are nothing compared with what you will gain from a good one."  One does need to insert the caveat, however, that not everyone needs to be married; what Murray wouldn't be so keen about, I would guess, is that being attached and co-habiting in a long-term relationship is just as good.  And there are some who don't need or want an attachment at all—and they do just fine.  But statistically, Murray's correct.

3. Eventually Stop Fretting About Fame and Fortune

This is an interesting one because it's really aimed more at people in their 40s.  Murray says he'd be distrustful of a youngster who didn't aspire to wealth or fame, which suggests to me he must deal with college graduates with big egos.  (Do all college graduates aspire to fame and wealth?)  In any case, Murray offers his young staff members wise counsel about reaching age 40 and having neither fame nor fortune.  To whatever extent I thought I'd have wealth and fame—and I honestly cannot remember now if I ever thought either of those was coming my way—I did realize a number of years back that they weren't going to.  "Suppose you arrive at age 40, and you enjoy your work, have found your soul mate, are raising a couple of terrific kids—and recognize that you will probably never become either rich or famous. At that point, it is important to supplement your youthful ambition with mature understanding."

4. Take Religion Seriously

Here's where a lot of you stand when it comes to religion: It isn't for you. You don't mind if other people are devout, but you don't get it. Smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.  I can be sure that is what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ, college-educated young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as your counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who weren't religious, and you've never given religion a thought. Others of you followed the religion of your parents as children but left religion behind as you were socialized by college.

            I just flatly disagree with him on this one.  He says he's describing his own life with that description.  It seems to me that this is a case where one size does not fit all—and it reflects the more conservative view of society that generally comes from those affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.  I would not say it's wrong to be affiliated with a religion, and even take it seriously (I'd be much happier if many of the self-proclaimed Christians in the United States actually adhered to the precepts advanced by Christ), but it isn't necessarily the case that one has to in order to have a successful and happy life.  I know a lot of people who are not religious at all, and quite a few who eschew religion, but who are happily married/attached (or not) and who lead perfectly fulfilled lives.

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen.  Destiny does not send us heralds.  She is too wise or too cruel for that.

           

Christopher Lee (aka Saruman)

I have never met any really wicked person before.  I feel rather frightened.  I am so afraid he will look just like everyone else.

One of the concluding paragraphs of an article published in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) contains this sentence:  "What we are witnessing is not just a massive die-off of the world’s languages, it is the final act of the Neolithic Revolution, with the urban agriculturalists moving on to a different, digital plane of existence, leaving the hunter-gatherers and nomad pastoralists behind."  The author, András Kornai, a Hungarian scientist and faculty member (Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford), estimates that only about 5% of the languages currently spoken in the world will survive the digital age.  Some languages are vital (that is, being used daily by millions of people), some are borderline, and some are already on the verge of disappearing.

            The reasons for the decline and disappearance of a language aren't difficult to identify.  Kornai points to a decline in the number of speakers (that's rather obvious), "a loss of function, where other languages take over entire functional areas such as commerce; a loss of prestige, as the young lose interest in learning and using the language; and finally a loss of competence, wherein a generation can maybe understand their elders, but don’t really speak the language themselves," writes a young guy on the website Motherboard who reviewed Kornai's work.  Often speakers of a language will switch (over time) to another language, one used by a larger and more powerful group in the society.  Communities themselves may abandon a language.

            The Internet exacerbates these pressures.  In Kornai's judgment, there are only about 250 languages that are well-established online and another 140 that are borderline.  That's out of 7000 now spoken.  Doing an analysis of wikipedias, which he maintains is a useful measure of the vibrancy of a language and instrumental in maintaining it, he concludes, in Richmond's phrase, "No wikipedia, no ascent” to unthreatened status.  (And that's a very liberal standard, because it only takes five active users for a language to make it into a wikipedia.)  Richmond observes that "It’s a self-perpetuating problem that means if you want to do business online, it’s more than likely going to be in English, the FIGS languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish), the CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and "the main languages of former colonial empires" (Dutch, Russian, Portuguese). . . . The adage 'If it's not on the web, it does not exist,' neatly encapsulates the loss of prestige."

            All but the 250 healthy languages are moving to "digital heritage status," Kornai says, where materials will be available for scholarly purposes, but they will not have native speakers online.  A major part of the problem, according to one scholar, is that about half the world's spoken languages have no writing system—which means that it never appears on the web (except perhaps in YouTube videos?).

            So is this bad?  One view is that

each language reflects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it.  In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people, and it remains a reflection of this culture for some time even after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture.

Really?  I wonder.  No doubt a language reflects the cultural heritage of the group, but "unique world view" that is worth preserving is another matter.  If indeed the languages of the hunter-gatherers and nomad pastoralists are dying, is humanity losing a great deal?  Many of these languages may reflect a common experience (life without any of the modern conveniences we like and perhaps without modern medicine and science); is the loss of that view, perhaps in many languages, so devastating, and are the views of life different from one language to the next?  And what wisdom do they have to offer?  My read of history through anthropology is that humans pretty much just fight each other (the groups get larger, so rather than families, tribes, and clans, now it's entire nations or groups of nations [see WWI]) and otherwise produce and consume food, procreate, and amuse themselves. 

            I don't know if I even buy the proposition that speakers of one language (e.g., French) have a different world view and culture from those who speak another language (e.g., Chinese) because of the language.  Clearly different cultures, but due to (in any significant part) because of the sounds they use to communicate?  I wonder.

What a silly thing love is!  It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

I must remember that a good friend is a new world.

            In the "not all uses of technology are beneficial" category, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported some interesting research out of UCLA and Princeton.  The two researchers examined differences in student performance on tests depending on whether the students had taken notes by hand or with a laptop.  Those who used pen and paper scored significantly higher on the conceptual understanding part of exams (the two groups scored equally well on factual questions), even though those who used laptops had twice as many notes as those who used pen and paper.  They concluded that "Verbatim note-taking, as opposed to more selective strategies, signals less encoding of content."

            One could speculate that there's a generational difference in play—because I know for sure that I absorb more writing by hand than using a keyboard—except that the research subjects were all current college students.  I'm a fairly lousy typist, so I'd spend half my time taking notes on a laptop trying to make sure that my notes made sense. 

            The less said about life's sores the better.

         

In this world there are only two tragedies.  One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

            I received in mid-April one of the more unusual telephone calls I have ever experienced:  my long-time and dear friend of nearly 40 years, Dagny Christiansen, who had just gone into home hospice care, called to say goodbye.  She had been dealing with multiple ailments, and in her late 80s they became more than the body could handle.  It was no surprise, but it was nonetheless heartwarming to hear her say that she was completely at peace with her family and friends and how much she had valued our friendship.  But that we can all say that when the time comes.  Dagny died about a week after the call.

I don't know if I would have—will have, if the circumstances permit—the courage or the emotional wherewithal to make such calls.  It is a reflection on Dagny's strength of character that she would do so.

Dagny was among the most vibrant and ebullient people I have ever known.  I mostly saw her at the bridge table, with her husband Holger, and she was one of the most aggressive and talented players I ran up against.  For those of you who know the game:  she would rarely let opponents keep a 1-level contract, and several of us in the bridge group of 35+ years would say "Dagny made me bid that" when we stuck in harassment bids.  Between bridge and associated events—dinners and overnights at their lake place—we who were in the bridge group from the beginning must have gotten together for fun times with the Christiansens close to 300 times.  Dagny enlivened our lives, and certainly our social gatherings!  Once again I am sorely sorry to lose someone who made such a positive contribution to my world and to life.

            Looking good and dressing well is a necessity.  Having a purpose in life is not.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

 

Slate had an interesting article headline last spring:  "What Are Cats Thinking?  Inside the mind of the world’s most uncooperative research subject."  The author noted that there is voluminous research on canine intelligence but little on feline intelligence.  Those few studies that have been conducted have been challenging, but one leading animal researcher did discover that cats, when they choose to pay attention, can understand human pointing (at something) just about as well as dogs.  That finding is certainly contrary to our experience with our three cats, but we haven't tried very hard.  One point that one researcher made was that dogs have lived with humans about 30,000 years, or 20,000 years longer than cats; perhaps cats haven't had enough time to become as attuned to humans as dogs have.  "Indeed, we may be the only station dogs listen to. Cats, on the other hand, can tune us in if they want to (that’s why they pass the pointing test as well as dogs), but they don’t hang on our every word like dogs do. They’re surfing other channels on the dial."

            The Slate author suggested that future feline research may be more productive, given advanced technology such as fMRI and eye-tracking technology.  Krystin, after reading the article, expressed doubt, hypothesizing all future research report conclusions:  "the test subject maintained a fuck-all attitude the entirety of the testing period and decided to nap, stare at imaginary shadows on the wall, walk around meowing as if lost, or lick its butt instead of participate.  No findings were able to be recorded."

            Elliott didn't offer any views on research possibilities but did on our cats:  "I suppose like any animal there is a bell curve of intelligence and we just happen to have two out of three cats who are significantly to the left of the mean."

It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.

Tywin Lannister (Game of Thrones)

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously—and have somebody find out.

            One Saturday in late April we had ordinary social plans:  brunch at our friends Andy and Carolyn Collins's and then off to the Met Opera simulcast of Cosi fan Tutte by Mozart.

            I told the Collinses afterwards that they were in a tie for first place for the most pleasant and well-appointed brunch I have ever had.  The food was ample and delicious, the china and silverware laid out invitingly, and the conversation lively.  They tied with a brunch we (Pat and I) had with our friends Rowland and Stella Evans in Wagga Wagga, Australia, about 15 years ago.  We were expecting a casual brunch; we had champagne, several courses, silver and china and crystal, all outdoors by their pool, and it lasted 4 hours.  It also was a marvelous event, even if not quite what we had been expecting.

            As for Cosi fan Tutte, any Met performance is going to be top quality, and this was.  The words of the title translate literally to "Thus do all [women]," or more popularly, "Women are like that."  The gist of the plot is that two guys, on a bet with another friend, pretend to leave their fiancées and then return in disguise to woo one another's fiancée.  To their horror and anger, they succeed.  The premise of the opera is that a woman's fidelity is always suspect.  I would say that the two guys, who do everything possible to lure the women into violating their affianced status, were a couple of assholes.

            The premise is not only not politically correct, I would say it's also suspect on its face.  If I were pressed, I would guess that it is the man's fidelity that is more likely suspect, and at best there's no significant difference between the sexes on that score.  A quick glance at survey research results suggests a fairly consistent finding that men in monogamous relationships cheat at a notably higher rate than women (at least in the U.S.).

            One can wonder if Mozart wrote the opera with tongue in cheek, if he was reflecting sexual mores of late 19^th-Century Vienna, or if he really believed in greater female inconstancy.  I can't find any evidence on any of those points.  Given that humans have had some kind of monogamous relationship norms since the dawn of civilization, and that one can believe that behavior in that arena hasn't changed much over the millennia (because it seems unlikely that male and female biology has changed), my guess is that males in the Europe of Mozart's time were as lacking in fidelity as males are today.  I asked a faculty colleague who's an expert on social norms such as these about whether the pattern of more men than women cheating pattern has repeated itself in human society for centuries or millennia; he said it has.  Social norms have never done much to prevent "illicit" sexual activities, at least in Western civilizations, as far as I can tell.

Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from what's not.  The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.

            As always in May, we made our usual treks to Bachmans as well as neighborhood garden stores.  When we were done planting, we had the two planter boxes next to our west deck and 43 pots full of flowers.  That's up by 1 over last year.  And also as usual, the squirrels were happy to be out and dig in the boxes and the pots. 

But this year I finally found a way to make them stay away.  I did what any normal human being with access to the Internet did:  I googled "squirrel repellant" and found several websites.  I was impressed with a remarkably simple recipe that was said to repel rodents that eat new plant shoots:  1 cup dish detergent, 1 cup hot sauce, and 1 gallon water, mixed and to be sprayed on the plant.  I was a little suspicious about putting dish soap on plants and the soil, so I asked a faculty friend in Chemistry about it (and sent him the dish soap ingredients).   He got back to me promptly and said everything in the dish soap was fine except for triclosan, which is nasty stuff, even though it is a good antibiotic.  He advised buying organic dish soap.

I'd never heard of "organic dish soap," but off to the coop I went, and sure enough, there it was, with a list of ingredients that looked pretty harmless to plants and soil.  So I made up my mixture and began spraying—and the squirrels have stayed away.  Of course, every time I water or it rains, I have to re-spray, or the squirrels are quick to return, the little pests.

Quite coincidentally, at the exact time I was getting organic dish soap, the Minnesota legislature became the first in the nation to ban the use of triclosan in the state because of its many harmful effects.  It was because of research done at the University of Minnesota (that found triclosan in the lakes) that the legislature took action, because triclosan has been found to have a number of adverse effects on both humans and animals.

I also had to face up to a task I had put off for some time:  We have dozens and dozens and dozens of hosta all over our city lot, and many of them badly needed splitting.  So I sent out a message to the College of Education and Human Development faculty and staff (they have a listserv for general purpose personal announcements—stuff for sale, apartments for rent, etc.) and said I had free hosta for anyone who wanted them, and I expected to have about 150.  That's about how many I dug up and gave away.  People (especially the graduate students) were extremely grateful to have free hosta, and I was glad to give them away, but my back was not happy about digging them all up.

I will be giving away more next spring.  The one thing I didn't do was mark the hybrid/more-exotic hosta that needed splitting (the ones I split and gave away were the everyday, garden-variety hosta one sees everywhere).  I dunno, I may not give those away for free—they were expensive to start with and it's taken years to get them to full size.  On the other hand, it's a pain to negotiate with potential buyers through Craigslist or sites.  I'll have to think about it.

            Our planting schedule was somewhat disrupted by Kathy's trip to Nebraska for a week to help her mother with spring gardening and both indoor and outdoor house work.  One thing Kathy reported was that she found a significantly greater diversity in plants in the nurseries in Omaha than she saw here in Minnesota.  That doesn't make a lot of sense to us, when it comes to annuals, because the summer temperatures in Omaha may be some warmer than Minneapolis, or perhaps warmer longer, but 75-90 degrees is 75-90 degrees, here or there.  So why can't we get as interesting a set of plants as they do?

They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.

Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.

            Last spring we decided it was time to at least redecorate the kitchen and breakfast nook.  Actually, Kathy had decided that the day she moved in, but we postponed doing anything because we were contemplating a more substantial remodel.  The more we thought about it, however, the more we began to wonder if we would get, as my Scots friends say, value for money.  We'd have new cabinets and about 2-3 more feet of counter surface.  (Now, if you've seen our kitchen, you know that even 2-3 feet more would be significant.)  As we began to calculate, it became apparent that the 3 additional feet would be about $8000 per foot, because removing cabinets, redoing some of the plumbing, moving a small wall, etc., would probably hit $25K by the time it was done.  We would, at the end, still have a small galley kitchen in what was a 1931 bungalow.

            So we moved toward simply doing the cosmetic, to Kathy's great relief.  We'd had sunflower wallpaper in both the nook and the kitchen, and I agreed with her that they were really ugly.  (It is not clear now who originally picked it out; I say not me, but that view is contested.  But that was 17 years ago and we forget.)  So we had painters come.  At first we thought, "heavens, we can take off the wallpaper."  We'd taken it off in Krystin's former bedroom and it came off like a charm, in big sheets.  Washed the walls, did a little spackling, and they were paint-ready.  Not so in the kitchen or in the bathroom (which we'd also decided to redo because the wallpaper there wasn't quite as ugly but it was worn and dated.)  That wallpaper came off in little pieces, and the walls behind it had paint chips and holes; they were not in good shape.  After about 3 hours of trying to remove wallpaper, we said "to hell with it" and let the painters do it.  They did, and somehow managed to make the walls look almost like they'd been built in 2014.  We were very pleased.  (Although not completely.  One reason I hire professional painters—apart from the fact they can make old walls look really great—is because they are supposed to be expert at trim, wall corners where two different paint colors meet, and edging.  Rolling the walls once the edges and trim are done is easy—and these painters did not do edges well.  I didn't make a fuss—I usually don't, in life—but I won't be recommending them to any friends.)

            The one small task the painters declined to take on was painting the Formica backsplash above the kitchen counter.  They said, and I could certainly understand, that painting Formica was not recommended and they didn't want to do it.  But we couldn't leave it—the walls were now a pale celery green and the cabinets were a dark cranberry, so the beige Formica didn't exactly fit the color scheme any more.  Faced with that dilemma, I did what anyone with an Internet connection does:  I googled "painting Formica" to see what was possible, if anything.  There is a way, and I ended up doing something I'd vowed I would not ever do again:  painted an interior surface in this house.  I have literally touched every surface on the interior of this house, in some cases repeatedly, and I had decided I was done with painting and wallpapering. 

            But not quite.  So I cleaned, sanded, primed, and painted the Formica on June 1.  By the end of the year the paint was still there.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

            It was late spring that I suffered, in my friend Scott's phrase, from technology overload.  When I changed jobs at the U, I was given a new laptop.  It had a few updated versions of common software, such as this Word program, that took me a little time to adjust to (and I still haven't completely figured out stuff that I knew on the earlier version).  Then Kathy and I got new cell phones, the jazziest and most powerful new androids, which meant I was befuddled for a month when trying to use my phone.  My new job also meant that I got an iPad, which is widely used in the college, and which I got at the same time we changed cell phones.  So I had to learn how to use that as well (but fortunately Kathy's had an iPad for a long time so could help me with it).  I just have to keep adapting and not gripe, and I don't mind all these new gizmos, but I sure wish the uses of them came more intuitively.  (I had to have Elliott show me how to answer the new cell phone; I had received a couple of calls the first day I owned it and could not figure out how to answer it.  Sigh.)  I quickly became really good friends with the tech support guys in our office.

            What has startled me about the new technology is how vastly improved voice-recognition software has gotten.  It's almost a little creepy.  Siri on the iPad will respond to all kinds of commands.  "Wake me up in an hour."  "Find a good restaurant nearby."  "Where is Elliott Engstrand?"  (It didn't have an address for him, but it did have websites where he appeared.)

            Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

          Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

            Krystin has speculated about going back to school to become an RN.  I responded by exclaiming "my goodness, that will mean taking a lot of basic science courses!"

Krystin is aware of that.  She wrote to me that "I know it's a lot of science, and I was thinking about it last night, and I would just have to keep thinking about the end goal.  How much it will be worth it when I'm helping others to save their life.  I love working for [Sponsored Projects Administration, at the University], but I've been drawn to the medical field my whole life.  Since I can remember I've always told people that if I had my dream job (aside from writing), I would be an EMT.  Or a nurse in the ICU/CCU.  And if I can get in here and start taking nursing classes, I get a huge tuition break.  Working in the medical field, like I said, is something that I've wanted ever since I was little, but in high school I turned away from it when I learned how much science is required.  But that dream hasn't died!  I think I'm finally ready to face it!

I told her she should go for it if she thought she could handle the course work.  But even with the tuition break for employees, it would be expensive, and she'd have to be admitted to the School of Nursing—with effectively no background in the sciences.  I said she better be committed to pursuing the degree because she'd be taking a lot of biology and chemistry.

She agreed that she wouldn't be leaving her current job any time soon, if at all.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

          I think I aimed for respectable.  That was a mistake.  Anyone can be respectable later.

One should always be in love. That's the reason one should never marry.

            I have seen references to it over the years but never read it.  So I tackled Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time this year.  In four volumes (originally 12 books now published in 4), roughly 3000 pages and one million words, Powell traces the lives of a number of people in England from their college days in the early 1920s through their lives into the 1970s, thus tracing also the evolution of English society during a tumultuous era.  The books are all narrated by the same man, a novelist (who is, it is widely understood, Powell); the novels are about his literary and social circles.  I realized early that I had to go find help on the web to understand the narrative, a "Cliff's Notes," if you will, because I happened to read a commentary on one of the early books, just after I had finished it, and had completely missed the fact that the narrator had lost his virginity.  Powell, who wrote the books between 1951 and 1975, wrote extremely obliquely of matters of sex—so obliquely that I missed it altogether.

            Once I'd finished, I wondered about the series for a considerable time.  It's considered by most to be one of the great masterpieces of 20^th Century English writing.  I'm still not sure what I'd learned, or what I thought, but I did enjoy them.  A number of commentators have said they needed to read the series twice in order to fully understand them.  I don't know if I can re-read 3000 pages in this lifetime.

            Kathy has been mildly worried about how I'm going to spend my time in retirement.  So am I.  I don't really have a "hobby" per se, like refinishing furniture or making stained glass (tried that, don't want to pursue it).  I don't really want to just play bridge 3 times per week; perhaps we'll take up golf.  Kathy, however, suggested that I write something parallel to A Dance to the Music of Time, a narrative story covering the decades of my life, with characters floating in and out, as with Powell.  Powell acknowledged openly that many of the characters in the books were based on real people (and there are websites that link the characters to the real people), and the narrator (about whom we never really know that much) is Powell himself.  It's also clear that the books are semi-autobiographical.  The more I thought about Kathy's suggestion, the more fun I thought it might be to give it a try.  Heaven knows I write.  Whether well enough to put together something like such a quasi-fictional narrative is open to question, and whether I can create events interesting enough, with dialogue, is a question.  Moreover, Powell led an interesting life as author and critic and knew many of the leading lights in English literary and artistic circles; I can't make any such claim, and Kathy said that mine would have to be focused on academic rather than literary or artistic circles.

            I've decided to tackle the project, but it won't be a million words.  I have some sympathy for Lisa Bonos, who wrote a piece for the Washington Post reviewing a book celebrating the lost art of letter writing.  (Supposedly Oscar Wilde dropped his letters out his window and hoped that someone would pick them up and put them in the closest mailbox.)  I think everyone acknowledges that letters are largely dead, even though they are something one can hold and touch and savor long after they were written, and even though they reflect the author—in choice of paper, in handwriting, in non-letter symbols—more than any electronic message or keyed letter such as this one.  (I have letters that my great-grandmother wrote to my grandmother when she was dying of cancer.)  The challenge for biographers (and autobiographers) is to find the letters, if they exist, and capture the electronic exchanges, where they exist.  In my case, it is only because I have past letters (and emails) that I could even think about the effort.

            I may get part way through the writing and decide it's not worth it.  As I told Elliott in a text message, in looking through saved papers, I've now remembered events that I would have been quite pleased to have left forgotten.

            And I am afraid that this next Wilde quote rings too true for me, as I've been perusing letters and notes from my twenties.

We never get back our youth. . . .  The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot.  We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

            We had one of the more uneventful vacations in our lives last summer.  We visited my brother and sister-in-law at their lake cabin in Wisconsin and then drove to our friends Rolf & Roberta Sonnesyns' place on Leech Lake.  We thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality and the good company, as we always do with both couples, and did little else.  I did finally see the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which I suppose anyone who lives in Minnesota should do at some point in their life, and learned (what Kathy and Rolf & Roberta already knew) that the beginning of the river forms a question mark, flowing first north and then arcing east and south.  You learn something new every day.

            Elliott and I also handily outscored Rolf and his friend Tim Budge (their neighbors the Budges were also visiting at Leech Lake while we were there) 21-13 at bocce ball.

            Women are never disarmed by compliments.  Men always are.

          The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

            A few months after we finished mounting much of Kathy's button collection, I turned to my own collection of presidential campaign buttons.  I had learned, (through email) from a guy who's been dealing in political collectibles for years, that I had mine stored in a way that could cause damage over the long term.  So I had to disassemble the collection, purchase new mounting boards (acid-free mats), and mount them using wire twisted through small holes I had to drill in the mounting board.  The upshot was that over several weekends I was drilling and poking and twisting wire, and as with Kathy's buttons, lost sensation in a couple of my fingertips from all the twisting of wire.  But now, in theory, the buttons are mounted for the ages, and since Elliott's really interested in them, he will inherit them and he can expand the collection as or if he wishes in the future.

            I also added a few buttons to the collection, but I can't afford to expand it very fast because many of the buttons I need to fill it in are from before 1900—and those, especially the ones with pictures of the candidates, tend to go for a lot of money on eBay (which is where I obtain most of the newly-purchased ones).  I'm willing to pay $20-30-40 or perhaps a bit more for some older and rarer buttons, but when they get to $200-500, that's more than I'm prepared to spend.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

Anybody can make history.  Only a great man can write it.

            We received research confirmation this year that our marital relationship should be successful and happy.  If one believes the research.  Item 1:  economists at the University of Warwick in England "looked at why certain countries top the world happiness rankings. In particular they have found the closer a nation is to the genetic makeup of Denmark, the happier that country is. The research could help to solve the puzzle of why a country like Denmark so regularly tops the world happiness rankings."  They supported the research by using both international survey data and international genetics data, and found there were lower perceptions of wellbeing the further a nation's population is genetically from Denmark—and that included looking at Danes who had migrated elsewhere, such as to the United States.  The genetic explanation is that there are variants of a gene that affects "the reuptake of serotonin, which is believed to be linked to human mood."  There are long and short versions of the gene, and those with the short version appear to have higher rates of clinical depression (a debated proposition).  But of the 30 nations they looked at, [it is] Denmark (and the Netherlands) that have the lowest percentage of its population with the short version."  Kathy and I are both in significant part Danish.

Item two:  two researchers, one a professor of sociology, evolutionary biology, and medicine at Yale (he must be one smart guy to hold appointments in all 3 of those departments) and the other a professor of medical genetics and political science at UC San Diego (another odd juxtaposition of academic appointments) looked at 1.5 million gene variants in a large group of people (all European, so their study didn't speak to any question of skin color differences between groups) and concluded that close friends are the genetic equivalent of fourth cousins, on average.  “Not only do we form ties with people superficially like ourselves, we form ties with people who are like us on a deep genetic level. They’re like our kin, though they’re not.”  As I have mentioned before, Kathy and I share ancestors (both Danish and German) with the same names, Jensen and Pagel.  We have no idea if our Jensens and Pagels were related, but if one went back far enough in the genealogy, it would not be surprising to find that they were.

            So, on the basis of these two disparate pieces of research, we concluded that we made a good choice to pair up!  I confess that I'm a little skeptical about the first piece of research, but what the hey—it's still a good story.

            Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

          The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

            A friend of ours, half of a married couple with whom we are good friends, wrote an email to us after joining us on the deck one night in July for cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and described our back yard as our "glade."  I realized it was the right word:  trees, vines along both sides, hosta everywhere, 40+ flowerpots on the decks and ground, flower boxes, and other varieties of plants here and there.  That glade also provided us with wildlife amusement many nights last summer.

            Because our local chipmunk seemed to like them, we got into the habit of bringing a bag of assorted nuts out with us to the deck if we went out for a beer or glass of wine after work.  We would toss them on the deck and pavers and after a bit she'd appear (clearly a she—with nipples).  It didn't take very long for the chipmunk to make the connection between our presence and the nuts, so it got to the point where she'd come out quickly once we sat down.  She would eat the nuts, then cram her pouches as full as she could and scurry off to put the nuts somewhere—and promptly return, looking for more, which we'd give her.  This would go on for 2-3 times.  The most amusing part was when she'd try to cram a Brazil nut into her mouth.  That didn't work so well.

            Elliott checked out chipmunks on the web, and it seems that chipmunks do store food for the winter—and they know where it is.  Unlike squirrels, I suspect, because squirrels bury nuts and food everywhere, mostly places that get covered with snow during the winter.  I am unconvinced that squirrels have sufficient brain power to actually remember all the places they dug and stored nuts.  Chipmunks, however, store them in nests and places they can find the food.  Of course, I suppose the squirrels can come along and eat it out of the chipmunks' storage bins.

            While the chipmunk was retrieving, eating, and saving nuts, the finches finally found the finch feeder in July and would show up at the cocktail hour.  Presumably they showed up at other times as well.  Then the sparrows decided they liked the finch food as well, so there'd be 8-10-14 sparrows on or fluttering around the feeder.  Meantime, a daddy cardinal came down to the pavers, about 3 feet from the chipmunk, and flew off with one of the nuts.  (Mommy and daddy cardinal were both around, as they have been the last 2-3 years, but we didn't see any babies this year.)  At the same time we'd have a couple of butterflies floating about, bumblebees going into the hundreds of hosta flowers in bloom, and crows sitting on top of a neighbor's tree making a racket.

            All in all, a little bit of nature in the middle of the city.

            The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

Class model

            I hate people who are not serious about meals.  It is so shallow of them.

            Despite my avowal that this letter can't become a collection of obituaries, I seem not to be able to avoid noting the loss of long-time, close, and thus very dear friends.  In mid-August I lost another, Burt (Professor Burton) Shapiro, who before he retired held professorial appointments in both the Medical School and School of Dentistry at the U of Minnesota, and in that role taught genetics to hundreds of dental and medical students.  More importantly for me, Burt and I had lunch together at least once a week for over 20 years, when we talked about all subjects under the sun.  He was, in addition, my "Mr. Science," because every time I had a question about something related to the biological sciences, he usually either had an answer or a good referral—and in terms that I, a social scientist, could understand.  Burt was a world-renowned scientist for his work in identifying the causes of Down's syndrome and cystic fibrosis; he had well over 100 publications by the time he retired and countless additional invited presentations at national and international conferences and he had received many honors and distinctions from the professions.

            One lesson I learned from Burt was that if I read something in the news about a genetic cause of something, I should be very skeptical—because the genetic bases of afflictions are so complex that any researchers proclaiming a single-gene cause for anything will be wrong 99% of the time.  (He pointed out that even though eye color is popularly thought to be controlled by one gene, it isn't—it's a multi-gene trait, just like virtually all human traits.)  He also expressed skepticism, 20 years ago, that sequencing the human genome would have much immediate impact on medical treatments; he likened it to having all the parts of a Boeing 747 spread out on a field but no indication of how the parts fit together to make an airplane.  He predicted that it would be decades before the knowledge from the Human Genome Project would be translated into useful medicine.  Thus far, I think he's been proven correct.

            I shall miss his erudition in conversation, either over lunch or over drinks, his great wit, and his firm friendship of many years.  But I am fairly certain Burt is glad to be gone:  a few months before he died he had been diagnosed with ALS, from which there is no escape and no effective treatment—and nothing but depressing physical decline.  I saw him after the diagnosis, and we talked as always, but he was already having trouble with speech and he had difficulty with mobility.  He knew the end was coming but was stoic about it.  His wife Eileen, also a good friend, accepted his death with the knowledge that it was the way Burt wanted it.

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

I can resist everything except temptation.

            Kathy and I took a short break from the routine of life and drove down to Lanesboro, MN, for a Friday-Sunday in August.  Kathy had been there previously, camping; I had not.  We stayed in a rather luxurious Victorian B&B, and Kathy commented that she preferred the B&B approach over camping.  (The second "B" took on a new meaning at that place:  it was enormous.  Both days we didn't eat again until dinner.)

            Lanesboro's a fun little town that has somehow managed to make itself a go-to place for people in the surrounding Midwest for theater, shopping, and eating, along with biking and rafting on the Root River.  We saw Arsenic and Old Lace, which neither of us had seen for decades, and it still elicits laughter.  I wondered whether it would remain in the general theater repertoire, given that quite a few of the references in the dialogue are becoming dated (the play was written in 1939, and while we knew all of the references, the next generation won't).  But then it occurred to me that Shakespeare's plays at this point are almost nothing but references that no one now understands short of holding an annotated version of the text while the plays are being performed.  That isn't to say that Arsenic and Old Lace and Shakespeare's plays are on the same level, but I guess the former may survive awhile because it certainly is funny.

            At one point during our visit I was reminded of the humorous Australian country song "A Pub with No Beer."  We wander into the only bar or pub in Lanesboro on Friday afternoon and ask for a glass of white wine.  Sorry, they're out of white wine.  OK, we'll have red wine.  So we receive two plastic containers with pull tops that have the worst red wine I have ever had.  It was like drinking sandpaper.  We finally decide we can't handle it so I go back to the bar and ask for scotch and water.  Sorry, they don't have any scotch.  I was dumbfounded.  We didn't stay in the place long after that and we certainly didn't return.  A pub with no scotch.  Indeed.

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.  What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.

My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.

            One of the topics of jokes at many universities is parking.  There is never enough of it and good parking spots are greatly envied.  Clark Kerr, one of the great chancellors of the University of California system, once joked that his job involved primarily athletics for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty.  After years and years on a waiting list for one of the University's indoor somewhat-heated garages, I finally received notice that my name had made it to the top of the list.  So I took the new spot.  But I think I was probably on the waiting list for 20 years.  I didn't even remember, in fact, that I had put my name on the list!

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

           

Ian McKellen (aka Gandalf)

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

            Mid-September became an "old home week," although not planned.  Within a week I had reconnected with two guys I haven't seen in over 40 years, one a high-school classmate who found me on Facebook and the other someone I got to know the one semester I spent at Macalester College in the fall of 1969, my first year of college.  Then I had a high school class reunion (our class gets together every 5 years) and connected at a pre-event gathering with friends I've seen only intermittently in the 45 years since graduation. 

            I hope the newly-found old relationships can stay intact.  In none of the cases was there any good reason for them to have disappeared.  I'm a little surprised, in retrospect, that I let a relationship go—I've had many of my friends for three or four decades, which I don't think is all that unusual for people of my vintage, but I can't think of many times when I inadvertently let a friendship slip away.  But I suppose we all see some friendships ebb for the simple reason that a few of us are activist in maintaining relationships and others seem not to care much one way or the other.  I have never understood the latter group and have always tried to follow Polonius' advice to Laertes on this point:  "Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel."  I suppose one can question how far their adoption was tried, if I only knew them a year or so, but that's a minor quibble.  (And no, I can't quote Shakespeare at length at the drop of a hat, but I've always remembered much of Polonius' advice because we had to memorize it in high school English.)  Some relationships, of course, all of us purposely let slip away. . . .

            Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

          The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

            Krystin had the pancreas transplant, which followed the kidney transplant by 14 months.  This was the one she'd been waiting for, because it eliminated her diabetes.  Unfortunately, the life expectancy of the pancreas transplant is only 5-10 years (better when there's also been a kidney transplant), but we hope that within that period there will be sufficient advances in other diabetes treatments, such as growth of replacement organs from stem cells, that she won't need another cadaver transplant.  So she spent another week in the hospital, but this was time she considered better spent than any before.

            The medical events went on and on, however, and Krystin ended up being in the hospital for a month, only out here and there for a day or so before she had to go back.  Her esophagus constricted, so she couldn’t consume food or liquids, which is a drawback for anyone who wishes to continue living.  That meant she had to have an esophageal stent put in—we'd never heard of such a thing but learned that it's not all that uncommon.  Almost simultaneously, her gastroparesis flared up, not unusual following a transplant—so she could now get the food and liquids down, but they would then come right back up again.  So they put a temporary feeding tube in her stomach.  The tube—or the procedure, who knows which—caused her over a week of pain that she said was on the 7-8-9 end of the scale, and the medical folks could not figure out why.  All they could do was put her on painkillers—and after several days of Dilaudid, an extremely potent opiate, Krystin took herself off it because of a concern that she could become addicted and because the levels she was on were dangerously high—to the point that more and more was being required to reduce the pain.  Oddly, once she took herself off the Dilaudid, the pain subsided to a level she could bear.  And as soon as they put in the feeding tube, food and liquids began staying where they were supposed to.

            After all that, Kathy suggested that Krystin should perhaps stay with us a few days, rather than trying to live on her own.  Krystin was just weak from three procedures in less than a month and all that time on a hospital bed, so she took over Elliott's room for a short while.  She stayed a few days, went back to her apartment and back to work, but it was a struggle for her, and she ended up back in the hospital in mid-November.  After a few more days there, she was again released, feeling pretty good.  Every time she goes in, they try a new pharmaceutical cocktail, and I think that's really the major difficulty at this point.  The transplant docs also warned that it takes about three months to fully recover from a pancreas transplant and to receive its full benefits.  That's about Christmas for Krystin.  So we hope.  In the meantime, Krystin was back in the hospital over Thanksgiving and will be staying with us again for a few days after the holiday while continuing to recover from recurring dehydration and weakness.

The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.  It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

            One of my colleagues and friends who is highly sophisticated in matters of technology invited me to join a Google circle.  I told him that "I am sufficiently technologically challenged that I've never been quite sure what to do with these invitations to join a Google circle.  I once had a class on technology, about a year ago, that included explanation of Google circles, but I have never created one or joined one and am unclear what benefit there is to doing so."

            I explained that "I am not a Luddite by any means, and once I get adapted to new technology I usually love it, but I confess that I adopt a new technology as I am nudged or required to do so in order to function in the world—because none of it comes naturally for me.  I had to have my son show me how to answer an incoming call on my new cell phone because I couldn't figure out how to do so.  Sigh."

            I laughed out loud at his response.  And didn't feel quite as techno-retarded as I might otherwise.

"Hey, truth is, I haven’t got a clue how to use Circles either—just trying to keep up with the cool kids!"

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

            Elliott was being pestered at dinner in his resident hall at Moorhead by a guy who wanted to talk to him about the Bible and Christianity.  Elliott does not look kindly on these solicitations.

"If I had a time machine, before I went back and killed Hitler as a child, I'd probably stop by whoever decided that Christianity should be evangelical and punch him in the face."

I suggested that "as for murderers, if you want to go back in history, there are quite a few one could list.   You need to get Stalin, too.  I think the Romans did a few in."

Elliott didn't buy inclusion of the Romans.  "Thing is, Romans also contributed a considerable amount to modern society.  And even if I somehow wanted to erase the Romans from history, there is not one single person I could off and change history forever.  Killing Hitler in the early 30s would most likely have prevented Nazi Germany from ever existing."

I pointed out that I probably would not be alive, or not where I am, if not for WWI and WWII (citing the French Revolution -> Napoleon -> unification of Germany -> world wars -> my dad going to college on the G. I. Bill).

There is that inescapable paradox of time travel, of which Elliott is well aware.  "Any time I talk about time travel I have to suppose the hypothesis is correct that the act of traveling back creates a second branch of existence which runs parallel to your original timeline, thus anything you do would not risk your own birth. Therefore killing Hitler would be for the good of humanity as a whole, and would not affect me personally.

"However, if you assume that there is only one timeline, time travel becomes impossible because the moment you go back with a particular goal, the completion of that goal erases the motive you had in the first place. Instant paradox, regardless of what it is you intended to change.

"But if I really thought about it, I most likely would not ever change anything. Even horrific things like Nazi Germany always have silver linings, many of which we cannot measure. The (mostly) worldwide economic and technological boom that immediately followed WW2, the formation of the UN, etc.

"Same with the Titanic. Yes, many people died but at the same time, naval safety protocols and engineering were forever changed for the better—that kind of event had to happen to spur that development. You can never know what new damage you might be creating by preventing one catastrophe."

I wondered if my Jewish friends would agree about not killing Hitler.  I noted a number of web pages speculating on what might have happened if Hitler had been killed as a child.  Ours was, of course, hardly the first time anyone had speculated about that possibility.  We hadn't thought about the fact that if Hitler is eliminated, (1) the Nazis still come to power, but with a more effective leader, or (2) the Soviets take over Europe.  There was also the problem, pointed out by a number of commenters, that one would have to go back and kill a child who, at that time, was innocent, something many would not find easy to do.

"I had assumed that without his charisma, the whole thing would have fallen off or never been more than a small mob annoying the German government.  However had not considered the Soviet Union in the equation.

"That could certainly have some major implications for the future of civilization.  If Hitler had died and the Nazis had never come to power, the nuclear arms race could have been an entirely different game.  Who knows, maybe we would have all blown ourselves up in that alternate universe."

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

          To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

            There was an interesting article in Salon about how the Baby Boomers should quit blaming the millennials or any of the following generations for the mess the world is in—because it's the Baby Boomers who created the mess, after being left a world by their parents that was in reasonably good shape after WWII going into the 1960s.  I think that in large part the argument is valid:  it is my generation, those my age plus/minus 10 years, who have screwed up the economy and politics in this country and foreign policy around the world.  There are all kinds of qualifiers to be put on the proposition, but as I say, I think in gist it's right.

I sent the article to Elliott and told him I thought it was largely correct.  He had an interesting response.  "Seems like we are becoming our grandparents, or the generation before them:  we're going to have to build the economy back up so the next generation or two can have that prosperity.  That's fine; I can survive perfectly well on a moderately low income.  My needs are simple."  But then, I asked him, how can he support Kathy and me in our old age???

More seriously, in a long article in the Guardian titled "Were we happier in the stone age?" that was focused  more on happiness than the state of the world, note was also taken of the fact that for some, life has never been better than in the last 50 years.

Even though the last few decades have proven to be a relative golden age for humanity in the developed world, it is too early to know whether this represents a fundamental shift in the currents of history, or an ephemeral wave of good fortune: 50 years is simply not enough time on which to base sweeping generalisations. . . .  Indeed, the contemporary golden age may turn out to have sown the seeds of future catastrophe. Over the last few decades we have been disturbing the ecologic equilibrium of our planet in myriad ways, and nobody knows what the consequences will be. We may be destroying the groundwork of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.

That's the greater worry, in my mind, about the world my generation is leaving to its children.  Was ours just a one-time episode in human history, not to be repeated for centuries, a prelude to the onset of another medieval period or worse?  I think there are reasonable grounds to think that might be the case.

            Genius is born, not paid.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

            Two metaphors and one Scottish phrase caught my attention this year.  I have no reason to write about them other than the fact that I liked them.

            One of the metaphors is an old one, from the German philosopher G. W. F Hegel in 1820:  "Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly."  (The owl of Minerva refers to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and a little owl that accompanied her.  Athena became Minerva in the Roman pantheon.  The owl has thus come to represent wisdom in Western symbolism.)  What he meant, in the context of philosophy, was that it is not possible to understand previous epochs or eras until after the fact.  The metaphor later came to be used more generally, that one cannot understand past events until after the fact.  One might argue this is just a hifalutin way of saying that hindsight is 20/20, but my sense is that it isn't used for the quotidian events of life but instead refers to a larger understanding of past events or eras.

            The other one only appeared in fall 2013.  Lewis Lapham recalled that in his first year of college, he had been stricken with a virulent form of meningitis and given virtually no chance to survive.  He did, and writing 60 years later, observed that "I hadn’t been planning any foreign travel, and yet here I was, waiting for my passport to be stamped at the once-in-a-lifetime tourist destination that doesn’t sell postcards and from whose museum galleries no traveler returns."  Interesting way to describe death.

            "Help ma Boab!"  One of my Scottish friends used this phrase in an email exchange.  I had to ask about it.  It comes from a comic strip written since the 1930s, "Oor Willie," and is one of Willie's stock phrases, roughly meaning "goodness gracious me." 

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

            As the election season came to a close this year, I was struck by a "credo" from Isaiah Berlin, one of the most brilliant philosophers and social and political theorists of the 20th Century, written when he was 85 on the occasion of being granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Toronto.  He spoke about the power of ideas and the cause of the terrible events of the century, during his life (all that follows is quoted material from the New York Review of Books):

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments. . . . They have been caused, in our time, by . . . one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it.

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.

This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not.

So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?

I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.

            Or, in the succinct and somewhat more flippant words of Evelyn Waugh, "Every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste."

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

Fruit Study

It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom.  He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

            Sometimes what I write here can perhaps be useful to those who read it.  Rebecca Boyle, a free- lance science writer, wrote a piece titled "The end of night" this year.  She described the ubiquity of lighting, particularly in cities and towns in the developed world, and cites considerable research to the effect that "an eternal electric day is creeping across the globe, but our brains and bodies cannot cope in a world without darkness."  Humans have had artificial light since the first campfire and the drive to increase lighting in society has existed ever since.

Only in the last couple of centuries, however, has there been widespread expansion of lighting.  One of the primary justifications for increased lighting has been safety, but she reports on a 1997 report by the National Institute of Justice (U.S.) that found no "conclusive correlation between night-time lighting and crime rates."  Of greater interest, a report just a couple of years ago from a committee of the American Medical Association described lighting as a "man-made self-experiment" that could have harmful effects.  Humans and all other species evolved over billions of years in a cycle of day and night; we are not evolved to have constant day.  (She notes that a shopping mall at night is 200,000 times brighter than a moonless night.)

There are a multitude of ill effects from lighting up the night, including effects on migratory birds (that use the moon and stars but are misled by lit buildings and spotlights), sea turtles (affected by beaches lit up at night), bats (flight paths and ability to feed and defecate seeds), and so on.  Equally dismaying, light pollution may increase, and even cause, cancer, obesity, and depression in humans.  The vehicle for the potential effects is melatonin, derived from serotonin, a neurotransmitter that affects mood and appetite.  Melatonin, she reports, is an antioxidant, protecting DNA and possibly preventing development of cancer cells (particularly breast and prostate cancer).  Melatonin's chief role, however, is regulating the sleep-awake cycle by making one drowsy and suppressing body temperature—and it plays that role in mammals, fish, and birds.  Melatonin production begins with the onset of darkness and is inhibited by light.  Light stops it, in fact.

Of import on a daily basis for many of us is the fact that the "circadian photoreceptors" in our eyes are especially sensitive to light from the bluish end of the spectrum.  But blue light is what comes from our iPads, laptops, and cell phones, and there's now ample research from a number of sources demonstrating that exposure to the blue light of screens tamps melatonin production.  Use a phone or tablet before going to bed and the research is clear:  you'll be tired.  People naturally wake up at night and always have—to perform bathroom functions, eat, make love, etc., and there's good evidence to suggest that natural wakefulness was the pattern before the modern age.  The difference between that and device-induced insomnia is that we get up and turn on the light—stopping the production of melatonin.

The upshot of the various epidemiological and neurological studies is that all this light is causing significant health problems for many of us.

This is, Ms. Boyle notes, much more a first-world problem.  The satellite images of the globe at night show that beyond dispute (e.g., South Korea is lit up like a lamp; North Korea is dark; much of Africa is dark but Europe blazes).  But we aren't going to close power plants and (for those of us in the north) start going to bed at 5:00 in the afternoon in winter.  There are steps people can take to offset the worst effects of light pollution in their lives.  For example, the fluorescent swirl lamps that are coming to replace traditional incandescent bulbs have too much blue light; for bedside reading, red-shifted lights should be used.  So also for street lights and lights in buildings at night.  Downward-directed street lights can increase lighting on the ground while reducing errant upward lighting—which can save money as well as save the darkness.  There is even a free app for tablets and phones called F.lux that in the evening shifts the lighting in the display toward the red end of the spectrum, which mimics the setting sun and incandescent bulb.  The best thing to do, however, is avoid blue-shifted artificial light of any kind at least an hour before you go to bed.

So there's my science lesson for the year.  This article struck a chord with me, however, because we have neighbors who leave a spotlight on 24/7, we have a streetlight directly behind our house in the alley, we have one in front on the street, and it's just impossible to have a dark night.  We have to go to some length to darken our bedroom so that we don't have the light that stops the production of melatonin.

(This article also let me understand the virtue of taking melatonin before going to bed in anticipation of and dealing with jetlag.  It also suggests that taking melatonin in a plane, 30 minutes before an overnight trans-oceanic flight, may only be modestly successful:  there's often too much light in the airplane.  Perhaps taking it orally helps overcome the inhibition created by the interior plane nights.)

            Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing [viz., Wilde and Kardashian!].

Time has been condensed for many of us.  William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (the novel that essentially founded the cyberpunk tradition, created the idea of the matrix, and that popularized the term "cyberspace" [which Gibson himself had coined in an earlier work]), commented this year that "There’s just some sort of endless now, now. . . .  Fifty years ago, I think now was longer.  I think that the cultural and individual concept of the present moment was a year, or two, or six months.  It wasn’t measured in clicks.  Concepts of the world and of the self couldn’t change as instantly or in some cases as constantly.  And I think that has resulted in there being a now that’s so short that in a sense it’s as though it’s eternal.  We’re just always in the moment."

At about the same time I read that, there was an intriguing little piece on "The Pleasure and Pain of Speed."  Google has concluded that "now" lasts about ¼ of a second (about 250 milliseconds).  That's how long it takes for a human to register something visually as a stimulus; anything longer and the viewer's train of thought is interrupted, Google concluded, so the ideal latency for a search engine is ¼ of a second.  "A quarter of a second, then, is a biological bright line limiting the speed at which we can experience life.  And the life that we are creating for ourselves, with the help of technology, is rushing towards that line."

What's astonishing, to me, is that "in absolute terms, the speed of human movement from the pre-modern period to now has increased by a factor of 100.  The speed of communications . . . rose by a factor of 10 million in the 20th century.  Data transmission has soared by a factor of around 10 billion."  Human neurology has not changed; we can react to stimuli no faster than our ancestors.  But we face a life that has sped up, a "now" that barely lasts, as Gibson observes, and the world now brings us vastly more stimuli than any of our predecessors faced.  Some object, some avoid it, some flee from it, but "Whatever protests we have made to the march of modernity, . . . the world opted for speed again and again."

So what's my point?  I don't know.  One way of looking at the speed up is that technology is bringing material to us as fast as our speed of thought, and is thus a vast improvement over libraries and typewriters.  We can get information faster—and we're probably learning to use a keyboard faster to get it even more quickly.

That we enjoy accelerated time, and pay a price for it, is clear.  The ledger of benefits and costs may be impossible to balance, or even to compute.  As the sociologist John Tomlinson writes in his book The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy, speed “offers both pleasures and pains, exhilarations and stresses, emancipation and domination.”  These are often “so intertwined that it seems impossible, as individuals, to say whether an increasing pace of life is, in essence, a good or a bad thing.”  But it may be that the most salient feature of accelerating time is not pleasure or pain, but that it is useful, and that we are willing to go a long way for a little bit of extra utility.

The people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people.  What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.  Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

As Elliott entered his 9^th semester of college, I passed along a couple of observations.

1.  You perhaps recall that I told both you and Krystin, when you were in high school, that you should take in college what interests you, not what you necessarily think will get you a job--and that the professional training, whatever it be, could come in graduate or professional school.  I still believe that to be true, although I surmise you're going to want to look for a job after you get your B.A.  I just hope you don't rule out the possibility (and desirability) of advanced education at some point.

2.  You've now pretty much had the college education I wanted you to have in order to become a civilized, reasonably educated, literate adult.  (Yes, you have courses to complete your major, which presumably will increase your proficiency in the field, but in terms of your basic liberal education, with whatever breadth you obtained, that's done.  You had psychology, history, sociology, ethics, etc.)

So I have two adult children who are competent to carry on a conversation with other educated adults.  Surely what many of us want for our kids!

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details.  Details are always vulgar.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

            Because of the news feeds to which I subscribe, I see quite a number of research report summaries every day.  Most are of no interest or they may be so scientifically complex that only the specialists in the field can understand them (or judge them).  Some, however, strike my fancy, and one was that sadness lasts longer than other emotions.  But as with all such reports, one has to be careful:  in this case, the research involved 233 Belgian high school students, which isn't exactly a representative group of subjects.  For myself, I'd be more interested in research that included a large number of Americans, and certainly not just high school students (or college students).  The researchers found that sadness can last up to 240 times longer than other emotions (shame, surprise, irritation, boredom, etc.), and probably because sadness accompanies events of great impact.  Those kinds of events, they suggest, take more time to assimilate and to get over.

            The qualifiers aside, my response when reading the summary of research was that it was true for me.  The times I have been most affected in life, in terms of the lengthiness of the effect, was when I lived through events that provoked profound sadness on my part.  The three that occur to me are my mother's death at 62, the only time I had an emotional relationship severed involuntarily, and my divorce.  In retrospect, other highs, lows, and in betweens have lasted for much less time and probably had much less effect on my life.  (One caveat about that last statement:  the effect of being happy and getting married certainly has had a long-term effect on my life, but in those instances I think it's the marriage and not the happiness per se.)  It is a bummer that one of the most aversive and depressing emotions is the one that seems to last the longest.

            To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

          Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

            There is a congeries of issues that we should all be paying attention to, especially if we're not approaching the end of our working careers.  Consider this from media.com:

--          Someone could make off with all your garbage that’s put out on the street, and carefully record how many used condoms or pregnancy tests or discarded pill bottles are in the trash, and then post that information up on the web along with your name and your address. There’s probably no law against it in your area. Trash on the curb is public.

--          If an addiction recovery group decided to take advantage of the summer weather by meeting in a park across the street instead of their usual church basement, you could record the entire conversation and post it, along with photos of the group’s members, on the Internet in real time. You could tag it with the names of their employers, friends and family members, to make sure no one missed it. Conversations that take place in public parks are public.

--          A stranger could park a drone with a webcam outside your window and live-stream video footage from inside your house to the world, complete with sound. In fact, it’s probably not illegal. The view from the street is public.  [There may be "peeping tom" laws in some places that would bar this behavior.]

--          There’s no real restriction preventing Google from popping up your home address, likely place of work, a recent photo, and accurate political donation data when someone searches for your name. Public data is public.

--          You can talk to your friends about an issue in your life, even exposing information about how you’re vulnerable or affected by a circumstance. And if that conversation with friends happens to occur online, various publishers might capture it, remove it from its context, attach it to your real name, mention your employer or other affiliations, and then build their own narrative around it without your consent. Because social media is public.

            These possibilities are related to the news about the NSA snooping on Americans and across the globe and about the European community's decision to require Google and others to permit people to remove items from the web.  We don't have any social, much less global, agreement on what is "private" and what is "public."  Certain governments want very little to be private, so they can track everything their citizens do (think totalitarian governments or those that fall on that end of the spectrum). 

(Despite all the hoopla about what NSA has done, I don't think the U.S. is approaching totalitarianism, and I have some sympathy for those responsible for the security of the country:  they can be barred from tracking electronic activities, but the U.S. public will scream loudly for their necks if any more major terrorist acts occur on American soil.  I understand perfectly well the civil liberties implications but also the fact that there are some really nasty people out there.)

            The more troubling issues, at least for now, it seems to me, arise around the need to forget.  People fired from jobs because they posted an indiscreet photo to the web 20 years ago or because they wrote something incendiary while in their teens.  Before the age of the Internet, those incidents in lives faded into lost personal history and were usefully forgotten as people changed and matured.  The European approach, the right to be forgotten, has problems:  there are free speech questions as well as the specter of politicians and a lot of other people pulling down stuff that might be embarrassing but that citizens of a nation should be able to know.  A writer for the New Republic instead urges a "right to evolve" or a "right to a dynamic identity."  (As I mentioned earlier, I've run across papers from four decades ago that I'm glad aren't on the Internet.  There's nothing criminal, by any means, but I occasionally behaved in ways that now make me wince, and I wrote things, and wrote about things, in a way that I would never do now.)

All of us, I am sure, have awkward incidents from our distant past, but those of us of a certain age—whose youth preceded the Internet—aren't at risk (as long as we haven't, as adults, posted anything stupid).  Our children are if they ever post anything the least bit risqué or socially or politically or religiously contentious.  We who are older also needn't care so much, at least in terms of future employment.  I'm not planning on running for public office, and like many of my friends (those who haven't already done so), I'm on the glide path to retirement in the next few years, so even if something embarrassing about me showed up on the web, my life will be largely unaffected.  (I can't imagine what that would be, either.  My embarrassments are all buried in the past and on yellowing paper.  The only embarrassments that could hurt are those that might damage my personal relationships—marital or with friends—but there aren't any such embarrassments lurking anywhere.)

There are a lot of inter-related topics here that I'm not going to try to explore in this letter, but they're worth tracking.  There are also articles published almost daily about these issues, in one form or another.

One thought that's sort of off the wall does occur to me.  I think one of the more interesting characters in science fiction literature comes from Isaac Asimov's great work, the Foundation series.  "The premise of the series is that the mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept of mathematical sociology.  Using the laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale."  (Wikipedia)  In the books, it is quintillions of people spread across the galaxy, but NSA has data for billions.  Surely, a la Seldon, it can begin making psycho-historical predictions.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves?  My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

            Here's a word debate for you.  A friend of mine posted an article on Facebook about how some people at Smith College had reacted negatively to the use of the word "crazy" as "ableist" and derogatory of people with mental impairments.  The article author found the episode outrageous, an example of "political correctness" gone wild.  Mixed up in the discussion at Smith were the use of n-word and the c-word in exchanges about freedom of speech.  One of the speakers used the words themselves, rather than "n-word" and "c-word" replacements, and some present got upset.

I confess that my first response was to agree that this was excessive political correctness, but I was curious about the opinions of some of my colleagues in the academic community here.  (This was not a large sample, and it's my friends, so it can be taken as nothing but indicative of possibilities.)  I asked about the reaction to the use of "crazy" and opined that if one is talking explicitly about the impact of words such as "nigger" and "cunt," in discourse about free speech and its impact, it is acceptable to use the words themselves.

            The responses from my friends were fairly nuanced.  On the one hand, this does seem to go overboard.  On the other hand, there are really two different meanings to "crazy."  One is the sense of "wild and crazy guy" or "it was a wild scene."  Presumably no one objects to that kind of description (although in fact apparently at least one person at Smith did object even to that use, to which I can only say "get a life").  The second is to use the term to describe someone, or a group of people, who suffer from mental impairment to some degree.  In the second instance, to use the word "crazy" to the person's face, when they do have some cognitive abilities, is clearly insulting and hurtful.  In that case, I'm not sure it's that different from using an ethnic or religious slur.  No one who wrote to me thought the use of the other terms should be barred from discourse when the words themselves are the focus of the discussion.

            A few representative comments.

In my opinion the tone policing that is taking place is overboard.  I am sympathetic, however, to the degree to which many, many years of institutionalized discrimination—overt or unconscious—provided the impetus for such over-reactionary dogmas to take hold.  Getting the pendulum to swing back to equilibrium is the trick."

I totally agree that we should be able to use the n-word, c-word, and all other racial, sexist, etc. slur words in academic discourse when they are the topic of that discourse.  Equally, we should be able to use the other c-word (crazy) in academic discourse.  The problem may be, however, that most of us are sensitized to the use of nigger and cunt and would not use them in conversation, but are not sensitized to the word crazy (in the context of those with mental disabilities -- not Steve Martin's "wild and crazy guy").  Similarly, those of us who watch football are not sensitized to the word Redskins -- but it clearly has a horrible history that would require us to retire it from our normal conversation.  But how would we ever discuss this horrible history without using the word?  The issue should be, I think, one of what our normal conversations should look like, not our academic discussions relevant to word use and historical discrimination and mistreatment of particular groups.

Wow, if true this is a frightening.  It's good to know that even the libertarians get something right now and again.

Hmmm.  Remember the use of the word "retard" back in your schooldays.  Never nice, but doubly taboo now, and rightly, because of offense to people with intellectual disabilities.  Is the word "crazy" offensive in a similar way?  I'm not sure.  "Crazy" seems, on first thought, to be somewhat more general in meaning.

Of course, offense is in the eye of the beholder.  The censorship—as opposed to simply raising the concern—does seem over the top, but I attended a panel/conversation last year at the U talking about invisible disabilities, and there was mention by some of the panelists that the use of the word "crazy" (along with other insensitive behaviors) made them feel excluded and disrespected.

I am really old fashioned.  I don't like words that can have a negative connotation because they distract me from the context or meaning of the discussion/article.  I also worry that controversial words may change the dialogue.

I'd say you don't say "crazy" (meaning "mad" in some way) in unfamiliar and/or potentially misunderstanding company, or familiar but crazy, unless the crazy person is known not to object to being called crazy.  These terms, any terms, are a matter of tact for the company.

I suppose "crazy" is considered an insult to the genuinely mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, but that's just nuts.  Only in the groves of academe would this even come under discussion.  I have very mixed feelings about these language issues.  I think it's important to be sensitive and respectful to our fellow humans, and outside of the academic discourse context, use of the n-word and c-word should perhaps have consequences, in both school and the workplace.  Language policing is never successfully legislated, however, and it is an extremely slippery slope.

            A closing story about "crazy."  Forty years ago or so I took a seminar in clinical psychology when I was a graduate student.  The seminar was taught by Regents Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Law Paul Meehl (to whom I've alluded elsewhere in these letters as writing about clinical versus statistical prediction).  The seminar occurred not long after the publication of Thomas Szasz's book The Myth of Mental Illness, in which Szasz maintained that mental illness is a social construct, unlike cancer or an infection.  I have always remembered that Meehl related during a seminar session that he had been in institutions and clinical settings for those with severe mental disabilities and said "you can't tell me those people aren't crazy!"  Maybe now, four decades later, he wouldn't say that, but there you have it.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written or badly written.  That is all.  [And this one, of course, is well written!]

No good deed goes unpunished.  [I include this only because, while many of us have heard this many times, especially at work, I never knew it was Wilde.]

            Elliott's cell phone died in mid-November.  Talk about a crisis of the first magnitude.  We find out from Verizon that we have no upgrade eligibility until February 2015, so Elliott suggests I find his old flip phone and send it to him.  I do, but first have to get it activated by Verizon and then get it shipped to Moorhead.  So one day at lunch I walked 2 miles, first to Dinkytown and then over to Stadium Village to get the phone working and on its way.  Elliott thanked me in an email message (since he had no phone) and wrote almost exactly what I had been thinking as I was trekking all over to get the darn thing to him.  "Weird how naked I feel without a piece of technology that didn't even exist a couple decades ago.  You don't realize how much of your life revolves around having access to your cell phone until it's completely gone."  I was willing to walk all over because I knew exactly what he meant—before he even wrote it.

            Elliott also suggested that hereafter we should keep the old phone, when we get a new one, for precisely the case when a phone dies and there's no upgrade eligibility.  (I should point out that with upgrade eligibility, a new phone for Elliott would have been about $200; without it, it would cost $650.)

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.  He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.

            At the close of Thanksgiving break, when Elliott was home for 4 days, I had won 47 cribbage games and he had won 46. 

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.

Business advice writer Penelope Trunk suggests that "there’s a rule for writing authentically.  If something really bad is happening, write shorter."  Because nothing bad is happening (at least in my life), I don't have to.  As 2014 draws to a close, I am glad to be able to say that life is, on balance, good.  When one is happily married and one's children are on paths to achieving something—whatever it turns out to be—other matters are less significant.  It is pleasant to be on a calm and sunny sea rather than on one that sometimes seems to be the perfect storm.  The occasional breeze to rock the boat is healthy and keeps us on our toes; a life that's too calm can easily become boring and stuck in a rut.  2014 had occasional breezes.  (And sometimes annoying ones, such as when, over Thanksgiving weekend, both the refrigerator and the dishwasher decided to go on the fritz.  Really, it had to be both of them at the same time.)

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One of us has got to go.  (Written shortly before he died.)

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.  [Certainly not true of me!]

I wish you the best of the season and for 2015!  So does Kathy, even though this isn't her letter.