Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Good morning.
Another brief travelogue, a le Carre observation, and a few fun words that I'd like to use in this missive but won't. I'll just list them with potential applications.
We extended our stay in Florida from February 28 to March 13. In the meantime, as all my family and friends in Minnesota know, we missed an extremely long stretch of bitterly cold weather. From what I read, it didn't break any records, but it sure seemed to me that it went on longer than any recent periods of cold weather that I can recall. Several friends wondered if we were gloating about being in Florida. We were not; I was feeling sorry for family and friends. We were *glad* we were in Florida but we weren't gloating.
On January 30 we learned that Elliott is engaged to his girlfriend Martha. We were delighted because we like her very much. The two of them have been to our home on a number of occasions, including Christmas and on the deck last summer during the pandemic, and she's as good a raconteur as Elliott is. Now their challenge is to figure out when they might have the appropriate events. I personally am optimistic, reading the pandemic news, that they might be able to have a wedding and reception later this summer. He and I have been having fun going back and forth on a guest list, but I will be careful not to insert myself into their planning except as they ask for my advice. I'm not holding my breath—and that's OK.
Late in January we journeyed to Lake Placid (FL, not NY!) to visit a high school classmate and her husband. We've done a fair amount of visiting—and driving to do it. This was a 90-minute drive each way, but worth it. We had a great time and got to see many of the nearly 50 murals on building walls in the town of 2500. They are quite proud of all those murals and keep them maintained. Here's one.
Here's another, one that has an amusing story behind it.
The three geezers in the back right are Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. The three of them were on a road trip in 1927 looking for plants that could be used to make rubber. They got stuck in the sugar sand; the guy who came and dug them out owned Lake Placid Motor Co. Lore has it he was a Chevy dealer.
A Facebook post of mine from a bit ago, for the many of you who are not Facebook friends. It is no surprise that one sees in south Florida a much wider variety of state car license plates than in Minnesota, especially in the winter. California and Texas, but more from the snowbelt states, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota. However, I was amused to see the single largest collection of different plates in one place at one time in the Total Wine parking lot.
I don't know that I agree completely, but interesting observations on the pandemic. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/02/groundhog-daze-on-living-the-same-day-over-and-over.html
Lately, I've found myself wondering if the time spent in lockdown is going to be memorable or if it's just going to be one long blur of days spent more or less the same way—waking up, staring, trying to work, forgetting to do things, drinking, sleeping. Even the initial flood of pieces about the lockdown experience has mostly dried up, replaced by tweets in which people confess not to know how to get through the sameness of each predictable tomorrow. There's nothing to say about nothing. Furthermore, no one wants to read about it. No one even wants to write about it (though here I am anyway).
Life under lockdown, for some, is a life of pure consumption: a life without social goods, let alone a social life. Being a good citizen is measured in terms of the conscientiousness of one's spending: ordering takeout from a local restaurant, paying for a movie from a local theater, having groceries and home goods delivered instead of going out. For people whose immediate work has not placed them on the front line of infection, the message of staying home and consuming for the greater good has led to a form of moral activity that reduces itself to spending money in the right way on the right things, and only that. And, of course, such "virtuous" isolation relies on people who can't stay at home all day: the cooking staff at the restaurant, the grocery workers packing up your order, the delivery people bringing you what you've ordered. Even if staying in is the right thing to do, it is also, in the most basic sense, parasitic.
Parasitic does seem right, in some way.
One of my good friends, retired faculty from the U, sent me a message one morning. "I'm glad you are having a wonderful time. I'm trying to imagine a winter from here on out where you don't go to Florida!" She made a good point. We're pretty much settled on next year, since we've scrapped any plan for international travel in 2022. We'll have to see about the future, but her observation does prompt me to wonder the same. Why would we stay in Minnesota during the winter if we don't have to? Kathy agrees that if we do go anywhere in future years, it will be Florida. One major reason is that we know a lot of people here. We wouldn't go to Texas, Arizona isn't green or anywhere near water, and California is too crowded.
It has taken me some time to figure out why driving around here is different from driving around in the Twin Cities: the roads are generally smooth. There are no potholes and patching all over! My one question is this: do any of the roads buckle from heat in the summer? We see that happen in the southwest, and sometimes even in Minnesota (although that's fairly rare). My Florida friends assure me that at least some places, there are potholes, and on occasion the roads buckle from heat. I have to say, however, that in general the roads here are in much better condition than those in Minnesota. The weather must be the major difference, because there's no freezing and thawing here, which is hell on asphalt and concrete.
I rarely watch anything on TV. However, Kathy discovered a series that we've been watching the last few nights: a colorized version of films from a wide variety of sources taken during some of the major events of WWII. The colorization was done extremely well and the producers assembled a set of excellent military and other historians to provide commentary (which was quite lively). Episodes included the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway, Hiroshima, Buchenwald, and a few others. They reported—and I checked Wikipedia on this—that when Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton came to Ohrdruf concentration camp—the first one that the Allies liberated, a part of the Buchenwald complex—Patton, whose nickname was "Old Blood and Guts," went behind a building and vomited at what he saw. Eisenhower and Bradley were stony-faced. "After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:
The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. [Patton had vomited earlier, I believe.] I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"
Eisenhower also called in the press and members of Congress.
One day we walked for the second time at the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, an Audubon site. We drove there but had forgotten (1) you need a reservation and (2) it costs $17 per person. They had slots available, so we paid our $34 and took the 2¼-mile boardwalk. By far the most expensive walk we've taken—twice. The boardwalk is lightly shaded, which was better than the day before, when we walked too far in the sun, partly on asphalt and concrete, and got overheated. We started our time in Florida walking in jeans and sweat socks and shirts and sweatshirts and jackets and sometimes hoods; now we're in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and we get too warm. The evolution of south Florida weather from January into February. We finally saw an alligator; in fact, we saw two, one adult and one baby about 2' long. Here's the baby:
Ugh. I happened to glance at the
front tires on our car and was startled at what I saw. I did the Lincoln penny test
on them. Three different automotive websites suggest the test. You put the
penny, Lincoln's head down, into the grove of the tread; if any part of Lincoln's
head is not visible, your tires are OK. If his entire head is visible, they
need to be replaced. His entire head and then some was visible on the tires. I
will be taking the car in for two new ones. I won't be driving 1700+ miles back
to Minnesota, possibly on snowy roads in March, with two front tires with nearly
no tread. That's an invitation to an accident.
Kathy and I already know what we're having for dinner on the afternoon we get home: Papa Murphy's take-n-bake pizza.. Kathy will call ahead as we hit the Minnesota border coming from Wisconsin. Then we'll go down the street a few blocks to Longfellow Market to get some milk. Neither of us is going to want to cook after an 8-hour day of driving—and there won't be any food in the house anyway. If the travel goes as planned, we'll be driving home from Champaign, Illinois on March 15 and it should take 7 hours and 40 minutes, according to Google Maps.
That's enough about Florida.
* * *
Some time ago I wrote about Lord Acton's dictum that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." I stumbled across a quote from the novelist John le Carré apropos of Acton's claim: "All power corrupts, but some must govern." And therein lies the problem.
* * *
Some fun with words. I'll just list them with my own uses (some of which, no surprise, are linked to the circumstances of 2020). My varied sources for these words, incidentally, typically include a quotation from within the last 20 years.
Noctilucent: Shining at night. *I* am noctilucent until about 9:00 p.m.; years ago, I could shine later into the evening.
Autotelic: Having a purpose, motivation, or meaning in itself; not driven by external factors. I would like to think about my life as entirely autotelic but I suspect I would be deluding myself.
Quaternion: A set of four persons, things, etc. A varying quaternion of my friends and I play online bridge several times per week. I wish we had an occasional quaternion for dinner but that's not to be for months.
Metonymy: A figure of speech in which someone or something is referred to by the name of something associated. For example, the use of the word crown to refer to monarchy. I'm not quite sure when I'd use this but I like the word.
Jedburgh justice: Punishment before trial. After Jedburgh, a town in Scotland, where in the 17th century people were summarily executed. My stroll through all the Hercule Poirot novels tells me that he wouldn't have cared for Jedburgh justice. But then, he was Belgian.
Operose: tedious, wearisome. Our world since March of 2020.
Ballardian: Relating to a dystopian world, especially one characterized by social and environmental degradation, assisted by technology. Unfortunately, this could be all too accurate a term to describe the coming years of the 21st century. Fortunately, I share Elliott's view that humanity always seems able to save itself from disaster—but only at the last minute.
Risible:
1 capable of laughing; disposed to laugh
2 arousing or provoking laughter; especially : laughable
3 associated with, relating to, or used in laughter
I have always thought of myself as risible (definition 1), but others may think differently of me (definition 2). (I knew this word but not the breadth of its meaning.)
Palmary: Of supreme importance; outstanding; praiseworthy. My bridge skills are not palmary even after decades of play.
Onymous: Bearing the author's name; named. I love backward-created words. Some wit a couple hundred years ago decided that dropping the "an" from anonymous meant the author was identified.
Divagate: to wander or stray from a course or subject : diverge, digress. I thought that many of my days since retiring are spent divagating, but even that's incorrect because it presumes there was something from which I could divagate.
Vilipend:
1 to hold or treat as of little worth or account: contemn
2 to express a low opinion of: disparage
I vilipend those who prefer cribbage to bridge. (That's a joke. . . .)
Horse marine:
1. Something imaginary.
2. Someone out of their element; a misfit.
3. A marine part of a cavalry or a cavalryman doing marine duty.
Apparently there really have been "horse marines." This term is a cousin to the one I first heard from my dad about dating when he was young: watching submarine races at Lake Harriet. The appropriate response to most of Giuliani's lawsuits is "tell it to the horse marines."
Pleniloquence: Excessive talking. I wonder if there is a 21st century version: plenitweeting. In my life, neither my father nor my late former father-in-law nor my son will be/ever was accused of pleniloquence. Whether I am or not depends on how many glasses of wine I've had.
Chapfallen:
1 having the lower jaw hanging loosely
2 cast down in spirit : depressed
I was far less chapfallen (2) once Kathy and I got to Florida—and will be even less so when I can resume playing bridge with my friends!
Wantwit: A fool; one lacking good sense. It's such an evocative term, but I don't usually vilipend people so I can't use it very often.
Thinko: A careless error in thinking. Like a typo, something I'm afraid I may commit more and more as the years go by.
Red Queen hypothesis: The hypothesis that organisms must constantly adapt and evolve in order to survive in an evolutionary arms race. (In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass the Red Queen tells Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.")
The Red Queen hypothesis describes me trying to keep up with computer software.
My best.
Gary
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