May 21, 2022
Good morning.
We successfully got Elliott and Martha married. It was a marvelous event. I've attached a few photos at the end of this missive for those of my friends who are not on Facebook. The ceremony and reception were held in an old warehouse originally used by Sinclair to hold gas station pumps and equipment. Elliott and Martha's wedding planners recently purchased the building and are modernizing it for weddings and other events. Sort of a funky place but it worked out extremely well.
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My beloved wife knows me too well. She sent me this recently.
Most of the reason we have people come into our house while traveling is to water the plants, of which there are many. Way too many, in my spouse's opinion.
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A friend of mine recently went through a bout with prostate cancer. Fortunately, it was caught early and he's fine after surgery to remove the cancer. He's not the first of my male friends who have confronted the diagnosis of possible prostate cancer. Apart from the potential life-threatening disease itself, the biopsy to evaluate the cancer is itself worrisome. Two of the possible outcomes from having the biopsy are impotence and incontinence. Were I to face the need for a prostate biopsy, I would not be worried about impotence—I'm not planning on having more children at my age!—but incontinence would be a major annoyance.
Scientists at Columbia University have developed a new method of diagnosis. From ScienceDaily:
Researchers have developed a technology that could replace conventional biopsies and histology with real-time imaging within the living body. MediSCAPE is a high-speed 3D microscope capable of capturing images of tissue structures that could guide surgeons to navigate tumors and their boundaries without needing to remove tissues and wait for pathology results.
This is one of those advances that one hopes gets to the clinic as fast as possible, once it's been demonstrated to be effective.
Even at a very modest level the availability of this technology would have meant I could have avoided an obnoxious biopsy. I had a mysterious rash while we were in Florida—nothing serious—and saw a dermatologist. Just to be sure there was no underlying pathology, they did a biopsy. I believe they took about a teaspoon of flesh and skin out of my shoulder. OK, that's an exaggeration, but it was "a chunk" (in Kathy's word; she was watching; I couldn't see it). Several weeks later it's still not fully healed and I'll have a scar forever. Unless I go without a shirt—which I never do—no one can see the scar, and I really don't care, but for some time it was been scabbing and re-scabbing and itching. That minor irritation could have been avoided with this new technology. I can imagine that many people would be well-served if they could avoid the physical intrusion of a biopsy for diagnosis of potentially severe illness.
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Merriam-Webster's word you should know this week: Ultracrepidarian
This week’s word you should know is ultracrepidarian, defined as “going beyond one’s province or sphere; presumptuous.” The word may also function as a noun, used in reference to a person who behaves this way; the verb form ultracrepidate is defined as “to go beyond one’s sphere or province.”
Although these words may be found in our 1934 Unabridged Dictionary we do not currently enter any of them. The reason for this is that they have largely fallen out of use. This is somewhat odd, as there is certainly no shortage of people who feel comfortable offering advice and judgment on things about which they know little, but such is the way of language.
This is definitely a term that should come back into general use. One cannot count the number of ultracrepidarians when it comes to the coronavirus, starting with the man who was in the White House when the pandemic broke out. Anthony Fauci fights them every day. However, on a lighter note, when it comes to sports, everyone is an ultracrepidarian: they all know better than the coach what play should have been called or what player to send in or what the opponents are going to do. And some of us, me included, are ultracrepidarians when it comes to medicine: in the age of Google, I'm as good as the physician at diagnosing my own afflictions, right?
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A distant cousin of mine (whom I've never met), and now former Facebook "friend," posted this commentary recently [no corrections made]:
This regime is absolutely pathetic. They have no plan in place to help the people of this country. And the idiots that support this president should be the ones struggling in life not those who are out busting their ass everyday. Be nice if someone took one for the team for society and man kind. It’s almost legal to throat punch someone with a biden sticker on their vehicle or anyone that supports this Douce bag.
That post had been preceded by this: "Just when you think them scum in Washington won’t pull anymore tricks for midterms. They release the monkeypox. Folks you can’t make this up. Monkeypox."
As for the first post, it almost seems like something in which the FBI would be interested. I suppose it's too vague to be an actual call to action to assassinate the President. As for the second, such a monstrous charge could only arise from someone who reads the dark parts of the web. I suppose I should not be surprised at the tenor of these messages, given what we can all read about the attitudes of the MAGA folks.
What's so disturbing about these messages, for people who embrace the beliefs expressed, is that civil discourse is no longer possible, nor is a civil political process. Those who you disagree with are the enemy, evil, and to be eliminated. This is outright fascism and an end to the Republic.
I have rarely agreed with Republican public policy proposals, but until the advent of the Trump Republican party, I never thought of Republicans as bad or evil or out to undermine the government of the country. I disagreed with them, but that's what elections and political bargaining in legislatures are about. I guess I still don't think of them as evil, a term that must be used with caution, but there are other pejorative terms I could think of that I would not have considered before 2016.
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In the same depressing vein, Fareed Zakaria made a troublesome analogy about the country.
It has become two countries,” Zakaria said. “One is urban, more educated, multiracial, secular, and largely left of center. The other is rural, less educated, religious, white, and largely right of center. [Philosopher Elaine] Englehardt and the scholar Christian Russell have a famous cultural map that plots countries according to their responses to questions about values. . . . If one were to divide America into two countries, one red and one blue, I suspect that you would see that blue America would fit comfortably with Northern European Protestant countries, while red America’s cultural values would move it closer to Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.
I don't know enough about the culture of Nigeria to have an opinion, but I know enough about Saudi Arabia to think there is some truth in the comparison.
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On a less contentious and depressing note, I recently contemplated a small purchase that we made. Like every house I've ever known, we have an exterior spigot to which one typically attaches a hose. In our case, since we need hoses to run both to the front and the back, we have had a Y-shaped attachment that screws on to create two spigots. The one we had was old and leaking, so Kathy picked up a new one at our local hardware store. She had a choice between one that cost $8 and one that cost $15, so she splurged and bought the more expensive one, figuring it would last longer.
This little gizmo, made out of steel (I think), with plastic gaskets to seal the hose connections, little levers to close and open the hose valves, and a hard rubber or plastic screw-top to attach it to the house, cost $15. I think that's amazing. A steel plant had to make it, another outfit probably made the plastic parts and the small valves, and it had to be assembled. Then it had to be packaged and shipped from wherever it was made (I forgot to look at the packaging to see where it came from). A remarkably small price to pay for a simple little device.
Maybe I'm just fascinated by unimportant trivia in life. We're getting a new dishwasher; there's another device, far more complicated and far more expensive—but still, given the number of components and both electrical and mechanical systems needed, it's also relative cheap at $900. (One can purchase dishwashers that are both less and more expensive. We were about in the middle of the price range.)
In the same vein, I am continually amazed at the results of the work of material science engineers. How many times did the fan in our car go around in the trip from Florida to Minnesota? How many times did the tires revolve on their axels? Hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million. Yet the steel and rubber just keep on working as they should with minimum wear and tear. I think that's remarkable. (By the same token, as I have commented to friends more than once, I'm astonished at the strength of the steel in landing gear on airplanes: I can't believe they don't buckle the instant the wheels hit the runway—and I believe "hit" is the correct verb.)
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I've been thinking about housing lately because Elliott and Martha would like to buy a house, but the prices are so ridiculous that it's depressing for them to even look. What they want is the kind of setting that we (their parents) and they were raised in: in a city with a plot of ground with a lawn and a house and trees. I wonder what percent of the world's population lives in a house with land around it that belongs to them. I bet it's very small, perhaps 5% or fewer. Having the option for such housing must be a considerable privilege in the context of the world's population—as well as that of the U.S., probably.
One's view of desirable living quarters is of course largely conditioned on what you grew up with. I can vividly recall, when riding on the trains in both South Korea and Japan, passing countless 30-40-story apartment buildings, often five or six identical buildings adjacent to each other. I have read that these are not large apartments, by our standards. Millions of people live in and raise their families in those apartments and I'm sure think nothing of it. (I know, of course, that many people in large metropolitan areas in the U.S. do the same. One of my best friends on the faculty was raised in an apartment in New York City.) Many of us, raised in Minneapolis or elsewhere in a freestanding family home, however, would be depressed just thinking about living and growing up in those circumstances: no gardening, no sitting outside in the yard, and not a lot of space.
Living in a detached house presents an ecological problem: It requires considerably more energy than multiple dwellings within the same building. As an aspiration for the population, it presents an insoluble problem: There isn't enough land available to provide such homes for everyone, even assuming everyone could afford one. But what are the most desirable living conditions, at least in the U.S., in the eyes of many? The larger suburban lot, preferably adjacent to water, with trees and greenery. There is an inevitable conflict between what many want and what the planet can support.
Another aspect of the ecological problem is space. Kathy and I, along with many of the couples we know, occupy far more space than we actually need to live comfortable lives. It is an obscene amount of space, I am sure, when compared with what much of the world's population has available to them.
As with many such problems, there's nothing that any one person or couple or family can do. These are matters that require federal solutions, even international solutions.
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Back to the category of fun research. Where you grew up affects your sense of direction. Scientists at two major European universities, one French and one British, relied on over 400,000 people playing a video game to assess their sense of direction. "The scientists have found that, on average, people who grew up in the countryside have a better sense of direction than people who grew up in cities. This extent of this difference varies from country to country: very strong in Canada, the United States, Argentina and Saudi Arabia, much less so in Austria, France, India and Vietnam." What they also found was that people who grow up in cities with a grid (Minneapolis is a prime example, of course) have a worse sense of direction than people who grew up in cities where there is no rhyme or reason to the street layout (e.g., most European cities). Not surprisingly, you're better at navigating an area if it's similar to the one in which you grew up: people who come from rural areas "are better at navigating great distances if they come from rural areas, and better on a grid plan if they grew up in a city 'with right angles."
No wonder I can get turned around when out in the country following curving roads. Or, for that matter, get directionally mixed up driving on rural freeways when they curve around. I wonder if there is a difference between city people who grow up with a logical grid (i.e., Minneapolis, with numbered and alphabetical streets and avenues) versus those whose city had a grid but with no organization to the street names or numbers. There must be a difference; otherwise how can I explain that I cannot figure out St. Paul?
Enough for now. Enjoy your weekend. Ours is cold. It was 44 degrees this morning.
Gary
Wedding photos
Kathy, Gary, Elliott, Martha, Pat (Elliott's mom)
(below) The dad and the groom. I forgot to take off my reading glasses for the photos, but since I have them on my nose 95% of the time, this is an accurate representation. I don't know how many people noticed that Elliott the artist was wearing a Van Gogh tie.
(below) Martha walking. None of this father-gives-away-the-bride stuff. The bride's father agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment.
(below) Martha read a poem to Elliott that she had composed. It was the hit of the wedding and brought many of us to tears.
(below) The groom's father giving a toast before the dinner. Martha's father, Bruce, preceded me and had made a comment about their family tradition of going camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota. Those camping trips are truly roughing it: they bring all their food and clothing and tents and canoes and they portage and camp. My toast was roughly this: "I will key off what Bruce said. I knew this relationship was serious when Elliott, Mr. indoors/AC/video-game guy, said he would go on these camping trips. We are delighted that Martha is joining the Engstrand family and we are equally pleased that Elliott is joining the Heyl family. Let us toast to a long and happy marriage." Then I sat down. Several of our friends later commended me for my brevity.
(below, the next two) Kathy and I listening to others toast.
(below) At the head table.
(below) The first dance of the night.
(below) One of the two times Kathy and I were on the dance floor. The music was mostly not the kind to which I like to dance.
(below) The bride and groom at the close of the evening. We were not there. I talked briefly with Elliott about 9:30 and told him that unless he wanted us to stick around, we were going to take off. His response, more or less, was "If I had my way, everyone else would go, too, so we could go home." We were told, however, that they were there another couple of hours and had a grand time.
