S.O.S.

Just last Sunday a picture in the New York Times caught my eye. It showed a group of middle-aged folk standing out of doors. In the forefront was a large placard saying GUNS SAVE LIVES. What struck me was the piety of the people, their hands over the hearts. No doubt they were listening to the National Anthem—and the fact that they looked very much like the American citizenry might, on average. The picture is accessible here.

The picture came back powerfully when the Washington Navy Yard shooting spree began to dominate the news yesterday morning. It reminded me to what an extent the concept of an informed citizenry is something of a chimera. Information is simply not enough. The receiving mind must transform it into rational thought, comprehensive understanding.

We’re sure, eventually, to hear the argument that the dead in Washington could have been saved if only an alert civil servant working there had been carrying a gun and, observing the maddened killer, would have dispatched him before he had managed to get off his first shot. What erodes democracy, ultimately, is that public opinion—rather than responsible thought—influences people. They have a menu of opinion served up by the media. They can choose their flavor without thought based merely on feelings.

Only in Russia

I simply must note here an event reported in the New York Times this morning. Two men stood in line somewhere in southern Russia waiting to buy a beer at an outdoor festival. They were discussing the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. (Of course, one might add.) The argument grew heated. One man pulled a gun loaded with rubber bullets and shot the other in the head. The man attacked survived—fortunately. The very brief NYT story ends with this deadpan sentence: “Among educated Russians, classical literature and philosophy are sometimes debated in casual social settings, the way sports often are in Western countries.” Based on my own experiences, Russians need not be all that “educated” to fall into such discussions. Mother’s milk and so on.

Canada, Show Us the Way

Two news accounts in recent days—on the surface entirely unrelated—have given me an insight into things. The first of these concerns changes in the definition of drunkenness in British Columbia; the other is continuing public resistance to Obama Care in the United States.

The new British Columbia law, passed in 2010, redefined the definition of driving under the influence of alcohol. To be in that state meant having a blood-alcohol level is .05 rather than .08 percent, the definition of drunken driving. Police testing people may impound the car of the person who fails the new, lower test limit for a three-day period; and the license is revoked. In my opinion, it is this last provision of the new law—not the percentage change—that has had a dramatic consequence: a 55 percent reduction in alcohol-related fatalities in two years.

This result also reminded us of our visit to East Germany—back when it was separate communist country. The law there promised draconian punishment for driving under the influence—and so wide-spread was this knowledge that the “driver,” on any one occasion, never even dreamt of touching even a glass of wine.

Simple laws with direct, immediate, and entirely predictable consequences still work just fine. And that explains to me why Obama Care is problematical—at least in the eyes of many, many people who answer polling questions. On the new Aljazeera’s news program the Business section is presented by one Ali Velshi. In one of his promotionals he shows us the 800 pages of the Affordable Care Act, promising to make sense of it for us. Thus far the segments doing that explanation have left us as confused as ever.

Alas. An existing health law is better than none, I suppose. But good law it is not. If Obama Care simply expanded Medicare to the entire population—so that people could ask their elders what they thought about it—Obama Care would be a very simple shoo-in. Not so 800 pages and a jungle-like complexity in which too many cooks are needed who merely spoil the broth.

Music in the Spheres

Let me mark here, even if a few days late, the official recognition that NASA’s Voyager 1, launched September 5, 1977, has finally passed through the walls of the solar bubble. This bubble, also known as the heliosphere, is the solar wind moving from the sun and filling space with charged particles. It weakens or falls off in what is called the Stagnation Region beginning at around 113 astronomical units out from the sun; each AU is about 150 billion miles. Well, Voyager had reached well beyond that point, touching actual interstellar space, 122 AU out, on August 25, 2012 already—but what with uncertainties still to be resolved, it took NASA another year to be sure of this—hence its firm announcement on September 12 of this year that we’ve finally reached interstellar space with out little machine. Herewith a brief NASA film summarizing the essentials:

The program, consisting of Voyager 1 and 2, cost $865 million. That sum represents less than four days of expenditures on the Afghanistani conflict; therefore you might call it a pittance. The mission, however, has lasted for 36 years. It illustrates, in a way, the theme of the poem I put up today. Voyager’s design, launch, and operation—and the analysis of the great emptiness, throbbing although it is with ionized vibrations—involves people whose minds are filled with matter very far removed from those engaged in our global conflicts.

Noted, here and there, is the fact that Voyager 1 carries to the empty outer reaches the recorded music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky. We can relax a little considering that, if there is intelligent life out there, and it chances upon Voyager 1—and it has invented the appropriate instrument—it will finally be able to learn how to play the well-tempered clavier.

A Taxonomy of Mind

The difference between the horse and oak

Between an evergreen, bacterium, or bird,

Between an ape and the tomato plant

Or spiders and the nesting cardinals

May be discovered to be as great as

That we find between whole groups of human

Individuals if we engage in

A taxonomy of minds, observing now

This person’s vast web of thoughts, and then

Another’s mind unfold, each a primordial

Jungle of symbolic references—

Some clusters thickly habitual others

Marginally thin but still linked in—and

We can then classify these webs and clouds

Into domains and kingdoms, phyla, class,

Orders, family, genus, species and the like

Until we have at least as vast a realm

As nature holds of living things that cannot talk.

The Resonance of Rocinante

A discussion now going back a week or so—about stunning musical experiences—brought back several memories. Of these one had been listening, for the first time, to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem. At first Brigitte could not produce the piece or its composer, but she managed to sing, without words, what later turned out to be “Pie Jesu.” I recalled the occasion but nothing more, not a clue; but when I heard the melody that she was humming, I joined right in. Brigitte then said: “It has to do with the end, with death, something in the church.” She made agitated motions common when her memory is working hard but simply not fast enough. It worked a little faster in me. “Requiem,” I said—and Brigitte lit up.

In any case, we got to talking, afterwards, about the magic of music, of resonance, and how it worked and why—and what it might signify. As usually happens, Brigitte assigned me the task of researching resonance, and I agreed.

Well, it turns out to be rather a formidable subject—having everything to do with the wave-forms of which, seemingly, everything is ultimately made. We do not ever see it although, in the form of sound-vibrations, we actually hear it. When it is rendered visible it is just curves on paper, waves upon waves, oddly deforming others while not touching those out of synchrony. An impossible subject—for a brief blog entry anyway. I gave up the effort yesterday.

This morning, oddly, I woke up with the word Rocinante on my mind. Sounded oddly reminiscent of resonance, but I knew nothing else until I looked. Ahh! Insight at last. Rocinante was Don Quixote’s old nag of a horse. Wikipedia explained to me that the name itself is a pun. Ante means before and roci means a nag. Rocinante, therefore, was “just a nag before”—but now, alas, having undergone the heroic adventures as Don Quixote’s companion and mount, it had achieved the status of a Noble Steed.

Now in some ways this has a meaningful resonance for me, old hack that I’ve become—unsteady enough to avoid a massive subject like resonance. But though my feet sometimes stumble and my head sinks as I amble unsteadily on, I know that my adventures in these realms below vaguely promise greater glories up above. Yes. Resonance extends from physics on up to symphonies and the resonance of literature—but yet also higher still to the invisible reaches of the cosmos. Now where did I put my tuning fork?

Infra-Data on our Climate

Our furnace came on overnight what with the temperature having declined to 40° F. Last year we reached this marker a little later, September 19; the temperature then had been 45.9. Last year with here-a-day, there-a-day of silent furnace, the 19th signaled the beginning of the heating season. And we keep our house quite cool.

As I’ve already noted, thus far the summer has been unusually cool—much as our previous winter had been unusually mild. Here is hope that the same compensations will operate in the future as well.

The meta-data are one thing, what happens locally is what we live. In the big picture vast floods, fires—and who knows where the locust is. Here, by some magic of the Jet Stream, which makes two odd wiggles northward as it describes a very shallow trough over the northern U.S.A., thus frequently passing north of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, therefore having made our summers there hellishly humid, and then also at Detroit, with the same result, has been shielding us, this year and last, from the worst extremes of what seems to be the return of the Dust Bowl again—and corresponding excess of water elsewhere.

I try to keep good infra-data; I mark the furnace leaving hibernation and our plants coming indoors in the fall (Mid-October, recently) and going out in Spring (Mid-May). The furnace has come on, the plants have come in earlier each year. But so far I only have two years of data. With such rich information, and $3.75 in cash, I can buy myself a Starbucks Frappucino Grande Mocha/Mocha Light.

The Strength of Spider Silk

Four domesticated silk moths.

The weekend when we saw the last episode of Silk air on Public TV coincided with a riot of cobwebs in our back yard. The silk of the show refers to the fabric worn by Queen’s Counsels (barristers) in Britain; it comes from silk-moth larvae. The moths are quite lovely—and butterflies are another of our perennial outdoor topics. The same silk is also made by our spiders. These coincidences reminded Brigitte of an attempt, announced some years ago already, of inserting silk-producing genes into…let’s see…was it sheep? was it goats?—the harvesting of which, somehow, would give us access to this magic fiber in a form more easily processed? That opened the topic on the supposedly astounding the strength of spider silk—and produced a note to look it up.

We remembered correctly. Spider silk, the strands of which are exceedingly thin, around one to four one-thousandth of a millimeter, approach the tensile strength of steel, measured in Giga-Pascals; silk is 1.3 and steel is 1.65 GPa. Silk, however, is less dense; it is more ductile, meaning stretchable. It is also, and for this reason, much tougher—so that a strand of silk is three times stronger than a strand of steel of the same thickness. Two engineers, in fact (Ed Nieuwenhuys, Leo de Cooman), have even calcuculated, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, how thick the strands of a cobweb would have to be to capture of Boeing-747 in full flight (link): the thickness of a pencil.

Tensile strength is resistance to pulling; ultimate tensile strength is pulling to a break—the measurement used in the paragraph above. A Pascal is a measure of force on a defined area, thus a square meter. It is the same measure as pounds per square inch. 1000 Pa equal 0.145037738 psi.

Wikipedia’s article on Spider Silk ends with a listing of projects, some quite successful but none as yet commercialized, that produce spider silk by genetic engineering. The project we were vaguely remembering is the work of Nexia, a Canadian company, which put spider genes in goats. The silk appears in the goats’ milk.

What must surely be the latest news on this subject—dated Septerber 11, 2013—is shown here. It tells of work at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, Florida, where a team headed by Eden Steven coated spider silk with nanotubes of carbon; they are superstrong and also conduct electricity.

Where will it all end?

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My images are from Wikipedia here and here. An earlier post on silk production appears here.

Hello

As an add-on to or completion of the last post on phrases used to say goodbye, I might as well note here initial greetings when people meet again. If a farewell hold within itself a kind of pain, caused by the demands of time—and therefore time is emphasized in the words themselves—such is not the case when rividerci becomes vederci.

Now it turns out that time tends to play as much of a role in greetings as in goodbyes, but in a different way. The most common form of that is to note the time of day when the greeting takes place—and then to preface that time with the word “good.” Good morning, Good day, Good evening. When we say Good night, however, we’re actually saying goodbye. The good is added because it is pleasing to meet, painful to part. But in many parts of the world an old tradition still rules, based on status.

When I was growing up in Hungary, thus the late 1930s and early 1940s—and later, in Bavaria, as I continued gaining height, the most common form of our Hello was Servus. It amused me, therefore, the other day, when I was doing my due diligence in preparing these blog entries, that the Italian Ciao derives from the same root. The root is Servus in all cases, but in Italy it comes from an Old Venetian form of the Mediaeval Latin sclavus, rendered as s-ciavón, later s-ciavo or s-ciao, and last with the S completely abraded, ciao. Even in greetings, time plays the role as the Relentless Eroder.

Hello itself rather baffles etymologists. It is dated back to at least the 1400s; attempts to trace it suggest that, as Holla!, it meant to stop, to cease. Another attempt is to assign it to halo or holo, the imperative of the Old German verb halon or holon, to fetch, thus calling the ferryman. It does not surprise me, therefore, that its latest eroded form is Hey! Hello, after all, requires two syllables—which is one too many for people on the go.

I am, dear reader, your faithful servant—another, more formal way of saying Servus—which, like Ciao, serves equally well as a greeting or as a goodbye.

So Long

There is something basic in human beings that is at war with time. I got my introduction to this concept ages ago now reading a novel by Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (1944). That title comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1, Scene 4:

Hotspur (Henry Percy).

O, Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!

I better brook the loss of brittle life

Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;

They wound my thoughts worse than sword my flesh:

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;

And time, that takes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,

But that the earthy and cold hand of death

Lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust

And food for—

[Dies]

Henry V.

For worm, dear Percy…

A year after writing his novel, Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy. In that book he treats of this subject at much greater length in Chapter XII, Time and Eternity. Here he quotes a panoply of spiritual writers, among the Rumi, St. John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart. The Eckhart quote follows:

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but termporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

Well and good, one might say. Well and good for poets of high rank , for mystics. But does this feeling permeate all of humanity as well? Does it also touch that “temporal affections” that Eckhart views as yet another barrier born of time? I would assert that it does—and the easiest way to prove that is to look at the words we use to say good-bye.

Time plays a significant role in most of the phrases used. Hasta la vista. That may be translated, with generous unpacking, as [May the] view [of you] rapidly return. The German Auf Wiedersehn also evokes seeing, which is here and now, in the present, and time by reference to “again.” Until [we] see [one another] again. A rividerci, of course, says the same thing; the Italian phrase has us re-seeing. The Hungarian Viszontlátás is identical to both of these; látás is vision, viszont is again. The Japanese Sayonara has much the same basic meaning, but the structure is expressed with more subtlety. The word comes from sayo, meaning “thus” followed by nara, meaning “if it be, indeed”: [We shall be] thus, [together,] if it [is to] be, indeed. Along with such English phrases as See you soon and ‘Til later, we are dealing here with what might be called secular expressions of the inner wish that it might be well if time would cease when we desire to be with those we care for.

A more religious or transcending phrasing has reference to God. The French Adieu preserves this meaning most directly. It might be fleshed out as [I hand you over] to God [while time separates us]. But the same idea is also present in Goodbye, although it is much more compressed. It is a compression of God be with ye. And then there is that most compressed and totally casual German “bye,” Tschüss. When spoken it sounds almost like an imitation of a brief sneeze. So where does that Tschüss come from? It entered the German language from Walloon, the romance language of a part of Belgium. The word there is adjüs—the Walloon way of pronouncing adieu. Virtually no German-speaker knows the root of Tschüss.

When we are at last with God, we’ll always be together. So long.

Diagnosing Silk

Those in their fifties today were in their teens in 1975 when Rumpole of the Bailey first aired on television. Its creator was Sir John Mortimer, a genuine British barrister, played by Leo McKern. The series eventually featured 44 episodes the last of which appeared in 1992. The show has, at minimum, produced a phrase destined never to die. “She who must be obeyed” was Horace Rumpole’s muttered reference to his wife, Hilda, played by Peggy Thorpe-Bates.  Both actors have since passed away. For Brigitte and for me, the series also presented what we viewed as a realistic insight into the workings of the British legal system as viewed from the perspective of a senior barrister and a lawfirm, called chambers, of which he is a member.

In the United States series based on lawfirms have been quite numerous. The American Bar Association cites 25  such shows, labeling them Best; of these 24 were made here—and that list does not even include The Good Wife. In Britain the second such series, in structure entirely echoing Rumpole, is Silk. It just aired its third and last episode of Season 1 on Public TV last night. It has all the necessaries: Barristers, solicitors, criminals, victims, police, odd judges, wigs, chambers, drinking in dark crowded bars by night, conniving chamber clerks, etc., except that, in Silk—is that a sign of leveling?—there is no evident Head of Chambers, that role filled, and perhaps by default, by the Chief Clerk.

This is a rather long, but alas necessary, introduction to my actual subject. It is that Silk appears to have been born with a disease—but one which afflicts all too many new television series, be they fiction or documentary. Don’t get me wrong. Silk is in many ways quite excellent and benefits much from its lead character, Martha Costello, played by Maxine Peake, a relative newcomer. Martha Costello has values. I thought I would try to diagnose this disease.

The show suffers from what I call flicker, by which I mean a chopped-up character where video images, certainly in action sequences, last much less than one second each. In scenes with many people, thus out- and inside courts, continuous motion, also continuously interrupted, adds to one’s sense of trembling or tremor. Based on this feature—the object of which, presumably, is to induce excitement in the viewer—makes me weight Parkinson’s disease as perhaps the appropriate diagnosis. But there is also a lot of noise. The noise is present over, above, and beneath the dialogue; and all through this noise, except in the most tense exchanges, there is a constant musical sound as well. This audio-based distraction reminds me, deeply schooled as I am in diseases, of Synesthesia, in which sounds and smells and even symbols, like writing, turn into colors and, possibly, colors turn into sounds. One interesting feature of Synesthesia, however, is that many people who are said to suffer from the syndrome deny suffering at all—and treat it as an added source of stimulation and of meaning.

Now, of course, it’s well to remember that TV shows are not people. They are social constructs. To apply human diseases to them too directly may be inappropriate, except by analogy. And one analogy might be to fuse, as it were, Parkinson’s with Synesthesia into a single syndrome—and then search for a broader cause of it in the social world. Then a proper diagnosis finally comes into focus, sort of, flickering and music-making all the while. Call it Advertisingitis.

Recalling Stephen Jay Gould

Few among my own almost literal contemporaries have had as much influence on my thinking as Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist. I’ve noted that before on this blog (here) when discussing his The Mismeasure of Man (1981). The subject of that book is aberrant uses of science—a subject that popped up the other day in one of our morning discussions. I found the book again. It came as one of two in a boxed set. The other was The Panda’s Thumb—probably the best known of Gould’s books written for the general public. I began reading the book again after many years—and discovered that some writings retain their originality, freshness, and still bring new delight.

In the current context, for the first time, I did in about a minute what in the good-old-days might have required a trip to the library. I looked up Stephen Gould’s biography. And it stunned me to realize that he was born some five years after I was (1941) and died at 60 (in 2002). Had I been asked before this lookup, I would have imagined him my elder, my father’s age perhaps—so singular are his accomplishments. Speaking of libraries, the Library of Congress established, as part of the bicentennial celebrations of 2000, an award called Living Legends. Gould received this award in April of 2000; two years and a month later he had passed on, a victim of cancer. The Library was just in time.

The Panda’s Thumb, published in 1980, is a selection of some thirty-one essay, of a total of 300, Gould wrote for the magazine Natural History. Oddly now, in time’s distorting mirror, reading it one cannot help but think that it reads like a strongly-themed biology blog. A kind of aura of unity rises above it rainbow-like, with each essay drawing its light from that aura and in turn contributing to it.

Gould’s chief scientific contribution to evolutionary thought, developed with Niles Eldredge (1943-), is the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Let me hazard to put the essence of this theory into a sentence. It proposes that evolutionary change is rare but, when it happens, very rapid. Evolution happens every now and then, therefore rarely in geological time; but when it happens it does so with a Bang—not with a continuous whimper. The orthodox theory is gradualism.

Gould, of course, belongs to the originals—who are rarely celebrated by the always fossilized orthodoxy of their times. The best proof that Gould had something real to say is to note that Richard Dawkins (he of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, among others) dismisses Gould’s theory as a “minor gloss” on evolutionary thought.

Some Radiations of Alienation

It occurred to me, the other day, that “alienation” may be viewed as a two-sided coin. A spatial element was present in this thought, as follows. For the moment I saw the word defined as “a turning away from something.” But if it is a turning away, the person engaging in this act is also causing him- or herself to turn toward something else. And if the stress is then laid on the new view, the person is no longer alienated. Suppose, however, that this movement from something to something else is arrested at mid-point. Then we get social alienation—estrangement without a new attachment, feeling strange in a strange land. Not good.

Interesting word—and one firmly anchored, originally, in the ownership of property or, rather, the giving it up. Both “land” as property and “strange” as in “not mine” play a role in its etymology. Webster’s first definition of the word is “conveyance of property to another,” therefore, simply, “a sale.” The root here is the Latin alienare, to make something another’s. Behind that lurks the Latin alius, meaning “other,” thus literally translated the sale is a kind of “othering.” Strikes me that the negative connotations of that sale have lingered on in the linguistics of it—as in “I want to keep the money and the land as well. Too bad that I cannot.”

The human tendency of ferociously keeping a grip on something even after we’ve alienated it for a payment applies as much to intangible properties as to tangible real estate. Two examples of such ownership are affections and sanity. Alienation of affections means transferring them from one to another object; the loss, however, is not that of the person who moves his affections to another—but the person from whom he takes them. The phrase is alive and well in law. As for sanity—it may be lost or severely disturbed. The alienist, in that case, is the person to consult for a cure. The word is still alive in the dictionaries, but I’ve never heard anyone saying that he or she was seeing an alienist.

It may be that—although my trusted source on etymology, Online Etymology Dictionary, does not confirm this—the real root, perhaps further back than we can see, derives the word from the Latin ligamen, meaning a “bond, link, or tie.” That’s where the word lien, comes from by way of Old French. It means “the right to hold the property of another until the debt is paid.” Here lien is a link and, presumably, alien is a non-link. That might be so much simpler. But where property rights are involved, it’s a jungle out there—and such research uncovers the weirdest words ever.

Today’s excursion landed me on a Wikipedia site entitled Subinfeudation. Now in mediaeval times all land was viewed as owned by the king, but for purposes of administration pieces were granted by sovereign to lords, lords to others, and so on. Certain obligations went with these lands. In efforts to escape these, the titular owners sold parts of it to others by alienation; this practice was known as subinfeudation. The granting lord therefore lost services; not surprisingly, this had to be and was fixed by legislation in 1290 in England, forcing subinfeudators to require buyers of land to render, toward the granting lord, the same services as the original grantee.

Never fear. Financial scandals and real estate meltdowns had their horrid place even when Christendom was still in flower. We’ve sprouted derivatives, synthetic CDOs, and hedge funds. The Mediaevals worried about subinfeudation, wardships, substitution, escheats, serjeanty, socage, and such. Enough, in those days, to make you feel downright alienated.

Sagi the Finicky Eater

A while back now I put up information about the black hole at the center of our galaxy. To reintroduce that creature, its name is Sagittarius A* (read A-star). My post (here) reported that the hole was drawing, to itself, a vast cloud of gas. And the NYT story that I’d read and quoted there assured us cheerfully that Sgr A* will eventually eat the whole galaxy. I confessed problems believing that.

Well, the other day, we saw a story that appeared in Science, originating from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The chief investigator was Daniel Q. Wang, professor of astronomy and leader of a team researching Sgr A* using NASA’s X-ray telescope Chandra. Wang and company discovered that this, our most potent black hole, actually rejects more than 99 percent of the matter flowing toward it. Why it does so—when other black holes are thought to be swallowing masses and masses of matter (or so they say, so they say)—is not yet understood.

Reading that I got to thinking about some future, galactically rich man who decides to commit suicide by plunging his rocket into Sagi’s center—and gets rejected as inedible.

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The image is NASA’s picture of the day today (link - but it may change tomorrow). It is titled The Quiet Sagittarius A*. The credit line reads: X-ray - NASA / CXC / Q. Daniel Wang (UMASS) et al., IR - NASA/STScI.

An Ecumenical Exchange

Rarely in our travels have we passed a cathedral we did not at least briefly visit. Thus many years ago, on a trip to California—which also took us down to San Juan Capistrano—we stopped in Garden Grove, CA on the way back and spent part of a mid-week morning visiting the Crystal Cathedral and its environs. Wondrous weather. Glass and light all over. Virtually no one about. 

This morning I learned that this church, built by Robert H. Schuller, founder of the Reformed Church in America, and famed for his Hour of Power television show (which we quite often watched) has become the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, now named Christ Cathedral. The legal transfer of ownership took place November 17, 2011—but the facility was leased back to the Reformed Church for a while. That church performed its last services there on June 30, 2013. Thereafter the congregation, has been occupying, yes, a Catholic church once known as Callistus; its new name under the Reformed Church is Shepherd’s Grove. Let’s call that an ecumenical exchange and ignore what history certainly shall—the bankruptcy and all the rest. Deep digging into the history of any cathedral will bring that sort of thing into focus, but time overlays it with a more pleasing patina. The image is Wikipedia’s (link).

Schuller founded the Reformed Church in 1955; the cathedral was completed in 1981—and, as is the case with such structures, saw further additions and changes; and those are still going on.

Reading about this exchange, memories of other unusual houses of worship rose—suggesting that church construction, and at striking scales and splendor, has not disappeared. Far from it. The first church we attended in America—or, rather, tried to attend—was Saint Francis of Xavier in Kansas City. Three of us children travelled there by street car—like on our first or second Sunday in the United States. It was a famous church, referred to as the Fish Church. Alas we did not speak English very well yet. They stopped us at the door—and it took quite a while to understand that we couldn’t go in because my sister, Susie, was bareheaded—she should have had a scarf over her head. Here was a new Catholic rule we knew nothing about. Saint Francis Xavier was built in 1949—thus two years before we arrived. I got to know the church quite well later because it was right next door to Rockhurst College, a Jesuit school, and served as the locus of college services. The images that follows are from Wikipedia (link); the second shows the “fish” shape.

Here in the Detroit region, the most striking house of worship, at least for members of this clan, is the synagogue of the Conservative Jewish Community, Shaarey Zedek. It is quite easily seen from superhighway I-696 where it intersects with super-artery Telegraph Road. A splendid structure. I show it from the front and from the side; it was built in 1962. For quite a long while the family business, Editorial Code and Data, had its offices on Telegraph, in the Onyx Building yet, itself something of a minor jewel. We saw Shaarey Zedek every day, approaching and leaving by night. These days Brigitte and I sometimes glimpse the structure on our way west to visit Monique and John. I bring the image courtesy of Docomomo, an international group dedicated to the conservation of modern architecture (link).

A Fresh Flavor of Nonconformity

A quite interesting article in the American Conservative, “Freedom or Virtue?” by Donald Devine, cites part of an interview another author (E.J. Dionne Jr.) held with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger had been asked how he could “insist on moral positions that conflicted with the views of a majority of Americans of his own tradition. Why could he not compromise with those people, who mostly took libertarian views on social issues, especially on sexual matters?” I quote the next paragraph in that article:

Ratzinger replied: “If it is true that a Christian faith taken seriously means nonconformity with a not inconsiderable number of contemporary social standards, then a more or less negative image is unavoidable.” Ratzinger concluded that in a confused world, the obligation of a moral tradition, Christian or otherwise, is to recover the capacity for nonconformity rather than seeking either elite or mass approval.

Brigitte was reading this out loud to me yesterday on what must have been the loveliest day of the season yet. And this passage certainly resonated with us. In effect it represents what some call “the third way,” thus avoiding reflexive adherence to this camp or that, participating in the collective social labor without merging with fashion, in effect to be in this world but not of it.

The article is not yet available on the Internet, but it should appear in a month or two. Worth reading.

Nymphalis Antiopa

In what had been a very, very active butterfly spring and summer—we raised 13 Black Swallowtails and have been entertaining a small tribe of Cabbage Whites—late summer, now moving toward autumn in lengthening strides, has left our little eden here bereft of new species. Until yesterday. A very large and virtually black butterfly landed on one of our tomato plants, staying in the shade of its leaves. We watched it for quite a time, just resting. Then I got my camera and tried to make a stealth-approach, but the creature sensed my coming and betook itself, next, to the roof of our sunroom to find a new perch in a coil of cable wiring at is edge. We managed to get a look at it, finally, from a stairway window—from a distance of about three feet. But then, maneuvering my camera to take a shot, I triggered its flight response. No. I never managed to take a picture.

Fortunately I had had a close look. And today, therefore, I was able to identify it as a Mourning Cloak, Nymphalis antiopa. The picture I am showing here is taken from Wikipedia’s article on this species, and I chose the image that most closely resembles our own. Mourning Cloak is a particularly large butterfly—and the females are markedly larger than the males. For this reason we’re pretty sure that we’d encountered a lady, furthermore rather an old one. Always a pleasure to say Hello to yet another rarely seen species—but, I am told, quite common in North America.

The name is interesting. The Brits call this butterfly Camberwell Beauty, but in Germanic languages the literal meaning of Mourning Cloak is used: in German, Trauermantel; in Swedish, Sorgmantel. The antiope of the Latin name harks back to Antiopa, a Greek figure with a dramatic history. Tragedy surrounded her, so much so that Pacuvius, a renowned Roman tragedian (he died in 130 BC), wrote a tragedy about her. Mourning becomes Nymphalis…

Added Later: Herewith some additional interesting facts about the Mourning Cloak. It belongs to the Superfamily Papilionoidea, the Family Nymphalidae, also called four-footed. In the American context it is the longest-lived species of butterfly with a life of 10-11 months. It is a tree-dwelling butterfly (willows, elms, cottonwood, birch), likes to feed on tree sap and rotting fruit, and its coloration makes it look like tree-bark. It’s also rather big, with a wingspan of 2.25 to 4-inch wing span. They extend form lower Canada to northern Mexico, do a lot of travelling in the Summer months, rest in the fall, overwinter, and then breed in the Spring.

One Hand Clapping

The meaning of “technology”—back when I was a paid a salary to analyze of same—was such things as plastics, solid lubricants, and automated machine tools. Today it means hand-held devices, the smartphone—AKA “mobility.” And mobility has come to mean the power to see the very latest postings on one’s Facebook or Twitter pages in what is known as real-time.

Now the latest rash of news is all about such entities as Blackberry, which is looking to be bought, Verizon buying Vodaphone, and Microsoft acquiring Nokia’s smartphone business. A while back Facebook was in deep trouble; its initial public offering almost failed. Why? Because it wasn’t with it, mobility-wise. But now that’s ancient news. Shudder, shiver. Thank the Lord that’s over. So what is next after all of this? Or will we hear technology/mobility for a few more years yet to come? What will “technology” mean a decade or so from now? Surely not the same thing as today.

This got me thinking about that Zen koan. The thought came, baffling at first, from the barely visible left field. You know the one I mean. It is about the sound of one hand clapping. It took me a minute before I saw my mind’s clumsy intent to say something meaningful on the subject. Let me unpack that.

All this hysterical scrambling to unload or to load up, to cash in or to cash out, comes about because the field of computing, generally, is maturing, putting on some bark, laying thick roots—and the only flower that attracts the bees of investment is the handheld device of people in motion but wishing still, yes, even while jogging, to keep up with where its at: on the Internet. A maturing industry, naturally, has flagging growth. But growth is one of a pair of things. Where there is growth, there is decline.

What is the sound of growth without its brother, decline? On a spherical planet with limited surface? Once we have the answer, satori won’t be far behind.

Reinventing on the Fly

Discussions of Natural Law on the web can seem hair-raisingly complicated, despite the rather strong and persuasive presentation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) (link): it argues that St. Thomas Aquinas presents the central case, these days, and that other theories may be judged by reference to him—some deviating, others approximating his theory. The pertinent words come from the article’s first paragraph. To give this a succinct summary, here is the lead paragraph on the subject from the Catholic Encyclopedia (link):

In English this term [Natural Law] is frequently employed as equivalent to the laws of nature, meaning the order which governs the activities of the material universe. Among the Roman jurists natural law designated those instincts and emotions common to man and the lower animals, such as the instinct of self-preservation and love of offspring. In its strictly ethical application—the sense in which this article treats it—the natural law is the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which He has endowed us.

I rather like this, particularly the grounding of this law in human nature—which in turn is grounded in God’s dispensation. The ability to discern the requirements of Natural Law are assigned to human powers of reasoning and, of course, observation.

The chief feature of this law, therefore, is that it is grounded in a reality above that of Nature, as that word is commonly used. Therefore, it seems to me, acceptance of this theory—namely the existence of a moral order that is innately present in the human soul, although, of course, in an undeveloped form until reason is trained to discern and to apply it—is incompatible with positivistic or naturalistic theories which deny any reality beyond that which is physically discernible. In those ranges concepts like pragmatism (it’s good if it works) and consequentialism (it’s good if the consequences are) rule. Now as for the judgement of what constitutes the good, that becomes a matter of subjective or consensual perception. One might add to this, of course, that principles, as such—thus founding, basic, absolute ideas—also require the same kind of ultimately divine grounding.

My looking at this difficult subject was caused by mentioning Natural Law the other day in the context of war, specifically the looming attacks on Syria. The aim of this policy is obviously to achieve some good. The problem with it is that while the object is good—stopping chemical warfare—the circumstances surrounding this act are much too complex and in conflict with other lawful objectives. SEP cites Aquinas’ argument for comprehensiveness. Any act, to be conformant to Natural Law, must have the right object or purpose; but it must also have a meaningful end; and it must discern and consider all of the circumstances involved.  The means used to achieve the end, one might add, must be appropriate. And the actor must have standing in the matter—which involves the laws of war.

Any international policy in which the broad contexts are ignored to achieve some limited end may be pragmatically desirable but are unjustified under Natural Law. The narrow good to be achieved may be totally swamped by the bad that is the secondary consequence of that action. It amazed me this morning to hear John Boehner justifying the Syrian attack by saying that it will send a message to our enemies, probably meaning Iran. When there is no guiding center to our thought, reinventing motives on the fly becomes the chief art of politics.

A Note on Reading Reading

Brigitte read to me—after our discussion about Justice Sotomayor (see last post)—a brief piece by Dan Ariely, part of Ask Ariely, in the Wall Street Journal of today: “Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?” Ariely reports that, for him, following an audio book requires more attention that reading a book—and Brigitte and I tend to agree. But our discussion ranged well beyond that. My own reaction to any kind of streaming medium—be it a film, a recording—is a lack of freedom. If one’s device is well equipped, one can certainly stop in the middle of it. But going back, be it on a disk or a tape, is a major problem. When reading a book, it is merely a glance back—and memory is good enough so that one can go back just the right number of pages to recall yet another passage. And books permit you to annotate, to underline.

It then occurred to us that these real-time media are but a electronic extension of ordinary life, where something is always moving and cannot be stopped. The chief merit of YouTube is that it does permit back or forward tracking—and freezing of images. Teaching people how to read, therefore, and accustoming the young to reading books, represents something very important in the development of civilization. It teaches sustained attention—and the value of a symbolic representation of reality. At the same time, it increases our freedom to grasp and understand reality, in a symbolic form. It lifts us above the unending, compelling flow.

There was a story recently of a school where every child received a laptop and all instruction came by way of the machine. The children love it, but the teachers have mixed reactions. Are they sensing something missing in that interaction? Are we, electronically armored, going back to the caves?

Well Suited for Her Job

Names with a special sound, a kind of roll, catch our attention around here. Therefore, out of the blue the other day, Brigitte wondered whether or not the name of one of our Supreme Court Justices, Sonia Sotomayor, might have a meaning. We both do this sort of thing—but I usually do the searching. Well, soto means a “thicket” and mayor means “major, high, or great.” The Spanish translate the French phrase force majeure, as fuerza mayor. You get the picture. The result pleased us—rather. Sotomayor had found the perfect name. Sonia is a variant of Sophia, and Sophia stands for Wisdom. And here is a lady wise about a major thicket, the laws of the United States…

Austerity

Temporarily uncovered next to me, on a stool layered by books, the Second Series of D.T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism just now produced the thought “austerity” as I glanced down. And the feeling-context was quite positive: refreshing, restoring, noble austerity.

It’s early morning, and I’d just surveyed front pages in two papers. In one I was shown a list of new tech companies. In most cases the “technology” appears to consist of code to be run on mobile devices, the programs intending to enhance our gaming experiences or the ambiance of our social networking . In another story, in another paper, I learn that gigantic rubber ducks are now de rigueur if you live in the Hamptons (read Long Island, NY), own a McMansion, a Mercedes G-Class SUV, and an Aquariva boat. Or equivalent. Or better. Hosting huge parties is another necessary qualification for giant duck ownership.

Trying to See the Principle

Incoherence happens, one might say. But when it happens in the social context, the cause can usually be traced to muddled principles. Having said this, let me sort out my own reactions to the pending U.S. intervention to punish Syria for using nerve gas in its civil war.

At the basic level it seems to me logical to assert that deadly violence is deadly violence no matter how it is applied to a target. The weapons system that produces it—be it bullets or grenades or IUDs, artillery, bombing, drones, gas, or atomic bombs—is therefore a secondary consideration. Under what principle, therefore, is gas attack so much more heinous than the conventional killing that has already taken place?

Yes, I know. I was a child through World War II; the use of gas in WW I was then a still fresh and horrid collective memory. But WW II produced its own mass killings of civilian populations; atomic bombs on two Japanese cities are but the most awesome examples. Does it matter whether you convulse to death or die by having your flesh melt off your bones?

Under what principle may one sovereign attack another if no state of war exists between the two? Is that the principle of Might is Right? Is there a principle under Natural Law that makes one country Cop of the World? The principle of collective self defense is present in that law, not selective and you might say boutique attacks with missiles and such in certain carefully selected cases to justify threats made in speeches in order to deter Syria from using nerve gas—the threats themselves not justified except by might. That might also guarantees our own fairly certain invulnerability to a response.

Yes, incoherence happens. I note that wherever it happens, it also sets the stage for random violence in other venues as well. The young are hungry for rhyme and reason. When it is denied by the society as a whole, by the family structure, it can sometimes burst into a kind of madness we’ve come to call “going postal.”

Cadfael's Places

For British fans of Ellis Peters (nee Elizabeth Parteger), the Cadfael novels, and the television series based on them are firmly planted in the mind as real. But those, like me, born far from there and living in America—and especially those who’re geography-challenged unless we look it up—the town of Shrewsbury in England, in the border region that adjoins Wales to the east, might appear to be a very nice fictional invention. But of course it is real. I began reading those novels roughly twenty years ago. And ever since, off and on, I’ve promised myself to look it up. My pathetic sense of geography had Wales located right next to Scotland somewhere—until Brigitte, yesterday, raised her eyebrows oddly and corrected me. Therefore finally, I looked it up. And the first image I show is a map locating Shropshire, of which Shrewsbury is the central city—as shown in the second map.

The Severn river, which plays such a major role in the Cadfael novels, is clearly shown meandering through Shrewsbury. But since Cadfael’s times, what we’d call a beltway curves beneath the city, a so-called ‘A’ Road—which, heading toward the east becomes M54, something we’d call a freeway. As for the Severn, what follows is a view of it. The picture is taken from Shrewsbury castle, looking south. In the distance is Shrewsbury; not quite visible to the far left is the Shrewsbury abbey. The water is flowing toward the photographer here, thus to the north.

The last novel I’ve recently re-read was The Raven in the Foregate. The foregate is a triangular area surrounding the abbey of Shrewsbury, still functioning as a church today. The only picture I’ve managed to get of the foregate itself shows an image taken when it was flooded in November 2000; the Severn can still be unruly. In that picture I notice a half-submerged red telephone booth. Or is it? In the dimensions where I am fully at home, that red structure might well be the Tardis temporarily stopping so that Dr. Who could take a look at the damage and lend a hand in restoring back to pristine order one of my favored fictional town-scapes. The second image shows the awesome interior of the Shrewsbury Abbey where the abbots Heribert and Radulfus, the real abbots and the fictional, presided over the faithful in the years 1128 through 1147.

My pictures come from Wikipedia’s pages on Shropshire, Shrewsbury, and Shrewsbury Cathedral. Clicking on the images will enlarge them. My next project, in this nexus, will be to understand the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud…

Milkweed Notes

I’m becoming more and more convinced—now that we noted, with momentary shock, that August was virtually over—that the plant of the season, this year, may be our Swamp Milkweed. We got it last year in a pot with the idea that a modest backyard aspiring to host butterflies ought to have this plant. It is the favored breeding base for the Monarch. The plant did poorly, was quite disappointing—even after I had freed it of its pot and planted it in a bed where it shares space with lilies and grasses and three varieties of hosta. This Spring, however, the milkweed had not only multiplied but flowered, and it now shows signs of bearing ample fruit—in seed pods.

I’ve noted the early flowering of milkweed on this blog a little earlier (link). Then I failed to take pictures when the flowers opened. Never mind. With a little assist from Bear Creek Nursery (link), I can here show the full glory of this rather humbly named but very stately, tall plant. Its Latin name is Asclepias incarnata. It gets its name from the Greek god of medicine Asklepios; he is the fellow who holds the rod around which a serpent twines….

The second image shows what happens after the flowers have done their duty. Large pods form around them—green this time of year. They hold future seeds. Later in the season they turn into brown and brittle pods that break open and show the seeds within embedded in silvery-white masses of superfine hair that carry them off in the winds of the Fall. The name presumably comes from those masses of white. Later this season I hope to have photographs of those as well.

I note, without accompanying emotion, that thus far we have seen not a single Monarch in this yard. Where butterflies are concerned, the most showy community of that kingdom has been the species Cabbage White (some members of which are actually yellow). They rather liked sipping the nectars of Asclepia incarnata, but their real favorite has been our masses of mint and their blue blooms.

Richer by Mesoamerica

The first of our large tomatoes reached harvesting stage yesterday; the cherry tomatoes shown with them ripened much earlier. This reminded me, once again—the thought recurs when I am focused on these very lovely fruits—that they were not known to Europe, Asia, or elsewhere until the European discovery of America. But sometimes I wonder, having such thoughts, if that is really true or whether I am simply echoing something I’d read or heard long ago but never looked up. So this morning I checked. Yes. The five major plants I’ve always linked—tomatoes, tobacco, potatoes, cacao, and maize—all originated in Mesoamerica, of which I provide a map for good measure. The first three of these belong to the Family of Solanaceae, called nightshades.

How that name, nightshade, got itself attached to such glorious sun-lovers as tomatoes is a puzzlement. The word, per Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from Old English nihtscada (the current German is Nachtschatten), apparently derived from a poisonous berry. As for potatoes, that grow in the dark, that makes sense. And tobacco, of course, can kill you as well. The Latin name is somewhat obscure; per Wikipedia it may derive from Solanum nigrum, the botanical name of a berry that goes by many names, including Hound’s Berry; parts of it are poisonous. The other explanation is that it comes from the Latin verb solari, meaning “to soothe,” an action attributed to the sometimes present pharmacological effects of this family of plants. Yes, for some, tobacco is a medicine against the stress of life.

The nightshades are represented by some 2,700 species in the vegetable kingdom; and they are not solely confined to Mesoamerica. But those in most common use come from that “middle” part that links the north to the south of the American continents. Cacao belongs to the family of Malvaceae; chocolate has everything to do with glory, nothing with the night or the shade. Now as for maize, it belongs to the family of Poaceae. Those huge ears, full of sugar, are actually the fruit of “true grasses” in the language of biology, and maize a giant among them.

Agile in Our Anility

The original Siamese twins, known to the world later as Chang and Eng Bunker, died in 1874 and therefore a hundred and thirty-eight years before I was even born. They were born in what is now Thailand where, presumably, a name like Bunker was not very common. And, to be sure, it wasn’t. They got that name from a British merchant, Robert Bunker, who persuaded their parents to let him exhibit the pair on a world tour...

This is a rather long way of saying that, working a crossword puzzle yesterday, Brigitte and I did not, automatically, know the answer to the following clue: “Chang’s twin.” The answer had to fit into three squares. We got the first and the last letter of the name by solving other words: E­__G. So what letter should we put into in the middle? Solving for the word that intersected E__G, we got A__ILE. The clue for that word was “Feeble and doddering.” We tried every letter of the alphabet for that blank. The only one that produced a plausible answer was G, as in agile. But agile, it seemed to us, was the very opposite of feeble and doddering. Finally, the whole puzzle was filled in except for that the blank that marked the twin and the dodderer.

So I looked up the shorter of the two. ENG. The missing letter was the N. That, in turn, gave us ANILE for the feeble and the doddering. We looked at each other, baffled, raising hands and eyebrows. “Webster’s please,” said the word surgeon. And there we found the definition for a new word. And at our age. It is: “Of or resembling a doddering old woman.” No end of surprises!

Well, it turns out that the Latin anus—a feminine noun with a masculine ending—does mean an old woman. In fact, Ovid used the phrase anus Cumaea to indicate the Sybil of Cumaea. Meanwhile our word, anus, comes from the Latin annulus, meaning “ring,” shortened to anus. The word senile, by contrast, derives form the Latin senex, meaning “old.”

Now when the Queen in 1992 described that year as the annus horribilis, she was using two Ns, not one, and describing a year, not herself—although she was sixty-eight that year. Curiously, of course, that annus is also a ring, in a way, describing a circle in another dimension, that of time. We two are also gathering dust, anility competing with senility. How much time is left us? Who knows? And how many new words shall we still discover? Plenty, I am sure. That ocean has no shore.

As Through a Needle

As I brought Brigitte the massive sheaves that constitute the Sunday New York Times, she eyed me for a moment and then said: “Do you have something white? And 8 and a half by 11?” In other seasons, very often, I bring her whatever blog posts I have written. Not of late. I got to pondering the dearth of entries in the wake of this exchange and eventually came up with a generalization that fits it. The broadest of these generalizations comes from astrophysics. It is a wormhole, a hypothetical topological feature (quoting Wikipedia) that links two regions of spacetime.

I’ve spent most of my time this summer in the world of nature, that is to say our “garden,” front and back. A new lawn in front has needed lots of worry and care; in the back we have what the Times recently called an embarrassment of tomatoes—never mind the perennial magnificence of our mint bush—which yesterday attracted, and for some hours held, no fewer than five members of the Cabbage White butterfly. And never mind the newest arrival, our flowering milkweed. And much else, including a rearrangement of our furniture to give the plants more sun. The more you look, the bigger any world becomes until one’s lost in its this-worldly infinities.

The world of blogging is, in its more humble way, also incredibly vast. If you’re in the one, you’re not in the other. But what connects the two is, like, a wormhole. Therefore to go from contemplating the exact redness of our earliest big tomatoes—or the first and altogether premature red leaves appearing on our Burning Bush (Euonymus alatus)—one has to make a passage through a very narrow place, and entering that needle is not something gladly done.

Years ago, while I was still working, I arrived home after a vacation and what with deadline pressures much intensified, I had to plunge back into the worlds of code and indices and publication credits and such. I recalled that time as today I contemplated Brigitte’s inquiry about something white and 8-1/2 by 11. Back then I had said to her. “Getting back to work is like passing through a hypodermic, dear. It seems impossible. But when you finally make the passage, you discover that the other side is just as big as this one.”

Observation v. Illusion

Events in Egypt (at this point marked by Square Cleansing of Brotherhood Supporters), had me asking myself this morning: “Did anybody really win the French Revolution?” The boiling eventually stopped, but looking for a winner—as in who achieved power in that endless flux— the best answer is that Napoleon Bonaparte was the victor. He gained ultimate power and ended the Revolution when, in a coup, he dispersed the so-called Directorate and replaced it with the Consulate (1799). He was then a mere 30-year old self-made general of genius.

Refreshing my memory of the Revolution by reading the highly-condensed Wikipedia article on the subject, I though that the text sounded like instant commentary describing the boiling of a stew. You want chaos? There it is. In 1789 France had a population of 28 million—a large enough number to produce the kind of chaos that is not really describable. Egypt today has a population of nearly 83 million.

The parallels are many—because, in fact, upheavals such as the French or the Egyptian revolutions are best described as natural events. They happen when social structures reach a certain social paralysis and then, quite spontaneously, rearrange themselves—not unlike tensions in the earth’s crust that produce periodic quakes. In that process, inevitably, chaos results. And the chaos eventually ends when order is restored, always by military force.

While the chaos rages, all manner of illusory ideas will lend color to the madly rising steam that rises from the bubbling pot: such as progress or the fervently sought arrival of millennium. The deep intuition in the human soul—that all of us are destined for a better realm—gets projected to the here and now. But here and now is not where that takes place. But what is going on, here and now, is much better described as the mechanics of society. When these have frozen up while life’s energies continue to push demanding change, chaos happens.

"Active" Squared by Science

We are Seniors, busy, active,

We’re also mobile and we’re spry.

Nips and tucks make us attractive,

We climb mountains, we can fly.

But to those who are proactive,

Unwilling yet to say goodbye,

Doctors promise something drastic

From old hip U of Hawaii.

The doctors there have found a tactic

To breed rabbits that glow by night—

DNA and such. Fantastic!

Hurrah, we say. Let us be bright!

Allergic to anything lactiv?

Who cares! We’ll soon be radioactive.

The inspiration for this comes from an article in The Atlantic, August 13, 2013, reachable here and titled “Glowing Bunnies: Why They Matter.” Rabbits, cats, even a lamb will soon glow in the dark. But here is one Senior who hopes that by the time the U of Hawaii is ready to launch Glow-Baby-Glow, Inc., complete with IPO and all of that, there will be a choice of colors.

Shivery Doubt

Windy, grey, overcast day.

The temp gauge strains to reach but

Doesn’t quite manage to touch

Fifty-eight degrees of F.

This summer so far seems to

Lack those bruising torrid can’t

Breathe spells of heat that cause me

To believe that Global Warming rules.

The sun has a huge hole, or

Had, some coronal void

From which vast tongues outward bound

Lick the darks of space. No link.

Fear naught, we’re told. Not that, not that.

Fruits of the Season

The tomatoes come from our garden, the earliest. The peaches come from Monique's tree--way over on the other side of the metro area. We also saw, yesterday, the arrival of two Black Swallowtail males, named Max and Moritz. They were the eleventh and twelfth of our "production" this year--and the thirteenth, not yet named, will probably break from its chrysalis tomorrow. Moritz is resting on the leaf of our hydrangea brush. He dried his wings on that leaf for better than an hour, having flown there from our outdoor metal table. Then, finally, deep sigh, out into the world...

Deadline Pressures...

In Crossword Puzzle setting. Such puzzles aren’t written; they are set. I know this because I know the rather rich Morse series of detective shows, based on the novels of Colin Dexter. What with Morse a crossword puzzle lover, sooner or later we were bound to learn (1) that his first name was Endeavor (witness the latest in the derivative series based on those novels) and (2) something about the craft of puzzle making.

Setters have deadlines too—and what with the mass of puzzles to be made owing to the number of still surviving dailies and the number of days in the year—the pressure must be on. We noticed its presence in working (actually trying to work) the Saturday puzzle of August 3 in USA Today. Irritating puzzles for us are those with sports, pop culture, and celebrity names. In this particular puzzle nine such clues—and eight other name-clues—stopped us dead at last.

What struck us in this puzzle was the nature of first names we encountered as answers, including Sal, Ara, Lil, Les, Sol, Clu, and Tug. Tug? It is supposed be the first name relief pitcher McGraw. Only, of course, McGraw’s name was (he died in 2004) Frank Edwin, not Tug at all. When time pressures are great and the puzzle will not be finished unless odd words that “happen” are very tough to match with a clue, celebrity tags are very handy. The setter of this puzzle had problems. One place he ended up with the word RIV (53 down) for which, evidently he could not find a matching celebrity. So what clue did he provide? “Miss., e.g.” Oh, I get it. The answer sort of flashes instantly into the mind—five days too late. That Old Man Riv, isn’t it. He just keeps flowing along.

Another that pleased us mightily was the clue: “What the looker is next, presumably.” A clue like that, also presumably, would have sent crossword shivers of delight down Endeavor’s spine, but as for Brigitte and me, it produced that stare associated with bovines before a barn door. The answer is LEAPER. Get it? Look before you leap. Live and learn. When I see a future clue like “Ancient Chinese emperor, familiarly,” I’ll know that the answer is KUB. And when I see “What the fetcher is next, presumably,” I’ll know that it will be CARRIER.

And oh, by the way, and in parting. If you’re ever at an art exhibition and you see a sign next to a picture that merely says NFS, you will also know, after working this puzzle, that it means Not for sale.

The Libertarian Impulse

What is behind it? Where does its energy come from? Could it come from total gridlock—the inability of the collective to do anything at all? To view the libertarian impulse as arising from principles, from a philosophical stand, would seem to be unfair. Humans are so obviously a social species that libertarianism, taken to its ultimate expression, becomes rationally incoherent. It is much more accurate to see this impulse arising because the collective has ground to a halt, can no longer act—although it ought to. And then the healthy impulse is to find some other level where action may still be possible.

This thought arose as I read a profile of Thomas Massie in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Massie is a freshman congressman from Kentucky, a leader of the radical right, a young man of obvious technical and entrepreneurial talent and vigor—and married to a lady of matching traits. One of his exploits, replacing a defective water heater at the Lewis County, KY jail—by buying a used one on e-Bay and installing it himself, saving the county $6,500 in the process, is told here and illustrates the tendency.

One of my own more memorable insights into social change came from studying the French revolution—and never mind its bloody and half-insane political flowering. It’s the background where the insight was hidden. France had become paralyzed over centuries, had become a frozen place, a collective that no longer functioned. You could not go from one county to the other—just to cite one example—without buying enough salt to last you a lifetime. Travelers, of course, could not buy and carry so much salt in actuality—never mind across three county borders—but the purchase of it was necessary anyway—and had to be paid, or lesser bribes forked over to avoid it. Napoleon’s true achievement was wiping the slate clean, once and for all—of this and many other insane laws that time and custom had imposed.

Politics is just the most visible surface marker of things going on deep down in a society. The libertarian impulse, therefore, is a healthy one—one reason why, sometimes wondering about our own reaction, Brigitte and I, who are communitarian in orientation, that word underlined, sometimes agree with the likes of Rand Paul and Thomas Massie.