International Women’s Day

Our New York Times did not arrive this morning, but Google’s Graphic informed me of something I did not know about: March 8 is International Women’s Day and has been celebrated since the beginning of the twentieth century. The first such day in the United States fell on February 28, 1909, sponsored by the Socialist Party of America. Thereafter it was celebrated on different days in different countries, not least March 8. It has been uniformly observed on March 8 since 1977 after a United Nations General Assembly proclamation, that year, of March 8 as the UN Day for women’s rights and world peace. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Let me not to the celebration of woman admit impediments.”

There is also an International Men’s Day, held on November 19 since 1999. It is a day that I intend to observe, now that I know of it, only by benign neglect.

The image I reproduce here (from Wikipedia link) shows a poster for Women’s Day in 1914, in Germany; it was also celebrated on March 8. The slogan is “Go for Women’s Right to Vote.” The imagery is commie red; it looks dated now. Since those muscularly militant days this event has been softened and dressed into an expression of feminism. February 19, 2013 was the 50th anniversary of the appearance of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan—an event somewhat less dated than gigantic red flags. But, listening to some of the coverage of that anniversary, the recurring observation I’ve picked up is that not enough has changed. Women are not equally present in the visible places—in politics, at the top of corporations. And, as I’ve been noting, from time to time, for decades now, women’s compensation still lags that of men, not least in such professions as law and medicine.

Darnay the Younger, Cato the Elder

The difference is that I’m neither a senator nor famous—and that Marcus Porcius Cato wearied the world about the necessary destruction of Carthage whereas I weary the world (in an obscure blog or two or three) about the world inevitably running out of oil. Cato’s dictum, inserted in his speeches everywhere, context permitting or not, never mind, was Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed), whereas my mantra is The World will run out of oil; that, rendered into Google Latin, is Excurrat olei mundi.

Another difference is that I still have my hair whereas Cato had lost all of his, but we are equally attractive as we look in the mirror after a shower. And if I’m to live as long as he did (85), I’ve still got nine more years to go.

Now another, and even more telling, contrast between us is that in part Carthage was destroyed because Cato was, like, on and on. Meanwhile the world will run out of oil no matter what I say. In his case navies and armies had to be set sailing and marching, but in mine one needs but turn the key in the car—which requires neither much consciousness nor emotion. But without that key, that car, lordy, what would we do?

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Image of Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) from Wikipedia (link).

Castro Outlived Him

The death of Hugo Chavez (1954-2013), the most recent South American leader to carry the flag of socialism, was born when Fidel Castro, born in 1926, was twenty-eight years of age. The year of Chavez’s birth was also the beginning year of the Cuban Revolution when Castro, who had fled to Mexico after imprisonment in Cuba, participated in the re-formation of the 26th of July Movement, named after the date, in 1953, when Castro attacked the Moncada Barracks with some followers in Santiago, Cuba. We live, here in the United States, in a kind of cultural isolation as vast stretches of humanity follow quite different destinies. And Chavez is known to us principally because, for political purposes, he was at least in speeches and such antagonistic to the United States… Castro is 86, Chavez died at 58.

Orienting Musically in Time

It is possible to have a developed appreciation of music while remaining quite ignorant of it—to be a kind of musical primitive. By primitive here I mean a person who has experienced the phenomenon over a significant period of time but has no words to describe why he or she likes this or that. I am such a primitive. Written material about music completely baffles me—even after I’ve looked up scores of words. As others before me have pointed out, all dictionaries are circular. They define words using words, and in music the “answers” are in the same language as the “questions.” To illustrate:

The second half of the 16th century witnessed the beginnings of the tradition which many music lovers readily associate with the normal feel of ‘classical’ music. Gradually, composers moved away from the modal system of harmony which had predominated for over 300 years (and still sounds somewhat archaic to some modern ears), towards the organisation of their work into major and minor scales, thereby imparting the strong sensation of each piece having a definite tonal centre or ‘key’.

If now you begin your lookups with “modal,” you will get this for mode (from Wikipedia citing OED): “a type of scale, coupled with a set of characteristic melodic behaviours.” You look up scale and you get: “any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch.” You look up pitch and you get: “Pitch is a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.”  The message for the musical primitive is: to know music from inside, you have to live it; listening is not enough. Spend some decades playing it…

The same source that produced my conceptual bafflement, however, Naxos.com, which calls itself The World’s Leading Classical Music Group (link), also provided for me the kind of information that I am adequate to grasp—adequate when I combine it with a life-time of now-and-again concert-going. It is a timeline of music from about 1150; the text then names the leading figures in each period into which Naxos divides the timeline.

In the Medieval period, I recognized none of the names—but I am very fond of that sort of music. In the Renaissance period, Palestrina, yes! My great favorites are from the Baroque era, among the Johann Sebastian Bach, the ultimate for me. In the Classical, there is Mozart, but as that era gropes its way toward modernity, I begin to approach neutrality, not perhaps for Schubert but certainly for Beethoven. The ill winds of the French Revolution are becoming tangible. In the Early Romantic Smetana is meaningful, but have I heard anything other than Die Moldau? I doubt it. In the Late Romantic fall such figures as Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, and Wagner. Bruckner for me, and certain Verdi arias. As for the aftermath, there is one name there I rather value: Aaron Copeland. But, generally, my mind produces only shudders when I hear the words “modern music.” Or rather, to be more rational about it, here and there, rarely, a composer seems to suggest, in one or several of works, that the spirit of music is still alive but, mostly, buried.

Popular taste seems to resonate with mine—aside from the occasional lover of Wagner, one of my Mother’s favorites. Mostly when I look over a program, it is a mixture of Baroque and Classical—with a few dips into the early romantics. Orchestral modernity does not support its moderns aggressively at all (though it attempts to “educate” us)—because the audience would stay away.

Impatient as I am…

…to see Spring arrive, having mentioned moss pink yesterday, and noted earlier this morning,  wryly, on tang dynasty times, that in Japan this month, the third, is named (I’d say misnamed) “At Last,” I will content myself with showing a picture of moss pink beneath and behind a flowering cherry tree. The image comes from Wikipedia (link) and depicts a scene visible at the Yachounomori Garden in Tatebayashi-shi, in Gumma-ken prefecture of Japan. Thus I am simultaneously reacting to both stimuli. And time is pressing. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, in efforts to reach the public on the fringes of the City of Detroit, is performing this afternoon music by Mozart and Haydn at the Grosse Pointe Memorial Church, originally the first Protestant church in an area that was Catholic throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. So we are heading out…

Full Worm Moon

One of our new calendars for 2013 is The Old Farmer’s Almanac Gardening Calendar, courtesy of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. We noted that it features the names of full moons as they were known to Native American tribes in what is now the Eastern and Northern United States.  March features Full Worm Moon (scheduled to appear March 27) so named because the ground will soften and worms will appear. More northerly tribes knew this as the Full Crow Moon; crows got active; around here, alas, even seeing crows, which were quite numerous a few years ago, is always an event! Another Nordic name was Full Crust Moon, a name derived from the behavior of snow, which melts and then freezes again, leaving a hard crust; we’ve just seen that sort of crusty snow quite recently around here. For a look at all moon names, try this link.

What the Old Farmer’s Almanac does not say is how the Indians measured the lunar month. Different cultures have different start and stop dates. They either measure from new to new or from full to full. If from new to new, today is still Full Snow Moon (or Full Hunger Moon—conditions being terrible for hunting); that month began February 10. If from full to full, this lunar month began February 27.

Leaving the tent late at night for a last look at the calendar in the sky. Sigh. Quite a while yet until Full Pink Moon in April comes—signaled by herb moss pink (Phlox subulata) the earliest plant to flower in the Spring.

Pregnant Young Sun

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal (link) reports on the discovery of what may be a new planet forming in the gaseous disk surrounding a young sun quite near us in the Milky May. Near is 335 light years from here. The sun’s name is HD100546. The “planet” is an asymmetry in the gas disk; the point where the asymmetry is observed also emits strong radiation. I note this here for future reference. Of the two theories of planet formation, one has particles, large and small, colliding and cohering as they circle a sun and then, slowly, aggregating into planets. This would suggests that the asteroid belt in our own system has simply failed to “get with the program.” The other model is that planet formation is a spontaneous process that takes place in the wake of a star's own formation—the planets forming, much as the one reported today, from the same raw materials that gave birth to the sun and soon after—thus while a good deal of dynamism is moving that disk of gases and dust. I’ve long favored this second view—and prefer to imagine that the asteroid belt is the record of some planet that got shattered in some collision. The discoverer here is Sascha Quanz, of the ETH University in Switzerland, working with his team at one of two observatories operated by the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The one used was not reported but was probably Paranal, the location of the Very Large Telescope.

Sequester Day

What was the last crisis all about—and when was it exactly? Quickly now, spit it out. When was the last Winterstorm Warning? Give me the date. This morning, asking the first question, I suddenly had a total lapse of memory. That may be because of my age—or because we get very used to people crying wolf—and can’t remember what color the wolf was last time. I had to search around for it. Ah, yes. The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. Passed January 2, 2013. In which, assaulting our sense of language, payroll tax cuts were rolled back, no doubt to the relief of the working masses, and tax rates were nudged up for the uppermost layers. Now it comes to me. That was the Fiscal Cliff!

Today is Sequester Day. It was scheduled, originally—in the Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted August 2, 2011—to take effect January 1, 2013, but, to our great “relief” it was postponed by the above-mentioned Taxpayer Relief Act to March 1, 2013.

Now, today, a big meeting looms at the White House in course of which, possibly, a path will be paved to Sequester Lite, and the next crisis, at present due, roughly, on April 1st, will come into better focus. No name has been established yet, but that’ll come soon. Ceiling Crash II? Stop Government Day II? We’ve had such movable feasts before, in the past, hence my use of the Roman two. In wake of today’s meeting, every congress-person, of course, will rise to speak, be given his or her two minutes, hold forth about the Ceiling Crash, pro or con, and then “yield back the balance of my time.” Those speeches alone will take us to April 1st and, having built us up for it, we shall be prepared for the festive slamming of government doors when we can Bo-No-Mo, the Bo standing for borrow, the Mo for more. And the No? Well, which part of N and O don’t you understand?

Setting a Marker

In this realm of flux, setting visible markers is an affirmation of duration. February, for us, is ever such a marker, as I’ve noted here before (link). This year another brief but very meaningful period ends on this the last day of the month. We shall also remember that anniversary. The Pope retires amidst the nasty noising of Modernity. The dogs bark, but the caravan keeps moving on.

The Long-Enduring

The chance of war planted our family temporarily in Tirschenreuth, Germany in 1944—a place where porcelain manufacturing was a significant industry still, then. In consequence of that, I learned, while still in grade school, all about kaolin, the silicate mineral (officially kaolinite) from which china is made. Kaolin is also called china clay—and it delighted me to learn that the word itself comes from the name of a village in Jiangxi province, in China, Kao-ling.  Well, in our then region in Bavaria, kaolin was mined and made into porcelain. Kaolinite is a rock. You have to heat it in kilns to a temperature 2,192 to 2,552° before it can be poured as a liquid.

Was it because, as a child of ten or thereabouts, I studied the making of porcelain and awarely examined the product, that I came to admire finely-made porcelain? I’ll never know. One of life’s mysteries: we can’t know what might have been had we ended up, say in the much larger Regensburg, and Tirschenreuth china had not been there for me to admire, to caress, carefully to read the maker’s name when turning the plate over. The pleasure remains—and the thought that perhaps, in this world of flux, something in us comes alive when we encounter the long-enduring and incorruptible.

Porcelain can break, of course, but one of its oddities is that, even broken, it retains its enduring essence—and archeologists of the 15th millennium, digging up the shards, polishing them with a rag, will behold a wonder from the past, absolutely unchanged.

Stone figures, vast stone structures, belong to this category too—uniting durable nature and the human touch. But stone weathers faster; it endures millennia as well, but its features soften.

The image I bring is that of two Chinese moon flasks, dated to 1723-35, from the Qing Dynasty from Wikipedia (link).

Naming Your Newborn “Buckminster”?

Most people (certainly above a certain age) recognize the name of Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), he of the geodesic dome. Fuller also became something of a public intellectual and New Age figure in the late 1960s and 1970s, very much a positively-minded futurist and thought leader. Most people recognize the name, as I say, but not very many, and I’ll document this in a moment, ever wonder how that first name of his came about. Well, yesterday, Brigitte asked the question. She does tend to do that: ask the difficult ones.

Difficult because any serious perusal of at least web-based bios of Buckminster Fuller shows that all fully fail to explain that name of his. The first reason for that is that Buckminster wasn’t—wasn’t Fuller’s first name. He was born Richard Buckminster Fuller. But, and it’s a revealing “but,” he did not much care for that Richard—perhaps because his father was also named Richard Buckminster Fuller. For a while he called and signed himself R.B. Fuller. Then, later, he called and signed himself R. Buckminster Fuller. And then, as his fame grew, the media did the rest. They dropped the R. Soon Buckminster itself, a middle name, got shortened to “Bucky.”

After about an hour of trying and failing, the junk yard dog syndrome set in for me. I knew full well that Buckminster must be a family name, acquired along the way—far enough back when it was customary to name a child and, in so doing, honoring some female line. In our patriarchal world, women must abandon their lineage as they come under the shade of a husband. That custom began to be challenged, here and there, by self-assertive women—but it causes last names to turn very long and therefore inconvenient in the LOL age. In any case, I set to work consulting sites very unfamiliar to me: ancestry pages.

After another half an hour, I’d finally pinned down how the Fullers and the Buckminsters got linked and, in due time, produced R. Buckminster Fuller’s middle name. It all began in the eighteenth century with one Anne Buckminster. She married one Abraham Williams. Here is the rest of the story:

Anne Buckminster (1728-????)

m. Abraham Williams (????-1780)

  Sarah Williams (????-1822)

  m. Timothy Fuller (1778-1835)

    Arthur Buckminster Fuller (1822-1862)

    m. Emma Lucille Reeves (1833-1880)

     

      Richard Buckminster Fuller (1861-1910)

      m. Caroline Wolcott Andrews (????-????)

        Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

My helper in this venture? Geneanet, the international geneology database (link). The illustration shows the Montreal Biosphère built by Buckminster Fuller in 1967; my source is Wikipedia (link).

Winter Walk

Urbanization might be described, functionally, as the concentration of many people on relatively small areas of land. The process changes the subjectively-felt environment. What we call nature falls into the background; other people come to the fore and, indeed, come to saturate perception. Animals more or less disappear, so does green (unless we are in Central Park). The sky is there but does not naturally get our attention because weather (unless linked with the word “warning”) is unimportant. Superimpose high-speed electronic communications on this urban scene of highways and built structures. Next, miniaturize the devices so that even those out jogging (I see them every time I’m out on my these days infrequent walks) are having sound pumped into earphones or images to handheld devices they consult as they run. The other day I saw a woman wrestling two big dogs on leashes, one on either side of a baby carriage, while trying—despite a jerking dog—to see the image on her cell-phone screen. All right. Animals are still present; reproduction still goes on. A little later I saw a dog sometimes allowed to be outdoors—but this dog (and little flags planted into the snowy ground tell me so) has been trained to stay on that lawn by radio-controlled pain-delivering devices in its collar. The modern marvel even controls the dogs.

Yet everything looks ordinary, the superimposition of the New Age almost invisible. Okay. The joggers wear skin-tight suits of a fabric unthinkable in the 1950s. But the scene? Well, most of the houses around here date to the early teens and twenties of the last century, i.e., a time when Jules Verne had just recently departed. Near dusk I see the electronics in the houses—but only partially; they are lighted rectangles blocked by lampshades and artificial flower arrangements—signaling a kind of “life,” a little “warmth.”

In the 1950s science fiction dystopias projected all this much more dramatically. Unfortunate humans had alien-mounted control devices affixed to the back of their necks. People lived in cubicles and watched Big Brother’s face on the screen. Active book-burning took place at a temperature of exactly 451° F. The odd long pods those people are carrying furtively into the garage? They are your double and mine—and when they break out of their brown chrysalides we will be replaced by obedient look-alikes. The 1950s enemy was always “out there” somewhere. And, if Mulder and Scully had it right, so was “the Truth.”

Yet very often, even in wonderful weather, I walk all alone—almost as if in a landscape entirely scoured of people. A few cars pass now and then. But these days, what with the self-driving car now officially permitted to roam on the West Coast, how do I know that there are people in them? Maybe the end times have come, I sometimes think, with a faint shudder. What if I am? What if I am one of the left behind?

Dickens’ England

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is one of the most popular novelists in the English language—albeit these days that means films made of his books. He is not one of my favorites, although I think highly of Bleak House. “Bleak” is a good word for describing Dickens’ work. The dreary settings and the unjust society in which its polarized characters function—too evil, too pure—are perhaps associated with the city of London, but what Dickens reflected was the impact on an agricultural society of the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution, in turn, reflects a major urbanization of a population and its concentrated employment in factories where machines are initially used, then become the center, then, eventually, displace people. And where machines could not be employed yet, the social methods of forcing people into factories took place nonetheless—as in the so-called “sweated industries” like making matchboxes and lace, industries in which people were paid by the piece.

Just 20 percent of England’s population lived in towns when the first British census was taken in 1801. By 1851, the proportion had rises to 51 percent, by 1881 66.7 percent. The United States lagged far behind England. Here census dates come from the year before: 1800 - 6.1 percent; 1850 - 15.3, 1880 - 39.6 percent.

The unregulated—call it phenomenon—of industrialization brought with it all sorts of ills, not least extraordinarily long working days, child labor, and all sorts of labor unrest, usually put down by armed forces; some people were usually killed. Dickens’ life was also the time of the Luddites. Attempts by labor to unionize were resisted with the Combination Acts (1799, 1800); they should’ve been called “Against Combination Acts”; these were repealed in 1824 as reform began to take hold. Then unionization expanded.

Very slow but eventually effective public reactions to industrialization gradually caused the evolution of the welfare state—which is, viewed in perspective, another concomitant of industrialization, call it its human face.

If now political efforts are mounting to roll back the welfare state in late-comer United States, it may be a symptom of the fact that industrialization is beginning to weaken—at least so far as people are involved, as producers. People are still needed as consumers, to be sure, but today’s reformers, who want to roll back all of the defenses societies have mounted against untrammeled industrialization, seem unaware that if vast masses of consumers are weakened, the machines will also, ultimately, have to stop producing.

Two hundred years of industrialization—now beginning a slow fade. Boy, oh, boy. It will take quite a long while yet before we’re all back to farming—or herding. The smart family will settle in Navajo land and there learn the herding life over several generations before the industrial sun finally sets for good.

Asian Carp

I used to fish Asian carp as a boy in a modestly-sized lake in Palics, Hungary (now Palić in Serbia)—without knowing it. The kind found in Lake Palics was common carp, but all varieties of carp originated in Asia, were originally imported, and most were and are cultivated for food. They fight like the devil when caught and can get rather large. They are good to eat. For reasons that puzzle me, carp are viewed with disdain in the United States. Possible reasons are that they are omnivorous and eat aquatic plants as well as insects and other small creatures that live in muddy bottoms. They’re not a “game” fish—but they certainly have plenty of fight when hooked.

In the Great Lakes region and in the rivers that feed the lakes, the Asian carp are frequently discussed as a major nuisance, an invasive species; evidently we don’t like competition. The notion that they might be a terrific source of sport and food is simply off the table. But the time may come when all that will change. Here is a rich source of protein. Someday we’ll appreciate that.

Yesterday my brother, Baldy Darnay, sent along a quite fantastic video, produced by Indiana Outdoor Adventures. Three men are traveling up the Indiana river by boat—when they are subjected to an Asian carp attack. It’s worth seeing. Here is the link.

For more on this subject a quick-and-easy intro is provided on this U.S. Geological Survey site (link).

Dark Matter? Maybe Not.

Great orthodoxies in astrophysics are like the Tower of Siloam (link). They grow cracks and begin to crumble in almost unnoticed ways—until, one day, they crash down with a roar. I became aware of another little crumble this morning (ht to Montag). It takes the form of a press release from Case Western Reserve University reporting on a study which appears to legitimize Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and thus throws doubt on the existence of dark matter (link).

MOND, a theory introduced by Mordehai Milgrom, the Israeli astrophysicist, in 1983, suggests that Newton’s theory of gravity may not operate uniformly at all stellar distances, hence Newton’s theory needs “modification.” Wikipedia’s article on MOND (link) brings a graphic that neatly illustrates the problem.

Expected (A) and observed (B) star velocities as
a function of distance from the galactic center.

The dotted blue line illustrates the expected rotational velocities of stars at increasing distances from a galactic core. The red line illustrates the actually observed velocities. In order to explain that gap, between velocities predicted by Newton’s law of gravitation and what is actually seen, astrophysics has invented dark matter to supply sufficient amounts of mass to justify the observations—while keeping Newton’s laws untouched. The problem, of course, is that dark matter has not been physically observed. It is simply a projection of gravity-producing mass into a void which may be empty.

The current study is headed by Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom and deals with the rotational behavior of seventeen dwarf galaxies that circle around Andromeda. This sort of thing interests me—because I feel quite uneasy about a cosmological picture in which virtually the whole universe (96% of it) is supposedly made up of dark energy and dark matter—of which we have not even the slightest knowledge in a touch-and-feel sense.

The word mond in German means “moon.” Well, it isn't full moon yet in astrophysics, but the light is certainly increasing.

The Future Holds Withdrawal

In my childhood I lived (among other grander places) in two small towns, one in Hungary (Sümeg) and one in Germany (Tirschenreuth). Both were deeply and unselfconsciously Catholic communities in which religious life was very much in the public square, the visible festivals were all religious, pilgrimages quite routine. The very environment was religious, you might say, and in each the most prominent structure was the centrally elevated church itself.

This sort of place certainly had huge influence on children—they could see, and couldn’t help seeing, large numbers of adult participating in the religious life in which children themselves were also being brought up and schooled. And my presumption is that it also influenced the aging, for whom the meaning of the lives they were completing was reaffirmed in a socially obvious way.

Both in Sümeg and in Tirschenreuth that life still continues dominantly—indeed with renewed energy. In Tirschenreuth, for instance, a miraculous event produced a series of pilgrimages beginning in 1719. These were later suppressed, in 1803, as Europe was forcibly secularized. But the pilgrimage came back and is, today, held on the 13th of every month. On a recent visit to Sümeg, my brother Baldy and Peggy (Baldy is my brother) and Tibor and Evelyn (Tibor is my cousin), witnessed an openly religious festival—and a pilgrimage—in Sümeg; the pilgrimage drew people from all over Europe.

The life in these places—which also host all the usual modern facilities, factories, and the like—is a remainder of an era when religious consciousness was the environment. The sea of faith was then, too, at the full. And, what with its persistence, it may expand again from settlements like that—places known as backward. But backward is also forward; just give it time.

In the land of the free and officially secular—where the public square may not even display the emblems of faith—the process is likely to take the form of a withdrawal rather than an expansion. I conclude this because, sooner or later, elements of the public will begin to recoil from a culture in which the First Amendment is interpreted as sanctioning violent computer games as “freedom of speech”—recently (2011) pronounced to be such by a 7:2 Supreme Court ruling in Brown, Governor of California et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. I have posted the text of the First Amendment in the last post to serve as a reference here. The Justices saw the legitimization of training youth in violence contained in those words?

What with the Newtown massacre and gun control to the fore, such matters are much in the news now, and we were entertained by news of a test in which we saw the pale image of a teenage boy playing such games—and taking (ridiculous) questionnaire tests afterwards to “measure” whether he felt more aggressive after slaughtering vividly rendered digital images of humans than he felt before. Watching such a story one truly feels extraordinary disgust; and to hear commentary in which such madness is taken seriously produces mirages of the future.

In these mirages I see communities withdrawing. The Amish, Mennonites, and Huetterites will soon have company. It will be barely noticeable at first, but it will be a genuine movement, and as it grows in numbers, it will eventually rule. No. These will not be utopian communities destined to fade away. They will be real. No amount of reform legislation will ever work, but voting with the feet will. It’s in the air. Something within us tells us to take up farming again. And in a handful of decades or so, the drain-away of fossil fuels will bring practical confirmation of the faint inner urges that rise as we contemplate the death of reason.

Amendment I

To serve as a reference to the post that is to follow (but in blog-style above and not below), I here present the words of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

She Led with the Right Word

In quite another context, looking at the phrase “soul mate,” I was on Google Ngram Viewer again. This facility tracks the occurrence of words or phrases in all books that Google has actually digitized and indexed. The pairing of “sense” and “sensibility” has long amused me—showing in a way how language changes. Back when Jane Austen wrote her novels, sense stood for rational thought and sensibility for feeling. Herewith the ngram that tracks the usage of all three since 1800:

Note how sensibility has just about disappeared from usage—whereas feeling at first rose fairly steeply in the nineteenth century and has, since about 1885, been on a slow decline—at least among the printed words Google has digitized.

Now for that other even more famous Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice:

What this ngram shows is that pride is holding its own, but it was a lot higher in 1800 than since. And prejudice has been rising steadily, as I interpret the chart, since 1845.

Austen, however, unerringly used the right word with which to lead in her titles. But never mind the ngram rank of Sense and Pride. When it comes to titles, one syllable always leads when the next word has five or three.

Music to Our Ears

Call Roto-Rooter, that’s the name, and away go troubles down the drain.

Compulsive student that I am of major anniversaries (see below), I only discovered today that I’d missed a Big One a few years back. The Roto-Rooter jingle celebrated its 50th anniversary on May 13, 2004—by my calculation about the time when we had our last Sewer Event until, that is, the one that will be seriously attacked today. (In fact the men arrived just as I typed that last period.) Sometimes music, poetry, and that dreaded real life actually converge.

Not Until Friday

George Washington was born on February 22. It was the second national holiday I myself noted consciously, after July 4. I’d entered the Army on February 21, and my second day was already a day off!! That sticks in the mind. Congress established Washington’s Birthday as a national holiday in 1879, celebrated on the day. In 1971 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act and moved this day to the third Monday in February. I entered the Army in 1956 and thus escaped this revision. Lincoln having been born in February as well (the 12th), calendar makers call this Presidents’ Day. But the official name remains Washington’s Birthday, which it isn’t really. All these Monday holidays (Washington’s, Memorial, Columbus’, Veterans, and later Martin Luther King’s) might be uniformly named Three-Day-Weekend days. The public likes it—so do the banks. The last time Washington’s actual birthday fell on a Monday was in 2010; alas it was the fourth Monday, not the third.