As far as civilization got without the Internet

 I just watched 

this video on kids in the Phoenix area discovering the usefulness of old typewriters.

How you can not love what these kids are doing. I commented in the video that my belief is that civilization peaked with the advent of the commercial laser printer. For a generation raised on manual typewriters (they were still teaching that way in 1980 when I took typing), and even for those who used the later more convenient electric ones with automatic correction, the laser printer was a dreamlike technology that enabled new creative output beyond anything anyone had dreamt of.

All you needed was a laser printer and a little Mac SE, the old mini post office box style, and you could pretty much mock up anything. The first time I saw that set-up was in 1988 working on the campus newspaper in Salem. I was blown away. It changed newspapers almost overnight, antiquating centuries of established and evolving production techniques.

For a season, in the early nineties, it created a craft industry of published materials. Portland as we know it---the Portland of the 1990s---was created on this industry.

What happened? Well as I like to tell people, the thing about the 1980s, and especially the late 1980s, is that they represent as far as civilization got without the Internet. 

Or more specifically, the world wide web, which was invented in August 1989, the same month that Hungarians started pouring across the Austrian border, trampling the barbed wire, and no one was stopping them on either side.

The Bimmer Years

 As I write this, taking a break from work for a few moments, Jessica is in the next room breaking up with a client. She is closing down her private practice, in women's health, at least the level that she can do with a physical office. So she is reaching out to her existing patients, some of whom she known for years since coming to Arizona.  Some of them have been with her a while. Some are out of state.

It reminds me of much of life is saying good-bye to people in various ways. One day you no longer see that person. Sometimes you know it at the time, sometimes not.

In my youth the good-byes were mostly due to geographical separation. Sometimes moving from one neighborhood to another, and changing schools, meant one day a friendship was over, never to be in contact again. 

For a season of my life, up to about ten years ago, I made it a point to overcome, at least temporarily, the good-byes of geography that had accumulated over the years.

At the same time, I had the distinct feeling that civilization was collapsing, because the bonds of social interaction were disintegrating due to social media. I wanted to see people before the madness set in, which it id.

I found victory in this. I found both great joy and also pain. Reunions are only temporary it seems, even when good, and definitely when bad.

My effort--the Bimmer years--could not be sustained in the form I had achieved. I am now rather fixed, and again find many limitations of fellowship due to geography. 

The last decades have brought an increasing load of separation due to death. That was rare and abstract in my younger years, experienced mostly vicariously, seeing my parents mourn the grandparents, whom I knew, but not intimately. Later were my own grandparents, who loved me, and whom I deeply loved---one by one they went from the early 1990s until the last one in the fall of 2010, the occasion of which sent me into some kind of mania to see everyone I knew again.

Eclipses Make You Sick

 Today the eclipse came and I found myself waiting for 11 o'click, when it when the eclipse would be well underway here in Phoenix, and thinking I should got downstairs to the parking lot and get the eclipe glasses that are in the small plastic pocket in the car, leftover from the trip tot he New Mexico last year.As

As I waited, I wathed Youtube video on my ipad and Youtube suggested a live feed of a stramer showign the eclipse through a camera right here in Phoenix, so I was able to monitor how long I had to wait until it reached its maximum which would be about 65% coverage here.

I was in no hurry to go down, because I was not feeling well. I had woken up the day before, early on Sunday morning, and gone about my morning routine making coffee and praying, when I noticed something very weird. I noticed that I was losing my balance as I walked across the floor to the kitchen. It reminded me of being on a ship that is rocking, so that one is staggering bit to each side.

Then I immediately started feeling nauseous in the pit of my stomach, and I immediately hied to the bathroom, where I began retching dry heaves into the toilet, the stomach acide burning my throat as it came up.

After ecovering my wits, I tried walking again and found the same unsteadiness (not a spinning dizziness, jsut lurnching around like onboard a ship), and almost the same thing happened.

Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Jessica lager told me I probably have some kind of viral infection of the inner ear, which would account for my symptoms. It persisted all day Sunday,w hich ws spend mostly sleeping, and in the evening I was running a fever and got the violent shivers, as I do when I sick.. It was somewha ta relief to have a fever and know that I was sick. I told myself that meant I could recover from whatever it was that had hit me.

I'm at the point of my life where something new---a new condition or physical ailment---is something I dread. Since 2018, when I first started having issue with me left eye, I have shifted drastically in my self perception, rom the assumption of indestructibility of my youth to one of knowing that body is slowing falling apart as a I age, and that at any moment, out of the blue, something might arise in my body that could change my lie utterly going forward. It count it as a blessing, to be aware of this.  Our bodies are not mant to last forever, and the decay of flesh is a gentle way for us to let go of this world and concentrate on the next one.

Nevetheless I'm very happy if I can heal or recover from someting that happens to me. As I write this, I am now able to walk again, still lurching somewhat, but without rushing to the toilet, 

This was not the case even earlier today, when I went down to see the eclipse. When I got the bottom of the outside stairs, even taking it low, the nausea had welled up me and I wretched on the ground, trying to hold it in, and then I approached the car, I could not contain it and out came the coffee I had drunk ealier. IT was all over the concrete. Anyone looking at it would not have assumed it came from a stomach, but ws just a spilled drink. 

I quickly steadied myself against the car and unlocked it to get the nylar-paper glasses, and then put them on to look up at the sun, almost at its zenith above th nearby buildings. What a spectacle I must have been to anyone watching. I imagined some scenario where they might tinterpret the eclipse as causing me to vomit. 

No Eclipse for You!

 As I write this, millions around the country are gathering along the path of totality for the total eclipse of the Sun today. Jessica and I will not be among them. I had asked her last year if she wanted to see it. I had seen the one in 2017 in central Wyoming, but she had not seen one. Given the rarity of the spectacle, I did not want to deprive her of the chance to see it,

My personality, as I've learned throughout my life, is either to far in advance in planning, or last minute scrambling. In this case, about a year ago, I realized the eclipse would happen in April 2024 and did research to find a good place to see it. I figured Dallas was the best shot and researched hotel rooms there on Booking.com, finding that even a year in advance, many places were sold out. I tentatively picked out some decent hotels in downtown but did not book them. That's the "way in advance" part of my personality---figure it out and then wait, not taking action until the last minute.

Last fall, when we went up to New Mexico to see the annular eclipse, I made doubly sure that Jessica was not interested in going, as I figured we could still get hotel rooms at that point but it would be a harder with each passing day as people woke up to the event that coming in April.

Once upon a time in my life, I would have been disappointed to "miss out" on the rare spectacle, even though I'd seen a total eclipse. These days I am more relieved to stay home. The younger me would look at the older me and say, "what happened to you, man?"

So it was with mixed feelings that I read last week that the forecast called for cloudy skies in Texas during the eclipse. On the one hand, I was pleased that we had done gone through the expense and effort of traveling here just have a suboptimal experience of the event. From my experience in Wyoming in 2017, the most thrilling thing was to see the solar corona during totality. The tendrils of the corona were a type of beauty in patterns I had never seen anywhere in nature. They reminded me of an ancient Indian design, the kind girls try to emulate in henna tattoos back when I was in college. Without that, it would feel like not really seeing the eclipse at all, and that is apparently what people in Texas will experience this morning. 

I feel bad for them. I wish everyone along the route has the kind of experience I had in 2017. I would rather that, and feel like I missed out, then feel justified in not going. Many people will go away from the event today feeling like it was a giant nothingburger. There's no real consequence from that I suppose, but it would be more fun if everyone got to see it and delight in it.

The Computus of Bede: Christ is Risen

Modern stained glass at Gloucester Cathedral, England
depicting Bede dictating to a scribe

Easter morning came with rain, blessed rain. Sunday found me sleeping in, to the sound of it outside.  Easter Monday, the first day of April--the second driest month of year here--gave us more rain. If I don't hear it again for several months, it will be all right.

I just got done with this week's Spellbreakers Podcast. The subject was computus. It may be my favorite show so far, because I got to speak about God, Jesus, and the Church. I started off by showing a video of an Orthodox priest in England talking about the Jesus Prayer, proceded to a video of an Orthodox monk on Vashon Island describing the activities of the Othrodox patron saint of the Americas with the natives of the Aleutian Islands (the cradle of Orthodoxy in America) and ended with a Youtube video of a young woman in a Lutheran Church in Cincinnati singing a famous modern hymn written by a Catholic priest.  It also threw some Jack Chick and the Venerable Bede. I love Bede. Bede embodies computus as much as any man in history.

I'm a fan of these types of Lutheran worship service, where the pastor is tie-less and the music is supplied by a band with keyboard, drum, and guitar. There is something earnest about these Lutherans, in the desire to find a meaningful liturgy amidst the loose of the modern world. I would rather attend such a Lutheran church than go to a most modernist Catholic masses with similar music and church decor. The Lutherans of today at least seem like they are trying to pull something together out of the wreckage of postmodern western culture, whereas the modernist Catholics seem like they are trying to tear down the parts that are still standing.

I was very nervous before the show that I would not do justice the topic, but I think the Spirit helped me out.

The best part---I didn't finish and plenty of slides for part two next week. 

The Ultimate Opening Day

 

Working class sports hero Pete Rose

This week---yesterday, to be specific, was Opening Day of the major league baseball season. For several years now, Jessica has been telling me how big a deal is Opening Day in her hometown of Cincinnati. The franchise there, the Reds, is the oldest in major league baseball and for over a century, Cincinnati was given the honor of being the first game played, and always at home. They have suspended that first part in recent years, but still the Reds are always allowed a home game, as they were this year.

Moreover there is a parade--a huge one--through downtown, with many groups of marchers in costumes and marching bands from around the area. We watched it yesterday morning, streaming it from the major league baseball app, on which Jessica has an account that will allow her to watch all the Reds games this season. It was great fun to have it playing in the morning. Then in the afternoon they played the game and the Reds, in their brilliant white and red home uniforms, won handily, satisfying the hometown crowd. It has been lean far for the Cincinnati fans in recent years, but last year, about six weeks into the season, they were sparked by young talent and went on to win over a dozen in a row, I think, and missed the playoffs only at the last minute. This year expectation are much higher.

The lead-up to yesterday prompted me to dedicate by podcast show this week to baseball (link to show), specifically to the history of the Reds focussing on the part I remember best, which is the "Big Red Machine" dynasty of the mid 1970s, and in particular the spectacular unmatched 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Boston Red Sox. I talked in my show about the idea of baseball as representing the America of the past, before the mid 1960s, but that in 1975, it was still in perfect equilibrium, between the past and the future. 

It was the first World Series I watched, I told my audience. I wanted the Red Sox to win because they were the underdogs. Now I am much happier that the greatest World Series ever was won by Cincinnati. The idea that any team from Boston could be an "underdog" to a team from Cincinnati seems ridiculous to me. Cincinnati is a small market, a city in middle America that is part of the flyover country. 

That Big Red Machine was the last of its kind in that the players were working class athletes. Some had to take jobs in the off season. It was before the era of sky-high superstar salaries, when Americans knew that the well-known players were rich. Back then the players were much closer to the lives of ordinary Americans. This was especially true of the star of the Reds, Pete Rose, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time. He was a hometown kid from Cincinnati who wound up playing for his hometown team, and winning a World Series for them (and was named most valuable player). 

Thanks to Jessica I know he was from the West Side of Cincinnati, which is the less-desirable working-class part of town, as opposed to the wealthier East Side. 

I was delighted to share all this with my audience and talk about the era of the past that baseball represented, and that I was lucky to meet some kids in fifth grade who drew me into an interest in baseball, and baseball card trading, just in time to see the 1975 World Series, and burn into my memory that moment of equilibrium in America.

It was a fun show.

Of course it is also Holy Week in the western churches. As I write this it is Good Friday. Sunday is Easter, the ultimate "opening day."

I Lie Awake Thinking of You

 (citation)

Waking in the middle of the night last night, I remembered my Lententide vow in the previous post to roust myself for prayer, no matter what the hour it might. It turned out to be almost exactly three o'clock, which is not an unusual hour for me to awake, and moreover for many, as I learned from a Youtube video of the late Fulton Sheen. This automated reader version of Sheen's words I found last week does not do him justice. Who sh'd?

I think of how good it will feel to deny myself the pleasure of staying under the covers. To deny one's appetites is to be able to step outside them, and see how much--at least in my own case---that I have gone through my life as a slave to my appetites, pulled by them by impulse, one to the next, to satisfy them like an animal roughing to a trough. I lack patience, discipline, a sense of duty and obligation. I am disgusted at myelf.

I sit in my office chair without turning on the space heater. I would hardly need it anymore at this time of spring, so that is hardly a deprivation. Without a kettle of water heating for coffee,  I struggle to keep from falling asleep in the chair. I direct myself towards prayer, towards love of God.

It doesn't feel particularly rewarding this morning, the whole thing. It is not about feeling. Feelings will lead one right into the abyss. 

It is not about self-improvement. Can something be about other than your own life pursuits, sweetheart? For once, can you put aside your postmodern need for Me-Me validation? Can you just fulfill your duty to render justice God (i.e. give God what is due Him) by worshipping, praising and adoring Him?

I am dust.

Palm Sunday Rain

 Woke up last night in the small hours, as I do most days, and heard the sound of steady rain bearing down the tiled roof and dropping from the eaves on the pavement.

We have had many good rains the last two months, to the point that the annual golf-tournament-slash-roving-cocktail-party turned into a drunken proto-riotish mud bath that made the civic organizers question the validity of the overall concept going forward.

A couple nights a small front came down the the north in an inverted v-shape, the apex bearing down on us as we were out walking in the park and the soccer fields going down to Bell Road, to which I have gotten accustomed after the trauma of seeing the desert floor razed and graded.

The lightning was heavy in one wing of the v-shape. We could tell all this with Jessica's smart phone, on an app showing lightning strakes. I like leaving my phone at home when I can.

Now it is raining again. I can hear it out my window as I type. It is a sensual pleasure, like a space heater on a chilly morning, or a warm blanket. This being a season of repentance and fasting, I try to be aware of my desire for material comforts and sensual pleasures, and if possible to purposefully deny, or at least delay, myself the satisfaction of it. Or at least not jump to enjoy it so readily.

Waking up in the early morning hours then, with a rain outside and a warm blanket over me, must be God himself intervening, for it is little sense to get up at that hour. Perhaps tomorrow morning I will. I will go rise and go to pray, without making coffee yet, and certainly with no half-and-half until Easter---even to the Orthodox Easter this year. I will examine my sins and repent of them. In this is freedom.

Good Day in Goodyear

 My flight to Burbank had been come at the tail end of what seemed like a barrage of activity from mid February, starting with the trip to NewYork City, that followed almost immediately by the arrival in town of Jessica's father and his wife, who flew from Newark. We try to get together with them at least once a year. Last year we met up with them in New Mexico. This year they came to town, as they have done in the past, and stayed this time in an AirBnB in north Scottsdale not far from us. 

It was a great time seeing them.  On the Saturday of their stay, we went to a Spring training baseball game, of which there are many here, each in separate quaint stadiums, some of which are designed to mimic the grander structures where the teams play their regular season games. We were making. return visit to the same stadium as five years ago, which is the one far on the southwestern edge of Phoenix, in the community of Goodyear, where the two Ohio teams, Cincinnati and Cleveland, both play their home games in the training season. All of the trainig stadiums, I think, are doubled up in this way, shared by two teams. 

Jessica got us seats in the shaded section. It was opening day of spring training. As it custom, the two Ohio teams that share the stadium will play each other on that day, with this year at least, the Cleveland team being the official home team (which meant the stadium announcer had to behave as a Cleveland home announcer in front of many Reds fans sitting on the other side). 

That's where we were, because the shaded premium section was on the visitor side and we could see down at the Red's dugout. I knew some of the players because we had been watching the Reds last year. Jessica purchased a season pass to watch the Reds games on cable. It was fun to see all the players whose names I knew. The players are very friendly with the fans, and many people hang around the entrance to the training facilities, where the players interact with the crowd after the game.

Jessica's father is not a Reds fan, despite living in Cincinnati for many years. He is from northeastern Ohio, in the area of Youngstown, and he is a passionate suffering fan of the Cleveland team. Unlike the Reds, they have not won a World Series title in living memory, despite coming extremely close on several occasions, losing in heartbreaking fashion. He was wearing his Cleveland hat. They used to be called the Indians, but they had to change their name because of political pressure.

On this day, the Reds walloped the erstwhile Indians. I don't remember the score. We ordered chili dogs in the Cincinnati style using our phones to scan a QR code mounted on the seats in the premium section. They were perfect and delicious, and enjoyed in the shade of the canopy above us.

Death in San Marino

 Today finds this part of Arizona poised on the edge between spring and summer.  It was slightly cool these last few days but in between the coolness are the bursts of heat and bright sunshine that let one know that the hot days are not long in coming, and then it will be six months before we see coolness again. 

Last week I did my Spellbreakers podcast/telecast on California, southern California in particular, as I was just traveling there. I flew to Burbank on the 1st, on a late Friday afternoon, and then flew back to Phoenix on the afterrnoon of Sunday. In between those flights was an Uber ride from Burbank to downtown Pasadena, where I checked into the Pasadena Hotel and Pool for two nights in what amounted to a pleasant room in a pleasant hotel in a pleasant part of town. 

On Saturday morning I went to the memorial service of a man I knew for many years. He was a pediatrician in Fort Collins, my hometown in Colorado. He was, however, a native Californian, born in 1929 in Orange County, when it was a very rural place. His temperament marked the men of that generation, a quiet acceptance of duty, and the recognition that life is unfair and difficult, but complaining about it is counterproductive. He became a doctor via the Air Force and lived in Thailand with his wife, and is his eldest daughter was born there, in the late 1950s. Then two more children were born, another daughter in the early 1960s, and a son in 1965. 

I know all of his children, and I adored his late wife, their mother. She passed away just a week before my father did, at Christmas time 2015.

The man whose memorial service I went to had passed away in November in Austin, Texas, just after his 94th birthday. He had been in assisted living. He had moved down to Austin at the insistence of his son, who had been living in Austin since the late 1980s. He had been living a splendid old age until recently taking a bad fall. 

His son flew his ashes to California for the memorial. His two older sisters live there as well. His oldest sister went to splendid well-known East Coast schools, got a law degree, and became a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles for years.  His second sister became a school teacher and taught in Pasadena until retiring. 

So it was natural to have the memorial service there. It was a Presbyterian Church in the nearby community of San Marino, which is just south of Pasadena, as the neighborhoods get nicer and more expensive.  Later I learned that San Marino is where George Patton grew up, when it was rural. He rode horseback on the open hills that became the fancy houses. In the second World War h was our most feared commander by enemy, and perhaps the respected by his men. He remains the face of American military prowess and victory on the battlefield.  In San Marino, I thought how Patton was a phenomenon of those times, and nothing like him will be seen again. 

The memorial service included a video presentation of slides by his son, who has taught film production at a community college in Austin since the 1990s. Before that he went to graduate school in film at the University of Texas. 

Before that he went to the University of Chicago, and other institutions of higher learning, doing the Gen X college switcharound that suddenly became epidemic among my cohort, even the high achievers. 

Before that he graduated from high school in Fort Collins, and before that he went to junior high and elementary school there, all while his father ran a pediatric practice across Lemay from the hospital, and attended regularly in the maternity ward, as they used to call it.

Later he left Fort Collins and worked for vaccine manufacturers. He also worked for the CDC. He helped develop one of the vaccines that babies are now given.  I learned his from his nephew, who is a pediatrician in southern California. He spoke a long encomium of the deceased in the reception in the other wing of the church (a nice complex, as one would imagine).  The deceased should be known to history for what he did, said his nephew. The rest of the family, his three children and other cousins, spoke not a word in response, but politely accepted the accolade of their father and uncle. It was as if they knew the deceased would be uncomfortable hearing himself described as such, out of modesty.

I got to attend two nice evening dinners with his family, on Friday and Saturday, where I sat next to his son, who is my old friend dating from junior high school in Fort Collins. 

We talked about old times.  He has photographs of two of us taken by his father at Mile High Stadium in the summer of 1983. The three of us went to see the first championship of the USFL, between the Philadelphia Stars and the Michigan Panthers. It was mostly local football fans in the stadium---Broncos fans who were rabid for a championship.  The deceased and his son had gone to many Broncos games together. The end game, between two teams nobody cared about, was exciting and ended on a heroic play at the last minute. There was such a release of emotion among those in attendance that they stormed the field and tore down the goal posts. The Denver Police were called and dispersed the crowd with incendiary devices of some kind.  The three of us beat a retreat. Like me, his son is mostly the type to recognize a bad situation and leap out of it. Definitely the deceased was like that

Snowy New York Valentine

 As I write this, I am getting used to being back in Arizona after a five-day trip to New York last week. We flew up there last Tuesday, to JFK, and stayed through Sunday at the Hilton Midtown on 6th Avenue. The occasion was a conference for Jessica's work at a natural supplements manufacturer.  So the hotel was paid for by the company.

It was the first time I'd been back in the city in five years, and the first time I've stayed in Midtown maybe since...forever. Wow, I can sure understand why people like that part of town.. We had some good food, although we slummed it on Valentine's Day since every restaurant was booked. Instead we grabbed hot dogs and onion rings from the cart outside the hotel. Seventy five bucks!

I worked during the week from the hotel room, taking short breaks to walk around the vicinity, including an obligatory visit ot Trump Tower, which I hadn't visited since 1989. 

On Saturday we enjoyed the freshly fallen snow with a walk through Central Park up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art---Jessica's first time. It was a wonderful way to spend our final full day there, after our work obligations were done for the week.

All in all, a great experience. I saw nothing of the degradation and troubles that have befallen the city lately. We both anticipated a return visit for next year's conference.

I was impressed by how much Times Square had changed.Way more pedestrian f riendly than the old days. It really feels welcoming.It felt much cleaner and more alive from the old days, thanks to modern video screen technology. It was like looking up at a 100 giant smartphones playing videos on the sides of buildings. The ads featured musicians I had never heard of. Who is Zara Larsson? No idea. It felt good to be ignorant with such trends. I couldn't get used to seeing "2024" as the year up by the famous New Year's ball (see very top right corner of the screen).  I feel like this is not real, that real time stopped sometime in the last century, and we are living in some kind of parody of time.

We arrived at JFK on the day before Valentine's Day (Shrove Tuesday, as it happens) into a snowstorm. IIn Phoenix the night beore, I half-joked with Jessica that our flight was going to be diverted and we were going to be stuck overnight at the Cleveland Airport. Or Louisville. We both busted out laughing when the pilot came on and announced we would be landing temporarily in Indianapolis until the snow cleared. "Here we go!" we thought. But the plane took off again after an hour and by the time we got to FJK, everything was clearing out fine. We got a cab up to Midtown and hundered into the next few days of cold chilly weather, which was nice to experience. A chance to wear warm clothes. On Saturday, delightfully, we got a second round of snow, just to stop everything off, and this made our walk up the Met Museum through Central Park a wonderland. Children were sledding like in old paintings that we later saw at the Met. It was Jesssica's first time in the Park. Of course we stumbled upon "Alice in Snow" as seen in this photograph I took. 

Pygmalion (1938) vs My Fair Lady (1964)

 

Caught a showing of Pygmalion (1938) on TCM last week. First time seeing it. I very interesting experience. I expected My Fair Lady (1964) but stripped of the delightful gaiety of the musical numbers in technicolor, and the spunky ferocity of Audrey Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle.

 I did not expect to be blown away by it. Both Ginger and I were in awe of it, and wondering what had possessed me to overlook this, based on false assumptions regarding its stature relative to the later musical remake.

First off, the screenplay is not just adapted from Shaw's play. Shaw wrote the screenplay. Like Hemingway and others, he fancied himself able to compete in Hollywood as a writer. At this he was successful, and in 1938 he won the Academy Award for adapting his own 1913 play by the same name.

It is not a straight by-the-numbers adaptation. He greatly improved it, and it is clear, wrote it with a cinematographic eye. Among the whole additions for the movie was what would become known as the "Ballroom Scene," where Eliza is presented to a duchess, all the while menaced by the intrigue of Karpathy, the former student of Henry Higgins.

In Shaw's original play, Karpathy is a minor character mentioned only in the final scene For the screenplay, Shaw promoted him to a major supporting role completely contained within the Ballroom Scene, where he is given the assignment--to his great delight--to investigate the origin of the mysterious Miss Doolittle.

The biggest thing in favor of the 1938 non-musical black-and-white version, versus the 1964 Broadway musical technicolor version, is that the contest between the two Elizas is lopsided.  Wendy Hiller is so far superior to Audrey Hepburn, it will be difficult to go back and watch My Fair Lady (1964) anytime soon, because I would find myself cringing at Hepburn's over-the-top caricature of the role.

We agreed a fair thing to say would be that whereas in My Fair Lady (1964), Eliza (played by Hepburn), transforms from a flower girl to a lady, in Pygmalion (1938), Eliza (Hiller) is revealed to have been a lady all along. It's much more subtle and powerful.

Hepburn is a great actress but she has better roles.  She is completely believable as a flower girl (she grew up malnourished during the Dutch Famine during the war, and her constitution never recovered). By contrast, Pygmalion (1938) is Hiller's signature role as a film lead (she had an expansive theater career on stage in London).  

Hiller saved a great supporting role for her later years, in the 1970s, not surprisingly as a princess, as if cashing in on the 1938 role like an artistic savings bond. 

Check out the intro the Ballroom Scene. The rack focus when Higgins (Leslie Howard) and Colonel Pickering turn to see Eliza (Hiller) emerge. Then watch Hiller ascend the staircase and speak with the duchess.   We are so rooting for her at this point. By extension we are rooting for Higgins. Pickering is rooting for her in fatherly fashion, even though his wager with Higgins is against her. We are rooting for everyone---except Karpathy. Except at the end of the scene Higgins (Howard) is clearly egging Karpathy towards experiencing a triumph of ego. Methinks this scene shows how Higgins actually does understand rules of social behavior very well. He just chooses to flout them whenever it pleases him. A great pretzel of motives brought to life by great actors. Howard co-directed this. Hewas year from Gone With theWind

What did I miss from My Fair Lady? No knock on Harrison's acting, but Howard was so delightful it was hard to miss Harrison's character. But I did miss his singing greatly. "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" is one of the great masculine musical performances in the history of Hollywood film.  Likewise I missed "I'm Getting Married in the Morning" and other upbeat numbers. Hiller wipes the floor with Hepburn, though.

My Blissful Journey to Ordinariness

 When I was young, in my childhood and young adult years, I fancied myself quite an extraordinary person with special talents not possessed by other people. Buttressing this confidence were the statements made to me by other people, who told me I had extraordinary talents.

I realized lately that lately I felt as if I have made a journey to considering myself hardly extraordinary at all, but rather typical, especially as a specimen of my cohort within the flow of the passing generations.  Of course this has been a hit to my ego, on the hand, but on the other hand it has given me great peace to know how ordinary I am--almost a stereotype in some ways---and it has strangely given me a feeling of meaning to my life.

I had thought the meaning of my life was to use my alleged extraordinary talents to provide some great contribution to humanity through creative uses of my intellect. Somehow this never happened. The years went by. Judged on the standards of my childhood, and what people expected of me, I am nearly a complete washout.

But as an ordinary man, I have found new purpose is being, well, ordinary. Even this blog I write, and have written for over fifteen years now fits into this. I imagine this blog will disappear into the aether at some point when Blogger shuts down and the database is destroyed. Or I will leave this earth and my dormant account will be removed. This does not even include the inevitable end of all material things in the universe, however that happens, but certainly which no computer server can survive.

Even many years ago, when I was a scientist I have said to myself, "suppose there is some end to all of our civilization, and years from now there is an archaeologist or archivist who stumbles upon old writings preserved in some means, and suppose, by some pure random act, they include everything I have written. Suppose however that one's one name and identity is not preserved---only ones writings---so that they are effectively anonymous to people in the future who find them. What I would I then bother to write?"

In thinking about Classical Antiquity, it's clear that many of the most valuable writings are anything that preserves a sense of the life of ordinary citizens.  Do you see where I'm going with this thought?

Here then is a typical man. I have the advantage of being a white man, which according to current thinking means there is nothing special about my "identity" that needs expressing or explaining. Too much ink, phyical and digital, has been spilled by and about people like me, So that's another way I'm free to be ordinary. No respectable publisher would be the least bit interested in my story, or any of my stories, because of my sex and skin color disqualifies me. What a burden has been lifted from me, to attempt to publish anything by that route! I say that without irony. 

Instead I can just write to you, my dear readers, especially the ones who keep coming back here, and also to anyone reading this in the distant future. 

Streamcaster Stage Fright

 I've mostly gotten over the flare-up of my ego crisis from last month, fretting that I was not cutting as a streamcaster, at least to some arbitrary standard I had developed in my mind, and therefore my life was somehow deficient.

Even thinking such thoughts, I know they are absurd. Yet the demands to be excellent, or at least passingly good, in some many worldly things seems so obvious and overwhelming at times, especially in the modern world. We are supposed to be able to master these tools we have created.

I am way behind the times in tool-making. I am a downright fossil by tech standards. That I still make a living using standard and cutting-edge tools, and therefore need to keep up with their usage, is an outlier for a man of my age. I was supposed to go on to other things, a long time, according to some calendar that someone keeps about such things.

That calendar I always chose to ignore, in part because following this path gave me so much freedom in other areas that made up for the ongoing struggle of being a tool-user. 

But that's my day job. Also in my weekly streamcasting gig, I am also a tool-user. The platform and website through which one streams felt like the controls of a jumbo jet when I first starting using them. Well, that's exaggerating, but because I am such a perfectionist, my fumbling in using them were humiliating.

The age thing is surely the thing at the heart of this. I feel envy regarding the ability of the younger generation to get streamcasting--to give the audience what it is looking for, which is a legitimate concern of show business. It is not the technical tools which stymy me,

But fooey on that. I reality I do have an audience, a great one. I've discovered that in my last streamcast in which I realized I had greatly underestimated the value of chatting with the live chat in the minutes leading up to the start of the broadcast, which is at the bottom of the hour.

It was greatly relaxing, and put my mind at rest about the start of the broadcast, when we have gone live and sound is going out over the air. I am ever pessimistic that it won't happen, but being the live chat before we went live made that fear go away completely. I'd already connected with the audience. Now it was just time to come out on stage.

Conversations During a Long Winter's Nap

 This morning I woke up, as always do, well before 4 AM, but being that it was Christmas Eve, I decided there was no reason to get out of bed yet, and with the apartment a bit cold, I crawled back under the covers and recovered the warmth there, my thoughts straying into the things I think about only in those hours of the morning before daylight brings my attention to the agenda of the day.

This morning there was no sound of rain, as there had been the previous two nights.  We had a front come through that lingered and brought not just showers but a true soaking rain over several days, not only at night but during the daylight hours. The sound of that type of rain is one of the things I miss most severely about where live--the heavy patter on the roof and windows, and on the pavement during the day. One learns to savor it when it arrives, because one may not hear it again for many months.  

This morning in my thoughts I reflected on things I wrote in my previous entry here, about my struggle to build an audience for my show (playlist), and my fears that this will lead to its being canceled. These feelings are true, and in prayer, when we are to be honest with God, I confess my desire to find a greater audience. It is not out of ego fame--I truly don't care for that. But still it is ego--the need to feel as if I am doing something impactful on Earth. The last couple years I had come to regard myself as perhaps "the least influential person who ever lived," and had told myself that this was ok, since all power comes from God. 

Being an influencer is of course the aspiration of our age.  Fame is the coin of the realm.  I know people who truly judge others by how many Twitter followers they have, and how many likes they get on their videos. This latter metric is in fact what determines the pay scale at my network, which means I get a miniscule piece of the pie, barely enough to pay the electric bill in winter and certainly not in summer.

I am thankful for that. God is our father. By faith and baptism we are adopted sons and daughters of God. He provides for us what we need and will deny us what is not good for us. So many things that I have desired in life have been denied to me, even as great blessings have been heaped on me at every turn. The things that have been denied to me now look likes graces. They were denied to me for my own good, by a loving heavenly Father.

Certainly I am glad I did not become famous in a media sense,  at least in my youth, for I no doubt would have succumbed to the snares that draw down so many of those people, almost all of them, into something akin to a demonic cesspool. I might be one of them.  Even at this stage in my life, when I have put on more of the armor of God, could I resist temptations of satisfaction from attention.

God has given me as big an audience as I can handle, I guess, which is far more than I could have built on my own. My audience comes from the network. I did not build it organically through my own bootstrapping. I have nothing to complain about.

Still, being honest with God, as Jesus did in the garden in expressing his desire that the cup would pass from him, I would ask God to show me how to reach out to more people. In my head pops the question why?  Just so you will feel better? What do have to say that is so important that people need to hear it?

Christmas Greetings to Whoever is Reading This, Known to Me or Otherwise

 It has been a long since I wrote in this blog. Months have gone by.  This does not mean I have abandoned it. In fact just the opposite. I find myself, in bed at night, composing a blog entry and thinking I will write it down. Then during the day I forget, and another day goes by, and at night I am composing again.

I know of none of my old friends who read it anymore, who once read it. So I have no one to whom I can direct the open letter. At Christmastime I pretend I can write to them once again. 

In the time since I wrote, life has seemed amazingly constant. My day job has been demanding, with long hours and putting in extra time to keep ahead of things. Only in the last couple weeks has it felt like things are leveling off. Yet there are still long days, which mostly means I get up as early as 2 AM, when I first awake, in order to get a jump on things, and to work during the hours when I can work in peace without demands or distractions.

My weekends are taken up entirely with preparing for my weekly show on Wednesday. Lately this has morphed into not only preparing a Keynote slide presentation but also a short intro movie using iMovie on my mac. I have become an amateur film maker. Having a short intro film helps me calm my nerves as the broadcast begins. 

Between these two activities---my day job and preparing for my show---almost all of my time is taken up.  The idea of fitting anything else into that schedule seems impossible.

Somehow in October we managed to squeeze in two weekend road trips. Over my birthday, we went up to the top of Mount Lemmon, the "sky island" near Tucson with pines at the top. Like last year, we stayed in the small community of Summerhaven, this time at the new lodge which has opened this year. The next weekend we went up to Gallup, New Mexico to see the annular eclipse on October 13. To see the actual event, we drove out ot the visitor's center of the El Malpais National Monument. 

Other than these two events, it has felt mostly the same week to week. My show, Spellbreakers, is still on the air on the  Badlands Media Channel on Wednesday evenings, and of course the broadcasts are available after that.  Here is the playlist for my show. I take it as serrously as if it were a show on a major radiio network. I love doing the sponsors. I have come to love interacting with my audience. I feel so much stress leading up to the show, mostly out of perfectionism---something technical always goes wrong. Then afterwards I am on such a high and can't wait for the next time.

I don't know how long I'll get to keep my show. I often wonder. I am not exactly one of the favorites of the guy who runs the network. I'm lucky if he even reads my emails. My view numbers are low compared to the other shows, especially the number of "likes" I get. I tell myself I do not have the "touch". Were this a real network, I would probably be canceled by now. That's show business, I tell myself. I have given it my best shot.  However long I get to do this will be a gift.

I once craved variety in my life, like people do when they are young. Now I take it as a blessing if I just keep doing what I'm doing--working my job, paying the bills, and doing my little show with it's itsby bitsy audience.

Boulder Crazy

 The U.S. Open tennis tournament having finished, we have finally entered the season when television on Saturday can be given over completely to college football. Apparently the world has gone "Boulder crazy." The frenzy over the Colorado Buffalos football team, led by Dejon Sanders, is now playing on two rival networks, Fox Sports and ESPN, both of which have sent celebrity teams, including musicians and famous actors, to participate in the festivities. It looks like a perfect fall day in Colorado (fall begins in early September on the Front Range).

The camera shots of the campus and Flatirons are exquisite. The crowd is packed body to body in the broadcast areas. A year ago no one cared about Colorado football. Now it is the center of the sports world.

Moreover all of this is over a game with...Colorado State, which is in Fort Collins. Whoever thought that the CU-CSU game would be the focus of the entire sports media world? The CSU coach has done his part by making a personal slight to the beloved Dejon Sanders. 

How could he be so dumb? I think he knows exactly what he is doing. The best thing for CSU would be for CU to regain its position as a national power, and for the CU-CSU game to be a bitter rivalry, even it means giving motivation to CU today.

Watching this, I say to Jessica, "how many tens, hundreds of thousands of people are watching this and saying to themselves 'that's where I want to live.' ?"

"Sorry we're full up here," I reply to my own question, in an official voice.

Reflecting on this, I'm glad I got to "live the Boulder experience" to its deepest and fullest when it wasn't the focus of the national media like this. I have had that experience repeatedly in my life, being lucky enough to experience places before they "blew up with attention"---New York during the 1990s, as well as Austin, Portland, and the places in Colorado where I've lived.  In some ways it applies to Phoenix, where we have decided we saw the very tail end of the Phoenix Valley being a "catch-all" destination for Americans from the rest of the country. Now only a few years later, housing is way more expensive and it feels like part of California. 

I understand why people, especially young folk, want to go to the places I've mentioned. Once upon a time you could even raise families in Colorado, rather cheaply compared to other places. 

The past is a foreign country.

Battle Lines Drawn for the Upcoming Pre-Planned Pandemic

In my consumption of Youtube videos, I try to balance out my Catholic sources with Orthodox ones. Among my regulars is Abbot Tryphon who leads a community of monks on Vashon Island. He is not shy about expressing messages with a political tone to them, like this one. I consider him to be a national treasure.

Judging by Twitter and Youtube, everyone on our side is expecting them to come after us hard this winter, to shut everything down. One can sense that out there in America are legions of Lefties who feel bitter and defeated about the retreat of mask and vaccine mandates. They are looking very much forward to "being in charge" again.  It is part of the universal strategy of the left. They never accept defeat, only temporary setbacks. They did not get their way in 2020, which a "ten year shutdown" followed by a "Great Reset" of the world economy in which climate and social justice was established under world government. The destruction of chuches is of course something they greatly yearn for. 

My impression is that Abbot Tryphon in this video is expressing the universal sentiment of folks on our side, and of half of America or more.

Myself, having completely escaped vaccination the first time around---it's a no brainer to continue to do that. I'm almost looking forward to the battle ahead. 

Is There Really a Brotherhood of Man?

 The latest Spellbreakers episode, Number 32, just wrapped up--third and last in my "Summer Under the Stars" Series. 

I discuss the precession of the Earth, the motion of the pole star over time, reminisce about Boulder in the 1970s, while discuss the Antichrist and the writings of Carl Jung that terrified Jordan Peterson.

Listen to the end for answer to a question in the title.

Death Sucks

 Elisabeth, the late wife of my friend whom I mentioned in the previous post, probably would have disapproved of that post. Certainly her husband David, my close friend of many decades, whom I met in drama club in high school in the fall of 1980, would have disapproved, if know him. 

I don't know how Elisabeth felt about religion in general. I recall her mother was a devout Catholic. They lived in Sacramento, a large mixed-race family of many brothers and sisters. Her late mother was Phillipino, I think. Her father was Dutch-Indonesian. Elisabeth rebelled against her mother's religion in part by moving to San Francisco in the 1980s, living in the thick of the gay community in the mission district. Like many childless liberal women, she adopted the gay community as her children, and was fiercely protective of them throughout her life. That's my impression at least.

David I know to be a very strong atheist who tolerates very little "magical thinking" about religion. At least that is how I remember him. I haven't corresponded with him much over the last decade, and have not seen them at all since 2014, which the last time I visited them in the Bay Area. 

It was heartbreaking to remove myself from their lives in 2016 when I left Facebook. I knew I would not receive news about them anymore. They were very active on Facebook, and very forthright about their opinion of people who supported Donald Trump. They were not the only ones of my friends like that. I left Facebook in part because I wanted to preserve my love for them, which transcends politics. I didn't want to read the things they would inevitably write. They would not even know that they were talking about me. By this time, they had probably learned the "sad truth" about me---that I was one of them. I doubt my friends were curious about me at all, but sometimes even fringe subjects like yours truly pop up conversation when people get together. Certainly I know it would have been juicy gossip to share, to tell about my dive into what they would have considered some kind of psychosis. 

I loved Elisabeth for who she was, no reservations. I have nothing against her for her politics. I am glad I spared myself having to read anything she might have said about me unknowingly. It lets me have the great feeling of charity towards her, and mourn her, without the slightest dint of anger. Of course I hate it that it required an estrangement, one that lingers between my friend David and me.

I wrote him an email after I got the news, expressing my sorrow and giving my phone number. He has always been a popular guy, and the condolences will flood in on social media and in person. Maybe I am envious of that. When I go, hardly any one will notice at all. But I would not change places with him of course. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that Elisabeth is gone.

I sent David a card. He has such refined tastes that I struggled while standing in the card aisle of the neighborhood grocery store for one that would not offend his tastes, even in this state of mind of grief. Finally I picked out a tasteful blank one. For the message inside I used a heavy black magic marker and just wrote, "Death Sucks." 

Already Dead

 "I feel like...I'm already dead," I thought to myself, walking back from the coffee shop yesterday in the blazing sun, while carrying the remainder of my hot mocha in a paper cup.

The thought had hit me while I was drinking the mocha on the bench outside the front door of the shop, in a small alcove entrance shaded from the sun. I'd walked over there spontaneously a little before noon, feeling in need of more coffee, having woken up before 1 am, as becoming my habit increasingly. I had pushed my time of rising to half past two, in order to have more free time in the morning, and also to have part of day overlap the schedule of the developers whom I oversee as a team lead, and who live in India, China, and Azerbaijan. As soon as the work day starts here, my time becomes the property of other people, and I am liable to be called into a spontaneous meeting at a whim. If I want any time of concentration, I have to get up long before sunrise. 3 am sufficed. Then I wanted more time. Now my internal clock is waking me up regularly even before 1 am, and I lie awake until getting out of bed.

I'd wanted to visit the coffee shop which was in the enormous square plaza of shops nearby.  I love the plaza. It is the interior of a block along busy Scottsdale Road at the corner of Shea Boulevard. Unlike the rest of Scottsdale around it, which is cookie cutter on both a residential and commercial level, the plaza dates the post war decades and was built long before its surroundings. The shops along Scottsdale Boulevard, including a dive bar called the Dirty Dogg, face inward away from the road into the enormous parking plaza. The buildings are all differently constructed, side by side, by different developers long ago, giving it an organic feeling like a real city. As I walked around the exterior in the perimeter alley to access the entrance to the plaza yesterday, I smelled the odors of the alley, including the eateries and small immigrant-run restaurants. It felt like Europe. I was carried away to memories of travel, including just last year in small towns in Poland.

I had noticed the coffee shop during my ramblins around the plaza during daytime breaks. There are many salons and nail joints, a few pawn shops, a shuttered tea room, a 50s hamburger restaurant, and an addiction crisis center bookshop that one sees. The coffee shop has a darkened entrance. I had previously peeked inside to make sure that it was indeed a real coffee shop. Finally I went inside for real yesterday. It was expansive and well air conditioned. Everyone else inside the shop looked to be in their twenties. They were all of them on laptops, completely absorbed in their activity. It was a fifty-fifty mix of young men and young women. I was carried back to being in Austin in graduate school. I felt old. I was not he white-haired old guy in the coffee shop. None of them paid any attention to me, but I didn't take it personally. They were absorbed after all.

The bloke at the counter was friendly and made my hot mocha quickly. It cost five dollars and forty cents.  I drew out oa five dollar bill and a one dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it to him over the electronic screen where one would swipe one's plastic payment card. I wondered how often they get cash. The name of the place is "Mythical Coffee."

When I got my mocha, I didn't feel like hanging around inside, so that's when I went outside the little alcove to watch the cars in the big parking plaza. That's when I had the thought, "I feel like I'm already dead." 

It was not a sad thought, not one of mourning, but rather of complete detachment. I felt like like I had already detached from the world, the way one aims to do as a Christian, the way that Father Mike Schmitz talk about in his Cathechism in a Year series on Youtube, which I watch in the wee hours of the morning after rising, and drinking my home-made coffee on the patio. "As we journey together towards our heavenly home..." he always says, in his intro to each installment.

I had the feeling that I was a different person that the one who called himself by my name, and who lived the life I lived. I have the same memories as he does, and inhabit the same body, but so many of the things that used to have deep meaning to that person no longer have meaning to me, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. At the same time I feel an intense love towards those around me, and to everyone I have ever met, and loved, helped, and hurt. 

It was a curious feeling of weightlessness, almost literally, as I sat there. That person--he roamed around Europe almost forty years ago with a backpack. He looked young like those young people inside at their laptops. He is old now. I am him? I hardly know. Who is he? Do I care? Who is left who remembers the man I once was?

Already dead. Not sadness. Liberation. Freedom is the ability to choose what we ought to do, as Father Mike said on today's podcast, Day 233.

When I got home I got a message from one of my friends---of one of the last who will talk to me. The message was brief: "I knew you were close."

It opened it quickly. It was a portrait of someone I know, a woman a few years younger than me, the wife of one of my close friends who lives in Oakland. Above her were vital dates, her. birthday in 1967 and today's date.

Eclipse-o-Mania!

 My favorite cactus in my undeveloped desert makes his debut, at least by mention, on my show tonight on Badlands. I revert to being a physics professor again. Also I take the brazen step of coming out as not a Flat Earther! Definitely my most controversial show to date. (link)