Point Nemo

No, it’s not my hidden undersea lair from which my minions plot my megalomaniacal machinations. Nor is it some Vernesian secret society aiming to restore Victorian triumphalism throughout the globe. And it’s not even the hottest surfer spot in Australia, or Hawaii, or Southern California, where dudes mix it up with multi-metered monster waves, nor the stoner bar where they relax and tell tall toked-up tales of the pipelines that got away.

Point Nemo happens to be the furthest point in the ocean from land.

It lies in the central Pacific Ocean, nearly 1,500 miles or so from Pitcairn Island in the north, Easter Island in the northeast, and Maher island in the south, which lies just off the coast of Antarctica. Eggheads refer to it as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility.

Should you wish to plug the coordinates into your motorboat’s GPS (not recommended), you’d use 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south by 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west. From what I understand, H.P. Lovecraft used the coordinates in his infamous story The Call of Cthulhu, it being the location of the Old One’s ancient and terrible eldritch city. But I’d have to look that up; haven’t read it in four or five years.

My interest in Point Nemo was piqued upon reading a short article on the Tiangong-1. What? You don’t remember the Tiangong-1? That was the school-bus sized Chinese space station that plummeted to earth this past Easter. If you remember, “experts” were predicting it could come crashing down anywhere between latitude 43 degrees north (Hopper’s current hidden lair is at 41.01 degrees north) and 43 degrees south. That’s a wide swath of real estate. But, strangely enough considering there was no way to control the station’s crash, it landed very very close to Nemo. I say strange because, due to its isolation from shipping lanes and population centers, Point Nemo is chosen fairly regularly as a crash landing zone for artificial space debris, so much so that’s it’s informally known as the “satellite graveyard.”

Now, apparently there are these things called Gyres out on the seven seas – well, actually five of them. Gyres, not seas. One each in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific oceans. Major currents, “mega” or even “meta” currents we can call them, to be overly hip, form a swirling Coriolis Effect due to the spin of the planet, and each, logically, has a center. Point Nemo forms the center of the South Pacific Gyre. And these things are big, thousands of miles along the furthest outer regions.

Unfortunately, gyres have two downsides. One is the swirling tides tend to keep nutrients from the center regions. So these centers tend to be lifeless. But worse, they also tend to accumulate all the ocean junk that’s out there: plastic bottles, other floating man-made debris, sludge and oil from spills, the occasional Chinese space station, and whatnot. So much so that Point Nemo also has the informal label of the South Pacific Garbage Patch. Yuck.

So now you have three new terms to dazzle your friends and acquaintances: Point Nemo, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, and the South Pacific Ocean Gyre. Go forth and dazzle! And I shall abscond to my hidden undersea lair to plot how to use them all against mankind!

Spamtastic II

Hey Hops, surely not everything is grim and work-work-work. See or hear anything funny lately?

Why, yes. Yes I did see and hear something funny lately. This past weekend, to be precise. It literally – and I mean literally and not figuratively, made me laugh out loud.

Lay it on us, man!

Okay. Ever get one of those grammatically-spastic borderline pathetic appeals in your email to help some overseas prince out handling a couple million dollars? Sure. Who hasn’t? One time I even blogged about one I received, here. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this youtube video.

Let’s see it!

Tchk – not done with the set up yet.

Sorry, dude. Go on.

I don’t remember how I got to the video or why I clicked on it. It’s a TED talk, and I classify TED talks among Farmer’s Markets and hybrid vehicles. (That’s pretentious to the foo-foo-ey-eth degree, for those unaccustomed to Hopper.) But I gave it a chance, and wound up laughing so hard I had to play this guy’s other videos. They’re all good, and I still don’t know a single thing about him!

Play it! Play it!

Well, you can. Just click on the video below. Enjoy!

Memorial Day 2018

Well, a lot got done over here in Hopperville. Frankly, I’m exhausted. But satisfied.

I spent four hours over two days in manual labor fighting a tactical retreat against nature here at the Homestead. This involved mowing the crabgrass, clipping the hedges, sawing off splintered tree limbs, cleaning that gross yellow tree pollen off everything, and a whole host of other activities. I managed to fill four trash cans and eight leaf bags with vegetation debris to be carted off. Stuffed the entire back of our Honda Pilot with branches and dropped them off at the local recycling center. Assembled a deck table (a gift to my family from my tax earnings) where we ate dinner one night after bug bombing the yard. And this all had to be done strategically, as storm clouds intermittently messed with my agenda.

Saturday morning the wife took the little ones down the shore to visit with their grandpa. Me, I stayed local, ran some errands, entertained the dog. Studied some tax stuff. Watched the ball game. Ate some Chinese (the only time I eat Chinese is when the family’s away). They got back around 8, beat, sweaty, and sunburnt, and took showers, one after the other, and then – left me to go to bed! So I watched some random TV, surfed the web a bit, read some of my books, and finally hit the hay around midnight.

The little ones served at Mass Sunday morning, then spent the afternoon cleaning their rooms. My wife, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, went to the basement office and worked until dinner at her job. I have a 50-page booklet on depreciation I’m working my way through and will be tested on for my work, so I did that for an hour or two. Then Little One and I watched a bad 70s SF movie, Futureworld starring Peter Fonda. A semi-sequel to the infinitely better Westworld, it held her attention and she was fooled by the couple of twists at the end. But we both agreed it was a tad too long and meandering. We group-graded it a C. Patch was fighting a cold, but, being Patch and unable to sit still, was up and down the stairs a dozen times, practiced her saxophone, cleaned out some sea shells, and read her Rick Riordan books.

Yesterday we drove in to the Bronx and watched the Yanks ineffectively lose to the Astros, 5-1. Though the game overall wasn’t exciting, there were a couple of exciting moments (Torres’s two leaping line-drive catches and Greg Bird’s homer). We had decent seats if a bit too high, and I got one heckuva sunburn from the overcast, 60-degree windy day. Had a highly satisfying Stella Artois at the top of the seventh – of which a third ended up on Little One after some mindless lady swung her purse right into my hand. Oh well.

The wife will be flying down to Hilton Head tomorrow morning, staying down there for five days to help her mom in the aftermath of her stepfather’s passing. Dale didn’t want a funeral, so they’re not sure what they’re going to do, with either the ashes or some sort of memorial service. My mother-in-law is doing well from what I hear; her siblings have reached out to her and she has friends down in South Carolina who have been supportive. During the week Patch has a couple of soccer practices and a game on the weekend, Little One has a field trip with the French club and a bridging ceremony, and I got to give the dog some heartworm medication. Domestic bliss.

To honor those who gave their lives so we can have ours, I did DVR 1965’s Battle of the Bulge to watch and discuss with the Mrs., but life interfered. I may watch it piecemeal during the week. I heard that it contains many historical inaccuracies, of which I’m interested to see if I can detect, and that it does not focus on historical leaders, instead choosing to tell the story through fictional men. I may do a post on it in the near future.

Back to regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow …

Reflections on My Father-in-Law

My wife’s stepfather, Dale, died unexpectedly yesterday after a three-year private battle with leukemia. He married my mother-in-law when my wife was just a little girl aged two.

He was 84 years old and led a long, active life. To paraphrase Sinatra, he did it his way. Disappointed, discontented and disillusioned with the corporate world of the late 1970s, he and my wife’s mother cashed everything in and relocated a thousand miles from Michigan to the untamed wilds of Hilton Head, South Carolina. There they hung up their architectural shingles and proceeded to build the island up. After clearing out the gators and copperheads.

Dale was the quintessential quiet man who knew exactly and at all times what he wanted. My wife affectionately referred to him as the “Swedish James Bond.” Long, lanky, always debonair even in jeans and black T, always witty. A self-taught gourmet chef, he was the classic definition of an epicure, a connoisseur of fine food and finer wines, a bon vivant, a gastronomist. When we’d stay with them a week or two every year, I can honestly say I never, ever, had a bad meal from his kitchen.

In his later life he became a traveler. Whether to Arthur Avenue to hunt out the latest greatest in cheeses and meats or Wrigley Field to hunt out a winning Cubs team, he and my mother-in-law racked up the frequent flyer mileage. Those long thin legs of his tallied up the kilometers of the Italian north, unknown numbers of rustic hostels, cobblestone streets, Milanese cafes and Tuscany villages. An autodidact with a photographic memory, he picked up conversational Italian one winter to better arm himself for haggling with the beloved peasantry.

I first met him twenty years ago at La Guardia Airport. They were stopping back from a week in Europe, I had just started dating their daughter. I must confess to being more than a little unsettled; I don’t believe he spoke more than a sentence or two with me. In fact, over the next two decades, I think we exchanged perhaps the equivalent of a Shakespearian monologue. He made me look positively extroverted. But that was all right. After dinners, wine freely flowing, he’d regale the party with hilarious stories of his past or their travels. A born entertainer, if a quiet one.

Reminds me of a joke:

Two Swedes meet one night at a bar. First Swede pours two drinks; second Swede says, “Cheers,” and they both down the booze.

Ten minutes later the first Swede pours another round. Second Swede says, “Cheers,” and they both drink.

The first Swede frowns and turns red.

Ten minutes later the first Swede pours another round. Second Swede says, “Cheers,” and they both drink.

Now the first Swede starts trembling with barely concealed rage.

Ten minutes later he pours another round. Second Swede says, “Cheers,” and drinks his drink.

The first Swede can’t take it any longer, explodes, and pounds the table: “Are we here to drink or talk!!??!!??”

That’s not quite Dale, for I never saw him react to anything with anything approaching anger, but I like the fact that silent moderation seems to be a genetic trademark of the Swedes. It certainly was with him. And even though that predisposition to taciturnity kept touchy feelyness out of the equation, he had a profound admiration of and enjoyment in the lives and accomplishments of his daughter and granddaughters; that was obvious to all.

He was diametrically opposed to me on many levels. An MSNBC devotee, I had to actually tell him that channel didn’t work on my cable box when he came to visit our house one day. He also held no opinion on religion or belief in an afterlife. Whether he was an atheist or simply agnostic, I have no idea. But I do think he must have had an inkling to the existence of God. After all, he did live long enough to see his Cubs win the World Series after a century-long drought.

What we did have in common was a love for classical music. I threw myself fully into it in the spring of 1998, right around the time I first met him. A few weeks later, prompted by my future wife, he emailed us a list of ten or twelve essential Classical pieces to investigate. “Once you can hum them all,” he wrote, “we’ll work on a second list.” I still have that email printout somewhere in my files, and when I come across it again I’ll post it here.

As a kid he played the sax and was a serious jazz aficionado. He must’ve gotten a kick out of Patch, who is in her second year playing the sax at school and brought it down with her this past Christmas to play for her grandparents. I also delved a bit into his jazz collection that week, too. Particularly liked a Charles Mingus CD he had. Later while browsing online I discovered a series of CDs on “Hot Swedish Jazz.” Have you ever contemplated such a thing? Apparently, it is. We were going to get the set for him either for his upcoming birthday or next Christmas, but, alas, that is not to be. Perhaps we’ll pick them up and listen to them in his honor on those special dates, dry martinis or glasses of Italian Barolo in our hands and sparkling cider in the girls’.

Rest in Peace, Dale. It was a pleasure to know you; I only wish the ice was not so thick between us.

Grandpa and Little One, 2011

Prussian War Elephants

Part of the enjoyment of reading is being metaphorically smacked in the brain by a cold wet fish straight out of nowhere. Or, in this case, a gigantic tusked mammal. I’ve read a lot of military history over the past couple of years, and a lot of weird and strange stuff, but this has hands down got to be the weirdest, strangest thing I’ve ever read in a book on war:

… Yet the average Prussian regular soldier was a tough specimen, and no one in the army was tougher than the commander-in-chief, Prince Gebhard von Blücher, whose seventy-three years belied an offensive spirit second to none. His splendid nickname – Marshal Vorwärts (‘Marshal Forwards’) – was well-deserved.

Not everything about Blucher inspired confidence, however, since he suffered from occasional mental disturbances, including the delusions that he had been impregnated by an elephant and that the French had bribed his servants to heat the floors of his rooms so that he would burn his feet. The Prussian high command nonetheless exhibited a commendably broad-minded attitude towards these disorders; their army chief of staff General Gerhard von Scharnhorst wrote that Blücher ‘must lead as though he has a hundred elephants inside him’.

- from Waterloo: June 18, 1815, the Battle for Modern Europe, by Andrew Roberts, page 24

Ok. Now that I’ve passed that little tidbit along to you, I’m going to try my best to bleach my memory of it.

Hyperinflation

So the printing presses ran, and once they began to run, they were hard to stop. The price increases began to be dizzying. Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough. A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a café. The price on the menu was 5,000 marks. He had two cups. When the bill came, it was for 14,000 marks.

“If you want to save money,” he was told, “and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time.”

The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up, though they ran through the night. Individual cities and states began to issue their own money. A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11 a.m.: “At eleven o’clock in the morning a siren sounded and everybody gathered in the factory forecourt where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded brimful with paper money. The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top. They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes. As soon as you caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going.”

– from Paper Money, page 67, by Adam Smith (pen name of George J. W. Goodman), 1981

Thank God I wasn’t a payroll manager in 1920s Weimar Germany! Although I probably would have a slight advantage in such an occupation, i.e., I’d be sure to get my bundle of notes off to get some hard goods before anyone else. Although, come to think of it, that’d probably get me strung up from the nearest tree. I thereby reaffirm my first statement three sentences back.

Good Smoke Bad Smoke

Okay, I’ve yet to hear or read a clear explanation of the why – Why, with a capital W – the Why of the following:

One smoke is Evil. It must be stamped from the face of the earth and never to be spoken of. Children must be shielded from its evil influence. It must be digitally removed from old classic movies, Soviet-style, disappeared down the memory hole. Shame! Shame! Shame!

The other smoke is the Summit of all that is Good, True, and Beautiful. Politicians of all stripes are flailing all over themselves and each other to legalize this previously illegal drug, for it holds no downside (well, except that overuse makes the user completed blitheringly stupid). Glory! Glory! Glory! May it be legal and available in every town and city throughout the land!

I can’t be the only one who’s noticed this discrepancy. What is the difference? One alters perception a thousandfold times than the other, yet that is the one that’s promoted, not the tamer one. Now, normally I have a nose for smelling these things out, true agendas and such, but in this case, I’m truly baffled as to why.

Bueller?

Bueller?

Hopper's Presbyterian Service

Today my honorary nephew was confirmed in his church. I say “honorary” because he’s the son of the couple who my wife and I consider our best friends. His mom was my wife’s maid of honor at our wedding, and the dad is my drinking movie buddy. This boy is smart and accomplished; he’s working his way toward Eagle Scout, plays the viola in two orchestras, is very interested in STEM and wants to make a career out of it. He’s also very much into his religion – he’s won the perfect attendance award several years in a row now.

His family are true-blue died-in-the-wool Presbyterians. So today I attended my second Presbyterian service.

How did it rate to this dissatisfied Catholic revert contemplating a change?

Truth be told, there were pros and cons to my experience. Let me share. Oh, and I mean no disrespect to any Presbyterians who may be reading this. The following impressions are solely my own gut feelings from my own imperfect angle without too much thought or agenda put into them.

Cons:

My biggest impression was that the whole thing felt like a very spiritual Board of Ed meeting. I did not feel that sense of sacredness I often find in a well-done Catholic mass. I did feel the goodness of the congregation and the pastor as a whole, no argument there, but the service lacked the transcendence I desire so much in a religious experience.

The church itself lacked any statuary, any stained glass windows, any references to saints or the Blessed Virgin Mary. The cross behind and above the central stage (there was no altar) was small and, of course, had no corpus on it, as it does in a Catholic church. There were felt banners hanging which reminded me negatively of my youth in the 70s Catholic Church.

From a theological perspective, there was no Eucharist. For Catholics, that is the summit of our worship. It seemed odd and vaguely incomplete to me, for obvious reasons.

Pros:

The service was so much more reverent than what I am, disappointingly enough, accustomed to at Catholic mass. There were no sneakers, jeans, flip-flops, sports jerseys. Everyone was dressed to the nines on this mid-80s Spring day. Men wore jackets (or at least suit pants with collared shirts); woman and young ladies wore tasteful dresses (with one notable “goth” exception which stood out like a very sore thumb).

Everyone was friendly. Everyone who spoke was comfortable with public speaking.

The cliché that Protestants know their Bible and Catholics don’t has more than a grain of truth; the pews had a half-dozen Bibles each (though of a more gender-inclusive translation than I prefer), and people in the pews seemed to have no difficulty locating the passages to read along with the lectors.

The music! An organ playing traditional hymns (re: pre-1960s hymns) and a bell choir! There was no sign of the Godspell singers, singing-style, and songs that plague so many Catholic masses, nor were there any guitars, drums, or overzealous lead singers. No Woodstock infestation, blessedly enough. I was in heaven from this angle alone.

The bottom line:

Hopper will never convert to Presbyterianism, though it has my respect. To me, it seems they have the attitude but not the grace; whereas Catholics have the grace but not the attitude. Does that make sense? (You may have to step into my shoes to understand it.) But I was glad for the experience, and would gladly attend another such service.

Congrats, Tommy, you are a very impressive young man! Godspeed to you!

Book Review: H.M.S. Ulysses

© 1955 by Alistair Maclean

Minor spoilers …

An invaluable aid for any student of history is to read fiction relating to the period in question. When I first became interested in the Civil War six years ago, I read Jeff and Michael Shaara’s fictionalized versions on the various battles in the conflict (Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, The Last Full Measure, all highly recommended). Then my focus wandered toward World War II, and in addition to reading a slew of historical works, I also read The Caine Mutiny, Jeff Shaara’s The Rising Tide, even Worldwar: In the Balance, about an alien invasion that happens right in the middle of the action in 1943. There’s something about historical fiction that cements the people and places of a certain period into one’s mind.

Forgive a non-veteran’s presumption, but I always felt The Red Badge of Courage to be the most realistic depiction of war. Writing as one who – thank God – has never seen combat, it brought the dangers, the risks, the adrenaline, the fog, of warfare to life to me. Exhilarating yet terrible. A crucible for every man: how would I react in such a situation? Can I master fear and panic in a life-or-death situation? (An aside – if you haven’t read Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage since it was assigned to you way back in high school, forget any residual memories of that crime and re-read it.)

Now I think I’ve found a better book to bring that chaos to life.

Six months ago I picked up Maclean’s H.M.S. Ulysses and Ice Station Zebra at a used book store, not knowing anything about either except that the second was made into a Rock Hudson movie I saw a zillion years ago. Looking for something action-packed to counterbalance all the egg-heady stuff I’ve been reading lately, I snatched it off the shelf and whipped through it in a week. Though the first couple of days I had difficulty digested more than 10 or 20 pages at a sitting, due to just simply being busy with stuff, the last three days I couldn’t put it down, reading 60 or 70 pages a night.

The novel never, ever lets up over the course of 320 pages. It details a week in the life an English World War II cruiser, escorting a supply convoy of 34 ships from Scapa Flow (that’s the northern peak of the British Isle) to Murmansk, Soviet Union, a treacherous zig-zagging route within the Arctic Circle. Zig-zagging not only to avoid German U-boat wolf packs but also marauding flocks of Heinkels and Stukas. The temperatures hover at the freezing mark – flesh upon metal results in blood and pain. A dip in these waters is death after thirty seconds.

This is no Run Silent Run Deep – the tension ratchets up immediately and never lets up, one vignette of destruction after another. The crew’s already run ragged and mutinied on the voyage before, so this mission is one of expiation, or punishment. Our captain is dying of some sort of consumptive disease, but tries every last trick and trade to get his men to perform honorably on what will probably be the Ulysses’s final voyage. Over these grim and gritty pages men drown, have holes blown through them, drown, get funneled into propellers, freeze to death. Some mercifully die in the concussive aftermath of a Stuka bomb. And more than a few redeem themselves, dying so that others may live.

As it turns out, by novel’s end, one crewman of the Ulysses survives. Care to guess who it might be? And of those thirty-four cargo ships, carrying oil, ammunition, tanks, supplies, to open up a Second Front in the war to stop Hitler, only six make it to Murmansk.

Was it worth it?

Though H.M.S. Ulysses was a tough read, I liked it. From what I’ve read Maclean himself served in the royal navy during the war and a lot of incidents in the novel he directly and indirectly experienced. And I, having read it, feel that, even though through another degree removed, I also indirectly experienced the hell that was warfare during World War II.

Grade: B+

Note 1: Bonus points for having the ending to my all-time favorite poem, “Ulysses” by Tennyson, in the opening page.

Note 2: One rare disadvantage of reading a used book is that it could be damaged in an annoying way. In this case, the book smelled odd. Not bad, but not nostalgically good either. Sort of like a combination of mildew, nicotine, and something vaguely chemical. Perhaps the man who last read it was a machinist or something similar and had often thumbed through it with chemically-stained hands. Perhaps he may even have been someone quite similar to those men I journeyed around the Arctic Circle with these past seven days …

Bitcoin

Way back in December, on a whim, I listened to two one-hour podcasts on Bitcoin, figuring it might come into play for the upcoming tax season. Turns out I was right, but way overestimated the impact. My three-man office does about 900 returns by April 15, and it so happened that one, and only one, person had investment income from bitcoin.

How does the IRS handle it? Just like any other type of investment income. For now.

Below is a pretty good introduction to Bitcoin. I’ve listened to it over the past three days during my morning walks. They say the best indicator of how well you know a subject is if you can teach it. Well, I certainly can’t teach you bitcoin; maybe, just maybe, I can pass a multiple-choice exam on it. But it is fascinating, and the 25-minute video will fill you in on the gist of the cryptocurrency:

I have two big questions, though. First, when they say that bitcoin is trading at 1 Bitcoin = $8,126.44 (as it is now as I’m writing this), is that “trade” something that happens within the bitcoin realm or on some market exchange outside it? Within the blockchain, or between a bunch of Wall Street firms trading pieces of paper. And if the “trade” transaction is within the blockchain, how is the value to the dollar determined?

Second, as per the video, when you have two blockchains to evaluate, the rule of thumb is to always treat the longer chain, the one that’s had the most work done to it, as the valid one. So what then happens in this situation:

Chain 1 has 10,000 transactions and ends with A, B, C, D, and E.

Chain 2 has those same 10,000 transactions but ends with X, Y, and Z.

You’d treat Chain 1 as the valid blockchain. (Remember, a blockchain is a public, online ledger.) What then happens to transactions X, Y, and Z? How do they make their way onto the valid ledger? 

Or am I missing the boat completely here regarding the mining process? (“Mining” is simply bitcoinspeak for adding transactions to the blockchain, which must be done with some heavy duty computer processing power since it involves cryptography and algorithms ranging up to 2^256 power.)

The quest for knowledge continues …

Concertina

Ah, spring is truly here: Patch’s grammar school held its Spring Concert tonight!

This was her first Spring concert, and it was the first time I had the pleasure of hearing her with the entire ensemble, since I was stuck working for the Christmas – ah! excuse me – Winter concert. As one of eleven saxophonists in her then fifty-one member fourth grade band, she played flawlessly, though fessing up to one squeaky note during the three-song set list.

The fifth grade band played a couple of tunes, then all the students gathered on the risers to sing three songs. All the parents clapped loudly and proudly, cell phones raised and recording. The principle said some words, and we all filed out, collected our children, and headed out to the various ice cream shops in the surrounding towns to celebrate.

Congratulations my dear!

And – to make her dad extra, extra proud, she’s listening to Coltrane’s My Favorite Things up in her room!

An Orthodox Parable

A master departed, leaving his teaching to his three disciples. The eldest faithfully repeated what his master had taught him, changing nothing. Of the two younger, one added to the teaching, the other took away from it. At his return the master, without being angry with anyone, said to the two younger: “Thank your elder brother; without him you would not have preserved the truth which I handed over to you.” Then he said to the elder: “Thank your younger brothers; without them you would not have understood the truth I have entrusted to you.”

– from The Orthodox Church, by Timothy Ware, chapter 16, pages 332-333

Wes Montgomery

I know the question you’re dying to ask.

“Hey, Hopper, how can you be so consistently cool?”

Great question.

How does one maintain smooth coolness all the live long day?

How does one manifest omnipresent coolth?

Simple.

I loop the first sixty seconds of this tune as the background soundtrack in my mind. Every second of every minute of every hour – well, you get the drift. 

Try it! It works! Experience the Cool!

That’s “West Coast Blues,” the cool version, by the late jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery.

You’re welcome.

Seven Deadly Sins on the Present Day Internet

Saw this in a couple of places over the last week or two. Interesting. Pretty much on spot. Especially the whole Twitter = Wrath thing. I just don’t get Twitter. Why would anyone have a Twitter account? Why would anyone care what anyway says in 129 characters or less about anything? Maybe I’m just showing my age though.

Otherwise, compared to this chart, I’m doing pretty good. Don’t do Twitter, Tinder, Yelp, Instagram and Netflix. I have a marginal presence on LinkedIn and though I’ve had a Facebook account for 9 years, I really only check it once a day and post something once a month. It’s good to reconnect with old friends, but otherwise it’s just high school for adults.

I do have this blog though, for over a decade, and I suppose if having a blog falls under any vice, it would have to be vanity. So I guess I’m guilty of that, though I don’t promote the blog. But then I’ve always said I have a Messianic complex. Or what that a Megalomaniac complex? Or was that a Machiavellian complex? Hmm. Something that began with “m” …

Some Words on Regret

“My greatest regret,” said I to my wife, as I’ve often said over the years, “was that I never stuck it out with physics in college – never got the degree – never worked on something world-changing and important – but then I’d never meet you and our children never would be,” to which she, in her wisdom, replied, “then you must promise yourself from this day onward to never experience regret in your next endeavor, whatever it shall be.”

Point taken.

Care for a Subtle Hint?

This is a picture of my band Subtle Hint.

I played rhythm guitar and wrote most of the songs.

We took this pic in the spring of 1991, 27 years ago.

The band existed in various incarnations from 1986 until 1995.

Our heyday was the summer of 1991.

At that point, we had made three studio demo tapes, one studio “live” tape of our set, and had played out about twenty-five times in New York City, Newark, Hoboken, and the Jersey Shore.

I lived with the singer and another dude in a rented house; after each show we’d have parties at that house, sometimes lasting until the wee hours of the morning. We provided the beer and the booze. The rule was, if you come to see us play, you can come and party with us afterwards.

Before long, however, much more people were coming to the after party than the show. Also, the police were beginning to take an interest in these parties.

In the fall of 1991 we were ready to take it to the next level. We thought we needed to get rid of our weakest link, and did. Unfortunately, we spent the next six months auditioning over two dozen replacements and no one seemed to fit.

Two of the other guys drifted away into other bands. Me, I went back to college. Seton Hall, to study physics. Come to think of it, that was a pretty crazy transition.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

But I still dream of those days, at least once a week ….

PS. I’m the guy at the top left.

Alone and Drinking Under the Moon

Amongst the flowers I

am alone with my pot of wine

drinking by myself; then lifting

my cup I asked the moon

to drink with me, its reflection

and mine in the wine cup, just

the three of us; then I sigh

for the moon cannot drink,

and my shadow goes emptily along

with me never saying a word;

with no other friends here, I can

but use these two for company;

in the time of happiness, I

too must be happy with all

around me; I sit and sing

and it is as if the moon

accompanies me; then if I

dance, it is my shadow that

dances along with me; while

still not drunk, I am glad

to make the moon and my shadow

into friends, but then when

I have drunk too much, we

all part; yet these are

friends I can always count on

these who have no emotion

whatsoever; I hope that one day

we three will meet again,

deep in the Milky Way.

- Li Po (Li Bai, A.D. 701-762), translated by Rewi Alley

Wow

Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?

(from an article I read on semordnilaps)

Musings on 196

Take any number greater than two digits and add its palindrome. For example,

26 + 62

The answer will also be a palindrome.

26 + 62 = 88

Sometimes, you have to do the operation more than once:

48 + 84 = 132; 132 + 231 = 363

Sometimes, many times more than once.

59 + 95 = 154; 154 + 451 = 605; 605 + 506 = 1,111

The operation of adding palindromes has to be done twenty-four times for the number 89 to reach a palindrome.

But, consider this.

Do all numbers undergoing addition with their palindromes eventually wind up as palindromes?

Possibly not.

Numbers that may not eventually end up palindromic are known as Lychrel numbers. But Lychrel numbers have not yet been proven to exist; numbers that don’t quickly revert to palindromes when added to their palindromes are really candidates for the designation Lychrel number.

A clarification: Lychrel numbers have not been proven to exist in base 10; they have been proven in other bases, such as binary and hexadecimal.

The lowest candidate for Lychrel numberhood in base 10 is 196. The next two, going up, are 879 and 1,997.

Now, here’s a thought experiment. Or rather, the set-up to one:

Imagine yourself up one level of being. Not God, but something more powerful than a man. What a man is to an animal, you in your new self are now to man.

Imagine what new powers of reasoning you would have. Much greater than anything imaginable now, so I guess my command is a little self-defeatingly paradoxical. But, anyway, try to guess at what new intellectual capabilities you might now have.

For instance, I think I might have the capacity to move into another “higher” dimension. From this vantage point, I can look down upon that thing we call MATHEMATICS. I can see the whole gridwork our reality lies upon. Or within. Or analogous to. However it’s described, I can see it all as I “look” down upon it.

I bring my focus like a scalpel on the subject of Lychrel numbers. I can see how the pattern evolves, where it leads, how it twists and turns. I can see it because I can somehow transform this gridwork into more than just three spatial and one temporal dimensions. As many as I need until the pattern coagulates out of the mist. Then I have the ability to predict which numbers go Lychrel – if any indeed do.

Once envisioned, I have the ability to retain this information as I sink down back to the level of man. And I can teach man what I’ve learned, because though a man can’t teach an animal anything beyond the simplest of reward-punishment behaviors, can’t teach it to reason, I as a superior being can teach man to be over-rational. Supra-rational.

I wonder – can man alone bring about such a state of over-being? Meditation? Mind-altering drugs? A random knock on the head from a non-fatal accident? Or is this simply a case where an over-being needs to reach its “hand” down to “lift us up”? Did Einstein and Newton enter such realms without even knowing it?

Or will it simply and simplistically devolve down to developing a computer with enough chip power and space to grind out all the permutations 196 must go through to determine if its Lychrel or not?

Will we reach supra-being-hood before 196 is declared Lychrel?

My money is on the former.

Beard, Interrupted

Beard, 6:05 PM EST:

Beardless, 6:21 PM EST:

Let the mourning begin ...

Why Napoleon?

Why the sudden interest in Napoleon? Well, it’s not really sudden, and there are a couple of reasons for the interest. Three, actually.

The oldest dates back almost a quarter of a century. In one of my collegiate phases I attended night school, and had to take a World History class. The instructor was a pudgy, middle-aged introverted guy with a bad perm, who sat at his desk the entire ninety-minute class and stream-of-consciousness riffed on whatever historical personage or theme was peripheral to the chapter we were supposed to be studying according to the rarely followed syllabus. Most of the other students hated him, but I actually enjoyed it, and would probably place this course in the top ten of my favorite college classes.

When World History ended, I found myself hungry for more. I read a little bit about the French Revolution from the textbook (which we never read in class). This led me to pick up a small biography of Robespierre. Now there was one sick dude. A man who loved cats but hated people. A psychopathic Sheldon Cooper out to perpetually avenge not being elected class president in grade school.

Anyway, my next foray was Napoleon. The chubby history professor had mixed feelings about the French leader, but tended to the slightly positive, and that intrigued me. So I picked up a hefty biography sometime around the spring of 1996 and read it cover to cover, unable to put it down. This surprised me, for up until then I really only read fiction (I was probably at the tail end of my Tom Clancy phase). I found a healthy admiration in the man, though I was probably influenced by an overtly pro-Napoleon author.

Years went by.

Twenty or so.

Bored with my day job and with a new born at home, I looked for a way to stimulate my mind, and came across the unique program of literary self-torture of reading through Hegel’s philosophy. I found a thick paperback omnibus of the German thinkers thought and waded through it over four long months. Probably only understood a tenth of what I read (German philosophy in translation will do that to you), so I needed other works to decipher what his pen was trying to convey to me.

In an introduction to one such book, the writer described young Hegel fleeing the war-torn city of Jena, Austria, pages of his philosophy manuscript fluttering about, just as French forces have entered through the main gates. Then the philosopher catches sight of Napoleon triumphantly approaching on horseback – the Great Man of Destiny forecasted in the writings clutched in his ink-stained hands – and realizes this is one such World Soul that moves History, in the flesh. Such was the way Hegel thought. I think.

More years go by.

This time, about five.

Started reading Civil War books. After three or four, one recurring theme popped out at me: how much Napoleon influenced the military tactics of (at least) the early battles. All of the West Point generals studied the French leader as well as tactician Antoine Jomini, who served under Napoleon, and put his well-tested theories into practice. Also, I realized how many Civil War leaders (particularly the generals who floundered for Lincoln) failed to implement Napoleonic ideas. Especially the idea that one need not capture the enemy’s capital city to win a war; one must only destroy the enemy’s main armed force. How much hair Lincoln must’ve pulled out of his head trying to get that simple point across to McClellan, Halleck, Burnside, Hooker, et. al.

Sometime last summer I decided to re-read that Napoleon bio I first read in 1996. But I couldn’t find it! I never logged the author or title, and searching through the internet card catalogs, nothing jumped out at me. So after examining some biographies on Amazon, I settled on Roberts’ one. I’ve been diligently at it since March 15, and as of today I have about 140 pages to go. Look to finish it by mid-week.

So there is a motive to my madness, even if I need 675 words to spell it out …