"The Big Reveal"

In this age when Donald Trump never met a person or direction he could not or would not disparage as "fake" or "false" and receive accolades from his loyal followers, a phrase popped up on the Public Broadcast System's News Hour last night that I thought was spot on: "The Big Reveal."

EZRA KLEIN: [T]he argument of the QAnon conspiracy is it [that?] Donald Trump, on some level, has this all in hand, that we’re seeing a lot of chaos, but the chaos is all carefully orchestrated, and that, at some point, there’s going to be this big reveal, and Donald Trump and the people he’s working with are going to come out and basically root out all the corruption that has been endemic in Washington for so long.
There’s comfort in believing something like this. (Emphasis added)

The Iran nuclear agreement, climate change, health care (remember "repeal and replace?"), auto emissions, Russia's election hacking, media corruption, immigration and innumerable foes who became friends and vice versa ... all of it couched in lies and mischaracterizations that the Washington Post tallies at something more than 4,000 since Trump took office ... Trump has thrown each and more into a cocked hat to the wild applause of his constituency. The only piece of actual legislation he can lay claim to in a year's time is a tax bill that benefits the well-to-do. Otherwise he has sown confusion by nibbling at what he dislikes.

And it is comforting.

It's important to be comforted. That's what presidents used to do -- comfort, nourish and sustain. And to believe Trump has an uncluttered view and vision is ... well ... ahhhhhhhh.

But at what point, if ever, does the Big Reveal step out of the shadows and reveal itself? What might it look like? What answers does Donald Trump have? These are questions his constituency does not ask. They are too busy being comforted without knowing the basis and substance of that comfort.

And increasingly, purely on a guessing basis, the Big Reveal comes into focus ... the Big Reveal is that Donald Trump is the answer. Whatever your question, Trump has the answer ... and it is loud ... and it is comforting. He KNOWs what others lie about, create falsehoods about ... and America goes down the toilet. Wouldn't dictatorship be better? Wouldn't Donald Trump be better?

The Big Reveal is like a mechanical rabbit at a greyhound race -- always just out of reach, always offering a target that cannot be attained. But ....

It is comforting.

Trust me.

Scotty Bowers challenges the Kama Sutra

Actors Randolph Scott (left) and Cary Grant ... and the answer to your question appears to be "yes."

I mean ... I meeeeean ....

Here's a movie that challenges and trashes and ... gawd ... everyone seems to be fucking everyone else in, where else, Hollywood. The golden era, so-called. Gay, straight ... oh, that's so passe!

A new documentary reworks the memoir of [Scotty]
Bowers, who boasts he paired Cary Grant with Rock Hudson and Katharine Hepburn with 150 brunettes – and slept with so many actors he didn’t have time to see their films

It's hard to remember a time when the word "scandal" had some meaning.

Forbes dissects Washington Post 'hacking' story

Stalled out on the writing project (earlier blog post) when, in the course of checking one thing and another, I came across this Forbes article about a Washington Post story and how it was clumsily revamped as the missteps of a "hacking" article (can't find link) were called to the Post's attention.

The Forbes article makes it grindingly clear how news outlets willfully and unwittingly miss the boat when it comes to reporting and double-checking the facts. I can't say that I know what's going on, entirely, but the Forbes article is clear, I thought.

Probably a bit more than the reader is willing to ingest. The wispy cloud hovers, "How much of this article is reliable?" Forbes seems to parse things digest-ably, but what's true and what ain't?

I feel like the little bird flying in increasingly-smaller concenctric circles around the mountain top ... pretty soon, I will fly up my own asshole and disappear.

playing blog hookie

Gonna do some writing today and will give the blog a rest: I can't do both and there's an idea for a column rattling around in my mind.

photos worth a 2nd look?

From the Guardian:

London, UK

Leading body paint artist Carolyn Roper camouflages the model Daisy Lowe to showcase a feature on the latest Samsung television. The work took eight hours to complete

Photograph: Matt Alexander/PA

Glasgow, UK

Anastasia Theocharous of Cyprus competes in the uneven bars qualifying round for the women’s finals of the European Artistic Gymnastics Championships

Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Look again -- enlarged, perhaps -- at the second photo. Are those 'shoulder-boobs' ?????? It's bad enough having Donald Trump in the White House without being flummoxed in this way.

Pope nixes death penalty

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has decreed that the death penalty is “inadmissible” under all circumstances and that the Catholic Church must work to abolish it, changing official church teaching to reflect his view that all life is sacred and there is no justification for state-sponsored executions.

That ought to rattle some cages. What of military chaplains? What of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?" When executions and killing are part of the panorama, how does anyone go about undoing that panorama?

Whoa mama!

Unless, of course, the pope decides to join Donald Trump on the walk-it-back trail.

things get messy

Suddenly, like some exploding California wildfire currently raging in the West, things are a mess. What was relatively calm has turned into a shit storm of glass shards whizzing around my house.

1. My younger son started a guard job yesterday at a nearby welfare office. He viewed the job as a stepping stone to the cop he would like to be. Today he received an email saying he had no job: There had been a disconnect between the state offices near Boston that had hired him and the local welfare office which had no hours to give him. Having a job has been a hard row for him to hoe, so getting the job was a relief and losing it was ... a cutting shard.

2. My younger son and his partner, who is also living at our house, are having a falling out whose echoes I do what I can not to stick my nose into but cannot help but feel the fallout from. What's happening I don't know, but it's cutting.

3. A friend of mine in Maine wrote (and we talked this morning about) to say he was being forced to put down today his companion dog of nine years ... his best friend. Harley-Bear is old, his back legs are going, he has become incontinent ... the whole nine, cutting yards. There is precisely nothing I can do about it but absorb the long-distant, sympathetic cut.

4. My older son is due for an 8-10-day visit later today ... another cutting wrinkle in the cloth somehow.

Heretofore, things around the house have been relatively OK. Bumps, yes, but nothing major. Now there is dust dust and more dust in the air. I don't like it, having my relative calm shaken by forces I can do nothing about. Helplessness is not the men-are-from-fixit-Mars mindset I have to plead guilty to. A little peace and quiet seems little to ask and yet, in the midst of all these bits and sharp pieces, it is far too much and far too self-centered. And still a little peace and quiet is what I hope/whine for. An woe betide the well-wisher dispensing regurgitated Buddhist wisdom!

I can't sort it out. I can't fix it. And the whole business leaves me somewhere between growling angrily and wiping up confused tears. This universe gives me the kind of whimwhams that entering a cinderblock house filled with tear gas and removing my gas mask before stating my name, rank and serial number did in the army.

failing the pedophile test

Roy Moore

It's not fair, it's not news, it's not just ... but in the end, it left me laughing.

Roy Moore, a wa-hoo Alabama Republican who got his ass in a crack for refusing to remove a marble memorial to the 10 Commandments during his tenure as chief justice of the Alabama supreme court was caught up in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" serial on Showtime. It appears Moore failed a 'pedophile test:' https://mfanews.net/sacha-baron-cohen039s-latest-prank-using-a-fake-pedophile-detector-on-roy-moore/

Sacha Baron Cohen reliably churns out cringeworthy moments on his new Showtime series “Who Is America?,” but Sunday night’s episode may be the most uncomfortable yet.

Cohen — who shows up as various characters in the satirical series — played fake Israeli anti-terrorism expert Gen. Erran Morad as he interviewed former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R). And “Morad” brought along “the latest Israeli gadget”: a wand that detects pedophiles.

Moore lost the December 2017 special election to fill an empty Alabama Senate seat to the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, amid allegations that when Moore was a local prosecutor in his 30s, he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl.

Several weeks ago, Moore hinted that he had been tricked by Cohen and blasted Showtime for tricking other conservative politicians and personalities.

According to Moore, he received an expenses-paid trip in February to Washington to “receive an award for my strong support of Israel,” he wrote in a statement. “I did not know Sacha Cohen or that a Showtime TV series was being planned to embarrass, humiliate, and mock not only Israel, but also religious conservatives such as Sarah Palin, Joe Walsh, and Dick Cheney.”

He added that Cohen’s “art is trickery, deception, and dishonesty” and “as an American, I would never hide my identity and deceive others only to mock and ridicule them as this Showtime Series is designed to do.”

In Sunday’s episode, Cohen-as-Morad sits down with Moore and details some fake Israeli research: Sex offenders, “particularly pedophiles,” secrete an enzyme at “three times the level of non-perverts,” so Israel has “developed a machine that is used in schools and playgrounds to detect anyone coming in.”

The fake anti-terrorism expert then takes out a wand that sort of looks like a handheld metal detector. “It is very, very simple to use,” he says. “You just switch it on, and because neither of us are sex offenders, then it makes absolutely nothing.” The wand beeps every time Cohen puts it near Moore.

“It must be faulty. It’s malfunctioning,” Cohen says, as Moore keeps a tight smile. “Is this your jacket? Did you lend the jacket to somebody else?”

“No,” Moore responds. “I’ve been married for 33 [years]. I’ve never had an accusation of such things.”

Even as Cohen says, “I’m not accusing you at all,” Moore continues, “If this is an instrument — certainly, I’m not a pedophile.”

“But the machine, the machine works,” Cohen continues.

“Maybe Israeli technology hasn’t developed properly,” Moore counters.

“This is 99.8 percent accurate,” Cohen says. “It is not saying that you are a pedophile, of course not.”

Finally, Moore ends the interview. “I am simply cutting this conversation right now,” he says. “Good night. I support Israel. I don’t support this kind of stuff.”

Appearances on “Who Is America?” have generated other controversies. Georgia state lawmaker Jason Spencer (R) resigned from his seat after his appearance on the show, in which he dropped his pants and repeatedly used the n-word. Cohen also got former vice president Dick Cheney to sign a fake “waterboard kit” and several Republican politicians to endorse a fake program that would arm toddlers.

When asked about Sunday’s episode, Showtime had no comment.

NYTimes exec begs Trump

A.G. Sulzberger

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. (AP) — The publisher of The New York Times said Sunday he “implored” President Donald Trump at a private White House meeting this month to reconsider his broad attacks on journalists, calling the president’s anti-press rhetoric “not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.”
In a statement, A.G. Sulzberger said he decided to comment publicly after Trump revealed their off-the-record meeting to his more than 53 million Twitter followers on Sunday. Trump’s aides had requested that the July 20 meeting not be made public, Sulzberger said.

There is something both shaming and profoundly handsome about Sulzburger's willingness to stand the critical gaff, enter the tetchy lion's den, and ask for a bit of national uplift ... a reprieve not for the New York Times, but for the nation. Trump is too stupid -- too involved with his own bellybutton -- to see the opportunity he had been given and I can imagine his thinking, "I've got the bastard by the short hairs!" Power and money are the merchandizer-in-chief's currency. The depths of his ignorance cannot be plumbed.

Hats off to Sulzberger!

Jim Jeffries on U.S. gun control

Everyone else may have heard of Aussie comedian Jim Jeffries, but I hadn't until a friend sent along this two-part take on American gun control....

whistling ... seriously

When I was in high school, there was one fellow I knew, Vladimir, who still took and practiced whistling. I was always amazed at the wonders he could concoct.

Who whistles any more? More pointedly, who whistles with a seriousness that entails practice?

A quick zip around Google suggests it's still out there, but the art and artifice has lost its social inroads.

One thing that came up in the Google tour that was sort of fun was this:  Why Do People Whistle.

I remember being taught by a fellow student, a Mexican chum, how to whistle loudly for a cab. It took a while to perfect and a lot of saliva dribbled down my fingers, but eventually I caught on. I never did learn how to expel classical music with whistles.

Ah, the lost arts.

the Robert Reich effect

There is something I find suspicious when I agree with one voice or one point of view too much. And thus it is that I am suspicious of how much I agree with Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under then-president Bill Clinton. Somehow his writings about how and why the Average Joe is getting economically screwed suck me in, make me agree ... but also make me suspect my own agreement.

Oh well, I guess I'll just have to live with the fact that I enjoy and agree with the very man I suspect.
Here's an essay [today] from The Guardian.

Two fundamental forces have changed the structure of the US economy, directly altering the balance of power between business and labor. The first is the increasing difficulty for workers of joining together in trade unions. The second is the growing ease by which corporations can join together in oligopolies or to form monopolies.

Yes, it's another analysis, another deconstruction of how the American worker is getting fucked. In general, another analysis sends me running to the hills: Everyone has an analysis, a whine, a liberal and caring take ... and nobody's doing much more than using that particular realm to ... write another analysis, whine or caring take. I keep waiting for someone to toss a bomb in the arch-duke's passing carriage, but there seems to be no time to DO something other than analyze and wax 'compassionate' and 'intelligent' and 'truthful' and all the rest of it. [Lord, I have become the spawn of Donald Trump.]

But I keep on reading Reich's stuff while giving a cold shoulder to his analytical compatriots, some of whom are no doubt savvy and intelligent and ... repetitive and boring. Call me when you've lit the fuse or pulled the pin.

What can I say? Taste is taste. I like Reich (no matter how short he is :) )

of late and en passant

How long it has been I am not sure, but there have been a variety of cultural shifts in the last year or two ... mostly minor stuff, yet telling from where I sit.

The word "fucking" has entered TV movie lingua franca. Women's breasts are now more or less routinely displayed in TV movies where once they were locked up and hidden. Even an occasional vagina muff can be seen. I have seen, though briefly as yet, male genitalia. No one quite dares to say the word "nigger," which is, instead, "the N word." But "fuck" is another matter.

It may be my age, but all of this has seemed to clump and drop into reality simultaneously ... not as a dripdripdrip but rather as a moist and succulent PLOP. Nothing is any longer "dirty" somehow.

I kind of like the full-frontal getting-naked thing because it calls into question the meaning of the word "sexy." Clothes provide provocation. A lack of clothes is ... well, what the hell, we're all naked beneath the cover-ups and naked is not all that interesting.

I do miss the naughty of it all. When I was growing up, males said "fuck," but not in mixed company. Women seldom -- I mean really rarely  -- did. Don't we need a space in which to be naughty?

Telling a dirty joke that relies on cuss words is harder these days. Comedians who rely on cuss words for comedic fodder are really not terribly funny or daring any more. They're more prosaic and lack invention or humor. What was once brazen or even pornographic is now becoming pedestrian.

Simultaneously with all this, the plunging female neckline seems to have reversed course and women are wearing higher-necked (and therefore more provocative) clothing. Prurience, if I had to guess, is making a comeback: What other choice is there?

And of course the crassness and coarse merchandizing of Donald Trump greases all these wheels.

from flat earth to flat earth

Stepping off the edge of my flat earth....

I was 21 when I found that I had signed my name, taken my vows and ended up -- as was then mandatory in the U.S. -- in the American army. Aside from anything else, I was scared: I didn't know anything about where I was or where I was going but I did know that someone else -- a very big someone else -- was in charge of my universe.

It wasn't all smooth sailing in order for me to sign up. To heap weird on top of weird, I needed five character reference letters in order to link up successfully with the Army Security Agency I was linking up with ... an agency that boasted 80% of its recruits went to Europe, which is where I wanted to go.

One of those letters of reference came from a minister who had once been a high school English teacher of mine. He wrote a nice enough reference letter, but appended a private note that suggested I shouldn't go into the army at all: I was too rebellious, too loud-mouthed, too individualistic ... and the army did not look kindly on such attributes. They'd eat me for breakfast, he suggested.

But now, here I was, having stepped off the edge of my school-bubble flat earth and into the great unknown. Really, I didn't know anything and it scared me. And then the the minister's admonition echoed in my mind ... they'll eat you for breakfast, you'll never fit in. it's just not you.

But basic training made itself clear pretty quickly. A step into the deeply unknown was ... wait for it ... a cake walk. All I had to do was be right according to some fairly simple rules: make your bed, straighten your foot locker, clean your rifle, polish your boots ... this and more like it was all the army really required. It was easy to be right and the army loved "right." Nobody gave shit what I thought. No one gave a shit what my philosophy was. No one cared if I had read Marx and Engels.

Just be right. And being right was easy. The vast unknown -- vast enough to inspire a virulent case of metaphorical diarrhea -- was off the edge of my small, flat world. I was lost-lost-lost and ... it was a piece of cake.

The minister had miscalculated ... as had I. Just following rules is perhaps the easiest way to live this life. And not only that, it's social and full of friends with similar aspirations, fears and successes. And all you had to do was be right in order to get a gold star.

Be right? Sure. Lots of agreement and back-slapping and propaganda and no need to parse and dissect and see for yourself. Follow the rules and you'll always have company. The army helped me realize how others lived and how/why I felt lonely.

For the better part of three years, I lived in the military womb.

Follow the rules.

In the end, I decided not to re-enlist because, as I told a friend, "I don't want to work at any job from which I cannot (without real effort) be fired."

So I stepped off the military's flat earth and into a realm of vast, vast uncertainty. I'm still trying to fold my socks according to the, uh, 'rules.'

whopper wave-ride

There is something a bit too picture-perfect about it all and yet I find myself delighted for the moment that Koa Smith pulled off a whopper of a surf ride. Anyone who follows whatever dream, however lonely and minuscule, to its apex ... that's wowsers in my book. In this case, the documentation appears to be there, so perhaps it's all true and I am left purring. My skepticism at the perfection of that documentation is on the back burner for now.

Perched precariously on his surfboard, the 23-year-old from Hawaii rode a wave off the coast of Namibia, on the western shore of Africa, for 120 straight seconds. He stayed upright for nearly a mile (1.5 kilometers) as he traveled through an unheard-of eight barrels — the hollow formed by the curve of the wave as it breaks over the rider’s head.

Given the Fake-News-in-Chief Donald Trump's ability to assert falsehoods and then walk them back a day or two later, I really hope Smith's accomplishment is a true accomplishment. It may be a small matter compared to the devastations of hunger or immigration or water or fires raging around the world and yet a little plus-side woo-hoo really is welcome, whatever its source.

pop-pop-pop ... the newish normal

Of late, and with increasing frequency, I feel like I simply cannot cope. I cannot cope with the vicissitudes of  Washington (what's the latest corruption and who are the last players) in ways I might have once taken an intellectual interest in it all.

I feel like a sink full of water into which dish soap has been squirted and a sprayer brought to bear ... bubble after bubble after bubble floats and waxes and wanes and I simply cannot any longer sink my teeth in. This is not mopey. It's vaguely frightening, being that I must now pray that someone else will take up cudgels against what my mind might once have done. It's not that I 'won't' do something. It's that I simply 'can't.'

What once were smarts are now drip-dropping, 'slip-slidin','  away. There is an occasion sense of wooziness to complement the latest incapacities.

Perhaps the seemingly endless days of humidity around here contribute. Humidity takes the stuffing out of me. But I doubt it. I am getting dumber in the same way I am getting shorter ... quite literally.

I can't keep up with Donald Trump, his lawyer(s), the investigation that seeks to nail Trump and his minions to the lately-anointed Russian, the Chinese/American trade trade war, spiritual conundra, life's foibles, etc. .... I can get a sense of the panic in the face of forest fires in the West, but even there, it's hard to keep up.

Keep up with the Jonses? Hell, I can't keep up with whatever is left of my popping-bubble self.

Literally, not just sweet-talking metaphorically.

the juggernaut called "English"

Sotto voce, I have always kind of wondered about the tyrannical choke hold English has on the linguistic panorama of this globe. Why English? It's not especially beautiful. It's irregular as sin when it comes to meaning and pronunciation. Why not something more tenable, like Spanish? Isn't there something arch and elitist about cloaking everything in English?

A Guardian article unpacks the panorama in ways that are probably too long and arcane for most and yet caught my attention today.

Today it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks. Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century. For even a fraction of these to survive, we’re going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth learning.

There is a lot of information in the article, much of it more significant than simple statistics. A nice munchy, I found ... and, what's more, it's in English.

prattling ... morality ... stuff

Rattling around like lottery-balls in a cage are two (one?) thoughts:
1. The separation of church and state is a myth.
2. I secretly yearn for some vestige of morality to infuse the current American scene that is so rife with volume substituting for veracity.

Yearning for morality is one of those secrets I hardly dare tell myself. But based on a couple of recent caroms provided by some TV talking heads, I realize I am not alone. And one of the problems that those who yearn for some smidgen of morality face is the track record of the fundamentalist shredding of morality in the Bible machine: Asking for morality squares off against those who conflate Bible and morality and come out waving the Confederate battle flag.

I don't dare ask for decency in social discourse for fear of being labeled an extreme ignoramus... and an old fart into the bargain.

But for me, there was something balm-bastic in the words of Peter Wehner on Public Broadcast System's news hour last night. Balm-bastic in the face of bom-bastic.

A self-governing nation can’t run if you can’t have a common set of facts, if you can’t agree on common realities.What you have got is a man in the White House who is engaged in not just an assault on truth, but an effort to annihilate truth.... Well, what’s different is that we don’t have a run-of-the-mill liar in the White House. We have a pathological liar...."
I think Donald Trump, the effect of all of this is exhausting on the public. I think they’re embarrassed, as was said earlier. And I think they’re ashamed of what’s happening.

Ashamed, embarrassed and exhausted... and willing to come out, and risk the ignoramus label and ask for some common decency and decorum because otherwise people get hurt.

And as to church and state ... morality does not emanate from the Bible alone. What the Bible exudes most pungently is ethics. Morality emanates from individuals and the bathroom mirror. Yes, Virginia, it is possible to be moral and not even own a copy of the Bible. Or own one ... individuals will decide.

But morality -- the thing I am shy to ask for -- cannot be legislated. Morality takes balls ... ethics may take balls as well, but it also succumbs equally to a glib tongue.

Oh well ... I'm prattling and not thinking very well today.

I do wish the sense of "ashamed, embarrassed and exhausted" could be mitigated.

Chinese buy into American baseball

Texas AirHogs’ Na Chuang (36), Song Yunqi (15), Yang Yanyong (1) and Yang Jin (29), all of China, stand for the playing of the Chinese national anthem before an American Association of Independent Professional Baseball game, Wednesday, July 18, 2018, in Grand Prairie, Texas. The small ballpark in Texas just a few miles from downtown Dallas is home this summer for the Chinese national baseball team under an unprecedented setup. The Chinese players are part of a revolving roster in a professional league, getting to play more games and against tougher competition to strengthen their team for future international competitions like the 2020 Olympics. (AP Photo/Brandon Wade)

One thing China is good at is the slow start ... collecting the foreign building blocks that can pay dividends in years to come. Africa comes to mind for me: Where the west searches for the next big right-now oil or minerals, China is willing to put its money on roads and bridges and infrastructure and relationships. It'll take time, but guess who's going to win that battle.*

And there is something about the following story that suggests China may end up owning America's signature pastime -- baseball.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas (AP) — The starting lineups are announced in English and Spanish at home games for the independent Texas AirHogs, and then the Chinese national anthem is played.
For about 30 members of the Chinese national baseball team, the suburban ballpark adjacent to a horse track and only a few miles west of downtown Dallas has become their summer home and training ground in an unprecedented setup.
They are a revolving part of the roster for a professional team in the United States, playing more games and against tougher competition while working to improve their team for future international events such as the upcoming Asian Games and 2020 Olympics.

I can't say that I fully understand what is going on in this story outside "China" and "American baseball" so I may be off-base in my suspicious little mind. But it's got a whiff of the slow start leading to a world series title.

Donald Trump likes selling off and selling out America. I can imagine his saying this is a "very, very" good deal for the United States.

*In the dusty past somewhere was the suggestion that the Roman Catholic Church was planning to switch financial strategies and target Africa after U.S. revenue streams began to dry up in the wake of all the pedophile priests springing from American soil. Another helpmeet for another 'benevolent' cause. Another "very, very" good deal?

love etc.

Just a thought:

If anyone knew what love was, there would be no insistence on talking about it so much.

And I wonder how many other things are like that ... mindfulness, enlightenment, spectacular moments.

Perhaps there is a correlation: The more the talk, the greater the ignorance.

And what, precisely, is so unpleasant about not knowing? Is it the dangers not-knowing can impose? But if death is considered the worst possible danger ... well, what does anyone know about that? The bookshelves are cluttered with books, like love, about death.

Just some more talk, I suspect.

Viagra-linked baby deaths

The death of 11 babies born to women who were given Viagra during a drug trial has led to the termination of the experiment – and an anxious wait for other mothers involved.
The trial was designed to test whether sildenafil, a medication sold under the brand name Viagra, could help boost babies’ growth in the womb.
The research was carried out at 10 hospitals across the Netherlands and involved women whose placentas had been underperforming.

This is the first story I can ever remember in which news-worthy, medical-trial stories ended on a negative note. Considering the amount of testing that must be going on out there, the lack of failure-centric stories strikes me as pretty unusual.

As Thomas Edison was said to have said approximately, "I didn't fail 2,000 times to make a light bulb. I discovered 2,000 ways that didn't work."

water -- no laughing matter

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Harsh drought conditions in parts of the American West are pushing wild horses to the brink and spurring extreme measures to protect them.
For what they say is the first time, volunteer groups in Arizona and Colorado are hauling thousands of gallons of water and truckloads of food to remote grazing grounds where springs have run dry and vegetation has disappeared.
Federal land managers also have begun emergency roundups in desert areas of Utah and Nevada.

Could human beings be far behind?

sayonara, New York Daily News

I once asked a fellow who could type 100-words-per-minute and would occasionally take my dictation for use in the New York Daily News, "What's the difference between the Daily News and the New York Times?"

On the face of it, the question was ludicrous. The Daily News at the time was a paper I thought of without apology as a tits-and-ass tabloid, whereas the Times was stately and stolid as meatloaf when it came to content. But the guy I asked knew what I was talking about and he was ready for the question.

"The difference," he said, "is that the Times trusts its writers.* The Daily News trusts its editors."

And that was my experience. Looking back, one of my proudest moments was getting a story into the Daily News unedited ... unedited by one of the best-edited papers in the country. Nothing was extra in their stories. Not...one...comma. To be accepted without correction was an accolade for a stringer like me who worked at a Massachusetts paper and reshaped the occasional story for Daily News reuse. They paid me $35 per story.

I don't know what the parameters are these days at the Daily News -- or the Times, either, come to that -- but I felt a sadness to read today:

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York tabloid Daily News cut half of its newsroom staff Monday including Jim Rich, the paper’s editor in chief.
The paper was sold to Tronc Inc. last year for $1, with the owner of the Chicago Tribune assuming liabilities and debt.
In an email sent to staff Monday, Tronc said the remaining staff at the Daily News will focus on breaking news involving “crime, civil justice and public responsibility.”
The newspaper has been a key fixture in New York City for the last century. It has won 11 Pulitzer Prizes, including last year for its work with ProPublica on the abuse of eviction rules in New York City.

I think that if I have to be stuck between a tits-and-ass-tabloid and Donald R. Trump, a man who gives a bad name to the noble art of lying, I'd prefer to be a plug-spittin' fool. No more news as opposed to Donald Trump news? Trump's failing lies in his endless mediocrity, cruelty ... oh well, each has his or her own list, I imagine.

*I once heard a former New York Times reporter enunciate his exasperation with the paper when he said of the news reporting process, "All you [a reporter] have to do is mention Alexis de Tocqueville in the third paragraph and you're home free."

alphorn festival concludes

Alphorn Internartional Festival concludes

What it sounds like:

In tandem



and solo



I wonder if alphornists ever get together with those smitten by the didgeridoo... music in my ear begging for a fairy tale.

Echoechoechoecho.....

the pleasure of, say, bacon

A March 1, 2018, Guardian article resurrected today goes into lengthy detail about the facts, bogus and otherwise, about the links between bacon (yumm) and cancer (ick). On and on the article goes. I purely marveled at its almost-Jesuitical research.

And it set my mind a-noodling: Yes, there are studies done all the time about the links between what provides pleasure and what will kill/maim/cripple you. Pleasure, as anyone reading these studies will know, always comes up holding the short and often slimy end of the stick.

"Oh woe! Pleasure is fleeting.
Wisdom, by contrast, is perfect."
Why would anyone with his or her head screwed on the right way, choose the flimsy over the assured?

I distrust this assumption-prone proposition. How about making the argument that pleasure is preferable to perfection? That, for example, bacon may entail dangers, some of them perhaps fatal, but is fully worth the price of living life admission? Or that the cigarettes I enjoy are evil-incarnate and yet provide a pleasure I enjoy?

Yup, they'll kill me.

And your point is?

Life, after all, is the true killer, assuming anyone wants to make the death-is-bad argument. Is bacon or are cigarettes somehow off the beaten path that is so clearly laid out for anyone?

It seems to me that at a certain age (one like mine of course), it is hard not to ponder and puzzle: Is there some reason to step off the well-beaten path that I will follow whether I like it or not? Why should pleasure be less rich, less worthy of adulation, than the life of which it is a part? True, there's the downer quotient when it comes to pleasure, but that at least is closer to real life ... which has promised death all along. Who am I to improve on what is clearly perfect without any help at all?

And when has perfection ever qualified as a perfect solution to anything?

I'm not so interested in the religio-philosophical arguments. Blow it out your tail pipe. I'm interested in real time, this time, honest-to-goodness true time. Perfection comes up short when it comes to bacon, I suspect.

Just some confused noodling.

"Alice's Restaurant" redux

Woke up with "Alice's Restaurant" humming in my mind like one of those "ear worms" and figured I might be able to get out from under if I just posted it ... probably won't work, but hey...! ... what another time that was.

"lest we forget"

Reading along shiftlessly in the book and not quite sure why ... "Young Men and Fire" seems to suggest that the reader should not forget the 13 lives claimed by a forest fire in Montana on Aug. 5, 1949. The courage and craziness of it all... do not forget. Let us not forget these good men.

And "do not forget" puts me in mind of the "never again" that can be appended to any number of tragedies. Near at hand, when the tragedy is just past, the horror and anguish are enormous... and 'we' will never forget or allow others to forget ... a child, a spouse, the Holocaust, a groups of innocents ... never again such ruthless, edge-less pain!

But whereas I may have my schedule and maintain a self-affirming portrait of myself, forgetfulness has its and "never again" might better be rendered as "ever again." World War I gave way to World War II with hardly a hiccup, the the horrors were beyond screaming just like the first time. Never again...never again...never again...

Oh wait -- let's do it again.

And did I hear that the Jews who were so badly treated during World War II are doing a grand job marginalizing others in many of the same ways they themselves were once never-again marginalized?

George Santayana gets the credit for "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." ... and various incarnations of that saying. Doesn't it sound wise? Profound? Sage?

To me it sounds like bullshit when set up against the imperative that goes with forgetting. Of course history will repeat itself. Ditto personal idiocies.

Ever again! Too bad -- that's how the cookie crumbles and forgetfulness kicks in ... whatever the horror, whatever the pain, whatever the disgrace, whatever the dishonor.

When it's not flat-out false, memory at the very least is fickle as it offers up sorta-kinda recollections that are never exact, always fuzzy, always reshaped. The confusion is compounded by the fact that there is a burning desire to imagine that memory can or could be relied upon. Yessireebob, I'm going to remember into all eternity. In addition, I plan to do what I can to have others remember as well. Remember what? Remember this horrendous horror.

Not.

"Doomed to repeat it" suggests that there is another option.

There isn't.

Which, if true, means there is no "doom" in it. It's just part of the natural flow. Do I wish I could be smarter, less idiotic and less foolish based on part performance and outcome? Sure, but "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." My options dissolve into wishful thinking and an occasional, but not assured, correct activity.

Never again? I doubt it.

Let's not forget to remember... for whatever that's worth.
And let's remember the inescapable capacity to forget.

Just noodling.

among the immigrant's goats

 

 

 

 

 

Ethiopian migrant brings Italian hills alive with the sound of goats [Reuters]... Photo essay

astronomy photos

Holding Due North

Jake Mosher (USA). A weathered juniper tree in Montana’s northern Rocky Mountains is filled with arced star trails and in the centre sits Polaris, the brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor. It took several test frames of long exposures to make sure that Polaris was in the right position, but eventually things lined up and the Moon provided enough light to the foreground, yet plenty of dark skies to allow a high enough ISO to capture lots of stars.

Photograph: Jake Mosher/National Maritime Museum Guardian photo array

four-day work week

A bit self-referential, perhaps, but still....

The New Zealand company behind a landmark trial of a four-day working week has concluded it an unmitigated success, with 78% of employees feeling they were able to successfully manage their work-life balance, an increase of 24%.
Two-hundred-and-forty staff at Perpetual Guardian, a company which manages trusts, wills and estate planning, trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five.