calimac

1) So Trump gave his speech on election fraud. His real motivating factor here is his belief that he's so wonderful that nobody would vote against him (except his enemies, who hate him for unfathomable Reasons), so if he loses an election it must be rigged. Note his concentration on the presidential election he lost and not at all on the ones he won, though if there were fraud it would be widespread.

The substantive argument, which I've seen put forth in good faith by sincerely deluded people, is this: there are jurisdictions where the earliest-counted ballots trend Republican, but by the end of the counting they turn out to be heavily Democratic. It seems to them self-evident that Democratic election officials have dumped in loads of fake ballots to change the outcome.

What hasn't occurred to these people is that the earliest-counted ballots may not be representative of the whole. The first ballots counted are the absentees, and absentee voters tend to run Republican. But they'll be outweighed by the in-person votes that come in later.

Besides, if there were loads of fake ballots it would be easy to detect this, starting with implausible turnout figures.

I can testify, as a former Hugo administrator, that the first tranch of votes coming in will in no way predict the eventual winners, and there's no particular reason in the Hugos for the earliest ballots to lean one way or another.

Our election security is fine, and proposals to require ID at the polls, which wouldn't prevent the kind of fraud that's being alleged, are merely smokescreens to make it harder for Blacks, poor people, and other Democrat-leaning constituencies to vote.

2) Classics professor Denise McCoskey on the casting of Helen of Troy:

If you want to talk about historical accuracy, the Ancient Greeks would be far more upset that these things are not being done in Greek than about anything involving the appearance of these characters. To have Helen speak English is a far bigger transgression than to have her appear as a skin color that you don’t like. I think that’s something that is getting distorted for obvious reasons. And I don’t have a problem with that, if you want English-speaking audiences to engage with Helen—I teach English translations—but then you have to say that there’s a lot of ways we can translate Helen that has to do with our audience and what we want to think about today.

3) The bill enacting permanent Daylight Saving Time, which has passed the House, still needs to get through the Senate and the president's desk before it becomes law. Let's hope it fails one of these hurdles. People have forgotten that we enacted permanent DST once before, in 1974. But the outcry against morning darkness in the winter was so intense that it was repealed within a year. What this story proves is that DST can't really adjust the length of the day: what its supporters actually have a beef with is the axial tilt of the earth, and no legislation will help with that.

There's apparently a competing congressional bill that would return us to permanent Standard Time, what we had before DST was invented, and that I would support.

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 2024)

I'm not the audience for this book, which is addressed to the parents of tweens and teens and concerns the children's addiction to smartphones and other electronic devices. I read it because it was the topic for my public library's monthly book discussion group, and I was a bit surprised it was chosen, because usually even the nonfiction choices are primarily intended to entertain the reader, whereas this is hard informative facts about an urgent social problem.

I'll note that Haidt attributes the problems with children to two things: the lack of supervision of their online lives, and the over-supervision of their physical lives: that they lose the opportunity to learn in-person social interaction both from having all their communication being online (startling side effect, though: a decrease in teen pregnancy) and from not being allowed to go out and play unsupervised. (One of our book club members attributes this restriction to the reflex of suing the supervisory agency if anyone is injured.)

And I'll agree that children need to learn how to go out and take responsibility for themselves, because if they don't learn before they're adults, how will they ever do it as adults? The purpose of rearing children is to produce an adult as the end process, and certainly what I was able to do for myself in my 20s was the result of hard-won experience in my teens.

But otherwise this book mostly struck me as an illustration of how different I, and those I know, are from the norms described here. I don't know a lot of young people today, but those I do know do not suffer from the anxiety and depression described here, and they're not always leaving their heads buried in a screen. They're sharp and self-motivated, and I think that's what saves them from a syndrome which Haidt describes as widespread - so it is a major problem - but far from universal.

My own separation struck me in a chapter describing how young people crave risk, and they're not getting it. Crave risk? I never did that, or any of the stupid teenage tricks that illustrate it. I did do some risky things as a child - I rode my bicycle along twisty country roads that, when I drive them today, I'm astonished that I never got hit by a car, though traffic was much less heavy them - but they didn't feel risky. On the other hand, I never rode roller-coasters, which aren't risky but feel as if they are. When asked at the time by other kids why I declined, I always said the same thing I also said when asked why I refused to see horror movies: "Scary things are scary." It seemed to me self-evident that fright was an unpleasant sensation that was to be avoided when possible.

Haidt also talks of the addictiveness of videogames, especially to children. I expect I would have been immune to that. Admittedly, the games of my youth were not as sophisticated or engrossing as those of today, but they were plenty addictive enough. In my grad school years in the early 1980s, I had some friends who liked to hang out in the video arcades they had then, full of big consoles that displayed games like PacMan. I played those occasionally, but I was not strongly attracted. Others were.

Then there was Dungeons and Dragons. This is, or was in those days, a tabletop game played with paper and pencil and dice, so it's hardly a 21C video game. But it was massively addicting. My friends who took it up in college kept playing for decades afterwards, just not me. I tried it for a few weeks and then quit because I was bored. It didn't generate the kind of storytelling that interested me.

Then there's the point of social media as something children demand access to as a means of gaining social prestige and validation among their peers. I wonder how I would have fit into that environment were I a teen today, because at the time I was a teen, my social prestige and validation level was zero. I was a complete social nonentity in school, at least until I joined the science-fiction club, and part of my immunity from teen misbehavior was that I knew I would never fit in to the social networks so there was no point in trying. I suspect I would have shied away from social media for the same reason had it been around, but on the other hand its ability to enable the bullying and disparagement that were even then a major feature in the social nonentity's life - that would have made life very hard. So I don't know. I despaired a lot in those years, without any electronic media to make me do it, and I suspect its presence would only have made things worse. I would be lucky to survive adolescence today, most likely.

So now it's our turn to be terrified of cyclosporiasis. No more green salads for a while - which is a nuisance, as B. often has salads for lunch, and it's my custom to make Asian chicken salad, with romaine lettuce, for dinner on really hot days, to avoid cooking. And we have some really hot days lining up for this week.

An informative e-mail prior to Iolanthe yesterday named some restaurants in the neighborhood recommended by theater staff. By far the closest was a ramen place. Ramen restaurants here do not serve the cheap hot-water-and-noodle dish loved by impecunious college students everywhere. This is a big bowl of really serious Japanese soup, and unlike much Japanese food it's been known to appeal to my tastes. I went by the restaurant, and saw on the menu posted outside that just about everything came with scallions. I like scallions, but as a garnish they're frequently served raw, and they're among the most frequent cyclospora vectors. So I passed, and ate somewhere else.

I've mentioned that I had as broken tooth extracted. This leaves a space which has to heal for a period of several months until an implant can be placed. In the meantime, there's a gap, and to keep the neighboring teeth from moving over and filling the gap I've been given a prosthesis. This isn't just an artificial tooth to fill up the hole; the artificial tooth is embedded in a hard plastic device that fits over my entire upper teeth and was made by taking a putty impression of my bite.

I can't eat with this thing in, and I'm not expected to wear it more than half the time. I've been putting it in after dinner and leaving it there until breakfast, taking it out briefly if I have a late-night snack. It's very snug, hard to get in place and equally hard to remove. I've been assured it will loosen over time, and even after only several days I'm noting a bit of that, just a bit. It's transparent and close to invisible from outside unless you look closely, and it doesn't interfere much with my speaking, though yesterday when I told B. I had been watching the old movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town she thought I'd said Mr. Bean.

And that's going to be my duty for the next few months. This is just one of the medical regimens that shape my life right now, but it's the easiest to write about.

Slate has been running a daily quiz of six questions each with four multiple-choice possible answers, which runs the gamut from six questions I know the answers to offhand to six questions I have absolutely no idea of.

Occasionally there's a clever question or set of answers, and I liked one of today's in a cultural quiz; the question was, what were the names of the other two members of Josie and the Pussycats? Though I've seen the movie, I didn't remember the answer - which was Valerie and Melody - but I got it right because of what the wrong answers were. They were 1) Veronica and Betty, 2) Violet and Patty, 3) Velma and Daphne. I could remember where all three of those pairs came from, though two of the sources I've had no contact with in a long time, so elimination gave me the right answer.

There is no need for me to write about the soul-crushing news that Alex Ross, probably the finest classical music critic of all time, is retiring from his regular job as critic for The New Yorker, where he would occasionally - too rarely - write long and thoughtful articles, far beyond quotidian concert reviews, about the state of music. He'll continue to write, not always about music (as not always in the past, either), but it's not the same.

I don't need to write about it because it's already been said eloquently by Joshua Kosman, Will Robin, and Lisa Hirsch. And here's Ross's own thoughts in reaction to this.

I've met Alex Ross a couple of times. He would occasionally come out to speak in my area, and I was able to chat with him after the talk. I particularly remember thanking him for his then-recent article about Florence Price, whom I'd been erratically pushing as the first great American female composer. Now I had Ross's endorsement of her greatness, and it later turned out to have kicked off a virulent Price revival, whereby her previously obscure music is now heard all the time.

Such was the respect in which Ross was held and the influence that his statements had. As a sometime music critic myself, I can say that he was the highlight, the monument, of my profession.

Robert Strauss, Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents (Lyons Press, 2016)
The publication date explains how it was still possible to attribute this superlative to Buchanan, who sat there unmoving as the nation plunged towards civil war, having already endorsed the Dred Scott decision, which essentially negated the free states' anti-slavery laws.
The book starts out as whimsically as its title, with the author pawing through his father's history book collection for info on Buchanan - there isn't much. But it mutates into not just a full biography of the man, but a history of his political times. There's an entire chapter which has very little on Buchanan, but is a detailed account of the political background behind the presidential election of 1856. There's also a comparison of Buchanan with other Bad Presidents, explaining why he's worse.
The one thing Strauss doesn't do is explain how Buchanan could be such an active, even belligerent executive in other areas - the Mormon rebellion, the Pig War, he even launched an invasion of Paraguay (Paraguay?!) after the government there fired on a US ship - and yet be so inert at southern threats to take over US forts. Some of the other books on Buchanan that Strauss mentions - he's quite thorough bibliographically - get into this, but Strauss doesn't allude to it. (Basically, he was secretly sympathetic to their cause, but this motivation got buried in postwar historical analysis.)

Speaking of which, there's
Jonathan Horn, The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee's Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History (Scribner, 2015)
The decision was, of course, the one to resign his US Army commission and go with his state Virginia's decision to secede, even though he thought secession was a bad idea, had nothing but misgivings about the war to come, and he wasn't enthusiastic about slavery despite being a major slave-owner himself.
What Washington had done was declare himself primarily a citizen of the US as a whole. He would never, Horn says, have supported a state's secession. Why didn't Lee? Why did Lee decide that the one thing he couldn't do was raise arms against his native state?
Horn doesn't really answer this question, and despite the title doesn't concentrate on the decision. This is a full biography of Lee, though it skips lightly over some of the eventless years in the peacetime army. There's nevertheless a lot of interesting background, especially about his personal and family finances. Did you know that 1) Lee was available to lead the Harper's Ferry campaign against John Brown, although he was stationed out in Texas at the time, because he was home on leave after his father-in-law died? 2) that for many years Lee was not a legal resident of Virginia at all, but of the District of Columbia, because Arlington was in the west bank portion that was part of D.C. until retroceded to Virginia in 1846? 3) although he'd previously worn a mustache, he didn't grow his beard until after the Civil War started?

Saturday evening was Redwood's annual outdoors concert, held in the courthouse square downtown. It's right near the train station, so I took the commuter train up. It runs every half an hour, well into the evenings, on weekends, and the parking garage down at my end won't be full.

Advertising for the concert advised bringing lawn chairs. I don't have one, and wouldn't be inclined to lug it on the train anyway. I figured I'd arrive early and sit on one of the low stone walls that surround the plaza. But what I found was that a large number of slat chairs had been arranged in front of the orchestra's tent, so I could sit in one of those.

The orchestra was under a tent, and was festooned with microphones, the speakers for which gave a tinny and metallic sound to the music, especially the strings. They played Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I'm always up for hearing, sloppy and warbly in places, but the Largo and finale came out pretty much OK.

Also on the program, the waltz from Swan Lake, and two extremely catchy military marches, the second of which conductor Eric Kujawsky is convinced was an homage to the first: the "Colonel Bogey" March, and the main theme from the movie The Great Escape, by Kenneth Alford and Elmer Bernstein respectively. I know both marches well, but this was the first time I'd ever heard either in concert.

When I was very small, 3 or 4 I guess, "Colonel Bogey," then in the flush of fame coming off its appearance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, was my favorite piece of music. I wrote lyrics to it about my baby brother, the first line of which is all I can remember and which went, "Mikey, he is a pike-pike boy." What a pike-pike boy may be, I can alas no longer remember.

When we went to a record store to buy a recording of "Colonel Bogey," my parents encouraged me to make the request. "Do you have 'Mikey Is a Pike-Pike Boy'?" I asked. The clerks disclaimed knowledge of this until my parents told me to sing it. Then they said, "Oh yes, we have that."

All the signing and stamping have been done, and B. and I have officially created our wills. It's a rather complicated procedure; we're establishing a living trust and putting some of our assets into it, with the trust as the sole heir of each of us. Then, after we're both deceased, come the bequests and the distribution of the residue of the estate. This, our financial advisor explained, will simplify matters and avoid probate. I won't live to see it, of course, but I hope it works out that way.

After getting the documents drafted, for which we employed an online legal service, we needed witnesses - for which we asked the nearest nephew & his wife - and a notary. Then we needed the relevant assets transferred to the trust, which meant visits to brokers and a lot of paperwork which isn't complete yet.

Our medical provider had already nudged us into filling out advance directives using their forms (a lot better drafted than the ones the legal service provided), and we're keeping those with the same documents.

Owing to scheduling glitches, I missed last year's edition of the annual walk-through avant-garde concert held at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland's ornate columbarium and mausoleum. But I got there this year, nabbing a nearby parking space by arriving 2.5 hours early, with my lunch packed in my car.

Unfortunately many of my favorite performers didn't get there this year. So instead of focusing on them, I decided to emphasize the walk-through aspect and prowl around until I found things worth sitting and listening to for a while.

Garden of Memory always begins at 5 pm rather unpopulated, but although the organizers limit attendance, it tends to get more and more crowded over its four-hour length until it becomes deucedly uncomfortable. So I figured I'd start at the part of the building that gets the most crowded later on, the east end of the old wing, and I headed straight for the room designated the Garden of St. Matthew. Instead of being a niche like many of the "garden" rooms, it's along a major pathway. When I've been there before, interesting music was always going on, but I could never stop and listen to it but had to proceed directly towards the exit on the other side of the room, and the reason was that the room was so crowded that, if you stopped, you were blocking the only (and invariably busy) pathway.

So this time I got there early to get a spot where I could stop and listen, and found singer-songwriter Majel Connery on double-tracked vocals and electronic keyboard, accompanied by Felix Fan on electronic cello. I'd actually heard Connery here before, and was impressed with what I heard, but I'd never sealed her down as one of my favorites. I have now. I found this stuff enrapturing; unfortunately nothing of hers online really sounds like what I heard, so I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

Proceeding onward, I wound up in Laura Inserra's old stomping grounds (she's not there this year), the Garden of Eternal Wisdom, where I found violinist Shira Kammen, hammer dulcimer player Robin Petrie, and Celtic harpist Shelley Phillips playing what sounded like Celtic folk music with a Middle Eastern edge to it. I was able to grab the only chair in the room and sat in comfort for quite a while to listen to this charming stuff. Getting lost in the building is part of the experience, the publicity says, and as always in this room I noticed someone starting at the event map trying to figure out which room they were in. (I whispered it to them.) When I left, I found the twisty passage leading to the room was packed with people waiting for an opportunity to enter and listen, so again I had been wise to get there fairly early.

At this point, I found it was time for a set I wanted to hear in the largest venue, the Chimes Chapel, customarily shared by 3 or 4 performers. This was a contemporary classical art song recital, mezzo Silvie Jensen accompanied by pianist Sarah Cahill (founder of this concert series and a regular performer here) in songs by Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and some other younger composers whose names I didn't know and didn't catch. The Glass and Monk sounded very typical of their composers although I hadn't heard these particular pieces before.

I then hung around for the next set, which was the women's chorus Kitka - which I first encountered here, many years ago - applying their standard nasal vocals to their usual repertoire of obscure Eastern European and Central Asian folk music. As always, a half hour set by Kitka is easier to take than a whole concert. Talking with the people next to me beforehand, I found they'd never heard Kitka before. This is going to be unusual, I warned them.

By this time it was 7:30 and I moved onward to the new wing, which I'd avoided earlier in the day, as it's more spacious and is consequently better saved for later when things are more crowded. Here I passed by a lot of performers of ambient noodling, none of which attracted me enough to make me want to sit down and listen for a while. So eventually I meandered back down to the entrance and left just before the closing time of 9 pm.