Eve of October

There was something in my old apartment building that I didn't notice until I was winding down the big move.  The sun was shining in the gangway a certain way and I glanced up and caught a flash of gold.  Well, what do you know?  Uncle Ken isn't the only fan of the mighty sunflower.  Eleven years of living in that building and this was the first time I noticed sunflowers growing on the back landing of a third floor apartment.

My houseplants are doing well and I'm enjoying them much more than I anticipated.  Some are showing noticable growth and others are just maintaining a healthy demeanor, if plants can have such a quality.  It's been a simple pleasure for me to notice how the sun tracks a slighly different path every day as I move the plants so they get as much sun as possible; sunlight is reaching deeper in the apartment as the sun's path is lower every day.  But I'm still sorting out all my crap and floor space is still at a premium; this place is going to be a work in progress for the foreseeable future.

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I finished reading The Draft piece by Uncle Ken but I'm having trouble with determining the timeline.  The three of us dealt with military service in distinctly different ways and I'm trying to tie them all together.  From what I've read it seems that Mr. Beagles enlisted in 1964 after his sojourn in Alaska and completed his service in 1967.  I enlisted in 1968 and got out in 1971 but all I can tell about Uncle Ken's experience is that he was in Berkeley in 1967.  I'm curious about the time he spent dodging the government's paperwork before his C.O. duties at the hospital.  If Uncle Ken was indeed in the Bay Area at that time how come there's not a word about the Summer of Love, the Fillmore, Haight Ashbury, and all that groovy stuff?

In reviewing past posts Mr. Beagles mentioned he was given the chance to opt out of his enlistment commitments.  What does that mean?

And for Mr. Beagles' amusement, here's a pic of the shank, the paring knife I made recently.  Works pretty well, and as I use it I'll be trimming it down for a better fit to my hand.
 

cheddar, black olive, and jalapeno corn muffins

 There it is Dawgs, the fixings to make a dozen boxfuls worth of corn muffins,  Probably way more than enough, but isn't more than enough a fine number? There will be cheddar cheese, black olives, and chopped jalapenos.  I was also thinking of adding sun-dried tomatoes and maybe something else, and maybe tweaking the proportions, but then in a rare flash of lucidity I realized maybe there is a reason the recipe called for so much of this and so much of that, and maybe I should just follow it.

I have a friend and a baker who once told me that cooking is just cooking, but baking is an art, so I emailed her and she told me that I had it exactly backwards.  Cooking is feeling and baking is science  is what she had said.  So, though sorely tempted, I shall attempt to stay on the straight and narrow.

But then we have a baker right among us and I have a question for him.  I can understand where if you are baking something for the first time you want to follow the straight and narrow path of science.  But after you have done that a few times, doesn't it get awfully boring?  When I am painting I never know how my painting is going to end up and my primary motivation to keep pressing on is to see what it will look like when it is finished.  If I knew what it was going to look like before I was done, I don't think I would bother.  Actually I think Old Dog just baked things once or twice and then in search of new culinary excitement he moved on to other, likely more challenging projects.  But then I am sure that he will set me straight on this whole project.

Speaking of Old Dog, he has tasted my corn muffins before and found them to be 'not too bad.'  There will be improvements.  Previously, not having cups for my muffins I just squirted the batter into those little paper cup thingies, and shoved them into the oven where the heat further deformed them and they came out in the shape of, well, dog turds.  But two Christmases ago my sister bought me two large tins that will contain the muffins so that when they come out they will be shipshape.  And in my zest to boldly seize the day, I always prefer something overdone over something merely done and in that spirit my muffins have always been some shade deeper than golden brown.  In truth that is how I prefer them but other people, not so much.  So this time I will keep a sharp watch on the time and make frequent peeks into the oven to make sure they are whisked from the heat just before they reach the tawny stage.

Very well Gentlemen.  I shall keep you informed.

as god is my witness i will never click on a bare link again, i would rather step on a lego

 Beagles' forebears may have come in ships but to the anti immigration folk of the day they were swarming in like locusts.  Of course there were no immigration laws back then, but fifty years later they would not have allowed those ships of human vermin to dock on our shores at all, and there would not have been a Beagles at all.  As to his worries about the country being overpopulated, I have to ask when is the last time he left the swamp to take a look at the USA?

That link led nowhere, but it doesn't matter, because I have already read about it in my regular news feed.  Apparently Beagles thinks that things that are common knowledge are hidden truths that he has uncovered through internet sleuthing.  And he can't be bothered to insert the link into the proper form so that it can be clicked on instead of copying and pasting it into that whatchamacallit, only to find out, by the way, that it doesn't work.  And then he doesn't do as I do, accompanying all my links with an explanation and what my opinion of it is, but just shoves it in like a finger going into the reader's nose.  And DeSantis, this is the guy who has willingly let tens of thousands of the people of his state die in the (futile) hope that Trump will allow him to run for president.

But Beagles is dead on with this one.

The only reason some of them helped the Americans was the Americans were paying better than whoever was in second place at the moment.  

This has been the problem with all our experiments in nation building since Vietnam.  We go in there because there is some popular movement we want to stop, and at first we think we'll just kill the leaders of the popular movement and that will put a stop to that, but then it turns out that the people really like the movement, so then we decide that we should win their hearts and minds, but we never put much effort into that.  It's much easier to just pay some warlord who says he is on our side.  

We think we can win their hearts and minds by paying them money and standing over them with guns, and that works well enough but we just don't have enough people to stand over everyone.

And then there is the issue of the women.  As Americans of the current day we abhor the way they treat them.  They really should be able to get an education and go outside without a burka.  And we pointed out that we made some moves in that direction, but just in the cities, not in the countryside, where the woman probably would like to go to school and go outside without being in a burlap sack, but that is never going to happen, and unpleasant as the Taliban are, at least there isn't that everyday violence.

Say it Isn't So

 I read that whole New Yorker article last night and found it quite disturbing.  Of course it might not be 100% true, few stories are, but even if it's only10% true, it's still pretty disturbing.  I find it hard to believe that our guys would target innocent civilians like that.  I understand that shit happens in a war, but this appears to have been a matter of policy rather than a few isolated incidents where somebody got carried away.  I can't for the life of me figure out what our guys hoped to gain by this tactic.  There might be a logical explanation, but I don't know what it is.  

I think I do know now why the Afghanis meekly stepped aside and allowed the Taliban to over run their country.  It's because it's not really their country, or anybody's country for that matter, it's just a bunch of tribal warlords squabbling over who gets first dibs on the looting and pillaging.  The only reason some of them helped the Americans was the Americans were paying better than whoever was in second place at the moment.  

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 "There were many in the country when Beagles' forbears stepped off the boat that would have loved to apply his solution right at the dock."

 First of all, I don't think they even had vasectomies and tubal litigation when my ancestors came over.  The only surgical sterilization available was castration, and I'm not recommending that for anybody.  Second of all, my ancestors did not come swarming into the country like a horde of locusts.  They moved through the facilities at Ellis Island in an orderly fashion.  Of course that was more feasible when immigrants came by ship to a central facility where the ships could be unloaded one at a time while the rest of them waited their turn out in the harbor.  Another thing was that overpopulation was not a concern back in those days.  Some parts of the world were certainly overcrowded, but nobody expected it to become a global problem anytime soon.

On a related note:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/desantis-announces-lawsuit-against-biden-administration-over-immigration-policy/ar-AAOW145?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare  

The Women of Afghanistan

I think that's Old Dog in the back, because of the dog thing, Beagles at the front right because of that grim expression, and I of course am on the left with the gleam of the enlightenment in my eyes and with my mouth open.

There were many in the country when Beagles's forbears stepped off the boat that would have loved to apply his solution right at the dock.

I was going to continue with my math lesson announcing the rational numbers and them move on to the scary world of the irrational numbers, and to the strangeness of the imaginary numbers, but I'll give it a pause to speak of an article about Afghan women I read in the New Yorker over the weekend.

It's a long article, but it's even handed and I think quite enlightening, a view of the people who live in the countryside of Afganistan rather than the view of the Washington policy makers of the succeeding administrations.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

It reminds me a little of a book about Chinese women I read maybe twenty years ago, Wild Swans.  In the period before the revolution which was pretty feudal, they had no rights and were treated like chattel.  Then the nationalists, the Japanese and the guys Beagles loves to call the red Chinese took over, and each time the women thought they would do better and each time the new leaders turned out to be shits to them.

These Afghani women had a long succession of regimes come to their villages, the feudal guys, the Russkies, the mujahedeen, the Taliban, the Americans, and now the Taliban again.

It seems to me that the US has had three different goals in Afghanistan, revenge, nation-building, and fighting terrorism.  

The revenge was of course for 911.  That had to happen.  There was no way a US president could have shrugged his shoulders and said, well, shit happens.  Ben Laden slipped through our fingers, but we did topple the Taliban and that would have been a very good time, to dust off our hands like after the first gulf war, and go home.  

But W, who I think may have turned out to be not such a bad prez were it not for the seductive Dick Cheney whispering neocon dreams into his ear about Iraq and Afghanistan becoming bastions of capitalism in the mideast through nation building.  

Well that turned into a fine mess, and Obama was not seduced by neocon dreams at all but thought that if we kept a presence there we would be better able to keep a close watch on terrorism.  That did not turn out well either because then we had to make all kinds of agreements to brutal warlords which drove the rural Afghanis into the arms of the Taliban.

More on this and reflections on what it all means will be arriving in subsequent posts.  It's a long article, but it is interesting reading.

Head 'Em Up, Move 'Em Out!

I see that they finally cleaned out the migrant camp under that bridge in Texas.

"On Sunday, Mayorkas told CNN about 4,000 Haitians who arrived in the past two weeks have been expelled, 13,000 others had been allowed to enter the US to pursue their immigration cases in court and 8,000 had voluntarily chosen to return to Mexico."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/haiti-deportations-justified-because-of-covid-biden-homeland-secretary-says/ar-AAOQjlU?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShareIt doesn't say how they decided which ones could stay and which ones had to leave, or how those who left "voluntarily" were persuaded to volunteer.  The message it sends to others who are contemplating an attempt to break into our country is, "Go ahead and try, you've got at least a 50-50 chance of making it, and the worst thing that could happen is you get a free ride home."Like I have said before, the only thing I've got against these people is that there are way too many of them.  We were all warned, way back in the 1950s, that, if we didn't do something to reduce our population growth, Mother Nature would do it for us, and it wasn't going to be pretty.  I got an idea the other day to resolve the situation.  Let anyone who wants to immigrate to our country, provided that they agree to voluntarily submit to surgical sterilization.  I'm not talking castration, just vasectomies for the men and tubal litigation for the women.  They can still have all the sex they want, but they will be shooting blanks.  I know it will never pass, I'm just saying.  Remember, you heard it first from Talks With Beagles.

   

EXCLUSIVE!

The image below shows the alleged key members of the fringe group known as The Beaglesonian Institute.  True identities have yet to be determined but it is thought that they are "Uncle Ken, " "Talks with Beagles," and the "Old Dog."

Be on the alert!  The authorities have been notified.

on to the primes

 What subtraction is to addition, division is to multiplication, kind of the reverse.  Also like subtraction it is non commutative. 8x7 = 7x8, but 8/7 does not equal 7/8. If I have 80 sheep and I want to know how many herds of 20 I can make, I can divide them 20 into 80 and get 4.  But now it is a two step problem, for multiplication I just have to multiply but for division I have to first multiply and then divide. 1x20, no.  2x20, no.  3x20, no.  4x20, ah there we are.

And in the majority of cases you do not get an integer, you get an arrested development.  Divide 4 into 3 and you get 3/4 which is really just a description of the operation, but there it is, you can't go any further.  You now have fractions, and really there is no way to do proper arithmetic without them, you have to admit them into the kingdom, and now you have the rational numbers, which includes all the integers, and the negatives, and that odd fellow zero, and all those abominable fractions. 

It is my opinion, as a substitute teacher for grades k to 8, that at this point (third, fourth) grade, arithmetic becomes hard for the kids.  For all the other operations you can use those little cubes, line them up, toss them together, take some away, no problem.  But for division you have to use the pie on the blackboard, half a pie, a third of a pie, etc.  I always called them pizza pies to make them more fun for the kids, but they were not fooled wrong.

And then there is that awful long division.  To multiply 2,345,678 by 876,543 the main problem is keeping your lines straight and remembering what number to carry.  To do long division you have to do all that multiplication, and then you have to subtract big numbers with all the carrying and borrowing that that entails, and it's just a lot of fucking work.

And then there are the operations on fractions, before you can add or subtract them you have to multiply their denominators so that they are the same, and in that process you have to remember to multiply the numerators also. For multiplication it's not that bad you just multiply through, but division is excruciating.  You have to remember to turn one of them, I think the second one upside down and then multiply.  "Mr Schadt, why do I turn the second one upside down?"  Mr Schadt smiles indulgently and begins blah, blah, blah, and ends up sputtering, "Because I told you to, that's why."

And here is another thing.  Those fractions, those arrested developments, if you are dividing by two you get an integer every other time, if you divide by three you get an integer every third time, four, every fourth time, five, every fifth time.  In between are the fractions.  And there are certain numbers that unless you divide them by themselves always give you a fraction.  At first they are plentiful, 2,3,5,7,11,13, but by say 5,000 they get sparser 5,003, 5,009, 5,011, 5,021, and the farther you go the sparser they get, but they never completely fade away because there is an infinite number of them.  You would think there would be a pattern for them in something logical like a number system, but there is not.

biden

 Welcome back Old Dog.  Ravenswood is now on the air, and with enough opinions to wake up the blog a  bit.

I'll just pick one here and that will be Old Joe Biden.  I never had much of an opinion of him before he became veep.  As veep, I would often cringe when a news story lead with "Joe Biden, said today-", but there were also times when he spoke plainly as Joe Everyman in contrast to the intellectual Obama. that were moving.

I never thought that he would participate in the primary.  Having joined it I thought he had no chance.  When I cast my vote it was for Bernie.  But I did not feel so bad when he won the primaries because I felt that he probably had the best chance of beating Trump.

Well what is not to like about a guy beating Trump?  But outside of that it seemed like he was able to bring the moderates and progressives together and to deliver a coherent kumbaya message.  And there was something else: he believed in something.  I wasn't that crazy about his beliefs which seemed kind of cornball, kind of like the dems back in Kennedy days, but still it felt bracing to know that he was not just some windbag.

But I am not so fond of him now as I was then.  He seems a little lost, a little ineffectual.  He has this belief in bipartisanship, which is totally out of synch with today's political world.  And he is no longer able to hold the dems together, and overall seems out of it, and not to be aware of that, exuding a calm confidence which is disturbing.

But I don't think of him as a hack.  I think of a hack as a guy who acts like he is acting on high principles, but is just using them for his own means, and really doesn't believe in anything he says, but just picks the words that will work for the moment, someone like oh, Lindsey Graham.

But as is my habit I went to the google and found this

 a politician who belongs to a small clique that controls a political party for private

rather than public ends

And then I found this other thing

"Political hack", also called partisan hack, is a pejorative term describing a person who is part of the political party apparatus, but whose intentions are more aligned with victory than personal conviction.

These are not the same thing, and I expect that while the term may have once had a concrete meaning, now it is just used as an insult to apply to any politician you don't like.

And now on to more boring things.  Of course you cannot have a negative sheep, but if you wanted to express how your shepherding is going this year as opposed to last year and it turns out that you have four fewer sheep this year it sort of makes sense.  So if we want our mathematics to be useful we will have to add the negatives, and this gives us the set of numbers known as the integers as opposed to the natural numbers.  There are a lot of them but they are not all that different, just like a mirror image of the positives.  If you add or multiply integers you always get another integer, so everything seems hunky dory.

But there is an odd thing here.  When you subtract an integer from itself you get zero, which is neither positive or negative, and if you add it to itself or multiply it by itself, you just get zero again.  Odd, but easy enough to work with so it is also admitted as an integer, how much trouble can nothing be?  A lot as it turns out. 

As Time Goes By

 While it's certainly true that the perception of time is subjective, that's not what Uncle 
Ken and I have been arguing about.  What we have been arguing about is Einstein's concept of time or, more properly, spacetime.  I don't claim to understand the math behind it, but I think I have a layman's grasp of the broad general principles involved.  One of those principles is that, as the velocity of a moving body increases, time actually slows down.  It doesn't just appear to slow down, it really slows down.  When Einstein first developed this theory, there was no empirical way to either prove or disprove it, he just figured it out in his head.  Subsequent experiments conduced years later by others have tended to confirm it, although not definitively prove it.  

If you want to know more about it, you could check out the links from Wikipedia that I posted, which Uncle Ken has refused to do.  It's like the time I was arguing with one of my paper mill colleagues about something in the Michigan game and fish codes.  I brought a copy of the codes to work the next day, read the part to him that confirmed my assertion, and then shoved the copy across the table to him, challenging him to read me something that supported his position. He shoved the copy back to me without looking at it, saying "I don't need to read it, I already know what it says."

Good luck with those maple tree seeds Old Dog.  If you want a seedling, you might have better luck finding one growing wild (we call that "volunteering") in somebody's garden or even a crack in the sidewalk.  Trees put out a lot of seeds and only a small portion of them ever sprout.  The one that has already sprouted is a proven survivor.  

I don't need to plant trees at all on my property, they grow wild like dandelions.  I need to mow my trails and clearings once a year to keep them from reverting to forest.  

Arf! Arf!

It's good to be back online but it hasn't been without a few snags.  This new connection is so crazy fast that my tired old laptop is having WiFi gateway issues, whatever that means.  I'll sort it out later, maybe, and truth be told, I didn't miss the internet all that much.  Except for the musings of the Institute, of course.

Even then I didn't miss that much, really.  Too much rambling about things I don't care much about but I'm not going to rain on your parade.  But I find myself agreeing with Mr. Beagles more and more frequently.  The "speed of time" for instance, but not quite in the same way you guys were discussing.  Perception of time is subjective, it seems to me, and I'll leave it at that.  Ten minutes in a dentist's chair can be an eternity but ten minutes in an amorous embrace can be a blink of an eye.

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I find it easier to ignore politics, too.  Just recently I read or heard, don't remember which, this cogent phrase: "Left wing, right wing, it's the same bird."  I've got to give Mr. Beagles credit; he seems to give a lot of thought to different ideologies without following in lockstep to the traditional parties.  Yes, I think Joe Biden may be a nice guy but he is a political hack going back decades.  But that is just more crap I don't care about so I'll let it go and move on.

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Last Saturday as I was catching up with my old pal, Larry the bartender at the Ten Cat, I happened to see the new watercolors by Uncle Ken.  Definitely his best work in many years; there were even a couple that I liked.

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As I gaze across the green treetops my thoughts return to Beaglesonia and a statement Mr. Beagles made about being the "steward" of the trees, or something like that.  How's that going?  I read something about the return of the American Chestnut, or a close variant, and maybe Mr. Beagles knows the inside scoop.  I won't call myself a cockeyed optimist but I have a couple of maple seeds I'm trying to germinate.

This summer has been an eye-opener to me in many ways, mainly that I've become an old fart.  The move out of my old apartment did not go as smoothly as the move into it eleven years ago and my sore back is still recovering.  But I'm taking more time to think about many things and realized that, despite a few minor political differences, I'm drifting towards  Mr. Beagles' camp.  I even went and got the Illinois combination fishing/hunting license, just in case I get real hungry, y'know?  And I'll have to upload a pic of the little paring knife I made out of a broken steak knife, wood shims, and epoxy.  In the prison yard they call this type of thing a "shank," quite an effective tool for less than an hour's work.

wednesday math

 Let me interrupt this math lesson to bring you an observation.  I was watching tv when this familiar story came up, seems like you see a story like it at least once every day.  A young woman with wonderful kids and wonderful hubby, and well employed, and well loved, and a wonderful life ahead of her and now dead as a doornail.  Another one of those vax deniers.  But not one of those fanatics with a MAGA hat and fantastical theories, just a surgical nurse who vaguely thought it wasn't tested long enough or maybe that she was young and healthy, or maybe something some celeb had said.

But wait a minute, surgical nurse?  Don't you have to go to school for that?  Don't you have to learn about medical science and viruses and all that stuff?  

But then I remembered when I was going to edukashun skool. and the lecturer would drone on and the pens would glide across the notebooks, and nary a hand in the air, nary a question.  And then one day the lecturer went on about Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which is just a heaping poop pile of unwarranted assumptions, just the mutterings of some guy sitting in an overstuffed chair sipping brandy and smoking a cigar, which is not common sense and which no research has ever verified.  You can look it up here if you are of a mood.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

Anyway the point is my hand was the only one that shot up into the air.  The students listened to my sputtering with mild amusement but no pen met paper.  Nothing to write down here, nothing that would be on the test.  They were here to put in whatever was needed to get their teaching certificate and begin their careers of educating America's youth, not necessarily to learn anything.  

I have often wondered how so many medical people could be so ignorant, and now I am guessing that they were just like those education students, not necessarily learning anything, just getting their certificate.  

Just getting that off my mind.

Meanwhile as western civ was rolling along things were doing fine.  We had addition where you add one natural number (the number of sheep in this valley) to another (the number of sheep in that valley) to find out how many sheep you had altogether and the answer was always a natural number.  And we had another operation, multiplication (if you have herds of sheep numbering twenty each in four different valleys, how many sheep do you have altogether?) and the answer to that was also a natural number.  So everything was hunky dory.

But what if a wolf got four of your sheep from your herd of twenty?  How many sheep did you have now?  Well since to add numbers you just put up as many fingers as the first number and then count out the second number, then count all your fingers and you have it.  What you could do for, let's call it subtraction, you could put up as many fingers as you had sheep before and count off as many as the wolf got and then count the remaining fingers and there you are.  Still hunky dory.

But there is an odd thing here, a break in symmetry.  7 + 8 = 8 + 7, obviously.   But 8 - 7 does not equal 7 - 8, what is with that?  And worse, what the hell does 7 - 8 equal?  How can you have a negative sheep?  

We will continue down this road tomorrow.

math tuesday

 In the beginning there were just the natural numbers, the numbers Joe Sixrock, sitting outside his cave, idly watching the clouds roll by in the sunny days of prehistory, and thinking why look now I have as many fingers up as those birds perched on the tree.  Then another alit and he put up another finger and now he was onto something.  He was counting.  As he was living in a hunter gatherer society he had plenty of time on his hands and he could have worked out all the mathematics that fill our university math libraries today. 

Well it would have taken some time and practically speaking he would have needed something to write all this down, but it was not a problem, because he wasn't interested in doing anything like that, he just wanted to keep track of things, and from what we know from current hunter gatherer tribes his numbers didn't exceed five or six and after that it was just many, and that was good enough for him.  

As we developed agriculture and now had things to count, it must have become obvious that we couldn't just go on thinking of new names for each number, and if you looked at a whole bunch of notches on a log you really couldn't tell how many there were without going through the arduous process of counting each one.  You needed some other kind of unit, and five became as clear as the back of one's hand.  Since you have two hands you get ten.  They could have included their feet and got to twenty, but they didn't, they stopped at five and ten, and then they had five tens (L) and ten tens (C) and five ten-tens (D) and ten ten-tens (M), and then I guess they had enough, though you can see that if they ever had to write a million they would be in a bind.  The Sumerians by contrast came up with a base of 60, and after all those years we still have 60 minute hours.

Just looking at those Roman numerals you have to think geez, isn't there a better way.  But those Romans were tough so nobody said anything until about five hundred years later when the Arabs were top dogs and one look at their number notation system and it was clear that this was a better way, and along the way the way the Arabs picked up the zero from the Indians, and now you could represent a million succinctly with 1,000,000.  Which is pretty nifty, but a billion becomes a little iffy.  You could use the exponential thing with 1*10^10, but eventually as you go higher and higher you are going to need an exponent for the exponent not to fill the page, and then you will need an exponent for that exponent, and so on and so on and dooby dooby do on.  Infinity is always a problem.

culinary tips

 For many years my winter chow was ramen noodles with maybe half bag of frozen Brussel sprouts and a half  bag of frozen string beans.  Not always those two vegetables, but generally two different bags of frozen vegetables and I liked it just fine.  But maybe ten years ago I made the switch to fresh vegetables and I like them even better.

It may be true that frozen and fresh have the same vitamins, but in taste and texture I find the fresh veggies more than worth the extra time it takes to chop them up.  I make a ritual of it, chopping them while watching America's Funniest Home Videos on Sunday nights.  I never get tired of watching people fall down, but I cringe at the sight of all those cute babies.

Speaking of culinary stuff.  For summer chow I cut up some bell peppers (while watching AFHV of course), cook them with diced tomatoes and jalapenos, add a couple cans of chili beans, a can of corn and a can of garbonzos, pickled jalapenos to taste, and there you have it.  Then I eat that four days a week, and I am like the dog in the cartoon watching his master shaking the goop out of the can and thinking excitedly, "Oh Boy dog food again!"

So glad to hear the hypothetical wife liked my story.  Too me it is hilarious, but you never know how other people will react.  If I am reading it this Wednesday night and the audience is just sitting there and wondering what got into this crazy old coot and not laughing, I will be mighty embarrassed.

I don't remember if I read all those wiki things Beagles presented.  The fact is that I have read this stuff on the internet and in books for years, and I know I will agree with everything they say.

But they never say that time speeds up.  It doesn't make any mathematical sense.  It's like saying space speeds up.  But these are just words and if Beagles chooses them to make sense of something which is contrary to common sense, then I will allow it.  

Brussels Sprouts

 My hypothetical wife and I talked it over. and we can't remember ever seeing Brussels sprouts in the fresh produce section, but then we have never looked for them there because we have always bought them frozen.  Contrary to what some people say, frozen vegetables are just as good as fresh vegetables if you plan to cook them, but not, of course, if you plan to eat them raw.  

The best way to cook frozen veggies is in the microwave.  It's not only easier and faster than other methods, but they also taste better.  You don't need to thaw them first, just dump them in a bowl with cling wrap stretched over the top to prevent splattering.  The instructions on the bag should tell you how long to cook them, if not, start with around seven minutes.  You don't want to overcook them, just get them steaming hot.  Then, if you want, you can put butter or cheese on them and cook them for one more minute.  Any longer than that and you might scorch the butter or melt the cheese into a liquid state, which you don't want to do.  I don't think you would even have to microwave them if you wanted them in your soup.  Just slam the bag down on the table before you open it, which should loosen them up enough for you to pick out as many as you want, and add them to your soup before you warm it up. 

Of course, Uncle Ken's latest story is not just about Brussels sprouts, it's about a crotchety old man who feels that the modern world has left him behind.  It's a good story, even my hypothetical wife liked it, and she doesn't like hardly anything.  

Speaking of Uncle Ken, I still wonder whether or not he even looked at the stuff from Wikipedia that I posted about that time thing.  He is always admonishing me to look things up instead of trusting my own memory, and then, when I do, he either ignores it or dismisses it as Trumpist propaganda.

one year ago

 I kind of want to avoid politics because it is um, divisive, and time has come to a dead stop on our Einstein discussion, well not really a dead stop because of course time has no speed.  If it had speed then it could have negative speed and we could go back in time, which we all know that we cannot without some wormhole legerdemain.

But in the universe of The Institute we can go back in time and I went back to the middle of September way back in 2020.  Back then Illinois was past its first covid peak, and was just in the foothills of the great peak of that winter.  Right now we are in a slight decline, but winter is dead ahead, but most people are vaccinated, but we now have the delta, so it's unsure what the path will be.

I am wearing a mask inside everywhere.  I don it before I leave my condo, pull it down when I hit that refreshing outdoor air, and pull it back up when I enter Walgreens or Target.  The Ten Cat is open so there is that.  I wear the mask mostly out of courtesy, but also of course it is the law.  But I don't have much fear because I have the vaccine and no really bad condition.  Actually Chicago is doing pretty good, it is the southern tip where they have run out of hospitals, where the expansion is going on.

September a year ago we were talking about the police, Kyle Rittenhouse, and BLM.  The city of Chicago has just inked a contract with the police giving them what seems like a pretty fat slab of money, with reforms apparently going into arbitration.  Kyle Rittenhouse seems to be firmly in the embrace of some Proud Boys organization and his trial date appears to be in the mist.  BLM seems to also be in the mist also.  Well I was never crazy about the way they were organized, it was way too easy for some hothead to mouth off and everybody in the organization had to go along with it.

Right now we are a day away from another siege of Washington, which even red hot Trumpists are avoiding, and the vax mandate seems to be gaining steam, which is a good thing.  Trump looks to be fading just a bit, but if you look at it from another angle you can't be so sure.

And next week  Marina City will have its first ever open mic.  We have seven entertainers and I will be one and I will be reading the following humor piece:

You know I’m not complaining.  The world is the way it is and there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ve accepted that a long time ago and I don’t let trifles ruffle the clear composure of my state of mind, the smooth sailing of my ship of state. 

Simple pleasures really, that’s what it’s all about, like a nice bowl of hot soup on a cold winter afternoon.  Campbell’s Chunky Vegetable is a good enough soup, but it’s a little bland. However if you cut up some Brussels sprouts and stir them in, it perks it right up.  A bowl of perky soup followed by a short nap with the cat on my lap is just the thing for a grey winter’s day.  That doesn’t seem like too much to ask of the world.

But apparently it was too much to ask of the Jewel.  I entered with a smile, already anticipating the warm fullness in my belly, the cat in my lap, the long snooze, and maybe a little Judge Judy afterwards.  A dreamy afternoon which evaporated upon my discovery that within the entire produce section there was not a Brussels sprout to be found. 

My soup would now be noticeably perkless, the warm fullness in my belly incomplete.  I would not be able to really relax into my easy chair, the cat would feel my restlessness and abandon me for that warm spot in the corner next to the register, without the comfort of the cat, sleep would not come, without sleep I would be irritable, unable to snort along with Judy’s witticisms, wishing that she could send all the miscreants before her straight to the electric chair.

But so be it then.  This is, as we often tell ourselves, a free country.  If the store chose not to stock the sprout, as misguided as that decision might be, no doubt the decision of some hot shot corporate types, sneering in their thousand dollar suits, deeming the sprout not the sort of vegetable that they chose to occupy even one lousy little bin in their fancy shmancy gleaming neon produce department, well then is that not their right?

But perhaps we should consider the farmer, the humble man of the soil who tills the sprouts, who is out there rain or shine, dusk till dawn, who raises them from green shoots to galaxies of succulent orbs shining in the dark night with cabbage goodness.  His lined face, which has surely known many hardships, creases into a smile as he thinks of them resting, steaming hot, on the supper plates across the great land of America.

Well not all of America.  Not that part of America served by this particular store.  Seems kind of a shame doesn’t it, that a vegetable, raised with such dedication should be denied to those who appreciate it, not only for its sophisticated taste, but for the creases and  the dedication.  Oh sure among some circles it is considered fashionable to mock these concepts, to consider them old-hat and not relevant to today’s anything-goes society.

And maybe they’re right, but maybe what they need a good swift kick in the pants. 

Not that a person like myself, steering across life’s great ocean with a steady hand on the keel would do anything so extreme, but as my cans of chunky soup were being rung up I thought perhaps a little comment would be in order. 

“I notice that there aren’t any Brussels sprouts,” I said, casually, offhandedly, as if I were saying it looked like rain.

All I got was a shrug, and not much of a one at that.  I tell you, it made me a little angry.

But I didn’t show it.  I just spoke a little louder, a little more directly.  “Big store like this, don’t you think it would carry Brussels sprouts?”

She gave me the smallest of smiles, the smallest of nods as if I had been commenting on the weather, and began ringing up the next customer.

Certainly a swift kick in the keister would have been justified at this point. Who would blame me?

But I kept my calm.  I strolled on over to Customer Service cool as a cucumber.

“Big store like this,” I said.  “You would think it would have Brussels sprouts.”

“Brussels sprouts?” she replied, screwing up her little face.

Oh I know Brussels sprouts are not what you would call a first tier vegetable.  They are not your broccoli or your green beans or your stupid cauliflower.  They are a little exotic, suitable for a refined palate such as mine, not for a spoiled little brat such as this girl with all those food-dye colors in her hair and rhinestones crusting her fingernails.  Dollars to doughnuts when her permissive parents set a plate of savory exotic vegetables in front of her she went into a little pout and they got upset and told her to run along and watch her MTV where the characters on Real Life were popping skittles.

“Yes, Brussels sprouts.  I would like to know why a great big shiny store like this, all the latest whatever, big produce center,  cannot find room in its vastness for Brussels sprouts” 

I can sense that she is looking at me the way she looks at her parents when they fumble with the DVD machine and she is wondering how long before she can put them in the home so that she will only have to visit them once a week. 

“Never mind,” I say and turn on my heel.  I don’t look back to see them rolling their eyes and pointing at me behind their palms.

So then I am back in the vegetable section.  I will go to the source, the hands-on guy, the guy who makes the vegetable decisions, and I will brook no nonsense.

It’s not this guy with the ring in his nose stacking corn, probably dates the little floozy in Customer Service, slides his arm over her shoulder as they watch some dumb teen comedy and yuk it up when the brats lip their elders, but he probably knows who The Big Cauliflower is.

Big Cauliflower, a good one.  That’s who I should ask for, show that under my white mane I am still a hip and with it guy.

“The big cauliflower?” the guy asks after I tap him on the shoulder.  “Oh you must mean Ed, we call him the jolly green giant.”  Damn why didn’t I think of that.  “Over there, buy the oranges.”

I stop to calm myself, and then I gather up a full head of steam and head for the oranges.  Damn, the big vegetable guy turns out to be a big guy, and cranky too, look at the way he slams around those oranges.  I lose a little bit of steam as he turns to scowl at me.

“Brussels sprouts,” I begin with an embarrassing squeak.

“Over there,” he jerks his head and resumes bruising the helpless oranges.

And there they are, right over by the Customer Service girl’s boyfriend.  But you know that’s not where they should be.  They should be with the broccoli and the stupid cauliflower, their cabbage kin.  I should say something, but probably not to Ed. Maybe to the young guy, and then I could add, “And by the way, your girlfriend is a slut.”

No, that’s no way to be.  That’s not the way a good citizen should act.  I will just shake my head sadly at the way the world is going to hell as I bag my sprouts.

And you know there’s another thing I notice as I tear off my plastic bag, which doesn’t tear neatly, they never do, but nevermind.  The little cup that should hold the ties is empty.  Well you know I understand that The Jolly Green Giant’s realm is a busy place, a lot of things to attend to and there will be times when the last tie is taken, and it may be awhile before they can be replaced.

But you know the cup over by the oranges is full.  And this is often the case, more often than if it were by mere coincidence.  Oh I suppose the fruit section attracts a trendier crowd, young kids for the ring-nosed and rhinestone-fingered employees to flirt with and discuss the latest on MTV with.  Busy busy people you know, and it’s a long way for them to walk, clear over to the vegetable section to get their ties, better for the less trendy, older, vegetable crowd like me who have worked hard all their lives rather than spent most of it lounging on their permissive parents’ couches popping skittles and lip-synching inane pop songs to make the trek.

Just the way the world is.  I’m not complaining.

draft ten

 There is something I want to try out on you.  We are having an open mic at the towers next Wednesday, and I am going to give a reading from it.  But in the meantime there is that draft thing, which actually I think you have read before so I am just going to finish it off today.

Well I wasn't going into the army so what did that leave?  Jail or Canada.  You know, it would be bold, it would make a strong statement if I went to jail.  Yes it would, but then I'd be in jail wouldn't I?  Canada it was then.

 But there were rumors going around that Canada would give you a hard time letting you in unless you had a certain amount of cash, I think it was $500, and, as we used to get sick of hearing about when we were youngsters, but never get sick of saying now that we are oldsters, that was a lot of money in those days.  I had come back from California broke and hadn't been working for the Wigwam long enough to stack up much money.  If only I had more time.

 Especially since I had just gotten my draft notice.  Remember The Cream, they had this song:

 Take it back, take it back, take that thing right out of here.

Right away, far away, take that thing right out of here.

Don't let them take me to where streams are red.
I want to stay here and sleep in my own bed.

 I stuffed it back into its envelope, sealed it back up as best as I could, wrote on the outside "No longer at this address," dropped it back into my mail box, and wrote them that I had moved to a friend's address.

 There was another rumor that if you applied for Conscientious Objector status the army would not draft you until that issue was resolved.  And the thing was even if you got turned down you could appeal it, and all that would take a lot of time. 

 So a day or two after that I mailed them another letter officially asking for Conscientious Objector status.  When they mailed that form back to me a few days later I thought, aha, I had outsmarted them again.  But a day or two after that bam, back in the mail was that draft notice, and the date to appear had not changed.

 It was less than a month away.  I had some plans.  I had a friend who was willing to drive me, I had an address or two of people who had gone before me.  I didn't have the $500, but maybe the rumor wasn't true.  Just like graduation I hadn't told my parents a thing.  I had this letter started, still have it today somewhere.  "Dear Folks, by the time you read this I will be in Canada..." something about my moral standards blah, blah, something righteous about an unjust war.  Kind of trails off, I never did finish it. 

 About a week before I was going to leave, I ran into the people whose house I told the draft board I had moved to.  Did I get the letter from the draft board?

 What letter?

 They'd left it on the table in my room a couple days ago.

 When I got home there it was.  It had been buried underneath some other papers and I hadn't noticed it.  And it was, friends and neighbors, a Cancellation of Induction.  It wasn't exactly what it seemed, it was more of a postponement.  They were canceling my date to appear, and they would be awaiting the outcome of my Conscientious Objector application.

 Well this was plenty good, plenty good enough, now I would have plenty of time to build up some money.

 This Conscientious Objector thing.  I had never taken it seriously, never thought of it as anything more than a delaying tactic.  Generally you had to be religious, and you had to be against all wars, not just this particular one.

 Well not necessarily so, as I found out when I went to visit my draft counselor, Mr Silverman, because I would have to fill out this form, and I might as well do a good job on it, since I was going to appeal it and all.  Religious was good, but it wasn't necessary.  Technically you had to be against all wars, but you know, you could just keep quiet wars like WW II, because who wouldn't be for that one?

 Draft Counselors were a dime a dozen.  They were all over campus.  I don't know how I selected Silverman, I think his name was on a list on one of those card tables that were set up all over the student union.

 Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from 1 to 3 he joined this group that assembled at the Alma Mater statue behind anti-war placards.  I used to see him as I was passing by.  Why didn't they stay till 5, and end this war even sooner?  One day it was raining and they all had umbrellas out.  Why didn't they set the umbrellas aside and bring the boys home earlier.

 I was always a little embarrassed talking to him.  I felt like you had to be a good guy, a person with high moral standards to apply for this, and I wasn't bad, but I really wasn't all that good.  If there was a line of us waiting to give alms to the poor, the truly good guy would figure out how much he could scrape by on and put the rest in the pot.  Myself I'd be checking out how much the others were giving, and maybe if I was in a good mood I'd put in five bucks more, but that was as good as I'd ever get.

 And you know there were two kinds of COs.  One kind did two years work at a crappy job, very loosely connected to national security.  The other kind went into the army but carried a medic bag instead of a rifle.  I didn't plan on being the second kind.    

 And then there was jail, that would be the truly good move.  Who wouldn't rather do two years in some crumby job than be shot at and have to take orders from assholes?  Going to jail was truly making a sacrifice for what you believed in.  That's what the guy who only kept a few bucks for himself and dropped the rest into the pot would do.  "The most serene people I know," Mr Silverman would say looking at me sincerely, "are those who have decided to go to prison for what they believed in."  I imagined that if he could have gotten me to go to jail that would have been a gold star for him.  The other guys standing around the alma mater would look at him approvingly and nod.  I would never be that serene.

 I filled out the forms.  Slivon who had just come back from Vietnam before we had signed that lease on that house on Hessel wrote a letter for me.  Something like how even though he had fought in the war and thought it was the right thing to do he knew I was a sincere guy blah blah blah.  Actually he believed the war sucked, but we knew if he wrote that nobody would listen to anything else he had to say.

 I had to go to a hearing at my draft board at 63rd and Kedzie, a heavily Catholic, conservative, and patriotic part of the city.  I didn't have much hope of getting my CO.  I was preparing to answer questions like What would you do if someone was raping your grandmother, you coward,  My Dad drove me over.  He'd always been a Republican, and I knew he liked Nixon, but we never exchanged a word about how he felt about me going into the army.  

 They called me into a room and Dad came with me.  They said my Dad really shouldn't be in the room with me for the hearing, but they didn't seem to want to make a big deal out of it, and I was glad he was sitting with me.  And the whole thing was short, they asked me one question I think.  Did I realize that even though I was against the war, I had to pay my taxes and they went to pay for the war?  Well nothing I could do it about that was there? I answered weakly.

Well I thought, there went a whole lot of nothing and I caught the train back to Champaign and a couple nights later I was pouring beers at the Wigwam and my mother called me there and they had given me the CO.

And that was it.  With that phone call I had passed from those who had the draft ahead to those who had the draft behind them.

smoke that cigarette and get that vax

 I think we have gone as far as we are going to get on that Einstein thing.  Both of us seem to be saying the same things we have said before over and over.  No meeting of the minds here.  But very well, neither of us is likely to get into a spaceship anytime soon and fly around for awhile and come back looking a little younger than the guy who stayed home.

My classmate Ted Jennings, Beagles may remember him, had a heart murmur, spent the night before the physical banging on his heart. didn't do him any good. I've been going to the same doctor for at least ten years now. Usually I am as fit as a fiddle, well except for high blood pressure and high triglycerides.  Somewhere near the end as she is typing stuff into the computer she asks about my smoking and my drinking and makes that sour doctor face when I tell her that they are unchanged.  The thing is doubtless Beagles's doc will tell him to quit smoking, but then all doctors will always tell all patients, heart murmur or no heart murmur, to stop smoking.  

In the days of our youth the ads hinted that the doc would say, "Those cigarettes you're smoking are too harsh.  Switch to Chesterfield's they are smoother." and he'd pull out his pack and offer one to the patient and they'd both light up and enjoy that smooth Chesterfield taste, but I don't reckon that happens anymore.

Anyway besides telling you to quit smoking the doc may have some other things he can help you out on, and maybe he will spot a suspicious mole or something and things could be nipped in the bud.  And likely he will give you a little pat on the back for having your covid shots.  

I thought here, in the enlightened big city, that wouldn't be a problem, but when I asked my Doc about it she shook her head sadly.

These apologists, these southern govs who are all in favor of people getting vaccines, but recoil in horror at the idea of mandates, are, well basically full of shit.  I saw one on tv last morning whining about how insulting the unvaxxed by calling them stupid is not going to get them to be vaxxed, and that's probably true, but then nothing is going to convince them to do it, and meanwhile they run around and spread the delta to their friends and neighbors and also even to us who have been vaxxed.  You know what.  We used to make people go into the army though we don't anymore, but we do make them pay their taxes, and that's what we ought to do now, and I am glad Joe is moving in that direction.

A Slight Murmur

 My father was rejected for military service during World War II because of his heart condition.  I had a heart condition too, but I was told that it wasn't as serious as the one my dad had.  His condition eventually killed him at the age of 74, which was two years younger than I am now.  I didn't know whether or not my condition would disqualify me, and I didn't want to lie to get in any more than I wanted to lie to get out, so I answered all the questions on the form they gave me honestly.  One question was if I ever had rheumatic fever, which I had, and the next question was if I had any lingering effects from it.  I wrote "slight heart murmur", which was the truth.  At my physical, this doctor was going down the line listening to everybody's heart.  When he got to mine, he looked at the business end of his stethoscope and gave it a shake.  Then he went back and listened to the previous guy, then back to me, then to the next guy, and then back to me.  He finally wrote "functional systolic" on my form and moved on down the line.  Nobody said anything to me about it, and I didn't ask.

Later, during my training, I found that I had trouble keeping up with the rest of the guys if we ran much over a mile.  I could keep up if I walked alongside the formation, but not if I tried to match them step for step.  That running we did was stupid anyway, it was more like jogging than running, it didn't get you there any faster, it just made you burn more oxygen.  We all hated it and, when I have seen civilians doing it, their faces seemed to be contorted in pain.  

Nowadays I breathe almost as hard walking as I did running in the army.  My wife says I should see a doctor about it, but he will just tell me to quit smoking, and I'm not ready to do that yet.  Doctors! What do they know?  They told my father that he would only live about two more years if he didn't get this operation, so he got the operation and he was dead within a year.

Answer Me This

"I believe everything Einstein said, except for that cosmological constant thing and even he agreed that was one big mistake.  Einstein never said that time speeds up.  That is just some misinterpretation of yours of something he said."

Maybe Einstein never said that time speeds up, but he did say that it slows down.  So what happens when a moving body accelerates enough to slow time down for awhile and then returns to its original speed?  Does time stay slowed down, or does it return to what it was before the moving body speeded up?  If it stays slowed down, then the space traveling twin would continue to get younger and younger than his brother after he returned to Earth.  I don't think that's how it works, I think the returning twin would age at the same rate as the twin that stayed home, although he would always be as younger as he was when he first came back.  If that is the case, how could that happen without time speeding up?  

**************************************************************************

Trump is just as much at fault as Biden for that mess in Afghanistan.  It was Trump who agreed to withdraw our troops and let the Taliban take over.  Biden could have stopped it, but then he would have had all the peaceniks mad at him.  What they both should have done is evacuate all the civilians before withdrawing any troops.  They are both old enough to remember the fall of Saigon, so they should have known better.

draft nine

Right away we have to take off all our clothes except our underpants, and they put our clothes away somewhere and give us a card with a number which we put in a paper bag along with our change, wallet, keys, etc.  And this is the way the physical will be conducted, walking around in your underpants, holding a paper bag with your stuff, following this orange line on the floor and anybody who wants to yell at you will do so, and you won't say shit.  This is probably what the army will be like, actually probably a lot worse.

The first stop is the height and weight.  A few lucky fat and skinny guys got out of the whole thing right then and there.  They give them their clothes back, and they dress and walk out.  They are the true heroes.

My chain smoking is paying off.  I'm coughing up a phlegmy storm.  A few of the army guys at the stations take notice.  "That's not going to get you out Son," they say.  As do the guys at the hearing station where I fake not hearing noises, or at the vision center where I do badly, but not badly enough.

Finally I reach the psych guy and pull out the letter from my shrink.  I try to act nonchalant, like I don't care if I end up in the army or not.  I try to give him the look I remember seeing sometimes on Fred's face back in Berkeley.

"So, you're a sociopath huh?  What's a sociopath?"

"Means I don't get along with society, or, you know people."

"You know here in the army, we have a lot of people who don't get along with others, and you know, they get along fine here.  After all, you know, our job is to shoot people."

That was my last shot.  At the end of the line I get my clothes back and empty my paper bag into my pockets.  On the way out I walk into a glass door because I am not wearing my glasses. 

drawing my argument to a close

I believe everything Einstein said, except for that cosmological constant thing and even he agreed that was one big mistake.  Einstein never said that time speeds up.  That is just some misinterpretation of yours of something he said.

When you join the army you know that there is always a risk that you will be killed in some action.  So you are doing your countrymen a favor and you should be honored for it.  

What this whole long discussion is about is those thirteen soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan, killed during Biden's withdrawal, which it seems to me that he botched.  Like I said before I think getting out of there was a good idea, and no matter when or how you did it the end of it was going to be messy, and there were a lot of players, and there is plenty of finger pointing going on, but still.

I voted for Biden, and I have been talking him up, and I guess I consider him my guy, so I feel guilt about it.  My guy fucked up and thirteen soldiers died.

Okay, so it goes.  

But like I said, you join the army you take your chances.  63 died while Trump was prez, which I admit was not a lot, but still you didn't hear the Trumpists being upset about it, as they are now about the thirteen.  But then you may say a lot of dems are upset about this too.  Okay rightly so, but does it not say something about the respective parties that many dems call out the prez when he has done wrong whereas only two reps had the nerve to do that about Trump and both are being drummed out of the party by their fellow republicans.

All in all, maybe not as strong an argument as I thought it would be when I started out, but I will rest with it.

Spacetime

 

Introduction[edit]

Definitions[edit]

Non-relativistic classical mechanics treats time as a universal quantity of measurement which is uniform throughout space, and separate from space. Classical mechanics assumes that time has a constant rate of passage, independent of the observer's state of motion, or anything external.^[2] Furthermore, it assumes that space is Euclidean; it assumes that space follows the geometry of common sense.^[3]

In the context of special relativity, time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space, because the observed rate at which time passes for an object depends on the object's velocity relative to the observer. General relativity also provides an explanation of how gravitational fields can slow the passage of time for an object as seen by an observer outside the field.

Spacetime - Wikipedia

Uncle Ken is still hung up in Newtonian physics, which is fine as long as he remains on this planet.  If, however, he ever decides to venture out into inter-stellar space, he will need to accept that time speeds up and slows down.  Actually, time and space are not even two different things, they are all parts of one thing called "spacetime" which, among other things, causes gravity by curving around material objects, or so I have been told.