"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
[T]o appreciate the physical universe properly, one must be “born again.”
As I was fleshing out the text of this book, my grandson Luke was born. During the drafting, I got to observe the first few months of his life. I saw how he studied his own hands, wide-eyed, and began to realize that he controlled them. I saw the joy with which he learned to reach out and grasp objects in the external world. I watched him experiment with objects, dropping them and searching for them, and repeating himself (and repeating himself…), as if not quite certain of the result, but laughing in joy when he found them.
In these and many other ways, I could see Luke was constructing a model of the world. He approached it with insatiable curiosity and few preconceptions. By interacting with the world, he learned the things that nearly all human adults take for granted, such as that the world divides itself into self and not-self, that thoughts can control movements of self but not of not-self, and that we can look at bodies and not change their properties.
Babies are like little scientists, making experiments and drawing conclusions….
Wilczek is one of those super-brains-on-two-legs guys who, in their day jobs, are probing into the very existence of…, well, existence while they moonlight as authors penning books for the less cerebral among us to try to pretend to understand what they’re writing about. He knows what quantum mechanics is all about. Or, let me put that more accurately: among humans on Earth, he’s one of the very few who can at least know what he doesn’t yet know about the subject. For, as Richard Feynman once famously observed, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
Feynman, of course was one of those super-human intellectuals who wrote a lot for the lay person. Carl Sagan, too. Among the living, there are Dava Sobel and Neil deGrasse Tyson. In fact, here’s a list of great science writers, living and dead, who can (in most cases almost) be grasped by the likes of you and me:
Pick any three of the above and delve into one or more of their books and you’ll find your life enriched beyond any monetary figure. A caveat: it won’t be terribly easy getting through any of their books. No matter — the Big Mike philosophy goes: Nothing worth doing is easy.
Anyway, let’s go back to that Wilczek quote. The idea being perhaps the truest and most pure scientists are human babies trying to figure out what those spindly little things on the ends of their hands are for; why things drop; how, if my diaper is full and I howl about it, some big person’ll come along and put a new one on me; and, eventually, what’ll happen when I stick a safety pin point into one of those little holes in the wall.
How beautiful is that idea?
Babies observe. They wonder about what they’re observing. They experiment. Sometimes the result of that experiment hurts. Sometimes the result is they learn something. They file either conclusion away in their memories for future use.
The smartest among us are those who understand they don’t know all that much and are hungry to learn.
So, if I were to offer the scientific medical community advice — which they haven’t asked for, but here it is in any case — I would tell them to get cracking on researching how much our minds affect our health.
No, I’m not suddenly turning into one of these Rhonda Byrne types who tell the gullible that all the things that happen to them in their lives are the result of their own thoughts. Y’know, all that “Secret” and “Law of Attraction” bushwa. I do still have a functioning frontal lobe.
Mine Works
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Nevertheless, real thinking researchers have known for years that much of illness is psychogenic — that is, imagined. That doesn’t make the pain or disability any less. If you feel agony, you feel agony no matter if your coconut is contriving it or not.
Some aboriginal tribes in the New World thought the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca and his gang were medicine men, so they laid their treasures at the to-be-conquerers’ feet and begged to be healed. Lo and behold, people started telling each other they’d magically become well. When Cabeza de Vaca’s men became overwhelmed by these supplicants, he told them he was leaving and, suddenly, people became sick again and even died.
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The apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes drew many thousands of people there to be cured. A number of cancer patients who’d experienced spontaneous remission after visiting the site testified their newfound health was of divine origin. (Statistics show that in any grouping of cancer patients, there will be a percentage of those whose cancer simply goes into hiding, as it were.)
Our Lady Of Lourdes
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Sagan writes, “As Cabeza de Vaca’s experience suggests, the mind can cause certain diseases, even fatal ones.” And, one would assume, the mind can be convinced the body is healed as well. He goes on to cite the phenomenon of deathly sick old people in traditional Chinese communities where the Harvest Moon Festival is celebrated who “stave off death for a week or two to perform their ceremonial responsibilities.” The same thing happens, statistically, to old Jewish men around Passover and grandparents whose scions are graduating from college or having birthdays.
One reason, I suspect, the medical establishment doesn’t pursue these phenomena with greater vigor is there probably isn’t a pill that can be patented and sold as a result of such research. Medicine in the United States, I might remind you, is a for-profit business.
I bring this up because something similar has happened to me. I’ve been experiencing excruciating hip pain for the last few years. I’ve even been walking with a cane on occasion. Studying at the University of Google and speaking with others who’ve gone through the same thing, I learned that my symptoms indicated a need for a hip replacement. Knowing this, I started making plans to fit the surgery and rehab into my schedule. So, knowing that I will be finished writing the Charlotte Zietlow book soon (a descriptor that can mean anything from a few weeks to several eons), I went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago and said, “Let’s get going.”
Ouch
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Step one was a complete X-ray regimen. The technician spun me around like a top, zapping me with Roentgens from every possible angle. I posed so much I felt like Caitlyn Jenner, sans the lipstick.
The next day the doc’s nurse gave me a call. It turns out I do indeed have severe hip arthritis, so much so that the cartilage is significantly thickened and the actual bone material making up the ball of my femur is overgrown. Okay, I said, what’s next? Nothing, she replied. The radiologist and my doc agree there is absolutely no deterioration or necrosis of the bone substance in my hip. Such conditions are de rigueur for a hip replacement.
The nurse told me the course from now on would be to manage the pain, for which she gave me a number of suggestions.
To be honest, I was thrilled at the news. I had no wish to go through general anesthetic again. I’ve had major surgery a few times in my life and each time, it took weeks for my bean to recover from the drugs and gasses used to send me off to nap time.
Now, here’s the weird part. Over the next few days, my hip started feeling better than it has in a good year or more. See, every time I moved, I’d been afraid I was turning my right hip’s ball and socket joint into bone meal. I honestly thought I’d hear a snap, crackle, or pop one day when I’d lift myself up off the recliner, my hip shattering like peanut brittle. I became so tense and apprehensive that the right side of my body as well as my entire lower back were becoming as taut as a drumhead.
Yet, as soon as I realized my hip joint wasn’t about to disintegrate, it was as though I’d taken a magic pill that, if not curing me, at least made me feel remarkably better.
Young Adult author Julia Karr sat and talked with me recently for the latest installment of Big Talk. An eight-minute snippet of that tête-à-tête ran on WFHB last week.
Julia Karr
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You ought to listen to it, especially if you’re an aspiring writer, say, or a high school dropout. Julia Karr has pushed through a ton of barriers to achieve that most glorious status in life: published author. She has written the dystopian fantasies XVI and Truth, about young Nina, a rebel in the year 2150. In that world girls who reach the age of sixteen are expected to become sex playthings; there’s little more a young female can hope to do. Nina, though, has other ideas.
We’re putting the finishing touches on the long-form interview with Julia that will run in the July issue of The Ryder.
Meet Bloomington’s most fascinating folk via the Big Talk interview series, co-sponsored by this communications colossus, The Electron Pencil, as well as WFHB and The Ryder.
BTW: Go to Julia’s website. She has a blog that in my humble opin. is tied for second-best in B-town. Natch, you know who’s the boss of the bestest blog hereabouts.
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Pay To Play
When the Indiana University Hoosiers cartilage kids challenge for the top spot in any Big 10 sport, folks around these parts go gaga. And, this being the great United States of Murrica, we tend to throw dough at the gamesters, buying tickets by the fistful, wearing T-shirts, and drinking watered down brew out of IU-logoed beer cozies.
Only those cartilage kids don’t share in the swag. College athletes, as you know, aren’t paid. This despite the fact that their field and court exploits are the sole reason we fling our dollars around. Loyal readers already know how I feel about this stinking state of affairs.
Volunteers Of America
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Click on over to Frank Deford’s essay on NPR’s Morning Edition. He expounds on the bullshit notion that is amateurism — that is, amateurism the way the NCAA defines it. I like the way Frankie thinks.
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Don’t Tread On My Bread
I tilt against peeps who espouse this health craze, that diet, or the conspiracy theory over there all the time. F’rinstance, my oldest and dearest pal in the world and I are howling at each other these days over her recent conversion to the belief that wheat grain products are only slightly less dangerous to humans than an arsenic cookie in a radioactive tin attached to an improvised explosive device.
Our skirmish thus far has remained reasonably civil although my agents have uncovered intelligence that she is a mere two years away from possessing the capability to build the arsenic cookie in a radioactive tin attached to an improvised explosive device. This will not stand. I will not allow a chocolate chip mushroom cloud be the final piece of evidence against her.
This Means War
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Anyway, I always caution people I’m arguing with over such things that they should be careful what Internet stories they believe. I say, borrowing (okay, stealing) from Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”
My dear pal had one defender who said to me, Look, if it makes her feel better, why fight it? What’s the skin off your nose?
Other than the fact that my Sicilian/Polish beak looks just fine with the acreage of dermis presently attached to it, thank you, my argument is that any individual ideas based on rage, mania, trendiness, and pseudoscience might be only mildly harmful to the possessors thereof but they represent a credulousness that can be far more toxic when applied repeatedly or in certain other more pressing cases.
To wit: the anti-vax movement of recent years. A single family might have rationalized that it really harmed no one else other than, potentially, themselves when they refused to get their kids inoculated.
Here’s the argument that lays that rationalization to rest: it has been learned that a single kid who had not received the MMR vaccination was responsible for an outbreak of measles in Minnesota in 2011.
The parents of the kid were part of a community that bought into the hysteria over childhood vaccinations that arose in the first decade of this century. That hysteria, in too many cases, was fatal.
As important as saving the lives of innocent children may be, the even more dangerous aspect of the anti-wheat movement is the possibility that pizza and pasta may one day be outlawed. Now, that would be a human tragedy of monumental proportions!
Mind you, Fox B-casting is not Fox News. The two are separate entities under the worldwide umbrella that is Rupert Murdoch‘s media empire. Whereas Fox News typically airs topical news “debate” shows wherein, like professional wrestling, there are clear-cut villains and heroes, and its news updates generally steer blame for all the evils in the world, up to and including irritable bowel syndrome, toward Barack Obama and his liberal minions, Fox Broadcasting presents such darlings of the cognoscenti as The Simpsons, The Family Guy, and Glee.
Hell, F-Broad even will begin showing Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey this coming Sunday. To refresh, the original Cosmos was the brainchild of Carl Sagan. The presenter of this iteration will be Neil de Grasse Tyson. Both the late Sagan and and the still-very-alive NdGT would be ridiculed to high heaven were they to appear on a Fox News segment on climate change or evolution.
The Devil No Matter What?
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Still, the TV entertainment arm of the Murdoch octopus is run by, well, Murdoch. That’s gotta be enough to scare the bejesus out of us crunchy, bleeding-heart types who listen to Morning Edition.
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Fun With Books
Would you read a book entitled Everything I Know About Women I Learned from My Tractor?
How about A Passion for Donkeys or Does God Ever Speak through Cats? And then there’s that classic, What’s Your Poo Telling You?
Hot!
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IDK about you, but I’d read ’em! Not only that, I’d proudly display these tomes in my living room library. BTW: You can, indeed, tell the book, What’s Your Poo Telling You?, by its cover. It’s about paying close attention to your porcelain princess deuces; its tagline is “Loads of facts about your health.” And, yes, it’s illustrated.
Other, more genteel folks, might be turned off by these titles and more. That’s why Bored Panda offers The 40 Worst Book Covers and Titles Ever. Here are a few more, for your pleasure:
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[h/t to Tanisha Caravello.]
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I, Libtard
Just a reminder that I am the world’s biggest liberal, even in these days when liberals have lost their spark and are routinely portrayed as Nazi/commie terrorists who force their daughters to have sex with black men and then have their resultant fetuses aborted.
How did a nice guy like me get hung with that kind of rep?
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
Now, Students, Remember: Never Rock The Boat.
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Tell it, brother.
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Barbarians All
And, finally, here’s Italian TV dude Adriano Celentano doing a parody video showing what American English sounds like to them goofy furriners. Sort of a counterpart to Andy Kaufman doing Latka Gravas, as you’ll see.
Weird thing is, when I watched this vid last night, I though the music was very, very cool. Then, when I watched it again this morning, it sounded, well, unlistenable. Further proof that we have to trust our second thoughts .
And it’s bugging me. You know as well as I do how pervasive the old bird is.
Well, not exactly him, but his messengers and agents. He has priests, pastors, imams, rabbis, lamas, and a whole raft of other paid flacks. On top of that he depends on millions and millions — wait, billions — of unpaid volunteers who are more than happy to crow about what a swell dude he is. Perhaps only The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia has a publicity machine as widespread.
Brand Strategists
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Walk into any diner and order a cola. When the waitperson repeats your order, s/he’ll say, “And you wanted a Coke, right?”
Right. Even if it’s a Faygo or a Pepsi, it’s a Coke.
Same with the Big Daddy-o in the Sky. Whenever a legislative body wants to initiate proceedings for the day, it calls in Christ’s vicar or G_d’s interpreter to start the festivities off right. Whenever a plane crashes or a lunatic opens fire in a shopping mall, people climb all over each other to say the Big Boy himself was responsible for any survivors. Hell, I sneezed the other day and some woman said, “God bless you.”
And, like Dylan, his reputation is based on layers upon layers of bombast and myth.
There is no Bob Dylan, as you well know. There is a fellow named Robert Allen Zimmerman, born May 24, 1941, who one day decided to market himself by borrowing the given name of the poet Dylan Thomas and adopting it as his surname.
Both Bob Dylan and god have had spectacularly trenchant and brilliant mots attributed to them. These pearls of verbiage, though, have been largely excavated from under massive piles of nonsensical and silly pronouncements.
Maybe Bob Dylan is god.
Separated At Birth?
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Nah. Can’t be. Because there is no god.
The godly among the populace will counter that it is the height of presumption for me to say such a thing. Pious logicians will argue that I cannot definitively assert the non-existence of something. To which I might respond, Okay, you guys have had some 50,000 years (yup, humans in the Upper Paleolithic Period worshiped a god) to prove the Large Lummox created everything and is concerned with love, peace, war, and the result of yesterday‘s Monday Night Football game. You haven’t yet.
Then the believers will cluck their tongues and shake their heads. How sad, they’ll lament, that you’re so lacking in awe and wonder. Your world is empty and prosaic. They’ll tell me that when they look at the petals of a flower they see the handiwork of the creator. When I look at it, I see a bionic machine. Such an emotionally empty experience.
Not so. For instance, I could hardly get to sleep last night after reading about astronomers’ latest supposition that tens of billions of stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy host Earth-like planets in their Goldilocks Zones (that is, the area around them that is just right for terrestrial type life to develop in.)
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Dig: One of the astronomers who studied the results of a four-year Kepler Space Telescope search for Earth-like exo-planets was driven to ejaculations of Oh, Wows by what he’d learned. Here’s Erik Petigura of the University of California-Berkeley:
When you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing.
So tonight, I’m going out in the backyard to look at the dark sky. Weather permitting, I’ll see dozens and dozens of stars up above. If I feel really ambitious, I might take the five minute drive down to Lake Monroe, where the sky is even darker, so I can see many more stars. And as I watch them twinkle, the odds are overwhelming that I’m seeing, as it were, the homes of countless civilizations that communicate, reproduce, fight, discover, share, and play football. Maybe even baseball, if their intelligence is advanced enough.
And I will be in awe. My imagination will run wild. I’ll try to think about what those creatures look like. I’ll ponder the near-impossibility of humans ever visiting them. I’ll hope for the much more likely chance that we’ll exchange messages, perhaps soon.
“Are You There?”
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The feeling I’ll have will easily be as profound as that of someone who marvels that god let that plane go down, with several hundred poor souls burned to a crisp and torn limb from limb, but decided, because he is loving, to spare one little tot.
This I guarantee: My awe will be far more holy than that of the football fan or the tight end who was certain god deigned that the Bears beat the Packers last night.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe.” — Carl Sagan
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YOU CAN’T MAKE ME HELP A CRIPPLE!
The Republicans are now officially mentally ill.
The 2016 Republican National Convention?
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Personal to the GOP: Boys — and I do mean boys — you’ve got to cleanse yourself of the United Nations-hating nuts within your ranks. I mean, honestly, rejecting the UN disabilities advisory treaty because that world body is seen by the madmen within your ranks as some kind of threat to our national sovereignty?
Click Image For The Treaty’s Complete Text
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By 2016, the Republicans will be the third party in a land that only has two parties. You guys are running yourselves out of business.
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STILL CRAZY
And, as long as they keep having “discussions” such as this one:
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… they’re going to come no nearer to sanity than this world is to the edge of the Universe.
Dig the one guy who tells the panel that he knows “many, many people who’ve saved their own property because they had a handgun.”
Many, many people.
I’m assuming that anything under ten does not qualify as many.
Many, I would venture, means, oh say, 20 people.
Fair enough?
But he says he knows “many, many people” who’ve brandished shootin’ irons to pertekt their cabin and kin. That means he’s squaring many. Ergo, he knows upwards of 400 people who’ve pointed guns at other human beings and threatened to take their lives if they do not desist from trespassing or otherwise attempting harm.
Where the hell does this guy live, in Gaul at the time of Attila the Hun?
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EVEN CRAZIER
Then again, before we get carried away about how deranged certain folks are in this holy land, let’s consider, say, the nation of Qatar.
Until recent days, the tiny oil sheikdom has been a financial sponsor of several of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East.
In public, Qatar branded itself the champion of The People Throwing off the Shackles of Tyranny.
Oops. That is until the poet Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami wrote a few verses praising the Arab Spring and — uh oh — referring less than glowingly to the Qatari boss-sheiks. Ajami was tried behind closed doors (and not allowed to attend his own trial) and was sentenced to life in prison.
Despite the madnesses of our Me Party brethren and sisteren, I doubt if even they’d endorse life sentences for the writing of poetry.
At least I hope not.
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THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE
Try to wrap your mind around the concept of multiverses.
No, the term doesn’t mean a collection of poems. It’s the idea that this great big bunch of everything is really merely one of many great big bunches of everything.
Yeesh
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Maybe even an infinity of them.
And here we are worrying about Kate Middleton’s morning sickness.
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ALL I REALLY WANT…
This is now The Electron Pencil’s official, traditional Christmas/Hannukah anthem.
The Loved One sent me the link last night and, to say the least, it takes my breath away. Couple that with conservative guru Richard Viguerie saying Mitt Romney lost because he didn’t hammer it home that Barack Obama is a “radical” who is out to destroy our holy land and you get the gist of the angst Tuesday’s election caused much of the nation.
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I wrote on Facebook the other day, “Personal to Republicans like Karl Rove & Glenn Beck and everybody who thinks the nation is gonna collapse now that Obama’s been reelected: Get hold of yourselves, people!”
It does seem on first blush that many Republicans and Me Party-ists and Libertarians have become opera singers and drama queens about an event that occurs every four years.
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While driving The Loved One to work this morning, I said something on the order of, These people are lunatics. She had a flash of equanimity, though, and pointed out that we’d be singing a very similar tune, only with different lyrics, had Romney won.
She’s right.
Then again, I thought of George W. Bush “winning” the 2000 election. I could have consoled myself by saying, “Well, it’s only four years, we’ll get ‘im next time.” The problem was Bush bollixed the Afghan War and then tricked the nation into the Iraq War. Whatever my worst fears were about Bush at the time of his “victory,” those misdeeds far exceeded them.
I don’t expect Obama to manufacture evidence to whip up war hysteria. The thing that petrifies the Right is his willingness to spend dough on social services.
Even if he bollixes that agenda big time — say he creates some useless, bloated federal authority overseeing the health care system — it still won’t come close to comparing with a couple of wars that have thus far cost hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives.
So, on third thought, yeah, the people wailing and gnashing their teeth and predicting apocalypse — literally — over another four years of Obama are pretty much lunatics.
By the way, Sagan’s signature line, “billions and billions”? He never said it. He revealed that tidbit in his book entitled — what else? — “Billions and Billions.”
Sagan’s early passing was a great loss, especially in this era of anti-intellectualism and distrust of science. On the other hand, we’re not totally adrift — the big boss at the Hayden Planetarium, Neil de Grasse Tyson, is a worthy successor. He only needs a signature line — that he never said.
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FIRE
Now the news comes that a half dozen Tibetans have set themselves on fire in recent days to dramatize their unhappiness with the Chinese, whose Communist Party has been convening in Beijing.
That makes a total of some 60 Tibetans who’ve lit themselves ablaze in the last two years.
Buddhist Nun Palden Choetso Immolates Herself Earlier This Year
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Make no mistake, The Chinese are a bunch of bullies when it comes to Tibet. For that matter, they’re bullies in just about every issue, foreign and domestic, they address.
Is it my Western mindset that causes me to think it’d make more tactical sense to, I don’t know, set fire to the enemy rather than yourself?
Is suicide ever called for in a political dispute?
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2000 LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
Psychedelia, baby!
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The only events listings you need in Bloomington.
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Friday, November 9th, 2012
LECTURE ◗ IU Maurer School of Law — “The Transnistria Conflict: Not Frozen,” Presented by Matt Rojansky, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment; Noon
LECTURE ◗ IU Ballantine Hall — “Latin America and China: Primary Goods, Populism, and Political leverage,” Presented by Andrae Marak of Governors State University; 12:30pm
LECTURE ◗ IU SoFA — “Artists’ Books: When the Goblet Becomes the Wine,” Presnted by Bill and Vicky Stewart of Vamp & Tramp Booksellers; 4:30pm
The deep thinkers who run the outfit say nicknames are the gateway to bullying.
Nicknames.
Apparently, the Scouts believe bullies often start their nefarious work the moment they label a kid. Which is true.
If I recall correctly from my days at school, bullies also often begin terrorizing their victims at lunch time. Therefore I propose we crack down on eating.
Curly was right.
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PAY YOUR BILLS
The Loved One phoned in our annual contribution to WFIU Saturday morning.
Have you thrown a little green the station’s way yet?
See, competing groups of playwrights, directors, and actors were given a theme, a prop, and a line Friday night. They were to turn these simple raw materials into 10-minute plays, all shined-up, spiffied, and ready for the stage a mere 24 hours later.
The group deemed best Saturday night was called the Far-Off Broadway Bombers. Their playlet, “The Games,” was written by C. Neil Parsons, directed by Brian Donnelly and Benita Brown, and performed by Anthony Bradburn, Katie Becker, and David Sheehan.
The Far-Off Broadway Bombers
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What? You missed it?
Your penance is to attend at least one BPP production this coming year. The next play up is “Lemonade” by Mark Krause. It has won the Woodward/Newman Drama Award and runs from November 30th through December 15th.
Go and sin no more.
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SKY BLINDNESS
Believe me, folks, this is all too true:
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Bloomington proper seems to straddle the border between the suburban sky and the rural sky. The sky above Chez Pencil gets a tad closer to the brilliance of the dark sky.
Any time you get a chance, go out to a real dark sky area — the region south of Paoli and French Lick, for example — and simply look up.
You won’t need a fancy telescope or even binoculars, only your eyes.
You’ll be reminded that we’re essentially nothing in this Universe.
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The only events listings you need in Bloomington.
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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
VOTE TODAY ◗ Two Locations, Bloomington:
The Curry Building, 214 W. Seventh St.; 8am-6pm
Evangelical Community Church, 503 S. High St.; 10am-6pm
STUDIO TOUR ◗ Brown County, various locations — The Backroads of Brown County Studio Tour, free, self-guided tour of 16 local artists’ & craftspersons’ studios; 10am-5pm, through October
PHOTOGRAPHY ◗ IU Lilly Library, Slocum Room — Special exhibit: “Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict“; 10:30am
MUSIC ◗ IU Auer Hall — Doctoral Recital: Eunice Park on piano; 5pm
LECTURE ◗ ◗ IU Memorial Union — “After They’re Gone: Afghanistan After 2014,” Presnted by Timor Sharan of the USAID project; 5:30pm
MUSIC ◗ Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Lloyd Wood; 7-9pm
DISCUSSION ◗ Monroe County Public Library — “Organizing to Combat Wage Theft,” Led by Sung Yeon Choi-Morrow & Dianne Enriquez of Interfaith Worker Justice; 7pm
LECTURE ◗ IU Maurer School of Law, Moot Court Room — Patten Lecture: “Whats Does Genocide Look Like? And How Do We Know It When We See It?“; 7:30-9pm
LECTURE ◗ IU Kelley School of Business, Rm. 223, Auditorium — “From Auschwitz to Forgiveness,” Presented by Eva Kor as part of the IU Holocaust Awareness Program; 7:30-9:30pm
MUSIC ◗ IU Auer Hall — Octubafest: Guest Recital, Roland Szentpali; 8pm
GAMES ◗ The Root Cellar at Farm Bloomington — Team trivia; 8pm
MUSIC ◗ The Player’s Pub — Blues Jam hosted by Fistful of Bacon; 8pm
MUSIC ◗ IU Ford-Crawford Hall — Hot Tuesdays: Jazz Combos: Nate Anderson Group, Alejandro Papachryssanthou Group; 8:30pm
MUSIC ◗ The Bishop — Hallowe’en Celebration: The Gantle Shades, Apollo Quad, Dingo Duster; 9pm
“For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ As the United States was dropping 7.5 megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.” — Carl Sagan
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PAY ‘EM: DAY 1
Give teachers the dough they deserve. Do not increase class sizes. Do not extend the school day.
The Chicago Teachers Union strike is everybody’s business.
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LUCKY US
Steve the Dog and I took a walk at dusk yesterday on the shore of Lake Monroe in the Paynetown State Recreation Area.
A blue heron flapped past a few hundred yards off, probably heading home for the night. Fish feeding on surface bugs splashed in the water around the marina.
This Is Minutes From Home
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Paynetown was a bit lonelier than it’s been for months. The temperature hung around 64 degrees.
We walked fast — well, as fast as my creaky ticker would allow us. I may have to wear a long-sleeved shirt tonight.
Apparently, the Wikipedia entry on his novel, “The Human Stain,” recently contained faulty info on the inspiration behind the story. Wikipedia says the book is based on an incident in the life of Manhattan writer Anatole Broyard. Roth says it’s really based on something that happened to Melvin Tumin, a noted researcher in race relations in America.
Roth states in an open letter to Wikipedia that when he contacted Wikipedia in an effort to get the entry corrected, he was told he was not a credible source.
Hah!
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Apparently, Wikipedia needs its info verified by third-party independent sources. Roth, per the online encyclopedia’s own guidelines, is not.
All this makes a whisper of sense, when you think about it for a moment. Wikipedia doesn’t want people editing their own entries. Hell, I’ve been tempted more times than I can remember to create my own Wikipedia entry, describing myself as the Midwest’s greatest unheard-of writer. My newspaper and magazine articles, my books, my online posts have thrilled readers and moved them to tears. History, my fantasy entry would read, will recognize Mr. Glab in much the same way that Van Gogh in the art world was celebrated after his death.
Vince And Me
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But then I remember that Wikipedia won’t allow me to define myself in its database at all.
Can you imagine, for instance, how noted self-admirers like Richard Nixon or Donald Trump would portray themselves?
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve occasionally fantasized hinting to someone I know and trust that I really deserve a Wikipedia entry. Now, I wouldn’t suggest anything outright, but if the person whose ear I bent might take it upon her- or himself to immortalize me thusly, well, who am I to protest?
Anyway, Roth goes on for 2677 words to correct the bit of false information. I suppose that’s what a prolific writer would do. The Philip Roth bibliography entry in Wikipedia states he’s penned 27 novels. He hasn’t challenged that bit of data.
A “writer” such as Ayn Rand could have easily dashed off, say, half a million distorted, specious, and borderline psychotic words correcting some minor point in her Wikipedia entry.
“Writer”
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Writers write. Even “writers” write.
Roth’s open letter is fascinating because it reveals a bit about the life of Melvin Tumin, who was grilled for using “hate speech” in a classroom once. It seems he’d discovered in the middle of a semester that two students had not attended one of his classes. Taking roll one day, he asked the class if anyone knew the students. “Does anyone know these people?” he asked. “Do they exist or are they spooks?”
Ha ha. Spooks, meaning phantoms or wraiths. But at the time Tumin uttered the word, it also was a more “palatable” substitute for “nigger.” Archie Bunker on “All in the Family” regularly referred to black men as spooks.
Lovable Hater
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Tumin was subjected to a grueling inquisition, even thought he’d been known for years for his sensitive work in race relations.
Roth’s letter, like the novel, explores the issues of character assassination, hysteria, and groupthink. In the letter, he also ruminates on what it means to be black.
So it’s much more than a run of the mill letter to the editor demanding a correction. It’s a neat little look at us.
“By all means, let us be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” — variously attributed to Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, James Oberg, and others.
Oberg
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YOUR LIDS ARE BECOMING HEAVY….
I wonder if hypnotists still dangle pocket watches before the eyes of subjects they’re trying to put in trances.
More to the point, I wonder why there are still hypnotists. Then again, I shouldn’t wonder at all, considering we live in a credulous near-theocracy whose citizens largely believe in angels, a 6000-year-old Earth, and alien visitations.
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Unbelievably, the ancient art of hypnotism is in Indiana news today. It seems a Christian woman who makes it a practice to visit Loogootee High School to pray for teachers and students is up in arms about the school’s Saturday fundraiser that will feature, yep, a hypnotist.
The fundraiser will benefit the school’s baseball team. Loogootee is a speck on the map in the southwest corner of the state, total population as of the 2010 Census: 2751.
Lots of schools around this holy land hire hypnotists to entertain at fundraisers. It’s all in fun and every once in a while some kid or parent can be seen lurching around the stage, clucking like a chicken. I’m sure such a sight reaps scads of money.
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Geneva Yoder, on the other hand, takes her medieval belief systems seriously. Yoder used to have kids at LHS and still cares enough about it to go there, kneel down and implore her BFF in The Sky to smile kindly upon the place.
When she found out the organizers of the baseball team’s fundraiser had hired a hypnotist, she lodged a complaint with the Loogootee Community School Corporation.
Yoder told radio station WBIW that it’s “not morally or ethically right to hypnotize children” just to raise dough for the baseball team.
Not that Indiana has a sterling reputation as a land of forward thinkers but this mini contretemps, coming on the heels of Ft. Wayne Rep. Bob Morris claiming the Girls Scouts are a radical organization, makes us look worse than usual.
The sane among us can only hope our fellow state residents will someday bring their thinking in line with more modern 16th Century ideals.
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THE RAW AND THE KOOKED
All my life I’ve been a contrarian, so much so that at times it’s been to my own detriment.
My operative philosophy is, don’t get swept up in group think. The bigger the group, the dumber everybody in it becomes.
For many years, I wondered if perhaps I was — oh, I don’t know — anti-social. Imagine how thrilled I was, then, to read George Carlin’s critique of teams. Here it is:
Teams suck! I don’t like ass-kissers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn kids: “Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you ‘There is no I in team.’ What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an I in independence, individuality and integrity.’ Avoid teams at all costs. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, ‘We’re the so-and-sos,’ take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it’s unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don’t participate; it’ll be your death. And if they tell you you’re not a team player, just congratulate them on being so observant.”
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Yay! I wasn’t alone. The great George Carlin agrees with me.
Despite mainly being an independent writer since 1983, now and again I’ve worked for a private company. I worked in the Education Department at Whole Foods Market for three years not terribly long ago. This was at the time when companies were spending gobs of cash on foolishness like team-building getaways.
I’d ask, Why do we have to do this junk?
Everybody would say, Oh, so we can all get to know each other and spend quality time with each other. It’ll really make us unified.
Oy, I had so many objections I didn’t know where to start. Here’s a couple. First, if I wanted to get to know my co-workers better, I’d go out with them. Since I haven’t asked certain ones out, that means I don’t want to know them any better.
I mean, the company pays me to spend eight hours a day with people who, by and large, I would never want to be around unless there was remuneration involved. Once that eight hours is up, I wanna go home or to the places I hang out and see people I really like.
Second, why do we have to be reminded we are a team? “Well, it’ll put us all on the same page,” they’d say. For pity’s sake, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Of course we’re a team! Of course we’re on the same page!
They sort of told me when I was hired, This is whatwe do here. Now you’re going to be doing it with us. I had no illusions that I’d be able to, say, work on my great American novel while I was at work — well, at least not where I could be caught at it. By definition, all our presence in this building makes us a team. We’re trying to sell groceries here, for fk’s sake!
None of these arguments went over very well. And when I couldn’t come up with any credible excuses not to go on team-building functions, I’d go and I’d spend all my time with people I liked and avoid those I didn’t. Just like the regular work day.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all this because of raw milk.
Huh? Raw milk.
Yeah. WFIU ran a report on the morning news the other day about people who strive to circumvent Indiana’s raw milk ban. See. the state outlaws the selling of raw milk for health safety reasons. Pasteurization destroys most of the microbes that can cause food-borne illnesses.
Raw milk advocates, on the other hand, think pasteurization adversely affects the flavor of moo juice (sorry, I got tired of typing milk.)
When it comes to food fetishists, though, Bloomington often seems the center of the world. Almost immediately, Facebook lit up with people claiming raw milk is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
One person posted that since his family has switched to raw milk, his kids have suddenly been relieved of all their allergies.
Another said that he, his wife, and none of his kids have had so much as a cold since his family turned to raw milk.
I suppose they can believe what they want. What harm does it do for someone to believe raw milk is a miracle substance?
Now, I consider myself an advocate of fresh, healthy, wholesome foods. I try (although I occasionally fail) to minimize my intake of hydrogenated oils, red meat, excessive salt, and other iffy comestibles. I eat spinach every day. I gobble my fruits. I do my best to buy foods that aren’t laden with chemical preservatives or artificial flavors. I restrict my visits to White Castle to once a year.
That puts me on the health food team, I imagine. But remember, I hate being on teams. And the reactions of those Facebook posters is a prime example why. They’ve elevated a personal preference to an almost philosophical imperative.
So, I posted something myself. I wrote, “Look,if you dig the taste of raw milk that’s cool. But it ain’t no magic elixir, folks.”
Aw, that’s one of the 10,000 reasons why I hate Facebook. It too often turns me into a pain in the ass.
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ROAM
Hey, Cindy Wilson is 55 years old today. The B52s were the pride of Athens, Georgia and middle America’s intro to punk/new wave pop.
Wilson
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Wilson and her brother Ricky were two of the four original members of the band, formed in 1976. The B52s were sailing along in terms of popularity when Ricky suddenly died of AIDS-related complications in October, 1985. He hadn’t told anybody about his illness and his death was a shock to the other band members. Cindy, naturally, was hardest hit by his death. The band went on hiatus for three years.
When they came back and hit the charts in 1989 with “Love Shack” they achieved their greatest success.
Anyway, let’s go back to that Wilczek quote. The idea being perhaps the truest and most pure scientists are human babies trying to figure out what those spindly little things on the ends of their hands are for; why things drop; how, if my diaper is full and I howl about it, some big person’ll come along and put a new one on me; and, eventually, what’ll happen when I stick a safety pin point into one of those little holes in the wall.
