Rhyme Of The Day

Have Gun, Will Travel

2008-07-24T00:38:00.001-05:00

Stephen Scherer grew up in an anti-gun household. His mother banned even toy guns in the house, at first. But after a while she broke down and bought him and his sister some cute elephant-shaped squirt guns.

But Stephen wanted more. He made complicated pistols with Legos. He played endlessly with a BB gun inherited from a friend. Talking about his early interest in shooting, Stephen now says, "It's sort of like, if it's wrong, you want to do it more."

Now he's going to Beijing, to compete for the U.S. in shooting sports. He's 19. He wasn't favored to win in the Olympic trials.

"I probably surprised myself more than anybody else there," says Scherer. "Shooting is a very mental sport. A lot of times, it doesn't sink in that you've won until after, because you're so concentrated on the shooting."

Kid, I bet you'll do great.

Just wait,
concentrate,
and shoot straight.

Pragmatism 101

2008-07-23T21:57:00.001-05:00

For today's assignment:
write upon the board:
Flip-flops are refinement
and ought to be ignored.

Following the Money

2008-07-23T21:44:00.001-05:00

Investor's Business Daily reports that media folks give lots more money to one party than the other.

Who could that be?
The Democrats? Yes!
Funny that didn't
get more press.

But their standards are the highest
so they try to mask their bias
by writing extra sly
to help their guy.

Live from Wherever

2008-07-22T19:35:00.002-05:00

It's being reported, in the mainstream press, that Obama is getting more press coverage than that other guy.

But does this give him an advantage? Or is there a risk here?

You don't want folks to get tired of your face
till after you've won the race.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Algorithms

2008-07-21T22:29:00.000-05:00

An industrial mathematician is upset about the way math is being taught:

The claim that schools that have done away with traditional mathematics instruction have done so because they want "to prepare kids for a new world" is ridiculous for many reasons. The most important is that the job of math educators is to get students to understand math, and the best way to understand math is to master the traditional algorithms.

There are a lot of ways to teach algorithms... but... not to teach them at all?

There are no rules
in schools for fools.

Lunch with Borges

2008-07-21T21:52:00.001-05:00

I was reading Borges at lunch. He has an interest in labyrinths. Somehow I started thinking about the limitations of our knowledge of neurology. We cannot trace the path of a single line of thought with anything like assurance.

The labyrinth is in the brain.

The twisting turning strands defy
easy mapping of the chains
of logic that from deep inside
seem clear as crystal, plain as rain.

Classical Music Outdoors

2008-07-20T23:32:00.000-05:00

We enjoyed the summer breeze
while someone named Lang Lang
bang-banged
on the keys.

Okay, just to be fair,
the CSO was also there.

The Scoop on Barack

2008-07-20T10:38:00.001-05:00

The Sun-Times has an exclusive story on the jobs Obama held as a student. Here's the one that gave me another reason to support him:

As a high school student, Obama's first job was at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store.

Hey - I worked for a Baskin-Robbins too! We're fellow former employees!

So that's the scoop - we both were scoopers,
dedicated ice cream troopers!

But he turned his back on Chocolate Fudge,
he gave up Pralines & Cream,
so he could have a chance to trudge
the Rocky Road in pursuit of his dream.

You Didn't Need That Laptop, Did You?

2008-07-19T18:41:00.003-05:00

The Chicago Tribune reports on the trouble people have taking their laptops out of their cases for TSA searches:

More than 12,000 laptops are lost each week at U.S. airports, according to a study conducted for Dell by the Ponemon Institute, a research think tank. Only one-third of laptops lost and found in airports are reclaimed, the study said.

Wait. So if 12,000 are lost and one-third are returned that's 8,000 lost permanently each week.

That's 416,000 laptops down the drain per year?

No wonder people are nervous
about the TSA's service.

Good News

2008-07-19T13:33:00.002-05:00

Angelina Jolie and her twins have left the hospital.

Now, get back to work on Atlas Shrugged.
The lack of progress has me bugged.

I'll even accept, since I'm such a fan,
a Lollywood version from Pakistan.

Defenses of the Senses

2008-07-19T12:41:00.001-05:00

I've retrieved, from our bookshelves, 2 books: David Kelley's The Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception and Quee Nelson's The Slightest Philosophy. I'm thinking of doing a detailed comparison.

For one thing, is Kelley's "reductive focus" really the same as Nelson's "inviddying of scene-images"? Maybe I need a translation table! (Update: In both cases the idea refers to the kind of seeing we do when we see that a circular coin "looks elliptical" at an angle.)

Nelson's book is funnier, and easier to read for most people. Kelley's book is addressed to those trained in contemporary philosophy, and is more academic in style.

Both authors are out to rescue the idea that our senses are really in touch with reality. Of course, most people do think this, but many philosophers have thought otherwise!

Quee Nelson has a lot of examples of this skeptical philosophical tradition in her book's appendix. I like this one:

A. J. Ayer: “From our resources of sense-data, we ‘construct’ the world of material things.”

I often get tired constructing the world of matter.
Ideas are so light. You can toss them around with mere chatter.

Material things have such weight. They're so hard to build with.
But nice fluffy sense-data - that is something I'm skilled with.

A Fine Whine

2008-07-18T21:55:00.001-05:00

Phil Gramm "resigned" today from the McCain campaign.

Gramm is the guy who called us "a nation of whiners" a few days ago.

He hurt my feelings.
My heart was reeling.
So I complained.
I wrote to McCain
and his whole campaign:

"I never whine!
Make him resign!
Toss him off that plane
and under the train."

And surely then
I'll be happy again.

Obama Humor Shortage?

2008-07-18T20:26:00.001-05:00

Q: How many Obama supporters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Just one, and it's not funny!

All of a sudden people are complaining about a national deficit - of Obama jokes. I think it got noticed when the New Yorker cover elicited few chuckles.

We're in for some serious years.
Maybe we'll get some yucks from his ears.

Brain Plaque

2008-07-17T23:18:00.002-05:00

They thought it was the plaque in the brain that caused Alzheimer's. They invented a vaccine to get rid of the plaque. They used it on people who already had dementia. It got rid of the plaque. But the patients still had dementia.

But... maybe the vaccine could work preventively? So they aren't giving up on the vaccine yet.

What's clear is that they're making progress but that they don't really understand this disease very well yet.

At least they have a way to stop plaque.
Two steps forward, one step back.

Borges' Sonnet, "Spinoza"

2008-07-17T20:30:00.017-05:00

I was looking at this lovely sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges today, and I felt like trying a translation, even though I will fail to completely capture it. What is really hard to do, of course, is convey the simplicity and straightforward nature while trying to do something along the lines of his sound. And yes, here and there I have added some things and deleted some things. Also, I suppose I should mention that Spinoza, while now famous as a philosopher, made his living as a maker of lenses. Finally, I apologize to the ghost of Borges!

The Jew's translucent hands take hold,
scrubbing the crystal in the gathering gloom.
The dying evening fades to fear and cold.
(Evenings after equal evenings loom.)

His hands and this space of hyacinth,
grow pallid behind the Ghetto walls.
For this quiet man they barely exist at all.
He dreams his way through a clear labyrinth.

He isn't disturbed by fame, that collection
of dreams in the dream of another reflection,
nor by young ladies' timorous love.

Free from metaphor and myth,
he scrubs the crystal: the infinite
map of That which is all the stars above.

UPDATE... I keep fiddling with this.

Do As I Say, But Don't Say As I Say

2008-07-16T22:54:00.003-05:00

Jesse Jackson used the N-word somehow when he was fantasizing sotto voce about detesticulating Obama. At least that's what Fox news says, and they've got the tape.

Flashback to November 27, 2006:

Rev. Jesse Jackson is calling for entertainers to stop using the N-word.

Speaking as his defender,
I say it's a no-brainer:
he should simply mention
that he's not an entertainer.

Serenity Now

2008-07-16T22:08:00.004-05:00

I first saw the serenity prayer in elementary school. A nun had it pinned up by her desk in the front of the classroom. I believe we were driving her nuts.

My next encounter was when Ayn Rand wrote about it. She mentioned it was attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, and she commented that she hardly ever agreed with him about anything.

Well, now some librarian at Yale has established that very close versions of it were showing up in print, before the time when Niebuhr was thought to have created it. Each time it appears before Niebuhr, it appears with a different author.

Kind of spooky.

We were talking about The Selfish Gene in book club, so I have an idea about the serenity prayer - could it be a meme?

Nobody wrote it. It just appeared,
a random mutation, a brand new strain
that rang so true it simply seared
itself into the collective brain.

Or else it's possibly by
the mysterious, frightfully shy
A. Nonymous, whose game
is never to leave his or her name.

Bollywood Fountainhead?

2008-07-15T21:39:00.005-05:00

After I posted a humorous poem about Dagny-as-portrayed-by-Bollywood, Bill Nevin wrote me about a serious reported proposal to remake The Fountainhead in Bollywood:

Stephen Alter is an American writer who was raised in India in a missionary family. He has many contacts in the Hindi film industry, in part through his cousin, Tom Alter, who acts professionally in India. Stephen Alter became fascinated with the industry itself and with one of its signature features - the "love thief", a character who steals girls' hearts. This character type has deep roots in both the Islamic and the Hindu literary traditions. So he wrote a book called Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief (Harcourt, 2007.) In it, he captures a flavor of what it is like to work in the industry, relating telling details from interviews with many of the prominent personalities of Hindi cinema, asking them about their professional lives and concerns.

Much of Alter's work is devoted to documenting the making of Omkara, Bhardwaj's hip screen adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, which debuted in 2006. Instead of Renaissance Venice, however, Omkara is set in the present day, amid the dusty plains, teeming cities, criminal gangs, and dirty politicians of western Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, as well as one of its most notoriously corrupt. Writer-director-composer Bhardwaj gave Alter complete access to the
creative team throughout the writing, pre-production, and filming.

In between a brief biographical note on Satyajit Chourasia, the physical fitness expert, Schwartzennegger fan, and entrepreneur who revolutionized the look of Bombay's leading men with his chain of "Barbarian Power Gyms", and a description of the courtly manners of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh's heavily Islamic state capital, is sandwiched this exchange, which took place during Omkara's production:
After a full day on location our hair and clothes are thick with dust and ash... Though Vishal has been on location since seven this morning, he is still running on adrenalin and has a tennis game scheduled in the evening. Pleased with the progress of the film, he is already thinking about his
next project.

Rekha [Bhardwaj, the director's wife] suggests adapting Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Immediately, Vishal agrees, excited by the idea.

"The Fountainhead is one of my favorite novels," he says. "The main character is an architect. The way he approaches his work, as a perfectionist, you can never look at a building the same way again."

Entering the outskirts of Lucknow, the traffic grows thicker, swarms of bicycles weaving through a blue haze of smog. Vishal takes out his phone and calls Ronnie Screwvala, head of [Indian entertainment conglomerate] UTV, which produced [Bhardwaj's third film] The Blue Umbrella.

"Ronnie, I want to make The Fountainhead... "

Ten minutes later, when the conversation ends, Vishal tells us that Ronnie has read the novel three times. He too thinks it will make a terrific film. As we reach the heart of Lucknow, circling a roundabout and passing through the historic bazaar of Hazrat Ganj, we discuss how the main
character in The Fountainhead could be a filmmaker instead of an architect. His movies will reflect his own highly individualistic vision. Teasing Vishal, I say he should be careful not to turn it into an autobiographical film.

"But I'm not a perfectionist," he protests.
from Stephen Alter, Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief, pp. 143-4.

As for me,
I'll wait and see!

Lucky

2008-07-15T20:34:00.003-05:00

This cuddly-looking koala bear
got hit by a car, but hung on there
with his head stuck in the grill.

After 2 hours of zoo clinic care,
he felt much better and ate his fill
of leafy eucalyptus fare.

* * *

Zoologists, yes, I am aware
of a truth that's clear and indubitable:
the koala isn't really a bear -
but rather a marsupitable.

Cartoon Reflections

2008-07-14T17:53:00.000-05:00

Speaking of the New Yorker Obama cartoon... Some say it's funny. Some say it's offensive. But those 2 possibilities aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, they often arrive together in one bundle.

Funny and offensive
are sometimes coextensive.

The flashing bite of wit
can be unamusing to those who get bit.

Oval Office Cartoon

2008-07-13T23:42:00.001-05:00

The New Yorker has a satirical cover with Barack and Michelle in the Oval Office. A flag is burning in the fireplace. Osama's portrait hangs on the wall. Barack wears a turban and sandals. Michelle has an afro, camo pants, and assault rifle. They are doing a fist bump.

The idea, the editors say, is to make fun of people's irrational fears.

The featured story, inside the magazine, is about Obama's career in Chicago. In the story, apparently, he comes across as an ambitious politician, not a real revolutionary.

Ann Althouse thinks the cover is hilariously funny.

The Obama campaign claims it's tasteless and offensive. And the McCain campaign agrees!

When you make fun of fears, by naming them,
sometimes you just end up inflaming them.

Lots of Hope

2008-07-13T10:49:00.003-05:00

After hearing Christopher Robinson talk about hope, I've been wondering why the Democrats have been leaning so heavily on "hope". Clinton was "the man from Hope," and Obama has "the audacity of hope."

I mean, Republicans presumably have hopes too. Bush seems to have hoped, originally, that the Iraqis would all unite behind us once we overthrew Saddam.

Hope is an expectation of good things happening. But the good things can fail to happen. They may have been impossible.

And sometimes the things you hoped for turn out to be no so good after all. Communist revolutions come to mind, but the list is long and varied.

Sometimes your hopes
are slippery slopes
which sadly divert you
and finally hurt you.

Don't despair.
But choose hopes with care.

Long Day

2008-07-13T02:22:00.001-05:00

What a long day! I got up around 5 am to do a triathlon in Valparaiso, and now it's 2 am the next day. We just got back from a fun time in Rockford, getting a detailed China travelogue from kraorh.

I did sneak in an afternoon nap,
but now I'm ready to collapse.

Foiled

2008-07-11T23:19:00.001-05:00

So these 6 people arrange to kidnap the fiance of a bank teller.

To get her fiance back, the bank teller was supposed to get the bad guys some money. But she went to the FBI instead.

I love this sentence from the story:

Hoisington told agents the group was counting the money in the home when they discovered the tracking device, according to an FBI affidavit.

You think
you have it made,
then your stomach sinks
and you know you've been played.

"Technically Insolvent"

2008-07-11T20:27:00.001-05:00

Just whose brilliant idea was it for the government to create and back
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?