RIP Hardy Fox

Back in the early 1970s, Louisiana's Hardy Fox and his band The Residents set out to be the weirdest band in rock 'n' roll and by most any measure they largely succeeded and they stayed that weird for the next 45 years or so, putting out one inscrutable album after another.

We're sad to note that Mr. Fox passed away this week and that his distinctive drawl will no longer be heard on any new recordings.

The thing about Residents' albums is you never know what you're going to get.   One album might be of distorted Elvis covers and another of imagined Eskimo chants.  One might be all narration, Hardy telling the story of The Baby King to a group of children.  One album might be nearly unlistenable noise and another surprisingly melodic gamelan music.  The one thing you knew is that you'd never be bored.

Back in the early Aughts, we somehow managed to acquire nearly the entire Residents' discography, no small feat considering that they put out nearly an album a year from 1974 to 2001 and beyond, plus an equal number of CDs of live recordings, rarities, and compilations.  Listening through that entire discography, mostly on CD while driving in my car, turned into an exercise in sanity (as in, trying to hold on to sanity).

Anyway, they will be missed.

Puddles Pity Party

According to reports, shortly before he went on a murderous rampage at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the perpetrator of that heinous crime posted a message on social media stating, "HIAS like to bring invaders in that kill our people.  I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.  Screw your optics, I'm going in."  Established in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to aid Jewish refugees, HIAS is now a nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to all refugees.

As twisted and perverted as the killer's logic was, his fear of "the invaders" was no doubt stoked by right-wing fear-mongering and conspiracy theories about a caravan of refuges trying to make it from Honduras to the United States for asylum.  Our so-called President has made fear of the caravan one of the main talking points of his stump speeches and pointless rallies, he's called them "invaders" and has called out the National Guard to meet them at the border, and again there's no doubt that his words have contributed to those rumors and conspiracy theories and to the killer's motives.  The blood is on your tiny hands Mr. President, and you can't wash it off or make us forget it's there with your distractions or by doubling down on trying to frighten us with your scary refugee stories.

Today, another suspect explosive device was discovered, this time at CNN headquarters here in Atlanta.  Meanwhile, instead of trying to heal the nation and soothe the divides, our so-called President went to Twitter to blame the media for the anger and hatred across America.  In essence, even as the media is under violent attack, he chooses to highlight the target he's drawn on "the enemy of the people," which can only lead to more violence.

In his acceptance speech for his nomination, our so-called President catalogued all or the real and perceived threats to our country, and then claimed "I alone can fix it."  Mr. President, we're now two years into your Presidency, half-way through your first (and only) term, and you not only haven't fixed it, you've made it worse.  You're either bad at your job (a very likely possibility) or you don't care, or both.  It' time to set you aside, sir, so we can start making America better.      

Tragedy

There's nothing we can say that would affect recent events and there's nothing we can do that would change your opinion about recent events, but it is with extreme sorrow that we have to acknowledge those things that happened this week.  In the last two or three days to be precise.  To put it another way, we can't allow those events to pass without at least acknowledging them.  Anything less would be guilt by complicity, or at least guilt by apathy.

A gunman entered a synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing eleven. Back in the early 90s, we lived about a mile-and-a-half from the scene of this crime. A tragic, obviously anti-semitic tragedy, and in response, our so-called President noted that if more of the congregants were armed, as many people may not have died.

As everyone knows, last week, a fanatical hard-core Trump supporter mailed explosive devices to many of our so-called President's more vocal critics.  Fortunately, no one was hurt and none of the devices exploded, and it's still not clear if they were intended to detonate or just threats and intimidation directed at the critics.  But it's a scary and violent action that shows just how far some people are willing to go these days.

Almost forgotten in this tragic news was the gunman who shot and killed two black shoppers in a Kentucky supermarket.  He reportedly told a white bystander that "White's don't kill whites," and had earlier been unsuccessful in getting into an all-black Baptist church, where one can only imagine what he would have done.

This is not normal.  This can't go unacknowledged.  There's nothing I or anyone else and most certainly not our so-called President can say or do to make everything alright again.  There's no "Buddhist" or "Zen" take on this, there's no "liberal" or "progressive" policy or position of all of this, and there's no "scientific" or even "philosophical" stance.  Hate-fueled violence occurs and there's nothing that can be said.  We can only expose it to the light of day.

Look at any news outlet or opinion page and you'll find no shortage of additional details and thoughts and ideas about what needs to be done, who is to blame, and what's going to happen next.  We here at WDW have the humility to admit we don't have the answers.  All we can do is to love each other as much as we can, while condemning the perpetrators and enablers of violence in the harshest terms possible.

As well as get out and vote.

From The Politics Desk

We have a lot to say about all this but the Sports Desk had us up past 3:30 a.m. last night watching the marathon, 18-inning, 7 1/2-hour Red Sox World Series loss (ahem) to the Los Angeles Dodgers last night, and they will require our full attention a little later for the Georgia Bulldogs must-win game against bitter archrival Florida and then Game 4 of the World Series, so we have neither the time, energy or inclination to discuss all this in great detail.

The issue of voter suppression here in Georgia is very real and nothing less than a tangible threat to American democracy, and we're glad to see it being covered so prominently in the national media.  We've made the front page of the NY Times already on multiple occasions and been featured on the front page of England's The Guardian.  We've been the subject of lead-in monologues on Stephen Colbert's, John Oliver's, Trevor Noah's, and Bill Maher's television shows, and of course have been extensively discussed on MSNBC, CNN, and Huffington Post. 

As I'm sure you know, the issue here is that Brian Kemp, Georgia's Secretary of State, who's in charge of running elections, and a current gubernatorial candidate, has decided to hold off processing literally tens of thousands of voter registrations due to perceived irregularities in his "exact match" policy (e.g., a missing hyphen) or signatures that in his untrained staff's eyes don't exactly match what's on file.  It probably won't surprise you to learn that Mr. Kemp is a white Republican and that some 70%  of the suppressed registrations are for black voters (Georgia is only 35% black). 

In essence, what we have is a candidate who is abusing the authority of his office to illegally manipulate the outcome of the election in which he's running.  He has refused calls to even temporarily recuse himself from his Secretary of State position during the election, as S.o.S.'s have in other state's elections.  What's more, he's a despicable candidate, a true "deplorable," who's run t.v. ads showing him pointing a shotgun at a teenager he says was thinking about dating his daughter, and another of him in a pickup truck in case he had to "round up illegals and deport them myself."

The good news is that Kemp is running against a very strong candidate, Stacy Abrams, who's gathered national attention herself and not just because of Kemp's antics or because she could be the first black woman Governor of any state (much less Georgia), but because she's running as a bona fide, unapologetic progressive and gathering support in this deep red state.  Most polls have her and Kemp neck and neck. 

I don't base my votes on celebrity endorsements, but I find it an encouraging sign of her national popularity that last night Will Ferrell was here in Atlanta door-to-door canvassing for Ms.Abrams.

There's several other exciting campaigns going on here in Georgia, including our nemesis, Karen Handel, who narrowly beat Democrat Jon Ossoff two years ago, running in a close race for Congress against another black woman progressive, Lucy McBath.  Times do change and elections matter, and although Georgia's been governed for a long time now by a male Republican oligarchy, winds of change are blowing hard to turn this red state blue.

Dreaming of the Masters

Herbie Hancock from 1973 (although we didn't discover this LP until about 1977).  In addition to Herbie on Fender Rhodes, this track features Patrick Gleeson on synthesizer, Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, Bennie Maupin on soprano sax, and a rhythm section of Buster Williams (bass) and Billy Hart (drums).

Sextant was the last album of Hancock's early '70s Mwandishi period, when he first started experimenting with electronics, funk, and fusion, and predates the more commercially successful Headhunters era.  Julian Cope once remarked that this song, "contains elements of early electronica that might today be described as ambient - kind of like Tangerine Dream if they were a space-funk band mixed with Pomme Fritz-era Orb. Certainly, the sounds within stand up to today's stuff. The instruments kind of sway around each other . . . little solo pieces set off by electronic bubblings and spurglings."

I consider it validation that around 1979 or 1980, a college roommate hearing me play this song told me that I had "the worst taste in music ever."

Insane In The Membrane (Reprise)

While I was posting about Monday's road-rage incident and near accident, I got an email from my kid sister saying that our Mom was in a real honest-to-gosh car accident. 

Nobody was hurt, but her car was totalled.  We're waiting to see what we get from the insurance company, but in the meantime she's housebound, probably going insane in her own membrane.

Now is as good a time as any to let her know that she's welcome to come down here anytime she wants and for as long as she wants.  I'm out of the house anywhere from 9 to 12 hours a day and wouldn't be in her hair or in her way, nor would she be in mine.  The invitation's open anytime you want it, Mom, and do you really want to spend another snowy winter in northern Massachusetts hard on the New Hampshire border? 

The good news is that no one was hurt.  The bad news is now we have to find the Moms a new car.

Insane In the Membrane (Part 2)

So despite the self-centric introduction in Part 1 of this series, this story isn't about me, it's about someone who apparently hates me.

Picture this:  there I was, just another traffic bound civilian, trying to merge onto I-285, the Perimeter, and not very happy at all about even having to be out there for all the reasons explained in Part 1.  A large part of my commute each way and every day is negotiating about two miles or so of the Perimeter that I have to take on in order to get to and from the office.  I spend more time on that two-mile stretch than I do on the other 10 or so miles of my commute.  Every day, it seems, the Perimeter consists solely of slow-moving lanes of grid-locked cars, not just in the morning and evening rush hours, but depressingly, most of the day lately.  There's no getting around (or through) it, and I'm forced to slowly merge onto the highway if I want to get to or from work and then creep along for the next 10 to 15 minutes as the traffic allows.  I feel a sense of accomplishment once I finally get through - at last, now I can drive again - and I've come to think of the Perimeter as some sort of membrane surrounding the city that I have to penetrate if I want to get in or out of the ATL.

So there I was, as I was saying, on Monday morning, attempting my morning penetration of the membrane to get outside the big ovum that is Atlanta, waiting for the slightest gap in traffic to allow me to merge into the first stack of cars.  I wasn't happy about being there, I never am, and neither, I imagine, is most anyone else.  No one likes merging with the slow-moving membrane.  Patience is thin, and road rage is not uncommon.

I got into my lane, eventually, and crept forward with the traffic toward my exit.  One little trick move that  I learned over the years is that after I pass the next entrance, I can veer to the right over into the merge lane, which eventually becomes the exit lane I need to use to leave the membrane. This lets me by-pass several of the stacked cars in the grid-locked lane and zip up to my exit.  The problem is that other people have discovered this little trick as well, and use the merge lane to jump ahead of several cars in the stack and then merge back into the traffic before they reach the exit, which blocks the lane while they're waiting for a chance to merge back in.  It's basically the same thing as cutting in line, but as I pointed out no one's happy to be there and everyone is looking for any short-cut they can find.            

So I got up  to the point where the entrance ramp becomes the merge lane, checked my side-view mirror to make sure no one was coming up the ramp, and made my move to the right into the merge lane.  What I didn't see was that a motorist one or two cars back from me decided to make the same move at the same time, and when I merged over, I cut him off forcing him to brake hard (he was driving up the lane way too fast in my opinion, although I'm sure from his perspective, some chowderhead had just cut him off without warning).

Angrily, he followed behind me way too close as I drove up the merge lane following - in turn and at a safer distance, of course - the car ahead of me.  Following too close is a sort of passive aggressive way of showing displeasure in Atlanta driving protocols.  But suddenly and without warning, the car in front of me decided that he saw the space where he wanted to merge back into the main flow of traffic, and he abruptly hit his brakes and stopped to wait for a chance to merge back in, cutting me and my tail-gating friend off. I had to stop hard not to hit the car in front of me, and could only hope that the guy too close behind me had the reflexes and the brakes to stop in time too.

He did and we avoided collision, but I could only imagine how mad he must be at me now, first for pulling over in front of him and now for my albeit necessary quick stop.

The shoulder was wide enough for me to drive around the forward car, still waiting to merge to the left, so I swung around to the right to get around his blockade.  But once again, just as I did, the car following me had apparently decided to do the same and pass the two of us, so as I swung around the stopped car, I cut off the guy behind me for the third time.

And that, apparently, was more that he was willing to accept.  Rather than concede me the lane, he drove - at very high speed - off of the shoulder and around the two of us, his right tires on the hardscrabble roadside gravel.  I saw him on my right, off the road and glaring at me as I was on the shoulder passing the first car.

Neither of us, until that moment, saw the cop.  The cop was parked on the shoulder just in front of where the front motorist had decided to stop to merge back left.  The car formerly behind me but now on my right and quickly gaining the lead was on a collision course with the parked police car. Fortunately for everybody, he didn't hit the car but slammed his brakes hard and skidded on the gravel to a quick stop just behind the cop, and then had to let me pass on ahead as he maneuvered back, first onto the shoulder and then the exit lane, to get around the cop.  

The last I saw in my rearview mirror as I took the exit was the cop had his flashing lights on and was pulling over the guy who had almost just hit him.

I admit to no wrong-doing here, but can you imagine how angry that guy must be with me now?  He gets, in his mind, cut off not once, not twice, but three times, and then winds up getting pulled over and probably ticketed all because of some other idiot on the highway.  He hates me, I'm sure, and I'm lucky he never got a chance to get his hands on me.

He wasn't happy, I'm sure, but I didn't even want to be there in the first place either.  I never wanted to be a commuter in rush-hour Atlanta, I never wanted to be in a dead-end job, I never wanted to have to penetrate the the membrane twice a day just to make a living.  And I never wanted to incite someone into road-rage, and certainly not to the point where they got ticketed.  Although part of me did snicker in satisfaction when I saw him getting pulled over after he was badgering and harrassing me on the road.  

Anyhow, the World Series, Game 2, starts in a few minutes and I'm going to go watch the game now with the Sports Desk.

Insane In the Membrane (Interlude)

Insane In The Membrane (Part I)

Back in the early 90s - hard now to believe it was 25 years ago - I took yet another professional transfer, my third in ten years, for the large, multinational environmental engineering company for whom I was working. This time, I was transferring back to Atlanta, where it had all started.

We were giants then. Or at least we thought of ourselves as giants. I imagined myself a sort of one-percenter back then - certainly not in terms of salary or income, but in reputation and status.  Our large, multinational company was never guilty of humility - hubris may well have been our trademark - and while many thought we were the top company in the field, El Numero Uno if you will, I believed then and still believe now that we were certainly in the top 10%, at least in terms of technical proficiency, reputation, and capability.  You'd be ungenerous or even mean-spirited not to begrudge us a spot in the top 10%.  So, to be working for who I worked for, I reasoned, I was already in the top 10%.

But I was a Principal in the company, a position granted to few and requiring peer review and certification based on technical ability, business acumen, and leadership skills.  Fewer than 10% of the employees were made Principals, and the number was probably closer to 1%.  

So, without much braggadocio, I was in the top 10% of a company which itself was in the top 10%, mathematically putting me in the top 1% vanguard in my field.  Or so I imagined myself.

The firm was headquartered outside Atlanta, Outside the Perimeter or OTP if you will, so I rented an apartment and eventually bought a condo also OTP.  Commuting was a breeze back then, as the apartment and later condo were close to the Perimeter for better access to city restaurants and nightlife and other urban amenities, and the office was further out, so I had a reverse commute, heading away from the city during morning rush hour when everyone else was driving in, and the opposite in the afternoon.  

Picture me then:  in his 40s, at full professional stride, energetic, confident, and considering himself in the Top 1% of his profession.  A giant at the vanguard.  On top of that, he even had the whole lifestyle thing beat, with his reverse commute and a pretty red-headed live-in girlfriend, a flight attendant who was away on travel as often as she was home with him.  While others, those wage slaves and peons of the great unwashed masses, were living lives of quiet desperation (he imagined), stuck in an endless grind of commuting back and forth to unfulfilling jobs, worrying about mortgages and contemplating divorce, he was cruising around OTP, unimpeded, from his mile-high g.f. to his high-paying, prestigious position with not a worry in the world.

But pride goeth before fall, or so they say, and by the late 90s the company began falling apart.  We grew too fast and too large and exceeded our capability for managing our self.  We began losing money in first this sector and then that, and soon were hemorrhaging cash across the board. Management tried to double down on the losses by even larger acquisitions and bolder investments, each moving further and further from our core competencies, and the company never made it to the 21st Century.  We were purchased and significantly downsized by 2000.  I survived the massacre (I was still in the top 10% of the firm after all) but it wasn't the same.  I left the company by 2003.

At first, the rebound wasn't too bad.  I got a job at another large multinational, this one with even better salaries and benefits, if not quite as gaudy a reputation.  Their office was close to the Perimeter, so I didn't have to live OTP myself anymore, and bought a house, my current home, ITP and still managed to reverse commute out to the new office. 

Not crying in my milk, but that gig didn't last too long (three, 3 1/2 years) and it never got that good again.  I began working for small companies, where my big ideas didn't fit in, and I worked for single-owner firms, whose sole purpose was to make the sole owner richer.  The pretty little redhead was long gone by then (we didn't make it to the 21st Century either) and I even tried being a sole owner myself, starting my own firm and working from my ITP home, but the stress and the loneliness from working and living alone eventually got to me.  

In 2014, I finally settled at my current job at the ripe old age of 60, well past my professional prime and with noticeably less enthusiasm and energy.  I no longer command the respect that I once did and the new job is for yet another sole owner.  Where once I considered myself a one-percenter, I now can't think of myself even in the top 50%, or anything much above 25%.  It pays the bills but I find myself now just counting down the days until Social Security eligibility and retirement.  That brash one-percenter once breezing around OTP is now in the same stop-and-go traffic with the hoi polloi, in a rut, living a life of soul-crushing repetition and banality, wage-slaving for the enrichment of an unappreciative boss.

I'm not asking for sympathy and I don't even feel sorry for myself - it's karma, baby, and what that one-percenter always knew he eventually had coming, anyway.  I only bring it all up as deep background for what happened this morning, a psychological profile of the perpetrator of the case we'll call, for the sake of this story, Insane In The Membrane.

(To Be Continued)  

Tralfamadore

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes." 

- Kurt Vonnegut, from Cat's Cradle, Chapter 2 (1969)

Norts Spews

There's been no living with the Sports Desk lately.  They've been on a good run, despite the Georgia Bulldog's recent loss, and they're frankly ecstatic that the Boston Red Sox have won the AL pennant and are heading to the World Series.

While the other desks were discussing death and time permanence and sharing songs about death and time permanence, here's what the Sports Desk was thinking about:

 

No, there's been no living with the Sports Desk the past week or so, they've been so vocally emphatic about their Red Sox enthusiasm.  And in fact, we don't have to live with them - we're not kicking the Sports Desk out of WDW, but the Sports Desk has their own blog, Norts Spews (spoonerism for Sports News), where they can rant all they want about partisan sports enthusiasms without disturbing our deep, Zen-like equanimity (as if . . . ). 

We'll still allow the Sports Desk to say a word or two here, but they better have something interesting to add to the conversation other than "Our side won!" and they will need to bring a fresh perspective here to the sports discussion.

BTW, the Sports Desk reminds us that the Georgia Bulldogs are off this week, preparing for a pivotal, must-win game against the Florida Gators.  Any hopes at all of a Bulldog championship rely on Georgia winning next weekend.

Dreaming of the Masters

With all of the Zen Desk's recent posts here about death and grief and time permanence (whatever that is), we here at the DOTM Desk decided it was time to post some of the most uplifting and life-affirming music we could possibly imagine, so naturally we turned to Blue Note Records and naturally we found ourselves listening to Herbie Hancock.  We said before that we were going to start posting more Herbie, and it's hard not to - the man is sort of the Zelig of jazz: during most of the essential and transformative recordings in jazz history since at least the 1960s, Herbie was somehow usually in the room and usually on piano.

Here's Cantaloupe Island featuring the late, great Freddie Hubbard on trumpet (the Zen Desk is chiming in that since we can still enjoy Freddie, and some of us can still now discover him for the first time, it somehow makes a point they were trying to explain earlier this week).  Cantaloupe Island was composed by Herbie and first recorded for his 1964 album Empyrean Isles while he was a member of Miles Davis Quintet. This 1985 video features the musicians from the original recording, including Hancock, Hubbard, living legend Ron Carter on bass, and the American treasure Tony Williams on drums, with the addition of the professorial Joe Henderson on tenor sax.

By the way, if the music sounds familiar to you, congratulations, you're familiar with jazz, or else, and this isn't meant pejoratively, you remember US3's 1993 album, Hand On The Torch, and its lead single, Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia).

By the way, the voice at the beginning of the song is that of Jimmy Scott, who we saw perform at Variety Playhouse in 2003.

Nobody Dies

 . . .  except for when they do.

Here's another song on our current topic but with a different point of view, reminding us that although nobody dies, death is real.  All moments in time may last forever, but one of those moments irrevocably changes us such that there is no longer any existence and no new memories are formed, for us or for others.

Saying "nobody dies" is not meant to trivialize death. Life-and-death is the great matter. It's not meant to ignore the grief that the survivors naturally experience.  The nobody-dies concept is really just an attempt to remind us that although death is real, our minds and our imaginations can still engage with whomever we want whenever we want, and if our imaginations are limber enough, we can revisit - and even embellish - any moment in time with or without the departed.

We are hardwired to grieve - some other animals (e.g., elephants) grieve over death, too - and it's alright.  It's natural and it helps us get on with the life ahead.  

The songwriter Phil Elverum, who records as Mount Eerie, lost his wife, the cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, to cancer on July 9, 2016.  In response to his grief, Elverum recorded the song Real Death and eventually included the song on an album (A Crow Looked At Me) documenting his spiritual and emotional response to the loss of his partner. 

Warning:  Don't listen to this song unless you're ready to break down and start weeping uncontrollably.  This isn't a song about the experience of grief, this song is that very grief itself.  However, if you're emotionally prepared, the song is a powerful meditation on loss and well worth the experience of listening. 

Nobody Dies

Thao & The Get Down Stay Down at Terminal West, Atlanta, April 20, 2016

The recent posts about death and time permanence were inspired by our experiences in meditation and have absolutely nothing to do with this song from 2016, but ever since titling those posts "Nobody Dies," we've had this stuck in our head.

Puddles Pity Party

Our world is what we make of it, what we imagine it to be.  We can imagine our world to be an oppressive, brutal force out to get us, or we can acknowledge the life-affirming aspects of our world and consider all the kindnesses and generosity that's been shown to us.  We can either focus with black-and-white judgement on the petty wrongs we believe were done to us or we can color that perception with green trees, red roses, and blue skies.

Nobody Dies

We can choose to grieve about life and death, or we can recognize that those no longer with us still exist, even if only in our memories or as mental schema.  We can visit and revisit the times those persons lived as much as we like by simply recalling our memories, and we can even engage in new experiences with the departed by using our imaginations. Imagine someone you once loved reading this very post right now along with you.  Voila! - a new memory.

It's really no different than with the living.  Our only experience of those still alive but not immediately in our presence exists as memories of recent encounters and as imagination. Why are the departed any different just because the burden of creating new memories falls on us alone?

Simone Weil once said that imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Our world is what we make of it, what we imagine it to be.  We can imagine our world to be an oppressive, brutal force out to get us, or we can acknowledge the life-affirming aspects of our world and consider all the kindnesses and generosity that's been shown to us.  We can either focus with black-and-white judgement on the petty wrongs we believe were done to us or we can color that perception with green trees, red roses, and blue skies.

It's your choice, but at the risk of sounding like we're wearing rose-colored glasses, we'll take the technicolor view of this beautiful world.    

Nobody Dies

. . . other than the University of Georgia Bulldogs' football championship ambitions.

Yesterday, the Dogs faced their first real test of the season and traveled to Baton Rouge to play LSU in Death Valley, the Tiger's home stadium.  It didn't go well.

For a brief period there in the Second Half, it looked like Georgia still might have been able to engineer a comeback, but the effort fell short and LSU capitalized on Georgia fumbles and miscues and ran the final score up to 36-16.

Last year, Georgia dropped a game to Auburn, 40-17, but were able to avenge that loss and beat Auburn later in the season in the SEC Championship Game and eventually went on to play in the National Championship Game.  There's still a chance that history might repeat itself if LSU manages to win the SEC West and faces Georgia in this year's SEC Championship. In that situation, provided the Dogs don't lose again, Georgia could avenge its loss to LSU, still emerge as the SEC champion, and potentially qualify for the National Championship playoffs.  But a lot of things still have to happen that are outside of Georgia's control. 

So with Georgia's loss, only Alabama (three hours southwest of here) and Clemson (two hours northeast of here) are the only remaining undefeated teams within the Three Hour Drive (3HD).  Auburn and Tennessee are having disappointing seasons (Tennessee beat Auburn yesterday) and Georgia Tech and Georgia State are . . .  fine academic institutions, we're sure.

Which brings us to baseball (if you haven't guessed by now, this is the Sports Desk posting). The Red Sox pitched horribly in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series and lost to the Houston Astros, 7-2.  There's potentially six more games still to be played and Boston has come back from far, far worse that a one-game deficit to win series in the past, but combined with the Georgia game, it was not a particularly rewarding day to spend watching sports, and one we're not likely to want to revisit often.

Nobody dies, but sometimes it just feels that way.

But at least we beat the damned Yankees this year.

Nobody Dies

It's no big reveal and I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but human infants lack object permanence. It's only as their brains start to fully form that they realize that even objects they no longer can see still exist, or that the two parts of a dog they see behind a tree are not two separate dogs but in reality are one, connected dog.

Given the way our brains are wired and we perceive the world, it ends there (object permanence, that is, not Piaget's development).  But what if we were able to take it one step further?

It might sound absurd at first, but the Zen Desk proposes that we suffer from time impermanence.  In other words, we have achieved object permanence but we still lack time permanence.  We perceive a moment in time and when it's over and we're no longer experiencing it, we believe that the moment is lost forever - that it no longer exists.  We don't think that way about the objects in that moment; why do we think that way about the moment itself?

For example, on one very special day, I was standing in central Alaska and viewing Denali (Mt. McKinley to some of you still).  That was 1994 (I think), and although I have not seen Denali since then, I believe it still exists.  Right now, at this very moment, it is not in my field of view or readily accessible to me, but I am firmly convinced that were I to take all of those extraordinary efforts I undertook in 1994 (I think), the mountain would still be there.

This is because the mountain still exists in my mind, my memory to be precise. It's also because I have formed a schema, a mental model, that there is such a thing as "Denali" and that it exists in a very specific albeit remote location.  To be sure, I saw other mountains when I was in Alaska, I'm sure of it, but I don't remember them individually and I didn't create schema specific to any Alaskan Range mountain other than Denali.  The other mountains all exist in my mind in a sort of fuzzy schema you can call "other mountains in Alaska," which I'm sure also exist and can be verified on the same trip I would have to take to confirm the existence of Denali.

Here's my point: in addition to memory and schema of Denali, I also have memory and schema of that specific day in 1994 (I think).  I believe firmly that day and time existed - I'm sure I wasn't dreaming or imagining the day.  But because of the way our minds are wired, although I believe Denali still exists, I assume the specific day and time no longer exist.  Just because I don't have the means of going back and verifying the existence of the day and time doesn't mean that it does not still exist, any more than if I somehow lost my ability to confirm the existence of Denali - say, I went blind, or air travel was no longer possible for some reason - I wouldn't question the continuing existence of the mountain.

My hypothesis is that all moments in time still exist and that the past is never gone. My evidence?  The same as my evidence that objects I cannot perceive at this moment still exist: memory, and the mental schema formed regarding their existence.  Denali still exists and that day in 1994 (I think) still exists, as does every other day before and after.  

Accept this hypothesis, and the past is never really gone, and people and objects in the past are never really gone.  Those who have passed away are still existent, even if not accessible by conventional means. Nobody really "dies," they just stop existing in this present moment, but they still exist in past moments. And the beautiful part is that we can recall those moments when they did exist, and relive our experiences with them in our memories.  The more adventurous among us can create new experiences with the past in our imaginations.  

The only thing holding us back is our time impermanence.    

Dreaming of the Masters

If you follow the crime drama Better Call Saul, you might remember a scene a couple of weeks ago featuring Jimmy McGill riding a Greyhound bus while writing numerous (and we mean a whole lotta) postcards on behalf of the imprisoned Huell.  It was a montage scene, and the music in the background was Les McCann's funky Burnin' Coal, from 1969's Much Less.

1:25 - More cowbell!

A great choice for the scene, and thanks for bringing back the memories, Saul Goodman.  It's all good, man!

Michael: The Aftermath

We survived Hurricane Michael!  The wind wasn't so much a factor here (although we're still glad we got those big trees taken down) as much as the 12-plus hours of rain.  It ranged from a steady downpour to a torrential deluge, with occasional bursts of is-it-time-to-build-an-ark-yet?  It poured all through the mostly sleepless night, but finally let up by the time the alarm clock went off.

Not that we went to work today. Bone tired, we had no stomach for roads blocked by downed trees, malfunctioning traffic lights, and backed-up storm drains, so we telecommuted from the home office today.  

We experience a modicum of damage.  During the most intense precipitation, the rain managed to find a vulnerable spot on the roof and a very, very minor leak developed in the kitchen ceiling.  Just drops, not a steady flow, but it may have shorted out a recessed light in the ceiling.  We're well aware of the fact that we've needed a new roof for a while now. We were putting it off until we got the trees down (why pay for a new roof just to have a tree fall through it?) but now that's done, we have no more alibis.  Time to call back the roofing contractor who repaired the previous leaks and have them go ahead and replace the whole thing, shingles, gutters, and all.

So we're lucky here in Atlanta, and a welcome disruption to our normal commute and a gentle reminder of what we already knew about our roof pales in comparison to the suffering and devastation experienced in Florida and south Georgia.  Here are some pictures from south of here that I've gleaned from the internets.

Bye-bye, Michael.  Anybody want to guess where Nadine is hading?.

Michael

It looks now like we won't be unaffected here in Atlanta, but at least we're outside of the worst of the storm. But keep in mind that as of now, Michael has a 175-mile radius (350 miles diameter), and Atlanta is only 115 miles north of Perry, Georgia, which is roughly where the "Thurs. 2 a.m." dot is located.

Update:  10:30 p.m. - We're in the thick of it now.  The wind gusts occasionally get pretty intense, but generally speaking, it's the heavy rain more than the wind that's been a factor here.  As far as I know, it should pass within the next four hours or so, and so far, so good.

Say It With Pictures

 

Two Dakotas

Shortly following the 2016 election, Katy Collin noted in the Washington Post that because small states get more electoral votes per person than more populous states, the electoral college distorts the actual election results. Each state has the same number of votes in the electoral college as it has representatives in Congress. Since sparsely populated states have a minimum of two Senate seats and one House district, they have at least three votes. The most populated states have a ceiling, since the number of seats in the House of Representatives does not increase.

"That means that even the least populous state — Wyoming, with 586,107 residents — gets three electoral college votes. How disproportionate is that? Consider that California, the most populous state, has 39,144,818 residents and 55 electoral college votes. That means that in the electoral college, each individual Wyoming vote weighs 3.6 times more than an individual Californian’s vote. That’s the most extreme example, but if you average the 10 most populous states and compare the power of their residents’ votes to those of the 10 least populous states, you get a ratio of 1 to 2.5."

Since that time, California's population has gone up while Wyoming's has decreased.  According to the latest, July 2017 estimates, Texas, although not the most populous state, is the new loser with a whopping 744,858 people per electoral vote, while Wyoming has only 193,105 people per electoral vote.  That means that a Wyoming vote is now 3.85 times more powerful than a Texas vote. Want your vote to matter?  Move to Wyoming.

Those of us here in Georgia are 6th worst in the nation, with 684,462 people per electoral vote.

Meanwhile, what's going on in the Dakotas?  Combined, North and South Dakota have six electoral votes, but with only 1,625,059 people between the two states, that's 270,843 people per electoral vote. Why do we need two Dakotas anyway?  If the two states were combined into one, they would have 541,686 people per electoral vote, still low but more in line with Georgia and Texas.

If California were two states instead of one, they would have 693,625 people per electoral vote.

So here's a modest proposal: either abolish the electoral college so that we can move closer to a "one man, one vote" system, or barring that, for the purposes of the electoral college only, lump North and South Dakota together into one state and split California into two.

No Man's Sky

We don't particularly like the video game No Man's Sky and yet we can't stop playing it.

After playing through several role-playing games, first-person shooters, and stealth missions, and some games that were various combinations of those elements, we decided that it was time for a change of pace.  No Man's Sky is a science-fiction space-exploration game, and all that we knew about it was that it had a virtually limitless number of computer-generated planets to explore.  It sounded different and we decided to give it a try.

But wandering around planets endlessly collecting plants and minerals is all there is to the game.  Literally.  There is no real storyline, other than an endless number of missions you can choose to take on if you so wish although you can ignore them all if you want and most of which are just gathering the same plants and minerals for others as you do for yourself - in other words, it's the same thing you're doing anyway.

The game breaks down into a relentless series of sequential tasks that have to be repeated over and over again.  For example, to fly your starship, essential for getting around in the game, you need take-off fuel just to get off the ground.  The fuel is made from hydrogen crystals that for some reason are found all over every single planet.  So before you lift off, first you have to collect some hydrogen crystals.  Oh, and some iron too, because you have to craft a metal container to hold the hydrogen fuel.  

But that's just the start.  To gather the hydrogen and iron that you need, you have to use a mining ray gun that's fueled by carbon, which means you have to harvest a bunch of vegetation and trees first. And once you're finally up in space, you need thruster fuel for interplanetary travel, which is fueled by tritium, which you can find on asteroids out in space. So to get from Planet X to Planet Y, first you have to gather a bunch of carbon-based vegetation, then use the carbon to power a ray gun to obtain hydrogen and iron, and then craft a fuel cell with that hydrogen and iron to get off a planet and up into space, where you then have to obtain tritium for actual space travel.  Not that you're likely to make it all the way to the next planet without running out of fuel first and have to stop and gather more tritium to complete the trip.

All this is complicated by the game design, which only allots the player about a dozen or so cells to hold all the stuff that's gathered, and each cell only holds a restricted number of each item.  F'rinstance,  one cell only holds 250 tritium units, but fueling the thrust launcher requires 200 tritium units, which isn't enough to get you to the next planet, so you have to stop and refuel, and once you land on the next planet, as you can probably guess by now, you're now out of launch fuel, so off you go again to find more carbon-based flora, hydrogen fuel and iron for crafting a fuel cell. Over and over and over again.

On top of all this, your playable character has no real personality - you can't even see their face for the space helmet they always have to wear.  I couldn't care less about the character's fate, although the game is also vanilla bland with no real or present danger -  you really have to fall asleep at the console to die in game.  So, redundant game play, no story line, no sense of identification with the character ot anyone else in the game, and no excitement or sense of danger.

So why can't we stop playing?  Since Labor Day, we've logged 105 hours of game play, and spent more hours this weekend than we care to admit playing the game.  There's something almost hypnotic about the simplicity and redundancy of the game, and the never-ending spiral of having to complete one task first before completing the next, so that you can then move on to the one after that, and so on and so on.  We have absolutely zero desire to play when we're not in the game - we almost have to force ourselves to boot the game up, but once we're in it, we literally can't stop.  We've played until one, two o'clock and later on weeknights, and to near dawn on weekends.  It's bordering on the pathological, and it's clear that there's no end to the game - you just keep gathering carbon and hydrogen and iron and tritium on a near infinite number of planets.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey dropped last week and we expect to download that soon, and once we're playing a real game with a plot and likeable characters and some purpose to playing, we'll probably look back at No Man's Sky and laugh at ourselves for wasting so much time.

If, that is, we ever gt ourselves to stop playing No Man's Land and take on something else.                 

I'm drunk right now.  I very rarely, if ever, post while drunk, but it's late Saturday night and I'm disappointed in you, America.  A woman, a "credible witness" by almost everyone's account, comes forward with a heartbreaking account of sexual assault and near rape, and America concludes, "Young men are in danger."

We're better than this.  Let's make America better again.

Dreaming of the Masters

Well, this is sad . . . percussionist and trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez, cofounder and leader of the Fort Apache Band, died Monday in Madrid from cardiac arrest caused by smoke inhalation from a fire in his home. He was 69.

The one and only time we saw González was when the Fort Apache Band played the Lake George Jazz Weekend back in 1986.  We had to look the date up on the internet and if asked before we had researched it, we would have guessed that the performance was at least five years later than that. Time flies.

But whatever the date, he made an impression, and we're so sad to learn of his passing.  Double bummer: while doing our research on the Lake George Jazz Festival web site, we saw that festival founder and impresario Paul Pines died last summer at age 77.

Every year, more dreams and fewer masters.

Also, we're apparently pack rats.  We still have the souvenir coffee mugs from the Lake George Jazz Weekend:

They did it.  They went through a sham of a so-called investigation into charges against the Anger Bear candidate for the Supreme Court, and they overlooked the key issue - that it's the temperament of the man that disqualifies him from sitting on the highest court of this nation, not the specific results of that temperament from 35 years ago that disqualifies him. 

I'm confident the Senate will find the votes to approve his nomination.  The sham of an investigation gives the moderates the protective cover they needed to cast a "yes" vote, and the two women being most closely watched - Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) - will do what good Republican women always do and vote the way the men-folk tell them to.

But have they really thought this through?  What will happen with the Anger Bear on the bench?

My prediction is that the truth will eventually emerge and the Anger Bear's lies to Congress will be revealed.  And his quid pro quo arrangement with The Orange One for exoneration in exchange for nomination.  Now that he's shown his partisan tendencies, he will have to recuse himself from many cases, but of course, he will refuse - men with his sense of entitlement and privilege feel they should always get to speak their mind - and every controversial decision will get challenged and re-tried on the basis that his vote was not legitimate.  The Democratic Congress will move to have him impeached as we lurch our way from one constitutional crisis to the next.

The Orange Pumpernickel strikes again - now he's broken the Supreme Court.

But I'll give them this - they have caused me to rethink my position of some issues, specifically the Second Amendment.  It may be time, folks, to take up arms in order to overthrow tyranny.  Karl Marx once said that we'll hang the last capitalist with the rope he just sold us, and I wouldn't be surprised if the American public doesn't rise up and drive the tyrants out of Washington with the very guns that they insist we must own. 

And when that happens, you can join us at the barricades, laughing our heads off.