New Jersey Roller Derby
(NJRD) held its first regularly scheduled home bout of the season last night at
its usual Morristown location. The evening was a double header featuring first
its Junior
Division followed by the adult match. Each was an intraleague
bout in which the NJRD divided itself into Blue and White teams. While this
eliminates the Home vs. Visitor element – all the teams were Home teams – it
does showcase the leagues current skills and allows for the selection of very
well matched teams. This proved to be the case in both the junior and adult
bouts.
In the junior bout, the score
wavered between the two teams and, for the bulk of it, neither could pull
decisively ahead. With only a dozen minutes remaining Blue led 169-162. Jammers
Phantom Panda and Fast n Furious Blue as well as Sarahcuda and Slamasaurus Rex
for White, among others, proved adept at slipping by or through opposing
blockers. Enthusiastic blocking showed in pileups. Only in the last few minutes
did Blue pull ahead for a final score of 234-209
in favor of Blue.
MVPs –
Blue:
#22 Phantom Panda (jammer)
#104 Harley
Spin (blocker)
White:
#19 Sarahcuda (jammer)
#7 Darth
Skater (blocker)
**** ****
The adult bout was, if
anything, more evenly matched. Ragnarok for the Betty Whites and Tuff Crust
Pizza for Blue Steel both showed repeated skill at get past strong blocking
positions, sometimes with apex jumps. Star passes by both teams occurred with
more than usual frequency; this seems to be a well-practiced tactic. Neither
team could keep a lead for long, and the first half ended 98-91 in favor of
White. In the second half the pattern of trading leads continued. Whenever a
gap opened up, as after a solid point gain by Blue’s Queen Guillotine, it was
equaled or surpassed by an opposing gain as by White’s Rosa Ruckus. Blocking
was tough and well organized on both sides – tough enough to take down Ragnarok
hard, though she returned to the track before the end of the game. Chase Windu
for Blue proved very good at catching up with an opposing lead jammer thereby
causing her to call off the jam. Sukkubus Strike for White helped give her team
a margin of victory in the final minutes. The clock ran out with White ahead 184-173.
MVPs –
Blue Steel:
#11 Tuff Crust Pizza (jammer)
#7 Slam
Hathaway (blocker)
Betty Whites:
#14 Ragnarok (jammer)
#25 Malicen
Wonderland (blocker)
The next home
bout is interleague against the Reading Derby Girls in June. The NJRD looks
ready.
I’m not a good
multi-tasker. Strictly speaking no one is (see Technology:
The Myth of Multitasking), but some people are much better than I
at switching focus rapidly this way and that. Yet, when I read I do sometimes –
but only sometimes – also play background music quietly. When engrossed in a
book I don’t hear it. When my attention drifts I begin to hear it, then I pay
attention to it, and soon I’m refreshed enough to become engrossed in the book
again. This works only with novels and narrative history; for textbooks or
other materials that require more cognitive effort, I read in silence. The
stereo was playing quietly last week while I read Matt Haig’s novel How to Stop Time. My attention drifted
from the novel for a couple minutes when the all too apt number by The Rolling
Stones Time
is on My Side started to play. This was, needless to say, one of
the Stones’ early songs, for no one over a certain age – probably no one over
30 – ever would write those lyrics. Time is never on our side. We all begin to hear
mortality snicker well before we earn our first gray hairs.
A very very
long life has been a human fantasy since we’ve been human. It has been a staple
of imaginative fiction since there was literature, and nothing short of
immortality is ever quite enough. Desire for immortality is central to the plot
of the 4000-year-old tale of Gilgamesh.
In Voltaire’s 18th century scifi tale Micromegas a native of Saturn complains to a visitor from Sirius
about the shortness of the 15,000 year average Saturnian lifespan: “You see how
it is our fate to die almost as soon as we are born; our existence is a point,
our duration an instant, our globe an atom.” In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels the struldbrugs are immortal, though they age
normally and so just get ever more infirm. GB Shaw’s multi-centenarians in Back to Methuselah are much more vital.
Robert Heinlein imagined a secret society (the Howard Foundation) of the
superannuated in Time Enough for Love
and other novels. Poul Anderson follows eleven apparently ageless people in The Boat of a Million Years from 310 BC
into the far future. Claire North features an odd sort of immortality in her
novel TheFirst Fifteen Lives of Harry August. There is the whole Highlander saga. Those are just a small sample.
The premise continues
to attract present day authors. In Haig’s first person 2017 novel, small
numbers of secretive people age normally until puberty but then slow to a ratio
of 1:15, so that someone who is barely middle-aged could be over 400 years old.
They once remained hidden and frequently changed identities so as not to fall
afoul of witch hunters; in the modern world they do so to avoid being lab rats.
The narrator Tom Hazard, born in 1581, teaches history in modern day London. He
belongs to the Albatross Society, which helps with the increasingly difficult
task of providing new identities for its long-lived members. Tom still grieves
for his short-lived (“mayfly”) wife and has yet to heal a 17th
century rift with his daughter, who has inherited his peculiar condition. Haig keeps
a wistful tone without ever becoming maudlin, and mixes in enough adventure and
intrigue to keep the plot moving. Thumbs Up.
A glance at
his bio shows that Haig was 41 in 2017, the same apparent age as his 436-year-old
protagonist. This doesn’t surprise me. 40 is the stereotypical age at which we
become acutely aware of the passing of youth. We develop a deeper sense of
connection to the past. As anyone 40+ knows, the past is not so distant nor so
disconnected from the present as it seems at 18 or even 30. The Vietnam War, for
example, is as far back in time today as World War 1 was when I was in school,
and I know how ancient the latter seemed to me then. Neither seems ancient to
me today.
As for the
future, most of us choose most of the time to shove those nagging thoughts of
mortality to the back of our minds and behave as though we really do expect to
live forever. Perhaps this is no bad thing. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the
first to be right.
In its first home game of the
season, the Jerzey Derby Brigade (JDB) last night hosted in Morristown NJ the
Dominion Derby Girls visiting all the way from Hampton Roads VA. Despite a
strong 2017 season and a convincing win in its first 2018 away game on March
31, the JDB encountered an opponent strong enough to stop its winning streak.
The pattern was set in the
very first jam when Dominion jammer #21 Smokin’ Ices put the first four points
on the board. Time and again Smokin’ Ices proved herself Dominion’s big gun,
dodging past JDB blocking almost at will. Also formidable were Dominion jammers
#15 Sparkle Wolf and #777 Khristal Meth. Dominion’s blocking was exceptional as
well, often utilizing 4-blocker walls instead of the usual 3 plus one-free.
Dominion didn’t have it entirely its own way. JDB jammer #3684 Californikate
proved able to break through the Dominion wall repeatedly while #8 Lil Mo Peep
And #128 Val Royale found paths around them. In the second half JDB upped its
blocking intensity, with no fewer than three JDB skaters fouling out.
Californikate scored the last points of the bout. But, it wasn’t enough for
JDB. Dominion dominated, taking the win 275-74.
An
essential element of hipster culture – along with de rigueur denial that one is a hipster – is irony: the fashion and
lifestyle choices from silly beards to flip phones are regarded as cool because
they knowingly are uncool. My own uncool choices for better or worse have no
irony to them: they are merely uncool. No man bun ever could make them pass for
anything else. For example, my 9-year-old flip phone (which had replaced a
damaged one very much like it in 2009) makes no other statement than that I’m a
consummate procrastinator and haven’t gotten around to exchanging it. It’s less
a matter of choice than inertia.
At least it's more than two cans and
a string
I
don’t need a smartphone for work, as most people do these days, and I’m seldom
far from a computer screen, so there is little practical inconvenience from my
telephonic backwardness. True, there are times when I idly ponder such things as
which astronaut flew the penultimate Mercury flight (Walter Schirra) and what
was Jean Harlow’s birthday (March 3, 1911) and then have to wait 20 minutes
before I get home and look up the answers on my home screen. So far that’s not
been reason enough to say, “Today’s the day I’m going to the Verizon store.” That
doesn’t mean I deliberately avoid the tech. One day I’ll damage my flip phone
by dropping it on concrete or in a pond or something and finally I’ll be
motivated to join the 2010s. Meantime, while missing out on smartphones’
benefits I’ve also been missing the downsides.
There
are downsides. For one, they are not good for effective IQ. That’s not a mere
assertion. Brain Drain: The Mere Presence
of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity is a 2017
clinical study by Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W.
Bos of the University of Texas at Austin. They gave 800 smartphone users tests
that required concentration and cognitive effort; all of them powered down
their phones but some put their phones in another room while others put them on
their desks, in their pockets, or in their bags. The participants who put their
phones in another room solidly outperformed all the others. Just having the
(powered down) phone nearby was tempting and distracting. The authors concluded
“that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when
avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these
devices reduces available cognitive capacity.” Still, this one is easily
addressed: if you need to concentrate on something, put your phone in another
room.
Another effect – damaging more for some folks than
for others – is social and psychological. Checking texts, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and the rest is
notoriously addicting. How many people habitually scroll as they stroll? Social
media addiction causes depression in many people as they obsessively pursue
“likes” and compare their lives to the virtual facades of others. The more
sites we visit, the higher the risk. From a study in ScienceDirect: “Use of
multiple SM [social media] platforms is independently associated with symptoms
of depression and anxiety, even when controlling for overall TSSM [time spent
on social media].”
This
brings us to the 2017 indie movie Ingrid
Goes West currently available on DVD. It spun in my Blu-ray player last
night. The smartphone is a co-star in the film. Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) is a
mentally troubled young woman with a horrible self-image and severe
difficulties making and keeping real friendships. Retreating to her phone, she
becomes a follower of Instagram star Taylor Sloan (Elizabeth Olsen) who posts
about her fabulous California lifestyle of sun, fun, fashion, and joy. When Ingrid
inherits money ($60,000) from her mom, she uses it to move west and become part
of Taylor’s life, which she does by secretly stealing her dog and then
returning the “found” animal. Ingrid judges her own life entirely by the likes
and shares on her own Instagram account and by her inclusion in Taylor’s social
media. Everything Ingrid pursues in real life is for the sake of the online
image. Ingrid’s behavior goes beyond creepy and far into the criminal, yet she
remains a sympathetic character throughout the movie and she at least has the
excuse of being troubled. It is soon clear, however, that Taylor (along with
all of her friends and family) is a massive phony whose real life is anything
but enviable. Not quite a **spoiler**: Ingrid, scrolling her phone in the final
scene, has a moment of happiness, which for the viewer is a particularly bleak
ending.
Thumbs
Up on the movie. Nonetheless, despite its warning, my next phone will be smart.
Most ancient calendars began at the vernal equinox, which
marks the beginning of spring; under the current system that falls on March 21,
give or take a day depending on the year. There were numerous exceptions that began
the year at the hibernal solstice (December 21 plus/minus a day), but most
began at the equinox. This is reflected still in the names of the months, the
last four of which are simply wrong. September, October, November, and December
mean the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months: in each case off by two.
Prior to 45 BC those months were what they purported to be. In that year Julius
Caesar, as part of the general calendar reform, reset the start of the year arbitrarily
to January 1; inexplicably, he didn’t bother at the same time to change the
names of the months to fit the new arrangement.
Bone lunar calendar c.25000 BCE
Calendars based on the lunar and solar cycles preceded
formal writing. Among the earliest representational symbols ever found are notches
on sticks and bones marking the lunar cycle. Neolithic peoples were very good
astronomers as Stonehenge famously attests. The reason the ancients commonly
began a year at the vernal equinox (or at the full moon following it) is
obvious. Earth in the Northern hemisphere finally shakes loose of winter.
Spring is a rebirth. Ancient mythologies are full of resurrection stories symbolizing
vegetative rebirth at the start of spring. In ancient Babylon it was the return
of Tammuz to Ishtar, in Greece the resurrection of Persephone, in Phrygia the
return of Attis to Cybele, and in Egypt of Osiris to Isis. In Japan there are
parallels in the tale of Izanagi and Izanami and in Mesoamerica in the return
of Quetzalcoatl. The seasonal cycle is such an obvious analogy for a human
lifetime that it is a mythological universal. This led poet, classicist, and scholar
of mythology Robert Graves to assert in The
White Goddess (an indispensable text for Western mythology along with
Frazer’s The Golden Bough), “All true
poetry is about love, death, or the changing of the seasons.” Verses about
other things are just wordplay, he argued, not real poetry.
I can relate to this. It’s my atavistic practice to host
solstice and equinox parties when the weather cooperates – as it did not this
past snowy March 20. It snowed again yesterday (April 10) in this locale,
though just a bit and plainly as a last gasp effort of winter to stay past its
time. Persephone must have missed her boat connection back across the Styx this
year and had to reschedule with Charon; she likely got a scolding from Demeter
for being late. Yesterday’s light snow is what prodded my reflections on the
season twenty-one days after its arrival however. My response to spring always
has been mixed. It’s the season of new beginnings, of course, but you can’t
have a new beginning without an ending, and the endings tend to stand out in my
mind.
An outsized proportion of the biggest endings in my own life
have come between a vernal equinox and the next estival solstice: not the
deaths of friends or family members – those occur randomly at any time of year –
but endings involving some volition. Examples: two graduations, a contract to
sell my first house, the closing of a business, and the end of all five of the
most serious romantic involvements in my life. (One of those five was my idea,
the others weren’t.) This isn’t a unique pattern. While January is notorious
for a rise in relationship break-ups after a lull during the holidays, according
to University of Washington research presented to the American Sociological
Association in 2016, consistently over a 15 year period more divorce filings occurred
in the equinox month of March than in any other month of the year; a second but
smaller bump occurred in August. (Note that “autumn” in the US tends to be
regarded popularly as starting with the school year rather than with the
autumnal equinox, so it’s a seasonal end-of-summer bump.) Starting afresh just
seems an exceptionally good idea when surrounded by the new growth of spring.
More often than not, that requires saying “goodbye to you” to what or whom went
before; more often than not it’s also the right thing to do or it wouldn’t be
seriously considered at all. So, whatever endings and beginnings the reader may
be experiencing this particular spring, may you remember the fields you are
leaving fondly and may your new fields be ever green.
That time Michelle
Branch played The Bronze: Goodbye to You
There is no sense owning DVDs of classic (classic by age if
not always by quality) movies without revisiting them occasionally. So, now and
then I’ll spin up one or more on a sleepless night even when I’m only lukewarm
on the idea. Rarely do they fail to re-catch my interest and play through to
the end. Recently over several nights I revisited the flicks in one of
Universal’s The Legacy Collection
boxes: Dracula (1931), Dracula's Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943), and House of Dracula (1943). Somehow it
seemed appropriate then to follow up the vintage vampires with The Legacy Collection box of Universal’s
werewolves: The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), Werewolf of London (1935), and She-Wolf of London (1946).
These hoary movies have accumulated enough reviews over the
past eight decades to be in no need of mine. I will mention, though, that Lon
Chaney’s character in The Wolf Man
has the most interesting psychological profile. He is so guilt-ridden about the
harm he does as a wolf that he openly wishes to die; yet whenever he actually is
attacked his survival instinct takes over, even while he is in fully human
form, and he defends himself … and then feels guilty about that. Dracula, by
contrast, is just a narcissistic psychopath with a natty wardrobe and
questionable taste in beverages. These movies tweaked the centuries-old vampire
and werewolf mythologies into the basic forms that still underlie most tales
involving the creatures today, including the supposed mutual antagonism between
the two species that still turns up in the 21st century as in the Underworld films.
Harold Lloyd encounters vamp in
"Girl Shy" (1924)
It is hard not to wonder at the persistence of these night
creatures in film and fiction. Other classic monsters recur too, of course, but
not to the same extent or in the same way. Much of it has to do with the well-acknowledged
erotic appeal of vampires and werewolves of and to both sexes, which was
recognized even before the Universal movies. “Vampire,” commonly shortened to
“vamp,” was colloquial for a seductress of a certain kind (sort-of Goth, but
more upscale) in the 1920s as it very occasionally still is today. Then came
the movies with Bela and kin as seducers. Then came Anne. It’s not fair to
blame Anne Rice for Twilight and its
ilk, but it is unlikely the series and others like it could have happened
without Anne’s novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) and its sequels, which by the way are better literature than
one might expect. Anne in her fiction rebalanced the erotic appeal of the male
vampires in particular to such an extent and so effectively that her (less
capable) imitators writing Romance fiction largely replaced highwaymen with
vampires. Werewolves’ appeal is more feral. The hint of fierceness inside
werewolves even when in human form regularly is played as an attractive element
in fiction and films, e.g. The Howling,
Wolf, and Cursed. Also, calling someone a wolf – in the sense of “predator” –
never sounds quite as insulting as intended; it’s often taken as a compliment.
I’m leaving Buffy out of this, for Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer deserves
special treatment all its own.
Vampirism and lycanthropy (werewolfism) are both recognized
medical-psychiatric conditions. The sufferers (practitioners?) aren’t the real
thing of course, but the people with the conditions think they are. The
“vampires” do shun the sun and (often) drink blood. The lycanthropes are
convinced they shape shift. (They don’t.) Lycanthropy isn’t common, but there
are some 30 cases on record in the US in the past 15 years. One suspects they
are less romantically appealing than their fictional brothers and sisters, but
I lack the personal experience to state that definitively.
Werewolves and vampires of the fictional type appeal to the dark
side of our natures. Humans are forever repressing that side with mixed
success, but it is always there. At the time The Legacy Collection movies were first in theaters, many folks because
of the dictates of traditional morality were inclined either self-delusionally to
deny having a dark side or to be guilt-ridden about having one; today there are
folks who deny or are guilt-ridden by their dark sides because of the dictates
of PC morality, which is as Victorian in its own way as the traditional kind.
Either will keep Dr. Freud and his successors paying the bills. There are no
thoughtcrimes. Acknowledging and accepting (but not acting upon) one’s dark
impulses is an easier way to get happy. A good vampire or werewolf movie might
well help.
It says a lot about a person with which creature of the
night he or she most identifies: vampire or werewolf. To which one is attracted
(not necessarily the same), if either, also says a lot. Do you hear the call of
the tux or the call of the wild? If I get to choose, I’m going with the wolf
for both answers. However, while both critters have inspired popular songs, it must
be conceded that vampires by and large have the better music.
