Richard Bellush Jr. 1952-2024

May this blog honor your memory. 

To all who have been reading- thank you

The Fun of Low Bars

We are often exhorted to challenge ourselves – to seek new heights. That is all well and good for some single facet (or handful of facets) of our lives where doing that is actually fun in its own way: some hobby or sport, say, or even something more remunerative such as securities trading. Maybe you’ll one-up Albert with a successful Unified Field Theory. (I doubt it, but give it a shot.) But as a general way of life it has its drawbacks. Happiness sometimes is defined as reality divided by expectations when the quotient is greater than 1. (Since we’re talking about lowering the bar, one might prefer the even simpler reality-minus-expectations with the answer a positive number.) This is because we irrational humans judge success in relative terms. We’re giddy when things go better than expected and upset when they go worse.
 
We all see this every day. For years I was a real estate broker, and customers, especially when unaccompanied by spouse, often were surprisingly (and unsolicitedly) open about their disappointments in life. I remember showing one woman, who drove a $65,000 Mercedes, an $800,000 suburban house. (Both items would cost perhaps 25% more today.) “I can’t believe this is my life,” she said despondently. She was serious. I’m aware that there is more to life than material well-being, and that there are many legitimate reasons why moneyed people nonetheless might be unhappy. Maybe she had them, but I couldn’t help (unnoticed I hope) raising an eyebrow. If her material expectations had been even grander however (e.g. French villas and private jets) maybe the shortfall in that area alone was the disappointment.
 
Self-reported happiness in the US has been declining since the 1950s. Analysts have blamed everything from obesity rates to social media addiction for the trend. At bottom, though, it seems our expectations have changed. After a desperate Depression and a brutal war, those who in the 1950s achieved the dream of a little ranch house with a Chevy in the driveway thought they were in pig heaven – it was more than for which they could have hoped a decade earlier. They were happy days. Compare that to the previous story.
 
If we consider only the material portion of life, how much money would it take today for Americans to be happy by their own reckoning? The numbers vary significantly by generation. According to a survey by the financial services company Empower, the median minimum net worth it would take are as follows:
 
Zoomers:         $487,000
Millennials    $1,700,000
Gen X             $1,200,000
Boomers        $1,000,000
 
Annual salaries would have to be
 
Zoomers:       $128,084
Millennials:   $525,947
Gen X:            $130,344
Boomers:       $124,165
 
Zoomers actually have more realistic goals than Millennials, though it may just be that that they haven’t yet learned how much a dollar is really worth (or, more importantly, isn’t). All of these numbers are high, of course. The median household income according to the Census Bureau is $74,580. (The median household size in 2023 was 2.51; for a single-person-household the median income for a full-time employed worker was $57,200.)
 
A little greater pessimism about goals and expectations might cheer the whole lot of them up in the long run. They can get some surprises on the upside.
 
The power of lowering the expectations bar is evident in the counter-intuitive finding that seniors are the happiest age group. They don’t expect much anymore and so are not much disappointed. I can relate. If I wake up in the morning feeling hale, that is enough. It’s a good day.

 

The Doors – Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Updike Redux

The discount bookseller Hamilton is one of my go-to sites for perusing titles for possible purchase. More often than not I’ll toss something in the virtual shopping cart. Recently two by John Updike (1932-2009) caught my eye: his 1992 Memories of the Ford Administration and 1994 Brazil. I wasn’t looking for (or expecting) signed hardcover private editions but those are what arrived – apparently publisher’s surplus.
 
I first read Updike in high school in the 1968-69 school year. The English teacher Mr. Drew (a former monk and well-educated eccentric) mixed books by contemporary authors in with classics on the class reading list just to make the point that literature was still a flourishing art form. John Updike was youngish (36) and still considered up-and-coming at the time. So, for one of our assignments, Mr. Drew chose Updikes’s Rabbit Run, a novel about 26-y.o. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom whose dull marriage and duller job don’t measure up to his glory days as a high school athlete. As a student I found the book painless enough that I bought and read the sequel Rabbit Redux (1971) just for recreational reading despite my already hefty reading list at college. The four Rabbit novels written between 1960 and 1990 capture their times consummately as well as one man’s stages of life. Yet, in a general way they made me not so much an avid fan of Updike as a lukewarm fan – but a fan nonetheless. I fully understand Gore Vidal's remarks that Updike is an accomplished writer but that he wasn’t particularly interested in the man’s preferred subject matters and suburban protagonists. Updike does get more adventurous in his plots occasionally, as in The Witches of Eastwick and The Coup, but suburbs in his native Pennsylvania or adopted New England are indeed his most likely settings. The two books from Hamilton, however, were a step up from an already pretty high level.

In PA just west of Delaware River. I'm guessing
the novel by native son Updike came first and
the street second, but maybe not.

 

By fits and starts from the mid-1950s Updike worked on a historical novel about James Buchanan, the only President from Pennsylvania. Buchanan is also, by most historians’ reckoning, the worst President ever for failing to avoid the Civil War when a show of force might have prevented it, since even in South Carolina there was at the outset substantial Unionist sentiment. He took the curious view that states had no authority to secede but that the federal government had no authority to stop them, so he just wagged a finger and let secession happen. Most of today’s general public have forgotten Buchanan altogether. The novel didn’t come together for Updike for more than three decades. At last he hit on the solution of removing himself a couple steps from the subject matter by making the novel about a Professor Alf Clayton writing about the Ford Administration (another widely forgotten Presidency) while simultaneously writing a biography of Buchanan. This also allowed Updike to use a more deeply literary style than he usually employs since we expect a professor to write in professor-ese. Accordingly, the novel is every bit as much about the 1970s as the 1850s – as well as life as a New Hampshire college professor. It is worth a read on all three of its levels.
 
A greater departure from Updike’s usual fare is Brazil, which deserves a big thumbs up. Set (mostly) in the 1960s during the era of military rule, the Brazil of Updike’s novel is part starkly realistic and part sensual magical fantasy. The plot is basically Tristan and Isolde featuring wealthy families and slum dwellers instead of courts and commoners. In case there is any doubt about this, the protagonists are named Tristao and Isabel. A country that then (as now) prided itself on being colorblind, Brazil really wasn’t (isn’t) though the more thorough blending of the population makes the matter far more nuanced than in North America. This adds a crucial dimension to class differences in the tale.
 
The millennium-old story of Tristan and Isolde has numerous permutations, blending with Arthurian legends in England while taking other directions on the continent. All of them, though, up to and including Wagner’s over-the-top opera, are about a love supreme that survives suppression, violence, kidnapping, betrayal on various levels (including of each other at least superficially), escape, recapture, romance and bromance. All of that is in Brazil, forcing one to ask, “Why are the two lovers putting themselves through this brutal punishment? It can’t be worth it. Split up already.” The key is in Isabel’s realization during some of the worst of it that she is happy. The mutual willingness to endure punishment proves to her a love that illumines their lives in an otherwise meaningless world.
 
It is a strangely masochistic vision, but one that may be all too relatable. How many of us have experienced a self-destructive relationship and delayed far too long an escape from it? (I’m raising a hand high here.) If that is, we did escape. There is much to be said for being kinder to oneself – for living a calmer life in a softer light. If we don’t get a novel out it, much less an opera, so be it.
 
 

Paul McCartney - Back In Brazil

Intergenerational Money Grumps

Numerous articles in news and commentary sites lately have reported the difficulties Millennials and Zoomers are facing in their attempts to establish independent lives. High rents and college debt are cited as serious drags on them. A minority is very successful indeed almost directly out of college, but the majority struggle. I recall similar articles in past decades about Boomers and Xers, but that is not to deny actual changes in the challenges faced by the young in the 80 years since World War 2. At this stage in my life, the issue in a personal way is largely academic, but I do see friends and relatives affected by it.
 
The immediate post-war period was a remarkable anomaly. After a decade and a half of desperate times, members of the GI and Silent Generations created for themselves a civilian economic boom in the US and most of the rest of the West that set an unprecedented standard of widespread (not universal by any means, but widespread) middle class prosperity. They started adulting (a word that didn’t exist at the time) early; it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them to do anything else. My parents were typical: my dad was discharged from the service in 1946, he and my mom married at ages 21 and 19 in 1947, and they built their first house (a suburban ranch) in 1949. A loose regulatory environment for land development resulted in a construction boom that made housing 1945-65 as affordable as it ever had been or has been since.

My parents at work on their house. 1949.

Each generation since then has launched a little later than the one before. (They are Boomers 1946-64, Xers 1965-79, Millennials 1980-94, and Zoomers 1995-2012; the oldest of the upcoming Alphas won’t be legal adults for another 6 years.) Each generation blames the one before for shutting economic doors on them (e.g. through zoning and licensing) and each in turn blames the one after it for being laggards. There always is some truth in both accusations, but just some: the matter looks more complex, unsurprisingly, in detail.
 
Millennials and Zoomers have had particular trouble affording housing in the 2020s. In consequence, according to RentCafe, 68% of adult Zoomers live with parents or some other relative. 20% of Millennials still do. Of those, nearly half have no plans to move in the next two years. Of those that do move out, roommates are a commonplace way to afford rental units. Some even opt for alternative housing such as RVs. News sites are rife with stories about how most live paycheck to paycheck without so much as $1000 for emergency expenses; they rely on credit card debt for those. Yet, Millennials and Zoomers are not in as bad shape as all the stories suggest. Every generation takes time to build net worth and savings. The current crop of young people are a few years behind, but not by all that much. Housing for purchase was actually less affordable in the early 1980s (when mortgage interest rates were in double digits) than today. To be fair, rents and (especially) education costs really are significantly higher today in inflation adjusted terms than in previous decades. However, a windfall is coming.
 
Baby Boomers have capital – much of it is in home values rather than liquid but it nonetheless adds up to a lot. (To be sure, there are plenty of broke Boomers, especially among those needing long term health care, but we are talking about the center line of the bell curve.) According to the Federal Reserve’s 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median US household net worth (i.e. 50% have more and 50% have less) in 2023 was $409,000 for those aged 65-74 and $335,600 for those over 75. This gives a falsely low impression of how much is in this generation’s hands. Thanks to the millionaires among them, the average (not the median) net worth for Boomers is closer to $2,000,000; most of those wealthy people will have multiple heirs. So, an unprecedented transfer of wealth, mostly to Millennials and Zoomers, is set to take place as the Boomer generation passes: some 84 trillion dollars. Together with their own earnings, the kids should be alright – again, talking about the generation collectively. Individually, every person’s story will be different. At least half of Zoomers shouldn’t count on any rescue by inheritance – especially if health care saps Boomers’ bottom lines in the years ahead – but this was the case for earlier generations too.  
 
The generation in most immediate trouble is X. According to a 1000-person survey by Clever Real Estate, 56% of Xers said they had less than $100,000 in savings and 22% said they had none at all. Two thirds said recent inflation has seriously harmed them financially and 40% don’t think they ever can afford to retire. The windfall from Boomers will largely pass over them. The oldest of the Xers turn 59 this year, so they are not entirely out of time to repair their finances, but it is getting short.
 
No one wants to be old and broke. (No one wants to be young and broke either, but one can recover from that easier.) So, it is natural to worry about these things. But there are limits to the value of worry too. We do what we can with what cards we have at each point in life. We can do no more.

 

Ray Charles – Busted

 

Attachment to Music

It is not uncommon for friends on Facebook or other social media to post links to music videos for the sake of nostalgia, or because the artist is in the news (possibly deceased), or just to express the poster’s current state of mind. Unless I have some history with or personal connection to the song or artist (such as my Bobby Darin story), I seldom comment on the post whether I like the song or not. It means something to the poster, and that is enough: de gustibus and all that. However, it is well known (and a subject of recurrent research) that our musical tastes say much about our personalities, so perhaps we reveal more than we intend when we post music vids.
 
An acquaintance (the actual face-to-face kind) who is also is a frequenter of my posts on this blogsite (and thereby one of a smallish but I like to think discerning readership) asked me the other day whether the music videos attached to most of them reflect my personal taste. (I sensed a bit of judgment in the question, but didn’t pursue that aspect of it.) The answer is by-and-large yes. Not always. Sometimes the title or lyrics of a song are just apt for the topic of the blog, so I’ll attach it even if I personally don’t like it much. But 9 times out of 10 I like the attachment at least a little. Occasionally a lot. I’m not sure what that reveals, but an online test purports to do so.
 
Research over the past 30 years (confirming what was already obvious to casual observers) has shown that the overwhelming majority of people form their musical tastes between the ages of 10 and 30, with 14 being the peak year. People remember notes and lyrics of songs from this stage of life better than any they heard before or hear later. The songs typically remain a core preference for life with ever deepening nostalgia value. Our tastes as we grow older and more experienced may well expand far beyond what we liked in youth, of course, (mine did) but usually in ways that are unsurprising if you know the core. For example, heavy metal enthusiasts if and when they explore classical tend to like Wagner. I get this completely. Wagner is definitely the most metal of the classical composers.
 
For this reason the most recent studies on musical preferences and personality traits have focused less on broad genres per se (e.g. country, rap, folk, classical, etc.) and more on musical attributes within and across genres, such as arousal, valence and depth. David M. Greenberg at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Cambridge in a 2021 study, also found that listeners tended to like artists who appeared to express in their music personality traits similar to their own according to the Big 5 model. (The Big Five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN). “The match between the [personality of the] listener and the artist was predictive of the musical preferences for the artist beyond just the attributes from the music,” Greenberg said according to the Washington Post.
 
Anyway, I took his 35-question test on personality and musical taste. It can be found at https://musicaluniverse.io/ – if you take it, note the warning to save the results manually. My first page results:
 
Score Summary
 
Below is a summary of your scores based on comparisons to 350,000 people worldwide. To learn details and get personalized recommendations based on your scores, download your 15-page eReport on the next page.
 
Personality Traits:
Openness | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Conscientiousness | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Extraversion | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Agreeableness | High (76 to 91st Percentile)
Emotional Stability | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
 
Musical Preferences:
Mellow | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Unpretentious | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Sophisticated | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Intense | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Contemporary | Low (9 to 24th percentile)
 
Those are disturbingly normal results. So much for being eccentric. An agreeable average Joe who doesn’t get newfangled stuff? I’ve been called worse.
 
I’m not sure how any of that relates to the musical attachments on this site – well OK, you’d be hard-pressed to find much newfangled pop, I suppose. You’ll find new rock (e.g. Dorothy, Rival Sons, The Pretty Reckless), though admittedly the style of these groups is much like the rock of my 10-30 youth.
 
When I started blogging on this site on a whim in 2009 (Yikes! That’s 15 years ago) the posts were just prose – even photos were rare. The videos came along later to add a bit more… well… pretension – and perhaps to inspire in the reader the question “Why THAT song? My pick would have been much better.” You’re probably right, too. Hey, what do you expect? I’m just an agreeable average Joe who doesn’t get newfangled stuff.
 

Nostalgia Post: I first heard this number by Janis (when she was with Big Brother and the Holding Company) on the radio in 1968 at age 15 – right in that 10-30 sweet spot. I like several of her other numbers better but the first counts for something. It ultimately prompted me to buy 4 albums between 1968 and 1971 including the posthumous Pearl. Janis Joplin – Piece of My Heart

Brrr

It is cold outside. In NJ in late January that is no surprise, but it is cold outside… and snowing. As a kid I rather liked living in a region with four distinct seasons: each one had its own opportunities for play. (There was also a comfortable home to which to retreat, for which I didn’t have to pay.) Each season brought its own labors too, but my parents didn’t drive me and sister too hard on those. Nowadays the winter labors far outweigh the joys. Winter sports are not my thing: skiing is physically dangerous for me at this point in life, skating is plausible but at my skill level will result in some thumps on my butt, while the appeal of snowmobiling (icy particles blasting one’s face at 60kph) always has escaped me. I am left with snow shovels and snowblowers, which are not nearly so fun. I understand more with each passing year why so many retirees relocate to places like Sarasota or Tucson: let the sunshine in. I won’t be joining them, but only because I am too rooted to where I live. All my stuff is here – and I don’t mean just material possessions.
 
My own personal inertia aside, humans, like all great apes, evolved as tropical creatures. All the ones besides humans had the good sense to remain in warm environments. (I’ll modify that statement if a Yeti specimen ever turns up.) Our direct ancestors lacked that level of sanity. 500,000 years ago Homo heidelbergensis (a species predating both Neanderthal and modern humans) lived in an England far colder than the one of today. There is no evidence they had clothes and no physical evidence (such as ancient hearths) they had fire. (I suspect they did, but only because of the difficulties of being so far north without it.) They must have been cold. By 30,000 years ago migrating anatomically modern humans occupied pretty much every environment up to the arctic. Why go so far north? Riches – at least by the standards of hunter-gatherers. While not ideal environments for vegans the cold North hosts abundant wildlife, including fish and herds of caribou and reindeer. Scoring a meal was easy – but damn it was still cold.
 
There are numerous health benefits to living in colder regions. Despite annual flu season, cold weather actually reduces exposure to communicable diseases overall. (You’re not likely to be bit by a malaria-carrying mosquito when it’s -20C.) It reduces common infections. It rejuvenates skin. It improves sleep. It reduces inflammations and allergies. It even boosts brain function: people in cool rooms do better on cognitive tests than when in warm rooms. Nor are humans the only beneficiaries. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences latitude and lifespan were correlated in 85% of examined animal species.

 
All that may be so, but I’d rather be warm. If I cannot bring myself to the heat, I’ll bring the heat to me. That’s what fireplaces are for.
 

The Rolling Stones – Winter

The Fall of the House of Bell-Usher

Simplified, the first two laws of thermodynamics are 1) you can’t win and 2) you can’t break even. Said Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, “The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.” Though he was not the first to notice the effect, Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) is credited with formalizing the concept of entropy (ΔS=∫[dq/T]) in the 1850s. In a closed system spontaneous change is always in the direction of a reduction of energy available for useful work. This is another way of saying net disorder always increases overall; an increase of order in some corner of the system is always bought with a greater decrease in the system as a whole. Things decay. We decay. We can fight decay selectively, but we use up limited resources in the process. Our ability to combat decay decays. Entropy wins in the end.

 
This doesn’t happen right away. We have our glory days when we exploit our surroundings effectively to make our particular corner of the system splendid and strong. As Roderick Usher sings in allusion to his family home in Poe’s story,
 
“Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)...”
 
But of course the good times don’t last forever for either his estate or his family. (He and his twin sister Madeline are the last of the family lineage.) So,
 
“And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed...”
 
Like Roderick, I (also the last of a lineage) feel somehow connected almost physically to my home (built decades ago by my dad in sunnier times), and both of us are falling apart. The roof leaks, my teeth rot. The plumbing has problems, so does mine. The house visibly ages, so do I. Its furnaces cough, so do my lungs. Its minor systems (e.g. garage door openers) wear out, my physical abilities wane. Carpets fray, hair thins. The house more easily suffers damage from use, my stamina is much diminished. Both of us have become very expensive to maintain even in far less than ideal condition.

Back when order was still increasing on what is now my plot of land. The
house was not yet built, I had a Donny Osmund haircut, and area codes were 
unnecessary on local calls.

 
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not giving up on either of us quite yet. I’ll continue to invest time, energy, and money to keep us both functional, but in both our cases some realism is in order about what effects of entropy are reversible and what are not. Unlike a human being, a house in principle can be rebuilt totally of course, but that usually is not a pragmatic course of action for owners with limited funds – it is not a pragmatic course of action for me. Still, I’ll not yet let either the house or me just split in two and sink into the tarn.
 
Nonetheless, I’m acutely aware that neither of my parents lived past 74. Entropy caught up with them. My intention is to exceed that benchmark (not a very high bar nowadays), but entropy might play the prankster with me by then, too. One never knows.
 
I don’t hold a grudge, though of course I miss being 18, at least in terms of youthful vigor. (It and youthful foolishness were a package deal.) Entropy is a condition of existence. Without it there could be no life at all. Better some than none. So on balance I’d call it a positive. Meanwhile, there even may remain time to float yet another yellow, glorious, golden banner or two on the roof. I’ll get on that.
 

Kelly Osborne – Entropy

Giving Vice Its Due

This being the first week of 2024, some readers might have had some experience with alcohol sometime in the past seven days. Some may regret it. Others not. Some might even be participating in Dry January, though I suspect most of those doing so are non-drinkers anyway. We all know the health risks of alcohol overindulgence. I blogged on this not long ago: The Booze Bin. Those affected directly and indirectly by alcohol abuse are not few. As many as 1 in 8 drinkers may qualify as alcoholics and (according to the CDC) as many as 1 in 3 (while not necessarily meeting criteria for alcoholism) drink excessively. Nonetheless, these are still minorities – sizable ones, but minorities. For the moderate majority of drinkers are there benefits besides (possibly dubious) health ones? They obviously think so or they wouldn’t do it. First let’s first dabble in statistics, some of which are counterintuitive.

Per capita consumption of alcohol in the U.S. (counting only alcohol content itself, whether in beer, wine, cider, or spirits) peaked in the 1970s, which is pretty much as I remember the decade. It declined through the 1980s and 1990s and then started to rise again after 2000. It spiked in 2020. Though it fell back a little in 2021, it remained higher than pre-pandemic levels. In 2022-23 it again trended slowly upward. 62% of adults (over 18) say they drink at least sometimes; the number is 65% of those over 21, the legal age in the U.S. This compares to 71% back in the 1970s. The average annual per capita consumption for Americans over 21 (abstainers included in the total) currently is 2.83 gallons [10.71 liters] of pure alcohol or 603 standard drinks. Oddly, alcohol consumption is positively correlated with income: 79% of those with incomes over $100,000 are regular drinkers, 58% of those earning over $40,000 but less than $100,000 are drinkers, and 53% of those earning under $40,000 are drinkers. College graduates are more likely to drink (74%) than non-grads (56%). Unsurprisingly, weekly attendees of religious services are less likely to drink (48%) than non-attendees (67%). Non-Hispanic whites are more likely to drink (68%) than either Hispanics (59%) or non-Hispanic blacks (50%) according to the Pew Research Center. The differences among adult age groups are significant but not massive, though there is considerable variance by age of beverage choices, with older Americans preferring more traditional spirits, beers, and wines; the percentage of drinkers 18-34 is 58%, 35-54 is 66%, and over 55 is 61%. Among older Americans, health issues might affect the percentages.
 
Getting back to the matter of non-health benefits, are there any? For moderate – and only for moderate – consumers of alcohol the answer is a qualified yes. (“Moderate” according to the CDC is no more than 2 drinks per day for a man, 1, for a woman, and no more than 14 in any one week; “binge drinking” is more than 4 in a day. I haven’t had 14 in any one week in at least a decade… maybe 2 decades… maybe 3.) An article on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health site states, “The social and psychological benefits of alcohol can’t be ignored. A drink before a meal can improve digestion or offer a soothing respite at the end of a stressful day; the occasional drink with friends can be a social tonic. These physical and social effects may also contribute to health and well-being.” Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford’s Experimental Psychology department agrees. He says, “Our social networks provide us with the single most important buffer against mental and physical illness. While pubs traditionally have a role as a place for community socialising, alcohol’s role appears to be in triggering the endorphin system, which promotes social bonding.” A more detailed analysis can be found in the study Functional Benefits of (Modest) Alcohol Consumption, which states in the Abstract, “We combine data from a national survey with data from more detailed behavioural and observational studies to show that social drinkers have more friends on whom they can depend for emotional and other support, and feel more engaged with, and trusting of, their local community."

It turns out that even just bending the long-suffering bartender's ear can be as therapeutic as cliché would have it.
 
Note, however, the social aspect of the tippling mentioned above. Drinking alone, with all due respect to GeorgeThorogood, misses much of the point. Maybe one to unwind upon arriving home alone is OK, but think twice before pouring a second. Skip the third, and maybe join the sober minority if you find that hard to do. They have a point to make, too.
 

Ida Lupino - One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)

[One trusts that it’s the metaphorical road back to happiness]

Auld Times

Auld Lang Syne will fill the airwaves in a couple days. The song itself is part of the nostalgia it is intended to evoke. We resist updating the old-fashioned Scots lyrics because that is not the way we heard it in our youths. Besides, we get the gist of it as is.
 
We all know how a song can stimulate the memory of a special place, person or event. Most of us can experience that not just from a few but from hundreds of songs. There are several though (besides the Robert Burns ditty) that might come to my mind on New Year’s Eve but seldom anytime else. Oddly, most of the ones of that sort on my list I don’t even like very much, if at all. But they pop into my head as the clock runs out in the current year. A non-exhaustive sample:
 
In the Mood  performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My mom loved to dance (especially after a scotch and soda, but without one as well) and my dad wasn’t bad at it. (I did not inherit this trait: I dance like a wounded buffalo.) She had little trouble talking him into it, commonly in the living room in the presence of company. They had dated during WW2, so my mom’s most frequently (but non-exclusively) preferred dance was the jitterbug. Her record of choice was typically a Glenn Miller album, and In the Mood was the first track. She never skipped it. It is actually a pretty good number, but I heard it so many times growing up that I was sick of it as an adult – until recent years and only on New Year’s Eve. It transports me back to when my parents were half my current age and dancing in our living room.
 
In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. On a clear night it was visible from the ground. My dad thought this was the start of something important so he made a point of taking my sister, my mom, and I (and the dog for some reason) out to the driveway on a very clear night. I’m guessing a local radio station must have mentioned what time the satellite would pass overhead. It came and went on schedule. Just to impress upon us further the memory of this (I was not yet 5) my dad announced firmly, “OK, we’ve seen Sputnik.” In 1958 the novelty song The Purple People Eater  about a space alien playing rock’n’roll became a hit; at age 5 I loved it and played a 45 of it repeatedly. Even though this was months after the driveway viewing, the song and that event are tangled in my head somehow; I cannot think of one without the other. The song is silly and I seldom think of it except at the very end of a year.
 
Having a sister two years older was a huge advantage in matters of pop culture right up through high school. This was especially so because Sharon was pretty hip for her entire life. She was always in step with the times, which I by nature was not. Because of her, I nonetheless was introduced to social trends and artists (Bob Dylan, for instance) when they were still cutting edge. Left to myself I would have missed them until they were passé. This started early. Sharon (b. 1950) loved the Everly Brothers for a few years straddling 1960. I would play her 45s of them, and particularly liked the 1962 Crying in the Rain. Once again, it is not a song I play as an adult at any other time, but I might just do so on the 31^st. It reminds me of my sister. Hi Sharon.
 
Janis Joplin’s I Need a Man to Love is the second track on the Cheap Thrills album, which came out in 1968. I liked Janis from the get-go, and still do, but she grew on me more and more between 1968 and 1970. (Our psyches and tastes often evolve a lot between age 15 and 18 – mine did.) Initially, I Need a Man to Love was not one of my favorite tracks on the album. A prep school buddy named George (a troubled young man, but surprisingly insightful at times) told me to give it a deeper listen. He said it was undefensively soulful. I did. He was right. All of Janis evokes an extended era in my mind, but of course that track also reminds me of George. He died of HIV related illnesses two decades ago.
 
The Commodores – Easy. This is a song about which I had and have no strong feelings as a song. I neither like it nor dislike it. In the 70s I never played it on purpose but didn’t change the station if it came on the car radio either. I would react the same today, though one seldom hears this number anymore even on an oldies station. The reason it is memorable for me is that my 70s girlfriend Angela once sang it (with radio accompaniment) in the passenger seat of my car as we drove to NYC. I don’t know why. I didn’t interrupt or ask afterward. We all sometimes do things that are hard to explain. That memory sticks with me and makes the tune a possible New Year’s Eve play.
 
Time after Time by Cyndi Lauper. In 1984 I owned a property on Schoolhouse Lane with two small houses on it. I moved into the smaller cottage and rented out the other. It was the first real estate actually in my own name. The first home that is really yours tends to be special in a way that later ones are not, and I accordingly put a lot of work into it – not all at once but steadily. The grounds in particular got attention: I installed decorative 2-rail fencing, reworked the driveway, and planted blue spruce to delineate the northern boundary line. On the cottage itself I replaced exterior trim and repaired the back deck, which had seriously dry rotted in places. I recall Cyndi Lauper’s song playing on the radio while I worked on the deck; I cannot hear the song without remembering feeling at home in that home. Incidentally, the official video of that song was filmed nearby; the train station scene is in the NJ Transit train station in Morristown. Am I a Lauper fan? No, not really though I don’t dislike her either.

My old Schoolhouse Lane cottage

Frank Sinatra Fly Me to the Moon. A night club in the 1990s, where someone important to my life worked, closed every night playing this number on the sound system. The relationship that this song evokes would require a book rather than a paragraph to begin to describe. So let’s just call it intense rather than characterize it any other way here.
 
That’s one per decade (OK, two in the 1960s -- three counting when I most commonly heard In the Mood) up to the 21^st century. I’ll leave the next three for another blog someday – maybe.
 
Once again, not one of these is a favorite song on its own terms (though I do like the Joplin number). My general taste tends more to bluesier and/or harder rock. But that is not the point, is it? The point is a memory – maybe a good one, maybe a bad one, but a poignant one either way.
 
There are also entire genres of music with a nostalgia factor. I’ve grown to like much 1940s fare far more than I did when my parents played it on the stereo for instance. I see I’m not alone in that with groups such as the Postmodern Jukebox covering songs such as What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve, charted by Kay Kyser in 1947. In the case of people as young as that, they are nostalgic for an era they never experienced. True, I wasn’t around in the 40s either, but the music definitely was in the house when I grew up.
 
So, December 31 – on which I plan a quiet evening – I may not only hear Auld Lang Syne but some unfavorite yet special tunes from my youth. Perhaps also, some Kitty Kallen and Harry James. Then on January 1 to welcome the new year I’ll try something new.
 

Postmodern Jukebox – What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

Creaky

Some days I feel my age and others not. If there is a reason for the day to day differences (sleep length, diet, exercise, or whatever) I haven’t been able to discern it. The creaky days occur more frequently with each passing year, but the first hints of them appeared surprisingly early: soon after 30. That is a time of life when the innate sense of invulnerability of the 18-y.o. fades and mortality starts feeling real. This is evident in much of the pop culture content aimed at thirtysomethings. It accounts, for example, for the success of the movie The Big Chill among my fellow Boomers in 1983. Strangely enough, Barbie, directed and co-written by 40-y.o. Millennial mom Greta Gerwig, likewise speaks to the sense of aging among today’s Millennials (e.g. the bus stop bench scene). Thirtysomething (sometimes fortysomething) is an age when many folks adopt exercise regimens and start taking megavitamins to try to slow the hands of the clock. It’s when entrepreneurs with the wherewithal start businesses that take on the Grim Reaper himself.
 
One such company is Altos Labs, formed by Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner, which seeks to extend life through a variety of methods, but in particular through cellular reprogramming. The credentials of its researchers are impressive. Calico Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google), is similarly dedicated to combat aging. The company’s home page is worth a look. BioSplice Therapeutics reveals its approach in its name. Juvenescence reveals its goal in its name. If none of these or competing labs produce sufficient results in time for you to dodge the scythe, there is always Alcor.
 
The notion of suspended animation has been around in science fiction for more than a century. So, too, the similar notion of deliberately freezing a body in hopes it can be thawed out and reanimated at some future date when medical science has advanced to the point to make that possible. Alcor, located in very unchilly Scottsdale Arizona, was founded in 1972 in order to do just that. When a “patient” (who, of course, must be legally dead) arrives at the facility, s/he is injected with chemicals to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals. The body is lowered to a temperature of -196 Celsius and then deposited in a tank of liquid nitrogen. There are presently 224 patients plus about 100 pets. Among the patients are baseball great Ted Williams and Bitcoin entrepreneur Hal Finney. You can reserve a spot for yourself at a cost of over $200,000, though you can save some money if you just preserve the head.

 
It would be tempting to prank someone with an Alcor reservation who awakes after some minor surgery: say the operation didn’t go well, but not to worry because you’ve been thawed out, cured, and it is now the year 2324. You can pay the bill at the desk. The temptation probably should be suppressed.
 
Meantime, I’ll just deal with my creaks and aches as best I can and hope that tomorrow is one of those days with a more youthful spring in my step.
 
 

Neil Young – Frozen Man

Julia Gets By in the World As It Is

When I read 1984 (1949) by George Orwell as a school assignment back in the 1960s, the novel’s timeline already had been overtaken by real historical events. That didn’t matter. Alternate realities and parallel worlds long had existed in science fiction by then, predating by decades the quite serious hypothesis by physicist Hugh Everett in 1950s that they actually might exist. H.G. Wells has characters drive through a portal into one in Men Like Gods (1923), and it wasn’t his first exploration of the idea. Robert Heinlein famously rescued his early fiction (see The Past through Tomorrow) by the tactic. 1984 is a book of ideas. What mattered was that those ideas remained plausible and scary in the 1960s – as they still do in the 2020s.
 
In 1984, Winston Smith’s love interest Julia is a curious character. It is hard to see exactly what she sees in the middle-aged Winston, but she sees something. Winston himself seems surprised by her persistent affection. Julia gets her own story in Julia by Sandra Newman, a novel authorized by the Orwell estate. Nothing in Julia contradicts 1984, but the character is not as shallow and emotion-driven as she sometimes seems in Orwell’s novel. SPOILER ALERT: it is impossible to discuss what is special about this version of Julia without SPOILERS, so, if you wish to be surprised, stop reading this blog post now, read Newman’s book, and then return to this blog afterward.

Both Winston and Julia work at Oceania’s Ministry of Truth in London on Airstrip One, formerly known as Britain. (BTW, Oceania’s flag is described in passing as stars and stripes.) Winston destroys objects and old news articles that contradict current propaganda (e.g. previously projected production targets that were missed) while Julia works in Fiction where old literature is rewritten (and new literature created) in Newspeak to be compatible with the ideology of Ingsoc. The corruption of language that is Newspeak, which redefines old words and creates new ones (while always shrinking the total number in the dictionary), is a particularly insidious form of persuasion. It is difficult or impossible in Newspeak to say anything contrary to the Party without calling oneself a criminal while doing it. The words just don’t exist.
 
We learn that Julia’s parents before the Revolution had been dangerously bourgeois, which would have tainted her too, but when still a teen she informed on her mother, which won her a pass into the Outer Party. Julia wears the sash of the Anti-Sex League, though she indulges in clandestine affairs. As Winston grows increasingly troubled by the notion of truth, which it is his job to destroy, Julia notices him and is genuinely attracted to him as a bad boy. She picks up on his resistance to the Party line, especially after spotting him leaving Charrington’s shop in the prole district. Inner Party honcho and torturer O’Brien picks up on both of them. He tempts Winston ideologically by pretending to be a link to the Resistance known as the Brotherhood. He tempts Julia (who is more interested in her own personal freedom than philosophy) by dangling in front of her the prospect of being elevated to the Inner Party if she works for the thought police. She knows full well that the room above Charrington’s shop where she meets Winston for trysts is bugged. Nor is Winston (unknown to him) the only man she meets there and prompts to incriminate himself while there. So, while she actually likes Winston (unlike some of the other men), her professions of love are calculated. Given the choices she has, however, it is hard to judge her as evil – just as desperate to save herself.
 
What do the perpetrators of this system gain from it? They have the joy of the raw exercise of power. This is especially true of the Inner Party members, of course, but also applies to lower links in the chain. As O’Brien explains, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever." The fellow wearing the boot, at least in that moment, is having fun.
 
The timeline of Julia extends beyond that of 1984, which ends with Winston’s conversion and execution. We learn there really is a Resistance on Airstrip One. This seems improbable given the stability achieved by the thoroughness of Oceania’s repression, but aid to the rebels from Eurasia (one of the three superstates, the other being Eastasia, perpetually at war with each other in different combinations) has upset the status quo. There is more than a little hint, however, that even were they to succeed, it would be a false rescue: a matter of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
 
1984 at its core is a dark vision of humanity – and one that is all too credible. Julia makes the title character’s behavior in 1984 far more explicable – again, all too credibly. We are easily tempted to ruthlessness and disregard for truth in pursuit of lofty goals and also purely selfish ones. The two books are complementary and are welcome warnings about where those temptations can lead. Highly recommended.

 

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again

Slipping and Sliding

The information center on my Chevy has a lot to say to me about everything from tire pressure to remaining oil life. Yesterday as the temperature dropped toward freezing, it warned me that icy roads are possible and nagged me to drive carefully. That’s OK. It is one reason I bought the car – not for the information center but for being a better winter vehicle. Until a couple years ago I drove a 1998 4WD GMC 2500 Sierra (previously my dad’s) and a 2014 Cruze. The ’98 was a great winter vehicle but by 2020 it finally had grown too tired to keep on the road and had to be replaced. New 4WD pickups have prices that are simply ridiculous, so I opted to replace it with a basic 2WD Colorado priced in the mid-20s, which to me seemed quite high enough. It served (and serves) the workaday purposes for which I needed a pickup. The problem was that both my vehicles were then 2WD, and the winter of 20/21 proved this to be a bad idea. The Cruze was a small sedan runabout that was reliable enough on a dry road, but all but useless in snow and ice. The Colorado was only marginally better. There were days when neither of my vehicles could make it up my driveway, which definitely has an incline but is hardly a cliff. So, in the summer of 2021 I traded the Cruze for a Chevy Trailblazer with All Wheel Drive. (AWD is distinguished from 4WD by a differential between the front and rear axles.) It handles well in snow and, importantly, makes it up my driveway.

My driveway a few winters ago

4WD and AWD are well and good for extra traction driving forward, but of course they are no help at all when trying to stop. The Trailblazer’s information center is not wrong to warn about ice. I’ve been lucky with cars and ice, but I’ve had close calls. As a pedestrian I avoided getting struck by a car that lost control on black ice only by leaping over a fence. In a Jeep (in 4WD) on an icy road I once managed to maneuver around a pointlessly stopped vehicle when it was clear my brakes weren’t going to do the job. My Cruze once slid over a small backroad bridge sideways without incident. In the two latter cases it helped that I was driving slowly and didn’t lock my brakes. On dry pavement AAA recommends at least 3 to 4 seconds braking time (adjust speed and distance accordingly) between you and the car in front. Increase this to 8 to 10 seconds on icy roads. Even this might not be enough. Over 150,000 auto accidents occur every year in the US due to icy roads. There are over 1800 fatalities in those crashes. In the Northeast only 11.4% of surveyed drivers say they haven’t driven on black ice. I think those 11.4% are mistaken. I think they have but aren’t aware of it – that they simply didn’t happen to step on the brakes while on top of it.
 
The danger doesn’t stop when you park and exit your vehicle. The CDC reports that 1 million people in the US are injured each year by slips and falls on ice and snow. More than 17,000 of those falls are fatal. For those 65 and older, falls are the leading cause of accidental injury and death. Once again, I’ve been lucky so far. Every year I slip and fall on ice at some point, but, other than the occasional sore butt, as yet I have injured only my pride. Nonetheless, I’ve stocked up on salt and sand for my sidewalks and driveway. NJ winters are unpredictable: some are fierce with repeated blizzards while others are almost balmy. I hope for the latter but am preparing for the former.

 

Little Richard – Slippin' and Slidin'

Roll of the Dice

My choice for a movie last night was a re-watch of the neo-noir The Big Town starring Matt Dillon and Diane Lane at her most stunning. I recommend it. The film was made in 1987 but is set in the mid-1950s. Matt plays a young professional craps shooter in Chicago. The Big Town can be enjoyed without expertise in the game which is fortunate because I understand the rules of craps only in the broadest outline. In its casino form the betting in craps is quite complicated. Street craps is usually considerably simplified, but the fast pace still can make it hard to follow for a newbie. For all that, it has a reputation as a workingman’s game, though at the upper levels gamblers play for very large stakes. Craps was invented in New Orleans in the early 19^th century, apparently deriving from the European dice game Hazard. It reached a peak in popularity in World War 2, but still has plenty of aficionados today. It has never been my game, but as a kid I generally liked board games with dice. They introduced a random element that nonetheless was literally in one’s own hands, thereby mirroring life itself.

Dice are very old, and probably derive from the casting of bones for divination: 6-sided knucklebones in particular, which continued to be used into Classical times. Ancient cube dice were commonly made from bone (or ivory), which gives this idea further credence. The pips (the dots) allowed numerology to enhance the divinations. Once dice were invented, of course, secular gambling with them was a natural. The oldest dice ever found were excavated in southeast Iran and date to at least 2500 BCE – perhaps centuries older. Not far behind are bone dice found at Skara Brae in Scotland, which date to at least 2400 BCE. They turn up in Egyptian tombs from 2000 BCE and also are found both in ancient China and India. Given the geographic spread of these finds, I think we can surmise that the actual origins long predate any of them. Dice of alternate shapes (e.g. 4-sided pyramids and 20-sided polyhedrons) also are ancient, but 6-sided cubes by far were, and are, the most common. The arrangement of pips were largely catch-as-catch-can until Roman times. The ancient Roman die was the same as a modern one, with opposite sides adding up to 7. The Romans enjoyed dice enough to use them as metaphors for taking a chance, just as we do today. Hence Caesar’s “Alea iacta est” (“the die is cast”) when he crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 BCE for a do-or-die showdown with the Senate. Dice didn’t disappear in the Middle Ages in Europe but became less common and non-standard. They made a comeback in the Renaissance. The Roman pip arrangement again became standard and has been with us ever since.
 
Modern dice come in three basic types: loaded, commercial, and casino. It is best to avoid loaded dice if one values one’s own health and safety. Commercial dice are the ones found in board games and toy stores. They are inexpensive and produce results that are random enough for informal purposes, but they almost certainly have unintended small biases in them. Casino dice are carefully crafted to be as perfectly balanced as possible; even the pips are filled with a polymer of the same density as the die itself so that they don’t introduce a bias. These, though somewhat costlier than commercial dice, are not actually expensive, but casinos change them every 8 throws or so, so they go through a lot of them.
 
Can a skilled dice player beat the odds – at least by a little? Maybe. Casinos try to get around this possibility in craps by requiring that thrown dice bounce off the back wall. This introduces enough unpredictability to make nonrandom outcomes very unlikely. Even in a straight throw, minor variations in motor control, geometry, and air resistance should be enough to ensure random results with balanced dice. Yet, maybe. Casinos make a good deal of money, though, off shooters who think they can do it. My bet is always on the House.
 
Have I ever made money with dice? Not much, but some. Back in college in a Business class we were told the dart theory of investing. Beating the S&P with any one investment is just a matter of luck, we were told, and picking stocks by throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal on average produces returns no better or worse than picking them after assiduous research, which necessarily is always incomplete. I believe this is still taught today. Some years back, I figured dice should work as well as darts, so after jotting down the names of a half dozen companies that I recognized, I rolled a die and picked that number on the list. John Deere did all right. Too bad I didn’t buy more.
 

Linda Ronstadt - Tumbling Dice