I go out for breakfast about three times
per week at my favorite local hole-in-the-wall diner. Naturally, they know me
pretty well there. As soon as I walk in the door a server (usually Dawn) sets
down a mug of coffee (black) and a bottle of Tabasco sauce at an available
booth (isolated by plastic barriers these days). I haven’t had to ask for the hot
sauce in years. My breakfast choice varies (or more accurately cycles) among
chili jalapeno omelet, country fried steak and eggs (over easy), eggs on prime
rib hash, breakfast burrito, blueberry pancakes with a side of sausage, and a
few others. Hot sauce goes on all of them – OK, not on the pancakes, but on the
side of sausage. It doesn’t have to be Tabasco. Pretty much any brand will do,
but of the two available at the diner that’s my preference. (Another
[pre-covid] customer once asked me if I was a Roswell alien, an obscure pop
culture reference I actually got.)
A peek in my fridge
People differ in their taste for spice.
Mine probably originated in childhood from my mom’s theory that no meal
preparation can go so far wrong that it can’t be rescued by enough black
pepper. My dad didn’t agree (he didn’t complain but he didn’t agree) but to me a
crust of peppery seasoning on just about anything seemed perfectly normal. Soon
after I started making or buying my own meals I upped the ante with chili
peppers and hot sauces. They are an acquired taste rather than an innate one.
People raised with blander food traditions usually have to be eased into an
appreciation for hot spices, if they ever acquire one at all. (Curries are good
way to start, since they can be stepped up gradually from mild to fiery.) The
reason is biological: hot spices trigger pain receptors. Piperine (in black
pepper) and capsaicin (in chili peppers) both fire TRPV1 receptors, mimicking
the sensation of heat. Why is that pleasurable? Like the bite of high proof
bourbon or the bitterness of strong coffee, the attraction is hard to explain
to newbies. For someone acclimated to them, however, they enhance flavors in
ways that are worth having sweat break out on one’s forehead. Spices have a long (pre)history in human
recipes. Coriander seeds have been found at a 23,000-year-old site in Israel.
Traces of garlic mustard have been found in Danish pots dating back 6100 years.
Romans poured garum on food as freely as Americans pour ketchup. Garum is a spicy
fermented fish sauce, which is a bit much even for my taste though such sauces
are still common in some Asian cuisines. The European Age of Discovery was
prompted by a search for spices – or rather by the profits from spices. The jackpot
was found in the New World. In 1400 chili peppers existed only in a swath from
Mexico (where they were first cultivated) to western South America. Today they
are grown and eaten all over the world, though they are still most strongly
identified with Mexican cooking. Nevertheless, spice preferences are
literally a matter of taste. I’d never argue with anyone who prefers mild to
hot salsa. The right amount of pepper at any given degree of hotness on the
Scoville scale is the amount you like, whether zero or a fistful. Besides,
people differ in their gastric acid responses: the same chili pepper that
settles one person’s stomach will give another heartburn. However, if you are
gastronomically tolerant of piperine and capsaicin, there are a number of health
benefits from liberal doses of them. According to the Penn Medicine website
red chili peppers have been shown to reduce LDL cholesterol and to lower the
risk of stroke and heart disease. By notching up one’s metabolism they promote
weight loss. Once it gets past the stomach (where, once again, people differ in
gastric acid response) capsaicin aids in digestion and gut health by attaching
to receptors that release anandamide, an anti-inflammatory. Capsaicin even has
value as a topical treatment for pain relief by first firing and then numbing
pain receptors. Today I’m skipping breakfast but a
steak-and-cheese quesadilla is calling out to me for lunch. I have just the
right ghost pepper salsa for it.
The films and series of the Star Trek universe
include both swans and turkeys. Overall Star
Trek: Generations (1994) is a turkey, but it does contain some
poignant dialogue about time, as when Dr. Soran remarks, “It's like a predator;
it's stalking you. Oh, you can try and outrun it with doctors, medicines, new
technologies. But in the end, time is going to hunt you down... and make the
kill.” Other animals run from predators by instinct. Humans do too, but as the
only creature fully aware of its own mortality our reasons for running have
extra depth. Our awareness has motivated our obsession with time, which is
always running out. We live by the clock and the calendar.
In a way we always have as the giant calendar that is Stonehenge attests, but
the ancients nonetheless viewed and experienced time in different ways than
modern folks. That applies to daily activities, yearly activities, and life
courses, but also to their notions of deep time, such as whether it is linear
or cyclical and whether the world has a beginning and an end (their etiology
and eschatology). Time and Temporality in
the Ancient World, edited by Ralph M. Rosen, is a title that caught my eye in
E.R. Hamilton’s book catalogue in part because of my general interest in the
subject and in part because for various reasons I’ve been feeling a bit ancient
myself lately.
The book contains 9 scholarly articles
about the experience and consideration of time in ancient Western and Eastern cultures.
My primary caveat is that much of it is written in professor-ese. In the first
entry, for example, the author defines “event” and “process” at length: “We can
make the distinction between event and process because we are content to use
time as the axis on which events are mapped and through which processes flow;
time acts as our independent axis of measurement and definition.” He goes on
like that for pages. I’m aware of the utility of defining one’s terms, but the
meat of his article is perfectly well served by the normal Webster’s definition
of those two words, which he only managed to obfuscate. Beneath the unfortunate
prose, however, there are insights into the historical sense of the ancients in
the Middle East, India, China, and Greece and the ways they tried to reconcile
the clearly cyclical aspects of nature (seasons, astronomy) with an apparently
uni-directional arrow of time from birth to death. The Sumerians, credited with the first
written language some 5000 years ago, had a sexagesimal (base 60) number
system, which helps explain some aspects of their system of daily time that we continue
to use today: 24 hours to a day, 60 minutes to an hour, 60 seconds to a minute.
The curious thing about the last of those is that Sumerians did not have the
ability to measure a second, but they defined the time interval anyway. They
could only approximate a minute. To supplement naked-eye observations of the
sun, moon, and stars, they had no more accurate mechanical timepiece than a water
clock. In simplest form a water clock is just a leaky bowl that drips water at
a constant rate. (Sand hourglasses didn’t come along until the 8th
century CE.) The Romans and Chinese later (and independently) developed far more
complex water clocks with gears and escapements. They were notoriously
inaccurate, but they still were useful on cloudy days and nights. They were recalibrated
regularly to sundials, which themselves are inconstant due to the seasons. The 7-day week also dates back to the
Sumerians. It is the period of a waxing or waning moon (very nearly) and was
associated with the seven known planets (the ancients regarded the sun and moon
as planets) whose names (in English mostly with Nordic equivalents) still
attach to the days today. Used extensively by astrologers, the 7-day week
co-existed with 8-day market weeks and other divisions of months (e.g. ides and
nones) well into the Roman era, eventually almost entirely prevailing in the 4th
century CE due to larger Biblical sway and the directives of Emperor
Constantine. By this time the 7-day week was current in China as well (possibly
via India where it was also current), again largely
for astrological convenience. Enumerating time was helpful in a host
of practical ways, but practicality may not have been the initial impetus to do
it. It might well have been a sense of mortality and the spiritual questions
associated with it. The persistence of astrology alongside astronomy and
timekeeping seems to argue for this. Grand cycles of time beyond normal human
scales, but paralleling astronomical cycles, are common in Eastern, Western,
and New World mythologies. So are notions of personal rebirths whether
literally through reincarnation or into some afterlife. Ancient timekeepers I
suspect felt the predator stalking them and sought some hope of escape hidden somewhere
in the secrets of the celestial clock and in the large and small cycles of
which they themselves were a part. The personal experience of time has an
odd duality in modern as in ancient times. We tend to live each day as though
we have unlimited numbers of them even though each year seems to pass faster
than the last. The effect shows up early. I remember back at the beginning of
my junior year at George Washington University my friend Donald (hi Don, if you’re
reading this) commenting, “I feel I’ve always been here [at college], and
always will be here, but that I got here yesterday.” That isn’t the sort of
time that can be measured by an atomic clock, but I knew what he meant.
Unspoken but understood was that he (and I) would leave there tomorrow… and so,
in a sense, we did. It reminds me of an old Henny Youngman joke: “Live each day
as though it’s your last. One day you’ll be right.”
No one
over 30 would ever write a song with this title.
That
everyone in this clip (if still alive) is a senior citizen is explanation
enough why.
2419 years ago Socrates was sentenced to
death officially for impiety and corrupting youth (with philosophy), but really
because he annoyed people by proving they were talking nonsense when they
thought they were smart. According to his own account, as related by Plato, the
priestess at Delphi had called Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates held
no such opinion of himself so he interviewed statesmen, craftsmen, poets, and
other persons of skill and intelligence in order to prove the oracle wrong.
Instead, he found that everyone he interviewed, though unquestionably competent
in their particular fields, believed their competence extended far beyond their
fields including into matters of ethics, meaning, and political policy. He
found it easy to get them to contradict themselves and show they didn’t know
what they were talking about. He decided the meaning of the oracle was that he
was wise for at least recognizing the limits of his own knowledge and wisdom. Most of us know that brains and wisdom are
not well correlated. There no fool like a smart fool. In his book The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make
Dumb Mistakes, David Robson uses an automotive simile. Higher intelligence
is like having more horsepower under the hood of your car; it doesn’t make you
a better driver. If you’re a bad driver, more horsepower just makes you more
dangerous on the road. The trouble is that few people self-identify as bad
drivers, metaphorically or otherwise. (In the US 99% of drivers think they are
above average!) In order to avoid tweaking current ideological noses, for a
social policy example let’s return to Plato with a revisit to The Republic. Only someone as brilliant
as Plato could imagine and argue persuasively in favor of such a proto-fascist
hellhole.
Though I.Q., a measure of abstract and
analytical thinking, is broadly associated with academic and career success,
the correlation isn’t anywhere near as tight as one might expect. Psychologist
Robert Sternberg has had better predictive success by measuring three
abilities: analytical (bare I.Q.), creative, and practical. Yet people who
score well on some mix of these, however successful career-wise, are as apt to
make terrible life choices in other ways as the rest of us. They are as apt as
well to hold bizarre beliefs and to think non-analytically outside of their narrow
specialties (sometimes even there). The percentage of people who believe in the
general gamut of paranormal, for example, from ghosts to astrology to
clairvoyance actually rises with education. Consider Nobel prizewinning chemist
Kary Mullis and his… let’s call them nonmainstream views on alien abduction and
on the (according to him) non-HIV cause of AIDS. As Michael Shermer also has
written, intelligent people are better at rationalizing evidence that
contradicts their views, and so cling all the harder to beliefs in fairies or
spiritualism or transdimensional lizards or the Illuminati conspiracy or what-have-you. Most intelligence traps are more mundane
than those, but all the more consequential for that. They come in many forms.
One is to see things excessively in terms of your own specialty. The German for
someone like this is Fachidiot, which
is a concise way of conveying the longer but expressive English adage, “To a
man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Another is for genuinely
competent people to be overconfident in their competence. The results can be
tragic. Some 80,000 people per year in the US die due to misdiagnosis by
generally capable physicians. In 2004 self-confidence by FBI experts in their
own fingerprint analysis capabilities led to the arrest and trial of Brandon
Mayfield for the Madrid bombings. The FBI identified his fingerprint on a bag
found at the scene, and FBI fingerprint experts couldn’t imagine being wrong.
They were wrong. Charges were dropped when the Spanish National Police (whose
doubts about the FBI’s identification had been ignored) arrested the real
perpetrator whose fingerprint actually was a match. (Mayfield won $2 million in
damages.) Robson gives a lengthy list of other
failings that are as or more common among the gifted as among average folk.
They include blind spots, anchoring, confirmation bias, sunk cost bias,
groupthink, motivated reasoning, mindlessness, meta-forgetfulness and more. Thinking analytically requires attention
and effort and most of us prefer to rely on intuition when we think we can get
away with it. Most people including Ivy League students get this wrong for
example: Jack is looking at Anne but Anne
is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person
looking at an unmarried person? Yes, No, or Cannot Be Determined? Most people say Cannot Be Determined which is the intuitive answer because Anne’s
status is unknown, but the correct answer is Yes. (Anne is either married or not; if not, Jack is looking at
her; if so, she is looking at George.) The good news is that we can train
ourselves to think better (including with regard to propaganda and
misinformation), and Robson discusses the methods. The hard part is having the
intellectual humility to do it. As in AA, one must first admit to having the
problem.
I have a small property I’m readying for
sale. The repairs and fix-ups required a dumpster, which I placed not there but
on my primary property (my home) since it is in the woods; the other location is
visible on a well-trafficked road where everyone in the neighborhood would be
tempted to use the dumpster. Besides, as mentioned in the earlier blog Junque my barn and garage attic teem
with mismatched stuff left behind by my builder father, so I took the
opportunity of the dumpster’s presence to reduce (though far from eliminate) the
excess from them as well. While removing some items from the attic I uncovered
a small surprise. I should preface this by mentioning that
my mom was very unsentimental about material things, photos and documents (such
as journals) excepted. She was personally warm, but artifacts didn’t mean that much
to her and she was wary of clutter. “When in doubt throw it out” was her motto
in such things. It’s not a bad motto really, and I’ve generally tried to follow
it though I make more sentimental exceptions to it than she did. My dad (b.1926)
by contrast was not sentimental on the surface but he did save keepsakes (which
I now own) such as a 6” (15 cm) combination safe from the 1920s, a cast iron
toy tractor from his childhood, some shelving he made in shop class in school, and
his uniforms from WW2. (My mom, on the other hand didn’t save her wedding dress
past the date when it was clear my sister wouldn’t use it.) Anyway, in the
attic between wall studs I encountered his baseball bat from the 1930s, which
he gave to me in 1960. The last time I remember using it was 1970 before I attended
college. I really haven’t thought about it since then: out of sight out of mind.
Yet, there it was. I’m pretty sure my dad put it there (who else would have?) out
of view to avoid tempting my mom to make one of her “Oh, he’ll never use this
again” decisions to toss it.
The bat still feels the same with a very
familiar balance, but I wouldn’t hit a fast ball (assuming I still can hit a
fast ball) with it anymore. Ash is a pretty tough wood but after nearly 90
years of rough use and semi-exposure to the elements I doubt it would survive an
impact with an 80 mph ball. Maybe, but I wouldn’t risk it. It is still a suitable
self-defense weapon, however, so maybe it has value as more than just a
keepsake presently occupying a corner in my bedroom. All of my keepsakes are for me alone
since I don’t have kids whose closets can be cluttered in turn. Odds are if I
did they wouldn’t be interested anyway. Of course, ultimately no one has
biological legacies, for humanity is temporary, just as individual humans are.
We are doomed as a species. One might hope the end comes later rather than
earlier but the end will come. How will the world end? Back in 2008 the Future of Humanity Instituteat Oxford took a stab at calculating
odds of human-caused catastrophic global events prior to 2100. The researches
divided risks into three categories: events causing at least 1 million deaths,
events causing at least 1 billion deaths, and extinction events. I’ll mention
only extinction events except for the report’s prediction of a 30% chance of a
pandemic by a genetically engineered virus that kills more than 1 million
people. (Whatever the origins of Covid – crossover from bats is still the
official explanation – it has killed 2.8 million at this writing.) The chance
of actual extinction from an engineered pandemic was given at 2% by 2100, which
is small but non-negligible; the extinction risk from a natural pandemic by
contrast is only 0.05%. The risk from Artificial Intelligence was estimated at
5%. The extinction risk from war (all types of war, which might or might not involve
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons) came in at 4%. The total risk of
extinction from anthropogenic causes of all types combined by 2100 came in at 19%.
In 2008 the decline in fertility that is currently much in the news, though
noted, was not yet alarming many researchers, so the risk that humans would
just stop reproducing was not considered; in any event, 2100 is much too early to
be a global doomsday for that reason. FHI focused on human-caused disasters,
but the biggest threats to the species are out of humans’ hands. Natural
climate change can be truly dramatic. Where I am currently sitting there was
once a mile of ice overhead. There will be again one day. Episodes of mass vulcanism
have occurred before and will occur again. Whether or not they would drive us
to extinction, they’d make civilization pretty hard to maintain. And, of course
there is the punch from outer space, which is not just a plot device for cheesy
scifi movies. In 2029 the large asteroid Apophis will pass inside the orbit of geosynchronous
communications satellites. It will be visible to the naked eye from the ground.
The odds of it striking earth are vanishingly small on that pass, but when it
returns in 2068 the odds, while still small, are not vanishingly so. Sooner or
later we will be hit by a big one as earth has been hit multiple times before.
Even if we somehow escape such celestial catastrophes as lethal asteroids, mass
solar ejections, gamma ray bursts from nearby supernovas, and so on, the sun
itself will kill us. It is growing hotter as it evolves and will make earth uninhabitable
in 500,000,000 years – some say an order of magnitude sooner than that. So, I’m not much worried about my bat as
a legacy though it will remain a personal keepsake for as long as I’m here. Hmmm, perhaps tonight is a good night
for an apocalyptic movie: maybe Gregg Araki’s 2010 Kaboom about a hedonistic college student who becomes aware of a
doomsday cult seeking the end of the world – an end of the world for non-cultists
at least. There are real cults of this stripe, such as Aum Shinrikyo, members
of which were responsible for the Tokyo Sarin gas attack of 1995. Warning: Araki
has his (weird) moments but he is not for viewers triggered by sexual content (albeit R
rather than NC-17).
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about disposing
of unfinished liquor bottles that had been sitting too long in the cabinet.
This apparently has not been a necessary chore for a sizable chunk of the
population lately: few bottles have gone unfinished during the pandemic.
Psychiatrist William Scott Killgore of University of Arizona's College of
Medicine wrote in the February Psychiatry
Research, “many people are relying on greater quantities of alcohol to ease
their distress.” Indeed. Alcohol consumption by those not affected
significantly by the lockdown (for whatever reason) didn’t change. For those
who were significantly affected by the lockdown, however, he noted that “hazardous
alcohol use” rose from its normal (but high enough) 21% in April 2020 to 40.7%
by last September based on answers to the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification
Test. Severe dependency rose from 4% in April to 17.4% in September. Probable
dependency reached 29%. Alcohol consumption rose for much of the remaining
affected population, too, even if it didn’t reach hazardous levels. Ironically, this makes drinkers who are
locked down more susceptible to Covid. The World Health Organization remarked
on its European website, “Alcohol consumption is associated with a range of
communicable and noncommunicable diseases and mental health disorders, which
can make a person more vulnerable to COVID-19. In particular, alcohol
compromises the body’s immune system and increases the risk of adverse health
outcomes.” The highest risk comes from combining
alcohol abuse with obesity, which also has increased during the pandemic;
higher obesity rates in wealthier countries accounts for much of the higher
lethality of Covid in those countries. The Abstract of an NIH study states, “Our
hypothesis suggests that a combination of alcohol consumption and obesity
causes low immunity and makes the individual prone to develop ‘cytokine storm’
and ‘acute respiratory distress syndrome’; the hallmark of COVID-19 mortality
and morbidity. Thus, we propose that reducing any one trigger can have a
beneficial effect in combating the disease severity.” It may come as no surprise that obesity has soared during the lockdown. While I’ve not increased my tippling
during the pandemic, I regret that I have not been immune to raiding the
refrigerator. Unlike the liquor cabinet, the fridge has not needed a clean-out
of unfinished meals. My bedroom mirror finally frightened me at the beginning
of December. Since then I’ve dropped 20 pounds (9 kg) but that’s only halfway
toward my (by no means thin) target weight, so there is still a fat guy in the
mirror motivating me to stay hungry. The problem with reining in overeating, of
course, is that unlike alcohol one cannot simply stop cold turkey. (I could do
with some cold turkey – on whole wheat with tomato and mayo.) That makes it
trickier, but we do what we can.
Cold Turkey
To the extent the lockdown has led to increased
obesity, it also has had the unintended consequence of increasing the severity
of Covid infections. According to a January 2021 article in Nature, “Furthermore, novel findings indicate that specifically visceral
obesity and characteristics of impaired metabolic health such as
hyperglycaemia, hypertension and subclinical inflammation are associated with a
high risk of severe COVID-19.” Most of us know infected people who shrugged off
Covid with nary a sneeze and others who were knocked squarely (perhaps
lethally) off their feet. 60 – 90% (yes, that’s a big range of uncertainty) of
the severe cases have significant co-morbidities, and obesity (with its common
health effects) is definitely a risk factor. Self-reported weight gain among
Americans having experienced lockdowns according to one study has averaged 2
pounds (.9 kg) per month. (People tend to lie even on anonymous surveys for
some reason [wishful thinking?] so the real number may be higher; we know
Americans drink more than they say they do, for instance, because the alcohol
tax brings in 50% more than it should if they were telling the truth.) This is
in line with my own experience: I needed to lose 20 pounds before the pandemic,
so I’m actually back to where I was this time last year but not to where I aim
to be. In truth, the pandemic is not a big
factor in my ongoing effort to lose pounds. Vanity is a slightly bigger one.
Mostly, though, it is just the hope that being fitter will feel better in a
more general sense. At my age that might be a fantasy. Nothing will restore me
to feeling 18. We all need our fantasies though, and there are worse ones to
have. Without it I could all too easily give up and resemble Ella Mae’s Mr.
Five by Five.
The
painfully uneven slow-walk back toward normality (which itself seems abnormal
by now) means there is still much time in evening hours to entertain oneself by
oneself. Here are three of my picks for the job from the past week. The Glass
Slipper (1955) It is
my habit once every week or two to randomly pick a movie from my DVD
collection. Well, almost randomly. My DVDs are arranged chronologically: not
meticulously by precise release date but by decade. A 1938 could be bracketed
by a 1934 and 1936 but there won’t be a 1948 separating any two from the ‘30s;
this is more than sufficiently ordered for my purposes. So I have an idea of
the probable age range of the movies toward which I reach with eyes closed when
I stand (or crouch) in front of one general area of the shelves, but the
particular movie on which a finger alights is still a surprise. My reasoning is
that if I really don’t want to watch the movie I blindly pick (even though I
want to watch some movie or I
wouldn’t be picking at all) it shouldn’t be taking up shelf space. (The true
turkeys already largely have been removed by this process.) I often have doubts
about what gets selected in this way, but rarely do I regret the pick after the
first 10 minutes of playing it. There
were no regrets at all about last night’s DVD. Filmed five years after Disney’s
animated hit Cinderella, MGM’s 1955 The Glass Slipper is the most
interestingly off-beat iteration of the story ever made by a major studio. The
production reportedly was a nightmare for many of those involved: screenwriter
Helen Deutsch stressfully (but successfully) fought constant interference from
the producer, director Charles Walters fought (unsuccessfully) against the
ballet dream sequences, and Michael Wilding (the Prince) tried repeatedly to
resign from the role because he thought he was unsuitable for the part. Only
Leslie Caron enjoyed the experience. Yet, it works. Even Walters’ self-doubt,
to the extent it manifests on screen, humanized a character that might have
seemed too arrogant otherwise. Caron’s
Ella (the nickname “Cinderella” is a taunt) is temperamental, tomboyish, and
feisty. On her first meeting with the prince, who pretends to be the son of the
palace cook, she pushes him into a pond. In case we don’t get that she lashes
out at others because she feels bad about herself, Walter Pidgeon explains her
motivations in Freudian fashion in a voiceover that verges on parody of the
Disney technique. The village crazy lady acts as the fairy godmother of the tale.
The dream sequences with Les Ballets de Paris are trippy – an out-of-fashion but
wholly applicable adjective. As in many films from the era the pacing isn’t
rushed, but with a total length of 93 minutes the film doesn’t have time to drag.
The
film is utterly enjoyable. It is the only movie version of the story I would
watch again of my own accord rather than as an indulgence to company. ** ** Ways to Die
in Glasgow by Jay Stringer “Write
what you know” is the standard advice to aspiring writers. It shouldn’t be
taken too literally. It is highly unlikely that a science fiction author knows
much about what life is like on the fourth planet of the Trappist-1 star system
unless he happens to have been abducted by aliens from there. He isn’t thereby
forbidden to write about it. Still, it helps if whatever drama plays out there
in his story is grounded in his own experience. For example, fine author of Golden
Age sci-fi Harry Harrison in the early days of his career lived in a small
Mexican town; he later wrote that the residents of that town were the basis for
characters in his novels and short stories. The standard advice is soundest, of
course, in novels that strive for realism. The top three of my go-to contemporary
mystery/suspense writers definitely benefit from it: South African author Deon
Meyer, fellow New Jerseyan Harlan Coben, and Glaswegian Jay Stringer. Even if
you’ve never been to Cape Town, Livingston, or Glasgow, the three authors’
intimate feel for the physical and cultural milieus of their hometowns draw you
in effectively. I
first became aware of Jay Stringer from a brief description in an ER Hamilton
book catalogue of his 2016 How to Kill
Friends and Implicate People. I bought and enjoyed the darkly humorous
mystery in which he breaks a number of writing-class rules and gets away with
it nicely. The book also introduced me to Sam [Samantha] Ireland, a recurring
PI in his novels. This week’s read, Ways
to Die in Glasgow, is another Sam Ireland mystery written in Stringer’s characteristic
style of multiple alternating POVs.
Mobster
Rab Anderson has grown tired of the criminal life and has found he can make
money and become a minor celeb by writing books about it instead. This doesn’t
sit well with people who might be implicated in those books including crooked
cops. Rab is kidnapped while an attempted hit on his rough-edged nephew Mackie
goes awry. A prestigious law firm then hires Sam to serve papers on Rab. She has
to find him first, which puts her in the middle of whatever is going on.
Whatever it is involves police, politicians, wealthy developers, organized
crime, and well connected legal firms – and murders. The
noir novel is fast-faced and bloody while the humor is Chandler-esque with a
Scottish accent. Good stuff. ** ** Harley Quinn As
I’ve mentioned in other blogs, there are some pop culture things I watch, hear,
or otherwise sample just to be part of the conversation – and perhaps in-person
conversations will be something that happen again someday. More often than not
I don’t much care for them, but the HBO animated series Harley Quinn proved enjoyable.
The
character Harley Quinn has been one of DC’s most bankable villains since her
first appearance in the early 90s. For two decades, however, the franchise
floundered in its attempts to make proper use of her. The movie The Suicide Squad failed critically but
it was profitable anyway, mostly thanks to Margot Robbie’s version of Harley. The
subsequent Birds of Prey fared far
worse. DC finally regained its footing in print with an intelligently revamped
origin story Harleen (which I
reviewed last year here) by Croatian author Stjepan Sejic who details the emergence
of Dr. Quinzel’s shadow self under the influence of Joker. In 2019 the animated
series Harley Quinn came to the small
screen with Kaley Cuoco voicing Harley and Alan Tudyk as Joker. Creators
Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, and Dean Lorey were executive producers on The Incredibles and bring some of the
same irreverence and humor to this show. Harley
Quinn, unlike The Incredibles
however, is R-rated and brutal – but still smartly written and funny. In
Season 1, Harley, with a figurative and literal push from Poison Ivy, finally
breaks free of her dependence on Joker but without returning to her old persona
Harleen Quinzel. She attempts a reconciliation with her parents but ends up
confronting them over the damage they did to her psyche – the confrontation is
not bloodless. To take over Gotham she assembles her own gang of villains
including a bumbling Bane and a foul-mouthed Dr. Psycho in order to challenge
the Legion of Doom in which her ex Joker is a prominent member. The supposed
good guys (e.g. Batman, Gordon) are almost uniformly pompous, self-righteous
egotists reminiscent of Captain Hammer in Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The villains would be humanly
likable were it not for their propensity for casual murder. Season 2 continues
Harley’s evolution including her relationship with Ivy. The show isn’t afraid
to be incorrect (an increasingly rare attribute), and when it is politically
correct it isn’t preachy about it. The mix is a lot of fun, though very much
over the top in violence. Recommended, but not for the easily offended.
Due to
you-know-what there hasn’t been a significant get-together at my house in a
year. Prior to then there was at least one sizable party per season, usually holiday
related: solstices and equinoxes count as holidays. My parties aren’t boozy by normal measures, but they aren’t entirely dry either. My own consumption of alcohol
has varied over the years from a bit excessive in my 20s, to near teetotal avoidance
in my 30s, to light-side-of-moderate today. The last descriptor might seem
subjective, but I’m using the CDC’s guidance to define moderate. According to
the CDC, an adult male should restrict his alcohol consumption to no more than
14 drinks per week and no more than 4 in any one day. (A standard drink in the
US is 14 grams of pure alcohol, which is equivalent to 1.5 ounce [44.4 mL] of
40% [80 proof] spirits.) I haven’t had 4 drinks in a single day in years. I haven’t
neared (much less exceeded) the weekly limit in decades. In consequence of such
restrained sippage by either guests or myself, the inside of my liquor cabinet
hasn’t seen much daylight (or artificial light) since the early days of 2020.
So, earlier today I figured it was time to sort through what was there and
spill out what needed spilling.
My liquor cabinet
2019 equinox party
Unless
stored recklessly, unopened spirits and wines have a shelf life longer than a
human lifetime. Once opened, however, even hard liquors go bad in months. How
many months depends on how much air is in the bottle. A mostly empty bottle
should probably be discarded after 3; a mostly full one is good for 6 months to
a year. They don’t go bad in the sense of being dangerous (more than
otherwise, that is) but in the sense that they taste awful (more than
otherwise, that is). Several partially filled bottles were selected out of my
cabinet to intoxicate whatever critters (microscopic or otherwise) live in the
drain pipes. There
is no cabinet or drawer in my house for other intoxicating substances unless you
count caffeine. Despite having lived in a college dorm in the hippie era with constant
haze in the hallways and a dealer in psychedelics on every floor, I never cared
for any of them. I have been in favor since my teens of legalization of all
recreational drugs (not just marijuana) but that always has been on civil libertarian
grounds rather than because I have a taste for them. There are other arguments
in favor of legalization (the social side effects of the drug war) too, but I
trot them out only when debating someone who values social arguments more. For me, though,
the belief that free people have the right to make bad choices for themselves
is enough by itself. It’s a belief not always widely shared. 120 years ago,
true enough, you could buy cocaine and morphine over the counter, but all that
changed in the next two decades. 101 years ago alcohol Prohibition began. The current
contents of my liquor cabinet, though fairly modest, would have been enough to
earn me a prison sentence. Prohibition ended in 1933. Prohibition
was enacted by Constitutional Amendment, by the way, because the federal courts
(though not state courts) back then did share the quaint idea that the Bill of
Rights protected a citizen’s right to make bad decisions. An Amendment got around the real possibility that the
Supreme Court might otherwise overthrow a federal ban on alcohol sales. The
same concerns account for the bizarre way marijuana was banned by the Marijuana
Stamp Tax Act of 1937. Marijuana was not outlawed per se; you simply had to pay a tax on it by buying a stamp.
However, you had to bring in the substance to be stamped, and since the
marijuana was unstamped when you brought it in you were in violation of the law.
This Catch-22 arrangement persisted until 1970 when it was replaced by the Controlled
Substances Act. By 1970 there was less concern the Court would overthrow straightforwardly
paternalistic legislation. The concern has only lessened since then. Anyway,
the cabinet doors are closed again. Perhaps by the solstice I’ll be able to
open them again for actual company. Though NJ is stumbling through an obstacle
course of the legislature’s own making toward legalization of pot, any guests
inclined toward it will have to supply themselves. Nonetheless, perhaps someday
(though I don’t see it happening soon) we’ll even revive the general notion
that what private people voluntarily do in private settings is nobody else’s
business.
Bessie Smith – Tain't
Nobody Business If I Do (1923)
