tiger woods

Once more, Tiger Woods finds himself mired in scandal and negative headlines.

He was arrested again the other night, this time after being found by police asleep in his car in traffic at four in the morning. The cop awakened Woods, who then spoke slowly and with slurred words, and administered a field sobriety test, which the golfer failed.

The golfing superstar was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence and for parking illegally. Some media reports say that a field test showed he had no alcohol in his blood, while others say he was under the influence of a prescription drug.

Arguably Woods is one of the greatest golfers who has ever lived, if not the greatest. He had a phenomenal, unmatched fifteen-year streak that ended about 2010. Since then, his career is only a shadow of what it once was and he has been mired in a number of personal scandals.

This leads one to question why yet another superstar has crashed and burned so spectacularly. There's probably no easy answer. And there's no easy way for this to be prevented.

The only idea that comes to mind is for superstars who haven't crashed should form some kind of support network to reach out to rising stars who seem ready to burst into the highest celebrity firmament. Perhaps they need to self police each other to keep some of them from crashing and burning so horribly.

prison blues

I was reading something offline about solitary confinement and super-max prisons. And then I had a thought that might sound bizarre.

If I was sent to prison on a longish term, I think I would rather go into solitary or super-max than in crowded circumstances in general population. This would not be a blanket preference, however.

I would still want to have family visits, have some kind of daily recreation, and access to mail and reading material from the prison library. From what I understand, these are all allowed to people in solitary and super-max incarceration. If the only way to get these would be in the general population, then I would opt for the latter.

In all reality, I suspect a woman's prison would not be much like Orange Is the New Black. I imagine many or most inmates would not want to talk about the things that interest me, and I would probably hate whatever drudge job was given to me.

Compared to that, solitary or super-max sounds like a step up. I like people, but I don't think I'd want a boring life with a lot of lady cons.

Then again, hopefully I would never be sent to prison. I don't think I've ever done anything that would land me in prison, except possibly using some file sharing websites, but nobody is prosecuted for those unless you're sharing massive amounts of copyrighted material for profit.

greed is not good

Over the weekend, we were at a big park near us and a frequent destination. We were along the edge of a large inland body of water, and at some point I was watching some ducks gleaning in the grasses.

There were maybe a dozen ducks of unknown gender and all but one was feeding without incident. One of them, however, kept chasing away other ducks whenever they came too close to it.

Now I don't know if the nasty one was eating some kind of better grass and that's the reason it kept chasing others away, but it spent about half of its time not eating and being bitchy. The others were eating about 95 percent of the time.

So the nasty one was eating a lot less and wasting a lot of time being an asshole. If I was a zoologist, I'm sure I'd understand why it was being that way, but it certainly seemed unproductive to me.

That got me to thinking about how my grandfather's chickens and goats were the same way. One goat or hen, probably the alpha, was always busy trying to keep the other ones from eating what it wanted but usually failing, whereas the plebes ended up eating more.

Now alpha dominance makes sense in carnivore populations, where the strongest alpha gets the best meat and all the others have to wait until the alpha is finished before being allowed a mouthful.

In herbivore species, it seems sort of pointless, particularly when food is plentiful. But greed nonetheless seems genetic.

Greed seems genetic in humans, too. Some people, particular alpha males, seem to want more and more and more no matter how much they already have. While most people are trying to enjoy life, they're busy trying to acquire even more wealth.

Rupert Murdoch comes to mind. He's 86 and is worth tens of billions, but he keeps wanting more. Why?

When you think about it, the world probably would be a lot better off without greedy people.

dinosaur mummies in the news

This short article is pretty fascinating. It's about a fossilized horned and spiked armored nodasaurus, a type of dinosaur, found in Canada in a remarkable state of preservation, considering it's about 110 million years old.

The piece apparently uses the term "mummy" fairly loosely, because it sounds like it actually is fully fossilized and wasn't actually embalmed in any way.

When the critter was alive, the thing must've been truly frightening to see. It would've weighed around three thousand pounds and measured eighteen feet long. Although it looks like a monster-sized alligator on steroids, it would've been a herbivore, meaning it would only eat plants.

No humans, of course, would have been around way back then. But if you could travel back in time, how would the creature have reacted to humans? Would it run away or attack you like a hippopotamus, another herbivore species that can be aggressive toward people?

If you're interested in more information, the critter has its own Wikipedia page, where you'll find a link to a lecture video about its life and discovery.

a very bad first date

A Texas man is suing a Texas woman because he said she texted during their first date and left in the middle of a movie for which he had bought the tickets. His suit demands repayment of the cost of her movie ticket.

Talk about a special snowflake.

People are rushing to his defense because they say movie theater texting is rude. She says her friend was having an emergency, hence the reason for the texting and hasty departure.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, she was very rude. But he truly needs to let it go. Life is full of little disappointments. First dates are known sometimes to be awful -- after all, you're dating someone who may not have a significant other for an important reason.

But this kind of petty litigation is exactly why the American legal system is so screwed up. People's instinct as soon as they've suffered any kind of perceived wrong is to sue.

Reading more about him and some of his online behavior, he sounds creepy and weird and stalky. He's not only demanding a refund for her ticket, he's writing about her all over the internet and contacting members of her family. Not cool.

In other words, he's veering into restraining order territory. I'm glad she left early -- the poor woman didn't need to be dating a jerk like him.

He should let this go and move on to something more constructive, like suing the person who took his parking place at the supermarket.

don't need no education

In earlier years of this blog, I thought on occasion about enrolling in some college-level classes with an eye toward possibly pursuing some kind of degree down the road.

It's probably no surprise that, given I haven't written anything about it on her for a good while, I've pretty much abandoned this idea.

Having children certainly diminished the appeal. But I also thought about why I would do this. Was it to overcome any inadequacies I felt at dropping out of high school (although I did later earn a GED)?

Maybe. Or maybe I decided I just didn't really need a degree in anything and would rather just self-educate by reading whatever I wanted.

On occasion, I will watch part of a college or university lecture on YouTube or wherever, and I'm always left with the thought that, "well, that was slightly interesting, but it's not nearly as interesting as reading a book about the topic."

Because of earnings on my investments -- the principle was saved from when I made really good money dancing -- and because of James's pension and part-time earnings, I really don't need to go out and work. And, quite honestly, I'm not motivated to do so.

I'd rather stay at home and read when I want to. The kids occupy a lot of my time, of course, but when they don't and I'm doing housework, I just pop on an audiobook and learn about something new.

Why go back to school if that's not truly what I really want to do?

Now this is not to say that education is foolish or wrong. Far from it. I hope my children are well educated and want to go to college.

But for me, it's not in the cards. Not now and maybe never.

the politics of air conditioning

I am currently reading Richard Nixon: The Life, a new biography published in March by John Farrell (more about that below). At one point in the book, the author discusses the trend of Americans moving to the Sunbelt in the latter twentieth century.

I found this bit to be particularly interesting: "The 1960 U.S. census determined the allocations of votes in the Electoral College in 1968, and the historic growth of the Sunbelt had barely begun to register. It was only as air-conditioning made the South and Southwest more habitable (fewer than one in five southern homes had air-conditioning in 1960; almost three in four enjoyed it in 1980) that those regions boomed and assumed far more important roles, with increased clout in Congress and many more votes in the Electoral College."

More than thirty-five years after 1980, the Sunbelt has a huge influence on the outcome of presidential elections. In other works I've read -- books and magazine articles -- I've seen various explanations for why the South now tends to vote Republican while it used to be solidly Democratic.

But I've never seen this air conditioning explanation before, and it makes a great deal of sense. I personally don't use air conditioning unless it's really roasting hot -- typically above ninety -- and my husband feels the same way, but other people are not nearly as heat tolerant as we are.

As for Farrell's book, I'm about 80 percent throughout by this point. It's a rather long book and I worried it would be too dense and dry, but the narrative really flies along.

I decided to read it because it's been earning excellent reviews and also explores some aspects of Nixon never before reported because the author used recently-released source material. On and off, I've been reading history and biography from the Nixon era so I may be better informed in the event the current President end up facing impeachment or indictment or, ideally, both.

premastication

I was in town yesterday with Joey and Tombo. The latter is now fourteen months old.

We went to an outdoor cafe and sat near two women, one of whom had a small child that she was breastfeeding under a scarf. The scarf was not particularly large, so if you looked for any length of time, you could see what she was doing.

I noticed that Tombo was watching her rather intently with sort of a covetous expression. He then looked at me with a quizzical face as if wondering why I didn't do that for him any longer.

That led me to thinking that breast feeding in public was something of a pain, but at least humans didn't have to chew their food and then regurgitate for their young like some species do.

When I was at the computer later, I was curious what mammals, if any, regurgitate their food and feed it to their young. I knew already many species of birds do it, and quickly learned via the internet that some mammals do, as well.

And then I learned humans do it, too.

While this isn't true regurgitation -- they only pre-chew the food -- the concept is similar. This is obviously not something seen in Western culture but it is still practiced in certain cultures.

Given how some people from Western cultures can adopt some goofy ideas and fads about parenting, I'm surprised this idea hasn't infiltrated that sub-population like the no-vaccination and no-diapers movements. Or maybe it has and I just don't know about it.

Actually, I don't think I want to know about it. I think I'll stop looking into this particular research topic.

the censor's vibrator

The New York Times published an interesting essay on Sunday by Singaporean novelist Balli Jaswal about the confusing mysteries of living in a society with heavy-handed censorship.

While some countries blank out edgier content in movies and TV shows with pixel boxes and the like, in Singapore an entire scene or more will be surgically removed by censors. The result is programming can make no sense.

Although she doesn't specifically say this, the inference in her piece is that fiction is not censored. So if you're a reader, you can read explicit content that would never be allowed in a movie or TV show.

As a parent, I understand why violent and overtly sexual material is not appropriate for children. But I have never understood the mindset of how some people think adults need their material censored.

In Singapore, as Jaswal explains, material is censored because "authorities believed 'undesirable content' could corrode conservative Asian values." Hence, a scene where someone holds a vibrator but does not use it, for instance, is scissored out entirely.

Would society collapse if women talked about vibrators on television? Would that lead to crime waves or rampant looting? Of course not. Countries where vibrators are shown on television are generally peaceful and prosperous.

In reality, censorship just seems to be a process of perpetual pointlessness. They censor because they censor without ever stopping to consider, "well, what would happen if we actually let this one slip through?"

Some quick reading around the internet reveals that content in Singapore is censored primarily for sexual or political content. So a character shooting up a shopping mall is AOK, but a character talking about her nipple will be removed.

Remind me again, how many societies in history have been overthrown because of too much nipple talk?

pine gap

When I was out with the husband and kiddies over the weekend, an earnest-looking woman approached and asked if I would sign a petition about Pine Gap. I told her I was not an Australian citizen so she smiled and moved on, apparently wrongly thinking that James is American, too.

I had vaguely heard of Pine Gap but couldn't remember what it was. I asked my husband and he first said "a magnet for nutters" then explained actually what it was.

Situated smack dab in the middle of the country, Pine Gap is a so-called "Earth station" used to monitor and communicate with satellites and jointly run by the Australian military, American military, CIA, NSA, and other US agencies. Because we're on the far side of the world and can pick up things US-based stations cannot, there are a number of Earth stations scattered all over the Australian continent.

For whatever reason, based on what I've read online, Pine Gap is more controversial than the other Earth stations. Like Area 51 in the United States, it also is ground zero for conspiracy theorists, particularly for ufologists, those obsessed with alien races and alleged encounters.

Google the phrase "Pine Gap" on the Internet and you soon find an endless warren of conspiracy rabbit holes. Pine Gap isn't a monitoring station, one webpage insisted, it's actually a secret facility where three large alien space vehicles are being dismantled and studied. Another claimed it was actually a colony of "tall blonde" aliens who interact with a select few humans tasked with communicating with and learning from this extraterrestrial race.

Thereafter I learned the "tall blonde" alien myth is a whole subset of ufology theory with devoted adherents. These aliens are said to be brilliant and benevolent. Photographic evidence is sparse and, not surprisingly, consists of badly copied and blurry old black-and-white shots of highly dubious origin.

I was left with the conclusion that some people, for whatever reason, would rather believe the most hair-brained conspiracy theories rather than a simple truth. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, to quote Sigmund Freud, and sometimes a boring satellite monitoring station is nothing more than a boring satellite monitoring station.

gobsmacked

I regularly exchange email and occasionally Skype with my uncle, the man who I generally refer to here as "my favorite uncle" because he is. He is my father's youngest brother and the polar opposite in personality.

About half the time I hear from my uncle these days, he mentions "that woman," as in "no luck finding that woman."

"That woman" is someone he spotted and made eye contact with for only a few seconds in a supermarket around Christmas. Ever since that day, he's convinced he fell in love with her in just that briefest of moments.

The longer version of the story is this. He and his son (my cousin) had just shopped in the supermarket. Because they were heading other places before returning home, they stopped to use the supermarket's public restrooms on the way out.

My uncle took a leak first while my cousin stayed with the paid-for groceries in a cart. Then they switched places. While my uncle was waiting for my cousin, "that woman" walked by.

He was shifting around some groceries in the bags, looked up, and "that woman" passed him. She gave him a big smile as she walked on by. He smiled back and said something like "well hello there."

Now if my cousin wasn't in the loo, uncle would've followed her out of the store with his cart and struck up a conversation. When my cousin came out of the john, they hurried out to the parking lot but there was no sign of "that woman."

He described her as looking a lot like Cate Blanchett but otherwise he knows nothing about her. Nevertheless, he has spent the last four or five months searching for her with no success.

He has gone back to the same supermarket at various times, sometimes on the same weekday and time that he saw her and also at other random times. He hangs around in the same entry area of the store in case that's near her favorite exit but also wanders the store in search of her.

This has consumed hours of his time. He's even kept logs of when he visited and asked the store manager if he could review security camera footage from the time he saw her but it had already been erased.

I told him he doesn't even know if she lives in his area. There are several long-term stay hotels very near the supermarket because a large corporate headquarters is nearby.

He said she only had one smallish bag of groceries, so it's very possible that she was staying in one of those, popped over for some snacks, and flew out of town several days later, never to return.

Now some people believe in love at first sight. My husband certainly does, and insists he fell in love with me within minutes of our meeting.

Our meeting, fortunately, had a happy ending for him. But I have to wonder, with my uncle, if this is really an infatuation and not "falling in love." The woman only shot him a smile, nothing more. She may simply be a friendly woman who's happily married and forgot about my handsome uncle two seconds after she saw him.

I told my uncle the moral of this story is never wait for opportunity to strike again because it usually doesn't. He should've just followed her out in the parking lot and left it to his son, who is an intelligent adult, to find him on his own.

the $100 million skull

An untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of a skull sold for $110.5 million at auction in New York this week. It was the sixth most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

Basquiat started out doing graffiti on building walls in Lower Manhattan. IMHO, his record-breaking skull painting looks like graffiti, too.

If somebody wants to spend $100 million on a dirty paper towel or a rotting banana peel, that's their business. No matter how many billions I might have, however, I don't think I'd ever buy a Basquiat painting.

I like artwork that moves me, that evokes a powerful emotion. I don't feel that looking at Basquiat's skull. It just seems unsightly to me.

At the risk of sounding like a philistine, I have to wonder if this painting is an example of the emperor's new artwork. How much will it sell for in ten or twenty years? Or fifty? A hundred?

I searched online to see examples of expensive artwork that later lost a lot of value. I seem to remember an article about that a few years ago.

I did not find the piece I was looking for, but I did locate this item about "artwork" with non-functioning urinals costing more than a Reubens as an example of a marketplace obsessed by price and not quality. And then there's this article about a controversial artist whose multi-million-dollar pieces lose about 30 percent of their value and some fail to sell at all.

I'm glad I'm not a billionaire and have to deal with all of this nonsense.

the king's belly button is showing

The government of Thailand is threatening to sue Facebook and other individuals plus pursue possible criminal charges against some of them for reposting a picture of the Thai king wearing a crop top and accompanying a woman who is not his wife during a trip last year to Germany.

Thailand has so-called lèse-majesté laws, which make it a crime to insult the king, the queen, or the crown prince. Apparently posting a picture of the king wearing decidedly non-regal clothes is considered insulting.

The contrarian that I am, as soon as I heard about this, I decided to post pictures of the king in a crop top online. You can see one of them below.

The fault here lies not with the person who took the photos nor anyone who posts them online. The fault here lies with the king, who didn't use basic common sense before wearing inappropriate attire in a public place.

The king can easily solve this problem by making sure it doesn't happen gain and dressing better when he leaves the palace. After all, you never see Queen Elizabeth in public wearing a halter top and Daisy Dukes.

is this a question?

Whenever you read an online forum where someone has posted a link to an article that has a question in the title, almost invariably someone will post a comment along the lines of "Betteridge's law of headlines says that whenever there is a question in one, it can be answered 'no.'"

I would submit this "law" fails for several reasons. First, it does not distinguish between headlines and titles. News stories typically have headlines, while feature articles and other non-time sensitive pieces have titles.

So a page-one newspaper story about a tragic industrial incident might have a headline like "Deadly Factory Explosion Kills at Least Thirty Workers." A follow-up feature article in a Sunday or weekly magazine might have the title of "Who Is to Blame for the Deadly Main Street Explosion?"

News headlines invariably are not questions because of the nature of the beast. They are short, succinct statements of fact that are usually in some form of subject noun plus verb plus object noun: "Governor Vetoes Crime Bill"; "Widow Pleads Guilty in Lawyer's Slaying"; "Wiggins Says Won't Run for Re-election." The news story then provides more details about what the headline summarizes.

In contrast, feature articles are built around a thesis of sorts. The article either proves or disproves the thesis subtly so as not to seem like a polemic.

Thus by their nature, feature articles are about questions, regardless of whether the title includes a question. Some do have question titles that cannot can't be answered with a yes or no, like the example above -- "Who Is to Blame for the Deadly Main Street Explosion?"

Sometimes a title does ask a yes-no answer, and if you read the article, you can clearly see the answer is "yes." I remember an article in The New Yorker, which went on to win a number of important awards, with the title "Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?"

Using Betteridge's arbitrary and imprecise rule, the answer would be no. However, if you read the article, you see the answer is almost certainly yes.

I'm left with the conclusion that this law is close to worthless if not entirely so. It's lazy, uncritical analysis unsuccessfully trying to pass itself as something brilliant.

donald milhous nixon

Some funny person posted this on Reddit and I had to share it here.

Although he was corrupt as hell and broke the law repeatedly, Richard Nixon did some good things, like creating the Environmental Protection Agency, lowering the voting age, slowing the nuclear weapons race, opening up relations with China, fighting to end segregated classes in the South, ending the draft, and more.

If it wasn't for Watergate, Nixon probably would be remembered today as a pretty good President. And the funny thing is he didn't even need to do all the evil shit, because he won re-election by one of the largest margins in US history.

The same cannot be said for the current corrupt-as-hell White House occupant. He's like all the bad parts of Nixon, but much worse, and without any of Nixon's good points.

Four months into the most incompetent presidency in American history, it looks like things will only get worse. And here's a chilling thought: he's only burned through about 8 percent of his first term so far.

He still has a lot of time to make even greater colossal mistakes than the ones the came to light just this week. Hell, it's only half way through the week and he already has two historic catastrophes under his belt since Monday.

There's still time for him to get in one or two more major fuck-ups by Friday.

accelerated nuptials

One of my sisters-in-law was telling me over the weekend about a coworker who married a man one week to the day after meeting him. They had fantastic sex every day for that first week so they decided to sign on for the duration.

Five years on, things aren't going so well. She started cheating on him a few months after their wedding, and he eventually strayed from the fold, too. Divorce talk is now in the air.

As I've written on this blog before, I married my husband about four months after I met him. We were together pretty much the entire time 24/7 during those first four months.

I still worried at the time that I was being too hasty, but after four intense months, I figured I had seen all sides of him. Now after more than eight years of marriage, I have absolutely no regrets -- he is still the same man he was in the first few weeks after I met him.

With all that said, I think a week from first meeting to marriage is too brief. They had great sex that first week, but it doesn't sound like they connected on any other level. Marriage is more than just sex.

When considering how long is the right time period between first meeting and marriage, there is no right answer. But I think a good guide is what you might call "the new friend" rule.

Throughout our lives, we make new friends. Sometimes you like those people at first, but after a while, for a thousand different reasons, you find you don't like them so much. Or, you might find that, after a while, you like them much more.

I think the same rule applies to a marriage wait time. You have to let the relationship marinate to see if personality clashes start to occur. If he's not nearly as charming after your first month as he was the first week, then you're probably on some kind of irreversible downward trajectory.

le nouveau président

France's new president Emmanuel Macron was sworn into office yesterday, exactly one week after he was elected. He will announce his new prime minister today, the same day he makes his first international visit.

Legislative elections will be held in four weeks, so until then, he has no idea whether he will have a supportive or hostile Parlement Français.

Although I have no stake in France's politics, I have to say their system seems goofy. While I think the election season is far too long in the US, I think the two-plus month transition period that our incoming president has is very good.

Imagine trying to throw together a governing plan and a government in a week. Obviously, some of this was done before the election, but that wasted valuable resources when they should have been campaigning.

The separate legislative election a month after the presidential election is equally weird. Had legislators been elected at the same time as the President, they could have ridden his wave and given him a supportive majority. But now, he could be handcuffed to a hostile legislature and achieve almost nothing during his time in office.

France's political system is not really an old one. This is their so-called Fifth Republic, formed with a new constitution in 1958. This was supposed to be an improvement on the Third and Fourth Republics, which both were hampered by unwieldy complications.

So maybe the French really like what they have, so who am I to question it, but it sounds like a system designed for gridlock and not forward movement.

Nevertheless, I wish them good luck with their new government. At least they didn't elect a deranged and incompetent Twitter-addicted buffoon with a bizarre hairstyle.

sharks and porn news

A woman named Molly Cavalli, who does online cam porn, claimed she was bitten by a shark while filming an underwater scene. She shared video of the alleged incident with whatever media would pay attention this past week.

The video itself looks somewhat convincing if you screen the (finished footage) of the scene, billed as being graphic but it isn't really. The one thing that jumped out at me was the wound is small compared to other sharkbites where bites can fill the torso.

It turns out the whole thing was faked. That sort of makes me wonder why she even bothered in the first place.

There's something about shark bites and porn that doesn't go together. It suggests that when the people take off their clothes for some on-screen action, scarred and gnawed-off limbs would be visible.

What's sexy and erotic about that?

This ends up looking like a really clumsy attempt to get her name in the news. She did that all right by getting the word out that she's a shameless fraud.

She's wasting her time. She should go into politics.

a bilious bag of hate

I read this article when it was linked on a women's online forum and shook my head in disgust. How can one person be so filled with hate toward an ordinary woman who he doesn't even know?

I followed a link-through in the article about the jerk in question (named Anglin) and read this:

"Anglin, who was once known to speak out against racism and homophobia, was also prone to violent tantrums including one alleged incident during a party in high school where he repeatedly bashed his head on a sidewalk outside. Former classmates also recalled Anglin’s bedroom walls being dented from other tantrums involving head slamming."

Okay, that probably explains him. He already had some kind of serious mental health issues if he was deliberately beating his head on concrete and walls.

That kind of head trauma would only worsen existing mental health problems and/or create new ones. So chances are the man is seriously mentally ill, which would explain his radical change in personal beliefs.

But how do you explain the people who support him? Of course, history is filled with examples of people who slavishly follow mentally ill leaders. Yeah, Adolf, I'm talking about you, but not just you.

I hope things don't go from bad to worse for the woman involved in all this. She's very brave to endure such abuse and to not let other people's hate bring her down.

classics illustrated

When I was a child, I spent summers at my grandparents' farm in Pennsylvania. I had free run of the house and could play with anything I found in the attic, which was packed with stuff from several generations.

At some point I found boxes of my uncles' comic book collection from their boyhoods. These were worn but still very readable and I enjoyed many volumes of Batman, Superman, and other superheroes.

They also had a number of Classics Illustrated copies, which I also consumed. If you're not familiar with these, Classics Illustrated is a comic book version of great classics of literature.

Not too long ago I read an article somewhere -- I don't remember what it was -- where the writer disparaged Classics Illustrated. I took exception to that but there was no way to rebut the defamer so I turned to this blog.

Because of Classics Illustrated I started reading the actual classics upon which they were based. So, yes, the comic book versions were very slimmed down derivatives of the original, but I think they were a great way to introduce young readers to classics, which often can be quite lengthy.

I distinctly remember reading the Classics Illustrated versions of Dickens and then reading the original novels sometime later because I had read the comic versions and wanted to dive into the whole book. But I didn't stop there.

I continued to read other Dickens that didn't have Classics Illustrated versions available. I also read classics by other authors, some of which I had first read in comic version but many I hadn't.

Would I have ever read the classics if not for my introduction through Classics Illustrated? Who really knows but I suspect I might not have.

So if my boys ever want to read Classics Illustrated -- which are still sold in reprints -- I will encourage them to do so. Snobs may think they're trash for lowbrows, but I beg to differ.

the monkey trial

I was reading an article offline about how a forthcoming statue of Clarence Darrow is causing some controversy ahead of its installation this summer in the Tennessee town where the famous "Scopes monkey trial" took place in 1925. (Although not the piece that I initially read, this article includes some of the same details.)

I'm amazed in 2017 that evolution versus creationism is still hotly contested. This seems to be more of an issue in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

I find it particularly mind-boggling some people think creationism should be taught alongside evolution or even instead of it. I also find it astounding that so-called Christians don't think that a supreme being could have created evolution.

If you don't believe in evolution, how do you explain DNA? How do you explain DNA mutations? How do you explain new strains of bacteria that keep evolving?

There is no evidence that creationism is real. Religious texts are not evidence. They're hearsay. That's not to say they're not divinely inspired, but they're faith-based, not fact-based.

There is documented, tested, exhaustive evidence that evolution is real. Pretending that doesn't exist won't alter the reality that it does.

As well, the United States is not a theocracy. A state religion is specifically forbidden by the US Constitution. Evolution is a religious theory. Religious theories should not be taught in public schools.

Rather than forcing schools to teach religious theories, maybe pro-creationists should spend a little time studying the US constitution so they could understand what they're advocating is un-American when they say creationism should be taught in schools.

the fall

After reading Simon Mawer's terrific French resistance novels, which I wrote about on the blog last month, I wanted to re-read what I think is his greatest book, The Fall, so I did.

This was at least the fourth and possibly the fifth time I've read the novel. It's one of my all-time favorites, in my top five for certain, and I liked it even more this latest time.

It's one of those books that, when you're familiar with the story, you find wonderful little bits of foreshadowing you wouldn't catch the first or even the second time you read it. There are multiple "falls" in the book, some literal, and some metaphorical, and the more you read it, the more you find.

A good deal of the story involves mountain climbing, a subject about which I know nearly nothing, so the fact that it can hold a novice's attention speaks volumes about the power of the writing (Mawer was once a mountain climber until he, too, had a great fall).

And, of course, the story has complex, intricate, interwoven love triangles and quadrangles, making for all sorts of angst and heartbreak involving two generations of characters. The plot unfolds many parallel stories and is told in a non-linear fashion to a certain degree, a type of in media res that I always enjoy.

The novel made the first cut for the Booker Prize but not into the final round in the year it was published. While Booker novels are uniformly excellent, I don't always agree with the finalist choice as "best" book, but that can be true with any subjective award where the judging panel changes from year to year.

If you want a powerful, memorable, magisterial novel that is captivating on every page, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly real, then you can't go wrong with The Fall. I give it my absolutely highest recommendation.

the blitz

We visited the elderly women in whose house we live at her care home over the weekend for her 96th birthday. At our previous several visits, she seemed rather befuddled and confused, thanks to her advancing senility.

This time, however, she was fairly lucid and particularly chatty, talking some about when she and her husband lived in London during World War II. Like many elderly people with memory loss, her earlier recollections are much stronger than more recent ones.

For whatever reason, she talked for a while about the Blitz. Because she was involved in war work and her late husband was in the military, she did not leave London for any extended periods throughout the war, so she had a front-row seat for the Blitz and the later V-1 and V-2 attacks.

As a young married couple, they lived with her husband's parents throughout the war, and while their house suffered some more minor damage in the Blitz, the place never suffered a direct hit. She and her husband and in-laws, however, knew a number of people who were left homeless by the attacks and also some who died.

After we returned home, I read some on the Internet about the Blitz. I have to admit I only had a very general knowledge of the subject gleaned from various history readings and movie and TV viewing.

I was amazed to learn, for instance, that during one stretch in the fall of 1940, London was subjected to Blitz bombings on fifty-six out of fifty-seven successive nights. That must've been emotionally harrowing, always living on the edge like that.

Which brought me around to thinking that I've never really read a novel or seen a movie told from the perspective of someone dealing with daily Blitz attacks. While some works have touched on the subject tangentially, it has never been the primary focus of a story that I know of.

Perhaps the reason why is because you really have to experience that first hand, that there's no way to imagine what it was like if you didn't live through it. A story might only work when someone wrote what he or she truly knew and understood and experienced.

the unpassed past

Like many people in countries around the world, I've been following the French elections. This article in particular caught my attention.

The piece discusses how the winning candidate was not afraid to talk about the recent past and France's complicity in the Holocaust, while the losing candidate said that the perpetrators, not the country, were the ones to blame.

I agree with the victorious candidate. Many countries have shameful periods and incidents in their history, and I think it's a mistake to focus all the blame on the perpetrators. Because something happened in the recent past, something somewhat similar could happen in the future.

Recognizing the national complicity in past atrocities and shameful acts is arguably the best way to ensure that similar actions are not repeated. Arguably few, if any, people alive today are responsible for the Japanese and Italian internment camps in the United States during World War II, but to assign all the blame on now-dead people, and not the nation itself, misses the point.

Our country failed fundamentally when that happened. Individual people made bad decisions, but the government structure that existed then is essentially the same as it is now.

If it happened before, something like it could happen again.

During one of my long hitchhiking trips through Europe, I spent a few weeks each in Germany and Austria. At least from my perspective, the Germans seemed quite candid about how they, as a nationality, had been horribly wrong during the Nazi era.

For that reason perhaps, they seemed to be a happier, more open people. The fact that they recognize their past arguably makes it much less likely that something similar could happen again, as is witnessed by their collective respect for privacy, human rights, and pacifism.

In contrast, Austrians seemed to have a single response when it came to discussing the 1930s and 1940s: that wasn't us; it was the Germans. This collective myopia conveniently overlooks the fact that Austria united voluntarily with Germany, that many who perpetrated atrocities were Austrian, and that Hitler himself was born and raised in Austria.

The Austrians seem to want to avoid their history, to look away and try to change the subject. Arguably, what happened before could be more likely to happen again, because people have never fully examined how they failed before as a nationality.

I always thought this personal anecdote was particularly telling: when I was in Germany, I toured the Dachau historic site and discovered that most of the visitors were Germans, but when I traveled to the Mauthausen concentration camp site in Austria, almost none of the visitors were Austrian.

goldie hawn at 71

The Daily Mail (yeah, I read trash sometimes) ran a story and some photos of Goldie Hawn at 71 a few weeks ago which I'm just seeing now.

All things considered, I think she looks pretty good for her age. I've read that she's always lived a pretty healthy lifestyle so that's probably a contributing factor in her battle against age.

I do think there are some things she could do to improve her appearance. She still looks like she spends too much time in the sun, and a lifetime exposure to UV have taken their toll. I imagine she does something to improve her skin but she could probably do more.

I also think she would look better if she dialed back on the makeup, particularly around the eyes, and updated her hairstyle a bit so it isn't always in her eyes. Part of the reason she prefers floppy hairstyles, I suspect, is because they mask some signs of aging, but a cleaner hairstyle and more moderate makeup could do a better job of that.

Various gossip website seem to disagree about whether she's had much plastic surgery. I don't think she's had anything recently. I do think she's having some Botox done, but that's not permanent.

If she is having nip and tuck work done, it's been subtle. Women her age sometimes have significant eye and face work and it's so obvious because they end up with that rigid rictus look. She has wisely avoided that.

I think the rule of "less is more" works for women of any age when it comes to makeup, clothes, and hairstyles. Goldie has embraced this for some aspects of her look but not for others, so maybe it's time she consider a minor makeover.

The picture of Hawn seen below was when she looked her best IMHO. I'm guessing this was taken when she was around thirty, back when she made The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox.

thanks but no thanks

I have been doing this blog for more than eight years, and one of the most consistent kinds of email I have received throughout that time is what might be called the "sperm offer."

Unknown males send me an email, asking for my photo so they can ejaculate on it and then send me a photo or scan of the results.

Why would I possibly want that? What is it about these men? I see their requests posted on various forums. They even have their own group on Reddit.

There seem to be two distinct types of photo spunkers: those who like to do it on photos of famous women and those who like to do it on photos of ordinary women. Obviously I fit into the latter group.

This led me to wonder if famous women receive letters from fans offering this free service. Do men write to Emma Watson or Jennifer Lawrence asking to splatter their glossies?

This also made me wonder if there are women who actually like to see their photos inseminated. Otherwise, why do these men keep asking?

Truly, if I wanted to see this, I could just squirt some liquid hand soap on my photo and the result would look the same.

evolution of douchebag style

Some very clever people put together a video showing the evolution of douchebag style for every decade from the 1940s to now using the same model and time lapse. The whole thing is hardly more than a minute and excellently done. The actor playing the douche is what makes this all really work.

notorious

The husband and I watched Notorious last night, the 1946 film starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and Claude Rains, directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a script by Ben Hecht. I was fairly sure I had not seen it, and I thought with a cast like that, plus the director and a top writer, it would be the enjoyable classic many have said it is.

I was disappointed. About halfway through, during the wine cellar scene, I realized I had already seen the movie and probably twice. When you completely forget a movie to the point you don't even remember watching it, that's a pretty straightforward verdict you didn't find it memorable.

Bergman tried really hard but she couldn't save a surprisingly weak and clumsy script which often made the fundamental error of telling instead of showing. Rains also tried his best to be villainous in the shallow role of a henpecked son of a domineering, sinister mother played really well by Leopoldine Konstantin, an actress who was actually only three years older than the actor playing her child.

Hitchcock tried hard to make an unbelievable story dark and edgy but you can't make a silk purse out of the proverbial sow's ear. Cary Grant was quite tepid in an underwhelming role and phoned in much of his performance.

After the movie was over, I said to my husband that Grant was overrated. I can't think of any more than one movie where he really delivered a performance with depth and nuance, and that was North by Northwest.

Like many movie stars, I think he was more famous than his talent warranted. In many ways, he seems to deliver much the same performance in movie after movie. He has appeal but no depth.

The only aspect I would call outstanding about the film was the cinematography. Although the matte shots look clumsy by today's standards, the movie was very stylishly shot. That may be it's big problem -- there's a lot more style than substance.

Why is the movie considered such a great classic? Well, I'm certainly not the one to answer that. Different strokes for different folks. In my opinion, it's certainly not Hitchcock's best nor the best from the 1940s.

stones in the river

The New York Times published an interesting op-ed yesterday that was a reaction of sorts to the astoundingly ignorant comments about the Civil War made by the pompous clown currently occupying the White House.

The piece talks about how many people believe that a single person can radically change the course of history. They also believe that they are that one person.

If you look at human history, however, you can see that really was never true -- no one person can stop the course of history. Yes, dictators like Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler gave orders that ended in millions dying. But they didn't act alone and were at the head of much larger movements that had a momentum of their own.

History is like a river, and no one stone can change the course of a river. Some world leaders are big stones in the river, but even if you remove that stone, the river will still flow, albeit on a slightly different course.

So a character like Hitler or Stalin was a big stone in the river. Without them, major calamities still would have happened, perhaps a little earlier or later, somewhat larger or smaller, but nations were still going to beat the hell out of each other some time soon.

People like Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi were big stones in the river, too. They somewhat altered the course of the river, but they did not act alone. If it wasn't for them, then someone else would have come along at some point to cause somewhat similar change.

the $400,000 speech

A number of pundits and others have gotten themselves into a tizzy over the fact that former President Obama will be paid $400,000 to speak to executives and their guests at Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm.

One current Democratic Senator said that accepting payment for a speech like this threatens democracy.

Come again? Obama is no longer President. He is prohibited by the Constitution from ever being President again.

That means he's a private citizen. He has repeatedly said he'll never run for elected office again, which is typical for most former Presidents.

Paying $400,000 to a former President for a speech threatens democracy as much as paying $4 million to a singer who gives a concert or $40 million to a top actor to appear in a major motion picture.

In short, it's a ludicrous claim.

Obama is already getting millions in a royalty advance for his forthcoming memoir, a far larger amount than the speech fee. Does that book advance threaten democracy, too?

Curiously, the critical senator was silent about book advances. Perhaps that's because the same senator was also paid a hefty royalty advance for a book that was published just last month and is available in bookstores now.

was Liz sexy?

The Daily Beast just published a chatty, catty article about Ash Wednesday, a 1973 Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda movie that garnered decent reviews but bombed at the box office.

During the filming, Taylor was her typically charming but extremely difficult self. The article makes it sound like the production was a nonstop headache from start to finish.

Which makes me wonder why studios and producers put up with Taylor's antics when she was no longer a box office draw. You'd also think she'd have been on better behavior, considering she had to know she wasn't the draw she once was.

Or maybe she was so completely wrapped up in her stardom, so certain that she was still the queen that she never gave it a second thought. The little people will still adore me even if I am four hours late to the set, so why rush?

This led me to wonder if Elizabeth Taylor was ever actually sexy. Yes, she was strikingly beautiful when she was young, but I've always felt she had an emotional aloofness that didn't make her particularly sexual. Compared to someone like Marilyn Monroe, who oozed sex, Taylor always seemed somehow frigid or sexless to me -- she acted sexy but was actually sexless.

I could see how men would fantasize about banging Marilyn Monroe. But would they have similar fantasies about banging Liz?