aussie halloween

I've written here before about how Halloween is not a big deal in Australia, but plenty of merchants are trying to change that. Because door-to-door would be a bust, we're taking the children to a late-afternoon/early-evening party for expat families here.

Joey is very excited to wear the pirate outfit I made for him. Tombo is going as a leopard in a costume with a detachable tail I made for Joey several years ago that also doubles as sleepwear.

I certainly hope the woman seen below doesn't have a candle in her pumpkin. That could get awfully hot awfully fast.

Happy Halloween!

from russia with love

I largely restrain myself from publishing current political content, but this one is too good to miss. The effects are not quite seamless, but that makes it funny in places. I love how many of them keep talking like they're a little cracked when they're led away by the FBI agents.

a $17.8 million watch

Paul Newman's Rolex watch sold a few days ago at auction for nearly $18 million. The buyer was not revealed.

The seller was the former boyfriend of Newman's daughter. The legendary actor had given him the watch on impluse.

An unspecified portion of the sale proceeds will go to charity. The seller presumably will also pay a whopping amount of capital gains tax.

IMHO it was sad Newman gave the watch away to a non-family member in the first place. I know if I was one of his children, I'd be peeved, because Newman's wife of many years, Joanne Woodward, gave it to him.

I also think there's something obscene about someone paying that kind of money for a used watch. Far better to give that amount to a charity that helps sick or starving children.

I've never understood the attraction of a bling watch. A timepiece is a utilitarian device. As long as it accurately tells you the time, what more do you need? It's like owning a diamond-studded toothbrush.

When I used to dance in New York clubs, I'd see the young Wall Street hotshots flashing their Rolexes and I used to say to myself "what a waste of money."

I cannot think someone with an $18 million watch will wear it. So it will be displayed, sitting contentedly in its special case, where it will look exactly like all the other Rolex watches of that style.

It would be identical to a Rolex formerly belonging to a failed Wall Street hotshot or the deposed president of a banana republic. Poking around online, I see the exact same watch, formerly owned by a nobody, selling for anywhere from the five figures to the low six figures.

So somebody paid roughly $17.7 million for the Newman association and roughly $100,000 for the actual watch. That just seems so ludicrous to me. Tulipmania for the twenty-first century.

Right-click the photo below to see the enlarged period original.

petrograd 1917

I just finished Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917; A World on the Edge, by Helen Rappaport and found it a highly compelling book about the two Russian Revolutions which occurred exactly a century ago. The book was published in English-speaking countries earlier this year.

Rappaport draws significantly from eyewitness letters and journals of the period, and that's part of what makes it so accessible and real. There's no significant historical analysis of the major issues that caused the revolutions themselves; this is more social history, the story of the event itself as seen through the eyes of those literally with a front-row seat.

The tone starts with the spectators being somewhat amused and mystified in a curious way at what they're witnessing. But like the real events, the pace and intensity slowly builds, and before you know it, you're in the thick of the things and feel the real horror and terror of the witnesses.

I love books like this because you get a real feel for what it was like living in a city experiencing one of modern history's most consequential events. You get a true sense of how people struggled for food, shelter, safety and, ultimately, their lives.

If you're at all interested in history or just something compelling to read, I highly recommend the book.

Right-click the photo below to see the enlarged period original.

president pooh

I heard an item on the radio earlier this week about how Winnie the Pooh is increasingly censored now in China because people have been creating so many memes comparing President Xi Jinping to the beloved bear.

This is so ludicrous it seems like something out of a farce. Given how wide the comparisons have spread, trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube will render this censorship worthless. I hope this heavy-handed approach blows up in the president's face.

The meme craze started four years ago when a photo ran in the media of Xi Jinping with President Obama. Then other Pooh memes followed whenever the Chinese president appeared with a head of state.

I wonder what George Orwell would think of all this?

happy cheaters?

The Atlantic recently published a thought-provoking article called "Why Happy People Cheat" and with the subhead "A Good Marriage Is No Guarantee Against Infidelity." The piece was written by a psychotherapist who specializes in sex and relationship topics, about which she has also authored several books.

My first thought upon reading the subhead was, if one or both spouses is engaging in extramarital activities without the other knowing, that is not a good marriage. You may think you have a good marriage, you may call it a good marriage, you may not be shouting at each other, you may be communicating well and enjoying each other's company, but you don't have a good marriage.

You could call it an "okay marriage," but it's not good if you have a monumentally fundamental issue like adultery right below the surface. Discovery could very well shatter that marriage. If it survives, it might become good, but always scarred in a way.

I'm not a marriage therapist of any sort, but I am married and observe other marriages. I think if you're observant, objective, and have a good helping of common sense, you can probably figure out why somebody's marriage is not working. You don't necessarily need to have letters after your name.

I see marriages where the partners might call it good, but I wouldn't. They don't spend much time with each other. They don't seem very invested in their marriages. Both spouses are very involved in their own lives.

Some of those marriages ultimately fail. The spouses didn't necessarily grow apart, but they grew differently. And in the ones I know, the marriages never seemed essential to the couples.

In contrast, among what I know of as good, strong marriages, the husband and wife spend a great deal of time with each other. Their marriages are the center of their world. The spouses have an interlocked symbiosis to the point where they're inseparable much of the time. The spouses are actually addicted to each other, in a way, each other's stalkers.

My husband and I have a good, strong marriage. We spend a tremendous amount of time with each other. We would rather be with each other than anyone else. When we see other people, we are almost always doing so as a couple. And we have a lot of sex.

We do have the advantage that James only works part-time and some weeks not at all, while I rarely work, because we primarily exist on his pension and the earnings from my investments. I've often wondered if we both had full-time jobs, plus the kids and other responsibilities, would our marriage be as strong as it is?

pennywise

The very best New Yorker covers combine biting political satire with the timeliest of pop culture references. The cover for their October 30 issue, seen below (enlargement) joins that distinguished company.

This one is funny and creepy and twisted and scary all at once. It helps if you've seen at least a trailer for the current box office smash hit It, based on the Stephen King classic, and are thus familiar with the evil clown Pennywise.

When you think about it, evil clown is also a perfect phrase to describe the current Oval Office occupant.

guilty brains

PBS has an intriguing new article on their Nova webpage about using MRI brain scans to establish whether defendants are telling the truth when people say they didn't commit crimes for which they were charged.

This is an interesting idea but interpreting a scan is subjective and the results are not obvious to laypersons on the jury. It's not like DNA or fingerprint evidence that can be shown to a jury to corroborate a witness's testimony where the comparison is obvious. An MRI looks like expressionistic shapes superimposed on a two-dimensional skull filled with gray cauliflower.

More interesting still would be the technological possibility in the future that a mechanism could be invented to automatically determine if someone was telling the truth or not, thus ruling out human subjectivity and possible error.

But then this is almost like The Minority Report where non-humans are making all the decisions. I'm no lawyer, but this seemingly would violate the Sixth Amendment -- how can you confront your accuser when your accuser is a machine?

Hence, I think this technology may never be appropriate for a courtroom. I don't think too many people want to be judged by a gizmo.

library porn

Someone posted links to this picture article on a book forum. The photographer has many more gorgeous photos of libraries on his webpage.

I like to think of photos like that as "library porn." If they don't have libraries like this in heaven, then I don't want to go there.

Instead, I'll just be a ghost hanging out in a fantastic library like the New York Public Library main branch or the Library of Congress, randomly reading through the collection. One of my favorite things in life is just aimlessly browsing in a library.

My husband said I should get a job in a library when the children are older. But I'm afraid I wouldn't get any work done -- I'd want to look at all the books and old magazines they have.

I've noticed lately that our older son, who is almost five, has picked up the browsing habit, too. He wants to look through many books before deciding which ones he wants to check out. I wonder if library habits are genetic?

living hell

I've been reading about the recent fires in Sonoma County, California, but only seeing still pictures in the net, it was not easy to grasp the cast scope. The video below is breathtaking and shocking as the fire just goes on and on and on. I wish it wasn't in vertical format, and you might be able to see it better in the fullscreen version, but nonetheless you get an idea of the horror.

This video is clumsily shot but captures an extraordinary sight. I wonder how that happened, given much of the surrounding area shows no fire damage.

Maybe a random flying spark somehow got inside the trunk. I feel sorry for the tree, quietly roasting alive like that -- you can see its leaves are still alive. Mother Nature is very cruel sometimes.

madame prime minister

New Zealand has a new prime minister, who happens to be a 37-year-old woman named Jacinda Ardern. She is not NZ's first nor second lady PM but the third.

She will occupy the official residence, Premier House, with her boyfriend, a television host who is something of a himbo pinup. She has sometimes been criticized for wearing clothes deemed too sexy for a serious politician and for allowing herself to be filmed in skintight exercise outfits that emphasize her trim, toned figure.

Oh, the outrage.

She is therefore a thoroughly modern prime minister. I hope she succeeds and gives heartburn to stuffy old farts who want to keep politics traditional and boring and tiresome.

I would not surprised if sometime in the near future the current Oval Office occupant doesn't say something particularly boorish and tasteless upon meeting her at a forthcoming G20 summit.

tasteless hallowe'en

A controversy has broken out recently over certain online retailers selling an Anne Frank Hallowe'en Costume. This is in such poor taste that it sounds like the punchline to some insult comic's black humor.

While Frank's powerful diary is indeed inspirational, her life after deportation from the famous secret annex to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she ultimately died not long before liberation, was profoundly tragic. The tasteless costume in question even has a tag affixed to the outfit's collar much like victims wore when transported from one location to another.

Some online retailers openly marketed the product as the "Anne Frank Hallowe'en Costume," others attempted to be more discrete by calling it a "World War II evacuee girl" or something similar.

One has to wonder about the people who created this and those selling it -- not only were they lacking in taste and decency, they were devoid of common sense.

I also imagine some unwitting little girls wearing this costume might unfortunately face some harsh words when standing at someone's door for treats. Hopefully few parents had sufficient lack of taste and sense to buy such a product.

john dos passos

In my quest to read more classics of literature, I picked up a copy of American writer John Dos Passos Three Soldiers at the library recently. The novel was published in 1921 and is widely considered an important early twentieth century work.

I finished the book last night and found it quite striking. For a work that's nearly a century old, it has aged amazingly well.

The novel tells the story of three American soldiers in World War I. The story begins with one soldier, who serves as the central character for about a third of the book, and then that segues into the second soldier, who picks up the story for the middle third.

The third character is the most striking, and the story ends with him in a shocking and memorable way. I think the book is every bit as strong as works by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both who knew Dos Passos well.

I plan now in the coming months to read what is universally considered Dos Passos's greatest work, his U.S.A. trilogy, published in the 1930s. His later books are not held to be memorable and have been largely forgotten.

His power as a writer was when he was a young man. Unlike many novelists who grow stronger with age, Dos Passos somehow lost what made him distinct. Interestingly, in the span of his life, his politics went from far left to far right.

Reading this book made me wonder if Hemingway and Fitzgerald's celebrity has maybe crowded out some of their strong contemporaries. If so, then that is indeed unfortunate, and there's room for more than just a handful to share some of the spotlight.

alien fashion show

Gucci is now advertising their new promotional campaign called "Gucci and Beyond," which features models and aliens dressed in the designer's fall/winter collection. The inspiration is said to be classic 1950s and 1960s scifi movies and TV.

The problem, as you can see below in the sample photos, is that both who the aliens might be and what might be alien attire are difficult, at best, to determine.

In the first photo (enlargement), the model in the front apparently is the human while the woman with the really bad shag hairdo is supposed to be the alien, I guess. So why do both have those ridiculously huge steer horns nose jewelry which would impair breathing?

As for the clothes themselves in the whole collection, many look like they were designed by Michael Jackson on LSD. They're extremely gaudy and the outfits often clash badly.

In the second photo (enlargement), the alien male is obvious, but is she from another world, too? His jacket looks like something that only a used car salesman would covet.

Her suit appears like it could be very attractive, what little can be seen of it, and therein lies the problem with shoots like this -- they often obscure the clothes in their rush to be perceived as clever.

I priced the suit on the Gucci webpage and it would cost around $5,000. I wonder how hard that would be for me to copy?

If you're tempted to buy something, In Style has more shots from the collection in their coverage of the unv.

organized vs. disorganized revolutions

I have been reading offline about the failed February Revolution which occurred in Russia in early 1917 after the czar abdicated. The government lasted only ten months and was overthrown by the October Revolution of the same year, which started the process toward the Soviet Union's birth in 1922.

The February Revolution failed because, in good part, no one had ever really planned for what would happen after the monarchy was gone. The revolution itself was a series of random events with no real leadership or unifying figure.

In some ways the February Revolution was like the largely failed first phase of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century -- people wanted change but they didn't really know or agree what that change would look like. The early part of the French Revolution deteriorated into the brutal Reign of Terror.

Compare these two revolutions with the largely successful American Revolution. In comparison to the French and the Russians, the Americans were fairly organized before and during the insurrection with bodies like the Continental Congress and the colonial assemblies. The insurrection had both a leadership system and strong unifying figure.

When the new government was failing during the Articles of Confederation phase, it was successfully succeeded by the Constitutional Convention and resulting government. Both of these phases were planned ahead of time with careful and complex organization.

So the moral of this story is, if you want a successful revolution, plan ahead. You have to get ready for what you want before you remove what you already have. It's the old rule of "better to be ready and not to go, than to go and not be ready."

sexual harassment revisited

Since I wrote about Harvey Weinstein earlier this month, the matter has absolutely exploded in the media. At least forty more women have come forward to tell their stories about encounters with him where they allege some level of sexual misconduct.

And some of those women are now accusing him of rape. The earliest alleged incidents stretch back more than thirty-five years.

Weinstein is now at the frontier of Bill Cosby territory. A number of media outlets are reporting that criminal proceedings against the legendary producer are possible.

Whenever incidents like this burst into the public view, the response always seems to be reactive. And because of that, arguably things like this will continue to happen.

Various statistics show that at least one quarter of female workers in first-world employment, and possibly as many as 80 percent, have experienced sexual harassment at work.

Maybe the time has come to be much more proactive. This would require a response on both the legislative and law enforcement sides.

Should tougher criminal penalties be possible for men who take sexual harassment to the physical level, even when violence does not occur? And is law enforcement doing all it should, considering how many times cases aren't pursued because of alleged "he-said-she-said" situations.

The reality is that many people will confess to criminal behavior when asked. Not all will, surely, but depending on the statistics used, as many as a third of perpetrators will confess when questioned by police. Are alleged perpetrators being investigated as thoroughly as they should be?

And maybe there needs to be a more organized system for women to come forward and report what has happened without feeling hostility in response. First-world countries have well organized suicide hotlines and rape hotlines and spousal abuse hotlines with associated services.

So sexual harassment needs that sort of visibility. And that will probably require one or several high-profile women who are willing to take the lead on this issue, and they don't have to have been victims themselves.

The status quo clearly isn't working with this problem. Something needs to change.

crunchy frog

This has always been one of my favorite Monty Python sketches. John Cleese looks so incredibly young in this clip.

A memory from childhood illustrates why I get along so well with my brother but not my sisters: when I was young and my older siblings were in their late teens and early twenties, my brother and I loved Monty Python and did all the lines back and forth, but my sisters absolutely hated the show.

I still divide the world into Pythons and the others. One of the first things I learned about my husband after meeting him was that he is a Python, too.

joseph stalin

I wrote earlier this week about how I was reading a biography of Joseph Stalin. I finished it last night and was left feeling somewhat disappointed.

The book was Stalin: Breaker of Nations, by Robert Conquest, a well respected and well reviewed writer on the Soviet Union.

While I learned a lot and don't regret reading the book, I wanted a thorough biography of a complex man, and this book did not deliver that. Having read some great presidential biographies this year, I guess I was expecting too much -- a thorough look at an historically important man. Not every bio is a winner.

Conquest had previously written some highly praised books about specific topics and incidents in the Soviet Union, but he seems less equipped to handle a cradle-to-grave biography. The Stalin book felt largely anecdotal at times and the character was approached from the outside in -- I did not feel like I understood what made Stalin tick, what drove him, and why he did many of the things he did.

The work included extensive details about all the various people Stalin persecuted but far fewer specifics about the scope and incidents leading to a particular group being targeted. The author makes very clear that Stalin had many people murdered, but the why for most of them is never really explored in any detail.

For instance, the author mentions the infamous Katyn massacre detail a number of times after detailing what exactly happened, but he never provides answers as to why Stalin ordered it and what could be his motivations. With all the focus on Stalin persecuting enemies, real and imagined, vast periods of history are left out entirely.

The writer also presumes readers will already have an understanding about how things worked in the USSR and provides little context. For someone like me who didn't have a great deal of background on the Soviet Union, I didn't understand how things were important -- like what exactly the Politburo was and how it worked.

At the end, I was left feeling I still needed to read a good biography of Stalin and will hunt for another. I want to understand a lot more about twentieth century history because it had such an impact on the one in which we live now.

In a closing note, I couldn't help but chuckle a few times when reading the book when I realized that Stalin seemed remarkably in some ways quite like he who shall not be named and who currently occupies the White House. Both men believed that they were smarter than everyone else, that a little bit of knowledge on a topic made them an unquestioned authority, that everyone was out to get them, and that people would believe without question their ludicrous lies.

humpty dumpty was a drunk

The Daily Beast is running a fascinating article about the dark and bawdy origins of many popular nursery rhymes.

I do remember when I was a child asking why Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. Was he sick? I had a children's book where Humpty had sturdy arms and legs. Why couldn't he just hold on to the wall?

My older brother also taught me some bawdy versions of lyrics he made up in place of classic lines. I've forgotten them all now except: "Little Jack Horner, shat in the corner..."

This part of the article made me sad: "Childhood as we know it didn’t actually exist until around the 19th century. Prior to the Victorian era, at least in the West, kids were considered scale-model adults, and didn’t need much in the way of special coddling."

Depriving a child of childhood seems so cruel. It's also a way to seriously mess up your child for life. Kids need to grow both physically and emotionally before being sent into the workforce.

I know, of course, that children of past eras often had a very hard life. I wrote recently about child labor. And many children around the world do not have happy childhoods in our time, either.

Now that I'm a mother, I think about things and have attitudes about things that never crossed my mind when I was a single woman. The only constancy of life is change.

heavy stubble

Research has shown, numerous times, that men with heavy stubble are rated as more attractive by women than clean-shaven men or those with beards. It really makes no particular sense, but at the same time, I agree wholeheartedly.

My husband is apparently entirely of Irish ancestry. He's one of the true "Black Irish," dark and almost swarthy, darker than someone like Colin Farrell, so he has a heavy natural beard.

As a result, he has a visible beard line even when he did a close shave ten minutes ago. But when he goes five or six days without shaving, one look at him and I practically have a spontaneous orgasm.

I have a new theory that we've decided to test, to see if I can get pregnant more quickly than our usual time. When I calculate the day that I'm more fertile, he'll stop shaving six days before that. Then we'll fuck like bunnies.

Hopefully my ovum will then be at its sluttiest.

is cannibalism always indefensible?

I've been listening to this podcast with an author discussing her new book that covers, in part, how Joseph Stalin deliberately caused a famine in Ukraine in the 1930s that killed millions. I happen to be reading, right now, a Stalin biography, so I was interested in a different perspective.

The book's author, as you will hear if you listen to the interview, discusses how some people in Ukraine resorted to cannibalism to keep from starving during the famine. If they were discovered, many reacted with fury, leading to arrests and prosecution.

Cannibalism is disgusting and, in normal times, reprehensible and indefensible. But if your children are literally starving, and eating an already dead neighbor or stranger is literally the only way to keep them alive, then I say go for it.

I certainly know if I was living through a famine and my children were starving, I'd do that. I think cannibalism is less indefensible than allowing your children to starve and die when you could save them.

Once people are dead, their bodies are nothing more than raw meat. Wasting that potential food source when it may help someone live seems morally absurd.

If you've never read it, I recommend Piers Paul Read's book Alive about surving passengers aboard a plane that crashed high in the Andes and who made the difficult decision to eat those who had died. Similarly, survivors of the notorious Donner Party resorted to cannibalism to survive a brutal winter high in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The threshold to this decision, I think, must always be this: if someone could survive with resorting to cannibalism, then don't do it. But if it's the only thing that will keep someone alive, then it's foolish not to.

Of course, killing someone simply to eat him or her is indefensible, no matter how hungry someone else might be.

hasty injustice

Last month, a young father almost went on trial and faced the death penalty on charges he murdered his two-year-old daughter. He was released just when his trial was due to start, however, when his seven-year-old son admitted to accidentally killing his little sister when he was five.

Now I'm generally neither a pro- or anti-death penalty person. I don't lose any sleep over those guilty of cruel, savage multiple-murderers being put to death when the evidence is overwhelming.

At the same time, I think the death penalty should only be used very rarely for particularly heinous killings. The main reason is because too many convicted people on death row are later exonerated by hard evidence. As well, the cost of executing someone, because of the complex appeals, is actually more expensive than keeping someone behind bars for life.

One state has executed more than five times as many people since 1976 as the state in second place. That state is Texas and more than a few of those cases saw people put to death when serious questions about their guilt was later uncovered. This is an excellent example.

The young father case noted above was in Texas. If you read the linked article, you'll see the evidence could barely be considered circumstantial. Quite frankly, the case sounds like it was built entirely around a prosecutor's rather baroque theory about the father.

The death penalty should only be used in extraordinary cases when there's absolutely overwhelming direct evidence. There was nothing of that in the young father's case, and had his young son not confessed, the man could easily have been executed based on a dubious theory.

Australia, by the way, abolished capital punishment in 1985. The last execution actually occurred in 1967. The United States is the only first world country where capital punishment has not been outlawed.

spray-on tans

I happened on a recent photo of a particular Washington-based politician who shall not be named and noticed his fake tan looked more orange than usual.

That led me to wonder why people ever think a phony tan is convincing. It's more obvious than a bad toupee.

People tan differently, depending on their complexions. So what appears natural on one person will look bizarre on another person.

If you have a naturally pale complexion, you would never tan much in real life. So why spray a color on yourself you could never achieve on your own?

I suspect people addicted to fake tans are like people who wear way too much personal scent. What they think is subtle, the rest of the world sees as overpowering.

thoughts and prayers

I think the time has come to officially retire the phrase "thoughts and prayers," as in our thoughts and prayers are with the victims at this time.

The expression has become so commonplace, not to mention cliched, that it has lost all impact. It has become an empty commetary.

If a public figure or business plans to issue a statement following some tragic event, I think they should invest the time and thought into crafting a unique comment. Then the statement potentially has power and feeling.

sleaze

The New York Times ran an eye-opening article yesterday about how a number of women independently have accused legendary movie producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment over the past three decades.

These allegations include unwanted physical contact, asking the women to massage him, and appearing naked in front of female employees and creative talent. At least eight women received out-of-court settlements after they accused him of inappropriate conduct.

As with other public figures, the more women who independently accuse a man like this, unaware others are doing it, the greater their credibility. When it comes to potential victims, there is strength in numbers.

Weinstein has released a conciliatory statement and is taking a leave of absence from his company. He is also receiving counseling and other professional services.

How this plays out will be interesting to watch. Some men become pariahs after such allegations surface. Others can escape unscathed, as happened to the current Oval Office placeholder.

I'm fortunate that I never faced problems like this during my working years. Men might talk to my tits and not my face, but they never tried anything funny.

Curiously, at least based on my experience and that of other co-workers I knew, sexual harassment from employees was not a problem in the various clubs where I danced. I guess so much skin was on display that men had sensory overload and were not tempted further.

Nonetheless, I feel sorry for women who are preyed upon by sexual exploitation in the workplace. I can see how that would be very frightening and disturbing.

kazuo ishiguro

The Nobel Committee announced yesterday that Kazuo Ishiguro has won this year's literature prize. He's a British citizen who writes in English and is a longtime London resident after immigrating there as a small boy from Japan.

IMHO, Ishiguro two best novels are masterpieces: Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. A few of his other novels are disappointments and I'm not alone in that assessment; several of his novels have been savaged by critiques.

Media coverage of Ishiguro's award has noted that his output is inconsistent -- sometimes brilliant, sometimes mediocre -- and some held that out as if that should be a disqualification. I think that idea is flawed.

Looking through the list of previous Nobel literature winners, I think all of the writers I've read could be said to have the same flaw. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck both are Nobel winners and their work was wildly inconsistent, notwithstanding each wrote several masterpieces. And some of the previous Nobel winners only had one book of true merit, like Boris Pasternak.

An artist should be judged by and celebrated for his or her best works. No artist in any medium has produced only masterpieces.

So few produce true masterpieces, and they should not be devalued because they've also cranked out a few stinkers.

artificial immortality

I was thinking about my late grandfather recently and wondering what he would have made of some current events.

That started me wondering if, at some point in the future, artificial intelligence and robotics would become so advanced that you could have a cyborg version of a deceased loved one custom made for you.

Whoever programmed the AI would have to have access to a great deal of documentary material about a person. So maybe this would work only with famous public figures.

You could have an AI John Kennedy but not an AI Grandpa. But still, your own personal dead President cyborg could be interesting.

However, if you were determined to leave behind an immortal memorial of yourself, you could make an ongoing video record of your life for decades for use by the AI computer. It would be sort of like a reverse version of The Truman Show.

This potentially could make an interesting scifi story or novel. Someone's personal AI Mahatma Gandhi or AI Martin Luther King cyborg is lost, for instance -- when only the truly wealthy have cyborgs but no one knows who it belongs to -- and it becomes famous in his own right.

conspiracy theories

I was reading online about some of the bizarre conspiracy theories and memes that are circulating since the tragedy over the weekend in Las Vegas. How people could possibly believe such utter tripe is unfathomable.

That made me remember this terrific article by Kurt Andersen that I read a few weeks ago about how conspiracy thinking is pushing aside rational thinking as the accepted norm in America now.

Instead of believing or merely considering more plausible explanations, some people seem determined to believe the least possible scenarios.

It makes you wonder if things will get a lot worse before they get better. And maybe they'll never get better at all. That's a truly scary thought.

las vegas

Sixteen months ago on this blog, after what was then the worst mass-shooting in American history that had just occurred in Orlando, I commented "something is very wrong with American society where shootings have become commonplace and nothing seems to be done to resolve the crisis."

Toward the end of the entry, I wrote "I would be very surprised if anything significant changes because of this latest massacre." That turned out to be true. Nothing was done.

And now America has had an even worse mass shooting, a new worst massacre ever, only little more than a year later, this time with at least 59 killed and at least 525 injured.

Once again, I predict nothing substantive will be done. The solution once again will be no solution.

What will it take to move people off the dime? How horrible does a mass shooting have to be before there's a sea change in attitude, as if the wanton murder of nearly five dozen people in a few minutes Sunday night wasn't already horrible enough?

This is not a problem that will go away all by itself.

sophie's choice

I was watching my two sons playing together yesterday. That started me thinking about parents who favor one child over their others. I've known families where that happens, even when the children are quite young.

I don't think I could ever be that way. Each child is unique, and my love for each of my children is unique, but the love for one is not stronger than for the other. I don't understand how parents can do that.

That started me thinking about Sophie's Choice. I've read the book several times and seen the movie more than once, too.

I hadn't really thought about the main premise of that story in quite a while, not since I became a mother for the second time. If you don't know it, the central character, named Sophie, is forced in Auschwitz to choose which of her children should live when that means the other will die. If she does not choose, both will die.

Thinking about this story again struck me much more than it did when I had no children. I don't see how I could make that kind of choice, even if forced to.

Writing this made me realize I need to read Sophie's Choice again. I think it might have much more resonance for me now.

perfume ads

I was looking at the most recent issue of The New Yorker in PDF format online, which looks exactly like the print edition. I noticed a perfume ad that I've seen in a lot of glossy magazines lately and immediately thought, "that looks like a gigantic waste of money."

Most people I know buy a scent because they like how it smells on themselves. I'm the same way.

It's a classic case of "no try, no buy." If I'm in a store with a scent counter, I'll try something on me, see how I like it, and see how the husband likes it on me.

I will not buy a scent simply because I see a pouty woman with lots of decolletage in a multi-million-dollar slick ad campaign.

That makes me wonder why perfume companies, instead of spending all that money on image advertising, don't spend it instead on getting samples to women so they can try it on themselves.

And I don't mean those wretched things in magazines where you fold back the paper and sniff the scented strip. They never smell like the real thing and, besides, a scent on your person can seem much different than when sprayed on a cotton ball or piece of paper.

This article from last year notes that of the $800 million spent annually on scent advertising, much of it is wasted. And as I suspected, "only 6 percent of respondents said advertising was the reason for a purchase."