neck rings

I know it's not politically correct to knock another culture for their traditions, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm sorry but I think the practice of making your neck appear freakishly long is cruel and wrong.

This is done by the Kayan People, originally from Burma, but now many of them live in neighboring Thailand. Girls as young as five are pressured into beginning with a few rings. From there, more and more are added over time.

Although the practice makes their necks appear unusually long, the neck isn't actually lengthened, Instead, the collarbone and the ribs are collapsed. In short, they're permanently disfigured on purpose.

The resulting freakishness has made them into tourist attractions for travelers from North America and Europe.

I would have no problem with this if it was started when the women were adults and was done with their adult consent. But a five-year-old child does not have the intellectual capacity to understand that wearing the rings will disfigure her for life.

belated thanksgiving greetings

You can tell I've been an expat for too long — it completely slipped my mind that Thanksgiving was yesterday. I made a mental note last week to remember to write an entry to post yesterday but that note got lost somewhere in the laundry baskets full of stuff inside my brain.

So I hope you're having a happy holiday weekend. I remember reading somewhere that a third of Americans don't even celebrate Thanksgiving on the actual holiday date and instead do it on Friday or Saturday to accommodate traveling and work. So maybe you've not yet had your Thanksgiving.

As has been the case for the last several years, we did not do anything to celebrate the holiday, since I'm the only one in the house who has any reason to. We used to go to expat Thanksgiving gatherings but, like many things, that was put on the shelf once we had multiple children.

Seen below is Diane Arbus's legendary photograph "Two Ladies at the Automat," photographed on Thanksgiving Day 1966 (enlargement). This was taken when nearly the entire world was a smoking section.

a portfolio diversification horror story

My uncle told me on our most recent Skype session that my grandfather's youngest brother — my great uncle who I believe I only met once — was selling his home and liquidating other assets because he was having serious financial troubles.

I was surprised because the uncle was always known in the family to be rather affluent. He had been a mid-level executive at General Electric for a number of years and earned a tidy income.

Turns out he was doing very well for a while in his retirement. But it also turns out he had invested his entire portfolio in a single stock — General Electric.

If you know anything about the market, you probably know GE has not been doing well. They recently slashed their dividend by some 95 percent, and my uncle relied on that income to maintain his lifestyle. He is only left with his pension and Social Security, which is at least something, but nothing like what he was earning before.

He made the classic investor's mistake — he did not diversify his portfolio and instead held everything in one asset.

This is why so many people were so badly hurt when Bernie Madoff was exposed as a fraud — they had invested their entire portfolio with him. So when he came crashing down, so did their entire life savings. But even investing only in a legitimate company is highly risky, too, because the company might hit the wall.

Always diversify. Always.

fake fruit

The husband and the boys and I stopped by to visit an elderly aunt of his over the weekend. Her modest, very tidy house is a temple of tchotchkes.

The place is always spotlessly clean so she must regularly dust all of the knickknacks. That's no small task, considering how many of the have tiny details.

The absolutely silliest of these are the three compotes she has in the dining room that are brimming with plastic fruit. With the exception if the pears, the rest of the fruit is obviously fake. The pears look actually real and a bowl of just those might not look bad.

She obviously dusts the grapes piece by piece because they're spotlessly clean. Either that or she keeps them covered by plastic bags when no one is visiting.

My rule on fake fruit or fake flowers or fake anything ornamental — if it doesn't look entirely real and genuine, don't have it. Purge it from your life. Because a bowl of plastic fruit impresses nobody.

This is not the actual fruit in question. It's not quite this bad. But it's close.

queen lowers the party boom

Queen Elizabeth has cancelled a sixtieth birthday bash for her son Andrew because of his worsening dumpster fire scandal growing out of his friendship with disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Ouch. Punishing your kid by nixing his party sounds like something you'd do for a six-year-old, not a sixty-year-old.

Of all the wastrels in the royal family, Andrew has always struck me as the top of that class. He is now eighth in line to succeed the throne, which means his chances are slightly better than yours or mine.

This, of course, is not the first time he's found himself in the middle of a scandal growing out of his associates. The man is clueless about picking friends.

He will never want for food or clothes or entertainment, but his life has to be emotionally wretched. He's like Britain's mascot that keeps crapping on the carpet.

What he should do is separate himself from the royal family and go out on his own to do something noble and valuable, like fund a clinic in some woebegone corner of the third world. He'd hire some doctors and nurses and then run the thing. Then he'd feel like he had some real purpose in his life.

the opposite of smartphone

I was using my mobile in public over the weekend in a store and when I disconnected a woman next to me said, "that thing is an antique."

I wasn't offended. I never realized how old it must look to other people. I got it in 2009 and it still works fine for me.

Both my husband and I have what are known in the communications trade as "feature phones," meaning they're mobile phones but not smartphones. They are what sometimes are called dumbphones. His is newer than mine, about five years old.

Neither of us have a smartphone because they're more expensive both to buy and also to use, if you have internet access. So why spend the extra money? Both hubby and I use a pay-as-you-go service, meaning we don't pay a flat fee per month but instead a per-minute charge.

I rarely text and the husband even less frequently. If we need to access the internet, we do that at home or a wifi hotspot. So our monthly mobile costs are close to nonexistent.

I see no reason to change to a smartphone. I guess that makes me a Luddite. Or a cheapskate. Or both.

nuke the moon

How's this for crazy — in the late 1950s, the American government considered detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon as a show of strength to the Soviet Union and to boost domestic confidence.

Fortunately, the top-secret program, known as Project A119, never got off the drawing board.

It's amazing how something that seemed like a good idea in the 1950s now sounds monumentally deranged six decades later. It also sounds like the stuff of a 1950s B-movie scifi movie plot — humans detonate a nuke on the moon and the resulting radiation reawakens an alien species dormant in suspended animation. Chaos ensues. Blouses are torn.

"Nuke it to see what happens" should never be acceptable policy.

tesla truck

Tesla introduced their new all-electric "Cybertruck" this week. It's a pickup designed for consumer and light industrial use.

The radical design seemed to be what's causing the most chatter. It's all abstract angles and makes it look more like a toy than an actual vehicle. It has quite a few interesting innovations, including the fact that it has no paint and a extremely sturdy body. Smash it with a sledgehammer and it leaves hardly a dent.

Some have called its boxy style ugly. I don't know if I'd say that yet. It certainly is distinctive.

When it was unveiled to the media, the presenter made a big deal about how the windows were virtually indestructible. To prove his point, he threw two steel balls at the glass.

The windows broke.

human guinea pigs

I started reading an article offline about people who are paid to be infected with flu viruses and then studied by medical experts and a thought immediately popped into my head two sentences into the piece — what kind of money are we talking about here? Yeah, I'm a bit mercenary.

Turns out they're paid from $2,500 to $3,300. You also have to agree to a week's quarantine in a medical school facility.

Not to trivialize this extremely important work that they do, but you'd have to pay me a lot more than two or three grand to get sick for a week. I'm thinking ten grand. But then I imagine they'd say thanks but no thanks.

When I first went out on my own and had to make my way in the world, I was a paid guinea pig for medical researchers doing audiology experiments. This did not involve getting sick, however — I just had to listen to white noise recordings and then report when I could hear certain faint sounds under the white noise.

I seem to remember I was paid $500 for a ten-hour study. It was boring but harmless work. They did have to stop the study and wake me up a few times, however, so I could continue.

a thousand words

I thought the picture seen below was quite striking (enlargement). It's telling us a story as the past warns the future.

The gentleman on the right is a decorated 67-year-old Vietnam veteran. The gentleman on the left is a decorated 23-year-old lance corporal currently serving in the United States Marines.

This photograph was taken last week at a Veterans Day commemoration in New York City. The photographer is Andrew Kelly with Reuters.

seven years old

Our oldest child turns seven this week. Every day he seems more like a boy and less like a little boy, if that makes sense.

When I look at him, I am reminded there once was a time, before I became a mother, that I thought I'd be bored by my children if I had any. Was I ever wrong.

Every day, they're fascinating to watch and hear and observe. All on his own, Joey has taken on the role of big brother for both of the younger boys and never seems to tire of entertaining and instructing them, notably the three-year-old.

I think the most surprising thing about having children is how much they teach you about yourself. I believe I've come to know and understand myself far better now that I'm a mom three times over.

how a modern classic was born

The current issue of The Atlantic includes a fascinating essay about Margaret Atwood and her latest book.

At the beginning, the writer includes an anecdote about how Atwood's most famous book, the modern classic The Handmaid's Tale, was germinated:

In 1980, "Atwood was appearing at a poetry festival in Portland, Oregon, when her trip was disrupted by natural disaster: Mount St. Helens, in nearby Washington State, began erupting for the second time that spring. Plumes of volcanic ash and gas grounded all flights in Portland, and with trains booked up as well, Atwood joined forces with the poet Carolyn Forché to find a route out of town. The pair ended up driving south to San Francisco, and over the 11-hour car ride, Forché told Atwood about the horrors she’d witnessed as a Guggenheim fellow during the lead-up to the civil war in El Salvador: sexual violence, men kept in cages, torture, death squads. What was happening there, she told Atwood, was going largely unreported."

Five years after that road trip, Handmaid was published.

The linked essay details how that trip transformed Atwood's life in important ways, a metamorphosis that resulted in her now most famous work. While the book doesn't bear any resemblance overtly to the El Salvador tragedy, you can see how that opened Atwood's eyes to the evils of totalitarianism, which ultimately inspired a massive research effort where she collected carton after cartoon of news stories about people living outside democratic societies.

Were it not for that serendipitous roadtrip, would Atwood have ever written Handmaid? After reading the linked essay, I came away convinced she would not have. And I don't think she would have written many of her other novels, either.

man's body makes its own booze

A man in North Carolina in 2011 was arrested for driving under the influence but he hadn't had a drink. That's because he had an extremely rare condition where his body converted carbohydrates into booze.

So if he ate a pizza or bowl of pasta, that made him drunk, even though the food was totally nonalcoholic. The condition is called auto-brewery syndrome and also gut fermentation syndrome.

The North Carolina man's condition was probably triggered by antibiotics he had been prescribed after an injury. The cure for his booze-making gut was not a quick process. He had years of anti-fungal therapy and a probiotics regimen before the condition was abated.

Hopefully he didn't go out drinking to celebrate when he was cured.

teleportation troubles

Last night I finished reading a not particularly compelling scifi thriller that included teleportation as a plot element.

The story is set in the year 2028, so not very far into the future. The idea that teleportation could be nearly perfected within the next decade is highly implausible and one of the reason I wasn't thrilled about the book because it wasn't grounded in common sense.

Teleportation seems to me a technology that's so advance and complicated that it would be centuries before humans could develop the science and engineering to make it work, if ever. For teleportation to work, you'd need to break a body down atom-by-atom within a few dozen seconds, somehow broadcast those atoms far faster than the speed of light, and then reassemble them without any errors.

I just don't buy it.

If you're wondering about the book, it was Obscura by the American writer Joe Hart.

brawling judges

This week, the Indiana Supreme Court censured and suspended three trial court judges in the state who had been involved in a drunken brawl and shooting in a White Castle parking lot at three in the morning. Two of the judges were suspended for a month without pay and the third for two months without pay.

The one with a longer sentence had already been convicted of a misdemeanor battery charge and was sentenced to a year in jail but only ended up incarcerated for two days.

In my opinion, all three judges should have been suspended permanently and removed from the bench. Perhaps the state supreme court lacks the power to impose that sort of sentence and it's up to the state legislature to impeach them. If so, then that's what should be done.

We can't expect judges to be perfect angels. At the same time, then can be expected to behave in a civilized manner and with some basic common sense.

I could not find a photo of brawling judges. So the next best thing is three drunken women brawling in the street after a dressy horseracing event (enlarged).

the unicorn puppy

A Missouri-based animal rescue organization has taken in a puppy with an unusual feature — the critter literally has a tail growing out of his forehead between his eyes.

The tail does not wag like normal dog tail — which the pup also has. It just flops around on pooch's forehead as he does his normal dog things.

This led me to wonder if the unicorn myth was founded in an actual horse with an odd birth defect. There's also something called a teratoma that appears in both humans and animals — it's a benign tumor found anywhere in the body and be made up of muscle cells, teeth, brain tissue, or even an eye.

My grandparents had a dog that, several times during her lifetime, had a complete dog's toenail growing out of her ear flap. The thing would just start to grow and, after six months or so, would just fall off. A year or two or three later, another one would start to grow in at the same place.

to airpod or not to airpod

I've been having a discussion with myself about whether to buy a set of Apple AirPod Pro or one of the competitors, a product collectively known as wireless earphones. I listen to my iPod several hours a day, so they're definitely something I'd use.

You've undoubtedly seen people out and about wearing them — they look like traditional Apple EarBuds with the wires cut off.

They are not cheap. A set of Apple AirPod Pro retails for $399 Australian or $249 American. The convenience factor is obvious. But they also have some drawbacks.

The biggest issue, from what I've read, is battery time. And from what I've researched, battery time deteriorates from month to month, so you might get four hours a charge in your first month but only ninety minutes by month ten.

There are other cheaper wireless earphones on the market but they have more drawbacks, particularly sound dropout. So it may be a matter of you get what you pay for.

Right now, I'm probably 40 percent sold on buying a pair and 60 percent against buying some. I imagine my thinking might change if Apple puts the Pro model on sale sometime in the next year or so.

the dead passenger

Back in May, Oklahoman Rodney Puckett was arrested in Arizona for driving around with his naked dead wife in the front passenger seat. Police were initially alerted to the situation by workers at a drive-through who saw the nude body when Puckett picked up a food order.

An autopsy revealed the wife had died from natural causes, specifically heart disease.

Puckett was sentenced on Monday to two weeks in jail plus time already served. He also was sentenced to three years of supervised probation upon release from custody.

IMHO, this case sounds like one of unnecessary incarceration. Better to have sentenced him to a thousand hours of community service. Hopefully he also received some psychological assistance, too.

This aside, the case does sound like the plot to an absurdist Hollywood comedy. Art usually imitates life, but sometimes it's the other way around like it is with Rodney here.

libraries without fines

I've seen several articles recently about how some public libraries are doing away with fines for the late return of materials. IMHO, this is a mistake.

The general idea behind this is that some people feel "shamed" for failing to return material on time. I don't buy that. If you felt such shame at a trivial matter like this, then all the more reason to return your material on time.

I think fines work both as an incentive to return material on time so that other patrons may borrow it and also as a great way to raise funds for a library.

Under the typical no-fine system, you can't borrow any more materials until you return late stuff you already have. But if you don't attempt to borrow anything more, then you can take months before returning what you already have.

This could be a particular problem with a library's new books and other materials for which there's a waiting list. Those people must wait until the tardy individual brings back the wanted item — are their wishes less important than the overdue person's hurt feelings at being "shamed"? I think not.

janis joplin

Over the weekend, I listed to an episode of the Fresh Air podcast that featured the author of a new biography of Janis Joplin.

The author notes several times during the piece about how Joplin worked incredibly hard on her music and was really driven by perfection. This came at the same time that she was regularly using heroin.

And that, of course, would be her undoing. Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of twenty-seven.

Why is it that someone could be so diligent about their music and yet so careless about their body? Unfortunately, the otherwise excellent interview never reveals the answer to that mystery.

george washington's secret

I thought this article was really interesting — a newly discovered eighteenth century manuscript reveals that a young George Washington may have been the first one to fire a shot which in turn started the Seven Years War. (The Seven Years War is called the "French and Indian War" in the United States.)

Britain won that war against France and thus took all of the latter's North American colonies. But that win saddled the nation with a huge amount of debt that took years to pay down.

The United States in turn took much of that North American territory in the Revolutionary War treaty. So it got the benefit of the Seven Years War without the cost. Thus if the story is true, Washington inadvertently started a war that would greatly benefit the country he would one day lead.

the antique hamburger

An Icelandic man bought one of the last McDonald's cheeseburgers and fries before the fast food conglomerate closed down all operations in that country in 2009. Rather than eat the burger, he put it in the garage and then promptly forgot about it.

Flash forward to 2019. The burger and bun are now on display. But they're not covered with mold. In fact, they look much as they did when first saved ten years ago.

The thing must've been pumped full of additives and chemicals when it was first made. But why a level that would make something last for as long as it has?

Anybody wanna taste test it?

ancient cunnilingus

Recently, I was looking at an art magazine offline with a photograph of a rather erotic ancient statue for sale that might earn an NC-17 rating if it was in a movie. That caused me to think about how early civilizations seemed less squeamish about erotic artwork than people today who implode over a brief glimpse of a partially obscured female nipple at a football halftime show.

While things like saucy woodblock prints wouldn't be widely seen way in past centuries, a bas-relief sculpture on the side of a structure certainly would have been. So why did humans become more uncomfortable about erotic art with time?

I suspect a good part of the answer is the early church. Pre-Christian art had lots of erotica, so church leaders associated paganism and polytheism with artistic smut.

Ergo, erotica is deemed bad because it's anti-Christian and heretical. Out come the swaddling cloths and fig leafs. Naughty bits must be hidden from view.

But we've moved past that. It's time to bury the seventh century paranoia. I'm not saying we should have hardcore public murals, but we also shouldn't have hysteria over the occasional asscrack seen in public art.

too much democracy?

The December 2019 issue of The Atlantic includes a thought-provoking article that I recommend but don't agree with 100 percent or possibly even 50 percent. It's titled "Too Much Democracy Is Bad for Democracy."

The piece focused primarily on baked-in flaws in presidential primaries. I agree that the primary system as it now stands has some serious problems.

But I disagree that just because the primary system now has problems does not mean that a primary process must be flawed. A badly designed home doesn't mean the idea of housing should be abandoned.

The authors offer some ideas for how primaries could be improved. But I don't think they go far enough in thinking outside the box. And they totally ignore how certain ways of constraining primary candidates might not pass constitutional muster.

Still, it's a very intriguing piece that could serve as a template for thinking about how to remedy and reform the primary process.

chances are

Last night I finished reading Richard Russo's new novel Chances Are, which was published in July in the United States.

I really liked some of Russo's previous books, notably Empire Falls, which won the Pulitzer, and Nobody's Fool. With this one, I neither loved not hated it. I was left feeling indifferent.

Russo writes beautifully when he's at the top of his form, but here the writing often feels flabby, characters ramble on and on, and there's a lot of repetitive prose. Was Russo hurrying to meet a deadline for a book with which he'd lost his enthusiasm and passion? It certainly feels that way at times.

So a thumb sideways on this one for me. There are plenty of better books out there to read instead of this, like Russo's own Empire Falls and Nobody's Fool.

the not-so-great escape

I thought this was a really interesting article about how the movie The Great Escape completely glossed over the much darker history of actual prison camp escapes during World War II.

The most painful part of the true story was about how prison escapes resulted in intensified searches for all sorts of fugitives so that far more people were apprehended than who had escaped.

Great reading. Check it out.

google goofiness

I use Google's image search all the time, for this blog and other projects as well. A few days ago, they changed the service so that almost all size searching was no longer possible.

This made the service far less attractive to use because search results were considerably inferior to what they used to be. You could no longer search by pixel dimensions, for instance.

Poking around online, however, I found that Google has a much superior image search page that's not linked on the Google main page. That makes no sense. Why have a feature like that if you don't promote it?

Google seems to be a massive monolithic bureaucracy where the scores of left hands don't know what the scores of right hands are doing. Needless to say, I've bookmarked the much better webpage and will now use that.

BTW, I wanted a high res photo of a mama bear with her cubs to make a greeting card. This is what I selected, thanks to the better but hidden Google image search page (enlargement).

hyacinth bucket

Keeping Up Appearances never fails to make me laugh. If you've never seen it before, borrow or stream some episodes and you'll see what I mean.

The program stars the great Patricia Routledge as insufferable snob Hyacinth Bucket. Routledge is a genius at comedy because she's not afraid of making a fool of herself.

the congresswoman's nude photos

Freshman Katie Hill resigned from the House of Representatives this week after nude pictures she had sent a lover were published online and by a British tabloid. This came a few days after the House opened an ethics investigation into allegations she'd been having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a member of her staff.

In her final speech in the House on Thursday, Hill condemned what she saw as a double standard in Congress, noting how women are held to a higher standard than men.

She may very well be right.

However.

Hill sent the pictures to her lover after she was already in Congress. How dumb was that?

Yes, she should not have been targeted for what she had done. At the same time, she should have exercised some common sense and never sent her naked pictures in the first place. She was a member of Congress, after all. How could she solve the nation's problems if she was too dimwitted to keep from putting her own selfie porn online?

the saint's odoriferous relic

In the dark and middle ages, when some venerated individual shuffled off his or her mortal coil, attendants and others would collect their garments, hair clippings, earwax, nail clippings, skin peelings, body parts and more as sacred relics.

Many of these would be deposited in elaborate, ornate reliquaries and housed in important churches and cathedrals. And many of those can still be seen today in locations throughout Europe.

Which leads me to wonder, if people without hesitation collected dirty clothes and ear wax and beard clippings as sacred, holy objects, why didn't they collect solids from the chamberpot, too.

I mean, would a reliquary containing St. Jerome's earwax and skin peelings be any less disgusting than a reliquary holding St. Sebastian's dried turd?

Seen below is a fifteenth century reliquary containing St. Eustace's skull. Hopefully the poor man was already dead when some ambitious individual decided to harvest that.