greatest prude in history?

I don't think I've ever really known a prude well enough to ask him or her what the problem is. Why are people so uptight about sex that they want to scrub every possible mention or depiction of it completely out of public view and make sure no one else sees it?

If you were making a list of the greatest prudes in history, surely Anthony Comstock would have to be way up there. He spent most of his adult life in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America doing his utmost to not only remove anything remotely erotic from public view but also to see that anyone connected with such material was prosecuted and ended up in the slammer.

He did for the anti-smut movement what Carrie Nation did for the temperance movement. And not only did he make war on publishers or sellers of anything remotely erotic, he also went after anyone who sold or promoted contraceptives as well as any type of gambling.

He may have succeeded in the short term but in the long term he failed on an epic scale. I'd love to see him propelled by a time machine to modern-day Las Vegas where you can find everything he railed against in generous helpings.

a hot mess

The evolution of the term hot mess is a curious one. Originally, it was a place that served hot food for the military.

A mess might serve hot and cold or only cold food like sandwiches. But a hot mess meant you could get cooked food, but typically the sort you need to eat from a bowl — things like chili or stew.

Early in this century, the phrase began to be used as a way to describe an attractive person, usually female, who was nonetheless untidy and disorganized. A pretty woman with smudged makeup, hair in need of a combing, a run in her stockings, and a dubious stain on her blouse frantically searching for her purse is a hot mess.

Now the phrase seems to be used for anything that's in great disorder. I saw a line in a political article yesterday about the Georgia senate election next week that described polling there as a hot mess.

IMHO the phrase best works when describing an alluring woman not at her best.

free news

Although the New York Times charges for content on their website after you read a maximum and paltry number of free articles per month (a system which is easily circumvented in several ways), for whatever reason they provide dozens of daily and weekly newsletters for free.

I subscibe to several, two of which provide a digest of American and Australian news, plus others on books, entertainment, breaking headlines, etc. You can sign up for them without cost at the newsletter page on their website.

Presumably they think people will pay to subscribe after reading the free newsletter content for a period of time, but they never thin their email list. I've subscribed to their newsletters for five years or so and never any sign they didn't like that.

Free is one of my most favorite words, probably second only to sex.

rescuing benito

I read lots of history books and magazine articles, and I'm regularly surprised to learn about important historical events I've never heard of before.

I'm currently reading a book offline that mentioned in passing Adolph Hitler ordering an attempted rescue of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943 after the latter's arrest as the Allies invaded Italy. I'd never heard of that before.

The Germans called it Operation Eiche, which means Operation Oak, but it has more commonly come to be known in English as the Gran Sasso Raid. Military historians still consider it one of the most successful special-operations raids in history.

My last exposure to history was in the ninth grade, but I suspect this sort of thing wasn't covered in the remaining three years of high school. If more exciting stuff like this was woven into the curriculum, maybe students would like history more because it tells a story and isn't just a regurgitation of dates and facts.

I hated history in school like most kids, yet I love reading about it now. That suggests the way children are taught history has some serious flaws.

dead at fifty

Scotland native and supermodel Stella Tennant died on December 22, just days after turning fifty. Official details about her death have been sparse, which Scottish police described only as "sudden" and with "no suspicious circumstances."

Unconfirmed rumors have thus swirled around online, as often happens after a celebrity dies suddenly with few details released and when not in senior years. Some say suicide. Others say drugs.

Few have mentioned what came to my mind upon hearing of her death. During the zenith of her career, Tennant was painfully skinny (see below). As she aged, she became less emaciated looking but still quite thin and spoke out against an industry that forces models to have a certain look

One of the major dangers of being seriously underweight is it causes things like heart rhythm disorders and sudden heart failure. If her weight turns out to have contributed to her death, she will not be the first major model who died this way,

a quieter holiday

For the first time since we were married, we did not go to the inlaws for Christmas yesterday. My father-in-law has heart issues, and out of an abundance of caution, to prevent him from getting sick with coronavirus, the family did not gather as usual.

The infection rate per capita is much lower here than in the US and Europe, but it has ticked upward somewhat since the middle of December. And the great fear is the more potent strain that appeared in southern England may end up here because there was some UK/Australian travel when that strain began appearing.

So hubby, the kids, and I just had a quieter Christmas at home. With three happy children, however, they made it a joyous day.

Our youngest is twenty-one-months-old now, and this was the first holiday he really enjoyed. His biggest thrill was playing with wrapping paper once it was torn off packages. If only children stayed that easy to please forever.

merry christmas!

Merry Christmas to you and yours, wherever you may be in this wide world. It's also our twelfth wedding anniversary! And remember my motto — if you can't be good, be careful.

ben's back tattoo

Ben Affleck has been receiving generally very positive reviews for his performance in his 2020 film The Way Back, which opened shortly before the pandemic shut down theaters in much of the world. So it's been relegated to streaming services like most 2020 releases.

Looking at a few stills for the film, for which my Hollywood friend will soon be sending a DVD among others, I noticed that Affleck appeared to have sleeve tattoos on both his arms. I immediately wondered if they were temporary fakes for the film or an unwise albeit permanent decision on his part.

Some quick Googling revealed (1) the sleeve tatts are fake but (2) the huge back tattoo not visible in the movie stills is real (see below).

Affleck is a big enough star, at least for now, that a production would pay for daily makeup sessions to mask that mistake, but think of all the hours he would waste with that.

Affleck is currently forty-eight years old. What will that tattoo look like when he's sixty-eight? It's tail will be stretched by the inevitable love handles and sagging skin.

When will the love of ink start to fade in Hollywood? When some of the older inked stars age the alleged coolness out of it?

why the mafia died

A mildly interesting review of mob books contained this really interesting bit about La Cosa Nostra's decline:

"The former Mafia prosecutor John Kroger ... admits, with some chagrin, that the Mob was really defeated not by charges but by changes. Crime battens on prohibition. The lotteries stripped the numbers racket of its appeal; Internet porn took a toll on the prostitution and smut business; easily obtained credit cards robbed the loan sharks of their monopoly. A more permissive society—with gambling, sex, and debt regularized—was a less Mafia-friendly one."

So no one prosecutor "broke" the mob, despite some of their claims. It was simply Powerball, Pornhub, and MasterCard. Duly noted.

The period picture below (enlargement) shows Lucky Luciano, Salvatore Maranzano, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel in the 1930s.

the austrian national library

The fantastic picture seen below (enlargement) appeared on the New York Times website a few days ago. It was taken in pre-pandemic times and is an interior shot of the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

What's great about the ceiling paintings, which you can see much better if you click the enlargement, are the trompe l'oeil people in the imaginary balcony above this all. I wonder how many near-sighted individuals in past centuries, when eyeglasses were rare, thought actual people were up there.

I have to imagine all those old books on the mammoth shelves are not something the public can wander through and just pull out at random. Looking carefully, however, it doesn't appear they're roped off or behind any kind of barrier, unlike the big globes in the foreground.

I guess if someone attempts to do that, security personnel will appear and hiss "das ist verboten!" Or maybe there are some kind of motion sensors and, once tripped, all the locals looking at the exhibits would give you contemptuous stares.

Then again, if I started pulling books off the shelves to look at them, they're probably all in German or Latin and I wouldn't have a clue what they were about.

skeleton lake

Most people know of writer Douglas Preston because of his wildly successful bestselling novels, many cowritten with Lincoln Child. Probably far fewer know of his nonfiction magazine writing.

Earlier this month, Preston published a fascinating nonfiction article in The New Yorker about a mysterious cache of human skeletons from hundreds of people, found in and around an extremely remote lake high in the Himalayas.

Preston's skill as a storyteller is obvious in the article as he tells a true story like an unfolding mystery. I found it to be a riveting read.

So how did a band of Greeks, thousands of miles from home, end up near the top of the world centuries ago?

neckbeard jerkface

A few months back, I posted about a computer whiz who has created realistic digital images of Roman emperors.

In another nod to imperial super-realism, a Spanish artist named Salva Ruano has created amazing sculptures of the more famous — and infamous — emperors. One website described his ultra-realistic Nero as looking like a neckbearded jerkface.

The artist has a website where he shows how he made his sculptures. The text is in Spanish, but if you use a Chrome browser, it should automatically translate for you.

Ruano has also put together four short videos without spoken language showing clips of him making the sculptures. These are posted on his YouTube page. I was particularly impressed with how he stitches in each facial hair by hand, and then cuts them off to recreate stubble. "Creating Nero" is shown below.

radio emissions from an alien world

Scientists believe they may have detected radio emissions from a planet some fifty light-years away from Earth.

This does not mean an alien is seated at some kind of extraterrestrial radio transmitter chattering away. Instead, the scientists think the plant itself may be emitting the radio signals.

A planet like Earth emits radio signals because of its magnetic field. That field, in turn, helps keep our atmosphere intact and in place.

Hence an alien planet emitting radio signals suggests it, too, has a complex magnetic and atmospheric system possibly something like ours. And with that, it could also host some kind of life forms.

Whether they could be intelligent life forms at this juncture is impossible to determine. They could be nothing more than clumps of moss-like entities or single-cell creatures utterly lacking in sentience.

Then again, the planet could host advanced life forms that would find it amusing humans are just now discovering another planet emits radio waves.

We figured that out how many thousand millennia ago, Ork?

the whole gang

The photo seen below (enlargement) was included in a daily free news email from Axios but for some reason not on their website. It's a terrific picture because it makes the meerkats seem so human-like in their behavior, as if being posed by a photographer for a family portrait.

Uncle Fred, move a half step to the left. That's it. Good. And Madge, don't keep turning your head around like that. Okay, three, two, one, now say live grubworms!

While they look cute and seem to interact gently with humans in documentaries, I read online that they can be vicious little bastards and quick to bite in the real world. Their Disneyfied image of adorableness is deceptive.

smells like a cult

The current issue of Vanity Fair features an interesting article about a cult-like organization called "Twin Flames Universe."

Although fairly new, the group has all the hallmarks of a classic cult: messianic leaders who claim divinity and special knowledge, significant payment requirements from potential disciples so they can learn that special knowledge, miraculous claims, requirements to cut off traditional healing and treatment programs, litigation to quiet dissent and former members, and more.

It's like a new incarnation of Scientology although it has no connection with that organization.

For instance, the two Universe leaders claim they can cure combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder in one day. You must, of course, pay for that cure. They also condone people discontinuing medications and instead enrolling in their program. They have many other claims, as well. And, yes, the two leaders have no training or licensing for any of this.

They're not living as large as some cult leaders, but they're not living in an efficiency apartment, either. The two leaders were photographed for the article in their sumptuous new $850,000 home in Michigan.

I have very little personal experience dealing with cults. The only first-hand exposure I've had was back when I lived in Los Angeles, and someone I slightly knew tried to talk me into going to a Scientology orientation meeting. I told the person I would rather have root canal surgery without anesthesia than go to something like that. That person never bothered with me again, which was just fine with me.

sifting through the ashes

In October, highly respected journalist Jeffrey Toobin had a swift fall from grace after he accidentally exposed himself during a teleconference call. I wrote an entry at the time about how Toobin's carelessness was a disservice to his readers.

Now, nearly two months later, the New York Times published a catty, chatty article about Toobin that offers nothing really new in terms of reporting. It compiles some biographical information on him, then rehashes the incident that lead to his firing, and people's reactions in the aftermath.

So what was the point to an article that essentially sifts through the ashes of a scandal that was briefly in the news two months ago but comes up with nothing new? Hell if I know.

Toobin made a bad mistake two months ago and paid the price for it. Publishing this article feels like a cheap attack on someone who has steadfastly kept himself out of the limelight in self-exile.

It almost reads like the New York Times was dishing up some payback to Toobin. If so, the reason why is anyone's guess. If not, then it was beneath their normally high standards to publish the item.

anklet socks

Seen below is a photo (enlargement) of comic actor Chloe Fineman which appears in the current issue of Vanity Fair. The image runs with a short profile and a second photo of her.

In both shots, she wears anklet socks with dressy shoes. That was a common look in the mid-twentieth century for girls old enough to wear a bra but considered too young to wear stockings.

Seventeen-year-old Judy Garland famously wore anklet socks with the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, probably because the character she was playing was supposed to be younger.

No offense to Chloe, who I think is brilliantly funny, I think anklet socks look ridiculous on adult women. Fineman might have been wearing them for comic effect in the magazine, which is fine, but I certainly hope this isn't a coming fashion trend for women.

If it will be, I will have no part of it. I'm fortunate because I'm often thought to be younger than I actually am when people meet me. With that said, I will not deliberately wear girly clothes like anklet socks. I am a woman, not a child.

rip john le carré

The great writer and one-time spy John le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, died Saturday night in Britain. He was 89.

I've written here several times about how much I've enjoyed his writing, which spanned nearly sixty years, from his first novel in 1961 to his final one last year. He is often described as a spy or espionage novelist, but the truth is he was a literary novelist who wrote about spies and espionage in nearly all his twenty-five novels, short stories, nonfiction, and screenplays.

His novels always have compelling, complex central characters and the prose is subtle, witty, multi-layered, and often wickedly funny. His writing is a mastery of saying more with less. His heroes are not sleek, sophisticated spies but instead weary, anonymous, jaded men and women skilled at fading into the background and slipping away unnoticed.

Nearly all his novels were commercial and critical hits. Some have become classics. If you've never read him before, you can't go wrong with any of his books. Arguably, his shorter, later novels might be the best place to start.

word processing dogs

Scientists at a university in Hungary have recently concluded by using electroencephalographs that dogs, no matter how smart they may be and how good their hearing, will never be able to distingish much about human speech.

Even the smartest dog, for instance, can't tell the difference between sit and set. At the same time, a dog can tell the difference between distinctly different words like sit and bep.

That's because dogs cannot distinguish the difference between two words involving only a single speech sound, like sit and set. In contrast, human babies can make such distinctions when aged only fourteen to twenty months.

I imagine many mischievous children already conducted a rudimentary study along these lines, as did yours truly, when learning that the family dog would sit when you said shit.

tis but a scratch

This is one of my all-time favorite Monty Python scenes. It's from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail but also works 100 percent on its own. It's become an emblematic meme for people advocating hopeless causes who nonetheless insist they will prevail.

why voting matters

When I lived in the United States, I would occasionally hear people who don't vote rationalize that by saying something like "why bother? One vote won't change anything."

The November election was more than five weeks ago, and all but two races for the House of Representatives have been called. In one of those races, where some ballots remain to be counted, the winner and loser are separated by twelve votes.

And in the other race, all the counting has been completed and it will now go to a recount. That's because the winner and loser are separated by six votes.

That's why you vote because, indeed, your vote does matter. If seven people had not voted in that congressional district, because they thought "one vote won't change anything," the outcome could have been different.

Now let's say control of the House of Representatives came down to one seat. Which way that one seat went would significantly impact new legislation.

So seven people would make all the difference.

Yes, when one candidate is ahead by hundreds of thousands or millions of votes, one vote won't make a difference. But when the vote count between two candidates is in the single digits, the power of your vote is enormous and can make a tremendous difference.

leaving the clan

When I lived in Manhattan, I would occasionally see Hasidic men walking on the sidewalks. They were never alone and always in groups of twos or threes, particularly when I was nearer 47th Street.

I never saw any Hasidic women. Decades ago, Manhattan had Hasidic communities, but they're all in Brooklyn now.

The Hasidic men would talk fairly quietly as they walked and, except to watch where they were going, they would look at each other. On the rare occasion they made eye contact with me, they would immediately look away.

With the exception of their immediate family, Hasidic men and women don't much interact with the opposite gender. I never dressed like a someone who danced in a club, so I wasn't flashy, but any woman, even if she was 80 pounds overweight and as ugly as blue mud would be forbidden to them.

I could only imagine what they would think if they knew where I worked. Did they even know such places existed?

I had the sense that the Hasidim were more worldly then the Amish but more segregated. I used to see Amish when I visited my grandfather and they were pleasant but reserved.

The New Yorker is currently running a very interesting article about when Hasidim leave their community and live out in the wide world. Their fish out of water status is something like the Amish, both in terms of culture clash and how they're shunned by their former world. Extreme religion can be toxic to those who don't want to be a part of it any longer.

I thought the article writer did an excellent job building jeopardy and suspense within the piece as she cuts from one story line to the next. That's something not commonly seen in nonfiction.

rip chuck yeager

Famed pilot Chuck Yeager, the first human to break the sound barrier, died Monday in California at age 97.

The bestselling book The Right Stuff and the acclaimed movie of the same name introduced younger generations to Yeager's extraordinary contributions to the early years of supersonic flight.

In his early twenties, Yeager was a pilot during World War II, flew sixty-four missions, and shot down thirteen German planes. He was shot down over France while it was occupied by the Nazis but managed to escape back to Britain with the help of the French Resistance.

Six years after breaking the sound barrier, he broke another speed record, but this time at more than twice the speed, exceeding 1,600 miles per hour.

the parasite jacket

The woman's jacket seen below (enlargement) is part of Burberry's Winter 2021 collection.

The extra attached thing on top can be unbuttoned and buttoned independently of the jacket but cannot be removed from the garment itself. It's stitched to the jacket on the side, back, and bottom seams.

It's sort of a parasite, like it was part of another coat or vest that escaped and attached itself to this one. And like any parasite, it can't be easily removed. What is it supposed to be? A hip warmer?

Without that thing, the jacket wouldn't be bad, although the plaid is a little loud. And I think it's too big of a pattern for a jacket; it doesn't even have a full repeat.

The piece is fairly well constructed, with one exception. The plaids match well on the sleeves, shoulders, and lapels. The exception is the collar, which doesn't match. It should've been pieced so as to continue the plaid lines of the lapels.

The jacket is priced at $2,250 American. The thing around the hips is included, of course. It is a parasite, after all.

the thieves next door

Jerry and Rita were a friendly older couple living outside a small New Mexico town. Little did their neighbors know the two were hiding an incredible secret that wouldn't be known until after both of them died.

Hanging in their bedroom was a Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million that had been stolen from an art museum decades earlier.

Were Jerry and Rita the thieves who snatched it in broad daylight? Or did they unwittingly buy it from someone who may have known the real secret behind the theft?

Evidence suggest they were the thieves. After Rita died (Jerry had predeceased her), more than a million dollars was discovered in their bank account, a fortune seemingly out of reach for two former teachers.

And there were other hints Jerry and Rita had a secret life. Their twenty-acre property was hardly a cottage, they owned a classic sports car, and they took many long vacations all over the world.

They never sold the painting they may have stolen. So where did the money come from to fund a lifestyle well above their means? That suggests they may have stolen something valuable somewhere else and sold it. If so, what was it? Was it more than one object? No one knows.

(If you're interested in the documentary that's excerpted in the insert window for the linked article, the full 22-minutes video is on YouTube.)

the thirteen-year-old hero

Yesterday, the British newspaper The Times published an amazing short article about a thirteen-year-old Polish boy in 1940, imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto, who stabbed and killed a Nazi guard to save his brother.

He then escaped the ghetto and made his way to the Spanish border some 1,400 miles away. He was arrested there but a British diplomat helped him cross the country to Gibraltar and then to Britain.

He fought for the Brits towards the end of World War II and then settled in Scotland, where he fell in love with a Catholic woman and secretly converted to keep his Jewish heritage a secret. His son did not find out about his father's religious history until he was eleven or twelve.

His heroics and ghetto escape were a secret until he died in 1995. His son at that point began to research his amazing dad and has since written a book about his life.

Pictured below is the footbridge in 1940 connecting the two parts of the Lodz ghetto, which was divided by a streetcar line prohibited to occupants (enlargement).

a super secret spy agency

I'm currently reading a new biography offline that mentioned something called "The Pond," a super-secret spy agency operated by the United States government from 1942 to 1955. Its existence was not publicly known until decades later.

I had never heard of this before, notwithstanding I've read a good number of fiction and non-fiction books on the intelligence world.

So I headed to Google and found two interesting items on the topic: an 2010 article from the Associated Press and a 2015 working paper by a University of Maryland professor.

This certainly sounds like an agency that warrants both a non-fiction book and fictional treatment, in novel and in filmic form. What particularly jazzed me to this was learning that one of their top operatives was a woman.

rembrandt farted

A while ago, I clicked a Sotheby's ad on some publication's website, and now I frequently see Sotheby ads at news sites where I can't use an ad blocker. That's to be expected because Google ad services will keep displaying ads from companies you've clicked on in the past.

The face below (enlargement) appeared in a Sotheby's ad this week, so I clicked through to the page and learned that it was a forthcoming lot in an old master print auction. What appears at first glance to be a cartoon is in fact a self-portrait by a young Rembrandt.

What caused that odd expression? Squinting into a mirror while sketching himself? Or clowning around, aping the face of a man who just farted?

He was twenty-six when he did the original but, given the shorter lifespans of his era, not quite as young a man as a twenty-six-year-old today. Given he was an artistic genius, I wouldn't be surprised if he dashed off the original in a few minutes and then made the etching, which would have taken longer.

The expected price is not as high as one might expect for a Rembrandt, but then again it's an etching, not a painting, so more than one identical copy exists. The current bid is £13,000, which is about $17,500 American. The auction estimate for the eventual sale price is £15,000 to £20,000, or about $20,200 to $26,900.

It's not at all big, so maybe that keeps the price down. It only measures about two inches by an inch and three-quarters. If you bought it and wanted to impress a guest when proudly displaying it on your wall, you'd need to also give him or her a magnifying glass.

the autonomous ship

Sometime next year, a 49-foot autonomous ship called the Mayflower will set sail from Plymouth in Great Britain and cross the Atlantic to Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Not a single person will be aboard.

In simple-speak, an autonomous ship is a self-driving boat. Unlike an autonomous car, which usually has a person aboard monitoring the driving, the Mayflower will be on its own and, for long periods of time, largely out of touch with any humans.

It's primarily a research operation so it won't be carrying any hazardous cargo.

We'll see how this all turns out. I remain somewhat skeptical. Anyone who has had a phone or a laptop or a tablet do odd things knows that machines can make illogical errors.

I asked my professional diver husband what he thought of this. He made a skeptical face and asked rhetorically "what's wrong with human sailors?"

The Mayflower will be using some of the same artificial intelligence systems as IBM's Watson, which was a skilled Jeopardy! contestant. If you've ever seen any of the programs where that device competed, it often was right and very fast, but when it was wrong, sometimes it was way, way, way out there.

As long as voyages like this are limited to small research projects, then probably no serious harm can result. But if anyone wants to send autonomous oil tankers, then that needs to be shut down and fast.

Seen below is a picture of the Mayflower during recent trials (enlargement).

a peek inside north korea

I just finished reading a really interesting article about a group of people dedicated to overthrowing the brutal dictatorship in North Korea.

Group membership details are sketchy by necessity but it appears most members are ethnic Koreans outside their home country, people inside South Korea, and former North Koreans who managed to escape and defect.

Involvement with the group inside North Korea seems to be close to nonexistent although some cross-border communication does result, particularly about defection assistance, which by necessity is not described with much detail at all.

Reading the article, you get a clear sense that life inside the North Korean dictatorship isn't going to change anytime soon. The state's control over people is extreme. It sounds like the unhappiest place on earth.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

washing grapes

I've come to the conclusion there's no effective way you can wash grapes. You can run a lot of water over them in a colander, but does that really clean them?

Most grapes in the stores here come from the Australian state of Victoria, which is the next state to our south. I remember a few years ago when we took a road trip to Melbourne, we passed a vineyard down there and they were spraying grapes from tractors.

I normally do not buy organic fruit, but I make an exception for grapes and berries. The non-organic grapes could be sprayed with who-knows-what in the vineyards, and dumping water over them in the kitchen sink might not clean off pesticides and other unwanted yuck. Even submerging them in water might not really clean them.

Larger fruit like apples and pears and peaches can be washed with soap and water. Who knows if that really washes off all the pesticides, but I like to think it does.

If one of my children grows a third eye in the middle of his forehead, I'll have to presume I was wrong.

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