The Fake New Year

"December thirty-first is the very worst time of the year"
--Phoebe Snow, "It Must Be Sunday"

Numbers, are by nature, arbitrary, things we invented to mark things without emotion.

Obadiah Youngblood, Cump, 1865

So today is December 31, 2017 and the last day. But it does not feel any different than yesterday and tomorrow is not likely going to be any warmer.

It is 10 degrees F on my front porch.
It is 22 degrees in Reykjavik, Iceland. Thank you, Gulf Stream. 

December 31 was my mother's birthday. She said, "Everyone celebrates my birthday. The biggest party of the year. They blow up balloons and party all night. They just don't know what the are celebrating."

If we were going to celebrate a New Year in some rational way, it would be winter (or summer) solstice.  Now that is something to celebrate: We have made it, one more time, completely around the sun. Three hundred sixty five day journey, done. 

Now start again.

Obama in Washington

I'm watching "Band of Brothers" again and have got to the Bastogne episode. Now those guys were cold. They did not have gas fire places. Not even roofs over their heads. They dug into the frozen ground and they could not light fires for fear of giving away their positions.

Those were some tough guys. 
Americans.

I'm 200 odd pages into "Grant." 
I've read Bruce Catton and others about Grant, but there's always new stuff. 
Whenever things look bad, it's good to read history. Gives you perspective. Oh, you think the Dotard is bad, well...

History is marked by numbers. 
1862 was a fearsome year. 
2017 was pretty tame, by comparison. 
Another thing about marking years:  Your gravestone will have dates, if you have a gravestone.  If you make it until midnight tonight, you know one thing you could not have known before that point: Your gravestone will not have 2017 on it. 

So there's that.

The Debauched Sloth

I  stopped reading novels some time ago.  It's not that I think fiction is worthless, but as I've got older I find it hard to keep faith with an author, and usually stop after a chapter or two. The exceptions were Kate Atkinson ("Life After Life") and  Michael Chabon ("Yiddish Policeman's Union.")
But now I've stumbled onto Patrick O'Brian and his series of 20 books about the British Navy captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin.

Maturin is a competent surgeon and a physician, two very different things in the early 19th century. As he remarks, he can cut on your arm, or cut it off; he can do almost nothing about cancer, lupus , melanoma or pneumonia.  He is gratifyingly, and accurately, modest about what any medical practitioner of that era can offer a patient.

 Many, if not most of the things he has to offer likely do more harm than good.  Makes me wonder what we'll think of doctors of today, when we look back from 100 years hence.  Even now, we look at the way we once treated cancer by poisoning cells ("pushing poisons" as we said at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the 1970's) where now we intervene on a molecular level, understanding how the melanoma's genes use proteins to thrive.

So that's Maturin's day job. His true love, apart from Diana Villiers, is his world of the naturalist. His travels allow him to identify and describe new creatures from all over the world, from a Galapagos beetle to an interesting sort of bee.

His good friend, the Captain, tolerates his bee hives but in "HMS Surprise," the doctor brings on board a sloth, who takes one look at Captain Aubrey and wails and sobs. Aubrey has no idea how the sloth intuitively understood the Captain's dislike for him. Aubrey had mistaken the sloth for some sort of vampire animal, but as the two get to know each other things progress and eventually, Aubrey offers the sloth a piece of cake soaked in grog, and the sloth is his.

This has all been set up in a previous book when the crew got a gibbon drunk. The gibbon, acquired on a trip to the Philippines, had been hanging about the topsails. The gibbon falls to the deck, injuring itself, and when examined by the doctor, the diagnosis of drunkenness provokes the doctor to investigate who has got the gibbon drunk and agitates to deny those crew members their rightful share of grog and rum and the Captain has a near mutiny on his hands.

Stephen clearly loves animals more than men.

But when the good doctor discovers his beloved sloth is not just besot with the Captain but drunk, he confronts the Captain: "You have debauched my sloth!"

Crew members also run afoul of the doctor when, in his absence, they cannot resist cooking up his rats. He has been experimenting on the rats with a concoction he thinks may strengthen their bones, so he was intending to sacrifice them eventually, and he is not too put out to find them missing.
But one conscience stricken midshipman admits to having participated in the rat feast because he could not resist the smell of the meat cooking in onions. The midshipman admits to this out of unbearable guilt, though he thinks it will cause him to be cashiered and cost him his commission. The doctor shrugs it off, but asks many questions about the nature of the bones, which the midshipman allows were much tougher to masticate than normal rat bones.

The doctor is smitten with Diana Villiers, who has told him he is not good looking enough to tempt her into an ongoing affair and not rich enough to marry, although he is clearly one of the few men who is her intellectual equal. It's pretty clear there can be no other woman for the doctor. Whether Diana will ever come around is in doubt. She tells him her fortune is her face, meaning she is beautiful now, but on the verge of losing that and she has to sell that face; it's her only path to fortune.
She is the most honest of women.
But that is no help to Stephen, and in fact once she starts bedding Captain Jack for sport, it causes a rift between Stephen and his best friend which is only healed after they survive a near death experience and get back out to sea where men can be free of the Siren call of women.

Sloths are enjoying a moment in the sun and the renewed push for independence in Catalonia (which also figures in O'Brian's tales) along with commentary on the state of the medical art make these books seem more current than Twitter.

Cold Day in New Hampshire

My porch thermometer read zero degrees this morning.
But it wasn't windy, so it wasn't bad walking across the snow bank back down to the woods behind my house.
Tugboat, the Labrador, pooped promptly, when he walked out into the cold.
M. Le Boat walks on padded paws, but he was getting ice in between his pads and he turned around to return home, where he knew his breakfast would be waiting.

I walked across the street, up my neighbor's steep driveway to toss his morning papers on his porch. That driveway is potentially lethal, or at the very least, it's an orthodedic nightmare for any bipedal  with a hip.  It is very steep and trying to get down to the newspapers in their plastic sleeves,  lying on that slope is a test of daring. I've seen ski jump approaches less steep than that driveway. So I toss those papers up, to his porch.

That gets me good press in the neighborhood, but it's mostly selfish on my part: If the neighbor winds up on his back on that driveway, I'm not going to be able to just go back to starting my snow-blower, or drinking hot chocolate. So, better to keep your neighbor safe on his porch.

Temperatures increased four fold by the time I got to work. The twenty mile drive south into Massachusetts saw the thermometer in my car rise from 1 to 4 degrees F.

I walked from the parking lot with just my scarf and my L.L. Bean quilt lined wool jacket and was perfectly comfortable by the time I reached my office building, although my fingers had frozen around the handles of my briefcase, and that took a while of thawing at my desk.

The wind picked up later in the day and people failed to keep their appointments at the office.

People who did come in were happy to be here. There's a sort of camaraderie of the frozen. People who make it in smile like people getting off an airplane. Just happy to have arrived safely, into a warm place.

I'll never understand why people would miss all this for Florida.

The Joys of Victimhood

Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why this should be so isn't very complicated: to position oneself as a victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even victory
--Joseph Epstein, The New York Times, July 2, 1989


Recently watched a stream on Twitter in which a young woman posted about having been humiliated and victimized in connection with her time at a place called "Vice" and her picture was published along with a totally fabricated tale about her sex life.

Not a Victim

After much consolation and tweets about how horrible this must have been for her, somebody said, actually, humiliation is something you feel when you have failed in some way; this had nothing to do with you and everything to do with the perverse fantasies of whoever made up this story about you.  An avalanche of "You don't ever have the right to tell someone how to feel!" tweets ensued.

The original troll/bot/misanthrope weakly protested that we tell each other how to feel all the time, either directly, as when Bernie Sanders tells you to get angry about being exploited by the billionaire class, or subtly, as when someone tells you she was the illegitimate offspring of a drug addicted mother who sold her to pick fruit in the fields of California where she was raped. That whole story is put out there to evoke sympathy, and to wrap a life in drama. 

Of course, even as he victimizes Hispanic immigrants, Muslims citizens, the Dotard in Chief constantly evokes victimhood:  He his own self is the victim of "fake news."The California woman who was raped or maybe murdered (the story shifts) by a Mexican immigrant, factory workers who lost their jobs and towns because of a that Democratic plot called NAFTA, victims of the World Trade Center attack, every person killed in a terrorist attack, even if the shooter is a white guy using a bump stocked rifle approved by the NRA.  Whites who have lost "their" country to demographics. Christians who have suffered egregiously from the War on Christmas. 

Trump is the defender of these White, Christian, English only, under educated long suffering American victims.

Way back in 1989, Joseph Epstein observed how claiming the mantel of victimhood was becoming a new rite of passage: He described the electrifying speech by Anne Richards at the Democratic national convention in which she demolished George Bush with restraint and sophisticated lancinating lines like: "Poor George, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth." What struck Epstein was immediately after she left the podium, the newscaster remarked that she had been born poor and been an alcoholic and now look at her. A victim triumphant! The worm had turned!

Epstein noted that victim hood had been used throughout the Civil Rights movement and even Gandhi had made effective use of the tool. 

He noted that Israel was a country of 2 million set in a sea of 200 million Arabs, and yet it was the Arabs who tried to portray themselves as the victims. They played that card because they had seen how effective the victim card could be: Without it, Israel would never have become a nation, never been recognized by the United Nations. After the Holocaust, no group in the world could claim to have been more thoroughly victimized than the Jews. There was no arguing their status as world's most aggrieved victims.

Definitely not a Victim

And yet the Israelis, especially those Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel wanted no part of playing the role of victims. They wanted to fight, to be seen as people you can no longer victimize. They wanted to be tough, impossible to be led to the slaughter, weeping and wailing. They would rather die than be victims.

We do not need your sympathy, do not want it, Israelis said. We do not need to be saved. We are going to play the game with the cards we were dealt and just you try and stop us. 

Of course, now 70 years later, one might look at Israelis building settlements, pushing around Palestinians and you might wish they had more sympathy for the people who get in their way.

But at least they do not play the victim card. That much is refreshing. 

Grant, and Our Current Frustratioins

We have early Christmas at our house and I got "Grant" which I have been eager to read. Ron Chernow has chosen well in looking at U.S. Grant in this time of Trump, because we often forget how tumultuous and unglued our country has actually been. 

U.S. Grant

For all his inanity and volume, Trump is a footnote, to use one of the Dotard's own favorite words, a "lightweight."

Grant, of course, guided us through the most serious threat to our nation's life. Today's phrase du jour is "existential threat," which is such a bastardization of the word, existential, I could scream. People use existential when they mean, "serious" or "potentially lethal" or something ultimately important, critical, decisive. What Grant presided over was all that. 

What he faced as President was no flaccid "alt right" but out and out racist cleansing, the Ku Klux Klan in full revolt against the outcome of the Civil War and the legal outcome of that war, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. 

Reading Twitter is a discouraging experience: It undermines one's estimate of people you might have otherwise admired. David Simon, the creator of the "The Wire"--a man whose work demands respect-- tweets relentlessly in a vain attempt to assert what a blue collar, tough and profane guy he is. He protests too much, of course, and winds up sounding like a blowhard wimp.

Grant is just the opposite. Simple, direct, understated.


"Cump" --Obadiah Youngblood 

And his friends are an indication of the man:  Sherman was an admirer. Like most important, pivotal figures of that era, Sherman was racist by our current day standards, and he did not suffer irritants gladly. He hated newspaper reporters in his camps.  "If I could kill them all, I would," he said. "But then we would be having reports from Hell by breakfast." 

What we have now in Trump is simply a man who is too small for the office, which is what Grant was thought to be in his time. But his detractors were wrong in Grant's case. 

He was small of stature and ordinary looking, had no bluster about him. No show, no bling. His qualities could not be seen so easily, but they ran deep, and they carried the day where mere marketing could not. Grant was preceded by a great showman, George McCellan, who rode his charger down the ranks of wildly cheering soldiers, who arranged for grand parades, great rallies, whose men loved him for a couple of years, but he could not fight, would not fight, blamed every reversal and failure on the unwillingness of others to understand his own greatness.

Eventually, enough people figured it out. They understood the showman is fun to watch, but the show is not enough. 

Invasion of the Brain Lamers

As a corporate employee, I have had just completed my on line course on sexual harassment and my course on opiate addiction.

These took two hours of my life, which will never be refunded.

My sexual harassment course taught me that it is not the Inspector General who investigates sexual harassment complaints but the Office of Economic Equality or something that sounds like that. 
I was very disappointed to learn it was not the Inspector General, who I have never met, but that sounds like someone I would like. I mean, what a great job. You can inspect just about anything, sounds like. You can generally inspect things or people or events. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Oh, and there are two categories of sexual harassment: Quid pro quo and creating a hostile work environment. Creating a hostile work environment is so easy to apprehend it's boring.  The questions on the quiz (to make you you were actually listening) asks if pinching the buttocks of a co worker is an example of creating a hostile work environment or Quid pro quo. 

Personally, I like the sound of quid pro quo, but it turns out to be pretty pedestrian. It turns out if you tell an underling she  will be promoted if she sleeps with you but she will be fired if she does not sleep with you, that is sexual harassment of the QPQ variety. 
Who woulda thunk? Harassment? I would have thought, "blackmail" or "extortion," but I am clearly behind the times. That is QPQ. So there. Not allowed. Do not do that. 

As for opioids, I learned from my online such valuable lessons as: 
1/ If you prescribe opioids you should inform the patient there is a risk to opioids. 
2/ You should inform your patient they should not drive a car, operate a chain saw or a table saw or a crane of more than 50 feet height or fly a jetliner with 400 souls aboard if  he is nodding out under  the influence of opioids. 
3/ You should warn anyone you are giving opioids it is not a good idea to mix them with alcohol or to crush up the capsules or tablets and inject them into your veins.  This is important advice, which likely would never have occurred to the patient, had you not mentioned it. 
4/ You should warn your patient if he has a family member who is addicted to opioids not to share his stash which you have just supplied with his drug fiend family member.

For preparing this important information, the company which prepared these on line courses received compensation which placed its CEO in the upper 1%. 
I have it on high authority this particular CEO responded by inviting his secretary on a trip to Aruba in his private airplane and assured her if she refused to accompany him she would be fired.  
Unfortunately, when they reached the bridal suite he had reserved, he inhaled an industrial dose of cocaine and suffered a cardiac dysrhythmia and the secretary called the ambulance which took him  to the emergency room, where he was given an opioid to settle him down, and he died in respiratory arrest.

From which, I had to conclude there is justice in the world after all. 

Smart Enough to be British?

How did I miss this story?

For Meghan Markle to become a British subject, she needs to pass a written test, 24 questions in 45 minutes. (That's 1.8 minutes a question. If you had to ask, you already fail.)

Sample question: what is Vindolanda? 
Answer: Roman fort just south of Hadrian's Wall. 
Another: Who wrote "Rule Britannia?"
Answer: Thomas Arne. (Not Edward Elgar as the Prime Minister David Cameron thought.) 
Another: What does "Magna Carta" mean?  
Answer: Great Charter.

Bonus points: What does the Magna Carta say? Who is David Cameron?

Is that a peacoat she's wearing? Good choice.

If you don't pass the test, you are denied citizenship in Britain, which has got to be a meritocracy, if ever there was one, in exactly the same way elite colleges are meritocracies--if you can pass these tests you have clearly learned how to play the game.

President Dotard has said he wants to limit immigration to people who have something to offer to the country. No more illiterate, Spanish speaking Central Americans. We want only smart people. Let's give them all a test, like the Brits do.

Personally, I liked the test they gave Will Smith in "Men in Black" to separate out the very best from the "best of the best."  If you remember that scene, Smith demolishes the whole idea of the best of the best in a simple repetition of the phrase. 

She passes my test

And while all of the other candidates shoot the monsters in a simulated back alley brawl, Smith assesses the threats and chooses to shoot the innocent looking girl in pigtails, because he thinks counter intuitively.

He would never be granted British citizenship, and fact, if there were a test for American citizenship, he'd like be thrown out of the country, as would most citizens who were subjected to it.

As for Ms. Markle, if she wants to be taken into the British royal family, she'd better be hitting the books. 

Why, you might ask, would she want to have anything to do with those people? Can you imagine anything short of being stretched on a rack more agonizing than having to sit through a dinner with the 90 something Queen and King and/or any of the extant Royals? 

Seen near Lincoln Center

Downton Abbey it is not.
Why would a woman marry that kind of money?
I suppose Ms. Markle could ask Melania if that kind of encumbered wealth is really worth it.
Can you imagine what Melania and the Dotard actually talk about? Think about it: They are on an airplane, stuck with each other for four hours. You have to say something. 
Myrna Loy and William Powell they are not.

Occupied: Norwegian Dystopia

Forget "House of Cards." Forget "Dicte."
The best of Nordic Noir and Netflix is the Norwegian "Occupied."

It is so clever and current, and it speaks to an issue I had not fully appreciated: What happens when you have a bully with a bludgeon next door who decides to use that power? 
Not since Steinbeck, has a story posed the questions of when and how do you resist force, especially a force which may at first look like a "silk glove" occupation?

Set in the near future, after a series of climate catastrophes, the Green Party in Norway is swept into power on the idea that fossil fuels have got to go, and the new Prime Minister shuts down all those North Sea oil rigs off the coast of Norway and insists on pioneering a new, safe nuclear option, "Thorium."

But Russia, and the rest of Europe have the problem of "Now."  Middle Eastern oil has been shut down by civil wars there and somehow the Russian oil production seems to have been thwarted--you would think Russia would be happy to be left as the biggest oil producer in the world, but no, they are oil starved and need Norway to start pumping again.

The United States, now entirely oil sufficient, has quit NATO and is no longer interested in Europe, withdrawn and isolated. America first has left the little countries within easy reach of Russia unprotected.

Suddenly, the new Prime Minister finds his oil rigs occupied by Russian troops, who have the blessing of the rest of Europe, and Russian troops arrive in Oslo and at strategic places. Resistance to the overwhelming might of Russia appears futile and the Russians promise, once the oil starts flowing, they'll leave. 
The Prime Minister sees only fruitless loss of life as the price of resistance.

The choice of resistance or capitulation, the notion of honor, the instinct to fight, the calculation of how much a principle is worth in terms of human lives all swirl around the many subplots of this masterpiece. 

And I'm only through Episode 2, Season 1.

It makes you think about Trump's Russian connection, about power, thugs and the risk of finding the Russians at your door, and in your neighborhood.

A Russian bought the house next to mine some years ago, outside Washington, D.C.
It was a ranch house, modest but prim and neat. He demolished it.  In it's place, he built a McMansion which towered over my house, making it look like the carriage house next door. The neighbors were aghast. 

One day one of his hired men started digging a hole on my  lawn to plant a big fir tree, and I walked out and told him he was digging on my property and he shrugged, looked at me and kept digging. 

So I called the County men, and one came out and made the Russian dig up his tree and he also made him disconnect his huge outside air conditioner air compressors, which straddled our property line and move it behind his house, to conform to code.
That little incident must have cost him a couple of thousand dollars. 

If he cared, I don't know. He seemed to have plenty of money.

I should not generalize about Russians from my one experience, but it does fit that image of the Russian who does just what he wants because he can. 

Makes you want to fight.
But the smart thing sometimes is to simply move on.
My grandfathers did that. Told the czar and the Russians to keep their stinking country, hopped a boat and found a way more attractive country to live in, to thrive in.

You can have your country, your war with Hitler and your pogroms and your despotic government and your oligarchs.  Thanks for being such unappetizing knuckle draggers you drove the good people out.  We found a better place, far from your cesspool.

I did the same thing and moved to New Hampshire. Like my grandfathers, I found a way better place to live. Let the Russian have his big house. Maybe all his friends will move into the neighborhood and they can all get drunk together. I'm rid of them.

But now the Russians are coming again. Norway, Ukraine, maybe even Washington.
Hopefully, it'll take them a few generations before they discover New Hampshire.