Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 27

Selfie Stick

If you haven’t heard of this product (we had not until this morning) it is high time to get with Modernity and invest in a Selfie Stick. The illustration I’m showing is from Wikipedia creative commons ( here ). The image was taken by Petar Milošević in Prague. The selfie stick is widely available from Amazon to Walmart, you might say. I saw one discounted from $21.81 to $4.19 (plus shipping) at Amazon.
The big banks all over the world are desperately trying to cause economic growth by printing more money and such. Growth is already here, if only we could promote desperately needed new products so that the public could know to acquire them.
Here is our attempt to grow the economy by making publicity waves. We shall, of course, acquire a pair of sticks ourselves, a Hers and a His, as soon as we have acquired some brand of iPhone to fit into their maws.
In the future—no doubt from Amazon, which already uses little robots to fill our many orders for books and such—will come the Selfie Bot. It will roll ahead of the user and take a constant stream of selfies as that person is doing his or her shopping. Stay alert, NSA. Here is yet another way to keep track of potential terrorists. We all are, after all, especially after seeing such products on sale…

My Mother on Inertia

My Mother understood the fundamental problem of this dimension—which she voiced around about the time when she had reached my age. She used to say, but only sotto voce and in private, that eating was disgusting. But eating was just her standing-in for anything to do with ordinary physical life; she chose that activity to make the point more sharply; because, no matter when, eating remains a pleasure and a need. She meant life-in-matter. The problem only appears when life in the valley is viewed from a point of view above it, thus from awareness, intelligence. Viewed through a materialist monism, thus from below, what you see is simply what you get, matter and matter all over again: the endless catch-as-catch-can and tawdriness of everything made temporarily neat and tidy only by massive expenditures of energy and effort; even then the daily functions of intake and elimination provide sufficient instances of grossness so that we cannot avoid eventually noticing that something is amiss.
Fighting the fundamental chaos that surrounds us—and it seems to have a powerful will of its own we call Inertia—is the principal occupation of daily life. Extraordinarily high levels of collective coordination and cooperation are required to keep that chaos at bay in the best of times. Life-in-matter is by definition conflict—of the soul against the random. Any ideology that embraces it, e.g., a free market ideology, invariably increases chaos by increasing conflict and directing energy from cooperation.
Not what God actually created. This world here is what we rightly call The Fall.

Ideological Shift

An interesting article in The American Conservative (Nov/Dec 2014), titled “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs Dante,” reminded me again that no really decent statistics on politics are available to the general public. Economic statistics are available; but you have to pay real dollars for political statistics. Therefore it is difficult to check, using numbers, opinions, as those in this article, that the shift in ideology in the United States represents a movement from urban to rural. I always marvel at the detail that CNN, for instance is able to show in its coverage. Such data must cost a ton of money—but the people’s right to know does not extend to a right easily to analyze those numbers.
Half-heartedly looking for some, I found at least a few numbers looking backward provided by the Brookings Institution ( link ). These show the shift in dominance of the House and Senate, between 1991 and 2013—thus excluding the results of the most recent election—by regions of the country.  Here is the tabulation:
Democratic Strength, in Percent, in House and Senate, in 1991 and 2013 House Senate 1991-1992 2013-2014 1991-1992 2013-2014 102nd 103rd 102nd 103rd South 66.4 29.0 68.2 27.3 Border 67.4 36.6 60.0 50.0 New England 66.7 100.0 58.3 66.6 Mid-Atlantic 56.9 60.3 50.0 90.0 Midwest 61.2 38.4 70.0 60.0 Plains 54.2 33.3 58.3 41.7 Rocky Mountains 45.8 41.9 37.5 43.8 Pacific 60.6 70.4 40.0 90.0 Democratic regions 8 3 5 4
This tabulation still identifies the border states as a separate region. They are Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Delaware. Note the dominance of the Democrats in the 1991-1992 Congress (8 of 8 regions) and near dominance in the Senate (5 of 8 regions). Twenty-three years later, the dominance has swung to the other side—but four regions are still hanging on to the Democratic view of things. I show them in bold type.
I’ll look some more. One of the great puzzles, for Brigitte and me, is this general trend. People are getting poorer—and more Republican. Something’s oddly askew. Perhaps it is those gerrymandered districts. Or could it all be just Fox News?

Marescence

To keep Alzheimer’s at bay, learn a new word every day. Or perhaps one every month. This month’s word is marescence. It stems from the Latin for marescere, to wither or to shrivel. The subject presents itself every fall, but the energy to dig up the facts is not present every autumn. This time I went on a search to discover why it is that virtually all deciduous trees loose their leaves more or less on schedule—thus, hereabouts in the Midwest, they are mostly down by today. But some hang on for dear life. And some keep them until well into the coming spring. Such species, among them Oaks, Witch-hazel, Hornbeam (musclewood), Hophornbeam (ironwood), some species of Willow, and American Beech display marescence, meaning that their leaves turn color but remain attached to the branches until new budding pushes them off. The evolutionary value of this tactic is debated but not resolved.

To get this list I had to find a helpful post ( link ) at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Endless blogs and chat rooms go on and on about leaves, but all are incomplete and rarely roam farther than the nearest oak.

Well, in the center of our large back yard rises a rather young American Beech. It still has all its leaves although, at the tip, they are beginning to turn brown. Finding the name of a tree merely by looking at its leaves is very time-consuming. You have to be retired to do it. One step leads to another. The images you see displayed above are the leaves of some of these species, in the order listed above. They suggest that my Fall raking will have its Spring complement as well. My images are courtesy of Wikipedia commons.

The Leaves at Wolverine Lake

Their Huddled Masses
The 1 Percent
The occasion here is tomorrow’s second, and last, leaf-pickup by the Village of Wolverine Lake (I actually typed Wolverine Rake, so intense had been the effort). As for the 1 percent, we owe that to Monique’s careful collection of leaves when walking Katie.

Brigitte suggests that I label these pictures—particularly in the context of today’s first post—“Detroit” and “Downton Abbey.”

Home at Last

The Manners of Celebrity demands, for males at least, that the person be precisely three days unshaven, the hair artfully uncombed but not quite pasty on one side (as having just arisen from disordered sleep). The shirt must be open at the collar, the suit jacket must simply be seento be expensive, and a ragged pair of jeans must be worn beneath.
But the above is mere celebrity—painful as it must be to live that life. The real aristocracy today lives virtually at Downton Abbey. For us, of course, the obligatory study is The Manners of Downton Abbey, available for $19.99 on DVD; it only takes an hour to master the arts; it might take longer to read Downton Abbey Rules for Household Staff ($14.99) and to teach its contents to our virtual servitors.
PBS, this time of year, well ahead of Christmas, sends us shopPBS.org, its magazine, where our virtual aristocracy may be physically spruced up by buying all kinds of products. All Seasons of DA now available may be purchased alongside Christmas at Downton Abbey ($16.99), a raft of books to start our own DA Library (A Year in the Life of Downtown Abbey($29.99), Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (ditto), The Chronicles of Downton Abbey ($19.99), and The World of Downton Abbey (ditto)).
The newest addition to our growing collection is Downton Abbey Teas, 30 bags for $12.99. The categories are “Bates’ Brambleberry Tea,” “Mrs. Patmore’s Pudding Tea,” “Christmas Tea,” “Lady Cora’s Evening Tea,” “Grantham Breakfast Blend Tea,” and “English Rose Tea.” For a mere $77.94 (shipping may be free), we can have all six flavors.  The savvy buyer, however, may obtain a free sampler by buying Season Five first. Oh. These teas are a “PBS Exclusive”;  don’t waste time trying to buy these tea products at Kroger.
I’m personally much attracted by the Miniature Downton Abbey Snow Globe ($12.95), complete with a Downton Abbey Quote book titled Wise Words. And if you’re feeling contrarian, I’ll accept, with equal pleasure, the Miniature Downton Abbey Light-up Castle with sound track andQuote Book.
But, surprise, we aren’t even close to being done yet! There are in addition 26 other purchasable reminders that Downton Abbey is physically real. Of these the most expensive (unless that’s a typo) is Downton Abbey Fragrance ($244.99), the least expensive is a Round Jute/Polypropylene Storage Basket ($10.99). There is jewelry, lace, gloves, towels, and even a Downton Life Cotton Oven Kit (also $10.99); I could use one in making our croutons around here. The Downton Life Cotton Apron carries the following slogan: “My second HOME is Downton Abbey.” Well, they have our number at PBS. Obviously.
Finally, there is a kind of show stopper. It is a DVD, priced at $19.99. It is displayed right next to another DVD titled Secrets of the Manor House; the two are related. The show stopper is titled Secrets of Highclere Castle. What? Highclere Castle? What is that? Well, it turns out to be the actual setting of Downton Abbey, the actual physical place. It turns out to be a real location with a real lord and lady (Lord and Lady Carnarvon) who, mostly, expend their energies keeping it intact ( link ). And what a great achievement it was, for them, to get BBC to turn it into Downton Abbey. We’ll have to visit there, visit our second home, as soon as it becomes safe enough to fly again in the unreal world where we’re obliged to live in actuality.

Fides in Fido and Further Flotsam

The leaves are mostly down and raked—in quantities fearfully greater than at our old house. Here it is the maples that dominate the landscape in yellow. Transitions, we hope are transitory, and a settling down should slowly set in. In any case, posts to this log have virtually vanished, what with mile-long to-do lists still to be worked. But some old habits are returning, among them reading out-loud. The book we recommend is James Galbraith’s The End of Normal. It ought to resonate with those who follow economics. Its most curious thematic—not stated so much as implied—is that the transition (yet another one), this time to the Post-Oil Age, actually began already in the early 1970s. Which brings echoes of my surprises when I realized, over the decades, reading authors who’ve been most influential in forming my own views of modernity, that the current decadence was fully alive and well in the 1930s already, before I was even born. Galbraith’s “normal” is the unbending faith of our culture in the unfailing growth in the economy, the reliable certainty of endless new waves of technological change that will continue to generate it, and a consumption culture, therefore, that will never end.
Brigitte yesterday found a rather fantastic book review, “The Creepy New Wave of the Internet,” by Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books (11-20-2014) ( here ). It describes the next wave said to be rising, ready to make life worth living in the immediate future ahead. Worth reading if you have the stomach for it. I did not manage it—but then, of late, I’ve been suffering from (stress-related) irritable bowels. The wave is described as the Internet of Things (IoT), thus objects communicating with each other. Hold on to something firm please: it is projected as a $14.4 trillion industry by 2020.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, sure enough—no doubt to correct my total lack of faith in the future—comes an article proving that Halpern may have a real thumb on the pulse of things—comes an article on dog collars and whistles linked into the Internet so that uptodate pet owners can track their animals and measure their caloric expenditures on walks. This sort of thing—still in early stages—is sure to give new life and growth to the Pet industry, now measured at $58 billion. Our faith in Fido will get a lift from the growth of three fiercely competing companies—no doubt just the first of a whole swarm—in the dog-tracking segment of this market. Bowls that will signal when they have been licked entirely empty will follow—joining the reinvention of eggs, in the grocery business. We have, if you believe Sue Halpern, eggs in a future that will count themselves in the refrigerator and let you know, via your iPhone, when it is time to buy more eggs.
All this came crashing down on me today—when, with the lawn fully raked, my escape into the old normal was denied me. Besides that, the temperature out there is not yet entirely controllable by devices trafficking inside my blood stream informing my Internet-enabled hoodie to turn on the heat using a battery pack that doubles as my zipper and is, of course, rechargeable entirely by a wireless energy transfer that Tesla once saw in his wildest dreams.

The Sun Also Rises…

…to the south and to the north of due East. Indeed the sun rises in the East only on two days of the year, March 20 and September 23, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
This subject came up yesterday when, discussing the tilted wind-rose on our newly acquired gazebo, I kept insisting that what Brigitte called East was really West. She kept insisting that the sun rose in the East—and never mind which way the wind-rose was pointing. I kept arguing feebly for a while until she said: “If you are right, Arsen, the sun is right now setting in the East—and you can see it for yourself by looking out the window!” Sure enough. Some windstorm had managed to turn our wind-rose helter-skelter.

Another fix-it chore goes on my list, but I rather dread having to climb up there just to correct that problem. I am as challenged by heights as I am by spherical geometry.
Herewith a graphic that shows the rather considerable deviations of sunrise from due East for the North 42nd Latitude where Detroit lies on the map.

I have this diagram from a paper published by the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles in 1948 and accessible here. One of the reassuring aspects of astronomy is that what was true in 1948 is still true in 2014—and will presumably still hold in 3014. Until the skies go into disarray, all’s well with the world.

Don't Let the Airbag Explode Over You!

Was off to have a routine medical test—but one that required, ahead of it, that I drink 80 ounces (4 large bottles) of water. We call such days Medical Day Lite. For the aftermath I had a medium-sized shopping list for Kroger. Brigitte trailed me to the driveway outside doing her usual checks. “Have you got your glasses? Keys? Have you got the list? Good. And Oh. Drive carefully—and don’t let the airbag explode over you!” I laughed and walked the rest of the way to the car as Quasimodo might. — When are these people finally going to grow up!?

At the Root of the New Normal

To speak of “the new normal” is, you might say, the new normal. The phrase signals something negative. The speaker is comparing current conditions with a much happier one—a time of growth in every category, even such negative categories as debt. People piled on debt because they were confident that growth, progress, advancement, promotions, and good fortune would magically create the necessary funds to pay it back. And debt for some meant sales for others. More and more sales. Higher and higher profits.
The new normal signals disappointment. It’s as if, watching a pot, waiting for it to boil, we looked under it to see if the blue flame was on; and it was. So why, for Heaven’s sake, doesn’t it start to boil? Something is wrong. Is it the water, the pot, or the fire? The Laws of Progress no longer seem to hold. A fundamental change has set it. It’s the new normal.
If the gas flame is the cause of water boiling, what is the analogous driver of the economy. For the longest time—essentially since the end of World War II—economic dynamism was a given. It was the way things were: dynamic. Yes, the occasional “correction” explained why sometimes we had brief recessions, but the phenomenon, the old normal, was really Progress. The way things ought to be. So what was the source of that dynamism.
Confidence. And the root of the New Normal is—the lack of it.
Confidence is two parts faith and one part observation. It is a feeling. It also feeds on itself. It was first shaken on 9/11/2001. On that day a fundamental feeling of American invulnerability was put in question. The excessive reaction to it—proportional in size to the unrealistic faith in our superiority—has spawned a series of mismanaged wars. Meanwhile the Money Culture ignored it and produced growing inequality, the fraudulent Mortgage Bubble, and then the Great Recession. And since then, no matter what happens, it is interpreted as yet more proof that something’s wrong—so that we are now behaving irrationally about the ebola plague in part of Africa.
When for far too long a period a vast, rich society like ours has come to forget that real life is dangerous and ever demanding of vigilance, especially in good times—and that our faith should be in Something beyond our own genius—the “corrective” of our delusion will also take a while to manifest. The New Normal is an early sign of that correction. But confidence will only return when we forget about the Old Abnormal—infinite growth and progress—and turn our eyes to the Heavens. That will steady us again. And the waves of hysteria, which now characterize social life, will then gradually diminish.