Going to the Dogs

My recent visit to the campus of the Black Warrior has provoked some consideration of accidental (?) correlations. Two in particular have been of high density in these: hush puppies; and food.

I quite recognize that the average Southron will admonish that hush puppies are food and one of its highest forms, for both humans and their most stalwart of allies, canines. My reference however is not to these wonder morsels of fry bread, but rather to footwear. Back in my undergraduate days at the campus of the Black Warrior, my wanted footwear were gray split pigskin loafers with composition soles. The latter were claimed to be ‘non slip’ but that claim was specious, especially on newly mopped linoleum floors. Slippage was not an issue on the rough, bare concrete floors of the student laboratories.

The origin of this consideration is two-fold, arising from my purchase a couple of months ago, after a period of several decades, of a pair of hush puppies. I could not get those split pigskin loafers of my undergraduate days because despite my foot having broadened in width from its then “A” (slender) to its current “B” (narrow), the company has diminished its scope of production of the shoe. As a result I had to settle for what I mentally categorize as ‘an old flatulence shoe’.

Nonetheless, the shoe is a hush puppy, made on a last that is different from those used by any other manufacturer of my experience. After many years of wearing Allen Edmonds in the office, and Clarks since retirement, it took a couple of weeks for me to accommodate myself to the differences of the shoes. This evinced memories of the same process when I was a freshman and new to both the split pigskin loafers – recommended by a helpful shoe clerk in Huntsville to my parents as ideal for the college student – and the intense walking required of freshman in college. The latter would diminish somewhat in later years but never to the benign levels of high shul.

Those memories resurfaced Thursday as I walked from the new chemistry building to the stately general library, and then back by way of Lloyd and Galilee halls to my accommodations. The day was crisp, albeit warmer then near Frank Miller time than it had been when I arrived on campus. Nonetheless, one of the thoughts that surfaced was that this was about the time during my undergraduate days that I would begin the process of buying a new pair of shoes.

In those days, my hush puppies wore out from one of two causes. Either the soles eroded, and the shoe repair gurus did not know how to renew them then, or drops of chemical solutions, mostly acidic, would burn little holes near the toes that would eventually work through the leather. As my standing became more senior over the years, the mode gradually shifted from the former to the latter so that by the time I was a junior, and about this time of the year, usually after thanksgiving holiday, I would begin to feel a bit of breeze on the toes of one or both feet and know that during the christmas holiday I would have to go purchase a new pair. Not that these shoes are thin, either on top or bottom. Much has been learned about soles and I deal little with strong acids and bases these days, more with fountain pen ink and paper and computers. But the thought was there, the memory of good days past.

The other thought that came had to do with foodstuffs. During my first two years at the campus of the Black Warrior I resided in dorm and had a meals contract, wither 20 or 14 meals per week, running Monday breakfast through either Sunday or Friday lunch. Once I moved off to an apartment off campus, that ceased and food was less structured. Nonetheless, I recall the nature of that food: mostly unappealing, and definitely unspiced. There were exceptions but they were few. Such is the nature of institutional food.

This memory resurfaced when I ate in the hotel on campus. This is a nice facility well cared for (superficially) with pleasant staff. Unfortunately it operates the heating and air conditioning as if it were a dormitory so unexpected cold or heat waves must be endured rather than abided with either shivering or perspiration. The other institutional aspect of the hostelry was its food. Definitely dorm food, somewhere between insipid and abysmal. In fact, the coffee on this trip was that way regardless of where I had it. I suppose I am spoiled by Rooster’s Coffee Barn.

Anyway, I did find something to be thankful for which is a boon given the season.

MultiTool

As a younger man I was a devotee of the action television program “McGyver”. One of the thematic cornerstones of this program was that the protagonist would haul out his Swiss Army knife, one of the simpler ones, and perform some necessary task to accomplish a technological nexus. This was one of the less believable metaphors of the program, albeit relatively easily suspended, because of my fundamental mistrust of multiple purpose tools.

Back when Ubuntu 9.10 emerged earlier I first tried to install it on my Itty Bitty Lap Top (netbook for the bogs) and it malfunctioned mid way through leaving me with a piece of fragile matter but no longer a tool. Reinstalling Ubuntu 9.04 was a relative snap with none of the machinations I had to go through originally with adding Ubuntu and by now I was more than willing to dispense with the wasted space on the hard drive that was SLED. Admittedly I did lose a bit off the box but nothing of abiding value.

What I did not get to do was reinstall all the pieces of software I needed to make use of the box, partly because of other demands and partly from inadequate memory. This was not worrisome since I knew I could install later when I realized the want.

Since I had uncertainty on time and connection on my immediately concluded boondoggle to the campus of the Black Warrior, I took the IBLT along in lieu of three times the volume and mass of a full up laptop. My uncertainties about connection and time proved to be accurate once I could collapse the wave function. The hotel I was using had a relatively whacked wireless network that required one to log on using a browser. The folks who put the system together made the usual brain dead assumption that everyone who would use it was a MegaHard serf and sure enough the system choked a couple of times with Linux alienation. Luckily the adaptations were within my limited IT capabilities since I knew that hotel staff are worse than bogs when it comes to matters computer, although I will give them points for being pleasant in expressing their ignorance and disinterest.

More accurate was my projections of time and so I was largely limited to evenings, in lieu of the intellectually banal wasteland that is American television, and mornings during the interval when the early riser mutation got me out of bed and when the late riser normals (?) actually were conscious.

Having bored with the usual snivelous complaints, I will get to the meat. I repeated found I needed something in the way of a client to do various things. And all I had to do in most cases was install that client from one of the standard repositories; in a few cases I had to add a repository. The delays had a small but not oppressive impact on work rhythm but that was all. Driving back yesterday it occurred, I think just past Trussville where FD SCP and I had stopped to ingest mass, how different this had been than if I was using MegaHard Windows. What repositories? Clients could be gotten online but only with detailed transactions, lengthy inefficient downloads (built into Windows) and problematic idiosyncratic installs. Definitely major speed bumps if not actual barricades.

Epiphany repeated. Wars are won by the forces you have at the right time and place, not hordes over yonder tomorrow. The same holds for computers.

On Hallowed (?) Ground

Wonderful day yesterday, both exhausting and exhilarating. S tarted the day driving across the campus of the Black Warrior to the new chemistry facility. Its entrance is a stately three story rotunda lacking only a proper statue of its benefactor and namesake, probably something on the order of that Romanesque statue of George Washington that resides in the Smithsonian, properly sidelined from impressionable children and like minded bogs except standing since the rotunda is a bit skinny to give the proper celestial majesty. Certainly the brow of the benefactor is suited to a laurel wreath.

But as is often the case with the Potempkinish intentions of humans, especially politicians, the real impressiveness is inside, the facilities and the temper of the place. It is obvious where the gilded dreams of immortality have succumbed to the realities of teaching and doing chemistry and these spots shine trough the tawdry gilt like something ethereal. The academics who strive here have good heads for both, the labs functional and practical, the curriculum constructive and strong, much more than I have seen at other colleges. Despite its appearance as a party schul there is metal underneath.

Frm there by a wonderful walk whose path inclosed the old quadrange and in a day much more temperate than the near lower phase point of dihydrogen oxide of my arrival on campus, to the stately central library, the base of the new quadrange. There a full two hours and more of interaction with graduate students on the informational temperaments and behaviors of scienctists and engineers. Too few questions but the students of today seem to lack both the interest and the chutzpah of my time. Or perhaps it is that library science students are just more polite?

Then I was free to play tourist. Off first to the site of the old observatory and muse amidst the bustle of the pangs of war and the goodness of humans. None of this will get the mirror back but that would be a vindication somehow. Still, the overbuilt Topsyesque tenor of the present campus bitterly reminds that its discovery is even less probably.

Next, back along my path to pace what was science row when I was an undergraduate. The buildings seemed little changed without but within was another matter. Lloyd, the old chemistry building is being transgendered into classrooms and that work is still apace. I could glimpse my senior year research area through a basement window after withstanding challenge of presence from one of the infamous Quad squirrels. Surviving this challenge with a sob story of nostalgia I was permitted to gaze through the window – gather the photons emerging from that room via the window – and see that at some point since my departure 40 years ago the room had been finished and painted a far cry from the irregular concrete floor and bare cinder block walls of my day. This had been my oasis between classes my senior year, a place to do some studying but mostly working on the content and expression of my senior research thesis. Poor quarters even then but in many of the ways that count better quarters than any office since.

Next, Galilee Hall, the seat of physics here on the campus, now far removed from the other components of science as the chemistry and biology and maths have moved over the years. The interior is much changed. Blackboards and arm desks alike are long gone and the paint scheme is somehow oppressive. But the people inside radiate the thoughts and demeanor of physicists and the air has the aroma of physics, more heady than frankensense or myrhh. Seeing this I can now leave content. Despite the distressing ministrations of administration, the depravity of athletics, and the hedonism of rednecks, there is still a core of value on this campus vindicating all the other evil and waste.

nostalgia, science, management, humans

On Site

No wonder they haven found the mirror! Almost all the campus is either covered with brick or asphalt. The only green is in the sidealk cracks or on the scared ground!

Also unprepared for the disparity of coeds – the ones at the campus of the Boneyard tell me that Ugg boots are passe while all the ones here are either wearing boots or four inch heeled opera pumps. Glad Iḿ not a student. Life was bad enough forty years ago.

And the only buildings that are as I remember are the ones with historical markers next them.

The Path of Croxton

Blogging is a bit slack, I know. Yesterday I had rather a bit of running about so that today FD SCP and I can motor down to the campus of the Black Warrior. I have an invited appearance to enlighten graduate students. Fear that this will be more of a mouse-in-a-maze ( not I’itoi [Link]) thing rather than a wellspring of knowledge thing. Ah well, I have been accused of being extinguished many times, distinguished seldom.

Since this is in the nature of a road raid rather than a persisting campaign IT resources are going to be light on my side and unknown connectivity on the other. Some campuses have enough WiFi that hair straightener is outsold by Brylcream and Wildroot while others are as vacant of etheric opportunity as Greater Metropolitan Arab. Won’t know where in the range the campus falls until I actully stick my toe (metaphorically) in the Black Warrior. Also I will be vacating promptly after the anticonfabulation so not only will blogging be limitedbut I probably won’t even have much time to concentrate on the improtant question that haunts every nerd whenever they visit the campus, namely – where is the mirror?

Also, in addition to having to return to observe dinosaur devourment day early, a result of family entropy in action – once the third generation attains adulthood and strats producing another generation the number of opposing states, a form of entropy, has a calendar wrecking effect – I also want to be well out of cintral Alibam before the arrival of any hydrophobic fanatics (yes, that likely is redundant) of Alibam football. Although it would be enjoyable as sort of an academic Boxing day extravaganza. (Although I have to admit I have no idea whether such is scheduled. Not one of the things I give much attention span to since Italian ham sandwiches are unavailable and off the diet.)

academia, humans, peversion

My Best, Your Worst

The WIRED folks have put out an article [Link] entitled “Best Sci-Fi Flicks of the ’60s, ’70s, According to You”, which is fairly descriptive. About all it really seems to do is illustrate how absolutely WRONG surveys can be. The movies cited are:

1. La Jetée (1962) Missed this one somehow. No comment.
2. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) Cute. Not, most definitely, not science fiction. Just a Saturday morning trap for kids.
3. Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) That this one made the list is mediocrely heartening. Mars (Ares) movies are as a rule, disappointing. Movies about Mars invading Tellus are not. So how did that horrible Gene Barry shirred stercus version of The War of The Worlds not get included?
4. Quatermass and the Pit (1967) This may actually be the high point of the list. Lousy special effects but good story, good acting, all the rest. Shows you how shallow and vapid Hollywood really is.
5. The President’s Analyst (1967) Sorry, doesn’t pass the so-what test, Definitely not science fiction.
6. Barbarella What the French consider Science Fiction? Sorry. This one is famous mostly because of peeks at Jane Fonda’s anatomy. The worst part is that this movie gave her the idea she can impose her ideas on humanity.
   
7. Colossus: The Forbin Project(1970) The book was passable but Hollywood pretty well took the good out in making the movie and left the bad. Marc Anthony would have something to say at the funeral.
8. A Clockwork Orange Another one that had a book following but was a dismal failure as a movie. Very dismal, very failure.
9. The Andromeda Strain(1971) Mediocre story told by a medicore hack author in a medicore book. The movie was actually an improvement but even that doesn’t make it worthwhile.
10. The Omega Man (1971) The perfect example of taking a fair story and making it into a bad, boring, vapid movie. And the mistake has been repeated!
11. THX 1138 (1971) This may be the highlight of the list from a science fiction standpoint. Of course it was a failure because the bogs and many of the geeks just didn’t get it. So much for humans being wise.
12. Night of the Lepus(1972) The only thing noteworthy about this movie is that they actually got talented people to act in it. This is the worst kind of bad; it isn’t even bad in a funny wy like The Black Hole.
13. Westworld (1973) Neither science fiction nor particularly entertaining. Dream Park can probably be the phoenix that arose from these ashes. Makes me want to sob that Yul Brinner actually stooped to crawl on his stomach and made this thing.
14. La Planète Sauvage (The Fantastic Planet) (1973) Ah! The thrill of a French cartoon science fiction movie. The closest comparison would be Jerry Lewis doing Othello. Save your minutes of lifespan and go see the original Duck Dodgers cartoon. Much better!
15. Sleeper (1973) This one validates the old saw ‘Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.’ Makes you wonder how Woddy allen has evaded stoning for so long. Science Fiction this is not; go read When The Sleeper Wakes.
16. Dark Star (1974) Some how I missed this one, or it was so unmemorable that it occupies no neurons.
17. Flesh Gordon (1974) Modern big production porn. Gotta have a crazy locale or it isn’t believable, not that it is believable by anyone other that endocrine ridden young men. The number of women who have seen this and not collapsed in laughter is enumerable on one hand.
18. Killdozer(1975) This is not science fiction. Rather, it’s what the SyFy channel is all about. Mind trash.
19. The Stepford Wives(1975) Another one that was bad to start with and every remake has also been bad. Asimov would turn in his grave.
20. Death Race 2000(1975) This one falls in the bad = funny catagory. Definitely goes with the Santa Claus movie; probably attended by the same little boys just a bit older and looking for blood and mammaries.

from which we may see that what is attention gathering is less what is on the list than what is not on the list. We do have to face the fact that almost everything that comes out of Hollywood (or its imitators) is not science fiction even when it comes from a science fiction story or book. And almost everything that has come out as science fiction has been bad or worse. We have to acknowledge that the two genres do not mesh well. You can have good science fiction or good movie but seldom both and generally the cmpromise shows.

Still little to indicate that Forbidden Planet may not have been the best science fiction movie made, at least in this time frame.

Monochromeness

Yesterday I ran across an article that both encouraged and distressed me. Seems that there are 28K people in the English Dominion that still watch monochrome television. [Link]

The encouraging part is that number of people who are so underwhelmed by what is shown on television that they cling to what is now not even thought of as a antiquated technological capability.

The distressing component is a bit more complicated. The way they measure this is not by conducting a survey. The English, with their long tradition of tyranny, license the use of televisions. I am told this type of oversight is common in Europe. So much for greater attention to human freedoms!

What is also distressing is that one cannot infer a negative from this. That is, the number of people who do not have access to a television because they reject the corporate mind parasite is unknown. The mental health of the populace is not of interest; the gathering of tax – by whatever name – revenue is. So this gives us no insight into how many people lack television because they choose to and those who lack the money to indulge a habit.

Of course, this does not address the relative quality of television content in England compared to that in the Yankee republic. Certainly it must in several ways be superior in that it lacks all manner of Yankee athletic games that have the intellectual content of leeches. Although from what I have seen of not-Amerikan football I cannot advance that that is any better. And at least these games have the quality of being less artificial than the bulk of Amerikan programming including infoporn, ‘news’, and ‘reality’ streams.

Of course, the Scots have another advantage here. They have a shorter logistics distance to whisky which is sovereign in making even television programming endurable.

Trencher Trash Talk

One of the things I have been mulling this week arises from a rather under-discussed bit on the Guardian Science podcast. It seems the English government climate tzar, Lord Stern, has announced that it is necessary for humanity to become vegetarians to ’save the planet’. [Link] I almost missed this on the podcast; there was little discussion as if the statement was accepted with all the adulation demanded by a Führer.

I suspect that was part of why I chose to mull the matter a bit rather than rushing home to check the actuality of the statement (did that!) and respond (waited until now!) Not that the pronouncement was any surprise. It has been telegraphed for some time by all the grrr brrr about methane as a greenhouse gas and bovine digestion. That may have escaped the boggish fraction of the Yankee republic inasmuch as the media buried the matter under tons of twelve-year-old-girl hand wringing over the inhumane [1] methods used in the slaughter of meat animals. Not a useless approach, but one of no substantive effect as demonstrated by the proliferation of fast food emporia all of whom make their profits largely on humans purchasing heat treated animal bits. Humans are very good at excluding discomfortable things from their consciousness. It was done by the people living around Auschwitz, it is done by the people who visit McDougals, BurgerAutark, and their ilk.

It happens that I have been reading Richard Wangram’s Catching Fire, a book that presents the idea that we are human – intelligent – because we eat cooked food. If we get past the distractions that the author is an academic at the other shul on the Charles, the one where they train the nation’s secret masters, and it is written for bogs and hence over-dramatic and poorly presented, the thesis has good credibility. The only real sticking point in it is the lack of evidence that modern man is still, in the main, intelligent. Indeed, we may posit that in a more demonstrable positive sense that there is ample evidence that modern man is, in the main, not intelligent. Everyday behavior, especially in automobiles and in association with electronic appliances such as cellular phones, clearly demonstrates this absence. Forget the meek, the stupid have already inherited the planet, which probably prompts the English tyrant’s pronouncement.

I am however reminded that it is almost always when one of the ruling tyrants does something stupid that the English come to rationality and discorporate the individual, or equivalently vacate them from the island. Americans, on the other hand, come to rationality when the English do something stupid to us. Example: 200+ years ago they were escorted out of the country with bayonet, cannon, and a bit of rational glee. It has been a long time since they have provoked us so and hence great wonder that we coped with all manner of other tyrants and autarks.

For myself, courtesy of a heart attack and a properly zealous cardiologist, I am a semitarian (which I am led to understand Lord Stern is as well, this is not a convincing argument) and hence eat meat much less often than my fellow Amerikans. That does not mean I would gladly become a vegetarian, or more properly, given the autark’s pronouncement, a vegan, since all animal products would be curtailed.[2] Much as I enjoy occasionally vegetable protein it is harder to digest and less satisfying than animal. More important, I am not ready to surrender my intelligence, nor should we as a species.

The answer is that we have resorted to repeatedly. Our intelligence must be bent to fixing or at least surviving global climate change, not denying that intelligence.

[1]  This raises the intriguing question of whether there is anything wrong with being ‘inhumane’ towards animals that are not humans? Quite apart from the question of how consistently or even frequently humans are humane to other humans, there is question of how one can be expected to be humane to non-humans and even whether such behavior is proper? But then, as my mother has told me all of my life, I read too much science fiction and that has warped me.
[2]  One shudders at how the elite of the planet, actual and self-deluded, would be able to haught without leather for clothes or shoes. I would dearly miss my own shoes and belt. Nylon is however, acceptable for a wallet. But having caved in on this, plastics will be next. Can nudity be far behind as a mandate?

government, tyranny, diet, climate, humans

Ex Oram Fatuus

Thursday is my day to listen to Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s “In Out Time” and Jesse Brown’s “Search Engine” at gym. I save the best for last. The IOT ‘cast dealt with the Anabaptists and the Siege of Münster. The SE ‘cast dealt with the incarceration of the Iranian ‘Blogfather’ and the inaction of the Canadian government. The commonality here is rather obviously the tyranny of organized religion.

In and around this I was watching Reynard News on the Electromagnetic Imager with part of my attention span. I find that I can’t keep my balance on exercise machines, even recumbent bicycles, if I close my eyes, so I have to look at something and since the electromagnetic images are (somewhat) dynamic all saccades converge on them.

The selection of Reynard is like American politics, the least bad of all no good alternatives. In this case my other choices are a sports network (amazing the intellectual similarity to soap operas but so vapid of content variation as to decay into boredom for anyone literate, calculate, or computerate in about a hundred seconds,) and infoporn (overly long advertisements disguised as advice and counseling for penile, mammary, piliary, or income enhancement, or adipose or acne reduction, all infantile, and fantastical.) So at least Reynard News offers a more abundant source of humor.

From this my scanning revealed several things:

• If Pat Robinson says something is bad, is this a necessary and sufficient condition that the thing is actually good, or just a very high probability (P > 0.9) that it is?
• The opinions of the consumerate are more inaccurate the more overwhelming they are. This leads to the question of whether human stupidity is an example of a Bose-Einstein condensate? Which in turn leads to the question of wether it is humans or just their mental processes that obey Bose-Einstein statistics?
• My old model for judging the merits of movies also applies to the media, especially the radicalized media like Reynard. If TIME magazine gave a movie zero or four stars it was a movie worth watching, 1-3 stars and it was a dog dead for weeks. The same now develops as holding for television journalism. If something is reported excellent or abysmal, it is good. If in between these states, it is bad.
• We spend a lot of attention on pretense these days. People who have false credentials cited on their resumes, people who claim to have a degree never awarded from a shul never attended in a discipline never studied. It seems that the greatest pretenders of all are journalisms/mediasts and because of this they are blind to anyone else who is pretending to be something or someone. The case in point is the recent shootist at Ft. Hood.

humans, media, journalism, religion

11/11

Today is Armistice Day, also known as Remembrance Day and Veterans Day. Regardless of what we call it the purpose of the day is for us to recall and rejoice those of our species of military service.

Clausewitz tells us (approximately) that “War is a continuation of policy by other means.” What that means, separated from its nineteenth century political correctness is that when organizations (governments in the main) have enormously vertically copulated and exhausted all reasonable alternatives those of the military service remain to rescue the organization from its own terminal stupidity.

Organizations, regardless of their purpose, have scant concern for their members except to make minimal assurances that the members do not negate the organization. Otherwise, organizations are perfectly happy to proceed in a fashion that has scant regard for the well being of their members. Nonetheless, organizations while survival focused still get themselves in situations of demise and it is in those circumstances that those who serve militarily must act, not so much to preserve the organization as to prevent harm to their fellow members.

Organizations are a necessary evil; soldiers, sailors, and airmen are a needful good. Remember that this day and forget it not tomorrow.

organization, government, military, humans