Author: admin

Today is Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday. For those of you who were wondering, yes, the man is still alive.

Few have had a greater impact on our modern era than Kissinger. The second half of the 20th century would arguably have been very different without his towering political influence.

But his particular brand of realpolitik has not been popular with everyone. It can be argued that political solutions which lead to the deaths of countless innocent people are not ideal.

I think Tom Lehrer said it best, when asked why he had stopped writing satirical political songs: ‘When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died.’

As humans, we are problem solvers. This makes sense, because it’s how we have survived as a species, and pretty much taken over the planet in the process.

But it means that we are not at our best when things are going well. Rather, we are at our best when something is wrong, and we need to fix it.

This is likely why the stories that we tell each other revolve around problems. Nobody wants to hear a story where nothing goes wrong. That’s just boring.

But give us a hero and a problem and a race for a solution, and we’re hooked. To find meaning, we need to be working toward something.

This is our great contradiction: We seek happiness, yet it is not exactly happiness that we seek, but the seeking of happiness.

Today, walking down the street in Greenwich Village, I saw a young man who was channeling the young Bob Dylan. He had the hair, the outfit, the exact walk. He even had the right facial expression.

And in that moment it occurred to me that no matter how much this young man wanted to be Bob Dylan, he was never going to write Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues or Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right or Forever Young or Hard Rain or Blowin’ in the Wind.

You can adapt everything about a person whom you admire, except their genius. That belongs to them alone.

You can tell any story you want, if you tell it with complete conviction.

Sometimes it seems that you just cannot take it.
You’re not feeling social, you don’t want to fake it.
So you order a drink, just for breaking the ice
And everything suddenly seems very nice!
People are friendly, the room has more cheer
You lose inhibitions, you lose all your fear.
But something is nagging in back of your mind
Why are you needing that drink to unwind?
Is there something you’re missing you really should see,
Is that drink that you’re drinking not setting you free?
Then you have an odd thought which will make you forsake it:
Why is there ice, that we all need to break it?

I was wandering through a Costco today, and I noticed that they have every possible variety of large screen flat TV, smartwatch, data tablet, phone (folding or otherwise), audio device, or pretty much any other electronic gadget that you might dream of having in your home. Except VR headsets.

To me, this seems like a strong statement about where things are. As far as the nation’s largest and most comprehensive general purpose retailer is concerned, VR is simply not a thing.

I wonder whether that will change after June 5th.

I wrote a post a little while back in which I talked about actors dancing n a play dancing down the aisles, and contrasted that with one’s experience at the cinema.

Recently I saw a production of Peter Pan, which only reinforces that difference in my mind. As you probably know, at a crucial point in the play, someone turns to the audience and asks them to clap to bring Tinkerbell, the beloved fairy of Neverland, back to life.

To me, this is one of the purest expressions of the difference between live theater and movies. It simply would not make sense to ask a movie audience to do anything to change the course of the movie. That is way outside of the implied contract between filmmakers and film audiences.

As someone pointed out in the comments recently, audiences can take it upon themselves to create their own show, has happens in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But that seems to me to be an entirely different form of community engagement, a connection between audience members yes, but not between performers and audience.

When I’m working on a software project, I notice that much of the effort consists of finding ways for different parts of the project to communicate with one another. Once I’ve got this thing working, and that thing working, I then need to get them to talk to one another.

So much of the time I am actually constructing little translators. It’s kind of like trying to give people an easy way to cross a world that consists of many tiny islands. You end up building lots and lots of bridges.

I guess there are worse things to spend your time on than building bridges of communication. As metaphors go, this one seems pretty life affirming.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. It was arguably the most influential document by a political prisoner in modern times.

In these sobering days when fascism in the U.S. is again on the rise, that letter should be required reading in America’s public schools. For one thing, it would show schoolchildren what a well reasoned political argument truly looks like.

Of course that can’t happen in Florida, where even suggesting such a thing in a classroom can now get you arrested. The last thing a fascist like Ron DeSantis wants is for our future citizens to have the skills or the opportunity to think for themselves.

It’s scary what’s happening in that state. I wonder how long the creepy governor in Tallahassee will wait before he decides to grow a little mustache.

I developed a trick years ago to keep track of which day of the week is which date on the calendar. The trick is to remember which day of the week is a multiple of seven.

Or, equivalently, which day of the week was the last day of the previous month.

For example this month, May 2023, is a Sunday month, since May 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th all fall on a Sunday. From there it is easy to get the exact date of any other day in the month.

For most practical purposes I only need to remember a few months out. So next month will be a Wednesday month, July a Friday month and August a Monday month.

After any given month has passed, I promptly forget about it, and focus on the next few months ahead. It’s a simple trick, but it makes a lot of things easier. And it sure beats needing to look at my phone all the time to check the date.