Archive for February, 2025
Books that go bump in the night
Posted by dsbdavis in Uncategorized on February 26, 2025
[If you’ve been stapled to this rumination list long enough you may already have read what follows. I know it or its near-twin ran at some point, but given my inherent inability to keep things in neat order, I have no idea when.
[But why run it now – again – anyway? Because over the past week I’ve been accumulating notes on the current political situation, and if I didn’t quickly come up with a diversion, you and I would be disgraced by my unloading them here.
[Much better to celebrate frivolity and ancient personal history than yet another paean to our national putrescent decay. This way you can laugh up your sleeve, rather than puke therein]
* * * *
I was afraid I’d made a mistake a couple years back.
I’d ordered a copy of Cursed Be the Treasure, a 1920’s novel by H.B. Drake. As I reviewed it from memory on Goodreads (likely the book’s only review in the past 100 years):
“This is something I read as a teen and that has stayed with me forever. Probably I should never read it again, because, as a jaded old man, I could only be disappointed. But at the time it hit me like a ton of bricks. What happens to the young protagonist, his father and his friend could make a statue weep. Wonderfully descriptive and evocative.”
My intention in buying a new-old copy was to pry open the cover, fondle it a bit, but never, ever read it again, to avoid the certain sad, ludicrous letdown.
Yet, of course, I did. You have to know. And, god be good to bibliophiles, it was every bit as wonderful as I’d remembered it: engrossing, convoluted, heartbreaking, redemptive.
Our family had an odd collection of kids’ and kid-inflected reading material, mostly British, because my mother was mired in a false sense of inherited aristocracy from her (mostly crazy) Canadian relatives. In prime living room shelving, we had:
- a fairly complete set of Kipling that made me want to spend at least a decade in India
- a shelfload of G.A. Henty, Canadian-based historical fiction that I never cracked as a kid; I read one years later and was bored near comatose
- several volumes of E. W. Hornung’s tales of master-thief “Raffles”; him too I read only recently – free on Kindle, thank god. What godawful crap
To prime the intellects of my two older brothers, my mother installed both the Compton’s youth encyclopedia and the14th edition of the adult Britannica in the late 1920s. They still recline at my elder brother Rod’s home – now my daughter Morgan’s – a decade and a half after his death.
But my greatest reading joy came from works like the Drake and the unlikely-to-the-point-of-ears-falling-off-absurdity Old Nursery Rhymes Dug up at the Pyramids. (This thin but broad-format hardcover, bound in burlap, featured one corner chewed off by rats – my mother’s childhood rats, not mine.) Each nursery rhyme presented a traditional Mother Goose stanza followed by four new verses illustrated with midnight-blue pseudo-Egyptian relief drawings.
As an adult, I didn’t remember a thing about the content of those verses. The book itself was what fascinated – the feel of it, the rat-nibbled corner, the sense that, even at the age of ten, I knew it was truly weird.
Last time I looked online, I could have picked up a copy for around $35, “with one corner damaged” – wait, it couldn’t, couldn’t possibly be…. I’ve since downloaded a digital copy. Interesting, and still damned weird, but digital burlap doesn’t quite meet the test.
From her own youth, my mother had kept six or eight volumes of Playbox and Chatterbox annuals, year-end supplements or recapitulations of British children’s magazines from the early 20th century. Occasionally these float around the online stratosphere, wonderful silly adventures of anthropomorphic animals like Tim the Tiger, in story or comic-strip episodes. The strips sported a very different feel from American comics, leaving me with a slightly uncomfortable sense of otherness, as though I’d entered a room that smelled both heavy and quaint.
Mom’s anglophilia led to our continuing subscription to Punch, the finest adult satirical magazine ever produced (well, until Paul Krassner’s The Realist); it was going strong into the 1950s after 100 years.
Long before Volkswagen and Geico, the ads in Punch had a raucous yet self-deprecating sense of humor, such as “Schweppervescence lasts the whole drink through,” at a time when Schweppes, for Americans, was a mysterious, almost magical liquid imbibed 3,000 miles to the east.
Marvelous cartoons and tiny squibs attached themselves to the ends of articles, usually absurd bumbelations gleaned from newspapers and other magazines, with telling responses added by the editors. (They were the forerunners of the short ruminative blats I drop in here when high on Yukon Jack.)
My brothers had passed down to me Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat and Other Tales, a 1932 edition with Art Deco typography and drawings by Keith Ward, a blessed marriage of text and illustration (the latter much livelier than Lear’s own cramped pictography).
I loved that book. Our copy returned to me a few years back with the cover and several pages missing or mangled. When I checked for a replacement, it would have taken 50 dollars to retrieve a complete copy. Now I can find no listing for it. But at the time, I had more pressing needs for the 50 dollars).
Back to Cursed Be theTreasure: I will probably read it yet again, because the plot turned out to be far more complicated and intertwined than I realized at the first go-though, especially the mutual betrayal of the boy’s dead father and the man who saved the boy’s life
Is all this just nostalgia realized? Could be, though I think it’s more my rejoicing in a reawakened sense of wonder. In part, the sense of wondering what gets me into thinking about such things.
* * * *
Our current PA state representative is one Joe Hamm. Our previous rep was Tina Pickett. Our friend Karen, in Tioga County, is represented by Clint Owlett.
Owlettt, Pickett and Hamm – a great name for a law firm, but a godawful sandwich.
* * * *
Can anyone tell me the principal vice of the vice principal?
Wily dimbulbs, old fogies, and puzzled AIs
Posted by dsbdavis in Uncategorized on February 20, 2025
If disinformation is bad, datinformation must be good.
* * *
I like to separate the “wily” from the “intelligent.” Predators are wily, but they’re working on instinct, not smarts. beloved President Stump is wily, yes, but with no intelligence behind it; he parrots back what his cheering crowds mouth.
That’s dangerous in itself, but there’s a difference between his malevolence and that of a a fascist like Hitler, who was definitely smart and truly believed some of his mad ideas. Dump believes in nothing beyond his own skin and has no core values. He cheers America because of what it can do to stoke his ego, draw attention, or make money for him.
He can barely put together a coherent sentence and has been an object failure as a businessman, but he’s been wily enough to garner the support of others as ignorant as himself.
An elemental coward who cancels meetings and interviews because he’s afraid of anyone saying bad things about, or, worse, to him. And since no one in Ukraine votes in our elections, they can all go to hell.
* * *
Much of the rancid ranting online by the far-right comes from the senile crabbiness of old farts like me. One of my major hopes for our country is that my generation will soon die out, the sooner the better.
The election of more women – and women standing up and yelling – are wonderful advances. But I fear the country will have to collapse much further before it can rebound. And it has to learn how to rebound, not drift backwards into a passion for sinkhole periods like the 1950s.
Looking back to and through the ‘60s, when I was in my 20s, and feeling that society might be at last learning the value of inclusion and welcoming, it’s sad to see so many of my contemporaries vote for lunatics, dimbulbs and rabid dogs.
Maybe it will be much the same will happen over time if the Millennials and Generation Z (damn such vile designations for the young) become as self-centered as those of us who’ve now sunk into the mire.
I hope not. For all my basic social dyspepsia, I’d love to see them prove me wrong.
* * *
I haven’t done crossword puzzles in years, but there as a period in my teens when I bumbled through a series of small Penguin puzzle books, back when Penguin was a cheap British paperback publisher, rather than the leading dingle on a hedge-fund corporate book-distribution butt.
The British idea of crosswords back (still?) was intriguingly different from the American, its clues often depending on puns and interwoven meanings, rather than straight-ahead Webster definitions. Recently, I’ve been wondering how AI chatbots would/could handle these.
The one clue and answer that I particularly remember from one Antarctic birdie entry was this:
Clue: twaddle or machine part
Answer: rotor
“Twaddle” in England refers to trash or verbal nonsense, which is also called “rot.” So the answer is a combination of “rotor” and “rot or.” I loved that – and still do.
Now, how much true intelligence does it take to design and unlimber a convoluted verbal problem like that? No doubt a computer could do it within a specific context, but would it, at this stage in programming progress, be able to wangle something this linguistically convoluted on its own, without external direction?
* * *
Dream #19 [lucid?]
I forgot most of the beginning on waking – a criminal or similar activity in West Philly. It involved a lot of driving.
“We” were somehow involved with a drugged out, immobile Black teen and his mother, at the tine peripheral characters. Later, something that happened up north made it necessary to pretend that the teen had been killed and to tell his mother that he was dead.
We traveled back to West Philly, to an area where I always get peculiarly lost in my dreams. I said to somebody, “Don’t go through there, that’s where I always get lost in my dreams, in tiny alleys and through people’s houses and back yards and have to crawl through small spaces.”
I didn’t think I was dreaming, I just didn’t like the association (this is an area that does not exist in reality – akin to Woodland Ave. in the mid 40s, but entirely different).
We ended up back at the rundown houses/apartments where we told the mother her son was dead. She curled in a fetal position against the wall and cried non-stop. I was very upset and thought maybe we should tell her the truth, but it seemed too threatening to us.
Later, she got up and went downstairs. We hear a rapid series of staccato sounds – not gunfire, more like firecrackers. We were sure the mother had done something suicidal. When we looked out the window, the large area in front – looking like foreshortened city blocks with no buildings – was crowded with people, mostly children.
One by one and in small groups, they began to collapse and drop to the ground. They weren’t bleeding but we knew they were dead. We couldn’t understand what kind of weapon the mother had used to kill them and what caused the delayed effect. After awhile, all 30-50 people were dead.
The kicker: We later found that the mother and son were planning a much larger massacre, and that the son was collecting the necessary materials for it. She had been crying not for the loss of her son but because she couldn’t complete her plan.
The latter part was probably inspired by a dream from several years ago of lobotomized children being massacred. I later published that dream as a short story titled “The Children” (also to be unleashed in the collection Farewell My Zombie, coming to Amazon).
Marigold
We met her at the humane shelter outside Ulster in Bradford County. She was about two years old and they’d named her Gidget. What a hell of a thing to do to an innocent dog! We brought her home and quickly renamed her Marigold.
She was probably a whippet mix, skinny and put together like the barely fleshed skeleton of a dog. Linda likes that look. To me, dogs, even mid-sized ones, should be burly and physically assertive.
Marigold was definitely and rightly Linda’s dog. I didn’t cotton to her at first (another of those truly weird expressions), and for the first couple years I didn’t know what to make of her.
But as I walked her every morning, down the trail I’d made through our woods (almost always accompanied by Tigger, the world’s best cat), we developed a slow accommodation.
About four years in, she showed a lump on her left hind leg. I didn’t pay that much attention at first; Linda was a lot more concerned, Last year we took her in to the vet’s, they biopsied, and yes – cancer. During the operation, they found more on her abdomen: two different forms of cancer, one a type that always recurs. So, the outlook was, keep an eye on her, but know that her time was limited.
Enough about her illness.
This is really about Marigold the person and what she taught me, what I learned from her this year, and how I ended up seeing her as one of the finest people of any species I’ve known.
As she brew gimpier, and the morning walks more problematic, I spent more time with her and came to realize that she was weirdly empathic. She knew when my spirits were down, often before I did, and was there to comfort me while I was trying to comfort her. I came to like her more, then like her a whole hell of a lot, then love her.
This week, when she had almost stopped eating, we took her back to the vet for stronger pain and appetite pills, but nada – she moved slower, was more uncomfortable, uninterested even in roast chicken, her favorite.
So yesterday we made the choice that she couldn’t. She’s gone, and I’m more stricken that I thought could be possible. The good side, for me, is that I did find out who she was and that I let her see it. And I know she did. She as much as told me. Thank you, Marigold, from the bottom of my so often constricted heart.
I wonder what I’m supposed to do with grief? All the well-wishers tell us it’s for healing or some other form of resolution. I would not include it in my design for a universe.
So now I need to concentrate on the wonders I have left to love. There’s Tigger, who, as I continually repeat, is the best cat in the world. There’s Linda, who is simply beyond belief, beyond good luck or reason, beyond anyone or any blessing I could have imagined.
Think of this as a strange Valentine thanks to Linda, to Tigger, and, in the depths of my feeling, to Marigold, who taught an old man a lesson he should have learned long ago.
* * * *
All mapmakers must now relabel the salt water dish below our country the Gulf of Asinine Dispute.
And celebrate the resurgence of Mt. McKickme, renamed to its original, indigenous name of Denali, then re-renamed for an American president who loved tariffs.
And I personally suggest that the Oval Office now be referred to as the Anal Office.
* * * *
At Amazon, Jeff Bezos pretty much invented online shopping as we now know it by putting customer satisfaction first in every consideration. Later, he bought the Washington Post and did the exact opposite, making decisions that pissed off his subscribers, who are leaving in droves.
Yet he has been consistent in his treatment of his workers. At Amazon, they were and are a form of poorly maintained machine. And at the Post, he has gone to lengths to piss off his leading workers, the reporters.
* * * *
I plan to create a computer program for the rapid development and distribution of humor. It will be called the Giddyapp.
* * * *
A tech-designed online site upgrade, when not tested by actual users, is like hiring a butler who deals ideally with the family but has no concept how to greet someone who comes to the door.
Various whats
What’s worth talking about these days? What makes sense, what’s a waste of time, what can make a difference or have an effect, what constitutes indifference or actively hiding from the situation?
Everybody has an opinion, but opinions don’t make change.
I have no answers and wouldn’t want to pretend to. We’re far enough up shit’s creek to spot its source, but I don’t see a paddle handy at the moment. Hope that I do some day.
* * * *
I may have mentioned our good luck in running across a couple of remarkable music programs online from the radio station KDHX in St. Louis – especially “Music from the Hills,” hosted by John Uhlemann on Sundays, 5-7 p.m. E.T., covering music from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Wonderful stuff and brilliant commentary by John, he has visited just about every country whose music he presents.
Well, last week I tuned in and the program wasn’t there. Basically, the whole station wasn’t there, just feeding through crap pop from, I suppose, there archives, with no hosting.
With some effort we tracked down the problem, which is that the station’s CEO and board had fired all the volunteer DJs and claim not the have the funds to staff the production end.
The uproar form the fans has been huge, and the incompetence of those “in charge” remarkable, even for these days. We’re hoping that something sane is figured out soon.
This reminds me of what happened to WXPN, the UPenn station, in I think the late ’80s or early ’90s. /formerly student run, at that point it had been taken over by former students and have perhaps the most free form programming I’ve ever run across, where the DJs played whatever the hell they wanted at the moment, so you might [and I did] hear Beethoven followed by The Residents. But they got in a tangle with the FCC for letting little kids say obscene words on-air through the phone line. Penn’s response was to have the station taken over by an outside outfit that trashed the whole idea of what the station had been about – making it more popular, as far as number of listeners went – and introducing a major afternoon show of singer/songwriters [still running] that I found about as entertaining as a toothache.
By the sheer accident of whatever happened to be playing at the moment, I learned a hell of a lot from the old XPN, nothing much since, except that Johnny Meister still runs the Blues Show every Saturday evening, as he has for the past 40+ years.
One song, “Numberless are the sands on the seashore,” would pop up at odd times, taken form a collection called The Real Bahamas. As a result, I bought the collection, which decades later someone called “the greatest album ever made.” That’s a bit expansive, but I just might agree. And “Numberless are the sands on the seashore” is still may favorite track, unlike quite anything else, complex construction of interweaving spoken and sung religious chanting, as beautiful as a wildflower bouquet where you can’t identify any single flower.
As this week’s gift I’d hoped to upload the cut of ‘Numberless,” but good old WordPress doesn’t allow it. Well, nobody reads this anyway.
* * *
Just wondering: Is there bird flu over the cuckoo’s nest?
* * * *
Coming soon to Amazon, a short-story collection called Farewell My Zombie, published by folks including Paradox Pollack and his brother Jackrabbit, both fellow ruminators on this list, along with a few of their friends whom I don’t know personally.
The collection includes two of my stories, which I was delighted to have them accept, also ones by Paradox, Jackrabbit and others in the collective. I’ll say more when I get the official release date.
* * * *
Some terms and their unlikely companions:
- I can act in an uncouth way, but I can no longer behave with couth, which once meant good manners but sounds like an unpalatable substance that’s fallen off the dinner table.
- If I am ruthless, I am acting without ruth, a former term for compassion. But shouldn’t compassion be called gladys?
- On a church organ I can hear a trumpet voluntary, but I have never heard a deliberate trumpet involuntary.
- I have been taken aback, but never taken afront – though I have been affronted.
* * * *
Just read that David Hogg – spokesperson for gun control and survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida – has been elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.
While our creaky, anachronistic two-party system is much to blame for the rancid descent into political absurdity in the US, we’re stuck with it for the near future. The Dems haven’t been able to figure how to fight against the current chaos, but more folks like Hogg could help pull in young voters and show what real progress might look like.
As for the two-party system: There is no one perfect way for “the other side” to respond, because people’s takes on politics, as in other human areas, are not simple reflections in a mirror held by the opposition. They are individual and scattered to the winds. “Independents” can’t even vote in PA primaries.
OK, no more political crap here. The rest gets flushed into our leach field.
* * * *
If you have any old car tires to dispose of, send them to France. I understand that they have issued a call for tires to burn at their eternal street protests.
* * *
There’s been talk of late of using lucid dreams – those in which we’re aware of being in a dream – to perform tasks while we sleep.
What a ghastly idea. Don’t we perform enough useless tasks while awake? Leave our dreams he hell alone.
AI, aye or nay?
I love it when I come up with a half-assed idea that veers off in a different direction, gallops for awhile, then races back close to where it started.
I’d thought I’d mumble here about AI for awhile. I figured maybe I could be slightly more coherent that most of what I’ve read. (Unlikely, but worth the try.)
So I typed up a few quick notes. Then I went back and expanded on them because I realized gibberish like “check previous” or “didn’t I?” weren’t completely self-explanatory.
But I did actually “check (through) previous” rumins and found that most of the ideas I’d jotted down now I’d already covered a couple months back.
What next?
Take time off and read something that has nothing to do with what I had in mind.
A couple weeks ago I downloaded Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy from the Gutenberg Project. Considering my usual snarls about philosophy in general, you may wonder why I did so.
My main problem with philosophy is that I find 95% of it either boring or bullshit, often both – and yes, that does include Plato. But I’m a fan of Russell and William James, who both seem to be talking about reality and trying to provide lucid explanations of their subject.
Russell has an often sneaky, sometimes overt, humor, and he talks in terms that a standard-issue human being might use in conversation with another standard-issue human being. He tries to explain, not just assemble impenetrable categories into which he can bundle outlandish conjectures.
So OK, I moved on to Bertie: No AI to worry about here, just a short romp explaining how philosophy works… in 1912.
About a third of the way through, it occurred to me that creating philosophy is much like writing fiction: You come up with a basic broad idea, then you establish a plotline filled with supporting incidents – categories in the case of philosophy – to carry you through to a satisfying ending.
A bit further on, when I thought I’d become safely diverted from my annoying flap of an article, Russell got into the problem of how we can prove that an object – or any form of “matter” – actually exists, independent of our mental experience of it. That is: Can we conclusively say that anything outside our self’s perception is real, when it’s conceivable that the entire universe could be a bad movie playing inside our one and only head?
At that point, bingo! It had me thinking that, just possibly, AI – at work in the real, not the philosophical world – might be able to solve a seemingly impossible conundrum that has bugged me for years.
Which is this: How do I know that a color as perceived by someone else corresponds to the color of the same name that I see? It’s entirely possible, even likely, that what you call “red,” if perceived by me exactly as you see it, might be what I call “blue.” We would agree that objects that we both call “red” have the same color, while each each of us is experiencing that color uniquely.
But, of course, with no possibility of proving that conjecture, one way or the other, because you can’t place another’s internal perception inside your own head.
Or can you?
It’s been only in the last half century that we’ve begun to directly study the “mind,” as opposed to the physical collection of neurons and other squishy folderol flopping around inside our skulls. Books on consciousness and the self are popping up all over the place these days, because we now have the beginnings of a handle on what those neurons and their buddies do to form a linked, coordinated system that produces “experience.” We’re even starting to move toward defining what that experience might be – not just what it does, in other words, but what it is.
This progress is a product of the overall blistering ramp-up taking place in all areas of science, not just biology. And within the study of life, as within the study of, say, particle psychics, much of this advance depends on the explosion in computational ability, which is on schedule to become unimaginably wider and faster once quantum computers reach their potential.
All of this has led, over tine, to the realization of AI, no matter how you define the term “artificial intelligence” – and believe me, that AI acronym covers as many variables as those unending food spreads in a Korean video series. Basically, AI is anything that a fine-tuned, programmable machine can perform as well as or better than the average human.
It’s the “better than” that has freaked out the ever-wary. But let’s put that part aside for the moment. Here’s the question that’s been sitting inside me for decades: If a near-unlimited computational machine could identify, read and duplicate every input that goes to creating an individual’s perception, couldn’t this machine then project that perception accurately into the mind of another, after modifying the input to meet the different range of inputs specific to the receiving individual?
And if so, could not your perception of “red” be duplicated in my mind for comparison with my perception of red?
This outline is ridiculously simplistic, and nothing close to it could be considered possible yet. And there may be other imperceptible limitations – call them “existential” – that would otherwise prevent it. But isn’t the idea of such a transfer, considering today’s rate of progress, at least conceivable?
Yeah, it would be a damned stupid waste of time, money and equipment to perform such an experiment just to make me happy. So, consider it a thought experiment, and since sillyass thoughts can get us in trouble, I won’t go any further with that.
Instead I’ll pick out some other points I may or may not have touched on previously.
How can artificial intelligence be any worse than the human variety? Is there anything, anywhere that we exalted beings, in our chest-beating pride, haven’t managed to fuck up?
With every major technological advance, we alternate between pseudo-religious adulation and atavistic horror, with little attempt at rational examination. So far, AI has gone from “cool-ass whoopee” to “them machine muthafuckas gone kill us,” creating a scrum of conflicting comments that run around our feet like the rats in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.
Much of the negative fixation on AI comes out of our evolutionary dislike of the “other,” whether that other be animal, vegetable or machine.
“Intelligent” machines were initially seen as potential aids to improving life and removing drudgery; now they’re being seen as evil inventions that can eliminate jobs and become our masters.
Similarly, UFOs were thought to be overseen by gentle extraterrestrial saviors in the 1950s; by the ‘70s their major activity was confined to ramming probes up our orifices.
Here’s a more serious area for investigation: Are there only levels of intelligence, or could there be fundamentally different kinds of intelligence?
I’d expect that a higher intelligence would look at the whole picture, shorn of our evolutionary basis, and this could lead to “good” outcomes – such as improved life and less drudgery.
Should the most intelligent life-form be the one in charge? If so, maybe humans are just another waystation.
Anyway, is humanity worth saving if we’re determined to be destructive?
Another funny thing that came up while pondering all this was a simple reversal that wholly changes outlook.
Consider the two words “nuclear” and “unclear.” The reversal of two letters flips their meaning on its head.
“Nuclear” sums up not only atomic annihilation, but a singular, central approach to problem-solving.
“Unclear” suggests that a problem involves a hidden multitude of ramifications to be determined through questioning and experiment.
* * *
Sign off: Got to admit, President Thump’s come up with the cleverest idea yet on how to deal with immigrants: turn the US into a country no one in their right mind would want to enter or live in.
lickhaven 