debate

I didn't watch the debate. (It seems to have been blacked out on our tv anyway, and I would have had to use the computer.) The reasons for not watching it were two: I was too nervous about it, and I didn't want to have to sit through DT ranting.

Instead, I've read and watched commentaries and clips. And that seems to have been enough to convey the gist. DT is so full of himself, so sure he's wonderful, that he figures he can just walk through it against an experienced prosecutor. He can't.

Oregon

The most surprising thing I learned in Oregon is that it's no longer illegal for drivers to pump their own gas there.

US road warriors have long known that two states, Oregon and New Jersey, required attendants to do it, as was the custom everywhere before the first gas crisis of 1973. I suppose it was a combination of a job creation program for gas station attendants and a fear that drivers wouldn't do it right. (Indeed, driving off with the hose still in the tank is an oops known to happen.)

The first time I filled the tank in Oregon on this trip, I didn't know the law had changed: there was still an attendant to do it, a practice I suppose will stick around for a while and gradually fade away. But the second time, there was no attendant, and when I went in to the shop to ask, I was told the law had changed over a year ago. This is the sort of news that should have produced banner headlines in the AAA magazine, but I didn't see anything there.

Here's the rules, though it doesn't seem to fit the discount station I was at, where they told me an attendant doesn't come in until mid-afternoon. This was in Yamhill County, which is one of the more populous counties where stations are required to offer attendant service at all times. But there was no attendant and no signs.

Cascade Moot

It was a whim, of sorts. I spent Saturday in Seattle at Cascade Moot, one of the numerous regional meetings sponsored by Signum University, Corey Olsen's Tolkien-oriented study group, and presented the John Wain paper I'd written for Mythcon. The moot's theme was "The Importance of Secondary and Tertiary Characters," so I retitled it "John Wain: A Tertiary Inkling."

About 35 people, some older but mostly 30s-40s by the look of them, gathered in a ground-floor classroom in what is otherwise mostly a dormitory (though you wouldn't know it from what we saw of it) of the University of Washington, but it wasn't really necessary to be there, because there was also a large Zoom attendance. In fact six of the ten papers were given over Zoom, which is why it was a whim for me to travel this far.

Five of the ten papers, not counting mine, were Tolkienian in topic. Despite some of the presenters confessing nervousness at giving a presentation, they were fine, though more than one presenter pronounced "Aragorn" as "Aragon." The best papers were close readings of the texts of minor characters' appearances, squeezing out what could be fairly deduced about them: a theory that Goldberry is the personification of a yellow water lily; a comparison of three encounters with gatekeepers in LR, each introducing a new culture to the story in what are quite different expressions of the same basic concept. The same was true of some of the non-Tolkien papers: the very little that's said of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but she's been expanded on in pastiches and film adaptations; and the evolution of the concept of a "Scooby gang" and how it differs from an Avengers-like collection of heroes or a hero-and-sidekick situation. Besides Scooby-Doo and Buffy, The Goonies and Stranger Things (neither of which I've seen) were cited as having the distinctive characteristics of a collection of diverse misfits who contribute individual skills to form a protagonist group greater than any of them.

More broadly, we had a firm reading of Eowyn from a woman who understood that her driving force was despair, and who suggested that victory opened the future for her and offered Faramir as a non-military role model, thus leading to her change of heart; and an even firmer reading of absent mothers, mostly in the Silmarillion, and how they're blamed for their children's misdeeds. Somewhat more dubious was a paper on Beregond which ran out of time to address the character's distinct appeal and human qualities after having spent an enormous amount of time on categorical throat-clearing of unnecessarily trying to distinguish primary, secondary, and tertiary characters in LR: why are you obsessed with these fine distinctions? what difference does it make?

The day got off to an awkward start when it turned out the AV setup hadn't been tested beforehand, and what was supposed to be the 15-minute introduction turned into 20 minutes of computer troubleshooting, and we only got back onto schedule when one paper on some minor character in some book I didn't know turned out to be so minor the paper was exceedingly short. But it mostly worked out well, and my own paper, which came last, attracted some interest and a few favorable comments, as well as a number of people now determined to read Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep.

I took the light rail in from the suburbs where I'm staying. Parking at the station was dicey as the lots have been hijacked by people using them as free airport parking for the holiday weekend (there's a station at the airport), but a few spaces had appeared early Saturday morning and I was on my way.

Latest form of internet humor: impressions of JD Vance trying to be human.

experience counts II

I already provided a list of the previous public office experience of each non-incumbent Republican Vice Presidential candidate since the end of WW2; here, a little slower off the mark (but I've had this sitting on my desktop for weeks and wanted to deal with it) are the Democrats:

Alban Barkley, 1948: DA 3 years, county judge 4 years, US House 14 years, US Senate 21+ years
John Sparkman, 1952: US House 10 years, US Senate 5+ years
Estes Kefauver, 1956: US House 9 years, US Senate 7+ years
Lyndon Johnson, 1960: US House 12 years, US Senate 11+ years
Hubert Humphrey, 1964: mayor 3 years, US Senate 15+ years
Edmund Muskie, 1968: state legislature 5 years, Governor 4 years, US Senate 9+ years
Thomas Eagleton, 1972: DA 4 years, Attorney General 4 years, Lt Governor 4 years, US Senate 3+ years
Sargent Shriver, 1972: city board 6 years, US agency director 7 years, ambassador 2 years
Walter Mondale, 1976: Attorney General 4 years, US Senate 11+ years
Geraldine Ferraro, 1984: Asst DA 5 years, US House 5+ years
Lloyd Bentsen, 1988: administrative judge 2 years, US House 6 years, US Senate 17+ years
Al Gore, 1992: US House 8 years, US Senate 7+ years
Joe Lieberman, 2000: state legislature 10 years, Attorney General 6 years, US Senate 11+ years
John Edwards, 2004: US Senate 5+ years
Joe Biden, 2008: county council 2 years, US Senate 35+ years
Tim Kaine, 2016: city council 4 years, mayor 3 years, Lt Governor 4 years, Governor 4 years, US Senate 3+ years
Kamala Harris, 2020: Asst DA 12 years, DA 7 years, Attorney General 6 years, US Senate 3+ years
Tim Walz, 2024: US House 12 years, Governor 5+ years

Note the predominance of senators. Tim Walz is only the third in all that time never to have been one, a much rarer thing than among the Republicans. He is, however, the second Tim to have served as running mate to a female presidential candidate, a fact I have not seen noted.

Democrats, day 4

Sorry, I think I reached surfeit stage after three days. I didn't watch the proceedings, except for KDH's big acceptance speech. And that was satisfying to see: I particularly liked the careful balancing in the Gaza section.

But I don't have to say much; there are excellent and insightful articles by Dahlia Lithwick and Fred Kaplan and Jim Newell and Amanda Marcotte.

I've also seen note of how confident and prepared she is now, far more than in her first run. The stories about her dysfunctional staff are far behind her: they got that straightened out in around the second year of Biden's term, and - despite reports of huge glitches at media checkin, which strangely did not color the media reports - the convention went very well. Mark Evanier is still marveling at how well the roll call went, a terribly complicated technical feat of TV production that they pulled off with minimal problems.

Jonathan Last is equally impressed by the convention and the nominee's performance. "But her speech last night was very good. Her entire campaign has been very good. We are watching a politician execute, at the highest level, with an enormous degree of difficulty. Harris is doing something extraordinary and I don’t think we should take that for granted."

But yeah, yeah, haven't we seen this before? Wasn't Hillary acclaimed in 2016? But a couple things are different now. First, DT is eight years older and eight years more tired and more incoherent. The other is that up to now we've had four major party tickets with a woman on them. The first three lost. But the fourth won. Maybe we've turned the tide. Maybe. It's still a long slog and the race is tight.

Here's something I haven't seen publicized much: a casual personal conversation between Harris and Walz. They talk about their preferred foods and the music they grew up with, and they establish that despite their very different personal backgrounds, they share the same values. That helps make them a good ticket.

Democrats, day 3

I managed eventually to get through all of this, though it wasn't easy. An AP video had the whole thing, but the sound kept going out, including for the entirety of Bill Clinton's speech. I switched over to a video on Kamala Harris's account, which only had the prime-time speeches, but at least I'd gotten that far before the AP started glitching.

The climax was, of course, Walz's acceptance speech. This began as an apologia for himself and his governmental accomplishments, replaying some of the points he made in his introductory speech in Philadelphia, skillfully morphing by the end by dropping his own ego and turning into a straightforward cheerleading session for Harris. The videos I watched did not have many of the reaction shots of Walz's children which have afforded so much commentary (critical from the Republicans, charmed from everybody else), but this article discussing the matter has embedded a CNN video which does include the reaction shots. When Walz described how years of infertility treatments had finally produced a child and that's why they named her Hope, from her seat Hope (who is now 23) formed a little heart symbol with her hands, an "I love you, Dad" gesture which sent commentator Stephen Colbert quivering with tears.

In the long list of previous speakers: A surprise appearance by Oprah Winfrey. A loose-jointed effusion by Lateefah Simon, a former Harris deputy at the SF DA's office (she has a story, not told here, of Harris sending her home on her first day to put on more professional clothes, and then personally buying her a suit), who is the nominee to replace Barbara Lee in the House, so we're going to be hearing a lot from her in the future. The parents of one of the hostages still held by Hamas, who made it clear that they're equally opposed to bombing civilians in Gaza, but they do want their son home. With all the fuss being made over the Palestinian victims, I was grateful for this gesture made towards the Israeli ones. As was made clear, there is no point to be made in competing victimhoods. They're all topics of our concern, and the audience seemed appreciative.

Most of the speeches emphasized the positive, of course, but it was the jabs at the opposition which most stuck in the mind. Today the prize went to Hakeem Jeffries, who compared DT to "an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won't go away. He has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason."

But there's been an immense amount of commentary on a gesture of Barack Obama's in his speech the previous day. I'd hardly thought this worth discussing at the time. Listing DT's oddities, Obama mentioned "this weird obsession with crowd sizes." As he did so, he gestured with his hands - holding them palms facing each other, moving them farther apart and closer together but still apart, and looking down dubiously. This has widely been taken and even roundly criticized as a visual joke implying that DT has a small penis. Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show thought it so brutal that he remarked "That's the second time this summer the Secret Service has failed to protect Trump from a lethal attack."

Sorry, but that strikes me as overthinking it. This moving of the hands back and forth, as if playing an air accordion, is a standard gesture of Trump's, so much so that it's been adopted by comedians like Colbert and Seth Meyers when doing DT imitations. I think I even saw Walz make the gesture at one point in some other speech, though I can't remember that for sure.

Or maybe Obama is just relying on plausible deniability.

Democrats, day 2

So today I watched the unannotated feed of yesterday's convention proceedings. It was even more raucous and joyous than Monday's, largely because of the roll-call vote. This was purely nominal, as the official vote has already been tallied, and any opposition votes were subsumed under "Present". The proceedings were that each state called upon offered the usual local puffery followed by the vote announcement; what made this one different was the presence of a dj, who played a song selected to be appropriate for each state while its representatives were speaking. They were almost all upbeat contemporary pop numbers, which made it a little exhausting for me to listen to, and I had to take several breaks. There was no singing on the recordings; they were all of instrumental riffs, which made it a bit hard for me to recognize even any of the half-dozen songs I actually knew. Here's a complete list.

The evening began with the grandson of Jimmy Carter and the grandson of JFK each testifying that Kamala Harris is in their grandfather's tradition, followed by a couple of renegade ex-Trumpistas. Both of these themes could have been carried on for quite a while, but I guess they judged it best to stop at two or three of each.

Of the midlist speakers, some good jabs at Trump were delivered by Governor Pritzker ("Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity") and Senator Duckworth, who remember is one of those maimed war veterans Trump is so disdainful of ("I take it personally when a five-time draft-dodging coward tries to take away my rights and freedoms in return"). Then came Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, whose message was basically that Kamala was the right thing for him at that particular time, and that she's the right thing for the country at this particular time.

Then to end the evening the con pulled out the big guns: Michelle, followed by Barack. Michelle said that Kamala believes "that regardless of where you come from, what you look like, who you love, how you worship, or what’s in your bank account, we all deserve the opportunity to build a decent life. All of our contributions deserve to be accepted and valued." And that, children, is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said "All men are created equal." And then she said that when things get tough, don't mope or whine: "Do something." And Barack did something similar when he responded to boos of one of his digs at Trump by saying "Don't boo. Vote."

Useful reminder for the slog ahead. Go get 'em.

Democrats, day 1

I didn't see any of this when it was happening; I was still driving home from LA. I started to watch day 2 live this evening, but the talking heads kept rambling on instead of letting us hear the proceedings, and they did not say anything that hadn't already been heard many times. So I turned it off and spent my time watching the unannotated video of day 1.

This was the "Thank you Joe" day, and that came through clearly. I'm confident that Biden's withdrawal freed Democrats to express their natural love and respect for him and what he's accomplished, without it being burdened by the problematic need to support him for a second term. Biden's own speech concluding the evening included a specific denial that he's angry at anyone for forcing his withdrawal. You can believe that or not. The speech was a stemwinder, and fortunately largely State of the Union Joe rather than Debate Joe, though there were a few glitches, mostly places where it appeared the needle had skipped over a groove, to use an obsolete metaphor I still find useful.

Many other speakers mixed the Biden eulogy with the Harris-Walz support card. A lot of names got chanted, mostly speakers' first names, including Laphonza Butler, whom I wouldn't have thought that well-known; though when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared, the form of her name that got chanted was "AOC! AOC!"

The speeches that most stuck with me were Jamie Raskin, elegant in a suit and white tennis shoes, who got in a few crufty lines like "banana Republicans" and "kangaroo Supreme Court," and Raphael Warnock. When Warnock calls a vote "a prayer for the world we desire" and adds that "our prayers are stronger when we pray together," you can't forget he is a preacher. He also made a point that's rarely brought up about public health: that our own health is protected by investing in the health of our neighbors. We really are in this together.

Of course he also called DT "a plague on the American conscience," and a lot of others had similar remarks, but mostly this was an upbeat evening about healing and moral imperatives. Hillary Clinton's major speech, in which she called Harris's nomination the culmination of a long series of women's advances, from the 19th Amendment to Shirley Chisholm's run to Clinton's own nomination. She seemed happy to pass the torch on, and so did Biden. I hope that's the case, and I'm ready to watch day 2 unannotated on day 3.

more than a concert review

Sunday evening I was seated in a large, high-vaulted Catholic church tucked away in a corner of downtown Pasadena. The entire surface was various shades of orange marble, and the decorative style vaguely Byzantine. I was there for a concert of various Bach and Telemann works for strings and continuo, performed by a small group (3-9 players per piece) called Kontrapunktus. They were very good, but the echoing reverberation in the hall was epic.

But Pasadena is down in southern Cal, 350 miles from where I live in the north. What was I doing there?

I had originally planned to come down and visit a couple of friends who'd asked for a reading of my Mythcon paper which they'd missed. But family medical emergencies caused the indefinite postponement of the plan. It was at this point that I discovered that my hotel reservation was on a special rate that couldn't be cancelled. So since I was paying for the room regardless, I decided to make the trip anyway.

The extra time gave me a chance to do a little research at the UCLA library that had been on my want list for years. I did that on Saturday morning. It's intersession, so nobody was around though the library was open. On the way back that afternoon I stopped at a used bookstore in Hollywood, but was persuaded not to buy anything by the sign announcing a 50% off sale the following day.

So I came back. Traffic was fine until I got to Hollywood, where something was going on. Streets were closed and the traffic was packed. It took me 15 minutes to travel five blocks. When I finally got out of there, I retreated back to my hotel room and napped all afternoon, deciding that the peaceful Baroque concert close to where I was staying would be a more pleasant way to spend the evening than any other possible outings.

Nor was that the only traffic difficulty I had or the stress I had in dealing with it. I'm glad I didn't attempt to go very far around the area when I was there. On Monday, instead of sticking around through lunch as I'd intended, I fetched out of that traffic hellhole of the LA basin as quickly as possible, over the Grapevine and down for lunch in Bakersfield, thence home.

I'll have to come back for the reading when that's rescheduled, but my ability to handle the local congestion seems on the decline.