fraud, Helen, time

1) So Trump gave his speech on election fraud. His real motivating factor here is his belief that he's so wonderful that nobody would vote against him (except his enemies, who hate him for unfathomable Reasons), so if he loses an election it must be rigged. Note his concentration on the presidential election he lost and not at all on the ones he won, though if there were fraud it would be widespread.

The substantive argument, which I've seen put forth in good faith by sincerely deluded people, is this: there are jurisdictions where the earliest-counted ballots trend Republican, but by the end of the counting they turn out to be heavily Democratic. It seems to them self-evident that Democratic election officials have dumped in loads of fake ballots to change the outcome.

What hasn't occurred to these people is that the earliest-counted ballots may not be representative of the whole. The first ballots counted are the absentees, and absentee voters tend to run Republican. But they'll be outweighed by the in-person votes that come in later.

Besides, if there were loads of fake ballots it would be easy to detect this, starting with implausible turnout figures.

I can testify, as a former Hugo administrator, that the first tranch of votes coming in will in no way predict the eventual winners, and there's no particular reason in the Hugos for the earliest ballots to lean one way or another.

Our election security is fine, and proposals to require ID at the polls, which wouldn't prevent the kind of fraud that's being alleged, are merely smokescreens to make it harder for Blacks, poor people, and other Democrat-leaning constituencies to vote.

2) Classics professor Denise McCoskey on the casting of Helen of Troy:

If you want to talk about historical accuracy, the Ancient Greeks would be far more upset that these things are not being done in Greek than about anything involving the appearance of these characters. To have Helen speak English is a far bigger transgression than to have her appear as a skin color that you don’t like. I think that’s something that is getting distorted for obvious reasons. And I don’t have a problem with that, if you want English-speaking audiences to engage with Helen—I teach English translations—but then you have to say that there’s a lot of ways we can translate Helen that has to do with our audience and what we want to think about today.

3) The bill enacting permanent Daylight Saving Time, which has passed the House, still needs to get through the Senate and the president's desk before it becomes law. Let's hope it fails one of these hurdles. People have forgotten that we enacted permanent DST once before, in 1974. But the outcry against morning darkness in the winter was so intense that it was repealed within a year. What this story proves is that DST can't really adjust the length of the day: what its supporters actually have a beef with is the axial tilt of the earth, and no legislation will help with that.

There's apparently a competing congressional bill that would return us to permanent Standard Time, what we had before DST was invented, and that I would support.

Music@Menlo: one bite at the apple

As I'm not professionally reviewing any more, I have no required commitments at the Music@Menlo Festival, and I'm going to be away for most of it anyway. It started today; for the brief period before I go, I squeezed in just one item, tonight's free Prelude concert by the young professionals of the International Program.

We had a firm and dutiful rendition of Beethoven's rather perky Op. 1 No. 1 piano trio, followed by a zippy and sizzling Dvorak Op. 81 Piano Quintet, notable for the soulful viola solo in the dumka slow movement from Rang Tae (she's from Korea).

Kind of leisurely; started at 5, wasn't over till after 6.30. Good thing I wasn't going to the evening lecture that started at 7, or I wouldn't have had time for what I did do, which was hunt down dinner offsite.

book review, no, adolescence review

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 2024)

I'm not the audience for this book, which is addressed to the parents of tweens and teens and concerns the children's addiction to smartphones and other electronic devices. I read it because it was the topic for my public library's monthly book discussion group, and I was a bit surprised it was chosen, because usually even the nonfiction choices are primarily intended to entertain the reader, whereas this is hard informative facts about an urgent social problem.

I'll note that Haidt attributes the problems with children to two things: the lack of supervision of their online lives, and the over-supervision of their physical lives: that they lose the opportunity to learn in-person social interaction both from having all their communication being online (startling side effect, though: a decrease in teen pregnancy) and from not being allowed to go out and play unsupervised. (One of our book club members attributes this restriction to the reflex of suing the supervisory agency if anyone is injured.)

And I'll agree that children need to learn how to go out and take responsibility for themselves, because if they don't learn before they're adults, how will they ever do it as adults? The purpose of rearing children is to produce an adult as the end process, and certainly what I was able to do for myself in my 20s was the result of hard-won experience in my teens.

But otherwise this book mostly struck me as an illustration of how different I, and those I know, are from the norms described here. I don't know a lot of young people today, but those I do know do not suffer from the anxiety and depression described here, and they're not always leaving their heads buried in a screen. They're sharp and self-motivated, and I think that's what saves them from a syndrome which Haidt describes as widespread - so it is a major problem - but far from universal.

My own separation struck me in a chapter describing how young people crave risk, and they're not getting it. Crave risk? I never did that, or any of the stupid teenage tricks that illustrate it. I did do some risky things as a child - I rode my bicycle along twisty country roads that, when I drive them today, I'm astonished that I never got hit by a car, though traffic was much less heavy them - but they didn't feel risky. On the other hand, I never rode roller-coasters, which aren't risky but feel as if they are. When asked at the time by other kids why I declined, I always said the same thing I also said when asked why I refused to see horror movies: "Scary things are scary." It seemed to me self-evident that fright was an unpleasant sensation that was to be avoided when possible.

Haidt also talks of the addictiveness of videogames, especially to children. I expect I would have been immune to that. Admittedly, the games of my youth were not as sophisticated or engrossing as those of today, but they were plenty addictive enough. In my grad school years in the early 1980s, I had some friends who liked to hang out in the video arcades they had then, full of big consoles that displayed games like PacMan. I played those occasionally, but I was not strongly attracted. Others were.

Then there was Dungeons and Dragons. This is, or was in those days, a tabletop game played with paper and pencil and dice, so it's hardly a 21C video game. But it was massively addicting. My friends who took it up in college kept playing for decades afterwards, just not me. I tried it for a few weeks and then quit because I was bored. It didn't generate the kind of storytelling that interested me.

Then there's the point of social media as something children demand access to as a means of gaining social prestige and validation among their peers. I wonder how I would have fit into that environment were I a teen today, because at the time I was a teen, my social prestige and validation level was zero. I was a complete social nonentity in school, at least until I joined the science-fiction club, and part of my immunity from teen misbehavior was that I knew I would never fit in to the social networks so there was no point in trying. I suspect I would have shied away from social media for the same reason had it been around, but on the other hand its ability to enable the bullying and disparagement that were even then a major feature in the social nonentity's life - that would have made life very hard. So I don't know. I despaired a lot in those years, without any electronic media to make me do it, and I suspect its presence would only have made things worse. I would be lucky to survive adolescence today, most likely.

hot

The temperature the last few days has been approaching 100F, which is about as hot as it ever gets here. (We're in the first valley in from the coast; further in, it gets hotter, which is why we're not moving there.) The last couple of days I finally found it too difficult to bear, and I've been spending my whole daytime at air-conditioned public libraries, occupying my time by reading some of the books they have there.

I'm finding that several hours of coolth inures me slightly to the heat when I emerge out of it, but it's still tough. Reports say the temp will drop somewhat tomorrow; I sure hope so.

latest scare

So now it's our turn to be terrified of cyclosporiasis. No more green salads for a while - which is a nuisance, as B. often has salads for lunch, and it's my custom to make Asian chicken salad, with romaine lettuce, for dinner on really hot days, to avoid cooking. And we have some really hot days lining up for this week.

An informative e-mail prior to Iolanthe yesterday named some restaurants in the neighborhood recommended by theater staff. By far the closest was a ramen place. Ramen restaurants here do not serve the cheap hot-water-and-noodle dish loved by impecunious college students everywhere. This is a big bowl of really serious Japanese soup, and unlike much Japanese food it's been known to appeal to my tastes. I went by the restaurant, and saw on the menu posted outside that just about everything came with scallions. I like scallions, but as a garnish they're frequently served raw, and they're among the most frequent cyclospora vectors. So I passed, and ate somewhere else.

Gilbert and Sullivan review: Iolanthe

The Lamplighters, San Francisco's Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, is reinventing itself, due to the financial pressures facing local theatrical groups of all kinds now. No more large-scale productions carted around to big regional theaters around the Bay Area; they're commencing small-scale productions in small local theaters in the City. This Iolanthe's entire run was sold out before the first performance, so I can't send you to it even though it'll be running next weekend; all I can say is that they'll be doing Pirates of Penzance in the spring.

The venue was the ODC Theater in the Mission district, just three blocks from the BART station, a small space converted from a brick warehouse by installing a steeply raked bank of merely nine rows of seats on one side. Since it looks like one anyway, the setup was a backstage theater area, with costume racks and other paraphernalia floating around; the setting was simultaneously the London of the original 19C show, with a bit of San Francisco salted in, and the backstage it looked like. Private Willis was converted to a stagehand, and made several nonspeaking appearances in that capacity in Act 1 before his first canonical appearance in Act 2, for instance.

There were a few other tinkerings with the text, mostly to change outdated references. Strephon is now "a parliamentary Costco: he carries everything." When Mountararat says "This comes of women interfering in politics," he's roundly booed, and the conductor, former Lamplighters star soprano Jennifer Ashworth, says, "Watch it, baritone."

The costumes, however, were scarfed from the Lamplighters' extensive costume shop which covers decades of productions, so they were full-scale. Mostly pretty conventional, though the fairies were in dark and eerie hues.

The performances were lively and full of imaginative stage business. When the fairies want to run around but not be seen, they put big signs reading "Invisible" around their necks. The only thing that didn't work was the fairies' ability to control the peers' movements, which made hash out of the "don't go" song. The best singer all-round was Ash Hurtado as Phyllis. Her voice was a quite spectacular combination of the light and delicate with the strong and powerful. The dialogue between Mountararat (John Melis) and Tolloller (Jacob Bronson) where they're trying to negotiate over claims to Phyllis's hand was also quite delightfully done. Iolanthe (Rose Waldman) dominated the show rather than being buried underneath everyone else as often happens. Strephon (newcomer Matt Skinner) was bluff and intense, the Fairy Queen (Sonia Gariaeff) was fierce when she ought to have been, nd the Lord Chancellor (veteran Chris Uzelac) was played with heft but a minimum of eccentricity.

As an experiment, this worked, but I hope they come up with different new and original ideas for subsequent shows.

dental prosthesis

I've mentioned that I had as broken tooth extracted. This leaves a space which has to heal for a period of several months until an implant can be placed. In the meantime, there's a gap, and to keep the neighboring teeth from moving over and filling the gap I've been given a prosthesis. This isn't just an artificial tooth to fill up the hole; the artificial tooth is embedded in a hard plastic device that fits over my entire upper teeth and was made by taking a putty impression of my bite.

I can't eat with this thing in, and I'm not expected to wear it more than half the time. I've been putting it in after dinner and leaving it there until breakfast, taking it out briefly if I have a late-night snack. It's very snug, hard to get in place and equally hard to remove. I've been assured it will loosen over time, and even after only several days I'm noting a bit of that, just a bit. It's transparent and close to invisible from outside unless you look closely, and it doesn't interfere much with my speaking, though yesterday when I told B. I had been watching the old movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town she thought I'd said Mr. Bean.

And that's going to be my duty for the next few months. This is just one of the medical regimens that shape my life right now, but it's the easiest to write about.

cleverest remark I've heard lately

"I poured root beer into a square glass. Now I have just beer."

quiz lolly

Slate has been running a daily quiz of six questions each with four multiple-choice possible answers, which runs the gamut from six questions I know the answers to offhand to six questions I have absolutely no idea of.

Occasionally there's a clever question or set of answers, and I liked one of today's in a cultural quiz; the question was, what were the names of the other two members of Josie and the Pussycats? Though I've seen the movie, I didn't remember the answer - which was Valerie and Melody - but I got it right because of what the wrong answers were. They were 1) Veronica and Betty, 2) Violet and Patty, 3) Velma and Daphne. I could remember where all three of those pairs came from, though two of the sources I've had no contact with in a long time, so elimination gave me the right answer.

concert review: TACO

So I did, Sunday afternoon, attend an Independence Day celebration of a sort. The Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, that group of nonprofessional musicians who get together to practice purely for the fun of it, was holding one of its rare public concerts, in the grass-lined amphitheater bowl in the park at the Mountain View civic center.

B. plays violin in this orchestra, so I chauffeured her to the event - a lot easier than driving in by herself - and stayed to listen to the concert. The conductor, knowing I was coming, even labeled one of the ADA chairs with my name. I was grateful for the chair: sitting on the ground at the top of the bowl, as the rest of the audience did, would not be in my repertoire these days.

For a patriotic program, they played not the usual custom of American classical standards like Gershwin and Copland, but resurrected one of standard patriotic songs, most of them in very fine arrangement. We had the national anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, America ("My country 'tis of thee"), and America the Beautiful. We had a couple of Sousa marches (Stars & Stripes Forever and the Liberty Bell, of course). We had a few popular songs of patriotic cut: George M. Cohan's Grand Old Flag, Irving Berlin's God Bless America (on seeing that title, I always wonder if America sneezed), and Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

Most of these were instrumental, though the national anthem and one other were sung by a 13-year-old female student with an impressively powerful voice but some rather irregular, TACO-like, ways of expressing it, plus a pop-singer-like way of circling around the final note in a phrase before landing on it. The orchestra needed a second try on one or two of the numbers, but handled most of it pretty well.

One catch with a volunteer orchestra is that you can't control what instruments you get. For this concert, there were no oboes. Fortunately, a clarinet in C can cover the oboe part and serve as - brace for it - a fauxbo.