added travel tips

I've counted myself as an experienced traveler for over 40 years, but even at this point I can still learn tips for how to handle things.

I arrived at the airport for my flight home from Mythcon to find that I had no assigned seat for the flight, and that I'd have to get one from the gate agent, the one who arrives at the gate one hour before departure time. This was initially puzzling, as I'd picked a seat when making the reservation, but the check-in agent explained: the aircraft had been changed to a smaller one, and all the seat assignments erased.

Here's where I learned my lesson. When I'd checked in online the previous day, there'd been an option on the screen to choose a seat. Partly because I was pressed for time at the moment, I'd ignored that, as I already had a seat. I shouldn't have ignored it.

Fortunately I was early at the airport, the gate seating area was not crowded, and I went to stand up at the counter a few minutes before the gate agent arrived, and there was a seat available in the class that I'd requested, so all came out OK.

after Mythcon

Since Mythcon was being held in a slice of territory entirely new to me, I decided to spend a little post-Mythcon time exploring that territory further. What most interested me was the Oklahoma Panhandle. Center of the Dust Bowl long ago (I found Ken Burns's documentary on that subject one of his more successful efforts), it interests me as a geography buff as one of the few places in the US where as many as five states are so close together. It would be fun, I thought, to tag all five of them.

So that's what I did. Monday after the con, I drove northwest through Oklahoma, visited the Washita Battlefield NHS, where Custer massacred the Indians instead of the other way around (captions in the site museum are very sorrowful about the whole thing), cut through a corner of Texas, back into Oklahoma, and finally into Kansas, where I stayed for the night in the improbably-named border town of Liberal.

Tuesday was the real action day. I was in KS-OK-TX-OK-KS-CO-OK-NM-OK-TX-NM. Colorado was the most challenging of these: thirty miles of unpaved road. Generally, though, it was pleasant. The temperature was hot, but the fields of grain - mostly cattle feed - were green and the aspect pleasant. People I stopped and chatted with, at museums and gas station convenience stores, were friendly and agreeable. Only in the very farthest extent of the panhandle did the gently rolling land turn jagged, with buttes and arroyo canyons. It would have been a good spot to take a photo for one of those "what state is this?" competitions; few would have been likely to guess Oklahoma.

In the Oklahoma town of Goodwell, home of the local college, is a museum on the history of the panhandle. This slab of territory has a curious jurisdictional history. Before it was attached to Oklahoma Territory in 1890, it wasn't part of anything, the victim of political machinations and accidental omission back in the 1850s. For forty years it had no US civil authority whatever, and settlers came in at their own risk (not usually staying long, more because of the brutal climate than the lack of any legal right to buy their lands.) Because of this absence, it was known as No Man's Land, and the museum in Goodwell is the No Man's Land Museum.

Nobody was at the museum when I arrived at the 10 am opening time except me and the curator. She asked me, what did I know about No Man's Land, and I answered with a brief version of my understanding of the jurisdictional history. "That's good," she said. "A lot of people come in here expecting a museum about World War I."

Venturing further into New Mexico, I explored two further NPS sites: the Capulin Mountain NM, an extinct cinder cone where you can drive a road that twists up the mountainside as far as the crater; and next day to Salinas Pueblo Missions NM, three abandoned spots in the desert which all have the same thing: fragments of the buildings of a once-thriving pueblo, and the better-preserved remains of a Spanish church built in the 17th century and which flourished for a few years until, partly due to Spanish interference, the pueblo began to collapse.

DT would not be happy with the historical interpretation either here or at Washita, so nobody tell him about it.

Mythcon report

I'm back from my trip to Mythcon, and now's the time to write about the conference part of the trip.

Mythcon was held in the unlikely grounds of Weatherford, Oklahoma, because the library of the local college, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, is the home of the Mythopoeic Society archives. Our online records are hosted by their website, and - as I saw when I visited by appointment on Friday - the printed records are stored in their vault. All this is at the behest of enthusiastic Mythie and SWOSU library archivist Phillip Fitzsimmons, who also chaired the conference.

Our meeting venue was not on campus, but closer to our hotel (a quick mile's drive or so) in the Stafford Air and Space Museum, established by, or at least because, early US astronaut Thomas P. Stafford (always called "General Stafford" in hushed tones around here) was a native of Weatherford. I went to the museum exhibits and was hugely impressed, especially by the numerous, sometimes replicas and sometimes the real thing, of full-size aircraft, starting with a full-size replica of the Wright Brothers' original plane. I had never seen such a thing outside of grainy old photographs before, and this conveyed the nature of the craft better than do old photos.

The museum has - or had; I think they're in the process of converting it to new exhibit space - a large function room, divisible by temp walls like a hotel ballroom, which it rather resembles. We had it divided in three, registration and dealers in front, one programming room in the middle (mostly online speakers), and the other in back (mostly live). You have to walk through the middle room to get to the back, which could become tricky. I was leaving the back room just as a new session was beginning, and realized as I got to the middle room that if I didn't sit down, the online paper presenter would have only one person in the audience. So I did sit down, and listened to a paper whose fascination wasn't dampened by the fact that I hadn't even heard of any of the three books being discussed. Another time I passed through as the online speaker was explaining that Treebeard introduced Merry and Pippin to homosexuality. That time I just kept walking.

I missed a lot of interesting papers because I had to keep dashing back to the hotel to take naps, regular sleep being a rare function, and another got canceled when the presenter had to run off to the hospital (he's OK), but I did get to some good ones, including John Rosegrant's exploration of Tolkien's sound symbolism and Eric Rauscher's discussion of what Charles Williams's poetry got from Gerald Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. I also heard both Guest of Honor speeches, which I'll not attempt to summarize here. The scholar Joe R. Christopher, still hale at 91, broke his arm in an accidental fall the day before the convention, and while he and his sling did attend, they didn't get there in time for his scheduled speech, which was read by Janet Brennan Croft. The author David R. Slayton delivered his rousing defense of literacy at the banquet. We were all - there were less than 100 in person - stuffed into the banquet room of Lucille's Roadhouse, the restaurant adjacent to and sharing a name and ownership with our hotel. This is clearly the place to dine in Weatherford; I had three dinners there and it never got tired. Weatherford apparently counts as in the South, and the food was mostly Southern in nature (my three entrees were ribs, chicken-fried steak, and pork chop), including having bacon in the green beans, a bit of a surprise if there were any vegetarians present, which I guess not, though the full menu does cater to them.

Plenty of conversations had between papers and late night (the hotel's breakfast nook doubled as an evening con suite) with old friends and new people, some of them wandering in from Signum University's Mythmoot, which I've been pressing for years as the best possible source for new Mythies.

It was hideously hot outside, but dry so not enervating; and we mostly stayed inside with pleasant but, unlike on some previous occasions, not violently overblown air conditioning. Pleasant, I'd say it was indoors. Parking was nearby and sufficient in quantity at both museum and hotel. The Procession marched from the museum's front lobby into the programming room, avoiding the outdoors altogether.

One oddity passed around the conference had been found in miscellaneous donated archives, a small ceramic jar labeled "Gopher Guts." None of the old-time Mythies present had any idea what that was, and Janet asked several people if they'd invent stories about it and write them down in a little booklet. I hope she publishes this; the two before mine were very clever. I thought for a moment and wrote down that it commemorated the ruler of a tiny German principality, Gofür (spelling varied). In this particular principality, probably inspired by L. Sprague de Camp, princes were subject to regular recall elections. Citizens voted by dropping a nut or pebble into one of two jars labeled Gopher Gut and Gopher Schlecht, I forget how I explained the extra "s", and this one had been taken as a souvenir by a US Army soldier after WW2, eventually finding its way into the MythSoc archives.

Into Oklahoma

Thursday I drove north out of Texas into Oklahoma. To avoid getting on the turnpike, I took minor highways and found myself in the town of Duncan. There I visited the Chisholm Trail museum, commemorating the huge cattle drives of the late 19C. A docent showed me around and told me a long anecdote about an early automobile they had on display, so when I saw an exhibit on determining a cow’s age by looking at its horns, I was tempted to tell her Buddy Hackett’s joke about cow horns, but I refrained.

Lunch in a round steakhouse that also had catfish, then onward. Mid afternoon got me to Anadarko, an old Indian agency town that had two tribal museums. My tour books hadn’t mentioned the one run by the Wichita tribe, who were the native inhabitants before the feds started moving displaced eastern tribes in. It was an excellent museum, full of well presented materials on their customs and their sad history. The other museum belonged to what it insisted on calling the Delaware, one of those displaced eastern tribes, though that’s a European name. It had a lot less to say, including not saying how to pronounce the tribe’s name for itself, which is Lenape.

I had wanted to eat dinner in Anadarko before heading on to Mythcon in Weatherford, because there’s not a lot of places in Weatherford and I didn’t want to use them up. But it was still early enough that I had time to kill. So I thought of doing the deep countryside exploring in search of weird rock formations, next on my agenda, and then circling back to Anadarko.

There was also the question, where in Anadarko would I eat? It’s far tinier than Weatherford even. A Yelp search had brought up just two promising places, a Mexican restaurant and a bbq place, the latter with no Yelp reviews whatever. I’d be the first! Turned out it had no reviews because it didn’t exist. The building was long deserted and had a notice posted on the door from the city ordering the property owner to clean up the abundant weeds and trash. I posted an update to Yelp.

The Mexican place had a promising menu, but by the time I was finished in the countryside, I was in no mood to return to Anadarko and then head back out again. My maps didn’t show how to get on the back country roads to Weatherford, but I guessed, and guessed correctly, and I had my bbq ribs there.

Fort Worth

Texas. In july. It’s perishingly hot here; the only mitigation is that indoors, the air conditioning is not equally punishingly cold. It’s comfortable. This may be a rural Texas or specifically Fort Worth thing, because I have found that super air conditioning even in Dallas.

I’m in Fort Worth because Mythcon next weekend is in Oklahoma and I took a nonstop flight to DFW. On previous trips here I went to Dallas, so this time I am trying Fort Worth. Dallas thinks of itself as a sophisticated Eastern city, but Fort Worth is the Gateway to the West. It has a Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, which I visited despite knowing nothing of any cowgirls except Annie Oakley. I might learn something, and I did. Turns out there were a lot of ranch-bred women skilled at riding and roping in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, though there’s not much in the displays about any of them. And these skills are still to be found among ranch women today.

Fort Worth also has a Stockyards district. It’s a small area bursting with a riot of local color, rather like Beale Street in Memphis. And in among the Western wear shops and the Western furniture shops and the saloons are some steakhouses. I couldn’t go to the Stockyards without having a steak, right? {And if ir wouldn’t appeal to you, you wouldn’t be much attracted to the Stockyards anyway,) Ah, it was a good steak, richly flavored without seasoning, crusty and textured and marbled and juicy just as I like them. One down

fuzzy suggestion

So it's an article about what people who've been "canceled" are doing to make a living. Kevin Spacey is selling stainless-steel rings with the initials of his character Frank Underwood on them.

And this is all compared to the movie Tár, at the end of which the once-renowned symphony conductor Lydia Tár, having been immersed in scandals, is reduced to conducting concerts of music from video games.

But is this really so degrading? Pop and rock songs have been a feature of symphony orchestral repertoire for decades. The London Symphony recorded a whole album of orchestral arrangements of Rolling Stones songs over 30 years ago, for instance. I've been to a couple of symphony orchestra concerts featuring music from anime tv shows and what not. I thought the music was noisy and crappy, much worse than the music heard in Tár, but the conductors seemed to like it and to be playing it of their own will.

Or is the point in Tár that conducting such music isn't objectively degrading, it's just embarrassing for such a formerly elitist star? In which case her comedown is not really that dramatic, not the equivalent of a major movie star hawking cheap rings.

I dunno. It's as mystifying as the movie was.

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.