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.

books of cultural history

Many of my readers have indicated an interest in cultural history; I think they'd like these books, particularly the first one.

Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2018)
Victorian writers, Hughes says, tended to avoid describing raw human physicality. So she's going to research the significance of body parts in some well-documented Victorian cases. I got this book for the chapter on Charles Darwin's beard. Darwin didn't grow his famous beard until after he'd written The Origin of Species, and it altered his appearance so much his friends didn't recognize him. (Photos confirm this difference.) He said he grew it because of his eczema, which should but doesn't raise the question of why he waited, since he was a late adopter of the beard. I was hoping that Hughes would say something of why the Wave of Beards arose. She offers a reason I've read before, that the failure of the 1840s revolutionary movements freed the beard from its association with revolutionaries and criminals, and supports this with a reference to a series of 1850s Punch cartoons in which the likes of railway porters, offering to help passengers with their luggage, are taken by the passengers as hold-up men because they have beards; the old image took a while dying. But she also says that the growth of the sedentary middle-class and the fall of outdoorsy he-man occupations made men want to show their he-man credentials with big bushy beards. Also that barbers were scary (ref the legend of Sweeney Todd, which made its first appearance then). Maybe, but it reads as if Hughes is just making all this up.
Darwin is the only male subject. Other chapters discuss the infamous case of Queen Victoria's lady-in-waiting who was taken as pregnant in an unmarried state, a shocking thing at the time, until she died of the tumor that she actually had; the biographical dispute over whether George Eliot worked as a dairymaid in her youth and consequently had a coarse and muscular right hand: some insist she did, some insist she didn't: Hughes comes down on the "didn't" side but has no definitive proof; the disappearance from the historical record of D.G. Rossetti's long-term mistress; and the gruesome case of the murder-dismemberment of an 8-year-old girl whose name, "sweet Fanny Adams," eventually became a slang term indicating meaninglessness.

Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf, 2023)
This is more a continuous narrative than separate accounts, but it describes four WW2 memorial works of music and the events in the composers' lives that led them to it: Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, and Dmitri Shostakovich's Babi Yar Symphony. That Schoenberg's and Shostakovich's works are directly about the Holocaust, while the other two avoid it (Strauss's is purely instrumental anyway: no words) is part of the point, and Eichler explores this thoroughly. He also explores why Britten's requiem, though ostensibly about WW2, winds up being a memorial to WW1 instead. This is, Eichler says, because WW1 in Britain was by far the more searing experience (though Tolkien did not find that in people who were guessing the war relevance of The Lord of the Rings), while in Russia, where Shostakovich was, it was the other way around.
Eichler goes to the places described in the music and tries to evoke what it feels like to be there. He also devotes a lot of awed description to the subtleties and meaningfulness of the music itself. I'll reluctantly go along with this for three of the pieces, though my reaction to them is different than his; but A Survivor from Warsaw, which describes a tale of Nazi brutality that Schoenberg just made up to an accompaniment of the composer's emptiest twelve-tone style, strikes me as a piece of worthless kitsch, and it's embarrassing to see it described in this worshipful tone.

Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2020)
The exact opposite approach: 150 short separate essays, mostly in chronological order, covering the Beatles from their childhoods up to the band's breakup. This allows Brown the opportunity for lots of digressions, but some of these are among the most interesting parts of the book. A chapter on what classical composers (Britten, Copland) and literary critics thought of the Beatles was mostly new to me, and there are a number of other outside views elsewhere in the book. The last chapter is a biography of Brian Epstein told chronologically backwards. Gives a new perspective. Brown also emphasizes how contingent the Beatles' early history was by positing some alternative history. For instance: if Paul McCartney had passed Latin in school, he wouldn't have been held back a year and wouldn't have became close friends with a boy in the next class named George Harrison. An entire chapter guesses what would have happened if Gerry and the Pacemakers had had the big breakthrough instead of the Beatles, and why they could be seen as better qualified to do so.
But I have to approach this book with some caution, because the chapter on the possibility of the Beatles making a movie of The Lord of the Rings doesn't match up with anything else I've read on the topic.

culinary advance

It became evident during my cold that I was becoming seriously dehydrated. And this was due to insufficient liquid intake.

I drink almost nothing but water, but during a cold, mucus in the throat makes water taste unappetizing, so one tends to drink not enough of it. Fruit juice - my favorites are apple and grape - would solve that problem, but I don't want to be drinking a lot of juice either.

But when I got home from the trip, I decided to buy some juice, and I was mulling over the choices in the grocery when I noticed "light apple juice," which proved on inspection to be apple juice diluted with water. But why buy this when I could do it myself? So now when it's time to partake, I fill a glass about 2/3 with water and for the rest put in juice. That's enough juice to provide the taste without the sticky sweetness or so much of the carbs. And I'm slowly recovering.

another fine mess

An additional stresser discovered as I unpacked from the Mythcon trip is that I seem to have lost my cell phone. My best guess is that I put it in the seat-back pocket on the flight and failed to find it (it's rather small) when digging around to retrieve items at the end.

An online report to the airline's lost and found having failed to produce a reply within two days, and I needing the phone tomorrow, I set out today to replace it. The helpful AT&T store (the helpful ones are the corporate-owned ones, but you won't know which they are until you get there and ask) that I'd used in the past has closed, though it's still listed on their web site, but I found another one. They didn't carry the flip phone I use - I've never used a smartphone yet, and with luck I never will - but they did say it might be found at Target, and there was a Target a block away, and there I found the kind I previously had while the store's sound system played songs from Encanto.

Back to the AT&T store, where the employee struggled at getting the back of the case off and struggled with replacing the SIM card. All this time my eyes were distracted by the big tv at the back of the store, which was showing a women's volleyball game. The words "Paris 2024" on the side court suggested this was part of the Olympics. Never having paid much attention to the Olympics, I hadn't even known volleyball was an Olympic sport. For all I knew, the Olympics consisted of nothing more than Simone Biles prancing around on a mat and showing off her medals to interviewers.

That done, it was time to take the machine home, look up my frequent callees and add them to the phone's list and then transfer in the file, which I've learned to keep on my computer, of my distinct ring tone (the Addams Family theme). When I plugged the phone into the computer, a message popped up saying "To add files, turn on Enable USB Storage," which is exactly the hidden switch that that brilliant tech at the old helpful AT&T store figured out after much travail the last time I bought a new phone. At least they've figured out to make a message out of it by now. Did that; transfer worked on first try.

Now I have a new phone just like my old phone and all is well.

Mythcon

We're back from the Mythcon in Minnesota.

On the personal level, this was a debilitating crisis, though not so agonizing as having lost my bag in the Atlanta airport on my way to Mythcon 6 years ago. Despite fervent mask-wearing, on Sunday I came down with a cold (covid tests negative, at least so far) which prevented me from attending the banquet (someone ferried my pre-paid meal to my hotel room) or playing my accustomed role as narrator of what was announced as the last ever performance of the Not Ready for Mythcon Players. Bonnie Rauscher, an excellent actress, took it on instead and paid a nice tribute to me which I saw on video later.

Nor could I deliver my paper on John Wain on Monday morning, so papers coordinator Melody Green read it to the audience, it having fortunately been written in full, which is not always true of my papers. So thank you, Bonnie and Melody. And I was feeling better enough on Tuesday that the scheduled trip home was feasible.

The venue, a large DoubleTree in a shopping center in the Minneapolis suburbs, was not ideal. The bulk of the programming rooms, though compactly adjacent to each other, were a long trudge at the other end of the complex from the sleeping room tower. The elevators in that tower were already beginning a nervous breakdown when we arrived and it only got worse (though promptly fixed on Monday, see comment below about service). The hotel restaurant didn't serve lunch, and though there were box lunches for con workers, the rest of us had only 90 minutes to head out and find something. There were some places within walking distance, assuming that you could walk farther than we can and didn't mind the heat (on Friday and Saturday) or the torrential rain (on Monday), but most places worth dining at were much further off and challenging to get to due to the extreme disruptions of Minnesota road-repair season. Also, the hotel was repaving its parking lot and those with cars had to keep moving them around as different areas were blocked off and only a tiny sufficiency of spaces were left.

But! That having been said, this was in many respects a splendid Mythcon. The papers and speeches were interesting, the social side was chewy and full of substantive discussion (not true of the last in-person Mythcon), the hard-working committee did everything possible to keep the show running smoothly, the hotel staff earned gold stars in courtesy and helpfulness, the woman who was distressed over losing her eyeglasses eventually found them on the floor of her hotel room. And lastly I should report that, though B. and I flew on Delta, everything happened on time, no delays, no hitches except the e-mail system getting confused about what to send which one if either of us. Though at least one other person got stranded in the airport homebound due to missing a connecting flight.

Best line of the convention, from Juanita Redfield as Eric Rauscher, running a workshop session, was trying to encourage everyone to move up to the front of the room and sit in a circle: "We're Episcopalians. We always sit in the back pews because there are no pews in the parking lot."