tsunami Kohoutek

After the enormous earthquake off Kamchatka, there were properly tsunami warnings across the Pacific. The waves were expected to reach California in the post-midnight hours on Wednesday. But after reports from Hawaii showed smaller waves than expected, people breathed a little easier. And indeed, even in Crescent City - something of a tsunami focuser because of the shape of the bay - the waves were only four feet higher than normal. Which caused only minor and incidental flooding. A huge contrast from the deadly 21-foot waves that hit the city after the Anchorage quake in 1964.

But there's still a lot of sloshing around going around after the quake, and unwary people on the shoreline could be hit and drowned, so stay careful out there.

mystery of beards

The 7/28 New Yorker has a review of a book, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in 19th Century America by Sarah Gold McBride, that has not one but two insufficient explanations for the question I've only previously seen entirely different insufficient explanations for, namely what was the cause of the Wave of Beards that settled on the faces of most middle-to-upper-class European and American men in the mid 19th century?

McBride's first explanation is that it was an attempt to show white male virility in the face of the rise of the supposedly emasculating suffragist movement. Besides being inane (as noted by the reviewer, Margaret Talbot: "Did men really need beards to remind anyone that they were in charge?"), this explanation doesn't fit chronologically, as the suffragist movement was an odd minor cause at the time the Wave of Beards began. It became a major public movement at the time that the beards were going away.

McBride's second explanation is white men fearing African American barbers with straight razors. Whatever you might think of that as an explanation in the US (I place it in the "inane" category), it wouldn't apply in Europe, yet the Wave of Beards settled on faces there too.

I noticed an error which I'm not sure if it is McBride's or Talbot's. Talbot writes that "J.D. Vance is the first Vice-President since the nineteenth century to wear a beard while in office." That's not quite true. While there were 5 Presidents with beards in the olden days, there were only 2 such Vice-Presidents: Schuyler Colfax (1869-1873) and Charles W. Fairbanks (1905-1909). So, not quite 19th century.

concert review: Music@Menlo

So my second Menlo review of the season was of a violin-and-piano recital. Not my normal fare, but I covered it OK.

The review was rather longer than ideal, which must be why my editors cut the material on two of the shorter pieces. I also decided for space purposes to omit any discussion of the preceding Prelude concert. Each piece on a Prelude program is performed in two of those concerts, and this was the second time for Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2. I heard both of them, in fact, having been on campus the previous day for a lecture. More on that later. Friday's performance of the Shostakovich wasn't as devastating as Thursday's, but it was more compelling and clear, and the Dvorak Op. 87 piano quartet that came with it was equally passionate.

Sunday I took a break from Menlo and went to a local children's theatre production of Guys and Dolls. The actors ranged from 11 years old, which was grotesquely young for a show like this, to 16, which was just barely old enough to look like they knew what they were doing. The performers knew their lines, I'll give them that, but their voices were small and lost-sounding. There was no amplification and the music was canned. The lead singing was mostly OK, but when Sky tried to harmonize with Sarah on "I've Never Been In Love Before," he shouldn't have.

two more Tom Lehrer items

that I forgot about while writing my previous post. Like the others, they're about my appreciation of his work.

9. Fact proven scientifically: If you take four Jewish boys attending a science-fiction convention on Thanksgiving weekend, and put them in a car going out for a dinner expedition, and the car drives past an early Christmas display, all four of them will spontaneously and simultaneously begin singing Tom Lehrer's "A Christmas Carol." And they won't stop until it's done, because of course they all have the song completely memorized.

10. You've heard of two-finger typists? I am a two-finger pianist. There are two tunes I can play two-fingered: one of them* is Tom Lehrer's "The Irish Ballad" and the other isn't.

*which I learned from the sheet music, thank you

Tom Lehrer

I don't have to outline his accomplishments, as I did when the even more venerable and astonishingly similarly-talented Sheldon Harnick died. So instead I'll say these:

1. My parents saw Tom Lehrer perform in person. They went to the hungry i during his residency with the songs that were recorded there and became his album That Was The Year That Was.

2. They also had all his albums. That included his own personal-label 10" issues of his first two albums. Not the original pressings, I'm sure, but those issuings. I still have them all today.

3. But I don't play them, because I bought the CD set The Remains of Tom Lehrer as soon as it was published. That was one of two such collections I bought; the other was of Allan Sherman.

4. As a child, I would have said that I liked Tom Lehrer second among the musical comedians whose records we had. Sherman was first. Third was Stan Freberg. It took me a while to grow into Lehrer's humor.

5. But I had by the time I went to university. It was about then that Lehrer's "The Irish Ballad" became the first original song whose lyrics I memorized.

6. A few years later, of course I went to see the musical revue Tomfoolery when a touring company came to our area.

7. Tom Lehrer trivia item no. 1: He is not the only person to have written a song titled "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." His is, however, the only one worth listening to.

8. Tom Lehrer trivia item no. 2: Here's Lehrer on The Frost Report adapting "New Math" to Britain's conversion to decimal currency.

donut scroll

I went up to the independent bookstore's counter as the two clerks and a customer were avidly discussing donuts: what kinds they like and dislike, what's good and what isn't. They solicited my opinion.

I said, "I'm a heretic. I think the Krispy Kreme is one of the most vile things I've ever tasted."

And they all agreed with me.

Really? I thought everybody loved the Krispy Kreme except me, which is why I phrased myself in that defensive manner.

So where do I get donuts?

I didn't say that I don't, not very often, because sugary treats have to be low on my priority list. But I did say that when I do, I go to little local donut shops that around my home are usually owned by people of Cambodian origin. I specified where I live: mind, that's 20 miles away from the bookstore and the ethnic/cultural mix is quite different there, but they seemed to know what I meant.

What variety? I usually get a chocolate-covered raised, and a chocolate cake if I'm getting two. I don't like jelly, I don't like cream.

What about fritters? the conversation turned. Are they donuts? Probably not, we decided. Are they not croissants? What? No, even less. But they're still good.

The same thing's true of pizza, even music. I should have mentioned bagels. And why, since we were in a bookstore, didn't we bring up genres of fiction? Saying that something doesn't belong in a class isn't a criticism, it's just a matter of proper classification. You have to understand what something is to appreciate it properly. Trying to stuff it in a category where it doesn't belong will only lead to unfair criticism of it for failure to be something it isn't.

I bought my book (nonfiction) and went on my way.

rain of errror

Reagan: His Life and Legend, Max Boot. (Liveright, 2024)

I found this large book in the library, picked it up and browsed the section on how Reagan won the 1966 California gubernatorial primary, a rather curious story. Boot gets the full tale right, so I checked the book out. Highly readable, discusses all of Reagan's career including both the artistic and economic sides of his movie-tv period. Does not stint on pointing out his habit of telling untrue stories as if they were true, his insistence that he wasn't racist while craftily making racist appeals, his strange evolution from a New Deal Democrat to a Barry Goldwater Republican, his presentation as a personable and friendly man while being completely alienated from all his children. Also explores why, then, he was so damned popular, partly that personable presentation and his quick-wittedness and (selectively) sharp memory, partly because his rather rigid acting background made him so good at speech-making but also because he was so good at writing his own speeches, something you don't expect of either an actor or a politician. Boot likes to end chapters with cliffhangers, which read oddly if you already know what's going to happen, like the chapter introducing his presidential administration which concludes, "And yet his presidential performance almost ended just sixty-nine days after it had begun."

And yet despite the sure command of detail, I found a few clanging factual errors. One of them appears twice:

1) After his wedding to Nancy and a reception in Toluca Lake, "Then the newlyweds drove sixty miles west in Ron's Cadillac convertible to Riverside, California, to spend their wedding night at the historic, Spanish-style Mission Inn." (p. 193)

2) His ranch ownership: "Reagan used part of the proceeds from the sale of Yearling Row to buy 778 acres in Riverside County, west of Los Angeles, for $347,000." (p. 285-6)

No, Max: Riverside is east of Los Angeles, not west. Drive 60 miles west from Toluca Lake and you'll be somewhere around Ventura.

In other erroneous news, I've discovered that there's a vast horde of people who've posted podcast videos on YouTube explaining things about Tolkien. If these were written down, I could glance over them quickly, but I'm not going to listen to them, especially as the only point of my doing so would be to see what they got right and what they got wrong. I did begin one which started with an outline of Tolkien's literary career, but stopped dead early on when the podcaster described The Hobbit as featuring "a large-footed creature called Bilbo Baggins." Oh, dear. Tolkien's hobbits are not "large-footed." They have hairy feet with leathery soles. Read the book, that's what it says. It's only in the movie that the necessity for prosthetic feet on the actors make their feet larger than normal. Don't describe the movies when you claim to be talking about the books.

concert review: Music@Menlo

I approached my first Menlo concert for review on Sunday with misgivings. A narrow slice of the repertoire, it consisted of four works all written during the same half-century (roughly 19C second half) from one small patch of central Europe. That's too default to be worth talking about - I don't like spending my limited review space complaining about the repertoire - while the only interesting thing the works had in common was in all being for three instruments, though not all the same three instruments.

But that seemed a rather esoteric theme to base my review on, so I was wondering how I'd do it.

I found my answer when we got to the third piece on the program, the Elegy by Josef Suk. Young violinist Jessica Lee simply ran circles around the two storied veterans she was playing with, so much so that if this was a meeting of the generations - as was suggested in the introduction to the concert - it was clearly the younger generation that had the goods.

And I realized that the same thing had been true of the second piece, Brahms's Clarinet Trio, which is basically a duet for clarinet and cello with piano accompaniment. Just with less vehemence. But the young cellist had played full of passion and color and a variety of tones and expressions, while the old clarinetist had been kind of bland by comparison. Bland, on a clarinet? The orchestral instrument with the most capacity for wild colorful expression? But yeah, he didn't exploit any of that.

So that was my theme, and while the other works on the program didn't show the same contrast, it was no trouble fitting them in to the theme. And here's the finished review.

choral celebration

B. doesn't sing much any more - medical reasons have put paid to it - but she dusted off her voice for a special occasion on Saturday. A concert was being held at San Jose State to celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Charlene Archibeque, long-time choral director in the music dept. About a hundred of her grateful former students - some local, some from across the country - were gathering to form an ad hoc choir for the occasion, and B. was perforce among them. She's long talked about how much she learned from being in a chorus under Dr. A., and this was the opportunity to show her respects.

I drove her down to the SJS music building that morning (having previously ferreted out the secret back alleyway in so that she didn't have to walk far) to drop her off for the chorus's one and only in-person rehearsal, and then came back for the concert in the afternoon. Dr. A. herself and several former students who've gone into choral conducting led a total of 16 items, most of them unaccompanied, a few with piano. They included pieces that Dr. A. had composed or arranged herself, mostly for her doctoral dissertation; a few classical standards including Anton Bruckner's supremely beautiful "Locus iste"; and several folksongs and spirituals, including this really striking arrangement of "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho."

The chorus sound was rich, full, and powerful throughout, and not just because it was a large group. Even after many years in most cases, these were good students who had been well-taught.

Afterwards, most of the chorus members and a few sundry like myself adjourned to a function room at a local hotel that had no available parking, for a reception/buffet and a lot of schmoozing among old fellow students. A small cake was presented to Dr. A. and everybody sang "Happy Birthday" at 7:15, because that was the date of her birthday.

Music@Menlo begins

The Menlo chamber music festival began on Friday, so I've got some catching up to do. Friday featured not a concert but a lecture. Aaron Boyd was to speak on the history of chamber music. I went because I'd heard Boyd lecture in past years: his profound erudition and eloquent lucidity always make for a delightful experience.

He began by saying that the size of the topic had thrown him for a loss. Seeking some guidance for a road through his topic, he turned to A.I. But while he tried a vast variety of prompts, he found that invariably the A.I. gave him what he called "completely useless blandnesses."

So, having already covered much of the central history in previous years' lectures, he focused on the edges. The first half was a prehistory, tracing from the first medieval definition of chamber music as any music played in private rooms, as distinct from church or theatrical music. (There were no public concerts then, apart from theatrical performances.) Instrumental music evolved from adaptations of vocal forms, and through Renaissance and Baroque forms like viol consort music and trio sonatas, chamber music as we'd know it had a long history by the time Haydn developed the modern string quartet; he didn't work in a vacuum.

The second half explored works fitting the definition of "late style" as coined by the critic Theodor Adorno, and then proposed that chamber music itself is in a "late style" crisis, identified by Milton Babbitt's infamous 1958 article, "Who Cares If You Listen?", proposing that new classical music should be addressed to a hermetic audience of specialists and not to the general pubic, hermetic obscurity being one of Adorno's hallmarks of "late style." Boyd went on to say that even the reaction against Babbitt's total serialism was still "late style": the general public isn't going to listen to a five-hour piece by Morton Feldman, either.

I think he's excluding a middle, here. The composers inspired by Feldman and Cage eschew their extremes too, and produce music that concert audiences want to hear, as any number of Menlo contemporary music concerts have demonstrated.

Still, Boyd is right in a larger sense, that even the general concert audience for classical music is a hermetic group now, preserving the relics of a grandiose lost past civilization we cannot re-create.

But there was some music on Friday after all, a Prelude concert by the International Program artists having preceded the lecture. A crunchy and urgent version of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op 1/3 was followed by Schumann's Piano Quintet with strikingly vehement solos in the slow movement by violist Sofia Gilchenok; I'll be looking out for her in later concerts.

not seeing Superman

B. wants to see the new Superman movie, enough to have ventured out to see it, but the theater she went to did not have a functioning restroom, so she gave up and left. One more strike against our city's downtown, which we rarely go to anyway.

I am not interested. The last Superman movie I saw was in 1978 with Christopher Reeve. This one has been acclaimed the best one since then, but the last time I saw a superhero movie because it was supposed to be really good was Iron Man in 2008 with Robert Downey Jr, and while he was good, the movie was the usual superhero crap. I saw the trailer for the new Superman which consists mostly of Superman trying to argue that he's not the bad guy. That he's not the bad guy? I don't need this.

I read a review of the movie which listed some other superhero characters who appear in it. Green Lantern I knew about, but to me Mister Terrific is the name of a short-lived 1960s tv comedy show about a gas station attendant who takes a pill that gave him short-lived superpowers. (I remember liking it a lot at the time, but I sought out an episode some years later and found that, like most of the other comedies I liked as a child, it was really bad.)

B., who knows a lot more about superhero comics than I do, tells me that no, there was a Superman-universe superhero called Mister Terrific, and that the tv show was probably named after it.

had a hammer

The doorbell rang this morning, and it wasn't a package delivery, which is what usually generates a doorbell ring here. It was a guy from the utility company, wanting to look at our gas meter.

This was slightly odd, as the same thing had happened the previous day.

The guy said the previous guy hadn't been able to get access to the meter.

Uh-oh, had we blocked it off or something? No, he just meant that the previous guy hadn't had the right tool with him.

It turned out, the new guy explained, that the valve on the pipe attached to the meter was partly underneath the concrete in the patio, and they had to get it free. (It's been this way for the 18 years we've lived here.) So the right tool turned out to be ... a jackhammer.

Not too large a dent in the concrete, and everything was swept up afterwards, and the cats were not as bothered by the loud noise as I'd thought. B. had on her noise-canceling headphones, and I just went upstairs.

dreamworld

I keep having this dream in which I'm the eldest of 6 or 8 children who've been kidnapped, or something, and we're each going to be asked a question, some type of relevant trivia knowledge I think. But though at the time I face the first question, I think I can identify the age and gender of all the other children as well as remember what the question is that each has been asked, by the time I get through that stage of the dream, all that knowledge has vanished and the dream crumbles. (I have particular trouble remembering dreams after I wake, thus even more of the vagueness of this account.)

Speaking of trivia questions, I've been watching compilations from a British quiz program called University Challenge, in which teams of undergraduates expose their knowledge, or, if the questions are about classical music as in these compilations, their ignorance. I've gotten used to identifications of Wagner's Lohengrin as by Leonard Bernstein, or not knowing a crumhorn when they see a picture of one, but this was a real gem. Played a piece of music and told it was from an opera overture and asked to name the opera, they were stumped.

The music was a pastoral theme for English horn and flute that you've probably heard in Bugs Bunny cartoons or even Bambi Meets Godzilla, and which in the overture immediately precedes what is surely the most famous tune in any opera overture anywhere. One team guessed La bohème and the other Carmen. No, it's the Ranz des vaches from Rossini's William Tell.

world according to cat, and more

Tybalt really does seem to find my weekly sorting of pills into pillboxes to be fascinating. Whenever I start it, he'll jump up and start inserting his nose in the business. I've managed to dissuade him before he gets to the point of eating the pills. He also likes knocking pill bottles to the floor. When I'm done, he goes back to wherever he was resting before. We call him my assistant.

B. is struggling with trying to get her new CD player to pair with her older headphones. They're both Bluetooth-enabled, and Bluetooth is supposed to be a universal standard, but apparently not. It's probably something like USB, which may I remind you stands for universal serial bus, but there are now at least four different sizes of USB plugs and ports, and woe if you have the wrong one for where it's supposed to go. So maybe there are different kinds of Bluetooth. They should name the new standard Forkbeard, as he was the next king of Denmark after Bluetooth.

Out on errands and needing lunch, I thought I'd revisit the Thai restaurant in a convenient shopping center. It was OK, never that great, but it'd been a long time since I'd been there. It's gone, replaced by a new Chinese Malatang outlet. This is like the fifth one I've come across in the last couple months of a type of cuisine I'd never heard of before. Malatang is a little bit like Mongolian barbecue in that you take a bowl, fill it with raw ingredients from a buffet, and hand it in for cooking. It's different in the ingredients and the seasoning - typical Malatang is soup, though there are also some dry versions - you pay by the weight, and you can't watch it being cooked. Ingredients are roughly the same between outlets but vary a bit. Some have lots of veggies, some few, some with broccoli, some with bok choy. Some have fish, some don't. Some peel their shrimp, some don't. Meat is always shaved beef and lamb, but there might be pork, might be bbq. There's also plenty of weird stuff, which the westerner tries at their peril. (I did not find cow throat edible.) There are no serving utensils in the containers; you take a pair of tongs with your bowl at the beginning. The quarters are always very clean, which is not always true of Mongolian barbecue. I've been getting kind of used to Malatang and will probably have some more.

a 17th-century joke

I thought this was pretty funny. B. didn't get it. How say you?

A melting* Sermon being preached in a Country Church, all fell a weeping, except a Country man, who being ask'd why he did not weep with the rest?
'Because' (says he) 'I am not of this Parish.'

*I presume 'melting' means 'causing the hearts of the hearers to melt.'

Source: The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, compiled by Frank Muir (OUP, 1990)

the end of Westercon

The business meeting of this year's Westercon, last weekend, passed a motion to retire Westercon, to put an end to a nearly 80-year sequence of annual science-fiction conventions. It will need to be ratified next year, and any seated conventions will still be held, so unless it's rejected next year, the last Westercon will probably be no. 80 in 2028. I wasn't at the meeting, but you can read about it and, if you're really a glutton for it, watch a half-hour video of the whole thing here.

How have the mighty fallen. When I was active in fandom in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Westercon was the king of the west coast convention calendar, behind only Worldcon in importance to fans in the area. It was large, maybe 2000 people, full of activity and a great place to expect to meet friends. There were plenty of other large regional conventions around, but Westercon was a centerpiece. Like Worldcon but unlike most other convention series, it moved from city to city each year, so nobody had to carry the entire burden of responsibility for running it. But, once shared, the responsibility was welcome. For instance, Portland had a big annual local convention, Orycon, in the fall. But for nearly 20 years, every five years or so they'd also hold a Westercon, in July. It wasn't too much of a challenge.

Westercon had grown to meet a need. It was in 1948 that LASFS, the LA club, had decided to hold a one-day event to assuage the needs of those who couldn't afford to attend the Worldcon on the east coast. After a few years it got bigger and longer, and started to be hosted in other cities, but for 20 years or more, Westercon served this role of a substitute. When the Worldcon was held on the west coast, no separate Westercon was held - there was no need for it.

But by the 1970s, Westercon had begun to exist for its own sake. 1972 was the first year there was both a Worldcon and a separate Westercon on the west coast. They were both in the LA area. Around the same time, local conventions began growing up: Loscon in LA (starting as a revival of the original format of Westercon), Orycon in Portland, Norwescon in Seattle, Baycon in San Jose, all began in the 70s or early 80s. But Westercon flourished along with them.

But sometime after the year 2000, Westercon began to diminish while other conventions continued to prosper. I'm not familiar enough with the fannish milieu of the time to understand why, but Westercons became much smaller and more obscure. I went to a couple in this period and was really surprised by how the atmosphere had changed.

In recent years it's been suffering from organizational ennui. Every Westercon but one (Tonopah in 2022) since 2014 has been co-hosted with another convention, usually as an add-on to a better-established partner. And for three consecutive years recently there was no qualified bidder, and a special committee had to figure out how to get the convention held. Maybe, Kayla Allen suggested in proposing the motion, there just isn't a need for our product any more.

But as mentioned, what I don't understand is why this has happened. Ben Yalow and Michael Siladi, also experienced conrunners supporting the motion, both suggested that the rise of other regional/local conventions on the west coast has sapped interest away from Westercon, but as Ben pointed out, that phenomenon dates back to the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Westercon was still flourishing in that period. The decline came later. What happened?

100 best

Here's a list of the New York Times's idea of the 100 best movies so far of the century of years beginning with a "20", to be precise about it. It's a little behind; there are no movies on the list from 2025, and none from 2024, either. But it's an interesting list that balances between acclaimed popular movies and more abstruse critical darlings with a lot in between also.

I've seen 37 of the 100 films, of which I'd name 10 as real favorites, which I identify as movies I've re-watched for pleasure, sometimes skipping over parts but usually in full. Those ten, from the top on the list of 100, are:
Mulholland Drive (2)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (7)
Zodiac (19)
Moneyball (45)
Inception (55)
Memento (62)
Spotlight (66)
Ocean's Eleven (71)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (76)
Inside Llewyn Davis (83)

Two Christopher Nolan movies, two Coen brothers movies. That doesn't mean I like all their movies.

Of the 37, there are also 8 which I found disappointing or annoying in at least some respects. Interestingly, while one of my top ten, Mulholland Drive, is near the top of the list at #2, it is immediately followed at #3 by the movie I saw in full that I disliked more than any other, There Will Be Blood (yes, worse than The Fellowship of the Ring, #87).

The other 19 that I saw I enjoyed watching well enough.

Besides the 37, there are 4 that bored or irritated me so much that I gave up on them early on. I'd rather explain why I hated a movie than why I loved it, so they are:
Roma (46) - Even the opening credits bored me to tears, and nothing that happened in the next five minutes changed my mind, so I turned it off.
Whiplash (60) - The teacher is such a human cretin that, were I the student, I would probably have punched him in the face before walking out and never returning.
The Hurt Locker (68) - I explained my problem with this one in a post titled action movies in which the only reason the hero doesn't die is that heroes don't die
The Florida Project (74) - Begins with three six-year-olds gleefully spitting onto their neighbor's new car for no reason other than that they can. Do I want to spend a whole movie with such obnoxious kids? Off.

1984 revisited

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984, Dorian Lynskey. (Doubleday, 2019)

B. is re-reading 1984, first time since high school. I also read it in high school, not I think for a class, but I've never attempted to re-read it. It's the bleakest, darkest novel I've ever read, it was searingly memorable and remains fresh in my thoughts, but I don't ever want to delve into it again. I've re-read other dystopias, like The Handmaid's Tale, but Offred remains defiant until the end. Orwell's Winston is just totally crushed, and the rest of the book tends to foreshadow that.

So instead I read this book about 1984. It's in two parts. Orwell said that 1984 was the summation of everything he'd read and done since the Spanish Civil War, which is where he discovered that both sides can be totalitarian. Lynskey goes through all of the ingredients, directly contributory or not, spending a lot of attention on Animal Farm, which is deeply thematically related. Lynskey also disposes of any notion that the year 1984 is any sort of code for 1948, as often suggested. That Winston's environment is based on austerity post-war Britain is a red herring. Orwell picked that as something he could depict, not out of secret hatred of the Labour government.

Orwell died less than a year after the book was published. The second half is the book's posthumous career. This includes consideration of just about every major dystopia concocted in English-language literature or film since then, even if (like Fahrenheit 451 or Brazil) they've little to do with and weren't inspired by 1984. There's also a long and gratifyingly detailed discussion of The Prisoner. But it also covers film and stage adaptations of 1984 itself, and lots of what people have said about the book or about What Orwell Would Be Saying Today. About this last genre, Lynskey is appropriately caustic. "The most inflammatory reputation grab was a story by Norman Podhoretz. 'Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise,' he acknowledged, before gamely pressing on to insist that an octogenarian Orwell would have said that Norman Podhoretz was right."

Orwell's particular balanced perspective is widely misunderstood. Normally, especially in Orwell's day but even now, critics of fascism and other leftists tend to make excuses for the Soviet Union and other communist regimes: they're not so bad, Stalin's show trials were misjudged, etc. Visitors to the USSR like Bernard Shaw were totally gulled. Even Jon Carroll writing on Elian Gonzalez thought that Elian's mother was unhinged to make a dangerous flight from the communist paradise of Cuba. And anti-communists tend to have a similar soft spot for the right. Jeane Kirkpatrick praising any dictatorship on the map as long as it was right-wing. Robert Conquest, brilliant excoriator of Soviet terror, offering comparisons as if making excuses for everyone else except the Nazis.

Orwell wasn't like that. He hated totalitarianism, and he hated it equally from either side of the spectrum. He didn't think that the sins of one side made the other side acceptable. People can't see that balance, especially right-wingers who see the depiction of the Soviet-style government in 1984 and especially the Soviet allegory in Animal Farm and assume Orwell would be a right-winger, in favor of capitalism. You'd have to ignore the opening of Animal Farm entirely to think that.

Somebody once summarized Orwell's philosophy - and I think Lynskey quotes this but I can't find it now - as "Capitalism is a disease, socialism is the cure, and communism would kill the patient." Keep that in mind, and your preconceptions won't fool you about Orwell.

talk to the police

Every once in a while YouTube shows me a link to a video urging its watchers never to talk to the police. I've never watched one of these videos - lectures on haranguing topics are not a high priority in my life - but I have looked the question up on Quora and Reddit. There it appears that the urgers don't mean this literally. For instance, when I was in a crumpling three-car auto accident, calling the police and talking to them could hardly be avoided, and it was clear that I wasn't at fault.

But otherwise the answer seems to depend on who's giving it. Police writing say that innocent people should always talk with the police, who just want to gather as much evidence as possible. Others, especially lawyers, say no! no! Whenever there's a crime involved, ask to get a lawyer first. Some say only if you're being detained to be questioned.

And the reason for all this is that the more you say, the more opportunity the police have to twist your words into evidence of your guilt. I know this happens. I've seen a number of accounts of cases where the police, having made a preliminary survey, take a first guess as to the culprit, and then devote the entirety of their attention to finding, sometimes even concocting, evidence of that person's guilt, ignoring anything that points to their innocence or to guilt lying in another direction.

OK, I thought, but if you're an innocent person terrified that the police might fasten on you as the presumed guilty suspect, wouldn't defensive insisting on a lawyer only make the police more likely to suspect you?

I just found some evidence, admittedly in a fictional movie, for that point of view. The movie was The Town, which I came across on Netflix. I hadn't heard of it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a crime drama which got good reviews. So I watched it, and it was indeed a good movie. It's about a bank robber, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with his hostage. Well, it's more complicated than that. First the robbers, who are masked during the crime, let the hostage go. Then they decide to tail her, and that's how Affleck meets her without her having any idea that he's one of the bank robbers. It's set in Boston, which I think is required for movies starring Ben Affleck, and is full of Boston accents coming out of unlikely people like Jeremy Renner.

Anyway, quite early on, the ex-hostage (Rebecca Hall) is being interviewed by the lead FBI agent (Jon Hamm). Worried that she might be considered complicit because she opened the safe at the robbers' orders, she asks, "Should I have a lawyer here?" and he replies, "This isn't a very civil libertarian thing of me to say, but anyone who lawyers up is guilty."

So I guess you should take that under advisement too.

well ...

With the country in the state it's in, I needed something offbeat to commemorate Independence Day, and then YouTube dropped this in my lap:

Frank Sinatra sings "America the Beautiful"
(an impression by Mel Brooks)

chirps

Chirp. It was the smoke detector in our bedroom, waking us to inform that the battery needed to be replaced. Or so we thought. Upon inspection, it turned out the battery couldn't be replaced on this one. You had to buy a new detector. Wait for the hardware store to open for the morning, then find one of the same model, so it fit on the same brackets. Sort of. Anyway, it's up and alert now.

Boom. That, I presume, was the sound of the warehouse full of fireworks exploding after it caught on fire, a couple days ago. Although it was after hours and out in the countryside, seven people were reported missing. It may be a while before this can be put out; fireworks keep exploding. At least one local town had been relying on those fireworks for its July 4th show, which has been canceled. Be careful out there.

Smof. It means ... well, it means someone experienced in running science-fiction conventions. One such has written that the unopposed bid for the next Worldcon up is woefully unequipped to do its job. This is the sort of thing smofs often say about Worldcon bids, whether or not it turns out to be true. The smof recommends voting No Award, er I mean None of the Above, so that the Worldcon Business Meeting will decide what to do. Reading the very serious comments on this post, I decided it was better not to post my snarky comment, which would have been, "Maybe we should put the Worldcon on a boat." But I'm not sure how many readers will have been around long enough to remember what that's a reference to.
Update: Worldcon bid in question has responded with a puff piece. This does not instill confidence.

Meow. A cat walking in front of my monitor, hoping for an early breakfast, made it difficult for me to read the announcement of the impending publication of Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats. This is apparently a collection of unpublished or obscure pieces, many of them whimsical, rather than e.g. an omnibus of Catwings.

Speaking of cats ... This was on xkcd a few days ago: