petty annoyances of the week

1. It was still officially winter until Friday, but the weather out here skipped spring and went straight into summer. Temperatures were around 90, hotter in LA. The cats were lying on the linoleum.

2. My car was in the shop for repairs after the stupid U Haul driver clipped me a couple weeks ago. They said it was a 4-day job, so I brought it in Monday morning, but I wasn't able to pick it up until literally ten minutes before they closed for the weekend on Friday. I'd been able to survive the week without a rental (which I'd have had to pay for myself), making necessary errands in B's car, but I'll need my own this weekend, so it's good that's over. The shop did do a very nice job, and cleaned up the interior too.

2a. In the shop's waiting area were magazines to browse, some of them issues of a body shop trade journal called Fender Bender. Most of its contents were about the economics of the trade, but each issue has a puff profile of a shop. One of these is in San Francisco, and the article said it had a branch in Moraine County. That's "moraine" as in what a glacier leaves behind. It's actually Marin.

3. I can't get into the Social Security website to download my 1099. They've changed their login to require a smartphone to jump through the hoops, and like a lot of older Social Security recipients, I have a dumb phone. They don't tell you that you need a smartphone, of course. First is the two-factor ID, so they text you a code. That a dumbphone can handle, but it's the last thing. Then they want you to snap a photo of your ID, but there's actually an option at the bottom, "I don't have a smartphone." That's the last time you'll see that. It offers an upload. So off to FedEx to make a PDF. Then when you try to upload it, they tell you it doesn't take PDFs, only JPGs. Find a site that converts them. Then they tell you your files are too small. Find a site that promises to increase the size of your files. Discover that it reduces them instead. Find another site that actually does as it promises. Upload the files. Then you have to click on a verification URL the site sends to your phone. I can't do that, I don't have a smartphone, remember? I already told you that. Painstakingly copy the long link text to my desktop browser. Get in and answer the questions, but then it says the link has expired because I took too long.
At this point I give up, having not even gotten to the promised final step, which is "a brief video call." I can do video calls, I do them all the time on Zoom, but by now I suspect it will only accept your cell phone number, and I can't do video calls on a dumb phone.
Go to the pre-login part of the SSA website. Tells me I can get the 1099 online. No I can't. Get address of local office. Will go in on Monday morning.

wtf, Cesar Chavez?

The news broke locally a few days ago, and has now percolated out to the general media: charges have been made that Cesar Chavez, the revered farm labor activist, was a sexual molester. Dolores Huerta, his long-time colleague, has said that he both raped and seduced her, and was the father of some of her children. Huerta revealed this in support of two other women who report that Chavez molested them when they were in their teens and he was in his forties. And more have come out.

I didn't write about this earlier because I needed time to process this disturbing news. Chavez has been considered a secular saint at least since his death in 1993. His name is all over buildings and plazas and sidewalks and such like around California and probably elsewhere. Parades are held in his name. His home is a national monument, also with his name on it. There's a near-hagiographical bio-pic starring Michael Peña. His birthday - which is also mine, so I feel a kind of granfalloonish personal connection to him - is a state holiday in California.

Are we to erase all of that? It would be like taking Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson out of the South, wouldn't it? (Something which has not been very comprehensively done.)

Huerta has been sitting on this charge for some 60 years. She says she never said anything about it earlier because it would have harmed the farmworkers movement. Or maybe nobody would have believed her, though perhaps that block has been removed since the Harvey Weinstein case. But that was less than ten years ago, and Chavez had already been elevated to secular sainthood long before that.

The thing is, though, that it's long been known that Chavez was "no angel," as cops like to say of the people they murder on the streets. Chavez was a cruel authoritarian boss, he enforced stereotyped gender roles, he indulged in anti-semitism, he neglected his family, he was pals with Ferdinand Marcos, he was already a known adulterer. We named things for him while overlooking or ignoring these facts. Some of this - notably some shocking misogyny and the neglect of his family - even pop up in that hagiographical bio-pic. As with others of this kind, he was considered a good man - or maybe a great man, which is not the same as "good" - despite his flaws.

But now it turns out ... such a shame, such a horror. Wtf, Cesar Chavez?

more than it seems?

Is Alysa Liu actually happy to be posing with this police officer?

She's giving the British version of "the finger."

breakfast

As a small boy I ate cold cereal for breakfast. I liked sugary treats like Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs, but some cereals like Cap'n Crunch I found over-sugared and would not eat. I also wouldn't touch anything with marshmallow bits in it, so no Lucky Charms.

I ate these dry. At the age of 9 I started finding the taste of milk to be sour and spoiled - I had probably developed a slight allergy - so I simply stopped using it.

As an adult my tastes changed to more boring cereals, like Special K and Product 19. I never much cared for corn flakes, though.

On special occasions, or when eating out for breakfast, I'd go for an omelet or scrambled eggs and sausage. But whatever the breakfast, I never ate very much in the mornings, preferring a large early lunch.

Eventually health reasons led me to give up cereals and I turned to fruit. For a long time this was apples, and I developed a taste for tart but crisp and sweet apples, like Fujis and Braeburns. Occasionally I'd spell these with pears.

But after a while I started finding apples too heavy to eat. I tried other fruits. I liked kiwis, and they're supposed to be good for you, so for a while I ate that. But I found, to my surprise, that while a kiwi as a special treat is great, as a regular diet they quickly palled. I eventually settled on a can of mandarin orange slices. No peeling or tearing up, simple to eat.

That worked fine until I started having trouble swallowing. Oranges would not chew up into mush that I could get down. When I was in the hospital and they put me on a liquid diet, I was surprised to find for breakfast cream of wheat. Did that count as liquid? But I could get it down.

On coming home, I settled on packets of instant cream of wheat. B. has a little kettle that boils water in a jiffy, and a small measuring cup used only for water, so I can fix it easy with a little salt substitute and a lot of margarine added. My dietician approves; she wants the fats and the calories in my otherwise meager diet.

The first time I stopped in at the grocers to buy some more cream of wheat, I discovered to my delight that there was also instant grits. I'm a northerner but I've always had a taste for southern US food, and I love grits. They're basically cream of wheat except with corn (maize). So now I alternate between the two, finishing one box of packets before turning to the other.

And that's my breakfast these days.

context!

A friend wrote about a vehicle service appointment where they recommended some future work which she did not want to do at this time, and I replied:

I put off some non-urgent matters at my last car service appointment, and now I'm getting regular automatically-generated e-mails (I almost wrote "auto-generated," which would be misleading in this context) reminding me that I need this stuff.

a pair of concerts

I attended two concerts last weekend, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Both were nonprofessional groups I've heard before, so I was prepared for the playing to be a little dicey, but the choice of programs interested me.

The Saratoga Symphony featured Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 1, which conductor Jason Klein said is never played. Maybe not, but I'm sure I'd heard it before, I don't know where, but it sounded awfully familiar. It's a rather declamatory work, opening with a proclamatory call for horn, repeated in trumpet, which proceeds to dominate the first movement. Fortunately, if you can call it that, we had a declamatory soloist in Natalya Lundtvedt, so the result wasn't imbalanced.

Also on the program, a set of tone poems by Max Reger, no more uninteresting than usual for Reger, a rather fetid overture by Cherubini, and an unsatisfactorily airy orchestration of Debussy's "The Engulfed Cathedral."

The tiny string orchestra Harmonia California had a bit of a hit with a Serenade in E Minor by Robert Fuchs, one of those obscure late 19C German composers who play bit parts in biographies of Brahms and the like. The Allegretto movement of this one was both stately and stealthy, had real charm, and was played quite well.

They did well enough in short pieces by Gershwin and Granados (misspelled in the program, I notice), but struggled in the muck with Carl Nielsen's "Little Suite." However, the Bach Third Brandenburg as a closer worked very well, the more impressively as it was without a conductor, director Kristin Link having picked up an instrument and disappeared into the middle of the violins.

Oscar the semi-grouch

I didn't watch the Oscars, I just brought up the results afterwards on a news site. Having only seen two of the nominated films, I didn't have much stake in the outcome, but I was kind of curious.

As expected, it was a showdown between One Battle After Another and Sinners for the big prizes, and they split the two screenplay awards. Sinners is said to be a horror movie, so I'm not going to see it. No argument, no discussion, I'm just not.

I did, however, see One Battle After Another, and to my surprise I rather liked it. This is a surprise because I've seen three previous Paul Thomas Anderson movies, I didn't much like one and detested both of the others. But this one was good, and rewatchable.

The movie is in two parts, the first and shorter part taking place 16 years before the other. This part was a little hard to follow on first watching, as the characters are dumped on you before they're introduced, so it's hard to figure out what's going on and who's doing it. But on a rewatch, when you can recognize them, it's clear, especially with the help of subtitles.

Part 2, however, is crystal clear from the beginning. It is essentially one long chase scene, though as there are breaks in the storytelling and the identities of chased and chaser do sometimes change, it could be called one chase scene after another. But it felt to me like one long chase scene. But a very exciting and well-paced one as well as clearly told. It wraps up very well, too. That the father and daughter, who have been the object of most of the chasing, are finally at ease with one another by the end, so much so that they're comfortable going off and doing separate things, was particularly heart-warming.

This movie is not for everyone (I wouldn't recommend it to B.), but for what it is it's a good one.

a guide

I wrote to Pat Murphy. I said we all liked her book, there was just one small error. She asked for more information. I sent her an explanation. Rather than being put off by this core dump, she thanked me for it and asked if she could copy my e-mail to another author who was interested. I said don't bother, I've put the whole thing online. Pass it along to anyone who's interested.

So here it is, "A Guide to Terms of Address for British Nobility." Let me know if there's anything wrong, or anything left out you think is necessary.

review redux

A few days ago, I reviewed a performance of Aleksey Igudesman's The Music Critic. I didn't like it very much. Today, Joshua Kosman slammed it more than I did.

Like me, he noted that it's "essentially the live-music version of" Nicolas Slonimsky's book The Lexicon of Musical Invective but without any credit to Slonimsky. But Kosman would go further than I would. He says that "to imply that [Beethoven's contemporaries] were buffoons for not understanding that music on first hearing is craven nonsense." No, what they're buffoons for is ludicrously inaaccurate denunciations of it. What's fair, if you don't understand the music, is to express your wonderment and bewilderment, like Berlioz's composition teacher who said that, at the end of the concert where he first heard Beethoven's Fifth, he went to put on his hat and could not find his head.

Imagine having that reaction to this now-best-known of all classical works! That's the kind of feeling I'd like to recapture.

Igudesman's subtext is that critics are only there to complain about music they don't like. Unfortunately in Kosman's case that is often correct. He'd rather spend a review complaining about Carmina Burana than judging whether it's a good performance whether he likes the work or not. I try not to do that.

Kosman left at intermission, judging that he wouldn't be missing anything worthwhile. He didn't. I stayed till just before the end, when I finally got fed up, and I could just as well not have gone at all for anything I got out of it.

books with erorrs

The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy (Tachyon, 2025)

This book does to Peter Pan what Wicked does to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: entirely deconstructs it. In this story, when the children disappear, their mother goes on a quest to find them. She's well-equipped to do so, having - it turns out - been with the Lost Boys in her youth; so was the children's father; so was Captain Hook. Captain Hook is a good guy, almost the only admirable male in the story. Peter is not a little boy who wouldn't grow up, but an entirely amoral and very dangerous though not entirely wicked spirit. That last is derivable from Barrie, but he doesn't emphasize it.

The first thing Mrs. Darling does is enlist the help of her Uncle John. That's John H. Watson, M.D., so his famous friend immediately jumps in. This book is a Sherlock Holmes story to which Holmes is entirely superfluous. He doesn't solve the mystery or do much of anything. In fact he's shown up as something of a patsy. Towards the end, there's some hasty backtracking by other characters in which they explain that Holmes is actually very talented in his limited sphere of expertise, but it is so very limited. The problem is that Holmes comes from a world with the same physical rules as our primary world, but he's stumbled into an alternate world with spirits and fairy dust in it, so his rules no longer apply but he doesn't know it.

The story actually made enjoyable reading, so where's the error? (Yes, I misspelled that deliberately above, damn you.) Murphy makes clear in the afterword that she aimed for historical accuracy in anything she didn't make up, but she made a huge clunker that fiction authors writing about British history make constantly, and that is ignorance of the nomenclature of British nobility. There's a character sometimes called Lady Hawkins and sometimes Lady Emily Hawkins. She can't be both at the same time. They mean entirely different things. "Lady" or "Lord" are not free-floating terms that can be used wherever you want. She is, like many wives of British peers at the time, an American heiress by origin, so she cannot be Lady Emily, which would make her the daughter of a high-ranking British peer, like the daughters of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey, who are all Lady Firstname Crawley. That her husband is called both Lord Hawkins and Lord Robert Hawkins is equally impossible; if he is Lord Robert Hawkins, then his wife's proper style would be the bizarre but real Lady Robert Hawkins. (See Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon, where Harriet Vane, by now married to Lord Peter Wimsey, gives her style correctly as Lady Peter Wimsey.)

Victoria: A Life, A.N. Wilson (Penguin, 2014)

This is a readable and interesting book, so why is it filled with so many clunkers? On p. 166, Wilson says that Lord John Russell served as Foreign Secretary in the 1852 coalition headed by the Earl of Derby. No he didn't. He was Foreign Secretary in the following government, a coalition headed by the Earl of Aberdeen. Derby's government was not a coalition. Since Wilson goes on to tell us about Derby, this isn't just a glitch in name. On p. 192, Wilson says "A child was born to the marriage," but he had not told us who got married. Prince Albert died on December 14, 1861, as the text makes clear, but on p. 259, Wilson tells us that "A year on, in 1862, the Queen prepared herself for her first Christmas as a widow." Say there, Wilson, what day is Christmas?

impatient crash

Where the small access street to our development meets the main artery, there's a traffic light, and the exit direction of the small access street splits into two lanes.

Therein lies the rub, because the left lane of those two is a left-turn-only lane, clearly marked with an arrow on the pavement. That leaves the right lane, which has no markings, for both going forward and turning right.

I was in my car at the front of this lane, waiting at a red light, because I was going forward. Behind me was a U-Haul truck whose driver wanted to turn right. He thought I had to turn right too - which I could have done safely, had that been my intent - and got impatient. So - since there was nobody in the left lane - he decided to go around me.

At that moment the light turned green, and - not seeing this truck pulling this dangerous maneuver - I started to move forward. And he came around and clipped me, wrecking my left headlight cover and a bunch of other stuff. So, instead of saving 3 seconds, he wasted half an hour, because that's how long it took to settle things after we pulled over.

"Why didn't you go?" he asked me.

"The light was red," I replied.

"You could have turned right safely," he said.

"I wasn't turning right. I was going forward," I replied.

"Then you should have been in the other lane," he said.

"That's a dedicated left turn lane," I replied.

He then went over and looked at it, and what he thought after seeing the arrow on the pavement - which he could easily have seen when he was behind me - I don't know.

I got very angry with him and he responded by calling the police. The cops were bemused by what was a civil dispute, not a criminal matter, and mediated our exchange of information. One of the cops advised me not to get angry, with an implication that I did so as some kind of negotiating tactic. I said I expressed anger because I was angry. He said it wasn't a big deal, insurance will cover it.

Well, it won't. I have a large deductible, my insurance doesn't cover the cost of a rental car while mine is in the shop, and that doesn't count the nuisance and fuss of dealing with all this. My usual body shop has abruptly gone out of business, to my surprise, so I had to get the insurer to find another one on their approved list. I hope the insurer agrees that I wasn't responsible for this. That the other driver tried this tight going-around maneuver in a large truck is what seemed most to impress my insurance adjuster.

concert (sort of) review: San Francisco Symphony (sort of)

I heard an ad for this on the radio, and it sounded interesting: something called The Music Critic - ok, my latter-day profession, so I'm curious already - apparently some sort of one-man show starring John Malkovich, but at Davies, the SF Symphony hall.

It wasn't a one-man show. It was two men and an orchestra. Essentially it was a musically-illustrated version of Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, "written and conceived" by violinist/conductor Aleksey Igudesman, who conducted the SFS in various pieces while Malkovich, miked at a music stand with his script on it, read aloud critical denunciations of the composers over (and occasionally under) the music.

Not necessarily old ones, either (Slonimsky published his Lexicon in 1953), though there were a few classics, like Tchaikovsky calling Brahms "a giftless bastard" or César Cui's description of a Rachmaninoff symphony as the product of "a conservatory in Hell." (No credit to Cui, though, or to most of the other critics, and certainly not to Slonimsky for having thought of this idea first.)

But there were also newer ones, e.g. several claims that Beethoven is a barrier to contemporary appreciation of classical music, or even that he's unappreciable by LGBTQ+ people. At one point Malkovich read negative You Tube comments on Igudesman's videos, enabling Igudesman to respond with Max Reger's famous dismissal of criticism as if he, Igudesman, had thought of it - though, as it refers to paper, it makes no sense in an online context.

At the end, the program fell apart. Igudesman coaxed Malkovich into reading critical reviews of Malkovich's own stage performances, after which Malkovich left the stage and Igudesman announced he was going to play something evidently as a quick encore, but then Malkovich came back on stage to interrupt with incoherent critiques of the way Igudesman was playing. This was supposed to be funny but was witless and annoying. The second time it happened, I just got up and left. I'd had enough.

the evil dex

The late blogger Kevin Drum was under treatment for many years for multiple myeloma, which eventually killed him about a year ago. He wrote often about his medical adventures, and had particularly strong feelings about a medication he was on, a steroid named dexamethasone, which he called "the evil dex."

What exactly was evil about it he never made exactly clear, but it seems that it prevented him from sleeping, leaving him groggy all the time.

I do not have myeloma, but I have been taking intermittent courses of dexamethasone - one to four days each - and have to report differently. It doesn't seem to have caused any disruption in my sleep, which has actually been getting less disrupted lately, and though that may be because I was taking the dex in the mornings, I've had it in the afternoons with no further effect.

What it does cause is a spike in blood sugar, which has to be watched over carefully. And either it or some of the other medications I've been taking at the same time has been causing constipation, about which the less said the better.

mystery solved

At Corflu, where the banquet was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, I was pretty sure I'd been to that restaurant before. Having gotten home, I went to leave a review on Yelp and discovered that not only had I been there (nine years ago, a wonder I remembered it) but I'd reviewed it.

Had I checked my review, I could have been definite on something I was trying vaguely to recall during conversations at the banquet. The food line offered two kinds of plantains, green and sweet. What I recalled was getting a mixture and liking one but not the other, but I couldn't remember which one. Turned out that what I'd written back then was, "The fried green plantains were fairly dry and crunchy, the sweet ones far too intensely sweet and got over anything they touched."

That was in contrast to general opinion at the banquet, which is that the green ones were inedible while the sweet ones were quite good. (I didn't have either this time.)

convention report: Corflu 43

Although I still receive a few fanzines, I consider myself retired from fanzine fandom, which is pretty much why I hadn't been to a Corflu, the annual convention of that small and elitist fraternity, in 15 years. But this one was to be in Santa Rosa, easily accessible from home, and the membership list was full of people I knew and would like to see again. So why not.

It felt like I'd never left. Conversations were resumed without any hitch. Only the visuals were startling. Many of us, and I don't except myself from this, have aged so much as to be hardly recognizable at first after a long time gap. And the number of physical infirmities and mobility aids was impressive. It's a sign of the times that, when 14 of us headed out on a group expedition to the Charles M. Schulz Museum (which I'd been to before more than once, but it's an excellent museum well worth revisiting), we all qualified for the senior discount but one, and she was given it by courtesy.

The hotel was a comfy Marriott just outside of downtown, with plenty of restaurants within walking distance, though because of my dietary restrictions I refrained from joining in. But I did risk the convention banquet, which was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, a favorite of Rich Coad, the convention chair. I was able to nibble at the ground beef picadillo, and some seasoned rice and beans, all delicious. It was an excellent choice of venue, at least for all of us, and the convention was altogether superbly run, so kudos to Rich and all the committee.

Interesting programming, too, curated by Jeanne Bowman. A couple panels on Bay Area fannish history, one on the Magic Cellar, which as moderator Deb Notkin aptly described it, was a nightclub that felt like home to the fans who frequented it; I was lucky enough to be one of its denizens for the last year of its existence in 1977-8. And a panel on local fandom of the 80s, which while it paid notice to the local clubs, the Little Men and PenSFA, which I frequented, concentrated on a circle focused in San Francisco some of whose members I knew well but which as a group I had no connection with.

Panels also on contemporary fan editing and APAs. I haven't belonged to an apa in 20 years, so some of the discussion of their migration away from print was news to me. I agree with the general opinion that an online discussion community isn't an apa, but the production of apazines as PDFs and their distribution over email, saving both the expense and time of physical mail - especially for international members - seemed a good idea, despite a song by Sandra Bond poking fun at the whole idea of efanzines that was sung lustily at closing ceremonies.

Of lighter programming, charades based on fanzine titles was a little dubious, especially as many of the attendees, including those tasked to do the charading, hadn't heard of some of the titles, and having them be ones we recognized was the whole point. On the other hand, slam storytelling - you get the microphone for five minutes, tell an amusing anecdote from your life - worked very well. The convention theme was pickles, so the storytellers worked that in somehow. In only a couple cases did that involve physical pickled cucumbers, but all the rest told of being in a pickle. Mostly stories of travel or of animals, or both. Tom Whitmore and Karen Anderson's story of transporting pet cats by car was perhaps the most amusing.

The Guest of Honor, name picked out of a hat as customary, was Jerry Kaufman, and his GoH speech at the banquet, on the embarrassing circumstances long ago which is why he never gives speeches, could have been another entry in the previous evening's storytelling. Past president of fwa, an honorary position chosen by acclamation, was Jeanne Gomoll. Geri Sullivan and Pat Virzi showed around the current draft of a book of Corflu memorabilia they're editing. Next year's Corflu will be in Vancouver BC, run by some of the same people running this one plus sundry.

I had a good time. I picked up a bunch of interesting-looking fanzines. I'm glad I came. Health permitting, I should resume going more often.