Thanks to All

June Begins on Sunday

Many minds came together, and many hands worked together. This poster indicates that the new loading zones and no-stopping signs are coming to Pine and Spruce in June. 

See also Mayor Parker Signs No Stopping Bill.

Just Another Picture

What the Future Holds

In case you're interested, Donald Trump is staring at his own death. He actually seems a bit surprised. He's turning 79 next month, so he shouldn't be surprised. Maybe he thought he was going to live forever. I just turned 78. Donnie should grow up and face the music.

Meanwhile, little Mikey Johnson is also staring at Trumpie's death, and he seems quite happy, not to say smug. He knows in his heart that JD Vance - the Tool of Thiel -  won't last long. And then he - Master Mikey - will ascend to the throne - oops, the White House. It will not be a techno-fascist state. It will be a theocratic fascist state. 

Or maybe they will once again come up just a bit short. A falling out among thieves can go in a bunch of different directions. 

See also Sacrilege, Elon Musk Is a Martian, The Tool of Thiel in Thule, Unleashing the Oligarchs.

Evening on the Boardwalk

Finding Peace, With or Without a Crowd

Asbury Park's boardwalk becomes a different place at the end of the day. Usually there are fewer people, and the light is softer. The world is suggesting to us, by reducing the intensity of our environment, that it might be time to reduce our internal intensity. 

There are also special gifts, like the eastern sky in the picture above. This display is known as the Belt of Venus. It doesn't happen every night, but it's worth keeping an eye out for it. 

Sunsets in Asbury Park can be quite intense, and I love those too. But the quiet pastels of the Belt of Venus have a special place in my heart. 

At what time does the evening begin? I find that's a tricky question. Back when I was working, my evening began at 5 o'clock. Not that my work necessarily stopped at 5, but the gears inside my head definitely shifted. 

Astronomers seem to prefer the term twilight, which itself has a number of different definitions - civil, nautical, astronomical. Evening, on the other hand, seems entirely up for grabs.

I've decided it's a conversation between my external world and my internal life.

The position of the sun is important, of course, but again there is flexibility. The photo above was taken about 6 pm last October. The photo below (taken from a rooftop restaurant, by the way) is from last July, at 7 pm. For me, both of these are evening.

Again, I think it's the softness of the light that makes it evening. 

Eventually, of course, the sun goes down, and a little later we get to something called last light. Then the sky finally gives up being blue and becomes black velvet. But I would argue that, even then, evening can continue.

This can be assisted, as the natural light fades, by the deft addition of artificial light. The key here is to mix and balance the various light sources to provide a gentle, pleasing illumination. Below is, I think, a good example of doing it right. 

So when is evening? It's when your world and your mind agree that you are in the evening. 

See also Lighting Rittenhouse, City of Lights, Umbrellaville, Night Lights at Coney Island, Painting with Light.

Medicine in 1726

Gulliver Explains to the Houyhnhnms

Jonathan Swift, aka Lemuel Gulliver.

In her May 4 letter,  Heather Cox Richardson explains that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and a member Donald Trump's cabinet, appears not to believe in "the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory." Instead, he seems to be attracted by the older "miasma theory" and also "terrain theory."

I found this news sufficiently depressing that I went in search of an antidote. Fortunately, one was ready to hand. I had recently reread Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which was first published in 1726. In the last part of the book, Gulliver finds himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms, explaining medicine to his Houyhnhnm host, who is a horse (all the Houyhnhnms are horses).

He told his host that "there was a Sort of People bred up among us, in the Profession or Pretence of curing the Sick. ... Their fundamental is that all Diseases arise from Repletion [a state of being filled or overfilled]; from whence they conclude that a great Evacuation of the Body is necessary, either through the natural Passage, or upwards at the Mouth. Their next Business is from Herbs, Minerals, Gums, Oyls, Shells, Salts, Juices, Sea-weed, Excrements, Barks of Trees, Serpents, Toads, Frogs, Spiders, dead Men's Flesh and Bones, Beasts and Fishes, to form a Composition for Smell and Taste the most abominable, nauseous and detestable, that they can possibly contrive, which the Stomach immediately rejects with Loathing: And this they call a Vomit. Or else from the same Store-house, with some other poynsonous Additions, they command us to take in at the Orifice above or below (just as the Physician then happens to be disposed), a Medicine equally annoying and disgustful to the Bowels; which relaxing the Belly, drives down all before it: And this they call a Purge, or a Clyster." 

(Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Daniel Cook, 2023, pp. 255-256; if you're looking at a different edition, search in part 4, chapter 6.) 

There's more, but I'll spare you.

People have been sending copies of George Orwell's 1984 to their senators and members of Congress. I think maybe I'll start going to used bookstores and picking up dog-eared copies of Gulliver's Travels and sending them to Washington, D.C. 

Quack.

The portrait of Jonathan Swift above was painted by Charles Jervas in 1710. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.

Sacrilege

We live in a secular age, and I think it may be hard for many people to understand the gravity of what Donald Trump has done by pretending to dress himself in the pope's clothes.

Sacrilege is a word you don't hear much anymore. One definition is "gross irreverence toward a hallowed person, place, or thing" (Merriam-Webster). Synonyms include blasphemy, defilement, profanation.

Recently I was working on an article about eighteenth-century France, and I came across a story about a young man who did much less that Donald Trump has just done:

Back in everyday France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes meant that the government would persecute people who did not toe the Catholic line. Professor Darnton provides a vivid picture of what this oppression could look like on an individual level. This example is actually from the reign of Louis XV: "Francois-Jean, Chevalier de la Barre, was convicted of blasphemy and sacrilege in 1765. He had failed to take off his hat when a religious procession with the Eucharist passed by in a street in Abbeville, and according to a rumor, he and other feckless young men had desecrated a cross. ... He was condemned to have his tongue cut out, to be beheaded, and to have his body burned on a bonfire... ." In the end, the excision of the tongue was removed from the menu of butchery, but the rest of the sentence was carried out. 

_________

To see the whole blog post, click here.

Elon Musk Is a Martian

By Way of Russia

Pretending to be human in Wisconsin.

Poor little Elon. All he really wants to do is go home. Recently leaked documents from Russia's most secret archives allow us to tell this story in detail, and perhaps create some sympathy for someone who currently is not receiving the adulation he once basked in.

We need dial back only a few decades to start at the beginning. Despite recent despicable slanders, Elon is not 500 years old, and he is not a vampire. He and his twin sister Nola were born on Mars to their loving parents, OgOg and BipBip, in what earthlings would call the 1940s. It was an age of exploration for the earthlings, but the Martians had been traveling around the galaxy for a very long time, not finding all that much of interest, but they did come across a lovely vacation spot called the dark side of the moon. Martians in general loved to go there because it was dark. Apparently it's very sunny on Mars, and Martians were very pleased to find a place where they could sit outside in the dark and not have to wear their sunglasses.

One day an interesting group of people arrived from earth. The Martians initially had trouble communicating with them, but the Martians had long been accustomed to using the translation devices on their cell phones to communicate with the odd people they ran across in their travels. It turned out that the new arrivals were from a place on earth called Russia, and they were very interested in setting up a mining operation on the moon, digging up various things that would be useful in their conflict with the evil Americans, who were apparently very unkind to the Russians. 

The Martians knew a lot about mining, but they weren't terribly interested in helping the Russians. However, in their conversations, something else came up. The Russians said they were having problems with their "sleeper agents." It turned out that the Russians would take small Russian children from their families and train them to be Americans. After they reached a certain age, they would secretly insert them into American society, where they were supposed to blend in and, with deft handling, quietly move into positions of influence, where they could help their masters at home in the struggle agains the evil Americans.

The problem was that the sleeper agents, once they arrived in America, had an alarming tendency to tell their Russian handlers to fuck off - they were in America, they were Americans, and if their Russian handlers gave them any problems, they would rat out the whole system to the entire alphabet soup of American government agencies that had no idea what was going on. 

The Russians didn't know what to do, so they killed all their sleeper agents. But they still liked the idea. They just needed a source of better agents.

The Martians perked up at that. A few thousand years previously, the Martian government had decided that it needed to control the size of the Martian population. Martians tended to live a long time, and also to be reasonably fertile, and of course the soil on Mars was not terribly fertile (although very handsomely red) and so could only grow so much food.

It was decreed that, when a Martian couple reached the age of 500, it would have to decide whether to commit suicide or kill its two children (any children in excess of two had already been sent on their way). This naturally caused much unhappiness to Martian families, who normally wound up killing the children (although occasionally their children, if they were old enough to know what was going on, would beat their parents to the punch).

And so one day OgOg and BipBip and Elon and Nola got in their spaceship and cruised over to the dark side of the moon, where they spent time lying out in the dark and chatting with the Russian visitors. Eventually a deal was reached. OgOg and BipBip were paid uranium and caviar, all brought up carefully from earth. Uranium was in short supply on Mars, and neither of them had ever seen caviar before, although they had heard about it from friends (who never got around to sharing).

OgOg and BipBip told Elon and Nola that they would be going to a summer camp on earth, of all places, and introduced them to their counselors, Ivan and Svetlana. And then they got into their spaceship with their loot, and hightailed it back to Mars.

Elon and Nola spent several months on the far side of the moon, where Ivan and Svetlana taught them Russian and English and other useful subjects. Then it was time for the trip down to earth.

Russian rockets in those days were very prone to blowing up at inconvenient moments. Ivan and Svetlana told the children that, just as a precaution, they would be traveling to earth on two separate rockets. (They did not tell the children that Russians who actually made it to the moon always chose never to make the return journey.)

Elon thought his trip from the moon to earth was the most fantastic experience of his life - the flames and roar of the rocket were so much more exciting than the quiet humming of Martian spaceships. He was absolutely entranced when Nola's rocket blew up. He thought he now understood what the American phrase "a ringside seat" meant. (The two rockets had been spaced a good distance apart, to make sure that an explosion in one would not affect the other.)

After a few years of preparation in Mother Russia, Elon was inserted into an Ivy League university in the United States, with a fake past that he had carefully memorized. And the rest is history - except for this: Recently, Elon has developed a strong desire to return home to Mars. He wants to see his parents and tell them of his exploits. And then, because he must, he will kill them.

On, Wisconsin!

 See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office, Slingshot, Little Karl, Is Elon Musk a Vampire?