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The Socks I’m Not Sizing

February 23, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, games & puzzles, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), movies, music, school, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Socks I’m Not Sizing

Department Of Spoiler Alerts

* Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
* Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
* We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
* Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
* Here’s looking at you, kid.

After seeing Poor Things last weekend, I have a nominee to add to the list of the American Film Institute’s best/classic movie quotes:

“I must go punch that baby.”

 

Dude, please, let her go punch that baby.

 

And on the subject of movies, have y’all seen the nominees for the 2024 Best Picture Oscar?  One of the best lists in years, moiself  thinks.  I’ve seen eight of the ten films that are nominated…

֍  American Fiction

֍   Anatomy Of A Fall

֍   Barbie

֍   The Holdovers

֍   Killers Of The Flower Moon

֍   Maestro

֍   Oppenheimer

֍   Past Lives

֍   Poor Things

֍   The Zone Of Interest

My favorite fellow movie lover, daughter Belle, was eager to know what I thought of Poor Things, which she’d highly recommended.  Here’s part of our text-versation early Sunday afternoon, as MH and I exited the theater after having seen  Poor Things.

Moiself:
I must go punch that baby!

Belle:
I laughed out loud in the theater when she said that line.

Moiself:
So did we – for several minutes.

Belle:
I was wondering if I should warn you guys about the gratuitous amount of sex scenes. But hey, you’re adults too (haha).

Moiself:
They were mostly just funny.

Belle:
I agree, the whorehouse scenes were practically comical.

Moiself:
I like the fromage joke she told.  That’s something I would do.
I mean telling a joke about cheese, not working in a whorehouse.
Now I don’t know what to root for, for Best Picture…the strongest category the Oscars have had in years, I believe.

Belle:
Yes!
I decided to catch up on Oscar noms today. I finished watching Anatomy (of a Fall) maybe 30 minutes ago, and I’m gonna watch The Holdovers later this afternoon.

Moiself:
I’ve been wanting to watch Anatomy but can’t find a time when MH will agree to it because he thinks it’ll be depressing…just like he can’t find a time for me to watch Killers of the Flower Moon, because more depressing than the subject matter to me is 3 ½ plus hours of watching Leonardo DeCaprio’s pumpkin face.
The Holdovers is really good.
Here’s another nominee that has something to do with Nazis/WWII. I don’t know if I’ll get around to that; there’s been so much done on the subject – done well, of course but still…. Do you know which one I’m talking about?    [1]

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Thanks (Mick & Keith) For The Memory

Dateline: last Saturday, 7:45am-ish, driving with MH to meet son K for breakfast.  MH was playing music via his music app’s we-think-you’ll-like-these-songs-because-you-listened-to-these-other-songs  playlist via his car radio.   [2]  The iconic rhythmic intro to  Honky Tonk Women rambles through his car’s speakers, providing me with a flashback to one of the few times in my life when my mother said or did something quite uncharacteristic of her.

Dateline: one late Spring evening when I was in high school.   [3]   For some reason I have the living room all to moiself.   Our house’s only decent stereo/radio console is in the living room, and I have the radio on and the volume up, to distract my brain from a boring homework assignment I’ve been putting off.

As whatever station I’ve tuned to begins playing The Rolling Stone’s Honkey Tonk Women, I hear the hallway door open, and my mother enters the living room.  She cocks her head to one side as she listens to the song, and begins to snap her fingers to HTW’s instantly-recognizable-to-anyone-under-30 syncopation  (hats off to TRS’s stickman extraordinaire, the late great Charlie Watts). 

 

 

 

She then declares that HTW would be a great song “…to do a striptease to.  You know, like Gypsy Rose Lee?”  She begins swaying her hips from side to side, and mimes removing a glove from her left hand, finger by finger, and gestures for me to join her in her…uh…dance.    “C’mon, Rob, try it.”   [4]

 

 

 

*   *   *

 

Lies, lies.  More of the same, as in a potpourri of mostly apolitical blurbs.  After a week’s worth of not-particularly-surprising-but-nonetheless-depressing news from around the world, moiself  feels like taking the blog equivalent of a spa day.

*   *   *

Department Of Oh, That Poor Kid

Dateline: Tuesday morning 7:58 AM.  Nearing the end of my morning constitutional,   [5]  moiself  is walking up a neighborhood street, headed toward home.  Approaching me is a girl riding a bicycle.  [6]  I assume she, like other kids I’ve seen on this street at this time of the day, is headed for the local middle school, which is two blocks behind me.  She has curly, shoulder-length, dark brown hair, thick black rimmed eyeglasses and is wearing khaki pants and a red/blue patterned sweater.  And she is grinning from ear to ear. 

 

I don’t know how important this message is; my pause is to insert background info:

I vary my morning walks, but most of my routes take me around/near the two schools in my neighborhood (one elementary, one middle school) and several street corners which serve as a stop for the high school busses.  If I’m out walking and make eye contact with a person passing by it has been my lifelong habit to briefly greet that person, no matter their age.  But in the past few years, I’ve stopped extending a quick good day if the passersby are of student age.  This is because 99.5% of the time the Young People Of Today ® never return the greeting, and/or seemed annoyed or embarrassed or even alarmed that an adult is recognizing that they are a fellow traveler in this world.  I figure they mostly fail to see me in the first place:  they don’t make eye contact; they’re all looking down at their cellphones (the rare one or two who are not screen-mesmerized are still walking with their heads down).  Someone over age 30?  I’m not on their radar.

BTW, this saying-hi-to-strangers was a custom of mine that one of my college boyfriends found bemusing at first, then alarming, when he realized it was a thing-that-I-do.  We were planning a trip to the East Coast for the summer after my graduation, and he’d spent some time exploring The Big Apple with friends when he was in high school.  “Please don’t to this when we’re in New York,” he advised me, and told me scary incidents he and his friends had experienced, illustrating how making eye contact with or even acknowledging the presence of strangers was an invitation to get mugged.

 

 

Big Smiling Girl’s bike is a beach style contraption with balloon tires; when she is about 50 feet away from me, she stops her attempts to ride it with her hands off the handlebars (the bike was wobbling, quite a bit.)   When she’s about 30 feet in front of me she looks directly at me and chirps an enthusiastic, “Good morning!” I return the greeting; as she pedals past me she adds, “How are you doing?” I turn around and reply, “I’m doing well, thanks, and I hope you are, too.”

It was a sweet moment for me, even as I vacillated between stifling both my laughter and my “Oh dear…” reaction.  The latter is due to the idea that if junior high is anything like I remember it (and my sources tell me it is, if not worse), this girl, by acknowledging and even initiating an exchange with an adult who is not related to her….oy vey.  Why am I so cynical about her likely social standing among her peers?

*   *   *

Department Of Yet Another Appeal To The NY Times

Gentle Editor of The New York Times game section:

When I open your app on my phone first thing in the morning, and see the game you have chosen to be “on top” (as in, the first game that the app user sees   [7]  ), please refrain from greeting me, under the play button of the game which you currently have as the top choice (Spelling Bee), with the phrase/warning/admonition/challenge (what is it, BTW?),

You missed yesterday’s game.

Moiself  missed nothing.  I used to play Spelling Bee, but it’s been over a year since I have, after for the too many-eth time I became irritated by the narrowness of the game’s word curation choice – a petty complaint to you, perhaps, but one that to me is a matter of honor.  I’m not coming back.

I greatly enjoy your new word game, Connections, and also Wordle, the mini crossword, and Letter Boxed, as I have written here previously  (no need to thank me for the free publicity).  Just stop the nagging, OK?

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [8]

 

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

Moiself  hates it when someone whose job it is to help you can’t or won’t admit that they just don’t know something (or that they are wrong):

Dateline:  Monday, 11:30 am shopping at a local sporting goods store for a pair of socks for MH’s half birthday.   [9]    I’m looking for a certain brand of wool socks.  Flipping through the store’s sock selection hanging on the wall by the hiking boots department, I notice that there seems to be no pattern to either the size or brand or color organization of the socks.  I keep thinking I’ve found the pair I’m looking for, then see the sizing info on the price tag, which reads, Womens.

A salesperson standing about twenty feet to my left, who has been organizing a sales rack in the adjacent (camping supplies) department, calls out to me, “Are you finding what you’re looking for, ma’am?”  I thank him, say that I’ve found the socks, and am now trying “…to find the right size for my husband – men’s sizing.  I found one in large, but it’s a women’s large, which is as two sizes smaller than a men’s large, and my husband has big feet.”

“All of our socks use unisex sizing,” he responds.

 

And all of our socks use they/them pronouns.

 

Hmmm.  *Some* of the socks are clearly labeled unisex, with a small chart detailing unisex sizing range, but others are not. “Well…noooo,”  I reply, shaking the socks I am holding in my hand.  “I need a men’s large; this is a women’s large.”

“Our socks *all* use unisex sizing,” he insists.

I find the pair I’m looking for, and mutter, “Tell that to them,” pointing to three hanging rows of socks clearly marked Womens, as I head to the store’s checkout counter.

 

…and some of your socks speak French.

 

*   *   *

May the world be filled with junior high nerds who freely greet adults;
May you always find the right-sized (and linguistically appropriate) socks;
May you curate your own list of classic movie lines;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] I think that’s Zone of Interest, which, as of this writing, I still have not seen.

[2] That must be moiself’s  record for most vias in a run-on sentence.

[3] Don’t ask what year; I can’t recall, and that detail would neither add to nor detract from the story.

[4] Rob was what my mother called me, until her fourth and last child, my brother Robert (younger than me by 9 ½ years), decided that that nickname was rightfully his. 

[5] When I’m feeling particularly jaunty I use words like “constitutional” instead of walk.

[6] Safety-conscious pedestrian that I am, I am walking on the left side of the street, facing oncoming traffic.  She is riding with traffic, thus, headed toward moiself.

[7] This varies – which game is featured first – although it seems to have been several weeks if not months that Spelling Bee is first.

[8] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. 

No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[9] Our family – MH, son K and daughter Belle and I – celebrate our respective birthdays, and half birthdays, thanks to MH (unknowingly) starting the tradition when he and I were dating. 

The Acclaimed Grammy Performance I’m Not Watching

February 16, 2024

Robyn Parnell annoyances, are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), current events, foodie, freethought/humanism, health & wellness, Holidays, Isms (religion), making fun of lawyers and/or doctors, music, politics, reproductive rights, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Acclaimed Grammy Performance I’m Not Watching

Department of Holiday Gifts

Dateline: February 13, 4 pm-ish.  Moiself  suddenly remembers what the next day will be, and that I’ve neither a gift nor a card for MH – damn!  What do you get the man who has everything?  Besides, of course, a good dose of antibiotics.   [1]

 

 

I decided instead to go for the practical, but heartfelt.  MH’s father worked for General Mills, and there is a certain cereal which MH not only loves but is the only commercial cereal MH will eat. 

 

 

*   *   *

The Fast Car I’m Not Driving

“Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs pulled out all the stops with a performance of four-time Grammy winner and 13-time nominee Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car at the 2024 Grammys.”
( Grammy Awards site )

Regarding Chapman’s performance at the Grammys, I’m sure all that or most, of “the stops” were pulled out during her performance of her masterpiece song, although I didn’t see this year’s Grammy awards telecast.  Moiself  will probably wait for a bit before finding a video of the Chapman-Combs cover of Fast Car, due to the emotions that Chapman’s staggeringly evocative song stirs up in me.

When that song first came out, I found it both memorizing and depressing. Memorizing as in it was – and still is, IMO –  one of the prime examples as how a song can be the most perfect short story.  The depressing part was how, whenever that song came on the radio, I thought to moiself,  “Ah, it’s the Planned Parenthood song.”

 

 

…in another life it sometimes seemed, I worked in women’s reproductive health care, with jobs in different Planned Parenthood clinics bracketing 5+ years in a private OB/GYN practice.  As stressful and challenging as the job could be, I mostly enjoyed my stints working at Planned Parenthood, and considered it an honor to have been able to serve their clientele.

Chapman’s song, with its skillfully sparse instrumentation and haunting narrative, reminded me of many patients I encountered at PP:  well-meaning if emotionally immature women and girls, scrapping by in poverty, hoping desperately for something more in their lives besides what they have, which is getting involved with the wrong man and being dragged down with him….

At least the protagonist in Chapman’s song finally realizes what she has to do, and tells her once beloved partner – whom she now sees as the ultimately and utterly useless baggage he has become –  to “take your fast car and keep on driving.”  All these years later, the song takes me back, and I wonder about certain patients:  What happened to her?  Whatever became of those women, and girls who grew into women?

And still, after all these years, when I hear Fast Car I ache for the protagonist’s naive humanity, for her wanting something more than a life of caretaking, first for her drunk, ill and incompetent father, and then for the family her incompetent partner saddles her with…

That break/catch in Chapman’s voice, with the lyric, “I’d always hoped for better…”   Slays me, still.  Every time.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Don’t Know

Is there an age after which a person should not be able to run for public office?

Moiself  doesn’t know.

Our country’s constitution has a minimum age requirement for federal office,   [2]   but no maximum.  According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans favor maximum age limits for federal elected officials and Supreme Court justices.  I have been among the plethora of Americans on all sides of the political divide who have been grumbling about the age of the two major party likely candidates for president. 

Then, after a recent conversation with a neighbor whom I’ve admired for years – a conversation wherein he revealed his age to me – I felt the surprising sting of my own ageism.

After our wide-ranging discussion I was thinking about what an asset he is, not only to his family and friends and neighborhood, but the community at large, the co-workers he served with….  And this kind, compassionate, intelligent, clear-eyed person, even at this late stage in life, felt called to enter public service, making use of his years of experience and a variety of fields, what would be the point in denying that?

I don’t know.

Then I started thinking about my other/older friends and family, colleagues and neighbors, whose exact ages I sometimes don’t know,  [3]   whose intellectual acuity is heightened by their years of experience and shows no signs of abating, and whom I’ve seen outwitting and out-reasoning people decades younger than themselves.  And yep, I’ve had/seen aging friends and family members whose decision-making facilities and memories translate into shouldn’t leave the house without an escort or intellectual guardian of some kind – but I’ve also seen that in far too many people under the age of forty.

 

 

Should there be some kind of a means test, as in cognitive function, to run for public office after say, age 70?  But why that age – why not 57, or 75?  And who will be the ones to design and test for and then implement such limits?

I don’t know.

I do know that the current presidential candidates’ ages, along with the average of a US Senator being 64   [4]    (!!)  are adding more fuel to the fire in the minds of many young voters.  Unfortunately, the fires being fueled are those of dissuasion, and not activism.   It is further proof to many young people that the country is run by and for the old (mainly white and mainly men), who know little and care less about the world that these younger voters have inherited and are navigating.

 

I do want the opportunity to vote for Dolly Parton (age 78).  For something.

 

*   *   *

Department Of Looking For A Good Article On Identity And Cultural Appropriation,
And …”Its Relationship To Concepts Of Authority And Ownership”?

 

 

If your answer is well duh yes, then Mexican-American, gender queer writer and artist John Paul Brammer has writen the story for y’all.   How’s this for a teaser:

“The rise of social media has profoundly impacted cultural identity. Optimistically, it has served as an equalizer of sorts, allowing historically marginalized voices a platform to be heard. But it has also cultivated an ecosystem where there’s incentive to gate-keep, where identity is its own form of capital. In an influencer age crowded with voices, it’s shrewd to find a lane and to thin the herd in terms of who gets to talk about certain topics.

Over the last decade or so, ethnic identity, at least among the internet literati, has been governed by a certain essentialism that holds that culture is biologically ordained by blood. It is a solemn, sacred, fragile affair that must be protected with utmost care by those qualified to handle it, by individuals appointed to this role by virtue of their birth….

The concept of cultural appropriation has been a handy tool to such ends, serving as a broad category of crime that covers everything from genuine grievances, such as the pilfering of Black American musical trends by an industry that consistently neglects and disrespects them, and truly absurd claims about who is ‘allowed’ to ‘make sushi.’….

I’m not trying to make a blanket dismissal of people’s concerns over how their cultures are handled by those unfamiliar with the nuances. But a problem I do have with ‘cultural appropriation’ as a concept is how it flattens everything down to a simple narrative of theft and is more of an end to a conversation than a springboard for one….

Culture is messy, and in an increasingly globalized world, dictating how and where it spreads is incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible….”

(  excerpts from “De Los: In defense of Vietnam’s love of pachucos,”
by JP Brammer, LA Times, 1-22-24 , emphases mine )

 

 

I didn’t know that “who is allowed to make sushi” is a thing.  Which is good, ’cause moiself  enjoys making sushi (or what passes as my version of it).  But I’ve no worries in the matter, as I’m sure if the Cultural Appropriation Police ® ever raided my kitchen while I was making sushi they would leave soon thereafter, smug in their assessment that my pathetic, non-Japanese, gaijin attempts at “cold rice dressed with vinegar, formed into any of various shapes, and garnished especially with bits of raw seafood or vegetables”    [5]    is no threat to anyone’s cultural authenticity.

Moiself  highly recommends this informative and entertaining article, especially to find out the hitherto unknown (well, to moiself ) cultural exchange between Vietnam and pachuco culture, and also between Yugoslavia and Mexico in a style called Yu-Mex.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I love it when I feel a part of the totality of the human experience while surrounded by strangers, as when at 5:10pm on 2/13/2024 I found moiself  standing in one of three very long checkout lines at The Dollar Tree.  Although the lines were very long they were moving quickly because, as I saw (glancing at each person in line, ahead of/behind/beside me, to confirm my suspicious), each person in line had at most two items, one of which was the distinctive red-enveloped greeting card. “You too?” I asked knowingly of the elderly gent in front of me.   He smiled conspiratorially and whispered to me, in heavily-accented but understandable English,

“I almost forget what tomorrow is.”

 

 

*   *   *

May you always hope – and more importantly, work – for better;
May you find a way to enjoy the last minute greeting card shopping;
May you never have to defend your right to make sushi;    [7]

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] I actually said that once, to a patient in the medical practice where I worked, when she wondered aloud about what to get for her husband for his upcoming birthday, as he had few hobbies and “…we want for nothing – what do you get the man who has everything?”  “Penicillin?”  I suggested.  She stared blankly at moiself. 

[2] Minimum age of 35 for President, 30 for the Senate, 25 for serving in the House.  No minimum or maximum specified for Supreme Court justices.

[3] Except for a certain range (“He’s in his mid-70s, I think….”  “No way – she can’t be 82?!?!” )

[4]  Yep, an *average* of 64.  Even more shocking to me, over two thirds of them – 34 out of the 50 – are aged 70 or older.

[5] Sushi, noun, as defined by Merriam- Webster dictionary.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[7] Unless, of course, your sushi really sucks.

The Truth I’m Not Not Handling

February 9, 2024

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, current events, freethought/humanism, friends, Isms (religion), Me so happy, movies, music, nature, politics, radio & podcasts, school, science, TV, Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Truth I’m Not Not Handling

Department Of First Things First, As In:
This Date Should Be A National Holiday

♫   It was twenty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…♫

And it was sixty years ago today – February 9, 1964, that, all over the world but especially in America, aspiring musicians who didn’t even know they were that, or that they wanted to be in a rock n’ roll band, watched the Ed Sullivan Show…and the rest is history.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Cheese Is Supposed To Be
Whatever You Want It To Be

Dateline; Sunday 12:45 PM-ish; MH and I are waiting to order lunch at Schmizza Public House in Orenco.  The couple seated at the table next to moiself  (a father and his non-custodial daughter, which I gathered from their ensuing conversation, which I overheard due to the volume with which they spoke   [1]   ) is giving their order to the server.  The man is asking to have the blue cheese crumbles excluded from a dish which includes them; he also wants a different dressing.  He says this three times; each time the server repeats it back to him, to confirm she’s getting it right:  “You want ___ instead of ___, and no blue cheese?”  At the final confirmation, she says “Got it,” and as she leaves to put in their order I hear No Blue Cheese man mumble under his breath, “Cheese is not supposed to be blue.”

 

I wonder how he feels about other Cheeses of Color?

 

*   *   *

Department Of Stealth Bombs

Dateline: Monday morning, circa 10 am.  MH comes into my office to tell me something, and quickly gets sidetracked.  “Hey, he says, pointing to the carpet behind where I am sitting in my chair, “cat barf!”

Earlier in the morning moiself  had already cleaned up a hairball-involved spew from our cat, Nova, near her food bowls upstairs.  Had she also, unbeknownst to moiself,  done the deed downstairs at the same time, or was this a new deposit – series of deposits as it turns out (there were three small spots; two on the carpet and one on the carpet protector underneath my desk and chair    [2]  )?  Either way, I’d been in and out of my office several times and hadn’t noticed.

“Don’t roll back!” MH warns, as one of the barf blobs is right behind my office chair – “Oh, I think you already rolled into it.”  He goes and gets some paper towels; I follow him to the laundry room and get a wet rag, muttering, “She makes no noise, all of a sudden, it’s just there.”   In exasperation I blurt out to MH, “How can she do that, without me noticing?!?!?!  She barfs like some people fart: silent, but….”

 

*   *   *

Department Of Cool Scientists We Should Remember

Last week moiself  listened to the first of what will be a series of Freakonomics podcasts about the late great renowned physicist, Nobel Prize winner, Caltech professor and member of The Manhattan Project, author and bongo drum enthusiast, Richard Feynman.  That episode, The Curious Mr. Feynman, featured memories of Feynman shareby by family, friends and colleagues, and most specifically focused on the venture for which most non-scientist Americans know Feynman: for serving on the commission ordered by President Reagan to investigate the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

What most Americans don’t know is that Feynman did *not* want to serve on the commission.  The majority of its members were political and/or military appointments, and after working on the Manhattan project, Feynman was convinced that the military and scientists were not a good mix.  Suffering from cancer (which he kept private), Feynman’s strong impulse was to decline the invitation, especially when he found out that President Reagan had instructed former secretary of state William Rogers, whom Reagan had appointed to chair the commission, “Whatever you do, don’t embarrass NASA.”

 

 

I know; really.  How alarming is that?  But Feynman ‘s wife kept reminding him that if he were not to serve on the commission it would just be “the rest of them” (i.e., politicians and the military), and so he finally agreed.

Looking back, especially after hearing some of the  notes Feynman kept as he served on the commission, I find it highly creepy to think of what might’ve happened had Feynman (or another scientist like him    [3]  )  not been on the commission. 

Once he agreed and got on the commission, he was again reluctant to serve with the others, so Feynman did what he did best.  He went on his own, finding out from the ground up, just how is the space shuttle constructed? And he was aided by this in being able to consistently and meticulously question the scientists and engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’d designed and built the shuttle, many of whom were willing to talk with him rather than someone else, because he had been their professor at Caltech!

My takeaway from the episode:  as much as Feynman loathed politics, he evidently understood the political mind and the value of PR, for had Feynman not pulled that “stunt” with the O-ring, it is highly possible that his findings would have been ignored or buried by the others on the committee.

 

 

 

Which brings up the major area of creepiness: Reagan’s instructions to the commission that they were not to embarrass NASA.  That stayed with moiself  for hours after having heard about it (via the podcast).  Consider the times:  when the Challenger exploded our country was still in the midst of the Cold War, and the USA’s space program was lauded by many as a prime example of our “victory” in that conflict.  Reagan in particular championed how our successes in space exploration were just one example of the proof of how the innovation and openness of American democracy triumphed not just politically, but scientifically, over the closed and stagnating system of the Soviets.  I get that that was a factor.

What blows moiself’s  mind is how Reagan could then turn around and use the very tactics of the regime he famously touted as the “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the modern world.”   Reagan’s commission was, supposedly, appointed to find out the facts  of the Challenger tragedy – why did the shuttle explode? – and yet in doing so they were not to “embarrass NASA.”  If the commission discovered that the shuttle had a design flaw which was not detected and/or minimized, that would embarrass NASA.  However, given their Prime Directive from the president himself, re any such discoveries the commission would be under pressure to act as if:

* this fact is not a fact

* we are not seeing what we are seeing

* we cannot discover what we are discovering, because even if we discover it, we were instructed, “whatever else” we do, *not* to embarrass NASA.
And the facts show that NASA fucked up…so we cannot discover the facts.

 

 

Wasn’t that attitude – ideology trumps reality – a hallmark of closed, repressive, totalitarian systems?   By giving the commission chair that instruction, Reagan was borrowing a move from the playbook of the “evil empire.”  By giving the commission chair those no-embarrasing-NASA  instructions, Reagan showed that in his zeal to maintain the impression of (what be believed to be) the USA’s scientific and moral superiority to the Soviets, he was willing to employ the *exact* strategy of the Soviets, and later the one employed by the Russians , most egregiously in their sham investigation a major tragedy of their own – the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Y’all should really check out the episode.  Fascination, and a bit frightening.

Feynman grew concerned that this “investigation” would be more of a show trial — political propaganda meant to save face….

Most of the 12 members of the Commission were political or military appointees; Feynman worried that Chairman Rogers would try to sideline him, maybe even withhold information….

In Washington, the Commission began to interview witnesses. Feynman didn’t think Chairman Rogers was trying very hard to get to the true cause of the explosion. So Feynman began asking questions — sharp, unrelenting questions. Questions about the science. During a break, Chairman Rogers was overheard, in the men’s room, complaining to the astronaut Neil Armstrong, who also sat on the Commission. He said: “Feynman is becoming a real pain in the ass.” Feynman…felt the investigation was becoming a whitewash.

Serving on the commission had been as dreadful an experience as Feynman had feared. But he kept digging. By now he had come to believe that the Challenger exploded because of the failure of what are called O-rings — small, circular seals designed to prevent fluid or air from leaking during a mechanical process….

Richard Feynman was a patriot; he loved NASA, he loved adventure and exploration; he even loved risk-taking — as long as the risk had been properly calculated. What he hated was any attempt to paper over the truth; as a scientist, all he wanted was to find out true things. Here are some other things he hated: hypocrisy, B.S., and the use of unscientific thinking to make important decisions….

So, he now decided to pull a stunt.  This stunt, on a Presidential commission investigating a national tragedy, would be in public, on television….

It would later be revealed that NASA had known about the O-ring problem, but had downplayed the risks. The Rogers Commission, in its published report, went easy on NASA, as President Reagan had asked. But the report did include an appendix written by Richard Feynman. He didn’t go easy on NASA. Here is his final sentence: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

( excerpts from The Curious Mr. Feynman, Freakonomics  )

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Interesting, And Revealing, Choice Of Words

On the subject of PR trumping reality….  I recently came across this scary article:

At Hopdoddy Burger Bar near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville recently…  he menu advertised the usual gluten-free and vegan options, as well as something more unusual: beef purporting to “save the planet, one bite at a time.”

The Austin-based chain buys the meat from ranchers who use eco-friendly agricultural techniques. The burgers — about $4 more expensive than the traditional ones — are designed to appeal to a fast-growing, desirable demographic of climate-conscious omnivores. But the extent to which such premium-priced beef patties are helping cool the earth is hotly disputed.

“We want to change the narrative that eating meat is bad for the planet, or that eating plant-based is better,” said Chad Edwards, the on-duty manager, explaining the company’s “just eat a Hopdoddy burger” solution to climate change…. The stakes, or perhaps steaks, of this effort to rewrite the science-backed narrative that cows are a climate menace are bigger than this 46-restaurant chain. The company is at the vanguard of a contentious push by meat and dairy industries trying to rebrand as climate solutions.

( excerpt from “How meat and milk companies are racing to ease your climate guilt
A climate-friendly hamburger? A carbon-neutral glass of milk? As companies make bold claims, a heated debate erupts.”
By Evan Halper and Laura Reiley, The Washington Post  ; emphases mine  )

 

 

Interesting, and revealing, choice of words.  Can’t change the facts? Change the narrative.

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [4]

 

 

*   *   *

Parting shot: I love it when/I hate it when…

I hate it when word games apparently have a Word Cop curating them. I’ll explain.

Letter Boxed is one of the series of New York Times puzzles  [5]   I do each morning. The objective of Letter Boxed is to use all of the 12 letters around the box in 5 words or less, sequencing the letters to spell words that are at least 3 letters long (no proper nouns or hyphenates or contractions).  Letters can be reused, but consecutive letters cannot be from the same side (for example, in today’s puzzle, pictured below, the letter W in your word cannot be preceded or followed by an E), and the last letter of a word becomes the first letter of the next word.

 

 

Dateline: Thursday, 5:30 am, playing Letter Boxed. I have two of the three words necessary to win by *my* standard, which is to solve the puzzle in three words at most.  My remaining, #3 word, must start with the letter S and use up the letters L and U, which have not been used in my first two words.  I attempt to enter the word slut, and get the curt rejection, “not a word.”

 

 

*   *   *

May we all live by the maxim that reality must take precedence over PR;
May we smugly know when a word is a word,
no matter what the NYTimes games curator apps decree;
May we change the narrative to fit the facts, and not the other way around;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] They were speaking loud enough for me to overhear them, whether I wanted to or not (it’s kind of a sports bar atmosphere), and the details he asked about and the routine things she had to explain to him – he’s obviously her father, but was playing catch-up in her life – made me think she does not live with him.

[2] I hope you’re enjoying all the details.

[3] Although, has there ever been another scientist like Richard Feynman?

[4] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. 

No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[5] The NY Times games I play are (in this order):  Connections; The Mini; Letter Boxed; Wordle.

The Brain I’m Not Hard-Wiring

February 2, 2024

Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), books & magazines, community, current events, freethought/humanism, health & wellness, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), Oregon, politics, radio & podcasts, reproductive rights, school, science, The Write Stuff (literary life), Wow, Yikes! , , , , , , Comments Off on The Brain I’m Not Hard-Wiring

Department Of Not The Kind Of Story You Want To Start Your Day With
Sub-Department Of It’s Not “All In The Past”

 

( image from Newsweek story 9-18-19,
Illinois Opens 24 Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Cases That Were Never Investigated )

 

Dateline: last Wednesday, 6 AM, scrolling through LA Times headlines.  The words Orange County, where moiself  was born and lived most of my first 18 years, caught my eye; also, I thought I recognized the name of the reporter.   [1]  The article, by LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, is about the first big story Arellano covered as a cub reporter, that of a notorious Catholic priest and sexual abuser.

Father Eleuterio Ramos was a priest in Orange and LA Counties in the 1970s and 1980s.  Ramos was transferred from parish to parish by church officials who knew about Ramo’s history of molesting (in Ramos’s own words, “at least” 25) boys, but – surprise! – never notified the police or removed him from the priesthood.  Here is the entry  (my emphases)  for Ramos on bishopaccountability.org, a website which has documented the abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church since 2003.   

“Full name Eleuterio Victor Al Ramos, Jr. Priest of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles CA, then the Diocese of Orange when in was created in 1976. In and out of treatment, kept in ministry. Placed on leave in 1985. Sent to a Tijuana Mexico parish in 1985 and put in charge of a children’s ministry. Removed in 1991. Died in 2004. Personnel file released in 1/2013. Wrongful death suit filed in 3/2017 vs the Orange and L.A. dioceses by the widow of an alleged victim who died by suicide in 2015….The victim was altar boy who met Ramos at age 10.”

The story of Ramos, and of what happened to his victims and their attempts to bring him to justice, haunts Arellano to this day, both as a reporter and as a human being. 

“Ramos has cast such a specter over me that when I received a text from attorney John Manly that his firm had reached a large settlement in a clerical sex abuse case, I immediately guessed who the perpetrator was.

The plaintiff alleged that Ramos…molested him…during the 1970s and 1980s. Church leaders…did nothing to stop the abuse, despite repeated warnings from parishioners, staff and even a fellow priest, the lawsuit alleged.

The $10 million settlement…requires the Archdiocese of Los Angeles…to pay $500,000. The Orange diocese will cover the other $9.5 million….

… the plaintiff declined to speak to me. The Times does not identify victims of sexual abuse without their consent.

In a statement, spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales said that the diocese ‘deeply regrets any past incidences of sexual abuse,’ adding that ‘the allegations in this case date back more than 40 years and do not reflect the Diocese of Orange as it stands today.’ “

( excerpts from Arellano’s column, “A pedophile priest. A $10-million payout. A monster who won’t leave my life.”  ( LA times, 1-25-24 )

 

 

Moiself  is genuinely sorry that Arellano (and other reporters who’ve worked on the thousands of priest sexual abuse stories) continues to be haunted by the story he covered. What haunts me is the WTF?  WTF?!?!?   quote from that church spokesperson – about how the abuse “do not reflect what the diocese is today.” Okay, it doesn’t haunt me so much as it frosts my butt to think that people might read that obscene muddling statement and say, “Oh, well, yes, that was then and this is now.”  It’s a line I’ve read about from so many other Catholic church spokes-folks I figure it must be in the first chapter of their, “How to Handle Those Pesky Sex Abuse Settlements” handbook:

“The allegations in this case date back more than ___years and do not reflect the Diocese of ____ as it stands today.”

 

 

WRONG.   Excusez-moi, Mr. Spokesperson, but the abuse does in fact reflect what the diocese – what the Catholic church – is today.  Of course it does.  The whole point of your religion is that the past lives in the present, and that the stories and protocols of the past determine the future. 

Yep, this shill spokesdude wants us to believe that this darned abuse thing is “all in the past.”   Um, hello, the Catholic Church is *all about* the past!  Roman Catholicism is, as all Christian religions are, based on stories and mythologies from Iron Age, pre-scientific cultures, and as such, it struggles desperately to concoct and maintain its relevancy in the present and future.  The church clings to ancient legends and scriptures and bizarre rituals (e.g. the metaphorical cannibalism of the rite of communion), which they sometimes try to pass off as symbolic or allegorical despite their own theologies of literalism (i.e. transubstantiation).     [2]  

 

 

Their theologies and the power they hold over adherents come from the past; they continue to live in the past, and look how they react when their past catches up to them?

The Catholic church’s leaders have, for over a millennia, been appointed by a cabal of their brothers who claim to be voting in response to the spirit of their god.  This spirit led them to elect centuries of buffoons and also downright evil men, including but not limited to Pope Stephen VI  who ordered his deceased predecessor exhumed and his fingers cut off; Pope John XII, whose worldly ways included gambling, incest, murder (he himself was killed by the man who caught him in flagrante delicto with his wife); Pope Urban VI, who was disappointed that he didn’t hear enough screaming when the Cardinals who had turned against him were tortured.   [3]

The church leaders and their brotherhood continue to cling to misogynistic, homophobic, medieval policies which were formulated and are enforced by a hierarchy of, as a self-described recovering Catholic once told me, “Men who’ll dress like women but refuse to ordain them.”

 

 

The RC’s sexual abuse scandals and their aftermath are not in the past – they are in the here and now, and shall continue to be, until RC adherents say enough is enough, and take their arses and their checkbooks  ( how many RCs truly comprehend that their donations “to god” go to pay off priest sexual abuse lawsuits?    [4]   )  out of the pews and into the light.

Support groups include for those considering doing so include

* Catholics Anonymous

* Former Catholic

* FCC- Former Catholics Connect

* Live Journal

 

 

*   *   *

 

*   *   *

Department Of Everything You Know Is Wrong

Well, not everything, but it turns out….

“Psychology is a bit of a double-edged sword, because it is so intuitively interesting to all of us. And the positive side is that we’re all psychologists in everyday life.
We all know — or at least think we know — something about love and memory, and friendships and dreams and things like that. The downside though is that because something seems familiar it may sometimes seem understandable. There’s a very hungry, very receptive audience for psychological books on positive psychology, emotions, love, relationships, infidelity. That’s all good.
But the danger, I think, is we can very easily push our wonder buttons and push our interest buttons using pseudo-science rather than science.”

That teaser ( my emphases) is a quote from Scott Lilienfeld, clinical psychologist and  professor of psychology at Emory University, from his interview with host Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics podcast, “Five Psychology Terms You’re Probably Misusing” ( my emphases ).  Lilienfeld authored a paper called “Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases,” and the book Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology.  For this interview, he (and other guest scientists and journalists) stick with a mere five common myths of psychology.  Dubner’s take on the book:

 “…this book is incredibly fun; I love it. It’s hugely enjoyable on the one hand, but also hugely sobering on the other…. Because basically you’re saying that all these things — all these ideas that people love to embrace and talk about and pass on — are somewhere between bogus and trumped up.“

  

 

The things-we-get-wrong include believing that the following concepts are true:

* statistically significant = statistically reliable
* bystander apathy
* personality type
* Some people are left-brained while other people are right-brained
* The brain is “hard-wired”

Sharon Begley, a journalist specializing in neuroscience and the neuroplasticity of the brain, joined the conversation to discuss this latter myth.

LILIENFELD:
I think in the overwhelming majority of cases in which it’s used, “hard-wired” is really misleading and I think sometimes potentially pernicious because it can lead people into assuming that certain behaviors cannot be changed….

BEGLEY:
If you say it’s hard-wired, implicitly — or actually not that implicitly, quite explicitly — the message is, you can’t change that.

Just as if you wanted to go into your computer’s hard drive with a teeny little screwdriver and start messing around with those integrated circuits to change something, that will not work out very well.

But the hard-wired idea didn’t originate with computing.
The history of neuroscience has shown us that even going back centuries, whatever was the prevailing cool mechanical machine, device, whatever, that was the metaphor that people appealed to. So the brain was compared to a counting machine, to a clock. And then computers burst on the scene and so people said, “Well, then the brain is like a computer.” But one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience over the last few years has been, in fact, that all that hard-wired stuff is completely wrong in very fundamental ways.

LILIENFELD:
There are very few — if any — psychological attributes that are strictly genetically determined, strictly hard-wired into the brain.

BEGLEY:
This realization has also led to treatments for major depressive disorder, because there’s a clear neurocircuitry underlying it. O.C.D., which reflects over-activity in a particular circuit, through the form of therapy called cognitive behavior therapy, the over-activity in that circuit can be quieted just as much as if people take the medications that are prescribed for O.C.D.

After a brief discussion of how the brain’s flexibility, including the fact that it can be trained to control different body parts after a stroke, Begley suggests it may be time to “trade in the hard-wired metaphor for a less misleading one.”

BEGLEY:
… The brain is more like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can seem to incise lines on it, and they look for all the world like they’re real, but with a little bit of shaking up, you can make significant changes.

 

 

I recommend a listen to this fascinating topic, presented with, as host Dubner puts it, “a dose of humility, along with a plea for good science.”  And, on the topic of bystander apathy, after the guests debunk much of the infamous Kitty Genovese story, Dubner has a cogent warning for us all:

“The moral of the story, I guess,
is to always be careful of what you think you know.”

*     *     *

 

Department of Employee Of The Month

 

 

It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself.   Again. The need for which I wrote about here.   [5] 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [6]

“… the Vatican issued its first new policy statement since a torrent of sex abuse cases around the world began last year….

But what the new guidelines could have done, but failed to, was to require churches to report complaints of sexual abuse to law enforcement.  Nor do they set up any chain of accountability for church hierarchy who may abet sex abusers….

As if all that weren’t enough to make that vein on your forehead throb just a little more insistently, in among all the strong words for sex abusers and heretics was the classification of the ordination of women to a ‘grave crime,’ punishable by excommunication.
Let me think: women ministering the sacraments, priests raping children. Women ministering the sacraments, priests raping children. Still not seeing them on quite an equal level yet….”

Mary Elizabeth Williams, American writer, in
“The Vatican’s new sex abuse guideline misstep: The church’s tougher new stand on the issue still disappoints — and manages to insult women.”
salon.com 7-15-10 )

 

 

*   *   *

May we be careful of what we think we know;
May we stop thinking, How did it get to be February?;
May your brain be more organized than any of moiself’s Etch-a-sketch drawings;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Turns out, I didn’t.

[2] The doctrine of transubstantiation holds that “the bread and wine at the consecration become Christ’s actual body and blood.”  Yum!  If you want to delve deeper into this primitive, Jesus-is-the-ultimate-animal-sacrifice shit ritual, read the explanation in the primer written for Catholics by Catholics, in the website Catholic Answers:  Transubstantiation for Beginners

[3] More fun and links to the lives of “The Bad Popes” are just an internet search away, or here on Wikipedia.

[4]  In figures only through 2018, over $1.2 billion in the USA alone (from “Settlements and bankruptcies in Catholic sex abuse cases“, Wikipedia).

[5] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg.  Until I did.

One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens.  No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.

[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org