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December 29
We got it from WHERE?
Guy Deutscher, in his book The Unfolding of Language: an evolutionary tour of mankind’s greatest invention tells the story of the linguistic theory of “Frenchman Jean-Pierre Brisset, who in 1900 demonstrated how human language (that is to say, French) developed directly from the croaking of frogs. One day, as Brisset was observing frogs in a pond, one of them looked him straight in the eye and croaked ‘coac’. After some deliberation, Brisset realized that what the frog was saying was simply an abbreviated version of the question “quoi que tu dis?’ He thus proceeded to derive the whole of language from permutations and combinations of ‘coac coac’. It must be admitted that more than a century on, standards of speculation have much improved.”
As for at least one of the ironies here, don’t ask.
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December 26
Gust L. Avrakotos, the “Blue-Collar Bond”
The CIA agent known both as “Dr. Dirty” and as “the blue-collar James Bond” died at the beginning of this month, according to the truly interesting obit in the Washington Post yesterday. Here are some of the segments of the obit.
“Gust L. Avrakotos, 67, the CIA agent in charge of the massive arming of Afghan tribesmen during their 1980s guerrilla war against the Soviets, died of complications from a stroke Dec. 1 at Inova Fairfax Hospital. . . .
Mr. Avrakotos, who ran the largest covert operation in the agency's history, was dubbed "Dr. Dirty" for his willingness to handle ethically ambiguous tasks and a "blue-collar James Bond" for his 27 years of undercover work. In the 1980s, he used Tennessee mules to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in automatic weapons, antitank guns and satellite maps from Pakistan to the mujaheddin. . . .
Mr. Avrakotos, whose thermonuclear approach to internal politics twice led him to coarsely insult the CIA's European division director, lost his position just as the Stinger antiaircraft missile launchers downed the first Soviet gunships. He was transferred to an African assignment and retired shortly thereafter, in 1989.
Mr. Avrakotos remained obscure until 2003, when "60 Minutes" producer George Crile published "Charlie Wilson's War," a best-selling description of how Wilson and Mr. Avrakotos strong-armed Congress and the bureaucracy into supporting the cause of the mujaheddin. He may become still better known: Tom Hanks has bought the rights to turn the book into a movie. . . .
He joined the CIA in 1962, just after it began recruiting agents from beyond its Ivy League training grounds. Because he spoke Greek, he was assigned to Athens. While he was there, a military junta overthrew the democratic, constitutional government, and Mr. Avrakotos became the chief liaison to Greek colonels. Their fascist regime fell in 1974, and the November 17 terrorist group assassinated the CIA's station chief. CIA renegade Philip Agee, who had exposed the Athens station chief's name, six months later revealed Mr. Avrakotos as well, and the Greek press vilified him for his role in the regime.
He left Greece in 1978. But he could not get another decent assignment with the CIA, Crile wrote, because his superiors considered him too uncouth for promotion.”
He was forced out of the CIA after outing the Oliver North arms for hostages deal in the Iran-Contra period.
Tom Hanks has bought the rights to "60 Minutes" producer George Crile’s book, "Charlie Wilson's War," a best-selling description of how Cong. Wilson and Mr. Avrakotos strong-armed Congress and the bureaucracy into supporting the cause of the [Afghan] mujaheddin.
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A Psychologically Dangerous Product
An audio/home theater store’s day-after-Christmas sale ad features a “Bipolar Surround Speaker,” but no accompanying medication.
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The Plasma Car
Not only a must-have toy, but one that has its own applied acceleration theory. You can view everything you need to know here. Be sure to watch the Quicktime movie.
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December 25
The Curious Story of Mistletoe
I got to wondering the other day about where the word mistletoe came from and why its Christmas legend developed. So I looked it up. The word’s derivation might actually put one off, so to speak, so you’ve been warned.
Mistletoe is a parasitic plant that grows on the bark of a host tree, intruding its roots into the bark and feeding off the tree. Birds eat its berries (poisonous to humans, by the way) and excrete the seeds onto the trees they perch upon. The plant then propagates on the bark of the tree and establishes residence there, qualifying it for in-tree tuition. What? Oh. Sorry.
Anyway, the roots (here we go again) of the word or the Old English words mist, which itself derives from an Indo-European root word, meigh-, which means to urinate; and the Old English word tan, which means twig. Thus, observers thought that mistletoe derived from birds urinating on twigs, not actually far from what really happens (but it doesn’t make me want to think much any more about Play Misty For Me, let me tell you). All of this information comes from the estimable American Heritage Dictionary (3rd Edition) , which every right thinking person should have at hand at all times.
A most informative web site I found provides details of the myths and mysteries of mistletoe’s. It tells us, for one thing, that “one French tradition holds that the reason mistletoe is poisonous is because it was growing on a tree that was used to make the cross that Jesus was crucified on. Because of this, it was cursed and denied a place to live and grow on earth, forever to be a parasite.” I believe that this is now called “guilt by association.” For another, “Vikings dating back to the eighth century believed that mistletoe had the power to raise humans from the dead, relating to the resurrection of Balder, the god of the summer sun.” Go to the site for the extended legend. It’s quite Wagnerian, not to be anachronistic or anything.
Druids also got into the act, not that I’m suggesting that this is a mistling contest. But they had their own ideas about mistletoe, and here’s where the kissing probably comes in: “In the first century, the Druids in Britain believed that mistletoe could perform miracles, from providing fertility to humans and animals to healing diseases and protecting people from witchcraft. The Druids would cut mistletoe off oak trees in a special ceremony five days after the new moon following the winter solstice. The Druids believed that the mistletoe would become contaminated if it touched the ground, so they used a special white cloth to catch it. The Druids then sacrificed two white bulls while prayers were said, and priests gave out the mistletoe sprigs to the people, who believed they would then be kept safe from evil spirits and storms. Mistletoe is also said to be a sexual symbol, because of the consistency and color of the berry juice. The tradition of kissing under the mistletoe could have come from either the Viking association of the plant with Frigga, the goddess of love, or from the ancient belief that mistletoe was related to fertility.”
So there you have it. We can only be happy that somebody thought to cut the mistletoe from the tree before one had to stand under it.
My you live and be well, no matter what your holiday tradition.
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December 23
The Font of Human Kindness
A request from a reader to be merciful to his poor, sad eyes reminded me that I had looked at this blog on my sister’s computer and been amazed at how unreadable the small typeface was. So I’ve changed this column’s font size to 11 (from 10) and the size in the side columns to 10 (from 8).
I hope that this helps those of you who had been reading with great squintage.
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Barber Stories
My regular barber has been having physical problems of late and has brought in a local guy who has, according to himself, quite a varied work history: cop, hospital chaplain, chauffeur to the stars, barber. He’s a very good barber and a chatterbox story teller. He told me this story yesterday.
An Irishman goes into a very upscale bar in Dublin and orders three shots of Louis XIII brandy, which is priced at $120 per shot. The bartender retrieves the Waterford crystal decanter and pours the three shots. He turns away from the bar to place the decanter on the shelf, and when he turns back to his customer sees that the three shots are gone.
“Good heavens, why did you drink them so fast?” he asks, astonished.
“If you had what I have,” says the customer, “you’d drink them fast too!”
“My God, man, what is it you have, then!?”
“Thirty-seven cents,” says the man.
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December 21
Upon my return . . .
. . . from several days of visiting in the Northeastern US, I find that:
- Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, head of the Genovese mafia family and known as “The Oddfather,” has died in Federal prison. He earned his “Oddfather” appellation by assiduously faking mental illness to avoid prosecution. He was in the habit of wandering Greenwich Village in ratty clothes, muttering to himself. The Feds decided to prosecute him anyway and once he was convicted he abandoned the crazy act.
- Judge John Jones of the US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania has ruled that the introduction of “intelligent design” into the Dover, PA schools curriculum is an unwarranted intrusion of religion into public education. His downright scathing opinion more than supported those who brought the suit and severely reproved those who testified for the errant (and out-of-office) school board for being liars, among other things. The New Scientist notes in their discussion of the matter that “Judge Jones found that the school board had acted from religious motives, and castigated them for the "breathtaking inanity" of their decision. And he concluded that intelligent design is not science, but merely creation science in disguise. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creation science was a religious concept, not a scientific idea, and could not be mandated in public schools.”
Among Judge Jones’ strong statements are these:
"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."
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"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
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"The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory."
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"After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community."
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"The evidence presented in this case demonstrates that ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications."
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December 13
As he says, “Have at it, kids.”
Our rural Virginia correspondent Hank Burchard has said something profound and stirring about our land. Here it is in all its brilliant brevity.
I am firmly convinced that it is the endless influx of the best and brightest -- and the toughest and greediest -- from all over the planet that made and has kept this country the last, best hope of earth.
While the Miracle of 1776, in which our gentry -- as a matter of principle, for all love -- gave away much of their power and privilege and launched the era of the empowered individual, the country surely would have stagnated and retrogressed without the constant inpouring of people determined to be free. The Darwinian laws of fitness were plainly in operation, and such a people they made of us!
I believe the current situation reflects continuation of the process, complicated by the ease of modern travel and darkened by religious extremism -- theirs AND ours -- but ultimately accruing to the country's continuing greatness. Freedom is a messy and dangerous state of affairs. Always has been, always will be.
The availability, concealability and mobility of weapons of mass destruction is a terrible threat. The threat of worldwide pandemics of drug-resistant diseases is an even more terrible threat. The prospect of genetic engineering of supermen is, to me, a far more terrible threat. But if there are solutions to these things, I believe they are more likely to be found here than anywhere else on earth, because we have the most talented team and deepest bench of any nation.
And what the hell, it ain't my problem. Have at it, kids.
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And Yet Again on Bird Folks and their General Store
Our New Jersey correspondent Rod Vyskocil has this to say about Mike O’Connor, proprietor of the Bird Watcher’s General Store (see the December 4 entry and the December 5 entry below):
Joanne and I have known Mike for 20 years or so. He is the founder (1983) and owner of Bird Watcher's General Store. He's just as hilarious in person as he is in print. In fact he’s nuts (but a great businessman).
When you look at the website (www.birdwatchersgeneralastore) be sure to check out the door signs he has posted. They are ingenious. As Mike writes on the site:
“It's tradition here to keep a sign hung outside the door expressing our views on current issues or just our deep profound thoughts. People drive by or stop by just to read it, so we thought we should share it with the rest of the world.”
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December 5
FEMA Watch
Sent to me by Correspondent Paul Caliban:
Meanwhile, for a most trenchant take on survival in NOLA’s Nith Ward, look in on this blog, a record of living in general awfulness.
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More on “Dear Bird Folks”
Correspondent Ric Clancy, who lives near The Birdwatcher’s General Store, sends this note:
The Birdwatcher's General Store is right next to the fish store I visit frequently. During the California gubernatorial election they had a sign up which read, "Free entry into the California election with every purchase".
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December 4
“Dear Bird Folks”
Yesterday I mentioned (Science Writing) that I had been reading The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2004. In that volume is a piece by Mike O’Connor nominally entitled “Rice at Weddings.” It is one of many columns written over the years by O’Connor in the weekly Cape Codder newspaper.
The columns begin, “Dear Bird Folks . . .” and answer questions sent in ostensibly by readers who want to know something about birds they have seen, would like to see, have heard of, and so forth.
O’Connor is the proprietor of The Birdwatcher’s General Store in Orleans, MA on the Cape. Its site is by itself worth a visit and a browse.
The repository of columns back to June, 2000 is on the store’s web site, not on the Cape Codder site. I commend them to you. “Rice at Weddings“ is a good example, but any of them will serve.
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Old Pilot’s Saying
Friend of Overtones Allan Janus on Panabasis, the splendid blog of The Janus Museum, records this fine sentiment: “As for me, I just hope I die peacefully in my sleep, as my grandfather did; and not screaming in terror, as his passengers did.”
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December 3
Science Writing
While reading a New York Times review of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions by physicist Lisa Randall, I happened to glance down at the footer, which described the reviewer, Tim Folger. It said of him, among other things, that he is the series editor of the Best Science and Nature Writing books. The review got me interested in Randall’s work, since she seems to have turned cosmology on its head of late. Her new book is a top scientist’s stab at making some very complex ideas comprehensible. I tend to enjoy such books a lot. The footer got me curious about the Folger series.
So I hied me to my local library’s on line catalog and reserved Randall’s book, as well as The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2004 and the edition of 2005. The BSANW 2004 and the Randall arrived at the library at the same time.
I got so wrapped up in the earlier BSANW book that I had to renew the Randall book. Today I discovered that the renewal has run out and that I can’t renew it again. Meanwhile, today, not even thinking about Randall, I followed up on a phone call from the library that the BSANW of 2005 had finally arrived and I went to pick it up. I just made a second trip to return the soon-to-be-overdue Randall, dammit. I’ll get it again, but really wanted to dig into it.
So now that I’ve finished whining, I want to talk about the BSANW of 2004 - more particularly about some of the great essays in it. Not a one of them was I able - or willing - to skip - not even the Foreword, an impassioned Folger attack on what some people call “common sense” of the sort that defends the status quo in thought and understanding of the universe. As Folger says, “Common sense is much overrated as a virtue. The defenders of a flat Earth invoked it. . . When it comes to understanding the universe, the history of science shows common sense to be a most unreliable guide.” In the Introduction, this volume’s editor, Steven Pinker, says, “what I treasure most in science writing [is] the ability to show how a seemingly capricious occurrence falls out of laws of greater generality.” Pinker has collected essays that “combined explanatory depth [with] limpid prose.” And he delivers the goods he implicitly promises when he says, “Of all the things that go into good science writing, I am fondest of prose that airs out a stuffy hall of scholarship and conveys its insights (or its absurdities) with irreverent wit . . . “
Pinker has chosen carefully also to include essays that expose the great risks in scientific kowtowing to the political fashions of either the right or the left, both dangerous, agenda-driven worlds that could, and gladly would, undermine the purposes and progress of science. He is also at pains to ward off what might be called a misguided hyper-morality. “Our neural circuits for morality are overly receptive to the trappings of purity, naturalness, and custom, and they are too easily impressed by gravitas, indignation, conspicuous asceticism, and other advertisements of saintliness that may have scant correlation with actions that make people better off.”
Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and has won numerous prizes for his teaching, research and books. He has no patience with certain “moral intuitions.” He states that “Reams of nonsense have been written about cloning, genes linked with personality, and pharmaceuticals that may enhance mood, concentration, and memory. Some of the non-sequiturs are so bizarre that they make me wonder whether the authors have fully assimilated what Francis Crick calls ‘the astonishing hypothesis’ - the idea that all thought and feeling consist of physiological activity in the brain - and instead tacitly believe that human choice and individuality reside in an autonomous soul.”
The articles cover lots of ground: “Genesis of Suicide Terrorism,” “The Mythical Threat of Genetic Determinism,” “A War on Obesity, Not the Obese,” “The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics,” “Where Have All the Lisas Gone?” (an article on name frequency in North America), “The Cousin Marriage Conundrum” (which calls into question our strategic assumptions about extending our style of democracy into a society in which the glue of close family ties driven by high levels of consanguineous marriages makes highly unlikely any development of fealty to a nation-state), and a splendidly remarkable essay on “Parallel Universes.”
I can’t wait to start BSANW of 2005. In fact, that’s what I’ll do right now, thanks.
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December 1
The New Yorker: A Complaint
I love The New Yorker, and not primarily because most of its political articles coincide with how I think and feel. It’s mostly because of how it grabs my interest about things that I would not spend much time either thinking about or caring about. I said to someone recently that I have no interest at all in ballet; but Joan Acocella has actually dragged me into articles she has written and kept me in there. The same thing happens with much New Yorker writing about food: it almost always sucks me in and holds my interest, despite my feeling that most writing about food is, well, boring.
What annoys me, though, is that the writing is, in these days of electronic rendering of text, unusually ephemeral. The New Yorker has, in my opinion, one of the worst of policies about the on line version of its magazine: only a smattering of its articles, and not usually its best ones, is available on line. The magazine declines even to do what many publications do: make its most recent issue(s) available for a limited time on its web site or to make them available through paid subscription to an on line version or through purchase of individual articles.
Why does this bother me? For much of my life I have tried to make my friends and acquaintance aware of the interesting things I find in the world. It is one of my joys. That is pretty much what this blog is about. In the far, pre-Internet past I would cut articles out and copy them (more on the copyright issue below), then distribute them to my list of correspondents and colleagues. Today, I quote from the on line copies of articles and encourage folks to get a copy and to read it.
A case in point is the September 5, 1005 issue of the magazine, entirely devoted to food articles (and lots of food-themed cartoons). Never mind the interminable article about tofu in Japan (nothing against tofu, don’t you know, just could not stay with this without screaming). But do mind the “Annals of Agriculture” article by John Seabrook on the preservation mainly of ancient pear stocks in Italy, “Renaissance Pears.” The title is not at all an exaggeration. A single family in Italy (now one member of that family) has kept alive on their own farm examples of pear trees and pear types from the time of the Medicis; and they have searched out surviving pear, apple, fig, quince and other types of trees throughout Italy. The daughter of the family does it alone now, and doubts that she will be able, after a time, to keep the effort going.
This is an article that deserves wide readership, wider than it will have attained with the magazine’s subscribers and with readers in dental offices. Not only that, it deserves electronic preservation and ready availability. But it won’t have that.
What would I do if the article were easily available for cutting and pasting on the Web? I would cut and paste pieces of it and send it, with my learned and brilliant commentary, to people who are not New Yorker subscribers or readers (and to those who are, as well). It’s that simple. I would hope that they would be as interested as I am. I would harbor a hope that someone might even be moved to go to Italy to see what the article describes, or, mirabile dictu, to find a way to help the family continue their labor of love and respect for history.
Would this violate copyright? Probably, at least as copyright laws now seem to suggest. “Fair use” has become a murky concept in these days of draconian publication rights. In my opinion, creators of copyrightable content have, in pursuit of completely protecting their interests, screwed themselves worse than they were being screwed before. I am not about stealing other peoples’ material. Quite the contrary. I am about honoring what they have done by giving it circulation that it would not have had at all. Many publications allow me to do that: newspapers, for the most part; other magazines, such as The Atlantic; journals and zines that are completely on line, including those that allow access only through paid subscription.
In essence, I am suggesting that Conde Nast is shafting its writers in many ways - and, in the process, shafting itself. Am I rationalizing? Sure. That doesn’t make me any less correct.
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