Sky Watch: Oncoming Weather

Looking out from the fourth floor of my hotel on the night before the storm...




more Sky Watchers here - a stunning Brazilian beach and sky

Happy Birthday, Alexis

de Tocqueville, that is - born in 1805.

"He went with his best friend, Gustave de Beaumont, and after a brief stop in Newport, they arrived in Manhattan at sunrise May 11, 1831. Over the course of the next nine months, Tocqueville and his friend traveled more than 7,000 miles, using every vehicle then in existence, including steamer, stage-coach, and horse, going as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and as far south as New Orleans. He interviewed everyone he met: workmen, doctors, professors, as well as famous men, such as Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the richest man in America. At the end of nine months, Tocqueville went back to France, and in less than a year, he had finished his masterpiece, Democracy in America (1835)." [quoted from The Writer's Almanac]

America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a State. ... Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough.

I hope our passions aren't necessarily so "small", nor our intelligence just "practical" - let's make it more than "enough" this time around, okay?

Happy Birthday, Gerard

Born today in 1844 in Stratford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets (still today, though I don't agree with his philosophy).

Bless you, Robert Bridges, for publishing his work after he died, in 1888, too young and no longer writing...



Ash-Boughs

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep
Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled
Fast ór they in clammyish lashtender combs creep
Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.
They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep
The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May
Mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray
Of greenery: it is old earth’s groping towards the steep
Heaven whom she childs us by.

Wikileaks

I have no comment on the recent Wikileaks disclosures - because of where I work, it's better that I don't.

But I will say this: By all means, let's pretend that Bradley Manning is the only person in the US armed forces who's unhappy. That'll prevent future leaks and keep us all "safer".

Taboo word avoidance: a fine case

A story in the Minneapolis "Star Tribune" displays some fine obscenity-avoidance on the part of the reporter (or possibly editor). The story is about a man who got between a guy and the woman he was hitting and who got soundly beaten for his trouble.

"I just simply say, 'Dude, that's enough,' [thinking] maybe he'll back off," Skripka said. "He got in my face. I didn't flinch. I said, 'Dude, back off,' pardon my French but that's the words I used. Then I finally said, 'Dude, what's your problem?' The next thing I know is I'm waking up on a gurney. I was knocked out cold."

Seriously?

"Dude, back off" requires "pardon my French"? That's a phrase generally reserved for hard-core profanity or obscenity. "Dude, back off" is a bit slangy, perhaps, but I can't picture a guy thinking he needed to apologize for saying it, especially since it's clearly not the word "dude" he's apologizing for using; it's "back off".

Somehow I don't think "that's the words [he] used."

What makes this so deeply weird is that "Dude, back off" is a well-formed and appropriate phrase for him to have used. There's no hint of expurgation. It's not "Dude, --- off" or "Dude [back] off": it looks like "back off" is what he said. But then we get that reflexive apology, because he knows that what you say to an aggressor who's threatening you is probably not appropriate for a newspaper. It's really odd.

source

UPDATED: Over at Language Log a commenter says:

The newspaper quote matches supplied footage of the press conference. In the press conference video, at 0:40 he says, I said, 'Dude, back off,' pardon my French but that's the words I used.' Then there's a flash cut on the video, and then he's saying "I just don't know why he …"

If they edited the quote for the newspaper, then they edited the video sequence perfectly to eliminate any trace as well.

That is just ... wow. I can't imagine saying "Pardon my French" for "Dude, back off". That's Minnesota nice taken to the extreme.

Maybe he should stay home...

Lino Lakes, Minnesota, just voted an English-only ordinance that prohibits the city from translating anything out of English (with a prudent 'let's not lose our federal money' exception for health, public safety, and education). The typical rationale was that it was "budgetary" - its main proponent on the council said "The reality is these are really hard times, economically, for all of us, and it is a budgetary issue." Pointing out that the city is furloughing and laying off, he added, "we're trying to protect the good staff that we have and need." Wow, you may be asking, how much of the budget was consumed by translation services?

None.

Yeah. Lino Lakes has never spent a dime on translation services of any kind. That makes this way less about being "a budgetary issue" and way more about being something else.

What kind of something else? Well, here's what one guy* had to say:

"I'm tired of going to restaurants and hearing these new families speaking their native tongue to their kids."

Okay. I think we can all tell what kind of issue it is for him...

*I know. Someone's going to point out that he adds, "There doesn't seem to be any teaching of English to kids in their families." But that only demonstrates his profound lack of understanding how kids learn a new language. It isn't from having parents who don't speak it well "teach" it to them in restaurants. The kids will learn English, especially if they're put into a good school (though I'm guessing this guy's stand on translation makes that more difficult - and would, if he could do it, make it impossible). And so will their parents, who will - as pointed out in a column ironically running on the same day - try very hard to learn English.

"In loud voices and on the opinion pages of the local paper, residents railed against the newcomers for not learning English. But as I soon found out, they were certainly trying. Every evening, exhausted after a day of work, men and women came to a baby blue schoolhouse in Aberdeen to learn."

There is in fact plenty of evidence that over 80% of immigrants try to learn English formally - in the rapidly disappearing ESL courses offered at nights. In fact, there's plenty of evidence that even illegal immigrants (the sad end of that column was about the school closing because the local fishing plant was raided and people were afraid to come) will work their butts off to learn English. Unfortunately, not only is there a perception that people who are "speaking their native language" are not trying to learn English, but also a very wrong perception out there (as evidenced by a poll in Salt Lake City a few years back) that learning English is easy:

One of the biggest surprises from the survey, community leaders said, is the time employers think it takes to learn English. Almost half of employers said it should take six to 12 months to learn English, the survey said.

Combining those two perceptions leads to this: anybody who speaks their native tongue to their children is a lazy parasite who just wants to sponge off the rest of us.

And one more thing: regardless of what he thinks, his grandparents almost certainly didn't stop speaking Swedish to each other once they came to the US... though quite clearly he (like most immigrants' children) doesn't know any of their language. That's the way it works. Most people whose parents were European immigrants, or who grew up in Littly Italy or Poland know this - and grew up speaking English even where their parents never mastered it. And people like him won't stop it or speed it up. All they'll do is make their city a deeply unwelcoming place.

Addendum: In the workshop I'm taking, a woman just said that her students are heritage speakers of Chinese, teenagers who ... don't want to be there because they don't want to study Chinese, don't use it among themselves, and only speak it when their parents make them.

The Week in Entertainment

I'm in Minneapolis for workshops. They're engrossing and keeping me busy, so I haven't done much but work, and read Agatha Christie, mostly Poirots...

But! I did watch the season finale of Dr Who. If you haven't seen it,
I don't want to spoil it, but - Rory!!! (I do like it when there are two Companions, plus I just like Rory. He's wonderful.) Plus that wonderful line from Amy's mom: "I don't want her growing up and joining one of those Star Cults. I don't trust that Richard Dawkins."

Also, watched Leverage tonight. Excellent, as usual. Hardison and Eliot play off each other very well - I'm especially thinking of the exchange where Eliot told Hardison he had escaped armed pursuers while handcuffed to someone before.
Hardison: "This? In the woods?"
Eliot: "Exactly this! But it was easier last time."
Hardison: "Why?"
Eliot: "He was already dead!"

Gift me a break, indeed

Sigh... Today's Arlo & Janis:

It's certainly Johnson's right to complain about words he doesn't like. But please.

First, "gift" as a verb isn't a "trend" - unless Modern English is a trend. The verb's been around since the early 17th century (as Barry points out), and it's only its overuse by Madison Avenue that threw it into disrespect.

Second, it is nice to have a verb that means "make a gift" - "give" doesn't mean that - you can give things that aren't yours - that aren't anybody's, including the person you "give" them to (like the time of day)- and you can "give" things as a loan, clearly (and rightly) expecting them back.

Third, nobody would ever say "gift me a break", unless they were trying to be funny. (Not actually being funny, of course; just trying.) People don't use "gift" in all senses of "give", or interchangeably with or instead of "give".

Sky Watch: Infinite Regression

Yesterday's sky over my hotel in Minneapolis



more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Robert

Today in Wimbledon, England, in 1895, Robert Graves was born. 18 when WWI started, he was immediately shipped off to France. He was badly wounded and reported dead; he believed his life had been spared to write poetry. He suffered from PTSD - recurring nightmares and flashbacks that paralyzed and terrified him. But after he married he began to write, prolifically. In 1929 he published a memoir called Goodbye to All That, and he was able to support himself and his family on his writing for the rest of his life. He may be best known for The White Goddess, a exploration of poetry and myth, and his novels I, Claudius and Claudius, the God, his translations from Latin, and the controversial King Jesus. But he also wrote poetry:

Babylon
THE CHILD alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all’s poetry with him.
Rhyme and music flow in plenty
For the lad of one-and-twenty,
But Spring for him is no more now
Than daisies to a munching cow;
Just a cheery pleasant season,
Daisy buds to live at ease on.
He’s forgotten how he smiled
And shrieked at snowdrops when a child,
Or wept one evening secretly
For April’s glorious misery.
Wisdom made him old and wary
Banishing the Lords of Faery.
Wisdom made a breach and battered
Babylon to bits: she scattered
To the hedges and ditches
All our nursery gnomes and witches.
Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,
Drag their treasures from the shelves.
Jack the Giant-killer’s gone,
Mother Goose and Oberon,
Bluebeard and King Solomon.
Robin, and Red Riding Hood
Take together to the wood,
And Sir Galahad lies hid
In a cave with Captain Kidd.
None of all the magic hosts,
None remain but a few ghosts
Of timorous heart, to linger on
Weeping for lost Babylon.

Happy Birthday, Zelda

My father grew up in Montgomery, and once when he was ill Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald read him a story. She was beautiful and crazy, and her life is a tragic romance... Her husband loved her dearly, and she him, and he wrote once, "...For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness."

Happy Birthday, Stephen

Vincent Benet, that is. Born in 1898. This fragment is one of my favorite bits of poetry - it's from The Army of Northern Virginia and is describing Traveller. I love it for its sentiment and its syntactic complexity.

They bred such horses in Virginia then--
Horses that were remembered after death,
And buried not so far from Christian ground
That if their sleeping riders should awake
They could not witch them from the earth again
And ride a printless course along the grass
With the old manage and light ease of hand...

Who's off message?

Mitch McConnell says: "There's no debate in the Senate about whether we should pass a bill -- everyone agrees that we should." And John Boehner says: "The president knows that Republicans support extending unemployment insurance." They just want it to be "fiscally responsible" and "deficit-neutral" (though not by - horrors! - getting rid of tax cuts on the wealthy, money which doesn't go right back into the economy like spending money for the out-of-work does, but that's a different post).

But if they want anybody to buy that, they need to muzzle some other prominent Republicans. Like, say, Senator John Kyl: "[C]ontinuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

Or Senator Richard Burr: "The wrong thing to do is to automatically today extend unemployment for 12 months. I think that's a discouragement to individuals that are out there to actually go out and go through the interviews."

Or Senator Judd Gregg: "Because you're out of the recession, you're starting to see growth and you're clearly going to dampen the capacity of that growth if you basically keep an economy that encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment."

Or Governor Tom Corbett: "People don't want to come back to work while they still have unemployment. They're literally telling [employers] 'I'll come back to work when the employment runs out.' That's becoming a problem ... The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there."

Or Tom Delay: "[T]here is an argument to be made that these extensions of these unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs."

Or Ben Stein (not elected, but a powerful voice): "The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities."

Or candidate Sharron Angle: "you can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job, but it doesn’t pay as much." (Does she know what unemployment is in, say, Mississippi? Or Pennsylvania?)

Or candidate Ron Johnson: "When you continue to extend unemployment benefits, people really don't have the incentive to go take other jobs. They'll just wait the system out until their benefits run out, then they'll go out and take, probably not as high paying jobs as they'd like to take, but that's really how you have to get back to work. You have to take the work that's available at the wage rates that's available." (And if there isn't any work available, Mr Johnson? What then?)

Anyway, I'm not saying that the official position of the Republican party, or even the unofficial position of most Republicans, is that if you're out of work, you deserve it and should lose your house and then starve. I'm just saying that a lot of them certainly do talk like it is.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Two Joan Hickson (she's the best) Miss Marples: The Moving Finger and A Caribbean Mystery. The Moving Finger, by the way, was one of my early lessons in the mutability of memory: the first time I saw it the only thing I remembered from the book was that Joanna would end up with the doctor... (the other was my vivid memory of a scene from Snow White that isn't actually there - the crow turning pink and blue from magic clouds going up the chimney. Weird thing, memory.)

TV: YAYAYAYAY! Psych is back! I'm glad they didn't ignore Juliet's experience, but I'm also glad they're not dwelling on it. I love the little things about this show, like the way they play with the credits (in Chinese this time). Nature's Andes: Spine of the Dragon - the footage of Humboldt penguins crossing a sea lion colony to get to the ocean, clambering over the huge predators' backs and jumping off and on, was hysterical. Twice the Leverage (I love DVRs) - Nate is on the edge. I was relieved that Parker was supposed to set off the motion detectors, and laughed out loud at the expression on her face while she was doing it. zAnd the second one - well, I saw Angel; I know Christian Kane can sing. He can also act. The scene where Eliot is fighting the Busey in the sound-proof studio while Hardison and Parker are watching the equipment and not seeing it, and he keeps waving at their backs ... priceless. And I love the line at the end: "There are some roads, when you start down them you can't go back. And I'm about a hundred miles down one of those roads." Nice episode. Dr Who - man. If I'd realized what a cliff-hanger they had prepared, I would have waited. But Rory's back! Kind of. Damn, they're mean to Companions nowadays.

Read: Several YAs: The Magic Thief trilogy (Sarah Prineas), which was excellent; Ashes (Kathryn Lasky), a spare but moving look at 1932-33 in Weimar Germany; Turtle in Paradise (Jennifer L. Holm), not as good for adults but interesting. Also finished In Other Rooms, Other Wonders - a series of linked stories set in contemporary Pakistan, truly fascinating. What is Left the Daughter, a very, very good Canadian novel (Howard Norman) about a tragic incident in a small Nova Scotia town in the early days of WWII... we Americans forget (if we ever knew) what that time was like for our northern neighbors; the protagonist is well drawn and story is compelling. Norman can certainly write.

Gosh, really?

Let me say up front that I know some people have severe allergies and can't eat anything that has even peanut dust on it. But, really... was this warning necessary?

On the plane today we were given peanuts from Delta's Kings Delicious Nuts®, which were labeled:

Dry-Roasted Peanuts
Ingredients: Dry Roasted Peanuts, Salt
Produced in a facility that processes peanuts

King of the Birds

Just yesterday at work I was reading an analysis of Pushkin's "The Tale of the Fisherman and the Golden Fish", and the author spent a great deal of time on a bit that had been cut from the manuscript by Pushkin before publishing. It dealt with the fisherman seeing his wife as the Pope, seated on a tower with a crown on her head, and on the head a wren. The wren, Bykov tells us, is remarkable for the contrast between its tiny body and large voice, and is an attribute of supreme power - representing the court poet. He also recounts a German story about how, when the birds decided to choose as their king the one that flew highest, the wren hid himself on the back of the eagle and thus ended up highest of all... Well, be that as it may, these birds are indeed tiny - and very, very loud. Here's one last shot of one of the pair that nest in my father's backyard.

Happy Birthday, Peter

It's the birthday of Peter Schickele (1935)! A Julliard-trained musician who writes good stuff under his own name, he's probably most famous for his "discovery" of JS Bach's youngest son - the incomparable PDQ Bach, composer of such works as Oedipus Tex, Iphigenia in Brooklyn, The Abduction of Figaro, and innumerable shorter works. I saw Schickele in concert three years - it was amazing fun!

Happy Birthday, Erle

Born today in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889, the creator of America's most famous fictional lawyer. Erle Stanley Gardner qualified as a lawyer himself without attending law school, only working in a law firm. After passing the bar, he made his living defending poor immigrants in California, and writing an enormous number of stories. He finally settled into the Perry Mason novels, and wrote more than 80.

Here I must add that as well as the tv series I remember so well, there were a lot of movies made in the 30s - with a Perry Mason Raymond Burr wouldn't have recognized (especially the boozy Nick-Charles-wannabe from The Case of the Lucky Legs)!

There were also some good movies made of the DA series (yes, the other side of the battle) one of which featured Jim Hutton in the starring role.

Happy Birthday, Hermann

Hermann Jadlowker was born today in 1877 in Riga, Latvia.

Destined by his family to be a merchant, he ran away from home at 15 - heading to Vienna, where he studied classical singing with Josef Gänsbacher. In 1899 (some sources say 1897), he made his operatic début at Cologne in Kreutzer's Nachtlager von Granada. He then secured engagements in Stettin and Karlsruhe. Kaiser Wilhelm II heard him and was so impressed that he offered him a five-year contract at the Royal Opera in Berlin. Apart from Berlin, Jadlowker sang also in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Lemberg, Prague, Budapest and Boston during the course of his career.

In 1910-12, Jadlowker appeared at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, where he proved to be one of the company's most versatile artists although his performances were overshadowed by those of Enrico Caruso. He returned to Europe prior to the outbreak of World War I and continued his operatic career in a number of German cities. During the 1920s, Jadlowker sang increasingly on the concert platform and, in 1929, he was chosen to be chief cantor at the Riga synagogue. Jadlowker subsequently became a voice teacher at the Riga Conservatory before emigrating to Palestine with his wife in 1938. He taught in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, dying in the latter city at the age of 75.

Jadlowker possessed a dark-hued, lyric-dramatic tenor voice of extraordinary flexibility. His agile vocal technique enabled him to sing runs, trills and other coloratura embellishments with ease and accuracy. He made a large number of records in Europe and America across a 20-year period, commencing in 1907. Many of these recordings, which include arias by composers as diverse as Mozart, Auber, Verdi, Rossini and Wagner, can be heard on CD reissues.

Among the very best of those is Hermann Jadlowker: Dramatic Coloratura Tenor which has everything he ever recorded, from Mozart to lieder by Strauss and Tchaikovsky, including his incomparable "Noch tönt mir ein Meer im Busen (Fuor del Mare)" (they say that when Mozart wrote Idomeneo, his tenor was a sexagenarian who thought Mozart was a brat. Be that as it may, he must have had a voice to die for: since then, not until Jadlowker, and (I think) not since, has anyone sung the "long" aka "hard" version of this aria, with trills and coloratura like you've never heard before.) and "Ecco ridente in cielo" from Rossini's "Barber of Seville". Marston 52017-2. Because of the age of the recordings, there is some noise, easily (in my opinion) overlooked.

As soon as I found this, I had to buy it. As Tom Kaufman's liner notes say, "Jadlowker's voice and skills were unique." Simply a fantastic collection, 2 discs, and I can (and have) listened to the first disc for literally hours.

Sky Watch: Misty Evening

Mist rising from the Clinch River at Melton Hill Lake blurs the line between water and land, and the sky is both above and below the trees...





more Sky Watchers here

Cardinals

Here's a juvenile cardinal in the woods out back at my father's, along with mom who's lost most of her head feathers.

I write like who?

Hmmm... I'm not sure (a) how reliable this is or (b) what it means, but

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

(Hat tip to fev at headsup)

Young Cardinal

There's a Japanese maple next to my father's kitchen. Sometimes, birds sit inside it, not seeming to notice (or having figured out the glass) people inside. This juvenile cardinal was there this morning. Note the dark beak, unlike the red-orange of the adults.

Happy Birthday, Woody

Woody Guthrie, born this day in 1912.

He wrote a lot, and he gave a voice to the unheard.




Old Cap Moore

Old Cap Moore was a bakery hand
Loaded trucks at night
The hungry cries of the alley kids
Made Old Cap close his eyes
He turned his back while the kids ran up
Grabbed a good hot loaf of bread
The kids run home, but when payday come
Cap Moore was in the red

Because the bakery boss did count the loss
And he wrote it in his book
He docked Old Cap full retail price
For the bread the kids had took
Old Cap he jammed the backdoor latch
So the door did fly unlocked
The hungry kids picked up that bread
For ten or twenty blocks

Mister, I’m a-tellin’ you
Everything I’ve said is true
No alley kid had a friend as sure
As Old Cap Moore

That boss took the driver and Cap to court
But he could not make it stick
The driver swore, “I did not know
“Those doors had come unhitched.”
Old Cap says, “Boss, I’ma quitting you
“And I am quitting now
“I’ve got friends to put me up
“In every house in town.”

Mister, I’m a-tellin’ you
What the old man said was true
It’s an open hand and an open door
For Old Cap Moore

Mister, I’m tellin’ you
One thing I know is true
To even the score we need a whole lot more
Like Old Cap Moore


Woody Guthrie lyrics

Flatwater and rowers

There's a nationally known 2000 meter rowing course on Melton Hill Lake in Oak Ridge. The Flatwater Grill is located at the start of the course, and you can often see collegiate rowers practicing while you dine.

This week the US Rowing Club's National Championship is being held here, and some of the rowers were out early...







Here, mist rising off the river turns them into a scene from a horror film ... the team vanished, never to be seen again: what lurks in the mist?



One lone sculler contemplates the course.

rather than

Here's a fairly odd sentence from Call Mr Fortune, written by HC Bailey in 1920:

Lucia Charlecote was so frail, of such a simplicity, that she looked rather like an angel in one of the primitive pictures than a woman.

"She looked rather like an angel" is fine for me, meaning "somewhat like an angel". But then I hit that "than", and the sentence derails. I can't use "rather ... than" like this. In fact, though I realize he means "more than" when he says "rather than", the sentence is deeply weird for me.

What's very odd, though, is I can reverse it (sort of). That is, I can use "rather than", but only as a unit:

Lucia Charlecote was so frail, of such a simplicity, that she looked like an angel in one of the primitive pictures rather than a woman.

Now, "rather than" doesn't have to be a unit. For instance, I can say "I'd rather be an angel than a woman" or "rather see an angel than a woman". But there we have a modal, and rather's in front of the verb, not after it - a modifier rather than a part of the complement.

And, of course, I can keep his information structuring by using "more ... than":

Lucia Charlecote was so frail, of such a simplicity, that she looked more like an angel in one of the primitive pictures than a woman.

What about you? Does his "she looked rather like an angel than a woman" work for you?

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Sophie Wang in concert. She did a brilliant Beethoven Sonata in E Major, Op. 109, and one of the best versions of Liszt's Les jeux d'eaux â la Villa d'Este I've ever heard.

Film: The Karate Kid - the new one with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. It's genuinely moving, and the locations are wonderful. Jaden has inherited his parents' skills - he's marvelous, better than many adult actors. This is (again, meaning nothing snide) Jackie Chan's best performance: the script asks him for depth, subtlety, and nuance, and he delivers it. There's a scene between the two of them that's achingly perfect - I cried. The A-Team, which was good for what it was, an action summer flick. Actually, Copley and Cooper were very good, but Neeson was either miscast or badly directed...

DVD: Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone - you know, I'd forgotten how totally irrational his hatred for Snape was. In this first movie Snape actually saved his freakin' life. Some of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes.

TV: Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express. I have a fondness for the theatrical version with Finney, Connery, Perkins, Bacall, and the rest of them, but I don't think that's why I didn't care for this version. Instead, it's the psychological exploration they tacked onto it, with Poirot's crisis of conscience and Colonel Arbuthnot's trying to shoot Poirot and Mary Debenham's tortured realization that she'll never be free of murder... It's the extra stuff at the beginning, where instead of Poirot coming home from Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death, he's coming from a murder investigation that resulted in an innocent man's committing suicide, with Poirot blaming him for lying, and a stoning (!) in the streets of Istanbul that left him rather unmoved and pontificating about "justice"... It's how all that extra stuff meant the actual murder on the Orient Express and its investigation got rather short shrift. I was looking forward to this. Now I kind of wished I'd missed it.

Read: Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett, a good overview of what happens when stimuli are more than nature intended. State Fair by Earlene Fowler, the best one in a while. Began In Other Rooms, Other Treasures by Daniyal Mueenuddin. The first story was excellent - I'm not sure if these are intertwined stories or if there's a coincindental same-name, but I'm looking forward to finishing it.

Not the rest, though...

My father's Sunday paper carries "Parade Magazine". This week they had a story (online) called "Red, White, and Scammed" by Earl Swift. It's about the various ways unscrupulous merchants as well as scam artists take advantage of and rip off service members. Car sales, life insurance, "cheap" computers ... there's a host of them, and always have been. Just drive past any army base and see.

But this really got me (my emphasis):

Washington has waged war against the scammers with limited success. When a 2006 Defense Department report cited payday lenders as a threat—rates for short-term loans had soared as high as 780%—Congress passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 2007 that capped rates on such loans to military personnel at 36%. “Many payday-loan businesses stopped lending to service members,” Petraeus says, “because they said they couldn’t make a profit.”

The less principled, however, simply altered their tactics. Some lenders abide by the cap but drown their products in fees—in one reported case, $452 of charges were piled on a $1000 loan. Others base their businesses offshore and call their offerings “revolving lines of credit”—both so they can skirt U.S. laws and charge 500% interest. In her Arlington, Va., office, [Holly Petraeus, director of the military program of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and wife of Army Gen. David Petraeus] typed “ military loans” into Google. “I got about 2.5 million results from that,” she says. “A lot of them are predatory or just outright scams.”

So ... it's great that it's now illegal to charge more than 36% interest to military personnel. But it's still legal to charge 780% to civilians?

This is a huge part of why it's so hard to get out from under when you're poor. You have one bad month, and you have to borrow against next month's paycheck to meet this month's bills - because nobody will give you credit or an extension when you're that bad off. Problem is, you owe five or six times what you borrowed, so even if you get that loan paid off you need another one to meet that month's bills... And so it goes. Forever.

That kind of interest is way past usury. It's the most immoral way to make a profit that exists, barring only murder for hire.

It ought to be illegal to charge that much interest to anybody.

Off the deck

My father had his deck rebuilt (mostly by his kids) and in the mornings it's a wonderful place to sit. In the afternoons just now it's too hot, but in the spring and fall it'll be nice - although it's west facing, the trees are very high and it's in shade except right at noon. I've seen a lot birds, and heard even more. Here are some of them.

Here's a red-bellied woodpecker.


And here's the logcock - the pileated woodpecker. There's a pair; this is the female.


When I snapped this I thought it was a titmouse. It's not ... I think it's a phoebe?




Here's a titmouse, rather out-of-focus, sorry.


And this, of course, is a crow.


Here's the 'rain crow', a yellow-billed cuckoo. He did herald rain (a day later, but still...)


One of a pair of Carolina wrens hollering blue murder about something.


And the other... their alarm calls were similar but distinctly different in pitch.


And this female cardinal has definitely seen better days. There are five or six cardinals here - three males for sure - but the males have been stubborn about getting out of the leaves...

Happy Birthday, Alice

Today is the birthday of Alice Munro (born in Ontario in 1931). I'm almost ashamed to say it, but I read my first Munro story only a couple of years (after watching Away From Her). I've read many since then, and have the rest of her collections in my to-read pile. She's amazing. Her prose is clear, spare, beautiful, and her characters so real and vivid that even in stories where nothing much seems to happen the story draws you in and releases you only well after you've finished. I'd call her a national treasure if she were American; as it is, she's a treasure in the world of English-language writers (and readers).

Richard

Richard is the name they've given this Great Blue Heron at the Flatwater Grill, whose dock he's standing on here. These pictures were taken last night, after a hard half-day's rain.

Great Egret redux

I went back down to the river last night to see if the Great Egrets would return. Two did, but this picture still isn't great. It rained here for about seven hours - you can see the mist rising off the river in the second photo - and it was gray. Low light is my camera's achilles heel, especially at that distance, something like 200 yards. Still, at least in this picture you can see for sure that it's an egret!

Happy Birthday, Nikola

It's the birthday (1856) of the man who invented alternating current - and made the modern world possible, Nikola Tesla.

Great Egrets

Okay, I know this isn't a great photo - it's kind of impressionistic, in fact - but it was taken with my cell phone, not my camera. I'll have to go back out with the camera and see if they show up again. You probably can't tell for sure, but they are Great Egrets. There were eight of them by the time they'd all flown in and settled in a tree - not this one at the end, but a larger one a hundred yards or so down the river. Great Egrets were nearly wiped out by hats - their plumes were avidly sought - but they're making a good comeback. But I didn't know there were any here. In fact, on the Cornell Lab map (select the map to go to a larger version on their site) we're north of that little blue dot in East Tennessee. But here they are.