No Kings Day

The No Kings 3.0 uprising (demonstration, protest) has not happened yet in Portland, and exactly what my day will be like is unclear given I'm coordinating with others and their plans are only starting to gel as well. Likely public transportation will be involved. Left to my own devices, I'd likely head into town on the Max from the Hollywood station, looking to join the throng near the Steel, as I did recently (one week ago) for the cherry blossom experience.

However, having arisen early, as is my custom, I did spend a couple hours doing some deep cleaning, in the bathroom and kitchen. My meditation was along the lines of: No Kings means a lifestyle with no servants, no court, no sycophants. One might contract with assistants for sure, as when needing an appliance repaired or installed, or even housecleaning by professionals, but there’s no sense in which these companies are necessarily socially lower on the totem pole. No ranking is required. No proof is social station is involved. More like Food Not Bombs.

The American Dream does not involve “winning the lottery” and retiring to some tasteless McMansion with lots of servants, for a life of partying and superficial pursuits. That’s more the antithesis of the American Dream of you ask me. Americans would like to live in a world where none are oppressed on their behalf. On the contrary, Americans would love to be of net benefit to this world. That’s the dream anyway. The reality is a lot of people feel they represent the Americans and set up in offices pretending as much. At least they’re not kings or queens (or other royalty), except on floats or in the theater.

I shared this same picture (above) on my Meta timeline, and in the comments section went somewhat deeper into the Jesse Jackson story. I was involved with his campaign in 1984 as well, especially after he dropped out after the primaries, and we could use his picture to help motivate people to vote from whomever remained. 

As usual, Dems did their bait and switch, to make sure only middle of the roaders would enter the final contest — leading to my Vote for Nobody pin, popular during the Occupy movement, in which I was active (and no, I was not and am not connected to “Antifa” the nebulous organization — Portland has a more imaginative resistance scene than most stereotypes allow for).

Project Hail Mary (movie review)

As I do somewhat often, I deliberately avoided any opinion pieces (aka reviews) regarding this movie, but had seen the previews. However I’d stereotyped the type of film somewhat inaccurately. The film proved somewhat surprising in other words, such as by including a song number, a female vocalist (and main character) hearkening back to those noirs of the 1930s-1950s I’ve been sampling.

I’d expected more of a special effects high action movie, with a lot of kinetics, and this film had that, but its axis of emotional depth as well as intellectual depth was more than that of many comic book derivatives I associate with this genre. I haven’t read the novel behind it, which explains a lot of my cluelessness, which I was fine with (I’m clueless about a lotta stuff).

The smart part is its juxtaposition of high school biology with phenomena of an astrophysical scale, condensing solar systems to Petri dish ecosystems model-able in the lab. Suns are dying because of an infection, and antibodies must be sought. The humans push their technology, leveraging the very biohazard they’re fighting, and the one guy at the tip of the human spear encounters a counterpart with the same objective, so they form an alliance.

As we were leaving the theater I overhead one viewer saying “I didn’t expect it would be that funny” which well-encapsulates my own sense of surprise as well. 

A Hamlet Rendering

For some readers, "rendering" may have a negative connotation, perhaps associated with something a butcher might do vs-a-vs meat. In my namespace, it's a softer meaning: ray-tracings, renderings into visible vistas of mathematical objects ("making the invisible visible"), as in "render farms". 

However, as an English speaker and as someone into Shakespeare, as well as Norman O. Brown, I can't claim to control all the connotations. Misreadings are ever possible, and are not even discouraged.

With that opening for context, let me say Johnny Stallings knows how to render Hamlet effectively, as a read performance, presented at a podium, but with props, a mini-play. He actually dons hand-puppets when he gets to the play-within-a-play (a big part of Hamlet is the play staged in its interior), and when we get to the Alas Poor Yorick part, he pulls out Budget Skull from its box.

The Yorick part got me off on a tangent later as I associate that scene with a performance by one Andrius Kulikauskas in my backyard, with a bubble-head named Zoltar, an homunculus. Hence the selfie (one of the embedded slides), as even though Andrius was the principal actor, we're talking about my memories.

The setting for this rendering was also a big part of the experience: a maze of rooms in a gigantic space, a Presbyterian Church that has creatively morphed into a dual-purpose community center named Taborspace (it's on the northwest slope of Mt. Tabor). 

Until one of the other invitees pointed it out, I hadn't realized there was a literal labyrinth just outside our Artspace window.

Speaking of the other invitees, this was a very hip-to-Hamlet crowd. One guy immediately noticed Johnny's version omitted some famous concluding lines. However Johnny's pithy densification of a four-hour plus marathon is told from Hamlet's viewpoint, and since he's dead by this scene, it makes no sense to include it.

You'll find Johnny appearing throughout these blogs over the years, not only in association with Shakespeare, but Walt Whitman as well. I have Nick Consoletti to thank for cluing me into the Stallings namespace lo these many years ago, when I saw him do King Lear as a one man show.

Spring Equinox

Today is officially (per Google search) the Spring Equinox. My wife had a small business called Turning the Wheel that was about passing on Celtic (mostly) traditions around the eight holidays, the four solstice-equinox orbit points, marking seasonal changes, and the four additional points between those four points. You might picture two squares, superimposed, at 45 degrees to one another, resulting in eight equally spaced points around a circle. 360//8 == 45 (per Python).

Depicted above: a scalable recipe I usually use because it’s nutritious and vegan. It goes under savory versus sweet and is basically lentils with nuanced flavors added by molasses and soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, some flavor of oil. Spices (cloves, ginger, and what we call allspice, which is not a curry).

This recipe came to me through a couple, Joe and Teresina, who moved to Portland in their senior years and who started overlapping study groups my wife and I would attend, Teresina’s on Buddhism and Joe’s on Economics. They were a vital component of our Quaker Meetings (Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) in North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM).

Portland has two main unprogrammed Meetings (not called churches, nor temples). I’m much more proximal to one of them, within walking distance, whereas the other is adjacent to Reed College. Fittingly because College Park, a place in California, is a name from our Beanite past, referring to a family that went west from Iowa or someplace in the Midwest. We don’t usually get into the details. Quakers are full of schisms going back to the Hicksites and such, and only a few of us bother to memorize a lotta details about these developments. In geek world, branching and forking are taken for granted.

In Asylum District, a business moniker for our neighborhood, the Friends on Stark Street, the closer-to-me meeting (I can drive to Reedwood in a few minutes, where Bridge City Friends just had a newcomers gathering), have a shared history with Linus and Ava Helen Pauling through a mutual benefactor: Electro-Scientific Instruments, the owner of the Quakers’ meetinghouse after acquiring it from Jantzen, the swimming suit company. ESI used the Stark Street factory to make electronic instruments and later moved to bigger digs (which burned in a fire on Macadam, necessitating yet bigger digs).

ESI’s founder, Doug Strain, had studied under Linus Pauling at CalTech, plus shared the regional pacifism for which Cascadia has long been known. He helped the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy restore the Linus Pauling boyhood home on Hawthorne Boulevard and make it a center, a hub, of Portland’s cultural vitality. A group calling itself the Wanderers still meets there, thanks to ISEPP (for which my wife had been bookkeeper (she had a lotta nonprofit clients; her Turning the Wheel was a side business)).

Puzzle Pieces

Our family uses the jigsaw puzzle as a source of memes, which I don't suppose is unusual. Many families gather around such a puzzle at family gatherings, ours no exception, even if we’re exceptional in other ways.

The memorial service for Phil Wikelund at Reed College was a well-attended who’s who of a now mature cohort who went through life with Phil, a hub figure in the Pacific Northwest, through his sharp intellect and devotion to helping people pursue their own interests. One podium speaker suggested “edgy but kind” and guessed he typified a specific Scandinavian temperament bespeaking hardship getting to the far west.

Phil owned Great Northwest Books, where Trevor Blake once worked, then near Powells, and getting started on his combined career of bookseller publisher and appraiser. Trevor does the whole pipeline. I just bought his newest book, Does Not Equal. 

I’ve linked to a Perplexity prompt for more of the story regarding Phil. My focus here is to pass along puzzle pieces I’m in a position to provide, not to assemble the whole picture in one blog post.

In driving Don Wardwell to and from his Mt. Tabor campus, and from talking with the other guests at the reception, I was prompted to reminisce about Anthology Books which had been adjacent to the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne, in that same building, set further back from the street, wherein Adorn, the body art studio, is installed today. 

Gary Wilkie owned and ran Anthology Books and had one of the most interesting privately owned for-sale book collections I’d ever seen, which is saying a lot given the competition (Portland is a bookstore town). I bought some obscure Quaker books, like the published journal of a Quaker opera singer around Philadelphia.  

Gary later redesigned his business making it almost purely online. I got invited to a party at Gary’s place once, quite the fun crowd.

Patrick Barton, whom I talked with later, in Fred Meyer (we crossed paths by chance), mentioned he’d helped out with cleanup in the aftermath of the fire, which consumed Great Northwest Books once it had moved into what used to be called Area One, an urban renewal zone in an earlier chapter, wherein Portland was being pulled in a more Robert Moses like direction.

The fire that took Great Northwest Books reminds me of the one which consumed the photography store and studio in the Bay Area, in which a first collection of Columbia Gorge photographs had been collected by their creator.

Phil’s closest friends and family gave us great insights into Phil’s character. As one of about four Wanderers present, counting Lew Frederick, who spoke from the podium, myself, Ron and Don, we know Phil and Gloria from retreats and a few meetups. 

Ron, from the Reed College matrix, knew Phil way better than the rest of us. I was not in close orbit around Phil, but that just means I have a more zoomed out view, now much clarified thanks to a life well-lived. I’ll hope to see Ron and Don again soon as Wanderers will be gathering per our usual schedule.

Reed College was being its usual peaceful self amidst the horrors of our time. This was when the nation-state minded seemed to snap, or however we tell it (I’m self-admittedly esoteric) and all hell broke out in one of the messiest areas (messiest as in “into messiahs n stuff like that” if I may be allowed a pun).

Happy Pi Day while I’m thinking about it, just past. I did my part to celebrate, which doesn’t mean I can’t do Tau Day as well (what some wish to call two pi). Happy St. Patrick’s Day today. I’m also remembering Dawn Wicca, my late wife and life adventure companion.

Geometry for GenZers

https://groups.io/g/synergeo/topic/118308284

Cascadian Synergetica: The Early Days

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 10:09 AM 4D Solutions wrote:

Hi Jim --

I hope you and/or rybo will post summaries of your findings from Lehmanville per your new geometry group. Adderley also has a group with overlapping membership; I've not heard from him lately (he's in Australia, well remembers the heyday when we started up a Synergetics subculture in Cascadia, in Seattle, distinct from the SNEC operation, with its own funding / sponsors).

While on this topic, of booting our Synergetica subculture in Cascadia, the theme of our meetup was Elastic Interval Geometry for the most part, as both Gerald de Jong and Alan Ferguson were present, coders of Struck and Springdance respectively.

Tim Tyler also did an EIG implementation named Springie (he wasn't at this meeting though).

Russ Chu was the main organizer, the same dude who organized the founding of SNEC at that rented house in Washington DC I was mentioning, where Bob Gray, Ed Applewhite, Joe Clinton, CJ, and Yasushi Kajikawa were among those present.

For this earlier meetup, we met at Russ's Seattle house (he would move to DC temporarily in a future chapter, a move having to do with Deb's career). He was by then married to Deb Kasman and they had two kids: Liana and Daniel.

The time frame of our Seattle meetup is pretty easy to triangulate in that Gerald was in the Bay Area for a JavaOne, a kickoff of the new Java language, after which he came by train to Cascadia, and also: the cult named Heaven's Gate had just drunk the kool-aid, the appearance of the comet Hale-Bopp being their X-Day type event (some kind of abduction).

I recall Ed Applewhite phoning me while our meeting was ongoing and joking "they got the wrong Applewhite" or something funny like that (he was a bit of a joker). So this was 1997 I'm thinking.

Gerald went on after coding Struck in Java to developing Darwin@Home and then Pretenst, eventually abandoning Java in favor of Rust, which compiles to WebAssembly or something along those lines.

Alan and Karl Erickson were "lost to followup" eventually (shoptalk from my outcomes research days at CUE / CORE), meaning I lost touch with both of them. Jon Braley passed away.

These were long distance friends of Peter Adderley and he hoped I could help him re-establish contact, but I wasn't able to. I have maintained contact with Russell Chu over the years as well as his ex, Deb, and saw them both not so long ago (they're on amicable terms even though they've gone their separate ways). Russ was my best man at my wedding, September 11, 1993 (near Reed College).

In terms of sponsors and donors, special mention to Sam Lanahan, inventor of Flextegrity and former collaborator with Joe Clinton. Sam also was a sidekick for Bucky himself on a trip to the Philippines. He's currently traveling abroad.

Sam helped organize another summit later, in Portland, which included Nick Consoletti, the wandering bard, steeped in lore, and in contacts, and also Trevor Blake, at that point still a Portland resident and inheritor of the Joe Moore archive, the Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute I think he called it.

That Joe Moore archive, after being sorted and upgraded by Trevor (a professional archivist), ended up at OSU in Salem, where Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's papers are also housed.

Friday in Hillsdale

I got to hang out with Bradford again yesterday, and return the L. Gordon Plummer book mentioned in the above video, to the Theosophical Society Library. I made sure they knew about this video, as they're included therein, as is Bradford.

Bradford gave me more of a picture of his network. Given we've both been receptive to the Bucky stuff (many if not most are not) we unsurprisingly know or knew many of the same people. 

I told him about the one time I met Bob Gray in person, in Washington DC, at the founding of SNEC (later renamed to Synergetics Collaborative). Yes, Bradford knew who CJ Fearnley was (another friend of Bob's, and mine). Applewhite was there at the SNEC summit, as was Yasushi Kajikawa of Scientific American fame (Japan edition).

Given the pre-emptive attack by President Rubio, of the District, against the Middle East, I was naturally effusive in my distrust and dislike for the Beltway Mafia, entangled with the Las Vegas Mafia historically and contemporaneously. 

DC and LV have a lot of shared personnel and similar mindsets. I understand why Canadians are leery of both (tourism is way down). DC has a bright future as a tourist town, even if we no longer take it seriously as a seat of government, outside being an important part of the Northeast Corridor (Cosmopolis or Gotham). The DC-NYC line, with Princeton in the middle, has long been a part of my consciousness. 

I'd visit CJ in Philly, by train when I lived on the east coast, but also by plane, when NPYM (a west coast Yearly Meeting, RSF) was paying my way to AFSC corporation meetings.

Fortunately for our collective sanity, PDX in Cascadia is not a co-belligerent with the District (or LV) and has its own way of coping with the post-USA neoRoman fascists trying to dominate the world these days i.e. we have the Portland Frogs etcetera (meaning we use a lot of satire and ridicule, other forms of propaganda).

As a veteran of Portland Occupy and Food Not Bombs, I've never been an allie of the neoRomans and their rackets (as Smedley Butler called 'em). I think both Dulles brothers were imperialist fools, as was General MacArthur. These men are not heroes in my version of history.

The Scarlett Pimpernel (movie review)

This was the 1982 version; I hear there’s another one. I’d have to say it’s an early spy story, set after the American Revolution set off the one in France (per some tellings), and wherein the “Bond” character is quite effete, a dancer-prancer type, a flaneur, a fop. But it’s all an affectation (a disguise) as in reality he’s fighting bravely for the crown, against depraved terrorists.

The terrorists in this case are the scary hoi polloi, a Pol Pot style mob some might say, chopping the heads off anyone with eyeglasses or who otherwise looks like they can read or, worse (code): dance the minuet and other courtly numbers. People of culture in other words, not riffraff.

“Chop chop” goes the guillotine, and the crowd roars its approval, “Off with their heads!”.

Our movie audience (the spectators, those for whom this spectacle was made) should be feeling revulsion and disgust by now, mixed with righteous outrage. How is this “Enlightenment” in any meaningful sense? It all seems so cheap and tawdry.

Countering all this madness is the Scarlett Pimpernel, who / which understands the necessity of a strong monarchy to prevent just these kinds of mental illness from spreading virally. 

The SP is somewhat a Society, a peer group (think Three Musketeers) but also is lead by our hero, the faux dandy, so “fake n gay” to sound like Candace.

It’s obviously a spy movie because it’s all about betrayal, defections, switching sides, or at least appearing to, or… unless you’re quite dedicated to puzzling it all out (cut to snoring on the couch) there’s no way to be much besides confused. 

And the disguises, let’s not forget the disguises.

We’re always wondering if SP is sincere in his love for his lady love, as in the first chapter of their relationship he uses their romantic picnic together as another occasion to smuggle another aristocrat out of the looney bin (where the patients now run the show). So he’s using her as a human shield of some kind?

No, he sees her as fighting the same oppressor. At first that is. Then he has reason to doubt. Then he has reason to have faith again. See what I mean? He has his ups and downs. She, meanwhile, is trying to fathom his calculus and is likewise doubtful of his integrity.

Anyway, there’s a superhero superpower coloring to the whole thing, which is of course intentional as that’s what fiction is all about doing, usually:  creating larger-than-life characters who swashbuckle their way through all kinds of obstacle courses in unlikely, sometimes oddball, ways.

Spring Term

I started pitching my Spring Term, given it's March 1 already, the Equinox coming on the 20th.

For those new here, we're talking School of Tomorrow, an umbrella term for a buncha sigs (special interest groups; like edu-sig), study groups, asynchronous threads, Github pages and so on. They criss-cross every which way ala that "Spherical Pinball Machine" I like to go on about.

The right margin here has a lotta links to related social media, where I commit some of my writings. I was always cut out for hypertext, which is why I'm not as popular among print only bookstore types, although you'll find me in acknowledgments (a Historical Dictionary of Wittgenstein's Philosophy by Duncan Richter; Bucky Works by J. Baldwin, which front matter typically nobody reads).

Monster U Strikes Out

We woke up to the dreaded news of Monster U outta control again. 

I’m seeing Biden and Trump were human shields, too senile to really take the heat for the dummy beginner mistakes made by presidents Blinken and Rubio respectively. I’ll do more satire some other time.  

Grok completely rewrote my prompt.

What Grok wrote (based on my initial input):

A cinematic movie theater screen displaying the iconic final scene from Thelma & Louise: a 1991 Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by Benjamin Netanyahu as Thelma and Marco Rubio as Louise, both in character as the heroic women, plunging off the edge of the Grand Canyon cliff into the abyss in a dramatic leap of defiance, dust and sunlight streaming dramatically, wide shot of the car mid-air against the vast canyon, the scene framed as a large movie screen in a dark theater with faint audience silhouettes, humorous and satirical political comedy style

Try it yourself?  I’m outta tokens.  Not everyone uses Grok, I realize, but at free tier I’ve found it generous with how many freebies it lets me choose from.

From my outbox:

From my angle both Biden and Trump were way too burned out to be key decision makers.  They're just human shields, these senile presidents.

What I see is Secretary Blinken, and now Secretary Rubio (doubling as NSC chief) arrogating "superpowers" (extraordinary authority, as in extra judicial) in the background, aggressing against Russia and Iran respectively, and losing big time because neither is the brainiac each supposes.  

Damn, vanity sure is rampant among the so-called "leadership" (snicker).

Printing Polys

See: Printing Polys (Jupyter Notebook)

Faculty Lounge Chatter

Where it looks to me Fuller was headed was towards a “geared trig” based on what he called Scheherazade numbers. With gear teeth that fine, would we ever need something finer for physics engines (models)? Instead of trailing off indefinitely, we could stay with definite terminating numbers — as we must anyway in the real world.

When it comes to visualizations on a computer screen, the threshold is pretty low i.e. there’s no way to register a difference of higher frequency than the resolution of the monitor. Under the hood though, we can carry the overhead needed to go higher precision if we need to, which is where computer algebra systems come into play.

In the world of frequencies (energy world), we come down to measurement. Even though physics formulae are redolent with pi (π), we learn in high school that the uncertainty in measurement trumps theoretical “infinite precision” i.e. no one in physics needs pi to a thousand places (unless working on a pi algorithm for some reason — I like Ramanujan’s). “Nature is not using π” is akin to saying: in a discrete quantized universe, “infinite precision” is a mirage.

When I introduce Synergetics to people, one of my first moves is to talk about “namespaces”, a concept with concrete literal meaning in the Python language, but also kind of a shorthand for “subculture” (Wittgenstein: way of life). We can identify three namespaces that use the meme “4D” as in “four dimensional”.

(1) n-D, n-dimensional linear algebra, home of E8, Leech Lattices, Machine Learning and all the rest of it, very established and highly productive.

(2) 4D as 3D + Time, owing to Einstein / Minkowski. Donald Coxeter (to whom Synergetics is dedicated) is at pains, in Regular Polytopes, to distinguish Einstein’s 4D from his own n-D 4D, the 4D of extended Euclideanism (i.e. the 4D in (1)).

(3) 4D as referring to the the four directions of the tetrahedron, the most primitive polyhedron, the “ab initio” beginning for conceptuality in prefrequency (Platonic) space (Fuller’s shoptalk).

There’s a tendency to confuse (sometimes deliberately) all these different meanings of 4D, on the assumption that math is some “universal language” whereas in reality it’s an amalgam of partially overlapping namespaces, or “language games” as Wittgenstein calls ‘em.

Assuming an IVM ball of radius R, diameter D, I think what Synergetics does that’s both easy to understand and revolutionary is we trade in the R-edged cube of unit volume (XYZ, unit cube) in favor of a D face-diagonalized cube of volume 3. The inscribed tets have volume 1. 

The payoff is the octa (same D edges) is now volume 4, and the rhombic dodeca (D long face diagonals) is volume 6. 

We get more whole numbers if we let the old R-edged cube be the “odd man out” with volume 1.06066… √(9/8). 

That’s heresy, meaning to fight against it is to merely uphold an established dogma, not to mount a rational thought-out defense (which the orthodoxy is not prepared to do). Fuller’s system has merit, there’s no way around that fact. Even if XYZ still works, as it does. 

The epithet Fuller applied to XYZ “Qyoobism” (I’m making it sound like a cult) is not “it’s wrong” but “it’s awkward” (relatively).

Blake Meets Bucky

More context

A Thirster in Cuba

slide show: hover mouse

Thirsters host Dr. Art Kohn, peppered his presentation with modest caveats, reminding us he was learning more than teaching about his topic. However, with memories of his visit to Havana still vivid, he was up for giving us his eye-witness account. The interest level was high with many attending, including Jonathan Potkin.

Cuba was in crisis around now because the District of Columbia had imprisoned the president and first lady of Venezuela, whom we don't hear about daily as one might expect, and Marco Rubio (the District president) is making sure VZ is no longer in control of where its oil goes. That oil now belongs to the District as far as the Beltway Mafia is concerned, and Cuba has long been on its enemies list.

However, US citizens are still permitted tourist visas and short hop airlines that don't need to refuel in Havana still serve its airport. 

Art is a big fan of AI and used it to help with the slideshow, which took us through a lot of history, albeit briefly as this was but a two-hour long meetup at best. 

I'd arrived with two guests, Don and Susan, having enjoyed their company, and Terri's, at their home base first. I was their driver / chauffeur for the evening. Don enjoyed the freeway twists and dips, which we took much faster coming home, in light traffic.

After the formal presentation, Thirsters (a pun on Thursday beer drinking, recalling our pub meetup years) asked questions and shared views.

Art's mental model is that a public-ownership-based framework equates to a top-heavy bureaucracy and a kind of egalitarianism that keeps the gap in living standards, between the best-off and worst-off, relatively narrow, but also keeps that living standard relatively low for everyone, on average. 

Private ownership, on the other hand, which encourages competition, and a leaner government, opens the door to a higher top level standard, thanks to greater efficiency, but at the cost of a wider disparity in living standards. One might picture the two bell curves.

I shared one of my Cuba stories, the one about my friend who organized trips to Cuba for retired Pentagon brass, for fun in the sun and meetups with Castro. I thought about getting into the whole Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory scenario, but decided that was too complicated a kind of science fiction to pass off as a quick anecdote.

In the car driving home I shared my view that the District is at the hub of a military-socialist empire, centered around the Pentagon as a central planner. Between corporate hierarchies, flock-n-shepherd temples, and military service, US citizens have little opportunity to practice boots-on-the-ground democracy except vs-a-vs the District melodrama, which turns "democracy" into a kind of reality TV show.

Note that USers are by now used to having the Secretary of State be president, as this was true under President Blinken as well.

Marking Time

I might write a movie review for The Apostle, a Robert Duvall film. Rosalie mentioned liking it. I grabbed a copy from Movie Madness around the time news of Duvall’s death was percolating through social media. He plays a preacher really not well suited for anything else, except fixing cars.

There’s a pall across the land, a sense of deadness, as people come to grips with (a) having no leadership and (b) the prospect of an all-out brawl in the Middle East for no coherent reason other than tempers are running high. No cold calculations suggest spazzing out would be productive, but who coldly calculates anymore?

I woke up feeling a bit on the woozy side, and I’m not blaming Duvall. Even this many hours later, I don’t think I’m at 100%. Something I ate maybe; either the oyster stew or the juicer carrots.

Is this just a boring journal, like a diary, where I write about diet and flatulence (thinking of Darwin, sorry)? I’d say it’s not just that, but I do want to keep it quirkily individual, clearly written by a human and not some bot. It’s getting hard to tell anymore.

My line on AI is that “artificial intelligence” has always been with us. You’ll get that from other thinkers besides me. Improved intelligence is a direction, and means a lot of things, where “artificial” or “phony” is the other direction, pretending we have just the two (an oversimplification in other words).

More sense vs less sense: as much as some are concentrating and curating sense, so are others maybe squandering it, and maybe that’s fine. 

Housecleaning matters. Old, obsolete belief systems needn’t be kept “alive” on life support. There comes a point where suspending disbelief becomes impossible. Beliefs can’t be forced, which is why we have the words “persuaded” and “convinced”. Sure, one might feign beliefs, to get ahead in the party, but if they feel forced upon one, or from one, then they’re experienced as inauthentic, insincere, and therefore prone to crumble, dust to dust.

The veggie heads (those with no brains left, heads stuffed with straw, alas) tend to stumble towards war in hopes of that making more sense somehow. They’re drawn to the flames by their sense of what’s needed: more intel. 

The zombie trope is likewise nothing new. In a way, we’re all on the same page.

Acting Locally

This journal entry will focus on mundane matters of immediate circumstance, such as the loud noises from the construction site, which set Ruby aquiver, and an ask to be held in her guardian’s arms, Mazur, visiting from out-of-state (more northward in Cascadia). 

Speaking of Cascadia, we’re proud of our football-oriented subculture obviously, for winning that trophy. Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics in Italy has some friends fully engaged. I’m more asynchronous around sporting events these days, although I was watching NFL Seahawks vs Patriots in real time, with Mazur, Ruby and friends. Some friends were betting money, but not through any app.

Ruby is a cha-weenie if I remember correctly, a chihauhua-dachshund. I grew up around dachshunds, then later switched to chocolate lab (Sydney) and lab-adjacent (yellowish Sarah Angel).

The construction site in question already has an open food cart, more at the ready, while they finish the grange (I’ll call it) where you might bring your food to an indoor table. Restrooms. A beverage bar. 

This has proved a winning formula around Portland. The food truck pod is an institution, prototypical of traveling circus havens in other forms, ala the Earthala Project (ongoing terraforming). The trucks typically intend to stay awhile, but they’re also free to come and go. The pod provides a hookup, including to a metered gas line in some cases.

The food pod in question is at the corner of SE 38th and Division, adjacent to Tom’s on Chavez. We were on our way to Tropical Hut, past Village Merchant and Skavones. This was a mouse Monday for Barry (the ball python in my Photostream, inherited from my then off-to-college daughter (Barry may outlive me; snakes have a long lifespan)).

Earlier, before the mouse trip (about a mile total?), before Dave came over (he hadn’t watched the Super Bowl at all the day before), the fuel truck had arrived as expected. The operator and I stood around yakking while the truck pumped an already set number of gallons, cheque written already. 

I’d let the tank run out, whereas I thought I was on top of it, having measured the fuel level recently enough, I thought. Since Friday the house had been hovering at an ambient temperature more reflective of outside weather conditions, whereas I usually keep the thermostat at 60F, and the basement furnace complies, but only because there’s still fuel in the pipeline. 

The operator relayed what he considered a consensus view of the truck diver community: they appreciate Cascadia (Pacific Northwest) as an agreeable part of the country. Truckers enjoy driving through here more than average. However settling here, making it a base, has become more difficult, as a lot of people have that same idea, bidding up the cost of property (stuff).

Our neighborhood housing market seems robust, even when they tell us downtown office building occupancy is relatively low. They’ve also decided there’s no way to rescue the Lloyd Center as is, a signature shopping mall in the minds of long term residents. I learned of that decision through a KOIN posting on Facebook. 

I do receive broadcast television through an antenna, and of course I get TV through my internet hookup (optical fiber). 

I don’t get any cable TV outside of what I get through my internet subscription.

Coming back from the mouse store, we came upon one of those bird-house on a pole looking free libraries. Take a book, donate a book… I took out a thick one on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life. I hope to be visiting his grandson later this week. 

Later when back at the house, I passed on to Mazur my hardcover David Bowie book (purchased from the local Powell’s) as I’ve always associated her with David Bowie, of whom she’s been a fan.

The Videodrome (movie review)

You might imagine I’d seen this by now, or at least heard of it. Why? Because I extol eXistenZ, another Crononberg film that came out around the same time as The Matrix, and received less notice. 

Coming from that background, of having seen eXistenZ more than once, you’ll appreciate how much I found The Videodrome (another “The” movie, like a noir) to be its precursor. 

I’m sure critics have already gone to town with the observation, cashed it in so to speak, but to me, a recent initiate, it’s all new. I haven’t read what the critics say nor consulted Perplexity regarding this film. I was blindsided, as they say.

The Criterion Collection 2nd disc (this was from MMU) contains a lengthy (23 min) panel discussion in which Cronenberg and a couple other directors have a moderated panel discussion of the MAA’s movie rating system: G, PG, R, and X. Quite a bit has changed since then. 

Cronenberg, from Canada, with even harsher UK-based censorship, was pushing for a rating between PG and R (right?) and since then we’ve seen TV14 appear. Also, X is now MA (Mature Audiences).

The Videodrome is talking about viewer-voyeurism, how the observer is drawn in, in this case Civic TV, a “small station” i.e. literally a “little me everyone” (meaning “Everyman” in the language of Chaucer — in the namespace of learning about Chaucer & Co. in a school setting, I shoulda said). 

Everyman can’t take his eyes away from the public hanging or guillotine extravaganza or whatever it is, and this satellite TV show outta Malaysia (not slander, no worries — later Pittsburgh is revealed to be the true source (a spoiler)) is gonna be a likely hit on Civic TV, which specializes in the lurid tabloid stuff that makes money on Times Square (which has done much to clean up its image of late).

I loved the “subterranean lady” character, who still makes old-fashioned X-rated stuff, almost Victorian peep show in its naïveté. Civic TV wants more raw violence, forget the sex stuff. American Psycho might be just around the corner, stealing market share. I’d been on a Christian Bale kick earlier.

Why I liked watching this movie in the sequence I’ve been following, meaning earlier noirs (The Glass Key and The Hidden Room most recently), is partly the sense of continuity I experienced. 

The viewer-voyeur (the average tax-paying voter) is being taken by the TV into the smarmy underground of hinted-at perversions and occult rituals, very Epstein. Telegenic televangelists rule somehow, in this newly emergent Donahue-Oprah world, where we get more of a look at everywoman (Everyman is all-genders, partly why he went out of style, for sounding too gender-definitive).

I can hear the lawyers now (figuratively, not “voices” no): ear piercing is the everyday business of cosmetology shops the world over, so trying to sexualize the process in erotic comedy (a serious scene judging by lighting) won’t get us an X, how could it?  We’re not showing more than you’d see at an everyday tattoo parlor (sorry, body art shop). 

The rules are clear (but they’re not, that’s the whole fun of it if you’re making horror films).

The lawyers are doing a lot of such thinking actually: acted-out violence for real crosses a line that grainy documentary-style violence allows, and considers important for propaganda purposes, the MAA allows it; so keep all the worst violence on television, and have viewers viewing it for context. 

And when real blood and guts are involved (another line crossed?), have it all pour directly from a television, like in that Frank Zappa number. Use actual sheep guts (I thought the other guy said pig). 

When we get to the ear piercing, we’re talking of-age, consenting adults, obviously, so that part is PG. Teens get their ears pierced all the time.

I’m reminded of Victorian times when, they say, curvaceous pianos needed ankle covers because Everyman was trying to stay focused and didn’t need the piano writhing like some TV console, in sexual ecstasy or whatever it was, especially during a concert with polite company present. Hallucinations might mean brain tumor, as we all know. So cover up those piano ankles already.

The “eye of the beholder” is hard to capture, as it’s the one doing the beholding, but this film does a good job. It makes Mr. Civic TV be an alert, intelligent businessman, someone women find attractive. Everyman can identify. He’s like a Neo. The well-worn formulae remain intact and the movie makes money at the box office, as it’s supposed to.

Syn-U Faculty Lounge

 

Greetings from CrowTown

Greetings from CrowTown y'all. I'm reminded this morning, as I've been sharing with friends, of Jim & Patty, valued Portland business owners who've shared many fun chapters with us, through their various enterprises. I often reminisce about All Y'All, the E Broadway smoked meats restaurant with southern cooking (ocra, catfish, stuff like that).

What might've triggered my most recent recollections, actually I'm sure of it, was having pointed out to me a property in the Pearl explicitly named Jim and Patty's by Jim and Patty. Well before that, they had shops all over town branded Coffee People, with clever marketing. Portlanders flocked to the place. We had one in our neighborhood here on Hawthorne. That property has since morphed into a series of excellent restaurants, another one on the way.

During a Wanderers meetup a long ways back, we got a report from one of those Shark Tank events wherein would be entrepreneurs would pitch their plans to would be venture capitalists (VCs), and we learned not just one of the business plans featured technology focused on seniors, improving life quality for older folks. For example: how to combat early onset senility, or any kind of senility? Proposal: pepper life with fun little puzzles, like if you wanna open this fridge, do this cryptogram in your head right now, or starve, only $10.99 a month.

So do I have onset issues at 67? It pays to remember we're all born extremely senile, although that's not the word for it. "Incompetent" would be considered mean also. So when I can't remember how a certain digit sequence maps to something so obvious as a touchtone phone keyboard, I forgive myself for being like that today, because I've always been like that. I'm no superman, let's restate the obvious for the record.

I'd say on average I've been doing pretty well for my age group, in many ways thanks to a generous donor, a good friend, who gifted me with that gym-quality elliptical, a device I've used for many hours in past chapters, as a loyal gym member who took advantage of my privileges. I'd started working out at Princeton, taking their gym class more out of curiosity than anything. I came as an alien, ready to sample what "Ivy League" was supposed to mean. Would their gym class be any different? I'd say the coaches were quite good. All I was doing was working out recreationally, no team sports, no rowing or anything like that. I had no time for such commitments.

Then I got into running, after my hallway-based guidance counselor, an older student, a university-recognized position, pointed out I was gaining weight at a somewhat alarming rate (this would be me in my early 20s, having been thin enough through high school). Thanks to Roberto, I was out the window (literally, not the door) onto the adjacent golf course, running with a pack. Princeton Inn has been drastically remodeled and renamed since then, although its overhaul is nothing, compared to what they did to the dinky station (the dinky being our affectionate name for a shuttle train out to the main Amtrak line, twixt New York and Philadelphia).

Google Earth View: Princeton Well Passed My Time There