Top Five books I should have read by now

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If written before 1931, it’s yours for free, anytime.

There is no longer any excuse for any of us not to have read the books we’ve always known we should read.

Of course, there have been free libraries since generations before I was born. But that still left me with an excuse. Not an excuse that most people would stoop to, but it worked for me: If the book is good, I don’t want to read it unless I can keep it. First, I like to read things over and over if I like them. Second, I like to quote from them when I write, which means I want them handy — and I want the very same editions that I first read, because I can usually — or at least, I could usually, when I was younger — go straight to the passage I want within a moment. I’d flip back and forth a few times, realizing it was before this or after that. Then, I’d have a rough picture in my mind of what the page where the passage was looked like, and pretty much precisely where it was on the page.

So it had to be the same edition of the book, and preferably the same, physical book, because books awaken acquisitiveness in me.

But over time, I’ve been reading more and more on my iPad, so that excuse doesn’t work as well.

Most of the books on my list — the things I’ve always known I should read — are now in the public domain, and completely, immediately free to anyone with a computer, a tablet or a smartphone. No trek to the library or a bookstore. Not even a wait of a couple of days while Amazon delivers.

Just tap the button, and bingo! The literary treasures of all time are in your hands, and belong to you permanently.

So what haven’t I read? There are too many even to sort through my mind and recite a reliable Top Five. If you choose to share your own list, I might even replace my list with yours. Even without your suggestion, I might give you a different five on another day. This is just to gig myself to act, and stimulate some discussion, if you’re interested. And I’m limiting myself to a Top Five just to force myself to keep it brief, because I have other things to do.

So here’s my list of Top Five… well, not books in the broad sense. Here are the Top Five books of fiction I should have read by now:

Ran into Joyce in Dublin. Couldn’t admit to him I hadn’t read Ulysses.

Ulysses, by James Joyce. Big embarrassment here. I downloaded it a few weeks before we left for Ireland in 2019. But it turns out that the word on the streets about this book is accurate. It was interesting, but just too dense for me to get very far into it. I’ve read and enjoyed Portrait of the Artist, and of course Dubliners. To make myself feel better, I downloaded Dubliners and read it again on the plane to Dublin. The best story in the book, as I’ve said before, is the longest and last one: “The Dead.” It was as good as ever, and we spent a good part of a day in Dublin looking for the house where most of the story plays out. I had intended to do the same with sites in Ulysses, but it was not to be.

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. I really feel obligated to finish this sometime, and maybe I will. But it hasn’t happened yet. Several years ago, I got maybe halfway through. But there’s so much misery, and, well, I know how it ends. I know what becomes of the slim hopes these poor folks manage to cling to for most of the book. For me, that makes for a high wall to climb. I sort of have to be in a mood for being slapped down to finish this.

The Iliad, Homer. I’ve touched on this before. Until about a millennium ago in the Western world, there was one story that gripped the imagination of the literate, and probably a lot of the illiterate crowd as well. Think you’re tired of Hollywood’s lack of imagination, and repetition of the same stories over and over? Hey, at least they offer some variety (comic book heroes, Tolkien, George RR Martin, Dune, Harry Potter, etc.). Imagine being a Greek or a Roman in ancient times. They had the Trojan War, and that was about it. Sure, there was the classical mythology, but even that gets mixed up into the sage of Troy. As for the Romans, they were so lacking in originality that they based their own mythological founding on the children of a Trojan War veteran. So, you know, I feel like I ought to read the Iliad. Really, I should read it in the original Greek, but that’s not going to happen. Because I lack a basic skill of any educated person a couple of centuries ago.

The Odyssey, Homer. The sequel. I’m actually more familiar with this, thanks in large part to an Italian movie with Spanish subtitles that I saw at the Variedades theater in Guayaquil, Ecuador when I was about 10. I’d kind of like to see that movie again. But I also should read a good translation of the poem. Untill I do that, all I’ve got is my favorite Cream song. And yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what Spinal Tap was mocking with the ridiculous “Stonehenge.” But I kinda love “Stonehenge,” too.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville. Ultimate embarrassment. Trouble is, it starts out so well — I love the first chapters. But the middle part is horrible. Why couldn’t Melville just stick to the story, instead of wandering off on chapters that read like an encyclopedia entry about whales? I swear I’m going to finish it, and dive in, and after two or three of those tedious distractions I quit again. Call me whatever you like. Call me Ishmael. Just know that I am deeply ashamed, although it’s hard to avoid the temptation to blame Melville.

As I say, I could give you a different five on another day. Don Quixote, anyone? Robinson Crusoe? But I think that before I go, I should give you a separate list of nonfiction.

When I was young, I wasn’t a big fan of nonfiction. “Good book” meant, to me, a novel — or a collection of short stories. But over the years my tastes have grown up enough that I’ve developed more patience, particularly in the realm of history. But if anything, I’m much more sadly behind in that category than in fiction.

Just a very quick list:

The Second World War, Churchill. The author certainly knew the subject, and the subject is possibly THE historical period that has fascinated me more than any other — after all, it put the finishing touches on the world I grew up in. But talk about an intimidating work.

Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas. How can I be Catholic and not have read any work by Aquinas, ever?

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. Another one of my favorite historical periods. Seems like this would be the best one that I haven’t read on the subject. Either that, or Suetonius’ greatest hit.

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. I know the story. My wife and I spent our last evening in Amsterdam a couple of years ago visiting the house where she and her family hid from the Nazis. I believe I’ve absorbed the lessons to be learned from the book, and can apply them going forward. But I haven’t been able to force myself to witness the horror of it, page after page, knowing that there’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening to this girl, in that time. It’s just too painful. But I still don’t excuse myself.

The Holy Bible (and those of you who think this is all fiction, including the New Testament — just go make your own list). To paraphrase myself, how can I be a Christian and not have read this through? Maybe on some subconscious level, this is another reason why I converted to Catholicism (the main reason is suggested within that Joyce story, “The Dead”). Baptists are expected to have read it all the way through. Catholics have long been content with those three years of mass readings, repeated over and over. I mean, I’ve read and read the Bible, and read it and read it, but not straight through all the way. Maybe it’s unnecessary, since it’s not one book — it’s a bunch of books. But it’s one of those things to a Christian, like crossing the English channel to a swimmer. I feel the need to accomplish the feat.

That’s it for now.

Inside the Anne Frank House. I really have to read this one.

Here comes Santa Squirrel, here comes Santa Squirrel…

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As you can tell by the sunlight, the above photo was taken a couple of days ago. I shot it out our kitchen window because the squirrel seemed to want me to. He was posing. He seems to say, “Look! Who am I?”

Rather brazen of him, because he’s been stealing the fluff out of a chaise lounge cushion on our deck for some time. Which is OK. Once it got that hole in it, might as well let the critters make what use they can of it.

We assume they’re using it for a nest or something. If not, it’s just malicious destruction. Again this morning, my wife saw him out there and said yet again, “I hope they’re building a nest…”

My response? I don’t think they’re dumb enough to run back and forth through the snow if they don’t have a practical purpose for it. I certainly wouldn’t do that to amuse myself.

Of course, I’m not a squirrel. Or a naturalist.  have no idea what kind of domiciles they have. But whatever their homes are like, they could probably use some insulation this weekend…

On displacement, and what it says about humans

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Some more of my notes from linguistics class. The readings last week in our Language Files textbook were in part about Charles Hockett‘s list of characteristics that distinguish a system of communication as an actual language. They are:

  1. Mode of communication
  2. Semanticity
  3. Pragmatic function
  4. Interchangeability
  5. Cuntural transmission
  6. Arbitrariness
  7. Discreteness
  8. Displacement
  9. Productivity

All communication systems possess the first three of those design features, while only human language exhibit the last two. I’d give you definitions of all of them (here’s a link), but really my own attention was drawn completely to the penultimate one, and that’s what I wrote about in my reading notes:

In both this reading and the one from ULTH, we are told that animals other than Homo sapiens do not possess or employ language, as defined by Hockett, because they lack displacement.

Of everything I read for this week, that was the point that made the greatest impression on me.

It speaks clearly to the most important quality that many humans in different times and places, employing different modes of thought and belief, have cited in asserting their belief that Homo sapiens is not an animal, but a distinct creature on a higher level.

Frequently over the millennia since modern humans developed sophisticated (from the human self-flattering perspective) language and other distinct cognitive abilities (about 70,000 years ago), sapiens have expressed this through belief systems that we refer to as religion. A well-known way of expressing this is that Man was made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Therefore we are able to think (and speak and write) about things and events and ideas that we cannot see or touch. This quality is in fact essential to the very existence of religion. We are unable to prove (to the satisfaction of an unbeliever) the existence of God or gods through empirical means.

From the perspective of my own religion, this can tempt me to embrace the sin of pride, since it suggests that unbelievers are inexplicably limiting themselves intellectually to the material, here-and-now perspective of animals (or lesser animals, or simply other animals, depending on the way you choose to frame it).

But unbelievers also perceive the ability to employ displacement in a communication system as an important, defining difference between our species and others.

In Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari stresses repeatedly that the quality that not only took Homo sapiens to the top of the food chain, but also caused our species to outlive Neanderthals and Denisovans, is the ability to perceive that which is not immediately, obviously and materially present or detectable.

The book for which Harari is best known begins in a remarkable way for students of linguistics, particularly for those who study written language. The first page is essentially an atheist’s, or at least materialist’s, take on the beginning of the book of Genesis.

He considers religion to be a myth. But he considers such myths essential to why sapiens have come to dominate the Earth, and survive while other Homo species have faded away. To him, “myths” include belief in gods and spirits, but also such abstract concepts as money, laws, liberalism, communism and many others. He asserts that none of these things exist outside shared human imagination. (If I were writing the Sapiens book, I would tend to use the term “abstraction” when Harari uses words such as “myth” and “imagination.”)

Unlike some other atheists (those tempted to their own sort of pride), he doesn’t see belief in such “imaginary” things as a weakness. In fact, it is the main quality responsible for modern humans’ success over other species, including other humans such as Neanderthals.

Such shared beliefs (and the modifier “shared” is key here) have enabled our species to cooperate in immensely larger social groups. Neanderthals just couldn’t compete with that.

Of course, to be clear. While I embrace such “imaginary” concepts as Christianity, liberalism (meaning the word in terms of the actual approach to government in most of the West until 2016, not today’s popular misunderstanding), and the rule of law, I don’t do so because it’s a nifty strategy for our species’ survival and domination. I embrace them because I believe in them.

And it’s nice to see it brought up in my new field of study…

No, you don’t need a little watermelon right now

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I was at Walmart last night to pick up a couple of things, and noticed this as I got into the self-serve line.

I thought I would share it as a public service. To save you a trip.

You might think you want one of those nice, seedless watermelons right now, but trust me — you can wait a few months. In June, the price should be close to that of the cantelopes in the background…

I’m not the only one who can see this! Hallelujah!

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Yes, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, I know. I’m busier than usual, partly because I’m in my third week of classes at USC.

But my assignments include writing commentary on our assigned readings, and these tend to take a form similar to blog posts. And one that I wrote a couple of weeks back is nearly identical to one I’ve meant to write here for at least a year or two. I haven’t written it because it was one of my long, involved posts like this one or this one. I was going to call it something like, “A Hierarchy of Communications.” Too involved. Too easy (for me) to keep putting it off.

But last week, I had occasion to write a brief summary of one of the ideas that would have been included in that tome. It went sort of like this…

Here’s something that’s long been very obvious to me, possibly because I started regularly using a keyboard to send instant messages directly to other people at some point in 1980. That’s when our newspaper in Tennessee abandoned the IBM Selectric and started generating and editing copy on the screens of dumb computer terminals linked to a mainframe. The system had this wonderful little, almost entirely superfluous, feature: You could, using this same system, generate and send a brief written message directly to anyone else in the newsroom.

I could tell you some horror stories about the trouble this caused, but I’m trying to be brief. I’ll simply say that eventually I learned that that there are things you should never try to communicate using this medium. You should instead get out of your chair, walk over and say it face-to-face.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. But mainly, it’s because when someone’s looking at you and listening, you can communicate more clearly not only emotional content (and emotions fly wildly about in a newsroom near deadlines), but the person can immediately, in a matter of seconds, ask questions that wouldn’t have occurred to you as the writer of the text – usually because you didn’t realize such questions existed.

You save a lot of time this way, and maybe even avoid a fistfight under certain awkward conditions.

Today I live in a world in which most of the billions on this planet (as opposed to the 40 in that small newsroom) possess the ability to send text to anyone else whose mobile numbers they happen to possess. And they can do a lot more with those texts, which means they can cause trouble unimagined back in 1980. (This is a central problem with social media, but let’s stick to texts at the moment.)

I’m constantly begging friends, family and sometimes mere acquaintances NOT to send that important text, but to use another convenient application, the telephone feature. (After all, we do call the thing a “phone,” right?) It would save a lot of time, often a half hour or so of multiple, imperfectly typed and even less perfectly understood texts back and forth. Time and again, these matters could be handled more fully and efficiently with a 30-second conversation.

Evidently, I’ve seldom explained this well, because I don’t often succeed in convincing anyone.

So I refer you to the text in the box. The author tells us that spoken language:

  • allows confusion and ambiguity to be resolved directly by repair and confirmation procedures
  • is used in a social and temporal context, and thus brings with it a great deal of background information; draws on context to complement meaning and fill in ellipses

Absolutely. Written communications don’t offer these same valuable features.

Anyway, that’s the end of what I said — on that one subject — in my notes on the reading. It would have been just one point among many in my treatise on the full range of options in daily interpersonal communications.

Here’s the aforementioned box, from page 20 of English with an Accent, by Rosina Lippi-Green.

No, not THAT St. Hillary…

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Depiction of St. Hilary’s ordination, painted 1,000 years after he lived.

I’m studying the USCCB’s daily scripture readings, and I see that the alternative reading for today is dedicated to Saint Hilary, Bishop and Doctor of the Church.

This Hilary, by the way, was a man. He lived in the 4th century AD. Interesting fact: He was married, because that was allowed in those days, and he had a daughter who was also a saint.

I mention this because every time I see a mention of this saint, I’m reminded of a certain other person who was called “Saint Hillary” in a satirical manner. Below is the image that appeared with that headline in The New York Times Magazine on May 23, 1993:

When I saw that, only four months after Bill’s inauguration, I knew that this administration’s honeymoon with the press was pretty much over.

Here’s the article, if you want to read it. Here’s an excerpt:

Since she discovered, at the age of 14, that for people less fortunate than herself the world could be very cruel, Hillary Rodham Clinton has harbored an ambition so large that it can scarcely be grasped.

She would like to make things right.

She is 45 now and she knows that the earnest idealisms of a child of the 1960’s may strike some people as naive or trite or grandiose. But she holds to them without any apparent sense of irony or inadequacy. She would like people to live in a way that more closely follows the Golden Rule. She would like to do good, on a grand scale, and she would like others to do good as well. She would like to make the world a better place — as she defines better.

While an encompassing compassion is the routine mode of public existence for every First Lady, there are two great differences in the case of Mrs. Clinton: She is serious and she has power….

Back to the real saint. To lift the tone of this post, here’s an excerpt from the readings offered in his name:

Matthew 5:13-19

Jesus said to his disciples:
… “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.
Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments
and teaches others to do so
will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.
But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments
will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”

Watch out; here comes the surge!

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You could be like one of my fave depictions of a politcal pro — Peter Boyle in ‘The Candidate.’

Just a heads-up…

You know that job posting site I’ve mentioned a few times before, called Daybook? It lists a lot of political and governmental openings, and I’ve been getting the notices daily ever since I worked with James Smith’s campaign. I have zero interest now in applying for any of the jobs (you know those stress dreams I keep mentioning — even as recently as two days ago? — one of the recurring plots is that once again, this time against my better judgment, I’m involved in a campaign), but I sometimes find the jobs interesting, or even entertaining.

Anyway, yesterday they posted this, under the heading “Surge of political campaign positions:”

For those who haven’t been to Daybook lately, we have exciting news!

Over the past week, there has been a surge in job and internship listings to work on political campaigns. With the primary elections approaching in the coming months and the midterm elections in November, campaigns are staffing up right now! Currently, there are more than 700 open campaign jobs on Daybook with over 100 posted in the past week…

Here’s the list, if you’re interested. If you end up being hired for one, don’t blame me. I’m just warning you that the surge of madness is rolling your way. For political professionals, this may be exciting. For the rest of us, it’s a reason to dive into a bomb shelter, or at least duck…

Just tell me how much, OK?

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I’ve complained here a couple of times about the obscene current practice on news sites of teasing readers rather than informing them.

Now I’ll deliver a swift kick to folks attempting to do business online.

You’re familiar with the practice. You see something on, say, social media about some product that stirs your curiosity. I say, “stirs your curiosity” because you don’t have enough information to know whether you would ever consider buying it.

What’s the one thing you want and need to know? The price, of course.

So you click on the offered link, and what’s the ONE piece of information that they NEVER provide on the landing page?

You’ve got it. Or rather, you don’t…

Oh, the price is usually just another click away, although I find that, often as not, you have to scroll to the bottom of an unnaturally long landing page to get to that link.

Yeah, I know why they do it — to give themselves a chance of holding onto your attention just a BIT longer before scaring you away with the price. Maybe, they think, you’ll be charmed just enough by what you see on that landing page that you won’t mind the price.

Maybe it will work. But in the meantime, you’re royally ticking me off. I don’t like being stiff-armed…

By the way, here’s the page with the prices on this one…

It was good to see the monks pass through town

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Technically, I didn’t see them, although a number of people I know did (such as the pastor of my church). But you might say I felt their presence.

I was on my way to Lowe’s Saturday morning between 9:30 and 10, and had some trouble getting there. My elder son and I were aiming to pick up some more lumber for a project, and Highway 1 was jammed because the monks were on their way from Lexington toward downtown. But we eventually got what we needed, and I shot the pictures you see above and at the bottom while on the way to my son’s house, of the people waiting for the monks.

What monks? Well, these monks. Not your Mepkin Abbey kind of monks, but the kind I ran into in Thailand. They were hard to miss there, because they were everywhere. My daughter who was then serving in the Peace Corps lived across her country road in Khorat province from one of their wats. You also run into them on public transportation, where they have preferred seating.

Speaking of preferred seating. On a bus to Kanchanaburi, I met a retired roofer from England who had settled in Thailand with a Thai wife and kids (a lot of farangs do that, it seems. He and I had a high old time sitting and chatting on the back seat. The very back seat is of course the coolest seat on any bus, as I had learned in school. (You’re too far back for the teacher on bus duty to see you, and it bounces more than the forward seats, which is cool when you’re a kid.)

Alas, my wife and daughter were forced to sit farther to the front, because women are not allowed to sit on the coolest seat in those parts. (I think the reason why is because monks sit there.)  I felt bad for them, but Mark (I think that was the retired roofer’s name) and I had a good time anyway, bouncing along, and at one point I took a selfie that included the monk sitting next to us, also enjoying himself. I’m sorry I didn’t manage to get the monk beyond that one into the picture, but you can see his robe:

But I digress….

Anyway… I can’t say I’m fully hip as to the details about the monks’ walk across the South in the cause of peace and mindfulness, but for what little I know, I’m for it. Y’all know I’m not on the whole very fond of public demonstrations, but this is the kind that seems to have its head in a good place. They’re not out to bother anybody (except for maybe slowing down traffic, and what are we in such a hurry for, anyway?).

And you know what? I really liked seeing my fellow Lexington Countians turn out to stand along the road and wait to see them. Some of y’all across the river don’t think we’re cool enough to get into something like this, but we are.

And now you know that…

Old School in the real world

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Oxford and other universities awarded honorary degrees to Mark Twain. He adored the fancy duds, and went away happy…

For the next several months, I’ll have yet another excuse for not blogging very often:

I’m going back to school — tomorrow. I’ve enrolled in a course at USC designated LING 300, Introduction to Language Sciences. And yes, I’m taking advantage of the deal that offers free tuition to SC residents over the age of 65. Which makes me feel like I’m sort of throwing money down the drain if I don’t take something.

The reason I’m taking this particular course is that many times over the last 50 years (I last attended school in 1975), I’ve thought that maybe I should have studied philology. Or etymology. Or something else in that general realm. Words have been my profession, but my interest in them extends beyond using them the way a mason uses bricks. My exposure to various languages — the years I spoke Spanish as a kid in Ecuador, my two years of high school Latin, my very brief study of German, my recent dalliances with Dutch and Italian via Duolingo — has fascinated me to what most would regard a ridiculous extent. I’m interested in the relationships between various modern and ancient languages (at least, those of the Indo-European sort), as well as how human languages developed both before and after our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering.

I’m signed up as a nondegree-seeking graduate student, which apparently allows me to take undergrad courses as well. And that’s good because I’ve never taken anything in this area before, so I need to start on an introductory level.

Depending on how this course goes, I may continue this line of study. Or, since these doors are now opened, I may branch out. I might return to my second major from undergrad days, history — if I see courses that grab me. Or maybe I’ll dig into some specific language or other. I dunno. The options seem fairly unlimited.

But first I’ve got to get through this one. I opted to take this for a grade rather than simply auditiing. I figured I would slack off too much if there were no grade to work for. Here’s hoping I don’t come to regret that decision.

My plan is to do much better than I did my one previous semester as a student at this university, in Fall 1971. That should be achievable, as long as I don’t lapse into a long-lasting coma.

Perhaps I can even do well enough to put an end to those dreams. You know, the ones in which you have to go take your exam at the end of a term, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea where the class meets, because you haven’t attended it even once. You’d meant to, but somehow never got around to it.

There are variations on that dream. For instance, the Superintendent of Dreams decided at some point to use that same template, but transfer the anxiety to the more frequent (in my life, anyway) challenge of trying to get a newspaper out when everything is going wrong. But still, for old times’ sake, I occasionally experience the college version. Seems like I had one of those just a week or two ago.

Frankly, I suspect that such dreams are a lifelong affliction, so I’m not going to hold my breath in expectation of them going away. Maybe I’ll just have to settle for learning a bit about linguistics.

Oh, and before someone mentions “Old School.” Well, I love that movie. (In fact, I may have to go back to my Top Ten Comedies list and bump something off to make room for it.) But I don’t intend to emulate it. I’ve never at any time had the slightest interest in the Greek life. You can be almost certain you won’t see me at a football game, even if I continue into the fall. And streaking? Admittedly, I was an undergrad during that madness in the ’70s, but I did not partake then, and do not have plans to do so this time around. Much to everyone’s relief.

A few words regarding this Venezuela thing…

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Hey! Whatever happened to U.S. determination to deal with THIS guy?

Last week, I referred to my recent lack of interest in the sort of news that used to fascinate me, and as an example mentioned my unsettling (to me) failure to keep up with what the U.S. was doing in and near Venezuela.

And then, BANG! My eldest granddaughter woke me on Saturday morning with a text that asked me to call her because “I don’t understand what happened in Venezuela.”

I took it something new had happened there overnight, and I was able to confirm that immediately. But if I was to explain it, I had to do a bit of scrambling. Knowing how good The New York Times is (or at least has been in the past) at providing overall perspective on events and the background behind them, I looked there. Unfortunately, I encountered one of those “live update” stories, which provide no easily accessible perspective at all.

So I turned to the editorial page, and found what I needed in this lengthy editorial the board had put together while I was sleeping. “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise.”

It’s a pretty good piece, especially for something thrown together quickly. But it has its flaws. For instance, it asserts that “If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse.”

Well, yes, it can. But that doesn’t mean it must, as so many in our country — on the left and the right — now believe. Many of you believe it. So the NYT has used a convenient post-Vietnam lever here — We know intervention is always a bad idea! — as an easy device to persuade us that this foray into another country is a bad idea as well.

Which really doesn’t explain what’s wrong with this latest action. In making its easy point, the board of course mentions Afghanistan. As though it was a similar situation. It was not. As the Times and a huge proportion of America seem to have forgotten, we had an ironclad reason to go into Afghanistan — we needed to make sure it would never again be a haven for Al Qaeda. You know, that group that had just deliberately murdered almost three thousand Americans in their own country.

We’ll discuss later, if you wish, what happened later. The point here is that Venezuela does not in any way offer such a justification. Mumbling about “narcoterrorists” and the like does not constitute a viable explanation. Nor does mention of the Monroe Doctrine. I wonder who told him about the Monroe Doctrine? Well, no matter. The fact is, it doesn’t apply.

But on the whole, the NYT piece did a good job of explaining the situation, and condemning this unwarranted action by Mr. Look-at-me-now-I’m-suddenly-a-neocon.

To appreciate how good the piece was, you have only to look at the mad raving that was published in The Washington Post under the headline — and I’m not making this up — “Justice in Venezuela.”

The Post, which was once a great newspaper, seems unable to see past the happy fact that Nicolás Maduro is now out of power. And it is a happy fact, as the NYT acknowledges:

Few people will feel any sympathy for Mr. Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly eight million migrants…

But that’s not the point. The thing is, if the man in the ruins of the White House is in a mood to pull on his big-boy pants and throw his nation’s weight around, there are more urgent needs in this world.

You want to take bold action? International priorities indicate the place to demonstrate your strength and determination would be Ukraine, or the Near East. But no, not the same kind of action. No, no, no, no, no.

Since the adversary in Ukraine possesses — you may have heard about this — nuclear weapons, a far more subtle approach is called for. Something like what we saw the Biden administration doing — exercising soft power where we could, and gradually beefing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. This was working,, before an off-and-on Putin admirer took over.

Or you could concentrate your efforts on trying to sort out the mess in the Mideast. Don’t expect overnight success, but we need to continue to try — as American leaders have tried since about 1967 — to keep the peace and realistically reassure our ally Israel of its survival. And if you’ve decided regime change is your new thing, try doing it the hard way — by convincing Israelis, via diplomatic means, that they can survive without Netanyahu.

But, you say, why can’t we get rid of Maduro and then do that more important, harder stuff?

Because… as I acknowledged in response to the NYT’s simplistic condemnation of interventionism, attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. Every such venture is a risk, often in ways we’re unable to anticipate.

There can be far-reaching negative effects, even horrific effects, from this action in Venezuela. And I’m not just talking about the straightforward, housekeeping considerations such as answering the question, “So what happens now in Venezuela?”

Let me pull one such consequence out of left field: For more than thirty years, China has very effectively been buying friends all over the planet, particularly in the Third World. (I’ve occasionally written about this since my first week on the editorial board of The State in 1994. Here’s an update from the NYT.) Building airports and local economies, it has promoted an image of itself as poor countries’ kindly, helpful friend. This action in Venezuela can play right into China’s hands as it tries to become the next America (in hegemonic terms). We’re the Bully Boys; they’re the ones in the white hats. Maybe you don’t think that and I don’t think that, but we’re not the only people in this world.

For that reason (and many others), you don’t do things such as this unless you have an extremely good reason — as we did in Afghanistan, before we all forgot what it was.

Digression: Of course, we can’t do what China does because we are not run by leaders who spend money as they like in pursuit of their careful plans. Try spending a few extra bucks on a needy country, and the folks who currently run our democracy will holler, “America First!”

America First. Speaking of that… we could talk all day about Trump’s inconsistency in this instance, but what’s the point? What are we going to say — that he’s not following his own doctrine? The power he currently possesses is not the result of philosophy of any kind. How could it be? Philosophy means “love of wisdom.” It’s hard to imagine a word less at home in TrumpWorld.

Trump does what makes him, personally, feel good. And that may be the most dangerous thing about this venture in Venezuela — it has greatly expanded his own sense of what he can do, and get away with, and feel good about.

So going into Venezuela was a bad thing. But it wasn’t the worst thing Trump has ever done. It’s not even the worst thing he’s done this week.

I’ve written about 1,200 words so far on this, and I need to move on to some other things. So I’ll just mention in passing my nomination for worst thing of the week: Withdrawing the U.S. from 66 more international organizations, and making America more of a pariah in the world. That was not as noticed the way removing Maduro was, but it was way worse…

Musicians we lost in 2025

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I almost skipped over my email about “The Musicians We Lost in 2025,” figuring it would be about people I’d never heard of. But no. It turns out that at my age, the people I remember are the ones dying. Which makes a sober sort of sense, I suppose.

The NYT’s Amplifier feature does a good job with these kinds of things. Here’s the whole article, with playlist. I’ll just share below some of those that meant most to me…

  • Sly Stone. The Amplifier chose “Dance to the Music,” which I suppose is fine. I chose to share “Everyday People.” That’s just me. It’s odd the things you remember about people. What I remember is something a psychology professor said to our class about him at Memphis State. This prof was an Indian woman, who seemed mature and sensible enough. But she was talking about drugs — the kinds kids like us tended to stray toward — and telling us that being a drug addict wasn’t a problem, as long as you had enough money to feed the habit. Look at Sly Stone, she said — he’s high-functioning. She also told us at about that time that cocaine wasn’t addictive. (And what was Sly addicted to? Crack. Ahem.) So enjoy yourselves, kids, as long as you can pay the bills! I had some good instructors in college, but some were wanting in perspicacity.
  • Roberta Flack. I’ll go with the one they picked: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” My random memory, which you will share if you’re the right age, is about hearing it for the first time in the Clint Eastwood change-of-pace film, “Play Misty for Me.” It made more of an impression than the song mentioned in the title. Unfortunately, that hauntingly beautiful song is permanently tied in my mind to the image of a sleeping man suddenly opening his eyes to see above him a murderous madwoman with a butcher knife. But it’s still beautiful.
  • Sam Moore and Steve Cropper. Wow, I didn’t know we’d lost not only the tenor half of Sam & Dave, but the legendary rhythm guitarist who played on their greatest hit. The Amplifier notes that “Moore famously immortalizes Cropper’s playing on “Soul Man” with the exclamation, ‘Play it, Steve!’
  • Mark Volman. Volman and the other Turtles were embarrassed by their first and biggest hit, “Happy Together.” They didn’t think it was cool enough. They were wrong. It’s one of the finest pop songs of the 1960s.
  • Marianne Faithfull. This is not possible, because Marianne is 17 years old and always will be. And you can’t see her picture without your heart melting, just a bit. I don’t know whether Mick Jagger was the melting sort, but he was certainly open to her appeal at one point. Of course he was. The NYT chose “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” but I’ll go with “As Tears Go By.”
  • Brian Wilson. They saved the biggest for last, and so will I. And while I was afraid they’d miss on the song, they didn’t. Good for them. They chose “God Only Knows.” If you doubt the choice, I refer you to this scene from “Love and Mercy,” in which Paul Dano, as the young Wilson, shares the song for the first time with his heartless creep of a father. It’s painful to watch, but the beauty of the song comes through. The Amplifier notes that “that Paul McCartney once called the greatest ever written.” Paul was on the right track.

May they all rest in peace. They gave us what they could while there were here.

‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three…’

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In this first day of the year, I thought briefly about diving back into politics, global affairs, etc., which I’ve generally ignored (by my usual standards) since last January. I mean really ignored, to the point of not knowing enough about recent events to comment. Occasionally I’ll tell myself I really should look into why the honor of the U.S. Navy is being fouled by the task of blowing up small boats coming out of Venezuela, but what good would it do?

And now I’ve seen that almost everything being offered by the various papers I peruse — items in the subject areas I had always assumed were most important — are as absurd and dispiriting as as they’ve been for awhile now. So much for that re-engagement resolution.

But… I did find one bright spot. It’s this item from the NYT:

Your Wait for These Space Events Is About to Pay Off

This is encouraging. Homo Sapiens actually trying to stretch itself forward again, the way we used to do. Rather than sitting about stewing in our little obsessions.

For awhile, I’ve had to look backwards to get a glimpse of what it’s like to look forward. Remember when I wrote about my recent interest in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era? Well, I think a lot of that was because that was a time when this country saw its possibilities as unlimited, and had a positive view of its future. America had survived the Civil War and overcome slavery, the issue that had inhibited the national spirit since our founding. Americans believed they could to anything, and they went out and proved it in a variety of fields.

Which means it was a lot like the time in which I grew up, when we had whipped the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists and were leading the free world in the advancement of liberal values — and the advancement of everything else: Technology, exploration, high and low culture, etc.

It was the Space Age, a term that excited us then, but has seemed so quaint in recent decades.

And now we have this one encouraging news story telling us:

NASA is sending astronauts back toward the moon. No, for real this time.

It has been more than 50 years since humans exited low-Earth orbit and traveled around the moon. In the time since, space agencies have built space shuttles and space stations, but their crews have remained within our planet’s close embrace.

Early in 2026, astronauts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency will again travel around the moon and back….

And that’s not all. We can also look forward to:

  • More great pics — fancy, high-tech pics — from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Yeah, I know: That sounds kind of like the name of a house of fashion design, but it fits. This is an stunningly beautifully designed universe, and we’re just getting started at admiring it.
  • More trips to Mars and its moons — by us, by the Chinese, and Japan’s getting in on the act, too.
  • Another solar eclipse, in August. OK, this isn’t mankind doing stuff, but it’s fun to watch, if you can get there. This one won’t be local.

And more. Things to look forward to. This is a good start to the year…

I want to go to there! Or to then…

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I say “then” because what I need to reach my destination is a Time Machine.

What does it take to make me post again after a week? This:

Science girl is apparently not making this up. Remember when Volkswagens were cool? Well, I didn’t even know how cool until I ran across that on social media.

The best part is — or would be, if I had the Time Machine (why am I capitalizing Time Machine? because that’s what H.G. did) — is that I could actually buy one of these babies, new, for less than $1,000 if I could bring it back with me. Coffeemaker included. Because, you know, that was another of the coolest things about the People’s Car back in the day. Chic cheapness.

Sure, there are several things we haven’t worked out yet:

  1. How to build a working Time Machine.
  2. How to make it big enough to bring back a then-new Beetle. This one wouldn’t work, although I admit it’s got plenty of style. (Doc Brown thought his machine had style. Huh. It wasn’t as ugly as a Cybertruck, but it was almost as boxy.)
  3. How to — and this is the hard one, for someone as financially challenged as myself — how to take the money back with me in a form that would transfer to a spendable grand in the desired time and place. I mean, you don’t want to try to go back and earn it, because that wasn’t the easiest thing to do in 1959. It was like coming up with more than $11,000 today. It might take you a couple of hours.

Which I suppose is why we mostly just drive our cars to a Starbucks now.

A new change in the rules

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The first image I came up with to illustrate this didn’t work. So here are some more…

A few days ago, I received a comment that mildly violated my civility policies, but raised a point worth addressing. The reader was complaining about a comment from someone else that was off the subject of the post. It referred to that other comment as “ranting.”

After it sat there awhile, I went ahead and approved it, just so I could respond to it thusly (which I’m now editing a bit to make my point clearer):

Well, you present an interesting dilemma…

I WANT people to always address the subject of the post, and to address it in a civil manner, refraining from trying to tear down the other folks involved in the discussion.

But I’ve always been fairly tolerant of folks wanting to address something else. I generally just post such comments and then ignore them, hoping someone else will help us get back on track.

Maybe I’ll change that. In fact, I’ll engage in an experiment: From now on, I will expect everyone to address the subject of the post, and to do so in a polite, civilized way. Those comments that fail to follow those simple rules will not be approved.

With one exception: You can bring up your own topic, as long as you follow the civility rules, on posts that are labeled “Open thread” in the headline.

We can watch and see how that words. Or rather, I’ll watch and see how that works. Because as much as the fact seems to offend some, this is my blog. If you don’t like my approach, there are millions of other places where you can say whatever you like. Here, you can only say MOST things…

This will remain in effect until I decide it’s not working. Yeah, there’s that first-person singular pronoun again. That’s just the way it is…

I’m running out of living authors

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When I was a little kid, around the time I first learned to read, I loved the card game “Authors.” This made a big impression on the adults. They were amazed I “knew” all these writers and their greatest works.

In fact, my mother mentioned it just the other day, and I’m 72 years old. (Which tells me maybe I haven’t been very impressive since then.) I immediately pointed out that I hadn’t read them; I just knew them the way I knew the suits, numbers and face cards in regular deck. In fact, come to think of it, I still haven’t read some of those books. Maybe I’ll take another crack at finishing Moby Dick…

But that’s not my point. My point is that while lots of people write books, that bunch — Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Mark Twain — were the ones I thought of at that age as actual authors.

And that hasn’t changed much. Oh, I’ve learned that the term technically applies more broadly, extending even unto the writers of self-help books, I’m still sparing with my use of the word. I’m even more sparing with my personal definition of writers worth reading.

And my list has a lot in common with the card game. You’ll note all most of those folks — with the glaring exception of Shakespeare — were active in the 19th century. Which didn’t bother me then — I wasn’t demanding that members of my generation be included or anything like that.

And over time, my adult tastes developed along similar lines. And not just with regard to literature. Consider church music. When I’m in Mass and hear a hymn, or would-be hymn, that really stinks (and yes, I sometimes do have such judgmental thoughts during Mass), I check in the hymnal to see who wrote it. And it pretty much always turns out to be someone writing within my own lifetime. My generation may have come up with the Beatles, and the Beatles were awesome, but they weren’t shooting for timeless sacred music. Except maybe with “Let it Be.”

I’ve mentioned before how stupid I think the annual “books of the year” lists are (and hey, it’s that season again!). I probably won’t ever read any book written within the past year, or if I do it will be by chance — simply a matter of a contemporary work being worth the trouble. The thing that gets me is that in order to compile such a list, or critique the list as a reader, you have to have read scores or even hundreds of books right off the press.

Which is an enormous waste of time.

Let the old man tell you, boys and girls, life is very short (and there’s no ti-i-i-ime…, just to give the Fab Four their due again). If you look over the list of works of literature written in English (and that’s all I’m thinking about here, because that’s a long-enough list on its own) over the last few centuries (before that, it’s hardly English), you will probably never get around to all the books that you should read (for your own enjoyment, and for the betterment of your mind and soul). Not in this life. Sure, lots of people read faster than I do, but still… well, this post is about me running out of living authors, not you.

All that said, peer pressure to keep up with the moment being what it is, especially for those of who lived through the frantically kinetic culture of the ’60s, I do like occasionally to trot out a short list of actual living writers that I’m really into.

But I’m running out of them.

Once, I could have claimed, if I wanted to:

John le Carré
William Faulkner
Alex Haley
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
John Hersey
Harper Lee
Patrick O’Brian
Philip Roth
J. D. Salinger
John Steinbeck
Hunter S. Thompson
Leon Uris
Kurt Vonnegut
Tom Wolfe

… those just being a few that come immediately to mind. And some of them — such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and even my great fave O’Brian — died before I read them. OK, to be honest, I still haven’t finished any novel by Faulkner, but everybody tells me he’s great.

And now we’ve lost another one. He died several months ago, but I just found out about it the other day. I had just finished rereading Rose — yes, again — and went to Google something about it, and found out that Martin Cruz Smith was dead.

That’s a real loss to letters — to the kind of stuff I like, anyway — and that’s what caused me to write this post.

I mean, who is left for me to really, really appreciate?

There’s Nick Hornby, who wrote such brilliant modern classics as High Fidelity — which inspired this blog’s Top Five lists.

And then Roddy Doyle comes to mind. You know, the Irishman who wrote The Commitments. But as brilliant as that film was, the book was — and this flies in the face of the cliche — not as good at the film. Because you couldn’t hear the music. I think Doyle’s best is another book from the Barrytown Trilogy, The Snapper. I can also recommend A Star Called Henry.

I read a piece Hemingway wrote, as a journalist, when Joseph Conrad died, in which he engaged in some self-flagellation for, as he put it, having used up all his Conrad. He’d read all Conrad had written, and now there would be no more. I could understand what a bad feeling that would be.

Happily, I still have some Doyle and Hornby to read — and come to think of it, plenty of Smith and O’Brians, and even a le Carré or two left.

But I need to come up with some more living writers I dig, before I run out completely…

Hate the latest iOS update? I don’t blame you…

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WHY would you fade out the ONE thing I need to see clearly in the middle of the night?

Last night, sometime after dinner, a dialogue box appeared on my iPhone screen. It wanted to install an update. With reckless abandon, I allowed it to do so.

I agreed on the basis of vague concern that something I rely upon might not work right in the future, at a moment when I really needed it, if I didn’t go along. In other words, the device was saying to me, “Nice setup ya got heah. Shame if sometin’ was ta happen to it…”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those discreet, unobtrusive, polite updates. This iOS 26.1 is more of a tear-down-everything-you-like-and-replace-it-with-something-far-less-appealing update.

A lot of my problem had to do with what I sometimes refer to as my Tory sensibility — my instinctive conservatism. I’m like those Age of Sail foremast jacks Patrick O’Brian describes. Their daily existence might be strenuous and harsh, but it “was what they were used to, and they liked what they were used to.”as

Amen. I like new things well enough — nothing like a new toy. As long as I don’t have to throw away my old toys to get one.

This time, they’ve messed with the visual appearance of practically everything that is completely within Apple’s control– camera, clock, settings and such. Worse, they’ve messed with the functionality. Actually, I’m exaggerating a bit. The visual and functional design of only a few things have changed. But they’re the things you most often use quickly, without having to think about it. Now you have to stop and think.

As I often say, nothing wrong with thinking. But I’d rather spend that mental energy on more important, complex matters than setting my alarm clock.

Example: When I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m used to glancing at my phone’s lockscreen, without putting on my glasses, to see what time it is. Not the date, not the weather forecast, just the time. In previous iOS versions, they made the time the biggest thing on the screen, apparently recognizing that’s what people needed to see. NOW, it’s the one thing on the page that’s faded into the background. This is a pain. (And don’t dismiss this as an old man’s complaint. I’ve been nearsighted since I was in the third grade.)

But rather than give you a list of all the things I don’t like about it, I’ll push myself to be positive and name the one improvement (and remember, there’s no reason to change things except to improve them) I’ve found so far:

In the past, those alternative camera settings that can be fun but which you seldom use — time lapse, slo-mo, cinematic, portrait, etc. — sometimes got in the way when you didn’t want them. Your finger might have accidentally touched that part of the screen and ruined your shot. Sometimes, I would swear it would drift to those settings on its own.

That won’t happen now. After a fraction-of-a-second glimpse when you first open the app, those settings disappear, leaving only “VIDEO” and “PHOTO” readily available.

As someone on the boob tube used to say, that’s a good thing. But it’s the only one of those I’ve noticed so far…

Oh, wait, I almost forgot the nut graf. Here goes: Why won’t technology companies leave their wonderful products alone and let customers enjoy them? Why do they have to create a constant state of unsettled confusion by gratuitously chaning them? I can only think of one good excuse: Their beancounters would make them fire all the R&D folks if they didn’t keep producing these visible changes.

Hey, I want people to keep their jobs. But a wise company would employ these people to constantly seek ways to improve their products by addressing actual existing problems. Just don’t let them make the change unless it is undeniably an improvement, rather than change for change’s sake.

 

The best podcast you can find: The Rest is History

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Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, hosts of “The Rest is History.”

I’ve previously mentioned my favorite podcast ever: “The Rest is History.” I’ve only mentioned it in passing, though, and have meant for some time to say more about it in a separate post.

And now I have the perfect news peg for doing so.

Apple, which provides the podcast app through which I listen regularly to hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, has named this brilliant gem its 2025 Show of the Year.

And rightly so. I had never heard it before this prize-winning year, but I can attest that what I have heard stands far above any podcast I’ve heard previously. As Apple said:

Apple is proud to celebrate The Rest Is History with the Apple Podcasts Award for Show of the Year, a recognition that honors a show that demonstrates quality and cultural impact in podcasting. Produced by Goalhanger, the series has captivated a global audience with its witty, insightful, and endlessly entertaining exploration of the past, becoming the first UK-based show to be named Show of the Year.
Hosted by acclaimed historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, The Rest Is History has become a fixture at the top of the charts worldwide by bringing history’s biggest moments to life. From the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the sinking of the Titanic, the hosts blend deep expertise with gripping storytelling and unexpected humor to make complex subjects accessible and compelling for millions of listeners…

Absolutely. I don’t know about those millions of listeners, but I certainly love it. And in my opinion, their audience should be in the billions — or at least, whatever the number of people who can understand English well enough to follow.

And not just because I think everyone should enjoy the same things I do. As I’m always saying, the failure to understand history is possibly the greatest problem facing our country today. Not that Americans were in general great historians in previous generations. But the gross ignorance today is more dangerous than ever, because we live in a time when dimly-perceived history is one of the favorite weapons of the warring tribes into which our once-great society has been divided. The armies of left and right charge again and again into battle waving their opposing misconceptions like so many heavy, dull swords.

It’s not about names and dates, or about which tribe got wronged by which other tribe in the past, but about understanding. It’s about perceiving and accepting, on a deep level, the people who came before us, and lived normal human lives day after day, just as we do. They’re not black and white object lessons, they’re people, like our families and friends.

And their stories are fascinating. And sometimes hilarious as well. Apple mentions these guys’ “unexpected humor.” Well, it’s not unexpected at all once you get to know these guys. They are brilliant historians, and so comfortable with their material that they fully appreciate the human comedy they are telling about. And while they don’t neglect the serious stuff, sometimes they go off on wonderful digressions about the really fun stuff.

You’ll hear that if you listen to this one short (half an hour, compared to the usual hour) episode they released this week to celebrate their award. They review some of their favorite episodes this year such as:

I became besotted with this show in April, when I ran across it in the middle of their four-part series on the year 1066, a year that of course has tremendous meaning to these two Brits. I immediately found that the site allowed me to go back and hear the previous episodes in the series — and for that matter every one of the more than 800 episodes since the show began.

I hadn’t listened long before I signed up to become a member of the show, which means I don’t have to “tune in next week” to hear the rest of the current series. I also get to hear their bonus episodes either riffing further on the current topic, of going far off the track on something they enjoy talking about.

All that is well worth $6 a month. Go give it a listen. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll also walk away smarter. You could start with the one celebrating their award.

Oh, and as Americans, don’t be put off by their constant “Bully for England” shtik. They worry about that a bit, although it doesn’t stop them:

Tom: What makes us particularly humble is that we are the first non-American show ever to win show of the year. So it’s a victory not just for us, but for Britain.

Dominic: Yeah, in a very real sense, for Britain.

Tom: Yeah. So Dominic, I’m a bit worried that our tone of British smugness may have scared away lots of readers who are tuning in wondering what the fuss is all about, and they’ve never actually listened to us before, so why don’t we just talk a little bit about what we do….”

Which they go on and do. Then, to celebrate the giver of the award, they riff on the Top Five Apples in History. Give it a listen…

Why not a QUIET ‘hold’ option?

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I’m on hold as I type this.

I’m hearing instrumental music — bad, staticky, extremely monotonous “music” — which I could stand, if I must.

(It’s now been 10 minutes.)

What gets me is the earnest robot message about every 30 seconds explaining “we are currently experiencing extremely high call volumes,” followed by a suggestion that we leave a message on the website. Which of course is the point, to the institution from which I’m seeking information that the website does not provide.

At least I’m not being subjected to the bitterly laughable, “We value your call” shtick. This is more honest, but it requires translation: “We don’t want to pay enough humans to help you in a timely manner, so we’re going to torment you until you go away.”

Oh, this just in…

A different recording kicked in to tell me that it would remain connected with me no longer, and that I must now do what it’s been telling me to do and go to the website and leave a message in a location that sounds like the description of where citizens could find the notice that local government was going to tear down Arthur Dent’s house:

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

In other words, the machine had had it with me and my patience, and wasn’t going to take it anymore. The call ended at the 16-minute point.

But back to my original suggestion, before that last insult: Why can’t these waits at least be quiet and peaceful?

Never mind, I know the answer: The water-torture irritation is key to the institution’s strategy…

So do you have this ‘new’ form of dementia?

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No, this doesn’t show dementia. It’s just an image that was in the public domain.

My wife brought this graf to my attention when she was reading in the NYT about a “new” form of dementia:

He used to have a “wonderful vocabulary,” he said, “but now, my field of words is far reduced.” He still reads books, exercises at a gym and socializes with friends, but he increasingly forgets names and details. He was particularly distressed when he immediately forgot the minister’s homily at church one Sunday, though he’d been listening avidly. “That’s really scary,” he said…

My wife’s reaction was to say she’d had this since she was 4 years old. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I think I had it earlier. Whenever it started, I’ve had it ever since, no matter how well I might have done in school or in my working life.

He forgets names and details? Been there, for about 72 years. He forgot the homily? Hey, I’m lucky when I hear it! And even before my hearing loss began back in 2012, I had a terrible time “listening avidly,” unless it was a really engaging sermon. I felt bad about it, but there it was. It happened, a lot. I’d set out to listen, and the priest would make an interesting point, and I’d start thinking about that point, which would remind me of something else, and I’d think hard about that, and next thing I knew we were reciting the Nicene Creed.

(It’s not that religion bores me — quite the contrary. I’ve long been that way in a lot of secular situations, even when I’ve been well paid to listen. It would occasionally happen in editorial board meetings. Somebody would say something really interesting, and I was off to the races, thinking about what a great column topic that would make, and how it reminded me of something I’d read previously, and … fortunately, Nina Brook and Cindi Scoppe got spookily good at recognizing that look in my eye (Nina in particular seemed alert to it), and would call me back to my duty. At which point I would have to beg the board’s pardon and try to catch up. And I was the guy presiding. I’m not making this up.)

Not that every point the man was making was silly. I, too, have an extensive vocabulary, but there are some words that have eluded me for many years. Take “futon,” for instance. I can usually recall it after a moment or two, but if I need to refer to one in a hurry, I have to change the subject, or fall back on something lame like “one of those pieces of furniture like the daybed thing I have in my office.” Which doesn’t fool anybody.

I don’t know why it gives me trouble. Maybe because I’d never heard of one until I was well into adulthood. Or maybe because, even though it sounds kind of French when you first hear it, it’s not from any of those Latin-derived languages with which I have some passing familiarity. (Of course, even if it had been French, well… that’s the Western language I understand the least.)  Futon is, in fact, Japanese. I might know a handful of words in Japanese — sushi, zori, kimono, hai and banzai, for instance, but I can’t explain the etymology of any of them. I just know if a bunch of guys who are hopped up on saki (hey, another word!) are running toward you yelling “BANZAI,” you might have a problem.

Another such word is “yogurt.” Again, I don’t know why.

OK, I’m avoiding the subject.

The truth is that lately, I’m forgetting more words. Names, too. I’ve never been great at names, but now I’m worse.

This might be about aging, of course. But at the moment, I’m taking something for an old spine injury (dating to when I was 17) that has made me goofier than usual. Gabapentin helps me sleep while this is acting up, but I’ll be glad to stop it. It’s not just forgetting words. It’s also remembering why I just walked across the kitchen. If I think about it a moment I’ll remember, but it’s still not fun.

And sure, I’ve done that sometimes when I was young as well, but now it’s much more common. Which is tiresome. I’m really hoping it stops when I’m not on the drug anymore. Otherwise, in another few years, my vocabulary is likely to descend to Trump level. On the bright side, maybe that means I can go into politics, and win.

The first time I ever had a memory lapse that I felt sure was age-related was something I’ve mentioned before: About 20 years ago, I suddenly realized that I no longer knew all of the lyrics to every Beatles song. This was a shock, but I got used to it. It’s not really something that comes up much anymore.

Anyway, I’m curious what y’all have experienced. For my part, I think I’m going to post more on the subject of aging from a first-person perspective. Might as well make use of whatever new expertise that getting old brings…

A less-subtle meaning of ‘banzai’… (screenshot from a clip I’m having trouble finding now)