Literalature

Have you ever seen a title and said to yourself, "I wonder what that's all about?"

If you read this blog, I know you have.

The editors of the Wyoming Legacy Love Inspired Historical novel series apparently worried mightily about confusing their readers with fancy titles that include metaphors and allusions. As I was walking through Half Price Books, I came across the novel seen below, held in your author's massive mitt. The first thing that you'll notice is the title: The Wrangler's Inconvenient Wife. Come on, Darling, tell me how you really feel about me.

Oh, wait! There's the subtitle: She's the wife he never wanted.

Ouch.

I do like the cover photo, which has been nicely hit with a very light Photoshop painting plug-in. Of course, it's a little tough to tell if that's the wife or the reason that the wife is inconvenient. The horses seem equally fond of each other.

Being an inconvenient spouse in the back country was an unhealthy way of life. People tended to die of various infectious diseases back then and once buried, disinterring them wasn't generally considered a good idea.

Despite the almost overwhelming temptation to spend a dollar and actually read the thing, I resisted.

On the same trip, I saw that someone had taken the display copy of The Conan Compendium and had left a tossed-aside copy of Crime and Punishment on the pile. Sorry, Vertikles, but it's Robert E. Howard 1, Fyodor Dostoevsky 0.

VIPDUCK

Man, two long, serious postings. It's time for a break. Here's an example of random brilliance. That's when you're walking along and you see something totally cool that has no business being there.

Call Me Ishmael

Your humble author, when he is not producing these musings or crafting artifacts for the gods, is crafting artifacts for a large multi-national corporation. My artificing can best be described as legendary, in that it is best documented through lore and not through any discernible historical record. Nevertheless, a rather staggering number of companies have been willing to trade good coin for my efforts over the years, which demonstrates that having a good bard to sing one's praises is often the best ally a person can have. This, in turn, goes a long way toward explaining why I spend time honing my rhetoric in this forum.

Three of the aforementioned companies have been members of the fifty largest companies on Earth, while some of the others were more of a size where we not only knew the names of our colleagues' most significant others, but spawn and pets, as well. As the years have passed, I have learned that among the primary differences between one end of the corporate spectrum of sizes and the other is that in a small company there is a general honesty, whereas as the company grows ever larger, that honesty becomes overwhelmed by paranoia, arrogance, and ambition. These characteristics become more pronounced as you move closer to the seat of power. (For proof of this, please feel free to peruse the mythology of any culture. You'll note that gods and kings schemed against each other constantly, usually to the detriment of the mortals who dwelt below. The best things in life never change.)

I had this explained to me once by an organizational psychologist who had been brought in to train the mid-grade peons in how to deal with the perpetual in-fighting of the mighty. She pointed out that when forming groups, people tend to select those most like themselves. This is a phenomena that I had observed early in my academic career, when I was employed as a photographer of fraternity and sorority parties. After a very short period of observation, it became possible to identify which house a particular female had pledged merely by noting hair color and style, and the nature of her garb.

The behaviorist went on to note that the people who are successful in large organizations are paranoid, arrogant, and ambitious, as a rule. As they begin their climbs up their particular Olympus, they look for minions who are also paranoid, arrogant, and ambitious, because they understand the motivations of those individuals. Altruists and those who are open-minded regarding the intentions of others are scary people who behave in random and mysterious ways. And so power is concentrated on one end of the spectrum of collaboration, plunging exponentially to an asymptote only microscopically above zero for those who are actually willing to cooperate with their fellow man (or woman).

All of this is prelude to the events of the day, when there was the ritual known as a reorganization. Since the particular vessel on which I have shipped had grown fat and happy during the good times, the time had come for a reckoning. In addition to the random shuffling of deck chairs, a number of them were to be tossed overboard, in order to raise the freeboard. If this inspires thoughts of ship's officers walking along the promenade and examining each chair for its condition and suitability, I congratulate you on your naïvité and encourage you to quickly close this page and move on to some other activity, such as browsing the Garfield archives.

No, while determining the fate of the chairs on their merits may seem both logical and fair, it suffers from the unfortunate element of offering an opportunity for legal action by those left behind in the wake. Thus, with the courage that only Human Resources can muster, the decision whether or not any individual would stay or go was determined solely by seniority with the company. Thus, your narrator was spared while others, whom I freely admit could add more to the success of this particular organization, were cast off. My opinions on this process were not solicited in advance, nor would the proposed solution of a game of "Duck, Duck, Goose" have been accepted, despite being both less arbitrary and more fun.

What moves this from tragedy into farce (Damn, where is that chorus when they are needed?) is that the Captain of our ship, the Chairman of the Freeboard, so to speak (this will teach me to choose my metaphors with more care, if I wish to avoid mixing them), is possessed with an Ahab-like drive to pursue world-class engagement by his employees. This particular cetacean can be identified by the scores on particular questions in the biennial employee surveys.

Now, much to our Ahab's dismay, (Did you note how smoothly I moved from one unsustainable metaphor to another? You don't learn that in Freshman English in this day and age.) the employee engagement had not only been merely continental-class lately, but it had fallen considerably in the previous two surveys. This led to a letter from the Captain to the employees that came as close to the proverbial "the beatings will increase until morale improves" as any document that I have ever seen in real life.

The particular aspects of the survey whereby our Pequod had fouled its lines the worst were in communications and in dealing fairly with over- and under-achievers. I'd quote the figures here, but oddly, when we asked if we could have a copy of the results, which were being presented to us, we were told that there were instructions that they were not to be distributed. Identifying this as a potential example of the communications issue accomplished nothing more than to earn the enmity of the speaker.

Now, if I were a cynical man,
...
...
...

Excuse me, I had to go and get a glass of water after almost choking on that line.

If I were to express my cynicism openly, I might point out that the method used to select which chairs would become jetsam^[1] and which would remain on board the vessel might do wonders for eliminating those who want management to be more aggressive about separating out non-performers. On the other hand, the fact that the mechanism was never explained outright, but had to be inferred from muttered conversations in which the various parties tried to identify the distinguishing characteristics that led to the various outcomes may indicate that the communications line may still be wrapped around Ahab's leg in two years when the next harpoon is hurled.

Now, if you will excuse me, I shall retire to consume an appropriate elixir. Since Summer has finally departed these parts and the evening is cool and dry, I cannot in good conscience consume a Tonya Harding. Instead, to honor my metaphorical meandering, I shall have a whale of a rum and Coke.

Admit it. The two of you who actually have read^[2] Moby Dick were waiting for a Starbucks joke.

^[1] Jetsam is material intentionally thrown overboard. Flotsam is material from a shipwreck or other incident. There are legal differences between the two, which is why one refers to "flotsam and jetsam". I mention this only to point out to fair Aglaea why her father kicked her ass on the vocabulary test.

^[2] Three times, thank you very much. Including the chapters on whale anatomy. I happen to think that it is one of the great reading books of literature.

A Foolish Consistency

Somewhere in the multiverse, that is the name of this blog. It was my first alternative and I spent a lot of time deciding between the two. Perhaps I chose wrong. That phrase comes from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Self-Reliance. The essay, which I highly recommend, is a diatribe against conformance. It was written by a man who felt that the common standards had become both a strait-jacket on imagination and independence, and a licence to behave in a boorish and self-centered manner.

The whole paragraph is never quoted. In fact, the entire sentence itself is almost never found intact. This is a shame, as it is a bit of writing that we could well use in this year, as people are urged to vote for party unity against their own interests and the interests of the common good. (And I say that of all parties, and not just those in the United States of America.) I cite it here, so that you can see what Emerson meant.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' —Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I have a reputation at work for ignoring awards. Those that I have been given sit abandoned upon shelves in Human Resources and my supervisors' offices until they finally heed my response to their calls to claim them and dispose of them in some way or another. I don't attend ceremonies and I did not bother to collect my high school or college diplomas. I have no need for these things. I can understand that others value them and collect them like treasure, but that does not affect me one way or the other. I have no disdain for those for whom these awards have merit, but at the same time, I give them no credit. If I have no knowledge of the accomplishment, I have no knowledge of the value of the award, while on the other hand, if I know the accomplishment, the award adds nothing to my appreciation of the effort or the level of achievement. Emerson spoke of this, as well:

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I choose to interrupt the usual meaningless ramblings presented in this blog to cite Emerson and to urge you to read Self-Reliance because I can see that in near future some of my posts will need to refer to my beliefs, for the sake of understanding. These beliefs are incoherent and inconsistent. They make no sense to anyone but me, because I am the only one who has to live by them. I hold no others to the tenets of my belief system, just as I accept no binding from the beliefs of others.

My beliefs change through time. This does not make them unique; anyone who claims that their beliefs are fixed and unchanging is ignorant, arrogant, or foolish beyond imagination. They are also wrong, but stand too close to the painting to see the image. All they see is the brush strokes and pigment, and they fail to see how they change through the day as the light moves from window to window and as the fire flickers in the night.

I hold no belief in the divine, whether a universal God who created everything in the beginning, but who does not interfere in day-to-day matters, or in a personal God who answers prayers from individuals and who requires obsequence and adoration. To me, God is synonymous with "I don't know."

"In the beginning, there was God and God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was." This is the equivalent to me to the sentence, "I don't know what there was before there was a universe, nor do I know what caused the universe to appear, but it did." After that, I'd argue that there is much more empirical evidence for how we got to this point for those who aren't big believers in continuous divine intervention. When I say that I'd argue that point, I'm speaking metaphorically. I don't try to convert people and I don't tolerate those who try to convert me. Enough studies have been done to show that you can't argue someone out of a belief system and attempting to do so only makes her more determined to believe.

So what do I believe? Today at least, I believe in the elder gods, both good and evil, who battled throughout time, raising mountains and crushing them flat again. Only today, these gods no longer deal with furious thunder, howling winds, and raging seas. Instead, they have taken up new roles as gods of technology, who delight in tormenting those who do not properly serve them. I believe in titans who dwell in plumbing, causing the mysterious need to fine-tune the settings for the shower each morning and who cause the drain to clog fifteen minutes before a houseful of guests arrive. I believe in sprites who cause doorknobs to fall off when you are in a hurry to leave, who can kill a light bulb in the one fixture that you need to work, and who can divert a cloud burst a few hundred meters to where you left your windows rolled down.

What happens when we die? Some would say God. I say that I don't know. But despite that, I believe in karma; both the variety that passes through eternity, chasing you through lifetimes; and the kind that opens up a parking spot right when you need it after that week when you left particularly good tips for all of the waiters and waitresses, including the one who brought the wrong plate, but who apologized and rushed the right order through the kitchen.

I believe that no person is really gone until the last person whose life he affected no longer remembers him. I believe that we are here to do good things. Spectacular things. To create art. To advance science. To help those around us. And to be kind to each other.

Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

I do not believe that the unjust, the cruel, the foul, and the evil are punished, unless we rise up and punish them. I do not believe in retribution in the afterlife. We need to get those bastards here and now. At the same time, I do not believe that goodness will be rewarded after death. If someone does something good, reward them now. Or better yet, go out and do three good things of your own, instead. You'll leave the world a better place and that works toward the goal that the good people have.

I do not believe in bigotry of any kind. Hatred of a whole class of people is the worst intellectual laziness. If you're going to hate someone, hate them one at a time for a specific reason. The best and most common reason that I have found is because they are an asshole. That is a suitable reason to hate someone. Being an asshole is a choice and it's perfectly fine to hate someone because of a choice that they made. The color of a person's skin, her nationality, his sexual orientation, mental and/or physical handicaps, and economic status are not choices. They came as part of the original equipment and unless a lot of expense has been put into aftermarket components, a person is pretty much stuck with the model that he got at birth.

What about religion? It's clearly a choice. Is it alright to hate someone because of their religion?

For this, I'll point you back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. A person, regardless of which religion they espouse, who works to bring good to the world, who takes the parts of his religion that improves the human condition; the parts about loving one's neighbor, about caring for the stranger, about tending to the Earth; that is a good person who makes good choices and you have no right to hate him for his beliefs. On the other hand, the person who picks out the poisonous threads from the cloth of her religion and who uses them to spew bile at those who are different and who don't have the same religion, who uses her life to do evil to others and to the world; regardless of the name of the religion she professes, she is a blazing asshole and you have not merely the right, but the responsibility to do everything in your power to crush her and everything that she believes in.

And so maybe the two names are interchangeable: viewing the world as symmetric, with good and evil balancing each other, with tolerance and hatred as equals, with independent thought and mindless devotion both considered virtuous is a foolish consistency, and it is only by breaking that symmetry that we can be all that we are meant to be.

The First Rule of Relationships

More Amazon Goodness

So, I had an Amazon seller cancel an order on me without wasting time letting me know. Groovy. Now I can return the parts that I ordered to go with the cancelled equipment.

In exchange, Amazon continues to amaze with suggestions. The other day, it offered up Paradise Lost as a "Children's Book." Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a screen shot of that, because it was particularly memorable. If I had to think of a way to turn a kid away from reading, I'd be hard pressed to think of a better choice.

Today's suggestions aren't as good, but there are a few worth noting. First of all, in the reference department, we have that fire safety manual:

Next is Amazon demonstrating that all electromagnetic waves should be treated equally, regardless of frequency:

If you happen to be a particularly funny photographer, you'll definitely want a copy:

I have nothing to add that can improve upon this:

When my kids were little, we occasionally had a bath bomb. I might pick these up for nostalgia's sake:

I suspect that Amazon is trying to tell me something about being particularly dim:

I've been trying to avoid current events lately, but these seem to be taking it a bit too far:

In order to be prepared if your Tesla runs out of power four inches from the outlet:

Once again, I can literally think of nothing that would add to the spectacular nature of this selection. There are at least three completely different forms of humor on display here:

While I suppose that asphyxiation could be used to kill wild game, how do you get a live trout into a vacuum freezer bag, let alone a deer?

If you ignore the title, the subtitles are a pretty good description of teenagers, given my experience at raising two of them:

Good Guys

Aphrodite and I often exchange news stories about "the good guys". These are the people, companies, teams, etc. that make the world more livable simply by doing a little bit more than is absolutely necessary. You've seen the stories: athletes who spend time at children's hospitals, police officers who pay for the baby formula that a mother was trying to shoplift, companies who do things that they don't have to do, simply because it's the right thing.

I'm going to include occasional good guy stories, when they're sufficiently interesting/amusing/amazing, because they are part of the symmetry of the multiverse. For every Donald J. Trump, there is a Jill Nobody, who goes out of her way to make the world a less hateful, less bitter, less awful place.

Today's good guys are Topps, the baseball card and bubble gum company.

Back in 1957, they held a contest where kids who sent in a special card, plus three gum labels, and predictions for the scores of two baseball games to be played on 19 July 1957, could win a new baseball glove, if they got the scores right. The material mentioned had to be received by 11 July to be eligible. The company didn't specify the year, though.

Enter Darwin Day, age 65, whose brother died of cancer. Mr. Day, recognizing the inconvenience that his brother's family was going through as they dealt with a lifetime of flotsam and jetsam, decided to clean up his own mess before departing this mortal coil. Eventually, he found three binders of baseball cards from 1956, 1957, and 1958. Included among the cards was one of the special contest cards. Since he and his brother had enjoyed collecting the cards so much and since his brother was a practical joker, Mr. Day decided in his brother's honor to enter the contest.

Not surprisingly, picking the correct scores of 59-year-old baseball games was easy and Mr. Day sent the required materials to Topps.

Tony Jacobs, Vice President of Topps in charge of confectionery (not a bad job, if you can get it), received the package and being a stand-up guy who runs a stand-up company, decided to honor the terms of the contest as written.

Mr. Day is now the proud owner of a brand-new baseball glove and Topps and Mr. Jacobs have the honor of joining the ranks of the good guys.

This story is courtesy of the New York Times.

Old Age and Treachery

A while back, I read a nice little article written by a B-52 radar navigator. His plane and three others were attending one of the big training exercises. They had been flying for about a week under extremely severe restrictions — ingress at 15,000' from the West, egress at 18,000' to the North, no jammers, etc. Needless to say, the other participants were picking them out of the sky left and right.

On the night before the last exercise, which was to be a simulated nuclear attack, the bomber squadron commander walked into the office of the guy who was running the exercise and said that the BUFFs weren't going to fly the next day. Since his people weren't getting anything out of the exercise except for morale bruises, he didn't see the point in racking up airframe hours. After a heated debate, the exercise manager agreed that the bombers could fly their own attack the next day — no restrictions.

The author and the other radar navigators spent the whole night working out the attack plan.

The next day the B-52s came into the target region from four directions at altitudes ranging from 250 to 500 feet at full throttle with every electronic countermeasure cranked to eleven. They criss-crossed over the target at less than 200 feet altitude in what's called a lay-down attack, where the bombs are intended to soft-land to allow the bomber a chance to depart before special relativity is experimentally proven once again. The total time over target was less than two minutes and none of the SAM sites even got a lock on them. One defender fired a (simulated) missile, but it was during the egress phase, was a wild shot with no chance to hit, and left the firing plane directly over ground zero at the moment when the bombs would have gone off. An F-18 was "shot down" when he obliviously flew directly behind one of the bombers.

The author stated that they returned to base and had just begun the debriefing when the general in charge of the defense team literally kicked the door open and started screaming. The author went on to say that it was exactly like the scene from "The Dirty Dozen". The offended general was red-faced and ranting about how the bombers had cheated and about how their crews' mothers and fathers had never known each other's last names. All in all, a supremely satisfying moment, from the report.

Of interest is the fact that all of the fighter pilots were amazed by the abilities of the B-52s. The pilot who had been shot down had no idea that he was anywhere near the bomber, let alone in its tail cone. The pilot who had made the wild shot only noticed the plane because it was flying so low that the shadow was completely black against the ground.

As an aside, the sight of four B-52s coming in at full throttle from all different directions at 200 feet must have been pretty damn impressive, if not to say deafening. When we lived in Austin, there was an annual airshow at Bergstrom Air Force Base. Since it was an old SAC base, there were always a couple of B-52s, which were enormously popular for the amount of shade they produced. They would always make a low pass at about 500' and it was one of the highlights of the show to have your chest rumble.

What Makes Nascar the True American Sport

Okay, so your former boss has managed to screw you one last time, long after you've stopped working for him. Only Nascar gives you a microphone and lets you tell a national audience the following:

 "It's just disappointing that you've got somebody old like that's retiring -- should be retired the way he drives -- it's just ridiculous. I only hit him in Turn 1 when he cut across my nose, so I don't think there was any reason other than him just being bipolar and having anger issues. Google Tony Stewart. You'll see all kinds of things he's done. Look it up on YouTube and everything else. He's quite the guy."

By the way, just like at work, here's what your ex-boss left around the office:

Amazon's Algorithms Are Clear, Now

So, Amazon decided that my interests lay in Religion and Spirituality books, a topic of which the best that can be said is that my reading tends to the highly esoteric. If the recommended books had involved the various aboriginal religions, seventeenth-century religious schisms in Islam, or medieval Lithuanian paganism, I would have been impressed and might have perused the selection.

Instead, it consisted almost entirely of pop theology, Christian leadership, and "The Men Who Stare at Goats" (to quote the great Dave Barry: I am not making this up). Since I don't read these books (although I might read "The Men Who Stare at Goats", if I ever find the time), I couldn't begin to guess why Amazon decided to recommend them. Fortunately, I can click a link and find out:

Wow! Three Vonnegut novels, Huxley's classic, a novel of the Franklin Expedition of 1845, and Grant's Memoirs. If I saw these on your bookshelf, I'd come up with a very different list of suggestions. Something regarding the Elder Gods might be appropriate, or more likely, something from another shelf in the library. (I do actually own and have read all of these books, by the way.)

Amazon is also incorrect in that my hobby is not voyeurism. I live in a neighborhood filled with middle-aged bodies living middle-class lives. Frankly, my neighbors are neither attractive or interesting enough to justify peering through their windows, making this suggestion irrelevant:

Why Broken Symmetry?

Symmetry is one of the most fundamental concepts in science, philosophy, and art. In principle, it represents an ideal state of balance and potentiation, where possibilities remain open and equal. In reality, symmetry is elegant, but dull. I chose the name Broken Symmetry for my blog because it reflects a crossroads where my interests meet.

As a physicist, I know that symmetry is behind many of the most beautifully brilliant theories, but that nasty experimentalists have a habit of performing experiments that disclose cracks in these theories and that these violations of symmetry are the likely cause of the universe consisting of matter, rather than equal quantities of matter and antimatter, annihilating each other to nothing.

In chemistry, most organic molecules have chirality: that is to say, they are right-handed or left-handed. While most synthetic processes produce equal quantities of each, biological processes tend to be very specific, producing (and consuming) left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. As we search for life on other worlds, one tool that will be used is looking at these compounds to see if they show a preference for one hand or the other. If they do, it will be strong evidence of biological function.

As an artist, I know that symmetry is graceful and pleasing to the senses, but that asymmetry causes tension that makes art exciting and inspiring.

Something as common as a face may seem symmetric, but virtually no one's is. Psychologically, more symmetric faces are generally viewed as more attractive, but as these photos show, even when viewing a random person, the natural face appears more interesting than do either of the two faces created by mirroring one half onto the other:

Even a face generally considered to be beautiful looks strange and uninviting when made symmetric:

So this blog is all about the interesting and exciting world that comes when things are not in balance. When good and evil aren't equivalent, when truth and lies don't cancel out, and when you discover that two left gloves aren't the same as a pair.

I believe in balance. I'm just opposed to it. This is the place where chaos begins.