In Yogi Berra’s Washington Post obituary, the subtitle “American philosopher” is well-chosen. While some of the quotes attributed (or misattributed) to Yogi Berra may just be funny malapropisms, some strike me as quirky ways to say something important, akin to Zen koans. One of his gems is widely applicable and especially relevant to a world on the brink of ecological and/or political collapse. It deserves a special name. It is also so widely quoted that 2 versions are common, as indicated below:
Yogi Berra’s Law
The game ain’t over til it’s over.
It ain’t over til it’s over.
Yes, the original context was baseball. With 2 outs in the bottom of the 9-th inning, the home team may be trailing. Yogi rightly admonishes both the home team (to resist despair) and the visitors (to resist complacency). A lot can still happen with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9-th inning. I prefer the shorter version of the law because it is more explicit about the law’s generality. “It” could be almost anyhthing.
My current context for heeding Yogi Berra’s Law is the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as POTUS. At best, this event marks the start of 4 long and nasty years in the US. At worst, this event might combine with trends elsewhere (in China, Europe, and Russia) to start a new Dark Age. To consider the worst case is prudent, not alarmist.
Mindless repetition of platitudes like
is no substitute for the eternal vigilance that Jefferson said is the price of liberty. (There are other prices.) I resist the complacency of those platitudes; I also resist despair and continue (in my own small way) to be a citizen rather than just a complainer.
In a late inning in the biggest game of my lifetime, the Enlightenment is trailing. That sucks. But 2+3 is still 5 and Yogi Berra’s Law is still true.
I cannot draw my way out of a paper bag, but Poet Rummager can draw. She is also a fine creative writer (with an impish and sometimes dark sense of humor) and a fun collaborator.
Originally posted on Slasher Monster:
The climax of this great series raises the Xmas Cat Pix tradition to new heights of hilarity.
In music, any mishmash with a beat or a scale has an at least slightly repetitive structure. The sounds emanating from a beer garden or a rap concert are extremely repetitive. The good stuff is in between. While the musical lines in a piece by Glass have subtle variations, they are often too simple and repetitive to be interesting by themselves. Happily, they are not by themselves. Something special emerges when they are superimposed.
Descriptive short phrases can become oversimplified facades that obscure realities too complex to be described well (not just named) by the phrases. Neither Glass nor I can think of a good short descriptive phrase for his style, but I can offer a decent visual analogy that can be expressed concisely in a haiku. I should be doing my chores rather than responding to
But how could I resist a chance to put a link inside a haiku and pun on both the composer’s name and the title of one of my favorites among the works by him that I have heard?
Seeing while Listening
Transparent layers,
etched to form Moiré patterns:
See the sounds of Glass.
From Suite 3 by JSB
Bubbles in Bach’s Air:
I cannot grab them, so I
sing with silent joy.
Carpe Diem Haiku Family — A New “Shadow” Challenge
Image cropped from © Ryanfaas | Dreamstime.com
Lost Lunch?
Sunlight breaks thru clouds
and sends hawk’s shadow downward.
Prey darts for cover.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
A somber interpretation of this quote comes naturally.
And so on.
Like many classics, the Faulkner quote can be reinterpreted later, w/o superceding the original intent. As a quick example of such reinterpretation, consider JS Bach’s Two-Part Invention #11. It is very quick indeed (about a minute long) and was originally written for solo harpsichord. Click here to hear it arranged for banjo and marimba, on one track from a Grammy-winning CD, where banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck and friends reinterpret 19 short classical pieces. We will return to music shortly.
The story of my upbeat reinterpretation starts a few years ago. Tired of having the air in my kitchen be warmer and wetter than elsewhere in the house, I bought a window fan: 2 small quiet fans in 1 housing, meant to be squeezed between sash and sill for blowing air in or out of a window. I mounted the fan in a doorless doorway, so as to blow air from the dining room into the kitchen. It does help. A tall person would need to stoop when passing thru; I do not.
To mount the fan, I drilled holes in the fan housing and drove screws thru the housing into wooden supports (cut from scrap lumber) that I attached to the upper corners of the doorway. I chuckled at the thought that relating horizontal and vertical lengths (along the doorway) to diagonal lengths (of cut lumber) was yet another small consulting gig for Pythagoras.
Hmmm. I did not think of Pythagoras as an ancient dead Greek. I thought of him as an eminent older colleague (long since retired) who is doing quite well for his age and still has consulting gigs. The past is not past.
Will our civilization endure until I am as old as Pythagoras is now? (Not w/o some major course corrections.) Suppose it does. I doubt that I will have many more consulting gigs. But Pythagoras will. Bach’s music will still be cherished and reinterpreted, along with that of other great composers, from Hildegard to Hovhaness and beyond. Sometimes it is good that the past is not past.
Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179
Mystic visions or
migraine headaches? Whatever.
Her music lives on!
If lumping fairness with (liberty; rationality; tolerance) sounds odd, please note that fairness to me is subtler than crude egalitarianism. Credit where credit is due. Ability rather than ancestry as qualification for high office. Opportunity for upward mobility. Respect for differing priorities. Willingness to forego getting all I want so that everybody has a shot at getting all they need, w/o trying to impose the same wants/needs categories on everybody.
Downloaded from Clipart Kid, the image of David and Goliath trash talking illustrates a subtlety of fairness. It may look unfair that Goliath is the only one with armor and heavy weapons. Should David have them too? No, he would still be a scrawny youth, just encumbered by all that stuff. Let David have what suits David’s (not Goliath’s) skills and will not interfere with Plan B:
If my shots miss, run like Hell!
Deciding what is fair and then doing it can be a lot of work, as the endless stream of affirmative action lawsuits illustrates. Dunno how that story will end. I do know a true story about the difficulties of being fair in the real world that has a happy ending. I blogged about it in 2015, before I had a responsive theme. My post would have been unintelligible to anybody surfing on a phone or tablet (Harrumph!) rather than a real computer. Now that I have a responsive theme and a renewed urge to defend Enlightenment values (thanks to the current dismal state of US politics), I have revised that post in many small ways, partly to make it more explicit about fairness. The WordPress previewer assures me that it is indeed intelligible on all 3 platforms. Here is the link:
As John Adams noted long ago, facts are stubborn things. So are misconceptions. Tossing dull little facts against a seductively simple misconception is like tossing pebbles against a window. To break the window, U must organize the pebbles into something like a chunk of concrete.
One way to organize facts is to create a clear and colorful visualization that sums up the take-away. One kind of visualization is a bar chart where all the big bars have the same length but are divided into little bars of various lengths. Perhaps a green little bar shows the percentage of my daily protein that comes from breakfast, while yellow and red little bars show the percentages that come from lunch and dinner. Another big bar shows those 3 percentages for somebody else. This kind of bar chart can be very helpful when there are more kinds of little bar than just breakfast/lunch/dinner, if the chart marker chooses colors well.
An excellent example of this kind of bar chart is in a Daily Kos post by Auriandra dated 2016-10-05. The whole post is a good read; the chart is shown below, in a cropped screenshot.
Contrary to what many cartoonists and progressive purists (not to mention right-wingers) proclaim, Hillary Clinton is relatively truthful, among the pols considered. (None of them deserve high marks by the standards of scientific research or testimony under oath.) By far the least truthful is Donald Trump.
If voters eventually notice and heed the veracity difference between Clinton/Kaine and Trump/Pence, the loss will leave Trump angry at the fact checkers. How can someone with his skillset (blustering; lying; swindling) get back at them? He could try for yet another Pants-on-Fire rating, with a lie about the fermentation capabilities of his microbiome.
Revenge for Fact Checking
Donald Trump could say
his farts and his shit smell like
warm cinnamon rolls.
Learning from history is tough, even for those who remember it. Parallels are never exact. The importance of each difference between then and now is a judgement call. Consider a darkly hilarious cartoon by Jen Sorensen:
Yes, the resemblance of the armed guard to a Nazi storm trooper is as subtle as a sledge hammer. Fine by me. Maybe it will overcome the American propensity for historical amnesia and wishful thinking.
Much to my dismay, Hillary Clinton is the only Trump opponent who might conceivably be elected. The progressive purists who disdain supporting Clinton are confident that something like what happened in Germany in 1932 and 1933 could not happen here and now, with a Trump victory. Yes, our traditions of liberal democracy are stronger than those of the Weimar Republic. The pertinent question is not whether our traditions are stronger but whether they are still strong enough, after years of relentless assault from the pseudoconservative coalition of bigots and plutocrats that controls staggering amounts of dark money and has already taken over the GOP. Dammit, the answer is not obvious.
Who’s Bhaskara? We will get to that question shortly. First, consider whatever gadget U are using to read this post. It depends on many things, discovered over many years by many people who (unlike many pols) preferred building up to tearing down. With many steps omitted (and “depends on” abbreviated to ←), a few of those dependencies go like this:
Your Gadget ← quantum physics ← coordinate systems ← Pythagoras’ Theorem
Back in high school, Pythagoras’ Theorem may have seemed like a little fact about right triangles that may have been mildly interesting but did not deserve the effort of slogging thru the book’s tedious proof. I could read the proof line by line, observe that it was valid, and be glad that I never needed to retrieve it for a test. Hardly anybody could remember it for more than a few minutes.
Pythagoras’ Theorem turned out to be essential to blogging (and much else), so it would be nice to have a proof that mere mortals could remember, appreciate, and be inspired by. Enter Bhaskara, 1114-1185.
Bhaskara replaced the usual picture (of 3 squares glued to the sides of 1 triangle) with a picture of 4 copies of the same triangle, arranged to form a big square with a little square inside it:
The proof is sometimes displayed more tersely, with just the figure. I prefer to write out a little algebra (while not belaboring why the angles do add up the way the figure suggests). Tho he did not have modern notation, Bhaskara did have an elegant way to provide more detail for the mathematically fastidious. He displayed another figure that also puts the 4 copies of the triangle inside a big square with sides a+b. In the other figure, the area not covered by copies of the triangle amounts to a²+ b² because it consists of 2 small squares. But the not-covered area amounts to c² in the figure displayed above, so we can conclude that
a²+ b² = c²
w/o bothering with algebra and how to compute areas of right triangles. We just need to bother with drawing both figures. Wanna try your hand at drawing the other figure? U can find the answer by following the link provided by Sieglinglungenlied in the comment section.
OK, I admit that having written a proof of mind-blowing elegance does not really qualify Bhaskara to be POTUS. Too bad that many people think mind-blowing arrogance can hack it.
Clicking on the “politics” category or tag in this post will display all my uses of acidic humor to cope with the current state of US politics. But acids are corrosive. Sometimes, I forgo acid and contemplate some of the enduring (so far) glories of modern Western civilization, one of which is that it is not exclusively Western. In particular, we got some elegant math from India and some elegant poetry forms from Japan.
One Way to Stay Sane in the Age of Trumpery
Cherish all that is
true and good and beautiful
(like Bhaskara’s proof).
© Wisconsinart | Dreamstime.com
As American politics in 2016 illustrates, Calliope’s portfolio is not as weird as I would wish. Neither is my title.
Stale Bread Can Wait
My muse is stingy (when implored)
or really bitchy (when ignored).
If I want to sing of croutons
(but her fancy turns to plutons),
I have just one way to go:
with the mighty magma flow.
As I discovered long ago when I tried to read an English translation of Goethe’s Faust, poetry in couplets tends to sound silly even when it is dead serious. Now that I have had my little respite from blank verse in haiku form, maybe I should go back to solemn austerity. Maybe.
What the World Needs
More silliness from
those who know they are silly;
less from the others.
While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
Many amazing photos have been submitted to the Weather Channel’s It’s Amazing Out There / 2016 Photo Contest. The contest has both expert judging and voting for the “fan favorite” by anybody with a Facebook account. U can vote daily until 2016-08-26 and distribute those votes however U like. Having viewed only a few of the submissions, am I competent to recommend votes to other people? Not really, but Donald Trump has set the competence bar low enough to be cleared by a garden slug. Being a little more competent (and a lot more honest) than Trump, I will share my enthusiasms anyway, with cropped/resized versions of 2 submissions.
While I have been voting enthusiastically for Coming Storm by CJDraper (aka Dancing Echoes on WordPress), I also want to salute the fan favorite as of the last time I looked: Ozzie (a bald eagle) by Davedc. The latter already has plenty of well-deserved votes, so I wrote a haiku inspired by it.
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
To illustrate my response to Carpe Diem # 1020 rainbow, I did a quick search that found more fine images of rainbows than I could view in a lifetime. The image used here jumped out because it has a vertical format, does not need the rainbow to grab me, and hints at a futile yearning. The termite mound in the foreground looks like a hand trying to grasp the rainbow.
Termites are much too busy building mounds and digesting cellulose to indulge in such yearnings. Humans are busy too, and many of us have some awareness of the geometric reasons that a rainbow is forever out of reach. We sometimes yearn anyway.
No Pots of Gold
Seek ends of rainbows.
You will not find them? Okay.
The quest is enough.
The image used here is a photo by Randy Olson that was available at the time of posting as computer desktop wallpaper from National Geographic.
The choices listed in the following poll have varying plausibility; they do include the actual author. Please have a go before scrolling down to see the answer and why it matters.
Scroll down for the answer …
↓
↓
↓
↓
↓
↓
↓
The image of the US Constitution’s famous oversimplification “We the People” was downloaded and resized from http://mtviewmirror.com/wp-content/uploads/we-the-people-9.jpg.
↓
↓
↓
↓
↓
All of the quotes are from a speech on The New Nationalism delivered 1910-08-31 by Theodore Roosevelt. More than a century later, the work has still not been done. More than a century later, pseudoconservatives still dump truckloads of ratcrap on anybody who opposes running the USA for the benefit of the biggest corporations and richest billionaires.
What to do in 2016? Yes, I feel the pull toward a protest vote like writing in Bernie Sanders (or Theodore Roosevelt). In what is not so obviously a mere gesture of protest, I could vote Green or Libertarian. But I will not. Unless U live in a cobalt blue or screaming red state, voting Green or Libertarian in 2016 is voting for Trump. In the real world, all options suck. Some suck worse than others. Much worse.
Yes, one can hope that the combination of Trump in the White House with McConnell and Ryan dominating Congress will be so blatantly toxic that “the people” finally wake up, rise up, and wrest control from the plutocrats. Alas, the 99% of us who are getting shafted includes bigots and nitwits. It includes those who bought the Fox News claim to be fair and balanced. It includes heavily armed crazies like Omar Mateen and Dylan Roof.
Popular uprisings do succeed now and then, as when the government of East Germany collapsed in 1989. Hey, the good people on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall suffered only 44 years (*) of communist oppression before that. More often, uprisings are either crushed (as in Hungary 1956) or seem successful for a while but descend into chaotic violence that spawns yet another tyranny (French Revolution; Russian Revolution; Arab Spring; …).
So I will trudge to the polls, hold my nose, and vote for Hillary. I will also remember a more familiar quotation from TR, excerpted below with a few letters added in italics:
While Hillary is deeply flawed, she is not one of those “timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat” detested by TR. For that matter, neither is Trump. He has other issues. While TR was far from being a pacifist, he could see the downside of putting an impulsive jerk in a position to start a war. That jerk also thinks appeasing the NRA is more important than making it harder for crazies like Adam Lanza to murder school children and their teachers.
