JFK files

So the JFK files will finally be completely visible. Some years ago I wondered why several different administrations kept part of the proceedings secret, even after everybody was dead and no careers could be ruined. I came up with a possible reason.

Given who Oswald was, and what kind of life he'd led, the obvious suspicion is that the Soviets had directed him. Maybe they did, maybe not -- it would be hard to prove, especially this late. But what should have been the US reaction if they had? Would we risk nuclear war for revenge (and some kind of retaliation would certainly have been on everybody's mind)?

The discussions of how much injury we'd be willing to take without pulling the trigger would be useful information for modern enemies, and I can see multiple presidents saying "Let's not talk about this," and keeping any historical conversations under wraps.

I wonder if I was right.

Feiffer

I remember mostly liking Jules Feiffer when I was adolescent. His "Marriage Manual" seemed, to an "outsider," cynical enough to be realistic.

But older me found him "OK in small doses," and his thoughts on marriage missing the points. His dancer might dance for hope, but in the end there never seemed to be any.

I read a collection of his work that covered several years, and some years were downright bitter. Every now and then he hit the nail exactly, and for those times I'll be grateful.

Do as we say, not as we do

Coneflower seed heads feed some birds during the winter, so we cut and stacked them. Cut stalks of various of the annuals in the garden are used as bee nests over the winter too, so they're lying loose also. We have some firewood stacked by the house, and several bushes of one type or another, on a pretty small lot. Though we no longer have any trees, neighbors do.

If we lived in the Altadena area, our house would have gone up in no time.

True, tornadoes are a more frequent threat around here...

Not quite the desired result

A CPAP helps you breathe by providing "continuous positive airway pressure" to help keep the airway open. Without it, if you're lying on your back (and sometimes if you aren't), your tongue and soft palate may relax too much and block breathing, resulting in sleep apnea.

With it, you can feel the air forcing in when you breathe, and exhaling. Well, you can feel those anytime, but it's more pronounced with the machine. Being aware of your breathing is one technique for Buddhist mindfulness meditation: which isn't quite what the doctor ordered. Un-mindfulness so you can get to sleep is the point.

I guess one just has to get used to it, at a time of day when it doesn't matter if you sleep or not: no pressure. So to speak. (That seems to be helping.)

BTW, the valve at the mask may deteriorate over time. Even if it seems to move when you blow on it, at night it might just offer to stay mostly closed on you, making you feel like your machine is trying to blow you up like a balloon. Replacement isn't pricy, and helps a lot.

Interplanetary infection

Some years ago I wondered if Mars could be infected from Earth and then revisited the question, with the likely answer being "no." Another group decided to investigate life traveling to Venus instead.

That's "downhill," so you don't need as much energy to launch the bits of bacteria-laden rock, so the odds of it being sterilized in the blast are minutely smaller. OTOH, Venus isn't exactly the easiest place to live. Maybe some extremophile bacteria could survive, if there was something to "eat." Some bacteria survive here by oxiding using sulfur, but something had to produce the available sulfur in the first place. (geological chemistry? I don't know the mechanism) A huge amount of what's around us is shaped by life: O2 in the atmosphere, for instance.

Venusian microscopic life doesn't seem impossible--high up. Given what we know now. Maybe something will change the picture later...

Across the street

The weather will reach a seemingly tropical 44F today, and be mostly sunny. The workmen are wearing heavy jackets and gloves. The old roof is coming off, including some decrepit 4x8's, and new one is going on. 17-January. Tomorrow night it's supposed to hit -3F.

It's a ranch-style duplex, so they needn't climb high. I wonder if there's a discount for the off season.

UPDATE: They only did part of the roof, so I guess they were working on storm damage.

A few quotes

from the past day's reading:

"Genius ought'n to be eccentric!" he cried in some excitement. "Genius ought to be centric. It ought to be in the core of the cosmos, not on the revolving edges."

or this, about Augustine, and millions of the rest of us

an idleness which was fatal to his virtue

LA thoughts

The fires are far from the places we used to live, before we left in '63. The closest I've been since then was at meetings at UCLA, which may be threatened in the next few days. (I was offered a post there once, with a raise--but when I looked at cost-of-living it would have been a disastrous pay cut.)

I remember very little of the town. Most of what I know about it has come through pop culture, which is why Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" keeps coming to mind when I hear reports mentioning Santa Monica.

The contrast of that song is a bit jarring; "have some fun" vs evacuations and loss. But looking over the lyrics it seems as though part of the "fun" is the (lesser) contrast between the revelers and the busy or sleeping mundanes. I wonder if they'd have as much fun if the revels were a community dance, with everybody participating, instead of just a select few at night while everybody else sleeps.

That's a rabbit trail; coming back to the main track:

What can we do to make houses more resistent to fires? Metal roofs would help (it was something like a factor of 5 more expensive than asphalt shingles when we checked; it may be less now. Still it represented an investment of something like 1/3 the nominal value of the house.) Window frames that don't melt in the heat. Siding that doesn't allow embers to get stuck in cracks, and resists burning.

And the painful parts: trees away from the house (no shade), bushes away from the house (gardening and flowers), and so on.

I suppose if we want to build in flood plains we have to build for floods, and if we want to build in chaparral that burns regularly we need to build to resist burning.

Fixing that will take a while, though. In the meantime, they'll have to build more of the same, assuming they can get permits (never a foregone conclusion in California).

Walking back down the highway

after your car ran out, carrying a gallon of electricity...

Suppose you bring back a half a gallon of gasoline: enough to take you 10 miles, maybe? How big a battery would you have to carry to power an electric car to go 10 miles? (10 miles/400 miles range) * (1200 pounds) = 30 pounds of battery. Maybe a little less, as not requiring all the infrastructure of the car's battery. Say 20 pounds, or maybe 10kg for the non-Imperialists out there. Maybe push the weight back up a bit for the charging interface.

Not impossible, especially if the makers designed it as a backpack, but not fun.

Lure of magic

Andy Crouch writes about modern magic, and the side effect of instant gratification on development. Some things demand time and discipline to develop.

Tangentially, some fantasy pays at least lip service to the notion that magic takes lots of preparation effort, and that once you've shot your bolt you have to figure something else out if it didn't work. A story about a magician spending hours prepping and practicing would be pretty boring, though. (Did it trace to Jack Vance?)

And while these stages of life are singular and essential, magic is equally disastrous at other formative moments. A friend of mine found himself seated on an airplane departing Los Angeles next to a couple en route to their honeymoon in Hawaii. He observed with growing horror as the newly-married young woman opened up TikTok on her phone, began scrolling and swiping through videos, and did not stop, even for a bathroom break let alone a word to her husband, until the plane landed five hours later. One can only wonder how the rest of the honeymoon unfolded. Even and especially when we face the defining seasons of our lives, the temptation to use magic to evade their demands as well as their gifts can be—as every one of us knows one way or another—overwhelming.

UPDATE:

Grim has a couple of essays about magic and alchemy (the essay I linked uses the word "magic", which isn't quite right), and about magic and chivalry and virtue.

Waiting

We had a sermon on waiting the other week. Simeon got to see Jesus, but only as a baby. The rest everybody had to wait for. We still have to wait for the completion of the salvation. Joshua had to wait -- several times, not just at Jericho. Often the waiting is for things we can't do ourselves, though sometimes it seems that maybe we could expedite matters a trifle, if only ...

Just keep going, just keep praying, just keep doing the apparently ordinary stuff in front of you, just keep hoping ... and waiting. Patience isn't one of my front line virtues, which makes perseverance a little weak too -- and God seems to value perseverance.

Since so many of the things we hope for aren't things we can assist with very much (e.g. A isn't open to listening to advice from you), maybe the waiting is God's way of giving us a role that we can handle. "Hold until relieved," perhaps. We can't see what good our waiting does; maybe we will one day.

The same item

Two different children independently decided to order a replacement for something their grandmother had had when they were young--a modern version of a German face mug.

Can you spot the differences? No, one is not tilted; that's just to keep the illumination roughly comparable.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Short answer: sometimes yes.

About 48 years ago an Illinoisian wrote a science fiction novel and spent a fair bit of effort publicizing it; even wangling an interview on a local radio station. In order to keep his science fiction un-prejudiced by current trends, he hadn't read any science fiction--mostly romances. I did my part for the university sci-fi club and spent the money and read the book, and wrote a review. I kept the copy around for a few years until I decided that emptiness was nicer to have. (A beta-reader told him the book was too long, so he cut out the only chapter with action/exposition. No, I'm not making this up; he said in the interview that's why he cut out a chapter. A reader could figure out where and what was missing.)

I don't know what brought that to mind yesterday, but I checked to see if the book had made any more of a splash. According to google (which is less than stellar for pre-internet things), the answer is no; it was listed among new books, but nobody's review (not even mine) was findable. No loss.

However, his self-publishing firm had put out two more books in 2017, with the same pen name. I read the blurb for one of them, and it is odd enough that I wonder if he read any more sci-fi in the intervening forty years. I'm guessing not.

The press published a bunch of books by somebody else, with titles like "Atomic Spirituality" and "Alien Threat from the Moon." I'll pass on all four of the writers.

Once burnt, twice shy.

Influential people

The local paper had an article today of the "influential people" who died this past year. It was pre-Carter's death, so I added that one in for my count. Of 69 entries, about 3/4 were entertainers (including sports figures here).

I wonder who wrote the headline. "Famous" might fit better than "influential"-- at least I hope it does.

Traditional sightings

At solstice the news had photos of the usual suspects circling the standing stones at Stonehenge and clambering around barrows--dreaming of a wight Christmas?