tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62926104079271448442024-02-06T21:02:27.768-08:00Doggy-Dog WorldI've always collected errors in diction, things people mis-hear, like "windshield factor" and "the next store neighbors." Years ago, one of my students wrote an essay in which she described the world as being harsh and cruel, "a doggy-dog world." I've since come to think she may have been more astute and accurate than those who describe it in the usual way. <a href="http://www.jerrytravis2.blogspot.com">My Stories
</a> - <a href="http://www.jtmobridge.blogspot.com">Mobridge Memories
</a> - Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.comBlogger1410125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-30226586735898596912019-08-06T15:09:00.000-07:002019-08-06T15:09:42.144-07:00Racism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background: white; color: #666666; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here we are again, with more and more mass
shootings happening almost daily. This past weekend there were another 22 or
more killed in El Paso, and 9 dead in Dayton, with apparently no motive but
domestic terror sparked by white racism. The majority of Americans believe this
is the result of President Trump’s fanning the flames of bigotry by using such negative
labels for non-white citizens and those from our south who want to become
citizens.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white; color: #666666; line-height: 106%;">We now have more divisiveness over skin color
and racial and ethnic identity than ever before. Under the Trump administration
we are seeing more and more groups actively promoting racial separation, whites
separate from blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, or any combination
thereof. If we’re lucky we can still become that melting pot envisioned so many
years ago, the national race which is a combination of all those races who have
immigrated to this country, all of us some shade of brown, all of us Americans.
</span><span style="line-height: 106%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As of May 19, 2012, in this
country there were more babies (under 1 year) of color than white. The media
called it “The Browning of America,” a label that says a lot about the future
of our country. Demographers also predict that by 2042 we will have no ethnic
majority, just a majority of brown-skinned folks of mixed ethnic backgrounds. I
remember reading something by Phillip Wylie half a century ago in which he said
he looked forward to the day when we’re all a little tan. Well, fifty years
later he’d be happy to see his wish coming true. Since our very beginning, the
U. S. has been known as the melting pot, meaning we were a nation of immigrants
amalgamated into one new nationality. Well, now we’re seeing us as a melting
pot of ethnic diversity, a mixture of races too diverse to be labeled. Amazing
that as recently as 1967 there were still anti-miscegenation laws in most of
our Southern states. What idiocy. One of my nieces, as pale as virgin snow,
married a man as black as Columbian coffee. And they have a lovely daughter who
is latte tan. She will grow up in a society that no longer looks askance at
children of mixed ethnicity, may even marry someone also mixed and have
children even more mixed. And who will care? I hope no one. Tiger Woods has
described himself as Cablinasian, a mixture of Caucasian, Black, Indian, and
Asian. But we don’t need to invent new labels to describe ourselves. I look forward
to the time when we no longer need labels for anything—not our religious
preference, not our political persuasion, not our ethnic makeup. Especially not
our ethnic makeup.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white; color: #666666; line-height: 106%;">I’m confused by all the genetic labels
currently being used in this country and why we still use them. Is anyone with
even a trace of Negroid blood considered to be black? I know it once was so,
but is it still? Is Meghan Markle black? Does Prince Harry care if she is or
isn't? I don’t think so. Is NBC newscaster Lester Holt black? More like a
nicely tanned fellow with a very receding hairline. Black is a color and is
often used as a synonym for Negroid, but not all blacks are black. Most are
those with varying degrees of skin pigmentation, all the way from obsidian
black to opal pale. Skin color shouldn’t be what we use as labels for the
world’s ethnic groups. Why even have such labels? And if we really do need a
label for Blacks, then “coloreds” is much more accurate. But we also try to
distinguish other races by skin colors, like red, yellow, and brown. Native
Americans are redskins, Asians are yellow skins, and Hispanics, Indians, and a
host of others are brown skins. What nonsense. America in the early 20th
century was thought of as a melting pot or salad bowl because we were made up
of so many different “colors” or ingredients. The melting pot metaphor suggests
that we think of all these people who either emigrated here or were already
here as different colored metals that are put in a pot, melted down, and
stirred together, resulting in a new metal, stronger and more cohesive, a new
breed of mankind that exemplifies freedom and unity, an American. Why do we
insist on all these labels, especially the ones based on country of origin, as
in German American, Irish American, Italian American, Mexican American, or
Korean American? What nonsense. We’re all American Americans. And if we stick
with nations of origin, would we have to label those from Panama Panamanian
Americans, or from Argentina Argentinian Americans. Or should we just call
everyone from south of our border South American Americans. What nonsense.
“African American” as a label for blacks doesn’t make much sense since there
are all kinds of different colors in Africa. Are Egyptian Arabs black or are
they a hue of a different color? Or maybe we should use various religions for
our labels, like Catholic Americans, Jewish Americans, and Muslim Americans.
Or, best of all, entirely do away with labels.</span><span style="line-height: 106%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-42587434638541817112019-06-23T14:20:00.002-07:002019-06-23T14:20:57.630-07:00US Open, Pebble Beach<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The USGA has received many black eyes
in the past over their choices of venues for this hallowed event and their
setups regarding fairway widths and rough depths. Finally, though, they got it
right last weekend at Pebble Beach. This time the setup was US Open tough
without having to resort to any tricks. Pebble Beach has enough tricks of its
own. Normally, there'd be varying wind speeds of ten to as much as forty mph
blowing in off the Pacific to give players new gray hairs and enough sunshine
to make the greens mean-ass hard. But neither happened . . . which should have
turned Pebble Beach into a pussy cat . . . which it wasn't. The USGA has always
been accused of trying too hard to protect the sanctity of par golf. Its goal,
apparently, was to have winners shoot around even par. This year, at a very
benign Pebble Beach, Gary Woodland won at minus 13 with another thirty who were
also under par, but the USGA didn’t need to feel that they’d been too easy in their
setup. They weren’t. The under-par players all played quality golf on a course
that still managed to bare its teeth despite the soft greens and calm breezes. The
rough was so rough that we saw Ian Poulter actually stub a chip from just above
a greenside bunker, sort of a reverse whiff. And his next shot went only a
foot. Rory tried to smash one out of some waist-high fescue that nearly ripped
the club from his hands, the ball going about ten feet. But it seemed like for
every example of ugly results there were an equal number of magic chip-ins and
hole-outs from the fairways. This Open was one of the best, most exciting ever
contested on one of the best, most picturesque golf courses in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I and many other golf fans were rooting
for Tiger to produce another of his magic moments, but it never happened. Well,
it didn’t happen for the first sixty holes, with a Tiger who hit more bad shots
and bad putts than any of us could believe. It was like he was totally
indifferent to what he was doing, nothing very bad but also nothing very good,
pretty pedestrian, in fact. But on Sunday, he birdied six of the last twelve
holes to shoot a respectable 69 for a T-21, and show me and the other Tiger
fans that the old Tiger could still growl. It gave us something to hope for in July’s
Open in Northern Ireland.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Other observations?</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">That really heart-warming clip of Woodland
and Amy, the young lady with Down syndrome who, in January, played the
sixteenth hole in a practice round in the Waste Management with Gary Woodland.
She hit the tee shot, the chip onto the green, and when Gary asked her if she
wanted to putt it, she said, “I got this, Gary,” and knocked it in. What a
really neat story. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">More about the pins, leave it in or
take it out when putting. Fewer and fewer are opting to leave it in, with
Bryson DeChambeau and Adam Scott the main ones to leave it in. I also noticed
that the USGA doesn’t seem to have a policy about what is or isn’t a standard
pin. In some tournaments, the old lightweight pins are used; in others, the new
fat heavyweights are used. In this Open, the fat one was there, but in last
weekend’s Canadian Open, the skinny one was used. If you can’t tell the
difference on tv coverage, the heavy one is black and white with the bottom
foot or so a skinny black; the light pin is usually all white, the same
diameter from top to bottom. I’ve said before, the light pin can be more help
than hindrance, but the heavy pin the opposite.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Am I the only viewer who’s offended by
all the spitting that so many of the young players do? It’s not the little shot
you see coming from baseball players; that’s what I call spitting and I can
sort of live with it. The young golfing gunslingers like Dustin Johnson, Justin
Thomas, Kevin Kisner, Tiger Woods, and even Gary Woodland will often and too
often on camera let a long drippy gob go, and I just shudder at the sight. If
they all want to be gunslingers from the past, they should all carry a spittoon
in their golf bags. In the ancient days of baseball, many players kept a big
wad of snuff in the cheek and would periodically emit a nasty, brown string of
tobacco juice and spittle, but back in those ancient days, we didn’t have tv
cameras with extreme facial close-ups, so we were spared most of these yucky
sights. I still like to think of golf as one of the last of the gentlemen’s
sports. Not so much now with all the slobbering going on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The prodigious distances these young
bucks now hit it also amazes me. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLsf_YLotxZ36rsQD48rrdENOM4LQplrIDGBhO7AG9w2MJtctUAf4Q2-eyXBCLwym2-bab8ldR-nCTOR9OB2EySqOGaJU26VrFZwg63k158bw8D9Rzvtl_JLXmgaDTpSDd_iDb63ssM3g/s1600/golf+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="421" data-original-width="366" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLsf_YLotxZ36rsQD48rrdENOM4LQplrIDGBhO7AG9w2MJtctUAf4Q2-eyXBCLwym2-bab8ldR-nCTOR9OB2EySqOGaJU26VrFZwg63k158bw8D9Rzvtl_JLXmgaDTpSDd_iDb63ssM3g/s320/golf+4.jpg" width="278" /></a></div>
We can account for it by better equipment and
better physical condition. Almost the top half of touring pros now average over
300 yards off the tee. The old unreachable 600-yard par-5s are now being
reached with drive and in some cases short irons. What!? A 240-yard par-3 now
requires as little as a 7- or 8-iron. What!? Golf, like every other sport keeps
evolving. Someday, just like Annika Sorenstam has often said, somebody will
birdie all eighteen holes for a 54. What!?<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-32144456561328666422019-06-13T14:23:00.001-07:002019-06-13T14:23:50.830-07:00I Am Mother<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> The faster we move exponentially in
technological advances, the more likely it will be that artificial intelligence
becomes the main blessing or potential ruination of life as we know it. Even
before Leonardo da Vinci created his early mechanical knight in 1495, man has
considered the potential for building machines to take on the drudgery of
mankind’s tasks—robots of one kind or another. But we’ve also considered the
possibility that our creations might try to eliminate their creators.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> And here we are now with drones that
can drop our bombs on our enemies or deliver packages from Amazon or Walmart,
with cars and planes that can drive themselves more safely than we can drive
ourselves, with smartphones that can tell us practically anything we want to
know, direct us to destinations, give us instructions on how to build or
operate almost anything. We also have films and novels that have explored what
AI can do for us or to us—most recently <i>Blade
Runner 2049, Ex Machina, Her, </i>and the <i>Star
Trek </i>series with their C-3PO and R2-D2. Best known of the literary
examinations of robotics are Philip K. Dick’s <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i> and Isaac Asimov’s <i>I, Robot, </i>written almost eighty years
ago. It was Asimov who introduced the threat of malevolent robots by formulating
what he called the Three Laws of Robotics (to be built in to the artificial
psyches): 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a
human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human
beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot
must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict
with the First or Second Law.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRcB4fXUV3tjYzN4bPa3Zx3nfdCO91xRNEwt9DMNc0vGsd2-56m6mJGTsSyOwPdeh-jaXKPcvYSGVL9Nh_GRJbfZiXEga7RFBihVQQNJDLpdrMZ02UZ03Os_lD1RJvPuoffdJVorlT4O8/s1600/Mother.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="182" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRcB4fXUV3tjYzN4bPa3Zx3nfdCO91xRNEwt9DMNc0vGsd2-56m6mJGTsSyOwPdeh-jaXKPcvYSGVL9Nh_GRJbfZiXEga7RFBihVQQNJDLpdrMZ02UZ03Os_lD1RJvPuoffdJVorlT4O8/s320/Mother.jpg" width="217" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Netflix has a new movie, <i>I Am Mother,</i> that asks most of the old
questions about robots and their possible malevolence or benevolence. What I
have to say about this movie is loaded with spoilers, so if you ever want to
see it, you should stop reading here. But if you’ve already seen it or don’t
want to see it, you might find what it was trying to say entertaining or even
enlightening. Or not. Some of you might have already decided the film simply
leaves too any questions either unanswered or too poorly explained or is just
too hokey simply for the sake of dramatic effect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Short plot summary: Sometime in the
future, mankind has poisoned the atmosphere so that all of mankind has been
killed. The opening scene shows a sign that 63,000 embryos are being kept in a
safe bunker presided over by an android called Mother, who will allow embryos to
be born in artificial wombs when she (it?) decides it is safe to do so. The
first embryo she brings to life is a female named Daughter (Clara
Rugaard-Larsen). Mother raises her for fourteen years, teaching her about man
and the earth and giving her mental skills involving philosophy and ethics,
with periodic tests to see how she is advancing. Daughter is brilliant and
lovely and seems to be happy and content in her enclosed environment, and
appears to love Mother just as a human mother. But she also wants to know when
she can go outside the bunker to see what the planet is like. Mother warns her
that it is still too toxic to leave their safe haven. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Shortly after that, Daughter hears a
voice calling to her from outside the airlock. It is a seriously wounded human
woman (Hillary Swank) who wants medical treatment. She opens the air lock and
lets the woman in, angering Mother with her act of defiance. Mother, however, relents
and decides to treat the woman’s wound. The woman then convinces Daughter that
it is now safe for her to leave the bunker and join her and her band of other
survivors. They leave, walking through a devastated landscape, taking shelter
in a tall field of corn when flying drones try to capture them. The woman
explains that the atmosphere has been restored by these huge, cultivated corn
fields, planted all over the planet by the androids. That raises the first
question about the robots and their motives regarding the human race: Are they
trying to save or eliminate mankind? The corn fields suggest their benevolence.
But some of Mother’s actions seem to be malevolent, her anger when the survivor
refuses to tell her where she and the other survivors are located, even going
so far as pressing her finger into the woman’s wound to force her to say where
they are. Later, after Daughter has been returned to the bunker, Mother goes to
the Survivor’s home on the beach, where the woman is living alone in a rusting
shipping container. When Mother enters and slams the door behind her, the
audience is almost certain that nothing good is going to happen for the
survivor’s survival. No benevolence there in those androidal eyes. Meanwhile,
back in the bunker, Daughter has been given the responsibility of becoming the
mother of the remaining 62,999 embryos, who will then become the next race of
man, a much better man than the one that nearly destroyed themselves and the
planet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Too many questions go unanswered, though, All right, the woman had been shot in the side and needed to have the bullet removed. Who shot her and why? If Daughter ever failed one of the tests she must take periodically, what happens to her? Does Mother destroy her and start over with a different embryo? If Mother is actually the "leader" of the androids and can appear anywhere inside or outside the bunker, why does she need to pretend that the world is still too toxic for Daughter? Why does Mother need to leave Daughter alone to care for and raise the other embryos?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> I’d give this movie two and a half
stars out of five for its entertainment and dramatic storyline, and four stars
for the philosophical precepts it raises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-6354187186838990012019-06-05T12:07:00.000-07:002019-06-10T12:46:01.453-07:00Dis- Words & Mayor Pete<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Another of those mid-night moments of
dream/awake musing, this time on the word "dismember." All of a
sudden, around 4:00 am, it popped in my head like an unwelcome flashbulb.
Actually, I was thinking about forgetting something and I used the slangy
"disremember." Naturally, that led me to "dismember" and
the apparent connection between the two meanings of "-member." In
"dismember" it suggests a human or animal limb, and in
"disremember" it seems to be about cutting off a thought or memory.
The prefix -dis means "without," as in "without a limb" and
"without a thought or memory." That thought then led me to other -dis
prefix words, like disbelieve, disable, disguise, discover, disillusion,
disaster (interesting image there?), discomfort (and discomfit—another interesting
pair), and disorder, all of which have sensible meanings when you take them to
mean "without whatever is the meaning of the root word." But what about
these? Distinct (?), distort (?), disdain (?), dishabille, and, especially,
discombobulate? I wasn't sure of any of the root meanings so I gave it up until
morning when I could do some etymological digging. I seem to spend too
many sleep hours chasing words around in my head. Only after I'd already posted this did I remember that -dis word that actually became its own new word, the verb "to diss." It has become the most toxic word anyone of color can accuse someone else of doing to them, to disrespect them. How could I have disremembered that word?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Last night we watched Chris Matthews on </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Hardball</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14pt;"> in a Q & A with the young mayor of South Bend, Pete
Buttigieg. They were in California with Mayor Pete fielding questions from the
audience and Mathews, and I now know why the young man is so popular with
voters, especially young voters. He is remarkably well-spoken--clear and quick
and despite his youth (37), seems to be politically astute. In that way he’s
much like AOC on the distaff side. Although we’ve moved ahead on issues of
sexuality in the past year or two, we still have a long way to go, and his
being openly gay right now would make it impossible for him to win the
Democratic nomination and run for president. Maybe in 2028, but not now. I can,
though, certainly see him as being successful as a vice presidential candidate
on a Biden/Buttigieg ticket. He’d have my vote and that of most of the LGBTQ
community as well as many women of all colors. Whatever it takes to get Trump
out of here would be wonderful. So, let’s go, Joe and Pete. Make us all proud.</span></div>
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Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-63985616324486123852019-06-01T13:51:00.000-07:002019-06-02T07:09:34.763-07:00Abortion Debate<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">We’re
in the middle of a battle between the anti-abortionists and the Roe vs Wade
supporters, with more and more states passing laws prohibiting almost all
abortions. I’m pretty much on the Roe/Wade side and am offended by the other
side referring to their view as pro-life, implying that the other view is anti-life,
a group made up of baby killers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">I’ve
been gathering notes on thoughts as they pop in my head but I haven’t yet made
sense of them. So I’m offering them up to see if they come together in some
sort of coherence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Miscarriage
usually happens within the first twenty weeks of pregnancy and is sometimes
referred to as “spontaneous abortion.” If Missouri’s new law says that anyone
performing an abortion is guilty of murder, does that suggest that any woman
who has a miscarriage is guilty of murder because her body has chosen to abort?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Is motion
one of the determinants of lividity, and if so, then is a moving sperm,
tadpoling its way up the uterine canal a life form? We even have a means of
birth control called “spermicide,” which suggests that we actually do “kill”
sperm with it. Is an egg swimming down to meet the sperm also a life form? Is a
miscarriage Nature’s way of saying a fetus should not be born? What about a
fetus that can be medically determined to be defective, that if allowed to be
born would be a life-long burden medically, emotionally, and financially for
the parents? What kinds of defect might be considered as justifying abortion?
Deaf and dumb? Pre-natal genetic disorder that would cause death after only one
or two years? Mental retardation? Spinal defect that would cause life-long quadriplegia?
Defective heart valve? Down syndrome? Also, who would decide—the courts, the
parents, or the woman?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Why do
the courts and theologians all say that life is determined by the presence of a
heart beat? The heart is only one of our organs, so why zero in on only the
heart? The debate about when life begins—at moment of conception or at time of
birth? Now, that’s a real philosophical conundrum. If one believes it’s at the
moment of conception, then any douching by the woman after a successful
(conceptive) sexual encounter would be considered murder. Isn’t an abortion
simply a somewhat later method of douching? How much later would be too long—4weeks,
8 weeks, 16 weeks, beyond 16 weeks?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">If our present
methods of birth control aren’t working in some parts of the world, what about
aborting the millions of children born into extreme poverty in communities
without knowledge of or means for birth control, in places where children
starve to death in childhood?</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">If the earth
is approaching its maximum capacity for sustaining mankind, why do various
religions continue to say that we should “go forth and multiply?” There may
have once been an ancient reason for multiplying to preserve the species, but
that is no longer necessary. Shouldn’t we be striving to achieve zero
population growth? If Nature considered all life to be sacred, then why does
Nature have nearly all species produce more eggs or babies than can survive? If
every baby sea turtle made it from sandy nest to the ocean, wouldn’t the seas soon
be filled to the brim with sea turtles? Or the earth with rabbits, or quail, . . . or
people?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-77346579956522508412019-05-30T13:08:00.000-07:002019-05-30T13:08:08.340-07:00Memories<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Memory
and the loss thereof may be the most tragic of all fates. Memories, after all,
are the summary of our being. I realize that not all of our memories are accurate
or in some cases may even be entirely manufactured unconsciously. They are what
gives us shape, individuality. Maybe that shape or individuality is more
flattering that true, but that’s how we see ourselves and believe us to be. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Way We Were, </i>Streisand sang that
they were “misty water-colored memories of the way we were,” often made falsely
softer or more pleasant when we thought of them. In the very old days, when we
had only friends or relatives to help us find something our memories had lost,
if those friends and relatives had all died ahead of us, we were stuck with
only those facts we could remember. Your mind says, “Oh, who was that guy I
used to love in the romantic movies back when I was young? What was his name?
Oh, I can see his face but I can’t come up with a name.” We might then rely on
a friend or relative to fish it out for us. No friend or relative? Then no
fishing it out. “I used to know all the words to the popular songs when I was
growing up. Now I can think of only a few of the titles, but almost none of the
lyrics.” No friend or relative to sing something for us? Then the song no
longer exists. More and more memories get flushed down Time’s commode. But that
was then. Now we have search engines to find lost memories for us. Good old
Google and its buddies. Just punch in one or two key words and bang, your new
AI friend or relative will take you right to it. You’re not sure when a WWII
battle took place? Just do a search and bang, there it is. There may even be in
some distant future the technology to implant a tiny computer into our brains
that will become our own search engine, storing for each of us most of the
world’s knowledge, or at least giving us immediate access to it. It may also
store in one of those clouds above all our experiences and memories. I’m not
sure if such a thing would be good or bad. Lots of frightening and exciting possibilities
there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">But
back to memory today. I forget if I ever shared this poem with anyone. My good
friend Anne Smith sent it to me a few years ago and I just discovered it again,
momentarily lost among the million documents I’ve saved on my computer. It’s
too good and too relevant to someone my age not to share it with others who may
have been touched by a friend’s or relative’s dementia or Alzheimer’s. Billy
Collins was appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003,
and, according to one of many Google searches, is the modern equivalent of
Robert Frost. Since I’m an ardent Frost fan, I think I may have to find more of
Billy Collins’ poetry. But then, I may forget what it was I was looking for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">“Forgetfulness,”
by Billy Collins<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">The name
of the author is the first to go<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">followed
obediently by the title, the plot<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">the
heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">which
suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">as if,
one by one, the memories you used to harbor<br />
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain<br />
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.<br />
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye<br />
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,<br />
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,<br />
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,<br />
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.<br />
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember<br />
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,<br />
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.<br />
It has floated away down a dark mythological river<br />
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,<br />
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those<br />
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.<br />
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night<br />
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.<br />
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted<br />
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;">Here’s one about a daughter’s experience
with her father’s dementia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; padding: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Falling Lessons: Erasure One” by Beth Copeland<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My father steps into a field of lost<br />
sensation, sunflowers, a yellow star.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He lives in the garden without maps.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My father dreams through<br />
what he feels and believes is real.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He loses his memory, his flesh,<br />
his child with seawater eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He forgets the fog.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We forgot to speak and snow was falling<br />
on blue mountains, a vein<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of childhood, blood, and sorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I walk into this memory when my thoughts<br />
start falling into a funnel, when I’m failing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to love, falling into a freeze-frame<br />
where time fades like the flurry<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of furious wings. I fall.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Aren’t
those two nicely but sadly done? Reader, you may be too young to understand them,
but somewhere down the road of your life, you may.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-70576529810623972352019-05-29T14:11:00.001-07:002019-05-29T14:11:36.548-07:00Words & Catch-22<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;"> I stumbled onto another example of the
difficulty of some English vocabulary, people mis-hearing or misunderstanding
words very close in sound but quite different in meaning, the pair “squash” and
“quash,” for example. I heard this latest example on a recent Stephen Colbert
show when he and a guest were discussing one of one of Donald Trump’s fits of pique
over some Democrat’s insult. Colbert said that Trump was in “high dungeon” over
what was said of him. Stephen’s ear had apparently always heard “high dungeon”
when it should have been “high dudgeon.” “Dudgeon” refers to the handle of a
knife or dagger, suggesting an anger leading to a knife thrust. Granted, in
Trump’s case, “high dungeon” may be more appropriate. We should throw him in
followed by the key.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;"># # # # #
#<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;"> I’m happy to see that Joseph Heller’s <i>Catch-22</i> is being remade on Hulu, a
6-episode retelling of Yossarian’s fight with the authorities who are trying to
kill him. This was always one of my favorite novels, comically dark in its
anti-war sentiments, showing how man and man’s institutions can give us
conflicting explanations for absurd decisions. In Yossarian’s case, when he
tried to get a medical leave to be sent home from flying bombing runs in WWII,
claiming that he was insane, the psychologist said that only a sane person
would want to be sent home; therefore, he must be sane and couldn’t be sent
home. Classic catch-22.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">And
a week ago I encountered my own catch-22 when I tried to renew my auto
registration. Although it may not entirely qualify as a catch-22, it was
certainly like a foolish runaround by the folks at the DMV and the Kia
dealership.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;">This year I needed an emissions test
done before I could get my annual auto registration. So, off I went to the
testing place where I was told that my car couldn’t be tested until the computer
system was reset. The instructions about doing this reset involved either
simply driving the car in a normal fashion or by having a mechanic reset it.
Not knowing exactly what was meant by “normal fashion,” I called my Kia dealer
to have them do it. They told me they couldn’t do it, that the car would reset
itself by just driving it. I asked them how long I would have to drive it. They
said 5 to 10 days; I said that was way too long. So I called the Kia Company help
line to see if they could tell me some other way to get it reset. I was told I
should contact my dealership. See, a run-run-runaround. The Kia dealer explained
again that they couldn’t do it, that I just had to drive it for three or four
days, maybe take a trip on a highway. So my wife and I took a scenic hour’s
drive, came back to the emissions testing place, and the car passed. It had,
indeed, reset itself. Man, talk about AI having us by the short hairs. And the
future seems to indicate that computers, large and tiny, will become more and
more in control of our lives.</span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-32686933172363626442019-05-28T14:06:00.000-07:002019-05-28T14:06:19.936-07:00Dystopia Revisited<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;"> Here’s a post I wrote a few years ago,
but in the present state of affairs in our country and the rest of the world,
it seems even more relevant today. It’s a look at fictional dystopias, the
best-known of which was Orwell’s <i>1984</i>.
Man, we’ve come a long way since then, both fictionally as well as
realistically. Talk about Big Brother watching. Today, he’s looking right up
our noses and any other orifices he can find. Here it is. Hope you find it
enlightening as well as somewhat frightening.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The word “dystopia” seems to be popping up all over the place
lately. Not that it’s a new word or concept. It’s been around as long as it’s
antonym “utopia,” which dates back to Sir Thomas More’s <i>Utopi</i>a in
the early sixteenth century. But a recent flood of novels and films like to
describe themselves as dystopian, that is, set in some future reality or
allegorical time and place which is bad, in which the human race and/or the
earth have undergone radical changes for the worse. I think part of the word’s popularity
has to do with the ubiquitous ads for pills to fix erectile dysfunction. You
know, keep a stiff upper lip and hold your head up high? But back to what could
be labeled as dystopian. Probably the best known and maybe the best examples
are George Orwell’s <i>198</i>4 and Aldous Huxley’s <i>Brave New
World</i>. But the list goes on and on as a string of writers warn us of
impending dangers to the future: nuclear war, a new ice age, Big Brother
governments, overpopulation, viruses that nearly wipe out humanity, a revolution
of robots or computers, alien invasion, environmental disasters such as global
warming or poisoning of the seas or the atmosphere (a sub-category called <i>ecotopian</i> fiction).
The list continues to grow as seen in the popularity of so many young adult
series of novels and films like <i>The Hunger Games</i> and <i>Divergen</i>t,
the success of so many television series like <i>Falling Skies, Person of
Interest, The Last Ship</i>, Stephen King’s <i>Under the Dome</i>,
and <i>Extant</i>, the new one with Halle Berry. And now another one
called <i>The Lotter</i>y (sort of leaning a little on Shirley Jackson’s
“The Lottery” in which once a year the lucky winner gets stoned to death). In
the tv <i>Lottery</i>, there’s a biological problem wherein women can no
longer reproduce, an idea much like the plot twist in <i>Children of Men</i> a
few years ago. Two other works that are sort of like “the Lottery” (the story,
not the tv series) in that they’re microcosmic dystopian tales, William
Golding’s <i>Lord of the Flies</i> (set on a South Pacific island)
and the recent film called <i>Snowpiercer</i>, set on a train.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here’s a short list of novels and films that exemplify the
various categories of dystopia: Karel Capek’s play <i>RUR</i>, Isaac
Asimov’s <i>I, Robot</i>, and the recent film <i>Her </i>(robots,
computers); H.G. Welles’ <i>War of the Worlds</i>, John Wyndham’s <i>The
Day of the Triffids</i>, Robert Heinlein’s <i>The Puppet Masters</i>,
tv’s <i>Falling Skies</i>, and the film <i>The Edge of Tomorrow</i> (alien
invasion); Nevil Shute’s O<i>n the Beach</i>, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s <i>A
Canticle for Leibowit</i>z, Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Road</i>, and the
films <i>Dr. Strangelove</i> and all in the <i>Mad Max</i> series
(nuclear war and post-apocalyptic devastation); Pierre Boulet’s <i>Planet
of the Apes</i>, John Christopher’s <i>No Blade of Grass</i> and <i>The
Long Winter</i>, the tv series <i>The Last Ship</i> (deadly viruses
and ecological errors); John Brunner’s <i>Stand on Zanzibar</i>, Harry
Harrison’s <i>Soylent Green</i>, and, in a crossover about cannibalism,
McCormack’s <i>The Road </i>(overpopulation and starvation); Orwell’s <i>1984</i>,
Huxley’s <i>Brave New World</i> and <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>,
Ray Bradbury’s <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>, and Stephen King’s (written as
Richard Bachman) <i>The Long Walk </i>(Totalitarianism).</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
list is only one grain of sand on the beach of all the other novels and short
stories and films about dystopia. It’s interesting that <i>The Hunger
Games</i> has a common thread with King’s <i>The Long Walk</i>: Both
have a plot element like the Roman Coliseum in which a contest is held to
entertain the masses and to eliminate contestants. Stephen King did his best to
exhaust his readers as we walked along with the hundred young men who had to
keep walking and walking until only one winner remained with the other
ninety-nine killed along the way. But then, Stephen King has always been
exhausting with his endless string of huge novels.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Now, what about
Utopian novels and films? It’s far easier to warn us of what could go wrong
than to paint a positive picture of the future. Of course, there’s More’s <i>Utopia</i>,
but what since then? The most positive novel about man’s future is Arthur C.
Clarke’s <i>Childhood’s End</i>, in which mankind evolves from childhood
to adulthood when we become united with a universal life force. In fact,
Clarke, maybe my favorite sci-fi writer, is usually positive in his examination
of technological advances. Both series on tv and film, <i>Star Trek</i> and <i>Star
Wars</i>, are essentially positive in their views of the future. The only other
positive looks I can think of are Heinlein’s <i>The Door into Summer</i>,
Baum’s <i>Oz</i> series, and Barry’s <i>Peter Pan</i>. But in
these last two, about eternal youth, there are still witches and dark woods,
Hooks and crocodiles. Then there’s that unusual depiction of the near future in
Spike Jonze’s <i>Her</i>. Is it a positive or a negative statement? Is it
a good relationship we might have with our computers and smart phones or is it
a creepy indictment of where we’re going with computer technology? If my
computer sounded like Scarlett Johansson, I could easily fall in love with her
(it?).</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Maybe
the next best-seller will be a dystopian examination of a world in which all
men, not just the numbers we now see, are afflicted with zero testosterone and
erectile dysfunction. All men are slouching around with both heads drooping and
all women looking in bemusement (and maybe a little amusement) as the human
race ends, not with a bang, but a limp whimper. And, thanks to T. S. Eliot
again, it might be called <i>The Hollow Men.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-85923629124453503222019-05-13T13:37:00.000-07:002019-05-13T13:37:36.795-07:00Love & Lust<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "Georgia",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> Joe Biden seems to be the early
front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for 2020, but Joe is burdened by
a few handicap pounds under his saddle—his age, the Anita Hill business, and
the charge of inappropriate touching and hugging that arose recently. Let me
repeat what I’ve already said in one of my earlier blogs about hugging. Hugging
is therapeutic. I don’t mean the kind where two people bend at the waist and
pat each other on the shoulder. I mean full body hugging. More therapeutic than
a kiss, especially the kiss on the cheek or forehead. Most men don’t feel
comfortable hugging another man, but I do. The hug is comforting, saying by the
act how sorry we are at the bad news the other has just received. Or how much
the hugger loves the huggee. The world would be a much better place if we all
gave each other a hug occasionally. I’m still trying to figure out what is or
isn’t appropriate about touching and when exactly can an attempt at having sex
with someone be all right and when is it not. The standard now seems to be when
one or the other who’s about to have sex says no. That’s reasonable. But it can
also lead to charges of assault or even rape. I was amused when I read what Dr.
Ruth Westheimer (the 90-year-old Dr. Ruth of <i>Ask Dr. Ruth </i>fame), in a <i>Time
Magazine </i>interview, said what she considered assault or consent and how
this standard has changed in recent years: I think some people took it to an
extreme. I believe that two consenting people, if they are in bed naked with
each other and about to have sex, no way then can say in the middle, “I have
changed my mind.” We also now seem to have a problem with expressing love. The
very concept of love gets mixed up in emotional connection and sexual activity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> For
example, with the current rage for tweets and instant messages and texts and
short notes on Facebook, there seems to be a trend away from the old niceties
in letter writing. No one seems to have time to go into any detail in their
correspondence, feeling obligated to use a minimum of characters and the
annoying text shorthand ("LOL" especially annoying). And the old
salutations and closures are now long gone. I was raised in a time when it was
automatic to open any letter with a “Dear,” and close it with a “Yours truly”
or a “Sincerely” or, when it was to a friend or relative, a “Love.” Now people
are too uncomfortable to use that closure, instead opting for nothing but a
name. People think I really mean I love them when I close with a “Love.” In
many cases I do, but I don’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable when I say it at
the end of a letter. It’s just the way I was taught in my youth. The “Dear” in
the salutation doesn’t really mean I hold the recipient “dear” in my heart. The
“Love” in the closing doesn’t mean I’m hot for the recipient. It’s just a nice
way to open and close a letter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> What
then is the new definition of love? It’s our strongest emotion, stronger than
fear or hunger, stronger than hate. But it’s a two-pronged beast made up of
emotional love and physical lust, and too often people misunderstand one for
the other. How many couples engage in sex and then assume that what they feel
is love, feel it enough to spend the rest of their lives together, only to
discover soon or late that lust wasn’t enough to bind them. Some live with it;
some go separate ways. Otherwise, how can we explain that two out of three
marriages end in divorce? That number would be even higher if we added in those
who wanted to split but couldn’t, either because of religion or moral
upbringing. Lust is the physical drive to satisfy our sexual appetites. It
feels so good at the time, but what follows may not be love or even affection.
The simplest solution is to find a fuck buddy: find a momentary satisfaction
followed by a mutual separation. In marriage, after the sex tapers off or even
disappears, we find two people who don’t really know each other or care for
each other. They split or they stay together, unhappy. For a lifetime. Then there
are extra-marital affairs, lust again. Real love doesn’t require sex. Sex may
be part of it, but not necessarily. Real love involves affection for the
person, with or without the sex. Real love can be between good friends,
parents, siblings, or offspring. Real love can exist with many others, not just
the one we live with. It’s important not to mistake lust for love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-77191141888111320812019-05-11T11:05:00.000-07:002019-05-11T11:05:08.283-07:00Ed McBain<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 23.8pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">Forgive me for going so often to the literary well of Ed McBain,
but he’s so good, and in these two cases, so funny that I have to share them
with you, maybe entice some of you to find his <i>87<sup>th</sup> Precinct</i> novels and see for yourself just how good
a writer he was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 23.8pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">This first example shows how Detective Steve Carella, his main
character, first made use of the words “I love you”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 23.8pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> I’m thirty-eight years old, and when I
was growing up in Chicago, I had none of the sexual advantages today’s young
people enjoy. I was seventeen when the sixties were just starting. I missed out
on the permissiveness that followed. A goodly amount of my adolescent energy
was spent feverishly scheming on how to plunder the treasures inside a laden
blouse, each button the equivalent of a Vietcong division guarding the road to
Hanoi, how to slide a wily and preferably unsuspected hand along the inside of
a thigh and onto those cherished nylon panties beneath a fortress skirt, how to
hide from the eyes of a shocked citizenry the erections that bulged the front
of my trousers whenever any girl of reasonably modest good looks (and, quite
frankly, even some very ugly ones) sashayed into view. I loved legs, I loved
breasts, I loved thighs, I loved asses, I loved girls with a passion that was
all-pervasive and overwhelming. And on that perilous road to hopeful
consummation, I discovered that the words, I love you, sometimes worked
wonders: “I love you, Harriet, I love you, Jean, I love you, Helene, I love
you, Melissa,” my fingers frantically working those maliciously obstinate
buttons and those diabolical brassiere clasps invented by a mad woman
scientist, “I love you, Joyce, I love you, Louise, I love you, Alice, I love
you, Roxanne!” Those were the days of garter belts and nylon stockings, soon to
give way to panty hose (invented by that same madwoman in her boiling
laboratory), and God, the delirium of actually touching those secret mysterious
undergarments, the windows of my father’s Olds fogged with the exhalations of
singular male intent and determined female resistance, “I love you, Angela, I
love you, Shirley, I love you Ming Toy, I love you, Anybody!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> I used the words as cheap currency in
a market without buyers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">I’m now reading for the third time <i>Widows</i>, published in
1991. Carella has just lost his father, killed in a nighttime robbery in his
bakery, and in his grief he thinks back to times when he was a young man in the
old neighborhood. He remembers Margie Gannon and his first encounter with
Margie’s freckled breasts. He and Margie were at her home, reading comic books
together, Margie’s parents away for the afternoon, an August rainstorm outside.
This passage expresses adolescent desire better than anything I’ve ever read,
and more masterfully written than most writers could do: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> “He could not remember now which comic
they were reading. Something to do with cops and archcriminals? He could not
remember. He remembered what she was wearing, though, still remembered that. A
short, faded blue-denim skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse buttoned up the
front. Freckled pretty Irish face, freckled slender arms, freckled everything,
he was soon to discover, but for now there was only the tingling thrill of her
silken hair touching his cheek. She reached up with her left hand, brushed the
hair back from her face. Their cheeks touched. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> It was as if an intensely sharp light
suddenly spilled onto the open comic book. Not daring to look at her, he
concentrated his vision on the brilliantly illuminated pages, alive now with
pulsating primary colors, red and blue and yellow outlined in the blackest
black, focused his white-hot gaze on the action-frozen figures and the shouted
oversized words, POW and BAM and BANG and YIIIIKES! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> He turned his face toward hers, she turned
her face toward his. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Their noses banged. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Their lips collided. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> And oh, dear God, he kissed sweet
Margie Gannon, and she moved into his suddenly encircling arms, the comic book
POW-ing and BANG-ing and sliding off her knees and falling to the floor with a
whispered YIIIIKES as lightning flashed and thunder boomed and rain
relentlessly drilled the sidewalk outside the street-level living room. They
kissed for he could not remember how long. He would never again in his life
kiss anyone this long or this hard, pressing her close, lips fusing, adolescent
yearnings merging, steamy young passions crazing the sky with blue-white
flashes, rending the sky with blue-black explosions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> His hand eventually discovered the
buttons on her blouse. He fumbled awkwardly with the buttons, this was his
goddamn <i>left</i> hand and he was <i>right</i>-handed, fumbling, fearful she
would change her mind, terrified she would stop him before he managed to get
even the <i>top</i> button open. They were both breathing audibly and hard now,
their hearts pounding as he tried desperately to get the blouse open. She
helped him with the top button, her own trembling hand guiding his, and then
the next button seemed to pop open magically or possibly miraculously, and the
one after that and oh my God her bra suddenly appeared in the wide V of the
open blouse, a white bra, she was wearing a white bra. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> Lightning flashed, thunder boomed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> He thought Thank you, God, and touched
the bra, the cones of the bra, white, her breasts filling the white bra, his
hand still trembling as he touched the bra awkwardly and tentatively, fumbling
and unsure because whereas he’d <i>dreamt</i> of doing this with girls in
general and Margie Gannon in particular, he never thought he would ever really <i>get</i>
to do it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> But here he was, actually <i>doing</i>
it—thank you God, oh Jesus <i>thank</i> you—or at least <i>trying</i> to do it,
wondering whether he should slide his hand down inside the bra, or lower the
straps off her shoulders, or get the damn thing <i>off</i> somehow, they
fastened in the back, didn’t they? Trying to dope all this out in what seemed
like an hour and a half but was only less than a minute until Margie moved out
of his arms, a faint flushed smile on her face, and reached behind her, arms
bent, he could see the freckles on the sloping tops of her pretty breasts
straining in the bra as she reached behind her to unclasp it, and all at once
her breasts came tumbling free, the rain kept tumbling down in torrents, and oh
dear God, her breasts were in his hands, he was touching Margie Gannon’s sweet
naked breasts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> He wondered what had ever become of
her.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> There. I rest my case. Find McBain.
Read McBain. Find your own favorite passages.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-17993370595066524062019-05-10T13:29:00.001-07:002019-05-10T13:29:40.613-07:00Old Age<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">More
and more often, my body keeps reminding me that I’m getting old. No, not
“getting” old; I AM old. Every morning, Arthur Eyetis wakes me up and then
screams at me as I prop my weight on an arm to hoist my aching body out of bed.
The shoulder aches, the lower back moans, my feet tingle. I take two ibuprofen
every morning, along with a handful of other meds, and they keep me relatively
pain-free throughout the day. I feel like I’m relatively healthy compared to a
lot of the oldies I see at Safeway or at Hole-in-One, the restaurant where we
breakfast quite often. I see them shuffling to the restroom, tiny steps, backs
hunched over their walkers, faces contorted with the effort. But lately I
notice a sway in my gait, and the gait is a lot slower than it used to be. Now
that I’m an octogenarian, I’m thinking more and more about that exit door just
down the hall, with the green ripper behind it waiting for me. A little girl in
one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series overheard her parents talking
about the Grim Reaper and thought they were describing some green monster who
ripped people apart, thus the Green Ripper. I don’t envision any ripper or
black-cloaked figure with a scythe. I know death is a kind of farewell, a closing
down. But what comes after?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">I
was a science fiction addict, so religious explanations of the universe never
made much sense to me. It was provable scientifically that our planet, Earth,
was a tiny insignificant little speck in the immensity of the universe, third
planet out from a tiny insignificant little star set way off in a corner of our
galaxy, the Milky Way, one of an infinite number of galaxies in the immensity
of time and space. That we could be the only intelligent life in that immensity
made no sense to me. I always believed that we created God in our own image,
not the other way around.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as for our souls and what
happens to us after we die, I always believed that we would live again in the
next closest to us genetically. If I had one son, his mother and I would be
combined psychically in that son. If we had more than one child, we would be
spread out among them. But there would be a continued consciousness evolving
and spreading out into the future. Walt Whitman said something like that in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leaves of Grass</i>, that our individual
spirit is one speck in an ocean of spirituality and that when we are born we
are removed from that pool and placed here in this physical space for the
length of our lives, to be returned to the spiritual pool when we die, to await
our next time in life. Reincarnation, yes, but not involving insects and lesser
animal species. But I take it one step further and believe the human connection
must be more direct, a genetic connection, not a random placement. All life
must be part of this creative force and all might be considered to be God or
Godhead. I’m a part of it, everything that has life and motion is part of it.
The physical substance of our universe isn’t part of it any more than the husks
of our bodies are a part of it. When we die, the shell that held our spark of
life returns to the substance from which it came. But the spark returns to the
body of the life force—Whitman’s pool of spirituality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">What
part does religion play in this? Most people would rather let religious leaders
do their thinking for them. They accept on faith what the church tells them,
the church’s explanations of life and death and good and evil and the nature of
the universe. Most of them are afraid of death and need the comfort of a social
organization to lessen their fears.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Where
do I stand on Christianity and the many churches that derive from it? I don’t go
to any church but I do believe in the humanity and teachings of Christ. I
believe that there is evil in the universe and that we have to combat it
through a universal or personal code of ethics, a morality we need to work at
and pass on to our children. Christ was a messiah, a messenger who brought that
code of ethics for us to follow. But he wasn’t a messenger from God. He wasn’t
the son of God. And he won’t be reappearing tomorrow or any tomorrow
thereafter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Death
makes little sense to me. I’ve often thought, if there really is a God, that he
must be an unfeeling bastard, allowing the bestiality we read about in the
papers every day, allowing the unfair deaths and tragedies that occur all
around us. And cruelest of all, the span of our years is like some awful
practical joke. Just when we become skillful physically or mentally, just when
we’re able to answer most of the questions we asked throughout our lives, it’s
time to die. This is the plan of a God who pulls wings from flies. Fifty years ago, Peggy Lee made popular a song called “Is That All
There Is?” When I first heard it I thought it was the most cynical, despairing,
darkest set of lyrics I’d ever heard. It was, still is, but the words are
becoming more and more personal. Is that all there is? Just this ridiculously
short span of time without any meaning and then an eternity of nothing? I hope
not. But I guess I won’t really find out for sure until it’s too late to report
back to the living.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Life,
even though painfully short, beats the alternative. Even when we become so
weary we’d like to get off the train, we can’t. Somewhere I read that life is
like dancing with a gorilla. You don’t stop when you get tired, you stop when
the gorilla gets tired. So, like Peggy Lee, I guess I’ll just keep dancing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Old A</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-24800466638277937722019-05-09T14:28:00.002-07:002019-05-09T14:28:55.860-07:00Texting & More Puns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<h3 style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The national news informs me that
texting is now so prevalent among our young people that it’s now believed to be
as addictive as cigarettes. Whoa! That sounds too much like the end of
well-written prose as we once knew it. What can possibly be the attraction to
this two-thumbed communication? What will happen to face-to-face conversation?
What will happen to writing, not just by professional journalists and novelists
but by the general population? Then there’s the problem that schools must have
to contend with. What to do about texting during class, during tests? I’m
really glad I no longer have to deal with it. I went crazy enough when students
chose to ignore my teaching by chatting or staring out a window. But if I were
confronted by a classroom of people, heads down, arms and hands in motion, I’d
have gone ballistic. My next question is obvious: What in the world do they
have to say to each other in their texty shorthand? Are they trying to solve
the world’s problems? Discussing the nature of the universe? No. Much more
likely, social small talk. Hi, how ya doing? Where are you? What’re you doing?
All in the text code they all use. It strikes me as somewhat similar to the
time when I was a very young and dumb lad who flashlighted messages at night to
my next door neighbor. But I outgrew that at an early age. Let’s hope that
texting among our youth will also pass when they discover how truly simplistic
it is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">Some puns are punnier than other puns. There was the person who
sent twenty different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least ten of
the puns would make them laugh . . . no pun in ten did. And Mahatma Gandhi, as
you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of
calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail, and
with this odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a
super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis. Here another: A group of
chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and were standing in the lobby
discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager
came out of his office and asked them to disperse. “But why?” one of them asked
as they moved off. “Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an
open foyer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;">And now, maybe the funniest cat joke I’ve ever seen. Even
Garfield would get a chuckle out of this one. An elderly lady called the vet to
advise him she had a sick cat. “His eyes are dull and he’s listless, just mopes
and sulks all day and he won’t eat,” she said. “I see,” said the vet. “You’d
better give him a cup of castor oil and I’ll be out about three this afternoon
to have a look at him. You may have trouble giving him the castor oil. With your
left hand force his mouth open and pour the castor oil with your right.” The
old lady had quite a struggle with the cat but her efforts were highly
successful. At three that afternoon the vet knocked on the door and asked, “How’s
that sick calf of yours?” “Calf? Why, I have no calf. I called about my sick
cat.” “Cat? Did you give it that cup of castor oil? We’ve got to do something
about this mighty quick or you’re going to lose your cat! Where is he now?” “I
don’t know,” she responded. “Last time I saw him he was taking out across the
cornfield with nine other cats.” “What in the world was he doing with nine
other cats?” asked the vet. “I don’t know for sure,” she said, “but I think he’s
formed some kind of organization. He had three of them digging holes, three of
them covering up, and the other three out looking for new locations.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-5598552497578965762019-05-07T12:19:00.000-07:002019-05-07T12:19:04.655-07:00Gun Control Again<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpb-i7sh9Bf70Qk4a_Es6uej4Kz5gHmxG7wwe9w-F6xCzgzDqlY8segaOyX5v8HjK6ldeGlzH87FmoZLQLaBXjtj1lSOBoN8uX3pwW4IB1q1cd1STQOCQtwuQ8ts1VyZeYDgxE4TOt0WQ/s1600/gun+control.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="447" data-original-width="640" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpb-i7sh9Bf70Qk4a_Es6uej4Kz5gHmxG7wwe9w-F6xCzgzDqlY8segaOyX5v8HjK6ldeGlzH87FmoZLQLaBXjtj1lSOBoN8uX3pwW4IB1q1cd1STQOCQtwuQ8ts1VyZeYDgxE4TOt0WQ/s400/gun+control.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There
doesn’t seem to be a news day anymore that doesn’t include another example of
gun violence, nut cases who want to take out as many random people as possible
before taking themselves out, or someone with a real or imagined grudge against
an employer or an entire company, or a disappointed lover getting even with the
disappointer, or a political protester using a gun to do his protesting. Another
school shooting, a synagogue, a church, a rock concert, anywhere that people
might gather and become easy targets for someone looking to set a new record
for numbers killed. Back and forth go the arguments—gun lovers and Second Amendment
supporters against those who argue for more stringent laws about who may own
guns and what kind of guns they may own. What follows is a compilation of my
thoughts over the last decade regarding our ever growing need to address this
issue. If the paragraphs seem to be a little disjointed, that’s because I wrote
them at different times about different news stories.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"># # # #
# #<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s
time to talk about guns again. In light of the twenty children and six adults
shot and killed in Newtown, Connecticut, it’s way past time to talk about guns
again. I’m not opposed to the Second Amendment; I’m opposed to its application
in a modern society. The Founding Fathers correctly protected the rights of
individuals to own guns—rifles, shotguns, handguns—weapons they needed to hunt
game for the family table, needed to fend off varmints both animal and human
(sometimes one and the same) that threatened them and their families. This was
a time when there was little police presence to protect them. And, the Founding
Fathers thought it might again be necessary for a civilian army to rise up to
battle invaders from Britain or Mexico or even Canada who threatened our
borders. That was then. This is now. Why is it now necessary to protect the
rights of individuals who want to own assault weapons with high capacity
magazines, or even weapons more lethal than that—grenade launchers and mortars
and bazookas, maybe even a tank or two? We now have armed police forces all
around us to protect us from most varmints. We have military forces to guard
our borders. We have National Guard units to protect us. We have militia groups
(heaven help us!) to supposedly guard us from invaders within. Sportsmen and
hunters and gun collectors don’t need fully-automatic or semi-automatic weapons
that fire as many or more than thirty rounds in fifteen seconds. Jared Loughner
fired 31 shots in about fifteen seconds in Tucson from his Glock 19. James
Holmes in July of this year had a 100-round drum magazine in that Colorado
theater, killing twelve and wounding fifty-eight. Why would Nancy Lanza, ardent
gun collector, not have kept her “collection” more safely locked up, knowing
she had a son with mental issues? Where is the sport in having such weapons?
What hunter needs such weapons to bring down a deer or moose or elk or bear? Or
even an elephant, for that matter? Why did we allow the 1994 law against
high-capacity magazines to expire in 2004 and not renew it? Let’s keep the
right to bear rifles and shotguns and handguns. Let’s renew a ban against
high-capacity magazines. Let’s require background security checks for anyone
wanting to buy such weapons. Let’s tighten controls over gun sales at gun
shows. Good God, let’s stop the mass killings in our country.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"># # # #
# #<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; text-align: justify;">Gun violence in Chicago.
How can NRA people still maintain their position on gun control? Would all
those deaths in Chicago, recent as well as in the past, have happened if guns
weren’t so easily obtained? Without a gun, murder would have to be up close and
personal, strangling or beating on a head with a hammer or sticking someone
countless times with a knife, none of which would be accidental. Guns make it
too easy from an impersonal distance. Up close and personal, not so easy. Yes,
people would still die but it wouldn’t be in such numbers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"># # # #
# #<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> In Ed McBain’s <i>Mischief</i>,
written in 1993, the author, tongue in cheek, had this to say, “Sixty-one
percent of all the murders in this city were committed by firearms, but that
was no reason to take guns away from people, was it? After all, in eight
percent of this city’s murders, feet or fists were the weapons, but did anyone
suggest <i>amputation</i> as a means of control? Of course not.” That sounds
like the sort of skewed logic Wayne LaPierre, NRA lobbyist, might make.
"If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our
schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," he said recently.
Well, Wayne, then you’re crazy. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,”
they constantly say. But people who kill people find it way more difficult to
complete that act if they had only fists or feet or a knife or a rope or a
baseball bat, or even a vial of strychnine. And that could only be done one at
a time, slowly, not twenty or twenty-six at a time, rapidly, as with those
damned weapons capable of firing multiple bullets in only a few seconds. Here’s
what the Second Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to
the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed.” Where, in that statement, does it suggest that our
citizenry needs to bear automatic weapons? Nowhere. It’s now way past time to
tighten our controls over what arms we people have the right to bear.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"># # # #
# #<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why
does anyone need a rifle designed to fire 100 rounds per minute? Why do we still
allow people to buy such a weapon? What are the NRA gun nuts thinking? Do they
really feel the need to go hunting with this thing and what kind of game would
require that sort of firepower? Or do they feel the need to have one for
self-defense? If the latter, then please don't let me get anywhere near such a
self-defensive crackpot. Why don't our laws prevent anyone from buying 6,000
rounds of ammunition? Or at least have such a purchase send out a red flag to
law enforcement? Too many questions, too few answers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"># # # #
# #<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In
the wake of the shooting in Aurora, gun sales are spiking, not only in Colorado
but all over the country. I guess OK Corral isn’t that far off. Are those now
buying guns first-time gun owners or are they just building up their arsenals?
If they’re first-timers, what do they plan to do with their new purchases?
Carry them all the time, keeping a wary eye over shoulders in case some
gun-wielding bad guy is creeping up on them? That’s a scary scenario. Are those
who already own guns simply adding more in case they have to flee to some
deep-woods hideaway?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"># # # # # #<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> The
gun supporters in Tucson, after the Gabby Giffords shooting, argued that if
everyone in that crowd listening to Giffords had been carrying, Jared Loughner
would have been toast after his first shot. Of course, there may have been
fifteen or twenty dead from collateral damage, but that’s the price we have to
pay to put an end to the M-15 crazies.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Loughner’s guilty plea
comes after twenty months of legal maneuvering and courtroom antics. He’ll
serve life with no probation. Free room and board, clothing, medical treatment,
television, movies, books—all the amenities of lazy living. Granted, he won’t
have his freedom, but life for him will be mainly carefree. And the cost to the
public for keeping him? Depending on the state, the annual cost varies from
around $50,000 (California) to $13,000 (Louisiana) for an average around
$30,000. Arizona averages $25,000. Assuming Loughner will live into his
eighties, that’s around sixty years at $25,000 a year, a total of about a
million and a half bucks for a man described at his early booking as "smirking
and creepy, with hollow eyes ablaze." In most cases, I’m not a proponent
of the death penalty. I know the threat of execution doesn’t deter people from
committing murder. But some murders are more heinous than others. And Jared
Loughner in Tucson and James Holmes in Aurora and Wade Michael Page in
Wisconsin and Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and all the others who commit such
senseless acts all fit the heinous label. I say, just kill them. I don’t think
that would be cruel and unusual punishment. Storing them in tiny, cold,
windowless cells would be cruel. Daily waterboarding would be cruel and
spiteful. Stretching them daily on a rack would be cruel and barbaric. Bamboo
spikes under the nails would be cruel and silly. But a lethal injection would be
just and satisfying. One eye for the numerous eyes each took. That would be
Biblically just.</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-80118467296590099312019-05-04T12:13:00.001-07:002019-05-04T12:13:35.629-07:00Ed McBain Style<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> I know some of my readers must get bored
whenever I talk about a writer’s style, but the old teacher in me just can’t
resist. What follows is a long segment from Ed McBain’s (rest his soul) <i>Widows</i>,
a very good episode in the 87th Precinct series. Gloria Sanders is an ER nurse
who has just witnessed the death of a stabbing victim and is now being
interviewed by two detectives from the 87<sup>th</sup> Precinct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Gloria
Sanders was covered with blood.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">This
was ten o’clock on the morning of July twenty-fifth in the nurses’ lounge at
Farley General Hospital, down on Meriden Street. Her white uniform was covered
with blood, and there were also flecks of blood in her blonde hair and on her
face. They’d had a severe bleeder in the Emergency Room not ten minutes
earlier, and Gloria had been part of the team of nurses who, working with the
resident, had tried to stanch the flow of blood. There’d been blood all over
the table, bed, blood on the walls, blood everywhere, she had never seen anyone
spurting so much blood in her life.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> “A
stabbing victim,” she told Carella and Brown. “He came in with a patch over the
wound. The minute we peeled it off, he began gushing.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> She
was dying for a cigarette now, she told them, but smoking was against hospital
rules, even though the people who <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">made</span>
the rule had never worked in an emergency room or seen a gusher like the one
they’d had this morning. Or the kid yesterday, who’d fallen under a subway car
and had both his legs severed just above the knee. A miracle either of them was
still alive. And they would let her smoke a goddamn cigarette.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Arthur
Schumacher’s taste for blue-eyed blondes seemed to go back a long way. His
former wife’s eyes were the color of cobalt, her hair an extravagant yellow
that blatantly advertised its origins in a bottle. Slender and some five feet
six or seven inches tall, Gloria strongly resembled the one daughter they’d
already met, but there was a harder edge to her. She’d been around a while, her
face said, her body said, her entire stance said. Life had done worse things to
her than being bled on by a stabbing victim, her eyes said.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> “So
what can I do for you?” she asked, and the words sounded confrontational and
openly challenging. I’ve seen it all and done it all, so watch out boys. I’d as
soon kick you in the groin as look at you. Blue eyes studying them warily.
Blonde hair bright as brass, clipped short and neat around her head, give her a
stern forbidding look. This was not the honey-blonde hair her daughter Lois
had; if this woman were approaching you at night, you’d see her a block away.
She reminded Carella of burned-out prison matrons he had known. So what can I
do for you?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> I wish I’d written that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the effect of the first lone sentence
at the beginning of this segment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the structure and punctuation of
“There’d been blood all over the table, bed, blood on the walls, blood
everywhere, she had never seen anyone spurting so much blood in her life.”(the
movement from table to bed, then repeating “blood” to introduce the next two
phrases; the use of a comma to hook the next sentence in instead of a semicolon
or a period)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the author movement to interior
omniscient in the paragraph beginning “She was dying for a cigarette . . .”
(not using quotation marks for what she told them, the way he makes it sound
like what she would be saying to herself even though he keeps it in the 3rd
person) Note also the two fragments written as sentences (they’re both noun
clusters)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the use of “blonde” as an organizing
device (blood in her blonde hair, blue-eyed blondes, then a description of it
as “blatantly from a bottle, blonde hair bright as brass, not the honey-blonde
of her daughter,” then the image of her hair like a beacon in the night)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the cadence of “She'd been around a
while, her face said, her body said, her entire stance said. Life had done
worse things to her than being bled on by a stabbing victim, her eyes said.”
(the position and repeating of “face said,” “body said,” stance said,” and then
the clever echo of it in the next sentence, “her eyes said”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the opening and closing of the final
paragraph (the first question actually spoken and in quote marks, the final
question only Carella’s mental repeating of it to illustrate the sound of her
challenge)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> Note the way he uses suppositional dialogue
to get at the character of Gloria—her question in the last paragraph suggests
that she might have said to them, “I’ve seen it all and done it all, so watch
out, boys. I’d as soon . . .”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> I hope I haven’t bored any readers. But
this is a very instructive passage, and oh so very well written. Ed McBain
(Evan Hunter of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackboard Jungle</i>
fame) may have started out as a writer of pulp fiction in the early books in
the 87<sup>th</sup> Precinct series, but about a third of the way through he
began writing much more carefully constructed stories. If you tackle the
series, you’ll see what I mean. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-29134231268602102572019-05-03T10:59:00.002-07:002019-05-03T10:59:39.089-07:00Joe Biden & Song Lyrics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Joe
Biden seems to be the early front-runner to win the Democratic nomination for
2020, but Joe is burdened by quite a few handicap pounds under his saddle—his age,
the Anita Hill business when he didn’t treat her fairly in 1991 in the hearings
to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the charge of
inappropriate touching and hugging that arose recently. Will the Democrats
overlook this baggage and make him their favorite to oust Trump or will he get
dropped along the way? Will women voters forgive him for his treatment of Anita
Hill and his penchant for touching people inappropriately? I don’t know, but I
do think in his case the #Metoo Movement may have moved too far. Let me repeat
what I’ve already said in one of my earlier blogs about hugging. Hugging is
therapeutic. I don’t mean the kind where two people bend at the waist and pat
each other on the shoulder. I mean full body hugging. More therapeutic than a
kiss, especially the kiss on the cheek or forehead. Most men don’t feel
comfortable hugging another man, but I do. The hug is comforting, saying by the
act how sorry we are at the bad news the other has just received. Or how much
the hugger loves the huggee. The world would be a much better place if we all
gave each other a hug occasionally. So, dear reader, please assume that I just
gave you an internet hug. There, don’t you feel better?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What
else will be at the center of debates leading up to next November? Well,
obviously, the wall and its effectiveness at preventing or at least slowing
down the flood of asylum seekers; the necessity of dealing with climate change;
gun control, gun control, gun control (it bears repeating at least three times);
tax reform; our failing infrastructure; and, of course, the results of the
investigations into Trump’s finances. These should be an interesting and
revealing twelve months.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"># # # # # #
#<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> I
just listened to Jackie Allen sing an old Rogers and Hart song, “You’re
Nearer,” and couldn’t help but notice how simple, yet how lovely, the lyrics
were. <br />
<br />
You’re nearer, than my head is to my pillow, <br />
Nearer, than the wind is to the willow. <br />
Dearer, than the rain is to the earth below, <br />
Precious as the sun to the things that grow. <br />
You’re nearer, than the ivy to the wall is, <br />
Nearer, than the winter to the fall is. <br />
Leave me, but when you’re away, you’ll know, <br />
You’re nearer, for I love you so!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> I
may be old-fashioned, but I still most admire lyrics I can hear and understand,
lyrics carefully constructed and balanced, unlike too many song lyrics being
written today. Even Taylor Swift, a singer/writer I admire, writes lyrics that
don’t have real balance. “White Horse,” for example, is a great song, but it
depends for the most part on her singing it, her delivery, her personality.
Then there’s the insanely popular Justin Bieber. I think he could sing the
yellow pages and his female fans would go berserk. But the lyrics themselves
are certainly not up to any of Larry Hart’s. He begins “One Time” with “Me plus
you, I’ma tell you one time, / Me plus you, I’ma tell you one time, / Me plus
you, I’ma tell you one time, / One time one time.” Catchy, right? And he goes
on with “When I met you girl my heart went knock knock, / Now them butterflies
in my stomach won’t stop stop. / And even though it’s a struggle love is all we
got / And we gon’ keep keep climbing to the mountain top.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">All right, so I’m picking on the Beebs and
his lyrics. He seems to be a fine young man / With a great future in musical
art, / But I’ma tell you one time, one time, / He ain’t no Larry Hart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-69845738724647722912019-05-02T15:03:00.000-07:002019-05-02T15:03:25.291-07:00Electoral College<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> 2020 is
rushing at us like a runaway political freight train, cars loaded with hats in
the ring, Tweet wars, enough gray guilt to paint the entire White House, Mueller
reports, and so many other investigations I can’t keep track of them all. And
once again we’ll revisit the debate about the Electoral College. Not that
anything can or will be done about it by next November. <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">According to a Gallup poll in 2013,
62% (more Democrats than Republicans) of American voters are in favor of an
amendment to do away with the Electoral College and to use the popular vote to
decide who should be president. Granted, most winners with the 270 electoral
votes have also had a majority of the popular vote. But five times in our history,
people were elected who did not have the majority of the popular vote: Andrew
Jackson in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George
W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016. Bush, with that strange Florida
recount, beat Al Gore but lost the popular vote by 543,816. Most lop-sided of
all was the amount by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump by almost four million
yet lost by way of the Electoral College. Gore had a valid argument then and
the voters in 2016 have an equally valid argument against this outdated method
instituted by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between those who wanted
Congress to select a president and those who wanted it decided by the people.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> Besides the
unfairness of the above five examples, there’s another reason why we should use
the popular vote: In states that seem to be already decided based on past
voting (non-swing states for either nominee), too many voters might be
discouraged from voting simply because they’d feel their vote wouldn’t matter.
And it wouldn’t. The electoral votes in California, for example, are already
decided ten months ahead of time. A vote for anyone other than Barack Obama
wouldn’t matter. Might as well tear up your vote and throw it to the wind,
maybe even skip voting entirely. A vote in South Dakota for anyone other than a
republican wouldn’t matter. Throw that one to the wind as well, maybe even skip
voting entirely. But, you say, they’d have other races to decide on a state and
national level, so they’d still come out to vote. Yes, the dedicated and
politically aware voters would still vote. But what about the millions of not
so dedicated or not so politically aware, the semi-apathetic? Hmmm, the argument
would be that we don’t want those millions deciding anything so important
anyway, an echo of our Founding Fathers’ reason for not wanting a popular vote
to decide such an important matter, their fear of giving too much power to the
riffraff. Or as Ron Paul said in his 2004 essay <i>The Electoral College vs. Mob Rule</i>: “The Electoral College system
represents an attempt, however effective, to limit federal power and preserve
states’ rights. It is an essential part of our federalist balance. It also
represents a reminder that pure democracy, mob rule, is incompatible with
liberty.” So, Ron, who decides who the mob is? So, Ron, we should keep an
elitist system for making this decision and not put it at least partially in
the hands of the mob, the riffraff, the rabble, the great unwashed . . . the
people? I don’t think so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> In the next
few blogs, I’ll visit some of the other concerns that will be discussed,
debated, and fought over in the coming flood of political ads and interviews
leading to the choosing of nominees and the final voting in November 2020.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /><br />
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-40080784190936091742019-04-29T13:54:00.000-07:002019-04-29T13:54:30.604-07:00Puns & Other Clever Bits<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;"> I
have no idea where these came from (probably from one of my e-mail buddies,
most likely you, Jim). And I know I’ve stuck them in one blog or another over
the years, but here I go again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">1. Two vultures board an
airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and
says, "I'm sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">2. Two boll weevils grew up
in South Carolina. One went to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other
stayed behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one,
naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">3. Two Eskimos sitting in a
kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving once
again that you can't have your kayak and heat it, too.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">4. A three-legged dog walks
into a saloon in the Old West. He slides up to the bar and announces: "I'm
looking for the man who shot my paw."<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">5. Did you hear about the
Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend
dental medication.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">6. A group of chess
enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing
their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of
the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?" they asked, as they
moved off. "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess nuts
boasting in an open foyer."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">7. A woman has twins and
gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named
"Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him
"Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth
mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she
also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If
you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 106%;">* * * * * *<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">I can’t prevent the birds of
sorrow from passing over my head, but I can keep them from building a nest in
my hair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">Going to a church doesn’t make you a
Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.<span style="color: #333333;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">The most abundant elements on
earth are oxygen and stupidity.<br />
<i>Quondo Omni Flunkus Mortati</i> (When all else fails, play dead.)<br />
I became a teacher for the money. The power and fame were just a bonus.<br />
If it moves, it’s biology. If it stinks, it’s chemistry. If it doesn’t work,
it’s physics.<br />
Always remember, you are unique, just like everyone else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia",serif;">Being a good writer is 5%
talent and 95% not being distracted by the internet.<br />
My train of thought just derailed. There are no survivors.<br />
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">My idea of housework is to sweep
the room with a glance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">Bills travel through the mail at twice the
speed of checks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">Middle age is when broadness of the mind
and narrowness of the waist change places.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">Opportunities always look bigger going than
coming.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif;">By the time you can make the ends meet,
they move the ends.</span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-19295335349074062102019-04-26T11:42:00.001-07:002019-04-26T11:42:48.058-07:00Tragedy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">So
much sadness in the news these days, too much tragedy and not enough comedy, too
much insanity. Still too much war in the world, too much terrorist activity,
too many sad tales of child abuse, too much bullying. Too many shooters in
schoolrooms, too many trucks and autos driving full-speed into crowds of people.
Too much division . . . too much Trump.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">These
examples that follow are all taken from the 2013 news, but they could all be
duplicated in any year from then to the present. We just don’t seem to run out
of tragedy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">When
Cory Monteith from <i>Glee</i> died from a drug overdose, either accidental or
purposeful, the cast paid tribute to him and I wept along with them as Lea
Michele sang “Make You Feel My Love” in memory of his passing, tears simply
rolling down her cheeks as she sang, tears rolling down mine as I listened to
her. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Then
there’s the woman who drowned her three kids and just gave birth to her fourth
child in a psychiatric ward. What chance does that poor fourth child have in
this world? And why didn’t we as a society require that the woman have her
tubes tied? All right, all right, I know we can’t become Big Brother and
declare such an edict. But how can we or God allow such tragic insanity to
continue?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Adrian
Peterson, NFL running back, heard that his two-year-old son had just died from
a beating. The boyfriend of Peterson’s ex-girlfriend beat the two-year-old to
death. A two-year-old.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">A
sixteen-year-old in Phoenix recently gave birth to a girl in a public restroom
and then threw the baby out the window.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Twenty-seven
impoverished migrants, on a boat bound from Africa to Europe, drowned in the
Mediterranean.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">Joe
Bell, father of the Oregon gay teenager who killed himself after being bullied
by classmates, was himself killed during his cross-country walk to honor his
son, struck by a semi on a Colorado highway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">The
list goes on and on, like some kind of bad cosmic joke.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;">As
I approach the end of my life, I realize more and more just how inconsequential
all our lives are. It’s not that our lives aren’t worth living. It’s just that
the marks we leave behind are so insubstantial, tiny ripples in an eternal sea.
We die and the world moves on. I read all the time and I have all these words
in my head, other people’s words. I know the lyrics to most of the Great
American Songbook and can sing them in my head, word for word, thousands of
songs. I’m writing stories and essays and expanding on ideas during most of my
waking hours and, I swear, I’m even doing it in my sleep, or that twilight time
between waking and sleeping when memory is at its clearest. Why have I spent my
whole life stuffing words into my head only to die and have them vanish along
with me? All those words seem so unimportant now. I don’t know. But now I think
I’m babbling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-31229498740247968172019-04-25T09:53:00.000-07:002019-04-25T09:53:05.575-07:00Words & Puns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I’m
a big fan of words, English words, that is. I guess that goes almost without
saying since I chose to teach English all my life. And English words can be so
interesting but often so peculiar. For example, “invalid” has two
pronunciations and two meanings. When it’s an adjective and pronounced
“in-VAL-id,” it describes something no longer valid—having no force, null or
void. But when it’s a noun and pronounced “IN-val-id,” it describes a weak,
sickly person, especially one who is chronically ill or disabled. What a cruel
thing to call a sick or disabled person, suggesting he’s null or void.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Another set of words
involves the suffix “-ful,” which derives from Anglo Saxon, and “-ous,” which
derives from old French by way of Latin. The both mean “full of” whatever is
the root to which it attaches ("harmonious, full of harmony"). We
have a small group of words which can take either suffix and mean essentially
the same thing: beautiful and beauteous, wonderful and wondrous, plentiful and
plenteous, graceful and gracious, pitiful and piteous, bountiful and bounteous,
joyful and joyous, rightful and righteous, doubtful and dubious. All of these
pairs are nearly synonymous, but not quite. Each one has taken on slightly
different hues and one almost has to consult a dictionary to see the proper
usage for each. The best example might be <i>graceful</i> and <i>gracious</i>.
“Graceful” suggests beauty of form, expression, or movement, especially
physical movement. “Gracious” suggests a person showing kindness or courtesy,
mercy or compassion. Both describe people who are full of grace, but one a
physical grace, the other a mental grace.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But we also have many
words ending in “–ful” that don’t have a near synonym ending in “-ous” and many
ending in “-ous” that don’t have a brotherly “-ful.” Many of them should,
though, with some fanciful (fancifous) or humorous (humorful) results. For
example, “sinful” might have “sinuous,” the one meaning full of sin, the other
meaning full of twists and turns, like the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve
with that tasty, sinful (sinuous) apple. If there’s a “righteous,” why not a
“wrongeous?” For every “sorrowful,” there should be a “sorrowous,” a “hateous”
for every “hateful,” a “stupendeful” for every “stupendous,” a “malodorful” for
every “malodorous,” a “ridicuful” for every “ridiculous.” And to end this
discussion, we should have both a “bsifous” as well as a “bsiful.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And while I’m at it, here
are some of the puns I’ve earlier used in one of my blogs, but they’re so very
clever regarding words (I borrowed them from t-shirts in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Signals</i> catalogue) they’re worth
repeating:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">1. Keep
clam and proofread. Loose your cool and it’s easy to make misteaks.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">2. “I”
before “e” except when eight weird, feisty neighbors seize a surfeit of weighty
heifers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">3. The
past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">4. Seven
days without a pun makes one weak.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">5.
Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">6. A
backward poet writes inverse.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">7. Her
bootlegging was illegal, but I loved her still.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">8. A tardy
cannibal gets the cold shoulder.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">9. Never
play cards in the Serengeti—there are too many cheetahs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">10. I
regret not developing my photographic memory.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">11. And
my favorite of all in this age of talkers: <i>Listen</i> and <i>silent </i>have
the same letters. Coincidence?<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-22491319365206018222019-04-24T12:08:00.000-07:002019-04-24T12:08:15.779-07:00Blogger's Block<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr37qDs7_NdFwxak2Jtqp-iR4-vOxhdDxKJox0y6L_CACxncGuVkrdW082p0G6p7qdghdzxoUYI7HK9TXaPcGCz1_yUXO4FjgVAfs4yanD7dDSclMFE2Hi90Q04M4Dcx7hpeNv-I9lZjo/s1600/Blogger%2527s+Block.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="415" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr37qDs7_NdFwxak2Jtqp-iR4-vOxhdDxKJox0y6L_CACxncGuVkrdW082p0G6p7qdghdzxoUYI7HK9TXaPcGCz1_yUXO4FjgVAfs4yanD7dDSclMFE2Hi90Q04M4Dcx7hpeNv-I9lZjo/s400/Blogger%2527s+Block.png" width="331" /></span></a><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I’m
suffering from severe writer’s block, or in my and Danae’s worlds, Blogger’s
Block. There just doesn’t seem to be anything worth writing about. “Even if
it’s crap, get it on the page,” some writers instruct. But who wants to read
crap? Or maybe it’s not only that no one wants to read crap, no one is reading
what I have to say, crap or garbage or words of silver and gold. Word crap,
verborrhea. I wonder if there’s an antonym for </span><i style="font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">verborrhea</i><span style="font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">. How about </span><i style="font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">verboconstipa</i><span style="font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">?
That’s what I’m suffering—verboconstipa. All the words are there, but the
linguistic sphincter is squeezed like a fist. In some cases, that’s a better
affliction than the opposite. Too many people today are so full of words they
just can’t wait to find someone on whom to dump them. Such a nice list of words
for this afflication—bombast (suggesting a barrage of words like hand grenades,
or mouth grenades), prolixity, verbosity, verbal plethora, verbophilia, euphemism,
grandiloquence (these last two suggesting not so much an outpouring of words as
a fondness for purple prose, a straining for effect rather than meaning). But
enough about verbal colon motion.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What
about my lack of ideas? I could write about the weather, the wave of severe
storms sweeping across the east coast. But what can I say except that I’m
really thankful I live here in Arizona and not back there. I might write about
any movies I’ve seen lately, but I’ve either already written about them or I
haven’t seen any movies lately. How about books and television? How about plot
elements that invite readers and viewers to root for characters who are either
evil or appear to be evil? I remember when we began watching FX’s <i>The
Americans</i>. How were we supposed to feel about this couple, an empathy for
them or an aversion to them because they’re bad people embarked on a bad
mission? The main characters are a couple of Russian spies, deeply embedded in
cold war America. They’ve been trained to be as American as apple pie, living
apple pie lives with two apple pie children, waiting for orders to do whatever
spies do. But they both seem to be so normal, such good people. Do we root for
them or do we despise them? I’m reminded of other fictional characters with
this same double nature. John Sandford, in one of his <i>Prey</i> series,
included a hit-person named Clara Rinker, a very likeable young woman who just
happened to kill people for money, most of whom probably deserved to die, in
some way connected to one mob or another. But still, she was a killer. Do we
like her, root for her, or do we despise her? Lawrence Block has a series about
a hitman named Keller. Keller kills people for money, and he’s very good at it.
And, like Clara Rinker, he disposes of people who probably deserve to die. He,
too, is a very likeable character and the reader really does root for him. I
remember reading <i>Darkly Dreaming Dexter</i> by Jeff Lindsay a few years ago,
a novel about a man named Dexter Morgan, whose foster father early on
recognized the boy’s psychotic need to kill. So, instead of shipping him off to
psychologists, he convinces him to channel his psychosis by killing serial
killers. A psycho killer who kills psycho killers. And the reader sympathizes
with Dexter. That’s rather creepy, but there you have it. The television series
based on Dexter takes it even further, making him a loving husband and father,
the flip side of his dark side. Hard to decide these days who are the good guys
and who the bad. It’s like the popularity of the <i>Twilight</i> series a
decade ago, the many fans of these fanged characters. I mean, they’re vampires,
for God’s sake. And the current fans of the walking talking dead. I mean,
they’re zombies, for God’s sake. Even Clint Eastwood’s main character in <i>The
Unforgiven</i> is duplicitous (I know, I know, it means he’s a liar, but I want
it to mean he’s a two-sided character). Is he an evil man who became good and
then became evil again when he goes to fight evil and does evil things in his
fight? The line between evil and good is no longer as clear as it once was,
when good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black. Now, everyone seems to
be wearing gray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we have a president
who should be a white hat and yet seems to be as black as midnight. Whoosh!
That’s a lot of words for someone suffering from Blogger’s Block. The sphincter
may have loosened.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-57232324036455882512019-04-23T10:17:00.000-07:002019-04-23T10:17:00.285-07:00Oz & Up<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Last
night I had a linguistic dream in which I was explaining to an old friend how
difficult English is for foreign-born people to learn. Just so many anomalies,
so many idioms. We like to force words into new meanings that don’t always make
much sense. I told him about the first line of the song in <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>,
“We’re off to see the wizard.” Odd word, <i>off</i>.
“To be off” suggests an actual movement toward something. I can just see
Dorothy, the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipping through the Oz
countryside, the Emerald City in the distance (Oh, and don’t forget Toto). So
they’re off to off the wizard. That is, they’re going there to kill the wizard.
They aren’t really, but in my proposed sentence above, there’s that second <i>off</i> to explain, the verb <i>to off</i>, which in slang means <i>to kill</i>. The first <i>off</i> simply means that they’re about to begin a journey. Reverse it
and you might get, “We’re on to you” (We know all your secrets). Or “We’re onto
you” (We’re now sitting on you). And look at <i>going</i> in “We’re going to be going to the Emerald City.” The first <i>going</i> has nothing to do with a physical move
forward as in the second <i>going.</i> It
means future time, as in “Sometime in the future we’re moving toward the
Emerald City.” By this time in my dream, my friend was just shaking his head,
moving slowly to the bedroom door.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More
linguistic oddities, even though not in my dreams, just in my observations. We
love to take adverbs and force them into joining forces with some verb to take
on new meanings. Our little two-letter word <i>up</i>
is a good example of these strange verbal unions: <i>give up</i> (surrender), <i>suck up</i>
(either to renew fortitude or to falsely flatter), <i>take up</i> (begin a new hobby), <i>sign
up</i> (join), <i>seize up</i> (piston
freezing by friction), <i>shut up</i> (close
one’s mouth), <i>chin up</i> (raise one’s
chin [a verb], but <i>chin-up</i> [a noun in
which one raises one’s body by pulling oneself up to a bar]), <i>shine up</i> (falsely flatter), <i>fix up</i> (repair), <i>show up</i> (appear), <i>slow up</i>
(And why does “slow up” mean exactly the same as “slow down?”), <i>stick up</i> (a verb suggesting the act of
putting a gun in someone’s face) and <i>stickup</i>
(a noun indicating the act of putting a gun in someone’s face), <i>stuck up</i> (nose in the air), and <i>throw up</i> (Do we regurgitate up or
down?). You know, all this linguistic consideration is giving me a bellyache. I
think I’ll just throw up my hands. Eeeooo, now there’s a disgusting image.</span></span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-7830027974096600032019-04-21T16:28:00.001-07:002019-04-21T16:28:39.510-07:00English Grammar Lesson<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I’ve
been thinking about all those old pedantic rules of English grammar that I used
to teach, most of which I told my students to ignore. But I thought they should
at least know what they were before they ignored them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">First,
don’t split infinitives. That’s when you put some adverbial stuff in between
the sign of the infinitive, “to,” and the verbal itself, like “Try to never
listen to old English teachers.” Un-split, it becomes, “Try never to listen to
old English teachers.” A little awkward but okay. But sometimes there’s no
better place to put an adverb than right there between the “to” and the verbal.
For example, “Life is too short to totally behave yourself in study hall.” Can
“totally” go anywhere else? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Second,
don’t end sentences with prepositions. Winston Churchill famously had this to
say about that: “This is a form of pedantry up with which I will not put!” When
a writer tries too hard to avoid the prepositional ending, the sentence can
come out sounding too stuffily formal. For example, “The Red Cross was the
charity they chose to give their fortune to.” Switch it to, “The Red Cross was
the charity to which they chose to give their fortune.” A little stuffy, right?
Now look at this sentence in which there’s no way to avoid the preposition at
the end: “The trip committee decided it was the best direction to come in
from.” Lousy sentence, yes, but the only way to fix it leaves “The trip
committee decided it was the best direction from which to come in.” Okay, okay,
maybe it should have been “The trip committee decided it was the best way to
enter.” But we still have the American verb “to come in” equal to “to enter.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Third,
there’s the old dictum to never begin a sentence with “and” or “but,” and to
always write in complete sentences. But I’ve already broken that one three
times thus far. Also, two split infinitives in the sentence above. Also, a
sentence fragment in the last sentence. Also this one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Fourth,
don’t let your modifiers dangle or get misplaced. A dangler usually refers to a
word group at the beginning of a sentence that should be referring to the
subject of the main clause. Such an error can lead to misunderstanding or
sometimes even hilarity. For example, “Flying over the African plain, the
elephant herd looked majestic.” That would require a very large plane or a
bunch of big-eared Dumboes. Another: “Smashed flat by a passing truck, my dog
Rowlfie sniffed at what was left of a half-eaten Whopper.” Poor Rowlfie. And
one example of a modifier that got misplaced, maybe even lost: “The body was
discovered by a hunter with a gunshot wound to the head.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Fifth,
don’t engage in superfluity, excess, repetition, prolixity, wordiness, or
redundancy. That sentence is a good example of what not to do. Here are a few
much shorter examples: a pair of twins (Does that mean there are four or only
two?), surrounded on all sides (Does that include above and below?), consensus
of opinion (One of the few things I learned in my high school Latin class was
that “consensus” already means “a unity of opinion” and that only dumb dolts
would ever say “consensus of opinion.”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There,
that should be enough English lessoning for the day. But one last comment about
the vagaries and complexities of the English language. Look at these pairs of
words that drive foreigners as well as natives crazy: "discomfit"
& "discomfort," "sacrilegious" &
"irreligious," "squash" & "quash,"
"rife" & "ripe," "complimentary" &
"complementary," "effect" & "affect," and
"slow up" & "slow down." These last two are crazy
Americanisms that are but shouldn't be synonymous.</span></div>
</div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-42190231725022736152019-04-20T11:29:00.000-07:002019-04-20T11:29:23.018-07:00Texting vs Writing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the Arizona Broadway
Theater last week, my wife and I watched a couple a few tables away. They were
sitting across from each other, heads down, shoulders hunched, hands in front
of them not quite clasping. They looked like two novitiates praying to God, in
this case, the almighty Phone God. Their little thumbs were clicking and
clacking away at some game app, neither one looking at or talking to the other,
neither taking in their surroundings to see what or who was there. They didn’t
care. They were lost in their "appiness." I just don’t get it. This
last five or six years has seen such an explosion of cell phones and smart phone
technology that now almost our entire population has one of these hand-held
computers, with constant babbling and texting, so much so that almost everyone
has these busy thumbs and fingers and almost no one is saying anything
meaningful. I keep asking myself, why is texting so fascinating? How is texting
better than phone talk? Why is phone talk better than face-to-face
conversation? Texting has also led to the silliness of text shorthand, with the
subsequent loss of words and spelling and punctuation, the same kind of
abbreviated messages that we now find on Twitter and Facebook. “Tweet” sounds
like an adolescent trying to say “treat,” and almost all the tweets I’ve seen
are pretty adolescent and certainly no treat to read.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What can one possibly say
about writing that hasn’t already been said? We’re now in an age when more
people are talking than writing. I guess if you consider texting as writing
there are still a bunch of folks who write, but I don’t consider texting as any
more than silly teeny tiny talk. Writing is what people used to do in letters
and essays and short stories and novels, putting words on paper for other
people to read. Most who then wrote did so because they wanted someone to read
their words, listen to their ideas, maybe comment on what was written, maybe
even pay them for what they wrote.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Did anyone ever write simply
for the sake of putting ideas on paper without expecting any audience? Henry
David Thoreau could be one, but even he might have thought his friend Ralph
Waldo Emerson would give him a look, maybe a few others in their transcendental
group. I’m sure there must have been some who wrote in diaries solely for
private perusal. Samuel Pepys in the 17th century put his diary entries into a
current kind of shorthand called tachygraphy which many later thought may have
been his attempt to keep what he said strictly private. Or maybe he really
wanted someone someday to translate his words. Which we did, finding it an invaluable
picture of life in London in Pepys’ day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Emily Dickinson wrote
thousands of poems, only a few of which she shared with friends and
correspondents. Did she never want us to share “Hope is the thing with
feathers— / That perches in the soul” or to puzzle over “Wild Nights—Wild
Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” or to exult
in “A word is dead / When it is said / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to
live / That day” </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">There must be others, but I
can’t think of any.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Most of us commit words to paper because we want someone to
read them. It’s an egotistical endeavor. We live and then we die, and for most
of us the only words that point to our existence are the cryptic words carved
on our headstones, as was this one pointing to John Keats: “Here lies one whose
name was writ in water.” Keats, who died very young, was probably despondent
because he thought no one would ever recognize what he had written. He borrowed
these words and personalized them for what his grave would say, and how ironic
that his words and his name were written not in water but in books that will be
around forever.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some are driven to write. I
include myself in that category. Our lives are shaped by the amount of time we
spend with pen and paper, or, much more likely today, sitting with keyboard and
word processor, putting thoughts on paper or hard drive. That’s what I’m doing
right now. That’s what successful writers (those who actually make money at
their craft) do. And some of them who have already made more money than they
can ever spend continue to write daily until the day they die. They’re driven
to write. In the past it was Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, Ed
McBain, Agatha Christie, and Barbara Cartland. Today it would be Stephen King
and Dean Koontz. These people all wrote and wrote and wrote, with little regard
for how much money they could make. They wrote because they had to. And then we
have James Patterson, who writes and writes and writes with any number of
co-writers for the money. How in hell much money does any writer need? I want
him to be driven, as am I and Zane Grey and all the others I mentioned above. Forgive me for having put myself in
the same category as those I’ve mentioned above (other than Patterson). But
then, maybe no one is reading this.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-56186265589948078052019-04-19T12:54:00.000-07:002019-04-19T12:54:25.193-07:00Writing Style<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 106%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Since my pool of suitable blog topics seems
to have dried up, I decided to go back to posts from years past that were good
enough to repeat. In 2015 I wrote several about writing styles and what makes
some better than others. Here’s one that struck my fancy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As an old
English teacher, I often notice a writer’s style, especially when the style is
noteworthy for one reason or another. Michael Dirda, in "Style Is the
Man," defines it thus: "Beauty, I learned, grows out of nouns and
verbs, and personal style derives from close attention to diction and sentence
rhythm. When Yeats decided that his poems had become too ornamented and
flowery, he took to sleeping on a board. Before long, he’d put the Celtic
Twilight far behind and was producing such shockingly blunt lines as 'Nymphs
and satyrs copulate in the foam.'" Style is a combination of word choice,
sentence type and length, descriptive accuracy, images that either bore us or
surprise us, and a few other characteristics that are hard to explain. But I
can recognize good style from bad. Most writing doesn’t need to do anything
unusual. It simply needs to communicate whatever its message is. That’s what
most non-fiction does or should do. I call it an invisible style, just doing
its work without bothering or confusing the reader. Maybe the best and
best-known American writer who wrote invisibly and yet managed to win the Nobel
Prize for Literature was John Steinbeck. A good, maybe even a great writer, but
not a stylist. Some writers love jargon and obfuscation and don’t want to admit
they don’t know what they’re talking about. These are writers one should avoid.
They’re bad and their styles are bad. Romance writers often use a purple style,
lots of flowery images and sexual innuendo. It’s an easy style to spot and one
you would do well to avoid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Since I’m
much fonder of fiction than non-fiction, I’ll stick to writers of fiction. The
two I always cited in my English classes were Hemingway and Faulkner, polar
opposites stylistically. Hemingway was what I’d call a plodder. His sentences
came at you like a somnambulistic heavyweight, one simple sentence after
another, sometimes two simple clauses in a compound sentence, the words
agonizingly chosen. In real life he exuded machismo, and he wanted his writing
to do the same, to be a plodding tough guy. Often he might get only one or two
saved pages after a full day at the typewriter. Writers who followed Hemingway
and tried to duplicate his style most often fell flat on their faces. It may
appear simple but its looks are deceptive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then
there’s Faulkner, who drives us crazy with his complexity. I’ve often wondered
if he was actually aware of how complex his sentences were or if it simply came
naturally to his ear. There is that sentence in “The Bear” that goes on and on
for several pages, going ever deeper in the layers of subordinate thought,
hooking word groups together with colons and dashes and parentheses. And the
poor reader is swept along with him, hoping to find shore before drowning.
Faulkner is more admired in the writing than in the reading. Most readers just
don’t have the patience to figure him out. Of the current writers, James Lee
Burke comes closest to Faulkner in both style and Deep South setting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some
writers caress the reader with their style. Fitzgerald is a good example.
Although he wrote many short stories for<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Saturday Evening Post</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Collier’s</i>, stories he wrote
hurriedly and without much revision, he was still one of the most elegant
writers our nation has ever produced. Listen to Nick’s thoughts at the end of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Great Gatsby</i>, thoughts
about the dead Jay Gatsby and his dream: “Most of the big shore places were
closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of
a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential
houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here
that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new
world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had
once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a
transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of
this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Elegant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The modern
writer with an elegant style is Kate Atkinson, who is the most quotable writer
today. Nearly every sentence she writes is new and elegant and quotable. Two
examples from<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>One Good Turn</i>:
“Gloria didn’t believe in heaven, although she<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>did</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>occasionally worry that it was a place
that existed only if you did believe in it. She wondered if people would be so
keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of
people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting
Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. . .
. He thought he was invincible, but he’d been tagged by death. Graham thought
he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn’t going to be
paid off with Graham’s baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If
anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like
to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she
would be quite cheerful<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>(“Come
along now, don’t make such a fuss”)</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Gloria
remembers a time when Graham had been stopped for speeding, drunk, speaking on
his cell phone while eating a double cheeseburger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Gloria
could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into
the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his
breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing
lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating
him. Now she thought that that was probably going on as well. Gloria hated the
term 'blow job' but she rather liked the word 'fellatio,' it sounded like an
Italian musical term—<i>contralto, alto, fellatio</i>—although she found the
act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And that
leads me to a writer I’m fond of, Lee Child. I and millions of others have read
all the books in his Jack Reacher series. I just finished the latest,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Make Me</i>. If ever a writer had a
distinctive style (without judging it as either good or bad), Lee Child is such
a writer. I’d compare his style to a slap in the face, or if Reacher were doing
it, a violent head butt. It’s characterized by lengthy descriptions of time and
distance and weapon calibers and statistical analyses. The style typifies
Reacher more than Lee Child. For example, in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Make
Me</i>, Reacher is confronting a hit man who has come to take out him and his
female companion. The faceoff is in a shabby apartment building hall and lasts
from start to finish about three minutes, but it takes ten pages for
Reacher/Child to explain exactly what will take place—the moves, the
countermoves, the kind of blows he will need to deliver to foil the shooter.
Reacher is obsessed with facts and details, and the style shows it. And as I
earlier said, it’s neither good nor bad, just distinctive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6292610407927144844.post-68475802593137976892019-04-15T16:59:00.000-07:002019-04-15T16:59:20.076-07:00Masters 2019<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What a weekend in Georgia. That roar
we all heard was the sound of a Bengal tiger who had just made another trophy
kill, and most who heard it were delighted, excited, and deliriously joyful.
Some, however, were not so full of joy, still thinking of Tiger Woods as just
another lucky, cocky, uppity black (fill in the “n-word” here). We may have
come a long way in race relations, but there are still too many old fogies with
red necks (fill in “retirees” here) who actively dislike Tiger Woods. Young
people of all ages, but especially pre-teen boys and girls, are now embracing
him as he was never embraced during the glory years from 1997 to 2005. Too bad
for all the non-embracing old folks, though. They missed out on the celebration
that followed Tiger’s fifth win at the Masters. It was good for him; it was
good for the game; it was good for a world that’s grown weary of WH ego tweets.
If Tiger can come back from his physical, mental, and emotional problems over
the last decade, then maybe we as a nation can come back to political sanity in
2020.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSIJ0qJl-XYWAwxFY9e3aNtrV6yYRQgcK5YeaPimaivjVqSjXNIgjXPZb5_k5bWa-KkR8VdMSfN2w9W7gt5ONkXypi_r4fpTnKgnjtYrjjmJDwJAycvvUPbdcI1LcnIhIr9lPXlmSrQNA/s1600/Masters+flowers+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="1024" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSIJ0qJl-XYWAwxFY9e3aNtrV6yYRQgcK5YeaPimaivjVqSjXNIgjXPZb5_k5bWa-KkR8VdMSfN2w9W7gt5ONkXypi_r4fpTnKgnjtYrjjmJDwJAycvvUPbdcI1LcnIhIr9lPXlmSrQNA/s400/Masters+flowers+2.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>More Augusta observations: The golf
course was even more gorgeous than ever before. It looked like they’d hired
thousands of tiny gardeners with tiny scissors to hand-trim every blade of
grass, kneeling in worship as they clipped each hole to resplendent beauty. There
was a fear that thunderstorms would have the audacity to rain on Augusta
National’s parade, but even the rain gods realized what a mistake that would be
and stayed away for most of the four days. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMc18xa_F_vvM5g8nZVg3yc_I7Do-gPfo21ujjrz4sN-uMzc3o8YthS6YNPdLQMrCW-CiluILUhGvuA7Eup8pXfZbAfG3NfHZC6ffYscR5JfWeBSgWYnv7tKzCf85m-A7CqTbhFZZpZ_0/s1600/Masters+Hogan+Bridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="500" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMc18xa_F_vvM5g8nZVg3yc_I7Do-gPfo21ujjrz4sN-uMzc3o8YthS6YNPdLQMrCW-CiluILUhGvuA7Eup8pXfZbAfG3NfHZC6ffYscR5JfWeBSgWYnv7tKzCf85m-A7CqTbhFZZpZ_0/s400/Masters+Hogan+Bridge.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What
was the pivotal hole on Sunday? It was that little dream-killer the par-3 12<sup>th</sup>.
Jordan Spieth, in 2017 found out about what pressure can do, dumping two shots
in Rae’s Creek to lose what should have been a walk-in win. And Francesco Molinari
felt the tightening collar when he got there with a two-stroke lead and hit it
in the water. All along, I’d thought of him as the Italian assassin because he
seemingly never made a mistake, making only his second bogey of the first three
and a half rounds. Until he got to number 12 and double bogeyed it. From there
to fifteen, he and Tiger were tied until Molinari dumped another in the water
on the par-5 15<sup>th</sup> for another double bogey. Goodbye, Francesco. The
Tiger pressure and the pressure of the second nine on Sunday finally assassinated
the assassin. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This
was Tiger’s 5<sup>th</sup> green jacket and his 15<sup>th</sup> major. The
Masters, because of its extremely limited field, was probably the most likely
place for him to win another major. But, guess what? Who do you suppose will be
favored to win next month’s PGA at Beth Page or the US Open at Pebblebeach or
the Open in Northern Ireland? Yep, probably Tiger. But that may not hold true
if he doesn’t play well in May at Beth Page. Will the Comeback continue or will
this 15<sup>th</sup> win be his swan song? We’ll see.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now that Johnny Miller is gone as golf’s
premier analyst, who’s left to call it like it is or make any controversial and
astute comments about the game and those who play it? Paul Azinger was supposed
to be his replacement but he hasn’t given any indication that he can do it.
Curtis Strange, although he’s finally seen the wisdom of getting rid of his
Southern drawl, is still pretty stupid. CBS’s go-to guy Peter Kostis, in his
annoying soft-speak, makes too many too obvious comments about the action. And one
of the Golf Channel’s spokespeople, Brandel Chamblee, tries to sound
all-knowing by making controversial comments but comes off as seeking attention
only by controversy. Brooks Koepka called him out when he said that Koepka’s rapid
weight loss was the stupidest thing he might have done. I guess that the one I’d
most like to see as golf guru on regular telecasting would be David Feherty,
who is as funny as he is insightful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now, to beat on this not-yet-dead
horse, I must comment on the debate about leaving the flagstick in or taking it
out when one is putting. No one has yet mentioned that much of this decision
should rest on what kind of flagstick is being used. The lighter the stick the
more one should use it. In the very old days, a bamboo flagstick was very
lightweight and most receptive to a ball hitting it. Then came the fiberglass
sticks which were also light and receptive. All studies showed that more chips
were made with it in than with it out. Dave Pelz, an old-time putting guru, has
done several studies that showed statistically that more shots were made with
the flagstick in than with it out. However, that was when fiberglass was still
being used. Now that it’s legal to leave it in when putting, what do the
studies show? I noticed that the ones being used at the Masters were the new metal
sticks, narrow at the bottom but much wider up from there, much heavier and
less receptive to balls striking them. These heavier flagsticks will make it a
more difficult decision about leaving it or taking it out. The debate will
continue throughout the rest of this season. I’m guessing that by then, about
half the professional players will leave it in, half will take it out. But
amateurs should leave it in all the time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Jerry Travishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09762766647453045430noreply@blogger.com0