Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

Seeing Eye Cat

In Jacqueline's cosmology, St. Lucy has a seeing eye cat. Actually, she's on her second one. The first was named Mulan.

But in December 2016 we got our Black Halloween Cat*, whose name is Jet, and now she has taken the leash for St. Lucy.

Seeing Eye Cat. Heh heh.

* Jacqueline's coinage, of course.

Speech Therapy / Autism Humor

Yesterday morning Joe's speech therapist was doing an exercise in which she would name parts of A Thing or things associated with The Thing and Joe had to come up with The Thing. E.g. "Band, face, time = watch."  I was hoping she'd do "Person, woman, man, camera, tv, " but it was not to be. Almost as good, though, she did "Scent, liquid, women, " and Joe responded, "It's wine." 

Anybody out there have an A-men?

The Book I'm STILL Reading: Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

No spoilers here, so the only context I'll give is that an old man who is in a position of authority is speaking to a young man who is on the cusp of entering into the lower regions of that authority's structure, and the young man says this:

"...no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery." 

I immediately had a flashback to George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (I can't find the exact quote, but it was something on the order of "You are able to live in comfort because a group of coal miners work in conditions which are miserable and dangerous".) And I also started thinking about the whole Structure of Society thing. Orwell talked about it in several of his books...the good old pyramid scheme where a small group--say 10 to 15%--was at the top, there was a thin layer of "outer party" folks, and then there was a majority of people who were basically cannon fodder. If you ship that bit of Orwell with the aforementioned bit of Asimov, you get a rather strange idea: society's stability is dependent on the "cannon fodder." But that doesn't make any sense, does it? 

Well...let's pretend that it does for a minute and work from there. And let's throw a little Alexis de Tocqueville into the mix. He said that 

"When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can never shake off: in a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling which he has chosen. It is in vain that laws and manners have been at the pains to level all barriers round such a man, and to open to him on every side a thousand different paths to fortune; a theory of manufactures more powerful than manners and laws binds him to a craft, and frequently to a spot, which he cannot leave: it assigns to him a certain place in society, beyond which he cannot go: in the midst of universal movement it has rendered him stationary."

That sounds pretty fucking stable, doesn't it? And if "the workman" can be counted on to keep in his place...I suppose that there are several benefits which accrue from that. First off, the dirty work gets done. Second off, those workmen can be exploited in several significant ways: tax revenues and purchasing power. If you create a society in which people "need" a car (car insurance, gasoline, repairs, etc.), a house, some booze to numb the pain, etc. ...then you have some serious money coming your way. Even better, if you put some of these items just a bit out of their reach, you can get them to go into debt and pay for loans for all kinds of things. 

Oh, man. I guess the cannon fodder is the stable part of society, isn't it?

It's funny (but not ha ha funny)--this wasn't what I intended to write about at all. I thought I was going to write another Asimov Knows Trump thing. But that's the thing about writing. It seems to tap into a part of your brain that gets you to think about things in a different way. At least for me. So writing takes me places that talking or thinking wouldn't take me. 

Which is why I do this blog, I suppose.

So...thanks for being witnesses to that.


“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”

― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Yo Semite

Dead Bird

I love my kids for lots of reasons, but one of the foremost of those is that all three of them have kind hearts. It seems to me that "it's how kind you are" defines your humanity...as Philip K. Dick once wrote. I saw a flash of that kindness one day when my daughter and I saw a bird hit by a truck.

We walk every day, and our usual course takes us down a section of Whipps Mill Road. There are no sidewalks in our neighborhood, but there's a fair amount of separation between you and the traffic on the one side of the street, as there is a parking lane, a skinny no man's land lane, and a bike lane, so it's as pedestrian safe as you can be under the circumstances. Still, the cars whizzing by definitely catch your attention, and as we were walking one day I looked up as a large truck blasted past us...and saw its grille smash into two birds who weren't flying fast enough to get out of its way. One of them was thrown into our path and landed hard on the asphalt. I saw its claws extend futilely before it died. Jacqueline immediately rushed towards it, saying, "We've got to help it!" Alas, there was no helping it. But as disturbed as I was by seeing a bird die right in front of me, and as sad as I was that my daughter was there to witness the event, I also immediately felt love and pride for her. Her first impulse wasn't revulsion or fear, but the desire to help. 

She has a diagnosis of autism. Would that we all were as "handicapped" as she is.

The Jacqueline Way to Deal With Social Isolation

Have a Les Misérables viewing party! Be sure to bring all of the necessary accessories:

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NOTE: It's actually impossible to take this picture in my living room with my puny phone camera. This is a combination of two pictures from slightly different angles, which allowed me to include the television screen. I thought it turned out quite well. Just sayin', sir. 

The Book I'm Reading: Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

I've been working my way through Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" (Second Foundation, which I'm currently 35% of the way through, is the 8th book in the series) for some time now. Today it struck me how much the character The Mule is like someone we all know and love.

Some small spoilers are inevitable here, but I'll tread as lightly as possible.

The Mule is a mutant who has the ability to control the emotional responses of others. He uses his power to put those others under his control--essentially by making their loyalty to him supersede all other motivations. It's not that they're incapable of rational thought, just that any rational thoughts which contradict their loyalty to The Mule are shunted off their mortal coils.

He runs up against another person who has similar (though in some ways inferior) powers, and that person tells The Mule that because of his experiences growing up, The Mule has been psychically distorted--and suffers from megalomania and psychopathic paranoia.

Although The Mule himself doesn't see it this way, the Person essentially says that The Mule's attempts to subjugate others...ALL others...is really just an effort to strike back at the world which mistreated him when he was young.

Sound familiar yet?

Yeah, I thought so, too.

And the cherry on top is that the cover art of my edition of the book (Avon, 23rd printing)  is all in hues of orange. Heh heh.