Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, September 01, 2000 TRIPPY DICKY'S TREASON Charles Taylor's review of The Arrogance of Power, the Anthony Summers book detailing the perfidy of the Dick that screwed a nation, echoes some of the points I recently made, although he's a lot more vicious about it (and, yes, I'm jealous). For instance, he nicely reiterates my bit about the media being largely a pack of drooling sensation-mongers with no sense of proportion or perspective: Summers offers a wealth of skulduggery and deceit that, you might imagine, would keep journalists busy for weeks. But instead the advance reports on Summers' book illustrate the debased nature of what currently passes for political journalism. They have almost all focused on just one of his allegations: that Nixon beat his wife, Pat. "The most provocative charge in the book," reported the New York Times last Sunday. More provocative than Nixon's almost-certain interference with the Paris peace talks? Than his probable involvement in schemes to assassinate Castro that predated the Bay of Pigs? More provocative than the charge, confirmed by Nixon's Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, that the president was so unstable during the final days of his administration that Schlesinger instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to react to any military orders from the White House unless they were first cleared with him? Even Vanity Fair, in the excerpt it ran from Summers' book, went with the section on the Paris peace talks. What kind of alternate universe are we living in, where Vanity Fair understands what the important news is better than the New York Times? He also sees Nixon's apparent scheme to derail the Paris peace talks in 1968 (as a civilian) as the most damning thing in the book, and goes much further by making the stark consequences crystal clear: Of course, there were plenty of reasons for Thieu to back out of the peace talks even without Nixon's encouragement -- most of all, the fear of his government's collapse. And even had he agreed to the talks, there was no guarantee that the talks would have led to an end to the war or even to a Humphrey victory. All that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Nixon, as a private citizen, conspired to affect the course of American foreign policy by sabotaging peace talks that could have prevented the deaths of thousands of American soldiers (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, civilians as well as combatants). In other words, Nixon committed treason. And it's a pity -- for the nation as well as for the families of the soldiers who were killed during the four subsequent years of the war (nearly a third of all Americans killed in Vietnam) that the son of a bitch didn't swing for it. In the early 90s this sort of accusation would've disturbed even me. After all, the T-word accusation isn't one to be bandied about like accusing someone of exceeding the speed limit. I've been inured, however, by the propensity of the jackass right during the 90s to accuse Clinton of treason if he as much as farts in public. Most recently one of the usual locals trotted out the accusation because the object of his obsessive hatred had supposedly sold out the USA to China in "missilegate," with that "scandal" being the one where the spook community obtained a Chinese document which, if true, left little doubt as to some information transfer occuring that shouldn't have. Well, that document was obtained in 1995 and dated 1988. That is, the barn doors were wide open at least as early as 1988. But, as is par for the course with those for whom the facts are completely meaningless if they don't jibe with that day's dittospeak, even causality is casually discarded. Reality has become surreality to the point that not only is Clinton responsible for something that started at least four years before he become president, but he's also personally committed treason because of it. I'll let Taylor have the last word as he recounts another incident from the tenure of the man the right routinely puts forth as a saint compared to their Arkansan focus of evil: On Oct. 23, 1973, Kissinger was told by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the Soviets could very well be sending troops to the conflict. Kissinger, attempting to get in touch with Nixon, was told by chief of staff Alexander Haig that Nixon had "retired for the night." While the United States went to DEFCON III, preparation to launch a nuclear attack, the president of the United States was passed out, drunk. (Haig still denies this. Kissinger's aide, Roger Morris, has quoted Kissinger's assistant Lawrence Eagleburger saying that it did happen.) Kissinger handled the crisis and the Soviets backed down. posted by Steven Baum 9/1/2000 03:53:30 PM | link PEREC While I've previously mentioned Georges Perec in an entry on lipograms, I've not yet supplied any samples of his lipogrammatic prose. His most famous and impressive feat along these lines (with Gilbert Adair's translation from the original French into English equally impressive), is La Disparition or A Void, with the English translation weighing in at over 280 pages completely lacking the letter `e'. Here's a sample from the first chapter: His mind runs riot. Lost in thought, scrutinising his rug, Vowl starts imagining 5, 6, 26 distinct visual combinations, absorbing but also insubstantial, as though an artist's rought drafts but of what? - that, possibly, which a psychiatrist would call Jungian slips, an infinity of dark, mythic, anonymous portraits flitting through his brain, as it burrows for a solitary, global signal that might satisfy his natural human lust for signification both instant and lasting, a signal that might commandingly stand out from this chain of discontinuous links, this miasma of shadowy tracings, all of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a kind of paradigmatic configuration, of which such partial motifs can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations: a body crumpling up, a hoodlum, a portrait of an artist as a young dog; a bullock, a Bogartian falcon, a brooding blackbird; an arthritic old man; a sigh; or a giant grampus, baiting Jonah, trapping Cain, haunting Ahab; all avatars of that vital quiddity which no ocular straining will pull into focus, all ambiguous substitutions for a Grail of wisdom and authority which is now lost - now and, alas, for always - but which, lost as it is, our protagonist will not abandon. Fairly smooth prose, that. You might even not notice for a while the curious lack of the most common letter in the language. Now for the converse: guess what Perec did with all those extra vowels he had scattered all over the house? Try this excerpt from "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex" from the collection Three (English translation copyright 1996 by Ian Monk): Rene deserted then rented seventeen fez-dressed henchmen. Between the jebels, the deserts, the ergs where the steppes' breezes seeded then deleted defenceless weeds, here erred these henchmen, needleless brens, spent stens, nerveless epees, depleted steeds, kneeless gee-gees, bereft jennets, Therese's feckless seekers. Then Mehmet Ben Berek's Berbers penned themselves between the secret crests. The desert steppes were mere creekless versts, endless extents: Kef, Meknes, Zemzem, Yemen. Rene sensed he grew demented when he'd see these wenchless henchmen seek ewes then eschew Therese. Yes, this much tighter constraint is quite a bit more stilted and silly, although the phrase "wenchless henchmen seek ewes" does have a certain rhythm to it (and might be just the thing to punch up that next personals ad). posted by Steven Baum 9/1/2000 02:19:53 PM | link MP3 FUN-O-RAMA I struck gold last night at the Captain Beefheart Radar Station, wherein they have a treasure chest full of doubloons in their Filtered Through Dust Speakers section. Fair warning: If you don't get an immediate nostalgic rush upon hearing phrases like "bat chain puller," "trout mask replica" and "lick my decals off, baby" then give the rest of this entry a big skip. It features several complete live shows in MP3 format that are freely downloadable. These include: Live in Copenhagen, 1975 described as "simply astonishing, demonstrating the full raw power of the live Magic Band at its very best on a Hallowe'en night, with the Captain seemingly intent on ripping out his vocal cords"; Electric Poetry: The Magic Band Live in Amsterdam, 1980 Don's Birthday Party, Seattle, 1981 The Best Batch Yet: Live at the Country Club, 1981 and The Original Bat Chain Puller, 1976. If you think that wearing your baseball hat backwards is the ultimate cultural statement, then get on back to napster and all that Eminem and Kid Rock garbage. Like two-dollar whiskey and red habaneros, the Cap'n ain't for the young or the weak. posted by Steven Baum 9/1/2000 01:54:20 PM | link THE GENIUS OF THE MARKET, PART 1 I'm starting an occasional series with the title you see. It's mostly inspired by Doug Henwood's Wall Street: How It Works and For Whom and Paul Krugman's Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations, although some John Kenneth Galbraith (since I just snagged a copy of his A Journey Through Economic Time on the cheap) and John Maynard Keynes (via the biographical material in the second volume of Robert Skidelsky's biography, i.e. John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937) will probably also sneak past the censors. I'll start with a paragraph from Henwood's introduction that will whet some appetities and hopefully put some others right off their feed: The U.S. financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society's savings towards their optimal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment. Most money managers can barely match market averages - and there's evidence that active trading reduces performance rather than improving it - yet they still haul in big fees, and their brokers, big commissions. Over the long haul, almost all corporate capital expenditures are internally financed, through profits and depreciation allowances. And instead of promoting investment, the U.S. financial system seems to do quite the opposite; U.S. investment levels rank towards the bottom of the First World (OECD) countries, and are below what even quite orthodox economists term "optimal" levels. Real investment, not buying shares in a mutual fund. Take, for example, the stock market, which is probably the centerpiece of the whole enterprise. What does it do? Both civilians and professional apologists would probably answer by saying that it raises capital for investment. In fact it doesn't. Between 1981 and 1997, U.S. nonfinancial corporations retired $813 billion more in stock than they issued, thanks to takeovers and buybacks. Of course, some individual firms did issue stock to raise money, but surprisingly little of that went to investment either. A Wall Street Journal article on 1996's dizzying pace of stock issuance named overseas privatizations "and the continuing restructuring of U.S. corporations" as the driving forces behind the torrent of new paper. In other words, even the new-issues market has more to do with the arrangement and rearrangement of ownership patterns than it does with raising fresh capital. For those who need a mental palate cleanser after reading such evil liberal nanny boo-boo-isms, I'd recommend something by a venerated conservative idol like Friedrich Hayek (since I've already provided many a passage from venerated conservative idol H. L. Mencken). Might I suggest his Why I Am Not a Conservative? On an ancillary note, you'll be pleased to know that a Google search for " hayek" still brings up Friedrich first rather than Salma, although she does make it up to third place. The walls are still holding, although just barely. posted by Steven Baum 9/1/2000 10:14:59 AM | link Tuesday, August 29, 2000 MP3 MANIA I've never much bothered with MP3s since - being such a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary - I'm not all that fond of most new stuff that's released. Things have changed a wee bit. While perambulating the infobahn a couple of weekends ago I serendipitously ran across a treasure trove of MP3s of bootlegs from the 60s through the 80s. HOT PUPPIES!!!! About 10 GB worth of Grateful Dead, Govt Mule, Little Feat, Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Phish, Santana, Allman Brothers, etc. (I know, I know, I'm an old fart) MP3s later, I'm almost but not quite sated. This meshes neatly with the desires fomented by my recent reading of Clinton Heylin's Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth while I was reading that as I remembered the thousands of bootlegs I've had a chance to snag since 1970 that I didn't. posted by Steven Baum 8/29/2000 10:54:17 AM | link Monday, August 28, 2000 NIXON'S AGONIST The Aug. 27 NYTimes has a piece by Adam Clymer on A16 entitled "Book says Nixon took mood-altering drugs as President" that provides even more confidence about the GOP's ninja mastery of affairs both foreign and military. It seems that Tricky Dicky started taking the prescription drug Dilantin in 1968 "when his mood wasn't too good" (which even the available transcripts of his White House tapes tells us was most of the time). He later consulted a New York psychotherapist when he became even more moody and depressed after the public's ("those ingrateful bastards!") less than wholly favorable reaction to his bombing of Cambodia in 1970. (And y'all thought The President's Analyst was fiction, didn't you?.) The increasingly erratic mental state of the President the psychotherapist considered neurotic led James Schlesinger - Steve Martin lookalike and Secretary of Defense - to order (in 1974) all military units not to react to orders from the White House unless they were cleared with him or the Secretary of State. According to the Times piece: Mr. Schlesinger confirmed the account in an interview today, and said the book's description of events was the most complete and most accurate account of his actions, which had been reported in more general terms earlier. The book quotes him as saying, "I am proud of my role in protecting the integrity of the chain of command. You could say it was synonymous with protecting the Constitution." He confirmed today that that was how he felt. And just what is Dilantin? Jack Dreyfus, the founder of the Dreyfus Fund and both a user and promoter of the drug, illegally gave two 1000-capsule bottles of the prescription drug to Nixon. In a recent interview he stated that the drug was effective in dealing with "fear, worry, guilt, panic, anger and related emotions, irritability, rage, mood, depression, violent behavior, hyperglycemia, alcohol, anorexia, bulimia and binge eating, cardiac arrhythmia, and muscular disorders." Whew, that's quite a list. And what does a real doctor have to say about the drug? Dr. Richard Friedman, director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Cornell medical school, said in an interview Thursday that Dilantin was properly used to prevent convulsions, and was discredited for psychiatric use. He said it could be used to prevent anxiety, but other drugs were better. He said Dilantin has "potentially very serious side effect risks, like change of mental status, person becoming confused, loss of memory, irritability, definitely could have an effect on cognitive function." Golly, none of that sort of thing comes across at all in the tapes, does it? Sort of reminds me of Shrub the Elder's reported use of halcyon, which explains a lot of his "I am the Walrus!" moments in the latter parts of his administration. And, of course, the "apple fell from the tree and rolled under the coca bush" example of Shrub the Lesser now lines up as a venerable GOP tradition rather than as merely an unpunished and unadmitted major felony. We also find in the article yet another example of the GOP's propensity at attempting to tamper with foreign policy during Presidential campaigns. Talking about Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (which sounds like a nod to and nice companion volume for Seymour Hersh's investigation of Kissinger entitled The Price of Power), the article says: It restates, with much new detail, the accusation that Mr. Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign sought to persuade South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu not to agree to President Lyndon Johnson's pleas that he agree to join peace talks in Paris with the United States, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. A declassified FBI document detailing the contents of a wiretapped called to South Vietnam's ambassador to Washington containing the phrase `hold on, we are gonna win' increases the credibility of that which has heretofore been dismissed as an unsubstantiated rumor. By far the least substantial allegation in the book is that Tricky Dick was a wife beater and, predictably enough, that's what's being picked up and regurgitated by the insatiable maw of the mass media machine. Not that I would support that sort of behavior even if it were true, but it disturbs me a lot less than the idea of a Nixon hepped up on goofballs staring at The Phone and flashing forward to a giddily happy populace cheering the brave, visionary and brilliant man who just permanently saved them from evil, and at a not unreasonable cost, too. posted by Steven Baum 8/28/2000 01:34:48 PM | link THE AFFAIR OF THE MISSING ENTRIES ADDENDUMB: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. He was having one of those flashbacks they've (you know who they are!!!) been promising him for years, during which he overlooked the obvious. I've just noticed that two recent entries have disappeared. It could be more but two is all I remember as having once been there and now not. One was a long linkfest containing a list of obscure bands, and the other a pointer to a book by George Dyson. Has there been some sort of a burp over Blogger way? And has anyone saved a copy of either, especially the band thing as I'd hate to have to redo that sucker. posted by Steven Baum 8/28/2000 11:29:47 AM | link ADMINISTRIVIA About the only thing I managed to do here last week was include a search link to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary near the top of the page, mostly for my convenience although I'm sure a reader or two will return to it interfrastically as needs be. Be that as it may, a series of other time-demanding contrifibularities ate most of my time last week, not the least of which was the time spent in the evenings checking for dead links in letters J through M in the leviathan. Yes, I know that task can be automated but I prefer the hands-on method since it both allows me to see if new features (or even software) have been made available and inevitably gets me sidetracked at least 10 URL levels deep every hour or so. That latter part is the true fascination of the web, at least to yours truly. posted by Steven Baum 8/28/2000 10:35:40 AM | link BOSTON CHARLIE In a crass effort to both get the first Xmas entry and brag about getting a copy of The Best of Pogo (1982) for $4, I'll offer from within the latter the complete lyrics to Walt Kelly's Pogo Christmas song "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie": Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo! Nora's freezin' on the trolley, Swaller dollar cauliflower alley'garoo! Don't we know archaic barrel, Lullaby lilla boy, Louisville Lou? Trolley Molly don't love Harold, Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo! Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Polly welly cracker n' too-da-loo! Donkey Bonny brays a carol, Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you! Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon, Willy, folly go through! Chollie's collie barks at Barrow, Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo! Duck us all in bowls of barley, Ninky dinky dink an' polly voo! Chilly Filly's name is Chollie, Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo! Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof! Tizzy seas on melon collie! Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof! The book's full of Pogo rarities and Walt Kelly miscellanea, many of which are difficult to find elsewhere, e.g. the complete original run of the strip in the long defunct New York Star from Oct. 4, 1948 to Jan. 28, 1949 showing the early development of many of the characters; samples of Kelly's editorial cartoons (including a regular weekend Star feature called "The Week in Cartoons and Text"); the script from a Pogo radio program that never quite got off the ground; the first syndicated strips (starting in May 1949), some of which are reworked strips from the Star period; a complete collection of the various Pogo parodies created by Mad magazine, one of the cultural touchstones of my long-lost youth; and the words and music to the "Go Go Pogo" song Kelly wrote for Pogo's 1956 presidential campaign. Related links include: I Go Pogo, the personal site of a long-term fan featuring a bibliography; a synopsis of Kelly's Our Gang comic book that ran for over 50 issues in the 1940s; the official Okefenokee Swamp site complete with a Pogo page; a highfalutin' pointy-headed academic overview entitled Walt Kelly's Pogo: The Eye of the Whole Man; and the Pogo inventories of Amazon and ABE. posted by Steven Baum 8/28/2000 09:53:18 AM | link

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