Pee-wee, RIP

His show was an antic blend of kid stuff and double entendre. Something for everyone in the family.

Summerfield, FL

Lithium and how everything is connected to everything

I recently bought eight settings of dishes from East Fork. It is beautiful, and they care about things I care about, and it will last... forever? Worth the money, on many levels, I think. Here was interesting news.

We’ve switched our glaze formula because our current glaze contains Petalite: a mineral that contains lithium. As the battery industry has grown they have started to buy up all minerals containing lithium. First the price for any material containing lithium exploded, then the supply chain dried up completely. The disappearance of this mineral forced us to quickly switch formulas.

Tony Bennett, RIP

I don't go gaga for Gaga, so Tony's late forays into duets left me a little underwhelmed, but then, he was still sounding pretty good well into his 90s... And in his prime, he was damn good.

Mass decarceration

Some amazingly good and important news... 

"One obvious consequence of these findings is that any contemporary claims suggesting that 1 in 3 Black men born today will be incarcerated in their lifetimes are no longer empirically tenable."

Krugman on motivated reasoning in economics

He's right about this, and the pattern extends well beyond positions on inflation. Consider the employment effects of the minimum wage, or the wage effects of immigration. Economists who study these issues tend to be on one team or the other, and their careful and "objective" empirical analysis will more often than not support their team's views. A challenge for anyone who wants to believe in technocracy.

This says something uncomfortable about the economics profession: We’re supposed to be doing dispassionate analysis, but the fact that most economists are consistently either inflation optimists or inflation pessimists whatever the circumstances suggests that somebody is suffering from motivated reasoning. (But not me. I, of course, am totally objective. OK, I do sometimes catch myself engaging in motivated reasoning. But I try to fight it.)

Authorial cruelty

John Banville seems to have found his calling as a writer of very literary yet can't-put-it-down crime novels. April in Spain is a very good one indeed, the best of his books I have read. It seems that everyone in Banville's Ireland has an appalling history of abuse and/or abandonment. Banville believes in morality, but whether one's tortured personal history leads to a life of sin or redemption seems a matter of chance, and the redeemed life is not one that offers consolations– to the contrary, God (Banville) is as content punishing the righteous as the evil. The problem is that Banville's eagerness to punish even his most admirable characters sometimes leads to plotting decisions that stretch credulity. What he does to Quirke by the end of this novel seems cruelly gratuitous and, perhaps for that reason, predictable. And predictability is one sin a crime novelist should avoid committing.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 102

From the inviting intro on tres, to the compulsively swinging percussion, to Ismael Quintana's vocals, to the awesome big-band horn arrangements, to the master's solo, channeling a little McCoy Tyner. 50 years old this year, and sounding better than the day it was born... Wow.

Yosemite

A couple weeks ago now. It's not possible to do justice to the roaring water at anything like the actual scale, even with video, but here are just a few snapshots from our hikes along Hetch Hetchy to Rancheria Falls, and up to Glacier Point and back down past Nevada Falls. The purple flower is (I think) harvest brodiaea, which looks a lot like our local Ithuriel's spear and is abundant and vibrant along the trail out to Rancheria. Wading knee-deep across the Valley floor flooded by the icy Merced is not something I would be eager to do again... or would I? (See my colleague MK in the last photo...)

Reading roundup

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker

The third novel in the Regeneration trilogy is thematically and stylistically the most ambitious of the series and, for the most part, equally as compelling as the first two. The book's characters are haunted by dreams, daydreams, memories, and ghosts– real or metaphorical– and by very real traumas and dilemmas. I was not completely convinced by the passages in which real-life protagonist William Rivers recalls and reflects upon his encounters with Melanesians in his earlier life as an ethnographer, but one cannot dismiss the brutal irony of a British colonial culture that could fear and condemn ritual acts of human sacrifice in the South Seas while sending countless thousands of its own youth off to the killing fields of Europe... "Dulce et decorum." 

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin

The multiverse plot done right. Le Guin's short novel blends her characteristic humanism with an Aladdin's lamp "be careful what you wish for" fable– the source of the story's humor as well as its sting. In its 184 pages you'll also get an alien invasion, a prescient portrayal of post climate-change Portland, and a very sweet love story, all wrapped up in a well-written 184-page package. Bravo! 

Bad Actors
Mick Herron

The latest Slough House; a solid addition to the series. The baddest (in the bad sense) of the bad actors is, as usual, a populist-authoritarian political grifter. It's all about politics, as well as the professional love-hate relationship between our "hero" Jackson Lamb and his ally-nemesis, head spook Diana Taverner. Their symbiosis and grudging mutual respect form the driving force of the series. Comparisons with Le Carré are not entirely apt, given the mischievously comic tone of Herron's books, but the two authors definitely share similarly cynical politics and a sense that the career British spies they write about are – to paraphrase Churchill – the worst people in the world, except for all the others. While recovering from my first-ever and nasty case of covid recently, I watched A Most Wanted Man, the film adaptation of Le Carré's novel starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The plot is not Le Carré at his best, but the movie is solid, and of course Hoffman is always worth watching. He is ideal as the world-weary master spy with a conscience, a la Smiley. Jackson Lamb is cut from the same cloth, despite his cover of crass buffoonery and equal-opportunity bigotry. As the series continues (now up to #8), with each of Lamb's triumphs and acts of kindness and loyalty it has become increasingly implausible that any of the characters is really taken in by Lamb's schtick. The avid reader certainly knows better. I await #9 nonetheless.

The Wallcreeper
Nell Zink

There's little question that this novella is well written, and it features some appealing birds, in particular the eponymous little fellow, a distant relative of our beloved nuthatches. As for the first-person narrator, she is alternately funny and frustrating– in a book published in 2014, I find it a little difficult to buy a protagonist who is a smart woman yet so deferential to a series of untrustworthy dudes. Is she really just in it for the sex? And I wasn't sure what to make of the quick and tidy ending. Lesson learned? Or last laugh on her? Or on us?