Women Only Train

I went to see Women Only Train.
It's a show that's of hard to explain.

Well, I don't want to put any spoilers up here, because it's partly a horror play for the Halloween season.

As an audience member, you can choose to be part of the action - as a matter of fact, you can choose to be the lead character. You go on stage where there's no fourth wall at all:

You're an innocent on a journey
who may end up on a gurney.

I did it, of course. A friend of mine, who also did it, commented that it reminded him a bit of one of those point-of-view video games.

If you're easily scared,
be warned and prepared.

Next Tuesday

I'll have to check on the state of my checking account:

$10K asking price for photo with Michelle Obama at fundraiser

Seems high.
I think I'll wait.
By and by
It may deflate.

Boom Bust

I've been trying to figure out where the anti-boomer sentiment is coming from. A fair chunk of it is numerically inaccurate, in the sense of citing non-boomers as evidence of boomer failings.

But I think I've got it.

Our kids have grown up and are mad at us. Well, not my kids so much, but a lot of my fellow-boomers' kids are angry about the messy world they've inherited and they know it must be our fault. No doubt, in aggregate, some of it really is "our" fault. A few things are even "my" fault in particular. For instance, I have made some really awful puns in my life - puns for which I haven't yet been punished.

I think we're being unfairly picked on as a group. But I've decided it's pointless to defend ourselves. After all - who knows us better than our children?

Rather than trying to reason,
I'm simply committing treason,
denouncing my own generation,
in a spirit of self-flagellation:

The baby boom
is the cause of doom -
it has sucked all the oxygen out of the room!

Rodent Envy

Squirrel on the power line,
I think your balance skills are fine.

If I could balance as you do,
I'd hop on that high wire too.

Character Judgment

Last night we had an interesting discussion centered around the way heroic characters in Ayn Rand's novels deal with errors of judgment and moral failings. The interesting thing is that they don't demonstrate a quick inclination to moral condemnation, the way her later essays often do.

Is it the case that her attitude altered
towards those who faltered?

Pondering Uganda

We're sending troops to Uganda. Because some crazy rebels are killing people there.

Heading a movement based on a mix of religion and brutality, Kony a self-styled mystic and religious prophet, claims to be fighting on divine orders to establish theocratic rule based on the Biblical Ten Commandments.

An American general is quoted in the story. He's the head of "U.S. Africa Command". I didn't know we even had such a thing.

Which reminds me, one of the great thing about talking to foreigners, is you always learn about odd things the U.S. government is doing to their countries. It's always something the foreigner doesn't like - and usually something that you, as an American, have never even heard of.

It could be military,
it could be financial,
it could be imaginary,
or even quite substantial.

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Dennis Ritchie died October 8. Like Steve Jobs, he was a pioneer of modern computing. But he wasn't a brilliant visionary marketing guy. He was a brilliant visionary coding guy.

Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).

Ritchie's invention of C and his role in the development of UNIX alongside Ken Thompson has placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing.

Underneath the hood
of the MacBook Pro
is OS X,
and Unix makes it go.

Yawn

Modern political debates are so rarely debate-like. And that goes double for intra-party presidential debates!

It's hard to be really critical in a debate
when you don't know
which current foe
will end up as your running mate.

Marathon Mystery Death

A firefighter, a veteran marathoner, died Sunday while not-quite-finished running the Chicago Marathon.

An autopsy on the 35-year-old North Carolina firefighter Monday did not provide them with answers; the autopsy was inconclusive, authorities said.

If this were that TV show - CSI,
by now we'd know what made him die.

But, it's real life, and we don't. He collapsed very near the medical tent. There wasn't much delay about getting him help. But to no avail.

This sort of thing happens, but it's extremely rare, which is part of the reason, I suppose, that they don't understand what happens some of the time.

So far, my luck has been good.
Knock on wood.

The Rhetoric of Nod

John Ralston Saul, a Canadian writer who is currently the head of International PEN, an association of writers:

Many political leaders think that it is dangerous to speak well. In fact, they are looking to bore people – and we feel that. As a result, when we stand up and say real things, people are quite shocked.

Their content may be nearly null
but if they can only lull
their audience into the proper trance,
their agenda may advance.

TSA Gives An Inch

The TSA has belatedly realized that little children are not likely to be shoe bombers.

So in a welcome step for little feet and parents, children 12 and younger are no longer required to remove their shoes every time they go through airport security.

I'm never going to be 12 again. But I hope that by the time I'm 65 there will be a senior citizen exemption as well!

I'm tired of putting my shoes
into that grey plastic box.

Next flight, I may even choose
to travel only in socks.

Pontification

The WSJ ran an article today by Andy Crouch who claims Steve Jobs was a prophet in a secular-but-religious sense. Crouch sees Apple's bitten-apple symbol as the biblical fruit of the tree of knowledge, and he's not too happy about this newfangled technology cult. Crouch riffs on ideas from a Heideggerian:

The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence.

So technology is defiance of divine will?
What swill.

Impossible Crystals

You hear sometimes that modern science is no longer an individual effort. That it's a team sport. Then someone like Daniel Shechtman wins the Nobel prize for Chemistry.

In 1982 he discovered a kind of crystal that was thought to be a mathematical impossibility - a crystal with "five-fold symmetry"...

...that is, the atoms in it formed a pattern that appeared essentially the same when rotated by a fifth of a turn, or 72 degrees

But the science, unfortunately, was already settled.

When he finally told colleagues about his discovery, he was met with dismissal and ridicule. His claims caused such embarrassment that his boss asked him to leave the research group. The results drew a similar hostile response when he finally published them in Physical Review Letters in November 1984.

Eventually, science re-settled. Shechtman was right.

And It turned out other researchers had even seen the same telltale diffraction pattern which he had spotted. But they had dismissed it.

He believed what was before his eyes.
For that he wins a Nobel Prize.

Occupied

Perfect:

A liberal organizer told the Daily Caller on Thursday afternoon that he paid some Hispanics to attend “Occupy DC” protests happening in the nation’s capital.

At least in this underemployed nation
these people have an occupation.

What Street

The press seems to love these Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. And I heard we had a branch in Chicago. But I haven't seen them. And I'm wondering if it's because we lack the requisite environment - namely:

We don't have a street named Wall.
Not a lane, not a boulevard, nothing at all!

But some of the surrounding towns do. Maybe they headed out past the city limits?

Perhaps in some quiet burb
they can find a Wall Street to disturb!

Cool Again

Some weeks back, Virginia Postrel published an essay on "How Steve Jobs Made Business Cool Again".

There's a streak of hyperbole in that. Lots of people still don't think business is cool. "Corporations" remain the great bogey-man of the left.

But perhaps she is correct that a corner was turned with the excitement that burst out of Silicon Valley.

Nobody ever asked why Steve Jobs kept working after he was rich. Everyone understood.

Everyone understood.
He loved his work and found it good.

I Love Them, But...

Shikha Dalmia explains why intellectuals are so good at messing things up:

Ordinary mortals don’t engage in fancy mental gymnastics to reach conclusions that defy common sense.

Beware of drastic
mental gymnastics
that start with a flash
but end in a crash.

Imperfect Timing

Nobel winner dies
before hearing of prize.

They didn't know he was already dead when they announced he had won. As a rule, they don't award to the dead. But since they announced it already, they decided to cut some slack, and let the prize money go to his family. Sounds like they'll get about 300,000 Euros.

The Nobel Peace prize winner is due to be announced Friday.

Can you win the peace prize twice?
I giving it to our president again would be nice.

Fogged Judgment

Maybe he just always wanted a ride in an ambulance:

A 36-year-old intoxicated man stole an ambulance from Norwegian-American Hospital early Sunday before crashing and needing treatment from another ambulance for his injuries, according to Chicago police.

His method seems slightly insane
and also simply not right,
but in the end he did obtain
2 ambulance rides in one night.

The Problem

I really liked Peggy Noonan's column today. She detects a jump in patriotism among American's professional classes. Which sounds like a good thing to me. And she lashes out at the political class's obsession with crafting narratives and telling stories:

Here's the problem: There is no story. At the end of the day, there is only reality. Things work or they don't. When they work, people notice, and say it.

Yes, that's the problem.

At the end of the day,
that which is real
washes away
the spin and spiel.