a couple of random thoughts

 For the past several years (except for a break for the COVID-19 debacle), The Princeton Public Library and the McCarter Theater have co-sponsored an event where readers join to read the entire text of Dickens' A Christmas Carol aloud (link to the 2022 event). The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I have done it several times. I was honored to be chosen as the first reader this year; I got to declaim, "Marley was dead, to begin with," and to drive home the 19th-century jokes with which Dickens peppered his manuscript. (The entire event is a time commitment of about three hours, but the story really is a great one to have read to you. While we could not this year due to other commitments, TEW and I have stayed for the whole thing in the past, and the variety in quality of the readers is part of the experience - yes, there are some halting and inexperienced readers, but there are great ones, and wonderful accents from many of the voices that make up Central Jersey. But you're also welcome to drop in and leave whenever you'd like.)

And one of my own personal traditions is to read the whole of A Christmas Carol for myself every December, and it reminds me that it's time to start.

The person who read after me was TEW, and the woman after her had this wonderful Indian accent (Hindu? Gujarati?). I have not heard Dickens played on that orchestra before, and it was novel and delightful... but THAT reminded me of one of my pet peeves: actors being credited with the lines they deliver. Judy Garland delivered the line, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore*," but it was said by character Dorothy Gale, and it was written by the screenwriters (Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf**, or at least one of them).

Some actors are marvellously smart and verbal, and able to improvise (Devid Ogden Stiers apparently came up with the "...promises you don't intend to keep" line in the Disney Beauty and the Beast), and many others are clearly not. Those great quotes that you've been taking from movies are mostly written by uncredited writers, not the glamorous actors to whom you've been accrediting them.

I'll go back to Christmas Carol now. Cratchit, after all, needs to slide on the ice a few dozen times, and then run off to Camden Town to play Blind Man's Buff.

*NOT "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." Sheesh.

**How could a person with a name like that be anything OTHER than a writer?

better ramblin wrench logo

 The Excellent Wife (TEW) had the idea of putting him on a bicycle. I love what the artist did:

Go see him on my business page.

ramblin wrench art

 Remember I decided to start bringing bicycle maintenance to the customer, and called it "Ramblin' Wrench"?

I'm still in discussion with the artist, but I mostly like it. The cost was less than what I get for two basic services!

I also started a blog, just to have a web presence, and to have a dated use of the name in case of a trademark dispute.

modern music

Of course I don't like modern popular music. It wasn't made with me in mind.

In fact, in view of the fact that I'm an old, white guy with too much education, it probably suits the people for whom it was made better that I don't like it. Can you imagine what they'd have to record and publish if they found I did like modern music?

giving up on latin

 Those who know me, know my intellectual snobbiness goes deep. But the little humility I've got demands I point out the limits of my learning. As my ol' pal, Desiderius Erasmus, wrote, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." He wrote it in Latin, so there's some latitude on the exact translation.

I'm giving up on Latin. I've just seen that there is an animated entertainment to be released entitled The Legend of Vox Machina. It's a Dungeons & Dragons story, and not my cup of tea. But that's not what I'm whining about; I'm old and cranky, and I find fault with almost everything that began after about 1980 (we can probably blame Reagan and his supporters).

The title, specifically the Latin, doesn't make sense. Latin uses word endings to determine how a word is used in a sentence, which has the advantage that you can completely upset the word order for the purposes of emphasis (one example of word endings changing to determine meaning in English is the use of 's to show possession; English, however, generally uses word order to determine word use: "man bites dog" is fundamentally different from "dog bites man").

And the word ending of Machina is wrong; it's the ending you would use if the machine in question were the object of a preposition. If you want to say "The Voice of the Machine", you'd say vox machinae.

I'm sure they took the term deus ex machina, "the god from out of the machine", and just yanked the word into their title (the term comes from drama. You can go ask your high-school English teacher about it; it refers to a practice in ancient Greek plays of getting a situation all messed up, then having a god come down from on high to clean things up [sometimes lowered on a mechanical platform, the "machine" in question]. They evidently liked that; modern critics and audiences consider it cheating [if you're gonna have a device fix everything up in act three, you have to set it into your play in act one]). In the case of deus ex machina, the ending of machina  is correct because machina is the object of the preposition ex, "out of".

It rankles just enough that I wrote this post about it. And I know so little Latin, that I usually have to go back to my textbooks (from 1973-74) to make sure I got stuff correct.

There are probably twenty people in the world who would see the title of the show, know enough Latin to know it's incorrect, AND get cranky enough to "spill some ink" about it (is it spilling ink if I'm blogging?).

Enough. I think it's time to give up on Latin. Nobody cares, and I don't need to broadcast any more examples of just what a wacko I am.

classical music

 Classical music is racist, misogynistic (oh yeah, like a lot), and colonialist.

Much of it is also great art, and I love it.

Both of these things are, uncomfortably, true.

halloween ride

 Yeah, I didn't lead a couple weeks ago because I was on the Fall Foliage Weekend hosted by the Bicycle Club of Philadelphia... and I didn't lead last week because Laura OLPH led her annual "Let's go see the Halloween decorations on Union Street in Lambertville" ride.

Yeah, not a lot of love for Republicans in Lambertville.

What did I say about Republicans?

It started out looking like it was going to be wet.

It turned out not to be a problem; some of it was gorgeous.

After judging the Halloween stuff, we repaired to Union Coffee, which I think I like better than anybody else does (certainly better than Laura does). I can't tell good coffee from bad, and the sweets are better than at Rojo's... also, there's a certain alternate-sexuality vibe here I like. When they find out I'm a cisgender Caucasian boomer, they're never gonna let me back in. (Martin G sent me this next picture.)

Ride page. More climb than you would have thought.

I've got a ride posted for this coming Sunday. It's time to go be responsible again.

no bottom to my racism

 Early in the pandemic, I had an experience that brought home to me how deeply I harbor thoughtless misogyny. I'm no stranger to racism, either, as I was reminded after seeing this video:

There have been a number of responses, many disagreeing with Mr Neely and defending Heinrich Schenker. But for me, the fact that I accepted, without thought, that the default, correct "music theory" was that of German composers of the 18th century, was another sign that, no matter how hard I try to eliminate racism from my life, there are always more layers.

And are we really to say that Mozart's harmonies are more perfect than, say Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's, or Stevie Wonder's? 

The most important American musical innovations come from the blending of all sorts and sources of music here. Dvorak, for one, according to Wikipedia, "supported the concept that African-American and Native American music should be used as a foundation for the growth of American music. He felt that through the music of Native Americans and African-Americans, Americans would find their own national style of music." So why have, apparently, no American concert composers since Gershwin even made reference to that? Why is not American symphonic music full of blues and hip hop?

not pedantic, enthusiastic

 

 

I might do something like this.

The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I sometimes go down rabbit holes of shades of meaning, tenses, subjunctives, and the like, and when we do, one of us will often look at the other with the knowing eye and intone, "When English majors marry...".

Original here. How are you not checking out XKCD every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? It is one of the last bulwarks of brains and sense against the onslaught of anti-intellectualism, anti-vax, and all the other anti's that will bring down civilization. (One of the things I love about XKCD is that when I don't understand it [it's OK; you probably won't understand all of them; Mr Munroe is brilliant, and makes comics in many areas of his learning], I find that topics relating to the comic come up as some of the top suggestions in my Google searches. When smart people don't know stuff, they go check it out.)

elitist

 In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the deplorables, as Hillary called ‘em, consider me one of the despised elites.

• I’ve got a graduate degree.
• I’ve never lived more than thirty miles from New York City. Although my preferred city now is Philadelphia (not that Philly is any improvement, according to the deplorables), for decades, “the city” meant Manhattan.
•  As a child, I was easily grossed out. It was never my choice to play in mud; I never wanted to catch frogs (when the opportunity arose, as it did annually, at a vacation spot); I even eschewed eating oranges and tomatoes because the insides seemed just too icky.
• As a teen, I affected an English accent. For this and other reasons, my homophobe father, at the end of his wits because he thought I was going to be gay, thought to send me to military school. (It might have helped with the affected accent. It wouldn’t have helped with the elitism. Nothing needed to be done about the gay; that never materialized, although I know more about musical theater of the 50’s and 60’s than any straight man you know.)
• One of my favorite books is Moby Dick. I’ve probably read it eight times.
• I decided as a teen to learn about classical music because it was supposedly the best, and I wanted access to the best.
• Similarly with art. I hated the fact that there was this supposedly excellent stuff, and I didn’t know anything about it, so I learned some stuff. The thing that attracted me was that people I respected said it was great, not that I saw anything in it myself (although I do now, after having learned some of the things to look for).
• After learning just enough Latin to get into trouble, I have continued to use it. It is not unusual for me to reply to the checkout clerk’s cheery “Have a nice day!” with “pax tecum, gratias te ago” (“Peace to you, and I give [do] you thanks”). (And I know that Latin phrase wants a semicolon in the middle, but the semicolon hadn’t been invented at the time Latin was still a living language.)
• I know how to use semicolons; as a result, I do use semicolons. Sometimes I’ll stack three or four into the same sentence.
• And probably dozens of other things. If you know me, you can probably come up with your own list.
  

The deplorables think we look down on 'em, and hate us for it (among other things). I never thought to look down on 'em for cultural reasons... but I have no tolerance for the homophobia, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or other traits they display. (And I can't be the only person who has noticed that the people who appear to be most afraid of, for example, an Islamic invasion are the ones who have the least contact with actual Muslims.)

And not all the people with whom I disagree politically have all the traits of deplorables. But they have supported a man who is one of the worst, and this brings all of their bona fides into question. (Like, will any of us ever again take seriously the good faith of the older, white Evangelical crowd?)

I'm mostly going to be signing off from politics; I've allowed it to damage my already-fragile mental health. I had to post this. But, for at least a while, with Candide, I'm going to tend my own (elitist) garden.

why he runs is why I ride

Of course it's too small; it might even be too small if you click on the pic. Instead, go check out the original, and then add Incidental Comics to your regular web check-ins.

You're welcome.

autumn leaves & lambertville halloween

(Above, Luis C and autumn.)

I had thought last week's ride, from Lambertville up to Black Eddy in Pennsylvania, would have been the best foliage ride of the year... but it wasn't. This week, Laura OLPH planned (or improvised) a ride from The Pig to Lambertville, and this ride was far better for an autumn-in-NJ experience that last week.

I got to Pennington early, and found this biker who's not carrying an ounce of extra fat:

In the same yard was this witch, taking off from the lawn for some unsavory errand or other.

I got back to find Raj, who doesn't usually dust off his bike for a ride of fewer than 100 miles, was out, and thereafter up came Peter R, Peter G, and Luis C; Laura and Ricky G (sportin' a few days' growth of beard) rolled up after that. Off we went. Laura didn't have a specific route, and made it up as she went.

Fall has come.

I like that above, of the trailers in the field with the leaves behind.

It's October in Lambertville, which means Halloween decorations are up. Some of them rival Fifth Avenue at Christmas for elaborateness and artistic merit.

I liked that above with the various phones on the tree.

It seems to me there was more at this house than there was last week. I love this one.

That scary-lookin' creature above is just poised to jump up and fly away.

Across the street were these:

Luis said that if he were ten years old, he's not sure if he would have had the courage to go up to this house:

I think I agree with him.

These dolls were a bit creepy...

And so on to Rojo's for the stop. While we were there, two couples came in on tandems. This one separates into three sections for travel:

... and this one has electric assist, AND has separation between the captain's and the stoker's pedals; one can coast while the other pedals.

More autumn in NJ:

Luis was rockin' an excellent pair of bike socks; we agreed the world would be the worse if I didn't get a picture:

Mules, I think. I haven't been able to find a link to 'em.

Ride page.

I'm writing this on Sunday (the day after); I didn't post a ride for today because of the predicted rain (which came)... but now there seems to be some brightness in the sky. I've just completed my annual breakdown-and-rebuild of the Yellow Maserati, and the lower headset bearing will need some attention; a new one is on order. Maybe I'll put on a mile or two just to make sure the bike was reassembled correctly.