vexing, but completely unimportant, problem

 I'm doing my best to be welcoming of LGBT&c. folks, transgender folks, nonbinary, and the like. I understand that gender and sex are different. I get that the world is just more complicated than some of us would like to think it is. (I won't say I'm good at, or comfortable with, this acceptance, but I'm doing the best I can.)

But my language hasn't caught up. I generally refer to associates, acquaintances, and friends, with the usage "honorific + last name": Mr White, Ms Black; when possible (and when I'm aware) Dr Blue, Professor Green, sometimes Counselor Brown, and so on.

But I don't know a non-gendered honorific, with widespread acceptance and comprehension, for a person who doesn't have a designation. I can refer to that person by first name (and am usually directed to do so), but first, it's unseemly (to me) to use first names in the occasional address of some people, and second, when I usually use the (to me) more formal "honorific + last name" construction, to call an individual by first name seems to imply a familiarity I do not want to project.

Sometimes I have tried the construction "Friend Grey", which also implies familiarity (I stole that from the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends; some of their more staid members refer to everyone as "Friend Grey", in the belief that the single designation removes the hierarchy that the more formal titles convey [some Friends are deeply moved to treat all people as equals]). It's not ideal.

I could, of course, revert to calling people by first name. In modern America, it's the default. But I like the little distancing implied by the construction I use. I'm both socially inept, and somewhat snobbish and anachronistic (somewhat??!), so "honorific + last name" suits my desires.

It is, of course, likely of no importance to anyone but me. And I have more important things to which to attend (like actually treating people with acceptance and respect, including myself; I've got a huge portion of pretty privilege to manage, and one of the ways that works out is how my own aging - lines on the face, grey hair, my changing body - makes me uncomfortable allowing myself actions and attitudes that others appear to take for granted).

I need to think about this. (Or maybe, as one of my acquaintances has pointed out on other, similar issues, I'm already overthinking it.)

good closing speech

 Youtube recently fed me a video from Psychic Derailleur through my feed. I watched it and liked it, and watched another, and liked it, and another, and now I'm smitten.

He closes his videos with a little speech: "I hope something good happens to you today. Until next time, be nice; work hard; ride bikes; play music when you can."

I like it. I might steal it.

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.

apothanein thelo

 The Sibyl at Cumae was the priestess of the oracle there. She lived about a thousand years, but aged miserably during that time; she had gotten long life as a gift from a god (sources differ), but when she refused the advances of Apollo, she was allowed to age, as she had not asked for eternal youth.

In Petronius's Satyricon, Trimalchus finds her shriveled to a tiny lump and kept alive in a jar. He asks her, "Sibyl, what do you want?" (in Greek, Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; pronounced more or less "Sibylla, ti theleis"). She replies, "I want to die" (in Greek, ἀποθανεῖν θέλω, pronounced "apothanein thelo").

I learned this, as you did, not from reading the Satyricon, but from beating T S Eliot's The Waste Land to death in my English Lit class. 

I know someone who, if she knew the story, would empathize. But I doubt she ever knew the story, and the ravages of time will have taken it from her even if she ever did.

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.)

and on currying favor

 The good opinion of a fool is not worth having.

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.

thoughts on "hamilton"

The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I are watching "Hamilton" on the Disney Network (I can only take watching anything in small doses these days, so we stopped for the night about forty minutes in).

Rap doesn't move me the way more traditional musics do. The poetry plays with rhyme, assonance, and meter (I find myself thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins). The sometimes-startling images I get from other forms of poetry I have not heard in the little bit of rap with which I'm familiar, (and that's OK, I don't think that's what rappers are trying to do), and what I've heard so far in "Hamilton" has not made me change my mind about that.

It's my contention that American musical theater will become (or has become) a repertory form, the way Italian opera is, and "Hamilton" represents a new form-within-the-form. I think part of the buzz is the novelty, and the adaptation of street music to musical theater. I find that interesting.

One thing rankles, though, and I can't get past it. So far, all - ALL - of the people in the cast are persons of color, EXCEPT for the one loyalist and the by-turns-comical-and-threatening King George. They are pure white.

This is racist casting. There is no other way to describe it. It is perhaps understandable given the history of casting all forms of theatric art. It is racist, nonetheless.

finally seeing friends, and 65 for 65

Group rides for our bike club, the Princeton Freewheelers, have been cancelled for weeks. As noted in Tom H's blog, some of us have been gathering for meetings on Zoom. But it's not the same as riding together.

While they haven't been riding together, some of Tom's Insane Bike Posse have been riding to a meeting point, and hinging out for a few minutes, shouting at each other at a "social distance" (see some of the pictures from this post in Laura OLPH's blog).

I haven't been going. I've been a bit freaked about the whole COVID-19 thing.

But with the governor opening the parks this weekend, I thought I might like to meet the gang. Tom suggested a meeting at a location in Bordentown, 30 miles from me one-way over roads that are not the most bike-friendly. But he talked about a start from the Mercer Park East Picnic Area, a much-more-reasonable 20 miles away, over less-threatening roads. I could make their 9:30 am meetup easily if I left the house at 7:30, and the weather looked cooperative.

I made it so easily that I was half an hour early. There weren't many in the lot.

I decided to make the most of the time by rolling over to the main entrance to the park. It might be hard to maintain social distance on the park path, so I went by road. The entrance sign warned:

but I figured that all would be right in the world because they spelled "cancelled" with two L's, the way I prefer. (Yes, I made a point of getting a picture of the sign. In fact, I got three; this is the best of the lot.)

I rolled back to see that folks had arrived, and they were, in fact, (mostly) masked and keeping social distance.

After some in-person chat, we decided to go our separate ways. Some of them were riding with Tom for at least a while; I was going my own way. As I was fiddling around with the bike GPS, up rolled Peter G, just that bit too late to have met anyone else.

We also chatted for a bit, and went off.

I had only about twenty miles to get home... but I have a sixty-fifth birthday around the corner. Now, among our bike club members, there's a tradition that the old geezers (well, we're mostly in that crowd) should ride their age in miles around their birthdays. Mine comes early in the riding season, so I haven't done it most years, and I decided, since I was on my own today, that I would. Instead of going straight back, I set a route that I thought would add enough miles...

...and it mostly did. I was a few miles short as I was closing in on home, so I turned south as I neared home and retraced my earlier steps (or pedalstrokes), until I got home with just over 65 miles.

Happy birthday to me.

a bunch of annoying hills

Rowdy lookin' assemblage, ain't they?

Good heavens, NINE riders came out for my 38-miler out of Blackwells MIls today. Laura OLPH described the route as "a bunch of annoying hills",and I don't dispute her facts (look at the elevation profile on the ride page), although I think the collective noun for "annoying hills" needs to be something other than "bunch". We came up with a few alternatives:

• An affliction of annoying hills;
• An infection of annoying hills; 
• A hassle of annoying hills (thanks to Bob N for that one).

I'm opening the comments to suggestions for the best collective noun for the purpose. The favorite will win a mention in a future post and my admiration, and nothing else.

But nine riders, on a day that didn't top 45°F. Ricky G, Peter G, Tom H, Jack H, Dave H, Laura OLPH, Ira N (a fast boy, new to me), Bob N, and Pete R. I'm honored that they figured my ride was the best option for their day.

(I need to assign a few more nicknames to The Usual Suspects; the simple recitation of names needs some more flavor.)

The new-to-me fellow, Ira N, gets special mention for two reasons: first, he had excellent socks (I collect bike socks, even if only in pictures):

And second, for the arresting aero brakes on his Trek bike. They're reminiscent of the fabled Campagnolo Deltas:

In that picture above, you can see an aero baffle that extends when the fork is turned. But I just think the brakes are gorgeous. On no other bike, perhaps, with the aero feature work the was it does on that Trek, but the brakes are beautiful, even with the road grit on 'em.

I don't think they're TRP T860's; do you?

Now, these folks can complain (I'm sure they will), but I avoided what I consider the most annoying hill by rerouting to avoid that climb up to Mount Rose. The elevation is the same, but the climb is spread over a much longer distance by going up Bayberry rather than Carter. And on Bayberry, you get to see... SHEEP!

Oh, my stars.

Near the golf course:

We stopped at the Boro Bean:

Bike pics:

Peter G had turned off to go home before the stop, and we dawdled too long at the Boro Bean for Ira and Dave, who left before the rest of us. Laura turned off to go home, and whe the rest of us turned up on Hollow Road, Ricky G went straight back on 518 (which is straighter and flatter than my route, but longer). So this was another ride of attrition... but I've already used that title at least once, and the collective for "annoying hills" was too good to miss.

Send in your entries promptly! This offer won't wait!

geri

My twenty-something niece, as the tribes were gathered for Thanksgiving yesterday, referred to some of her aging Floridian neighbors as "geri's". It's obviously from "geriatric", and just as obviously derogatory; when I asked if I (at 63) qualified as a geri, she said, "Maybe at 70".

I just love it. Urban Dictionary lists it, but at this writing it's down about sixth in ranking (OTOH, number one is obviously a vanity post, so the ranking system may not be ideal).

I intend to be a real, pain-in-the-ass geri to every damn millennial and Gen-Xer I meet. Get off my damn lawn!

(Actually, with all the talk, even among some of the millennials at dinner yesterday, I may be the only one in the family with hope for the future. Texting, Snapchat, Instagram, and the like included, the kids are all right. They will work out their lives, just as every generation does.)

bikes can pass

In a post on the Princeton Freewheelers Facebook page, Laura OLPH posted the following:

8:00 a.m. Windsor Road is blocked between Edinburg and South for emergency wire work. Bikes can pass.

Blake said that the last sentence should be the Hill Slug motto (but we already HAVE a Hill Slug motto ...), and Laura challenged me: "Latin me that, Plain Jim!"

Well, alright then. It's pretty simple that "They can pass" is "possunt praeterire". The problem is specifying the bikes. Starley didn't invent the Rover until long after the end of the Empire, and even the Ordinary and the Draisine did not see the light of day until the sun had long set on the Caesars. The word "bicycle" is more Greek than Latin, and the direct Latin might be something like "dirota".

Well, that sucks.

However, in this case, the French come to our rescue. They've happily adopted the nickname "velo" for the bicycle. It has the advantage of a Latin root (for "speed), and it's easily transmogrified into the pseudo-Latin "velus" (second declension; you learned it in week three). We need a nominative plural, so "veli".

So the sentence is:

veli possunt praeterire.

I maintain that the Hill Slugs already have a motto. I further submit that THIS, if anything, should be the motto of Tom Hammel's Insane Bike Posse.

Edit: Professor Jack Lynch reminds me that word order is important, and adjusts (correctly) to  praeterire veli possunt. He then suggests, "And then screw with the orthography with 'Præterire veli possvnt.'" At which point I give up any pretension to literacy, and return to mumbling and grunting at my wrenches.

mine, too

I was catching up with the ODDman posts I've allowed to slip by, and I came upon a graphic that said, "Using Latin phrases to look smart is my modus operandi."

It's mine, too.

I was gonna copy the graphic here, but since the only thing on it is the text, it's really unnecessary, don't you think?

ODDman's post here.

'merica magazine

I gotta link to this:

Not everyone will like this magazine. The following people in particular: If you insist that “America is the greatest” country in the world, in all things, even after you are presented with contrary evidence. Anyone who has a “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper sticker. If you are proud of not having a passport. If you’ve ever cluelessly asked why there isn’t a “White History Month.” If your response to “Black Lives Matter” is a tone-deaf “All Lives Matter.” If you support a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. In fact if you wrap yourself in the flag – American or that treasonous one with the X in the middle. If the image you have in your head when you hear the word “American” is always a straight, white man. If you have ever unequivocally supported nuking people “over there.” If in 2002 you actually called French fries “Freedom fries.” If you have ever asked a native born Asian-American “Where are you from?” If you’ve ever told a black American in a surprised tone that “You are so well-spoken.” If you want a border fence built separating the United States from Mexico. If you think America was founded as a Christian nation. If FOX news is your 24/7 background noise. If you’re bellicose. Nationalistic. Xenophobic. Jingoistic.

The following people may possibly like this magazine: If you get pissed off at being an American, but you wouldn’t trade it with anything else. If you stand-up when the national anthem is sung at baseball games but you feel a bit embarrassed about it. If you’d never pretend to be Canadian when traveling abroad but you sometimes still hate to admit that you’re American. If you’ve ever gotten misty during the charge scene in Glory. Or when Sullivan Ballou’s letter is read in Ken Burn’s The Civil War. Or at any point in his baseball documentary. If you understand that the real America might exist in Wasilla Alaska but that it also equally exists in a Hell’s Kitchen gay bar. If you own a copy of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (extra points if it’s on vinyl). If you’ve ever wanted to visit the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. If you get a bit chocked up when you see immigrants take the oath of citizenship. If you actually (at least sort of) believe in Emma Lazarus’ words on that New Colossus in New York Harbor. If you see no contradiction in liking both country music and hip hop. If you know that Moby-Dick is the greatest novel ever written. If you stop to read historical markers. If you ever get emotional when randomly thinking about Abraham Lincoln. Or when going to the Lincoln Memorial, or the Jefferson Memorial, or Gettysburg, or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. If you can’t quite shake the feeling that American exceptionality might be real – while at the same time admitting it doesn’t always mean “exceptionally good” and sadly often means “exceptionally bad.” If you’re one of the roughs, an American.

I gotta remember to got back there.

you could look it up

What I didn't tell youse-all in yesterday's post is that when I met Laura OLPH yesterday, she presented me with a pre-production copy of her husband's latest book. Professor Jack Lynch has published a book, entitled You Could Look It Up :The Reference Shelf From Babylon To Wikipedia, about everything you ever wanted to know about reference books and sources.

I've been waiting impatiently for him to finish it for years. Doesn't that sound great?

Well, it does to me, but apparently it doesn't to others; when I tell people about it, they give me the same look I would get if I said I was going for a fitting for a tin-foil hat.

Jack's inscription to me is a delight:

For Not-So-Plain Jim, Who may be just nerdy enough to enjoy this book.*

*No guarantees expressed or implied.

I'm foregoing all other literary pursuits in favor of this one.

cursing: sign of bigger vocabulary

According to this article in the Washington Post, "fluency in 'taboo words' is correlated with having a larger vocabulary in general."

I don't care if it's %$#^%^ true; I'm stickin' to my *^$%# f-bombs.

xkcd isolation comic

In a post last month, I pointed out that I didn't think our cell-phone culture will be the end of humanity. Today, I saw this on xkcd:

1. It's an honor to be agreed with by Randall Munroe.
2. You ARE checking in with xkcd regularly, aren't you?

narcissus and echo

While I don't think cell phones, texting, and twitter are going to be the death of civil discourse (such gloomy predictions have been made before, at least since the age of movable-type printing*), I do think this take on the Narcissus/Echo story is great:

From today's Oddman. There's another one there about traditional and simplified English that's too good to be true, so I won't post it, but it made me smile.

*FWIW, while I do think we have lost a former greatness that was a result of a no-longer-shared Western canon of culture, I do not think this means that we will devolve into grunting and pointing as our primary means of communication. First, that great culture was not shared by most of the people in it, including women, the poor, and the uneducated (and it was not even available to the rest of the world). Secondly, I have faith in humanity. Art will arise. Given time, art will always arise.

twitter spelling test

Not really fair, of course; I went to grammar school in the 1960's, when such stuff was actually taught.

Created by Oatmeal

pi day, tew is home, and the monstrum cracoviae

Today, in the shorthand date format used in the US (mo/day/2-digit year), is 3/14/15. At 9:26:53 this morning, it will be 3/14/15 9:26:53, making a perfect representation of pi (π) out to nine digits to the right of the decimal, the only time this will happen this century. I'm a liberal-arts guy; I know just enough about math to get in over my head, but I'm also just enough of a nerd to find this delightful.

In other news, The Excellent Wife (TEW) arrived back from Poland last night. She found the house in good enough condition that I'm not in trouble. For both of these facts, I give thanks to the god in whom I don't believe.

In other other news, I've got a name for the new bike: the Krakow Monster.

In 1559, the estimable Pierre Boaistuau published Histoires Prodigieuses, one of the first picture books of monsters. In it, he related the story of the Krakow Monster, a beast born in 1547 with heads on all its joints, a sure sign of the work of the devil. It lived only four hours, but before it died, it said, "Watch; the Lord cometh" (whether in Latin, in the Polish vulgate of the time, in Boaistuau's French, or in the archaic English quoted is not made clear). The editor of this page from Strange Science said, "By the time this monster was 'born,' Luther and Philipp Melanchthon had published pamphlets about other monsters engendered by divine displeasure with the papacy. Convictions that heretical beliefs were on the rise likely played a role in the appearance of this beast."

I like this pic better:

In any case, since the new bike was made as a result of TEW's trip to Krakow, and since it's undoubtedly a monster (while it doesn't have heads on all its joints, it does have the ungainly combination of that cheap-ass Altus derailleur and those lovely Nitto bars and IRD cranks), I will henceforth refer to the Crosscheck as the Krakow Monster. Unless, of course, I revert to Latin, when it will be either the Monstrum Cracoviae or the Monstrum Cracoviensis, depending on whether I want to use the real genitive or that johnny-come-lately genitive-of-place ending. (After all, the college I attended was Collegium Cathedrale Immaculatae Conceptionae Brooklyniensis. Brooklyniensis? Really? Come on!)