voluntaryXchange

Marking Time

It was a year ago, just about right now, that my son and I threw all his perishables into a box, grabbed a few things, and abandoned his college apartment.†

He doesn’t have a car, so he needed a ride. I-15 was congested going north: lots of Alberta plates, cutting their snowbird season short. Coming south, the road was deserted.

Less than 10 weeks before that, I’d first heard of the unusual cases of pneumonia in China.

Less than 8 weeks before that, I’d first told my upper level macroeconomics course that they needed to start paying attention to what was going on in China. Putting together that first Monday lecture took non-stop work from the time class had ended on Friday. I started it by noting the pandemic “might be economic if it gets bad enough”.

Less than 6 weeks before that, we’d flown him down here for a fancy birthday dinner.

Less than 4 weeks before, we’d told him to start buying extra pantry stuff on each trip to the grocery.

Less than 2 weeks before, the University of Washington was the first one to close down for the remainder of the Spring semester.

The week before I picked him up had been spring break at his school. He’d stayed (like he usually does). As his break progressed, he shifted from I’m not coming back, to maybe next week, till after this thing I have to do early next week. By Thursday he was saying Sunday might work. Early Friday afternoon, he said come within 24 hours. He’d been in his favorite professor’s office when the calls started, one-by-one cancelling his travelling engagements for the next several months.

It was our last week before spring break. I literally told that advanced class on Monday that it would take a “basketball player or a game show host” getting sick to convince people this was real. On Wednesday night, the former happened. Best and worst prediction I’ve ever made.

I knew the death rates. I ran the math. At that time, the odds were better than 50/50 that someone in my immediate family would die.

It’s a year later. That college student is still living with us. For him, remote learning is actually an improvement. Not one of us has gotten COVID-19. Another kid moved out, but she stays healthy and safe. Two of us have been vaccinated.

† I’m going by the 365 day calendar. It was a Saturday that I’d made that trip. He paid rent on that empty place. Two months later, we drove up there together and put all his stuff in a storage unit.

Tom Toles Has Retired

Most people know Toles as a long time political cartoonist for The Washington Post. But before that he worked for the Buffalo News (which I read daily up through 1989), and before that for the Buffalo Courier-Express (which I only read on Sunday, when my parents got it back before I was buying my own). Here’s his last cartoon, forwarded by a friend:

In my view, Reagan was his muse, and Toles peaked when he left office.

Whenever Russian students saw this one they’d burst out laughing at the stylized birthmark.

It’s That Time of Year

I was old enough, and we had the news on in my house enough, to be cognizant of the loss of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.

In the fevered imaginings of an 11 year old, the complete disappearance of the ship (its wreckage was found only after a few days) was yet more evidence of Bermuda Triangle-like anomalies.

This infographic is timely:

Various authors have used pretty much all of these to explain the disaster.

A Glitch In the Matrix?

While sorting through some papers on my desk I found a hub from the interior of a cassette tape.

It’s the white thing with the teeth on the right side of this photo:

You have to take apart the shell of a cassette tape to get a hub out. And usually the tape itself is bonded to the hub, although it peels off easily.

It’s the part that, in the before times, once in a while you’d need to slide a pencil through to re-tighten the tape.

I’ll admit to once have about 500 tapes. And to having opened them up to fix playability problems with them.

But the last player in occasional use left out household in 2008. I still have a tape deck, but it hasn’t been used since I digitized all my rare tapes and through out the rest about 15 years ago.

Yes, I have found a few tapes lying around the house since then that I don’t have the heart to throw away.

I’ll also admit to generally having a messy desk, but it went through a clear the desk top and wipe it down cleaning just a couple of weeks ago … and really not much has piled up since then.

So where the f**k did a tape hub come from??

If it isn’t a glitch in the matrix, my next best theory is that it escaped years ago, and has been happily living on the ceiling these many years, waiting to drop onto my desk when the time was right.

Loved This

Humans do the best shit:

I’m glad this guy is doing it for a neighborhood kid. I don’t have a handy kid around for this. But here’s my post from 10 years ago about doing something like this with my kids.

Buffalo Gets MLB

The first major league baseball game in Buffalo in decades is on right now.

Here’s coverage from The Beaverton.

FWIW: I have posted about Buffalo’s past attempts to get an MLB team. BUT, you may have noticed that Google sucks these days, and it won’t find a link to it. Long story short, Buffalo was the front runner, until groups in Miami and Denver offered a whole bunch more money in east to carry bags.

UPDATE: Google may suck, but Bing does not suck as much. They found this post about how Buffalo was supposed to get an MLB team in 1969. That team went to Montreal. How’d that work out for you MLB? Still looking for the post about how Buffalo was supposed to get an MLB team all through the late 80’s and early 90’s until that WTF day.

UPDATE 2: Woo hoo. I found it the old-fashioned way: I spent a few minutes looking for what Google took milliseconds to deny the existence of. Here’s the link. Also, the link in the post is being redirected (for who knows what reason), but the original is here. The skinny is that MLB laid out what it wanted in a major league city, Buffalo did it, and then they chose the money.

Some George Will

George Will revisits Jose Ortega y Gasset:

The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans. Someone anticipated something like this.

Today’s gruesome irony: A significant portion of the intelligentsia that is churned out by higher education does not acknowledge exacting standards of inquiry that could tug them toward tentativeness and constructive dissatisfaction with themselves. Rather, they come from campuses, cloaked in complacency. Instead of elevating, their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega y Gasset called the “mass man.”

In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” (Emphasis is Ortega’s.)

Much education now spreads the disease that education should cure, the disease of repudiating, without understanding, the national principles that could pull the nation toward its noble aspirations. The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.”

Remove the sexism, and the third paragraph describes a teenager in our family.

Read the whole thing, entitled “Much of today’s intelligentsia cannot think” in The Washington Post. Via Cafe Hayek.

After 20 Years Here I Still Know this Feeling

This appeared on MLTSHP this morning:

I love that caption. I’m amused.

When confronted with something like this for the umpteenth time in the past week, the vXyoungman and I just say to each other “We’ve got shit like this everywhere.” You never get over that feeling: the sky is just better out here.

An Amazing and True Tale for Tolkien Junkies

Maybe Tolkien got the idea for a engraved ring lost for millennia … from actual archaeology in the 1920’s.

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I love Tolkien; maybe almost as much as Stephen Colbert.

Here’s my favorite story.

Tolkien’s son collected and mildly edited all of his father’s unpublished work.

In it is a single usage of the word “ruel”, as in a ruel bone blade.

This word appears essentially nowhere in the English language.

Except for one spot. It is in the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language (the really huge multi-volume one).

One of Tolkien’s first academic jobs was working on this. He did the early part of the coverage of words that begin with w.

Ruel isn’t in the w’s.

It’s in the notes.

For walrus.

Ruel-bones were used to make ceremonial and decorative blades. They’re too fragile for actual work, but they are very rare because descendants of Vikings started trading a few of them in the later Middle Ages. No one else knew where ruel-bones come from. Turns out they are walrus tusks.

What’s the English Word for Horse Served as Dinner?

Many people know the vocabulary: in English our animal words come from Anglo-Saxon, and our food words from Old French. †

So we tend cows, but we eat beef. Same deal with pork, and so on.

The other night while the vXyoungwoman was at work, the rest of us were around the table, and we wondered: if the French eat cheval, there should be an English word for horse served as food.

But there isn’t.

It turns out that eating horse is a culturally newer thing in France, dating back to the early 19th century. So it misses, by several hundred years, the importation of many French words into English.

BTW: English imports from many languages, but French is the predominant contemporary one. Lots of cultures eat horse, but none of their words have snuck into English.

† Interesting trivia on this page: venison is meat from large game (grand gibier), not just deer.