Sounds & Fury

Sand Dancer (An S&F Divertissement)

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

Beyond The Limits Of The Possible

The following is apropos of nothing whatsoever, on- or off-message, but is so beautifully astonishing we couldn't resist posting it. Her name is Boyanka Angelova, a Bulgarian gymnast, and at the time of this performance was fourteen years of age.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

Ambivalence

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:37 AM Eastern on 31 Aug. See below.]

We've been watching the satellite view of Irene's progress on and off all day today. It's an almost unprecedented East Coast hurricane in terms of its size and extent which is simply mammoth. We're aware of just how deadly a storm like this can be even at its present relatively mild (relatively mild as hurricanes go, that is) Category 2 wind speed (100mph), and just how much property and infrastructure damage it's capable of causing at landfall, but all we can think about as we watch it via the satellite image is how magnificently majestic it appears as it makes its slow, resolute, wheeling way up the coastline. We of course will curse it when it takes out our power and we lose our most essential appliance, our air conditioner, for what is certain to be days rather than hours, but right now and at this remove we feel nothing but privileged to be eyewitness to one of Nature's most awesome phenomena.

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Update (1:37 AM Eastern on 31 Aug): Just in case you were wondering, Irene passed us by with nothing more untoward than a few hours of fairly heavy rainfall and wind which did zero damage locally that we're aware of and, mercifully and miraculously, no interruption of our power. And we're but a scant ten miles west of the New Jersey coastline.

Go figure.

That's A Relief — Sort Of

It wasn't something gone very wrong with our perception of reality when we felt our entire apartment building shake and sway for some ten seconds or so this afternoon accompanied by a horrible noise. It was an actual magnitude 5.9 earthquake, never mind that this is the East Coast and we don't have no steenkin earthquakes here. This was our first experience of an earthquake of a any magnitude and it was scary as hell. Not nearly as scary, however, as the thought that it might have been just a figment of our altered sense of reality.

A relief — sort of.

"I'm freaked-out by this."

We are, too. The possibilities are simply mind-boggling. Oh, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with music, opera, or the arts.

On second thought....

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the heads-up.)

Apropos Of Absolutely Nothing

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:16 PM Eastern on 5 Jul. See below.]

Here is Glenn Gould playing the Sarabande from Bach's French Suite No. 1. We post it here simply because it's beautiful and as an excuse to display our new MP3 player, an adaptation of an elegant WordPress plug-in designed by Martin Laine.

Enjoy.

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Update (1:16 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): If you thought you saw a green stripe crawling from left to right across our new MP3 player when you opened it earlier you weren't hallucinating. We were experimenting with colors for what's called the "tracker" and at one point tried green with the thought that perhaps a splash of color might add a nice touch to our otherwise grayscale color scheme but decided ultimately that all it managed to do was tart-up the player's elegant design and so abandoned the idea and re-coded our player template — then promptly forgot to re-code the player actually embedded in our above entry(!).

It seems that our Senior Moments are becoming more frequent with each passing month.

Advice to the young: never get old. It sucks.

Lament

We don't know Christopher Hitchens nor have we ever exchanged a word with him nor even so much as read any of his several books. We have, however, a long acquaintance with his appearances on various talk shows and panels and with his writings in various periodicals all of which served to make us value the man whether we agreed with his positions or not, and feel a kind of real affection for him due his always virtuoso performance in both speech and print. Just how deep that affection went we didn't realize until we learned of his being stricken with esophageal cancer and received the news as if it had been news about one of our most bosom buddies. Thoroughly irrational, we know, but there it is. At least, we consoled ourself, he can still write and speak so the terribleness of this killer disease is thereby to that extent mitigated both for Hitchens and for admirers such as we. Then, today, we read this by Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

On a much-too-regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? [...] On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so...considerate.

Most despond-inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. And at times it threatened, and now threatens daily, to disappear altogether. I had just returned from giving a couple of speeches in California, where with the help of morphine and adrenaline I could still successfully “project” my utterances, when I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home — and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow.

Again thoroughly irrationally, and this time almost embarrassingly, we were thunderstruck and could not keep from hearing, over and over again in our innermost ear, the musical excerpt we quoted in our last entry;viz.,

We can think of nothing consoling to say at this point, either to Mr. Hitchens or to ourself. Would that we believed God and miracles possible.

From The Wish I'd Said That Department

Climbing a tree [or running, I would add] makes sense to me only if behind you there are Nazis.

—Fran Lebowitz (quoted in The New York Times)

And For The 4th...

The greatest march ever written by the greatest composer of marches who ever lived in its greatest performance ever.

OK, so the tempo taken here is a bit too fast to actually march to. So what?

We'll Never Do Anything That Stupid Again

Before last week, we never so much as heard the name of that curious, um, instrument so beloved of soccer fans (which name we won't repeat here for reasons that will become immediately apparent). When we searched it out on Google and then on YouTube and heard the sound it made, it reminded us instantly of another instrument of more ancient vintage which is pitched a couple octaves lower, and so was born our whimsical post titled simply the one-word name of that curious instrument so beloved of soccer fans.

Super-bad mistake.

S&F has been virtually inundated with hits on that post to the extent that the rotating, first-in-first-out, 500-entry-limit database of our stats provider is all but filled with entries listing visitors to that single S&F page, leaving no room for anything else. Turns out, if one enters the name of that curious instrument so beloved of soccer fans into Google's search box, S&F comes up as the third entry in the listing on Google's first page (excluding ads, and grouped entries for news and YouTube videos) right after entries for Wikipedia and a site devoted exclusively to that curious instrument so beloved of soccer fans.

We'll never do anything that stupid again.

The iPad: What's It For? (An Off-Message Commentary)

Although no fan of the products of Apple Computer (we, for instance, wouldn't even so much as consider switching from a Windows machine to a Mac or MacBook laptop even were they given to us gratis), we readily confess to hugely admiring the design of most of Apple's products; design so compellingly beautiful aesthetically that, for instance, even though we have no imaginable use whatsoever for Apple's iPhone, we can but barely succeed in triumphing over our thoroughly irrational impulse to go out and buy one. The iPad, however, as beautiful aesthetically as it is, is an altogether different story. New York Times technology columnist David Pogue ends his review of the iPad with the following question:

The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine.

The only question is: Do you like the concept?

To which our response is: What concept? From what we can see, the iPad is nothing more or other than a monster-sized iPhone display on which one can select and run "apps" just like on the iPhone. The notion that the iPad could in any way act as a stand-in for or even replace a full-featured laptop computer is simply prima facie absurd. The iPad has, of course, all that sexy touchscreen stuff going for it, but, for us, far from being sexy, touchscreens are a huge turnoff. We hate touchscreens. They seem to us almost perverse. We, for instance, could have had the display of our new Dell laptop be a fully functioning touchscreen and didn't even consider the option, inexpensive though it is. The last thing one should do with a computer display is touch it with one's fingertips (or anything else, for that matter). The proper function of a computer display is to do one thing and one thing only: display text and images with the utmost in detail, accuracy, and clarity. Period. Full stop. For us, the thought of touching a computer display with one's fingertips is as repugnant a thought as, say, the thought of a surgeon operating on a patient without first donning sterile surgical gloves.

So, what's the point of an iPad? No point at all that we can discern other than to be a slick new toy for those with too much disposable income on hand (the entry price of the bloody thing is on the order of some $500, for which money one could buy a fairly decent, full-function Windows laptop), or for those who are Apple devotees or cultists (which latter abound for reasons which elude us entirely).

Will the iPad turn out to be a commercial success? If one subscribes, as we do, to Mencken's (in)famous, barbed, but spot-on dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and broaden its reach to publics beyond America, it almost surely will.

Score another victory for the aesthetic brilliance of Apple's designers, the genius of mass marketing, and the stupidity gullibility of the American public and publics beyond.

And Speaking Of Being As Mad As Hell... (An Off-Message Rant)

And speaking of being as mad as hell, the ferocious onslaught against the prime cultural demons du jour, tobacco and smoking, is fast reaching fever pitch, but mostly quietly so that its impact will hardly be felt except by those of us devoted to the pleasures of tobacco and smoking (and don't even think of substituting the pejorative, incendiary code word "addicted" in place of "devoted"; tobacco is NOT addictive in the only meaningful sense of the term; i.e., physically addictive as is, for instance, heroin, never mind the mountain of tendentious and massaged "scientific" studies to the contrary).

Ever since the early '90s, at long last empowered by the publication by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of a fraudulent, statistically "cooked" 1993 study that declared so-called "second-hand smoke" (Environmental Tobacco Smoke, or ETA) to be a public health hazard, the rabid anti-smoking zealots among lawmakers, local, state, and federal, have managed to do everything short of proposing a Constitutional amendment to prohibit smoking and the sale and use of tobacco products; something they would have done years ago had they not the gruesome example of the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment to dissuade them from embarking on such a rash and foolhardy enterprise. Yet they've managed to accomplish the very same ends by other, more surreptitious means, even to the extent of the passing of laws in some cities that prohibit apartment dwellers from smoking in their own homes.

And what's the lawmakers' most powerful weapon? Draconian taxation. You need money? Tax tobacco and smokers — punitively. No one other than the tobacco interests and smokers — a decided if fairly large minority — will object. In fact, people will think you're doing good and a good thing. Why, not only are you helping to protect the public from lethal second-hand smoke, you're actually helping to save the lives of smokers themselves who are simply too stupid or too trapped by their addiction to realize the dangers they're exposing themselves to, never mind the public.

And just how draconian are these punitive taxes?

As recently as ten years ago, we were paying $10.00 per 150g tin of roll-your-own cigarette tobacco (real, no-additive, 100% tobacco leaf, not the junk, adulterated tobacco scraps found in commercial cigarettes); enough to roll the equivalent of a full carton of commercial, manufactured cigarettes which was then selling for something on the order of $50.00 per carton. Today, that same 150g tin costs upwards of $25.00, and in some localities, as high as $46.00, 100% of the price increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale. Our custom, English-blend pipe tobacco sold ten years ago for $23.00 a pound. Today, the price is $65.00, again, 100% of the increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale.

And we smokers are helpless. There's absolutely nothing we can do to change any of this. Our best hope today is that a thriving illegal industry will emerge to significantly undersell the still legal market. Beyond that, all we can do is rant and rave in impotent rage against uninformed public opinion, public stupidity, and the rabid zealotry of the anti-smoking powers that be. Ergo, this rant.

That is all.

As you were.

It's 2010!

Finding A Long-Lost Old Friend

Way back in the early '60s when I had far more money than was good for me (all my life I've had no understanding of or respect for money personally, and thought — and still think — it good for one purpose only: to spend), I took it into my head that I wanted — nay, absolutely needed — to own a harpsichord even though I had no formal training on keyboard instruments of any sort, my instruments being the fiddle and, when needed, the viola. Consequently, I embarked on an investigation of contemporary makers of this ancient instrument, part of which investigation involved enlisting the help of a close friend — a non-musician but a knowledgeable and devoted classical music aficionado — whose business interests took him to many cities both at home and abroad.

One day, I got a call from Boston from said friend who had stopped into the shop of harpsichord maker William Dowd, and had been mightily impressed by what he'd seen. My research had already revealed to me that Dowd was considered by those in the know to be one of the world's very best contemporary makers of harpsichords, and was considered by some, no less than Ralph Kirkpatrick among them, to be the best contemporary maker extant.

After listening to my friend's glowing report, I instructed him to immediately place an order with Dowd for a pedal-operated, double-keyboard instrument complete with a 16' register in addition to the standard two 8s and one 4 (and a buff stop), and to inform Dowd that I would be in touch with him later to select the veneers for the casework. An hour later, I received a call from Dowd himself explaining that he could not honor my request for the additional 16' register as his experiments over the years (including a couple instruments built for Kirkpatrick) had convinced him that the added 16' register compromised the voicing of the 8' registers, and he no longer offered that additional register as an option. After hearing his detailed explanation, I, with some reluctance, agreed to have the instrument built sans the 16' register, and so the making of what was officially to become known as Dowd #48 began.

A little over a year later, and after a trip to Boston by me to select the book-matched walnut-burl panels for the casework, #48 was delivered by Dowd himself, and a truly gorgeous creation — sonically and aesthetically — it was, too. I'd spent the past fourteen months practicing on a beat-up old upright piano teaching my fingers how to work the keys, and had progressed so far as to be able to play a not entirely loathsome rendition of the Toccata from Bach's Partita No. 6, and I shall never forget the thrill of sitting at that beautiful instrument for the first time, and hearing that music come from the lustrous throat of #48 under the urgings of my own fingers.

Alas, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and due to circumstances beyond my control, I was forced to sell #48 a couple years later, and Dowd himself was the buyer, after which transaction (which actually netted me a cash profit) I lost track of #48.

A few days ago, I received an eMail that read simply:

Met up with an old friend of yours. You might want to stop by and say hello.

I clicked on the URL provided, and was greeted by the sight of these images. Fuzzy and amateurish though they are, their subject is unmistakable. There she was, #48, looking just as gorgeous as when I last saw her, and now up for sale through the aegis of Australian harpsichord maker and dealer Carey Beebe for a mere $20,000 AUD ($17,630 USD).

Oh!, that I now had available the money and the room!

A Blogger's Life Is Hard

For almost two weeks now, our summary statistics have shown a huge increase in the number of unique daily visitors to S&F. Encouraging, thought we — until, that is, we checked to see which sterling posts were attracting all the attention, and who the referrers might be. Turns out, the sole referrer was Google, and it wasn't our penetrating insights or lapidary prose that was the attraction, but the striking image which constitutes our annual greeting of the arrival of the winter solstice (why, in October, this sudden, widespread interest in an event that won't occur until December remains for us a mystery).

Oh dear. Our second balloon-deflating experience of the past couple weeks.

A blogger's life is hard.

Alas, A Pipe Dream, Merely A Pipe Dream

In order to overcome TypePad's (hopefully soon to be corrected) lapse in its new blogging platform by their omission of a "Justify" option for formatting automatically one's blog posts with justified margins which lapse we made note of in this S&F post, we, of necessity, resolved to resort to hand-coding all our posts (that is, all our new posts; all our past posts will have to remain stuck at left-aligned for the duration) to achieve the justified format desired as we never compose our posts within TypePad itself, but on our word processor using our own HTML markup wherever necessary. [Update (11/1): TypePad has just fixed this oversight and all our past posts are now formatted correctly.]

At first, it appeared a not-too-terrible business at all, albeit a royal pain — that is, a not-too-terrible business until we actually sat down to write out a post and discovered that overriding TypePad's underlying template setting of Left-align, which template we've no access to, would involve formatting individually every single paragraph in the post in a most awkward and tedious way.

This, of course, was out of the question, and so we set about building a suite of macros to do all the tedious bits for us using our word processor's macro function (Microsoft Word, without which piece of powerful software we'd be lost).

That, it turned out, was a mistake — or, to put it more properly, a mistake for us personally as when we begin programming a computer, even something as doorpost simple as building a complement of macros, our time sense goes irretrievably AWOL. (A macro is nothing but a recorder of a series of keystrokes — its "program" — which, after the series is saved, the macro can "play back" or execute fast as lightning at the mere touch of a key or click of a mouse button.) We could be working at the machine for what seems an hour or so, but when we lift our eyes from the computer monitor long enough to consult a clock, discover that some eight hours have passed.

No, that's not hyperbole to make a point. It's a for-real and common experience with us.

Well, we were at that machine for what felt like some four hours or so, but in actuality totaled some thirty hours — straight. Lots of coffee; lots of black bread slathered heavy with cream cheese to serve as a lusciously soft bed for tissue-thin slices of exquisitely cold-smoked Norwegian salmon (called colloquially, Nova Lox); and no sleep.

And what music did we choose to have going in the background while we typed away with joy in our breast (few things are as satisfying to us as creating clever, efficient, and, above all, elegant computer programs; even doorpost-simple ones such as the keystroke series that is a macro)? Why, the ecclesiastic music of Renaissance masters such as Allegri, Byrd, Cardoso, Gesualdo, Josquin, di Lasso, Lobo, Palestrina, Tallis, and Taverner, all courtesy of Philips and the superb Tallis Scholars.

And, no, the wrenching disparity and vast gulf between that sublime music and that era and the era and activity in which we were engaged didn't escape us. It was, in fact, something of which we were keenly aware, and it produced in us a most delicious sensation, and the thought crossed our mind that this would not be an uncongenial way to spend all our waking time for the rest of whatever time we may have left to us.

Alas, it's but a pipe dream, dear readers, merely a pipe dream.

“Success Breeds A Disregard Of The Possibility Of Failure.”

We've several times made known here on S&F the fact that we're an economics moron and, further, couldn't care less about this "science" and our ignorance of its principles.

That notwithstanding, we every once in a long while come across an article about the field that's so inherently interesting we can't help but want to share it with our readers. This article written for The Boston Globe by history professor and author Stephen Mihm is just such an article. Writes Dr. Mihm:

Since the global financial system started unraveling in dramatic fashion two years ago, distinguished economists have suffered a crisis of their own. Ivy League professors who had trumpeted the dawn of a new era of stability have scrambled to explain how, exactly, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had ambushed their entire profession.

Amid the hand-wringing and the self-flagellation, a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a “Minsky moment,” and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming “Minsky meltdown.”

“Minsky” was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.

[...]

Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.

In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”

[...]

[Unlike the simplistic lessons drawn by most economists of the time,] Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from [economist John Maynard] Keynes’s landmark writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.

[...]

Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

RTWT here.

Caution! Off-Message Mini-Rant Ahead

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:21 AM Eastern on 14 Aug. See below.]

It will come as no revelation to anyone to say that the problem of the affordability of quality health care for citizens of this country is a problem urgently in need of a viable solution. President Obama's vow to pass legislation this year that will be at very least a strong beginning of the implementation of such a viable solution is laudable, but to our way of thinking is off on the wrong track in conceptual principle, and that does not bode well for its operative success even were it enacted into law just as Mr. Obama envisioned it.

Why off on the wrong track in conceptual principle? In short, because it focuses on and is primarily concerned with making health insurance affordable for all U.S. citizens, and that means centrally involving private sector insurance companies, all of which are for-profit businesses. When the matter is health care, that's a concept that's fundamentally perverse, even lunatic. No one in his right mind, if he could possibly avoid it, would willingly put into the hands of businesses and businessmen the securing of his access to those persons and institutions on which depend his physical and mental wellbeing. Businesses and businessmen in the insurance industry are concerned not one whit with your physical and mental wellbeing beyond their actuarial implications. That's not why they're in business. Like all businesses and businessmen, insurance companies are in business for one reason and one reason alone: to make a profit. Whatever increases profit is therefore ipso facto to be desired; whatever decreases it, ipso facto to be avoided. Whenever an insurance company pays out a benefit, it decreases its profit. Whenever it denies a benefit, its profit is increased. One need not be an Einstein to understand and appreciate how that calculus translates when applied to the health care of the insured.

No, we've no magic-bullet solution to the at-critical-mass quality health care affordability problem in this country. All we can say, and say with absolute certainty, is that the involvement of private sector insurance companies in any capacity whatsoever is a central part of the problem, and no part of the solution.

Mini-rant over.

As you were.

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Update (1:21 AM Eastern on 14 Aug): For a more temperate and hugely more well-reasoned piece on the issue of health care in this country, see the article, "How American Health Care Killed My Father", online in this month's Atlantic. By recommending this piece, we don't mean to suggest we agree with all the author's points. It's rather that even those points with which we disagree are so well researched and thought through that one simply can't dismiss them out of hand.

A thoroughly worthwhile read.

Proud To Be An American This July 4th

We Americans have special reason to be proud this July 4th as we, by democratic process, have elected as our president a genuine modern-day philosopher who, in the words of Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, has shown himself to be our "philosopher in chief" as well as our chief executive.

The first part of Obama's Cairo teach-in combined the best of rhetoric and philosophy. In the shrewd tradition of Isocrates and Aristotle, the president softened up his audience in Cairo University's ornate auditorium by quoting the Koran and dispensing rich praise. He related how Islamic culture had given us "the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed."

[...]

[H]e imparted rules for philosophical discourse: "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground." At its core, his teaching was ethical and political, using the intellectual tools of logic to illuminate hypocrisy and contradiction: "None of us should tolerate these extremists," he said. "They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths — but more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the right of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind."

Without weighing the pros and cons of American egalitarianism, Obama simply affirmed that "a woman who is denied an education is denied equality." Countering Machiavelli without mentioning Madison, he spoke straight to the prince: "You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party." Weaving the ethical, political, and pragmatic together, Obama told Palestinians that if they forswear violence and take the high road, à la Gandhi and King, they will get their state.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

A New Nigerian-Type Scam? (Off-Message Linkage)

Here's an irreverent — and hilarious — mini-drama the subject of which is President Obama's economic recovery strategy. Much of it rings true to us, but, then, we're an economics dummy, so what do we know.