Stymied [update]

This will be a rare spontaneous post from me. Usually I work 'em over thoroughly, rewrite them at least a couple times before posting, but all my plans have gone awry.

I will never buy another PC. Ever. It's Mac next time. This [bleeping] computer has (again) developed a host of problems. My work plans idled, I said to myself, OK, I'll do a blog entry I've been meaning to do. That's when I discovered that I can't upload pictures either.

But I can still scan! So for lack of anything better to do until a solution -- and that might mean taking it in to the shop -- here's a blog entry I did not plan, an assortment of scanned photos to ... um ... ponder.

Two pictures that I couldn't find for My Unillustrated Robert Goulet Post have turned up.

Me (in white) and my cousin Emily (in blue): The not-very-matched set of little girls our paternal grandmother -- who had two boys -- had always longed for. We're about 11 and 12 months old, respectively.

And a later pairing. 1959 is a guess. We look about 5 or 6. She got to have a ponytail, while short cuts were my lot in life. I'm still rebelling. Our plaid dresses do not match precisely, but you can see the effort at coordination. Whenever our clothes had a theme like this, it probably meant that our grandmother had bought them for us.

In unrelated scanning: Snakes are fire hazards??

Why did I take this picture? I have no idea.

Wait! Guy I was dating had picked the flowers for me. That's it.

Around the same time, I took this one as kind of a humorous still life. My unwashed dishes, spring 1988. I stood on the opposite countertop, my head nearly against the ceiling.

Last but definitely not least, my dear little cat Alpo, 1995, lounging in my Wilmington, NC, apartment window, as I look up from the walk below.

I'm afraid that's all the entertainment I can provide for now. This miserable machine may be in the shop after tomorrow. If it weren't so filled with toxins I'd be sorely tempted to dump it into the marsh.

---

An Alpo Update - Sherwood in a comment mentioned that Alpo looks like a tuxedo. On looking back at my initial post about Alpo, I see that he does look rather like one in both pictures. Neither gives a good view of his true colors, which were really dark tabby and white. This early 2000 photo shows him more clearly.

Our older daughter does share her life with a lovely tuxedo - Larry gave her an entry in the cat blog.

Meanwhile some computer problems are solved, thanks to Larry! Others persist. My Pakistani tech support friend is getting very tired of me, but hasn't yet run out of things to make me do. I tend to gravitate toward all-or-nothing solutions and hadn't really thought about Linux, but I may need to look into that!

Fear and popcorn. On Expelled, part II

Sheesh, days of reaction to Expelled stewing in my brain and I still can't distill it down into a blog entry that isn't book-length.

FIRST, apologies for any missing names, or inexact words of speakers I quote. Each scientist interviewed was name-captioned at least once, but I wasn't taking notes in the dark theater, and they were not always identified each time they appeared. The website covers a few but not all. I doubt if I will spend another $6 (bargain matinée), though I might rent Expelled later for another look. I'm trying to be vigilant in my quotes and represent them accurately.

I wonder if my fellow believers really know what they're getting into, when they ask that Intelligent Design be taught to students?

The film at first seems to make a reasonable request. Ben Stein walks all over the world in his suit and sneakers, interviewing scientists. The film time he gives to all his interviewees, on both sides, is fair. He doesn't edit his "opponents" to make them look stupid. Occasionally they fumble the ball, and I can't blame Stein for using the footage. I'd use it too.

He talks to scientists who claim to have been ousted from teaching positions for such seemingly mild transgressions as mentioning the existence of the ID point of view.

If they really get fired for such mild acknowledgements that ID exists, then that's obviously out of bounds. But Stein doesn't tell us the facts of their cases. I'm not saying they all are guilty, all I'm saying is the film didn't put that to rest.

Then there's another very reasonable statement from Dr. Richard Sternberg. I thought, he says, that science was free to ask any question and then follow the research wherever it leads.

It should be. No argument from me, but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that this is not what Stein or his pro-ID interviewees really want.

The specious equation of Darwin's theory with Nazi atrocities (discussed in my first post about Expelled) was a big mistake on Stein's part, and should be resoundingly denounced by Christians everywhere. Dehumanization of other races or the "unfit" has existed throughout human history, it is not something Darwin caused or advocated.

Darwin did state that:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world." - Darwin, Descent, vol. I, 201. [Source: "Quote Mine Project" Scroll down to quote 2.10]

For a knowledgeable view of the issue, Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, offers this piece on his website.

I maintain that the use of Nazi extermination in Stein's film to vilify Darwinism requires equating genocide advocacy with the theory that the Nazis hijacked and mutated from a benign cell into a cancer. It's inaccurate and wrong to do so.

It indicates to me that a fair hearing for ID isn't what ID proponents want. They want Darwinism vilified. If science departments are acting paranoid and ousting any professor who whispers "ID," they're beating a dandelion with a tire iron, but the hidden ID agenda to vilify evolution makes their reaction, NOT justified, but understandable.

See, the real controversy isn't about advanced-level Origins research, either in astrophysics or evolution. The trouble is that the controversy is about us commonfolk. It's about what we should be taught. Stein mocks the nanny mentality with an ancient film clip in which some blowhard says, "People can't make decisions for themselves." But in the realm of advanced science, is that an entirely crazy statement? I'm not equipped to evaluate DNA research or theoretical physics. I took my last science class as a high school sophomore. 1969-70. Yeah, really.

Time out to warn any unfamiliar readers dropping by that I am an avowed Christian. I feel quite certain that there's a creator God.

But Darwin doesn't bother me. His theory has been modified through much new knowledge in the past 150 years, and if we let facts pull us forward, then any untruths in it will fall on their own. So God is a fact? Great, then we need not worry about any line of inquiry that follows facts, right?

I fear that there are a lot of believers who hear Richard Dawkins and others say that their scientific journey killed their belief in God. Then the believers malign the science, thinking "If it's creating atheism, it must be wrong." The film runs with this.

Well I say: if anyone thinks that premature atheist conclusions formed by individuals mean that the science which brought the conclusions about is evil, then they're thinking way too small. And drawing a premature conclusion that there's hard data supporting an Intelligent Designer at this point is just as wrong. There could someday be proof, but if we make a claim that later gets knocked down, that can even do greater damage to faith.

One pro-ID interviewee whose name I missed came right out with it: Maybe, he said, we're going about research the wrong way. Traditionally one investigates and eventually the results lead one to forming a world view. But maybe we need to start with a world view and then do the research.

Wrong turn. The answer comes at the end, not the beginning. We can't know where God ends and physics and chemistry take over, until we follow the whole scientific trail back to it. We're way way early on that trail.

Here's how it looks to me. Human learning is like building an arch, and the answer to the God question is the keystone. Placing either atheism or ID in the classroom, considering humanity's current level of knowledge, is like trying to place a keystone without completing the piers and the arch-stones. You can't build an arch backwards.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

And that is why the insistence of believers that science courses address that issue -- lay a keystone right now -- is out of order, out of line, absurd. Any teacher who is claiming to understand and define the nature of that keystone is out of line, and yes, that goes for defining it as a godless scientific force, as well as for defining it as God. Either one deserves the to lose credibility, if he/she calls it anything other than an opinion. Its nature is way beyond our comprehension. When humanity is ready for that stone, it will be ready for us.

--
Illustration from: Winston's Cumulative Encyclopedia. Charles Morris, Editor-in-Chief. Philadelphia and Chicago : The John C. Winston Company, 1914. Vol. 1, s.v. "Arch," unpaged.

On Expelled, part I

There's a lot to say about the movie Expelled. I saw it today and it's percolating in my mind and will be posted. But one thing needs to be addressed first.

In this film, Ben Stein, in a quest to defend professors who acknowledge Intelligent Design, takes us to a Nazi insane asylum.

It comes fairly late in the the film. Up until this point i disagreed with much of the film, agreed with or respected a few things about it, and felt i could write about it fairly with no need to express outrage.

But from a relatively low-key, calm and reasonable, "fair and balanced" plea for all views to be on the table, all rigorous science to be allowed to stand or fall on its own merits, suddenly Stein takes a dark and nasty detour.

Framed by quotes from Darwin, about how only in regard to human beings do we nurture the defectives among the species -- how no farmer in his right mind would breed the weakest farm animals -- Stein devotes an outrageous stretch of film time to a tour of a Nazi insane asylum, one in which the "defective" were gassed and dissected. After a fairly brisk pace throughout the earlier portion of his film, Stein spends long quiet frames walking us through the gas showers, the dissection table, the echoing hallway of this slice of hell. Powerful imagery. Imagery which he quite intelligently designs to play on the viewer's mind, to associate Darwin's theory with a regime that perverted that theory to commit crimes against humanity.

This was reprehensible.

Stein should be ashamed of playing on the worst excess of warped Darwinism as practiced by Nazi Germany, in a film in which he keeps crying out for Intelligent Design to be fairly represented.

I'm glad it came late in the film. It would have colored my opinion of anything that came after it, and some points earlier seemed honorably made and worthy of discussion. But that passage worries me a whole lot. I'm still mulling over just how much the later passage should alter my respect for the earlier points.

More thought is in order before i address the film in more depth.

Granddaddy's chair

My grandparents' house, I have to admit, was kind of a Victorian horror. Heavy dark red drapes always shrouding the windows, dark upholstery on gewgawed dark wood chairs and settees, ornate gilt frames, a huge bad family portrait that loomed on one living room wall.


Granddaddy, 1929. Different chair.

One room was a delight. My grandfather's den. Warm, simple, comfortable, light shimmering in through the windows. A room barely bigger than a closet but you could tell he lived in it and let my grandmother have the rest of the house her way. The TV set was in there, and every male relative would crowd in to watch football on holidays. Once the game was over, often the big red armchair would be unoccupied and I'd hunker down in it, make myself invisible. Even when I was an adult, it could almost swallow me.

Messing with my new camera, 1988

When my grandmother was alone and could no longer live there, the grandchildren got to go through the house and choose the things we wanted. Talk about youth being wasted in the young. I was 18. The things I shrugged off! The antiques that, incorporated into the decor of any light-filled room would be things of old-fashioned beauty. The books!

But I picked a few nice things, and the one I wanted most was Granddaddy's chair. With every relocation for 36 years, I've watched movers struggle to get it through doorways, and it's always had to live in the first big living space it landed in. It won't go deeper into any residence through mere interior doorways, even if you take the doors off their hinges. I've let go of a lot of stuff over the years, but giving up the chair has always been out of the question.

We didn''t get many hard freezes way down near Savannah, but one spell in 1986 was bad, and a sweet yellow cat who lived free at my apartment complex -- friend to all, owned by none -- was going to be in trouble. I let him in at about 10 PM when the temperature was in the 'teens f. and headed for single digits.

Guest cat, 1986

He hopped into the chair and looked at me. Thanks. This will do. Maybe he roamed around after I retired upstairs, , but I never saw any sign of it. He was curled on the chair when I went up and curled on it in the morning when I came down. He lifted his head. I went to the door. "I've got to send you off," I told him. "I'll be at work all day." He hopped down and went out into the cold morning air. We repeated this for three icy nights. Then the cold spell was over. I saw him often around the grounds but he never became "my" cat.

Downyflake claimed the chair -- reupholstered in 1990 -- the day he came to live with us in July 2001.

Downy, aged about 12 weeks, 2001

He can't fit on the arm anymore and stretch out, but he keeps trying (March 2008).

The chair was, until a couple weeks ago, in bad shape. Lots of grime, threadbare patches. Sprung springs made it impossible to sit on. So off it went to an upholsterer, for fabric carefully chosen to resist wear and pulled threads. Not that the animals determine our lifestyle or anything.

It's back. And for some reason, it reminds me of this Charles Addams cartoon:

It's not a gift

Hot on the heels of my relatively lighthearted look at attention deficit disorder, in which I referred to myself as "differently focused" came this morning's Dear Abby. Yes, I read Dear Abby. It's right there in the feature section. You might as well know the worst about me. I even think Jeanne Phillips is pretty smart, and does a good job. OK, there are worse things about me, but we'll save those till later, like 2012.

Anyway, it wasn't Phillips who teed me off this morning. It was the last letter. The one in which the adoptive mom of a child with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder is still the official term) says that "we" choose to use a "new term." MPG. Multiple Personality Gift.

"We" who?

I looked this up. It seems to originate with a book, and apparently one that's a great help to people brave and cool enough to take on loving a multiple.

Usually when something gets me angry, I whip out my trusty keyboard and start fighting about it with the appropriate online entity. But this morning I was angry beyond words. I put the paper back on the coffee table, made a conscious decision to forget I'd even read it, and did.
Something on TV this evening brought it back into my consciousness. I had probably, no joke, dissociated, the everyday mind trick kind of dissociation that we all use (daydreaming is another one), because I really had no idea why I was in such a foul mood all day.

We've got a language problem in this society, and it's caused by a boundary problem. We've traditionally defined people by some out-of-the-mainstream characteristic. Blindness, deafness, ADD, things we used to call "handicaps" and "disorders." We'd pigeonhole somebody as "handicapped" as though nothing else about them mattered.

And the movement to call these "differences" and "challenges" so as to acknowledge that it's something they do -- and deal with and overcome-- it's not who they are, is not a bad thing.

To me it would be better to call a damn disorder a disorder, and then train people that it's a small part of who a person is. That it does not define them. This may be too hard. I never had such a concept of identity or boundaries myself, until life as a 12-stepper. It's not a quick and easy concept to train into oneself, much less society as a whole, and I can accept changing the terms as a practical solution.

I have no answers.

But I have a great big answer to the claim that multiple personality is a gift and that answer is No.

DID is a coping mechanism. It helps people, usually as young children, get through trauma. But like many coping mechanisms, it mutates like a movie Gremlin, from a nurturing servant into a lousy master, and is no gift.

I see several letters in the column, and other things I've encountered in other sites, showing how successful relationships with some DID's are possible. If spouses study up first and know what they're getting into, OK. But forgive me for thinking a happy outcome is not typical.

Forgive me for thinking that childhood trauma most often creates relational problems for the victim (survivor, whatever), whether he/she becomes a multiple or not, and that DID is no more likely to prevent those problems than is non-dissociative response.

Those who want to point out that DID is not an angry or violent disorder intrinsically, fine. That it allows the patient to put the trauma into a smaller more manageable box instead of having the fear and anger that the trauma creates permeate all of life - great. That works for me.

But that's still far from it being a gift. At best I would call it Less Worse. The kids, parents, or spouses of DID patients can live in a confusing, frightening hell. Anything traumatic enough to cause such a dissociation is also quite likely to cause relationship problems. That unresolved abuse often makes the abused feel a lifetime attraction and hatred --both-- to people who remind him of the abuser or trigger the old feelings, is well-known.

Yes, this is personal. Yes, I know whereof I speak. Yes, mine is one person's experience, and others differ.

Yes my reaction was way more emotional than rational.

But I stand by my contention that calling this disorder a gift is the worst of PC excess. They can be very gifted people. They can be very brave people. For some, getting out of bed in the morning and facing the day, relating, creating, is an act of courage and a bloody miracle. Distance and time have enabled me to see this in someone I once knew, and to admire the admirable in him and wish him well.

But the overwhelming need to call negative things by positive terms can sometimes deserve "otherly differently abled" mockery. I've lived with a DID and it was no gift to anyone, least of all to the one who had it.

Life in slow motion

I just got it.

It took me 45 years to really see this cartoon. While looking for a different Addams cartoon a couple days ago, I happened across this one, and at last! the light went on.

I was about (?) 8 or 9? when I first saw it. In addition to the Peanuts books, I was raised in a home stocked with a library's worth of Charles Addams, possibly a peculiar thing to appeal so to a little girl, but I pored over them for hours.

At that time all I saw was the spectral "hand" of the tree root. I even noticed it was reaching for the glass, but to me it still looked menacing. It's gonna pick his pocket too, I bet! That trapped, dehydrated, desperate little tree over on the left? It barely registered, and 45 years of looking at it numerous times didn't change that.

Possibly, this demonstrates a simple rule of childhood, like: the way you perceive something when you're 8 gets locked in, and you see it that way forever because you see your mind's interpretation instead of the real object.

But there's another factor at work here and that's the ADD thing. My first take on anything I see, read, hear, is just that narrow. I can't handle much info, so I zero in on key elements and let them define my response. Often very inaccurately.

Last time I wrote about ADD Life, some interesting responses came up in the comments, mostly about remembering things, retrieving stored information out of what Mike likened to a bank of file drawers in the brain. Diane Harrington's term "attention difference" brought a grin to my face because it's so like the "differently focused" label I concocted for myself.

There are also encounters with the new, and with the unexpected, to consider. I can be extremely focused, and that's the word: I focus in the extreme. I narrow my mental aperture to a pinhole, find a key element and screen out the rest. In searching for something that's usually in a predictable spot, I look in that spot. If it's not there then a normal person opens the aperture a notch and widens the search. I do too, but only after
SYSTEM FAILURE/SHUTDOWN/REBOOT. And a few $#%* -type words.

In fairness, most people use mental shortcuts, especially people whose day involves sifting through minutiae. I've noticed, with my teeth gritted, that doctors are real big on this. You can say, "I haven't walked in the woods for a month and this rash appeared yesterday," and they listen for key words: "walked in woods"; "rash." Then ka-ching! (in more ways than one) a poison ivy diagnosis pops out, the one-month gap between the walk and the symptoms unheard.

I go further and simplify even the already-simple:


ADD QUIZ time!


Can you spot the exercise ball in this picture?


I couldn't. Really. It's usually on the floor in front of the cedar chest. I walked in, looked there, walked out and asked Larry, "Where'd the exercise ball go?"

Bless him, he resists the nearly irresistible "Are you blind?!" kind of response. He's had 12 years to get used to this stuff, and just tells me, if he knows the answer. He's a kind and supportive man. Who values his life.

Meanwhile, my life's work is to rethink. Re-look. Reread, re-listen, reassess nearly everything, for the details, the nuance, the broader picture that I nearly always miss the first time. And accept the fact that I will never cover more than a third-to-a-half of the territory others cover, because my gears turn so bloody slow.

But lest you think that I fail to see the flexibility advantages that come with learning slowly, I have encountered the upside.

One day in library school we got a classroom exercise. Prof handed out 4 sheets of paper to each of us. On the top sheet were numbers (1-20, if I recall correctly) scattered randomly, like a kids' connect-the-dots puzzle. He took out a stopwatch. Our task was to connect the numbers in order.

We all fumbled through it. Then we did the 2nd sheet. It was identical to the first, so, having done it once, most people got faster. By now I was coming in last. The third sheet was also identical to the first 2. The rest of the class whipped through it and put down their pencils, while I continued to fumble.

The prof took 2 dollars out of his wallet and slapped them onto the table. "OK, the first person to finish the last sheet wins the money," he said.

[cackle] Yep, sheet 4 was a whole different pattern. I finished first and won the 2 bucks. I had less to unlearn.

He suggested that most people would buy the class a dozen doughnuts and share the winnings. No one in that group really needed doughnuts, and he for sure didn't. On my all-frozen-dinner grad student budget, it would buy me two -- two! -- "Mr. P's" frozen pizzas (They fit in my toaster oven), so in another demonstration of my decent IQ, I kept the money.

Stealing a car

This post by genuine, and multiply award-winning, artist Brian Fies on his Mom's Cancer blog, shows how he used a model to place an automobile into a drawing.

I am about as genuinely Not An Artist as it gets. People who can draw seem to me to be channeling a god who snubs me. I loved Brian's post, and I love any illustration that an artist does which shows his/her process. It remains a very mysterious process to me.

But I did copy a car image one time. Brian's post inspired me to haul my 1976 embroidered denim shirt out of storage.

I miss the old ten dollar bill. The engraving on the back, of the U. S. Treasury building in around 1928, is just delightful and so much more interesting than the new serious designs. One element that always enchanted me was the little car on the street. I always thought it was a Model T Ford, but according to wikipedia's article on the bill's history it's no particular model, just a sort of generic car of the era.

I traced it onto the shirt with a pencil and embroidered it, taxing my artistic abilities to the max, while I watched the Ford/Carter debates on the dorm-basement TV. Did a so-so job on its proportions, but, hey, it's not a real car anyway, so accuracy is irrelevant!

Attack of the Fifty Foot Cat

A great idea, at the time

There's a bicycle path along the local leg of the highway, through Murrells Inlet. There's also a bike path through the state park, which lies on the other side of the tidal creek.

For years, the plan has been to build an unbroken 11-mile bikeway from Litchfield (south of the park) to the county line (at the north tip of Murrells Inlet). Each leg is to be connected to the others. And we loved the idea. Actually, we still love it in theory, but we failed big time to take a hard look at what they planned.

This creek is a fragile tidal estuary. It's home to a lot of wildflife, seasonal and year-round, including the threatened woodstork and the Eastern brown pelican. When a developer across the street decided to build a shopping/condo eco-horror, a bunch of us residents took it to hearings and got the plan reduced to accomodate a big wooded setback around its perimeter. It's still going to release asphalt-soaked runoff into the creek, the developer is still taking down beautiful 150-200 year old live oaks, and we're still depressed as hell by the destruction, but we did what we could.

The bike path was another matter. We paid no attention to the plan. Stupid!

The Americans With Disabilites Act is a great thing, and if we'd realized the impact it would have on this path, we'd have found a way to make it meet ADA and still be more ecologically sound. But it slipped under our radar. When we heard the power saw, we ran outside.

First, the already-made bike path through town is on both sides of the street. But to cross the creek along this bridge (thereby connecting to the park's path), both northbound and southbound lanes will run together on the east side of the road. This triggers width requirements that, according to the contractor, mean two wheelchairs must be able to pass one another. Fine, ADA is important.

The next part, though, is elaborate and unnecssary. Some grandiose wanna-be Nature Lover decided that it needs to have a scenic overlook (which will go on the other side of this guardrail). So now a big wide observation deck must go where we thought only a level, bikeable path over the bank needed to go.

That means the death of that beautiful old cedar in the top picture, and, worse, it means pressure-treated pilings to support the deck. Pressure-treated lumber is necessary if you have to use wooden posts. Of course. Otherwise they'd rot quickly. And while there are newer, less toxic types of pressure treatment, they are lower-rated, and suitable only for residential use. To live outdoors in salt water, the rating must be 2.5 (explained in this article -- see the green box and below), and that means CCA (chromated copper arsenate. Yes, that is arsenic).

Bottom photo by Larry

At the very least, we could have required some other material be used. None are very good, rammed into this precious creek, but pressure-treatment means slow leach of poison into the water when the tide comes up.

Woulda coulda shoulda, again. From now on, we'll have to be vigilant about any project, even one that seems as blasted nature-friendly as a bike path.

Decades

I'm curled on my chair, or was a few minutes ago, listening to Joss Stone. Joss, Katie Melua, KT Tunstall, I listen to a lot of kids I'm old enough to be the mother of. They sing about the way their bodies sing, like roaring crystal springs, while I feel like a stagnant pond today. Unintelligently designed to make babies then croak when I'm done, not to do what I'll be doing, thanks to science, stroll through decades with equipment that doesn't know what to do with itself anymore so it needs pinches and scrapes from unnatural objects that make it recoil and that silence its quieter song for awhile. They leave me curled in a chair for the day listening to Joss Stone sing about things old women like me also get to have, those extra decades, entitled to them or not, natural or not, the walks and the crystal air and nights curled with my head on my arm while my body sings more softly now, but still sings.

Assumptions

His name is Frank, and he's 82. He was one of our favorite customers back when we had our walk-in store. Larry knows him better than I do, since he was a train customer. Many of the train customers were retirees who'd moved here from elsewhere, usually the northeast. Northerners played with toy trains as kids more than southerners seem to have.

So here was this guy in his late 70's, absolutely delighted to find some model railroad items he'd wanted for decades.

We closed the store in 2005, and lost track of a lot of the customers, including Frank. He phoned the other day and left a message, asking help in selling off his collection. Larry called him back.

Frank is now 82. His wife died in 2006. He's moving back up north.

It nearly broke our hearts. It just sucks to see someone who loved these things so much, dealing with loss, divesting himself of the things he loved, going back to where there's family to look after him, winding down his life. "Isn't he keeping any of it?" I asked Larry. "I don't know. He may be moving into a spare room. He may not be able to keep it. I said I'd go over and help him sort and sell it."

So today, Larry visited Frank. Dreading it.

He came home smiling.

Frank isn't moving into a spare room, or into assisted living. A few months ago, on one of his trips back to his hometown, he met an old girlfriend. Hadn't seen her in 62 years. They're moving in together.

I think I'll quit making assumptions.

UPDATE: Typewriter keyboard configurations

The excitement never stops here at the Nostalgic blog!

I knew this was in that garage somewhere. "Smith & Corona" after 1924 (when Smith and Corona merged).

The 5 top row keys perform tab functions; they do not type characters. Numerical keys share the same characters as their counterparts in the 1950-ish machines.

Here, the ? shares the apostrophe key, and above the forward slash, you get a three-fourths fraction character! Wow. Still no plus sign.

Pictures 2 & 3:

Both the Underwood and the Smith Corona date from -- sheesh, am I supposed to know? Late 40's, early 50's? And their keyboards are almost identical. One exception: back space key on the Underwood, right-pointing arrow (Indent? But why have both that and a tab key?) on the S-C.

But both have %, both have (what was that secret formula again?? Never mind) cents characters, and neither has a + . Possibly, one could create a + by using a dash superimposed on an apostrophe?

And that quotation mark (above the 2) must mean that these were high end models, because I remember my mother's typewriter in the 1960's, which required the use of two apostrophes instead.

Guess those fraction characters were important.



(The tag dates from our yard sale in 1999. Everyone who looked at these got my sales-pitch: "You'll be needing that Y2K word processor! Haha!" And every one of them said "Haha!" and then, obviously, didn't buy one.)

This last picture comes from the Sears 1969 catalog, and didn't scan too well, but the basics are that it had a treasure trove of keys! %, fractions, and a + key as well. The cents character might be above the 7. Unless that's some other character I haven't thought of. It's as unreadable in the real-life catalog as it is in the scan.

(Passers-by can find the origin of this discussion in the comments for this nellieblogs entry.)

Isn't she a little beauty!

Til the clouds roll by

LUNAR ECLIPSE

COASTAL SOUTH CAROLINA

FEBRUARY 20, 2008

They said that it would be so overcast that we probably wouldn't get to see it at all, so I was happy to get a few shots before the cloud cover obliterated it.

This was about 8:45 PM Eastern.

Cat Geometry 102

After you've mastered Cat Geometry 101 as demonstrated by Fonzie over on Sherwords,

observe Downyflake demonstrating Cat Geometry 102, "Fitting a larger object into a smaller space."

Some days are like that.

Home improvement continues

These shelves come from the store that we had, but closed, a few years ago. Now that we've cleared that nice big space, we can actually use them to organize the business inventory. When somebody buys something, we're now able to, like, find it to send it to them! Hey, we're cutting edge here.

And this emptied out an upstairs bookcase -- which I now get to use! All for me!

BEFORE:


Behold the chaos that used to be my reading area. Stacks everywhere, in a disorderly mass, from reference books, to current reading, to "No, we're not selling that, I want it," to "These just arrived and I haven't sorted them yet." Plus magazines, catalogs, CD's, and always a cat.

AFTER!

We moved my chair to the other side of the room and moved the disorderly mass onto shelves. By using the bookcase to partition the room, we solved another problem; now if I have insomnia, I can go out and read without my book light -- which can pretty much light up the whole house like an amusement park -- glaring into the bedroom.

Don't get me started on why the BLEEP they make these stupid book lights so blasted bright, when their whole point is to let one person read while the other's darkness is undisturbed!!?! Just don't get me started.....

You don't know what we go through

Love 'em or hate 'em, any bookseller who doesn't deal in romances is making a mistake. Romance readers are steady, voracious consumers.

Unfortunately, to sell these books you have to --bleah-- spend time at least skimming them, because readers are very picky about content.

These days there are websites for it, but back in my librarian days we attended seminars about why people read the fiction they read. In normal libraries (ours was not terribly normal) there was a high demand for what the profession calls "readers' advisory" in which, to give an example, somebody who loved Outlander comes in asking for more books like that. You, the Advisor, need to be able to zero in on what the reader means by "books like that": Was it the time travel plot device? the time period, the Scotland setting? Something more difficult to articulate?

Our library almost never got such questions, but the seminars were too much fun to miss. The guy who ran them was a true comedian. He used The Hunt for Red October as an example, and started by summarizing the plot: the Soviets want to conceal the fact that the commander of their high tech sub is trying to defect to the US. Jack Ryan, a mid-level CIA analyst, figures out that this is a defection, but Ryan has to fight his way through the thick-headed upper management and the Joint Chiefs of Staff trying to get somebody to listen, and then has to manage a touchy political situation while playing the cards just right, to keep the Soviets from destroying the prize before the US can gets its hands on it.

Here you have to picture our seminar leader assuming a posture and a voice like Jack Benny:

"Now," he said, feigning puzzlement, "why do you suppose that white, middle management males went crazy for this book?"

It was the delivery. You had to be there. The room cracked up.

The seminars naturally focused on the kind of reader response to fiction that librarians could actually help them satisfy. We're talking what's called "genre" fiction. Romance, mysteries, technothrillers, fantasy, sci fi, etc.

Most fiction genres (I'm not so sure about romance, but that may be my prejudice) can produce something innovative and mind-expanding. "Formulaic" is only a subset of "genre fiction." And some very intelligent readers use genre fiction to take much-needed mental R&R, so we learned long ago that we couldn't make assumptions about the readers. We did find that when people seek a semi-meditative, emotional auto-pilot type of reading experience, they're more inclined to ask for book suggestions than when they're looking for a mind-challenge.

Advising them meant getting enough information out of them to identify the attraction a book held, and that's not so easy when the attraction is on a more emotional and less cognitive level. Romance readers are very specific as to the plot and character components they like. Sometimes the time period or setting will get the customer a big enough stack of books to send her home happy, but often it's a more subtle factor. She might like poor-plucky-orphan-girl stories no matter the setting, or arranged-marriage-turns-into-true-love plots.

So a book is set in the American West? Not enough info! You need to identify the sub-genres. Does the woman tame the most powerful authority figure in town? Or is it an outlaw bad-boy she overwhelms with her charms? Hey, a reader who craves outlaws isn't going to be terribly interested in our schoolmarm thawing out the cold local sheriff.

Time travel romance is the hot "new" thing in a series of historical romance sub-genres that feed the urge to escape the bonds of "civilized" society : a way out of one's Dilbertian cubicle is supernatural transport to a wilder, more primitive era.

If the whole idea behind this level of pleasure-reading is to bypass conscious thought and go directly to Primal Urge Central, that explains why romances tend toward types in their elements and, whether they're sexually explicit or not, toward those things innocuously called traditional values.

For a seller, this means skimming some of the worst stuff on earth. An inconvenient husband is always an SOB but, even to someone we'd call an abuser in real modern life, marriage is sacred in these novels. So he must change radically into a tender appreciative mate, or die or, in one case, turn out to be gay. That book's POV made gay orientation a synonym for villainy. If you want sympathy for a character forced into a societal role that he can't fill, you won't get it in a bodice-ripper.

Categorizing romances: it's not a pretty job, but somebody has to do it!

Undisciplined writing

Back when I was the Town Librarian, that apparently credentialed me as being knowledgeable about books (nothing could be less true) so the features editor asked me to write book reviews for the local paper. It wasn't usually much fun. The paper understandably wanted a focus on books of local or southern interest, whether they interested me or not. But once in awhile somebody would write, oh, say, a lesbian comic novel with a South Carolina setting. Cackling softly, I'd put it on my list.

I still had to write in a demure professional manner. And it was very valuable experience. I challenged myself to tighten and polish my prose to a point that would force the editor to print every word I turned in. I succeeded only occasionally (OK, like, twice, all right?!), but I felt triumphant when I did, and learned a lot about fine tuning my work.

But I always wanted to indulge in the total lack of self-discipline that I've found blogging. In later entries, I might investigate this issue more.

This is a review I wrote in 1991. You can blow up the picture and read the review if you like, but it's a basic, conventional review, written for the sensibilities of a community so concerned about Good Taste that a group made a formal complaint about the spine labels on the library books; they were not precisely aligned so that you could gaze down a row and see an even white line.

(Click if you'd like to enlarge)

--

There are 3 things you can't do in a nice polite local paper feature. Well, probably more than 3, but I ran into 3 when I wrote this review.

1. You can't giggle like a 12-year-old over a dumb sex joke.
2. You can't digress at all, much less outrageously, and
3. you really shouldn't diss a classic too often. Choose your battles.

So because it's my blog and I'm no longer reigned in by an editor, here's what else I really wanted to say about The Revolution of Little Girls, by Blanche McCrary Boyd: This book had me literally sliding out of my chair with tears in my eyes, laughing.

Generally, it's a well-done fictional journey through reconnecting with buried memories of abuse. The funny passages that don't quite work are still not insensitive, just a little implausible, so the integrity of using humor in an abuse-memory plot remains intact. To take a comic approach to such a subject is risky and, remarkably, Boyd pulls it off and manages to be both moving and wickedly funny.

The episode that had me howling depicts the kids in the English class getting out of control, as the tension drains off following a confrontation between the teacher and another student. It all happens during a read-through of Our Town. So, OK, you'd maybe have to find Our Town as irritating as I do to find the passage so uproarious.

The novel's heroine, Ellen, forms a slightly obscene misinterpretation of a scene in Our Town. The scene in which Mrs. Gibbs bids her husband to come out to the garden and smell her heliotrope. Ellen collapses in hysterics. So did I.

Our Town is admittedly one skillful piece of work. You have to admire any writer who can take a view of both life and afterlife that makes Pet Sematary look warm and fuzzy, and snuggle it down into such a deceptively wholesome hometowny play that schools produce it on a regular basis. So when somebody like Boyd mocks it so well, I just kind of fall in love with her.

Anyway, I liked the book.

Worth passing along

I'm a day late for this, but that's nothing new.

Yesterday was "Liar's Diary Blog Day". I liked what this blogger said about writers having every reason to help each other.

First, I can't give a personal recommendation for this novel, because I'd never heard of the author or this, her first novel, till today. I burned out on standard mysteries and thrillers awhile ago, but when something above the norm comes out I get interested. So it's in my shopping cart, and would be anyway. But the blog day effort gives me an extra incentive.

Until November anyway, author Patry Francis was living my dream. She'd spent 25 years as a waitress, but her first novel was published a year ago, to some good reviews. Yesterday was the launch date of the Plume Books paperback.

In November Francis was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. The good news is that it appears that it had not metastasized, it appears that surgery worked, and her prognosis is good.

So I'm happy to participate in this show of support for Patry Francis, and to pass it on to yall! Good wishes, prayers if you do that sort of thing, will undoubtedly be welcome, and if the book sounds interesting to any of my readers, here are places to get it:

Books-A-Million
Amazon
B&N

In 1954 it was a very good year

And in honor of the year, a post (almost) entirely in black-and-white :

A 1954 commercial for Peter Pan [TM]







The new Corvette!





And Elvis makes his early commerical recordings for Sun Records.

"That's All Right"





Born in '54, and I turn 54 today.


So it's off to Charleston for a day of fun. Here's hoping it's an equally good day for all my readers!





8~)

One afternoon in 1988

Remember these?

This tube of gluey muck would make a big bubble, or balloon -- it was kind of something in-between -- that you could bat around for a few minutes to a couple hours (rarely. If you got lucky), until it wore out. In 1988, I was wandering around my apartment complex with my Christmas camera and there was kid playing with the stuff. It still existed! It's undoubtedly a medically or environmentally hazardous thing of the past now, but this kid was making some great bubbles. This one was a good 18 inches in diameter!

[UPDATE/Amendment]

I keep looking at this picture, wondering: where's the seam? SuperBubbles always had a seam or at least a pinch-off point and I don't see one on this. So I could be wrong. It could have been a soap bubble. A pretty impressive one, and I still love this picture!

And we're just getting started

We're engaged in a huge clean up, clear out, organize job.




Over the years we've had bursts of organizing energy. Here's a terribly useful example. In 2000, we went through this box and decided it was OK! Isn't that great? We felt no need to label it further. Is it store stock or our own? Is it books? Glassware? Beanie Babies?? Who knows? But what really matters is that it's OK! There are lots of these in both our handwriting. At some point, this was useful information.

With a few warm days appropriate for garage work, we decided to put everything else on hold and plunge in. For the next few days the weather will be too cold, so work has moved upstairs to the main living space, where we're also making radical changes. We're both pack rats but I admit I'm worse.

I kept every cancelled check I ever wrote. Copies of every tax return I ever filed. The stub of every paycheck I ever received. Insurance claims, paid-bill stubs, you name it, carried from address to address and stored all these years. "Retain for your records." It's out of character for me to be so obedient.





Check out the book on the bottom of the adjacent stack. I swear, I dumped the old files and diskettes there beside a stack of books ready to sell, took a photo and then spotted it. Didn't plant it.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to keep this stuff. "Would you like a side of Hoarding Disorder with that ADD?" Somehow it seemed important then and it doesn't now. Along with the space problem, there's the minor matter of having about a thousand bits of paper bearing my SSN, a bunch of account numbers, and my detailed address/phone number history, all stashed in a garage and ready for a good windstorm to send them flying all over two counties.

So a big clean-out project is underway. And along with audio cassettes and VHS tapes,

(Not all of them. But the "Keep" piles are small.)

which get donated, away goes the garbage. We got a good shredder at Costco a couple months back, with just such a cleanup project in mind, since merely dumping personal data is a bad idea. With the exception of a few items that fit in a single file folder, I have shredded 30 years of unnecessary documents.





4 bags full of my shredded documents alone. So far.

And I'm discovering buried treasure. Like the 1919 edition of Bartlett's Quotations. A stack of TV Guides, most of which are going to Recycle, but I'm keeping the Best Cartoons issue from 2002. A deck of Harry Potter playing cards in a magic disappearing-card box! Far out, man.

























Empty space. Amazing.

Downy checks out an almost-empty shelf.

It's going to take awhile, but when we're done we'll have what matters, and be able to find it.

One afternoon in 1974

Happy New Year - 1913

Playing around with my new scanner!

From my collection of vintage stuff. Here's to 2008, yall!