Quote of the Day (Richard Hofstadter, on Americans’ Long-Time Acceptance of Violence)

“Americans certainly have reason to inquire whether, when compared with other advanced industrial nations, they are not a people of exceptional violence. Any American who has lived for a time in England, for example, can hardly fail to notice there a gentleness and a repugnance to violence that underlines our own contrasting qualities. Americans, however they may deplore and fear violence, are not so deeply shocked by it as the English are. Our entertainment and our serious writing are suffused with violence to a notorious degree; it is endemic in our history. Americans, apparently taking it as a part of the stream of life’s events, do not as a rule very promptly rise up in large numbers and in lawful ways to protest, oppose, or control it. They are legendary for their refusal to accept the reality of death, but violence they endure as part of the nature of things, and as one of those evils to be expected from life.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, edited by Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (1970)

Quote of the Day (Celeste Headlee, on the Need to Talk and Listen to One Another)

“We must learn how to talk to one another and, more important, listen to one other. We must learn to talk to people we disagree with, because you can’t unfriend everyone in real life.”— Public radio journalist Celeste Headlee, We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter (2017)

The accompanying image of Celeste Headlee was taken Apr. 4, 2012, by Sheryl Victor Levy.

Quote of the Day (The Editors of ‘Commonweal,’ On the Supreme Court’s Reversal of ‘Roe v. Wade’)

“Now that Roe is finally overturned, the [Roman Catholic] Church must think through the implications of its success. An issue that has dominated public discourse and reshaped American society over half a century remains far from settled—morally, politically, legally, culturally. Catholics ambivalent about abortion and discouraged by the Church’s alliance with the right will continue to tune out the bishops or even disaffiliate. Meanwhile, the left’s often cavalier dismissal of the moral status of the unborn makes productive debate on this issue increasingly difficult. With lawmaking on abortion returned to the state level, partisan divides and regional differences will deepen. Women will continue to seek out abortions, through legal and extralegal means, including medications delivered by mail. Abortion is likely to remain the subject of protests, sloganeering, and demagoguery. As we have seen across the decades—from the murders of abortion doctors and the bombing of clinics to recent attacks on pregnancy-counselling centers and a death threat against Justice Brett Kavanaugh—some people on both sides of this issue are willing to resort to violence. Such violence is likely to increase in this moment of uncertainty.”—"The End of Roe: A Test for American Democracy” (editorial), Commonweal, June 25, 2022

As I thought of the changed landscape in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a line from the prophet Isaiah came to mind: “Come, let us reason together.”

My fear is that this fervent hope will fall on deaf ears. 

The wounds from the past half-century—the vitriol and hypocrisy of this opening salvo of the culture wars—have already infected the body politic, in the form of a Democratic Party ready to accept not only some of the most liberal abortion laws in the industrialized world but also among the highest rates of abortion in that sphere, while the Republicans jiggered their own self-imposed rule for Supreme Court confirmations in election years and aligned itself with a would-be authoritarian peddling conspiracy theories like a snake-oil salesman.

And that does not even take into account, as the editors of the Catholic opinion journal Commonweal note, the damage to religious institutions like the Church.

Now, I fear, what may be about to ensue will only further divide families and friends. None of this had to happen had each side only engaged in mutual respect and a willingness to compromise.

Quote of the Day (Paul Laurence Dunbar, on African-American Valor in the Civil War)

“Yes, the Blacks enjoy their freedom,
And they won it dearly, too;
For the life blood of their thousands
Did the southern fields bedew.
In the darkness of their bondage,
In the depths of slavery’s night,
Their muskets flashed the dawning,
And they fought their way to light.
 
“They were comrades then and brothers,
Are they more or less to–day?
They were good to stop a bullet
And to front the fearful fray.
They were citizens and soldiers,
When rebellion raised its head;
And the traits that made them worthy,—
Ah! those virtues are not dead.”—African-American poet-novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), “The Colored Soldiers,” in Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)
 
I wanted to include some verses by Paul Laurence Dunbar, born 150 years ago today in Dayton, Ohio. Even before reading the above lines, I had been interested in the contribution of African-American soldiers in the Civil War.
 
But I think Dunbar—one of the first African-Americans to earn a living from writing—invested his poem “The Colored Soldiers” with even greater depth of feeling because his father Joshua, a Kentucky slave who escaped to Canada before the war, returned to serve with the 55^th Massachusetts Regiment.
 
After Joshua separated from his wife Matilda, Paul was raised by his mother, who encouraged him to pursue writing. From an early age, he displayed his talent, editing while in high school a short-lived paper The Dayton Tattler (printed, incidentally, by his classmate, future aviation pioneer Orville Wright).
 
In certain ways, Dunbar’s career resembles that of Stephen Crane. Both produced an enormous both of prose and poetry, drank heavily and died far too soon of tuberculosis. Both also dealt at one point or another with war and racism.
 
The title of Maya Angelou’s famous memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, derives from a Dunbar poem, “Sympathy.”
 
Five years ago, filmmaker Frederick Lewis created a feature-length documentary on Dunbar’s life, Behind the Mask, taken from the title of one of the writer’s poems.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Tin Men,’ With a Couple’s Disagreement About Picnics)

Nora Tilley [played by Barbara Hershey]: “If we went on a picnic, it would be fun.”
 
Ernest Tilley [played by Danny DeVito]: “I don't understand a picnic. We go someplace, we put a thing on the ground and eat.”
 
Nora: “Yeah, it's nice to do that.”
 
Ernest: “Why? I don't get it. It's better sittin' in front of the TV.”
 
Nora: “I happen to think there's somethin' nice about a picnic. It's fun.”
 
Ernest: “What's fun about it? Ants get in the food—there's bees. I don't get it. You have to drive—it takes you maybe an hour to get there. And then whataya do? You sit on the grass and eat. Why is that fun?”— Tin Men (1987), written and directed by Barry Levinson
 
This section of Barry Levinson’s screenplay is not as famous—and certainly not as raunchy—as the priceless dialogue on how Ben Cartwright came to be a father (through three different wives) on Bonanza.
 
But I think it’s just as uproarious while setting up a crucial element of the story: Nora’s sense of isolation from her husband, which makes her unexpectedly easy prey for Ernest’s nemesis, rival aluminum-siding salesman Bill "B.B." Babowsky (played by Richard Dreyfuss).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine, on ‘The Path of Charity’)

“Let me ask of my reader, wherever, alike with myself, he is certain, there to go on with me; wherever, alike with myself, he hesitates, there to join with me in inquiring; wherever he recognizes himself to be in error, there to return to me; wherever he recognizes me to be so, there to call me back: so that we may enter together upon the path of charity, and advance towards Him of whom it is said, Seek His face evermore.” — St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), On the Trinity, translated by Arthur West Haddan (1887)

Song Lyric of the Day (Carly Simon, on ‘Time's Printed Pages’)

“Time's printed pages,
Words you won't forget;
go out and try to live them,
you'll be an angel yet.” —American singer-songwriter Carly Simon, “Another Door,” from her debut LP Carly Simon (1971)
 
Happy 77^th birthday to chanteuse—and recently elected Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame member—Carly Simon!

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, Defining the People Who Define Words)

“Lexicographer, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.”— American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, edited by David E Schultz and S. T. Joshi (2002)

As soon as I saw this quote, it struck my fancy: The satirist making fun of himself. And that was before I realized that I would be using it on the 180^th birthday of Ambrose Bierce today.

Bierce might be best known for the last act of his life: his disappearing act in the Mexican Revolution, an event depicted in the film adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel The Old Gringo, with Gregory Peck in one of his last big-screen roles as the writer.

But, unlike many authors, his life (including the most dramatic parts, such as his service as a Union soldier in several Civil War battles) does not distract attention from his writing.

In particular, The Devil’s Dictionary stands as his great achievement in biting cynicism. It is, as the title suggests, hardly the stuff of traditional dictionaries. Its mockery does not age in the slightest after all these years.

His insults could be something to behold, as in this description of Oscar Wilde when the young writer came to lecture in San Francisco in 1882:

“That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding.”

Such invective derived from Bierce's wide-ranging misanthropy, as explained by historian Kevin Starr in Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915:

“He hated democracy and he hated Walt Whitman. He hated ministers. If dogs harassed him as he pedaled his bicycle along country roads, he would dismount, draw his pistol and shoot the offending animal, sometimes before an astonished owner's eyes.”

Quote of the Day (James Russell Lowell, Responding to an Earlier Age of Cynicism)

 

“But stay! no age was e’er degenerate,         
  Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,        
  For in our likeness still we shape our fate.           90
    Ah, there is something here           
  Unfathomed by the cynic’s sneer,   
  Something that gives our feeble light          
  A high immunity from Night,          
  Something that leaps life’s narrow bars               95
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;       
  A seed of sunshine that can leaven  
  Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,          
        And glorify our clay       
  With light from fountains elder than the Day.”—American poet, editor, and diplomat James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865,” in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman, edited by John Hollander (1993)

Quote of the Day (Dan McCrum, on the Lack of Due Diligence Behind Financial Fraud)

“Trust means not wasting time on pointless checks. Most deceptions would generally have been caught early on by basic due diligence…[But] it makes as much sense for a banker to visit every outpost of a company requiring a loan as it would for the buyer of a pint of milk to inquire after the health of the cow. For instance, by the time John Paulson, one of the world's most famous hedge fund managers, became the largest shareholder in Canadian-listed Sino Forest, its shares had traded for 15 years. Until the group's 2011 collapse, few thought of travelling to China to see if its woodlands were there.”— Business and financial journalist Dan McCrum, “Why We Trust Fraudsters,” The Financial Times, June 18-19, 2022

TV Quote of the Day (Mel Brooks, With a Script for a Lucrative Commercial)

“Don’t write with a peach. If you write with a peach, you’ll get a very wet letter. Don’t write with a prune. Words will come out wrinkled and dopey. Let’s face it: The only fruit you can write with is a banana. The Bic Banana. A fine-line marker. Not to be confused with a ballpoint. Writing a letter to your son, right? Right. Usually, I write, ‘Dear son, how are you? I’m fine.’ Write that same letter with a Bic Banana and you’ll get: ‘Dear Sonny, I miss your face, Mom.’ See what a nice letter it writes? And it comes in colors. Most fruits only come in one color, except grapes, which come in two colors and, of course, pits and pitless. Look, if you’ve got to write with a fruit, write with a Bic Banana! It’s only 29 cents. Your best buy in writing fruit. The Bic Banana. A different way to write!”—Script for the “Bic Banana” commercial, included in Mel Brooks, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2022)

There are some commercials engraved in my memory from constant repetition in my impressionable youth. It’s far more unusual for me to recall an ad that did not air too long. It always helps if the latter kind of commercial is insane.

Enter Mel Brooks. In his new memoir, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, director, and actor recalls how, in a financially fallow period in the 1960s when he was courting future wife Anne Bancroft, commercials helped him pay the bills.

The one TV ad he cited was for the Bic Banana. He gave no exact date for his voice-over work for this, but left the impression it was in the 1960s. It could not have been in the early 1960s, as I wasn’t old enough to watch TV regularly then. As it turned out, it was in 1973—after his Oscar for The Producers, but just before his huge success with Blazing Saddles.

I don’t know how much input Brooks had in the actual script for this one-minute ad. I suspect, from what I’ve read on his interactions with show-business collaborators in Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man, that he may not have been easy to get along with the ad men who worked on this.

But if the makers of the Bic Banana wanted their product to get noticed, they sure picked the right person. Just watch this YouTube clip—or rather, because his face is never shown, listen to it. The demented intonation of certain words is classic Brooks. In fact, it can only be Brooks.

(This crazily voiced commercial for a crazily named product would be followed by an even more insane ad, with actor/game show fixture Charles Nelson Reilly dancing and singing--dressed up as a bright, yellow Bic Banana, promoting these markers to similarly dressed schoolchildren.)

If you want an even more unusual Brooks commercial—this time, a 1960s radio ad, with Dick Cavett serving as straight man—then listen to him play “The 2500 Year Old Brewmaster” (a variation on the “2,000-Year-Old Man” character he had played with friend Carl Reiner) for Ballantine Beer.

Photo of the Day: Juneteenth Celebration, Englewood NJ

My hometown, Englewood NJ, celebrated Juneteenth with not one but four days of a festival from this past Thursday through Sunday. I took this photo yesterday, as residents thronged Depot Square to eat, go on rides, and, as you see here, listen to the music.

For those who’d like to ponder the meaning of Juneteenth, when it began in 1865 in Texas (the last state in the Union to hear the proclamation that all slaves were free) and to our own time, I urge you to read this blog post from historian, literary critic, and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates connected to his PBS documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Quote of the Day (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, on a Slave Mother)

“She is a mother pale with fear,
   Her boy clings to her side,
And in her kirtle vainly tries
   His trembling form to hide.
  
“He is not hers, although she bore
   For him a mother's pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
   Is coursing through his veins!
  
“He is not hers, for cruel hands
   May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
   That binds her breaking heart.”—African-American poet, abolitionist and temperance and women's suffrage activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), “The Slave Mother,” originally published in her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), anthologized in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)
 
I am glad to see historians’ growing attention to Reconstruction and the far longer Jim Crow era of reaction to the political and economic gains of African-Americans. It’s important to realize how easily such advances can be reversed.
 
But with the federal holiday of Juneteenth occurring today, I think it’s also important to remember that emancipation—and the horrifying Civil War that made it possible—also ended practices that would never be repeated. One of these was the breakup of slave families by their owners, a dread evoked in the above verses.
 
I had never heard of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper before I began looking for a quote in observation of Juneteenth—she never came up in my college courses on American literature nor American history in the 19^th century—but I think her life and career are worth recalling.
 
Particularly in the antebellum era, this child of free blacks bore witness, through her writing and lectures, to the horrors of slavery—and implicitly refuted whites who perpetuated the myth of innate African-American intellectual inferiority.
 
For a deeper consideration of what Harper meant—for her time and ours—I recommend Eric Gardner’s 2015 post on OUPblog, Ohio University Press’s Website offering “Academic Insights for the Thinking World.”
 
The image accompanying this post, Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's The Modern Medea (1867), was inspired by Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who, after being recaptured in the North through the Fugitive Slave Act, killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery.
 
Garner’s case—an example of the plight faced by African-American women under slavery depicted by Harper—also gave rise, a century later, to Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), as well as her libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Poet Edward Taylor, on the ‘Bread of Life’)

“What wonder's here, that Bread of Life should come
To feed Dead Dust? Dry Dust eate Living Bread?
Yet Wonder more by far may all, and some
That my Dull Heart's so dumpish when thus fed.
Lord Pardon this, and feed mee all my dayes,
With Living Bread to thy Eternall Prayse.” —New England Puritan minister and poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729), “Meditation 9 Joh. 6.51. I am the Living Bread,” in The Poems of Edward Taylor, edited by Donald E. Stanford (2014)

Quote of the Day (Albert Schweitzer, on ‘The Spirit Generated by Truth’)

“One belief of my childhood I have preserved with the certainty that I can never lose it: belief in truth. I am confident that the spirit generated by truth is stronger than the force of circumstances. In my view no other destiny awaits mankind than that which, through its mental and spiritual disposition, it prepares for itself. Therefore I do not believe that it will have to tread the road to ruin right to the end.” — Alsatian physician, theologian, humanitarian—and Nobel Peace Prize laureate—Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, translated by Antje Bultmann Lemke (1931)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Uncle Buck,’ As the Kids’ Emergency Guardian Performs His Duty)

“Uncle Buck” Russell [played by John Candy]: “Did you brush your teeth?”
 
Miles Russell [played by Macaulay Culkin]: “Yeah. You can even feel my toothbrush.”
 
Buck: “You know, I have a friend who works at the crime lab at the police station. I could give him your toothbrush and he could run a test on it. To see if you actually brushed your teeth or just ran your toothbrush under the faucet.”
 
[Miles imagines hearing sirens. Buck leaves]
 
Maisy Russell [played by Gaby Hoffmann]: “If that's true, we're gonna really have to start brushing our teeth.”— Uncle Buck (1989), written and directed by John Hughes

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Love and Marriage)

“’Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime;
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine—
A sad, sour, sober beverage — by time
Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavor
Down to a very homely household savour.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan (1819-1823)
 
In the most popular month for weddings, it really does go against the grain to post such a cynical view of marriage. And these verses were written by a man spectacularly unfit for this institution—a walking advertisement for scandal who was once famously described by a future lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
 
No matter. Whatever interest might derive from the romantic escapades of Lord Byron, that curiosity would likely fade if these adventures were ranked next to those of history’s other great lotharios. 
 
There’s a far better, more lasting reason to be fascinated by this poet: his work. And nothing in the rest of his career can quite prepare you for his great, rollicking, mock-epic of the last stage of his short life, Don Juan. 

Erect whatever defenses you want against Byron's irreverence, but by the time you finish stanzas such as this, it seems to me impossible not to put this poem down without one’s sides shaking with laughter.
 
(For an interesting blog post on the satirical knock-offs inspired by this poem—which itself was a satirical knock-off—see this post, centered around the work of early 19th-century editor-publisher William Hone, from nine years ago.)

Quote of the Day (Ward Just, on the Aim of Art and Politics)

“I believe that the aim of art is consolation, and it is the aim of politics as well; the artist and the politician are brothers." —American novelist, short-story writer and journalist Ward Just (1935-2019), Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women (1979)

The accompanying image of Ward Just was taken Sept. 5, 2015 by slowking4.

Quote of the Day (John Maynard Keynes, on Wealth Inequality)

“I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist today. There are valuable human activities which require the motive of money-making and the environment of private wealth-ownership for their full fruition. Moreover, dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative. But it is not necessary for the stimulation of these activities and the satisfaction of these proclivities that the game should be played for such high stakes as at present.”—English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935)

Quote of the Day (Paul Simms, Imagining a Corporate Upper-Management Move)

“Alex Kerner (C.E.O., C.O.O., chairman, and president of Alex Kerner's Personal Life, Inc.) announced today a wide-ranging restructuring of his imaginary company's upper management….

“In a reshuffling move unrelated to the current streamlining, former Best Platonic Female Friend Lisa Mayberry has been summarily terminated from the organization for malfeasance involving telling Kerner's ex-girlfriend details about Kerner's current girlfriend.”— Paul Simms, “Shouts and Murmurs: For Immediate Release,” The New Yorker, Aug. 31, 2009

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Marilynne Robinson, on Why Love is Holy)

“Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Quote of the Day (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on Trusting Yourself)

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”— German playwright, poet, and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Faust, Part One, translated by John R. Williams (1808)

Seeing that quote, outside of its theatrical context, one might regard it with the same optimism and innocence as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” (And, indeed, in his essay collection Representative Men, the American admired the German man of letters so much as to offer him as an example of “The Writer.”) What could be wrong with that?

Well, wait. In Goethe’s tragedy Faust, the line is said by Mephistopheles—yes, the Devil himself. He may be more gentlemanly and witty than what one might expect, but he remains wheedling, calmly appealing to Faust’s belief in his own reason and scholar’s overweening vanity.

Self-confidence lies at the heart of the modern self-help movement. Yet it is crucial to remember that, unchecked by any outside restraint, that quality can lead to self-delusion, a refusal to recognize reality, and a willingness to use others for one’s own ends.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Happy Days,’ As an Alien Enjoys Earthly Programming)

TV Announcer: “We'll return to The Andy Griffith Show after these messages.”

Mork [played by Robin Williams] [smiling as he watches]: “I like that boy, Opie. Why does an Earth boy have a Martian name, though?”—Happy Days, Season 5, Episode 22, “My Favorite Orkan,” original air date Feb. 28, 1978, teleplay by Garry Marshall and Joe Glauberg, directed by Jerry Paris

During the 11 seasons of Happy Days, I doubt that I watched more than a half-dozen of its 255 episodes—and I can only recall the plots of about two or three.

But a week or so ago, I was overcome with curiosity when I saw, through the “Guide” feature of my cable TV, that Robin Williams would be appearing on the sitcom, in his first time as the alien Mork from Ork. Technically speaking, it wasn’t the pilot for Williams’ own hit, Mork and Mindy, but it might as well have been, so wild was the reception that the comic received from the studio audience.

It was a good moment for me to catch up with this episode. Considering the turns that Williams’ life and career took—many triumphant, but ultimately sad—I wanted to see what he was like at close to his beginning.

Watching the episode also seemed a bit serendipitous, given the sudden renewed interest in UFOs on Capital Hill. Republicans and Democrats agree on precious little these days, but UFOs is one of them. (Ronald Moultrie, Pentagon Undersecretary for Defense and Intelligence, even told the lawmakers, "We want to know what’s out there just like you want to know what’s out there,” according to blogger Kim Bellard.  Now they’ve even gotten NASA looking into the subject. Who’d have thought it?

 

Quote of the Day (Gillian Tett, on Quantum Computing and Looming ‘Encryptogeddon’)

“Quantum computing [the use of quantum mechanics to run multi-processing calculations] is still nascent to be sure. But one message from the WEF [World Economic Forum] discussion was crystal clear: when quantum computing takes off, it will be able to break current encryption systems. Yes, you read that right. Our bank accounts, emails and other transactions will be vulnerable to hackers. So will digital assets, such as bitcoin, since most blockchains rely on similar encryption techniques.”—British columnist and editor Gillian Tett, “Notebook: Encryptogeddon Is Coming for Us All,” The Financial Times, June 4-5, 2022

Hmmm…hacks…you mean it can get worse than it is already?

Great. Just what we need…

Quote of the Day (Terry Teachout, on the Loss of Browsing in Online Book and Music Buying)

“Everybody knows that browsing is central to the experience of museum-going. It enables the serendipitous, horizon-widening discoveries that are part and parcel of an art lover’s education. Absent such discoveries, you’ll never know more than what you already knew going in. To put it another way, you may deepen your knowledge of art, but you won’t broaden it. And therein lies the problem of online book and record buying: By eliminating casual browsing, it deprives us of the opportunity to grow.” ― American critic, biographer, playwright, stage director, and librettist Terry Teachout (1956-2022), “Closing Our Browsers,” The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2014

The accompanying image of Terry Touchout was taken at the 2013 Texas Book Festival in Austin, on Oct. 27, 2013, by Larry D. Moore.

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on ‘The Highest Degree of Human Wisdom’)

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”― Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), War and Peace (1869)

Quote of the Day (Preston Sturges, With His ‘Rules for Box-Office Appeal’)

“1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959), “Eleven Rules for Box-Office Appeal,” quoted in Alessandro Pirolini, in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study (2010)

The image accompanying this post is from my favorite Preston Sturges comedy, The Lady Eve (1941). I love how Henry Fonda plays bumbling brewery heir Charles Pike with a mix of enthrallment and alarm as he falls under the spell of the alluring gold digger Jean (played by Barbara Stanwyck). 

And well he might: As Jean tells a confidante, in one of the great lines in Sturges’ hilarious script: “I need him like the ax needs the turkey.”

Photo of the Day: Petting Zoo, Caribbean Festival, Englewood NJ

On Sunday morning, approaching the railroad tracks in my hometown of Englewood, NJ, I saw booths being set up for 50 assorted food, merchant and informational vendors for a one-day Caribbean Festival. It was a good opportunity for many people to promote their work, I thought, in a time when COVID-19 has crimped that chance.

For the families streaming through the space on Depot Square, it was also a nice way to experience a beautiful day without driving too far, with games and music also coming from the booths.

But a bit farther on, I came upon this petting zoo. More decades than I want to admit have passed in my life, but the sight of these creatures that I photographed reawakened in me a child-like sense of wonder that I thought not merely dormant, but maybe even dead at times.

Judging from the kids lining up around the enclosure in no time, I think today’s generation had a similar reaction. Who says you knew electronic games to have fun?

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Bedazzled,’ As Satan Explains the 7 ‘Mystic Rules of Life’ Behind a Faustian Bargain)

[George Spiggott—aka Satan—has pulled out a contract calling for Stanley, a woebegone, lovelorn short-order cook, played by Dudley Moore, to sell his soul to him.]

George Spiggott [played by Peter Cook]: “It's the standard contract. Gives you seven wishes in accordance with the mystic rules of life. Seven Days of the Week, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Seas, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers...” —Bedazzled (1967), screenplay by Peter Cook, from a story by Dudley Moore, directed by Stanley Donen

Quote of the Day (Edward Niedermeyer, on the ‘Negligent and Sometimes Cruel Workplace’ of Elon Musk)

“For those of us who have followed Mr. Musk’s antics for some time, the latest twist in his bid for the social media platform [i.e., reevaluating his acquisition Twitter] is entirely in character. The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. Often announcing new features without consultation with his team, he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.”— Edward Niedermeyer, “Elon Musk Masks Dysfunction With Hype,” The New York Times, June 5, 2022

Since Niedermeyer’s article was posted on the Web site of the Times four days ago, the owner of Tesla and Space X has engaged in additional “antics,” including:

*announcing that he plans to launch “thousands” of 394-ft.-tall rockets to Mars;

*demanding that Tesla employees currently working remotely should prepare to spend a minimum of 40 a week back at the office, or resign;

*engaging in a bit of economic soothsaying by letting it out that he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy;

*informing employees that Tesla planned to lay off 10% of its workforce, then partially walking the statement back by saying that this only applied to “salaried employees,” and that the automaker is still hiring hourly workers.

These recent developments point to something that Niedermeyer only hints about when he explains that managers have taken to “deciding whether or not to take issues to Mr. Musk based on the shade of blond of his wife’s hair that day (with platinum shades being correlated with better moods).”

All of these multiple head-snapping mood swings beg the question of whether Musk is either a charismatic business and technological visionary or a megalomaniac. You can bet that not just his closest advisers, but also the shareholders in his ventures and even all of West Street, are sweating out the answer.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors Annual Meeting, was taken June 9, 2015 by Steve Jurvetson.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on ‘Every Common Bush Afire With God’)

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,        
And every common bush afire with God;     
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,     
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), Aurora Leigh (1856)

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on the Hour of ‘This Rough Beast’)

“The wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last." — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," based on the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” included on Mitchell’s CD Night Ride Home (1991)

This post is dedicated to the victims of the Uvalde shooting this week—and to all the casualties of mass shootings over the last several decades.

Some of those “thoughts and prayers” we keep hearing about after all these incidents should be reserved for us, the guilty bystanders who haven’t done a blessed thing to stem the plague of gun violence in this country.

We are already experiencing the bewilderment of the international community over this rank failure. Before long, I fear, we will suffer the rebuke of history.

I can only hope God has mercy on us, because we surely don’t deserve any.