None Of The Above

Yes, I know I haven’t posted since the end of June, but I had a very busy July. So bear with me; I’m trying to get back in the Contra saddle on a much more regular basis. A fair bit of good stuff has piled up in my notes. Perforce:

• WordStar 7 for DOS can now be had as a free download, thanks to the work of SF author Robert J. Sawyer. The product has changed hands a great many times down the decades, and as best we can tell it’s now abandonware. Caution suggests that if you’re a retrocomputing fan, better snag it now, before somebody pops up with a copyright objection.
• The Heartland Institute has a very nice free 82-page full-color PDF overview of climate issues from a skeptical perspective. Beyond global warming it covers sea levels, droughts, violent weather, crop yields, and much else. A lot of the data cited comes from the NOAA, which I still consider a reliable source.
• There’s a new image-generating AI called FLUX from Black Forest Labs that apparently knows how many fingers and toes humans have. Sorry, guys: I’ll believe it when I test it.
• Chris Martz put together a map displaying the record hottest day in August for all 50 states. The hottest August temp we’ve ever seen in Arizona was in…1905. Not much of a climate apocalypse, eh?
• Solar cycle 25 has handed us the highest sunspot count in 23 years. This cycle was supposed to be weak. And we haven’t hit the likely peak yet. We may not see that peak until 2025 or 26.
• New research shows that elenolic acid, found in olives and olive leaves, brings down blood sugar and reduces body weight. I have to wonder if this is why the Mediterranean Diet appears to work. Elenolic acid is available OTC, and I’m tempted to try it and see if it will trim a little fat off my waistline.
• Here’s a nice BBC piece about an obscure British clergyman who predicted the existence of black holes in…1783. The guy should be way better known than he is, given that he also identified the inverse square law in 1750.
• For any of several reasons, electric vehicles are dangerous. [Link removed by me; see comments.]
• Copyright issues in training AIs are ongoing. MIT summarizes the use of "copyright traps" that embed nonsense sentences into text by hiding it somehow. (White text on white?) This allows software to determine if a piece of text was used in training. (Just how is too complex to explain here. Read the article.) My response is that finding "invisible" text in blocks of text is an easy challenge for software, especially with Web content. I envision a Web crawler that checks for copyright traps and either refuses to add trapped content to an index, or else scrubs the traps outright before copying the scrubbed text to a local database used for AI training. Bottom line: There is no easy solution to this problem.

72 today. I am quietly rejoicing for having logged another year. Each year we survive is a win. But each year I ask myself: Am I old yet? and every year, well, I can’t in all honesty say yes. I used to think that 65 was the border separating middle age from old age. But when I turned 65 in 2017, I couldn’t shake the feeling of still being middle-aged. So I shoved the border back a few years, to 72. Here I am. And damn if I don’t feel a whit different than I did at 65.

I’ve written about several of my birthdays at some length, and make a few points in those entries that I don’t intend to make again. Here’s 58, 60, 66 (I didn’t do an entry when I turned 65) 69 and 70.

So when does a person become old? My hypothesis: There comes a point when it becomes impossible to live without a little (or maybe more than a little) help. That’s when you become old.

It’s not a dumb question. As we age, things lose functionality. Little failures accumulate, with an occasional larger failure as a sort of quantum leap. A lot of those you can see coming and dodge; I’ve never smoked nor done drugs and don’t drink much. Low-carb has kept my weight down. It’s unclear how much getting plenty of sleep helps, though from all I’ve read it’s a lot.

A few you can reverse with medical help. I’ve been told I’ll need cataract surgery eventually, and whereas my sight isn’t strongly impaired yet, I’m not looking forward to the surgery itself. Joint replacements exist for knees and hips and probably a few others. So far, my joints are in reasonably good shape. Carol and I have been doing some intense weight training since 2003, and I’m pretty sure I now have more muscle than I did when I was in my 40s.

As I’ve written before, sure, I’ve been lucky. That said, a lot of luck you make yourself. Simple caution and not doing stupid things have kept me from spraining or tearing anything essential. I practice sanity, refuse to engage in tribal screaming matches, and don’t take myself as seriously as I might. Laughter feels good, even if you’re laughing at yourself. I keep my brain busy.

Yes, I now have a certain amount of metal in my mouth. In truth, that metal works better than the teeth it replaced. The rest of me is still original stock. I still have my tonsils and my appendix, granting that neither buys me much beyond peculiar bragging rights.

All of which suggests that I’m not old yet. I may someday need a cane or braces of various kinds. 75? 80? 85? Who knows? I’ll take it as it comes. As a grade school friend of mine often says of life, Enjoy the ride. I’m a contrarian optimist. I am enjoying the ride. And as long as I’m enjoying the ride, I suspect I will not think of myself as old.

• Spooky or creepy music in SF/Fantasy/Horror flicks is assumed to rely on the theremin. I just discovered the Ondes Martenot, which sounds like a theremin but is easier to play. Furthermore, it’s been around for most of 100 years. Not sure how I got into my 70s without ever stumbling on it. Good link on YouTube.
• Carol and I don’t go out to the movies much anymore. We stream or buy a DVD for anything we want to see. This writer offers a cogent explanation for why theaters are largely to blame for this phenomenon. (Crappy movies are the rest of the explanation.)
• This sounds a little (or more than a little) grandiose: A meteotsunami subjected the shore of Lake Michigan in Holland, Michigan to—oh, no!—a 2-foot wave. When I was a kid this phenom was called a seiche, and Chicago got its share, rare though they might be. Certain types of bad weather including strong winds and rapid changes in atmospheric pressure are to blame. Again, I’m surprised I made it to my 70s without ever seeing the word.
• No small number of people have claimed that "return to office" mandates are back-channel layoffs, a way to reduce headcount by having heads quit voluntarily. Now some research seems to indicate that this is the case.
• Ok, this is mondo weird: I spun through the McD’s drive-thru not long ago for an iced coffee and got two pennies (and some other coins) in change. Both pennies were 1981-Ds. What are the chances?

  

• I was looking for Revolutionary War flags and stumbled upon a list of flags on Wikipedia that would do Sheldon Cooper proud.
• Beethoven was a classical music composer, but his body was full of heavy metal, specifically, lead. The Mayo Clinic analyzed a few strands of the maestro’s hair, and found 64 times the lead found in a typical American today. This likely led to the many medical problems Beethoven had, including deafness.
• Lazarus 3.4 is now available, built with FreePascal 3.2.2. It’s a bugfix release and there isn’t a lot of New Stuff, but get it anyway! There’s nothing else quite like it in the OSS universe.
• A few days ago I received an email inviting me to the—wait for it–Lane Technical High School Milwaukee World Naked Bike Ride. I thought it was a hoax but no—naked bike rides are evidently a thing in big cities. Now, Lane Technical High School (which I attended 1966-1970) is in Chicago, not Milwaukee. There is in fact a World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago on my 72nd birthday tomorrow, but they didn’t invite me. I don’t own a bike, and I’m a long damn way from Milwaukee, or Chicago. That said, I doubt there will be a World Phoenix Naked Bike ride any time soon. It was 113 the other day. People would die.

…to Robert Williams, Jr. of Necedah, Wisconsin, who gave his life for his country in 1944. I’ve mentioned him before and will mention him again; he was my mother’s high-school sweetheart, and had he returned from the War, I am pretty sure they would have married—and I would not now exist. Does this bother me?

Don’t be silly. Love and honor matter.

I don’t know a great deal about Bobby Williams. My mother did not talk about him. I’m pretty sure she moved to Chicago from Wisconsin in 1945 once she knew Bobby was never coming back. I knew nothing more until Craig Williams, one of Bobby’s grand-nephews, contacted me in 2020, and explained how he died during the war: His Navy torpedo bomber crashed into the Pacific on March 9, 1944. Craig sent me a number of photos, including the Navy’s 21-gun salute at his funeral (below) and one of my mother when she was 17, in her prom dress for the Necedah High School Senior Prom. (At right.)

In a slightly weird coincidence, both Bobby and my father were radio operators during the War, Bobby on a torpedo bomber in the Pacific, and my Army father first in Italy and later North Africa.

I’m not sure how much more I can say. WWII was a horrible thing. The best I can say about it is that after VJ Day, people understood that the world might not survive another World War. So far so good. I still worry sometimes.

Alas, millions of good people like Bobby Williams had to die to put that lesson across. I honor all of them, and always will. But Bobby Williams loved my mother until his last breath, for which I honor him, and also hold him in tremendously high esteem. He looks like the kind of guy I could hang out with, trade stories, and knock back a couple of glasses of wine with over dinner. Knowing that I can never meet him doesn’t in any way change my honor or my esteem.

Or…who knows? He’s on my prayer list. Maybe “never” is too strong a word.

Yup.

By popular demand, here come a few more triumphant and mostly triumphant (or at very least stirring) works of classical music, each one with a link to a recording on YouTube. I’ve considered all suggestions and rejected several for not having enough melody (Adams’ “A Short Ride on a Fast Machine”) or enough energy (Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Procession of the Nobles”) to carry off the feel of triumph. I like those too, but I’m on a mission here, and feeling sprightly tonight.

I’m about out of time for fooling with Contra today and want to post this before supper. I’m still looking for candidates and still considering a few, like Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome” and Aaron Copland’s “Outdoor Overture,” which is a touch peculiar but deserves way more play than it gets. Again, I’ll start collecting pieces for a third entry, though it won’t be soon, since I’m at 104,000 words and struggling to finish The Everything Machine. So let’s have at it!

• William Tell Overture: March of the Swiss Soldiers, by Rossini, 1829. Ok, guilty: I skipped this one the first time because who doesn’t know, well, The Lone Ranger theme song? Although nominally a march, it always sounded to me more like a mad scramble or (in most people’s minds) a guy on a galloping horse. The music world now agrees that the piece is indeed a “galop,” which was a rapid dance movement in the 1700s that became the forerunner of both the polka and …wait for it… the can-can.
• A Moorside Suite: March by Gustav Holst, 1928. The conclusion of a three-movement suite, all of which is worth hearing. This concluding march expresses both confidence and triumph right through its final bars, which don’t explode but instead say, “We won. Live with it!”
• The Running Set, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1933. Here we have, not a lead-up to an explosive ending, but an absolutely manic five minutes beginning to end that I often characterize as “an Irish jig on meth.” It is probably Vaughan Williams’ most obscure work, drawing on four folk dance tunes and cranking the meter up to 11. Here’s about as much description as I found on a quick scan. Ok, sure, no explosion at the end, just a single forward chord. But given what came before it, hey, that’s all that I require.
• March of the Trolls by Edvard Grieg, from his “Lyric Suite,” 1894. The orchestra tries to play a pretty melody, and here come those darn trolls, not marching but madly scrambling from rock to rock in their cave and making an awful racket. They go away, and the orchestra tries again. Can’t have that. Here come the trolls, back from whateverthehell trolls do, scrambling into their cave, double time. March? Trolls don’t just march. Moral: Don’t try to play pretty melodies near the trolls’ cave. They’ll win every time.
• Troika by Sergei Prokofiev, from “The Lt. Kije Suite,” 1934. It was a movie: The previous incarnation of Captain Tuttle is born, falls in love, marries the girl, and then goes for an invigorating sleigh ride! That’s the life—but make sure you stop there, because the next movement is a downer. Really, it’s ok; Lt. Kije (like Captain Tuttle) never actually existed.
• Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg, from his ”Peer Gynt Suite” (1876). Sure, how can we play “March of the Trolls” and then not go to the next mountain over and try to sell the Mountain King some solar panels? No, King Carbon lives above a coal mine and avoids the Sun. So you have to sneak out again, with the King’s bodyguard following along behind. You go faster, they go faster, and before you know it, it becomes (yes!) another mad scramble to jump over chasms and race down the mountain to the valley, where there are fewer grouchy kings (or trolls) and more pubs.
• Symphonie Fantastique 5: Dream of a Black Sabbath, by Hector Berlioz, 1830. Most people in the classical music universe consider this a musical depiction of an occult nightmare. It’s not. It’s something utterly different and better: a musical metaphor of good triumphing over evil. So it begins: the creepy crawlies skitter and gesture and finally join together in an infernal dance (1:18) The nightmare is underway, and the minor evils make themselves known, posturing to each other, some noticing a brief bit of a different force (2:27) that strikes fear in their hearts. At about 2:50, the Big Bad opens up its Eye in the tower and, with funereal bells in the background, looks down at its minions while the Deus Irae pronounces its rank as top of the evil heap. But at 4:52 something new and terrifying happens: The Army of Good arrives at the gate and makes its presence known with the rhythm of marching stallions. Sneaking around circa 6:35, evil starts to worry. That’s quite an army that Good has out there. Time to engage! Down the gates fall and in comes the army, trampling the minions and making its way up the Tower to confront the Bad Boss. Up the tower stairs the minions retreat, sneaking and hopping (8:20) and falling over the railings (6:12). None can truly face the forces of Good. At the top of the stairs, Good unleashes its power against the Big Bad. Big Bad responds (9:01) Good overpowers evil, the Deus Irae plays for the end of Big Bad, and the Tower crumbles to dust and rubble on top of the doomed minions. Good rides off triumphant. No matter how bad you think you are, don’t mess with those guys. Really. REALLY.

Heh. I’ve wanted to write that last item that for a long, long time!

I like happy endings. If you’ve read any of my fiction, you know that I write them. Bummers are popular in literary fiction, and were when I got my liberal arts education fifty years ago. (This is why I don’t write literary fiction. That shoe just don’t fit.) But this applies to music as well as fiction. The three characteristics I look for in music are these: Melody, Harmony, and Energy. I’ve enjoyed an occasional sad song (like “The Parting Glass”) for various reasons, but if a sad song has none of those three characteristics, I won’t buy it—and if there’s a skip button, my index finger finds it at some significant fraction of c.

Energy is the one I get the most pushback about. Who doesn’t like a peaceful tinkling Mozart piano piece? Well, if I can’t hum it…me. I have always used music to rev me up and break me out of blocks in my thinking or especially my writing. Energy in music is a very big thing for me.

So in today’s entry I present a playlist of some classical pieces that carry a special grip on my imagination: the music of triumph. No gentle fade at the end. Uh-uh. I want a musical explosion that makes me want to stand up and cheer. Yes, I’m that kind of screwball. If you didn’t know that already, well, this playlist will make it abundantly clear.

All links are to performances on YouTube. There are many others available.

• Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zoroaster), by Richard Strauss, 1896. This one has special significance for me, because it’s the unforgettable opening piece in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which may be my favorite film of all time—and the film I asked Carol out to see for our first date in 1969.
• Symphony #3, Organ, final movement, Maestoso, by Camille Saint-Saens, 1886. It was years after I saw the 1995 film Babe that I first heard this larger work from which the Babe theme borrowed. The thunderous organ sequences are like nothing else I’ve heard in classical music. It opens with an explosion, and ends with an even bigger explosion. What’s not to love?
• Building the Crate, by John Powell, from the Chicken Run soundtrack, 2000. I’ve mentioned this one before, and whereas it strikes some people as slightly goofy in spots, it’s definitely stirring. There’s a touch of klezmer in it, and for a few seconds a chorus (if that’s the word) of…kazoos. It’s all about the chickens triumphing, something one doesn’t generally associate with chickens. But triumph they do, with callbacks to films The Great Escape and The Flight of the Phoenix.
• Lincolnshire Posy 6: Lost Lady Found, by Percy Grainger, 1937. Short and to the point, and definitely gets across the triumph of finding a beloved person after a long and difficult search.
• The Planets: Jupiter, by Gustav Holst, 1917. If you’ve heard anything in this playlist, you’ve heard ol’ Jupe. Although subtitled ‘The Bringer of Jollity” (is that still a word?) its utterly explosive ending makes me consider it “The Bringer of Triumph.”
• Russian Sailors’ Dance, by Reinhold Gliere, 1927. Written as part of a ballet called The Red Poppy, it starts out low and slow, gathering speed and force as it goes, until it reaches a manic but completely satisfying explosion at the end.
• Towards a New Life, by Josef Suk, 1931. I never heard this until KBAQ played it a couple of years ago. It deserves way more than obscurity. A triumphant march for full orchestra, it has roots in Czech nationalism and lyrics in the Czech language for which there is no English translation. (The linked performance is instrumental only.) Some think the trumpet solo opening is too long; if you agree, skip the first 90 seconds.
• Symphony #9. The New World: Finale, by Antonin Dvorak, 1895. There are a few slow parts in this finale to Dvorak’s all-time best work, but they act to frame the explosive energy of the rest and make it stand out by contrast. That’s ok; sometimes we have pause for a bit to take a breath, in our lungs and sometimes in our lives. No matter; the explosion at the end makes the quiet parts worthwhile.
• Pictures at an Exhibition: The Great Gate of Kiev, finale, by Modest Mussorgsky, 1874. In spite of the countless times I’ve heard it, this piece continues to bring a tear to my eye, often as not. Especially when preceded by the creepy and subversively diabolical movement “Baba Yaga’s Hut,” (as here) to me it symbolizes humanity staring down Evil, kicking its ass across the galaxy twice, and then dropping it down the black hole at the galaxy’s core, where it belongs and will trouble us no more. Triumph you want? Triumph I’ll give you!

That’s all for now. Got any more? I’m always in the market for music like this.

We lose our heroes one by one. By the time you’re in your 70s, like I am, you begin losing them a lot more frequently. We lost Don Lancaster back in July. Don’s books taught me how digital logic worked way back in the last half of the ‘70s. His writing was so good that I imitated it when I began to write computer articles and later books in the 1980s.

Niklaus Wirth died earlier today, in Switzerland, at 89. He was another hero, who taught me how to write computer programs that could be read. Pascal wasn’t the first programming language I ever learned; that honor (or perhaps dishonor) falls to APL and a little later, FORTH. I wrote a text formatter in mainframe APL in 1978. It was 600 lines of squiggly jibberish. By the time I got to the bottom, I had already forgotten how the top worked. FORTH, well, the less said, the better. I think of it as Yoda’s programming language. If you’ve ever messed with FORTH, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

My friend Mike Bentley introduced me to Pascal in 1980 or 1981. I bought a compiler for my CP/M machine soon after. Pascal/MT+ was awesome, so awesome I decided to write a book about it. I was about halfway through the book when Turbo Pascal popped up above the horizon. By the time I finished the book on Pascal/MT+, Turbo Pascal had taken over the Pascal universe, and I rewrote Pascal from Square One for Turbo Pascal. (The publisher retitled the book Complete Turbo Pascal for reasons I have never understood.)

I learned Pascal by cut’n’try. I learned how to write good Pascal by reading Wirth’s wonderful 1976 book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. My flameout with APL left me with the indelible conviction that software must be readable by the people who didn’t write it—and not after hundreds of hours of hair-tearing, either. I learned C, billed as a “high-level assembly language,” which is a contradiction in terms. My view: Go as high as you can go, or as low as you can go. To me, that meant Pascal (or BASIC, or COBOL) on the high end, and real assembly language on the low end. C source code is needlessly obscure, and by that I only mean it could be a lot more readable if its creators chose not to be proud of its obscurity. There’s actually a contest for writing the most unreadable C programs possible, which I think tells you a lot about C and its partisans. There was a time when C could do things that Pascal couldn’t. Those days are long, long past, and I will no longer argue the point here.

I learned Wirth’s Modula 2 programming language when products became available in the 1980s. I read up on Modula 3 (1988) and Oberon (1987) but never coded in them. As best I can tell, they expanded Pascal’s power without damaging its comprehensibility. Pascal itself has long been out of Wirth’s control, and today we have tremendously powerful implementations of Pascal like Delphi and Lazarus/FreePascal. But without Wirth, people like me would still be writing in BASIC or COBOL.

I write this eulogy without a heavy heart. Niklaus Wirth made it to 89, and reshaped much of the software development universe in the process. To me, that means he won—and won big.

Godspeed, sir. We will never forget you.

[Excerpted from my book, Odd Lots, 2021]

Centuries ago, during the Age of the Great Cathedrals, a mighty church was rising against the rolling green hills of a distant Christian land. The king of that country had retained the world’s greatest architects, masons, sculptors, and artists to build the church, which would be a task of many years, perhaps decades. The greatest of all the artists that the king had employed had come from far away, and made his home in the shadow of the church, knowing that he would be pouring most—and perhaps all—of the rest of his life into its completion.

He was an artist of a special skill, the creation of mosaics. With nothing but colored tiles he could paint scenes and landscapes so real, so luminous, that they seemed to have a life of their own, as though they were windows into the ineffable realms of Heaven itself. His task in the building of the church was a mosaic above the main altar, sixty feet high, depicting Mary, Queen of All Saints.

The mosaic would require tens of thousands of colored tiles. The Artist made each of the tiles himself, alone, by hand, at a small bench behind the main altar. Each tile was precisely what the mosaic required. Each one was shaped individually in the Artist’s hands, and no two were alike. His skill was great: No more than were needed were made, none were ruined, and none were thrown away. After the tiles had been colored and fired, the Artist took them up on the scaffold himself, and cemented each tile individually and precisely into its place in the great mosaic.

The Artist was the greatest that his craft had ever produced, and he had promised Jesus and Mary that this mosaic would be his masterwork. God saw how the Artist loved the tiles he had crafted, just as God loves all of His children, and in a special way God allowed the tiles lives according to their natures, and made them recognize the Artist as their master, because tiles have neither minds nor souls with which to recognize God. The Artist spoke to the tiles as he shaped them, fired them, painted them, and positioned them in the mosaic. As the years went on and the mosaic took shape, the tiles would speak to one another and to the Artist, who praised each of them for its part in the greater work that was unfolding. The tiles listened to the Artist, and they were happy.

All but one. At a particular place within the mosaic was a white tile. The tile knew the tiles all around it, but no more than that, because a tile within a mosaic cannot see the picture of which it is a part. The white tile looked to its neighbor tiles, and realized that all of them were made of gold. The white tile was large, and its angles were irregular. All of the surrounding tiles were smaller than the white tile, and of compact and regular shapes. Where the golden tiles had neat corners, the white tile had sharp spikes. This made the white tile unhappy.

One day, as the Artist was positioning new tiles into their places in the mosaic, he heard the white tile calling out to him: “Master! Master! Why am I so strange and ugly?”

The Artist heard the white tile, and stepped down a few rungs on the scaffold to where the white tile was, so that he could speak to it: “You are not strange and ugly, my child. You are precisely what I needed you to be.”

The white tile was not convinced. “But all the tiles around me are made of beautiful gold! I have no color at all!”

The Artist shook his head, and smiled. “White is the greatest of all colors, dear one, because it contains all other colors. Every color of the rainbow lies within you.”

The white tile was still not happy. “But I am huge and gross, and have no shape. All of my angles are sharp, and nothing about me is regular. I am nothing but a jagged, ugly, spiky white blotch. Why, master? Why?”

The Artist leaned forward toward the tile. As his eyes grew closer to the mosaic, he reminded himself that he could see the tiles the way they could not see themselves, and that he could understand their places in the heavenly image in a way that none of them could ever understand. So it was with great tenderness that he reached out a fingertip, and gently touched the white tile while he replied:

“Because, my dear child, you are the dazzle at the center of Our Lady’s golden crown.”