None Of The Above

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.”

It occurred to me years ago that the ancient Christmas carol “The Holly and the Ivy” really has nothing to do with ivy, even though ivy is mentioned side by side with holly in the title and the refrain. It’s almost as though something was left out of the lyrics:

“The holly and the ivy, when they are both full-grown,”

Ok, I give. When the holly and the ivy are both full grown, then what? The holly has the berries, the blossoms, the thorns, and in the full version, the bark. Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown. The ivy has…nothing.

I haven’t thought about that silly little issue in a lot of years, until KBAQ played a song this morning called ”Ivy, Chief of Trees, It Is,” by British composer Sarah Cattley (with a little help from Yoda, there might be.) You can find a very nice performance here with great harmony. Lyrics are here. The Latin “veni coronaberis” means “Come and be crowned.”

So here we are: Two Christmas carols about trees that wear the crown. Will there be civil war in the woods? A duel? A fistfight?

Wait. Hold on. Something weird is going on here: Holly is a tree. Ivy is ground cover, or at best something crawling up the sides of elite college buildings. A little snooping on Wikipedia yielded a clue: An older carol that may have been originally penned in Middle English, called “The Contest of the Ivy and the Holly.” The lyrics in modern English are these:

Holly stands in the hall, fair to behold:
Ivy stands without the door, she is full sore a-cold.
Nay, ivy, nay, it shall not be I wis;
Let holly have the mastery, as the manner is.

Good ivy, what birds hast thou?
None but the owlet that cries how, how.
Nay, ivy, nay, etc

(A quick query shows that “laverock” is what they called the lark in Chaucer’s era.)

Wikipedia suggests that holly and ivy are emblematic of the male and female principles. So it’s not a fight over a crown; it’s the battle of the sexes, with the deck severely stacked against women. I also wonder if “The Holly and the Ivy” as we sing it today was sanitized back in the 19th Century, leaving out the verses that slander poor ivy: Holly stands inside, warm by the fire; ivy is left outside to freeze, and so on. If such sanitizing was ever done, I see no mention of it online. So the mystery remains.

I’m looking around for interesting Christmas-related topics and will post the best here. So stay tuned.

I’m fascinated by the Victorian/Edwardian period of history, which is where steampunk is usually set, as well as weird westerns. My WIP drumlins novel The Everything Machine is in some respects a space western. But quite apart from a lot of other fascinating things from that era (The Great Eastern! Brunel!) there is the puzzle of spiritualism. It’s that time of year again, so I can ask and perhaps answer a question that popped up as I read about the phenomenon of spiritualism, which was quite the thing in the Victorian era and for some time after, from roughly 1850 until 1940. It came out of nowhere and spread explosively, then vanished almost as quickly. Yes, there are a few spiritualist churches still in operation, but they’re notable not because of their ubiquity but because of their scarcity.

Here’s the (double) question: Why did spiritualism appear? And why did it vanish?

My tl-dr answer: Lotsa deaths. Also antibiotics, and television. Let’s talk about that.

Most people agree that spiritualism began in 1848 in the farm town of Hydesville, outside Rochester NY. There were two young sisters living in a small house with their parents. As you’ll note if you read Colin Wilson’s excellent Poltergeist (see yesterday’s entry) having pubertal girls in a house is practically begging for poltergeist activity.

And so it was. In the house of the Fox family, there began all the usual: scratchings, bangings, growls, raps, and more bangings. Some of the booms could be heard over a mile away. (Subwoofers didn’t exist in 1848.) Katie, the younger sister at 12, was a bit of a snot. The general assumption was that the noises were the work of the devil. So Katie jumps up in the midst of audio pandemonium, and yells, “Here, Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do!” She then pounded the kitchen table twice with her fist. The noise stopped for a moment, then two loud raps answered. Katie and her older sister Margaretta listened to the invisible whatsit echo their own noises, then established a sort of code for answers: noise (of whatever sort) meant “yes.” Silence meant “no.” Using this code, they questioned the family poltergeist, and soon established a more complex code for spelling out words. The poltergeist claimed to be the spirit of a dead peddler who had been murdered and buried beneath the cellar of the house. He gave his name as Charles Rosma, and a little digging in the cellar and behind a wall turned up bones and a peddler’s carry box used for door-to-door sales work.

The story spread like wildfire across America and then across the Atlantic to Europe, and soon lots of other people were talking to “spirits” via pounding on tables or—later—making the tables tap out codes with their legs. After that came the “planchette,” which is a kind of pointer, to be used on a board printed with the alphabet. (These were not called “ouija boards” for quite awhile after.)

Certain people had a talent for talking to whatever was tipping tables or moving planchettes around. Other people didn’t, but tried it anyway—and in some cases, got some minor interactions. By the 1860s, formal spiritualist groups coalesced around the world, many claiming to be parts of a new religion. By the 1880s, spiritualism had also become a sort of parlor game played by groups of bored teens and young adults, some of whom freely admitted moving the planchette or table with their own muscles. After all, you had to touch the planchette or table with human hands to make it work. Faking it was easy, and getting laughable answers was the goal of the game.

Down the years after 1850, different methods of talking to dead guys appeared: automatic writing, trance mediums, and direct voice, among others. Despite being a game for many young people, it was taken seriously by many adults, and a spiritualist canon (most produced by automatic writing) appeared, explaining what spirits do on the job and off, where they go to school, and what sorts of surroundings they live in. Spirits claiming to be deceased relatives of the “sitters” (the people attending what later became known as seances) came through often, sometimes to say very little more than “I’m all right! It’s beautiful here! Can’t wait to see you again!” Despite a slightly grim edge to such communications, people were ecstatic to hear from their dear departed. There was plenty of religion abroad in the Victorian era, but spiritualism offered something none of the other religions could: Messages from departed loved ones.

Something people now in the 21st century generally fail to understand is that there were a lot of departed loved ones back then. And not just old people. Many children died of diseases like diphtheria, pneumonia, or that hideous killer “consumption”: the Victorian term for tuberculosis. Spouses became widowed far earlier and oftener than now. Death in childbirth was common, and supposedly happened to one in twenty pregnant women trying to give birth. Stillborn children and infants who lived for only a day or even a few hours were quite common.

If you read the contemporary literature of spiritualism (I have) it becomes obvious that everybody back then had deceased loved ones: parents, children, infants, grandparents, spouses, close friends.

Everybody.

There was a huge market for Spiritualism (I’ll cap it now because it had become a global movement/religion and not merely an idea) and Spiritualism catered very well to that market. Spiritualism cruised along at full roar (or maybe full bang) for decades. It reached what might be considered its peak during WWI, when a great many new deceased love ones happened. After WWI and the Spanish Flu of 1918, death rates continued to fall due to chlorinated water, indoor plumbing, sanitation in medicine and the first vaccines. Penicillin appeared in 1942, and it was the first antibiotic of many. People no longer died from infected minor cuts and scratches.

Once WWII was over, death was no longer an everyday thing in American life and elsewhere in the developed West. People were (mostly) living their threescore-and-ten, and death in childbirth was not the scourge it had been in the 1890s. The demand for talking to dead people was nowhere near as strong. The supply of seances and mediums thinned out. Little by little, people lost interest.

That was Spiritualism’s first whammy. There was another.

In the last quarter of the 19th Century, entertainment was scarce, and mostly confined to the well-off. There were concerts. But there was no broadcast radio, and until the 1920s, few phonographs. For music in the 1880s, it was concerts or nothing. (Or in some cases playing your own piano.) Concerts cost money, as did plays. So what did bored young people do for entertainment?

Table-tipping. Planchettes. It was a craze. It was cheap. Modern histories generally don’t state this, but if you read the contemporary reports, seances had become a parlor game.

Fast-forward to 1930. There was radio. There were movies. Not free—but increasingly inexpensive as time went on. Seances had competition. Then, in 1948, TV happened in a big way. Sets were still expensive, and until the early-mid 1950s people often watched them in bars. But demand brought down prices, and by 1955, TV ruled the entertainment world.

How could seances compete with Sid Caesar?

They didn’t. Spiritualism became an eccentric current in an increasingly distant past. Now, there’s an asterisk to this story: In the early 1960s, Parker Brothers (the game people, makers of Monopoly) bought the rights to a product called Ouija, which had been produced and sold since 1910 or so by a William Fuld. It was basically an inexpensive prefab planchette system. By 1965 Parker Brothers was targeting Ouija at tweens and teens with commercials on both radio and TV. I was there; I saw them. The girl down the block got one for her birthday and twisted my arm into trying it with her. Nothing happened. She was annoyed. I was relieved.

Many millions of boards were sold. In 1968, in fact, Ouija outsold Monopoly, which boggles my mind, at least. I wonder how many people actually treated the “game” seriously. I also wonder how quickly the damned things went into the trash.

That’s the story as I understand it. When death was an everyday thing, the demand for Spiritualism was high. As death rates went down and death became a sad but uncommon occurrence (compared to the midlate 1800s) the demand went off a cliff. Parker Brothers tried making it a game, and although I have no real data, no one I knew except the girl down the street had a Ouija board.

As with poltergeists, I take no particular position on Spiritualism. NDEs and channeling have taken over nickel-and-dime afterlife exploration. A couple of weird events in my life suggest that there is an afterlife, and it’s a fundamental concept in Catholicism, if not described well. I’ll take author John Hick’s opinion as my own: It’s there, but we won’t know what it’s like until we get there.

I’m good with that.

• It looks like we’re closing in on deciphering the Linear A script, which was the written form of the Minoan language, spoken between ~2000 BC and 1450 BC. We don’t know much about the Minoans, who were mostly displaced or absorbed by the Mycenaeans, mostly because we can’t read what survives of their writing.
• I’ve been using Windows since before there was Windows, and I never heard of this until last week: You can pause updates in Task Manager by pressing and holding the Ctrl key. It’s that simple: Just the Ctrl key. This is useful if your tracking memory or CPU usage of processes, because the display updates once per second and processes jump around as their resource usage changes. This applies to Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10—and possibly more, but those were the versions I had on hand.
• Now that they’re ducking and dodging lawsuits from doctors, the FDA finally admits that MDs may prescribe Ivermectin, whether on-label or off-label. Now it’s time to purge the FDA of those who tried to ruin the careers of MDs for legally prescribing Ivermectin.
• Dropping salt to lower blood pressure may not work without a balance between sodium and potassium. My godmother was healthy but had some hypertension. She stopped using salt cold-turkey. A year later she was dead.
• Researchers at City of Hope have discovered an anti-cancer chemo compound that targets solid tumors and only solid tumors. Oh, and not just tumors in one organ or location, but all of them. This could be a game changer if it can be tested and checked for side effects.
• What isn’t a game-changer is LK-99, the supposed room-temperature superconductor that’s gotten a lot of ink (pixels?) in the last couple of months. This doesn’t mean we should stop looking.
• Invisible supernovas that were once invisible stars made of invisible matter are called bosenovas. If you know your ‘60s pop music, the jokes write themselves.
• Here’s my own weird theory: Dark matter and boson stars are invisible because they are in fact 4-dimensional matter bending our 3-dimensional space without actually existing within our 3-dimensional space. My proof is this: Ya got any better ideas?
• Here’s what I consider the strangest list of books ever: The 20 Best-Selling Assembly Books of All Time. My own assembly book is #2.  SolidWorks gets several places in the stack-rank. But #1, egad: It’s a popular fantasy novel about werewolves. Hey, with the title Assembly, how could it not be there?

The inimitable Don Lancaster has left us. He died on June 7 in Mesa, Arizona, of complications following hip surgery. He was 83.

Anybody who was there at the dawn of microcomputing knows who Don Lancaster was. His seminal TTL Cookbook sold over a million copies. He also did cookbooks for RTL and CMOS ICs. He was famous among early mirocomputer fanatics for his books on “cheap video,” back when video boards were just emerging and (can you believe it?) some folks rolled their own from loose parts. He wrote about the Apple II, including one or more books on Apple II assembly language. His book The Incredible Secret Money Machine was an eccentric guide to starting your own small-scale home business.

When I began using Don’s books in the midlate 1970s, I never gave any thought to actually meeting him. His CMOS Cookbook was critical to my ongoing COSMAC Elf project. I built the original Elf from Popular Electronics in 1976, and over the next several years expanded it in several ways, including a wire-wrapped memory system totaling 2,560 bytes of CMOS memory, as ten banks of paired 5101 CMOS 256X4 RAM chips. I doubt I could have managed that without the CMOS Cookbook.

I also used his TTL Cookbook to learn how the various TTL chips worked and could be hooked together. I’m not exaggerating when I say that without Don’s books on ICs, I would never have learned digital logic to any useful degree.

Don had a strong interest in local archaeology, especially the ways that indigenous  peoples used and stored water for irrigation. About that I know little or nothing, but looking for tinajas was one of his hobbies.

As I drifted toward technical writing in the early 1980s, I realized that I was imitating Don’s style without consciously doing so. This is an odd talent called “pastiche” in literary circles, which is the art of writing in another writer’s style. I discovered this talent in college, when after reading the whole (thick) book of e.e. cummings’ complete works, I began writing what were recognizably e.e. cummings poems. They weren’t great poems, but they were definitely in his style. When I began writing Pascal MT+ From Square One toward the end of 1983, there was a lot of Don Lancaster in it.  (That book eventually emerged as Complete Turbo Pascal in 1985.) I later found myself pastiching Isaac Asimov when I wrote the “Structured Programming” column in DDJ. Asimov almost always started an article with a funny story, and so did I. (See DDJ for September 1991 for my well-known intro about the Pizza Pride girl.)

Don Lancaster and Isaac Asimov taught me more about technical writing than anyone else, ever. Furthermore, neither had any idea that he was teaching me. I met Asimov at LACon in 1984 when Carol and some friends and I won breakfast with him at a charity auction. But unlike Asimov, Don eventually became a personal friend.

I don’t precisely recall how I was introduced to Don. I think my PC Techniques art director Barbara Nicholson’s brother somehow pulled me into Don’s network. Flukier still was the fact that Don lived within reasonable driving distance from Phoenix, in Thatcher, Arizona. Although Don never wrote for my magazines (and we published none of his books) we invited him to our monthly author parties. He attended quite a few, generally with his wife Bee and his dog.

And we went down to visit him a time or two. Don took us up the side of a nearby mountain in his VW microbus, which was scary at times but otherwise wonderfully scenic.

Once Carol and I left Arizona for Colorado in 2003, Don and I fell out of touch, but he was still working to the very end, and produced a boggling body of work including 44 books and over a thousand technical articles.

He was a little eccentric (though he had nothing whatsoever on Wayne Green) and I’ll freely accept the tag for myself as well. His skill with words and his rampaging curiosity were like nothing I’ve ever seen elsewhere. I am honored to have known him, and to have learned from him. He really was a guru, and the world could use a few more (or maybe a lot more) like him.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Back in January I published a list of things that had once been common and are now fading into the mists of history. It got a lot of attention, so here comes another one. A few of these came from readers and posted in the comments.

1. Typewriters. Ok, these may already be well and truly vanished, but there are times when I miss them. I kept my IBM Selectric until we left Arizona in 2003. Mostly I used it to type up adhesive labels and addresses on business envelopes. All of that stuff comes out of my laser printer now.
2. Wing-tip dress shoes for men. I admit, I never had these myself, but I was still seeing them here and there until ten or fifteen years ago.
3. Pantyhose. Apart from older women who may have been wearing compression stockings, I almost never see sheer hosiery anymore. Weirdly, the last place I saw it regularly was at dog shows, where male handlers wore business suits and female handlers wore skirts and pantyhose. This was true well into the teens, but we haven’t been to a dog show in some years now.
4. Car keys. Our 2014 Durango was our first car with fobs instead of keys. All the rental cars I’ve driven since then were the same thing: Key fobs without keys. It took some getting used to, but now when I try to drive Carol’s 2001 4Runner, I almost always try punching the (nonexistant) button on the dashboard rather than twisting the (real) car key.
5. Women wearing hats in (Catholic) church. Back when I was a kid this was a very serious business. I saw teen girls wearing a sheet of Kleenex atop their heads during mass when they forgot their hats. Girls at our Catholic grade school had beanies to wear during mass before school started.
6. Paper routes. I delivered papers for a little while when I was 13 or so. It was a weird little paper that was ad-supported, but I was asked to ring doorbells and see if people would pay for it. Almost no one did, and it was enough of an embarrassment that I stopped after just a couple of months. (Thanks to Rick Kaumeier for this one.)
7. Penny (or nickel) toddler rides in supermarkets. Usually by the front windows, usually a horse, though I’ve seen ones where the ride is a stubby little airplane or even a cowbow-style covered wagon. (Again, from Rick Kaumeier.)
8. Card parties. (Yet again, from Rick Kaumeier.) My father had these now and then with his gang from work. They all smoked so much that the air was mostly unbreatheable on the first floor of our house. My mom slept upstairs with my sister and there were a lot of open windows for a couple of days.
9. Ash trays. These used to be almost everywhere, because when I was a kid almost everyone smoked. There were even ash trays in my college classrooms, and a few students smoked. (Tthankfully, only a few.) (Thanks to Jim Tubman for this one, which should have been obvious to me.)
10. Cigars. The last time I saw anyone smoking a cigar it was a couple of people in my writers group in Colorado Springs, circa 2014. Tobacco kills. (It killed my father.) I think maybe we’re finally catching on.
11. Mercury blood-pressure cuffs. And, for that matter, needle -gauge blood pressure cuffs. It’s all electronic now.
12. White-wall car tires. I had totally forgotten about these, which were in decline even in the 1950s. (Thanks to reader TRX for the reminder.) It makes me wonder what people who restore classic cars do for white-walls.
13. Newspaper vending machines. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom.) Not only the machines, but the papers themselves are getting scarce. Now I only see them at the customer service counter in supermarkets.
14. Neighborhood mailboxes. (Again, thanks to Rich Rostrom.) We had one at the corner of our street, near Edison grade school. Now you only see them in high-traffic areas like in front of supermarkets.
15. Balsa-wood model airplanes. (Thanks to Spencer Arnold.) We used to get balsa gliders for a quarter at Bud’s Hardware Store in the Sixties, and you could get a balsa plane with a prop and a rubber-band “engine” for 50c. My father built a lot of balsa planes when he was kid, and built a few when I was in grade school. These may still exist, but see the next item:
16. Hobby shops. There was always one within reasonable biking distance when I was a kid. There was still one in Colorado Springs circa 2012, but that was the last time I saw one. They varied in emphasis; some sold stamp albums and sometimes stamps, others did not. Most sold model airplanes, and the .049 engines that I couldn’t afford. Craft stores absorbed some of that business. The bigger Ace Hardware stores still have small brass & aluminum sheet and tubing. Beyond that, most of the business has moved online.
17. Reel-type power mowers. These were just like hand-pushed lawnmowers, but they had engines. My grandfather Harry Duntemann had one. Once the rotaries came in around the early 60s, the reel models quickly slipped away. My uncle gave me a rattle-trappy old one about 1966 and my friends and I made a bizarre go kart out of it.
18. AM radio. (Thanks to Tom Byers.) As a teen in Chicago I listened to AM a lot, especially WLS and WCFL, the rock stations in their time. As rock got harder, I listened more to WIND, which played a gentler kind of music that I preferred. Of course, once I had an FM radio (college) I dropped AM and never looked back.
19. DJ chatter. DJs were celebrities when I was a kid. They’re now an endangered species, especially those who did a sort of fast standup comedy between songs and commercials. Radio is heavily automated these days, and most announcements are prerecorded. Weather and traffic reports are mostly gone as well.
20. Cable TV. (Thanks to Bill Beggs.) We still have cable, but internet-only. People are moving their TV viewing to streaming sites in droves. Carol and I don’t watch a lot of TV, with a smidge off the air, and rest from streaming sites.

There are a couple of things that I thought had vanished that are coming back. Whether this is a good thing or not is an open question:

1. Bell-bottom pants. Yes, they’re coming back. I’m of seventeen minds about this.
2. Big glasses. And I mean big, mid-late ‘80s big. I had those, and used to joke that my cheeks had 20-20 vision.
3. Vinyl records. (Thanks to Don Doerres & Rich Rostrom.) The reasons I dumped vinyl were pragmatic: CDs did not wear out and you didn’t have to turn them over. Now Wal-Mart and Target have racks of vinyl. Wow.

There may be more, but 20 is a good round number. Maybe we’ll come up with enough to do a third installment.

• Our longtime friend David Stafford stopped in for an evening on 5/27, and we took him to Tutti Santi restaurant at 64th & Greenway. It’s one of our favorite eateries here, high-end Italian, and we ate on the patio. David took some photos, which turned out pretty well, as you can see above.
• Could the ancient Greeks see the color blue? This is evidently a massive, long-term fistfight in certain circles, as ridiculous as it sounds. Mostly, the best guess is that the Greeks didn’t have a word specifically for blue tints. Matt Iglesias posted the best discussion I’ve found. It’s apparently more about linguistics than color vision.
• I’ve posted some of my weird experiences dealing with modern AI here. AI images often have the wrong number of fingers or toes, and sometimes bizarre body proportions. Now an AI has created an entirely fictional governor of South Dakota, whose term in office was 1949-1951…in its imagination, or whateverthehell creates AI weirdness like this.
• Carol and I have three Intel NUC computers, which are both small and quiet and yet still manage to do pretty much anything we do in terms of computing. (We are not gamers.) I’m not entirely sure why, but you can now buy a lid for a NUC machine that is a Lego base plate. I gave what Lego I had to our nieces years ago, or I’d be sorely tempted.
• I’m a sucker for robots, so an article stack-ranking the top 100 movie robots was a must-read, even though my all-time favorite film robot, Kronos, only made it to #57. (I do agree with the very high quality of #1, which may be my second favorite movie robot.) Some of the robots are very old and/or very obscure; I think there were fifteen or so that I’d never heard of and another four or five that I’d simply forgotten.
• A study published in the Lancet shows that natural immunity to COVID19 is equal to and often greater than what the supposed vaccines offer. The paper is a real slog if you’re not a researcher, hence the link to City Journal‘s overview.
• And another City Journal piece I enjoyed, about Rod Serling and some of his struggles during the rise of television as the premier form of American entertainment.
• A cow got loose in Carol’s thoroughly suburban hometown of Niles, Illinois (just north of Chicago) and CBS News described the results as “Udder chaos.” Points for that one, guys.
• Some lunatic stole two million dimes from the US Mint in Philadelphia. That’s not as much money as it sounds like (do the math) but the bigger problem is how to spend it. Unless you’re getting a burger and fries at McDonald’s, paying for things by the pound (of coins) will attract a great deal of unwanted attention.