(Yes! Yet more) Thoughts and Images not otherwise classified.

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Ca. 1980, I heard Amanda Lear's record "Sweet Revenge" at a friend's house, and I wanted to get a copy for myself. She was so little popular that, even though the record was only a couple years old, I could not find a copy at any store. I wrote to the record company asking if I could order it directly from them. They sent me two copies free (one was warped; I sent it back and got a replacement). But there was something different about one of the albums: The records were packaged in "two sleeve" folding format (even though there was only a single record disk). Hence, there were 4 sides of printed matter (front cover and back cover, outside, and the two inner pages). On the inner pages were various pictures of Ms. Lear, including one that showed her naked breasts. In one of the copies of the record which I received, when I tore off the plastic shrink wrap and looked inside, I found that someone had cut out this picture with a razor or box cutter. Inside the shrink wrap, there was this rectangular empty space where the picture had been cut out -- one can only hypothesize, by an employee of the record company. Lyrics, from Sweet Revenge, Enigma (Give A Bit of Mmh To Me): "Are you question or answer?" From Alter Ego, I'll Miss You: "Now it's time to say goodbye. I fly away tonite. I promise I won't let you cry. I'll miss you. Can it be possible -- to be away from you? .... Time. Time to say goodbye. I fly away tonite. I'll miss you. I'll miss you...." 20Mar05 addendum: I started listening to "Sweet Revenge" in the car this day, after having watched Antonioni's film L'Eclisse the day before. And I realized -- something I'd never thought before -- that part of the reason I find Amanda Lear fascinating is that I associate her with Monica Vitti from Antonioni's films. I had previously noted that the two can look similar, but I had not noted that this fact was significant for my imaginative life. Proposal for a new Duchamp Readymade: Take a hand-full of "chads" from Florida 2000 Presidential election ballots, place them in a jar, screw the lid on the jar, and title it: "Why not vote?" [Vote now!] A painting by Hieronymous Bosch (of which there seem to be no reproductions on the Internet): A man walking along a road inside a glass bubble. [Maybe I remember incorrectly and there is no such painting? But that is not important.] A drawing by Leonardo da Vinci in the collection of Windsor Castle (of which I have found no reproduction available anywhere...): A pile of human bodies at the bottom, and, in the sky above them, a large "air burst" explosion. I think this would be an appropriate piece to have on display at the entrance to the main building at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Stuff: Apocryphal popular songs, Popular movies, Proverbs; And: Real persons with apposite names, Real[ly] offensive popular song lyrics, Real companies -- used to be here. Now all this Stuff has its own page (Go there). Serendipity. The New York Times on the Web runs advertisements with their stories. One that accompanied Health article: "Brain Imaging May Detect Schizophrenia in Early Stages" (11Dec02) was particularly apposite: Click here to see. One of my very few good memories from elementary school: The elementary school librarian instructed us that, when we got a new book, we should "break it in", in the following way (this was back when most books were "sewn in signatures" -- I don't know if it applies to glue-binding, and I rather doubt it does). Take the book and hold it so it is vertical with its spine resting on a flat table. Gently press down the front and back covers on the table (book is now in the shape of a T-beam, so to speak...). Now, alternating from the front and the back, gently press down a few pages at a time on the table. You are finished when you press down the last few pages and the book is resting, open approximately in the middle, flat on the table. I did not think about this when I was a child. But, as an adult, I have remembered it, and do it with each new book I get -- as a small bibliographic prayer.

The dutiful son and the ingrate. Having placed an ocean between himself and his family, a distance conveniently close enough that wire transfers of unearned income could reach him but far too long for any strings to remain attached, his noble image as a paragon of filial devotion rose ever higher in everyone's esteem, as ever more grandiose fantasy filled an ever bigger void in reality. All the persons he had left behind sang hosannahs praising Him: "He is so devoted! He always remembers to call on everybody's birthday!" --And, truly, his concern for everyone was limitless, extending even to him asking about how it would look when he would not come for his uncle's funeral! One who remained "here", but who had their own [frustrated...] aspirations for a more than quotidian life, aroused universal oppobrium during one of the devoted son's rare and therefore exceedingly precious trans-oceanic phone calls, when this person had what they thought was a really bright idea that might help the devoted son to be able to share in and enjoy, at last, once again, some of the blessings of life of which his self-imposed exile had so grievously deprived him: "Wish you were here!" The whole family, all at once and all together, came down on the ingrate and the ingrate's negativity, which, once again, had spoiled a perfectly lovely telephone call from the devoted son: "You have a good family, but that means nothing to you. You never appreciate the good fortune you have, but you always are looking for approval from people who aren't here and who will never be a real part of your life. Your self-centered selfishness is unbelievable...." Another but similar communication interaction  Learn: How persons try to be "helpful"  Read: Story of unselfish solicitude  Read: Famous O'Henry story of sentimental waste Yet another example of haste making waste: 5 minutes before the bank closes, I get a check in the mail which I desperately need to get deposited as soon as possible in hopes it will clear in time for the money to be available for my mortgage closing less than 7 days away. This check is the only money I have, so I really need the funds to be available before the mortgage closing! I grab the check from the mail, jump in my car, and rush to the bank. I do indeed get in the bank door a couple minutes before the bank closes! Success! I deposit the check and the bank manager says that, Yes, my check will go out today and not be held in the branch overnight. I drive back home, thinking I am now less rushed, after having accomplished my mission. I park my car where I usually park it on the street, and walk in the house, looking to wind down.... As I open the door, wife points out to me, out the window, that my car is rolling down the street. I look and see my car rolling backwards down the street. I realize I forgot to apply the parking brake! (I always set the parking brake and then check to make sure.) Fortunately, the street is almost flat, so the car is still rolling slowly and has not hit anything by the time I run out of the house and across the lawn, jump back in the car and finally apply the parking brake. Haste continues to cause problems even after its precipitating cause has been taken resolved.  Read: Trying to make up 90 secs, 106 die in Japan train crash Frustration makes waste: All Sunday afternoon (18Jan04), I simmer a pot of chicken carcass, to make jellied consommé which I like a lot. It keeps snowing outside hours and additional inches of accumulation after it was supposed to have stopped, frustrating me that the cars may get stuck in the driveway, and I have acquired asthma in recent years, so it is hard for me to shovel out. I go out and drag the trash cans to the street for the trash men to pick up in the morning, and they are very heavy and one even bumps into my wrist as I drag the can thru the slushy foot deep snow (Damn! Did I hurt my watch?). I am able to back the cars out of the driveway and into the street, but, when I start to back my car out, I start shifting into reverse before I depress the clutch pedal which I notice only when I hear some rasping noise from the gearbox (Damn! Did I hurt my car?). Finally, I get the cars back in the driveway in a way that I should be able to get out to go to work in the morning. I come back in the house and wash some dirty dishes in the sink, including the colander I will use to strain my consommé. I take the pot that has been simmering all afternoon off the stove, and pour the soup into the colander and since I have forgot to put a pot UNDER the colander, all the consommé just goes down the drain. Damn! (10Apr04: I mistakenly pour out the soup down the drain again! But this time I catch my mistake half way thru, so I save at least half of my soup.)  Learn: 2 more dumb things I did recently Charting my course in life (still more of my "confessions"): I feel my life has been a big disappointment, in terms of both public accomplishment and personal gratification. I look back on what I did and ask: "What did I do wrong?" I generally tried to do my best, or at least fairly close to it. I certainly was not lazy. I did not throw money away on gambling or waste my time watching TV.... I have often found myself "at odds" with my environment, but I always tried to make something of what I felt stuck with. I have long felt I had ample opportunities to fall "down and out", but I don't think I've ever passed up a clear opportunity to rise "up and out". The worst mistake I can come up with was on my first computer programming job, where, as a trainee, I had a senior manager who kept giving me more and more difficult assignments, to see how much I could accomplish. He even gave me experienced programmers to whom I could delegate work. I "blew" this opportunity, because "my head had been turned" by wanting to become a systems programmer, so I didn't throw myself fully into tackling the tasks the senior manager had assigned me. Had I chosen to give everything I had to these -- at the time uninteresting -- tasks, and if I had succeeded in climbing the ladder of responsibility that I had been thereby offered (instead of finally succeeding in getting transferred to the Systems Programming group, where I encountered unanticipated frustrations and disappointments...), my programming career might have "gone a lot farther" than it has. A likely even more consequential, but less clearly defined at the time, mistake I made was when I was an undergraduate at Yale (in the same "class" as George W Bush, although I never heard of him when I was there...): I did not cultivate "connections" which having gone to Yale might have given me, so that, when I went out into the world, I would have had a "network" of persons who might have helped me get better jobs, etc. Here, it was not the case that I failed to appreciate an opportunity and seize it and "run with it", but rather that I wasn't aware that there was anything there at all. (What did I do at Yale? Be afraid of failing, and try to keep from failing at assignments that were mostly meaningless to me and which I consequently found difficult to do.) I look back on my life and see myself as having persistently tried to attain the maximum value for a function, where the maximum value I was aware of was only a "local max", not the function's really maximum value. Please examine the graph at right: All my life I've striven to attain the best I either knew about or felt I realistically could attain: 'b', and I've been terrified of falling into the "pit": 'c'. Often I had no idea that the upward trajectories to the left of 'a' and to the right of 'c' even were possibilities of human life; when I did have this "abstract" knowledge, I saw no way I could act to have a reasonable chance of getting on the upward track. Read more of my "confessions" Also: How I keep putting my foot in my mouth Also: Case study of one specific dumb thing I did My New Year's 24 January 2000 resolution: Yesterday (23 Jan 2000), I put my foot in my mouth in email, twice: (1) Once, by failing to correct a Reply-to: address, and consequently broadcasting to a whole mailing list a message I intended to send "off-list" to a single person. And (2) I put my foot in my mouth a second time, by posting to a mailing list something that would have been offensive to some persons in any case, but which looked even worse because I failed to include in my posting enough contextual information to identify what exactly the posting referred to. (Some persons have more than once accused me of saying things they cannot figure out because I assume I have already given the context when I haven't: the conclusion they draw from this is that I "live in my head" and do not consider other persons to be separate individuals.) So my 24 January 2000 resolution is to try to do better: (1) To think one more time before I hit the SEND button (e.g., to make sure I'm not sending a personal message to "everybody"!). And (2) to try to make sure I don't send controvertial things [send anything...] that runs avoidable risk of causing me problems on that account [Proofreading note: this sentence is itself a trivial example of what I'm talking about here! Q: On what account? A: On account of me not providing sufficient contextual information for the reader to orient themself to what I am saying...]. Example of constructive competition: We want to build something that is beyond our existing technological knowledge. There are two (or more...) design concepts, each of which looks equally (un)promising from the vantage point of our best judgement. So we create competing teams to each make a prototype of one of the proposed designs, to the very best of their ability. And, when the prototypes are done, we compare them and choose the best one. (Obviously, some designs may demonstrate they are not the right way to go without any comparison -- as problems and downside side-effects manifest themselves during the prototyping activity. On the other hand, trying to build the prototypes may suggest a previously unimagined idea which is far more promising than any of the original competing alternatives. Etc.) [I have heard that, back in the 1950s, IBM designed some products exactly this way.] Note that, whatever alternative design is chosen, none of the persons working on the losing designs lose their jobs, since, after the competition is over, they all get to work on production implementation of the winner. Indeed, production implementation of the winning design should be expected to benefit from the different experience those who worked on the losing designs bring to their post-competition activity. (Most competition in our society, unlike in the model here presented, pits persons against each other, instead of pitting all persons directly against real problems. In our society, when real problems do get solved, this happens as a side-effect of the persons endeavoring to "beat" each other. Since the focal objective is winning not solving, our kind of competition can thrive just as well on phony problems as real ones, e.g., determining who is the "World Champion [whatever]" -- thus wasting lots of resources and even creating problems that don't have to exist, e.g., stadiums and all the supporting infrastructure they require for "sports" competitions to be able to take place...). Out of the closet. I had never thought about things quite the way an old friend described a recent experience (I paraphrase from memory): "Hey! You might find this one interesting. The pressure got too much for me. I just couldn't keep up the pretense, and I wasn't thinking and I said something I shouldn't have. Then I realized I'd blown it, and 'Damn!', I thought: So this is what coming out of the closet feels like, Oh God!" I had not thought this person was gay, but I figured anything is possible in our sublunary realm.... My old friend continued: "Friday was a deadline day at work, and at 4 in the afternoon, just as I am getting ready to leave for the weekend (I'd completed all my work for the project), my manager gives me this thing to do that I know I can't do right at this time at the end of a long day. I also get pissed at them doing things at the last minute, especially trying to 'get just one more thing in before the deadline' -- and them involving me in their last minute panic, since, as you know, I try to get things done early, precisely to avoid last minute panics. If this thing was so important, why didn't we do it earlier? And everybody knows they're going to make more changes after the deadline in any case.... Haste makes waste, and so on and so on.... "I blew it. I told my manager I couldn't do the thing right, right then. I said I could kludge something up that he could put into the deadline and then the testers would find the bugs and then we could fix them. I said I'd be glad to come in the next morning [Saturday] to work on it. I just kept digging myself in deeper and deeper. He just froze me out: He told me he was 'too busy to talk to me'. "I should have just put my head down and did what I could (you know me -- I did that anyway...), and then after an hour or so, I could have pleaded exhaustion (I'm still not over my bronchitis...). You know, I'm not good at 'politics': I gotta learn to spot 'em coming and then keep from putting my foot in my mouth. I think 'Don't ask, don't tell' is about the best you can hope for.... I'm not looking forward to Monday...." I haven't heard any more from my old friend yet about how his Monday went, but he's a good person and I wish him very much the best! I also heard from another old friend who had a story he wanted to tell me that he felt better about, but I wasn't sure it really was all that much better. He told me (again, I paraphrase from memory -- I should have wrote it down at the time!): "You know my brother-in-law who reamed me out real bad some time back, but I can't just tell him he's out of order -- and you know he wouldn't dare talk that way to somebody he thought he had to kiss up to? Well, the last couple times he called for his sister and she wasn't there, I forgot to tell her he called. I just was busy and forgot -- I didn't mean to not tell her or anything.... "Anyway, she told me a couple days ago -- clear out of the blue --, that I mustn't forget again to tell her if he calls, because -- and this is the part I found so interesting, and so surprising: she said my failing to tell her he'd called made him feel like he was unimportant. Well, I'd never thought that. But, as soon as she said it, I saw how true it was: He'd got the message that I wouldn't have ever dared to tell him, or even think to myself. That was really something to learn. "And, you know what? Now that I know he figured this out all by himself, I think I won't forget to tell her next time he calls and she's not there. I really want to make sure not to forget again. I'll write down some place conspicuous that he called.... Somehow I feel better about him now." I haven't heard any more from this old friend yet, either, but he's a good person, too, and I wish him too all the best. (If, dear reader, you found this communication interaction interesting, Here's another) Returning merchandise. My wife mail-ordered a piece of assemble-it-yourself furniture. It came in two heavy (50-70 lbs each) boxes. The instructions and hardware to put it together were missing, so I called the company, and they sent the missing screws etc. When I finally started to put the piece together, the quality was so poor that everything was loose and wobbly no matter how I tried to tighten it. It was put together mainly with "cam lock" thingys, which have got to have the virtue of being cheap, for I can find no other virtue in them [See right for example: You screw the metal post with the "hookable" top into one of the two pieces to be connected (#1). Then you push the cam (#2) into the other piece to be connected, get the hookable part of the post into the cam, and turn the cam 90° which supposedly locks the two pieces together by tension.]. I decided the quality was so bad that we should return the thing for a refund. I called the company and they said they would send me shipping labels. When the labels finally arrived, they were USPS labels. I found out that if you put your parcels out, you can schedule on the USPS website for the postman to pick them up the next day. But the more I thought about this, the less I liked it, because I was not sure my 2 repacked packages were within USPS weight limits. So I called the company again and asked for FedEx return labels, noting that they had originally shipped it FedEx. The customer support person explained that they could not send me FedEx return labels, but they could contact FedEx and have them come pick up the packages, usually within 3 to 7 business days. It was August, when afternoon thunderstorms are a regular expectability. I explained to the support person that nobody is home during the day, and I had no place to leave the packages out where they would be safe from the rain, so I wanted to be able to schedule the pickup myself, for a day when I thought it wasn't going to rain. The support person said this was not possible, and that, with their FedEx pickup arrangement, I could not even take the packages to a FedEx office myself. Finally, seeing no better alternative, I said OK, and started hoping for the best. The support person explained that I did not need to leave the packages out every day: FedEx would come 3 times, so the first time they would leave a note saying they had come, and I could leave the packages out for pickup the next day (rain or shine, I thought...). I found a big plastic dropcloth, and thought, at worst, I'd wrap the packages in the dropcloth and hope that would protect them from the weather. I started waiting. Each day when I came home from work, I looked for a FedEx note on the front door (none there), and, since I get home about 3:30 in the afternoon, I started having fantasies of FedEx coming to pick up the packages after I got home (but I really believed FedEx always did such pickups in the morning and early afternoon...). Nonetheless, each FedEx truck I saw drive up the street, I hoped. On the 4th business day, about 4:30PM, while I was watching Oprah on the TV, I looked out the window and saw a FedEx truck coming up the street and -- slowing down.... I immediately ran outside and waved my arms and shouted and, amzaingly, it turned out indeed to be coming to pick up my packages! I thanked the FedEx man profusely (I really had no idea how I would have handled leaving the packages out in the weather, even with the dropcloth). I opened the garage door where the packages were waiting to be put out in the weather, and said to the FedEx man that they were "not light". He slowly scrutinized the packages (presumably to see if I had taped them together well enough for him to have to accept). Then he went back to his truck and backed it up to my garage door and took them. Again, I thanked him profusely. He drove away with my 2 packages on board, and I was immensely relieved. I really had been worried that this merchandise return would not turn out well -- that the packages would be made unacceptable for return by rain damage to the flimsy cardboard when I would have had to leave them out for pickup. --Truly the unexpected arrival of that FedEx truck seemed to me a piece of very good luck [albeit disconnected from the vicissitudes of the rest of my life]. The information superhighway ends here

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