Of chainsaws

It’s Prime Day, Prime Day

Gotta get down on Prime Day

Karin bought herself a chainsaw. It arrived a few hours ago and I haven’t seen her since. I wonder what she’s doing with it, out in the yard (rumble, rumble).

I finished re-reading Out of the Silent Planet. I read from this handsome omnibus edition published by Scribner.

I have two complaints about this edition.

(1) The text isn’t always transcribed correctly:

• some paragraphs aren’t indented
• terminal possessive apostrophes are written with double quote marks, as in: suns” blood

This must have been due to a “find-and-replace” error.

(Earlier U.S. editions of OSP follow British convention. They use single quote marks to indicate dialog. Scribner must have decided to replace these marks with double quote marks.

Nothing wrong with that. But it seems to have been done in one fell swoop, sans proofreading.)

The error mars this three-book omnibus edition and various single-book editions of OSP issued by Scribner.

I don’t expect to find this problem in Scribner’s editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Earlier U.S. editions of those books, e.g. those of Macmillan and Collier, already USify the dialog, enclosing it within double quote marks.

(2) My second complaint is that the omnibus lacks the first thirty pages of Perelandra.

Maybe that’s just my copy. Probably not.

I noted, previously, that the baddie, Weston, is a longtermist. He thinks that humans’ most important task – which they should try to fulfill no matter how high the cost – is to colonize other planets before their own planet becomes uninhabitable and humankind dies out.

I wonder, did Elon Musk ever read Out of the Silent Planet?

Should we require all of our governmental officials to read it?

Shopping

My Google Chromebook – cracked and dented after two years of harsh treatment (Samuel would use it as a stepping-stool, Daniel as an anvil/discus) – gave up its ghost yesterday, so I am blogging with my phone.

We trekked to Best Buy last night. The children gaped at the huge TVs. The computer salesman, who was urging an older couple to buy a higher-end device, may or may not have noticed us hovering (we were in his section some thirty minutes).

I cornered a worker from a different department. Sorry, he’s the only computer guy, he told me.

Amazing, I remarked to Karin as we left the store.

It’s been that way since COVID, she said.

Oh, dear.

I bought a refurbished machine through Amazon. It should arrive on Friday. Suppliers of refurbished Chromebooks receive very low ratings. The company I bought from has an approval rating of 88% – extremely high.

I don’t know how troubling this ought to be. A lot of “one star” raters complain, misguidedly, that they can’t install a Windows OS. How do you take off the Google, they ask.

One fellow quoted fire-and-brimstone verses, concluding: Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD.

Drafting today’s entry longhand before I tap it out may benefit the prose. Or not. Samuel is fascinated; never has he seen such long blocks of handwriting. He stares at the paper, draping himself over me, pinning down my limbs.

Daniel, who has removed his pants and diaper, races through the house.

Some projects for the back burner; body-text fonts, pt. 23: Linotype Palatino

Another winter with a too-full garage. Not a terrible thing so far – the snow hasn’t been heavy, the car has been all right outside – but we really ought to clear the space once the weather warms. Ditto for other parts of the house.

We need haircuts.

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Anyone want to buy me the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship (ed. Diane Jeske, 2021)? It’s only $178 on Amazon; that’s a markdown of 34%. Having ruminated on this topic for eight years or so – roughly, the period of my marriage – I’ve come up with my own “theory” of friendship and am hankering to turn it into a publication, but my grasp of the recent literature is infirm.

(My grasp of the older literature, too. And, arguably, of the phenomenon itself.)

(The examples that motivate my “theory” involve people throwing darts and drinking beer together, not so much improving each other’s characters or visiting each other’s sickbeds. I guess this is a masculinist “theory.”)

(I may also need a copy of Bartlett’s or some other reservoir of folk wisdom.)

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In April there’ll be a memorial conference for my PhD adviser, Dick. Much as I’d like to attend, I can hardly think that far ahead right now. My last big trip was just in October. Before that, I hadn’t traveled farther than two hours since 2019 (when I last saw Dick).

Coincidentally, I’ve been dreaming that I still have to defend my dissertation. It’s always a relief to wake up and realize that I finished. That was the mother of all back-burner projects.

Philosophers talk about how personal projects give our lives meaning, and maybe they do, but they also give us lots to worry about.

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This month’s body-text font, Linotype Palatino, is known by all and loved and hated in equal measure. It isn’t Hermann Zapf’s original Palatino design; it’s the font on everyone’s computer. I love it in movie titles. I like it in some books. I kinda hate when people create their own documents with it; they usually don’t put enough space between the lines.

It often appears in textbooks.

This amusing passage opens Warren Hollister’s Roots of the Western Tradition. (Had he actually been reading E. O. Wilson, or was he just helping himself to a metaphor fashionable during his time?) Later editions only get crankier. Mine, the sixth, says: “In our own time, the pace has become so swift that some dull-witted people” (my emphasis) “see no point in studying history at all.” Such language is not now indulged.

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Look at this frog.

Le spam; body-text fonts, pt. 12: URW Garamond

For 1½–2 years, my phone wouldn’t ring. A short time ago, however, it “fixed” itself – probably by downloading an automatic update – and the spammers began making up for lost time. A spammer roused Daniel from his nap, and, when I picked up, inquired after my “senior benefits.” Within an hour, another spammer had tried, twice, to convince me that an impostor had used my Amazon.com account to buy a MacBook Pro.

The police, paramedics, firefighters, war veterans, university chancellors, air traffic controllers, dentists, etc. resumed their panhandling-by-phone. I still am waiting to hear from the U.S. Space Force – or whichever underfunded military branch it is whose job involves shooting down Chinese weather balloons.

(I mean, either the phone repaired itself or Samuel fixed it by punching who knows what buttons. The other day, he called 911.)

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This “true crime memoir” is quite good.

The typeface is URW Garamond, the upper-case “Q” of which makes it an apt choice for setting The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford.

Web bots, pt. 2; a birthday weekend

Quickly, a follow-up to the previous entry. A reader tells me about this announcement on the Canon Press website:

(To enlarge the image, click on it.)

No wonder the Web bots led me to The Case for Christian Nationalism.

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Thank you, well-wishers and gift givers. I turned forty-one upon a day of classic “John-Paul” weather, as gloomy as all get-out (and windy). For my birthday supper, we drove to my in-laws’ house in Granger. The traffic was dense – Notre Dame was about to host a game – and, along much of the route, the power was extinguished; intersections had to be negotiated in the manner of four-way stops. We passed some accidents. We arrived safely.

“Meat loaf and cheesecake,” Karin’s mom said, afterward, when we were stuffed. “What good choices, John-Paul.”

“Karin chose them,” I disclosed.

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Stephen visited today; we watched the first leg of Barcelona’s championship series against Aucas. Barcelona lost 0–1 and didn’t deserve better. The concluding leg will be played next week. I can truly say, I’ll be glad for Aucas to join the list of title winners.

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In this photo, Moisés Caicedo celebrates his birthday with the other Spanish speakers of Brighton & Hove Albion FC. There are three Ecuadorians, an Argentinian, a Paraguayan, and a Spaniard.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all but the young Paraguayan were chosen for the World Cup.

I meet a politician; the Golden Rule; one thing leads to another

Political ads have been landing in our mailbox, and today a candidate came to our house. I stepped outside to talk to him.

(Samuel wanted to go outside, but I wouldn’t allow him to. He stared out the window, howled, and made a piteous face. Daniel chugged his milk.)

The candidate wore a U.S. Marine Corps baseball hat. The flyer he gave me didn’t say which party he belonged to, but it named and criticized a certain Republican candidate, so I figured he was a Democrat. He unenthusiastically confirmed this. “I’m running as a Democrat because I was raised as one,” he said, “but I’m against the extremists in both parties who are tearing our country apart.”

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R.I.P. Harry J. Gensler, the Jesuit philosopher who wrote a helpful (if expensive) “Golden Rule book for everyone.” You ought to treat others as you’d like to be treated, the Rule says. In most societies, this is regarded as common sense. But is it philosophically defensible? How, exactly, should the Rule be interpreted, formulated, and applied? And what is its place in an overall picture of morality and value? One could do worse than to begin with Gensler’s book.

Incidentally, if you use Amazon to search for books on the Golden Rule, you’ll be led to authors affiliated with the Templeton Foundation. I don’t object to Templeton; but if you click on too many Templeton Golden Rule products, you’ll soon be shown items from Douglas Wilson’s Canon Press, with titles like The Case for Christian Nationalism. Gensler cites examples of Golden Rule reasoning due to Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and concludes that the Rule’s appeal is “bipartisan.” Alas, the Web bots suggest otherwise.

A severance; a curiosity

On Tuesday night, we went to a gathering of local Alliance Academy alumni. Most who attended were related to me by blood or marriage. A few others were people I’ve known since childhood.

The school’s director also was there. He announced that the school must move: its land lease will not be renewed.

(The school will have been on that land for just about one hundred years.)

Thus, my last tie to any specific missionary property in Ecuador will have been severed. (I gather that it’s uncertain whether the school will even remain in Quito.)

Most of the Ecuadorian churches I frequented are still in the same locations, as are the Luz y Libertad school in Esmeraldas and the Seminario Bíblico Alianza in Guayaquil.

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You can preview a huge amount of the Amazon Kindle version of Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Booker nominee, Ducks, Newburyport – probably because so much of that novel consists of one sentence, and Amazon displays a fixed number of sentences; or perhaps because the novel is long and Amazon displays a fixed percentage of the whole.

Is the book any good? Well, if you find out, let me know.

On reading scholarship

Juneteenth as a federal holiday, year two. I don’t have a job, but the holiday does bring me some respite. Karin got a day off and helped to mind the children.

Amazon delivered a package. No rest for those workers.

Our air conditioner has been repaired, and just in time: after a cool weekend, the temperature is rising again.

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After some months of staying put, philosophically speaking (Daniel’s birth threw off my routine), I am back upon that horse, reading articles and books, some of them rather old, about the ethics of nuclear warfare and deterrence; about the problem of dirty hands; about political realism, as opposed to political moralism; about the distinction between “private” and “public” morality; and about the epistemology of testimony. The topics are related, though not seamlessly. Their common elucidator is C.A.J. Coady. The longer I live, and the more I read, the more I prefer to read the same author on many topics than many authors on the same topic. Monologs rather than dialogs. Or, more precisely, I prefer dialogs to be recounted within monologs, in a clear, familiar, and singular voice. It’s one thing to give every point of view its due; it’s a different and considerably more tiresome thing to listen to every person who expresses a new point of view. It used to be, I would read topical anthologies because I thought it was good to listen to different people talking about the same topic. Now I read anthologies because, by and large, different ones feature the same authors. The better authors. I never took sociology in college, but I acquired a nice volume of first-year sociology readings. I used to think they were chosen for their topical importance. Now that I’ve read around for twenty years, and I know more names, I realize those topics were chosen because those authors had written about them. Which is well and good.

Another thing, it’s nicer to read people who don’t give a citation for every little point. Better for an author to do as Quine does and just call the other guys “McX” and “Wyman” and not refer explicitly to their writings. I realize you only can write like this once you’ve Arrived. Until then, you have to cite everybody under the sun, and you have to drone on in your acknowledgments about the many hours during your fellowship year when you were encouraged by Senior Figure So-and-So and criticized, over pints or during long walks, by Up-and-Comer Such-and-Such. Which is a bit groveling and, frankly, not much fun to read.

I’ve noticed that novelists write longer and longer acknowledgments now. These are annoying because they’re like, “I want to thank my agent and my tireless editor and all my friends and my dad and my mom … and my dog, ha, ha.” As if the general reader would care about that. When even the novelists have to display all their social and professional connections, we know there isn’t likely to be a place for a loner like me in the industry of the mind.

Sherlock Hound

… or, in Japanese, Famous Detective Holmes, is a 1984 TV series of Hayao Miyazaki’s. I never thought I’d get to view it without having to shell out a lot of money. Last night, though, our Amazon Fire TV Stick suggested that we try the show for free using the HappyKids.tv app. (We haven’t watched much of Miyazaki with the Fire Stick, but it must know that we like our British period shows.)

On the basis of our first episode – “A Small Client,” a.k.a. “Little Martha’s Big Mystery,” which adapts Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” – I’d say the show is a great success. Miyazaki’s Sherlock is youthful and tousle-headed. Mrs. Hudson – also surprisingly young, and exuding kindness – is a Victorian beauty (or, rather, she is as beautiful as a talking cartoon dog could be). Moriarty is a flamboyant wolf, while Watson and Lestrade belong to portlier breeds. Transport, done by hansom cab in Doyle’s stories, is here performed in a nifty little motorcar upon which Holmes – or Hound – has doubtless tinkered. Another marvel is a machine that wheezes and gasps as it mints counterfeit coins bearing the image of Queen Victoria.

Alas, as the show was being made, its production team turned over. Some of its episodes failed to reach the highest standard – or so says one reviewer. But a half-dozen episodes do evince the master’s touch. (The reviewer lists them.)

Karin & I are delighted to have found this show. Samuel also watched with interest and didn’t howl as he did when we tried to watch Sanditon – a Jane Austen series in which the men do naked sea-bathing (but not with such courage as in the Merchant-Ivory Room with a View).

Update: What we watched tonight: “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (the link is to YouTube – this video was uploaded within the last day or so).

Quarantining, pt. 2

I keep on ordering vol. 1 of the Strangers and Brothers omnibus and receiving handsome copies of vol. 3. This happens even when I try ordering from different vendors. There must be some error on Amazon’s product page for vol. 1.

Thankfully, my money is being refunded.

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Just a moment ago, as I was typing, I received this injurious text message:

Your Amazon package with Strangers and Brothers (Omnibus Edition; Vol. 1) was delivered.

Alas, the package contained vol. 3, not vol. 1.

Would anyone like the leftover volumes? Karin is anxious to be rid of them. I have an extra copy of vol. 2, two extra copies of vol. 3, and zero copies of vol. 1.

I may have to obtain vol. 1 from a distributor made of flesh and blood.

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Little Samuel was slightly feverish yesterday: we think his first tooth is about to come out. Today he was happier and had a cooler temperature but remained uncharacteristically docile. He also slept more than usual. I think yesterday’s fever must have worn him out.

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Like millions of others, we’ve been attending church services from our living room. No, not by watching televangelists; we’ve been watching video of our pastor and musicians in their respective basements.

Then, tonight, using an online video calling system, we held a “small group” meeting with 5–10 participants. (I give this range because some participants dropped in and out of the meeting.) The highlight, for me, was seeing the dog of one of my fellow churchgoers lazing behind him on the back of his couch.

This reminds me that one of our neighbors has a beautiful husky dog. I keep seeing its tail bob up and down above the top of the fence.

TNF

Thursday Night Football just broadcast its last game of the season. The show became more tolerable a few weeks ago when I realized I didn’t have to listen to Troy Aikman and Joe Buck: Amazon Prime offered channels with nontraditional commentary. I liked the Mexican commentators pretty well, but my favorites, on the “UK” stream, were the Irishman and the Scot. They described the plays accurately, told nice jokes, and didn’t murder the language.

Nor did they overstate the obvious. Aikman and Buck usurped tonight’s broadcast at the beginning of the second half, opining that “It’s of PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE that the Jets score touchdowns,” before the audio switched back to the UK commentary and I was able, again, to breathe calmly in my armchair and enjoy my tea and kippers. The Irishman recited a line of poetry: “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’”

The Jets got some touchdowns, all right, but the Ravens still destroyed the Jets, 42 to 21. The Ravens looked very, very good. The Jets also looked good, uniform-wise. This season they’ve switched from their traditional white and forest-green garments to an ensemble that’s closer to what they wore in the Eighties and Nineties, with a color between forest green and kelly green. (Officially, it’s called “Gotham green.”) The Jets’ helmets are solid green now, not white or striped, and they look like solid-patterned billiard balls. I do miss the simple piping that used to run all the way up and down the sides of the pants. The team itself is awful.