The piano (cont.); World Cup notes

The piano has been moved to the kitchen, its likely resting-place for as long as we live in this house.

Now we must learn to play the thing.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What follows is highly selective.

Ivory Coast 1, Ecuador 0: An even, chaotic contest decided by an 89th-minute goal. Chaos doesn’t favor Ecuador. Our strength is tidy defending.

Piero Hincapié had trouble marking 19-year-old Yan Diomande. The goal came from an attack down that flank.

Thrice we hit woodwork. Our attacking woes continue. I will say, it’s hard when foulers aren’t penalized. The Ivorians were spared a couple of second yellow cards.

Brazil 1, Morocco 1: Has-been vs. emerging superpower. The same is true of their respective continents. The Moroccans were breathtaking in the first half; having established their superiority, they ceded the initiative. Brazil had a single brilliant moment.

Australia 2, Türkiye 0: The most entertaining game so far.

(Some would choose the Netherlands vs. Japan [2–2].)

I love watching the Turks. They attack at breakneck pace, slickly, all game long. But the Australians defended stoutly and landed two counter-punches.

USA 4, Paraguay 1; Germany 7, Curaçao 1; and Sweden 5, Tunisia 1: Three blowouts that tell little about the winners (and not much more about the Tunisians, who fell apart late but weren’t consistently bad).

Mid-half hydration breaks, twice per game: I am sick of them.

October’s poem

Not a horror poem but a love poem.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(William Butler Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

October is for baseball, too.

Shohei Ohtani enjoyed an historic night in the NLCS. He pitched six innings and struck out ten batters, allowing two hits and zero runs. He batted three times and hit three home runs.

(Very roughly, it’s as if Erling Haaland or Pelé had tended goal for sixty minutes in a Champions League semifinal, stopped several good shots, given up a few corners, kept a clean sheet … and scored three goals.)

Hoyle

Someday I’ll explain why, a decade or so ago, I resolved never to learn another brand-new board or card game – indeed, why I came to loathe the very idea of new games.

Tonight’s post is about why despite (or perhaps because of) this loathing, I bought The New Complete Hoyle, Revised (1991) at Goodwill.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The book’s subtitle is: “The Authoritative Guide to the Official Rules of All Popular Games of Skill and Chance.”

All popular games. Of skill and chance.

Is this a literally true description of the book? No.

Was it true in 1991? No. There were other popular games than those in Hoyle.

The pretense of officiality also goes too far. See, for example, this admission:

The rules of Go differ somewhat in China, Korea, and Japan. Unfortunately they have not been codified even in Japan, where, in 1928, a championship tournament was interrupted and suspended for a month by a dispute over rules. A commission appointed to clarify the Japanese rules proposed a code in 1933, but it has not been generally adopted.

One might deplore the book’s exaggeration. On the other hand, one might admire its determination to establish a canon of games.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Which brings me to what canonization is for.

Walk down any Walmart games aisle, or visit a specialty shop: new games proliferate like Hydra’s heads. This, at best, is a distraction from the sustained pursuit of excellence. At worst, it’s postmodern absurdity.

One is tempted to commit one of two opposing mistakes. The first is to renounce all gaming. This is the Charybdis of asceticism. The second is to try to keep up with new gaming. This is the Scylla of … well, probably not asceticism’s starkest opposites, wantonness and incontinence. It’s more like an arms race. Or like keeping up with the Joneses.

The sensible middle course is to choose just a few games and to stick with them. Here a canon of games is invaluable. It’s less good to practice something with no stock of wisdom built up around it. (I’m sure Alasdair MacIntyre would agree.)

Adhering to the canon ensures that one is communing, not only with today’s gamers, but also with those of the past, e.g. the Japanese who debated the rules of Go in 1928.

Hoyle is steeped in history, or aspires to be.

(Indeed, its stated pedigree is almost blasphemous:

The only truly immortal being on record is an Englishman named Edmond Hoyle, who was born in 1672 and buried in 1769 but who has never really died.

I imagine my pious grandfather, who refused to play cards, disapproving.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Suppose that one is nauseated by the uselessness of gaming and decides that total abstention is, after all, the way to go. Hoyle still is invaluable. What better tool is there for understanding scenes of gaming in old books? I’ve never actually played bridge, but (in some moods) my favorite Christie novel is Cards on the Table. Identifying the murderer in that book depends on knowing about bridge. Then there are the James Bond novels (Casino Royale, Goldfinger  … ). Even Austen’s and Pepys’s people are card fiends. A confirmed teetotaller probably should know a little about boozing, if only for literature’s sake.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 80: Cure

I’ve been stumbling across references to mesmerism – in Poe, in William James. Even this month’s E. M. Forster reading, Maurice, touches on hypnotism, mesmerism’s better-regarded cousin.

This is the key difference between the practices, as I understand them. Hypnotism, to be effective, must be welcomed – or at least not resisted – by the subject. In contrast, mesmerism, due to its eerie basis in “animal magnetism,” is supposed to influence even those who resist.

Mesmerism once was widely feared. After the French Revolution,

major politicians and people in power were accused by radicals of practising animal magnetism on the general population.

In his article “Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England,” Roy Porter notes that James Tilly Matthews suggested that the French were infiltrating England via animal magnetism. Matthews believed that “magnetic spies” would invade England and bring it under subjection by transmitting waves of animal magnetism to subdue the government and people. Such an invasion from foreign influences was perceived as a radical threat.

Not everyone objected to being mesmerized. Desperate people welcomed it as a cure. Scientists lent it credibility.

No longer. Now it belongs to history – and to the horror genre.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is blurred in the thriller Cure (1997). Subjects are induced to commit murders they wouldn’t ordinarily commit. The question is whether they murder willingly.

How different, really, are you and I from the “monsters” we condemn? This is the theme of many policing stories, and of such cringe-thrillers as Oldboy. Cure belongs to both traditions.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Bizarre killings plague Japan. The victims are slashed with similar markings. Each killing is done by a different person.

Each killer immediately and remorsefully confesses and is taken into custody. Each killer had never done violence before. Each is baffled.

So are the lead detective, Takabe, and Sakuma, the psychologist he consults.

Even if you manage to hypnotize someone, you can’t change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil won’t kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.

So says Sakuma, a rather naïve figure. His manner conveys that this is the scientific orthodoxy. I don’t know if it is, but the assertion, in this unqualified form, is doubtful. People murder deliberately while believing that murder is wrong; if people act wrongly while aware of their moral beliefs – if their urges aren’t stopped by the safeguard of their own conscious disapproval – why wouldn’t they acquiesce to a hypnotist’s suggestion?

Sakuma’s personal advice to Takabe is better. Don’t let the investigation consume you, he urges; look after yourself. Not all is well with Takabe, whose wife is psychologically disturbed. His own smooth façade has started to crack.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The investigators learn that a young drifter has been seen near every crime. They track him down. He appears to have severe amnesia.

The scenes with the drifter are, to me, the movie’s most absorbing ones. Do-gooders take him in, try to help him. Police question him. Or, rather, he questions his questioners. Where am I? Who am I? Then, after a half-dozen questions, the sequence resets: Where am I? The drifter is quiet, laconic, apparently uninterested. His failure to supply answers suggests insolence as much as memory loss. As his questioners’ frustration mounts, he imposes his own rhythm on the interrogations. Then, he flips the questions back on the questioners. Who are you? He asks about their lives, their homes. He plants suggestions. In short, he hypnotizes, or mesmerizes. I don’t know how realistic this is. I’ve not seen conversations like this in life, or in any movie. But they’re fascinating; their rhythm is … hypnotic. They’re worth the price of admission.

There are dreamlike locations, too: an empty, wintry beach; an abandoned, old, wooden dormitory; the bowels of hospitals and prisons. There are hallucinatory sequences (the halluciations are Takabe’s).

Here is a long video about Cure’s unsettling techniques – an exposition of how movies use ordinary sights and sounds to subtly re-tune our emotions.

Don’t watch it now if you plan to see this movie; do if you don’t.

The sports

You’ll have to enlarge this to read it.

I would choose the sushi, the ham-and-cheese pizza, the pasta salad, the Nutella sandwich, the bologna-and-chorizo sandwich, and the fruit.

(I doubt the authenticity of this. Was there no second fullback?)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s time for my annual baseball peek: Dodgers vs. Yankees, World Series Game 1. No runs yet. I’ll watch until the Fox Sports app’s free preview expires. We need a TV antenna. … The celebs are out in droves. … It’s nice to see such plain uniforms on both teams. I appreciate the subtle palm trees on the Dodgers’ socks. … Shohei Ohtani sure is … tall. … I like it that so many people in Japan are watching the Dodgers at 9:00am.

Karin: “Sports ads are garbage.”

First run scored: triple, then sacrifice fly. Dude wore a mitten to slide home hand-first. I’d never seen that.

Update: First walk-off grand slam in World Series history:

He is a “sixth-generation Salvationist” (Wikipedia; cf. the source article).

Growth and limitation

Eleven-month-old Daniel, who’d been taking five or six steps at a time, casually walked across the living room two nights ago. He’s learned to climb up our staircases (but not down them). He’s grown tall enough for his head to be whacked by the refrigerator door. Today I caught him playing with the dials on our gas stove.

Samuel received his first YouTube lesson in adding and subtracting. He grinned and squealed and waved his arms. Fireworks of possibility exploded in my brain. Should I buy Samuel an abacus so that he can practice calculating like the Japanese? (Should I buy myself an abacus?) Should I teach Samuel about truth tables? Propositional logic? Quantification? He’d probably get a kick out of seeing “∀” and “∃.”

I’m not even sure I could teach logic to adults. I’ve never tried.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I spent a couple of hours at the whiteboard with Samuel. He can’t add yet. He won’t even count all the dots unless I do so along with him. He does like to yell out the numbers and the operations, but he gets the sums wrong.

“Five plus three equals FOURTEEN!”

No, son.

He is bitterly disappointed. Not because he’s got the sum wrong – I doubt he understands what it is to get a sum wrong (and he never has minded factual correction as such) – but because he really wants the last term to be fourteen. He is an enthusiastic laissez-faire combinatorialist. If South Africa vs. Mexico is a valid possibility, and if there’s another possibility which is South Africa vs. Finland, and if South Africa vs. North Korea is possible … then surely five plus three equals fourteen is perfectly kosher, perfectly respectable (worth celebrating, even), no matter that dot-counting can establish that five plus three actually (therefore, possibly; therefore, necessarily) equals eight.

I believe this is his first brush with theoretical, as opposed to practical, impossibility. It is baffling to him.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Philomena Cunk (Cunk on Earth) is coming to Netflix.

A bonus poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Look at these trophies.

See how my trophies gleam in the sunlight.

See how they shine.

What do you think it took to become

English hammer-throwing champion nineteen sixty-nine?

Do you think in that moment, when my big moment came,

That I treated the rules with casual disdain?

Well? Like hell!

As I stepped up to the circle, did I change my plan?

Hmm? What?

As I chalked up my palms, did I wave my hands?

I did not!

As I started my spin, did I look at the view?

Did I drift off and dream for a minute or two?

Do you think I faltered or amended my rotation?

Do you think I altered my intended elevation?

As the hammer took off, did I change my grunt,

From the grunt I had practised for many a month?

Not a jot, not a dot did I stray from the plot.

Not a detail of my throw was adjusted or forgotten.

Not even when the hammer left my hands

And sailed high up, up above the stands, did I let myself go.

No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,

You have to stay inside the circle all the time,

And if you want to make the team,

You don’t need happiness or self-esteem,

You just need to keep your feet inside the line.

Sing, children – two, three, four!

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,

(Habinot est magitem.) [Suitable is more.]

You have to stay inside the circle all the time.

(Circular! Magitem! Magitem!) [More! More!]

And if you want to teach success,

(Aaah …)

You don’t use sympathy or tenderness.

(Tenderness …)

You have to force the little squits to toe the line!

Sing, Jenny – two, three, four!

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,

(Regotem … Regotem varia magitem …) [To guide … To guide variety more …]

You have to stay inside the circle all the time.

(Tempero es te iste is.) [Thee are to control it.]

Apply just one simple rule –

To hammer-throwing, life, and school –

Life’s a ball, so learn to throw it.

Find the bally line, and toe it,

And always keep your feet inside the line.

Now get out.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

From Matilda the Musical; lyrics by Tim Minchin.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel, in a pleading voice: “Soccer on Peacock?”

John-Paul: “Tomorrow we will watch some soccer on Peacock.”

Samuel: “We will watch Netherlands versus Japan.”

John-Paul: “We will watch Croatia versus Argentina.”

Samuel, happy: “We will watch Croatia versus Argentina.”

He has a deck of cards with flags, country names, and capitals on them. He likes to put two cards opposite each other and announce the soccer matchup. “Denmark versus North Korea.” Or else: “Germany versus Thailand.”

That’s the spirit.

His Spanish pronunciation is improving, too.

An aborted journey; we finish Midsomer murders; body-text fonts, pt. 7: Janson Text

My parents set out yesterday for a tour of Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, one or both Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and I forget where else. How I envied them! They got as far as Illinois, and then my mother tested positive for COVID.

So, now, they’re back.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s typeface is Janson Text.

(A crooked but stimulating observation.)

Some say this typeface is the best of the Jansons. I wish it had a longer-tailed Q, as Monotype Janson has.

Also, everything depends on what you count as a Janson. Is Ehrhardt a Janson? Now, there’s a question.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It took five years, but Karin & I finished viewing all of Midsomer Murders. Twenty-two seasons; 132 episodes of 90–100 minutes.

My overall assessment:

Grainier picture → better episode.

More French horn → better episode.

More scenes with Joyce Barnaby and Cully Barnaby → better episode.

Teleplay by Anthony Horowitz → better episode.

In other words: the earlier, the better (as a rule).

As it happens, we concluded the project with an early episode: S2E3, “Dead Man’s Eleven,” about the cricket. When we first tried it – four years ago? – I couldn’t stay awake, due to my sleep apnea.

I don’t know if more episodes will be released.

Whatever will we do when we run out of Midsomer Murders?, I used to lament.

Karin suggested: Watch them again.

I think we shall.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 46: Maborosi

Some dialog from Michael Cera’s Youth in Revolt:

I think my favorite film was Tokyo Story. I just think Mizoguchi is a great director.

But wasn’t that by Ozu?

Who can say?

I’m reminded of this joke because I, too, must talk about Ozu without having seen his movies.

Does that matter? I know enough about Ozu to understand that, visually and rhythmically (and also, probably, thematically), Maborosi has the style of an Ozu movie.

I didn’t get so strong a feeling when, a couple of years ago, I watched The Third Murder. That movie introduced me to Maborosi’s director, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Maborosi, more than The Third Murder, must be Ozu-like.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I doubt I’ll review a quieter movie than Maborosi – even if I decide to review Microcosmos (which, I dimly recall, is just footage of insects chewing leaves).

Stuff actually happens in Maborosi, but it barely seems to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

There’s a wonderful passage in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A man describes a brief but sublime experience involving a single beam of light at the bottom of a well. His life, ever since, has been shadow-like.

Like this unfortunate man, Yumiko, the protagonist of Maborosi, has largely stopped living.

In early scenes, she is gloriously happy with her young husband. Then he dies. It is a baffling death. It seems to be a death full of life, if such a thing can be; at the very least, he dies on his own terms.

The life that is snuffed out is Yumiko’s, even though she’s just twenty years old and has a beautiful infant son.

Yumiko remarries. She moves from Osaka to a remote seaside village. Her son and stepdaughter grow up happily together. Her new husband and inlaws are good people. Yumiko has good moments.

But she is not fully present in her life. The memory of the dead husband draws her away from her surroundings. Usually, this is not explicitly commented upon; but everything suggests it. Action is observed from a distance. The scenery is gloomy to look at; meanwhile, this or that person performs this or that movement in some remote corner of the screen. Foreground becomes background.

Life goes on, but only at the edge of Yumiko’s consciousness.

Meanwhile, this or that supporting character is lured toward death. Some characters die; most don’t. Yumiko can’t understand the attraction of death. That’s why she constantly grieves.

I am going to stop now because the New Year is almost here, and I am about to fall asleep; and besides, there is little more about Maborosi that I could discuss. The richness is in the detail with which daily life, or its negation, is observed.

P.S. Another movie Maborosi reminds me of: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar.

Olympic gold

The boy constantly climbs the furniture. Things which once were safe upon high shelves are no longer safe.

The boy also climbs and climbs on his father, who, hours later, must resist the urge to shield himself from being trampled by (phantom) mountain goats.

The boy’s mother drags herself to work most days. When not at work, she is in bed, sick.

This is what has been going on in our household.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ecuador won its second-ever Olympic gold medal – the first since 1996. The competition was a pretty badass one: the men’s cycling road race.

The winning cyclist, Richard Carapaz of Carchi Province, recently finished third in the Tour de France. His fellow Olympic medalists excelled in that contest, too.

The six-hour Olympic race climbed part of Mt. Fuji.

Here are an Associated Press/Sports Illustrated report …

an NBC highlight video …

and some analysis.

A veterinary ordeal, followed by a quiet evening at home

We had trouble last night rounding up the kitties and putting them into their pet carriers. They knew what was in store for them.

Ziva darted under our bed. But we caught her in the end.

She and Jasper were hauled away. The vet gave them their shots and scolded them for being fat (Jasper has been ballooning ever since he figured out that Samuel tosses food scraps onto the floor).

Thankfully, both kitties were confirmed to be flea-free.

The rest of the evening was peaceful. Karin used her computer to play a very strange role-playing game from Japan, and I read from the unfashionable philosophy of William Godwin. The kitties didn’t fight at home (which they often do when one of them has returned from the vet). Samuel played with a toy alphabet that he got for Christmas; then, listening to the music of Bambi, he went to sleep.

Tonight, though, our Young Prince is considerably more grumpy.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 34: Whisper of the heart

This movie was released in Japan in 1995 and in the USA in 1996. The version I know is the one dubbed into English.

I first saw it in 2007. I was twenty-five, still tossed by youth’s tempests. The movie affected me considerably.

Revisiting it, what impresses me is its patience. It isn’t obvious, at first, that the movie is a love story. For a long while, it mostly just follows fourteen-year-old Shizuko in and out of buildings and trains, and up and down the sidewalks and outdoor stairways of hilly Tokyo – all of which are drawn with the naturalistic clarity that is typical of Studio Ghibli.

Shizuko is a solitary person, but she is not a loner. Her parents, sister, and friends occupy stable positions in her life. But she is driven by her own interests, so that these other people occasionally complain that she neglects them. She also neglects her studies.

She is obsessed with motifs and feelings. She does some writing. Mostly, though, she just absorbs as many stories as she can, reading dozens of library books.

She notices that one book after another has been checked out by the same borrower. She dreams of meeting this person. She even makes a few inquiries about him. But she is a little too wrapped up in her own idea of what he is like. She imagines that he is unfailingly polite (it turns out that he is not). What she does sense, correctly, is his offbeat drivenness; in this respect, she and the other book borrower are as alike as two peas.

Then, one day, she follows a strange cat around a neighborhood and ends up wandering into a shop with some marvelous antiques. …

I had better stop describing the plot. This isn’t a suspenseful movie, but it has secrets. What is revealed isn’t the solution to any great mystery, but, rather, depth of feeling.

“You complete me,” Tom Cruise says to Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. This movie, Whisper of the Heart, has similar utterances, delivered with an earnestness several orders of magnitude more powerful than in most love stories.

The movie is about unrecognized love …

unrequited love …

lovers tragically separated …

and lovers who manage to come together – who, in the fullness of time, might indeed complete one another as well as lovers could do …

who, after some struggle, are able to express this out loud.

(I think, also, of another exquisite Japanese movie, The Garden of Words, and its shattering declaration: “You saved me!”)

It’s possible to interpret the lovers’ condition, their being-in-love, as age-specific. They feel and speak so strongly because they are so young. Of course, there is something to this, but to lay all the emphasis on this point would be a mistake. Another important character, an old man, is shown to feel his own love just as intensely.

The division isn’t between the young and the old, but between those who are romantic and those who are not – or, perhaps, between those who speak frankly about their passion and those who do not (or, between those who are ready to do so, and those who are not). There is a delightful scene in which the two main lovers talk intimately upon a rooftop, in full view of a crowd of gawkers. The lovers simply ignore them. They have important things to tell one another.

As in Jerry Maguire, it’s the frankness about idealism that makes the movie so good. It’s a pleasure to watch people who are passionate about living excellently – and who recognize and love each other for it.

(The music in this video isn’t from the movie. YouTube has lots of videos made by fans of Whisper of the Heart who have mixed different scenes together and set them to other music.)

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 33: Ghost in the shell

This violent, disturbing cartoon for adults has the best soundtrack of 1996:

When I hear those drums, I think of a vast, hidden indoor swimming pool, or a great cistern in a derelict building. I visit such places in my dreams.

The main protagonist of Ghost in the Shell likes to go diving in a canal in the middle of a Japanese city. There are skyscrapers all around her, but hardly anyone is in sight. It’s a good place in which to introspect.

All movie long, this character philosophizes out loud, compulsively.

She works for a governmental agency that deals with cyber crime. Her assignment is to trace the source of a computer virus called the “Puppet Master.”

Indeed, she and her colleagues have been designed for this task. They are robot-human hybrids, or cyborgs (the year is 2029). They look like regular humans, except that they stare vacantly and are able to talk without moving their mouths.

And, sometimes, their limbs get torn off.

The limbs are artificial and can be replaced. Still, it’s unnerving to see humanoids conducting themselves matter-of-factly while they’re mutilated. They’re like sinewy, bloody china dolls.

I’ve watched movies with reanimated corpses, talking severed heads, and the like, but nothing else unsettles me just like Ghost in the Shell does.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I won’t go into detail about the metaphysics of personhood that underlies the combining of a human with a robot. Yes, the movie’s title evokes “The Ghost in the Machine,” the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s derisive phrase for Cartesian substance-dualism. But whether or not the cyborgs have Cartesian souls is beside the point (as it happens, the movie opts for a thoroughly physicalist ontology).

What matters is that these beings have embodied selves. What kind of self the protagonist has – and, consequently, what her life means – can’t be separated from a physicality that she doesn’t embrace. It troubles her that she’s neither fully human nor fully robotic.

Nor is she fully female – she lacks genitalia. This is evident from scenes in which she fights in the nude.

And this takes us to the interpretation that I find most compelling. The movie meditates on transgenderism, on what it’s like to have a body that feels not just dysfunctional, not just awkward, but wounded.

Here is an excellent review that explores this theme.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have little more to say. The movie’s dialog is sometimes flat, sometimes ponderous. This is not an artistic failing. It reflects how the characters struggle to come to terms with the strangeness of their existence.

The futuristic Japanese city is superbly conceived. Against this backdrop, the humanoid characters are drawn rather lifelessly, except when they seem most artificial. Then they become curiously expressive.

There is an extraordinary sequence near the end of the movie. Two cyborgs lie next to one another; below their chests, their bodies have been torn away. They communicate by thinking. One tries to persuade the other to join with himself (herself?) into a single being. When shown from a certain angle, their faces almost seem to merge. The scene could be an homage to Bergman’s Persona. One being combines with another; only, in Ghost in the Shell, it isn’t a nightmare or a colonization, it’s a longed-for realization. The movie isn’t pleasant, but it does plumb fascinating depths.

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).

Samuel, cont.

Here I’ve posed Samuel next to a Penguin Classic to show his size. (See his arms flail.)

We brought him home on Friday. Since then, he’s been to church, where the congregants queued up to greet him; to Wendy’s, where he insisted on being fed in the parking lot; to a house that my parents are thinking of buying; and to my grandparents’ house.

There are many other photos I could show, but I’ll just offer two in which Samuel is acknowledged by the kitties, who seem enormous. Little Ziva looks like a horse.

This wasn’t their first encounter with Samuel. Upon first meeting him, Jasper sniffed once and then bolted under the bed. Ziva quickly followed.

Samuel operates on Tokyo time. He sleeps most of the day and wails most of the night. His wail isn’t WAAH, WAAH so much as uh-LAAH, uh-LAAH.

Los pibes

The last bits of my dissertation, not counting revisions, need to be turned in around the beginning of next week. Meanwhile, I continue to apply for academic jobs. It amazes me that so many are posted so near to the beginning of the next school year.

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After starting slowly, with a draw and a defeat in the first two group games, Ecuador has progressed to the quarterfinal round of the men’s U-20 World Cup in Poland.

Ecuador’s opponent in the quarterfinals: the USA.

(I’m not saying that one side is morally better than the other, but one is like Luke Skywalker and the other is like Darth Vader.)

Los pibes, as the youths are called, seem especially bad at kicking penalties. They missed one against the Japanese, whom they outplayed and should have beaten, and another against the Italians, whom they also outplayed and with whom they should have drawn.

They did convert two penalty kicks against the Uruguayans. They used two different shooters who followed the same strategy: shooting low and centrally into space vacated by the goalkeeper.

Not very inspiring. I hope the quarterfinal doesn’t have to be settled with a shootout.

Final Four, pt. 2

At halftime of the championship game, Kenny Smith and Sir Charles pointed out that the teams – especially Virginia – were so used to bleeding out the clock that they weren’t taking open shots.

But the game’s real howler occurred in overtime. A Red Raider dribbled down the court on a fast break. A Cavalier knocked the ball out of bounds. Everyone saw this. But cue the replay review anyway. Frame-by-frame analysis. Yes, the Cavalier touches it last. But look more closely. There. In a single frame of the video, some electrons orbiting the little finger of the Texas Tech player appear to touch the ball.

Honestly, it was like the famous photo reconstruction scene in Blow-up.

The refs reversed their call and awarded possession to Virginia. The Red Raiders were never able to regain control of the game. The Cavs held on for their third straight deeply controversial victory (and the national title).

Did the Red Raider touch the ball last, using a few subatomic particles on his pinky? Maybe so. It shouldn’t have mattered.

One critic tweets:

For 100 years of basketball and on every pickup court in the country this is off UVA.

Slow motion replay changing the game by changing from who knocked it out to technical last touch is something I don’t think I like.

I agree.

It was like last summer’s World Cup final. All that time looking at video, and the refs still got it wrong.

Oh, and on the same play last night, the Red Raider dribbler was fouled. Indisputably. (See the previous link.) But that more important factor wasn’t considered, whether or not the rule allowed it to be.

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One of my colleagues is scheduled to have his gallbladder removed next week. The hospital sent him a letter saying that the night before the surgery, he shouldn’t eat or drink anything besides, “water, taki, and coffee.”

Takis?

I looked up the word “taki.” Wikipedia says it’s Japanese for “waterfall.” So maybe the hospital is telling my colleague that he shouldn’t have anything besides water, waterfall water, and coffee.

The first knockout stage

… has been played out.

I just finished watching England defeat Colombia in a penalty shootout. This game had a villain: U.S. referee Mark Geiger. He called a very dubious penalty against Colombia, forfeited his credibility with the players, and was generally incompetent. In fact, he was a jackass. Given his history, he shouldn’t have been assigned to the World Cup in the first place.

With Colombia’s disqualification, one half of the playoff bracket looks utterly dismal. One of these sorry teams will reach the final game:

• Russia (KO’d Spain in a penalty shootout after playing bunker defense)
• Croatia (KO’d Denmark in a shootout after an utter snoozefest)
• Sweden (KO’d Switzerland with a goal from a deflected shot, mercifully ending an utter snoozefest so that extra time wouldn’t have to be played)
• England (toothless)

So far, all knockout games between two European teams have been deadly dull. We can expect more of the same for the quarterfinal and semifinal games in this half of the bracket.

The other half is much better. These are its surviving teams:

• France (scored four goals against Argentina)
• Uruguay (scored twice, and at will, against Portugal – seven minutes after beginning to play, and seven minutes after having been scored upon – and with breathtaking technique; dominated play without possessing the ball)
• Brazil (broke down Mexican resistance with two well-crafted goals)
• Belgium (showed attacking prowess by surmounting a two-goal deficit vs. Japan)

Even if France and Belgium should defeat the South Americans in the quarterfinals, we can expect them to give us a rousing semifinal game.

Some links pertaining to the World Cup

It’s the summer’s solstice, but you wouldn’t know it from South Bend’s dark skies and pouring rain.

In Russia, the World Cup has continued its string of bizarre matches.

Colombia was upset after suffering an early red card against Japan.

Poland was upset by Senegal, who scored a wacky second goal.

Spain defeated Iran with another wacky goal.

Argentina was badly upset by Croatia.

I could discuss many more games, in minute detail. But I’ll leave it at this: general weirdness is this World Cup’s main theme.

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The trappings have been more wonderful than the games themselves. The crowds, in national dress, have lent their usual pageantry. The stadiums also have been lovely to behold – even on TV; even the one in Yekaterinburg, which has seats built on high stilts outside the stadium proper. (Yekaterinburg, I learned today, is east of the Urals, which makes this World Cup the second one held in Asia.)

And here is Telemundo’s rousing musical theme for the tournament. It’s played during every commercial break. It builds gradually. At the end, it introduces vocals, sounding very Russian.

Results

Though the Ecuadorians played hard, they lost, two goals to one, relinquishing their last chance of qualifying for next year’s World Cup.

They almost didn’t lose. The Chileans scored their winning goal because an Ecuadorian substitute, having just ventured onto the infirm playing surface, slipped. But the night’s other results would have sunk the Ecuadorians even if they’d drawn.

A draw also would have pretty well sunk the Chileans. Instead, momentarily, they’re vaulted into third place. I say “momentarily” because they must play their concluding game in Brazil. Whether they qualify may well depend on how few goals the Brazilians decide to score against them. The Brazilians may end up KO’ing Chile for the third consecutive World Cup cycle.

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Argentina and Peru stalemated in Buenos Aires. Their fates depend upon their respective final matches.

Sitting pretty are the Brazilians (already qualified); the Uruguayans (assured of a playoff, at least; virtually assured of direct qualification); and, amazingly, the Paraguayans. GET THIS. Right now, the Paraguayans are in seventh place, i.e., three places from direct qualification, with a goal differential of minus-five. But if they defeat Venezuela at home, they’ll at least reach the playoff (they’d overtake either Colombia or Peru) and they might even qualify directly, overtaking Chile or Argentina (or both). This good placement is due to their superb comeback victory in Barranquilla. They scored in minutes 89 and 92, defeating the Colombians, 2–1. The Paraguayans are South America’s “cardiac” team.

Then again, I wouldn’t put it past them to fail to defeat the last-placed Venezuelans.

To recapitulate, this is the table (click to enlarge):

And these are the concluding fixtures:

Argentina at Ecuador
Bolivia at Uruguay
Chile at Brazil
Colombia at Peru
Venezuela at Paraguay

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The best result of the day was Kazuo Ishiguro’s selection as the Nobel literary laureate. When it was announced, it made me so pleased, I almost wasn’t bothered about the World Cup. Ishiguro is a fine writer, and The Remains of the Day, his most famous novel, displays the sublimest English and Japanese virtues.