July’s poem

This poem is for the eliminated World Cup teams. The thing about international soccer is, you can’t just go out and buy the crucial missing pieces. You make do with what you have. (But if you’re France, you’ve already “imported” so many pieces that everybody else is scrambling for your castoffs.)

It’s demoralizing knowing that, however well you use what you have, you or whoever beats you will eventually surrender to France.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,

For want of a shoe the horse was lost,

For want of a horse the rider was lost,

For want of a rider the battle was lost,

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost –

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(From The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona & Peter Opie. Recited, in The Clocks, by Hercule Poirot. Previous versions due to: Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack; the poet George Herbert; the Germans; and the French.)

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Is the “want of a horseshoe nail” an “INUS” condition? (That is: an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition; in ordinary English: a cause. See: J. L. Mackie.)

Losing the battle might suffice for losing the kingdom, even if the kingdom could be lost in other ways: e.g., due to a meteor strike.

Losing the rider might suffice for losing the battle, even if the battle could be lost in other ways: e.g., due to a meteor strike.

And so on, for each preceding line. (Let’s say the meteorite gets smaller and smaller.)

Or is causation better analyzed in some other way? I’m getting too old for this.

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Q: What was the “horseshoe nail” that Ecuador wanted?

A: Goals. And (controversially), according to some journalists, avoiding getting death threats from Mexican cartels.

More trouble for the World Cup

Some dozens of recent killings in Mexico have stirred up anxiety about that country’s ability to safely co-host the World Cup.

The U.S. has safety worries, too. E.g., who will pay for the extra stadium guards and police in little Foxborough, Mass.? Not the 18,000 townspeople, who are threatening to deny FIFA the use of their locality.

Good for them.

See this New York Times article.

“We may get a little more [than usual] in meals tax and hotel tax,” a local official explains:

But this is not a moneymaker for this town. In fact, it’s probably more of a headache than it’s worth.

This is nothing more than seven events up there. If [the] World Cup wasn’t coming, we’d probably have seven concerts in that time. We’re not gaining much of anything by hosting this event.

So it goes when a country that doesn’t really care about soccer – or about, you know, the world – is awarded World Cup hosting rights. You run up against locals who refuse to sacrifice. Which is what hosting these games is. FIFA always has made money for the rich and compensated the masses with an experiential high. But these particular masses don’t care about soccer or foreign visitors, so they aren’t going to get that high.

FIFA should give more games – or all of the games – to Canada. I’m curious what the people of, e.g., Edmonton or Regina would say. Those cities have pretty stadiums; I’ve looked at them on Wikipedia.

Valentine’s

Abel has cabin fever now. He points at the stroller, squawks, climbs onto my chest, and beats it. Soon, Abel, soon.

Like his brothers before him, he attacks my face and snatches at my glasses when I put them on at night. His little nails must have cut inside my eyelid. When I fold it back I find the scab. It has been chafing my eyeball.

Happy Valentine’s (this time, on the day itself). No celebration for Karin & me tonight. We’ll go out later this week.

I did put on Sleepless in Seattle for the family. There aren’t a lot of Valentine’s Day movies. I’ve seen these others:

My Bloody Valentine and the excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock – two for the horror aisle;

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;

and:

Some Like It Hot.

Irrespective of overall merit or demerit, only Sleepless preserves the spirit of, and does justice to, the holiday. (I’ve not seen An Affair to Remember.)

Happy birthday to my long-dead Great Grandad Valentine, my father’s mother’s father.

Great expectations

A portrait of our family:

Before you ask if one of the children is a prodigy: No, I drew this.

Our unborn one’s “placeholder” name is Pip.

(Permanent name TBD.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Having mostly recovered, healthwise, we’re happier tonight. The weather – lately rather droughty – has been recovering, too. Yesterday there were wild rains (and hail); the lawn is greening again.

The boys have inherited their second cousins’ trampoline. Their use of it, so far, is reminiscent of the WWE (née WWF). But with less pretending.

Ah for those proto-anglophilic days in Esmeraldas when I would cheer for the British Bulldogs, and then emulate them with David.

Tournament honors

A young man tried to kill Trump but only wounded him slightly. Bystanders were hurt; one was shot dead. The attacker himself was killed. Investigators say his motive remains unclear.

Of course this tragedy is more important than soccer, but I don’t know what else to say about it.

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Congrats to Spain and Argentina for winning their respective tournaments.

Congrats to the Colombians for playing so well. They collapsed in the end. Their semifinal had been the more tiring one, and they’d rested a day less than the Argentinians.

Here is my Copa América “team of the tournament” (with honorable mentions in parentheses):

Martínez, ARG (Vargas, COL);

Nández, URU; Romero, ARG; Martínez, ARG; Mojica, COL (Sánchez, COL; Hincapié, ECU);

Ríos, COL; De Paul, ARG; Caicedo, ECU (Valverde, URU; Koné, CAN; Lerma, COL);

Rodríguez, COL; Martínez, ARG; Díaz, COL (Córdoba, COL; Rondón, VEN).

The Euros’ official “tournament team” is here. I mostly agree: I’d choose Mamardashvili (GEO) over Maignan (FRA), and maybe Carvajal (ESP) over Walker (ENG); and I wish I could make room for Çalhanoglu (TÜR), but not at the expense of any of the tremendous Spaniards.

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I finished reading the First Movement (novels 1–3) of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. The pace is 20 pp./day, no more than 1 novel/month, for 12 months. Repetitious though much of it is – the narrator has to keep reminding us what his dozens of characters have been up to – its soap-operatic tidal wave swamps the intricacies of E. M. Forster, whose novels I’m also reading.

Sméagol has appeared in LOTR and is, in his way, delightful – a grotesque busybee. He, Sam, and Frodo have reached Mordor’s Black Gate. Two towers flank it. Are these the titular towers? I thought Orthanc was one, and also the Dark Tower. Is the question ever settled?

I finished reading the longest appendix (A).

A Pole’s woes; the “clásico del Pacífico”; plans for Samuel

More Euros. The Germans look decent … the Spanish look very good but depended on an Italian “own” goal for their second victory … the English look putrid … the Dutch and French played a tedious, scoreless draw … the French have yet to score (they did provoke an Austrian “own” goal; the Euros’ official tally, so far, is five).

Poland’s excellent but perennially luckless goalkeeper, Wojciech Szczesny, committed a penalty-kick foul with his face. He only received a yellow card.

(I first saw him in the opening match of the 2012 Euros; he committed a delicate penalty-kick foul then, too, and was ejected.)

The Copa América has begun. Argentina defeated Canada. Chileans and Peruvians kicked each other all through their scoreless draw; quite a few were incapacitated (their rivalry is known as the Pacific Classic).

Frodo et al. have ventured into Moria.

Samuel watches Scooby-Doo.

He was waitlisted by and then accepted into our preferred preschool. A relief; but I grieve that this summer will be his last before he heads out into the world.

Learning in protest-time

Whatever you think of the recent campus protests, now is a good time to read about old ones.

I used to hear about old protests at Cornell. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But the way the old protests were talked about, it seemed the best of times, morally speaking. At least it was better than the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period characterized by routine alternations of study and debauchery.

Middle-aged, I now see the obvious rightness of the study-and-debauch routine inside a university. (Well, yes, the routine could do with less debauching.)

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning,” C. S. Lewis says, echoing many, many other university people since the dawn of (at least) the modern university. This is an obvious truth … or was for a long time.

But, but, the present urgency!

Well, there’s always a present urgency; if nothing else, people need their souls saved. (It’s usually other people, isn’t it?) But that’s not what a university is for. “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.” So, one (a) leaves the university and does whatever seems urgent, or else (b) stays in the university and pursues learning. No distractions, please.

(The old Cornell protests may actually have been justified since they were about how to pursue learning. This is an important point. Alas, it is not a neglected one. “How learning is moral to pursue” has been trotted out as the concern behind much gratuitous scholarship⁠/activism. The result has been the blending of two endeavors that university people, of all people, should take pains to distinguish.)

I do take issue with Lewis’s second sentence: “As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians.” Fine, if being a clerk is (a) temporary or (b) lifelong but avocational; but a natural reading of the passage, for us if not for Lewis’s Oxford students, is that it’s a career. The truth is, students are not expected to make themselves into lifelong professional students. Well, some are, but very few.

Lewis (p. 49):

A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.

Good, good. And if one is so excited by the present urgency that one can’t devote oneself to learning or let others get on with it in peace, that is prima facie evidence that membership in the university isn’t one’s vocation – that one should leave. There is wiggle room, of course. Michael Dummett put aside his Frege for a while to decry racism. He kept on decrying racism the rest of his life. He also wrote about tarot cards. But he did get back to Frege, in a big way.

A February stroll

An early spring, says Punxsutawney Phil, whose predictive record is mixed (good on temperature, bad on seasonal change). What with yesterday’s fifty-plus Fahrenheit degrees, we led our boys on a long walk through the parking lots of Western Avenue. Karin was carrying a gift card, so we popped into a Dairy Queen, rested in the armchairs of the café section, watched a couple of awful sitcoms on the big TV, and snacked. The boys mostly behaved themselves.

(As I write this, in the sanctity of our home, Samuel lies next to me on the sofa; Daniel climbs up the back of the sofa and jumps on Samuel; then, Samuel twists Daniel’s nose. Rinse, repeat. They think it’s a great game. I think it’s a great way to break someone’s bones. Mine, probably.)

(I should have finished reading King Solomon’s Mines by now, but Daniel threw it from a great height and broke its spine. My new used copy should arrive tomorrow.)

Anyway. We also toured a small African/Caribbean food mart. It sells unusual tubers, legumes, grains, flours, and many kinds of rice and canned herring. Of course I wouldn’t know what to do with most of these foods. I was familiar with certain Goya products: plantain chips; cassava/yuca chips; and malta, which I am curious to see Karin try some day.

I would have bought some chips out of politeness, but the clerk stayed in the back office, on her phone, and I thought it kinder not to disturb her.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In case you wonder why the fonts look different: The website that provided URW Classico got glitchy, so I switched back to Charter for the body text and to IM Fell French Canon for the blog post titles.

Violence in Ecuador worsens

Ecuador is in an “internal state of war” after a spate of widespread, coordinated gang violence.

President Daniel Noboa has declared a sixty-day state of emergency.

The news is on Wikipedia’s main page. Whenever Ecuador is front-and-center there, I feel a twinge of pride, and then more often than not I weep (silently) because it’s because of something terrible. (Here is the Wikipedia article.)

There’s lots of official press coverage, of course.

Pray for Ecuador!

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In other news:

“BYU Offering New Taylor Swift-Inspired Philosophy Course.”

(“Philoswiftie” website.)

Move over, Immanuel Kant.

Closing credits

What happened in 2023? It’s a blur. I get through a day at a time. I barely look ahead or behind.

Mostly, I chase after children who live only in the moment. They are rather wicked. (As I compose this, one of them is removing his diaper and peeing on the floor.) My wife kindly looks after them a few hours every third evening so I can record my thoughts on this blog; a week later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve written.

I steal moments to do a little reading. A book or two later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve read.

Someone at a party asked which books I liked best this year. I said Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Narnia; I had trouble remembering anything not in a series. I had to check my list of “completed” books after I got home.

My life is turning into a series of disconnected events. I’m becoming the hero of Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” only without the memories.

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Before I forget, I wish to complain that the previously serviceable app Grammarly has quietly gotten much too big for its britches. Yesterday, I was typing in a document, and Grammarly sneakily auto-corrected “resistible” to “irresistible,” which is THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I MEANT. This illustrates a larger point, that 2023 was the year when a lot of ordinary people started noticing (or reading online) that AI had “jumped the shark.”

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“You need to go to therapy, Sweetie,” says Karin. “This is the bleakest entry ever. ‘I remember nothing, and the robots are coming.’”

She is too young to understand.

Now that I think about it, it would be amusing to pay a stranger to listen to me read my blog entries out loud.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Allegedly I groan a lot, even when I’m sitting still.

Do I groan, or purr? Jasper snuggles next to me as I type this, and our noises sound alike.

Jasper is middle-aged now; Ziva is almost middle-aged. They’ve both mellowed out. They hardly fight each other anymore.

I look forward to my sons’ attainment of this happiness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Every year, I read the book of Zechariah; and afterward, I am sorry to say, I forget about it until the next year.

It ends like this.

[14:16 ff. (NIV):] Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The LORD will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.

On that day HOLY TO THE LORD will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the LORD’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD Almighty.

So when you worry about war in Israel, or anywhere, think about that.

Christmas with Boney M. et al.

We went to Karin’s mom’s house for our final Christmas party. The best part was hearing stories about Karin’s grandma, who died in 2016. (Don’t tell anyone, but she was my favorite person from that branch of the family.)

Karin’s mom used to consult a book called Mrs. Dunwoody’s Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping.

Mrs. Dimwitty, Karin’s grandma called it.

Karin noted that her grandma was the “queen of ‘work smarter, not harder’.”

She liked to dump ingredients into a vessel and let them bake. Hence her fondness for cookie bars – which are cut out from a grid, not sculpted individually – and for casseroles.

And she’d start washing the dishes while everyone else was eating dessert.

That’s pretty much how I like to clean and cook, except that my appliance of choice is the rice cooker, not the oven.

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It was a rough Christmas. Samuel and Daniel opened many gifts and fought over them all day long. I kept thinking of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), in which Bushmen fight over a Coke bottle that has fallen from heaven. Would my children fight so viciously no matter what, or would they get along better with less? Some of the famous “peace” churches severely restrict private ownership. Does it help them, peace-wise? The Thomas Friedmans of the world think that competition and accumulation help to make for a more peaceful planet. I really don’t know. This is the sort of thing that ought to interest “peace studies” academics, those who talk about war-curbing and peace-building. How many of them are telling people to get rid of their possessions? I can’t imagine there’d be much incentive for that sort of message, even if it were correct, but again, I don’t know what those writers actually say.

Poor, unfortuble souls

Modifying a song from The Little Mermaid, Samuel has coined the word “unfortuble,” as in:

“Poor, unfortuble souls.”

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Daniel has taken to postponing his afternoon nap as long as possible. Not that he doesn’t still need to nap.

The wilder he gets, the closer he is to sleeping. Lately, his escalation has manifested itself as repeated summersaulting, headfirst, off the couch.

Yesterday, after a particularly violent landing, he lay on the floor, smiling, and gently floated off to dreamland. I was reminded of Frank Reynolds and Charlie Kelly in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, who put themselves to bed every night by scarfing down catfood until they feel so awful, they have to go to sleep.

(Daniel likes to scarf down catfood, too.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In a moment of frustration, I called Samuel a monster. He thought it was a great joke.

Later I was singing “My Son Calls Another Man ‘Daddy’,” by Hank Williams, while a child (Daniel, I think) tried mightily to push me away from the kitchen counter even as I was fixing him a sandwich.

“Your father is singing that as a threat,” Karin told the child.

I wasn’t, but I liked that reinterpretation of the song.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Six Harry Potter books down, one to go. Book 6, utterly devastating, is my favorite so far.

In our household, we employ a useful phrase, “The Shocking Truth,” to refer to the last entry in a narrative series. As in: “Be quiet, children, your father & I are trying to watch The Shocking Truth of WPC 56, series 1.” I was tempted to read the last Harry Potter book as soon as I finished book 6, but then I calmed down, decided to stick to the schedule, and resigned myself to waiting until next month to read The Shocking Truth.

A killing

Fernando Villavicencio, one of Ecuador’s leading presidential candidates, was shot dead in Quito tonight. Other people were injured, too.

Read reports from these outlets:

The BBC.

El Comercio.

El Universo.

El Universo, again, listing some of Villavicencio’s anti-corruption efforts.

August 20 is the planned election day.

I believe this is the first Ecuadorian president or presidential contender to have been murdered during my lifetime. President Jaime Roldós died in a plane crash several months before I was born; as far as I know, he was Ecuador’s last president – or near-president – to die mid-career (so to speak). It happened forty-two years ago; I’ve now had a longer life than Roldós.

Other presidents have been kidnapped, exiled, forced to barricade themselves indoors, etc., but they’ve survived. It hasn’t been too, too unsafe to seek the presidency in Ecuador. A lot of ordinary citizens have had it much worse.

But several politicians have been murdered this year (and more ordinary citizens than usual have been murdered). Ecuador is in a bad way.

Parenting, round 2; “Bluebeard”

Daniel hasn’t been a great one for sitting still and being read to, but yesterday he badgered me into reading Dr. Seuss’s ABC five times in one hour. Like Samuel before him, he laughed and laughed at the page with the Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz.

The rest of the morning, he followed me from one piece of furniture to the next, around and around the house, committing violence against me (and against the house). That, too, reminded me of how Samuel used to behave at that age.

I had to lock Samuel away from Daniel, in the basement, for his own safety.

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Today I am watching Daniel walk down the stairs feet first (which Samuel only started doing a few weeks ago). He isn’t quite tall enough. Wherever a step doesn’t provide him a bannister to hold onto, he slides down on his bottom.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Are you the right man for me?

Are you safe, are you my friend?

Or are you toxic for me?

Will you betray my confidence?

This is from the Cocteau Twins’ “Bluebeard” …

I post this song as a tribute to Cho Chang.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 64: L.A. Confidential

My “anchor” year is 1996, but now I’m casting a wider net. 1997 is well within what I consider to be a “golden” period of moviemaking – which, like other golden eras, hearkens back to previous ones. The English Patient (1996) hearkens back to David Lean; L.A. Confidential (1997) hearkens back to Chinatown, which itself hearkens to older crime dramas – the greatest of which, for me, is The Big Heat.

The Big Heat, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential. Three dramas about police or ex-police who have a special zeal for protecting women, and who end up hurting those women in one way or another.

That sounds as if the women were passive. They aren’t. Arguably, the most forceful and complex character in each of these movies is a woman. In L.A. Confidential, it’s Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who specializes in reminding men of Veronica Lake; meanwhile, she loves those she is able to love.

But these movies are mainly about the men who try to save the women – foolishly, perhaps.

The “protector” in L.A. Confidential is Bud White (Russell Crowe). Rescuing domestic abuse victims and sex workers is his avocation. His temper often gets the better of him. His captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), keeps him around to intimidate and beat confessions out of criminals. This is the 1950s. Los Angeles is growing. Mobsters from out of town try to move in, but the police keep them in check.

It’s the corrupt local bigwigs, cloaked in respectability, accumulating wealth and power in tandem with the city, who run the scene.

Bud seems like a brute, but he’s smart. He follows leads and quietly makes progress on tricky cases. The movie also follows two other smart police officers. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is running a side-hustle, sharing information with the tabloids. They get the scoops; he gets the collars and the publicity. Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) is a careerist “boy scout” – upright but ruthless, and loyal to none but himself. His colleagues initially doubt that he has the stomach to perform the necessary brutalities. By the end, he’s laid out more bodies than anyone else.

The death toll is high, what with one mass murder, a few gunfights, and many assassinations. There are a lot of beatings, too, and an off-camera rape. People speak nastily enough to make each other cry. All of this taxes and ennervates the viewer. The movie isn’t shy about how morally compromised, even downright awful, these police are; but it revels in the exhibition. It invites the viewer to share in the thrill of pumping a shotgun or getting an interrogee to squirm. More than Chinatown, in which the spectacle descends into tragedy and then sordidness, or The Big Heat, which seethes with irony, L.A. Confidential helps us to understand the visceral attraction of policing that mixes sadism, cynicism, and self-righteousness.

Each protagonist is asked why he became a cop. Jack Vincennes can’t remember. Edmund Exley wants to catch the guys who don’t get caught: in other words, he wants to outsmart people. The hotheaded Bud White, the noblest of the three, simply responds to woundedness, inflicting it upon the wounders and rescuing the wounded. He breaks the most rules – while following orders, as often as not – but he takes the job more seriously than the others do. He also relishes it the least.

The best line is uttered by Lynn Bracken when she says goodbye to Exley, who has just climbed a few more rungs up the ladder: “Some men get the world. Others get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.” Ex-hookers and Arizona is the better choice.

I don’t know how closely this movie resembles real policing. I just have other movies to compare it to.

An historic victory

Chumbawamba: “I get knocked down! But I get up again! You’re never gonna keep me down!”

Daniel: “Dowww! Dowww! Dowww!”

Karin: “That’s Danny’s song, all right.”

Chumbawamba: “Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy.”

His chin has a scrape that we can’t account for. He has a bloody goose egg on his head from having backflipped off the couch. But mostly he gets knocked down by his brother.

It’s been a terrible week for him, what with those injuries … and teething … and getting weaned. Getting weaned is worse than getting knocked down.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Barcelona just beat Liga de Quito in Liga’s stadium … for the first time ever. (I am not counting penalty-kick shootout victories.) Only one goal was scored. It was an olímpico, or maybe an own goal.

The referee added twenty-two minutes because Liga’s fans caused a disturbance.

The stadium was inaugurated in 1997.

That’s a 26-year winless streak. (Twenty-five, if you discount the season that Liga spent in the Serie B.)

How long is that? Chumbawamba released “Tubthumping” in 1997.

Warmth; the philosophy of spying; Thurber; you can’t go home again

Eighty-two degrees (F) today. That’s more like it!

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Something you don’t often see: a philosophy book about spying. And it looks like a good book. (The reviewer is C.A.J. Coady, whom I’ve previously mentioned and who is known for philosophizing about “dirty hands” in governance.)

From the acknowledgments:

I read my first spy novel, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger (in French translation), about thirty-five years ago. Since then, spy fiction (be it in novel, movie, or TV series form) has been one of my favourite genres, alongside crime fiction. Over the last four years, I have had to read spy novels, watch spy movies and sit through years’ worth of television series. Of all my books so far, this one has been the most enjoyable to research and write, though at times and for reasons that will become apparent throughout, uncomfortably so. Unless I decide to write on the ethics of policing, it is unlikely that I will ever again combine my research with my love for so-called popular culture and so have the chance to indulge in the latter entirely without guilt. Partly for this reason, my elation at having finished this book is tinged with regret.

I’m glad the author admits this in the very first paragraph! It reminds me of the quip:

I am voting for George Bush because I liked his daddy.

I liked Daddy Bush because I liked Ronald Reagan.

I liked Ronald Reagan because he was in the movies.

I like movies.

Maybe someone who likes to watch movies about the Mafia can write a book about the ethics of belonging to the Mafia. (I’d hope the thesis would be an unqualified or negligibly qualified condemnation of belonging to the Mafia.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve met at least two philosophers who were spies.

They didn’t tell me they were spies.

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Karin & I have been reading aloud about James Thurber’s quasi-fantastical hometown – Columbus, Ohio – in his My Life and Hard Times, one or two chapters each night. Our mistake last night was to read Thurber and then the Old Testament. “The Car We Had to Push” and “The Day the Dam Broke” did not prepare our hearts for Leviticus 15.

Re: my own hometown – sad news.

February’s poem

William McGonagall, “The Demon Drink”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Oh, thou demon Drink, thou fell destroyer;

Thou curse of society, and its greatest annoyer.

What hast thou done to society, let me think?

I answer thou hast caused the most of ills, thou demon Drink.

Thou causeth the mother to neglect her child,

Also the father to act as he were wild,

So that he neglects his loving wife and family dear,

By spending his earnings foolishly on whisky, rum and beer.

And after spending his earnings foolishly he beats his wife –

The man that promised to protect her during life –

And so the man would if there was no drink in society,

For seldom a man beats his wife in a state of sobriety.

And if he does, perhaps he finds his wife fou’,

Then that causes, no doubt, a great hullaballo;

When he finds his wife drunk he begins to frown,

And in a fury of passion he knocks her down.

And in that knock down she fractures her head,

And perhaps the poor wife she is killed dead,

Whereas, if there was no strong drink to be got,

To be killed wouldn’t have been the poor wife’s lot.

Then the unfortunate husband is arrested and cast into jail,

And sadly his fate he does bewail;

And he curses the hour that ever was born,

And paces his cell up and down very forlorn.

And when the day of his trial draws near,

No doubt for the murdering of his wife he drops a tear,

And he exclaims, “Oh, thou demon Drink, through thee I must die,”

And on the scaffold he warns the people from drink to fly,

Because whenever a father or a mother takes to drink,

Step by step on in crime they do sink,

Until their children loses all affection for them,

And in justice we cannot their children condemn.

The man that gets drunk is little else than a fool,

And is in the habit, no doubt, of advocating for Home Rule;

But the best Home Rule for him, as far as I can understand,

Is the abolition of strong drink from the land.

And the men that get drunk in general wants Home Rule;

But such men, I rather think, should keep their heads cool,

And try and learn more sense, I most earnestly do pray,

And help to get strong drink abolished without delay.

If drink was abolished how many peaceful homes would there be,

Just, for instance in the beautiful town of Dundee;

then this world would be heaven, whereas it’s a hell,

An the people would have more peace in it to dwell.

Alas! strong drink makes men and women fanatics,

And helps to fill our prisons and lunatics;

And if there was no strong drink such cases wouldn’t be,

Which would be a very glad sight for all Christians to see.

O admit, a man may be a very good man,

But in my opinion he cannot be a true Christian

As long as he partakes of strong drink,

The more that he may differently think.

But no matter what he thinks, I say nay,

For by taking it he helps to lead his brother astray,

Whereas, if he didn’t drink, he would help to reform society,

And we would soon do away with all inebriety.

Then, for the sake of society and the Church of God,

Let each one try to abolish it at home and abroad;

Then poverty and crime would decrease and be at a stand,

And Christ’s Kingdom would soon be established throughout the land.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, pause and think,

And try to abolish the foul fiend, Drink.

Let such doctrine be taught in church and school,

That the abolition of strong drink is the only Home Rule.

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There is a lot of truth in this poem.

My hometown

Samuel, I regret to say, has identified himself with a certain fictional character: Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes. “Greetings, my name is Calvin,” he proclaims. “GREETINGS, MY NAME IS CALVIN. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

They do look alike.

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Aunt Linda – my parents’ oldest sibling – is visiting from Missouri. Samuel and Daniel are turning on the charm for her. My parents are at our house, too.

They reminisce about the Ecuador of the 1950s and 1960s. My dad talks about the night his family’s house in Esmeraldas burned down because a kerosene lamp was lighted with what turned out to be gasoline. After the fire, my dad’s family had to stay over with some missionaries who lived on the plot of land where, eventually, the Hotel Cayapas was built. I don’t envy my dad’s family their ordeal, but I am slightly intrigued. I grew up a block from the Hotel Cayapas; it was one of the fixtures of my childhood; it seemed the height of luxury and class (the grass in its yard was cut silently, with a reel mower, by a starched-shirted worker). I ate in the restaurant once or twice and dreamed of spending a night in the hotel. My dad slept there – or on the same land – during his family’s time of greatest need.

It’s strange to think of the hotel not existing. But, of course, travel to Esmeraldas was hardly easy in those days; vacationers certainly didn’t flock there.

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In theory, it wouldn’t be very hard for me to sleep in the Hotel Cayapas now. I look it up on Kayak: a night’s stay costs a little over $50. The hardest part would be traveling to Ecuador. The second-hardest part would be to avoid being kidnapped or killed. In recent years, Esmeraldas has become a hub for foreign drug cartels and their domestic recruits and conscripts.

When I was growing up, I’d go to sleep listening to the loud music of the discotheques on the beach. Now, because of violent crime, that nighlife has pretty well ceased. In the 1980s and early 1990s, that was unthinkable: that sort of thing only happened in Colombia, and Esmeraldas always would be a party town.

Body-text fonts, pt. 3: Melior

The mower is repaired, thanks to Karin’s dad; and the lawn is cut, thanks to me. And just in time, because this has been a rainy day.

On the whole, the weather has not been bad, but I haven’t wanted to go out strolling with Samuel and Daniel. I’ve been reluctant to take Daniel out very far: he’s still so small.

It’s not easy to think of good content for this blog when I don’t leave the house.

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This month’s font, Melior, was designed by the great Hermann Zapf.

Speaking of Bond, I suppose the Russians are due to make a comeback as “the baddies” of spy fiction.

The reason is terrible, of course.

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Domestic terrorism is featured in British thrillers more and more often. Has this been true of U.S. thrillers? Of the Jack Reacher novels, for example?

It’s fun to read about agents who fight exotic foreigners. I imagine it would be less pleasing to read a thriller about, e.g., a homegrown mass shooter.