Never Again

Now and Then

Yay, I’m finally done with that blood test, part of my annual routine, a recurring calendar event as they say. I came home to that gift from my gardener (he works for free, on his own recreational projects): a homemade gourmet lasagna (he’s also a retired chef). Yum.

Before hopping in the car around 7 am (this was a fasting test so they set it up for early), I unboxed a new package, the one containing the new iPad keyboard. I’d ruined the old one using alcohol wipes meant for kitchen counters. I’d done that before and gotten away with it, although when I thought it was curtains, I ordered a new one back then. That new one was not “magnetic” and overall was a dud, but in the meantime the abused keyboard bounced back and was good as new. I’d lucked out.

So had I learned my lesson? Apparently not, as I took to the same keyboard again with the same inappropriate kitchen supply and “surprise! surprise!” I lost keyboard functionality once again. This time I lost the lowercase ‘a’ and the ‘delete’ key, except delete would work with caps lock on, as would uppercase ‘A’. 

Then I found blow drying the keyboard, getting the ‘A’ key good and hot, would restore functionality, to ‘delete’ as well, but only until the keyboard cooled off again, then performance would degenerate. I found myself blow drying and typing, blow drying and typing. This was science, combined with persistence. Until I finally gave up and ordered yet another replacement.

So Drugstore Cowboy has William Burroughs in it, I’d forgotten that. We saw it last night. Dave judged this one to be of very high quality compared to the previous two we’d seen: My Private Idaho, and Elephant. Steve Holden had a friend who knew William Burroughs as I recall, and he had a stash of collectible pictures relating to that fact. 

Steve who? Steve Holden of  holdenweb (his web domain) was the engineering prodigy from Manchester who rose high in Python Nation, joining the board and then chairing it (we’re talking PSF). 

I first met Steve at a Chicago Pycon after my wife had died, a tragedy he knew about from a prior Pycon which I’d bailed out of at the last minute (I was already in Washington DC on account of a prior Bucky Fuller symposium — where Ed got an award) upon getting the bad news (her terminal diagnosis) some years before. Steve was the originator of Pycon, helping to spread this European language and emerging conference culture (they go together) beyond the EuroPythons. 

Steve was fully aware that Portland was a kind of Mecca (in the sense of hub, grand central, clearinghouse) for open source development in the software engineering realm, his realm and mine. So after moving to Greater DC from Britannia, and building a business there, he decided to try living way out west, in the former territories. Here he’d encounter the history of the western coast: Russian River, Sebastopol… those were places we’d both hang out, when working with O’Reilly Media, the famous publishing company. 

We’d take the “puddle jumper” (short flight airplane) from Portland, to the Charles M. Schulz regional airport, outside Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, California. Mostly though, we worked remotely from Portland. He’d set up a conference production business (The Open Bastion) only blocks from my own home office. His apartment was in the same complex currently occupied by Paul, the gardener, and also Glenn Stockton, who knew both. 

Another reason Steve moved to Portland is he want to partake of an elective surgery that might finally address his lifelong knee condition, which was only getting worse. The Trailblazers with their legendary sports doctors were also available to a niche demographic: those who could afford their services. Steve had saved his pennies and the operation was a success.

I still use one of those Open Bastion computers almost daily, as a way station / backup, whereas Steve himself has long since returned to England, where he continued his brilliant career.

When Steve first made his debut in Portland, he booked Secret Society, a conference venue, and historically a headquarters for African heritage Masons. Don’t let that surprise you: Masons have been prominent in Portland for many decades, with properties all over, including right near me: The Hawthorne Theater (Hawthorne Blvd and SE Cesar Chavez), a well-known music venue in my chapter.

Most of those properties have since been sold off, but the new owners, most notably McMenamins, the brewpub brothers, celebrate that Mason past, a treasured part of our collective history. 

The O’Reilly company hosted one of its famous Foo-camps in that same Secret Society venue, whereas I was a Bar-camp attender. 

If all this insider jargon is a bit bewildering, just don your anthropology hat and remember subcultures tend to revolve around a core namespace of esoteric terms, or at least that’s far from an uncommon pattern.

My Private Idaho (movie review)

For some reason I wanna share the quirky context wherein this movie came up for me, I thought to watch again, but upon viewing, I'm doubtful I'd seen it, but maybe. 

I've been contemplating this drive to the coast, from Portland, Oregon, and if you know your geography you know that's a one to two hour drive at least, not some trivial jaunt. 

And yet there's a movie out there somewhere, that I saw long ago, wherein it looks like Portlandia high schoolers get off school at like at 3 PM, and are all at the beach in their cars, hanging out, but minutes later, like one could drive to the coast routinely just to socialize. I wanted to find that movie. 

We (I had help from Mercado Group) narrowed it down to a Gus Van Sant film. He'd directed films around Portland a lot. 

I now think the scenes I remember are in Elephant, and I plan to watch that next, if for no other reason than to watch one of our Wanderers, Joe Cronin, play the chemistry teacher in that film. It's been decades since I saw it (or Joe). and I'm looking forward to rewatching it.

My Private Idaho is about young male prostitutes or escorts or street kids or whatever you wanna call 'em. They bounce around as a subculture, mainly between Seattle and Portland. 

Our protagonist, played by River Phoenix, would like to see his mom again and Keanu Reeves, his friend and protector, accompanies the main character (who has narcolepsy, and so really needs protection) all the way to Rome, Italy on this quest to find his mom, based on various clues. No dice (the mom is long gone, back to the Americas), although Reeves lucks out in finding the girl, which is gut-wrenching to Phoenix, who has a crush on him, feels a bond.

As a denizen of both Portland and Rome, I can attest to the movie's authenticity in terms of the Rome scene near the Colosseum, a known spot for outdoor recreational sex under the cover of darkness. I even knew that as a kid, wandering through there by day sometimes, because of all the condoms lying around. 

I'd wandered all over that city, a middle-school-aged flaneur. I was never accosted, mugged, nor otherwise messed with. My parents were persuaded by the their friends that Rome is safe for kids like me (young boys, roaming alone), and in retrospect it was. Later in life, on some visit, a gay guy got me drunk, encouraging me to talk about Wittgenstein in broken Italian, but he wasn't being predatory, just having fun with another weirdo.

As for Portland, this city is known for a high number of strip clubs per capita, as well as microbreweries. Sex workers, practicing and retired, abound in Portland (as in almost any big city), a few of whom I know personally, as friends or perhaps collaborators. I worked for Sisters of the Road as a computer guy (I'd call them my client) back in the day. Our little road show (me the roadie) worked with women's' shelters some, in a fundraising capacity.

The movie is highly stylized. Sex scenes are presented as stills flashing by, as if we're flipping through a an adults only magazine. A lot of the dialog, around that guy "Bob" especially, sounds Shakespearean or maybe Dickensian, in the sense of stilted, formalized, ritualistic.  

The "pack animal" pattern of young boys around an adult male leader is well played, especially at Bob's "funeral", where their unsupervised antics (hooting and hollering) are contrasted with a parallel service happening a few gravesites away, more demur, more high society. 

The high society funeral was for Reeves' character's dad. Even though street roots Bob had considered Keanu an heir apparent, like a son, Reeves had rejoined his social class and left the pack. 

Reeves had been born into wealth and, although estranged from his dad because of his promiscuous lifestyle, he'd since met his future queen in that Italian farmhouse, while accompanying Phoenix on his quest. Returning with a queen won him a place in heteronormative society, thereby securing his inheritance.

Phoenix, on the other hand, was born into poverty, in Idaho, without any prospect of an inheritance. As a loner, now without Reeves, and with narcolepsy, his prospects remain relatively dim. Fade out, the end.

Addendum: this was a two DVD Criterion Collection edition, so after writing the above I was able to take in lots of additional data, including listening to Gus Van Sant being interviewed (like on a podcast). All very informative. I enjoy taking in data from these director types and usually do watch these extra features, when available.

Nostalghia (movie review)

No that’s not a typo: nostalgia with an h. Like Bagdad is without an h (the local move theater). I watched this on a rented DVD from Movie Madness, my 3rd in a set, along with Fun with Dick and Jane (the one with the real Jane) and Le Mans with Steve McQueen. [1]

Nostalghia is filmed in Italy, the opening credits say for RAI TV, and is in Italian. I’m acoustically very acclimated to Italian but need the subtitles to really follow along, so I had those turned on. Half the plot was about translation, and how Russian can’t really be put into Italian or vice versa, let alone English, or can it? The movie investigates the question.

The film comes as a masterful set of reframings wherein our understanding of what’s happening twists and turns, like on a dark ride at some mysterious theme park. Does he have a crush on her, or her on him? At first, the answer seems obvious but as the film starts going back and forth between black and white, and color, the first shock, we start to realize what we’d mistaken for reality, was more likely just a dream (but whose? — usually at least that much is pretty clear).

A second shock is when all those birds fly out of the statue Madonna. Who saw that coming? Not me. One epiphany after another in this film. And speaking of pregnancy and motherhood, just the night before I’d watched the new Fantastic Four (Marvel universe) at the Bagdad. Talk about a double-dose of the same archetypes! A double-whammy of mammy, hah hah.

I think the translator lady mostly freaked out over the relationship (professional) because her professional abilities were called into question. She thought she could read body language well enough to know the village crazy person was not going to submit to an interrogation. But interrogation is not what the Russian poet had in mind. He was just seeking to understand at a deeper level. He was on a quest and therefore curious.

The crazy guy had imprisoned his whole family for like seven years in a previous chapter (flashbacks), until the police finally did a wellness check and helped his family break free. Things move slowly in Italy, apparently. 

The Russian poet, ostensibly researching the life of a famous composer, another one who’d committed suicide, once back home in mother Russia, after a long excursion in Italy, really seemed more drawn to the crazy guy’s story by the middle of the movie. The shift in focus came at the hot springs, near their hotel, where he caught wind of the local gossip and met the crazy guy for the first time.

The translator lady gave up on getting him an interview (her Italian was perfect, his broken), concluding the crazy guy was just too crazy and he should try it himself if he thought it possible. She resigned on the spot. He then ended up getting past the crazy guy’s defenses and they had a deep interaction (something involving a ritual candle — spoiler alert).

That blew her mind, his succeeding where she’d failed, and explains why she flipped out, and literally flipped her breast out, while giving the Russian a bloody nose — not with her breast, but with something she threw. She was pissed, that much was clear.

She made it up to him (the Russian poet) later by phoning him from Rome to say the crazy guy was holding forth downtown, with a crowd gathered. He was ranting like Fidel Castro she said. She encouraged the Russian poet to come check it out, while meanwhile reassuring him she’d overcome any  romantic notions; she had a new guy (Vittorio?) to go to India with.

I won’t spoil the ending in this case. Let’s just say the Russian poet and crazy guy underwent a kind of Vulcan mind meld during the candle episode, helping answer the question of whether Russia and Italy could ever become convergent cultures. Apparently they could.

[1] thanking Fran of FranLab for opening my mind to watching a race car movie, against which I have a certain bias (ditto westerns and musicals — but we’re talking filters, not walls).

Friends Respond

click for slides

I was surprised to learn at Meeting for Worship last Sunday, that one of the Friends there was there because he'd been called to Portland on short notice owing to the fact that his son had been incarcerated on charges of assaulting an officer. The trial is still pending, and the son has since been released.

Although I don't know Jacob personally, I was aghast by his housemate's account of the theatrics employed to show off the type of bully-state that wants to assert itself as running the establishment. 

The FBI was all kitted out in SWAT style costumes, flashed their guns around, and refused to engage in proper paperwork (by showing the warrant or whatever). Jacob had apparently done something forbidden versus an ICE agent six weeks prior, but we don't know what. 

Excerpt:

At around 9 a.m. on Friday morning, July 25th, Jacob and I looked out our bedroom window to see a flood of armed officers race into our driveway and charge at our house with assault rifles. We quickly put on the first clothes we could grab and heard pounding and screaming on our door. Because everyone in my household is a safe, caring person, I was convinced they had the wrong house and couldn't understand what could warrant this kind of threat to our lives. Jacob attempted to ask through the window if the police had a warrant, and they responded by aiming laser reactive targets on his body, threatening his life. 

I told Jacob to open the door because I feared we would die if we continued to ask for a warrant. Jacob opened the door with his hands up, empty-handed, and I and my roommate followed. We were screamed at, handcuffed, and put on the street in our underwear. There were about 20 FBI agents surrounding our house in unmarked vehicles, and several local Portland police officers. Jacob was put in the back of a car. I could not speak with him. We were not shown a warrant at this time.

Quakers are strongly biased against use of violence but "assault" does carry such a connotation in ordinary language.  Unless we're talking "verbal assault"?  Is that a crime, or free speech? We're done with free speech by now right?  Resisting authoritarians has by now been criminalized, even though that's what made this country great. 

Protestors who gathered across from the Hatfield Justice Center, me one of them, in photo journalist mode for my peeps on Facebook, were mumbling about wanting body cam footage so we could judge for ourselves what this "assault" event was like. 

Whatever it was, the bully-state certainly wanted to escalate. Their goal was intimidation, and to get applause from those viewer-voyeurs who always enjoy the spectacle of armed thugs striking fear into the hearts of privileged white kids who think they're entitled to resist authority.  It's time to put all those "college kids" in their place and ship them off to Vietnam like all the "working class" kids, to use some  anachronistic Boomer Era terminology.

Another goal may have been to spark some sort of violent protest, thereby justifying opening another front against west coasters, after sending in the US military -- so-called "posse comitatus" is dead in the water, a floating corpse, by 2025 -- to quell the agitated crowds in LA. 

As I wrote in an email, using voice-to-text while waiting at a bus stop:

I’m pretty sure the feds are trying to spark some kind of violent response so they can crack down LA style using Israeli Gestapo techniques. Their base loves to see Portland being “quelled” as Trump put it The last time they tried this during the Joker Riots. It’s a kind of gladiatorial event from the point of view of the cable news people. Good for ratings. Beat up Portland. More news right after this word from our sponsors.

The entire nation is familiar with the militarization of the police forces as the congress prepares for a crackdown against the populace that might happen when they decide to draft us into NATO or whatever hell they have planned (something by the RAND corporation no doubt -- always a source of disaster scenarios).

Funny addendum: later the same evening, I watched Fun with Dick and Jane (the original Jane Fonda 1970s version -- a comic light-hearted prototype of Breaking Bad) with a friend. The joke about how "Jewish Gestapo" is an oxymoron comes up in the script, followed by a picture of Moshe Dayan in that aerospace headquarters basement. But I'm one of those who makes distinctions between zealous authoritarian nationalists, and religious practitioners (a Venn Diagram), so no oxymoron intended.

DOGE Thyself

Speaking of Superman, the Tai-Chi based MuscleMan app I purchased, I thought for a one time fee, was actually purchased on subscription. 

That's what everyone wants these days, for you to keep buying the same thing over and over, be it a workout app or Windows, or something on top of Windows (like a workout app -- mine was for iOS however).

In a way I got my money's worth in getting sucker punched for not reading the fineprint. By the time PayPal and taken a monthly rental check, it was too late to realize my mistake. Score one for Muscleman. 

That got me poking around in my PayPal account bowels, where I found some other questionable autopay  subscriptions, although I think most were simply leftovers. But they were marked "active" nonetheless. 

Time to "doge myself" and counter my own bad habits, time to clean up the autopay mess.

Now in another sense, it is only I who have this view, that I was somehow being deceived. 

I'm sure MuscleMan has an army of coaches, AI and for real, along with a huge catalog of how to keep oneself fit. I was paying for access to this valuable library. The O'Reilly School I taught at had a similar model: when you're ready for coaching, we're here (and we're not bots).

Silly me for imagining anything so simple as a one time fee was our agreement. 

That's what I mean by "learning my lesson". 

Maybe those with eyes wide open going in, already fully committed to becoming proficient in Tai Chi, shedding pounds, restoring fitness, are willing to pay a gym-level monthly fee just for a smartphone app and whatever trainers it connects them with. 

That's discretionary spending I'd rather spend another way, like on a memory stick, or a tank of gas. Even a real gym membership might be the way to go -- I've had many already. I'm really not at all sickly or weak. I'm nursing a back muscle I strained, and hauling a heavy body around, but I have the muscles for it.

Doge Thyself!  You'll be glad you did.

at the beach

Superman (movie review)

I was on the fence about seeing this one, as I’ve got my Bayesian bias against superhero movies, somewhat newly acquired maybe, thanks to over saturation by DC and Marvel. 

That’s just my own personal bias mind you, as I have nothing against others loving superhero movies and pigging out on them as a central part of their movie-intake diet. 

I have a similar stance towards alcohol: me, I’m not into it these days, but I have some in the kitchen for guests and have no problem people enjoying alcoholic drinks. I’m not into feeling morally superior. It’s more like “I’ve had my share” and it’s not a punishment to refrain, just another life chapter.

Anyway, back to the movie, I enjoyed it a lot. It reminded me that cartoon extremes of action, of violence, such as superhero films feature, are also meant to be extended to the plot. We have all the basics of the Superman universe, sharply rendered, but then we permute it a bit, rotate it, move it in some dimensions. Like Louis is well aware of who Superman is in real life, I mean at work.

This movie has the inter=dimensional wormholes, the evil genius, tortured by jealousy, the well-acted Lex Luthor… but then we have a whole caste of superhumans, of which Superman is but one. The Earthlings have become acclimated to comic book levels of disaster as their city is routinely visited by various monsters, against which Superman must defend.

The biggest envelope push is not Louis knowing the ET’s secret, but the ET’s midlife crisis vs-a-vs how his real ET parents actually envisioned a career for him, a future. He had only ever heard the first part of their message and had been shaped by his human foster parents into a good and noble type of character. That’s who he was. He had chosen that identity. Finding out his ET heritage was not in alignment with his personal values was a coming of age story for an older guy. The lesson: we may go through “coming of age” transitions at any age. We morph into a next chapter.

So back to the top, if I was on the fence, what tipped the scales and got me to go see it? My friend on Telegram, whom I don’t get to see in person anymore due to distance, said it was worth seeing. That was enough. Bagdad is close by. Why not?

Eurasian Affairs

I don’t know how it is in your coffee clutch or coven, but out here in mine, it seems like using Ukraine as a staging ground for long range missiles into Russia is retroactively the justification for why, from Russia’s point of view, Ukraine must be demilitarized, i.e. purged of NATO assets. 

If NATO wanted to stick to its narrative that Ukraine would not be used for such aggressive purposes, then this hardly seems a way to inspire confidence. 

But come to think of it, NATO never made such promises. On the contrary, the whole point of the 2014 coup, enabled by the celebrated Azov group, pumped up by Nuland, Bidens et al, was to teach Russia a lesson in humility. 

Now that the USSR had fallen, the time had come for a global reckoning, or so some deluded neocons (including “McCaine democrats”) imagined.

Now we’re hearing that Germany is keen to enter the battle against Russia on the side of Azov. If Ukraine is to host more NATO missiles, then let them be of German origin, or at least design. 

Apparently there’s a demographic in Germany that feels encouraged by these moves.

I think all factions with empathy for the Ukrainians are eager to stop the air war and bring an end to armed drones wreaking havoc across the land. However there’s a lot of inertia to any war of this scale. The option to simply stop is not there. 

Trains can’t stop on a dime either, which is why some train wrecks that may have looked preventable to casual observers, really weren’t after a certain point.

I’m thinking the eastern Ukrainians have voted with their feet, hearts and minds, and for the most part do not regret their decision to rejoin the Russian federation. The UK does not acknowledge that Donbassers have the right or even the jurisdiction to make such a choice.

But then English has not been an imperial language for a couple hundred years at this point. The Americans have always spoken in many languages. I’d say the Donbass has time on its side as it continues with writing its own history, with elections, with redevelopment projects.

The idea that Germany would step up to the plate as a chief belligerent suggests its people are reconciled to living with wartime rhetoric 24/7. 

So far, the Americans are fighting back, demonstrating a sharp unwillingness to be manipulated by the usual suspects. But then Germany is a much smaller place with a relatively tiny inner circle.

The A-Team Code

:: Ant vs Bee ::

:: high roaders ::

Perambulating

One root meaning of Wanderer is "flaneur", let’s say the random idle gentleman, perhaps a lady in disguise, out with a sketch pad and an eye for what’s happening. Recreational curating. Tourism. 

That’s one reading, and for me, it well fits. 

I wander with my trusty camera, and today also an iPad, around town. In my youth, middle school era, my parents allowed me to roam about Rome. I’d spend some days exploring, hopping one bus, then another. No phone.

Nowadays I’m with phone, although I’m not really using its camera. I have a separate device, somewhat bulky, but it’s my habit. I’ve gone through a series of such cameras, the kind you can just point and shoot, letting it take care of most variables except framing. That’s a typical tool of the flaneur.

Today’s route retraced last week’s trek at the start, so I could pick up where I’d left off on the theme of Rust as a motif. From there I explored the Lloyd Center, with one skater, with another doing floor exercises. They had a coach as I recall.

I roamed over to the Lloyd Center Max station, heading west, to the last stop on the east side, at Moda Center, the swoopy enclosed stadium that replaced the old Memorial Coliseum as a primary venue, although the latter still stands and does service, such as by hosting high school graduation ceremonies. 

I used the Memorial Coliseum as a skating rink, in an earlier chapter, having taken to inline skates as a curious hobby, encouraged by Tom Connolly. I’d circle on smooth concrete, wearing helmet and knee pads, Wrist pads maybe? Memory fades. I remember falling a few times but not getting hurt.

From Moda Center I made my way along well-marked walkways to the East Side Esplanade, a well-thought-out lane for pedestrians and bicyclists mainly. Runners. I think I saw one mono-board or whatever those are called. The bicycles may be mechanically enhanced i.e. battery power assisted.

My walk took me south from the Steel Bridge, east entrance in view, to the Hawthorne Bridge, along a path that’s partly floating and includes bridges. I’ve gone through these same paths as a cyclist many times, but today was about being a ped, and using TriMet, more like my middle school days when I’d roam in Rome.

I mistook a bus 6 for a 14, so ended up adding another walking segment from the eastern shoreline of the Willamette, to Asylum central, meaning the food court by that name, named for the Oregon State mental hospital that had a large property here, a campus with running streams, not some dreary urban structure you might have been imagining. 

This side of the river was all very bucolic back then. I’m drawing from well researched accounts, not sharing personal experience, as I was as yet unborn in this chapter.

The 14 got me back to The Bagdad from which its a short and familiar jaunt home. I had my shoulder bag leather briefcase in which I stored the iPad, camera, brush, kombucha bottle, a random reading from my shelves.

Silicon Forest (not Valley)

Yesterday I went dog walking with a peer engineer, as in software engineer, a loosely used term as there were so many routes to get here, me through applications development for nonprofits and data science types, him through psychometrics and government lab work (Sandia I think it was). We'd both been on the same code school's faculty. He helped me find my way to Clarusway, a source of recent teaching gigs.

Anyway, we were chatting about the difference between NaN and None in Python, walking Sydney and Quinn, enjoying the perfect weather, when I realized various new things, meaning I had some insights, sparked by what we were talking about, a free ranging conversation.

Towards evening, I tackled the task of rounding out my online profile a little more, as the requests or queries need their data to hit against. Lots about me out there, but maybe not always as helpfully cross-indexed as it could be, and I'm in a catalytic position when it comes to connecting loose ends.

For example, I cross-posted my reddit account to DobbsTown, a Mastodon server. I also wired my right side main access panel, on the right margin of World Game (Grain of Sand), to include said reddit and tiktok connections. The content dates back but the links are brand new.

Speaking of branding, it's hardly lost on the market researchers and PR types, that Silicon Forest and Silicon Valley have remained quite distinct in Geek Lore. The former is gravitating into Cascadia, the bioregion (not really a political entity) whereas Valley boys and girls are seeing dollar signs in more military contracting. Washington State gets a lot of that, whereas Oregon's role is more subtle (think field testing), to the point where Oregon actually advertises as a "peace state" in some circles (hint: WILPF). We also have better land use planning than you'll find in many states (another source of pride).

The story goes like this: the Oregon Trail, coming west from the Great East (lots of peeps seeking a better life, refugees from Euro-think), came to a fork somewhere in Montana or one of those. Keep going along a northern latitude, and reach Oregon, with its lush and secure agricultural lifestyle, or turn south and wager your future against the likelihood of striking it rich, laying your claim to fame and fortune. The former sounds relatively prosaic and vaguely communist, whereas the latter is Ayn Rand, bold, heroic, venture capitalist.

Feeding my story (above) is an example: a true life story featuring a young, dashing CEO, looking to base a startup here in Portland, but finding the venture capital culture close to non-existent relative to what he was used to in strike-it-rich California. His idea was to use AI to provide a look ahead feature in any browser that could steer junior away from pornography, a see-no-evil genre product. 

The only problem: he was twenty years ahead of his time (this all happened a long time ago). 

VCs tend to live in the future. Portlanders, given all the rain, and Powell's Books, tend to be bookworms, as likely to live in the past as anywhere. Getting Portlanders to march towards the future is difficult when so many of them still believe they're in Nirvana already (even in the wake of the Joker Riots). 

When PDXers do get around to futurism, it looks like socialism, given half of them are latent Swedes and Finns and see society more as a design problem begging for elegant solutions, than as a source of melodrama and outrage and Protestant moralizing about who deserves what they get.

Memories & History

The Google Earth close up view is not the same as Street View. The structures look a bit cartoony given a computer doing its best to data structure the surfaces. I’m not the expert (never had a job with Google Earth). This is a classic Portland food pod, named Asylum in honor of the facility run by Dr. Hawthorne when this whole area was still more park like, all green with running streams. Oregon State contracted to have its first state mental hospital between SE 12th & Hawthorne and the river. We tend to call the whole area Asylum District, commercially if not officially.

 

Now I’ve switched to actual Street View to capture this facade further north a few blocks from the Asylum food pod. I used to work in the basement of this building when its top floor served as CUE headquarters, CUE being Center for Urban Education. We had a Mac lab in the basement, with LaserWriters, state of the art at the time and a grant from Apple to the nonprofit community in Portland. We shared the tech with a wide variety of NGOs and provided training in its use. That was Steve Johnson’s responsibility more than mine. My job was to train still-working or job-seeking seniors in office-relevant computer skills. We mostly used PCs (IBMs or clones thereof) and left the desktop publishing skills to the others. I’d use the Mac publishing equipment myself for various fun projects e.g. Project Renaissance.

 

Further north along the same street: Revolution Hall, formerly Washington High School (where the young Linus Pauling was enrolled, if oft absent from) and in my own writings HQS (Ministry of Education) for OPDX (Occupy Portland) during a time when said building as spooky-ghostly-abandoned. That served my purposes just fine, as I was simply including it in my curriculum writing to help anchor it geographically.

    

This Google Earth view marks all three locations: Asylum food pod, CUE building, Revolution Hall, with blue balloons, against the backdrop of much of Portland, Willamette River running south to north (bottom to top).

28 Years Later (movie review)

The title had been on the Bagdad marquee for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to search it up. When I finally did some homework, I realized it was in the ballpark of horror sci-fi. That genre interests me, notwithstanding so much slop (nothing new with AI), so I headed out for the matinee. On a hot summer day.

I’ll say up front that I watched it with English subtitles. Not that I need subtitles (English is my first and pretty much only language, unless we say American is something else) but on the first Tuesday of every month or something like that, Bagdad screens the film with captions on. Hearing impaired and/or non-English speakers wanting to learn English, might come to such shows. As it is, I probably picked up on a few lines I might’ve missed, given the accents and everything.

The movie is set in a future England where the virus has ravaged the population and the mainland (Europe and Scandinavia) have quarantined the place. However, a tiny island off the big one, connected only by a tenuous land bridge, has allowed a small English-speaking tribe to keep themselves uninfected. At low tide, the land bridge appears and in principle one of the infected could come storming in their direction. They have defensive fortifications, and bows and arrows. No guns in this universe. No wait, the Swedish have them (we meet up with a Swedish patrol on the mainland, Erik et al).

As I remarked to a friend over iced green tea this morning, having taken the bus, I see movies “guided mediations” in a lot of ways (I used the word "tantric"), and in the hands of a skilled writer and director, the process may serve a given viewer’s mental healing, even if the content is highly traumatic, as it tends to be in this genre (“alas poor Erik” says the doctor at one point). 

In this case, I’d say that was the case: the writing was conscious and well informed by the human condition. Theater students will immediately appreciate the Oedipal triangle, a three body problem we always only explore, never really get to the bottom of, except in a love and death sense.

The protagonist is a twelve year old boy and it’s a coming of age story, the kind my late wife treasured, but probably would not have in this case, as not everyone is in a mood for movie therapy. I’m reminded of Poor Thing. 

I’m also reminded a new Wes Anderson movie was slated to come out this summer, have I missed it already?

Upon arrival at The Bagdad I queried the ticket seller whether this was part of a series and he replied very intelligibly about there being previous movies in this same universe but I wouldn’t need to see them all in order. I pass that on to those wondering the same thing. And yes, the way the film ended left said universe wide open to another rendering, not unlike the worlds of Mad Max or Planet of the Apes.

Saladified Wordings

Prompt: 

A Caesar salad word scramble cryptographic 

scrabble game night at a local diner greasy spoon. 

People still smoked in restaurants back then.

A typical intro to cryptography might be through Caesar Codes, which might be just offsets, mapping the alphabet to itself shifted left or right by some number of letters, going around a wheel. 

This is like a dance, with the drone looking down on two consecutive circles, say women facing out, men facing in. You start with your partner, home position, then the music begins and the men and women go into opposite rotational movements, clockwise and counter-clockwise. 

When the music stops, your new partner represents a letter-to-letter mapping, and so forth around the doubled circle. You’ve got yourself a Caesar Code.

The segue here to “word salad” coming from Caesar salad is tempting, given a next stop: a word scramble. Here we map letters to counterparts more arbitrarily than if circles were involved.  Start with your partner and now run around wildly until the music stops, and form a new pair. No dancers get added or subtracted so the male-female ratio stays 1:1.  

What if we don’t want to divide along gender lines? Who are we asking? It’s up to us. The point is to show off permutations in a group theoretical sense. Every letter and punctuation symbol, including the space character, gets remapped or stays the same. Permutations underlie group theory as the most general operation. To morph is to permute. From morphing arise isomorphisms, homomorphisms, and homeomorphisms… all manner of morphing.

From these examples, we might jump into cryptographic algorithms more generally, and also into hashing, i.e. creating cryptographic signatures from an object. The School of Tomorrow follows the many in going for RSA given its reliance on number theory concepts we want to hit anyway: Fermat’s Little Theorem, Euler’s Theorem, totient, totative, prime and composite. Strangers (relatively prime).

Crypto currency and version control infrastructure follow. Hashes zip blocks together, into chains. Cryptographic impenetrability may not be the point, simply A fits into B seamlessly, and so now we move on. Handshake complete.

What I’d bring into the meme pool at this point are mnemonic systems designed to hang together owing to cleverly optimized links. Memory palaces and like that.

Caesar and Scramble codes are about making the intelligible unintelligible, the visible invisible (in the sense of meaningless) until deciphered on the other end. But memory codes may have the opposite purpose: to render the invisible more amenable to conceptualization. 

The optimizations are not about concealing secrets so much as bringing them to light, but then the reader has to learn the language to bring that light to the equations. Flip the switch, and the tunnels become illuminated.

I think in some of these Indiana Jones type movies and/or narratives, what the explorers stumble upon was never about concealment in the conventional sense, any more than the dashboard of a car is attempting to be cagey or coy about what it displays. Yet the driver still needs to know how to read a dashboard, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning a language takes time.

On The Road

cl CogSci CC

Pet Peeve

What good is a blog if the blogger can't use it to vent from time to time? We use our journals for psychotherapy, some of us, some of us Quakers, who journal as a matter of religious practice. I always encourage Quakers to journal i.e. blog, as a part of their faith and practice. Most don't though. They never get over their paranoia about being semi-public with their thoughts.

The customer return lady was understably "I'm not a computer and can't recall all our changing policies, so you'll forgive me if I pick up the phone." And I did, immediately. What I was there for was to see about getting my money back (like $29.99) on a pair of Dataproducts print cartridges meant to emulate HP's 61s, black and tricolor. But does Fred Meyer except print cartridge returns anymore? She made the call. Answer: if the customer has opened it, then no, no refund, tell them to contact the vendor.

Walking home, none the richer, I was reminded of Walter Kaufmann for some reason, one of my teachers at Princeton. He was a firebrand, maybe making up for being short, and I recall a lecture where he criticized Kant for being petty about some chocolate he'd not be getting, because the ship had gone down with all hands. 

I know not to what event he was referring to, only that the message was Kant might not be deep, more like petty and blind to his own ethical blindness (aren't we all). He was an asshole basically (my words, not Kaufmann's, the latter's "Kantsipation" jokes notwithstanding). 

WK went on to say he wouldn't blame us if we thought Heidegger's stuff was pure puke. He never assigned us such vomit in any classes I took. I think he'd waded through Heidegger's stuff himself, poor guy.

So yeah... venting. Where was I?

Rewinding (flash back): I unclipped the plastic shields on each cartridge, which was all I was supposed to do, and put them in their Envy 4500 series ink jet printer cradles. No dice. I was informed these cartridges were non-performant.

"Did you remove the tape?" the printer asked (paraphrase), not in a human voice but on its tiny screen. 

"What tape?" I was thinking, "you mean the plastic clips? Yeah, I did that already" (the printer wasn't listening, I was just thinking out loud).

So what "tape" was the printer talking about? 

The cartridges have some tape on them, and a signature "do not remove this chip" warning. So is the chip behind the tape? I'll be sure not to remove any chip, but I will remove this tape, obeying the printer.

Wrong! The tape is the chip in question, or rather a chip is integral with the tape, which is also a little circuit board. 

But then it wasn't working anyway, before my faux pas. Your honor, I draw the court's attention to my having followed instructions correctly, at least until I didn't, and started trusting my printer.

So Fred Meyer should take the remanufactured inkjet cartridges back right? 

No, it's really my job to complain to Dataproducts -- which is what I'm doing, indirectly. Actually I'm complaining to the whole printer ink industry, which smells as rotten as the Kingdom of Denmark did, to Hamlet that time.

I then found authentic HP 61s, a pair of XLs, for only a few dollars more, but like for much more ink. "Free" delivery (I pay for Prime). Duh. That's the way to get my ink from now on, right?

I also got an extra long shoehorn, good for seniors who don't always have as easy access to their feet as they once did.

People need to stick up for themselves. 

Remember the emperor with no clothes story? What is the moral of that story anyway? It's that people are cowards and won't speak up in a crowd, out of fear of what peers might say or do in retaliation. Only an innocent child, semi-clueless, daring to be naive, manages to blurt out what's on everyone's mind e.g. what was so great about German Idealism anyway?

Noticing England

In addition to the hot war conflagrations that are going on in the eastern hemisphere, aided and abetted by remote cheerleading on our side (western hemisphere), I'm tracking the British scene to some level. 

At this time, right before a meetup at top of the hour, I'm aware of judicial branch action to oust a gangster class, the lawyers around the world starting to realize they're not in control and really, have probably never been in control if we get right down to it, to the pirate layer (see OMSE).

So someone high up in the powdered wig class (what was that movie -- Divergent), told the PM to step down, given all the forensics going on, all the pickling and displaying in museums of the future. Nope, gangsters aren't managed by the powdered wig class, never have been. Gangsters have control of the armies, after all. The White House was eager to show it could set Marines against popular uprisings.

When I say "gangsters" I'm quoting Jeffrey Sachs in a YouTube I was taking in while in the kitchen about an hour back. Yesterday I met with some visiting faculty, and before that David and I were doing our usual BBQ with Fred Meyer burger and Franz kaiser buns. Lots of raspberries. Good weather.

The consequence of privatizing everything and taking government behind the scenes, out of sight of the people, is that you lose the perception that those in charge have anything to do with who's elected. There's taxation, lots of that, but no representation. 

Ever since Citizens United (nonperson personhood citizens), the system has been run by literally soulless creatures: the bots put out by a Dr. Frankenstein legal system, per the Thom Hartmann tome, Unequal Protection.

The same invisible hands keep control of the steering wheel, no matter what the passengers want. That sense of being hijacked runs pretty deep with people, leaving presidents as so much window dressing, and Congress a set of weighted nodes in some DL trained to recognize... 

I dunno, Congress seems in a rush to embrace bad ideas with gusto so I can't really figure out what it's for. I'm sure a lot of you would be able to provide some lectures on the topic. I remember the old theories, from when we followed a constitution. But today? You tell me.

No Kings

I’m ignoring the “tinky tank parade” in the District, other low quality melodrama, and heading out to a hacky sack tournament. That’s my idea of a real summer.

On the way, though, I’ll check out one of the more far flung No Kings rallies, a franchised operation conducting itself nationally, a reminder from the populace that we recognize no monarchy.  

Kings of old could embroil their serfs in wars as cannon fodder no problem, in feuds by proxy. We came to a New World to get away from those guys.

Since I’m on a tight itinerary, I have to avoid the larger No Kings rallies downtown and along MLK, and pick one more aligned with my route and goals. The hacky sack tournament is actually also a chance to rendezvous with one of the faculty I keep blogging about.

I’ll likely be seeing him again later in the week, along with Casey, and later Ryan, as we’re engaging in a kind of mini-summit around the Summer Solstice.

The three of us, me, Don and Dave, attended the final meetup this term of the Dead Mathematician Society at MHCC, for a brilliant talk on Group Theory, Burnside's Lemma, complete with table top game like activities.

I’ve been communicating with the organizers about doing my Quadrays talk or something like it, and did some brainstorming on what we’d do for a tabletop game. I was thinking BRYG and “how would you, if the designer, bridge XYZ and the IVM.” In a way, that’s not a new problem, but the Quadrays aspect makes it more number crunchy.

If you’re new to my blogs, here’s fair warning I’m one of those Americans who mocks The District as a soap opera capital far less talented than LA when it comes to screenwriting. West Wing melodramas really suck. I’m so glad I don’t waste a lot of time with its products, not that the ripple effects can always be avoided.

Bioregionally, we’re Cascadians out here with our Pacific Rim identity. We’re not “Atlanticists” as they’re called, mostly a lotta prep school prima donnas with east coast breeding. Like what we used to call Yankees. I mostly just call ‘em Anglos. They’re still living in the eastern hemisphere in their own heads, thinking the whole world revolves around their Old World fantasies.

Post Travel Debriefing

Yes I got to reconnect with Russell Chu, and see Deb's new place for the first time, in South Seattle. 

Being in that neighborhood with the both of them (Liana at work) brought back memories of our many visits when the kids were young, and of our mini-summit of geometricians and mathematicians, whatever you wanna call us, cultists, back around the time of Java One in the Bay Area. 

Java the computer language was just being kicked off and Gerald de Jong came all the way from the Netherlands to help celebrate is new freedoms, as a former C++ programmer.

Depicted: some of Deb's glass work and, that blue ball on the right: that's the fishing float from Lincoln City gifted to Deb during the fishing float finding festival. They're made locally and finders should remember to register their findings using the number. 

They're called fishing floats because at one time actual Made in Japan glass fishing net floats, a technology no longer favored by the fishing industry, used to wash up this side of the Pacific Rim. Nowadays it's up to glass-working artists to make them and Deb Kasman is a glass-working artist, explaining why she was there.

Regarding the driving experience: in the week prior to departure, my car failed to start after a private screening of The Great Gatsby (DiCaprio interpretation) some miles from my digs. AAA had only a skeletal crew that night so rather than wait, I bussed home, and got the new battery the next day.

Having a new battery has solved all my short term problems, but in the longer term we know said battery will have a shorter life if we don't diagnose why it's losing juice even when turned off. That's not an uncommon issue with older cars and people not driving often will disconnect the battery to prevent draining. Driving the car is a way of recharging it.

Maxi Taxi sat idle for over 24 hours as we took the Mustang EV to and from the birthday party.

Russ and I reminisced about folks we'd both overlapped with, such as Robert Orenstein, a contemporary of Koski's and Bonnie's and me, during the chapter when BFI (Buckminster Fuller Institute) was based in Los Angeles, where D. W. Jacobs lives to this day, and Victor Acevedo. J. Baldwin loved LA. My sis lives in Whittier and I plan to visit her later this summer.  Robert died in the SARS2 epidemic, in Uganda.

Birthdays

Alice and Mary

I’m on my north circuit as another relative’s odometer flips. 

Uncle Bill’s flipped to 100 a few weeks ago. Yesterday, cousin Alice’s flipped to 70, the same day as Tara’s flipped to 31. We’re celebrating today. Catered tacos. Homemade cake. Tara joined us on FaceTime.

While we’re talking family, I’ll chronicle my dog’s adventure. She’s on her farm not far from here, where she lived before joining my household, a gift to Carol, my mom, who missed having a dog, as did I.

Tomorrow, I’ll retrieve her from her farm and take her home. Syd has mostly recovered from “old dog vestibular disease” about which YouTube has any number of videos.

The plan, let’s hope it works, is to stop south of Seattle on my way home to visit with old friends. 

There’s a high probability I’ll reconnect with Russ Chu, my best man at my wedding to my wife Dawn Wicca, at Rhododendron Garden near Reed College, some 32 years ago. I haven’t seen him in a long time.

We used to talk for hours about “the four IVMs” and other Synergetics-related topics. His name is in the literature here and there, and in my YouTubes (see my Graph Theory 2025).

I’m staying these two nights with cousin Mary, Alice’s sister. Their mother, Evelyn, was a sibling of Uncles Bill, Eddy, Howard and Bo Lightfoot. 

Howard’s son Lee is here, and his wife Julie. I’m the grandson of Evelyn’s mother, Elsie’s sister, Esther Urner, wife of Carl mother of Jack.