Mary Beard and Stephen Greenblatt

This has been bothering me ever since I first held in my hands a copy of The Swerve, the hugely-acclaimed book by Stephen Greenblatt about the ancient Roman Epicurian philosopher Lucretius and his book-length poem de rerum natura, and Poggio, the 15th-century scribe who stumbled across a copy of it, and noticed one of the blurbs on the dust jacket.

I do not know very much about Mary Beard. She is Professor of Classics at Cambridge, Professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy, and the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Many of her fellow Classicists revere and positively adore her.

On the other hand -- if we may believe the dust jacket of The Swerve --



-- she is the person who wrote:

“A wonderfully engaging book starring two often forgotten heroes of Western culture: the Roman poet Lucretius, who argued that the world was made up of atoms and that fear of death was foolish, and Poggio Bracciolini, whose rediscovery of Lucretius's great poem launched all kinds of radical intellectual inquiry into the modern world. Another triumph for Stephen Greenblatt."

Alright: Lucretius, often forgotten? Onward.

I have long known that not every blurb on every dust jacket was written by someone who actually read the book in question. In the past several years I have had to accept the fact that such mendacity is perpetrated not only by hack book reviewers in mainstream media, but also occasionally by academics whom I greatly respect. In Robinson Jeffer's words: "Be angry at the sun for setting/If these things anger you."

I do get angry at the sun for setting, now and then. I wonder whether Jeffers sometimes did too.

I'm sure that Mary Beard is not the only Classicist ever to have accorded The Swerve more than very faint praise -- in fact, I have a feeling that if I continue to carry on in this manner, I may hear directly from some others -- but she is the only one I can think of, and I have looked around a bit.

The problem is, I'm not sure which should upset me more: that Professor Beard would write such a thing about a book she hadn't read, or that she would write such a thing about The Swerve after actually having read it.

No, that's a lie: the latter would upset me much, much more. It would be a great relief to learn that Beard had not read The Swerve, that compendium of completely misleading assertions about Epicurism, atomism, Lucretius, Poggio, textual transmission and many other things, at the time when the above blurb was written. Or that she had authorized someone else to write the blurb in her name, and then forgot about the matter entirely.

It was with tremendous reluctance, after years' worth of acquaintances telling me all sorts of absurd things which they had "learned" from The Swerve -- Lucretius and Poggio ushered in the Renaissance?! De rerum natura came within a hair's breadth of being lost forever?! -- that I finally read it myself. I really ought to read an entire book or two by Beard before I diss her -- but that blurb on Greenblatt's book makes me really, really not want to.

There are -- how many? hundreds of thousands? millions? of people running around loose today, who believe that Epicurus came up with the theory of atoms, that Epicurian philosophy would have been forgotten without Lucretius, that atomism would have been forgotten without Lucretius, that the ancient Classics were not studied in the Middle Ages, that Lucretius's book went unread for a thousand years, that it would be unknown today except for Poggio, that it only just barely survived, and other things which are completely, 100% untrue, all because of that one God-damned, best-selling, hugely-awarded book by Greenblatt, with that blurb on its dust jacket by perhaps the single most pre-eminent Classical scholar living today.

I am angry at the sun. I am angry at the world and the way that it is.

Democratic Candidates For President in 2020

Gabriel Debendetti thinks that Democrats' chances in the 2020 Presidential election may be hampered by too many candidates.

I think Debendetti is a Republican.

I'm not worried about a bunch of Democrats in the primaries. Real Democrats know when it's time to drop out and support the nominee. I'm worried that Bernie, who pretended to be a Socialist for a long time before this brief period of pretending to be a Democrat, might screw us with his giant ego, again. Yes, Bernie is a fake Socialist: Socialism, by definition, means working well with colleagues, for the greater good, for the benefit of those most in need of help. Bernie is an Independent if there ever was one: the opposite of a Socialist. Anti-social. We Democrats are Socialists, and it's high time we stopped being afraid of the word, and afraid to read the European Socialists, from before Marx to the Frankfurt School to after Gregor Gysi, who have so much to teach us. And it is definitely way past time for us to be afraid of going negative on Bernie.

J Lincoln Hallowell Jr summed up Bernie's relationship to the Democratic Party very well during the 2016 campaign. The quote is often mistakenly attributed to Barney Frank. I mistakenly attributed it to Barney on this blog. Sorry, Barney. As Hallowell said:

"The Democratic Party. The party that gave this country its first African-American President; the party that is poised to give this country its first woman nominee of a major party, very likely its first woman President; a party chaired by a Jewish woman; a party which features the first openly gay member of the United States Congress on the party’s rules committee; isn’t 'progressive' enough, or inclusive enough, according to a 75 year old straight white male, who 'white flighted' his way out of the most ethnically diverse city in the country, to the whitest state in the northeast United States, and who just passed his 1 year anniversary of declaring himself a member of the party, that he thinks that he is the only fit candidate to be the party’s nominee for President. A nomination which if he can’t secure it by the ballot, has threatened to secure it by lawsuits, and more than just hinted at violence."

Here are some remarks about Bernie which, at least according to the Boston Globe, Barney actually did say:

“Bernie Sanders has been in Congress for 25 years with little to show for it in terms of his accomplishments, and that’s because of the role he stakes out.”

“I think he has unduly denigrated the {House of Representatives} and a lot of the members,” Frank told The New York Times in 1991. “It does not help leftist causes to make people think government is full of poltroons and charlatans.”

“Bernie alienates his natural allies. His holier-than-thou attitude—saying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone else—really undercuts his effectiveness.”

““But maybe [being effective] is not his goal. There are some people who seek to have a major effect inside, and others who opt to use the place as a platform.”

“I think when he first got here, Bernie underestimated the degree that Republicans had moved to the right … I get sick of people saying ‘a curse on both your houses.' When you point out to them that you agree with them on most things, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, well, I hold my friends up to a higher standard.’ Well, OK, but remember that we’re your friends.”

“I think it is a lack of information, to be honest,” Frank said, explaining Sanders’s appeal [in the 2016 primaries]. “You have people, I believe, who do not understand how hard it is to make change. [It is] the importance of not just being idealistic, but being sensibly pragmatic and keeping their ideals. Sanders is getting their support.”

“Is pragmatism the opposite of idealism? Or is pragmatism a necessary adjunct to idealism? I think Bernie Sanders tends to have the approach, ‘Don’t be pragmatic, state your ideals, state what you think is the right policy, and be very wary of compromise and of accepting less than you want.'”

Exactly: Sanders is a schmuck, and his supporters are uninformed idiots. Do not wait to go negative on Bernie.

David Butterfield on the Early Textual Transmission of Lucretius

Textual transmission is the means by which a text -- for example, de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a book-length Latin poem of Epicurian philosophy written in the 1st century BC by a man named Lucretius, his only surviving work -- has been passed along -- in Lucretius' case, manuscripts written in the 9th century BC were copied into other manuscripts in the 15th century, and printed editions have been made based on various manuscripts. This is called the direct tradition. In addition, other authors have quoted or described passages from Lucretius poem: this is referred to as the indirect tradition.

In this blog post, I criticized Stephen Greenblatt for including grossly misleading and just plain inaccurate statements about the textual transmission of de rerum natura in his book The Swerve.



Although reading The Swerve was a very disappointing and upsetting experience for me, all the more so because so very many readers who know even less about ancient Latin literature than I do have assumed that Greenblatt knows much more about it than he obviously does, it led me eventually to another book which I positively love: The Early Textual History of Lucretuius' De Rerum Natura.



It is hard to imagine 2 books about the same book which would be more dissimilar than Greenblatt's book and Butterfield's. The Swerve is a very popular book, full of wild exaggerations, reckless speculation and plain inaccuracies, while The Early Textual History of Lucretuius' De Rerum Natura is definitely not for most readers. It is very radically limited to statements which Butterfield can support with exhaustive evidence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm sure Butterfield would agree; however, in this book he strictly limits himself to that for which he build a solid case. It seems that even compared to many of his colleagues in Classical Studies, Butterfield is very conservative in stating evidence for the transmission of Lucretius.

And yet, what is left over after Butterfield is done rejecting evidence which he deems not sound enough, still presents a picture of a much greater readership of and interaction with Lucretius' poem than that presented by Greenblatt, who carelessly dismisses a thousand years between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance in which, he says, Lucretius was forgotten.

First of all, there are the manuscripts, both those which we still have, and those whose existence the extremely-cautious Butterfield confidently posits.

And I must not go any further before assuring you that I am not a Classicist, nor a scholarly editor, and cannot yet follow Butterfield in all the details of his arguments for the previous existence of manuscripts of de rerum natura. (I've included the modifier "yet" because I intend to re-read Butterfield's book over and over, because I enjoy doing so, and also to consult many of the works Butterfield mentions in his footnotes, so that I may eventually understand him more fully than I now do.) Rather than go into too much detail and risk mis-representing what Butterfield says, I will try to keep it simple, and if there's actually anyone reading this who cares to investigate the matter further, but hasn't yet read Butterfield's book, he or she can read Butterfield's book.

And yes: some of the Latin names of codices below are abbreviated, in the same form as they appear on p 32 of Butterfield, because after I thought it over, I decided that if I tried to write out the full names I would probably mis-spell some. I admit it. I ain't frontin'.

First, the direct transmission: We currently have 3 9th-century manuscripts of Lucretius: the most significant one was written early in the 9th century, on pages which are oblong in shape, and has therefore come to be referred to as O; another, from the late 9th century, is written on square pages and is called Q, from the Latin quadratus, meaning square; and finally there are 3 fragments of another manuscript from the late 9th century, fragments which, together, Butterfield calls S, after the Latin schedae, meaning fragments.

In addition, Butterfield feels that 6 more manuscripts, now missing, written between the 8th and around the 12th century, can be confidently posited:

-- Ω, an 8th-century manuscript from which O was copied;

-- Ψ, also called the Cod. Sang. mid-9th century, copied from Ω, and from which in turn both Q and S were copied;

-- the Codex Dungali, copied from O in the 9th or 10th century;

-- the Cod. Murbac., or Poggianus, the copy which Poggio, a hero of Greenblatt's, found in "some German monastery" (Poggie was not more specific than that in his letter describing the find), copied from O in the 9th or 10th century;

-- the Cod. Corb., copied from Q, possibly in the 12th century; and

-- the Cod. Lobbes, unrelated to any of the others, copied in the 12th century.

So, there are 9 manuscripts of Lucretious' poem, right smack in the middle of the era when, according to Greenblatt, Lucretius was unknown. Plus whatever the Cod. Lobbes was copied from.

In Butterfield's opinion, all of the manuscripts from the 15th century or later were copies, or copies of copies, etc, of Poggianus, although one of them could have been correcting using O.

Next, the indirect transmission: Between the 1st century BC and the 10th century AD, Butterfield says (p 100), "Fifty-five different Latin authors cited 492 different Lucretian verses in full or in part."

In addition, there are 16 fragments which at various times have been thought to have been parts of Lucretius' poem not found in the direct transmission. The skeptical Butterfield says we do have sufficient evidence to regard any of them as actual quotations from Lucretius.

And then there is a very long and very remarkable footnote, pp 286-288, note 1 of Appendix II, in which Butterfiled discusses about a dozen authors who quote Lucretius between the end of the 10th century and Poggio's discovery in 1417, who in Butterfield's opinion could have been quoting from the indirect tradition and not from manuscripts of the entire poem; and about a dozen more who other scholars have said were acquainted with Lucretius, but, according to Butterfield, with insufficient evidence.

The more I learn about Poggio, who according to Greenblatt ushered in the Renaissance by discovering the Poggianus or Cod. Murbac., the less I like him. He seems to me to have been pathologically ill-mannered. Many have taken him to have been badly-disposed toward monks and monasteries, but maybe he just hated everybody, and it only seems that he hated monks because he had mostly to do with monks and monasteries, because monasteries were where most of the manuscripts were which he was looking for. Maybe if he had been a clockmaker instead of a Classical scholar, he would've poured all of that verbal abuse onto his customers, and we never would have heard about it because he would have written far fewer letters, and they all would have been lost.

Speaking of pieces of writing being lost: for a while I thought of accusing Poggio of actually having impeded the process of Classical Studies, because again and again I read of him finding some old manuscript (old in his own time) which was then lost. But as I studied further I saw that Poggio was hardly unique in this regard. For example, look at the 6 now-lost Lucretian manuscripts described above: only 1 passed through Poggio's hands before being lost.

Reviewing Butterfield's book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Lisa Piazzi remarks, "Probably only a few specialists will read it from beginning to end." A few specialists and at least 1 oddball autistic blogger. And perhaps 2 or 3 of you will have found this blog post interesting.

SIHH Is Not the Only Show in Town

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the SIHH in Geneva, 15-20 January this year, is one of Switzerland's 2 major watch shows, and the more exclusive of the 2 The other major show, Baselworld, happens in March.

However, there is another watch show going on right now in Geneva, which calls itself simply "Geneva Days." This began last year: it seems that LVMH, the company which owns the brands Tag Heuer, Zenith and Hublot, reacts to not being invited to SIHH by pulling a huge yacht up to the pier at Geneva while SIHH is going and having their own show on the boat.

I have heard vague reports about one person connected with SIHH complaining about the goings on aboard this boat, saying that is shows that LVMH is violating some spirit of "fair play." I don't know whether such complaints have actually happened, and if so, whether they actually reflect the attitudes of many people at SIHH. I hope not: it's rather silly to be ostentatiously, notoriously snobbish, and complain about fairness at the same time. In any case, I don't think that SIHH has to worry about "Geneva Days" stealing their thunder. I only learned of its existence just now. My first reaction is that it looks like fun, as do LMVH's brands:

I mentioned in an earlier post that, as far as I could tell, a watch show is a lot like an auto show, although of the 2, I've only been to auto shows so far. When I wrote that earlier post, I didn't realize that the Detroit Auto Show is also going on at the same time as SIHH. It started on the 13th and runs until the 28th.

Here's Tag Heuer's official Geneva Days 2018 web page.

And here's the Detroit Auto Show's website. The show is officially called the NAIAS, the North American International Auto Show, but I have a feeling that if you call it the Detroit Auto Show, more people will know what you're talking about.

I wonder how many people find it inconvenient that SIHH and the Detroit Auto Show, or Baselworld and the Leipzig Book Fair, happen at the same time. Detroit is a lot farther away from Geneva than Leipzig is from Basel.

I Still Don't Have Much to Say About SIHH 2018

However: Hodinkee has a huge awesome page full of links which say lots and lots about many of the most exciting new watches at SIHH, in Hodinkee's opinion, which is a lot more than Joe Blow's opinion, in my opinion. Seriously: if you like watches but you've never heard of either SIHH or Hodinkee -- it's a website dedicated to watches -- just click on that, and you'll thank me.

Here's a new watch at the SIHH which Hodinkee and a lot of other people (including me) are very impressed by: the Laurent Ferrier Galet Annual Calendar Montre École:

Dream Log: 17th-21st-Century Action-Adventure Movie

I dreamed I was on the set of an action-adventure movie, with a minor role in the cast but a major role as one of the producers, almost a co-director, having a lot of back-and-forth discussions with the director about how this film was going to look and sound.

Many recent movies have had scripts by Shakespeare in contemporary settings. This movie took its script from some later 17th-century English playwright, from a play with lots of swordfighting. In our movie, as in some of the above-mentioned Shakespeare movies, the swords were replaced by guns. The setting was midtown Manhattan, in and among the skyscrapers.

Most of the characters had the hair and clothes of conventional 21st-century businesspeople, but many of the people carrying 21st-century guns -- not all of them -- had an appearance with strong 17th-century touches: very, very long 17th-century hair, knee-high boots, black jackets with a bit of brocade. I played one of the minor gunmen. Although in the actual 17th century the hair-impaired often wore long wigs, I had real hair which reached almost to my waist. Black and curly hair. It wasn't clear whether my hair was naturally black and curly or had been colored and curled for this role.

We didn't look like 17th-century people who had traveled here in a time machine, but like 21st-century people who had made some bold fashion choices. Besides our guns, there were other 21st-century notes to our appearance: belts, watches, gloves, etc, tended to be contemporary. Trousers which didn't balloon up. There weren't many 17th-century moustaches to go with the long hair, nor many 17th-century hats. Men were mostly either clean-shaven or had 21st-century-style trimmed beards. We didn't wear a lot of ruffles. The overall effect was very butch both for male and for female killers who borrowed fashion touches from the 17th century. When we didn't walk, we drove cars rather than riding horses.

The script, however, was pure Baroque, taking delight in long and elaborate sentences. All of the characters were very sophisticated speakers. Long speeches mixing aggression with wit took place in boardrooms, and punctuated gunfights in parking garages and on sidewalks.

SIHH 2018 is underway!

Here is the official website. SIHH -- the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie Genève, the International Salon of High Horology in Geneva, is one the 2 biggest watch shows in Switzerland, the other being Baselworld, which will happen in March. SIHH is smaller and snootier. The automobile industry has auto shows, the watch industry has watch shows. As far as I can tell, auto shows and watch shows are very similar, and if you'd been to one, the other would feel quite familiar. But don't quote me, because so far I've only actually been to auto shows.

My Facebook feed is full of reports from SIHH. It's all really overwhelming. I don't know much to tell you about it, because it's too much and I'm very new at this and I don't know how to process and evaluate the information. Also, I'm exhausted from setting up my new computer. The new purchase may prove to have been a total waste, besides being an emotionally shattering and exhausting experience. I wasn't able to import any downloads or bookmarks, as I wanted to, but I do have the same settings, which I didn't want to have anymore and which I don't know how to change. Also, the screen is smaller, which is bad, because I like large type. On the other hand, this new computer is touch-screen. How much difference will that make? I have no idea. I'll keep you posted if there's anything about touch-screen significant enough to mention.

Here is one of the watches unveiled today at SIHH, a piece by Urwerk which I like:

It's called the Black Platinum UR-210 Royal Hawk.

I may have a more detailed report about SIHH tomorrrow -- about SIHH, not from SIHH, like many horological publications -- and then again, I may not.

Horological means having to do with time and timepieces, but I think that these days it's mostly used to refer to watches and not clocks. Don't quote me on that, cause I'm not 100% sure. A few of the fanciest watchmakers also make clocks these days, and there may be some clocks at SIHH and Baselworld 2018. But again: don't quote me on that.

Too Much Coffee Man

I quit drinking coffee-- I don't know how long ago. I'm really bad at remembering how long ago things happened. A few months ago. Maybe a year ago. I don't know. I was feeling kind of sick, and I wondered whether I'd feel better if I quit drinking coffee, and I definitely did feel better -- except for missing the taste of the coffee and the rush it gave me.

Anyway, lately -- I don't know how recently exactly -- I'd have one coffee every now and then. And it seemed that if I just had one, and didn't have one every day, I didn't feel sick. A couple of times before today -- I don't know how many times exactly. Maybe 3 -- I had gotten a small mocha from Sweetwater's Cafe, and it was really good. So good that today I felt like experiemting and getting a medium or a large.

So I went to Sweetwater's and ordered a large. Then, while they were making it, I noticed that the menu on the wall didn't say Small, Medium and Large -- it said Single, Double, and Triple.

I asked, Does this mean there's 3 times as much caffeine in there as in a single mocha. They said, Yeah. I said, Wow. I don't drink coffee every day. They said, We can refund your money and start over if you want. I said, No, it's fine. I like new experiences.

So I went to Kroger's, chugging on my triple mocha, to get a piece of school & office supplies which I needed, but, for my 2nd trip to Kroger's in a row, they didn't have it on the shelf. (Kroger's was where I had been getting this item for years.) Even though I was telling myself to be careful and cool it, because the unaccustomed caffeine level might make me inappropriately excitable, I exclaimed, "C'mon, Kroger's, get your shit together!" And I may have said it inappropriately loudly.

Then I thought that the drugstore at the other end of the strip mall might have what I was looking for. Then, on my way to this drugstore, I remembered that there was a huge office-supply store on the way to the drugstore. I drained the dregs of the triple mocha, went into the office-supply store, muttering a bit, trying not to mutter too much or too loudly. I'm not sure how well I succeeded in this attempt to control myself. The caffeine was really affecting me a lot.

Sure enough, they had exactly what I was looking for, and priced lower than Kroger's, which should come as no surprise to anyone.

Alas, however: there seemed to be only one register open, and there was a line. No self-checkout registers whatsoever.

But, aha! In another corner of the giant store, a young woman was standing next to what appeared to be a cash register, and a sign which said "check-out"! I approached and asked whether she could check me out. She gestured toward the other corner of the store, where there was one register open, with a line. I said, "Yeah, but there's a line." She said some things explaining why she wasn't going to check me out, things which I didn't quite hear, we went back and forth about it, several times, finally I turned my back and exclaimed, "Fine!" and took one stride toward the register with the line, when she said something else I didn't quite catch -- she was soft-spoken, and I've listened to a lot of extremely-loud music over the course of decades -- and I turned back, and, to my surprise, she was waiving me in after all. Seemed all I'd had to do to convince her was give up. I thanked her several times during the course of checking out.

I was waiting in a left-turn lane at a stoplight on the way home when a semi pulled up beside me in the adjacent lane, which was a right turn lane, but when the light changed, the semi turned left, cutting me off. I yelled a bit before telling myself 1) that I definitely had much too much caffeine in my system, and 2) that it was entirely possible that the driver of the semi was completely unfamiliar with this area and was not a dick at all, but a good guy doing the best he could. The drive home was less than a mile and a half altogether, but I yelled at several other drivers, and then each time reminded myself that I had way too much caffeine in my system and that it was threatening to turn me into a dangerous maniac.

But I got home okay, and put some of that excess energy to work writing this essay. I hope you enjoyed reading it more than I've enjoyed writing it. This is definitely too much caffeine. It's not pleasant. Well, live and learn. Maybe wait a week or more before having more coffee, and then, maybe a single mocha again. Maybe a year or two would be better than a week.

Computers: Anger, Confusion and Depression

So I thought to myself, "How complicated could it be to import files to Windows 10?" So I did a Google search for that, and got really discouraged really fast. I found a Dummies pages for Importing Files to Windows 10 For Dummies, and it was not as simple as I would've hoped. Am I all ready to do it myself, having read that part of that page? Haha -- no. And near the bottom of that page, it said: "Assuming there have been no complications, you're done," or something like that. And then it went on, talking about if there had been complications during the attempt to import the files, and I didn't even read past that. I was too frightened to keep reading, because I've been overwhelmed by complications I didn't see coming many times in my interactions with IT.

I've bookmarked that page, and I'll try again later to understand what it says. One thing upon which which every source I've seen so far agrees, is that I'll need an external hard drive.

I had sort of been hoping that I could connect the two drives, find a button that said, "Import files from drive A to drive B," and be done with it. Apparently it's not that simple.

But then again: maybe it is that simple. Maybe what is generally thought of as "importing files" is a lot more than what I actually want to do. I want to import some downloads and some bookmarks, and that's about it, I think.

For all I know, though, that is exactly what everybody else means when they're talking about importing files, too.

Assuming that I'm not so lucky that importing downloads and bookmarks is muuuuuch simpler than what people usually mean by "importing files," I might need some cable, too, in addition to the external hard drive. I don't know if I have any ethernet cable lying around here or not.

I could pay somebody else to do this. Apparently, these days, I could pay somebody to do this without even leaving home -- unless some people can but I can't for some reason I don't understand. I don't have a cloud connection. I don't know if I'd have to have one, or if the people importing my files would just use their own cloud connection, or what.

Another possible nightmare -- that is to say: possible as far as I know. It should be clear to some of you that I know just about squat about IT, while others of you no doubt have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about ("What's a 'down...load'?") -- another possible nightmare might be if there's no way to import files without also importing some settings which I made on the old computer, settings which I wanted to undo, but was unable to...

This really sucks. Bill Gates, I know you're combating malaria and AIDS, and that's wonderful, but this issue I'm having with importing files is driving me mad.

I suppose that it's POSSIBLE that if I read that Dummies page one more time, a huge light bulb will turn on over my head, and I'll be able to import download files from as many as 6 or more old hard drives which I haven't thrown away, just like that, as easy as anybody could ever peasy. I'm just having a very hard time imagining that this will not be very painful and expensive and that all sorts of things will go wrong, whether I try to do it myself or pay someone else to do it.

Thomas Middleditch's character on "Silicon Valley" had a big dramatic moment when he told off some very good-looking person and said that no-one would ever be able to understand nerds' pain. I got mad and started yelling at my TV during that speech. Maybe if you nerds made products which everyday people understood how to use, you'd be in much less pain, because everybody would love you.

Is more or less what I angrily yelled at my TV. Maybe if, when someone shared some of their frustration at IT with nerds, and their reaction was something other than to laugh and not help -- maybe that would make both nerds and others happier. Maybe if you were less obsessed with taking revenge on the whole world and more interested in interactions of friendship and trust, your lives would improve in ways which you presently can't imagine.

Guess we'll never know, huh, nerds?

Sorry. That was uncalled-for. I'm just... This issue with importing files is frustrating me.

Trump Insults Immigrants in an Obscene Way in Oval Office Meeting

The Washington Post reports:

Trump attacks protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries in Oval Office meeting

"President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

'Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?' Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met Wednesday."

Does the fact that he thinks this way about those countries and the people who live there surprise me? No. It was already as clear as could be that he's a despicable bigot. Does the fact that he doesn't know any better than to talk that way in a bipartisan meeting surprise me? Actually, yes. But only a little bit. He's clearly coming unraveled. What really continues to surprise me is the way that top Republicans continue to act as if everything is just fine. But the longer they do that, the more we Democrats will gain in November. So, the human being in me is appalled, while at the same time the cold-blooded politician in me is delighted.

And both of me are curious about how Norway will react. (With more or less the same horror as normal decent people everywhere, I should imagine.)

I Had a Frozen Roasted Whole Chicken --

-- onion, celery, arugula, mayo, other sauces and spices to taste -- and a half hour later, I had a whole bunch of chicken salad. I didn't take anything out of the chicken except the bones. The skin is in there, all chopped up with everything else. Is that different and daring? I don't know.

*googling chicken salad skin*

Well, it's not unheard-of, apparently, but it's not the #1 most popular choice either. Also, a lot of recipes call for the breast meat only. But that's most chicken salad, the way most people like it, I would assume. (Why else would everybody make it that way?) This here is chicken salad for me, the way I want it.

To me, the dark meat and the skin are in competition for being the tastiest parts of the chicken, and the white meat is definitely dead last. I made this chicken salad this way in large part as a way of making the white meat edible to me. The dark meat, the skin, the chopped-up veggies, the mayo, the salt, garlic powder, ginger, the half-dozen drops or so of Dave's Gourmet Ghost Pepper Sauce -- don't try it! It's too hot for you! It's like 50% ghost peppers! I warned you! -- the oyster sauce, the Hidden Valley ranch dressing, the sweet and sour sauce: all of those ingredients are doing one job in my chicken salad: concealing the fact that there is any white meat in there at all.

It is glorious. (And too spicy for you! Why won't you believe me?! I WARNED YOU!!!)

"Urban Democratic Elitists" Don't Exist

(PS, Later the Same Day: Okay, I was a little angry when I wrote that and blamed the rural Democrats for their own problems. I felt I was being lashed out at, and in return I lashed out. Maybe the best approach would be if all Democrats try to appreciate and support other Democrats, and to always think about how they themselves can improve what they're doing. All of this time and energy Democrats spend blaming each other for this and that could be much better spent making the case for the entire party and against the Republicans.)

I am so sick of hearing about "urban Democratic elitists." The Republican Party is the elitist party in the US; they're the ones cutting taxes for the rich and cutting support for the poor. The Republicans, not the Democrats, are the ones who marginalize, exclude, exploit and otherwise eff over people who are not white, male, and heterosexual and do their best to look like they just stepped out of the 1950's.

It's one thing to hear the "urban elitist" charge from Fox News and their proletarian dupes. It's quite another to hear rural Democrats blaming things on the Democratic elitists who don't exist. Rural Democrats such as Terry Goodin, a Democrat who's been in the Indiana House of Representative since 2000, and the subject of this below-average analysis from POLITICO. Goodin describes the main planks of his political platform as "the importance of public education, affordable health care and a living wage, and the moral necessity of addressing the opioids scourge."

And with that platform, he couldn't sell Hillary Clinton to his constituents over Donald Trump.

And it doesn't seem to occur to Goodin and some other rural Democrats that their inability to get out the vote for Democrats might be their own damn fault.

That maybe the divisiveness in the Democratic Party might be partly their own damn fault. Goodin complains about "identity politics." What the Hell is identity politics except another Fox News talking point, another spoonful of Republican snake oil swallowed by a lot of dumb people, not all of whom are Republicans? Goodin claims that the Democratic "urban elites" are no longer "inclusive," because they don't understand him and his people. But when people complain about "identity politics," what are they complaining about? They're complaining that traditionally-oppressed demographics, such as African-Americans, Native Americans and LGBT's, are finally, gradually -- PARTIALLY -- getting more rights and more equality. Who's resisting inclusion here?

From the POLITICO article:

"Goodin’s Indiana District 66 went heavy for Trump. One reason: It used to have plenty of decent-paying, union-boosted jobs, anchored by the Morgan Packing plant."

Jesus H Christ: These people were too dumb to see which party is pro-union and which party is rabidly anti-union? And the fault with people misunderstanding something so basic and plain lays with -- urban Democrats hundreds or thousands of miles away?

You want party unity, Terry Goodin? You want all of us Democrats pulling on the same rope? How about you enjoy a nice steaming-hot mug of STFU about these "elitist urban Democrats" who supposedly don't care about you and your constituents, and take a good long look in the mirror instead? Yes, there is some divisiveness in the party. But when it comes to who's responsible for it and who needs to shape up to fix it, you got it exactly backwards, my friend. We urban Democrats are on the side of people who need help, just like you are. You need to do a much better job of explaining to your friends and neighbors who we are.

When Lyndon Johnson was an up-and-coming politician -- you don't get a whole lot more Democratic and rural than Lyndon Johnson -- did he complain about that God-damned urban elitist FDR? No! He was known as a "110% FDR man." To the many people in the Hill Country outside Johnson City, Texas, who were suspicious of "that Commy" FDR, he explained to them who FDR really was. And that he was on their side.

Worked pretty well. Among many other things, it brought rural electrification to the Hill Country for the very first time, and it started a politician on his way to the White House, who signed the major civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965. Food for thought, maybe.

Just Look at How Smart and Down To Earth I Am! Look, Everybody, Look!

POLITICO reports:

Enraged by widespread speculation about his mental state and fitness for office, President Donald Trump defended himself on Twitter Saturday morning as "very smart" and "a stable genius" amid allegations contained in an incendiary book about the Trump administration released this week.

“Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.....” the president tweeted at 7:19 a.m., hours before a scheduled meeting with congressional GOP leaders at Camp David.

Several minutes later, Trump added: “...Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....

....to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!"

Yeah, that's what we mentally-stable geniuses do when someone implies that we're stupid or crazy: we become enraged and constantly tell everybody how smart and stable we are and how there's nothing wrong with our hands or anything else if you know what I mean!

I'm a million times smarter than Trump the Chump! I'm also amazingly good-looking, probably just the best-looking man there has ever been. I don't put a photo of myself on my icon because hetero women and gay men would be passing out left and right from mad desire when they're trying to get stuff done on Facebook. Look at these supposedly "sexiest men alive"! Johnny Depp?! Bradley Cooper?! Harold Bloom?! Sad! Next to me they all look like girls! UGLY girls you wouldn't even want to harrass! I'm also extraordinarily non-crazy. Completely sane. Amazingly so. Top-flight sanity experts are always saying so. Just yesterday, on one of my many private jets, the Chairman of the Vienna Psychoanalysis Association was running up and down the aisle, screaming and clutching his hair and cursing, because I was so sane, so intelligent and so sexy that it drove him mad with envy!

I can read and write and speak a thousand languages fluently! No -- a MILLION!!! No -- saying "fluently" implies that I read and write and speak as well as native speakers, when obviously I do it much gooder than them all!!! Everyone who is HONEST and not being paid off by Crooked Hillary and Sloppy Steve acknowledges this! It's so obvious that Crooked Hillary and Sloppy Steve have secretly been in this together right from the start! It's another "classic" Chinese hoax!

It's obvious that America is simply too intimidated by me to elect me President. That's pathetic. But of course my life is still the envy of ALL! That's why they're writing all of these bad things about me -- which are all completely untrue, obviously. It's obvious that they're all lying -- out of sheer envy! I'm so cool in every way that it makes them all want to scream!

How Long Can This Go On?

What's today's most frivolous legal action: Trump attempting to get Bannon to cease and desist being interviewed in a book written by someone else, or Paul Manafort suing the Justice Department for arresting him? And when are Republicans in the White House and Congress going to start saying publicly what they've been saying privately, and what Republicans not in the White House or public office have been saying publicly all along -- along with the rest of the God damn world? Namely, that Trump is crazy, stupid, a crook, a thug, a traitor, and utterly unfit to lead?

How long will the Trump administration adhere to its policy of determining which side is the most popular with regard to an issue, and then taking the other side, after having lied by saying it would never do any such thing? (Today Jeff Sessions reversed Obama-era policy allowing states to declare marijuana legal, and Trump signed an executive order allowing offshore oil drilling in areas which have been legally off limits since the 1970's.)

How badly do the Republicans want to lose in November? Are some of them moles whose real endgame is to destroy the party once and for all? Or are they all just really, really, really stupid?

Batteries

Batteries are what I've been thinking about lately.

For one thing: the thing which will make solar power the answer to everything and the source of all the power we need, would be: if batteries got a lot better. And: batteries are getting a lot better, in large part because lots of people are very excited about not burning Earth to a crisp by continuing with fossil fuels. When it comes to large batteries: according to the Washington Post,

Less than a month after Tesla unveiled a new backup power system in South Australia, the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations: In the past three weeks alone, the Hornsdale Power Reserve has smoothed out at least two major energy outages, responding even more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide emergency power.

When it comes to somewhat smaller batteries than that: an individual home can combine rooftop solar with batteries to not only be impervious to grid blackouts, but also to help provide power to others during grid blackouts. Between the huge batteries like the one Tesla just installed in Australia, and the ones for individual homes, what we're talking about here is, eventually, and maybe quite soon, and end to grid blackouts. This makes me want solar even much more than I had. I think that imagining an end to blackouts might just make people in general want solar very much. So imagine that, and spread the word.

Speaking of grid blackouts, and smaller batteries than the ones which go with home rooftop solar: earlier today, while I was sitting before this PC, the power went out for about 2 seconds. The PC didn't know why it was now on battery power, and it told me that I might want to think about re-charging my battery because it was at 12%. I'd been worry about blackouts because I'd noticed that my battery was always at around 12%, plugged in and not charging, according to my desktop battery icon. I couldn't figure out why it never seemed to be higher than 12%. Anyhow, after that 2-second blackout, it occurred to me to see whether the problem was that the battery wasn't plugged in all the way. I fumbled around with it for a second, wasn't sure whether or not I pushed it in farther than it was, and now, whether I did anything to it or not, it's at 95% and charging.

Speaking of even smaller batteries: I noticed some pictures of Devon watches:

And I like the way they look. (Yes, my friend, that's a wristwatch.) So I researched them, and found, to my great disappointment, that they run on batteries. Not the kind of batteries which are in most battery-powered watches, which have to be replaced when they run down. The Devon batteries are rechargeable. But still, ewwwww.

That's right: I'm talking about batteries being a large part of our being able to refrain from wiping out our own species, but I still don't want one in my watch. Some watchmakers agree, and manage to combine the waycool styling with a movement that runs because you wind up a spring, manufacturers like Hublot:

and Urwerk:

But maybe I'll keep Devon in mind since their batteries are rechargeable, and since we might be just this far away from running the whole planet on renewable electricity, with the help of modern battery technology.

Does Devon make mechanical timepieces in addition to the battery-powered kind? The first FAQ on their website, and I quote: "How often should I charge my Devon watch?" does not make me hopeful about that. The website gives a list of authorized retailers, which in the US includes an online watch store in addition to some brick-and-mortar locations. The online store carries a whole lot of watch brands I've never heard of. One I had heard of is Shinola (made near where I live, hugely hyped, all-battery). And they don't carry Detroit Watch Company (made near where I live, relatively tiny company compared to Shinola, lots of really nice-looking mechanical watches.)

It seems that once again I've written an essay which was supposed to be about something else but ended up being mostly about mechanical watches. What can I say, I think they're really cool.

So support battery R&D, and just maybe we'll avoid that climate-change apocalypse. In conclusion, France is a land of many contrasts.