So THAT's What a NATO Strap Is!

And that's also why ordering things from Amazon can be surprising. A NATO band comes in one piece, which was definitely a surprise for me. I had to google how to install the thing on my watch.

By the way, if you're thinking about getting me some watch straps or bracelets or entire watches or just giving me huge crates of cash or large parcels of real estate, first of all, thank you, that's so sweet! But secondly and very importantly, if you get me a watch strap, get me the longest one they got, whether that option is labeled "long," or "extra long," or "Seriously, what are you, a gorilla?" or whatever the case may be. Who could've known that a guy who's 6'3", 300 lbs and constantly lifts weights and 100 lb balls and heavy sandbags and so forth would end up having big wrists, eh? And, yet, apparently, my wrists are somewhat large. Watch bands made for normal humans just don't work.

(I know: I'm seething with greed, always thinking about what I will get, me me me, shower me with money and watch straps and sand bags, and I know it's not an attractive feature. You know that episode of "Ren & Stimpy" which begins with Ren and Stimpy saying their prayers before going to bed, and Stimpy finishes his prayers by saying, "-- and most importantly of all, please look after my dear, dear friend Ren!" and Ren finishes his prayers by saying, "-- and please give me a million dollars, and -- oooh! Huge pectoral muscles!" Makes me laugh and laugh whenever I think about it, because I know I'm just like Ren: surrounded by sweet loving Stimpys, but seething with greed, me me me. I know it's not a great way to be. Well, maybe I've heard it's not a great way to be. Maybe I'm thinking about it. Anyway, I'm not the one on trial here! This post is about NATO watch bands.)

At first I thought that NATO was an acronym for "nylon (something) (something) (something)" bands, but actually, they're called NATO bands because they were first used by NATO, the military alliance. The one-piece design keeps metal off of your wrist -- which may have been more important decades ago, when watch cases might be more prone to corrosion. I don't know. It surprised me to learn that keeping metal off of the wrist was a priority, and I'm just guessing as to why that was -- and also keeps the watch on your wrist if one of the spring bars breaks. The typical NATO strap is made from woven nylon fabric, although now that they're getting popular we're beginning to see more and more made in leather and other materials.

On a conventional watch strap, the spring bars go through holes on either end of the strap -- or to be more precise: on the end of each of the strap's two pieces -- and then are fitted into holes in the watch case. With a NATO band, the spring bars are put in place in the case first. Then you thread the strap through the bars, passing it over the back of the watch,

and then fasten it around your wrist in your choice of various ways. Of course, with the strap going over the back of the watch, that means the view of the watch's back window, if it has one, is blocked. But it's not very difficult to slip the strap the band out for a peek through the window, and then back in again to wear the watch.

Easy or not, though, I don't WANT to have to take off the strap in order to be able to look through the window.

Maybe what watches do is just keep pointing out to you more and more ways how the world isn't perfect. Or maybe: more and more unimportant ways one can be dissatisfied with a wonderful world? Hmm.

Is it so Important that the Dixie Chicks are Now the Chicks?

I'm not asking rhetorically. It's more like I'm asking for people's opinions, because I don't know what to make of the name change. One way or another, their new video, "March March,"



is badass.

Did they need to drop "Dixie" from the name of the band? Are Klansmen very pleased by this change, shouting, "Yes! Finally!" ?

Another thing that it makes me think of is that some people at some times in history would still greatly object to the name Chicks and call it degrading to women. "I'm not a chick -- I'm a WOMAN!" I say "at some times in history" because I don't know whether and/or how much these things have changed. I know that in 1989 and 1990, when I was 28 and 29, I was friends with a 19- and 20-year-old woman who got mad whenever I called her a girl instead of a woman, and the last time she got so angry that for 30 years I've been very careful not to refer to a grown-ass woman as a girl. Well, maybe I've loosened up about that a little bit in the past couple of years.

Anyway, in 1989 and 1990, this 19- and 20-year-old woman was a huge fan of Sinead O'Conner, so big a fan that she was seriously considering shaving her head, which was somewhat more unusual for women to do in 1990 than it is now.

And then in 1992, Sinead O'Conner released her 3rd album, and its title was Am I Not Your Girl? and I laughed and laughed and laughed, although I was still so scared of the white-hot anger of that women whom I had not seen for 2 years that I was still very careful to use the term "woman." In fact, by then it had become ingrained habit. Even though by then the Riot Grrrrl punk rock movement was underway, and then a little later there came the Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks,

and it seemed as if the term "girl" and other similar terms, like "chick," might have changed a bit in their usage. But I haven't actually talked with any feminists about this.

Hey, I could do that now!

We could all do a lot of talking to each other now about language and respect and preferences and whether I should have laughed so much when I heard the title of Sinead O'Conner's third album, and all sorts of stuff.

Be sure and watch that new video by The Chicks.

A Time Machine Brings Beethoven to the 21st Century, and "Dance (pt 1)" by the Rolling Stones is Playing

"What is that -- Oh! I was about to say, 'What is that noise?!' and then, a couple of seconds later I realized it's meant to be music, and now a few seconds after that I'm starting to like it! Who are these musicians?! What is this music?!"

"This is a piece composed and performed by a group who call themselves the Rolling Stones, Herr Beethoven."

"Ha! A clever name! Their music is coming at us like stones in an avalanche! It's so loud that it's shaking my bones! It makes me want to dance and leap about! The feeling is overpowering."

"Please, Herr Beethoven, feel free -- dance!"

"But I don't know the steps!"

"Ah, yes. Well, you see, with this sort of music, often people dance without having any steps planned beforehand. They just move to the music in a fully improvised way. You're already swaying to and fro and moving your arms to the beat."

"As are you. Where are they, where are the Rollling Stones? I don't see them anywhere. Well done, Rolling Stones! This is such fun!"

"The Rolling Stones aren't here, Sir. We're listening to a recording. An electronic recording."

"Great God. Electricity! And I suppose some of those instruments are guitars, but with the sound manipulated electrically?"

"Exactly right, Herr Beethoven! Good ear!"

"And the voices and the drums and the brass are manipulated somewhat less, or not at all. Show me how you dance to this!"

"Alright... There's no need to copy me. Let the music move you. The main point is to enjoy yourself. Let go! ...There you go!"

"What glorious hedonism! I'm reminded of sex!"

"Sex is a major theme in many of the Rolling Stones' songs."

"I don't understand the lyrics. 'Get up, get out," that's plain enough, but what does he mean by 'get down'?"

"Oh, that's, uh, that's slang, it can be understood in various ways, which I think is intentional with many of their lyrics. Getting down can be having fun, so you're certainly doing it right. It can also mean to dance in an enthusiastic way, so, again... And it can also mean to have sex. So, I'd have to say that you understand this music very well indeed, even without knowing the slang in the lyrics."

"Oh, it's glorious!"

"You're definitely dancing correctly to this recording. Just dance as if no-one were watching."

"If someone's watching and they don't like the way I'm dancing, I don't give a damn!"

"That means you're doing it perfectly."

"Ha ha ha ha! What is the name of this glorious tune?"

"Well, coincidentally, it's called 'Dance, Part One.'"

"Is there a Part Two? Can we obtain it and listen to it as well some time?"

"We can hear it the moment Part One is Over."

"Ha! Oh, I see some people down the street have seen us dancing, and they're dancing along with us! Come over here and dance with us, my lovely dancing friends! 'Get down' with us! Oh dear!"

"It's alright, Herr Beethoven, it was a perfectly appropriate remark for the moment"

"Ha!"

Dream Log: Rescuing Kittens in Paris

In last night's dream -- coronavirus: non-existent. Social distancing: not practiced. My age: 59, same as in waking like. Location: Paris. Did it resemble the real Paris: partly. It was less built-up than the real Paris. Other people in the dream: unknown to me from waking life.

We were riding in a double-decker bus somewhat like the ones I've seen in Manhattan and London, except that the top level was enclosed. The whole vehicle felt a bit top-heavy, sluggish and old. I was sitting in the top level. I had a notebook, and paperback book and several smaller items with me, each about the size of a matchbox. I was having trouble holding on to everything, I keenly felt the need for a briefcase or backpack.

Suddenly the bus slammed to a halt when one of the passengers shouted that someone outside was abusing kittens.

I and several other passengers immediately scrambled off of the bus and ran in the direction the shouting person had been pointing. Only with difficulty did I keep ahold of all of my possessions. In front of the house we were running toward, two boys stopped stuffing kittens into garbage cans and ran away. (This is an example of how this dream Paris was unrealistically spread out: this neighborhood had one-and-two story single family houses and did not seem to be extravagantly wealthy.)

We found four kittens in the trash cans. No one came to the door when we rang the bell of the house in whose small front yard this was happening. We didn't know where home was for these kittens, so we decided to just wait there with them, until we could figure out their situation. By a stroke of good luck, someone happened to have a bottle of milk in their backpack. The bus driver called out that he had a schedule to keep. We called back that we understood and waved him on. Someone called the local Humane Society.

One of the other people from the bus, a young man, made fun of me, calling me old, and also mocking my obvious need for a briefcase or backpack. I ignored him, thinking that it was a rather strange combination, kind to kittens in need and a jerk to human strangers.

Some of us decided to walk to a nearby Humane society shelter with the kittens, while others stayed behind, in case they were able to solve the question of the kittens' ownership. We exchanged phone numbers. After a couple of blocks of walking through a dream version of France which was a bit more suburban than the real Paris, I woke up.

Dream Log: Kissing Milla Jovovich

Last night I had another one of those dreams where there was no pandemic. It was also one of those dreams about a movie, but this time, it was not one of those dreams where I'm in a movie, but at the same time, the events in the plot of the movie are also really happening. This time, there was a movie being filmed and there was no blending of movie and reality. It was just a movie. And we also weren't watching the finished movie while we were filming it -- we were just filming it in the conventional waking-world manner. And in this dream, I wasn't even an actor in the movie. I was a producer.

The movie was being directed by Luc Besson, and starred Milla Jovovich

as Boudica, a real historical figure, a tribal leader in Britain who led an large-scale but ultimately unsuccessful revolt against the Roman occupation in the area of present-day England in the first century AD. In real life, Ms Jovovich is married and has 3 children with her husband Paul W S Anderson, maker of the Resident Evil movies. This fictional dream version of Milla Jovovich was single.

In my role as one of the film's many producers, I went around the set trying to solve problems as best I could. If someone in the cast or crew was having a creative problem and wanted my help, I tried my best to offer constructive advice. If someone was feeling down, I tried to cheer them up. If someone wanted some money from the film's budget, I either gave it to them, or turned them down, or referred them to one of the higher-ranking producers.

The movie was being filmed on location in Minnesota, near the campus of a large, academically-undistinguished university, a "party college." The cast and the crew interacted with the students and faculty of the university. In an unrealistic dreamlike aspect of this dream, I was solving problems on the university campus as well as on the film set.

I saw a young man with a full beard sitting on a bench in the hallway of a university building, not moving, with a glazed expression on his face. For a moment I was very alarmed, but I checked his pulse and breathing: he was alive. His pulse and breathing were slow, steady and strong, but he was in quite a daze. I couldn't smell alcohol on him, and I can usually smell if someone's been drinking. It was not clear whether this guy's state was due to drugs, fatigue, depression, some combination of these, or none of the above. I saw Milla Jovovich nearby and waved her over.

In the movies, often a man is in some sort of state, and a beautiful woman will kiss him and he'll snap right out of it. Like Sleeping Beauty, but with the genders reversed. I gestured at the young man and said to Milla, "You wanna try a Reverse Sleeping Beauty on this guy?"

Milla shrugged and said sure and leaned in over the young man and gave him a long kiss. Nothing. No response.

I thought it was a terrible shame, a kiss from Milla Jovovich going to waste like that. I stared at her, and she was staring right back, and slowly we got closer and closer to each other until we were kissing.

It was a long, wonderful kiss, and while we kissed we hugged each other and rubbed each other's backs and scalps and squeezed each other's shoulders. When it was over I was stunned. Milla smiled kindly at me, shrugged and said, "Mmmm... Yeah, it was okay. But I'm Milla Jovovich. You understand." And she walked away.

I caught up with her and walked beside her. She gave me a raised-eyebrow look. "Let's talk, okay?" I said. "Let's have everything... above-board and clear. I want to keep trying. You can tell me to leave you alone, any time you want."

Milla laughed and said, "I know I can! It's good that you know it too."

"It was a poor choice of words on my part. Just tell me to leave you alone and that's that, over and done like it never happened." I waited as we walked along. She didn't say anything. I waited some more. She still didn't say anything. I said, "Do you want to have dinner tonight, after shooting's done?"

She was silent for still longer. I felt like I was going to die from the waiting. Was she one of those women who actually think it's kinder to just leave someone hanging? Then she leaned in close, gave me a peck on the ear and said, "Yeah." Then she ran away, running as fast as Milla Jovovich. Then I woke up. And after a few minutes, I realized that I wasn't really going to have dinner with Milla Jovovich. And that she's married, very happily married, apparently, to the Resident Evil guy, the father of her three children.

Stinky Cheese Monkey

mee r stinkee cheez munkee. mee luv yu.

You know how the cheese section of a supermarket will offer small pieces of cheese for sale, an ounce or two per piece? Maybe they'll be in a wicker basket or something like that, a bunch of all different sorts of cheese. Maybe the supermarket does that because they have small pieces left over after cutting the cheese up into the more normally-sized pieces. Or maybe they offer the small pieces in order to entice customers to try new things. Or maybe both, or maybe something else.

Be that as it may, Whole Foods donates some of these small pieces of cheese to the local food bank. A nice lady who works at the food bank has noticed that I really like these fancy pieces of cheese from Whole Foods, and apparently there's not a lot of demand for this stuff generally at the food bank, and so, the last few times I've gone to the food bank, as soon as she sees me coming, this nice lady goes and gets me a few pieces of wonderful, exotic, expensive, stinky cheese. mee r stinkee cheez munkee.

When I get my precious home, I unwrap the small pieces of cheese and put the cheese into plastic refrigerator containers. Am I doing it wrong, by putting different sorts of fine cheese into one container? Am I ruining everything? Are true cheese connoisseurs in anguish as they read this? (Am I flattering myself to think that a true cheese connoisseur has ever been within a mile of reading anything I've written?) I don't know. As I unwrap them, I note the brand and the price per pound of each piece of cheese, and then I quickly forget most of that information.

If my memory were better, or if I had written down the name and price of each brand of cheese before throwing the wrapper away, this would be a much more informative and interesting post. And yet, here we are. If I ever get any more of the fancy cheese from the food bank, maybe I'll actually manage to add an informative PS to this post. I promise nothing! [PS, 16. June 2020: And today's the day! I got two pieces of stinky cheese from the the food bank, and I remembered not to throw the wrappers away. One of the pieces is Jasper Hill Farm Cabot Clothbound Cheddar and sells for $25.99 per pound at Whole Foods, and the other piece, also donated by Whole Foods, Is Jasper Hill Farm Alpha Tolman and sells for $24.99 a pound. It looks and smells a bit like Gruyere (which I've also gotten from the food bank). The manufacturer recommends Tolman for melting. I don't remember having seen either of these particular varieties before. I'm melting a piece of Tolman on a cracker... Very nice. The texture of the melted Tolman is reminiscent of Gruyere, and the flavor is a bit more intense. Very nice. As for the Clothbound Cheddar, a website devoted to cheese recommends pairing it with charcuterie. Cracker, cheddar, hot dog... Hmm, maybe I wasn't doing that right. Or maybe I needed to cleanse my palate after the Tolman. I'll keep an open mind about this cheddar.]

I try not to eat too much cheese. Even when it's really delicious. And it seems that, generally speaking, I like cheese better the more expensive it is -- another good reason for me to be a billionaire! -- and some of the little information from the thrown-away cheese wrappers which I have retained is that four of those little pieces of cheese -- at least four. Maybe five, or more -- sell at Whole Foods for $29.99 a pound. And at least one more cost $27.99 per pound.

Now, readers, maybe, for some of you, $30 a pound is not a lot for cheese. For me, $30 a pound is the most expensive cheese I've ever seen. And I know that some of you will be astounded to learn that cheese can cost so much. Astounded and perhaps also outraged, for all I know.

But like I said, for me, as a general rule, the more cheese costs, the better it tastes. Also, since I've been getting the fancy stinky cheese from the food bank, I've been researching cheese a little bit, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and so I think I know a little bit about those $30-a pound cheeses:

-- One was a goat cheese with pieces of truffles in it. I was worried about this piece of cheese, because I'd eaten other, much cheaper things which supposedly had truffles in them, and gotten headaches from eating them. But in retrospect, I suspect those other things may have had very little truffle, and a lot of artificial additive to try to fake the taste of truffles, and probably the additives gave me the headaches. Anyway, now, after eating this $29.99-a-pound cheese, I may actually have some real idea of what truffles taste like, and I didn't get headaches.

-- Another $29.99-per-pound cheese reminded me a bit of brie, it was white and had a similar softness and mild flavor, but was better than any brie I've ever had.

-- Another one was a blue cheese. It's the only blue cheese I've ever seen that is orange except for the delicious blue pieces of mold which give blue cheese its name. It was orange, and more soft and pliant than crumbly, and it was sticky, and I remember that its name definitely sounded English, and it was hard to keep from just gobbling it down, without even putting it on a cracker or anything, just gobbling it down by itself, it was so good.

As for further $29.99-per-pound packages, I can't remember if one was another package of the same mild white variety which is sort of like brie but better. (Unless, of course, there are other, more expensive sorts of brie which I've never had and I can't even imagine how delicious they are.)

I admire the vegans, I really do. And I completely believe them when they talk about the health benefits of vegan diets. I have eyes. I can see how good-looking they are, how healthy, how clear-skinned.

But on the other hand -- for instance, stinky cheese.

Fans of Appalling Music

When some terrible band is extremely successful, it stands to reason, statistically, that there are a few people who don't just put up with that band, and also don't just sort of like them, but that band is their favorite band. Have you ever met any of those fans? I've met a few. It's a horrifying experience.

In one of these experiences I didn't actually meet the fan, I just read him gushing about Squeeze at length in Rolling Stone. I know, I'm going out on a limb a bit here, calling Squeeze a terrible band. Okay, so maybe they're not the worst, but they're certainly nowhere near the best either, and the way that this guy was going on and on about them in Rolling Stone, back in the early 1980's when their single "Tempted" was a hit, was grotesque. I wasn't tempted by their music, not even a little. But it was more than that. This writer also gushed about how handsome the guys in Squeeze were.

Now, this latter point may be just semantics: if one of the definitions of "handsome" is "attempting, by the use of very expensive clothes and very elaborate grooming, to conceal the way that Nature made you look like a potato or an elephant's knee," then, yes, Squeeze were very handsome. If handsomeness is a matter of the price of your watch -- and clearly, in many relationships, it is -- then Squeeze will always have most of us beat.

Or maybe the remarks about handsomeness were some sort of inside joke: maybe one of the band members said something like "Look, we know we're not handsome, and we're competing with freakin' Duran Duran, so maybe we just try a little harder with the music," and the interviewer said Oh c'mon now, and then someone said, Hey, why dontcha SAY, in the article, that we're ridiculously handsome, something like that? Just to see how people will react? And six months later they all had supermodel girlfriends.

But their music? One of the things about being a music critic at some place like Rolling Stone is that you have access to all of the music, and if you miss something, you're working elbow-to-elbow with a whole huge organization full of other music critics who can point out the best stuff which you may have missed, and so there's very little excuse for surveying the entire pop music landscape of the early 80's and deciding that its summit is -- Squeeze. Excuse me, but seriously, ewwww.

Then there's Crowded House, the Australian Band which formed in the mid-80's with members of the New Zealand band Split Enz, which had combined exotic costumes, hair and stage decoration with thoroughly mediocre music. Crowded House dropped all of the interesting visuals and concentrated on making the music mediocre. I believe their biggest hit in the US has been "Don't Dream It's Over."

In the case of Crowded House, I ran into an entire party full of passionate fans. I did this round about 1985, and I did it because I was taking way too many drugs, and crashing parties. I haven't crashed any parties except during this one period in the mid-80's.

One thing about crashing parties is that it can bring you face-to-face with an entire roomful of people of sorts you might otherwise rarely meet. Sometimes the experience was good, as when I crashed parties full of good-looking people who listened to the sort of Top 40 music which I and my friends snickered at. To my surprise, these good-looking people in the mid-1980's with their designer T-shirts and expensive sunglasses were very friendly -- to me. They were very nice. And the music wasn't all that bad, and frankly, it was a bit of a relief to be away from my friends' snobbism. Maybe I should've just stayed there, with the good-looking, sexy people with their unsophisticated tastes in clothing and music. Stayed there forever, kept my snarky opinions to myself, married a beautiful airhead, made beautiful babies, accepted the cushy idiot-son-in-law job and gradually transitioned from keggers to good Scotch and cigars.

But anyway, I didn't, and at another party, the people weren't especially good-looking, and the music was Crowded House. The music was ALL Crowded House. One Crowded House song wouldn't have been especially remarkable, what with "Don't Dream It's Over" being such a huge hit at the time, but three in a row was strange, and four and five in a row were starting to be really disturbing, and then I noticed that a bunch of people were gathered around a small, 1980's-sized TV, and then I realized that there was a Crowded House concert on MTV on the TV and that the audio was coming from the concert broadcast, and THEN I realized that the party was being thrown by fanatical Crowded House fans in order to celebrate, and to experience together, the premiere of the concert broadcast on MTV, and I fled in terror, as you might well imagine, looking for some other party somewhere full of sexy Top-40 fans.

Then there's Wang Chung, famous for their singles "Dance Hall Days" and "Everybody Have Fun Tonight." They're not terrible, but they're really creepy. They strike me as the kind of music I might really love if I were evil.

So I met this guy who was clearly neither evil nor a sophisticated music connoisseur, who talked about Wang Chung all the time. "Have you ever seen the movie To Live and Die in LA?" he asked me. "The whole soundtrack is Wang Chung!" Once again, I fled in horror.

Then there was the guy who couldn't stop talking about Ray Parker, Jr and Raydio. Boy, did he love Raydio. He explained to me over and over that Raydio was spelled with a y because Ray was spelled with a y, although I had thoroughly grasped the concept the first time he'd explained it. Need I say that I fled in deep fear?

If I Had a Billion Dollars --

-- the red light on my computer's mute key, f6, wouldn't go from functional to non-functional or vice versa every time my OS updated. And similarly, I wouldn't have to tell my blog software not to count my own pageviews for the blog every time I turned on the computer, because that box unchecked itself every time I turned off the computer. I can't afford to get a new computer every time one malfunctions, or get it repaired or other fancy rich-guy stuff like that.

If I had a billion dollars I'd have an EV and solar panels on my roof, and so would a few nonprofit organizations, courtesy of me.

If I had a billion dollars I'd have an extra-fancy strap on this watch, here, and I'd pay somebody to attach it to the watch because I'm really bad with that sort of fingertip type work.

If I had a billion dollars, I would finally find out what truffles taste like if you just eat one whole, as opposed to eating some food which just has tiny specks of truffles in it which you can barely see but which make the food irresponsibly expensive for you to eat.

If I had a billion dollars, I would finally know once and for all if becoming rich still leaves you unhappy. I strongly doubt that a billion dollars wouldn't make me very, very happy for a very long time, maybe forever. I think that people who say that money lacks such power simply don't have enough experience with poverty to appreciate being rich. And you'll notice that most of the rich people who say money can't make you happy do NOT give all their money away, and that that's not just because they are too kind to make others unhappy with money, but because they're basically full of shit, in addition to being full of money.

I just did an update, and the red light on my f6 key went from working to not working. I really like that red light when it works. That's what set me off into thinking about having enough money to own multiple computers and and an EV and solar power and to be able to give generously to causes I find to be good and to be able to obtain a truly fine watch band without giving it a second thought and eat all the truffles I could eat.

Here's to Fully Automated Luxury Communism bringing all of those things, and much, much more, to everyone on Earth, very soon. Cheers. First step: vote Trump out. I know, I know, Joe is hardly a Fully Automated Luxury Communist dream come true, but beggars can't be choosers and right now the choice is Trump or Joe, and Joe's a lot closer to want we want even though he's very far from what we want. The Communists in Germany should've voted for Hindenburg along with the Social Democrats in 1932...

Dream Log: Art and Ohio State

I can remember a lot of my dreams since the coronavirus crisis started. Last night's dream was the first one where there was a pandemic in the dream.

I was in Columbus, Ohio, on the campus of the Ohio State University,

in order to attend a meeting intended to aid low-income people. However, the other people at the meeting would not respect social distancing from me, so I left before the meeting started, and wandered around the campus. On the way out of the meeting I found a key on the floor, but I didn't know what to do with it.

Social distancing was not being respected very much at all: for example, an Ohio State football game was about to get underway. I steered clear of the football crowd. On my way past them, I noticed a group of about twenty people in wheelchairs. A member of the Ohio State football team got behind each wheelchair, and together they ran, pushing the wheelchairs ahead of them, into the stadium. The crowd roared as soon as they got a sight of the speeding wheelchairs.

I walked through some campus buildings, looking at some library books which were not shelved in the main library. One book was a literary-and-visual-arts journal for Chilean expatriates. It was written in English, but everything was full of Chilean references which I did not get. I liked the illustrations, though, many of which were in a colorful sort of post-Matisse style.

Then an idiot neighbor of mine, several houses away, woke me up with a hammer and an electrical saw, making some stupid home-improvement stuff, just as he has been waking me up -- and quite a few others in the neighborhood, I'm sure -- very early most Sunday mornings for a long, long time. However, I fell asleep again very quickly, and in my dream, now I was both in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State, and simultaneously at home in Ann Arbor. And my neighbor was no longer a home-improvement boob oblivious to his neighbors and their sleep patterns, and was now instead an artist who used the hammer and saw to make works consisting of vertical rows of wooden panels about 15 inches square. An interesting thing about the panels was that they were decorated -- with paint, mostly -- in a very wide array of colors and styles. I made two fabric panels the same size as his wooden panels, one with a silkscreened image of an early-20th-century American politician, and the other very colorful,and hard-edged, very post-Ellsworth Kelly:

I offered these pieces of fabric to my neighbor, for him to add to the wooden artworks. He bought the one with the silkscreen image of the politician for $10, and passed on the colorful hard-edged piece.

Then I was back in Columbus. I met someone I knew decades ago when I lived in Columbus, and we sat in a huge deserted student union building outside of a shuttered cafe, talking. Suddenly the cafe's manager appeared, tossed me a bunch of keys on a ring and walked away. Just like with the key I'd found outside the meeting earlier, I had no idea what I should do with these keys. Then I woke up.

Jacob Burckhardt

About 35 years ago, David Lee, then the Head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Tennessee, and the instructor of an undergraduate course I was taking, explained to me, as we were chatting between classes, that Germany has a tendency toward the monolithic. More than some other cultures, the Germans tend to regard one person or entity as being the greatest in its category: the greatest conductor, the greatest painter, the greatest automobile manufacturer, the greatest culinary country (not Germany, Germans freely admit) -- the greatest professor of history.

It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,

who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?

Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.

Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.

Rivian, Electric Vehicle Manufacturer

There is a community of electric vehicle enthusiasts on the Internet -- we refer to electric vehicles as EV's, and we call conventional vehicles ICE, which stands for internal combustion engine -- and next to Tesla, the EV company which which is generating the most excitement in the EV community may be Rivian. Rivian was founded in 2009, and it hasn't sold any vehicles yet. The R1T,

a pickup truck, and the R1S, an SUV, are scheduled to go on sale in 2021, or at least that was the schedule. I don't know whether the coronavirus pandemic will delay the debuts of the R1T and the R1S.

Some of you may be thinking that it is taking Rivian an awfully long time to actually start selling, but the thing is, it generally takes a very long time for large automotive companies to get started. For example, Tesla was founded in 2003. The Tesla Roadster and Model S, both made in relatively limited quantities, were introduced in 2008 and 2012, respectively. The Model 3, Tesla's first truly mass-produced vehicle, was first delivered to buyers in 2017.

Speaking of Tesla, Rivian has been making headlines by hiring former Tesla employees, but, according to this story from electrek from July 2019, Rivian had by that time hired more employees from McLaren, Ford and Faraday Future, an EV startup which has been having financial problems.

Speaking of Ford, Rivian has received a large financial investment from Ford, which has announced that it plans to manufacture electric trucks of its own using Rivian's platform. That same platform will also be available to other automotive manufactures who want to make their own EV's around it.

Speaking of large investments in Rivian, Amazon has invested over half a billion dollars in the company, and committed to buy 100,000 of their vehicles by 2030.

I'll give you a moment to shake off being stunned by the news that Amazon signed a contract to buy 100,000 vehicles from one company. Yeah, Amazon is big.

All set? Okay, onward -- obviously, Rivian is also moderately big solely by virtue of that deal with Amazon, and the deal with Ford is also huge, both for the money involved and for the fact that Ford will be building electric Ford trucks based on Rivian platforms. But another big factor in the excitement in the EV community about Rivian is that some people who write or make videos about EV's full-time have seen Rivians up close at car shows and been very impressed, and a privileged few have taken test drives and been very, very impressed, and some have announced that they're going to buy their own Rivians.

Suggested retail price? Something like $65-75,000 and up, depending on the options. Wait, wait, come back! Remember I just told you about Amazon committing to buy 100,000 of these? Is Amazon known for losing money? No. You save a lot with an EV, compared to ICE, in fuel and maintenance costs. A lot. And more, the more miles you drive. Before you just walk away, saying that EV's cost too much, without actually doing all of the math including the expenses of running an EV compared to running an ICE vehicle, ask yourself again, very seriously: is Amazon known for losing money? And while you're at it, look into all of the other large companies, and governments and so forth, who are buying EV's. (Not to mention all the utility companies building huge solar and wind installations.) Oh, they're all schmucks? Yeah, sure they are. They're the schmucks.