Celebrities and Rolex

Just because you have a wonderful talent for acting or singing, or playing the baritone sax, or cooking while talking to cameras about cooking, or even all of the above, there's no guarantee that you will know much at all about any other given thing. Luxury watches, for example. Ask the average person to list as many brands of luxury watches as they can, and they'll say: "Rolex... Uhhhh... Ummmm..."

And celebrities seem to be pretty average when it comes to watches. Over and over again, a headline about some celebrity's watch collection leads to a story about a collection of Rolexes (also known as "the genuine fake Timexes"), or a collection of mostly Rolexes. Over and over again, some person whose talents apart from the world of watches impresses me very much, has disappointed me in this way. I'm just about all out of hope. 

I don't have a lot of room to complain here. Faithful readers of this blog may recall that after suddenly developing a fascination with watches around 2010, and before reaching a certain level of sophistication in my knowledge of watches more recently, I myself, for a couple of years, was fascinated by, indeed, somewhat obsessed with, a certain Rolex model, the platinum Daytona on a platinum bracelet:

Which is a perfectly fine watch. All Rolexes are very high-quality, very dependable and accurate timepieces. Rolex is also an extremely conservative brand, to the point of being boring, with very slight changes in styling and function coming only once in a great while. Also, a Rolex typically will cost about twice as much as an Omega made from comparable materials, with comparable function and quality.

And some might argue that Omegas, too, are somewhat overpriced, because, although, as I mentioned above, Rolex is the only luxury watch brand of which many people have heard, if they've heard of two, there's a good chance that the second brand is Omega, so that their prices may be due more to marketing than to any inherent quality in their products.

Now let's compare this to the point of view of someone who actually knows a bit about luxury watches. Among real connoisseurs, there are three Swiss brands which for decades have been considered the pinnacle of watchmaking: Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantine. Apart from things like very small specialty brands who turn out one custom-made hand-made watch every several years at a price of several million dollars, these three brands have widely been considered to be the very best there is. Although recently, some would say that a fourth Swiss brand, Jaeger-LeCoultre, should be considered alongside or even above the Holy Trinity, and some would say that the German manufacturer A Lange & Soehne is right up there, and others would say Grand Seiko, which recently split off from the Japanese brand Seiko.

All of the brands mentioned so far are relatively conservative in styling. Two Swiss brands which are definitely outside the box with their designs, but which still don't seem to offend the snobs, are MB&F and Urwerk. Two brands which are way outside of the box, which definitely DO offend snobs, are Hublot and Richard Mille. In my opinion, with watches as with anything else, I think that if you give any weight to the opinions and nasty remarks of snobs, it's a real shame. 

But anyway, Rolex is just not in that upper echelon. Someone who really knows about all of those other brands may sneer at you for wearing a Rolex, or make some nasty remark about Rolex being God's way of marking fools who until recently had too much money. Or, if they're nice, they might say that if you're sure you can afford it, and you're sure that it's really really the watch you want, then a Rolex is a fine watch. (And they wouldn't be lying.) But they also might urge you to shop around a little in the other brands I've mentioned, and there are still others that could be mentioned, dozens of brands which are just as good as, if not better than Rolex.

So, why is Rolex so much more well-known? It's rather mysterious. It's as if Mercedes-Benz were the only luxury auto brand people had ever heard of -- unless maybe they'd also heard of BMW (in analogy to Omega).

Many watch brands, including Rolex, have what are known as "brand ambassadors," famous people who wear their watches in public in exchanges for free watches, or money, or both. Rolex has brand ambassadors -- perhaps it won't shock you to learn that Jack Nicklaus is one -- and they have ads in fancy magazines. But not enough of either one to explain their complete world domination. Not enough to explain why there are waiting lists years long for the choicest Rolex models.

I just had a sinister idea. The fact that most celebrities who collect watches, collect Rolexes and not much else, is tremendous advertising for Rolex. Maybe Rolex has many more brand ambassadors than they admit. Maybe they have shadowy agents everywhere in the world of fame. Whenever a performer or athlete seems about to break through into fame, perhaps the anonymous Rolex guy appears and says, "Hey, Rolex admires what you do. And we'd like you to have a Rolex on us -- Hell, take two, they're small! Heh heh heh. Yeah, there are some vintage watches in there with the new ones. You could mix it up. New is interesting. Old is interesting in a different way. We'd just ask one favor: don't tell anybody that Rolex gave these watches to you. Let people think that you bought them. And then maybe I'll come around to visit you on a regular basis."

Yes, that's a rather extreme speculation of mendacity. But Rolex has a rather extreme position in the watch market. It's extremely difficult to explain.

12th-Century European Vernacular Literatures

In the 12th century, an anonymous, book-length epic poem, El Cid, very loosely based on the exploits of an 11th-century Castilian knight, was written in Spanish, as well as one in French, La Chanson de Roland, very loosely based on the exploits of one of Charlemagne's generals, and one in German, das Nibelungenlied, very loosely based on some events in central Europe in the 5th century, mixed with some pre-Christian Germanic mythology. 

 

 Each, in a way, was either the beginning of literature in each of those languages, or was there very close to the beginning. I say "in a way," because creative literature including poems and fanciful stories had been written in each of those language for centuries beforehand. Still, an overall description or representative anthology of Spanish will tend to start with El Cid, of French with La Chanson of Roland, and although anthologies and descriptions of German literature tend to go back earlier than the the 12th century and the Nibelungenlied, perhaps they shouldn't always. Although it does so happen that a greater volume of poetry from before the 12th century has survived in German than in Spanish or French, to be honest, most of this very early German literature is of very little interest to anyone but specialists. El Cid, La Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied are among the earliest works in each of their respective languages to be widely read and re-interpreted today. A continuous, conscious literature in each of those languages goes back directly to those three works, and not much further, if at all.

Why did Spanish, French and German literature each get going in such a big way around the same time, and why did a long anonymous quasi-historical epic poem play such a big part of this beginning in each language? I have no idea. I simply noticed that these three epic poems all appeared in the 12th century, and that there wasn't much by way of written literature in their languages before that. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's much more than a coincidence. I also have no idea whether these three anonymous poems started the great waves of literature which started in Spanish, French and German at that time -- or if they just happened to be a part of that sudden explosion. In any case, beginning in the 12th century, many poems were published in those languages with authors' names attached to them. 

Latin literature, including Latin poems and Latin epics, continued to be written in Spain, France and Germany, and would continue to be written there for a long, long time to come, just as they were written everywhere from Iceland to Poland and Sicily. The sudden appearance of Spanish, French and German literature in the 12th century may seem like a large-scale explosion to us today. From the point of view of those who read and wrote Latin at the time, I'm not sure whether it caused much of a ripple. It could be that many 12th-century Latin authors and scholars never even heard about the new vernacular literatures. Big things often grow from small beginnings, beginnings which come to seem much larger than they were at the time. And as far the general populations were concerned -- most of them couldn't read any language yet.

And it's very likely that some people know much more about all of this than I do. I just sort of accidentally noticed some similarities between a few poems.

Innovation in EV and Renewable-Energy Technology

For you Republicans: "EV" means "electric vehicle." Those things which you believe are well-meant, but don't work, whose sales are booming worldwide, because they work really well and are rapidly improving. The way that you believe that solar and wind energy are well-meant, but that the time when they will provide electricity more cheaply than coal or natural gas or oil is some time off. And, in a way, you're right about that: that time is some time off and keep getting further away, because it is years ago. That's right: wind and solar have been cheaper than coal and gas for years, and they keep getting cheaper, and coal and gas and oil don't. That's the reason why more and more wind and solar power plants keep being made, and why more and more rooftops have solar panels on them: not because of widespread insanity, as you may have been told, but because it's a better deal. Financially. Even before you start to calculate the value of being able to continue to breathe.

To be fair, some of you Republicans are already with me, but to be real, an awful lot of you are still buying (or selling) a line of BS from big polluters.

Utilities are also not necessarily everybody's friends. They themselves are building big solar and wind plants, and in some cases are even eager to build solar generating systems on people's roofs which they, the utilities, own, not the owner of the building, all because they would rather make the profits of generating electricity by solar panels than see you make those profits by generating a lot of electricity on your roof and selling what you don't use to the grid. In the past four years they have done a very good job of taking those profits out of other people's hands.

On the other hand, off-grid solar and wind are growing fast: people who've decided they don't need the power utilities at all. The word "utility" means the quality of being of some use to someone. When electric power utilities take worse and worse advantage of their customers, they undermine their very reason for existing. A strategy which may seem unsustainable in the long term.

Those of you who are technologically-literate, regardless of political affiliation, know that the biggest current problem with EV's is batteries. And you know that also when it comes to EV batteries, there is an awful lot of disinformation out there. The importance of range, of how far an EV can go without recharging, is exaggerated. The abundance of charging options is hidden from public knowledge as much as possible. And the rate at which EV batteries degrade, lose their power, turns out to be not as great as even EV enthusiasts feared, let alone the stories that circulate in the right wing. 2004 Nissan Leafs are being sold second-hand, why, because they're a great deal, and their batteries, their original batteries, still work pretty well. 

Still, EV batteries are a problem because they're very heavy, and because they take a while to recharge. (Not as long as you might think if you get your news from right-wing sources, but...)

So it occurred to me a while ago that EV's could be recharged from satellites. That's right: besides radio and TV and Internet signals, you can also send electrical charges wirelessly over great distances. The wireless recharging technology is not very advanced right now, or it would be widely used right now, but eventually, unless some other technology I'm not thinking of beats it to the punch, the current aggravation with EV batteries will be overcome, not just by better batteries, but by satellite recharging. This means that EV's will have to carry much smaller battery packs, which in turn means that they will be much lighter, which means that they will be even peppier and more efficient than they currently are.

So that occurred to me a while ago, and I conferred with my brother, who is a mechanical engineer, and he confirmed that this has already occurred to other people and they're working on it. 

But then yesterday, while my mind was up there in space with those satellites, it also occurred to me that electricity can be generated in space -- space, where overcast skies are less of a problem than the problems which Republicans tirelessly exaggerate in their attempts to convince people that solar power will never work.

And of course, solar power has been used in outer space for a long, long time. How long? Since 1958. 

When googling this subject, I came across things which I don't yet understand at all. But people have been working on large-scale solar power generation in space since the 1970's. 

So, to summarize, renewable energy has already been a better deal than coal, gas and oil for some time, and it will continue to improve much more quickly than fossil-fuel technology. How great the benefits will be which the public reaps from the change to wind and solar, and how fast the change will happen, depends on education: education of scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians, but also the education of the public in general about the political and economic forces which are slowing the transition for the sake of the short-term financial interests of a few people, at the cost of everyone's health.

Random Notes

I recently, finally, got ahold of a copy of Steven Runciman's History of the First Bulgarian Empire. But whoever made this hinky edition -- they forgot to include the index! Is this important to me? Yes, it's important to me! It's not as bad as if they had left out the 3rd chapter and the bibliography, but only in the sense that cutting off one of my ears would not be as bad as cutting off one of my legs. It's still very bad! And it's just completely thrown me off. They left in a map of Bulgaria at the end of the book, but the reprint is so small and so poorly-done that it's just about useless. Are there more maps, and/or other illustrations in a legit edition of A History of the First Bulgarian Empire? Hey! You find a copy of a legit edition, and then you tell me!

I've been binge-watching Bill Burr, and I don't hate him so much any more. He seems like a guy in therapy, saying shocking, horrible things because those things are inside of him, and he has to get them out in order to deal with them, and heal. Except that in Burr's case it also makes him a very successful stand-up comedian. Burr has said, repeatedly, that he knows he's a very sick, damaged person, and that he's trying to get better. That alone makes him better than a Republican. He's Democratic/Green, apparently, although he very often enrages Democrats and Greens. And Republicans, and Libertarians, and independents, and apolitical aesthetes.

And he doesn't seem to mind if he shocks people, which I think is a good position for a "serious" comedian to take. I'll give you an example: Bill was talking about Trump supporters who love the way that, according to them, Trump "triggers" overly-sensitive liberals with his Tweets. Bill is not impressed. He says that Trump offends maybe 60% of the public with his Tweets, which any moron could do. Bill says that it would actually take some creativity to offend nearly everyone with a Tweet. Like, over 90% of the general public. For example, he says, you could tweet: "Trump is such a bastard, he made me vote for a woman!" and than just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

And he made me laugh when he talked about airlines. I would've thought the whole topic of airlines was played and tired for stand-up comedy, but Bill had some nice touches. He talked about having flown coach for 20 years before making it to first class. His description of first class air travel is nice: for example, he describes a seat in first class as "a chair large enough to hold a human body." And he describes being seated in the back of coach once during that earlier time, and there was still an empty seat next to him close to takeoff, and he started to have hope that he would experience what he called "poor man's first class," being able to stretch out on two coach seats. But then, just before takeoff, a very fat man got onto the plane, and sure enough, he was coming all the way to the back to sit next to Bill, and as the fat man approached, Bill began to scream and kick "like Quint sliding down into the mouth of the shark at the end of Jaws."

There are some comics who actually are right-wing bigots. And then there are some who joke about things we don't usually talk about in public, and say the quiet parts loud, and are sometimes mistaken for bigots. Like Sam Kinison and "Dice" Clay and Sarah Silverman. And Bill Burr. Okay, keep hating him if you want to. Bill will certainly understand.

Early yesterday, Twitter blocked an account from the Trump campaign. And then later yesterday, Twitter crashed. Or did it? I became very paranoid, wondering whether Trump had shut Twitter down (I can't be the only one who was wondering. He's threatened to do it numerous times), wondering whether a great crackdown had finally begun, whether an unmarked van was coming at last to break down my front door and take me to an undisclosed location. But I'm still at large. 

BE STRONG, MURRKA! THREE MORE MONTHS! MEE R MUNKEE! MEE LUV YU! VOTE 4 TH OTHER GUY!

What I Should Have Done

What I SHOULD have done, of course, was to google bookcase easiest to assemble BEFORE ordering a bookcase from Amazon. The easy 20-minute assembly process I finally finished today was brutally difficult, days long, and familiar. And if I hadn't had the hammer and screwdrivers I bought because a recent conversation with my brother reminded me that I really needed some tools already -- it would have been impossible. The moral of the story is, I still need more bookcases, and I'll research which ones are for us non-home-improvement types before I order.

I didn't assemble this one perfectly over the past several days. I'd assembled enough bookcases more or less exactly like this one 

 

to know that I wasn't going to assemble this one perfectly. But I may have come closer to actually following all of the instructions correctly this time than ever before.

Strangely enough, though, I hadn't assembled enough of them to realize that I should never, ever put myself through it again. For some reason, it took one more. Well, learning takes what it takes. Maybe that's why they call it learning. Hmm.

Dream Log: Detroit and Sweden

 In my dream last night, it was the year 2020, I was my real age, my Mom was still alive and COVID didn't exist. Mom was driving, I was riding shotgun, and we were driving at night through an area of downtown Detroit filled with huge buildings which had been breweries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but which had been abandoned for some time more recently. The city government had begun a program to reclaim these brewery buildings, putting new homes and businesses into them. I told Mom I thought this was a great idea, and I thought that these buildings looked very solid and that they would provide great "shells" for the new development. 

In real life, although I know of a few "Brewery Districts" in which old brewery buildings have been re-purposed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I have no idea whether brewery buildings are inherently superior to any other buildings in any structural way. 

 

I would not be able to look at any large old abandoned buildings and be able to tell you much of anything about them. And I do not happen to know anything at all about any breweries, past or present, anywhere near Detroit.

Mom seemed skeptical about this renewal project -- and in real life she knew far more about construction and renovation than I do -- but I told her that it had already begun, and pointed out some new renovation here and there: a hotel, a micro-brewery, some apartments among the windowless wreckage. 

 Our destination was on  the other side of the brewery district: less built-up, mostly residential, home to many Swedish-Americans whose ancestors had immigrated in the 19th century, many of whom could still speak Swedish as well as English, and often could read and write it, too. A second-hand bookstore in this neighborhood was reputed to have a copy of a Swedish Bible which was interesting to me for some reason not explained in the dream. It was a small store. A woman about my age owned it and seem to be the only employee. 

Mom said she had to go. I said I'd be fine, there was a bus stop nearby.

The bookstore owner had been waiting for me, and she happily handed me two books about the Bible I was looking for. It turned out that she didn't have a copy of this Swedish edition of the Bible itself. She showed me some other books she thought might interest me, but it was clear that she wasn't on my wavelength when it came to books. For example, she showed me a copy of a Swedish translation of Nietzsche's Götzen-Dämmerung. A very large proportion of her inventory seemed to be modern non-Swedish items translated into Swedish. To me, a real scholar is someone who avoids translations whenever he or she is able to read the original language, except for very rare exceptions when a translation has some intrinsic interest, as did the Swedish Bible did, which this bookstore didn't have.

Then the dream changed completely, and I was inside a virtual-reality discussion group where participants were able to print out messages telepathically. An image of the sender's face came automatically with each message, on virtual objects reminiscent of those in broadcasts of American football which come onscreen showing a player's face and some information about the player. The participants seemed to be mostly Swedish-American, to judge from their names and the fact that most of them were blonde. Everyone was talking about the changes to the Brewery District. Then I woke up.

Beelzebub

So: in the Vice-Presidential debate, a fly landed on Mike Pence's hair, and stayed there for a while, and now some people are calling Pence "Beelzebub."

Because "Beelzebub" means "Lord of the flies," and yes that's also where William Golding got the name for the novel everyone in my generation was supposed to read in school but many of us didn't. I'm also reminded of one the many great moments in Rob Roy, 

 

 

a much better movie than Braveheart but Braveheart was released like a month later and destroyed it commercially:

Montrose : Great men such as yourself draw rumor as shite draws flies. Duke of Argyll : You are the shite, Montrose, and the flies upon it!

And I'm reminded of that because I disagree with those who say that Pence is even worse than Trump -- I mean, have you seen Trump?! Have you heard Trump? Have you SMELLED Trump?!

 

To stay with the metaphorical theme of this post, in my opinion the biggest offense committed by Mike Pence is the same as that committed by most Republicans over the past four years, namely, polishing a turd. Admittedly, Pence is even more guilty of this one than are most of his colleagues.

Which is why I'm so struck by the physical resemblance between Pence and Franz von Papen, one of the clique of German upper-class twits who, in January 1933, thought it would be a good idea to appoint Hitler Chancellor of Germany, figuring it would be easy to control him -- a real world-class, Hall of Fame bad idea.

Which brings us back around to Hal Holbrook in All the President's Men, telling Robert Redford that these guys weren't very bright, and things got out of hand.

So get out there and vote if you haven't already. Or stay in there and vote from there, which ever one applies. You know what I mean.

 

Dream Log: Fun with Physicists

Before going to bed last night I browsed through a two-volume work: Electromagnetic Theory: A Critical Examination of Fundamentals by Alfred O'Rahilly (1884-1969), who wrote mostly in the genre of theology. Published in 1938, O'Rahilly's work on electromagnetics rejected major aspects of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, and, as a consequence, also much of the mainstream physics which followed Maxwell, including Einstein's theory of relativity. Whether O'Rahilly altered his views on physics after 1945, when two rather large ka-booms had offered striking practical demonstration of the soundness of Einstein's formula E=mc2, I have not yet been able to determine.

So anyway, that's what I was reading before I went to sleep last night. And then I dreamed that I was hanging out in someone's living room with some contemporary physicists -- conventional ones, a dozen or so, both genders and a wide range of ages. The subject of O'Rahilly never came up. Neither did the subject of COVID-19. We did, however, talk about Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Susskind and others. To be more precise: the physicists mostly talked and I listened.

One of the physicists, a thin, grey-haired man in a worn-out sweater, was also an amateur sculptor. He had made pieces each of which was intended to combine with one of us as a temporary, partly-living sculpture. The sculptures were plastic or metal or both, some looked somewhat like molecules, others looked somewhat like abstract animals. The art show was just for us. It was great. We would each stand next to the sculpture made for us, positioned according to the physicist-sculptor's instructions, as we quoted a famous physicist of the past. I quoted Bohr. There's no way I could quote a word of Bohr from memory right now. Nor could I explain any of his ideas to you. I was not mistaken in the dream for a physicist, and every other person in the dream was quite an advanced physicist. But everyone was very friendly, and they all seemed more than glad to explain any point of physics which was unclear to me. 

After the art show, we put on coats and headed out into a wintry, snowy afternoon. There was a woods nearby, and today was supposed to be especially good for bird watching in that woods, and sure enough, we saw woodpeckers and finches and cardinals and an owl. We kept walking through the woods until we got to a university campus where a conference was underway in which some of our group were scheduled to speak.

On the other side of the woods, we had to walk across a two-lane road, and then we would be on the campus. A new car with the windows rolled down, full of young men, probably rich kids and students at this college, and probably not straight-A students, roared past while the young men inside yelled obscenities in our general direction and one of them hurled some litter at us. He missed. A young woman in our group mumbled something which I didn't hear, but everyone else in the group laughed quite heartily, so I was going to ask her to repeat it, but I woke up.

Dream Log: Driver of Tragic Celeb

 I dreamed that a celebrity, no one I recognized from real life, a former Olympic athlete turned occasional actress, had had a severe accident during an attempted acrobatic publicity stunt. She had severe wounds to several abdominal muscles. Doctors told her that it was unlikely that she would heal soon, or that she would ever heal completely. 

She left the hospital against medical advice, stole a big bag of cocaine, and this was when she met me on the street. She said she was in trouble and needed a driver. I didn't recognize her in the dream, although she was very famous. She said she needed help, so I helped her.

 She was being searched for by a lot of people. Law enforcement wanted to arrest her because she was in possession of a large amount of cocaine. A crime organization was looking for her, because it was their cocaine she had stolen. And news media were going crazy, because their "this is a private tragedy and nobody else's business"-button broke decades ago and apparently cannot be repaired.

While we were driving, she asked me to turn on the radio news, and I noticed her taking the bag of cocaine out of her purse and applying cocaine directly to the stitches on her abdomen (I don't know whether this would actually result in pain relief in real life), and that's how I put two and two together and figured out who she was. It wasn't long after that when she asked me to put on some music instead of the news.

She told me that when the cocaine ran out, or when she was about to get caught, whichever came first, she was going to kill herself. "Do you judge me for that?" she asked.

"No," I said. "Because nobody knows exactly what it's like to be anybody else."

 "That's right," she said. "You'd be amazed at how people judge celebrities."

"I've noticed the way a lot of people do it," I said. "Maybe most people. Not me. I also don't watch so-called 'reality' TV. Not that I assume you've been on it."

"Not knowingly," she said. "Not willingly."

"So possibly you're in the background in a couple of shots."

"It's possible," she said, and we laughed.

"I try not to judge people," I said. "But I do try to help them. If I could help you -- if someone could help, somehow, so that things got better, and you didn't want to kill yourself anymore --"

She interrupted me, saying, "You're starting to come close to judging me." We were both quiet for a while.

We came to Fargo, North Dakota, and suddenly, instead of the year 2020, everything was the 1950's: our car, other vehicles, road signs, storefronts, everything. Then I woke up.