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Open Mike: Shut In and Locked Down? That's What Old Movies Are For (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]

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Cars and music both play big roles in American Graffiti. Mel's drive-in, which was in San Francisco, was demolished not long after the movie was filmed.

This isn't a movie review. It's a review of one guy watching one movie.

I read that people are watching old movies because they're penned in the house by the pandemic, so, on a whim, I decided to get with the program. Clicked on Amazon Prime and American Graffiti popped up. So I watched again a movie that I first saw when I was 16.

It has always been one of my favorite movie memories. Just as an aside, most peoples' favorite movies come from the ones they saw during their formative years. It's a sign of a real movie buff when that's not the case. I have a few older movies on my favorites list, but that's only because of the Dartmouth Film Society, where I saw lots of old classic movies...during, yup, my formative years.

Unlike some old movies that I cherish in memory, this one was just as good from the perspective of late middle age as it was when I was a kid. I thought it was hilarious when I was a teenager—I laughed out loud in the theater when the cop car pops its axle (a scene which was much more subversive and transgressive then)—and now the jokes no longer strike home with nearly the same force. But if anything, the movie is even richer to me now as a period piece, a character study, and a masterpiece of pacing, editing, storyline, casting, and dialogue.

Here's where you stop reading if you don't like spoilers
It's a story of four young men who've graduated from high school and whom life is about to take in separate directions. There's John Milner, the greaser mechanic and hot rodder who plays the tough guy but has a soft side; persecuted but still game and friendly Terry the Toad; and best friends Steve and Curt (Steve dates Curt's sister), who discover they're on opposite sides of their longtime plan to leave their hometown and take their lives higher and farther. In one epic all-nighter, John gradually becomes a tragic figure, a personification of the old Shakespearian line "uneasy is the head that wears a crown," even as he is gradually revealed to be tender-hearted and gallant; and (as the movie's clown figure), luckless, ugly-duckling Terry magically gets everything he ever wanted—great car, beautiful girl—and has the worst night of his life. Steve and Curt start out as opposites—they've worked for months to leave their little California town for college "in the East," but Steve is eager to escape and Curt is having second thoughts. Over the course of the evening, Curt has to confront his desire for something more, something "exciting and dazzling," in form of a fleeting connection with an elusive blonde in a white Thunderbird who he chases for the rest of the evening, and he gets dragged into various crimes and associations that could make remaining in town uncomfortable for him. Meanwhile, it turns out that Steve had probably been gung-ho about escaping because he'd seen his likely future all too clearly: he'd been feeling the tractor-beam pull of marriage and a humdrum small-town life. The appeal of which becomes clear to him when he almost loses it, in the fiery penultimate scene. By morning, the two friends have both accepted their destinies and have switched places—Curt leaves, Steve stays.

And as Curt's plane disappears in the sky (the movie's version of riding off into the sunset), we learn the fate of our four protagonists.

Harrison Ford, who interrupted his chosen career as a carpenter to play John Milner's hot-rod challenger, refused to cut his hair for the part and got drunk on set every night

What I didn't know about the movie is how hard the then-little-known George Lucas had to fight to realize the vision he had for the film. He realized that much of the culture he took for granted in his own teen years had been a candle in the wind, a brief moment between the complacent 1950s and the Kennedy assassination, the "British Invasion," and the counterculture of the tumultuous '60s. He wanted to commemorate it accurately, if also lovingly, and the movie has been widely praised for being a sociological record of what that brief era felt like to live in. His intention was to direct; but the first script he commissioned was cynical and conventional, so he fired the screenwriter he had hired and began to craft the story line himself—the partners he wanted to work with were off toiling on other projects. In the final draft those partners returned, and the trio worked especially hard to rewrite the storyline between Steve and his sweetheart Laurie. It shows. We learn a great deal about those two characters and their relationship through the most economical of means, and as the movie progresses it becomes a romance that's all the more beautiful for being so true to life.

The aging, popsicle-eating disc jockey (Wolfman Jack playing himself) knows he can't live up to his on-air persona, so he stays in the shadows. As with everyone else, Curt has his number.

The film was one of the first to use a series of real pop songs in place of a soundtrack—a commonplace technique since then—and clearing the rights to the many songs was a significant impediment to bringing the project to life. One holdout was Elvis Presley, so there are no Elvis songs in American Graffiti. Matching songs to scenes is also believed to have been an important part of the way George Lucas went about organizing his material.

It was shot in a low-key, unassuming, vaguely verité style on 35mm film. Like Asphalt Jungle, another favorite of mine, most of the action takes place at night, with the exception of the final scene.

Probably the most moving scene in what was designed as a comedy is the final pane, the epilogue as it were, that shows the fate of each of the four friends. Diverge their lives did...one died in Viet Nam while another (it's implied) dodged the draft in Canada, for instance. (I assumed when I was 16 that Curt was the fictional alter-ego of the writer of the movie. Not true, exactly. But in the context of the fictional world of the movie I'm going to keep thinking so.) In any event, knowing in advance the contents of that last pane makes the brief junkyard scene far more poignant—the king foreshadowing his own downfall—and lends retrospective nobility to the hapless Toad.

What's past was prologue
American Graffiti is that rara avis in Hollywood, a work of artistic integrity and authorial vision, and it's very famous now. Ironically, given that it was rejected by no less than four big studios and criticized by studio bosses as a non-starter because it didn't have any stars, many of its then-unknown actors went on to become big names in movies and on television. Even the woman in the Thunderbird, seen only in glimpses, obliquely, went on to star in a sitcom. Director Lucas, who arguably couldn't have made Star Wars if it weren't for the success of American Graffiti, is now one of the most famous and richest filmmakers in history. And the movie itself earned the distinction of having the largest return for the smallest investment of any American film ever: as a low-budget first effort by an unknown, all-in, including its promotion budget, it cost about one and a quarter million dollars to make, and it has earned hundreds of millions worldwide. There have been bigger blockbusters, but none were ever made on such a shoestring. The list of the honors it's been given is as long as your arm—it's included in numerous top-100 lists. It lost out for Best Picture in 1973 to The Sting, a good film on the level of The Grifters and Blood Simple, but which of the two would you call the better movie now?

I'm sure most of you have seen it. But it's a nice movie to rewatch. Seeing it again reconnected me not only to a vanished America I never knew firsthand, not only to my teen self, but to a style of movie-making I miss. A lovely film to revisit.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

David Hamilton: "Ironically The Sting was one of the first movies I saw growing up. I still haven’t seen American Graffiti. That’ll be rectified this weekend."

Duncan: "What a great review. Makes me want to watch it again after all these years."

fred fowler: "What a pleasant surprise to see your comments today regarding American Graffiti. It remains one of my favorite movies and was one of those rare but wonderful films that when viewed for the first time with neither knowledge or expectation, one is completely smitten. Having just turned 74 I very much lived many of the automotive and cultural aspects of the movie. Those also being my formative years, many of those same elements remain in essence part of what I value and am entertained by. I have also felt the movie in many ways was a metaphor for the country with the epic all-nighter being the fleeting innocence and rebellious good time of the '50s all too harshly supplanted forever by the dawn of the of the '60s. I agree it has more than aged well and is a touchstone I periodically revisit."

Bruno Gonzalez: "I saw American Graffiti for the first time in the summer of 1976 during my first visit to the U.S.from France (a cross-country Greyhound adventure). The cinema was a small room in an abandoned building in Cannery Row, Monterey; no seats, you had to sit on cushions right on the concrete floor and try to keep for a while some kind of not-too-back-breaking position. I loved the movie, I was 19 and a hot rod enthusiast.

"The abandoned building where the cinema was located was in fact part of the Hovden Cannery, the site of what became eight years later the world-class Monterey Aquarium; that part of the old cannery still exists, just near the entrance to the Aquarium. I had been attracted to Monterey and Cannery Row in the first place because of my interest for John Steinbeck. I had already read all his novels and wanted to experience the places he rendered so vividly in some of his best writings. The yellow Deuce coupe, the old cannery on the waterfront, everything came together—what a cultural shock.

"Serendipitously, many years later, my son Paul moved to Monterey to do his PhD in biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, just next door to the Aquarium.... Every time I visited him there, I passed by this building forever culturally linked to so many things that have mattered a lot to me, and still do. Like Curt, I now live in Canada."

David Comdico: "Great film. It was shot in chronological order to which, I think, Ron Howard responded along the lines of: 'George we're actors, we know how to act to a script.' But Lucas wanted the actors to look more tired as the film ran on. It's almost a shame that he got lost in the Star Wars franchise. The use of widescreen along with the cinema verité style create a very unique look that still feels current.

"Another great movie about California/American car culture is Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, starring James Taylor."

Mike replies: Re 'It's almost a shame that he got lost in the Star Wars franchise,' couldn't agree more. I would have loved it if he'd gone on to a string of similarly excellent naturalistic movies about real people and real life in the real world. I never would have begrudged him Star Wars, but he got diverted into it (and other popular fantasy) for the rest of his life. And there goes that. You know what they say: Oh well.

Peter: "Although it came out after my first set of 'formative years,' one of my favorites is Animal House, mostly because I spent four malformed years as a member of a college fraternity that was very much like the one in the movie. To this day, I can still put real names to all of the main characters in the movie."

Russell Scheid: "I grew up in Walnut Creek, 75 miles away from Modesto. 'Cruising the Main' was a such a highlight of my high school years. From flirting with the opposite sex at red lights between car windows to dragging between stop lights, the California car culture was unlike any other. Every time I watch American Graffiti I'm transported back to those glory years where instead of Bloods vs. Crips, it was Mustangs vs. Camaros."

The Bandana Republic (OT)

Health workers don't have adequate PPE.

That's something I have to be careful about when I write—explaining acronyms. If you know what a JPEG or an EXIF is, the terms communicate, and you don't stumble over them. But if I use the term DJST, say, and you don't know what DJST means, I've just tripped you up and interrupted your flow as a reader. It's certainly not acceptable for a writer to think everybody knows what DJST is and move on. You have to know your audience.

Anyway, I had to Google "PPE." I had been reading an article that introduced the acronym cold, so I went back to re-read the first part of the article to find out what the hell PPE means. As you probably know, the convention in short-form writing is that the first time an acronym is used, it is written out, with the initials it's thereafter to be known as in parentheses after it. Like this: "personal protective equipment (PPE)." And no, it's not proper to capitalize the words of the term just because you're going to make an acronym out of it, so you wouldn't write "Personal Protective Equipment."

...And technically, PPE is not even an acronym. It's an intialism, which is a term composed of the initial letters of successive words. Initialisms that are pronounced as words are acronyms, like POTUS or SNAFU. Initialisms are terms where the letters themselves are pronounced, like DoJ (dee-oh-jay) or USA (you-ess-ay). PPE is an initialism because we say it pee-pee-ee.

Shocked
Health workers don't have adequate PPE.

This is such a shocking scandal that I can't believe it's not what everyone is talking about. Here we are talking about projected shortfalls in hospital beds and ventilators, but what's the very most essential and most difficult to resupply link in society's medical lifeline?!

Personnel!

You think it takes a long time to test a vaccine?! Dear Lord. Try replacing an experienced. knowledgeable, highly trained nurse.

Dr. Marcello Natali was a general practitioner who treated patients in the town of Codogno, where Italy's outbreak of novel coronavirus originated. He was a second-generation doctor. He died because his hospital ran out of PPE—disposable gloves, it is believed, in his case. (He had been reduced to using hand sanitizer to protect himself.) Like any doctor of his age, he was the product of years of medical school training and decades of experience. Can he be replaced with a snap of the fingers?

Italy, hard hit by the pandemic, lost 627 souls on Friday, up from 427 the day before. Gruppo Italiano per la Medicina Basata sulle Evidenze (GIMBE) published a report last Wednesday saying that more than 2,600 health workers in that country have been infected, amounting to 8.3% of all cases there.

And of all the countries in the world, the USA's trajectory with the virus so far resembles Italy's the most closely.

The supply of doctors and nurses is limited. And if they're not there, it's going to take a long, long time to refill that pipeline. That is, if anyone still wants to be a doctor or a nurse in countries where they aren't even provided with adequate PPE in dangerous crises. And you think running out of toilet paper is bad? STFU. (Okay, maybe I'm getting a little carried away with the initialism leitmotif here. Sorry.)

Abandoned
Marcello Natali died all alone, isolated in an ICU. He was 57. On Facebook, his friend Silvestro Scotti, President of Italy’s National Federation of Doctors and General Practitioners, said "I have no more tears."

As a former manufacturing powerhouse, it's pathetic that the USA now can't even supply doctors and nurses with enough N95 masks. Never mind ventilators for all the people who will, very soon, need them. As I'm sure you've heard, on Thursday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated, for the second time in a week, its guidelines for health workers concerning the use of face protection such as N95 respirators and surgical masks. As the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy too drily put it, "To the surprise of many, the guidance recommended that nurses, doctors, and staff fashion homemade masks out of scarves and bandanas if there is a shortage of face masks in clinics and hospitals."

So that's what America has become, then: a Bandana Republic.

Pathetic and sad. The more I researched this yesterday, the angrier I got.

Health workers don't have adequate PPE. Why is this not being treated as a matter of the highest possible urgency? What more valuable and critical resource do we have right now than our healthcare workers?

I don't know what we as private citizens can do. Agitate, I guess. All I know is, this isn't an afterthought. I don't know how we as private citizens light bigger fires under the butts of the idiots in charge, but we need to do something. Health workers are our front-line soldiers, our bastion of defense, our thin scrubs-green-colored line, and they might be your (or your parent's or child's or friend's) life preserver when you are drowning and literally can't breathe.

Agitate we should. However we can. Health workers' lives are at stake.

Don't just sit there! (Hey, there it is: DJST).

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

JimH: "Don't forget the other workers who are keeping us safe—those who operate and maintain utilities like electricity, water, and the Internet.

"With everyone working from home, the Internet has become another critical utility. My doctors are doing phone and online consultations to stop visits to offices. Emergencies depend on wireless and Internet communications. We worry that the internet is going to be overloaded. Service providers are already dropping bandwidth caps and stepping up. But users can help too. If you are working at home, it's best to not stream movies in the middle of the day when workers are busiest. Wait till the evening when you usually do it. If you can, change your settings to regular video resolution not high definition—that reduces bandwidth tremendously. Watching video on your mobile device eats up cell phone bandwidth. Emergency workers depend on wireless devices to do their job. They use the same cell phone networks we do. And also conserve water and electricity. We really depend on these services, as do our healthcare workers."

Chris Kern: "(Somewhat off-topic even for an off-topic post.) Mike said: 'Initialisms that are pronounced as words are acronyms, like POTUS or SNAFU. Initialisms are terms where the letters themselves are pronounced, like DoJ (dee-oh-jay) or USA (you-ess-ay).'

"I don’t know whether you ever took a course with John Kemeny while you were at Dartmouth, but, as I’m sure you know, he and his collaborator, Tom Kurtz, invented an early, extremely easy-to-learn computer programming language known by the acronym BASIC. Kemeny was a brilliant man and an outstanding lecturer, and while English was his second language (he was born in pre-war Hungary) he had acquired a mastery of and great affection for it. Anyway, more than once I heard him opine on the proper way to concoct an acronym in his adopted language. It should not only be a real English word, he insisted, but the word must also be descriptive of the thing being named by the acronym. Anything else simply wouldn’t do.

"BASIC? It stands for 'beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code.' Perfect!"

Mike replies: Now this is really off-off-topic (like off-off-Broadway), but I'll tell the story anyway. I was fortunate when I was at Dartmouth in that I got to have a number of personal, one-on-one conversations with President Kemeny.

It happened like this. I was all aggrieved about some issue of the day or another, and marched into the Administration building (actually I forget where his office was, although I have a visual mental picture of the inside of it) and asked to see him. I was told he had office hours at a certain time. Somewhat taken aback at the idea of actually speaking to him, I signed up for one of his office hours.

When the time came we had a very satisfying, far-reaching conversation, at the end of which his secretary tried to interrupt several times because he had gone too long. I think we talked for something like an hour and twenty minutes vs. the allotted hour. Then when we were wrapping up, he said something to the effect that it was nice to talk to a student, because frequently no one took advantage of his student office hours and he would sit there by himself! Well, I didn't need more encouraging than that—I figured if no one else wanted to talk to him during his open office hours, I would. So I went in most weeks and would talk with him if no one else was around wanting to see him.

He took to using me as a sort of casual, impromptu bellwether of student opinion, and several times asked me to sound out students about various issues of campus life. I would then bring up his topic, whatever it was, with friends, or at keg parties, or in the dining hall, and "report back" so to speak. We often talked about various ideas he had for changes and reforms to student and campus life and activities. He had lots of ideas, and the window he opened to me of the difficulties of running a college was fascinating. It was naturally much more complicated than I could have imagined.

The only problem was that his secretary very much didn't care for me, because often our talks went past the time allotted and she would have to interrupt and nag him with increasing insistence to get him back on his schedule. He would resist her for a while and then, with reluctance, bow to her wishes and bring the chat to an end—although sometimes he would conclude and then we'd talk for ten more minutes. I recall that I had read in a book some phrase like "shooting daggers with her eyes" or something like that, and had no idea what it could have meant...until I met Dr. Kemeny's secretary! She didn't look at me much, but when she did....well, "shooting daggers" was about it all right.  :-)

He was a fascinating guy with far-ranging interests. I never did draw him out much on the topic of Albert Einstein. I wrote more about him here.

I like to exaggerate and say we talked every week for the better part of a year, but being flatly honest with myself it's possible we actually spoke six times altogether, as few as that. Might have been a few more. I don't recall exactly. Still, I feel very privileged—felt so at the time, too—to have had those conversations with him.

robert quiet photographer: "Among the problems we have in Italy is that we do not have enough PPE because they are not produced in our country. They were believed to be a 'poor'" article and the production was left to other countries. Now we need them and they have not been available even for doctors, nurses, volunteers...robert, from north Italy."

Tim Bradshaw: "The PPE thing is shocking. Given plausible trajectories of the disease (if you have not read the Imperial College paper from Monday then you should) it's not surprising that countries are likely to run out of intensive care unit (ICU) capacity, or even ventilators: it's likely that the number of cases needing ICU care could be of the order of 10 times capacity, and it would be just hugely expensive to keep a reserve of a factor of 10 very expensive ICUs just sitting there in case of, well, this. Ventilators are probably much the same. But PPE is f***ing cheap (sorry for swearing, but no, not sorry): just keep enough of it that your effectively irreplaceable staff don't ever have to choose between doing their job and not dying.

"'Doing their job' is going to be awful for the next many months in any case: they will be hugely overworked and patients are going to die untreated, while they watch, unable to do anything because ICU capacity is not available. To expect them, for instance, to make the choice between offering palliative care and their own health is inhuman."

Fred Haynes: "Mike, in all the years I’ve been coming to TOP, this is the most important, powerful, and emotionally charged post I’ve ever read. Thank you, and God bless you! I made a quick list of friends, and sent it out to everyone! Monday, I’ll be calling senators Gilibran and Schumer’s offices. I got very emotional reading this, got teary-eyed telling my wife. I just hope it hits the mark with everyone who reads it. We really have to do what we can, and quickly!"

Rick Popham: "Yes, this is a huge problem. Much of the manufacture of this gear has moved overseas, and to China in particular. When the pandemic started over there, none of that equipment made it out of the country anymore. I found this story on NPR summed up the situation pretty well. It's going to take a national (Federal) effort to keep essential manufacturers going here at home. The government will have to keep a national stockpile going and buy this equipment regularly to keep production at a useful level so it's there when we need it. Hospitals CANNOT do this alone: they have neither the funds to spend nor the storage space."

Mike replies: That's a very interesting link for those interested in the problem. Thanks for that.

R. Edelman: "Thank you for your sentiments, Mike. I've been a physician for 42 years. I only heard of the term 'PPE' a few weeks ago. The problem that Italy had is the same one that the US had: politicians at the highest levels of government who denied to the public that there was an emerging pandemic threat, and who avoided taking drastic but necessary steps early to prevent a crisis that would occur only a few weeks later. This was a failure of imagination coupled with greedy politics. They didn't understand that they could not wish the problem away. Ethically, the worse cases were the two senators who knew of the evolving disaster and, instead of sounding a warning to the public, kept quiet and sold off stock for their own financial benefit. I also take great offense to a President who chides health care workers for being wasteful by not reusing protective masks which, when properly used, are single use only. This is an attempt to blame health care workers, who are risking their lives to help others, for the shortage of critical supplies that is the responsibility of this President and his administration."

Marek Fogiel (partial comment): "I am in Italy, locked down like everybody else. At this moment in time, it does not matter if Trump is incompetent and how many mistakes have all politicians made. What counts, is not to spread the epidemic around, and survive. Eventually, the elections will come and people will judge. Meantime: take this very seriously. Most infections come from people with no symptoms and most of them are kids. You also get infested from virus left over on surfaces—it can survive up to five days on hard surfaces.

"General rule is: wear a mask and gloves, if you have no mask, take a piece of cloth, it is for not spreading anything. Pretend that anybody who comes into your house does the same. Sanitize all your shopping or set it aside for a week before you touch it with bare hands, After you come back from a shop, take off the mask, gloves and shoes outside the main dwelling and wash your hands right away. Above all stay home and don't see anybody. Good luck!"

giulio: "I'm writing while at home, home working in Northern Italy, reading scaring bullettins every evening. It's quite descouraging, but I see the same mistakes repeating again and again…. No PPE even for health workers, days or weeks lost before closing schools, shops and factories hoping the virus run away on its own. First in Italy, now probably in Spain, maybe Switzerland, reading your post you looked set for the same path (hope I'm wrong!).

"Sure, closing everything in a country is a bold step, has serious consequences, panic is dangerous, but how it is possible that again and again countries get caught without PPE, gloves or testing equipment? Or how it is possible that health care systems everywhere are designed in a kind of just-in-time supply chain, with little resilience? Flu pandemics are rare, but hardly a surprise: it's the third in roughly a century; I'm not too pessimistic, sure we are getting smarter (Spanish flu, 20–100 millions casualties, Asiatic flu, two millions, this one hopefully a lot less), but it looks that, in general, we are not even ready to believe that things can go wrong.... Good luck!"

Mike replies: And to you.

A Few Tips for Working at Home

New York State, with more than half the nation's cases of coronavirus, just instituted strict new orders that take effect Sunday night. A lot of people are soon going to find themselves working from home.

I've worked from home for many years, and I raised my son alone, so I thought I'd share a few tips from my experience for those who suddenly find themselves working from home and aren't familiar with it.

1. If you're taking care of kids at the same time—it's difficult, yes. But years ago I lit upon a good solution that worked for us. I would work for 45 or 50 minutes, and then take a break by spending 10 or 15 minutes of focused quality time with my then two- to five-year-old son. As impulsive and demanding as we can be, humans are also time- and schedule-sensitive creatures, and you can take advantage of that. We "learn" schedules—intervals—even if we just sense them and don't understand them by the clock. I kept this 50/10 schedule strictly, studiously ignoring him while I worked (unless he hurt himself or really needed attention, of course) but then giving him all of my attention when it came time to. By keeping strictly to this schedule, what I found was that my son relaxed his demands on me during the time I was working, because he knew he was going to get his turn soon. (He also knew he wasn't going to get what he wanted when I was working.) I found if I played with him at indiscriminate intervals, he ramped up his demands on me if I turned my attention to work; on the flip side, if I left him to his own devices for too long (two hours, say), he would get peevish and tired and start to "lose it." It's very important, though, to give the kid your whole focus during his or her time. They'll learn. What would happen is that he would play quietly and happily by himself for the time I was working, and then we'd both enjoy the 10–15 minutes we spent together. Peaceful coexistence.

I found it's actually a nice way to connect with a kid, too, and get to know him better.

2. If you're not taking care of a kid, take frequent breaks anyway, and reserve personal tasks and activities for break time. You'll know your own proclivities much better than I do, but there are far fewer constraints at home, and some people find the lack of structure disconcerting. Some people can't keep at work—they go off and do laundry or make personal phone calls or other things they wouldn't have done at the office. But the opposite can be just as much of a problem—you'll sit at the computer for marathon sessions and only stand up for a stretch after many hours hunched over the screen. That way lies...well, not madness maybe, but eyestrain, carpal tunnel syndrome, back and neck aches, and that bleary, "underwater" feeling. Schedule your breaks, then take them—be sure to move around, stretch, drink some water, and stand up for a bit. Do some jumping jacks. Touch your toes. If you're fit enough, do the NYT 7-Minute Exercise.

3. Eat real meals, and don't snack at your desk. As I'm sure you know, our bodies take "set points"—weights our metabolisms seek to maintain. For years I weighed 240. Then I discovered that I could skip meals and eat cheese sticks by the wheelbarrow-full at my desk, without having to take a break from working. Very convenient. (Let's just say I was not into health food back then.) Big mistake, though. I "broke" my former set point and quickly headed for 260 lbs. I cut out the string cheese once I realized what was happening, but too late—260 became the new normal, for a number of years.

3. You'll find you are more attached to the phone at home, not less, so it's good to devise a contact protocol. Even if you're not at your desk, if your jacket is on the back of your office chair and you're known by one and all to be "at work," then it doesn't matter if you're in the bathroom or down the hall gabbing with a colleague or in the break room scrounging for leftover doughnuts. You're still "at work." And nobody's getting agitated about you. When you're at home, though, let the boss or a colleague call you once when you can't answer, and right away their imaginations will run wild—in their minds, you're off skylarking, eating bon-bons and binge-watching old HBO shows. Cat's away, mouse will play, that's the sort of thing that jumps into their jealous minds. So I'd suggest devising a sensible phone policy that lets you ignore phone calls when you have to, but that makes it clear you're working. (As a number of my friends know, I often ignore phone calls during the day. You can't both concentrate on writing or reading and talk on the phone at the same time. A 20-minute phone call might not seem like much, but there is only room for 24 of them in an entire eight-hour day.) If your boss is "home worker insecure," and contacts you frequently just to confirm that you're working, you might have to have a talk and gently remind him that you won't get much else done if you're always responding to him.

4. Be sure to "turn it off" when it's time to. Yeah, working at home is great because you're always at home! Yay. But you're always at work, too. I used to wake up at 2:00 a.m. with insomnia and think, well, I might as well work. I'd get up at 6 a.m., put on my robe, wake up my son, fix my coffee, and sit down to work. Then sometimes I wouldn't even get dressed until the UPS guy came in late afternoon! That's no way to live. The problem is that work leaks into every hour of the day and night. It's important to set limits and schedules and then resist working when you're not working. A friend who has worked from home for many years wouldn't even look at email on the weekends. He scheduled his "off" time as strictly as he scheduled his "work" time. It's not the easiest thing to do if you're overworked anyway, but be sure to reserve—and observe—"not-at-work time," too.

Working at home works...it just takes some getting used to. Even if you end up not liking it, or liking it far less than being at your workplace, you should be able to make it work just fine for however long the contagion crisis lasts. It feels worse at first than it really is. Hang in there!

Solidarity,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Scott: "Required, hilarious reading for those of us who work from home."

Gaspar Heurtley: "A friend of mine is a web designer that works from home (he’s done it his whole life) and always tried to keep work and life as far apart as possible. A few years back he moved away from his little apartment to a much bigger house and set his office in a spare bedroom. He wouldn’t take personal calls, didn’t tweet, etc. while he was in there. When his daily hours of work were done, he got out and actually locked the door till next morning."

Mike replies: My friend Nick, after working at home for ten years, rented an office in an office building downtown and got dressed and arrived at his office every morning at the same time, leaving for the day on schedule as well. It was a corner office with great views and cost a pretty penny I'm sure, but work was work and home was home once again for him!

Lynn: "Timely advice for many Mike, thanks. I was listening to ABC Radio here in Sydney earlier this week on the same topic. A female presenter who often worked at home with young children in the house shared her technique: when the kids knocked on the door to her home office, she would ask (through the closed door), 'are you bleeding?' If the answer was yes, the door was opened. Otherwise it was wait for scheduled break time. Worked for her...."

Nigel James Robinson: "If you're two adults, and are taking care of more than one kid at the same time, split your days. One looks after the kids, the other works. You might get in half a days work each. Don't try working in parallel; the productivity then halves."

Mike replies: Great tip. Thanks.

Tesla Model X Review (OT)

New and deep blue! Photo by Sandy Stone.

Written by Ctein

I am really loving my new Tesla Model X. I guess I better when I spend close to $100K on a car, but it's nice when there's not any buyer's remorse.

The only thing Paula and I don't like about it is that it's larger than we're used to—it's a standard sedan chassis and we are used to compact cars, so it's taking a little bit to get adjusted to a car that's a foot wider and two feet longer.

A small disappointment—with all the high-speed freeway driving, the range is significantly less than EPA figures. I get about 80% of official. That turns out to be surprisingly significant with the kind of driving I do, but it is what it is. Can't really fault the electric for that; if I were driving an ICE [internal combustion engine vehicle —Ed.] at an average 70–75 mph, I wouldn't get EPA mileage either.

On the other hand, Tesla keeps rolling out software tweaks that improve the efficiency, which is not something that would happen with an ICE.

Quality control is everything you've heard about Tesla. That is, crappy. Fortunately, the D minus they get in manufacturing QC is offset by the A plus they get in servicing. Going in, we were prepared for that, and, yes, we've had two warranty fixes so far. The first was a wire harness obstructing the front camera. Not a common thing—the service manager had never seen that failure before—but one that should never have gotten out of the factory. If any kind of check were done on the cameras it would have been very obvious.

The second was that the actuator arm on the passenger side door popped off the ball joint. That is also uncommon but wouldn't show up in normal QC. I'm guessing the socket or the ball sleeve was slightly out of tolerance. That was something Tesla could fix in the field. Within 48 hours they had a technician out to the house who pulled the door apart and replaced the entire actuator motor assembly. Very probably the problem was only in the socket/sleeve, which would've taken five minutes to swap, but he agreed with me that it wasn't worth the risk of having to make another trip out, so he spent most of an hour replacing the entire assembly.

My unexpected-favorite things are the navigation system display and the heated steering wheel. I didn't imagine that I would care about the latter in California's mild climate, but I chill easily and my hands are what gets cold first. Heating up the steering wheel for a few minutes makes me a lot more comfortable. I know, wimpy Californians.

The navigation display might be the best safety feature in the whole car. It makes use of the in-dash display where the speedometer lives—the navigation map appears right next to the speed. It takes about one second to glance at it for driving instructions, as opposed about three seconds for an off-axis nav display.

The adaptive cruise control works extremely well and does the right thing 99+ percent of the time. It takes a whole lot of the stress out of driving in traffic and works perfectly in stop-and-go traffic. The autosteering/autopilot is not so good. Definitely reduces the stress of driving, and it's entirely reliable in stop-and-go, but normally I have to keep close tabs on it. Because it makes mistakes. Paula's description was to think of it like a horse: Most of the time it will do the right thing, but it lacks common sense and every so often it gets spooked or makes an entirely wrong decision. Me, I think student driver. Still, the two features make my driving a whole lot less difficult.

Also, the sound system, which seems to be the best way I have to listen to music in or out of the house. Sandy, my expert sound-engineer sweetie, says that it's Bose and it's top-notch. I was pretty happy with my Audioengine 5+'s until I heard the Tesla sound.

Ctein and his Tesla Model X in Daly City. Photo by Laura Majerus.

Getting used to everything being automated was disturbingly easy. When I walk up to the car, it unlocks the driver side door. When I get within about two feet of it, it swings it wide open, retracts the steering wheel, and moves the driver's seat all the way back to make it easy to get in. Once in the car, pressing the brake pedal moves the seat and the steering wheel back to the position I saved for them (I can save preferences for any number of drivers) and closes the door.

I didn't realize how used I was becoming to these features until I had to drive the Chevy HHR (which we still have) a couple of weeks ago. I walked up to the car and it took me several seconds to remember how to make it work.

Overall, it's difficult to describe the driving experience. My general comment is that "Friends don't let friends drive Teslas." It's like crack on wheels. The Tesla engineers borrowed a big page from Apple design philosophy when they came up with their luxury models. They thought long and hard about how many things people find annoying about driving and how many of those they could fix with existing hardware and software. It's far from perfect but it must be way ahead of whatever is in second place.

If Tesla ever really does get fully autonomous driving, Paula and I will be in heaven—I paid for the full (nonexistent!) package when I bought the car in hopes for the future. We aren't counting on it, no matter what Elon Musk smokes. Based on the performance of the current software, it isn't remotely close, not even for freeway driving. But Tesla is closer than anybody else, so that's where I've put my money.

I'm still getting used to the performance—this is a luxury car that handles and accelerates like a sports car. It'll pull two thirds of a G and doesn't bank a smidge on tight turns. I've been doing a lot of runs down Highway 1 to Santa Cruz (where Sandy lives) which is two-lane highway for much of the way. South of Half Moon Bay, it's normal to be passing tourists and beach visitors who are driving the 55-MPH speed limit, which nobody trying to get from Point A to Point B observes.

The first time I passed a 55 MPH-er, I did what I would usually do—push the pedal to the metal to get past as quickly as possible. I passed them at 98 MPH! I suppose that's really nice for my safety, but I'm not trying to scare the crap out of other drivers on the road. I'm having to learn to moderate my reactions.

I'm still getting used to the car, climbing the learning curve and discovering customizable settings I didn't know about. Today I figured out that it was possible to set the passenger and driver temperatures differently. God knows what else is buried in the feature set. It's like buying a new computer system with an unfamiliar operating system and user interface...

...That can kill you.

I proceed with caution.

And that's about it from Daly City, where all the photographs are beautiful and all the cars are above average.

Pax,

Ctein

Ed. Note: Readers notoriously ignore bylines, so please note that this review is of Ctein's new car, not Mike's! Mike will continue to drive his paid-fer, 30-MPG, manual-transmission 2014 Acura ILX, made by Honda in Greensburg, Indiana, until it dies, or 250k miles, or his ship comes in, or the cows come home, whichever comes first. (It's got 79k miles currently, at age six.) His next car, far off in the hazy future, is likely to be a hybrid. Ctein's next vehicle will be a spaceship, bound for other precincts of the solar system, or possibly beyond.

(This review replaces "Open Mike" for this week.)

ADDENDUM by Ctein: The Tesla is an absolutely frivolous purchase for me—the one monstrous, frivolous purchase in my entire life. But that does not mean I entered into it frivolously. Paula and I have been looking at eVs since 2010, and we started looking seriously about four years ago. Not seriously in the sense that our Chevy HHR needed replacing, but in that when it did the odds were very high that our next car would be an eV, and there were workable options out there for us. Depending, of course, on money and needs and timing.

But, oh yeah, we've been studying this. And by now you should all know that when I study something, I really study something. Most especially when looking at having to spend $40,000 or more, which is four times more than we spent on the Chevy. A great deal of consideration went into this purchase, not to mention no small amount of planning. Yes, it is a frivolous and an exorbitant luxury. Do not imagine, though, that it was entered into ignorantly. There are many pros and cons to buying an eV these days. They are not panaceas. I'm not asking you to think so. But please give me a little credit—I knew exactly what I was doing.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kirk: "Made me chuckle a bit. In Austin they are as common as pickup trucks and Honda Accords...."

emptyspaces: "I have had a Nissan Leaf Plus for about five months now. Couldn’t afford (or drive!) a Tesla during the buying process (Leaf Plus will be $10k less than the off-menu Model 3...before insuring it). Anyway, I love it. It’s quick in that key 25–55 MPH range and can easily merge onto the freeway from any ramp.

"I am happy for anyone who gets to experience an EV for basic driving...none of them are great for long trips but in five months my biggest day has been 85 miles. It’s our second car, and my DD. Congrats on the Model X—I have a hard time believing the sound system is better than Audioengine, but glad to hear the sound doesn’t suck like in my Leaf. Just got done replacing the speakers in it."

Malcolm Leader: "I want one!"

Daniel: "Meanwhile, the old '81 VW Rabbit diesel keeps on going with 50 MPG at highway speeds all day long. In-town driving is 46 MPG. Was made in Pennsylvania, USA. Roomy enough that Wilt Chamberlain (former NBA player) drove one. Parts easy to get and the vehicle still works well. Paid for decades ago and insurance cost is low. Why mess with what works?"

Thomas Mc Cann: "Worth watching:"

Tim Auger: "What’s the depreciation like on a high-end Tesla?"

Great Escapes (Your Shot of the Day) (OT)

[Note: This post is invisible to Muggles.]

Happy to report that Dresden Hotel, my Pool League team, won last night 8-1 and are still in first place in the County. But boy, did we win ugly. And my partner and I were responsible for the only loss—we stunk it up on that rack. Didn't get the rolls and couldn't keep the white ball out of the hole.

I redeemed myself by making a difficult shot on the 8-ball as the final shot of the match. The cue ball was right over a corner pocket, about a sixteenth of an inch away from being corner-hooked, and the eight ball was on a dead straight line to the opposite corner about two-thirds of the way down table. I had to shoot jacked up to keep the cue ball from following. That's the kind of shot they call a "tester" and I passed the test, pretty as you please.

Moving the white ball around the table is the game, at the higher levels. Check out this simple sequence of two shots by German phenom Josh Filler, playing against his Russian counterpart Fedor Gorst—two of the hottest young talents in the game right now.

The game they're playing is 9-ball, where you must contact the lowest-numbered ball on the table first. We join the action at 25:25 as Fedor, in his seat, knocks a cue to the floor. That's something that could be interpreted as sharking* if you did it at the wrong time. Josh has ball in hand, meaning he can place the cue ball on the table anywhere he wants. He has to shoot the blue 2-ball. But his red 3-ball is "tied up" and doesn't have a pocket. Watch as he brilliantly engineers a simple shot on the red three...and then keep watching to see how he gets back to the other end of the table for the pink 4-ball (if you look carefully before he shoots the red three, you can see him point with his cue to the spot on the table where he wants the cue ball to end up for the pink four).

Simple but elegant...and deceptively difficult. No clue about the whistling in the background!

If you keep watching, next is the orange five (watch how he goes all the way to the rail and back out—pros seldom try to "hold" the cue ball except when they have to), the dark green six, the black eight, and out.

Nothing to this game.

Filler is a genuine phenomenon—Gorst is a big talent who will be a top player for many years if he works hard, but he "plays his age" more than Filler, showing his talent more sporadically. Filler on the other hand is a Mozart.

Filler behind the 8-ball

For a bonus, there's a wonderful escape shot if you go to 7:35 in the same match. As Fedor shoots the red three he is also trying to move the pink four, which is tied up. But he misses the breakout. So he "plays safe"—that's when you deliberately give your opponent a hidden target to make things tough for him. (Notice Filler's expression in the background—he knows exactly what's about to happen.) When Filler comes to the table he has to hit the pink ball first, but the 8-ball is in the way. (If you ever wondered where the expression "behind the eight ball" comes from, now you know, although the expression no doubt came from the game of 8-ball. In 9-ball any ball but the one you're on can be a blocking ball.) Watch what Filler does.

Amazing shot. Great escapes are some of the best shots in pool.

That's it for pool for March!

Mike

*The word "sharking" is frequently confused with hustling by people who don't play pool, and even by some who do. A person who tries to elicit a bigger bet from an amateur player by hiding his true skill level until the big money is on the table is a hustler. A shark is somebody who tries to distract his opponent as the opponent is making a shot. For instance, my friend I play pool with, a few days ago, waited until I was down on a critical shot and said, "I wonder what ----- looks like naked," naming a woman he knows I have a bit of a crush on. That's sharking. There was a famous old-time shark who was notorious for moving directly into his opponent's line of sight and, with exquisite timing, whipping out his handkerchief or striking a kitchen match to light his cigar just as his opponent brought the cue forward to hit the ball.

Interestingly, Earl Woods, for several months, deliberately heckled his son Tiger as Tiger practiced, to get him inured to it. One day Tiger said, that's enough now, Dad, I got it. At the bar where we played last night, which is known for being rowdy and where the path from the kitchen to the bar area goes right past the pool table, you'd best not be too easily distracted.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Blog Note: Gratitude is the Attitude (OT)

Tom Lovell (1909–1997), Surrender at Appomattox.
Painting commissioned by National Geographic in 1965.

It's my birthday. (George Harrison's too, so go listen to "It's All Too Much." One of the greatest of all psychedelic-era songs, if you ask me, not just of the Beatles' efforts in that genre).

Birthdays, to me, are like Halloween trick-or-treating...great and memorable fun when you're little, and then you try to hang on to the magic until you're maybe fifteen, when you're past the right age for it and it's starting to get a little, let's say, awkward. You're too cool for a costume and your voice is breaking, if you're a guy, and if you're a girl you don't even want to be a ballerina or a princess any more, and you're almost as tall as an adult and...well, all right, kid, here's your candy. But grow up. You don't get to go backwards.

After that, birthdays make nice excuses for family get-togethers and a good reason to connect with friends you like and don't see much, but it's not really necessary that they be all about the person who's turning whatever double-digit age. For many of us, many birthdays go by as just another day, and that's okay. They're just mileposts on the stretch of highway we get to travel, whether it's fifty or seventy or ninety miles long.

That's one of the best things about birthdays now. I know my stretch of highway gets to be at least this long! Increasingly, every year that passes is a little tiny...victory. At 63, it's worthwhile for me to remember that this age was the average life expectancy for American males in 1944, which was just a few blinks ago in galactic time. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, who both survived the Civil War, each died at 63. And, save one eye-drop every morning, I don't even have to take any medications. Almost no matter what event you're considering, you can look at it with gratitude if you try. (Isn't it weird that no one thought to have a photographer present at the surrender at Appomattox?)

I don't think time is linear anyway. Scientists rationally space years as if they're all equidistant regular points on a graph line, but I look at it this way: years feel like whatever percentage of your life they are. They're 1/10th of your life when you're ten, then eventually 1/30th, then 1/60th and so on. So this past year was 1/63rd of my life and it cracked past pretty quick. Months feel almost like weeks used to. I don't worry any more about having to wait for things, for instance—time passes fast, and whatever you're waiting for will be along. Going to a concert next month? That day will arrive before you know it. Waiting for a lens from Japan? No worries, just keep living your life and voilà, it'll be at the door.

And some periods of your life are full of intense living, and others are place-holders, like the filler around the hits on a great old vinyl album. In 1976–78 I lived as much life as I have in other periods of my life that lasted a decade, by the clock. 1993, when my son was born, packed in many years' worth of drama.

Every day
This isn't a bad time of my life. I wake up every morning and pray, which is an odd thing for a former rationalist materialist atheist to be doing, but it makes me feel better. The longer I do it, the more of my morning prayer is taken up with thoughts of, and blessings for, others—I also pray every day to be relieved of the bondage of self, so what better way than to be praying for other people? I had a salad for breakfast today, and I won't eat after three, just like every other day. I have a standing date to play pool at the bowling alley this evening, before my meeting.

And gifts? well, I'm blessed—I get gifts intermittently throughout the year. I don't just get to talk to my son on my birthday, but all through the year. I wrote about my new glasses and my repaired eye the other day. What's a great picture but a gift, for that matter? It's like we're fishing and we catch one. I had two runouts in one day the other day (in the game of 8-ball, a runout is when you sink all seven balls of one set, stripes or solids, plus the eight ball, in one turn). I've never done that twice in one day before; that was a nice gift. A reader named Fred Morrison, out of the blue, sent me a wonderful care package of old equipment he doesn't need any more. He thought I might like some of it. And I do. It's wonderful, and it might even change my life. This past year a reader named Jay Burleson gave me one of the nicest presents I've ever gotten. And I have 815 Patreon supporters! How awesome is that? (Thanks to every one of you.) I have readers, who care enough to read what I write. That's a gift right there, for someone who calls himself (somewhat egotistically) "a writer." It's more than Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka had.

No, I'm grateful every day. Gratitude is the attitude that helps you be happy.

Anyway, I'm going to take the day off. My brother's family and I used to have what we called "sushi blowouts" for my son's and my February birthdays, so, in honor of them, I'm going to drive to Corning and ceremonially indulge in a little animal protein in the form of bits of raw fish and other ingredients cunningly crafted into delicacies. Sybaritic and self-indulgent, God knows, but hey, today's a milepost on my stretch of highway, so I'm going to rationalize and indulge.

Back tomorrow, same as always.

Mike
(Thanks to Fred, Jay, the 815, and all my supporters, commenters, and readers)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Henning Wulff: "Have a great day, and even more so, a happy, healthy and satisfying next year. And remember: You're now too old to die young. When you think about the things you can/might/should be grateful for, you find that there are an increasing number of things to be grateful for as you go on. An additional reward for being grateful. It also tends to keep you from being that guy who yells 'Keep off my lawn!' at kids."

Robert Stahl: "Wonderful article, Mike! One of my favorite quotes on gratitude is by the 13th Century German mystic Meister Eckhart: 'If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.'"

Marten Collins: "A happy birthday old fruit, there is something rather pleasant about getting older! Seen it before, eaten it before, heard the promises before and got over it before. Enjoy."

The Big Game the Morning After (OT)

Turns out my assumptions were out of date. I watched the big game online in perfect quality at the broadcaster's website with no issues.

Pretty exciting game.

I have to say I wasn't overly impressed with either team, though. Kansas City lost the battle of the line on both sides of the ball, and I'm not sure the much-ballyhooed Patrick Mahomes made a very convincing MVP. For a lot of the game (although it was probably because the pocket kept getting very small very fast), I thought he performed a skillful impression of an inexperienced QB having an off day. Several times, as Joe Buck mentioned, he appeared to not even have a clear idea of what he was trying to do. The KC offense took on a faintly slapstick aura now and then—several times a player with the ball had an easy first down right in front of him and failed to simply keep running or keep running in the right direction. And you know that play KC kept calling where the QB hesitated, then handed the ball to the running back standing next to him, who then ran straight down the middle? Anthony Anderson's real-life mom from the T-Mobile commercial could have told you that wasn't going to work. I don't know what it's called, but I'll bet that play was old when Andy Reid coached his first game.

But the Chiefs came through in dramatic fashion when it mattered, storming back from a double-digit deficit in the final eight minutes, and that is what counts. Exciting to watch. It's very satisfying when a smaller-market team wins a big championship—it's a triumph of grit, gumption, and "everything coming together" over the big-market money that usually manages to dominate these contests. (Just as an aside, that's another remarkable thing about what is historically the best NFL team, the Green Bay Packers*, who lost this year in the NFC Championship Game—the semifinals, for those of you not from here. They're located in the smallest media market of any NFL, NBA or MLB team, yet they have so many more NFL championships (13) over the longest span of time—81 years—that no other team comes close.)

Through the looking-glass
I watch so little TV that my occasional visits tend to be startling...even a bit shocking. While I enjoyed the game, the viewing experience as a whole once again made me glad of my decision to cut TV culture out of my life. What a wretched mess it is artistically, morally, and stylistically. Full of stylized violence and empty eroticism, ominous music, bathos, fantasy, threat-posturing, posing, greed, and histrionics. (Should I tell you how I really feel?) How do people get inured to it? You get the feeling that if it could possibly be contrived to be any more mannered, frenetic, bombastic, slick, and shallow, it would be. Particularly poignant and regrettable to me were all the shiny expensive ads for wretched junk food and horrible junk drinks—the kind of stuff that is slowly killing a lot of us.

...But step slowly away from that soapbox, Bub (I said to myself).  :-)

Anyway, congratulations to Chiefs fans, and all Missourians. It must be fun to be in Missouri (yeah, Kansas too**) today!

Mike

*Or is my fan loyalty showing? Nah, I'm completely objective about the Packers!  ;-) 

**Again, for those of you not from this country or who know nothing about (American) football, the Kansas City Chiefs hail from Kansas City, Missouri.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Andre Moreau: "Most of Québec was watching that Superbowl game, as local boy, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, number 76 for the Chiefs, was playing. By the way, he's the first ever medical doctor to play at the Superbowl."

Jack: "Mike, I’m sorry the Packers didn’t make the big party. Had they won, you could have gotten to wear another ring even bigger than the one you wore in this photo."

Mike replies: That was a fun day! Good memory.

Lindsay Bach: "It probably comes as little surprise that, depending on the source, the average American watches between three to five hours of television per day. As a person who has largely shunned TV for nearly 50 years, on the rare occasions I do watch television I am always stunned at the incessant wash of crass culture and consumerism viewers willingly submit to. Twenty-five years ago when I taught high school English, I used to sometimes tell my students that I didn't watch TV, just for their reaction. I remember one kid said incredulously, 'you don't watch TV?—you must be really bored all the time.' I responded that I was really never bored (the truth) given all there was to do in the absence of TV."

Speed: "On my very occasional visits to televised sports I am amazed at the technology that is now applied for our benefit—especially the Skycam...Skycam is a computer-controlled, stabilized, cable-suspended camera system. The system is maneuvered through three dimensions in the open space over a playing area of a stadium or arena by computer-controlled cable-drive system. It is responsible for bringing video-game-like camera angles to television sports coverage. The camera package weighs less than 14 kilograms (31 lbs.) and can travel at 13 meters a second (29 mph). Invented by Garrett Brown (also the inventor of the Steadicam). Following kickoff returns up (down?) the field is a thing of sports and technological beauty."

Jon Porter: "I believe Missouri's team was named for the Kansas City Chief, Santa Fe's posh Chicago-Kansas City train. So it might be more appropriate for fans to dress as engineers and conductors instead of Indians. The Green Bay Packers took their name from original sponsor the Indian Packing Company, a meat-canning firm. So while the Packers name has sometimes been the butt of jokes, it's not as bad as an early cross-state rival, the Beloit Fairies."

Mike replies: Not too sure about the train connection. Where'd you hear that? The team was originally called the Dallas Texans, and the Chiefs website says the name was changed to "Chiefs" when it moved to Kansas City in 1963 "partly" in honor of H. Roe Bartle, the mayor of Kansas City, who was instrumental in convincing the Texans to move to Kansas City. Bartle's nickname, which he got in connection with his role in local Boy Scouts organizations, was "Chief." That's all the website says about the name as far as I can find.

Lamar Hunt, owner of the Texans/Chiefs, is acknowledged to be the founder of the American Football League. He was later instrumental in the merger of the two leagues, and he was the one who named the Super Bowl—getting the idea from the Super Ball, a popular toy in the 1960s.

Greg Heins adds: "Speaking of Lamar Hunt, there's a photo connection (of course!). He was one of three brothers who took their family oil billions and cornered the market in silver in late 1979, driving the price through the roof. Guess what? Lots of silver in film and paper (what photographers used at that time). The price of those went up substantially. The scheme ultimately failed, silver came back down, and the brothers finally declared bankruptcy, which as you can see didn't cramp their lives a bit. Although silver came down, film and paper did not; funny how that happens."

Open Mike: So You Say You Like Everything

["Open Mike" is the everything goes, often off-topic editorial page of TOP, wherein the hounds are released! It appears on Wednesdays. Note for this week: I'm just having a little fun here, so please don't take this personally. Gotta keep myself entertained too.]

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RayC wrote: "Okay, I’ll play. I admit I was taken aback by the statement: 'It's a middlebrow conceit to say "I like everything!" in a chipper voice, which to real music aficionados means that music isn't very important to that person.'

Fortunately it was good to see in the comments that I am not alone in having an 'important' relationship to music, but it is a bit eclectic as well as encompassing various forms of jazz, pop and rock from the '40s on. So many of the artists mentioned ticked those boxes. One that I haven’t seen mentioned and perhaps further solidifies my middlebrowness (?) is Jimmy Buffett, whose music just makes me happy. Not an amazing musician but a very good songwriter and, even better perhaps, a great bandleader who often mixes genres and includes band members like Mac McAnally who is just amazing on his own."

Mike replies: Yep, I've gotten a few complaints for saying that, probably from people who are in the habit of saying they like everything. And that's okay, because we know what you mean. But in reality, "liking everything" wouldn't just mean that you're eclectic and listen across genres—we all do that—or that you have a few guilty pleasures such as Jimmy Buffett; most of us probably have some of those, too. (I can't think of one of mine, unless it's Jacques Loussier.)

If you truly like everything, I have some assignments for you that you'll enjoy. (And by "you" I don't mean you, Ray, just the proposed hypothetical person who says s/he likes everything.)

First, listen to Metal Machine Music—loud. Because you like it, you'll want to go on to enjoy the quarter-speed version, and you'll listen intently to the whole four and a quarter hours of it. Also loud. Without distracting yourself with a screen or a book—no cheating.

I'll wait.

Finished? Still like everything? Okay then, we're good.

As an interlude, it's too easy to throw in some happy celebration of low talent like Green Jelly doing "Three Little Pigs" or—a double whammy of dubiousness—William Hung's cover of "Achy-Breaky Heart." (William enjoyed 15 minutes of fame for his campy badness on American Idol years ago. It was always ambiguous whether he actually understood the nature of his own appeal, which was a big part of the joke.) But that would be too easy. Instead, we'll have you listen to the great William Shatner's interpretation of Bernie Taupin's "Rocket Man," which, as the video shows us, Bernie was forced to sit through. Note the thespian chops as the man who brought Captain Kirk to life goes all-in selling the emotion of "high as a kite by then." Gives you chills, doesn't it?

Don't think you get off there. That's just one song. No. Your assignment is to familiarize yourself so thoroughly with Shatner's discography that you can make a cogent case for the three best (which might, of course, mean worst) of his albums. You'll enjoy the process—it's all about the process.

Next we're off to Edgar Varèse's Poème Électronique, during which you may not think of farts. (Note the first comment: "Who is here because of a class?") But since that's too short—you were just getting into the groove—we'll pair it with John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, one of his most appreciated pieces. The hour-plus of that should satiate the craving in you triggered by the Varèse.

Extra credit: write a five-page paper comparing and contrasting the Cage with Gamelan percussion music, which you also like.

Next up on our concert tour—Teletubbies!! For a whole hour. Hey, you're the one who said you like everything.

After an hour of that, continue the "relaxing" a.k.a. mindless vibe with an hour and 40 minutes of Kenny G serving up cruise-ship music. Alternately, throw yourself into the sea.

At this point, readers might be saying, hey, I like soothing Kenny G music! I have some on in the background right now. What's wrong with it? Or, I've listened carefully to John Cage's prepared piano three times over thirty years and I think it's innovative and important, and you're a Philistine. Both of which sentiments are fine. But...both? Together? From the same person? Would one individual say both those things? Calculate the odds. So then...beginning to appreciate my point?

Billies
A person who likes everything has to have, pardon the allusion, catholic taste, small "c." If you like Christian folk such as The All Saved Freak Band, presumably you might also like Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Christian music from eight centuries earlier. (Or maybe you like Hildegard because you're on board with Lilith Fair and she was a very early female composer.) But, because you like everything, you also disapproved (on artistic grounds) when Ice-T removed "Cop Killer" from Body Count, and you're way into Scandinavian Satanic bands like Beherit and Zyklon-B. Contradiction? What contradiction? It's only music.

You see no reason to prefer Justin Bieber over Eminem or vice-versa—and you like Vanilla Ice too, for that matter. And Vanilla Fudge. And Public Enemy and Drake.  You like both Billie Holiday and Billie Eilish, naturally, because who wouldn't?

Speaking of billies, you like acid rock and rockabilly. You like the German band CAN and Holger Czukay, yet you're also one of the eleven fans of Screaming Lord Sutch, which tops many "worst albums ever" lists. You love the vocal stylings of The Captain and Tennille but also the singing style of Captain Beefheart. Who's got a better voice in your opinion—the lead singer of Predator or Hermann Prey? (Did you know right away who both of those are?) Which cover of Otis Redding's "Hard To Handle" do you like best—Tom Jones's, or Mae West's from the film Myra Breckenridge? You like Lawrence Welk (the whitest television show in history, in several ways, despite this little treasure) and you like John Zorn. And, um, "Lawrence Welk." (Everything means everything.)

But back to the tour. How far will you make it through Alphonso und Estrella, one of Franz Schubert's 16 operas that have, as one critic delicately put it, "failed to hold the stage" (i.e., are seldom performed)? It has some nice things in it. Unless you don't like opera. But, of course, you do.

When I think of Schubert I always think of Gérard Depardieu breaking the fourth wall in Bertrand Blier's Too Beautiful for You by noticing the soundtrack and exclaiming "Schubert!" in exasperation....

We won't even get into experimental music. For example, Paul Lansky based his "Night Traffic" on recordings of...well, cars going by. For "Deep Listening" (the musical piece—the term also expressed her ethos), the late Pauline Oliveros took various instruments into a cavernous empty cistern deep underground that had an exceptionally long sound decay. (This piece can be a spiritual experience under carefully controlled listening conditions, such as, late at night with no interruptions, in a state of meditative concentration.) Or one of my personal favorites (no joke, I love these) the early Bass Communion v. Muslimgauze collaborations.

We also won't make you listen to a bunch of "outside" jazz. Or some gorgeous Ludovico Einaudi. (I didn't get to minimalism.)

The point, at the risk of being obvious
Think I can't go on? Oh, I could go on. We haven't touched country. Or show tunes. Or campfire singalongs. Or marching band music. Or Lo-Fi. Or Edith Piaf or piano rolls. Post-punk. Howe Gelb. Polkas. Quick, name all the subgenres of electronica. Sheet-music hits from the early 1900s. Brit-Pop. Field blues. Renaissance polyphony. Novelty music and parodies. Dance music and drone music. Thrash metal and ambient. Film scores. Dub and Ska.

We haven't even scratched the surface. Music is much larger than whatever small subset you've been calling everything. You could spend ten years, and incredible amounts of time and attention, just exploring and learning one kind of music—post-war orchestral music, for example, or early computer music, or bluegrass—or just one little aspect of music, like drumming, or guitar building. There are guys who know more about jazz than I know about anything. More than I know about myself. I know that, because my friend Artie, who died a few years ago now, was one of those people who remember every little detail about every day of their lives and can never forget it (called hyperthymesia), and Artie knew many things about me that had completely left my own head. He remembered everything about any way in which his life had intersected with mine, even though that overlap was fairly limited. It's a weird experience hearing things about yourself you don't remember, and then having it come back into your consciousness gradually over the next half-day. So I know I don't know all there is to know about me, despite my having been me for all these years. And you think you like everything? You don't know everything. You're not in the ballpark. You don't even know everything about one thing, where music is concerned.

If you liked all of the above, though (heck, just if you listened to the Zorn and Welk links clear through to the end—I think I'd tell the cops whatever they wanted to know long before that), you win—you were right, you like everything!

Otherwise, stop saying that.

Mike
(Thanks to Dan W., RayC, and, as always, Kim, for making my originally average ears bigger)

P.S. I have to admit I actually sorta enjoyed a whole lot of the stuff I compiled here, even the self-parodizing Schubert opera. I'll stick to my guns, though—not only do I not like everything, I don't even like all the songs on The White Album.

Please let me know if any of the links are bad!

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Robin Dreyer: "I’m worried that it’s not even February, and you’ve already had the most fun you are going to have this year."

Bob G.: "Absolutely hilarious! I couldn’t stop laughing...an essay worthy of the New Yorker, for sure. One question on the assignment—what should our physical state of mind be to listen to the selections? I saw Lawrence Welk in Scranton after a more than a few tokes once, and Makers Mark seems to work with Captain Beefheart...."

Stuart Dootson: "Shatner? Has Been, followed by Seeking Major Tom, followed by (I guess) The Transformed Man. That's just my preference, though!"

Jim Simmons: "Brilliant essay today! When I was in grad school and procrastinating from doing my work, I'd go to the library and listen to their collection of ethnographic records of field recordings of music from the South Pacific, Africa, and other non-western music traditions. Some of it was nearly impossible for my unsophisticated ears to listen to, but it was often mesmerising."

Mark Roberts: "If you're going to listen to Metal Machine Music be sure to get the Dolby 5.1 surround remix issued a couple of years back. Might as well go all the way, right?"

Ken Bennett: "I'm just going to leave this here:

"It features the best atonal banjo solo I have ever heard. :-) "

Mike replies: I don't usually like novelty songs, but that's funny and wonderful, especially the timed silence. Thanks.

Dennis: "Last year, I read This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. Most of it made sense at the time, but much of it was far enough outside my realm of knowledge that the details didn't stick. But our brains end up wired to respond to music and much of that wiring happens when we're very young. We 'get' chords; we respond to major chords and minor chords differently; we anticipate sequences that return to their starting point and so on. And people who grow up listening to Eastern, rather than Western music end up wired differently, attuned to different chord structures.

"I imagine that if you drew a circle that represented all music, you'd find some people who enjoy a narrow slice that represents classical and others enjoy a narrow slice that represents jazz. Some of us have a hard time characterizing our tastes, preferring an 'eclectic mix' as you say—but instead of a narrow slice, I'd have a number of little blobs spread out across what would still probably be a fairly narrow portion of the circle. A little of this, a little of that, but not much of a lot of other stuff.

"I think that's the issue—how do you answer the question 'what music do you like?' When you like an eclectic mix; a little of this and a little of that? It's been said that your playlist is a window to your soul."

Mike replies: Your comment speaks to the core of much of these issues. Not only do we "get" chords and so forth, but we also have a remarkable innate sense of internal consistency—a feeling that strategies from one genre just don't "belong" in another. I thought of this in the Masterclass ad for Deadmau5, where he says "Using an SSL G-series compressor on a dance music kick makes no f------ sense whatsoever." Even though almost all of EDM seems immaterial to me, because it doesn't move me or interest me intellectually, naturally he has a strong sense of its internal consistency. We also see this in the proliferating lists of subgenres used by critics. Both Mozart and Beethoven were criticized for doing things "you can't do"—they were pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in the soundworlds of their day, even though they seem very familiar (and not very "out there") to us today.

That internal consistency makes for some bizarre twists occasionally. I learned a while ago that a number of country artists are "volitional" artists—they're not actually from the country and they don't (or didn't originally) actually speak in a Southern drawl or a Western twang. They adopt those characteristics to get along in the genre they want to be included in. Much like the comedian who created the character "Larry the Cable Guy"—there are videos of him early in his career dressed in slacks and speaking without any accent whatsoever. I asked a guy at my Pool League match last night who the singer of the country hit "Wagon Wheel" ("hey, mama rock me"—that one) is, and I was mildly amazed to learn that it's Darius Rucker, the black former lead singer of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish. Turns out he reinvented himself as a country artist back in 2008.

The question of "what kind of music do you listen to" is quite similar to the question "what kind of photographer are you," which I never quite knew how to answer.

Hank: "You've name-checked almost all of my heroes. You forgot Conlon Nancarrow."

Mike replies: I enjoyed that. I also appreciated the comment under that video written by Gus Cairns:

"When people rant on about 'This isn't music' I just invite them to think of the list of much more celebrated composers who cite Nancarrow as an influence—everyone from Gyorgy Ligeti to John Adams. Also: try to imagine it in a context, as a piece of music with a practical use such as a film score. It's often Hollywood and TV that actually takes avant-garde music and places it into popular culture—Bernard Herrmann is the best known example of a serious avant-garde composer who also wrote popular film scores such as Psycho. Ligeti of course ended up in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stockhausen writes stuff that would be perfect for SF films—Xenakis would be certain for perfect horror films—where would Nancarrow fit in? Well, imagine him as the score for a Tom and Jerry cartoon. John Adams wrote a whole chamber symphony in homage to cartoon music, and Nancarrow's music, with its zany pratfalls and jagged assaults, is there in the roots of that style. Lastly, this is the Deep End of Nancarrow. You might want to try the orchestrations of some of his earlier studies first before telling us he's not music."

Arg: "Reading your introductory words, I thought you were picking on me for my tendency to say, 'I like every genre of music, because, in my experience, there is great music to be found in every genre.' I usually find myself saying so in reply to the not-uncommon pronouncement along the lines, "I hate (e.g. rap) music.' But then I realized that you were ridiculing a position by taking it in extremis, which includes 'the most literal possible interpretations.'"

Mike replies: Yep. Guilty as charged. Vince laid out the real situation well in his comment. As far as greatness in every genre, I like the art critic Peter Schjeldahl's stance—when faced with art he doesn't like, he asks himself, what would I like about this if I liked it? My friend Kim will engage with music he hates until he's satisfied that he can separate the good from the great from the bad. It's as though his goal is to understand it. Then again, he can really only listen to music a few times before he has to move on. My own goal is to find high points...I'm a connoisseur, not a critic and not catholic. For example, I love "Every Picture Tells a Story" but no other Rod Stewart album, "Post-War" but no other M. Ward album, and "'Sno Angel Like You" but no other Howe Gelb album. My approach would be anathema to many music lovers and I know that.

Wednesday Open Mike: A Writer's Writer (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. sometimes wanders into double, double toil and trouble. It appears on Wednesdays.]

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Things have slowed down here as I'm a bit under the weather. I don't feel bad, but I'm very tired—listless—and once again I've got the voice I always wanted...about two registers lower than my normal voice. As often happens when I get a "bug."  :-)

An off-topic placeholder: If you remember the TV shows "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Tales of the Unexpected," and "The Twilight Zone," or ever watch them on YouTube, you might be interested to know that one of the strongest influences on that style of storytelling was a writer from the UK named John Collier, who wrote short stories among other things. Fourteen episodes of those three television shows came from Collier's short stories.

Collier, who never graduated from college but was an admirer of both Swift and Joyce, came to the US from England in 1935 and landed in Hollywood. But he was hardly a typical Hollywood writer. An early screenplay that flopped nearly wrecked Katherine Hepburn's career, and his style marks him as "a category of one," playful yet wicked, with plentiful overtones of myth and fantasy. He began a minor literary tradition when he wrote an anonymous negative review of his own whimsical first book His Monkey Wife, which was about a man married to a chimpanzee. "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony," goes his self-assessment, "too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humor is too hysterical, too greedy, and too crude." That might work as a review of some of those old TV shows.

His quintessential book of stories is Fancies and Goodnights from 1951, which won the very first International Fantasy Award as well as an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America. The book was famous for years and is still in print. (The subtitle of the first edition [pictured], is "TALES UNLIKE OTHER TALES," and the book cover got that right!) If you'd like to read the first story in the book online, a tale of a treacherous genie in a bottle, as a sample, you can read it at Esquire magazine's website. Although a written story, you'll find it as short and to the point as the 22 minutes of a half-hour TV show.

There are also more complete compendiums, The Best of John Collier and The John Collier Reader. (I could swear I bought the latter, but it has mysteriously vanished.)

Collier was a favorite of many writers, including Roald Dahl as well as Ray Bradbury, who wrote the introduction to the linked edition. Other than his books, Collier seems to have left little trace: there are few interviews and not many photos. His biographer said of him: "Collier saw humans, flawed but with potential, everywhere contaminated by narrow creeds, institutions, coteries, vanities, and careers."

Anyway, try Fancies and Goodnights. Perfect reading if you're just a bit sick!  ;-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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jerry: "My mother bought me Fancies and Goodnights when was in junior high in 1969. I just reread it about two years ago. Uniquely lovely and wicked little tales. Truly unforgettable to the youngster I was then."

Matthew Liggett: "I haven't read Collier, but I will definitely give him a shot, thanks. Your post immediately reminded me of Ben Loory's Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. Some are bleak and most are surreal. They're very short—what's sometimes called micro-fiction."

Mike replies: Those look wonderful. Thanks back at you!

Sunday Support Group: Salad for Breakfast (OT)

There's a highly anticipated, eagerly awaited book coming soon that you're going to want. How Not to Diet by Michael Greger will be published on December 10th and can be pre-ordered now. It's almost certain to be a bestseller.

The title is a clever (cute?) takeoff on his bestselling title How Not to Die, which outlines what is currently scientifically known about nutritional solutions to fifteen different common causes of death, from breast cancer to suicidal depression. Note that the author donates 100% of his profits from both books to charity.

Highly recommended.

You've probably noticed that information about nutrition, when you first approach it, is very confusing. There are a couple of very good reasons why that's true:

1. The weight loss industry. In the USA alone, the weight loss industry is worth only slightly less than the global digital photography industry (~$72 billion vs. ~$77b). It dwarfs traditional categories such as, say, book publishing (~$4b). The weight loss industry depends on you being confused, so it's constantly stoking public ignorance. This isn't because of any evil centralized conspiracy, mind you. It's just that individual actors spread falsehoods for all sorts of reasons and collectively it muddies the waters.
2. The influence of the existing food industry on politics. The food industry isn't actually evil; they're just trying to maximize profits. If they have to kill you and your children to earn profits, that isn't because they actually want you to die. However, a lot of the things you probably believe about food have been bought and paid for by the food industry. Even the USDA is deeply conflicted. It has a stark conflict of interest baked into its mission: it supervises food safety and recommends to the public what's healthiest to eat on the one hand, and on the other hand it's supposed to do whatever it can to support US food producers. Those two functions are often at odds.

An example of one of those bought-and-paid for beliefs? Well, ever heard the one about "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"? True?

Nope. There's nothing wrong with eating breakfast if you're hungry at that time of day and/or if you enjoy breakfast, but there's no scientifically valid evidence that it's any more important than any other meal. The happy myth is promoted by the makers of breakfast cereals. Which, for the most part, are decidedly unhealthy foodlike substances!

It's worth mentioning that the public is complicit in the confusing of itself, too, because it wants to be told to do all the bad things it likes to do. This can be tracked over the years; there are always fad diets that flourish and fade that tell people what they want to hear. This is another big reason for the confusion...because we want to be confused, if it's going to allow us to feel okay about continuing our bad habits.

Tips
One tip I read in WFPB lit somewhere is that you should eat your salad first when you sit down for a meal, while you're still hungry. Makes sense to me because I don't like salads much, and they're sort of a bother to make (at least I used to think so for some reason—now I'm in the habit and it seems easy), but edible greens are the probably the single most important thing we eat regularly. They contain hundreds and hundreds of phytochemicals, many of which are essential for cellular functioning. They're one of the most nutritious foods we eat. Your daily salad is the last thing you should delete from your daily diet.

I'm not hungry in the mornings, so I start my day with two large mugs of white tea, with lemon added. Then, I just apply that advice about eating salad first...but I apply it to the whole day! Sometime around 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., I "break my fast" with a green salad. It's not just the first thing I eat at my main meal—it's the first thing I eat every day.

Here are a few random tips I've learned about recently:

1. Most fruits don't have much in the way of anti-cancer properties, but two in particular do: lemons and cranberries. So you can guess who's been eating a lot more cranberries recently. They're very bitter, and I don't like bitter taste, so I eat them in clever ways. I base my berry smoothies on a small amount of cranberry juice concentrate, or sometimes I use frozen cranberries in the smoothie; I eat whole organic cranberries from a bowl along with black or red grapes, so the bitterness of the cranberries can cut, and contrast with, the grapes' sweetness, and the grapes' sweetness can mask the cranberries' bitterness; and I mix about one-quarter of a glass of pure cranberry juice with my glass of pure Concord grape juice, which is the last thing I consume in the evenings. Oh, and I routinely sprinkle my salads with a few dried cranberries. (Dried cranberries and cranberry juice are only half as loaded with antioxidants as whole cranberries, but both are still excellent.)
2. Very strangely, a daily vinegar drink does a lot to cut belly fat. Start with 12 ounces of unflavored seltzer water. Add two tablespoons of organic apple cider vinegar and about a teaspoon of lemon juice—the lemon juice is my own addition, just to take the vinegar-y edge off the taste. You might not lose any weight at all, but drink that once a day for a month and see if your belly isn't flattening. No idea how that works, but it does. (After a month you'll get accustomed to the taste, too. I liked it well enough right away, but for others it could take a little getting used to.)
3. You don't have to buy organic for everything. But there are some things that are much more likely to be contaminated by pesticides. You might want to familiarize yourself with the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen. The advice is to be sure to buy organic strawberries, but you don't have to worry so much about avocados...and so on.
4. Brazil nuts (which are actually seeds) aren't good for you in large quantities—they're high in selenium, and eating too many can cause selenium toxicity. But a recent study suggests that just four Brazil nuts per month can lower your bad cholesterol significantly—and they start working faster than statin drugs! And more than four doesn't work any better than four. Four Brazil nuts a month, check.

That last is—forgive me—nuts.

Speaking of cranberries having anti-cancer properties, I eat lots of garlic, too. I have to—the Mennonites peel them for me, but only if I buy them in bulk! (About thirty cloves in a plastic container.) I have to use them up as quickly as I can. But then, garlic is good against cancer, too.

Get in line for that book. I've requested a PDF as a review copy—think they'll believe a photo blogger is worth an early bird copy of a book about nutrition? Maybe not, but it's worth a try. Either way, I can't wait. [UPDATE Monday: The publisher is restricting copies of the PDF to combat possible piracy, but is sending me an advance hard copy. It's only a few weeks before publication, but look forward to a future Sunday book report!]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Trevor Johnson: "It worries me a bit when you get onto the healthcare stuff. OK, so I'm an editor at a Cochrane Group and work part-time at the medical school, running research, etc. And here is the problem. The research from well conducted trials, and systematic reviews, are poorly understood, even by healthcare professionals. So with all due respect, I am afraid that your observations, though interesting, are just that. Subjective."

Mike replies: Well, I'm just parroting what I have learned from WFPB doctors for the most part, so it's not entirely me. It's true that I like to use myself as a guinea pig and experiment to see what works for me. Kicking off the day with a salad laden with goodies and a berry smoothie is working splendidly, which is why I thought I'd share.

But I'm a layman, and only partially educated. I also tend to be an empiricist by intellectual temperament, and (God forfend!) intuitive by psychological predilection, and I have strong opinions and tastes...a recipe for crankery and crackpottery if ever there was one. If that weren't enough, I could also be under the influence of confirmation bias, since I suck up WFPB books and vids like they were black grapes. So your skepticism is well placed.

Then again, the topic is food, and I have no control whatsoever over what you choose to put into your mouth. So the potential damage I might do via my crankery, if crankery it be, is firmly constrained. Even Dr. Greger departed from his usual ethics in recommending four Brazil nuts a month, on the excellent basis that it cannot possibly do harm!

On the other hand, approximately 75% of American medical schools do not teach nutrition at all, and the majority of medical doctors have never taken a nutrition course, much less a nutrition rotation in medical school. The people I listen to and trust (Michael Greger, Joel Fuhrman, Neal Barnard, John McDougall, Kim Williams, T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Ellsworth Wareham, etc.) are all medical doctors, but ones who have spent their lives and careers studying nutrition and working with patients' diets. My empirical, anecdotal observation (subjective, I know!) so far has been that almost all of the doctors I come in contact with socially or professionally—the ones who have never taken a nutrition course and whose specialties might be very far from anything having to do with nutrition—think they know more about the subject than their colleagues who have made the study of it their life's work. Why that is, I don't know.

I'll put forward a challenge to you. Anyone who is able to a.) feel their bodies and be minimally conscious of how the food they eat makes them feel, and who b.) can somehow contrive to eat a 100% strict whole-food plant-based (WFPB) diet for only THREE WEEKS—purely as an experiment!—will, I believe, be convinced. If you can get a checkup and have your blood work done before and after it will be an additional "convincer."

Of course, such an experiment has impediments—it's not as easy as it sounds. It usually requires time and effort to adapt to a WFPB diet. God knows I have not done very well myself, and not for lack of trying. You have to work out what foods you are going to eat, what you find palatable, what you can cook, and what ingredients you have available to you; you have to get over the four days or so it takes your gut to adjust to a normal amount of fiber; and for at least a few days and maybe as long as the whole first half of those three weeks you might suffer cravings for the sugar, alcohol, oil and grease most Americans are used to.

If a person were rich, he or she could kick such an experiment off with a stay at Dr. McDougall's 10-day live-in program, where they will feed you tasty chef-prepared WFPB food, fill your head with WFPB info, and monitor your body's response. But that costs like five grand and a plane ticket, not to mention ten days free, and almost nobody I know can afford such a thing. More's the pity.

But this is kind of amusing. From pages 305–306 of How Not to Die:

"[Dr. Neal Barnard] often uses what's called an 'A-B-A' study design. Participants' health is assessed at baseline on their regular diets, and then they're switched to a therapeutic diet. In an effort to make sure any health changes participants experience on the new diet aren't merely a coincidence, they are then switched back to their regular diet to see if the changes disappear.

"This kind of rigorous study design improves the validity of the results, but the problem, Dr. Barnard related, is that sometimes people improve too much. After a few weeks on a plant-based diet, sometimes people feel so much better that they refuse to go back on their baseline diet—even though it's required by the study protocol. Since they didn't complete the study as planned, their data have to be effectively thrown out and may never make it into the final paper. Ironically, healthy eating can be so effective that it undermines its own studies of effectiveness!"

James: "Just keep it up Mike. As someone who is still living because of diet intervention in 1982/3, I am always happy you give us 'reminders' occasionally. You will always get someone saying that you are not an expert after every post. We know that you aren't. Maybe you should add 'hey, it's just what I have found' after each nutrition post. Food for thought?"

Kirk W: "I’m with James on this one. I learned of Nutritionfacts.org through one of your posts from early in 2019. It’s making a difference in my life and I thank you for that. Plus, Dr. Greger’s humor suits me. I can’t walk through the produce section without thinking about 'Big Broccoli' competing against the pharmaceutical giants!"

Kirk: "Seeing a whole lot of sugars in your diet (Concord grape juice, cranberry juice, etc.) Sugars seem to be the emerging culprit in just about every disease in the west. Also not seeing nearly enough fun food that you enjoy eating. There is a psychological component to the enjoyment of food that is as important as the basic chemistry. If you hate the taste of cranberries then why torture yourself? I get the whole vegan theology but I always go back to 'moderation in all things.' The brain is a tricky thing. Its response to deprivation and forced eating of foods it doesn't like could sabotage all the 'good' effects of another lifeless bowl of oats and grains.... Just sayin'."

Mike replies: Absolutely. Sugar is my particular Achilles' heel. I'm a sugar addict, which is about 1/10th the intensity of alcohol addiction but on the same spectrum IMHO. Sugar is the reason I fall off every diet after I'm successfully on it. I despair of ever controlling it. But I'll keep trying.

Peter Nigos: "I'm with Trevor Johnson on this one. There are opinions on what we should eat, and there is nutrition science. These two universes are not necessarily the same. It is peculiar that blogs on photography seem anxious to tell us what we should or should not eat. Both Lloyd Chambers (diglloyd) and this blog have promoted doubtful nutritional advice. I have not noticed any comments on photography of food on either site. At least you have not offered us promotion of your paranormal experience, like Steve Huff."

Mike replies: Again, I don't have any control of what you eat. And what is wrong with Michael Greger's knowledge of nutrition science? His schtick is, "Every year, I read through every issue of every English-language nutrition journal in the World so busy folks like you don't have to." He's been studying nutrition science intensively for 25 years. So do you know more about the subject than he does? (Here's the source of the quote—in the video starting at about 2:10.

I agree with one of the YouTube commenters that he has "...one of the strangest speech patterns I've ever heard in my life. It's like if you took a clip of Mr Rogers speaking and randomly tinkered with the speed lol."

Jim K.: "I'm a scientist who has spent his career in the pharmaceutical industry working on treatments for a variety of diseases. I've been regularly exercising for the last few years: what I found was that my body had reshaped itself pretty nicely (well, I still had the belly fat), but I didn't lose weight. And my vitals (blood work, blood pressure) were not particularly good (200–220 total cholesterol, blood pressure ranges 125/78 to 140/90). Thanks to Mike's blogging, I started WFPB dieting at the end of August (so coming up on month three). My diet had been typical standard American (SAD); I love meats, eggs, dairy, other tasty sweet stuff. I ate my veggies too...so while I wasn't eating horribly, I certainly wasn't eating 'right.'

"Into this journey, I've had a couple sets of blood work and a physical. My weight is down 20 lbs. (weight loss is tapering off to a more reasonable two lbs./week). My cholesterol is down from 200–220 to 140. Triglycerides are still a bit high (150–160). Blood pressure is down to 110/65. And as an scientist, I've observed that my skin and nails have gotten much better (on my feet, mainly).

"Most of the dietary strategies used in WFPB dieting are evidence-based: there are scientific studies (sometimes with placebo-controls). It can be hard to tease out cause and effect in population studies, but not impossible. I've been very thankful that Mike has blogged about his experimentation on diet, and I can confirm that many of these strategies are working well for me.

"I'm looking forward to trying his vinegar and lemon seltzer—I bought the vinegar a while ago, but hadn't figured out a vehicle for ingestion (other than salad). And I pre-ordered How Not to Diet a while ago—how can you not with that title?

"PS: I give myself forgiveness for cheats. I know Mike loves sushi—he got me hooked on that too (years ago). I have a weakness for pizza, and I'll do that with my finacée once a month or so."

Open Mike: Timed Shots, Point shots, and Extreme Cuts

["Open Mike," the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, is two days too late this week. It is planned to appear on Wednesdays. But you know the auld quote from the Scottish poet Robert Burns: "The best-laid plans of Mikes and men...." —Mike]

-

I've just added many words of material to the previous post, in the Featured Comments—I was feeling loquacious this morning, and I'm typing well today (little-suspected fact about me: I don't know how to type), so I think I'll just leave it at that going into TOP's off day tomorrow. There is a lot more I could write—there are a number of new products to talk about, and I have a backlog of "Around the Web" items requiring attention, and I still haven't even done the "At the Museum" Baker's Dozen, even! (What's wrong with that guy?) So I have my work cut out for me.

Till Sunday, as an inconsequential diversion purely for your amusement, I'll venture the following. Regular readers know I never write about pool, because some readers (incomprehensibly) do not care for the sport. But this isn't exactly pool. Trick shots (now called "artistic pool" by the cognoscenti, by the way) are to pool what the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball. It's entertainment. So I thought I'd risk it. You'll know pretty quickly whether you're being entertained—if you don't care for the first five or so, you can turn it off, because there is more, much more....

Florian "Venom" Kohler, a transplant to Las Vegas from France where he grew up, is an Internet sensation and a wonder of nature—his combination of extraordinary skill and extreme inventiveness is very rare.

...As is his patience, too: some of these shots probably took many dozens or hundreds of attempts before he made the one for the video. I like that he walks away from them as if bored, rather than going nuts in celebration like a lot of kids on YouTube vids do when the thing they've been trying over and over again for the camera finally works.

From a pool player's standpoint the timed shots beginning at 6:00 (I've seen Melling do that in competition), the shots off the points beginning at 9:00 (ditto Reyes for that), and the extreme cuts beginning at 12:00 or so are particularly astonishing. Some of the jump shots too—he holds world records for most jump shots in the shortest times, for instance.

For more on Florian (I can't quite get with the hipster nickname "Venom"—he looks more like his nickname should be "Dilbert," or at least something more a bit more milquetoasty than snake poison—although he is a black-belt judoka), see Rollie's visit with him in "the house that Internet pool built."

Mike
(Thanks to Hatter)

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Shot o' the Day: Del "147" Smith (OT)

I never write about pool (as you know), but I've never seen this before. Del "147" Smith is playing Chris Lawson in a short race to five at the 2019 WPA Players Championship at Griff's in Vegas. Neither player is having a good day—the big guy is whacking the hell out of everything and the little guy is missing simple shots.

Having broken three times, Smith, who is British and naturally a snooker player—which means he's likely to be not very good at the break shot—has scratched on the break not once, not twice, but three out of three times. (Scratch means to pocket the cue ball, which you're never supposed to do. Note that both the commentators are British, so they call a scratch an "in-off." Note also the sound is very low, so you might have to turn up your speakers.) Three scratches on three breaks in a row is not something you see every day, or, well, every year.

Determined not to do it another time, Del lines up on the rack dead straight and hits the head ball, the yellow one-ball, head on. That in itself is a bit of a joke—it's a setup that's not likely to result in an effective break, but it's about the safest way to shoot to avoid a scratch. So watch what happens.

Del doesn't get to break again, so four is his total for the match.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: You Don't Lose Until You Stop Trying (OT)

Well, Summer's over. Boo-hoo. Maybe just boo.

It's been a beautiful Summer, but difficult. I haven't been doing a very good job with my various resolutions lately, and it's getting me down. That's awkward to admit, but I need to be honest. I haven't touched my book project since my operation, and I stopped being strict about my WFPB aspirations after the last post I wrote on the subject. It's depressing.

Math Problem (OT)

Actually, I'm not even sure this is mathematics. I don't even know what discipline it is. I realize this might be trivial to a lot of you, but my brain has never gotten along with numbers. (We all have weaknesses. The key to success in life is to know how to ask for help with the things we're not good at.)

Say you have four pool players—call them 1, 2, 3 and 4. The person who pays breaks, and each player pays and breaks in a fixed sequence, 1-2-3-4. Each game is two against two, but the teams rotate so that each person takes turns playing with the others. How do you arrange this so both sequences work?

It seems to me that there are four possible breakers, 1-2-3-4, but only three possible teams—that is, 1 plays with 2, then with 3, then with 4. How can both sequences continue? Sitting at the Moose the other day trying to bodge up a score sheet while the others were saying "come on, it's your turn!", I couldn't quite get there. To me it's like one of those odd time signatures that only jazz drummers know how to play.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: Two Radical Obesity Interventions (OT)

"Change of mind is not inconsistency."

—Cicero

If you see an obviously obese person walking down the sidewalk clutching a jumbo container of soda, you are almost certainly looking at a food addict. It's possible to get addicted to food, especially sugar. The helpless person you're seeing can't even venture out and be ambulatory for a little while without infusions of sugar-water at the ready.

It's not entirely her fault. An industry with formidable resources has entrapped her. As with the tobacco, alcohol, and now (in some states) the marijuana cartels, 80% of their profit comes from 20% of their customers. They're highly motivated to get you hooked.

I seldom drink soda, and never have it in the house, but I'm a food addict myself...

Open Mike: Damaging Myself

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of The Online Photographer. It appears intermittently.]

-

I have an embarrassing situation that I have to confront at regular intervals. I go to the hardware store to buy dog food, and I have to get the kid who works there to carry two 50-lbs. bags to the car for me. I'm a big enough guy, but I have what's called "shoulder impingement" in both shoulders. If you're a baseball fan you might be familiar with something similar that is known under the rubric of "rotator cuff injuries," which pitchers get—the rotator cuff being a fancy name for the muscles in your shoulder that you use to move your arm around. Anyway, I'm not supposed to lift 50-lbs. bags. The kid who usually carries the dog food to the car for me is a young guy whose age I'd peg at maybe 20. He doesn't seem to mind in the slightest, nor does he seem to have any cognizance of any embarrassment on my part, so it's all good. He carries both bags at once.

Me, I wish I'd done my pushups over the years. So one time I asked the kid at the hardware store if he did pushups. I was going to, you know, give him some of that good "old man" advice that older people are obligated to gas on about every now and then and that young people are obligated to listen to politely and then completely ignore.

He said he got "into" pushups for a while but plateaued at 120 so he got discouraged and quit. How many pushups does he do now? None.

I remember doing something similar at or near his age—my little brother and I would do as many pushups as we could, then wait a while, then do as many pushups as we could again, and then repeat until we couldn't do a single pushup. It's kind of a cool sensation—you lie on your stomach on the floor and try to push yourself up and nothing happens. The routine makes you sore and then supposedly you're stronger once you recover. No clue if it was actually good exercise or not. I did it a few times over a period of maybe a few weeks, and then, of course, stopped, because who wouldn't stop doing a thing like that?

Here's what I think from the perspective of age 62: rather than work his way up to 120 and then quit, what my young helper should do is...three pushups a day.

Three.

But every day.

For how long? For an entire year. Every single day, rain or shine, hell or high water. What young guy can't do three pushups before he puts on his shirt in the morning? After 30 days it would just be a habit and he wouldn't even notice it.

Then, at the end of the year, he should add...one. One more. For a total of four. And then do four pushups a day for another entire year.

And then the next year, five, and so on.

If I had done that, I would now be doing ~42 pushups a day and it would be a deeply embedded habit, and I wouldn't have any shoulder impingement problems and I'd be carrying my own bags of dog food to the car.

But no. We're all like that kid at the hardware store, or my own younger self.

Walking
Not exercising every day is correctly categorized as a health risk, similar to smoking or obesity. But what do I do? What happens to me, repeatedly, is that I 1.) get all gung-ho to exercise, 2.) overdo it, which leads to 3.) getting injured, or discouraged, or simply finding it too hard to keep up the pace, and 4.) quit, usually sooner rather than later.

In fact, during that great lather of initial enthusiasm I have actually damaged myself several times in my life by reckless strenuous exercise that had a long-term negative outcome.

For example. My ex-girlfriend was a health nut who went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and got up at 4:30 in the morning to go to the gym. When I visited her, I would accompany her there...which even I recognized as courtship behavior and not something that I was good for in the long term. But hey, she worked all day, and when I visited I wanted to see more of her, so that's why I used to find myself dressed in an exercise getup sitting next to her in the car on a frosty Winter's morn, heading for the YMCA. (Note: this is unnatural. No living thing should be stirring at five in the ever-lovin' a.m. except nocturnal animals in the forest, if that.)

She did spinning, on stationary bicycles, but spinning made my hips hurt. This mystified me. Later I looked it up, and the Internet helpfully informed me that a common side effect of starting spinning is that it makes your hips hurt, especially if you're a middle-aged man. Check on that. (Reminds me of the time I looked up the reason why dogs eat grass when it only makes them throw up. The explanation given is that "dogs eat grass because it makes them throw up." Oooh-kay.) But the Y had an indoor track that was 1/16th of a mile around. Now, I had been a sprinter in my youth. It was not long before ye olde light-bulb lit up. While Sara was spinning, I would become a sprinter again. I ran around the track a few times. It felt good. The next morning, I arrived all gung-ho to start my new career as an age-group track and field champion, and I sprinted around the track repeatedly, walking one lap between sprints. It felt marvelous. I was actually pretty fast. Why had I never thought of this before? I think I sprinted 18 laps that day, a mile in total distance plus a couple of extra laps for good measure.

By the time I went to bed that evening, my knees were hurting ominously. The next morning, not only could I not go to the gym, I could barely make it down a flight of stairs. My knees hurt like the devil. After a week I was pretty convinced that I had permanently damaged myself. I was still hobbling around like some superannuated character in a Dickens movie. All in all, it was a good eight weeks before my knees returned to normal, and, by the way, thank you for that, Lord—I really would not have been surprised if I were still limping to this day.

Me, following my triumphant return to sprinting.
Note expression. That was my exact expression.

This is only one example. This has been a pattern. Three months ago I decided to start exercising again, and I did—so vigorously that I promptly got a bad backache. Since then, I've had a series of recurring backaches that were troublesome enough that I finally went for an hour-and-a-half-long session with a physical therapist last week. The physical therapist gave me three exercises to do every hour, so I did one of them eight times, and it helped immensely, and now my back feels like it's back to being a normal back. Once again I am relieved that the damage has not proved to be permanent, as it well could have done.

The best-laid schemes o' Mikes an' men...
One hallmark of maturity is that you start to recognize your patterns and take them into account in your behavior. So Michael Greger says we should walk 90 minutes a day, and that if we fail to exercise it's a risk factor for our health. So you would think, knowing this, that I'd resolutely walk for 90 minutes each day for three days—probably uphill, since I have a steep hill very near my house—then give up. But oh no. I've been down that road, no pun intended. Just because the young fella at the hardware store is going to ignore my advice about the three pushups doesn't mean I can't learn something from my own advice! So in response to Dr. Greger's video, which advises that 20 minutes of exercise a day is insufficient, I've started walking 15 minutes a day. It's August first now, and I've just returned from my 15-minute walk. I plan to walk 15 minutes a day at least through the end of September, and maybe longer, before considering ratcheting it up to 20 minutes. See? I've learned.

If all goes well, I will be up to 90 minutes by about this time in 2021. Actual chance of that? Approximately zero, because constancy is my worst thing. But at least this time I am not going to damage myself. Why not? Because, my friend, I am old now, and wise, and finally beginning to realize some of the things I should have known all along.

Mike
(Illustration by Arthur Rackham, from his Rip Van Winkle)

UPDATE Friday: I walked up the hill today, but I drove up past the extremely steep part and walked the merely steep part. (Welker Hill has a 520-foot elevation change in about 8/10ths of a mile. That's the height of a 40-story building.) When I got to my mark, I had to walk on just a ways—the weather was cool, the light was brilliant and gorgeous, and I just love it up there on the high meadow. I'm lucky to have that place to walk to.

But I walked for 20 minutes...rats. The best-laid schemes....

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Jeff1000: "Hey Mike, pushups are basically just upside down bench presses using your body weight for resistance. The limitation is that you quickly adapt to your bodyweight as resistance and you end up increasing the amount of reps to the point of absurdity. With a barbell, performing bench presses, you can simply increase the amount of weight to keep yourself in a productive repitition range, like ten to fifteen."

Mark L: "Probably the worst thing you can do is sit on your bum writing a blog all day...please don't stop though!"

Mike replies: That's a mixed message, Mark.  :-)

Anya's Riddle (OT)

Riddles are best if you puzzle them out in your head, so no cheating! Google begone.

It's better than God and worse than the devil; the poor have it, and the rich need it; yet if you eat it, you'll die.

What is it?

This was put to us at the "Picnic in the Park" last night by a nimble-minded nine-year-old named Anya. (I hope I'm spelling that right.) Her soon-to-be-stepdad Alex was the only adult who got it.

Please, no spoilers in the Comments. I'll pass along the answer tomorrow morning.

Mike
(Thanks to Anya)

UPDATE the next morning: The answer is "nothing." Good one, eh?  :-)

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anthony reczek: "Ha ha! For the past twenty four hours, this 'nimble minded nine-year old' in upstate NY was wreaking havoc in households across five continents. Glad I only saw this earlier today...."

mishka: "Spent a lot of time thinking but nothing comes to mind."

DALI Oberon Loudspeakers (OT)

[Warning: Bloviation Alert. The second half of this is what I meant to write on Wednesday for "Open Mike" this week. Marcin's right, I do go on too long when I get my teeth into a topic.  —Ed.]

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A few further thoughts about the concept of an "apex product":

It's not an average. Nor is it mediocre. It's an ideal.

...But a practical, utilitarian sort of ideal. One that takes into account more than just the normal hierarchy of status and expense. For example, with highly salable top-of-the-market products, such as, say, the VW Golf, which is the best-selling car in Europe, even though each iteration is not terribly costly, the company is justified in putting huge amounts of research, R&D, and engineering into the "template" on which the "workmanship of certainty" is performed (i.e., the production process). "Handmade" products, such as a Superformance, have an undeniable appeal, but handwork is simply not as good as when you can spend millions of dollars on a robot to do a specific type of precision weld. It's true that you can spend $300,000 on a Rolls-Royce, but a Honda Accord would cost $300,000 too if there were no mass market and it were made one by one in low total numbers by teams of craftsmen, and the engineering that went into it had to be amortized over a small number of sales.

So "ideal" for me incorporates a number of things not normally associated with status. Is it easily replaceable? Is it non-precious, such that it can actually be used, and, if it's appropriate for the product type, used up? Is it reliable? Is it easily repairable? Example of that: I knew a guy who bought his cars by picking his repair shop first, then asking the mechanics there what kind of car they most liked to work on. If they said Chevy Impala, then he bought a Chevy Impala (he tipped them a bottle of whiskey when they worked on it, too). By contrast, I also knew a guy who was a Ferrari mechanic in the '90s, and he told me that an oil change on certain cars had to be done by the dealer and cost $2,000. Guess which one I would judge to be more ideal?

And don't say "Ferrari owners can afford it," either—the same guy got out of the automotive field altogether because the average Ferrari owner—80% of them, he said—can't afford routine maintenance, and it just got too frustrating for him to so seldom be able to take care of the cars the way the manufacturer intended.

This little guy (3/8 to 1/2 inches in length) will cost me
at least $600 this year. Not ideal.

So, continuing with the list...parts availability; the exclusivity<—>anonymity spectrum and where you want to fall on it; the simplicity <—>complexity spectrum and ditto; ergonomics; residual value a ways out (five years for cameras, 10 for cars, 30 for houses) as a percentage of initial new price (digital cameras suck at that); and mandatory related expenses. As an example of "mandatory related expenses," I'm finding out that my yard here is a fairly big line-tem in my budget. Last year I had to spend $1,400 on a used John Deere; this year a beetle called the emerald ash borer just killed a full-sized ash tree in my back yard, and the lowest estimate I've gotten for removing it is $600. Ask me if I think spending $600 on account of a beetle, even one in a Doc Severinsen suit, is an ideal situation. There are maybe five more trees on my property that could come down if I were actually wealthy enough to live here.  :-)

I don't think there's any such thing as a complete list of these things, because we all have different realities, comfort levels, incomes, ideas, locations, tastes, and specific needs and wants. but the point is that in attempting to locate an apex product, you can get pretty subtle about how you determine what it is. For me, a Toyota Corolla with a stick shift (automatics being expensive points of failure) is a better car than a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari. The Rolls is more luxurious and will impress people much more (although I saw a new Bentley on the streets of my semi-impoverished little town a while back and no pedestrian even looked up as far as I could tell), and the Ferrari is much more exciting to drive, assuming you have access to a race track now and then, but then, consider taking your dogs to the vet in the back seat of the Rolls, or plopping some wet bags of topsoil on the pristine wool carpeting in its trunk. The Ferrari is merely a toy that could land you in jail if you actually play with it. Neither can touch the Corolla at preventing cash from evaporating. The Rolls and the Ferrari are not in the Toyota's league when it comes to that. So what's best? Depends on what you value.

Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries: DALI
How I got started thinking about this is that I was going to draw your attention to a new speaker called a DALI Oberon 3. As you might know I have pretty specific and idiosyncratic tastes in a lot of things, and two-way minimonitors with 7-inch paper (well, paper-ish) woofers (which I like) and soft-dome tweeters (I dislike metal ones, which is partly bigotry and partly not) are a holy grail thing with me. I love 'em. I owned a Swiss speaker called a Revox Studio 3 for years and I got imprinted. And I used to own Rogers LS3/5a's, which are legendary. Audio catnip.

I'd love to hear these DALIs. They tickle the endorphins. They look so tidy and minimalist and basic and simple and clean and pretty, don't they? Designed in Denmark and made in China, so they're well designed and well made but they only cost $800, which is well into the "sensible" range for a pair of minimonitors. (Compare here. Be prepared!)

But then I got to thinking...they're not the apex product.

In fact, no small stand-mounted two-way is. The problem starts with the fact that you have to buy stands, which are needed to hang the drivers in the right place in the air. And the stands have to be well-made because the coupling to the floor affects the vibration of the speakers. Good stands can cost anywhere from $200 to $1,200, but stands are something close to wasted money...necessary, but only because "bookshelf" speakers never sound very good on, well, bookshelves.

And minimonitors don't really have quite enough bass. They demand a small room.

But the biggie is that small speakers are, as a category, less efficient and harder to drive and thus require more amplifier power than bigger ones. Really, to pair with these, you should have an amp with decent grunt, something of good quality rated, I would say, in the  85 to 120 watts-per-channel range. So any money you save on the speakers you're going to lose on the amp.

A lot of people make this mistake. They think small, tidy speakers should go with small, tidy amps, and big honking speakers should go with big brutish amps. It's kind of the other way around, all else being equal. The small speakers need power, whereas bigger ones can be set free with less. Want a pair of Klipschorns big enough to hide dead bodies in? You can drive them with a flea-powered single-ended triode (SET) tube amp with only a handful of watts, like this little 3.5-watt [sic] SA3 amp from Bottlehead.

So the apex product in the DALI Oberon line is probably the more expensive and larger Oberon 7 floorstander. True, they're more expensive at $1,400, still a good bargain by audio standards. They sit right on the floor; no stands needed. They have two woofers rather than one, so they're three decibels down at 36 hertz rather than 47 hertz like the 3's. The sensitivity isn't that different—88.5 dB rather than 87; same drivers, after all. All in all they can probably load a bigger room and I'd say you could stick in the 50-100 wpc range with good quality solid-state amplification. Probably more satisfying in the long run than the little guys.

Besides, if you're going to get minimonitors—and stands—you should go all the way and get Falcon's loving remake of the BBC LS3/5a, the absolute all-time classic great holographic minimonitor, the "original gangsta." Drive them with a tube amp (Mike loves EL34's) that has at least 25 wpc and has 16-ohm taps. Nirvana. Don't have a small enough room of the right shape? Build a room for them.  :-)

Rooms!
Speaking of rooms—and efficiency and sufficiency—I seem to be annoyingly attracted to hobbies that need "room-sized accessories," as my friend Nick once called his darkroom. First I needed darkrooms, which caused me to always ask real estate agents to see the basement of a prospective house first, which they always thought was peculiar. Then there's pool—the real luxury of having a pool table is having a place to put it. I can tell you from experience that there aren't a lot of reasonably priced houses in Southeastern Wisconsin that will accommodate a full-sized pool table. I don't have space for one here, alas, and I feel the lack.

Then there's stereo. My brother Scott always thought it was fun to move, because then you get to know your speakers all over again—different rooms make speakers sound different. Most people put a stereo near where they hang out, instead of hanging out where they put the stereo, and that's perfectly sensible, but dedicated audiophiles, who are, as a class, very far from sensible, will sometimes build dedicated listening rooms. In audio, the amp-speaker symbiosis is very important and the speaker-room interaction is just as important.

The best place for the Oberon 7's would be a rectangular room of medium size, say 150 to 400 square feet or thereabouts. Say you have a room that's 15x25', so 375 square feet. I'd start by placing the optical axis (imagine a line running vertically down the middle of each speaker face, touching the front of the drivers) along the short wall 1/5th of the way out into the room—so, 5' into our 25' long room—and 1/5th of the room width from the sidewalls, so, three feet in our 15'-wide room. Then place the listening chair at the other end of the long dimension of the room, also 1/5th into the room, or five feet from the back wall in the 25'-long room. With the Oberon 7's I'd start with no toe-in, meaning, with the speakers facing squarely forward rather than pointed partway toward the listening chair.

That would be a good starting point. Then you could fine-tune the positions of both speakers and listening position based on listening. I should mention that assuming you have a pretty "regular" room, it's worth it to measure as exactly as you can even when first setting up—get the speakers to 1/4th inch of the intended placement if you can.

So, should you buy a pair of Oberon 7's? Well, I never said that! I haven't heard them. I've only read about them. They look interesting to me, but you'd need to hear them for yourself before committing to a purchase, whether you do that by going to a dealer or by buying a pair with a reasonable period of return privilege. Unless they seem just too excruciatingly cheap, however, they, or similar floorstanders for a similar price, seem pretty close to an apex product for me. Not the best, not the worst, just a very well-judged approximation of the optimum bang for the buck.

Mike

P.S. Before we leave the topic of audio for another six or eight or ten months or two years or however long it's going to be, here are three more current audio products I personally think are really cool: the Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers, a modern update of classic 1970s three-ways, designed by Peter Comeau, a designer whose work I really like; the newest version of the now newly retooled Panasonic direct-drive turntable, the Technics SL-1500C, a semi-automatic (!!!) version of the new rebuild of the classic, which also has a built-in phono section and comes with a cartridge, truly plug and play; and the Benchmark AHB2 power amplifier, which is tiny and light and is mopping up awards and earning lavish praise all over the place. I was going to write about these, too, but I have run out of steam for today.

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Dave Miller (partial comment): "I enjoy discussions about hifi. I used to be an audiophile until I was cured. This happened when I met hifi design engineer Phil Marshall. Phil worked for Dolby Labs amongst other companies but for many years he designed NAD's amplifier range including the power edge models (1990s?). I met him for the first time after he replied to some questions I asked about articles on his website explaining the importance of the room environment to the audio experience. I ended up working with him as a volunteer for a while, just a naive pair of ears, helping him with listening tests and learning from him. Phil now runs a tiny bespoke loudspeaker company called Marshall Choong Audio. He moved to speaker design because that product still had a lot of room for improvement and a skilled and creative engineer had scope to advance the art.

"Phil taught me a fundamental truth about music reproduction understood by engineers but not so much by customers. The most important component in hifi isn't the amp, speakers, source, cables or even your own ears, but the listening room. Speakers sound different in different rooms—something that a lot of people know. But perhaps what many people don't realise is that the difference a room makes totally dominates any other factor. Nothing you do in your choice of components makes any difference if you have an unsuitable room.

"The magazines would love you to try and fix the problem by buying ever more expensive components but if the room is the issue, it won't help. The key factor is room resonances. A typical room has reflections and standing waves that create massive response boosts at certain frequencies. Phil showed me how to measure room response. A typical small living room in a typical modest UK family home (say a brick-built three bedroom 1930s semi-detached home) has room dimensions that create resonances at around the 50Hz region that can sometimes be greater than +50dB above a flat response. That is a ridiculous problem. Almost all speakers will have bass overhang and undamped resonance that make getting a smooth, accurate sound very difficult. There are few ways to effectively counter this problem (set up your music listening space in a cow field?)...." [For the rest of Dave's comment, please see the Comment Section. —Ed.]

Mike replies: ...Or the near field! This is one reason I like small two-ways so much—near-field listening. My current speakers aren't great shakes by audiophile standards but set up on my desk they're a reasonable approximation of near-field listening and take the room more or less out of it.

Of my two favorite stereos, one was a pair of Celestion SL700's (bought as cosmetic seconds for half price) that I set up in the middle of the barn-like living room of a rental apartment and listened to in a near-field setup. Wonderful. And of course a good way to manage room resonances in the 20–150Hz region is to not have the bottom half of it in the first place.  :-)  (My "personal standard" for "enough but not too much bass" was –3dB at 42Hz, which I arrived at because that's the response of Thiel 1.5's.)

The other was in the basement room of my house in Woodstock, Illinois, which happened to be almost an ideal room—best room I ever had, anyway. Shoebox-shaped, big but not too big, with a concrete floor and two concrete walls, heating ducts encased in drywall on the ceiling which turned out to be great for disrupting reflections, and a wooden closet that stretched all the way across the back wall that turned out to be great for breaking up standing waves. I placed two floor-to-ceiling bookcases at the strategic points on the sidewalls. It was carpeted wall-to-wall, and I experimented for months with the position of my desk (listening seat) which was at the back of the room, and the speakers, which were given most of the rest of the room. I ended up, entirely by ear, with a very close approximation of George Cardas's room proportions and setup. George's site was where I got that tip about measuring the position exactly—when I did that, I moved the speakers less than two inches, but the focus was improved remarkably. I wouldn't have believed it any other way except experiencing it.

That house also had really crummy AC, so the other revelatory change happened when Paul McGowan (who is a photographer and was reading Photo Techniques at the time, although I don't think he reads TOP) let me be one of the beta testers for his then-upcoming original P300 Power Plant. My prototype didn't have the fancy casework, though—it was built by Cullen Circuits in a Ayre amplifier box. I kept it for years and in fact might still have it.

I've certainly heard of Phil Marshall. Very cool that you got to work for him. I suspect I would like Marshall Choong's "bookshelf" speakers...I once started a website called "The Sealed Box" which was intended to list all the non-vented speakers available! That was not popular.

Peter Wright: "One of my theology professors once remarked that when considering something like the shroud of Turin: Had it ever touched the face of Christ? It made no difference to Christianity either way, so we could choose to adopt what she called a 'hermeneutic of trust,' or a 'hermeneutic of suspicion.' Now, when it comes to audio, I am definitely a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' type of person. (And I speak as an electronic engineer who studied tube and transistor circuit design at university.) I agree that different speakers sound different, but past say $1,000, the differences don't have any effect on how much I enjoy the music. Placement of speakers has a more significant effect, but most of us have live-in partners (used to be called a 'wife' long ago) who don't generally allow the sort of room arrangement you describe. As for amps and CD players, nope, they all sound essentially the same. (Don't get me started on cables!) My strategy for buying audio is therefore to get midrange NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers, and then enjoy the music. That is my apex audio.

"The emerald ash borer destroyed the ash tree in my front yard, and all the other ash trees in town (in Ontario), so I feel your pain. The town management said they had come from China, but now I learn from you that they may have come from upstate New York!! I used to do a lot of wood turning, and frequently removed unwanted trees to feed my hobby. Ash is a good wood for turning, so you may want to see if there are any wood turners in the area who could have the ash for taking it away."

Mike replies: Actually, everything makes a difference—but saying nothing does is a pretty close approximation of the same statement. :-) 

And you're absolutely right to place the primacy on "how much I enjoy the music." Listening past the mechanics of the reproduction and hearing the music is the key skill, and stereophilia shouldn't be allowed to overwhelm that. In very much the same way that "seeing" through to what must have been in front of the camera and not getting too distracted in the technical aspects of a photograph is also the key skill that must be cultivated and protected. As we know, it's very easy to lose sight of the forest for peeping at the pixels.

And I hate to break it to you, but mid-range NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers could well be a perfectly nice music-listening system. Not expensive or exclusive maybe, but potentially highly listenable and nothing to scorn. A perfectly fine proposition for being apex products!

The Gettysburg Address on the Internet

SA*

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE LIFESTYLE NEWS dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting CARNIVAL CRUISE VACATIONS place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add

People also search for: Mary Todd Lincoln Lincoln Navigator Linkin Park

or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

Super Bowl MVP chugs beer on Jumbotron at Bruins game to the delight of crowd. "Julian Edelman chugging a beer was awesome," Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said at the end of the game.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this Nationwide is on your side nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

—@realAbrahamLincoln
November 19, 1863

Like 4,275     Dislike 832

-

Mike

*Satire Alert

[Ed. Note: The text of the speech used here is that of the Bliss Copy.]

P.S. And then for the next twelve days after reading this, you'll get targeted ads and emails for funeral homes.

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Benjamin Marks: "GOL. "Groan Out Loud" Funny/Queasy. The only tropes you missed were the ubiquitous 'list' ('15 Gettysburg tips that experts want you know'), 'belly fat,' and the trailing headline, 'Gettysburg Experts were astonished by these weird Lincoln habits.' Wait. Maybe only I get "news" stories about belly fat...."

Larry Gebhardt (partial comment): "Those 'Sponsored Stories' blocks are enough to make me stop using the Internet. I can feel myself getting dumber just seeing them on the page."

Bob Keefer: "The problem is, this isn't even remotely satire any longer."

Adam Richardson: "The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint is old Internet classic, but still good for a laugh."

Dramatic Documentary (OT)

This three-year-old grew up to be one of the greatest racing drivers in history,
and the last F1 driver to die in the heat of battle until Bianchi in 2015

A few days ago, May 1, was the 25th anniversary of the death of Ayrton Senna.

If you've never seen the movie Senna, I highly recommend it—it's one of the great stories, easy to appreciate even if you don't care at all about cars or racing. It's a documentary that has more drama than most fictitious films. One sports movie you shouldn't miss.

Senna was one of those rare figures who transcend their sports. He won the World Championship in 1988, 1990, and 1991, and died while leading the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy in 1994.

Senna the movie was first recommended to me by a TOP reader, years ago.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Peter McKenzie: "I watched him race in Adelaide in the '80s. There was a palpable hunger to his driving style that instantly stood out. Very sad that he died so young and in such tragic circumstances.

"If I can indulge on a slight tangent here. I took my wife to see Senna the movie when it came out. She is by no means a rev head, but she was enthralled by the story and entranced by Ayrton. The outcome was, thus, inevitable when near the end of the story she suddenly wailed, hit me and broke into tears saying 'you didn’t tell me he dies!'"

David Lee: "I’ve been a F1 fan since 1978. I used to hate Senna. I was sure all the hype in my dear Mexico was because he was latino, a Brazilian. The minute I saw him drive live, seated in stand 23 in Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, I converted and became his number one fan. There are millions of us. There are countless stories and anecdotes about him everywhere; anybody can read about them. The documentary, Mike, is fantastic, but you will need at least three or four more to do justice to this guy. I don’t have many heroes. Ayrton Senna is one of them. The day he died, I woke up very early, around 4:30 a.m., to find the race feed in the satellite dish and record the race. I had a flight that day, but before leaving home to the airport I went to say goodbye to my wife and told her that Senna crashed and it didn’t look good. When I returned home later that day, all the world new about his death. I still have the tape. Still don’t feel like watching it. Maybe in another 25 years."

beuler: "You just made me go watch F1 videos on YouTube. I haven't watched F1 for 25 years. I first saw Ayrton Senna race at the Macau Grand Prix in Formula 3 in the mid-eighties. It was one of those beautiful black and gold JPS cars. Senna won of course and I became a fan. Years later I saw him race at the Estoril circuit near my house in the Portuguese Formula 1 Grand Prix. I miss the Sunday ritual of sitting down for two hours to watch a race on television."

hugh crawford: "I went to see the film with my wife in a theatre the last day of its run in NYC. Her first comment was how she had never been in a theater full of middle-aged men crying before. It’s that kind of film."

Khürt Williams: "Wow! As a Formula 1 fan, I never thought I’d find a connection to my favorite sport on TOP. I guess I am getting old.  :-)  I took a day off work and drove more than an hour from New Jersey to Philadelphia to see the Senna movie. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen."

Al C.: "Senna died while leading the race at Imola. The driver behind him that day was Michael Schumacher, who is reportedly still in a vegetative state after his freak skiing accident more than five years ago. To my way of thinking, Schumacher's end is the more tragic of the two."

Tom: "I remember watching it live on TV. In one of those funny ways in which events seen by the eye can arrive at the brain in the wrong order I was convinced it was Damon Hill, who was in third place, who had crashed.

"Let's remember Roland Ratzenberger also died that weekend. I believe an Austrian flag was found in Senna's cockpit. He intended to win the race and trail the flag from the car on the victory lap as was common at that time."

David Babsky: "Asif Kapadia (the director) edited this film on a computer on his kitchen table in east London."