hackspitcough

Leela seems to have developed kennel cough, roughly defined as "horrifying hacking noises with occasional small puddles of sputum." It was a little unnerving, but seems to be clearing up. I'm not sure a dog's anatomy really accommodates "spitting" vs. "vomiting" in the way we're used to. She has no trouble eating, sleeping, or being a pain in the ass, though, so I expect it will pass.

I've missed having some properly dull bedtime reading, ever since I finished Moby-Dick. I keep trying, but I'm 99.9% pure curiosity by weight, so I keep finding stuff interesting. Non-fiction doesn't work so well, although A Natural History of the Piano delivered a decent dose of turgidity with a subject I am at best indifferent about. No, I needed to look elsewhere.

I eventually get around to reading Dan Brown's novels (he of The Da Vinci Code), which are unchallenging as literature, but interesting as art history. The latter book takes much of its plot from the pseudo-nonfiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, material much better explored by the graphic novel Preacher (now a decent TV adaptation!). Angels & Demons was the Illuminati book, and The Lost Symbol was Masons. Secret societies make for fine paperback fodder, and you can save some time by reading The Illuminatus Trilogy, which literally has all of them, or save even more time by reading Everything Is Under Control by the same author, essentially a catalog of conspiracy theories and secret societies (real or imagined).

Ever get the sense that a ton of people did drugs in the 60s and in the end it did not do some of those people any favors?

Dan Brown also wrote Inferno, another escapade with his usual protagonist (a "symbologist," which is not a real thing but does provide endless excuses to be chased after by secret societies using secret symbols), but Inferno lacks any conspiracy theories. Instead, it's about...Dante Alighieri. And Florence. And Dante in Florence. It has no pretense to being anything more or less than the novelization of an art history course about Florence in the 1200-1700 C.E. period. At the end of the book, the heroes have not 100% saved the day, which is an unexpected dose of ambiguity from one of English's greatest hack authors.

I read the book a while ago, and was reminded of it because I watched the movie, which was terrible, in ways that were only surprising because usually a Dan Brown novel is not something you could make an enjoyable, let alone intelligent, movie out of, but no. They took a Dan Brown book and dumbed it down. Out of habit, maybe.

Well, hell. I've never read Dante. I don't like poetry. What translation should I use? Already more work than I want to put in. I'm near the end of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast, and the last section is about the origins and development of Satan. Our conception of Hell is Dante's, but our conception of Satan is Milton's (brought to modernity by Neil Gaiman's graphic novel Sandman, and Mike Carey's brilliant spinoff Lucifer). I've never read Paradise Lost, but it bypasses the translation problem, and it's pretty dull to read! (At least as of line 450 or so, the language is somewhat unaccountably easier to read than the roughly-contemporary Shakespeare. Maybe I'll learn why, some afternoon when I should be working.)

I leave you with what is surely the most famous English-language description of Milton's work:

a flash of lightning, passing.

We still refer to J as "the boy," and we will for a long time, even though he's now maybe an inch taller than Anna, which means 1.5 inches taller than me. It's weird for him to be taller than his parents, as though a body at 13 isn't already enough to contend with, so at his request we've stopped measuring for the time being.

He is a remarkable human by any measure, and further so as an autism-spectrum person, but he is more typically autistic in many respects, including a difficulty making friends. So we were blown away a few years ago when he made a friend on his own, a very sweet kid a couple years younger. We got to know his mother, and met his older sister occasionally. I don't think we met his father (though more on that in a moment). Years passed, and the friend decided to change his name from one masculine name to another, but also to start using they/them/their pronouns.

The dad has some typical abuse/control problems, and moved the family up to Oregon, away from the support network they'd built down here. It turns out I'd interviewed the friend's father for a job a long time ago, and further that the friend's parents had once brought a hailstorm of drama and heartbreak down on folks I met separately. I mean a crazy hailstorm, like "if they tried to get on Judge Judy, no one would believe it actually happened" kind of crazy. In the back of my mind, I knew the dad lived here in town, and it's not surprising that they should be at the same school (for quirky kids) together, but that they should independently befriend each other is pretty out there.

(The father's ex-wife is re-married but still uses his last name; the friend's mother uses her maiden name, so I didn't see the connection until everyone was tagged in a Facebook photo.)

Last month, J's friend N committed suicide, at age 11. Powerless, un-heard, un-seen, un-accepted. Just...gone.

"It is impossible, when we're children, to acknowledge how vulnerable we are."

It could have been me. It almost was. Nothing in particular made it be otherwise. It's not like I knew things would get better with time. Just...luck.

still listening to this one.

Following up on my previous post, I actually did take the Bar Violin and tuned it from GDAE down to DDAD. Nothing magical happened, viz.

1. It sounds crappy. No surprise there: a string's size and composition vary depending on what pitch you want it to sound good at (and what your instrument will tolerate without breaking).
2. "Midnight On the Water" doesn't sound that much better (the low D in particular is just a drone), and I still can't play "Bonaparte's Retreat."

They can, though:

I can play backup on the slow one. It's a process.

frets are for chumps.

I'm still learning the violin! It's great. It's an absurd instrument, but as long as I'm willing to spend 10 minutes trying to get the same 6 notes right, gratification is near-instant. My teacher says that's the great thing about teaching adults: we understand that repetition is not exciting, but that's how you learn stuff.

(Years ago a guy taught a first-aid class at the dojo, and he had this defensive/defusing banter down about how we were all going to hate him by the end because of the repetition. I went up to him at the break and said, "I see why you need that elsewhere, but you should understand that you're teaching a roomful of people who have quite literally spent decades doing the same movements over and over, and we get it. You can relax a bit." Which he didn't, very much, but I tried.)

I have a 5-day work conference in San Diego in May, and I don't really want to go a week without playing, so I'll bring the violin along and hope the practice mute and the normal hotel soundproofing work well enough that I can practice without complaints.

I'm at the point in Volume 1 of the Suzuki Method where the music gets more interesting, because "It's by Bach, instead of Suzuki." In this case it's Minuet #1, and YouTube is full of people playing it who clearly had it under their belts quite some time ago, if you're interested. I just play it over and over, mostly in bits and pieces, doggedly trying again and again until I get it better.

My fingers have a memory of their own. I'll play a passage, make an identifiable new mistake, decide to fix it on the next run-through, only to have my fingers make the same mistake. This is where I hit a wall performing as a classical guitarist, not just that I didn't practice enough (which was certainly true) but that my fingers just...didn't do what I told them to do, and it was worse with performance nerves.

Some years back, Anna read or saw a story from someone with autism, who said that they would tell their body to do something, like "raise my right hand," and instead their body just came out with some randomized action. Anna asked J if he ever felt that way, and without looking up, said "Yeah. All the time."

So it happens that trying to play an actual instrument with fine motor control might be my only analogue to his physical experience. (I can definitely be sensorily overwhelmed, but not in quite the same way, and I can power through it if that's what's needed.)

Did I mention I actually went to physical therapy for my left thumb? My thumbs took some heavy hurting from aikido, and then I fell on my left hand a while back walking the dog, which didn't matter much until I tried keeping my left thumb from clamping onto the violin neck. One of many differences about the violin is that you are not using the left thumb to press on the neck to counteract the force of pushing your fingers down on the string. This is the opposite of the guitar, so I was trying to keep my thumb away from the neck, at the same time as these accumulated injuries pulled in the opposite direction, and then that really hurt. PT's been so helpful, I forgot to make more appointments.

I was doing some reading this weekend and learned that:

• Aaron Copland's Rodeo was actually a ballet score;
• he was kind of in a hurry, so "Hoe-Down" (known to earlier generations as "the music from 'Beef. It's What's For Dinner.'") is a pretty direct orchestration of a fiddle tune called "Bonaparte's Retreat";
• actually, it's an orchestration of the 1941ish transcription of a single 1937 recording of one guy's way of playing a song he called "Bonaparte's Retreat."
• (It kind of keeps going, but I'll spare you.)

I did eventually track down some sheet music for it, and it's...well beyond my level right now, even if I were willing to alter my violin tuning. For an exploration of the subject, I refer the reader to the Bluegrass Intelligencer article "Old-Time Music Permanently Revokes All Song Titles."

at least we have high-quality weed.

[Seriously. I thought I smelled skunks a couple nights out walking the dog, then realized it was surely just the mighty marijuana available here, now even closer to legality than before.]

The Bay Area is headed for a painful inflection point, which I call the Low-Wage Apocalypse.

Go through a normal week's errands and far too many businesses have HELP WANTED signs on them. Restaurants, coffee shops, stores are all trying to hire people for $12-$16 an hour to be dishwashers, line cooks, register clerks, baristas. Rents have skyrocketed, and people who don't work in tech often just can't afford to live here any more, no matter how clever they get. According to Zillow, our house--which no one else wanted (and now we know why)--is worth 225% what we paid 5 years ago. Zillow's numbers trend high around here, and the house is nicer now, but not quite that much nicer. We did get it re-assessed for real a couple years back, and that assessment was a mere 158% of the purchase price.

Now see that rents have increased by at least that much, and it's a wonder more people haven't left yet.

We're getting wound up for a market correction, but I've never heard of this happening and it's not obvious to me what it looks like. I've only got two scenarios:

1. Hourly wages rise to match housing prices.
2. Non-housing prices (goods and services) rise to pay for the higher wages.
3. Consumers (a) suck it up and pay $6 for a small coffee that the hourly-wage set still can't afford, or (b) consume less, which damages small businesses in the ways small businesses can be damaged.

or...

1. Something stops the fountain of money: either a hollowing-out of the tech industry, or a major earthquake.
2. Prices tank precipitously.

Anna's in the middle of a few grand plans for the house and yards, partly for now, partly because J will probably be at home for some number of years regardless of how the Low-Wage Apocalypse plays out. Looks a little grim.

the intellect returns.

I've had lots of good sleep recently, leading to all kinds of strange conditions, like not falling asleep during the day, and holding more context in my head at once. As Anna points out, these are not necessarily the first things I want to recover--most of me would prefer to be jogging or doing aikido again--but they're no less real for my stubborn ingratitude. She pointed out that I'm reading more books at once, on steadily more esoteric subjects: I've been chewing through all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, which aren't challenging, only numerous (I think I've read about 20 out of 40something), but also Cixin Lu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and the surprisingly erudite-yet-accessible The Chinese Typewriter: A History. For truly boring books, I slogged through A Natural History of the Piano, and after many, many months, I finished Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History, which isn't terribly obscure, but does contain a lot of detail I didn't just want to skim past.

Looking at my lists, I think the number of books I can usefully rotate through, approximated by how many books I can return to and pick up the thread of the text, is going up, as well as how many of those books live in the world outside undergraduate syllabi.

Learning stuff is fun. Not for any particular reason, except what the Nobel-laureate physicist(/chauvinist/womanizing asshole) Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out." I doubt I'll ever find a use for the contents of Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (a history of many-worlds/universes theories from antiquity until now), but more to the point, I'm not sure why it should have to be useful in order to be interesting.

better living through electronics

I'm reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, translated from the Chinese. It's really good, on its own terms, but also in the same way Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon is good, which is that it's a non-Western example of a (largely) Western genre. Translation is a miserable set of tradeoffs, but the translators have written English that probably no native speaker would write, which combined with the Chinese names does keep it fresh.

I've been sick all week, starting right after I spent Thursday and Friday in the office last week. I mostly only go there when I have a new minion starting, and #10 started on Monday of last week. Monday is my big meeting day, so I pushed through that, then I was useless Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday I wore myself out with 90 minutes of hiring tasks.

As you might imagine, I handle the home IT tasks, which extends to the A/V gear. We've been running for a while on my Yamaha "PianoCraft" receiver that was already discontinued when I bought it in 2008. In addition to the companion DVD player dying (who plays DVDs any more?), it doesn't handle modern video cables (HDMI), and as is always the case with these kinds of setups, only the person who set it up can really remember that in order to use the PlayStation you have to set the receiver to TAPE/MD and use the HDMI Y-junction to select Input A, and the Windows gaming laptop is DVD/CD on the receiver and Input B on the HDMI. The speakers are nice enough, though.

I did the usual research on how to solve this problem, and the answer appears to be precisely the kind of Home Theater AVR (Audio/Video Receiver) that I've avoided as being too awkward and expensive, which was true until recently. They look like this:

Incredible as it seems, I have avoided them, as they are large, and used to be expensive. My late housemate J.D. bought one, a Harman-Kardon, and I'm not sure he ever got the full value from it. They're better now in pretty much every way, and the base models start at $180: not too shabby for something that will stay mostly up-to-date for a decade.

This being the Bay Area, people are always selling this caliber of stuff, so after some painstaking research to count HDMI ports and try to understand what I'd be able to do with it, I picked up an older sibling of the Denon shown above, for $75 from a very nice Irishman who moved into a smaller place. Maybe his new place was too small for 5.1 Surround Sound? Dunno.

The digital music devices I use, the now-Logitech Squeezeboxes, were originally made by/for audiophiles, so they have a digital optical output I've never used. But behold! a few minutes with the on-screen menu, and I've reassigned the OPT port to the DOCK source, rename DOCK to "Squeezebox" (because changing the name is a thing you can do), and it's done! BD (Blu-ray Disc) becomes "PS3," DVD becomes "Laptop," and then that's it. If we ever get the yen for more speakers, there's 3 more speaker outputs, and an automatic setup function using the included calibrating microphone, although I don't remember where it is.

In other respects, it's been an extraordinarily messy few weeks. But the stereo is easy to use now!

We do what we can.