Venial, venal will drive me to drink

So here I am calling Karl last night thinking it would be nice to see how his cataract surgery went. It was a kind gesture. He had been haunted with worst possible scenerios from the beginning. Another friend Nardia had lost his sight post surgery because of a rather bad infection. My surgury had been perfect and my take on the whole procedure was that it was nothing short of a miracle. Fortunately he had no complications and we drifted off into other topics.

Over the years languages and their use have been one of our favorite pastimes and we had whiled away uncounted hours playing around with words. Karl loves to have his english knowledge tested which is always flattering because he assumes I know the correct meaning of all these words. In fact, for someone who counts English as his 5th language, Karl has the bigger vocabulary. The main reason is that he's persnicketty about words that he learns. He doesn't just sort of know the meaning he knows the shades of meaning and proper usage. I had gotten a word from dictionary.com and wanted to test him. Venal was the word. His response was "wine?" which took all the fun out of leading him into my planned comparision of venal with venial. It was fun. And after all these years I've finally got the differance. Venal comes from venum which is latin for sale, so that venal means for sale or corruptable. Venial comes from venia which is latin for forgiven. Venia as a root seems more like the root for vengenence than forgiveness so the way I remember is to see venal-venial as a pair and to cue off the association of venal with vendere (itl) and vendre (fr). Two words that I won't be forgetting in this life.

The Architecture of Doom 1991
This a very enlightening movie. It's a documentary concerning the art and aethetics of the 3rd Reich. After all these years I would have thought that those 12 years of German history would have been covered completely. However right from the beginning the film presents new material that I've had no idea existed. I knew Hitler was a failed art student, but I hadn't actually seen his works. The narrator called them pedantic which is fair enough, but doesn't convey how well these pieces were done. Sure the little people drawn for scale purposes look ridiculous and the Viennese buildings have been drawn to death, but I wonder how the average architecture student's sketches would look by comparision (especially American students).
Later Hitler witnessed a performance of Wagner's Rienzi in his home town of Linz. He told a childhood friend, who had seen the opera with him, that "This was where it all began". In the opera Rienzi dies at the end in his capitol surrounded by his enemies. The documentary notes that Hitler and his worked for 3 years on a similiar opera. Hitler also took as his own Wagner's theme of nordic spirit, the power of of this spirit and a dose of anti-semitism.

The movie tries fairly successfully to draw a parallel between operatic staging and Hitler's later use of showcraft. Hitler had a hand in a surprisingly large amount of the aestectics the National Socialist movement. The parades and standards were all overseen and in some cases designed directly by "The Fuhrer". I knew he selected the swaztica, but didn't know that he had actually drawn the standards and some of the uniforms. These are just some of the surprising lessions, there are many more interesting revelations in this movie.

This is a remarkable movie which is forced me to rebalance the scales. I tend to believe that the times creat the man more than the man makes the time.

After the DVD ended I had this thought; was German romanticism and Soviet rationalism the prime reason we ended up with such a horrible war in 1939? How important was nationalism? Was this an ehco of the earlier conflict between Rousseau and Voltaire. Was it just a part of a long line of conflicts from the French revolution, revolutions of 1848 and the Great war of 1914.

It's a pleasant metaphysical thought that the publication of a pamplet or the spreading of an idea could lead to truly earth-shaking event such as the wars of the 20th century, but how true is that thought? If the idea hadn't been formulated or expressed widely could all this been avoided? Perhaps

A job I don't really want is looming in Portland
Today was more was more tail chasing with a certain large company's HR department. She left messages as soon as I left the house and than disappeared for the rest of the day. She telecommutes which I think means that she is at home. Her message said Wednesday is telecommute day, that is except when she isn't. She offered an over the phone interview on Friday and I accepted. Interestingly neither of us has spoken to each other yet.
After a similiar job interview over the phone to a secret remote work site in the middle of Alaska, I am not holding my breathe in anticipation. They work from a generic script and I respond to such chestnuts as "where do you see yourself in 10 years". This company does this because they have been sued by every dicernable interest group known to man. Do you doubt me? How about a group made up of only western asians? That's right only Afghanis, Pakistanis, Indians and Bengladeshis need aplly.
The company's response was to make the interview as bland and non-specific as possible and of course to conduct it over the phone. Where this is all heading I can't guess. Maybe interviews will be conducted by robots with random programming. There wouldn't be bias if the questions asked weren't germane to anything.

It looks like my WI adventure is slipping away. Slipping is the right word. It wasn't that long ago that the reason for going was 6 weeks away. Now July 21 looms up in a most intimidating way.
I spent most of today staying close to the phone waiting for a call back on a job that is considering me as well as me considering it. It's been months of e-mailing and phone tag along with changing job requirements. I had a message to get back to HR for an interview appointment. I got home too late to call Monday so I called and left several messages today. No one was there apparently and according to the prerecorded note Wednesday was an out-of-office day. I suppose when I return there will be another message that I will have missed.
I'm immanently qualified for the position, having performed the same job for the same company for 18 years. That fact seems hard to communicate for some reason. My last comment on the subject is that this job would be disruptive fro me. That's both good and bad. It would be a major shakeup for me to move 180 miles down I-5. And of course everyone knows that a shakeup is sometimes the best thing that could happen. Unfortunately after 20 years of minor and major improvements my home fits me pretty well. There is also the possibility of other work for the same company much closer to home. One of the closer jobs would be a contract position which would be a very good fit indeed. How realistic these other positions are, I have no idea.

The remaining landscape work involves the big one. The driveway is shot and now needs replacement. After much thought I've come to the conclusion that I have to use paving stones. This should make sure that the poplar's roots don't destroy the new surface as they did the old asphalt. I've got over 100 feet of border that is prepped and ready for planting. All I need is a plan. I'm convinced that I can make this driveway border beautiful. I'm unsure if I have it in me to creat what I would like to see.

Predicting the future.
If I assume conventional wisdom is always to some degree flawed, then I wonder about the wisdom of population replacement immigration. What is usually stated when the matter is addressed is that the overall population is aging and that some percentage will soon be over some arbitrary age and therefore a crisis is developing. First of all let me say that whatever the numbers there is the fact of mortality that needs to be considered. Those old folks will pass on and after they do the society will adapt to the new circumstances and no doubt continue on. The problem is the discontinuity. For a period of time a cluster of old people will stress out society. After they're gone the slow decrease of population will not be all that noticable. This is assuming that there will be a permanent birth rate of less than 2.1 per woman. I wouldn't bet on that eventuality. The crash in population as well as the previous boon in population were singularities. Technology produced one and urbanization produced the other.
It's instructive to look a a society which is dealing successfully with a population crash. That would be Japan. From what I've seen the Japanese are aware of the problem and are dealing with it. Intelligent toilets now monitor the health of the elderly, eliminating the need of additional medical personnel. Rice-planting robots reduce the need for field labor. And of course pet robot dogs show every sign of solving the companionship needs of the old and infirm. The Japanese seem to intuit correctly that there is no really good reason that the home islands should have 125,000,000 people and that if it all crashed down to 60,000,000 it would still be Japan. The only differance would be the the infrastructure would be still built out for a population of 125,000,000. The uncrowded roads extra housing, etc. would provide a built in redundancy for the entire culture. I don't really see a downside.

Gawd I wish I could write. If writing is the mirror of the soul, my soul must be jumbled, indeed, it might be fractured more than I realize. I hope that it is just a lack of ability on my part rather than a failure of logic or lack of original thought.

Upon reflection, it could be an understandable lack due to circumstances. After all I came from a heritage that was far removed from literary expression. My college education required little in the way of writing. I roamed the math library for fun in Madison; not a good sign for development of a literary bent. How do you become a proficient writer if the first desk job you had was on your 30th birthday. Maybe if I write a million words the skill will manfest itself. Practice practice and someday it'll be there. That's an interesting idea, blogging as practicing the scales in music. Necessary but of no particular value.

I was looking at history again. It's a passion of mine that I can indulge today in a way I never imagined. Not that I spent a lot of time imagining the future years ago. Today I can research quite deeply into all sorts of history. I can get as lost as I want which is not necessarily a good thing.
The election of 1900 was an event I wasn't familiar with until yesterday. All the newspapers from that era that I read were giving me a "gut" feeling about the time and I felt I needed to fill out my knowledge of the era. The main debate in 1900 was really two debates and in a way the two debates are a the same as always; international and economic. In 1900 America found itself an empire. A small one compared to the European powers, but Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico not part of our agreed Manifest Destiny. There was still fighting going on in the Philippines that was to go on for 16 more years and involved America having to defeat a home grown insurgency. What was at stake? I'm not sure. How the Philippines fit in with our needs as a country isn't clear at all. It might have been national pride, stoked by the previous 20 years worth of newspaper reports of European colonial activities. By 1900 we had pretty much filled out our continent and our "Destiny" and perhaps we were looking beyond. The sitting Republican president was Wilm Mckinley was challenged by the former Populist Wilm Jennings Bryant. The Democrat position was to leave the Philippines and focus on America.
Besides the empirialism debate the economic debate seemed to be what helped decide the election. Believe it or not what was debated in lengthy articles in the newspaper was the bimetallic monetary policy. Bryant was famous for his "cross of gold" speech in 1897 and was supported by many western farmers in hia attacks on gold and silver monitary policies. In the end the solid Democratic south and the Small number of electorial votes available in the west lead to the defeat of Bryant. Bad harvests in China the year earlier had driven up the commodity prices which kept the midwestern states in the Republican column. The eastern establishment was happy with the post war economic boom and went completely Republican.
What I came away with was how fervantly the people debated these issues. Mark Twain wrote articles against us joining the Europeans in building an empire. The smallest towns had debates about monetary policies.
It all seemed a bit fusty to me at first until I thought how easy it was to substitute Iraq and illegal immigrants for the Philippines and the gold standard. Which left me wondering if it was possible to look at all the 20th century US elections as debates over only two subjects one international and one domestic. I doubt that a such a simplification is possible.
Boring no?

One of the current ideas in education is the idea that to creat creative people we must teach outside the norm. The norm being the way we have taught students for 100s of years. No more "drill n' kill" and rote memorization for the child of the 21th century. Progessive math will he little Brooke or Dillon find out how to find out the answer or better yet not find an answer or still better find many answers. All of this in pursuit of the "creative" child.
The only problem in this is that there is no evidence that memorization and mastery stifles the imagination. In fact a quick look at late 19th century - early 20th century Germany seems to indicate otherwise. Most of the great discoveries in a surprisingly larger number of technical fields was made by German scientists. Scientists who were the products of the most rigorous and demanding education system on the planet Earth. Academic failure resulted in a short trip into the manual arts.
These guys pushed the technical frontiers with things like quantum theory and relativity. I wonder if the current crop of non traditional students will have that kind of impact?

Immanuel Kant sagte, daß "vom gekrümmten Bauholz von Menschlichkeit, keine gerade Sache überhaupt gebildet werden kann,"
Good old Immanuel! He never traveled more than 30 kms from his hometown of Konigsberg and yet he entertained his visitors with tales of many places. Proving that the intellect and reading trumps a credit card and a travel agency. It does make you wonder what he was like. Was he any fun? Or was he just another pedant. A man perhaps too used to explaining and no much given to listening. We'll never know, at least, not from reading his books.

Yikes What a mess. I'm convinced I could never be an editor, especially of my own material. I can claim a certain rustiness, since this is my first post in two years. Still it's God awful.

The news just announced that due to our current heat wave the expected weekend drownings are occurring right on schedule. Every summer weekend from now through August there will be a death in our lakes or rivers. It's almost dull in it's repetition. Teenage boys or young men in their 20s swimming in a fast flowing river will make one too many trips to the beer cooler and then take a dip. Or maybe it'll be the guy that abandons his Ski-doo or power boat to swim to shore in Lake Sammamish or Lake Washington and he won't make it. Or most tragedies a toddler will disappear the moment his minders back is turned. It's always like that; sad, but predictable.

As far as I'm concerned I've always been wary of water, at least largish bodies of water. When I was a wee kid the family arrived at a northern Wisconsin lake just as a stunned father was carrying his dead son out of the water. It was the first dead person I had ever seen. After that I liked to be able to feel the lake or river bed beneath my toes whenever I was playing in the water. Needless to say that kept me from learning to swim properly for a long time.

Actually I've been quite lucky. One cold March morning in Milwaukee harbor I was standing on a small raft painting the aft end of a freighter with a 20 foot long paint roller when I got dunked. The raft was about 10 feet long and 3 or 4 feet wide and was propelled by the incredibly simply method of me pulling a rope to go one way and pulling another rope to go the other way. Due to the temperature I was layered up with several layers of work clothes. So there I was right next to the rudder reaching straight up and applying "Hull Maroon" overhead with my roller. Unfortunately my raft was slowly drifting away from the ship and by the time I wised up I was leaning on the roller and rapidly pushing myself away. My only support was a receding hull. Time really does slow down in such moments, so I had plenty of time to realize the extent of my stupidity. In I went. You go down quite aways when you fall face first into Lake Michigan. I just swam for the light found the raft and tried to lift myself up on it. The work boots and soaked layers of clothing acted like a 50 lb backpack, but I was in the grip of panic and I clawed my way up. After I climbed up the ladder I realized no one had even noticed. I was stictly on my own.

Years later I was on my first scull on Lake Washington when I flipped the boat (caught a crab as they say) and was dunked. It was late fall and the water was cold (warmer than Lake Michigan though) and again I went deep and patetiently waited for myself to bubble to the surface. Since there is quite a trick to mounting an overturned scull I waited until the instructor who was on another part of the lake to notice. It was one cold ride to the dock.

The bottom line is that to me, at least, there is simply an element of fate involved. It's just as easy to take a big gulp of water as it is to close your mouth. It certainly wasn't something I was aware of. The same goes for panicking, either you do or you don't. You can train for such an accident, but most of us haven't.

I've been in a canoe on the Peshtigo river. I've spent five years on lakeboats and I rowed several years on Lake washington (8 man sweeps) and all in all I've still don't love the water. I don't fear it. I just don't like it. My first wife Barbara and my friend Karl both scuba-dived and simply wax eloquent about the subject, but for me it just wouldn't be fun.

There seems to almost be a genetic componant to some of our likes and dislikes. I've heard the same thing about private pilots and motorcyclist. All I know is that whatever it is that excites people enough to drive them to those pursuits is absent in me.

Well so be it I try one more time to blog. Sad to remember the last attempt. An attempt that ended in eventual erasure by a most ungratful child. No regrets.

As I try somewhat in vain to focus on what I'm writing I realize just how distracting it is to have 1100 of your favorite tunes playing in your head. All I want to do right now is google the lyrics for the Handsome Family. Should lyrics really be that poetic? So poetic that I require a lyric sheet? There, I switched to Dylan; those lyrics I know by heart and therefore they'll make a much better musical background.

I just looked at a blog that interested me (Ann Althouse). In fact the pictures of a beautiful elegant frat house in Madison was worth the price of admission alone. I wanted toi comment but I needed a blogger account, hence my return for a third dip in the blogger sea. Heads up.

Damn I'm stuck on Laurie Anderson (Example #22). One of the best. Distratto! After viewing that gorgeous Madison home I am inspired to finish that 1975 memoir of Madison. I spent nine months delivering the WSJ at 5:00 every morning and never missed a day. Seven days a week in all the weather that Madison could throw at me. I had the central area and frat row with over 125 papers a day. I must have visited every frat and sorority house in the area to collect. I don't remember that that house. I'm sure I would remember; that's my exact style. Heaviness with just enough light to make you notice. I reminds me of Patricia's apartment in Portland. Her place had the curved interior corners that the NW seems to like, but it also had the massive dark varnished wood the Madison house has. The oddist memory just flashed by. Patricia had an Oxford dictionary on it's own stand in the middle of the room. How odd? And how convenient. We could be debating the correct meaning of a word and she would jump out of bed and run over to the dictionary stand and look it up. Odd memories of naked women looking up words in a dictionary. Especially for someone who is most definately not an English type.

Back to Madison, please. After a while I had become familiar enough with my route that I could rip thought the entire route in about an hour. There were the multiple story apts where the slow payers lived, the odd single resident houses who no doubt contained retired profs who had never missed a paper, the putrid apartment elevators on saturday morning reeking of fresh vomit and stale piss. Yes indeed. Then there was the frat and sorority houses on Langston street. They were always interesting in the predawn. I never knew what I would see, what leftover from the previous nights partying. I had worked out every concievable shortcut along the lake and I had keys. Yes keys to all sorts of places. Keys that had been passed down through generations of paperboys. My keyring had over 75 keys and for fun I tried every lock that amused me. looking back I doubt poeple would be so free with there access. We've become a lot more paranoid and much less trusting (hitch-hiking comes to mind). It was a real rat maze of a route. Oddly I recall that I for some reason enjoyed racing around those empty streets slightly before the rest of the world.

Which reminds me of Ricky. She was this very bright over achiever who I dated for a couple months years ago. We were walking around Wallingford in north Seattle one evening after eating at Julia's. She was talking about where she grew up in California. It was a nice upscale suburb in southern CA as I recall. Ricky was one of those people that never fail to interest me. Valedictarian of her school and Stanford grad in enviromental science, definately an accomplished person who was setting up a travel business. Mid life change I guess. What was weird was as we walked among the great old homes of Wallingford, she calmly walked up the driveway of one immense grand home just to take a look. She then explained that as a teenager she used to sneak out of her house and roam the neighborhood in her PJs. She would check in on the neighbors, check out their garages and see if the doors were all locked. She was a normal as possible other than the trangressive peeping tom aspect. It was a female thing and I don't think there was any similarity with male peeping tomism. It was way beyond where I was willing to go that's for sure. I have a hard time crossing over someone's yard. Walking up someone' s driveway to see what the inside of the house looked like, (even with no one home) just seemed a bridge too far. Now that's something I from the galactic memory box.
Enough I want to listen to the best Kinks song ever, even if it's a cover by camper van Beethoven "I'm Not Like Everyone Else".