arcane: known to only a few; esoteric [L.>arcanus- hidden] (see holocryptic & recondite)

Alan King was always one of my favorites. Even as a wee lad, I loved his stand-up routines and his appearances on Johnny Carson's couch, even though I had no reason to relate to his put-upon-by-modern-life suburban persona; I even read his books, Anybody Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It and Help! I'm a Prisoner in a Chinese Bakery.

I can recall as clearly as yesterday watching King do one of his routines more than forty years ago, maybe on Ed Sullivan, taking the piss out of the crop of television shows that season. Westerns were still in vogue then, and one of his bits went: "Look at Bonanza. It's Father Knows Best out west. The Big Valley? Mother Knows Best out west. Dundee and the Culhane? Nobody knows best out west!" The line got a big laugh, but I didn't get it.

I had never seen an episode of Dundee and the Culhane, and I still haven't. I can recall seeing subway poster ads for the show; I think they showed a top hat and a cane lying on a table with a cowboy hat and gun, or somesuch still life, with text promising something new in westerns. I was intrigued. I think the hat and cane put me in mind of Bat Masterson, another show that I liked, and I was always a sucker for people referred to with the definite article, so I was all over "The Culhane." I was primed for the show, but I never saw it.

Although these scattered remembrances - a line from a comedian and a poster - have floated in my consciousness since Lyndon Johnson was president, it was only recently that I thought I could use the power of the internets to tie this loose end off once and for all. I imagined I would be able to find a Dundee and the Culhane fan club, a tribute website, and even, if I were lucky, a full episode on YouTube or Hulu or somewhere.

Boy, was I wrong.

Oh, there are some sources out there, to be sure. IMDb catalogs the show, and Wikipedia gives it all of 169 words. It is mentioned ever so briefly on some television mega-sites and baby-boomer nostalgia pages. But there is no love for DatC on the internets: no fan site, no shrines, no clips, and very few stills. This one below repeats the most.

For the record, the show was a lawyer-western hybrid that aired for thirteen episodes in the fall of 1967. Dundee was a British attorney who came to practice in the American old west (how does that work?), establishing an office in Sausalito of all places. The Culhane was his Irish-American --- apprentice? partner? -- I'm not really sure. Apparently, the pair traveled across the west, providing thrills of the Perry Mason meets Have Gun, Will Travel variety. Dundee was played by John Mills, pre-Oscar and long prior to his knighthood; The Culhane was played by Sean Garrison, who seems to have been a working television actor up until 1981 or so. All of the episode titles ended with "Brief" - "The Cat in the Bag Brief," "The Death of a Warrior Brief," and so on. I think I really would like to see an episode or two.

But what is much more interesting to me about this whole affair is that even with the internets, there is still some ephemeral knowledge that is out of easy reach. One of the first websites I ever contributed to years ago was a Tales of the Gold Monkey fan page. I was amazed then that this obscure show, which lasted one season in the early eighties, had so much information available; in the ensuing years, I gradually became accustomed to finding on the web any information I wanted I almost no time, and was amazed at just how much energy was poured into some pretty specific niche interests. But despite to this commodification of popular culture and the incredible networking power of the world wide web, there are still some things that remain known only to a few; the details of the adventures of these two gunslinging lawyers seem to be in the category. If I really want to find out about Dundee and the Culhane, I'm going to have to work a little harder than making a few Google searches. Somehow, that actually feels good.

And maybe I'll even do it. Then I'll know why that Alan King line was so funny.

In all fairness

I remember a conversation with my philosophy teacher, mentor, and pal Joel Goldstein back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and I was trying out college for the first time. We were discussing fairness, and how in some circumstances it might be determined by the result and in others by the process. For example, if you and I were to split a cookie, a determination of fairness would probably depend on whether we each felt we got an equal share (the result) and the process - I cut and you pick, get a trusted third party to do it, measure/weigh it - wouldn't really be important. However, in an other situation, such as a poker game or Monopoly, fairness would be determined not by an equal distribution of the resources in the end, but only by whether the correct process was followed - the rules were adhered to and no one cheated. Result vs. process.

A recent lunch with my favorite Mad Engineer Dr. Burn, I was reminded of a discussion* we had a few weeks ago about Babylonian fractions, a system whose process seems to have been affected by a particular cultural positioning regarding the fairness of different results.

Let's show this through a word problem. You have seven loaves of bread and eight people. If you were to divide up the bread evenly among the people, how much would each person get?

In most classes discussing fractions, the answer might go something like this: Well, there are 7 loaves of bread that I have to divide among 8 people, so 7 is the numerator and 8 is the denominator, and each person gets 7/8 of a loaf of bread. And that's as good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.

Think about how you would actually make this happen. Presuming all the loaves are the same, you could cut a one-eighth piece from the end of each one and pile them all together. Seven people would get a less-than-full loaf, and one person would get a pile of slices.

But is this really dividing the bread evenly? Is an almost-whole loaf of bread the same as a pile of slices? (Slices that would all be heels, too!) Isn't it really the case that seven people got 7/8 of a loaf a bread and one person got stuck with seven 1/8s? We can try all sorts of variations on this method - take a slice from the middle of some loaves and the ends of others and so on - but it all comes out to same sort of result unless we work at it from a completely different perspective.

The Babylonians had this other perspective. Rather than focusing on trying to make the denominator in fractions equal one, which we really like to do (6/1 is the same as 6, right?) the Babylonians liked keeping the numerator at one.

The bread problem would be solved like this in Babylonia: First we cut each of the seven loaves in half. Now we have fourteen 1/2s. Each person gets one 1/2, leaving six. We cut those 1/2s in half, making twelve 1/4s. Each person gets one 1/4, leaving four. We cut those 1/4s in half, making eight 1/8s. Each person then gets one 1/8, and all the bread is gone. Each person gets a 1/2 and a 1/4 and a 1/8 of a loaf of bread.

(And in case you think this is just one of those math tricks, it does come out the same: 1/2 = 4/8 and 1/4 = 2/8, so 4/8 + 2/8 + 1/8 = 7/8, just like the other way.)

The difference between the Babylonian method (which I am sure I have oversimplified) and just "doing fractions" is that the approach incorporates a sense of the reality of fairness in dividing things up in its very structure. I don't think I'd feel good about getting seven bread heels for my share of the baked goods, even if you showed me how it was mathematically even. In the real world, 7/8 does not necessarily equal seven 1/8s. But 1/2 and 1/4 and 1/8 should be the same as 1/2 and 1/4 and 1/8. In this case, the result and the process work with each other, and fairness comes from their intersection, not from one or the other.

So, perhaps a purely binary view of how fairness is determined is less useful than initially thought. And that might be the most important takeaway from consideration - not a new way of doing math, but a new way of thinking about things and an understanding that as unlikely as it sounds, many coins have more than two sides. These two conversations took place over thirty years apart. My learning may be slow, but it appears to be constant.

*In calling it a discussion, I flatter myself. Actually, Dr. Burn just told me what for.

Problems solving

Some time ago, I was a supervisor in the circulation department of the main Seattle library. We had two cash registers for overdue fines and other fees, so we had a combination safe in which we kept our change bank and pending deposits. When we closed at night, we would put the two cash drawers in a locked desk drawer, and one of the first supervisor duties in the morning was to retrieve them, complete the reconciliation and deposit, and make the safe right.

One morning, we discovered that the safe had been emptied overnight of about $400 in cash, without having been broken into. The cash drawers locked in the desk were untouched.

We had a meeting of the supervisors to figure thing out; everyone was puzzled as to what happened. In my (very) recent ex-detective voice, I told them: It's very simple. We supervisors use the combination daily; we have it memorized. You (and I pointed at our manager) never use it, but you need to know it just in case. So you have it written down somewhere. Probably on a post-it note. Probably in the back of the center drawer of your desk or under the phone. Some custodian came across it, realized there's only one safe around here, took a shot, and made a quick four hundred bucks. My manager was silent for a moment, and then said, "Well, it wasn't in my drawer. It was on the bottom of it."

After checking with the higher-ups, it was decided that, besides changing the combination of the safe (duh!), we would stop keeping the cash drawers overnight in the desk.

I pointed out that the security of the desk hadn't been compromised and that there was no need to change that practice. I was told that we just wanted to ramp up our overall security by keeping all the cash in a more secure place. I pointed out that were were moving cash from a place that had never had cash stolen from it to a place that had had cash stolen from it and asked how that was increasing security. I was told to stop pointing things out.

The episode has remained close to my heart as I have studied and thought about and taught critical thinking, but it may have been supplanted by a new episode that has recently unfolded on our campus.

There is a busy crosswalk on our campus from our main building to our main parking lot. Ever since I came to at Cascadia, it had been controlled by a stop sign in both directions. Traffic was required to stop at all times, regardless of whether a crossing pedestrian was present.

Recently, construction work began in the crosswalk area, and when it was completed, the stop signs had been removed and a new feature installed at the crosswalk: sensors now react to the presence of a walker by activating in-ground yellow flashing lights along the crosswalk itself, and a recorded voice admonishes pedestrians to "use caution when crossing."

Besides the disembodied voice being a little creepy, the whole rigmarole seems confusing. Apparently, someone may have been struck at or in the crosswalk, and this modification was in response to that incident, but I have yet been able to find hard info on that.

I have been trying to figure out how taking away a stop sign makes the crosswalk safer. I mean, if someone was indeed struck, it was (obviously) by a car that was moving; is taking away the mandatory stop likely to increase or decrease the number of cars moving through the crosswalk without stopping? Are the flashing yellow lights more or less likely than a stop sign to cause a driver to yield right-of-way to a pedestrian? Isn't the voice warning, on some systemic level, moving the responsibility for crosswalk safety from the drivers onto the pedestrians? This whole thing doesn't seem thought through.

I have also heard, but been unable to confirm, that the campus was not allowed to have both the flashing/warning system and the stop sign at the same crosswalk. There may be an RCW that prohibits this on public roads, but the campus is governed by Washington Administrative Code, and neither WAC 132Z-116, for Cascadia, or WAC 478-117, for UW-Bothell, seems to preclude the installation of any combination of traffic signaling devices. Even if the code made such a restriction, it would leave us with the question: if you have to choose between just a stop sign or just a lighted crosswalk, which one intuitively seems safer?

Maybe there is a counter-intuitive aspect to the situation; that can sometimes be the case. I wonder, though, if this wasn't another instance of people solving the problem that wasn't there rather than the one that was.

A day

I read on facebook a note from my childhood pal that he was remembering the death of a parent seven years earlier that day. My thoughts turned to my own father's funeral, perhaps because I think that was the last time I saw my friend, and I realized that I couldn't remember when my father died.

That's not exactly true; I knew it was 1984, because when I got the news I had just been on the police department a year or so and was living in that big apartment in Magnolia. But I couldn't narrow it down much more than that.

I could remember that Pop had been diagnosed in late 1982. I can remember my brother-in-law Gene filling me in on the situation, that Pop had lymphoma.

"So, it looks like this type of cancer has two kinds, the kind that kills you slow, and the kind that kills you quick. And your father don't have the first kind."

That must have been around Christmastime 1982. When I next saw Pop it was when I made a mad cross-country dash back to Brooklyn in June 1983 for his and Ma's 50th wedding anniversary while I was in the middle of the police academy. My then-wife Lisa and I caught a plane on Friday night knowing I had to be back in roll call at 7:00 am Monday morning. My sisters had planned a huge reunion party around the anniversary.

I can remember that during that weekend, there were more of our family's old friends and relatives in my sister's backyard than I have ever seen together before or since. Pop arrived to the surprise party showing the effects of radiation treatment: he was thin, frail, and weak. But his spirits brightened immeasurably as he caught up with his old cronies, these tough old birds from the bowling alleys and racetracks of New York. We made sure he had pictures taken with all of his children.

I guess we figured the end was close, but Pop fooled us. I can remember when he and Ma came out for my graduation from the academy in August 1983. He was his old self - better even, strong and vibrant, having a ball walking all over Seattle with my mother, both of them proud of my accomplishment. They stayed in my Belltown condo and we had a splendid visit.

It was great, but it didn't last too terribly long after they went home; sometime after Lisa and I moved into that apartment in Magnolia in early 1984, my sister called to say that Pop had gotten sick again. I asked her if she wanted me to fly out; she said to wait and see. The "kind that kills you quick" didn't wait for me a second time; Pop died less than two weeks later and my next trip out would be for the funeral.

I can remember finding out that Pop had died. I was at home alone in the afternoon when the phone call came from my sister; after hanging up, I began to make arrangements to go back. A short time later, Lisa came home with our friend Jim; I can't remember where they had been or why Jim's wife Sandy wasn't there. I told them about Pop and they wanted to comfort me; I waved it off and we played Risk.

I can remember the wake; not all of it, but some details. I can remember that George, my sister Monya's widower, seemed have the hardest time of all of us. I remember that he fell on the sidewalk, cutting his head on a metal fixture, and we had to take him to the emergency room. I made him a chicken sandwich when we got back home.

I can remember the funeral; not all of it, but some details. I can remember my brother comforting my mother by handing her handkerchief after handkerchief that he pulled from his pocket as she was crying. I can remember him tucking one of his business cards in Pop's jacket pocket before they closed the casket, a gesture so apt and so loving and so surprising in its tenderness.

I can remember heading to the cemetery on Staten Island. The hearse got a flat, right there on 66th Street under the Gowanus Expressway, and we all waited, a stationary procession.

I can remember Staten Island: green and far away.

I can remember saying goodbye to my father as they lowered the casket into the ground, knowing that there was no unfinished business between us, that he had cared for me as a boy and respected me as a man. He loved me, and although he was a man of few words, he had even said so, once, sort of. During one regular weekly long-distance call from the west coast, after small talk about the weather and before handing the phone over to Ma, he said "Your mother loves you, you know." I said I knew that. "And I do, too," he said. I said I knew that, too.

I can remember all that. But for the life of me, looking down at the computer screen twenty-five years later, I couldn't remember that date.

I got up and walked down to my office, and pawed through some folders in the second drawer of the file cabinet. I knew exactly what I was looking for; a sheaf of yellow five-column accounting paper with handwriting in black ink. I found it in a less than a minute and leafed through the pages of a timeline I had written up back in the day, cataloging major events and transitions: jobs, apartments, and so on. It was right there, two inches down from the top of the 1984 page, in the furthest right column, in tiny lettering. Just Pop's name and the notation 5/19/84. No other explanation.

Twenty-five years, one month, and 26 days.

Now I can remember that date, but I guess it doesn't change much.

Running Jogging on empty

So, I have been going around Green Lake just about every morning this summer. It's a nice four-mile loop: a half-mile to the lake path, a three-mile circuit, and a half-mile back. I usually go right after I get up; I'm generally heading out sometime between 6:16 and 6:45. It's been great, physically and spiritually. But it has brought up a semantic issue of how to name what I am doing.

On alternate days, it is easy: I walk. Walking is something that most of do, and we can easily recognize it. Specialized variations of it are usually very distinctive and have specific names : racewalking and silly-walks, for example.

But on alternate days I go around the lake at a faster clip, raising the question: am I jogging or running? The question came up at a recent breakfast with Johnbai, and we explored various distinctions; I later did a bit of Internet research. I eventually wound up with little in the way of a satisfactory answer.

The first consideration was that is had something to do with the stride. Running, we reckoned, had a longer stride, an open stride, and jogging meant using a small stride, with perhaps more knee than hip action; we thought that jogging might be harder on the knees than running. As usual, we didn't even know what we were talking about.

Stride came up first partly because my buddy D.D. had clued me into some research into running form from an anthropological standpoint. To grossly oversimplify, it seems we've been training ourselves to do it all wrong for the past thirty years. The human foot, with the arch acting like a natural leaf spring, is designed to land almost flat-footed, to absorb the shock of impact and then spring back up, transferring the energy to the next step-off. The long-stride, heel-and-roll form (encouraged and abetted by over-designed running shoes) is actually less efficient and is likely increasing the incidence of running injuries, despite all the cushioning and padding. So, "real" running probably involves a stride that looks more like what we have been calling "jogging" - the foot hitting the ground directly beneath the hip, instead of in front of it.

(There is a secondary hypothesis that ancient humans, natural endurance runners and one of the few animals who could run in the heat of the day, would use this skill to run down game, not by catching it, but by exhausting it.)

So, with stride apparently out of the mix to distinguish jogging and running, we turned to speed. A few websites and discussion forums used this as a measure: some arbitrary number - a ten-minute pace, a nine-minute pace, an eight-minute pace, whatever - was selected. Slower than that speed was jogging, faster than that was running.

(As a baseline, the typical walk, exclusive of window-shopping or flower-smelling, ranges from about a 15 to 20-minute pace - 3 or 4 mph. NatDog ran her first marathon at about a nine-and-a-half minute pace - a little better than 6 mph. World class runners can do a marathon and maintain a five-minute pace - 12 mph.)

This result-based method doesn't seem to take into account the observed differences between individual ability levels - we have all seen people whom we would characterize as running all out even if their speeds were under one of these arbitrary levels.

Another theme arose in the research that did address individual differences, that of effort: running was what you did when you were working hard and getting out of your comfort zone, while jogging was moving comfortably and working, but not too hard. This approach seemed way too idiosyncratic to ever become useful in a general application and didn't get much traction in the discussions.

From a completely different angle came the cultural construct method. In this scheme, running is what people do when they are training competitively for timed events; jogging is what people do for general health reasons. In some of the more developed models of this type, this kind of social construction seemed to make the most sense; underlying most of the definitions, however, was some sentiment like "Running is what I do because I am a Serious Athlete; jogging is what the rest of you amateurish rabble do." The unspoken judgmental nature of this model makes its use less appealing than it might otherwise be.

You can see where all this rumination took me: nowhere. I still didn't know what to label my morning locomotion. I was thinking about it, and, in fact, thinking about this blog post, as I made my way around the lake this morning (walking today), when I suddenly realized that I was spending so much time looking for a label for what I was doing that I wasn't paying attention to feeling what it was I was doing. And I thought back to a mediation I wrote last summer, in which I talked about how good it felt to do and not to think about running.

So, we're done with this. Jogging, running, walking, sprinting, racing, tearing, trotting, galloping - whatever we want to call it, I'm just going to keep going around the lake.

Apology for taste

So, this past weekend, I came to be at a cabin in the woods in pursuit of a peaceful weekend away from Independence Day festivities and explosions. High in Chinook Pass, I tarried with some pals beside the American River, relaxing in the rusticity.

Of course, bringing a book is part and parcel of such a retreat, and I had in my hands a copy of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which had coincidentally been left in my work mailbox just days before by a colleague who thought I would enjoy the story of two seventies-era youths who bond over comic books. Since the seventies were my own coming-of-age decade and since comics are my penchant, it seemed like a sure bet, so much so that I did not even bring a Plan B / backup book.

Alas, it was not to be. I don't know about Lethem's qualities as a storyteller; I never made it that far. I do know that his prosody leans toward the elaborate - in fact, it is positively filigreed. The language was so lyrical and literary that I felt as if I were reading sonnets written on Belgian lace; there were so many grace notes I had a hard time finding the substance.

Take this description of two young girls roller-skating, from the opening of the book:

The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut.

Sky-pink hair? I've seen the sky get pinkish at sunset or sunrise; does that make their hair an off-blue? And gauzy? I'm not sure I know what gauzy hair is. I sure didn't know what the girls looked like. And if, in fact, the girls were murmured rhymes, why not edit that sentence down and just say that first? Finally, I have often told my students that italics and boldface for emphasis are marks of weak prose; maybe I was wrong, but I don't think the edited version of that sentence would need them.

I soldiered on through more similarly flowery prose and in a few pages was struck by this passage wrapping up a description of the historically dubious naming of a newly-gentrified neighborhood by its sponsor:

So, Boerum Hill, though there wasn't any hill. Isabel Vendle wrote it and so it was made and so they would come to live in the new place which was inked into reality by her hand, her crabbed hand which scuttled from past to future, Simon Boerum and Gowanus unruly parents giving birth to Boerum Hill, a respectable child.

Again we get the in-text edit-by-comma, "hand" gaining a "crabbed" modifier only with repetition, not at the outset. We also get a serial "and," the metaphorical "inked into reality," and a concluding participial clause trying to shoulder the action, all in one rambling sentence.

I'm not saying any of these language choices are bad, incorrect, or even inappropriate; I just felt when reading it that it was all style and little substance, that Lethem cared more about writing prettily than telling a story, and that I didn't know how much I could get through.

As it turned out, not much. About page twelve or so I gave up on it and wandered into the cabin to see if there was a nice paperback on the small bookshelf in the corner by the fireplace. I pulled out a somewhat worn copy of Agatha Christie's Dead Man's Mirror, one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries. It began

The flat was a modern one. The furnishings of the room were modern, too. The armchairs were squarely built, the upright chairs were angular. A modern writing-table was set squarely in front of the widow and at it sat a small elderly man. His head was practically the only round thing in the room. It was egg-shaped.

Ah. This room I could see, and this man I could visualize. The weekend's reading agenda was reshaped but salvaged.

Now, I have wondered about this response I had. An easy explanation is my falling on the spare side of the ol' Fitzgerald-Hemingway divide: possessing a bent for the plain and unadorned as opposed to the mannered and ornate. A specific preference between those two authors may be so in my case, but how does that explain my absolute enthusiasm for Dickens, whose paragraphs seem like dense thickets of forest next to the bare tundra of Papa's sentences?

Perhaps I merely fall in the Animist quadrant of Scott McCloud's Four Tribes theory of creators, concerned mostly with story, while Lethem is a Classicist, focused on beauty.

Or maybe the answer is as prosaic as my commute companion suggested today: I wanted a "beach book," and not a literary novel, in that particular place and time.

But maybe the truth is that I'm just not very "literary" at all. And maybe I can live with that.