Winnah, winnah, tofu dinnah!

So,  as part of our California desert-to-ocean vacation trip, Coco and and I had time to visit with pal Wendy for some beach touring of the Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan, Hermosa, and Redondo types. At the last of these, we walked the amusement pier and enjoyed the offerings of an old school "penny arcade" - the kind that gives you tickets for winning the games.

Coco and Wendy look so gleeful here because Coco actually "won" something!

When we walked in, Coco spotted a life-sized stuffed husky dog hanging from the ceiling and playfully suggested that I win it for her. It was redeemable for 400 tokens, and I demurred. After I had a go at an electronic version of the carnival hammer game (that offered no rewards), Coco spotted one of these:

Coco had never encountered one before, and I explained to her how she needed to slide a quarter down the slot and position it to shove other quarters off the shelf when the flat shovel-thing made its move. Wendy read the fine print and saw that the game did not pay out in actual quarters, but in tokens redeemable for prizes (such as the husky dog).

Coco played one quarter into a perfect spot to no good result; it was just shoved on top of the pile. Undaunted, she played another; the shovel came forward and a clutch of quarters fell off the edge and into the bin with some satisfying clinking and clanging! The machine began spitting out a ticker tape marked with divisions, like a ruler. We tried to count them as we gathered up the ever-growing strip; it wound up being over twenty feet long with hundreds of units. After some confusion, we found another machine to feed the tape into; it counted the units up and printed off a more manageable receipt.

It read 250! More than halfway to a husky dog with just one play! How awesome is that? But wait a second... what's that fine, fine print?

Coco had won 250 stamps. At the described exchange rate, that was the equivalent of only 10 tokens, hardly a dent in the total toward a husky. (We never actually saw any tokens, either; apparently they only exist as a mathematical construct.)

We soon discovered that ten tokens barely kept one from vagrancy in a place like this. Being unable to choose between a water bottle with no lid and a couple of batteries with dubious provenance, Coco decided to double down and go for broke. She picked a Surprise Box from this enticing display:

The contents? Well, for that, let's go to the videotape. Enjoy. Or be warned.

This post created and uploaded at the dreadful Delta terminal at LAX.

Up and Atom

So, anyone who's known me very long (or has read the title of this blog) knows that I have more than a passing interest in Epicureanism - not sensual hedonism, in the modern (and incorrect) usage of the word, but the philosophy, related to Stoicism, named for Epicurus of Samos. In this school of thought, the avoidance of pain and the search for pleasure are related directly to the question of good and evil, and the ultimate goal is ataraxia, that state of clear-headed tranquility that comes from, among other things, releasing all fear of gods and the afterlife.

In addition to developing his ethical philosophy, Epicurus (pronounced eh-PIH-kur-us, btw) was a proponent of the atomist theory of matter - that everything material was comprised of combinations of tiny particles in different arrangements. Not a bad guess for someone in the fourth century BCE, eh?

The most definitive text on Epicureanism is De Rerum Natura - On the Nature of Things - by Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman writing 200 years after the Greek philosopher's death. This poem by Lucretius, comprehensive in its elucidation and by all accounts beautiful in its language, could be considered the manual for modern, humanistic thinking. Yet it was lost for many years during the Middle Ages, the few extant copies mouldering in monasteries tucked into forsaken corners of Europe.

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of one Poggio Braccioloni, a Vatican secretary and avid book-hunter who found and circulated Lucretius's classic work and in so doing became (according to Greenblatt) the spark of the renaissance and the catalyst for the modern world.

(airplane photo, complete with superhero bookmark)

Greenblatt weaves a tight story, equal parts history lesson, travelogue, political thriller, and comedy of manners. Throughout it all run two threads. One is the tension that Poggio embodied - a secular staffer in the Hoy See, a man obsessed with classical literature working in a culture that renounced all things pagan,  a person of intellectual curiosity living in a time of Inquisition. The other ever-present thread is the notion of just how close western civilization came to losing some of the pearls of its past - and how many gems were never found again. The swerve of the book's title refers the small deviation in the movement of one atom that causes a collision and begins the building of things, just as one small find by one lowly scholar began a whole new era.

The book is worth a read just for the sweep and scope of the adventure that brought that De Rerum Natura back to us. In addition, after the climax of the historical story, Greenblatt gives an excellent summary of the principles of Epicureanism as explained by Lucretius. I resonated so strongly with them, I reproduce the list here, minus the explanatory notes:

• Everything is made of invisible particles
• The elementary particles of matter are eternal
• The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size
• All particles are in motion in an infinite void
• The universe has no creator or designer
• Everything comes into being as result of a swerve
• The swerve is the source of free will
• Nature ceaselessly experiments
• The universe was not created for or about humans
• Humans are not unique
• Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival
• The soul dies
• There is no afterlife
• Death is nothing to us
• All organized religions are superstitious delusions
• Religions are invariably cruel
• There are no angels, demons, or ghosts
• The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain
• The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion
• Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder

I have to say, looking this over, that this is a pretty good summary of how I believe as I move through life. I have been reading and re-reading Epicurus and Lucretius for maybe forty years now; I guess some of it must have sunk in.

Read Lucretius, or at least read Greenblatt. You'll be glad you did either.

O.G. Blogging

So, while Coco enjoys her birthday luxuriating at what is colloquially called The Naked Lady Spa, I am out blogging in Starbucks, just like old times. I've got an outlet and a hot coco, and they're playing some nice tunes, but the view isn't much to write home about. Ah, Suburban Nation.

(If I were really ambitions, I would have done some time-lapse photography.)

Since I'm feeling old school, I thought I would just dump some bloggy stuff in here, like I used to, when people actually had blogs and read each other's. See, here's an old joke about it:

(Now our cat has his own Facebook page)

Ah, those heady days. We'd meet each other and someone would ask "what's up?" and the response would be a resentful acknowledgment that maybe not everybody was waiting for your latest post, to devour it and know exactly what was up. I guess the practice lives on in memory, at least - I mean, this is from a fairly recent television show, isn't it?

(Although that short looks like it's made out of Qiana - that's not coming back, is it?)

Before hanging out at Starbucks waiting for Coco to finish her spa visit, I hung out on campus waiting for her to finish teaching. (Yeah, she had to work today, more's the bummer.) I graded and prepped and visited some folks and sent some email and had lunch, a tofurkey sandwich. Not leftovers from Thanksgiving: we didn't have any of those, since we went out for dinner to Bamboo Garden, although we did have some faux-leftovers because Coco made stuffing anyway and I bought a can of jellied cranberry sauce, just like mom used to buy, except that the can isn't ribbed anymore and they don't emboss the sell-by code into the metal but use ink instead, so the quivering purple cylinder has less architectural detail now, but I digress. My sandwich included cheddar cheese and cucumbers, and was on sliced "artisanal" bread.

Now that's an old-school blog post.

Excelsior!