Recognizing

This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in May, 1967, in an address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”

While politicians seem to like to invoke Dr. King's name,  I have heard only one presidential candidate talking about an approach to change that is anything close to this. The memory of MLK has been watered down and his power neutered as his narrative has been co-opted. He believed in the power of love, yes; he was also a radical who believed that radical change - political, economic, and social change- was necessary for justice to prevail in America.  He fought the Establishment and spoke truth to power: he stood up against racial injustice, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the working class, he demonstrated against the war. His fight was real and it goes on today.

Let's not forget that.

Close enough for government work

So, my new-to-me/old little Smart Car has what i can only guess is a very European design, and as a consequence is always surprising me with odd features (you can only remove the key when the car is in reverse) and oddly placed control buttons (the dome light control is a rocker switch next to the cigarette lighter). The latest quirk revealed itself as the weather got cooler here in B'ham: whenever the temperature drops to within a few degrees 0f freezing, the odometer display automatically transforms for sixty seconds into a gauge showing the exterior temperature. Viz:

When it first changes, there's even a little snowflake icon!  All that to say "Hey! It might get a little slick out there... be careful!"

Of course, since the car was never intended for import into the U.S., the temperature is only displayed in Centigrade - there's no way to toggle it to Fahrenheit. When I first pointed this feature out to Coco, she asked how to do the degree conversion. I gave her my simple formula: double the degrees and add thirty.

Yes. I know, that's not exactly it. We all learned (C * 9/5) + 32 = F  in grade school. But really - who can or would multiple by nine and then divide by five (or multiply by 1.8) and then add 32 in their head? Doubling comes easy - we do that more or less naturally all the time. Adding a round number is easier - you only ever have to deal with the tens column. The formula is easier to remember, and it's close enough.

Or is it close? I always figured it was, but I had never really checked it out.

Well, now I have: I made a spreadsheet. I'll spare you the table and just show you the chart:

At typical temperatures, the simplified method ranges from 13% under to 5% over the more formally calculated Fahrenheit equivalent of a Centigrade temperature. At the extremes: -5º C should be 23º F but shorthands to 20º, and 36º C calculates to 97º F, but the approximation works out to102º.

That's as far off as you'll ever be: between the freezing point of 0º C/32º F and a balmy 22º C/72º F, the easy approximation is two degrees or less from the complicated calculation. And between 46º and 54º F, the two calculations are within a half a degree.

I'm not saying you should translate recipes or chemical formulae using this method, but when you hear the weather forecast from a Canadian station - or drive a car that will not relinquish its European identity - it's quite good enough.

El Condor Pasa

So, a friend of mine went to see the new Star Wars movie and came away more depressed than excited. She said that seeing her cherished idols old, tired, and (in her take) disengaged made her feel old, tired, and disappointed. I didn't share her response, and wasn't even sure I understood her. Then I read James Grady's Last Days of the Condor and got some insight into her reaction.

Back in 1974, Grady write Six Days of the Condor, a story about an CIA analyst (emergency codename: Condor) who gets caught in the middle of an internecine clash after rogue agents wipe out his unit. The protagonist is a failed academic who was recruited by the CIA after he wrote about Nero Wolfe instead of Don Quixote for his comprehensive exams (he had failed to read Cervantes); he uses the skills he has learned from years of analyzing mysteries and spy novels for potentially leaked or useful information to evade capture and survive against skilled professionals for six days. The inexperienced guy with native intelligence and some specialized knowledge holding his own against trained and veteran agents was a  ripping yarn that spoke loud and clear not to a young, more than slightly academic reader of mysteries and spy novels.

The book was made into a movie a year later called Three Days of the Condor which has little to make it memorable it other than some kinky and problematic Robert Redford-Faye Dunaway sexy time. Grady also wrote a pedestrian sequel called Shadow of the Condor, in which our hero become a real field agent, but it is so inconsequential as to be non-canonical.

No, it is Last Days of the Condor that really closes the circle for our wayward agent. Only now instead if the brash tyro, Condor is the weary veteran, "retired," under surveillance, and kept in a drug-induced haze to make sure he doesn't reveal the wrong secrets to the wrong people. When he gets caught in the middle of another bloody intramural conflict, he has to shake off the fog and call upon all his now-formidable skills to survive and unmask the threat.

I had a few problems with this book. First, Grady's sex scenes, as in both previous books, still manage to be kinky (if less problematical) and uninteresting at the same time. It's as if he adds them in because his publisher or agent thought it would be a good idea.

Second, Grady buys into the idea that trained spies are superhuman killing machines with Sherlock-level powers of deduction and attention to detail, and civilians are clueless, defenseless sheep. If LeCarre's Smiley gave us the spy as an ordinary man, Grady's characters - now to include Condor - demonstrate quite the opposite. While this allows for some great set pieces, it eventually becomes hollow spectacle.

The overarching plot is also too spectacular. While the action in Six Days was driven by nothing more than a small band of opportunistic drug smugglers within the CIA, the Big Bad in Last Days is a world-threatening combination of a Bond villain and the Forbin Project. Can't even spy stories be small anymore?

But the biggest disappointment in the novel is the overriding weariness of the whole thing. No one in the book seems thinks that any of their actions mean a thing, that anything is ever going to get better, or that the distinction between right and wrong is even discernible. Heavens to betsy, maybe it would have been better to stay drugged.

As I read the story, I thought of my buddy the young Condor, using his book-learned street-smarts to stay one step ahead of the bad guys and Do the Right Thing.

Or maybe Condor was never that earnest; maybe that was me.

Straphanger's lament

So, this post concerns both Christmas trees and file cabinets, but trust me, there's a connection.


As part of our holiday season music, Coco put into the rotation an iTunes collection called A Frank Sinatra Christmas, which contains a lot of groovy, swingin' arrangements of holiday standards and novelty songs. One of the latter is "I Wouldn't Trade Christmas," a cut from the album The Sinatra Family Wish You a Merry Christmas which features Tina, Nancy, and Frank Junior singing along with Ol' Blue Eyes. One of the lyrics goes like this:

The jingle bells jingle, you feel the old tingle,
You buy the Kris Kingle scene.

The idea is clever, but subways will never
Quite handle that huge evergreen!

That last couplet hit me right in the feels, as the kids say: if anything can make me nostalgic for my childhood, it might be a reference to both family holidays and urban living at the same time. And something that says Christmastime in The City even more than "Silver Bells" is the image of trying to take your Xmas tree home on the subway.

Y'see, when I grew up in New York - and it'd be the same in any Real City, I imagine - mass transit was just the default travel option. Very few people I knew drove or even had a car. When our family's 1955 Chevy BelAir gave up the ghost when I was in seventh or eighth grade, Pop had it towed for scrap and never replaced it. My family moved when I was in second grade - the move occurred while my sister and I were in school, and instead of walking home to our old place we just took a bus to our new place. (Norma Jean was in fourth grade and had the address written on a piece of paper wrapped around two tokens.) For all four years of high school I took the subway an hour each way to and from school - the BMT (RR and N trains) to Union Square and transfer for the IRT (5 or 6) to Yorktown on the upper east side. I wasn't special - it's just what we all did.

So the notion of trying to take an evergreen tree home on the subway sounds both plausible and familiar to me - and from experience, so does the failure of the attempt.

As luck would have it, I was reminded recently (perhaps nudged by having heard the song) of my own attempt to push the envelope on the common carriage afforded by the subway. One of the loose ends from the move to Bellingham from Seattle is my obtaining a file cabinet for materials that had been stored in now-repurposed bookshelves. Scanning craigslist for cheap affordable option, I encountered this ad, and that was all it took to throw me back to Brooklyn.

 

"Vintage" indeed  - I bought one of these in, let's see, it must have been 1972. My oldest pal Robert (now Rob) and my best high school buddy Liam (now Bill) were hanging around in Bay Ridge and we happened to pass the Triangle sporting goods store; they had a cabinet just like the model pictured in this ad standing outside with little handwritten For Sale sign on it, apparently clearing out after a remodel or renovation. I was thrilled - I needed something to hold my burgeoning comic book collection - and I paid the exorbitant sum of five dollars to make it mine. Of course, I had to get it home.

So, we started a round-robin carrying scheme - one in front, one in back, and one spotting - rotating every so often or whenever someone complained loudly enough (and if I recall correctly both Rob and Bill complained a lot) and headed off, with little or no discussion, to the nearest subway entrance, about two blocks away.

We struggled down the station stairs debating the best way to get it into the platform - open the wooden, spring-loaded exit door and go in that way, or just have two carry it over the turnstile and the third drop the tokens in. I don't think we ever resolved the question, but it didn't matter - as soon as we got down the stairs, the token booth guy yelled "You can't take that on the train!"

Dumbfounded, we asked why not.

"You can't take that on the train!" he explained.

We offered to pay a separate fare just for the file cabinet.

"You can't take that on the train!" he countered.

Faced with such eloquence, we had no choice but to shoulder our burden once again, head up the stairs, and schlep the cabinet the twenty or so blocks back to my house. The trip gave Rob and Bill even more opportunity to practice their complaining and develop a repertoire which I am sure serves them even to this day, but we made it without any blood or tears, although with a lot of toil and sweat. We installed the cabinet in my bedroom, where it became a useful feature until I sold my comic collection in an ill-considered financial re-organization a few years later. I still insist we could have easily managed a file cabinet on the RR.

Well, I don't buy Xmas trees anymore and I don't think I will buy either of these craigslisted file cabinets, but if I were to make either of those purchases I am sure I would bring them home in a car and not try to take either on the subway. And in some ways, more's the pity for that.

BTW,  $5 is about $28 in today's money,

 so I got a great deal on that cabinet, eh?

Just another pic dump redux

Continuing a January tradition started a year ago...

I saw this from the window on campus and  thought it really illustrated how small the Smart car is.

I didn't think they made these anymore, but there they were, big as life. These were an especial treat when I was a kid. Although I indulge in a box of Oreos once a year during holiday season, I imagine that if I were to eat these now, they would be entirely too sweet. My sister has a memory of me stuffing my mouth full of these, pouring milk in after, then laughing at something on TV and spraying the mess all over the screen. What delicacy they were.

This was a random rainbow on the floor of the hallway on campus. I couldn't find the source - something prismatic on in the window of the bookstore, I thought.

The desk of a colleague at work; the animal motif is not random. The pachyderm by the computer is there to remind her to always talk about the elephant in the room. The livestock scampering on the pencil case fill a similar function: a reminder not to let anyone get her goat. Sometimes the goats will even accompany her to meetings, riding in a pocket to provide some grounding. Nice practice for more effective collaboration, I think.

I may repost this every January just because it is one of my all-time favorite photos, but this year I have an excuse: Alex, the lab tech par excellence I hired some years ago (the first time I was a dean), just finished her master's degree. I can pick 'em.

Be it resolved

So, an annual New Year's Day blog-post is a tradition hereabouts, one that dates back to the very first new year's in the life of Hoodies, Kilts, and Cons, the 2005-2008 lunch-blog that started this whole habit for me. In that post, I mused on the the arbitrary nature of the ballyhoo surrounding the  December 31-to-January 1 transition while accepting its significance.

That post started a long-running tradition of the Perennial Resolutions™, which was wrapped up and put to bed (as most traditions ought to be, eventually) last year.

So now, mindful of rich tapestry of the past, aware of the present mood of promise and potential that we all want to foster, and looking toward the future, I have two offerings:

First of all, this Kurt Vonnegut quote has been on my mind lately and it seems an appropriate note on which to begin the new year:

"Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies— ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’"

And then to go along with the standard practice of more performance-based resolutions, here's a gif of Coco on treadmill:

Happy New Year!