[… in reply to a note from my brother Jim …]
Message received and noted. Damn the bastids. However, we remain balanced with equanimity due to a healthful residue of blissful ignorance.
Apropos the delayed reply, though, here’s today’s fun chain of unanticipated consequences:
While we were gone, we paid a neighbor’s kid, M., to mow the lawn once a week. Monica was actually here the first week. We had one of her friends, J., staying in the house the following week to watch the dogs and pool and so on, when Monica joined us in Belize. As you know, we were kind of out of touch that week, though we found out on the way home that there had been a problem. J. had called that the air conditioning had gone out upstairs. She called Cathy. Cathy called an a serviceman, who called an electrician. Everyone had called me and left messages on my mobile phone, while I remained happily unaware, spearfishing my jubilee dinner, or conversing with a bush doctor over some maybe surprising secret lore of zericote wood.
What? Because apparently overzealous in his duties as lawnmower boy, M. also mowed right over the power line feeding the a/c. Ka-pow!
The unanticipated part? Evidently, the surge blew out the disks of one of our primary computers. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know that was the cause. All I know is that when we came home, both disks were as well as the bulb on the lamp on the desk were dead, but the computer itself would boot with a replacement disk. (turns out I’ve got a sackful of ’em.) So it’s a drag, but not that bad, because a certain party backed up all the data just before we left, and the server is fine and well, thank you very much.
The moral of this story? Aside from the obvious — that the real world will bleed you dry and then kick you in the ass just out of spite, so the hell with it? Just go have a good time and ignore it. Maybe it will go away.
I don’t know. But I can tell you this: the server is protected by a heavier duty surge protector with a thing called an uninterruptible power supply. Basically it’s a glorified battery. Get one.

as for the adventure getting here, it seems much milder in retrospect, but also I think serves as a kind of group personality test (fyi, we passed).
here’s what happened. first of all, we are kind of bouncing around and spaced from a nice couple of days on the beach in montauk and a wedding in new jersey, and the usual stuff in between, and we had a challenging drive after the reception driving halfway across the state to get to the hotel in queens near laguardia so we could take a reasonably short hop over to the airport in the morning. no problem, except for queens, I guess, which seems to be laid out in a non-euclidean geometry, where no two streets meet at right angles, and two different streets are immediately adjacent and run parallel to one another with different numbering schemes involving dashes and letters and nonlinear sequences. and the hotel wasn’t really too bad at all, except for the stink of smoke in the halls that just about made you nauseous. really, we literally had to hold our breath from the door to the elevator full of philippine and indian immigrant laborers, apparently. but nevermind that, we did ok..
our flight was fine, and we arrived in houston shortly before bj and pam who were to meet us flying directly from new york, and monica who would be driving down from austin. all that worked out, which was kind of amazing considering the number of different ways that sync-up could have gone wrong, except for the fact that monica forgot her passport. hoo boy.
after some quick brainstorming, we got that taken care of by a combination of monica’s good friend julie who would be minding our house anyway, searching for monica’s passport for her and driving halfway to houston where monica and I would meet her in brenham in the middle of the night.
believe it or not, that worked out too, and we got up on time in the morning and made it to the airport with everybody and their friends and their passports, and sure enough, here we are on the plane to belize.
here’s where the real fun started, because its a pretty good hike from the airport to belize city, to the crowded third world ferry dock, to the two hour ferry ride out to the caye. we could have saved some time and taken a puddle jumper over, but it was a bit more expensive, and we all know anita’s feelings about little planes. fortunately the weather was fine, we were in good spirits, and there’s few things a smile and a good slathering of money won’t solve.
the ride was nice, though a bit long, and finally, the dock at san pedro came into view. everybody off. it was hot, but here was some shade and even a bar. let’s go inside, have a bite and a drink, while I call alberto.
no answer. no answer again. no ring. what the?
no one had heard of him or the place where we were staying (it wasn’t a resort, but a new house, well out of town and far up the beach, we think. we’re not quite sure. they don’t exactly have street numbers out here).
this interval of uncertainty was challenging, and compounded by the fact that anita was not well, and couldn’t venture very far from a bathroom, and naturally she was quite cranky.
the kids were great, calm and chipper, self-reliant and helpful. I was very proud of them.
and I was ok too, thank you very much, after exploring hiring a water taxi (which would have been pretty expensive), I was advised to wait for the three o’clock shuttle, filled with locals and driven by a sort of blustery young man who thought he might know the house we were looking for, after we showed him the picture we had printed off the internet.
scanning house after house, nestled among the coconut palms, for perhaps five miles, the resorts began to thin out, and we were practically the only folks left on the boat. and I was considering contingency plans. there appeared to be plenty of places we could stay, a little inconvenience, maybe, but no panic.
finally, “there it is!” we all shouted just about at once, and circling around, the boat driver dropped us all off at the dock. Thanks and a tip and off he tooled into his own little world.
the place looked fabulous, but there was no sign of life anywhere.
“where’s the nearest bathroom, do you think?” Anita asked.
wandering around back, I found who I later would learn was Mar, and Alberto’s brother, and explained who we were.
“Oh!” She apologized, and explained that Alberto was under the impression that we would be arriving at the airport, and that he had a new cell phone number, that no one had told us…so we were calling his old number that had been disconnected, and they were beginning to worry where we were. They spent the rest of the week trying to make it up to us. I think they succeeded.
So.
Remember this lesson: In adversity, stay calm. Stay clear. Smile. Be generous. Have faith, but also have a contingency plan. You never know what may go wrong, but things have a way of working out.

i will tell you right now and without reservation that bach’s “die kunst der fugue” is the highest musical achievement in all of human endeavor. it is really more than that, it is among the highest artistic achievements of all humankind.
it is unfortunate that bach’s instrument of choice, the church organ has so many other connotations, especially for the modern listener, but it is surprising and disappointing to me to see how little attention this astonishing but sadly unfinished set of compositions receives among the musical community.
there are a few transcriptions for ensembles of strings and horns, but so far, and with rare but exceptional moments, i have found none that really cover the depth of insight, the breadth of emotion, the nuanced ingenuity of the master the way a complete treatment does.
maybe its presumptuous of me to think that this lack of attention may be due to a true lack of appreciation, even among the musical cognoscenti of the accomplishment this work represnts, its perfection down to the unfinished ending of number 19, the fuga a tres sogetti.. as the work of bachs last years conclude a set of carefully constructed, almost mathematical formations with an unresolved harmonic progression…
everything is in there, its like a mandala, its perfect, particularly with this final imperfection.
maybe its my mathematical mind, structured as it is through years of computer programming. i remember my first exposure to the musical offering by way of hofstadter’s book “Gödel, Escher, Bach…” which, if you have not read, please stop reading this now, and go find right now and read.
that is, if you care about any of this..
but i wondered what hofstadter was talking about, and checked it out, and i was kind of struck, especially given a little bit of an anticipatory set, how the nature of the human mind, of thought itself is kind of expressed in this kind of music, but that music carries so many other aspects of our humanity with it, love, sex, longing, desire and guilt, grief, hope, righteous outrage and anger, among all the musical forms of blues, rock, folk, jazz, and traditional music of all sorts, and all the things everyone is trying to say through these pieces, and it reminded me of some dreams i started having when i first began studying computer science.
they were strange, sort of like that segment of disney’s fantasia, where just before the elephants start dancing on the mushrooms or whatever, where there’s nothing but black background and streams of staffs and notes and then they start to wave, but my dream was not exactly like that, the notes in my mind were the bits of the computer and i understood them, saw them, sort of like that critical moment at the end of the first matrix movie where neo sees the matrix for what it really is, except this was back in the seventies, when i was studying this stuff, it was much more abstract when all you’ve got to work with is punched cards, or maybe an electronic terminal.
but nevermind that, maybe what i’m trying to get at is this correspondence between bach’s mazelike accomplishment in the art of the fugue and our modern work with computers. there’s this requirement of a certain level of comprehension before you can even begin to contemplate the thing. and as i said, i suspect that even very capable musicians, composers, and people you think should know better, that there’s something missing from their perspective that causes them to lack the ability to percieve this accomplishment, even as they claim that they do…
but never mind that either..
just do this: sit down with a good version of die kunst der fugue (i recommend marie-claire alain). and listen to it straight through for a whole day. lather, rinse, repeat. drink deep, my friend. you won’t be the same when you’re done.

one of the known effects of certain pollutants is to emulate the effects of estrogen. you could easily track this if certain data about the epidemiology of cancer were more widely available. its amazing in this era of the internet and instant information, how hard it is to find a fucking map showing the distribution of cancer by type and location. all the sites that once had such maps have been shut down most forcefully and/or been redirected to sites with a .gov domain. very peculiar. international sites with such maps give mysterious 404 errors. how odd. try a google search for “cancer maps” or “cancer epidemiology” and after you’re done scratching your head, give me a call.
in any case, one of the inferred consequences of this effect is to induce an increased incidence of breast cancer and possibly also cervical and uterine cancers in women. one of my own suspicions is that its also a lurking variable in the increased incidence of homosexuality among men in certain areas. you have to look not so much at the adult homosexual communities, that is, not where these people wound up, but rather where they grew up. I suspect that if you did, you’d find clusters that mapped very well with the corresponding maps for breast cancer in women. that is, if you could find such maps, which you can’t. most peculiar.

cities on I-40 (with intersecting and overlapping us highways…)
wilmington
raleigh
greensboro, nc 74
knoxville
nashville
memphis 412
little rock 412
norman, ok. (412 veers north to tulsa)
amarillo 70, 34
albequerque 84, 54
flagstaff 191
bakersfield 95, 93
I-40 doesn’t quite make coast to coast, at least as defined by I-95 and I-5.
it starts in a nowhere’s ville called wrightsville beach, goes through fine n.c. towns like watha, magnolia and newton grove, before it gets to raleigh. why is there an interstate going through there, anyway? have you ever been there? it largely follows the route of the old american and north carolina railroad, carrying slave cotton and tobacco to northern markets, but nevermind that
at an indeterminate point west of grensboro, and it dies nowhere east of california city.
doesn’t even make it all the way to bakersfield… kind of symbolic?

today’s thought is that bach’s art of fugue was unfinished at his death, but was a massive bomb to future generations of musicians and even some philosophers. to me, one of its most interesting aspects, is that like many of his greatest works it was conceieved and executed in his spare time. he was an essential middle class individual, with a job and a wife and a family to support, but although his profession allowed him certain lattitude, he carved out enough time from his limited spare time (he had thirteen children, for christ’s sake), to produce works, lacking patronage or even any real hope of remuneration, but just because that was what he did. and one of those works has the ability to make you think about things in a new way, maybe 250 years later. isn’t that what its all about? God bless him for that, if nothing else.

I think bruce springsteen is a great songwriter.
but I always got the feeling he wanted to be more than he actually was. like he was always itchy and climbing, always a little uncomfortable in his own skin.
if you look, in his earlier stuff, there’s not so much of him as the story, and there’s a lot of that that’s good: rosalita, blinded by the light, spirits in the night, growing up, and of course thunder road and born to run. but later on, something happened, and like his center moved, and his really powerful songs came from a different place, and they were all about him: darkness on the edge of town, adam raised a gain, stolen car, one step up, brilliant disguise and stuff like that.
then there’s a lot of derivative stuff, but every now and then he comes out with something that is really good, like ‘ghost of tom joad’ or ‘devils and dust.’
and all that.

just like everything else they’ve ever done, microsoft reverse engineered java, broke their contract with sun, threw them out of the house, renamed everything, and claimed they invented it.
windows nt is clearly was an unholy comingling of windows, ibm os2, dec vms and unix, sans attribution, thank you very much, but I remember the days, not so long ago, we were working with them then, when microsoft actually considered not using sockets for network communication. the only question was, if they could get away with it, and isolate unix, but that was a non-starter, so they glommed on their networking software, I don’t know if you remember the nt days, when it was a weird hodgepodge of netware, netbeui, tcp/ip, and so on. maybe it really wasn’t so clear to them, I remember debates about token-ring versus ethernet, like who really cares at that level?
but the point is that for microsoft, it was never about the technology, it was about how far can they go, very carefully thinking it out, very consciously, boxing you into a corner, so from your point of view, you start out easy, and every choice is made for you down the road, leading you to give more and more of your money to *guess who*
(you being the non-tech-savvy-but-with-money-to-spend victim, for whom the profile is pasted to a bulletin board…)
its no accident they’re so successful, you know.
but the thing that kills me, and it happed (yet again) just the other day, when engineers, who should know better, are brainwashed, and they don’t even know it.
I was talking to a co-worker, and I pointed out how .net was a ripoff of java (and just try to tell me it wasn’t!), and someone overheard me, and said, “well, not so much” or something to that effect. I apologized, since I hadn’t even been talking to him, and said I didn’t mean to be confrontational, and he just kind of trailed off, and mumbled not to anyone in particular, “I think they did it better, anyway…”
putting aside some disturbing aspects of that personal interaction, I would expect more from a technical expert. I suspect he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. maybe inside the .net box, he has a certain level of mastery, but outside the box,… well, what I would say is that one should have the courage to just come out and say, “yes, they reverse engineered java, and they made it their own, and they made it better,” but not deny it but spouting the half-truth that is microsoft’s corporate position.
all that proved to me is that a certain party may be smart, but nonetheless is capable of being brainwashed.

on this day in 1611, explorer henry hudson, his son john and seven others were cast adrift in a small open boat, abandoned by mutineers in the bay that would later bear hudson’s name.