Halfway There

I've half a mind

2012-01-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

Bad teacher!

When it's early in the semester, I tend to cut my students a little more slack. Of course, I expect them to pay attention when I explain why I take off points for some calculations that manage to produce correct answers. For example, how many minutes does it take you to travel 12 miles at 18 miles per hour? Here's what one student told me:

Yeah. Well, I'm really not happy with that. Sorry, but 12/18 is simply not equal to 40. Equality is supposed to be a transitive property, folks! Of course, this could be redeemed with the appropriate use of unit conversion:

This I like. Careful use of units is a powerful way to keep one's calculations in order and to make sense of the results. Full marks! But then you get the woefully calculator-dependent student who presents this travesty:

Heck, you can keep your puny old leap-seconds! My students can conjure up a dozen seconds out of the thin air of feckless rounding. This is a particular gripe of mine. You actually need to grab for a calculator to compute two-thirds of sixty? Good grief!

Thoughtless calculations like these were sprinkled throughout the early semester quizzes and exams. But the pièce de résistance came in a different problem. One that had nothing to do with rounding. I gave my students (gave them, mind you) some volume formulas. All of the most popular shapes were there: cone, cylinder, sphere, box (ahem! Sorry. I mean rectangular parallelepiped, of course). The formulas were actually written out on the assignment sheet. I then asked my students to use the formulas to compute the volumes of some specified shapes. One of the shapes was a hemisphere.

Sure enough, several students decided the formula for a sphere was the best match they could make, computed the result, and ended up with an answer that was two times too big. Arrggh! Naturally, I took off points for that mistake. One of my students waxed indignant when he got his paper back and issued a two-part complaint: (a) I had not given them the formula for the volume of a hemisphere and (b) I had not done an example in class where we had to divide a result by 2 to get the correct answer.

I offered a plea of “no contest” to both charges. They were irrelevant. I patiently explained: “I have higher expectations of my students than merely plugging mindlessly into formulas. I want my students to think about what they're doing. This is not just a plug-in and grind class. Sorry.”

But not very.

Hey, Stupid!

2012-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Have I got a deal for you!

No competent marketer would miss an opportunity to sell product to a broad new demographic. I don't think I noticed, however, when the "total idiot" demographic became a hot new target. Perhaps it's been there all along, but only more recently came into high profile. After all, I'm sure you can think of instances where, after watching a commercial, you said to yourself, “Who would be stupid enough to pay good money for that?” The entire Home Shopping Network was based on the existence of people with minimal discernment and taste.

Still, I've noticed a rash of television commercials that I find peculiarly disturbing. It's like the sponsor of the advertisement is saying, “Are you stupid? A total idiot? Well, have we got a product for you!” For example, who is the Xfinity commercial supposed to appeal to?

Hurray! If you're ignorant enough to demand (non-negotiably!) that Comcast give you Xfinity service with those features that already come standard, then come on down! You're the boss! You'll get a wonderful false sense of power and we'll send you the bill! Yay.

Then there's Yoplait. Are you a skinny woman who saves money by wearing your late grandmother's good-condition, novelty-print, mail-order dress from the 1958 Sears Roebuck catalog? Do you need just one more push to cross the line into wannabe model anorexia? Then pick Yoplait for your noon nosh!

“A swap a day adds up to something amazing!” Like, malnutrition?

I never thought I'd learn to appreciate the subtle wit and humor of the old Shake 'n Bake commercials from the seventies. Today's commercials are making me nostalgic. (Or just dyspeptic. Hey, where is Speedy Alka-Seltzer these days?)

Tastes like chicken

2012-01-22T01:00:00.000-08:00

I, Ofnewt, take you, frog

The toadlike Newt Gingrich has been refreshingly open about his reasons for abandoning Wife No. 1:

You know and I know that she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president.

Like other right-wing epitomes of perfect manhood, Gingrich feels that it is all right to engage in a bit of “lookism.” As we all know, a woman's true value can be discerned by a cursory inspection of her exterior. By his lights, therefore, the former Speaker of the House was doing exactly the right thing when he eventually recruited the blonde and plastic Callista as First-Lady-in-waiting. Newt and his third wife have been buffed up to a high gloss as representatives of faithful till-death-do-us-part Catholic marriage. Now that Gingrich has rolled up a stunning victory in South Carolina's primary election, the probability of his eventually becoming president has risen to something slightly above zero. It could happen.

In that case, we should take more seriously Callista's qualifications to be First Lady—relative, of course, to Newt's superficial measuring stick. This is Callista:

This is Mark McKinney of The Kids in the Hall as Chicken Lady:

I'm sure we'd all have a lot more fun with Mark McKinney in feathered drag in the White House, but—frankly—I'd have to call it a tie.

Oh, no! Not again!

2012-01-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

Déjà vu all over again

Most of us in the teaching profession like to get to know our students and try to find ways to kickstart the process at the beginning of each new school term. One of my colleagues hands out a questionnaire. Another has the students take turns introducing themselves to the class. I usually give an e-mail assignment, which I call a quiz. The instructions are simple: send me a message that (a) includes the name of the class on the subject line (no blank subjects, please!), (b) tells me why you're taking the class in question, and (c) includes your full name (in case I can't tell who you are from the hell-girl-666@inferno.net e-mail address). Since it's a “quiz,” they get points for it.

Like I said, it's simple. I get some useful contact data and a perspective on what my students are looking for (although I can't be much help to those who are taking the class “because the voices in my head told me to”). I also find out which of my students are capable of following instructions, which happens to be an extremely important survival skill in any college class, but perhaps to an even greater degree in math.

Every semester, of course, there's a few students who just can't be bothered to earn a few easy points by sending their instructor a short e-mail message. I presume their lives are full of fun, excitement, and distractions. (I'm envious.) I reply to each message individually and then, after the submission deadline, send out a global message to the entire class roster: “If you didn't get an individual response from me with your quiz score, that means I didn't get an e-mail from you!”

I repeated that message in one of my classes this week. One of my students raised his hand. It was “Stan,” an apparently smart but disorganized student who was repeating the class, having flunked out the previous semester. He had earnestly assured me that this semester would be different.

“Dr. Z, I didn't get an e-mail from you.”

“Right, Stan. That's because I didn't get a message from you. Did you follow the quiz instructions and send me an e-mail message with the requested information?”

Stan paused for a moment before giving me a tentative answer.

“Yeah, I did. I sent you a message.”

“Okay, Stan. When did you send it? Before the deadline? It's possible it got sidetracked by the spam filter and I can search for it in my trash bin.”

“Um, last time. I sent it last time.”

I was confused for a moment, then figured out what he meant.

“Oh, you mean last semester?”

Stan nodded his head. I bit my lip.

“I think we have a problem, Stan. Doing it last semester doesn't exempt you from doing the assignment again this semester. You also took exams last semester, right?”

I let that sink in. Stan achieved enlightenment.

“Oh, so I should do all the assignments this semester even if I already did them before?”

Oh, yeah.

God is bread

2012-01-20T19:00:00.000-08:00

Dough, ducats, shekels, moolah, ...

It was mostly a mistake. The new semester had just begun and I was adjusting to a new early-rising regimen. I clicked on the television as I dug bleary-eyed into my cereal. The screen lit up with what seemed to be a news broadcast, with a talking head reading off a sequence of headlines. I looked up from the morning newspaper and realized why the television broadcast sounded a little strange. The talking head belonged to Terry Meeuwsen, a pioneer in the now-common practice of former beauty queens becoming spokespersons in right-wing media.

The television station was broadcasting The 700 Club in this early morning time-slot. My hand reached out for the remote control, but then I paused. I had not seen Pat Robertson's program in many years—with the exception of certain choice excerpts featured on the YouTube channel of Right Wing Watch—and I was curious what would pop up next. The program had already caught my attention with its sudden segue from headline news to a hand-wringing statement that the sad state of the world was due to insufficient devotion to the message of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (You can always hear the capital letters.)

I was rewarded with a teaser for a segment on financial success. Not exactly a grabber at the hour of dark o' clock, but no waiting was required. A woman appeared to give her testimony that God had showered her family with success. Her husband appeared, looking a bit chastened, as he admitted that he had initially resisted his wife's God-inspired counsel. He was now, however, a firm believer in the magical power of tithing.

Yes. The happy couple had successfully bribed God with a tenth of their income. In return, God had given them financial security for their retirement. I guess it was supposed to be a miracle. The details, however, were less than fully compelling. They had been struggling to make ends meet when the wife suggested to her husband that they were not meeting their obligation to give the Lord ten percent of all they earned. As the husband admitted, he had argued that it made no sense to try to live on ninety percent of an income that was already marginal, but his wife had argued forcefully that ten percent was God's by right. She smiled for the camera, looking smug.

The husband picked up the story by recounting their first windfall after he and his wife began to send more money to The 700 Club. Their insurance company contacted them to report an error in the computation of their premiums; it had resulted in a significant overcharge and the company was giving them a big refund check. God is great! (He can even create an honest insurance company.)

The next miracle was the husband's promotion at work. His new position and salary brought them a level of income and security they had never experienced before. Good work, Jesus! Also, they could now send even more money to The 700 Club.

A pitchwoman came on camera to exhort viewers to join The 700 Club for only twenty dollars a month—“only sixty-six cents a day!”—and to reassure indigents in the television audience that making a sacrificial offering would be more than offset by God's future blessings. The most important thing was to scrape up some dough and ship it off to Pat Robertson's money-handlers. Amen!

I punched the button on the remote control and the television winked off, sparing me any further nauseating exposure to the conscienceless money-grubbing of Robertson's minions. To be sure, there have been more overt examples of televangelist cupidity (like Robert Tilton or Mike Murdock), but the smooth come-on from The 700 Club is particularly noisome. Given the program's reach, I'm sure they have very little difficulty combing through their correspondence for testimonial letters from folks with strokes of luck that can be conveniently attributed to divine intervention—even in the case of such mundane examples as a promotion at work. I'm certain they ignore the letters and e-mails from those sinking ever deeper into poverty. Or, worse, they reply to those people with faux concern and suggestions that they aren't sending in enough money.

Televangelism is a transparent con, but it still hooks those too blind to see. My brief exposure to The 700 Club reminded me what a disgusting spectacle it is. I had mercifully forgotten just how much.

An angelic experience

2012-01-15T23:30:00.000-08:00

Learning on the wing

Like a moth to a flame (or an archangel to a young Jewish virgin), I was drawn irresistibly to the opportunity to attend a faculty training event on the existence of angels. When it first came to my attention, I was initially struck by how inappropriate it seemed as a topic for a professional development activity. While not quite as bad as giving nurses continuing education credit for attending a Catholic indoctrination session, the angel seminar simply seemed irrelevant and beside the point. Where was scholarship in this? What useful lessons might I learn?

The presenter was TM, a young woman who holds a doctorate from the California Institute of Integrated Studies. She is an alumna of the CIIS program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, but I suspect “cosmology” in this context has very little to do with what science-types consider to be cosmology. That's just a guess, of course. You can visit the program webpage and consider the course content for yourself.

To give credit where it's due, Dr. TM declared in her opening remarks that she did not expect attendees to change their opinion about the existence (or non-existence) of angels as a result of her 90-minute presentation. That demonstrated TM's connection to reality, recognizing that the material she would present lacked the evidentiary weight necessary to persuade non-believers. Among the two dozen attendees were several who nodded their heads in sad acknowledgment that some people just aren't open-minded enough to embrace the reality of God's messengers. Others, like me, sat still, resisting the impulse to roll our eyes. It was prudent of TM to allow for our skeptical presence. We were, however, very well behaved throughout the event.

TM was much enamored of Carl Jung's notion of synchronicity, a concept I have never been able to take seriously. As TM explained, a synchronicity occurs when a strong interior impulse, condition, or sensation is reinforced by an exterior manifestation that generates a transformative moment of understanding. Jung's own favorite example, according to TM, was the appearance of a beetle at the window during a psychotherapy session with a female patient who was telling him about a dream about a golden Egyptian scarab. Since the beetle at the window was the nearest local analog to Egypt's golden scarab, Jung deemed it a synchronicity—an acausal simultaneity between his patient's inner life and the external world. (J. B. S. Haldane might have preferred to regard it as a manifestation of God's inordinate fondness for beetles, having scattered hundreds of thousands of species of beetle throughout the world.)

As TM hastened to explain, “Synchronicities are not just happy coincidences!” In response, one of my neighbors muttered, “No. Synchronicities are happy coincidences which people invest with heavy significance.” Only the closest people heard the riposte, but a couple of us nodded. (I was one of them.)

So, where were angels in all of this? As you might suspect, angels are implicated in synchronicities, especially when they manifest as exterior confirmations (i.e., as if they exist in the physical world) of interior emotions or yearnings. The archetypal example is The Annunciation. TM asked the attendees if anyone recognized this special event. I helpfully raised my hand and offered a description: “That's the event reported in the Bible of the archangel Gabriel appearing to Mary and announcing that she was to bear a son who would be the savior.” TM beamed at me and added some details. First of all, the yearning of the Jews for the coming of their messiah would be manifested in the hopes of young Jewish maidens to become the savior's bearer. Second, it didn't matter whether Mary was pregnant or not when Gabriel made his announcement. Either way, Mary would have a deep interior desire or anticipation that was acausally linked with the archangel's appearance.

TM was particularly interested in the parallels between synchronicities and annunciations. The incident with Mary and Gabriel is the most famous, but angels were also reported to have advised Joseph not to divorce Mary and later to flee to Egypt to avoid Herod's slaughter of the innocents. In her dissertation research, TM made the case that annunciations in religious history (by no means limited to Judeo-Christian sources) were anticipations of Jung's theory of synchronicity and fit well into the Jungian model. Furthermore, the parallels remain even if the angels did not actually exist. (Surprise!) That's because it's not strictly required that the coincidental confirmation of the interior sensation be an actual event in the physical world. The angels could, in fact, be confirmatory figments of the imagination.

At this point, I got to learn something—and by this I do not mean that I learned there's a lot of silliness in this field. After all, who should be surprised that there are parallels between supposedly different forms of delusion? No, in this case I learned a bit of Bible lore that I had not heard before, and which I found interesting and intriguing. According to TM, Gabriel does not appear in the earliest Bible texts. His role is magnified by redactors who found fault with Mary's inner conviction that she was indeed fated to become the mother of the messiah. If this is correct, then Mary's synchronicity was a progression from “I want to bear the messiah” to “I will bear the messiah.” That's pretty thin gruel. Having an archangel with a name showing up to put his stamp of approval on Mary's inner yearning makes the story much more satisfying.

A few of us got fidgety near the end of the event as some of the attendees hastened to offer personal examples of synchronicities. My inner yearning for it all to end was confirmed by the external manifestation of a yawn, but I'm afraid it lacked the acausal quality that would have classified it as a synchronicity.

Teenage sex fiend!

2012-01-11T17:00:00.001-08:00

Dear Abby says, “Flee!”

Jeanne Phillips received an urgent query from a distraught teenage girl. What will Dear Abby advise a 14-year-old who discovers that her boyfriend is an addict? In this case, the boy is an addict to ... Internet pornography!

Dear Abby: I have been dating “Kyle” for more than six months, but I have loved him for more than two years. I always thought we had a wonderful relationship and that Kyle was a sweet, innocent guy. Well, he just confided to me that he has an Internet porn addiction! I'm very hurt by this and don't want to lose him. What should I do? (By the way, we're both 14.) —Innocent Teen in Michigan

Dear Innocent Teen: You should urge Kyle to get help for his addiction. Addiction, by definition, is behavior that is compulsive and out of control.

The problem with teenage boys getting involved with Internet porn is it gives them an unrealistic expectation of how regular, normal women look and act. Although you don't want to lose him, becoming more involved could lead to his wanting to try out his sexual fantasies with you—and if you go along with it, it will land you in a world of trouble. The smart thing to do is end this relationship now.

(The emphasis is Abby's own.) Okay, perhaps Dear Abby has more information than we do, but the evidence she provides us is scanty. All we really know is that a 14-year-old girl reports that her 14-year-old boyfriend admitted to being an “addict” to Internet porn. What does that actually mean? Even assuming that Innocent's report is accurate, what did her boyfriend Kyle mean by his confession? What constitutes “addiction”? Does he spend twelve hours a day sitting in front of a computer monitor with his pants down around his ankles? That seems rather unlikely.

We can fairly safely conclude (again, assuming Innocent isn't exaggerating) that her boyfriend confessed to masturbating to on-line images or videos. However, I have heard—and vaguely recall—that masturbation is a common—and damned-near universal—hobby among teenage boys. In fact, Seinfeld would go further, omitting the age qualification: “We have to do it. It's part of our lifestyle.”

Unless Kyle's “addiction” has (shall we say) gotten out of hand, it's really a non-issue. Nevertheless, Dear Abby goes off half-cocked and advised Innocent to drop her boyfriend now. In the absence of more substantive information, this is clearly an example of premature consultation.

Demon sheep haunt Romney

2012-01-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

The ghost of Fiorina past

Marty Wilson was a strategist for Carly Fiorina's ill-fated attempt to oust Barbara Boxer from the U.S. Senate in 2010. He was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle by staff writer Joe Garofoli in an article on the current presidential race. Wilson is concerned that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is about to run afoul of the same problem that dogged Fiorina's candidacy:

“You've got to adequately answer the questions that voters may have about your business record,” said Marty Wilson, a chief strategist for Fiorina's campaign. “We didn't have the resources to do that, and the Boxer campaign did a good job of exploiting that.”

That can be a problem when your corporate career consisted of raising profits by stripping companies of assets and firing employees. It also doesn't help when a tin-eared Romney tells voters that “corporations are people” and “I just like being able to fire people.” (Make all the arguments you like about context, Mitt, but producing sound-bites like that suggests you lack a certain self-awareness.)

Reporter Garofoli's choice of Fiorina as a cautionary example for Romney is a good one in most ways. Her supposed business acumen did not recommend itself to a California electorate hoping for better economic times. Instead Fiorina was viewed as the modern incarnation of the robber baron—someone who reaps benefits for herself and her associates, but at the expense of the poor wage earners—many of whom no longer earned wages after she got through with them. It also helped that Fiorina made stupid campaign decisions while Boxer did not. Fiorina approved the ridiculous “demon sheep” political spots that drew mocking reactions during the primary campaign. In some respects, Fiorina never recovered from that initial appearance of goofiness.

I do, however, take issue with one of the points stressed by Garofoli in his article:

Boxer, a three-term incumbent who at one time held a 9-1 edge in fundraising, got TV commercials on the air early enough to define Fiorina as an out-of-touch CEO and defeated her by 10 percentage points.

That makes it sound entirely too much as if Fiorina was swept away in a tsunami of Democratic campaign cash. Garofoli's one-point datum misses the big picture. In aggregate, Boxer spent $28 million and Fiorina spent $22.6 million. Even if you subtract the $5.5 million that Fiorina spent in the contested Republican primary (while Boxer won renomination without real opposition), the net tally is still only $28 million to $17.1 million. That's a lot closer to 5 to 3 than 9 to 1. It also doesn't take into account Fiorina's big edge in “independent” money, which involved millions of dollars of GOP campaign funds spent on TV ads attacking Sen. Boxer.

The bottom line—as business-types would say—is that Fiorina was a lackluster product in the political market. When Romney looks in the mirror, he might see Fiorina looking back at him, demon eyes and all.

Religion is bliss

2012-01-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

Because of the ignorance thing

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. (Gen. 3:7)

It must help to lack self-awareness. Surely self-awareness is a trait that would severely handicap the helpful god-botherers who manage to peer past the beams in their eyes while seeking motes in their neighbors'. A perfect example of this blinkered perspective showed up in an anti-abortion flier that came into my possession. It contained an account of its diligent distributor's efforts to paper high school and college campuses with her “pro-life” literature. It also contained an example of her poetry. Her rhyming isn't particularly bad (of course it rhymes; poetry has to rhyme!) and the message isn't especially insipid for a composition of this kind. Not especially. No, just the usual level of insipidity: an anti-Obama rant that equates him to a “king.” This is nothing more than your typical modern-day right-wing hand-wringing.

But read to the end. That's where the pay-off is:

HUMPTY OBAMA

Humpty Obama sat on a wall;
Humpty Obama had a great fall;
All the “king's” media and all the “king's” men
Can't put Obama together again.

Polls in the thirties predict his demise;
People now see through the maze of his lies;
All broken promises—Obama's schemes
Fell on a people to shatter their dreams.

God will be with us to keep us from fear:
Let's look at a hero of yesteryear!
Washington crossing the Delaware—
Hope to a people in dark despair.

Crossing the Delaware of broken schemes,
Someone will rescue our broken dreams;
Humpty Obama in November will lose;
Out by a people with power to choose.

Read that last line again. The anti-abortion activist is singing the praises of people having the “power to choose.”

I swear. No self-awareness at all.

A seraphic school seminar

2012-01-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

Guardian angel

John Vasconcellos was a well-known figure around the State Capitol. A big teddy bear of a man, his rumpled figure had all the debonair flair of an unmade bed. He briefly achieved national fame when his “self-esteem” initiative drew mocking attention from the Doonesbury comic strip. John himself, however, was unfazed, even if his more substantive contributions to the state of California passed unremarked.

Anyone who serves in a California community college tends to associate the name of John Vasconcellos with his landmark education reform bill, AB 1725, which in 1988 rewrote the sections of the state education code dealing with our schools. One legacy of that legislation is a greater emphasis on professional development for faculty members. On most community college campuses, professional development opportunities are embodied in various seminars and training programs, especially on “flex days” when faculty assemble in the absence of students to rack up their required hours. The flex days, how ever many there are, are ordinarily scheduled at the beginning of each semester. We hear talks, participate in meetings, attend panel discussions, enroll in training sessions, or watch subject-specific demonstrations.

Some flex sessions are great. Most are okay. A few have been dreadful enough to be entertaining. (I recall one in which a colleague quipped—but was it a quip?—that he was thinking of killing himself and several people in the room offered to help. Now that is supportive!) In other words, flex is like any other activity, with its ups and downs, successes and failures. In general, though, we all give it the good old college try and make the most of it.

However, sometimes you run into professional development opportunities that strain credulity just a teensy-tiny little bit. In looking at the flex program books posted on various California community college websites, I have encountered seminars that strike me as, well, odd. Do teachers really need an introduction to “qigong breathing techniques”? I suppose it could be lumped in with those other activities involving movement and health activities, although yoga and various stretching routines seem to be more popular options. No doubt the “Happy Fanny” workshop announced at one school is one of those feel-good PE-type sessions—especially with that Middle Eastern dance component.

But qigong and fannies cannot compete with my favorite among all of the spring sessions I perused. The angel seminar wins it going away:

An Inquiry into the Existence of Angels

There are many who claim that any lingering belief in angels is merely the residue of imaginary wishful thinking. There are others who hold that angels (wings, halos, harps) literally exist. How is one to reconcile such contradictory beliefs? In this session, you will discover how C.G. Jung’s theory of synchronicity provides a vehicle for the exploration and possible reconciliation of this question. Rather than echoing the skeptic who says angels cannot exist or the religious enthusiast who affirms their immanence, this study asserts that by expanding our understanding of both synchronicity and angels, we might be able to resolve the conflict.

It may well be that you are having an uncharitable reaction to the description of this 90-minute program, indicating that you are one of those anti-angel skeptics. If so, how close-minded of you! Are you not open to the possibility of a synchronicitic reconciliation of (A) angels don't exist and (B) sure they do! (Synthesis: Angels maybe exist!)

I confess that I am one of those cynics who has been known to remark that a good course in probability is the best cure for folks who cannot stop seeing significance in random occurrences and coincidences. Still, I must admit that it behooves one to examine carefully the credentials of the seminar leader. Perhaps there might be some substance here:

The faciliator earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at California Institute for Integral Studies.

Whoa! “Cosmology”? (Of course, angels are indeed reputed to hang out in the heavens.) What exactly is this peculiar doctoral program? Here's the on-line description:

Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness (PCC) graduate programs in San Francisco are dedicated to re-imagining the human species as a mutually enhancing member of the Earth community.

They attract intellectually engaged individuals who are in varying degrees dismayed by what they see happening in industrial societies and who are striving to find meaningful ways to develop their gifts to serve the future of the world.

We support those called to meet the Earth community's unprecedented evolutionary challenge by offering students a challenging and supportive learning community in which to find their voice and vision as leaders.

Please return to the links on the upper left of the screen to explore the PCC mission, faculty, curriculum (including our Integral Ecology track), current students, alumni and community, as well as how to apply to the program.

Okay! That's clear enough, isn't it? Well, I don't know about you, but my doubts are completely assuaged. Perhaps I should write the angel-seminar school and suggest a topic for a follow-up seminar next year. I hear that business about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is still outstanding.

Broken engagement

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

Pining after the “old” atheists

The National Catholic Register is a century-old newspaper that was recently acquired by the Eternal Word Broadcasting Network (EWTN): “The acquisition of the Register is the latest in EWTN's efforts to expand its news presence in the global Catholic digital and multimedia market.” As a result, EWTN Radio has added Register Radio to its broadcast schedule, a weekly program hosted by Thom Price and Tim Drake. On January 6, 2012, Register Radio featured the observations of Father Robert Barron on its “Media Watch” segment, wherein mass media treatment of the Roman Catholic Church is examined (and usually found wanting).

Father Barron and his hosts focused their particular disdain on an editorial column penned by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller. Back in August of last year, Keller considered the religious beliefs of the Republican presidential candidates. His words did not please the Register Radio commentators:

Tim Drake: In this August 25 editorial—it was titled “Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith”— New York Times executive editor Bill Keller scrutinized the religious beliefs of the different GOP presidential candidates and he touched on Mormonism, evangelical Christianity, and Catholicism. And in the editorial he likened Catholics' belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist to belief in aliens. He wrote, “If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him?” And he later wrote, “Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.” And so we thought we would bring on Father Robert Barron with us today to kind of tackle this. Father Barron heads up the “Word on Fire” ministry of the archdiocese of Chicago and is also the creative director behind the new “Catholicism” series, which will be airing on PBS starting September 22. So, Father Barron, thanks for being with us.

Father Barron: Gentlemen, good morning. Thanks for having me on this morning.

Tim Drake: So, first of all, Fr. Barron, what was your reaction to Keller's comments, specifically his description of the Catholic belief in the real presence as baggage?

Father Barron: Yeah, well, it was sadly typical, as you were saying, not just of the New York Times but a lot of the mainstream media. Something I've noticed—you know, I've been following media for a long time—and there's this extraordinary uptick after September 11, I would argue, in anti-religious rhetoric, a tendency to mock religion rather than seriously engage it. I mean, go back to the early twentieth century, and you have the great atheists like Sartre and Camus and company. Well, they engaged religion seriously. They knew they were up against a serious opponent and they disbelieved in God and they didn't like the Church particularly, but they didn't mock it. But now you see after September 11, and the rise of the Hitchens and Dawkins and Bill Mahers and Sam Harrises, you find a shift in tactics. Not even an attempt to understand what the Church means by its teaching, but simply to mock it in the most sort of juvenile way. Sadly, you see it in all the comment boxes and all that on the Internet. People have taken their cues from Hitchens and Dawkins and company and they just sort of dismiss religion with the back of the hand. It's really sad that it's come into, you know, much of the leading mainstream media in the same way. So I'm not really surprised by it. I see it all the time. But it's still, you know, dispiriting and discouraging.

Tim Drake: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I had never thought, you know, of the sort of the treatment of religion pre-9/11 and post-9/11, but with the rise of the “new atheists” it almost seems like we need a “new apologetics” to kind of respond, don't we?

Father Barron: Absolutely, and I think—I've been thinking about it for a long time—there is a clear watershed at September 11, because what it did, it stirred up in the minds of a lot of people that old Enlightenment Era critique, namely, religion is irrational, therefore it's violent. You go back to Kant and to Schleiermacher and to Spinoza and the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment, that was exactly the argument. Religion is irrational. Therefore you can't really have an argument about it, all you can do is fight about it, which is why religious people tend toward violence. And that old argument from the eighteenth century was stirred up after September 11. People say, well, look, there's these irrational—therefore violent—religious people knocking down the World Trade Center. All religion is like that, you know. So I saw a revival of that. And that's why I think it's no accident that Hitchens and company emerged so strongly after September 11. The difference, of course, is you want people who'll be willing to engage religion seriously, to try to find out what serious religious people actually mean when they use language like, a wafer of bread is transubstantiated into the body of Jesus.

What serious religious people believe about transubstantiation? Why does Fr. Barron think anyone, in the media or otherwise, is puzzled by that? “Serious” Catholics believe that magic happens. It's no big mystery what they believe because the Church doctrine of transubstantiation is very clear: the wafer of bread truly, really, literally becomes the genuine, actual flesh of Jesus Christ himself—except without changing any of its physical aspects. The bread retains its previous appearance, form, and tastelessness. In brief: a miracle without evidence. As I said: magic. And, lacking the least particle of physical evidence, it must be taken entirely on faith. If you're not a believing Catholic, then it's just so much superstitious baggage—to borrow an apt term from Keller.

Father Barron: But I find that there's just an unwillingness on the part of much of the mainstream media even to understand what we mean. It's simply a back-of-the-hand dismissal. That's a problem. And then to your point: Yes, indeed, we need a new apologetics. When I was coming of age, apologetics had a bad flavor. You know, it was seen to be defensive, and it was non-ecumenical, and it was Tridentine and all this, but, you know, what's happened is my generation—I'm fifty—my generation ran out to meet the culture. The culture's good, embrace the culture. Well, I mean, now a large part of the culture has turned against us, with hostility. And so there we are, without any weapons. And so I think, yes, indeed we have to recover the intellectual tradition of Catholicism, which is very strong, and will enable us to meet some of these attacks.

Tim Drake: Yeah, it certainly seems as if the Catholic Church does not receive the same degree of respect that other faith traditions receive. And don't you think that much of that hostility and hatred that is directed at the Church comes from the fact that the Church is one of the only institutions that kind of actually stands for something.

Father Barron: Yeah, Oh, quite right. In some ways it's a back-handed compliment that we get so much attention, you know, so much opprobrium, it's because we're the biggest kid around and, as you say, we actually stand for something. So it is a back-handed compliment that we're still seen as a threat. And it's something I find fascinating, to go back to what I said a few minutes ago, from the Enlightenment on, who is perceived as the great enemy of modernity but the Catholic Church? And so you've seen a revival of that argument. Now as with Vatican II, there were elements of modernity that we can and should reach out to, we should try to engage the modern culture as much as we can, but there are elements of the modern culture that are antipathetic to our program. And it's wrong for us simply to, you know, embrace it all in an uncritical spirit. They've recognized in us an opposition. Okay, good. I'm glad. We are opposed to modernity. In some ways. I think one of the primary ways is modernity loves the mythology of self-creation, you know, that we make ourselves by sovereign acts of the free will. That's a great modern myth: Here I am, an individual with rights, privileges, responsibilities, and I can even create the meaning of my own life. Well, I'm glad the Catholic Church stands against that and I'm furthermore glad that the modern culture recognizes that. They know that we're the enemy of that view. I think we should boldly enter the lists and say, yeah, let's get it on. Let's have a good argument about this.

Fr. Barron fails to recognize that the “ good argument” actually began a long time ago and has been going against his side. His attack on “modernism” is an instructive echo of the Church's long and losing struggle against humanity's slow progress toward rationality. In the Church's formulation, “modernism” is a heresy, much abhorred by popes. Barron joins them in condemning the notion that the meaning in one's life can come from one's own conscious will. In Barron's world, the Church is in charge of doling out meaning. If you don't like it, that's just too bad. Amen?

I don't think so.

Wherein I fail

2012-01-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Impostor Fantasy

My friends and acquaintances are very helpful in keeping my ego in check. They are ever ready to assure me, especially recently, that I am no good at false modesty. As someone who strives to excel in every endeavor he undertakes, it is understandably greatly disappointing that my self-deprecations are so unsuccessful. For some reason, friends and family do not accept my frank admission that I am a dilettante and poseur. It is a puzzlement. I ponder wearily how to remedy the situation, but inspiration fails me. I confess that I do not know what to do.

I felt like a fraud.
So I learned to fly an airplane.

When did this all begin? I am not certain. Perhaps the most recent spate of failures began when I told some friends I had stumbled into writing a novel. It was a purgative event, rendering the pent-up demons of old family feuds into a fictional form, exorcising ancient controversies by reducing them to narrative form. Much-told tales had been written down where others could see them and smile. Tragedy had been tamed into a tragi-comic story, which I shared with several friends.

At 50,000 feet I thought:
“A fraud is flying an airplane.”

I explained to people that I wasn't “really” a novelist—just someone who had written a novel-length manuscript. After all, I'm just a math teacher and not a littérateur. People scoffed. One particularly sly friend pointed out that using a word like “littérateur” was a dead giveaway. Clearly I fancied myself an author. In response, I confessed that I was an author: an author in the field of expository mathematics, with contributions enshrined in a number of texts and supplements and magazines—and a couple of writing awards to my credit—but not really a fiction writer.

So I crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat.
I docked at Cherbourg and thought: “A fraud has crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat.”

This was deemed evasive. Did I not intend to seek a publisher for my quasi-memoir? I confessed that I was interested in shopping it around. The first readers had been extravagant in their praise (of course, they were friends), raising my expectations and causing me to dare to think the story had commercial prospects. I had even sought an agent. This was, clearly, proof positive that I was now a fiction writer—and my biggest fiction was my pose that I was not.

So I took a space shot to the moon.
On the trip home I thought: “A fraud has circled the moon.”

I failed at finding an agent interested in my manuscript, but instead I found a university press that was eager to look at it. Several months passed while their reviewers read it, but eventually my novel was accepted for publication. When I met the professor who was the editor-in-chief, I ever-so-modestly mentioned that it was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune for a non-novelist—a math-teaching non-writer—like me to get his manuscript accepted. The good professor scoffed at my characterization: “You wrote a novel. It's being published. You are, by definition, a novelist. In fact, you should be thinking about future writing projects.”

I had to grin. A professor of foreign languages was lecturing a professor of mathematics about what is true “by definition.” He had me there.

So I took a full page ad in the newspaper and confessed to the world that I was a fraud!

One of my colleagues dimpled when I recounted my recent failures at modesty. “Oh, Zee,” she said. “Don't you know about ‘fishing for compliments’? You're just trying to get people to tell you how wonderful you are.” I would, of course, have denounced this vile calumny, but it seemed to hit pretty close to home. Yes, perhaps I protest just a little too much. If I'm really anxious about being a dilettante in foreign fields of endeavor (and risking embarrassing pratfalls), wouldn't it make more sense to stop drawing attention to it? If only I were a naturally taciturn person—

I read the ad and I thought: “A fraud is pretending to be honest.”

During the late seventies, I had a Jules Feiffer cartoon posted in my graduate student office. The “impostor fantasy” amused me greatly, as well as speaking to deep-seated fears. Naturally I was reminded of it and was pleasantly surprised to discover it still resided in my decades-old files. It gave me renewed inspiration:

I felt like a fraud, so I wrote a blog post...

Dumping on Fresno

2012-01-04T11:30:00.000-08:00

Trashing your allies

Like anyone else, the stars of entertainment and news media want to go on vacation during the holidays. Thus the interval comprising Christmas and New Year's is chock-full of opportunities for the B team. Wingnut radio is no exception. On Saturday, December 31, the semi-sane Barbara Simpson (“The Babe in the Bunker”) was missing from her KSFO talk program. In her place was the fully certifiable Mark Williams, reliving the glory days when he used to have a radio program of his own.

During the 4 o'clock hour, Williams lit into John Boehner, the one-term Speaker of the House. He was wroth that Boehner had been so ineffective a leader in congress and condemned the speaker as complicit in the political machinations of the Obama administration. While floundering around for a metaphor sufficiently negative to exemplify his disdain for Washington politicians, Williams picked a peculiar target:

You know, the government's acting like they're from Fresno, you know, meth-heads. They're acting like they've got teeth made out of Styrofoam, like you lived in Fresno or something.

Fresno? Williams homes in on Fresno, the epicenter of California's bright-red Central Valley. The home of raisins and Freepers and Republican votes is the most contemptible example that Williams can conjure up. Talk about clueless. Talk about slapping your own allies up alongside the head.

Nice work, if you can get it. No wonder he no longer gets it very often.

Victoria Jackson is not crazy

2011-12-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

Not when you grade her on the (extreme) right curve

Depending on your scale of measurement, your conclusions can vary dramatically. For example, suppose you're trying to evaluate the sanity of Victoria Jackson, the Saturday Night Live alumna who has found a new life—if not happiness—as a right-wing pundit. Do you measure her against an absolute scale or a relative one? She comes out a lot better if you gauge her against the fringe-centered standards of Free Republic.

Recently Jackson announced that the Islamic group known as the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated “the highest levels” of government in Washington, D.C., including the White House! When Jackson's claim was posted at Free Republic, the first commenter said, ”I'm inclined to agree with her.”

A dissenter weighed in with a cautionary note: “Umm, don't we usually dismiss the pronunciamentos from Hollywood airheads out of hand?”

He was promptly denounced for his use of a foreign word.

Another Freeper chivalrously leaped to Jackson's defense: “She played an airhead of SNL but she isn’t one in real life.”

Perhaps he has not seen her current act. The crazy seeps right out of the video.

Toons ahead of their time

2011-12-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

Rocky & Bullwinkle & birthers

The longest running plot in the original Rocky & His Friends cartoon show was the 40-episode “Jet Fuel Formula” series, which involved a quest to find a mooseberry bush (to obtain the vital ingredient for rocket fuel). With the bush in hand, Rocky and his sidekick Bullwinkle face a dilemma. The moon men Gidney and Cloyd have helped the heroes obtain the mooseberries, which the lunar natives need to fuel their craft if they are ever to return home. Rocky and Bullwinkle, however, are agents of the U.S. government. The bush is supposed to go to Washington, D.C., and not to the moon men.

As the brains of the duo, it falls to Rocket J. Squirrel to come up with a clever plan: Since the U.S. government was itself planning to use the mooseberries to power a moon rocket, Gidney and Cloyd need only offer themselves as Americans willing to volunteer for the mission. A complication, however, arises in the form of Senator Fusmussen, chair of the Senate Citizenship Committee, who has introduced troublesome legislation:

Reporter: Just what does your new bill mean, Senator?
Sen. Fusmussen: Well, you see, right now it's entirely too easy to become an American. This bill's going to make it tougher.
Reporter: What do you mean, it's too easy?
Sen. Fusmussen: Well, all you got to do is be born here. This large loophole has got to be plugged up! Too many people are claiming to be Americans. Alaskans! Hawaiians! Californians! It's disgraceful!

What? Hawaiians and even Alaskans are claiming citizenship? Outrageous! Sen. Fusmussen's bill may already be too little, too late!

There is, inevitably, a happy ending. Gidney and Cloyd fail their citizenship exam and get deported—to the moon.

The conclusion of the “Jet Fuel Formula” epic was broadcast in 1960. Was it a prescient anticipation of today's absurdly hollow controversy over how one qualifies as a “natural-born citizen,” or simply an echo of previous instances of overwrought nativism? Perhaps it's both.

There was an enjoyable grace note to the happy return of Gidney and Cloyd to their homeland. Sen. Fusmussen, present at their deportation, accidentally gets launched with them. President Obama could take a lesson from this and should consider a renewed program of lunar missions. I have suggestions for some people we should shoot into space.

Orly? Your ticket is waiting.

Adroit gaucherie

2011-12-27T10:30:00.000-08:00

A left-handed backhand tribute

David Berlinski has brilliantly resolved the sovereign conundrum of his existence: How can he remain modest while being the smartest member of an anti-intellectual cult? His elegant solution is to not even try. Another effortless triumph!

He again puts his sumptuous vocabulary and self-conscious prose on display as he preeningly pretends to celebrate the life of the late Christopher Hitchens. While Hitchens was a master of the finely honed, sharp-edged phrase, Berlinski prefers to poke about with a dull-tipped poniard. The jewels on his stiletto's hilt are of more interest to him than the blunt tip's inability to make a point. Watch as he uses his supposed tribute to Hitchens as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement, attempting to clamber up to Hitchens' level and stand by his side as a co-equal polemicist. It is an intriguing spectacle. Some excerpts:

Christopher Hitchens's reputation rests on his literary works, his panache as a public speaker, and on his defiant atheism. He wrote on a very wide range of subjects, and his book reviews were often very fine. He liked to praise the writers and poets he loved: Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen, James Fenton, many others. He read closely and he read well. As an essayist, Christopher Hitchens is often compared to George Orwell. The comparison is careless, and it is one that in his final interview with Richard Dawkins, he rejected. Hitchens wrote fluently, Orwell, unforgettably. The difference is very considerable, but it is not to Hitchens's discredit. No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

Poor Hitch. He was no more than he was, but that's not his fault. Berlinski understands, and sympathizes. (As well he should.)

Hitchens was an engaging public speaker, and he had the gift of gracefully holding an audience. His intimate interviews were often wonderful because invariably, he was more elegant and far more articulate than his interlocutors. When faced with a rhetorical bruiser like George Galloway, his natural register failed him, and he did not have the dexterity to secure by means of an ironical divagation what he was otherwise unable to secure by matching bruise to bruise.

Poor Hitch. He was better at fencing than at crotch-kicking. (Really? Perhaps Berlinski overlooked Hitchens' well-known stone-crushing skills. Or maybe David wisely kept his knees clasped tightly together during his debate with Christopher.)

With the publication of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens reached a mass audience. He became celebrated. When he discovered how well he had been received by the public, he tended to regard his own religious beliefs with the indulgence of a man who on discovering that he has been lucky in attracting admirers very naturally concludes that he has been justified in attracting them.

Poor Hitch. He mistakenly thought he deserved the attention he got. Berlinski desperately wants to know how he got that attention and would sell his soul to achieve the same level of recognition. (Perhaps he already has. The house intellectual of the Discovery Institute has a lot to answer for.)

His atheism nonetheless had a kind of shambling boisterousness that made Christopher Hitchens seem a Mirabeau to Richard Dawkins's Saint Just [sic] or Sam Harris's Robespierre.

Poor Hitch. Did he never suspect that he was playing a part in a zany recapitulation of the French Revolution? (By the way, David, the name of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just is usually rendered with a hyphen. Not, of course, that this significantly detracts from your light-shedding simile. Pas du tout!)

Hitchens was uninterested in subtle analysis. On the masthead of the Daily Hitchens, there is the legend: What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. The difficulty with this assertion is straightforward. If it has been asserted without proof, why should it be believed, and if not, where is the proof?

I asked Hitchens about this during a break in our debate. We had retreated to a forlorn hotel loading ramp in order to have a cigarette. “Well, yes,” he said, “it's just a sentence.”

Oh, that Hitchens! Such a sly boots, and yet hoist by his own petard when caught making a statement without proof about statements without proof. Sneaky, clever Berlinski, to catch him out like that! It was also wise of Berlinski, who routinely plays the part of a math expert, to refrain from making the obvious point that every theoretical discussion must begin with unproven axioms at its foundation. Ceding this point to Hitchens would have deflated Berlinski's elegant gotcha. How unfortunate that Hitchens neglected to cringe in humiliation at Berlinski's sly riposte.

Christopher Hitchens found objectionable the very idea of a source of authority, and so of power, greater than his own. This has seemed to some of his readers all of the time, and all of his readers some of the time, both defiant and uplifting. The very same idea is at work in the terrible crimes of the twentieth century. It is inseparable from them.

I hasten to point out that Berlinski is not running afoul of Godwin's law here. Our elegant elegist deftly ducked this faux pas by not elucidating the nature of the twentieth century's terrible crimes. Hitler is only implied. We all understand perfectly well that Hitchens would never have supported Hitler—that is, of course, if he had only possessed the wit to realize that “the very same idea” of disdaining an ultimate authority is “inseparable” from campaigns of mass murder.

At least, that's one way to read Berlinski's prolix paragraph. Antecedents are difficult to pin down. (Does “the very same idea” refer to “the very idea of a source of authority” or the notion that this source itself was “objectionable”?) One of the glories of his prose is that the author will be on a firm footing if he objects to this characterization on the grounds that the sentences are ambiguous and subject to many (and divergent) interpretations.

Christopher Hitchens chose to greet death publicly. Had he thought of it, he might well have invited an orchestra. We signed books together after our appearance in Birmingham, and to admirers on his very long line inquiring after his health, Hitchens replied that he was dying. It was a response that inevitably took his interlocutor aback, the more so since it was true. I followed his interviews and read his essays about cancer and death. I found them moving. But they do not evoke the man.

And neither does Berlinski's supposed encomium.

God's utilitarians

2011-12-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

The meanies justify their ends

Someone had been busy. Each car in the parking lot had its own copy of an anonymous flier. I pulled the document out from under the windshield wiper. Large letters said “A B C.” Upon closer inspection, the fine print delivered the message:

Abortion = Breast Cancer

The flier was a simple one-fold document, the interior of which went on to explain breathlessly that “post-abortive” women were at severe risk of breast cancer. A woman's body, you see, goes slightly crazy when frustrated in its divine mission to bear young and unfulfilled hormones wreak havoc in the mammaries. Hence the battle by “pro-life” forces against abortion is also a battle to save women from horrible and disfiguring disease—and even death.

It's science, people. You have to believe in science. (Except, of course, when those same crazy-ass scientists go on about evolution, global warming, or that nonsense about a billions-year-old earth.)

The so-called ABC connection between abortion and breast cancer is a favorite talking point of the anti-abortion activists. It is routinely cited on Catholic Radio and fliers like the one I found on my car keep insisting that the link is established beyond any reasonable doubt. They like to give numbers, too, such as “28 studies reveal increased risk.” The cherry-picked reports, however, include results deemed not significant (in the statistical sense) and no hint is given that the preponderance of the evidence goes in the opposite direction. As the National Cancer Institute puts it, in the affectless diction of a neutral science-based agency, initial research in the area was ambiguous, based on small sample sizes, and produced inconsistent results:

Since then, better-designed studies have been conducted. These newer studies examined large numbers of women, collected data before breast cancer was found, and gathered medical history information from medical records rather than simply from self-reports, thereby generating more reliable findings. The newer studies consistently showed no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk.

That is the consensus of modern medical science, but the pro-lifers still cling to the handful of early studies that went their way.

I always find it irksome when some wrong-headed group tries to co-opt science in support of its non-scientific objective. Creation “science,” of course, is a prime example of the perversion of science in the service of sectarian interests. I have, however, a particular disdain for the sheer opportunism exhibited by people like the ABC proponents. Contrary to their supposedly deep-held principles, they are fully prepared to embrace the notion that the ends justify the means. It's a pragmatic utilitarianism that I suspect most of them would instantly disavow, but here's another place where the evidence goes against them.

For example, anti-abortionists emphasize that terminating a pregnancy is the killing of human life. Many of them are willing to call it murder and express the wish that health professionals who perform abortions be tried in courts of law under homicide statutes (and then, somewhat inconsistently, some anti-abortionists want them subjected to capital punishment after conviction). It is, therefore, a great moral crusade against a heinous crime that society at large has so far been blind enough to permit.

Doesn't it severely undermine the moralistic argument to append a health warning? “Oh, and don't forget that you'll get breast cancer if you do it!” The ABC issue is irrelevant to the faith-based moral argument. Its inclusion is nothing more than a concession to pragmatic realpolitik. Yet I never hear apologists on religious programs concede that point. They toss in the ABC argument as if it's equal in status to their abortion-is-murder claim. The disproportion should be dizzying to the conscious brain, but it appears that this does not bother most anti-abortionists. (In fact, not any that I've ever seen.)

Down on your knees!

My recollection of the ABC flier was prompted by a recent e-mail that I discovered in my spam folder. The nice loons at Newsmax Health (as distinguished from the loons that infest all the rest of Newsmax) wanted me to be aware of the health benefits of prayer. No, not the long-discredited notion that intercessory prayers could speed one's healing. This message was about the benefits to oneself. Prayer, by golly, is good for you!

Can modern science explain prayer?
Does praying strengthen your brain and prevent mental decline?
What benefits, if any, does prayer offer you — physically, mentally, and emotionally?

That's a pretty good teaser. I'm sure you're as excited as I was at the prospect of learning the answers to these weighty questions. A free video (28 boring monotone minutes) is available to tell you amazing facts:

How a specific amount of “prayer time” per day can help prevent memory loss, mental decline, and even dementia or Alzheimer's . . .
The #1 prayer pitfall that can actually make you sick if you're not careful (this is one of the most important bits of wisdom you'll ever gain) . . .
47 scientifically proven benefits of prayer, including pain relief, reduced risk of death from heart attack or stroke, lessened anxiety or depression, and more . . .
And much, much more . . .

Want the details? Newsmax Health will send you two free copies of its Mind Health Report! (And more, if you subscribe for only $36 for twelve monthly issues. You knew we'd get there eventually.)

Of course, this is science. (Remember “science”?) The founder of “neurotheology” is a real scientist (well, an M.D., anyway) at a real medical research center (well, an “integrative medicine” center, anyway). As a totally careful scientist and researcher (and stuff like that), the researcher began with a formal definition of the phenomenon being studied. Namely, what is prayer? I wasn't surprised by the research paper involving the rosary. That's pretty traditional and old school. But there's a much broader non-sectarian approach to what is called “prayer.” Here's the definition from the beginning (at 4:41) of the tedious video!

So, for the purposes of our research, we defined “praying” as any mental activity that includes
traditional prayer practiced by people of religious faith
meditation, or contemplative reflection on a power greater than oneself, which can be God, the Universe, or all Life
focused positive thinking, such as speaking affirmations
attending a church or synagogue service

How's that for a tight focus? When you bundle it all up, it amounts to meditation of some kind. Period. (Even in a church or synagogue, which were specifically cited. But not, apparently, in a pagoda or mosque.) The results, of course, merely indicate that quiet contemplation is good for you. It says nothing about the efficacy of prayer qua prayer. Newsmax is trying to sucker its conventionally religious readers into ponying up some cash to wallow in “scientific” validation of their prayer practices. We should “pray” because it's good for us—not because it works in any conventional way as a nice chat with one's deity.

Nice work, Newsmax!

I know that I could dig out my credit card and send Newsmax Health some money right now for a subscription to what I'm sure would be a rich and reliable vein of unintentional humor. However, I really think I should pray about it first. Or, as I prefer to call it, a “nap.”

Solving for the X in Xmas

2011-12-25T22:00:00.000-08:00

A high holiday potpourri

Christmas has been a little simpler in the years since I announced that I didn't want any more gifts and that I wouldn't be giving any gifts except to the youngsters. Of course, some of those youngsters now have youngsters of their own, but even adult nieces and nephews still qualify for gifts from Uncle Zee. And they're not picky, bless 'em. (As one niece commented upon receiving a gift card good at one of her favorite stores: “Oh, it's just my size! A perfect fit.” That's the spirit.

My goddaughter's eldest boy was transported with delight to discover that I had found a two-axle baler to add to his farm-toy collection. He spent most of his time at his great-grandparents' on the floor, harvesting the rug. (It was, fortunately, only “pretend.”) In case you didn't know, two-axle balers are more stable than the old-fashioned single-axle version, are less subject to jamming, and produce bales more efficiently. It doesn't take much to get the seven-year-old to deliver an extemporaneous lecture on farm management, which is how I obtained the immediately preceding information. (My brother had better make certain the family farm survives until his grandson can take the helm. That boy will be ready.) The matching toy tractor was just the icing on the cake. Uncle Zee is officially a hero.

Other, less inspired gifts were received with proportionate expressions of delight and gratitude. My goddaughter gave me a framed photograph of her family, a present which certainly gets a grateful exemption from my gift ban. My parents, who cannot help but give gifts to all and sundry (no matter what we say), presented me with a sports coat. It's an important life lesson to learn that one's parents cannot be controlled, so I offered thanks and tried it on. It fit rather snugly, so I quipped to my mother that she should break her long-standing habit of shopping for me among the “slim fit” racks. It'll work better after I drop another five or ten pounds. (Any day now, of course.)

It was a good thing my parents had warned me at Thanksgiving that the gigantic pine tree in their front yard was coming down. That spared me the disorienting experience of not spotting a lifelong landmark from miles away as I approached the family dairy farm. Dad joked that I would have been likely to drive right past the place had I not been forewarned. Either that, or I might have run off the road while trying and failing to spot the towering conical form on the horizon.

How red was my valley

Anyway, I was already sufficiently disoriented at the end of the first leg of my day-trip. The sights of California's Central Valley and the sounds of the local AM radio stations are sufficiently discombobulating to require no additional shocks to my mental stability. I'm no longer inured to it, as I was in the days when I lived down there. (In my youth one of the regional radio stations sported the call letters KLAN, mindless of the unsavory associations.) The middle stretch of Highway 99 is decorated with signs denouncing water shortages as “Congress created” (drought and increasing consumption are irrelevant) and still singling out Pelosi, Costa, and Boxer for particular blame (despite the fact that all three members of Congress ran successfully for re-election over a year ago). They're reminiscent of the older signs that said, “Adios, Babbitt, Clinton,” with a similar lack of impact. How the Central Valley votes, so votes the state—in the opposite direction.

There used to be an anti-United Nations sign in Tulare County that said, “Get US out of the UN!” I kind of miss it. It used to be right next to an “Impeach Earl Warren!” sign.

I think the Central Valley counties would secede if they could. If the rest of the state let them go, initiatives like the contentious Proposition 8 would never pass. Of course, I would probably end up having to show my papers at the border every time I headed south to visit family. (And there's a fair chance I would not be allowed in.)

The FM radio dial offered an occasional oasis of public radio stations, but those were generally offering public affairs or news programming instead of classical music. The other FM stations were devoted to oldies or country-western (or country-western oldies). The AM dial was replete with right-wing talk, more country-western, and religious programming. Surfing the AM band brought me such delights as a psychic explaining that Ron Paul would be next year's front-runner for the GOP nomination for president. I noted that she was careful enough not to say he would get the nomination, making it easier for her to explain it away when the Republican Party apparatchiks deliver it to Romney. On the other hand, she also said the 2012 presidential election campaign would be a low-energy and relatively gentlemanly matter, so clearly we can dismiss her out of hand.

Your holy host

Naturally I was disappointed to discover via one station's house ad that I was too late to hear the daily dairy report. That airs at 5:00 each morning. However, my ears pricked up when Jesus Christ came on the air, introducing himself as “your holy host” and “the reason for the season” and offering to take questions. Holy crap! It was The Jesus Christ Show, a syndicated show that bills itself as “interactive radio theater.” The show's website identifies some guy named Neil Saavedra as a self-taught lay apologist who is the “producer” for The Jesus Christ Show. He has no academic credentials and “hates when people try and sound more educated than they actually are.” (That would appear more literate if it were “try to sound more educated.”)

To give the devil his due, Saavedra correctly noted that “Xmas” was not an anti-Christian slur, since the “X” represents the Greek letter chi, an ancient shorthand symbol for Christ. Good one, Neil. On the other hand, one questions whether Jesus would have cuts from Christian rock bands for his bumper music and Jesus would certainly have known better than to sing with such a lousy voice. Ouch!

The show struck me as having been inspired by Saavedra seeing Jesus Christ as a talk-show host on South Park and thinking it was worthy of emulation (but on radio, where dressing up is not necessary). The segment I heard was very uneven, especially given its abrupt transitions. When Saavedra is speaking in third-person-pretentious, he sounds like just about any radio preacher prattling about Jesus. However, when he shifts suddenly to first-person-intimate, it utterly fails to evoke the listener's suspension of disbelief so that the imposture works. Part of the problem may be that it's difficult to imagine Jesus prompting a caller with, “Okay, let 'er rip!”

Thou shalt not tell fat jokes

I did not share any of my radio experiences with my folks. Too dangerous a topic, fraught with peril. Any discussion of broadcast media with my father is certain to elicit his favorite diatribe: too many Spanish-language programs and channels. Last Thanksgiving, for example, his opening conversational gambit was to fish a slip of paper out of his pocket to show my brother-in-law and me how many Spanish-language television stations were available via a local satellite-based provider. Dad smugly proclaimed that a client had employed him to block all such stations on his TV so that his eyes and ears would not be profaned by exposure to that Mexican-type talk. He was clearly inviting us to roll our eyes in sympathetic dismay over the proliferation of Hispanic entertainment in the Central Valley, but my brother-in-law and I were eye-rolling for other reasons.

Instead the snatches of brief Christmas conversation were dominated by family chit-chat and generally harmless holiday chatter. The brother who currently runs the family dairy farm commented that the front yard was now spacious and wide open in the absence of the old pine tree. I quipped that there was even enough room now for my wide brother. My sister-in-law had not heard my previous fat joke at my own expense, but she certainly heard the quip about her husband and did not appreciate it. Displaying an enviable talent for maintaining a cheerful expression and upbeat tone of voice while laying stripes on one's hide, she pointed out how much she disapproved of fat jokes about her husband and said, while citing his good points, “You know he's as big-hearted as all outdoors.”

You will, I know, be amazed to learn that I was intelligent enough not to seize the opportunity to pile on with, “Yeah, I'd expect an enlarged heart, too, if I were carrying that much excess weight.” (So there, dear friends. All of you who have said I would risk my life for a good punch line— Not so!) I listened meekly, then asked my sister-in-law whether their next stop was her mother's house. When she told me that was correct, I asked her to proffer my best holiday wishes to her widowed mother. My sister-in-law rewarded me with a big hug and a warm farewell, so I made my escape intact and in good odor. (Besides, my brother's mother-in-law is a nice lady and my greeting was sincere as well as conveniently timed.)

I will consider, however, that my sister-in-law has conveniently given me a New Year's resolution as a Christmas gift. I solemnly promised her that I would tell no more fat jokes within her earshot. In return, she agreed to spare my life. And I didn't even try to ingratiate myself by agreeing that my brother is twice the man I am. It's win-win.

I can hardly wait to tell Jesus!

The crazy next to me

2011-12-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

It's that close!

You know how the good folks working in M-theory posit eleven dimensions with which to explain (or try to explain) how the universe works? Given our natural observational bias toward four-dimensional spacetime, the extra seven dimensions must be really hard to see. Perhaps they're very, very tiny. Maybe there are even parallel universes tucked into these dimensions, invisible to us despite their ultra-close proximity. It's like a weirdly enhanced game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, where the links in the chain are dimensional shifts that move you into alternate realities. Creepy!

On the other hand, the world we live in is already replete with perceptible weirdness. My recent experience could be called “six degrees of Ed Brayton,” except that six is much too generous a number. Also, instead of talking about the consecutive links in a chain, it might make more sense to talk about the consecutive straps in a straitjacket. Come with me now on a little journey, starting over at Ed's blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where he posted an entertaining little item:

If you’re looking for your daily dose of serious right wing insanity, Sher Zieve has you covered. This is so batshit crazy that it would make Glenn Beck cringe:

This was by way of introducing Brayton's latest nominee for the coveted “Robert O'Brien” award, which recognizes distinguished performance in the art of vapid, wrong-headed, tortuous, and torturous argument. Ed went on to demonstrate that Zieve was a worthy aspirant to the honor with a quote from one of her recent columns. Zieve saw fit to mock the concerns of those who see President Obama pushing the nation toward European-style socialism. Not true, she says:

Instead, it is careening at full speed — with no discernable braking — into full-fledged Marxist Communo-Fascist elitist-ruled Islamo-Drug cartel Narco/Nazi State — replete with its own apparent and visible concentration camps.

Wheeeeee! That must be quite a thrilling ride!

Tickled by Ed's excerpt, I went to Sher's page on the reactionary RenewAmerica site and read the rest of the column dated December 20, 2011. The bowl-cut blonde did not disappoint:

Second, we are living under an apparent dictator-driven oligarchic government. Whether many are aware of it or not, the US Constitution officially ended with the passage of the "new and revised" NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] and we are, also, officially no longer a Republic. Both had been on their last legs for years and now have come to an end under Usurper and Dictator-in-Chief Barack “the smiling Muslim” Hussein Obama.

I'm not sure when “the smiling Muslim” earned its quotation marks, but I'm pretty certain that a “Dictator-in-Chief” would not be having anywhere near the trouble with Congress that the president has been having. Does he know that Ms. Zieve has ascribed unilateral and arbitrary power to him?

Now I'm even more disappointed with Obama. He doesn't even know how to use his absolute powers!

Sheesh.

But let me get back on track. We were talking about degrees of separation. The next step came when I scrolled down to the comments. What a treasure trove! When the columnists are crazy, the commenters are crazy-squared:

Sher Zieve, I have been aware of the direction this nation is being pushed by the elite for some tiime. Sher.....PLEASE look at my web site www.starovertexas.com and then contact me. I AGREE with you. The TIME IS NOW.....if we are ever going to stop this...we must ACT NOW. The working people are our only hope now.
warmly, STAR LOCKE.

Who could resist such a plea? Not me! I clicked over to Star Locke's website.

It turns out that Mr. Locke is in the construction business in Texas. His business plays only a secondary role on his webpage. Locke's focus is bright-red politics. Surprisingly enough, a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gets bold-face play in the middle of the page. I guess Mr. Locke is unaware that Douglas was one of the court's great liberals. But perhaps it makes sense to cite a dedicated exponent of civil liberties when one excepts to get swept up into FEMA concentration camps (cf. Zieve's column) at any moment. Do you have your overnight bag packed?

Mr. Locke's website offers a bizarre and colorful biography (including a reported encounter with John Wayne) and a collection of political issues. My favorite is the proposed “Family Security & Protection Act,” whose provisions are quite remarkable:

THE FAMILY SECURITY & PROTECTION ACT

An act promoting family security and safety by putting certain dangerous actions and dangerous products out of the reach of children thereby keeping our most precious blood—our children out of “HARMS WAY.” Further this act put certain items out of the reach of government. By using a tool given to us by our founding fathers we hereby effect or families and their security. James Madison taught us, “the power to tax is the power to destroy”. By utilizing this tool handed down to us by our founding fathers, we strive to promote the general welfare and protect our future security for ourselves and our posterity.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE UNITED STATES:

SECTION 1

[a] The FAMILY HOME SECURITY COMMISSION is established which duty it shall be to carry out and implement this ACT.

[b] The COMMISSION shall establish the FAMLY HOME SECURITY ACCOUNT with funds coming from the EDUCATORS ACCOUNT under the authority of THE DEPOSIT AND RECYCLE ACT.

You can read the details of the Deposit & Recycle Act on the same site. While it seems odd to refer to “the legislature of the United States” instead of “the Congress of the United States,” the really good stuff is yet to come.

SECTION 2.

[a] THE TEXAS Alcoholic AND BEVERAGE COMMISSION IS HERBY CLOSED and the enabling legislations is hereby rescinded.

[b] The FAMILY HOME SECURITY COMMISSION shall take over all existing facilities presently owned or leased by the T.A.B.C and shall make its own determinations as to any future facility location needs.

[c] All TAX ON PRIVATE PROPERTY in TEXAS is hereby rescinded and repealed.

[d] The Annual renewal fees and/or taxes on already licensed vehicles, equipment, trailers and/or instruments of transportation of humans or goods is hereby rescinded and repealed.

Yeah. Section 2 is where it got interesting. Locke thinks that the U.S. Congress can repeal legislation enacted by the state of Texas. Someone who is paranoid about the federal government wants to harness its power to supersede the enactments and shutter an agency of his own state government. Can it get any stranger? Oh, yes!

SECTION 3.

[a] The TEXAS ATHLETIC BOARD shall be established within this commission and consist of 10 members appointed by the GOVERNOR with their terms running concurrently with the Governors term in office and who’s duties it shall be to establish and operate a CODE OF EXECELENCE for health and fitness requirements for all TEXAS SCHOOLS.

[a] The ATHLETIC BOARD shall set minimum Physical fitness work out programs for all TEXAS SCHOOLS with 2 hour minimum P.E. daily classes for all students.

[b] The ATHLETIC BOARD shall establish a High Protein Diet Nutrition Program that shall be instituted in all TEXAS Schools with the goal to [a] promote the physical fitness in each student. [b] to eliminate OBESITY and addictive behaviors in children and staff.

[c] The ATHLETIC BOARD shall work with existing School Boards to implement the goals of this act.

Two hours of P.E. every day? Cruel and unusual punishment! (Especially to me.) I'm surprised that Locke passed up a chance to make football the official state religion, but instead he had money on his mind. After all, how is he to fund a section that has two clauses labeled “[a]” as well as a commitment to “EXECELENCE”? Fear not!

SECTION 4.

[a] This COMMISION shall levy a 100% of price sales cost tax for the sale on all item listed below:

1 . any video game containing any form of human violence. .

2. any machine or toy or cd that uses or includes bodily harm of any human or human image its function or goal or score.

Hmm. No “human violence”? Oops. I sense a lot of alien massacres coming up! Take that, space bugs!

Now that the youth of Texas have been slimmed down and spared [human] video violence by congressional fiat, what more is there to do? Mr. Locke is not at a loss. It's time to ban abortion—unless you're prosperous enough to afford the fee! And, while we're at it, let's not forget grease and sugar.

SECTION 5.

[a] This COMMISSION shall levy a ACTION FEE TAX on any act of abortion on a human female within the State of TEXAS. This tax shall be levied upon and be paid by each individual involved in each act of abortion procedure done or practitioners thereof within the borders of the STATE OF TEXAS. The fee/tax is $10,000.00 each participant per each abortion. The one exception to this rule is when it is medically determined that the mothers life is in danger if the pregnancy is continued. Failure to pay said tax shall be a Class A Felony.

[b] This commission shall levy a 50% of price of sales tax [GREASE TAX] upon all food prepared by deep-frying or cooking in any form of oil or grease for human consumption

[c] This commission shall levy a 50% of price sales tax on any beverage sold to humans to be consumed by humans that contains added glucose, fructose, and sucrose to the beverage for sale to humans.

Now that the republic has been made safe, it's time for a big finish:

SECTION 6.

The importance of this legislation and the crowed condition of the calendars in both houses create an emergency and an imperative public necessity that the Constitutional Rule requiring bills be read on three several days in each house be suspended, and this rule is hereby suspended, and that this ACT take effect and be in force according to its terms and it is so enacted.

Wow. The measure supersedes the usual constitutional provisions concerning the enactment of legislation by means of its own provisions! Talk about boot-strapping!

I'm relieved that Locke's site did not have a Links page that would have taken me into any other parallel universes. The twists in this one were quite enough, thank you.

I'm not a bigot, but ...

2011-12-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

If you have to say it—

Yesterday the Sacramento Bee ran a front-page photo of the traditional welcome-kiss marking the return of the Oak Hill to its home port of Little Creek, Virginia. With the end of the “Don't ask, don't tell” era, the Oak Hill's homecoming became the first to be officially marked by a same-sex kiss, as Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta bussed her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell.

Today, with a rapidity indicating how quickly it was dashed off and submitted, a whining note appeared in the Bee's Letters to the Editor column:

Photo could confuse kids

Re “A welcome-home kiss” (Page A1, Dec. 22): Surely there must have been considerable discussion before intentionally publishing the “first kiss“ photo on the front page. Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?

The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about homosexuality. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

If the story was so darned important, then why did the text appear several pages back? Perhaps McClatchy should consider adding “Enquirer” to the title of the newspaper.

—Jane Doe, Rocklin

Oh, won't someone please think of the children!!

Thanks for your concern, “Jane.” (The excessively curious can obtain her real name from the Bee website. I won't use it here.) I can't help wondering how Jane's children managed to grow old enough to be “confused” without Mommie Dearest having had that “thoughtful discussion” she values so highly. It's not as though most toddlers spend any time perusing the pages of the newspaper. And why should even older children be upset by a glimpse of a same-sex couple kissing on the Bee's front page? Have they not seen plenty of same-sex kissing among family members and close friends? Doesn't grandma kiss mommy? Doesn't mommy have BFFs from high school or college who hug her and smooch her whenever they meet?

I mean, it's not as though the newspaper photo will unduly disturb youngsters just because mother has neglected to instruct them—in a “thoughtful discussion”—about cunnilingus, strap-ons, and tribadism. Jane Doe has constructed a straw lesbian.

She wants us to believe that people who object to displays of same-sex affection “are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.” But I don't believe that. Not filled with hate? Maybe, but that's not self-evident. Filled with intolerance? Definitely.

Dear Abby doesn't do the math

2011-12-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

A little arithmetic would help

Did you know that newspaper editors often lay rough hands on the work of their syndicated columnists? It's true. I noticed this because I have a voracious appetite for newspapers and often read more than one each day. Thus I notice things such as weirdly truncated—or even “improved”—questions and answers in the advice columns. It usually means that local editors cut the column to fit available space or just decided to second-guess the columnist. I'm therefore suspicious when I see a lousy answer in Dear Abby and sometimes take a minute to go directly to the source.

I'm beginning to learn, however, that Jeanne Phillips is perfectly capable of generating her own lame answers. She did it again today:

Dear Abby: I have been living with my daughter and her family for two years because I lost my job. I don't pay rent, but help out with the utilities and buy my own groceries. I also baby-sit for them several days a week. The only money I have is an inheritance my father left me to live on, and it is dissipating quickly.

I have met a man and have fallen in love with him. I plan to move in with him soon. The problem is my daughter and son-in-law owe me money. They promised it would be repaid, but when I ask when, they give me the run-around. (They always have money for tattoos, movies and concerts, though.) They also expect me to baby-sit for them on weekends, but that's the only time I can see my boyfriend.

How do I tell them I want to live my own life? I want to be free and not have to worry about them needing me to baby-sit and making me feel guilty about it. I'm afraid they'll say that because I lived with them, they no longer owe me the money. I don't know how to tell them without it turning ugly. Any suggestions would be appreciated. —Frustrated in KC, MO.

Dear Frustrated: I presume your daughter and son-in-law have met your boyfriend? Announce the good news that you will be living with him; it shouldn't be shocking. Ask again for the money that they owe you. Be pleasant, but firm, and don't let it escalate into an argument. If they say they don't have it, ask them to sign (and date) a note promising to repay it at a later date. That will be your proof that a loan was extended. If they refuse, with no proof that you loaned them money, you won't have leverage to force them to pay up.

As for the baby-sitting, do it when it's convenient for you. If they want their "freedom" on some weekends, let them pay you instead of a sitter and work off part of their obligation that way. But insist on cash.

Did you notice how Jeanne glossed over one tiny little item? Her correspondent has been living rent-free with her daughter's family for two years. This seems a rather significant factor to overlook so completely. Let's try rewriting Dear Abby's response for her:

Dear Frustrated: Whereabouts in Kansas City do you live? You can't rent a place for much below $400 per month in your city and even $500 is probably below the average. Twenty-four months times $500 works out to $12,000. Does your daughter owe you more than that? If not, you should really be thinking about forgiving that loan. If so, you should still be considering lowering the amount owed by a suitable amount. You may want to estimate the value of the babysitting services you've provided during your stay, but be aware that neither rent-forgiveness or unpaid babysitting were ever part of a formal agreement. Trying to make it formal after the fact is just asking for grief. A properly appreciative first move by you is the best bet.

See? Isn't that better?

The cartoonist as clairvoyant

2011-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Did Thomas Nast see the future?

Being on the mailing list for the Catholic League ensures a never-ending stream of vitriol in one's in-box. As a tactless and belligerent curmudgeon, Bill Donohue is always ready to make a pugnacious spectacle of himself in the defense of Mother Church. His latest missive is titled “Bigot Nominated to NJ Hall of Fame.” Donohue is quite offended that editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast is about to be honored in Nast's residence state of New Jersey:

The New Jersey Hall of Fame (NJHF) includes luminaries as diverse as Albert Einstein and Shaquille O'Neal. It should not be dishonored by including bigots: Catholics will be outraged to learn that of the 50 nominees for the class of 2012, Thomas Nast made the cut. Nast is not only the most bigoted cartoonist in American history, the 19th-century artist consistently inflamed hatred against the Irish and Catholics alike.

Never at a loss for hyperbole, Donohue does not hesitate to declare that Nast is the most bigoted cartoonist in all of American history. One cannot help but be impressed by Donohue's relative innocence.

In his Catholic League screed, Donohue takes particular offense at Nast's attacks on the Roman church (that is, after all, Bill's job). Nast delighted in depicting Roman Catholic bishops as crocodiles, with their miters representing reptilian jaws. An example shows that Nast really was being a bit nasty:

It was a theme to which the cartoonist returned whenever he wanted to inveigh against Romish influence (the Church was on record in opposition to the separation of church and state) or Irish immigration (Nast had decidedly nativist tendencies). Today we can look at Nast's cartoons and see them as over the top. In high dudgeon, however, Bill Donohue cannot help but demonstrate once again his unerring instinct for avoiding le mot juste in favor of the words least apt:

[H]e demonized bishops by portraying them as crocodiles with miters for jaws; and he also depicted them as emerging from slime while prowling towards children.

Really, Bill? You had to go there? Silly man.

You just depicted Thomas Nast as a prophet.

A grade goeth before a fall

2011-12-16T17:00:00.000-08:00

And it's all my fault

While I doubt it registers with my students, I am at pains every semester to explain to them that they earn grades. I do not merely give them. Unfortunately, the students who most need to hear this message seem to be the least likely to retain it.

I recently taught an algebra class in an accelerated format. Students were warned at the outset of the course's brisk pace and the need to work diligently to stay abreast. The faint-hearted quickly folded their tents and stole away. The braver students stuck it out to the end—a bitter end for a few of them. Overall, though, the success rate was over 80 percent. I was happy that so many of my students passed the class.

One of the students was less than enamored with her “success.” Yes, she passed the class, but she passed it with only a C after having spent most of the semester at the B level. She had spectacularly flunked the comprehensive final (earning fewer than half the possible points on it) and her average plummeted. I declined to award a B to a student who couldn't even earn a D on the final exam. She called me up to complain at the injustice of the result.

Her particular complaint focused on what she perceived as the inequity of students getting a C grade with composite semester scores of 68.5 while she was being denied a B despite a composite score of 78.5. Why did I “round up” the scores near the C-D boundary but not hers at the B-C boundary?

Several factors influenced my decision. First of all, the C-D boundary is basically academic life versus death. A grade of D forces you to repeat the course for credit. I give very close scrutiny to the scores of all students teetering on the precipice of the C-D divide. Furthermore, the three students in question had all beaten my complainant by several points on the final (and the weakest of the three was in the enviable “hammock” position). Unlike my former B student, they had not used the final exam to demonstrate utter confusion and lack of subject-matter retention (a consideration of some significance in a prerequisite course like algebra).

Then, of course, there's the other tiny factor: Among the students with passing grades, the student in question had one of the lowest participation rates in the quizzes that I used throughout the semester to gauge my students' progress. To be fair, it was not chronic absences that caused her to miss so many quizzes (although her attendance did suffer near the end of the semester). No, it was her refusal to submit her paper to me when I collected them, even when I made a point of asking her directly. “No,” she'd say. “It's no good.” Brimming over with sweet reason, I would explain, “Five points on a ten-point quiz may be a little embarrassing, but five points in the grade book is significantly better than zero points!” She'd shove the crumpled quiz into her binder and resolutely refuse: “No, I don't want you to look at it. It's no good.”

In the end, she withheld or missed over twenty percent of her quizzes. A series of truly bad decisions. Those points were not there to reinforce her against a bad result on the final exam, which turned out to be a significant matter in the end. I guess her problems weren't just in algebra.

Even lotteries have winners

2011-12-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

Lucky Larry hits a grand slam

It has been noted that state lotteries are basically a tax on innumeracy. You're better off dealing with the house percentage at a casino in Nevada. Nevertheless, even lotteries have winners. Just don't expect it to be you. Lightning is not going to strike you.

Of course, sometimes it strikes near by.

One of my students won the calculus lottery during the exam on integration, beating very long odds indeed. The result was the most bizarre “Lucky Larry” of my years as a math teacher. My colleagues were as flabbergasted as I was when I shared the student's “solutions” with them. Her work was nonsense, yet her answers were correct. Three times in a row. Of course, when that happens one suspects a hidden underlying pattern that produces valid results, contrary to all expectations. In this case, though—no. It was a giant fluke.

Or, rather, three flukes in a row. My flabber, she is as gasted as possible.

The problem on the integration exam was one of my “conceptual” exercises. One of my tasks as a calculus teacher is to clarify the meaning of the definite integral, ensuring that my students grasp its significance. Of course, one of the most common (and visual) interpretations of the definite integral is as the area under a curve. Surely any first-year calculus student must understand at least that much.

Accordingly, I presented my students with the graph of a simple function and asked them to evaluate three definite integrals of that function by inspection of the graph. I did not forbid them to use antidifferentiation and the fundamental theorem of calculus, but I emphasized that the simplest of calculations would suffice.

What, pray tell, is the value of the definite integral of f(x) from x = 1 to x = 2? A cursory examination of the trapezoidal region spanning the space between the x axis and the graph of the function reveals the area (and thus the definite integral) to equal 1.5. Easy! Not satisfied, however, with such a trivial computation, one of my students rolled out the big guns:

Damn! What a coincidence! The calculus is bogus, but the result is accidentally correct. No one expects lightning to strike twice, of course.

Brace yourself.

What if we ask for the definite integral from 1 to 3 instead? We get a little more area now. Take a look at the new graph, in which a second trapezoid now joins the first. We get an additional 2.5 square units which, added to the original 1.5, gives us 4. My student swung into action and unlimbered her surreal calculus calculation again:

I was now quite beside myself, shaking my head in astonishment as my red pen hovered over the page. Twice in a row! (What were the odds?)

Fortunately, I knew that I could count on part (c) to set the record straight and demonstrate to my student the error of her ways. It was, in fact, the simplest part of the problem. A kind of gift to the student possessing a clue. Can you find the area of a rectangle measuring 2 by 4? Of course! The answer must be 8.

My student presented her solution:

Nooooooooo!

Time to hit my head against the desk a few times.

In a million years, this will never happen again. (For one thing, this problem is going straight into the waste can, never to be recycled.)

I need to go lie down for a few minutes.

Dan Quayle speaks!

2011-12-06T23:30:00.000-08:00

Stupid is as stupid does

My goodness, how we have missed Dan Quayle, the man elevated above his station in life as impeachment insurance by George Herbert Walker Bush. Quayle spoke up this week to endorse Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. The man who spent four scary years one heartbeat away from the presidency stressed the conviction with which he was backing the former Massachusetts governor. Addressing Romney in front of television cameras and radio microphones, the illustrious former vice president said:

I am confident that you will be our nominee, and I am even more confident that you will be the next president of the United States of America.

Okay, you got that? Dan Quayle thinks Mitt Romney is all but certain to be the Republican standard-bearer ... and even more certain to become president. That's tricky, since the consequence cannot be more likely than its prerequisite.

Poor Dan is as good at probability as he is at spelling.

I think that I shall never see

2011-12-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Sic transit gloria arboris

The house was nearly ready. The front yard was nothing but dirt, but it was already cleared of most of the construction debris. Paulinho had planted a small evergreen tree that he intended to use as a local landmark when it grew larger. “The house with the fig tree” was his father’s. His would be “the house with the evergreen.”
—From an unpublished novel

The sentence of death was announced on Thanksgiving. The decision had been made earlier, but it was revealed only when I was present to hear it in person. One more eternal verity is about to hit the dust—quite literally in this case.

The pine tree in my parents' front yard was planted the month before I arrived on the scene. The family photo album is full of pictures of the first-born standing next to it. The tree's growth quickly outpaced mine and soon it towered over everyone and everything. For many years my siblings and I referred to it as simply “the Christmas tree,” in honor of its once-a-year decoration with lights and in recognition of its uniqueness. No other house on the dairy farm was so adorned. Deciduous trees and spindly palms dominated the landscape, while our evergreen stood out in singular splendor.

For all I know, the execution has already been carried out. My parents and their friendly neighborhood tree surgeon were simply waiting for a mutually convenient date to do the deed. My Christmas visit will tell the tale, and I will know the outcome while still several miles from the family farm. The tree's absence on the horizon will be more than obvious. The loss of the lifelong landmark will be acutely felt.

My parents did not make a casual and unfeeling decision to raze the tree. The decades had inflicted significant damage on the evergreen. A dangerous crack in the upper reaches of the trunk had already forced a hasty topping of the tree before it dropped its crown on the house. No other remedy was possible. The truncated tree was still taller than anything other than the oldest palm trees (it's framed by the two tallest in the above photo), but its glory days were now clearly over. The loss of its upper third caused the tree's remaining branches to spread out in renewed vigor, extending them to the point that they began to sag and threaten to break. The old tree required either a serious and continuing pruning regimen or ... removal.

My parents made an economical and prudent decision, so the tree's fate was sealed. I passed the information along to my manuscript editor, who was aware of the tree's supporting role in my novel. He quickly replied to my message with a painfully apt poem by Seamus Heaney:

Clearances VIII

I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet's differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush became a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

A tale of two churches

2011-11-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

Catholicism in transition

This is the weekend when Catholics in the United States begin to use the third edition of the English-language Roman missal, which makes several changes to the text of the mass. It is, overall, a more traditional translation, reinstating such things as the thrice-spoken “mea culpa” (rendered in English as, “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”) and reverting to “And with your spirit” as the rendering of “Et cum spiritu tuo” (instead of the more mundane “And also with you”). Except for the hardcore ultramontanes who still pine for the old Tridentine mass in Latin, most conservative Catholics are gleeful, correctly seeing the new translation as further evidence of reactionary retrenchment in the Church—and a further diminution of the influence of Vatican II. Can veils for women be far behind?

In the past few months I have had occasion to step into two Catholic churches. (Before anyone asks, I will note that in neither case did anything shatter or burst into flames.) Both churches are modern constructions and had some notable features in common. In particular, they represented a big step back toward a more traditionally Catholic presentation, a far cry from the nearly featureless dark-paneled rectangular box that is St. Aloysius in Tulare.

I visited Our Lady of the Assumption on the occasion of a Portuguese festa in Turlock. The pastor's brother gave me a tour of the facilities. As someone old enough to have been an altar boy in the days of the Latin Mass, I have seen enough Church history to recognize a regression toward the mean. I told my guide that his brother's church represents a successful fusion of modern construction with traditional decor. My guide beamed, acknowledging that the Portuguese community in Turlock had aimed at that exact result when planning their church.

More recently I joined some family members at Holy Spirit Church in Fresno for the baptism of a nephew. The christening would follow the conclusion of the mass service, so I thought I was safe when I made a late arrival and loitered in the lobby. However, my eagle-eyed sister was too alert for me, noted my presence, and came out to collect me and take me inside. (As previously noted, no supernatural phenomena attended my entry into the sacred circle of mystical incantations and wafer transubstantiation.) The first thing I noticed was that Holy Spirit departs from the traditional parallel rows of pews in the same way as Our Lady of the Assumption. Unlike the Turlock church, however, the Fresno church has placed its crucifix so that it is invisible to those sitting in the side pews. From that perspective, where I was sitting with my sister's family, you might as well have been sitting in an Episcopal church. Holy Spirit's altar was a Protestant-compatible table and I'm sure the motley collection of art screens behind it provided ample peek-a-boo opportunities for the servers (both altar boys and altar girls at the service I attended).

The churches in Turlock and Fresno had another thing in common, and I regret not having any photographs to show you. Both of them have the Stations of the Cross (the “Via Dolorosa”) represented in mural form as a kind of frieze on the interior wall above the main entrance. In traditional churches, the fourteen Stations are usually wall plaques depicting the crucifixion of Jesus, seven of them equally spaced on the north wall and the other seven on the south wall (many old Catholic churches were preferentially oriented so that the altar was at the east end). The mural in Our Lady of the Assumption is dark and stark, graphically conveying the pain and anguish of the Savior's execution. I commented to my guide that it seemed more intense than some parishioners might prefer. He admitted that a few people in the community had lobbied to have the mural painted over after it had been unveiled, but that it was now generally accepted. The artist had had plans for other artwork in the interior of the church, but those had been shelved after the mural of the Stations of the Cross had been judged to sate the community's appetite for the artist's work.

By contrast, the Stations mural in Fresno's Holy Spirit is an exercise in kitsch, a truly unfortunate and distracting collection of excessively bright images in different sizes, cartoonish in conception and execution. The color palette appeared to be inspired by sidewalk chalk. If any venue cries out for disciplined and respectful depictions, I should think a church interior does. While the Our Lady of the Assumption mural pushed hard against the bounds of tradition in its display of angst (Jesus is amazingly serene in most of the crucifixion scenes in Stations of the Cross), the composition had a unity of purpose and conception. The Holy Spirit mural was a collage of disparate scenes united by garish colors and amateurish execution.

The results were occasionally unintentionally amusing (unless the artist was being deliberately subversive). The fifth Station depicts Simon of Cyrene, an innocent bystander, being impressed into service to help Jesus carry the cross lest the condemned prisoner die of exhaustion before the authorities get to nail him to it. The Holy Spirit mural makes it look as though Jesus is copping a feel of Simon's butt. In the tenth Station, Jesus is stripped of his garments. This scene in the Holy Spirit mural is so badly composed that it could be subtitled “Jesus flashes his Roman guards.” Both of the guards have stunned expressions on their faces, so they appear to be quite impressed. I made it through the service without chuckling aloud, but I suspect it looked like I was having a better time than the mass warranted.

It will take a few Sundays for practicing Catholics to work the kinks out of the new Roman missal, but I expect the complaints to be few. Regular mass-goers will quickly pick up on the changes and infrequent attendees (Easter and Christmas, anyone?) won't care. For former Catholics who outgrew religion and “put away childish things,” it's mostly a matter of curiosity and perhaps just a bit of nostalgia. The third edition of the Roman missal is yet another signpost that conservatives are in the ascendant in the Church, but we already knew that, didn't we?

Addendum

In searching the web for photos of the Turlock and Fresno churches, I ran into the following dyspeptic reaction to Our Lady of the Assumption, posted by someone who thinks highly enough of himself to use “St. Christopher” as his handle:

What madness! A Catholic Church that has mostly Portuguese Mass. Oh yes — a TLM [traditional Latin mass] thrown in, at the Chapel at odd times on Sunday. Having cultural loyalty is a fine thing, and Portuguese is a wonderful language — but this focus on whatever is prevalent (Klingon Mass, anyone?) obliterates the meaning of what the Mass is supposed to represent. There is no question but that the Church must return to Latin, and a single, uniform Order of the Mass, as soon as is possible. Let those that wish to participate in something else, go to something else.

Is there any chance that “St. Christopher” might consider taking his own advice? No one is making him attend a Portuguese-language mass. For my own part, however, I think it might be fun to attend a Klingon mass. Once, anyway.

Post-Addendum

The diligent searching of my friend Gene O'Pedia has uncovered a pair of on-line images of the Holy Spirit mural. The colors are more muted in the photos than they appeared to me in real life, but I recognize the compositions and can confirm that these are the Stations of the Cross that I saw in Fresno. Their resolution is not high enough to zoom in too closely on the panels of particular interest, but they can still convey a sense of what I was talking about. The first image depicts, right to left, Stations 6 and 7 (“Veronica wipes the face of Jesus” and “Jesus falls for the second time”). The flat perspective of Station 7 (not Station 5, as I said above) makes it look like Jesus is patting Simon on the behind. The other photo shows Stations 10 and 11 (again, right to left: “Jesus is stripped of his garments” and “Jesus is nailed to the cross”). Again, the resolution is limited, but you can just tell that the two Roman soldiers are gaping at the undraped Jesus in Station 10. It's a fine example of religious kitsch.

A moment's reflection

2011-11-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Another conceptual understanding problem

I gave my algebra students a pretty little problem involving the graphs of functions and their inverses. The prompt was fairly simple:

The graph of y = f(x) is shown in the figure. Use the graph to find the following function values and then sketch the graph of the inverse function y = f ⁻¹(x) on the same coordinate grid.

The student was asked to find the values of f(−3), f(1), f ⁻¹(2), and f ⁻¹(10). As you can see from the graph, I conveniently provided my students with several points highlighted on the graph. If one examines the point on the function curve where x = −3, it is fairly easy to discern that y must be 2. Hence f(−3) = 2. Similarly, f(1) = 10. It's elementary graph reading.

After reading the initial two function values, I expected my students to discover the method in my madness, noting that I'm asking them to figure out the value of the inverse function for the input values 2 and 10, which were the initial output. Since the inverse function, by definition, maps in the direction opposite that of the original function, it immediately follows that f ⁻¹(2) = −3 and f ⁻¹(10) = 1. What could be simpler?

Apparently, lots of things. Some of my students were quite irked:

“You didn't give us the function.”

“On the contrary. I certainly did. Its graph is right there before you.”

“No, I mean, you didn't give us the formula. We can't figure out the inverse function without the formula.”

“Leave that for a moment. Can you do the first part of the problem? Can you find the value of the original function at x = −3 and x = 1?”

“No, I already told you: You didn't give us a formula to plug into.”

“I recommend you try looking at the graph a little longer.”

In a few variations on the above theme, the querulous student suddenly lit up and rushed back to his or her desk to fill in the answers. In other cases, the student instead sat down, head shaking, and appeared to be muttering sotto voce imprecations at the instructor's expense.

Later, of course, when the exams were returned, I demonstrated what I had expected them to do. Since most of them had memorized the procedure for computing an inverse function—switch x and y in the formula y = f(x) and solve for y—they should have realized that the presence of the point (1, 10) on the graph of the original function implies the presence of (10, 1) on the graph of the inverse. Previously perplexed students rolled their eyes: “Oh, is that all? Why didn't you say so?”

I thought I did.

Hasta la vista, pendejo!

2011-11-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

Telling more than they know

During the 6 o'clock hour on Friday morning, November 18, the KSFO talk-show hosts had some fun with the news item on the White House shooter. Babbler Brian Sussman and his trusty sidekick, “Officer” Vic, magnanimously agreed that it was important to protect the country's public officials (in stark contrast to their predecessors), but nevertheless found some cause for amusement.

Sussman:The media, though, has to really be bummed out. Because, okay, you look at the story, okay, think of this. He owns guns! All right?

Officer Vic:Yeah.

BS: He's from Idaho!

OV: Ah! That's two. We're getting close!

BS: He's a Christian!

OV: Oh! That's the big golden one right there.

BS: Oh, no, no, no. You really need a fourth one to really make this work.

OV: Yes.

BS: He needs to be white.

OV: Ah!

BS: Damn! His name is Ramiro Ortega Hernandez!

OV: Ah, darn it!

BS: He's Latin!

OV: Arrgh.

BS: We thought we had the perfect whitey. The bad Christian whitey from Idaho, who owned guns.

OV: They could even make him a tea-party guy!

BS: Oh, yes! Oh, we thought we had Idaho Whitey. The gun-owning man who's a Christian, who called Obama the Anti-Christ. But what's his name? What? His name's Ramiro Ortega Hernandez?

OV: Oh, no!

BS: Uh! Okay, wait—

OV: Can we anglicize it like we used to in baseball?

On the surface, of course, Sussman and his sidekick are simply mocking what they perceive as bias in the mainstream media (to which they apparently do not belong, despite being broadcast by a radio station that blankets the greater Bay Area). Without realizing it, though, they are making something else exceedingly clear: People with Hispanic surnames are automatically part of the constituency of the “mainstream” media. KSFO has no truck with such. Sussman and Vic draw the line of demarcation without a moment's hesitation.

And the right wing wonders why the damned Mexicans keep voting for the other guys.

I threw them a curve

2011-11-12T10:30:00.000-08:00

Rote versus reason

Most math teachers would agree that we want two things from our students: (1) correct solutions to math problems and (2) an understanding of those solutions. Of course, some students are perfectly happy with mere technical facility: Please teach us the algorithm so that we can turn the crank on it, generate correct answers, get our college credit, and get the hell out of here. They balk when we probe for conceptual understanding. Other students, naturally, claim a profound knowledge of the conceptual underpinnings of the subject matter but lament their difficulty with the merely technical and computational aspects. Will the twain ever meet?

Course grades in math classes tend to be based mostly on the demonstrated ability to compute accurate results. It's more difficult to probe for evidence of their conceptual grasp. Occasionally, however, I give it the good old college try. Here's a graph I presented to one of my calculus classes. I asked my students to look at each of the points indicated by the red dots and make some judgments about the function and its first two derivatives.

My students had a little table to fill in. The instructions said, “Fill in the table, using +, –, 0, or DNE (for positive, negative, zero, and “does not exist,” respectively) for f(x), f ʹ(x), and f ʺ(x) at the indicated values of x.”

A small panic ensued. “Where's the formula for the function, Dr. Z?” “How can I compute derivatives if I don't have the formula?” I counseled them to calm down and consider that I wasn't asking for numerical values—yes, quibblers, except for 0—and that actual computations were unnecessary.

Consider, for example, the point corresponding to x = −1. The value of f(−1) is pretty clearly 5, hence positive. The point is also a local maximum, so a tangent line at that point would be horizontal; the slope is therefore 0 and that's the value of f ʹ(−1). Finally, the curve is concave down in the vicinity of a maximum, so f ʺ(−1) is necessarily negative.

No need to panic.

The trickiest case (if “tricky” is even the right word) is probably x = 3.2 (or thereabouts). It's approximately midway between a local maximum and a local minimum, suggesting that it must be at or near a point of inflection, where the concavity changes and the second derivative must be zero (or nonexistent). That takes a little discernment. In most cases, however, the answers should be evident to any first-year calculus student with a genuine understanding of the significance of the first and second derivative.

At the class's post-exam discussion of the results, the reviews for this problem were decidedly mixed. When pressed slightly, there was a grudging consensus that, “Oh, yes, it's clear now,” but my more computation-driven students remained unmollified. They preferred to demonstrate their differentiation chops on actual formulas using the rules they'd memorized.

The experience triggered an odd recollection with me. I remembered my grandfather at the dinner table, finishing off a meal my grandmother had prepared with a recipe she had never used before. She was eager for his verdict:

“Was it good?” she asked. “Did you like it?”

My grandfather nodded his head.

“Yes, thank you. It was very good. But don't make it again.”

A few of my students may despair, but I'm keeping that calculus problem in my recipe box.

Get on your knees

2011-11-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Amen!

Jeanne Phillips fumbles another easy one with a flaccid answer in today's installment of Dear Abby:

Dear Abby: My husband and I are not religious. We believe that people are entitled to their own beliefs. My problem lies with my brother-in-law and his wife. They are two of the most judgmental, sanctimonious people I have ever known. They “hate” (their word) Mormons, Catholics, etc. How would you suggest I respond to their criticism of our “lack” of Christianity and their offers to pray for us? —Biting My Tongue in Great Falls, Mont.

Dear Biting Your Tongue: If your relatives are an example of people who practice Christianity, heaven help the rest of us. If you must interact with them, practice selective deafness, and when they spout hatred, excuse yourselves.

Oh, Jeanne, “selective deafness” isn't going to work with these god-botherers. Otherwise they would have gotten the hint long ago that their religious babble isn't appreciated by the tongue-biter and her husband. By offering to pray for them, the self-righteous duo is setting up a perfect rope-a-dope situation. Seize the opportunity! For example, thus:

Dear Biting Your Tongue: Subtlety would be lost on your brother-in-law and his wife and direct confrontation could cause family strife you might prefer to avoid (though do discuss with your husband the possible advantages of being estranged from his brother and sister-in-law). Your best option is grateful acceptance of their offer to pray for you: “Oh, thank you! That is so considerate of you! You know that my husband and I aren't particularly religious, but it's clear that your faith is strong and in your hearts you're prepared to move mountains. You are welcome to pray for us as much as you want, but let's not speak of it again. We can patiently wait for your prayers to demonstrate their power.” Try to avoid a sarcastic tone while you say this. Keep it neutral. If they try to bring it up later, quash it quickly: “Oh, don't worry about it. I'm sure you're doing your best.” Repeat as necessary.

Garfield does math

2011-10-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

And so do we

I always look at the comic sections of the newspapers I read, but I don't necessarily look at all of the comics. “Pearls Before Swine” always gets my attention, as does “Bizarro,” but others need to do something special to draw me in—like sprinkle their panels with numbers. “Garfield” did exactly that yesterday. (Is it true, as Stephan Pastis says, that cartoonists prefer to bury their weakest efforts in their Saturday strips?)

Everyone realizes, of course, that a giant mutant 98-year-old lady would be physically impossible, despite such earlier documentary evidence as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Galileo's square-cube law should have put that notion to rest (but Hollywood prefers to honor that law in the breach). But let's allow Garfield the same leeway that movie producers get. Let's accept that a giant 98-year-old lady is driving her 32-story 1965 Bonneville into town, threatening the entire community.

The 1965 Bonneville was a gigantic (in its own way) vehicle over 18 feet in length. Its height was about 4.5 feet (with allowances for tire pressure and passenger load). In the comic strip, the giant old lady's Bonneville is said to be scaled up to 32 stories in height. While architects are allowed quite a bit of variation in what constitutes a “story,” we can use 10 feet as a reasonable mid-range measure. In other words, the giant old lady's car is 320 feet tall, or (divide by 4.5) over 71 times as tall as a regular Bonneville. That's big.

And if your 98-year-old great-grandmother is five foot two, she'd be nearly 370 feet tall if she were scaled up to be the little old lady in the car.

Scary!

Now, about that turn-signal thing. Garfield says it's 16 feet tall (and blinking, of course). A look at the back end of a '65 Bonneville shows us that the rear lights were not quite half as tall as your basic license plate. If we call it 4 inches (being just a little generous—I don't have a Bonneville handy to actually measure), scaling it up by a factor of 71 results in 284 inches—or nearly 24 feet.

But Garfield said 16 feet. Oh, oh! But you know, that's probably good enough for the funny papers. Let's give him this one.

Catch 22 goes to school

2011-10-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

Academic dual citizenship and its discontents

One of my friends is in postdoc limbo, having completed his degree and thus been thrust into academia's outer darkness. Since PiD is no longer a graduate student and faces a very discouraging job market, he is now at the tender mercies of the schools that hire part-time instructors on a term-by-term basis. To earn something approaching a living wage, he currently shuttles between his old school—a university that tosses him an occasional class or two—and a neighboring community college, which uses adjunct faculty for many of its classes. The two institutions don't cooperate in any formal way, so it's up to PiD to juggle the offers and cobble together a schedule that doesn't require him to break any laws of physics to meet his classes.

Fortunately, PiD has found enough similarities between the course offerings at the two colleges so that he can adapt materials he uses at one school for use at the other. In particular, boilerplate text concerning student conduct was borrowed from his university syllabus and incorporated into his community college syllabus. It had been battled-tested at the Big U, so it seemed suitable for Medium Community College. PiD had every reason to assume that all was well because MCC requires its instructors to submit their syllabi for review and approval before the start of each semester. The BU language passed muster with the MCC administrators, so clear sailing was to be expected.

As I'm sure you can well imagine, PiD's education was about to move into a new and more surrealistic phase.

He called me recently to share a conundrum. It seemed an unfortunate but typical college situation: He had clear and unmistakable evidence that a student had committed plagiarism. PiD had found the original source material and the student's surreptitious use of it was extensive and blatant. He reported it to the department chair:

“I have a clear case of plagiarism by one of my students and I need to initiate MCC's academic discipline process.”

The chair was characteristically helpful.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean the student will flunk the class, per the language in my syllabus regarding plagiarism, and I need to refer him to the college's disciplinary process.”

“Um, well, I don't think we have a formal process.”

“So what do I do then? My syllabus says plagiarism is a flunking offense and that the student can appeal by means of the college's disciplinary process. The evidence I have is unambiguous, but I presume we have a way for the student to state his side of things and get due process.”

“Okay. Well, you have to do what's in your syllabus.”

“Yes, of course. So how do I do that?”

“You should check with the academic dean.”

“Okay. Good. Does he enforce academic discipline?”

The chair seemed to think that might be the case. PiD contacted the dean.

“Yes, I agree with the chair. You have to follow your syllabus. We approved it and you need to follow it,” said the very helpful dean.

“Yeah. How exactly do I do that?”

“You know, I'm new here and just learning the ropes, so I don't want to depart from MCC's established practices. I need to refer you back to your department chair.”

As PiD well knew, Big U had a fully functioning review process in place to handle cases of academic misbehavior by its students. To his dismay, however, he had discovered that MCC was letting each department go its own way and there was no college-wide protocol for dealing with plagiarism. His current department had essentially nothing in place. The chair referred PiD to the college's statement of academic standards, which did mention that students were expected to be good citizens who behaved in a scholarly way, but neglected to stipulate any penalties or adjudication process for dealing with instances of not living up to those expectations. There was, of course, that helpful policy of reviewing instructor syllabi each semester, but apparently no one bothered to tell instructors when they cited nonexistent processes. (To add the cherry to the sundae, the department specifically required that syllabi contain a statement on the evils of plagiarism—but in reality was unprepared to deal with its occurrence.)

The last I heard, PiD was preparing a carefully constructed message to the cheater that his plagiarism had been discovered and that (a) his case had been brought to the attention of the department chair “in accordance with the provisions of the course syllabus” and (b) he would receive a failing grade in the class “in accordance with the provisions of the course syllabus.” If the student is bold enough to object, he can try his own luck with the chair. (That sounds like a “process,” doesn't it? Close enough!) Maybe she'll send him to the dean!

Oh, oh. Good luck, PiD! The dean ain't got your back!

You are right, I guess

2011-10-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

And I'm right: you guess

The aftermath of the semester's first exam is often a teachable moment. I frequently assign my students to analyze their results. This usually comes in the form of a two-part prompt, to which I want a written response: (1) What kinds of mistakes did you make? (2) What steps will you take to minimize these mistakes on the next exam?

Most of the responses are dominated by the usual litany of math's most persistent errors and shortcomings:

I misread the problem.
I made a stupid mistake.
I used the wrong formula.
I made a calculation error.
I didn't study.
I didn't do the homework.
I need to catch up.

The proposed remedies are as predictable: More study. More answer-checking. More diligent attention to homework. More visits to office hours or tutors. All good ideas and apt to be helpful if actually applied.

Occasionally, however, I get the whiny response from someone who is looking to place the blame elsewhere. Why not engage the instructor's sympathies by explaining to him that he is to blame? Most students avoid this approach, but sometimes you get a brave one:

After looking to see if I had done the problem right in which case it was correct but the only thing that I had over-looked was the correct notation.

Ah, yes. Notation. I may be a little stricter about notation than other math teachers, but I refuse to countenance false statements like

4x + 3 = 11 = 4x = 8 = x = 2.

I'm just not crazy about taking the equal sign in vain. Putting an equal sign between things that aren't equal is irksome, sloppy, and—darn it!—untrue.

In the present instance, the student was taking a calculus class and had presented me with solutions that were mostly bits of scratch work and the occasional untrue statement. For example,

6x + 3h − 5 = 6x − 5

is a false statement unless you indicate that you are taking the limit of the left-hand side as h goes to zero (if you would please be so kind). The student got most of the credit for deriving the correct answer, but he lost a few for neglecting correct notation. His tone was a bit pettish, but he came to a correct conclusion in his analysis:

Overall, I think in order to improve myself as a math student in Dr. Z's class, I need to focus on how he wants me to solve or work out the problems so I can meet his expectations. Because it seems to me that I do the work as best as I can but fall short of what is expected of me from him. So my best solution to this dilemma is to find out how he wants things done and pretty much follow his rules in order for me to get an A in his class.

A helpful hint: The best way to find out how I want things done is to watch what I do in class, because I model it in every example I do and in every homework question I solve for the class. And—one more hint—be there when I do it.

Shameless self-promotion

2011-10-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

On not being famous

My editor-in-chief pointed out the other day that I am not a famous person. Naturally, this took me by surprise, since I have followed my career with rapt attention and had not realized that others were not doing the same. I'm sure you can understand.

Having recovered from the initial shock of this discovery, I wondered why my editor had made this obvious—in retrospect—observation. In response, he reminded me that his main occupation was professorial, not editorial. Although he headed up a university press, it was not a gigantic publishing firm with crack teams of publicists and salespeople. (Rather, they have catalogs and websites.) He suggested that sales of my novel would get a significant boost if only he could run some cover quotes from more famous authors—where “more famous” means “famous at all.”

The solution, of course, was simple. I just needed to get in touch with all of the famous authors I know and ask them to please send me enthusiastic encomia to emblazon on my book cover. You know the type of thing: “An excellent book!” “Laugh out loud funny!” “Exceptional descriptive writing!” “Brilliantly orchestrated, hilariously funny!” “As good an ending as ever written!” “One of the best books I’ve ever read!”

Yeah. That kind of stuff.

One teensy, tiny problem, though.

All the successful authors I know are involved in math or computers. Not in fiction. (At least, not intentional fiction.) Rats. This means I have to go trolling for endorsements from people I don't know. I have to sidle up to famous and semi-famous people and make a nuisance of myself. The task is an unpleasant one. However, I may be good at it.

The unsuspecting Jonathan Franzen came to Northern California on tour. He made a stop at the Mondavi Center at the University of California at Davis. I got myself a ticket and made plans to get up to the home of the University Farm for Franzen's talk. He won the National Book Prize for The Corrections and reaped a huge publicity windfall from his public spat with Oprah (followed by a highly publicized kiss-and-make-up event on her show). The man is either a promotional genius or incredibly lucky. Either suits me just fine.

I got to UC Davis early (not much traffic in Davisville on Saturday nights) and wandered about the Mondavi Center for a while. A few years ago I was there on the invitation of a nephew who scored a pair of tickets for an appearance by Stephen Hawking. It was a different crowd for Franzen's talk (less of a comic-con vibe and more of a white-wine-and-cheese ambience).

Franzen read his talk—somewhat to my surprise—but there's no rule that says a good writer must also be a good public speaker. He was starting to hit his stride when he interrupted his talk to fish a pen out of his briefcase and scribble a couple of corrections on his typescript. In fact, the talk was punctuated with such interruptions. At one point, he shook his head and confided to the audience that he had written “actually” three times in rapid succession and at least one of them had to go. He was also in fear of encountering a fourth, actually.

Whether intentional or not, Franzen was giving a good illustration of a writer's travails, fussing over text and vocabulary. The talk was, overall, a well-received success, with enthusiastic applause, after which Franzen took a seat on stage with a UC Davis faculty member who fed him some Internet-delivered questions for a Q&A session. In addition, a live microphone was set up in an aisle in the orchestra section of the hall. When Franzen suggested it was time to go to a live question, heads swiveled to discover that no one was at the mike. I popped up out of my seat and strolled over:

Thank you for being here, Jonathan. I'd like to ask you about the importunities visited on successful authors. You must have lots of people making demands for chunks of your time to provide pre-publication quotes for book covers. How do you decide whether an author's unpublished manuscript is worthy of the stress of your regard?

Franzen laughed and said, “That's an original question. That's why I love university audiences. The questions are so clever.”

Then he rashly answered my question: “I don't know if I should really say this, but I actually look at just about everything that gets sent to me. If the first page contains no clichés, I'll read the second page. If there are no more than one or two clichés on subsequent pages, and I find it interesting, I'll keep on reading.”

I was still standing at the mike while Franzen wrapped up his answer, so I leaned back toward it and said, “Thank you, Jonathan. I'll be in touch!”

That got a good laugh from the audience. Afterward, I got in line so he could sign my copy of The Corrections.

Just to be clear, Franzen has promised me absolutely nothing and committed himself to nothing. When he gets the packet of sample pages from my manuscript, he might riffle through it, yawn, and toss it aside. On the other hand, he might like it. And then say so. I live in hope.

P.S.: The “pretend” quotes above are actually¹ genuine. They were actually² sent to me by people who actually³ read the manuscript. When these folks get famous, I'm all set!

One order of oxymoron, please

2011-10-12T23:00:00.000-07:00

Hold the oxy

A letter-writer to the Sacramento Bee has earned my stunned admiration. In criticizing the Occupy Wall Street protesters, this resident of the town of Auburn has crafted a sentence that is all but perfect in its representation of unthinking tea-partyism:

These protesters are part of a very well-organized group of anarchists who vow to destroy our American way of life, which, yes, is capitalist.

Thanks for the warning! Once the well-organized anarchists join forces with infertile parents, wealthy paupers, and impoverished millionaires, western society is doomed! Doomed!

This is not about Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

Death at a young age

[D]eath is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

The quote is from the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005. Naturally lots of people have been considering those words since the report that Jobs died on Wednesday. Naturally people have been thinking it's unfortunate that Jobs was “cleared away” after having lived only 56 years.

I can remember when the fifties seemed like old age to me. That was a few years ago, of course. I no longer think that. Especially since I am no longer in my fifties. In fact, I used to doubt that I would ever make it that far.

Young people. How foolish they can be.

By a curious coincidence, I have a cousin who is 56. The same age as Jobs. My cousin is in hospice care. Perhaps you know what that means. It provides some relief to his wife, of course, because she has been bearing the burden of caring for a terminally ill man who can no longer get about under his own power. However, it is also a harbinger of imminent death, because hospice workers don't show up till the final days, which is where my cousin is now.

By a peculiar circumstance, my cousin is acquainted with the hospice workers. He knows them from the meticulous and considerate care they gave to his sister last month, in the days before she died at the age of 53. She was the first of our generation to go. Her brother will soon be the second. He attended her funeral in a wheelchair, knowing that the ceremony could be considered a dress rehearsal for his own imminent last rites.

How do people deal with tragedies like this? I don't know. I suppose that having no choice is a big part of it. You can't pick any alternatives. You have to endure the unendurable because it cannot be avoided. My uncle and aunt are still alive, having buried one child and expecting soon to bury another. I can't imagine how they feel.

I am insulated from the grief. These are cousins who live at a distance. Not cousins I used to see on a daily basis when we all lived on a big farm. They're the city cousins I used to see a couple of times a year when we traveled down to southern California to visit my maternal grandparents. Many years have passed since I last saw any of them in person. We've been out of touch and the bad news has been percolating north through the family grapevine—my mother, mainly. My dying cousin is her godson.

No, this post is not about Steve Jobs. It's about people dying young. People younger than me. I wanted to say something about it. Not that it does any good.

Enjoying your mid-life crisis

2011-10-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Trying to get the hang of it

One of my colleagues, now retired, told me about his mid-life crisis. He dyed his gray hair back to dark brown, bought himself a motorcycle, and got a new wife (one of his former students). By the time he recounted this tale to me, the gray hair was back, the motorcycle had been replaced with a sedan, and he had settled down into a relatively sedate middle-class existence with wife No. 2. He wasn't sure, but he suspected things had worked out better than he had had any reason to expect.

I'm not sure I understand these crises. Perhaps I favor routine too much. Perhaps I decline to embrace the evanescent enthusiasms of the day—including society's tiresome expectation that middle-aged men are supposed to get fidgety. Perhaps I have successfully punctuated my life with screams of “Serenity now!”

In looking back, I've tried to consider whether my existence has been marked by any decadal milestones. My conclusion is a firm maybe. Decide for yourself:

When I turned 20, I went off to school, leaving home for the first time. It wasn't any kind of mad impulse, though. It was simply the logical next step. I had to pursue my education at least to the point where I could escape from my bucolic environment. Certainly I was beginning to suspect that education would be a primary theme in my future. So off I went, nervous but determined.

When I turned 30, I was out of school and starting a stint in California's civil service, having been transformed into a minor bureaucrat in Sacramento. The job was something of a detour, but I had done a modicum of teaching, experienced a stint in journalism, and tried my hand at magazine writing. I wasn't exactly at loose ends (civil service is seldom a “loose ends” kind of place), but my goals had become diffuse. In theory, I could earn job security, get vested in the retirement system, and ride out the decades till retirement. But that somehow seemed unlikely. For the time being, though, it was okay.

The classic crisis year in which I turned 40 was unremarkable in most respect, though I did get fitted for braces. Orthodontia seemed a better choice than a motorcycle. I had bravely run away from civil service for a tenuous temporary appointment to a faculty position, leaving the state capital behind. Fortunately, I had successfully navigated the transition into a tenure-track position, was under contract to produce a math textbook, and was now accumulating seniority in my college. The mouthful of metal seemed a mere detail.

When I turned 50, I was back in grad school. My transcript had long boasted a mess of units beyond the master's degree, and I had finally ginned up the courage to go back to school to try to complete a doctorate. It was a thoroughly weird experience to be a student after years of being a teacher. More than one of my professors looked askance at me with eyebrows raised as if to remind me which side of the room I was on. Oops. But I survived the experience—and so did they.

When I turned 60, I became a novelist. Or I will, when the book hits print next summer. I've served my department as chair a couple of times and only a handful of my colleagues have seniority over me. My teaching job is still the best job I've ever had and I seem to have little cause to suffer from emotional crises. My serenity endures and bids fair to last forever!

Either that, or 70 is going to be a doozy.

I miss the symbolism

2011-09-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

Not quite perfect

At work I use Microsoft Word, which is installed on all of our office computers. My library of exams, however, old and new, are maintained in WordPerfect format. I've routinely upgraded Corel's product to the point that today I am using WordPerfect Office X5 to write my exams at home, where most of my school materials are prepared. (I've never felt a need to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, and I use enough of its products anyway, whether by my choice or not.)

But now something weird has happened. I replaced my home computer with a newer and faster system, using LapLink's PCMover to migrate my software from the old computer to the new. Unfortunately, on the new computer WordPerfect got balky. I uninstalled it, dug out the original disks, and reinstalled it. The same problem remained: I've lost the gallery of useful special symbols that I used to invoke with Ctrl-W. It's a significant loss, especially now that I have to resort to the equation editor for every little thing, such as merely embedding a Greek letter in text or a prime symbol after a function name.

I am not pleased.

Interestingly enough, the problem has survived a number of attempts to uninstall and reinstall the program. In addition, I now get an error message when trying to implement the Service Pack 2 maintenance upgrade. I'm stuck with the original release version from the installation disks, but without the special symbol feature. Woe and alas!

Gaze upon the stark difference of “Before” and “After”:

Before: The math symbol palette as it should appear.

After: The math symbol palette in its current denatured form

Any bright ideas, anyone?

You may already be a loser

2011-09-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

Are you effing kidding me?

I sometimes get e-mail from students. It happens. Students usually write to ask questions or to tell me why they missed (or are going to miss) class. I like it when students take the trouble to contact me.

Usually.

Then there are examples like this, which initially appears innocuous:

Hello mr Z, I need help with alot of the materials, is it possible to get some help from you? Thank you, Edie Sent from my iPhone

This plaintive query arrived during the fifth week of the semester and came from a student enrolled in a class that had met nine times. I had given that particular class a total of six quizzes, short one- or two-problem exercises designed to help me keep tabs on my students' progress and to highlight the concepts or formulas I deemed most important.

I took a peek into my gradebook to see how much help Edie might need. Out of six quizzes, with a total of 60 points possible, Edie had racked up a grand total of seven points. She managed a score of 6/10 on Quiz 1 and 1/10 on Quiz 3. She missed Quizzes 2, 4, and 5. I imagine she finally got worried when she took Quiz 6 and earned 0/10. Time to ask for help!

Several possible responses to her plea came to mind. For example:

Hello, Edie. It's way too late. I'm dropping you for non-attendance. Take care, Professor Z

But I got a grip on myself and decided to take a milder tack (and included none of the bracketed remarks!):

I can recommend several steps, Edie, to improve your performance in the class, but you have to implement them quickly if you are to do well in next week's exam [after which pigs will fly]. First of all, you can come to my office hours, which are included in the course syllabus (look at the top of the first page) [and which I e-mailed to everyone in addition to handing out a hard copy on Day 1]. Second, you can go to the Campus Tutoring Center for drop-in math tutoring. Check at the CTC's information desk to find out when tutors knowledgeable in our subject are available. Third, you should review the problems on all of the quizzes we've had so far [including the ones that you missed or flunked—which is all of them]. I have been posting solution keys on the course website where you can download them or print them out. Finally, ask questions in class [if you're ever there]. We will be doing as much review as we can fit into Tuesday's class next week. [Then, when you realize you have no idea what we're talking about, you can drop the class.] Professor Z

My student was impressed with the helpfulness of my message, which prompted the following response:

Thank you mr Z! I will read the book this weekend and come to you during office hours.

Yeah. That seems reasonable. Four chapters of neglected school work all polished off in a single weekend.

The self-delusion will not be long lasting.

Clairvoyance: the real thing

2011-09-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

My colleague knows the future

Deliveries from the college's repro services ramp up in the days preceding the start of each semester. Our course syllabi and first-week handouts begin to appear in our campus mailboxes. The initial trickle turns into quite a flood as the first day of instruction approaches—and woe betide those who submitted their print-jobs too late to ensure delivery before the semester begins. (You could end up on the doorstep of repro services, hat in hand, while disgruntled employees poke among the just-printed but undelivered jobs to see if your syllabus is ready for the class that's meeting in thirty minutes.)

In our math department, the deluge of printed matter is always punctuated by a singular event. During the last week of summer vacation (or the last week of winter break), a heavily-laden delivery cart arrives from repro services, groaning under stacks of boxes of shrink-wrapped bundles. This particular shipment stands out from all the others because it is addressed to one person, a colleague who always submits her entire semester's worth of print-jobs in advance.

The entire semester. On the first day of instruction her office is stuffed with every handout, worksheet, quiz, and exam that she intends to use in her courses for the duration of those courses. She will not have to write or copy a single instructional document during the entire academic term. Despite having witnessed this for several years, I am still unable to fully grasp the concept. It's quite foreign to me.

I know what lesson plans are. Why, I've even used them. Or, rather, tried to use them. I confess that my “lesson plans” have eroded over my years of teaching. Careful outlines with boxed examples and key concepts have withered away to Post-it notes containing pre-cooked problems with the kinds of results I want. (Well, sometimes. In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that my cluttered brain contains many memorized examples that I can call on at will, or reconstruct on the fly, depending on what comes up. I mean, how hard is it to cook up on the spur of the moment a quadratic equation with complex roots? Who needs a Post-it for that, right?)

Moltke's dictum that “no war plan outlasts the first encounter with the enemy” applies to the classroom as well as to the battlefield. I simply cannot imagine following my colleague's example of preparing every quiz and exam in advance of meeting my students and then managing to stick with my original plans. In fact, I prefer to hold off on writing my exams until after holding a review session with my students, which usually means writing the exam the night before I administer it. It's not procrastination. It's how I find out what I need to test them on. It's a process of reacting and adapting to each class at each moment of time during the semester.

There's a neat counter-argument to my mode of instruction, and I presume it's the one my colleague would use if we were to discuss our differing approaches. She could tell me that course content is pre-determined and learning outcomes are pre-defined. (She's right, of course. All classes have official definitions that can be found in the college catalog.) One can then reasonably focus on those pre-ordained objectives, testing students to gauge their mastery and ensuring a kind of standardized approach that avoids subjectivity and random variation from term to term.

I don't, however, think that I am capricious or random in my instructional approach. I have the prescribed goals carefully outlined in my syllabus and I certainly test student mastery of desired learning outcomes with my exams. But I do not try to anticipate in advance whether a particular class needs more or less emphasis on a particular concept or set of concepts. Every sample from the student population is different in some way from every other. Every semester I need to find out their aggregate strengths and weaknesses and attempt to direct my instructional efforts in the direction that seems the likeliest to do the most good. It's not exactly a science, of course, and it's certainly not predictable. My crystal ball is way too cloudy for that.

I have a grudging admiration for my colleague's industriousness in generating all of her course material so far in advance, but it's mostly the credit one gives to prodigious labor, whether or not the result strikes one as praiseworthy. In addition to being awestruck when I witness the massive delivery from repro services, I also shudder with horror.

God loves a good splatterfest

2011-09-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

An anniversary meditation

The media are full of stories about the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Without the slightest hint that they are aware of the irony, Christian extremists are eager to lay special claim to the various memorial services. For example, Catholic League bully boy Bill Donohue is furious that New York City's official commemoration event will not feature religious observances. In classic Donohue fashion, he says that we should demand to know “why Bloomberg decided to censor the clergy from speaking at the 9/11 memorial ceremonies this Sunday.”

“Censor”? Donohue clearly does not understand the word. Bloomberg is heading up a secular municipal government ceremony and decided that sectarian prayers did not belong at such an event. No one, however, is “censored.” The various priests, rabbis, ministers, imams, and snake-handlers are free to conduct as many worshipful memorial services as they like—whether or not Bloomberg thinks it's a good idea. Donohue, however, would like a nice Christian—preferably Catholic—prayer at the event and might even settle for some words mumbled by a rabbi. He still can't get over the idea that religious faith is not as privileged in our society as it used to be. (The secularists who left God out of the U.S. Constitution might be smiling, if only there were an afterlife.) The 9/11 perpetrators shouted prayers of their own; how odd that some people think the main problem is that it simply represented fanatical devotion to the wrong religion. So we need more prayers—of the right kind. (Thank God for the absence of religion-driven violence among Christians!)

Catholic Radio has certainly not been intimidated by Mayor Bloomberg into avoiding the topic of 9/11. They appear not to have noticed the supposed censorship (although I'm sure at some point one of the EWTN programs will point a microphone at Donohue and allow him to complain in public about what he calls the mayor's “gag order”). Just this afternoon I heard a snippet of a program in which a man was interviewed about the way in which religion comforted him on 9/11. This particular individual made his way to St. James Church, where he found solace. Soon afterward, he visited another church: “One of the great things about New York City is that there are churches everywhere!” he told his interviewer.

Then he said, “I felt the presence of God all day on that day.”

I pondered that for just a moment, then realized he was making excellent sense if his God was the deity of the Bible. The God of the Bible is particularly fond of mass murder, whether by his own hand or at his instigation. Such a God would, of course, show up for the slaughter in the Big Apple. He probably brought popcorn, too, because nothing seems to please the Lord as much as a nice splatterfest. Just consider:

“And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” (Gen. 6:7)

“And Moses said, Thus saith the Lord, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts. (Exodus 11:4-5)

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1 Sam. 15:3)

“Is not this David, of whom they sang one to another in dances, saying, Saul slew his thousands, and David his ten thousands?” (1 Sam. 29:5)

“And when he had removed [Saul], he raised up unto them David to be their king; to whom also he gave their testimony, and said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will.” (Acts 13:22)

Be advised: If your kill ratio is too low, God will oust you and find someone more likely to slake his thirst for blood.

I am certain that many Christians would hasten to point out that the above quotes are either from the Old Testament—when God was more of a bastard—or from a New Testament verse that looks back to Old Testament lore—since in Acts the reference is to King David. I find this unpersuasive. First of all, it's not as though Jehovah God of the Old Testament lost his re-election campaign and was replaced by a kind and loving turn-the-other-cheek Jesus Christ in the New Testament. It's an article of faith with Christians that it's all just one (triple-headed) God. Thus the Christian deity can't escape responsibility for mass murder in the Old Testament. Second, Jesus was all too happy to implicate himself:

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” (Matt. 10:34)

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

It is sometimes said that Christianity is a “religion of peace.” Actually, it sounds like Homeland Security should keep a closer eye on those who take their God's advice a little too seriously. It's only a quirk of translation that “jihad” is not in their book.

The power of prayer

2011-09-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

God hates Texas

P.Z. Myers is pointing out that Rick Perry's prayers to God are going unanswered. After all, back in April the governor of Texas summoned his fellow citizens to grovel before God and beg for an end to their unprecedented drought. The U.S. Drought Monitor map makes it abundantly clear that prayer doesn't work. Either that, or prayer just pisses God off. In that case, Gov. Perry's prayers have been answered, and the answer is clearly, “Go to hell!” (which Texas is currently a good approximation of).

The gravity of the situation

2011-09-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

A major contender in the stupid sweepstakes!

All reasonably rational and intelligent people have had occasion to groan in pain and palm their faces in astonished contemplation of the inanities that come from the mouths of creationists, religionists, and other “believers” who rely on faith rather than knowledge. Once they have hung their tiny brains on the peg of revealed wisdom—usually derived from some sprawling and clumsy tome (like the Bible, Koran, or Atlas Shrugged)—they are smug in their ignorance and beyond the reach of reason. Is it even possible to recover from the weapons-grade stupidity displayed by Noah Hutchings and Jerry Guiltner in this exchange from the August 30, 2011, broadcast (at 13:28) of Southwest Radio Church's Watchman on the Wall?

Hutchings: Now, Brother Jerry, we hear all about this Big Bang. That's how everything has come into being. Now some of these heavenly bodies you see out there really have no atmosphere and yet they are perfectly round. Now all the planets are perfectly round. Our moons are perfectly round. The stars are perfectly round. Our sun is perfectly round. Now you mean that they mean to tell us that there was a big explosion at the beginning and all these heavenly bodies come out perfectly round? Now can you explain that?

Yeah. It's gravity.

Guiltner: [Laughter] I wish I could. I can't even explain why intelligent people would believe that. That it's just amazing that these folks that claim to be as smart as they are can't see that— You know, someone said, Brother Hutchings, that it takes more faith to be an evolutionist than it does to be a Christian and I believe that they may be right because that just simply makes no sense at all to me.

Pardon me for pointing this out, Noah and Jerry, but did you realize people occasionally hear things when you broadcast them on the radio? That's right. Folks are going to find out how stupid you are.

Fortunately, most of those who are listening are just about as brain-damaged as you are!

RYFM revisited

2011-08-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

If you can't follow instructions...

Once upon a time computers and software programs were bundled with books—actual hard-copy sheafs of bound paper. You were supposed to read them. On-line help was limited (if you even had on-line access) and fellow computer nerds would cheerfully offer advice in times of distress by suggesting that you “read the friendly manual.” (I do, however, recall that not everyone agreed that the F stood for “friendly.”)

Learning to read instructions is a survival skill. If only I could get more of my students to take it seriously. (It sure helps on word problems!) I wish all students would take it more seriously! As a senior faculty member, I am often called upon to adjudicate the earnest petitions of the college's desperate students. It's educational for me, but I think I've learned as much as I want to. It's depressing.

I'm talking about those petitions known as “challenge forms.” Every college has something equivalent. My school's challenge forms are usually submitted in hopes of getting a prerequisite waiver. For example, a returning student wants to enroll in precalculus but gets bounced because his academic record doesn't include a passing grade in trigonometry. He files a petition with documentation demonstrating that he's been doing field work for a surveying company for several years, along with actual samples of trigonometric calculations done on the job. We sign the challenge form to indicate approval of the waiver and he gets to enroll in precalculus.

Simple!

But no. Most students file challenge petitions that are cleverly designed to waste our time. (I nearly said, “and theirs,” but there's not much evidence they actually put any time into it.) For example, one student wanted to take intermediate algebra. The evidence he provided in support of his petition was a high school transcript showing he had flunked elementary algebra. I mean, surely if you fail Algebra 1 in high school you must be ready for success in Algebra 2 in college, right?

Petition denied.

The instructions for the challenge forms are quite specific: It is the student's responsibility to provide “credible evidence” that he or she is prepared for success in a class despite not having passed the prerequisite class. An amazing number of students seem to think that “credible evidence” consists of writing a personal note saying things like:

I could have passed if I tried, so please give me credit for having taken it.
I plan to transfer to Big U next fall and I can't if you make me take the prerequisite over again, so please don't make me.
The teacher was awful and it wasn't my fault I didn't pass the prerequisite.
I promise to work really hard for a change.

Yeah, it's depressing.

Strangely enough, though, my most negative reactions are reserved for the padded petition forms full of time-wasting chaff. While we don't consider personal promises to do better as credible evidence, we do give rather more weight to successful completion of math placement tests. Want to take Algebra 2 even though we have no record of your having taken Algebra 1? Take the placement test and earn a score that suggests you're ready to take Algebra 2. We'll let you in!

But many times I've seen challenge forms plumped up with material from the placement test—because students have included the booklet of sample placement test questions. What a waste! Those pages are useless. Just give me the one-page print-out with the test results. I have waded through forms that included (a) the instructions for filling out the challenge form (with no evidence that they read it), (b) instructions for taking the placement test (I already know those), (c) sample test questions (even if you marked them up I don't want to see them; only if you take the proctored test do I know it's your own work), and (d) a personal statement in which the student promises to do better (fine, but that's not really evidence). My colleagues and I peruse these bundles of futility, shake our heads sadly, and sign on the “petition denied” line.

Really. If you can't follow the instructions and give us credible evidence, you're probably not cut out for a successful educational experience. Better take care of that first, before you try to move on.

We're hoping that word gets out that the math department is a hard-nosed place that requires real evidence before it will approve a challenge form. The record of several years suggests that we hope in vain.

Do-it-yourself yourself

2011-08-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

So many books, so little space

Some of my friends and acquaintances keep flaunting their electronic book readers at me. They're confident I will eventually be assimilated. I'm confident I won't be—at least not to the degree they believe. Sure, I expect that one day I will acquire a Kindle or something similar. If I were more of a traveler, I'd probably have one already. However, I've had a life-long love affair with real books and my eventual e-reader will augment them rather than replace them. Trust me on this.

Of course, a love affair with real honest-to-gosh books is both time- and space-consuming. This summer I resolved to get my monotonically increasing collection under better control. It's been years since the last time I sorted and arranged all of my books into something approaching a rational system, and entropy has been steadily working its randomizing magic. Unfortunately, I discovered I had achieved grid-lock.

Are you familiar with the classic Fifteen Puzzle? The goal is to slide the numbered tiles about until they are all in numerical order. The tiles reside in a four-by-four grid, one square of which remains empty. That's what allows you to slide the numbered tiles around. Without the empty square, you cannot budge.

And that's what happened to my out-of-control library: It had grown to fill all available spaces and thus I was left with a staging area—a blank space—to use as a temporary storage niche while unshelving and reshelving books. You really need some elbow room if you're going to do a wholesale sorting of your books—instead of a painfully slow and incremental tweaking. I was reminded of RAM-poor computers trying to run programs that ate up all available memory and then ground to a crawl because of the lack of available working space.

Like I said: grid-lock.

My keenly-honed intellect began to consider options: (1) I could free up some space by tossing out a bunch of unneeded books. (Oops: no such thing!) (2) I could shift more of my math books into my office at school. (Ha! My office is worse!) (3) I could replace many of my books with electronic editions and an e-reader. (Too early! See above.) (4) I could magically create more space by cleaning house. (Huh? What is “cleaning house”?)

In a way, I did choose (4). My residence has a storage room attached to one side of the building, integral to the structure. It's where the lawnmower used to live (long gone; that's what gardening services are for). I went exploring and discovered it was full of old boxes (anyone need the shipping carton for a Gateway 2000 computer?) and some obsolete electronic gear (would you believe an original IBM PC monochrome monitor from 1983?). I began to clear it out.

The storage space is 44 inches deep and 108 inches wide. Room! I nosed about Home Dept and Lowe's and found a 5-tier shelf unit that was 42 inches wide. It would fit perfectly—but the shelves were rather farther apart than I might have wished. The paperback volumes I intended to stack on it needed much less clearance than the standard unit would provide, and the shelves weren't adjustable. (Adjustable-shelf units were also available, but they were all 36-inches or 48-inches wide.)

Of course, the fixed spacing of the shelves assumed that I would follow directions and mount the shelves on the built-in flanges provided on the support poles. Ha! Instead of following directions, I bought five shelving units (with an aggregate of 25 individual shelves) and created three eight-shelf units (one shelf left over).

After a bit of exploration and experimentation, I discovered that the toner cartridge box for my HP LaserJet printer was as wide as the shelf spacing I desired. After installing the bottom shelf, I placed the toner cartridge box in the middle of that shelf and slipped the next shelf unit onto the support poles and let it drop until it rested atop the box. The shelf didn't match up with the mounting flanges (of course), so I serenely drilled holes at the four corners and secured the out-of-place shelf with nuts and bolts. After extricating the toner cartridge box, I tossed it atop the new shelf, grabbed the next shelf, and dropped it atop the box. Occasionally, of course, I had to install the extensions of the support poles.

The results were stunning. The storage room has now sucked up two thousand paperback books and opened up several feet of shelf space in the house proper. Books that were stacked on end tables and floors and the piano (which I can now see again—and really should consider having tuned) are now being spirited into shelves. Hurrah!

I must admit, though, that they are not yet as meticulously sorted and grouped as I had planned. But soon, I'm sure. But first I have to put away some tools.

Root, kit, or die

2011-08-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

Don't go there!

You might not realize the extent to which you're living the Google lifestyle until suddenly you can't any longer. It happened to me over a week ago. Google stopped working. The search engine seemed okay, but clicking on a result entailed unpredictable consequences. Most of the time I would not get the webpage I had selected. The results seemed random. It was perplexing. More than perplexing. It was maddening.

If you're technologically savvy, you know that weird computer behavior is a good indication of a viral infection. It wasn't long before I realized that some weird bug was affecting the way Google behaved. Naturally, I quickly resorted to ... Google to figure out what was wrong!

Damn.

It took a few moments to find a work-around. Google was, after all, doing a perfectly fine job of finding websites related to search-engine viruses. Instead of clicking on an individual result and trusting Google to take me there, I instead copied and pasted the URL directly into the browser. Success! After visiting several sites, I learned that my computer had contracted a form of the “Google redirect virus.” Google referrals were being hijacked and directed to sites that were benefiting from extra hits from infected computers.

Example of a rogue page from a redirected Google item

Some of the rogue pages that popped up were plausibly connected to the original Google search, even if it they weren't the pages you asked for. But tell me, would you trust a supposedly anti-virus program that offers itself as a solution to the Google redirect virus if the virus itself suggests it to you? Sorry, Stopzilla, there is no way that I am trying you!

The virus in question creates a “rootkit” problem, where a “rootkit” is a program that gives privileged access to the functions of a computer. Rootkits can be damnably elusive. I've tried ferreting out my computer's infection with utilities from Norton, AVG, Sophos, Zookaware (SpyZooka), Enigma Softweare (SpyHunter), and Kaspersky. Lots of adware cookies were demolished in the process of scanning my computer, but the redirect virus was not caught. Damn. I was especially disappointed when Kaspersky's vaunted TDSSKiller did not track down and kill the lurking rootkit.

My new problem was keeping track of which anti-virus scanner I had used and then disabling or uninstalling those that wanted to fight each other. (You can definitely have too much of a good thing, and anti-virus programs are not fond of polygamy.) I've discovered that Anti-Malware from Malwarebytes is the most active combatant in the battle with the rootkit virus. It often (but not always!) detects attempts to redirect my clicks on Google results and prevents them. I'd much rather, of course, expunge the rootkit entirely and go back to clicking with abandon. But so far it is not to be.

Suggestions, anyone, on the best way to smash a rootkit virus on a PC running Windows 7?

Catholic spin cycle

2011-07-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

A faithful parody

The more-Catholic-than-the-pope fringe of Roman Catholicism is faithfully represented by the ultra-ultramontanes of RealCatholicTV, where Michael Voris shares his overweening smugness in a series of videos titled The Vortex. In recent installments he has decried the collapse of Catholicism in Ireland and reported that contraception has brought humanity to the edge of destruction. Voris would not know the meaning of “subtlety” if it hit him in the face with a sledge hammer forged in the white-hot intensity of a million suns. His antics would seem to put him beyond parody, but nothing daunts the truly brave humorist.

Enter Steve, the eponym of Steve Likes to Curse, a blog of peculiarly skewed and irreverent humor. This month he's unveiled a series of Vortex parodies that are wickedly on target. Sporting a helmet-hair wig every bit as authentic as Voris's and styling himself “Michael Whirly, B.F.D.,” Steve presents The Whirlpool (“where fibs and fabrications are pulled under and drowned”). Check out his denunciation of atheists (“stupid retards who only care about fornicating with members of their own sex and smoking drugs”).

Keep an eye on the background animation for the floating washing machine. Then take a look at some of his other videos. He sincerely pities “those silly Jews” and their “obsolete” religion. Consider how specifically he cites scripture as he lusts for an opportunity to stone Emma Watson as a witch. At least, I think stoning is what he wants to do to her. It is a wonder to behold.

Perhaps you have never wasted precious minutes of your life watching Steve's original inspiration, the egregious (I was going to say “inimitable,” but that obviously no longer applies) Michael Voris. You can get a rush of schadenfreude while marveling at the accuracy of Steve's portrayal as Voris wrings his hands and laments over the sorry state of the modern Catholic Church. (Steve does look down a bit too often at his cue cards, I admit, but he also doesn't flub his lines quite as often as Voris either. It's a trade-off.)

One thing does, however, confuse me. Steve says he has just observed his blog's fifth anniversary, but has yet to attract much notice:

After five years, the first four of which I posted at least one article a day, every day, Steve Likes to Curse’s popularity and exposure are still minimal. On a good day, this one gets around 100 hits. Most days it gets between 40-50. And yet this quiet little website of mine has changed my life. What must it be like for someone whose blog gets thousands of hits a day?

Something is wrong when a treasure trove of humor like Steve's blog gets so few visitors. Go give the nice man a little love.

I believe in a higher power

2011-07-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Even Homer nods

The all-knowing Shphinx (a.k.a. Mooch with a towel on his head), sometimes falls just a bit short in his oracular pronouncements. This was quite evident in his declaration concerning the solid, low-temperature state of water.

No, it's not H₂O squared. It's H₂O cubed.

Mooch should have said “to the third power” in the third panel.

That's awfully white of you

2011-07-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Right-wing terrorism and its apologists

A visit to Free Republic is a lot like snorkeling in a sewer. Not advisable. Unfortunately, the freeper rabble has enjoyed the unaccountable spectacle of its extremism getting mainstreamed via Fox News, the teabaggers, and the Republican Party (which is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of its nutcase fringe). The terrorist outrage in Norway sparked a predictable reaction among the freepers. First, it had to be an attack by Muslim extremists (or “Islamofascists,” as the freepers like to say). Second, the right-wing racist apprehended as the prime suspect isn't “right wing” in the American way. Third, the prime suspect was secretly part of an Islamofascist cabal (you know, just the way Timothy McVeigh was!).

While scanning the comments on Free Republic and gritting my teeth, I saw a phrase that puzzled me: “lily white” used as a noun.

I suspect this man is a ‘lily white’. This tactical action is very typical of Arab thinking.

It is meant to turn us against one another, to weaken us from within.

The Norwegians will find out the truth behind these acts and our media will ignore the facts. Just you all watch what develops.

21 posted on Saturday, July 23, 2011 11:40:26 AM by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)

Apparently the denizens of Free Republic have keen insight (or think they have keen insight) into typical Arab thinking. I held my nose and did a little more poking around. I found another use of the term. It was in a 2005 post about Joel Henry Hinrichs III, the suicide bomber at Oklahoma University:

JAYNA DAVIS: Report No. 1 - OU SUICIDE BOMBING CASE
phone call with Jayna Davis | 10-5-05 | dfu

Posted on Wednesday, October 05, 2005 4:51:42 PM by doug from upland

JAYNA DAVIS: Report No. 1 - OU SUICIDE BOMBING CASE

As FReepers are probably aware, Jayna Davis, indefatigable reporter and author of THE THIRD TERRORIST, is on the case of the OU suicide bomber. A local FReeper is giving her assistance. Here are some of the highlights of our discussion a short time ago:

1 - she has spoken to the feed store owner, Justin Ellison . . . Joel Hinrichs III exhibited strange behavior while in the feed store trying to buy ammonium nitrate . . . the store owner asked why he wanted it, and Hinrichs turned away and started mumbling to himself

2 - Hinrichs was dressed in a photographer's vest that was stuffed . . . a wire was noticed sticking out of it

3 - a plain clothes officer was in the store at the time and witnessed what happened . . . Jayna is not clear who got it, but someone got the plate number to track the guy

4 - they did a background check and he came out clean . . . Jayna reminds us that he was a “lily white,” just like McVeigh and Nichols

What are we to make of this? A comment on this post provides a little more information about how this term is being used by the extreme right:

Good work Doug... keep us informed.

One only wonders why it has taken so long. Of course he was “lily white” like McVeigh or others on police checks. That's the whole methodology.

This might actually spur us to win the war.
4 posted on Wednesday, October 05, 2005 4:57:51 PM by Robert Teesdale

Another freeper weighed in with what he admitted was a “factless supposition,” but it certainly didn't stop him:

Here's a factless supposition:

Assuming this is a Muslim event at its core, what if his handlers caught wind of the fact that the Norman PD was checking him out, and they made the quick decision to “set him up the bomb”?

I don't have any knowledge of how and why his bomb exploded, but if it's possible his handlers set it off, what do you think of this as one possibility? His handlers knew they needed a lily-white, and all of a sudden, he's under suspicion.

18 posted on Wednesday, October 05, 2005 5:07:20 PM by savedbygrace (“No Monday morning quarterback has ever led a team to victory” GW Bush)

In Free-Republic parlance, therefore, a “lily white” is someone with a clean criminal record who serves as a front man for a (probably Islamic) terrorist organization. As we saw above, SatinDoll has already pegged right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik as one.

There is, however, some divergence of opinion among the freepers. Unfortunately, those who disagree with the Islamofascist-catspaw theory are even scarier than those who agree. The dissenters shake their heads in token disapproval of the massacre and then nod their heads in expressions of sympathy—for the killer. Fasten your seatbelts and consider the following, which came after a comment that Breivik had been described as anti-Muslim:

If that were the case, his target would've been Norwegian Muslims. ....of whom there are millions.

He was trying to make the enablers of the Muslim invasion pay. His motive, while inexcusable, is not that hard to understand.
18 posted on Saturday, July 23, 2011 11:33:17 AM by Gumption
“His targets make no sense if he was after Muslims.”

His target was the next generation of Labour Party activists, i.e. the people who make the laws that allow for muslim immigration. In a sick way, it makes plenty of sense.

22 posted on Saturday, July 23, 2011 11:41:39 AM by I Shall Endure
Any comments on leftwing socialism being responsible for 200 MILLION deaths in the 20th century?

...cue crickets....

30 posted on Saturday, July 23, 2011 12:11:10 PM by newfreep (Palin/West 2012 - Bolton: Secy of State)
I was unaware than the camp in question was a youth wing of Norway’s Labor Party. So knowing that....yes, there is a grim logic to it.

47 posted on Saturday, July 23, 2011 1:50:26 PM by Mr. Mojo

We might consider giving Mr. Mojo the benefit of the doubt, since he could be giving a straightforward and dispassionate analysis of the terrorist's mental processes. On the other hand, he's on Free Republic.

Be afraid of these people. They represent where conservative American politics is heading, step by crazy heads-on-fire step.

Teachers! And other union thugs!

2011-07-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

A confused letter-writing campaign

The California state legislature is in Democratic hands, so it's trying to protect public-school teachers rather than firing them or stripping them of collective-bargaining rights. Political cartoonist Tom Meyer decided to portray this as selfish teachers hogging scarce resources in a time of emergency—at the expense of poor little children. (After all, every teacher saved is a student harmed.) Editorial cartoons aren't a good medium for nuance, but it was still a rather nasty effort by the normally moderate Meyer.

There was, of course, a flurry of letters castigating Meyer for his cartoon's ham-handed “teacher versus student” message. Just as predictably, there were a few that cheered him on. Here's one that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 19:

CTA's orchestrated outrage

I just received an e-mail from the California Teachers Association suggesting that I express my outrage over the recent political cartoon run in your paper. So here goes: I am outraged that every time the overpaid, self-serving, self-important CTA union bureaucrats get attacked, they try to turn it into an attack on teachers.

CTA does not represent students, period. For that matter, it does not even truly represent teachers. While every public school teacher in California is required by law to pay dues to CTA, only those members who pay extra to support political candidates of CTA's choosing are allowed to vote in CTA elections. Does that sound like representation to you?

Like virtually all organizations with power, their primary goal is securing more control over those issues they deem important (many of which have nothing to do with education).

Kinsey Blomgren, Porterville

Porterville? That's right in the middle of Tulare County, down in the Central Valley—the reddest part of the Golden State. Mr. Blomgren is undoubtedly one of those teachers who knows things would be better if the California Teachers Association went away and left him to the tender mercies of school administrators, most of whom are unlikely to take undue advantage of unrepresented faculty members. Most.

Then I saw a letter in the July 20 edition of the Sacramento Bee. Gosh, it looked familiar:

The real outrage on cartoon

Re “Cartoon is ignorant” (Letters, July 18): I just received an email from the California Teachers Association suggesting that I express my outrage over the July 14 Tom Meyer cartoon depicting how teachers were protected in the recent budget. So here goes: I am outraged that every time the overpaid, self-serving, self-important CTA union bureaucrats get attacked, they try to turn it into an attack on teachers.

CTA does not represent students, period. For that matter, it does not even truly represent teachers. While every public school teacher in California is required by law to pay dues to CTA, only those members who pay extra to support political candidates of CTA's choosing are allowed to vote in CTA elections. Does that sound like representation to you?

Like virtually all organizations with power, its primary goal is securing more control over those issues they deem important – many of which have nothing to do with education.

—Kinsey Blomgren, Springville

Huh. It looks like Kinsey has forgotten he lives in Porterville. Or did he previously forget that he lives in Springville? On the other (third?) hand, perhaps he moved from one town to the other between bouts of letter-writing.

Not only is Mr. Blomgren uncertain of where he lives, he appears not to understand that unions are accountable to their members—and Blomgren prefers not to be one. He pays a representation fee because CTA is obligated to represent him in any grievances he might file against his school, but he has chosen not to become a full member and therefore does not have a voice in choosing the CTA leadership. His choice.

I think it's probably a rational choice by Blomgren. The “political candidates of CTA's choosing” are never going to be right-wing politicians who attack public schools (like the one Blomgren teaches in down in Tulare County) and Blomgren would be doomed in his attempts to garner majority support among his fellow teachers for a reversal of CTA policy. One might as well try to organize chickens to endorse Colonel Sanders.

Thus Mr. Blomgren's complaint about “representation” is rather pointless. He has embraced what is certain to remain a minority viewpoint within his profession. He can rail against CTA all he likes, but it's not an anti-democratic organization. It's also not an anti-Democratic organization, which may be Blomgren's real complaint.

I won't deny that unions have sometimes descended into thuggery and strong-arm tactics, but that's pretty rare. Modern-day examples are not easy to find. (The pointing and screaming by Wisconsin's teabaggers is pure anti-union propaganda.) Fortunately, there's a dead giveaway for when unions start to go bad: They endorse Republicans.

Addendum

Today (July 22) a thoughtful letter-writer shares an informed perspective of the California Teachers Association and its role in representing anti-union faculty like Mr. Blomgren:

Clarifying CTA rules

Re “The real outrage on cartoon” (Letters, July 20): Whether or not the California Teachers Association does a good job of representing teachers and students is a matter of opinion for another letter; however, there are some problems with the facts in this letter.

First of all, every public school teacher is not required by law to pay dues. In each district, the teachers must vote to form a union, then vote whether they want to affiliate with CTA. Even then every teacher only pays dues if they vote for an agency “fair pay” agreement. Not all districts have unions, and not all local unions join with CTA; some affiliate with AFT or only have a local union. Secondly, CTA members are still voting members even if they opt out of paying for political action.

—Steven Smith, Rocklin

If he still balks at joining CTA so that he can vote for the union's officers, Blomgren could always consider moving to one of the idyllic “Right to Work” states where he could cheerfully work with lower pay and less job security. I hear Texas is hiring. He should wait awhile, however. God is still smiting Texas with a heat wave in disapproval of something or another.

Nearly there

2011-07-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

I saw this cartoon about teabagger politics on Daily Kos this morning and felt an irresistible impulse. For some reason, I just had to reprint it. (I wonder why.)

The closing of the Ring

2011-07-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

Thoughts about the San Francisco Ring

This summer the San Francisco Opera presented a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the gargantuan composition by Richard Wagner. Although there is nothing else like it, Wagner's Ring has somehow become the archetypal opera: the statuesque lady with horned helmet and spear is the iconic image that evokes grand opera.

As opera aficionados go, I'm rather eccentric. Rather than worshiping Italian divas and swooning over coloratura fireworks, I prefer the Sturm und Drang German repertory. I like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. The only Italian opera I've ever seen in live performance is Puccini's Tosca. The only French opera I've seen is Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. The great standards, like Bizet's Carmen and Verdi's Aïda, I know only from recordings and broadcasts.

But really: if your favorite opera composer's masterwork takes over fifteen hours to perform, how much else do you actually need?

The San Francisco Opera presented Der Ring des Nibelungen in three complete cycles. I attended the first one, which started on Tuesday, June 14, and came to a close on Sunday, June 19. It was my fourth Ring—and my best Ring.

Previous San Francisco productions of the Ring were more traditional, and I confess to being partial to faithful recreations of the composer's intent. Wagner left detailed stage directions for each of his operas, but almost no one pays any attention to them anymore. The 2011 Ring was a modern interpretation by producer Francesca Zambello. Despite my skepticism (and disdain for some of the production's details), the overall production and performances had me applauding with enthusiasm at the close of each installment.

During the Ring cycle, I sent regular reports to some interested friends. (Not so interested that they wanted to go with me, but interested enough to skim through lengthy e-mail messages.) I've reworked those reports into the following commentary on Cycle 1 of the San Francisco Ring. Reading this post will be a marathon in its own right, but here you can get an avid amateur's perspective on a gargantuan work of operatic art without leaving the comfort of your computer room.

Brace yourself. Here we go, into a patchwork quilt of descriptions, reactions, and quasi-insightful analysis.

Das Rheingold

The new production had several clever and quirky ideas, most of which worked pretty well. The opening scene in the Rhine river was introduced with a beautiful projection of wave swells and splashing water. In many productions the stage is enclosed by a sheer fabric—the “scrim”—which is all but invisible when the stage lights are turned high but which becomes opaque when the stage lights are low and the video projectors are using it like a movie screen. In San Francisco there was an actual screen behind the scrim which was whisked up into the flies when a scene began.

When the lights came up, the three Rhinemaidens were playing among the rocks and currents of the river bottom, with waves of stage fog concealing the ground. The evil dwarf Alberich appeared dressed as a vagabond with backpack and map, as if he were a treasurer-seeker. It's all part of Zambello's “American Ring” concept: Alberich is a gold-rush prospector seeking his fortune. I presume the part of the Rhine is being played by the American River near Sutter's Fort.

The entire floor of the stage lit up with golden lights when the maidens began singing the praises of the Rhine gold, the magical gold they're supposed to guard from malefactors. I immediately started wondering where the Rhine gold was, since the scene is supposed to end with Alberich stealing it. How could he steal the entire stage floor? This is how: At the climax of the maidens' celebration of their sacred gold, they reached down into the fog and lifted up a great glittering sheet, like cloth-of-gold, one Rhinemaiden at each corner and a bewildered Alberich groping for and finding the fourth corner. The maidens mocked him because only someone who renounces love forever can master the gold and wield its power (by forging it into a magic ring). He was so obviously desperately in love (or at least lust) with them that the gold had no meaning for him. Or so the foolish maidens assumed. Enraged, he ripped the sheet of gold from their grasp, renounced love, and stole away with their “precious.” (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

The gold sheet was a new gimmick that I've never seen in any earlier production of Rheingold, so I imagine it's original to this producer. Clever and effective. It also makes for a more dramatic exit for Alberich, rather than having him march off stage with a lump of gold-painted styrofoam held overhead.

Right near the end of the scene, Loge appears stage left and witnesses the theft of the gold. That's not in the stage directions, so it's another new touch cooked up by the producer. Loge is the demigod of fire and a master of deceit and trickery. In a later scene he will relate his encounter with the Rhinemaidens, so this cameo appearance is consistent with subsequent developments. It was a harmless production gimmick.

Scene 2 seemed to be set on the rear patio of a posh country home, with outdoor furniture (mesh-work chaise longues) and the gods dressed in the preppy outfits of the idle rich. Donner (Thor) had a croquet mallet instead of Mjolnir (the hammer of thunder & lightning). His brother Froh looked even more effete, with slicked-back blond hair and the aspect of someone stepping out of a garden party in The Great Gatsby, white duck trousers and all. Fricka and Freia were in long gowns, the former's outfit more flowery and matronly, consistent with her senior status. Wotan was rather more butched-up, as befits the king of the gods, in knee-high boots and a double-breasted blazer. The traditional eyepatch was in place.

It was odd that Donner and Froh were onstage from the start of the scene, since there's a musical cue later when they're supposed to rush in from the wings to save their sister Freia from the evil giants. The producer's decision to put them onstage early meant they had no lines to sing and no essential functions to perform, so they just hung around looking decadent, which they did pretty well. The whole scene is a marital spat between Wotan and Fricka, the latter upset that Wotan has promised Freia to the giants as payment for their construction of Valhalla. Wotan assures her that it was all a ruse, and that he plans to cheat the giants of their payment through some loophole. The giants made their entrance on a huge steel girder, which was lowered from the flies. They were in bulked-up overalls to make them look like big-ass construction workers as they demanded their payment. It was a good entrance, even if there were reduced to dangling legs from the perspective of those in the balcony seats.

Since the entire troupe of gods was already onstage, Freia didn't get to run frantically in from the wings, screaming that the giants are threatening her. Since the entire troupe of gods was already onstage, Donner and Froh didn't get to rush in heroically from the other side of the stage to attempt to rescue their sister from the advances of the giants. Zambello instead had them bound up from their seats on the lawn furniture and act upset, Donner fiddling (threateningly?) with his croquet mallet. (“Look out, you giants! I'll pop you a good one! See if I don't!”) It was not the most effective stage work possible, but they all sang well.

At this point, things got very interesting: Loge finally shows up. An irritable Wotan demands to know if Loge is ready to deliver on his promise to void the contract with the giants through some trickery. Loge replies that he agreed only to find a loophole in the agreement if one existed, but the giants had fully satisfied their end of the bargain. How then, could he be expected to find something that does not exist? Wotan is furious, but Loge remains coolly unperturbed. (The casting of Loge was superb. Stefan Margita was as smooth and slippery as Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister.) Wotan's power is based on the oaths and vows—including the contract for Valhalla—inscribed on the shaft of his mighty spear (hewn from the World Ash Tree). He cannot go back on his word without destroying the source of his divine strength.

Oh, is this rather phallic? I never noticed.

With Wotan and the gods at the point of despair, Loge plays his trump card: The giants want Freia because they crave some love in their lives (Freia is the goddess of love, just as Fricka is the goddess of marriage; funny how they're not the same). However, there is something even more desirable than love and he has witnessed it: the lust for the power of the Rhine gold. Would the giants accept the gold in lieu of love? The giants confer and agree they do not want Alberich to be ruler of the world (he is apparently their enemy, too) and they crave the respect that the power of the Rhine gold would give them. They tell the gods that they will hold Freia in captivity for the day as they await the outcome of Wotan and Loge's effort to steal the Rhine gold on their behalf.

Scene 3 in the depths of Nibelheim was appropriately hellish. Alberich has forged the Rhine gold into a magic ring and enslaved his people, forcing the other Nibelung to mine more gold on his behalf, which they are stacking up in mine carts, which they push about a stage lit with fiery red lighting. Alberich has forced his clever brother Mime to create the Tarnhelm, which gives a person the power to transform himself in various ways. Alberich uses it to turn invisible and strike the mineworkers by surprise, keeping them anxiously hard at work. Wotan and Loge show up and meet Mime, who laments that he wanted the ring for himself but wasn't able to master the Tarnhelm that he himself had built. Alberich appears and demands to know what Loge is doing there. Loge makes nice, reminding Alberich that he gave the Nibelungs the gift of fire, thereby enabling their forges. Alberich remains suspicious, especially when he recognizes Wotan. The king of the gods says that he and Loge have heard of Alberich's power and just wanted to see his accomplishments for themselves. Alberich preens. Loge intimates that Alberich's great power is insecure: What if someone steals the ring while he sleeps? Piqued, Alberich puts on the Tarnhelm and turns himself into a dragon, to demonstrate that no one could overpower him.

The dragon transformation was introduced with a flash of stage pyrotechnics, enabling Alberich to vanish offstage while the projection system fired up and displayed a sinuously oscillating pattern on the stage's backdrop, making it look like the stage was enclosed in the coils of a giant serpent. Loge and Wotan acted appropriately impressed, but Loge expressed further doubts when Alberich resumed his normal form. Turning into a big thing like a dragon was probably pretty easy with the Tarnhelm. It would presumably be much more difficult to become tiny, like a frog, and slip away through a narrow crack to elude one's enemies. Rising to the bait, Alberich demonstrates than nothing would be easier. Another flash of light and Alberich vanishes again, this time to be replaced by a small toad hopping in a spotlight on the stage. Loge gleefully grabs him and the gods leave Nibelheim with their captive.

Scene 4, the final scene, is back up at the country house. Alberich is back in mortal form. He is forced to use the ring to summon his minions to deliver his gold, which is stacked up on stage. Wotan then wrests the ring from him, whereupon Alberich curses the ring and flees. The giants return with Freia. In a new (to me) piece of stage work, she is obviously now smitten with Fasolt, the kinder giant who sings the praises of her beauty and gentility. His brother Fafner cares only about getting the gold. Fasolt says he won't be able to part with Freia unless she entirely vanishes from his sight.

Wotan (in a serious moment of weakness) agrees that Freia's own body will be the measure of the ransom and that the Nibelung gold must conceal it entirely to satisfy the bargain. (Loge should have objected, obviously.) In other productions, I've seen Freia standing in the middle of the stage while the other participants stack ingots of gold in front of her until she's no longer visible. In this production, she instead lay on the floor in the middle of a big square of cargo net while her brothers dragged over bags of Nibelung gold and stacked them around and atop her, concealing her. Given how many mine cars of gold were in Scene 3, I have to say that someone got gypped in Scene 4, because Freia doesn't vanish completely. (They should have been able to smother her many times over.) Fasolt cries out that he can still see one of her eyes peeking out from the stack of gold. (Actually you could see her entire face. At least, those of us in the balcony could.) Fafner sees the ring that Wotan took from Alberich and declares it's part of the hoard and must be put over Freia's face so that his brother can no longer see her eye.

Wotan objects, of course, but is eventually prevailed upon to surrender the ring. A brief appearance by the earth goddess Erda helps, since she warns Wotan of doom if he does not relinquish it. The moment the giants have the ring, they fight over it and Fafner kills his brother to take sole possession. (The curse is working!) While Freia weeps over the body of the dead Fasolt, her brothers help Fafner gather up the cargo net of gold, which is attached to a cable and hauled up off the stage. (I've never seen it done that way before!)

Donner now has his big moment, when he summons the storm clouds to clear the hazy path to Valhalla, smiting the ground with his hammer and causing a huge thunderclap. Mercifully, the croquet mallet has been set aside and in this scene he has a sledge hammer, which he picked up from the construction site. (Remember the I-beam? There was also a wheelbarrow and a couple of other construction accoutrements in Scene 2. If I were seeing this production again, I'd look for the placement of the sledge hammer for use in the final scene. I'll bet it was there somewhere.) With a nice bit of timing, the audience learned that the sledge hammer was wired with pyrotechnics, which Donner set off with a great flash of light at the moment of climax. (At least, I assume it was his job to set it off.) Froh then invokes the rainbow bridge (an actual bridge—or gangway, really—in this production; are they going to Valhalla or taking a cruise?) and the gods all merrily sip champagne as they promenade up the gangway into their glorious new home.

Loge, however, hangs back. He's thinking of whether there's new mischief he'd like to do.

And curtain.

Huge applause and lots of cheering. The biggest cheers of the night went to Loge. (I admit that I yelled “Bravo” when Margita took his bow.) The producer was not brought on stage to take a bow, which surprised me a little. Perhaps she was not in town. Normally a new production's creator is brought out so that the audience can boo and cheer (there are always guaranteed to be a mix of both).It turned out that she was saving it up for the final night of the cycle.

Die Walküre

I have seen Die Walküre more often than any other Ring opera, as it is frequently staged independently of the complete cycle. Back in 1981 I was privileged to hear the great Birgit Nilsson in the role. The new Walküre had a splendid cast giving a splendid performance. It was a rocking event.

The main gimmick in Zambello's production is that the valkyries are dressed up like early 20th century aviators (think Earhart) and arrive during the famous/infamous “Ride of the Valkyries” via parachutes, scooting across the stage dangling from lines and apparently landing just offstage in the wings, then running onstage to sing their lines. Pretty impressive. Too bad the actual dialog is full of references to horses (though the supertitles were careful to omit those so as not to conflict with the visual aspects of the staging).

Act I

Bereft of weapons, Siegmund flees into the woods to escape his enemies, finds shelter in a house occupied by Sieglinde, whom he does not recognize as his long-long twin sister. Sieglinde's husband returns and eyes Siegmund with suspicion and anger. Hunding had been summoned to aid his clan pursue an enemy, whom he now finds sheltering in his house. Hunding tells Siegmund that the code of hospitality protects him for the night, but they will fight in the morning. Later, when Hunding is in a drugged sleep (Sieglinde spiked his beer), Sieglinde comes back to Siegmund to point out that a sword is embedded in Hunding's ash tree, left there by a mysterious old man (Wotan in disguise) and clearly meant for the use of the hero who could pull it from the tree's trunk (and Hunding had not been able to). Siegmund and Sieglinde are already crazy in love with each other, initially not recognizing that they are siblings, but later realizing it when too far gone to care. Siegmund pulls the sword from the tree, claims Sieglinde as his bride, and they flee into the woods.

The San Francisco production was full of effective touches in Act I. Sieglinde's arms bore the bruises of domestic violence, underscored by Hunding's boorish treatment of his wife during the action, occasionally pawing at her or peremptorily bossing her about. Hunding's behavior was dialed back a notch from last year's debut of this production and was not distracting as it had been before.

For some reason, Zambello decided it would be a nice effect to have Hunding shackle Siegmund to the ash tree to await the morning's duel—as if it was likely that the hero would run away during the night. It would have been easier to dismiss that decision as a quirky choice by the producer had not Siegmund's fetters included a length of chain that kept clinking through his soliloquy. It seemed to me at one point that the tenor was minimizing his movements—whatever the stage directions might have been—to stop the damned noise. If so, good for him.

I have never been able to figure out why it is so difficult to set up the bit with the sword. It's supposed to be embedded in the ash tree in the middle of the stage. Siegmund isn't supposed to recognize it until Sieglinde expressly points it out, although at one point before her entrance Siegmund sees something glittering in the tree trunk but dismisses it without investigation. Zambello chose to keep the sword completely out of sight and then pop it into view when Siegmund is about to ruminate concerning the sword once promised to him by his father. If you're looking at the tree at that moment, you actually see it spring out. Boing! It's laughable, and I heard titters in the audience.

The business with the sword in the tree awaits an imaginative producer who will finally score a coup de théâtre by suitably dramatizing its revelation. It could be as simple as partially concealing the sword beneath low-hanging foliage, letting it glitter within the leaves during Siegmund's soliloquy and then blazing in the light when Sieglinde tears away the concealment. It's not rocket science, folks.

Act II

Fricka confronts Wotan over the incest of the wanton twins, telling Wotan that as goddess of the sacredness of marriage she must obtain vengeance for Hunding. She's had no luck protecting the sanctity of her own marriage, but she's damned if she won't try her best for those of others. Fricka recognizes the twins as Wotan's own offspring by a mortal woman and further understands that Wotan set up the sword to provide Siegmund with a weapon in his hour of need. Wotan explains that Siegmund is supposed to be a free agent who can wrest the magic ring from Fafner, which Wotan himself cannot do because he gave the ring to the giants as payment for Valhalla. Wotan is bound by his own bargains and cannot go back on them without diminishing his power. Fricka points out that Siegmund is Wotan's pawn, and not a free agent. No matter what her husband's plans might be, she cannot let his bastard son commit adultery and incest without punishment. Completely against his will, Wotan acknowledges that Fricka has the power of law on her side. He finally agrees that Hunding will strike down Siegmund—the opposite of his original plans.

Wotan instructs his daughter, the valkyrie Brünnhilde (yet another of his illegitimate children), that as arbiter of the battle she is to see that Siegmund loses and then escort him to eternal bliss in Valhalla. She is shocked at the change in plans, but reluctantly aquiesces in her father's command. She confronts Siegmund in the woods (or, in this production, under a derelict freeway overpass), where he is standing guard over a sleeping Sieglinde, and informs him that he is to die. He asks if Sieglinde will accompany him. Learning that she is to remain behind, he defies the valkyrie and says he'd rather go to the underworld than go to Valhalla without his true love. Brünnhilde cracks and agrees to go against Wotan's command. Hunding appears and the men fight. Brünnhilde calls to Siegmund to trust in his magic sword and smite his opponent. Wotan appears, discovering his daughter's treachery, shatters Siegmund's sword and allows Hunding to kill him. Brünnhilde seizes Sieglinde and the shattered sword and flees her father's wrath.

Act III

The noisy “Ride of the Valkyries” opens the act. The eight valkyries wonder where their sister Brünnhilde is. She then rushes in with Sieglinde and begs for help. Her sisters are horrified to discover she is fleeing from Wotan. They refuse to help her against their father. Sieglinde bewails her fate and begs for death, until Brünnhilde reveals that she is carrying Siegmund's son. How Brünnhilde knows this is unclear, but she is the daughter of the earth mother Erda and presumably inherited some of her mother's powers of divination. Sieglinde is given the shattered sword to keep in trust for her child, who will become a great hero (Siegfried); she thanks Brünnhilde and flees.

Brünnhilde remains to face her father's wrath. Wotan arrives in a fury and denounces Brünnhilde's disobedience before her sisters. He decrees that she will be banished from the ranks of the gods and from Valhalla. He condemns her to become a mortal housewife. (He really does. It's explicit in the libretto.) Brünnhilde shrieks in horror at the prospect of domesticity and her sisters flee in terror, quaking at the thought of sharing her dreadful fate if they do not abandon her.

Brünnhilde pleads for mercy and claims to have done only what Wotan really wanted her to do. Wotan eventually softens (but, like everything in Wagner, this takes a long time), but will not revoke the penalty of mortality for his daughter. He will, however, ensure that only a hero will be able to claim her as his bride. He puts her into a magic sleep, surrounds her with magic fire, and leaves her to be discovered by a hero brave enough to penetrate the flames and discover the sleeping maiden.

The End (except for two more operas)

The parachuting valkyries in Act III were theatrically effective and jollied up an audience jaded by cinematic special effects. It was engaging live action. The disjunction between what the women were actually singing and the supertitles was slightly irritating to those of us who knew the meaning of the German libretto, but much can be forgiven when you're being richly entertained.

The first scene of Act II had Wotan and Fricka confronting each other in a corporate boardroom, presumably in Wotan's skyscraper offices high above the high-tech world he rules. The anachronistic spear lay on the conference table and made one wonder whether CEOs would be more effective if they carried such weapons into staff meetings. I'm guessing yes. Brünnhilde jumps up on the table and teases her father with the spear, Nina Stemme being one Wagnerian soprano who can do that without collapsing the table.

The second scene of Act II was staged under a decrepit freeway interchange, with a conveniently abandoned car seat providing a perch for a moment's rest by the fleeing twins. Hunding's hunting dogs ran across the stage a few moments before the climactic duel, but the hounds were clearly well-trained animals who ran their course without dillydallying or causing the audience to coo over the puppies. Zambello may have removed the horses from Act III, but she added dogs to Act II. Does that balance things out?

The flames that surrounded Brünnhilde's resting place were the real thing, blazing up on three sides of the stage while projected fire danced on the stage smoke that billowed about. The fire marshal must have had an anxious night (or the opera management might have had an anxious night fearing he might shut them down). The word is that flame-retardant gloves and cloaks were used in abundance in the final scene.

The ovation at the end of the opera was thunderous. The audience screamed and pounded its hands to a pulp. Soprano Nina Stemme won rapturous acclaim from the attendees for her Brünnhilde. She established herself that evening as the unchallenged star of the evening and raised everyone's expectations for the rest of the Ring

Siegfried

Siegfried is a problematical work. The first half has no female voices at all (in fact, Scene 1 consists of two tenors), raising the risk of a bland monotony. Not so in San Francisco. The characters were well contrasted and the musical dialog was a constant to and fro, combative and stimulating. (No, it wasn't a boxing match, but sometimes it nearly came to blows.) The tenor in the role of Siegfried was a change from the originally announced cast. Ian Storey got cold feet about trying to master the role for the two concluding operas of the Ring cycle and withdrew from Siegfried, choosing to focus on Götterdämmerung alone. Jay Hunter Morris stepped into his shoes.

Morris was taking on a big job. In the eponymous opera, Siegfried forges a sword in Act I, slays a dragon in Act II, and sings a love duet with a Wagnerian soprano in Act III. Guess which task is more frightening? As the libretto makes clear, Siegfried knows not fear until he meets Brünnhilde.

Sounds about right.

Act I

Mime, Alberich's brother and the clever artificer from Das Rheingold, is upset because he can't repair the shattered Notung, the sword that Siegmund wielded in his death-battle in Act II of Die Walküre. Mime has the fragments because he gave shelter to the pregnant Sieglinde, who died giving birth to Siegfried. (Sieglinde had received the shattered sword from Brünnhilde, who carried it away from the battlefield.) Mime fosters Siegfried, thinking to raise the boy into a hero who will be beholden to him. The plan is to use him to destroy Fafner, the giant who has used the Tarnhelm to turn himself into a dragon to guard the ring and the hoard of Nibelung gold from Das Rheingold.

The Ring is full of people who try to manipulate others to do their bidding. Wotan does it because he wants to do things forbidden to him by the divine law inscribed on his spear. Mime does it because he is not brave enough to accomplish his goals himself. Fricka and Loge are the most successful string-pullers, Fricka because she has law on her side and Loge because he knows its loopholes. Wotan and—as we shall see—Mime are less fortunate.

Siegfried grows up into a restless young man who despises his guardian, but without quite understanding why. He's unaware of Mime's schemes and knows only that his foster-parent can't seem to live up to his reputation as a skilled craftsman. Why can't the little man provide his “son” with a proper weapon? Every new sword that Mime gives him shatters on initial use. Siegfried is too strong for Mime's handiwork. Under pressure, Mime finally reveals that Siegfried's real father was a warrior slain in battle and that he has the father's broken sword. He just can't repair it for Siegfried.

Siegfried tells Mime to try again and rushes off into the forest. While he is gone, Wotan shows up in disguise. He is now a vagabond who calls himself “The Wanderer” and makes himself at home despite Mime's efforts to shoo him away. Wotan challenges Mime to a question contest, the loser to lose his head. Mime asks Wotan three questions. In answering them, Wotan summarizes the plot of Das Rheingold. In return Wotan asks Mime three questions. In answering the first two, he summarizes the plot of Die Walküre. (So why did we have to go to those two operas, huh?) The third question, however, is “Who will forge Notung anew?” Mime doesn't know the answer. He recognizes Wotan now and realizes he is trapped. Wotan tells him that Notung will be reforged by the man who knows no fear, and that man will also be the one to kill Mime. The Wanderer departs.

Siegfried returns (there's some incidental business with a bear he drives before him) and finds Notung still in pieces. Mime is rather in pieces, too. Siegfried impatiently chooses to reforge Notung himself, which succeeds brilliantly (as expected). How can mere expertise compete with bumptious self-confidence and super-strength? Mime tells Siegfried that the boy is now ready for adventure and a quest against the dragon Fafner. Siegfried is intrigued, especially when Mime tells him that Fafner can teach him the meaning of fear, something Siegfried has never experienced. Mime hopes to kill two birds with one stone: If Fafner teaches Siegfried fear, he will no longer match Wotan's prophecy of Mime's future killer. If Siegfried kills Fafner, Mime will have an opportunity to steal the ring as well as some gold. It's a brilliant plan!

Act II

Siegfried kills Fafner (a bizarre mobile trash-compactor in this production), but doesn't learn fear. He accidentally tastes the dragon's blood, however, and suddenly can understand the conversation of birds. A little bird tells him to take the ring and the Tarnhelm from the body of Fafner, for the ring will make him ruler of the world. Siegfried also discovers that the taste of dragon's blood enables him to understand Mime's intent, which is to murder Siegfried and take the ring for himself. When Mime offers him some refreshment, Siegfriend understands that the drink is poisoned and strikes down Mime with his sword Notung. Wotan's prophecy is fulfilled. The little bird tells Siegfried that a bride awaits him atop a fire-encircled mountain and will lead him there. Off they go.

Act III

Wotan visits the earth goddess Erda to inform her that the reign of the gods is at an end. Erda is deeply disturbed to learn that Wotan has punished their daughter Brünnhilde for disobedience. How can a god who counsels defiance punish someone who takes his counsel seriously? Dismayed, Erda descends back into the earth.

Wotan is keeping watch over Brünnhilde's sleep when Siegfried encounters him. Wotan is initially pleased to see his grandson in person for the first time, but not does reveal their relationship. He at first intends to let Siegfried proceed freely, but then takes offense at Siegfried's casual dismissal of him as just another interfering old man—just like Mime. When Wotan tries to teach him a lesson by barring Siegfried's way with his spear, Siegfried cleaves the spear in two with Notung, reversing the outcome of the last encounter between Wotan's spear and Siegmund's sword. Defeated, Wotan stands aside. Siegfried plunges into the magic fire, finds the sleeping maiden, awakens her, and then learns fear. (Be afraid! Be very afraid!) They have a passionate love duet (at some length) and the opera ends in jubilant celebration. Happy ending! Happy ending! (But only for now.)

Complaints and quibbles

The tenor missed a horn cue in Act I. No big deal, but after missing the first phrase, he raised his horn to his lips and pretended to play the second phrase. No need. When he realized he had missed the cue, he should have ignored the rest of it. Letting the horn theme play in the orchestra was enough, as punctuation to Siegfried's statement that he had a splendid hunting horn. Yeah, we get it. Miming the playing of it was unnecessary.

The bellows in the forging scene was anemic, moving only a few inches when Siegfried pumped it. When you have a big-ass set of bellows on the stage for the forging scene, make that sucker travel, make it move. You want to make the audience believe it could pump up the forge to the heat necessary to reforge a sword that an expert like Mime could not handle. That detail was kind of sad. I did, however, like the sparks that were thrown off by the anvil during the hammering.

The tacky house trailer that served as the residence of Mime and his ward was perfectly consistent with the production and somewhat amusing. At one point Siegfried was sitting at the table in the trailer and pushed a mug toward Mime, which Mime trepidaciously accepted and began to sip. It was an action underscoring Siegfried's words that he had tried his best to endure Mime's company, but could never find him anything but irksome and irritating. Since Wagner's stage directions have Siegfried constantly abusing his foster parent, it is all too easy to make Siegfried appear as nothing more than a muscle-bound thug who terrorizes his diminutive companion. I appreciated that moment, which was an effective tonic for Siegfried's otherwise aggravating behavior. Yes, we're supposed to sympathize with Siegfried as the good guy because Mime is plotting his downfall, but Siegfried does not know that yet and it detracts from his character to have him behave purely as a bully.

The forest bird in Act II appeared onstage as a young woman. It is a soprano voice, but most productions have her singing from offstage, as Siegfried looks up into the branches of the stage set. While it added to the action onstage and made things visually more interesting, it took away some of the impact of the next act, where Siegfried is supposed to be shocked at seeing a woman for the first time in his life. Not in this production. He spent half of Act II playing around with a pretty girl. Brünnhilde is just more of the same. (In fact, the forest bird was prettier.) Some reviewers liked the added stage action, but I put it down as one of the production's major mistakes. If you really want the forest bird to appear on stage, put her in a giant chicken suit. (Now you know why they don't normally put her on stage.)

In Act III the supertitles were screwy. When the Wanderer announces to Erda that her “waker” has come to rouse her from her slumber, the supertitle said, “Wotan has come to wake you.” No, no, no, and no. Wotan says “waker” in the actual text because he is in disguise. Erda does not initially know who he is. By explicitly putting Wotan's identity in the supertitles (though not, of course, in the sung dialog, which is sacrosanct), the production obscured the parallels between Acts I and III, in both of which Wotan shows up in disguise and starts asking questions. In both cases, Wotan's respondent eventually recognizes the king of the gods and realizes that big matters are afoot. While the singers onstage in Act III were acting out one scenario, the supertitles were misleading the audience into thinking that it was another—just a reunion between old friends. Only we opera cognoscenti understood that it was a partial replay of the Act I drama. Ach! (Of course, need I add that it gave us opera cognoscenti a warm feeling of superiority over our less-enlightened neighbors? Maybe they did it deliberately so that we could enjoy our snooty disdain for their faux pas.)

The shards of Notung were wrapped in a strip of cloth that presumably came from Sieglinde's dress, as it matched her outfit from the previous opera. Siegfried often wears this token of his mother's memory as a scarf after Mime recounts the story of Siegfried's parents. It was an effective touch, linking the young hero with his heritage. (This device carried over into the next opera, too.)

There is a bit of dialog in which Erda specifically says that her vision of the future is clouded by earthly matters because she was “once” mastered by a conqueror (mich Wissende selbst bezwang ein Waltender einst). The conqueror was Wotan and the result was the birth of Brünnhilde. So where did the other valkyries come from? Anna Russell famously assumes that they are all Erda's daughters (“She then bears him eight daughters!”). This mysterious eight-daughter-gap in Wagner's Ring mythos remains unexplained.

Götterdämmerung

The fourth and final Ring opera was mercifully offered as a Sunday matinee, saving everyone from a post-midnight final curtain. (I'm sure concerns about overtime pay had something to do with the scheduling decision.) We emerged into the bright afternoon light following the performance, our heads spinning from the experience.

Briefly, Nina Stemme blew the doors off the production and left the rest of the cast blinking in astonishment—and doing their best to keep up. Unless she blows a gasket (damaged vocal chords being an occupational hazard in the world of Wagnerian singers), Stemme is on track to be the Brünnhilde of her generation. Perhaps she already is.

This opera begins with a prelude in which the three Norns (the “Fates”) recap the plot while spinning the web of fate. The result of the spinning is usually portrayed as a long rope, which the Norns pass to and fro during their weaving. In this “modern” Ring, however, the Norns are dressed in green clean suits like those that workers would wear in a high-tech fabrication facility (not quite the spacesuits of a microchip fab, but still complete with caps and goggles). Instead of weaving rope, they are laying electronic cable. There were lots of sparks when the cable broke and the scene came to an end. In the actual stage directions by Wagner, the rope of fate does break, indicating that the future is no longer predictable. Here it was apparently a short-circuit.

Act I

Brünnhilde and Siegfried remain madly in love since the end of Act III of Siegfried. Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the ring as a token of their love (the curse!). Brünnhilde gives Siegfried her horse, which—although it can no longer fly through the air as when she was a divine valkyrie—should be useful in Siegfried's career as a world-famous hero. We don't get to see the horse, of course, but it's nice that they're now acknowledging his existence after pretending in Die Walküre that parachutes sufficed.

She sends him off adventuring, because her true love for him forbids her from shackling a hero with domestic bonds. (Big mistake!) He goes gallivanting off, promising to return after performing more great feats. All he's done so far is slay the dragon, so his résumé is still rather thin for a hero. The new tenor, Ian Storey, was heftier than Jay Hunter Morris in Siegfried, although there was a marked resemblance to his predecessor. Apparently one night with Brünnhilde is enough to stimulate a significant growth spurt—and some aging.

The scene switches to the stately hall (a big glass and steel edifice) of the tribe of the Gibichung. Gunther and Gutrune want their half-brother Hagen (the son of the evil Alberich!) to tell them how to increase their fame among the other tribes along the Rhine. Hagen points out that Gunther lacks a wife and Gutrune lacks a husband. He proposes a two-bird-with-one-stone solution: Offer Gutrune to Siegfried and in return get Siegfried to breach the fire protecting Brünnhilde's mountain peak and obtain her for Gunther (since Gunther is not brave enough to do it himself). The Gibichung apparently already know that Siegfried is a great hero (perhaps Alberich has been feeding Hagen information), but they don't know that Siegfried has already found, freed, and bedded Brünnhilde. Gutrune expresses doubt that she can endear herself to Siegfried (even if she does dress in blood-red gowns and wears her pale blonde hair straight down to the middle of her back). Hagen reminds them that they have a love potion that will do the trick.

In a masterpiece of timing, Siegfried shows up, asking to meet Gunther, the son of Gibich. He wants to fight Gunther or be his friend. It appears to be a requirement of the hero business that you go along knocking over the more famous tribal leaders or making alliances with them. The somewhat cowardly Gunther agrees to be Siegfried's friend and ally—and offers him a drink. Gutrune brings Siegfried the spiked brew and he immediately forgets Brünnhilde and proposes marriage to Gutrune. (Gutrune, by the way, unlike Brünnhilde, is not Siegfried's aunt, so this is the Ring's biggest departure from its incest theme.) Gunther agrees that Siegfried can have his sister if Siegfried will obtain for him the hand of Brünnhilde. Siegfried is astonished to hear about the sleeping warrior maiden surrounded by fire atop a mountain peak, just as if he had never heard of it before. He agrees to disguise himself as Gunther (using the Tarnhelm) and woo Brünnhilde on Gunther's behalf. Siegfried and Gunther swear blood brotherhood, promising faithfulness to each other or hope to die (no, really; they declare themselves worthy of death if they break faith with their brother; Hagen does not participate, but now has an excuse to slay Siegfried).

Brünnhilde gets a visit from her sister Waltraute, who has fled from Valhalla to tell her that some mysterious hero has shattered Wotan's spear and his spirit. The heroes of Valhalla have, per Wotan's instructions, chopped down the World Ash Tree and heaped its timbers about the home of the gods, preparing it as a funeral pyre. The only way to forestall the impending disaster is for the ring to be returned to the Rhinemaidens. Brünnhilde recoils at the thought of giving up the token of Siegfried's love and declares she'd rather see Valhalla burn than relinquish the ring. (The curse!) Waltraute retreats in wailing despair. No sooner does she leave, then Siegfried appears in the guise of Gunther—to Brünnhilde's horror—and wrests the ring from Brünnhilde's hand. He tells her he is Gunther and that she is now Gunther's bride.

Act II

Except for the electronic environment of the Norns in the prelude, nothing is particularly shocking about the production of this opera to this point. Now the producer gets a bit cute. Hagen is usually depicted at the beginning of Act II as standing night watch. Zambello has him instead dressed in his jammies, lying on a big bed, and watching television, clicking a remote control impatiently. Gutrune is on the bed next to him, demonstrating an excessive coziness with her half-brother (and renewing the Ring's incest theme). Hagen shoos off Gutrune, turns off the TV, pops some sleeping pills, and passes out on the bed. Alberich appears and counsels his son in his sleep to remain true to the quest for the ring. Hagen drowsily swears it is his highest goal. Alberich then uses the remote control to lower the scene-changing curtain and the audience burst into laughter.

In the morning, Siegfried arrives to inform Hagen that their mission was a success and that Gunther will soon arrive at the Gibichung hall with his new bride. Hagen sounds the alert and the tribe's vassals assemble in a multitude, fearing that they are being attacked. Hagen lets them worry awhile, and then springs the news of Gunther's acquisition of a bride. He orders preparations for a double wedding. Gunther shows up, dragging a reluctant Brünnhilde along. (Stemme wore a very unflattering gown—with long gloves—that made her look matronly, quite a contrast to the flight gear that had been her earlier costume.) She is horrified to see Siegfried standing next to Gutrune and takes the opportunity to denounce him as a traitor. She also sees the ring on Siegfried's finger and demands to know why he has it, since it was presumably Gunther who had taken it from her the night before. No one has a good explanation.

Brünnhilde figures out it was really Siegfried in disguise and then tells Gunther to avenge her honor, since Siegfried sexed her up before turning her over to him. (Of course, that was the night before, but she doesn't clarify the timeline for the hapless Gunther.) Still befuddled by the magic potion, Siegfried is wounded by the accusation, since he deliberately remained faithful to his pledge to his blood brother the night instant. He no longer remembers having claimed Brünnhilde for himself earlier. Hagen conveniently points out that death is the price for betrayal of the oath of blood brotherhood, which Gunther and Siegfried entered into so hastily. To make things more dramatic, Siegfried swears on the point of Hagen's spear that he did not break trust with Gunther. Enraged, Brünnhilde seizes the same weapon and swears that he did. (At this point, the tenor singing Siegfried was losing his voice and Stemme's oath blew away his. The poor man was quite outgunned.)

Siegfried whispers to Gunther (just as well, that's all the tenor could do now) that he is upset at how Brünnhilde penetrated his disguise, although he reiterates his claim of innocence. Blithely telling his blood brother that everything will work out, he tells everyone it's time for the big double-wedding feast. He takes Gutrune by the hand and leads her into the hall, followed by the Gibichung vassals. Hagen, however, hangs back with Gunther and Brünnhilde, and the trio sings a song of vengeance against Siegfried and vows his death. Brünnhilde tells Hagen that Siegfried is particularly vulnerable in the back, since he lacks magical protections there (since he would never turn his back and run from an enemy).

Act III

The San Francisco Opera's general manager appeared onstage—never a good sign—and told the audience that the lead tenor had voice problems. (We knew!) However, the opera's staff physician has treated him and the tenor would bravely try to perform Act III. We braced ourselves for what followed and hoped that the tenor was exaggerating his distress (and correspondingly exaggerating his success if he did a decent job for the rest of the opera).

The Rhinemaidens are reduced to bag ladies in this production, stuffing plastic bottles into plastic bags for recycling. The Rhine is a dry bed littered with debris, including tires and a pickup truck's camper shell. Intentionally tacky. The debris was unfortunately noisy as the maidens stuffed it into crinkly trash bags. Quieter props, please!

Siegfried shows up and greets them, saying he's hunting with the Gibichung and got separated. The Rhinemaidens try to get Siegfried to give up the ring. He seems tempted when they ask him nicely, but recoils when they warn him the ring is cursed. He won't give them the gift as a ring if they threaten him. So there! The Rhinemaidens run off and Siegfried is joined by the rest of the Gibichung hunting party.

Hagen suggests that Siegfried cheer up the downcast Gunther by telling some amusing stories from his childhood. Sure enough, Siegfried launches into yet another recap, telling of his forging of the sword, slaying of the dragon, discovery of the ring, and slaying of Mime. Hagen then offers Siegfried some refreshment, having spiked the drink with a restorative that would bring Siegfried's memory back. Not realizing what was going on, Siegfried tosses back Hagen's drink and blithely continues his storytelling with his discovery of Brünnhilde and spending a rapturous night with her.

Gunther cries out in horror, believing that Siegfried has now confessed to betraying him. (Gunther is a bit dim, not realizing that Siegfriend's brain was scrambled by the love potion, despite having participated in the scheme to drug the itinerant hero.) Hagen takes advantage of the “confession” to stab Siegfried in the back with his spear. Mortally wounded, Siegfried takes some time to sing of his love for Brünnhilde. Wagner may have been a revolutionary in many respects, but he could not resist the tradition that fatally wounded characters must be allowed one more rousing song. (The tenor was struggling at this point, but he did a reasonable job of his last lines. Despite the curse!)

The passage known as “Siegfried's Funeral Music” accompanies the scene change back to the hall of the Gibichung. Hagen calls Gutrune to come greet her dead husband. She denounces him for treachery, since she was not part of the plot to kill Siegfried. Hagen goes to take the ring from Siegfried's body, but Gunther forestalls him, accusing him of trying to steal Gutrune's inheritance. Hagen strikes him down, so now Gunther is dead. (The curse!)

Brünnhilde appears, chiding the Gibichung for their petty behavior in the presence of the body of the world's greatest hero, conveniently forgetting that she conspired in his death. (She's now wearing a long coat that conceals her unflattering gown. The gloves are gone, too. It's a big improvement.) She orders the creation of a funeral pyre. In this production, the womenfolk of the Gibichung proceed to bring out trash bags and toss them into a landfill (presumably) which lies at the back of the raked stage (that is, they're tossing it over a cliff). Gutrune and the Rhinemaidens participate.

The cart bearing Siegfried's body is trundled to the back and he is dumped over the edge. That bit was rather perfunctory, unfortunately at odds with Brünnhilde's immediately preceding rebuke of the insufficiently grief-stricken Gibichung. (Those of us in the balcony were easily able to glimpse the tenor walk off into the wings after his dumping. Too much light backstage, folks!) It would have been so easy to position Siegfried's funeral bier center-stage rear, a guard of honor on each side, and then decant him rather more ceremoniously as Brünnhilde brandishes her torch overhead. But no. The staging had all the solemnity of dumping the old couch by the side of the frontage road when you think no one is looking. Ouch.

Brünnhilde sang the Immolation Scene, took a torch, and marched slowly to the back of the stage, going over the edge as the flames begin to rise from the landfill. No dramatic jump into the funeral pyre in this production, but Stemme's final notes were still ringing in our ears and they were good. Hagen dashed out for one last try to seize the ring but the Rhinemaidens put a trash bag over his head and suffocated him. He died surprisingly quickly for such a robust guy, but this is one of the few places that Wagner doesn't linger.

The maidens then rushed backstage as the flames died down (and the music of the river Rhine came up in the orchestra). They returned with the big gold bedsheet, the ring having been transformed back into its original form as seen in Das Rheingold. The gold has been restored to its river guardians and all is once again as it was.

At this point, Zambello decided to rub our noses in the symbolism just a little. A small girl appeared at the back of the stage holding a small sapling. She solemnly proceeded to the front of the stage and gently placed it in the ground, planting it to begin cycle of renewal. I sure hope it was an ash tree!

Several reviewers and commenters noted that Zambello had created a feminist finale to the Ring by keeping the men off stage for the Immolation Scene (except for Siegfried's body and Hagen's libretto-mandated final line). The producer also elevated Gutrune's role in the final scene by having her directing the Gibichung women in the preparation of the funeral pyre. Then, of course, there was the decision to have the Rhinemaidens appear before their customary musical cue of the Rhine's leitmotif in the score.

I was not unduly perturbed, although I think the Rhinemaidens have more dramatic impact if they arrive at their usual moment, revealing at the last minute that the river is about to reclaim its gold. They have no lines to sing at the end of the opera, so their impact is in their appearance. Zambello reduced them to extras as they prepped the pyre and then stood around waiting for their cue to grab the ring.

Having women take care of the Immolation Scene is unique to this production, as was the little girl with the sapling (not in Wagner's stage directions).

During the curtain calls, the first was reserved for Nina Stemme, standing by herself. The audience jumped to its feet and shouted its approval and gave her thundering applause. It took some minutes before it died down enough for other cast members to take their bows. Even the poor Siegfried got some sympathy applause. He wasn't bad (when we could hear him). Only when the producer came out did you hear booing from those who disliked the production. A group of especially noisy detractors were near me in the balcony. They did not hold back. Overall, though, I think the producer enjoyed the audience's approval.

Wolf in priest's clothing

2011-07-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hypocrisy 101

One of the buttons on my car radio is set to the local Catholic station. I punch it occasionally to see what my former co-religionists are up to. There aren't many surprises these days. Catholic radio is little more than an extension of the nation's extreme political right, an environment in which someone like Alan Keyes is considered a credible and worthwhile guest. It's convenient to sample the broadcasts in small doses until I reach the limits of my endurance and punch the news-radio or classical-music button.

One of Catholic radio's most recognizable voices belongs to Father John Corapi. His acidic baritone drips with contempt as he excoriates those who are supposedly corrupting modern society and exhorts his listeners to take up cudgels in defense of morality, purity, virtue, and motherhood. Corapi lays it on pretty thick. He likes to beat his breast about the sins of his youth and to offer himself as an example of overcoming one's personal demons. If he could do it, so can you! Fr. Corapi has no patience with lame excuses for not taking up one's cross and joining the church militant in the ongoing culture war.

It happens, however, that I am wrong to use the present tense. Corapi disappeared from Catholic radio during the spring and has now withdrawn from public ministry. His religious order has deemed him unfit to discharge priestly duties. The Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity—which uses the acronym SOLT—was not restrained in its rebuke of its wayward son:

July 5, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

From: Rev. Gerard Sheehan, solt Regional Priest Servant Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Robstown, Texas

Fr. John A. Corapi submitted his resignation from the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (“SOLT”) early in June. SOLT is a Society of Apostolic Life of Diocesan Right with its regional office in Robstown, Texas.

While SOLT does not typically comment publicly on personnel matters, it recognizes that Fr. John Corapi, through his ministry, has inspired thousands of faithful Catholics, many of whom continue to express their support of him. SOLT also recognizes that Fr. Corapi is now misleading these individuals through his false statements and characterizations. It is for these Catholics that SOLT, by means of this announcement, seeks to set the record straight.

A woman, well known to Fr. John Corapi, mailed SOLT a signed letter detailing allegations of Fr. Corapi's sexual activity with adult women, abuse of alcohol and drugs, improper sacramental practices, violation of his promise of poverty, and other wrongdoing.

After receiving the allegation, SOLT formed a three person fact-finding team to ensure that it handled this matter in accordance with canonical norms. The team included a priest-canonist, a psychiatrist, and a lawyer. Two were members of religious orders, and one was a lay Catholic. Two were men, and one was a woman. All three have national reputations and substantial experience in ecclesiastical processes related to priest disciplinary issues.

As the Society was engaging this team, Fr. Corapi filed a civil lawsuit against his principal accuser. He contended that she had defamed him and breached her contract. The contract, according to Corapi's lawsuit, contained a provision binding the woman to silence about him. He offered the woman $100,000 to enter this agreement.

SOLT's fact-finding team subsequently learned that Fr. Corapi may have negotiated contracts with other key witnesses that precluded them from speaking with SOLT's fact-finding team. Many of these witnesses likely had key information about the accusations being investigated and declined to answer questions and provide documents.

When the fact-finding team asked Fr. Corapi to dismiss the lawsuit, to forbear from foreclosing his mortgage, and to release her and other individuals from their contractual obligations to remain silent about him, he refused to do so and, through his canonical advocate, stated: “It is not possible for Father Corapi to answer the Commission's questions at this time.”

SOLT's fact-finding team has acquired information from Fr. Corapi's e-mails, various witnesses, and public sources that, together, state that, during his years of public ministry:

He did have sexual relations and years of cohabitation (in California and Montana) with a woman known to him, when the relationship began, as a prostitute; He repeatedly abused alcohol and drugs; He has recently engaged in sexting activity with one or more women in Montana; He holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock, and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of the Society.

SOLT has contemporaneously with the issuance of this press release directed Fr. John Corapi, under obedience, to return home to the Society’s regional office and take up residence there. It has also ordered him, again under obedience, to dismiss the lawsuit he has filed against his accuser.

SOLT's prior direction to Fr. John Corapi not to engage in any preaching or teaching, the celebration of the sacraments or other public ministry continues. Catholics should understand that SOLT does not consider Fr. John Corapi as fit for ministry.

Corapi's resignation from SOLT effectively terminates the order's investigation into its former member. Unless civil authorities take an interest in possible criminal behavior, the nature of which is unclear, Corapi can pursue his lawsuit against his accuser without interference from SOLT or any ecclesiastical body.

At this point, Corapi is still a priest, although one without a formal affiliation with any religious order. Under those circumstances, it is difficult for him to function as a cleric within the Church's hierarchical structure. He insists, however, that he remains a faithful Catholic and has issued a string of statements and denials of wrongdoing on a new blog, where he styles himself “the Black Sheep Dog” of the Church. Demonstrating his possession of a tin ear, he offers a Clintonesque denial of the charge of sexual impropriety:

I have never had any promiscuous or even inappropriate relations with her. Never.

Corapi also assures visitors to his blog that he still sees himself as having a vocation:

Wherever justice is subverted in the name of expediency, or through abuse of authority truly freedom-loving people should raise their voices against it. There is no shortage of such causes today. In the future the Black Sheep Dog will be doing what he can to sound the alarm and exhort the troops.

Woof.

No sense of proportion

2011-07-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Large and small insanities

As Douglas Adams has observed, the universe is so mind-bogglingly big that a sense of proportion can be a dangerous thing to have. That is, at least, if you want to maintain your equanimity and sense of self-worth.

Nevertheless, the absence of any sense of proportion appears to be one of society's major ills. It manifests itself in various forms of innumerate inanity and scientific delusion. I have three very different examples in mind, the toxic impact of which should be readily apparent to any minimally rational reader. Today I'll present the first one, which is a delightful mix of religion and pseudoscience.

Playing center

Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have cruelly quipped that Gerald Ford spent too much time playing center on his football team, looking at the world upside-down from between his legs. I wonder whether Robert Sungenis filled the same position on his high school's team. Whatever the case may be, he ended up as a dedicated exponent of the theory that he is the center of the universe.

Forgive me. I overstate the situation just a little. Sungenis is actually a geocentrist rather than an egocentrist (although I suppose it's possible that he could be both). An ultramontane Catholic apologist who is far outside the mainstream of Catholic thought, Sungenis is a Bible literalist who believes in young-earth creationism and argues that Joshua couldn't have ordered the sun to stop in the sky (Joshua 10:12-13) unless it circled the earth—and not the other way around. Logical, right?

Sungenis is considered an embarrassment to the Catholic hierarchy even though he is trying to defend its old accusations against heliocentrist Galileo Galilei. However, his diocesan bishop has deemed some of his essays anti-Semitic and has ordered him to stop writing such material. You'd think the Church fathers would be grateful!

I have encountered Sungenis before. Any Google search on Catholic apologetics brings up his “Catholic Apologetics International” website, although it has since been renamed the “Bellarmine Theological Forum.” I was reminded of his rabid geocentrism upon being directed to an amusing post on The Greenbelt, where The Ridger gently eviscerates the campaign by Sungenis to discredit Galileo. As she points out, “When Ken Ham finds you too wacky, you are definitely in need of help.”

To get a sense of how ridiculous it is to think that the entire universe spins about a fixed earth, consider the simple case of Neptune. The distance between Earth and Neptune averages 30 astronomical units—that is, thirty times the mean distance of the earth from the sun. Assuming that Neptune's supposed path about the earth is approximately a circle, we compute the circumference of a circle with a radius of 30 AU to obtain a distance of 60π AU. This is the distance that Neptune supposedly travels in a single 24-hour period as it wheels about the earth. So how fast does Neptune have to travel to complete that circuit in the allotted time? Since an astronomical unit is approximately 93 million miles, a little calculator work yields 730 million miles per hour. If we divide by 3600 (the number of seconds in an hour) to convert this speed to miles per second, we get a little over 200 thousand miles per second for Neptune's speed.

Oops. The speed of light is only about 186,000 miles per second. Unless Neptune has warp drive, it can't possibly be traveling faster than the speed of light.

Please note that we were discussing the simple case of a relatively close planet—one that shares the same solar system as the earth. Imagine how much more ridiculous the results would be if we merely extended them to the nearest star, approximately four light-years away. Or the Andromeda galaxy, about a million light-years away. (The folks in Andromeda must be as dizzy as hell!)

Of course, this refutation of geocentricity assumes that Einstein was right. I'm sure that Sungenis is prepared to contradict Einstein in his discussion of “Jewish science.” You know, perhaps we should revisit the “egocentric” issue in his case.

More help for Abby

2011-07-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Missed opportunities

Perhaps I should stop reading Dear Abby. I sense danger. It's gotten to the point that I can't peruse Jeanne Phillips' column without thinking, “Oh, girl! That's not what your mama would have said!” The temptation, of course, is to try to rewrite her every response. I'll indulge that impulse just a little today, but I really should swear off. This week, however, the low-hanging fruit was hanging pretty darn low.

DEAR ABBY: I apparently have a problem communicating with people. I have had conversations with colleagues, managers, friends—even my girlfriend—and have been told my words were too harsh and made them feel defeated. It's at the point where people are afraid before I even open my mouth.

I don't mean to be cruel. I just speak the truth as it comes to me and I don't sugarcoat things. Some folks appreciate my candor, but it's getting in the way of having decent relationships. How do I learn to communicate differently when I'm just being myself? The words flow naturally out of my mouth. Am I a jerk? —UNVARNISHED in Inglewood, CA

DEAR UNVARNISHED: You may be grossly insensitive—or you may have a disorder of some kind. (Forgive my candor.) Because you are having difficulty relating to others and it has become a handicap, you should discuss the problem with a psychologist who can help you to gain the tools for better communication.

Geez, Jeanne. Could you have blown a more perfect straight line? Try this answer on for size:

DEAR UNVARNISHED: Yes, you are a jerk. Stop being yourself. Try shutting up for a change. If “people are afraid” before you even open your mouth, you have clearly demonstrated a complete lack of consideration for the feelings of others. No one needs to hear every thought that crosses your mind. Use some self-discipline and stop the words that “flow naturally” from your mouth when they consist of such boorish statements as, “Damn, you sure are fat!” or “You look like hell. You sick or something?” or “It sure must be a bitch to find out your girlfriend was cheating on you, right?” I'm sure you learned to control your bladder although urine “flows naturally” from it. Try something similar with your words. If necessary, get help.

How's that for candor?

Later in the week we got treated to this exchange:

DEAR ABBY: For the past 10 years or so, at bridal and baby showers I have attended, blank envelopes have been handed to guests upon arrival with instructions to self-address them. This, apparently, saves the gift recipient time having to address envelopes to the gift-givers.

I usually set the envelope aside and don't fill it out, but last week the guest of honor's mother handed me an envelope and pen and stood there until I completed the task.

After spending time and money shopping for and paying for a gift, I feel insulted having to address my own thank-you envelope!

Can you think of an appropriate response when I'm asked to participate in this insulting new party ritual? Or should I stay quiet and accept that most people are ignorant regarding good manners? —INSULTED IN OHIO

DEAR INSULTED: How about this for a response: “After spending my time shopping for a gift, and my hard-earned money to pay for it, it is insulting to be expected to address my own thank-you envelope. If she likes the gift, she can address the envelope herself. If not, she can return the gift to me.”

It's like she's not even trying! Here are some alternatives, beginning with the short, sweet, and obvious one:

DEAR INSULTED: How about “After spending time and money shopping for and paying for a gift, I feel insulted having to address my own thank-you envelope.”

Pauline Phillips would not have been so tone-deaf as to reply to a correspondent with a lame paraphrase of the correspondent's own words. When the writer has already done your work for you, just point it out gently! Simple. And it's less insulting than giving the correspondent's own words a trivial rewrite. Put your stamp of approval on the original and move on.

Perhaps the writer should have approached Miss Manners instead. I imagine Judith Martin would have had a deft suggestion for a subtle response that eschews even a trace of overt rudeness. This is the best I could come up with for Dear Abby working in a Miss Manners vein:

DEAR INSULTED: Thank the mother-in-law effusively for the envelope and pen and tuck them promptly into your handbag. Resume conversation with other nearby guests. If she does not walk away in befuddled defeat and continues to hover over you, say “Oh, dear. Whatever was I thinking? You'll want your pen back, of course.” Give it back to her and perhaps now she'll go away.

The really incorrigible cases will resolutely ignore all the indications that they are being a pest and may even resort to giving you detailed and explicit instructions. Be gracious in your response to this boorishness: “Oh, you wanted me to perform a clerical task now, in the midst of this lovely reception. Please forgive me. It would never have occurred to me that you would be expecting such a thing! Just give me a moment, please.” Retrieve the pen and fill out your address on the envelope, but write “Occupant” in place of your name. If the indomitable mother-in-law notices and retains enough reserves of effrontery to point this out, smile ever-so-cheerfully and say, “Oh, heavens! I would never want to deny the lovely young couple the opportunity to add a nice personal touch of their own!”

Pauline Phillips used to claim that none of her Dear Abby responses were ghost-written. The same may be true of Jeanne Phillips, but the record suggests she should considering staffing up with a wordsmith or two. Anyway, that's my advice.

Exorcism for fun and profit

2011-07-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's not just for priests anymore!

There are two good ways to tell if a psychic is a fraud: (1) They all are. (2) They don't cringe at the name of Steve Rubenstein.

Who is this Steve Rubenstein, you ask? He writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. He has an engaging just-the-facts style that might seem out of sync with New Age woo, but his wonderfully deadpan reporting deflates all pretensions in a delightfully effective way. Have you heard the one about the swordsman whose blade was so sharp his opponent didn't realize he had been decapitated until he turned his head and the whole thing fell off? That's Rubenstein.

He sent some heads rolling in the July 6, 2011, edition of the Chronicle with an article titled “What's in your closet?” Read the whole thing on the Chronicle website (where its title was changed to “Cleaning houses with psychic Sheldon Norberg”). Below I present some choice excerpts for your delectation:

What's in your closet?

Steve Rubenstein
SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

There had to be a reason why a perfectly nice $1.7 million Marin County house wasn't selling. Maybe it had something to do with ghosts.

If so, it couldn't hurt to call in an expert. And there is no greater expert in persuading stubborn and obstinate ghosts to leave a haunted house than Sheldon Norberg, 48, a slender man with a shaved head who has been driving demons, devils and negative energy from Bay Area houses for the past two decades, at $1,200 per dwelling.

“I'm not cheap,” Norberg said, sitting quietly in a lawn chair by the front door to get a feel for what he would soon be facing inside. “But selling a house is a million-dollar transaction. Why take a chance?”

How true! I mean, his remark about not being cheap. The $1200 fee seems really clever—not such a round number that it seems arbitrary. Sheldon put some thought into that!

He sat with his eyes closed, his palms upturned, to enhance reception. At last he declared that this particular three-bedroom house, on a shady corner on the banks of Lark Creek, was by no means hopeless. True, there was negative energy on the top floor and in the basement. But nothing he couldn't handle.

“We are vibrating entities,” he said. “Realtors don't like to deal with these things. They think it's all woo-woo stuff. But prospective buyers get a feeling the moment they walk into a house. If there is anger, or sadness, or unresolved feelings inside, you have to handle it.”

Please tell us, Sheldon: At what frequency do we vibrate? Is it best measured in Hertz or kilo-Hertz? Perhaps even mega? For some reason, they never tell us. The “woo-woo stuff” is apparently really hard to measure.

Although Norberg neglected to inform Rosenberg about any specific frequencies he might have detected, the self-proclaimed psychic was otherwise ready to demonstrate his powerful talents to the Chronicle reporter. The house in Marin, it turns out, was full of anger and sadness. What's more, Norberg knew where the anger and sadness were centered!

[The house] was being sold, Norberg said, because the owners were getting divorced. After two months on the market and no offers, it was time to find out why. He headed upstairs, to the master bedroom. There he closed his eyes once more and declared the room to have been the site of conflict and sadness.

Okay, folks. You have to give Sheldon this one. His awesome sixth sense has manifested its supernatural acuity. He could tell the divorced couple experienced anger and sadness in the master bedroom.

As a professional psychic, Sheldon knows enough to pretty things up a bit with some Eastern mumbo-jumbo while he's at it:

This could be, Norberg said, because of the feng shui of the room, and its orientation on the north-south axis, its proximity to the nearby creek, the lack of sunlight and the heavy crossbeam that ran across the middle of the ceiling, cleaving the energy flow.

Also there was the divorce. Perhaps that had something to do with it too, he said.

“There is anger here,” he said in a soft voice, calling on his store of psychic powers.

We scoffers must stand in awe of such a demonstration, faithfully and reverently documented by the Chronicle's ace reporter. Who can doubt Sheldon Norberg now?

The owner of the house, a young woman named Rosemary, pulled up in her Lexus to check on Norberg and see firsthand what she was getting for her $1,200. (She had already paid $10,000 to a real estate stager to make the house look nice, and that had bought her a few bowls of decorative seashells and plastic lemons, so another $1,200, she opined, was just the cost of doing business.)

“I never used a service like this before,” Rosemary said. “But if it works, it's not really that expensive.”

Oh, Jiminy Christmas! The “real estate stager” has an even better gimmick than the psychic. For a $10,000 fee I would have supplied real lemons! For an extra $5000, I'd even toss in a few limes!

Although Norberg had already demonstrated his skills were almost up to the level of the real-estate stager, he continued to strut his stuff. Rosemary was there to provide first-person validation of the psychic's amazing insights.

Norberg stood in the bedroom where Rosemary acknowledged that she and her husband had themselves some pointed misunderstandings, and the psychic announced that he was feeling chest constrictions, emotional sadness and compressed energy. Rosemary nodded. Then he descended into the basement, a dank windowless storage space with a lot of junk lying around, and said it was not the most cheerful room in the house, either.

Speaking just for myself, I have to admit that I have always regarded dank, windowless basements as cheerful places, but I guess that's because I'm not psychic. Sheldon's preternatural powers can penetrate mere façades.

To ensure that Rosemary could see that she was getting her money's worth, Sheldon banished the basement's oppressive miasma.

He proceeded to sit down and close his eyes. The psychic said he does his best work with his eyes closed. It concentrates the energy.

“I feel the Earth shifting with the relation to the rotational planes,” he said at last. “The magnetic field has changed.”

There will be scoffers, I know. Skeptics will demand to know what the heck “rotational planes” are supposed to be. People who are not entirely ignorant of science will point out that magnetic fields can be detected and measured. The absence of appropriate electronic gear suggests that Sheldon Norberg prefers not to document his psychic manifestations with hard data. It's probably because any trace of doubt is exceedingly harmful to psychic powers. I'll bet Rubenstein had to be on his absolutely best behavior.

Norberg sat motionless for three hours, until the psychic heavy lifting was done and the house, he said, was clear. Afterward, Rosemary said the house felt pretty much the same to her as it did before, but maybe that was because she was “not in touch with the major energy channels.”

Rosemary is an absolute jewel, isn't she?

I'll admit, though, that Sheldon is starting to impress me just a bit. While earning $400 per hour while sitting stock-still may sound easy, just give it a try. You'll get the fidgets within minutes. Sheldon is earning his fee. (I'll bet the entire time he was thinking about the advantages of going into real-estate staging instead.)

And now—quite obviously—it's time for the happy ending! No newspaper puff piece would be complete without it.

Two days later, her real estate agent threw open the doors to the public for an open house. Rosemary had high hopes. Seventeen couples toured the newly energized property.

“But nobody made an offer,” Rosemary said with a sigh.

I'll bet Rosemary forgot to bury a little plaster statue of St. Joseph on the grounds. You need to bury him upside-down, for some reason, but it always works. You can get one for just a few bucks from your local Catholic bookstore. (I suspect that many Catholic bookstores are surviving on the margin provided by hordes of superstitious real-estate agents.)

Well, if the story can't have a happy ending, could it at least have a twist? Rubenstein digs deep into the story behind the story and comes up with a precious nugget:

Perhaps her optimism in Norberg was misplaced, she acknowledged, and perhaps her optimism in the real estate market was, too. According to the comps, which is real estate lingo for please-get-your-head-out-of-the-clouds, the house was worth not $1.7 million but $1.4 million.

I am not a real-estate expert. Neither, probably, are you. However, I have it on good authority that it is difficult to sell a house that is overpriced by $300,000. Imagine that!

“Hiring Sheldon, I was just covering all the bases,” she said. “It's good to have the positive energy. But we might have to lower the price just a little, too.”

You think? (Evidently not.)

A musician and a gentleman

2011-07-07T14:30:00.000-07:00

A musical interlude

As you may know, I bestowed my extra ticket to the San Francisco production of Wagner's Ring on the son of long-time friends. “EF” is a recently-declared music-composition major and I got to play the part of a patron of the arts by introducing him to the sui generis landmark of operatic composition. My friend Gene O'Pedia weighed in with a vigorous endorsement: “Neat that it's all in the space of a week, a concentrated dose of Wagner. Could be transformative. Like if EF starts the next school year as an engineering major.”

Good point. The experience could confirm the young student in his career goals or scare him off into some different field entirely. As it happened, the former seems more likely than the latter. An important factor in EF's opera adventure was his opportunity to converse with one of the performers in the orchestra pit.

We arrived at the War Memorial Opera House early enough on the evening of the performance of Die Walküre to catch most of the talk that was scheduled one hour before curtain time. It turned out to be an unfortunately dull affair—a flat and uninflected reading of an analysis “by some great expert for the edification of other great experts”—and I was glad we had missed part of it. However, the talk was presented on the opera house's main floor, so EF and I got a different perspective than the one we normally had from our regular seats in the balcony level. After the talk ground to its eventual end, I led my guest over to the orchestra pit so that he could check out the disposition of musical forces and ogle the conductor's stand.

It was still half an hour before curtain, so there were very few musicians in the pit, but EF was in luck. Although he is studying several instruments, his principal instrument is the cello, and there was a cellist at his post in the orchestra pit. EF promptly leaned over the railing and asked the musician about the cello part for Die Walküre. I was concerned that EF was committing a faux pas by bothering one of the performers, but the cellist seemed not in the least perturbed.

He came up to the rail and informed EF that the cellos had 79 pages of music to get through for that night's performance. He added that Walküre worked the cellos especially hard, having the same number of pages for them to perform as the massive Götterdämmerung, despite being 45 minutes shorter in overall duration. Upon finding out that EF was studying music composition, the cellist gently suggested that his future compositions might give the cellos a break by not emulating Wagner too much.

Although we did not know it at the time, EF's friendly advisor was David Kadarauch, the opera's principal cellist. He took several minutes to chat with EF and was generous in sharing his informed perspective on composition and performance. When he found out that we were sitting in the lower balcony, Kadarauch congratulated us: “I always tell my friends to sit there. It's the best location in the house for appreciating the music.” My young companion soaked it up like a sponge and it started the evening on a high note for him.

I am confident that Mr. Kadarauch does not follow this blog, so he may never see this. However, I feel that I witnessed something significant and praiseworthy. He probably did not think it was a particularly big deal to take a few minutes to encourage a young music student who hung on his every word. He was simply exchanging his performer's hat for a moment for that of a teacher. But it was a big deal. EF may be at the beginning of a long musical career. The kindnesses of those who have gone before him will shape and inform that career. Thank you, David Kadarauch, for giving that career an encouraging and appreciated nudge at its very start.

And I'm pretty sure it won't be in engineering.

Religion-crippled reason

2011-07-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

I guess God hates logic

Noah Hutchings is the superannuated leader of the Southwest Radio Church. His radio broadcasts are replete with numerological arguments (God the Master Mathematician) for various wacky Christian dogmas and earnest warnings about the imminent apocalypse. Hutchings isn't quite crazy enough to set dates in the manner of Harold Camping, but he demonstrates his lack of basic reasoning skills in virtually every radio program.

The July 6 installment of Bible in the News took President Obama to task for having issued a proclamation that designated June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.” Hutchings quoted a line that was actually from Obama's 2009 declaration: “I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions.... These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants.”

Hutchings draws the obvious conclusion from the president's statement: “In other words, President Obama says that homosexuals are better than heterosexuals.”

Yeah, I can see that. In a world where “equal rights” immediately equate to “special rights” when certain minorities are concerned, it makes complete sense that praising the qualifications of gay individuals is tantamount to proclaiming them better than straight people. If your brain is sufficiently god-rotted, you can follow this line of reasoning, too.

Hutchings went on to say, “ He has indeed appointed, according to reports, over 150 to high government positions—many more than heterosexuals.” Oh, yes. The president has fewer than 300 government positions to fill by appointment, so 150 LGBT appointments constitute a clear majority of Obama's administration.

I think the statements by Mr. Hutchings are as stupid as any I've ever heard. Perhaps he will now declare that I am therefore claiming he is more stupid than anyone else. ... Damn. This time he might be right!