Attention spans are ridiculously short

Hey! Remember these hot news stories?

There are probably some other major events, but I forgot them.

Can an entire country, or possibly an entire species, come down with acute Alzheimer’s disease?

A geography lesson, with automobiles

A few fleeting thoughts about these maps:

  • I notice that the two states in which I lived the longest, Washington and Minnesota, are among the safest. Coincidence? I think not.
  • I have driven across North Dakota and Montana and Idaho. Those bloody dark colors do not lie, although they and Wyoming are also among the more thinly populated states.
  • What’s going on in the deep South? Those are places I’ve rarely visited, again suggesting the importance of my talismanic presence.
  • Of course, everyone in Europe must be better drivers than most Americans. Or, possibly, they are sensible and don’t drive as much.
  • I am intrigued by the mysterious vast empty space in the North Sea. Is it possible that a hidden land mass lurks somewhere in the open ocean there?
  • Avoid Wyoming at all costs.

Taken in by a trolling parody

I’ve deleted the part of the previous post where I was fooled by a parody account. It seemed plausibly extreme — in a party that includes Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene it’s become almost impossible to tell reality from insanity — and I saw it cited in multiple places, but I didn’t check thoroughly enough.

That kind of parody account is taking advantage of a tragedy to get laughs at the expense of a political opponent, and whoever they are, they are scum.

I was informed that it was bad earlier this morning, and I would have taken it down earlier, but I was off at the optometrist’s to get my eyes checked. Even now I’m mostly blind from the eye drops, so I have to stop here with my mea culpa.

Bring on the pain!

I’m beginning a course of physical therapy this morning — my back pain is currently at manageable levels, so it’s time to work it over and get my core up to a better state for the long term. I am not looking forward to it, but it would be nice to get into a stable shape.


Hey, I’m back already, and that wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined. I pictured brutal gym coaches yelling at me as I worked out on big heavy machines, but it wasn’t like that at all. I got an ultrasound treatment of my lower back, and then a nice firm back massage (it was difficult to stay awake), and finally we ran through a set of 3 stretching exercises I have to do every day. They were exercises I can do lying down in bed! I’m also supposed to continue taking long walks, but I was doing that anyway.

Now the only danger is that I’m feeling so relaxed that I want to go take a nap.

Know wonder we struggle with French pronunciation

Maybe if I had more French, I’d be able to appreciate these more. There exists a book of Mother Goose rhymes written by Luis d’Antin van Rooten that has to be mind-bending if you are bilingual.

His book Mots d’Heure Gousses, Rames, as you might expect from the title, is written in French – but rather odd, archaic-sounding French. The book ostensibly contains a collection of poems, which have scholarly footnotes attached to them. In fact, the brilliant idea behind this book is that if you read the French poems aloud they sound exactly like English nursery rhymes spoken with a French accent. This is called homophonic writing and here’s an example from the start of the book:

French poem Nursery Rhyme
English translation
Un petit d’un petit

S’étonne aux Halles
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu’importe un petit
Tout gai de Reguennes.

Humpty Dumpty

Sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty
Had a great fall.
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty
Together again.

A child of a child

Is surprised at the Market
A child of a child
Oh, degrees you needed!
Lazy is he who never goes out
Lazy is he who is not led
Who cares about a little one
All happy with Reguennes

That almost makes me want to learn French just for the wordplay. My second language was German (now extremely rusty, I’m afraid), and I don’t think you could do anything similar, because the pronunciation is so close to English already. I wonder if you could do something similar with Italian?

Neurotically evil cat gets revenge

My wife is away for a while, being a grandma to Iliana. That would be fine with me, for a little bit at any rate, but our cat is not taking it well. The evil cat does not like change. On Saturday night, she leapt into our bed while I was sleeping, snuggled down in Mary’s spot, and then at 3am started horking up vomit all over the sheets.

So last night I banished her from the bedroom altogether. The whole rest of the house was hers to possess.

I get up this morning to find…

She had puked in the hallway.

She had barfed in the bathroom.

She had ralphed in the dining room.

She had upchucked in the kitchen. The kitchen was her masterpiece — she had tossed her cookies and then gone back to her full food bowl, chowed down on it, and then heaved up the barely digested contents of her guts all over the place.

I know it’s not pleasant to read about, but pity me, who has to clean it all up.

I guess I know which human in our household she misses the most.

The Northman — just a bit too down home for me

I count two films by Robert Eggers as just about the best movies of the last decade — The VVitch and The Lighthouse — they’re thick with an otherworldly atmosphere and a fearfully weird kind of horror. So of course tonight I had to go see The Northman.

It was OK. Not as compelling as the other two movies, but I enjoyed it as a grim, fatalistic saga of bloody revenge. I think it was less exciting to me because the primary elements of the story — howling with the wolves, vengeance, berserker rages, betrayal, and vicious fights against the backdrop of an erupting volcano — were so familiar. That’s the mundane experience of growing up in a Scandinavian-American family, don’t you know.

Also, finally, we get some affirmation of our religious beliefs. Yes, when I die in battle, a Valkyrie will descend to carry my soul into the sky to Valhalla, where I will spend eternity feasting and fighting. I saw it in a movie now, so you know it has to be true.