Posole morning

On Saturday mornings, I try to make a big pot of something that will last a few days, because Mary works such wacky hours and we usually don’t have dinner together. Today I made posole.


(Note: we’re vegetarians, so I didn’t make it with pork, just Impossible Burger. I didn’t add jalapenos, since my wife has a more delicate palate.)

This got me to wondering, though: why do we USAians associate hominy with the South, and why don’t we eat more of it, since we’re swimming in corn in this part of the world? Hominy is just nixtamalized corn, very healthful, since it enables better digestion of tryptophan and assists in the production of niacin, but it’s an Aztec/Mayan food. Are Southerners more obliged to contributions from our Mexican neighbors than is commonly acknowledged?

Also, Minnesotans should be pre-adapted to like hominy — lutefisk is just nixtamalized cod, after all.

Please, tell me more

I can sometimes see the appeal of conspiracy theories.

SMBC

Think about it. He’s called Captain Hook, but there’s no way he was born with the name Hook. He was born with hands. And what character 21 years earlier and was about 21 years younger? Long John Silver’s coxswain: Mr Israel Hands.

There’s something compelling about connecting the dots and seeing the pattern, even if it is deeply stupid.

Important facts

Consider this:

  • It is almost my granddaughter’s birthday.
  • It’s the month of Halloween.
  • If I don’t get my shopping done in a timely manner, Christmas is the fallback holiday.
  • Her parents aren’t allowing her to get an animal pet.

Swish those facts around in my head, and then put this before my eyes.

There is a reason my wife does all the shopping for gifts, I guess.

Oh well, there’s still my grandson’s birthday in November. He’d love this.

The most ghoulish use of AI so far

A lot of people think I’m batshit crazy, says Justin Harrison of Grieftech.

I don’t. I think he’s a delusional ghoul.

Harrison has cobbled together a chatbot that uses an imitation of his late mother’s voice and predictive text built from her online communications, and he thinks that it is a cure for grief, because it enables him to talk to his “mother”. It doesn’t. There is no person there. It’s a kind of selfish version of grief, where he can deny her death and pretend it’s OK because his superficial, fake emulation of his mother can pay attention to him. It’s gross and creepy.

In the last few years, I’ve lost my mother and a brother; in years gone by, I’ve lost my father and a sister. They’re dead. The grief comes from the loss of living, human, thinking, behaving human beings who can’t be resurrected by some fraud with a collection of words they may have uttered. But this shallow idiot thinks a chatbot is a substitute.

Harrison is being interviewed, and he thinks he’s being clever by throwing some publicly recorded videos of his interviewer into the chatbot’s database, and then conversing with the computer. The interviewer is not impressed. So Harrison and some other team member argue with him to say that the computer used a spot-on turn turn of phrase. I guess if all we are is a series of turns of phrases, then the simulacrum is perfect. Except we aren’t. There’s no person, no thinking mind, behind the chatbot.

Then the interviewer goes off to talk to a series of people: one who imagined seeing a dead person after taking drugs, another who dreamed that they were visited by the ghost of their father, a medium who claims, with many weird jerky expressions, that they can communicate psychically with a friend. They’re all the same thing: frauds, liars, or deluded people who have convinced themselves that their loved ones are nothing but superficial reflections of their own minds. Justin Harrison is just more of the same, a phony like all the other phonies who have leeched off other people’s honest grief for profit.

After I’m dead, at least I’m reassured that no ghoul is going to be tormenting me with banalities; I’ll be gone. Don’t be fooled that my chatbot copy’s banalities are coming from me, though.

Do they just hate animals?

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, promoter of Project 2025, and generally evil dude, murdered a neighbor’s dog. Just flat out killed it with a shovel.

Speaking to the Guardian, then-chair of the history department Kenneth Hammond, along with other witnesses, described the story as unsettling but noted that they did not press Roberts for further details at the time.

Hammond told the newspaper: “He was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem.”

Marsha Weisiger, another professor at the university, recalled Roberts sharing the story at a dinner: “My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it.”

She added that Roberts also mentioned considering killing the dog’s puppies.

He wanted to kill the puppies?

OK, now the story about Haitian immigrants makes a little more sense. It didn’t happen, it’s just projection and fantasies of a gang of animal-hating monsters.

Weekend? What’s that?

I have noticed something terrible about my semester so far. My weekends have disappeared. Yeah, I actually know what they are — I’m supposed to get some time to rest, but instead I find myself sucked into a terrible time.

The scene outside my house on Saturday night, as I imagine it. (Probably not to scale.)

One little thing: apparently, some students have a party house on my street, and every Saturday night/Sunday morning I’m going to be awakened by young people having fun. 2am: a flock of girls stroll past my front window, laughing loudly and getting into an excited discussion. 4am: a mob of boys are getting heated about sports, and bellow slogans at each other. Those I can live with, but what drives me nuts is the rude person who is shuttling people to and from the party, who has to honk their horn to let them know they are waiting. Some advice: get out of your car, walk to the door, knock, have some pleasant conversation with the party-goers, then drive people about quietly. There’s also someone who revs their engine and races up College Avenue. Stop that.

These are minor disruptions. The bigger issue right now is that I’m teaching a new class this year, and my weekends are consumed with composing new lectures, which I can do in the time I have available, except that my brain doesn’t stop at 10pm to let me sleep. I go over and over these lectures all night long, spiced up with cars honking and chattering passers-by. Here it is, Monday morning, and I’m worn out. I go to work to let my brain relax into a routine…but not to sleep, unfortunately.

Now I have to go to class and somehow talk to them about the contrast between Bacon’s confidence in induction and Hume’s doubts about the same. Good thing I’ve been rehearsing it all night long!

Pre-Fall

I went for a walk this morning. I see that we’re in that transitional phase between deep summer and inescapable Fall. We’re not quite into Fall yet, but the signs are clear.

The trees are still green, but here and there we see blotches of yellow.

If you ask me, the weather is nearly perfect: sunny, warm, but not unpleasantly so, with cool breezes (although we do occasionally see fierce thunderstorms). I wouldn’t mind if the weather were like this year around, but the trees know better, and they know what’s coming. They’re making preparations.

I’m also seeing brown leaves piling up curbside, blown there by the wind, so I know some trees are shedding leaves already.

The more fragile forbs are taking it even further. The flowers are losing their petals already. The milkweed we planted in our yard to feed the monarchs are reduced to brown, rustling stalks.

Get ready. October is almost here.

One of those movies where I was left wondering, “What did I just watch?”

Uh-oh. I just learned that Grave of the Fireflies is streaming on Netflix. It’s a magnificent movie, but I don’t know if I could cope with the painful catharsis of seeing it again.

I took my daughter to see it years ago; I should ask her if she considers that a horrific instance of child abuse, or an opening of her emotional experiences. Or if she’d take her daughter to see it.

Here’s someone arguing that You Should Show Grave of the Fireflies to Your Kids. They make a good case.

It is okay for children to experience sad and even scary stories. In fact, doing so in safe environments is extremely healthy! Feeling sad allows us to learn empathy so we know how ourselves and others should be treated. The need to healthily experience sadness is literally the entire point of the movie Inside Out — a movie made with child audiences in mind — which will probably get its importance across better than any short paragraph I could write here. Sadness is an inevitable part of life, why would we want to leave children ill prepared to deal with it?

If the continued relevance of fairy tales and Goosebumps Books didn’t make it clear, stories that safely scare kids as part of consensual fear experiences are healthy for their development too. As psychologist Emma Kenny explained, “when you are reading a scary story to a child, or they’re reading to themselves, the child has got a level of control — they can put it down, or ask you to stop. And the story can raise a discussion, in which they can explore and explain the way they feel about a situation.”

I suspect that the kids could cope with the experience better than many parents, including myself.