Subtrahend

Thursday, July 31, 2003

· A few years ago one of my best friends died, and I (of course) did my best not to think about it, until one day I was sitting in a coffee shop and, since it was March 17th, the radio played the old song "Danny Boy". Ostensibly that song is about some old guy thinking of his son, who has gone away to America. But if you think about it, it's about any human relationship; because things change, and we're not who we were.We're no longer who we thought we were, and neither are our friends. Every day that passes changes us amd the people around us, and so you can't expect to see things the way they were.

Back to my friend: well, we actually had this conversation at his death-bed:

"I'm dying , you know."

"Yes, I've heard. That's why I'm here."

[Then some more jabber about my laziness, and the fruits thereof].

"Hee-hee-hee!"

"Ha-ha-ha!"

And we laughed like schoolboys at this whole problem of his dying, and I rather felt that he treated our time together as a kind of dress-rehearsal for our real life. Maybe that's not a bad way of looking at it

— posted by P | at 9:06 AM | |

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

· Well, back to the real worlds, I guesss (blats, I wish I knew hopw to typo): Angua has been justifiably angry (if I may be so bold) about this story:

Will the Canadian government give the man the

Bill Sampson

Ahmad Sa'id Khadr

Zahra Kazemi

Well, I don't know about you, but it seems to me ... we've never been big on being sore-heads in this country. Go and take pictures of people committing genocide (or sociocide, which is the same thing), but their people may kill you, and there's nothing you can do about that. Interesting — we've very few fotos of Stalin's gulags or Castro's, and only (of course) the post-War pictures of Hitler's, because the really oppressive regimes don't even let you anywhere near their "problems". To get any real satisfaction out of the Iranians, it would mean we go to war with them, right now, tomorrow, and we can't. So either we cough up some 50 bil. p.a. on our armed forces, or we stop whining. Because no-one will look after Canadian citizens abroad except us.

— posted by P | at 10:01 AM | |

· A few weeks ago some atheists were patting each other on the back and marveling at how wise they were. You can read about it here. Yet there are some things to be said about belief.

To be embarrassingly frank, I don't know anything at all about electricity or thermodynamics [sp?], and I am profoundly ashamed of that. I was no good at high school arithmetic, however, so there was really not much point in further study of those matters. I used to think that the word "arithmetic" could be etymologized as "arithmo-emetic".

But if I now set my oven at 425 F., and the little light goes off, I am convinced that my oven has, in fact, achieved that heat. I open the door and find it to be pretty hot; yet — is that really 425 F.? I've no way of knowing. It feels hot enough for most frozen food purposes, but I couldn't tell you why I think that. So I rely on my instruments, which seem to imply "425 F.", and I believe them, and I put my pizza pockets into the oven, fairly sure that they will turn out pipin' hot in 15 minutes. Then I look at my watch, and say, "Okay, h'mm, how fast is it running? Well, okay, I think I can tell when 15 minutes will be up." But my watch is no chronometer. It could be a bit fast.

Of course, this type of argument has been made a million times before. The nub of my gist, however, is that I do this a hundred times a day, for very small things, and so does everyone else. So what about doing this once, for a very big thing?

Next: the problem of the gulf. There is a nice poem by Baudelaire entitled "Le gouffre". Since all that copyright stuff is probaby way over (it's not like it's the latest release of some Cape Breton fiddler, or something big like that), here's the whole text:

It's an interesting poem on several levels. Pascal thought that human reason could not explain everything in our lives, because (I believe) ambuiguity and faith are not topics to be dealt with by logic. That's what I understand by Baudelaires's reference to "Pascal's Gulf". But think also of the horror this causes him: "J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou." It's the emptiness, the nothing, and (despite what one gets from 2001), the big emptines of our universe that horrifies us. I'm advised that only 4% of the universe consists of actual stuff — rocks and vast explosions. Then there's another pitiful percentage of stuff that you can't even see and therefore not worth talking about, and then the rest is nothing. I think that's the main thing that makes people unhappy. And this made me think of a bit in the New Testament:

would come

So there is a big gap or gulf or something between me and perfect knowledge of things. Between me and everything. I think that story implies that that's normal. There are gulfs all over the place, and we should acknowledge them, and maybe do something about them.

— posted by P | at 8:12 AM | |

Monday, July 28, 2003

· At the Movies:
Truffaut's Day for Night (La nuit américaine) (1973) seems even better with the time that has elapsed. I had forgotten that towards the end one of the older actors (played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, known for Hôtel du Nord, Assignment in Brittany, The Cross of Lorraine), is reported to have died in a car accident, and the narrator explains that his death marks the end of a whole way of making movies. He says something like: "People will film on the streets instead of in studios, with no scripts." He also says that what a director does all day is answer questions, because people keep coming up to him with problems: "How do you like the wig? Too light?", "What will we do about insurance for so-and-so?", "How do you like this candle-effect?", "Which car do you want to use for ...?", etc. And then he acts as a confessor to most of his actors, and a defenceless employee to his producer. The most affectionate movie about movies I have seen. It also features Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jaqueline Bisset, and Dani.

2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)
I've seen this several times but I still don't get it. Where is the astronaut supposed to be at the end? How come he's in the space pod instead of the main vehicle? You'd think the space pod would have extremely limited range, but it appears to be zooming along at great speed past all kinds of nebulae and space neon. But I'm not even going to wonder about the mysterious black box, which looks as if it contains a giant's Ikea kit. Another small quibble: their in-flight meals consist of plastic trays containing different-coloured portions of peanut butter, Cheeze Whiz, pureed squash, and some other pastes, to be eaten with a tiny shovel. I say if you can send men to Jupiter and beyond, you can darn well come up with something decent for them to eat. They're going to be up there for several years, and you're giving them baby food? Even pizza pockets would be better.

The video I saw comes prefixed with the original theatre trailer, and you can enjoy the 60's style voice-over: an authoritative baritone rapping out the movie's argument, almost like a news bulletin. So different from the modern, unctuous, slow-talker who seems to be so acceptable now. (Although the best trailers now don't have voice-overs; just really loud music, cars crashing through plate-glass windows, and two-fisted gunmen in sunglasses wasting ammo).

— posted by P | at 8:05 PM | |

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

· The Tao That Can Be Named Is Not the Eternal Tao (and Why Would You Think It Could Be?):
About health care, you have to consider that it takes the government five or six times as much money to do a thing as it would take you or me. It just is that way, and you have to factor that in. So in order to improve any government thing, you're always going to need more money. And then you're going to need more money after that. And don't forget, it actually costs money to get the money. It might cost more to get the money than the money spent on the thing itself. And then you have to pay people to talk about how well the money has been spent.

— posted by P | at 2:33 PM | |

· As I was listening to all the grumbling about uranium and Saddam Hussein, it seemed to me that something people don't talk about much is the big difference between war and terrorism. Someone came up with the term "asymmetrical war", to address the kind of war that will have to be fought against terrorists, but that's a bit like saying "asymmetrical love" to describe a situation in which one of the principles is bored. It's not really a war unless both sides are fighting a war.

People only embrace terrorism when they have nothing better to do: it's not a strategic option, and it can't lead to anything. People are only fighting a war, properly speaking, when they have some plan of getting from A to B, no matter how improbable. That's why you can't negotiate with terrorists: not because it's immoral (although it is), but because there can be no practical point.

Anarchists and revolutionaries of the old school, by contrast, seem to have thought that they did have real goals. They reasoned that blowing up the tsar could bring about some massive political change. When the Arabs became convinced they couldn't win a war against Israel, they gave up on the idea and devoted their remaining militant energies to incidental, attention-grabbing outrages. I think the first clear example was the murder of the Olympic athletes at Munich. What possible military goal is served by attacking an Olympic team? It's entirely symbolic. Although people are killed, and many lives are ruined, these attacks are of no more military value than burning the enemy's flag. In this case, our options are limited in one sense, but perhaps a good deal more abundant than we think.

— posted by P | at 1:04 AM | |

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

· At the Movies:
Fritz Lang's M, made in 1931, stands up pretty well after all these years. It's still difficult to have a final opinion about it. A disturbing quality is its ability to make the viewer at the outset follow the police and the underworld in their separate manhunts for a child-murderer, and then, near the end, start to have second thoughts about their quarry, played by an agonised Peter Lorre. The movie also includes famous German actors of the time: Otto Wernicke as the fat, crafty police detective who smokes huge cigars, a role he resumed in the Dr Mabuse series; Gustaf Gründgens, the German Laurence Olivier (and model for the main character in István Szabó's 1981 Mephisto); and Paul Kemp, the popular comedian.

A few other notes: (1) all the men smoke, pretty much non-stop: in the police station, bars, offices. Not in the final scene, though; maybe because of the tense courtroom drama. (2) The Berlin of the period looks authentic, with its courtyards, tiled stoves and attics full of drying sheets, although it all seems to be the inside of a movie studio.

Lang's favourite theme, the modern city and its mythical , all-powerful underworld, might derive from a poorly-written novel by Norbert Jacques, entitled Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (Berlin: Ullstein, 1920; an earlier edition than the one mentioned at the link above). He also travelled and wrote some books about that.

— posted by P | at 8:27 PM | |

Saturday, July 12, 2003

· Vladimir Kormer is an interesting writer. He wrote a novel called Krot istorii, which I doubt has been translated into English.

Oh. My cat. Every so often she goes into whingy mode:

Waah?

What? I've replenished your bowl and washed and filled your water dish; what is it now?

Waaah?

What - you see I'm busy right now.

Waaaaah?

But I'm - oh, all right then.

(She had to jump into my lap.)

— posted by P | at 8:37 AM | |

Friday, July 11, 2003

· Good news, for a change. Boy, 13, rescues cat from hanging , from the Halifax Herald. The link may rot, so you could go to the main thing and search for the story. In general, what happened was some bad teenagers hanged a cat and this 13-year old boy saved him by giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation! Cats have a sort of snout, rather than a mouth, so how do you go about reviving them? Anyway, it's a good story. The young hero looks not unlike the boy in "King of the Hill", who saved a pig in one episode.

One thing I do know is that cats have terrible bad breath.

I think, if I may say so, that this this event justifies a certain optimism. Among us there are kids who will go and try to help a suffering animal.

— posted by P | at 2:59 PM | |

Thursday, July 10, 2003

· I had a nice game of pool the other night. It was fun, but of course that game with the fifteen numbered balls is the Devil's tool, because I soon found myself memorizing jokes from Cap'n Billy's Whiz-Bang, and certain words were creeping into my conversation; words like "swell" and "so's your old man". And soon I was playing for money in a pinch back suit and listening to some big out-of-town jasper, here to talk about horse race gamblin'! Ah it's a disayze, you know.

What's "pinch back" mean? you're probably asking. It means sham, after a certain watchmaker who used an alloy of copper and zinc to look like gold. I've no idea where "jasper" comes from, though - other than as a "phoney" in The Music Man.

— posted by P | at 7:15 PM | |

· Best Things in Life are Free:
Some thoughtful comments, as you would expect, on Volokh Conspiracy about downloading music and so on. But I would go further: I would make it illegal for people to just play "their" dumb music for me to hear in public. If restauranteurs and bar owners wanted to have music, they would have to hire real musicians, for a start. That way, you'd probably never have to listen to EuroPop (okay, maybe Ding dinge dong would still be allowed).

— posted by P | at 4:04 PM | |

· Canada Makes CNN Once Again:
This time for solving the riddle of Stonehenge: It's an anatomical bunch of stones rather than an astronomical bunch of stones. Of course people were always putting up irregular slabs in those times, a hobby of theirs. It might be a stab at immortality. "At least people will know that we were here," they probably said, walking away from their lithourgy. That's why people have weblogs. Maybe 5,000 years from now people will be reading "Instapundit" and looking for mystical revelations.

— posted by P | at 1:55 PM | |

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

· Pushkin's "The Upas Tree" ("Anchar").

Not a very good (or even adequate) translation, but the rest of the story is this: the upas tree is terribly poisonous and causes all things that are near it to die: grass, birds, anything. It is therefore surrounded by death. Should a bird fly by, it will eventually collapse and die. But a prince sends a man to collect some of the sap and branches of this poisonous tree. He does so, and returns in a cold sweat, and then dies. Then the prince then fires his upas-tipped arrows into neighbouring lands to bring them down.

Pushkin served in the army and knew a lot about the warfare of his period. He was well-read, having an enviable personal library, and was familiar with English, French and German literature. Intrigued by E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Spielerglück" (and who was not?) he wrote the thematically unrelated "Queen of Spades" ("Pikovaia dama"), later made into an opera by Tchaikovsky.

So Pushkin was no fantasist, and when he says "firing arrows into neighbouring lands" it can be taken to mean "sending his archers" etc. But poems have a way of encapsulating many things, so the idea of WMD is not far away.

(I suppose the Russian word "anchar" comes from the Latin "antiariis"; the English word is borrowed from the Malay "upas", or poison. The tree itself is found in Java.)

— posted by P | at 3:34 PM | |

Friday, July 04, 2003

· Here we go again with secret tapes of the various Old Men of the Mountains; this is from a Mr Saddam Hussein: "no recent days and weeks have passed without the blood of the infidels being shed on our pure land as a result of the jihad of the mujahedeen."

Isn't the phrase "jihad of the mujahedeen" redundant? Well, maybe not exactly, but it seems poorly said.

— posted by P | at 1:31 PM | |

Thursday, July 03, 2003

· At the movies again, I saw a bizarre little entertainment called Battle Royale (2000), directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Some Japanese grade 9 students go on an outing at the end of the school year and find themselves drugged and whisked away to a remote island, kept under guard by soldiers and their dreary teacher. Their insolent attitude to authority has caused the Ministry of Education to institute an interesting means of chastising them: They have been fitted with neck rings which can explode, and must now participate in a three-day game of killing each other. The last one alive wins.

If you like watching Japanese teens beat each other to death and shoot everyone, then this is highly recommended. If you don't care for that sort of thing, however, there are still some good things in it. Moments of that peculiarly Japanese deadpan humour: a character is riddled with bullets and seemingly killed; the phone rings, and he immediately gets up to answer it, since it is most probably his estranged family calling to favour him with with some reproach or other.

A strange, ridiculous, revolting movie, but not unrewarding. I think the best thing is to look at it as the flip side of Hello Kitty and not demand too much sense.

— posted by P | at 6:01 PM | |