holidays

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Fictional birthdays, date misassignments, and the calendars of Caesar and the Pope

Hi, everybody.  It’s Wednesday, July 22nd, which means there are only two months left for you to buy something for Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Though, actually, they’re pretty well-to-do hobbits, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be able to get them something they want that they don’t already have.

Oh, and also, hobbits give other people presents on their own birthdays, not the other way around.  This always struck me as odd, but kind of cool.  It’s almost like saying, “Here’s a little gift for you in celebration of my birth, just to remind you what a gift it is that I was born and that you know me.”

Well, at least that’s one way of looking at it.  Anyway, I don’t think you’re likely to receive a gift from Bilbo and/or Frodo, even on their birthday, apart from being able to read and/or watch The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings.  That’s a lucky break for us all, when you think about it, and you don’t need to wait for September 22nd to partake of it.

I know, I know, why would one celebrate the birthday of a fictional character, anyway?  Well, it’s not as though mainstream culture doesn’t do it already, in oodles of major religious holidays.

Even if you’re convinced that Jesus really existed, biblical scholars agree (so I’m told) that he was not born on December 25th, but sometime in the summer, probably.  The later Church, never shy about playing free and loose with facts of reality (as religions tend to do), reset the date in order to appropriate the typical winter solstice-related festivals heavily celebrated by many cultures.  Such celebrations included Saturnalia (Roman culture‒you can tell because it’s got Saturn in it) and Yule (Norse, with the evergreens and mistletoe and holly and such like).  There were probably others.

The earlier Church cared more about Easter anyway, which makes a bit of internal sense.  That’s the purported miraculous day, when Jesus regenerated and flew to the heavens in his TARDIS.  Or whatever happened, if anything.

Of course, if we all wanted to avoid mislabeling Jeshua’s birthday, we could just celebrate Newtonmas on the previously celebrated day, since Isaac Newton was born on December 25th.  And he definitely did things that, while not literally miraculous, boggle the mind of nearly every mortal with knowledge enough to understand those contributions.

Mind you, he was, by all accounts, a serious dick and a born curmudgeon.  But he was effing smart, and his scientific accomplishments surely compensate for, say, his bloodthirsty reign as Warden of the Royal Mint, and even his really petty and childish vendettas against other scientists.

“‘A was a man.  Take him for all in all.  I shall not look upon his like again.”

Ah, but there’s a catch (or a rub, since we’re quoting Shakespeare):  Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar* did already exist, but England did not adopt it until sometime after Newton’s birth.  They were sort of stubborn about going along with Catholic innovations, and it held them back.  I blame Oliver Cromwell.

Anyway, by the modern, “Gregorian” calendar, Newton would have been born sometime in about…January, something like the 7th, I think, but I’ll look it up (see below).

Why the disparity?  Well, as you may know, the Julian calendar does have leap years.  Earth’s trip around the sun takes 365 and about a quarter days, so the extra full day builds up and is added onto every 4th year.  Except…

…well, it’s not quite a full quarter of an extra day there in that orbital period.  So, over time, the Julian calendar gets ahead of the literal year a bit.  It’s a small bit, but it’s there, and it accumulates.  To correct for this, one of the things the Gregorian calendar does is to skip the leap day on any year divisible by 100**.  It also adds the leap day back on every year divisible by 1000, but I think that’s only applied once since the Gregorian calendar was created.

Anyway, by the time the Gregorian calendar was put in place in England, the Julian calendar had accumulated something like 11 extra leap days.  Maybe it was 12.  If January 7th was the Gregorian date of the 25th of December, Julian, that would be, let’s see…I think 14 days.  I suspect I’m off a bit in my recollection, so I’ll look it up and add a footnote***.

Wow, that was a weird, discursive post, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s probably more entertaining than hearing me talk about my problems with my mental health, at least.  Indeed, one might say that I am instead hereby demonstrating my problems with my mental health‒some of them, at least.  Anyway, I hope this was at least mildly entertaining and possibly informative.  It’s at least probably better than my previous two posts.  In any case, I hope you have a very good day.

*Named for Pope Gregory Peccary the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine.

**I mean “evenly divisible”, of course.  Every number is divisible by 100.  Pi is divisible by 100:  ℼ/100.  “i” is divisible by 100:  i/100.  See?  But they don’t give integer quotients.

***Here goes:  Newton’s birthday would have been January 4th of the following year according to the Gregorian calendar.  This is ten days that needed to be skipped by the Gregorian calendar, or a thousand years worth of Julian calendar mismatch.  By now there would have been about five more extra days in the Julian calendar, so your birthday would be officially labelled as whatever day is 15 days before what it is, Gregorian Style.

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Imagine whatever headline you want; I don’t care

Welcome to the Monday of the first full week of July in 2026 CE (or AD if you must).  I hope that those of you in the USA had a nice Independence Day weekend.  There are no more significant holidays (that I recall) until at least September, now.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday‒unless you count trying to burn some kudzu‒because holiday celebrations generally involve other people, family and friends and such like, and I did not have any such group with whom to celebrate.

It’s probably just as well for such groups that I am not a part of them; I’m a serious downer and an unpleasant person* to be around for very long.  This used not to be the case; in my default or older settings, I’m naturally more hyper and sometimes rather silly (that too can be irritating, I fear).  Since my chronic pain began, however, I have become a much grumpier, angrier, more irritable person.  Things that I would have laughed off in the past, or about which I would have been more “philosophical”, easily get my ire up, even tiny little, minor, innocent things.

Using the seven dwarfs as personal descriptions, I spend most of my time these days Grumpy, rarely if ever Happy, frequently Dopey, quite Bashful almost always, from time to time Sneezy, not Sleepy nearly as often as I would prefer.  But I’m always Doc.  Take that for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing.

Anyway, yeah, I didn’t do anything pleasant on Saturday, nor much on Sunday, though at least I did talk on the phone to my sister.

I toyed with the notion of “celebrating” the 4th by making my way to the front of the Palm Beach County courthouse and making a fireworks display in the style of Thích Quảng Đức.  However, it was not only a Saturday, but it was a federal holiday; no one would have been there.  Also, I don’t know that I would have the courage to go through with it.

I need to do something though.  I cannot keep doing what I’m doing.  But I don’t see many options which I’m capable of embracing, given my dearth of personal energy and motivation.

I’m sorry I’m not being more positive or interesting, or at least quirky and strange in a less negative way, today.  Actually, I don’t really know if I’m ever interesting.  But, anyway, I just don’t have the energy right now to pretend not to be depressed, like I often do.  Maybe I’ve been pretending all my life that way**.  They do talk a lot about “masking” in neurodivergent people, and it has struck me as a very accurate and apposite notion since the first time I encountered it.

But, of course, there’s not necessarily any identity underneath such masks.  There’s certainly nothing very consistent, since “who we are” at any given moment or stage of our lives is but a three-dimensional slice of what is actually a four-dimensional being.

In case that sounds weird, I just mean that who we are at any given moment is true for just a point in time, a snapshot of a being that has not only spatial extent but also has a beginning and an end in time and which changes with every moment of that time, taking in and losing particles, maintaining that roughly constant but always altering configuration from frame to frame of of the movie that is a person’s life.

So, a question like “Who am I, really?” is perhaps best answered by saying, “I am the being who is asking that question.”  There is probably no deeper answer, at least not any much more specific one.  There is no “character description” in some Platonic realm that lays out who we really are, or if there is, I’ve encountered not the slightest intimation of it, and I would be very surprised if it existed.

Anyway, enough gobbledegook.  I’m just tired already, and it’s only the very beginning of Monday morning.  I’m so very tired.  I really ought to go before I spoil the party, to paraphrase a good Beatles song (see below).  I fear that I will just be a black cloud for everyone around me today, and probably in general.

I can’t even seem to find a book I can stick with reading right now; I shuffled through several different genres, let alone books, in my Kindle library a few dozen times in recent days, weeks, whatever, trying to find something interesting.  But after a brief time reading each thing I lose momentum and interest.  Even The Noonday Demon, a well-written book about depression, loses me after a bit.  Even Physics isn’t interesting to me, and that’s a bad sign.  Ditto for music, or movies (or shows) or what have you.

Everything is just a drizzly, insipid gray‒metaphorically, and sometimes also literally.  And I sometimes don’t have the energy to keep pretending that I can see anything else.

Like Ed Deepneau said in Stephen King’s Insomnia, “…sometimes the world is full of colors…but now all the colors are turning black.”

Enough, this has gone on too long already.  I apologize.  I hope you have a good day and a good week and a good remainder of your lives.

*More than one person has told me this, and they did not compare notes.

**Probably not.  It would be very bizarre indeed to be born depressed, though the tendency thereto can certainly be congenital, much like both forms of ASD that I have/had.

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“…deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Well, first of all, happy Independence Eve to all my fellow USians out there.  I’m greeting you today because I will not be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I will not be working tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (exclusis improvisis one might say in Latin).

I suppose I could pre-write a post for tomorrow and schedule it to be published in the morning, but that would require a fair bit of extra work, and I barely have the energy to survive to the end of any given day as it is.

As for tomorrow’s holiday, I think it is important for US citizens (“Americans”) to remember what tomorrow represents: the signing (and publication) of the Declaration of Independence, asserting the end of British rule in the colonies and the formation of a new, independent nation.

In this present time, when the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum show all too clear leanings toward authoritarianism, it’s worth rereading the Declaration of Independence in full, including the list of grievances.  I will link to it as part of this post.  It’s not very long, really‒the main text contains only 1320 words, barely longer than yesterday’s blog post‒and it’s worth rereading at least once a year (as is the Constitution).

It’s not that there’s anything astonishingly ingenious about those documents, let alone “divine” in character, though they are well thought out and nicely expressed.  It’s the notions they convey that matter, among which (implicitly) is:  human “authority” is almost always a misnomer.

Stephen King has authority over the universes of his books, because he actually authored them.  Ditto for me regarding my universes.  But the real world is under no one’s authority, since as far as we can tell, it has no author, and no one understands it completely.

There is such a thing as expertise‒it varies quite a bit in its quality, but experts do exist and it tends to be worthwhile to listen to them within their areas of knowledge.  But experts are fallible, and those who would take part in “running” the various governments are extremely fallible, since it is an area of poorly developed science.

It’s worthwhile to remember and emphasize this fact, because naked house apes are prone to be swayed by primate dominance hierarchical urges, just as much as Vervet monkeys and chimpanzees and baboons are.  And since these proclivities are more or less instinctive, they don’t feel like mere thoughts.  They feel like perceptions.  They feel like direct experiences of the nature of reality.

They are experiences of some aspects of reality, of course, but they are frequently misleading ones.  It’s worthwhile remembering that politics, especially politics with authoritarian leanings*, tends to attract those who want to have power for its own sake, for their own sake‒not only those who really want to look out for the people and institutions of their particular nation‒though often they will pretend, even to themselves, that they are seeking some “greater good”.

But if there is such a greater good, and if the glaringly mediocre minds that claim such things can understand it, then that notion can be carefully communicated, and if it truly is good and great, then that should be clear and convincing to any honest and intelligent interlocutor.

Admittedly, there may be many biases that prevent every living hominid from accepting even the clearest bodies of evidence and argument; there are people who claim to believe the Earth is flat, after all, and that is not very bright.  But one should at least find a tendency toward confluence of judgment among those who live by the intellect, such as philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, physicists, engineers, etc.  When ideas are tested honestly and rigorously against reality, they tend to converge over time, because as far as anyone can tell, reality is at root unitary.

But those who seek political power are not generally drawn from fields that encourage and focus on rationalism, empiricism, and fallibilism.  And though I do not doubt that many people go into politics hoping to do actual good and to be of service, there are also very many who crave power over others, for whatever reasons, or even without reasons.  Such people do not tend to be our best and brightest, for as someone once wrote, “power lust is a weed that grows only in an untended mind”**.

This is why checks and balances and votes that include inputs from many (potentially all) people in a society, as well as frequent changes of office, are useful.  Weird shit, being unconstrained by reality, tends to be all over the place, ceteris paribus, compared to more grounded, realistic shit.  So, hopefully, in most cases, the overall mean or median or mode of good ideas is going to tend to be more reality based.

It’s not perfect, and we can certainly strive to improve it.  We can seek increased and better education, and encourage ourselves to seek to understand reality and to traffic in rigorous and self improving ideas to make it ever better.  But a crucial point is that there is no human authority over the world, and the sorts of people who would arrogate to themselves such power are not among the best and brightest.

As the old song says, “He can’t even run his own life, be damned if he’ll run mine.”

Anyway, Happy Independence Eve, again, and have a happy Independence Day tomorrow if you are in the US and celebrate it.  Don’t be put off by the lamentable state of current politics.  The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are still worth celebrating.

*e.g., the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

**Yes, I know who said it.  But though I do like to give credit for well-turned phrases, it’s often the case that naked house apes will either latch onto or dismiss out of hand ideas solely based upon who said them, not on the quality of the ideas.  This is not rational, but it is horribly typical.  I’ve written about this before, this problem of attribution.  So, since it’s the message that matters, not who said it, I will sometimes refrain from revealing a quotation’s source, with implicit apologies to such sources.

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Cool it with a baboon’s blog, then the charm is firm and good

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 25th of June.  This means we are at the more or less exact temporal antipode of Christmas, which was six months ago and will be six months from now.  Does that imply that we might all be feeling the “anti-Christmas spirit”?

Maybe the cycle acts something like a half-integer spin quantum entity, such as electron, and it takes two full rotations to bring it back to its initial state.  Or, rather, it could be like a spin 2 particle (e.g., the hypothetical graviton), rotating ½ times and being the same as where it started.

No, I guess it really seems like just a spin 1 particle, where half a rotation leaves it 180 degrees (or pi radians) different.  So:  Merry Anti-Christmas (you filthy animals).

I know, that’s rather silly.  But that’s okay, so was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Mind you, they were much funnier than I am.  That’s no real shame on me, though.  It’s rather like saying that the Beatles were much better song-writers overall than I am.  It’s true, but it’s also true of nearly everyone else in the world (that the Beatles were better song-writers than they are, or that Monty Python was funnier than they are, not that they are funnier or better song-writers than I am).

I’m also not as accomplished a scientist as Newton or Darwin or Einstein or as good a mathematician as Noether or Ramanujan or Euler.  This is nothing about which I (or you) should feel ashamed.  These are among the finest minds the world has yet produced.

On the other hand, none of them has a publication credit in the scientific journal Mycoses, do they?  No, they do not.  But I do.

Also, I have literally and directly saved people’s lives and helped ease and even prevent their suffering, whereas I don’t know that any of the above people ever did that, not directly* anyway.  So, neener neener neener!

Oh, by the way‒or by the by, or by Grabthar’s** hammer and by the suns of Worvan‒I have written all my posts this week so far on the smartphone, not on the lapcom.  And I am trying very hard to avoid writing too long a post.  I have seen that I can really write a lot with either the lapcom or the smartphone, though it’s easier in a sense to do so on the lapcom; it’s also easier and quicker for me to lose track of how much I have written thereon.

Oh, and another “by the fill-in-the-blank”:  I wanted to point out that yesterday’s voice recording thing was recorded using my smartphone, not any kind of fancy mic (those are fancy mics on smartphones, really, but not in a pertinent way), so unfortunately, it’s hard to keep breath sounds out of it.  And the tunnel kind of sound is probably because I (injudiciously, it seems) added a wee bit of reverb in post, to try to counter the flatness produced by the “noise reduction” function.  Sorry about that.

I tried a goofy little thing on the phone yesterday (speaking of such things) where I took a brief video, but with a thin cloth over the camera, so it was a video that was really just audio, but in principle it could have been uploaded without trouble directly to YouTube, etc., but no one would need to see me.

I don’t really like my face, so I don’t like to have to see it, let alone to inflict it on the world.  If you look at my relatively sparse YouTube videos, you’ll see that even when my face is shown, I usually try to cover it at least partially.

The exceptions, I guess, are the music-playing videos, but in those it just wouldn’t make as much sense to cover my face, since my singing would probably suffer.  Though, who knows, maybe I could become famous as a performer who always wears a mask and sunglasses.  M F Doom wore a mask.  Daft Punk wore their weird space uniforms.

This subject calls to mind the fact that yesterday evening I received a package from my sister.  It contained, among other things, some old stuff of mine, including a big print of my high school senior picture, which I didn’t know still existed.  I didn’t think to get a picture or a scan of it before writing this, but maybe I’ll do so later, so you can see it and I can learn if you agree that I resemble a certain character (not the hero) from a very popular movie franchise.

Anyway, as one of the spirits summoned by the three wyrd sisters said in Macbeth, “Dismiss me.  Enough.”

Tyler:  This conversation…

Narrator:  This conversation…

Tyler:  …is over.

Narrator:  …is over.

TTFN

*Of course, their various contributions have shaped all of modern science, and thus technology, and have thus indirectly saved many lives and relieved much suffering, far more than my little, localized efforts have done.  Still, let me throw myself a bone, okay?

**I initially wrote, going from memory, “by Frothgar’s hammer”, but then I realized that was a slightly bastardized name from Beowulf, i.e., Hrothgar, the Danish “king” whom Beowulf rescues from the depredations of Grendel, not the line from Galaxy Quest.

 

[Aside:  it would be cool if someone made a simulated spin-½ coin, with inertial sensors within and LCD faces, so that it could start, say, at heads, flip once and be intermediate, flip twice and be tails, flip three times and be oppositely intermediate, and flip a fourth time to come back to heads!]

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Awe, for self-pity’s sake!

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 23rd of June in 2026, in case any of you aren’t aware of that fact (or if you’re reading this post later…but not earlier, because I strongly suspect that it’s impossible for you to read it earlier).  It’s the third day of summer and the third full day of what I rather jokingly refer to as “The Days of Awfulness” or even “The Days of Aw, Shit!”*.

The number of days in that stretch is not constant, because one of the bookends on them changes a bit every year.  My Days stretch between Father’s Day and the date of my wedding “anniversary”, on June 29th.  Heck, one of the regular readers here was at my wedding on that day.  How cool is that?  Anyway, those two days highlight and commemorate, or lament, or what have you the two greatest and most terrible of my personal failures, about the two things that have mattered most to me in all my life.  They weren’t my only failures, obviously enough.  But they were, have been, and are the most devastating and heartbreaking ones.

I shouldn’t dwell on them, I know.  It’s not healthy.  But my nervous system (i.e., me) is prone to latch onto numbers and dates and patterns and cycles and all that kind of stuff.  This is part of why I tend to be so skeptical and even sometimes disdainful of people’s tendency to feel significance in truly absurd notions, like the zodiac signs and imagined alien interlopers and other such things.  I recognize my own tendency to find and latch onto patterns even when they are only in my mind.

I’m fine with enjoying those patterns and even playing with them, in a sense, but I don’t want to attach some imagined significance to them.  Even Newton fell into that trap, though he had more of an excuse‒you can’t be the founder of mathematical physics and at the same time know all the stuff that will only be discovered by building on your insights.  That’s related to the whole “you can’t be reading my blog post before it was written” thing.

Anyway, I tend to feel pretty despondent around this time of year, because I cannot seem easily to stop thinking about those things at which I failed and which I lost.  I know it’s contrary to the recommendations of the Stoics and the Taoists and the Buddhists, but I’ve never sworn loyalty or fealty to any of those -isms, I just think some of their ideas are good (and some are not, though these three are way above average in terms of signal-to-noise ratio).

I do, however, have to call attention to the fact that I am having semi-regular interactions with my youngest child, starting since after I was hospitalized with my kidney stone.  We watch Doctor Who together over Discord™ and have gone to a couple of movies together, the most recent of which was Backrooms**.  So, that’s very good, indeed, and those moments are the happiest ones I’ve had in well over a decade.

Mind you, my son (my eldest) still won’t interact with me at all.  And I get it.  Though he knows (I hope) that I didn’t do anything willfully or even willingly that caused him (emotional) pain, he still felt the pain, and that’s a hard thing to get past, especially since it’s the more recent of things (see The Peak-End Rule).  Also, he’s got a stable and (presumably) comfortable and happy life, and disrupting it would be unpleasant and very stressful.

I cannot really blame anyone for not wanting me around.  I know I don’t, a lot of the time.  It’s been a bit of a tendency over my lifetime, for others and for me.  I feel like so many people who have been around me would readily sing along with a Beatles parody called Got to Get You Out of My Life.

Ugh.  Can self-hate and self-pity go together?  Apparently so, and it must be a nauseating spectacle for you to take in.  I apologize.  I guess it’s sort of akin to Gollum hating and loving the Ring, as he hated and loved himself.

People are complicated‒brains being the most complicated local things in the universe known by us (though that could soon change).  Internal contradictions don’t necessarily cause the program to freeze in people, like an old “return without gosub” error**, but there are consequences…probably.

Anyway, thank you for reading.  I forgot to publish the post I had prepared with that audio file I mentioned yesterday, so I’ll do that sometime today.  In the meantime, I hope you all have a good day, then double that, then double it again, and so on.

*This is a reference to or parody of the stretch of days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition, which are sometimes referred to as The Days of Awe.

**I highly recommend both the movie and the earlier YouTube channel series by Kane Parsons, the now-twenty-year-old (!) who directed the movie.

***I don’t know what more recent error messages are.  I haven’t done any real programming since college.

 

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Summertime, and the living is…

Well, it’s Monday‒one day after the Summer Solstice, and thus the 2nd day of official summer‒and here I am writing another blog post.

It’s funny how weird the perception of time can be.  Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my abnormally long blog post from Saturday, when in fact it was a full two days ago.  Weird, huh?

All joking aside, it was quite a long post that I wrote on Saturday.  I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing.  I mean, I read it, course; I wrote and then edited it, after all.  I don’t remember it all that well right now, but that’s because I wrote it down and I know where I can find it if I want to revisit it.

Working memory and narrative memory and all that are useful, powerful attributes of human minds, and my own copy of both of those systems is better than those of the majority of people I have encountered.  But I do still have fundamentally limited internal memory, so there’s no need to clutter my hard drive with the contents of all of my blog posts.  I know where I can find them, in general.

Though this triggers a thought that I’ve had before:  I was thinking of doing some audio recordings of me reading some of my blog posts and sharing the audio here and as videos on YouTube.  What do you think?  I would love to hear input from any long term (or short term) readers as to which posts they might nominate for such a treatment.

Oh, yeah, in the latter part of last week I did a voice recording, this time about AI as an attribute-weakener for humans.  It’s somewhat related to what I said recently about humans becoming‒in what is nearly the best case possible scenario‒the “pets” of future AI.  Anyway, it’s pretty short, so I’ll probably edit it rather quickly and share it here and maybe do a “video”.

The annoying thing is, it ought to be quick and easy to use Microsoft’s basic video editor just to add a picture to the audio for the video, but now they have it where you need to sign in to your Microsoft account to use the program.  That means mucking about with accounts on the work computer, and that’s stressful.  So, I don’t know.  I’ll try to think of some other solution.

Speaking of solutions and things not necessarily working the way they ought to work, my smartphone‒on which, by the way, I am writing this post‒is starting to be a bit laggy and somewhat herky-jerky* in its operations.  It may be that it just needs a restart‒I haven’t done that in a while, because it consistently slips my mind.

On the other hand, the phone has a finite time of operation, meaning it will eventually stop working, as will all things that are not constantly maintained (and even they will almost certainly all fail eventually).  At that point, I would need to get a new smartphone.

I really hoped not to need to do that ever again.  It’s such a pain.  I really hoped that I would not live long enough to need to get a new smartphone.  I had various intentions regarding that, but so far they have not yet come to fruition‒as witness, the fact that I am writing this blog post.

I’m certainly feeling much less verbose right now than I was on Saturday morning.  I don’t know what circumstances and local forces are behind that, but of course, I’m pretty darn sure that there are good explanations available.  It’s just hard to gather and trace all the innumerable threads of the web of causality even for the tiniest of behaviors in any given moment or event.  I’m no Laplace’s demon (nor is anyone or anything else, as far as I can see).  All I can say for sure is that all of those events lie in the past light cone of the event itself.

Okay, well, this is getting to feel tedious to me, though I don’t know how it is for you, so I’m going to wrap it up and leave this blog post near the left end of the bell curve for word length of posts, whereas Saturday’s was nearer the right end**.

I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.

*Please excuse the technical jargon.

**That tail of the curve can’t really go off toward infinity, even if a mathematical description of such a curve does, because I cannot actually write an infinite number of words…though I fear sometimes it might feel that way to my readers.  On the other end, the low end of the curve cannot get below zero, since a blog post with a negative number of words is like a house whose rooms have negative lengths and widths.

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Are you a Memorial Daypot Dome Gate scandaloholic?

First off, Happy Memorial Day, for those who live in the US (or anyplace else Memorial Day is observed, if there are such places).  I have to admit, it seems slightly weird to wish someone a “happy” Memorial Day, since it’s a day in which we honor and remember fallen soldiers.  At least, that’s the idea behind the holiday.

But of course, when I was quite young, Memorial Day was a happy sort of holiday.  We got a day off school, it was all but summer already, and we always had a big family get-together with grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and all sorts of side dishes like potato salad and chips and such like.  There often tended to be desserts, as well, including (if I recall correctly) popsicles.  I’ve never been a huge popsicle fan, but sometimes, during warm weather, and at such special, family events, they could be quite refreshing.

Still, if I look at a popsicle now, even if it’s a Creamsicle®, I get more of a positive nostalgic feeling than any even slight urge to eat the popsicle.  Would that this were the case with more straightforward ice cream and other such treats.

I know from experience that it is possible to break one’s proclivities for certain junk foods just by overexposure.  I did that‒unintentionally‒with Nutter Butters® and with Pringles®.  I no longer crave either of those things because, for a time, I overindulged in them quite severely, and it wasn’t good for me‒I ended up getting negative associations with eating those things because of the general physical ill-health they engendered.

I guess that means that one way to break a bad food habit may be to give into it in spades‒say, eating only Cheetos® for every meal, three meals a day, nothing else.  I’m not recommending that, by the way; it would not be good for you.  Though, if you were truly starving and had nothing else, it could keep you alive for a time.

Interestingly, I don’t think this aversion therapy works for more fundamentally pathological addictions.  For instance, I wouldn’t recommend trying to quit heroin by doing nothing but heroin for a while‒as I understand it, that’s actually what some people do, and it tends just to lead to tolerance.  Of course, if you die of an overdose, that would eliminate your addiction, but it certainly would not cure it (by any reasonable definition of “cure”).

And of course, severe alcoholics often just drink alcohol almost solely, sometimes as their main source of calories, but even getting sick to their stomachs doesn’t make them quit nor does experiencing the more horrifying effects of alcohol addiction (including alcohol withdrawal, which can kill you).  If these sorts of things don’t trigger an aversion to something, it’s hard to see what would.

This raises (quite tengentially) a pet peeve of mine:  it makes no sense to describe real or figurative addictions by calling oneself, for instance, a “chocoholic” or a “workaholic”.  This would seem to imply that one is addicted to “chocohol” or to “workahol”, whatever such things might be.

If one were following the paradigm that gave us the word “alcoholic” one would be a “chocolatic” or a “workic”.  It’s flagrantly stupid to do the other thing.  If you’ve got a problem with chocolate or with working too much (or whatever), don’t try to use a cutesy, cannibalized term made by cutting and moving something that was never a suffix and then using it as if it were one.  Just call the problem what it is.

This is similar to the fact that people inexplicably want to add “-gate” to the end of every scandal du jour, in reference to the very famous Watergate scandal.  But the Watergate scandal was about a break in at the Watergate Hotel.  That’s where the “gate” part comes from!

If we were to assume current media scandal standards, we would have thought that historic event was a scandal involving water somehow.  It’s as if, because of the old Teapot Dome scandal, people named every scandal a “-pot Dome” scandal.  Then the actual Watergate scandal would have been called the “Watergatepot Dome Scandal”.

It’s submoronic* to call a scandal about pizza, for instance, “pizzagate”.  Is there a Pizzagate Hotel somewhere that had a breakin?  (Though, I must admit, if there isn’t a restaurant that calls itself “Pizzagate” then I’ll be disappointed in the creativity and chutzpah of restaurateurs.)

If my blog achieves only one thing in the world (or two things, in a sense), and if that is to decrease the use of “-holic” and “-gate” in such situations, then I would be pleased enough with having written it.

I don’t have high hopes for that possibility, though.  Then again, I don’t have high hopes for much of anything.  I’m a pretty miserable sort of person, though I think that before the onset of my chronic pain I was less so (though I did already suffer from dysthymia/depression).  Like Kenny Rogers’s gambler, the best I can hope for is to die in my sleep.  Of course, the fact that I sleep horribly makes even that small hope less likely than it might be otherwise.

Whatever.  I’ll simply have to accept the fact of not being asleep when it happens if that’s the way it has to be.  Who knows, maybe it will be better to see it coming, so to speak.

Try to have a good holiday.

*By which I mean “worse than moronic” not “not quite moronic”.

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“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders…”

I almost started this post by writing “Hello and good morning,” but I can’t really do that, or future readers‒and possibly even some current readers‒might think this was a Thursday blog post.  But this isn’t a Thursday post.  It’s a Tuesday post.  It’s a “Taco Tuesday post”, really, since Taco Tuesday is a thing (an advertising thing, mostly, but still a thing I like).  Pertinent to that, today is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo.

It’s not a terribly clever name for a holiday.  It’s about as bland as “The 4th of July”.  At least that’s not the official name for that holiday; the official name is “Independence Day”, which has specific significance, since it is the date of the signing and release of the Declaration of Independence.  I try never to wish someone a happy 4th of July, but say, “Happy Independence Day”, because it’s an important thing to know and recall (for an American).

Of course, there may be an actual, official title to Cinco de Mayo, but if there is, I don’t know it (if there isn’t, I still don’t know it).  I don’t even recall what the day commemorates.  I know it’s not the Mexican Independence Day equivalent.  If anyone out there knows what it is off the top of his or her or their head, please let me know in the comments below.

“Please let me know in the comments below” could be a nice part of some rap, couldn’t it?  It’s got a good rhythm and an internal rhyme.  If you’re a rapper and want to use that phrase, please do.  But let me know about the final product, please.  I’d be interested to see what grows up around it.

I could, in principle, write such a rap myself‒I’m reasonably good at rhythmic rhyming‒but just try to imagine me producing and performing a rap song!  I’m almost certain that would be one of the worst signs of the end of the world.

Though, if that’s the case, maybe I should do a rap, come to think of it.  If by doing so I really could engender the end of the world*, it could be worth doing it.  I could put everyone out of their misery.  As for those who aren’t miserable, well, we have Sweeney Todd’s words to address that:

 

“They all deserve to die

Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.

Because

In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett

There are two kinds of men and only two:

There’s the one staying put in his proper place

And the one with his foot in the other one’s face

Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you.

No, we all deserve to die!

Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I

Because

the lives of the wicked should be

made brief

For the rest of us death will be a relief

We all deserve to die!

 

And I’ll never see Johanna…”

 

Okay, well, that last bit is the beginning of another segment of the song, in which Sweeney laments his lost daughter.  I won’t get into the plot more than that right now, but it’s a great musical.

The film version with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and so on was excellent, though apparently Johnny Depp didn’t know whether he could sing (adequately for the role) when Tim Burton asked him to play Sweeney Todd.  He knew he could play music, but singing “lead” was just not something he had done.  So, according to what I’ve heard, before accepting the role he went off in solitude and practiced singing (to confirm he could do it) before coming back and saying okay.

I’m glad he did it.

As an aside, I suspect that anyone who can do various voices and accents and who also can play and hear music almost has to be able to sing reasonably well, if they practice.  The tools required to make alternate voices and accents are more or less the same as the tools for singing specific tones and notes.  You also have to be able to hear tunes and to hear yourself and adjust to hit the proper note, but as I said, Depp was already a serious musician.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of erratic stuff, isn’t it?  Clearly I have no specific agenda here (trendy or otherwise) at least not any conscious one.  As for what goes on in my unconscious mind, well, I don’t know what that is, more or less by definition.  If I knew what it was thinking, it wouldn’t be unconscious.

Of course, there’s always a legitimate question whether the unconscious mind actually has its own internal self-awareness, or even more than one, but this is pretty much speculative for now, so I’m not going to get into it or its implications.

Boy, wow.  I’m really feeling pretty incoherent right now.  As you might have guessed, I didn’t sleep well last night, even for me.  As for pain, well, large portions of my body feel somewhat as if they have already been embalmed, but the sensory nerves‒the nociceptors, at least‒are still working.  If anything, they’re working too well.

Ah, well.  I’ll wrap up now with these almost kindly but ominous words, again from Sweeney Todd:  “You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn.”

Please have a good day if you’re able.

*“Engender the end of” also has a good cadence or rhythm or whatever as well as a bit of an internal rhyme.  You could go on with something like, “Engender the end of the trendy agenda,” or similar.  “No rapper can rap quite like I can”, eh?  That’s a fact for which all rap fans can be grateful.

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What’s that distress call that pilots use again?

It’s Friday again, at long last, and I should have tomorrow off.  I think I might take tomorrow off, even if they asked us to come in.  I barely wanted even to move at all today.

Of course, “want” is a tricky word in this case.  I don’t ever want to go to work in any kind of “terminal goal” sense.  But in an “instrumental goal” sense, I do want to go to work.  However, there are many conflicting pressures within the system that is I, and the vector magnitude of the “go to work” sum is sometimes not very large at all.

I’m going, though.  I’m not yet literally on my way, but I will be soon (and as I edit this for the last time, I am at the office).

Oh, I almost forgot to note, today is May 1st, 2026 (AD or CE).  Happy May Day, or whatever that holiday is, if it is one.  According to Camelot, May is a lusty month, a time for every frivolous whim, proper or im.  I’m not too terribly sure of the truth of all that, but it’s an amusing song.

Oh (again), I almost forgot (again) to note, I’m writing this on my mini lapcom today.  I haven’t done that in a while, but then again, I haven’t even picked up a guitar in over a week.  Of course, I haven’t played any keyboard (other than computer ones) in a longer time than that.  I also haven’t drawn, nor have I written any fiction.  I haven’t gone on Brilliant dot org this week, either, though I did do some last week, if memory serves.

I’m just very tired.  My various bits (ha ha) of literal hardware that constitute part of my extended phenotype are also getting a bit sluggish and erratic.  My lapcom here, and the lapcom I use at the house, and my smartphone, are all showing a bit of lagginess, a bit of evidence that they are past their prime.  Hey, they’re not alone in that, at least.  I’m so far past my prime you could call me a super-composite number, like 60 squared or something*.

There is an impetus—and there almost certainly would be recommendations, if I were to ask someone—to get a new lapcom and a new mini lapcom and of course a new smartphone.  But I really don’t wanna.  I look at the lapcoms available on Amazon just for fun, and there is a bit of enticement in looking at them, but honestly, I feel like I want to let them go the way of motor vehicles for me:  just to be gone when they’re no longer workable.

I have the vague hope that I will die before I am forced to replace any of these, my three main personal computing devices, which are my only local friends (of sorts).  It’s not so much that I actually feel a personal, sentimental sense of connection with them.  It’s more that I cannot conceive of finding the energy to go through the process of getting new ones, since that seems especially futile in this case.

I currently have no plan and no desire to live long enough to be forced to replace my personal electronic devices.  It just seems valueless, without any reward other than the things that I would buy, themselves, and these really don’t appeal to me.  Maybe someday they might start to appeal again, and I might feel the desire to get new ones.  I don’t know.  But there’s certainly no logic in trying to invest in my life right now.

Okay, sorry about being melodramatic.  I wasn’t trying to do that, honestly.  I don’t feel dramatic about this stuff.  I just feel resigned and tired and even kind of bored.  Nothing is gripping enough to distract me for long from pain and depression.

Though, I have to admit that I’ve recently discovered the YouTube channel “Yee Yee Life”, which basically is just this guy and his cameraman in Texas who (more or less in their own words) take various things, shoot them with various types of bullets, and see what happens.  The shooting part is mildly interesting in itself, but really the draw is the hilarious deadpan comedy of their interactions and the apparent idiocy/lunacy of the host.  This is all clearly deliberate, by the way.  I am not watching people unwittingly make fools of themselves—they are doing it on purpose, and they do it very well.

But, of course, one can only get limited value out of such things at any given time.  It ain’t exactly Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or the BBC’s Planet Earth.

I still do at times watch the YouTube channel PBS Space Time, which has great videos that are nicely informative, but they lot are less interactive with mere YouTube watchers than they used to be, focusing now on their Patreon supporters.  This makes sense for them, of course, since they get more money from them.

I used to support them on Patreon myself—briefly—but I had to let that lapse, since I never really took advantage of the Patreon perks, if there were any.  Why would I want to go to yet another website to be able to enjoy learning the stuff they discuss?  Also, I had to get off the slippery slope of supporting Patreon accounts of people I followed elsewhere.  It ended up threatening to be a serious combination of monthly expenses.

I already subscribe to YouTube premium, which means I am giving money to the people whose videos I watch (the ones that are monetized), and I cannot simply lavish even more money on these various informative and thought-provoking channels.  I would love to be able simply to do so without worry, but I cannot.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week—but presumably not for this month, since the month has just begun.  I hope you all have a very good weekend, and then a very good week next week, and I hope you then repeat the same pattern but with each new iteration being incrementally better than the last.  If anyone deserves such a thing, surely you do.

Of course, the whole notion of “deserves” is very much an artificial, orthogonal-to-nature concept.  It’s a human invention.  That doesn’t make it not “real”.  But it is not essential, and it is not necessarily even coherent.

Whatever.  Take it easy.  Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

*60 squared, or 3600, may be one of the “anti-prime” numbers.  It has 45 (!) positive factors!!!  That’s not as cool as being a prime number, but it’s pretty close in the coolness measure.

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Shall you this fond pageant see?

It’s Monday again.  It is as I write this, anyway.  Maybe it’s not Monday when you’re reading it.  Who knows, maybe you’re living at some point in the relatively far future in which the human race‒or their computer overlords‒has abolished Mondays because they are too unpleasant.

Of course, then you’d just move the problem to the next day, leading it to be the unpleasant beginning of the week, because it’s not what day it is that presents a problem, it is the function of the day, if you will.  In this case, that means the day serving as the beginning of the “work week”.  Still, even future humans might be foolish enough not to recognize that fact, based on my experience with past and present humans.

Actually, based on the nature of current “AI” and how it functions and is grown, I wouldn’t be much more surprised if they made the same mistake.  Careful, logical reasoning is not necessarily in the nature of so-called deep neural networks and the like.  Indeed, the ability to reason abstractly may have arisen in humans precisely because they needed to be able to convince their tribemates of various things, and also to avoid being taken in by a tribemate trying to convince them of something that was not in their best interests.  As with so many attributes of life, even the ability to reason was probably born of a kind of arms race.

Heavy sigh.  Ah, well, great things can arise even from inauspicious beginnings.

I started my post a little late this morning because I’ve been moving slowly, both mentally and physically.  I’m kind of wiped out, and I have been all weekend; I could hardly get anything done.  I guess this is one of those times when I ought to be grateful that there’s no one to nag me (or cajole me, or encourage me, or what have you).  Honestly though, having such a person around is underrated, I think.

I had a stretch starting about two weeks ago or so in which my back and joint pain seemed to have calmed down a lot, and mere moving didn’t even hurt.  As a consequence, my mood and optimism improved a bit, and I even started to feel like I might be able to like myself to some degree.

Ha ha ha!  Lord, what a fool this mortal be.

Starting when I got sick, which I think I have mentioned more than once, I got a re-flare of my pain, and it has come back with a vengeance.  During the course of the latter part of this last work week, I took a fair amount of extra pain medicine of various (legal) types (I don’t even know how one locates “street fentanyl” or the like, let alone how one could feel confident that it is what it claims to be) and maybe that’s what’s taking the wind out of my sails.  Certainly my kidneys and stomach and probably my liver are not terribly chuffed about the work they have to do dealing with lots of NSAIDs and Tylenol and CBD and topical lidocaine and menthol and all that stuff.

Listless shrug.  It is what it is.  My flare is tapering a bit at this point, at least.  I don’t like to anticipate it getting better (nor it getting worse) but I try to be optimistic, at least for me.  It is simply true that my pain could get better and stay relatively good for a while (and it could go the other way), and I will only find out as it happens.

Whether or not all of you will find out depends very much on the degree to which I share it here.  Of course, no one who sees things only on any of the Meta-owned social media will find out, because (obviously enough) I’m not able to share anything there anymore.  Maybe the occasional (very) odd person might find my stuff via Bluesky and Substack and TWFKAT, but if so, it’s hard to tell.

Whatever the case with respect to those matters, I am still just kind of tired and mentally enervated, so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic here.  I don’t really have anything good or interesting to report.  Nothing is happening in my life other than the steady cranking of the entropy machine, doing what it does.

Sorry.  The pain is very discouraging.  When it ebbs, I can even start to feel like my old self again, the “me” from thirty or more years ago.  But though I keep trying new things and approaches, and sometimes I even get some good results, it doesn’t seem prone to ebb* for very long at a time.

Okay, well, let’s wrap this up.  I hope you all had a good holiday (or are having a good holiday) and that you and those you love are doing well.  Unless I’m lucky, I expect I’ll write a post tomorrow.

*The more often I say “ebb” the more it feels as though I’m saying the name of some character‒perhaps some mountain man‒from The Dukes of Hazzard or The Andy Griffith Show.