Here’s your tenth periodic digest post reviewing the last few entries and tossing in some recommendations, tidbits, etc.
It is hot here like you wouldn’t believe. The public libraries are overcompensating with AC. My daughter wants to go to the pool every chance she gets. She complains about being served any food other than pancakes. My son eats anything. Sometime he bites other children, or us. The notes home from his Montessori school refer to his classmates as little friends. “Today, Cosmo climbed down the stairs and bit a little friend on the thigh. We told him that we do not bite our little friends.” After a rough first month, my mother is now digging her new assisted living facility here in Florida. She knows everyone. Widow is a dour word, but she is finding a way to wear it like a gown, to wear it well. She took her wedding ring off when she arrived here and handed it to me like a ceremony. My wife is racing to finish paintings for a big show at the end of this month. She paints late into the night. If Cosmo needs comforting, I sing to him. Do you have a go-to line when people ask how you’re doing? Mine is “hanging in” but lately I have been saying “not too bad.” The rhythms are okay, the interruptions are okay. We are trying to work, have fun, be passably good parents, hang with buddies, be kind to strangers, do no harm. Later, it will be less hot, and then later still it will be hot again. We do not bite our little friends.
Recent posts
Thursday, July 6
Honky-Tonk Weekly #11: Tina Turner, “Stand By Your Man”
Eleventh edition of a weekly column here at Tropical Depression. Every week, I listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. This week: The country side of Tina Turner, in memoriam to the way she sang.
Monday, July 10
Morning Mixtape, Volume 3. Drinking songs, regret songs, East St. Louis songs, more drinking songs, and so on.
Tuesday, Aug. 1
Honky-Tonk Weekly #12: Jerry Lee Lewis, “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Made a Loser Out of Me)”
Twelfth edition of a weekly column here at Tropical Depression. Every week, I listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. This week: On the country side of Jerry Lee Lewis, his cousin Jimmy Swaggart, eternal damnation, and the Holy Ghost. I think this is one of the better posts I’ve done in a while, so check it out if you haven’t already. It’s a long one, pull up a lawn chair.
Vibrations from behind the Iron Curtain
Phenomenal instrumental surf-rock from Russian band Noivy Elektron. This EP was put out in 1969. Very groovy, with psychedelic flair. Also has diversions into Bossa Nova vibes; odd, but whatever. Highly recommend.
Queries
Did Glenn Danzig know how funny it was when he was singing “Christmas cards to which I never reply” with a hardcore/horror affect for the Misfits? I’m on the fence. The phrasing “to which” is so so funny. Like Danzig, I am hardcore and fail to reply to Christmas cards.
(Are you supposed to reply to Christmas cards?)
If a) the eternalists are more or less right about time and b) the Big Bang theory is basically correct, what occurs at the initial singularity with respect to time? Is the situation that time stops—that time itself only came to be, along with space, at the Big Bang? Or is the situation that, when reckoned from the lens of the quantum wave function of the universe, time in some sense becomes more uncertain as we get closer (in time?) to the Big Bang? If quantum mechanics teaches us that fundamental reality is probabilistic, does time at a certain distance become probabilistically diffuse—sort of unknowable or even meaningless in the observerless initial conditions of Creation? You know?
Dept. of Abstracts
“A Critique of Olfactory Objects,” by Ann-Sophie Barwich, Frontiers in Psychology, 2019; 10: 1337.
Abstract:
Does the sense of smell involve the perception of odor objects? General discussion of perceptual objecthood centers on three criteria: stimulus representation, perceptual constancy, and figure-ground segregation. These criteria, derived from theories of vision, have been applied to olfaction in recent philosophical debates about psychology. An inherent problem with such framing of olfactory objecthood is that philosophers explicitly ignore the constitutive factors of the sensory systems that underpin the implementation of these criteria. The biological basis of odor coding is fundamentally different from the coding principles of the visual system. This article analyzes the three measures of perceptual objecthood against the biological background of the olfactory system. It contrasts the coding principles in olfaction with the visual system to show why these criteria of objecthood fail to be instantiated in odor perception. The argument demonstrates that olfaction affords perceptual categorization without the need to form odor objects.
Skeleton crew at the cookbook editing department
My wife Grace and I really like Alison Roman’s recipes. I’m going to confess upfront that I haven’t closely followed the controversies around her. For better or worse, we use her cookbook. Grace wound up not doing this, but a while back she was thinking about making Creamy Cauliflower and Onion Gratin. It looks really good. One of the ingredients is bread crumbs, but Roman makes them optional.
And then she makes an analogy:
It may seem like a crazy thing to do, but I left the bread crumbs optional for two reasons. One, because without them, it is a really great time for people who don’t indulge in gluten to get on the gratin train (which is usually either bolstered with a roux made from flour, covered in nonnegotiable bread crumbs, or both); and two, I think this gratin is really, really good (and, superficially, more beautiful) without them. So good in fact, I couldn’t choose between the two preparations, but would rather saddle you with this Sophie’s Choice.
So. I mean.
The comparison here is the choice between whether to make a creamy cauliflower dish with OR without breadcrumbs—and a choice (spoiler alert) imposed on a mother to select which child to save from the gas chambers in Auschwitz. I dunno, Alison!
The culture war is a flat circle
“Who is Dan Quayle to go after single mothers?” Tanya Tucker asked the New York Daily News in 1992. “What in the world does he know of what it’s like to go through pregnancy and have a child with no father for the baby? The real trouble with these situations isn’t the women having children out of wedlock, it’s men with no backbone like Dan Quayle who don’t understand their plight.”
Let it linger
And here is the late Dolores O’Riordan singing “Go Your Own Way,” you’re welcome.