The wheel's still in spin

Man—you talk about an October surprise: the Nobel Prize committee announced yesterday that it has awarded the 2016 prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. You can debate if you want to about whether he’s a world-class poet; he’s sure as hell captured the zeitgeist of generations of people for the last five decades.

(And, look: if you're down with the prize going to Hemingway, you got no squawk with it going to Dylan.)

I’m more open to the question about Dylan as a performer: the one time I shelled out good money to go to one of his concerts, he came out on stage, played and sang with a zombie style and literally when he wasn’t doing either of those he turned his back to the audience. Evidently that was a phase he was going through, but it sucked.

Also—the guy definitely did not hit songwriting homers every time he came up to bat. Case in point would be "Don't Think Twice (It's All Right)". I expect it's intended to be the anthem of the free-wheelin' yout of the 60s, but all I've ever heard was irresponsible claptrap. And my reaction to the lines, "I wish there was something you could do or say/To try to make me change my mind and stay" is to tell him, "fuck you and the horse you're riding away on." Because who needs that kind of tsuris?

On the other hand, I’m one of those generations that have his lyrics woven throughout their lives. It would be impossible for me to pick my “favorite” Dylan, but here are some that I have embraced wholeheartedly.

Naturally, I first heard “My Back Pages” sung by The Byrds. And at that time in my life I didn’t understand what the refrain was about, it was just deep, you know? It was Dylan, man. Here’s a version a whole lotta legends got together to sing at Dylan’s 30^th Anniversary Concert more than 20 years ago:

And yes: that’s Eric Clapton screwing up the refrain.

Another song that’s been at times a lifeline is “Forever Young”. I first heard Joan Baez sing it at a concert in Illinois. But here’s a cover by Norah Jones that may have displaced Baez in my heart:

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard “I Shall Be Released” and felt, “Yeah—any day now…”? Here’s Chrissie Hynde knocking it out of Madison Square Garden at the 30^th Anniversary concert:

And one more from that concert: Tracy Chapman singing possibly the most iconic of Dylan’s works:

One way or another, the order is rapidly fadin', and the times they are indeed a-changin’.

Life of Riley

Y’all know how much I love the Twitters-dot-com. In addition to political exploration, there are all the animals.

No, no—I mean real animals. As in: not members of homo sapiens.

Here’s one, for example: We Rate Dogs.

To be honest, I don’t recall how I came to be following them, and I sure as hell don’t understand what they’re on about. I’m guessing that people send them pix of dogs, and they rate them. The dogs, I mean.

But they’re all 11 and 12 out of 10 ratings. Which they appear to be explaining here:

Well, fair enough.

But the one that caught my eye was this photo of Riley, in a sprinkle doughnut pillow:

That was certainly worth the 13/10 rating. But then there were the reply tweets. Viz.:

The elephant in the room

If you have any kind of connection to mass or social media, you’ll have noticed the terrible quandary that those pleased to call themselves Republican leaders—and especially those whose names are on November ballots in races ranging from Vice President of the United States clear on down through Senators, Representatives, Governors and state legislatures—have found themselves in since the #TrumpTape was released on Friday.

Because they’re desperately trying to demonstrate their loyalty to whatever it is that the Republican party claims to hold as core values as they simultaneously spray themselves with DDT to purge the contagion that the Chaos Monkey they nominated for President is spreading every time he opens his mouth, pretty much.

Let’s put aside the issue that his long litany of racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, cruel, ignorant and delusional statements didn’t seem to ruffle any of these people’s feathers over the past, well, decades. It doesn’t even seem to be an issue to them that the behavior he described on tape (which may, TBH, fall under the “delusional” rubric above) was abusive and in most civilized places illegal. It’s that he used language that no Baptist is supposed to know the definition of that caused them to flap their hands about and call for smelling salts.

The trickle of disapprobation (characterization of his recorded bragging as “unacceptable” and “offensive”, but no unendorsements) that started late Friday has turned into a torrent of not only withdrawal of support for him, but also frantic attempts to put as much distance as possible between them and him. 

They're even—mirabile dictu—calling for him to step down. Like that's ever going to happen.

(And nor should it. People are already casting their votes based on the slates nominated by the various parties. Play the damned hand you dealt yourselves, babies. You don't get to redeal because you suddenly don't like the cards.)

The Chaos Monkey, as usual, is pissed off but not at all dismayed, and he still has connectivity and an iPhone:

Also, I believe the “shackles” he refers to in this tweet are the ‘Pubs who are shoving the women and children aside in their race for the Titanic’s lifeboats:

Well, whatever.

But I do love the way social media stepped up to the plate to frame the current neo-con conundrum in images that they hold so dear:

And, of course, Twitter totally owned it like a boss.

Chemistry and couraging

It’s the second Tuesday in October, so it must be Ada Lovelace Day, when we honor women who’ve made major contributions to the advancement of society via one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines.

In the past I’ve brought to your attention the mother of modern computers, Grace Hopper (whose Celebration is taking place in Houston this week); Nobel Laureate (in Physiology/Medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (if you’re reading this on a mobile device, you can thank her for developing the frequency hopping system on which mobile communications are based); and two engineers who contributed to the Allied victory in World War II: Joan Struthers Curran, whose work on little aluminum bits called “chaff” helped to foil Nazi radar and divert attention from the D-Day landings; and Beatrice Shilling, who solved the problem of British fighter planes cutting out mid-dogfight due to carburetors that weren’t designed to support the kinds of maneuvers necessary to take on the Luftwaffe.

Last year I wrote about a woman who went through two careers—one military and one in private practice—as an occupational therapist, during which she designed and patented various devices to help patients achieve and maintain balance. Eventually, after retiring twice, and in her 90s, Barbara Beskind got to achieve her longstanding dream of being an inventor when she joined Silicon Valley design giant IDEO.

Today, though, we’ll go back to academia and to bench research, and talk about Marie M. Daly, the first African American woman to be granted a Ph.D. in chemistry. If you are concerned about your cholesterol, happy about your cholesterol or know anything at all about your cholesterol, it’s largely because of the work that Daly did.

Born in Queens in 1921, Daly was encouraged to follow her interest in science by her family and her teachers at Hunter College High School (which was all-female, a fact that I cannot believe is insignificant). She pursued studies at Queens College, living at home to keep expenses down, and graduating magna cum laude in 1942 with a degree in chemistry.

She followed with a master’s in a year from New York University, while working part-time as a lab assistant at Queens College (who thought enough of her potential to fund her studies at NYU). Following a year tutoring chemistry students she enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, working under another woman pioneer, Mary L. Caldwell, whose focus was on the digestive enzyme amylase. She was awarded her Ph.D in 1947.

Daly taught for two years at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., then received a grant from the American Cancer Society to support a postdoc at the Rockefeller institute in New York. There she worked on understanding the metabolism of components of the cell nucleus. Her career included teaching at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Daly was also an investigator for the American Heart Association, researching how hypertension affects the circulatory system. She was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to her research and teaching, Daly set up programs and scholarships to increase diversity in the ranks of chemists. Her real passion was expanding knowledge, whether it was as a bench researcher, a teacher or an encourager.

It’s hard to know what kinds of hurdles she faced as a black woman in science in academia. Bias against women and minorities is still rife at all levels of STEM (and elsewhere); rather ironically, this is well-documented in scientific study after scientific study. But she never wavered, not from her first discovery as a child of Paul De Kruff’s book, The Microbe Hunters. She knew at an early age what she wanted to do, and she did it.

All this is an extraordinary tale. But the thing that drew me to Daly’s story is this quote, which is applicable to everyone: “Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”

Well, yes you do.

Gratitude Monday: reading through the weekend

On this Columbus Day, I’m grateful for two things:

It’s a holiday for my employer, so I get another day to sleep in past 0520.

And on Saturday morning I picked up the latest in Louise Penny’s detective series about Chief InspectorArmand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. So I had something to read last night and didn’t have to watch the debate.

Team spirit

You might have gathered that I’m not much of a sports fan. I’m vaguely aware that there are events that purport to be athletic endeavors around town, but in my opinion, once “sportsmanship” left the field, they should be called what they are. Which is a bunch of over-hyped egotists pumped-up on performance-enhancing substances engaging in activities that fleece the public, first in the granting of ridiculous tax favors and building of free facilities and then in the wildly over-priced ticket charges.

And that’s before the traffic jams.

Basically, whether it’s baseball, football, basketball or hockey, we’re just talking about another incarnation of corporate welfare.

Given that premise, I might be forgiven for getting confused by logos I encountered when I arrived at the District They Call Columbia earlier this year.

What happened was that I went into a Harris Teeter, saw this logo, and wondered, “Do they have a Walgreen’s [pharmacy] in this store?”

Because, look—grocery stores have over-priced and over-hyped coffee-like-substance chains, and banks and whatnot, so there might be a Walgreen’s…

Only it turned out that logo represented the local baseball team, the Washington Nationals.

But before you slap me upside the head, here’s the actual Walgreen’s logo:

So—an easy mistake.

Back in the very early years of this century in London, my bus route home from a Saturday morning wandering around the Portobello Road market or being a culture vulture at one of the museums took me past Chelsea Football Club. I was watching fans converging on the stadium one day, wearing shirts proclaiming their team support. Viz.:

(Apparently these are now collector’s items, ergo the eBay-worthy pix. Sorry.)

Here’s what I thought: “Man, that Autoglass team really has a lot of fans here.”

Well, look—when the corporate sponsor has bigger lettering than the team logo, what am I supposed to think?

I twigged to the situation at some point before I got home, and then mentioned it to a couple of colleagues on the Monday. They told me I was pitiful.

Well, fair enough. But in this regard, I’m with Sherlock Holmes: my brain does not need to be cluttered up with identifying specific athletic (ish) teams. What I care about is knowing when there’s a game on so I can take alternate routes to where I want to go.

The scary season

I was in Target the other day, and I think we’ve jumped the Halloween shark with this:

I mean—why not just hand out baby carrots and tofu?

Semper fi

Here’s a story that totally messes with the narrative put forward by the Republican presidential candidate: an Iraqi refugee, a woman, who is serving in the very military that he dodged five times in his youth.

Amanda H. Issa first encountered Marines as a child in Mosul, where she admired all the qualities that the candidate does not possess: discipline, sacrifice, comradeship, skill… So after a period in a refugee camp in Turkey, she and her family came to this country in 2011, settling in Michigan. Since then she’s graduated from high school and junior college, and joined the Marines she so admired as a child.

Ironically, during her bootcamp training at Parris Island earlier this year, Issa suffered a foot injury on a conditioning hike. It was so bad that USMC doctors told her she could be separated from the service. Issa refused to consider that and was graduated as PFC last month. Unlike the candidate, who used bone spurs to get his multiple deferments from the draft.

And she’s the kind of person that buffoon and his followers would like to exclude from our country.

Layer upon layer of meaning and information

Most of the women-in-tech list-servs I’m on have a good number of members who do not speak English as a first language. So I tend to cut them some slack when their grammar, punctuation and spelling aren’t publisher-ready.

But there was a (thankfully) short thread last week on Ada’s List (as in Ada Lovelace) in which the OP pointed out that the plural of a noun is formed by adding an “s”, not an apostrophe plus an “s”.

A lot of posters begin their emails with “Hello lovely Ada’s”. Apparently the missing comma of direct address doesn’t bother the OP. And ignore the fact that the list itself shows up in the sender’s block as “Adas List”, not “Ada’s List”.

Fair enough.

But someone who describes herself as “the pivot point between techs, designers, commercial and brand objectives, and user groups for startups” decided to weigh in. (Both OP & Ms. Pivot appear to be native English speakers, from England, for what it’s worth.) And let me just say that when someone chooses this kind of language as her face-on-the-world, you know you're in the presence of a major-league pisher.

Well.

I dunno, but it seems to me that if you’re going to attempt to, well, make a point about language, it would help if you refrained from word salad sentences, like that third graf. I mean—this is the kind of thing you might expect to overhear after watching an avant-garde one-act play off-off-Broadway, while standing amongst the vapers.

Also, in commenting on clarity of expression, which is clouded when people misuse contractions, your point is somewhat vitiated when you use the contraction of “it is” when what you probably meant was the possessive “its”. Just sayin’.

(I wonder if her shortening of communications in the last graf is ironic, given that it appears in a sentence where she proclaims that written communications should be “quite formal”? Perhaps she’s inviting us to explore her layer upon layer of meaning and information?)

I’m letting the typo on abbreviations slide; Lord knows my fingers don’t always cooperate with my brain. But I do find it interesting that she doesn’t seem to know the difference between abbreviations and contractions. An abbreviation, generally speaking, is a shortened form of a word (Dr. for Doctor, or lb. for pound [technically, a shortening of the Latin libra]), while a contraction represents the omission of one or more letters from a word or phrase by replacing it/them with the apostrophe (can’t for cannot or they’re for they are). Consequently, her pontification on “authentic patterns of speech” cracks me up.

As does referring to the “abbreviated” original phrase as its “full name” and then saying that however you want to spell stuff helps “provoke a deeply personal and genuine discourse”.

Well, at least—I think that’s what she’s saying. But truthfully, I’ll be blowed if I really understand her finely nuanced informal conversation (or, wait: it’s written, so does that make it formal?) and its constantly changing vernacular.

And I’m betting that the women on the list from Ghana, India, Colombia and Poland are with me on this.

Gratitude Monday: Days of Awe

Jews around the world gathered with families and friends at sundown last night to welcome in the year 5777. Rosh Hashanah begins with the call of the shofar at a synagogue service, and continues with a meal that traditionally includes a round challah (symbolizing the circle of life) and apples dipped in honey (for a sweet year). 

(I love the way food is fully integrated into religious observation.) 

It also marks the ten Days of Awe, when Jews reflect upon the past year and consider what they might have done better. The Days end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews acknowledge the wrongs of the previous year and ask forgiveness—from both the person(s) they’ve wronged and from God.

As I’ve written before, I think it’s a custom that pretty much everyone could benefit from. Most Christians pay lip service (literally) to the notion of atonement when they recite that passage of the Lord’s Prayer that goes, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But there are a shedload of Christians who run through that whole prayer without giving it much thought.

That may be true of Jews at the High Holy Days, too. But I think that taking entire days out of your life and devoting them to the notion of enumerating your transgressions and asking forgiveness (as well as accepting others’ apologies) tends to focus the mind.

At any rate, I’m grateful for all my Jewish friends and their families, and I wish them all (whether in Herndon, Chicago or on a cruise around Iberia) L'Shanah Tovah.