The Agony and Ecstasy of Working in the Yard

by James Wallace Harris, 4/25/24

My backyard is an example of entropy in action. Working in my yard is a never-ending battle between chaos and order. If I had my wish, I’d move to a retirement condominium so I wouldn’t have to worry about a yard, or any kind of house maintenance. However, with rising HOA fees, and private equity takeovers, that wish could turn bad, and we’d be homeless. I see our paid for house as our last bastion of security, so I want to hang onto this home as long as possible.

Regarding yardwork, I must choose between two options. Either I pay someone to do it, or I do it myself. I’m not keen on either option. I’ve known lots of folks who got into gardening as they got older, and they found enjoyment and exercise in the pursuit. Right now, I strongly dislike working in my yard. I wonder if I can change my spots. Since I find hiring people frustrating, I’m agonizing over choosing between two things I don’t want to do.

My front yard is mostly weeds and dirt. My friend Annie told me how she was seeding her lawn with mini clover and told me about all its advantages. So, I ordered a couple pounds of mini clover seeds from Amazon. It’s been fun seeing it come up, that is until the lawn guys mowed the lawn for the first time this year. I had texted them to raise the cutting height to three inches. They didn’t. My front lawn was sheared so close to the ground that nearly everything green is gone. That annoyed the crap out of me. Like they say, if you want something done….

The mini clover can be trained to grow just 3-4 inches high, so after a few mowings it will require no more mowing. If I really want that to happen, I need to buy a mower and mow the lawn myself. Unfortunately, I don’t have any place to keep a mower. So, I’d also need to buy a storage shed. And if I fire my yard guys, I’d also need to buy a blower, trimmer, and chainsaw. And if I got into landscaping, like I need to do, I’d also need to buy a wheelbarrow and other gardening tools. This is getting expensive and a commitment.

My friend Leigh Ann hired a yard planner. He produced a 24-page document advising her on how to beautifully landscape her yard. I’m thinking about hiring him too, but I want him to advise me to create a simple easy-to-maintain lawn. I don’t want a beautiful, landscaped yard, but a yard the neighbors won’t feel embarrassed to see in the neighborhood.

Our house used to be Susan’s parents’ house. We bought it after they died. They loved working in the yard, and it was nicely landscaped. We’ve neglected the yard for thirteen years, and the landscaping has gone wild. I want a new landscape design that’s easy to maintain.

I rationalize letting it go wild was good for the environment. Birds, insects, and little creatures love it. We even have a possum living out back. However, twice now the utility company has had to hire a crew to cut a path to the power pole during power outages. They don’t tell us to keep our yard clean, but they do give us dirty looks and act mighty unfriendly.

One reason I don’t work in the yard is I have spinal stenosis, and I can only do a limited amount of physical work before I’m in a lot of pain. But I do believe I could put in twenty minutes a day. Susan absolutely refuses to work in the yard.

I theorize I might eventually conquer the yard by working twenty minutes a day and it might even be good for me. Hell, it could even turn into a hobby I enjoy. That seems to happen with a lot of older folks I know. On the other hand, I might invest thousands of dollars and want to give up in a month.

I really would like to make the mini clover work in the front yard. I’ve kind of enjoyed working with it. I go out twice a day to see how it’s doing. It does take a lot of watering, but if I can get it established, the mini clover is supposed to fix nitrogen in the soil and be minimal in maintenance. That would give me a sense of accomplishment if I pulled it off.

Reversing the entropy in the backyard will be a full-scale battle. I’ll need some dangerous power tools to conquer the reemerging forest. I’ll feel bad about killing all those wild bushes and baby trees, especially if they’re sanctuary to wildlife. However, if I want a yard that’s a yard, I will have to do that.

I’m just not sure what to do. I’ve been trying to get away from all my screens and do something real, and yard work is very real. I just don’t know if I can handle it, either physically or mentally. My friend Janis’ father still works in the yard, and he just turned ninety-nine. I wonder if his longevity and vitality come from yard work.

JWH

Are You Bothered by Fiction Based on History Changing the Facts of History?

by James Wallace Harris, 4/22/24

I divide historical fiction into two types: fiction set in the past, and real history that’s been fictionalized. Susan and I just finished Manhunt, a seven-part limited TV series running on Apple TV+. Manhunt is about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth after he shot Abe Lincoln.

We both loved the show and I felt like I was learning a lot about history that I didn’t know. It made me want to know more.

Then I read “Manhunt Episode 7 Fact-Check: 9 Biggest True Story Changes & Inaccuracies” on Screen Rant. That site has posted over thirty articles about the series and real history, including articles on each episode and how they differed from the facts. Here’s some of the points they bring up:

• Edwin Stanton did not do all the things portrayed in the show. He was not the detective hot on the trail that we saw in the show. Nor did his son help him. This was very disappointing to learn because the show makes a historical hero out of Stanton. I finished the show thinking Stanton was next to Lincoln in historical importance. Now I don’t know if that’s at all true. This bothered me a lot. Stanton did not track Booth south. Nor was Stanton’s asthma a major health issue during the time. And there is no evidence that Stanton ever suspected Johnson had any connection to the conspiracy.
• Many of the details of the assassination differ from history, but historians don’t agree on what happened either. For example, it’s undecided if Booth broke his leg jumping onto the stage or during his getaway. Those kinds of nitpicky details don’t bother me in fiction; however, I wish shows would put a disclaimer at the end.
• John Wilkes Booth didn’t escape Washington due to a fan on sentry duty. This happens in the show when Booth tries to cross a bridge after curfew and a sentry lets him pass because he’s famous. These kind of fictional changes to history I don’t care about, I can easily see them as dramatic speculation.
• John Surratt never met up with David Herold or Samuel Mudd. This is deceiving. The show makes a case that Booth was part of a large conspiracy controlled by the highest levels of the Confederacy. Since the show itself is making a case, like a court case, this kind of false evidence is stacking the deck. I consider this as bad as intentional misinformation used on the internet for political gains.
• The show thoroughly convicts Dr. Samuel Mudd as an active conspirator. I remember as a kid seeing a show that defended Mudd, claiming he was just a doctor following his professional oath. History is undecided about Mudd’s real role, but the show wasn’t.
• The hidden room in The Surratt Boardinghouse didn’t exist. This bit of misinformation made me feel that Stanton was inventing the role of detective and pursuing evidence in a modern way.
• The details of Oswell Swann were quite different. He didn’t know who Booth was, and when he found out later, told the Union soldiers.
• Lincoln’s funeral train was not Eddie Stanton’s idea. I wondered about that when it happened in the show.
• Mary Todd Lincoln never boarded her husband’s funeral train.
• The show completely backs the idea that there was a big conspiracy behind Booth, but there’s no historical evidence to support it.
• Lincoln never spoke to Stanton and Frederick Douglass together.
• Evidently all the stuff about George Sanders, and his role in a conspiracy was made up by the show.
• There is no evidence that Edwin Stanton ever traveled to Montreal.
• Ciphers and codes were so popular during that time period that finding one with Booth was no proof he belonged to a conspiracy.
• There’s no proof that Stanton ordered an assassination of Jefferson Davis.
• Mary Simms left Samuel Mudd a year before Booth came through. She never met Booth. She never had a land grant. Nor did she have a significant role in the trial. Nor was the part with Louis Weichmann true either. And Mary Simms did not attend Howard University. Manhunt the TV shows makes her into a major character of history, and my second favorite character of the show.
• Much of George Sanders’ role was made up, especially to promote the conspiracy theory.
• Agent Lafayette Baker never led a raid on Wall Street, although Confederate sympathizers and supporters dominated Wall Street.
• Edwin Booth was not at Lincoln’s wake.
• Sanford Conover’s role was exaggerated and deceptive.
• Stanton never met Sanders in his office.
• John Wilkes Booth didn’t meet with Confederate soldiers.
• The real Andrew Johnson was much worse than he was portrayed.
• There is no evidence that Stanton questioned Jefferson Davis in his cell.
• Conover’s “pet letter” never existed. This rang false in the show too, but it’s presented as a major piece of evidence that Jefferson was involved in the plot to kill Lincoln. This makes the show come across like Oliver Stone’s JFK.
• The eighteen missing pages of Booth’s diary is a historical mystery. How they are portrayed in the show is fictional. The show led me to believe that Stanton saw something in the eighteen pages that proved there was no conspiracy, and he didn’t want that to come out. That’s damning both Stanton and the show. But that then, that might be the artistic way the show revealed its picture of history could be wrong.

All this information makes me wonder if I should have even watched Manhunt. It was very entertaining, and Susan and I looked forward to every episode. However, the show left me with the impression that Edwin Stanton was Lincoln’s closest confidant, who influenced Lincoln in a major way, and was the architect of Reconstruction. Now I’m left wondering if any of that was true.

I thought about reading Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson, but now I wonder if it speculates in the same way that the television show does? I’m going to have to do some research before I buy it.

Ultimately, I feel the TV series gave me a false view of history, one that I would have assumed was true if I hadn’t read up on the show. On the other hand, Susan and I really enjoyed the show, and it’s extremely hard to find shows that we both like. We tend to like shows based on history. That’s an intersection of our interests, so I’d hate to give up on such shows.

Yet, it still bothers me. If television shows and movies that are based on history and real people aren’t essentially true to history, then they serve the same purpose as conspiracy theories, spreading misinformation. That troubles me.

I talked with my friend Mike about this, and he says it doesn’t bother him. He says he never expects fiction to be accurate or to teach him about history. I can’t help but feel historical fiction does leave me with the impression that I learned a bit of history. I can’t easily imagine that people who don’t read and study history feel that the history they get from fiction was the way it happened.

JWH

Why I Deleted Facebook and Twenty Other Apps from My iPhone

by James Wallace Harris, 4/21/24

Lately, I’ve been encountering numerous warnings on the dangers of the internet and smartphones. Jonathan Haidt is promoting his new book The Anxious Generation. Even though it’s about how there’s increase mental illness in young girls using smartphones, I think it might tangentially apply to an old guy like me too.

Haidt was inspired to write his book because of reports about the sharp rise in mental illness in young people since 2010. That was just after the invention of the iPhone and the beginnings of social media apps. Recent studies show a correlation between the use of social media on smartphones and the increase reports of mental illness in young girls. I’m not part of Haidt’s anxious generation, but I do wonder if the internet, social media, and smartphones are affecting us old folks too.

Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus, is about losing our ability to pay attention, which does affect me. I know I have a focusing problem. I can’t apply myself like I used to. For years, I’ve been thinking it was because I was getting old. Now I wonder if it’s not the internet and smartphones. Give me an iPhone and a La-Z-Boy and I’m a happy geezer but not a productive one.

So, I’ve decided to test myself. I deleted Facebook and about twenty other apps from my iPhone. All the ones that keep me playing on my phone rather than doing something else. I didn’t quit Facebook, or other social media accounts, just deleted the apps off my phone. I figure if I need to use them, I’ll have to get my fat ass out of my La-Z-Boy and go sit upright at my desktop computer.

This little experiment has had an immediate impact — withdrawal symptoms. Without Facebook, YouTube, and all the other apps I kept playing with all day long, I sit in my La-Z-Boy thinking, “What can I do?” I rationalized that reading the news is good, but then I realized that I had way too many news apps. With some trepidation, I deleted The Washington Post, Ground News, Feedly, Reddit, Instapaper, and other apps, except for The New York Times and Apple News+.

I had already deleted Flipboard because it was one huge clickbait trap, but couldn’t that also be true of other news apps? They all demand our attention. When does keeping current turn into a news addiction? What is the minimum daily requirement of news to stay healthy and informed? What amount constitutes news obesity?

I keep picking up my iPhone wanting to do something with it, but there’s less and less to do. I kept The New York Times games app. I play Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, and Sudoku every morning. For now, I’m rationalizing that playing those games is exercise for my brain. They only take about 20-30 minutes total. And I can’t think of any non-computer alternatives.

I still use my iPhone for texting, phoning, music streaming, audiobooks, checking the weather, looking up facts, reading Kindle books, etc. The iPhone has become the greatest Swiss Army knife of useful tools ever invented. I don’t think I could ever give it up. Whenever the power goes out, Susan and I go through withdrawal anxiety. Sure, we miss electricity, heating, and cooling, but what we miss the most is streaming TV and the internet. We’ve experienced several three-day outages, and it bugs us more than I think it should.

One of the insights Jonathan Haidt provides is his story about asking groups of parents two questions?

1. At what age were you allowed to go off alone unsupervised as a child?
2. At what age did you let your children go off unsupervised?

The parents would generally say 5-7 for themselves, for 10-12 for their children. Kids today are overprotected, and smartphones let them retreat from the world even further. Which makes me ask: Am I retreating from the world when I use my smartphone or computer? Has the iPhone become like a helicopter parent that keeps me tied to its apron strings?

That’s a hard question to answer. Isn’t retiring a kind of retreat from the world? Doesn’t getting old make us pull back too? My sister offered a funny observation about life years ago, “We start off life in a bed in a room by ourselves with someone taking care of us, and we end up in bed in a room by ourselves with someone taking care of us.” Isn’t screen addiction only hurrying us towards that end? And will we die with our smartphones clutched tightly in our gnarled old fingers?

Is reading a hardback book any less real than reading the same book on my iPhone screen, or listening to it with earbuds and an iPhone? With the earbuds I can walk, work in the yard, or wash dishes while reading. Is reading The Atlantic from a printed magazine a superior experience than reading it on my iPhone with Apple News+?

Is looking at funny videos less of a life experience than playing with my cat or walking in the botanic gardens?

Haidt ends up advising parents to only allow children under sixteen to own a flip phone. He would prefer kids wait even longer to get a smartphone till they complete normal adolescent development, but he doesn’t think that will happen. I don’t think kids will ever go back to flip phones. The other day I noticed that one of the apps I had was recommended for age 4+ the App Store.

Are retired folks missing any kind of elder years of psychological development because we use smartphones? As a bookworm with a lifelong addiction to television and recorded music, how can I even know what a normal life would be like? I’m obviously not a hunter and gatherer human, or an agrarian human, or even a human adapted to industrialization. Is white collar work the new natural? Didn’t we live in nature too long ago for it to be natural anymore?

Aren’t we quickly adapting to a new hivemind way of living? Are the warnings pundits give about smartphones just identifying the side effects of evolving into a new human social structure? Is cyberization the new phase of humanity?

There were people who protested industrialization, but we didn’t reject it. Should we have? Now that there are people rejecting the hivemind, should we reject it too? Or jump in faster?

For days now I’ve been restless without my apps. I have been more active. I seeded my front lawn with mini clover and have been watering and watching it come in. I contracted to have our old bathtub replaced with a shower so it will be safer for Susan. I’ve been working with a bookseller to sell my old science fiction magazines. And I’ve been trying to walk more. However, I’ve yet to do the things I hoped to do when I decided to give up my apps.

It’s hard to tell the cause of doing less later in life. Is it aging? Is it endless distractions? Is it losing the discipline of work after retiring? Before giving up all my apps, I would recline in my La-Z-Boy and play on my iPhone regretting I wasn’t doing anything constructive. Now I sit in my La-Z-Boy doing nothing and wonder why I’m not doing anything constructive. I guess it’s taken a long time to get this lazy, so it might take just as long to overcome that laziness.

JWH

We’re Never Going to Change

by James Wallace Harris, 4/15/24

Years ago, I read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. It was a passionate plea to act on climate change because if we didn’t everything would change. Her new book, Doppelganger, is a metaphor about our polarized society and what keeps us from changing even though Klein still makes a case that we need to change.

Between reading these two books I gave up all hope that humanity would change. I read Doppelganger as further proof that we won’t change even though Klein again passionately expresses the rational reasons why we should. I also believe we all need to change, but sadly, I don’t believe we will.

Doppelganger begins with Naomi Klein explaining how people on the internet often confused her with Naomi Wolf, a once respected feminist who is now considered a conspiracy crank. Klein uses the idea of the doppelganger as a metaphor for how to relate to our opposites, whether male/female, black/white, liberal/conservative, religious/atheist, Christian/Jew, Israeli/Palestinian, etc.

Klein goes to great lengths to make the metaphor work in several situations, but I found that distracting. What the book does exceptionally well is to ask: How do we decide what to do when half of us disagree with the other half? We all assume there is one truth, but everyone sees a different side of it.

In many chapters Klein makes Wolf seem ridiculous, but there are quite a few places where Klein recognizes Wolf’s point of view, or even gives her credit for being right.

I believe that extremists on the left act like naive young children, while extremists on the right act like selfish young children. In other words, I believe Klein is unrealistically hopeful, while Wolf is self-centeredly overly positive.

I must assume Klein writes her books believing we can still change. With Doppelganger she’s hoping that if we can get together and endeavor to understand each other we can make rational compromises. That would be lovely if she were successful and right. I believe Klein is right but won’t be successful.

We are doing essentially nothing towards controlling climate change. Wars, collapsing economies, and weather catastrophes are on the increase. Our responses are becoming more irrational, rather than wiser. We must face the fact that evolution works on all levels, and Darwinian conflict will always prevail.

The strong are going to take what they want at the expense of the weak. To solve all the problems Klein covers in her books would require overcoming our Darwinian natures and everyone acting for everyone else’s good. I no longer believe we’re capable of such altruism.

In the early days of Christianity, its philosophy was anti-Darwinian. But modern Christians have lost all their compassion. Christianity has been dissolving for centuries. The compassionate Christians gave up on God and became liberals, and the ones left became conservatives who rewrote Christian ideals with serving rationality that backs evolution.

In other words, I believe early Christianity, and 20th-century secular humanism were two times in history where we tried to fight our Darwinian natures, and in both instances, the movements failed.

We’re not going to change.

Not to end on a completely depressing note, I’ll try to offer a somewhat positive idea. Since we won’t change, the environment will. How can we use our Darwinian nature to build hardened societies that can survive climate catastrophes? Don’t read too much hope into that. What I’m saying is how can the strong survive the coming changes we chose not to avoid?

JWH

Being Remembered vs. Doing the Remembering

by James Wallace Harris, 4/12/24

My father died at age 49, so I always thought I would die young too. I share a lot of his physical qualities, including heart problems. However, at age 72, I feel like I’ve been proven wrong. Dying before my wife is another lifelong assumption I’m starting to question. Both my grandfathers, and all seven of my uncles died before my grandmothers and aunts. What if my lifespan is more like my mother’s, who died at 91? Susan’s parents both died at 78.

I thought the reward for dying young is getting out of watching my loved ones die. Plus, I wouldn’t have to deal with getting rid of my possessions or figure out the legal aspects of what happens to my savings. I admit, one of my biggest faults is my mastery of avoiding stress. I’ve always worked on the principle that being remembered is the effortless way out.

However, what happens if Susan dies at 78 and I die at 91? I think a lifetime of deferred stress will come due all at once. Being the one to stay behind to remember all those that died must be depressingly hard. I remember my grandmother once telling me about a tontine her high school graduating class formed. It was a small group of around thirty-five, I think. My grandmother was about my age when she told me about this, and she talked about how she was one of an exceedingly small dwindling group. I never learned who was last, and I’ve forgotten what the prize was.

I’ve been feeling something like that lately because over half my cousins on both my father’s and mother’s side of the family have died. I am the oldest male cousin on my father’s side, and the youngest male cousin on my mother’s side. Of the total of twenty-six of us cousins, only two males are still here.

I often think about all the family and friends I know who have died. But up till now, the living has way outnumbered the dead. But that’s changing. I wonder about being one of those people who all their family and friends have died. To be the last of their generation. I imagine you spend a constantly growing amount of time remembering.

Susan and I don’t have children. Most of our friends don’t have children. Of my family and friends who do have kids, I can sense a stark difference in our lives as we grow old. People who have children are links in an extraordinarily long chain that continues in the future, while folks without children are the last links in an exceptionally long chain that doesn’t make it any further.

Being the end of the line must have its psychological costs, ones I can’t even begin to imagine fully. I think being that last link must come with a heavy weight of remembering. Because we don’t have children, I don’t imagine we’ll be remembered for long after we die. I’m starting to wonder about being the one who must remember.

I assume if I died first, Susan would remember me until she died, especially when she needed something done that I always did. That might be getting colanders off the top shelf or being a companion to watch Jeopardy. She will especially remember me when the cats wake her up at 5am begging to be fed. (Susan fixes their dinner.)

I want to die a natural death, and fulfill all my responsibilities, but I can’t help but think getting to leave early might be a blessing. Like I said, I’ve always believed the woman went second. Who knows, maybe they even prefer a few years without the burden of fixing dinner for a man. My mother found a kind of peace after my father died.

But another thought has occurred to me. I was always taught to let women go first. Which is the true gentlemanly thing to do at the end of time? Go first, or let her go first? I’m much better at taking care of things than Susan. She’ll be pissed off at me if I go first and leave her with all the work of closing out our lives.

And we both worry about what will happen if she and I die before our cats Ozzy and Lily. I bet anything if I died, and it was 5am and Ozzy couldn’t wake me up, he’d just start breakfasting on me. Some mornings I do wake up with Ozzy sniffing my face.

I can remember two generations that came before me, my parents and their kin, and my grandparents and their kin. But I also remember my parents and grandparents, each remembering people from two generations before them. When I’m gone, will anyone remember any of them? When my sister and I are gone, who will remember our parents? I know my sister and I are probably the only people left who think about my father. I know my cousins still think about my mother. My sister has a son, and he will remember my mother, but he never knew my father.

I don’t worry much about being remembered. Maybe that’s why I didn’t try hard to have kids. But I do like remembering.

JWH

46 Years of Marriage and Television

by James Wallace Harris, 4/8/24

Susan and I celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary on March 26th. To commemorate the event, I’ve given myself the task of remembering all the TV shows we’ve watched together over the last 46 years. What’s been bugging me since 5:05 AM this morning has been trying to remember all the TV sets we watched all that TV on.

I can visualize the five apartments and two houses where we watched television. I can visualize the six cars we’ve owned over those forty-six years, but I can’t remember what the TV sets looked like from the early decades of our married life together. Obviously, we stared at them for hours a day so why can’t I remember what they looked like? I’ve checked my photos and can’t find any physical documentation. The first TV I can remember buying together was sometime after the year 2000 and it was a 36″ RCA monster of a CRT.

What’s funny is I can vaguely recall the TV stand we had when we first got married, a cheap aluminum affair on wheels. I assume we started off married life with a 19″ set I had owned as a bachelor. I just have no memory of it. I think we eventually bought a 25″ set, but it wasn’t a console. Just no memory whatsoever. I do remember that one of our first big purchases together was a VCR. We paid $800 around 1979. Susie used it to record soap operas to watch after work.

I believe we had cable TV at the beginning of our marriage because I just don’t remember using rabbit ears. And we had HBO before 1981 when MTV began, because I remember HBO playing music videos between movies and I loved them. That’s why I was so excited when MTV came out.

I enjoy challenging my memory with a specific task like this essay. And I’ve found that a fantastic way to trigger memories is to find an external anchor. I think the first show I can remember us watching together was I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theater. Wikipedia confirms that I, Claudius ran in Season 7 1977-1978. Since we met in July of 1977, that means my vague memory might be right.

My next memory is we watched the original All Creatures Great and Small Together. Wikipedia confirms it came out in 1978. However, I thought it came out on Masterpiece Theater, and Wikipedia nixes that idea. I also thought we were big fans of Masterpiece Theater, but Wikipedia reveals Susan, and I didn’t watch another series on that program until 1990 with Jeeves and Wooster. Looking over that Wikipedia page reveals we didn’t become big Masterpiece fans until Season 38 (2008) when they ran all the Jane Austen stories and have seen many of the shows since Masterpiece Theater was renamed Masterpience Classic. We really loved Downton Abbey starting in 2011. However, that might have been me, and not Susan. Thinking about it now, I think Susan was a latecomer to Downton Abby.

It’s funny how memories can be deceiving.

If we weren’t watching hi-brow shows, what else were we watching? I remember we both became addicted to MTV when it came out in 1981. Luckily, Wikipedia has pages for all the American TV seasons starting with 1945. I’ll use it as my memory crutch to recall our married life television viewing together. I’m only trying to remember what we watched together.

The first memory of the 1977-1978 schedule made me recall is Happy Days. Susan and I weren’t fans of that show, but I remember going over to her parents’ house and telling them we were getting married while they were watching Happy Days. (I was left alone with her dad to watch Happy Days while Susan’s mother took her in the back to ask if she had to get married.) The shows from that season that I remember Susan and I loving were Barney Miller and Soap.

For the 1978-1979 season we added Mork & Mindy, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Taxi to our watch list. This makes me remember that Susan and I loved sitcoms when we first got married. Normally, we went out a lot. We loved eating out at cheap places, or going to the mall, or the movies. I don’t think we watched a lot of TV in the early years.

In the 1982-1983 season we added Cheers on Thursday night on NBC. Taxi also moved to that night, and it became the early version of Must See TV on NBC on Thursday nights.

The 1984-1985 season added The Cosby Show to Must See TV night. Family Ties and Night Court also moved that time slot, so we had two hours of sitcoms.

Seinfeld started in the Summer of 1989. We loved that show.

Starting in the 1989-1990 season we added Roseanne to our list of sitcoms we tried to always catch. However, on Thursday nights in 1988, Must See TV was broken up and it got worse in 1989.

Looking over the schedules reveals something that conflicts with my memory. I thought we were TV addicts and watched all kinds of TV shows. But the schedules showed that for most nights there was nothing that we watched together, and I didn’t watch on my own. That makes me remember how often we went to the movies or rented videos.

I remember one time at Blockbusters they told us we had rented 794 movies. So, thinking about it, maybe Susan and I weren’t the TV fans I thought we were. But on the other hand, we loved buying the TV Guide every week. I’m thinking we might have watched more TV by ourselves, and I certainly don’t remember what Susan watched on her own. I think in the 1980s I vaguely remember Susan liking Murphy Brown and Designing Women. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation without Susan.

In the Summer of 1990, we both fell in love with Northern Exposure, and I think we followed it faithfully until Joel left the series. I eventually watched all 110 episodes when it was syndicated on A&E, I think.

For the 1991-1992 season we added Home Improvement to our list of shows to watch. However, I believe Susan watched it more than me. Over the years, I think I started watching less TV.

We added Mad About You for the 1992-1993 season. We watched Seinfeld and Mad About You on Thursday together, and then Susan watched L.A. Law.

In the 1993-1994 season, Fraiser joined Must See TV and Wings moved to that night. We tried to always be at home for Mad About You, Wings, Seinfeld, and Frasier on Thursday nights.

The 1994-1995 season was big, because it added Friends and ER to Thursday nights. We now watched NBC from 7 until 10. I believe we stuck with Friends and ER for every episode. We both loved those shows.

We added 3rd Rock from the Sun for the 1995-1996 season. Obviously, by now my research is showing that Susan and I mostly watched sitcoms together. During these years I watched Nova on my own. But I don’t think I watched anything else by myself. I guess I wasn’t a broadcast TV addict like I’ve always thought I was. And I just don’t remember what we might have watched on cable channels.

During the next few years NBC kept monkeying around with Must See TV. I stuck for Friends, Seinfeld, and ER, but skipped on the other shows. I don’t remember if Susan watched the shows in between or not. Will & Grace and That ’70s Show came out in 1998 and we both loved them.

In the year 2000 Survivor premiered, and we followed that show together for over forty seasons. I stopped watching it this year because I didn’t like the new longer format.

In 2003, Susan got a job out of town, and lived in Birmingham, Alabama Sunday through Friday for ten years. She’d come home Friday night and go back Sunday afternoon. Those ten years completely threw us off watching TV together. When she finally transferred back to Memphis in 2013, we ended up each watching our own TVs, she in the living room, me in the den. We had completely adapted to diverse types of shows that each other didn’t like.

For those ten years I watched TV when friends came over. I got hooked on shows like Breaking Bad, The Americans, and Game of Thrones. Susan never did like this kind of television. On my own, I watched The Big Bang Theory. I believe that’s the last broadcast sitcom I’ve liked.

Nowadays, we get together twice a day to watch TV. Before supper, we watch Jeopardy and the NBC Nightly News together. Then from 9pm till 11pm we watch streaming TV series together. We’re currently watching Manhunt on AppleTV+, and We Were the Lucky Ones on Hulu. Before that we watched Feud: Capote and the Swans on Hulu and The New Look on AppleTV+. Sometimes we agree on a movie, but not that often. Before we liked sitcoms together, now we like shows that have a historical setting. Usually, they are limited series on streaming TV networks.

Lately, we’ve taken to one sitcom again, an old one. We watch Leave it to Beaver on Peacock on the nights when there are no new episodes of our other shows. Susan is still heavily addicted to sitcoms. She watches them all day long while she cross stitches.

JWH

How To End Identity Theft

by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/24

The reason we have identity theft is it’s easy to pretend to be someone else with just a credit card number, a password, and a bit of trickery. Because we no longer buy most of what we buy in person, sellers must accept tokens to prove who we are, and it’s easy for others to steal our tokens. We call it identity theft because thieves pretend to be us by using our tokens.

In the old days we had to show up in person to buy what we wanted. The seller was only concerned with the validity of the money. Their concern was counterfeit money, not counterfeit people. Credit cards introduced two problems. They could represent fake money from fake people. That was when the credit card only made an impression on a piece of paper. With electronic validation of funds sellers knew they could get their money, but they couldn’t prove from whom. This was the beginning of modern identity theft.

Thieves had to physically pretend to be someone else when buying in person, but the merchants’ requirements for proving identity weren’t hard to forge. It became even easier on the internet.

To stop identity theft will require perfect identification of a person. And we can’t reply on driver’s licenses, photo IDs, passwords, electronic keys, or other kinds of proofs of identity that can be forged. We need to prove the person is exactly who they are.

Can you prove who you say you are? Even if you had a birth certificate and every piece of printed identity you acquired over your whole lifetime, can you really prove who you are? Who are we really? Identity is an abstract concept. We need to make it physical.

Our bodies are who we are. We can give it any number, password, or electronic key to point to that body, but that won’t stop identity theft.

What the government needs to do is establish identity by having a person visit an agency that establishes physical identity. They record your face, voice, fingerprints, palm print, eye print, DNA, etc. and enter that into a database. Then whenever you need to prove your identity, either in person or online, those identifiers need to be measured again and the results compared to the database.

When validating your identity, it will be vital that no recordings of those biometric factors will be allowed. What’s needed is a machine that sends information back to the database in real time. The database needs to be able to connect to the validation machine and know it’s receiving live data only.

Imagine buying something at a store or at home. You’d have to have an identity validation device. It will include a video camera and a bunch of biometric sensors. You use the device to measure who you are. Since all transactions will also be recorded, I can’t imagine many thieves even wanting themselves measured so closely.

Our phones can do face and fingerprint identification, and it would probably be easy to add voice and eye print recognition. But phones compare input from sensors to previously stored recorded data on the phone. That’s not good enough. The recorded data of your physical identity needs to be in a national identity bank that’s guarded better than banks for money.

The national identity bank needs to be able to take control of remote sensors and verify live input against your recorded identity in the identity bank. If thieves somehow stole recordings of all your biometrics they could pretend to be you, so the key is to create identity recognition machines that can’t input recorded data and prove the data its sending back to the national identity bank is from live sensors.

Think of it this way. The old saying, “Seeing is proof.” That essentially meant you had to see with your own sensors (eyes) to believe. The identity bank will have billions of eyes that work in real time.

Of course, if such an identity system were created it would solve all kinds of problems, but it would also create others. For spending money, voting, buying airline tickets, going through customs, or doing anything where identity is crucial it would be a plus. But for people who want to stay anonymous, or not be tracked, or fool the system, or be somewhere illegally, it will be a negative. In a police state, with universal security cameras and AIs, such a national identity bank will be absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

But aren’t we moving towards such a system anyway? We’re required to get RealID driver licenses. Security cameras are becoming as universal as cockroaches. As we add more biometric sensors to our devices, merchants are bound to start using them. Banks and credit card companies are going to get tired of being responsible for refunding stolen money. They will demand more identity recognition tools. If banks and credit card companies didn’t refund stolen money and we had to cover our own losses, we’d start demanding them too.

I’m not sure we can avoid this future because most people will want it. My guess, is most people favor security over privacy.

JWH

What Method of Cursive Handwriting Was I Taught in 1959-1960?

by James Wallace Harris

I’ve been wanting to write by hand again, using cursive handwriting. For decades now, whenever I’ve had to write anything by hand, I printed it with block letters. It’s terribly slow. I keep trying to switch back to cursive so I can write faster and fluidly. However, the muscle memory of whatever cursive technique I was taught is faulty, causing frequent crashes in my penmanship. Such bumps in my inky road cause me to switch back to printing.

My friend Leigh Ann lent me The Art of Cursive Penmanship by Michael R. Sull after I mentioned to her that I wanted to learn handwriting again. Leigh Ann said most older people were taught the Palmer Method of penmanship, which was common in schools until the 1950s. In his book, Sull adapted a consensus of hand movements used in teaching the various forms of the Palmer Method and calls his version American Cursive. However, when he started using it, I realized I hadn’t learned to write certain letters that way, especially the upper-case F Q R and Z or the lower-case z. Here’s an example from Wikipedia.

I have a vague memory of learning cursive writing in school. I think it was in the third grade, which would have been the 1959-1960 school year for me. I completely have no memory of learning to write Qs and Zs this way. Now it’s possible that I’ve just forgotten. I’m forgetting words all the time nowadays, so why not forget some letters too?

According to Wikipedia, the Palmer Method might have been phased out by then and the new teaching method was called the Zaner-Bloser Method. It looks like this:

The differences are very slight. I think the big differences were in the teaching methods, especially how the hand and fingers were positioned and held. I believe each successive method aimed to make it easier for students to write by hand. It’s funny that most of us have forgotten this.

These are still the strange Qs and Zs. And I can’t make myself write zoo in cursive, either with a capital or lower case. It’s like my hand has no memory of writing Zs. Nor can I write anything with a capital Q. I do use that lower-case q.

Wikipedia says the Zaner-Bloser Method began to decline after the D’Nealian Method was introduced in 1978. It looks like this:

What’s weird is all the letters look about the same from method to method. It appears the physical method of writing them differs. I’ve also read that teaching penmanship varied depending on the teacher. I wonder if I had a weird teacher that didn’t like the Qs and Zs and created his/her own? (I went to three different third grade schools, in two states, and had a man, and two women teachers.)

What I’ve been learning this afternoon is my memory, especially my muscle memory, balks at writing some of these letters in the way they are being taught in their specific method. That suggests that the teacher taught me differently, or my teacher wasn’t paying close attention to me developing wayward habits. Do we all put our own spin on lettering? Is that why we have such a tough time reading each other’s cursive handwriting?

The reason I want to learn to write by hand again, using cursive, is because I want to write quickly and smoothly with a pen and have the results be easily readable. I’m not going for beautiful handwriting. I just want to develop a comfortable way to write with pen and paper. I keep reading that using pen and paper is better for my mind and memory than using a computer. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I will assume it is until proven false.

I also have back trouble if I sit at the computer for too long, so I’m hoping to learn to write with pen and notebook while in my La-Z-Boy.

What I’ve decided to do is practice handwriting by studying these techniques in a general sense to see if I can figure out the smoothest way to cursively move from one letter to another. I want my writing to flow so I don’t have to think about it. If I could handwrite without letters crashing together, I think I would be satisfied.

I doubt I need to study a whole book, but I do need to do a lot of practice until I can figure out how my pen should move from one letter to the next depending on all the combinations. Michael R. Sull has people copy poems and other kinds of writing, and I think that’s a promising idea.

I do find it fascinating I was taught something around 1959/1960 that became muscle memory, and it should be a clue to which writing method I was taught.

JWH

Growing Old with Television

by James Wallace Harris

Don’t you think it rather absurd that we’re conscious beings who have emerged into this fantastic reality for no reason that we can confirm and yet spend so much of our lives watching television and computer screens, which are essentially fake realities? Or look at it another way. They say when you die your whole life flashes in front of you in an instant. How will we feel when we see that a large fraction of our life was staring at a screen?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t watch TV or play on a computer, but I’m just asking if it isn’t weird when the universe around us is so far out that we should? Or maybe television is the most far-out thing this reality has produced?

I belong to the first generation brought up on television, and now we’re the generation that will spend our waning years going out watching TV. I’m 72 and can remember 69 years of screen addiction. Was it worth it? Or was it a lifetime devoted to a false idol?

When I was young, television shows were probably the most common topic of discussion I had with other people, and now that I’m old, that’s become true again. Whenever I get together with people, or talk with them on the phone, we generally always compare what television shows we’ve been watching, and which ones we recommend. Is that true for you and your friends?

Over the years I have found several ways to mark, rule, and remember time. Who was I living with, where was I living (state, city, street, house), what grade or job was I in, who was president, what songs were popular, what books I read, where I went to school or work, and of course, what was popular on TV.

Television has become a time machine because we can now watch shows from any period of our lives. The same is true with music and books, but television has more details that connect us with our past. If I watch an old show from the 1950s it reminds me of what the clothes, cars, houses, furniture, and people looked like back then.

Television is also transgenerational. The other night on Survivor, a few of the young contestants talked about how they loved to watch The Andy Griffith Show. I must wonder if that’s where they get their mental conception of the 1960s. I know I’m getting a mental image of the Nazi occupation of Paris from The New Look on Apple+ TV.

This makes me realize that I have several modes for evaluating reality. I assume the best mode is direct experience. Just above my monitor is a picture window, and outside that window is a tree. Books and magazines give me another view of nature via words. I’ve learned a lot about trees from them. But then, I’ve seen the most variety of trees and landscapes with trees on television. I’ve lived in many states, north, south, east, and west. But I’ve seen more places on TV.

TV is like our sixth sense. However, it can be a sense that looks out on reality like we do with our eyes, or it looks at make believe fantasies, like we do with our inner vision and daydreams.

I probably spend 4-5 hours a day watching TV. During my working years, I believe that number was less. In my childhood I think it was more. I’ve always wondered what life would have been like if I never watched television. I think it would have been more real but duller. I try to imagine what life was like in the 19th century, say as a farmer or factory worker. News about the world at large would come through newspapers and magazines, and it would be much delayed in time.

Now that I’m getting old and wanting to do less, I thought I would be watching more television. We think of television as a babysitter for children, but isn’t that also true for us old folks? However, I’m losing my ability to watch TV for some reason. I can only watch TV series and movies if I’m watching them with other people. Watching them by myself makes me restless. I can watch short things like YouTube videos by myself, but I’m even getting restless watching that stuff too.

I had planned to catch up on a lot of television shows and movies in retirement, but that’s not working out. I’m wondering if this is happening to other people. Does the novelty of television ever wear off?

JWH

I Gleaned Two Useful Bits of Wisdom from YouTube This Morning

by James Wallace Harris, 3/18/24

The first insight applies to internet addiction. I constantly check several apps on my iPhone all day, and regularly browse YouTube on my television. It’s gotten to be a terrible habit, even though it’s so satisfying.

The first video made an analogy to rats and internet use. If you provide a button to a caged rat that when pressed provides a food pellet, the rat will eat its fill and then stop pressing the button. But if you set the button to randomly provide a food pellet the rat will constantly push the button. The analogy is we constantly check the internet hoping to get a reward, but because we don’t always find something rewarding, we keep checking. I believe that describes my internet habit.

I’m going to take his advice and set a limited time to enjoy browsing. But for the other times I’ll only use the internet when I know I want something specific.

The second piece of advice is about To-Do lists. The guy on the video said if your To-List is too long, you’ll avoid using it. And that’s true for me. I use the same To-Do list app he uses, Todoist. So, I went and rescheduled most of my tasks for the future, and just left five on the main page. I might even reduce it to three. Or even one. I want to try extremely hard and get more things done, even if it’s only one thing a day.

It’s ironic that I found these two insights that are perfect for me by browsing. I think it’s important to do some internet browsing, but I was like a rat in a cage always pushing the button hoping that I’d get a reward. There’s just not that many truly significant rewards to be had on the internet every day.

I hope I can apply these two insights and stick to using them. I might even add them to my habit tracker. Since I started using it, I’ve been doing seven core habits for 151 days straight.

JWH

“Sorry, I’m Not a Human, I’m A Computer”

by James Wallace Harris, 3/10/24

What will happen if we all end up embracing artificial intelligence (AI)?

My friend Linda told me a funny story today. Her robotic vacuum cleaner was acting up, so she called its tech support number. The tech immediately started telling her how to troubleshoot the problem, but Linda had to tell her to hold on a minute.

Linda went off and gathered up her robot. When she came back, she said, “I’m sorry I took so long, I didn’t expect you to fix it right away.”

The tech replied, “That doesn’t matter, I’m a recording.”

Linda said the computer spoke perfectly and told her exactly what to do. She was shocked by how well the call went.

At first Linda and I joked about this incident, thinking up funny scenarios that standup comics could create about humans interacting with artificial intelligence machines.

I even thought I would try to write up some of those humorous ideas, but then I started thinking along a different track. What if people prefer getting phone help from an AI rather than real people? For years now everyone I know has complained about how hard it is to get any kind of support over the phone. Most folks hate phone trees. Many acquaintances complained they couldn’t understand phone support from foreign call centers. And everyone seems to think it’s almost impossible to get a human on the phone.

What if AI chatbots change all that? What if computers start giving us perfect service over the phone, the kind we used to think humans provided? No one wants humans to lose jobs to automation, but what if we end up preferring the AI voice over the human voice?

How far will that acceptance go? It’s one thing to want to get help from Amazon when your return doesn’t fit any of the listed reasons on the website. But what about more sophisticated support over phones? Would you choose to pay $20 an hour to talk to an AI psychiatrist over Zoom or $100-300 an hour to human psychiatrist in person? What if the cheap AI psychiatrist helps you become happier sooner?

Right now, AI chatbots aren’t factually trustworthy. What if they were? What if it was impossible to tell the difference between AIs and humans by talking to them over the phone? Synthetic voices are getting closer to sounding human. But with AI generated video, soon chatbots will be able to talk and look like a human over video calls too. What if AI chatbots could pass the Turing Test? Will you care? Remember that old New Yorker cartoon showing two mutts with the capture, “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.”

Already people are using chatbots for friendship. I imagine they will soon offer phone sex talk if they don’t already. Will Only Fans users care if they see AI generated nudity rather than video images of real people?

We must ask, what do we really want from other people?

I’ve been watching the excellent limited series Feud on Hulu. The first season was about the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The second season is about Truman Capote and how he ruined his friendship with several New York society women he called his swans. On the surface, the show is about famous conflicts, but below the surface it’s about hurt. It’s about what we want from friends, and why we don’t get what we want, which is recognition and support.

How often are you disappointed with technical or business phone support because the offered solution didn’t recognize your individual problem or solve it? What will happen to society if AI chatbots see deeper into our souls and give us more support than other humans? Will we let millions go unemployed?

This whole AI thing is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone ever imagined.

JWH

“At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.”

by James Wallace Harris, 3/4/24

My cousins and I on my mother’s side of the family occasionally exchange emails. There were sixteen of us first cousins, from five sisters. There are only nine of us left, and all the sisters have passed on. Recently, we’ve been talking about our memories of my grandmother’s house. The house was out in the country, near the little town of Enid, Mississippi.

I only have one memory of that house. I think it was from 1968, but I’m not sure. I believe my mother, along with one or two of my aunts, I’m thinking it was Aunt Let, but maybe Aunt Sissy was with us too, and maybe even a couple of my cousins, all went to see the house. By then it was abandoned and run down.

I stole the title of this essay from a meme I saw on Facebook. I wish I knew before I visited the house what I’ve learned from my cousins’ memories in their emails. I wish I had been shown the photos of the house before that visit. I would have asked all the questions I had to my mother, her sisters, and my cousins. Some of my cousins were even born in the Enid house.

Why are memories more emotionally intense now in old age, than the original experience that created them? I wish I could save all my memories perfectly. I wish I could copy my cousins’ memories into my memory bank.

I recently reread Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, became unstuck in time, so he randomly popped in and out of all the moments of his life. I wish I could do that. Billy was also abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore. They didn’t experience time like we do. They didn’t experience moments one after another, but all at once. I wish I could do that sometimes, to be shown the big picture. It might have helped me always understand the small moments better.

Lastly, I’m reminded of the film Blade Runner, and the “Tears in the Rain” speech given by Roy Batty just as he’s dying.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.

When I and all my cousins die, all our memories will be lost. Susan and I don’t have children to pass on our memories. And I’m not even sure my cousins’ children can tune into what my cousins felt about their lives. My father died when I was eighteen, and I never talked to him much about his past. My mother lived to be ninety-one, and I did talk to her, and she told me a lot, but I never felt it the way I feel my own memories.

In the decades since my parents died, I’ve tried to imagine their lives from the clues they’ve left. Too bad we weren’t a race of telepaths because I don’t believe words are ever enough.

I believe this photo is the last time all sixteen cousins were together. I wish I remember that day better too. (I’m on the far left.)

JWH

Will People Change vs. Can People Change?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/28/24

I just finished listening to The Deluge by Stephen Markley, a book that speculates on what the next sixteen years could be like. The book is almost nine hundred pages in print, and over forty hours on audio. Reading this book feels like it’s compressed the last twenty years of polarized political conflict into a forty-hour long disaster film. It’s intense.

Markley uses a large cast of characters to dramatize how people on the left and right will battle for control over the next five U.S. presidential election cycles. Most of the story involves two groups of characters, those working within the political system, and those who decidedly don’t. Markley portrays an ultrasecret ecoterrorist group that works to force change by violent acts versus a dedicated group of political wonks that labor in Washington to influence both parties. Dynamic women characters lead both groups. (By the way, I disliked both women. The only character I cared about was a drug addict in Ohio, who Markley uses as a kind of everyman.)

To further spice up the story, Markley explores the growing power of computer surveillance, artificial intelligence, privacy, and how everyone can be tracked.

I’m not going to review the details of The Deluge because I want to use my reading experience to talk about a specific response to reading the book. I’ll link major book reviews at the end in case you’re considering reading the book. I can say liberals will be terrified by the conservatives in this story, and conservatives will by horrified by these fictional liberals.

The Deluge is about climate change. We could have solved that problem by now if we had acted promptly twenty years ago. The government could have added a tax on all fossil fuels and then raised it slowly month by month. For example, by adding ten cents to the federal tax on gasoline each month. If we had started this in the year 2000, gasoline would be approaching $30 a gallon today. That would have forced people and corporations to make the changes needed.

That tax revenue could have been used to overhaul the power grid and for developing renewable energy technologies. If we had taxed carbon properly, we wouldn’t be fighting over climate change today. That didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because the people who owned trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves made sure it didn’t happen. They built a political and religious coalition to fight with them to protect that wealth.

All that’s beside the point now. What Markley envisions is the breakdown of the United States over the next sixteen years so it’s obvious to all we need to do something. The Deluge includes dramatic scenes of a massive fire that destroys Los Angeles, a massive flood that overwhelms the Midwest, and a massive hurricane that devastates east coast states. These events caused the insurance industry to collapse, leading to economic chaos. Markley doesn’t overplay all this. His fictional disasters are realistic, only somewhat larger than what we’ve already experienced, killing just hundreds or a few thousand people in each event, but having an enormous impact on politics and the economy.

Reading The Deluge makes readers ask themselves: Will American change soon? But I ask: Can people change at all?

Before reading this novel, I had seen two insightful videos about climate change that ask the same questions. The first video makes a careful case saying people don’t change and if there is a solution for avoiding climate change it must work with the psychology of how people act. The second video summarizes the first video with impressive summations of it and this tweet. (I wish I could summarize what I watch and read this well.)

Over the two hundred thousand years that our species have existed on this planet, we haven’t changed. Our societies and technologies change, but not us. Over those two hundred thousand years we have developed four major cognitive tools to understand reality: religion, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Only science using mathematics has consistently proven it can consistently describe reality. If you don’t believe that I wouldn’t fly in an airplane.

Science is not black and white. It’s statistical and hard to understand. But science has overwhelmingly shown that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is turning up the temperature. The parts per million of CO2 in the air acts like a thermostat. Add more CO2 turns up the temperature. The only way to return to the weather we liked in the past is to return to the CO2 levels of the 1960s, but we keep adding more. The only way to stop adding CO2 is to completely stop using fossil fuels. And if we want to turn down the thermostat, we need to remove CO2, which isn’t easy. That’s why taxing carbon is the only way to force us to change, but we won’t do that, because it’s not in our psychology.

However, The Deluge suggests when things get bad enough, we’ll change. It ends hopefully. People even have hope for their children and grandchildren.

Personally, I don’t think we will change. If you want to know what the next sixteen years could be like, read The Deluge. If you believe people can change, and we’ll do the right thing eventually, read The Deluge. If you don’t believe we’ll change, I wouldn’t bother with the book unless you like looking at train wrecks. And if you suffer from depression, I suggest avoiding reading this novel at all costs. I seldom get even the slightest depressed, but this book bummed me out.

Reviews:

• ‘The Deluge,’ an epic new climate novel, drowns us in catastrophes – Los Angeles Times
• The Enormity of It All: On Stephen Markley’s “The Deluge” – Los Angels Review of Books
• A New Novel Confronts the Scale and Gravity of Climate Change – New York Times
• The Deluge by Stephen Markley review – apocalypse in slow motion – The Guardian
• How will climate change destroy us? ‘The Deluge’ imagines the scenarios. – The Washington Post

JWH

A Painful Challenge to My Ego

James Wallace Harris, 2/26/24

I’m hitting a new cognitive barrier that stops me cold. It’s making me doubt myself. I’ve been watching several YouTubers report on the latest news in artificial intelligence and I’ve been amazed by their ability to understand and summarize a great amount complex information. I want to understand the same information and summarize it too, but I can’t. Struggling to do so wounds my ego.

This experience is forcing me to contemplate my decaying cognitive abilities. I had a similar shock ten years ago when I retired. I was sixty-two and training a woman in her twenties to take over my job. She blew my mind by absorbing the information I gave her as fast as I could tell her. One reason I chose to retire early is because I couldn’t learn the new programming language, framework, and IDE that our IT department was making standard. That young woman was learning my servers and old programs in a language she didn’t know at a speed that shocked and awed me. My ego figured something was up, even then, when it was obvious this young woman could think several times faster than I could. I realized that’s what getting old meant.

I feel like a little aquarium fish that keeps bumping into an invisible barrier. My Zen realization is I’ve been put in a smaller tank. I need to map the territory and learn how to live with my new limitations. Of course, my ego still wants to maximize what I can do within those limits.

I remember as my mother got older, my sister and I had to decide when and where she could drive because she wouldn’t limit herself for her own safety. Eventually, my sister and I had to take her car away. I’m starting to realize that I can’t write about certain ideas because I can’t comprehend them. Will I always have the self-awareness to know what I can comprehend and what I can’t?

This makes me think of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both are older than I am. Does Biden realize what he’s forgotten? Does Trump even understand he can’t possibly know everything he thinks he knows? Neither guy wants to give up because of their egos.

So, what am I not seeing about myself? I’m reminded of Charlie Gordon in the story “Flowers for Algernon,” when Charlie was in his intellectual decline phase.

Are there tools we could use to measure our own decline? Well, that’s a topic for another essay, but I believe blogging might be one such tool.

JWH

I Finally Finished All 271 Episodes of Perry Mason

by James Wallace Harris, 2/18/24

Back in 2018 I wrote “Why Am I Binge Watching Perry Mason?” I started out watching the series on MeTV, but decided I wanted to watch the series from the first to the last episode. After printing a listing of all the episodes to act as a checklist, I then subscribed to CBS All Access to stream the episodes in order. I soon discovered they skipped some episodes. That annoyed me, so I got on eBay and found a bargain on a used copy of the complete series on DVD. I watched Perry Mason at a steady pace through the seventh season, when I completely burned out on the show. This year, I went back and with my wife’s help, finished the series.

Last night we watched season 9, episode 30, “The Case of the Final Fade-Out.” It was a fun way to end the series because that story was about a murder on the set of a television show. That episode used the Perry Mason crew as actors portraying a television crew, plus Erle Stanley Gardner played the judge. And there was one in-joke I particularly loved. We overhear an actress telling someone, “Who wants to be on a show that goes up against Bonanza.” Perry Mason was being canceled partly because it couldn’t compete with that popular western.

Even though I enjoyed watching episode after episode of Perry Mason, I can’t say it’s a great show. My love for the series was mainly due to nostalgia. My favorite aspect of each episode was seeing the guest stars, the sets, cars, and costumes. Perry Mason was filmed in black and white, except for one episode. I love black and white movies and television shows but seeing that one episode of Perry Mason in color made me wish the entire series had been filmed in color. The guest stars, old cars, and sets looked great in that one episode. It shows why color TVs became so popular. I can remember our family getting one in 1965.

I loved the characters Perry Mason (Raymond Burr), Della Street (Barbara Hale), Paul Drake (William Hopper) and Hamilton Burger (William Talman). However, they seldom ventured from their one-dimensional characterizations. In one episode Raymond Burr got to play an old English seadog who looked like Perry Mason. That revealed Burr’s missing acting potential. I’ve read that Burr got a big kick out of playing that crusty old sailor with an accent. It’s a shame that Burr played Perry Mason so woodenly so damn consistently.

We never got to see the private lives of Perry, Della, and Paul. The show followed a rigid formula. I’ve read that in the books that Perry and Della were a couple, but I can’t even say that’s even hinted at in the TV show. It would have been great having Della being involved with both Perry and Paul over the nine seasons. That would have added so many character dimensions and plots to the show.

Another missed potential the show should have added, was having Perry Mason lose a case now and then. Poor old Hamilton Burger must lose all his. Having Perry always win, always right, always infallible, made his character cardboard.

It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not. For television shows coming out from 1957 to 1966, Perry Mason‘s formula was on par. I wrote an essay, “Does Merry mason Follow the Rules for Detective Fiction?” that dealt with its mystery plots. When you watch 271 of them, it gets painful that every client of Perry Mason saw the victim just before they were killed. Sometimes, just minutes or seconds from the murder event. You’d think the writers would have been more creative in producing plots.

Yet, even with such a rigid formula, it was hard to guess whodunit. I seldom did. Often the plots were so confusing that even when we’re told what happened, it’s hard to understand what happened. I know HBO has a new Perry Mason that addresses my complaints, and I’ve seen the first season of that series. It’s excellent, but it’s not the same Perry Mason. The HBO series might be closer to the original books, and it’s set when the original books were written, making it more authentic to them, but still, I’d like a better Raymond Burr Perry Mason.

I know this is a bizarre and an impossible wish to grant, but I wish someone would remake the 1957-1966 television series set in the 1950s and 1960s, with actors much like Burr, Hale, Hopper, and Talman, but with 2024 television production values. Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) recreates 1969.

The old Perry Mason sometimes plotted stories based on current news events. One episode was obviously inspired by the Kitty Genovese case. It’s a shame they bungled that episode. Having one of the bystanders who didn’t want to get involved be the murderer detracts from the moral lesson of the real-life murder.

Another episode was about computer dating. I assume that the 1965 episode was inspired by Operation Match, which was in the news in 1965. Wikipedia has an interesting history of computer dating, and the idea goes back further than I imagined. Again, I thought the writers mangled the inspiration. Because they shoehorned it into their formula, the implications of matching couples by computer was just a novel idea they threw out but didn’t explore.

I’d love to see a new Perry Mason series that explores the reality of Ameria from 1957 through 1966. We changed so much in those years. It’s a shame that an artistic artifact from that period reveals so little about the times, mostly giving a false impression of the past. We humans prefer consuming fantasy over reality.

I know all of this sounds like I’m complaining, but I did enjoy watching the series. It’s just knowing what’s happened to the world in the last sixty years, and knowing the potential of what television can be that makes me fantasize about watching a much better Perry Mason based on the old series. It had so much potential.

Given the times could Perry Mason have been better? I thought Route 66 (1960-1964) proved Perry Mason could have taken more chances and been truer to the times. I must assume that the writers and producers of Perry Mason calculated what American TV watchers wanted to see at the time, and that’s what they gave them.

Could 1950s America have accepted Perry Mason if he lost cases, made mistakes, had personal flaws, was screwing Della, was jealous that sometimes Della might have been screwing Paul, and had to deal with the real years of 1957 through 1966?

I love watching old TV shows, shows from the years I was growing up. That’s mostly because of nostalgia, but it’s also because I like analyzing the past. I can remember the real, edgier, darker, 1950s, even though I was a kid. I wonder why television was so unreal. I often think that back then, we wanted real life to be like television. Now that I’m older, I’m wishing that old television had been more like real life. What does that say about me?

Perry Mason witnessed at least 271 dead bodies, murdered in all kinds of ways. Why didn’t that have a cumulative effect on his psyche? You’d think Perry would have become cynical and bitter as the show progressed over nine years. I think that’s the substantial difference between old television and new. The characters grow and change.

America changed dramatically from 1957 to 1966, but we don’t see that in Perry Mason, except for cars. Watching Perry Mason is escaping into a fantasy we all had a lifetime ago.

But I’ve got to wonder, will people growing up now believe television accurately captures life during their adolescent years when they rewatch their old favorite shows in retirement while looking back over their life?

Even with these complaints, I’m already thinking about starting the series over.

JWH

ChatGPT Isn’t an Artificial Intelligence (AI) But an Artificial Unconsciousness (AU)

by James Wallace Harris, 2/12/24

This essay is for anyone who wants to understand themselves and how creativity works. What I’m about to say will make more sense if you’ve played with ChatGPT or have some understanding of recent AI programs in the news. Those programs appear to be amazingly creative by answering ordinary questions, passing tests that lawyers, mathematicians, and doctors take, generating poems and pictures, and even creating music and videos. They often appear to have human intelligence even though they are criticized for making stupid mistakes — but then so do humans.

We generally think of our unconscious minds as mental processes occurring automatically below the surface of our conscious minds, out of our control. We believe our unconscious minds are neural functions that influence thought, feelings, desires, skills, perceptions, and reactions. Personally, I assume feelings, emotions, and desires come from an even deeper place and are based on hormones and are unrelated to unconscious intelligence.

It occurred to me that ChatGPT and other large language models are analogs for the unconscious mind, and this made me observe my own thoughts more closely. I don’t believe in free will. I don’t even believe I’m writing this essay. The keyword here is “I” and how we use it. If we use “I” to refer to our whole mind and body, then I’m writing the essay. But if we think of the “I” as the observer of reality that comes into being when I’m awake, then probably not. You might object to this strongly because our sense of I-ness feels obviously in full control of the whole shebang.

But what if our unconscious minds are like AI programs, what would that mean? Those AI programs train on billions of pieces of data, taking a long time to learn. But then, don’t children do something similar? The AI programs work by prompting it with a question. If you play a game of Wordle, aren’t you prompting your unconscious mind? Could you write a step-by-step flow chart of how you solve a Wordle game consciously? Don’t your hunches just pop into your mind?

If our unconscious minds are like ChatGPT, then we can improve them by feeding in more data and giving it better prompts. Isn’t that what we do when studying and taking tests? Computer scientists are working hard to improve their AI models. They give their models more data and refine their prompts. If they want their model to write computer programs, they train their models in more computer languages and programs. If we want to become an architect, we train our minds with data related to architecture. (I must wonder about my unconscious mind; it’s been trained on decades of reading science fiction.)

This will also explain why you can’t easily change another person’s mind. Training takes a long time. The unconscious mind doesn’t respond to immediate logic. If you’ve trained your mental model all your life on The Bible or investing money, it won’t be influenced immediately by new facts regarding science or economics.

We live by the illusion that we’re teaching the “I” function of our mind, the observer, the watcher, but what we’re really doing is training our unconscious mind like computer scientists train their AI models. We might even fool ourselves that free will exists because we believe the “I” is choosing the data and prompts. But is that true? What if the unconscious mind tells the “I” what to study? What to create? If the observer exists separate from intelligence, then we don’t have free will. But how could ChatGPT have free will? Humans created it, deciding on the training data, and the prompts. Are our unconscious minds creating artificial unconscious minds? Maybe nothing has free will, and everything is interrelated.

If you’ve ever practiced meditation, you’ll know that you can watch your thoughts. Proof that the observer is separate from thinking. Twice in my life I’ve lost the ability to use words and language, once in 1970 because of a large dose of LSD, and about a decade ago with a TIA. In both events I observed the world around me without words coming to mind. I just looked at things and acted on conditioned reflexes. That let me experience a state of consciousness with low intelligence, one like animals know. I now wonder if I was cut off from my unconscious mind. And if that’s true, it implies language and thoughts come from the unconscious minds, and not from what we call conscious awareness. That the observer and intelligence are separate functions of the mind.

We can get ChatGPT to write an essay for us, and it has no awareness of its actions. We use our senses to create a virtual reality in our head, an umwelt, which gives us a sensation that we’re observing reality and interacting with it, but we’re really interacting with a model of reality. I call this function that observes our model of reality the watcher. But what if our thoughts are separate from this viewer, this watcher?

If we think of large language models as analogs for the unconscious mind, then everything we do in daily life is training for our mental model. Then does the conscious mind stand in for the prompt creator? I’m on the fence about this. Sometimes the unconscious mind generates its own prompts, sometimes prompts are pushed onto us from everyday life, but maybe, just maybe, we occasionally prompt our unconscious mind consciously. Would that be free will?

When I write an essay, I have a brain function that works like ChatGPT. It generates text but as it comes into my conscious mind it feels like I, the viewer, created it. That’s an illusion. The watcher takes credit.

Over the past year or two I’ve noticed that my dreams are acquiring the elements of fiction writing. I think that’s because I’ve been working harder at understanding fiction. Like ChatGPT, we’re always training our mental model.

Last night I dreamed a murder mystery involving killing someone with nitrogen. For years I’ve heard about people committing suicide with nitrogen, and then a few weeks ago Alabama executed a man using nitrogen. My wife and I have been watching two episodes of Perry Mason each evening before bed. I think the ChatGPT feature in my brain took all that in and generated that dream.

I have a condition called aphantasia, that means I don’t consciously create mental pictures. However, I do create imagery in dreams, and sometimes when I’m drowsy, imagery, and even dream fragments float into my conscious mind. It’s like my unconscious mind is leaking into the conscious mind. I know these images and thoughts aren’t part of conscious thinking. But the watcher can observe them.

If you’ve ever played with the AI program Midjourney that creates artistic images, you know that it often creates weirdness, like three-armed people, or hands with seven fingers. Dreams often have such mistakes.

When AIs produce fictional results, the computer scientists say the AI is hallucinating. If you pay close attention to people, you’ll know we all live by many delusions. I believe programs like ChatGPT mimic humans in more ways than we expected.

I don’t think science is anywhere close to explaining how the brain produces the observer, that sense of I-ness, but science is getting much closer to understanding how intelligence works. Computer scientists say they aren’t there yet, and plan for AGI, or artificial general intelligence. They keep moving the goal. What they really want are computers much smarter than humans that don’t make mistakes, which don’t hallucinate. I don’t know if computer scientists care if computers have awareness like our internal watchers, that sense of I-ness. Sentient computers are something different.

I think what they’ve discovered is intelligence isn’t conscious. If you talk to famous artists, writers, and musicians, they will often talk about their muses. They’ve known for centuries their creativity isn’t conscious.

All this makes me think about changing how I train my model. What if I stopped reading science fiction and only read nonfiction? What if I cut out all forms of fiction including television and movies? Would it change my personality? Would I choose different prompts seeking different forms of output? If I do, wouldn’t that be my unconscious mind prompting me to do so?

This makes me ask: If I watched only Fox News would I become a Trump supporter? How long would it take? Back in the Sixties there was a catch phrase, “You are what you eat.” Then I learned a computer acronym, GIGO — “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Could we say free will exists if we control the data, we use train our unconscious minds?

JWH

Reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five at Ages 18, 55, and 72

by James Wallace Harris, 2/8/24

When I first read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut back in 1970 I thought of it as an antiwar novel. The Vietnam War overshadowed everything back then, and I was old enough to be drafted. 1970 was the year M.A.S.H. and Catch-22 came out in the movie theaters. I went to see Catch-22 and was so blown away that I bought the book, read it in a day, and then went to see the movie version again. I didn’t read the book version of M.A.S.H. for another year but saw the film in 1970 too. Ever since I’ve thought of Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, and M.A.S.H. as the trilogy of anti-war novels of my generation. The books were all about hating war.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five again, in 2006 when I was 55, I listened it on audio. That time it was a completely different novel. That time it was hilarious. It was over-the-top silly, slapstick, and viciously satirical. At that time I focused on the Tralfamadorians and Kilgore Trout, and Vonnegut’s commentary on science fiction. In 2006 I noticed the antiwar parts, but they didn’t seem to be the primary point of the novel. They were still horrifying, but I found it hard to take Slaughterhouse-Five as a serious novel about WWII. That happened to me last year when I tried to reread Catch-22.

Now in 2024, when I’m 72, I listened to the book again. This time the story was bittersweet, heavy on the bitter, gentle on the sweet, and deeply philosophical. This time Slaughterhouse-Five was a condemnation of humanity. It was dark, very dark, but strangely not depressing. Both Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, and Vonnegut were accepting that humans do horrible things and there is nothing we could do about it. This time it was obvious that Vonnegut believes we have no free will, and the best we can do in life is enjoy those moments when life is pleasant. This time around Slaughterhouse-Five was incredibly stoic.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five the first time I thought the main goal of the novel was to horrify readers that we bombed Dresden in 1945 and make them outraged. I thought Vonnegut was testifying to an Allied war crime. This time around I realized Vonnegut wasn’t doing that at all. He was completely accepting that we had to bomb Dresden.

I think both times before, I thought Billy Pilgrim was a stand-in for Vonnegut. However, this time it was quite explicit that Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut were distinctly two different characters in the book. At the end of the audiobook, there was a ten-minute conversation between Vonnegut and another unnamed WWII vet. In that conversation Vonnegut even tells us the name of the man he based Billy Pilgrim on.

The vet Vonnegut was talking to kept trying to praise Vonnegut, and Vonnegut kept deflecting the compliments. But one thing the other guy said stood out. He said that all of Vonnegut’s books were in print because they have multigenerational appeal. Since I have read the book when I was young, middle aged, and old, I can attest to that.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five back in 1970, I thought the book was a protest. It was Vonnegut telling his readers that we need to change. And back then I thought humans could change. When I read it in 2006, I still had hope that humanity could evolve into something better. But in 2024, I didn’t find Vonnegut protesting at all. Vonnegut advised acceptance. Why didn’t I see that at 18?

Slaughterhouse-Five is neither an antiwar novel, nor even a misanthropic novel. In 2024 it seems obvious that Vonnegut was saying we have no choice but to accept the life we’re given, both as an individual and as a species.

Vonnegut was around 42 when Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. How is it he now seems like a wise old man when I read it at 72 in 2024? Every time I read Slaughterhouse-Five I thought of Kurt Vonnegut as a modern-day Mark Twain. I was very into Twain when I was young, but I pictured him as a bitter old man from his later fiction and autobiography.

I wonder now if Vonnegut eventually turned bitter like Twain. Even though for the 2024 reading many scenes felt bitter, now that I write this, I’m not even sure that’s what Vonnegut intended. Could he have intended a total beatific point of view? I need to rewatch the 2021 documentary about Vonnegut called Unstuck in Time. And I need to read And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields.

This time around I’ve been thinking more about the Tralfamadorians, the alien race who kidnaps Billy Pilgrim in a flying saucer and takes him to their home world where they exhibit him in a zoo. The Tralfamadorians don’t see time like we do. Existence is all of one piece.

These aliens are like Zen Masters. Vonnegut uses them as enlightened teachers. But then, he gives a rather pitiful assessment of science fiction with his portrayal of Kilgore Trout. However, in a later novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where Kilgore Trout is again featured, its hero, Elliot Rosewater attends a science fiction convention and gives this speech.

Science fiction didn’t come across so positively in Slaughterhouse-Five. Kilgore Trout wrote dozens of books that never sell. He’s a surly old man who makes his living by managing paperboys. Billy Pilgrim finds Kilgore Trout’s books only by accident. One time he finds four of them in a porn bookstore used as window dressing.

Wikipedia has an illuminating entry on Kilgore Trout. It says Vonnegut based Kilgore on Theodore Sturgeon. I’ve always wanted to know more about Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon’s fiction suggests he’s both eccentric and beat.

There are certain writers that haunt me. I think Vonnegut is becoming one of the ghosts that I need to get to know a whole lot better. And I might need to give Catch-22 and M.A.S.H. another read too.

JWH

How Anne Got Phished and What We Should Learn from Her Experience

by James Wallace Harris, 2/2/24

My friend Anne called me the other day terribly upset. Her bank had just called her to say her account had been hacked. She was worried that her computer was the tool of the hackers and wanted me to look at it. Anne was freaked out and called me because I’m her computer guy.

The first thing I asked her was, “How do you know it was the bank who called you?” She said the bank’s name and phone number came up on her phone. I told her she needed to call her bank and confirm that. I told her the bad guys can pretend to be anyone. Anne said she would do that immediately.

When I didn’t hear from her for a couple of hours, I called her. A man answered. I didn’t think it was her husband but asked for Anne. A woman got on the line I didn’t know. I again asked for Anne. She said she was Anne. I was suspicious, so I asked this time giving Anne’s full name. She said, “Yes, that’s me.” I said, “No, you’re not.” and hung up.

I couldn’t call Anne, but I thought a text might get through. I texted “Call me right now.” The real Anne called me. I told her what happened. She said she’d been on the phone with her bank for hours and she had been phished. They stole $3500. I told her she needed to call her phone company immediately. “Tell them your calls are being redirected.” A couple of hours later, she called back to say her forwarding had been set to another number and the phone company had turned that off. Anne said the phone company couldn’t help her anymore and would notify their security people, but it would take a few days.

My guess is the phishers had gotten ahold of hacked data from Anne’s bank, so they knew a lot about her, enough to convince them they were the bank. The phishers then conned Anne into giving them more information. Then they rigged her phone so they would get her calls. That would allow them to confirm any transfer requests. That’s very clever.

Anne knew she had been duped, and it made her feel stupid. Anne is no dummy. She has two undergraduate and two master’s degrees. But we want to trust people, especially banks. We trust banks with our money, so we want to believe they’re dependable.

Anne brought over her laptop for me to check. It didn’t seem to have any malware or viruses, but Google would not work using Chrome. I couldn’t change anything on the computer because an IT department had it locked down. I don’t know if that was a coincidence that Google stopped working, or if the phishers had somehow jammed Chrome and Google without needing administrative rights. They wouldn’t have needed to hack her computer to steal the money, but it might have helped them by keeping Anne from searching for help.

Anne was still upset, frequently crying, and embarrassed by this event. Her bank had immediately replaced the money, but Anne was still afraid something else was going to happen. She’s so afraid that she’s changed banks and doing everything she can to protect herself. She cried off and on for days. At first, she didn’t want me to tell anyone because she was embarrassed about being conned. But I said she should tell everyone she knew to help other people avoid getting phished too. That’s when she said I could blog about her.

Now I’m worried. I’m thinking about all the things people should do to protect their identity and money. Once I started thinking about it, I realized the problem is immense. What should I do to be more proactive? We generally think of “identity thief” in terms of people, but phishers also steal the identity of banks. Solving phishing would require perfect identification of people and corporations. But since nearly everything happens online today, it’s easy to spoof both kinds of identity.

An antivirus program won’t protect you from this kind of theft, although the best ones try. Norton has a nice tips page, “How to protect against phishing: 18 tips for spotting a scam.” Its focus is on phishing emails because that’s what their software can deal with, but you also need to consider phone calls or even people coming to your door.

There are also all kinds of anti-fraud services for credit cards, but I don’t know enough about them yet. AARP has a whole website devoted to “Scams & Fraud.” It even has an article, “Bank Impersonation Is the Most Common Text Scam.” It makes me want to join AARP, but I wonder about trusting a company that has so many ads and popups.

Remember the old days when you had to go to the bank in person? And the bank was a big, impressive building? The digital world is both insubstantial and so damn shady. Since I read a lot of science fiction, I think of what the future might bring to solve phishing and identity theft.

The core problem is verification of identity. Right now, thieves can be you with a username and password. Hell, my iPhone needs facial identification before it will talk to me, so why don’t banks want better verification? You’d think banks would want two or three kinds of biometric proof of your identity before they transfer any of your money. But then, how do you verify your bank is your bank?

Another thing that worries me is the number of companies that have my credit card on file, or my bank account routing number. I hear about big companies getting hacked all the time. Maybe there should be a law against storing such financial information, or even personal information. It would be a pain in the ass if I had to fill out all my information every time I ordered an ebook from Amazon, but it might be worth it. PayPal is one solution to hide credit card information.

Just a bit of searching the internet on how to protect myself from fraud reveals it could be a subject worthy of a college major. Right now, banks and stores cover digital theft, but will that always be true? Insurance companies that insure homes are going out of business in some states because of too many natural disasters. Some retail chains are closing stores in areas where there’s too much “shrinkage” in their inventories. So, I can imagine banks going bankrupt or refusing some types of customers.

Right now, banks are making more money by laying off human tellers and using online systems. They probably save enough money downsizing buildings to web servers even with the cost of covering phishing theft. But at some point, they will decide that the cost is too high. I think the reason many people want to elect Donald Trump again is because they secretly want more of a police state. They’re tired of all the crime and cons. One way to solve it is to use computers and the internet. Americans never wanted national identity cards, but what will they think of being chipped like a dog? Things could get very weird in the future. If we really knew the absolute identity of every person and their location, it would solve a lot of crimes, but what would it mean to personal freedom?

Anne just called me. She’s learning. She got a phishing attempt in her email. She called to see if I thought it was the bank phishers. I didn’t think so. I told her that The International Guild of Phishers kept a dummies list on the Dark Web to share with each other.

At least she laughed at that.

JWH

Too Many Ways to Become Homeless

by James Wallace Harris, 1/25/24

I never could understand why my mother was so obsessed with dying at home until I got older myself. As the years pass, the more attached I’ve become to this house, and the more I fear becoming homeless, even temporarily. I’ve never been an anxious person, but this fear is starting to gnaw at me. Is that an old person thing? I never can tell what’s real about getting old.

Consequently, I’ve started paying attention to all the ways people become homeless — especially the ways that could make Susan and I homeless. I was going to write an essay listing the numerous ways people could lose their homes, but I found “15 Ways to Become Homeless” online and felt I shouldn’t duplicate it. Instead, I shall focus more on my specific feelings.

Whenever I see news about tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, ice storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, I think about all the homelessness they cause. This horrifies me. It depresses me to see people lose their homes, which makes me anxious about climate change and weather. I wonder how refugees from natural disasters find new homes and how long it takes. I also wonder about the odds of it happening to anyone. If I knew how many homes and apartments there were in American, and how many are destroyed by nature every year, I could calculate the odds. (ChatGPT at Bing says the odds are 1 in 200 for the general population, and 1 in 25 for people under the poverty line.)

It also upsets me to see news about Ukraine and Gaza, or any other country at war. I see all those homes and apartments blown up and worry about the millions of war refugees. War is so cruel to civilians. I never worried about becoming a war refugee until recent years and people started talking about a second U.S. civil war. How can they even think of such insanity?

I don’t know how rational this fear is, but I’ve become afraid of trees. I frequently see videos on the internet of trees falling on houses and cars. I’ve even thought of having all the trees near my house cut down. But that would be hugely expensive.

Increasingly I’m seeing stories about people being made homeless because of investors using housing as a commodity. I was particularly depressed by this story I saw on YouTube (see below). Old people, mostly old ladies who looked in their eighties and nineties who had been living in a retirement community for decades, were pushed out when their monthly fees went from around $1500 to over $6000, all because some millionaire/billionaire figured they needed to make even more money. It disturbed me that all those long-term friendships were broken up, and all those carefully crafted comfortable homes left behind. I have thought about how Susan, and I might be safer, and life would be easier, if we could live in such a community, but now I wonder about their long-term viability.

A lot of people are becoming homeless because corporate and private investors see housing as a money-making opportunity. This is increasingly pushing people out of owning homes, or even renting them. But the rich also push people out by gentrifying a neighborhood. Lots of retired Americans can no longer afford to live in the United States, so they move abroad to take advantage of lower housing costs. But that only raises prices for the locals, pushing them out of housing. Thus, using housing as an investment makes Americans and people living in other countries homeless. It has a snowball effect. Would there be less homelessness if Airbnb was never invented?

Global warming, war, economic collapse, failed states, and growing class violence are generating millions of refugees. That’s why Republicans are so freaked out about illegal border crossings. Since we already have a housing shortage, immigration causes more homelessness, and an even greater need for cheap housing, compounding the political problem. On the other hand, we have a declining population which means a shrinking economy, and immigration is the only capitalistic solution for depopulation. Building more housing grows the economy.

We need to figure out how to increase low-cost housing. Most builders are in it to make money, so they build what people with money can afford. Capitalism is one of the main contributors to homelessness, so someone needs to figure out how to make capitalism become one of the solutions. Conservatives don’t want socialism, but do they really want Darwinian capitalism?

I wonder about all the abandoned homes in decaying cities and small towns. Could they be repurposed? Could small towns attract retirees and revitalize their communities? Any person with a retirement income is like having a job added to your community. Getting a thousand retirees would be like getting a factory that hires a thousand people. Wouldn’t it?

Most people become homeless when they lose their jobs and have no family or friend support. Many people become homeless when they become drug users or alcoholics. Then there a huge population of mentally ill people who are homeless. All those factors are what people consider traditional causes of homelessness. I worry about those people, but I don’t think I’ll become one. What I worry about are all the non-traditional ways people are becoming homeless.

What a lot of people don’t know is about half of single homeless people are over 50 years old. In general, 1 in 5 homeless people are 55 or older, and that percentage and age demarcation is growing larger. It’s almost impossible to be single and live just off social security. Collapsing pension plans are also causing homelessness. No matter how careful we create our financial nest egg, there’s always ways for it to be raided.

I know nothing about the real problem of homelessness. It’s quite a complex issue. All I know is what I see on television and read on the internet. It appears that anyone could become homeless, and that scares me. And the problem is getting larger every day. It’s like climate change, a problem we mostly ignore completely, or confront by slapping on political Band-Aids.

I feel like Chicken Little yelling the sky is falling. To paraphrase Joseph Heller’s “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” and say, just because the sky doesn’t look like it’s falling doesn’t mean it’s not.

JWH

I’m Too Dumb to Use Artificial Intelligence

by James Wallace Harris, 1/19/24

I haven’t done any programming since I retired. Before I retired, I assumed I’d do programming for fun, but I never found a reason to write a program over the last ten years. Then, this week, I saw a YouTube video about PrivateGPT that would allow me to train an AI to read my own documents (.pdf, docx, txt, epub). At the time I was researching Philip K. Dick, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of content I was finding about the writer. So, this light bulb went off in my head. Why not use AI to help me read and research Philip K. Dick. I really wanted to feed the six volumes of collected letters of PKD to the AI so I could query it.

PrivateGPT is free. All I had to do was install it. I’ve spent days trying to install the dang program. The common wisdom is Python is the easiest programming language to learn right now. That might be true. But installing a Python program with all its libraries and dependencies is a nightmare. What I quickly learned is distributing and installing a Python program is an endless dumpster fire. I have Anaconda, Python 3.11, Visual Studio Code, Git, Docker, Pip, installed on three computers, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and I’ve yet to get anything to work consistently. I haven’t even gotten to part where I’d need the Poetry tool. I can run Python code under plain Python and Anaconda and set up virtual environments on each. But I can’t get VS Code to recognize those virtual environments no matter what I do.

Now I don’t need VS Code at all, but it’s so nice and universal that I felt I must get it going. VS Code is so cool looking, and it feels like it could control a jumbo jet. I’ve spent hours trying to get it working with the custom environments Conda created. There’s just some conceptual configuration I’m missing. I’ve tried it on Windows, Mac, and Linux just in case it’s a messed-up configuration on a particular machine. But they all fail in the same way.

I decided I needed to give up on using VS Code with Conda commands. If I continue, I’ll just use the Anaconda prompt terminal on Windows, or the terminal on Mac or Linux.

However, after days of banging my head against a wall so I could use AI might have taught me something. Whenever I think of creating a program, I think of something that will help me organize my thoughts and research what I read. I might end up spending a year just to get PrivateGPT trained on reading and understanding articles and dissertations on Philip K. Dick. Maybe it would be easier if I just read and processed the documents myself. I thought an AI would save me time, but it requires learning a whole new specialization. And if I did that, I might just end up becoming a programmer again, rather than an essayist.

This got me thinking about a minimalistic programming paradigm. This was partly inspired by seeing the video “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text.”

Basically, this video advocates doing everything in plain text, and using the Markdown format. That’s the default format of Obsidian, a note taking program.

It might save me lot of time if I just read the six volumes of PKD’s letters and take notes over trying to teach a computer how to read those volumes and understand my queries. I’m not even sure I could train PrivateGPT to become a literary researcher.

Visual Studio Code is loved because it does so much for the programmer. It’s full of artificial intelligence. And more AI is being added every day. Plus, it’s supposed to work with other brilliant programming tools. But using those tools and getting them to cooperate with each other is befuddling my brain.

This frustrating week has shown me I’m not smart enough to use smart tools. This reminds me of a classic science fiction short story by Poul Anderson, “The Man Who Came Early.” It’s about a 20th century man who thrown back in time to the Vikings, around the year 1000 AD. He thinks he will be useful to the people of that time because he can invent all kinds of marvels. What he learns is he doesn’t even know how to make the tools, in which to make the tools, that made the tools he was used to in the 20th century.

I can use a basic text editor and compiler, but my aging brain just can’t handle more advance modern programming tools, especially if they’re full of AI.

I need to solve my data processing needs with basic tools. But I also realized something else. My real goal was to process information about Philip K. Dick and write a summarizing essay. Even if I took a year and wrote an AI essay writing program, it would only teach me a whole lot about programming, and not about Philip K. Dick or writing essays.

What I really want is for me to be more intelligent, not my computer.

JWH

Is Remembering Just Not Forgetting?

by James Wallace Harris, 1/17/24

I am fascinated by how works of pop culture become popular and then how they are forgotten.

I read this article, “The Percentage of Music on Streaming Services That Was Never Played in 2023 is Staggering” that got me thinking. Most music streaming services now claim to have catalogs of over one hundred million songs. This report is based on 158.6 million songs, with the following breakdown of plays:

79.5 million had 0 to 10 plays

42.7 million had 11 to 100 plays

30.0 million had 101 to 1,000 plays

 6.4 million had more than 1,000 plays

The report said 45.6 million of that first group got no plays at all, but ten songs in 2023 got one billion plays. This says a lot about pop culture. 86.2% of all those songs got less than one thousand plays. I guess that’s the background radiation of pop culture interest, showing how quickly society forgets.

I wonder if I played any of those songs with less than a one thousand plays during 2023. I wonder if I play a song that no one else played at all in 2023. I wonder how many people also play the same songs I play all the time from my favorite playlist.

When I was young, I wanted to hear the current hit songs and albums, read the latest books, go to the movies that just came out, and talk with my friends about the TV shows which broadcasted last night. Now, in old age, I’m years behind, and make no effort to keep up with current pop culture. I desperately cling to the past, hoping not to forget. I feel like I’m one of the characters at the end of Fahrenheit 451 trying to preserve a book.

My focus in old age is to find the best music, movies, books, and TV shows from all time. The trouble is digging through the mountain of old pop culture artifacts and finding the archeological gems. I work to remember what I love, but also find new loves before they are completely forgotten. I find those new loves by finding people who still remember them.

Of the roughly sixteen million albums that’s been recorded, how many are worth remembering and playing? Even if I played an album a day, and I lived another thirty years, I doubt I could listen to more than ten thousand of those sixteen million albums. There’s too much to remember.

It’s great that streaming services offer us access to all those songs, but they will be forgotten. That’s an immense amount of creative effort that’s disappearing from our collective consciousness. It’s also true for books, movies, and television shows.

How much can a culture remember of its best creative efforts? I once speculated that less than one hundred novels from the 19th century are remembered by the average bookworm. Literary scholars could name more, but I doubt even many English professors could list two hundred novels from the 19th century off the top of their heads.

Lately, I’ve been watching old movies from the 1950s. IMDB says there were 4906 movies made between 1950-1959 in their database, of which 165 were released in theaters. Here’s their list of the 165 in order of popularity. I would guess I’ve seen about 140 of them. But then, I was born in 1951. How many of these movies have been seen by people born after the year 2000? I have a tough time getting friends of my own age to watch old movies from the 1950s with me. However, I’m often surprised by young people on YouTube that have channels devoted to old movies. But what percentage of their age group are they? 0.001?

There’s always a percentage of the population that loves to explore old pop culture. I maintain a database system that identifies the most remembered old science fiction books. I follow people online who specialize in remembering old movies, old music, and old books. Only one of my friends is like me and searches out old books and movies. Is there a word for people like us, who cherish remembering old pop culture? It’s different from plain old nostalgia.

I’m currently reading The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick that was written in 1963 and published in early 1964. In it, characters from the 22nd century collect old records from the 20th century. I wonder if that will come true. Or will the music from the 20th century just sit on some computer, rarely played even by scholars? In the novel, Dick has his characters agree that a song, “Every Valley” by Aksel Schitz (book spelling) is their favorite vocal recording. I could find this (slightly different spelling):

Is this what Philip K. Dick couldn’t forget.

JWH

Reading Comprehension: Books vs. Audiobooks

by James Wallace Harris, 1/3/24

At 72, I’m still learning how to read.

I recently finished the audiobook of The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick and started to write a review for my science fiction blog. That’s when I realized I needed to read the book with my eyes before I could write a proper review. The Simulacra was a complex novel involving several plot threads and dozens of named characters. (Read the plot summary at Wikipedia. Get the book at Amazon.)

From my audiobook experience I found the book compelling, fun, and I was always anxious to get back to listening to the story. I was never confused by what was going on, but when I tried to summarize the novel for my review, I discovered I couldn’t recall all the details I needed to make a coherent description of the story. There were just too many science-fictional concepts. Nor could I describe all the plot threads without researching them.

I won’t describe the book in detail, I’ll do that in my review, but for now, The Simulacra is about a post-apocalyptic world where China attacked America with atomic missiles in 1980, and the U.S. government and Germany combined to form a totalitarian regime called The United States of Europe and America (USEA). It appears to be run by a captivating 23-year-old first lady named Nicole Thibodeaux. However, she has been married to five presidents and always remains young. Since this book was written in the summer of 1963, I assume Dick was inspired by Jackie Kennedy because Nicole spends most of her time charming people, decorating the White House and gardens, and putting on nightly cultural events. But Nicole is also ruthless enough to have people summarily executed, evidently wielding unlimited power. She has access to time travel no less, and one subplot involves her negotiating with Nazis to change the course of WWII. Other subplots involve an insane psychic pianist Nicole wants to play at the White House, the outlawing of psychiatry pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, what happens to the last legal psychiatrist, a pair of ordinary guys who have a jug band that plays classical music who want to perform at the White House, a trio of sound engineers who are trying to chase down the psychic pianist to record, and a small company that hopes to get the contract to construct the next president. This long paragraph barely scratches the surface of the whole novel.

My failure of completely understanding the novel from listening to the audiobook was partly due to aging memory and partly due to the complexity of Dick’s prose. I could have hashed out several thousand words describing what I remembered, although it would have been a bundle of vague impressions. Summarizing what PKD was trying to do was evasive from just listening to the audiobook.

Audiobooks are bad for remembering exact details, which I knew, but was painfully revealed when I tried to read the novel and take notes. I called up The Simulacra on my PC in the Kindle app on the left side of the screen, and launched Obsidian, a note taking program on the left side of the screen. I started reading The Simulacra again, but with my eyes. After two days, getting to the 29% read position on the Kindle edition, I had twenty-eight names, twenty-six plot points, several lists of other details, and several quotes in my notes. I figure there are three to five main plot threads, each involving three or more characters.

More than that, I realized Philip K. Dick had riffed on hundreds of ideas. As I read them, I remembered them, but I realized that while listening, I had not put most of them within the context of the story. It wasn’t until my second reading that I saw all these hundreds of creative speculations as being part of one jigsaw puzzle picture. And I’m not talking about the characters and plots. I’m talking about worldbuilding.

Rereading with my eyes allowed me to stop and ponder. Rereading allowed me to remember the bigger picture. However, listening to the audiobook let me enjoy the story more. The narrator, Peter Berkrot, did voices for each of the characters, and acted out their personalities. Listening to the novel, it felt like I was listening to an old-time radio drama where many actors performed a story.

At one point I got too tired to read and went to bed. But before I fell asleep, I listened to the part I had just read. Berkrot expressed emotions I had not picked up while reading with my eyes, but recalling the scenes made me realize that Dick had put them there. In other words, Berkrot had found aspects of the text I missed and was pointing them out with sound.

Over the ten years since I’ve retired, I’ve been learning the value of rereading books. In fact, I now feel reading a story just once is unfair to the author. It takes two or more readings to see the author’s vision. Reading a work of fiction just once provides one layer of understanding. It’s when we see multiple layers within a work that we start to truly understand it.

Switching back and forth between reading with my eyes and reading with my ears reveals both methods have their advantages. If I read once with one sense organ and reread with another, the two combine to create reading synergy.

For most of my life, I’ve always been concerned with reading more books, but the wisdom I’m gaining from getting old is showing me that both speed reading and reading lots of books is a distraction from deep reading.

Right now, I’d recommend:

1. Listen to an audiobook for the first reading to get the big picture.
2. Reread with a physical book or ebook to get the details. Read slowly and stop often to ponder.
3. Write a review to make deeper sense of a book. Putting things into words pushes us to make sense of things.
4. Read reviews and scholarly articles to get other perspectives.
5. Reread the book again to bring it all together.

This is what I’m working on with The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick. It’s not considered one of Dick’s better works, but I’m trying to discover if there is more to the novel than its current reputation.

JWH

Getting My Stick-to-it-ness to Be More Sticky — Has the Internet Ruined My Ability to Focus?

James Wallace Harris, 12/29/23

Over the past few years, I’ve lost the ability to watch movies and television by myself. I read 55 books last year but only 33 this year. I rarely finish reading news and magazine articles anymore. I’ve given up on my hobbies and learning projects. And I’m blogging way less.

I can’t decide if this is aging related, or have I’ve ruined my ability to focus because my growing YouTube and Facebook video watching addiction. Does constantly watching short videos ruin attention span and the ability to focus?

I think this started years ago when I got addicted to Flipboard, RSS, and other forms of news feeds on the internet. I got hooked on constantly grazing on entertaining bits of information. Then for the past year or two, I’ve switched to short videos. They’re way more addictive than even clicking on clickbait.

I used to not watch TV until evening, but now I turn it on after my morning physical therapy exercises to watch YouTube videos for about an hour. I watch more after lunch and supper, and before bed. Lately, I’ve also been watching videos on Facebook, they have particularly good cat videos, bear attack videos, and people doing amazing feats videos.

I know I shouldn’t watch these videos and do something constructive instead, but I can’t help myself. It’s so pleasant and relaxing to just kick back in my La-Z-Boy and watch. I have over a hundred YouTube channels I follow. It feels like I’m involved with countless people and learning about endless subjects.

And that’s one of the problems with this addiction. I used to finish most of the videos I watched. Now I seldom finish them. If they cover something I already know I switch to another one, or scan ahead looking for real news. I’ve watched so many stereo product reviews that I could become a Hi-Fi salesman. Ditto for computer reviews, telescope reviews, and many other tech toys. I watch so much political news on YouTube during the day that I know everything that’s on the NBC Nightly News in the evening. And this is only touching on a few of the dozens of subjects and people I follow. Who knew I’d want to keep up with a transgender guitar pedal engineer? Or an expat couple living in Ecudor. Or an opinionated old English guy who makes hour long videos about his science fiction collection.

YouTube and Facebook videos give the illusion that I’m seeing what’s going on around the world. I watch videos from countless countries. From people living 40 degrees below zero in Siberia, to following a woman nature photographer in Sweden, to a Chinese girl who can build almost anything out in the woods by herself with just a few hand tools.

And that might be one of the reasons why YouTube videos are so addictive. As I’ve gotten older, and developed more physical limitations, I seldom leave the house. Watching the videos on my 4k 65″ television feels like I’m traveling around the world. It’s more visceral than reading a book or programming on my computer.

But I need to think hard about this addiction. Writing about it now reveals why it’s more appealing than watching old movies and TV shows. It also reveals why I can watch old movies and TV shows if I’m watching with someone else. If I have company, I’m doing something with them. But by myself, clicking around the world is more stimulating, offering far more information, and in a way, far more connection to other people. Fiction, in books, movies, and television shows, gives the illusion of connecting with people, but watching someone talk directly to you on a YouTube channel gives an even greater illusion of relating to someone else.

I get lots of human contact with my wife and friends, and regular socializing, and so I’m happy. However, my virtual acquaintances on YouTube offer a greater variety of intellectual stimulation. And thinking about it, I see where that competes with reading too.

Still, I have my problem of diminishing focus. Doing something constructive requires spending hours alone, concentrating on details, and applying a kind of disciplined focus. Watching YouTube videos seems to be destroying that ability.

However, what I want — or think I want, is to work on projects that take focus and discipline. I have too many projects I dream about accomplishing, and the indecision of picking one might also be why I watch YouTube videos instead. To accomplish anything worthwhile requires focusing on that project for hours a day for many days, weeks, or months.

That means sitting at a desk working by myself. That was easy when I worked at a job. I could focus for four hours, go to lunch, and then come back and focus for another four hours. Retiring has also ruined that ability. Aging might be a part of it, but I’ve also got addicted to relaxing and always having fun.

If I want to strengthen my flabby focusing ability, I need to give up having so much fun. My focusing stamina is limited to about one or two hours, for writing short blog posts like this one. For anything else I crash and burn.

I constantly dream of working on projects that would take much longer to finish. For example, I just read The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick, one of five novels he wrote in 1963. Last year I read Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, another he wrote in 1963. These are very strange books, and they all deal with mental illness and marital problems. Because I’ve read several biographies on Philip K. Dick, and know what his life was like in 1963, I would like to read all five and write about how they are similar and reflect his own mental and marital problems he was having at that time. Such a project would take about two weeks of concentrated work, reading of the reading of the novels and researching the biographical material, and reading about the novels.

I don’t know if I can do that even though I think it would be a big fun project. It’s a barrier involving focus that I’m not sure I can break through. But I have a theory. I wonder if I exercised my focus, extending my ability to stick to one task for longer and longer, could I finish such a project?

I’ve even wondered if I should start by giving up YouTube videos and practice by watching movies by myself. Right now, I watch movies by myself, by watching them five minutes at a time. I know that sounds weird, but I’ll keep returning to the movie until I finish it. Maybe three times a day, or once a day. The way my focus works is I’ll start with five-minute segments. If I get into the movie, and I really like it, those five-minute viewings stretch to ten minutes. Usually, if I can get through most of the movie, I’ll stick with the last thirty minutes in one stretch. Even this piecemeal watching technique only succeeds with maybe one in twenty movies I try.

This isn’t a New Years resolution, but I’m going to try and stick with movies until I can watch them in one sitting by myself. I wonder if that will beef up my stick-to-it-ness muscles? It’s something to try.

UPDATE: 12/31/23

After I wrote this I read “It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber” at The Atlantic. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall. It said things like, “First, PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screenmore than give hours a day.” It also said, “For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.” The article went on to detail the many ways phones might be the cause of anxiety, distraction, and learning loss.

JWH

Reading at the End of Existence

by James Wallace Harris, 12/19/23

I don’t plan to die anytime soon, but the end of my existence looms ahead. That leaves me with a growing anxiety to read all the books I haven’t read but want to. Another growing anxiety is realizing I’m reading less every year. Those problems are acutely revealing that I’ve bought far more books for my retirement years than I could read in several lifetimes. I need either the lifespan of Lazarus, or the ability to reincarnate, or to triage my library.

I would feel better if I could only read those books I’m dying to read before I die. There’s that word I’m trying not to say, “dying,” but it does seem literal in this situation. Which books do I want to read the most before I reach a Henry Bemis tragic ending?

The euphemism “dying to read” sounds like I’ll die if I don’t get to read certain books, or it could suggest books I’m so engrossed in reading that I’m dying while I’m not reading them. What I’m really saying is the possibility of dying is pushing me to get down to some deadly serious reading. It would help if I hadn’t developed a YouTube video addiction.

Some people might see retirement years as a time of waiting to die. On the contrary, every day in retirement feels like I’ve got all the time in the world, so I don’t feel the need to hurry. That’s why I’m probably reading less. When I worked, I read more because I had so little free time and it gave me a desperation to read.

However, the problem at hand is I have nine tall bookshelves filled with books waiting to be read. And that’s not counting all the invisible Kindle and Audible books in my digital cloud library. I might read one bookshelf a decade, and I don’t think I have nine decades left. (I kind of think I might have one or two.)

I need to stop wasting time and start reading my ass off.

Unfortunately, it’s not a matter of picking the first book and turning pages. With the sense that my days give me all the time in the world, but my years are running out, it causes anxiety over what to read. If I’m in day mode I can read anything and not feel like it’s a waste of time. If I’m in year mode though, it’s like “Holy Cow, I’ve got to read something great, it might be my last book!”

Lately, I’ve started a lot of books that I want to read and even enjoy reading them but quickly switch to another book I’m also anxious to read. I then forget about the previous book — for a while. This creates a daisy-chain of unfinished books that I’m constantly trying to finish. Here’s a list of unfinished books I’m currently cycling through in my reading:

• The Science Fiction Century edited by David G. Hartwell
• Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories by Samuel R. Delany
• Man in His Time: The Best of Brian W. Aldiss
• The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis
• Davy by Edgar Pangborn
• Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
• Anthony Powell by Hilary Sperling
• Songbook by Nick Hornby
• Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Determined by Robert M. Sapolsky
• The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick
• The Rise of Democracy by Sean Wilentz

And these are just the ones lying nearby that tick my memory.

Of course, I rushed through and speedily finished Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson. Why do I read some books without stopping but not others? Well, some books you really can’t put down. However, I worry my television affliction is carrying over to my reading. That worries me. For the past several years, I have had a tough time watching TV by myself. If I’m watching with other people I can sit through an entire show or movie, but when I’m alone, I end up clicking around every few minutes. I think the internet has ruined my attention span.

Last year I read 52 books, which is about average. That’s about one book a week. This year, with two weeks left to go, I’ve only finished 32 books. If I read books as fast as I read Lessons in Chemistry and Democracy Awakening, I would have finished 75-100 books this year. That 1.5 to 2 books a week.

When I really love a book, I can finish it in 2-5 days depending on length. Since I’m worried about running out of reading time, I should try to read those kinds of books all the time. But I have trouble finding such addictive titles.

If I had a Genie that granted me wishes, I’d wish that he/she would put all my unread books in order of how passionately I’d want to read each of them. But would I start with the most potent? That would put me on a downhill slope of reading enjoyment. Maybe a good procedure would be to pick #52 and read toward #1, so the year would be one reading pinnacle after another. Then take a long break and do it again. But in the second year, would I really want to read 52 books that were less enjoyable than all the books I read the previous year?

Whoops! I wasted my first wish.

Books often complement each other. Reading a history book, along with a biography and historical novel often creates a synergistic reading high. I still want to read the best books first, but I’d also want them blended by subject so that the highs came in waves as I wander from topic to topic. Right now, I’m reading about democracy in America in the 19th century. Susan and I are watching The Gilded Age on television. Supplementing those with some novels and additional nonfiction books about 19th century art and science would make for a very educational month or two.

However, I know I’ll get burned out on America history soon enough. Not only do I not stick to books, but I flit from subject to subject. While I have that Genie, I wish I knew which subjects I wanted to study the most before I die. Not only do I need to abandon some books in my collection, but I also need to abandon some subject areas.

I keep standing in front of my bookcases thinking the sight of so many books is paralyzing me from deciding what to read and sticking to it. My two all-time favorite periods of reading in my life were when I was a teen and could barely afford any books, so I cherished each as I bought and read them. And when I first joined Audible and had two credits a month, that made me incredibly careful to pick what I wanted to listen to and finish. In both cases, I’d finish what I owned, and spend days anticipating what I could buy and read next.

I know I can’t make an end of the world reading plan because I never stick to my plans. Over the years I’m slowly getting a handle on my book buying addiction. Although, I might have slowed on book purchasing because it’s finally hitting me that I’ve already bought far more books than I’ve got time to read. That reality has gotten to feel very real, so I no longer buy books like I used to. But it’s also adding to the anxiety that I need to read as much as I can over the time I’ve got left.

What I need now is a sense of what I will read and what I won’t. Over the coming years I’d like to read more and get rid of books I know I can’t or won’t read until I end up on my deathbed with just one book. But this desire isn’t really about numbers. It’s about the topic of the last book I will be reading. Not only do I have too many books to read, but I’m trying to cover too many subjects.

More than ever, I know my mind can only hold so much. And after a lifetime of reading, I get the feeling I’m heading towards an ultimate distillation of interests. When I leave this existence, I want to feel tranquil satisfaction that I’ve completed my life’s education. I worry I’ll be like one of those foolish Hindu guys who think of a beautiful stag just before they die and must reincarnate as one. If I leave wanting to read more, I’ll come back as a bookworm again. (Or come back as a book.)

JWH

Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson – Review Part Two

by James Wallace Harris, 12/17/23

The idea of Donald Trump becoming president again has me worried. I’ve enjoyed the quiet years of the Biden administration, and I fear four years of a Trump president because it won’t be peaceful. I know I shouldn’t worry at my age because any kind of stress is hard on my health. I know I can’t control the future or even what’s happening now, but I’ve discovered that reading about the past alleviates some of my worries. America has always been at war with itself and the political strife we see now has always been the norm. Political peace never existed. Even when I think Biden’s administration has been quiet, that’s only relative to the Trump years. The volume of acrimonious political rhetoric has stayed quite high, just nowhere near as high as 2016-2020.

After I finished reading Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson, I began rereading it hoping to make sense of an overwhelming amount of information. Ultimately, I felt Democracy Awakening Richardson identified two forces seeking to define the political structure of America. Those two forces have always existed since the beginning of our nation, each fighting for dominance, with power swinging back and forth between two poles of human perception. My hopes of that conflict going away is a fantasy that I need to give up. That conflict might be as natural as kill or be killed is to animal evolution.

The political poles could be called conservative and liberal, or we could use political party names like Republican and Democrat, but one thing that Richardson shows is labels for politics have constantly changed over the history of our country. I constantly think if I could only understand why people believe what they do I could just accept them and let them be, even if I think they’re out of their minds.

I’ve started wondering if political views are connected to personality and upbringing. Richardson’s book gives an overview of the history of democracy in America that feels like a war between the two philosophies that divide us. First, are the Darwinians who believe power belongs to the fittest, and second are idealists who want complete democracy and universal suffrage. But I don’t feel these beliefs come from free will or logic. It’s something much deeper, as if we’re two different species.

Ever since growing up in the 1960s I can’t understand why we’re so polarized politically. What I believe offends half the country, while they passionately believe in what I think are delusions. In recent years I’ve concluded that each group perceives reality differently. It’s not a matter of evidence, or external truths, we just don’t perceive the world in the same way. We can’t convince each other of anything because we’re psychologically different. I’ve even wondered if there’s a physiological difference.

I read a science fiction story yesterday that might be the perfect metaphor for what I’m trying to say. It’s called “The First Men” by Howard Fast and you can read it online. Fast based his story on theoretical concepts about feral children, which is a controversial subject itself. Children raised without language seldom acquire it later in life. Children raised by animals never act human because what it means to be human is something acquired in childhood. In the story, Fast suggests that mutant superhuman children are born occasionally, but because they are raised human, they can never become superhuman. In the story, scientists track down orphans with very high IQs with a technique that can detect intelligence in babies. Those babies are raised in a controlled environment and grow up to be superhuman. I’ll let you read the ending.

What if back during the Renaissance a new kind of child began to show up and saw the world in a different way? At first, they were rare, and most of their special thinking was snuffed out by being raised by traditional believers. But slowly, some of them got a new upbringing, and raised a few more of their kind. So today, about forty percent of the population have this new kind of thinking. We might call this thinking liberalism. While the old thinkers call their perspective conservatism. The conservatives have a theocratic, autocratic, aristocratic, or oligarchic view of reality. While the new people think everyone should have equal say in politics and be given equal opportunity to achieve their full potential. This new way of thinking is anti-Darwinian, but then so is the Christianity of The Sermon on the Mount. And these two ways of perceiving reality are not based on logic, facts, or rhetoric, but a biologically programmed perception etched in early childhood upbringing.

We have a problem with words and labels. Richardson uses democracy vs. authoritarianism. The trouble is, both these terms have many definitions, used in different ways. Even saying Republican and Democrat, or conservative or liberal is very troubling. Republicans today are different from Ronald Reagan Republicans, or Nixon Republicans, or Eisenhower Republicans, or Teddy Roosevelt Republicans or Lincoln Republicans. Lincoln Republicans are more like current Democrats. The words conservative and liberal have gone through several different definitions and meanings.

Despite the problem with labeling these two forces in politics, I believe it’s important that we recognize what each force wants to achieve. There have always been people wanting to limit the running of the country to an elite group, while other people have wanted to move towards a democracy with universal suffrage.

You can see this back-and-forth battle by reading Wikipedia’s timeline of voting rights in the United States. Whatever 2024 brings, it will just be a continuation of this long process.

I believe political stress is caused by believing we need to decide issues once and for all by our personal perspectives. I think we’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop that we can’t escape because everyone wants what they want and won’t be happy until they get what they want. It’s like being stuck in an endless programming loop without an exit condition. Because we’re polarized politically, half the country is always unhappy when the other half gets what their biological programming wants at the poll.

The failure has always been that each group thinks it can convince the other to change, and that’s just not going to happen.

The only escape I can see for this endless loop is to change a condition. One idea I’ve had, is require more than a simple majority to win elections or pass laws. I think we should raise it to 55% to start with, and eventually increase that over time, to 60% and 66%. We should force politicians to appeal to a wider audience, and we should pass laws with referendums. Of course, this won’t happen because the current power structure would never allow it.

I’ve decided to read more history books about the United States to see how changes were brought about. It’s soothing to my mind to understand how things got to be the way they are. It’s less stressful than wanting things to be different.

JWH

Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson – Review Part One

by James Wallace Harris

Americans have general thought of America as a democracy, although it’s never been a true democracy. When the United States of America was first created a limited number of white males could vote. As time progressed more white males were allowed to vote. As liberals and radicals influenced politics, they advocated for wider suffrage state by state. See this timeline for details, but the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 gave black men the vote, and in 1920 the Nineteenth amendment was passed that gave women the vote in all states. Whites have always suppressed black voters, and even some men still resent women voting. And political parties have always tried to control who could vote and how, and even suppressing voting.

A true democracy would allow every citizen over a certain age to vote, or universal suffrage. Before the 21st century most Americans didn’t see that as a problem, but as ethnic demographics have changed it has turned some Americans against democracy.

America is supposed to have a representative democracy, but it inspired the formation of political parties supported by various special interest groups fighting for power. In America Awakening Heather Cox Richardson describes how we’ve reached the current state where liberals advocate more democracy and conservatives push for less, apparently wanting authoritarian rule instead. Authoritarians general promote some ideal in the past as the authority of how things should be govern. Most modern American authoritarians look to either the Founding Fathers and the Constitution or to God and The Bible, or a combination of both. Modern American authoritarian leaders tend to be white and paternalistic, and their followers tend to want a strong man, or strong father figure, although more women are wanting to be Republican leaders too.

Richardson says it’s important to understand that many terms like conservative, liberal, radical, Republican, and Democrat have changed over the centuries. In the 19th century Republicans were for African Americans voting, and for gun laws, and in the early 20th century, for regulations on corporations. In the 19th century and through the first half of the 20th century, Democrats tried to keep African Americans from having the vote. The Republican and Democratic parties went through a polarity change in the 1960s. Richardson says its important understand how words have changed meaning because authoritarians often abuse them and justify their abuse by claiming history supports their new definitions. In other words, history gets distorted and abused.

I’m reviewing Democracy Awakening because I think it’s an important book everyone should read for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but also to push my ability to remember. I love reading nonfiction books, but their information often feels like it goes in one ear and out the other. I can only retain what I learn in the vaguest way. Since I’m also reading about memory and aging, I’ve decided to read Democracy Awakening differently. I’m going to distill what Richardson is saying into my own words but in some concise form that I hope I can remember. I’ll do that in a series of blog posts, outlines, tables, etc.

My friend Linda and I are reading Democracy Awakening together and for our first discussion we are covering Part 1, Chapters 1-10, which I hope to cover today. Here is the Table of Contents.

Because I’ve also read other books on this subject already, including watching related documentaries and YouTube videos, I’m going to reference them in this series to show how there’s a synergy in my reading.

Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor who has specialized on the history of the Republican Party through a series of books. I have not read these books, but I have read some about each and it gives me confidence that Richardson is an expert on this subject. On the internet there are zillions of people claiming to be knowledgable on specific subjects but when you check into their creditials, you find little to back their claim of authority.

• The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (1997)
• The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001)
• West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007)
• Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010) (2010)
• To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014)
• How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020)
• Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023)

Richardson makes her points by citing historical events. I wish I could remember all the cited dates and important changes in history because they show an evolution of how we got to today. The first ten chapters progress mostly in a linear fashion, so I hope to eventually create a timeline.

Richardson also quotes significant papers, speeches, books, and other sources to reveal how concepts emerged that cause people to seek political change. Just the history of African Americans seeking Civil Rights reveals many connections to how conservatives and liberals changed their parties and political goals. I’d like to make a list of the most significant quotes to remember. And I’d like to read the books Richardson references, including books by conservative writers. But this will take a lot of time.

And there’s another problem, both conservatives and liberals use the Founding Fathers as historical authority even though members of both political parties distort history for their cause. Republicans like to cite the past, both the Founding Fathers, and The Bible, as how to create or interpret laws. This is rediculous. 2023 isn’t 1776, or 800 BCE. Yet, reading Richardson’s book Democracy Awakening shows the democracy we have today is constantly changing, and how those changes comes from actions in the past.

It is well documented that Republicans feel the United States took a wrong turn in the 1930s when FDR’s administration created the New Deal. They’ve been trying to undo it ever since. And their methods and philosophy of why and how have evolved over the decades. Part of that evolution is moving away from democracy, which is what Richardson’s book is about.

Richardson believes we didn’t fall into fascism in the 1930s because the United States has a long history of various groups fighting for suffrage. That the history of United States is one of a ruling class struggling to keep power from various groups of people wanting to vote. This includes poor whites, African Americans, women, and immigrants. The current Republicans know they cannot win with universal suffrage and fair elections and so they have to do an end run around democracy.

Republicans formed coalitions with special interest groups that the leaders of the party have no interest in supporting. What has changed is the special interest groups have taken over the power from the old Republican elites. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats have a clear majority with voters, and depend on Independents who swing their votes.

The main problem revealed in the first part of Democracy Awakening is the country is dividing itself into two camps. Those who want an authoritarian government based on their version of the Founding Fathers and their version of Christianity, and those people who want universal suffrage and a true democracy.

The authoritarians cannot get what they want by existing voting laws and population demographics. That’s why they are undermining the election process. Since majority rule is 50%, these two groups are polarized. Neither Republicans or Democrats have a majority. They depend on swing votes from Independents.

What I’m hoping to see in the next two parts is whether or not Richardson thinks democracy can survive. I was recently terrified by a New York Times essay, “Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’” by Donald P. Moynihan. In it Moynihan says Trump has three goals which I’ll take out of context and quote here:

The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.

...

The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.



Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on — into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”

...

The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for The New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.



This is not about conservatism. Mr. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Mr. Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Mr. Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffrey Clark, who almost became Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

This is why I believe everyone should be reading Democracy Awakening. I believe Richardson’s book is defining what the 2024 election will truly mean at the deepest level.

JWH

Could Different Actors Make a Mediocre Film Great?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/28/23

Billy Wilder has made many great movies, including seven films on the National Film Registry. So last night, when Susan and I started watching Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) we expected another hit. The show wasn’t a total dud, but it was one of the weirdest major motion pictures I’ve ever seen. It’s a sex comedy, and Wilder has a great reputation from two previous classic sex comedies, The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like it Hot (1959). And if you think about it, Some Like It Hot is a very weird picture, but it worked despite its weirdness, and it gets more famous every year. Why hasn’t Kiss Me, Stupid? (Although, it might work with younger people for reasons I can’t fathom.)

There are many parallels between the careers of Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock. One is young people are getting into the films of both directors today. And two, both directors fizzled out in the 1960s after a long career. There are other parallels, but for now I feel disappointed for Kiss Me, Stupid in a similar way I felt let down by Hitchcock’s Marnie, another 1964 film. Both films had many elements I liked, but they weren’t easy to watch. Both were too long.

To me, Wilder was obviously trying to have another sex comedy hit like Some Like It Hot because he originally hoped it would star Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. Both starred in that movie. Instead, he got Ray Walston and Kim Novak.

The story is about a piano teacher named Orville Spooner (Ray Walton) and gas station attendant Barney Millsap (Cliff Osmond) who dream of selling hit songs. They’ve composed 62 so far. So when Dino (Dean Martin) shows up at Barney’s gas station Barney quickly concocts a wild idea to get Dino to hear their songs. Barney sabotages Dino’s car and tells him he’ll have to stay over night. Dino asks where some action could be had, meaning where he could get laid. He tells both Barney and Orville that he gets terrible headaches if he doesn’t get sex once a day. Barney tells him to go to a dive called The Belly Button.

Dino then asks where’s a good place to stay and Barney says there isn’t any, but he should stay with Orville and his wife. When Barney gets the chance he tells Orville his plan. He wants Orville to get his wife out of the house, and they’d get a prostitute from The Belly Button to play Orville’s wife and seduce Dino. He’ll be so grateful for all their efforts he will sing one of their songs on his TV show.

Orville’s wife, Zelda, is played by Felicia Farr, who was Jack Lemmon’s wife at the time. The prostitute, Polly the Pistol is played by Kim Novak. And here’s one of the major problems of Kiss Me, Stupid. Even though Ray Walston does a good job playing Orville, the loser piano teacher, who is easily sent into rages of jealousy over his pretty wife, there’s no chemistry between him and Farr, or him and Novak. And Walston plays the role just how I imagined Jack Lemmon would have played it, he just doesn’t have the physical presence of Lemmon. Lemmon really would have been the perfect choice for the role or Orville.

Farr plays Zelda okay, but she doesn’t really charm us. I wondered if Zelda had been played by Shirley MacLaine, who had tremendous screen charm back then, could Kiss Me, Stupid have been another Billy Wilder classic. It makes you think about just how important the actor is in a hit, especially two actors in a romantic comedy. Lemmon and MacLaine had proven themselves in two other Wilder pictures, The Apartment (1960) and Irma la Douce (1963), although the second picture is no where near as good as the first. That shows that story counts for a lot too.

And since Kiss Me, Stupid becomes a three-way love story, the role of Polly the Pistol is also important. If Marilyn Monroe had lived, I don’t think she would have been right for the part. I thought Novak did a great job, and I think if she had the right onscreen chemistry with Jack Lemmon, it would have been perfect. Poor Ray Walston just wasn’t a romantic comedy lead. And even though he’s the main character, he only got third billing.

Dean Martin was fine playing himself, and his public persona that he uses in his acts fits the part, however, I always thought Martin was nicer than than the boozie character he created. And Martin never comes across as a horndog that the role needs. I wonder if Frank Sinatra or Bobby Darin wouldn’t have been better at acting the sex maniac. The part needed a big name singer who could act sleazy.

And last, I thought Barney should have been played by Jonathan Winters.

How much does on screen chemistry play in creating a hit movie? Watching Kiss Me, Stupid, it proves that it’s a great deal.

Kiss Me, Stupid was both stupid and boring in many places, but also oddly touching sometimes, and even funny in other places. We have to listen to a bunch of bad songs that are parodies of famous songs. They were funny sometimes, and painful at other times. The songs were written by Ira Gershwin pattern on George Gershwin’s melodies. They almost sound good, even the words, but it’s obvious they’re suppose to be bad too, even though they almost sound good.

Kiss Me, Stupid is available to watch for free on YouTube.

JWH

Are Computers Making It Too Easy for Us?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/24/23

Last night I watched two videos on YouTube that reviewed the Seestar S50 “smart telescope.” It’s an amazing $499 go-to telescope that does astrophotography automatically. It works in conjunction with your smartphone. You take the telescope outside and set it up level, then use your smartphone to tell it what astronomical object to photograph, and it does everything else. You can go back inside and monitor the Seestar S50 by smartphone.

But does it make astrophotography too easy? The reviewer mentions that question and says no. But I know if I bought the Seestar S50 I would play with it a couple of time and then leave it in a closet. (Unless I felt challenged to find ways to push the device to its limits.)

A couple of decades ago I wanted to get into digital astrophotography. I even bought a $60 how-to book. At the time, it was both too expensive and too difficult for me. The learning curve was extremely high. I had a 120mm cheap refractor that was fun to look through, but a bitch to carry around and set up. And it didn’t have the mount to handle photography. And except for the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, I needed to drive an hour out of town to the astronomy club’s viewing site to see deep sky stuff. I eventually gave my telescope to a lady who wanted to get into astronomy. I lost interest in what I could see with just by eyes. The next step was photography, and it was too big to take at the time.

After I retired and have gotten older, I’ve thought about getting another telescope, but a smaller one. After having hernia surgery, I don’t want to risk picking up heavy stuff. The Seestar S50 would be light enough, and cheap enough. And it takes better photographs than what I fantasized about doing twenty years ago.

Astronomy is a deceptive hobby. You see the great astrophotography in Sky & Telescope and think that’s what you’ll see when you look through a telescope. It’s not. Even with expensive scopes, deep sky objects are just patches of fuzzy gray blobs of lights in the eyepiece. Cameras, both film and digital gather greater amounts of light by making time exposures, sometimes hours long. What the Seestar S50 does is take a series of ten second exposures that build up the image over time. The longer you spend photographing an object the better it looks. Watch both videos to see what I mean.

What you see on your smartphone using the Seestar S50 is way more than what you see looking through an eyepiece. And real astronomers seldom look through eyepieces. However, is looking at your iPhone really what you want?

In this second film, we see how traditional digital astrophotography is done. It involves a lot of equipment and software. It’s a skill that takes time to master but look at the results. (Watch the entire video here but the results in the video below are stunning.)

The 80mm APO looks so good I can’t help but think the guy is fooling us with a photo from the Hubble telescope.

What is the goal here? To have a photograph of something in the sky you claim to have taken? The Seestar S50 will do that. But what did you do? Paid $499. Isn’t the real goal to learn how to take an astrophotograph by learning how it’s done? Doesn’t it also involve the desire to know how to find objects in the night sky? Isn’t what we really want is knowing how to do something, and do it well?

Computers are starting to do everything for us. And by adding AI, it will soon be possible to do a lot of complex tasks by just asking a computer. People now create beautiful digital art by assembling keywords into a prompt.

I know it’s impossible to turn back progress. I wouldn’t want to give up computers, but I’m not sure I want computers to do everything for me. Of course, everyone is different. Some people will be happy to have a computer do the entire job, while other people will take pleasure in doing something entirely by themselves. I don’t mind using a computer with word processing to write an essay, but I wouldn’t want the computer to write the essay for me.

I’m already seeing people give up their smartphones for dumb phones. I know people who have taken up drawing, painting, or water coloring by hand rather than use a computer art program.

I wonder if society will eventually reject computers. AI might push us over the limit. We could draw the limit at AI. Or we could draw the limit at an earlier stage of computer development. What if we gave up the internet too? Or set the clock back to 1983 before the Macintosh made graphical interfaces what everyone wanted. What if we limited computer technology to IBM AT personal computers, IBM 370 mainframes, and VAX 11 minicomputers? Humans had to work harder and know more to use that level of technology. But wasn’t using those old machines a lot more fun?

I don’t think we would turn off technological progress. I expect a Seestar S80 that does everything that guy could do with his $5000 computer for $399 in a few years and be even easier to use. And in ten years people will have robots with eyes like telescopes, and if you want a photography of M31, you’d just say to your robot, “Robbie, go take a picture of M31 for me.”

JWH

Do You Plan to Bequeath Any of Your Computer Files in Your Will?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/20/23

I currently have 71,882 files in Dropbox. Will anyone want any of those digital documents after I die?

Let’s say I go on a Döstädning rampage (Swedish death cleaning) of my digital possessions, would there be anything left that I’d want anyone to have?

Most people consider their photographs to be among their most cherished digital possessions. I have 5,368 of those — some of those photos go back to four generations in our families. Susan and I have no children. We made copies of those photos for our relatives one Christmas, although I’m not sure if any of those relatives wanted them. I imagine them groaning at their pile of digital junk growing larger.

Would a genealogical database want old photographs? I know people interested in their ancestry spend a lot of time looking for old documents online. I wonder if I have any photos, letters, or documents that would be of interest to people in the future researching their past?

I have 28,811 digital scans of old science fiction and pulp magazines that took me years to collect. Most of them are easily found online, so I doubt they will be wanted. But what if the Internet Archive servers were shut down for lack of funding? Will there be kids in the future wishing they had a complete run of Astounding Science Fiction? Or will that desire die with the generation that grew up reading the stories that were first published in that magazine?

There are certain documents relating to money that my wife will want, but she will prefer printed copies. When my mother died, and Susan’s folks died, I scanned a bunch of family documents. I haven’t looked at them in years, and Susan has never asked about them. Still, would they be of value to anyone? What will future historians want to know about ordinary people?

I wonder how long my blogs will exist after I die. I’ve known bloggers who have died, and I can still read their blog posts, but some of writers were published at online companies that went under. I know I used a couple of those sites, and I can’t even remember the names of the companies.

I have over a thousand Kindle books, and over a thousand Audible audiobooks in Amazon’s cloud. Is there any way for me to leave those libraries to other people?

And if no one in the future will want my digital files, do I need to hang onto them now? Why do I keep them? Why do I give Dropbox $119 a year? When I retired, I made copies of all the computer programs I wrote. I put them on several drives just to be sure. I put those drives in the closet. Several years later I went to check on them and every one of those hard drives was dead. I have a friend whose computer hard drive died recently. She had always backed everything up with Apple’s Time Machine. However, when she restored her files, many were corrupted. It’s hard to preserve digital files for a long time. Backup programs and online backup services aren’t 100% reliable.

When humanity stored our past on paper, some of it got saved. Not much, but some. I get the feeling that since we switched to storing stuff digitally, even less will survive. I have a handful of paper photographs that my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents took. So does Susan. I wonder who we should give them to?

Every day I spend a few minutes going around the house looking for things to throw away or give away. I need to start doing that with my computer files. I spent a lifetime gathering stuff, both physical stuff, and digital stuff. It’s funny now that I’m trying to reverse that progression of acquisitions.

I wonder when I was young if I had somehow known for sure that my older self would be getting rid of all the stuff I was buying back then, would I have bought so much stuff in the first place? How much stuff have I bought or saved because of FOMO (fear of missing out)? And how much did I really miss out?

JWH

Linux Diary 0000

by James Wallace Harris, 11/17/23

You may think this diary is about technology, but deep down it’s about being old and fighting to learn new things. My life would be far easier if I weren’t pushing myself to learn Linux. I spent hours yesterday trying to get Linux Mint Debian Edition working with my scanner and printer. So far, I’ve mostly failed. Both work with my Windows and Mac OS machines, so I know both devices work and the cables work. Both took just minutes to set up on those OSes.

Failing is frustrating. But failing is how we learn. Technology is getting so easy to use that we learn less and less by using it. Technology is getting so good that the technologically challenged can fumble around and make their phones, TVs, and computers work by themselves. We used to believe every kid should study STEM courses, but recently the big tech companies laid off a quarter million computer careerists. We weren’t smart enough to foresee technology getting smarter.

Of Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws, the third says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Most technology is approaching magic in use by most people today. As it does, we’ll need fewer magicians. This is becoming even more true as we rely on artificial intelligence.

At seventy-two I doubt I’ll have time to become a Linux Wizard, but I might become a wizard’s apprentice. Linux isn’t made for Dummies, although the Wizards of Linux are working hard to spread Linux to everyone. Linux is already hidden away everywhere. You use it but don’t know it. All I’m doing is trying to consciously get to know it before it turns completely magical.

I got LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) running on my new Minis Forum EM680. It looked great and worked in the way I wanted — until I tried hooking up my printer and scanner. In both cases, Linux said it saw the device, even giving me their names, but said there was an error communicating with them. I started with the built-in drivers and utilities that come with LMDE. I then downloaded drivers and utilities from HP and Epson. Same results. They recognized their own hardware by name but said there were problems.

I wondered if the problem was the new AMD computer or LMDE? I got out my old NUC 5 with Linux Mint based on Ubuntu. This time the drivers that came with Mint worked with the HP Officejet. I got the printer working with a USB cable and with a Wi-Fi connection. But I wanted to use HP’s utility hoping I’d get more functionality out my all-in-one printer/scanner/copier. No matter what I did I couldn’t get any further with the HP driver and utility. I didn’t bother testing the Epson Perfection V370 and Plustek 3800L scanners. I figure I’ll work on the HP Officejet all-in-one first. Get the printer going, and then see if I can get its scanner working.

I then started Googling and found people having the same problem with HP and Mint. One Reddit thread suggested that the latest Linux Mint and the HP software had a timing problem. One guy even said if he turned everything off and on, then waited thirty minutes, the HP device manager would work with the printer one time. This is why most people don’t use Linux. This is why I should give up. But I won’t.

I also posted a message to a group of people who scan books and magazines asking if any of them used Linux. Three said they did. Two used Ubuntu Linux and one Fedora. Ubuntu and Fedora use the Gnome desktop manager, a graphical user interface. Mint uses Cinnamon for its desktop manager but is based on the Ubuntu distribution. I picked Mint because I like the way Cinnamon looks and feels. I dislike the Gnome desktop. But the Mint version I used also switched from the Ubuntu Linux distribution to the Debian Linux distribution. To make matters even more confusing and amusing, the Ubuntu distribution is based on Debian.

In other words, the Debian people build a version of Linux, and then the Ubuntu people customize it the way they like it, and then the Mint people take that and customize it again to their tastes. LMDE tried to simplify things by putting Cinnamon directly on Debian.

My problem might be a configuration problem. Maybe it’s a dependency problem. Maybe it’s caused by new hardware. Or its old drivers. Or conflicting drivers. Who knows?

I don’t know if my major problem lies with software configuration or the new hardware on my new computer. That’s why I started testing things on an old computer. The new machine has an AMD CPU while the old one has an Intel CPU. And they each have different GPUs.

This is further complicated by the fact that HP and Epson try to make drivers and utilities that work with all flavors of Linux and hardware. But the configuration combinations are endless, and that’s where problems arise. Even Vuescan that works with a wide variety of scanners didn’t work. It recognized the scanner was an Epson Perfection V370 but couldn’t talk to it.

Now this brings me to the point where I need to decide what to do. My friend Mike sent me a text this morning that said Nvidia updated its driver for Linux, and it fixed a bug that the last version caused him. The fix he made for that bug was to downgrade to an earlier edition of the driver. Waiting is sometimes a solution, so now Mike’s back to using the latest Nvidia driver. I could wait and see if Mint LMDE sends out a fix in the future. I’m in no hurry because I can print and scan from my Windows machine.

However, the goal is having a Linux machine that does everything I want to do. Luckily, I have two Linux machines. I can keep Mint on one and continue to learn to use that distribution. I can then use the second machine to test different Linux distributions.

Then what distribution will I try next? Linux has countless distributions. They vary by what graphical desktop they use. But they also vary by how often they update to the latest version of Linux itself, all its support programs, and all the various application programs, and which programs they prefer. They fall along the spectrum from old and stable to new and bleeding edge.

There’s a big advantage to sticking with the tried and true. But new CPU, GPUs, and other technologies need the latest version of Linux to recognize the new hardware, but the latest versions of applications often break things, and it takes a while for the bugs to be discovered and fixed. So, you want the latest hardware support and the shiniest new software, but not if it breaks something. It also helps to pick a distribution that is so popular that it gets supported first.

For my test machine I need to try Ubuntu, which is popular and widely supported, and Debian which is old and conservative. That tried-and-true nature is why Ubuntu starts with Debian and adds newer hardware support and mostly new applications. However, Debian changed recently to speed up hardware/software adoption yet stay reliable. It also comes with a plain version of Gnome, the desktop manager. However, Ubuntu is what two of the guys use that said they scan with Linux. And when you go to software web sites that support Linux, usually it’s Ubuntu.

I’ve just talked myself into getting a copy of the last version of Ubuntu that offered long term support and test it with my HP Officejet, Epson Perfection V370 scanner, and my Plustek 3800L scanner.

I wrote this to help me decide what to do. Hope it wasn’t too boring to read. But if you use Linux and have any tips to help me out, let me know.

JWH

The Challenge of Cross Platform Computing Life

by James Wallace Harris, 11/11/23

For the first twenty years of my life, I didn’t use computers. I started off using computers in 1971 at school, and bought my first one, an Atari 400 in 1980. Before the decade was over, I had standardized on MS-DOS computers at home, but used PCs and Macs at work. During the 1990s, Windows became the standard at work and home, although I also used a MacIntosh at work sometimes. I was a computer programmer and had to support both. I liked the Mac, but never owned one until recently when I bought a M1 Mac Air.

I bought the Mac laptop because I have back problems and can’t always sit at my desktop computer and the Air had the longest battery life. I can use the Mac Air in my La-Z-Boy when I can’t sit at my desk.

Because I use the iPhone the most daily of all my computers, and because I like to read on iPads, I should have standardized on MacOS and bought an iMac for my desktop computer. Apple is doing everything it can to make its hardware and software to synergistically work across all its devices. However, I haven’t done that. I’ve been a Windows guy for decades.

Life would be much easier if I owned a Windows computer, with a Windows tablet, a Windows smartphone, and a Windows laptop, and they all shared files from OneDrive. Windows offers the widest functionality because it supports most hardware and software. And Microsoft has done an excellent job of constantly improving Windows. However, since the early 1990s I’ve hankered after another operating system, UNIX. Back then, real computer guys used UNIX. Now real computer guys use Linux.

In the early 1990s, my friend Mike bought a copy of MINIX. It was a cheap imitation of UNIX for $89. I didn’t want to spend $89, so when I read about a free UNIX-like operating system called Linux I downloaded Slackware from USENET News messages onto several floppy disks and installed it on an extra machine. I thought it was neat, but I couldn’t run any program I was used to running. That was disappointing.

After that, I would check into Linux about once a year, always hoping it could do everything I did on my Windows machine. In recent years it’s gotten close. This week I bought a Minis Forum UM680 small form factor computer and installed LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) on it. This was a complete extravagance since I don’t need any more computing power. Unfortunately, when I started seeing videos about the UM680 I just lusted after it. The thing is tiny, but super cool. It has 32GB of memory, 1TB of SSD hard disk space, 3 USB-A ports, 2 USB-C ports, and a microSD card reader. I paid $433 for it. To configure a Mac Mini or iMac like this would cost three times as much.

I decided I would finally use Linux as much as possible. I’m writing this blog on my Linux machine (see photo). I don’t hate Windows, in fact, I think it’s the best OS to use. I bought the M1 Mac Air because as a piece of hardware it was impressive and had a long battery life. However, I’m not too keen on Mac OS, and I dislike using a laptop. I love big computer screens. My Windows machine has a 34″ widescreen monitor, and the Linux box has a 27″ 4K monitor. Using the 13.3″ screen on the Air is painful to me. But I practice using it every day. During those times when my back goes out, I hate being away from my computer and figure I need a lifeboat computer, and the Mac Air will be that lifeboat.

After using the M1 Mac Air I wished I had bought a Windows laptop even though I would have had to buy a machine that had much less battery life. The Mac Air is great, and I’ve always wanted a Mac, but life would have been so much easier with one less OS to support. I should have ignored my long desires to use both Macs and Linux machines. That didn’t happen, so I’m living with three operating systems. I’ll standardize on one in the future as I get older, but for now I need to be a cross platform user.

Dealing with five operating systems (Windows, MacOS, iOS, Linux, Android) is a pain in the butt. Doing word processing is a snap on all the operating systems. So is using a spreadsheet, web browser, and email. It really doesn’t matter what OS I use for common computer activities. A cheap Chromebook would have been all I needed. However, I pursue two activities which I’m having trouble doing on the Mac and Linux.

Most of my computer use involves blogging. If I had to, I could create a blog with text, photos, and videos just from my iPhone. But it’s tedious and I can’t manipulate images the way I can in Windows. I create my photo layouts using HTML first, and then using the Windows Snipping Tool to grab the layout I want and save it to .jpg. I know that’s a silly way to avoid learning a program like Photoshop or GIMP. I’ve been using Photoshop Elements for photo manipulation for years but have never learned to use it well. Since Photoshop Elements isn’t available for Linux, I need to learn to use GIMP, the standard free photo editor that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Blogging on the Mac and Linux will take a little time to learn, but it shouldn’t be too hard.

Because I write about science fiction and its history, I have a large library of digital scans of science fiction magazines. In fact, I have copies of most of the science fiction magazines that were published in the 20th century. They are in the .cbr format. I can read them on devices from all five operating systems. However, I currently can only create a scan with my Windows machine. It takes several programs to create a magazine scan, and a scanner. The scanner works best under Windows. Getting it to work under MacOS or Linux is a pain. And some of the software I need to process the scan pages is only available for Windows.

For me to be truly cross platform ready, I need to get magazine scanning going on the Mac and Linux machines. That will take much longer. I will need to find drivers for my scanner, and new software on each OS that does the work of the Windows software I use now.

Like I said, I should have just stuck with Windows. Life would have been easier, cheaper, and less cluttered. But when I look into the future, I wonder if I shouldn’t become a Mac person, even though I don’t like MacOS. I love my iPhone, and doubt I’ll ever switch from it. I love the iPad far better than my Android tablet. The logical thing would be to migrate to iPhone, iPad, iMac, and Mac Air as my only computer platform.

I guess years of being a PC guy makes me shy away from becoming a Mac guy. I’ve always wanted to be a complete computer nerd and use Linux. There are Linux phones and tablets, but they are so damn clunky. Theoretically, I could go total Linux. However, I would be out of step with everyone I know.

Logic says I should pick one platform and stick to it. But I’ve never been very logical, at least with computers and technology. I’ve aways been impulsive, wanting all the different kinds of gadgets. Now that I’m getting older, that impulse is coming home to roost, and I don’t think it’s viable for the last years of life when I should be minimizing possessions.

JWH

My Problem with the Terms “Evil” and “Free Will”

by James Wallace Harris, 11/8/23

Yesterday my friend Mike and I were talking about evil women characters in old movies. We both immediately thought of the character Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) in the 1945 film, Leave Her to Heaven. I told Mike that I had just read a review of Detour, also from 1945, that featured one mean woman, Vera, played by Ann Savage. The reviewer said she was the evilest woman in all of film noir.

This got me Googling the phase “evil women in the movies” and finding several lists: 25 Of The Best Female Villains You’ll Love To Hate, The Greatest Female Villians, 10 Awesomely Sinister Women in Movie History, Most Memorable Female Villians. Not to surprising, most of the films listed were recent. What was surprising, was most modern female villians are from fantasy, horror, or animated films. Mike and I were thinking about ordinary realistic women in films.

Mike texted me:

I make a distinction between evil and insane. For example, Kathy Bates in Misery, Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me, and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction play characters that I consider insane, not evil. The Barbara Stanwyck character in Double Indemnity is not insane, just evil. The same goes for Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven.

I texted back:

Evil is a slippery word for me. In the original religious term God was the source of all good and the Devil was the source of all evil. Being evil meant you were doing the work of the devil. It connotes that the person is a puppet of the devil. Or worshipping of the devil by doing the kind of things he wanted done. Being evil meant being devilish.

By the way, in the old days being insane meant being possessed by the devil. So judging someone evil or insane was close to the same thing.

In the modern sense of how we use those words it all relates to free will. An insane person has lost control of their free will. An evil person chooses to do evil.

But we have a problem. Recent research suggests no one has any free will. 

Now, our fun conversation has turned serious, but I think valid. If we don’t have free will, how do we judge people we think are doing wrong? I just bought the book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky but haven’t read it yet. However, I have been reading reviews and watching interviews with Sapolsky. What he’s saying is based on brain research that I’ve been reading about for years. We don’t have free will. The trouble is our moral and ethical structures depend on people either being sane and deciding on their own actions, or insane and out of control. What if we have no control over our actions at all?

The nightly news is full of people I’d call evil. What if we took a different approach to the problem. What if we say killing innocent children is evil no matter if you have free will or not. Does it matter if the evil person is consider sane or insane? Or has free will or not? What we’re horrified by is bad things happening to good people.

Modern films have made evil rather cartoonish by portraying the bad guy as over the top in their evilness. The films Mike and I were talking about, Leave Her to Heaven and Detour, are mundane portrayals of evil. I think the gigantic evils we see in the news, and the unrealistic portrayals of evil in modern movies, have made us forget the everyday type of evils. We no longer expect everyone to be honest and civil, and bad behavior is often claimed to be free expression and a personal right.

I don’t like what I see on the news, or in modern movies and television shows. And the behaviors I’m seeing on the freeways and while shopping is disturbing too. Maybe we don’t have free will, but we could at least act like we do. Maybe pretending to be good is all we can hope for.

I’m reminded of a science experiment I read about back in the 1960s where they put many rats in small confined cages to simulate overpopulation. The rats became violent, tearing at each other. I think that’s what’s happening to us today. Overpopulation is causing us to go mad. But that also supports the argument that there’s no free will.

Even though neuroscience is revealing there’s no free will, I wonder if free will isn’t something we could develop? Can we overcome genetics and conditioning? Is there some way we can consciously reprogram our unconscius minds. The reason why scientists say we have no free will is because they can measure brain activity happening before we’re consciousnessly aware of our choices and actions. Is there no way to condition our unconscious minds to act in the ways we consider ethical?

It’s obvious that any adult who follows the same beliefs they were taught as a child is not acting on free will. Most people believe what they are taught early in life. But if they radically change what they believe, is that a case of free will? If someone raised a Baptist grows up and spends many years trying out different religions, and ends up choosing to become a Zen Buddhist, is that free will?

When you watch movies think about whether or not the antagonist is acting on their own, or from genetics and conditioning. Do the same when you are watching the news. Does Putin have free will? The current war in the middle East is just like all the wars of history. Maybe we don’t change because we can’t.

Still, the idea of being able to change ourselves intrigues me. Science might prove we don’t have free will, but does that mean we should stop trying to change ourselves?

I’ve been paying attention to my dreams lately, so I’m getting to know my unconscious mind. I’m also working on developing good habits and breaking bad habits. And I think there are ways to reprogram how our unconscious minds function. If we could, wouldn’t that be an act of free will?

JWH

Can’t Find My Way Home Dreams

by James Wallace Harris, 10/31/23

I have a recurring dream where I can’t find my way home. These dreams take various forms, and I’ve been having them all my life. We moved around a lot when I was growing up, and those old dreams were about me trying to find my way back to our house in Lake Forest subdivision, in Hollywood, Florida. There was an obvious reason for those dreams by my younger self. That was my favorite house when I was growing up and I wanted to go back there. After I became an adult and went back to that house once, I stopped having those dreams.

In recent years, I-can’t-find-my-way-home dreams usually involve turning down a street that I don’t know and trying to get back to the part of town that I’m familiar with. But I get further and further lost. Variations on this dream involve being in a shopping mall and trying to find my way out. I can’t find the exit doors, so I start looking for back doors to the outside in the individual stores, but end up in rooms with no windows, smaller attics, and dark closets. I rush from room to room trying to find an exit, any exit. Each time I keep finding smaller and smaller rooms, and the possible exits to these rooms get harder and harder to find. Sometimes, I end up in a dark room. I usually wake up feeling frustrated.

The other night I was on a bike. I was riding down a familiar street, and I turned onto another street, and I was suddenly in an unfailiar downtown with freeways and busy streets and I didn’t know where I was at all. I tried to retrace my route but that didn’t help. I looked up at the sky to see where the sun was, to discern north and west, figuring I’d head east until I saw something I knew, however, I never found anything I knew. Then I remembered I had a smartphone with Google Maps. I got it out, but I couldn’t use it to get to the maps app.

This wasn’t the first time I tried to use a smartphone in a dream. It’s always frustrating because I can’t make it do what I want. And the screens are never clear in the dream — just blurry photos and text. In one dream I kept trying to call my wife, but I couldn’t remember the number and then thought I had her phone and calling it wouldn’t do any good.

Sometimes I can fly, and try to fly home, but I get frustrated because I can’t fly high enough to see where I am. In these dreams I’m constantly moving forward, overcoming one obstacle after another, always getting more frustrated as I feel more trapped. Often, I have to transverse water — pools, canals, and rivers. I used to be afraid of water in dreams. For many years I had a dream about trying to drive across an exceptionally long and tall bridge, but whenever I got to the middle of the bridge the water would rise and wash me away. These dreams would begin when I was far away from the bridge, but I could see it in the distance, rising in the sky, crossing an expanse of water, an ocean even, where I couldn’t see the other side. I’d always have to psyche myself up to drive across these bridges, and when I was ready to go, I’d put the peddle to the metal thinking the only way was to race across as fast as I could. I haven’t had this type of dream in years. They were common in my middle years.

Since retirement, the dreams of finding my way down unfamiliar streets, or maze of rooms or offices, or flying over houses and buildings mostly felt about being lost and not getting somewhere. I assume that means I’m frustrated about something in life. But what?

I found this website, “Lost Dream Meaning: Dreams About Not Being Able to Get Home.” Not only is this a common dream type, but there are many sub-types to this dream. Most of the explanations remind me of the kind of generic explanations you see in astrology columns. These two paragraphs do resonate, or could:

On the other hand, being lost in a dream may also reflect all the distractions in your life that have caused you to lose your direction or sense of purpose. You are going off on a digression, distracting you from seeing the entire picture. 

Do you feel as if you are just wasting your time or your life is simply going in endless circles? This may be a warning dream concerning the potential bad choices you are about to make that may lead you astray.

Since retiring from work, I do feel I lack direction, or purpose. I do feel my retirement days are going nowhere, that I’m just spinning my wheels until I die.

Here’s an explanation for getting lost while driving:

Are you driving in your dream when you get lost? This may represent the decisions or plans you have that may have been fallen victim to distractions. Perhaps you lose sight of the whole picture and gave too much of your focus on every little detail.

This also resonates. I do feel my life is one of pursing lots of fun distractions. When I first retired, I thought I would pursue specific goals and spend my time at useful work.

Here’s what they save about dreaming about getting lost in a forest, something I don’t think I do.

If in your lost dream you are lost deep inside a forest, this may symbolize feelings of being overcome with confusion. You may not know where to start addressing a problem in your waking life. Likewise, you are at loss on how you can get yourself out of a difficult circumstance. It’s as if you feel like there are no possible solutions and nobody is around to help you out. It seems like you have completely lost your way in your waking life.

Yet, it still fits. Like I said, a lot of this woo-woo stuff is so generic that it could fit anyone. I often wish I could escape our reality of war, political polarity, climate change, environmental collapse, and other problems that I can’t control. But then neither can anyone else.

Which makes me ask: Are you having dreams like mine? I would think the explanations for these dreams would apply to most people, which means most people should be having these kinds of dreams.

I wonder if on the days where I get something done, and feel satisfied with that day, I won’t have dreams about not finding my way home that night? I should pay attention to what I dream after each kind of day. Who knows, maybe I could see a pattern and decipher my own unconscious.

I notice my dreams a lot more in old age because I must get up in the night frequently to pee. I’m starting to notice that I have certain kinds of dreams. Can’t find my way home dreams are just one kind. Another kind that’s showing up more often is dreaming about people that I knew a long time ago. Of course, one of my most frequent type of dream is searching for a bathroom, but that’s logical with my pee situation.

I wonder if dreams matter. If I didn’t pee so much at night, I doubt I would even know I had them. Maybe, they aren’t meant to be consciously examined. On the other hand, they do feel like some kind of communication.

JWH

Vertigo (1958)

James Wallace Harris

Read the Wikipedia entry for a concise overview and evaluation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo — especially the sections “Reception.” When Vertigo was first released it got very mixed reviews, but over the years its reputation has risen. Some polls have even placed it as the best film ever made. Quoting this one paragraph should give you an idea of what I mean:

Over time the film has been re-evaluated by film critics and has moved higher in esteem in most critics' opinions. Every ten years since 1952, the British Film Institute's film magazine, Sight & Sound, has asked the world's leading film critics to compile a list of the 10 greatest films of all time.[83] In the 1962 and 1972 polls, Vertigo was not among the top 10 films in voting. Only in 1982 did Vertigo enter the list, and then in 7th place.[84] By 1992 it had advanced to 4th place,[85] by 2002 to 2nd, and in 2012 to 1st place in both the crime genre, and overall, ahead of Citizen Kane in 2nd place; in 2022, the Sight & Sound poll ranked Vertigo 2nd place.[86] In the 2012 Sight & Sound director's poll of the greatest films ever made Vertigo was ranked 7th.[87] In the earlier 2002 version of the list the film ranked 6th among directors.[88][89] In 2022 edition of the list the film ranked 6th in the director's poll.[90] In 1998 Time Out conducted a poll and Vertigo was voted the 5th greatest film of all time.[91] The Village Voice ranked Vertigo at No. 3 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[92] Entertainment Weekly voted it the 19th Greatest film of all time in 1999.[93] In January 2002, the film was voted at No. 96 on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film Critics.[94][95] In 2009, the film was ranked at No. 10 on Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo's Top 10 Non-Japanese Films of All Time list.[96] In 2022, Time Out magazine ranked the film at No.15 on their list of "The 100 best thriller films of all time".

If you haven’t seen Vertigo, you should go watch it before reading my reaction.

I’ve seen Vertigo twice in the past year, and it is a mesmerizing film. But what makes it great, or even the greatest? I love dozens of films, but I have no idea which one is best, even for me. How can critics think in terms of ranking films? By what criteria do they judge them? If you search on YouTube, you can find several documentaries and short films about Vertigo. Some people are quite passionate about this movie and what they see in it.

I know there is one thing missing from Vertigo, and maybe all Hitchcock films – and that’s an uplifting experience. His films are pure movie storytelling. There are no messages, no moralizing, no philosophy, no expressions about Art, and they aren’t studies in sociology. Some critics analyze them psychologically, but I’m not even sure they express anything consistent about psychology.

This summer, Time Magazine picked one hundred movies the editors considered the best to celebrate its one hundred years of publication. Three of Hitchcock’s films made the list, The 39 Steps, Vertigo, and Psycho. What qualities did the editors of Time and other list makers use to rank films?

I can’t answer that without months or years of study. What I can do is give my reaction to Vertigo. Is there something in my reaction or yours that points to the quality that makes films great?

On a simple level, Vertigo is a murder mystery, but the audience doesn’t know that until two-thirds way into the show. And then it doesn’t matter. The film starts with San Francisco detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) chasing a fugitive across rooftops. He jumps a gap, misses, and hangs by a gutter several floors above an alley. A uniform officer comes to help Scottie and falls to his death.

Next, we meet Scottie in the apartment of Marjorie “Midge” Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes). It’s a beautiful room overlooking San Francisco and the bay. Midge an artist who makes her living illustrating women’s underwear. Midge and Scottie were once briefly engaged. Stewart was 49 at the time, and Bel Geddes was 35. I found that age difference surprising. This scene is used to show how Scottie has become afraid of heights and the resultant vertigo. This is important to the plot, but I don’t think it’s important at all to the story.

Soon after that Scottie meets with his old college friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore). Helmore is four years older than Stewart. He asks Scottie to tail his wife who is acting weird. Madeleine Elster is played by Kim Novak who is only 24. I also found this age difference hard to accept. I’ve even read that Hitchcock thought the age differences were a problem, but since many people consider this film about sexual obsession, and in recent years we’ve been learning about how obsessed Hitchcock felt over his female stars, it makes the age difference mean something. However, I doubt Hitchcock planned that.

Novak plays two characters, Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton, but moviegoers don’t know that until two-thirds way into the film. The first two-thirds of the movie is Scottie following Madeleine around and falling in love with her. It’s all rather mysterious.

There are two McGuffins in Vertigo. One is a murder mystery. Some critics have even called Vertigo a film noir. I think that’s bullshit. From my experience of watching the film three times, it’s all about lusting after Kim Novak’s characters. The second McGuffin is Madeleine’s obsession where she thinks she’s a reincarnated woman from the 19th century who committed suicide. The 1950s were full of weird psychological studies and stories like Bridey Murphy, The Three Faces of Eve, and Edgar Cayce. Starting in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, mental illness was a big theme in the movies. Madeleine’s obsession is colorful, but it’s another McGuffin.

That’s because Judy Barton is playing the role to help Gavin kill the real Madeleine. They are using Scottie’s fear of heights. Gavin and Judy make up this obsession to trick Scottie. It’s not real or valid.

The audience doesn’t know about this subterfuge, and that’s why I don’t think it matters. What we really enjoyed while watching the film is Jimmy Stewart chasing after Kim Novak. And we’re just as shocked as Scottie when we think we see her die. This is Hitchcock’s obsession – to surprise and shock his audience. He loves building suspense. Suspense and surprise are his core values.

Scottie goes through a year in a mental hospital helped by Midge. Of course, we wonder, why isn’t Scottie chasing after Midge? Then Scottie sees a woman who looks vaguely like Madeleine, but who claims to be a poor shopgirl named Judy Barton. Novak as Madeleine looked classy, Judy looked trashy. For the rest of the film, Scottie slowly convinces Judy to change her appearance to look like Madeleine while he woos her. Judy finds this creepy.

The audience and then Scottie learns that Judy is really the same girl who impersonated Madeleine. However, Scottie doesn’t turn her in. He’s obsessed with recreating Madeleine and recreating his experience of the murder scene. He tells Judy he wants to confront his fear of heights. Scottie becomes increasingly creepy, pushing Judy into doing things she doesn’t want to do. Personally, I felt sorry for Judy. Even though she committed a murder for money, she seems less amoral than Scottie. Yet, I’ve never seen any critic call Scottie amoral.

In the final scene, Scottie frees himself of his fear, but a nun scares Judy, and she falls from the same tower as Madeleine. Damn, in this movie, anyone that goes up several floors with Scottie falls to their death. And that’s three for three.

I love watching this film, but I don’t care about the story. I don’t care about the plot. I don’t care about who the characters are. All I love is the visuals, the cinematography, the sets, the costumes, the interiors, the street scenes, the cars. It’s all gorgeous. And I love looking at Kim Novak.

Is beautiful to look at a reason to make Vertigo one of the greatest films of all time? If I made a list of my favorite 100 films, I would include it.

But damn, I wish I could rewrite this story!

The story follows the point of view of Scottie. It should have followed the point of view of Judy. Then it would have been a true film noir murder mystery. Kim Novak would have had a deep character to play. Imagine how Judy would have gotten involved with the scheme and what it would have taken to pull it off. Think about all those details. Imagine, how afterwards Judy realized she had fallen in love with Scottie and let herself be found. Imagine how hard she would have wanted to be Judy and loved by Scottie, and how upsetting it would be to have Scottie remake her into the woman she murdered.

Hitchcock missed something big. The story was based on a novel, and the screenplay had to be rewritten several times. They should have rewritten it again.

JWH

Deciding What Will Be My 7th Habit

by James Wallace Harris, 10/26/23

About ten days ago I bought Atomic Habits by James Clear and started reading it. It’s quite convincing about how to start good habits and phase out bad ones. I then decided I should track my habits and created a spreadsheet, but then a couple of days later a video about habit tracking apps showed up on my YouTube feed. I decided on one called Streaks for iOS; it was $4.99.

Streaks can track twenty-four daily habits. I decided to track six habits I’m already half-ass doing now:

1. Physical therapy exercises
2. Wordle/Mini crossword puzzles
3. Invert for 15 minutes (with inversion table)
4. One housekeeping chore
5. 16:8 Intermittent fasting
6. Clean kitchen before bed

After six days of practicing with these six habits I see how Streaks works. James Clear in Atomic Habits advises to focus on systems rather than goals. Instead of wanting to write a novel, make writing fiction daily a habit. And instead of aiming big, aim small instead. Clear says making tiny changes can lead to big results.

My starting six habits which I’ve been working on for years are mostly about mental and physical health. I haven’t always stuck with them, but I have learned, without a doubt, that if I do them every day, I feel better. Streaks has helped me stick with them better because keeping a streak going is challenging — like a little game. And I hate the idea of breaking the streak.

It’s time now to pick something I want to do but I haven’t gotten a half-ass habit going already. I don’t want to be too ambitious. Failing at New Year’s resolutions has always been demoralizing. I need another win to bolster my momentum. Yet, it needs to exercise my new habit muscle.

My life-long fantasy to write fiction is an obvious choice, but I think it might be the wrong time. I’ve always failed at fiction writing before, so I don’t want to fail at it again, and possibly ruin my efforts at forming atomic habits. I need a new habit that is both small but bigger.

However, selecting a new habit that will lead to achieving a cherished goal is an enticing thought. Isn’t that why I’m pursuing this habit system? Here are some things I wish I were doing in retirement:

1. learn Python and make programming a hobby
2. study math as a hobby
3. learn to draw illustrations like I see in 19th century science journals
4. learn Obsidian and use it with Readwise to create a second brain for remembering what I read and want to write
5. read one lengthy article a day and write about it
6. write short stories

These are all things I wish I worked on a little bit each day. I could add all six to Streaks with the self-imposed rule of doing each for a minimum of fifteen minutes a day. That would only be ninety minutes of activity, less than watching one movie. But Atomic Habits claims building one habit will strengthen other habits. So maybe, it’s better that I add one at a time.

Items 4 and 5 go well together, and would aid things when I go for item 6, but how would I structure it into a daily habit? Reading a long-form article can take an hour or two, and taking notes for Obsidian could be another hour or two. Writing about what I learn could take another three or four hours.

Streaks does track weekly habits, but I’m not ready to try one of those yet. Studying math on Khan Academy, practice drawing with You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler, or writing 500 words on a short story is habits much better suited for finishing up in 15-30 minutes.

I don’t know if this is cheating, but it occurs to me that I should try doing each of these activities daily without adding them to Streaks and then see which one I stick to the most. Then add it to the habit tracker. (Don’t place a bet unless I think it’s a sure thing.)

This is psychological revealing. Could this be what I do all the time? I don’t try to create habits because I don’t want to fail at them. All six of the habits I’ve created already on Streaks are ones I need to do or I’ll feel bad. Feeling bad is a great incentive — I’m highly motivated to avoid pain and suffering. And those six habits were ones I was mostly doing anyway.

I’m a laid back lazy guy that dislikes obligations. Creating a habit is taking on an obligation. I guess successful people who get a lot done either don’t mind obligating themselves, or thrive on it.

Fantasizing about being a different person is one thing, but actually becoming a different person is WORK. (You should voice that like Maynard G. Krebs did in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis television series.)

JWH

Ethical vs. Virtuous

by James Wallace Harris, 10/23/23

I try to be an ethical person but I’m not a particularly virtuous person. Some might define both terms, “ethical person” and “virtuous person,” as a good person. I’m reading The Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman and it’s making me wonder if being ethical, or even a moral person is not the same thing as being a good, or virtuous person.

I believe morality is defined by theology, and ethics are defined by the consensus of humans. It’s how we divide right from wrong. Before I thought about it today, I assumed being moral or ethical meant you were a good person, and being unethical or amoral meant you were a bad person. But now that I’m reading the Stoics I’m wonder if they offer a different definition for being good or bad, mainly because they bring in the term virtue.

Stoicism is all about how you live life. Actions speak louder than philosophy. Being a virtuous person, a good person means acting in the positive. Doing good for yourself, your family and friends, for you community, nation, species, and planet. Being ethical or moral only means not breaking the rules, not being bad. That doesn’t make you good.

And I can imagine amoral and unethical people doing constructive things. And I can imagine ethical and moral people being destructive. I can see why the Stoics, and philosophers in general, argue so much.

Most of us fear and despise amoral, unethical, destructive people because they hurt us or people we know. But I’m not sure we are good people if we’re just ethical and moral. In my reading of the Stoics I’m getting the feeling that by virture we have to do something good to be good. But doing what is where philosophical problems arise.

We make exceptional people in our society who can do amazing things into stars and heroes. But should we equate success with virtue? Expecially success measured by money and fame? For the early Stoics like Zeno, working hard all day at a job was virtuous. To handle whatever life threw at you without complaining was virtuous. To take hardships and disease in your stride was virtuous. Of course, today we’d say that’s only being stoic.

Maybe I want to define virtue by what some people call saintly. Does someone have to bring diplomatic peace to the Mideast to be virtuous, or does just volunteering at food bank count? I haven’t read enough of ancient philosophy to know yet.

I do know the more philosophical I become the more I distrust words and concepts. I do enjoy reading about the Stoics, but ultimately, I’m not sure philosophy will be any more valid than religion was to me.

I used to say I was a Puritanical Atheist. Now I want to label myself an Existential Buddhist.

JWH

Is Ethical Capitalism Even Possible?

by James Wallace Harris, 10/20/23

This month, several of my friends have separately expressed doubt about the future. I don’t hold much hope either. Our current world civilization seems to be falling apart. Capitalism is consuming the planet, but capitalism is the only economic system that creates enough jobs to end poverty. The only alternative to free market capitalism I can imagine is if we adapt capitalism to an ethical system. So, I’ve been keeping my eye open for signs of emerging ethical capitalism.

Here’s one: “The Workers Behind AI Rarely See Its Rewards. This Indian Startup Wants to Fix That” from Time Magazine (8/14/23). The article describes how AI startups need vast amounts of sample data from other languages for their large language models. In India, many data companies are exploiting poor people for their unique language data and keeping the profit, but one company, Karya, is giving the poor people they employ a larger share of the profits. This helps lift them out of poverty.

Capitalism has two dangerous side effects. It destroys the environment and creates inequality. For capitalism to become ethical it will need to be environmentally friendly, or at least neutral, and it will need to be more equitable. If we want to have hope for the future, we need to see more signs of that happening.

Right now, profits drive capitalism. Profits are used to expand a corporation’s ability to grow profits, and to make management and investors rich. Labor and environmental controls are seen as expenses that reduce profits. For a corporation to be ethical it will have to have a neutral or positive impact on the environment, and it will need to share more of its profits with labor.

Since the pandemic hourly wages have been going up, and so has inflation. If capitalism becomes more ethical, costs for environmentalism and labor will go up, thus ethical capitalism will be inflationary. Some people have gotten extraordinarily rich by making things cheap, but it’s also shifted labor and environmental costs away from corporations onto the government and the public. The price at the store does not reflect the actual cost of making what you buy. You pay the difference in taxes.

For ethical capitalism to come about things will need to be sold for what they cost to make. That will involve getting rid of governmental and corporate corruption. It will involve political change. And it will be inflationary until the new system stabilizes.

My guess is ethical capitalism will never come about. If I were writing a science fiction novel that envisioned life in the 2060s it would be very bleak. Life in America will be like what we see in failed states today. Back in the 1960s we often heard of the domino theory regarding communism. Failed states are falling like dominoes now. Environmental catastrophes, political unrest, dwindling natural resources, and viral inequality will homogenize our current world civilization. Either we work together to make it something good, or we’ll all just tear everything apart.

Civilization is something we should all shape by conscious design and not a byproduct of capitalistic greed.

We have all the knowledge we need to fix our problems, but we lack the self-control to apply it. I have some friends who think I’m a dope for even holding out a smidgen of hope. Maybe my belief that we could theoretically solve our problems is Pollyannish.

I have two theories that support that sliver of hope. One theory says humans have always been the same psychological for two hundred thousand years. In other words, our habits and passions don’t change. The other theory says we create cultures, languages, technologies, systems that can organize us into diverse kinds of social systems that control our behavior.

We could choose better systems to manage ourselves. However, we always vote by greed and self-interest. We need to vote for preserving all.

In other words, we don’t change on the inside, but we do change how we live on the outside. My sliver of hope is we’ll make laws and invent technology that will create a society based on ethical capitalism and we’ll adapt our personalities to it.

I know that’s a long shot, but it’s the only one I have.

I’m working to develop a new habit of reading one substantial article a day and breaking my bad habit of consuming dozens of useless tidbits of data that catch my eye as clickbait. In other words, one healthy meal of wisdom versus snacking all day on junk ideas. Wisdom doesn’t come packaged like cookies or chips.

JWH

If You Love Old Movies on TCM, Try Old Movies on YouTube

by James Wallace Harris, 10/20/23

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is the gold standard for old movie lovers. Nothing beats it if you’re addicted to watching movies from the past. However, TCM doesn’t show every old movie, and I’ve found a great secondary source for films from yesteryear. YouTube (not YouTube TV) is another giant cinematic library. It’s not as convenient to use, and the quality varies greatly, but there are plenty of old movie gems there to see.

Warning: YouTube also rents and sells movies. I’m referring to films that are part of YouTube to watch for free.

I subscribe to YouTube Premium to avoid commercials, so I don’t know if I’m getting some content that’s not available to the free version of YouTube. I’m going to present several examples, so it should be a test of that. It also helps that you sign into YouTube with your free Google account so it can remember what you like. 99.99% of YouTube content is hidden away, but YouTube will follow what you like and recommend more of the same. Once I started watching old movies it kept offering me more. It’s well seems endlessly deep.

First, you need to have the YouTube channel added to your television. You can watch on your phone or table, but these movies look great a large screen TVs. YouTube app is available for most smart TVs, or for streamers like the Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, etc.

Next, go to YouTube on your computer and find a movie you like — I’ll be linking to several. Hit the save button and create a folder called Old Movies. If you want to save movies by categories, create them now. You can’t create these folders from your TV, but you can save movies you find on your TV to these folders.

When you see a movie you might like, start playing it. Check the settings icon to see what resolution the film is using. Films loaded years ago tend to be 240 and 360. Avoid them. Lots of films are being uploaded at 1080p or 720p which is high resolution, like what’s on a Blu-ray disc. 480p is the quality of DVDs. Occasionally, you’ll see higher resolutions, but 480p, 720p, and 1080p are fine to great.

I tend to save films that look interesting as YouTube recommends them. Then I go to my Old Movie folder when I want to watch one. I’m not sure how long these films stay on YouTube, or even if they’re legal. My guess is some copyright holders or companies licensing the copyright of old movies are putting them up on YouTube to earn ad revenue, or a share of YouTube Premium revenue. Since I’m seeing more movies all the time, I’m guessing it’s becoming a feature. (By the way, you’ll also need to use your computer to delete the movies from your folders once you watch them.)

I often read about movies to find ones I want to watch. I check the JustWatch app on my iPhone to see where they are streaming. If the movie isn’t listed, I often I find them on YouTube. Evidently, movies first go to premium streaming channels, then to the ad-support streaming channels like Roku, Tubi, Pluto, etc. After that, they are in limbo. And some of those are showing up on YouTube.

I’m finding lots of movies on YouTube from American and British studios that don’t often appear on TCM. Movies I’ve wanted to see for years. Movies I used to buy on DVD.

There is one downside to movies on YouTube. Their Closed Caption is AI generated, and horrible. If you need to see the words on the screen, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Now for some examples. Links are to Wikipedia. Here’s a real gem, This Happy Breed (1944), about England between WWI and WWII, directed by David Lean.

I thought Mister 880 (1950) about Edmund Gwenn being a counterfeiter of $1 bills to be an afternoon feel good flick.

Here’s a less famous Alfred Hitchcock flick with Gregory Peck, The Paradine Case (1947). It’s quite good.

Here’s the first Mr. Belvedere film with Clifton Webb called Sitting Pretty (1948). It’s from a YouTube channel called DK Classics III — they have tons of great old movies. Clifton Webb made three of these Mr. Belvedere movies. The first two show up on TCM all the time, but I’ve never seen the third, Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951). I found it on YouTube, but sadly only in 360p. I still watched it, and liked it so much I bought the DVD. I’ve now watched several Clifton Webb movies on YouTube.

Here’s a film noir with Lucille Ball. Clifton Webb plays an evil art dealer in The Dark Corner (1946). It’s only in 480p, but nice enough. One thing that’s important is to read about these movies on Wikipedia. It got decent reviews when it came out, but over time, it’s considered a respectable film noir and has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Not all old movies are great, but some I want to see for a reason. Project Moonbase (1953) was the second film Robert A. Heinlein worked on as a screenwriter. The first being Destination Moon, which TCM shows often. I’ve never seen Project Moonbase though. And here it is at 720p.

Susan and I are getting into old English movies. Here’s a fun romantic comedy with Vivian Leigh and Rex Harrison (his first film) called Storm in a Teacup (1937) about a reporter siding with a dog’s owner in a political brouhaha. It has the feel of a Frank Capra movie.

This should be enough to give you a taste of what I mean. These aren’t famous films, but they are fun to watch. If you’ve been watching TCM for decades, you might like to give YouTube a try and unearth some unseen treasures.

JWH

Looking Back at My First 10 Years of Retirement

by James Wallace Harris, 10/15/23

Friday was my 10th anniversary of retiring. I started work at Memphis State University in 1977 and retired from The University of Memphis in 2013. I hadn’t moved, they changed the name. Those 36 years represents half of my 72 years. The second largest chunk of time in my life was K-12 schooling. It’s interesting to see retirement has become the third largest segment of this pie chart.

These ten years of retirement were the same number of years as third grade through twelfth, but they certainly didn’t feel the same. For some reason, 1963-1969 were the longest seven years of my life, way longer than the last ten years of retirement. Isn’t that weird? Why have they sped by so fast?

When I look back, I can see a lot has happened. Three presidents. A pandemic. Several wars. Quite a bit of economic ups and downs. In the past ten years we’ve all seen society transformed by smartphones. The worst political polarization of my lifetime has happened in this last decade. There were lots of marriages and babies in our family, and several deaths. I entered my socialist years with social security and Medicare. I’ve had several surgeries and lots of MRIs, CT scans, a couple ER visits, and endless medical tests. Yet, I’m basically healthy.

I have lived in the same house since I retired. Those seven years I mentioned, I lived in nine different houses in three different states. Maybe that’s why those were the longest years of my life. These past ten years have been the most stable of my entire lifetime, and I’m not bored.

I thought when I retired I would do so much with all the free time I would have, but that hasn’t happened. The past ten years has been a slow decline into inactivity. I guess that’s what getting old means. And I accept that decline.

When I first retired, I didn’t watch TV until about eight o’clock at night. I tried to stay active all day. Susan worked out of town, and I spent a lot of time socializing.

Now my daily routine starts with an hour of YouTube videos after I do my physical therapy exercises. Then I putter around doing chores, eating lunch (breakfast since I’m intermittent fasting), writing blogs, listening to music. Then another hour of TV with Jeopardy and NBC Nightly News at 5:30 with Susan. After dinner I wash dishes and try to watch TV by myself while Susan watches her shows. I usually fail and switch to blogging, reading, or listening to music. I finish the evening at nine with two hours of TV watching with Susan, shows we both like.

In 2013 I probably watched 1-2 hours of TV a day, and not every day. Susan was working out of town, and I’d only watch TV when I had friends over in the evening. Now, I’m logging 4-5 hours a day. Television has become an addiction in retirement. I’ve been thinking about breaking it, but I’m not sure I can be more active anymore.

In 2013 I would go out several times a week with friends. I’d go to the movies once or twice a week, eat out several times, and I’d go to museums, parks, shopping, or just walks. Now I go out once a week to the used bookstore, and every other week to the grocery store. Susan and I take turns grocery shopping since we both hate doing it. The pandemic really changed my habits, but also my spinal stenosis limits my walking. However, staying home more does not bother me at all. In fact, I love it. My mother was that way when she got old too. A lot of people do that as they age. Like most of the old people I’ve known, I want to die at home, in this house.

What I’ve really gotten into these past ten years is reading. I read about fifty books a year, so I’d guess I’ve read about five hundred books since I’ve retired.

And several years ago, I joined with a guy from Britain and another from South Africa on Facebook to moderate a science fiction short story reading group. We discuss one story a day, and I’ve slowly developed several online friends from this activity. I’ve been focusing on reading short stories for the last five years and I’d guess I’ve read at least two thousand since then.

I also write essays for two different personal blogs. For a few years I wrote for three web sites, Book Riot, SF Signal, and Worlds Without End. I’d guess in my ten years of retirement I’ve written at least 1,500 essays.

I don’t keep records, but I’d guess I’ve watched a hundred TV series in my retirement. When Susan worked out of town, I’d watch them with my friend Janis. And since Susan retired, I watch them with her. I don’t really like watching TV by myself, so I tend to watch what other people like. My favorite series with Janis was Breaking Bad. My favorite series with Susan was Call the Midwife. Lately, my friend Annie has been coming over and we’re going through the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Ann and Tony come over to watch various shows, we’re currently finishing Ted Lasso. Our friends Mike and Betsy used to come over for TV or movies but since the pandemic that’s stopped. Watching TV series and movies with other people has been a major social activity for me during my retirement years.

Another recent activity is having people over for games and cards.

Our cats Nick and Nora died during the early years of my retirement, and now we have Ozzy and Lily. They are a big part of our retirement life since Susan and I have no children.

We bought this house; the one Susan grew up in when her parents died. That was 2007, I think. We had Susan’s brothers, wives, and their children over for Thanksgiving and Christmas for several years to continue the tradition of her parents. But by the time I retired, the nephews and nieces were grown up and had families of their own, and we stopped hosting the holidays. In terms of family life, the past ten years have been noticeably quiet. My mother, aunts, and uncles all died off before I retired. Since then, about half my first cousins have died. Our generation is fading away.

My retirement years have been mostly about maintaining friendships. I spend a lot of time on the phone keeping up with people. Some of my friends still come over to the house, but that’s slowing down too. Many of our friends no longer travel or drive at night. My sister still visits. And a few old friends that have moved away come to Memphis now and then. Getting old is weird that way.

Retirement goes hand in hand with aging. I didn’t foresee that before I retired. I thought I wouldn’t feel old for many years, and my first decade of retirement would be more active. When I first retired, I fantasized about moving to New York City for a year. Later, I thought about moving to The Villages in Florida. But NYC was impractical, and the pandemic and health problems killed off Florida. I no longer think about traveling, and the only way I imagine moving is if we need to move into a retirement community or assisted living.

My goals have become less ambitious. I’m reading self-help books about developing good habits. I want to do more reading and writing but be more organized and focused. I’m researching ways to take notes and remember what I read because I’m starting to forget more.

I think the next ten years of retirement will be more streamlined. I want to get rid of stuff and focus on accomplishing small quiet creative projects. I know I’m physically running down. I feel wiser than ever, but I’m losing mental horsepower. I need to become more efficient in my use of mental and physical energy.

These ten years of retirement have been nothing I planned. But then, long ago, even when I was still young, I had learned the future is everything we never imagined. My friend Linda and I are studying Stoicism. I think it’s the perfect time for that philosophy, both in our lives, and in this moment of civilization.

JWH

Discovering New Music From the 1980s – Prefab Sprout

by James Wallace Harris, 10/6/23

I get very few hits when I write about music, but I’m hoping to find a few old music addicts like me who didn’t discover Prefab Sprout back in the 1980s. Over the decades, I occasionally discover a band I’ll play obsessively for weeks. Well, I discovered Prefab Sprout on John Darko’s YouTube channel a few weeks ago and I’ve been playing them ever since. I started playing them on Spotify and Apple Music, but I loved them so much I’ve been ordering the CDs. I have a feeling I won’t get tired of this band for several more weeks.

It’s hard to put a love of music into words, so just listen below. At first, only a few songs grabbed me, especially the first two on Jordan the Comeback. But as I continued to play the albums more songs became great. This is why streaming music is so great. I can keep trawling the past until I find another band that pushes all my buttons.

JWH

Remembering the Sixties in Two Bad Movies

by James Wallace Harris, 10/4/23

I’m always shocked by how much American society has changed since the 1960s when watching movies and television shows from that decade. I graduated high school in 1969.

I’m curious how people born after the 1960s picture it in their mind’s eye. I grew up in the 1960s and remember two versions of that decade. I mostly recall the pop culture 1960s that everyone learns about in history and from the media, but if I think about it, I remember another 1960s, one far more mundane, and quieter. The difference you might say between The Beach Boys in 1963, and The Beatles in 1969.

Over the last two nights, Susan and I watched two movies from the 1960s that reminded me of the less famous version of that decade: Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966) and Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding (1967). Neither film was particularly good, but I found them both to be fascinating time capsules of that other 1960s.

Someone growing up in the 21st century would probably find both films stupid and even offensive. They would probably wonder where the smartphones, tablets, computers, and social media were, and why no one used certain now universal four-letter words routinely as adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. I’m sure they would think the acting stilted and why people fit into roles, especially gender roles. Those thinking a little deeper would wonder why all the famous 1960s pop culture was missing. But I think the thing that would standout the most, was the attitude both movies presented regarding sex. You’d think people living in the 1960s were Victorians.

Both Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number and Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding were about sex, but neither showed actual nudity or anyone having sex. Doctor is about Sandra Dee getting pregnant and three boyfriends wanting to marry her. None of the three had had sex with her. And the only reason we know Sandra Dee had sex with her boss, George Hamilton, was because the movie showed fireworks.

Boy is about Bob Hope, a late middle-aged real estate agent getting accidently involved with sexy movie star Elke Sommer, but not really. Elke Sommer plays a French actress famous for making movies where she takes bubble baths. She really wants to do dramatic roles and free herself from tub casting. Ironically, we see her taking several foamed covered baths in this film. 1966 is before they started having nudity in films, but it tries hard to show as much of Elke Sommer as possible. Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number advocates good old fashion puritanical values while promoting itself with the allusion of sex.

I thought both films were accurate with the clothes, houses, furniture, and cars. The look of the other sixties does come across in these films. Even the lame jokes and goofy dialog gave off the right vibes for the times.

Both films were aimed at the silent majority but tried to appeal to the emerging youth culture. It’s strange how we see counterculture slowly take over Hollywood by watching old movies and television shows from the late 1960s and 1970s. Very few movies in the middle 1960s showed what was happening in the rock world, or counterculture. If they had rock music, it was generic instrumental shit. Hollywood lagged for several years recognizing the social impact of rock.

I remember seeing The Graduate in late 1967 and thinking how radical it was. The soundtrack used Simon and Garfunkel. That was tremendously exciting at the time because it felt like my generation was finally being recognized. However, seeing it recently was another shock. It wasn’t that radical at all, not how I remembered feeling it in December 1967. The Graduate was still much closer to that quiet version of the sixties than the infamous loud sixties. I see it now as a transitional film.

It wasn’t until 1969, with Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, that we began to see that notorious version of the 1960s. I remember how shocking both films were when I saw them at the theater. But by then, my personal sixties were closer to those films. But in 1966 and 1967, my life was still like the Bob Hope and Sandra Dee flicks.

Another way to look at it was Hollywood was censored for showing real life for many decades, and finally in the late 1960s changes in the laws allowed it to portray a more real America.

I’m not sure any film captures the times in which they were made. They all create a mythic view. But I need to think about that. Are there any films from the 1960s that come close to how I lived in that decade? Do you have a film, from any decade, that you feel represents something close to how you grew up? I was too young, but I do remember people like the characters in America Graffiti. Actually, I remember people like the Bob Hope and Sandra Dee characters too. Maybe it’s the characters and settings that feel more historical than plots.

JWH