Genius

Ever wonder what's behind the lyrics of that song you heard on the radio - or what, exactly the lyrics really were? Wonder what that reference was in a speech? Heard about genius.com, a website that annotates music lyrics* and other things on Studio360 this AM & thought you might be interested.

I particularly like this song, that, of course, they bleeped out on the broadcast (so be careful, it's NSFW - not safe for work). And is it me, or has his girl friend left him for woman?



And now that you know the lyrics, here's a more traditional music video that's still fun

*Looked up Obama's 2nd inaugural, though, and unfortunately no one's annotated that wonderful moment when he ties gay rights into the nation's struggle for equal rights for women &amp for blacks in the line: "We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall." As far as I can remember that's the only time (at least so far) that a president has mentioned Stonewall in any kind of a speech.

More words to the wise

Some more goodies from HRH Purple Queen on Ravelry. I hope you like them.

Heading up to the 30sF today - so a little melting should happen. Fortunately, at least so far, the piles along the sidewalk are still ice-free, thanks to Andy's efforts the other day. Fingers crossed with the cold temps starting again tomorrow, that that stays the case.

Old masters & laughter

Here are some images from my Ravelry friend, HRH Purple Queen (remember you can click on the images & get bigger versions). My favorite one is the last one.

And a link to a NY Times article on folks in their 80s who are "at the top of their game." I quoted it a couple of posts ago, but thought you'd enjoy the whole article & the pictures. I tried getting the thing to print but it came out all wonky.

The weather outside is frightful

A few pix & a video of the latest blizzard - the 2nd in 3 weeks (I though when they called the first one "the blizzard of 2015" that they were being a bit optimistic).

And a link to a recent interview with the wonderful poet, Mary Oliver (whose poems I've used a couple times as a Christmas card insert, if memory serves). The afore-linked webpage includes recordings of several of her works). Who knew she lived around here for several years? I hope you'll have time to listen to it, or to read the transcript.

I'll requote one here:

"Wild Geese":
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place / in the family of things."

Liberation

A couple Valentine's Day photos to make your day (I hope), and a great essay to calm your mind (ditto).

The Liberation of Growing Old
By ANNE KARPF    JAN. 3, 2015
LONDON — WHY do we have such punitive attitudes toward old people? Granted, the ancients did hideous things to elders who were unable to work but still needed food and care, but in more recent times, that had changed: In 18th-century New England, it was common for people to make themselves seem older by adding years to their real age, rather than subtracting them.

Once upon a time, “senile” just meant old, without being pejorative. Even “geriatric” was originally a value-free term, rather than part of the lexicon of contempt toward old people.
Yet today, the language used to describe the changing age composition of the population is little short of apocalyptic. We’re told that the “graying of America” is an “agequake” or a “demographic time bomb.”

Older people are likely to be seen as a burden and a drain on resources, rather than a resource in themselves. Their only contribution, it seems, is to make worse the “dependency ratio,” a term that enshrines dubious assumptions about who will be financially dependent on whom.
In 2050, Americans age 65 and over are predicted to almost double in number to 83.7 million, one-fifth of the population. An aging population does pose real challenges, but increasing numbers of people of working age (as traditionally defined) are unemployed today, while growing numbers continue to work beyond pensionable age.

In reality, age can no longer be neatly correlated with economic activity. In particular, old people are themselves significant providers of care, notably the child care provided by grandparents.
To be sure, some older public figures attain “national treasure” status, as cuddly, unthreatening George Burns-type figures. And while “ageist” language demeans and caregivers’ pay remains poor, we no longer cast old people out into the wilds. Instead, innovative services and goods are developing that seek to capitalize on the “silver dollar.”

But the social bias is real, too. When a large sample of Facebook groups created by 20- to 29-year-olds was examined by a team based at the Yale School of Public Health, three-quarters of the groups were found to denigrate old people. More than a third advocated banning old people from public activities like shopping.

Such “gerontophobia” is harmful because we internalize it. Ageism has been described as prejudice against one’s future self. It tells us that age is our defining characteristic and that, as midnight strikes on a milestone birthday, we will become nothing but old — emptied of our passions, abilities and experience, infused instead with frailty and decline.

In their study comparing the memory of young and old Chinese and Americans, Ellen Langer, a social psychologist, and Becca Levy, an epidemiologist, found that the older Chinese people, who, it was hypothesized, were exposed to less ageism than their American counterparts, performed memory tests more like their younger compatriots. Among the Americans, on the other hand, there were significant memory differences between the old and young. The beliefs that we imbibe about our waning powers may turn out to be self-fulfilling. In effect, our culture teaches us how to be old.

The historians Thomas R. Cole and David Hackett Fischer have documented how, at the start of the 19th century, the idea of aging as part of the human condition, with its inevitable limits, increasingly gave way to a conception of old age as a biomedical problem to which there might be a scientific solution. What was lost was a sense of the life span, with each stage having value and meaning.

Perhaps this is why, as a 2006 study found, we mispredict the happiness we expect to feel across the course of our lives and assume that we’ll get more unhappy as we age. In fact, the research shows that the opposite is true. For my part, at 64, I haven’t attained serenity (another stereotype of older people), but I am more able to savor life — and if offered the chance to return to my 14-year-old self, I’d run screaming the other way.

A student of mine, nudging 60, recently called age “the great liberator.” Part of what she meant was that old people simply care less about what others think, but also, I think, that our sense of what’s important grows with age. We experience life more intensely than before, whatever our physical limitations, because we know it won’t last forever. How to enable the growing numbers of old people to live comfortable, meaningful lives is a fundamental issue of equality, with benefits for all. If we make the world better for old people, we make it better for everyone, from stroller-pushers to wheelchair-users.

Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the elder advocacy organization the Gray Panthers, argued that instead of making a fetish of independence, we should value the idea of interdependence between generations. Thus age-friendly cities, like Portland, Ore., rethink urban spaces to make them more accessible and encourage the integration of old people into communal life. And programs like Cleveland’s intergenerational charter schools, which provide lifelong education alongside grades K-8, break down the age apartheid now so common. Instead of seeing each other as generic categories, old and young people can discover each other as individuals.

Age resistance is a futile kind of life resistance: We can’t live outside time, we begin to age the moment we’re born. But the emerging age-acceptance movement neither decries nor denies the aging process. It recognizes that one can remain vital and present, engaged and curious, indeed continue to grow, until one’s dying breath. Then we need only echo the wish of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott: “May I be alive when I die.”

Anne Karpf is a British-based journalist and sociologist, and the author of “How to Age.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Liberation of Growing Old.

On aging

Before I head down to lunch, I wanted to share something I read today in an article on "Old Masters" people 80 or over who, instead of retiring, are tops in their field. (Sorry, can't find the link to the article on the Times's website.) It's a quotation from T.H. White's The Once and Future King, Merlin talking to the young Arthur:

"You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics or know you honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

And here are some wonderful pictures from 8.Apr.2013, which apparently a very cold day since that's the only time you'll see these two together.

Live & let live?

One of the (few) things I miss about getting up for work before dawn during the winter, is that I miss the lovely frost creations with which Mother Nature decorates our windows. I did, however, get up early enough recently to catch some of them before the melted.

I call this one dueling snowmen,

I confess to having similar qualms come spring & summer when ants & moths invade our space.

MENAGERIE

On Smushing Bugs

By Tim Kreider

November 15, 2014 2:35 pm

Menagerie: Just between us species.

When my kitchen became infested with ants this summer, as it does every year, I put out ant traps, which, in another annual rite, did exactly nothing. So I did what I always end up doing — inefficiently smushing the ants one by one. Sometimes I’ll massacre dozens at a time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my sugar bowl, but then, seeing a single ant moping around on the counter looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I’ll hesitate. He looks like maybe he’s not having such a great day already. Getting smushed is the last thing this guy needs.

Dispensing death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Ants, as individuals, do not seem like very complicated animals to me (I’m sure E. O. Wilson would correct me), but every time I smush one I am aware I am

extinguishing for all eternity one being’s single chance to be alive. It’s hard to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were automata; watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am.

Living in a cabin in the country in the summer, I end up having to kill a lot of things. In this, as in so much else, my 16-year-old self would be disappointed in me.At that age I thought maybe Jainism was the religion for me. All I really knew aboutJains was that they carried little brooms with them everywhere to sweep insects out of their paths, lest they accidentally step on a single bug. As a kid who used to spend most of his time at pools rescuing flailing beetles from drowning, this appealed to me.

I note that Jainism originated in India, a country to which stinkbugs are not indigenous. The stinkbug, an invasive species, has taken over the Mid-Atlantic region, including my house, in the last few years as swiftly as the Martians conquered England. It was from stinkbugs that I learned that any animal in sufficient numbers, no matter how harmless, can be horrific. An effective stinkbug trap can be constructed out of a two-liter soda bottle and an L.E.D., but I find it more thorough and meditative to eradicate them through piecework, using the nozzle attachment of my vacuum cleaner. They make a very satisfying thhhhhP! Sound when you suck them up. They then get to live out the rest of their lives in the oubliette of the vacuum bag. So my compassion is not quite Buddha-like in its embrace.

Mice are a stickier moral problem. Mice are mammals, and, it has to be admitted when you look at them in the light of day, cute — little bright-eyed wriggly creatures. You can see why they make such endearing cartoon characters. In an ideal world I would be content to coexist with mice. But my Gandhi-esque live-and-let-live attitude hardens into a more Fleming-McCartneyesque one when I go to enjoy my first cup of coffee of the day and find a tiny, hardened black turd in my mug. It is then that I set about carefully daubing the trigger of a mousetrap with peanut butter. So begins a wearisome cycle of vengeance and remorse.

A traditional mousetrap is designed to function like a guillotine, killing instantly and painlessly, but human technology is imperfect. Having to dispose of the limp corpse of a mouse first thing in the morning is a depressing chore with which to begin the day, but God forbid you should find the mouse alive, bleeding, maimed and crying on your kitchen counter. Now what? Mercy-smush the mouse with a rock? Put it outside and hope it’ll recover? It will die of sepsis under your porch. Whatever you do, you are going to feel like John Wayne Gacy for days. These days I use clever balance-activated traps that harmlessly capture the mouse. Whenever I catch one I carry the trap out to the car, place it on the passenger seat, and drive the mouse up the road to let it out near the house of my neighbor Gene, who likes animals.

I feel guilty about this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to sorta (ants, stinkbugs) to gut-clenching remorse (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each in categories from Should You Help It? to Can You Eat It?. Some of these biases are based on help versus harm — cats and dogs are our pals and protectors, snakes and mosquitoes can kill us — but some are irrational prejudice. It is my official policy never to kill spiders, even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door holding my hand as far away from me as it will get mentally reciting Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer. My rationale is: Spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s a little like arming the mujahedeen, but as far as I’m concerned mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war on. Also, anyone who’s read “Huck Finn” knows that killing spiders is bad luck.

It’s impossible even to live and move through this world without killing something. Not long ago I stepped out in my lawn and felt something squish under my heel. Inside my slipper I found the body of a daddy longlegs, an animal of which I am rather fond, its attached legs still twitching. Just driving the 10 minutes to the library and back, I wince as I smush butterflies when I fail to brake in time to whip them into the slipstream, or, worse, the occasional lightning bug, whose splattered magical guts leave a fluorescing greenish-gold smear of stars across my windshield that I then have to watch go heartbreakingly dark. Once I struck an indigo bunting who’d been sitting in the road — I didn’t see him in time and he couldn’t fly out of the way of my grille. I stopped and got out and stood watching him dying in the grass, slowly spreading his wings, iridescent under the sun. I helplessly kill dozens, if not hundreds, of animals daily with my big, dumb, blundering existence.

It’s fastidious and silly in this culture, kind of sissyish, to confess to feeling bad about smushing bugs. As far as most of us are concerned, bugs are household dirt that moves. I recently read an article about the survivors of an earthquake in the Tibetan city of Yushu that killed 3,000 people saving thousands of near-microscopic crustaceans from the mud, as an act of devotion. This may seem to Westerners like a trivial ritual, a waste of time, but it is, at least, more real than posting condolences on Facebook or applying a custom R.I.P. decal to your car’s rear window. A bug may be a small, unimportant thing, but maybe killing or saving one isn’t. Every time I smush a bug I can feel myself smushing something else, too — an impulse toward mercy, a little throb of remorse. Maybe it would feel better to decide that killing even a bug matters. Does devaluing tiny insignificant lives have some effect whereby we become more callous about larger, more important ones, like a karmic brokenwindow theory? People running for cover on the ground must look antlike from a bomber or a drone. As flies to wanton boys.

This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill en masse without qualm) down to the Dumpster at the end of my dirt road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the Dumpster, and what did I find in there but two miserablelooking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have been in there for too long, or they would’ve roasted to death in the summer heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry — the floor of the Dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they must’ve had a bad night of it in there; they looked scrawny and matted and sad.

What I had here was a Situation. I put down my bag of garbage and turned off the car. I trotted off to a shed where I found just what was needed — a piece of lumber about six feet long. Raccoons may not grasp the concept of favors or gratitude but they instantly grasped the concept of the ramp — I hadn’t even lowered it to the Dumpster’s floor before one of them reached up and grabbed it with his paws. (They’re extremely clever, dexterous animals — I do not doubt they will be the next species to set paw on the moon if we successfully exterminate ourselves.) I set the board down and backed off fast. They both clambered up it, crawled across the Dumpster’s rim, plopped to the ground and slunk off into the woods whence they’d come — to rehydrate, debrief or generally recollect their dignity. See? I thought. I am

a good person. I am helping.

When I told this story to my neighbor Gene, who puts bowls of meat out for the local vultures, he told me he lets those same raccoons out of the Dumpster once a week or so. So O.K., maybe they’re not all that smart after all. And maybe I am not a hero in the raccoon community. But whenever I think of all the harm I’ve done in this world, through cruelty or carelessness, or just by the unavoidable crime of being in it, I try to remember how I felt standing there, watching them go.

Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and

cartoons.

A version of this article appears in print on 11/16/2014, on page SR10 of the National

edition with the headline: On Smushing Bugs.

© 2015 The New York Times Company