"Past Lives"

The storyline is very simple.  Lifelong childhood friends in Seoul, Korea are forced apart by circumstances when the girl's family emigrates to Canada.  About 12 years later they re-connect via the internet, but he is stuck in Korea, and she has career commitments in Canada and the U.S.  So, in a decision reminiscent of the memory-erasure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they agree to stop corresponding and Zooming online and pay attention to their real lives.  Another 12 years pass, and he is invited to meet her and her husband in New York City.  They meet, talk, and ponder.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  The three actors are excellent, and the dialogue with its hesitations and pauses is utterly realistic - which I value highly in movies that are dialogue-driven.  Regarding the overall tone of the movie, one of the reviews I read used the term "pitch-perfect", which is exactly correct.  This movie is not overly sentimental or overly analytical - and it's not a "rom com" because there is no comedy.  It is a serious contemplation of destinies, alternative possibilites, and stark choices that echo Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

As I looked through various reviews for salient commentary, the best I found was this comment, oddly enough in the YouTube trailer comment thread:

The quick cut at the end showing them as kids was sublime. Gave me chills. There they are once again the two kids standing together but also apart on their divergent paths. The memory now in nighttime mirroring their present was beautiful visual poetry. A realization that their feelings for each other can only exist in a time and space both real and imaginary."

Past Lives has won multiple awards internationally and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screeplay at the last Academy Awards.  I borrowed the DVD in our library, but the movie should be available streaming.

We should be celebrating the 2nd of July

This Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence with picnics, parades and, of course, fireworks. It's a tradition that's been in place for more than 200 years — and for more than 200 years, it's been kind of wrong.

"It is the right day to celebrate the Declaration of Independence," author and historian Ray Raphael tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It is not the right day to celebrate the signing of the declaration or the right day to celebrate independence. The vote for independence was on July 2 — two days before — and the first signing of the declaration ... was not until August 2 — a month later."..

In his book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, Raphael explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation — like how America ended up lighting fireworks on the 4th and not the 2nd.

Raphael says that even the writers of the declaration expected July 2 to be the day that went down in history.

"Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, on the 3rd of July, the day after they voted for independence, saying the 2nd of July will always be remembered and will be celebrated with parades and illuminations and patriotic speeches," Raphael says. "He described the Fourth of July to the tee, but he called it the 2nd."

America ended up with the 4th because that's the day the Declaration of Independence was sent out to the states to be read. The document was dated July 4, so that's the day they celebrated.

Image from Old Hollywood.

Reposted from 2014 because this is still a "thing you wouldn't know."

The "changing room" illusion

WWII prisoners-of-war in Minnesota

I watched this program on Minnesota public television while on a recent vacation back to my home area, and was delighted to find that is is available on YouTube.  It is an outstanding and uplifting program, and will be of interest to those outside Minnesota (I think a map in the video shows other POW camps scattered around the U.S.).

Somehow while growing up in the 50s and 60s I never learned that there were German prisoners-of-war living here and working on farms during the war.  It was win-win for American farmers and for the prisoners.  This video is well worth watching IMHO.

James Garfield - president for only 200 days

I have a new favorite president. Before reading this book, literally the only things I knew about James Garfield were that he was featured on the 20c prexie stamp (because he was the 20th president) and that he was assassinated while in office. Now I can add the following...

He grew up in Ohio in abject poverty – a one-room log cabin with a plank floor and windowpanes made of oiled paper. When he was two years old, his father died at age 33, leaving his mother with four children to feed. She farmed the land with the aid of his 11-year-old brother and saved money so that by age four James was able to get a pair of shoes. At age sixteen he began working on the Erie and Ohio Canal, but returned home after contracting malaria. By then his mother had saved $17, which was used to send him to Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a one-building prep school. During his first year he worked as a janitor in exchange for receiving an education.

So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more – one on penmanship and the other on Virgil. (p. 23) 

From there he moved to Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated in two years. He entered state politics in Ohio, then served in the Civil War in the Union Army, after which he was elected to Congress. He did NOT want to be president. He attended a nominating convention which was hopelessly deadlocked. On the 34th ballot, some electors voted for him. He rose to protest and was told to sit down.  On the 36th ballot, he became the Republican nominee – against his will. He was described as shocked, sickened, and pale as death during the proceedings. (pp 40-46).

He never participated in the campaign which was conducted on his behalf, preferring to work and receive visitors on his 160-acre farm.

He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house…. he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room…” (p. 58) 

His campaign platform as a Republican emphasized civil rights and the welfare of the freed slaves, in which endeavor he was supported by Frederick Douglass. Voter turnout for the election was 78%, and he was elected by a narrow margin.

In the days that followed… Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring hi only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured – his time with his children, his books, and his farm – abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. (p. 64) 

The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a religious fanatic who was delusional to the point of frank psychosis. He borrowed $10 to buy a gun, used it to shoot the president not for any political or philosophical reason, but because he believed God wanted him to do it.

His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” (p. 237) 

The “insanity defense” was well established at the time. Interestingly, everyone at the time agreed that Guiteau was insane and that insane people were not liable for their actions. Everyone on the jury knew this also, but they were so angry that they basically said “he’s guilty – hang him anyway.”

Other interesting tidbits from the book: After Garfield was shot, the second physician who responded to the event was Charles Purvis, surgeon in chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital, 39 years old, one of the first black men in the U.S. to receive medical training at a university, and obviously the first ever to treat a president. (p. 140)

The White House of that era was like a slum residence, perpetually damp with rotting wood and vermin-infested walls and the odor of raw untreated sewage, situated next to a malarial tidal marsh. (p. 176)

Garfield was a Republican who embodied the party’s enthusiasm for helping immigrants, freed slaves, and impoverished people. He believed the key to improving the country lay in educating those people. (182)

It has been said that Guiteau did not kill the President – he shot him, but the doctors killed him by repeatedly probing the wound with ungloved, unwashed fingers. Guiteau used this argument in his own futile defense (“General Garfield died from malpractice.”). The bullet had lodged on the left side of his body behind the pancreas, but the attempts to find it on the right side resulted in profound septic sequelae:

One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile. (p. 196) 

He apparently developed septic emboli:

Just two weeks after the surgery, another abscess formed, this one on Garfield’s right parotid gland… the abscess had become so filled with pus that it caused his eye and cheek to swell and paralyzed his face. Finally, it ruptured, flooding Garfield’s ear canal and mouth with so much pus… that it nearly drowned him. (p. 216) 

The woefully incompetent Dr. Bliss treating him [“Ignorance is Bliss”] tried to cope with the president's rapid cachexia by feeding him intrarectally. The eventual cause of death (determined by autopsy) was hypovolemic shock following a rupture of the splenic artery (probably from a septic aneurysm).

Garfield does not get credit for any particular legislative achievements, because his time in office was too brief. Rather, his legacy is reflected in how his illness and death united the people of the country during the fractious time in the aftermath of the Civil War. And since Guiteau’s act had arisen in connection with the corrupt “spoils system” for giving out lucrative government job contracts, the popular revolt after the death led to the establishment of the civil service system. After his death, Garfield’s widow assembled his books and papers in a wing of their farmhouse, establishing the nation’s first-ever presidential library. 

The book is Destiny of the Republic. A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published by Doubleday in 2011. I'm pleased to add it to my list of recommended books.

Addendum 2016:
I am delighted to report that the superb television series American Experience has just released a program entitled "Murder of a President," about President Garfield; it is based on the book I reviewed above in 2012.  The two-hour program is playing on PBS stations around the country, and it can be viewed online here.

Reposted from 2016 because of the upcoming Netflix series Death by Lightning, which is scheduled to drop later this year.

Extremophiles

Extremophiles are real, and absolutely astounding.  Read about them, and be amazed...

Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no energy from the sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a gold seam on Level 104 of the Mponeng Mine near Johannesburg. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It needs no oxygen to live. It can survive for a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of 323º Kelvin, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for one hundred millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It does not die in the hellish infernos at the Stadtbibliothek during the firebombing of Dresden. It does not burn when exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via DNA. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hair spray.

It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It inhabits caustic geysers of steam near the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park. It thrives in the acidic runoff from heavy-metal mines, depleted of their zinc. It abides in the shallows of the Dead Sea. It breathes methane. It can withstand temperatures of 333º K, hot enough to melt phosphorus. It resides in a fumarole of scalding seawater, deep in the bathyal fathoms of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It can endure pressures equivalent to sixty-five tons of force per square inch, nine times greater than the pressure at the nadir of the ocean and one tenth of the pressure required to crush graphite into diamond. It lives in the muck at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It is ideally adapted to devour the wreck of the RMS Titanic. It does not die while suffering immolation in the Nazi bonfires at the Opernplatz in Berlin. It eats jet fuel.

It feeds on nylon byproducts. It feeds on stainless steel. It inhabits a dormant volcano in the xeric waste of the Atacama Desert, where the rain falls only once per century. It blooms in a barren salina ten times saltier than the sea. It breathes hydrogen. It resides in micropores of superdense granite, crushed down 3,500 meters below the bedrock of the earth. It can withstand temperatures of 343º K, hotter than the flash point of aerosolized kerosene. It is adapted to devour the rubber tubing in the engines of the F-22 Raptor. It does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the space shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. It does not die among the tornadoes of hellfire raging unchecked in the oil fields of Kuwait during the Gulf War. It gorges on plumes of petroleum venting from the wellhead of the Deepwater Horizon.

It eats arsenic. It eats uranium. It resides inside the core of Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It thrives in hydrochloric acid. It can withstand temperatures of 373º K, hot enough to boil the water in its own cells. It is ideally adapted to dwell inside any steel drums of radioactive waste now entombed at the Yucca Mountain Repository. It lives in the stratosphere. It can survive exposure to the vacuum of outer space. It can survive the effects of g-forces more than two thousand times greater than the surface gravity of the earth. It is the only known organism capable of exceeding the speed of sound. It can, in fact, repair damage to its DNA. It never evolves.

It devours plutonium. It can endure long-term exposure to acids that eat away at human flesh. It can withstand temperatures of 383º K, hotter than the polar zones on the planet Mercury. It can hibernate for five hundred millennia in the core of a snowflake deep beneath the permafrost of Siberia. It awaits discovery in the abyssal fathoms of Lake Vostok, four thousand meters below the ice of Antarctica. It survives direct immersion in liquid nitrogen. It survives one thousand times the dosage of gamma radiation that can kill a human being. It is ideally adapted to eat hot graphite in the ruins of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island. It resides on the surface of a heat shield in the clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is fossilized inside the Murchison meteorite. It does not die in the conflagration during the collapse of the World Trade Center. It does not die in the crucibles of Treblinka.

It resides in a soda lake, whose pH level equals the alkalinity of lye. It can withstand temperatures of 393º K, hot enough to melt sulfur. It can lie dormant for forty million years, hibernating inside the gut of a honeybee shrouded in a jewel of amber. It evades its predators by hiding in the firmware of the Intel Pentium III microchip. It propagates itself through the use of networked computers. It can pass itself off as a thought inside the human brain. It can survive direct blasts of cosmic rays. It is, in fact, the only known organism to survive being shot, point-blank, by the proton beam in the U-70 Synchrotron. It does not die in the incineration of Hiroshima. It does not die in the planetary firestorm after the impact of the Chicxulub meteor.

It survives. It resides inside the robot scoop of the Viking 1 lander during tests for perchlorates on Mars. It can live through exposure to supercooling temperatures at the brink of absolute zero. It can hibernate for 250 million years, living as a spore encased in a halite nodule found in the Carlsbad Caverns. It can withstand temperatures of 423º K, hotter than the nose cone of the Concorde in supersonic flight. It can endure multiple meteor impacts. It can endure multiple atomic attacks. It lives nowhere on earth, except in one petri dish of agar, locked in a fridge at a level 4 biocontainment facility. It is totally inhuman. It does not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know that you exist. It is invincible. It is unkillable. It has lived through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism to have ever lived on the moon. It awaits your experiments.

I've excerpted this text in toto from the June 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  I normally post only excerpts from my readings in order to drive TYWKIWDBI readers to the sources.  In this case I've embedded the full text from Harper's, but this is just an excerpt from an upcoming book by Christian Bok entitled The Xenotext: Book 2.  Bok is a poet (which some of you may have surmised from some repetitive patterns of the text above).  He is also the author of Eunoia, which I excerpted back in 2008; that book is unique in that each chapter is written using only one vowel.  When Bok's new book becomes available, I plan to read it.

It should be apparent to knowledgeable readers, but I'll clarify that the passages in the text refer to a multitude of different extremophiles, who inhabit an unimaginably vast range of microenvironments.

Posted for a member of my extended family - Dr. Doug Nelson, who has devoted his career to the study of extremophiles at UC Davis.

Humor scrapbook, part II

This is the second of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially in the case of humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

 

Reposted from 2020

Counting asteroids

I'll never forget the moment Carl Sagan described the number of stars as being greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.  This video provides an equivalent perspective on the number of asteroids in the asteroid belt.  The successive zoom-outs are impressive, but especially the final image showing how little of the belt was sampled for the data.

Humor scrapbook, part I

Before there were blogs, there were scrapbooks.  Like many people in the pre-internet era, I saved clippings of interesting or humorous items in envelopes and folders and desk drawers, and eventually transferred them into "magnetic" photo albums.  Now I've reached the "downsizing" phase of my life, and have to decide what to do with the material.  I don't want to drag the albums around with me forever, but some of the material is too good to just throw in the dumpster.

So, I'm scanning the pages into TYWKIWDBI.  This is the first of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially in the case of humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (and in any case, old "magnetic" photo albums don't lend themselves to the rearranging of paper content, which starts to shred when you try to remove or rearrange it.)

The text on all the types of "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

Reposted from 2020 because we're even more in need of humor than we were five years ago.

Blogcation over

I was sorry to say goodbye to family and friends "up at the lake."  I was serenaded nightly by loons, so I hope I can find some way to embed a 30-second recording of them yodeling.  Not sure how to do that.

I need to recombobulate for a day or two, then will resume blogging after the weekend.

Blogcation

My cousin's place on Girl Lake, Longville, Minnesota.  The cabin is a legacy site, so the setback from the lake was grandfathered (nobody can build this close to the water nowadays).  

No blogging for two weeks - and no curation of comments.  Feel free to comment on old posts, but I won't review them for publication until I get back.

The "cosmic calendar" - depicted visually and verbally

This subject has been filmed before, including perhaps by Carl Sagan? but it's worth emphasizing.  Posting this now so that later I can add extended text from Orbit 13 of Orbital, which has I believe the best text description of the cosmic calendar.

Addendum:  I'll add the text description now so I can quit blogging for a couple weeks.  With apologies to the author/publisher - I really shouldn't excerpt so much, but here goes...

Too many people just can't recognize satire

Embedded above is a screencap from a post on X that I saw reposted on Facebook, where there were thousands of comments, the vast majority of which seriously argued that this is not a walkable community.  Others asked why you would walk miles to a gas station, and some suggested walking seven miles to a liquor store would be a good idea.  These must be the same people who become congressmen believing stories from The Onion.

Lots more similar posts from @bankertobuilder.

North Korean postage stamps created as instruments of propaganda

Rainbow airglow with visible gravity waves

The original image (at APOD of course) explains the phenomenon, and you can mouse over that image for additional information about the constellations and gravity waves.

Why "covered parking" might be designed like this

A fragmented but lucid discussion at the whatisit subreddit entry.

The disturbing childhood of R. Crumb

Those who came of age in the 1970s will remember Fritz the Cat and other cartoons by Robert Crumb.  Here is an abbreviated summary of his developmental years:

"One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”

That passage from a review of the new book Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life in the current issue of Harper's.

Bike tunnel in Switzerland

Awesome.  Looking forward to comments from readers.

The ultimate legacy of our lives

"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...

What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."

Excerpts from "Mortal Coils," in turn excerpted from Earthly Materials by Cutter Wood, via the April 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  Posted for me for future reference re the meaning of life and humankind's role in the cosmos.

"Sami Blood"

This is an excellent movie.

Sami Blood is set in Sweden in the 1930s and concerns a 14-year-old girl who experiences prejudice at a nomad school for Sami children, and decides to escape her town and disavow her Sami heritage.

The film premiered at the 73rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in the Venice Days section, in which it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label Award and the Fedeora Award for Best Debut Director.

Reposted from 2018, because today I rewatched the movie with new eyes, after having discovered that the "Fin-" part of my Finseth family name indicates that some ancestor had been from the Sami ethnic group. 

The movie is a bit dark because it examines prejudices the southern (Uppsala) Swedes had (1930s) against the subarctic Samis - prejudices that starkly resemble ones the Europeans in North America had against the Native peoples there.  The acting was superb - especially by the lead - Lene Cecilia Sparrok - who is a Norwegian Southern Sami reindeer herder/actress. 

An observation on political dialogue - updated

"We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know we know they are lying.
We know they know we know they are lying.

But they are still lying."

I found this quotation in Scribal Terror back in 2021 (it's sad that blog is no longer active).  At the time it was attibuted to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn in his 1973 work, The Gulag Archipelago.

After I posted the quotation here, an anonyous reader found documentation that this attribution is spurious and that the source is apocryphal.  The discussion at the Quote Investigator site is worth reading, and the sentiment expressed in the quotation is worth preserving, so I'll leave the quotation here.

Map of British English dialects

Discussion at the source includes the definition of a dialect, the inaccuracy of borders, and the meaning of "British."

Rotate your insulin injection sites

These accumulations of subcutaneous amyloid developed on the lower abdominal wall of a 47-year-old man at the sites of his repeated insulin injections.

"In this case, surgical resection was performed for cosmesis. Histopathological assessment showed amorphous eosinophilic deposits, positive Congo red staining, and apple-green birefringence under polarized light. The specimen also stained positive for thioflavin T under fluorescence."

A pianist with phocomelia

VERY impressive. This seems to be part 1 of several parts, but I haven't located the others yet.

Credit to Alex at Neatorama for finding and posting this.  Reposted from 2009.

Children in Gaza are being shot in the head

The children being shot in the head are not victims of accidental crossfire; they are being individually targeted for assassination.  Most news sources that provide news about Gaza tend to focus on the ongoing genocide, and the mass starvation, without details about the children being intentionally head-shot.  I only learned of this phenomenon from a podcast on This American Life.  Herewith some excerpts from a transcript of their "Solving for Why" segment of the "Chaos Graph" podcast on April 25:

Chana Joffe-Walt: 

"One of the hardest places to see through chaos in the middle of a war-- fog of war, all that. This is especially true for the war in Gaza. There is very limited information moving in and out of Gaza. Israel has banned international press from entering the strip for nearly 18 months, except for a few brief trips, accompanied by and under the control of the Israeli military.  One rare outside group has gotten a view on the ground of Gaza-- medical workers. Since the start of the war, over 100 American doctors and nurses have traveled to Gaza, treated patients there for weeks at a time, and come back out. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah talked to a dozen of them who volunteered there...

Ike Sriskandarajah: 

"Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from the US-- he's also volunteered as a doctor in the war in Ukraine and with Palestinians in the West Bank. He's closely studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though his family is from a small ethnic minority in what is now Pakistan.

Feroze Sidhwa: 

"The nurse that was showing us around didn't really speak English very well, and she just pointed at these two kids, and just pointed at her head, and said, shot, shot. There were four kids in the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.  I just thought that that was unbelievable. And I just assumed that she was just wrong. I didn't think she was lying, but she was just incorrect. That probably was a shrapnel injury or something like that.  But then, I looked at these kids, and they didn't have any other evidence of an explosive injury. And then we pulled up their CT scans, and sure enough, it did look like they had been shot in the head. And then we went on and found two more kids also shot in the head in the other ICUs.

Ike Sriskandarajah: 

"Feroze works at a hospital near Stockton, California, which has higher rates of violent crime than most of the country.

Feroze Sidhwa: 

"But to see four kids with gunshot wounds to the head already admitted to the hospital when I get there, it certainly struck me as being very unusual...

Feroze Sidhwa:

And what I wrote down is that I was going through the ICU, and I found an eight-year-old girl shot in the head overnight. Her pupils are fixed and dilated. It's a transcranial gunshot wound, definitely non-survivable...

Feroze Sidhwa:

Yeah, the bullet didn't stop. And then, let's see, the next day. So the next day, the eight-year-old girl had died, and in the same bed is a 14-year-old boy shot in the right chest and the head.

The next day, I said, I went through the ICU afterwards. The 14-year-old boy turns out to be 12 when his family arrived. So then, let's see, two days later, he's been replaced by a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. I wrote, he'll also die.

So then on that same day, I wrote, I took care of a two-year-old girl who was brought to the ED after being shot in the head. She arrived with bilateral fixed and dilated pupils, also a non-survivable brain injury. We then had a mass casualty event a few minutes later...

Ike Sriskandarajah:

At the same time that Feroze was starting to document this, Mark, working with his patients-- he was seeing the same thing. He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.

Mark Perlmutter:

One of the kids was there with a family member. I ripped up his shirt, and there was a bullet entry wound right over the heart. And then I picked up the dressings on his forehead, and a second bullet went in right in front of his left ear hole, in front of his ear and out of his neck.

Ike Sriskandarajah:

Oh, my god. What was the kid doing when this happened?

Mark Perlmutter:

Walking with their adult to get water.

Ike Sriskandarajah:

Was there a street battle happening?

Mark Perlmutter:

I didn't ask if there was a street battle going on, but it happened twice in the same day.

Ike Sriskandarajah:

Could you say the second time?

Mark Perlmutter:

Yeah, right next to that kid was another kid who got shot in the head and the chest. And that child had no adult with him, so I couldn't get a story. It's hard to see it.

Ike Sriskandarajah:

These weren't kids injured by collapsing buildings. They were kids who'd been shot-- direct gunshot wounds into 12-year-olds, eight-year-olds, even toddlers...

Ike Sriskandarajah:

13 children in 14 days. Even with all the other traumatic injuries and deaths they saw, the kids who were shot really stuck with Mark. It was haunting him.

Mark Perlmutter:

Early on, I thought it was just an isolated jerk carrying out, because every army has jerks. War changes people, and so you can absolutely have rogue people behaving inappropriately...

Adam Hamawy:

When I was in Iraq, there were civilians that were injured. There were children that were injured. And that's called incidental, collateral damage, all the terms that we use to cleanly justify what's happening. But the scale was, I mean, not even-- not even close to this.

I mean, I probably took care of, like, five, six children the whole time I was in Iraq, and I wasn't there for three weeks. I was there for eight months. I mean, it didn't look-- it didn't appear that they were intentional targets. Those you could really say that they were wrong place, wrong time.

I didn't see targeted gunshots to little kids that were five, six years old or 10, 15 years old. In fact, I mean, I'm thinking back. I mean, I don't think I saw a gunshot wound to a kid at all when I was there...

Adam Hamawy:

These are little children that are being shot, and these aren't stray bullets. These are aimed. They're precise. So a stray bullet will explain one or two of them. It's not going to explain the string of precise, targeted shootings that are being done on children since October.

Ike Sriskandarajah:

The medical worker I spoke with who spent the most time in Gaza also saw the most kids shot-- 50. She showed me a picture she took of a scan of a five or six-year-old's skull. There's a bullet in the middle of it. She was told this child was playing with their friends when an armed quadcopter drone came overhead and shot the child...

Ike Sriskandarajah:

Feroze reached out to as many American medical workers as he could-- doctors, nurses, paramedics. He created a survey to send out and compiled all the answers. The results stunned him.

Feroze Sidhwa:

Almost everybody had the exact same experience. Almost universally, they said the same thing, which I really was surprised by.

Ike Sriskandarajah:

Out of the 53 American medical workers surveyed who did emergency care for children in Gaza, 44 said they saw kids shot in the head or chest...

Ike Sriskandarajah"

Feroze published an op ed in the New York Times with the results of the survey. A group of the doctors wrote two letters to then President Biden outlining what they saw. Feroze thought that would mean two things-- they'd get a call from the White House and there'd be an investigation...

Ike Sriskandarajah:

I talked with three people who worked at the US State Department and reviewed allegations like this, including the person who, until recently, was the Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, a position that used to be called the War Crimes Ambassador. They all agreed the doctors' report sounded credible and significant enough to investigate.

Each of them said the next step should be asking Israel for answers. One, who is involved in vetting US weapons transfers, told me if this had been another country other than Israel, this is what would have happened...

So we asked the Israel Defense Forces how they explained the reports from American medical workers. They declined both my interview requests, but sent a statement, saying, "The IDF does not target minors and takes extensive measures to prevent harm to civilians, including children. The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm and operates in full compliance with international legal obligations. For security reasons, we cannot elaborate on operational policies."

What follows the above segment is an interview with an Israeli soldier about the possible whys and hows of the described events.  I've already excerpted too much from This American Life, so I'll offer apologies to them and suggest that the very few readers who will be interested in more details should read the full transcript at this link, or even better listen to the full podcast (I had to stop twice and do other things while listening, because the information is so unsettling).

Here are several observations from medical personnel from the op-ed published in the New York Times.

“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”

“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”

“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”

Other related articles: Mother Jones interviews Sidwha, and a denial by The Times of Israel.  

Most of the press coverage about Gaza is about the ongoing starvation and genocide.  I hope to address that later.  In the meantime I'm sending some additional $$ to the World Central Kitchen.  I fully realize Israel has assassinated WCK workers delivering food to Gaza and have an ongoing blockade of food trucks at the border, but if I do nothing I will have no answer to the question "What did you do during the genocide in Gaza?."  

"Thanks to your support, WCK has offloaded 49 trucks of essential food supplies at the Kerem Shalom crossing after more than 80 days of border closures. This milestone brings us closer to resuming meal production in Gaza, where our operations had been paused after serving over 130 million meals and 26 million loaves of bread. While awaiting approvals for additional deliveries, our field teams remain ready to restart operations, with trucks loaded, fuel secured, and kitchen systems prepped. In the meantime, we’ve distributed over 2 million liters of clean drinking water, reaching 170,000 liters in a single day, bringing hope and dignity to communities in need. Thank you for standing with us to help nourish those facing unimaginable hardship."

Sapsucker damage

I've seen this type of damage on trees and assumed it was related to constriction as a sapling by encircling vines, because my favorite Kentucky walking stick is in fact "vine-curled":

But the image embedded at the top, from the marijuanaenthusiasts subreddit, has a totally different pathogenesis.

A common cause of tree damage in backyards and small woodlands is from sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus spp.), which are a species of woodpecker... Sapsucker damage is easy to identify. The holes are approximately .25 inch in diameter and are drilled (pecked) in horizontal and vertical rows. There are usually many holes close together. This is often mistaken for insect damage such as that by bark beetles or other boring insects. Insect damage will typically have fewer, smaller holes, and the holes will be randomly distributed, not in rows like sapsucker holes. Insect holes may also have some boring dust (frass) in or on the ground under them, whereas sapsucker holes will not.

You learn something every day.  And I also learned this:

The presence of sapsucker damage does not necessarily mean the tree has an insect infestation. Unlike other woodpeckers, sapsuckers are actually drilling for the tree sap, not for insects living in the tree. However, sapsucker damage may attract opportunistic damaging insects, which the sapsucker may then subsequently feed on.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker info page. 

In memoriam, Lieut. L. Stanley Finseth, 1920-1943

Born Jan 31, 1920 and raised on the family farm at Kenyon, MN, my uncle Levi Stanley Finseth graduated from Byron High School in 1938. He then enrolled at St. Olaf college and later enlisted in the Air Force in 1942. As navigator of a bomber crew he flew 35 missions in North Africa, but died with his crew when their plane was brought down by a combination of enemy action and friendly fire over Switzerland on October 1, 1943.

Memorial gifts in his honor were directed to St. Olaf's WCAL, the first listener-supported public radio station. In 1946, when I was born, my parents named me after him.

Levi Stanley (identified as "baby"), next to my mother and the oldest sister Ona on their farm in 1921.  They will come of age in the Great Depression of the 1930s, then do their parts for their country in WWII.

Standing next to his proud parents, Knute Olaus and Selma, as he goes to St. Olaf College.  Knute Olaus' father was one of the Norwegian immigrant farmers who contributed funds to purchase the land in Northfield for the establishment of the college.

A portrait from those college years, which were interrupted by the onset of the war.

At a Chicago airport, visiting family on a stopover during his deployment. 

The obituary prepared by his family for St. Olaf and the local paper.  Such a waste - as all wartime deaths are.

Reposted for Memorial Day 2025.

The garlic on this salmon turned blue while baking

The discussion thread in this mildlyinteresting subreddit post is fragmented, but knowledgeable.  You learn something every day.

Pondering infinite monkeys

We've all heard the old adage about monkeys at typewriters, sometimes expressed as a million monkeys (as above, via Savage Chickens), or as infinte monkeys, or as a monkey for infinite years.  Recently, Australian mathematicians have reconsidered the Finite Monkeys Theorem, and calculated that "given the expected time until the heat death of the universe, we demonstrate that the widely-accepted conclusion from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is, in fact, misleading in our finite universe."  Their data as applied to various works of literature -

- is available online at Science Direct.

Sadly, I have lost my favorite cartoon on the subject.  It depicts a monkey turning in his paper to the teacher, who reads "To be, or not to be, that is the glbiftza" and tells the monkey "Sorry, try again."  Bob Newhart worked the same joke into one of his standup monologues.

A tip of the blogging cap to John Farrier at Neatorama for the via.

Reposted from last year to add one more cartoon variation on the joke:

"Hypernormalization" explained

The term has been nicely explained in an Instagram video, and that explanation has been converted to text in a Guardian article this week:

“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.

This is exactly the feeling I have been experiencing for most of this calendar year.

Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.

Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.

For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

“Donald Trump is not something new,” Curtis tells me, calling him “the final pantomime product” of the US government, where the powerful are abandoning any pretense of common, inclusive ideals and instead using their positions to settle scores, reward loyalty and hollow out institutions for personal or political gains.  Trump’s US is “just like Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s – promising a new kind of democracy, but in reality allowing the oligarchs to loot and distort the society”, says Curtis...

My apologies to The Guardian for excerpting so much of their content for this post, but I feel this concept is important to understand, and I feel some relief in knowing I'm not alone:

Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”

People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.

“What we’re really scared of is that the people in power have not got our back and they don’t give a shit about whether we survive or not,” she says...

Marielle Greguski, 32, a New York City-based retail worker and content creator, posted about everyday life feeling “inconsequential” in the face of political crisis. Greguski says the outcome of the 2024 election reminded her that she lives in a “bubble” of progressive values, and that “there’s the other half of people that are not feeling the same energy and frustration and fear”...

When we feel powerless in the face of bigger problems, we “turn to the only thing that we do have the power over, to try and change for the better”, says Curtis – meaning, typically, ourselves. Anxiety and fear can trap us, leading us to spend more time trying to feel better in small, personal ways, like entertainment and self-care, and less time on activism and community engagement.

More at the link.  It's a real gem.  

The International Dublin Literary Award

Just this week I learned of the existence of the International Dublin Literary Award.

"Since its inception in 1996, the Dublin Literary Award has celebrated outstanding achievements in global literature. Awarded annually by Dublin City Council, this prestigious prize is among the most significant literary honours worldwide, distinguished by its unique nomination process that involves libraries from cities across the globe. The award recognizes a single work of international fiction, whether originally written in English or translated into it, with a generous prize of €100,000. If the winning title is a translation, the author receives €75,000, while the translator is awarded €25,000. In 2025, the Dublin Literary Award will proudly commemorate its 30th anniversary."

Kudos to them for honoring - and rewarding - translators.

I have certainly been aware of the Booker Prize, and have featured some of their selections as entries in my recommended books section.  So I looked over the list of Dublin award shortlist entries, and found only four that I had read (out of hundreds) - but two of those I have already featured in posts in TYWKIWDBI (Prophet Song and North Woods) because I thought they were outstanding.

Clearly this is a list that deserves further exploration.  By me at least.