A golden retriever lay in state at the Minnesota capital

I trust every reader here is politically aware enough to know that a political assassination occurred last month in Minnesota when State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot to death at their home.  Many of you may have missed the detail that when the gunman entered the Hortman's home he also shot their golden retriever, Gilbert.

This was not a hunting dog.  Melissa Hortman was training this dog for Helping Paws, a nonprofit that provides service dogs to people with disabilities, including veterans and first responders with PTSD.  Gilbert did not graduate from the program, so the Hortmans decided to keep him as a house dog.  There are no living witnesses to the assassination, so it is not known whether the dog came to the front door out of curiosity or to protect his humans, but it doesn't matter.  Governor Walz decided to include Gilbert in the memorial at the state capital.

There is no record of any other nonhuman ever lying in state, and Melissa Hortman, a former state House speaker still leading the chamber’s Democrats, is the first woman. The state previously granted the honor to 19 men, including a vice president, a U.S. secretary of state, U.S. senators, governors and a Civil War veteran, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.

If any readers consider a dog lying in state to be trivial, please read my post five years ago entitled Remembering Sugar Rae.  And if you still don't understand, please find a different blog to follow.

"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 and it's available on Netlix.

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."

Addendum:  I found this info in the National Archives:

The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. It was engrossed on parchment and on August 2, 1776, delegates began signing it.

Although the section of the Lee Resolution dealing with independence was not adopted until July 2, Congress appointed on June 10 a committee of five to draft a statement of independence for the colonies. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with the actual writing delegated to Jefferson.

Jefferson drafted the statement between June 11 and 28, submitted drafts to Adams and Franklin who made some changes, and then presented the draft to the Congress following the July 2nd adoption of the independence section of the Lee Resolution. The congressional revision process took all of July 3rd and most of July 4th. Finally, in the afternoon of July 4th, the Declaration was adopted.

Perhaps my previous source was inaccurate?  I presume Adams was celebrating the addition of the Lee Resolution, which allowed completion of the declaration.

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