Fisking Fisk Fisking Kinzer

I was watching Stephen Kinzer on BookTV on Cspan2 earlier today talking about his book, "The Crescent and the Star", about Turkey. It sounds pretty good. I googled Kinzer to see what else he had written and came across this article in a Pakistani newspaper accusing him of writing an article for the New York Times that was "offensive" and a "suppression of historical truth", because it denied the Turkish attempt at genocide against the Armenians in 1915. It sounded unlikely to me that the NY Times would be getting into that. They love genocide and victimization. I looked at the byline, and whose name should I see but Robert Fisk's. Now I really had to check out the story.

This Turkish woman gives Kinzer mega-accolades on his work with and for Turkey. The original Kinzer article is, unfortunately, available only from the New York Times archive, for a price. The abstract, though, makes it clear that Kinzer was just giving both sides of the story. The article itself states that the "genocide" is still a matter of "intense debate". The article quotes from Turks and Armenians and doesn't really take sides. The point of the article is not at all "historical revision" as Fisk implies. The standard figures and stories are given full credit. He is a reporter, merely trying to use the opening of a new museum to make the humdrum but hardly controversial point that museums are often used to make partisan political statements. Keeping an open mind on this point seems to be utterly foreign to Fisk's way of thinking about things. And he's not even Armenian. What is his dog in this fight? Fisk goes on to tie this article to, hey, guess what, the Arab-Israeli unpleasantness. What a surprise! He cites the Holocaust museum in Washington and the "Jewish lobby", now to be joined in his pandemonium by the "Turkish lobby", presumably outfitted with better carpets. Fisk sees the fine Zionist hand at the bottom of every threat to his world of pathetic but noble victims and dastardly oppressors. His one virtue is consistency. He's consistently sloppy, vicious and wrong.

Scary

Now this is scary. Weapons-grade uranium on the Syrian-Turkish border? I can just hear the paranoids saying "How convenient! What a coincidence! weapons-grade uranium shows up just when Bush needs some credibility on Saddam's progress towards nuke-u-lar weapons." Sure. They're right, in a way. It's all a matter of whom you believe, an American president whose every word and deed is scrutinized by a manic and cynical free press, a frustrated opposition party and masses of intellectuals trying to make a name for themselves or a mad dictator who answers to no one. Let's see, which choice makes more sense? And which one is going to blow up my city - OK, Tallahassee's far down the list, but it's on it - if he gets a nuke in play?

Also, I wonder if that cabbie's had a radiation check lately? Next time I'm taking a cab in eastern Anatolia, I'll make sure to ask the cabbie, "Oh, by the way, you don't happen to have any weapons grade uranium under this seat, do you?" Better safe than sorry.

Update

A comment on the News Forum points out that the picture of the uranium cylinder at the Drudgereport has "Made in W. Germany" on it. Can I say I'm surprised? Haven't heard anything from the Green party former spokesmoron about this. Yet. And it weighs 33 pounds. Maybe someone will tell us how much of Germany a bomb made from that amount of uranium could blow up.

Adding site meter and comments

OK, I've breathlessly added a sitemeter and comments, now people have to start coming around and commenting or I'll feel like I've put on my Sunday best and washed my hair and have been left sitting on the sofa in the front parlor waiting for the phone to ring.

Quibble

OK, some relative of mine is questioning my recall of the movie "The Graduate" in my "clever" essay on "Paper and Plastic" some posts back. Did the old relative really say "plastics" on his deathbed or at a party by a pool? How would I know, I've never seen the movie. I've not felt any need to see it for, what?, thirty-three years now, it's a bit late to start. Bits from the movie are now cultural history and myth, suitable for distorting and improving to fit one's needs. So that's what I did. I admit it. But I can still see the scene, the guy on his deathbed, Dustin Hoffman bending over him to hear his last words. OK, maybe not. But it's better than at a darn undramatic pool party. Come on, cut me some slack here! Artist at work!

Instapundit afterglow

Instapundit linked to my post about Islam and intoxicants. Ah, that feels good! Makes me wish I had a site counter or at least a comments section. How does one do that, anyway? I know I felt, mystically, an avalanche of eyeballs overwhelm my puny little blog.

God stuff

I've stumbled into a theology discussion on Dave Trowbridge's page that stimulated from me this comment:

D. Trowbridge says:

"I have no argument with people who have decided they can't believe in God, as long as they're willing to credit those of us who do believe with equal intelligence and good reason to believe."

If I were to credit you with "equal intelligence and good reason" on the subject of whether God exists, I would have to adopt your reasoning. Reason, by its nature, cannot, despite all the "quantum philosophy" mumbo-jumbo, lead you to two different conclusions on the same question. Any such reasoning is no better than believing in boogey-men under the bed because you are small and frightened.

So what is the evidence for the existence of God and what is the reasoning that leads from that evidence to the conclusion that he exists? More fundamentally, how can God "exist" in any sense that corresponds to what men mean when they use the word "exist"?

We'll see if I get any meaningful response. I'm not impressed by this argument: "Oh, you just haven't thought about this deeply enough like all of us deep thinkers who have been spending years pondering the question and obviously know better than you, besides which, our livelihood, self-respect and social acceptance all hinge on being perceived as Godly men."

Isn't the blogosphere wonderful?

Every concern gets addressed sooner or later. I've been hearing a really annoying ad misusing a CCR song to sell jeans for weeks now. And Ken Layne, via instapundit, links to a story about selling Sixties songs for commercials and how the Doors refuse to do that, while everyone else goes for the cash. That enabled me to submit to Ken Layne the following comment:

The debate on Sixties songs being sold for commercials caught my attention because I've been outraged lately by the use of a few bars from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Fortunate Son" to advertise Lee or Wrangler or some kind of jeans. The bars they use sound totally patriotic and flag-waving. But if you actually listen to the song, it's anything but. It's a classic and powerful protest against knee-jerk flag-waving. The ad is the most outrageous distortion of a song's message I've ever seen. Is John Fogerty nuts or dead or what?
It is nuts. Do they think we don't remember these songs? Or is anyone who actually remembers the songs too old to worry about? But if that's true, why are they using the songs at all? Don't they have anything newer that's better?

Al-Naqba

Catastrophe has come to Tallahassee. It's odd, though, the first Nole loss is almost a relief. It's as though now I can feel that the football season is over and relax until next year. And if there should be a revival in November, all the better.

Read this

Rachel Lucas takes Barbra Streisand apart, and, as afterthoughts, Alec Baldwin and Melanie Griffith. Read it, please, you'll like it! She appears to be committed, but Rachel could definitely lodge herself in my consciousness permanently. The comments are almost as good as the column.

Ramsey Clark is Satan

This article makes it clear that Ramsey Clark, who spoke to my class in prep school when he was sane, has lost touch with reality completely. Is there something in the water in Washington that turns government officials, like Scott Ritter, into total liars, freaks and traitors? Notice they call Clark "former Attorney General" even though he hasn't had any responsible post for thirty years. Thank God.

Rain

Duh. Tropical Storm Isidore (wasn't it better when they all had female names? And Anglo ones? Then there was a chance a really bad one would be named after your woman. And you could yell at her about it when you were drunk. But no. No more. Political correctness has taken away all the fun things) is coming ashore in Louisiana tonight. So it's raining here in Tallahassee, 400 miles to the east. Maybe this time New Orleans, Sin City, will join Sodom and Gomorrah on the list of those destroyed by the vengeance of God. It's only like 3 feet above sea level, so, hey, it could happen. And mega-surf should hit St. George Island any time soon. Maybe I'll take a run down there on Sunday, look for Spanish galleons in distress I can rob of their silver. Oh, you thought you could kill all the Incas in Potosi and use the silver to conquer England, did you? Well, I and Drake and Hawkins have a little something to say about that!

Four months of grilled seagulls?

I don't believe this article about a guy who got lost going to Catalina and spent three - other sources say four - months drifting around the Pacific. He survived, they say, on grilled seagulls and the occasional turtle. It smacks of Gilligan's Island, but reminded me more of Boon Island, a desolate islet off the coast of Maine just north of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I used to live. Kenneth Roberts' book makes it clear how unlikely it is that a man could survive that long at sea without food. My antennae are up all the way on this one. Is he going through a bad divorce and took a side trip to some deserted isle to hide bonds and gold? How far could he have gone in that time? Probably not all the way to Hong Kong, but certainly to Mexico or South America. I'll keep watching this one.

Update

A few more details emerge. This guy is Vietnamese and was picked up off Costa Rica. He was living on his boat in Long Beach harbor, according to this story. I'd suspect the Coast Guard could figure out if his boat would have ended up where it did if it was unpowered, as he says it was, having lost its mast in a storm. He's now homeless, or, er, a new category, "boatless".

Gorebot self-destructs

What is Al Gore doing? He makes a speech criticizing Bush for not doing things he has done, denounces actions he, Gore, supported but did not take and now he, Clinton like, tries to rewrite history about his attitude toward whether he approved or not of Bush 41's decision not to carry on to Baghdad in 1991. Luckily, the blogosphere's tearing him apart, but so is the regular media. Even Joe Lieberman is coming out against his "new attitude", as is a prominent Democratic candidate for governor of a "swing state". Can anyone be more politically dead and still be the choice of a plurality of Democratic voters for 2004? Is this Paradise or what?

Hey, and is this blog looking more and more like Instapundit since I learned to link or what?

Direct election of senators

Gary Farber's site has a discussion about the direct election of senators and how that might affect federalism. I think there's more than that involved, as I mention in my comment to his post:

Transforming the state legislatures into mini-electoral colleges for senators would enhance their stature considerably. The staggering of Senate terms would mean at least two out of three legislative elections could affect which party a Senator came from. I don't seem to recall whether the Constitution dictates the mode of election of senators. Would all members of the Legislature vote and a majority decide? Or would a State Senator have more influence on the result than a state representative? Nebraska, with its unicameral legislature, wouldn't have to work that detail out. I like the idea.

Smack the Nominalist

Found a great site combining theological disputation with humor. I'm going to keep going back until I understand why God doesn't exist or I die laughing, whichever comes first.

I knew it!

Finally, an article has pointed out the nature of the Irish Travelers, one of the modern versions of the Gypsies, to which belonged Madelyne Toogood, who got caught on TV pummeling her four-year-old. I had wondered what was going on. These nomad gangs have been dubbing around for years, bilking the elderly and unwary, but keeping in general below law enforcement's radar. Now they even have their own website. The proprietor tries to play up the romantic side of the Gypsy life style, but the ignorance and brutality displayed by Miss or - maybe - Mrs. Toogood is more typical. It does show how powerless the system is, though, to enforce laws requiring schooling and cultural mores encouraging self-improvement, truth-telling and peacefulness. Outlaws are still with us, for which maybe some say we should be grateful, but I'm not sure the little Toogood girl would agree.

I see from this story that US troops have been sent to the Ivory Coast to rescue Americans and other foreigners, 200 in all. Some French troops have also gone. I wonder if there are any Germans among the foreigners. Funny, I didn't see anything about German troops being sent to their rescue. Oh, well, I'm sure the Green Party can make up an expedition of dowsers, crystal ball-gazers and radical vegetarians to save their countrymen. God knows not one American GI should exert any effort to save any Germans. And I'm sure their government would not want us to help, since we're just Nazis and are probably only doing it for the oil.

Jesse the Moral Arbiter

Darling of the left Jesse Jackson is actually calling for censorship of a hit movie on the grounds that he's offended by it. I thought all these lefties were against interfering with creative freedom?? Only when their ox is not being gored, I guess. At least they can't call for government censorship, as in those countries, like France, Germany and California, that have draconian hate-speech laws.

Speaking of goring, Andrew Sullivan takes Al Gore apart completely over his late speech about how much better he would be prosecuting the war on terror by not worrying about terrorists like Saddam Hussein who have whole countries and WMD and concentrating on Osama bin Laden, who's decomposing in a bombed-out cave in Afghanistan.

New Neighbors

Time for some real weblogging. New neighbors moved in to the next townhouse yesterday. The same people had been there since I moved in seven (can it be that long?) years ago. We never talked much with the departees. The new people I glimpsed here and there - a middle-aged guy, a boy maybe in his teens, moving furniture in from the big U-Haul. Then in the night I heard a muffled bark or two. Oh no, not a dog. Why would anyone have a dog in a little townhouse? If I do become acquainted with the new neighbors, I will look back on the day they first moved in and wonder why I didn't see them as I will have come to know them. People are walking question marks. Finding the answer can be the fun part. Or maybe they'll stay there ten years and I'll never speak to any of them. Maybe they'll ask me questions, like, "Hey, how come you don't have a dog?"

Sour Krauts

My admiration for the W administration keeps growing. The "new" German government backtracked on their anti-Bush stance by firing two ministers after they got safely reelected. If I know W, and I hope I do, that's not going to make a bit of difference. Rummy and Condi working together may even be able to give Colin Powell a backbone, unless he's been sandbagging all these months. I still haven't figured him out. All US troops should be out of Germany within a year, by the end of 2003. I'm old enough to remember, as a small boy in Germany, the devastation left by the war and how the only, and I mean the ONLY bright spot was the thousands of American kids like me, well-fed, well-scrubbed and looking forward, occupying forces, sure, but holding out a hand to the German people in their hour, heck, their decade of need and deprivation on a scale we today would find hard to believe. And now, nearly sixty years later they won't even help rid the world of a tyrant as odious as the one they produced, before he can do the same kind of damage. That's it. No more German nothing for me. Too bad. I used to like sauerkraut.

Paper vs. Plastic

I can’t believe people, when asked whether they want paper or plastic grocery bags, sometimes want paper. It’s nuts. The plastic bags are wonderful. You can hold twenty pounds of groceries in a soaking rainstorm with your little finger. They have a thousand uses around the house and can even serve as quick-lighting firestarters when the weather turns cool. Paper bags, however, turn soggy at the touch of rain or a leaky can or bottle, are difficult to hold with one arm, much less with one finger, and tear easily.

Oh, I know, the knee-jerk enviros say that plastic is awful and paper is more “natural” and efficient. Huh? That’s so dumb it’s hard to imagine anyone clinging to such a belief after any reflection at all. Which only shows that a lot of people don’t even start to reflect. They just emote. Brown, paper, from tree – good. But not too many, because there are only so many trees and they’ll all be gone soon. Right. Plastic – arggh – unnatural non-earth tones, from icky petroleum products raped from Mother Earth by right-wing conservative Texans. That’s about as far as their thinking goes. In truth, of course, the plastic bags are far more efficient than the paper ones. They weigh almost nothing, probably ten to a hundred times less than the paper ones. This means a tremendous savings in transport costs. Their strength means much less food is wasted from broken bottles and jars and dented cans and broccoli florets strewn across rain-soaked parking lots. And they even take up much less space in landfills and keep dyes and their other chemicals safely locked up instead of letting them leach into the soil, if you’re concerned about such nonsense. Not to mention that they’re cheaper, lowering food costs even more.

The worst way to bring home groceries is in your own canvas bag. Oh, I know, all the big chains are promoting them now, asking you to spend six or more dollars per bag. Now these things are heavy. You have to have ten dollars worth of groceries in them to equal the weight of the bag. I can’t imagine how heavy they get in the rain. But that’s not the worst part. They’re small. They don’t expand to hold very many groceries. You’d wind up spending thirty dollars just to have enough bags. The string bags we used to use when I was a boy in England make more sense. And, from an “ecological” point of view, these “reusable” bags are disasters. They cost far more resources to make than paper or plastic bags. And you can’t just blithely reuse them. The neo-Puritans’ horror of germs is even more severe than their hatred of plastic. Every time a bit of chicken guts gets onto the canvas bag, or meat juice or ketchup, you’re going to have to wash it. And let’s face it, that’s going to be every trip to the store. So if you go shopping more than once a week – and who doesn’t? – you’re going to be doing extra washloads to accommodate your idiot canvas shopping bags. Just think of the soap and water expended that wouldn’t be necessary if you weren’t scared stiff to be seen by the president of the local Sierra Club coming out of Publix with groceries in plastic bags. And do you really want to carry all those ultra-expensive “organic” vegetables home in a bag with detergent residue in it? How sanpaku!!

All in all, from every point of view, the old guy on his deathbed in “The Graduate” was right. It’s “Plastics, my boy, plastics...”

Paying the cost to be the boss

Ever thought you'd like to be a boss? Janis Ian has a great article about being a boss in the music industry. Makes you think twice, but she also makes it seem like, if she could do it, so could you. I enjoyed it, I think you will, too.

See Nessie! See Nessie swim!

Want to keep a lookout for the Loch Ness Monster (known to us of Scottish ancestry as Nessie)? The Scotsman has a webcam that will let you pass time scanning the grey loch for whatever secret its deep cold water may hold. Recommended as an activity while sipping single malt. Are you listening, Dr. Rines?

Google news and an evanescent poster

Google has a news service now, here. I've checked it out and I'm quite impressed. It could be quicker than Drudge or Lucianne. And it tells you how long ago the article it links to was posted on the Web. I mean, where else could you get instant New Zealand v. Bangladesh cricket results? Search engines are changing our world.

Wolfram was offering a free poster for anyone who wrote a review of "A New Kind of Science". I was going to use my posts from earlier this summer to cadge a copy. It features the entire book micro-reduced onto a wall poster. Cool. But too late, again!! I'll keep looking, in case it shows up again.

The German election seems like a good result, oddly enough. The Lefties' majority is way down and the coming victory over Iraq will make them look like idiots, especially when we find all the German products going into So damn Insane's WMD apparatus. Anyone for Zyklon B, left over from a certain regrettable era?

Don't smoke that stuff - you'll turn into an A-rab.

A lot of blogsters have been talking lately (Stephen den Beste, are you listening? And i flat refuse to capitalize the "d" in "den") about how different Arab Islamic cultures are from ours and how they must be defeated utterly in order to change. I have a different idea. Perhaps the real difference in our cultures stems from the choice of intoxicants. Mohammed forbade Muslims from using alcohol because he knew of the effects of alcohol on a civilization. But perhaps it is just those effects that makes modern Western society aggressive and forward-looking. Certainly alcohol is much more compatible with Western capitalist and Christian culture than is hashish or qat, the intoxicants allowed under Islam, by most interpretations.

Which reminds me, at the Cairo airport is a big sign "drug smuggling is punishable by death by hanging". Gets your attention. But then in the bazaars one sees old men sucking on hookahs and narjilahs, producing a smell that isn't tobacco. Like much of Arab culture, the reality differs from the public face. Rather than launching into a long discourse on the differential effects of alcohol and cannabis-like substances, I'll just suggest we try one experiment. Take an Arab state and introduce beer and whiskey big time, not just for the rich guys but for everyone. We can ban cannabinoids and qat if we want, but I don't think it will make much difference. In Western culture, even when cannabinoids were not illegal, alcohol dominated. I'd be willing to bet that within ten years that society would be optimistic, forward-looking, efficient and competitive. Perhaps the drug war in America is based on that insight. You smoke that ganja stuff, you turn into an A-rab, sitting around the hovel all day, listening to atonal music and casting longing glances at the camels. Drink beer and whiskey, you party, feel great for a few hours, wake up in the morning with a sore head and might as well go to work since you're going to be miserable until about five o'clock anyway.

If the combination of cheap booze, Baywatch and free love doesn't save the Arabs from their wretchedness, they're not worth worrying about. Just nuke 'em.

[9/17/2002 6:18:03 AM | Robert Speirs]
I haven't seen anything in any news about the pepper spray incident at the Eagles-Redskins football game last night. It was SO War on Terror! The pictures of people covering their mouths and noses, trying to get away from some "noxious substance" on the Eagles - away team - sideline sent shivers around the world of football. What if terror had struck home at the most sacred of American male ceremonies, Monday Night Football!? Or, perhaps worse, what if some sorehead Redskins fan, seeing the pounding his team was taking at the hands of Donovan McNabb and company, decided to overturn the chessboard and have the game called, by copycatting Osama? For a few minutes, no one knew quite what was going on, which is the worst thing that can happen these days. As it turned out, it was the cops. A fight had broken out in the stands behind the Eagles' bench and the cops had liberally doused the participants with pepper spray, some of which had drifted onto the field and around the stands. Like the cops don't have some better way to restrain drunken fools in the middle of a huge crowd other than dousing the whole crowd with noxious chemicals. Why do I sense the genesis of the problem in the politically correct presence of physically incompetent female cops here?

As to the Florida terrorist scare, set off by the boisterous idiocy of some wannabe Osamas in a diner in Georgia, I have to make one comparison. What would happen if I went into a restaurant in Saudi Arabia and started talking loudly about how those Arabs would regret September 11 when Mecca and Medina were vaporized? They wouldn't just close off a highway and explode my luggage. They'd bring out the sharpened scimitar immediately. If I insisted I was just joking, of course, they would apologize and let me go. Right.

The latest puzzle from Richard Maltby, called Triplets, is quite diverting. It features overlapping combinations of three solutions from three mixed-together definition clues. Not only is the location of each triplet unspecified, but so is the sequence of solutions within each triplet. These triple entries take up a large part of the puzzle, but leave just enough normal clues to pin down the location and sequence of the triple entries. I enjoyed this one more than most of my recent tries. Is that because I solved it fairly quickly? Is it a big surprise that you enjoy things more, from cooking to flying airplanes to romance, when they go well? The glow on this one, though, is such that I want to nominate it for Best Puzzle Ever. We?ll see how long that lasts.

Another football weekend brings a new term of art. Have you noticed how much bigger football linemen are getting these days? I don?t mean tall - they?ve all been tall for some time - but fat, downright, hanging-over-the-belt fat? Many are pushing 400 lbs now. I noticed one of the players referring to ?the Buddhas on the inside? and was thinking, ?How poetic! That?s better than anything Dennis Miller ever came up with?. Then I realized he was talking not about some inner peace that helps you concentrate on endzone nirvana, but the linemen. They do look like Buddhas! Line play is becoming more and more like sumo wrestling. It had to happen. The next development will be Japanese teams, cloned perhaps from the biggest sumo wrestlers. After all, football players have pushed speed and strength and aggressiveness to a maximum. There?s only one frontier left - heft!

New job. New JetStream Oven. New football season. Does life get any better? My observations of the blogosphere's delight at what looks to be George W.'s triumph at the UN, putting his critics in a bind make me wonder if I'm dreaming. Can he really have turned the tables so completely? One can only hope. The Iraq debate has shown the blog world at its most active and interesting. I no longer bother watching TV news or reading newspapers. Why should I, with Instapundit, Drudge, the News Forum and a dozen other sites ready and willing to serve me up news and spin that changes with the hour.

As to Wolfram, I've finished the main text and am struggling through the copious notes. I may skip a lot and go back to the main text. I may be reading this book for the rest of my life. Happy September!

D. Ultimate Models for the Universe.

Yes, I'm not kidding, that's what Wolfram titled this section. He explained that he is looking for and is pretty certain he has found a "complete and precise representation" of physical reality. Or, at the least he's pointing the way there. He points out once again that because the universe might be more complex than we thought doesn't necessarily mean that the automaton that compiled it is all that complex. Heck, it could get ten or a hundred or a million times more complex and still it could be based on a very simple rule.

In some of his simplest, clearest language, Wolfram asks how we could ever find the rule for the universe, even if it is simple and how we would know it once we had found it. He provides simple clear answers. But his thoughts brought to my mind a Biblical quotation:

Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto ye.

There are no short cuts. You may have to do a lot of searching and there's no guarantee you'll find what you're looking for. Hey, that sounds like the universe I recognize, the one I live in every day.

In the notes to this section, which are almost as long as the section, Wolfram provides a potted history of models of the universe. It's excellent. Then at the end of the note he addresses the concept of whether the universe has a meaning. Since his model is based on an abstract mathematical logical system, not unlike the system from which the digits of pi are derived, W concludes that the universe has no more meaning than can be found in the sequence of digits after the decimal point in pi. A bit deflating, but I think he's got more deflating in store. Beat me!! At least I'm still the most important guy in MY universe!

More links

To get away from Wolfram for a minute, I've seen several stories linking Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and the Mideast terror web. The latest relates that the bomb - apparently set up by AlQaeda - that exploded outside the US consulate in Karachi was a diesel oil/fertilizer bomb like the one that half-destroyed the Federal Building in OK City. I know that's hardly proof, but combined with the fact that the missing OK City suspect's picture looks an awful lot like Jose Padilla/Muhajir and the fact that Terry Nichol's ex-wife's maiden name is Padilla and the discovery of messages between AlQaeda operatives just before April 19, 1995 talking about the destruction of American landmarks and specifically mentioning the Murrah Building - among others, to be sure - why you've got more than enough for a website, paperback and set of Congressional hearings.

By the way, the lack of American fatalities in the Karachi blast says good things about the lessons learned since Beirut and Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, Pakistani bystanders were not so lucky. If a 500-lb bomb can't even destroy a consulate, we've come a long way.

Chapter 9 of Wolfram - This is the BIG one, folks!

One hundred and twelve pages that will change my view of the universe. At least that's what I was hoping. It does build from section to section, though, with a chutzpah that amazes. My only problem is that I'm not sure whether he's delivering the goods or not. I started college as a physics major, but ended up as a hippie political scientist and then went to law school. So I can spot an argument, but I can't compare Wolfram's conclusions about quantum mechanics or gravitational waves to the standard theory because I don't know it. Maybe that's an advantage in a way, though.

Section A - Reversibility

It seemed a little odd for W to address "reversibility" as the first point of a chapter telling how fundamental physics is explained by his theory. But he does a good job of it, pointing out how cellular automata can produce reversible results, that is, patterns in which it is possible to run the rule backwards as well as forwards. And in doing so, the patterns lose none of the randomness he says is necessary to explain how they can produce everything we see around us.

B- Irreversibility and the Second Law

Once again, I wish I knew more about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I'm sure it's more complicated than: "Everything's falling apart and there's nothing anyone can do about it." But Wolfram's message here seems to be "it ain't necessarily so". His automata patterns show that the king's horses and men can occasionally produce something that looks like Humpty Dumpty out of all that eggshell and protoplasm. I guess that means I have to say "the yolk's not necessarily always on them". King's anything - especially "men" - are non-PC these days, but W apparently doesn't care. He's been holed up with his automata since before there was any such thing as PC. Some patterns show a different kind of order emerging from randomized chaos from that order which existed before the chaos was generated. With many "mights" and "perhaps", W also points out the structures that occur, some of them separated by what look like "membranes". Curiouser and curiouser. The treatise on reversibility in the first section of the chapter makes more sense now.

C - Conserved Quantities and Continuum Phenomena

Hmm. Some cellular automata exhibit conservation of the number of squares of any one color. Wolfram compares this to the law of conservation of matter and energy - and momentum. Every so often I flash on how bold and confident Wolfram is about his comparisons. I almost want to see him fall flat on his face. But somehow he makes it all seem reasonable, almost inevitable.

A new word (for me): Ergodicity. Google found me a note about it, in, of all things, a game theory context:

In particular, his models show ergodicity. Basically, this means that if you have a large number of such systems, and at any one time p percent of them are in a given state, then every single one
of them will spend about p percent of its time in that state. (Technically, there's a distribution over the states such that the state-space average of any well-behaved function equals its
time-average starting from almost any state, if you take the latter over a long enough interval.) Ergodicity is a very strong property, and one of the stronger predictions his models make; it goes
away if the agents are not perverse, or can remember unlimited stretches of the past, in which case each population will lock in to a single convention forever. It is also liable to be hard to test
empirically, because it can take a considerable time to converge on the ergodic distribution, and in the meanwhile the game people are playing is apt to have changed.

Now that that's clear, I think I'll actually post this. More on the way about Wolfram's Chapter 9. A lot more.

Responding to terror

The horrific massacre by a Palestinian mass murderer in Jerusalem requires a response. His house and all his family's possessions that can be traced should be destroyed or confiscated. The university in Nablus he went to and where he was apparently recruited should be razed to the ground. My God! The Euro-weenies call the Israelis Nazis. Do they have any idea what the SS would have done if the French resistance had exploded a bomb on a bus in Germany and the bomber's family had crowed about it in public? There wouldn't have been anything left of the area of France the bomber was from. And the French are an actual nation. And the Nazis were real monsters.

Soccer, Wolfram and even a puzzle

I've been absorbed in the twelfth chapter of Wolfram, which appears to be as complicated - and interesting - as the rest of the book so far, which is saying something. I've even been taking notes. I'll be posting summaries soon. I'm at school with professor Wolfram. It bothers me maybe a bit that he's ten + years younger than I am, but I'm not letting that stop me. My mornings have been obsessed with the latest soccer games from Korea and Japan, which, too bad, just was ousted by Turkey at about 4:30 Tallahassee time. Korea's fighting for its life against Turkey, down 1-0. I did, yes, get my copy of Maltby's latest puzzle from Harper's and am liking it. It's nearly as intricate this time as one of Wolfram's automata. Hey, wouldn't that be a discovery? Automata using cryptic clues! Ha! Sorry, too much coffee and enough Wolfram for now.

Another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. When are the Israelis going to get really mad and just resettle the Palestinians, to, oh, say, Madagascar? Judea and Samaria fully Jewish again would make it so much harder for Hamas and Hezbollah to operate there.

Too much cheese, too many surrenders!

Saw the end of the France-Denmark World Cup game today. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys surrendered once again, 2-0, and go home having not just failed to win but having failed even to score in three games. And they're the World Cup champions! Is it a coincidence that France has the euro and Denmark has resisted it? I think not! The French played abysmally. You could tell half-way through the second half that they would lose. The Danes were smiling, loose. The French looked lost, hypnotized. Now don't get me wrong. I love France. It's beautiful. If there just weren't so many darned Frenchmen in it! Fill it with Danes and send the French to keep the Palestinians company. They deserve each other.

Bugs

Found an astonishing article at the Atlantic online (theatlantic.com) about viruses and bacteria that may - probably do - cause - get ready - heart disease, cancers, schizophrenia, even - gasp! - homosexuality! Somewhat breathless but entertaining. I knew it wasn't the sausages and bacon I eat every morning that were the problem, or even Atkins' demons, starches. It's infection, I tell you! They're everywhere!! Get them off me!! ARRRRRRR .....

[6/9/2002 10:56:48 AM | Robert Speirs]
Snowflakes, flowers, seashells and the stock market - Wolfram as God

In Chapter 8, Wolfram tells how snowflakes are made, how flowers grow, how sea creatures form their shells and how stock traders determine when to buy or sell. Or, he tells why we can't tell when traders will sell. This chapter has rather a lot on evolutionary mechanisms, a la Stephen Jay Gould. I kept wondering how Gould would respond to the patterns Wolfram generates from quite simple rules. As a layman, I also wondered how experts in the various fields Wolfram looks at would respond. Would it be, "Oh, of course, everyone knows that," meaning everyone in the field, or "That can't possibly be and I'll show you why"? Or, more likely, would it be, "Well, that's interesting. I'll have to check that out."?

For me, in my state of half-education on all these topics, my reaction to the revelations matches my wonderment at being shown that the progressions of buds on a plant stem are spaced according to the Fibonacci sequence. Ah, so there IS a correspondence between numbers and nature! And, now, "Ah, maybe someday we will be able to grow a creature like none that ever lived on Earth before!"

Chapter 7 - Mechanisms in programs and nature - Stephen Wolfram

This chapter lays out the interesting bits about cellular automata as compared to all the other mechanisms one could use to understand the working of natural processes. You get quite a bit more on randomness. Wolfram clarifies that randomness in natural processes has always been seen to come from the environment or from imprecision in mechanisms. He gives an example of a beam of light spread by parabolic mirrors and then reflected off several flat mirrors. No matter how carefully you polish the mirrors, some imperfections will remain to distort the patterning of the beam’s reflections, whether after 10 or 100 or 1000 reflections. Or, the beam itself could be imperfect because of atmospheric particles or fluctuation in the light source. The randomness one sees in cellular automata, however, Wolfram says is an entirely different kind of randomness, one inherent in the process that would remain even if an apparatus could be made fault-free. This, he suggests, is the sort of randomness that Nature uses. Maybe next chapter I’ll find out a little more about how Nature uses randomness.

This chapter goes on to address continuity and discreteness in natural and cellular patterns and several other patterns. As it’s sixty-plus pages long, I’ll have to have another look at it to do it justice. It is, however, keeping my interest.

World Cup

Break from Wolfram today to take in the US-Portugal World Cup game at 5 AM. Just barely got up in time for the kickoff. It was just stunning to see the boys stuff in three goals with no response from the Portegees! Amazing, unreal, even the own goal deflection from Landon Donovan's cross. It was like they could do no wrong. Figo did not seem to be that much of a factor. Beasley and Donovan seemed to be able to attack at will. Then before half time Portugal scored and the US pulled its head into its shell and hung on for dear life in the second half. That was much less entertaining. Jeff Agoos's own goal was an "uh-oh" moment that seemed to foreshadow a collapse, but the cave-in never materialized. Portugal just didn't seem to be on their game. The US players seemed as active and motivated at the end of the game as at the beginning. Great effort, guys! On to the final rounds!! One gets dreams of an overall US victory to set the cheese-eating surrender monkeys on their heels, but I still realize intellectually that's vanishingly unlikely. If I had to bet right now, I'd say Germany v. Brazil in the final and Deutschland comes out uber alles. They were great in their shellacking of the Saud family team which at the moment controls part of Arabia. I got cable just for the World Cup and it seems to have been worth it. Looking forward to more tired but happy mornings.

Chapter 6 - Starting from Random

More and more about cellular automata in all their manifestations. Instead of starting with one black cell and filling up sheets of graph paper, this chapter investigates the variations that happen when the top line of the automaton contains a varied array of black and white squares. The big surprise? The results aren't all that different from "simple" automata. They tend to cluster in four types. In the course of the investigation, the concept of randomness itself comes in for a thorough grilling. I've come to trust Wolfram's elucidations as not just clear but interesting and innovative. One example: A certain simple cellular automaton produces a pattern which gives a line of random white and black squares if you run your finger right down the middle of it. As far as can be determined, this sequence is purely random, unpredictable. And yet if you run the pattern again from scratch, it produces the same pattern, still internally random. But if you know the pattern, how can you say it's random? This reminds me of the stage in a puzzle where you don't think you'll ever get it, but something inside you tells you that if you just keep on going,the solution will come clear. I'm looking forward to it. The next chapter promises some application of all this theorizing to real-world events.

Chapter 5 - Two Dimensions and beyond

This chapter of " A New Kind of Science" makes one point - if you look at higher dimensions to find greater or more common complexity, you're not going to find it. It's got neato illustrations and clear if somewhat lengthy expositions of why expanding the basic scheme of cellular automata from flat graph paper to wire grids does not produce any greater insights into how Reality produces the complexity we see all around us. Ha! And we all thought in college that "higher math" would get us closer to absolute truth! Give it up! At least I haven't been overwhelmed yet by the avalanche of incomprehensible equations I've been fearing. I'm getting in the back of my mind the feeling that the reaon it took life so long to emerge from the primordial ocean of chemical soup was that the gods were sitting around waiting for the mechanism to happen on the one or two combinations out of millions that would allow complexity to happen. Just think of all the graph paper and chicken wire they must have gone through. The same process must also have gone on within the gas clouds before the birth of the galaxy, solar system and Earth herself. Ah, I love speculating about the author's conclusions! It would be a waste of $44.95 plus shipping if I couldn't be proven fantabulously mistaken at least once.

Numbers

Finished Chapter 4 "Systems based on Numbers" of Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" before falling asleep for twelve hours or so. After failing differential equations three times in college I never thought I would want to have much to do with numbers again, or especially equations. This chapter was pretty painless, though, and clearly enough makes the author's point that systems based on numbers aren't different in kind from cellular automata that you can draw on graph paper without using any numbers. The distinctions between/among rational and irrational numbers are clearer to me now and the lesson that complexity resides everywhere under the surface if we just look hard enough has been hammered into my brain with the result that I will now be looking for it everywhere. On to dimensionality!

Chapter 3

Finished Chapter 3 of "A New Kind of Science". This is going to take more than one reading! I am enjoying the clarity of the presentation, though. Simple cellular automata give way to mobile ones and Turing Machines. I can see how he got so interested in the ideas. He must have liked graph paper when he was a kid, too. The generation of complexity from simple regularity fascinates. Let's hope I don't get too obsessed! When I read Mandelbrot's Fractals book I wanted to cover my walls with Julia sets and now I want to make wallpaper out of cellular automata patterns. I especially like the way he uses the binary system to number the rules for the automata. It makes me want to learn binary better. It would make it a lot easier to match patterns. That coding scheme in itself was quite a brainstorm. I'm beginning to think this fellow may be for real!

Spooky

OK, I'll admit it. It's a bit spooky. I just finished reading Chapter 2 of "A New Kind of Science". It lays out the complex, nay, random patterns that can be generated by simple rules operating on cellular automata. Why does it look so familiar? Something to do with generative grammar keeps popping up in my head. I like this book. It's stimulating, yet understandable to a lay lawyer such as I. I read Mandelbrot's book on fractals years ago, but couldn't keep up. So far, Wolfram hasn't lost me. He contains fractals and everything else, perhaps. Also, when I was a kid I used to love graph paper, doodling all the time. So maybe if I had done more of that, I would have discovered what Wolfram did.

Wolfram and infomercials

After reading the intro to "A New Kind of Science", I feel the way I do after reading the first part of a "get-rich-quick" ad or watching the intro to a multilevel marketing or real-estate infomercial.

"For years, I struggled, barely able to pay my rent or buy food for my dog. Then one day I stumbled on an amazing secret. That secret has changed my life"

Only, Wolfram says his secret will change not just your life but the way men think. It will not make you rich, just more wise than anyone else, and for only $44.95 plus shipping and handling. I can't wait for the secret to be revealed. I love the anticipation. The only problem is that in the dozens of get-rich-quick schemes I have fallen for over the years, after you found out the secret, you didn't get rich, quick or slowly.

The lesson of those scams, of course, was, "you are a greedy idiot". That was a lesson worth learning, but I hope Wolfram has a better lesson to teach.

Abiogenesis

Lots of activity over on Slashdot on the topic of the amount of oil left in the world. There were something like 600 posts to a story that Iceland is going to move its economy away from oil. Typical Icelandic iconoclasticism. Well, soon I'm sure they'll be sued for tapping too much of the earth's geothermal energy. Why, if they don't stop we'll all run out of steam!! No more steamboats or steam trains or hot steamy showers!! Stop the madness!!

Actually, though, most of the posts referred to the "refilling the oil fields" story in Newsday. I remember reading decades ago - probably in the mid '70s - about something called the Siljan Ring Hypothesis. The Siljan Ring is a granitic formation in central Sweden that is perhaps the oldest rock formation on Earth. Indications of hydrocarbons coming from wells drilled in that area cast doubt on the theory that oil came from biotic sources - dead dinosaurs and plants. The Siljan Ring is so old that it dates back to before there were animals or even plants. So oil didn't come from dinosaurs or even from plankton and algae in the ocean, but from methane left over from when the Earth was a ball of gas. That meant oil was essentially inexhaustible. The best thing about the theory was that it drove the typical environmentalist crazy. He would stop smoking his joint for a minute and get all wild-eyed. You could tell he was thinking, "Oh, no, what if that's true? The right-wing bastards will be able to drive their Cadillacs over the working classes forever! It can't be!!" Well, hey, guess what, here it is thirty years on. We've got plenty of petroleum, more being discovered every day. And the Siljan Ring Hypothesis, unlike the predictions of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, is alive and kicking.

Behavior is computation

I don't know what it means either, but I got it after reading the first chapter of Wolfram's book. The Principle of Computational Equivalence looks like the key idea I'm going to have to figure out. Wish me luck. Oh, and by the way, I did finish the NYT crostic. As usual, it fell apart after I spotted one longish repeated word. I'm starting to remember why I don't do crostics any more. Can't say I didn't enjoy it a little, though.

Wolfram

I received Stephen Wolfram's new book, "A New Kind of Science" yesterday. Despite being warned by another blogger that it may be "all hype", I was intrigued and hopeful. I will report my impressions. The introduction certainly sets up some large goals, nothing less than to revolutionize hard science, social science, even art and philosophy. An odd feature - Wolfram lays out the number of keystrokes he used in the twenty years since he conceived the idea for the book (billions) and the distance he drove his mouse, which came to about a hundred miles. How did he ever figure that last one out? And how does that make his product better? Some bloggers with bloggorhea (new word?!) probably exercised their metatarsals to a similar extent. Maybe the central question for me is: Does this "New Science" create opportunities for composing a new kind of word puzzle? I'll keep you posted.

Vultus est index animi

So, tell me, why is the above unexceptionable yet curiously cautionary sentiment posted on the message board of a gas station in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, yep, right there at the intersection of Tennessee and Monroe? And on the reverse was "Carpe diem", for which you can at least make the argument that it's familiar. Someone educated is reduced to being a cashier at a gas station, I would guess. Is this a cry for help or a manifesto of identification with the laboring masses? Who can say? Perhaps he now and then even pumps gas, joining a long line of penniless intellectuals. In the Paris of Abelard, poor but industrious students might have lowered themselves to feeding horses, one supposes, muttering Latinisms. It was a surprise, possibly as much of a surprise as seeing that Cox and Rathvon are now composing the crostic in the Sunday Times Magazine. They could have been doing it for years, since I haven't looked at crostics for, probably, fifteen years. But this one was hard! I haven't finished it yet, since it isn't in a NYT Magazine I personally possess. I have to sneak around these days to feed my puzzle jones. sic transit, gloria!

Here's a copy of a letter I sent to Pejmanpundit and to Jane Galt on Live from the WTC about the Second Amendment:

ear Pejman,

Great article in FoxNews. I thought you might be interested in my powers-based argument below. Why don't people argue from basic principles any more, or have I just not been looking in the right places?

About the wording of the Second Amendment: The possible
dependency of the second clause "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" on the existence or necessity of a "well-regulated militia" seems irrelevant to what, if any, powers the Amendment is reserving to the Federal government. That's of
course
one of the major stumbling blocks for interpretation. The Bill
of
Rights does not create or even define rights. It, like the rest
of
the Constitution, only defines the legitimate powers of the
Federal
government. The Amendment makes it clear that the right to keep
and
bear arms resides with the people, and that no state or Federal
government has the power to infringe that right. The definition
of what "keep and bear arms" means should depend on the original
Constitution, not the Second Amendment. Otherwise, why would this
amendment have been added?

The Second Amendment grants no powers whatever to the Federal
government, especially and particularly not the power to infringe
the
people's right to keep and bear arms. The Ninth and Tenth
Amendments
nail that down. The only reason for the addition of this
amendment
can have been to clarify that the Federal government did not have
this power. The Founding Fathers must have feared that some other
section of the Constitution might have been interpreted to give
this
power to the Federal government.

It is absurd, therefore, to say that the amendment's restriction
of
the Federal government's power to control individual keeping and
bearing of arms was conditional on the need for a militia. The
Federal government had and has no such power, or at least
certainly not from the Second Amendment. The contention that it
does, and that with the withering away of the need for a militia
the
inherent power springs into existence full-grown, reflects the
mistaken view that the Federal government has every conceivable
power
unless the Bill of rights tells us it doesn't have that power.
It's
just the other way around. In order to give the Federal
government
the power to infringe the people's right to keep and bear arms,
the
Second Amendment would have to be repealed by another amendment
which
specifically gives the Federal government that power. That ain't
gonna happen.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

PS You might be interested to know that in a speech to the
Constitutional Convention on June 8, 1789, James Madison suggested
the Second Amendment, among others, but in this speech the
"militia"
clause came after the "shall not infringe" clause. Here's the
URL:

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/jm4/speeches/amend.htm

It's my personal opinion that the "militia" clause was thrown in
as
one possible justification for not meddling with the right of each
individual to keep arms. That makes it at most an explanation,
not
a condition. RS

It is the new millennium and I can't wait for the next big thing

How do I know it's a new era? At Wal-mart this morning I bought "Cheese Spam"! It's my two favorite things in one can! Not only that, but as all we spamophiles know, the opening of the can involves now only the pulling of a ring. That's too bad. It was fun to pry the little tool off the bottom and twirl the metal strip at the top. You could make bets with your friends on whether you'ld really need a transfusion or not. But then they'd just say the doctors were trying to get rich. You should have known better than to try and be friends with collectivists. But capitalism marches on, today cheese spam, tomorrow, what, macadamia beer?

Arab insecurity

Just finished "Paper Money" by Adam Smith, written in 1981, just after the oil crises of the Seventies had made some of the Arabs filthy rich. Smith (or Goodman or whatever his REAL name is) assumes in 1981 that by 2000 the Arabs will pretty much own the whole world. It struck me that the Arabs probably thought they would, too. That feeling must have produced some heavy-duty letdown when the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union broke up and prosperity, low interest rates and massive new oil discoveries broke the Arab near-monopoly. The Arabs in 1981 were really in the position that the DeBeers diamond monopoly may be in right now, if these stories ( I wish I had saved the link to them) about huge diamond discoveries in Canada are true. I suppose it would have made me go nuts with frustration if I were a twenty-something Saudi princeling named Bin Laden and I saw the power position my country had obtained go by the boards slowly but surely and the hated Americans gradually gather back into their hand all the good cards. Why, it might make me resort to fundamentalist Islam to compensate for my lost dream of bossing around the entire industrialized world. I might blame the Saudi hierarchy, as well as all the other not-sufficiently-fundamentalist regimes in the area. Now if I am alive at all, I'm hiding in a cold dirty cave somewhere in the mountains of southern Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, hunted like the dog I have turned into. Also, after thumbing my nose at the fool Clinton for eight years, bombing and murdering at will, this junior Bush has to come along and have the gall to declare all-out war not only on me but on my ideas and my lust for glory. Why, it's enough to make me fly a plane into a building!

Wolfram and Kamen

What is it about these guys, Stephen Wolfram and Dean Kamen, that enables them to get so much publicity, for very little? I am tempted to throw in Stephen Hawking, Bobby Fischer and Nietzsche, but no. I just ordered Wolfram's new book about a "New Science" - fifty dollars! Dean Kamen is selling his scooters that don't go any faster than a bicycle for $8,000. What is it? The press must be desperate for heroes. The word "genius" scatters itself liberally when any of these boys appear.

I should say, too, that I am extremely unlikely to buy a Segway, but since I've already plumped for Wolfram's book, I hope it has more substance to it. I've always been intrigued by cellular automata, fractals and all that. Maybe you could put the program that produced the universe on a 3.5" floppy. Making it produce anything would be the hard part, since everything is already deeply involved in becoming something else. As den Beste may have mentioned, at least one would hope that the program was well written. But that brings up another thought. What if it isn't all that good and can be easily improved? Would we be duty-bound to improve it and start the better version off with a little seed matter and step back and see what happens? This could be better than cloning.

[5/19/2002 7:13:22 AM | Robert Speirs]
Not us

Just finished listening to Fox News Sunday. Tony Snow got the whole war thing together in ten words: "We have met the enemy, and he is NOT us."! Take that, Pogo! What a great summary of the enlightenment that has - finally - come over this country after decades of self-loathing and guilt tripping. Makes me confident and happy. It also makes a fitting memorial to the thousands who died on Sept. 11.

OK, OK, I know, this blog is supposed to be about puzzles. I did finish the quasi-cryptic by Lewis in the Nation, dated May 20, number 2846. The Nation is a weekly, I guess. I wouldn't subscribe to it on a bet. But the weekly pressure does perhaps explain the sketchy nature of the cryptic puzzle. Lewis doesn't bother with any fancy "distort the solution before you enter it into the diagram" business. All the entries are the same as the clue solutions. Some other differences appear from the usual Cox/Rathvon and Maltby puzzles. Lewis is addicted to multi-word answers, therefore to very long answers, and to spilling entries over from one numbered slot to the next, sometimes to three or more. Every other letter is unchecked. That makes it difficult to guess words. The occasional obscure clue - this puzzle had one extreme obscurity - could remain unfilled-in even when all the cross-checked letters have been entered. Luckily, I knew enough about Ethiopia to figure out this one. Next time, who knows?

I enjoyed this one more than I expected to, but don't seem to be impelled to rush out and acquire each puzzle as it comes out, as I do for the other cryptics. Nevertheless, Lewis does offer a change of pace from the monthlies. Most entertaining clue? 6 down, but then I'm a sucker for - well - conundrums!
[edit]
[5/17/2002 2:59:19 PM | Robert Speirs]
Another good one

Yesterday, I finished the June 2002 Atlantic puzzle, "Layers" by Cox and Rathvon. It was one of the cleverest yet. The words are all entered conventionally into the diagram. The diagram, however, has two separate parts, an outside layer and a core, with one square in the middle. The clues are arranged so that some of the answers from the outside layer, when arranged according to the numbering scheme given, provide the clues for the core layer. Not only that, but the diagram entries from the core layer are entered in numbered squares. Then you enter each letter in a crostic-like row to give you one final clue, which tells you how to complete the final center box. So it is indeed "layered". Quite an achievement. The clues were challenging, although there was a good proportion of three and four-letter entries, which tend to be easier. This I find excusable, given the intricacy of the overall scheme. The cross-clues in the diagram were quite helpful, with the desirable balance pleasingly maintained.

As I went through this puzzle, I felt a keen sense of anticipation, thinking, "I wonder if they're really going to be able to carry it through?" They did not disappoint. This is a definite nine out of ten. That brings up an interesting point. How should puzzles be rated, for difficulty, cleverness, entertainment value? What should the standards be? I'll be pontificating on this in future posts and solicit any comments anyone may have.

Most entertaining clue: 12 Down. Yes, I know it's easy, but I found it fun anyway.
[edit]

[5/15/2002 7:02:58 PM | Robert Speirs]

Not us

Just finished listening to Fox News Sunday. Tony Snow got the whole war thing together in ten words: "We have met the enemy, and he is NOT us."! Take that, Pogo! What a great summary of the enlightenment that has - finally - come over this country after decades of self-loathing and guilt tripping. Makes me confident and happy. It also makes a fitting memorial to the thousands who died on Sept. 11.

OK, OK, I know, this blog is supposed to be about puzzles. I did finish the quasi-cryptic by Lewis in the Nation, dated May 20, number 2846. The Nation is a weekly, I guess. I wouldn't subscribe to it on a bet. But the weekly pressure does perhaps explain the sketchy nature of the cryptic puzzle. Lewis doesn't bother with any fancy "distort the solution before you enter it into the diagram" business. All the entries are the same as the clue solutions. Some other differences appear from the usual Cox/Rathvon and Maltby puzzles. Lewis is addicted to multi-word answers, therefore to very long answers, and to spilling entries over from one numbered slot to the next, sometimes to three or more. Every other letter is unchecked. That makes it difficult to guess words. The occasional obscure clue - this puzzle had one extreme obscurity - could remain unfilled-in even when all the cross-checked letters have been entered. Luckily, I knew enough about Ethiopia to figure out this one. Next time, who knows?

I enjoyed this one more than I expected to, but don't seem to be impelled to rush out and acquire each puzzle as it comes out, as I do for the other cryptics. Nevertheless, Lewis does offer a change of pace from the monthlies. Most entertaining clue? 6 down, but then I'm a sucker for - well - conundrums!

Another good one

Yesterday, I finished the June 2002 Atlantic puzzle, "Layers" by Cox and Rathvon. It was one of the cleverest yet. The words are all entered conventionally into the diagram. The diagram, however, has two separate parts, an outside layer and a core, with one square in the middle. The clues are arranged so that some of the answers from the outside layer, when arranged according to the numbering scheme given, provide the clues for the core layer. Not only that, but the diagram entries from the core layer are entered in numbered squares. Then you enter each letter in a crostic-like row to give you one final clue, which tells you how to complete the final center box. So it is indeed "layered". Quite an achievement. The clues were challenging, although there was a good proportion of three and four-letter entries, which tend to be easier. This I find excusable, given the intricacy of the overall scheme. The cross-clues in the diagram were quite helpful, with the desirable balance pleasingly maintained.

As I went through this puzzle, I felt a keen sense of anticipation, thinking, "I wonder if they're really going to be able to carry it through?" They did not disappoint. This is a definite nine out of ten. That brings up an interesting point. How should puzzles be rated, for difficulty, cleverness, entertainment value? What should the standards be? I'll be pontificating on this in future posts and solicit any comments anyone may have.

Most entertaining clue: 12 Down. Yes, I know it's easy, but I found it fun anyway.

Maltby comes through

I've just finished Richard E. Maltby, Jr.'s effort, called "Heads or Tails, Revisited" from the June 2002 Harper's. It was much more enjoyable than I had feared. One entered the Across answers in standard fashion. Each Down column, however, had one 8-letter word and one 6-letter, plus a few threes thrown in as filler. All the fun was in the eights and sixes. The sixes were clued normally, but entering the solution in the diagram required you to find a group of three consecutive letters in the solution that matched a group of three in an eight letter word - any eight-letter Down word, not just the one in the same column. Each of the eight-letter clues gave you a word of the form "X is X", with each X representing a group of three letters. An example, not from the puzzle, would be "theistic". If a six letter word contained either of the same three letter groups (the or tic), for instance "rather", you would replace "the" with "tic" and enter the result - raticr - in the diagram. It sounds clumsy, but in practice works very well. At first glance it looks inelegant that so many of the eight-letter words project beyond the main body of the puzzle, leaving five letters in each apparently unchecked. This is not really so, however, as the matching of groups of three letters that may be unchecked directly to other groups of three in the six-letter words provides a perfectly adequate cross-checking mechanism. Good on yer, Maltby!

Star clue: 46 across, one of those that isn't too hard, but makes you feel clever when you get it. And that's the whole idea, isn't it, preening one's plumage?

5/14/2002 6:42:16 AM | Robert Speirs]
Here's an email I sent to Unilateral.blogspot.com

Dear Mr. Seamans,

You say in your "Unilateral Commission" blog:

There are few indications of where the next counter-cultural movement will pop up, and that's a little frightening. So what's next? Any ideas?


Maybe I'm blinded by my objectivist ideology, but I think there's no "action" on the extreme flanks because we're going through a redefinition of the political
spectrum. Finally! This left and right bit that's been around since the French Revolution (?) is becoming more obviously inadequate every day. Putting Pim
Fortuyn and Jean Marie LePen on the same side of anything is clearly nutso.

My favorite spectrum is from individualist to collectivist, mostly because it puts the bad guys all on the same side! The Stalinists and Al Qaeda deserve each
other. The "Green" totalitarians should be classed with the Neo-Nazis. Let them fight it out. And the objectivists (or Objectivists) need to recognize that most
libertarians are pretty close to them, however "leftist" they may sound sometimes.

The effect of this realignment in thinking, I hope, will be to make it clear that a party that cannot be classed as Right or Left is not necessarily of the Center. The
only effect of cramping all political opinions into that old spectrum is to make big government seem inevitable. A lot of people don't think so.

So when a real party starts up which advocates cutting social - and corporate! - and farm! - welfare to the bone, which backs a strong, but efficient, military and
which opposes the drug war and tariffs with equal ferocity, you should see a real ferment among the hacks. It may be starting now!

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

Here's an email I sent to Unilateral.blogspot.com

Dear Mr. Seamans,

You say in your "Unilateral Commission" blog:

There are few indications of where the next counter-cultural movement will pop up, and that's a little frightening. So what's next? Any ideas?


Maybe I'm blinded by my objectivist ideology, but I think there's no "action" on the extreme flanks because we're going through a redefinition of the political spectrum. Finally! This left and right bit that's been around since the French Revolution (?) is becoming more obviously inadequate every day. Putting Pim Fortuyn and Jean Marie LePen on the same side of anything is clearly nutso.

My favorite spectrum is from individualist to collectivist, mostly because it puts the bad guys all on the same side! The Stalinists and Al Qaeda deserve each other. The "Green" totalitarians should be classed with the Neo-Nazis. Let them fight it out. And the objectivists (or Objectivists) need to recognize that most libertarians are pretty close to them, however "leftist" they may sound sometimes.

The effect of this realignment in thinking, I hope, will be to make it clear that a party that cannot be classed as Right or Left is not necessarily of the Center. The only effect of cramping all political opinions into that old spectrum is to make big government seem inevitable. A lot of people don't think so.

So when a real party starts up which advocates cutting social - and corporate! - and farm! - welfare to the bone, which backs a strong, but efficient, military and which opposes the drug war and tariffs with equal ferocity, you should see a real ferment among the hacks. It may be starting now!

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

The correct address for "Live from the WTC" is www.janegalt.net, not .com. Sorry.

June 2002 puzzles

Just got the June puzzles from the Atlantic and Harper's. Once again, Richard Maltby's effort from Harper's appears dishearteningly difficult, but it is certainly possible it will break down. I am having difficulty even understanding how it works yet, which doesn't give me a lot of hope about my chances of getting it done in a reasonable time. My initial reaction to Cox and Rathvon's latest is about the same, unfortunately. I'll sit down after work tonight with some Bass Ale - on special at Publix - and see if I get a brain wave that allows me to surf right in to the beach of comprehensibility. Since I've had a bit too much gout medicine today, my insights tonight may not be any more comprehensible than that metaphor, or, more likely, I'll fall asleep at seven o'clock. But at least I will be challenginig my word skills. The actual articles in the magazines from which the puzzles come seem to be getting more and more obnoxious. Or am I just getting more and more curmudgeonly anti-collectivist? Yep, that must be it. And a darn good thing, too.

An email I sent to the Jane Galt blogger (live from the WTC) follows. She's at janegalt.blogspot.com. It sums up my analysis of the Second Amendment pretty well. Comments are welcome.
Dear Jane Galt,

About the wording of the Second Amendment: The possible dependency of the second clause "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall
not be infringed" on the existence or necessity of a "well-regulated militia" seems irrelevant to what, if any, powers the Amendment is reserving to
the Federal government. That's of course one of the major stumbling blocks for interpretation. The Bill of Rights does not create or even define
rights. It, like the rest of the Constitution, only defines the legitimate powers of the Federal government. The Amendment makes it clear that the
right to keep and bear arms resides with the people, and that no state or Federal government has the power to infringe that right.

The Second Amendment grants no powers whatever to the Federal government, especially and particularly not the power to infringe the people's
right to keep and bear arms. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments nail that down. The only reason for the addition of this amendment can have been to
clarify that the Federal government did not have this power. The Founding Fathers must have feared that some other section of the Constitution
might have been interpreted to give this power to the Federal government.

It is absurd, therefore, to say that the amendment's restriction of the Federal government's power to control individual keeping and bearing of arms
was conditional on the need for a militia. The Federal government had and has no such power. The contention that it does, and that with the
withering away of the need for a militia the inherent power springs into existence full-grown, reflects the mistaken view that the Federal
government has every conceivable power unless the Bill of rights tells us it doesn't have that power. It's just the other way around. In order to give
the Federal government the power to infringe the people's right to keep and bear arms, the Second Amendment would have to be repealed by
another amendment which specifically gives the Federal government that power. That ain't gonna happen.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

PS You might be interested to know that in a speech to the Constitutional Convention on June 8, 1789, James Madison suggested the Second
Amendment, among others, but in this speech the "militia" clause came after the "shall not infringe" clause. Here's the URL:

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/jm4/speeches/amend.htm

It's my personal opinion that the "militia" clause was thrown in as one possible justification for not meddling with the right of each individual to
keep arms. That makes it at most an explanation, not a condition. RS

Joy

Back to cryptic puzzles. I finished "Compact Disc" from the May 2002 Atlantic Monthly yesterday. What a joy! The clues made sense, yet weren't too easy. The scheme for entering solutions was comprehensible, yet tricky enough to be challenging. The diagram was round, with one set of radial clues and one set of concentric clues. Of course, it wasn't like, just solve the clue and enter the word in the diagram. The radial clues were totally scrambled. The concentric clues were grouped in five rings, with three or four words in each ring. Luckily, the solutions in each ring were entered consecutively and ordered from a set point. Cox and Rathvon played one more trick, though. The disc consisted of twenty sectors. The word lengths in each concentric group, though, added up to twenty-one letters. So one space of each ring had to contain two consecutive letters. Each radial solution also had to contain one square with two letters in it. Interestingly, the two-letter boxes were also consecutive for the radial solutions, even though they were otherwise scrambled. When put together in order, the two-letter boxes from each ring spelled out a cleverly appropriate musical instrument.

This puzzle revealed the balance between tough clues and tricky ways of entering solutions in the diagram that marks the best puzzles. Of course, I did get this one, so I would say that! Perhaps the fact that I could figure out all the letters of at least some of the solutions from cross-checking before I had even solved the clues convinced me that the diagram was an integral part of the puzzle-solving process. That's what I like, maybe because I did a lot of crostics (acrostics, whatever) on my progress to cryptics.

Full marks to Cox and Rathvon for both constructing an intriguing and challenging puzzle and for making the instructions clear and "fair" for those of us who often struggle putting words in diagrams. One of the solutions was indeed - as advertised - uncommon. Once I fully figured it out, though, I had to admit the information needed was contained in the clue. Most entertaining clue? B1(concentric).

Pim Fortuyn

Few bloggers seem to be speculating about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in Holland. He's (was) gay and "right-wing" and increasingly popular. Why is his violent death important? Because it adds one more reason, before the French parliamentary elections, to see Europe as increasingly violent and crime-ridden. The same emotions now attach to walking the streets of Haarlem that used to go with taking a stroll in pre-Giuliani Harlem. It will take a long time for the political culture to change in Europe, but some sort of corner has been turned. People won't put up with that kind of insecurity along with gun control and the punishment of achievement and guilt-tripping about poverty and racism. It could get ugly. I wonder what Andrew Sullivan will have to say. He saw Fortuyn as a leader of some sort in showing that gays didn't always have to be collectivists, and that they could be successful on any part of the political spectrum. Looks like Pim misjudged the ferocity of the resistance. Or maybe he just didn't care. He was my age.

Usurpation

Some fool tried to hijack my blog. Seems to have gone away now. Funny how possessive one gets of abstract things, like the Muslims getting all possessive about Jerusalem, when it has little if any real religious significance for them. Found a great game on Shockwave.com - texttwist. Should help with puzzling.

[5/1/2002 6:46:21 AM | Robert Speirs]
Stock market, political campaigns

Although the market was up today considerably, the Dow Jones is still under 10,000 (9945) and the NASDAQ is still under 1700. This is a bit worrisome, since
traditionally the market looks three or more months ahead. If we were really in the midst of a strong recovery, would the indices be exactly where they were in
February?

Of course, it isn?t too many months until the political campaigns. Maybe that?s what the markets are dreading. Here in Florida Janet Reno, running for governor
against the First Brother, Jeb Bush, has been clumping around the state in her red pickup truck and clodhopper boots, waiting for someone to say, ?Hey, I?ve
been waiting for a candidate like you to come around!? As if. Maybe things will look a little different in October, but right now I?d be willing to bet a hundred bucks
the Jeb steamroller will make Janet into the longest, thinnest, ugliest patch of tarmac in the Sunshine State.

Every other day or so, I take a walk in the increasingly humid Tallahassee atmosphere past the Capitol and by Andrew?s restaurant downtown where the
politicos have lunch. I am always amazed by their ordinariness. Or is that why people vote for them? Not having voted for anyone since Carter in 1980, I can?t
tell. Yes, I?m ashamed of that vote, but at least I learned my lesson and got my head straight. I didn?t make the mistake of swinging the other way and voting for
Reagan, or Bush 41 or Dole or Bush 43. Heck, I gave the political system its chance. I wasted a vote on McGovern, then thought in 1976 Carter might really
make a difference because he promised ?zero-base budgeting?. He won, and didn?t I feel like the world was all better? Then he didn?t deliver. Surprise. I had
seen Kennedy continue Eisenhower?s policies, Lyndon Johnson ramp up Kennedy?s war, Nixon expand, then lose Johnson?s war while saying he was ending
it. Ford?s presidency was the only interval of sanity in there. ?The heck with it?, the nation said, and relaxed for a few months, got the troops back from
VietNam, took down the Tricky Dick pictures defacing government offices and played some golf. Then Carter drove up to Washington with a truckload of guilt
and self-loathing, canceled the Olympics, drove interest rates up to 20%, failed to do anything about Iran and Afghanistan and opened the door for Reagan.

During Reagan?s terms I got used to the idea that I was not a collectivist, although I certainly knew I was not a ?Reaganite?. Then Bush 41, one of my least
favorite people, stumbled through four incoherent years, opening the door for the eight year disgrace whose name will not disfigure this blog. I started to feel
good toward the Republicans for restraining the damage and putting a name and a historical mark of shame on the disgrace, but not good enough to vote for
any Republicans. Now I?m watching to see if Dubya can put together a few good years.

[edit]

[4/26/2002 8:40:17 AM | Robert Speirs]
THE DEFINITIVE TERM

A comment on Fredrik Norman's blog mentioned a new term for "suicide bombers". "Genocide bombers" conveys the
essence of the Arab threat to Israel, to wit, extermination, and takes the focus off the "suicide" part. For my part, I'm going
to use that term from now on.

[edit]

[4/26/2002 6:35:00 AM | Robert Speirs]
Stay-at-home dads

About that story saying ?stay-at-home dads have a higher rate of heart disease? that everyone?s sending to James
Lileks: isn?t it possible that a good number of ?stay-at-home dads? are staying at home because they have medical
problems? Specifically, maybe a lot of them have heart problems which make a full-time stressful job possible. So
wouldn?t these dads have a significantly higher rate of heart problems? Staying at home may not be the problem.

[edit]

[4/23/2002 8:47:59 AM | Robert Speirs]
LePen shocker

Last evening, in the middle of a gout attack, medicated to the gills, I saw on the web a story about Jean Marie LePen
coming second in the French elections. This resonated with me because in 1963-4 I lived in Paris, when DeGaulle was
having a heck of a time with the Algerian war and its aftermath, which formed a lot of LePen?s attitudes. Those were the
days when General Raoul Salan?s ?Secret Army? (OAS) threatened to parachute into Paris and overthrow le Grand
Charles? government. Salan was the head of the former French Algerians who wanted Algerie to remain Francaise.

The only way the unrest affected me directly was that, as a high school chemistry student at the Paris American High
School, I overheard the chemistry teacher grouse about the restrictions the French government had placed on the selling
of acids like sulfuric, nitric and hydrochloric. One of the terrorist tactics at the time was throwing acid into the faces of

Stock market, political campaigns

Although the market was up today considerably, the Dow Jones is still under 10,000 (9945) and the NASDAQ is still under 1700. This is a bit worrisome, since traditionally the market looks three or more months ahead. If we were really in the midst of a strong recovery, would the indices be exactly where they were in February?

Of course, it isn’t too many months until the political campaigns. Maybe that’s what the markets are dreading. Here in Florida Janet Reno, running for governor against the First Brother, Jeb Bush, has been clumping around the state in her red pickup truck and clodhopper boots, waiting for someone to say, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for a candidate like you to come around!” As if. Maybe things will look a little different in October, but right now I’d be willing to bet a hundred bucks the Jeb steamroller will make Janet into the longest, thinnest, ugliest patch of tarmac in the Sunshine State.

Every other day or so, I take a walk in the increasingly humid Tallahassee atmosphere past the Capitol and by Andrew’s restaurant downtown where the politicos have lunch. I am always amazed by their ordinariness. Or is that why people vote for them? Not having voted for anyone since Carter in 1980, I can’t tell. Yes, I’m ashamed of that vote, but at least I learned my lesson and got my head straight. I didn’t make the mistake of swinging the other way and voting for Reagan, or Bush 41 or Dole or Bush 43. Heck, I gave the political system its chance. I wasted a vote on McGovern, then thought in 1976 Carter might really make a difference because he promised “zero-base budgeting”. He won, and didn’t I feel like the world was all better? Then he didn’t deliver. Surprise. I had seen Kennedy continue Eisenhower’s policies, Lyndon Johnson ramp up Kennedy’s war, Nixon expand, then lose Johnson’s war while saying he was ending it. Ford’s presidency was the only interval of sanity in there. “The heck with it”, the nation said, and relaxed for a few months, got the troops back from VietNam, took down the Tricky Dick pictures defacing government offices and played some golf. Then Carter drove up to Washington with a truckload of guilt and self-loathing, canceled the Olympics, drove interest rates up to 20%, failed to do anything about Iran and Afghanistan and opened the door for Reagan.

During Reagan’s terms I got used to the idea that I was not a collectivist, although I certainly knew I was not a “Reaganite”. Then Bush 41, one of my least favorite people, stumbled through four incoherent years, opening the door for the eight year disgrace whose name will not disfigure this blog. I started to feel good toward the Republicans for restraining the damage and putting a name and a historical mark of shame on the disgrace, but not good enough to vote for any Republicans. Now I’m watching to see if Dubya can put together a few good years.

THE DEFINITIVE TERM

A comment on Fredrik Norman's blog mentioned a new term for "suicide bombers". "Genocide bombers" conveys the essence of the Arab threat to Israel, to wit, extermination, and takes the focus off the "suicide" part. For my part, I'm going to use that term from now on.

Stay-at-home dads

About that story saying “stay-at-home dads have a higher rate of heart disease” that everyone’s sending to James Lileks: isn’t it possible that a good number of “stay-at-home dads” are staying at home because they have medical problems? Specifically, maybe a lot of them have heart problems which make a full-time stressful job possible. So wouldn’t these dads have a significantly higher rate of heart problems? Staying at home may not be the problem.

LePen shocker

Last evening, in the middle of a gout attack, medicated to the gills, I saw on the web a story about Jean Marie LePen coming second in the French elections. This resonated with me because in 1963-4 I lived in Paris, when DeGaulle was having a heck of a time with the Algerian war and its aftermath, which formed a lot of LePen’s attitudes. Those were the days when General Raoul Salan’s “Secret Army” (OAS) threatened to parachute into Paris and overthrow le Grand Charles’ government. Salan was the head of the former French Algerians who wanted Algerie to remain Francaise.

The only way the unrest affected me directly was that, as a high school chemistry student at the Paris American High School, I overheard the chemistry teacher grouse about the restrictions the French government had placed on the selling of acids like sulfuric, nitric and hydrochloric. One of the terrorist tactics at the time was throwing acid into the faces of supposed collaborators with the Algerians. So the authorities radically restricted the availability of acids. And the next year they threw the American armed forces, including my father, out of France.

The worst hit for the French is to their prestige, their image of practical common sense. The runoff should be a great circus. All the lefties are saying they will be voting for Chirac. Why does it strike me, though, that those who opposed Chirac might just think, in their practical yet vindictive Froggish way, that a vote against Chirac, even if it’s for LePen, might send a most effective message to the Gaullist remnants. After all, everyone says there’s no chance LePen will actually win…… Stay tuned.

By the way, that last post was in response to my sister sending me a copy of a survey in the Guardian lamenting how the average reader knew so little about the true state of things in the Middle East - as though the Guardian has a clue!

GRAMMATICAL MAN
I've been reading Jeremy Campbell's "Grammatical Man" from the early '80s. It's about entropy, information, DNA, languages. Reminds me of James Burke's "Connections" series, except it's more focused and a bit more technical. I was especially intrigued by Campbell's exploration of the role of information science in explicating the function of DNA and what that means for evolution. I didn't know, for instance, that some DNA does not code for particular proteins, but "choreographs" the sequence of protein-creation. It's easy to see that mutations to that kind of DNA would have more far-reaching effects than mutations in the DNA that only codes for specific proteins. Campbell compares the complexity available through evolutionary change to the complexity of language available because of the "mutation" of Chomsky's generative grammar structure. His suggestion that some universal "grammar of life" allows, even requires complexity opens up a lot of ground for speculation. I'm rereading it. Only after I finish and think a bit will I start speculating wildly. Good mind-calisthenics.

Another email to my sister in Egypt:

Interesting you choose the Guardian. I hope you didn't spend any money on searching that archive of lies and willful ignorance. How about the "Independent" (methinks my lady doth protest too much!)? They were both reporting a "massacre" in Jenin which anyone has yet to substantiate. Hard to do, since Jenin has been destroyed by booby-trapped bombs as well as Israeli tank shells. Oh, yes, the refugees. The ones who were told to leave by the Arab armies, and that they would soon be able to return after all the Jews were dead. The ones who were expelled from Jordan in 1970, who took over Lebanon until Sharon attacked in the '80s, the ones expelled from Kuwait in 1991 - need I go on? The Arab world needs its "Palestinian refugees" just like Hitler needed his Sudeten Germans.

Oh, and is the average reader aware that there was no such thing as a "Palestinian nation" until 1967? Is he aware that terrorist attacks went on well before Israel, in self-defense, expanded the 1967 borders, by the simple expedient of crushing the armies of Arab nations with several hundreds of millions of inhabitants? Is the average reader aware that a return to the 1967 borders would not be the end of Palestinian terrorism, but merely a return to the pre-1967 terrorism? Is the average reader aware that Arafat at Oslo promised not to engage in terror or let armaments into the "West Bank"? And, on the strength of that promise, and under pressure from the ignorant and vicious Clinton admnistration, the Israelis let that snake reestablish himself in Judea and Samaria? Why do you think Sharon's in power? Oh, and does that average reader know that the "Al-Aqsa intifada" was planned and implemented long before Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount? Oh, the Israelis use three times as much water as a Palestinian? Maybe that's because they live modern lives, not the poverty Arafat is content to let "his people" languish in, while he disposes of the hundreds of millions the Saudis send every year, not to mention the 75-85 million of US taxpayers money that goes from the UN right to Mr. Ringo-without-a-shave. Did you ever notice how much Arafat looks like Ringo? What a joke, if people weren't dying.

NEW PUZZLES

OK, I’ve been trying to hide my shame and depression at not being able to make much headway on Cox and Rathvon’s “Loops” puzzle. I will give myself one more try. I am having much better success with Richard Maltby’s latest in Harper’s, entitled “Perfect Puzzle”, since the imperfect but always entertaining Mr. Maltby made a few booboos in his last effort.

Perhaps he bent a little too far over in the direction of making the puzzle easy, spending too much time checking and cross-checking each entry. Or do those ever-fallible computers do that nowadays? I don’t want to give away too many clues, in consideration of those of you who haven’t solved the puzzles yet, but I was particularly proud of my practically instantaneous brainstorm on number 28 across. The only thing that bothered me was that the solution was, while not exactly “uncommon” as Maltby signaled, was more of a traditional “crossword puzzle word” than one is used to seeing in these delightful cryptics.

You know the usual words, the ones that justify elderlies in spending Social Security money on crossword puzzle dictionaries instead of using their brains. Yep, I’m talking about words like “ai” for two-toed sloth, “ana” for a collection, “olla” or “ewer” for a jar, “etui” for a briefcase. Who ever would learn that sort of word if not for crosswords? They do make the composer’s job an awful lot easier. But they degrade the solver’s art to the memorization of useless jargon. So once again I’m picking on Mr. Maltby. Who knows, though? I haven’t finished the puzzle yet. Maybe he’ll stump me with his unclued lights. Stay tuned. And oh, yes, my email address is "robspe@paris.com" and I love to get thoughtful, acute emails.

Dummies and Idiots

Have you noticed the proliferation in the last few years of books titled "Linux for Dummies" or "Politics for Idiots" (that last a bit redundant!). Who buys these? Oh, OK, I will have to admit, I did buy one, called something like the Internet for Dummies. But really, what kind of self-image do you have to have to buy a book that says it's for dummies? Why would you think a book would help, if you're so far gone? Americans are really into other people telling them what to do, how to live, like "Relationships for Schmoes" that I saw the other day. Another good one was "Raising your Self-Esteem for Idiots". At least whoever would buy that book really needs it.

What does it say about us that we would buy books that clearly say to anyone who sees the book that this guy really doesn't know what he's doing, so he has to have everything explained really simply and slowly, like in the other book I saw, "The Alphabet for Morons" where you pay $26.95 for a book made of really heavy, brightly painted cardboard consisting of a hundred pages each with the letter A in a slightly different color? You have to buy twenty-five more books to get the whole alphabet. Hey, why not? We're dealing with morons here! Go for it!!

Maybe someday I'll figure out how to put my email address and links and stuff on my blog. Hey, what happened to that book I just bought, called "Blogging for Cretins"? I had it around here somewhere. Oh, god, don't tell me I flushed it down the toilet again!