• Category Archives cultural ramblings

  • Books, movies, music…

  • I Think I See A Pattern Here

    Posted on by Don

    Right now I have three books open: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner, and Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, by history professor Martha A. Sandweiss. This last book was a gift from Ray, and tells the story of famed geologist/explorer Clarence King and his secret double life, married to a black woman and passing as black, but all three books deal with the changing world of the mid and late 1800’s, and John Wesley Powell is the thematic center of the three.

    Unfortunately, I stopped reading them all, and have become obsessed with Craig Johnson’s “Sheriff Walt Longmire” series, a bunch of cowboy detective mysteries, total page-turners: great scenery, great characterization, but essentially chewing gum for the mind. Anne got them from her Mom, and I got them from Anne; I think she’s read all we have, and I’m on the third one in the series now.


    cultural ramblings

  • Ghostbusters!

    Posted on by Don

    Anne and I saw Ghostbusters the other night. It was no Woman In Gold, or even, say, The Lady in The Van, but it definitely was a fun way to spend a few hours. Silly and dumb, a bit cheesy at times (especially with the shout-outs to the original movie), it was still a fun movie to see. Did I mention that it was fun? Some observations:

    I’m a big fan of Melissa McCarthy, by the way, or at least I really liked her in Spy, and I found her to be a bit of a disappointment here, possibly because they didn’t give her enough space for real physical or verbal comedy. Leslie Jones was really good especially early in the movie, but she sort of faded once she became a Ghostbuster, while Kate McKinnon did the opposite, starting out annoyingly, almost cartoonishly affected before settling into her role. Kristin Wiig seemed to be the designated star, and she did a great job (never heard of her before, but I became a fan over the course of the movie),  but it seemed that her best parts were her dialogue with Melissa McCarthy, and in fact it seemed that some of her lines would have been better coming from McCarthy.

    There was one other main character, Chris Hemsworth as their ditzy beefcake receptionist. Some of the things he did made me laugh out loud, but it was mostly affected sight gags, and little skits that didn’t work for me.

    Affected, cartoonish — these were my only real issues with the movie. They seemed to like tossing a bone to different possible audiences: cameos by Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver for fans of the original (actually I liked these), manic cartoon ghosts (and manic Kate McKinnon) for the kids, etc. Kids might disagree but I found them annoying.

    Bottom line: this is a decent “stupid summer fun” movie. Definitely go see it, but don’t expect Shakespeare.


    cultural ramblings

  • Wharton Esherick Museum

    Posted on by Don

    More on this at another time, but we went to the Wharton Esherick Museum outside Paoli today. Tours by appointment only, we went with Lorraine and Ray and their friends Rob and Barb, and think that this was the coolest home I have ever been inside. (We were only allowed to take photos out-of-doors, sorry.) Afterward we went to Sly Fox nearby for lunch. Another awesome day, even if my entire body still hurts from yesterday.


    cultural ramblings

  • Scenes Inside The Lock Tender’s House

    Posted on by Don

    What a fun afternoon! I’d arranged to put in some volunteer time today with the D&L Canal people, so I took off down the towpath just after eleven, on my Iguana, to do some cleanup work inside the Lock Tender’s House at Hugh Moore Park. I’d forgotten how fast and fun the Iguana was on the towpath, but before long I was just flying along effortlessly, and was at the Canal Museum by 12:00. Meet up with archivist Martha, and then we go up to the Lock Tender’s house itself, a place I’d been many times but never inside.

    Then came the  “work” part, mostly vacuuming and dusting, getting the rooms ready for the season opening, but even that was interesting, since I was on the other side of the “do not enter” chain, handling stuff the public can only look at from afar. Actually, the house is not that old, having been rebuilt after a fire in 1928 (possibly an arson job from revenge-minded bootleggers, or so I learned today), and while some of the furniture was obviously ancient and worn, some items in the parlor, the room I mostly worked in, could have easily been mates of things in our living room right now — I’m looking at you, hurricane lantern…

    Anyway, here are a bunch of photos I took inside the house.


    cultural ramblings looking back

  • Almost-Weekend Update

    Posted on by Don

    Morning weigh-in: 187.5#, 13% BF

    Just thought I’d check in, and brag (I was pushing 200# in March)…

    The Sporting Life: The bike training continues apace, by the way. I’ve seen some definite improvement, in strength mostly. Endurance, not so much, but it should be coming. I have started riding Lehigh and Sals again, and I even broke out the singlespeed last night for Jacobsburg. What I really need is long road rides, sigh.

    Meantime, Anne and I also signed up for the Hersey Half Marathon in October. Her sister, and a bunch of her nieces and nephews are doing it too. I should — hopefully — be ready in time.

    Reading: I just finished The Mathematician’s Shiva, by Stuart Rojstaczer. Very good book, an awesome, well-written and well-structured read, with a great story — by turns funny and heartbreaking — with a lot of interesting math and science tidbits thrown in. It’s the story told by a professor of his mother, a towering figure in the world of mathematics who passes away, and the chaos that descends on their family when all her former students, acolytes, and adversaries come to pay their respects. There are also many jumps back to her early life, her work in mathematics, family history and dynamics, and academic and international politics. Just a really good book.

    RIP Joe Martin: I had a funeral of my own to go to recently. My cousin Joseph Martin passed away a few weeks ago. He’d been suffering for many years with Huntington’s Disease, and had been institutionalized and bedridden for probably the last fifteen, and now his struggle is over.  So sad, he was one of my older cousins, just two years older than me, and was the one I studied, as a pre-teen and teenager, for what “cool” was supposed to look like for me in a year or two.

    The wake and funeral were both in his home town on Long Island, and many of his old friends and hockey teammates came, as well as a large portion of the Long Island side of my Dad’s extended family. The funeral home was just up the block from where Joe grew up — the last time I was there was 2002, for his mother’s funeral, and he was buried in the nearby cemetery with his mother. My cousin Wayne came up from Florida; he brought the ashes of his parents, and after Joe’s service we had a small ceremony at the cemetery, where they will be buried with their daughter, my cousin Suzanne who died at 19 in 1967. (We stood around and marveled at the massive trees that weren’t even there when she was buried.) A sad day, but one with a bit of closure, and it was good to see so many of my relatives, and hear so many stories…

    GRAMPS, QGIS, Postgres: All that family talk, and all the photo albums that were bandied about, got me thinking about geneaology again, so I got that GRAMPS program up and running, and started updating what I had in there. I have about 250 people listed, but for many of them I don’t have much information other than where they fit in the family tree. Birth dates, death dates, where they lived or worked or got married, even for relatively close relatives I’m missing information. Working on it, along with everything else I’m fussing with.

    It’ll be a whole other post, but I’ve also been playing with Geographic Information Systems using GRASS and QGIS (mostly QGIS), and that led me to start messing around with databases. I’d already installed and played with MySQL for a while, but even if it’s everywhere MySQL is not all that advanced (especially for GIS), and so I also got PostgrSQL/PostGIS up and running.  I played with those for a bit, but sort of ran out of interest. Until…

    I started thinking again about one of my pet peeves (lack of information about old family photos), and since I was hyped up about metadata after reading a book about it, I thought I should be able to do something to capture or store that information, especially electronically, when or if they got scanned. (I’m talking about who took the picture, when/where it was taken, who are the people in the photo, stuff like that.) Anyway, there are all sorts of methods, including embedded metadata in the image files (like EXIF data for digital photos, only these are XML-based and show different info); even GRAMPS could be used with a little work, but I finally decided on a Postgres database using LibreOffice Base to be the front end. I have been on a steep learning curve — mostly LibreOffice, and mostly YouTube tutorials with droning voice-overs, so I do it when Anne’s not around — ever since.


    cultural ramblings day by day tech talk the sporting life

  • Wrong On Many Levels

    Posted on by Don

    I was driven indoors with all the recent snow and cold weather, and set up my road bike on the trainer in the basement. I hadn’t done all that much so far, but the other night I decided — dammit! — to finally get in a workout, and to make it more palatable I’d listen to a RadioLab podcast.

    Big mistake. I should clarify that it wasn’t a terrible failure in terms of riding the trainer, since it did make the time go faster, but I was forced to a realization I’d been moving towards for a while: I just don’t like RadioLab all that much. Back in the day, it seemed to have a good premise, and the shows seemed interesting and scienc-ey, but there was always something that seemed off, some side comment that they liked good stories better than the truth (what science buff would say that?), and their production habit of letting a guest speak a few words before fading out and having the hosts radiolabsplain, and their slow drift from science-related stories to whatever it is they’re now pushing.

    The podcast I listened to was about a woman hired in the 1960’s to teach dolphins to speak English — she actually lived in a half-submerged apartment, with an adolescent male as her subject and roommate. The institute doing the research was led by  a former physicist, who had once heard what he thought were human-like sounds coming from captive dolphins, and who was also an enthusiastic consumer of LSD for “research purposes” — one of those guys, in an era full of them…

    Pure hubris and ineptitude. Dolphins can hear and make many sounds, but they are not physically equipped to make the sounds required for human speech (a fact that these guys bumped up against, apparently without noticing), and no matter what their intelligence, their psychology is not human psychology, and “if a lion could talk we wouldn’t understand it,” as the saying goes — a meaningful conversation with a dolphin might not even be possible, in English.

    It was fairly obvious that these people were not really trained in animal research, and eventually there were ethical lapses: the woman managed to keep her boss from giving the dolphin LSD, but she herself had a “sexual relationship” with it. (Bad enough, but if they really thought that the dolphin was a sentient being like a human, then their test subject was a prisoner and their experiments were psychological torture, and the whole thing was an ethical failure.) I wasn’t surprised to hear that the funding dried up…

    Mind you, this whole story was told from a point of view very sympathetic to the researchers. I got off the bike thinking “WTF did I just listen to?”


    cultural ramblings the sporting life