Revisiting Thoughts on the Future of Israel

    
Sorry for the partial rerun here.  On February 3, I wrote this:

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Not Too Early to Ask – How Do You Feel About Israel? Are You Willing to Go to War for It? Egypt. Jordan’s unstable. Yemen is about to go and is a snakepit of al Qaeda conspiracy. The Muslim Brotherhood is on record for Israel’s destruction and jihad against the U.S. We know about Iran. When we leave Iraq, Afghanistan . . . . If those governments become radicalized, how long will Saudi Arabia be able to hold out?

Israel has been a critical U.S. ally for decades. Such a critical ally, that some say it has had an influence on U.S. policy that is disproportionate to its importance. At least until recently, we have been pledged to its survival.


Israel has military expertise, but take a look at the real estate involved

But folks, it is not too early to say that the noose is tightening. It is not too early to imagine Israel with not one single surrounding country with which it is reliably at peace.  

I don’t need to remind you that Iran will soon be nuclear, and Pakistan already is.

And the Islamists -- and, I very strongly suspect, some percentage of Muslims who in other respects would call themselves moderate -- hate Israel and desire its destruction not because it is imperialist, not because it threatens Islam, not because its treatment of Palestinians, but because it is not Islam. And because its founding was midwifed by the victorious WW II allies and placed in their midst. I am not here to debate whether the creation of Israel in 1948 was a good idea or whether Arab perceptions are accurate. I am here to say that diplomacy is not going to change the growing Muslim fundamentalism that holds that Israel must go. I read today that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has repudiated the Camp David accords.

So when the missiles begin to fall – not next year, maybe not for the next five years, but maybe a decade from now, how will the U.S. respond?

Which begs the critical long-term question, really the only important question that is going to come out of this, the question for our grandsons: If the Middle East as a whole decides for Islamist primitivism, and makes Israel its first target, will the U.S. risk a world war with Islam – that is what it would be – to come to Israel’s defense?

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President Obama today gave a strongly pro-Palestinian address and called for Israel to return to its 1967 borders.   It's an extraordinary position for an American politician to take, but it is utterly unsurprising that this president took it.

Sooner or later, what is happening in this "Arab Spring" is going to be more about Israel's survival, and less about anti-Western terror.  Looks like it is going to be sooner.

The Romance of the Sentence

I can’t draw. I can’t fix things. I can’t act. My singing talent, best described as “modest” – actually, that’s generous -- has been committed to CD. Don’t ask me to sculpt anything. The artistry of my photography is pretty much limited to bounce flash and primitive Photoshop 3 operations. If SEAL Team 6 broke in one night and said “your life or an engaging fictional plot,” I wouldn’t be here to write these lines.

But one thing I can do, is type. For this I have to thank my mother’s genes and Mrs. Humphrey’s eighth grade typing class, where I was the champ on a manual Remington with metal caps over the keys so you couldn't see the letters, even beating the kids who got the few IBM Selectrics, the iPads of their day.  (Fingernail polish hid the letters on the Selectric keys.)

You thought I was going to say, “One thing I can do, is write.” That is, of course, the animating conceit of this site and of much of my life, but when one’s public output is limited to blog entries, Christmas letters, and summary judgment briefs, one is reluctant to call oneself a “writer.”

I try to write well. My keyboard speedfingers are something of an enemy to this endeavor, as I’m able to dump pretty swiftly onto the page the contents of my head. The results frequently mirror the disorder of what is to be found there.

But once in awhile, I commit to binary code a nice sentence.

Writers are obsessed by sentences. Plots and ideas abound; words, easy. But assembling the latter to advance the former in a way that is pleasing and persuasive to the reader – brother, you gotta have sentences, and some of them gotta sing.

It didn’t start with the modern master, Hemingway, whose spare constructions are beautiful to the ear and nourishing to the inner eye. But his sentences brought the art to the attention of a larger public. Teachers of writing programs tear their hair out at the crummy sentences their charges urp out. Some of it is a lack of knowledge of syntax and punctuation. But a lot of it is simply the lack of an ear for the music of which the English language -- the palette of Shakespeare, the scribes of the King James Bible, Henry James, the Brontës, Austen, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler, and their descendants – is capable. I've written here of my admiration for Merrilil Gilfillan, whose sentences, both spare and flowing, are exquisite.

Stanley Fish, an extremely controversial literary critic and university administrator -- he is colorfully attacked by both the left and right, which probably means he’s on to something -- has written a very fine little book about sentences called How to Write a Sentence -- and How to Read One.  I think we can put his political notoriety aside; I did not detect an ideological agenda here.

The title is a little misleading. After you finish it, you will not have learned very much about how to write sentences. He makes a stab at taking the reader through a few simple exercises, but his heart isn’t in it. What he really wants to do is bring to the reader’s attention the importance of the sentence, to describe the different types of sentence, and to provide numerous examples of good ones from literature and non-fiction.

You will learn more about how to read one.  As I made my way through this slim volume, I recalled pleasures from my own reading. I recalled a crime novel by one of the better writers in that genre, T. Jefferson Parker, and encountering a paragraph stringing together some of finest sentences I have ever read – and their subject matter was probably rather lurid, given the subject matter. And there are those sentences like the first sentences of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation), that never quite leave you: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And I just now remembered another one; I had to go to my library to find it because I have long forgotten the novel and its author (although strangely, when I went to the stacks, I pulled it right out). It is the first sentence from a novel called Now You See It (1991) by Cornelia Nixon, and goes: “In the summer of 1949, in eastern Colorado, far from the nearest metric wrench, our car died and sunk in a sea of sheep.”

What is it about the sentence? Do we break up our communications in this way because it mirrors our need to take a breath during speech? Or is it something more fundamental – does it reflect the way we think, in discrete bundles of information and reasoning? As I composed this essay, it occurred to me that there may be no particular reason that thinking, and speech, and writing – which is to say, understanding and perception -- could not be seamless, freed from the tyranny of subject-verb-object. But it’s the way we’re put together, and the sentence is likely with us to stay. Even the extremely long sentence as practiced by the likes of Faulkner, James, the late David Foster Wallace must be broken up into separately comprehensible clauses to allow us to get from one end to t’other.

Here’s my formula for a great sentence: (1) It must stand on its own as pleasing to the inner ear, with pauses (or not), vocabulary, word choice (not the same thing), and grammar suitable to the nugget of information it is designed to communicate. (2) It must have some intrinsic interest. It need not be something surprising, as in the two examples above, but it should provoke at least some slight recognition that there is something different here to which heed must be paid. This second requirement is not found in every single sentence, because sometimes one has to advance the narrative without even a hint of razzle-dazzle: “He drove the boulevard looking for a McDonald’s.” Perhaps this is just another way of saying that not every sentence has to be great. Sometimes you just have to say something  simply and quickly to get to the more interesting stuff.

And (3), the fine sentence must be a part of the rhythm of the other sentences in the narrative. One great line does not make a great song, and the great line will sink if it is disharmonious with its fellows. (I think of Pauline Kael’s film reviews as examples of melodic writing.) Perhaps Professor Fish will favor us with a volume on “How to Write a Paragraph.”

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about writing, from Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel, who was tortured and murdered in Stalin's Great Purge:

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

Isaac Babel, practicing what he preached.

We Learned More about the President from the Release of His Birth Certificate Than He May Have Intended

I was never a birther. Those newspaper announcements were pretty persuasive.

I am nevertheless very pleased that President Obama authorized the release of his Hawaiian birth certificate. I understand that the birther/truther/assassination/Roswell conspiracy crowd will continue to howl about this, and I understand some book is coming out that has some stuff in it that’s supposed to be pretty hot, but this controversy is just about dead. I’ve seen a convincing explanation of why the typed information on the online version released by the White House can be made to disappear. For the good public officials of the State of Hawaii to have been hornswoggled into releasing a fraudulent document would have required a conspiracy that would make some of the nutbag Kennedy murder theories look convincing – and would have had to have taken place under the eyes of public scrutiny of the Hawaiian archives that has not let up since the man became a presidential candidate. And the argument that he’s not a “citizen” because his birth and adoptive fathers were not – folks, it’s nuts.

Nope, the President was born here and possesses the technical qualifications to be President of These States United.

And he has performed perhaps the greatest public service of his presidency, which is to have utterly marginalized the odious vulgarian Donald Trump. Another punch-line presidential candidate sliding off the charts, thank Jah.



[Photo Credit:  CBS/Getty Iimages]

And yet, as we have seen with the Osama killing (I’ll favor you with my thoughts on this soon), the episode leaves us with an uneasy feeling about this gifted but perplexing man.

What Took Him So Long? The questions of the circumstances of his birth, while coming from a faction of the right given to hysterical accusations against leaders they don’t like, were not entirely unserious. There existed circumstances which gave rise to doubt which hovered close to the “reasonable” range. For him to have ignored – more, dismissed -- this black-and-white issue of his qualification to hold office was just plain weird. I’ll come back to this.

He Made His Supporters Look Foolish. We kept hearing from the President’s supporters that he had done all he could do, that the record was as complete as it could be, that nothing further was required or even possible. I found this odd, since it did appear that a simple request from him would have sprung that birth certificate. Turns out, there was something definitive he could have done, and at long last, he did it. His supporters are probably jubilant, but from here those sounds of triumph over the birthers seem to be coming from under that bus over there.

His Delay Fed the Impression of Dishonesty About His Personal Record. His peculiar silence on this topic of immense importance served to remind people about how they elected a guy they didn’t know a whole lot about; whose academic record remains in shadow; who almost certainly did not compose Dreams of My Father (I’m not a birther, but the case that he’s fibbing about his authorship is strong); and whose political associations over the years have tended more toward the radical than he has chosen to admit.

He Managed to Look Bad Doing It.  When he finally got around to authorizing the release of his birth certificate, he was – well, he was pissy about it.  He actually had the sand to be petulant, not so much that anyone was asking about where he was born but that anyone even thought it was important. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” he said. (And how much time, exactly, did it take him to authorize the release of his certificate? The only thing that kept this issue alive, it turns out, was his refusal to resolve it.  And what is "silly" about formal constitutional mandates?) Above I said he “waited too long,” but that’s not quite right. He wasn’t “waiting” – he believed that the entire topic was beneath his -- anyone's -- notice.

Barack Obama's inaction and attitude have a single explanation:  He does not regard the subject of whether he is constitutionally qualified to be president of any importance.

We have seen this in him before. Here's what I wrote back in August::

“He recently made a statement which summed up for me the reasons I have come to find the course of his Presidency so disturbing. At a speech at the American University School of International Service a couple of weeks ago, he reportedly said: 'Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.' Even allowing the President some rhetorical license here, it's a very revealing remark, and a silly one. Being an American has almost everything to do with birth. The very first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.'

“While the President knows this, he doesn't really feel its truth. He far prefers the comfort of the abstract thought that America is not a chunk of real estate with borders, but rather a bundle of concepts that have something to do with freedom and equality and abundance and other fine things everyone should experience. And if you value those things, if you have faith in those Americanish things, well, then you must be an American.

 “It is similar to what John F. Kennedy meant when he said 'Ich bin ein Berliner' -- that is, all people who love freedom are, in a sense, citizens of Berlin who had been confined by the Berlin Wall. President Kennedy was speaking conceptually, and in his hands it was a powerful metaphor and a signal moment of the Cold War.

 “But President Obama wasn't just offering an attractive metaphor like Kennedy was. He didn't just say that people who have faith in American values are Americans, a pleasant but not terribly helpful thought in the current border controversy. He said that being born here had nothing to do with being an American. Unlike President Kennedy's graceful formulation, President Obama's treats the metaphor as reality by expressly rejecting the fact that where you are born has anything to do with being an American.

 “This is how he thinks. Not troubled by rules, constitutions, statutes, traditions, voting.”

It is a very academic attitude. His conviction as to his historic inevitabilty -- and rightness -- proceeds from first principles of his own devising (rather, the devising of the academic social theorists he admires), and not from the principles of American constitutional government or even the evidence of history.

And it gives rise to an extraordinary irony:  An event that should have put to rest the issue of his qualification for the White House has only yielded more evidence that he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the place.

Happy Birthday, Jim Osterberg

Better known to the Cool Hot Center as Iggy Pop, one of the most astonishing musicians and performers of the rock era.  I'll save my written appreciation until his 65th birthday next year, if both of us make it.

An Immortal Passes

The world of music has lost one of its most polished artists, an innovator whose work has stunned you over and over again without you knowing his name. If you own the Steely Dan album "Countdown to Ecstasy," you have seen the most memorable image of him:


Back of the "Countdown to Ecstasy" cover: left to right:
Jim Hodder, Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter,
Donald Fagen, and . . .

 Click on that image to enlarge it, or look more closely and you will see a disembodied hand reaching up to manipulate the faders on the mixer.

That's Roger Nichols.

Roger (the Immortal) Nichols.

Roger Nichols engineered every Steely Dan track you have ever heard, as well as much of Donald Fagen's solo work ("The Nightfly; "Kamakiriad"). Engineered them to absolute sonic perfection. He won Grammies for four of them, and one for his work with John Denver.

He died on April 9 at 66 of pancreatic cancer, destitute from medical expenses.

If you are a Steely Dan lover -- oh, there are some out there who aren't, but they're probably vegans or wiccans or fish whisperers or something -- you will know that on those albums, you can hear every instrument, perfectly balanced, clear as a bell.  You can hear what the singer is singing.  The albums are quiet when they're supposed to be quiet. Ironic: One of the most distinctive sonic features of those Steely/Fagen albums is what you don't hear.

Having produced a CD, I am here to tell you that the contributions of the technicians are not merely technical -- they are unavoidably musical. Nichols's contribution was particularly vivid; he invented devices and techniques designed to produce a perfect beat on the drum tracks. But his greatest gift was to be as exacting and patient as the two most notoriously demanding artists in modern popular music, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.  He supposedly got his nickname -- which appeared in the credits on the Steely Dan albums -- from his ability to survive their epic grueling recording sessions, in one case brushing off an jolting encounter with some improperly grounded equipment.

Put on "Aja."  If you have it on vinyl, even better.  Cue up "Black Cow."  Be startled by those pellucid opening figures.  And breathe in deep for Roger Nichols.

It Is Ever Thus

Every year I organize a trip to the Dallas Auto Show.  Attending when they can are Nancy's two sons, a son-in-law, and three of our grandsons.  (There are now four, but the fourth is four days old, and his dad wisely elected not to join us this year.)  The grandsons are all wonderful young chaps, much beloved of The Memsahib and me.

Our Auto Show Expedition has a steadfast rule -- NO GURLS ALLOUD.  

We were making our way among the exhibits, when I noticed that the three grandsons, ranging in age from 4 to 11, were standing at the Cadillac turntable.   It was near closing time -- they were the only ones there.  I caught the attention of their dad, who is very adroit with the camera on his smartphone, and pointed out this touching tableau:

Click on the photo for a dramatic enlargement.

Here was my Facebook description (I'm "Pops," by the way):

"At the Cadillac turntable at the Dallas Auto Show: Samuel, Jacob, and Caleb Smith admire the fine lines and sophisticated chassis, the expensive upgrades and premium materials. But boys, take it from your Pops, who's been around the block a few times -- that model's going to run you some major dinero."

Samuel seemed quite taken by the Detroit iron, as he considered (but admirably rejected) an act of naughtiness in climbing up for a closer look.  Jacob and Caleb seemed more interested in the oral presentation.

The speaker continued her spiel as though one of these lads might be inspired to visit a Cadillac showroom to pursue a purchase.

As we were walking away, I said to Caleb that the lady talking about the Cadillac was pretty cute.  He made a dreadful frowny-face and insisted that he was only interested in the car.

Their mother left a comment on the Facebook entry:  "This picture cracks me up (sort of)."

The eternal conflict of the mother of growing, changing boys.

Remember that motto?  We may have to consider some modifications come a half-dozen years or so.

A Novel of Ideas that Might Give You Some if You're Not Careful

36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (subtitled “A Work of Fiction”)


This is one of those novels – I seem to read a lot of them – I liked very much but I’m not sure who its ideal audience is. Perhaps one of y’all. Does this sound like something you might enjoy?:

[NO SPOILERS] First, every major character in this novel is Jewish. There is a lot of material here about Judaism of many varieties, and some of the finest scenes are set in “America’s only shtetl,” named here New Walden, where the residents maintain a strictly orthodox way of life. Second, every major character in this novel is a brilliant academic intellectual, and I do mean brilliant, and I do mean academic. Most of the novel is set on campuses, fictional and not, within spitting distance of the Eastern Seaboard. They are not only brilliant, they are the most brilliant in the world in their (sometimes competing) fields. The brilliant characters who are not academic are brilliant religious intellectuals. The plot centers on Cass Seltzer, a lapsed Jew who has written a celebrated book examining The Varieties of Religious Illusion,” and has earned a reputation as “the atheist with a soul.” The plot is difficult to summarize, but I will say only that the drama of the book arises out of the tension between his relationships with several strong (similarly lapsed) women and several strongly religious and charismatic men with whom he studies or otherwise encounters on his path to popular acclaim.

The foregoing description makes the book sound strident, biased against religion, and perhaps even sexist. And perhaps dull. And while Ms. Goldstein’s own thoughts on the existence of God are not hard to discern, I must report that I did not find the book offensive in this respect and hardly polemical at all. In fact, while I used the word “drama” in the last paragraph, the novel is comic in intention and effect. I found myself smiling throughout (and even issuing that rarity, the occasional laugh-out-loud), perhaps because in my own education and life I have encountered similar characters.

And it is not dull.  Even if those characters don't sound familiar to you, you can still get a kick out of this book. The writing is lively, if erudite, and there are some very fine passages the equal of any pure writing I’ve read in quite some time.

The book has two flaws, one bordering on serious, one less so. The more serious flaw is that Cass, the central character, although – yes, a brilliant academic intellectual – is weak, both intentionally (he’s kind of a schnook) and in portrayal (he’s not fully realized, although he appears in almost every scene). Goldstein can write strong, vivid male characters, both attractive and not, so it is curious that Cass is so bland. It put me in mind of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” You needed Mary to tell those stories, but the comic freight was borne by Lou and Murray and Sue Ann and Ted and Rhoda. Not that Mary was not a fine comedienne and sometimes funny in the show – just that her role was frequently to react to the spicier characters around her. That seems to be Cass’s function throughout much of this novel, although he will get off a zinger now and then. Nothing we hear from him in the book prepares us for his final tour-de-force performance.

The lesser flaw is that sometimes Ms. Goldstein forces ideas into the novel through excessive speechifying. I was reminded of another famous female atheist writer, Ayn Rand. The sometimes lengthy speeches are so lucid – on both sides of the existence-of-God question – that they are unlikely ever to have been uttered in the contexts in which they appear.

The novel concludes with an Appendix (as appeared in Cass’s own famous book) setting forth 36 arguments for the existence of God, with commentary, “flaws,” and asides. In reading some of the Amazon reviews of the book, some readers take her to task for misrepresenting these arguments, but they looked pretty neutrally-couched to me. Ah, but Ms. Goldstein is sly – I wrote “the novel concludes,” but it is unclear whether the Appendix is in fact novelistic – something that Cass himself penned in “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” – or only Ms. Goldstein’s helpful summary of the current (and ancient) debate.

Ms. Goldstein is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and has written on a variety of philosophical topics, including a popular account of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which, I was surprised to discover, I own, but which, I was not surprised to discover, I have not read). She is married to famed cognitive scientist and brainworks popularizer Steven Pinker. She’s also kinda waifish-hot, which does lead one to wonder whether perhaps she identifies with one of the hot female genius Jewish academic intellectuals in the book (who, I concede, is not a very appealing character).

Here’s where I come out:  You don’t see novels like this much anymore. I drastically reduced my reading of “serious” American fiction about twenty years ago when I wearied of dull, minimalistic writing about unappealing upper-middle-class men and women and their agonizingly uninteresting lives and loves. There are signs that things are changing. Goldstein’s characters are vivid (Cass notably excepted), her prose robust and sometimes challenging (and sometimes arch). The thing crackles with intelligence and curiosity and respect for the reader. That’s plenty good enough for me.

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That Poem Again

It doesn’t have to be a poem. Maybe it’s a passage in a book, or a painting. Maybe a scene in a teevee show or a movie. Maybe famous, maybe not. But it touches you somehow, you remember it. And it unaccountably pops up from time to time in your life.

Such a poem, for me, is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

You don’t have to be a poetry lover to have encountered “Dover Beach.” It is widely anthologized and betcha a lot of you read it in high school or college. Not limited in its appeal to pointy-heads, it is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and not one at which literary critics often turn up their noses, or at least not very high. (Arnold was a critic and essayist in addition to being a poet.) It was written in the early 1850’s, but not published until 1867. Although Arnold is not highly regarded as a poet today, and his other writings are mostly ignored, nobody, it seems, doesn’t like “Dover Beach.”

The question, to which I will return momentarily, is: why?

First, a note on that popping-up I mentioned in the first paragraph. Myself, I don’t remember studying this poem in high school. I think I first encountered it when I was a teenager in a marvelous Pocket Books paperback, A Concise Treasury of Great Poems, edited by the famous critic (and poet) Louis Untermeyer. Yes, here it is.  17th printing in 1968; ninety-five cents, and full of riches.

I didn’t know what it meant. But it stayed with me. I would turn to it from time to time, and the more I read it, the more I thought I got it, but I was never quite sure, and I never cared. This was decades before the Internet could reveal in a few seconds what literary analysts think it means. No matter; I always loved the poem.

Around 20 years ago, I went to live for a few years in the San Diego area. My favorite place to hang out just to sit and think was the bluff overlooking the Del Mar beach. And up and down the coast, where the beach was rockier, I remember hearing for the first time the popping and crackling of the breakers lifting and dropping small rocks near the end of the waterline. And I thought of that line from “Dover Beach” – you’ll see it in a minute – that I never quite understood, and then I did.

In those same days there was a young woman in whom I was interested. The first time I spoke with her on the phone, we were talking about favorite places, and she mentioned the sea, because it was “egoless.” I mentioned “Dover Beach,” and she stopped short – she’d been talking to some other swain just the day or so previously, who had also commended the poem to her.

And today, I was reading a marvelous novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and in a central scene, the eminent professor recites from memory, and then calls for analyses of, “Dover Beach,” which the protagonist botches.  And it got me thinking about the poem again.


Dover Beach, and the White Cliffs

 Dover Beach, of course, is the beach at the famous White Cliffs of Dover that overlook the English Channel and, as the poet suggests, allows a view France across the straits. The most popular interpretation of the poem is that it was written at the historical juncture where scientific discovery and Victorian materialism were calling traditional religious faith into question. The poet seems to regret this, but calls out to his beloved for comfort and reaffirmation as they witness the destructive philosophical battles of the age. (It is believed that early drafts of the poem were composed by Arnold on his honeymoon at Dover.)   That is certainly a credible interpretation of the poem.
The mid-to late nineteenth was an incredible time, to be sure. The theory of evolution, Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories, the explosion in discoveries in astronomy and physics – it was a tough time for traditional religion. But why would a poem with that as its subject -- if that is its subject, as it is still regarded as a “difficult” poem in some circles – be of any interest to us today?



Matthew Arnold

For one reason: It is beautiful.

I find new beauty, exquisite new artistic strategies in it, every time I read it.  The phrasing, the rhymes, the punctuation, the shift in point of view, and most of all the radical shifts in focus from -- and implicit connections between -- the greatest questions of the age to the most intimate personal relationships.


This hastily-composed article is not going to be able to explain why some things are beautiful to the senses, or to the perceiving brain. Or, perhaps I could say with every bit as much credibility, the perceiving heart. It may be evolutionary; it may be godly; it may be a condition instilled by culture.

I don’t know, but I know this – meaning is important, but it is not everything. Logic and science and analysis – gotta have ‘em, but if that’s all you have then you will be undernourished indeed.

Enough. Find a quiet place and read “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold.  In fact, read it twice.


     DOVER BEACH

     The sea is calm tonight.
     The tide is full, the moon lies fair
     Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
     Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
     Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
     Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
     Only, from the long line of spray
     Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
     Listen! you hear the grating roar
     Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
     At their return, up the high strand,
     Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
     With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
     The eternal note of sadness in.

     Sophocles long ago
     Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
     Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
     Of human misery; we
     Find also in the sound a thought,
     Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

     The Sea of Faith
     Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
     Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
     But now I only hear
     Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
     Retreating, to the breath
     Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
     And naked shingles of the world.

     Ah, love, let us be true
     To one another! for the world, which seems
     To lie before us like a land of dreams,
     So various, so beautiful, so new,
     Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
     Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
     And we are here as on a darkling plain
     Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
     Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Just Between Us, We Each Need to be Alone -- PART 2

Riddle me this: Have you ever made an important decision, or solved a difficult personal or professional problem, when you were not alone? Certain decisions, of course, are made collegially – on the eve of my tenth anniversary with The Memsahib, I’m thinking of marital decisions – but the decision to get married?

In Part 1, I regretted (more curmudgeonly than I had hoped to appear) the oversocialization of society – wow, there’s an oxymoron. Let’s make it “the oversocialization of members of society.” I regret it most keenly among the generation addicted to email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other technologies that they cannot leave alone, and which, in turn, cannot leave them alone.

It turns out that some recent studies have identified several material advantages to people of all ages – but particularly young people – to spending time alone. They’re summarized in this article ("The Power of Lonely") from the Boston Globe.   Here’s an excerpt:

"But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone."

Some of the specific results:

"One ongoing Harvard study indicates that people form more lasting and accurate memories if they believe they’re experiencing something alone. Another indicates that a certain amount of solitude can make a person more capable of empathy towards others. And while no one would dispute that too much isolation early in life can be unhealthy, a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school."

My own experience is that I don’t have any notable insights, and solve very few problems, when I’m not alone. Solitude is the time for synthesizing the massive data inputs we all experience, the time for puzzling things out. Some years ago, I stumbled on a problem-solving technique which I later discovered was very close to Zen, and which a former boss of mine called my “zero-based thinking.” Whenever I had a difficult problem that seemed to have no solution, whether personal or professional, I’d examine every assumption, including the assumption that the problem was a problem to begin with. This is solitary work. Maybe not sitting on a rural bluff and staring into space, but paying attention only to one’s own thoughts – not considering the impression one is making on another, not processing one’s impressions of another, not formulating expected responses to what one is hearing or reading or seeing. Just plain old thinking. Here’s the thing – it’s fun. And you can’t do it while you’re social networking.

There’s a skill to being alone. It must be cultivated. Witness the young man or woman who discovers to her horror that she has some time on her hands. What does she do? Chances are slim that she’ll pick up a serious book or take a walk or even doze and dream. (Blogging only half-counts – it involves organized thinking (good) but it’s not private and anarchic (bad, at least for realizing the benefits of solitude).) More likely, she’ll pull out her iPhone and make a call, check Facebook, tweet a chirpy tweet. She equates aloneness with loneliness and fears it, and so obsessively socializes. (Example could have as easily have been male.) No easy fix; just do it. For young ‘uns, parents can enforce social-networking-free times and zones. Assign some reading. Require the lad or lass to keep a (non-online) diary, with assurances of privacy – you can call it an analog blog, if that will help.

An anablog, if you will.

I understand that not everyone can find time to be alone. Families exist for a reason. Children need their mothers and fathers, and vice versa; husbands and wives need one another. Employers demand that everyone work in teams. So it’s a struggle for many to find that special time to communicate solely with what’s in one’s head.

Do it anyway.

Just Between Us, We Each Need to Be Alone -- PART 1

In the days – make that “decades” – before the Memsahib entered my life, I was alone a lot. I don’t know if I was alone more than most men of my generation, occupation, and location, but I believe that I was. Oh, I had some good friends and a girlfriend now and then, and if I had invested all of the money I spent in bars and nice restaurants during those years, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about the Obama administration. But while I was no Trappist, I’ll bet that I fell on the more-alone end of the scale.

The reason is pretty simple – I liked being alone. Within the borders of my commitment to the Mem – which will have its glorious tenth anniversary next week – I still do.

The reason isn't too important to the point I want to make somewhere in the next post, but I think it may have been because I was an early reader. Children these days can read by the time they get to first grade, but when I showed up in Mrs. Duvall’s classroom at Belleaire Elementary able to read at speed anything they put in front of me, I was unique (except for one other kid, Bryan Jack, a certifiably brilliant kid who grew up to be a certifiably brilliant adult, and who was tragically killed on 9/11 – another story). Not to say that I understood everything that I was capable of reading out at speed and with expression, but for a little kid I put on a pretty good show.

So, I read. I read everything – classics, kid’s books (Hardy Boys, Tom Swift Jr.), science, history, biography, modern literature, popular fiction, current events, the newspaper, magazines. Reading and the thinking it requires is done alone. It was pleasurable; I liked it, and finally grew to need it. Among my life’s highlights are, and will be, the solitary driving vacations I would take to the American West, almost always making sure that Death Valley was somewhere on the route – the best place in the world to be alone. I kept a microcassette recorder on the seat beside me, and when I had a Great Thought, or saw something interesting, I’d compose into the recorder and transcribe it later.


Not me reading; I was, however, black-and-white in those days


Was I ever lonely growing up and growing older? Oh, yeah. But I didn’t feel it very often, or very keenly, or for very long.

Of course, it is true and quite well known that excessive solitude is not good for us social human creatures. Kids need to be “socialized” through play, interaction with their parents, and group studies at school. Being alone too much can make us lonely, depressed, make us feel unattractive and unwanted. Make us be unattractive and unwanted.

In fact, the point of view that values social interaction above solitude has carried the day. We accept that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” (Don’t think about that lyric too hard – it doesn’t make much sense – but you know what it intends.)

I accept this, but also regret that so few of the last generation or so, and fewer still of the present generation (which is what? the generation that makes the biggest nuisance of itself at any given time?), spend much time alone. And by “alone” I mean “not actively communicating with or being in the presence of another person known to one.” Cell phones; email; Facebook; Twitter; Skype; there will be more to come. I feel sorry for the young men and women, mostly young, who spend enormous amounts of time and mental energy communicating the most banal trivialities with no corresponding enhancement of their social skills, useful knowledge, intelligence, or any other noticeable human characteristic. 


Of course, humans derive independent pleasure from the act of communicating and receiving communications – communicating is better than not communicating.  Got nothing against any of these technologies; we're demonstrably better off for each of them.   It’s the amount of time spent on communicating for its own sake, the communication of crap, that makes me wonder whether these folks ever have the opportunity to think, to learn things of value, to form intelligent convictions.  (Yes, I understand that this assumes that some communications are crap-heavy and some aren't, and that some learning is more valuable than other learning.  This assumption is correct.  I'll get to it some other time.) 

In short, I'm concerned that the pleasure of easy communications is robbing us of time that we need to be alone.

In my next post I’ll review some recent work on the benefits of solitude, and my own experience. Up in a few.

A Minor But, I Think, Original Theory About Elmore Leonard -- Actually More of an Observation

Elmore Leonard

I have read almost everything Elmore Leonard has published in book form.  All of his novels, including the westerns still in print.  All of the short-story collections.  I'm sure there are some early uncollected pulp-magazine short stories that have escaped me, but if it's generally available I've read it.

It would be fair to say that I am an admirer of Elmore Leonard.

Leonard writes crime novels (his westerns are much earlier works).  They are distinguished from "mysteries" in that the reader knows who the good guys and bad guys are from the start.

Actually, that's a little misleading.  Leonard is known for good guys who are not entirely good, and bad guys who are not entirely bad.  Consider an example that may be familiar to those of you who have not dipped into the novels -- Chili Palmer, memorably played by John Travolta in "Get Shorty" and "Be Cool."  Pam Grier playing "Jackie Brown."  (His novels are frequently made into movies, with uneven results.  Compare "3:10 to Yuma," both versions, with "The Big Bounce.")   Chili is clearly the protagonist, and clearly the guy you root for.  He is also a criminal and a killer.  Lots of guys like that in Leonard novels.  Even the cops are a little loose.  And the guys who have the conflict with the ambiguous good guy are themselves ambiguous bad guys -- attractive, frequently amusing characters even as they go about their theiving and killing, usually incompetently.   The women scheme as much, and with about the same results, as the men.

Leonard is rightly lionized for his clean, seamless prose style.  He has written a short essay called his "10 Rules of Writing" that every beginning fiction writer should read, if not memorize.  (My favorite:  "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue.")

The books are not above criticism.  There is a sameness to his protagonists.  They tend to be laconic, somewhat affectless, detached from the scenes in which they appear.  They seem to be observing the action from above, knowing more than the other characters know, and certainly more than the reader knows, and dropping in when it's their turn to talk.  Revealing rather little.   I'm not criticizing the artistic choice -- I'm criticizing the sameness in the characters across many of the novels.  Recall, however, that I"ve read everything.  So query whether this is really much of a critcism, since this method of portraying his characters is endlessly attractive to Leonard's fans.  It's more of an observation.

As is what I am about to lay on you Cool Hot Centrists.

I could go up to my library and count the Leonard books I've read -- several dozen, certainly.   And I am nowhere near the Leonard fanatic that some people are, people who can give you plot summaries of every single one of them.  But a dozen or so novels ago I noticed something.  This was a thing I thought that devoted Leonard readers would have noticed and remarked on somewhere along the line.  But I have done the Google research on this, and I find no notice of this thing anywhere.

And this thing is:

There is one phrase of dialogue that seems to appear in every Leonard novel.  In the last several novels I've read, there has been an aha! moment in each one when I come to it.  I have not gone back to reread the first dozen or so I read, and although I've seen it in some of the westerns, I can't vouch for its appearance in every single one of them.  But I think I'm safe in saying that it's in most of the novels, if not the short stories. 

At one point or other, a character says this:

"How's that sound?"

Here are some examples:

Get Shorty, character named Fay:  "How's that sound as a deal?"

Tishomingo Blues, character named Darwin:  "I'll give you two hundred a day for two weeks guaranteed and we'll see how it goes.  I"ll pay your rigger and the cost of setting up.  How's that sound?"

Stick:  "Only way I see it," Stick said, "is cash up front.  Two bills gets you the name of the stock.  Monday the price goes up to three, and if I see the stock take off right away the price might go up even higher.  How's that sound to you fellas?"

Out of Sight:   Buddy said, "It's pretty here, isn't it?  If you like looking at views.  I don't think you should go out anymore.  I mean for a couple of weeks anyway.  You got the need to do a bank out of your system.  Fell of your horse and got right back on.  I was thinking we could hire a boat to take us for the Bahamas for a while.  Get one right at the Haulover docks, a fishing boat.  Pay the skipper the going rate.  How's that sound to you?"

Maximum Bob:   He said to Dale Senior, “You know where Ocean Ridge is at? You go on over to Palm Beach and turn south.” Elvin would catch himself talking loud, as if the man couldn’t hear as good with his jaw wired, and have to lower his voice. “I’m moving into a house over there, big one, right on the ocean. How’s that sound to you?”

Up in Honey's Room:  “It’s mine,” Honey said. “Carl dropped me off but hasn’t any idea what I’m doing. Actually what I thought of when I walked in and saw you. Carl would love to sit down and talk to you, and if you want, you can do it. I swear he’s been told to leave you alone. You can walk up and give him a shove, he might growl but he won’t handcuff you. He’s been ordered not to” -- she was starting to overdo it -- “and I know he would love to see you again. How’s that sound? Sit down with Carl and have a drink.”

Road Dogs:  Mike Nesi said, "You mean they's rules?  Like I can't hang on to your shirt or stomp on your tennis shoes I get the chance?  As I understand the way the game is played, you want to put the ball through the hoop and I want to stop you from scoring, right?  That's the game of basketball.  But if they's no ref, we don't have to worry about rules, do we?  We put up a hunnert each and play to twenty-one.  How's that sound?  First one to score that many points takes the pot."

Road Dogs (bonus reference (different character)!):  "All right," Lou said, "let's bet on it.  I read about a bank job has your MO all over it, how this sweetheart of a guy made off with five gees, I swear I won't tell the cops or the Bureau or come after you myself.  What I"ll do is give you the chrome-plated .45 I was awarded by my colleagues for shooting down three Haitian guys that kidnapped a five-year-old kid.  They want three hundred large or they chop the kid up and send him home in a bag.  I shot to kill, the only guys I felt good about donig it.  I'll give you the piece and say, 'You win, partner,' and never bother you again.  How's that sound?"

*   *   *

There are lots more.

Well, there's my theory.  Yeah, I know it's more of an observation.  I wish it were a theory.  I wish it meant something.  I wish I could argue that Leonard plants this phrase in all of his books (if he does) as a pointer toward the importance of sound in literature, a subliminal reminder to his serial readers that prose must have the cadence and vocabulary of ordinary speech to engage the reader.

But it's probably only inadvertent.  Either that or it's the way Leonard himself talks and he's putting his own verbal habits in their mouths.  Either that or it's an inside gag.

And, quite possibly, a gag that many Elmore Leonard lovers already know about but haven't communicated in Google-searchable text.  

Which, in my judgment, means that it might as well not ever have been thought up at all.

So I'm sticking with my own theory, which is that you read it here first.

*     *     *

Follow Your Cool Hot Center on Twitter:  @CoolHotCenter

Reason No. 37 that I Am Not as Nice a Person as I Would Prefer to Think of Myself As Being

I apologize to you all.

Japan and the world are facing a terrible crisis.

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands are dead.

Many tens of thousands more are homeless, have lost everything.

Rebuilding will take decades, and much can never be restored.

Japan, no stranger to the evils of radiation, is facing yet another nuclear horror.

That horror could drift our way.

The world economy will be adversely affected.

Governments may fall, and our own is exhibiting its now-familiar dithering, feckless uncomprehending reaction.

I think on these things a lot, and follow the technical news with some care, and hope with absolute sincerity that the incredibly brave Japanese workers and their resourceful technical colleagues can cool those cores in time, and intensely and truly regret the pain of those beautiful people in that beautiful country I loved both times I have visited.

And yet  .  .  .

And yet, as hard as I try  .  .  .

And yet, as hard as I try, as much as I attempt to scrub my consciousness, as much as I would like to think of myself as a noble and pure-thinking adult, a man worthy of imparting wisdom and displaying an ethical example to his grandsons, as much as I try to push it out, out, out,  I simply cannot prevent this one additional thought from creeping into what passes for my thinking:


I hope this doesn't wake up that damned Godzilla again.



It Is Interesting, Is it Not . . .

..  .  .  that the Libyan army loyal to Muammer Gaddafi, or Khaddafi, or however you want to spell it (ABC News collected 112 ways to spell his name), are attacking mosques where protesters have taken refuge?

So much for the sanctity Muslims ascribe to those most holy joints.

(Not a photo from Libya, but apropos)

I guess that means it's OK for us to go get the bad guys hiding in mosques, too.

My Joke Proposal for World Peace

I recently read a very lengthy and thoroughly engrossing article in The New Yorker centering on a well-known world religion.  This religion has the following characteristics, among others:

     --  It believes in a very colorful founding mythology that is centered on a single charismatic leading figure.

     --  It believes that a single book has all the answers and provides a complete, consistent, and correct guide to all aspects of life and death.

     --  It has millions of believers worldwide.

     --  Some of its acolytes behave as though they have been brainwashed.

     --  Acolytes are willing to suffer all manner of deprivation and degradation for their faith. 

     --  It has a single leader and sub-leaders whose edicts are regarded as infallible and must be followed.

    --   Most significantly:   It cannot stand the slightest criticism of its tenets.  Even the most innocuous questioning of its beliefs or tactics, even parody or other humorous treatment, calls forth a variety of well-organized and severe defensive measures.  These measures include mob action, lawsuits, propagandistic publicity, accusations of discrimination, and even violence.  It sustains itself largely on instilling in its acolytes the belief that the rest of the world is against it, and that those who are not acolytes are condemned.  Believers are expected to sacrifice enormously to advance this religion.

Nope, not Islam.  Nope, not Radical Islam, if that is a different thing from Vanilla Islam (and who the heck knows?  But that's another article). 

You've guessed by now.


A-yup.  Scientology.  (You can find the article here.)

Unhinged Celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise declaring
his love for Katie Holmes to an apparently hissing Oprah

But read that list again.  It could have been Radical Islam, couldn't it?   Especially that last bit about how touchy-touchy they are about, oh, you know, opposing views in a free society?

Unhappy Muslim



So here's my proposal:

Get the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and Howard Stern's listeners (that last population might be the most effective) to infiltrate Scientology and Radical Islam in large numbers.  Among Scientologists, they spread the idea that the greatest threat to Scientology is Radical Islam, that in fact R.I. has an active program to attack Scientology from without and within, all over the world.

 

Scientology Leader and Accused Serial Batterer Richard Miscavage


You're way ahead of me:  At the same time, the R.I. infiltrators spread the same information about the threat to Islamic fundamentalism represented by Scientology's highly-organized, insanely-motivated worldwide cadres. 

These efforts can be supported by fake websites, propaganda, YouTube, the possibilities are endless.



And then you stand back and watch these two stupendous international nuisances eliminate one another.

 

An Operating Thetan VII

 Result:  World peace.

Or, if not, at least we can go back to arguing with the Russians and the Chinese, which we seem to know how to do, as opposed to suppressing fascistic and imperialistic religions, which we seem to not. 

If you want a nice tidy Cold War, you really need to be dealing with a better class of international thug.

*     *     *

Follow Your Cool Hot Center on Twitter:  @CoolHotCenter



I Felt Kind of Silly Flying an Airline Called "Virgin"

I recently flew Virgin America round-trip between DFW and LAX.  My report:

First, does the “Virgin” moniker of the various Richard Branson ventures strike anyone as kind of . . . icky? When I think Richard Branson, the extremely public face of his airlines and other ventures, I think of a gentlemen who – although I know nothing of his social life, and his love life, if any, does not seem to be tabloid fodder – I strongly suspect of spending little time supporting virginity, and his entertainment interests have likely done more than their share to depopulate the world of the subspecies that possesses it. Nor do his ventures call forth an image particularly reminiscent of Roman Catholic iconography. So all this Virgin stuff seems kind of jokey to me, and I feel a little like a punch line flying Virgin America.

Especially since all of its airplanes have red tails.  Come on.

All right, enough of this distasteful talk. How was the travel experience?

Pretty darned good. The Dallas end of things is particularly flyer-friendly. Virgin America presently has few flights out of DFW and exactly one gate – E20 – so possibilities of being shunted from gate to gate, or having any trouble locating one’s flight, are eliminated.

At both DFW and LAX the in-terminal staff was courteous, friendly, and nicely-turned-out, as one would expect from a hip company like VA. At LAX, the chap who was assigned to float around the computer check-in area assisting folks was positively chatty, and even upsold me an exit-row aisle seat for $30.

Flight attendants ditto. The flight to LAX featured an attractive pair of Asian sisters, supervised by a very fast-talking young black gent – very VA-ish. A couple of beauties were also working the LAX-DFW flight. No fatties. Based on my very limited ability to observe the VA work force at DFW and LAX, I am guessing that among airlines, the male FAs and customer-service guys at VA are at the more, uh, fabulous end of the scale. Announcements were warm, boarding trouble-free. Employees seemed generally happy to be working for Mr. Branson's airline.

The highlight of preflight obligations -- actually, the highlight of the entire flight -- was the instruction in seat belts, exits, water landings, and the like. There is a monitor on every seat-back, and all of that information was conveyed via some extremely clever – funny, in fact -- and quite informative animation. (I think I learned more about that inflatable vest thing than I ever have watching a bored flight attendant.) Always wondered whether the Federal Aviation Administration had to pass on some of the snappy patter I’ve heard from flight attendants trying to liven up that pre-flight spiel. The voiceover patter on this animation is snappier than most, but entirely clear and inoffensive. I enjoyed it even more on the flight back, picking up some visual gags that I missed on the first viewing.

The flight out was an Airbus 319, a smaller jet (only 20-odd rows in coach). The cabin is quite attractive, lilt with a muted purple glow, and the seats are comfortable.  I was struck with how quiet this jet was. The A320 on the flight back to Dallas, a bigger plane, was even quieter.

The touch-screen seat-back monitors offer a variety of entertainment. I did not view any of it but I looked at the menus. You can shop, view movies and TV shows, order food on the plane, play games with your kids, chat seat-to-seat, and even send e-mail and text messages. (Some of these features are not yet activated but are promised soon.) I did hear a young man across the aisle say that he tried playing a game, but it was kind of slow.



Touch-screen monitors

I only noticed two problems with my flying experience.

(1) The first was not such a problem for me, but it could be for others. I mentioned those seat-back monitors. If you don’t turn them off, or use them for entertainment, they run a series of ads, many of them for recent movies. Some of these trailers are not what parents would want a child to see. (My particular codger-based problem is that I’m weary to death of the no-talent generation of non-entertaining, featureless, indistinguishable young actors and actresses in leering slacker tales.) No nudity or profanity, but inappropriate for children. So, parents and people with standards: You may want to switch off that monitor if you don’t want to use any of its cool stuff. And even if you don’t object to the content it’s beaming at you at the particular moment, if you’re doing something else at your seat (reading, composing a website article, sudoku) it is a distraction to perceive a flickering screen in the upper part of your field of vision.

(2) The control for some of the entertainment available in your seat is in the armrest. You can pop open the armrest and take it out. But if you don’t want to take the control out of the armrest, the controls are also accessible through a large hole in the armrest itself.



Monitor control removed from armrest; note large hole in armrest



Controller in the armrest, looking down into the hole

This large hole renders the armrest uncomfortable at best and useless at worst as a feature upon which to rest one’s arms. I tried to snooze a bit and the discomfort of that ditch in the middle of the armrest positively prevented it. This is not a small thing and detracted materially from the comfort of the flight.

So – not an A+, but a solid A to A- for Virgin America. If you don’t mind feeling like a punch line. Or if you have no interest in resting your arms.

*     *     *

Follow Your Cool Hot Center on Twitter:  @CoolHotCenter





The World Is on the Brink, but What I Really Want to Talk About Is Mini-Moo's

I'm an optimistic guy. I have always thought things would go my way. I think that way about the world, too. Yes, we're going through a period of smallish world leaders pretty much across the board and evil philosophies held by evil men, but I'm thinking that in the mid-run things will be OK if people of goodwill apply their good brains to matters of public importance and let their voices be heard.

But some stuff is definitely getting worse.

Thing is, they are things that should be getting better.

I've already written about the appalling deterioration of AOL Mail with each successive version, which has caused that trailblazing service to plummet into almost complete uselessness.

But what has come closest of all to destroying my faith in the entire Universe is . . . Mini-Moo's.

But even before I tell you how this product has sent me into a descending spiral of Weltschmerz, we must deal with its name, which, as you can see, is a singular possessive: "Mini-Moo's." It designates something that belongs to Mini-Moo -- or is it "a" Mini-Moo? This in itself does not make it a bad name for a product. (Think "McDonald's.") But it leaves us with the issue of how to comfortably refer to the singular and plural of this product. I've researched this.  Some people would form the plural "Mini-Moo'ses," some would say "Mini-Moos," and some would treat the word as an invariant, like "sheep," with the plural the same as the singular. I vote for that one. But it would be better if the manufacturer had just called the product "Mini-Moo." But between you and me, "Mini Moo's" will be treated as both singular and plural. If, heaven forbid, I have to use it as a possessive, I will form it: "Mini-Moos'." 

And there's another problem for the careful writer:  Sometimes it has a hyphen, sometimes it doesn't -- see the photos below.   And its manufacturer, Land O Lakes?  Sometimes it appears as "Land O' Lakes," with the apostrophe indicating that it's a contraction of "of," and sometimes without.  Sheesh.

Mini-Moo's are little containers of half-and-half for use in coffee and other drinks.  They are little corrugated plastic cups covered with foil that is sealed around the rim of the cup.  As noted, they are made by the good people at Land O Lakes, who put that rather fetching Native American princess on all of their products.  Don't ask me why they don't have to be refrigerated.  (I know why, just don't ask me.)  You have seen them in 7-11's and other places where you can grab a quick cup of coffee (my own workplace favors the Mini-Moo's):



Perfectly fine product.  Excellent product, in fact.   Its major competitor, the famous Coffee-mate, is OK, I guess, but it's not half-and-half -- it's "non-dairy."

Now I know most of you have used one of these products or something like it.   When the item is produced, the manufacturer leaves the adhesive off a fair portion of the foil that covers that little tab.  You tease at it,  the foil on the end of the tab lifts a little, you seize the newly-liberated foil tab and pull toward the cup.  The foil top easily peels off and you can then pour that fine concoction into your drink.   The image on a box of these items portrays -- rather more dramatically than it happens in reality -- a successful peel-back and pour:

I have been using Mini-Moo's for years.  I cannot number the consecutive successful peel-and-pours I have executed. 

Until the last several months. 

One day I was preparing my morning coffee at 7-11.  Picked up a Mini-Moo's.  As I had done thousands of times, I held the cup between the thumb and index finger of my left hand.  With the thumb on my right hand, I scraped it lightly against the tip of that little tab, which usually lifts the unattached foil away from the plastic, and, with the thumb still moving, I prepared to bring the index finger of my right hand forward to grasp the little loose foil tab to complete the peelback.

Except that this time, the foil did not separate from the plastic.  It had been glued down all the way down to the tip of the tab. 

I tried it one more time.  Nothing.  Tried to stick a fingernail in to pop that little foil tab off the plastic.  No. 

Threw that one away.  Undoubtedly an outlier.   Possibly rare.  Maybe worth some money, like a misstamped coin.  Began to be sorry I threw it away.

Picked up another one.  Stunned to discover it suffered from the same defect.

After one or two more, I was able to select one that was more conventionally glued, and was only happy that my coffee had not unacceptably cooled in the meantime.

Since then, I have encountered many many Mini-Moo's that are almost impossible to open because the peel-back foil tab is glued all the way down to the end of that little sticking-out tongue. 

One might think this was a conscious decision on the part of the Land O Lakes people.  Perhaps  .  .  .  I don't know, product security?  Except that not all Mini-Moo's suffer from this inability to actually get at the product.  If you grub around in the bowl of cuplets long enough you can find one that's sealed like they all used to be.

No, this is a factory issue.  Either Land O Lakes has some new machinery that slathers on too much fastening stickum, or the quality assurance function at LOL (!) has suffered some unfortunate turnover.

It may seem like a small thing, those little gold-foil cups of half-and-half serially resisting my efforts to get at their creamy nectar. 

But what I want to know is:  If, in this marvelous world of ours where we witness the blessings of progress day after day and year after year, does the decline in the quality of Mini-Moo's after being so good for so long represent some kind of cosmic signal that we have gone as far as we can go?  That it's all downhill from here?  

Or  .  .  .  that I'm just wrong about the fundamental nature of reality?

And that there is, in fact, no chance at all that we can repeal Obamacare?