Appliance Jack

 The other Sunday, we found our freezer and refrigerator not working, and scrambled to locate and obtain small substitutes. They served until the repairman diagnosed and replaced a failed fan, then sat in our hall through the week.

Our two-wheel dolly had served well enough in getting the appliances into the house, but we weren't sure about its stability down the stairs to the outside, then to the basement. I announced that what we needed was an appliance jack, a two wheel dolly with a strap to secure an appliance--a refrigerator, a washer, or so on--and that our local hardware store probably rented them. I called up, and after the man in the rental department told me that I needed a dolly, we seemed to agree on what I needed, and he said they had it.

They did not. They had regular dollies just like ours. They did have a "Rachet Tie-Down", which sold for a few cents less than the price quoted for rental, and which worked nicely.

I wondered, though, whether "appliance jack" was a term used only by the company I worked for years ago, or something I dreamed up. A web search turned up many more actual jacks--items for lifting something--but about one image in ten was the item I had in mind. My brother thinks that the more common term may be "appliance dolly".

One of the Dozen Best

 In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Peter Geach as "one of the dozen best British philosophers of the twentieth century." This may be so, but it made me wonder whether I could name a dozen British philosophers of the twentieth century, of any quality. Counting only those who wrote their major works in the last century, and leaving out edge cases--if we count Wittgenstein as British, must we then count Whitehead as American?--I just about could, though I hadn't necessarily read their works. I came up with

1. G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe (two books)
2. J.L. Austin (two books)
3. A.J. Ayer (one book)
4. Philippa Foot (two books)
5. Peter Geach (no books, though much of a volume of Frege he helped to edit)
6. Stuart Hampshire (two books)
7. R.M. Hare (no books)
8. Anthony Kenny (philosophically, just the judgments in Brief Encounters)
   
9. Alasdair MacIntyre (one book)
   
10. Mary Midgley (one book)
11. Iris Murdoch (one book of philosophy)
    
12. Bertrand Russell (some of Essays in Analysis)
13. Gilbert Ryle (one book) 
    
14. R.L. Strawson (some of a collection of essays he edited)

I did not pay that much attention to British philosophy when I was younger, but now I can't come close to that number for any other combination of country and century.

 

 

 

Reading Midgley

 Having read Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, I thought I might read something by Mary Midgley, whose Wickedness the publisher advertise among other books in the end papers. I did not expect to find her work in the local bookstores I usually rely on. My preferred out-of-town bookstores didn't seem promising, either.

A Little Free Library on New Hampshire Avenue NW yielded The Essential Mary Midgley, edited by David Midgley, which contains excerpts from ten of her books. I am more likely to find some of those books to read than I am to pass along this volume.

The themes that Midgley writes on include

• A rejection of the Cartesian split between mind and matter.
• Related to that, a rejection of the tendency to regard animals as machines, and their treatment as not worth considering.
• Also related, the assertion that humans have a nature, and cannot be considered as acting from arbitrary will.
• The validity of (sound) moral judgments, including the identification of evil and the ascription of blame.
• The need for philosophy in general to clarify our notions, including particularly moral philosophy.
• The misreading and misuse of Darwin's thought.
• The unjustified pretensions of certain scientists who write as public intellectuals.

The book is organized in five sections, each with chapters of about a dozen pages each, the sections being

1. The Roots of Human Nature
2. Philosophizing Out in the World
3. The Myths of Science
4. Reason and Imagination
5. Gaian Thinking: Putting it All Together

 Midgley writes clearly throughout. She requires careful reading, but I recall only one spot where I suspected something omitted in the text. She can be cutting, for example in the notes to the essay "The Elusiveness of Responsibility":

British philosophers, who in many other cases have now relaxed their rule of reading only one book by each philosopher, sternly adhere to it in Kant's case, and treat a few quotations from the rather dramatic opening section of the Groundwork as his last words on individuality and freedom. Both Williams and Nagel take as their chief opponent the resulting shadowy fixture, who is supposed to be Kant, but to whom they amazingly attribute 'a very simple image of rationality.'

So Many Wicked People

 At Second Story Books today, I noticed the volume Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary by Anthony Kenny. Of course I bought it. The book is organized in short chapters, each with brief notices of three persons: "Three Oxford philosophers", 'Three Wittgensteinians", "Three cardinals", and so on. Kenny's career at Oxford and elsewhere brought him into contact with many persons worth writing and reading about.

Among the Oxford philosophers is R.M. Hare, whom I have not read, but have seen quoted and referred to a certain amount. Hare's specialty was moral philosophy, which one might have expected to give him a notion of human failings. But evidently real estate had things not dreamt of in his philosophy:

Because he was now a professor, on a university, rather than a college payroll, Dick had to vacate his college house. He said that trying to buy a house was one of the worst experiences of his life: 'I had no idea that there were so many wicked people in the world!' This from a man who, as a prisoner of the Japanese, had worked on the Burma Railway!

 

Frank Ryan, RIP (Belatedly)

 Frank Ryan, an outstanding quarterback for the Cleveland Browns in the early 1960s, died on January 1, 2024. He received respectful obituaries in the newspapers. Wikipedia has a long and detailed article on him (as on many other football players).

Ryan was unusual as earning a Ph.D. in mathematics while an NFL player. He taught at Case Institute (now part of Case Western Reserve) during some of his off-seasons in Cleveland, and later at Rice (where he studied as an undergraduate and earned his Ph.D.) and Yale. After his playing days, he oversaw the computerization voting of the House of Representatives. His wife, Joan Ryan, wrote on sports for the Washington Post in those days, as she had previously for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In his NFL days, home games were not broadcast on TV--tickets for the games cost an unaffordable $10--so I can have seen only so many of Ryan's games. But I remember the intense satisfaction we felt when he led the Browns to the 1964 NFL championship.

Lighting

 Today, one of the building engineers was replacing lights in fixtures in an open area near my office. The tubes looked unusually thin when I got a look at them, and I remarked on that. He told me that the tubes were not fluorescent lights, but LEDs. I had not previously seen LED lights in that shape. The connectors at the end are compatible with those for fluorescent tubes, so one need not switch out fixtures. The savings in electricity will be considerable. And the light seems to be warmer than a fluorescent's, which is all to the good.

Murdoch as Philosopher

 Long ago, in Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, I read a passage that embarrassed me:

Dave does extramural work for the university, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave's pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key should be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that.

I found the passage uncomfortable, as depicting too clearly the attitude I then had toward philosophy. The character Dave is Dave Gellman, a philosopher, of which it is also said

Most of our conversations consisted of me saying something and Dave's saying he didn't understand me and my saying it again and Dave's getting very impatient. It took me some time to realize that when Dave said he didn't understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.

At the time, I knew that Murdoch was a philosophy don. I had not read any of her philosophy, though. The other week I found and bought a copy of The Sovereignty of the Good. It is a book of about 100 pages, the first forty-some of which I had to read three times. I thought her arguments in general plausible, though I have the disadvantage of not wholly knowing the case she argued against: she mentions Stuart Hampshire, though the books of his she mentions are some years early than the ones I have read.

 The themes I picked out included: the difficulty of goodness; freedom as the matter of many small acts of attention, rather than as an arbitrary and unmotivated act in an otherwise determined world; art as a paradigm for attention to the world, not least because there is so much more bad art than good; love as another paradigm.

Counter Intelligence

 Most adult Americans have bought a car, or been with someone who has bought one, and know the mystifications practiced by dealerships, so that one is never quite sure what the actual cost is, and by the way did you want floor mats and the underbody sealed? Every new car sold in the US has a sticker on its window stating the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP), which is something. But dealerships do their best to keep one guessing on the real price. One can leave a dealership wondering whether any transaction could be more opaque. We have have found some that can.

We are renovating our kitchen, and have discovered that the price of countertop materials is a secret between the vendors, fabricators, and contractors. It would be something to have at least a rule of thumb ratio, giving the price of Corian compared to the price of granite, etc. Even that does not seem to be available through the vendors. I would not care if a) I suspected the prices to be reasonable, and b) the stores where the unpriced goods are on display were nearer than a thirty minute drive. But neither condition holds.

The whole business of home design and decoration seems to run on the principle that if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Large cities in the US have "design centers", which do not admit civilians unless accompanied by a designer. I gather also that companies can be stiff about sending samples to those who are not designers. Clearly some customers don't have to ask the prices, and the design magazines are full of their residences. Yet there are some not positively rich who want better than "builder grade", and would like to improve their dwellings, within their means, if only they could discover how far those means would go.

My wife considers that the practices of the design centers have dampened sales, and that the bad condition of American design magazines is evidence of this. Comparable English businesses seem to have no such restrictions, and their magazines, she says, continue to flourish.

Books and Covers

 Twenty-five or thirty years ago,  probably at an in-law's, I pulled a copy of The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss from the shelves. I looked into it, evidently at Chapter 2, and put it back on the shelf. The scene of a callow teacher failing to dominate a class of boys simply did not interest me. I wonder now whether the form of the book, a small Modern Library hardback (as I recall it) had some effect.

I wonder this because I bought a paperback copy at Carpe Librum on Friday at lunch time, and finished it yesterday evening. The setting is curiously foreign--set all but entirely in America, among persons speaking recognizably American English--but largely in Episcopalian boarding schools, or among rich families who would send their sons to one. A fair number fall into the category of those one is glad not to have met. The narrator, a man aspiring to and eventually joining the Episcopalian clergy, is not prepossessing. Yet the novel carries one along.

 Auchincloss wrote a memoir, which I read through at least once well before this. In the memoir he states that Frank Prescott, the rector, is based on the judge Learned Hand, not as some might have supposed Endicott Peabody, the founder of Groton. Peabody does make a cameo appearance in the novel, and gets a slighting mention. Clearly Peabody made a great impression on Auchincloss in his school days, but Auchincloss names Hand as the greatest man he had ever known.

 

German

 The last chapter in Gordon Craig's The Germans, "The Awful German Language" begins

In the days when Bismarck was the greatest man in Europe, an American visitor to Berlin, anxious to hear the Chancellor speak, procured two tickets to the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag and hired an interpreter to accompany her there. They were fortunate enough to arrive just before Bismarck intervened in a debate on a matter of social legislation, and the American pressed close to her interpreter's side so as to miss nothing of the translation. But although Bismarck spoke with considerable force and at some length, the interpreter's lips remained closed, and he was unresponsive to his employer's nudges. Unable to contain herself, she finally blurted, "What is he saying?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter answered, "I am waiting for the verb."

Craig of course quotes from the essay of Mark Twain's from which he took the title.  More seriously, he traces the history of the language from the days when Charles V said that German was fit only for speaking to horses and Martin Luther proved him wrong, up through Enlightenment clarity to Hegelian obscurity and beyond.

Not the API I Had in Mind

 For years, I have wished that there were a website that could tell me who is demonstrating which day near the White House. Some group often is, and anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of flags must sometimes walk over to the edge and ask someone what the group, and perhaps the grievance, is. I have to think that most of the groups have a permit. I suppose that the two or three fellows I see with East Turkmenistan flags on Pennsylvania Avenue don't have or really need one, nor probably does the bagpiper who is often there. But the people who march for blocks to get to Lafayette Square or set up stands and sound systems must have one.

 A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on Hacker News that linked to the page for an API offered by the US Park Service. This, I thought, was just the thing, for the US Park Police is in charge of Lafayette Square, among other areas around the White House. With the free API key and the clear documentation, it took little time to put together a script to retrieve and print information about sites in the District of Columbia. It took not much more to write a script to retrieve and print out information about all of the week's events at the White House and President's Park. But there were no such events. A closer look said that the events listed would be those arranged by Park Service. I thought perhaps alerts would serve me better than events. They did not--the only alert told of masking status at the White House.

French

 One recalls that War and Peace begins with paragraphs of "that accurate French in which our grandparents spoke and even thought". I had not perhaps realized how far French served, until yesterday I encountered a paragraph by Peter Demetz on Maria Theresa:

The dynasty was her nation; she corresponded with her children in French; as for her German, she spoke it with the sophistication of a plebeian Vienna wet nurse, as a popular ditty of her time suggested, and wrote the language of Klopstock and Lessing quirkily and according to French syntactical rules (only Frederick of Prussia's German was worse, but he was, after all, a French writer of note).

 (Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of  a European City, chapter 6, "Mozart in Prague")

I had read that Frederick preferred French. I have not encountered his writings, and would be no judge of his French if I had, but Samuel Johnson thought poorly of his work:

 Sir Thomas [Robinson] said, that the king of Prussia valued himself upon
three things;--upon being a hero, a musician, and an authour. JOHNSON.
'Pretty well, Sir, for one man. As to his being an authour, I have not
looked at his poetry; but his prose is poor stuff. He writes just as you
might suppose Voltaire's footboy to do, who has been his amanuensis.
He has such parts as the valet might have, and about as much of the
colouring of the style as might be got by transcribing his works.'

 (Life of Johnson, entry for July 18, 1763)

 

A Long Career

Today's Washington Post carries a story about Louis Kokonis, a math teacher at Alexandria City High School who died on January 4. He was 91, and had checked in at the school on January 3. He spent more than 60 years teaching in Alexandria, Virginia--if the statement that he began teaching during Eisenhower's administration is correct, he likely had 65 or more years teaching there.

It was always my impression that Latin teachers were born 50, and remained 50 until their first students had retired from the workforce. But evidently math teachers can compete.