At the beginning of 2019, I noticed an old Ford Taurus some blocks away. It had the driver's side front window broken out, and a Pennsylvania transit tag. I wondered whether it had been stolen and abandoned. I mentioned it to one of police officers who sometimes park and wait in the church parking lot across from the end of our street. He may have looked at the car, but nothing happened. My wife remarked that the police can't tow in our neighborhood unless a car has expired tags. The transit tag expired on February 1: 2/1/19
A day or two after the beginning of that February, I happened to remember the car, and had a look. Someone had put a strip of duct tape across the bottom of tag. The 1s and 9 had been extended with marker, the "2" had become a "3", and now the tag appeared to expire on 3/1/19. The missing window was covered with plastic. Of course, April required some more creative work. At some point the broken window was replaced, and a sign was taped on, offering it for sale.
I pretty much forgot about the car until one summer morning I noticed broken glass on that street. I looked about for a car with a broken window, and spotted the Taurus across the street, with plastic over the back left window this time. The transit tag now appeared to expire on 8/1/19.
A mile or so south of here, where one needs a zone permit to park for more than a couple of hours, this would never happen. The parking enforcement staff patrol constantly with license-plate readers, and issue tickets all the time. The Taurus would have been repeatedly ticketed, and probably towed early in February 2019. But our neighborhood does not have these restrictions on parking. There are fewer opportunities to write tickets, and the enforcement staff seem to come around less often.
A couple of months ago, I noticed the Taurus again, again with driver's window broken out. By then I was wondering whether it was a bait car set out by the police. I did not care to call the 4th District to inquire, and perhaps bring more trouble on an owner apparently down on his luck. Had the car been parked on my block I might have decided otherwise.
A few weeks ago I saw a notice to tow on the windshield. The grounds stated were lack of valid tags--duct tape and markers go only so far--and apparent inoperability. Yesterday I saw that the car was gone. I assume the city towed it.
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Monday, February 17, 2020
Guardrail and Planter
I suppose that the National Park Service owns the guardrails on 16th Street NW just north of the bridge over Piney Branch Parkway, as being on ground belonging to Rock Creek Park. There are wooden guardrails elsewhere in the park, though none I remember as quite like these, logs set on posts:
Some of the logs are still sound, in that they aren't cracked with plants growing in them, but all are more or less splintery. There is a gap of about three feet in the rails, left as I recall by a young man who some years ago--I suspect he didn't manage the oblique left from Arkansas Avenue to 16th Street. Well, that missing rail served its purpose by keeping the car from heading into the ravine.
Some of the logs are still sound, in that they aren't cracked with plants growing in them, but all are more or less splintery. There is a gap of about three feet in the rails, left as I recall by a young man who some years ago--I suspect he didn't manage the oblique left from Arkansas Avenue to 16th Street. Well, that missing rail served its purpose by keeping the car from heading into the ravine.
Friday, February 14, 2020
Names
A friend passed along the supplements to H.L. Mencken's The American Language in January. It took some discipline to read anything else for the next couple of weeks.
Supplement Two a section given to American names, with much interesting matter. I had never suspected the presence of the Welsh "Ap" in such names as "Powell" (Ap Howell) or "Pugh" (Ap Hugh). I had some notion of the butchery worked on unfamiliar names at American ports of entry, and of simplifications worked since. That General Pershing's ancestors were Pferschings I had never heard.
Mencken gives lists of both women's and men's names that he considers to have been chosen for novelty. Some would not now raise an eyebrow, having been made familiar through show business--Bette, Mariel, Petula--or otherwise, for example Darlene. Many still stand out as eccentric (Vomera), others lack only an adjustment to their spelling to be standard, as Calista.
In the list of surnames Mencken thought unusual, I saw "Pancake". According to my father, his father spoke of a cousin who married a Pancake. My father supposed the name to derive from the German "Pfannkuchen". In the late 1970s, the writer Breece D'J. Pancake published some excellent short stories. At the moment, the president of the Association for Computing Machinery is Dr. Cherri Pancake, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University. The Pancakes don't seem to be going away.
Supplement Two a section given to American names, with much interesting matter. I had never suspected the presence of the Welsh "Ap" in such names as "Powell" (Ap Howell) or "Pugh" (Ap Hugh). I had some notion of the butchery worked on unfamiliar names at American ports of entry, and of simplifications worked since. That General Pershing's ancestors were Pferschings I had never heard.
Mencken gives lists of both women's and men's names that he considers to have been chosen for novelty. Some would not now raise an eyebrow, having been made familiar through show business--Bette, Mariel, Petula--or otherwise, for example Darlene. Many still stand out as eccentric (Vomera), others lack only an adjustment to their spelling to be standard, as Calista.
In the list of surnames Mencken thought unusual, I saw "Pancake". According to my father, his father spoke of a cousin who married a Pancake. My father supposed the name to derive from the German "Pfannkuchen". In the late 1970s, the writer Breece D'J. Pancake published some excellent short stories. At the moment, the president of the Association for Computing Machinery is Dr. Cherri Pancake, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University. The Pancakes don't seem to be going away.
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Conversation
In "Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill", the eighth discourse of the first portion of The Idea of a University, Newman quotes at some length from John Davison, who argued against The Edinburgh Review's advocacy of strictly useful education. Among the passages,
In short, a man is to be usurped by his profession. He is to be clothed in its garb from head to foot. His virtues, his science, and his ideas are all to be put into a gown or uniform, and the whole man to be shaped, pressed, and stiffened, in the exact mould of his technical character.and
Now of all the those who furnish their share to rational conversation, a mere adept in his own art is universally admitted to be the worst. The sterility and uninstructiveness of such a person's social hours are quite proverbialreminded me of a passage in The Book of the Courtier, First Book, section 17, which recounts
what in polite society a worthy lady said to a certain man (whom I do not now wish to name) whom she sought to honor by inviting him to dance, and who not only declined this but would not listen to music or take part in any other entertainments offered him, but kept saying that such trifles were not his business. And when finally the lady said to him, 'What then is your business?' he answered with a scowl: 'Fighting.' Whereupon the lady replied at once, 'I should think it a good thing, now that you are not away at war or engaged at fighting, for you to have yourself greased all over and stowed away in a closet along with all your battle harness, so that you won't grow any rustier than you already are': and so, amid much laughter from those present, she ridiculed him in his stupid presumption.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Three Hours
When the lights came up, someone in the next row asked, "How long was that movie?" Several of us laughed, and a man in that row replied, "It clocked in just under six hours." In fact, "A Hidden Life" runs to three hours. But that is a long time for a movie.
"A Hidden Life" has admirable scenery and handsome people well filmed. It does not tell one much about Franz Jägerstätter. One gathers that he objects to Hitler, that he is not a member of the Nazi party. His grounds of objection to taking an oath of loyalty to Hitler are not really clarified; a twenty-first-century audience will think the point obvious, whether or not the viewer can imagine facing the consequences he did.
John Lukacs gives about five pages to Jägerstätter in an essay collected in Remembered Past. Having read that, I knew as much about Jägerstätter before the film as after. I suppose that some viewers may have learned that he was a Catholic; if so, they wouldn't have got much information on how that shaped his conscience and decisions. I don't think that the reviews in the newpapers gave much context.
Really, my points of complaint are three. First, the movie is perhaps unfair to Jägerstätter's parish priest, who is shown as a temporizer, but who did some jail time in 1941. Second, the quotation from George Eliot shown at the end, on hidden lives that change the world seems to miss the point--as numerous figures correctly told Jägerstätter in the movie, what he was doing made no difference to the course of history, did not contribute to ending the war a day sooner; the point is that he witnessed to the truth. Third, the story might have been better managed by a director other than Terrence Malick, whose strength seems to be scenery rather than character.
"A Hidden Life" has admirable scenery and handsome people well filmed. It does not tell one much about Franz Jägerstätter. One gathers that he objects to Hitler, that he is not a member of the Nazi party. His grounds of objection to taking an oath of loyalty to Hitler are not really clarified; a twenty-first-century audience will think the point obvious, whether or not the viewer can imagine facing the consequences he did.
John Lukacs gives about five pages to Jägerstätter in an essay collected in Remembered Past. Having read that, I knew as much about Jägerstätter before the film as after. I suppose that some viewers may have learned that he was a Catholic; if so, they wouldn't have got much information on how that shaped his conscience and decisions. I don't think that the reviews in the newpapers gave much context.
Really, my points of complaint are three. First, the movie is perhaps unfair to Jägerstätter's parish priest, who is shown as a temporizer, but who did some jail time in 1941. Second, the quotation from George Eliot shown at the end, on hidden lives that change the world seems to miss the point--as numerous figures correctly told Jägerstätter in the movie, what he was doing made no difference to the course of history, did not contribute to ending the war a day sooner; the point is that he witnessed to the truth. Third, the story might have been better managed by a director other than Terrence Malick, whose strength seems to be scenery rather than character.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Resisting Amazon
Last week, we drove the short distance to Loyalty Books on Upshur Street NW, there to hear Katya Cegel discuss her book, From Chernobyl with Love, an account of her work as a journalist in the former Soviet Union from 1998 through 2002. Having heard the discussion, it seemed only right to buy a copy. At the register, we noticed How to Resist Amazon and Why, which I'd have described as slim pamphlet, but which its publisher Raven Books calls a "zine". We bought two copies, though we haven't decided who shall get the second.
Danny Caine, the proprietor of Raven Books, opts for volume rather than focus in the pamphlet. His account of the economics of the book trade is compelling enough--Amazon uses its power to enforce discounts that publishers will extend to nobody else; therefore Amazon can sell a popular novel at a price that would turn every sale into a $5 loss for Raven Books. The power Amazon brings against publishers, and the way it uses that power, extracting "all the traffic will bear" as in The Octopus, has been in my view reason enough to avoid purchasing from Amazon. I hadn't thought much about the price pressure on local retailers.
Yet last winter I heard a young man ask the manager at Bridge Street Books whether he matched Amazon's prices. The manager said, No, I'm not subsidized by the government the way they are. Amazon does get favorable rates from the United States Postal Service, but in truth the book business is probably subsidized more by Amazon Web Services, a remarkably profitable undertaking, than by the USPS.
I had much rather buy books at a local bookstore, preferably for cash, than on-line. I am fortunate to live in a city with several independent general-interest bookstores. But some of them seem to have limited options with their distributors, so that a special order is impossible or impractical. Still, one can sometimes buy directly from the publisher. It might not arrive as quickly as it would from Amazon, but if the book is likely to take some weeks to read, the difference between one-day shipping and five-day shipping matters little.
(Ms. Cegel's book is quite readable. I should say that it tells more about the lives of young and nervy expatriates than it does about Latvia or Ukraine. Well, one can learn about the early days of Baltic independence or the lead-up to the Orange Revolution from other sources. This is the first book I have noticed that recounts the adventures of a journalist willing to go down an insufficiently secured coal mine in the Donbass region or drink home-distilled vodka in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.)
Danny Caine, the proprietor of Raven Books, opts for volume rather than focus in the pamphlet. His account of the economics of the book trade is compelling enough--Amazon uses its power to enforce discounts that publishers will extend to nobody else; therefore Amazon can sell a popular novel at a price that would turn every sale into a $5 loss for Raven Books. The power Amazon brings against publishers, and the way it uses that power, extracting "all the traffic will bear" as in The Octopus, has been in my view reason enough to avoid purchasing from Amazon. I hadn't thought much about the price pressure on local retailers.
Yet last winter I heard a young man ask the manager at Bridge Street Books whether he matched Amazon's prices. The manager said, No, I'm not subsidized by the government the way they are. Amazon does get favorable rates from the United States Postal Service, but in truth the book business is probably subsidized more by Amazon Web Services, a remarkably profitable undertaking, than by the USPS.
I had much rather buy books at a local bookstore, preferably for cash, than on-line. I am fortunate to live in a city with several independent general-interest bookstores. But some of them seem to have limited options with their distributors, so that a special order is impossible or impractical. Still, one can sometimes buy directly from the publisher. It might not arrive as quickly as it would from Amazon, but if the book is likely to take some weeks to read, the difference between one-day shipping and five-day shipping matters little.
(Ms. Cegel's book is quite readable. I should say that it tells more about the lives of young and nervy expatriates than it does about Latvia or Ukraine. Well, one can learn about the early days of Baltic independence or the lead-up to the Orange Revolution from other sources. This is the first book I have noticed that recounts the adventures of a journalist willing to go down an insufficiently secured coal mine in the Donbass region or drink home-distilled vodka in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.)
Monday, January 20, 2020
Algebra, Again
It seems to me that Americans, at least those in the Atlantic drainage, have an odd relationship with algebra. About seven years ago, Andrew Hacker argued in the The New York Times that algebra should not be required in high school.This exercised quite a few people for some days, after which it was probably forgotten as thoroughly as the formulas of Algebra I.
Last month, Jay Matthews suggested in The Washington Post that Algebra II should no longer be required. His suggestion received many responses for and against. I did take Algebra II in high school, though it I don't know that it was a required class there. It was third in the sequence of math classes, but only for students who had done well enough in Algebra I and Plane Geometry; other students took Trigonometry.
Nor do I remember what the class covered. I remember the instructor, and I remember my resentment at a poor grade for a proof that he considered too compressed. (I'm sure that he was right.) But what we did that was in advance of Algebra I, I can't tell you. Maybe we did more work with equations of two or more variables. I recall that a couple of the young, now in their upper 20s or approaching middle age, mentioned logarithms when I asked them about Algebra II ten or twenty years ago.
Maybe it isn't just Americans, or hasn't always been. In his autobiography, Stendhal wrote (Chapter XXVI)
Last month, Jay Matthews suggested in The Washington Post that Algebra II should no longer be required. His suggestion received many responses for and against. I did take Algebra II in high school, though it I don't know that it was a required class there. It was third in the sequence of math classes, but only for students who had done well enough in Algebra I and Plane Geometry; other students took Trigonometry.
Nor do I remember what the class covered. I remember the instructor, and I remember my resentment at a poor grade for a proof that he considered too compressed. (I'm sure that he was right.) But what we did that was in advance of Algebra I, I can't tell you. Maybe we did more work with equations of two or more variables. I recall that a couple of the young, now in their upper 20s or approaching middle age, mentioned logarithms when I asked them about Algebra II ten or twenty years ago.
Maybe it isn't just Americans, or hasn't always been. In his autobiography, Stendhal wrote (Chapter XXVI)
From [M. Chabert] I learnt about Euler and his problems on the number of eggs a peasant woman brings to market when a rascal robs her of one-fifth, and then she drops half the rest, etc, etc.But Stendhal was still bothered in middle age by the consideration that the multiplication of two negative numbers produces a positive one. He accepted it, on the practical ground that such calculations form part of others yielding true results; but clearly it still bothered him. The illustration that accompanies his statement of perplexity in Chapter XXXIV is much too complicated: he hasn't divided the labor far enough Clearly his teachers weren't up to explaining.
This opened my mind; I caught a glimpse of what it meant to use the instrument called algebra. I'm hanged if anyone had ever told me about this; M. Dupuy was always making pompous phrases on the subject, but never told us, quite simply: it's a division of labour which works miracles like all divisions of labour, and allows the mind to concentrate all its strength on a single aspect of things, on one of their qualities.
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