The Internet of Things

 Suppose that somebody ran an automated scan of your network for vulnerabilities, and reported that this web server had an outdated version of PHP, and that one an outdated version of JQuery. You would know to deal with this: if in a hurry, you would upgrade the packages at once, and trust in the developers to have maintained compatibility. If cautious, you might clone the servers, upgrade, and test carefully before upgrading the production servers. Either way, the path to the upgrade would be clear.

Now suppose that the outdated version warnings came attached to addresses that you did not recognize, and that on checking you found that they belonged to televisions and security cameras. Documentation on maintaining web servers is an internet search away, but not necessarily when those web servers simply provide the management interface for a device. A friend remarks that such servers could be implemented in firmware and essentially impossible for the owner to upgrade.

What can happen if someone uses a vulnerability in PHP or JQuery to take over a television or camera? Perhaps they could bore us by showing bad movies, or stream live video of our yards in Pyongyang. More likely, I suppose, intruders could set up the device as a base from which to try to break into more interesting systems. I would think that the facilities offered by a camera would be substantially less than those of a general-purpose computer, but I don't know.

Do "smart" devices with network interfaces--refrigerators, washing machines, etc.--make one's home less secure? I suspect that they do, but not substantially so, mostly because so much of the home is likely to be insecure already--routers with weak passwords, PCs without anti-virus software, users careless about clicking on links. Still, I wish that we didn't have to worry about the security of computers in devices that don't appear to have them.

Over the Heads

 Having found my copy of The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport, I turned to an essay I did not remember, "Travel Reconsidered", and saw

This past summer I was cooling my heels outside the Musée du Louvre, a shrine not to be missed by the passionate pilgrim (Henry James's phrase for the American absorbing culture in Europe). Two such pilgrims with whom I was on vacation had wanted to see the Mona Lisa, and I, having shown them what I wanted them to see, had declined to try to see Leonardo's painting over the heads of five Lutheran Sunday School classes from Oslo, two busloads of Japanese businessmen, and a contingent of Mexican Rotarians.

I recall seeing the painting at some distance in 2007, and supposing that the crowds were brought by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. But The Hunter Gracchus was published in 1996, so one can blame Dan Brown only so far. I do remember thinking that one could build a good small city museum around the paintings on any ten linear yards of the walls past which folks marched, eyes front, to see the Mona Lisa.

A couple of fellow Americans informed Davenport that the Mona Lisa was at the Louver, across town, and that what he was looking at was not the Louver but an old royal palace. Well, one can, as he goes on to write, get misinformation closer to home.

Grundoons and Others

 When my father worked at a Geological Survey laboratory in the early to middle 1950s, "grundoon" was a common facetious term for a small child. This was about the peak of the baby boom, so the term must have received a lot of use. I had supposed that "grundoon" was somehow related to "grandson", for I first heard it in relation to my father's grandson. In fact, the term came from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, and the Grundoon was a baby groundhog.

When I first encountered the original Grundoon, in the book I Go Pogo, it was clear how the expression had caught on. One notices two qualities of the Grundoon: he is always asleep, and he is always utterly limber, draped over someone's forearm. Newborns spend most of their time sleeping, and they are very limber. It is true that few of them have the fine head of hair, something like Elvis Presley's, that I recall the Grundoon as having.

This came to mind at the sight of a neighbor's daughter, just two months old, and sometimes to be seen toted in a sling, curled up. We have met seldom, and so far I think she has been asleep or drowsy each time.

In Janet Lewis's novel The Invasion, Waub-ojeeg, a chief of the Ojibways along the western end of Lake Superior, and his son-in-law John Johnston, consider the infant Lewis Saurin Johnston:

One evening as the grandmother was taking the child back to his mother, his grandfather said, softly, affectionately, "Very soon he will be doing the only thing that Manabozho [a god of the Ojibways] could never do. You will be proud of him then."
"And what was that?" asked Johnston innocently.
"Manabozho could not put his toe in his mouth."

 

 

Rereading A Conspiracy of Dunces

 The book for the next meeting of our neighborhood book club is A Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. The last time I read the book was probably forty years ago. I found that I remembered it tolerably well--only one character, Professor Talc, seemed wholly new, and he is a minor character. But pretty much everyone else seemed familiar, if not by name then by role.

It struck me in the reading that I have very little sense of Ignatius O'Reilly's voice. Does he sound like Foghorn Leghorn? Does he sound like someone with a heavy New York accent of the type less frequently heard now? Should I be hearing a bass or a baritone, considering his size? This did not disturb me the first time I read the book. Yet given the rich absurdity of nearly everything Ignatius says or writes, it would be better to be able to imagine the voice. Most of the rest of the cast speaks an English that is just enough off to guide one: "Idnatius" for "Ignatius", "ersters" for "oysters", "nucular bum" for "nuclear bomb". But Ignatius has been to school, and acquired diction, if not sense.

And there seemed to a lot of screaming: desk sergeants at patrolmen, bar owners at their staff, the residents of Constantine Street at neighbors and family. Is the screaming what a Midwesterner would call "yelling"? I think of screaming as more nearly unhinged than yelling.

 The book aged pretty well, I thought. There are usually reservations when one rereads, and this was not an exception. It seemed to me that Burma Jones's dialogue would have improved by losing about every other "Whoa!". Mrs. Levy served a purpose in the plot, but otherwise cluttered the page without gaining plausibility or adding much. And as I said, I couldn't hear Ignatius's voice.

The Great Cryptogram

 Second Story Books has the two volumes of Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays and will sell them to you for $37.50. Together, they amount to 998 pages. The thought of all that print brings to mind the fellow in Wodehouse, one of the Mulliners perhaps, who tried to ingratiate himself with his beloved's eccentric aunt by reading up on the Baconian theory: for his trouble he found himself the audience of her long and bewildering explanation of some point, an explanation said to be unusually short and lucid for a Baconian's. It also reminds me what heroic reading Samuel Schoenbaum undertook when writing Shakespeare's Lives.

Brought to You by the U.S. Air Force

 Happening to look back at the front matter of First-Order Logic by Raymond M. Smullyan, I noticed that

The research of this study was sponsored
by the Information Research Division, Air Force Office
of Scientific Research, under Grant No. 433-65.

  I had known of the Air Force's role in sponsoring studies in operations research and computing, but I had not known that it sponsored studies in logic per se.

Lost Manuscripts

 Today I noticed in looking into a volume by John Lukacs the passage

In one instance, the book was delayed when the secretary who was supposed to retype the manuscript (the ephemeral paramour of the chief editor) forgot it in the broom closet of her summer rental apartment on Fire Island.

The book was The Last European War, 1939-1941, the passage appeared first in Confessions of an Original Sinner.

 This recalled what Wright Morris says in A Cloud of Light of his second novel, The Man Who Was:

... one of my first readers, a teacher at the Baldwin School, a Swiss woman with a profound dislike for speed reading, called me to ask if there was not something peculiar with a line of text on page 219. This line read "To get her mind off Boulder Dam I took the road up Baldy wanted to know about Boulder Dam." I allowed as how the line did sound a bit strange. A word or a phrase had been dropped. I would hasten to check on it. On checking this out--which took some time since I lacked the original copy of the manuscript--I found that eight or ten pages were missing.... Some months later, conducting my own inscrutable investigation, I discovered that the editor in charge of the galleys had been suffering a mid-career crisis, complicated romantically, that had finally revealed itself in pages missing from assorted galleys. They had simply vanished. The prime exhibit, designed to calm small losers like myself, was a mystery novel, written by Marjorie Bonner, the wife of Malcolm Lowry, which  was published without its concluding chapter. No question that this book was a mystery that remained unsolved. Only a handful of readers, besides the author, took the pains to point this out.

Here I don't see how lost galleys should have created the gaps. One sent galley proofs out for proofreading and perhaps reviews: the galleys themselves, long, heavy trays of type, by then usually Linotype slugs, never left the printer's. I would have expected bits missing from galley proofs to appear as clusters unusually dense in missed errors. I suspect that it was pages of manuscript that went missing rather than galleys.

In my copy-editing days, I once stepped off a train at Metro Center, leaving an envelope of manuscripts behind. Realizing this just too late to step back on the train, I took the next train out to Stadium-Armory, where the Orange and Blue lines diverged. There I waited for I suppose the second Blue Line train heading west, stepped on, and retrieved the envelope. I can't say that romance made me leave the envelope--I was just absent-minded.