A Bit of Pedantry

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article--the cover article, "Where Do Nazi Bones Belong?", about the work of the Volksbund, a German group that locates, documents, and reburies the remains of  German soldiers of World War II originally buried where they fell, in haste and without markers. The article has much of interest to say of this work, and of the conflicts that have arisen within the Volksbund between the more moderate members and those whose nationalism does not necessarily stop with the AfD.

However, I was brought to a stop by an account of a futile search for bodies in France. The soldiers supposed to have been buried near Meymac were said in the article to have been captured by the Macquis on June 8, 1945, "in the last days of the war." But June 8, 1945 was after the last days of the war in Europe, almost exactly a month after.

The magazine gives a picture of the author, who appears to be in his mid-forties at the oldest. I do not suppose the memory of World War II would have been the presence in his childhood that was in those of the baby boomers. Still, I'd have expected the editorial structure of the Times to include somebody who could more nearly identify the date of V-E day.

Bad Garlic

 During the last several years we have found what seems a high proportion of bad garlic. I consider garlic bad when it gets old enough to have shrunk in from the paper, so that its cloves take on a rubbery texture. I consider it worse when the clove is turning brown, worst when it has started to mold. We tend to use some garlic every week, so it is not as if we are letting a head sit for a month to molder.

This is not a failure in a single source. We buy garlic at the farmers market and at the grocery store. Both seem to sell us inferior garlic sometimes.

It seems to me that it was once less usual to find garlic gone bad. My recollection is of firm heads of garlic in the kitchen, ropes of garlic at friends' houses that looked firm. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps those ropes were in poor shape, and I discarded as much garlic then as I would now.

Lost

 In the chapter "Writing" of Reading and Writing, Robertson Davies wrote

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to draw in upon himself and his work until he knows nobody except other writers; he is then reduced to the literary desperation of writing a book about a man who is writing a book, and when he does that we know he is finished.

On St. Patrick's Day 2006, near the Gallery Place Metro, someone from Solas Nua offered me the choice of one of two or three books by Irish authors, and I chose the novel There Is a House by Kieron Connolly.  I took it home, looked at it, and put in on the bookshelf. It stayed there a good while.

Recently I noticed it and thought that I might as well read it: it is about 200 pages long, and the pages are not large. I have read it, and think that in part it is subject to Davies's criticism. The theme of the narrator's writer's block is varied if not improved by chapters of convalescence from alcoholic benders. 

Having said that, I will say that I don't believe that Connolly knew only other writers, though I can imagine that this might be easier in Ireland than in some other countries (and might not imply an especially narrow circle of acquaintances). I will also say that if Solas Nua were to appear suddenly next week and offer me another choice of books, I might take one of Connolly's if one were in the mix.

Tangible Reality

 Last week, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section gave about 3/4 of a page to an excerpt from a book that concerns Joan Didion, the Mansons, etc. I read the excerpt distractedly, until I came to a sentence beginning "Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969..." That stopped me.

Just above my left ankle there is a scar from a mishap in the late summer of 1969. The reality that contributed to the wound was certainly tangible enough. There are plenty of other tangible encounters I remember from that summer that left no scar but were sufficiently pleasant, unpleasant, or in any case significant, to stay in the memory. I imagine that most humans born by 1963 can say the same.

If in place of  "barely tangible" the author wrote "multiform and confusing", I could understand the sentence. As it stands, I can't.

 

Timber

 While we were out walking on Sunday, my wife and I had the following exchange:

W.:,"What does 'Zimmer' mean in German?"
I: "room". 
W.: "What does Zimmermann mean?"
I: "Carpenter. Hmm."

 A look at the Grimms' dictionary shows that "Zimmer" derives from roots cognate with the English "timber", and originally applied to buildings of wood and to wood suitable for building, then to portions of such a building. So a Zimmermann would be just who one needed to build a Zimmer.

And I don't know why it occurred to my wife to ask.

 

 

Certificates, Again

 It turns out that our network manager signed us up for certificates for the period 2013 through 2026. Evidently this means that we are grandfathered in for the one-year certificate duration. One of his successors received and verified the request for 2025-2026, then sent me the certificate bundle. I have applied the certificates to most of the servers that need it: two are very slow to come up after the installation and restart of the processes, and so are waiting for an early morning.

Suddenly the weeks leading up to mid-March are much less stressful. We have another year to think about how we will manage with the three-month certificates.

Certificates

Web server certificates used to last one for three years, I recall. Our network administrator would send a request to GoDaddy, get back a certificate, and it would be up to others of us to install it, possibly with some change of format, on the assorted servers. I thought that the three-year span was convenient. It gave one enough time to forget the procedures, but with proper documentation that didn't matter.

At some point, GoDaddy shortened the life of certificates to one year. That was tolerable. Last year, I read that the standard length of certificates would be three months, and so it is. This is great if you can set up LetsEncrypt with the http challenge, and let the certbot take over. If you can't, then life becomes somewhat more complicated. I suppose that we will figure out the dns challenge instead. But I wish we didn't have to. Is it really plausible to suppose that a certificate can be defeated in one year but not in three months? And there are proposals to shorten the lifetimes still further. Oh, dear.