Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Just the other day, Good Pope Bennie opened a door for conservative Anglicans to become Roman Catholics without completely abandoning their Anglican traditions. (Links to more discussion here.) The Roman Catholic Church will be willing to create Personal Ordinariates for converting Anglicans, which is jargon for establishing non-territorial dioceses in which members retain a distinctive liturgical style different from that of the RCC as a whole. This has been done before on a very small scale, though it's a complex business and not everybody within the RCC agrees that it's a good thing.

Basically, conservative Anglicans will be received into custom-built dioceses with their own priests and prayerbooks (what Anglicans call missals) and report directly to the Pope, rather than to an RC archbishop in a particular city. They'll be able to continue using their liturgies and occasional ceremonies pretty much as they have before. The big win for them is that they will no longer have to cope with women priests or demands for gay marriage. However, there's a downside, and I wonder if it's dawned on potential crossover Anglicans what they'll have to leave behind:

• Birth control. Even conservative Anglicans in my experience have no particular issue with contraception. (Abortion is another matter entirely.) In the Roman Catholic Church, procreation is the primary reason for marriage and the only permissible reason for sexual activity or even sexual thoughts. Contraception remains a mortal sin. There's no indication that Personal Ordinariates trump Papal teachings at this level.
• Divorce. This was, after all, the whole reason for Anglicanism to begin with. While divorce is treated less casually among conservative Anglicans than among liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is nonetheless embraced reluctantly when necessary. Crossover Anglicans will have to agree with Rome that divorce is impossible.
• Their bishops. Male Anglican/Episcopalian priests have been accepted into the RCC in the past, but married bishops are considered off the table. The problem here is that every prominent Anglican bishop I've ever heard of has been married, primarily because nearly all Anglican/Episcopalian priests are married. So crossover Anglicans will have to accept episcopal oversight from Roman Catholic appointee bishops, or bishops newly consecrated out of the ranks of (the very uncommon) unmarried priests.

I don't think this will work, and here's why: In my view, a religious culture is more than a set of prayers and ceremonies. It's a way of seeing Earth as well as a way of seeing Heaven, and in my own research the Roman Catholic and Anglican Catholic undertstandings of the physical world, the human person, sex, and marriage stand out as radically different. There's some serious question in my mind as to how many Anglicans will embrace Rome once they completely understand what Rome will demand of them--and whether those who accede will continue to be Anglicans in any honest sense of the word.

• If like me you stand amazed at the precision of the English language (which is distinct from the precision of the people who use it, which is all over the map) do visit Obsolete Word of the Day. Many of the citations are old slang and many words do double duty: A slype is slang for a man who talks much about seducing women but lacks the courage to do so. Its formal use is architectural: the connection (often a covered but not enclosed passage) between the chapterhouse and the rest of a church complex. Much more there; you can sink hours on this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Here's a gatherum of peculiar or downright gross sodas from around the world. Yogurt-flavored Pepsi, anyone? Or (urrrp) Placenta? Alas, Inca Kola is not mentioned, though it should be. (Thanks to Bob Calverley, via George Ewing.)
• The title on this article is wrong (or perhaps some people understand the term "hyperdrive" differently than I do) but it describes a new twist on an interesting and mostly forgotten 1924 speculation of mathematician David Hilbert: that a stream of particles moving at greater than half the speed of light could accelerate a nearby stationary object without subjecting that object to inertial forces. That wouldn't be a true hyperdrive, but a genuine inertialess drive would almost seem like one if we limit the frame of reference to the starship. (I.e., we could go from here to sunlike star Zeta Tucanae in a week or so from our perspective, though 28 years from the universe's perspective.) This is mighty exotic physics, and if there's anything to it, we may learn more once Felber's hypothesis is tested using the LHC, or perhaps the Tevatron.
• I saw a trailer on what may be an interesting new film comedy: The Boat That Rocked , which had been originally (and I think more appropriately) titled Pirate Radio. It's about the 1960's offshore radio pirates operating just outside the UK's territorial waters, something that's always fascinated me. I've been taking notes on a novel I call (or called, sigh) Pirate Radio, exploring the notion of untraceable Internet broadcasting through large-scale powerline networking, and that research brought the old UK high seas radio pirates to mind. Probably won't write the novel, but it's been a good excuse to read up on things I haven't looked at since I read them in Popular Electronics in the 1960s.
• Don't miss the Steampunk Genre Fiction Generator. Stumbling through it with no malice (or anything else) aforethought, I came up with: "In a leather-clad Aztec empire, a young farm boy with dreams stumbles across a talking fish, which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots with the help of a cherubic girl with pigtails and spunk and her discomfort in formal wear, culminating in convoluted nonsense that squanders the reader's goodwill." Somebody else write it and I'll pay a quarter for that!
• The ice melt across Antarctica during this past Antarctic summer (2008-2009) was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite era. I'd worry a little less about rising oceans swallowing New York City, as much as I sometimes find myself wishing for them to do so.
• I used to wonder how corn mazes are made (and still do, for older mazes) but if you're doing one today, you're basically going to need a lawnmower and a GPS receiver, and a way to overlay a drawing onto a GPS-enabled map display. Oh, and a large field of corn that you're willing to seriously mess with.

I didn't have time to say much the other day about my hometown's narrow escape from Olympian Hell, and a few days' wait has allowed me to spot some reasonable analysis by other people, especially Andrew Zimbalist, who I'm sure is often called a Sports Benefits Denier. I was a little surprised that our president would fly over there to lobby for his hometown--it seems a bad use of his time when health insurance reform is sinking out of sight--but that's the sort of thing that presidents do, and I for one won't hold it against him.

The nature of the ongoing spend-tax-money-on-sports argument is very nicely summarized over on Slate, in this piece by Brad Flora. It's the same thing we hear again and again when billionaire sports team owners extort publicly financed stadiums from cities by threatening to move the team to a more gullible venue. The strategy virtually always works, though one wonders how or why.

Such deals never make financial sense for the cities and their taxpayers. It's a strange ballet of spreadsheets vs. hypnotism: The policy wonks (I'm not sure they're nerds as I define the term) come up with studies and hard numbers to debunk the Civic Pride and Benefits myths, while the jocks simply repeat statements of tribal emotion over and over until the electorate's eyes glaze over and caves. It's the same deal with the Olympics, and perhaps worse. Cities are expected to cough up billions of dollars to host an event lasting a few scant weeks, including the construction of substantial stadiums and athlete housing and lord knows what else, and then figure out how to make the facilities useful after the Games are over and everybody disperses to the four winds.

How can this ever make sense? It took Montreal thirty years to pay off the billions it cost to have the Games there in 1976. Few Olympic facilities get much use after the Games. Past Olympic facilities in some cities are crumbling wrecks behind barbed wire fences or already torn down in whole or in part and dumped in landfills. (That was actually Chicago's plan from the outset.) The vast sums of money required are virtually always steered into politically friendly hands, and sheesh, guys, this is Chicago we're talking about! (The sport they play best over there is racketball.) The crush of outsiders makes residents flee to the countryside, and in places where an ongoing tourist economy already exists, tourism falls to nothing before the Games and often remains depressed for years afterwards.

All for a mutated megatourney that has gone 180 from its original purpose: to transcend nationalism and glorify the efforts of individual athletes. Instead, we now have a global festival of flag-flavored tribalistic poo-flinging that takes huge advantage of the dazzling young athletes, who work basically for free while insiders and organizers pocket whatever money comes in.

I know, I know, I always come out against sports, heh. Guilty, and unrepentant. Still, not a single person I know in Chicago (and I know lots) came out for the Games, and if anybody was defending them before, I suspect they're being very quiet now.

My view is pretty simple: The Olympics have long been too big an event to bounce around the world as though they were a spelling bee. They need to go back to Greece and stay there forever. What we used to spend on building whole cities every four years to host the Games, we should now parcel out as prize money to the athletes, so that they can at least get a college education against the (strong) possibility that there isn't much money in professional biathalon once the last echoes of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream" fade to silence.

• I just missed seeing a nice article on the current sunspot dearth before posting my entry for August 20, 2009. The longest stretch this solar minimum is 52 days back in 2008, and we could well exceed that come early September with no additional spots. (We're now at 45 consecutive spotless days.)
• I'm practicing rolling my eyes for the latest showing of the Mars hoax. On August 27, multitudes of people who are rumored to posess something close to human intelligence are claiming that Mars will appear the size of the full Moon. (This does the email rounds every couple of years.) Note well that if Mars were the size of the full Moon in the sky, we'd be living a disaster movie, so be very glad it's a hoax.
• Stanford University reports that media multitaskers do not in fact multitask very well. I liked this refreshingly straightforward quote in the article: "We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn 't find it." More details here from the Beeb.
• ZDNet reports on a virus, named Win32.Induc, that pulls a trick I've never heard of before: It looks for the Delphi programming environment, and infects Delphi such that any apps built by that copy of Delphi will carry the virus. I can't quite see how this manages to propagate in a herd as thin as the Delphi programming world has become, unless Delphi programmers tend to use a lot of Delphi utilities obtained from places like Torry's. (I know I did, so that's my theory.)
• Maybe you had one: A die-stamped thin steel rectangular lunchbox, usually (but not always) with completely inane artwork, often branded to TV shows, toys, and other pop-culture phenomena. The Denver Westword has a "10 worst" feature on tin lunchboxes that's worth a look. I never carried a tin lunchbox to school (we used paper bags from Certified) but I have one now very much like #1, purchased at a hamfest years ago, filled with FT-243 ham-band crystals. I've always wondered why the boxes always had little vents punched in the short end sides.
• Here's an interesting 2-tube minimal broadcast-band superhet, using 12V space-charge tubes. It's interesting enough that I might even build one, though my own holy grail is a 2-tube FM receiver. I've got the schematic (courtesy John Bauman KB7NRN) and lack only the time to hack it together.
• I'd never heard of morning glory clouds, probably because they mostly happen in a certain part of Queensland, Australia. The bigger question is why they get all the truly great Weird Stuff down there, and we have to settle for minor-league weirdness like Michael Jackson.

• In one of my rambles around the Web looking for interestering perspectives on education, I ran across this very insightful (if possibly misnamed) blog post. My take: We are teaching an entire generation that their own blathery opinions are unassailable. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
• From Frank Glover comes a link to recent research suggesting that too much artificial light at night correlates with higher risk of breast and prostate cancer. More research is needed, but if the answer is to go to bed early and sleep in a dark room, Carol and I have it covered.
• Rocky Jones's Silvercup Rocket is well along on its restoration, and this page has both period and recent photos, as well as the best history of the Rocky Jones TV show that I've seen anywhere. (Ok, I'm biased--two of the photos are mine!)
• Many people who have read my Hi-Flier Kites article have asked me what sort of paper was used to make the dime-store paper kites of the 1960s. I've asked around and tried any number of papers, but now I think I've come fairly close with a type of paper made in Germany and called--sunuvugun--"kite paper." For some reason it's popular with the Waldorf school crowd, though not for making kites. You can get it in 19 1/2" X 27 1/2" sheets, albeit only in 100-sheet lots, from A Toy Garden. That's a little smaller than the Hi-Flier 30" kite, but it'll work. As spring gets a little closer, I'll make one and report back here.
• What the Waldorf schools do with kite paper is in fact impressive; this Flickr album scrolls through a good many photos of Waldorf traditional origami stars made with kite paper.
• From Bill Higgins comes a link to Low End Mac, a site devoted to older Mac machines, especially pre-OS/X.
• Pete Albrecht sends hope that Maurice Lenell may not be out of business, though their suburban Chicago plant will be razed to make way for yet another damned shopping mall.
• I have several reasons for opposing contact team sports in schools (as opposed to careful weight training and aerobics). This is another one.
• The three things I was afraid of as a six-year-old were robots, mummies, and volcanoes. I've made my peace with robots and mummies, but volcanoes still give me the willies, and our Alaskan citizens are watching another one nervously.
• In case I don't remember to mention it tomorrow or Sunday, Puppy Bowl V on Animal Planet kicks off at 3 PM EST Sunday, 2 PM central, 1 PM Mountain. When you get good and tired of watching spoiled-brat millionaires get the crap beat out of them by other spoiled-brat millionaires, the puppies may be a blessed relief. We never miss it anymore.

There was a very funny article by Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal this morning, about a very stylish New Yorker who converted his entire family to Macs years ago because, well, they were cool. This is easy to do when you have a good job and you know your co-op will continue to appreciate at the rate of 30% a year forever. However, now that Big Media is reminding us every day that we are being crushed under the worst Depression in world history, even the cool people are buying Windows machines because the cost of cool may far outweigh its benefits.

(By the way, although Dan looks cool--click to his Web site--he is actually a highly insightful writer who could make his reputation by puncturing cool culture as his writer's mission. Read his stuff. I think he should start by buying a suit and getting a professional publicity photo taken. At least he hasn't shaved his head, which the majority of cool guys do, especially once they start to go bald.)

There's nothing wrong with Macs apart from the fact that they cost too much. I have some technical quibbles about the UI--using a one-button mouse was a hideous mistake, founded in Jobs' condescending view that All Users Are Idiots--but it's a very solid, well-engineered box, basically a Unix system that has been beaten about the head until it learned some manners. But that's not why people buy them, and once The New Austerity goes mainstream, either their prices will come down or they will become the next NeXT.

MAKE Magazine regularly runs articles about making furniture out of old cardboard boxes. Odd, though, that I rarely hear anybody say that used computers work just as well as new computers--better, actually, when the new runs Vista and the old runs XP.

And cheap. You want cheap? On eBay right now as I write this, there's a used 2.8 GHz Dell SX270 with 1 GB of RAM, a keyboard, and a mouse. Starting bid is $89.95, the auction expires in an hour, and there are no bids. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a very good machine, because I have one almost exactly like it in our condo in Des Plaines, and I very happily lay out books on it and process graphics. Add an SX270 Windows install CD (which may cost you $30) and a monitor (which you may already have) and for under $200 you have a machine that is built like a tank and will do anything you need to do. The install CD is BIOS-locked to the model (not the individual machine) and you don't have to activate it. The only thing it won't do is be cool.

Interestingly, there are pockets of coolness in the free software world, as I've discovered as I've kicked into high gear revising my assembly language book to be all-Linux. The cool index of Karsten "Rasterman" Heitzler's Enlightenment desktop manager is off the charts, and Raster's been working on it for 12 years now. He himself is one of the coolest geeks I've ever met, and he does it without any condescension or venom. (I've spoken with him in person on several occasions, though it's been awhile.) How well it works I won't know until I try it, but that's a separate issue. The cool is there. Few people know about it because cool is a proxy for status, and status is a proxy for money. If it doesn't cost money, and if just anybody can get it, then in our culture it's almost by definition not cool.

This may change. It may change in weird ways, too. It's currently cool to live in Manhattan, but once companies move most New York jobs to Iowa, Iowa may have to become cooler. Pockets of uncool places are sometimes cool, like Boulder and Austin, but such cool places are so expensive that they may eventually share New York's fate. You can buy a three-bedroom bungalow outside of Ogallala, Nebraska for 10% of what a similar house would cost in Santa Cruz, and you'd be closer to the beach than much of Santa Cruz. (It's a way better beach, too.)

Jobs will eventually follow affordable housing. Are you too cool to live in Nebraska? Heh. We'll see.

We were just BSing a couple of nights ago over wine and beers at Julie's christening, and LOLCats came up. I'm not a regular reader of LOLCats, but I've seen it enough to get a sense for the genre, and the addition of a little zinfandel reminded me that this is not a new thing.

Nossir. I remember Monster Cards.

Back in 1961 or 1962, a fad was raging in my corner of the Immaculate Conception grade school playground: Monster cards. These were a little like baseball cards (and about the same size) but instead of sports heroes, they had stills from old monster movies, with a silly caption at the bottom. This was in plain English and not LOLCats-speak (which itself is a parody of IM shorthand) else the card at left would be captioned PUT ME ON UR FRENZ LIST? On the flipside was a drawing of a ghost over a joke calculated to make fourth-graders laugh. (As you might imagine, the bar was not very high.) The whole thing was wrapped up in plastic with a card-sized rectangle of some tepid and invariably stale bubble gum. My friends were all collecting them, and even though I spent my money on Hi-Flier kites and Tom Swift books rather than monster cards or comics, I flipped through my friends' stacks, grinning at some and rolling my eyes at others.

There were two types that I remember, both available from Perlen Drugs at the corner of Canfield and Talcott. The larger cards had "Spook Stories" printed on the back and were copyrighted by Universal Films. These had the most famous and recognizable monsters: Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolfman. The jokes on the back were sometimes even clever. The smaller cards had "Monster Laffs" printed on the back over the jokes (which were invariably stupid and rarely funny) and were printed in sheets of three with bad perfs between them. My duller friends who didn't catch on to folding at the perfs before separating them often had to Scotch tape their cards back together after inadvertently ripping them in half. These smaller cards (which collectors have dubbed "Monster Midgees") were copyrighted by cheapo fright house American International Films, and apart from the several incarnations of the She Creature and the memorable Colossal Beast, showed monsters that few of us had ever seen, even with Chicago Channel 7's perpetual scraping of the bottom of the monster movie barrel. Mostly they were hokey-looking paper mache alien things or brains with eyes, over even hokier (and generally un-funny) captions.

I'm surprised at how little there is online today about monster cards, at least the ones that I recall. The genre continued long after I left grade school, mutating as it went, but I ignored them because they dropped the humor. The legendary Mars Attacks! cards were in no way funny; in fact, they were a gruesome comic book presented one frame at a time. (I wonder sometimes if they were a poke in the eye of the Comics Code Authority.) Cards from mid-60s TV series like The Outer Limits and Star Trek had stills from the shows but no funny captions and no jokes—and sheesh, guys, I had already seen the TV shows. I half-expected full indices of the cards and their captions online, but apart from a few fan pages and pictures of cards for sale on eBay, they've mostly been forgotten. "Caption humor" seemed to go into eclipse for forty years, not to emerge until the Internet Age and LOLCats. I guess everything comes back eventually. I used to wear purple bell-bottoms and worse in the late 60s and early 70s. Are they next?

I elbowed a bit of a wasp's nest yesterday, in briefly recounting the story of Paul Z. "PZ" Myers, the biology professor who put out a call for Catholics to mail him consecrated hosts for public desecration. There's backstory that fairness requires me to relate: Webster Cook, a student at the University of Florida, went to Mass at a Catholic Ministries liturgy held on campus, took Communion, and went back to his pew without consuming the host. Why he did this is unclear—I had a great deal of trouble sifting facts from hearsay in this case, which exists mostly in the blogosphere—but he took the host out of the building even though some of the people from Campus Ministries noisily demanded that he either swallow it or give it back. He refused, and the host went home with him in his pocket. Thus began...Crackergate.

I may catch some flack here from my Catholic readers for saying this: The church should have left it at that. But no, the well-known William Donohue, head of the Catholic League, got into the act, and suddenly it's a category 5 barroom brawl. Donohue has made a career of jumping on anybody and everybody who says something that puts Catholicism in a bad light. How effective he's been is open to debate. He was certainly instrumental in getting ABC's warm-hearted but liberal-slanted Catholic sitcom Nothing Sacred canceled back in 1997; beyond that it's hard to tell. He's gone after solid milk-chocolate statues of Jesus and tried to organize a boycott of the film version of The Golden Compass. I'd suggest that there are other, better places where that sort of energy might be spent, but let it pass. Most moderate Catholics would love to find another village that would take him.

Webster Cook returned the undamaged host to the church about a week later, but not before the Catholic lunatic fringe had begun sending him death threats. And then Prof. Myers jumped into the game, eager to play the dozens and keep the pot at a full boil. Here are his exact words, posted on his blog:

I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

Here's the full post on Pharyngula.

Ok. Does any of this sound to you like a pack of seventh graders mixing it up on the playground? It sure does to me. The detailed facts seem to change depending on whom you read, but Cook is claiming that he was "restrained" by a woman who turns out to be about half his physical size. He is now filing charges against the Campus Ministries for violating university hazing rules that prohibit forced eating. And Bill Donohue is trying to get PZ Myers fired. So far, as best we can tell, no desecrations have taken place.

My primary comments on all this:

• Genuine death threats are illegal and actionable. If you get one, don't just bitch. Go to the cops. That's what laws are for.
• If your opponents are insulting you, meeting them insult-for-insult is precisely the wrong thing to do if you want the moral high ground, or to simply avoid looking stupid.
• Respect is an inner virtue; less something you show than something you are. Desecration happens in the man (or woman) and not to the host, flag, book, shrine, or image.
• Allowing people to make you angry gives them power over you.

Atheists who are cheering on Myers seem blind to the fact that Myers is making atheism look bad. Which leads me to ask: What is atheism actually for? If its goal is to win people away from religion, making sane arguments in a respectful manner would seem more effective than insults and ridicule. If (as seems to me at times) it's a sort of tribal venting society, then go for it, keeping in mind that few people recognize therapeutic venting for what it is, and you won't get a lot of converts from ordinary folks who are not axe-grinders by temperament. You'll just look churlish.

I'm sure I've already given this more attention than it really deserves. I've begun wondering if Webster Cook was challenged over a drink to come up with the college prank to end all college pranks (judged by the ratio of effort required to publicity generated) and he may have succeeded. I've also heard that PZ Myers is considering desecrating a copy of the Qur'an as well. I'll believe that when I see it.

I find much or most of the debate on the obesity explosion puzzling. Many major American cities are trying to pass laws severely limiting fast food outlets or banning them entirely, blaming them for our increasingly fat population. The sheer violence of the debate (cruise pertinent online discussions and you'll see what I mean) suggests that more is going on here than a discussion of nutrition, but I'll be damned if I can figure out just what, though I will speculate below.

As I've said here more than once, obesity, like most health issues, is more complex than most of us would like to admit. It's about calories but not only calories, and contrary to conventional wisdom, one calorie is like any other calorie...if you're a calorimeter. Sugar calories do different things in the body than fat calories, yet you wouldn't know this trying to get a grip on the problem online. The speed with which I dropped belly fat when I basically gave up sugar was startling. Sleep loss is also a factor, according to the Mayo Clinic. (Alas, the Mayo Clinic still believes in the BMI, which does not distinguish at all between fat and muscle. Ummm...and you guys are doctors?)

I've read a lot of speculation as to what kicked off the obesity epidemic in the midlate 80s. That's when high-fructose corn syrup went mainstream and drove cane sugar out of soft drinks. It was when our high-speed, high-stress always-on culture kicked into high gear and 60-hour weeks became a commonplace. It's when the overall inflation-adjusted price of food fell to historic lows. And it was also the time when something else happened: an explosion of low-end "sit-down" restaurants fielded by national franchises. You see them everywhere: Red Robin, Applebees, Black-Eyed Pea, TGI Friday's, and so on. They are legion. And if you're a true calorie believer, the caloric content of their dishes will take your breath away: One order of Outback's Aussie Cheese Fries appetizer contains 2,900 calories. Even expressed by weight, it is to boggle: A large Maggiano's pasta dish gets you over two pounds of noodles on a 15-inch plate.

Wow.

The tirade against fast-food restaurants is peculiar in that it does not recognize that fast-food portions are generally smaller than those at sit-down restaurants, and more to the point, fast-food items are what old-time IT guys would call "unbundled": You can get menu items separately if you want them. You can get a single small burger—or a Triple. You can get fries or no fries, and fries in sizes. On the much simpler sit-down restaurant menus, you must get the potatoes with the steak, and the portion size is always...lots. And anyone who says with a straight face that there's more fat in fast food than at casual dining sit-downs is either lying or doesn't get out much.

We didn't go to restaurants much when I was a kid, in part because back then, sit-down restaurants were higher-end, and expensive. We had to dress up on special occasions to go to Llandl's or the Kenilworth Inn in Lincolnwood. The notion of "casual dining" was still pretty uncommon, and probably considered a contradiction in terms by dining purists. (What there was fell into the separately interesting category of "greasy spoons.") Since 1985 or so, sit-downs went mainstream on a huge scale, as corporate restaurant franchises gobbled up key slots at the corners of megamalls and major intersections. Your average American went from dining out a few times a year to a couple of times a week, with portion sizes that I still find boggling.

My point here is that crucifying fast food as though it were the sole cause of obesity (or even the major contributor) is magical thinking, and has more than a whiff of politics in it. (When reading things like Fast Food Nation I see union opportunism and attacks from the Vega System.) Nothing is ever that simple, and if we keep insisting that it is, no progress will ever be made. It's not about McDonald's. It's about genetics, metabolism, portion control, exercise, sugar, stress, and sleep—and probably fifteen other things, most of which we still haven't defined. Let us not pull the trigger with the wrong guy in our sites, just to be shooting something.

• Most people know that the New Age Millerites believe that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012; if that's news to you, here's a nice overview of this deliciously deranged topic, courtesy Frank Glover.
• Several people online, in an almost offhand fashion, have indicated that Vista's knucklehead UAC feature is training people to click "Allow" automatically, no matter what it's asking about. That may be the single greatest design error in Vista, and could over time render Vista as insecure as anything that came before it, and certainly less secure than just working in an LUA under XP.
• A reader has asked me to post an entry on all magazines to which I have subscribed and re-upped at least once, but no longer subscribe to. That would be an interesting collection, and a long entry, but I'll try and get to it soon. One of that group that I might still read if I had enough time is First Things.
• I had a tin toy robot when I was six or seven, and it seems like most of my friends had one or two. So it was a Boomer kid-culture phenomenon, and one I don't see much about these days. Here's a photo gallery from Wired with some nice shots. Most of my early childhood nightmares were about robots and mummies, which suggests that my two subconscious fears (at least according to one amateur Jungian friend of mine from twenty-odd years ago) were of death and berserk machinery. I'm not so sure; that was what most of the cheap horror/sf flicks I saw on Channel 7 were about at that time.
• Another interesting article/discussion on the Fermi Paradox. Me? I think we really are alone. I don't know why just yet. If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because imagination as a mental mechanism is rare. But I've been thinking about this for thirty years and keep coming back to that conclusion.
• Lordy, I remember these from catalogs back in the early 60s. Why do they suggest a filk: Looking Through the Eyes of Badminton! (Thanks to Bishop Sam'l Bassett for the pointer.)

• While chasing an interesting "out of the blue" idea that came to me while exercising the other day, I happened upon an RV surplus shop. Not surprisingly, it's in Elkhart, Indiana (Ground Zero for the American RV industry) and it sells leftovers and overstocks of RV parts and interior furniture. If I were to want to built a custom RV dinette table with a built-in keyboard, well, this might be the place to start.
• Good grief: Has Big Media run out of Republicans to torment? ABC News posted this story about the pastor of Obama's Chicago church, who repeatedly condemns the US in his sermons and tells his people that they should be singing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America." Expect those sermons (which are offered for sale by the church) to become very popular in coming months.
• Illinois is famous for a lot of things, but being the historical capital of manufacturing of fraternal organization initiation and hazing equipment is not one of them. However, the De Moulin Company of Greenville, Illinois, now known for making band uniforms, used to do a big and almost unimaginably bizarre business manufacturing expensive gag items used to make new Masons and Elks feel like one of the gang. The precise psychology here is obscure to me (the last remotely fraternal organization I joined was the Boy Scouts) but the devices are just insane. Browse and boggle.
• Here's another source for home-made telescope optics and truss telescope kits up to 32" in clear aperature. Even though I'm not a big Dobsonian fan, the scopes look good, and if you want light-gathering power above all else something like this is as good as you're going to do short of a full-concrete observatory. The optics are not cheap, but they're good. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Also from Pete comes a link to a site selling Swiss Army Ohmmeters. Should the Swiss Army encounter resistance, well, they'll be ready.
• Mike Burton (who worked in the industry for some time) wrote to say that "double shot" keyboards are no longer produced due to their expense. A double-shot keyboard is one in which the keycaps are molded in two steps: One step to mold the body of the cap, with a void in the shape of the letter, and a second to fill the void with black plastic. Such keycaps never lose their legends, like my decal-equipped Avant Stellar is now doing at great speed. I guess I had better stock up on period Northgates.
• We have evidently found the gene that triggers the onset of puberty. One wonders what suppressing this gene would do long-term. What would be the psychology of a 75-year-old boy who had never gone through puberty? Larry Niven toyed with the idea in World Out of Time, speculating that stopping puberty would stop aging, but I intuit that much more could be done with it. Would I give up sex for a shot at becoming immortal? (Answer from this side of the fence: No. Ask me in 1962 and you might have gotten a different answer.) Much depends on whether emotional maturity is a process inherent in or only affected by puberty. Sooner or later some renegade will try this, and we'll know.

Every once in a while, I look around to see if the Singularity guys are still out there making noise, and shucky darns, they still are. I won't recap the whole Singularity thing, nor my primary objections; see my entry for August 28, 2004. But every couple of years, I feel obliged to demand that the Extropian crowd give us some examples of exponential progress.

Computing? Hah. We're adding cores to CPUs without any idea how to use them. We have no idea how human intelligence works conceptually. (If we did we could emulate it. We can't.) We have no idea how the brain works. (So much for uploading it to a computer.) We are barely on the threshold of some real understanding of cellular processes. We have been using the Space Shuttle for 30 years, and are about to go back to a spacecraft that is basically the 45-year-old Apollo, with some marginal improvements. We can't perfect a scramjet to save our lives, nor a fully reusable SSTO launch system. A Drexler-style nanoassembler is nowhere in sight. (It may take another hundred years, and will require an almost complete understanding of those elusive cellular processes.) We have not extended lifespans, though we have improved the quality of life to some extent in the years 40-70. I've read in several places that the drug companies are hard-pressed to come up with new miracle drugs. Commercial fusion energy is still the same 25 years away that it was in 1970.

Guys, show me any evidence at all of exponential progress.

I will ask the question again in another three years. In the meantime, I'm wise to you, and life in 2007 still looks a lot more like life in 1950 than life in 1950 looked like life in 1900. This is not an exponential curve, and if you think it is, we need to talk a little about what "exponential" means.

Whew. It's been nonstop the past few days, and the machine here has been off way more than it's been on. (You don't see that very often back home...) We've had a great deal of fun, but it's been very concentrated fun, and it hasn't been until this morning that I've been able to kick back and collect my thoughts, much less share them with you.

Thanksgiving dinner this year was at Carol's sister's house in Crystal Lake, and Kathy knows how to set a table like nobody else I've ever seen. The setting above may actually be a little spartan by her standards, because we had so many people to seat (along with one squirmy toddler in a high chair) that some of the fine touches had to be sacrified. The dinner itself was dazzling, with contributions from all corners of the family, including turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean salad, rolls, corn pudding, heavenly hash (a sweet pineapple-orange-coconut mashup in a yogurt matrix, with fruit-flavored mini-marshmallows), lemon cheesecake, pumpkin pie, and three different wines, all of which went. (One of the wines, 7 Deadly Zins 2005 old vines zinfandel, did not meet my expectations, but we finished it anyway.)

A few days earlier, on November 17, we had Katie Beth's first birthday party. Katie is now not only walking but tearing around the house at flank speed, climbing stairs and getting into everything that isn't at least four feet above the floor or anything climbable. One of the perks of reaching her first birthday was the addition of wheat to her diet (pediatricians are staging cut-in of various food groups these days as a hedge against allergies) and we celebrated by presenting her with her first chocolate cupcake. After a hesitant exploration (she first stuck her finger in the cupcake and then in her mouth, considering) she decided that cupcakes were acceptable, and then proceeded to demolish and devour it, taking care to paint her face symbolically before making a suitable offering to the floor gods. Gretchen's cooking, as always, was wonderful, and nobody went home hungry, even (or especially) the floor.

But that was all relatively sane and peaceful compared to yesterday, when we decided to undertake an adventure we haven't attempted in literally decades: Hopping the Metra train (which I will always consider the Northwestern) to downtown Chicago on the day after Thanksgiving, to partake of what has come to be called Black Friday.

I'd done this before. In fact, in 1975 I was on the job wandering around the Loop on Black Friday, waiting for Xerox copier service calls on my pager, calls that never came. Most of the law offices and other legal/financial firms in my chunk of the Loop had the day off, and their staff were probably all out there on State Street, elbowing each other and frantically spending money. I met Neuitha Payton (the tech rep in the adjoining territory) for lunch, and then (with no calls on the board for either of us) she and I wandered around in the massive Marshall Field's department store, where at one point we found ourselves on the escalator immediately behind Illinois' governor Dan Walker.

32 years later, Carol and I did it all again. It was just as nuts as we expected, if colder. State Street was a mob scene, packed with cars and taxis as we recalled it—the State Street pedestrian mall was a huge failure and reverted to ordinary traffic in 1997. There were amazing street drummers every few hundred feet, using 5-gallon plastic buckets instead of drums, and a surprising amount of construction. Beside the Picasso we took in the Christkindlmarket, a German ethnic Christmas festival about which people wandered with little shoe-shaped ceramic mugs of hot gluhwein, munching bratwurst, strudel, and potato pancakes. The crowds were dense, and it was intriguing to watch Chicago police officers weave expertly through the chaos on industrial-sized Segway scooters.

A lot of stores and restaurants we had known 30-odd years ago are now gone: The Berghoff vanished in 2005. Carson Pirie Scott on State Street closed earlier this year, and Marshall Field's, as quintessentially Chicago as anything else you could name, was engulfed and devoured by tasteless New Yawk junkhaus Macy's in 2006. There is little left of the classic Field's except for Frango Mints and the Walnut Room, which Macy's retains mostly to suppress threats of rioting.

So it was a little sadly that Carol and I went from floor to floor in Field's, realizing that the once legendary toy department was now a poor colony of F. A. O. Schwartz, crammed up against three acres of bras. We looked for but could not identify their nun's lounge, and thus cannot reliably prove that it ever existed. The selection of fine china didn't seem all that fine, and cookware was dominated by merchandise branded by ex-con Martha Stuart.

At least we lucked into a table at the Walnut Room about 4:30, and I will readily admit that the food was as good as we remembered, especially after an egg nog brandy alexander. Our older nephew Brian joined us beside the four-story-tall Christmas tree, and we had a wonderful time catching up on things. (Brian is now an investment banker over on Wacker Drive. Things change.) After dinner we discovered with delight that Garrett's Popcorn is still there at 4 East Madison, and worked through the considerable line to bring home a bag of each of their three varieties. Carol, Brian, and I then wandered west to the plug-ugly Richard B. Ogilvie Transportation Center which (wretch barf) replaced the elegant Northwestern Station that was razed in 1984. We took the Northwestern home again and spent an hour with our feet up in front of the TV, decompressing and munching popcorn.

Don't get the wrong impression. We had a lot of fun. I grumble a little because I'm an architectural conservative, and much of the Chicago of my youth and young adulthood is now gone. We do intend to make the trip more often (at least next spring once the weather breaks) and see some of the more recent improvements to the skyline, including the quirky but striking main public library. We also want to see a few of the monumental local churches, like St. Stanislaus Kostka and the little-known but incredible St. Mary of Perpetual Help, where my parents were married in 1949.

In the meantime, once I caught my breath a little, I realized that I was thankful for many things, friends and family foremost among them, but also for having lived in such an interesting and pivotal era, and having grown up in what was and remains the most dazzling big city in the world. You win a little and you lose a little, and history is nothing if not full of surprises. Chicago may eventually cure the downtown infection that is Macy's, and we hear rumors that Carson's may rise again. We didn't fully understand how great they were until we lost them, but when is that ever not the case?

While in the car the other day, I heard the slightly jazzy old torch song "That Old Devil Moon" on the radio—and the announcer said it was from the musical Finian's Rainbow. It caught me up short: That was in Finian's Rainbow? Huh. Didn't know that. Now, I thought I knew all the songs from Finian's Rainbow; in fact, I could sing them if you wanted to be tormented, especially "That Great Come-And-Get-It Day," one of musical theater's supreme comic moments. But "That Old Devil Moon" got away from me.

So when I came home, I looked up the score of Finian's Rainbow online. And then I realized that I didn't know half the songs from Finian's Rainbow. Really. Literally. Half the songs were missing from my remembrance.

Here's why: Back in high school when I first met Carol, we would often sit in her living room in the evening and talk while records played on her father's expensive Scott stereo system. Carol would drop a stack of LPs on the changer and basically forget about them. The changer could take a decent stack, and for the few hours we had together (we were both early-to-bed types) that was more than enough.

Except that we never flipped them over and listened to the other sides.

So it was with Finian's Rainbow and all the other records in her collection. We listened to Side 1. We never got around to Side 2. And guess which side of the Finian's Rainbow soundtrack "That Old Devil Moon" was on?

There was a saying current among Boomers in our youth, hurled at people who were harping to excess on a single point: "Hey man, what's on the other side of that record?" It's passed out of our culture, for the obvious reason: Records now have only one side. (I flash on the punchline from Arthur C. Clarke's classic 1949 short, "The Wall of Darkness".) If you hear any of Finian's Rainbow, today, you hear all of it.

Carol and I spent some time with Gretchen and Bill and Katie Beth last night, and while making funny noises at my only niece (now ten months old) I found myself asking her in my mind: Little girl, will you ever understand half of what your parents lived through? And can we even begin to imagine what you'll see when you're 90, in the year 2096?

(Important note: This is a rant. If you don't know what a rant is, please look it up. I've discovered that I've had to warn some people, as it's a bit of a departure for me. Thank you.)

The mostly insipid Slate has (finally) knocked one out of the park: Mike Steinberger's recent four-part series on wine language and individual differences in how we taste things, including wine. Mike has confirmed for all time what I have long suspected: That bitter wine (including most Cabernets and nearly all Chardonnays) is shit wine. No, he didn't say that. What he confirmed is that the human experience of taste is not uniform—we don't all taste the same things the same ways.

Duhh!

Wine snobs generally assume that if they say a wine is spectacular and sublime, it is. If said wine makes Jeff gag for its bottomless bitterness, well, that's because Jeff is a yahoo red-stater with insufficient education and breeding to appreciate the spectacularly sublime whiff of cat piss and moldy oak floorboards. The possibility that bitter tastes overwhelm all other tastes in my mouth doesn't occur to them, because it doesn't happen to them, and of course their experience is normative. But now—OMG—one of the wine snobs has had the courage to admit it.

The series is informative and funny; read it all if you have any least interest in wine. Mike explains the current state of the art in flavor science, and how research seems to divide humanity into supertasters, tasters, and nontasters, who differ primarily in the intensity of their reaction to bitter flavors. (Here's another piece on the topic.) Then he lays waste to the whole concept by getting his sense of taste quantitatively tested, only to discover that the science as it applies to him points in all different directions: His genes, his tongue anatomy, and his sensitivity to bitter flavors do not agree. As is true in so many different areas, we find that in the subjective experience of flavor, we need more science, and better.

Wow. A wine critic has been forced to admit what most of us intuitively grasp: Each of us tastes what we eat and drink in entirely different ways. The standard language and uniform culture of wine enthusiasm are learned, and although they are weakly based on identifiable nuances in taste, the operative word is "weak." This language and culture are passed along as received wisdom and mercilessly enforced, though every so often a cultural power like Roald Dahl has the courage to call the whole pretentious business the nonsense that it is.

Here's the only thing you really need to know about wine, and it's as true of wine as it is true (as Professor Schickele says) of music: If it tastes good, it is good. Do not apologize for what you like, ever.

Let me throw yet another handful of mud into the faces of the wine snobs. Michigander Steve Salaba brought a bottle of St. Julian's Red Heron wine ($7 at Meijer's) to Chicago on his last trip here, and we tried it during dinner at Gretchen and Bill's last week. It's a semi-sweet, non-vintage blend of American red grapes and Concord grapes, and quite unlike anything we've ever had before. It's a wonderful summer grilling wine that goes beautifully with the hot dogs and hamburgers that Bill expertly flung about on the coals. Serve it chilled.

Red Heron is about 75% Concord, which is a taste you don't get much in wine because wine snobs hate Concord and have declared it bad in all its possible uses. According to them, Concord tastes "foxy." Umm...what does that mean? And is it really bad? The truth is that we're in circular reference territory here: Technically, "foxy" refers to the flavor of the Concord grape, an American native that was originally called the "fox grape." So the wine snobs dislike Concord grapes because they taste like...themselves. I suspect that it really means "reminds of us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which are unworthy fare for self-anointed cultural sophisticates." (One particularly pugnacious wine critic called the Concord grape a "mutant blueberry," though it really is a grape and tastes nothing like blueberries—or oak floorboards either, which we consider a big plus.)

Red Heron is not easy to find outside of Michigan, and I'm unlikely to get it once we return to Colorado. So it is with relish that I will recall sipping Red Heron from my grandmother Sade Duntemann's 1919 crystal goblets, between bites of Bill's most excellent hamburgers. Life is good, wine does not have to be dry, and your experience of wine—as with all of life—is unique. Let the wine snobs chew their floorboards with ecstatic praises. It works for them. You and I can see it otherwise without explanation or apology.

What few in the media (but a great many down on the street) are saying about the Virginia Tech massacre is that law enforcement botched the whole thing. Between the time Ho began firing in the dorm and when he started exterminating people in Norris Hall was a gap of two hours, during which time very little was done. The criticism is not exactly fair, but that doesn't matter—it's the perception that the public is taking away from the incident: The police are unable to protect me. This is a political issue with some interesting wrinkles.

Any hoped-for momentum toward additional restrictions on firearms will be more than balanced by the crawling fear that self-protection is the only viable option if the police can't be trusted. (Chicago's recent scandal of a police officer videotaped beating a female bartender toppled the city's police chief and—again, unfairly—cemented the conviction in many people's minds that the Chicago police are thugs.) This is worsened by the fact that the victims were college students—people's children, albeit legally adult children—whose parents had entrusted them to the university and, by implication, to the local police. People are notoriously irrational when it comes to the safety of their children.

Gun control is one of a class of political issues I call primal, because the passion they evoke in many people is older than and runs deeper than reason. It's about fear, specifically fear of death, which is about as primal a fear as they come. Primal issues easily become political "third rails" that politicians fear to deal with, because primal interest long outlives casual interest. (CNN has an interesting short article on this topic.) The nation as a whole is already losing interest in the Virginia Tech massacre, but gun rights advocates are taking notes on who's saying what in the political realm, and those notes will be organized, retained, and remembered next fall, and for years and years after that. Bill Clinton himself admitted that Democratic anti-gun activism cost the party control of Congress for twelve years. Even Obama touches that rail at his peril.

There's another primal third rail out there: abortion. Abortion rights advocates are just as primal in their support of abortion rights as gun advocates are in support of gun ownership rights. Abortion advocacy isn't based on anything as simple as fear, but on the complex strategies for human sexual reproduction that evolution has handed us. I could never figure out why abortion was so primal an issue until I read The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. That's worth an entry or three all by itself, but if you're interested, do read the book. The point I want to make in this entry is simply that if you want to understand politics, you must understand the primal nature of certain issues, including gun control, abortion, and Social Security, which is another third rail based on the primal fear (sometimes even the rational fear) of being put out on the street and starving to death.

The tribalism that infects our whole political process is energized by primal fears, most specifically the confoundingly deep fear that if the other tribe gets control, they will destroy my tribe and all that my tribe stands for. Pressure groups use such primal fears to make people cough up money and get them to vote for their tribe. Saving democracy in this country is mostly the process of identifying our primal fears and defusing them before they make us slaves of one tribe or another, both of which exist solely to make the world safer for their leaders and largest donors.

Primal emotions (fear, anger, jealousy, and all the others) trump reason, and can be easily manipulated to bring us into bondage. Basically, every night before you go to bed, look in the mirror and ask, "Who owns me?"

Answering that question honestly is the most important single thing that you will ever do.

I don't know how I missed this—I must have been traveling at the time—but Fred Bulback reminded me that last year's April Fool's stunt on Slashdot was a heart-studded, bubblegum pink "redesign" of the site with their signature slogan "News for Nerds—Stuff That Matters" replaced with "OMG! Ponies!" (See my puzzled question in yesterday's entry, and thanks to the hordes of people who sent guesses and pointers.) Slashdot did not retain the design after April 1, but you can get a sense for what they did by looking here. The quick summary of the joke is this: With an overwhelmingly male audience, Slashdot decided to broaden its appeal to young girls, who as a group really like ponies. There may be more to it than that, but I'm unwilling to follow all the culture tendrils out to their fringes.

And so yet another meme was born. OMG! Ponies!

Next year, to broaden their appeal to fifty and sixtysomethings, it could be OMG! 6SN7s!

Organized nudism was invented in Germany in the 1930s; when responding to the inevitable criticism, the stoic nudists replied, "When all are naked, none are naked." Those primordial nudists came to mind this morning when I read a New York Times feature aggregated by Bruce Schneier in his monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter. Although long, it's worth reading in full. The gist of it is that our young people (I won't call them kids; it makes me sound old and grumpy) are willingly giving over the very idea of privacy, in ways that their Boomer and GenX parents find appalling and in many respects dangerous. The story begins with a statement from a (gorgeous) 26-year-old female bartender, stating, "I am naked on the Internet." This (I think deliberately) elicits a strong reaction from those over 30. But wait: Yes, she's naked on the Internet. But so is everybody else.

It's not always physical nakedness. Young people are posting brutally frank descriptions of their everyday lives, including their complex relationships to the other heavily connected beings in their peer clouds. There may have been a time when they didn't realize that such postings would be there forever, and in one archive or another possibly outlive them (I was naive enough to warn about this a couple of years ago) but no more. They understand it, perhaps more clearly than even we do, and they revel in it.

There's plenty of room to argue whether or not this is a safety hazard, though such argument is ironic among Boomers, given some of the crackpot things we did when young and yet somehow survived. For me it was often electric shock; in my teens I would sometimes begin soldering or unsoldering something in a tube project without hitting the power switch. I've taken more than a few 400V (or higher) shocks through a roll of solder—and yet I'm still here. I've fallen out of a couple of trees. I've eaten M&Ms that were on the floor a lot longer than five seconds. Maybe we should worry less. (I'm trying.)

The real issue here may be more subtle: How do you want to be remembered? Or, more to the point, are you done yet? I spent the first thirty-odd years of my life trying to decide on a career, and I know an amazing number of people whose lives at 50 have little or no resemblance to their lives at 20. If I had had a blog when I was 17, I would have been posting photos like the one at left. There was a short period in college when I wrote poetry. Then I went back and read the poetry—and stopped. I thought that the SF I wrote while in high school was pretty cool, when I was in high school. My standards are much higher now, and as much as I yearned to be published when I was 17, I'm now glad that I wasn't. Some of the young people in the NYT article speak about having a crisp near-total record of their teen years. I have a few snapshots like the one at left. That's about as crisp a record as I think I could stand.

There's a certain nudist's armor in the simple fact that millions of bright teens are baring their souls online, and as much as each considers him or herself a startlingly original phenomenon, they're so numerous and all so similar that they vanish into a kind of pointilist reflection of their culture. We did too, in the 60s and 70s, except that there was no Internet on which to display the reflection. I'm good with that.

It can be argued that all of our lives are processes, and we'll be remembered by what we did at the end, and not what we did in the beginning. Possibly, though there's a worm in it: Unless you're John F. Kennedy or Hilary Clinton, people are not going to plow through a crisp record of your young years and reflect that you've turned out way better now that you're 60. (Or dead.) Mostly they're going to google out your naked photos or your stupid poetry and consider you cheap entertainment.

Oh, and who will bet that once all of these carefree soul-baring teens snag their degrees, get married, and begin working 70-hour weeks, the ongoing record will continue? The result is that a lot of them will be remembered (in search archives, at least) by what they did when they were 20, because that's where the story stopped. That's a scary thought—or at least it should be.

• Here's something I never knew about before. And it's probably just as well. (Thanks to Karen Cooper for the awareness.)
• And something else I never knew about before. It looks to be an electronic autoharp, and I have thought autoharps were cool since I first saw a nun use one in grade school. There are some online WAV files of the instrument's output, but I would like to see someone (or a video of someone) playing one.
• I'm looking for the September 1964 issue of Electronics Illustrated, or at least a copy of the construction article on p. 32. I'm gathering pointers to articles about Compactron tubes, in anticipation of writing a Web page about them at some point, as I did about 12V "space charge" tubes back in 2005.
• One of my Finnish correspondents asked me what a "turtle shop" is, after seeing a mention of them near the Roxy in New York City. Here's the mention: "On a side street off Broadway and not far from the Roxy Theatre there was an open-air parking lot. A lonesome, wasted-looking area, it lay there the only substantial sight on a block of popcorn emporiums and turtle shops." It's from Truman Capote's Summer Crossing. NYC gives me hives and I no longer go there. Is a turtle shop where they sell live turtles? (I thought selling turtles as pets had been illegal for 20 years or more.) Or a shop that sells chocolate-covered peanut caramels? Or is there a cultural reference here I've not seen before? It happens. (See the first item in this entry.)

The US mint has designed yet another damned $1 coin, to be turned loose next February. It's going to be the same size and color of the current Sacajawea dollar, and have a rotating obverse to honor all of our deceased Presidents, with one President featured every two years. The design is not stellar, in my view, and I don't expect anybody to use them heavily, though I will probably frame the Millard Fillmore dollar when it appears in 2010. Although he got onto a pointless 13c stamp during the Depression, poor President Fillmore has never gotten anywhere near a coin, which is unfair, even for a man whom Mark Twain said "proved that no one can grow up to be President." He brought books in quantity to the White House for basically the first time, and I honor him for that. (He is said to have installed the first bathtub as well, but that's a legend circulated by H. L. Mencken.) He was the last President to be neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and late in life turned down an honorary degree from Cambridge University because he felt he lacked the education to warrant it. Basically, a contrarian, and a fairly humble one too.

Anyway. I have yet to hear any sense spoken about why our last two dollar coins have not clicked with the public: They look too much like quarters, and there are both practical and mythic problems with that. The public perception of the "incredible shrinking dollar" is not helped by a coin that looks no larger than a quarter, and I think it's discourteous to blind folk (who like coins because they can be differentiated by feel with a little practice) to add that kind of confusion to their pockets.

Government arguments that a larger dollar coin would cost too much in metal are specious; unless a coin cost more than a dollar to make there's really no problem, and a coin can last in circulation for fifty or sixty years. I got a 1940 Jefferson nickel in change last week, and while it had been around the block a few times and looked the part, it still helped pay for my chicken sandwich. A dollar coin that will last for sixty years doesn't have to cost a nickel to mint. Just consider how many dollar bills must be printed and shredded in that same time period.

My suggestion: Officially retire the half dollar coin (no great loss; I've not seen one in change in 25 years) and make a dollar coin that is 15% larger than the traditional half-dollar, and a little thicker. Keep the golden metal mix, or use something like the UK pound coin, which is a handsome pale copper-nickel color much like the US mint used on certain coins (like the wonderful Flying Eagle penny) in the 19th Century. On a recessed place on the coin's reverse, put the denomination in Braille.

That done, leave the design unchanged...forever. The same image of Abraham Lincoln has been on our penny for just under 100 years. That's how I like my coins: Reliable and eternal—rather like a dollar should be, but isn't.