Archive for March, 2025

Pop psychology

March 13, 2025

The title of today’s Bizarro cartoon — a Psychiatrist cartoon, which will be incomprehensible to anyone who’s not up on American punk music, with a bare-chested, long-haired patient being asked by the therapist, “Can you tell me. Iggy, why you want to be a dog?”, a question that makes no sense unless you’re up on the lyrics of particular punk-rock songs; Wayno’s title for the cartoon is “Bark Therapy”, which is entertaining but not actually informative:


(#1) You really have to know about Iggy Pop (pictured on the couch) and his 1969 recording of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

Iggy Pop has put in a brief appearance on this blog — in my 1/24/16 posting “Morning name: John Varvatos”, in a section on the proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges (with a reference to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), But now it’s time to say more.

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Music of the night

March 11, 2025

Another posting in the Kharkiv Opera genre — as in my 3/9 posting “The dandelion caper”, where I described the genre as “a pleasant, playful, or joyous event staged in the face of terrible times” (from my 3/2/25 posting “Three men walk into bar”). That day’s pleasure was the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us; today I bring you a mixture of pleasure, playfulness, and joy, along with some weirdness, but with an alarming sting in its tail. All from the music that played during my sleep time the night before last (7:30 pm to 4:15 am, with brief waking moments roughly every hour during the night for a whizz — hey, my kidney disease has been brought to a standstill for the moment, and my whizz regimen is the price I pay for that), so that I had ten moments of nighttime music, from the final “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (yes, I can drop off to sleep during the “Ode to Joy”, with its cascade of musical climaxes), to waking with Dvořák songs for violin.

In between there was an extraordinary grab-bag of musical works, listed below, followed by comments on two of the items.

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Falling apart: the meta-posting

March 11, 2025

An excursion into the title of yesterday’s posting “Things fall apart”, a wry tale of the misfortunes of daily life, with the following moment, in which a can opener literally falls apart, as its comedic center:

Can openers are difficult for me to operate. But I wrestled with it, and had gotten the can half open when the opener sprung apart, spraying gears and handles and other parts all over the kitchen counter. I then discovered that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again; the can opener had turned into a useless pile of metal and plastic trash.

My title has a distinguished pedigree, in this poetic line from William Butler Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Which then provided the title of the stunning 1958 novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

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Things fall apart

March 10, 2025

I had a plan for the day; its centerpiece was to be taking a shower, an elaborate, difficult, and often painful operation that takes about an hour from preparation to putting things away afterwards. But I wanted to get clean for two medical appointments on Wednesday. But I was about to run out of a large number of staples and so needed to refresh the supply, plus a sandwich for lunch today. So the plan was to put in a grocery order early in the day, take delivery around 8 or so, and then have time to take a shower before lunch. I had two postings already set up to be polished in the afternoon. A good day lay ahead.

But, oh my friends, it was not to be.

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The dandelion caper

March 9, 2025

This posting is in a genre I’ve come to think of as Kharkiv Opera: a pleasant, playful, or joyous event staged in the face of terrible times; from my 3/2/25 posting “Three men walk into bar”:

the Ukrainians have been managing to mount opera performances in an underground bomb shelter in the city of Kharkiv. They sing and dance and enjoy one another’s company.

Today’s pleasure is the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us, something that has been with me since I was a child at my father’s knee (so, for 80 years now), and was shared with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who was a wildflower enthusiast) and my guy Jacques Transue (whose passion for gardening matched mine), and survives now in my little patio garden (with super easy-care plants on it that I can look at through French doors while I work at the computer) and in occasional short walks in my neighborhood (with my sturdy outdoor walker to rest in as needed, and with the company of a caregiver, who I can talk with about what we see, while we refer frequently to on-line sources in Spanish and English).

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Flagging DEI

March 7, 2025

(These are rough times, and I’m going to use some very rough language; I think the world would be a better place if we all just got comfortable with this language — and what it conveys — but I understand that people come to what I write with their own histories, attitudes, and feelings, and some might be offended by my words; this posting is not suitable for them)

I live in a world where my government has declared, in effect, that anyone other than a straight white cis-gender Christian male (a swhiccm, for short) in a position of significance holds that position only because of efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion; we non-swhiccms are inferior by nature, members of various untouchable castes (and therefore we should all be dismissed from these positions). That fratbro hounddog Bret Kavanaugh serves as a SCOTUS justice because of his extraordinary legal acumen, yeah right, while the distinguished jurist Ketanji Brown Jackson sits on the SCOTUS bench only because KBJ is a black women.

Getting personal … I have an adjunct professor position at Stanford, the story goes, only because I am a DEI poster boy, and I’m a DEI poster boy because I’m a pussy-boy gay / queer / faggot who’s highly visible, one who somehow got ahead in linguistics and mouths off on the net, willing to talk about almost anything. (On pussy-boyhood: I really do have a t-shirt that says FUCK ME LIKE THE WHORE I AM — I don’t wear it in public only because I believe you shouldn’t make offers you’re not in a position to deliver on, and though I’m ready at any moment to explain the physical and emotional satisfactions I used to derive from getting fucked, I’m a very old, sick, and disabled fat guy, and I haven’t been, um, up to the act for decades, though it lives on vividly, every day, in my sexual imagination. Daily happy balls!)

Now. If I’m going to be tarred with the DEI label, I’m going to wear it like a badge of honor. I’m going to flag DEI the way the hanky code advertised preferences in gay sex acts: I’m hot to DEI your fuckin’ socks off, buddy!

So, of course, I shopped for a t-shirt.

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Sounding the alarm

March 6, 2025

Or: life in these Soviet States of America, under the bitch goddess Putinitsa. Please read the NYT opinion column by Masha Gessen from 2/28 (on-line), “Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Tr**p Just Handed Him the Knife”, where MG writes:

I am reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German Jews and Communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be antifascist flipped overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace. French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside Germany. As antifascism was marginalized, antisemitism became mainstream. Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.

Most days now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are experiencing a terrifying sort of déjà vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, like The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Tr**pism, and how the air itself seems to change, until suddenly it’s Zelensky, with his cleareyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.

Things have since gotten much worse for Zelenskyy.

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Throw them a string of opals!

March 4, 2025

My grandchild Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky was born 3/4/04, so they’re 21 years old today, 3/4/25 — the final legal hurdle to adulthood in my country  — and, wonderful coincidence, today is Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, etc.), so we should be tossing them a string of opals. I suggest something along these lines:


(#1) A blue Australian opal necklace (with an electroformed copper chain), jewelry by Anaika from Etsy (US$50)

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Warnings

March 3, 2025

Passed on by John McIntyre on Facebook yesterday, this Jim Benton cartoon:


(#1) It’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them

(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on Jim Benton and his cartoons.)

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Three men walk into a bar

March 2, 2025

Neville Chamberlain, Philippe Pétain, and Vidkun Quisling walk into a coal-miners’ bar in Donetsk, in Russian-occupied Donbass, where a band of Putin-lookalikes is warming up for their evening set. The out-of-towners order three bottles of cheap vodka, one for each of them, but the bartender confesses he has only one bottle left, so they’ll have to compete for it. A singing contest, he says, and the band will play any melody you choose. The boys at the bar will vote on your singing.

Pétain went first, belting out Госуда́рственный гимн Росси́йской Федера́ции ‘State Anthem of the Russian Federation’ (lyrics from 2000, music from 1939), which got some appreciative catcalls but mostly polite applause.

Next up, Quisling performed a surprisingly seductive rendition of Подмосковные вечера ‘Moscw Nights’, a Soviet Russian patriotic song from 1956, and the guys at the bar went wild, miming lewdly what they’d do on their patriotic Moscow nights.

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