Voting has never been easier

Until after the election, this item will be at the top of my column.

Here are the relevant focus-grouped mottoes: Democracy is stronger when we all vote! Your Neighbors Are Waiting For You To Vote!

These links apply to the entire country:

It is now trivial to Get Your Absentee Ballot

In case you live in a place where some people are trying to throw you off the voter rolls, check on your status and register if need be:

Am I registered to vote?

Feel free to share to share this item with others:

Short version (suitable for posters and written letters): tinyurl.com/1psacot1

Long version: Voting has never been easier

 


Grandkids: Grandson: A Visit to Abba

I had promised to make a sno-cone at our house, and wanted to expose my grandson to Peter and the Wolf.

Turns out our icemaker’s “crushed” ice is barely crushed at all. Even running it through the Cuisinart barely improved it. It was a grade B sno-cone (flavored with hazelnut syrup), but he told me he liked it, and he tends to be quite honest on the subject of food likes and dislikes, so I believed him.

Because his music teacher has taught him to identify a number of instruments, I decided to play Peter and the Wolf  for him―the classic young person’s introduction to the orchestra. At first, I played Sir John Gielgud narrating it. I thought they would show each instrument as it played. Nope. So I switched to the classic Disney Peter and the Wolf, which showed the instruments briefly, then showed the story. As soon as the wolf swallowed the duck, you knew it was alive because that’s what happened in Red Riding Hood.


Life Predictors (1)

In science and medicine, a proxy is a way to measure something indirectly. You can’t measure infection at home, so you use body temperature as a proxy. You can’t measure the time and quality of sleep at home, so your phone uses temperature, movement and breathing as a proxy.

When I was fundraising for The Tech’s centennial celebration, the MIT development office told me you couldn’t directly predict willingness and means to give (except by past performance). So they told me (perhaps in jest) to concentrate on people whose first name was a last name, as they tended to be better off and more likely to be able to donate.

This matched my experience. I went to the office of Rutherford P. Johnson (not his real name) and made a pitch. When I was done, he wrote out a three-figure check (well, actually, he had his assistant write it and he signed it) made out to the centennial fund, care of MIT.

In this discussion, one must be aware of the fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, because of this). Or, as it is often put in science and statistics, “correlation is not causation.”

It was first explained to me as, “All murderers have eaten mashed potatoes, so all people who eat mashed potatoes become murderers.” It turns out that only a tiny fraction of people eating mashed potatoes commit murder.

The next two parts of this will discuss life predictors I have seen, experienced, known and heard of.

To be continued


Quotes: Usually, Not Really (1)

Virtually every quotation you know is either misattributed or inaccurate. Neither particularly matters. They last as quotes because they resonate with truth. Getting them exactly right or precisely attributed doesn’t make them any worse at expressing truths or humor.

For example, my freshman advisor told me:

“If you don’t stop spending so much time at the newspaper and the radio station you will have a mediocre academic career, taking the path of least resistance, just slipping by everything.”

Years later, when I started telling the anecdote, I quoted him as warning me that I was in “the twilight of a mediocre academic career”. It was only recently, when I discovered my freshman journal, that I realized I was misquoting him. I still tell the anecdote that way, because it is better. It appears in my 50th reunion book from MIT.

Misattributed quotes used to stay alive on the fact that that you generally can’t prove the negative. The Internet makes available nearly every word written by a great person, so at the very least you can say, “There is no record of them saying or writing that.”

To be continued


Movie Review: Lee *****

It took Kate Winslet seven years to make this female-centric bopic of Lee Miller, a WWII combat photographer for British Vogue magazine. Who was, incidentally, a woman.

I was thrilled to see women everywhere in the credits: director Ellen Kuras, producers, writers, cinematographers. You go girls. You go, audience.

Almost all the reviews mention this real incident from Miller’s life: when she joined the troops in Hitler’s Munich apartment, she had her picture taken soaking, disrespectfully, in his bathtub. It’s a great scene in a great movie, even though you know it is coming.

Many of the handful of men in the movie with speaking roles don’t start out well, although most eventually come around. This film blows the Bechdel Test out of the water.

There is a framing device: Lee being interviewed. The last scene exposes two classic tropes of American film-making, but if I told you, that would be a spoiler. If you’re a regular film goer, prepare not to be surprised.

There are 20 producer credits, of whom five are women, including both the "real" producers from the PGA (Producers Guild of America). One PGA producer, to my surprise, was Winslet. How many guilds does this woman belong to? Two of the three screenwriters are women.


Don’t Bleed On The Copy: Megalopolis (2.5/5 Stars)

Why is Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis so polarizing? So half-bad?

Because (deep breath), apparently, no one ever told Coppola “Don’t Bleed On The Copy.” When you’re the writer, director and producer, who is there to offer sage counsel? Clearly, at no point, did anyone ask him to tighten up the script or leave a moment of film on the cutting room floor.

As a young man, I was taught both the literal and figurative meanings of the phrase “Don’t Bleed On The Copy.” (copy being a term for your written work).

Literally, in the days of cold-type reproduction, it meant that when you used an Xacto-Knife to slice up the copy prior to pasting it down on a board, it was important not to cut yourself and bleed on it. Not, of course, because a bleeding cut was dangerous, but because it ruined the copy which had to be recreated.

Figuratively, it meant don’t be so much in love with every word you write that you bleed when one of them is cut. As a person who writes long, I would have heard this regularly from editors, had anyone outside The Tech ever used the phrase in the figurative sense.

If you are a Francis Coppola completist (he doesn’t like the Ford, so I don’t use it except parenthetically), you must see his Magnum Opus.

Still, it’s no wonder reviewers and audiences are split 50/50 on this overlong (2:20) epic; they can’t decide if it is trash or treasure. How could it not be treasure?

The film stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, James Remar, D. B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman. They all offer performances that are no less than creditable and sometimes downright amazing. Coppola knows how to direct actors.

Read someone else for the plot, the budget, the backstory. If you’re a film buff, you already know these things. My take: it’s as if all the elements of a great film where thrown into a blender: actors, sets, cinematography, musical score, high concept (on the back of a business card: The Catilinarian conspiracy reset in modern New York City). It looks and sounds like a real film, is moving and interesting, but comes off as an incoherent jumble and a waste of talent.

Before you rush to the comments section: Yes, ironically, I bled all over my copy, so this review is too long.


Grandkids: Grandson: Repeating

My grandson has already noticed I repeat my stories, such that when I start one he’s heard before, he says, “I already know that Abba.”

The same goes with grammar and vocabulary. We were talking about Sally Snake and Trip Triceratops (and all his other stuffed animals, all of which get obvious names) and I mentioned they involved alliteration, which I started to describe.

“You’ve told me that 52 times,” he said, with a specificity that I don’t think I deserve and may be an exaggeration.


Regrets? A few Episode 2

There is a regret I am extra-happy about not having: treating people badly. To the best of my recollection, I have only treated one person badly in my entire life, and she recently told me she hadn’t noticed.

And while we’re at it, one small regret I do have is not taking typing in high school. I was “protecting my 4-point,” and the typing teacher was notorious for C and D grades. Since I have typed every day of my adult life, it would be nice if I knew how.

In retrospect, I’m not sure the difference between a 3.97 GPA and a 3.95 would make that much difference. Plus, as an excellent student, I might have been one of those few who got a good grade.

Yes, if that’s my only regret, I am a lucky man.


This and That

Red Rock Cider/LeslieNielson
Nielson made the funniest commercials ever.

My UMOC Campaign
How did I spend my time as editor-in-chief of The Tech? One thing I did was for Ugliest Man on Campus.

Can You Beat The Internet?
I am sure that, in You Only Live Twice, a Japanese man says to Bond, “It fascinates me the way you westerners wrap your nasal secretions in silk. We use tissues.” Can you find proof?

A Day In The Life Of Jerry Wiesner
Want to know what the late MIT president Jerome B. “Jerry” Wiesner did for a living?

More Life Lessons

Clark Smith offered more life lessons, which now appear at the bottom of my list. Here’s a sample:
If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always “No”
Splitting an infinitive is not a crime
Call your mother