P.S. A Column On Things

Start of Jan. 18 Column

Six Foot―Woo!

(A parody of Has Anybody Seen My Gal, from 1914/1925)

Six-foot, woo! Eyes of Blue
42 years spent with you,
I love it when I see my gal.

Sweet and kind, knows her mind.
Only had one other beau.
I love it when I see my gal.

Now if you run into a
Six-footer who, down in the mouth
Doesn’t know things, has no ring
Betcha Life it isn’t her.

But could she love, could she woo?
Could she, could she, could she coo?
You bet! Much more than others do.

(repeat)

Listen to the musical version of Six Foot-Woo!

Limited Audience Parody: Attention CMPers

I am a middle boomer, born in 1952. My parents, 16 and 18 when I was born, were practically the same generation, which means they didn’t hate rock and roll.

But while many boomers were weaned on Elvis and R&B, at my house it was country music (the soundtrack of Dad’s life was KWJJ) and the likes of Louis Prima and Trini Lopez for my mom.

Roger Miller's Kansas City Star was part of the soundtrack of my youth because Miller was my dad's favorite performer (the only concert we ever attended together was Miller’s at the Memorial Coliseum in the 1960s). Listening to the song recently, a parody version came to me. I paid an anonymous freelancer to create a version based on my time in Cupertino at Computer Systems News (mostly covering OEM disk drives) and Information Systems News (whence I knew Kildall). There are only a handful of people in the world who will "get" it. I hope the rest of you find it amusing.

Cupertino Star

Good Book, Bad Quote

I am about ¼^th of the way through Rodham: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld. It is a remarkable piece of counter-factual fiction; what if Hillary hadn’t married Bill? So far, it is an excellent book, and I am leaning towards a five-star review. I thought Curtis was a guy, which made the way he wrote about first love and physical contact astounding and impressive. Turns out Curtis is a gal, which may explain her exquisite and moving descriptions of Hillary’s thoughts and reactions as she meets Bill. I wish I could write as well as her.

Nevertheless, the author is, in my opinion, massively wrong in this passage:

―――begin quote――――

   “I don’t know if this sounds pathetic or conceited,” I [Hillary] said. “But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain.”

   Again, Phyllis and Nancy exchanged a glance. Phyllis’s voice was kind as she said, “Hillary, no man falls in love with a woman’s brain.”

――――-end quote―――

Wrong, wrong, wrong. As a proud sapiosexual, who has informed all my lovers that it was their mind I fell in love with, I can firmly state that Phyllis was incorrect.

Pauli's In Our Garden

(As a boy, I was known as Pauli, the German diminutive for Paul. Carol Rowe, a young woman who lived next door to our house out on 88^th Avenue in Portland, wrote this poem about me)

[Carl Rowe, if you run across this, I'd love to hear from you]

by Carol Rowe
(who was his babysitter, pre-1957)
Here he comes! For heaven's sake
Hide the nozzle and stow the rake!
A daisy's growing? He will find it.
He'll fall in the tulips and never mind it.
He will check to see if the faucet's on,
To flush away the seeded lawn.
He'll gleefully chase the embittered cat,
Into the window box, and more than that,
Pull his tail until Puss scrambles,
Leaving the pansies a riotous shambles.
From the porch he'll heave the doormat down
Into the camellias, then winningly frown,
As he tries to fathom from my glare
If he should follow, or beware.
Pooh! to the tempest.
Bah! to the gale,
Compared to Pauli they're far too frail.
To turn my hair from black to white,
But he can do it overnight.
Yet when he's absent, our garden dies,
And we are learning, with shocked surprise:
To treasure a garden is purest folly,
When the sun lives next door-
in Pauli!

Copyeditors

I ran an item about copyediting last week; Harrison Klein reminded me of another ode in praise of copyeditors that I probably read 42 years ago in New West, a magazine I consumed avidly at the time. Here’s what happens when copyediting fails

END OF JAN. 18 Column

Start of Jan. 11 Column

Top of the News

In case you’re the kind of person who doesn’t read mid-week news bulletins, I’ll repeat the news here.

First, the good news. I have taken the plunge and posted my love songs, plus a novelty song (Farmer’s Market Blues) and an inspiration song (Radical Acceptance) as an iTunes album called Lyrics by Paul. I would have been happy to give this music away, but iTunes requires a minimum price of 99 cents. All the songs are still available free on my website, but I’ve had a few people tell me they don’t have the technical skills to download music files to their phones.

Then the bad news: presidential misbehavior. As Dan Rather put it in a tweet, “The audio of Trump with the Georgia secretary of state. Wow. It’s like telling the Nixon tapes to ‘hold my beer.’” If you are behind the WaPost firewall, or haven’t used up your free articles, you can get the audio and a transcript of Trump’s call. Or you can hear the Georgia Call free on YouTube. It is incumbent on every U.S. citizen to know about this in detail.

Individually Optimal, Societally Suboptimal

Way back when I took 1.00 (Introduction to Computing) at MIT in 1970, when Fortran was the bee’s knees, we learned that individual optimization does not always produce societal optimization. The example given was driving to work. Individuals optimize use of their time by driving, rather than taking public transit. But millions of individually optimal decisions produce a sub-optimal outcome for society: traffic jams (which also make the original decision less optimal). There are many examples of this, but it occurs to me the most recent one is Covid. People taking vacations and going out in public without masks may be making personally optimal decisions (I doubt it), but they are clearly sub-optimal for society.

By the way, having written a bank-line simulation program, I think it is a crime that there is a bank, grocery story or DMV office that does not provide a single line for multiple tellers. Without question, lines work better for the customer if there is a single shared line, rather than “guess which line has the person who will be paying in pennies.”

Not relevant but interesting: two things that stuck with me from my handful of engineering classes.

“For the love of God, please don’t design just for ease of manufacturing. Everything breaks. Design for maintenance as well. It is criminal that you have to remove the engine to repair the dashboard of an American car.”

“A project can be cheap, fast or good. You can have any two of those, but never all three.”

Farmers’ Market Blues

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Any poem or song that needs explaining isn’t much of a poem. And yet… pretend I am a famous poet and you are interested in the story behind Farmers’ Market Blues. Then pretend you’re interested in the song as well.

I shop at the Moraga Farmers’ Market every Sunday. One recent morning, I was listening to Weird Al’s First World Problems as I drove to the market. I think you’ll see why it inspired me to write this. When I mentioned I was disappointed at no hot dogs and one dozen eggs, Hajj told me to write a poem about it.

Another  inspiration was the fact that I took the UPenn Authentic Happiness Inventory, which strongly suggests a wide-ranging sense of humor is an important element in happiness. The survey highlighted the fact that I think almost everything in life is funny, while most of my poetry has covered the range from deadly serious to mildly wry.

I am not a writer of light verse, and I never hope to see one. All I know is, I’d rather see than be one. Still, here is my first attempt at deliberate light verse. Perhaps more to follow.

Dots WERE Connected... Last Year

Not for the first time in American history, there were plenty of “dots” of intelligence that could have been connected (see following item). But this time, someone did connect them and foresaw the trashing of the US Capitol by pro-Trump rioters. If I were a betting man, I would lay money on the appearance of some Trump official offering humiliating and obviously false testimony in an effort to tear away Condo Rice’s No One Could  Have Predicted This trophy.

Intelligence Failures, Then and Now

It began with my friend Joe Kashi: “Thinking over events of the past week, I recall years of warnings about Trump’s personality approach coming from scores of nationally prominent psychiatrists, former heads of national intelligence, retired generals, and a lot of other experienced people.”

I responded: In a sense, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11: flashing red warnings everywhere that we were either not seeing or not capable of acting on. God knows I’ve had that happen in my personal life.

I ended up with this discussion of Intelligence Failures, Then and Now

 

This and That

 

Dress like Bill Murray
Here’s your chance to dress like Bill Murray and take a New Years Day Polar Bear Plunge in South Carolina. Sign up for 2021. Thanks, Kent Peterman.
…
Humor: Dreading the Office?
Here’s a new casual (as they call them at the New Yorker) from Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe: Dreading….or dreaming? Do you want to go back to your office?

If you’re willing to write for what I pay ($0.00), feel free to submit a casual humorous essay any time.
…
Suggested Web Page
Here's a page full of pointers to my writing about journalism
...
Suggested Book
I cannot recommend too highly Beth Karpf’s suggestion: Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink. A long but gripping story about the difficulties of being female in 17th century England, and in American Academia in the 21^st.
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Suggested Documentary
Heal on Netflix is moving; much of it was in line with my spiritual experience of 2020. “Stories from spiritual leaders, physicians and those with chronic illnesses reveal the powerful connection between the human psyche and physical health.”
...
Suggested Movie
The New Yorker suggested streaming 1949's A Letter to Three Wives. I loved it. Well, it is a little sappy in places, but it makes up for it (in my opinion) by being snappy and proto-feminist in others. And Kirk Douglas' screed about commercial radio is worth the price of admission if you're interested in writing. A professor posted an excellent set of Three Wives film notes.
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Funny Take on Copy Editing
Robert Malchman sent me a link to this New York Times article: Because of an Editing Error: Blunders, gaffes and terrible math skills, written in permanent ink.
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Love, Weddings & Other Disasters
Available on Amazon, featuring Diane Keaton and Jeremy Irons. Funny, clever, heart-warming: everything you could ask for in a rom-com.
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This Week's Events
I will let Randy Rainbow express my opinion of this week's events.

End Of Jan. 11 Column