P.S. A Column On Things

My Very First Christmas Column

The first week of my freshman year at MIT, Michael Fiertag said no. William C. Walker, Jr. said yes.

So, P.S. A Column on Things ran in ERGO (MIT’s objectivist newspaper) under Walker from September 23, 1970 until April 7, 1971. It ran six more times in the regular student paper, The Tech (under Fiertag’s boss Alex Makowski) and then died for a half century when his successor Robert Fourer killed it. (Note: yes, I am still getting over it). I was rereading my columns, and noticed that I could repeat one from almost exactly a half-century ago.

 16 December 1970

Here it is Christmas time again. My special Christmas present to all of you faithful ERGO readers will be a longer than usual column, since we are putting out a longer than usual issue this time, a sizzling spectacular of 12 pages filled with the spirit of Christmas selling, brought to you by the people whose money has made this all possible.

Come to think of it, faithful Column on Things readers might be more appropriate a greeting than ERGO readers, since I understand that the two sets are not always the same. Some people just do not know what they are missing.

So, here it is Christmas time again. It is one of those things of life that never seem to fail you. Like death and taxes, except that death only comes to you once, whereas taxes come every year to those who pay them; so Christmas is like taxes. Just like so many other religious events, it happens whether you are ready or not, with a regularity that many find disturbing.

“What? You mean it’s Christmas again already?”

“Oh, Christ”, say some others, in obvious reference to the historical origin of the occasion: the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Of course, most Americans today realize and concede that in this country, the Christmas season has come to mean so much more than “just religion”. As a matter of fact, to most it means anything but religion.

In the spirit which has made this country great, a simple religious holiday has become the Mercantile Celebration of the Winter Solstice. This is a time of great feasting and celebration among the merchants about our plentiful land of the free and home of the credit card. During this period, they harvest the fruits of a year’s labor. For some, over 50% of their annual take occurs during just this one time period (Thanksgiving to Christmas, although there is a movement afoot to have the opening moved back to Halloween, which is in itself another fine example of an American religious holiday); but that is actually a good thing. As Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president once remarked: “The business of America is business.” Then the time is good for the sellers of goods in the U.S., the time is also good for most of the employees of our land. Thus, they are able to buy many nice products to give as presents, which makes the times good, which makes the employee more money...

But we have degenerated in this discussion from the real point. If this were a normal discussion in a normal column, you would anticipate that at this point, I would state “All of the above is a terrible indication of the decline in the moral strength of our people and the true spirit of Christmas.” HOWEVER, THAT IS NOT MY CONCLUSION AT ALL.

Christmas, in my opinion, is what you make of it. There is still ample opportunity for you to enjoy it as a religious holiday if you so desire. But if you enjoy giving and receiving gifts; if you like the stories of Santa Claus, Rudolph, and Charlie Brown; if you like tinsel and Christmas trees; JOIN THE CROWD. And try not to pay too much heed to the messages which will, as usual, proliferate around Christmas time about “Getting Back to the REAL Christmas.” YOUR Christmas is the real Christmas; make it a very merry one.

Even M.I.T. gets into some sort of spirit for the duration of the season. Some little patches of Institute Grey (here and there) are covered by plastic symbols of the time: little Christmas bells, holly, mistletoe. The bright reds and greens really stand out from their surroundings, as though to remind that Christmas penetrates even here.

So, ‘neath our plastic tree, we look past our plastic gifts and over the top of the plastic Santa on our lawn to wish you and yours the most Merry of Christmases and a Happy New Year.

 

Old Phone Number 503-281-5132

I spend a lot of time on Google, and am often amazed at the bad or missing information I find. So I like to drive an occasional stake in the ground providing accurate/useful information.

The Internet has figured out I am associated with the above number, assigned to 4241 NE Beech St., Portland, Oregon (our family home, now owned by my nephew). When I moved my father to Pleasant Hill for his last year in 2012, I had the number forwarded to my cellphone, but there was only one real call and dozens of spam calls, so I turned it off.

The clerk noted, “You realize this number has been in your family since 1946.”

“No,” I corrected him, “it has been in my family, in various forms, since 1928—84 years.”

When my grandfather arrived in Portland in 1928, he moved into the first house on Beech Street and was assigned the number ATwater 5132. My dad was raised in the house next door, with the number ATlantic 1 5132. I grew up in the house next to that, starting with AT1-5132 as my number. By the time I went away to college, All-Number Dialing and Area Codes rendered the same phone number as 503-281-5132.

I am the last living member of the family for whom this was once my home phone number. If you’re looking for the last of the Portland Schindlers, I’m your guy.

This and That

Management
Kevin Sullivan wrote: Your [brain] meme made me recall a conversation I had during a management and leadership seminar. A participant (seemingly unaware of the Peter Principle) remarked managers must be good leaders because “Cream rises.” My comeback was, “So does bullshit. We've known since Archimedes ₋  the space they take up is greater than the mass of their contents!”
…
Hitler Movie Meme… Again
Yes, it’s a meme:
Hitler's "Downfall" Parodies | Know Your Meme. There have been hundreds of them over 14 years. Still, there’s room for one more: Counting the Vote. Thanks for the link, John Kavazanjian.
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How Tall was Goliath?
Daniel Dern: While/after reading this (How Tall was Goliath), am I the only one who wondered "So how tall was Goliath in Smoots?"[Ed. Note: MIT Inside Joke. Answer: 1.5 using the most popular interpretation of Goliath’s Biblical height]
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Sucker for a Survey
I just took a survey from the Bay Area CBT Center. Here’s what you can learn: “The following questionnaire will help you determine which schemas are most relevant for you in relationships. Schemas are core beliefs or stories that we have developed about ourselves and others in relationships. When we are unaware of these stories, we are more likely to engage in behaviors that create a self-fulfilling prophecy and reinforce these beliefs”
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Alito An Honest Man?
I had this exchange with a lawyer friend of mine:
   Me: “I’m curious if you have an opinion on why Alito turned out to be an honest man.” (He declined to let Trump stop the certification of Pennsylvania’s results)
   Lawyer: “It would have been really hard to get that one wrong. I’m not sure that makes him honest.”
...
Simultaneous Ending
Wouldn't it be nice if both people in a relationship realized it was over at the same time? This has never happened to me or anyone I've known. Has it ever happened to you?  Email me your story

Mini Review: Let Them All Talk

Worth the subscription to HBO Max. A subscription is less than two movie tickets a month, back when you could see movies. Worth your time: a great movie. Well-written, well-acted, pretty to look at. Stephen Soderberg directed, shot and edited the film (using two pseudonyms). What a career! I've loved everything he's done since Sex, Lies and Videotape. Kind of the goyishe Woody Allen, without the perversion. Reliable. Consistently Good. Keeps working, against all odds.

Talk is what they used to call a mid-market movie; serious issues, written for adults. And featuring adults: women who look their age! Summary from RogerEbert.com: “Alice Hughes (Meryl Streep) is a world-famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been asked to go to England to accept an award. She can’t fly, and so she convinces them to pay for her to take the Queen Mary across the ocean, and to spring for three people to accompany her—old friends Roberta (Candice Bergen) & Susan (Dianne Wiest) and her supportive nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges).”

Yup, that sums it up. Great dialog, much of it supposedly improvised. Shot on board the Queen Mary II.

Clearly a roman à clef of Mary Carthy's book The Group, and the discord it sowed among  the friends from Vassar upon whom she based the novel. Since most first novels are autobiographical (with varying levels of fictionalization), I am sure this is a common phenomenon, taken to an extreme because that's what movies do.

Best Moment of my Life

This is the best moment of my life. Now this one is. Now this one is.

I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but I feel fortunate and blessed that I have not yet reached the climax of my life. Perhaps my anticlimax will be quite short—assuming that there is an anticlimax, that Oscar Wilde was right: “life imitates art far more than art imitates life”?

Who else remembers drawing story arcs during middle school and high school to track the action in a novel?

On this graphic the beginning of the end is called falling action; a half-century ago we called in “anticlimax.”

The Past and What Is Life

I can’t find an attribution I trust for this first quote; it’s all over the Internet. Thanks to my daughter, who saw it on a web site:
“When your past calls, don't answer. It has nothing new to say.”

I don’t necessarily believe it, but it seems like good advice for most people, most of the time.

And of course, there is William Faulkner:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

For some reason, these quotes reminded me of another:
"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans"

--Allen Saunders, American writer, 1957

While I’m on the subject, I’ll repeat a quotation I first offered in April (I am sure of the provenance because I copied it out of the book while I was reading it):
"It’s not that you ever get to make the one, big dramatic decision that determines your future. Unfortunately, your life is ruled by 10,000 chickenshit, spur of the moment decisions that, over a period of time, add up to make your life what it is."

--Tom Wicker, Facing the Lions

My Love Songs

For the technically adept, if you’d like to download my love songs, go to this directory at Schindler.org. You can right click on the song to download it, then load it onto your phone… if you’re that good. If you’re not, I’m planning to make them all available on iTunes. Alas, iTunes forces you to charge a minimum of 99 cents a track. But if you’re not particularly technically adept, that will make it easier for you to download the songs—at a price.

This and That

Attention Pilots
Joe Kashi, re last week’s This and That item addressed to Joe Biden on the subject of the aging brain:

“Might I suggest that ‘aging’ is not so much getting old as giving up. It's like an older aircraft ₋ as long as you keep flying it, the plane remains in good shape minus the ordinary wear and tear, but when it sits on the ground, not flying for a long time, it starts going wrong.”
…
The Somewhat Ironically Satisfying Thought of the Day
Kevin Sullivan notes: “There is one member of the Electoral College from New York who might enjoy casting her upcoming vote for Joe Biden even more than most.....Hillary Clinton.”
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Sound Relationship Advice
From American agony aunt/advice columnist Ask Amy (formerly Ann Landers): “When a relationship is really clicking, it feels like a happily-ever-after, not like a messy first draft.”
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ICYMI: Doonesbury at 50
Thank you, Daniel Dern. Gary Trudeau picks his 10 most important strips from a half-century of Doonesbury. I have been reading his strip avidly since his Yale Days. The Tech dropped Peanuts for the Yale version; the syndicate said we were the first paper ever to drop Peanuts.

Relationship Advice: Ocean, Mountain or Desert

Of course most of you are old enough not to be in need of relationship advice anymore.

If you’ve been reading along, you know I am gradually producing a journal/book of advice for my grandson. The advice is in the form of a letter from me. I self-publish it each year as a hardback book (along with a journal of his pre-verbal youth) in the hope that it will be around even if I’m not. I just added a new piece that I’ve always felt was really important. Please let me know if you disagree with this advice, which I suggest he not read until he is 18—16 years from now.

I’ve always said the world is divided into three kinds of people: ocean people, mountain people and desert people. I now realize there is a fourth category: no preference. I came to this realization when looking at my parents and in-laws; my mom was an ocean person, my dad was no preference. My father-in-law was one of those rare desert people; my mother-in-law was an omnivore: she loved them all equally.

In any case, here’s why that’s important. When you are looking for someone to spend your life with, the question of: “Which do you prefer, ocean, mountain or desert” is probably extremely important, and certainly seldom asked. Yet it can be a fundamental source of harmony or disharmony in a long-term relationship. I now think it is one of the most important questions you can ask of someone in a budding relationship.

Two people with different preferences can have a happy lifetime together if their preference is strong and their revulsion weak. But I know from personal experience your odds of relationship success are improved if you share this preference with your mate.

By the way, I tried this theory out on an old friend who said she had no preference and didn’t think this compatibility issue was important. What do you think?

Mail me your response

My First Meme: The Brain

My wife the psychotherapist made a casual comment that our two-year-old grandson’s brain was not yet filled with bullshit. After a brief discussion she figured adult brains are 70% bullshit. I am more optimistic, so I created my first ever meme (using a public domain drawing of the brain)