Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 1

If I fail to annoy everyone, I’m sorry

LOON BOOK MINI-REPORT

“Theodore Rex” by Edmond Morris is a ponderous book. The paperback weighs about 2 pounds and 213 of its 772 pages are devoted to archives, bibliography, credits, and index. As you might imagine, it is a scholarly work. It is the second of a planned biographic trilogy of Theodore Roosevelt, and Teddy Rex covers only 8 years of his life—those while he was President. Morris is a gifted writer of elegant English, and, for the Loon, that is the salvaging grace of this book. It didn’t hurt that Teddy Roosevelt is easily, in my mind, the most interesting man to ever hold the Presidency. He had an unusual mix of characteristics and abilities. Off the top of the Loon’s forgetful head, a wholly incomplete list follows, speed reader, photographic memory, polymath, conservationist and environmentalist, war-monger, stoic of the first order, cunning politician, encyclical charismatic, outdoorsman, mountain climber, hunter and bird-watcher, combat soldier, empire builder, visionary, child-like, ambitious, honorable, privileged easterner by birth but self-made westerner by choice, sickly child, uncommon physical strength and courage with uncommon stamina as an adult, prolific writer author of 15 books and reader of 15,000, fair-minded, honest, scientist, and the list should go on.

All that said, the exercise of Presidential power, which is what this book is about, is not a subject on the Loon’s list of top ten interests. Agreed, Morris weaves in the personal Roosevelt with the political, and that, plus Morris’ grand use of language kept me plodding along. The book is also heavy in content; every sentence adds something, and so, a few pages each night before sleep were often all I could handle. This book was made possible because Teddy Roosevelt produced a prodigious volume of writings, most of which are were archived unedited No President before or since is in the same class with him in this regard. Further, the many flawed Presidents during the last of half of the 20th century have been leery of leaving such an incriminating paper trail. Teddy wasn’t cautious with his reputation, as he was the most popular and endearing President we have ever had, and he knew it. He could have had, for the mere asking, a 3rd term and, perhaps, a 4th, term as President, but he had declared that he would stand for President twice and no more. Not that he wasn’t sorely tempted to continue in power, but the dishonor of pledges broken was not a frivolous matter back then, and assets of character were precious and not to be easily sullied. My! My! How behavior in the mighty has changed.

The final book of the trilogy is being written now. It is Teddy’s biography from the end of his Presidency until his death—I will read it. Of the first two books, I recommend most the first, “The Making of Theodore Roosevelt” (His life until be became President), but if you are interested in reading gorgeous writing which give great insight into life in the United States while Teddy was alive (1858-1919), read all three.

NOTABLE QUOTES

“In war the fathers bury their sons; whereas in peace the sons bury their fathers,” Croesus.
Famous as the subject of the saying, “Rich as Croesus”, he was a 6th century BC King of Lydia, and the last of the line. Lydia was a small kingdom in what is now western Anatolian Turkey. The Loon thought you just might like to know that.

“It is all I have wanted to be since I was thirteen.” The reining Miss U.S.A.

These words she spoke while blubbering on TV, after she had been miraculously pardoned by the chief inquisitor and conveyor of all wondrous treasures, THE DONALD, and after she had been caught hard-partying while under age in New York City. The Loon understands fully how important it has become for young people to aspire to be famous. This young woman has made the grade, even though I do not know her name, nor want to, nor need to One can only wonder if she will founder on the rocks of fame, or right herself by shedding her unearned celebrity, and go on to actually do something, or even, perchance, to become a genuine person? The Loon is not filled with confidence at the prospects. Under age hard-partying in New York City is certainly not a credential in support of the label of infamy, but today, infamy is almost synonymous with fame. Today almost any form of recognition is desirable over anonymity. A recent article in “Psychology Today” noted that many young people have relinquished aspirations of accomplishing anything, and exchanged them for desires to be someone—“famous” is they word use.. A current major role model for those who desire to be famous is Paris Hilton who is primarily famous for being famous, and secondarily for being rich and having parents who have been, most likely, derelict in their parental responsibilities. “Sniff!” goes the Loon.
LOON JAZZ BOOK MINI-REPORT (Skip this if you were an addressee on the latest installment of “News and Views from the Hall LindyJazzMobile”—the address lists for Fruits o’ the Loon and News and Views from the Hall LindyJazzMobile have some overlap.)
“The Oxford Companion to Jazz” is a compendium of 61 essays on jazz. It was published in 2000, edited by Bill Kirshner, and the essay contributors include some of the most knowledgeable and gifted writers in the field of jazz journalism and criticism. The essay subject matter is protean; covering history, prominent players and singers, the role of instruments, national and international locales, and the types, styles, and movements in jazz, and it’s used in film and literature. It is a 6 pound 800 page paperback doorstop, but one of the most informative books on jazz I have ever read, and I will tell why. Each essay in this book covers a small segment of jazz using limited scope unconfused by the inherent complexity in the history of jazz and the plethora of interlocking styles in the music. Most books covering the entirety of jazz offer a skewed perspective depending on the musical preference of the author, and a history of the music is often condensed into one huge indigestible confusing story line. The history of jazz is not neat, and everyone has their own perceived Gospel about of the jazz plot line. I have mine. To wit, in one paragraph…just to prove it can be done.

Jazz arose sometime during the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century in New Orleans. It was played by men in racially segregated bands as a musical stew composed of field hollers, Ragtime, Blues, African rhythms and sensibilities, European music structure, and seasoned with a spritz of Spanish pepper. The stew lid blew off, and the music poured up the Mississippi River, and, after topping the levees in Memphis and St. Louis, it flooded into Chicago where Louis Armstrong changed everything. Polyphonic jazz became monophonic. Then the erupting stew spewed all the way to New York City from which racially integrated Big Bands spread like a benign virus throughout the east and middle of the United States playing a music known as “swing”. , best characterized by Bill Basie’s comment “I want four beats to every measure”. This pissed off the polyphonists. Charlie Parker then went to New York City and created BeBop a music which changed everything by changing the vocabulary of jazz. This pissed off both the swingers and the polyphonists, the latter which then became derisively known as Mouldy Figs and who finally assigned their music the name “Dixieland”. In the 1960s everything changed again as jazz became psychotic (actually “multipolyschizophrenic), with multiple personalities emerging, and when the stew lost its distinctive flava, it became Baskin Robins jazz with 33 personalities. A personality exemplified by John Coltrane (Spiritual) was followed by one taking jazz back toward its roots (Hard Bop) with another taking it away from its roots (Third Wave). Then Miles Davis created a commercial personality (Fusion), which was followed by a back to kindergarten jazz personality (Atonal), and then there were several cigarette ad jazz personalities (Cool, Lite and Free), all of which were superseded by an all-string acoustic personality (Django Jazz), several revivalist jazz personalities (Neo-Hot Jazz, Retro-Swing, and Messiah Wynton Jazz), and finally, by a Kenny G Jazz personality (Modern). All jazz is now played by racially segregated, but sexually integrated bands, as women now play every jazz instrument except for drums because it is unladylike to sit a bandstand all night with your legs spread wide apart.

This book contains a panoramic variety of jazz essays but with concise content, such as “Louis Armstrong”, “Ragtime Then and Now”, “Hot Music of the ’20s”, “Major Soloists of the ‘30s and ‘40s”, “The Avant-Garde from 1949 to 1967”. “Jazz and Dance”, “Jazz and Brazilian Music”, and “Jazz Drumming” with each essay uncluttered by the bewildering omnibus of what, where, how, and by whom which was then concurrent in jazz. Dig this, I even learned what Blues is and ain’t.

Read it, or be square--if you have 3 months to spare.

NOTE: I am conflicted about where to put a Jazz book report. Should it go in “Fruit’s o’ the Loon” where most of my book reports are found, or, because of jazz content, go in “News and Views from the LindyJazzMobile”? I am going to try to put this book report in both—If, that is, someone will please tell me how to do it without having to type the whole damned thing twice—something I am always loathe to do. Retyping is like washing dishes or making beds, repetitive work that men have never excelled at. BTW, I tried going to “edit” to do the “copy” and “paste” dealy thingy, but my autocratic computer wouldn’t allow it—the nerve of some machines.

Damn! I made it work. Do I hear a move for a resolution to make The Loon the Cyber-Tech King of the Universe?

THE LOON’S MINI-BITCH LIST

The Loon hasn’t been dancing for over 2 weeks, and the edginess born of inactivity has flipped him over into an Andy Rooney mode. To wit:

Why do the media give NASA get so much press to lobby the people for obscenely expensive and largely worthless toys in space. NASA is nervous because young people are completely engaged with You-Tube and Googleing hither thither and yon, and have become indifferent to NASA’s grand plan to build a new fleet of Orion Spacecraft, which can build a way-station on the moon, and then put a man on Mars. See, the youngsters of today are going to have to hoist the tax cost of Orions onto their backs someday, and so NASA is flacking like a side-show shill in a Carnie in order to sell the program. The United States did very nicely for almost 200 years without an American on the moon, and now we have to have one on Mars? Oh! The shame of it all, to be second to the Chinese on Mars. The Loon sez, “Bah! it’s just exorbitantly expensive jingoism, e.g.,” My rocket’s bigger than your rocket.”

Why in the newspaper society sections do doctors get a “Dr” title, but plebian socialites don’t rate a “Mr.” “Ms” or “Mrs.” title? With the recent advent of common family names as given names to both men and women, you can’t tell the gender of the plebeians, and you can’t tell the gender of the doctors either. It’s a lousy system.

Why don’t people use their real names on internet forums? They like to call their internet names “avatars” when they are really just aliases. Are they ashamed of who they are, or what they will write? If you send an unsigned letter to the editor of a newspaper or magazine, the editor should maybe read it, but never publish it. Why do internet forums allow incognito writers? Apparently, the answer is because they can’t stop them, and, perhaps, in the interest of the utter freedom for the internet, the forums shouldn’t insist on real names. However, a cautionary note: utter freedom is utter anarchy. Incidentally the Loon’s internet moniker is “mrmusichall”, but he always affixes “Allen Hall” to the bottom of all postings. He is so proud of himself.

Why do these pissy-little cell phones have to have so many teeny tiny buttons on their sides? The Loon doesn’t know what they are for, and it is almost impossible for Big-Fingers Loon to pick one up without making some damned function go off that the Loon didn’t want in the first place. If he wanted to know the time, he could look at my watch. If he wanted to take a picture, he could use my camera. He doesn’t want call waiting—Hell! He doesn’t even know what it is. He doesn’t want call conferencing—he likes to talk to one person at a time, if he has to talk to more than one person, he becomes even more than ordinarily confused. He understands and appreciates the value of cell phones, for safety, say, if he am hopelessly lost somewhere in a Home Depot, and for coordination of activities, say, when Rudy wants to summons him to dinner when he am more than 120 feet away. If he had my way, the only time when his cell phone would be on was when he wants to make a call. Truly, ever since he quit drinking, he seems to have lost the urge to talk. Both Rudy and he have a cell phone—that was his first mistake--and so, one or the other is ringing all the time. We are SO popular.

Why do people love all these so-called reality TV shows starring so-called celebrities? The “reality” is BS and people designated as celebrities** are now not only ice skating and dancing, they are in a show in which they are foisted off on us as real cops, in a show named “Armed and Famous”. Gimmie a break! The Loon will believe the celebrities are real cops when one is really shot by a real criminal. What’s next, celebrities as real brain surgeons? The only reality show starring celebrities the Loon would like to watch would be entitled “Lost (hopefully forever) on a Jungle Island with lots of Leeches, Giant Lizards with bacteria-laced flesh-dissolving bacteria in their saliva, and Rattle-headed Copper Moccasin Cobras with venom so poisonous that if the snake strikes at you and misses, you are gonna die anyway”.

** Would you please s’plain to da Loon who in the hell determines who is a celebrity? Some celebrities have never been celebrated for doing anything, and besides, da Loon have never heard of half of them. Does the last clause in the last sentence say more about da Loon as an out-of-the-know doofus, than it does about undeserving celebrities?


The Loon is fresh off two days of dance, and, as a result, much more mellow.

YET ANOTHER APPLICATION OF “THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES”

Congress passed a law to make it possible for deaf people to use the telephone. The deaf person could type in a message and send it over the phone to an operator who would call the person to whom the message was intended and read it to them. For those of us who have many times tried in vain to reach a real person on the phone, just imagine the expense of implementing this law. Oh! It’s no where near the expense of making all public accommodation wheel-chair friendly, but still, hiring real people as telephone operators is not cheap. But forget the expense; the United States is a rich country, and part of that money is rightfully spent on making life easier for the disabled. However, this law allowing the deaf to you the phone is being primarily used by scammers, bunko- artists, drug-runners, money-launderers and the like. They have become the primary users of the new service because there is no record of their voices, and the law prohibits the operators from revealing to anyone the content of the messages. No Catholic Priest, no FBI agent and no local police detectives are allowed to know. And so, Congress has passed a law which could not have been better designed to make the business of crime easier and less undetectable. In defense of Congress, it has never been a body much concerned with “The Law of Unintended Consequences”, but, Hey! a just a tad of common-sense prescience would have helped here. Anyway they are going to have to cut the criminal use balls off of this law, that is to say, when ever they get around to it. Right now, many are absorbed with redecorating their new offices in D.C.

POTPOURRI

1. We in the United States should thank our lucky stars our immigration problem is largely with Christians from democratic Mexico. Consider for a moment, the European immigration problem which is largely Muslims from autocratic countries with a fondness for sharia law.

2. Correct the Loon if he is mistaken, but aren’t we undergoing a major bimbo eruption exemplified by Lindsey Loan, Nicole Ritchie, Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, and the pair of ace ditzes, Jessica and Ashley Simpson?

3. For those of you who object to eating meat from cloned animals, the Loon welcomes you to consider this thought experiment. Let’s say you are a cannibal and you were given a present of the most delicious and tender human you have ever eaten, and after having consumed the whole human, you leaned that the human had an identical twin. Would you object to eating the twin?

Allen Hall. alias “The Loon”
January 1 2007, in sunny warm Punta Gorda Florida

Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 2

If I fail to offend everyone, I’m sorry.

SO SHOOT ME, ALREADY!

The Loon sent out the first installment of the 2007 ”Fruits o’ the Loon” four days early (on December 28, 2006). Four readers noticed; all these eagle-eyes should be CEOs of national accounting firms. Here is the Loon’s lame excuse. Rather than confess to the charge of calendarly dementia, the facts are these. Writing midway through the last FotL he doubted he had not enough copy to finish a final ’06 installment, and so, he labeled it prematurely as #1 ’07, but, alas, he erred—ain’t the first time—a brief boost of writing energy on the final installment finished it early, but he was then too pooped to go back and change it because he had already grown sick of reading it—half of writing…..is editing. And so….NOW you know the rest of the story. That’s the Loon's story and he ain’t agonna change it.

CRAZY AL’S NEWS DIGEST

MARIJUANA

It has been reported (don’t ask me by whom) that marijuana is America’s biggest cash crop. Since a couple of 40 gallon trash cans stuffed full of fresh harvested Mary Jane can sell (so the police say) for $75,000 on the street, which, incidentally, is the primary site for retail, “bigness” of the crop has nothing to do with bigness of the acreage planted, as much of marijuana is grown indoors. This indoor agriculture provides dramatic decorative houseplants, generous indoor production of pure oxygen, plus a nifty source of income from an off-the-books cottage industry. You don’t often get such a neat three-fur.

However, after Crazy Al pondered the vagarities of taxation for recreational commodities, he has come to believe that MJ should be legalized and taxed. For starters, if MJ is our biggest cash crop, there must be a booming demand for it. For nexters, Crazy Al once read the whole Bible and he can remember no Biblical prohibition against MJ. For second nexters, Crazy Al has never heard of anyone ODing on reefers. For lasters, why in the hell doesn’t the Gummint tax cannabinol like they do alcohol and nicotine? Government reason # 1 is that MJ has been reported to be the gate-way drug. See, MJ use leads to use of worse drugs. That might be true, since the same street peddlers sell all the illegal stuff. BUT, if you legalize MJ, then the street pushers can’t compete with every Circle K which sells reefers by the pack to every viper who walks in the door. Once legalized, anyone can plant MJ, and the extra supply brings down the retail price. If the government doesn’t get too greedy and set the tax so high that black-market MJ can compete, then store-bought MJ becomes the only retail supply. Taxation on nicotine must not be too high, because, when was the last time you heard of people buying black market roll-your-own cigarettes? Similarly, booze is taxed heavily. The Loon read somewhere long ago, that it costs fifty cents to distill a gallon of alcohol that goes into bottles full of good quality sippin’ hooch, but it costs fifty dollars to buy a gallon of good sippin’ hooch. The difference is soaked up by packaging, advertising, distribution, profits and, a big hunk by taxation. To be sure, there are still stills in them hills of Appalachia, but most of the hooch consumed in America is purchased across the counter or bar. So, if Crazy Al can assume that nicotine and potable alcohol are taxed at reasonable levels, (he would dearly love to know the total State and Federal tax takes for each*), he must assume that the government has the wherewithal and savvy to tax legalized MJ at a level to make it both economically available to every adult who wants it, and, at the same time, provide some money for the government coffers. Let’s examine all the benefits from Crazy Al’s ”Legalize and Tax” proposal. With money coming in from MJ taxes, he will have less taxes to pay. Prisons are able to release many prisoners and the courts will have fewer hopheads and peddlers send to the clank, which reduces government expenses, and reduce his taxes. The extra men available in the work force will cause a drop in labor costs (more supply makes prices fall—has it ever been otherwise?). The reduced cost of labor reduces the cost of every domestic products and services, and thus, cuts down on Crazy Al’s costs for everything. The MJ grown in the fresh air and pure sunshine is cheaper than MJ grown under “Gro-Lux” lights, and this reduces the demand on power, and thus reduces power rates, and that will reduce Crazy Al’s electric bills. The farmers can have an alternative crop, one which will grow in ditches and on bad ground, and this extra income will decrease the needed government support for farming, and so, Crazy Al’s taxes should, additionally, go down. Further, a ready supply of cheap domestic MJ would cut down on the illegal importation of MJ and this would reduce our negative balance of trade, and if that is corrected, it should reduce my costs of buying exported goods. The bottom line is this; once MJ is legalized, Crazy Al will become rich, and everything he buys will cost less.

* Can we presume that tobacco and alcohol annual tax dollar numbers are closely-guarded government secrets?

ETHANOL

Speaking of alcohol, specifically the non-potable form we can burn in cars which is commonly referred to as “ethanol”, there is a lot of semi-pseudo-misinformation out there about it. If you believe everything you read and hear, alcohol distilled from corn is the domestic energy panacea cure for many of our problems, e.g., our reliance on imported OPEC price-fixing cartel oil, and the fear that petroleum deposits will soon run out, leaving us in the dark, cooking over twig fires in the back yard, or sitting helplessly by the side of the road in our marooned SUVs.

Crazy Al has heard that it costs about as much in energy to produce ethanol as you get when you burn it. Where does this energy of production come from? Hey, what do you take me for, an agricultural or Industrial engineer? Crazy Al has no idea, but he is also told that the cost in energy to extract oil, ship it, and refine it into gasoline is cheaper by far than it is to plant corn, fertilize it, cultivate it, keep the pests from eating it and the weeds from taking over, harvesting it and then converting it into ethanol at an equivalency of energy with gasoline, and AT SOME DOLLAR NUMBER FOR THE PRICE OF CRUDE OIL,WHICH IS MUCH HIGHER THAN ANY WE HAVE HAD TO PAY….ever. Since Crazy Al believes in regulation of prices by the hidden hand of a free enterprise system of open and unfettered markets, he has to ask, “what EVER in the world is going on here? Well, the farm lobby is HUGE. Maybe not as huge as the building trades lobby or the Trial Lawyers lobby, but easily big enough to make law-makers open to suggestions for a renewable domestic energy source. Philosophically speaking coal, oil and gas are renewable—if we wait long enough, the plants and animals of today will die and become buried and ultimately become converted into coal, gas and oil, but when it comes to law-making and the money which lubricates it, philosophy is seldom considered, and, besides, Crazy Al isn’t called “crazy” for no reason.

Ethanol burns cleaner? Crazy Al has read that producing a gallon of ethanol will produce as much green-house gases as burning a gallon of gasoline.

Ethanol will reduce our reliance on imported energy sources? Crazy Al has read that if we convert to 100% ethanol for transportation, we will have to import natural gas. If we distill ethanol from all of our corn now in production, it will produce only a small fraction of our needs for transportation energy. Even if we turn all of our arable land into corn production for ethanol, we would not come close to being free from the use of petroleum products for energy.

Actually, if we could produce ethanol from corn stalks, we would be in energy Sweet City, but the problem is that we need mult-mega-tonnage quantities of enzymes to turn the cellulose in corn stalks into sugar which would allow the wonderfully provident yeasts to turn the sugar into ethanol. The science for the technology of economically producing all those tons of enzymes is still not available.

Ethanol can be siphoned from your car, and, in a pinch, used as a fair substitute for Vodka? Crazy Al knows there are ways to contaminate Ethanol so that the taxes from drinkable alcohol are not imperiled—the government is seldom happy about imperiling existing tax revenue streams.

Crazy Al is concerned that using most of our corn for ethanol production is going to drive up the cost of many of his staples of life, Corn Flakes, Corn Bread, and Tortillas, unless we import cheap Mexican corn which will increase our negative balance of payments—or something like that.

CANCER

Crazy Al cannot understand why everyone is so down on cancer. Hang on for a fast philosophical ride in support of cancer. To begin with, Crazy Al believes that everyone has to die of something, or has he inadvertently missed an important concept? Now that we are all living longer, why are we spending so much money on diseases that are usually the killers of the old and unproductive members of our society? Back in the caveman days, people died at a younger age. They died of infectious diseases (rampant flying shit-squirts), parasitism (malaria) mal-nutrition (failure of the berry and root crops), environmental privation (Ice Ages and the like), and worse, young succulent humans often died while being eaten by big hungry Saber-toothed Tigers. Today, those longevity-reducing forces are less evident. BUT, pragmatic ‘ol Ma Biology has to have some method of last resort to cull the old and unproductive, or else we would all live until, say, the next Ice Age. Think for a moment what coastal Florida would look like if everyone lived a lot longer. Stop thinking, I’ill tell you. You wouldn’t be able to move because of golf-cart grid-lock, and the new political party “Curmudgeons Forever” would infect national political judgment with “senile logic”, and, worse, the oldsters would overwhelm the newspaper Op/Ed pages with grumpy letters.

Okay! It is a given that all cancer isn’t alike. Sure, let’s continue to do research on cures for cancer of young people—they have long productive lives ahead. That is to say if we legalize Marijuana and keep them out of prison. And, by all means, let’s pour more money into curing breast cancer than curing prostate cancer, BECAUSE breast cancer hits women who are younger than men who get prostate cancer.

How about a little thought experiment. Let’s say that all cancer disappeared tomorrow. Now, what has changed? Well, not much, aside from all the oncologists cross/training into cosmetic surgery, and there is suddenly a free-up of oodles of NIH cancer research money. Soon, however, we will discover that there are more old unproductive non-tax-paying people around. call it CG (Creeping Geriatricization) of the population. Soon the media will start a new increased drum-beat to cure cardiovascular disease in our lifetime (since the lifetime would be so much longer, the Loon thinks that there would be no big hurry about it). I can understand why people have a particular aversion to a disease in which traitorous cells eat them up from the inside, as compared to, say, cardiovascular disease which is more like acceptable “fair wear and tear”, even if it comes to “catastrophic failure” of vital parts.

GHOULISH OFFICE POOLS

The AP reported that a bunch of websites have erupted in which there is competition in predicting the dates of demise of lists of celebrities. Examples are “theghoulpool.com, cash4cadavers.com, and “youbettheirlilfe.com, and my favorite “flymetothetomb.com” for the “Old Blue Eyes Memorial Death Watch”. Some people think these morbid activities by people who obviously have too much free time, are in hideous bad taste. However, Zach Love, founder of “Stiffs.com” said “I’ve always been somewhat disdainful of how we deify celebrities. This seemed a perfect way to deflate that.” Crazy Al is 100% in Zach’s corner on this. And, you can win some money in the pools, but not enough, Crazy Al would hope, for contestants to put out contracts to snuff a celebrity. What a minute; let’s think about this. Even though Crazy Al can’t totally buy into to the comments of David Samuels, who wrote, “…the free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempt to make us seem like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave on the farthest shores of reality” but, in all honesty, Crazy Al would chip in until it hurt for a hit on The Donald.

NOTABLE QUOTES

“I don’t believe in mathematics” Albert Einstein (You tell ‘em, Al)

2. “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” Albert Einstein

“Prejudice” has now acquired a bad reputation, but where, tell me, would we be without it? The practice of prejudging humans is certainly problematic, but consider what would happen if everyone who is presented with a need for a subjective decision had to go all the way back to rational ground zero to make a decision; instead of using their experience as a guide for making a decision? Say, you took Ibuprofen once and it made you break out in hives, and aspirin never did that. Should you be prejudiced against Ibuprofen? Should someone be able to whip a “Shame on you” because you were unfair to Ibuprofen, and did not give it another chance? Maybe you got a bad batch of Ibuprofen. Maybe you were temporarily sensitive to Ibuprofen. How do you know for sure that the next pill will give you hives? Gimmie a break; you would have to be crazy to not rely on prejudice to guide the decision to not take Ibuprofen.

ABSTRACT ART

The Loon has little use for any of it. He has been given to understand that abstract art is no representation of anything in the physical (real) world, but rather, the art is done to elicit emotional response. Given that the artist’s abstract work may be an expression of the artist’s emotion, be it, love of beauty, or rage at an unkind world, or even bewilderment at societal nonsense, but the Loon remains unconvinced that this is the case, but even if it is, the Loon believes that the emotion is not transferable in the abstract art to the viewer of the art. The viewer may have an emotional response to the art which is entirely different from that which the artist was trying to elicit. Agreed, few of us are willing to drip many colors of paint on a canvas on the floor, and then create emotion-laden abstract art by scrooching around in the paint with the seat of our Levis, but, let me put it to you this way. What better way to show emotion through art than to do it yourself? Whenever, the Loon hears anyone, including the artist, describe the meaning of a piece of abstract art, the Loon’s first impression is usually, “Say what?” To use a rather loose analogy, describing the meaning of abstract art is rather like the hopeless task of subjectively describing an orgasm, or, even worse, objectively describing an orgasm as a parasympathetic nervous system explosion—please, I have to ask, just what in the hell does that tell you?

Allen “The Loon” Hall
January 16 2007 in sunny warm south Florida—I thought you might want to know that.

Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 4

If I fail to offend everyone, I’m sorry.

POTPOURRI

OVER-TRAINING AND/OR OVER-EDUCATING STIFLES INDIVIDUAL ARTISTIC EXPRESSION? (This IS a contentious question)

Three areas of artistic expression (that the Loon can think of) seem to have suffered from too much training. They are fiction writing, jazz musicianship and Lindy Hop dancing.

Author Margaret Atwood has published in numerous forms, including poetry, short stories, children’s literature, thrillers, romance, criticism, and Sci-Fi. She explained, “I think I‘m this way because I never went to creative writing school and nobody told me not to. Nobody told me, ‘You have to specialize’ or ‘For heaven’s sake, control yourself.’” Does attending creative writing courses at Iowa State create lit-clones? No! but more lit-clones are made there than would naturally occur if writers just felt their un-aided way toward their muses. The Loon is no fan of the so-called modern novel—he has largely abandoned reading fiction. The Loon advises, let a thousand different literary flowers blossom, so he can pick the prettiest.

The Loon has come to realize that many of his favorite jazz musicians have been either “musical primitives” (those who usually start playing quite young, and cannot easily benefit from formal music training), or those who were largely, and perhaps voluntarily, self-taught. Let’s call those “musical stubborns”. Several self-starters come to mind, pianists, Gene Harris, Errol Garner and Dave McKenna; saxophonists, Charlie Parker and Scott Hamilton, drummer, Buddy Rich and guitarist Cal Collins. To me, each of these musicians is different in a pleasing way. They each have a unique and readily recognizable style of playing. That is not to say that all unique jazz stylists are self-taught, but those which are self-taught seem to have a more highly personalized way of playing. That is not to say that I enjoy the music of all self-taught jazz musicians, just that those I especially enjoy are often self-taught. Others have held the opinion that colleges known for education of jazz musicians are cranking out readily-interchangeable jazz-clones.

Lindy Hop is a “street dance”. A “street dance” is one which arises largely de novo, is assembled by an amalgamation of new movements and those of dances which proceeded it, and matures without being benefited (or stifled) by instruction. Lindy Hop originated in Harlem in the late ‘20s, flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, and then fell into disfavor along with the popular jazz (swing) which accompanied it. Lindy Hop was then dragged out of retirement and revived in the ’80s. It has grown slowly in popularity ever since. The dance has moved through a number of stages of neo-evolution, some of which depended on the influence of especially charismatic dancers, some of which depended on regional preoccupation with certain affected stylisms in the dance. The increase of popularity of Lindy Hop has been matched with a mirror increase in Lindy Hop instruction. As a result, Lindy Hop is now less of a “street dance” as it has been codified by instruction. Dare the Loon say “strait-jacketed”? To be sure, Lindy Hop has enjoyed or suffered a succession of stylistic waves which have swept over the dance. Let’s call these “clone fadisms”? Lindy Hop is organic and will evolve independent of anyone’s wishes. So, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is not with the entire dance which seems to be evolving en-mass, aided therein with improvement of individual dancer skills. However, improved skills do not directly relate to the creation of personal artistic styles. What seems to be lost in all of this instruction is the free expression of the individual dancer. Were the Loon crowned Grand Emperor Poobah of Lindy Hop, he would mandate that training must cease whenever a dancer reaches the intermediate stage. Dance teachers, flame me if you wish, and I know you have to make a living, but if you must hang on to your students in order to eat, please loosen up the style leash a little, by teaching the dance style-free. Dance teachers, read on. I have thrown you a bone with some meat still left on it. See, street dances which were largely unaided by instruction have come to be founts of individualism, both in types of movements and in stylistic expression. However, as in most things, there is a down-side. Street dances which have developed without training seem to hit a developmental wall. Each dancer achieves a personal style which becomes fixed in perpetuity, and then, the entire dance becomes evolution-proofed. He take-away message, controversial as it is, teachers grow the dance, they encourage students to the point where they can take off their 6-count training wheels, and to the degree that each individual teacher turns out students different in part from every other teacher, teachers promote variation in the dance. So, what is the Loon’s point?????? He can’t seem to remember—Golly! It’s such a long paragraph. Is the Loon way off base and about to be tagged out?

VOODOO, WISHFUL THINKING, SIGNS, OMENS, SUPERSTITIONS, AND MAGICAL POWERS

The Loon is heading for New Orleans, the only place he knows where you can easily buy Voodoo stuff, e.g., “going away powders” (powders which when sprinkled on the doorstep of a no longer pleasing lover, will make the bum lover go away). You can also buy other supernatural specifics, e.g., powders, potions or paraphernalia for a particular purpose (a little doll and some pins to make your boss uncomfortable, or a knife to put under the pillow of a woman in labor so her pain will be cut in half). However, if you unsure what specific to buy, you can always pick up some all-purpose “goofus dust”. All you need is some wishful thinking, or a spell to be cast, and then sprinkle the dust appropriately. Incidentally, the Loon owns a vial of “goofus dust”, so don’t tick him off.

Some people are always on the look-out for signs of good fortune, or for omens that the feces chunks are about to hit the fan blade. These ill-defined signs and omens seem to be impromptu roll-your-own superstitions, or, if you prefer, superstitions in the making. Some folks put great stock in superstitions, just as some people put great stock in Astrological predictions. The best Astrological de-bunker I ever heard was an exchange between two people, one an astrological believer and the other an unbeliever, and the believer didn’t know the birthday of the unbeliever. The unbeliever challenged the believer, by saying, “people born under different astrological signs are supposed to be distinctively different, and you know me pretty well. So, tell what sign I was born under?” The chances are 1 in 12 the believer could guess right, however, the first and second guesses where wrong. I would love to see a large study done in this same way, but alas, science has bigger and more important bones to gnaw-–or do they? Is it not the role of science to both seek the truth AND debunk that which masquerades as truth? Some folks say all this hokum is harmless? In a way, “yes”. In a way, “no”, but If hokum reduces the general acceptance of rational thought and argument, then hokum is, indeed, harmful. So THERE!

“GAY”, “BRIGHT” GIMMIE A BREAK!

Male homosexuals have commandeered the adjective “gay” as general name for themselves. Thus they have rendered largely worthless “gay”’s descriptive connotations. Similarly, Atheists are trying to commandeer “bright”, and by adding a suffix “s” to nounize it into a name for themselves. Look, Gays could have used any word they wished, why use one which falsely connotes that every gay is gay. Likewise, I doubt all atheists are smart, and so, they should choose another name. I am sad about the loss of the descriptive use of these words, and wish people would make up new words to name themselves, and leave the rest of us with a full measure of descriptive words—we need more, not less, adjectives. How silly does it sound it to call a “gay” sad or a “bright” dumb? Sorry, I’m just ‘specially fussy today.

CYNICISM

Much herein with is lifted from “True Nonbelievers” by Elizabeth Swaboda in the Nov/Dec “Psychology Today”.

There is a fine line between skepticism and cynicism, and only hard-core doubters know where it is. Cynics are getting a bad rap, not improved by Rick Bayan, who wrote. “The world belongs to people with IQs of 120. Anything much greater or lesser amounts to a liability.” He has a website “The Cynic’s Sanctuary” which is a home for disgruntled idealists, subversive wits, professional misfits, skeptical jesters, curmudgeons and misanthropes.” Some famous cynics are Nietzsche (was he ever), Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde. Cynics die younger of heart disease, probably uttering with their last breath “Oh! bless’d relief.”

Molly Ivins wrote, “It is hard to argue against cynics—they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side. Speaking of Molly, she just passed, and while Molly and I shared few political views, I would give an arm for her gift of language. And she was funny. Indeed, she was to Texas as Lewis Grizzard was to Georgia. May they both R.I.P.

N’AWLINS—YA GOTTA LOVE IT

New Orleans sports beaucoup live music, and many bands have unusual names. Indeed, N’awlins provides a mother lode of “funny” band names. Soon as I get here, I glom a copy of the Friday paper with its weekly entertainment section, “The Lagniappe”, plus copies of the two free alternative weekly tabloids, “Where Y’at” and “The Gambit Weekly” so’s I can check out the band names. Here is a sampling: “Walter Wolfman” Washington and the Roadmasters”, “Kermit Ruffins and the Barbeque Swingers” (a good band), two more good ‘uns that we have danced to, "Johnny Angel and the Screamin' Demons”, and “Bobby Cure and the Summertime Blues”. And then there is “Kenny Holiday and the Rolling Blackouts”, “Zapf Dingbats”, “The Dear & Departed”, “Mickey and the Motorcars”, “Pig Pen and the Pork Chops”, “Elliot Cohn’s Cosmic Sweat Society”, “Danny Alexander & his Partners in Crime”, “Benny Grunch and the Bunch”, “Big Rubba Bubba”, “VaVaVoom”, “Schwartz and the Palace of Sin”, “Debi & The Deacons” , “Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Review”, “The Other Planets”, ”The Queers”, “Heart Attack”, “Chris Polechek and the Hubcap Kings”, “Monty Banks and the High Rollers”, "Geno Delafose & French Rockin' Boogies”, “3 Legged Dog”, “Reckless Kelly”, “Sheena and Swampdogs”, “John Sketch and the Dirty Notes”, “Big Head Todd”, The Hot Pots”, “Lips and the Trips”, “Balsawood Flyers”, Rockin’ Jerry and the Spice of Life”, “Jon Clarey and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen” and two who will entertain for the Vieux Doo Ball, “Billy Luso and the Restless Natives”, and Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias”. Two bands we danced to this week were “David Brooks and the Syncopated Percolators” and “Palmetto Bug* Stompers”, which is a nifty sextet which harkens to street “spasm bands” playing early in the 20th century. Ya gotta love N’awlins.

* Palmetto Bug is the common name for Blattidae americana, the largest and most handsome cockroach found in the United States. A full grown Palmetto Bug can be almost two inches long, three and a half with the antennae, and they are found in abundance in south Louisiana. When The Loon worked in Covington Louisiana and was still drinking out of his mind, he used to catch Palmetto Bugs and put them in his secretary’s top desk drawer. (A public confession is good for the soul)

The craziness of the Mardi Gras parade season is upon the city; they call it “Cahnival (silent “r”). This year, Mardi Gras is on Tuesday Feb 20th, but the parades will start on Feb 3rd .I counted 50 parades slated for the New Orleans area, and some of the big ones have as many as 40 floats, and that’s not counting the marching bands, second lines, clowns, and Flambeaus who dance and prance for thrown money while holding flaming torches aloft.

The Feb 3rd kick-off parade is put on by the Krewe du Vieux, and topped off with an evening event, ”The Vieux Doo Ball”. Many Krewe of Vieux members will be variously ill-attired, some may have costume malfunctions, and others, doubtless, will don faux-moon plastic buttocks—it is cold here. The Krewe of Vieux is the anti-parade parade, rather like the “Doo Dah Parade” in Pasadena mocks the Rose Bowl Parade. Krewe of Vieux mocks the historic formal parades krewed by New Orleans socialites. Krewe of Vieux floats are drawn by mules, and the parade theme this year is “Habitat for Insanity”, a rip at the government’s tardy efforts at re-housing New Orleanians. This parade just drips satire; indeed the name of one sub-krewe is “Spermes, and Drips and Discharges”. Give you a feel for what is going on? There are 20 sub-krewes; one for each float, and they have a free hand to use a variety of attention getters, ranging from high “camp” to low blasphemy. Do people become upset and protest? Is a pig’s butt pork? But, please tell me, when was satire not designed to sting?

Another anti-parade parade is the 15th Annual parade of the Mystical Krewe of Barkus, a parade of pets which mocks the more famous parade of the Krewe of Bacchus. Mystical Krewe of Barkus favors thrown to the pleading bystanders who scream “Throw me somethin', Mistah.” (note again missing “r”) will be rubber dog turds. The Queen of this year’s Mystical Krewe of Barkus is a mongrel yaller bitch with one blue and one brown eye. Ya jus’ gotta love N’awlins.

New Orleans is dirty and the streets are all busted up; just like before Katrina. Some traffic lights are laying down on the job (in the gutter with lights still working); it is hell to find a street name sign facing the right way; people don’t mow their lawns; parking can be a travail (however, the N’awlins parking fairy has made his or her eyes to look down benevolently upon Rudy and I); some places in the French Quarter stink of sewage; you can’t hold a coherent conversation on the street for all that loud jazz pouring out of the clubs; Damn I love this town and have since 1955 when Little Bear, George and I drove 20 straight hours from Cape Girardeau Mo to be in New Orleans for the last weekend before Fat Tuesday. George and I fell asleep in our chairs at 2 AM in a joint listening to great jazz, and somebody stole our hats, but I still love this town. I lost my pregnant wife for 4 hours during a Fat Tuesday crush on Canal, but I still love this town. I’ve been threatened by cops to get my ass out of the street and onto the sidewalk, but I still love this town. There is an undercurrent of irreverence in New Orleans that seems to re-enforce my personality. Y’all stiff-necks stay away; I love N’awlins.

NOTABLE QUOTES (not to imply endorsement by the Loon)

1. “The things outsiders (outlanders) find absurd or threatening about California—the self-fashioned spiritual practices, the body-builder/action star Governor, the crazy diets, the junk bonds, the endless supply of new fictions, the UCLA and Palo Alto-born Internet—do share a certain grandiosity, a ridiculous desire to change the world, or at least ones self, Better not to admit to such ambitions, or so goes the story easterners love to repeat: the story of the disillusioned California dreamer.” James Fallow

This run-on soft vitriol was found in an article in “The Atlantic” and was about—can you believe this?—attempts to develop data-management programs. Does everyone have an attitude? Well, the Loon do, but it ain’t the same as James Fallow’s.

2. “Modernity, it turns out, built a metropolis with a form so unprecedented that residents and critics still refuse to consider it a real city; a suburb without a core—which is to say, not a suburb at all…” “The suburb is not, as Frank Lloyd Wright and others imagined a place to escape the city; it is the city….” “By the end of the 20th century more than half of all Americans were living in metropolitan areas of more than a million people.” This sideways slap at L.A. was also found in an article in “The Atlantic”. The Loon knows that you have to spend a little time in the ‘burbia run amok called L.A. in order to learn of its many charms. The Loon can provide a list on demand.


Allen Hall, the Loon
February 6, 2007, under a cloudless blue sky in New Orleans.

Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 3

If I fail to offend everyone, I’m sorry.

NOTABLE QUOTES

1. “Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” William E. (Bill) Vaugan, American author and columnist.

Vaugnan also wrote “A citizen…will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.”, and “If there is anything a nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it is another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.” The Loon adds, Bill died in 1977; may he R.I.P.

2. “You know what I hate about people who criticize you? They criticize what you say, but never give you credit for how loud you say it, or how long say it.” Stephan Colbert.

The Loon knows just how he feels.

3. “It doesn’t take a Cornell West (who he?) to see the underlying racism involved when NBA players and hip-hop artists are categorized as thugs and gangsters. But, for some reason, it is still acceptable to make hurtful redneck jokes about the fans of country music and NASCAR. That’s yet another example of the sociological double-talk that indirectly feeds into this country’s festering racial tension.” LZ Granderson

The Loon questions the use of the word, “hurtful”.

4. “…beauty—whether in sculpture or in philosophy ---is a consequence of artistic and emotional discipline that leads to proportion, discrimination, and perspective. Accordingly, nothing is worse than excess of decoration, or of ardor.” This was taken from an article in the Jan/Feb ’07 “The Atlantic” and these are classic Greek values.

The author is anonymous, but the ideas belong to Thucydides. The Loon is borrowing shamelessly from that article to voice his concerns that the Western world is retreating into ardor, and into an age in which facts matter less than perceptions. It would appear that we are retreating toward the Dark Ages when what people believed was more important than what they knew, and passion with the resulting irrationalities are central to thought.

A SAMPLING OF MURPHY’S LESSER KNOWN LAWS

1. “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day drinking beer.” The Loon sez, file this under, “No man can fish while not drinking beer and chewing tobacco. The Loon preferred Budweiser, or anything cheaper, and Beechnut, but he could get along in a pinch (pun intended) with Red Man.

2. “Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there is a 90% probability you will get it wrong.” The Loon sez, file this under, “Life ain’t fair, nor mathematics reliable”

3. “The things that come to those who wait are the things left by those who got there first.” The Loon sez, file this under “Garage sale wisdom.”


CRAZY AL’S NEWS DIGEST

1. PIZZAS FOR PESOS

“Dallas-based pizza chain, “Pizza Patron” has received death treats and hate mail for accepting pesos as payment for pizza.” (From the Jan 12 2007, “South Florida Sun Sentinel”) Crazy Al thinks it ain’t no body’s business but their own what species of payment anyone wants to take in payment for goods or services. It may make a mess of cash register receipts used to determine how much sales tax Pizza Patron owes Texas, but if Texas doesn’t care, why should anyone? However, Texas might take exception if Pizza Patron accepted labor or goods barter as payment for pizza—the State of Taxas would likely take a dim view of that.. Look, Crazy Al is no globe-trotter, but he has been around some, and in many countries he has visited, several forms of currency are accepted, albeit, foreign currency is usually discounted from a tad to a lot.

2. MEATLIFTING

Meat reached first place on the list of preferences for shoppers who use the five-finger form of discounting. According to the Food Marketing Institute “Meat was the is the most shoplifted item in grocery stores in 2005” Meat moved up when cold medicines containing ephedrine were moved to secure counters, but, unexpectedly, meat roared right by beauty care items to the top of the shoplifters top ten. Crazy Al is reluctant to read anything sociologically devious or sinister into this shift in theft preferences, but the grocers are fighting back by secreting security tags under the labels on packaged meat.

3. PARIS HILTON’S WONKY LEFT EYE (the rest of the story)

See, the “Daily Dish” avers (I paraphrase) that Paris Hilton had a left eyelid-lift 7 years ago which went awry, causing her cockeyed stare. Now she wants plastic surgery to fix the damaged eye muscles. Meanwhile Ms. Hilton is going against doctor’s orders by wearing blue contact lenses in her brown eyes, and thus further drying out her already dry eyes.” Crazy Al thought you might want to know about this tragedy and Paris Hilton’s continuing ocular travails. Sigh! sometimes bad things happen to essentially worthless people. But wait, let’s cut her some slack; she is still young, with plenty of time to turn her life around and do service to her fellow man. Sadly, Crazy Al is not filled with confidence at the prospects.

4. BANNED BY THE MAN

In the Jan 12 edition of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Jonah Goldberg wrote an editorial entitled “Pastures of liberty fenced by bureaucrats”. Part of the lead line reads, “…a list of things that the New York City Council tried to ban—not all successfully—just in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans-fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18-20 year olds; foie gras; pedi-cabs in parks; new fast food restaurants;…cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N. C. because of a unionization dispute, mail-order pharmaceutical plans, candy-flavored cigarettes; gas station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus; and Wal-Mart. Washington D.C. extended the ban against smoking in bars, nightclubs and private clubs to cars in which children are passengers.” In 2005 a Pennsylvania legislator received national attention for his effort to mandate that all dogs must wear seat belt in cars.” Crazy Al thinks we are being annoyed, neigh, assaulted, by hordes of legislative mental midgets and busy-bodies. They bleed us of a free life in myriads of tiny ways, just as a thousand tiny cuts will free us of all our blood. Goldberg quotes Alex de Tocqueville, “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life.” “It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.”

5. KIDNAP-PROOFING KIDS

The January 25, 2007 Charlotte (FL) Sun, contained a front page article reporting that Florida is passing out take-home kits to kids in school so the kids can submit a DNA sample from a mouth swab, and a fingerprint. This will give law enforcement an identification data-base should a kid be kidnapped. So far so good, but Crazy Al, wonders about so many things. He wonders if a kid should do this if the kid is contemplating a career in crime. Furthermore the article reported that 800,000 kids are kidnapped each year in the United States. Crazy Al questions that number. That roughs out at 2197 kids kidnapped per day. Doesn’t that seem too high? Further, If our population is now 300,000,000, and kids are about one fifth of those, then, there are 60,000,000 kids in the country and that means that one kid out of every 75 kids is kidnapped every year, or if a kid is defined as between 1 and 17 years of age, then each kid has a one in five chance of being kidnapped once while they are a kid. Math is not Crazy Al’s long suit, but this 800,000 number just doesn’t jive.

POTPOURRI

1. “DUH” MAGAZINE

Has anyone every heard of this periodical? If so, send me the info for subscription. I am stuck using dial-up service and can’t surf the web. See, an item in this morning’s newspaper reads. “…beverage studies tend to be biased when the money funding them comes from the beverage industry, according to an article published today in “Duh” magazine.” Are you intrigued? Crazy Al is.

2 DIAMONDS

My daughter who creates and sells jewelry tells me that the 2006 Holidays sales of diamonds were noticeably down. Hmmmm! Hollywood has taken up the cudgel against trade in “blood diamonds” and the violence associated with them by making a movie of the same name. Hmmmm1 Ya don’t suppose? Anyway, blood diamonds are those which are mined in West Africa in areas not under the control of DeBeers, the company which exercises an international cartel on rough diamond supply. In the bloody violent anarchy of West Africa, people are killed for diamonds, and those who kill to get the diamonds are often killed by others to get the diamonds, and people use the diamonds to buy guns to support insurrections or to shoot people who have diamonds. DeBeers can maintain its international cartel in rough diamonds, by virtue of making the largest and virtually the only market in rough stones. This keeps free-lancers from entering the diamond trade. You may be disappointed if you try to sell rough diamonds. If you become more than a nuisance, DeBeers will punish you by dumping stones on the market and depress the value of your diamonds. And so, you must sell to DeBeers. However, blood diamonds has been creating a publicity nightmare for the diamond trade, and so, the Kimberly Process was begun. It is supposed to provide provenance for diamonds and declares that they were purchased from reputable dealers, which is ridiculous on the face of it, as diamonds are fungible, and there it no way of discriminating blood diamonds from DeBeers diamonds. Given the international availability of diamonds, the DeBeers cartel has maintained an unnaturally high price of finished (cut) diamonds many times higher than they should be, but Hollywood was not at all concerned that diamond purchasers have been screwed for decades by an international cartel.

First is was furs, and now diamonds. What’s next, clothing textiles because they are manufactured in Chinese and Indian sweat shops? Can you say, “Unadorned naked celebrities.”? Well, folks, we are on our way, with Brittany, Paris and Sharon providing recent peeks at female celebrity pudenda, but my first exposure, so to speak, came at the expense of Carmen Miranda, when a photographer took a shot of as her, sans panties, as she was held aloft by a male dancer. What is there about celebrity which makes people forget their undies?

Allen Hall a.k.a. The Loon and Crazy Al
January 28, 2007 in chilly southern Florida—go figure.

Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 5

If I have failed to offend everyone, I’m sorry.

NOTABLE QUOTES

Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.” Anon. The Loon includes this not for the opinion stated, not even for the florid tenor of language, but rather, for the imagery.

2. “One old friend is better than two new ones.” Yiddish Proverb, The Loon would agree,
provided the old friend had not become a “no count”.

NEW ORLEANS AFTERTHOUGHTS

The loon finds New Orleans eternally interesting, even fascinating. It is as close to a foreign city as we have in the United States, yet it is also utterly American. The native New Orleanian accent is redolent of that spoken in Brooklyn and upper New Jersey. The people are more than friendly, they are gregarious. On an extraordinarily pleasant day, Rudy and I stepped out onto the street after lunch in the French Quarter and the doorman of a hotel said, “This weather is so nice, I think I’ll get married again.” Where are you gonna go to hear something like that?

New Orleans has let one of the biggest private contracts ever, to keep the French Quarter streets clean, and it is working. Trash laden gutters, long an eyesore for fastidious tourists, are no more. Guys drive many little street sweeper machines, and guys walk around with pointy sticks and bags, and Voila! the streets are largely free of trash. Is it not miraculous what the private sector will do for money?

New Orleans is home to a large working class and a large artist class. The strategic shipping and petroleum industries in southern Louisiana require a considerable labor force, and that is why arguments to just abandon post-Katrina New Orleans were never taken seriously. And, one need only stroll about in the French quarter, the Garden district, Up-town and the Forbourg/Marygn and Bywater neighborhoods to appreciate the presence of a huge artist community. In addition to music, which everyone knows about, painting, sculpture, jewelry, needlework, and glass art studios abound. Further, New Orleans is a cherished home to many writers.

Of course, the city jealously guards its old architectural appearance. Many Katrina ravaged modest homes which I would have thought were certainly “tear-downs”, are having replacement clapboards lovingly fitted over the skeletons of old black moldy 2 by 4s, and ornamental cornices on shotgun houses* are considered precious. If you own a building in the French Quarter, and want to paint or repair anything, you must get permission from the Vieux Carre commission which rules on any alterations and even the color of paint you may use. For good or bad, more than any city in America, New Orleans is in love with it’s past.

* A shotgun house is a long thin house from front to back, so called because if you shoot a shotgun in the front door, you will shoot out the back screen door, and, like as not, kill everyone in the house. Shotgun houses are often duplexes set on deep lots with only about 30 feet of frontage, and many shotgun houses appear to have been longerated by the addition of multiple rooms onto the rear.

Residential and commercial New Orleans is being rebuilt—one house at a time, and one business at a time. Not all neighborhoods are coming back. Some are all but abandoned and in a state of arrested ruin, but in those neighborhoods which are struggling back, you can seldom drive a block without seeing a Dempsey dumpster on a front lawn, or a covey of worker’s trucks parked on the street. Indeed, almost half the vehicles on New Orleans streets are trucks—not ‘burb faux-cowboy pick-ups mind you, but working trucks, many pulling trailers full of rubble, building supplies or tools.

The proliferation of small communities of 24 foot long travel trailers continues. Often they are fenced and gated in parking lots and the trailers are lifted well off the ground so the external above ground sewer pipes have enough slope to drain. If they have a prolonged hard freeze down here, it will cause a constipated mess in the sewer pipes. Doubtless, most of these trailers are housing for construction workers. Rental housing is very tight and damned expensive in New Orleans, and on the 80 miles of Interstate10 between New Orleans to Baton Rouge (we drove it) truck traffic is thick day and night. In residential neighborhoods, it is hardly possible to be out of sight of a travel trailer parked on a front lawn. Some front lawns have two travel trailers. While some are temporary housing while the home is being worked on, it is apparent that some of these houses are now occupied, and the trailers are either grey-market rental housing, or housing for relatives or friends who have lost their homes.

I visited an old friend who lost his home in Mandeville, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartraine. His one-story home was 5 feet above sea level on a bayou near the lake, and the storm surge brought the water up to about 5 feet above sea level, and so they had to take down the building. He said many non-evacuated families thereabouts lived for weeks in the same buildings where they worked. That is to say if they had buildings left to work in. Streets were impassible for several days due to down trees, and electrical power (in late August in southern Louisiana) was off for weeks. There were whole lakeside housing developments which were reduced to sodden flotsam—cars turned over, piles of wet furniture, insulation, roofing tiles and structural lumber piled up like jackstraws. The only buildings spared were those raised 10 feet on concrete pillars.

Rudy and I drove to Slidell (also on the north side of Lake Pontchartraine) to look at the house I rented for a year in 1974. It was a beautiful old place on Liberty Bayou, Built on 14 acres of Loblolly pine forest by a curator of the New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo as a summer house, It was then sold to jazz clarinetist, Pete Fountain, who sold it to Al Stone who was the project engineer for the Lunar Rover (that 10 million dollar one-of-a-kind taxi cab we flew to the moon and left there). Al then rented it to me. It was a large two story 3 bedroom square frame home with a large added kitchen. The first floor great space had a huge fireplace, and was lined with Pecky (worm-eaten) Cypress, a rare and expensive lumber today. Out back, there was a swimming and wading pool connected by a small water-fall. Other buildings included a screened pool house, a six stall horse stable and a shed. There were two small ponds and two improved pastures on the property. There was a barbeque pit, a shelter house, and a dock down by the bayou. There is nothing left of any of it. The only reason why we know we were on the site is because we saw the white plastic bones of a temporary greenhouse which had been there about 15 years ago. It was clearly the most elegant and memorable house I have ever lived in, and it makes me sad to think it has simply disappeared into the Katrina vortex.

CYCLIC EPIDEMIC PROPAGATION OF E-MAIL FORWARDS

Is it the Loon’s imagination or have the best of the internet forwards become both unduly reiterative and cyclic? It appears to me that when I see a new e-mail forward, usually a good joke, or piece of political cant, it often appears from multiple sources, and then, it goes away. Later, it reappears with another flurry of forwardings, and sometimes it can even recur once more. It is understandable why forwards have geometric propagation; it is sooooo easy to continue the e-contagion when you don’t have to make a copy, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp and take it to the mail box. The cyclic appearances of a forward is also understandable; when a forward reaches an addressee who has not seen it before, the natural belief is that it has not been around the cyber-horn before, and thus, the addressee starts another round of e-contagion. It’s like internet Influenza. Of the last 53 e-mails I have sent, only one was a forward, but of the last 53 e-mails I have received, only 9 were principally addressed to me, all the rest were forwards and some of these were repeaters. The Loon has a remedy. See, if these computers are so damned smart that they can detect spam, why can’t they detect previously received forwards, and automatically return them to the sender, informing the sender that the Loon has already received the forward. Is that too much to ask? Are there any gifted software scribblers out there who will volunteer to do this simple thing for the Loon?

DEAD PLAYBOY PLAYMATES

Every now and then the Loon will receive a titillating e-forward, e.g. a recent one entitled “Dead Playboy Playmates”. Well, maybe this was more morbid than titillating, as it listed the 30 now dead Playmates. Since the quarterly “Playboy” began in December 1953, there have been, by the Loon’s calculation, 257 playmates, (No! I have never subscribed), and since all were young women when they appeared in the magazine, none could be much older than, Oh! say, 75 today, and with a median age today of about 47. The mortality rate of 11% for this cohort of women, all of whom, obviously lived to be very Ahem! healthy in their early 20s seems high. This is what killed them; three died of suicide, five of drug overdoses, three of automobile accidents, two by homicide, seven of cancer, three of other natural causes, one in an airplane accident and the rest due to unknown causes. There must be some doubt that a control group of demographically similar non-Playmate women would suffer an equal or greater mortality rate. Further, consider this; the average age at death of the 30 Playmates was 47. This raises two questions: 1. What is there about being a Playboy Playmate which reduces longevity? And 2. Who beside the Loon has so much spare time on his (I presume they are all “his”s) hands, that he can gather or analyze this kind of data?

HANK BAUER DIED LAST WEEK

The Loon was in the French Quarter to see the parade of the Mystic Krewe of Barkus, a floatless parade spoofing the up-scale Krewe of Bacchus parade. Barkus krewe members are dogs; hundreds of dogs; all breeds of dogs; mongrel dogs being pulled in wagons by people; painted, uniquely clothed and artistically clipped dogs; almost all of which were well behaved—a few alarm “Woofs”, but not one dog fight, nor a canine disagreement. It was there that the Loon saw across the street a St. Louis baseball fan suitably attired in a Cards warm-up jacket. Crossing the line of parade (a no no) the Loon identified himself as a fellow Cards crazy. We shared the moment when Cards’ pitcher, Wainwright, froze the Mets’ Beltron, (who had worn out Cards’ pitching) with a monster curve on a 3 and 2 count with two outs and the winning Mets’ runs on base in the last of the ninth of the 7th game of the series. That curve made the Cards 2006 National League Champs and assured, in my mind, that they were destined to win the World Series. And, that which was destined came to pass. .Before we parted company, my fellow fan mentioned that Hank Bauer had died three days before. How in the hell could Hank Bauer die and me not know it? Memories flooded back. A mere Loon fledgling in waiting in St, Louis went to baseball games at Sportsmen’s Park early to see infield and outfield practice. Even after 25 years as an infielder in baseball and fast-pitch softball, the Loon still relished the regimented ritual of infield practice as a graceful form of sports ballet. The adolescent Loon adored watching major league outfield practice, three fungo flys to each outfielder, with one throw to second, one to third and one to home. Guys with cannon arms liked to have their fungo flies sent deep so they could show off their guns. Right fielders usually had the best arms as they had the longest throw, to third base. Hank Bauer was a right fielder and he had a gun. He was a Yankee but when he uncorked a really good throw in warm-up, usually to home, the St. Louis fans in the stands would go “Whooooooo!”. I played baseball with only one man who made it to the major leagues, Charlie Peete. He died in an aircraft accident after one year up with the St. Louis Cardinals. Charlie Peete had a gun. When he threw the ball, it made a boiling churning sound as it went through the air. Both Hank Bauer and Charlie Peete could “hang blurred ropes” from the outfield. The Loon has seen ‘em both do it.

PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS

The Loon has finished reading “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel C. Dennett. It was one of the most difficult books the Loon has ever read, and writing a Loon’s Mini-Book Report will be equally difficult, but, brace yourselves, as it will be in the next FotL.

DISCLAIMER

You must know that a “Fruit o’ the Loon” is never finished; only abandoned. The process of writing takes a couple of weeks of gathering bits and pieces which pique an interest, and when it reaches a certain length, the Loon just get tired of picking at it like a scab, to cull jangling syllables and useless words. And when that happens, out it goes with the bits toward the top benefiting from repeated editing; while those toward the bottom are usually rife with raggedy-assed writing. This one is out of the oven—out it goes.

Allen Hall, the Loon
February 13, 2007 in post-tornado New Orleans

Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 6

If I have failed to offend everyone, I’m sorry.

CRAZY AL’S NEWS DIGEST

Surely most national news sources have picked up the item in New Orleans when a 17 year old kid got beat up in a fight with another kid, and when he went home, his mother gave him a gun, which he used to kill the other kid. Fueling this story, some news source found and printed a photo of the 17 year old kid in a celebratory pose holding a pistol in one hand and a wad of money in the other. The front page of the New Orleans Times Picayune carried a photo of the 17 year old kid in custody and cuffed. What the national news will probably not pick up is a letter to the editor which appeared later in the local New Orleans newspaper. The letter writer objected to the front page photo of the kid in custody, because…it would be prejudicial to his case? No. Because you should not publish a photo of a minor in custody? No. It was because other kids would see that he made the front page, and would think it was “cool”. Do we have Andy Warhol to thank for this?
Homeless sex offenders are housed in rolling concentration camps. The NIMBY issue is huge everywhere when it comes to where to house sex offenders, but Suffolk County NY is obligated by law to give them housing and also keep them away from “temptation and trouble”. So the county, using a “let’s all share the pain approach” puts 5 to 8 sex offenders each in FEMAish travel trailers, and then moves the trailers every two weeks to a new location on public land away from “temptation and trouble”. This almost insures they can’t get and hold jobs, but then, maybe Suffolk Co doesn’t want sex offenders working there. After all, Suffolk County is part of Long Island.

LOON MINI-BOOK REPORT (IF YOU WANT TO READ THIS THING; PRINT IT OUT; PUT IT IN THE BATHROOM OR ON YOUR BEDSIDE TABLE, OR YOU WILL NEVER FINISH IT.)

As promised, the book is “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel C. Dennett. The Loon reads a newspaper everyday, and so, he has taken a renewed interest in religion.

Brace yourselves, this is a monster mini-book report, and since the Loon has no cherished dawg in Dennett’s fight, it is best to let Dennett do most of his own talking. The Loon will add, in and out of brackets, both pithy and pithless comments, as is his want, and if he dares. The 389 pages in this book took over 2 months read. The writing style is not easy, either that, or Dennett is so intelligent he is incapable of writing down to the Loon level. Or, to cut the Loon some slack; since we each lose 14 thousand neurons everyday due to wear and tear, at age 20 the Loon might have understood everything in the book, which is ridiculous since the book was published in 2006, and no one in their right mind would have had the nerve to publish a book like this in 1952.

Let’s get this out early, Dennett is an atheist, so if you are a believer, and don’t want to read any further, no problem, but the book is interesting, informative and fun, and this mini book report is even more fun, and it won’t take you 2 months to read it. If unusual ideas ring your chimes, read on.

The book is stuffed with heavy and beguiling ideas—love that—ideas that made the Loon’s synapses spark and sizzle. The book is also full of great quotes—also love that. I have viciously marked-up my copy with underlining and marginalia. This made me wonder what differences would there be between the markings-up in this book and those in a new clean copy read a year from now. Would there be more mark-upable passages because the Loon would be deeper into the ideas of the book, or different mark-upable passages because he had spaced-out while reading parts of the book the first time? Does anyone else ever do this--read a page, and then, wake up and realize that your eyeballs had been temporarily disconnected from your brain? Anyway, all passages in quotation marks are from the book.

Dennett is a philosopher. Scary? You betcha, ‘cause all philosophers, like all kids in Lake Wobegon, are above average, and some of them have brains which throb in resonance with celestial sine waves not felt by the likes of the Loon. Dennett is an American writing for American because “…America is strikingly different from other First World nations in its attitudes to religion.” He is using contemporary American Christianity as an example of religion because he is not a religion historian nor conversant enough with other religions.

Why did he write this book? In so far as the Loon can tell, there are two reasons. 1. To examine why religion* is a universal characteristic of all human cultures. Where did religion come from, why does it persist, and what evolutionary advantage can it provide?** 2. To plead that religions be studied with the same rigor used to study all other universal aspects of human culture, e.g. language, music, ancestor reverence, a taste for sweet stuff, visual art, and that triad of seemingly incompatible human behaviors; “cooperation” with and “altruism” toward non-kin, and, of course, that eternal bogeyman, “aggression”.

*“Religion” in this report and in Dennett’s book includes all aspects of spiritual belief found in humans, and is not limited to formal organized religions, large or small.

** WOW! Is that ever a third-rail idea; touch it and you die.

Dennett quotes others to make points. To the question that scientific study might be the ruination of religion, he quotes a fictitious character from The Simpsons, Ned Flanders “Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends?” Dennett avers that science will not ruin religion, but it is a worrisome thing to rob humans of some of their dearest allusions, when they are thrown out along with delusionary bathwater. He objects to taboos against philosophical inquiry into religion with this. “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. --Anon”. And, central to the theme, “As every inquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two question in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature. –-David Hume in ‘The Natural History of Religion.’”

As a philosopher, Dennett is duty-bound to explore every side of every feasible argument and since music, like religion, is a human universal, he asks us to share with him this thought experiment. “Might music be bad for you?” (now a paraphrase of Dennett) “How would we feel if Caltech scientists found indisputable evidence that music caused an increase in Alzheimer’s and heart disease, and that teaching music to young children knocked 10 points off their IQs? How would you feel if the government recommended that you restrict your intake of music (including elevator and mall music) to no more than one hour a day, and music instruction for children be curtailed immediately?” “Can you imagine the visceral defensive surge, ‘What does Caltech know about music?” “I don’t care if it is true! Anyone who takes away my music is in for a fight, because a life without music isn’t worth living” “I don’t care if it hurts others—we’re going to have music, and that is all there is to it.’” Now please substitute “religion” for “music” in the thought experiment to see what dangerous emotional ground he is advising we tread upon, but if you cannot even imagine that music is anything other than an unalloyed good, maybe you are likewise locked into a similar conclusion about religion.

(An Aside) Scientists (most notably Daniel Levitan’s “This is your Brain on Music”.) have postulated that the human tabula rasa for language and for music are similar, in that human infants are proto-wired to accept the grammar and syntax of any language as well as the cadence and sounds of any particular style of music. Children imprint on language and music by hearing it, and in so doing, they complete the wiring schematic in the brain, but the wiring for either language or music does not rely, in any way, upon the wiring for the other.

Inevitably, Dennett poses the question, what evolutionary value can be found in religion? If one could find that belief in a religion would allow the believers a greater ability to procreate, then that would genetically account for the widespread presence and persistence of religion. On the other hand, as Karl Marx put it, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” and perhaps we have retained genes for a taste for sweet stuff and religion because both make us feel good.

Dennett draws a comparison between large formal religions and the modern business mode; it is an unflattering one. He also lists, “The three favorite…raisons d’etre for religion, (1) to comfort us in our suffering and allay our fear of death; (2) to explain things we can’t otherwise explain; and (3) to encourage group cooperation in the face of trials and enemies.” Dennett discounts them as characteristic of writings in the humanities and social sciences which offer “premature curiosity satisfaction.” Is it unfair to say that “ignorance is bliss”, when it might be shown that it is? The Loon believes that the big three pragmatic reasons for religion are more than just useful mental salve.

With respect to the history of religion, Dennett raises the possibility (if I understand him correctly) that religion grew out of an “ancestor reverence” meme***. And of course, the human invention of language and the concurrent cerebral hard-wiring for grammar, gave man, as distinct from other animals, as best we can determine, the ability to construct abstractions. Unlike Chimpanzees, humans can imagine a walking tree or an invisible banana, as well as “a menagerie of mythical creatures and demons. Since the monsters themselves have never existed, they had to be ‘invented’ either deliberately or inadvertently (the way languages were invented).”

*** a “meme” is an identifiable unit of human behavior which acts like a contagious virus, e.g. one teenager starts using the word “like” as an interjection, and before you know it, every teenager in the United States is infected with the “like” meme.

What is appealing about a benevolent omnipotent all-knowing God? Well, “all plots of all the great sagas, tragedies and novels, but also all the situation comedies and comic books, hinge on the tensions and complexities that arise because agents in the world don’t all share the same strategic information.” and so, only a nice guy who knows every thing and has the wherewithal to do anything, can work through the complications to fix things, and properly dispense justice and punishment.

The Loon wonders if there ever was, in fact, the storied wolf-boy, a child raised by wolves, and, if so, could such a child devoid of language ever imagine or know God?

“Scholars have uncovered a comically variegated profusion of ancient ways of delegating important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you can flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdmancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrifice animals (hepatoscopy), or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceromancy). Then there is moleoscophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites (still commonly used today) numerology and astrology.” Incidentally, the Loon noticed more artists and less quackers (palmists and tarot readers) in New Orleans’ St. Louis Square last week. Have we turned the corner from Nonsense Avenue onto Rational Boulevard? May we all hope so.

Under the heading “Shamans as hypnotists” Dennett quotes one of Hollywood’s foremost philistines, Samuel Goldwyn, who said, “Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.”

“…just as some of the features of written languages are clearly vestigial traces of their purely oral ancestors, some of the features of organized religion will turn out to be vestigial traces of the folk religions from which they are descended.” “Every folk religion has rituals—they are expensive, energy and time consuming, they often waste food, and may even be dangerous. And so the question become, for what purpose? The explanation might be that divination or shamanic healing requires them, and, “Once they are established on the scene for these purposes, they would be available to be adapted--exapted (Stephan Jay Gould’s term) for other uses.” Hmmmm! an interesting concept.

At this point, we are at page152. Only 237 pages to go. Remember the admonition that this was going to be a monster mini-book report?

Toxoplasma gondi is the causative organism of the disease Toxoplamosis. It is a single celled parasite which infects the brains of mice to makes them change their behavior from being afraid of cats to taunting cats. This, of course, gets the mice eaten by cats, which is what the parasite needs, so it can infect the gut of the cat, and then be spread in cat poop to other mice. Thus, by example, it is explained why behavior may not always be under personal rational and willful control. It may be an unlikely leap of logic, but Dennett poses the following. “Languages have enslaved our poor brains and made us eager accomplices in their own propagation!” Exclamation point? I should say. The Loon is disturbed by this, but unlikely to fall mute, or start watching TV with the sound turned off, but I have unsuccessfully threatened, on occasion, to declare a talk-free day.

About the birth of secrecy in religion, Dennett quotes a modern seer, Andy Rooney,” Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn’t anyone around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph Smith, and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters—and you know how reporters are. They’ll do anything for a story.” Hey Andy, who demands that God has to draw a crowd before he speaks?

Under “Domestication of Religions” Dennett quotes Elaine Pagels, in “The Gnostic Gospels”. “We now begin to see that what we call Christianity---and what we identify as Christian tradition—actually represents only a small selection of specific sources chosen from among dozens of others. Who made that selection and for what reasons? Why were these other writings excluded and banned as ‘heresy’? What made them so dangerous?” The Loon sez that three contentious questions in a row are way too many, and evidence of a contentious mind at work.

“Domesticated animals are less intelligent than their wild counterparts—because they can be. Their brains are smaller.” Does this mean that humans do their thinking for them, in exchange for their milk and their muscle for labor and food? “Ten thousand years ago, (at the dawn of animal domestication), humans and their domesticated animals were 1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today they comprise 98 percent.” Hey! the Loons sez that humans are doing pretty good for primates which have been domesticated by dogs, cats, sheep, goats, swine, cattle, poultry and horses. It seems like a commensural win-win deal. Domesticated non-humans animals get to proliferate and become more stupid, and we humans can proliferate and become less hardy….and maybe more stupid too, because we can be…we don’t have to go out and hunt, gather and scavenge. Hmmmm!

Dennett seems to draw a loose analogy between large religions and kleptocracies (governments run by thieves) but to do so he cleverly quotes Jarred Diamond, who writes about chiefdoms. “At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies….transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes…Why do commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard labor to kleptocrats?” Now back to Dennett in quotes “There are four ways that kleptocrats maintain power. 1. Disarm the populace and arm the elite. 2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute. 3. Use force to promote happiness by maintaining public order and curbing violence. 4. Construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy.” This is a dim, but perhaps realistic, view of organized society.

About the effect of prayer on God, Dennett, shamelessly, again goes for another Andy Rooneyism, “the Pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter and the fact that it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him. What goes through the Pope’s mind about being rejected all the time? Does God have it in for him?”

Dennett makes a distinction between people who believe in belief and those who truly believe, and he claims that many more believe that the belief in God exists than really believe in the presence of God. Further, he makes a distinction between people who believe “free will” exists and those who believe in the belief that “free will“ exists. He quotes physicist Paul Davies who defended the view that belief of “free will” is so important that it may be ‘a fiction worth maintaining.’”

About a certain type of religious hard-core he writes. “If anybody ever raises questions or objections about our religion that you cannot answer, that person is almost certainly Satan. In fact, the more reasonable the person is, the more eager to engage you in open-minded and congenial discussion, the more sure you can be that you’re talking to Satan in disguise! Turn away! Do not listen! It’s a trap!” Der Loon sez, it goes both ways, many atheists will quickly aver that religion is nothing but a conspiracy, a spell cast into the minds of the people by church leaders.

About the phenomenon of mega-churches, Dennett quotes Alan Wolf from “The Transformation of American Religion; How we actually live our lives” Wolf writes “…those who fear the consequences of a return to strong religious belief should not be fooled by evangelicalism’s rapid growth. On the contrary, evangelicalism’s popularity is due as much to its populism and democratic urges—its determination to find out exactly what believers want and to offer it to them—as it is to certainties of the faith.” The Loon stands mute, because he never been to a mega-church, but my daughter goes to one because she is lost in the crowd and if she misses church, no one will ask her where she was. This is a form of church lite, religion without fellowship.

About the mystery in religion. Dennett quote Rappaport “If postulates are to be unquestionable, it is important that they be incomprehensible.”

(Comment) this books suffers mightily from the absence of footnotes.

Under the heading “Does God exist?” Dennett quotes Voltaire, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary for us to invent him.”

“What can religion do for you” Dennett has a quartet of quotes.
Religion in the shape of a mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons.” William James. The Loon stands in awe of William James, but is wary of a sentence twice containing the word “certain”.
“No one dares suggest that neon signs blinking messages that ‘Jesus Saves’ may be false advertising.” R. Lawrence Moore
“Pray—to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in the behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” A definition provided by Ambrose Bierce
“In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.” Nicholas Humphrey

About research on Religion, “One strand in the current wave of research on religion raises a fundamental issue, in undeniable terms Studies are now underway on the efficacy of intercessonary prayer, (Dennett now quotes Robert Longman) ‘praying with the real hope and real intent that God would step in and act for the good of some specific other person(s) or other entity.’” The Loon would like to read that study, especially about how it was constructed and how it was objectively measured, and did those who were being prayed for know they were being prayed for and was there a control group who got no prayer but knew they could have been included in the group to be prayed for, and were there two other groups of people neither of which knew anything about the study but only half of which were prayed for, and was this a double-blind study, one with assessors of prayer effectiveness blind about which people where in which study group.

Under the heading “Morality and Religion” Dennett is cagy by relying on an utterly simplistic quote from Steven Weinberg, “Good people do good things, and bad people do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.” The Loon detects no closing of the loop with a discussion of why bad people do good things. Anyway, it appears to be a cheap shot against religion. Another cheap shot is “(Many religions) are impressed with the truth-finding power of science when it supports what they already believe.”

Under sacred values, Dennett quotes W. H. Auden wry comment. “We are here on Earth to do good to others, What the others are here for, I don’t know.”

In an obvious plea for rationality, Dennett writes, “No God that was pleased by displays of unreasoning love would be worthy of worship.” Further he quotes Emerson who wrote. “The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.” Emerson, it must be noted, was opinionated to a fault.

About the relative worth of people, Dennett offers this. ‘Consider for instance the example of contemplative monks who devote most of their lives to the purification of their souls and the rest to the maintenance of the contemplative life-style to which they have become accustomed. In what way, exactly, are they morally superior to those people who devote their lives to improving their stamp collection or golf swing? It seems to me that best that can be said of them is that they stay out of trouble, which is not nothing.”

In response to Cobb County GA putting stickers in textbooks that evolution is a theory, Dennett objects with the following. “Nobody put stickers in chemistry or geology books saying that the theories they contain are theories, not facts.”

About defense of the faith, Dennett (who is obviously a quoting maniac) quotes Avery Cardinal Dulles, (the Loon paraphrases) “Apologetics” is the rational defense of the faith….in the past it was supposed to rigorously prove that God exists, Jesus was divine and born of a virgin, and so forth, but it fell into disrepute…(because) it was under suspicion that it promised more than it could deliver and manipulated evidence to support the desired conclusions.” It did not always escape the vice that Paul Tillich called “sacred dishonesty” The Loon knows it is a stretch between belief that there are 12 foot long alligators in the New York City sewers, to belief that Jesus is a genetic haploid (with only one set of maternal genes), but you can find people who are vociferous in their defense of both premises. .

About the eternal turmoil found in science, Dennett writes, “…the cutting edge of science up close looks ragged and chaotic, a bunch of big egos engaging in shouting matches, their judgment distorted by jealousy, ambition, and greed, but behind them, agreed upon by all the disputants, is the massive routine weight of accumulated result, the facts that gives science its power.”

In this age of non-judgmental relativism and a plethora of available religious belief, at what age, the Loon would like to know, should it be permissible to expose a child to a single religion?

Whew! The Loon is exhausted, but there you have it; as disjointed a book as I have ever read, but gefult mitt ideas; a mixed bag of rageous, outrageous, deniable and undeniable ideas. If you have read this whole mini (Ha!) book review, let the Loon know, and he will send you a golden hero’s star for your calendar.

BOOKS-A-PLENTY

The Loon cashed in Christmas present gift certificates at Barnes and Nobel and Amazon, to restock his book larder. He is now well-fixed with reading. The list of a dozen books in waiting follows, not in the order of preference—the books alone will determine their order, and, indeed, if they will be read at all.

“Stranger in the Forest: On foot across Borneo”. By Eric Hanson (a gift from friend, Ron)
“From Beirut to Jerusalem” by Thomas L. Friedman, (a gift from friend, Pat). The Loon is underway in this book, and now he understands why Friedman is one of only a few columnists who writes anything worth reading about the Middle East. Friedman lived there long enough to know and understand the ferocious political, religious and social tensions found there.
(Comment: listing the two previous books as gifts is not a sub-liminal plea to send me books, but if you do, (Hint! Hint!) Each one will have a chance to enchant me. They will be read or not read based entirely each one’s merits. The Loon is not an “equal opportunity” reader.
“The Last Little Citadel: American High Schools since 1940), by Robert Hampel, This is a 1986 book gleaned out of a two buck bookstore box. It too has been started, and since the Loon was in high school for some time* between 1946 and 1950, Hampel’s description of early high schools seems “on the money”. FYI, other books of interest about high schools are “The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace”, by Powell, Farrar, and Cohen.

* The Loon didn’t graduate from high school; the minor offenses of juvenile delinquency plus repeated truancy and smoking in the locker room made him a three time loser. Later, when his mind underwent rational reorganization and reformation, he got hisself a GED. “Government Equivalent Diploma”, but he can’t prove it ‘cause he done lost the paper some’ers.

4. “David Brinkley: A Memoir” by (who else?) David Brinkley.
5. “Seal Team Seven”, a paperback novel about good guys in rubber suits riding in rubber boats and killing bad people, by Kieth Douglass. The Loon is going to save this for when he gets depressed; war seems to buoy the Loon’s spirits.
6. “The Lyre of Orpheus”, a novel by Robertson Davies, who is a fine Canadian writer, but this book always seems to settle to the bottom of the pile as others I fancy more percolate to the top—The Loon will give it one more year, and then, if not read, it becomes a gift to a library somewhere. Do others share revulsion at tossing books in the trash?
7. “Generation of Vipers;” a 1942 book written by Philip Wylie with the longest book sub-title I have ever seen. “A survey of Moral Want; a Philosophical Discourse suitable only for the Strong; a Study of American Types and Archetypes and a Signpost on the two Thoroughfares of Man, the Via Dolorosa and Descensus Averano, together with sundry Preachments, Epithets, Moodal Adventures, Political Impertinence, Allegories, Aspirations, Visions and Jokes, as well as certain Homely Hints for the care of the Human Soul.” Oh yes! The Loon could use some hints for care during those long dark nights of the soul. Anyway, see, the Loon wasn’t kidding about a humungous sub-title.
8. “50 Things You Are Not Supposed To Know” by Russ Kick (I finished it in one night, and it is not worth reading)
9. “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. This is a new controversial book creating both steam and the stench of brimstone.
10, “The Undercover Economist: Exposing why the Rich are Rich, the Poor are Poor, and why you can never buy a decent used car” by Tim Harford
11. “Culture Warrior” by Bill O’Reilly, another of today’s hot tomes. I hope he writes well, as the Loon suffers ideologues poorly.
12. “Body and Soul” by J. P. Smith, a bookstore freebie-bin novel about jazz and murder in France (I think). Letchaknow later.

LEXICOLOGY

Which is the proper term “Starter Castles” or “Mini Mansions”?

Allen Hall, the Loon
February 22, 2007, in warm sunny Dallas.