On becoming obsolete, and the spring bulb show...

(a mental dance and rumination illustrated with pictures taken yesterday at the annual Spring bulb show held in the 120+ year old conservatory of the Smith College horticultural department.)

My computer, a desk top, is aging.
It is slowing down; it's innards are constantly examined for viruses, but they are not the problem.
It stays updated, but the updates seem to add stress.
It's use of the fan has increased; it tries to keep cool as it deals with changes.
It seems as though it no longer has the ability to quickly process the ever increasing amount of data required for its ability to quickly complete what should be simple tasks.
Sometimes I wonder if all of this is a metaphor for the person who operates it.
I was going to write, "the person who owns it..." but that raises a few uncomfortable questions about the true nature of our relationship.
Certainly, it runs programs designed to keep it trouble free more than it once did.
It runs them so much, in fact, that I often have problems getting it to let me use it.

I've encountered this problem before.
It was solved with the purchase of a newer more powerful computer.
That event was in early May of 2011.
As the purchase was a discounted model from a chain store, I suspect that the computer was introduced the previous year.
Which means that it is old in computer years.
I can't believe I just wrote, "in computer years".
(sigh)

Sometimes it seems that most of the electronics are breaking down.
The tv works without a hitch, but the cable box often refuses to respond to commands as it busily updates the schedule page, or spies on people, or whatever it is really doing when I only want to see what else is on, or to simply change the channel.

Some days the internet pauses, takes a few breaths, and acts as though it is about to demand a vacation. It reminds me of the days when someone on the east coast could tell that it was after 5pm on the west coast - even simple internet searches slowed down when so many people got home and turned on their computers.




Over the last year I've explored streaming audio-visual content from services such as Amazon and Netscape. The hope was that I'd be able to cancel a large portion of my cable-phone-internet package to reduce costs. If there is a holiday, or a storm which keeps a large number of people home, streaming becomes a problem. One never knows where the problem originates, of course. Is it with Comcast, slowing down my service now that they can? Is it due to so much demand that Netscape or Amazon can't handle it? Is it a part of the electronic infrastructure somewhere in between the coast on which I'm located and the coast on which the streaming service originates? The reality is that when there is a problem, there is nothing we can do about it, whether or not we understand why it is happening. Is that a metaphor for life in the current version of America (or the world)?

These aren't new complaints, of course.
A minor problem can now have major repercussions.
I no longer carry more than a couple of dollars on my person.
If my bank's system, or the internet, or the company that screens for fraudulent purchases for the bank, or the grocery store's system hiccups, or is down, for any reason, I wouldn't be able to purchase groceries (this has happened to me couple of times).

The modern way of using plastic cards to access the 1's and 0's that represent money has been frustrating for some time. I still haven't forgotten my attempt some years ago to make a purchase in New Hampshire, a state that borders the state where I reside (Vermont), in a town about a half an hour's drive from my apartment. The purchase was around $100.00, and was for the business for which I worked (to be reimbursed). The purchase was denied. Luckily, this was during banking hours, so I called the bank. They quickly determined that the problem was that I seldom bought anything in New Hampshire, and seldom spent that amount of money on a purchase, so it had been denied as suspicious. They would authorize it so the sale would go through. Only it didn't. Another call to the bank revealed that they paid a company to flag what it considered suspicious activity on an account, and that company hadn't yet released my own funds to make the purchase. They would call the company while I waited on hold. I was eventually told everything was okay. Except it wasn't. All told, it took about 45 minutes to an hour just to be able to spend my own money which was in my own account.

When everything works the way it is intended, the modern electronic digital computer world can be quite an improvement over the old fashioned, low quality, slower analog world in which I grew up.
As long as one can afford it.

So why do I sometimes wish for a simpler time, a more gregarious time when people connected in person rather than through devices, when movies were screen in theatres and watched with a hundred or more friends of the dark in a shared experience?

The older folks always seem to complain that life was simpler, more beautiful, better crafted, more enjoyable, more social, more (fill in the blank) when they were young. That is when they weren't complaining about how difficult it was when they were young.

Now that I am of that older generation, I hear these same contradictory complaints from myself, see them in the things I type out, and revel in the open space, the balance between them, while accepting that there is nothing I can do, and that it doesn't do any good to try to understand. Then I try to understand.

 

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the computer, simply pushed beyond my capacity by the newer programs, that don't work as well as the older programs. If, in short, I am becoming old fashioned, and obsolete. I also wonder if I care about it in the least.

For now it is snowing, yesterday I reveled in the promise of Spring at the annual bulb show , and I plan to spend the rest of today reveling in a world passing away, a world that, like myself, is busy becoming obsolete.

addenda - While uploading the pictures for this post, the internet paused, lost the connection, and the program became stuck trying to upload the last picture. Tomorrow, I'll try to upload pictures from the conservatory rooms that aren't part of the bulb show. If the technology lets me. In the meantime, I'll be left to ponder whether the systems are simply breaking down, or becoming obsolete. I'll try to let pictures of spring flowers distract me. Before they become obsolete too.

Falling by the wayside

March? I haven't posted since March? Jeepers (mentally adds, singing, 'creepers, where'd ya get those peepers...'). Makes me wonder just what the hell I've been up to all this time. I'd write a bit of it out if I could remember any of it. Actually, I do, but much of it isn't that interesting, and a large part of the rest would be stressful ranting and raving about the political situation in my country. There have been a number of wonderful movies I've watched, or watched again. And there has been the garden, of course. As for the movies I've screened, there have been so many it would be a minor miracle if I could still name them all. The idea was to write them down here, making notes about each, but that project fell by the wayside.

A page from the Tyndale Bible.

Now there's a phrase I haven't used for awhile, "fell by the wayside". While it's meaning is readily apparent, the origin of the phrase may not be. It goes back to a 1526 translation of the Bible by William Tyndale. It was the first bible in English to be translated from Greek and Hebrew sources, and the first to hit the printing press. There had been an earlier version (the Wycliffe Bible) in Middle English in the late 1300's, but due to its use in a pre-Reformation movement, it was banned in 1409. By the late 1400's, owning one could bring the death penalty. But that's another story. The Tyndale translation, by the way, became a principal source for the King James version of the early 1600's. The "fell by the wayside" reference is from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 8, verses 5 thru 8. It occurs just after a mention of unclean spirits being cast out of Mary Magdalene and two other women, and concerns a farmer who went out to sow his seed. The sower was a bit sloppy, and some seed 'fell by the wayside'. In fact, a lot of it seemed to fall by the wayside. Only that seed which fell upon the 'good ground' was productive. Just after the teaching of this parable, the Teacher walked upon the waters, a pretty nifty act.

Now that I've wandered off onto this tangent, I'm no longer sure of where the heck I was headed. Was it to post a few pics from the garden? Or the chance to write mildly amusing commentary on making my own tomato paste, or the adventures of putting up copious amounts of fresh homemade pesto against the depravations of winter? (I used up the very last of last year's pesto a few days before starting this year's batches.) Or were the seeds a reference to all the movies I've watched lately? Or haven't watched?

A part of the larger garden at Solar Hill (which I help maintain) where my garden is located.
At the top of the photo is a bit of the playground for the Neighborhood Schoolhouse

More of the Solar Hill garden. Just off to the left are a large number of peonies, one of which can be seen here.
The Japanese dogwood was kind of spectacular this year; it demanded a photo.

A portion of my garden this past June.

Another part of my garden in mid to late Spring.
There's lots more, including other seasons. I'm considering starting a garden blog.

That last bit in the text above (the 'haven't watched' part) refers to an attempt to screen the RKO 'Hitler's Children' for one of my younger friends. While he's knowledgeable about independent movies from the late 1980's or so up to today, he's somewhat less aware of earlier movies. At any rate, my younger friend is going to be a first time daddy soon. He made his announcement via a Facebook post whose only content was a sound file that mystified a number of folks. It was the sound of the baby's heartbeat in the womb. Now, he's never seen any of the Nancy Drew movies, and thus has no associations what-so-ever for Bonita Granville, or, for that matter, with cowboy star Tim Holt, both of whom have the lead roles in the movie. So one night not long after the incidents in Charlottesville with tiki torch bearing American Nazis, white supremacists, and the follow up ravings of Donald Trump in the role of President of the United States, we settled in to watch this bit of lurid potboiler propaganda history.

The film starts out with a Nazi rally (above), and proceeds, via flashback narration, to a 1933 confrontation between American students in Germany, and a group of teenage male Nazis in training. A fight breaks out, during which wholesome Nazi Tim Holt holds onto the American's baseball bat, refusing to give it back. Plucky Bonita Granville looks him in the eye and suddenly exclaims, "Heil Hitler". When Holt's arm rises in automatic salute, she punches him in the stomach. When the German headmaster refuses to stop his charges from fighting, the American teacher (Kent Smith, giving a performance only slightly more lively than a cigar store Indian) simply yells out, "Achtung!", which causes the German boys to fall into line. If only it were that easy in real life. We then see a little bit of the school room education of the day:

Just after Tim Holt's praise for Hitler in the clip above, my young friend asked me to stop the movie. Under the current political climate, and being an expectant father, it was too much. His heart had started racing, and he was beginning to have a bit of a panic attack. We were only about 10 minutes into the film. Thinking back on it, it was probably a good thing we changed the picture. I'd have freaked out if I was an expectant parent, too. And I'm not just thinking of the scene in which a young mother to be hopes her birth is painful as a tribute to the Führer. This picture gets far more lurid and serious.

Of course, the reverberations of movies like 'Hitler's Children' into our own time should give us pause. We currently have an administration in power which excuses the outrages of the far right, pretending there were good people amongst them, condemning those on the left for their part in the violence (even though every report I saw or read stated that the 'antifa' crowd only resorted to violence when the Nazi types began charging at women, children, the clergy, and people with brown skin). Pictures that came out of the event were startling.

Is it live, or is it Memorex?

Today I turned 67 years old. My parents divorced when I was quite little; my mother was gone by the time I was 6 months old. My father, my brother, and I lived with my Aunt and Uncle in what had been my Grandfather's house. My Uncle had fought in WWII. When television came in, I wasn't allowed to have it on much after 5pm, when my Uncle got home. The noise and cacophony of tv shows with children's laughter, and especially sudden loud sounds, unnerved him and he would fly into rages. I won't dwell on it, or on what would now be easily recognizable as PTSD, except to say that I often felt terrorized as a child. The experiences I had in those years would come back to affect me later in life. As it turns out, I was diagnosed as having PTSD too. The stresses and coping mechanisms from those days got me through my first years on my own in the late 1960's, the Vietnam war protests, getting beat up because I had long hair, being beaten up and/or threatened for being perceived as gay, being shot in the head (not as serious as it sounds, except for the psyche - it was delivered via a pellet rifle after I was seen returning a European kiss on the cheek to a male friend returning to Germany. Still, the bullet lodged in my skull and they thought I might have some damage.) During my years managing bookstores in NYC, my assistant was from Pakistan. When the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran, my assistant became agitated and predicted the rise of ultra conservative Islam. He was in New York studying to become an architect so he could build decent homes for the poor of his country. He told me flat out that with the rise of conservative Islam, he was concerned about returning home; he might be killed for becoming educated, and going to the United States. The best cashier I had was a gorgeous black woman from the Caribbean, with a lilt in her voice which would make most people smile. My warehouse manager, who was the guy I trained to run the science fiction section, was from Cuba. You get the idea; I had a lot of friends and co-workers who, if they were around today, might face deportation. The sad fact of the matter is that my country is rounding people up. Some have been deported, some are being held. Many on trumped up charges, or minor traffic style violations. Now a  movement is on to deport those who were brought here as children, who grew up here, and became part of the fabric of life here. Legal protections for transgender folk are being removed. Repealing the right of marriage for gay folks won't be far behind. The Trump Department of Justice has already insisted that gay folks are not entitled to job protections under federal anti-discrimination laws. Confrontations in the culture wars continue, and will, until decent normal everyday people start to riot. And what then? Well, perhaps that's why the Trump administration has 1.2 Billion dollars in the Federal budget for 'detainee beds'. I have been accused of having a decidedly liberal paranoia about this, but I could spend several hours writing out the reasons for such suspicions, and pointing out the similarities between the US today and Europe in the early 1930's. You're free to laugh at me if you want, I won't mind. But I will remind you that Nazis are on the march. In America. They may be carrying mass market torches, but that doesn't change the fact that they are there, marching, provoking, waiting. Their own leaders will tell you that an army is being built. We have a President who threatened violence from his supporters if he wasn't elected. His supporters threaten violence if he is removed from office. Go ahead and laugh some more. But remember the following image when the 'arrests' start. It was painted on a fence in California a few days after the Charlottesville events. And you'd better hope to hell everyone in your family is straight, and white. A lot of the seeds being sown aren't for flowers.

another Memorial day.

Ahh, Memorial Day. A few days back, the emerging Spring propelled itself from rainy getting warmer right into mid summer. And it's humid already. When I first moved here in 1995, there was one, maybe two weeks of high humidity in late July. Now it starts in the Spring. In the next several years, I expect we'll probably see a population shift northwards. And to think that a few years ago we still used to have killing frosts in late May. It wasn't considered safe to plant until Memorial Day. And one may permissibly now wear white without being horribly gauche. Interesting the color white - depending on the geography it can symbolize purity and virginity or death and transformation. K/Cool virginity just doesn't fit with the idea of summer. If you're lucky, it's time to get that escape of one week with pay. The rest of us no longer even try to dream. Where was I?

Memorial Day. Back when I was a kid, the new Federal three day weekends hadn't started yet. Memorial day was always May 30th. I guess it was in my mid teens that the observance of Memorial Day moved to the last Monday of the month. Most of the new three day weekends were celebrations. They became special sales weekends almost immediately. But to my mind, at least, Memorial Day wasn't a day for celebrations. Celebrations always seemed to be festivities of rejoicing. The darker more solemn meaning seems opposed to festive, ya know? Memorial Day was a day when everyone took off. It wasn't just government desk jobs that got the day off. Even grocery stores closed for the day No one seemed to be bothered by the idea that they would have to plan at least a day ahead to fill their needs. There wasn't that kind of a sense of immediate entitlement yet. And no one seemed to catch on that having special sales weekends meant that everyday workers began losing their rights - somebody had to work. In a local economy like this one, it means giving up further rights to a peaceable life so we can get those very important people with money, tourists, to spend it here and keep the part-time jobs flowing. It's an economy based on debasing subservience as a way of life.

Well, what I'd planned as a sort of jolly perambulation down the streets and alleys of memory didn't quite come off as planned, did it? Ah, well. at least one can wear white again.

Mayday! Mayday!

It's truly beautiful now - on my 6am walk to work the forsythias are blooming, both the star magnolias and

the cup and saucer magnolias are in bloom, as  daffodils, jonquils, and tulips perfume the paths I trudge; delicate birdsong twitter tweets are joined by the less prosaic musings of geese wafting thru the air. Trees have light green cotton candy tufts swaying ever so lightly in the morning breeze. Spring is here.

It's May the first. In much of the world, its a day given to celebrations to honor workers and men who were framed and killed in Chicago for trying to unionize to demand a 40 hour work week. And it's Beltane, the new season of growth, the veil is thin, magic can...... WAIT. WHAT? men killed in Chicago?

See, May 1st, 1886 had been set as a day for a general strike and protests all across the U.S. in favor of a 40 hour work week. The average work week at the time was 60 hours, while many worked 12 to 15 hours a day, 6 days a week. Child Labor was common. Thousand upon thousand marched. The bosses tended to feign surprise at the numbers of workers who gathered. In Chicago, 80,000 took part in the main protest.  On May 3rd, as one rally ended, hundreds went to Haymarket Square to protest the strike breaking "scab" workers who had been brought in at the McCormick plant. The police were brought in, they opened fire on the crowd of workers. Some say four were killed. Others reported hundreds. A rally was held the next day to protest the violence. Someone threw a bomb. The police said it was the workers. The workers said it was thrown by a Pinkerton paid tough. It exploded, sending shrapnel into the crowd of workers. The police backed up, aimed their weapons and opened fire - according newspaper accounts for a full two minutes and more. The number of dead workers was not mentioned in the press.

Eight men, labor leaders and organizers of the May 1st march and subsequent protests were rounded up on false charges, and put on trial for being anarchists who incited the mob to violence. They were condemned to die by hanging. One man killed himself first. Five men were hung. The world took note. May 1st, Labor Day was born. But not in the United States. Here, after the murder of workers of the Pullman Union, President Grover Cleveland, to pacify workers and get their votes, created and set Labor Day at the beginning of September. He did not want to place the day in aassociation with May 1st, International Labor Day, so that no one could stir unrest in memory of the Haymarket martyrs.

As the trials and executions ended, a new labor organization was started, the AFL or American Federation of Labor. In the early 1914, Henry Ford gave his workers a 5 day/40 hour workweek. The eight-hour day was realized for many more workers in the U.S. in 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act (under the New Deal) made it a legal day's work throughout the nation.




May Day, Los Angeles 1933