Oh no. I hear the hum.


I first noticed the hum many weeks ago. When I first became conscious of it, I gave it little thought. Though this area is very quiet, engine noises can carry a long way. When I heard it in the middle of the night, it became more puzzling, because I couldn’t think of any reason why a large diesel engine would be idling a mile or two away in the middle of the night. Now that I’m aware of it, I hear the hum almost every day — or night.

Before I had read about the hum, I had described it to a neighbor the same way many others have described it. It sounds like a large diesel engine idling — a train engine, for example — about a mile or more away. It does not change pitch or volume. The sound is either there or not there. Eventually I Googled for something like “low pitched rumbling sound” and discovered that it is called the hum. It has been reported all over the world. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article. If you Google for “the hum,” you’ll find many articles about it. It has been reported that only 2 percent of people can hear it. Why me? My hearing is pretty good, especially for someone my age. Also it’s usually very quiet here.

At first I dismissed the sound as a form of tinnitus, or as some sort of pneumatic phenomenon having to do with how the outside air flows around the roof of my house. But after a few weeks, I became increasingly confident that the sound is real. Then it dawned on me to see if I could measure the sound with a sound-measuring app on my iPhone.

I have not yet done enough measuring to feel highly confident of what I’m seeing in the “Decibel X” app. But so far I think the app is confirming what I hear. When I don’t hear the hum, the background noise level averages around 30 decibels, at the whisper level. When I do hear the hum, the noise level averages about 37 decibels. The background noise here always seems to be concentrated at frequencies below 90Hz. But if I had to guess at the frequency of the hum, I’d put it as around 50 Hz.

Assuming that the hum is real, I have no theory about what is causing it. But I’m now 99 percent convinced that it’s real.

Does anyone else hear the hum?

Diet pesto



Pesto with roasted turnip

My belt having given up a notch and warned me of imminent danger, this morning I finally forced myself to go stand on the scales. The time for denial came to an end. I was 10 pounds over my ideal weight. To me, that’s the red-alert stage, meaning that a diet must begin this very day. The previous diet was three years ago. This is my usual pattern, up and down within a 10-pound range.

I had already planned to have pesto for supper. Fine. It would have to be as austere a pesto as I could make.

My usual pesto is anything but austere. I’ve always been generous with the nuts and parmesan, so an indecent amount of olive oil is necessary to liquefy everything. Today’s pesto was about five parts spinach, five parts parsley, and one part basil. The season of all-basil pesto is at least a couple of months away if not longer. I used only a couple of walnuts and a couple of teaspoons of parmesan (as well as a teaspoon of vinegar) to keep the requirement for olive oil low. (Though I had a few walnuts and a sprinkling of parmesan on the side.) I ground the basil in the mortar and pestle, but I used the food processor for everything else.

Roasted turnips are surprising satisfying on a low-carb diet. The pesto wasn’t terrible.

One of my resolutions for this year is to eat more leaves — lots more leaves. Chard, parsley, spinach, kale, and romaine are already under way in the garden. I’ll have more posts this spring about eating more leaves, and why I think that’s so important (hat trip Michael Pollan).

Moravian baking


I don’t know enough about German cooking or the history of the Moravian Church to accurately trace the pedigree of these thin lemon cookies, though I can provide some hints. But I need to digress for a few paragraphs before I get back to the lemon cookies.

First of all, the Moravian Church is one of the oldest Protestant denominations, with roots in the 15th Century. In 1753, German-speaking Moravians established a planned — communal, really — community at Bethabara, North Carolina. Their largest community in North Carolina was Salem, established in 1766. In 1913, Salem merged with the town of Winston to become Winston-Salem.

The Moravian levels of education and technology were much higher than that of other settlers in the area. They were well financed and were able to buy prime land for their settlements. Elements of their German culture and traditions persist today in the areas they settled. But at this point, because I don’t know enough to be able to follow the historical thread, I must skip ahead to, say, 1955. I have a clear memory of waiting in the car in front of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts while my father went into the shop to buy a box of doughnuts. This was at the first Krispy Kreme store in North Carolina (1937), on South Main Street in Winston-Salem, in Old Salem. Krispy Kreme has now gone international.

I cannot say to what degree Krispy Kreme might have been influenced by Moravian baking — probably very little, since the recipe for the doughnut dough came from New Orleans, according to Wikipedia. But I do know that the 1937 Krispy Kreme store was only a few doors away from the Moravian Winkler Bakery in Old Salem.

But another bakery got its start in Winston-Salem, in 1930. That’s Dewey’s Bakery. Dewey’s business was largely based on traditional Moravian favorites. Dewey’s certainly has not grown the way Krispy Kreme did, but clearly they’re expanding and shipping their products farther and farther. As far as I can tell, Dewey’s is now shipping nationwide.

Dewey’s makes a wide range of Moravian cookies. There’s a chocolate version of these thin cookies. The most traditional version, though, is a thin ginger cookie. There is a huge demand in this area for Moravian sugar cake and ginger cookies at Christmas.

What I don’t know (though I wish I did) is whether the pedigree of these cookies goes all the way back to the Old World. It’s probably safe to assume that it does. The Moravian homeland, Bohemia and Moravia, is now in the Czech Republic.

Dewey’s products, I’d have to say, don’t necessarily use the best of all possible ingredients. No doubt that’s to keep prices down. I don’t know if it’s still true, but it used to be that they made their Moravian sugar cake in two versions — one with butter and a less expensive version with margarine. The lemon cookies’ list of ingredients include palm oil and “butter flavor.”

I love the concept of small, thin cookies, though. It’s a little easier not to eat too many. Like shortbread, they’re perfect with tea.


A Moravian lovefeast, Bethania, North Carolina. Wikipedia photo by Will and Deni McIntyre.

Born into the wrong world


“Gentleman Jack,” season 1, episode 2. Copyright, HBO, BBC: Fair use, not monetized.

The second episode of “Gentleman Jack” contains one of the most brilliant, beautiful and touching scenes I can remember. Other than the recitation of the priest, there is not even any dialogue. The scene’s entire meaning is conveyed by the sequence of expressions on Anne Lister’s face. (Anne Lister is played by Suranne Jones.) Anne, with a broken heart, has changed her mind at the last moment and has decided to go down to London for the wedding of her former lover.

I know very little about Anne Lister. One probably would have to read her diaries (as the producers certainly did) to guess what might be going through her mind. But what I see in this scene is an acute awareness of being born into the wrong world; the knowledge that celebrations always will be for someone else, never for her; a stoic attitude and a resolve not to be crushed; and a determination to seize as much from life as she can from a world that isn’t ready for her. Every word of the priest is like being shot with an arrow.

“Gentleman Jack” is available for streaming at HBO Max.

Can we have some nice things now?



Pete Buttigieg at Washington Union Station. Source: Wikipedia.

With “Amtrak Joe” in the White House, and the new U.S. secretary of transportation wanting to lead the world in high-speed rail (we’re now 19th) can we Americans now have some nice things?

To people like me, who have ridden thousands of miles on trains (President Biden has ridden 770,000 miles on trains), it amazes me how many people have never ridden a train. How could they not be curious? I admit that I love cars, too. But where is their spirit of adventure? Certain images inspire awe and imagination: A Concorde in flight (a sight not seen since 2003), a square-rigged sailing ship under full sail in a white-capped sea, a Saturn 5 rocket lifting off, a Boeing 747 descending above the Golden Gate Bridge, a steam train working its way across Scotland’s Glenfinnan Viaduct on its way to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Some of those things are not doable. But anyone, even an American, can ride a train.

We don’t have a lot of details so far, but we do know that the Biden administration and the new Congress will push for a major investment in high-speed rail. We also know that Republicans will fight tooth and claw to resist, though Republicans don’t seem to mind the billions of dollars that this country spends each year on roads and gasoline.

Why do conservatives hate trains? The pompous and dull-witted George Will is infamous for claiming to know why we progressives love trains: “[T]he real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Does that make any sense at all when a few million Americans fly each day on packed airplanes, with about as much room left for their individualism as for their legs? I’m not the first to suspect that the real reason that conservatives hate trains is racism.

Trains for America — fast ones — make more sense now than ever. Our interstate highways are overloaded, dangerous, and miserable. To me, one of the most exciting things about this change in the American government is that trains are back on the agenda. New York City has made a nice start with the new train hall at Pennsylvania Station.

One more thing. The kind of people who hate trains also are the kind of people who would try to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service. The first order of business is to fire Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee. Then we can start talking about new services, new revenues, and a new prosperity for the Postal Service.


I took this photo in Paddington Station in August 2019, on my way from London Heathrow to Edinburgh.


Catching the train from Uig to Inverness, August 2019


New York City’s new train hall. Source: Wikipedia, photo by Jim Henderson


The Jacobite steam train crossing the Glenfinnan Viaduct. Source: Wikipedia photo by Nicholas Benutzer.

Almost April



The gate from the garden into the orchard

It’s a bit of a tradition to post this poem each year.


The Goose Girl

Spring rides no horses down the hill,
But comes on foot, a goose-girl still.
And all the loveliest things there be
Come simply, so, it seems to me.
If ever I said, in grief or pride,
I tired of honest things, I lied:
And should be cursed forevermore
With Love in laces, like a whore,
And neighbours cold, and friends unsteady,
And Spring on horseback, like a lady!

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950



A neighbor gave me the eggs

Gentleman Jack


Once again I need to express exasperation at how difficult it is to find good material for streaming. Finding it is like finding a needle in a haystack. Brute force seining through rivers of dreck is the only method I know. I found “Gentleman Jack” while seining through dreck on HBO Max.

The series is not exactly new. According to the Wikipedia article, it was a joint production of HBO and BBC 1 and premiered in the spring of 2019. There are eight episodes in the first season. A second season is now in production.

The story is based on the life of Anne Lister, 1791-1840, a member of the Yorkshire gentry who has been called “the first modern lesbian.” She kept diaries, written in code, that were not deciphered until years after her death.

I’ve watched only one episode so far, but this promises to be one of the best period pieces I’ve seen in a long time. It is excellently cast. The settings in and out of doors are visually rich. Each scene is beautifully conceived. The characters are much more multi-dimensional than what one usually gets in then-and-there social dramas. Anne Lister by all accounts was a highly intelligent and complex woman. The intelligence of the script and the complexity of the characters and situations seem to be doing justice to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg9d6S6N_xw

An early start on the 2021 garden


Amazon calls this a “mini greenhouse.” I’d call it a cold frame. It will be my first experiment in extending the growing season. It’s 95″ x 32″ x 32″ and cost $46.

Some people plant by the stars. I plant with the weather. The 10-day forecast for my location shows highs through March 20 of 73, 73, 61, 63, 51, 60, 65, 62, 59, and 57, and lows of 51, 49, 47, 45, 40, 43, 45, 44, 35, and 33. There are five rainy days ahead, with a total of about 1.5 inches of rain during the five-day rainy spell. That’s planting weather for cool-weather vegetables.

I’m going to sow radishes and some leaf crops from seed and set out some onion sets in the open garden. I’ve also bought a few cabbage plants. In the little greenhouse, I’ll start some things from seed (in peat cups) that should be safe to move into the garden around April 15. I’m also starting parsley and maybe some other herbs in the garden soil inside the little greenhouse. I’ll dismantle and move the greenhouse once the weather is warmer.

Several years ago, I grew an incredible crop of celery from seeds that I had started indoors. Celery is said to be hard to grow in this area, but I’ve never seen more beautiful celery. I plan to start celery in peat cups inside the little greenhouse. The trick is, start early and keep it watered. There’s a limit to how much celery one can use in the kitchen, but if I’m lucky enough to have a good celery crop, I’ll juice it and mix it with herb juices and leaf juices for spring tonics.

The squeals of the formerly dominant



David Hume (1711-1776) from a portrait by Allan Ramsay


“Generally speaking, the errors in religions are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” — David Hume


As a liberal and firm believer in free speech, I am willing to take my lumps from what others say and think. But whether on principle it strengthens my case or weakens it, the pressure of my Humean moral sentiments compels me to say that I am sick to the point of nausea of hearing conservatives going on and on about “cancel culture.” In retrospect, it was predictable: If a day ever came when the dominant moral order was brought down and its flaws aired and challenged, that dominant moral order would squeal in a very unbecoming way, never doubting its own superior virtue, half-blind to its flaws and to the weakness of its own case (and therefore of its need to change the subject), and bringing all its intellectual power to bear on trying to turn the tables on its critics.

Dominance takes multiple forms. Economic dominance is one. Racial dominance is another. But we talk far too little about another form, moral dominance. All forms work together to preserve power and privilege. Conservative intellectuals can’t make a case for economic dominance or racial dominance, though that’s clearly what millions upon millions of conservatives want. But on the matter of moral dominance, they think they can slip one past us. If moral dominance is lost, then economic and racial dominance can be maintained only by naked power, which gets us awfully close to what the Republican Party has become.

Ross Douthat tries to slip one past us today in his column in the New York Times, Do Liberals Care If Books Disappear? It is, of course, a rant about Dr. Seuss books. There is no need to get into the argument about six Dr. Seuss books going out of print. Do conservatives have a point? Sure they do. I might even be able to spare a moment or two of concern about six Dr. Seuss books going out of print, but only after I’ve finished being concerned about thirty thousand other things that conservatives are blind to and don’t care about and don’t write about.

In the light of my own moral sentiments, which are not attached to religion, a big part of what makes Douthat so wrongheaded is his catholic thinking. Douthat also is a Catholic with a capital C, though his religion is secondary to what I see as his worst foible — love of authority and love of the old order. The word “catholic” with a lower-case c has a somewhat shaggy meaning in English, but that meaning has to do with universality and the safety of orthodoxy. I would spin it like this: To think in a catholic way means to safely think the way a great many others think, to have authority on your side, and to think the way people have thought for a very long time. In other words, dominance with deep historical roots.

The matter of moral dominance needs to be a part of the cultural conversation that we’re trying to have amid all the cultural uproar. Conservatives need to be shown how they’re trying to assert moral dominance against the moral claims of minorities, and thus block justice. Conservatives have even made “social justice” into propaganda dirty words. And minorities need to feel greater moral confidence in challenging the blindnesses of the dominant economic, racial, and moral order. Did some well-off conservative provocateur lose his or her job, or feel a new and unexpected chilling of his or her rights, after saying something offensive? If so, that’s truly a bad thing. I will put it on my list of concerns, in position 33,432. Right now I’m much more concerned about those whose rights have been chilled for centuries.

Is philosophical work being done in this area? Not much, as far as I can tell. Googling for “moral dominance” brings up very little. But it did bring up a short paper with the title “The Demise of Ethical Monism,” by Philip A.D. Schneider. Schneider does not occupy a position in one the great university philosophy departments, though he holds a Ph.D. from Duke. He is, of all places, at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina. He makes a case not for overturning the moral order but for replacing what he calls “ethical monism.”

Schneider writes (italics mine):

“[W]hen we judge that another person’s decision is immoral, we are implicitly recognizing that this person has selected an ethical theory to justify what they sense to be a dominant value in the situation. We are saying further that our dominant value, and its supporting monist ethical theory, is being rejected.”

If I understand Schneider correctly, then I would apply it to Douthat’s column thus: Douthat is trying to preserve the dominant (and monistic) moral order by rejecting the moral values of a competing moral order.

Douthat is not by any means the only conservative intellectual doing that. Confronted with the atrocities of the Republican Party and lacking any principle with which to defend it, conservatives must grasp at any floating flotsam for their propaganda. It’s almost all they’ve got right now, which is why they’re so shrill on the subject of “cancel culture.” Conservatives are being told by conservative propaganda that their way of life is threatened. That’s how they see the challenge to the dominant economic, racial, and moral order. So why aren’t we talking about that, instead of six Dr. Seuss books? I’ll venture an answer to my question: Because they don’t have a philosophical, or a principled, or even a religious answer that will pass muster with thoughtful people. What they have left, and what they fear to lose, is their dominance.

How about a bit of Lent?



From the 1919 Church Hymnal with Accompanying Tunes, used by the Church of Ireland. Source: Wikipedia, public domain.


Yes, I’m a heathen who grieves for the loss of the pagan world. And yes, I think that St. Patrick was just about the worst thing that ever happened to the people of Ireland. They hardly knew what hit them, and over the centuries they forgot. But I’m also an amateur musician and organist and creature of this culture, and I know a good hymn when I hear one.

Earlier today I came across the image above on Facebook, posted by a political friend. At first I thought she must be a hymn scholar but had never thought to mention it. But when I asked about the source of what she had posted, she wrote: “Just a copy/paste from Wikipedia. My lent mini practice today was to pick a hymn and research it, listen to it, etc.”

Having seen this wonderful Irish hymn on paper, I had to hear it sung. That, of course, sent me to YouTube. There are infinitely many versions on YouTube, brutally murdered in every way imaginable. But one of the things I know as a musician and organist is that hymns are properly sung in only two places in the world: the chapel of King’s College Cambridge, and church congregations in Wales. The music-loving Celtic spirit in Ireland and Wales seems to have gone in two different directions, and it was the Welsh who perfected the choir. Below is a YouTube link to a congregation that sounds Welsh — Swansea, I wouldn’t doubt — though the YouTube page doesn’t say. This was the best version I found. It’s not properly attributed on YouTube, but I believe it may be a BBC recording. This congregation has been rehearsed.

Three things stand out: First, that everyone is singing. Most are even looking up so they can watch the director. Second, the vigor and symmetry of the director, making sure that no one loses the beat. Third, that the organist provides a long pause between verses, to give the singers a little time to catch their breath. Note also the time signature of this hymn, 3/2. Like 3/4 meter, this is a waltzy rhythm. Hymns with three-beat rhythms are in the minority. “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” comes to mind, in 3/4.

I do not know of a grander form of human collective activity than group singing. And of course group singing was one of the many things shut down by Covid-19. Those who either can’t, or won’t, put their lungs into singing with a group of other human beings who know how to sing don’t know what they’re missing.