July 2022 – Into the Woods

The Essex Serpent

I was hesitant to watch this. What I’d read about it made the story seem contrived. A sea monster? Really? Was it a bodice-ripper? If so, that’s not my genre. I also knew that the story was set in the flats and fens and swamps of southeastern England — a part of England you probably want to visit only if you’ve already been everywhere else or if you need to catch a ferry to the Hook of Holland. But I love well done period pieces, and I trusted Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston not to sign up for a weak project. The series is based on a novel by Sarah Perry.

Four episodes in (there are six episodes), I still had my doubts. Much of the dialogue is a bit unpolished and ragged around the edges. Sometimes the dramatic logic seems a little off, with what the characters say and do not always making sense. I frequently wondered whether it was going to be possible to like (and therefore to care about) Claire Danes’ and Tom Hiddleston’s characters. Two of the best characters, really, are supporting cast — Clémence Poésy as Stella and Caspar Griffiths as Frankie, an 1893 example of a boy we would today classify as autistic. The writer, I was afraid, didn’t have full control of the story. But by the last episode, the writer had dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s, and stitched the plot into a complete and complex Gothic embroidery.

“The Essex Serpent” can be streamed on Apple TV+.

Marmite

I am embarrassed to admit that, for the longest time, I didn’t recognize the difference between Marmite and Nutella. I filed them both away in the seldom-referenced category of mysterious European goop in small jars that people make jokes about.

But Marmite and Nutella are very different. Nutella, made in Italy, is a sweet concoction made of hazel nuts and chocolate. Marmite, though it originated in Germany and is now made in Britain, is a salty, savory brown goop made from yeast salvaged from brewing. I recently came across an article in British newspapers about the health benefits of the high concentrations of B vitamins in Marmite. But watch out for the salt!

Marmite, which is very rich in the umami flavor, is no doubt a less refined relative of monosodium glutamate, which also is extracted from yeast, though the MSG is of course refined into a white salt. I am not among those who disparage MSG. Back in the 1970s, MSG got a bad reputation based on falsehoods. Again and again studies have shown that MSG does not cause headaches and that it’s not bad for you. The truth is that yeast extracts are used in many foods to enhance flavor. I’m guessing, though, that there is no yeast extract more flagrant than Marmite. There is a slight bitterness — hops from the brewing? — but the umami flavor goes on and on. There’s a boozy, old-world flavor about it that I like. Marmite has been made for 120 years. It reminds me of a pub, and I like anything that reminds me of pubs.

No doubt Marmite is an excellent seasoning for dark soups and stews. I’ve seen recipes for Marmite pasta sauces. All that is something that I will definitely experiment with this winter. It’s too hot right now for that sort of thing.

Another forever home for another typewriter

I have written here in the past about empathy for mechanical things. The syndrome must surely be related to the feelings — should I call them moral intuitions? — that cause us to adopt homeless cats. The mechanical version is the conviction that beautiful old machines ought to have a home. They ought to be maintained. And they ought not to be abused or put down.

I now have five typewriters in working condition. Four of them are electric. I promised myself that I would stop bringing home homeless typewriters after I acquired just one more machine. That machine would be a manual typewriter. It also would need to be a full-size office machine. And it would need to be a fairly late machine that well represents the highest evolution of non-electric typewriters. I was looking for an Underwood, because I used to have an Underwood that served me well for many years. But no suitable Underwood showed up on eBay. My next choice was a Royal FP. That’s what I bought.

Based on an on-line database of typewriter serial numbers, this typewriter was made in 1961. The eBay photos showed it to be very dirty, but I couldn’t see any damage or rust. I kind of liked that it was green. Typewriters with colored panels seem to be in demand by collectors these days. When the typewriter arrived, I was horrified to see that the carriage was jammed, hard. The carriage also was out of position by about 3/8 inch. It would have taken a very heavy blow to knock the carriage off its rails. The shipping box was not damaged. My suspicion is that the eBay seller knew the machine was damaged, even though he said in the description that the machine was working.

The seller would have allowed me to return the typewriter. But my empathy for mechanical things had already kicked in. This machine was eminently restorable except for the derailed carriage. I knew that, if I returned the machine, it probably would end up being junked with no hope of ever being repaired. Removing the carriage on most typewriters is one of the last things you want to do. But after watching a couple of YouTube videos on repairing old Royals, I decided to remove the carriage and see if repair was possible. Hail Mary surgery was, I reasoned, this particular typewriter’s only hope. If I failed, I would at least learn and know that I tried.

To my surprise, after removing many screws and with only two screws left to go, the carriage popped back onto its tracks and started moving smoothly again. I stopped disassembling at that point and put everything back together. This old typewriter has a will to live. Then again, all old typewriters do.

Many people who collect typewriters these days — including lots of young people — have no early experience with typewriters that makes them sentimental about typewriters. But I got my first typewriter when I was eleven or twelve years old. My first part-time job, during high school, was as a newspaper copy boy (1966). Not only did I look after the routine needs of a roomful of beautiful (and noisy) Teletype machines, I also worked in a newsroom full of typewriters. Over the years, as I moved up the food chain in the newspaper world, I used many models of typewriters. They were mostly Royals, and some of them were Royal FP’s like this one. (Computers started taking over newsrooms in the mid-1980s.) I found that my hands still have a memory of using the controls on the Royal FP, including its “Magic Margin.” How long has it been since you held a kitten? Even if it has been many years, if you pick up a kitten your hands will remember.

And speaking of newspapers, I retired from the San Francisco Chronicle, where a famous Royal FP is still on display in the Chronicle lobby, as far as I know. The Chronicle columnist Herb Caen often referred to his “loyal Royal.” There’s a picture of Caen’s last loyal Royal in the Wikipedia article on Herb Caen.

Click here to expand

How reason propels the arc of justice

The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Peter Singer. Princeton University Press. Second edition, 2011; first published 1981. 208 pages.

Peter Singer, born in 1946, is one of our most progressive moral philosophers. In 1975, he published Animal Liberation. For years, he has argued for altruism, from utililitarian principles. In 2015, he published The Most Good You Can Do, which holds that we have a duty to, at the very least, donate money to help alleviate global poverty.

Singer looks largely to David Hume (1711-1776) for the roots of his utilitarian philosophy. Singer’s concern in this book is how it was that moral progress has continued since the time of Hume, as rights were extended to slaves, to women, and even, to a much lesser degree, to animals. Singer calls this the expanding circle. I would call it the arc of justice.

It is reason, Singer believes, that leads to this ever-expanding circle of rights. Applying reason to rights and justice, Singer writes, is like stepping onto an escalator. Once you take the first step, you must ride all the way to the top; there is no way on the way up to get off. There is no reason at all, Singer believes, why animals should not have the same rights as human beings. And Singer is entirely open to the idea, somewhere much higher up on the escalator, that plants have rights, as does the land, a mountain, or a river. On that subject, his sympathy is with Aldo Leopold.

Singer, in this book though, gets into a serious quarrel with the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who died in 2021. Singer entirely accepts Wilson’s case that our “moral intuitions” including altruism have their roots in our human evolution as social animals. But Singer believes that Wilson was entirely wrong in claiming that these moral intuitions are the last word in moral philosophy, with no moral progress possible beyond what is innate in our instincts. We are reasoning beings as well as social beings, Singer argues, and it is reason that leads us up the escalator to an ever-expanding and increasingly altruistic concept of rights and duties.

Singer makes a strong objection to Wilson’s criticism of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971). Wilson wrote that Rawls’ concept of justice (which is of course based on reason) may be “an ideal state for disembodied spirits,” but is “in no way explanatory or predictive with reference to human beings.” Singer does not discuss Rawls in this book except to defend Rawls against Wilson. But I think it would be safe to assume that Singer has no argument with Rawls. As I’ve mentioned here in the past, Rawls — having stepped onto the escalator of reason — does not attempt in A Theory of Justice to extend to animals his concept of justice as fairness. But as I read Rawls, he almost begs someone else to do that work.¹

Why am I so interested in moral philosophy? I would argue that we all should be interested in moral philosophy, as a means of holding our ground and preserving our confidence in an era in which religion and politics increasingly have gone insane, actually belittling the effort toward moral progress as “woke,” using insulting terms such as “social justice warrior.” Religion and right-wingery have always worked to block moral progress. But in the present era they are increasingly open to using violence and corrupting our institutions to gain power and cruelly turn back the clock to a far more primitive time.

Singer paraphrases Leviticus 25:39-46, which I quote here from the Christian Standard translation:

“If your brother among you becomes destitute and sells himself to you, you must not force him to do slave labor. Let him stay with you as a hired worker or temporary resident; he may work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then he and his children are to be released from you, and he may return to his clan and his ancestral property. They are not to be sold as slaves, because they are my servants that I brought out of the land of Egypt. You are not to rule over them harshly but fear your God. Your male and female slaves are to be from the nations around you; you may purchase male and female slaves. You may also purchase them from the aliens residing with you, or from their families living among you – those born in your land. These may become your property. You may leave them to your sons after you to inherit as property; you can make them slaves for life. But concerning your brothers, the Israelites, you must not rule over one another harshly.”

Though that passage is more than 2,000 years old, it is shocking that, until the Enlightenment, with the church unchallenged, the arc of justice moved so slowly. It was not until 150 years ago that owning and inheriting slaves was outlawed in this country. And now the heirs of the Confederacy² are reasserting themselves, actually claiming moral superiority for themselves and ridiculing resistance as “woke.”

What does one say to people like that? More important, what does one do to resist them? I return again and again to the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

But how?

Notes:

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 448.

2. Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, 2020.

Planting pumpkins

I’ve written here previously about the nearby farm where I’m buying most of my summer vegetables this year. They sell the vegetables for $1.50 a pound (mix and match) from the shade of an old barn right beside the fields. You can see in the upper right of the photo that the corn will be ready soon. The crew (they are from Mexico, and they are very good) are planting fall crops — three varieties of pumpkins including what I call pie pumpkins, and sweet potatoes.

I first observed this planting protocol from commercial strawberry fields. The plastic, of course, keeps down the weeds and preserves moisture. A drip irrigation pipe runs under the plastic in each row. The water for these fields is pumped from a pond just below the fields, but rainfall has been good here this summer. The soil look pretty terrible, doesn’t it? But it is typical of the soils in the North Carolina piedmont and foothills — very red. The high white fence is to keep the deer out.

The mountain in the background is part of the Saura mountain chain. It’s the location of Hanging Rock State Park here in Stokes County, maximum elevation about 2,500 feet.

Young lives, ruined by Hitler

Generation War, a German production, 2013

We Americans have seen many movies about World War II, but we probably haven’t seen a movie about how the war looked from a German perspective. Generation War is hard to watch, as the misery and disillusion of the Germans escalate year after awful year. The stories of the five young people in Generation War make it clear that the lies behind the war were as cruel as the war itself, adding existential agony to the physical agony.

The series is in three parts, each about an hour and a half long. The cast is charismatic. It’s a beautiful period piece, shot in Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia.

Generation War can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The epistemology of derp

Paul Krugman’s column today is about crypto currency, “Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?” But my subject here isn’t crypto currency. Rather, it’s the many, many ways in which people allow themselves to be deceived, and the many, many ways in which people try to deceive us.

As for how people allowed themselves to be deceived about crypto currency, Krugman writes (the italics are mine): “The way I see it, crypto evolved into a sort of postmodern pyramid scheme. The industry lured investors in with a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp.”

That started me thinking about derp. It’s a beautiful word that almost defines itself. Krugman uses the word fairly often, probably because economic derp is so common. But there are many kinds of derp. Our lives are a minefield of derp. If our defenses against derp are weak, then we’re going to get things wrong. When we get things wrong, we are vulnerable to misjudgments that can lead to all sorts of trouble. Did you receive a phishing email and fall for the derp? Oops. There went your bank account. Did you drink bleach during the Covid lockdown? Oops. There went your esophagus, your stomach lining, and half of your intestines.

Epistemology — the philosophy of how we know things, how we discover new things, how we disprove things, and how we correct our errors — is very complex and very well developed. More than once in my life I’ve been accused of wanting to be right, as though that is an insult. Perhaps it’s thought to be an insult because wanting to be right is assumed to be about policing the errors of others. But that’s not it at all. It’s about applying good sense and skepticism to what we allow into our heads. It’s about making good decisions. It’s about not being prey in a world of derp. And yes, whether you want to call it policing or not, it’s also about saying that’s derp when confronted with derp.

I often read books that go over my head and that are more than I can understand. Usually, though, that’s worth the effort, because something can be gleaned. There are three subjects in particular about which I would like to know a great deal more but which are subjects that go over my head: physics, mathematics, and philosophy. The over-my-head book that was most recently on the nightstand is Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry (James Blachowicz, State University of New York Press, 1998). I bought this book a while back because I’d come across references to the book which suggested that Blachowicz delivered a whipping or two to Karl Popper, whom many mongers of the smarter sort of derp take to be the last word in epistemology. I have learned the hard way that when someone is hectoring us with derp and makes a reference to Karl Popper, our derp detectors should light up.

Before, say, the days of cable television in the 1980s, it was fairly expensive to dispense derp. Historically people certainly found ways to do it. Pamphleteering, for example, which was often anonymous, is an important part of American and British history. But few people could afford the printing costs. But we now live in an era in which dispensing derp is nearly cost-free. It was cable television, for example, which brought us television preachers. The derp quickly created a lot of rich preachers. A decade later (1996), cable television brought us Fox News. When derp comes via email, we call it spam. And then came Facebook and all the other low-cost distributors of derp, derp, and more derp.

I think it’s unfortunately true these days that many people — if not most people — just don’t have the ability to defend themselves from derp. Some derp has become so sophisticated that having a Ph.D. is insufficient protection, at least where there are underlying susceptibilities. Some intelligence is required to detect derp, the more intelligence the better. Some education is required, the more the better. But character flaws also make people susceptible to derp — authoritarianism, narcissism, meanness and prejudice of every type, and (it’s a biggy) a craving for religion. Millions of people live in the trifecta of derp: They’re not very smart, they have weak educations, and they’re moral morons. Such people live in an alternate universe of purest derp, with just enough contact with a rational world to get in out of the rain.

I’ve hastily come up with a list of some categories of derp. If you’d like to add to the list, please leave a comment.

• Libertarian derp, with a hat tip to Krugman. There are well-funded think tanks that develop libertarian derp — for example, the Cato Institute. Billionaires and techno-utopians such as Elon Musk use the media to dispense libertarian derp.

• Right-wing derp. We’re utterly inundated with right-wing derp these days. It may be as close as your dinner table. Unless you’re off the grid or something, there is no escaping it.

• Centrist derp. The mainstream media are full of centrist derp. For publications such as The Atlantic, it’s a business model. Here I owe another hat tip to Paul Krugman, who I believe came up with the term “radical centrist.”

• Leftist derp. This is not nearly — not anywhere near — as common as centrist derp would have us believe. But it does exist. Think Glenn Greenwald or Jill Stein, the kind of leftists who are aligned with Russia.

• Religious derp. My personal epistemological view is that all religion is derp. But there are of course many religions and many degrees of religious derpiness.

• Marketing derp.

• Sucker derp. Think spam, phishing scams, pyramid schemes, and anyone who uses any form of derp to raise money.

• Doomer derp. You’d better buy your guns and ammo now to protect your family from the civil war that is going to start any minute. Trans athletes are going to groom our children and bring down the wrath of God on our once-great nation!

• Sentimental derp. Someday you, too, will find true love.

• Techno-utopian derp: Social media will bring us all together! Technology will save the planet! Artificial intelligence will save us from our ignorance! The meta world will be better than the real thing!

• Economic derp. Cutting taxes makes everyone better off and increases government revenue!

• Hero derp. I can’t stand the sight of Elon Musk, but he has millions of fan boys, most of whom, I’m pretty sure, also consume libertarian and techno-utopian derp.

• Distraction derp: Flood the zone with shit! Antifa did it! But her emails!

• Elitist derp: The New Yorker.

Part of the problem is that so many people love their derp. Without derp, their lives would be empty. And yet derp is the very thing that makes their lives so pathetic.

Cigar boxes

Tobacco and “vaping” stores seem to be all over the place these days, but I had never been inside one until today. My mission was to see if the shop would be useful as a drop point for Amazon packages. It’s the nearest Amazon drop point, and I’d like to keep those big Amazon trucks off of the little unpaved road that I live on.

As I looked at their stock, of which there was a lot, it occurred to me that they might have cigar boxes. When I asked, I was shown to a special little room that they call the thermidor room. All their cigars were on shelves in that room. On the floor was a wide stack of empty cigar boxes, all of which were for sale for $5 each. I bought a nice one. Now I wish I had bought more than one.

If the “6×52” on the box means that the box held 52 cigars, then at $7.99 per cigar the cost of the cigars in the box would come to $415.48. I’ve never used tobacco. What a waste of money!

An 18th Century cooking show

Delicious has a remarkable 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was released in France in 2021 as Délicieux and is now available for streaming at Amazon Prime Video.

It’s set in 1789, just before the Revolution got violent. A duke’s chief cook, humiliated by the duke’s obnoxious dinner guests, leaves the duke’s household and returns to his family home, accompanied by his teen-age son. The place is a shambles. But as the cook recovers from his depression, he begins to cook again. Encouraged by his son and a mysterious visitor, he turns the place into an inn and stagecoach stop. Whether it’s historically accurate or not, the story is a parable about how fine cuisine — and dining out — became available to everyone, not just to a pampered and bored aristocracy.

Not only is Delicious visually beautiful, it’s a highly entertaining comedy.

Squash and walnut fritters

Squash and walnut fritters with pesto

Especially if you have a garden, you’re always looking for ways not to get tired of summer squash. I made squash fritters a few days ago and noted that they were just a bit too mushy. They needed something to give them some extra substance and a better bite. Walnuts worked. The fritters were greatly improved.

Grind the walnuts in a food processor. Grate the squash and some onion. As a binder, I’ve been using potato starch. An egg would work, but using egg as a binder would require an ingredient to offset the liquid. Potato starch works well. Add just enough to get the fritters to hold together before frying. After the potato starch sets in the frying pan, they’ll be fine.

The walnuts somehow made the fritters a bit reminiscent of crab cakes. How you season them would make a big difference. It occurs to me that a little crab, or small shrimp, would work well in squash and walnut fritters, and a little bit of crab would go a long way.