Good news: That snowstorm they promised us today failed to materialize. Instead, the snow continued to melt, and with time the sun even came out.
I’m devastated by this development, as you’ve no doubt guessed. Almost as devastated as I was by the news that “The Golden Compass” tanked at the box office.
I’m not sure if this has really been one of the worst winters in my experience or not. But the weather’s certainly been tough, and my health has spent most of the time (as the saying goes) under it. I’ve bounced from one cold to a worse cold to a cold even worse than that, finally topped off by the flu.
A couple links. In the wake of David Mamet’s coming out of the closet as a conservative, we now have an article from playwright Tom Stoppard in which, if he doesn’t actually espouse conservatism, he at least has the courage to admit that the activism of the ’60s and ’70s was mostly about partying, rather than any kind of moral principle.
I’m still bitter about that part of my life. Not because of the difficulty I had in fighting the idols of that age, but because I’m embarrassed about the extent to which I in fact pandered to those idols. Oh, I didn’t actually participate in the fun stuff. I never got high, never took advantage of the sexual opportunities. But I took seriously, and spoke respectfully about, ideas that I now recognize as total codswallop. The memory of the clothes embarrasses me, I’ll admit, but the memory of the ideas is what really makes me blush. (Hat tip: Ed Veith at Cranach.)
Via Cronaca (not to be confused with Cranach): I think this is really cool. See, back in 1860, some scientists in France figured out a way to record sound waves graphically, and they “recorded” an image of the voice of a singer performing a folk song. Today, thanks to modern technology, scientists are able to turn that graphic image into sound waves, and we can hear the singer’s voice.
I remember one time my friends and I were in Chicago, back in the early ’70s. I said I’d like to visit the Museum of Science and Industry. My friends weren’t keen, but we had an afternoon off, and finally we all went. Everyone was very cool about it afterwards, talking about how boring and stifling all this technology stuff was.
We were idiots. Technology’s cool.
Tags: snowstorm, Tom Stoppard, cool, technology
Technology is cool. I loved that museum when I went there whenever it was.
Ah, the ’60s! What William F. Buckley, Jr. called “that slum of a decade”!
As an unreconstructed Goldwater Republican I can tell you that the period from about 1960’s stolen presidential election (a claim that is now more or less undisputed, by the way) to the election of Ronald Reagan was pretty much no great joy. It was more than a bit like the experience of being a politically and socially conservative academic. I occasionally grieve the fact that my youth had to take place during this poisonous time.
While I can appreciate Mamet’s and Stoppard’s rather belated admissions their statements do very little to begin to address the devastation that “the Generation of Vipers” has visited upon American society. It will be a long time before even some of the damage can be remedied, even assuming that there will be the will to do so. I fear that a good deal of the harm can never be remedied.
I agree. What we lost in the ’60s (and in their backwash) is pricelss and (probably) irreplaceable. Just watch an old movie (even a Noir). The civility they took for granted back then seems impossibly utopian nowadays.