Reading

 River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit.

I'd only read Solnit's political commentary until I picked up this book at my favorite used book shop in Albuquerque.  In River of Shadows she provides a lot of detail about Muybridge and his extraordinary innovations in photography, but she also gives historical context to his life at the end of the 19th Century.  I only had given the photographer passing attention because of his high speed photos of animal locomotion.  As Solnit documents, however, before he invented a whole new genre of the art Muybridge was a practitioner of landscape photography in the heroic tradition of wet plates and giant cameras. She also details the photographer's abrupt personality change following a head injury which led to his becoming a murderer, and perhaps contributed to his inventiveness.

Solnit's writing style is dense with ideas and requires more attention than I was sometimes able to summon with my bedtime reading habit.  She also left some things unexplained about the technical aspects of Muybridge's innovations in high-speed photography.  Solnit and others allege that Muybridge achieved shutter speeds in excess of 1/1000 seconds.  That seems feasible and true in regard to the mechanical accomplishment and the published results, but there must also have been some chemical innovations in creating adequate plate sensitivity and processing to allow actual recording of the images.  It would be interesting to see the actual negatives which apparently needed some considerable amount of embellishment to produce the positives.  

There is also no mention in Solnit's account of supplemental lighting to make the high-speed images.  Edison invented the electric bulb in 1880 and the two inventors knew each other, so there is that.  More important, perhaps, is the fact that Muybridge played a fundamental role in the invention of moving pictures which Edison capitalized on.

Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller.

Miller's memoir was in the 99-cent sidewalk bin, also at Mecca Music & Books.  I'm not sure what inspired me to pick it up other than the price and the 500-page heft.  I also can't discount the novelty of his marriages to two celebrities, Marilyn Monroe and Magnum photographer, Inge Morath.  So, I took home the book and -- 100 pages into it -- I am now quite taken with Miller's apparent total recall and the color it gives to my own vague recollections of what my grandparents told me of their time.

Life was radically different in many ways during the first part of the Twentieth, particularly in regard to the concept of time and how it was spent mostly in meeting basic daily needs, much as was the case for centuries before.  Then, industrialization gained transformative inertia, propelling us into an era of ease and terror.  In spite of the contrasts between the beginning and the end of the Century,  Miller's account of the politics of his time are oddly echoed in ours.  Both eras saw the rise of authoritarian, fascist ideologies, a fact which is simultaneously troubling and comforting in that it provides a vision of turning tides.

So, the narratives of Miller and Solnit provide some insights into the great transitions which humanity  has experienced over the last century.  His style makes for easier reading and I may have more to say about the life he recounts by the time I get to the ending.

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UPDATE

Margaret also read the book.  Like me, she found the middle of the book tiring because of Miller's obsession with critical reviews of his plays.  Further on, Miller regains his feet and provides an absorbing narrative including his sympathetic portrayal of Marilyn and her predictable end.  A happy ending was provided by his final twenty year marriage to photographer, Inge Morath.

Old Town Color

Mother Earth Welcomes A New Year

 

xmas

prep

Fall

 A hard freeze brings down all the leaves at once from our neighbor's mulberry tree.

I have been chasing the cranes all week and was able to get a bit closer to the birds at the Los Poblanos Open Space.

I don't have the proper gear for bird photography, but I enjoy watching these graceful big birds that spend the fall and winter near the river.

A New Start

 My maidenhair fern was in poor condition, so I cleaned out the terrarium and replanted it with invisibilium.

A drop in the bucket

 I got in the last word on the Nov. 16 edition of Joe Monahan's New Mexico Politics blog:

Reader Mike Connealy says:

Ronchetti's claim in his concession speech that "This campaign was a grassroots movement..." is laughable considering the big outside money that was poured into the campaign. Unfortunately, the Dems cannot claim the "grassroots" label either. It seems like an issue that both sides should get together on. 

This is the home of New Mexico Politics. 

E-mail your news and comments. (newsguy@yahoo.com)

I'll try to come up with a more substantial analysis of the elections once the dust has settled. 

AOC; What's Not To Like?

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is interviewed following the midterm elections by Ryan Grim at The Intercept.

Part 1:

Part 2:

AOC is always labeled an extremist by Republicans and often also by her own Party's establishment. 

She is for getting big money out of politics and for Congress over-riding the Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade, both positions supported by a majority of Americans.  So, that puts her in the Mainstream as far as I am concerned.

I am impressed by her fighting spirit, her intellect and her political acuity.  Those are qualities much to be valued right now.  Losing by a little should not be confused with winning.

New Neighbors

We have seen an increase recently in the numbers of free-range cats.  This young one and a sibling live across the street, but seem to prefer our yard.  

They don't appear to know much yet about dogs and traffic.

Don't forget to vote.

  It might be your last chance.

 

It's Not Over 'til It's Over

 New Mexico COVID-19 update: 6 deaths, 104 hospitalizations, 356 cases.

CDC

Facts Matter

Economist, Robert Reich, does an excellent job in his Guardian column of calling out the Republicans on their three big talking points in the upcoming election.  The most hypocritical and easiest to recall and refute is their criticism on taxes.  Trump and McConnell gave a huge tax break to the richest Americans.  The idea they are champions of average Americans is ludicrous.

Winding up.

 Not much new in the last of the Jan.6 Committee Hearings today.  However, I thought they did a nice job of summarizing the year of work by the committee.  It was interesting to see the clips of the Congressional  leadership during the siege.  Pelosi and Schumer were cool and effective in a very tense and uncertain situation.

I am skeptical that the House will support the effort to force Trump to testify, even if the Dems narrowly retain control.  Even if everything went as desired -- even if Trump dropped dead today -- we would still be facing the massive damage Trump has done by putting his supporters in office at all levels of government, including the retrograde Supreme Court.

It seems unlikely Trump will be able to run again; none of his aspiring lookalikes wants to see him on the ticket, let alone the rest of us.  But all the issues are still going to be in place including the undermining of elections and abortion rights for the 2024 contest.  There is certainly a good chance that someone with Trump's authoritarian bent but smarter could take the top spot.

Mental Health

There is an excellent article in The Guardian by Rachel Aviv, Psychiatry wars: the lawsuit that put psychoanalysis on trial. The author relates the history of an individual with an array of personality disorders. It is not a story with a happy ending, but it does throw some light on practices of psychotherapy and how they have changed over the last century, particularly in regard to psychoanalytic techniques and medication-based therapies. The lawsuit did not resolve the debates over the values of different modalities of treatment, but it did establish a standard for accountability in regard to claims of effectiveness.

Aviv's article got me to reflecting on my own observations of behavioral and mental health issues. I worked in New York as a welfare department caseworker and in San Francisco and Spokane in the Food Stamps program.  In Spokane, in addition to the food stamps eligibility work, I was also often called on to help out in adult protection services. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, I supervised adult in-home care services for the elderly in a city-run senior services program, and later in a guardianship agency. All of those jobs frequently brought me into contact with individuals with behavioral and mental health issues.

When faced with an individual in a crisis involving their mental condition my first effort was often to call on the services of the community mental health agencies.  The test applied at that point by the mental health crisis worker was to determine if the person's state of mind and behavior constituted an imminent threat to self or others. 

I recall one such crisis in Spokane in which one of my food stamp clients threatened to kill himself. Because he seemed very distraught and persistent in his assertions of self harm, I talked the young man into letting me take him in my car to the community mental health center in town.  We were invited into an office for an interview, and when my client was asked about what his problem was he pulled out a switch-blade knife and began waving it around as he talked. I told him that displaying the knife was not going to help improve things and managed to get him to hand over the weapon to me. The interviewer summoned a burly assistant and I was allowed to depart.  I never learned what kind of help the fellow got in the end, but I felt that I had been able to at least initiate an effort to move the situation in the right direction.

More often than not, however, people who seemed to be experiencing a crisis did not pass the imminent harm test. I am reminded, for instance, of the case of an elderly woman who had applied to me to receive food stamps. In addition to experiencing mental and physical health problems, she was living in a chicken coop. Since the mental health agency would not intervene, I made various suggestions about where some emergency services might be had, but she seemed not to have adequate mental resources to explore the possibilities for  assistance, and I was in no position to devote the necessary time to helping in any significant way.

In my work in senior services and guardianship in New Mexico I had somewhat more latitude in getting out of the office setting to serve as an advocate in crisis situations. Social services for the elderly were generally more accessible than for younger people and I made an effort to cultivate relationships with people responsible for providing mental health and medical care. While I thus made an individual effort to perform in a coordinating case management role, the agencies I worked for were not sufficiently invested in that effort to be really effective.

Faced now with epic problems of homelessness, some cities, including Albuquerque, have started to undertake crisis intervention services with teams of workers who go onto the streets, often as an alternative to police intervention. While that strategy seems somewhat promising it likely will not receive the funding needed for real effectiveness, and it is not in any case answering the underlying economic and housing issues. New Mexico is currently also facing the task of rebuilding behavioral health services after the previous Republican governor brought forth baseless allegations of financial improprieties and imposed crippling funding cuts.

Balloon Fiesta 2022

 The rain and wind let up by 8:00 AM on the last day of the event, allowing the mass ascension to take place.  A light wind from the north pushed the balloons south, and then the wind switched direction and pushed them back for landings close to the take-off point.

Beaming Down

 I mentioned watching Star Trek in the 1970s in a recent post along with the thought that the money spent on putting humans in space would be better spent on the ground.  Now I see that, rather surprisingly, William Shatner seems to be in agreement with that idea.  He has a new book out, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, with essays about his life including his thoughts following his recent brief trip into the stratosphere. What he says about the perspective he gained from the experience seems to go against the image I had formed of him as a promoter of big tech and spaceflight enterprises.  

The excerpt from the book, was posted on Slashdot and the responses were generally favorable; also a little surprising given the appeal of that site to the tech nerds, nihilists and anarchists.  There is a co-author, Joshua Brandon, so it is not possible to know how much of the writing was actually penned by Shatner.  However, Shatner is clearly endorsing the content.

National Air and Space Museum model

Levi Platero

I caught the Levi Platero blues/rock group playing at the Gazebo in Old Town.

They will be in Phoenix on Monday, the 10th of October.

Looks like the Balloon Fiesta will be grounded by the weather for the rest of the week.  Hopefully, the afternoon entertainment in the Plaza Vieja will make all those $500 nightly hotel bills seem worth the price.

Designs for Reality

 A large part of the pleasure to be had from using vintage film cameras can be attributed to their tactile qualities, particularly in the compact models.  Holding an example of precise mechanical design in the palm of your hand is an experience which is not available from most modern consumer items like cell phones.

The weight, along with the placement and operation of the controls, communicates the functional potential of the mechanical device as well as engaging the imagination.

With negligible weight, no moving parts and menu-driven controls the cell phone or a tv remote connects you to an abstraction of reality.  The hand-held mechanical devices on the other hand are designed to operate on and manipulate parts of the real physical world.

I was reminded of all that recently when I was preparing to renew my passport.  When I pulled the envelope containing my passport out of a drawer I found that it also held a compact Braun 370 shaver that I had put away with the passport after returning from Greece seventeen years ago.

The little Braun shaver runs on a pair of Double-A batteries.  It is easily cleaned after use and it does a great job in operation, easily comparable to the performance of full-size models costing many times as much.

An online search reveals that compact Braun shavers similar to the 370 are still being sold.  I found an ad for the modern version selling at Walmart for $16.90.

The little Kodak Flash Bantam is one of my favorite cameras.  It uses 828 roll film, fits easily in a pocket  and needs no batteries.

End of an Era

 I've watched the restoration of 2926 since we came to Albuquerque nearly fifteen years ago.  I was unable to visit the site during the Covid years, but the work went on and now seems complete.

I'll hope to get some shots of the locomotive out on the tracks.

Rising Star

 I was pleased recently to find this video interview of guitarist and composer, Gwenifer Raymond, which includes snippets of some of her performances.

(trans) 894 views May 24, 2022 On this muggy Thursday evening we were guests in Bernd Mair's loft for the first time. The relaxed and intimate atmosphere reminded some of the visitors of the legendary Tiny Desk Concerts from the USA.

Our first musician in this exclusive setting was Gwenifer Raymond, a guitarist originally from Wales who now lives in Brighton, England. She calls her style of playing the guitar Welsh Primitive, based on American Primitive and Blues music. Live, however, it quickly became clear that Gwen's music also lives from her energetic and passionate style, which is deeply rooted in punk.

Schnittraum Tirol produced the interviews and the live recording. Enjoy!

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Gwenifer Raymond has done a lot of pre-performance interviews since I first came across her a couple years ago, but they are mostly boilerplate endlessly repeated -- so read one and you've seen them all. There is an enthusiastic review of her history and style by Kitty Empire on The Guardian.

Words can't do justice to Raymond's performance on the guitar (or banjo).  Be sure to watch some of the full performance videos available on Youtube.  I think the first one I found was Sometimes There's Blood.

Dust

The September 21st edition of Native America Calling has an excellent discussion of the history of the Dust Bowl, including the mostly ignored effects of that calamity on Native American communities. The guest speakers also pointed out that the current drought in the Southwest along with unsustainable farming  and water management is leading us into a replay of the Dust Bowl.

Housing by the Numbers

 If you look around Albuquerque nearly all the new housing under construction will look like the one on the right.

That house on the right and the two north of it built at the same time all sold for about $400,000 each.  

To buy or rent one of those three houses you need an income of about $98,000 a year.

The median household income in New Mexico is $50,000.

Recommended Reading

A friend recommended a novel to me recently, The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.  I looked through her copy briefly and was skeptical about the story on two counts.  It starts out looking like a coming-of-age chronicle about a London teenager, and the main narrator is a fig tree!

I looked up the book on Amazon and the synopsis there showed that there was more to the story and that it dealt mostly with Cyprus and its turbulent history.  That was a topic of interest to me,  and it reminded me of Lawrence Durrell's book, Bitter Lemons, which I had enjoyed many years ago. So I bought the Kindle version and was glad in the end that I did.

Shafak skillfully ties together complex themes of history, ethnic antagonisms, personality development and ecology.  Her conscription of a tree as narrator, while seemingly improbable, turned out to be an inspired choice which made me rethink my own ideas about literary style.  

The omniscient narrator that carries the story in most novels really has no more grounding in reality than Shafak's fig tree.  The author actually does make use of the third person point of view to carry much of the plot's action, while the consciousness of the tree provides perspective as well as a surprising but satisfying ending to the story.  While I think the technique of jumping back and forth in time is much over-used to maintain suspense, Shafak uses it very effectively to explain the development of personalities and relationships.

Shafak's Amazon author's page shows some impressive academic credentials which give weight to the research acknowledgements in the book's endnotes, and she clearly drew on her own personal history of emigration in crafting the plot and characters of The Island of Missing Trees.

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Update:

Take twenty minutes to watch a TED Talk by Shafak.  It will explain a lot about her writing purposes and style.  She is multi-cultural, multi-lingual and impressively articulate. She writes in both Turkish and English.

911

Getting Real about Homelessness

 One local Albuquerque news program reported this evening that there are currently about 2,800 people living on the city's streets.  The encampments are all over the city in parks, under highway overpasses, in empty lots and on sidewalks.

The City Council voted to authorize some safe campsites recently, and then turned around and decided to prohibit such refuges.  The mayor vetoed that change.  The Council voted again to over-ride the mayor, but one councilor changed her mind and the veto was upheld. So now there are two official sites with room for maybe a hundred tents.

Mayors, city councils, governors and state legislatures are not going to solve the homeless problem.  Experience has shown that improved conditions for the homeless in any given locale will ultimately attract more homeless. It is a National problem which will require a significant commitment at that level.

A lot of problems contribute to homelessness including addiction and mental illness, but the fundamental cause is simply explained -- it is the lack of affordable housing -- and that affects not only the down-and-out but also families who are working and still unable to afford exorbitant rents or house purchase loan payments. So the inescapable conclusion is that what is needed in the way of a solution is a massive effort to create affordable housing nation-wide.

The housing crisis in turn is really just a symptom of an economy featuring ever-increasing inequality in wealth and income over the last fifty years.  The extent of that inequality has been well known for a long time: the top one percent are now likely paying a smaller percentage of their income than the guy who delivers your Sunday newspaper.

Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, concluded this about what must be done to make the economy work for the rest of us:

"The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital.  This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instance of primitive accumulation.  For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 or 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 5 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros.  This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market.  Historical experience shows, moreover, that such immense inequalities of wealth have little to do with the entrepreneurial spirit and are of no use in promoting growth..."

In fact, Biden has recently promoted the idea of establishing some reasonable tax rates for the country's top earners.  I would suggest that the income from that sort of tax on the billionaires might be devoted entirely for at least the first year or two to the objective of creating affordable housing.  Such a financial injection into the national economy would have an immediately obvious effect on homelessness as well as improving the prospects for working families for home ownership, while simultaneously providing a big boost to the home construction industry. It seems like a win-win which even some Republicans might get behind.

Fantasy vs. Reality

 In 1969 I was living in a third-floor walkup apartment in New York's Lower East Side.   The apartment building dated from the Civil War era; the bathtub was in the kitchen.  On July 20th of that year I hosted a Moon Landing party for a group of friends.  It seemed to me at the time to be quite a unique opportunity to witness a remarkable event in human history.  I was surprised that the noisy socializing in my two-room apartment showed that no one other than me had much interest in the tv images showing the first steps on the Moon.

By 1970 we were in San Francisco where both our daughters were born.  We were living in the Outer Mission in a second-floor railroad flat in a building that was likely built not long after the 1906 earthquake.  I recall enjoying the Star Trek series which I think was by then already in rerun.  In those early days of the often-reborn series the sets were pretty primitive and the depictions of imagined extraterrestrial life were really corny.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the upbeat, adventurous plots and their depiction of a human society that had evolved beyond the petty prejudices of the present.

Fifty years down the road I have lost track of how many versions of Star Trek have appeared, and the rockets have gotten a lot bigger.  Astronauts regularly shuttle between Earth and the orbiting space station.  It looks like humans will again set foot on the Moon within a short time, and there are plans to send people to join the robots already on Mars.  I find myself now less than enthusiastic about the prospects of sending humans beyond Earth's gravitational embrace.

The satellites allowing vastly enhanced understanding of weather and climate patterns are of undeniable value, and the pictures brought a million miles back from the Webb telescope are breathtaking.  Lofting humans into Space, however, seems to me to be an irrational distortion of priorities.  Space travel enthusiasts tout the advantages of human perception, performance and flexibility, but those traits' long-term value seems questionable in the face of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and robotics.

More importantly, given the current trajectory of Humankind, it seems doubtful that a human society with the resources to support something like interplanetary travel will be viable long enough to make that happen.  The odds of avoiding catastrophic, irreversible climate change seem no better than 50/50.  Given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the the present state of international relations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight.

Those billions aimed at carrying a few humans into Space would be better invested now in giving  us a chance for a real future.

Fundmentals

"We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn."

 — Bernie Sanders, The Guardian - 2 Sep 2022

* * *

It is interesting how little direct acknowledgement of those facts about our economy get in the discourse leading up to the pending mid-term elections.  The attention of voters is directed instead to symptoms rather than fundamental causes. The inadequacies of health care, education and housing dominate the conversation because they present imminent threats.  The proposed responses are really little more than symbolic gestures.

What all of that points to is the peripheral importance of the electorate in the governing process.  

Whac-A-Mole

 We went to dinner with friends on a Sunday afternoon at a restaurant beside Albuquerque's Central Avenue.  Sitting in the restaurant's outdoor patio gave us front row seats to the parade of motorcycles and cars with disabled mufflers which goes on day and night through the weekend.  At times the noise drowned out our conversation.

Of course the conversation turned briefly to the passing spectacle.  Our dinner host, who spent most of his life in law enforcement, observed that the police really could not do anything to quiet the noise given the priority to deal with the torrent of violent crime which besets the city.  I had to agree, though I suggested that making a noise check part of the yearly vehicle inspection might lower the volume a little bit.

Another source of day and night cacophony we are all subjected to now is the endless stream of political ads aimed at convincing voters who should next represent them at the local, state and national levels.  The Republican candidates in particular assure us that they will clamp down on crime by hiring more police and locking up more offenders.  Just as assuredly, close to half the voting population will forget that such promises have been made every year since the beginning of Time with no demonstrable effect on crime rates.

I think it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about who the people are that are racing their noisy machines around the city.  It is a challenge to come up with a convincing profile of the group members, though they seem to constitute a significant portion of the population.  Newscasters occasionally show clips of the police trying to cope with congregations of street racers and bystanders to little effect.  However, I don't recall anyone trying to interview the participants with an eye toward understanding the motivations behind the behavior.  I suppose some academic researchers - perhaps a novelist - have undertaken such a project; I'll try to look for some of that.

Meanwhile, it seems safe to conclude that an adrenaline rush abetted by some substance abuse is fundamental to the perpetuation of the machine-related noise pollution, and that it is greatly facilitated by cell phones and social networks.  Beyond the organizational particulars, I suspect that the noisy drivers and their sympathizers are simultaneously enjoying a defiance of authority and proclaiming solidarity with a like-minded if rather ill defined social group.

I will speculate further that the social group in question includes many individuals left behind by our society's tolerance for an economic order that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite at an ever increasing rate over the past half century.  Feelings of powerlessness, desperate gestures of defiance, political movements characterized by grievance, racism and xenophobia, and support for authoritarian regimes are some of the possible outcomes.  Whac-a-mole tactics are not the answer to complex antisocial behaviors.  

The Numbers Tell

 An article at FiveThirtyEight examines the issues around Biden's proposal to cancel $10,000 of student higher education debt ($20,000 for Pell Grant recipients).  Debt cancellation clearly has the potential to alleviate the disparities in wealth and income between the white and non-white populations of the U.S.  As the article points out, however, it would require a cancellation of debt five times greater than what Biden has proposed to have a real impact on the equity problem.

The most shocking revelation in the FiveThirtyEight article was the long-term outlook comparing black and white borrowers:

“Twenty years into repayment, the median black borrowers owe 95 percent of what they borrowed, while the median white person has almost fully repaid their loan,” 

So, tuition loans which saddle  some (mostly black) students with decades of crushing debt can hardly be considered a gateway to prosperity.

One bright spot not dealt with in the FiveThirtyEight article is the opportunities for intervention in the debt problem at the State level.  Amazingly, New Mexico -- usually at the bottom of most measures of well-being -- is at the forefront of higher education debt reduction as noted in a New York Times article:

A new state law approved in a rare show of bipartisanship allocates almost 1 percent of the state’s budget toward covering tuition and fees at public colleges and universities, community colleges and tribal colleges. All state residents from new high school graduates to adults enrolling part-time will be eligible regardless of family income. The program is also open to immigrants regardless of their immigration status.

Even though I came from  family with modest means I was able to leave college with no debt at all, thanks to a WWII death benefit from my father, and my family's determination to hold onto the $10,000 until I needed it.  As the numbers show,  the families of KIA black soldiers seldom enjoyed the option of postponing the use of death benefits far down the line toward higher education.

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Update:

An article in The Intercept by Jon Schwarz provides some historical perspective on the educational debt dilemma kicked off by Ronald Reagan in 1970.

John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after the unarmed student was fatally shot by an Ohio National Guardsman. (from Wikipedia)

Thank You for Your Service

I had several social services jobs during the AIDS pandemic.  I was mostly responsible for seeing that people got access to whatever assistance was then available.  In those early years an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence, so what I was offering did not seem to amount to much to me or my clients.  Dr. Fauci's firm leadership in getting the illness recognized and ultimately overcome was of inestimable value.

The prognosis for individuals with Covid 19 was not as severe as that for people afflicted with AIDS, but millions still died.  Dr. Fauci was there again to deal with the development of strategies to deal with the pandemic, and he stuck it out even in the face of confusion and misdirection from the administration he was working under when the pandemic erupted.

There is still much to be done to curb suffering and deaths from Covid, and the same conditions that allowed the lightning spread of that disease ensure that we are going to be faced with similar challenges in the immediate future.  Dr. Fauci will no longer be acting as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but he has said he will continue to find ways to exercise his expertise.  I will certainly be paying attention to what he has to say, and I hope we can elect political leaders who will do the same.

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8/23/22 (KOB4)

New Mexico COVID-19 update: 18 deaths, 110 hospitalizations, 1,327 cases

Going Dark

Two of my neighbors asked me if my electricity was out. "Yes", I said, "There are some big storms down south and maybe some lines are down." One of those neighbors is vision impaired.  She said her phone was just about out of battery. I looked at mine and saw that it was at 45%; probably enough to get through the day. I remembered that we had a portable lamp that has a phone charging port, so I connected my cellphone to that.  The batteries in the lamp were too low to charge the phone.

I got dressed and took the dog for a walk. I noticed then that the traffic light two blocks up the street was working  -- a good sign that the power outage was local.  Just to be on the safe side I drove to the nearby grocery store to get the six new batteries that the lantern/charger would need.

I was pleased to find that the lights were on in the store, but the batteries were behind the service counter where a sign said that the service counter was temporarily closed.  No problem; I walked through the swinging gate and took three packs of C batteries off the shelf.  I was immediately confronted by two store staff informing me that the area was out of bounds for customers.  "Yes, I know", I said, and walked to the auto-teller to check out.  I scanned the batteries' bar code -- $25 for six C batteries! 

While I waited for the phone to charge I wondered about how power outages affect people with disabilities or the homeless.  Then, I got to thinking about the thousands of people in New Mexico who faced catastrophic displacement just a couple months ago because of wildfires, and who are now experiencing massive flooding in the burn scar areas due to summer monsoon rains of unusual intensity. It is all a good reminder about how dependent all of us are on massive, complicated and vulnerable infrastructures, and how unready we are for what is coming.

Good Times

 No one in my immediate family had any talent for making music. I recall a record player in a big blond cabinet, a Motorola I think, and a small collection of 78 rpm records.  So there was some music in hearing distance from that as well from the radio and tv. There was some mandatory musical exposure in school, but can I only really remember enjoying a few elementary school folk songs. One of my worst memories from my junior high school days was being required to stand up in front of the class and sing something. I would have gladly traded that experience for a bout of corporal punishment.

Over the years my musical indifference and illiteracy was punctured occasionally by largely accidental encounters with musical expression which I found pleasing. I eventually developed a liking for classical guitar and even took a few guitar lessons. That went nowhere due to a lack of any sense of rhythm. Later, I found some affinity with some of the great jazz vocalists, mostly from '30s and '40s, and I also liked most chamber music I came across.

Luckily, music seems to have a genetic component which makes musical enjoyment accessible to even someone like me with a tin ear, and there were even a few instances in which musical performances became associated with life changing events. One such experience was the result of my immersion in the developing world of personal computers in the early 1990s.

We were living in southern New Mexico by then and I worked in a series of jobs in several social services agencies.  While working for a newly established guardianship group I developed a Foxpro/dBase program for recording visit notes along with billing information.  I got some free surplus computers from White Sands which I set up for our Las Cruces office and trained the staff in their use, and I also did some consulting and training with other social service agencies around the state.

The database application I developed relied on the text-based MS-DOS operating system, but it had easily maneuvered menus which made it quick to learn and easy to use.  I tried MicroSoft's early Windows system which was trying to compete with Apple's graphical user interface, but it just seemed awkward and ugly and did not tempt me at all to move my database programing in that direction.

What took me in a completely new direction in social services computer applications was the appearance of Windows 95.  I was working at that point in staff training in a agency providing services for mentally disabled adults. We used personal computers extensively in preparing training materials and I was often called on to do hardware and software trouble shooting.  I think most of the agency's computers were still stuck in Windows 3.1 at the time.

Windows 95 and its graphical user interface was a huge improvement over Windows 3, not only in speed and ease of use, but also in its networking capabilities which meshed nicely with the availability of a whole new world of information through the World Wide Web.  What really got my attention on the Windows 95 installation disk, though,  was a short music video which featured Edie Brickell singing Good Times.

There was no novelty in music videos in general by 1995; they were inescapable on tv. Somehow, though, being able to summon up a fully animated musical performance on a computer screen seemed revolutionary.  I recall inserting the Win 95 disk in a computer in our little three person office and seeing my coworkers' eyes light up as they watched Good Times. It was a short step from there to installing network adapters and wiring our computers together for file sharing and telephone line access to the World Wide Web.

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There is a nicely produced YouTube emulation of playing the Good Times video on the Win 95 screen.

  I still like Edie Brikell's performance a lot.

Old Town Color

 I spent Friday morning in Old Town with my friend, Bob.  We were both shooting black and white in our old plate cameras.  It didn't take me long to get through the eight frames available on a roll of 120 film, so while waiting for Bob to finish his shoot, I walked around the Plaza Vieja and made some pictures with my cell phone camera.