Matt McIrvin's Steam-Operated World of Yesteryear

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Canada Day always puts me in mind of the couple of times I spent it at the celebrations in Ottawa, among proud people who, if we were all sufficiently fortified with fine Canadian beers, were eager to educate me at length on the USA's 20th century contingency plans to invade Canada and the whupping Canada gave my native land in the War of 1812.

Anyway, in that vein, here is an interesting list of areas disputed by Canada and the United States.

I have no opinion on the merits of any of these claims. Most of the disagreements are over maritime borders or the status of various waters, but Machias Seal Island and North Rock between Maine and New Brunswick are actually disputed pieces of land, the larger of which is a popular birdwatching destination (it has puffins). I think this is the only land contested by Canada and the US. Recent diplomatic activity concerning the area seems to have been carefully crafted to make no particular attempt to resolve the issue.

I was actually inspired to look this up after reading this Strange Maps post on Bir Tawil, the only area in the world known to be disclaimed by both sides in a boundary dispute.

Something I never got around to learning until just now: James Ensor was actually awesome.

Jorie's going to preschool three mornings a week now, and it's already weirdly hard to get her to talk to us about what she does there, even though her teachers report that she's chatty enough in class. So we piece stuff together from teachers' remarks and ask her leading questions, and sometimes other things come out. She had a slightly rough adjustment when she moved up from the toddler to the preschool class; she's now one of the youngest and smallest kids in her class, and I get the impression that the other kids are generally nice to her but treat her more as a cute baby than as a peer. Nevertheless, she does refer to some of her classmates as her friends, so I guess she's doing all right there.

They did a recent unit on space, and one teacher mentioned that Jorie was just about the only kid in class who was getting into the lessons about planets, maybe because she'd gotten interested in the subject previously. One evening when I was trying to get her to sleep, she suddenly announced "The Sun is hot. It has hot gas. Mars is cold." Yesterday she started talking about putting her spacesuit on to walk on the Moon.

At almost 2 years 10 months, she's started to recognize some short printed words (mostly in all caps), and is into attempting to spell things with magnetic letters on the refrigerator; the order that the letters go in can be a little fuzzy, but she does all right otherwise. One of the earliest ones she wanted to spell was "VOOM", the mysterious nanotech cleaning agent under the hat of Little Cat Z in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. She's also memorized essentially the complete text of that book and recites it by heart when I try to read it. It's become a bit problematic, in that she's discovered she can slow down the recitation as a delaying tactic at bedtime, and she gets angry when I try to butt in and start reading again. "NO!! You can't say that!"

She likes to scribble on her chalkboard; the scribblings have not become all that figurative yet, but there are some things she likes to draw because I identified a chance resemblance to something, such as a forest of vertical lines that we call "beanstalks", and her first recognizable glyph: a vertical line with a horizontal leftward bar at the top that is the digit 7. Jorie also seems to have a pretty good operating concept of numbers up to about 5, and can count as far as 29.

Yesterday, she spent the whole day referring to herself as Laurie Berkner. This morning she decided that she and I were John Linnell and John Flansburgh.

1. The Doctor Who theme
2. The Decemberists, "The Rake's Song"

The conclusion I draw from this is that if the life situation you are in lends itself to the Phrygian mode, RUN.

If you were a nerdy kid who lived through the Seventies (or early Eighties), james_nicoll's ongoing review and discussion of a 1977 CoEvolution Quarterly compliation on space colonies will ring several bells. If you want to know what it was like, this may be a good place to start. It just gets better and crackier as it goes on, and James' comments are typically deadpan.

As people such as Stewart Brand and Gerard O'Neill and R. Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri trade comments with the likes of Wendell Berry and Lewis Mumford, often the anti-space-colonization side is as crazy as the pro side. But the argument between T. A. Heppenheimer and John Holt gets to the meat of it (Holt gets his orbital mechanics wrong, but otherwise I think his objections to O'Neill's cylinder colonies are pretty devastating).

Yes, there were people back then who seriously thought that multi-thousand-person space cities could be built at the Earth-Moon L5 point by the 1990s. Sometimes, I was one of them. Sometimes, NASA's PR people encouraged them. Sometimes, people still insist that it really could have happened if only [insert politically charged counterfactual here] just to annoy kadath. In its way it was more outrageous than any tailfinned Wernher von Braun vision of the Collier's era.

For all I know, people might emigrate massively into space someday. The future's hard to predict. But at the very least, the claim that this can be practically done with existing technology doesn't make a lot of sense, and people were already claiming that over 30 years ago.

I've seen a lot of advisories about the possibility of a flu pandemic that give a lot of common-sense advice about how to prevent transmission of the disease: wash your hands frequently and thoroughly, avoid touching your face (this is hard for me to manage), cover your coughs and sneezes, and, especially, an admonition to stay home from work if you're sick.

The last grates on me. Not because it's bad advice—it's very good advice—but because it's always phrased in terms of individual behavior, as if this were an entirely free choice. It's the "Tips for Living Green" approach to public health, as stacebass might have put it.


People who don't live in the US may not know this, but most American employers don't give their employees any time off for illness, per se. You probably know that Americans don't get a lot of vacation time; what you may not know is that for most of them, their vacation time is actually "PTO", Personal Time Off, a combined pool for sick time and vacation time and whatever else you need to miss work to do. Employees who take days off because they're sick have to take it out of their already paltry vacation time.

If you rarely get sick, this may seem like a fair deal, because you're not being asked to cover for your sicker co-workers without compensation. (We wouldn't want those lucky duckie sick people to benefit from being irresponsible enough to get sick—that's not the American way!) But if you are sick, this is a serious incentive to tough it out, with all the dangers that implies.

The recommendations I've seen say you should stay out of the office for the entire length of your symptoms, plus two days. I know from experience with the flu that the more minor, cold-like symptoms can drag on for weeks; that could easily be enough time to wipe out all of your vacation for the whole year! Nobody is going to do that, unless they can make arrangements to work from home, which not everybody can do.


As it happens, I do get sick time that is separate from my vacation. But I am lucky; this is a highly unusual situation in my country. And I still have to live in a country where most adults are structurally encouraged to be disease vectors. (And, I suspect, most kids as well, since their working parents would have to take PTO to look after them too.)

Now, I suspect that if this thing really does become a big scary pandemic with mounting numbers of seriously ill and dead people, employers will feel compelled to make special arrangements. But lots of people die of the ordinary seasonal flu every year.


Americans are currently trying to figure out how to reform the completely dysfunctional US health-care system. I propose that doing something about the cultural norms for sick time could do a lot of good.

Anyway, the little boxes referenced here are also the basis for a pattern for playing the Okinawan (and pelog barang-like) musical scale that I accidentally rediscovered back here. It's that little box plus an extra note, the fifth, which appears adjacent to the root on the next string down. Repeat by octaves and dislocate as necessary for the G/B string gap.

I still don't know jack squat about Okinawan music but I did spend some time last night noodling around with that scale. It has an interesting sound, happy but wistful to my ears, which of course have their own cultural associations.


An unrelated thing I realized recently was that when I remember (major-keyed) tunes in my head and then try to play them from memory, they tend to gravitate toward the key of D. I'm not sure why this is.

Sam speculates that D suits my voice well. My own theory had originally been that I just liked the way songs in D sound on a guitar. Since the lowest note on a guitar with standard tuning is an E, the lowest D is almost an octave up, so the easy open chords in D tend to have the root note higher up on the I chord (that is, the D itself) than on the other primary chords (G and A). You go up to return to the tonic, and that gives D major a bright and cheerful sound--unless, of course, you're doing something other than playing easy chords. (On the other hand, I suppose that if you are using drop D tuning, D might become a sepulchral key of underworldly darkness.) But this D business probably predates my attempting to play a guitar.

When Sam and I were talking about my bias toward D, I mentioned that I'd been messing around on my guitar the previous day while she was singing to Jorie, and found that Sam had been singing in F. Sam laughed and pointed out that she plays a horn in F. (It's a double horn, actually, like most modern horns; but one side is an F horn, and music for horn is usually scored with a transposition such that the key notated as C major is actually F).


Early on I scoffed at the whole notion of "key color" in music written or played after the rise of equal temperament, since for people without absolute pitch (which is to say, most of us) it ought not to make a difference; and in fact the most involved discussion of this seems to be old. But one thing I wasn't appreciating was that, unless you're composing on a computer with MIDI samples, the pitches you're using aren't generated out of the blue; they're coming from some physical instrument (or a human voice) operated by a person, and that's probably going to affect how the different keys sound. With a stringed instrument on which one frequently plays chords, the tuning is going to affect what inversions or octave repetitions can be used in a multi-string chord. While keys aren't going to have color in the abstract, they might well have it given a particular instrumentation.

I also wonder if most people don't have some sort of latent absolute pitch perception, even if they lack absolute pitch memory. Obviously in an extreme and rough sense we do detect absolute pitch, in that we can distinguish very high pitches from very low ones without a basis for comparison. And I can compare a tune I hear to the one I'm silently thinking of in my brain, it's just that the one in my brain probably wandered over to the vicinity of D when I wasn't thinking about it.

July 2, 2003. "This is my first post. Hello, hello, is this thing on? Sibilance. Sibilance."

I am resigned to make only slow progress on the guitar, since the only extended periods of leisure time I get are after Jorie goes to sleep, and often I'm too beat to do anything but go to bed, and need to do so in preparation for Jorie's predawn awakening anyway (admittedly she hasn't been quite so bad lately). And we've all gotten sick about three times since the last time I complained about us all getting sick, and we've had a couple of snowstorms since the last time I complained about all the snowstorms.

But I get in some practice now and then. Anyway, those pentatonic box patterns again. I am pretty good at remembering all the shapes but had the hardest time remembering where the root notes were in each shape. Most of the descriptions I've seen basically say "here they are, you have to memorize them." Which is true, but my brain's logic engine needs something to hang onto to start the process of memorization.

( Roots and boxes )

I'm going to say some more things about guitars. Most of my statements are going to be either wrong or idiotically elementary, but I'm saying them so that people who know stuff will be provoked to say something interesting.

If you poke around online, you will find an amazing profusion of pages whose authors have self-constructed systems, patterns or mnemonics they use for playing. A lot of it seems almost like crackpot science literature, except that in many cases the authors seem to actually be competent guitarists, so the systems are presumably working for them if not for anybody else.

( lots of wittering about symmetry groups and scale patterns )

1. Nt, nts

An nt is a double-height 1x2 Lego Duplo brick. As I mentioned earlier, I suspect these may exist because a single-height 1x2 brick, as regular Lego sets have, would still be small enough even at Duplo scale to be a choking hazard. These pieces are a bit unusual and evidently Jorie decided they were unusual enough to have a name. Nt is a very specific technical term and she uses it completely consistently. "Let's go pick some nts" is an invitation to find the double-height 1x2 pieces in the tub of Duplo bricks.

She actually coined this word a few months ago. More recently she started calling these pieces "chimneys", but she also uses the self-coined term as well. She also turns it around; there's an illustration in Richard Scarry's Best First Book Ever of a house with a chimney topped with two cylindrical projections, and she likes to point to it and say "it's a nt."

2. Double Pad

This one is far stranger. A while ago she had occasion to see the striking DVD cover of a very-not-for-children Japanese movie whose title translates to Devil's Tag (which I haven't seen, and which I can't find on IMDB for some reason, but which apparently disappointed fans of the associated manga). Anyway, the cover showed a creepy grinning cartoonish mask with glowing red eyes and a huge toothy mouth, which is apparently worn by some sort of deadly secret police agents in the movie.

Jorie is not yet fearful of anything conventionally scary and simply took this as a depiction of a friendly creature of legend, whose name she misheard as "the Double Pad". She makes up little stories about the adventures of the Double Pad. She likes to recite long passages from books with different things substituted for the characters' names, and, while usually all the characters in her ad-hoc mashups become Jorie, sometimes they're the Double Pad instead.

More recently, she has decided that the King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy (which she no longer calls "Real Ball") is the Double Pad, which I guess is an improvement.

We listen to a LOT of children's music these days. Maybe a little too much sometimes. On the other hand, we're fortunate to live in an age of relatively listenable children's music with some adult appeal. Here's some stuff Jorie's been hearing lately:

( Imagination Movers, Berkner, Roberts, Covert )

Online guitar instruction, once it gets beyond basic chords, seems to lean heavily on the teaching of pentatonic scales.

This is in contrast to the instruction book I have, which, despite being peppered with pictures of Elvis and Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix, bears hallmarks of having been written by a classical guitarist. It treats the subject much like an introductory textbook for an orchestral instrument, restricting play to the low frets (in that volume, at least) and training the student to read music while gradually expanding the range of available notes to a C major diatonic scale over a couple of octaves. Chords are considered as built out of individual notes, starting with three-note chords on the high strings only, that the book teaches you to read off the staff.

This is good stuff to know and I'm certainly going to continue with it, not least because my major aim here is to understand things about music in general; but it does seem to bear little resemblance to what rock or blues guitarists do. Instead, especially when improvising, they think in terms of boxes: patterns that you can freely transpose up and down the neck depending on key, for scales that are usually described as elaborations of a major or minor pentatonic scale.

( Pentatonic scales, the guitar, cultural appropriation, and a theoretical exercise with a surprise result )

Last night I dreamt that I was attending a reunion at the campus of William and Mary, which for some reason was accessible via the MBTA, and, reflecting on my life, suddenly remembered that I had been President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. And I thought, "Man, I don't remember actually doing much as President or spending any time at the White House during that period. I guess I basically slacked off for eight years. It's a good thing 1993-2001 was an incredibly placid and eventless time in American politics."

Last summer (as you may or may not recall), Jorie developed a Wiggles- and TMBG-based preoccupation with guitars which led to Grammy and Noreen giving her a child-sized guitar for her second birthday. She's still too little to actually do much with it besides strum the open strings with the guitar sitting on her lap, but she enjoys it. At the Music Together class that Jorie goes to with Sam, her music teacher urged us to keep the guitar in tune, which led me to start playing around with it, even though it's really too small for my hands.

I was coming at this from a position of complete non-musicianship, but I learned to play a few chords on this little kid's guitar (initially by looking at the "Chord Cards" that came with the guitar, a silly gimmick—they're these little chord charts with slots for the frets that you're supposed to slip under the strings so you can practice putting your fingers on the dots, but it's easier just to look at them). I soon learned the enchanting fact that, at least when it comes to chordal accompaniment, much pop, rock and folk music is not exactly rocket science, and you can start playing simple songs almost immediately, if not well—it's kind of like basic HTML circa 1994.

Then for Christmas, Sam and her folks got me a Seagull S6 and some accessories thereto (mine doesn't have the dark pickguard but it basically looks like that). Looking around, I get the impression that Sam really did her homework—it seems to be regarded as one of the best acoustic guitars you can buy without spending upwards of a thousand dollars, a good guitar for beginners or for professional musicians on a limited budget. It sounds nice to me. Of course, now that I have this lovely guitar it behooves me to actually learn how to play and take care of it.


And this affords me an opportunity to geek out about something new as well. I've always found music theory vaguely fascinating but essentially incomprehensible; I'd follow a couple of Wikipedia links and get lost in the weeds because, as a non-musician, I didn't have a visceral understanding of how any of this stuff sounded, nor the difficulties involved in playing it. Noodling around on our old piano a little helped me understand some of it, but what really helps is starting to learn to play an instrument for real, and to read a little music.

( some primitive music geekery )

Here's an enthusiastic review of our New Year's Eve show, with a few photos:

http://www.radiodramarevival.com/a-first-night-to-remember-with-your-whole-heart/

There's also a link there to a podcast of our 2006 studio performance of "Chicken Heart", with Sam as one of the meddlesome Ladies and as various crowd voices. There is going to be an official PMRP podcast of the First Night show at some point.

Well, they seemed to like it.

I'm in one of the lower-level boxes now, watching some last-minute rehearsing for the first half of the show, Red Shift. Sounding good. We have two ASL interpreters right in front of me at stage left, taking different characters in the dialogue. They're pretty good actors.

I hope they let us break for some food before the official performance call, but if not, I guess I can let hunger feed into my character's state of apocalyptic terror.

Posting from the stage at the Orpheum.

SOMEBODY PLEASE COME SEE OUR SHOW

Caught the noon train. Beard unfrozen. May be able to get lunch before rehearsal.

The trip home will be interesting.