Achilles and stochastic

How could I not look at the text of a spam message titled "Achilles and stochastic"? A small excerpt:

Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. But when I end up in the hay it's only hay, hey hey. Round, all around the world. Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down, until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on. 80 days around the world, we'll find a pot of gold just sitting where the rainbow's ending. Ulysses, Ulysses -- fighting evil and tyranny, with all his power, and with all of his might. He's got style, a groovy style, and a car that just won't stop. In search of Earth, flying in to the night. Thunder, thunder, thundercats, Ho! Thundercats are on the move, Thundercats are loose. Top Cat! The indisputable leader of the gang. He's the boss, he's a pip, he's the championship.

Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

And now it's back to reality (grading).

stochastic (Merriam-Webster OnLine)

Tea (take 4 times daily)

I take delight in any "study," no matter how small the sample (75 tea-drinking men in this case), that confirms the wisdom of doing what I like doing anyway:

Regular cups of tea can help speed recovery from stress, researchers from University College London (UCL) said on Wednesday.

Men who drank black tea four times a day for six weeks were found to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than a control group who drank a fake tea substitute, the researchers said in a study published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

The tea drinkers also reported a greater feeling of relaxation after performing tasks designed to raise stress levels.

And now back to grading midterms (and drinking tea).

Beat stress, drink tea (Reuters)

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In a memory kitchen

I rarely drink water from a juice glass. At work, I drink my way through a 32-ounce Nalgene bottle. At home, I drink water from large tumblers or Dixie cups. But this morning we were out of Dixie cups, and I wanted just a sip of water. So I filled a juice glass at the kitchen sink and had a moment of what Proust calls "involuntary memory," the unbidden return of the past via sensory stimuli.

Drinking this glass of water brought me back to the details of my grandparents' Brooklyn kitchen. The juice glass brought to mind my grandparents' glassware, most likely made by Libbey, with floral designs baked on. Water from my grandparents' tap would turn to a gray cloud in a glass and then clear. Whatever the reason -- aeration? the softness or hardness of the water? -- it doesn't happen at my sink. (And right now I am also remembering being fascinated in childhood by jelly glasses, the way whatever stories they told -- usually of the Flintstones -- ended and began again and again as one turned the glass, like a childhood version of Finnegans Wake.)

Looking around this memory kitchen, I recalled four other details -- cutlery with red plastic handles, a aluminum percolator with a glass knob at its top, a black- and grey-speckled metal roasting pan, and the fluorescent ring that seemed at one point synonymous with "kitchen," anybody's kitchen. I thought about aprons and anisette, but only vaguely. I thought of my grandparents as being in the living room, right next to the kitchen.

Later this afternoon, my wife Elaine made espresso, and the metallic coffee smell put me in my grandparents' kitchen all over again.

Crate art, orange

The Crate Label Museum has lots of orange crate art -- other fruits and vegetables too.

Crate Label Museum (via Armand Frasco's notebookism)

Overheard

"You're like a mental backspace."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Cigarettes and similes

Love is like a cigarette. You know you held my heart aglow between your fingertips. And just like a cigarette, I never knew the thrill of life until I touched your lips. Then just like a cigarette, love seemed to fade away and leave behind ashes of regret. Then with a flip of your fingertip, it was easy for you to forget. Oh, love is like a cigarette.

"Love Is Like a Cigarette," Richard Jerome and Walter Kent, 1936 (transcribed from the 1936 Duke Ellington recording, with singer Ivie Anderson)

Seventeen years ago today, I smoked my last cigarette.

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Proust: "People never cease to change"

People never cease to change position in relation to ourselves. In the world's imperceptible but everlasting march, we think of them as motionless, in a moment of vision, too brief for us to perceive the motion that is bearing them along. But we need only choose from our memory two pictures of them taken at different times, yet sufficiently close together for them not to have changed in themselves, perceptibly at least, and the difference between the two pictures measures the displacement they have effected relative to ourselves.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 409

Reality trumps satire

During the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, a Texas parent filed a "Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials" seeking the removal of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 from a high school's curriculum:

"It's just all kinds of filth," said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451. "The words don't need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class."

He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain.

Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world in which the reading of books is prohibited and books themselves are burned.

Parent criticizes book Fahrenheit 451 (The Courier, via Boing Boing)

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A night at the opera

This past weekend I had the wonderful experience of attending a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at Indiana University. My experience of opera is rather slight, my musical interests having been almost entirely elsewhere, so I went to the opera as one might travel to another country, with unguarded curiosity as to what it's like over there. It was delightful over there. Tito Capobianco's direction added some smart bits of stage business as the story moved from sexual comedy to the darkly supernatural close. The orchestra, conducted by David Effron, had a beautiful sound, particularly the strings. And the singers ranged from very good to excellent. The three performances that most impressed me: Austin Kness' Don Giovanni, a cocky narcissist sans qualms; Alan Dunbar's Leporello, a servant living through his master's conquests; and Siân Davies' Donna Anna, one of the Furies who pursue DG for his wrongdoing.

If you're lucky enough to live near a university with a music program, try a student opera. You too might like it over there.

(Thanks, Martha and Gary!)

Don Giovanni, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Words from Robert Fitzgerald

Why care about an old work in a dead language that no one reads, or at least no one of those who, glancing at their Rolex watches, guide us into the future? Well, I love the future myself and expect everything of it: better artists than Homer, better works of art than The Odyssey. The prospect of looking back at our planet from the moon seems to me to promise a marvelous enlargement of our views.¹ But let us hold fast to what is good, hoping that if we do anything any good those who come after us will pay us the same compliment. If the world was given to us to explore and master, here is a tale, a play, a song about that endeavor long ago, by no means neglecting self-mastery, which in a sense is the whole point. Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts -- cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace -- these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be. Nor do I suppose that the pleasure of hearing a story in words has quite gone out. Even movies and TV make use of words. The Odyssey at all events was made for your pleasure, in Homer’s words and in mine.

¹ This enlargement has now occurred, making everyone realize with a new pang not only the beauty of our blue planet but, by contrast with lunar and extra-lunar desolations, its bounty and fantasy of life.

That's the final paragraph of Robert Fitzgerald’s 1962 postscript to his translation of The Odyssey. The footnote is from 1969.

I wish Fitzgerald had written "the versatile brave man and woman," as Penelope too is both versatile and brave (as Fitzgerald of course knew). Replace the Rolex watches with Blackberries, substitute "the Internet" for "movies and TV," and Fitzgerald’s words seem as timely now as when he wrote them. This paragraph is for me a good explanation of why one might value and learn from ancient works of the imagination.