80s Dude

 Having once been married to one, I know that archaeologists and cultural anthropologists often date mysterious artifacts by comparing them to better known artifacts recovered from the same site. I still watch a lot of “ancient excavation” videos. So it isn’t surprising that on a recent pre-move visit to Raleigh, I began to excavate the ancient site known as the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in my basement office, or “the nethermost drawer.” Much had been written about it, but scholars were unable, with any certainty, to discern which stories about its contents were myth and which had roots in historical fact. I decided to take the plunge and actually look into the drawer.

I was able to cleverly discern, largely from dates actually written on various documents, that these were actually documents created at various time during the 1980s CE. But then sandwiched between artifacts of which I had vague memories, I came across this image:

While it bore stylistic signatures of the current millennium, I had no recollection of having created this image. This was different from having no recollection of where we had dinner last week or where I put my car keys. Those are normal memory glitches that no longer bother me. This was a drawing - ostensibly mine. And I remember my drawings. Often where I was when I created them, sometimes what I was thinking when I created the drawing. Not that guy. No idea where it was created, who it was, what prompted it. All I knew was that it was created sometime, somewhere in the 1980s. All else was lost in the mists of that decade of long ago.

I was left with only one investigative option. Enlarge the image and color it. I did so and here is the result:

And now, gazing at it in this reconstructed form, I realize I still have no idea when or where I created the drawing. Or, a touch disconcerting, what I was thinking at the time. Still, coloring it was fun! I plan to apply for grants from The National Geographic Society and The National Science Foundation to continue my research at this unique and too often ignored site.

Merle B. Smith: A Requiem

 My friend Smitty died on June 12th.  I think it was the 12th. Not sure, these things screw with your sense of time. Not important. Anyhow, a fall into a mindless spiky bush visited more trauma than, eventually, his 93-year old body could endure. He was an exemplary, self-reliant man and, in my opinion, the indignities of the prodding and personal invasions from his well-intentioned medical team were just more than he could put up with. Besides, his beloved black lab Vito Muso had departed not that long ago. So Smitty just said “No!” when they wanted to pound on his chest and stick more tubes down his throat. And he closed his eyes and went off to look for his puppy.

I choose to believe he found not one, but two lively labs - Vito and his predecessor, Safransky. Safransky was admittedly more reserved, and definitely larger, than the lovable Vito. But they still made a good pair to show Smitty around. Is it foolish to flesh out this fantasy about my departed buddy and his canines? I think not. You see, if there is anything comforting about the death of our loved ones, it is that no one has ever demonstrably come back to either confirm or deny our personal narratives regarding an afterlife. 

Now before you start quoting faith and belief, remember those are, in the final analysis, rather evidence-free narratives. They are beliefs about an afterlife that folks choose. And that is fine. I just happen choose a quantum-mechanics-many-worlds afterlife narrative that, among other neat, compassionate, and forgiving things, allows for Smitty throwing balls for Vito and Safransky on a pleasant beach, while Smitty and Vito sip martinis. You see, I never actually saw Safransky drink a martini, but Vito?  I have the video.

After Christine and I moved in with Smitty in Burr Ridge, he and I soon became fast friends.  Alright, so he was a couple decades older than I. And we shared the unique characteristic of having, again decades apart, both married Christine. A little strange, but we both saw it as confirmation of our excellent taste. Nonetheless, he and I developed a nice kind of comfortable rapport. We were both fond of music and luckily between my mother’s renditions of songs from the 30s and 40s, my brother Jim’s great collection of records from the 50s and 60s and my own involvement with popular music, show tunes and the media thereafter, we had music pretty well covered, and spent many delightful hours playing our own version of “name that tune.”

He also had those Labradors that I fell in love with. First, there was Safransky  who I met when he was living with Christine. Safransky was sometimes mistaken for a pony. Big dog, rather aloof, hogged the bed, but eventually tolerated me rather well. But then there was Vito Muso - undoubtedly the best dog who ever lived. Understood everything you said to him, with the unfortunate exceptions of “come back here,” “stay,” “sit,” and other words some canine owners consider important. But “park,” “ball,” and “martini?” Those were right there in his wheelhouse. And most importantly he loved us every bit as much as we loved him. 

After Vito passed on, some of the light went out of Smitty. Often out of the blue he would say, “I really miss Vito!” So said we all, Smitty, so said we all. And strangely, or perhaps not, when he would talk to Vito about dying - OK, I’d eavesdrop, it was an unusual conversation. “We’re going out together, buddy!” he’d say, rubbing Vito’s ears, “Going out together.” And then he’d give Vito the rest of the martini.

So, to continue my narrative, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, and opt to spend some time in the men’s club portion of my conception of heaven - if my lifelong best friend Dan hasn’t shuffled more quickly and arrived before me up there - I’ll find Smitty hanging out peacefully by himself, feet up in front of the fire, two black labs snoozing alongside. He’ll look up and say, “Took you long enough! I told you it was martini time!”

Here’s looking at you, brother.

Tiny Druids

 So I decided to try the Druids on regular letter-sized paper. 8.5 by 11. It was an interesting experiment resulting in hair that needed, again, Sharpe Ultra Thin markers, a headlight, and two sets of reading glasses worn over each other. I like the way the image turned out. But I was simultaneously working on a large version 24 x 19 of the same image which included coloring the bricks. But I’ve done a version like that already, and I am wondering “Do I really need two?” Maybe it is time to move on to another image? I dunno.

Anyhow, here are the Tiny Druids:

Spoke too soon🥴

 Family member back in ICU. Good vibes, remote Reike, prayers, etc, all appreciated 🙏F

And Now, Finally, the Internet

 You probably sense some approach/avoidance going on here. You are right. It is difficult to write about the Internet. Because, as one of the early denizens of this particular digital jungle has popularized, “It’s complicated!” 

Back when I taught courses about this stuff I would assert that every new medium would cannibalize the content of the previous medium, thereby stealing it’s audience, advertisers and profits. And that was usually true: records and movies stole from live performances, radio stole from records, television stole from radio and movies. It was a medium eat medium kind of world. But it was a kind of technology-controlled kind of cannibalism.  You took the content from the older medium and put it in a “package” that subsumed older packages. You couldn’t “play” a book on your gramophone, you couldn’t watch a movie on your telephone.

Until the world went digital. I have a former student who grew up, quite successfully, in the world when radio was a huge medium in the world of popular music. I remember quite clearly the day he came into my office and declared that this was “the day the music died.”  Well he didn’t actually say that. Don McLean wrote that in his 1971 hit, American Pie, but the feeling was much the same. 

What set the young man off was what he saw as the unholy alliance between mp3s, the earliest forms of digitized songs, and internet sites like Napster, founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker and Hugo Saez Contreras in 1999. Internet sites like Napster allowed free downloading and sharing on those mp3s. Napster eventually went broke under the weight of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits and shut down in 2002. But rather than being the day the music died, the Napster/mp3 alliance was instead the tip of the iceberg.

Soon a myriad of hackers, entrepreneurs, academics, and kids with “trash 80s,”  (Radio Shack’s TRS-80, which until 1982 was the best selling microcomputer in the world) began to digitize everything - music, books, movies, typed notes, lists, personal texts (aka Short Message System SMS). You fill in the rest as we jump into the world that came to be after April 30th, 1993, the day the Internet went public and the World Wide Web was born. And now, some three decades later, we have what Mark Zuckerberg grandiosely calls the metaverse.

Not a bad moniker actually, considering the extent to which we are dependent upon digital information zipping through the wires and ethers of the world to find life on our computers, tablets and smartphones. Be honest now, in addition to reading this Schrag Wall post, what else have you used the internet for today - or in the last few minutes for that matter? Amazing, right? And just a little bit spooky? Perhaps we can tame the digital monster a bit by chopping it up into bites (bytes? Sorry, couldn’t resist) that are a bit easier to chew and swallow.

The Corporate Byte: It would not be hard to argue that today there is nothing but the corporate byte. Amazon, an alternative online bookstore that Jeff Bezo started in his garage in 1994, not too long after the Internet went public, eventually morphed into “the everything store” where you can buy, well, everything!  If you don’t believe me think of something and Google it.

Oh, yeah. Google. According to Wikipedia, “Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University” And Wikipedia, according to itself, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered^[2] by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.  And both Google and Wikipedia are places we go, often, to get information about stuff that we then buy on Amazon. So you can see what I mean by the corporate Internet being dominated a few huge entities to which I should add Microsoft and Apple, who announced yesterday its new Vision Pro Headset, that lets you live, simultaneously, in the real, physical world and the metaverse. Sort of like those anablep fish with four eyes that can see above and below the water at the same time. Weird.

This is probably a good place to bring up the fact that a couple of years ago I added a fourth tenet to my worldview, Distilled Harmony. That new tenet was Distill Complexity, a gentle reminder to myself to “keep it simple, stupid!”  I could have used that tenet far earlier. I had occasion, a couple of days ago, to go back and look at some Wall posts from a decade or so ago. Jeeez. Even I couldn’t figure out what I was talking about. The point in this particular post is that there really isn’t much point in wandering around in the corporate byte. We use it. We have little to do with its structure. And we can’t change it.

Of far more importance is how the structure of the Internet has come to affect the way we communicate with each other - or don’t. I recently came across this post on a science oriented site I follow. I forget which, could be National Geographic, New Scientist, or maybe Science News.They tend to run together in my head, but the quote is germane here: “Social media can serve scientists as a refuge and a community — or a source of terrible abuse.”

On the one hand the Internet is incredibly helpful. We currently have a family member in the hospital recovering from a fall. (Good news there. Recovery moving along.) The point is that we can do updates to the whole family with group texts or emails without having to repeat the same information via multiple telephone calls. Furthermore, these Wall posts go out to some 90 folks, all of whom are, or were at some time intimates, close friends, colleagues, or family members. So I can easily keep all of you up to date on the strange state of Schrag’s brain.

But the way that you receive the Wall also reveals the tip of the dark side of the interpersonal internet. When you get the Wall you only see your name, but as I just told you there are 90 of you “out there.” But I send the Wall out as “blind copies.” Only you see your email version and you use it in different ways. Many of you treat it as sort of a magazine, read it or not, and move on. Some of you comment, and we can chat about your comments. Others, no doubt, may never see it, perhaps because the email I have is out of date, points to a deceased individual, or the user automatically blocks the post. I have no way of knowing. But the important thing is that both you and I have the option of engaging or not, with different degrees of anonymity.

Problematically, the interpersonal aspect of the internet - commonly referred to as “social media,” Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., etc., etc. have, in addition to being helpful avenues of communication, become enablers of bullying, and the “hiding in plain sight,” places for hate groups of every stripe spewing vitriol and misinformation that is often hard to avoid, and almost impossible to refute. That porous characteristic of social media no doubt brought on the “good news/bad news” post from the frustrated scientist cited above.

Also problematic in the “only sometimes anonymous internet” is the, apparently common, tactic of “ghosting.” In ghosting one side of a relationship simply becomes a “ghost,” ceasing all interaction with the previous “other” in the relationship. There are obviously relationships and situations in which becoming a “ghost” is wise and self-protective. In others it is cruel and cowardly.

So let us return for a moment to the new tenet of Distilled Harmony, “Distill Complexity” - or keep it simple, stupid. I think, for me anyhow, the best way to deal with the incredible complexity of the internet is to continue to follow those four Distilled Harmony tenets:

Foster Harmony - avoid those places and individuals on the internet that/who are strident, confrontational and hateful.

Enable Beauty -  Seek out the incredible rich sources of beauty on the internet, photography, fine art, poetry have all carved out niches easily located on the net. Find them, enjoy them, contribute to them.

Distill Complexity - Try to avoid those individuals and organizations - no matter how cleverly named - whose sites seem to wind around logic and/or cite seemingly sacred sources in pursuit of bigotry and evil. 

More pragmatically if you find yourself ensnared in government or organizational or commercial sites that fail to allow you to accomplish the task that led you to the site call someone - customer, client, constituent support is usually a good place to start - on the phone and insist on speaking to a human being who can address your issue.

Oppose Harm - As I stated here not long ago, the best way to accomplish the fourth tenet is to pay close attention to the first three. That certainly applies here.

And to those tenets of Distilled Harmony I would add the good old notion of treating the Internet, and the people you interact with there, as you would want them and the Internet to treat you.

So to close this ramble, let me observe that interacting with the Internet these days really is interacting with the world, and I have discovered, for myself anyhow, that the same principles I hope to follow in life apply to our digital communication. I need to point out that my coming to this conclusion has been, like everything else in life, a process. I have in the past fractured some of the very Internet interaction principles I now profess. I hope to avoid those errors in the future. But like I said, it’s complicated and a process. You just keep on trying.

Another Profession Bites the Dust

 One would think that being retired and in my early 70s I would stop worrying about what I would be “when I grow up,” but apparently not.  The whole “job of the future” thing got started for me early in grade school. They gave us “aptitude tests”. You answered a bunch of questions, undoubtedly drawn up by psychologists and other related professionals. The answers were then fed into what had to be early computers and the results decided the job best fitted with our “aptitudes.”  I was slated to be a forest ranger. I think I was in also in the midst of reading the novels of James Oliver Curwood, all set in the wilds of northern Canada. But I’m sure that had no influence on my test defined “aptitudes,” wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

A variety of ideal jobs followed my life, world famous thespian, renowned architect, etc., before I settled on university professor. Worked out well for the most part. However, back at the turn of the millennium, I began to think I really missed the boat by not pursuing a career more aligned with my art, which was claiming more and more of my free time. 

Then Christine and I took a few weeks off in Italy - Venice and Florence. I think it was in Florence. In a large side gallery of the Uffizi, a couple of art restorers were working on a large canvas. They were behind a rope barrier, but you could watch. I was like Toad from Wind in the Willows, encountering his first motorcar.  “There! There is the perfect job for me!”

It is a feeling I have clung to since. However jobs in the field tend not to welcome applicants with my resume.  I choose to believe that it is not my maturity that discourages them, but rather the fact that I have neither training nor experience in the field. Perhaps it was an “I’ll show them!” attitude that led me to explore finer detail in my own images. I would use Druids, a version of which I believe I have posted here, has always been one of my favorites. The original is 24 x 19 inches, and is very detailed.  I’ll jump over and see if I have a copy of that.  Nope, the image is Photoshop and blogger doesn’t like that.

Anyhow, so I decided to do an 8.5 x 11 inch very tiny version of the original to demonstrate my detail versatility.  This image is a detail from that smaller version.  It is about 4 x 3.5 inches:I had to use Sharpie Ultra Fine Points to add the color. I’m fine with how she came out. But I was exhausted, even after just working in bursts of a couple hours, naps, reading and beverages in between. 

Somehow I think that a professional art restorer would be expected to follow a different work schedule. So, alas, my life as a professional art restorer seems not to be in the cards. So I’ll finish this image, content to know that this version of Druids will be a one of a kind.

Maybe I ought to give that forest ranger thing some thought. Neat views from up in those towers, and I’m not that afraid of heights. You think they have put elevators in by now?

Steve and Me

 It is a presumption, I realize. Had we met in real life I would have said, “It is an honor to meet you Dr. Hawking.” Only in my imagination does he reply, “Aw, shucks. Just call me Steve.” However, since he passed away in March of 2018, decades after his doctors had predicted, he will not contradict my undeserved familiarity. Unless he slips through a wormhole out there in space-time. And if anyone could do it, it would be he. . . . Hmmm.

Anyhow, before leaving this present consciousness, Hawking created a TV series titled, fittingly, Genius. However, it was not a paean to his own genius, but rather an attempt to demonstrate his contention that anyone could think like a genius, if you simply asked the right questions. To do this he recruited a team of three “ordinary volunteers” and, by asking them to solve a number of challenges, he would lead them to genius like answers to these persistent questions humans are wont to ask:

1. Can we time travel?
2. Are we alone?
3. Why are we here?
4. Where did the universe come from?
5. What are we?
6. Where are we?

It is a delightful series, not always just for the answers to which Hawking’s questions lead his volunteers, but rather for the exquisite construction of the challenges he posits for the volunteers. From an incredible Rube Goldberg device to lasers across lakes and mountain tops he creates a wonderful tour de force of education in action, taking his volunteers step-by-step to a shared genius insight. It is a must see for teachers of any grade level - K through grad school.

But it did leave me with a question I wish Steve was still around to address. In the third episode, Why Are We Here? Hawking leads his volunteers into the quantum realm of many worlds, one of my favorite “what if that is true?” spaces. If you have the time and the inclination, hunt up the episode and watch it. Hawking’s reveal is just brilliant. To condense the notion, admittedly incompletely, many worlds asserts that all the options we consider in our lives generate all “paths not taken” out in the very real “many worlds” that exist in the multiverse. Didn’t take that job? Yes, you did in a parallel world out in the multiverse. Didn’t marry that person? Yup. Out in the multiverse. Didn’t move to Alaska? In the multiverse you did.

I am delighted Steve came down on the side of many worlds because, as I implied, I buy it. But watching his genius path to those many worlds made me wonder what was my relationship, if any, to those other versions of me living out their lives on those roads I did not take. Making the very unlikely assumption that there is - or will be - the option to communicate with those other versions of me, do I have ethical or moral obligations? Do I need to explain to myself why I made the choice I did that sent this version of me down this path? Are congratulations or apologies in order?

You see my problem Steve? Are you out there somewhere, somewhen? You reading this? Come on, Steve, help a guy out.