Pater Familias » Uncategorized

MAINTAINING THE MATERIAL BALANCE OF THE EARTH.

Philip — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:54:28 +0000

MAINTAINING THE MATERIAL BALANCE OF THE EARTH. Mary Jane remembers hearing a conversation some years ago between two college students in a ladies room at Queens college. The first student said that she was worried that with all the launchings of space ships, there would be less matter on earth, with dire consequences. The second student acknowledged the problem, but then had the thought that there was a population explosion and that would take care of the problem. They smiled in relief.

DEATH OF A BUMBLEBEE.

Philip — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 16:47:01 +0000

DEATH OF A BUMBLEBEE. This happened when Annalisa was about 8 years old. I put it at 8 because I was astonished by what she learned from somewhere in the culture. Annalisa and I were standing on our blacktop driveway when she said, excitedly, “Look there’s a bumblebee.” There was a very large bumblebee on the driveway, and I, heroically, stepped on it. Rather than being relieved, Annalisa was chagrined. She had been happy to see the bumblebee. Shortly thereafter, she took white chalk and made an outline of the bumblebee on the driveway where the bumblebee victim had been killed.

ITALIAN LEPRECHAUNS.

Philip — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:14:42 +0000

ITALIAN LEPRECHAUNS. On Saint Patrick’s Day, during an exchange about leprechauns, Mary Jane sent the following to a friend: “In Southern Italian lore, there is a creature similar to a leprechaun. I don’t know how to spell it, but it’s something like ‘mozzamadile.’ Though my maternal grandmother lived in the United States for over fifty years, she stayed a Neapolitan peasant in her mind and heart. One day, my Aunt Gertrude saw her leaving out little crackers and snacks around the kitchen. She asked her what she was doing. Ma replied that she knew there was a mozzamadile around the house, and she was going to catch him and make him give her his gold. (It turns out there was a mouse leaving little nibble marks on things. Alas, the mouse had no gold.)”

IS IT DEMOGRAPHICS AND NOT REGIONAL CULTURE?

Philip — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 19:06:28 +0000

IS IT DEMOGRAPHICS AND NOT REGIONAL CULTURE? In the post from 2008 that I linked to yesterday, I expressed some misgivings about the predictive value of my theory that regional cultural differences have an important effect on voters. On March 13, the same date that Michael Lind’s article advocating the regional culture theory was published on Salon, Sean Trende published an article on Real Clear Politics, which supports the rival theory that what appear to be geographic differences can be explained by ethnic, educational and religious factors. Trende’s article has an appealing map of the vote by county for Romney, Santorum and Gingrich. Trende has constructed a regression equation which estimates the vote in a county for Romney based on the county’s percentages of Latinos, college-educated voters, LDS (Mormon), evangelicals and African-Americans. Evaluating regression equations requires detailed analysis of alternative formulations, but this approach demonstrates the alternative approach to explaining regional voting.

Note, in any event, that both geographic explanations show the pitfalls of “momentum” theories. The order in which primaries are held has a lot to do with “momentum”.

THE NORTHERN CITIES VOWEL SHIFT.

Philip — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 01:29:09 +0000

THE NORTHERN CITIES VOWEL SHIFT. Jennifer Schuessler’s article also introduced me to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which has special meaning for me and Mary Jane. I had noticed that there were similarities between Mary Jane’s Syracuse accent and my Chicago accent. I had not realized that these similarities were reflections of the Northern Cites Vowel Shift, which has occurred in the area around the Great Lakes. Schuessler says: “The line separating the North and the Midlands — an area dialectologists define as stretching roughly from New Jersey westward to Kansas and Nebraska — is ‘the deepest division in our society’ linguistically, [William Labov, an editor of the Linguistic Atlas Project] said, and it’s only getting deeper.” Labov says that the change involves some 34 million people and has been going on since the 1940′s. Why it is occurring is a mystery. Labov suggests it may be a long-delayed result of the Erie Canal.

A GREAT PHILOSOPHER ON BASEBALL AS A RELIGION.

Philip — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:08:22 +0000

A GREAT PHILOSOPHER ON BASEBALL AS A RELIGION. Mary Jane quite frequently refers to baseball as a religion for me. The South Side Sox blog called my attention to this essay from 1919 by Morris Cohen, whom Bertrand Russell once called “the most significant philosopher in the United States”. The title is “Baseball as a National Religion”, and it is reprinted on John Thorn’s Our Game blog. Here are some quotes which give the flavor of Cohen’s argument: “I … maintain that, by all the canons of our modern books on comparative religion, baseball is a religion, and the only one that is not sectarian but national.” Baseball offers “redemption from the limitations of our petty individual lives and the mystic unity with a larger life of which we are a part.” Baseball has even more of the religious quality of Greek drama, “since we are absorbed not only in the action of the visible actors but more deeply in the fate of the mystic unities which we call the contending cities.”

Cohen says that: “When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on “A Moral Equivalent for War,” I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value.” He concludes by looking forward to “the establishment of the true Church Universal in which all men would feel their brotherhood in the Infinite Game.”

CLARK GABLE AND THE 50TH BIRTHDAY.

Philip — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:44:41 +0000

CLARK GABLE AND THE 50TH BIRTHDAY. Adela Rogers St. Johns told me that she was on a television talk show once which was interrupted when Clark Gable telephoned in. He told the host to ask her about her 50th birthday. … Continue reading →

ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS ON MISTRESSES.

Philip — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:42:59 +0000

ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS ON MISTRESSES. Adela Rogers St. Johns had a theory, based on her reading, that all the great mistresses were great clowns. She said that she had Marion Davies in mind as the best example of the theory. Marion Davies was the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, and Ms. Rogers knew her well. In addition to her reading, living in Hollywood exposed her to a lot of mistresses.

ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS ON DEFENDANTS IN CAPITAL CASES.

Philip — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:40:19 +0000

ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS ON DEFENDANTS IN CAPITAL CASES. Earl Rogers only lost 3 out of the 77 murder cases he tried. His daughter said that every one of people that Rogers defended in capital cases was broken by the … Continue reading →

SH*T MY DAD SAYS AND THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

Philip — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:16:44 +0000

SH*T MY DAD SAYS AND THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE. The content is different, and the technology (Twitter) is different, but there are similarities between SH*T MY DAD SAYS, which preserves what a father says, and this blog. As I said here, this blog is modeled on THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE and tries to preserve the spirit of my father holding forth at the dinner table.

LIFE LESSONS FROM SH*T MY DAD SAYS.

Philip — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:10:05 +0000

LIFE LESSONS FROM SH*T MY DAD SAYS. Justin Halpern’s dad has a number of life lessons that are passed on from father to son. I wish I had access to these when I was young or that the book had been published in time for me to pass them on to my kids when they were young. Here are some examples of the life lessons:

On the first day of kindergarten:

“You thought it was hard. If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.”

On your team not playing badly when you’re pitching:

“You can’t go getting mad at people because they’re shitty. Life will get mad at them, don’t worry.”

I think there is a world view underlying the aphorisms. Part of it is that there is lot of aggravating stuff in the world (the dad would express this more pungently), and you should expect it, recognize it, and ignore it.

SH*T MY DAD SAYS.

Philip — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:21:33 +0000

SH*T MY DAD SAYS. Our friend Nisma Baig gave me a copy of SH*T MY DAD SAYS by Justin Halpern for Christmas. Halpern created a Twitter page entitled “Shit My Dad Says” “to keep a record of the crazy things that come out of his mouth.” Soon he had over 300,000 followers and eventually there was a TV series, starring William Shatner, based on the Twitter page. There was a time when Annalisa was considering doing a series of comics (to be entitled “Adventures of Superdad”) devoted to my exploits. Instead, she gave me this blog.