Arboretum Road

My Life in Graph Form

By Jennifer Hagy: Needles and haystacks and such.

Caretaker's Gate

Book Review: The Hours Before Dawn

Celia Fremlin
1958
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ –

This was an unexpectedly enjoyable and well-crafted book. It was scary and suspenseful but also funny. And it did not disappoint at the end. Many of the award winners I have read recently start out strong, with a great and original idea, but then falter. This one does not have a super-original plot, but it was engrossing and satisfying right up to the very last sentence.

The book takes place in 1950s London. The main character is Louise, a harried housewife and mother with a new baby who can never get enough sleep so she is constantly tired and making mistakes and losing things (including her baby). To earn some extra money, she and her husband take in a boarder who appears to be a mild-mannered schoolmistress but who becomes more and more sinister throughout the story.

I love the way Fremlin writes, very matter-of-fact-ly; she is sympathetic to Louise and her family but also shows their faults. She has surrounded Louise with neighbors and "friends" who constantly gossip and criticize and offer advice, but who never are actually any help. Among the "friends" are some "progressive" mothers who advocate the latest in child care, which in the '50s apparently means being as uninvolved as possible and leaving it up to your neighbors to feed and entertain your children.

Carolina Street

Tower Street

Alveston Street

The Wonder Talkie

Bussey Brook Meadow

Cars of the 1970s: 1972 Ford Pinto

My parents bought this car new in 1972, I think.  Three-door hatchback, yellow, with a black interior, just like the one in the photo. List price $2,303.

This was my mom's car for getting around town. I remember noticing as a kid that the automatic transmission gear selector was on the "floor" (actually it was on the transmission hump) instead of on the steering column. Same with the parking brake, a hand-operated lever between the two front seats instead of a foot pedal.

According to How Stuff Works, our 1972 Pinto would have come with a 2.0-liter single-overhead-cam four-cylinder engine and a three-speed Cruise-o-Matic transmission.

The alternator failed once, just after we had left town on the way to Grandma's house. Other than that I think my parents were pretty happy with this car.

Fortunately, we never got rear-ended.

Book Review: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

James M. McPherson
1988
Awards: Pulitzer Prize
Rating: ☆☆☆☆ –

I first heard about this single-volume history of the Civil War, part of the Oxford History of the United States series, from Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. I was primed to plunge in because I had just finished Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, which was given to me years ago by loyal commenter Alex and which I only recently got around to reading.

Some things I learned from Battle Cry of Freedom:

• The idea that some high-minded defense of "States' Rights" was the cause of the Civil War is laughable. The issue was slavery: the right to expand slavery to the territories so as to preserve the power of slave states in the Congress and Electoral College. For instance, in the case of the Fugitive Slave Law, the South all of a sudden didn't care so much about states' rights: it wanted the federal government to overrule state laws and enforce property rights on slaves who had made it to the North.
• Prior to the Civil War, women were not seen as fit to serve as battlefield nurses. Clara Barton and others made believers out of the generals.
• There were several abortive efforts by southerners to invade Mexico,  Central America, and Cuba in order to add more Slave States to the union.
• Diplomacy. Lincoln absolutely had to keep Britain and France out of the war. His Secretary of State, Charles Francis Adams, played a key role here, along with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory at Antietam.
  

The best part of the book is the first 300 pages, which feature an extensive discussion of the domestic politics of the 1850s, and the role of westward expansion in fueling the sectional conflict. Once the war started, I found the discussion of military tactics deadly boring. I understand that this is a moral failing on my part.

Forest Hills Cemetery

Cheeze Blog + 7 Years = Time Magazine

A recent issue of Time details "Why it's Time to Retire the 401(k):"

The ugly truth, though, is that the 401(k) is a lousy idea, a financial flop, a rotten repository for our retirement reserves.

Takes me back...

Book Review: Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1992
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SPOILER ALERT

Red Mars is super-great, hardest-of-the-hard science fiction. It is the first book in Robinson’s Mars trilogy and it follows the experiences of the first hundred colonists on Mars through their first few decades of settlement.

The “First Hundred” settlers were all carefully selected for their technical expertise, diversity of skills, and psychological profiles. They trained together for years in Antarctica in preparation for setting up the first permanent Martian colony. After landing on Mars, they begin setting up living quarters, transportation systems, greenhouses, and power plants.

Every detail is totally realistic – the heated pressure suits they have to wear on the surface; the different types of structures they build as homes; the machines that extract ores and elements from the air and rock; the lichens that some of them develop to start oxygenating the atmosphere.

The colonists’ inevitable arguments and power struggles are equally believable. The longer the First Hundred stay on Mars, the more they separate into the “greens” who want to terraform Mars to make it livable for humans, and the “reds” who want to keep Mars as it is.

Meanwhile, as each colonist is trying to create their own version of utopia on Mars, Earth is dangerously overpopulated and in serious economic trouble. The multinational corporations on Earth who funded the original colonization effort now naturally want to exploit Mars’s resources for Earth’s benefit and start sending up more people to do so. Many of the residents of Mars need the corporations’ support to do their work but even many of the more Earth-friendly are resistant to this complete exploitation.

Corporate representatives eventually build a space elevator to make it easier on ships making the trip between Earth and Mars. The elevator consists of a giant cable stretching from Mars’ equator to the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid which has been captured and moved into geosynchronous orbit above the surface station. Passengers and cargo use elevator cars to go up and down the cable between the moon and the surface; ships only have to dock at the moon and don’t have to burn fuel to get in and out of the atmosphere.

The elevator is great for commerce and immigration. But to many of the Martians, it symbolizes all that is bad about the direction Mars is going. Eventually, the anti-corporate resistance organizes a revolution, which is unsuccessful and leads to the corporations taking over Mars, but during which they are able to bring down the space elevator. The collapse of the elevator is beautiful – tremendous slow-motion destruction on a gigantic scale.

To complicate the Earth-Mars conflict, a group of doctors on Mars develops treatments which can prolong life by hundreds of years and they start giving the treatments to their fellow colonists. They keep this secret as long as they can, but eventually Earth finds out. This causes chaos on Earth; some want to keep the treatments exclusive, knowing that giving them to everyone would only worsen the population problems, while others say that the treatments are a human right and should be available to everyone, paid for by their governments.

Regardless of what happens to the Earthlings, the age treatments were great for me, because they mean that some of the original First Hundred colonists can live long enough to see the fruits of their labors in Robinson’s fantastic later books, Green Mars and Blue Mars.

UPDATE 2/13/10: Added paragraphs about the tension between Earth and Mars, the space elevator, and the age treatments.

Where Would a Do-Gooder Do the Most Good if a Do-Gooder Could Do Good?

This is a question that I have been asking myself on and off for my entire adult life. Alex Tabarrok asks the question (originally posed by one of his readers) on his blog. The answers from the various commenters are interesting and for the most part refreshingly free of cant.

This strikes me as the right kind of question do-gooders and would-be do-gooders should be asking themselves, even if it is impossible to come up with the correct answer in a reasonable amount of time.

Mitigating the Tragedy of the Commons

Vernon Smith explains on Forbes.com how Elinor Ostrom, one of the two Nobel Economics Prize winners, focuses on the surprising success that various groups of people over the years have had in avoiding the "tragedy of the commons." She indicates there may be a way around this age-old resource management problem which involves neither pure privatization nor pure socialization.

Missing Manny

It's pretty clear to me that the departure of Manny Ramirez in July of 2008 is the one change that, more than any other, turned the Red Sox from a World Series champion into an also-ran.

In addition to his ungodly hitting ability, Manny provided a type of playful attitude that I think is sorely missing from the current squad. I do love the intense players, like Pedroia, Youkilis, and Beckett; and the quiet players, like Lowell. I am less enamored of the automatons like Bay and Drew. Papelbon does have his cut-up moments, but they tend toward the the out-of-control frat guy mode, which gets old quickly.

I maintain that 2004 doesn't happen without the inanity of former St. Paul Saint Kevin Millar. And Manny's "whatever" attitude after the Sox were down to Cleveland three games to one in 2007 was also a welcome relief from the gray-sky New England scowl that was on everybody else's face around here.

I do understand that Manny's off-field behavior was getting to be intolerable, and that it was beginning to ooze onto the field (refusing to play, claiming injury), and that he didn't really want to be here. I guess we have to assume that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein did everything humanly possible to get him to shape up. But I have to say that I miss the guy. I will be rooting for him to get a chance to beat the Yankees in the World Series.

Cool New Travel/History Blog

Here Is Where: The little-known places where different historical things really happened.

Toys of the 1970s: Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle

Received this for Christmas, 1974 or 1975. Place Evel on the cycle, and the cycle in the red launching apparatus. Turn a crank (hidden from view in this picture) to get the rear wheel on the cycle spinning, then release the bike, which zooms across the floor. Note that Evel comes complete with his regal cane.

Some Super-8 footage of the toy in action, shot by the Vasquez family:



This toy, in mint condition, now sells for $350.

Julie's Laminating World

Book Review: The Quantum Rose

Catherine Asaro
2000
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ☆ – – – –

The initial idea and most of the first half of this book were pretty good. The book was billed as "romantic fantasy" which made me skeptical from the start but it won a Nebula so I was willing to try it. The first half takes place on this rural, backwards planet but you eventually learn that the planet was seeded by a highly technological empire that is monitoring and interfering from afar. Which was all cool. But halfway through the book the main character gets taken off her rural homeworld and it turns into a space story and a mass-uprising adventure a la Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. It's like the author is trying to combine Asimov and Clarke and Stephenson and doesn't do any of them very well.

Also the main character is the classic madonna/whore, impossibly perfect, unbelievably beautiful and kind and generous woman who can't make up her mind about anything and yet everyone still loves her. By the fifth or sixth time that some woman was described as having hair in curls that tumbled to her waist I wanted to slap the author.

Suave

Book Review: The Gods Themselves

Isaac Asimov
1972
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ – –

Asimov is always good for a fun story. This one is about a portal from our world to another world where creatures in another dimension have discovered a way to change one of our elements into one that gives us an unending energy supply, which originally people think is great but then turns out to be bad because it is slowly making our sun hotter so that it will soon explode. The creatures in the other dimension are actually each made up of a triad of partner creatures, which each carry different aspects of the single creature's personality (parenting, logic, and emotion).

I really liked Asimov's introduction in which he explains that this book came about because he was having a conversation about physics and he referred to an element that couldn't possibly exist, and he was called on it, so then he swore he was going to write a story in which that element did exist and was the center of the plot.

Incoming!

Sunset from the Porch

The Demise of the Southern Veto

As a region, the South is more politically isolated right now than at any time since the Civil War. For most of our nation's history, the South has been so disproportionately powerful that the section has wielded a "Southern Veto" over U.S. politics and policy. A brief and admittedly oversimplified history of the Southern Veto over the years would include the following:

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was forced by delegates from Georgia and South Carolina to remove a clause from the Declaration of Independence condemning the African slave trade.

During the drafting of the Constitution, the Southern states insisted on being allowed to include their slave populations to determine representation in Congress and the Electoral College. The Northern states objected of course, since they had few slaves. To break the impasse, delegates from North and South agreed to count three-fifths of a given state's slave population in determining that state's representation. This shifted the balance of power in the Electoral College to the South in such a way that it routinely swung antebellum presidential elections in favor of candidates that were acceptable to the South.

When the modern Democratic Party organized itself the 1820s, it decided to require a two-thirds majority in order to nominate a presidential candidate. This gave the South an effective veto over any Democratic presidential nominee. For over a century afterwards, the Democratic Party existed as a coalition between Southern slaveholders and segregationists and the big-city machines of the North. Thanks to the two-thirds rule, every Democratic presidential nominee and his platform had to be acceptable to the South.

As a northerner, FDR found his New Deal initiatives severely constrained by the Southern Democrats who controlled key Senate committees. For instance, to get Social Security passed, FDR agreed to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from the program, leaving huge numbers of Southern Blacks out of Social Security entirely.

Other than Obama, the only non-Southern Democrat to be elected President since FDR was JFK. His domestic social agenda, which included civil rights and Medicare, went nowhere until after he was assassinated. His Southern successor LBJ pushed through both initiatives, turning the "Solid South" over to the Republican Party in the process.

Today, with Obama in the White House, the G.O.P. boasts electoral strongholds only in the South and in the sparsely populated Plains states. The Southern Veto, and especially its power over the Democratic Party, appears to have been finally overridden, at least for the time being. For example, there was only one Southerner among the "Gang of Six" centrist Senators in this summer's health care debate: Mary Landrieu from Louisiana. It is instructive that this lone Southern moderate hails from a state with a polyglot, cosmopolitan culture and history that sets it apart from the rest of the South.

Barack Obama is the gravest threat to the political power of the South since Lincoln. Viewed against this backdrop, the current town-hall-birther-deather-teabagger freak-out makes a bit more sense to me.

Obama's Health Care Speech

A classic of rhetorical technique:

1. Start with Ethos: Establish your credibility as someone to listen to. "When I took office, the economy was on the brink. Things are still bad, but we've pulled back from the edge. I am a competent manager."

2. Logos: Give a logical argument for why your approach is best. Obama offers a series of wonky arguments for why his reform is the best route.

3. Pathos: Appeal to the heart, and ask people to take some action. Obama invokes Ted Kennedy, and reminds us that wanting to help your fellow man is not a partisan issue.

Rhetorically, a very strong speech. Unknown is how many persuadable people actually watched it.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Dome Homes

I lament the unfulfilled promise of dome homes as a suburban housing option. Also yurts.

Forest Hills Station

Comparing Obama and FDR

This New York Times op-ed, Roosevelt: The Great Divider, argues that FDR rammed through his New Deal program with nary a care for the opposition. The implication is that Obama can and should do the same with health care reform.

However, there are some key differences between the situations faced by Obama and FDR:

1. The economy was much, much, much worse during the Great Depression than it is now. Much worse. Unemployment was 25%. There was no government safety net to speak of. The severity of three and a half years of Depression prompted the electorate to demand a radical response.

2. The economy was so bad, in fact, that the middle class identified politically with the poor, which is rarely the case. It certainly is not the case today.

3. The Congress is much more evenly split today. In 1937, the GOP was down to 17 seats out of 96 in the Senate and 88 seats out of 435 in the House.

4. The populist energy during FDR's administration was on the left and it demanded change. Today, the populist energy is on the right and it opposes change.