It's Alive!

The Tuesday night jam at Lynagh's is back! Good to be out playing my rig again! House band is Brent Carter and I on guitar and vocals, Matt Noell on bass and vocals, and Roger Barber on drums.

A little better crowd, but only 2 jammers out. Hopefully we'll get back to the 10-15 musicians we were getting out before. You could tell we hadn't played in 6 weeks. A couple of songs we had pretty well down were flubbed a bit. Did some new stuff all of which went pretty well.

Old Favorites

Back to reading sci-fi, I decided to read the stuff I had by authors who were old favorites.

Oldest was John Varley, whom I have been reading since the late 70's. Not that prolific an author. His latest is "Irontown Blues", 2018, 304 pages. This is set in his "Eight Worlds" universe which was my favorite of his stuff. It heretofore included the great novel "The Ophiuchi Hotline" and a couple of short story collections. This is a story of a wannabee cheap detective ala a film noir.

There was a bit of a curve about 1/4 of the way into the book when a 2nd narrator is introduced: she is a Dog Whisperer communicating with the protagonist's cybernetically enhanced bloodhound. The rest of the book alternates chapters between the detective and his dog. At 1st I thought this was not going to go well, but it turned out to be great! Who knew that cybernetically enhanced canines liked puns? And thought humans were stupid? Some really good stuff too about what it would be like living with a dog's sense of smell. Here's a passage I especially liked:

Irontown smelled like . . .
(I have to interrupt Sherlock at this point. I tried to tell him that most of what he was saying made no sense to me, but he was having none of it. Smells are so important that he spent most of an hour listing them for me. By the time he was done, there had been over two hundred separate and distinct smells. I had names for fewer than fifty of them, and many of those I had to guess at. It was made all the more difficult because many of the smells were new to Sherlock, too. He knew precisely where to file them, to categorize them by similarity to other smells, or by who-knows-what system a dog has of classifying smells. Once more, it’s a case of describing the ten thousand shades of “red” to a color-blind person.—PC)

A quick and enjoyable read, and not too much libertarian/heinlein nonsense.

Next oldest was Walter Jon Williams, whom I have been reading since "Hardwired" in 1986. His latest effort is "The Accidental War", 2018, 496 pages. This is his 6th book in the Dread Empire's Fall (Praxis) series, and starts a new trilogy of novels. An extremely regimented, hierarchical society, lots of military foo, space yacht racing, yada-yada... He does include a financial meltdown, with subsequent social turmoil, that is a well-told accounting of the 2008 meltdown and the Great Recession that followed. He writes well, but, I find the concept of feudal futures depressing. Still, a page-turner, and I will stick with the series.

Finally, Greg Egan, whom I have been reading since "Quarantine" in 1992. His latest is "Dichronauts", 2017, 312 pages. This story is set in a universe with 2 dimensions of space + 2 dimensions of time, rather than 3+1. So just all around weird. The story is about explorers trying a find a place to move their city after a draught makes their current location non-viable. The plotting is good, and some interesting social issues are raised, but still, I really felt that this whole 2+2 dimensions thing would have been much better carried out by an animated movie using intensive CGI. Egan does provide a web page exploring the physics of this universe - a bad sign maybe? Still, a fairly quick and enjoyable read.

Back on the magazine stack, then I think some fantasy.

Music is Life

Music out: the Tuesday jam at Lynagh's died in late July. We were getting decent numbers (10-15) of musicians out, but a minimal crowd. I think a bar 2 blocks from the UK campus is probably the wrong venue for mostly old farts playing blues and rock. So we still have the Blues and Groove Jam at Squires Tavern on Sunday evenings 7:30-10:30. I usually go there after playing with Steve at the Listen Locally Open Mic (formerly Red Barn Radio Open Mic) at Twisted Cork 5:30-9:00. There is also the excellent jam at Backstretch Bar & Grill on the last Sunday of the month 3-7.

Steve & I also play at the LexJam Open Mic the 2nd Saturday of the month at various venues 1-4. There is a female singer who brings her autistic son out to the open mic. He likes to channel Elvis, so I have played and sang "Blue Suede Shoes" a few times with him onstage with a guitar. I added 4 more fast Elvis songs to my book for next time - I'm tired of "Blue Suede Shoes".

Meanwhile, I continue to add any song requested or played by someone else at jams and gigs to the OnSong app on my iPad, plus any song I stumble upon that I like and could possibly play. It generally winds up being 3-6 new songs a week. I'm currently at 580 songs. Man, I love that app.

Steve & Chris played a couple of gigs this month which went pretty well. Our last gig of the year is this Friday at The Cellar 7-10.

Muppet news flash! I just had a text from the guy at The Cellar cancelling the gig. He was not there when we played earlier in the month, but said they had "negative feedback on fit". I asked for details, he was nice enough to respond that they wanted a more "lively, upbeat act". Ha ha, I guess someone noticed we were old farts - curse you, ageism! Oh well, we are indeed old farts. I think I'll call that strike 2.

A person who wishes to remain anonymous, and who I would not have guessed had a lyrical bone in their body, sent me lyrics to 2 songs to see about getting them published. So I wrote music for them and posted them online. Steve & I also performed them.

• "She Cheated With The Preacher", old school country.
• "It Don't Seem Fair To Me", an 8 bar blues shuffle.

My contention that, if you give me lyrics I can crank out a song, seems to be born out. Putting music to these lyrics was easy.

---

Music in: Man, it seems like I just did this. Time sure flies by.

• "Summerteeth", Wilco, 1999, 17 tracks (including "23 Seconds Of Silence". Wilco is the favorite band of music aficionado (and GM of J. Render's Southern Table) Josh Brown. He recommended this older album of theirs as one of his favs. Indeed very listenable tunes, 4 stars. Here's "When You Wake Up Feeling Old" (ha ha, I don't yet!)

• I mentioned to Josh I didn't have any Springsteen in my iTunes. He recommended "Nebraska", 1984, 10 tracks. This is a largely acoustic album, I would probably have preferred something with the E Street Band. Well, I want to get some Springsteen into the rotation, so 4 stars. Here's "Atlantic City".

• "God's Favorite Customer", Father John Misty, 2018, 10 tracks. These aren't bad tunes, but I find FJM's pretentiousness to be off-putting. Funny, I like other over-the-top performers - Vic Thrill + The Saturn Missile or Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. 3 stars.
• "Apart", "Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson", 2018, 5 tracks. I liked their last effort, this also is catchy, poppy tunes. 4 stars. Here's "Iguana Bird".

• "Earthtones", Bahamas, 2018, 11 tracks. Another recommendation from Josh Brown. Bahamas is a 1 man act out of Toronto, Afie Jurvanen. Very tasty tunes, 4 stars. Here's "Opening Act (The Shooby Dooby Song)".

• "Come Tomorrow", Dave Matthews Band, 2018, 14 tracks. I think I read this was their 1st album in 6 years. Dave Matthews doesn't seem to be aging well. When some of his older stuff comes up on shuffle play, my reaction tends to be "meh". I still enjoy playing and singing "#41". But, no catchy tunes in this effort. 3 stars.
• "so sad so sexy", Lykke Li, 2018, 10 tracks. I read a review of this that said she had gone seriously mainstream modern pop and I think I concur. I did not like this nearly as much as her earlier stuff. 3 stars.
• "Lush", Snail Mail, 2018, 10 tracks. I'm not sure where I got this. Plaintive, emo female singer, I am a sucker for this stuff. "Snail Mail is the American indie rock solo project of guitarist and singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan." per the Wikipedia article. 4 stars. Here's "Let's Find An Out", short and sweet.

• "The Blues Is Alive And Well", Buddy Guy, 2018, 15 tracks. Buddy Guy is the last of the old bluesmen left alive. So, it is required that I keep up on his stuff. Some of the tracks are the required "Yes, I'm still alive and playing" type songs. A good effort, 4 stars. Here's "Cognac", featuring Jeff Beck and Keith Richards.

• "The Broken Instrument", Victory, 2018, 13 tracks. I think my weekly Amazon email recommended this. Apparently she was a busker in NYC who drew attention. Very enjoyable, 4 stars. Here's "Jazz Festival".

• "The Now Now", Gorillaz, 2018, 11 tracks. These guys continue to make tasty tunes with great grooves. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Humility", featuring George Benson.

• "High as Hope", Florence + The Machine, 2018, 10 tracks. I like this one a lot better than her last. Much less bombastic. I was going to go 4 stars, but couldn't find a track I liked enough to include here, so, 3 stars.
• "Uniform Distortion", Jim James, 2018, 11 tracks. Kind of a retro sound, engineered with lots of reverb. It doesn't do much for me. I wonder when My Morning Jacket will have a new album? 3 stars.
• "Songs In The Key Of Life", Stevie Wonder, 1976, 21 tracks. I was surprised I did not have this album. What a great album, with some of Stevie's most popular tunes: "Sir Duke", "I Wish", "Pastime Paradise", "Isn't She Lovely". "As". 4 stars. Here's "As", which he recently performed at Aretha's funeral.

• "Lamp Lit Prose", "Dirty Projectors", 2018, 10 tracks. I think they are still feeling the loss of 1 of their female vocalists. Still, 1 of my favorite new alternative groups. As usual, the orchestration is all over the place. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Right Now", featuring Syd.

• "Back Roads And Abandoned Models", The Jayhawks, 2018, 11 tracks. Very listenable. I don't know how it took me so long to discover this band. 4 stars. Here's "Leaving Detroit".

• Eponymous, Giant Swing, 2018, 6 tracks. The 2nd album of this Local Lexington 3-piece band. Ab fab guitarist Jeff Adams is backed by Logan Lay on bass and Keith Halladay on drums. I have been lucky enough to get to play with all of them. 4 stars. Here's "Circus Murder".

• In The Pines, eponymous, 2016, 5 tracks, and "Mirror of Evolution", 2017, 10 tracks. I saw these guys at Best Friends Bar at the corner of Woodland and Euclid after playing at Lynagh's. A 5 piece band out of Cincinnati. Very good, tight southernish rock. I offered them $10 for a CD, they gave me 2. Well engineered, the lead singer's voice is not very distinctive. Almost 4 stars, but not quite, so 3 stars.

That brings us up to early August. _Unrated playlist has 118 songs, not too bad. So until next time ...

The Darwin Economy

"The Darwin Economy", subtitled "Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good", is a 2011 book by Robert H. Frank, a Cornell economics professor. 272 pages. Frank has published several other books.

I found this book fairly disappointing, for reasons I will detail. So I won't do a Cliff Notes level summary.

Without trepidation, then, I offer the following prediction. One century hence, if a roster of professional economists is asked to identify the intellectual father of their discipline, a majority will name Charles Darwin.

If the same question were posed today, of course, more than 99 percent of my colleagues would name Adam Smith

The main idea of the book is that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is completely unreliable as a means of assuring good outcomes in economies or societies. Darwin's idea that strategies that benefit the individual quite often harm the species as a whole is a much better way to look at things. Traits that are involved in sexual selection quite often turn into an arms race. For example, the antlers of a male elk have evolved to be larger and larger so that the elk can defeat rivals in battles for access to females for breeding. But the large antlers impede their movement through forests and make them more vulnerable to predators, so they are bad for species survival.

It seems to me that there are then 2 flavors of sexual selection:

1. As in the elk example, development of hardware that allows a male to defeat other males in combat for access to breeding females.
2. What I had thought of as sexual selection before: traits that don't aid species survival, but "chicks dig it": the peacock's tail, language and music in humans.

The 1st chapter of the book "Paralysis", talks about how our paralyzed government is unable to address the ever-increasing problem of wealth inequality. I found this statement, which he repeats later in the book, interesting.

Nor will business investment spark recovery, because most firms already have more than enough capacity to produce what people want to buy.

So maybe, no wonder corporations did nothing with their recent increased profits due to the 2018 tax cuts but stock buybacks - no point in building more factories if they already can produce more than they can sell. Can you say, post-scarcity economy?

Ha ha, here's an interesting new word to describe our current system of government: "ignoramitocracy—a country in which ignorance-driven political paralysis prevents us from grappling with even our most pressing problems".

The book seems to me to go off the rails in that it seems to be written as if the target audience is "rational libertarians" - libertarians who don't believe as a matter of dogma that all government and taxation is a violation of their liberties. From his Wikipedia article, Frank doesn't seem to be a libertarian. And he is clearly in favor of trying to fix the inequality problem. So why does he devote so much of the book with arguing with libertarians, as if they are the keepers of some worthwhile knowledge, rather than just selfish pricks?

I mean, the book's last chapter is titled "The Libertarian's Objections Reconsidered". With John Galt featured as a serious person to be discussed. Seriously? F#ck a bunch of libertarians. They are a fringe group at best, why is Frank so concerned about them?

And I was annoyed when he had the 2 participants in 1 of his thought experiments to be named "Rand" and "Paul". Our junior boy-senator continues to devolve into more and more sleazy behavior, as long as it gets him some attention. I really don't like to be reminded of him.

One principle Frank refers to frequently is that of John Stuart Mill: "preventing harm to others was the only legitimate reason for restricting individual liberty". He expands this principle to include indirect harm.

Frank also references John Kenneth Galbraith:

The late John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, stressed the contrast between the “traditional sequence” envisioned by Adam Smith's modern disciples and a “revised sequence” that Galbraith saw as a more accurate portrayal of the modern marketplace. In the traditional sequence, consumers enter the market with well-formed preferences, and firms struggle to meet their demands as well and cheaply as possible. But in Galbraith's revised sequence, powerful corporations first decide which products would be most convenient and profitable for them to produce, and then hire Madison Avenue hucksters to persuade consumers to want those products.

One good issue that Frank raises is relative vs absolute needs or position.

Reproductive fitness is thus a quintessentially relative concept.

...

Expenditure categories that are more easily observed—such as those for cars, clothing, and jewelry—should also tend to be more positional than those that cannot be observed, such as those for insurance.

...

On balance, then, the prediction is that savings is nonpositional

This reminds me of the old joke, that if you and a companion are being chased by a bear, you don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than your companion.

[I was going to put this at the end, I'll go on and do it here. I decided to read this book after it was referenced by this blog post by David Brin, in this passage:

Robert Frank ... asserts that – as one supporter put it - there is a homeomorphism between, on the one hand, natural selection and economic competition for absolute goods, and, on the other hand, sexual selection and economic competition for relative (positional) goods.

I thought this was a great insight. But Frank actually never says this?!?!? In consultation with The Google, I was unable to determine who actually said this. And meanwhile, Brin, who seems to be wanting to found a cult of Adam Smith, takes offense at Frank wanting to displace his hero with Darwin.]

Frank talks about why there are not more worker-owned companies. I don't know that he really concluded anything.

He talks about misguided efforts to shrink government which wind up costing us all more $$$ in the long run.

He talks about "expenditure cascades" - consumerism and conspicuous consumption spreads from the upper income levels of society to lower levels as well.

He proposes to tame positional consumption by replacing income taxes with a progressive consumption tax. This would reward saving, but, so what? The world is already awash in capital. There is no mention of a Piketty/wealth tax.

In general, Frank wants to use taxes rather than regulation to control bad behavior. I'm not sure this is a good idea. This just makes bad behavior - pollution for example - a budget line item. If the bottom line is still in the black, corporations are fine with that, it's just part of the cost of business. Meanwhile, the rest of us get poisoned. As with the lack of jail sentences for Wall Street fraudsters after 2008, hefty fines won't stop corporate bad behavior. You need to attach personal peril, to put people in jail for transgressions. So we need laws and regulations, not just taxes.

Of course, and I think Frank says this, our current oligarch rulers and their GOP flunkies have no use for either regulations or taxes, so, for now, this is a moot point.

This is an interesting point: "opportunities for causing harm to others clearly increase with population density". Hence the need for more regulation and law in cities than in rural areas.

Frank also has a chapter on "Success and Luck", where he notes that luck is probably more important than hard work, creativity, anything, in being breakout successful. I think we have seen this meme before. I personally was the beneficiary of a very lucky business break. Hard work is a given, but it it is still more luck than anything that leads to a significant liquidity event. Studies have shown that there is no correlation between CEO salary and bonuses and CEO performance. Ha ha,

These managers also enjoy remarkably favorable tax treatment, for reasons that no one can seem to explain with a straight face.

Frank also mentions the mythical "Tragedy of the Commons". As we learned here, the Tragedy of the Commons is a myth promulgated by advocates of privatization. Managing a commons is not that hard a thing to do.

From the halfway point on, Frank leans heavily on Ronald Coase - "the world's foremost authority on behavior that causes harm to others". And we then partake in many examples in which all conflicts are resolved by computing how much different solutions will cost the participants, and then implementing the cheapest solution.

I have 3 problems with this:

1. We previously encountered Coase in "Misbehaving", and there found that behavioral economics had shot holes in the Coase theorem.

2. So many of the examples in this part of the books use homo economicus at the peak of his powers:

   the best available metric for assessing the strength of such feelings is the amount they'd be willing to pay for what they want.

   ...

   Talent and temperament are again assumed to be perfectly observable.

   For example, in a thought experiment with a smoker and a non-smoker rooming together, they are able to assign $800 as the value to the smoker to be able to smoke in the shared digs, and $1600 as the value to the non-smoker to be smoke-free. Seriously? This is just silly - the smoker would find another smoker for a roommate, ditto for the non-smoker.

   We learned in "Doughnut Economics" that getting rid of homo economicus was way #3 of 7 in thinking like a 21st century economist. So finding him so prominently featured here was definitely off-putting.

3. Frank says that liberals are offended by using cost-benefit analysis on everything. Yes, for some things that is true for me. Maybe cost-benefit analysis on providing adequate nutrition, education, etc to children who don't have it would show that we should feed, educate, etc all children. But, if it doesn't, then f#ck cost-benefit analysis.

   Meanwhile, as a scientist, I am indeed offended by invoking homo economicus, pulling meaningless numbers out of your ass, computing with them, and then pretending they have even the slightest worth.

In summary, I wish "The Darwin Economy" had had a lot more Darwin, and a lot less Coase, homo economicus, cost-benefit analysis, and libertarians, "rational" or otherwise. But here's a good quote from the last chapter:

We need good government because individual and societal goals are often squarely in conflict. When they are, it's naïve to expect an invisible hand to produce good outcomes.

This was my 1st economics book in almost a year, I'm really sad it was so disappointing - although I did get more out of it than I did "Value and Capital: An Inquiry Into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory", J.R.Hicks, 1939 in 2015. Ha ha, I guess I better go read a bunch of science fiction!

ICYMI, here is the link to the blog post listing all of the economic books I have reviewed/summarized.

3 + 1

The escapism ends - after this post. Seriously, I am on the magazine stack. Sky & Telescope done, reading Scientific American. Technology Review and Wired still to go. Then, on to an economics book! Note, I have switched all my magazine subscriptions over to digital only, and read them on my iPad. My decades of taking old magazines to the Dunbar HS library appear to be over.

So, 1st read "The War Dogs Trilogy" by Greg Bear: "War Dogs", 2014, "Killing Titan", 2015, and "Take Back The Sky", 2016. Greg Bear was one of my fav sci-fi authors for years. I was a little concerned about this being just some militaristic sci-fi, but he got into some other interesting concepts, including several alien races, and some interesting ideas about the dynamics of the solar system. So these were much better than I expected. Note, Bear throws some theism in, as he seems to be wont to do of late :-(

Then, the 35th and final "The Year's Best Science Fiction", edited by Gardner Dozois. The final collection because Dozois died in May. Well, he went out with a bang. The last couple of years I did not enjoy the collection that much. This year, a totally outstanding collection of stories, surprisingly enjoyable. 2 or 3 I had read before in other collections, but there were pretty much no weak stories in the lot.

I liked the story by Tobias S. Bucknell, so I bought a couple of his short story collections on Kobo. He had a novel trilogy, the Xenowealth trilogy, that looked interesting but was no longer available on Kobo. So I went to his website and emailed him, asking if the novels could be made available on Kobo - which I use because my local independent bookstore, Carmichael's, then gets 40% of the proceeds. He emailed me back, said he was changing publishers, and included as attachments epubs of the 3 novels! He was glad I enjoyed his stories! Wow, I love living in the future!

What If?

[I wrote this November, 2017 and did not publish it - I'm guessing because it contains way too much personal financial info. Oh well. Please treat the personal financial info solely as a data point. Some good ideas in this I think.]

Keynes famously speculated that someday, capitalism would have done its job and generated all the capital the world would ever need and could then be retired. I have not read Marx, but he also foretold the end of capitalism.

But let's just focus on Keynes. I retired 5 years ago and have lived off the 6% ROI that my most excellent Merrill Lynch financial advisers have generated via interest on bonds but mostly via dividends and capital gains off of stocks. With CDs returning maybe 1%; savings accounts < 1%; bonds maybe 4-5% (although I see I just had a corporate bond mature that paid 5.6%), increasingly the stock market is the only place to put funds for a reasonable ROI.

Why is the ROI on all other investments so low? What if it is because we have reached Keynes' predicted point where the world has all the capital it needs? Do the low low interest rates on raw capital show that there is more capital than there is need for?

I will theorize: if indeed we have reached the point of capital sufficiency predicted by Keynes, then the stock market will not crash in the foreseeable future, because there is pretty much no where else where you can invest your money and get any ROI. The Fed has no reason to raise interest rates. The economy is not overheated. Unemployment is low - underemployment, who knows? Deflation is much more of a concern than inflation, although you can never convince conservatives of that.

The most recent stock crash in 2008 was caused by financial markets being flooded by fraudulent instruments. I don't think that will happen again real soon - although it would have been better if a lot of the fraudsters on Wall Street did some jail time.

I think I may have mentioned before that 1 side effect of having a world awash in capital is that it might mean that the Fed could fire up the printing presses and fund an aggressive Universal Basic Income program without having to worry about inflation (see below).

Even if they added $5T to the money supply it would represent only 2% of the $250T wealth of the world. (Note, that wealth figure is probably understated by a factor of 2 to 4. Also note, a better calculation might be $3.6T ($12,000 x 300,000,000 US citizens) / $92T wealth of North America = 3.9%) Add that to some Eisenhower era income tax rates (90%) on top earners, and we could maybe make a dent in inequality.

The only downside I see is that increasingly the climate crisis will continue to destroy more and more capital every year. This is yet another reason to address the climate crisis with urgency, and right now.

Inflation: I think inflation is driven only by supply-side shortages, which we haven't seen in quite a while. We moved to capitalism 2.0 in the 1950s, from scarcity to abundance. The only instance of real inflation in my lifetime was after the 1974 OPEC tripling of oil prices. It took more than 10 years for that to ripple through the entire economy. The OPEC monopoly artificially generated a supply-side shortage.

3 More

The hits just keep on coming.

"Suicide Club" is the 1st novel of Rachel Heng, 2018, 352 pages. Set in a near future where the fitness nazis and fitbits have seized power, you can live for 200 years if you toe the line and eat nothing but nutritionally correct smoothies and shakes. No music, it gets the juices stirring too much. And immortality is on the horizon, for those who can afford it. This story revolves around 2 women with complicated relationships with a parent, who become involved with the revolution, aka Suicide Club. Well written, a good read.

Next up, "The Freeze-Frame Revolution", a novella by Peter Watts, 2018, 192 pages. An interesting idea, with a asteroid spaceship circling the galaxy seeding it with warp gates. The humans on board cryo-sleep most of the time, and the supposedly not-too-smart AI named Chimp does most of the heavy lifting. Not as good as some of Watts longer stuff, but this is a guy who gets the concepts of what AI would look like. I was impressed that the book had cover blurbs by, among others, Cory Doctorow, Richard Morgan, Vernor Vinge, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Greg Bear - definitely some of my favorites.

Finally, the 1st book of an Arabian Nights type collection of stories, "The Orphan's Tales: In The Night Garden", by Catheryanne Valente, 2006, 496 pages. 2 main stories are told, but there are tales within tales nested I think 4 deep. There is also some dovetailing between the plots and characters of the 2 stories. Confusing at times, but it still gets you turning the pages.

Writing the post prior to this, looking up the blog posts for Hannu's earlier novels, I was reminded of the 2nd book of The Quantum Thief trilogy, "The Fractal Prince". That also had an Arabian Nights format, but approached much more creatively, as blogged here.

At one point a story that includes one of its figures retelling the same story causes a person infected by the story to go into an infinite recursive loop, presenting to the outside world as catatonic.

Hmmm, I thought this was new but I probably got it as a $1.99 or some such special. The 2nd volume "The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice", it looks like came out in 2007. I have just purchased that, I guess is it for this series.

Approaching Escape Velocity?

Well, as Putin's bitch, The Evil Orange One, continues to tweet the destruction of the US-dominated world order established after WWII, I continue to tear through nothing but escapist literature. Escape velocity?

I missed this one last post because I read it in Kindle format, as it was not available from Kobo. "Valence", by Jennifer Koehler Wells, 2017, 456 pages, is the 4th book in her Fluency series, most recently blogged here. Humans make contact with the Galactic Federation. Plenty of plot to deal with. I like that Ms. Wells includes some sex/genetics stuff, with humans being 1 of several species engineered by a progenitor species with different levels of oxytocin vs cortisol and adrenaline - humans being on the aggressive asshole end of the spectrum. Ms. Wells writing continues to improve. And who could not like a series in which some of the protagonists are cephalapods? This is an enjoyable series, she is doing at least as good as James S.A. Corey is with The Expanse.

Back in the Kobo world, I read "Quillifer", by Walter Jon Williams, 2018, 544 pages. I think I have read most of his stuff, he is a very dependable writer. This I have classified as Fantasy, but it is really more Historical Fiction - set on an alternative earth (different continents) with 1 character who is a supernatural being, with 17th-18th century technology. A very enjoyable read, as our protagonist, the title character, winds up being a hero in several circumstances, mostly due to thinking through options and coming up with some creative solutions. We have sea battles, land battles, court intrigue, etc, etc. A real page turner, I look forward to the next.

I also liked that the main character and others made up words, and all the archaic usages, particularly. Who knew that a Mercer is someone who sells fine fabrics like silks?

Next, "Provenance", by Ann Leckie, 2018, 480 pages. This is set in the "Ancillary" universe of her award-winning trilogy, blogged here and here. We are out of the immediate Radch empire although there is a Radch ambassador character. A "coming of age" story of a politician's daughter Forrest Gump'ing her way through several significant events. Indeterminate gender, and most of the main characters wind up hooking up female-female and male-male, as is becoming de riguer for lots of current sci-fi. An easy and enjoyable read.

Then another "Let's Rewrite Greek Mythology" effort from Zachary Mason, "Metamorphica", 2018, 304 pages. Similar to "The Lost Books of the Odessey", blogged here, Mason retells many, many Greek myths. As this is the 2nd time through this approach, I realized that maybe the main thing he is doing is taking myths we have all known for years and retelling them in the 1st person. But he also changes the myth when he thinks it makes a better or more rational story. I liked particularly his retelling of Midas as the person who invented money. I grew up on Greek & Norse mythology, I really enjoy when they are revisited and riffed upon.

Still in Denial

It is hard for me to make myself study Economy of Plenty / Post-Scarcity Utopia with the world descending into fascism. The climate crisis is responsible for a lot of it in Europe, with unlivable temperatures and crop failures driving millions of climate refugees out of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Evil Orange One continues to search for yet another manufactured crisis to drive the ratings of "President of the US Apprentice". Ah well, I'm sure the other shoe will fall soon enough, and we will #lockhimup.

But, please, sooner rather than later. So many people are saying the damage is irreparable - here's an example. Well, let's acknowledge that Putin is a genius who was able, via electing and then blackmailing a childish idiot with an incredibly overrated opinion of himself, to destroy the US hegemony which was created after WW II. Dictators of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your loser populace!

I mentioned I had bought the latest novel of E.J. Swift: "Paris Adrift", 2018, 320 pages. This woman writes really well. I highlighted a dozen or so passages I thought were really evocative, enough that I will leave discovering them as an exercise for the reader. A very enjoyable read, plus it is set in 1 of my fav cities, Paris! I will say though, that the plotting was not the best. Stuff that should have been explained never was, and stuff that seemed to be forbidden later on was A-OK??? There was a small subplot at the end that smelt like something an editor suggested.

Despite my philosophical aversion to dystopias, I did in impulse buy on "The End of the World", subtitled "Stories of the Apocalypse", edited by Martin H. Greenberg, 2010, 328 pages. This short story collection was recommended for me by BookBub. BookBub sends me an email/day with 5 recommended cheap eBooks. I buy maybe 1/month tops, but that is enough that I think the 10 seconds/day to read the email is a worthwhile investment of my time.

This collection had stories dating back to 1950. The last story was the longest, from 1950 by Poul Anderson (a fav author of mine for decades). Haha, a principle of writing sci-fi - never mention real technology by name - seriously, vacuum tubes??? And of course a lot of the societal attitudes are embarrassingly dated.

This collection was definitely slow getting started, but did wind up with some good stories. A few of the older ones had the groaner punchline or deus ex machina ending that in my youth I would have thought was really cool, but now just seems very dated. I did like the subdivisions of the book:

• Bang or Whimper
• The Last Man
• Life After the End
• Dark, Distant Futures
• Witnesses to the End of the World

Next up, a just released fantasy by Hannu Rajaniemi, "Summerland", 2018, 304 pages. This seems to be Hannu's 1st novel after the most excellent "Quantum Thief" trilogy, blogged here, here, and here. I was somewhat surprised he tried a fantasy. Set in 1938 and mostly in England, it is a spy story in a world where the dead and living can communicate, and Queen Victoria still rules the British Empire from the spirit world. There is a lot of action and a somewhat convoluted but satisfactory ending, but, throughout the whole book I kept thinking "Hannu has written a Tim Powers novel". Just before reading this book, I had been thinking about how I greatly preferred Tim Powers to Neil Gaiman for magic realism, so having the new Hannu read pretty much like something Powers would write really threw me off. No kudos to Powers in the book either. Oh well, still an enjoyable read.

Back to science fiction: I read "Dark Lightning", by John Varley, 2014, 352 pages. This is the 4th book of the Thunder and Lightning series, which started in 2003 - it says here I read the 1st 1 "Red Thunder" in 2004. No sign I read the other 2: "Red Lightning" and "Rolling Thunder". Varley was one of my favorite authors in the early 80s.

I guess this is a YA book - the narrators are 18 YO twin sisters. They are on an asteroid ship heading for the New Sun currently traveling at 0.77c when ... plot happens. Nothing particularly inspiring, libertarian overtones, but a page turner. Varley seems to be getting old, he's 70 now. Apparently this whole series is a tribute to Heinlein, oops.

I wonder how I missed the middle 2? Oh well, I don't think it's worth revisiting. Funny, old singer/songwriters seem to keep on keepin' on, old SF authors - Heinlein, Herbert, now Varley, seem to fall prey to DOM (Dirty Old Man) syndrome. It's disappointing, and a cautionary tale for my increasingly aged self.

Science as Art

For my birthday, my oldest daughter gave me the book "Waves Passing In The Night", by Lawrence Weschler, 2017, 176 pages, subtitled "Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists". She got me both the hardcover and the Kindle versions of the book. I scanned through the hardcover and looked at the pictures and then read the Kindle version so I could annotate passages. The book is a quick and interesting read.

Per Wikipedia, Walter Murch "is an American film editor and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing), he has been referred to as "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema."" He is also an amateur astrophysicist, and this book is the story of him trying to get professional astrophysicists interested in revisiting the mostly discredited 18th century Titius-Bode's Law, which predicts the positions of planets' orbits in the solar system. Bode's Law largely was assigned to the dustbin of history when Neptune was discovered in an orbit completely at odds with the law.

Murch seems like a very bright and creative guy. He helped develop the now ubiquitous Dolby 5.1 sound system with George Lucas. He carries a knapsack filled with "fortune cookie fortunes". 9 are given, this was my favorite:

Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. — GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ

There is a a lot of interesting material on ancient ideas including the Music of the Spheres. I had never heard of the quadrivium.

From Pythagorean antiquity through the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, all learned gentlemen (and they were all mainly gentlemen) were steeped in the fourfold classical curriculum known as the quadrivium, which is to say, arithmetic (pure number), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time).

I liked this new word: apophenia - "“The widespread tendency of human beings to see patterns where there are no patterns.”" Ah, Wikipedia says our old friend Confirmation Bias "is a variation of apophenia", and lists another old friend, pareidolia, as its 1st example of apophenia.

There has always been opposition to the acceptance of Bode's Law. Carl Friederich Gauss, the 18th century "Mozart of Mathematics", raised 3 objections, the last 2 being

Gauss observed that, furthermore, Titius and Bode were dealing with just too few “planets” (eight) from which to derive a reliable law— any chance arrangement of a small number of objects (coins tossed on a table, birds singing on a tree branch), he argued, could be accounted for if you allowed yourself, as Bode and Titius had, a sufficient number of arbitrary constants.

Finally, there didn’t appear to be any physical explanation for why this clunky formula might be playing out in the actual physical world.

But Murch still forges ahead. He feels like his expertise with sound gave him insight into something that maybe was a resonance-based phenomenon, like musical harmony is. He applies Bode's law to Jupiter and Saturn's moons, and to some of the data on the new non-solar planetary systems being discovered by observatories like the Kepler satellite.

But, there are so many exceptions that the acrobatics required to try to make things work reminded me of the epicycles of earth-centric theories of the solar system. Munch theorizes the existence of some form of standing wave around gravitational bodies. This is evocative, but as 1 of the astrophysicists who reluctantly engages with Munch points out, if there were such standing waves in the metric, they would have to throw off all satellite communications, both nearby such as GPS, and far away, such as our spacecraft exploring the outer solar system. But then Munch finds an article saying that there are some discrepancies in GPS signals, so off we go again.

Several of the astrophysicists with whom Munch does succeed in engaging seem sympathetic, but, in the end, rightfully dismissive. Here is the conclusion of Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute of Toronto, who seemed to be very sympathetic to Munch and his efforts.

My sense is that Walter has done just about as well as any lay person could do, without the tools and discipline instilled by succeeding in a Ph.D program. The main thing a professional life in science teaches is that almost every idea is wrong. [my bold] All of us who work in science have seen most or all of our cherished, beautiful ideas fail. This is the tragic element of a life in science. Few are immune. What a life in science teaches one is that science is really, really, really hard to do right.

The main mistake Walter is making is to stay in love with his first idea. Only when you have seen your first 20 or 50 ideas die do you begin to appreciate what it means to have a good scientific idea. This is why laypeople like Walter never succeed in contributing to science— they cannot give up their first ideas.

The second mistake Walter is making is to underestimate the likelihood that a flexible theory can be invented and adjusted to fit random data, even when it is based on wrong ideas. This, unfortunately, happens all the time in medical science. If one has 100 factors to try to correlate with a disease, and one requires 95% probability for a match to be taken as a result, then at least five of them will appear to fit, just by chance. The literature of science and medicine is full of ideas that had some success at a 95% or even 99% level, but on further examination were found to be wrong.

Every year we see “discoveries” of new particles in experiments at the 95% or 99% level, which is to say better than Bode’s law does, which go away when larger data sets are taken. This is why the standard for discovery in particle physics is five sigma (one chance in 3 million of arising by chance). Even so, last year there was a five sigma “discovery” in cosmology that got lots of attention before it was shown that the effect could be explained by reflection off of dust in our own galaxy.

Bode’s law has if I understand right three free parameters. There were initially six known planets. The right question to ask is how likely is it someone could have invented a rule with three free parameters that fit six numbers. The answer is that given that there are a vast number of simple patterns with three parameters, the probability that something like Bode’s law could have been found to match random planetary orbits is close to one. And given Neptune, and the 50% success rate with some systems and the 5% success rate with other systems, the law has done about as poorly as could be expected were it an accidental fit, fine tuned to a small data set.

When a hypothesis works in half the new cases, or when it has a five percent success rate against a new data set, the right conclusion to draw is that the hypothesis is wrong. We must throw such ideas away if science is to be a source of reliable knowledge, and progress.

Note that Smolin has been critical of science becoming too inbred. In 2006 he published a book titled "The Trouble With Physics", which was critical of string theory. Weschler references these objections, and recalls how at the start of the Enlightenment, a lot of scientists were amateurs.

But, that was 250 years ago, we have moved beyond that now. Towards the end of the book, I found myself getting a little annoyed with the degree to which Weschler seems to have drunk Munch's kool-aid.

This brings me to the title of this post. Maybe we need something new to call what Munch is doing. It's not science - he simply doesn't have the training or math. But it is interesting and pretty. Who doesn't love a good pattern, even if there is nothing particularly fundamental underlying it?

So, maybe "science-art"? Googling "science as art" brings up shows and competitions for the prettiest pictures generated by science via microscopes, etc. "Science-fiction" and "science-fantasy" are already spoken for. There must be a good word for this. Maybe Aimee Mann can inspire us ...

A quick and enjoyable read, with several FFTKAT. Thanks Erica!

Music

With this post, I think I'm going to get mostly caught up on music in. _Unrated smart playlist in iTunes is only at 111 songs.

But 1st, a music out update. From June 1 to June 5 I played 3 paying gigs: with Steve & Chris at J. Render's Friday, filling in in the house band for Dane Sadler at the Squires Tavern Sunday jam, and in the house band at the Tuesday's Sherman House Blues Jam at Lynagh's. I have been 2nd guitarist of record st the Tuesday Jam for a few weeks now, with Brent Carter on the other guitar, Matt Noell (whose gig it is) on bass, and Roger Barber on drums.

So, we did Purple Rain last week and everybody seemed to like it. I figured we'd close out the night with it again. We get like 4 lines in & the bar owner, our patroness Amy, walks up to me and says "I love you guys to death, but no Purple Rain". So we stopped ?!?!? Really kind of freaked me out. A mental blow of some sort - plus I suspect that this songus interruptus is going to leave "Purple Rain" stuck in my head for days. And what about 1A?

I just had a birthday, I'm 67 now, at some point I'm assuming I will be too old to keep going out and playing blues and rock in bars - this made me think maybe it's time to quit - or maybe to quit playing at Lynagh's. I think it's at least 1 strike.

Music in, let's see what we got. I have determined that in general it takes a max of 4 listens to rate an album.

• "Soul of a Woman", Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, 2017. Is the 1st posthumous album I've rated? Ms. Jones death was untimely. This album is as good as her others - open up a can of funk. 4 stars. Here's "Searching for a New Day".

• "Diamonds", JOHNNYSWIM, 2014. Not sure where I found this. A male/female singing duo out of LA. Very listenable. I had this as 4 stars, but I couldn't find a track I liked enough to include here, so, 3 stars
• "Utopia", Björk, 2017. The world's greatest living composer. She has recently done themes for albums: all brass, all voices. This one has lots of woodwinds, but also songs without them. Like this one, "Arisen My Senses". What a weird-ass video. Wow, this woman is such a genius. 4 stars.

• "The Greatest Gift", Sufjan Stevens, 2017. This album has both remixes and new material. Several of the remixes are some of my fav of his songs, so 4 stars, because I really enjoy his music. He was raised in some sort of christian cult, sometimes he seems to be carrying some of it with him. Several of his songs reference "the cross". Here's the short title tune.

• "Tribute To 2", Jim James, 2017. Mr. James is the leader of the most successful band in KY history, My Morning Jacket, out of Louisville. I was confused. I thought this was a "tribute to" 2 artists. But, no, he earlier released "Tribute To", a general "old standards" type album, this was the 2nd edition of that concept. None of the songs really work much for me. 3 stars.
• "How To Solve Our Human Problems (Part 1)", Belle & Sebastian, 2017. Only 5 tracks. 4 stars. Since they upped their energy level a little while back, I have liked their stuff a lot more. Here's "We Were Beautifil".

• "I can feel you creep into my private life", Tune-Yards, 2018. 4 stars. Still not as good as her 1st album but better than the last. Here's the 1st track, "Heart Attack".

• "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", Brian Eno/David Byrne, 2006. Byrne describes this album almost as a sound-effect-making effort in his book "How Music Works", reviewed/summarized here. It is odd to listen too, but its 17 tracks will be something different when they come up individually on shuffle play. 3 stars.
• "Always Ascending", Franz Ferdinand, 2018. A good album, but they are a bit brash for me at this state. 3 stars. However I did like the song "Huck and Jim": "We're coming to america, we're going to tell them about the NHS."
• "Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt", Moby, 2018. Moby writes such beautiful stuff. 4 stars. Here's "Like a Motherless Child".

• "Nudes", Lucius & guests, 2018. 4 stars. I still like their songs best when the guys get to sing too. They do a cover of "Right Down The Line". Here's "Tempest".

• "Yellow House", Grizzly Bear, 2006. 4 stars. I mentioned to my drummer nephew Max how Grizzly Bear was probably my favorite "new" band. He questioned the "new" - well, new to me anyway. He referenced this early Grizzly Bear album as one he listened to a lot Back In The Day - thanks Max. A lot of this sounds more like Department of Eagles than Grizzly Bear - that offshoot continues to be a source of confusion to me. Here's "Lullabye".

• "Valleys of Neptune", Jimi Hendrix, 2010. 4 stars. In March "Both Sides of the Sky", a posthumous album of unreleased recordings came out to generally good reviews. I learned that this was the 3rd album like this that had been produced. So I decided to go back to the 1st 1, "Valleys of Neptune" and work up to the latest. I liked a version of "Sunshine of Your Love". Here's the title track.

• "American Utopia", David Byrne, 2018. 4 stars. Byrne continues to produce great albums. Here's "Every Day Is A Miracle".

• "The First Sip", Whilk & Misky, 2014. 4 stars. 4 tracks. The Goddess of YouTube decided I should see the 1st track of this album after something else I had requested. What a great tune! Plus I love the mouth trumpet. Steve & Chris has added this song to our book. The band is a duo of white guys out of London. Here's that 1st track, "Clap Your Hands". This is a great video too.

• "My Round", Whilk & Misky, 2017, 4 stars. Those 4 tracks weren't enough, this album has 6 more. Here's "Oh Brother (featuring Nia Wyn)".

• "Clean", Soccer Mommy, 2018. 4 stars. I bought this album by mistake. Soccer Mommy was playing at The Burl and I really enjoyed the 1st act, Madeline Kenney (see below). So I went to the table and brought a CD - for the headliner. Regardless, I have enjoyed it. Very laid back indy rock type stuff. Here's "Last Girl".

• "Sex & Food", Unknown Mortal Orchestra, 2018. I think I got referred to this album because I liked Tame Impala - basically a 1-man Austraiian band - and UMO is a 1 man New Zealand band. 4 stars. Very creative, particularly on the orchestration. Here's "Hunnybee", with a tasty opening guitar lick followed by a disco beat.

• "The Cloud And The Clearing", My Brother's Keeper, 2017. I saw these guys at the Twisted Cork open mic and at Willie's Locally Known. Very tight and clean 3-piece bluegrass. Got the album and, listening, found every song to be pushing serious theist propaganda. Ugh. 2 stars.
• "Let's Make Love", Brazilian Girls, 2018. 4 stars. 13 tracks. Better than their last couple of efforts. Wow, it's been 10 years since their last album. Great dance music. Here's the 1st track, "Pirates".

• "Treasures from the Temple", Thievery Corporation, 2018. 4 stars. 12 tracks. What a great mix of influences these guys put together, particularly the reggae. Here's "Water Under The Bridge (featuring Natalia Clavier)".

• "Night Night At The First Landing", Madeline Kenney, 2017. 4 stars except for 1 track I didn't like. This the woman who opened for Soccer Mommy (see above). After I figured out I hadn't bought her album, I found it online and downloaded it. She was playing a Strat largely on the low strings, with a female drummer and a male bass player. Some really unique sounds, in a fairly laid back indy rock framework. Here's "Rita".

• "Dirty Computer", Janelle Monáe. 2018. 4 stars. 14 tracks. She has such great concepts, but I don't think the tunes on this album are as catchy as some of her prior work. Here's a nice dance number, "Make Me Feel".

• "Last Man Standing", Willie Nelson, 2018. 4 stars. This got good reviews, and us old guys got to stick together. Damn, Willie is 85. I will buy all his albums from here on out. I like the lyrics to the title track: "I don't want to be the last man standing. But, wait a minute, maybe I do."

• "7", Beach House, 2018. 3 stars. A review of this said "Finally an album you can listen to with other people rather than just by yourself". Still seemed a little too laid back for me.
• Eponymous, Rage Against The Machine, 1992. 4 stars. My FL friend Joe Fink (drummer) posted a cover of "Wake Up" by Brass Against The Machine. What a strong video. This is the music from the end of the 1st Matrix movie, when Neo flies off into the sunset. Strong female singer, good guitar player, drummer, horn section of sousaphone, bari sax, 2 trombones, 2 trumpets. I really seem to hear a bass guitar, but can't spot a bass player in the video. The Rage Against The Machine album is a lot brasher than I usually listen too, but it is great stuff.

  The message of this song is so topical now. But this song originally came 26 years ago. So the line at the end "How long? Not long!" has not played out. A little discouraging. But, still, we gots to keep on keepin' on, and fight the old lizards.

Wow, 26 albums, and we are current through the end of May! FTW!

This Time For Sure

Posted as a comment to this article:

Look. Capitalism has worked. The world is awash in capital. We used to have tons of nature & not much capital, now we have tons of capital but a rapidly diminishing amount of nature.

Since the 1950s we have been in a post scarcity economy - else the marketing industry would not be spending $$$B to convince people to buy things they don't need.

There's plenty to go around, for the whole world. We just need to thank capitalism for the great job it did accumulating capital and then adopt an accounting system that changes our score keeping algorithms to where everyone wins, not just the .01%.

The filthy rich will still be filthy rich. We may not even need to go to the punitive 95% tax levels of the 1950s - the greatest decade ever, right, old white people?

Money is software. We can literally say "OK, everyone is rich now!" and make it work. Everybody won't get a McMansion. but, we can have universal health care; universal education, academic or trades, to whatever level you are capable of; universal basic income; universal capital access; and NO HUNGRY CHILDREN WITH STUNTED BRAIN GROWTH.

I've said this so many times, I think I keep on doing it periodically because I hope that at some point I will state it perfectly and it will go viral and everyone will say "Yes! That's easy! Let's change our post-scarcity economy into a post-scarcity utopia!"

You know though, the biggest problem may be the need that some people seem to have, that there be people that they can look down on. Come on, folks, can't we get past that?!?!?

7 Down, 34 To Go

My Unread shelf in the Kobo eBook app on my iPad was up to 41 books, so I decided binge some science fiction.

1st up, "Overclocked", by Cory Doctorow, 2016, 388 pages. 8 most excellent stories mostly dealing with computing and artificial intelligence, which Doctorow totally gets. I particularly liked a couple of stories that feature robots who were programmed to obey Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics and robots who weren't. "The Man Who Sold The Moon", I had already read in the excellent "Heiroglyph" collection, blogged here. I didn't reread it.

Next up, "Null States", by Malka Older, 2017, 432 pages. The sequel to "Infomocracy", blogged here. So the system of micro-democracy proposed in "Infomocracy" may not be working out. Plus ninjas. Almost all the major characters are women, plus it has the same international feel as "Infomacracy". All in all a page turner.

Next up, "Head On", by John Scalzi, 2818, 336 pages. The sequel to "Lock In", blogged here. People with consciousness locked into their bodies (Hayden syndrome) who escape into VR and robot bodies. The same characters as "Lock In", the Hayden FBI agent and his bad-cop-from-hell partner. A snappy police procedural, definitely a page turner.

Next, 3 short pieces by Scalzi. He sells these for $0.99 or occassionally $1.99, which is more than you would pay for them in a short story collection. It's probably a nice supplemental income for Scalzi, and they are usually pretty amusing. They were:

• "The Tale of the Wicked": a space opera with AI thrown in;
• "How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story": an amusing story of human/alien interactions;
• "Judge Sn Goes Golfing": another humorous story featuring an alien judge who is the world's worst golfer and biggest asshole.

Finally, "Infinity Wars", edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2017, 356 pages. Apparently Strahan has done a number of collections with "Infinity" in the title. This is 15 short stories set in the future concerning war. I was around 1/2 way through before there started being some interesting stories. The 1 that really stood out was "Weather Girl", by E.J. Swift, about US info-warriors using cyber-warfare to hide climate crisis induced weather events from their future victims so as to maximize the damage. Horrifying and cynical to a level reminiscent of Frederick Pohl. I have ordered Ms. Swift's latest novel, "Paris Adrift".

It looks like the 35th Year's Best Science Fiction will be the last. Gardner Dozois died May 27, 2018. Reading that collection has been an annual ritual for ... 35 years. I'm not sure if I'll pick a new annual collection to read or not.

I'm on the magazine stack for June now. I think more sci-fi up next, still need to get that Unread shelf down to size.

Martinique!

Before we bought a house in Naples FL in 2009, for many years my wife and I would take a vacation the week of Valentine's Day to Grand Case, French St. Martin in the Caribbean. We loved it there. Boulevard de Grand Case was billed as "the gourmet capital of the Caribbean" - and indeed, many fine French restaurants, some Italian, some California, some bar food - but with the occasional "house with chicken coops" thrown in. A real place, not a f#cking Disneyworld. Plus, in the peak of season, you could walk the 1 mile Grand Case beach and see maybe 30 people.

So last year we decided to go back to St. Martin, to see what had changed, and what had not. I booked rooms for the 2nd week of Feb last summer, and even so we were going to have to change rooms in the middle of the week. The Google said to wait until 6 weeks before flying (Thanksgiving) to buy the plane tickets.

Then, September 6, after trashing Dominica, Hurricane Irma completely trashed St. Martin. The Grand Case Beach Club, where we were booked to stay, lost 43 of 62 rooms and all its common facilities. Wow, they just announced they will reopen October 1, 2018.

So, I asked my wife, "Well, maybe stay in the states, go to San Diego?" She's like "No, I want to go to the Caribbean."

So I ask The Google, "Where in the Caribbean is like Grand Case, St. Martin?" And I get 2 posts back basically saying, "Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique".

So I check it out. French St. Martin has a population of 40,000, 90% of whom speak English. Martinique has a population of 425,000, 25% of whom speak English. Martinique tourism is 80% French (All the French Caribbean islands are states of France, like Hawaii is to the US), 15% other European, 4% American. Basically from almost anywhere in the US it is a 2 day trip. But, if you're in SW or S Florida, it is a 1 day trip - direct flight from Miami to Fort-de-France (capital of Martinique) - and $252 for a round trip ticket!!! Flying to St. Martin was going to involve my wife and I meeting up in Charlotte, and the tickets were ~$1000.

So I looked around at hotels, and finally decided on the Hotel Bakoua. The rooms were $270/night, vs $430 in St. Martin. Martinique is about 40 miles long by 25 miles wide, and the books recommended renting a car, so we did that.

February 9, my wife flew from Lexington into Punta Gorda. I picked her up at the airport around dinner time, so we drove to Fisherman's Village and had dinner before driving back to Naples.

The next morning, Feb 10, we left Naples at ~ 6:30am and drove to Miami International Airport, around a 2 hour drive. We left the car there in the airport parking lot, probably many cheaper options. We had plenty of time for our 10:50 flight.

We arrived in Fort-de-France at ~3:30 pm - plenty of time to get our rental car - a Romanian Dacia (now owned by Renault) Sandero, with a stick shift, of course. Fort-de-France is on the north side of the Baie de Fort-de-France, the airport is at the east end of the bay, and Les Trois-Îlets is on the south side of the bay. Here is a Google Earth screen capture of Martinique with the places we visited labeled.

Here's Martinique as we approached its west coast.

You fly right up the Baie de Fort-de-France. There was usually a cruise ship or 2 docked at Fort-de-France.

We were incredibly lucky in our choice of travel dates. As we used to do when we went to St. Martin, we went during the week of Valentine's Day - which in 2018 was also Ash Wednesday (and Easter Sunday was April Fool's Day ?!?!?) - so we were there for Carnaval! The airport was decorated for Carnaval.

Les Trois-Îlets seems to refer to the region on the south side of the bay, but there is also a town with that name slightly to the east of where we were staying. We stayed on Pointe du Bout (the end of the end), a peninsula projecting north into the bay. Here's what Pointe du Bout looks like from Google Earth.

We really liked the Hotel Bakoua - a bakoua is a conical straw hat, as shown in their sign.

I would estimate it was 40-60 years old, but very well maintained and very clean. Here's the lobby.

The entire sprawling 1st floor, which included their main bar and 2 dining areas, was open air.

In what was maybe the only snafu of the whole trip, there was no bellman available to show us to our room, and I think we got told to take a right when we should have been told to take a left. Then we were asking for our room, #41, as "quatorze et un" (14 and 1) instead of "quarante et un" (41). But we did finally find our room. The room wasn't large, but the bathroom had a big tub, and there was a very nice covered front porch area.

Here was view from the door to the room - 10' to the beach and 40' from the water!

We went up and down these stairs from our room at the beach level to the bar and dining areas many times. We later found we could follow the beach and get into town with no stairs. Breakfast was included in the room price, and they had pretty much every kind of breakfast food you could imagine (in French), including custom made omelets and crepes.

Here's a night view of Fort-de-France across the bay.

Sunday, February 11, was Dimanche Gras (Fat Sunday), the 1st day of the 4 day Carnaval celebration. They even celebrated on Ash Wednesday?!?!? The patron saint/sacrificial lamb of Carnaval is named Vaval. He changes every year, usually modeled after a public figure. On Wednesday, the celebration concludes with him being burned! So, a Fisher King / Wicker Man meme. Here's the Carnaval schedule. Every day had a different color theme.

The Grand Parade was Sunday from 3 until 5:30. In the morning we explored out to the tip of Pointe du Bout. There were fortifications at the end.

The old fort appeared to have been used as a amphitheater / performance space, and had some nice tagging and local art.

We took the ferry over to Fort-de-France just after lunch. Waiting for the ferry, we talked to a couple of US citizens. Both were retired and lived on sailboats they sailed around the Caribbean. They are very much at the mercy of the trade winds and sometimes have to stay on an island for weeks waiting for the winds from the east to die down to where they could sail east.

We wandered around Fort-de-France sightseeing for a couple of hours before he parade started. Here's the main churcn.

Here's the library, named for a a famous French abolitionist Victor Schœlcher. The town just to the west of Fort-de-France is named Schœlcher.

This civic center had programs helping people get ready for the parade.

A Valentine's Day ad.

An old friend.

A memorial to war dead.

There were lots of cars with murals painted on them. We saw a lot of them in the Carnaval Parade, I'm not sure if they stay that way all year round. I like the 1 showing our Dear Leader some well-deserved love.

The parade started with a lot of these cars, a lot of them being ridden by buff young men, shirtless and in stockings and tutus. Dressing in drag is apparently a Carnaval tradition. We both liked the "Disney Princesses".

Then the 1st band came through. The music was incredible. I have already posted all the videos I took of these bands. Here's some of the rest of the stuff in the parade.

Butterfly ladies.

Clay people?!?!?

Princesses.

The Red Devils of Martinique. These look a lot like what my sister Katie has seen in Germany.

Not sure what, but, nice!

Black and white people. I thought these were harlequins, but "harlequin" means multi-colored.

A dance troupe.

Creepy clowns.

Porcelain doll ladies.

And finally, a float whose message and meaning I have completely forgotten.

The 1st 5 days we were on Martinique, it rained 3-4 minutes every hour or so, usually hard for 20-60 seconds in the middle. It rained 3 times during the parade. My wife would duck back under one of the tents of the vendors selling Carnaval goods, I just stayed out in the rain - you would dry off in 5 minutes or so. The paraders just kept on going. Here's a couple of pix of paraders getting pelted by rain.

We headed back the 200 or so yards to catch the ferry at around 5. The ferries were very crowded. On the way back we passed by Fort Saint Louis, which has an historical part you can tour (we didn't) and an active French naval base which you cannot tour.

With all the rain, there were many rainbows, and we were treated to one on the ferry ride back to Pointe du Bout.

Walking back to Hotel Bakoua from the ferry, we saw these carvings done in some dead tree trunks. Art!

Ha ha, I have to include this "Dogs forbidden" sign. It was a standing joke on St. Martin that we never walked on Grand Case beach, which featured a great big sign "Les Chiens Sont Strictement Interdit Sur La Plage" ("Dogs are strictly forbidden on the beach"), without seeing a dog or 3.

Monday, Feb 12, we decided to drive up to Mont Pelée. This is the highest mountain on the island. On May 8, 1902, Mont Pelée erupted, killing all but 1 of the inhabitants of St. Pierre, the capital at the time - 30,000 people. It was the largest volcanic disaster of the 20th century. The capital was then moved to Fort-de-France.

We drove through St. Pierre to get there. It was the most dingy and run-down town we went through - I'm guessing capital was skittish about tempting the volcano again.

The volcano museum on the north side of St. Pierre was closed when we came through. We headed east though the town of Le Morne Rouge. Given the volcanic mountainous terrain, the roads were hilly with many hairpin turns, but they were well maintained and well marked, and my wife did a fab job as navigator using her iPhone.

There was a 3 hour trail to the summit of Mont Pelée. We thought we'd go a little ways, but it was chilly and the peak was covered in clouds, so we decided against it - wisely as it turned out, as it started pouring 10 minutes after we left.

Here's a couple of views from the trail parking lot.

Here's what the view towards the summit looked like.

On our way back south, we stopped at the Martinique Zoo in Le Carbet. It doubled as a botanical garden. It was interesting in that it was built from the ruins of a sugar cane processing plantation. A lot of the animal enclosure walls were left over from the plantation buildings - found architecture.

Some of the yuccas and other familiar looking plants were well over 6' tall.

Animal-wise, they had a jaguar, which the sign said gets bigger than leopards. The flamingos and the scarlet ibises were beautiful. We have white and glossy ibis in Florida, I did not know there was a scarlet ibis.

I think we spotted this mural in Le Carbet. I love murals.

The normal route back to Pointe du Bout involved going through Rivière-Salée, which was having its Carnaval parade that afternoon. So we detoured to the east and south and wound up going through Le Diamant on the southern coast. If featured a striking conical island offshore - I did not get a pic.

Tuesday, February 13, started out with a beautiful rainbow, as a lot of the days did.

We decided to visit Village de la Poterie, on the coast just east of the town of Les Trois-Îlets. This was apparently the sponsor of the clay people in the parade?!?!? There was a brick and tile plant there but not that much pottery. There were several small shops. My wife got some earrings that were custom modified by one of the owners of a jewelry coop. We both liked the soap shop. This prismatic display featured 53 different colors/scents of soap.

That evening, we had the best meal of the trip at Le Café De Paris, which was just south of Hotel Bakoua on Pointe du Bout. The majority of the restaurants had their menus in French only. This one had a menu board in English, but not translated by a native English speaker. The Flying Fish appetizer was delicious. The "Crosy Fish of Carbet" turned out to great big crawdads. Very tasty. We definitely had some surprises, particularly from the French only menus. Most places had 1 person who spoke English when our French failed us.

Wednesday, February 14 was Valentine's Day. We went back to Le Carbet to visit the Gauguin Museum there. He only spent a few months on Martinique before illness made him return to France, but supposedly the time influenced his work. It was not exceptionally content-rich, but worth a visit. We lunched at a beach restaurant right across the street. They had a gallery with works by a local artist whose name I have misplaced. We both liked her work. Here's a sample:

We had our Valentine's Day dinner at the hotel's restaurant, Le Chateaubriand. We had had a good meal there our 1st night in. For Valentine's Day they had a fixed menu dinner, which was paced very slowly and was OK but not great. It included sauteed pâté de foie gras - OMG, possibly the fattiest thing I have ever eaten! It must definitely be an acquired taste.

Thurday Feb 15 we decided to visit the Jardin de Balata, the best known botanical garden on Martinique. On the way there and from the garden there were striking views of the Pitons de Carbet.

The garden was very nice. Coming in there was a feeder swarming with hummingbirds of at least a couple of species.

It also featured a walkway through the canopy. There was a bit of a wait to get onto this as each segment was only supposed to have 2 people on it at a time. In the queue, we chatted with some Brits who had come in on a cruise ship. We shared their dismay at who got elected as the current president of the United States. But when I mentioned, well, you guys screwed up with Brexit too, the guy was kind of like "No, there were good reasons to vote Brexit, but it hasn't been executed well." So a Brexit backer - an old white guy, of course.

As well as the beautiful foliage, the garden also had beautiful views.

Friday, Feb 16, we decided to visit a rum distillery. The one most highly recommended was on the far northern tip of the island, so we decided on one a little further south: the St. James distillery in Sainte Marie on the Atlantic coast. It also featured the Rum Museum. Some sampling and purchasing of rum was done.

The Atlantic coast was supposed to be a lot rougher than the Caribbean coast, but it not particularly seem so.

On the way back down the east coast of the island, we encountered an apparently abandoned kiddie ride. I doubted that Disney was getting any royalties for the use of its IP, but, who knows, France is a developed country so it probably toes a pretty hard line on IP protection.

My fabulous navigator spied out a shortcut back from the east coast, which worked great, saving us maybe 10-15 minutes.

On our last evening on Martinique, there was, as usual, a beautiful sunset behind the Hotel Bakoua's Coco Bar over the water.

Saturday, Feb 17, our flight back to Miami was at ~4. We just walked around the nice shops and restaurants of Pointe du Bout and the adjacent areas. I took this last picture on the ride from the rental car company to the airport. It is of a field of sugar cane. There were a lot of those, with all their production currently going to the rum distilleries. The main other crop they grow there is bananas, which are exported to mainland France.

We wound up back in Naples I think near midnight.

It was a great vacation. We felt like we chose something a bit outside our comfort zone that turned out fabulously. The Carnaval parade in particular was a really moving experience. We did not get to the far north of the island, or to the southeast part, the main town of which is Sainte-Anne. There were several other botanical gardens we didn't visit. So I think we will be back, and probably before we try St. Martin again. And we may also try Guadeloupe, the other large French Caribbean island, 2 to the north of Martinique - which got smashed on September 19, 2017 by Hurricane Maria.

Until the next time, Hotel Bakoua! We'll be back!