Monthly Archives: March 2015

Earlier this month, NPR reported job creation numbers:

February’s report showed 295,000 jobs added, and a drop in the unemployment rate, down to 5.5. percent. It follows on the heels of January’s strong report, which showed strong wage gains.

Good news?  It turns out it’s so hard to know.  Here’s an absolutely charming graph from The American Prospect comparing job creation for various Presidents:

The X axis is in absolute numbers, which of course will never do, given population growth – so this graph is more or less useless.  They supply another utterly fascinating graph to remedy this fault:

But, as author Paul Waldman points out,

Of course, none of those presidents took office in the midst of an economic calamity of the kind we were suffering through when Obama began his term. If you want to be more generous to Obama, you could measure from the trough of the Great Recession, which in terms of jobs was February 2010. The economy has created over 10 million jobs since then, and if we continue the current trend, Obama could claim 16 million jobs between that point and the end of his term.

OK, so if we make an awkward analogy, comparing oranges to oranges doesn’t work if one orange is in a glass of water on Earth and another is in a glass of mercury on Jupiter.  It’s really a lot harder to accurately display data in graphical form than one would think, especially when that data is only partially numerical.  Each of these Presidents faced unique challenges and environments, and while a partisan might condemn Bush I for his poor performance in this group, a more independent observer might find factors belying such a conclusion.  As much as I enjoy a good graph, I think any such must be approached with the greatest suspicion, especially those originating from partisan sources.

Charles Joseph Minard was a 19th century pioneer of the field of information graphics.  He is the author of a famous graphic, representing Napoloeon’s March on Russia, which hangs on the walls of many nerds; I have it on my living room wall, in a place of honor.  It contains 6 categories of information which, with just a little study, correlates troop losses with geological location, chronological location, temperature, distance, and direction of travel.  It’s the sort of thing you stare at with your mouth hanging open the first time.  Every creator of a graph should aspire to such artistry. (A big h/t to Don Lee, a colleague who introduced me to this wonderful graphic perhaps 20 years ago.)

(with apologies to the NewScientist Feedback column for using Blue Whales as a measurement.)

Liquid Consciousness.

Let me know your guess.

CNN reports on O’Malley’s visit to Iowa.  I have to agree with the Iowans interviewed – even if Hillary is your favorite, strong opponents will be very important to sharpen her for what will no doubt be a bracing Presidential contest.  While O’Malley’s resume’ is certainly very respectable, it doesn’t really match hers, so he’ll have to bring on his list of accomplishments and how they apply at the Federal level, and then bring about the perception that he has experience in foreign policy.  I haven’t seen anything on that subject, yet.  Hillary should be able to use that for some good leverage unless he names a VP with some real chops.

Quentin Misiag at The Daily Iowan Ethics & Politics Initiative provides the view from Iowa:

O’Malley has slowly but surely chipped away at Rodham Clinton’s political gravitational pull, climbing from a inadequate public speaker to prime presidential product, should he announce a Democratic run.

Diane Bolte has watched O’Malley mature, even before the closing of the 2014 midterms, when she saw him at a fundraiser in Clinton.

“I’m ready for somebody different,” said Bolte, a 2nd District Democratic Central Committee Executive Board member, wincing when asked if somebody different meant an alternative to Rodham Clinton. “He’s somebody you can believe in.”

Certainly there will be a segment of the voters who would prefer neither another Clinton Administration nor a far right GOP Administration – they would provide a base from which to build a campaign which might capture a VP nomination – and possibly the Democratic nod should Hillary stumble or – to the surprise of everyone – choose not to run.  The Iowan piece ends with this:

Presidential historian and political pundit Tom Whalen, who specializes in the tenure and assassination of JFK, said the two have the same charisma, particularly in relation to domestic policies such as income equality.

O’Malley has worked to establish himself as a crisis manager while governor and mayor, as JFK did during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, Whalen said.

Whalen said O’Malley leads JFK’s early presidential career in at least one definitive area: speech delivery.

“JFK wasn’t really JFK until he gave that famous inaugural speech,” he said.

Now there’s an invocation of myth.

I wasn’t going to comment on Dr. Carson’s remark claiming President Obama is a psychopath.  Dr. Carson is not a psychologist, he’s a neurosurgeon.  He’s reportedly considering a Presidential run.  It’s gauche, it’s peurile, it’s red meat to the conservative base … and it’s really jumped the shark.

How much more will the conservative base eat up?  When does the porridge become too rich, and they start to walk away from the table?  Does Rush’s reportedly falling ratings serve as a good proxy for this possibility?  Do we next hear … no, I won’t give Rush the next level of insults to fling into the maw of the conservative base: one must watch what might appear in a search engine?

Someday adult conversation will return to the national stage.  Just Not Yet.

Write faster: Identifies the two largest Japanese warships of World War II, Musashi and Yamato, as aircraft carriers.

Bzzzzt.  The old World War II buff in me identifies them as battleships.  So does Paul Allen, since he just found one.

(Bet they fix that without notice.)

Subject of spam found in mail tonight:

Hue White Scalding your unread messages will be deleted in a few days aggrandize

From the NewScientist (28 February 2015) letters section comes correspondent Martyn Thomas:

Changes in human behaviour may make driverless cars unusable. Why would you wait to cross the road, or pull out at a junction, if you know that the approaching cars are programmed to give way?

I’m having visions of passionless driverless cars in massive traffic jams while people caper across the road at randomly selected intervals…. doom for an industry?

My current free time project is the implementation of an XML SAX-like parser (much like that offered by Apache), but written in (and for) Mythryl, a functional language heavily derived from SML/NJ; the goal of the folks working on Mythryl is to transform SML/NJ from an academic language mainly used for doing PhD work into a production level language usable by commercial entities.  I’m doing this for these reasons:

1. Mythryl doesn’t have such an XML parser;
2. I’m doing it using a recursive descent parser engine;
3. And I’m doing it using the EBNF definition of XML

The latter two reasons can be best illustrated from an example.  From the definition of XML comes this specification:

prolog ::= XMLDecl? Misc* (doctypedecl Misc*)?

The ‘?’ means optional, and the ‘*’ means the element may appear 0 or more times.  This is an ordered set of instructions, as in “first this and then this and then this ….” other statements can also include “or” statements.  The words themselves refer to other specifications; eventually, those specifications will actually mention characters in specific formats.

In Mythryl I can write, given sufficient preparation,

prolog = |xml_decl| & <misc> & |(doctypedecl & <misc> )| ;

Here, the |xyz| means xyz is optional, the <xyz> means xyz may apply 0 or more times, and the ‘a & b’ means ‘a and then b’, as discussed above – i.e, the ordering mechanism.   Given a little leeway for capitalization conventions and symbol changes, and the Mythryl code assumes an amazing resemblance to the EBNF – which means I can copy the EBNF from the document, make a couple of changes, and all of a sudden I have a parser to handle the syntax; a little more meddling and I have semantic support.  And the semantic can be added as I have time; the parsing works on any valid XML doc, and I can slowly add in the other details, such as detecting problems with well-formedness, etc.

I’m interested in just how close I can come to using the EBNF, how quickly I can go from copying to full-blown functionality, and the post-development maintenance aspects – if any, of course.  One of the interesting facets of using Mythryl is that about half the time, once you get it to compile something (and that can be a challenge, even for an experienced programmer, for someone new to Mythryl), it Just Works – a phrase that the developer of Mythryl has been using.  No further debug …

That hasn’t applied to the parsing engine, as shoving large amounts of data at it had a performance impact; I may have gotten around that with an optimization; generally, though, functional programmers are encouraged to design a good solution without worrying about performance – let the compiler do it.  One estimate of its garbage collection is that it’s 10 times faster than Java.

As a quick PS, this the recursive descent parser isn’t built into Mythryl; it’s a part of a small library I developed using a Mythryl tutorial as a starting point.  Operator overloads and currying are very interesting after decades of programming in C and some OO languages.

I have long felt that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the near collapse of the financial system 8 years later, were an interesting correlate, and while I have not sat down and studied the content of G-S and compared it to the collapse, others have.  Those who think there’s causation include James Rickards at US News & World Report:

The oldest propaganda technique is to repeat a lie emphatically and often until it is taken for the truth. Something like this is going on now with regard to banks and the financial crisis. The big bank boosters and analysts who should know better are repeating the falsehood that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the Panic of 2008.

In fact, the financial crisis might not have happened at all but for the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking for seven decades. If there is any hope of avoiding another meltdown, it’s critical to understand why Glass-Steagall repeal helped to cause the crisis. Without a return to something like Glass-Steagall, another greater catastrophe is just a matter of time.

In 1929, the music stopped, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. It took eight years from the start of the boom to the bust. Subsequent investigations revealed the extent of the fraud that preceded the crash. In 1933, Congress passed Glass-Steagall in response to the abuses. Banks would be allowed to take deposits and make loans. Brokers would be allowed to underwrite and sell securities. But no firm could do both due to conflicts of interest and risks to insured deposits. From 1933 to 1999, there were very few large bank failures and no financial panics comparable to the Panic of 2008. The law worked exactly as intended.

In 1999, Democrats led by President Bill Clinton and Republicans led by Sen. Phil Gramm joined forces to repeal Glass-Steagall at the behest of the big banks. What happened over the next eight years was an almost exact replay of the Roaring Twenties. Once again, banks originated fraudulent loans and once again they sold them to their customers in the form of securities. The bubble peaked in 2007 and collapsed in 2008. The hard-earned knowledge of 1933 had been lost in the arrogance of 1999.

Cyrus Sanati at the New York Times reports on the same theme:

But 10 years later, the end of Glass-Steagall has been blamed by some for many of the problems that led to last fall’s financial crisis. While the majority of problems that occurred centered mostly on the pure-play investment banks like Lehman Brothers, the huge banks born out of the revocation of Glass-Steagall, especially Citigroup, and the insurance companies that were allowed to deal in securities, like the American International Group, would not have run into trouble had the law still been in place.

“Commercial banks played a crucial role as buyers and sellers of mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps and other explosive financial derivatives,” Demos, a nonpartisan public policy and research organization, wrote in a report discussing the problems it said were caused by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

“Without the watering down and ultimate repeal of Glass-Steagall, the banks would have been barred from most of these activities,” Demos said. “The market and appetite for derivatives would then have been far smaller, and Washington might not have felt a need to rescue the institutional victims.”

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins at Forbes disagrees:

By far, the single most cited example of this financial “deregulation” is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), which partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act thirteen years ago today. Regulatory evangelists including Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and recent senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street protesters, have named the overthrow of Glass-Steagall as public enemy number one.

Stiglitz, for instance, in a lengthy piece for Vanity Fair, could only muster two examples of the deregulation he thinks bears primary responsibility for the crisis: the repeal of Glass-Steagall and theSEC’s 2004 decision to raise banks’ debt-to-capital ratio from 12:1 to 30:1. The latter, of course was not deregulation, but re-regulation. For the regulatory evangelists, the repeal of Glass-Steagall is all they’ve got—and what they’ve got ain’t much.

Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933 to create a firewall between commercial and investment banks: commercial banks could not underwrite or deal in securities, and investment banks could not accept deposits. The Act also restricted commercial banks from being affiliated with any company that underwrote or dealt in securities.

But by the 1990s, the affiliation provision was widely viewed as unnecessary and even harmful to financial institutions. In 1999, President Clinton signed GLB into law. Although it left the bulk of Glass-Steagall in place, it ended the affiliation restrictions, freeing up holding companies to own both commercial and investment banks.

…

GLB [the act repealing Glass-Steagall] didn’t cause the financial crisis—and, when push comes to shove, the regulatory evangelists must admit as much. Stiglitz, in the same Vanity Fair article, concedes that Glass-Steagall did nothing to “directly” cause the crisis. Warren, meanwhile, confessed to New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin that Glass-Steagall would probably not have stopped the financial crisis, but that she was pushing to reinstate it because, in Sorkin’s words, “it is an easy issue for the public to understand and ‘you can build public attention behind.’”

Meanwhile, Senator Byron Dorgan (D – ND) tries on the hat of Delphi (from the NYT article):

One of the leading voices of dissent was Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. He warned that reversing Glass-Steagall and implementing the Republican-backed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a mistake whose repercussions would be felt in the future.

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010,” Mr. Dorgan said 10 years ago. “We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

Mr. Dorgan still feels the same way. “I thought reversing Glass-Steagall would set us up for dramatic failure and that is exactly what has happened,” the senator told DealBook on Thursday. “To fuse together the investment banking function with the F.D.I.C. banking function has proven to be a profound mistake.”

Senator Richard Shelby from the other side of the aisle also voted against repeal and so gets a feather in his cap as well.

Matthew Yglesias gives some initial coverage to O’Malley’s possible run here by way of covering Elizabeth Warren’s avowed non-run:

His agenda:

• Reinstate Glass-Steagall and break up the largest and most diverse banks.

• Prevent banks for taking tax writeoffs when they pay fines.

• Insist on CEO resignations as part of the resolution of regulatory misconduct claims and seek to prosecute individual executives for misconduct.

• An equivalent of the three strikes and you’re out policy to “revoke a bank’s right to operate if they repeatedly break the law.”

I have long felt that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the near collapse of the financial system 8 years later, were an interesting correlate; certainly the prohibitions of Glass-Steagall on commercial banks owning securities firms makes sense, since conflicts of interest can occur.  So I find this attractive.

Ballotpedia covers O’Malley here.  They report that a VoteMatch analysis evaluates him to be a Moderate Liberal Populist:

Follow the above link to see his responses to the quiz.  I’m appalled that he wishes to expand the Military and opposes legalization of marijuana; in fact, I would like to see the military budget reduced substantially and marijuana legalized – the nation would greatly improve, depending on the metrics used.  Otherwise, his views are not unreasonable, although I suspect an omniscient creature would find the gun ownership issue will be unresolvable (not because the two sides are stubborn, either).

This is simply one of the most beautiful bits of writing I’ve seen on the web.  H/T Andrew Sullivan’s Dish, now inactive.  It is a stream of consciousness piece by a Nepalese woman before, during, and after an avalanche swept away a number of Sherpas.

Jonathan Keane covers it in NewScientist:

The Breathe Project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Breathe Cam – four high-resolution cameras that capture haze and air pollution activity, along with software that visualises the data online. Up and running since December across Pittsburgh, the idea is that residents equipped with accurate information can lobby more effectively for companies and councils to stick to environmental guidelines.

Wonkblog on the Washington Post covers the future with robots from the distinctly human perspective:

According to a widely-cited study by economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at high risk of disappearance due to improving technology. …

Techno-optimist Kevin Kelly of Wired [former editor of Whole Earth Review] celebrates the coming of our robot overlords, arguing that they will free us to do more fulfilling and higher-value jobs in the future. …

Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute finds that the skill-based technological change explanation for wage stagnation and high unemployment doesn’t track with trends like the declining wage premium for college, and so can’t be a driving force behind income inequality. …

In a Pew survey of 1,896 technology experts, about half believed that technology would destroy more jobs than it creates, creating mass unemployment, and half disagreed.

Not exactly definitive.

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post takes issue with the kudos rained down upon Lee Kuan Yew at his passing:

The democratic model used by the USA, South Korea, Japan, and many others emphasizes more participation, more decentralization, and if it’s less efficient than Yew’s at its peak, it is also self-correcting.  Today is may seem as if our democracy is broken due to the inability of one side or the other to accept reality, but at some point reality will trump ideology, and those promoting ideology will fall by the wayside and become historical curiosities; we’ll revamp or dump the conflicting ideas and then carry on, buoyed up by our democracy – not weighed down.

NewScientist (28 February 2015 ) publishes Hal Hodson’s “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links” (print: “Nothing but the truth”):

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

I must be paranoid, because all I can see here is potential for abuse: gaming the system, er, vault, so that your truth is its occupant; infiltration of Google’s employee base by folks who want to make sure the vault has the proper truth; “tweaks” by Google executives and low-level employees; database rot – .01% error rate in the database still implies millions of fallacious “facts”.

Not to mention the lawsuits.  Oh, the lawsuits!  I’ll have to check with a lawyer or two of my acquaintance and get their thoughts on the matter.  And then government interference, both here and overseas, as certain uncomfortable facts make their way into the vault.

If you’re an older programmer, like moi’, then perhaps you haven’t had the training to appreciate Big Data.  If you want to learn in a competitive environment, then it’s time to hop on over to Kaggle, a web site which poses problems thought vulnerable to Big Data techniques, supplied by organizations ranging from obscure academic groups studying oddball problems (such as determining, given unlabeled data, whether any particular record is causative or merely correlative) to medical organizations (example: given pictures of eyeballs, identify which ones may have diabetic retinopathy) to commercial organizations trying to solve a number of different problems, ranging from optimizing flight planning to selecting the proper place to locate a new restaurant – all in an environment in which teams of programmers try to best each other while a deadline looms.

I indulged in this for 3-4 months before other obligations reduced my free time to zero; add in that I didn’t have the tools others had and had to write my own, in a language (Mythryl) still in development, and had to learn stats and probability on top of that … exhilerating exhilarating actually, and good for the brain, but way too time intensive.

But if you have time, want to learn something new, and get turned on by solving really advanced crossword puzzles, hey, Kaggle’s a fun place to start.

And today the GOP spews out more evidence of how the clutching hands of ideology have it by the neck … take it away, Steve Benen:

We’re well past the strange op-ed stage; McConnell yesterday “sent a detailed letter to every governor in the United States laying out a carefully researched legal argument as to why states should not comply with Mr. Obama’s regulations.”

The letter even cites Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, who believes the Obama administration’s regulations probably exceed the EPA’s legal authority.

But that doesn’t mean Tribe is on board with McConnell’s campaign. On the contrary, the law professor told The New Republic last month that states “can’t count on my being right.”

A reader responds to the meat of the issue:

“Shouldn’t adults be able to make decisions about end of life?  But if one has a mental illness, particularly a treatable illness, then they may make a decision which they might not otherwise make.”

The question is, who decides if an illness, especially a mental illness, is treatable.

The more current research delves into how the brain works, the more (what I read) it appears that many treatments are no more effective than placebos.  That is, conventional wisdom, or the accepted position of therapeutic professional organizations is that they CAN treat most or all illnesses — but those positions are based both upon out-dated science and self-preservation (of reputations, organization and business income).  But the emerging reality is that there’s more we don’t know, causes are more myriad and complex, and most of all, most drugs prescribed are next to worthless and often actually harmful.

The doesn’t make me feel very comfortable with allowing an organizational “opinion” be the deciding factor in what an adult can choose to do or not do.

On the other hand, I’m not saying we should make easier for people to impulsively commit suicide.

It’s a tough question, indeed.

I think – or hope – as genomic medicine begins to mature, we’ll see medications differentiated based on the responsiveness of a patient with a particular genome to the medication family – i.e., your genome will suggest which medicine is best for you. I believe this is already taking place in oncology, although still in its infancy.  Here is a study at Mayo.

I think we lack a really objective view of the human mind.  I know psychologists work to achieve such a viewpoint (my sister is a psychologist), but … well, I recall  listening to a psychiatrist talk about the ‘schools’ of psychiatry, by which he meant the various schools of thought on psychiatry.  He seemed a little bemused at the very thought; I think his medical degree (pediatrician) training had trained him to see things one way, as the right way, and the schools approach didn’t have the same rigor.  Or maybe not.  I failed to interrogate him when I had the chance.

If we had that objective view of the mind, then perhaps we could make real progress on this question.  I believe Senator Eaton’s bill will require two doctors to sign off on permitting the dispensation of fatal meds:

Eaton’s bill would require two doctors to sign off on a terminal patient’s state of mind before prescribing medication that would end the patient’s life.

It doesn’t say what sort of doctors, and Eaton hasn’t issued anything more specific that I can find.  But I can’t say I’m comfortable with that requirement, even if they’re psychologists.  At least not without credible studies showing psychologists can properly assess the current state of someone’s mind at a high enough accuracy rate.  It’s a conundrum.

Minnesota State Senator Chris Eaton wants to start a discussion (h/t MPR Radio), leading to a bill, on the subject of Right to Die:

“My mom used to beg us to take her to the vet because they would treat her better than what she was being treated, the amount of pain she was in and the lack of quality of life,” Eaton said. “You know it’s, people reach the point where they’ve had enough.”

Is pain a good enough excuse to commit suicide?  Medically speaking, we are not very good at treating pain, despite the efforts of many fine institutes, such as MAPS; we simply do not know enough about all the causes.  For example, neuropathy (damage or disease affecting nerves) has several causes, and it can be idiopathic, i.e., no known cause.  My mother had a neuropathy which manifested as severe pain in her rectum, brought about by a bout of viral meningitis where the germ involved was the shingles virus.  She endured the pain, multiple treatment types ranging from standard drugs to experimental surgeries to acupuncture and hypnosis: none of them worked over the long term.  She’d occasionally get a little relief from this or that, but in the end, after enduring fourteen years of agony, she passed away.

Mom never talked about suicide with me.  As long as Dad was around, she was determined to be there; and, I suspect, suicide was not really thinkable for her.  But without Dad, she may have chosen it since there did not seem to be any workable approach.  She didn’t have a quality of life, just hope that gradually faded over the years.

I don’t know if the pain had become an illness in itself, as is noted in this article from WebMD.  In her case, it was so hard to tell as she developed a host of other problems over the years, no doubt from the inactivity caused by the pain and spinal problems she developed during treatment for the meningitis.

Back to the Right to Die issue, there are concerns about individuals not fitting the expected profile of the acceptable users of such a program.  This may indeed be happening in Oregon, where the Death With Dignity Act has been in effect  for 16 years.  NewScientist (28 February 2015) covers the issue here (paywall):

Diane Coleman, head of advocacy group Not Dead Yet, which opposes assisted suicide, says the Oregon Health Authority’s annual reports on the practice show the law there isn’t working as intended. She points to the motives people gave for choosing this option. According to the latest figures, released on 12 February, only a third of people who took a prescribed lethal dose of medication in 2014 cited pain or fear of pain as one of the reasons for doing so.

Supporters of assisted suicide often cite pain as a primary reason why people should have the legal right to die. But the state’s report showed that people’s concerns tended toward loss of autonomy (91 per cent), loss of dignity (71 per cent) or being a burden on their family (40 per cent). Coleman is particularly concerned that people are choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden. “To me that feels more like a duty to die than a choice to die,” she says.

Unlike some issues, this is certainly an issue where all sides have a point, and if I think about it, it tends to tear at me.  Shouldn’t adults be able to make decisions about end of life?  But if one has a mental illness, particularly a treatable illness, then they may make a decision which they might not otherwise make.  Yet again, if they have been given a terminal prognosis, like Brittany Maynard, then why not permit them to terminate a life when it’s clearly become untenable and has no hope (outside of unpredictable spontaneous remissions)?

The bill under development by Senator Eaton is targeted for introduction at the next legislative session, not the current session.

Bob Jones III apologizes for advocating murder.

AND NOW, some really bad and rather pointless limericks, for your edification!  Although I must say, because of it’s rigidity in metre and rhyme pattern, the limerick as a poetry form is actually pretty hard to write.  So here goes:

Limericks

While painting a dreary landscape,
Van Gogh dreamt of a wild escape.
He said, “I can’t abide
one more pallid hillside,
give me color, perspective and shape.”

The Chapel at Kensington’s vicar
helped himself to the sacristy’s liquor.
He fell down in a swoon
in the ladies rest room
and awoke missing gaiters and knickers.
(This is too obvious. Someone has to have already written it.)

While walking alone by the highway,
a gentleman asked, “Going my way?”
I spitefully said,
“Not unless I was dead.
If you have to be going, then why wait?”

While stalled in the K-Mart express lane
I read candy wrappers to stay sane.
I noticed a trend:
That the more that you spend
the louder your checkbook complains. (Stands to reason)

The songbirds in May start to sing
and, so, herald the coming of spring.
The flowers rejoice
when the frogs find their voice,
and the doves and the eagles take wing.

Once spied by marauding fruit fairies,
my beautiful tree full of cherries
was stripped wholly bare
of all fruit that was there.
Then the sprites went off searching for berries.

— D.J. White

About 10 years ago, I dabbled in the world of art patronage.  This is a piece I commissioned for the Rose Ensemble.  It was written by local composer J. David Moore, with text by Sr. Juana Inez de la Cruz, a 17th-century Mexican nun.  In the Mexican Baroque style, a piece for 12 voices, viola da gamba and vihuela de mano, I give you A BELÉN:

Lee Kuan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore and its founding father, died earlier today at age 91.  The New York Times:

The nation, reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and pragmatic.

“We are ideology-free,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what had become, in effect, Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”

Al-Jazeera:

“The Father of Singapore” as he came to be known, first took power amid a host of problems including a multi-racial and multi-religious society with a history of violent outbursts, inadequate housing, unemployment, a lack of natural resources such as a water supply, and a limited ability to defend itself from potentially hostile neighbours.

Whip-smart, self-assured and unflappable, Lee earned plenty of criticism along the way.

“If someone living in Singapore in the 1950s could have entered a time machine and travelled to the Singapore of today, he would have found the transformations of this island literally unbelievable,” former Singapore president SR Nathan said at a September 2013 conference on the legacy of “LKY”, as he is commonly referred to.

Central to Lee’s vision were the creation of good governance, political stability, a quality infrastructure, and improved living conditions.

I suspect for the average American of a certain age, Singapore just equates to the caning of Michael Fay.  In truth, Singapore is much more – transformed from victims during World War II into a First World economy nowadays, they can be viewed as a success story, an alien society, or, as usual, the fetish for which you search.  But how many Americans could find it on a map?  I couldn’t.  I had to go look.

TIVO’s summation of this evening’s episode of LAST MAN ON EARTH:

Phil continues living in Tucson.

Glad I don’t live in Tucson.  That snow coming down even as I type looks infinitely better than Tucson, I’m sure.