Solutions to the sock dilemma

 Socks are lost in the washing machine or dryer, resulting in "orphan" (or more accurately, "twinless") socks.  We need to come up with some solutions. 

1. Buy 30 pairs of identical socks.  Some socks will be lost, but your socks will always match.  At a certain point, buy more socks identical to the first set of 30, or begin again with a different color or pattern. This solution is expensive but irrefutable.   

2. Wear socks that do not match. Make that your personal style. "Life is too short to make your socks match." If your socks do happen to match on any given day, that is fine too. Nobody will complain, in my experience.    

3. Wear no socks. 

4.  Continue your current pattern of losing socks, but decide not to care about loss of socks. Discard twinless socks, or keep them as dishrags. Whatever...   

5. Continue your pattern of losing socks, but continue, also, your laments for the loss of socks. Realize that your complaints about the loss of socks fulfills a psychological need, scratches an itch otherwise unscratchable.   

6. Worry about other stuff.  The problem will disappear because it is not very important. 

7. Place socks in a laundry bag with zipper before doing laundry. An elegant but dull solution. This is the one I have ultimately chosen, despite being tempted at times by solutions 2 and 3.     

I had more hands then

 Keith Jarrett had a stroke (or two), and cannot play piano with his left hand. There is a nice interview with him by YouTuber Rick Beato. At one point, Keith says, after they listen to a brilliant performance by Keith from many years ago "I had more hands then." Then: "But only one more." He can still play cool improvised lines with just his right hand, and comp at the same time with the same hand. 

***

I realized at one point I had many, many CDS of Jarrett's trios with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock. Your favorite musician is not the one you say is your favorite, but the one that is objectively your favorite, based on your actual listening history.  

***

When I play piano, it's fine. I am within my modest abilities. When I listen to someone really good, I could despair.  But that is a dumb attitude to take. Being able to play at all is a miracle. 

Amphigorey

My dad gave me Amphigorey for Christmas one year. I think I was 14 or 15. I had no idea about what it was really about, but I liked it.  I recently repurchased it, along with Amphigorey Too. I don't remember much about it from then. I do remember The Curious Sofa, a pornographic but very innocent book, in its own way.  "To beguile the the tedium of the journey, Albert read aloud from Volume Eleven of "The Encyclopedia of Unimaginable Customs." Or "The party split into two and threes before retiring." 

Now I have seen pictures of Gorey, I know that he depicts himself in his books in regular fashion. I probably didn't wonder if he was gay, at that age. I've since learned that he attended virtual every ballet there was in NYC.  

The Doubtful Guest is brilliant.  

Giovanni interviews Baldwin

I wish people were as smart now as back then.   

Archambeau

 My fb friend Bob Archambeau has some notes on how to give a conference paper. It boils down to "don't waste time" and treat the audience well, and ends with the gem: "Work the room, not the text."  

Cancel

 Most people are in favor of cancelling.  For example, I am in favor of newspapers canceling Scott Adams' Dilbert strip, if they want too. I am in favor of having Kanye West face the consequences of being anti-Semitic in an open way. Practically nobody is against it, as a matter of principle. People just differ on what kind of cancelation is legit, what specific offenses count. 

Adams has been semi-loco for a while, with Trumpism and other kinds of weird things. His strip is funny, I guess, if you work in an office, though he cannot draw. I don't believe in saying he is not funny, simply because he is also racist. In the past I have enjoyed his strip, and I find most comics today not particularly good, but it is not in the same class as Calvin and Hobbes. 

The first amendment is about the government. A newspaper can cancel a comic strip that it publishes, and it is not censorship.  On the other hand, I can put a Dilbert panel on the door of my office, and the University cannot tell me to take it down. I'm not going to do it, because I don't have things on my door, and if I did it wouldn't be someone who just came out explicitly as a racist.  

Private universities can censor, since they are not governmental, but many of them claim to follow 1st amendment principles, and in that case they can be called out on that. 

You can't make this up...

 A daughter of the infamous Koch family, as profiled in New York Times, in relatively sympathetic way:  

As she worked to untangle her knots, she did a lot of searching. She was an editor for a literary humor magazine called Opium. She tried to write a novel. (She’s still trying. “It’s about 1,400 pages with 24 major characters and 30 plot lines.”) She went to Peru to experience ayahuasca, the vomit-inducing hallucinogenic tea. Another time, she found herself at a nudist colony. In 2015, she started a book imprint called Catapult. “Cries for Help, Various” was its first title. (This month, Catapult shut down its online magazine and writing program to “ensure a successful future” for its core book business.)