3.13.2023 – almost wondered

almost wondered
devious, subconscious means
could settle down safe

Adapted from the passage:

Macon leaned back in his chair with his coffee mug cupped in both hands.

The sun was warming the breakfast table, and the kitchen smelled of toast.

He almost wondered whether, by some devious, subconscious means, he had engineered this injury — every elaborate step leading up to it—just so he could settle down safe among the people he’d started out with.

As Mr. Thurber wrote, Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

The Grizzly and the Gadgets

A grizzly bear who had been on a bender for several weeks following a Christmas party in his home at which his brother-in-law had set the Christmas tree on fire, his children had driven the family car through the front door and out the back, and all the attractive female bears had gone into hibernation before sunset returned home prepared to forgive, and live and let live. He found, to his mild annoyance, that the doorbell had been replaced by an ornamental knocker. When he lifted the knocker, he was startled to hear it play two bars of “Silent Night.”

When nobody answered his knock, he turned the doorknob, which said “Happy New Year” in a metallic voice, and a two-tone gong rang “Hello” somewhere deep within the house.

He called to his mate, who was always the first to lay the old aside, as well as the first by whom the new was tried, and got no answer. This was because the walls of his house had been soundproofed by a sound proofer who had soundproofed them so well nobody could hear anybody say anything six feet away. Inside the living room the grizzly bear turned on the light switch, and the lights went on all right, but the turning of the switch had also released an odor of pine cones, which this particular bear had always found offensive. The head of the house, now becoming almost as angry as he had been on Christmas Day, sank into an easy chair and began bouncing up and down and up and down, for it was a brand-new contraption called “Sitpretty” which made you bounce up and down and up and down when you sat on it. Now thoroughly exasperated, the bear jumped up from the chair and began searching for a cigarette. He found a cigarette box, a new-fangled cigarette box he had never seen before, which was made of metal and plastic in the shape of a castle, complete with portal and drawbridge and tower. The trouble was that the bear couldn’t get the thing open. Then he made out, in tiny raised letters on the portal, a legend in rhyme: “You can have a cigarette on me If you can find the castle key.” The bear could not find the castle key, and he threw the trick cigarette box through a windowpane out into the front yard, letting in a blast of cold air, and he howled when it hit the back of his neck. He was a little mollified when he found that he had a cigar in his pocket, but no matches, and so he began looking around the living room for a matchbox. At last he saw one on a shelf. There were matches in it, all right, but no scratching surface on which to scratch them. On the bottom of the box, however, there was a neat legend explaining this lack. The message on the box read: “Safety safety matches are doubly safe because there is no dangerous dangerous sandpaper surface to scratch them on. Strike them on a windowpane or on the seat of your pants.”

Enraged, infuriated, beside himself, seeing red and thinking black, the grizzly bear began taking the living room apart. He pounded the matchbox into splinters, knocked over lamps, pulled pictures off the wall, threw rugs out of the broken window, swept vases and a clock off the mantelpiece, and overturned chairs and tables, growling and howling and roaring, shouting and bawling and cursing, until his wife was aroused from a deep dream of marrying a panda, neighbors appeared from blocks around, and the attractive female bears who had gone into hibernation began coming out of it to see what was going on.

The bear, deaf to the pleas of his mate, heedless of his neighbors’ advice, and unafraid of the police, kicked over whatever was still standing in the house, and went roaring away for good, taking the most attractive of the attractive female bears, one named Honey, with him.

MORAL: Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

3.11.2023 – civilization

civilization
on a saturday morning
the roar, the power

I live in what is called the low country of South Carolina.

It is north of the Coastal Empire of south Georgia and the Hostess City of Savannah.

The low country.

So called because it is so low.

As I write, I am about 10 feet above sea level and I am on the 2nd floor.

It is low.

It is also nicknamed the slow country.

The nickname fits for many reasons.

I am not saying we are in the back woods.

I am saying you get here once you get to the back woods.

I am not saying it is Podunk.

I am saying that to get here, you turn left, once you get to Podunk.

The low country has a lot going for it, not the least of which is its solitude.

Its peace and quiet.

At least until this morning when the peace and quiet was wiped out by the roar of civilization.

At least that part of civilization that recognizes the gas powered backpack leaf blower as a part of civilization.

I live in a little apartment complex.

There is no lawn to mow.

There is no yard work.

Still, for reasons known but to those people who make those type of decisions, the parking lot was dirty or something, and the entire complex needed to be blow dried.

Understand the grass has not started growing yet.

There was no grass to be mowed in the little places where grass can grow around here.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think there were any lawn mowers in action this morning.

No sir.

It was this small army of noise terrorists armed with these backpack leaf blowers blow drying every inch of sidewalk and parking lot.

At 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning.

It sounded like a whole bunch of chain saws had been turned loose in the woods behind us and with development of the area the way it has been that would not have surprised me.

But no, it was just the parking lot cleaning force.

It was the Holland, Michigan street cleaners on steroids.

Up and down the sidewalks.

Under and around all the cars.

The sounds of the leaf blowers changing in pitch as they were waved around.

It was so odd as I couldn’t see that it had much effect.

It has been pollen season down here in the low country.

A pollen season with pollen so thick you can see it, taste it and feel it piling up in your nose.

But it rained all day yesterday.

All the pollen has been washed away by the rain.

I guess that was it.

The sidewalk and the parking lot need to be blow dried.

Ah that roar of civilization.

Well …

It wasn’t snow blowers.

3.10.2023 – still, how strangely still

still, how strangely still
water is today, not good
to be still that way

Adapted from the poem, Sea Calm by Langston Hughes as it appeared in The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) .

How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way

Langston Hughes was just twenty-four years old when his debut poetry collection The Weary Blues was published in 1926.

The first line of the introduction to The Weary Blues reads, “At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whatever who, at the age of twenty -three, has enjoyed so picturesque and rambling an existence as Langston Hughes.“

Back in the day when I worked at WZZM13 TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I remember a newsroom discussion about travel and places to go and places gone to and plans to go to other places.

I looked up and said in what my wife calls ‘My Hoffman Voice’, you know, the voice you develop in a family of 11 kids if you ever want anyone to hear you – my kids say it cuts through concrete – my Mom said it was just like my brother Bobby’s (who was a baseball coach for 20 years), “I live in house 1 mile from where I grew up, 1 mile from the hospital where I was born and 1 mile from the cemetery where I will be buried.”

Then I said, “Oh am I depressed!”

At the time it was all true.

I lived near Kent Country Club on the North End of Grand Rapids.

It was less than a mile from my childhood home on Sligh Blvd.

It was about a mile to Butterworth Hospital where I was born.

And it was less than a mile from Fairplains Cemetery where my grand parents and parents are buried and where, most likely, I would end up one day.

I was about to turn 50.

Since then, I can say that I have enjoyed a picturesque and rambling existence.

Someone looked at my life and said it was still, too still.

And then that someone decided that it was not good for my life to be still that way.

I am reminded of a silly movie starring Steve Martin named Parenthood.

Mr. Martin watches his life come apart at the seams with the flu, bills, car accidents, kids fighting, job loss and everything else and is ready to lose it.

When his Grandma comes by and kind of in passing says:

You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster
Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride.
I always wanted to go again.
You know, it was just interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened,
so scared,
so sick,
so excited
and so thrilled,
all together.
Some didn’t like it.
They went on the merry-go-round.
That just goes around … Nothing.
I like the roller coaster.
You get more out of it.

The movie was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

These two guys wrote a lot of movies.

One of those was, A League of Their Own where baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, says:

It’s supposed to be hard.

If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.

The hard… is what makes it great.

It is not good
For water
To be so still that way

3.9.2023 – fundamentally

fundamentally
flawed conception of our selves
language, knowledge

Adapted from:

Today our supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

It is at once comic and tragic, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

In the guest opinion essay, “The False Promise of ChatGPT” by Noam Chomsky (March 8, 2023, NYT).

Mr. Chomsky’s global standing as THE expert on language leaves me little room to argue, not that I would, as I was happy to read his opinions on the latest computer generated textual content craze that has a place in the current news cycle.

For me, the concept is as old as the Infinite Monkey Theory which states that if an infinite number of monkeys were left to bang on an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later they would accidentally reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

It goes back to 1913 and Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel a French mathematician, who wrote:

.. Concevons qu’on ait dressé un million de singes à frapper au hasard sur les touches d’une machine à écrire et que, sous la surveillance de contremaîtres illettrés, ces singes dactylographes travaillent avec ardeur dix heures par jour avec un million de machines à écrire de types variés. Les contremaîtres illettrés rassembleraient les feuilles noircies et les relieraient en volumes. Et au bout d’un an, ces volumes se trouveraient renfermer la copie exacte des livres de toute nature et de toutes langues conservés dans les plus riches bibliothèques du monde. Telle est la probabilité pour qu’il se produise pendant un instant très court, dans un espace de quelque étendue, un écart notable de ce que la mécanique statistique considère comme la phénomène le plus probable…*

I remembered it more from Bob Newhart who told the joke about the typing monkey’s, “Hey, Harry! This one looks a little famous: ‘To be or not to be – that is the gggzornonplatt.”

To be sure of the date, I did the google and read the article on Wikipedia.

BOY HOWDY!

So much on so little that for some reason caught the attention of so many people including a ‘famous’ study by some fellers named, Hoffmann and Hofmann!

It seems that the image of an infinite number of typing monkeys is just the thing to get stuck in a lot of people’s brain.

And, for the record, my family name is Hofman, but my Grandpa thought it looked unbalanced and changed it to Hoffman.

I think to get four spellings of the same last name into 2 sentences is pretty good for a non monkey!

To return to Mr. Chomsky and his something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind.

I used to try to observe objectively my mind in action as it worked to process all the information coming into my brain as I drove into Atlanta.

I was pretty much left in awe everytime.

In his books, C.S. Forester has several scenes where the hero is in a situation surrounded by activity and is called on to make decision after decision.

In these scenes, one of the sources of activity is either a beeping clock or someone else calling off the time in 5 second intervals or some such thing that marks the time in the background and the hero begins to contemplate how in the world the brain can process all the data let alone arrive at a conclusion, let alone a successful conclusion, in the time allowed for the situation.

Infinite use of finite means, creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

It is, the mind, an incredible thing.

click on image to watch music and listen

To shift from text to music, I have long said that I had been allowed to compose the first 8 bars or so of Mozart’s Piano Concerto #11, I could die a happy person.

When Artificial Intelligence can compose this music, then email me a note.

When Artificial Intelligence can compose this music and KNOW what it did, then text me.

When Artificial Intelligence can LISTEN to this and feel it and know it is special and also know that if the computer was unplugged today, that computer would be happy that it has composed such a piece, then call me.

*.. Let us imagine that a million monkeys have been trained to type at random on the keys of a typewriter and that, under the supervision of illiterate foremen, these typing monkeys work with ardor ten hours a day with a million machines to write of various types. Illiterate foremen would collect the blackened sheets and bind them into volumes. And at the end of a year, these volumes would be found to contain the exact copy of the books of all kinds and all languages ​​preserved in the richest libraries of the world. Such is the probability that there will occur for a very short instant, in a space of some extent, a notable deviation from what statistical mechanics considers to be the most probable phenomenon… (Yes I used a computer generated translation)

3.8.2023 – independence and

independence and
irresponsibility
cannot co-exist

Adapted from a scene in the book, Commodore Hornblower, by C.S. Forester who writes that Hornblower:

Recalling himself to reality, he forced himself to remember with what a bubble of excitement he had received his orders back to active service, the light heart with which he had left his child, the feeling of – there was no blinking the matter – emancipation with which he had parted from his wife.

The prospect of once more being entirely his own master, of not having to defer to Barbara’s wishes, of not being discommoded by Richard’s teeth, had seemed most attractive then.

And here he was complaining to himself about the burden of responsibility, when responsibility was the inevitable price one had to pay for independence; irresponsibility was something which, in the very nature of things, could not co-exist with independence.

It is part of the Hornblower lore that when Gene Roddenberry created the Star Trek character of Captain James T. Kirk, he used Hornblower and the Hornblower books as a model.