10.27.2022 – there’s a collective

there’s a collective
that whole machine all making
each other’s money

In the article, Deranged diners, inflation and staff shortages: American restaurants are struggling, by Rachel Sugar, Ms. Sugar writes:

“It really does change the way the restaurant works,” says Sophie, 30, a longtime server at a casual fine-dining restaurant in Lower Manhattan, who estimates that about a third of people working front of house are new since the pandemic.

(To speak freely, she asked to be identified by her first name only.) “It changes the culture.” It is perhaps less united that it used to be, divided by default into an old guard and a new guard, “which is kind of the opposite of what I would want in a restaurant culture, which would be solidarity and inclusivity”, she says.

Jones, a classical cellist by training, likens restaurants to orchestras. “There’s all these components, but there’s a collective as well,” he says. “That whole machine is what is able to accomplish things. No one part is more important.”

Or as Sophie, whose restaurant pools tips, puts it, less romantically: “We’re all making each other’s money.

10.26.2022 – sound of time ticking

sound of time ticking
Mr. Lincoln’s pocket watch
echoes across ages

It has been 10 years since the movie Lincoln came out.

I am not sure what made me think of it but, if you remember, they made a big deal about trying to get ‘sounds’ that Lincoln heard.

They went so far as to search out Mr. Lincoln’s watches and found that two were available in museums that experts agreed were part of Mr. Lincoln’s daily routine.

One watch was in the Smithsonian and the other was in the care of the Kentucky Historical Society.

The Kentucky people allowed sound technicians to wind the watch and record the ticking.

The ticking is heard in the movie for about 3 seconds.

Like I said, I got to thinking and after thinking about it, I got to work.

I messed around and downloaded a video file of the movie.

I found the scene and removed the audio.

I tried to clean out any other sounds from the background music.

There is an occasional loud clock tick-tock but I let that stay as I learned it was recorded from a clock that had been in the White House with the Lincolns.

But the tic-tic-ticking is there.

The 3 seconds of the sound of time that echoes across ages.

I then copied the clip over and over until I had 70 seconds of ticking.

It was kind of creepy.

It was kind of cool.

Hear it for yourself by clicking here.

10.26.2022 – do what they think in

do what they think in
faithful disinterested
judgement what is right

In a 1955 document titled, Modernisation of the House of Commons – First Report, contributed to by Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Mr. Churchill said that:

The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what they think in their faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. The second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the representative but not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this subject is well known. It is only in the third place that their duty to party organisation or programme takes rank. All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Let me put that in bullet points.

  • The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what they think in their faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain.
  • The second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the representative but not the delegate.
  • It is only in the third place that their duty to party organisation or programme takes rank.

All these three loyalties should be observed, but there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Let me, repeat part of that last line.

But there is no doubt of the order in which they stand under any healthy manifestation of democracy.

Change Parliament to Congress is easy.

But then you also have to change the last line to read, There is no doubt of the order in which they stand under this current un-healthy manifestation of democracy.

10.25.2022 – men make their history

men make their history
do not make it as they please
chosen by the past

Adapted from, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx  between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City and established by Joseph Weydemeyer. 

According to Wikipedia, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon discusses the French coup of 1851 in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. It shows Marx in his form as a social and political historian, treating actual historical events from the viewpoint of his materialist conception of history.

The title refers to the Coup of 18 Brumaire in which Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in revolutionary France (9 November 17s99, or 18 Brumaire Year VIII in the French Republican Calendar), in order to contrast it with the coup of 1851.

Mr. Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.“

Commenting on the changes brought on by the coup attempt, Marx writes:

” … fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned,

their houses bombarded for amusement –

in the name of property,

of the family,

of religion,

and of order.

Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero installs himself in the Tuileries as the “savior of society.”

Of course, that was then in the 1850’s.

It would never happen here.

It would never happen now.

History doesn’t repeat itself but historians do, still it seems like what goes around comes around.