Contradictions

 This has almost been a day off.

It has seen me up on time.

It feels like I have been procrastinating.

I went to Payless for groceries in the morning. In the afternoon, I went for smokes up on Wheeling. The only thing planned for today was to go to the grocery. I made it nowhere else.

I made one submission today. One Story – “Coming Home”.

The email has almost been emptied - I am caught up with yesterday; most today's stuff got deleted or moved onto another day.

Fly Fishing & Fly Tying with Tom Rosenbauer (Fulling Mill Blog)

Courage And Concession (Sheila Kennedy) is one political piece that I did not put elsewhere. It only reinforces my feeling that we back in 1860.

I spent time watching videos on YouTube (which means I mostly listened).

The Naked Spur: A Retrospective by Thomas Jane, surprised by being knowledgeable and well-written. 

The Shadow | Better in Black and White - one of my eccentricities is that I think Alec Baldwin's The Shadow is under-appreciated; another voice in support of that idea:

A little history - I have read about them for decades, this was a bit more of an explanation.

I have been watching off-and-on clips from The West Wing. It was criticized for being so liberal back in the day. I think it was an open rebuke of Bill Clinton. Too bad it did not raise the level of political discourse in this country.

MW was to call. CC did. I also talked to DM. I need to call Paul S.

It is 6:56 AM. I have been awake for about 12 hours. It feels later and also not so long of a day.

So, you know why this post is about contradictions.

sch

PS

Well, I spent 90 minutes untangling MW's problems with an appeal.

Then I spent a good long time chatting with Paul S.

More readings:

Science needs disagreement. What makes some disagreement useless? (Aeon Essays) - I was probably too tired to really get much out of it. But then it may be territory I covered a long time ago. Science puts out an idea, it gets tested, the tests get tested as questions get answered, and new ones get asked. People do not understand this. They want certainty. All science gives is the same that life gives us - probabilities.

Can AI tell us anything meaningful about Bob Dylan’s songs? (Aeon Essays)

In his essay ‘On Bob Dylan’ (2022), the legal scholar Cass Sunstein describes this restless shape-shifting as ‘dishabituation’: the deliberate disruption of expectations that keeps an audience awake and alive to what comes next. Since unpredictable stimuli trigger dopamine release, this neurochemical payoff may explain why Dylan’s wildest phases remain so addictive.

Sunstein points to Dylan’s expressions of delight in the off-kilter, or as Dylan himself puts it, his ‘songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels.’ Dylan, Sunstein notes, mocks ‘rote or routine’, and refuses to clap dutifully at protest slogans. That irreverence, Sunstein argues, explains everything from Dylan’s refusal to become a 1960s movement mascot to the rootless exhilaration of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.

The data support this interpretation. Think of the network of nodes as a subway map of Dylan’s mind: with Grand Central stations named Love, Time, God at the centre; and branch-line stops called Nightingale or Fiery Furnace on the fringe. In network theory, the bustle around each station (a node) is called its centrality: the more connections a node has to other nodes, the more ‘central’ it is.

Yeah, but none of it explains how he does what he does.

sch 10:34 PM