He of Pants Unsuitable

Several years ago I designed a couple of chess sets, and among the feedback I received there was an e-mail from a gentleman named Ray, who also made chess sets and had, in fact, won some awards for his "themed" chess sets, which included a set made from various makes and sizes of fire hydrants. Ray was an interesting guy; during the course of our correspondence, I learned that he was about 50, that he lived with or near his mother, and that he'd served in Vietnam. He was single, and one of the last times I heard from him he'd taken off around the world to meet a Russian mail-order bride he'd been conversing with via e-mail. He got as far as Paris, as I recall, before chickening out. He sent a long group e-mail to myself and others of his friends describing the journey in lavish and sometimes eccentric detail. As an example of the latter, I recall a confrontation he described between himself and an airline employee at the Denver airport in which he was told that his "pants were not suitable for flying." His e-mail did not include a description of the pants in question, leaving the nature of their unsuitability for us to imagine. The incident is described in passing, as Ray's experience of the Denver airport was simply in passing, but I found the phrase evocative and it has since become one of my favorite idioms: "His pants are not suitable for flying" has, in my mind, approximately the same meaning as "his elevator does not go all the way to the top" and "he's one card short of a full deck." I say "approximately" because, while the latter expressions clearly imply lunacy characteried by deficiency, of one sort or another, "his pants are not suitable for flying" seems to lack this perjorative connotation. One whose pants are not suitable for flying is crazy in an entirely benign way; as long as there are responsible personnel to remind him to change them before boarding an aircraft, no harm can come of him.

A Subtle Kindness

I knew I liked Dr. M_______ the second week I was in the Chemistry department. I was riding the elevator up from the basement. It stopped at the ground floor and a college-age male with some kind of neurodegenerative disease rolled onto the elevator in his wheelchair, together with a woman who was obviously there to assist him. The doors closed, and at the next floor Dr. M_______ got on. The kid in the wheelchair was parked right in front of the buttons. Without missing a beat, and with a slightly impatient tone, Dr. M_______ says "Five, please." "Sure," the kid replies amiably, and reaches out a trembling, scrawny arm and, with some difficulty, presses the button for five. Nobody said anything for the rest of the ride up, but you could feel both the kid and his assistant, who might've been a sister, flush with gratitude. Most people, in that situation, they look at the kid and feel like they can't ask anything of him, so maybe they nod politely and smile awkwardly while they reach around him to press the button for themselves. Dr. M_______ saw, in the second between the time the elevator doors opened and the time he stepped on, how rarely this kid would find himself in a situation--ANY situation--in which HE could be the one helping out, instead of the one asking for help. He saw an opportunity to make the kid feel like a normal person, and he took it, without being patronizing, without trying to politely tippy-toe around the glaring fact of the kid's handicap, and without second-guessing himself. He saw all that, and he did it, and he never once let on that he knew what he was doing. But he did, and everybody on that elevator knew he did, and every one of us, including me, had a brief glimpse of authentic human kindness. From that moment on I knew he was someone I wanted to know better.

Memphis, Tennessee

Recorded in 1959 and released as the B-side of "Back in the USA," Chuck Berry's song "Memphis, Tennessee" was not an immediate hit in the US, but would creep as high as #6 on the British pop charts in 1960(?). Although diametrically opposed in tone, the song's story foreshadows Berry's 1965 hit "Promised Land" (covered by Elvis in 1973) with its protagonist negotiating a cross-country long-distance phone call with the operator. In "Promised Land," the narrator's tone is jubilant and triumphant, but in "Memphis, Tennessee" it is somber and morose. "Memphis" is the story of a young man returning a long-distance call to a girl named "Marie," who lives in Memphis, "on the south side/high up on a ridge/just a half-a-mile from the Mississippi bridge," with whom the narrator had been emotionally involved, and subsequently separated "because her Mom did not agree." The songs plays with listeners' expectations; based on the typical content of pop songs from that era, most people automatically assume that the narrator is a young man, just starting out in the world, who remembers Marie as an early sweetheart, perhaps from his teenage years, with whom he was forced to part because of her mother's disapproval. The last line of the song, however, turns our expectations on their heads:

"Marie is only six years old. Information, please: try to put me through to her in Memphis, Tennessee."

The song so effectively misleads us that this line commonly horrifies first-time listeners--he was involved with a six-year-old girl? On repeated listening, however, we realize that the idea of a romantic or sexual involvement between the narrator and Marie is never stated, and come to understand that Marie is not the narrator's former sweetheart, but his child. The "Mom" mentioned in the lyrics is not a tyrannical mother-in-law figure, but the narrator's ex-wife, who "tore apart our happy home in Memphis, Tennessee" not by meddling, but by divorcing the narrator and maintaining custody of their daughter, Marie. And so in one line the song gains a tremendous gravity, transmogrifying from an adolescent paen to puppy love (which is what most other pop songs of the era actually were) into a much more serious lament of a much more mature situation. A young man (and he must be young, for how else could his sweetheart's *mother* effectively exert control over their relationship?) who loses a sweetheart is consolable--he has a long life ahead of him and should be able to find another. An older man who has missed the formative early years of his daughter's life due to an acrimonious divorce is not so quick to find solace, and his is a situation that most grown men, regardless of age, could at least relate to (if not actually identify with.)

Coming as it did in 1959, this one key line in this one particular song anticipated, in its affect, the metamorphosis of Rock 'n' Roll itself from children's music to adult fare, a process which would not be well underway until the advent of Cream in the late '60s. That the song was released as a B-side and did not find widespread acceptance until covered by Lonnie Mack in 1963 is perhaps, at least in part, due to the anachronism of its theme. Rock 'n' Roll audiences were younger, then, and not ready for the emotional weight of a subject as serious as divorce and the pangs of fatherhood. With its incestuous blurring of the line between mother and lover, the song, of course, is ripe fodder for Freudian analysis, and especially given the pedophiliac tone of some of Berry's other songs (e.g. "Sweet Little Sixteen") and the sex scandals that rocked his career ("C'mon, baby, just let me pee on you!") the way is clearly open for disappointing moralistic interpretations of "Memphis, Tennessee." Such tawdry readings miss the more profound meanings of the song and of its position in cultural space.

The Sweet Science

It has been theorized that part of the appeal of boxing is grounded in the homoerotic tension that seems to underly so many hypermasculine behaviors: Two hypervirile men enter the ring and pound on each other until one of them literally cannot continue. Then, if it's been a good fight (i.e. if Tyson wasn't involved), they hug each other and cry like sobbing sisters. That's the real pay-off, getting to show their soft sides and have them appreciated by the world without having to seem like a pair of sissies. All that's required is that they nearly beat each other to death first.

Science has an analogous process. From the very beginnings of scientific education, the objective nature of the discipline--the non-self-ness--is emphasized to all students. The style of written science (the passive voice) is deliberately chosen to eliminate personhood, and is often explained with words to the effect of, "we don't care WHO made the measurement, just that it was made and was such-and-so." For this reason, scientists can be notoriously bad at giving credit where credit is due. It's not that they're all glory-grabbing assholes who want to steal others' work; just that they've spent their adult lives steeped in a culture that doesn't care who made the measurement, only that it was made and that it was such-and-so.

But sometimes, after a long and illustrious career that includes the luck and determination to be associated with a major discovery, an individual scientist achieves the crowning glory of a Nobel prize. At this point--and the culture of science is very clear about this--he or she is suddenly allowed to be a human being again. I have before me a commemorative article in Chemical & Engineering news ("C&E," as it's known in the trades), published as a cover story on the occassion of the one-year anniversary of Nobel laureate Richard Smalley's death. Pp. 14-15 include a gray topbar spread cleverly titled "HUMAN ELEMENT" which, without excusing itself, describes Richard Smalley the person, in emotional terms. Because he spent his life negating his personhood through science, on the occasion of his apotheosis and death it is appropriate that his personhood be emphasized. This is the rational scientist community's chance to revel in the emotions that we spend most of the rest of our time trying to supress, eliminate, and control for.

Maybe science is for man-vs-world what boxing is for man-vs-man; a kind of ultimate theatre of conflict. As in any conflict, premiums are placed on strength, willpower, and determination--on denial of the "baser" urges that lead us to sleep until noon and massage our data and and give up if the math gets too hard. It's as if we acknowledge the certain pathological quality that one needs to achieve greatness as a scientist. We recognize it and acknowledge that it must have great personal costs, but because it is of such great value to society it is nonetheless condoned and encouraged in the young.

Auspicious File Extensions

I got to wondering whether anyone had been bold enough to adopt .GOD for some proprietary file format. Turns out, according to the folks over at filext.com, there was once an Australian outfit called "Games on Demand" that used .godd to denote something called an "Arena Partial Downloaded Game" file, which is not so very exciting. Note that they opt for the four-letter extension with the extra terminal "D" to avoid potential blasphemy. Games on Demand is apparently no more, so maybe they paid the price anyway. The last few lines of Revelation tend to suggest that the Almighty is pretty touchy about his IP.

Which got me thinking about other provocative three-letter homonyms that might make amusing file extensions. SEX, for instance, has more than one usage: Alpha Software uses it to denote something called an "Alpha five set index," and there's at least one report that some Urban Chaos game files use the carnal extension.

.EAT, interestingly, appears to be unexploited. So, too, .DUG, .LOW, and .YAK. It's kind of an amusing game to brainstorm applications that might use such extensions...

A Scientist Watches the Evening News

I do not really believe in a cabal of conspirators sitting around a table beneath an eye-and-pyramid in a basement in Geneva any more than Descartes really believed that an Evil Genius had his brain trapped in a jar, but I think Descartes had the right idea in positing this paranoia as the only basis for a truly rational epistemology. We do not assume the worst is true, but we exercise maximum skepticism by imagining the worst and asking, "How do we know it isn't true?" The idea, for instance, that 9/11 was really the work of powerful behind-the-scenes forces who wanted to effect certain changes in the American political system and/or the world economy, and not demonic terrorists, deserves to be examined rationally. Although my personal belief is that things happened more-or-less as the mainstream media has presented them to us, I see that belief as irrelevant to the question of knowledge. I don't know what really happened on 9/11 any more than you do, and it is almost certain that neither of us ever will. We are wise, then, to withhold judgement idefinitely, and especially to avoid making important decisions based on judgements we might otherwise be tempted to make. Politicians are not citizens in a court of law and should be presumed guilty until proven innocent, for the same reasons that a man who stands to lose his life or his freedom as punishment for a crime should benefit from the opposite presumption, and that is, that it is better to err on the side of caution. For me, for now (and probably forever), 9/11 was a tragedy on par with an earthquake, a hurricane, or a tsunami: Certainly we would prefer that it never happened, but there is no one to blame for it but God.

The Moussaoui Verdict

So I'm completely in a tither about the outcome of the Moussaoui trial. I am on the one hand pleased that they decided not to execute him, and on the other fairly vexed that the whole country--even the judge who sentenced him--seems to regard this as some kind of failure. I'm apalled by the fact that people across the nation seem to be comforting themselves with the thought that he's going to spend the rest of his life in supermax custody, which is by many accounts a fate worse than death. There were jeers in one editorial to the effect of "he'll rot in a cell before he burns in Hell." Shame on all of us.

To cap it off, there have been noises about how he's going to be denied even the 5 monthly non-contact visits afforded to other prisoners in this most extreme manifestation of solitary confinement, although I really don't see how they're going to get that one by the ACLU. The sentencing judge wagged her finger at him and said he would never get to speak publicly again, but that seems incredibly naive to me as I really doubt they're going to be able to hold him completely incommunicado, in which case lines from his letters and/or interviews will (probably sooner rather than later) find their way into various "true crime" and other exploitative books, copies of which will probably end up in the Library of Congress for indefinite historical preservation on the federal dollar. I would also point out to the scolding judge that, although most people in the English-speaking world today know Moussaoui's name, very few of those same people could produce hers if they were offered money to do so.

I really wish the media had paid more attention to exactly what crimes he was convicted of, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the outrageous things he said and did in the courtroom. The impression I get is that he was mostly convicted of vocally supporting Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 attacks, and Islamic jihad in general which, as distasteful as it may be to most of us, is not a crime. Considering that he was actually in federal custody as the 9/11 attacks took place, it would seem that the worst they could possibly get him on would be conspiracy, and although there's a long legal tradition of taking conspiracy very seriously I have had a problem with it since law school. Conspiracy is a charge that's relatively difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (especially when, as in this case, the defendent wants you to believe he was involved) and relatively easy to trump up with courtroom theatrics and propaganda (again, much easier when the accused does his best to help you out). Although the federal prosecutors have produced long lists of Moussaoui's alleged crimes and he was obviously found guilty on some particular charge, we all know, deep down, that his was mostly a show trial. 9/11 happened, the people most directly responsible for it died in the act, Osama bin Laden slipped through our fingers, and the Iraq war proved to be about something else altogether: SOMEBODY STILL OWES US AN EYE! So it's politically expedient to barbecue this guy who's obliquely connected and who, guess what, wants to be a martyr anyway, so why don't we give him his chance?

Well, they had to try somebody for it, right?

Right?