Russell Baker - Growing Up

While in college I was required to take some low-level English class, perhaps called "Essays" or "Non-Fiction," something like that, and there was one particular essay that especially affected me and always stuck in my memory even though, in the years that followed, I forgot both the title and author.

I remembered it was an essay about a grown man having to take care of his mother who was now suffering from dementia. I remembered it had a particularly poetic way of describing her behavior and I recalled that there was a strange irony that no matter how bad her memory got, she could still recite from memory the common rhyme about Guy Fawkes.

With these details, and with my textbooks all in a landfill, I recently tried to re-find this essay and found the task to be extremely difficult. A.I. was especially unhelpful as it would respond with 100% certainty that the essay was "X" by Y even when no such writing exists in the real world.

Nevertheless, through great frustration, I recently found the essay and found that it was not an essay, exactly; the piece I was looking for was an excerpt - it was the first chapter of the book "Growing Up" by Russell Baker.

I want to share with you a portion that so eloquently describes living with dementia:

At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

And:

For ten years or more the ferocity with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken the chains that imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I understood. I was the first time in years I had seen her happy.

And the part about Guy Fawkes:

So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that medical men apply in such cases. She failed catastrophically, giving wrong answers or none at all to "What day is this?" "Do you know where you are?" "How old are you?" and so on. Then, a surprise.

"When is your birthday?" he asked.

"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.

"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.

"Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day," she said.

"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor. "Who is Guy Fawkes?"

She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the years when the subject of her birth date arose:

"Please to remember the Fifth of November,

Gunpowder treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot."

Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes' failed scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. She had been a schoolteacher, after all, and knew how to glare at a dolt. "You may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously don't know any history," she said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.

So "Growing Up" is available on Amazon and the entire first chapter is offered as a free sample. I know absolutely nothing about or have any connection to Russell Baker but may add this book to my reading list. Happy Guy Fawkes Day.

Living in Cyberiad

 "The Cyberiad," by Stanislaw Lem, is a whimsical collection of science-fiction fairy tales, in a similar style as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It's episodic but it generally follows two intelligent machine rivals who try to outdo each other with their own invented machines. My favorite story in "The Cyberiad" is "The first sally (A), or Trurl's electronic bard."

The following contains spoilers for "The Cyberiad."

Through much hard work and countless hours of toil, Trurl has created a machine that, he hopes, can write poetry. He invites his rival Klapaucius over to test it (or to show off.) Klapaucius accepts, and after some false starts and tweaks, recites a short poem. Klapaucius is not impressed - the poem was just a pre-recorded message written by a person. Trurl invites him to make a request as a real test. Klapaucius thinks, trying to figure out the hardest request he can imagine. Finally he suggests:

"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

Trurl begins to object...

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking 

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

The story goes on from there with other bizarre requests and other poems but I'll focus on just this one, as it's my favorite. I was so used to seeing this story as a wonderful, whimsical flight of fancy (I first read this story in 1998-1999) that I completely failed to see that it's now a reality. Or is it? I was wondering, if I give this same prompt to ChatGPT, what would be the result?

Here is the experiment.

In truth, I usually see ChatGPT as just a more advanced search engine. I was fully expecting it to just lookup and return the poem from "The Cyberiad," at which point I would have had to try a similar prompt. But no, it simply went straight to its own attempt. Also surprising is that it doesn't follow the "only s" rule, for some reason. I mean, if a computer program doesn't write great poetry, we can all understand why but I absolutely do expect it to understand and follow basic, concrete rules.

I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am astonished by the sophistication of ChatGPT. Still, it definitely falls far short of the goal.

Let's try Bing:

Arguably better; it at least follows the 's' requirement, but still wanting.

And You!:

Terrible.

We live in a science-fiction future but the world of "The Cyberiad" still retains its mystique and fascination.

Finally, a small factoid that I just learned from Wikipedia: "The Seventh Sally was also an inspiration of the game SimCity." According to the New York Times, "In the Lem story a banished tyrant returns to his despotic ways after being given control over a simulated city."

Ronald Reagan - Berlin Wall Speech

 I'm reading Ronald Reagan's autobiography right now and I got up to the speech at the Berlin Wall. So I figured I'd watch it.

Even today it's a stirring speech. 

Ronald Reagan's autobiography is good but it is detailed. It's 775 pages and most of it is the 8 years of the presidency.  The letters between Reagan and Gorbachev go back and forth, back and forth, on and on for quite a while.

I'm watching now Reagan speaking to Moscow State University and there's no interpreter. I can't figure out how that works. It doesn't seem possible that they all know english, in the Q&A section they're asking in Russian.... I don't see them wearing headphones as if there's an audio translation. I don't get it.

The Johnstown Flood

In 5th grade, for some reason, we did an entire history module on the Johnstown Flood. I remember it being harrowing, dark and depressing. And it was morbid. And depressing. I mention "depressing" twice because depression was a new phenomenon in 5th grade so it has particular noteworthiness. I have no idea why we did it except to say that in the 5th grade, any topic is as valid as any other so why not?

It should therefore come as no surprise that I officially have no particular interest in the Johnstown Flood. But being a huge fan of author David McCullough, I read his book "The Johnstown Flood" and it IS great. That McCullough can sure spin a yarn and particularly the way he synthesizes huge amounts of research into a digestible story is so impressive.

If you're curious about the subject or are looking for a good book, I recommend it.

What is the Value of a Dollar?

 One of the things you're supposed to be taught when you're a kid is "the value of a dollar". I've never I've technically learned that in that the value of a dollar seems to always be changing. But I've learned the lesson, in essence, since I'm pretty cheap.

So my cheap self is shopping Amazon for "Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen. The second result that comes up costs $1 and looks like this...

But the FIRST result that comes up is FREE and looks like this...

 So now I guess my cheapness has run up against my sense of reason and vanity. Is it worth one dollar to not have a book with a cheap Dime Store Romance Novel cover in my library - for my sense of self, no never have to explain what this book is, to let reason prevail? Or is the cover a book unimportant and free is free?

A third option is to just grab the free version from Project Gutenberg they went with this cover:

I mean... it's better. But what were they thinking? That's a Math book from 1986. Jane Austen wrote Romances in the Victorian era, her works are considered classics, it just makes no sense.