It's a Lion's Mane mushroom! Grown from a mushroom-growing box from Segura and Sons, a mushroom farmer in Stevens Point.
Two weeks ago, we bought a Lion's Mane grow box from Segura, who sells mushrooms and kits in the Stevens Point downtown Saturday morning farmers' market. Lynn found a good place in the basement, asked me to spritz in the box in the morning and leave the light on until 6 PM.
Today, I learned about "MrBeast", reported in Numlock News to be the most popular presence on YouTube, with 3 million followers. MrBeast is 26 years old. I usually stay away from YouTube, which I have read is the most popular item on the internet. I read that MrBeast wants to switch his available material to a streaming service.
Most of the time that I was growing up, I made use of the Baltimore Enoch Pratt public libraries. When I go into that sort of library, I get the same impression as I get from this picture of the Long Room at Trinity College in Dublin:
An impression of endless choices, not consumable in a lifetime, riches beyond imaging. That is also what one gets with modern tv streaming: everything there just waiting to be viewed. I can see why MrBeast wants to stream. Make 2 or 3 tapes a day and put them on streaming, where they can be viewed repeatedly and simultaneously have more days when there is no need to be at the studio and be viewed.
The other day, I listed seven decisions that had a major effect on my life. Other experiences were also influential for sure, but these were strong influencers, although I didn't realize it at the time. The first one was in 8th grade when I was choosing a foreign language I would study. Choosing Latin had influences and consequences I certainly didn't know about. Thinking about what led to major decisions and what followed from them was assisted by searching for related words in my blog. As I consider various angles of major life decisions that pointed me in this or that direction, I find that notes and reflections about my education ten or so years ago often come as surprises that I would not have recalled without the written notes and blog entries.
These surprises interest me both personally and professionally. I attended public Baltimore schools for 12 years, teacher's college for 4 years, graduate school for 3 years and taught at UWSP for 37 years. Notes, just like old photos, often remind me of studies, knowledge, experiences that I had that I would have had no reason to recall, ever. Yet, when I do, I remember pleasures of discovery and comprehension that I had, and often still have in my head. This is similar to discussions with my wife who recalls various memories that I too recall but only with her prompts and remarks.
One of many difficulties with studying a person's education and its effects is the powerful but unconscious mind that we have breathing in us, digesting our food, forming impressions, all in secret but powerful influence. The weekly questions my daughter bought for me from Storyworth sometimes do similar things.
I imagine if I were a young person trying to have a career in writing of one kind or another, I would find generating excitement profitable. Not just profitable in income and reputation, but also but maybe in my productivity, too.
If I create a fictitious account of a race between two fellows who are always wondering which of them is the "better", it will probably be more interesting and more memorable if the account relates the high emotional state of the rivals, whether or not the reader has a brother, is a runner or has ever been in a match-up "against" someone that elicited strong emotion.
So, I may head the story line in a direction of typical strong emotion. Since most people have a strong fear of death or serious damage to their bodies, my story may get more readers and more raves if it shows the possibility of bodily harm to one or both of the rivals. Or, what if in addition to physical danger, the two are both trying to win the heart of the same girl??? Geez, I bet I could get a very high fee for a story like that.
Charging devices to 80% only
I read this article and am persuaded it is a good idea. You may be, too.
Link to CNN Photos of the Week
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/23/world/gallery/photos-this-week-august-15-august-22
I read Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter, dated yesterday. She is a professor of history and stated that until the end of the 19th century, it was considered "unseemly" for candidates for public office to campaign for themselves. I knew what she meant and I admire the use of "unseemly". I wonder if I am living in a "seemly" way. I realize if I am living in an unseemly manner, I am living in a way "that just isn't done."
When the book "The Limits to Growth" came out in 1972, my friend Professor Artigiani, a historian, asked What is the history of the future?, meaning how well have people accurately predicted the future. Of course, different people mean something different by "the future". He and I started a course in which we examined the matter. I concluded the answer is generally "Poorly".
In the matter of living in an unseemly manner, I guess what is seemly and what isn't is a matter of taste, income level, consciousness of fashion, determination to be "seemly" and related cultural, political and economic variables.
C.S. Lewis, a well-known author, often stated that a deeply literary person would find the usual practice of reading a given book only once to be ill-advised and short-sighted. As a person interested in the effect of education, I often wonder about the effects of reading a given book. Since I am elderly and have read many books, I think it is quite possible that I fail to remember that I read a certain book and read it again.
The book by Elizabeth Margulis, "On Repeat", explores the phenomenon of a music listener who has heard a given composition, listening to it again, often many times over. There are times when a young child hears a story aloud and asks at the end of the reading for it to be read aloud again, now.
The contrast between avoiding a second reading and a desire for a 2nd listening to music is striking. I suspect it is related to the length of a book, maybe to the number of times a reader has to sit down and "pick up" at the last place of reading. Very long books seem unlikely to be repeated.
According to results I found in Duckduckgo, the US divorce rate dropped from 3.6 per 1000 to 2.4 from 2010 to 2020. I'm a fan of marriage, having been married for more than ¾ of my life. I am pretty old and all that time, I have been married to the same woman. As you might guess, that woman has been married to me for the same amount of time!
Your kids or grandkids may ask from time to time about a long marriage. How did it start? How has it lasted? Is it a good thing to enter?
I had an unexamined but deep feeling that adulthood began with parenting. I couldn't wait. I found out that being a parent without being married was frowned on and I was eager to be a parent without frowns.
I recommend paying attention to each anniversary and being thankful for a good partner.
Stephan Pastis draws "Pearls Before Swine", which appears in the Stevens Point Journal. I admire the smoothness with which he gently draws the innocent, unsuspecting reader toward deportation.
CNN Photos of the week: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/world/gallery/photos-this-week-august-8-august-15
Electric vehicle acceleration from today's Numlock News:
Municipal adoption of electric vehicles is picking up faster than anticipated among police departments, which have begun to take note that the acceleration on these cars is way, way zippier than in an internal combustion engine. Tired of getting outraced by EVs, police departments have snapped up Tesla Model Ys in particular given the model's range and power. The Michigan State Police's precision driving unit publishes vehicle data for police departments nationwide, and clocked the Chevy Blazer EV and the Ford Mustang Mach-E going from 0 to 100 mph in 11 seconds, half the time of gas-powered options. The NYPD has about 200 EVs, and the chief fleet officer reported a 60 percent to 70 percent maintenance savings compared to the gas-powered squad cars.
I think I have something to write about these topics:
There is no repetition since every event takes place in its own time.
I have been getting unusual physical sensations ever since I started carrying my phone in a front pocket.
My daughter questioned my judgment when she thought of her father walking with him through Amsterdam's redlight district when she was 12.
I have seen writing about the spinal benefits of hanging by my arms from a crossbar.
We have research of all kinds going on. Seems that research uncovers details about better practice, resulting in more complexity all the time.
I find that every human has come out of a female. Should I sue female humanity for developing a monopoly?
I am an anticipator. I have a breathless approach to the next thing, whatever it is. So when I develop wrinkles and limitations from aging, it is anticipation, not surrender
We took a short trip to Ashland, Wi and environs. We learned that short trips overnight can reveal habits we have developed and depend on. We learned that some older people like short trips and that all sorts of expertise, not to mention life experience, are tucked into L.I.F.E. members. We learned that Wisconsin has a long history, going way back before Europeans arrived.
I have poor hearing and it isn't getting any better. When we attended the musical 'Six", I learned that musical shows are too loud for me to enjoy. I have no idea if the typical volumes are actually bad for my hearing or not. We attended Bigtop Wisconsin and listened to fiddle playing by Laura McMaster and family but I left before the end. My trouble is not detection or awareness of sound but interpretation of sounds into language.
We took a boat ride to Madeline Island. We have been there before, as we have with Ashland and Bayfield. I grew up in Baltimore and the Northwoods, mining and lumber were not part of my background but I think I have some appreciation for those industries as well as Wisconsin schools, colleges, technical schools and universities.
In high school and college, I enjoyed reading C.S. Lewis and Jacques Barzun, two very different European men. Lewis is a famous storyteller and strong Christian apologist. Barzun (1907- 2012, 105 years!) grew up in an upper class Parisian family. I read aloud to a blind Johns Hopkins University professor who held Barzun in disdain for writing on too many topics, a sign to him that the man could not be an in-depth scholar.
One of Barzun's books, "Science: The Glorious Entertainment"(1964) includes his mention that the number of terms, especially names, in the modern world was not keeping up with demand. He used the example of "plastic", which to many generations, meant "flexible". Then, we started applying the word to rigid objects made of certain rigid materials. He didn't like a word that meant "hard" and also "soft".
I recently read somewhere "no tax on tips". I felt I understood "no tax" but I thought the writer was stating that if I call my local tax authority and give them a "tip" that so-and-so isn't paying taxes, there would be no tax on my call to the IRS. That sounded a little off. Then, I realized that the writer was explaining that the tip I give my waiter would not be taxed.
I am confident that human imagination and artificial intelligence can defeat this disturbing problem.
It is Sunday, the day of the week that CNN Five Things posts a link to the CNN Photos of the Week. I looked at them and decided they include pictures that are worth seeing.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/08/world/gallery/the-week-in-34-photos
In case you are interested, the Library of Congress publishes a list of historical events and links to further information called "Today in history". I get it every Sunday and often ignore it but it can be fun to look over. There are other collections online that also list events for a given day of the year. The Sunday version never includes the actual day it is sent but some others do.
When President Joe Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21—less than three weeks ago—the horizon for the 2024 presidential election suddenly shortened from years to about three months. That shift apparently flummoxed the Republicans, who briefly talked about suing to make sure that Biden, rather than Harris, was at the head of the Democratic ticket, even though the Democrats had not yet held their convention and Biden had not officially become the nominee when he stepped out of contention. Lately, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that Biden might suddenly, somehow, change his mind and upend the whole new ticket, although Biden himself has been strong in his public support for Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Democrats held a roll-call vote nominating Harris for the presidency. The idea that presidential campaigns should drag on for years is a relatively new one. For well over a century, political conventions were dramatic affairs where political leaders hashed out who they thought was their party's best standard-bearer, a process that almost always involved quiet deals and strategic conversations. Sometimes the outcome was pretty clear ahead of time, but there were often surprises. Famously, for example, Ohio representative James A. Garfield went to the 1880 Republican convention expecting to marshal votes for Ohio senator John Sherman—General William Tecumseh Sherman's brother—only to find himself walking away with the nomination himself. As recently as 1952, the outcome of the Republican National Convention was not clear beforehand. Most observers thought the nomination would go to Ohio senator Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, but after a tremendous battle—including at least one fist fight—the nomination went to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who challenged Taft because of the senator's opposition to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Taft supporters took that loss hard: Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. drove Eisenhower's victory, prompting right-wing Republicans' enduring hatred of what they called the "eastern establishment." The 1960 presidential election ushered in a new era in politics. While Eisenhower had turned to advertising executives to help him appeal to voters, it was 1960 Democratic nominee Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy who was the first presidential candidate to turn to a public opinion pollster, Louis Harris, to help him adjust his message and his policies to polls. Political campaigns were modernizing from the inside to win elections, but as important in the long run was Theodore H. White's best selling account of the campaign, The Making of the President 1960. White was a successful reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer who, finding himself flush from a movie deal and out of work when Collier's magazine went under, decided to follow the inside story of the 1960 presidential campaign. "I want to get at the real guts of the process of making an American president—what the mechanics, the mystique, the style, the pressures are with which an American who hopes to be our President must contend," White wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN). White set out to follow the campaigns of the many primary candidates that year: Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy and Republicans Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. Before White's book, political journalism picked up when politicians announced their candidacy, and focused on candidates' public statements and position papers. White's portrait welcomed ordinary people backstage to hear politicians reading crowds, fretting over their prospects, and adjusting their campaigns according to expert advice. In heroic, novelistic style, White told the tale of the struggle that lifted Kennedy to victory as the other candidates fell away, and his book spent 20 weeks at the top of the bestseller lists and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. White's book emphasized the long process of building a successful presidential race and the many advisors who made such building possible. In the modern world a presidential campaign lasted far longer than the few months after a convention. In his intimate portrait of that process, White radically transformed political journalism. As historian John E. Miller noted, journalists who had previously covered the public face of a candidacy "now sought to capture in minute detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the candidates and their strategy boards and to probe beneath the surface events of political campaigns to ascertain where the 'real action' lay." For journalists, seeing the inside story of politics as a sort of business meant leaving behind the idea that political ideology mattered in presidential elections, a position that political scientists were also abandoning in 1960. It also meant getting that inside story by preserving the candidates' goodwill, something we now call access journalism. Other journalists leapt to follow the trail White blazed, and by 1973 the pack of presidential journalists had become a story in its own right. White told journalist Timothy Crouse that he had come to regret that his new approach to presidential contests had turned presidential campaigns into a circus. Over time, presidential campaigns began to use that circus as part of their own story, spinning polls, rallies, and press coverage to convince voters that their candidate was winning. But now the 2024 election seems to be challenging the habit of seeing a presidential campaign as a long, heroic sifting of advice and application of tactics, as well as the perceived need for access to campaign principals. Yesterday, apparently chafing as the Harris-Walz campaign turns out huge crowds, Trump called reporters to his company's Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. Those determined not to miss any twist of the campaign—and who had enough advance notice to make it to Florida—listened to him serve up his usual banquet of lies: that doctors and mothers are murdering babies after they're born; everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, no one died on January 6, 2021; he loves autocrats and they love him; and so on. The journalists there did not ask him about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign. But, as conservative writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted, Trump appears nonetheless to have gone entirely off the rails. He claimed that the crowd he drew on January 6 was bigger than those who gathered in 1963 to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous I Have a Dream speech, and he told the entirely fabricated story of surviving an emergency landing in a helicopter with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. As Nichols put it, "The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There's something deeply wrong with him." But the media appears to be sliding away from Trump: today he angrily insisted he could prove that the dangerous helicopter trip actually occurred, leading New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman to note that "Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so." When asked to produce the flight records he claimed to have, Trump "responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice." In contrast, as presidential candidates, first Biden and now Harris have not appeared to bother with access journalism or courting established media. Instead, they have recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy. Yesterday, after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, "What'cha got?" All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview. — Notes: John E. Miller, "The Making of Theodore H. White's The Making of the President 1960," Presidential Studies Quarterly 2 (June 1999): 389–406. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4ng1my55vno https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/truth-about-trumps-press-conference/679425 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/us/politics/trump-helicopter-landing.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-legal-challenges-keep-biden-on-ballot/ X Acyn/status/1821684703822508484 You're currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. 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© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
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It seems like my wife and I get in the same arguments over and over. I decided I wanted on my own to make a list of the points that usually come up as criticisms of me. Here is my list:
Habitual, follows a routine
Poor dresser
Shouts at wife when angry
Short
Other, such as disgustingly overtipping
I read her the list and she came up with the hopeful idea that I list things she likes about me.
She notes that my being habitual is also a point in my favor, in that I contribute things regularly such as making morning coffee and evening drinks and getting us to bed on time.
I have fewer explosions of temper
I give her many compliments
You yourself are a miracle. I am defining "miracle" as an unlikely event, one that is complex and unlikely. I, too, am a miracle.
Let me cite a reference that might help in addition to the umpteen religious, philosophical books and collections of photos that can show miracles and help us see them for what they are. A reference that might help show the value of what and who are around us is the book by Prof. Lisa Feldman Barrett. The book is "How Emotions Are Made" by her. If books are not your thing, look her up in TED talks.
It is possible to become so aware of the miraculous in our world, of the beauty of our world, of the mystery of our world, that it is overwhelming. This is related to what you might experience when you see a little kid, moving, climbing, running. There nearby the little kid is the mother, the woman whose body forged the little person.
Your priest, pastor or rabbi may be able to help you get a good dose of powerful appreciation of who you are and what you have.
