Rainy day loopie.

Woke up to thunder and rain. My cat hid under my desk like a scared puppy, but like a nice puppy comes out when I called her. (Who was the person that observed that a good cat acts like an average dog? Most dogs would never come out when they're rattled by a thunderstorm.)

I took a bus to my therapist, only to discover the appointment was cancelled. Yes, they called me. The message was on my phone, but my phone was off and being recharged. They also called my Skype, but by the time they did my computer was off and I was getting ready to leave.


I had to bus it back. By the time I arrived, an antihistamine I took earlier began hit me like an uppercut. I tried to type something for this blog, but my eyelids fell.

So, I allowed myself to sleep it off, along with most of the day. I really have to think carefully about taking another antihistamine. I have to do my writing, and then I have to somehow get my cooking and vacuuming done.

Wow! It seems like a lot has happened since I last wrote. I'll comment on a few things:













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 Boston Bombing

I just listened to the news conference. It sounds like they really don't have a lot. I managed to watch the security footage, at least some of it (website is being clobbered).

Now the FBI is going to get a million tips of from people who think they recognize these guys.

Being a novelist, I can say real investigations never go the way they do in novels. The problem with combing through photos for clues is never knowing exactly which detail is "a clue." It isn't so much perception as it is noise filtering.

People say the US had all the details needed to predict the Pearl Harbor attack. There were four Congressional Hearings about this, and whether there was a conspiracy by the Roosevelt administration to suppress them.

Problem is, it was impossible to tell what the details were clues to, and which of the many details in Japanese-US relations were important. Therefore, the clues were only there in retrospect. Without reference to the future, it would have been a miracle to predict an attack was pending.

This is a situation that's almost impossible to convey in a book, of all the noise in a crowd scene, how to do you narrow down what's important.  In a crowd where every other person carries a backpack?

I'm thinking that the FBI knows this and did a lot of winnowing before they released these images. They called these guys suspects. I'm thinking that photo-recognition would give them enough evidence to make an arrest and search. If the photos are the only evidence the Feds get, I wouldn't vote for conviction.
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Roger Ebert

I promised to continue my eulogy of him. 

The Internet remade Roger Ebert's career. He was already known as a popular critic, something that had previously been a contradiction in terms. With the Internet, he also became known as a blogger. He might not have strayed from his love of movies (he wrote 306 reviews in 2012, for goodness sake) but his other views became widely known.

Through his blogs and tweets, people got to know other aspects about him. He had a lot in common with Michael Moore, who attributes Ebert with making his career. Moore said he was on unemployment when Roger Ebert "discovered" his first film, Roger and Me, and actually named it as one of his five favorite films for that year (I remember this).  For those who missed it, the documentary was about Moore trying to get to a face-to-face meeting with GM's the President Roger Smith who shut down the auto plants in Flint, Michigan, Moore's hometown. The movie shows a lot of things "in passing." The devastating effect on the citizens of Flint, the measures people were taking to get by, how the wealthy were completely detached and out of touch with it.

Horribly enough, the film seems to be even more pertinent and even prescient to the 21st century. 

In fact, Ebert and Moore looked alike. Because their backgrounds and socio-political views were similar, I got the distinct impression that Ebert identified with Moore in that documentary. I won't go as far to say that Moore was doing what Ebert would have like to have done . . . but I'll say that the choice would have been a close second.

Like myself and Moore, Ebert was raised as a Roman Catholic. He had something interesting to say about the church in one of his final blog entries:

I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable. My beliefs were formed long ago from good-hearted Dominican sisters, and many better-qualified RCs might disagree . . .

That's far more even-handed about the Catholic Church than I've ever been. But he was willing to take any excuse to be kind to people, and to me, that scores a lot.

Post Internet, his prestige continued to rise until 2002 when he was diagnosed with thyroid and salivary cancer. What was so impressive was how he continued to have such a good attitude, work and enjoy so much of life (and movies, among other things) while he went through cancer operations, chemo and radiation treatments and was obviously in a lot of pain.

In his book, Life Itself: A Memoir, where he knows he's facing death, he said:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. . . .

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

 And so he continued to expand his work with such enthusiasm because it was the only form of afterlife he acknowledged.

I never suspected in 1979 who Roger Ebert would turn out to be, or that I would continue to even recognize his name over thirty years later. I never thought that I never looked thought there would be a day where I would mourn his death. I just knew I cheered for him over Gene Siskel, and looked to him to validate movies that I loved. (It disappointed me terribly when he called Brian DePalma's Carrie a "crude movie," but said Sissy Spacek gave a great performance.) However, I could say, if he and Siskel had a two-hour Sunday show discussing movies, I would have never missed it.
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Back to work

I also never know how long a blog entry is going to take. I still have to do my "serious" writing of the day, on my novel. Checking the time, it looks like cooking might be postponed until tomorrow, except that does leave me with the problem on what to eat. All the "fast food" in my place is already gobbled.