Friday Notes (Mar 13, 2025)

Pardon me for going momentarily meta, but these three-paragraph opens (hopefully with a pithy cliffhanger punchline for the third) are sometimes a real challenge. The intent is a recognizable style that acts like a watermark.

Some opens are more challenging than others, though. The right half-dozen or so sentences comprising three thoughts (with a hoped-for haiku-like third) can take forever to whip into shape.

Friday Notes are among the hardest because there isn’t much to say other than “here we go again…”

[Remaining meta for a moment more, my instinct was to here write, “Well, that’s the last time I can use that for a lede.” But it occurs to me that it likely wasn’t the first time, so it probably won’t be the last. </meta>]

The big news — or at least the news such as it is — is that as of March 5th, I’ve officially retired from posting on Substack.

I’m not deleting my blog or profile, so my posts and Notes will remain, and I expect to continue subscribing to and reading a number of writers there. But no more posts, no more Notes, and very likely no more comments.

For one thing, for some years now I’ve been putting into better practice the notion that “no, the world doesn’t need to hear your comment about this.” The simple truth is that social media at times too much brings out the teacher/preacher/opinionist in me.

Long ago, senior year in high school, a classmate gave me the button pictured to the left.

(I found the exact button, but it was the only one Google Images came up with, though the meme gets multiple hits for tee-shirts and bumper stickers. Fortunately, this was a decent image except for a couple of annoying light reflections on the lower part. Product photography is a trick.)

It’s a large button, about five inches in diameter. The back had a pin assembly as well as a fold-out stand. A bit big to wear as a pin, but since it could be stood up like a little picture, it lived for years on various iterations of “my desk” at work.

Ironically (in the true sense of the word), I took the gift as a compliment. I read it in the sense that my opinion was valuable and worth sharing. I eventually realized that wasn’t quite how she meant it to be taken. 🙄

I’d like to think my opinions are at least somewhat worthy (and my history seems to validate that), but the key is timing and discretion. I’ve long appreciated but found difficult to implement that old phrase about how “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” (often attributed without citation to Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain, but Proverbs 17:28 says: “Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue,” so it’s an old idea).

[Of course, as with all fools, I don’t think I’m a fool…]

All of which is to say that, after engaging in social media since the BBS and USENET days (circa mid-1980s), I’m just tired of it. Not that it was ever pristine or perfect — trolls and asshats have always been a factor — but I do think the ease of access and the format of social media conspire to create something more ugly than beautiful, more destructive than constructive, more unhealthy than healthy.

Because humanity can’t help being humanity.

Anyway, I’m effectively done with Substack. My final post there was by no coincidence exactly two years to the day after my first post there. I saw an opportune exit and took it.

I will, of course, continue to express my opinions here. 😁

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I haven’t gotten around to a better means of comparing winters. It requires pulling the monthly PDF files going back to 2013 from the DNR webpage and copy-pasting them into a Python app that massages the data into a JSON format I can copy-paste to my temperatures.json file.

Since I’ve only tracked the high and low temperatures, I don’t have wind or precipitation data (but those PDF files do). Including it requires restructuring the JSON data. And I should probably rename the file. Or put it all in a SQLite database.

It’s a bit of work, is what I’m saying.

But based on temperatures, this winter isn’t a very tough one:

My sense is that it has been a rather mild one, though 2023/2024 was even milder temperature-wise. If March is as mild as February, the bar for this winter won’t change much.

Our January Thaw was quite warm, but we had that cold snap in the latter half of the month:

Then February got a bit warmer than usual mid-month:

We never got below zero, and most of the month was above +10° (which is my personal threshold below which being outside is much less fun). The average high was nearly 35°, and the average low was just below +20°.

Five days above 50° — which leads me to think my “pain index” should account for the number of especially warm days.

What’s wanted is departure from average, which I’ve seen in some weather graphs. That data is also available in the DNR PDF files. For now, I have this chart:

Which shows the current month (bold lines) against the faint lines of previous years going back to 2013. Certainly, our mid-month highs were record-breakers in that time span. It looks like our lows were on the warm side, too.

We had very little snow last month:

And almost none to speak of so far this month:

Two minor dustings that warm temperatures quickly erased. Snow depth has been essentially zero since late February.

Those two dustings were so mild that the “heat bubble” created by the metro area of the Twin Cities actually kept the front edge of the “storm” at bay:

I’ve rarely seen it that prominent, but the storm was weak.

A weather blog I follow because of the interesting charts and weather information (even though he covers weather in the Ontario region) recently posted this interesting message he found online:

Minnesota’s winter so far is among the 50 warmest in the last 131 years, which isn’t that bad (top 40%), but a large region of the west — particularly the southwest — is having the warmest “winter” ever in over a century.

Showing how weather and climate are different beasts, a few small areas in the mid-northeast had especially cold winters. (Heh. Take that Washington, D.C. Your climate of cruelty made Mother Nature freeze you out.)

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We often think of a second as a short time, but three activities in different eras of my life taught me just how long a second is:

⏱️ In the 1970s, in film school, editing movies. Film goes through the camera at 24 frames per second. When you spend an hour in the editing room agonizing over cutting on this frame or that frame (a 1/24th of a second difference), you realize a second is pretty long.

⏱️ In the 1980s, working with computers and the millions of instructions they perform in a second is stunning. Especially with assembly programming, you realize the computer spends eons waiting for each keystroke.

⏱️ In the 1990s, skydiving where the freefall part is from under 30 seconds to a little over 45 seconds. All the freefall games skydivers play last less than a minute.

⏱️ One second = one billion nanoseconds. (Light travels roughly one billion feet — 189,393.9 miles —in one second.)

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Great (or at least similar) minds: In late February, I wrote this comment on a Substack blog post about Ai:

No rage against slop but also no interest.

We need a new acronym… Ai;DR?

Because I just can’t be bothered to read, look at, or even think about Ai slop.

When reading blog posts by others, I tend to tune out immediately if I realize the post is about — or worse, created by — Ai. It has nothing to do with the quality (or any lack thereof) but everything to do with mass-produced, trivially easy, machine-produced slop. And no, I don’t think prompting an Ai is a creative endeavor.

For the record, when I say “no rage” I just mean that it’s pointless to express it, not that it doesn’t exist. (I believe we’re ultimately going to regret our Ai lust.) But one might as well spit in the sea for all the good it does.

Anyway, that same week, in the most recent issue of New Scientist, in the regular Feedback column, the author wrote:

A funny moment of synchronicity. Admittedly over an obvious thought. An illustration of “an idea whose time has come.”

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In the most recent TV Tuesday I wrote about how I enjoyed watching The Name of the Rose (1980) again. That post ran long (as those tend to do because I am, after all, a child of television), so I didn’t say too much about it.

To be honest, I forgot that I’d made some notes while watching it — something I do when a show or book particularly impresses me one way or another. In this case, because watching it again was a joy.

A note I made because I wanted to remember and think about it involves a kind of subtitle shown during the opening credits:

“A palimpsest of the novel.”

An interesting thing to call your film adaptation. A palimpsest is a reused manuscript page from the days when parchment and paper were expensive and hard to get. Writers would scrape off the ink of a used page to create a blank page. (Historians are deeply indebted to some recoverable traces that were left behind.)

By extension, a palimpsest can refer to an object made for one purpose and later reused for another. The filmmaker, Jean-Jacques Annaud, seems to be making an interesting reference to the alterations from necessity (and vanity) made in adaptations. I’ve written some about adaptations, so the reference caught my eye. An interesting allusion to the adaptation process.

📝 A key theme in the story is the evil of piety.

We see that from sectors of the Right — religion wielded as a weapon for submission. Christ weeps. I am again reminded of the phrase: “Evil doesn’t question itself.”

That said, the Left has its own, in fact slightly more insidious, form of exclusionary condemning piety. That smug assumption of being on the “right side of history”. Recent times have demonstrated the fragility of that illusion.

There is also the quote by Mahatma Gandhi: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.”

📝 There was also a line about ‘faith versus fanaticism’ that caught my eye.

It reminds me of the 1999 Kevin Smith movie Dogma where Chris Rock as Rufus, the 13th Disciple (left out of the Bible because he was Black), has this bit:

Rufus: His only real beef with mankind is the shit that gets carried out in His name. Wars, bigotry, televangelism. The big one, though, is the fractioning of all of the religions. He said mankind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it.

Bethany: You’re saying having beliefs is a bad thing?

Rufus: I just think it’s better to have ideas. I mean, you can change an idea, changing a belief is trickier. People die for it, people kill for it. The whole of existence is in jeopardy right now, because of the Catholic belief structure regarding this plenary indulgence bullshit. Bartleby and Loki, whether they know it or not, are exploiting that belief. And if they’re successful, you, me… ALL of this ends in a heartbeat, all over a belief.

Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) is the last scion — a direct descendent of one of the brothers of Jesus. Dogma is one of my favorites of Smith’s films (though it has some close contenders in his early films).

📝 Oh, the destruction of books. The “Greatest library in Christiandom.” Entropy wins again.

The Library of Alexandria; another great entropic victory. We seem to be seeing something similar in the willful destruction of important information by barbarians threatened by facts, truth and history.

I think perhaps the root of what sickens so many of us is the willful destruction of order, history, and long-established values in incredible onslaught of entropy and chaos that attempts to erase the hard-gained good achieved in this country (and in the world). It’s the going backwards that dismays.

📝 Aristotle’s book of comedy — the motivating factor in the story — is a real book, the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. That dash of real history is part of what makes the Umberto Eco story so interesting. (And the movie is faithful to the book, as adaptations usually were in those long-lost days.).

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I spent an enjoyable weekend dog-sitting Bentley and will leave you with some cute photos. Along with her mom and me, she’s getting up there in years:

Lotta white fur, and she prefers much shorter walks now (but will still take as many as offered). As always, she’s 100% a sweetie and my favorite dog.

I looked over one evening and saw she’d found a new way to sleep:

Part of what’s so great about her is how much she makes us smile and laugh. Usually unintentionally but I do think she has a sense of humor and can be a tease sometimes.

Since this winter started, every morning I’ve been throwing a handful of raw unsalted nuts outside my patio door for the local squirrels. I stopped while I had Bentley because I thought she might freak them out. I’m trying to get them used to the daily handout and maybe eventually handfeeding.

Then BentleyMom mentioned a squirrel that every day comes to peek in the window at Bentley — who only bothers to move her eyes. I know she lost interest in chasing squirrels or birds some years ago. I figure she realized she’d never catch them and chose mature dignity.

So, I threw some nuts out, and sure enough:

She just stared. And the squirrel stared right back. 😂

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Stay dignified, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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