Inevitable, Dreadful, Unsurprising

Busy Calamondin: issuing fruit in spite of it all

The inevitable documentary about the multiple failures leading to the tragedies of Lion Air Flight 610 in October, 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March, 2019, where 346 people lost their lives, is playing on Netflix right now.

There was a fault in the software in the new Boeing 737 MAX that could cause a catastrophic malfunction surpassing the skills of even the most capable pilots ... and while the fault was predicted to happen rarely, Boeing knew but neglected to mention that the likelihood was greater than industry standards. 

So, the MAXes went into the air. Those in charge waited until the second dreadful event in March before they grounded the planes. 

It's unsurprising that Boeing blamed the crashes on the pilots and the airlines they flew for. The documentary blames Boeing's corporate decision to switch from a culture of safety to a laser focus on shareholder profit. 

After an enquiry found Boeing culpable, the Justice Department agreed not to prosecute. In return, Boeing paid $2.5 billion in penalties and compensation, which is small compared to what Boeing used to make in a year. And nowhere big enough for the families looking for accountability for the people who were killed. 

Also dreadful, and unsurprising, is Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of the Ukraine. It may happen, as it did with Boeing, that existing institutions will catch up with this global criminal and make him pay. But, inevitably, innocent people will lose their lives and there will be no accountability.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

Ashbridges Bay icy bush.

Upper Limit Problems

     

The hemlock tree in our back yard has reached its upper limit in snow burden, more this winter than we've seen in a decade.

***

In the late 70's, during the year I took off between high school and university, I worked as a cook at Earl's, a family-run restaurant in the plaza by the Dairy Queen in Trenton. 

The town bailiff would eventually change the restaurant's locks, but before that happened, two waitresses and I killed time one afternoon sitting around the staff table, smoking and gossiping. The place was deserted, and had been for hours. 

One of the waitresses played at stacking acrylic menu card holders on the table. The holders once advertised daily specials, which Earl's no longer offered. I joined in. It became a reverse game of Jenga. The higher the tower grew, the more committed we were to its future. We had to stand on chairs to put the last two holders in place.

We were amazed our tower had grown so tall and seemed so sturdy. We'd done it without a plan, just a common objective. Our shared sense of accomplishment was palpable. 

The other waitress, who'd watched us build the tower but had not joined in, stepped towards us, maybe, I thought, to marvel at what we had done. Instead, she pulled on one of the holders at the bottom of the stack, and collapsed the whole thing, clattering, into a heap.

I could not believe what she did. She said she liked loud noises. She absolutely had destroyed the mood. Disgusted with her and mourning the lost moment, I returned to the kitchen to prep for whatever few customers might show up for their evening meal.

***

Although I'm telling this story now, I swear that, for more than forty years, I'd never thought of it.

What hauled it out of the deepest recesses of memory was Gay Hendricks's The Big Leap. I'm reading it for my course.

Hendricks is a psychologist. He provides therapy for rich, successful people, who, despite their success are not reaching their full potential.

People fail to reach their full potential, their full happiness, their "Zone of Genius" (Hendricks's term) because long ago, sometimes beyond the reach of memory, people learned when they were most impressionable that they didn't deserve to be happy, because they were flawed, or a burden, or had some other failing that the people in their lives (parents, friends, strangers on the subway) took the time to tell them about.

This feeling of not deserving happiness is called an Upper Limit Problem and often shows itself through self-defeating behaviour. You know the kind. Everything's going great. You've achieved something, you're doing well. You've built that impossibly tall tower of acrylic menu card holders, and then someone comes along -- usually you -- and brings the whole thing down.

And sometimes your upper limit problems make you wreck things for other people.  

I have to admit I'm not clear on why this book is assigned reading for my course, but I think I finally understand why that girl trashed our tower.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

The City of Toronto: where vaccination has become part of the brand.

Another Paradox

Northern cardinal: Ashbridges Bay, February 2022

To start the conversation, a guest for dinner on Thursday night asked "should Canada send lethal weapons to Ukraine?"

"Aren't all weapons lethal?" said another guest.

"No, not all weapons," said Bruce. "There's rubber bullets, mace ..."

The talk went from there. I didn't have a lot to contribute, because these days I've been staying away from the news ... news about the threat of war in Europe, about this century's antebellum American politics, about the convoy protest. I'm avoiding reading these stories because they just make me anxious. 

Instead, I've been reading fiction. I mentioned Ted Chiang a few posts ago. His story collection Exhalation includes "The Great Silence", a poignant fable narrated by an endangered Puerto Rican parrot noting the irony of humans destroying its home to build a giant telescope to search for signs of nonhuman intelligence .... 

The narrator mentions a famous African Grey parrot named Alex. A human researcher working with Alex demonstrated scientifically that the parrot not only understood the words he spoke, he also understood abstract concepts like colour and shape. Alex died suddenly. His last words to his human friend were, "You be good. I love you." 

Chiang's parrot narrator seems to feel the same way about the Fermi Paradox as I do, insofar as we both find it odd that humans direct their curiosity into the heavens when there are so many rare and precious beings right here who we all should try to get to know better. Before we completely destroy them. Before we destroy ourselves.

You be good. I love you.

Karen

Marna Clarke's last masterwork, framed and hung in pride of place.

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 231 2/6

To weigh in on one of the world's least salient debates, I always start Wordle with the same word. That word is FRESH ... because it's what came to mind first and, as an after-the-fact rationalization, I can claim that three of its five letters are among the most commonly occurring in the English language. But that's where my strategy stops. I usually take around four tries to guess the word. I got today's word in two tries because of pure, dumb, luck. 

Speaking of dumb luck, as I train to become a book coach, I read books about the writing craft. At some point each of these books warns of the infinitesimal chance that anyone writing will ever get published. It's ironic, then, that they are all written by published authors who are, by their own admission, lottery winners, and their books are about where they bought their lottery tickets.  

On Writing, by Stephen King, is a case in point. I'm reading it because everyone in my new community of book coaches has read it, so I figure I should know what they know about what Stephen King knows about writing, even though what everyone really wants to know is how to become as rich and successful as Stephen King. 

On the topic of writing, King cribs most of his advice from Strunk and White, the guys who wrote The Elements of Style, which truly is the best book ever written about writing well.

As for becoming rich and successful, King's after-the-fact rationalization is that writers should read a lot, write a lot and stay married.  

The rest, as I've said, is just pure, dumb, luck. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

 

How I Imagine it Went

A jaunty chapeau for his birthday, April, 2019.

This is how I imagine it went. Ken woke in a comfortable bed under crisp white sheets. The gentle light of early morning encouraged him to open his eyes. He pushed the covers off and stood up. He felt great. He figured someone had been busy while he slept, because they finally removed the catheter that had been bothering him for weeks. He couldn't find his glasses, but he could see all right without them. They'd taken his hearing aid too. The birdsong outside the window was loud enough for him to hear without it. 

 

Birdsong? Window? Where was he? 

“You’re home,” someone said. 

 

Marna put her hand on his shoulder and turned him around. She kissed him and gave him a hug. 

 

"Everyone’s waiting for you."

 

And then Kenneth R. Clarke went with his wife of fifty years to reunite with all the other people who, ever since Marna passed away in 2016, had loomed largest in his mind: his sister Arlie who’d cared for him after his mother died young, his brothers Stan and Gordon, his father Fred.  

 

To us it looked like Ken departed peacefully in his sleep. To Ken, it was the best reunion ever.

Crocs for Christmas, December 2019.

His obituary is in the Kitchener Waterloo Record, which you can see here.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

March 21, 2009
Ken, Marna, Bruce & Jeff Clarke

       

March 21 2009
Ken and Arlie

Put Me In Coach - Part II

Doug Ford has hit rock bottom. Even the strip clubs have turned against him.

In 2017, when I was still working, I wrote "with my dwindling stock of days remaining, I need to figure out how to keep my world full of wonder."

As I enter my third year of it, I can report that retirement doesn't hold a lot of wonder, but that might be because no one expects it to. 

Everyone knows that retired people have a short list of things to do. They travel, golf, and go to medical appointments. They may also have grandchildren to take care of. 

When they’re around eighty, so goes the story, if they’ve managed to make it that far, retired people have nothing left to offer the world and so fully commit to their slide to the grave. Then they die. 

I don't see a lot in the news about retirement as a time of renewal and expansion, a whole new opportunity to take risks, to change perceptions, to learn from the generations coming up. 

Fiction about old people, when anyone troubles to write it, is at best about redemption, at worst about regret, and only very rarely about fresh starts. 

Despite the overweening societal indifference to people past retirement age, I have decided to make a fresh start. 

I'm enrolled in a course to become a book coach. 

What's a book coach you want to know? I'll explain later.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Some bergara daisies to brighten things a bit.

Free Will, Privacy and Other Poorly Defined Argument Tent Poles

Spadina Avenue logic puzzle: two BBQ and two pizza shops ...
what belongs in the place that's for lease? 

Whenever I hear someone going on about free will or privacy, I wonder what it is exactly that they are talking about.

Free will, I suppose, is this cherished notion that tells us we must be masters of our own fate. The opposite of free will is predetermination -- the allegedly soul-crushing state where we have no agency in our lives.

Ted Chiang -- a brilliant sci-fi writer who has been around for years but whom I've just discovered -- wrote a compact tale about a gadget that knows before you do that you are going to press its button. A light will flash exactly one second before you press. You can't push the button in less, or more, than one second. You can't pretend that you're going to press the button and then change your mind. The gadget knows whether you are going to press the button or not. In Chiang's story, the effect of this gadget on the world is it saps people of their will to live. They start to falter, fade and eventually die, because the gadget proves to them there's no such thing as free will. 

Chiang as a writer has considerable gifts, but it's not absolutely clear to me what his point is. I am personally surprised that anyone believes that free will is anything other than one of those fancy notions -- like justice -- that people put up as lace curtains between us and the utter arbitrariness of life.

It strikes me that a better opposite to free will would be chaos. So the gadget in the story would sometimes flash, sometimes not, and sometimes do a third thing you were not expecting at all, no matter what you did.

Speaking of curtains: privacy, that old-fashioned notion that your personal space is something you protect and control. 

People who fret about their privacy these days also post on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, have a YouTube channel for their lists of favourite songs and movies, and find their worth as a human being in the online reactions they get to these things. 

They worry that the data they ceaselessly, compulsively generate for social media companies could be used against them somehow ... like in targeted marketing campaigns. 

There's likely something to be wary of as humans upload their personalities to the cloud, but it doesn't seem like privacy is it.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

This is Lester. He's waiting for Sylvia to throw a stick.
This shot has nothing to do with today's post.