/reader

Caleb is courting the ladies. Much watch T.V.

Notes:

• Thank you Kiki for sharing the video.
• Post Title: Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.

— Kevin Townsend, The Culture Survey (The Atlantic, May 4, 2024)

(Music starts at 0:40 seconds)

(Like this track, listen to Movement 6 here.)

The smallest raindrops are around two thousandths of an inch across. These baby drops are spherical because the surface tension of the liquid squeezes the total surface area to be as compact as possible. Physicists find it strange that people often draw raindrops with a pointy end at the top, because the surface tension makes sure that there are no sharp corners—they’re all smoothed out incredibly quickly. Raindrops never have points.  

As more water vapor condenses on to the drops, they grow. Large drops fall faster than small ones, so the larger ones start to catch up with the smaller drops beneath them, bumping into them and coalescing to form a bigger droplet. Once the drops grow to more than 1/25th of an inch across, they start to flatten on the underside and become rounder on the top to form a shape often known as a “hamburger bun.” The bigger they get, the flatter the bun.

The real dance is in the beautiful fluid movement of the droplet shapes. When two drops collide, the water pulses and curls until the shape settles down. But the new combined droplet may also shatter immediately, sometimes stretching out into a sheet before bursting into a shower of tiny droplets. The cycle repeats itself—catch-up and coalesce, catch-up and break—on and on until the drops reach the ground. The harder the rain, the more often droplets bump into each other and the more frantic the dance.

The mix of raindrop sizes hitting my windshield was the outcome of this tussle between the drops fusing and splitting in the sky above. The more that coalescence dominates, the larger the drops get. In warm rain in the tropics, raindrops can reach a third of an inch across (although one-tenth of an inch is much more typical in most places).
Each droplet is also dancing on its own, between the interactions with others. Droplets frequently oscillate, pulsing rhythmically at a rate that depends on their size, and the bigger the droplet, the more pronounced these gyrations are. A drop one-tenth of an inch across can wobble more than 200 times every second, and the wobbling not only slows it down slightly but also makes it drift sideways as it falls.

So the next time you’re sheltering underneath an umbrella in heavy rain, make the best of it by thinking of yourself as having a front seat at a natural spectacle instead of an unwanted inconvenience in your day. Wishing the rain away won’t make it stop, so you might as well imagine the dance up above and enjoy it.

 

The question is why go here? It’s a Sunday, God’s Day (for all you believers. And then me, only in case I need Him / Her at the End). It’s a quiet peaceful morning, and I sit pondering, WTH is possessing me to go here?

95% of my Blog followers are female, and they stick together like a wolf pack.

I’m white, old, and male, nearly extinct, at least that’s what I keep hearing — and that’s exactly what I feel each time I get up and my bones groan.

BUT, at some point, one has to stand on principle. Enough getting pushed around by all these Women.

Case 1: It all started at Home. You don’t stay married for 40 (?) years without having a life changing dispute or two over household responsibilities. I would say I own about half-ish or so of the HH stuff (with a handful of exclusions incl. lawn cutting, edging and weeding, washing/vacuuming both cars, making the bed, doing the laundry and folding, dishwasher unloading, ironing, vacuuming & dusting the entire house, bathroom cleaning, grocery shopping, paying the bills, and anything and everything involving household repairs.) Yes, Susan owns all of these exclusions, and I unfortunately carry the overwhelming burden of the rest. So a dispute of how to correctly load the dishwasher started years ago, and the war of wills continues. (Apparently this is an American issue, so we’re not alone.)

Susan cares (deeply) about how dishes are stacked in the dishwasher, and there’s a correct way according to some expert on Oprah, or God knows who. Meanwhile, I, don’t give a sh*t how they’re stacked. Susan’s given up on “coaching” and now, each and every time she unloads the dishwasher, she emits a sigh that can be heard two neighbors down the street. And I, who can’t resist any skirmish, let ‘er fly (after another one of her Sighs), “WOULD YOU JUST LIKE ME TO LEAVE THE DISHES ON THE COUNTER, OR BETTER YET ON THE KITCHEN TABLE? I’M GOOD EITHER WAY. JUST LET ME KNOW.” Go ahead Ladies, pile on. You mean you can’t take a few seconds and do it right. And my answer would be NO, absolutely f-ing, NOT. No way, not a chance.

Case 2: This popped recently and I’ll leave out the details for self-preservation. And to avoid our house being fire-bombed by the Zealots for being a conscientious objector. The request, coming from a she, her, hers was for me to respect the use of Pronouns. And again, Man of average-ish IQ can’t resist flying headlong into a skirmish (dare I say a pointless one that is a for-certain lose-lose outcome, and worse, I KNOW IT and DO IT ANYWAY). This Man, way way on the wrong side of 50, who struggles to ensure his shoes are tied and his pants are on with pockets facing outward and frontward, the answer is simple: NO. Respect for all people: YES. But this, THIS, is beyond MY capacity. NO.

Case 3: No need for you all to know when this case was initiated, except grudge remains in force. Sawsan started in on me because I failed to know which way the Earth rotates. (And she wouldn’t let it go after I said “who gives a sh*t which way it turns. As long as it does what it’s supposed to do.”) To underscore my point, I followed with: “Just let me know before it stops so I can snatch the plate off the table when I’m eating my pasta.” She found no humor in this, not at all. Now, Old, white, male is getting scolded by a youngster (who speaks multiple languages, writes poetry, has advanced degrees in Genetics, DNA repair & mutagenesis – whatever the hell all this is.) While she’s blabbing on, it hits me. She thinks I can be taught, that I will listen, it will register and she’ll do her world good deed for the day. I’m mean my mast head on this blog is Live & Learn, which is largely a con to attract all these wonderful women followers. Blah, Blah, Blah, she continues. I’m listening to her go on and I mean nothing, ZERO is registering. Not one cell of this bio-sh*t is sinking in. I cut her off and terminate the conversation.

She’s thinks I’m an idiot (OLD, white, male, thick in the head). And because she thinks I’m an idiot, she disengages from my Blog for more than 2 years because she says: “I’m going off grid to focus on important things in my life.” Little did I know that “off-grid” meant just off-grid on my blog. Wow.

Then, this same Sawsan comes flying back into the picture, with the she/her/hers Posse stating that my Blog has lost its way, with few to no posts in weeks, no original content, and they might as well be watching TikTok for better entertainment.

I mean how much crap can one take before it’s Enough?

Case 4: So, I wondered, why are all these smart people and especially smart Women (She/Her/Hers) following this Clown Car? Or is it an unbearable rubbernecking interest to see how I manage to get through one day after another?

And then no sooner did this thought land, in comes a text from Sawsan: “I see that you have someone else exposing you for what you are, so I can sit back, relax and watch. Hehehehehehe. I retire and give her the throne. She is the Queen.”

“Exposing me for what i am.”

Wow. Let that sink in for a moment.

So there we have it. Sawsan has given up on me, her Project. She quit. Something doesn’t work, just dump it.

And she’s crowned her Successor: Cara Denison. That’s her up there in the photo. Another daily morning walker at Cove Island Park. Married to Barry, Mother of 3 wonderful boys, and she’s a 4th Grade School Teacher.

A 4th Grade School Teacher has taken over for Sawsan. Sawsan believes that’s where we need to start, 4th grade.

Look at her in the photo. Just look at her. Laying on the walkway at Cove Island Park taking hundreds of selfies to get just the right one to post on Facebook and Instagram.

Sad Sawsan, sad, to put Junior here in the line of fire.

Get her successor ready, stack up your Women instructors, this one won’t take long.

 In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote:

“Such memorization is a lost art, and much substance was lost with it. In high school and college, I used to memorize hours of stage dialogue and long passages from the Bible, which were a great comfort to me in times of stress. These days, only the stress remains. Most nights, staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?’”

For those of you not fluent in Fleetwood Mac, that last sentence is a lyric from the song “Second Hand News.”

— Frank Bruni, from “The Love of Sentences” (NY Times, May 2, 2024)

The only difference between a lake with waves and a lake without waves is the wind. A lake would be calm except for the wind. We would be calm if not for our thinking. We can tell how much of a turbulent effect the wind has on the lake by the size and strength of the waves. We can tell how much effect our thinking is having on us by the size and strength of our feelings. The wind is invisible. We can only feel the effects of it. Most of the thinking that affects us is also invisible. Our feelings are the only thing that tells us something is amiss.

– Jack Pransky, Somebody Should Have Told Us!: Simple Truths for Living

Notes:

• Video: DK. April 22, 2024 @ 5:30 am at Cove Island Park.
• Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
• Inspired by: “It is exhausting, dizzying. It is good to feel all sorts of things, even the bad things that scare you, because they, too, push you in the direction of your convictions. — Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)
• Also inspired by: “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press in 2012)