Gods in Four Colors

Yesterday we went for groceries (a sign of partial recovery) and as part of the shopping I put more Kleenex in our cart—we've gone through a lot!—including one of those little 6 packs. C asked me why I didn't just put some Kleenex from a bigger box into a freezer bag and carry that. I said that I preferred the prepackaged form, and she basically shrugged and said everyone had their own tastes.

As we walked out to the car it hit me: She carries a purse, which has space for a freezer bag (though it's often crammed). I have pockets, which don't, but which those little packets are exactly sized to fit.

Not "bias" in the sense of hostility, but a difference in how it's natural for men and women to think, based on their affordances.

"Sick? Is that what it is?"

"Yes. I was sick once, about thirty years ago. It was much like this."

—Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

On Wednesday, I started having premonitory respiratory symptoms of what turned into a full infection of some sort. C has followed, about a day behind me (of course we share all our microfauna). I won't rehearse all the medical effects, which are always tedious to discuss except for diagnostic purposes. But it's been a while since our last illness, so I had forgotten what being sick is like qualitatively: First, the overall exhaustion, which makes any minor task fatiguing; for example, our dirty dishes have piled up, being washed only as essential for eating meals. Second, and most surprising, the reduced appetite: Not merely that I don't seem to need as much food, even when a little fevered, or even that I don't have much desire for it, but that I actually find it an effort to eat, and at about half of a normal meal it becomes Sisyphean. In fact, for the first day and a half I ate nearly nothing, which perhaps tells me what anorexics struggle with feeling all the time. And perhaps more disturbing than either, a sensible loss of cognitive functioning: I feel as if I had shed at least a standard deviation on the IQ bell curve, if not more.

A few minutes ago, I sent my final edit of GURPS Ring of Fire in to Steve Jackson Games. This is a supplement based on Eric Flint's 1632 and its many, many sequels. I spent part of today checking the spelling and grammar, and more of it on making a few final revisions—for example, adjusting the prices of some gear, and adding a list of suitable GURPS character traits to a whole bunch of major characters. Now it goes into other hands than mine. No idea when it will come out, but I think it's ready to do so.

Back in the 1960s, one of the books I read from the city library was a volume by Lessley Conger about her experiences reading various classics, from Vergil to Thoreau, which I remembered fondly, in a desultory way. Just lately I became curious and managed to track down the title, Adventures of an Ordinary Mind, and purchase a copy, which I've now added to the list of books I've reread after a lapse of half a century. I found some passages that I still remembered, notably the one where Conger quotes Crito's responses in one of Plato's dialogues, which uniformly express agreement with whatever Socrates has just said, and then envisions Socrates protesting "No, now wait a minute" as she steamrollers over him and disagrees with everything he says (the first place I encountered the "Yes, Socrates!" trope); but I found some equally striking passages that I hadn't remembered at all, and may not have especially noticed in my teens; for example, the start of "If you get to Heaven before I do":

. . . Please ask the travel agency up there to assign me a different guide. I know that Beatrice is ineffably beautiful, incredibly virtuous, and the absolute epitome of perfection in womanhood—and I have a feeling I wouldn't like her much. It's the way she goes around talking to Dante in the tone "a mother uses to a delirious child." I can just hear her.

Smug female monster.

Yesterday, as we were getting ready to run errands, I spotted what looked like a dog out in the middle of the grassy area to the east of our parking structure—one that's surrounded by duplexes on all sides but ours. I didn't see a leash or a human being, so my first thought was that someone had let their dog run loose. But I looked more closely, and it didn't look quite like a dog: The coat was an unusual, slightly tawny color, the build was gaunt, and the ears seemed unusually large. When C joined me in the car, she agreed with my guess: that we had a coyote sitting out on the grass in the middle of the day, bold as brass, not intimidated at all by our watching it, though happily it didn't show any inclination to approach us. C saw it walk off between two of the buildings, approaching the street on the other side.

I hadn't known we had such visits; up to now I've only seen squirrels, rabbits, and various birds. We'll have to be more watchful when we go out; a coyote is large enough to be a potential threat. And I'm glad we keep Macavity indoors.

In an article I just copy edited, the authors make the following statement:

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

When I read that, it says to me, first, that the authors are saying that they don't know of any problematic relationships, not that they don't have any (how carefully did they examine the issue?); and second, that they don't have relationships that visibly influenced their work. That is, they're hedging the statement so thoroughly that they don't actually commit themselves to anything! "Yes, we were influenced by getting paid by so and so, but nobody suspected that, so it's okay."

The thing is, this isn't peculiar to these particular authors. I've seen the exact phrasing over and over in articles originating from China; it seems as if it's either a dictated by the Chinese government, or passed around and copied among Chinese authors. It makes me think of the old stereotypes about "face" cultures. In our current climate of widespread scientific fraud it's a bit worrisome.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a terrible crime. But I'm sorry to say that it's not a surprising one.

More than half a century ago, when I was attending the University of California at San Diego, I wrote occasional opinion pieces for the campus papers—not only the conservative paper, but the official student paper and even occasionally the leftist paper. One of the opinions I expressed was criticism of Third College (as it was called then), a college devoted to education of nonwhite students and to the idea of collective racial identity. This led to one of the students there, a black man, threatening to "beat the shit out of [me]." At one point, he and I confronted each other, and he told me that if I said anything negative about Third College, that might inspire some white racist to attack a black woman, and it would be my fault—so I had to be silenced. There is the exact precursor to the rationales for murdering people on the right (that loosely defined category) that we see now. I suppose I would have survived being beaten up, but the threat of violence was none the less real.

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that one of UCSD's senior faculty was Herbert Marcuse, creator of the concept of "repressive tolerance," which said that allowing people to criticize the welfare state (for example) was by itself an act of repression, and by implication that censoring any such incorrect views was liberatory.

I wrote about being threatened, and submitted it as an opinion piece to the Triton Times, and they actually ran it in the place of their official editorials, under the fitting title "Won't Get Fooled Again." I'm sorry that it didn't influence more people. A lot of people seem to be eager to get fooled again.

On Thursday, 21 August, Heart performed at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.  C spotted the upcoming event and suggested that we attend it, so I bought tickets. This was the first event I'd been to that wanted digital tickets instead of printed ones, so I installed the necessary app on my phone, and was pleased to find that it worked smoothly.

The concert time that was listed was 7:30-9:00 PM, so we left at 4:30, figuring that would give us time enough to drive to Kansas City, have dinner, and get to the venue. In fact, we ran into bad rush hour traffic and were a bit worried, and this got worse when we had difficulty finding parking near the restaurant. We sat down to dinner a bit past six, half an hour later than I had expected. We went to the Jerusalem Cafe, where we had eaten previously, including once with out of town friends who were visiting. I had lamb kebabs and C had kifta, both of which were very good, and we were done eating not long after 6:30—fortunately the restaurant wasn't crowded and the service was prompt.

It turned out that there was an opening act we hadn't seen listed: Todd Rundgren was on stage from 7:30 to 8:30. C enjoyed his music; I found it tolerable but not interesting. It didn't help that the sound quality was muddy. Then there was a half hour intermission, and Heart actually performed from 9:00 to 10:30. So we were late getting home.

Yesterday was a primary election to select candidates for the Lawrence city commission. A few weeks earlier, the Lawrence Journal-World ran articles on the biographies and the platforms of the candidates, which I had gone over and used to rank them. That was really my only data source, as hardly any of the candidates had Web pages (in 2025!). The morning of the election, C went over the candidates and we discussed them.

For me, the candidates fell into four strata:

Good choices: Steve Jacob was opposed to city tax increases, and also to giving special tax breaks to large organizations, which he described as "government picking favorites"; he wanted to make it easier to open a business. It didn't surprise me that he was a Libertarian. Peter Shenouda talked about his experience in Egypt with government that doesn't serve the citizens, and wanted to focus on crime.

Tolerable choices: Alex Kerr wanted to prioritize essential services. He was an interesting candidate, being a high school senior aged 18 who had researched how to run for office. Bart Littlejohn was a former city mayo who talked about encouraging business growth in Lawrence. Bob Schumm emphasized keeping the city's budget restrained by extending capital expenses over a longer term (10 years instead of 5). Courtney Shipley wanted the University of Kansas to show more commitment to supporting joint city/university ventures with its own funds.

Steve Jackson Games has announced the playtest for my forthcoming book, GURPS Ring of Fire, a guide to the world of Eric Flint's 1632 and its many sequels. The files will be sent out on 1 August and the discussion will begin on 4 August. We'll be looking both for workable game mechanics and for accuracy to the setting as presented in the novels and shorter fiction. I've been waiting for this to be possible for a long time, but it looks as if we finally have everything lined up.