Yesterday I didn’t post because I had one of my periodic, mystery illnesses. The symptoms were weakness, diarrhea, and vomiting. This time, I did not go into the emergency ward because I knew that I would get better in a few hours, especially after taking four 10mg hydrocortisone pills.
As I no longer have a pituitary gland, that is meant to supply me with the adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) my body no longer produced on its own. Apparently, when I get one of those episodes—with or without diarrhea and vomiting—it usually takes six to eight hours to return to normal.
Was it food poisoning that caused my illness? Was it low blood pressure (which was lower than usual when I measured it in the evening)? Was it high blood sugar (which was in fact running high when I measured it in the late afternoon)?
The thought suddenly came to me that we are so used to living in a digital world with its clearly demarcated boundaries that we tend to forget that we are primarily an analogue entity. My doctor thinks that what causes these incidents is an interaction involving the hormonal, circulatory, and digestive systems. Whatever the condition(s) that cause me to go out of whack, the treatment is the same: Hydrocortisone or Prednisone. Or 100mg Solu-Cortef injected into my bloodstream.
I will probably never find out what causes these bodily crises. I would be willing to bet that it may not even be determinable from an autopsy.
The health of the body is a mystery. I just have to be careful about eating, sleeping, pushing my body beyond its limits, and everything else. At the same time, I have to maintain a certain sense of humor about what is an endless conundrum.
Strange things happen when, through laziness or ignorance, one too readily accepts a slanted view of history. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like talking about the Second World War, mainly because the West’s participation was not what brought down Hitler and the German military machine.
In fact, until D-Day, the United States and England were not even confronting the Nazis where they lived, except in the form of bombing raids. On the ground, we started somewhat late in North Africa and then moved to Sicily and the Italian mainland, where we slogged our way up the boot of Italy.
We might not want to admit it, but it was predominately the Soviet Union that put the kibosh on Hitler. For Stalin, the war was an existential horror. If his forces didn’t hold, Russia was in danger of being wiped off the map.
According to the Percy Schramm Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht: 1940—1945: 8 Bde. 1961, 68% of Wehrmacht deaths were on the Eastern Front, more than double of all other Army deaths in Europe, North Africa, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and the Balkans combined. The figures for wounded German soldiers was even more spectacular: 82% of all wounded were on the Eastern Front.
I do not denigrate the bravery and lost lives among the Americans and British; it’s just that the Soviet Union was the main theater of the war. Recognizing this, the Russians refer to the conflict as the Great Patriotic War. It was at places like Stalingrad and the Kursk-Orel Salient where the Nazis paid the ultimate price.
I have always been fond of reading collections of short stories by my favorite authors. For some writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov, and Edgar Allan Poe, that’s pretty much all there is. But for great novelists like Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner the stories serve to fill out their work with an extra dimension of conciseness and sharpness.
Paul Theroux is for me a special case. I have been reading (and re-reading) his travel books for half a century, but it is only recently that I have turned to his fiction: both novels and stories. The following is a complete short short story from his collection Mr Bones: Twenty Stories. It is part of a microcollection of short short stories called “Long Story Short.”
A Real Break
Mother and Grace—let’s just say they weren’t best buddies. So as the elder daughter, and single, I began to look after Mother when she began to fail. And she was a wreck. Got confused in stores, left the oven on, real muddled about time. I made her stop driving, so of course I had to take the wheel. God, the hills. I wrote Grace that I was moving in with Mother. The big Polk Street house had been in Mother’s family for years; Mother was lost in it. Grace understood completely and said she was relieved. She had been in a Minnesota convent since taking her vows, though she sometimes spent extended periods in Nevada and Florida as a hospital worker, “and doing spiritual triage too,” on Indian reservations. We seldom heard from her, but Mother sent her money now and then. Because of the strictness of her religious order, she was never able to visit us in San Francisco. “And just as well,” Mother said.
It got so that Mother could only manage with my assistance. I resigned from my secretarial job, lost my retirement and my medical plan, and became Mother’s full-time caregiver. I updated Grace on Mother’s condition and mentioned the various challenges we faced. Grace wrote saying that she was praying for us, and she asked specific questions because these infirmities were to be specified in the prayers, or intercessions, as she called them.
About three years into my caregiving, Grace called. She said, “Why not take a few months off? My superior has given me special dispensation to look after Mom for a while. It’ll be a break for me. And you can have a real break. Maybe go to Europe.”
Mother wasn’t overjoyed, but she could see that I was exhausted. Grace flew in. It was an emotional reunion. I hardly recognized her—not because she had gotten older, though she had. But she was dressed so well and in such good health. She even mentioned how I looked stressed and could obviously do with some time off.
I went on one of those special British Airways fares, a See Scotland package. It was just the break I needed, or so I thought.
Long story short, when I got back to San Francisco, the Polk Street house was being repainted by people who said they were the new owners. Everything I possessed was gone. Mother was in a charity hospice. She had been left late one night at the emergency room of St Francis Hospital. There was no money in Mother’s bank account. Everything she had owned had been sold. I saw Mother’s lawyer. He found a number for Grace—the 702 area code, a cell phone. Nevada.
“I’m glad you called,” Grace said. I could hear music in the background and a man talking excitedly, a fishbowl babble, aqueous party voices. I started to cry but she interrupted me with a real hard voice. “Everything I did was legal. Mother gave me power of attorney. I never want to see you again. And you will never undo it.” Unfortunately for me, that was true.
As I wrote yesterday’s blog post about proofreading computer transcriptions of two Merriam-Webster dictionaries, I remembered that one way I entertained myself in the process was collecting weird words. Three from the 7th Collegiate Dictionary were:
rotl. A unit of weight in the Middle East ranging from one to six pounds.
crwth. A Welsh stringed instrument.
cwm. Another Welsh vowelless wonder, meaning a steep-sided hollow at the head of a valley or on a mountain side.
Soon I started going farther afield:
medioxumous. Of or relating to an intermediate group of deities.
septemfluous. Flowing in seven streams. (Gosh, that’s a useful word.)
zax. A small axe used in roofing (or playing Scrabble).
triskaidekaphobia. Fear of the number thirteen.
gardyloo. In Scots, what people shouted outside their windows before emptying their bedpans in the street.
petrichor. The smell of rain.
That’s all I remember for now, but no doubt other examples will come to mind at a later point.
I came to Southern California to become a graduate student in film at UCLA. After my first year as a student, I needed an income, as my parents weren’t able to foot the bill for me much longer. In March 1968, I visited the job counseling center on campus and applied for a job at a Santa Monica tech company called System Development Corporation, or SDC.
The job was for an interesting project. The Air Force’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had funded SDC’s Lexicography and Discourse project. The work done previously was to key in the complete contents of two dictionaries—the Merriam-Webster Seventh Collegiate Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary—onto paper tape. Included were definitions, pronunciations, and etymologies. The paper tape had been converted to IBM punch cards, which were printed out. The printouts of the two dictionaries was in two piles that ran floor to ceiling of the office I was to use.
Interestingly, my predecessor in the position was murdered by a UCLA graduate student from the film department. I never was to find out who did it.
For the next couple of years, I proofread the transcriptions of both dictionaries and made corrections to the data files, which resided on a military AN/FSQ-32 computer whose parts were encased in epoxy so as to be able to survive a nuclear attack. Unfortunately, it had a single I/O channel, so that if a large number of users were logged in, as was the usual case, simple transactions took forever on the computer’s primitive time-sharing system.
If you are interested in finding out more about the project, you can see the document that described the project: Two Dictionary Transcripts and Programs for Parsing Them. Volume I. The Encoding Scheme, PARSENT and CONIX by Richard Reichert, John Olney, and James Paris (that’s me). It is still available from the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).
Incidentally, ARPA also created the Internet. It was originally designed to allow for uninterrupted communications between two points when certain key cities in between were destroyed by nuclear bombs.
It was hardly a city. When I was attending Dartmouth College between 1962 and 1966, there were no traffic lights at any of the intersections. There were a few thousand people, most of whom were directly or indirectly connected with the college.
When my parents drove back to Cleveland, I found myself alone for the first time in my life. Actually, it didn’t bother me as I thought it would. It was probably because my father and mother were going through a rough patch in their marriage, and I didn’t want to be back home for that. And I wasn’t really alone, because my roommate Frank Opaskar was a classmate from my high school.
In the end, we didn’t get along too well—for a strange reason. He slathered Noxzema on his face every night before going to bed, and I had the top bunk over him. Every night I drifted off to sleep in a noisome chemical fog. After two years, we parted company and I got a solo room.
Winters in Hanover were long and cold. The snow, once it fell, lasted all winter. (I wonder if it still does, what with global warming.) By the time March came along, you could see where every dog in Hanover had urinated. Spring was the worst time, because all that snow turned to slush. It was not until May that we could walk on the grass without our shoes making a sucking sound.
The town itself had a much loved grocery store called Tanzi’s and a number of restaurants. Early on, I gave up on the college dining hall and patronized only the restaurants. Farther down the street were the Dartmouth Bookstore and the Nugget Movie Theater, where I spent great gobs of time.
I remember the meatballs and spaghetti at Lou’s Restaurant, those few times he offered it as a special. And I had a lot of pizzas at Minichiello’s. I remember the Mom and Pop cooks there trying to get me to give their cute but clearly wild daughter sage advice about life, when what I really wanted was to be wild with her. Nothing came of it because, alas, I had not yet reached the age of puberty because my pituitary gland was being eaten up by a tumor which was operated on three months after I graduated.
Not too many people have anything good to say about television, except maybe poet Robert Pinsky in his poem “To Television.” I have long thought that his poem “Samurai Song” is one of the past poems written since WW2. Three times, he has served has poet laureate of the United States.
To Television
Not a “window on the world” But as we call you, A box a tube.
Terrarium of dreams and wonders. Coffer of shades, ordained Cotillion of phosphors Or liquid crystal
Homey miracle, tub Of acquiescence, vein of defiance. Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes
Raster dance, Quick one, little thief, escort Of the dying and comfort of the sick,
In a blue glow my father and little sister sat Snuggled in one chair watching you Their wife and mother was sick in the head I scorned you and them as I scorned so much
Now I like you best in a hotel room, Maybe minutes Before I have to face an audience: behind The doors of the armoire, box Within a box—Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.
Thank you, for I watched, I watched Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not Through knowledge but imagination, His quickness, and Thank you, I watched live Jackie Robinson stealing
Home, the image—O strung shell—enduring Fleeter than light like those words we Remember in: they too are winged At the helmet and ankles.
Although the 2024 Paris Olympics have faded into history, there are still some controversies swirling about. Mostly, these are because of some pigheaded bureaucratic judges. I have already written about Jordan Chiles’s bronze medal in gymnastics.
Also victimized by poor judging was Rachael Gunn of Australia’s entertaining performance in breaking. Raygun, as she is better known, received zero points from the judges for her highly individualistic routine. In addition, she has become the target of hatred from more “conservative” breakers, if there can be said to be such a thing.
Has breaking suddenly become so wrapped up in tradition that anything that smacks of innovation is pilloried by judges and social media trolls?
Hey, Australia did a great job in these Olympics, winning a disproportionate number of medals considering the size of its population.
Read the BBC’s story about the controversy, and give this talented, gutsy breaker the support she deserves.
If you hate hot weather and have to live in California, near the beach is the place to be. My brother in Palm Desert is experiencing temperatures over 100° Fahrenheit (38° Celsius) on an almost daily basis. My friends Bill and Kathy in Altadena are typically getting temperatures over 90° Fahrenheit (32° Celsius). Martine and I, on the other hand, live two miles (3.2 km) from the beach and have been comfortable in temperatures not much warmer than 80° Fahrenheit (27° Celsius).
The reason for this is that we are enjoying what is referred to as the marine layer, which is what you get when relatively warm and dry air moves atop a body of cooler water. Sometimes, this layer only goes inland several hundred feet, or several miles, or even all the way to the edge of the desert.
As I drive to the beach, I enjoy looking at my Subaru’s thermometer reading dropping as I near the water. Today, fore instance, from Centinela Avenue to Chace Park in the Marina, a distance of two or three miles, the temperature dropped six degrees Fahrenheit from 83° to 77°. Plus there was a steady breeze that disappeared only a few hundred feet inland.
We live in an apartment that was built in 1945 (the year I was born) without insulation. We have fans, but no air conditioning. (We couldn’t afford it.) It is generally cheaper to live farther inland, but one cannot survive without air conditioning.
Only later in the summer and into early fall does the marine layer becomes less of a factor when the Santa Ana Winds bring the hot dry desert air to the beach communities and blows the marine layer offshore.
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou
In the late 1960s, as I was studying graduate film history and criticism at UCLA, I was completely enamored with the films of Jean-Luc Godard. I remember telling my late friend Norm Witty that I was glad that my favorite film director was so young and that he would be making great films for decades to come.
As it turns out, I was only half right. He did continue to make films, but something was gone once he divorced Anna Karina. That happened in 1965, shortly after he made Pierrot le Fou with his wife and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
After Pierrot, Godard came out with two or three films sans Karina, and then descended into a darker period with La Chinoise and Weekend (both 1967). After that, although he was still prolific, I have seen only two of his films. It was as if something was gone forever from his work.
What was gone was that almond-eyed beauty Anna Karina. Godard was clearly in love with her, as I would have been if I were him. Pierrot is a film about the deterioration of their relationship: Belmondo as Ferdinand is a bookworm spouting profundities at every turn, while Karina’s Marianne Renoir is instinctive, emotional, and mysterious.
I love the film because I am a bookworm, and I know full well how that puts me at a disadvantage in relationships. Another director—Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin (1955)—has the last word about how I feel in the matter:
The Tale of the Scorpion and the Frog in Mr. Arkadin
Tarnmoor 
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